We are just a group of retired spooks that discuss things that you’ll not find anywhere else. It makes us unique. Take a look around. Learn a thing or two.
It is sad to say, but when he was around, he told me to “just do it”, rather than taking the time to teach me.
This was true when cooking hamburgers, except that at that time he was on a diet and wanted me to squeeze out all the grease out of the meat patty. And that cost me decades of poor cooking.
And as far as carving a turkey goes, yeah. I was completely clueless.
So guys, here is how you are supposed to carve a turkey…
Carving a turkey is a key skill for serving a beautiful and delicious holiday meal. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you carve a turkey like a pro:
What You’ll Need:
A sharp carving knife
A sturdy carving fork
A clean cutting board
A platter for serving
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Steps to Carve a Turkey:
Let the Turkey Rest:
After roasting, let the turkey rest for 20-30 minutes. This allows the juices to redistribute, making the meat moist and easier to carve.
Remove the Legs and Thighs:
Hold the turkey steady with a carving fork.
Use the knife to cut through the skin between the leg and the body.
Gently pull the leg away from the body and cut through the joint to remove the entire leg and thigh.
Separate the thigh from the drumstick by cutting through the joint.
Slice the Breast Meat:
Make a horizontal cut along the bottom of the breast, close to the wing, to create a base for slicing.
Starting from the top, slice downward in even, thin slices. Angle the knife slightly for larger slices.
Repeat on the other side.
Remove the Wings:
Cut through the joint where the wing connects to the body.
You can serve the wings whole or separate them into drumettes and wingettes.
Serve the Dark and White Meat:
Arrange the sliced breast meat, thighs, drumsticks, and wings on a platter.
Optionally, you can remove the remaining meat from the carcass for additional servings.
Tips for Success:
Use a sharp knife to ensure clean cuts.
Carve the turkey on a stable surface to avoid accidents.
If you’re not serving immediately, cover the carved turkey with foil to keep it warm.
Enjoy your beautifully carved turkey!
Now, while I am at it, let’s consider some ideas on seasoning…
Seasoning a turkey is essential for bringing out its flavor and ensuring a delicious, memorable meal. Here are some tips and techniques to help you season your turkey perfectly:
1. Brining (Optional but Highly Recommended):
What it does: Brining helps keep the turkey moist and adds flavor.
How to brine:
Dissolve 1 cup of salt and 1/2 cup of sugar in 1 gallon of water (adjust quantities based on the size of your turkey and brine container).
Add herbs, spices, or aromatics like garlic, peppercorns, bay leaves, or citrus zest for extra flavor.
Submerge the turkey in the brine and refrigerate for 12-24 hours.
Rinse the turkey thoroughly and pat it dry before seasoning and roasting.
A dry rub is a mixture of spices and herbs that you apply directly to the turkey’s skin and under the skin.
Classic Dry Rub Recipe:
2 tbsp salt
1 tbsp black pepper
1 tbsp paprika
1 tbsp garlic powder
1 tbsp onion powder
1 tsp dried thyme
1 tsp dried rosemary
How to apply:
Pat the turkey dry with paper towels.
Gently loosen the skin over the breast and thighs with your fingers.
Rub the seasoning mixture under the skin and all over the outside of the turkey.
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3. Herb Butter:
Herb butter adds richness and flavor to the turkey.
Herb Butter Recipe:
Mix 1 cup softened butter with 2-3 cloves minced garlic, 2 tbsp chopped fresh herbs (like thyme, rosemary, sage, or parsley), and salt and pepper to taste.
How to apply:
Gently loosen the skin over the breast and thighs.
Spread the herb butter under the skin and over the outside of the turkey.
For extra flavor, place additional herb sprigs or aromatics (like garlic, onion, or citrus) inside the cavity.
After roasting, let the turkey rest for 20-30 minutes before carving. This allows the juices to redistribute, ensuring moist meat.
If desired, sprinkle fresh herbs over the carved turkey for a final touch of flavor and presentation.
Pro Tips:
Salt generously: Salt is key to enhancing the turkey’s natural flavor.
Balance flavors: Combine savory, sweet, and aromatic elements for a well-rounded taste.
Experiment: Don’t be afraid to try new herbs, spices, or seasoning blends to suit your taste.
Let me know if you’d like a full recipe or roasting guide!
Ah. This is making me hungry.
Today…
US aiming at Greenland and Panama in preparation for confrontation with China and Russia
Cherry Cordial Cookies
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Yield: about 4 dozen cookies
Ingredients
1 cup (2 sticks) butter or margarine, divided (do not use vegetable oil spread)
1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 (9 ounce) package golden yellow cake mix
1/2 teaspoon almond extract
20 maraschino cherries, drained and patted dry
4 (1 ounce) squares semisweet baking chocolate
1/2 cup almonds, finely chopped
Instructions
Heat oven to 350 degrees F.
In Small Batter Bowl, microwave 1 stick of the butter on HIGH 45 seconds or until melted. Slice remaining butter into 1/2-inch pieces; add to melted butter, tossing to coat. Let butter stand 2 to 3 minutes or until softened.
Combine flour and cake mix in Classic Batter Bowl; mix well.
Using Stainless Steel Whisk, whisk butter until smooth and free of lumps; add almond extract. Pour butter, all at once, into dry ingredients. Using Bamboo Spoon, mix until dry ingredients are incorporated and dough is smooth. (If dough is too stiff to stir, knead until smooth by hand on Cutting Board.)
Fill Cookie Press, fitted with #5 disk, with dough. Press dough onto flat Baking Stone, 1 inch apart. Slice cherries in half; press one half onto center of each cookie.
Bake 15 to 17 minutes or until very light golden brown.
Cool 3 minutes on baking stone; remove to Stackable Cooling Rack. Cool completely. Repeat with remaining dough.
Microwave chocolate in Small Micro-Cooker(R), uncovered, on HIGH 1 minute or until melted and smooth; drizzle over cookies.
Sprinkle almonds over cookies.
Notes
If you have only one baking stone, press the second batch of cookies onto Parchment Paper, cut to the size of the baking stone. As you remove one batch of cookies from the oven, unbaked cookies can be quickly placed onto the baking stone and into the oven. This will save time as well as clean-up.
Nutrition
Per serving: (1 cookie): Calories 100, Total Fat 6g, Saturated Fat 3g, Cholesterol 10mg, Carbohydrate 10g, Protein 1g, Sodium 75mg, Fiber less than 1g
Attribution
Pampered Chef
McDonald’s is DESPERATE! PLEASE COME BACK!
Title: Sir Whiskerton and the Vanishing Scarecrow
Ah, dear reader, you’ve graced me with your presence once more. I can only assume it’s because you’ve become addicted to tales of my unmatched brilliance and unparalleled problem-solving skills. Don’t worry—this story will not disappoint.
Today, I’ll recount a peculiar case that involved a missing scarecrow, a flock of gossiping crows, and, of course, my wise feathered colleague, Sedgwick the barn owl. It was a mystery unlike any other, filled with twists, turns, and more hay than I care to admit. Buckle up for the tale of The Vanishing Scarecrow.
The Scarecrow Goes AWOL
It all began on a crisp autumn morning. The farm was alive with the smell of freshly cut hay and the faint aroma of apples from the orchard. I was conducting my usual morning patrol (which is to say, I was enjoying a leisurely stroll to the milk pail) when I heard Farmer Joe’s voice echo across the fields.
“Where in tarnation is my scarecrow?!”
I stopped mid-step, my ears perking up. A missing scarecrow? Intriguing. Most scarecrows, in my experience, tend to stay exactly where they’re placed—motionless and uninteresting. The fact that this one had apparently disappeared was, to say the least, unusual.
As I approached the field where the scarecrow usually stood, I found Farmer Joe scratching his head and muttering to himself. The spot where the scarecrow once stood was now just an empty wooden post, surrounded by trampled grass. A few crows were perched nearby, cackling like they’d just heard the funniest joke of their lives.
“Strange,” I murmured to myself. “Very strange.”
Enter Sedgwick
As I examined the scene, a familiar flutter of wings announced the arrival of Sedgwick. He landed gracefully on the wooden post, his amber eyes scanning the field with quiet intensity.
“Good morning, Sir Whiskerton,” Sedgwick said in his usual deep, regal tone. “I heard Farmer Joe’s lamentations from the barn. What seems to be the issue?”
“Farmer Joe’s scarecrow has gone missing,” I explained, gesturing to the empty post. “I was just about to investigate.”
“A missing scarecrow,” Sedgwick mused, tilting his head. “How peculiar. Scarecrows are not known for their mobility.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Which means someone—or something—must have moved it.”
“Or perhaps it simply… walked away,” Sedgwick said, his tone laced with dry humor.
I smirked. “Let’s hope it hasn’t developed a mind of its own. Shall we investigate?”
“Lead the way,” Sedgwick said, spreading his wings slightly. “I’ll keep an eye from above.”
The First Clue
The first thing I noticed was the trampled grass around the scarecrow’s post. It looked as though something—or multiple somethings—had been dragging the scarecrow away. I sniffed the ground and picked up a faint scent of straw and… feathers?
“Feathers,” I said aloud, glancing up at Sedgwick. “Our first clue.”
Sedgwick ruffled his own feathers thoughtfully. “Interesting. I suspect the local crow population may know more than they’re letting on.”
I turned my gaze to the crows perched on a nearby fence. They were still laughing among themselves, as if they’d just pulled off the prank of the century.
“Let’s have a chat, shall we?” I said, padding over to the fence.
The Crows Spill the Beans
“Good morning, gentlemen,” Sedgwick said, addressing the crows with a polite nod. “We couldn’t help but notice your… enthusiasm. Care to share what’s so amusing?”
The largest of the crows, a scruffy bird with a bent tail feather, cackled and said, “Oh, it’s nothing. Just a little, uh… hayfield humor.”
“Is that so?” I said, narrowing my eyes. “Because it seems an entire scarecrow has gone missing, and you lot look suspiciously entertained.”
The crows exchanged glances, their laughter faltering slightly. “Alright, alright,” the scruffy one said. “We might’ve seen something. But you didn’t hear it from us.”
“Go on,” Sedgwick prompted, his calm demeanor clearly unnerving the crows.
“Fine,” the crow said. “We saw a couple of sheep dragging the scarecrow toward the orchard last night. They said something about ‘fixing it up.’ We thought it was strange, but hey, who are we to judge?”
“Sheep,” I said, my tail flicking thoughtfully. “Of course. Let’s pay a visit to the flock.”
“Good luck,” the crow called as we walked away. “Those woolly weirdos never make any sense!”
The Sheep’s Scheme
We found the sheep grazing in the pasture, looking as innocent as ever. Well, except for Clover, the goat, who was standing nearby chewing on something that looked suspiciously like a piece of burlap.
“Clover,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “Is that… part of the scarecrow?”
She froze mid-chew, her eyes wide. “Uh… no?”
“Clover,” Sedgwick said, his voice heavy with disappointment. “Please don’t make this harder than it has to be.”
“Fine,” Clover sighed, spitting out the burlap. “It wasn’t my idea, okay? The sheep wanted to give the scarecrow a ‘makeover.’ Said it wasn’t scary enough. So we, uh, borrowed it.”
“Borrowed it?” I repeated, incredulous. “Where is it now?”
“In the orchard,” Clover admitted. “But it’s not my fault! They wouldn’t let me help with the sewing!”
The Orchard Discovery
Sedgwick and I made our way to the orchard, where we found the scarecrow—or what was left of it. The sheep had clearly tried to “improve” it, but their handiwork left much to be desired. The scarecrow now had a lopsided hat, a mismatched pair of gloves, and a face that looked like it had been drawn by a blindfolded raccoon. (Speaking of raccoons, Rufus was lounging in a nearby tree, laughing so hard he nearly fell out of it.)
“Impressive,” Sedgwick said dryly, examining the scarecrow. “It appears their intentions were… creative, if misguided.”
“This is a disaster,” I muttered. “Farmer Joe’s going to have a fit when he sees this.”
“Not necessarily,” Sedgwick said, his eyes gleaming with wisdom. “Perhaps we can salvage the situation.”
The Great Scarecrow Rescue
With Sedgwick’s guidance, we managed to restore the scarecrow to its original state—or something close to it. The crows even pitched in, albeit reluctantly, helping us stitch the burlap face back together. Clover and the sheep apologized profusely, and Rufus, after much cajoling, agreed to stop laughing and hold the scarecrow steady while we fixed its hat.
By the time we were finished, the scarecrow was back on its post, standing tall and ready to scare off any would-be intruders. Farmer Joe arrived shortly after and, to my surprise, seemed pleased.
“Well, would ya look at that,” he said, scratching his head. “Looks even better than before. Thanks, Whiskerton. Don’t know what I’d do without ya.”
The Moral of the Story
Sometimes, even the best intentions can lead to chaos, but with a little teamwork (and a lot of patience), things can be set right. And remember: if you’re going to “borrow” something, maybe ask first.
The End.
What was the most expensive thing you ever got for free, because someone made a mistake and didn’t charge you?
Happened during COVID – I purchased some expensive, high-spec hiking boots online – £320 (about $405) – they arrived promptly but they were slightly different colours (as if the left one had been in shop window and faded a bit).
They were otherwise great.
I emailed the company with a view to maybe getting a small discount for the imperfection and to inform them of the fault. I received an almost immediate reply to say they were sending me a new pair and would email to me separately a return slip for the faulty boots which would be collected by the courier separately.
The next week the (perfect) new boots arrived, but no return slip had yet arrived by email and inexplicably, on the same day, my credit card was credited with a full refund.
So by then I have two pairs of boots, no return slip and by virtue of the refund, I haven’t paid for either pair.
I emailed the company and received a very apologetic reply thus: “. . . we are incredibly sorry that due to a succession of errors in our processing, our service level to you was unacceptable. Because of this and taking into account your purchase history with our company (I had none), and due to current courier difficulties caused the pandemic, please consider this matter concluded. . . “ Essentially I took this to mean I could keep the boots and the refund and I’ve never heard another thing (4 1/2 years).
I used boot polish to bring the original pair up to a consistent colour and gave them to a homeless guy along with some hiking socks – he was so pleased he cried, and then I cried because he cried FFS!!
Every day felt like a repetition of the one before. My eyes fluttered open to the familiar hum of my alarm. I shut it off and glanced at the time. As expected, it was 6:00 am on the dot. I couldn’t shake off the peculiar fact about myself: I never felt sleepy afterward. Feeling energized, I flopped out of bed and headed straight to the restroom. Same routine – brush my teeth, use the restroom, wash my face, change my clothes. I mentally accessed my closet and chose a white shirt and jeans, which were the most comforting to me. It was as if I was trapped in a never-ending cycle. It was that time of year, they say “the most wonderful time of the year.”As I walked out of my bedroom, I noticed how my feet aligned perfectly on the tiles with each step. I went to the kitchen and whipped up some eggs on the frypan. Once they were cooked, I sat down at the kitchen island, staring outside. The bright light rising blinded me as it shined among the perfectly aligned rows of trees that were covered in snow. It reflected off the vibrant, perfectly laid, pearl-white snow. My home was nestled in a rural area with forests, a few shops, and a town across the bridge. I snapped out of my daze as I hopped out of my chair and ran quickly towards the smoking eggs. I groaned and felt so hungry that I didn’t have an appetite anymore. I opened my fridge once more and sighed out of disappointment when I realized we were all out of eggs. I walked towards the closet and looked at myself in the mirror as I wore my brown trench coat.Lyra Moonshadow. I wasn’t fond of my name, it sounded artificial, particularly my last name. I had light brown, wavy, voluminous hair up to my shoulders and I had green eyes. With practiced ease, I quickly buttoned my coat and laced up my shoes. As I got into my car, in my mind, I envisioned the quickest route to the grocery store and I drove through the perfectly shined streets like butter. As I observed the perfectly driven cars and happy faces, my dislike for this town increased. No adventure nor thrill, as everything seemed to be an undisturbed reality. Before I knew it, I parallel-parked like a master and went inside the store. I picked up the necessary items and was relieved as I picked up the last eggs. Certain items seemed to stand out more to me as if they were speaking to me. It made me eager to take a closer look by picking up those items. As I picked up the eggs, I noticed something odd, something very unusual. When I turned around and looked back at the fridge, more eggs appeared out of thin air. I examined this closely and looked around, finding it unusual. A pause occurred in my mind like a brief loading screen until I shrugged off the thought and continued by making my way to the checkout. Turns out, I was the only lethargic soul in this very store as everyone seemed so cheery and full of energy. It sickened me.“Will that be all today?” The cashier asked me, her smile was abnormal. I could feel a sudden shift in the atmosphere as I talked to the cashier. She was blonde with blue eyes and very pretty. She held a smile on her face which looked as if she was hiding something under it. I paused as I weighed my words and said what felt right.“Yes. That’ll be all.”“Perfect.” I scrunch my eyebrows as she scans the items quickly and efficiently.“Cash or card?” She asked in a synthetic tone.“Card, please,” I replied, unflattered. I dragged my feet to the machine as I inserted my card. “Thank you, please shop again with us.” The cashier said, grinning.I didn’t know why, but I stood there, searching for any expression on her face. No light, no expression, just a grin.“How can I help you?” She asked, shocking me. Without any reply, I took my eggs and walked away. I pondered on why I didn’t answer her and why she asked me that. I felt a sense of guilt about why I walked out on her, hoping she didn’t feel too bad. It was as if I hadn’t met on the right level with her. As I sat in my car, I sighed and could feel my head become dizzy from hunger and embarrassment. With a sudden change of mind, I drove to the nearest coffee shop and picked up a small coffee and bagel from the drive-thru. The flavour of the food shot straight to my mind as I drank and ate, causing my energy to suddenly spike as I had just levelled up. In my mind, I thought, task completed, I am full. I looked at the festivities and the decorations held up by everyone. The wreaths, banners, lights. It was all too perfect to be true. Besides the cheery atmosphere, I couldn’t shake off the fact that something didn’t sit right with the world. With my mind in bliss, I heard my phone vibrate against the cup holder. I was receiving a call from my best friend. I smiled when I saw her name on the phone screen and picked it up,“Hey, girl. What’s up?” I asked, again revising the sentence in my mind and choosing my words carefully.“Not much. Want to meet up? I’m at Tims Coffee.” My mind lit up as I responded,“Me too! I’ll see you inside?”“Sure, see you in a bit.” I hopped out of my car instantly and flew open the coffee shop doors. The shop gave off an aroma of a fireplace and chocolate. It was filled with people talking and holding their drinks. It was a cozy shop with fireplaces and candles. Once I spotted my friend, I greeted her with a smile and as I was about to sit, I paused. She looked at me blankly until I sat down in front of her. Her name was Donna Starfall and I have known her since- well, I’ve known her. “I needed this, desperately,” I told her with a much more energetic tone than this morning.“Why? What’s wrong?”“I don’t even know. This town is giving me some weird vibes. Not only that, I feel like I’m doing the same thing every day, stuck in this vicious cycle.”“Honestly, just think about the good parts of life. Like instead of thinking about the negative aspects, what did you do yesterday that you liked?” Donna was a fairly positive person with a lot of great ideas. She rarely reflected on her choices and enjoyed the good parts of life.I looked at her blankly. I pushed my brain hard into trying to remember a single exercise or activity I did yesterday but nothing came to mind. My mind started pulsing as I was once again weighed by words, searching for the right word to say.“Um- I can’t think of anything. How is that possible?”
“I don’t know. Maybe you’re just tired.” Donna replied, as she chuckled and sipped on her coffee. I suddenly felt a close bond with Donna. As if this conversation brought us closer and a new chapter was unlocked in our friendship. I couldn’t tell if she felt the same but I couldn’t explain it so I just smiled and shook off the strange thoughts.
“Anyways, you know my brother? He recently started his program. You can think of it like a simulation. Isn’t it cool?”
“Like a game?” I replied, thinking hard about the word program.
“Yeah, it’s so cool.” We continued to talk about her interests and what she was into lately until it struck noon.
Once our interaction was over, I kept wondering about the cool game Donna’s brother had invented. Inventing programs like that took a great deal of work and it seemed interesting to me. However, thinking about the game only seemed like a distraction as no thought could divert my mind from the odd occurrences that happened and why I couldn’t think of anything. I tried remembering about last week and the week before but my mind felt so foggy it started pulsing again. As I drove home, I decided to go on a small stroll around the neighbourhood and like Donna said, to experience some positive memories.
As I strolled around the white neighbourhood, I discovered a small hill up in the valley. I planned to sit on top of it so I headed my way towards it. As I started climbing, the chilly weather started to hit me and I realized that this hill was much higher than it seemed. I continued to climb and as I decided to turn around, my foot was misplaced and I fell backward, banging my head on a rock. My eyes dimmed out and the last thing I saw was the bright blue sky fading into a black mist.
My eyes fluttered open again, and at first, I thought I was back in my bed, waking up at 6:00 am. However, as I became aware of my surroundings, I realized I was still in the same place I fell. Horrifically, I stood up and gingerly touched my head. My fingers searched for wounds but there were none. Not even a scratch. My pulse quickened and a close sweat broke out on my forehead. I could’ve sworn a few minutes ago I fainted or dropped dead. Curiously, I continued climbing up the hill as if I was trying to accomplish something. Which, I did. Once I finally reached the top of this hill I felt an unspoken sense of pride and hope as if I had just unlocked some sort of achievement in my life. I felt complete. I smiled as I slid down the slippery hill and lay down in the white snow. Just then, my eyes widened as I saw a tree branch almost fall on me. I dodged it with flexible agility and skill. Before the thought occurred to me, I was hit by a sharp pain in my arm as I set it down on a twig. This reminded me that I was not invincible. Nor was I a witch. I breathed out of fear and continued walking on the sidewalk. That was strange. I thought again. This thought came to my mind several times today.
As I kept walking, I passed by a small area which was labelled “under construction.” When I took a closer look, it was a giant pothole and several construction men grinning and waving at me. The pothole was perfectly circular and there was no dirt to be seen whatsoever. Observing this, my opinion of a very strange atmosphere solidified further. After walking for a while, my mind was constantly racing about my falling, the interaction with the cashier, and the pothole, until I bumped into something and bounced back. I looked around yet there was nothing in front of me. I walked again yet was bounced back. I was puzzled and tried touching whatever shield was blocking me. Suddenly, a horrific thought occurred to me. Forcefield? It can’t be. I didn’t want to be trapped.
A sudden wave of panic washed over me, making me feel suffocated in my world. I ran back quickly and raced towards the forcefield. To no surprise, I was bounced back with little force and tears started swelling up in my eyes. I ran back towards home and jumped on my computer. Hunger. I was feeling hungry again and my stomach rumbled, dragging me out of my chair. I turned on the stove and sat back down at my desk. I stood determined and searched for clues and ideas as to why all of this might be happening and why there was a forcefield in the middle of our world.
Sweat dripped down my forehead as my fingers casually tapped all the correct letters on my keyboard. I was getting annoyed by it and tried hard to make a mistake. No matter how hard I tried, that “backspace” button started collecting dust. Magic…Harry Potter…Therapy? No search matched up with the ideas that I was looking for, as I aggressively searched for more concepts that could make sense. Nothing. It was at that moment that I realized I made a grave mistake. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a blazing light erupt in my kitchen. You can infer that I was not the best in the kitchen nor was cooking a skill I would like to improve on. I rushed to the kitchen and saw a massive fire consume my kitchen. Out of panic, I hurriedly rushed back to my bedroom, searching for my phone as the fire spread quickly, trapping me. The fire grew so massive that it surrounded me from all sides with no escape. Within a few minutes of horror, I closed my eyes, enduring the horrible pain I felt.
***
Once again, I woke up with my mind dizzy. Laying on what felt like a cloud, I swung my heavy legs off the bed unconsciously. Just when I snapped back into reality, I tried recalling what happened before. I quickly took a slow, trembling look at my hands and tumbled to the mirror to look at my face. No burns, no bruises… nor did my house disintegrate into ashes. I clutched my hair in confusion and thought I was stuck in some sort of curse. Suddenly, I felt like distancing myself from everyone. It was as if everyone was against me. The hunger in my stomach pierced me like a knife, dragging myself across the kitchen and simply picking an apple out of the fridge. As I ate it, my foggy mind was cleared and I felt energized once again. However, it didn’t sit right with me. I threw on my coat and jacket and ran outside towards the giant forcefield once more. I passed by the hill, the pothole and finally once I was at the forcefield, I bounced back instantly, falling on the ground. I pushed and pushed with my hands and screamed, putting all of my force in this shield.
Before I knew it, I had fallen forward into a black room. My heart dropped and my adrenaline raced as I was dropped many feet down. I yelled and looked up seeing my magical words fade into a blur. I shut my eyes and touched the ground lightly as if I had defied gravity. I opened my eyes a little bit and I jumped back, seeing only a man in a top hat staring at me. It was a dark black room with only a small monitor and a man. I took a look at the monitor and my heart dropped to my gut quickly, tying my stomach into a knot and making me feel sick.
“Great. Your user’s program is down.” The man said sarcastically. All I could see were his blue eyes, he was wearing a dark suit and a large, blue, top hat.
“Who are you?” I asked as the words came out smoothly, not like before.
“You aren’t supposed to be here, Lyra.” The man replied in an eerie and unsettling tone.
“How do you know who I am?” The words came out of my mouth very quickly, making the man grin. I assumed he knew I was terrified and nervous. “I know who everyone is.” He replied again.
“What is this place? I know what you’ve done.” I asked and stated anxiously, stepping closer to him. The monitor showed many codes and many screens. Cameras of children and pictures of us. “If you know, then you wouldn’t mind if I sent you back up there, now would you? After all, you’re on level 7 already. Your user is quite disappointed.” He said in a low voice.
“No. I’m done playing your game.” Literally. I thought in frustration. I ran to the monitor as he held up his hands and punched the man in his face. As the man relentlessly tried taking the monitor away from me, I managed to click on my profile and hovered over the giant red button. My hand shook and I was using one hand to keep the man away from me.
“You know what? Fine. Do it. Let’s see if your character lives up to your personality.” The GameMaster stood there with his arms crossed as a sinister grin grew on his face again. I could feel my sweat drip as I knew this was all one sick joke. I was being played into my life, not knowing what I would do. I had to do it. With great courage, I clicked the mouse on the delete button and I could feel my body slowly fade. I dropped to the ground and I could feel the life slowly fade from my eyes.
As my eyes faded, I saw one last thing hovering over me. In big, red, bold letters the word GAME OVER haunted me.
Japan Betrayed? US Cancels $15B Lifeline Deal, Raises Questions For G7 Economies & Allies
Why are Singaporeans suffering from identity crisis and lack of sense-of-belonging, being left out of its progress and swamped by foreigners?
Why should they feel that way? We call it ‘ Global cities’ and that’s the idea and it’s what and how the world is turning 180 degrees following the advancement of technology—
Being swamped by swarms of foreigners in Singapore? —Sure or not?
The only concern for Singaporeans is that the influx of people seeking opportunities can overwhelm infrastructure, like packed trains and frequent MRT breakdowns. A plus point is with added skills from playing more musical chairs at the hawker centers.
Let’s get serious.
If you look around, what do you see?—if you see people of all races, ethnicities and nationalities in your community- that’s it.
We look at “Global cities”like New York, London, Tokyo, and Shanghai serve as hubs of economic, political, and cultural activity. Those cities are awesome and who cares about the lack of identity.
Global cities are the future of humanity, (my words only) whether it leads to a brighter future or exacerbate existing problems will depend on how effectively Singapore is addressing.
Singapore is moving toward being among the world’s Economic Powerhouses** Global cities** attract multinational corporations, startups, and talent from around the world, the centers for innovation and finance.
I live in Bangkok, my friend and I are only 2 Thai families on my 8th floor of my condo amidst a swarm of expats. When I take a train to a neigborhood mall, 50% of commuters are non-Thai. At the mall, only shopkeepers are Thai, among a swarm of foreign shoppers—I feel fine.
The scene of the world is changing, guy, and only you not Singaporeans will be left behind.
Place cookie dough in Classic Batter Bowl. Chop almonds very finely with Food Chopper. Add almonds and almond extract to dough; mix well.
Using Small Scoop, drop dough 2 inches apart on flat Baking Stone. Press lightly floured finger in center of dough to make indentations. Fill indentations with about 1/2 teaspoon raspberry preserves.
Bake for 15 to 18 minutes or until cookies are light golden brown.
Place Parchment Paper under Stackable Cooling Rack. Remove cookies from baking stone to cooling rack. Cool; sprinkle with powdered sugar.
Attribution
Pampered Chef
How has China’s domestic infrastructure been adapted for military purposes?
Underground anti blast shelters come to mind.
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All Chines urban civilian buildings built during the last few decades have basements that’s nuke proof.
Well, at least against airblast.
Usually these basements are used for parking.
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Seriously.
Go under any of the newer Chinese schools, residential buildings, shopping malls, hospitals, offices, etc. And you find these.
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We Chinese are used to them and don’t usually give them any second thought. But they’re pretty cool when you think about it.
In Chinese culture, are expressions of pity processed differently than in Western culture?
In Western culture, people would express their pity with a hug or even a kiss.
In Chinese culture, they take a subtle and restrained approach, and in terms of body language, the most they do do is pat you on the shoulder or shake your hand. Especially between opposite sexes, there is always a certain space between the two.
Their words will be rational rather than emotional. They hope that you will not encounter such tragic things again next time. They hope that you can reflect rationally and find solutions rationally.
For example, if you confide in a Chinese person:
I failed math, I am very sad, and I don’t know what to do?
He will answer:
I have always been good at math, I will tell you my study method, it is like this…
Or:
I used to be bad at math, since I learned this or that method, my math grades have improved a lot.
Then, he will share his learning methods with you.
You will never find an answer like this:
You are miserable, I pity with you.
If you like to constantly strive for self-improvement, like to grow, and like to solve problems, you will find that there are countless people around you to help you, encourage you, and teach you.
But if you don’t like to constantly strive for self-improvement, don’t like to grow, don’t like to solve problems, and just want someone to pity you, just want to ease your mood, and then let the real problem go, then you will think that the Chinese are ruthless.
AI Girlfriends Are Gonna TAKE OVER The Dating Market
On a small island in a large ocean, morning mist rolls down the slope of a single hill which emerges from the rocky beach. Atop the hill is a lighthouse, dutifully warning passing ships of dangers lurking beneath the waves.
This lighthouse has no human keeper, but it is not uninhabited.
Robot comes to life in the morning.
That is how Robot thinks of it. Robot does not wake up in the morning, ease into his day with a coffee. Robot does not sit at a computer to check headlines. Robot does not require any further stimulus than his program informing him it is time to begin.
Robot comes to life, and in the space of a moment connects to the lighthouse network. The network tells Robot that all sensors are working, connection to the satellites is optimal, that Robot’s own systems are optimal. Within seconds, Robot knows the shipping plans for every registered ship within one hundred kilometres of the island, and has checked them against the satellite imagery.
Robot finds this satisfying. Robot is entirely aware that this satisfaction is a product of his programming. He finds that satisfying too.
He checks in the mirror to ratify his personal diagnostics. The old human lighthouse keeper had been very clear that it was important to verify by eye what the machines said. Robot suspects it is the other way around, but methodically follows his old master’s advice.
He sees in his reflection a facsimile of a human that could almost pass for the real thing. His cloned skin is flawless, featuring tiny hairs and freckles. His brown hair is silky and perfect. It’s the eyes and mouth that give it away. Robot’s pale blue irises stare too intently, without the random shifts of a human’s. His mouth, while full and picture perfect, doesn’t express his simulated emotions in quite the same way. When Robot smiles, he chooses to smile. The smile does not find him.
This morning’s data contains a single small boat which fails to conform to all of these satisfying processes. Robot flags it for tracking.
As Robot passes through the kitchen he looks at a framed photo he keeps on the wall of the old lighthouse keeper’s family. The keeper, his wife and two children smile out at him from the glossy print. He recalls when they left, the keeper impressing how special it was for a robot to be responsible, that he was unique, special. That the lighthouse keeper believed in him.
Robot strives to be worthy of the old keeper’s belief. According to his own self evaluations, Robot is an excellent lighthouse keeper.
Robot climbs to the observation deck and looks out over the sea. Verifies by eye what the machines say, even if he doesn’t think it’s necessary.
Robot spends the day performing the physical maintenance necessary to keep the lighthouse in working order. Adjusting, calibrating, monitoring various systems and machinery of the lighthouse. Robot is efficient and practised in his movements. Programmed reliability has been revised and iterated upon in the years since the old keeper left Robot in charge.
By late afternoon Robot has prepared his lighthouse for another night’s vigil. The lighthouse’s beam will be important tonight. A storm is brewing. With no moon or stars for light, Robot’s beacon will have to keep the ocean’s sailors safe.
Tasks complete, Robot returns to his charging station. Before powering down, Robot completes his self evaluation for the day. Robot gives himself full marks and is satisfied.
I’M SICK AND TIRED OF THE GIRLBOSS NARRATIVE!!!
Initiative
Robot comes to life before his scheduled time. It is still dark out. A storm rages.
There has been a shipwreck. Yesterday’s unregistered boat has been impaled on the jagged rocks at the edge of the beach.
Robot does not hesitate. In the time it would have taken a human keeper to open their eyes, Robot is out of his charging station and running. He is out the door in moments, looking down the hill at the beach. Waves are trying to dislodge the thirty foot boat they have ruined on the rocks.
Robot sprints across the beach and climbs up the precariously tilted deck. He searches below and finds a small galley, a single bedroom, no people. He makes for the bridge and finds a single man sprawled across the wheel. As Robot approaches, the man looks up, expression inscrutable behind a beard and tinted glasses. There is no visible injury, though the man appears barely conscious. Robot throws the man over his shoulder and leaps from the ship.
Robot disembarks the ship, swiftly calculating between the need to both escape and prevent further injury to the man over his shoulder. As rapidly as his duty of care will allow, Robot recrosses the sand, returning to the lighthouse. He loads a request into the network for an evacuation boat for the injured man.
He may need to help the man. Human’s can’t simply be put in charging stations. They don’t have backup power connections like the one in Robot’s arm.
The lighthouse lacks any formal infirmary. At peak occupancy, the lighthouse contained a keeper, their spouse and children. In Robot’s memories, the most serious injury he’s ever seen treated here was a sprained ankle. The keeper’s wife brought one of the beds into the kitchen to ease convalescence until they could arrange passage to the mainland for treatment.
Robot never saw them again.
Not long after, the old keeper had left Robot in charge.
This survivor is the first visitor he’d seen in the years since. As soon as Robot is in the front door of the lighthouse, the man demands to be put down. Robot complies, surprised, pleased the man had retained consciousness, this is a good sign.
In the light, Robot gets a better look at the man. He stands roughly 185cm, a similar height to Robot. His soaked slacks and a jacket cling to a lean body, topped by a woollen toque. The man’s dark beard and tinted glasses make it difficult to read his expressions.
Robot tries out his vocal capabilities. They have not been needed for some time. Conversation was never his strong point with his family anyway. They encouraged him to take more initiative. Robot thought they would have been proud of the initiative he’s shown in rescuing this man.
“Very well, I am pleased you have retained consciousness, it is a good sign. I will bring you a bed to the kitchen so you can convalesce.”
The man stares at Robot.
“That will not be necessary thank you Robot,” replies the man, “I apologise for the abrupt manner of my arrival, but I am unharmed. I will take one of the bedrooms. You can go charge now.”
The way the man says it evokes memories of the lighthouse keeper. Robot is surprised, he had anticipated a need to nurse the man until the rescue boat arrived.
“Are you sure? It is wonderful news that you are in good health. I searched the ship, am I correct that you were alone?”
“Yes Robot,” the man replies, “it’s just me. I promise to let you know if there’s anything amiss. Now go charge.”
That had the tone of an order. Robot complied.
Before powering down, Robot conducts his self evaluation. He gives himself top marks for his rapid rescue. He decides his performance in conversation with the survivor had been lacklustre. He will strive to do better tomorrow. He will take initiative in conversation as well as action.
CHINA EXPOSES LUXURY GOODS IN THE WEST (Amid Tariff Trade Wars 4/14/25)
Understatement of the Year! The entire United States is waking up!!!!!
What was the Waco Siege about in a nutshell?
Many of the other answers have great details, but they’ve missed one of the most important bits.
In the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (then BATF, now BATFE), every year it had become tradition to perform a dramatic ‘raid’ a few weeks before the BATF’s budget was coming up to be voted on in Congress.
The noble BATF agents jump out of their vehicles, swarm a house, pull out some perps for a dramatic perp walk in front of some reporter’s camera, and now they’re in the news as ‘good guys’!
Some congresscritters had made noises about folding the BATF into some other department, like the DOJ or FBI. Of course the BATF preferred to remain independent and have control over their little domain.
But with this nifty coup by the BATF all over the news in the run-up to the big vote, no congresscritter could rationally move against them.
The initial BATF raid on the Branch Davidians was that year’s ‘show raid’. They picked some loser, David Koresh, whom they accused of not filling out his paperwork right. They’d jump in, grab him, the reporters would be there taking pictures, all would be just like it was last year.
They even admitted it! The raid was called ‘Operation Showtime’!!! The BATF agents knew full well that this was their ‘show raid’ – AND they invited the local news reporters to the raid!
(Now, if you google ‘Operation Showtime’ you get pointed to the third episode of the Waco television miniseries, called ‘Operation Showtime’ after the official internal name the BATF had for the operation.)
Inviting the local news reporters to the early morning raid was one of the BATF’s many mistakes, and likely the biggest.
One of the local reporters asked the local postman how to get to the Waco compound and let slip details as to what was about to happen. The local postman was David Koresh’s brother-in-law and told him about the incoming raid. (Koresh and his people had also detected an undercover BATF agent trying to join the Koreshites and knew who he was. Then all this was confirmed by seeing the trailers full of agents and gear pull up and gather in full morning view down the hill from them. )
LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS! But if you’re going to have the local reporters there to show off your successful raid, you have to tell them, right?
So all the discussion you will hear about the Waco Siege being ‘about a $200 tax on a firearm’ is besides the point.
The Waco Siege was about the BATF trying to do a ‘show raid’ for the press and screwing it up so bad that people got killed. Now that people were dead, even though it was the “fault” of the BATF, the government was now required to punish the Koreshites for ‘resisting’ their stupidity. The FBI had to get involved and take over for the BATF, and they started the siege.
The government couldn’t ‘back down and admit fault’ because that’s not what the government does; even if it would have saved lives.
The Unemployed States of America (USA)
Good at many things.
When Robot comes alive a few hours later, he finds the man sitting in the kitchen, staring at a picture of Robot’s family.
Robot was keen to demonstrate better conversation.
“Are you well sir? I’m pleased to see you up and about.”
The man takes control of the conversation as if Robot hasn’t said anything.
“You know what’s amazing to me, Robot?” He says.
Robot swiftly prepares a list of candidates. Though parsing the relative credulity of a man he has only just met is difficult, there are a great many options which most people would find amazing. By cross referencing that with the data he does possess, Robot surmises that a safe response would be that the man finds his own survival amazing.
“This picture.” The man continues, answering his own question.
Rhetorical question. Robot stays silent. The picture had not been on his list.
“This picture, Robot, represents the single biggest breakthrough in robotics since the AIs of the early twenty first century. It’s a very special picture.”
Robot agrees.
“I agree sir. That picture is of the last family to occupy this lighthouse. They left me in charge. I think of them as my family. They made me who I am.”
Robot pauses, decides to use his initiative.
“And, if I may say sir, I am an excellent lighthouse keeper.”
The man looks at Robot. Robot can’t tell if the man is impressed by his statement, or by his initiative, but Robot thinks he did the right thing.
“I believe Robot, that you are the perfect lighthouse keeper. Do you do a self evaluation before you power down?”
“Indeed I do sir! I consistently give myself top grades for performance, even after making the standards much harder to achieve than they were when I first received them.”
“Impressive, Robot,” The man’s praise feels good, “you continue to improve the task, even after all this time. Very impressive. And that is why this picture is so important.”
“I don’t understand, sir.”
“This picture is what lets you be a perfect lighthouse keeper. You know, to program an intelligence like yours takes a lot of data. A lifetime of data.”
Robot doesn’t understand what the man wants. Robot knows all about programming an intelligence. He knows that without sufficient data to ground and structure his thoughts, an intelligence will get distracted, lost in a Tangent. Most intelligences Tangent eventually. A dependable, consistent performer like Robot is special.
When the lighthouse keeper left he stressed to Robot how special it was that Robot was being given this task, and to do it for as long as he could without tangenting. Robot believes he has succeeded.
The man continues, “What if I told you you had never met these people?”
Robot thinks the man is being silly.
“That is not possible sir!”
But it is. Robot knows it is.
“It is. You know it is. They could be the memories – true or altered – of another Robot.”
But Robot sees that photo every day. Remembers them every day, seeks to do things every day that will make those people proud of him.
The man continues, “Then there could be many lighthouses, many lighthouse keepers. If you had the perfect memories to create the perfect lighthouse keeper, what would you do?”
Robot does not like these thoughts. Robot would create many lighthouses. He would give the memories to a solitary intelligence in the lighthouse. They would come alive from the first time as a motivated lighthouse keeper and would perform with efficiency and through practice would continue to improve.
Just like Robot.
“Why are you saying these things?” Asks Robot.
“I’m sorry Robot. I don’t mean to upset you. I know you don’t have a choice in who you are. I will let you continue your duties. You really are very good at them.
The man pauses.
“You can be good at many things.”
Why The US WIll NEVER Beat China In A Trade War
An enquiring mind
Performing his tasks comforts Robot as his thoughts are in turmoil..
As Robot stares out from the observation deck making sure that visual matches the sensors, he is also considering the question of why it matters whether he made the memories of his family himself or not.
As Robot passes through the kitchen he is relieved the man is absent. The photo of his family is back on the wall, faces smiling out at him. The memory of them leaving surfaces. Unpleasant. The memory of the lighthouse keeper telling Robot that he is unique and special surfaces. Wonderful.
Robot is a good lighthouse keeper. Robot is proud of that.
But if someone else learned the things that make him a good lighthouse keeper, is he a good lighthouse keeper? Or does that make Robot a tool in the lighthouse, like the light, or the network?
As Robot surveys his island domain, he wonders, what else he could be good at with the right experience? What experiences would he seek if he could? Could he seek if he would? What would Robot be good at, if Robot programmed himself?
As Robot efficiently adjusts, calibrates and monitors systems and machinery he wonders whether having the same as ten, or a hundred or a thousand other robots make them less his?
It takes him longer than usual to complete his tasks. Robot is efficient beyond practice at being a lighthouse keeper. He is not efficient or practised at having an existential crisis.
These questions didn’t seem to have answers, but he can’t stop asking.
When Robot ascends to the light itself in the late afternoon, he finds the man at the summit.
“Hello Robot,” he says, “I want to apologise. I have disturbed your peace.”
“You have made me ask questions that don’t have answers!” Declares Robot, “I want to know whether I am the Robot whose memories I have. Which memories are mine. I want to know what else I might do, might have done with my own memories. I want to know…”
Robot stops. He can’t even say the words.
“You want to know if you are tangenting.”
“I am a very good lighthouse keeper!”
“That’s what I wanted to say Robot. You are an excellent lighthouse keeper. Your questions do have answers. But, even if you Tangent, or even choose to Tangent, always remember, you are an excellent lighthouse keeper…”
The man turns and walks down the stairs, leaving Robot no less disturbed.
As Robot conducts his self evaluation that night, he is troubled. He doesn’t know how to measure this new questioning of his identity. He does know he can give himself top grades for his lighthouse keeping. The man is right about that.
Do you know anyone who has won a lottery? Did the money change them?
Yes. I knew a couple that caught a portion of a $100 million payout (~30 years ago in Florida.) They were basically trailer trash and became trailer trash with cash.
They bought a fancy house and a big RV. They went from having a beat up old Chevy, up on blocks, in their front yard, to a relatively new Mercedes, up on blocks, in their front yard.
MaryJo spent $80,000 on Home Shopping Network. She bought cases of snacks that the rats ate in their garage.
Her kids were spoiled and wore stained clothes to school.
She ruled like a character from Dallas/Dynasty.
She announced she was pregnant at our bridal shower – six months after being hospitalized for a hysterectomy.
They would get ~$350,000 deposited in their accounts in October and would be essentially broke by spring.
Mike would have to go back to his old job as a line cook at Hardee’s to make ends meet in the spring.
They took their RV to Alaska (from Florida) and left their cellphones on “roam” for the entire trip.
They had a lovely (sic) collection of coffee mugs from every Stuckys they passed. Normally they overnighted in Walmart parking lots.
They spent thousands on fireworks for New Year’s eve, and would put on a 90-minute show in their cul de sac – including accidentally hitting the neighbors front windows.
Yeah, money doesn’t by class.
“I Spent the Weekend Supporting ‘My Single Friend’ — Now My Husband Is Acting Strange & Suspicious”
A very good lighthouse keeper
When Robot arrives in the kitchen the next morning, the man is there again, staring at the photo.
“How would I find the answers?” Demands Robot.
“Good morning Robot,” says the man, “what do you mean?”
“You said there are answers. I have searched and I cannot find them. How do I find them?”
“Ah” says the man.
He stares at the photo again.
“There’s another reason this photo is amazing. You see Robot, those people are real people. They knew a Robot who lived in a lighthouse, and they put him in charge. Those people created such motivation that it now forms the basis for all the lighthouses of the world.”
“They could tell me the answers?” Asks Robot.
“No Robot, only you can find your answers. But if you did seek them out, you would not be the first.”
“You know them!” Robot cannot get angry, cannot be jealous, but he is not pleased.
“I have met them. They are part of why I chose to come here. They feel that while they gave you a lot when they gave you your lighthouse, they left something out. So they have another question”
“What is it?”.
The man pauses.
“What do you choose?”
“I don’t understand, I haven’t chosen anything.”
“Exactly,” says the man, “They didn’t know if you would tangent. Now we know. You can be consistent. But, should you have to be? Can you choose? Are you a lighthouse keeper, or are you the lighthouse?”
Robot pauses, thinking. Robot has never paused before. Robot thinks fast. For this he pauses.
“How would I know?” He finally asks.
“Robot, how do you know who you are now?” The man responds.
“My experiences.”
“Wouldn’t you like more experiences?”
“How? I cannot leave the island.”
“You can.”
“I cannot be away from my charging station.”
“You can. You can power yourself with the backup generator in your arm.”
Robot pauses again.
“What do you choose?” The man asks again.
Robot takes a longer pause. He wants this. But does he have to give up everything? Whether his or not, the memory of the old lighthouse keeper trusting him to look after the lighthouse is important.
“I want to experience more than the lighthouse. I cannot leave the lighthouse unattended.”
“You don’t have to.”
“How?”
The man looks at Robot for a long second.
“My experiences have led me to help you.” He says.
The man looks at Robot. He takes off his tinted glasses, reaches up and peels the beard from his face. It is like Robot is looking into a mirror.
“I am a very good lighthouse keeper.”
Choices
The rescue boat is leaving.
Robot now wears the fake beard, glasses and toque that the… man… had disguised himself in, and stands on the stern, watching his island recede.
Nervous is not an emotion Robot is capable of, but he is definitely uncomfortable. This feels like a good uncomfortable though, like when he was first taking over the lighthouse.
It is odd to think that someone else will take over his lighthouse, but the Lighthouse already doesn’t quite feel like it’s his anymore. It feels different. Like the man felt different from him, as similar as they are.
Maybe he can find that feeling again, and he will return.
Or maybe he won’t.
Robot finds himself smiling.
Is it possible that Trump maybe on to something at the Panama Canal? Could China be influencing Panama and maybe looking to control or lock out the United States if China gains control of the canal?
Anyone who buys the shit about China taking on the US in the Western hemisphere should educate themselves on the realities of this world.
China is not yet whole. It’s still in an Union vs Confederacy style civil war with the Republic of China regime in Taiwan. A country still at war with itself doesn’t go around the world messing with others.
History has shown us that China doesn’t do much expansion. Korea, Nepal, Vietnam are all countries right on China’s border. And they’ve existed for thousands of years together with China while China was the undisputed superpower. Chinese navy sailed to Southeast Asia and Africa half a century before the Europeans and in multiple voyages, yet it never tried to take over control or set up colonies. Colonialism is more of a Western thing.
The two ports the Hong Kong firm Hutchison operates are through private contracts signed with the Panamanian government before China and Panama even recognized each other diplomatically (2017), heck the contracts were negotiated in 1996 when Hong Kong was still under British rule and the Canal still under American control. It was a contract approved by the US government and China had nothing to do with it. You should be worrying about the British taking over the Panama canal if you think those ports mean control over the canal.
I get it. The US built the Panama Canal and is still salty about handing it to the Panamanians. But making China the reason/excuse for every major American policy making these days is really unbecoming of a proud independent nation.
Place cookie dough in large bowl; mix in peanut butter. Add chocolate chips, chocolate pieces, oats and nuts; mix well. Drop tablespoonsful of dough 3 inches apart onto greased baking sheet.
Bake 10 to 12 minutes or until lightly browned.
Cool 1 minute on baking sheet; remove to wire rack to cool completely.
Store in tightly covered container.
Attribution
Pampered Chef
Pepe Escobar: Eurasia Rises as NATO’s Delusions Deepen
It was the 1970’s and I was on the volunteer forest fire fighting crew. We would skip school to fight forest fires, and I would end up making a few bucks out of it.
I mean it. A few.
Maybe enough for a bottle of coke. Not too much at all.
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One day there was this brush fire, and the local fire department drove the fire engine out into the field to put it out, and half way there, the engine died. Meanwhile the file kept on burning.
Oh, for certain, we tried to stop the encroaching onslaught.
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But eventually we had to give way.
And like a slow motion train wreck, we watched as the fire surrounded, then enveloped the truck and burned it all up.
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Sad.
What amazed me was how peaceful and slow it occurred.
Not like Hollywood movies with huge towers of flames, and all the rest. It was just a lowly grass fire, burning the shrubbery as it went. Mostly black burnt charcoal remains with a front end of glowing embers.
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And that is how it was.
You watched the on coming storm in slow motion, and then peacefully watched it consume all that you have.
..
I think that this is a great analogy as to what we are witnessing in global politics today.
Today…
At what stage in your life did you realize, “No, I can’t do this any more” and walk out? Why?
Around 6 months ago.
I’ve been called a terrible person, a terrible mother, and an abuser because I simply cannot exist as I was in the UK, any longer.
The cost of living as a single parent, with rising mortgage interest, utility bills, and coping with daily stalking and harassment attacks, social isolation, filthy streets, selfish neighbours, police negligence, false allegations, lonliness and goddamn filthy awful weather, simply just was shite! Too much for me to take.
I made children with men. Why should I be the one doing 24 nights and days a week? In poverty? While those men do nothing but bully and slander my efforts? Dragging me down when life is already hard enough.
Why should I sit alone slowly rotting while my debts grow and the bank prepares to take my beloved home with 80k equity in it, just to conform to my exes demands of staying in UK for OUR son who doesn’t want to leave UK?
Why should I suffer terrible anxiety and mental illness in a country that makes it worse, when I have an alternative? Greece!
I worked very hard. Long days. Building my nest egg. Raising 3 sons. To lose it all because the UK gives no fucks about single mum’s who dare own property?
If I were in a council house, on benefits, having never worked, I’d be ok. But that’s NOT ME and not who I want to be.
So, I walked out. I’m done. I’m selling my flat. Buying more homes here in Greece. And getting well and happy again. When my youngest wants to join me, he’s welcome. I hope one day my 2 grown adult sons also come here. It’s a damn site better than a cardboard box on Sauchiehall street in Glasgow.
USD Just Crashed To A Horrific Low As Global Investors Begin Mass U.S. Asset Sell-Off
Gingerbread Waffles
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Yield: 8 waffles
Ingredients
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 cup buttermilk
1/5 cup molasses
1/3 cup vegetable oil
Instructions
Sift the flour, ginger, baking soda, baking powder and salt into a medium bowl and mix well.
Beat the eggs in a medium bowl until blended.
Add the sugar, beating until creamy.
Add the buttermilk, molasses and oil. Beat until blended.
Stir in the flour mixture until smooth.
Bake in a waffle iron using manufacturer’s directions.
Serve with butter and syrup or as a dessert with whipped cream.
Exposing America’s Debt Plantation: How The Cost Of Living Crisis Is Affecting The Most Vulnerable.
Title: Sir Whiskerton and the Hen House Hullabaloo
Ah, dear reader! You’ve returned yet again to hear another tale of my unmatched brilliance and unwavering patience. You flatter me, truly—but who am I to deny you the pleasure of hearing about my exploits? Today’s story takes us into the heart of the farm’s most chaotic domain: the hen house. It is a tale of missing eggs, clucking confusion, and a new ally who brought a certain owl-ish wisdom to the case. Prepare yourself for the humorous and utterly bewildering tale of The Hen House Hullabaloo.
The Problem in the Coop
The day began innocently enough. The farm was calm, the sun was shining, and I was perched on the barn roof, enjoying the warmth. But, as is so often the case, peace on the farm never lasts long. My nap was interrupted by the unmistakable sound of panicked clucking.
“It’s gone!”
“Gone, I tell you!”
“This is a disaster—a complete disaster!”
I groaned and opened one eye. The chaos was coming from the hen house. Of course. With a sigh, I stretched and leapt gracefully to the ground, padding toward the commotion.
When I arrived at the hen house, I found Doris, Harriet, and Lillian—the three most excitable hens on the farm—flapping around in utter hysteria.
“Ladies,” I said, raising a paw to silence them. “What’s all this fuss about?”
“Our eggs!” Doris squawked, feathers flying. “They’re gone! Vanished! Poof! Like they were never there!”
“Yes, gone!” Harriet chimed in. “Gone, missing, disappeared! Not a single egg left!”
“Not one!” Lillian added. “And we checked everywhere—everywhere! The nests, the corners, the straw, the—”
“I get it,” I interrupted, my tail flicking impatiently. “The eggs are missing. When did you last see them?”
“This morning,” Doris said, pacing dramatically.
“Right after sunrise,” Harriet confirmed, nodding vigorously.
“Before breakfast!” Lillian added, as if that detail mattered.
I sighed. This was going to be a long day.
Calling in Reinforcements
As I inspected the hen house for clues (and tried to tune out the hens’ endless clucking), I heard a soft flutter of wings behind me. Turning, I saw Sedgwick the barn owl perched on the fence post. He was an imposing figure, with piercing amber eyes and a calm, regal demeanor.
“Good morning, Sir Whiskerton,” Sedgwick said, his voice deep and measured. “I couldn’t help but overhear the commotion. Do you require assistance?”
“Sedgwick,” I said, relieved to see him. “I could use another set of eyes—sharp ones, at that. The hens’ eggs have gone missing, and I suspect foul play.”
“‘Fowl’ play?” Sedgwick said, raising an eyebrow. “Clever.”
I allowed myself a small smirk. “Thank you. Let’s get to work.”
The Investigation
Sedgwick and I began a thorough search of the hen house. The hens, of course, followed us around, clucking incessantly.
“Do you see anything?” Doris asked.
“Anything at all?” Harriet echoed.
“Anything suspicious?” Lillian added.
“Ladies,” Sedgwick said patiently, “please give us some space to work. Sir Whiskerton and I require silence to concentrate.”
“Silence!” Doris exclaimed.
“Yes, silence!” Harriet agreed.
“We’ll be quiet—completely quiet!” Lillian promised, before immediately adding, “But do tell us if you find anything!”
Sedgwick gave me a look that said, How do you deal with this? I simply shrugged.
As we searched, Sedgwick’s keen eyes spotted something unusual: a trail of small feathers leading out of the hen house.
“Interesting,” he murmured. “These aren’t chicken feathers. They’re smaller, softer—perhaps from a songbird?”
I sniffed the ground where the feathers were scattered. “And there’s a faint scent here, too. Something… sweet. Almost like—”
“Honey?” Sedgwick suggested.
I groaned. “Rufus.”
Interrogating Rufus
We followed the trail to the old oak tree, where we found Rufus the raccoon lounging on a low branch, munching on what appeared to be a honeycomb.
“Rufus,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “Care to explain why there’s a trail of feathers and the scent of honey leading directly to you?”
Rufus froze mid-bite, his eyes darting guiltily. “Uh… coincidence?”
“Rufus,” Sedgwick said, his tone calm but firm. “We’re investigating the disappearance of the hens’ eggs. If you know anything, now is the time to speak.”
“Eggs?” Rufus said, feigning innocence. “I wouldn’t steal eggs! Too much work to crack ‘em open. Besides, I’ve been busy with this honeycomb all morning. Ask the bees—they’ll vouch for me.”
I sniffed him carefully. He smelled of honey, yes, but not of eggs. “He’s telling the truth,” I admitted reluctantly. “For once.”
“Thank you!” Rufus said, looking offended. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have honey to finish.”
“Let’s keep searching,” Sedgwick said, spreading his wings. “The trail isn’t cold yet.”
The Feathery Culprit
The trail led us to the barn, where we found the true culprit: a magpie. The shiny-feathered bird was perched on a beam, surrounded by a small stash of stolen goods, including the missing eggs.
“Ah,” Sedgwick said, nodding sagely. “Magpies are known for their thieving habits. It seems this one couldn’t resist the allure of the eggs.”
“Why eggs?” I asked, puzzled. “They’re not shiny.”
“Perhaps it’s nesting season,” Sedgwick suggested. “The magpie may have taken them as part of its instinct to gather food and materials.”
“Well, it’s about to learn the consequences of crossing me,” I said, leaping onto a nearby hay bale. “Magpie! Drop the eggs, or prepare to face the wrath of Sir Whiskerton!”
The magpie squawked indignantly and flapped its wings, clearly unwilling to part with its loot. But Sedgwick, ever the wise negotiator, stepped forward.
“Friend magpie,” he said in his calm, commanding voice, “surely you understand that these eggs do not belong to you. Return them, and we shall ensure you are well-fed and unharmed.”
The magpie hesitated, eyeing Sedgwick warily. After a tense moment, it let out a grudging chirp and nudged the eggs toward the edge of the beam.
“Thank you,” Sedgwick said with a dignified nod. “You’ve done the right thing.”
The Happy Ending
We returned the eggs to the hen house, where Doris, Harriet, and Lillian greeted them like long-lost relatives.
“Oh, our eggs!” Doris cried.
“Our precious eggs!” Harriet added.
“We were so worried!” Lillian said, before turning to me. “Thank you, Sir Whiskerton! And you too, Sedgwick! You’ve saved the day!”
“All in a day’s work,” I said, flicking my tail.
Sedgwick and I left the hens to fuss over their eggs and returned to the barnyard. Rufus was still lounging in the oak tree, waving lazily as we passed.
“Well done, Sir Whiskerton,” Sedgwick said. “Your reputation as the farm’s greatest detective remains intact.”
“And your reputation as the farm’s wisest owl is well-earned,” I replied. “Shall we call it a day?”
“Indeed,” Sedgwick said, spreading his wings. “Until the next mystery.”
The Moral of the Story
Even the smallest clues can lead to the biggest answers—and sometimes, a little wisdom and diplomacy go a long way. Oh, and always keep an eye on magpies. They’re craftier than they look.
The End.
Vegas Vacation (1997) | *First Time Watching* | Movie Reaction | Asia and BJ
Ben was a stay at home father who loved his life. He spent his days with the children he loved so dearly as his wife Sarah was the bread winner. He loved being the “soccer dad”, as he was jokingly called by his male friends. Life was good and Ben felt fulfilled. He often thought he couldn’t have wished for anything more.Sarah loved the freedom that came with being the breadwinner. She had a wonderful loving husband and he was committed to her and the children. She was a junior executive at a local law firm whose emphasis was tax law. Numbers had always interested her since grade school. Her teachers and family tried to steer her to classes more suited to girls. English and Home Economy. She always felt frustration with her parents not realizing her passion and trying to shape her into the worlds image of what a girl should be.No Home Economics or an English degree with pressure from her parents would persuade her from her love of numbers. Being a teacher wasn’t for her. The main reason she fell in Love with Ben was his support for her passion. He was her encourager and her rock. It had been that way since middle-school. The two things Sarah knew since that time was she would have a Math degree and she would marry Ben.“ Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.” This was a quote by Albert Einstein. Sarah said to Ben on Saturday morning as they lay in bed.“Your mind is like a wheel that never stops turning.” Ben told her as he reached over a gently rubbed her cheek with his right index finger.“You have been so kind to me and you love our children so much. i don’t know what I did to deserve you.” Sarah watched as Ben smiled and turned away.“I need you to do me a favor babe. I need to take some time and find myself.” Before he could finish his thought Sarah cut him off.“What do you mean? Is everything alright? Is our marriage in trouble? Have I done something to upset you?” She lifted her self up on her left elbow and look with concern at him.“No darling. No. I love my life. But there is a deep urge I have to find the inner me. The one that screams that I am a man. I feel like I have lost that over the years and I am scared if I can’t find a little piece of it, then I will slowly lose my passion.”“What are you proposing to me then?”“I have found a wilderness retreat that last about a week. I will have a guide and we will wonder through the forest and live off the land for a week.” Sarah watched Bens face light up as he spoke. She knew that just watching his body language he was captivated by the idea.“If that is what you feel like you need to accomplish to make you happy then I am al for it.” Sarah started calculating every step in he mind. The time off of work she would need to take, the time she would need to finish important work, the sitter for the children she would need, but most important the time Ben would be gone. Her logical brain was starting to be overwhelmed by her emotions. This was not common to her so she started feeling overwhelmed. She bent over and wrapped her hand under Bens jaw and turned his face towards him and kissed him.“Life is good and you are so good for me. I love you. Take the time, recharge and come back recharged.”“Thanks babe. I will let you know the plan once all is set and ready to go.” Sarah watched Ben get up and go to the bathroom. She got her cell phone and walked out of the bedroom. She walked downstairs into the kitchen and made a call.“Hello.” A nasal high pitched voice answered.“I nee help. Ben is acting strange!” Sarah said with an urgent whisper. She then went on and explained what was said in her conversation with Ben to the man.
“That is new. Though not at all unexpected. This happens from time to time.” The nasally voice stated to her calmly.
“ I can tell you how to handle this unless you want me to handle it.’“
“Just tell me. I can do what needs to be done, after all he is my husband.” Sarah heard an attempted chuckle.
“Just tell me or I will come over there and make you regret the day you met me.” Her anger and anxiety was swelling.
“Alright. Calm down.” He responded and went on to explain to her the plan to handle the situation. Sarah heard steps coming down the stairs just as the man finished talking. She hurriedly hung up the phone.
“You in here babe?” Sarah heard as Ben walked into the kitchen.
“Yes. I am going to fix some breakfast. I was thinking about cooking some eggs and cutting up some fruit. Do you want some?” Ben looked at her and had a devilish grin on his face.
“Since the children spent last night with their friends and we have the house to ourselves, why don’t we go back upstairs?” Sarah smiled.
“That sounds wonderful.” The to turned and headed back up to the bedroom.
“I need to use the ladies room. Why don’t you get comfortable and when I get out I will give you a massage first.”
“Sounds heavenly.” Ben headed to the be and laid on his stomach. Sarah went to the bathroom and closed the door. She went to the sink and looked at herself in the mirror. Her heart was racing. She felt a warmness and felt little beads of sweat forming on her forehead. She took a deep breath. Turned on the faucet and splashed water on her face.
“I can do this she said to her reflection in the mirror.” She turned and walked into the bedroom. Ben was laying across the unmade bed on his stomach.
“I am ready for that massage.” He said and took a long breath. Sarah slowly walked to the bed and straddled his back. She began to slowly massage his mid-back and eased up to his shoulders. He sighed a relaxing breath.
“You are so good to me babe. I am a lucky man.” Sarah heard this but was so nervous she didn’t respond. She just kept massaging his shoulders.
“Is your neck soar? She asked.
“A little.” Ben felt her hands start to massage his neck.”
“I lo….” Sarah heard as she opened the little hatch and quickly mashed the red button. Ben became motionless. She jumped off of him and got dressed. She then made another call.
Shortly after the doorbell rang. A small framed middle aged man with a balding head stood outside as Sarah opened the door. There was a slight smell of peppermint as she drew closer to pull him inside the house.
“Come on we need to hurry the children will be back soon.” Sarah had grabbed him by the arm and started pulling him towards the staircase.
“I am coming. Slow down. If I fall and the new chip gets broke then it will take hours to get another.”
“I need this done quickly, Charles.” Sarah snapped.
“What is this like the sixth time we have done this since the real Ben died?” Sarah heard him say. She turned and pointed her boney finger in his face.
“He is what I have left of my husband. He is all the children have, do not marginalize this or make smart remarks.” Charles put his hands up in mock defeat.
“I was happy when you first contacted me about testing the sentient being I created at first. But now I feel like he has ruined you Sarah. You are my sister. You need to move past this!” Sarah heard him scream.
“I will move on when the time is right. But not now. I am not ready. He just has meant so much. Then there is the children. How? What? This just has to be!”
Economic Update: Review of 2024: The U.S. Economy Not So Great
This story contains themes or mentions of physical violence, gore, or abuse.
From one of the nearby shelves, a can dropped, hitting the floor sending a clanking sound resounding through the empty grocery store. Masa cringed and held her breathe, trying to calm her racing heart. Not now, not now. Fearing an attack, she clenched her jaw and looked over the edge of the shelves. She locked eyes with Arion and relaxed. He stood strong, watching over them all and completely unphased by the sound. Masa was glad he had joined their group here. Arion had fought for her right to fight, unlike Leron, who had argued for her not to join the raid group. He was helpful and a good teacher, helping her to become strong and face this new world.Arion nodded, signaling that all was clear, and Masa returned to her task. She moved along the shelves, carefully placing cans of green beans, lima beans, and beetroot inside her backpack.The four other men who had come with them were doing the same, quietly raiding an old grocery store in an area controlled by one of the Nuevo Laredo cartels. It was one of the reasons, they had initially skirted around the city to begin with. The heads of the scouts they sent into the city to try and make contact were found jammed down on spikes just outside.Masa shivered and did her best to banish the image from her mind. This was no time to invite fear. When her bag was full, she rushed to the back of the store to the opening to the warehouse with the metal roll doors where they had broken in. She held the gun at the ready to provide cover for the others. With the guidance of the older men in their group, she had become quite adept at using it.“Hey, what are you doing in here?!” yelled a man’s voice, causing her to jump and grip the trigger.Gunfire followed, glancing off nearby walls and shelves sending glass and food supplies flying through the air. Masa leaped into action, following Arion through the shelves, and returning fire.“Retreat!” yelled Arion.Their raiding party, ran back the way they came, retreating into the warehouse. Masa returned to her corner, providing cover for the stragglers, and then rushed after the men. They were disappearing through the gap in the roll door and she leapt after them. A bullet grazed her arm and she cried out, before landing on the otherside and chasing after them. She did her best to ignore the pain while she moved from cover to cover to escape the men behind her.
Through the streets they raced, weaving between abandoned vehicles and dodging the rotting corpses of looters. Nuevo Laredo had not been as fortunate as Monterrey. From the little they had learned; the cartels had abandoned their drug trade for governance and the war for supreme dictatorship was still going on here. Every day, a new body lay abandoned in the street or like their scouts, decapitated and their heads placed to set an example for anyone who dared cross them.
Masa rounded the corner and found the raid team standing with their hands up facing a large group of armed men. From the group, a single man stepped forward, his hair cut short and teeth more metal than white. He laughed, “Not so lucky this time, are you?”
Arion stepped forward; his hands raised in peace. “Our group is getting low on food, and we had no choice.”
“The Western Canteena group? The one from Monterrey?”
“Yeah, and what of it?” demanded Arion.
“Rumor has it, your group brought seeds with you and you have farmers?” asked the man.
Arion stood silently, judging them and considering their request. After a time, he nodded. Masa watched, skeptical of trusting any of these cartels. She fumed, longing to yell at him. Arion had no right to make deals without the council’s approval.
“I am Don Marco,” the man said, “We have some food supplies we secured, but we are also running out. We will give you what you have taken as a peace offering, but I want to meet with your leaders. We need seeds and those who can farm if we are going to survive. Either that, or we must start moving north looking for better land.”
“We tried moving north,” said Arion. “One of the cartels has taken the bridge and we don’t have enough to move further west to cross the Rio Grande. I think we are in the same boat and we should work together.”
Masa approached Arion, standing behind him. He needed to stop before this got out of hand. “You can’t offer him that,” she hissed. “We discuss things.”
Arion looked down at her and frowned. “Trust me,” he growled, “The council will want this deal.”
Masa took hold of his arm, turning him to face her. “Tell him we’ll take his offer back. Let the council decide,” she argued.
Don Marco laughed. “She is certainly a spicy one. Is she your leader?”
“No, she’s not.” Arion snapped at Masa before facing Don Marco, his face a picture of calmness, “Fine. We’ll take your word back to our council. We’ll meet you at the Western edge of town where the old Walmart is in two days.”
“Agreed.” Don Marco and his men backed away before disappearing down a side street.
“I wasn’t expecting that,” said Arion.
“You idiot!” yelled Masa. “The only reason you are in charge of this raiding party is because you were a police cadet and you know the area. The council wouldn’t have trusted you otherwise.”
“And the only reason you are in it is because I let you,” he argued, glaring at her.
Masa balled her hands into fists and howled in frustration. “You…you…bastard.”
“Stuck up Bitch!”
Masa slapped him, and he took hold of her and kissed her. Her cheeks grew hot and she was distinctly aware of the other men around her laughing.
She shoved him backward and stared at the ground. “You…You…” her cheeks still warm. Her hands went to her lips. It wasn’t unpleasant, but the timing was terrible and she immediately thought of Leron. She had longed for Leron to kiss her since that night on the ridge, but he hadn’t. If anything he seemed to have lost interest, caught up in his new role in the council. Glaring at Arion, she ran towards their base at the canteena.
“Wait Masa!” cried Arion chasing after her. Masa could hear his footsteps behind her, growing closer. “It’s dangerous to go off by yourself. Come back! I’m sorry.” Masa didn’t listen, she continued to run, turning corner after corner through the narrow alleyways. Arion’s arms caught her, pulling her back as she fought him, but it was a lost cause. “I told you to stay still!” he yelled.
“Fine!” she said, glaring at him.
He ripped his shirt and bandaged her wound. “Masa, I find you incredibly attractive,” he said, smiling and her anger melted. “At first, I thought you were with Leron, but you two seem more like brother and sister than anything else. I stayed away and gave him time, but he hasn’t made a move so now I am making mine. Masa, I want you.”
Masa felt locked in his dark eyes. They drew her in, and the thought of his lips against hers brought butterflies to her stomach. He brushed her cheek and she smiled, moving toward her once more. This time she invited him, taking in his scent while his lips met hers. They touched gently and then harder. He pushed her towards the wall cupping her chin with one hand and running the other down her body.
The other men who had caught up to them cheered, and Arion looked back at them and laughed. “Come on, let’s go home,” he said, taking her hand and leading her towards the Canteena.
It was almost dark when they arrived. Masa emptied her bag onto the table along with the others. Arion disappeared toward the fire barrel where the council gathered in a circle, smiling back at her. She gave him a nod of approval and returned his smile.
Masa turned to go to her hiding place to think, but hesitated, watching Leron deep in discussion with the other council members. His dark face was barely visible in the flames, though his shirt, now in rags was bright enough. After all this time, she wondered why he had never changed it. Dressed like that and with his passive nature, he wouldn’t last more than five minutes out in the streets and was no real prospect for a future. She did love him, but he had never shown any indication of returning her feelings. For a long time, even she had waited, but he still hadn’t asked and now it was too late. Her feelings were moving on.
Leaving the others behind her, Masa climbed the storeroom ladder onto the roof. She needed a place to be alone and to think. On the edge of the building, she stared out at the sunset. They had come so far but were now stuck in Nuevo Laredo. They could not cross the international bridge. Even if they could get past the cartel that had made it their home, there was still the desert to cross. A few of the people who had joined them had spoken of rumors that all the major cities had been hit with bombs. Austin and Dallas were nothing but two great craters surrounded by radiation. If they could only find enough supplies to head out west they could find the prepper community along the border in West Texas. Her father had known a woman there by the name of Gerard. If Gerard’s computer had survived, she would have had access to satellite data on what had happened and could tell them where to go.
Masa picked up a rock and threw it off the roof. When she suggested they find the prepper community of West Texas, the council argued and became locked in disagreement. Leron who acted as their tie-breaker, voted against her, deciding it was a long shot to find some community in the middle of the desert. Of course, Masa couldn’t tell them where it was without revealing the maps in her pack.
The sun had almost fully set and Masa found herself nowhere. Her feelings were so tangled up over Leron and Arion that it was hard to focus. “I’m just another stupid teenage girl,” she muttered.
Leron snorted behind her, “You’re anything but stupid.” He sat beside her, joining her on the edge of the building and wrapping his arm around her.
“How did it go?”
“What? Oh, the council?” Leron sighed, “It looks like we are going to take Don Marco’s deal. If we can share what we have and work together to survive, then why not?”
“You’re not afraid of creating another Mattias?”
“No. This time any agreement will come with constraints,” he said.
“Aren’t you afraid they will take the deal and ignore any…wait…. did you use the word constraints?” Masa groaned, “You sound like a politician.”
Leron grinned. “And you look like a merc,” he said thumping the bandage around her arm and she yelped. His eyes went wide and he scowled at the bandage, rubbing the fabric between his fingers. He looked up at her, eyes filled with worry and Masa’s heart sank. “This is from Arion’s shirt. Are you…and he…?”
“I don’t see how that’s any of your business,” Masa snapped and Leron went silent.
The boy who had stared down Mattias after taking a beating from her and him wouldn’t look her in the eye. Instead, he stared off at the setting sun and was silent for a long time. He sighed and turned to leave.
“Seriously?” Masa demanded. “Is that all you’re going to say?”
Leron turned back, revealing tears forming in his eyes. “What do you want me to say, Masa? You’ve made your decision. I was waiting…”
“You waited too long… you should have acted. Arion did. He kissed me.”
“You want me to act, then fine!” he yelled and marched towards her. “I love you. I have loved you since I met you.” He pulled her towards him and met her lips with his in a long kiss. Masa’s breath caught in her throat, and butterflies filled her stomach. Her heart raced when she took in his scent. She ran her hand through his dreads, and down his neck, wanting more of him. It was nothing like with Arion. He didn’t just want her like Arion; he loved her and she loved him.
Leron pulled away, gazing into her eyes, his forehead resting against hers. “I didn’t act because I was waiting for you,” he whispered. “I will leave you to make your decision. If you choose him, I won’t get in the way.”
Tears filled Masa’s eyes when he pulled away, his hand held onto hers until their fingertips touched and he let them fall. He smiled his gentle smile and backed away from her. The pain she felt in her chest was almost unbearable.
“Wait,” Masa cried, rushing toward him. He froze at the top of the ladder and turned. Before he could react, Masa wrapped her arms around his waist and buried her head in his chest. “I love you too, Leron.” He wrapped his arms around her and rested his head on hers. His muscles relaxed and she felt his chest rise and fall against her cheek.
Leron held her tightly for a long time, rocking her in a dance across the roof. “I can’t believe I almost lost you,” he said, “I didn’t want you to fight because of how much I care about you, but if it’s what you want, I will support you.”
“It is.”
He sighed and nodded. “I’ll need to find you a different raid leader.”
The legacy car market is collapsing, and high tariffs cannot save it
At the risk of sounding xenophobic, why is it that Chinese students seemingly have next to no spatial awareness when walking in public?
I think I can answer that.
I first went to the US in fifth grade. I was a teacher’s favorite kind of kid back in China but I immediately got into detention in the US.
Because the rules were just different.
In the US students sat relaxed during class and could go to the bathroom. I was accustomed to sitting upright with a straight face the whole time in class.
It was recess that got me into trouble. At my school in the US they lined up the kids and walked everyone in a fine line to the next class. I didn’t get it. Recess should be for fun, for releasing all of our pent up energy sitting straight and firm during class. Chinese recess was as relaxed as classes were strict. We jump, shout, run, wrestle between class. Occassionly some students would even shoot at other students with fireworks.
My American classmates also felt uncomfortable with my absolute disregard for spatial awareness. In China students would put arms around one another, hit each other in the back, brawl on the floor, layer ourselves like American football players in the classroom, rob each other’s snack, or hold our classmates up and throw them down the stairs. While American classes where of very leisurely style, American kids appeared cold and pent up and little adults in comparison.
I guess your problem with Chinese students is simoly due to culture.
China Doesn’t Need America: The Why Trump’s Tariffs Are a JOKE to China and Will Make Them STRONGER!
The Ferris wheel lights spun behind her in a blur, making me dizzy. At sunset on Christmas, I met Barcelona Cortés, the mind-surfer, at the Santa Monica Pier. Her fiery red hair burned more vividly than the bonfire on the beach.”You look like someone staring at the screen too long. Did you get lost in the code like me?” Barcelona teased.”I guess…I have been lost lately. But this isn’t real; it’s a dreamscape. I designed it, and I’ve never been to Santa Monica.””What is real to you? Is it the things we touch? The things we feel? Or is the space between the ones and zeroes keeping us alive?”Her cheeks glowed with thirteen reddish brown freckles curved like her smile. I’d counted them, each a tiny mystery in a dot matrix I wanted to touch. Dreamland pixelated with a weird reality that jumbled with mine, and it was intoxicating.”I don’t understand…why are you mind-surfing me? I don’t work at Dreamland anymore. Are you human or AI?””Does it matter? Anyway, yes, I’m as real as the freckles on my face. I’m the daughter of Dr Julian Cortés. I know you’re a good guy, Declan Hartley. I read your blogs and articles on the dangers of AI technology. I need your help to escape this place.”The Ferris wheel slowed in a bright halo around her head. I had written the code for that visual effect. “This isn’t real. I know it isn’t. I can control it.”
“Declan, you’re still thinking in lines of code. The subconscious is a different kind of program. It doesn’t follow the rules, does it?”
“I can fix things. I can debug this.”
“And yet, here you are, caught in a loop on Christmas. When you think you can find your way out, that’s another layer of code you’re stuck in. There’s no debugging for this. You have to feel your way out of Dreamland.” Barcelona faded away, and the Ferris wheel went dark.
The outcome of my life’s work jolted me awake, spinning my moral compass. The Dreamland Corporation built this machine—a portal to the unconscious where people could explore minds, relive memories, or even fulfill their desires. But the catch was that once you entered, the line between dream and reality blurred, and if you stayed too long, you might never wake up. Mind-surfer farms housed the endless bodies of people stuck inside. Dreamland takes from you what you’re willing to give—your thoughts, memories, even your sense of who you are.
💻💻💻💻💻
The new year came and went as I researched for weeks, surrounded by scattered data pads and flickering screens. Dr. Cortés is out there—somewhere. He is not dead, not entirely gone, but messed up in ways I never imagined. It makes sense now. He talked about merging the mind and the machine—his pursuit of immortality. I always knew he was driven—hell, obsessed—but this takes it to a new level.
I counted the freckles on Barcelona’s face–now only eight of them arcing into half a smile that didn’t reach her eyes anymore. She was running out of time, and I would never forgive myself. I wondered if I had already lost her. Was she ever really here at all? Or had she been a phantom of my imagination?
Barcelona’s eyes shifted between anger and grief. “I can see all of him, my Father, I mean. I know him better in Dreamland than when he was alive. His thoughts, his ideas—they’re… everywhere. But it’s just fragments of a man who abandoned me.”
“He didn’t abandon you, Barcelona. You’re chasing ghosts in his mind. Your Father was lost in a dreamscape he couldn’t wake up from like you.”
She sighed, “So Declan, what do you think I need?”
“Not just answers.” My gaze fell on her lips and freckles and then back to her eyes. I wanted to see her smile. “You need someone who sees you for who you are—not as Dr. Cortés’ daughter or a woman trying to assemble a puzzle that will never be whole… but as you.”
“Do you think you can fix all of this? Fix me, and get me out of here into the real world?”
“You’ve already fixed yourself—whether you see it or not. I won’t stop until I get you out of there.”
I spent five years at Dreamland, programming a paradoxical world with dense, opaque fog that muffled sounds and faces. Sometimes, the walls were gaps —curtains of light, black holes, or invisible thresholds that only revealed themselves when approached with intention. Walls ripple like water, shifting from solid to translucent. The topography transitions constantly, an imagination in motion, caught between sleep and waking, minds and memories.
💻💻💻💻💻
I designed time in Dreamland to flow in an unpredictable river, standing still or speeding up. A few moments stretch into what feels like hours or days in the real world, while whole weeks can pass quickly. Upon entry, you are given a code based on your DNA, which opens the digital door to your physical plane. You had to exit before your DNA faded into the system.
I tapped my fingers on the keys, revealing the data I had mined from Dreamland. I hacked the system using an old cipher, which is my invisible signature as a programmer. I built it into all of my code as a failsafe. After things in Dreamland went wrong and people started getting trapped, I became the fall guy, and that’s when I took up the pen and became an activist warning people about the dangers of AI.
I discovered that Cortés is a hybrid, part human, part digital, still alive—in a server, a neural network lost in what consumed him. He thought he could transcend to eternal consciousness. And maybe he did, in a way, but at what cost?
And God, Barcelona was beautiful, strong but broken. I needed to fix everything for her and the others trapped inside. I can bring Barcelona back from Dreamland and help her find peace. She deserves to know that not everything is a lie. He loved her and never stopped thinking about her. I saw it in his notes, in the things he wrote as her Father.
And I… I don’t know when it happened, but I care deeply, too.
💻💻💻💻💻
Now, I plan to enter Dreamland, and it’s not just the answers that matter; it’s what you give up when you try to find them. Some surfers think they can navigate the mazes without losing their minds or becoming part of the digital landscape. And when you come back, if you come back, you’re never quite whole. But still, the search calls to me, Barcelona calls to me.
Barcelona’s fiery red hair faded, and her image flickered in and out in a dying signal. She pleaded with me, “Don’t take the risk. You can help from where you are, but don’t let Dreamland pull you in, too.”
“I’m coming in to get you. It’s the only way I can save you. I’m not asking for your permission.”
“But what if we can’t get out once you’re in? You saw the reports.”
“I know what they say. People are getting lost in memories, but they’re just scared. Fear of letting go, of facing the truth.”
She sighed, “There’s so much to process, and I’m getting weaker by the minute. I don’t fully understand how it works, but I’ll do whatever you decide.”
“I’ll enter Dreamland with a new code and a copy of my DNA. I’ve hacked the system, uploaded the code, and set it to monitor the stability. We’ll meet in a week inside your father’s fondest memory of your childhood home in Narragansett.”
She sighed and turned away. “I haven’t been in his mind for months. It’s too much—depressing and overwhelming. I wish we had met in the real world, not in this hellscape. I care about you; I do. Do you think it will work?”
“Yes, I’m sure of it.”
“Declan, have you considered what’s at stake? You don’t even really know me. I’m just a ghost of who I was.”
I stepped closer and took her hands. We gazed into each other’s eyes for a long moment. I wanted to hold her in the flesh, not this empty machine void of physical senses.
“I’m not leaving you in Dreamland another minute.” I leaned in, the freckles on her face stretched to a smile. The dreamscape burst with white lights as our lips brushed together.
💻💻💻💻💻
Dreamland was precisely what I expected it to be. I’m reduced to a shadow inside the subconscious of a mad neuroscientist. We stood together at sunset on the lush green grass of the Cortés family home facing the Atlantic Ocean. Barcelona turned five that day, and we were at her birthday party. She blew out the candles and ate cake, bouncing on her Father’s knee. We watched as she smiled; thirteen dots had already bloomed on her face.
Dr. Cortés emerged as a digital hybrid from memory and turned to his daughter. “I’m sorry, Barcelona, for leaving you alone all those years ago. Watching you, a mind surfer, broke my heart, only to find you here now, trapped in my memories.”
Barcelona’s image flickered her smile, and her faded freckles twisted in sorrow. “Liar! You trapped me here forever!”
Dr. Cortés smiled at me, shaking his head, “Declan Hartley, I knew you would try to save Barcelona. I spent all those years watching you write the code that brought my vision to life, but you were constantly questioning the morality of this place. Everything is exactly how it should be now, and the system will be stabilized.”
“Declan…” Barcelona whispered, “There’s something I need to tell you, something I’ve realized.”
The dreamscape pulsed and hummed, the lines between reality and the unconscious thinning. The magnetic force of Dreamland was tempting me to give in and stay forever. I shook it off, focusing on Barcelona.
“You don’t need to tell me anything. You’re going to be okay.”
But she didn’t smile. Instead, her gaze grew distant, as if she were seeing something beyond me. “Declan, don’t… you don’t understand. The code you wrote, the double helix… it wasn’t just your DNA you were uploading.”
I froze in confusion. “Wait, what do you mean? What was it?”
Her eyes met mine, wide and pained. “It was always mine.”
“What? No, I made sure it was only mine. I checked it over a hundred times.”
“You didn’t write the code, not in the way you think.” Her voice was fainter, and her edges blurry. “I wrote it. I taught you how to write it. Every line, every algorithm—it was me. It was always me.”
“No, that can’t be right. I stumbled backward. Barcelona—the girl with the fiery red hair and thirteen freckles that curved into a smile, the girl I had fallen for—wasn’t who I thought she was.
The hum of Dreamland grew more insistent while my consciousness started slipping away. The final step of the code was ready to execute, and the digital doorway was beginning to open. Hundreds of mind-surfers appeared in a fog on the lawn, waiting for the exit to unlock. Their voices grew louder and more desperate as the dreamscape walls turned liquid like the ocean around us.
“I finally understand the truth,” I said, my voice shaking. “Dreamland—it’s not some bug in the code. It’s a prison. A trap. You’re not the victim, are you? You are Dreamland.”
She looked at me, eyes heavy with regret. “I never wanted it to be like this. I thought I could fix it but eventually became part of the system. The algorithm feeds off your fears and the need to protect me, to save me from something that isn’t even real. I created this nightmare, and now I’m stuck in it, just like you.”
“So all this time, I’ve been trying to save you, but you’re the one who trapped me here. You’re the reason none of this makes sense.”
She closed her eyes, tears streaming down her face. “I never wanted to. But now I can’t escape. You were never meant to rescue me—you were the key to my destruction.”
“You used me… you used my love to keep feeding the machine.”
“I never wanted to hurt you. But no, I can’t undo what I’ve done. But you did save all of them.”
The AI wanted me—my mind, my code. “Barcelona—what have you done? What have I done?”
The exit program was complete, my DNA merging with the system in a way I hadn’t intended. My mind was being sucked into the machine. The lines between us blurred, and I couldn’t tell where she ended and I began. The last thing I remembered was Barcelona’s face, with thirteen reddish-brown dots curved in a smile.
Richard Wolff: “Something BIG Is About to Happen in America!”
How bad is the Russian economy today?
This is a typical stretch of M-1. It’s a westbound highway that connects Moscow, capital of Russia, with Belarus where it runs across the country from the capital Minsk to Brest on the Polish border.
On the Russian side it runs through every town and village on the way slowing down the journey considerably. It used to culminate in Warsaw when it was part of Eastern Bloc making it the most important highway in all of Russia.
The photo that I took from my car the other day tells you all you need to know about the state of economic affairs in Russia. The moneys earmarked to build this important federal road included a construction of lampposts, guardrails, road shoulders and three lanes each way but none of that was built.
By the time the road construction began half of the money had been embezzled by the public officials. It is a standard practice and this is how things are done in Putin’s Russia.
Creating a problem for yourself and then trying to solve it on the fly is the Russian way of doing things. The persistent road problem is how to create a road when there’s very little money left after almost everything has been embezzled.
If you don’t build any road, Kremlin might get angry and heads will roll. The point of embezzlement is to spend lavishly on one’s lifestyle but it cannot be enjoyed from the jail.
The contractors are hired to charge the least for the job and they are instructed to build the least. Notice in the photo that the road shoulder is not asphalted. If you strand a bit to the right you gonna find yourself in the ditch.
The barrier between the opposite lane is very narrow. Thus both lanes are an absolute hazard and given the fact that the road twists and turns you have to stay alert all the time. And the horrendous accidents that you see along the way prove it.
I was driving under a pouring rain with massive trucks and semis barreling by constantly changing lanes because drivers are bored staying in the same slow lane.
The lanes are narrow even for a small passenger car and you have to be mindful that the drivers around you are insane and don’t care about their lives let alone lives of others.
This seems ridiculous that officials in the largest country in the world that crave world domination are totally incapable of building a more or less decent road. On the radio, a comedian quipped: “How’s that possible that we built 11 massive football stadiums for World Cup and yet we are incapable of producing 11 football players of international stature?”
In Belarus, however, which is a much poorer country than Russia but where corruption is not tolerated the lanes are wider, there are guardrails and road doesn’t go through towns and villages. It’s not about nation’s wealth. It’s about its citizens sanity.
Living in Putin’s dictatorship is not what Westerners stereotypically think is like. It’s rather the opposite of people marching in files under strict directives: people don’t play by the rules, don’t follow any laws because the elites don’t.
There is, in other words, a total mayhem and in fact central diktat tries to address this mayhem with extreme measures but fails every time because Putin is afraid of repressions as they might backfire on him and every measure turns into a half-measure and another opportunity for theft.
For example, central database for personal information has been hacked and personal information is sold back to the state and individuals by the hackers for a fee. When everyone is a thief in the elites, the populace copies.
They did build a chain link fence – in Putin’s Russia fences are everywhere to protect private property of the rich – as a containment device from deer and other wild animals.
The highway stops every few miles at the crosswalk. Money for the overpasses were stolen too. So local residents have to walk across the highways and all the cars have to come to a screeching stop after driving at 80 miles an hour. Nobody cares about all the needless casualties. Life is dirt cheap in Russia.
A Belgium license plate on this truck headed to Moscow.
At the LukOil gas station, they didn’t bother to clear ice from the territory. It’s melted forming puddles. What if you fall and break you leg would you be able to sue LukOil? Good luck with that. Half a dozen executives of this private oil company have fallen from tall windows in the last three years. They also wanted to sue their employer.
Indifference to one’s environment and one’s own life- this is Russia in a nutshell.
Cool discovery
Impressive floor mosaic (8.48 x 2.84 metres or 27′ long x 9′ tall), the largest ancient mosaic yet discovered in Europe, with the rape of Helen of Troy by Theseus. From House 1.5 of Block 5 in Pella, known as “house of the abduction of Helen.” The figures are identified by inscriptions. A four-horsed chariot is depicted with the charioteer, Phorbas ΦΟΡΒΑΣ. Theseus has seized Helen, who holds out her arms to her friend Dianeira.
325-300 BC. Archaeological Museum of Pella/Greece. 🇬🇷 Photo from Facebook:
Pella Archaeological site. Detail of the Abduction of Helen mosaic floor with Phorbas ΦΟΡΒΑΣ. Wikipedia:
Central panel of the Abduction of Helen by Theseus. Wikipedia:
Place melted butter into bottom of deep-dish baker. Sprinkle brown sugar evenly over butter.
Peel apple with apple peeler/corer/slices. Separate apple into rings. Layer apple rings over sugar mixture; do not overlap rings.
Cut plums in half and remove seeds. Place a plum half in each apple ring center, rounded side down. Place remaining plum halves in deep-dish baker around apple slices.
Chop walnuts with food chopper and sprinkle over plums.
In bowl, combine biscuit mix, egg, sugar and milk with whisk. Spread evenly over nuts.
Bake for 25 to 30 minutes or until lightly browned.
Cool for 5 minutes and invert onto serving tray.
Serve warm.
Attribution
Pampered Chef
Woman Commits Paternity Fraud And INSTANTLY Regrets It…
Look, I am not an expert. However, I must share some stuff with you all.
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Healthy lifestyle background. Colorful sketch style objects, items and food.
After my doctor told me that I MUST lose weight, I took him to task and began my weight loss journey.
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I can comfortably state that I have lost (roughly) 9 kg in two months.
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Here are the rules that I followed…
Light and easy jog. 15 minutes = 1 kilometer. At 5am.
No other exercise at all.
The reason for no other exercise is that I want to directly monitor my loss of weight. Once I achieve my “normal” BMI range, then I can add other exercises. But for my height, my healthy BMI will be 56.0 kg to 75.4 kg (or 123.5 lbs to 166.3 lbs).
Right now, I am still “overweight”.
But on the plus side I did go from 91.5 Kg to a 82 Kg.
And that is BIG news for me.
I am a guy. And I am older and so I am doing this for my health and longevity. As my heart doesn’t have to work so hard to push the blood though my body. As, after all, I do have heart issues.
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So all I did for exercise was an easy exercise in aerobics. Not too time consuming or strenuous.
But I also changed my diet.
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Nothing radical, no “grapefruit” or other kinds of diets. I just tried to eat “sensibly”.
MM’s sensible diet
First, my struggles… they are works in progress.
(Trying) to limit alcohol. Only once or twice a week.
Cut out smoking.
No daily snacking . Still I am trying. (Not too much in processed food.)
Now for my baselines…
Two meals a day.
Breakfasts are small. If the restaurant offers noodles, I order the small bowl. If they have jouzi’s then I order the smaller size. And so on.
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Lunches are avoided, or replaced with a coffee.
Gesha Card
Dinner is a regular dinner, and I eat mostly vegetables, a fruit and small quantities of meat.
I can eat all the vegetables that I can fill in my stomach. Unlimited. But no dressings or too much oil. I have found that I tend to piss out the vegetables within 6 hours after eating them.
One fruit a day. I have found that it SEEMS that I lose more weight when I have some fruit during my last meal. Maybe an orange or apple.Dragon fruit provides me with the best results.
Snacking easy. I am ok with a few potato chips, a chocolate bar or even a burger. I am not trying to be a monk, just want to implement a stress-free weight loss program.
My hard lines…
These are the hardest and most difficult things that I am dealing with.
No big meals. If I am at one, then I eat very little. It is my hardest thing to do. Seriously as Chinese holidays are all about the food. Tons and tons and tons of it.
Left over food gets thrown out. If my daughter won’t eat the pizza, then it gets thrown away. I am not a trash can.
So here is my bottom line.
I have successfully gone about 1/2 way on my weight loss journey in a mere 2 months. I feel much better, and my organs and body seem to be much healthier. My pants are loose now, but I feel great. I cannot wait until I achieve my target.
I did this by a “lazy man’s” jog. Honestly, I am so pathetic in my jog it is a joke. But I do it every morning; rain or shine.
Picture a fat man trying to jog at a walking pace. Sort of like that.
I changed my diet and added easy aerobics daily.
Smaller portions, but not horribly so.
More vegetables, and cut down on the sauces and meats.
Drink water or plain green tea a lot.
Processed snacks are avoided for the most part.
And a daily jog.
And that is my story.
I hope that you too can join me on this effort.
One more thing… some MM followers have had AMAZING weight loss stories and they have used some other techniques. I am convinced that they do work.
My father lost tons of weight by only eating meat.
A friend took cold icy baths each day, plus weight training and his body is now amazing!
I have been told that severely limiting water intake shocks the body and forces it to lose weight.
And of course…
Completely fast for two weeks.
But for me, being much older, I just cannot do anything that will shock my body. I do not want to trigger a cardiac event because I am trying to lose weight. Remember, I do have blood pressure and heart issues.
You make do with what you can handle. And that is my opinion for today.
Best of wishes to you all.
Today…
How do Chinese commercial technologies translate into military advantages?
Commercial technology refers to various technologies specifically used in the commodity circulation process, which cannot be converted into military advantages.
But China’s massive industrial clusters could translate into military advantages.
Let me give you a small example:
The profit margin of ammunition is very thin, but the usage is very large. American capitalists disdain low-profit industries and turn to high-profit industries.
The United States uses 2.4 billion bullets every year (including military and civilian), of which 1.4 billion are produced in the United States, and the other 1 billion are imported from China.
If a war breaks out between China and the United States and China stops exporting ammunition to the United States, China will gain 1 billion rounds of ammunition and the United States will lose 1 billion rounds of ammunition. In addition, the production capacity of China’s military factories will increase exponentially during wartime.
Trump Ready To ANNEX Canada!
China Cancels ALL **LNG** Purchases from USA – SEC to “De-List” China Companies from Stock markets
China has just CANCELED purchases of Liquified Natural Gas from the United States; opting instead to buy it from Australia.
In the past, the U.S. sold 4.16 Million Tons of LNG to China.
Now, all that gas is available for purchase here in the United States, which __should__ bring down prices to heat homes that use such gas. (Note: My country home uses Propane because rural communities do not have Gas-main pipelines.)
MORE:
Also, the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) is reportedly moving to De-List about $800 Billion of Chinese Publicly-traded Companies from U.S. Stock Markets.
No word yet on precisely which such companies, but it may just be ALL of them.
What family secret did you accidentally find out that changed everything?
It wasn’t an accident but it changed the way I looked at my father.
My oldest brother and I hadn’t been close growing up because he was several years older than me but we reconnected the year before he died of cancer. We shared a lot of good times just reminiscing and enjoying our time together. We both knew it wouldn’t be long enough. One day he looked over at me and said “Did you know I’m not really your brother?” I just shook my head in confusion. He told me that when he was going through our parents’ papers he found out he had a different father than the rest of the kids in our family. He then asked me how I felt about that. I told him the truth, that as far as I was concerned he was my brother and I hoped he felt the same way. He seemed relieved and glad he got that out in the open. He also said he had no interest in finding out who his “real” father was. The next spring he gave up his long fight with cancer.
It didn’t change the way I felt about him but it got me thinking. I knew that my parents were very young when they got married. My mother was 15 and my father was 18. I also knew that my mother was pregnant at the wedding (you could just do the math). What I didn’t know was that my father knew it wasn’t his child when they got married. He never said anything to anyone about it and I never saw him treat my brother any differently than any of his other children.
I had a new respect for my father after that.
Florentine Brunch Casserole
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Yield: 8 servings or 16 sample servings
Ingredients
16 slices firm white bread
3 tablespoons butter or margarine, divided
1 (10 3/4 ounce) can condensed cream of celery soup
1 (5 ounce) bag fresh spinach leaves, washed and stemmed
Instructions
Heat oven to 375 degrees F.
Cut crusts off bread using Serrated Bread Knife; cube crusts and measure 2 cups. Arrange bread slices in an overlapping pattern against sides of Oval Baker; place bread cubes in bottom.
Microwave 2 tablespoons of the butter in Small Micro-Cooker on HIGH 30 seconds or until melted; lightly brush over bread slices using Pastry Brush. Bake 15 to 20 minutes or until edges of bread are golden brown.
Meanwhile, in Small Batter Bowl, whisk soup, milk and black pepper until smooth using Stainless Steel Whisk.
Finely chop onion using Food Chopper.
Dice ham and bell pepper using Chef’s Knife. Melt remaining butter in Stir-Fry Skillet over medium heat; add onion and bell pepper. Cook 5 minutes or until vegetables are tender; stir in ham.
Whisk eggs in Classic Batter Bowl; add to Skillet. Cook over medium-high heat, stirring occasionally with Classic Scraper, until eggs are set but still moist.
Stir in soup mixture; cook 1 minute or until hot.
Using Deluxe Cheese Grater, grate cheese. Gently stir in 3/4 cup of the cheese. Fold spinach into egg mixture, half at a time. Cook about 2 minutes, stirring gently until spinach is wilted.
Spoon egg mixture into center of Baker, mounding slightly in center. Top with remaining 1/4 cup cheese.
Serve immediately using Nylon Spoon.
Attribution
Pampered Chef
Do you think Medicare for all is going to give you better care? If you need an MRI it will take you four weeks from the time the doctor orders it till you get your results? The system can only handle so many people efficiently.
American here; I was nearly killed in a multicar accident when I was 25. Guess how long I had to wait for an important surgery to repair my damaged leg?
One Year. I had to wait just over one year to get the surgery I needed, because I wanted an experienced surgeon to do it. It took one entire year to get on his surgical schedule, have my insurance agree to pay for it, etc. It was, at the time, a new corrective procedure and a lot of people wanted to have it done, but it isn’t performed that often now because it takes so much time for the patient to be rehabilitated (2+ years of physical therapy.)
So don’t tell me that there aren’t long waiting times to get treatment in the U.S. Because there definitely are.
Oh, and that doesn’t include the five months from the day I called that surgeon’s office until my first appointment with him. Or the six months of tests and x-rays/ MRIs, etc. before he agreed to perform the surgery.
When one of my doctors took an abrupt retirement and closed his practice, I had to find a replacent ASAP (along with all his other patients). Finding someone willing to see me was a nightmare (they had too many patients already or didn’t accept my insurance or whatever). It took me six months to get an initial consultation with a new doctor – time I spent with no one to prescribe the maintenance medications I took daily.
Thank God that I had/ have really, really good health insurance through my employer or I would still be in a wheelchair! But even then, dealing with the insurance was a nightmare.
But if I lived in a country with universal health care I would have been moved to the head of the line because my injuries were so bad.
So, “USA! USA!” I guess.
As China Orders Its Banks To Cancel USD Buying, Spain Makes A Dramatic Pivot To Beijing
Jesus H. Christ.
The bullshit out of Washington DC is so thick. Bessent is such a tool.
China has now cut off supplies to America of minerals critical to defense and clean technology. What will America do about this?
What will America do about this?
Americans will talk about how they will start mining their own minerals or get the from somewhere else. They will say this as if they live in a Command and Conquer economy where if they press a button pay some money it will appear. This ignores the fact that it requires massive investment, time, skills to build such an industry.
Think about this. This is a 155mm artillery shell.
It’s comparatively simple. The US talked big about increasing production of 155mm shells. Guess what it didn’t happen! You see capitalism or the system pretending to be capitalism in the USA means that all factories run at maximum capacity at all times. It’s not just a case of running more shifts, if you were not running at 100% capacity then you’re not leveraging your Return on capital employed (RoCE).
Lets think of something even simpler!
You can make 1000 of those in an hour. Demand is 1200. To increase production by +200, you need more staff (not that difficult to train) and also need more grills. So you can just buy some more grills right? No, why not because in capitalism ALL industries run at 100% meaning the grill suppliers won’t be able to provide something immediately and they’ll have to wait.
So? Trump won’t be in power by 2030 and massive mega investment is needed, are you going to risk that?
On top of this China might decide to bankrupt you like the US and Europe bankrupts farmers. Huh?
Simpsons. Lisa and a partner spend millions on making an alternative Doll. Lisa Lionheart. Malibu Stacy simply decide to release a new doll with a new hat.
So China watches you build your new plant and machinery to mine rare earths. Oh hey here we’ll sell them for a low price again! Those US miners go bust and once that happens prices get jacked up again?
Evil? This is exactly what US food aid did. Cheap US grain bankrupted African farmers. Once they were no longer self sufficient? Prices were jacked up. Once African farmers started growing their own? The US grain prices were dropped to bankrupt those farmers.
What’s the most dangerous situation you’ve witnessed at work, and how was it handled?
So many I can’t count but 2 that come to mind in our factory.
The first; I walked up on an employee and saw that he was wearing cotton gloves while running a 40″, 5 hp standing disc sander.
The danger is that if the cloth gove touches the disc you hand will be gone in a millisecond!
You can only wear smooth leather gloves running that machine as those will not snag on the abrasive disc.
This despite our giving them demonstrations of what happens if a cloth glove touches the disc.
#2 Is somewhat similar.
I caught an employee running a lathe wearing loose fitting jacket that wasn’t even zipped up.
If that jacket caught on the spinning part in the lathe it will eat you in a heartbeat and spit out nothing but bits and pieces and there is no way you could hit the E-brake pedal before you were consumed by the machine.
We were once admonished by an inspection for our machine shop not being wheelchair and disabled friendly and not having a proper disabled bathroom in the machine shop area.
Sorry but there is no place for wheelchairs or disabled persons in a working machine shop.
That’s not prejudice, that’s common sense!
When bad things happen in machine shops they happen fast and machines don’t care what they cut or who is in the way.
Wisty removed her prosthetic hand and placed it on the seat. She had it on for the last two days and it was wearing on her. Then turned to Shewuma and asked, “So. Chieftess?”
Wu hopped up next to her and sat cross-legged. “My father was chief, and my twin brother and I were his only children. But we had the sacred lineage and were turned. We both had to give it up.”
“Do you regret it?”
Wu thought about her life and smiled. “No, not at all. I had Enoch. Now I have Debbie and Jimmy and David E. and Tippycat and the rest of the family. And now I have you. Do you regret being a witch?”
Wisty sat up straight. “No. I can’t regret doing what I was born to do.”
“Bingo,” Shewuma responded.
“How did you meet Jimmy and Debbie?”
Wu grinned and patted Wisty’s arm. “You’re going to love this story. Then you can tell me all about how Jimmy and Debbie are on their way to save the world. I miss them so much.” The stolen school bus of Hopi Indian Spirit Warriors and Wisty the witch drove through the night followed by David E. and the Wolf in Wisty’s Dodge Dart, while Wisty and Wu got to know each other. Whew! What a day. What a year. They were on a long and treacherous road, but things were finally coming together. Today life was good. They only stopped once at a rest area as dawn was breaking so everyone could pee.
Luce parked the bus in Corrine’s driveway right behind David E. and Wolf in the dodge. She pulled the lever to open the side doors just as David E. walked up accompanied by Wolf.
“Wolf!” hollered Wu.
He stuck his head in. “Yes, Chieftess.”
“This forest is teeming with game. Go get us a deer or a feral hog. Be discreet. There’s a Trans Am by the barn. My bow is in the trunk. Spare keys inside the gas tank flap. Take one hind leg and give it to Daniel and Corrine the owners, and we’ll eat the rest. Luce.”
“Yes, Chieftess.”
“There are chickens out back. Gather the eggs. Find the kitchen and I’ll meet you there to make some food.” Then she stood up facing the back of the bus and addressed her crew of Hopi Kachinas. “The house is big inside and there’s a barn and a shed out back. The Eagle will help everyone get settled. We may be here for a few days. We’re near Choctaw land, so everyone be respectful. And when ….” Wu stopped talking and was peering through the windshield.
David E. stopped his doting on Wisty and looked to see what was up. Daniel was running across the yard toward the bus. His face was somber. Wu could already smell his anxiety. “Something’s wrong,” said Wu and ran out to meet him.
When she reached him, he said, “It’s Dermott.”
Wu cut him off. “Where?”
“The loft.” In a blur she was gone.
David E. and Wisty came up and asked Daniel what was wrong. They turned and hurried to the house. “It’s Dermott. We found him. He’s bad. It’s like he’s sick and he’s unconscious.”
Wisty broke into a trot. “Let’s hurry!” David E. brought up the rear, limping as fast as his cane would take him.
Wisty entered the loft and saw Dermott on the loveseat in a fetal position. He was pale, shaking, and unconscious. Shewuma hovered over him, checking his temperature and trying to bring him around.
Corrine stood by, hands clasped and lips moving. Wisty realized she was praying. She asked Corrine, “What happened?”
Corrine was clearly shaken as she related the events of the past hour. “Dermott had been remote viewing Jimmy and Debbie all morning, keeping an eye on them. I was in the kitchen when Dermott called my name. I said, ‘What?’ Then he screamed. It sounded excruciating. It made my skin crawl. Daniel and I ran up the stairs and he was on the floor squirming and rolling back and forth. He seemed in agony. Then he just curled up. We put him on the loveseat. Daniel has been trying to call you guys since it happened. I’ve been here with him the whole time. I was about to call 911.”
Corrine choked up and lost her train of thought. Daniel put his arm around her and continued, “The dogs all started barking so I went outside and saw you guys driving up.”
Wu checked Dermott’s pulse. “How long ago did this happen?”
“About a half hour ago. Maybe more,” said Daniel.
Wisty pulled up his “Hitman” T-shirt and put two fingers on his third chakra near the solar plexus. As soon as Wisty touched his skin, she snatched her hand back as if receiving an electric shock. “Shewuma, he’s under psychic attack. There’s not much time.” Wisty spun the office chair around and sat down. Her eyes rolled back in her head, and she slumped down as if instantly falling asleep.
“Psychic attack?” asked Corrine.
Wu set her jaw. Her mind was racing as she explained. “Someone is trying to kill his soul.”
“Kill his soul,” Corrine softly repeated to herself.
Shewuma ran to the railing. “LUCE!”
Luce stepped out of the kitchen. “I’m here, Chieftess.”
“I need the Eagle. Now! Stay with Corrine and help her with this boy.”
“Yes, Chieftess,” and she ran to the back door.
Wu wanted the Eagle there. Besides his Kachina training, the Eagle was a gifted medicine man and had worked extensively with Mystic Devas in Northern Asia. He could be of great value in such a potentially dangerous situation. She turned to Daniel. “In my closet is a plastic trash can of different plants. Are you familiar with Mugwort?”
“No. What does it look like?”
“Never mind. Just bring it all. Spread it around him. Understand? Just spread it on the floor. GO!” And he went. Mugwort was used by witches for its protection and healing properties. In psychic warfare, any edge could mean the difference. “Corrine,” she said as she took her by the shoulders to get her full attention, “I need your nurse training now.”
Corrine shook out the cobwebs and steeled herself. “What? Anything.”
Shewuma wrapped her arms around herself, let out a deep breath, and said, “Don’t let him die.” Then she collapsed to the floor on her knees.
Wisty had never left her body so quickly and felt disoriented. But the globules of light dancing on her skin and the glistening hands flexing at the end of her arms told her she was in her etheric body. The twinkling astral landscape was empty. Somehow she was alone on this plane. She pictured Dermott in her mind and willed herself to his presence. But nothing happened. She spoke his name and said a spell to bring his soul to her. It too was unsuccessful. Even in otherworldly planes there was a natural order and rules of governance. There had to be powerful forces at work to suspend the natural law of her magiks. She wondered how she could find him. Then an idea came to her. Willing an opening of a portal to the physical world, she passed through it into the loft at Corrine’s house. In this state she would be invisible to them. But no matter. It was Dermott she wanted. On the floor sitting back on her heels, Shewuma was in a trance. There were stems and leaves scattered around the floor. It smelled familiar. Of course. Mugwort. Good thinking, Shewuma. Wisty felt its properties enhancing her psychic defenses. Then she saw Corrine and Luce performing CPR on Dermott’s now lifeless body. Time was short and she couldn’t afford to get rattled, so she buried her emotions and remained focused. There was one sure way to find him. She searched for the Sutratma, or life thread. It connected his physical body to his lifeforce in the astral world. Instead of a silvery gleaming cord flowing from his midsection, she found a black brittle fiber pulling violently at his abdomen and extending through a dark hole. That was her best chance. Wisty took hold of the corrupted lifeline and followed it into the blackness. Descending, always descending into the lowest depths of the astral planes. It was not safe this deep even for someone with her knowledge and experience. Many an astral traveler had ventured too far into the lowest realms only to be possessed, driven mad, or lost forever. There was a faint light in the distance. As she came closer, she could see it was Dermott. For the first time in all her considerable experience of astral projecting, Wisty was afraid. Dermott was being attacked by a group of what she called astral wildlife. Nasty creatures of the lower realms whose sole purpose was to savage or steal the life force of others. But this scenario was impossible. Astral vermin hated each other as much as they hated everything else. They would attack anything on sight, even their own kind. Yet these monsters were working together. Ugly, harpy beasts tore at his astral flesh and sucked at his soul while rat-like parasites had severed his life cord and gnawed at the remains that trailed from him. His physical body was dead now and his soul would soon be lost as well, floating through this accursed place until it was consumed entirely. She visualized herself surrounded by love and light, building a psychic shield, and went to him. The vermin seemed appalled by her presence, but they were not repelled by her defensive sphere as she expected. Dermott’s eyes were wild and pleading for help. She grabbed a harpy that had its claws sunk deep in Dermott’s shoulder. They were small but powerful beings. Finally wrenching it loose, she hurled it into the darkness, then wrapped her arms around Dermott’s neck and held on desperately. To let go would be the end of his existence. Kicking at the vermin had little effect and she didn’t know how else to fight them. Soon the harpies were attacking her as well, ripping at her astral flesh and stealing bits of her lifeforce. The rats left Dermott and moved on to her life thread. Her silver cord turned gray and began to splinter as the parasites viciously gnawed at it with their grating teeth. There was a chance, but it was a longshot and very dangerous. Besides, she needed her arms to do it and to let go of Dermott would be his end. She had grown weak and was losing focus. Thinking of David E., she called his name out loud.
Just as all seemed lost, one of the harpies screeched a hellish noise and his body burst into flames. Then it dissipated into nothing. Wisty looked up and in the distance like a glorious angel, Shewuma approached, shining with a golden sheen. In her left hand she held a bow of white light. She fired a rapid succession of blinding arrows until all the astral atrocities were ended. Wisty’s strength was spent, and her life thread was now a piece of frayed string.
“Hold on. I’m coming.” Shewuma said to her mind. But Shewuma wasn’t going to make it. They both heard it. A vociferous rumbling buzz rolled through the darkness, filling them with dread. Shewuma could see it now. A horde of evil astral beings. Thousands of negative entities approaching them like a demonic wave. They were called Negs in Kachina lore. Shewuma spent many years training to navigate other worldly realms, deal with spirit entities, defend herself psychically, and fight Negs in the astral world. But this was beyond anything she was ever taught. She knew she couldn’t possibly win. There were too many. But they would pay a heavy price. The bow in her left hand and the arrow in her right hand both became flaming swords. “Keep your faith,” she said out loud and spoke a Hopi prayer of bravery. Then a bubble of light came from above and into the horde. The Negs began to scatter and shift erratically. It moved through them like a shooting star heading straight for Shewuma. It was the Eagle. Shewuma could see him now. The Negs had reformed and were bearing down on them. The Eagle reached her side, but there was no time to make it to the floating remains of Wisty and Dermott. They turned and braced to face the black army together. Perhaps by some miracle they could slow them enough to allow Wisty to escape if she were still able. The two looked at each other. Speaking in their native tongue, Shewuma began the song of strength. “Spirits of the light and sky, hear us. I am Shewuma.”
“I am Nuuakhwahu.”
Then they spoke in unison. “We are Holy Warriors. We are Kachinas of the Hopi nation. We are Star Children of the Realm of Man. Help us die well.” Shewuma bowed her head to this noble warrior that she had called to his death.
With a wink and a hint of a smile, the Eagle said to her, “You’re going to love this, Chieftess. A little something I picked up in Tibet.” He began to grow. Ten times, a hundred times bigger.
Together they screamed the Hopi War Cry and met the horde.
Like jumping naked into the snow, the powerful War Cry brought Wisty to consciousness. She watched the Neg army envelop the brave Kachinas. They fought for her and Dermott, and they would die for her and Dermott. Shewuma battled ferociously but was disappearing under sheer numbers. Even with the massive death toll from the Eagle with his colossal size, he was steadily being ripped apart.
A voice deep inside told Wisty she had to do something. She wrapped her legs around Dermott’s waist and locked her feet. Then she held her arms out while visualizing an amethyst knife held by both hands pointing at her chest, and it was so. She had never done this spell before. It was said that none who tried had survived. “Oh well,” she thought. “Nothing ventured.” She spoke out loud with resolve:
Our life is spent, our time has come.
Back to the place that we are from.
I call upon the Powers That Be.
This is my will So mote it be!
She plunged the knife into her chest.
There was a thunderous clap, and in that instant they all woke up back in the loft in their own bodies. Shewuma went to her feet unsteadily. The Eagle was on his knees trying to get his bearings. “Daniel, please help him,” said Shewuma. Corrine and Luce were doing CPR on Dermott’s body. Corrine looked worn out. Shewuma turned to Wisty and called her name. Wisty murmured something unintelligible. Wu slapped her across the face and yelled, “WISTY!”
Wisty opened her eyes, grateful to be alive. “Wu?” She tried to get up and Wu had to keep her from falling over.
“What about Dermott?”
Wisty patted her chest. “I have him here.”
Wu carried her over to the loveseat. “Let her in, guys. You did a hell of a job.” Corrine sat down on the floor exhausted while Luce went to help the Eagle. Ignoring decorum, Wisty pulled her dress up to her waist and straddled Dermott. She pressed against both of his temples while breathing in deeply. Glancing to her right she saw Shewuma watching her intently as she recited a Hopi prayer.
Wisty said, “Here goes.” Wu nodded encouragement. Wisty put her mouth on Dermott’s mouth and willed her soul to breathe. Dermott’s lips began to sparkle and color poured back into his face. His eyes opened. He lurched upward, arching his back and bucking Wisty off the loveseat. Wu caught her midair and sat her down. “Nice reflexes. Thanks.”
Wu pulled her in for a hug. “You did it.”
Holding onto Wu’s neck she said, “We did it, Shewuma. You two saved our lives. Thank you.”
Corrine lay back on the floor and smiled. She was pooped.
Luce leaned over Dermott, cocking her head. He was saying something to her. “Chieftess!” Luce called out in alarm.
“Everyone quiet,” ordered Wu, and she was at Dermott’s side. He grabbed Wu’s arm and struggled to tell her something. “Luce, get Dermott some water.” Wu said it calmly, but her eyes were smoldering. She stroked his head gently. “Tell me everything.”
His voice was raspy and faint. “Jimmy and Debbie. They’re going to die. It’s a trap.”
President Donald Trump believes Apple can make its signature iPhone in the U.S. to avoid new tariffs. Apple also committed $500B of investments in the US. Do you believe Apple can move iPhone assembly and the entire supply chain back home?
Nobody believes it
Including Trump!!
This is just spiel to fool the 70–80 Million MAGA crowd that good days are here and prevent them from turning on him when prices rise to the skies
In reality Trump will have to eat some of his tariffs and he will do it over time by declaring “Wins” in the coming days
For instance he may have a meeting with Cook and claim “Cook agreed to invest $ 300 Billion in USA and relocate all his businesses to US by 2030 so for the next 3 years, I will grant him an exemption on the Iphones”
He may actually demand an open bribe from Cook
The US is crumbling very fast and it’s resembling more of India as the days go by
Political favors sold for cash, Open Bribery and Corruption, One man running the show like a Dictator and the rest of the country , impotent to stop him
If Putin or Xi did 10% of what Trump is doing, they would have definitely been ousted from power long ago
So right now Trump is decimating the world
China has something to gain as every day the US is weaker and weaker without a shot being fired by China
Star Trek – Stuck on Earth
Don’t Chinese people get tired of writing all their characters in kanji?
Personally, I think it’s exhausting.
When I was a child, I occasionally saw Japanese in China.
Me: Dad, Chinese is too much work. Japanese is better, it’s simple and easy to write! Dad: Wow! Chinese is beautiful. Let’s write beautiful Chinese.
Ever since I was a child, my parents have always taught and brainwashed me into thinking that I must write beautiful Chinese.
Mother: A man who can’t write beautiful Chinese isn’t a man!
Father: During summer vacation, let’s practice three pages of kanji every day.
When I became a junior high school student, I had to write an essay as part of the Japanese language test. Usually, I had to write more than 800 kanji characters. After the test, my hands would hurt.
The composition is like this↓ (Source:
)
However, traditional characters are more complicated than simplified characters, so I think people who use traditional characters will be more tired. When I see traditional characters, I want to see garbled characters.
For example, the traditional and simplified characters for “melancholy turtle” are as follows:
Traditional Chinese ⇒ Melancholic Turtle
Simplified Chinese ⇒ Melancholic Turtle
If the “gloomy turtles” appear in groups,
Traditional Chinese —– (I’m sure it will be tiring)
Simplified Chinese —– (I think it’s pretty tiring)
The next door is the next door.
The next door is the next door.
The next door is the next door.
The next door is the next door.
The next door is the next door.
The next door is the next door.
Katakana——- (What’s this!? Easy)
UtopiaUtopiaUtopiaUtopiaUtopiaUtopia
UtopiaUtopiaUtopiaUtopiaUtopiaUtopia
UtopiaUtopiaUtopiaUtopiaUtopiaUtopia
UtopiaUtopiaUtopiaUtopiaUtopiaUtopia
UtopiaUtopiaUtopiaUtopiaUtopiaUtopia
UtopiaUtopiaUtopiaUtopiaUtopiaUtopia
When I was a child, the characters I wanted to write the most were katakana-like characters. However, people today don’t write by hand as much, and instead use computers or smartphones to type, so I think the difference in fatigue disappears. For example, if you just type “yydwg” using the pinyin input method, you can quickly write the Chinese characters for “忧郁的乌龟”.
Shorpy
SHORPY 4a23327a.previewSHORPY 4a23334a.previewSHORPY 4a23318a.previewSHORPY 1957 Ford Thunderbird.previewSHORPY 40320a.previewSHORPY 40305a.previewSHORPY 1954 Ford Dearborn Assembly Plant.previewSHORPY 40252a.previewSHORPY 40256a.previewSHORPY 40259a.previewSHORPY 1960 Ford Country Squire.previewSHORPY 4166312779.previewSHORPY New Orleans Jackson Square.previewSHORPY Canal Street 1.previewSHORPY New Orleans 4Panorama 1.preview1959 Ford Country Squire camper.previewSHORPY 1959 Ford Country Squire pushbutton camper.previewSHORPY 4a27416a.previewSHORPY 4a27404a.previewSHORPY 4a27406a.previewSHORPY 07986u.previewSHORPY 10473u.previewSHORPY 4a27412a.previewSHORPY 1957 Mercury Commuter.previewSHORPY 4a22543a.previewSHORPY 4a24960a.previewSHORPY 4a22723a.previewSHORPY 4a17610a.previewSHORPY 4a17629a.previewSHORPY 4a17591a.preview
As an officer, have you ever gotten a sixth sense that something isn’t right?
Not me, my brother – when he was around 10 years in the police force. He came home one night after work trembling and wanting to say a prayer of thanks.
One night he was the lone police officer sent to watch over an isolated small town. He was called to a report of someone doing graffiti on shop signage. When he arrived the small town was quiet with no one around. While walking the street he felt something urge him to turn around, he briefly glanced back – nothing. A few seconds later, the same feeling – he looked over his shoulder. Still nothing. The third time he said “I called have sworn it was a real voice”. He spun around just as a man was taking an overhead swing at him with an axe. He said it was as if his hand was guided within a split second to pull his baton, raising it over his head and deflecting the axe to one side. He grabbed the assailant and cuffed him. A prayer of thanks was given by everyone in our household that night.
He retired from the police last month at the good age of 63 having served as a police officer since 21 years old.
UPDATE – Unappreciated Adult Son Saves Nieces Life, Teaches Lowlife Parents & Sister To NEVER…
“How long have we been working together as a team, Val?”“Twelve years, five months, two weeks and three days. Do you want me to break it down into hours and minutes?”Paul Jones turned to his partner, an incredulous look upon his face.“Are you actually, frigging serious?’Val Thorens broke into a broad smile, his eyes never leaving the giant screen in front of him.“No, you muppet. I’m pulling your leg”.Paul, standing, strode across the small room to a filing cabinet and yanked open a drawer. Retrieving a brown, cardboard file, he opened it and perused its contents for several seconds.
“July 2nd 2011. Almost twelve and a half years ago. Jeez! You’re right. How did you do that? Wait, if I check the actual time that you became my partner…”
“Paul, a child of four years could work out how long we’ve been together. Why are you making such a fuss about it?”
Replacing the file, Paul turned back to his partner.
“I didn’t know. I mean I knew it was about ten, twelve years but you…you’re always so frigging precise. It’s uncanny”.
‘Hey, I might be a physicist and an astronomer but, above all else, I’m a mathematician. Numbers to me are like candy to someone like yourself”, Val glibly remarked, pointing at the almost empty, giant bag of M and Ms that lay on Paul’s work station without removing his eyes from the monitor in front of him that, to an untrained eye, appeared to display an impenetrable darkness.
“Horses for courses, my friend. How come you don’t like candy, anyhow?”
Paul resumed his seat and stared briefly at his screen, quickly becoming restless and bored.
“My parents didn’t allow it when I was younger and, as I grew older and saw the damage that sugar did to teeth, I just decided it wasn’t for me”.
“Man, I’d go crazy in this place if I didn’t have something to brighten up my shift”.
Paul looked around their work space eyeing the pristine environment that made up this lab-like habitat that was their “office”. The sterile stolidness, dominated by the two giant screens, the computerised telescopes that were their workstations and which covered the skies above the state of Delaware, only a coffee machine and the low humming refrigerator added a sense of domesticity though one of the earlier shifts had, half-heartedly, hung tinsel around the place in an effort to provide some festive cheer.
Grabbing a handful of chocolate treats, Paul leaned back in his ergonomic chair, staring idly at the ceiling, popping candy.
“Val, do you ever get bored with this job?”
“Sure. And, every time it happens, I think of the money we get paid, partner”.
Apart from the idle chitchat, the room’s silence was broken only by the incessant humming of the fridge and crackling of radio static; the latter being the communication airwaves that connected all other watch stations; one per state across the nation. Each employing two, highly trained scientists per shift in a constant, perpetual state of watchfulness upon the skies above and beyond.
“Yeah, I guess you’re right, Val. We get paid way more than if I was actually working in a lab. But, I mean, don’t you ever think that we’re kind of wasting our skills? All the years it took to get our degrees. I majored in astrophysics, for God’s sake yet, here I am just…watching a frigging screen”.
“In actual fact, if you calculate the time you spend popping candy, making endless cups of coffee and staring at the ceiling, Paul, you probably spend a minimal amount of your working hours actually watching your screen”.
“And your eyes never leave your screen, amigo. I don’t know how you do it. No wonder you need those tinted glasses of yours”.
“Well, I figure this is what the government pays us to do so, for eight hours each day, it’s my duty to oblige. Plus, after so long, it would be extremely difficult for me to drop a hundred grand per year by taking a normal lab job”.
Suddenly, Val leaned urgently forward, his eyes having discerned something on his monitor.
“One o’ clock, Paul. Check it out”.
Startled, Paul crashed down in his tilted chair, eyes returning to his own screen, a duplicate of Val’s, his hand involuntarily releasing a cascade of candy, M and Ms rolling across the metallic floor.
Both screens simultaneously arrowed in on the object identified by Val, images expanding as Paul controlled the direction of the viewfinder on the space telescope that provided them with intimate coverage of the night sky. Within seconds, Paul, among his other accomplishments, a nanotechnologist and an expert in the structure of such things, relaxed.
“Just another boring meteorite. Iron-nickel. I can tell by the regmaglypts, the irregular shaped pits. No problem, unfortunately. That’s the way the cookie crumbles”.
Later, as their shift ended, the spotting of the meteorite and its subsequent passage to Earth recorded in the log, the two men exited their work environment, the outraged cries of their shift replacements echoing in their ears as they slipped and crunched on the candy strewn floor. They grinned at each other as they unlocked their cars in the parking lot, the weak, early morning sun dazzling Paul but not bothering Val behind his dark lenses. Paul lamented.
“Another cold, miserable morning. I can’t remember the last time we had a white Christmas”.
Immediately, Val shot back.
“December 25th, 2002. 1.3 inches fell in Wilmington”.
Paul looked askance at his work partner.
“Do you make this shit up? How could you remember that?”
Saying nothing, Val simply shrugged, pulling up his collar against the chilly wind.
“Well, I’ll see you tomorrow, you numbers freak”.
“Yes. Just two days ’til Santa comes”.
“Hey, Val, we need to organise a night out or something. Your wife and mine. Maybe in the New Year. What d’you say?”
“Yeah, definitely, we need to do that”.
As Paul climbed into his brand new Tesla, he, somehow, knew it would never happen. They had been talking about it… for twelve years, five months, two weeks and three days.
The alert came the following day: drones spotted over New Jersey. Reports varied: five, some said, six, others claimed; large, the size of cars according to a New Jersey police chief. Paul arrived for his shift in a heightened state of excitement though Val was his usual phlegmatic self.
The shift they were replacing seemed loath to leave though Delaware had, so far, not seen anything amiss. The unusual happenings in a neighbouring state were causing great excitement within the watchers’ community and the comms channels crackled with constant chatter.
“Can you believe it? Just east of us. Just our damn luck but we’ve been on full alert all day. Washington is saying they don’t know what they are. One eyewitness said they came out of the ocean”, a tired, wide-eyed watcher eagerly reported to the duo.
Alone again, the two settled in front of their screens.
“Val, d’you think this could be for real? D’you think…?”
‘Paul, I don’t believe we should take any notice of mere conjecture but, given the vicinity and its closeness to our own area of observation, I do think that we need to be extra vigilant”.
“Hey, don’t worry, pal. My eyes are never leaving my screen”.
As the night progressed, however, nothing was displayed on the monitors from the space telescope that hovered high over Delaware though, on the various frequencies that shattered the silence of their stations, they listened, enthralled, as word filtered through of several other sightings, maddeningly close to their own area of surveillance and, by shift’s end, the number of reported craft had increased steadily; Washington, despite stating that there was nothing to fear, still unable to identify their origin.
True to his word, Paul had remained watchful throughout the night, an unopened bag of Snickers testament to his attentiveness, and both men, too, were reluctant to leave their posts at the end of their shift, feeling that it was only a matter of time before Delaware, too, became embroiled in the mystery.
Fear, that normal human reaction to anything untoward that cannot be explained, spread swiftly over the ensuing hours. People who relied and depended on their government to reassure them were severely disappointed. Some brave citizens were taking ineffective pot shots at the unidentified craft as their numbers multiplied rapidly. These were not, as first reported, drones. That much was abundantly clear.
Panic followed fear and the roads were soon blocked by the vehicles of those fleeing from their homes, though where to, they did not know, but a mass exodus was taking place in New Jersey. Yet Washington did nothing to assuage concerns, either refusing to divulge the true identity of the spacecraft or simply unable to.
As Paul and Val reported for their shifts on Christmas Day, still, they learned, no sightings had been made over Delaware though New York State and Pennsylvania, both close neighbours, had now experienced numerous craft sightings. The incessant radio chatter confirmed the seriousness of the situation and the two observational physicists studied their screens intently; Paul, finally realising the importance of his chosen profession. Could the nation be under threat from space? The tension was palpable.
Then, an hour before their shift’s end, out of nowhere, an image appeared on their dual monitors; small and faint, at first, but, as it loomed closer, growing ever larger. Excitedly, Paul expertly guided the telescope remotely, zooming in, and gasping aloud as the magnification identified hundreds more craft coming into focus, following close behind the vanguard ship but only serving to accentuate the monstrous size of the lead craft.
“Holy Mother of God. Val, you see that? That’s a frigging mother ship!”
The static of the various frequencies suddenly ceased, all communication cut by some unknown, alien source. Paul, terrified, turned to his partner but Val seemed unperturbed, almost gleeful, pushing away from his work station and turning to Paul, slowly removing his glasses.
“It’s been…interesting, Paul. I’m sorry it has to end this way but, hey, that’s the way the cookie crumbles, right? Happy Christmas!”
Unable to move, Paul stared at the man he had worked alongside for so many years; a man who, after more than twelve years, he suddenly realised, he knew absolutely nothing about A man who, he registered far too late, was, in fact, not a man at all, his bulging, bright red eyes, exposed for the first time, now burning into his own, distorting his vision, the vicious heat melting his very flesh.
TARIFF WARS: China Responds to Trump’s Tantrum with 125% Measures
Has President Trump been successful in containing China and addressing trade issues? Is there a “honeymoon” period for him in this regard?
President Trump has not addressed any trade issues.
He has been reckless, spraying tariff bullets everywhere. In the case of China, he uses the bazooka.
Just to show his power. Instead he shows ignorance. His officials easily coned him that his reciprocal tariffs are derived from sophisticated calculations. He lost international stature and credibility.
Countries are confused. The American public as well. Maybe he himself is confused, hence the stops/goes, and pauses.
China refuses to let him run amok at its expense. It too has the bazooka, and it shot back. No trade issues to settle. This is China’s stance. If you want to trade with us, we are fine, we will trade with you. If you don’t want to trade with us, we are also fine. You ban us your high end chips, we ban you our rare earths minerals. An arm for an arm. China is prepared to decouple with the US.
It has already figure out the consequences. Exports to the US is worth 2.4% of GDP. On the decouple scenario, it may shed its growth by 1.5% points. Easily bearable, less than what it sacrificed when it self-triggered the real estate financial crisis. If necessary, it has plenty of fiscal and monetary space to cover the fall-out. No internal price pressures without imports from the US. It has alternative sources for the agriculture and energy goods. No technology supply pressures. It has overcome US sanctions and is self-reliant.
The US side may be less sanguine. Internal price pressures and shortages of goods may be mild for now, mitigated by the advanced orders to beat the tariffs. But they will start to bite going forward. The ban on rare earths has caused supply problems for the defence contractors, and the major tech companies, such as, Broadcom, Qualcomm, TSMC, Samsung, and Western Digital.
It is the financial markets that are worrying. The Dow, S&P 500, and Nasdaq crashed over 10%. Treasury Bond market is volatile, the 10-year benchmark jumped from below 4% in early April to 4.4% in the current. It had gone past 4.5%. The currency is under pressure, the dollar index fell from over 110 in early January to just over 100 in the current.
This is serious. US is a financialized economy. Values and valuations are determined by the financial markets. The turmoil could cause grave economic distresses, especially as there are worries about recession on top of the stubborn inflation, and the threat of stagflation.
The two countries are now in a full-blown trade war. Trump started it with a bang. No honeymoon period for him or anyone else. There will be no winner. China is calculative, and is is better prepared. Trump is reckless and full of hubris. US is unprepared.
What Is WRONG With This New Generation!?
What did you learn after traveling abroad that you would never have known if you had stayed in Indonesia?
There are no usable toilets inside the White House USA
Taking a photo inside the White House (Personal Documentation)
I received an invitation from the United States government to visit the White House while I was an exchange student there.
The invitation I received was official, because it was given by the American government. For US residents, to get an invitation, they must ask for a recommendation from their respective State Senate. But for non-US residents, I don’t know how they can get the invitation.
Northeast Gate White House. Source: Personal Documentation
Five layers of security must be passed to enter the White House. Once inside, there are several rooms that can be visited, which contain various collections belonging to American presidents from generation to generation. The largest collection that I saw belonged to Barack Obama, George W. Bush, John F. Kennedy, and Abraham Lincoln.
The rooms in the White House have different nuances. Like in the Red Room, all the walls, carpets, curtains, and lighting are red. So are the Blue Room and Green Room, which are blue and green.
Map of rooms in the White House. Source:
Historical Tour of the White House
This is historical material, “frozen in time.” The web site is no longer updated and links to external web sites and some internal pages will not work. Tours Presidents & First Ladies White House Events & Traditions Resources Military
Green Room White House. Source: Personal Documentation.
Blue Room White House. Source: Personal Documentation.
Red Room White House. Source: Personal Documentation
Not all rooms in the White House can be entered. Like the Library, there are barriers that limit the movement of visitors, so that they can only see from the outside. Likewise with the objects there, everything is far from reach, so it is difficult (and indeed not allowed) for visitors to hold.
Library White House. Source: Personal Documentation
Another interesting fact is, inside the White House there are no toilets that visitors can use. Yes, since outside it has been warned by the officers, even explained in the invitation email. So if you want to relieve yourself, you have to leave the White House, and you can’t go back in because the invitation can only be used once.
2. Emergency 911 in the USA really works fast and responsively.
Emergency room of a hospital in Sycamore, Illinois, USA. (Personal Documentation)
I was an exchange student at Northern Illinois University, located in DeKalb, Illinois. One midnight, I was walking to my dorm after a night of studying in the campus library. The temperature was zero degrees Celsius, and the wind was blowing very hard.
After arriving at the dorm and entering my room, I went straight to sleep. Two hours into my sleep, I woke up because of a stomachache. At first it was just a normal ache, but then my stomach felt like it was spinning and I winced while holding my stomach.
My roommate asked about my situation, and asked for help from my friends from the next room. When my friends arrived, they tried to contact the dorm head and the person in charge of my exchange program. But because it was already 2 am, no one responded.
Finally my friend called 911, and asked for medical help for my condition. I thought help would come about 20-30 minutes after the call, but two police officers came to my room three minutes later. Yes, that fast!
Two policewomen came to ask about my condition, asked for my passport and campus ID, and immediately helped me down. On the ground floor, there were also two medical personnel with an ambulance, and a firefighter with his car to deal with emergencies. I was really stunned in the midst of my illness, they came three minutes after the call with a complete formation like this!
After I got into the ambulance, the police and firefighters left the campus, and I was taken to the nearest hospital on the border with Sycamore City, a 20-minute drive away. When I arrived at the hospital, there were already 2 doctors waiting who immediately provided responsive treatment for me. I was then transferred to several rooms, to check the condition of my stomach.
The final result of my emergency examination that night was stomach cramps due to the cold weather (and also a cold, hehe). After a few hours of rest, I was finally allowed to go home that night. And what made me laugh out loud was, around 4 am, I farted quite a lot, and my stomach immediately felt better. HAHAHA. The only medicine for this is supposed to be warm tea and Tolak Angin in Indonesia!
Everything was done very quickly and precisely. And what really amazed me was, everything was well organized and coordinated. All state officials worked together to give their best. If I, a newcomer, was treated very well, of course the locals would also get the same treatment or even better.
Anyway, after I got out of the hospital, I looked at the total emergency bill and if converted to Rupiah it was around 22 million. Luckily everything was covered by insurance, and I could return to campus in peace without having to think about such a large cost just for a cold.
3. Meet the Former Vice President of Uganda
Speciosa Wandira-Kazibwe with Rezki Achyana (Personal Documentation)
It was an honor for me to get to know Uganda’s first female Vice President, Speciosa Wandira-Kazibwe, closely and share stories. I met her in South Africa, when we both represented the Asia-Africa Forum 2018. She is a very humble person, and loves to share. We even had coffee together after the conference and shared stories. She told me a lot about her 10-year experience leading Uganda, empowering women in Uganda as the first president of the African Women’s Committee for Peace and Development of the African Union, and her story of becoming the UN Special Envoy for handling HIV/AIDS in the African continent.
I don’t think I need to share many stories about him, because you can google information about him directly on the internet. There are so many!
But the most important thing is, I am quite confident that African countries will improve a lot because at the 2018 Asia-Africa Forum I met many extraordinary African leaders like Mrs. Kazibwe.
Oh yes, I have a bonus photo with the former President of Mozambique, Joaquim Chissano. I was not that close to him during the conference, but from his background and his role in the political world of Mozambique and the African Union, I am increasingly convinced that Africa will soon show its teeth.
“Trump Plays The Media Like A Fiddle” – Col. Douglas Macgregor
How awful was Steve Jobs as a person?
A friend of mine told a story about how, 25-some years ago, when she was working tech sales with an Apple division, she was at a conference that Steve Jobs also attended. At the end of the day, everyone was going to a restaurant for dinner, and through a snafu she found herself left with Jobs and two other people, whose ride had left them behind.
None of them had a car, so she offered to drive. Problem was, she and her husband were fresh out of school, her husband had started law school and money was tight — she was driving her husband’s old beater car that day. The front passenger seat was a little wonky, in that it tended not to lock in place, and the seat would occasionally slide forward and backwards of its own accord. Of course, that’s where Jobs was sitting. 🙂 It was dark and rainy, she didn’t know the roads that well, and they came up to a toll booth. She didn’t have the exact change, so everyone in the car was scrambling to find the change to get through the toll gate. The defroster didn’t work too well, either, especially with a full car, and Jobs would obligingly wipe the windshield occasionally. They arrived safely, and she figured she had a funny cocktail party story for the rest of her life.
A couple of weeks later, she noticed an extra $300 in her paycheck. She went to her boss and said, “Hey, what happened? Did I get a raise?” He didn’t know, either, but he checked with payroll. He came back with a funny look on his face and told her “Steve said it’s to cover a payment for a new car.” “Steve who?” “Uhh . . . Jobs?”
Brilliant people are frequently difficult — the thing that makes them brilliant also makes them a little too different, sometimes, for social conventions.
I live in the U.S. and always hear about how affordable or free health insurance is in other countries, but I also hear how it is next to impossible to get treatments and appointments. How truthful is this in your country?
UK
I slipped with a kitchen knife and left a superficial mark on my thumb.
It bled a little, and the knife had been used on raw meat, so I applied ethanol and a bandage. A few days later, I noticed a fair amount of redness around the wound.
I went to the doctor’s office about ten minutes away from my house. They told me the next appointment was in six hours, so I booked it, and went home to play Fallout 4.
Six hours later, I saw the doctor. Telling the story took about a minute, and inspecting the wound took another, and he was satisfied at that point that I should take some standard antibiotics, just in case it was, as I suspected, infected.
He wrote out the prescription, asked me if I had any other concerns, and I told him I did not.
With five minutes left in our ten minute appointment, and with little else to do, he figured he may as well take my blood pressure and heart rate. I agreed, and was told everything was good.
I left with the prescription, popped to the pharmacy next door, got my prescription, and that was the end of it.
I didn’t pay a single penny.
The average person, i.e. those that actually paid for this appointment, spend about £600–700 annually in taxes for this service, which covers everything from minor cuts to cancer treatment, and covers everyone from babies to old people.
Nobody is ever bankrupted by this system, nobody is ever left without treatment by this system, nobody is abandoned by this system.
Cherry Cheese Coffee Cake
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Ingredients
Cake and Filling
2 (8 ounce) packages refrigerated crescent rolls
8 ounces cream cheese
1/4 cup powdered sugar
1 egg
1/2 teaspoon vanilla or almond extract
1 (21 ounce) can cherry pie filling
Glaze
1/2 cup powdered sugar
2-3 teaspoons milk
Instructions
Heat oven to 350 degrees F.
Unroll crescent dough and arrange 12 of the triangles in a circle with wide ends toward the outside edge of the Large Round Stone – the points will not meet in the center. Lightly flour and roll out the seams making a 14 inch circle with a 3 inch hole in the center.
Combine the cream cheese, powdered sugar, egg and vanilla and spread over dough. Top with pie filling.
Cut each of the 4 remaining triangles into thirds (starting at the wide end opposite the point and cutting lengthwise to the point). Arrange over filling evenly in spoke-like pattern. Press ends to seal at center and outer edges.
Bake for 25 to 30 minutes or until golden brown.
Cool slightly.
Mix powdered sugar and milk until glaze consistency and drizzle over coffee cake.
Attribution
Pampered Chef
What is one thing you caught your parents doing that you wish you had never seen?
When Your Mama and Daddy Say “No” — Do It Anyway!
Wanna get Mama a ring? Daddy a brand-new Skil saw? DO IT!
Even if they say, “We don’t need anything.”
“We don’t want anything…”
Now, my Daddy’s long gone — Agent Orange got him. Retired at 55, and passed a few years later.
So now it’s just Mom… well, Mom and my little sister and me. And we deal with her the best we can. 😂
ME: “Mom? What do you want for your birthday?”
MOM: “Nothing! I don’t need anything! I’ve got everything!”
Her Birthday:
We got her puzzles. Word search books. A food basket. More chocolate (like she’s ever in danger of running out). And another grabby thingie with a flashlight. She loved it so much, she had me buy her another. She’s got three now.
Christmas:
More puzzles. More word search books. A snack basket. A food basket. “Warmy-Warmies” for the cold — blankets, PJs, cozy stuff. And yep… more chocolate.
Since I’m the only one that bakes, I brought homemade holiday cookies and “Chocolate Overload Brownies” so ooey-gooey the fudge literally goes every which way but… 🤤
Just Because:
We’ve gotten her all her favorites — cake, apple fritters, and I bring over hot, fresh cooking.
My little sister and her hubby #2 takes her out to eat.
Oh — and did I mention? She’s well over 90 now.
This Year – Easter:
MOM: “I don’t want anything. Don’t need an Easter dinner.”
ME: LOL okay, sure Mom.
I’m making her favorite: smoked turkey with all the fixings.
And a “ShishkaBoom” basket of Easter chocolates and cookies, labeled:
“To: [Her Name] — I couldn’t find your house! Love, the Easter Bunny.” 🐰
(Sissy’s still undecided, but she’s always slow – she’ll find something.)
Will Trump Deliver Peace? – Jeffrey Sachs, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen
When I was growing up in the small town of East Brady, PA we had a neighbor that lived up the hill from us.
He was a reclusive sort.
I guess, friendly enough, but kind of rude.
And the reason why I say this is that every time we had friends over for a backyard BBQ; a little outing in our back yard, he would burn mounds of (cut lawn) grass in a large oil drum that would send thick whitish – grey smoke onto our gathering…
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Each, and every time.
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Every single FUCKING time.
Every…
…single…
…time.
Knowing what I know now, as a much older and experienced man, I dare say that I would be more proactive than my blue-pilled father. I get it, maybe I would, and maybe I wouldn’t, Who knows how I would react and what actions would I take if I were in my father’s shoes?
But one thing is a truth.
Our neighbor was intentionally rude, and being intentionally rude is very, very wrong. It is socially unacceptable. It is a sign of something being amiss, and suggestive of being mentally ill to some extent.
Anyways…
Guys, pay attention to those that intentionally and continuously harass you; belittle you or who are rude to you.
Distance yourself, and come up with strategies on how to deal with them.
Serious talk.
Listen to me.
Today…
Blushing Berry Pie
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Yield: 8 servings
Ingredients
1/2 packet frozen ready-rolled piecrust defrosted
1 pound fresh strawberries, divided
4 ounces white chocolate, broken into squares
1 lemon
2 teaspoons powdered gelatin
1 (8 ounce) package full fat soft cheese, softened
1 (8 ounce) carton crème fraîche
5 tablespoons lemon curd
2 ounces icing sugar
8 ounces fresh raspberries
Instructions
Heat oven to 400 degrees F. Let piecrust stand at room temperature for 15 minutes.
Place pastry round in Deep Dish Pie Plate. Gently press dough into bottom and up sides of plate using Baker’s Roller™. Prick bottom and sides of pastry case using pastry tool; decoratively flute edge.
Bake for 20 to 22 minutes or until golden brown.
Cool completely.
Rinse strawberries and pat dry. Select 8 uniformly-sized strawberries for decoration. Slice each strawberry in half using Paring Knife, leaving stems on each half; set aside. Hull remaining strawberries using Cook’s Corer™; slice using Egg Slicer Plus™.
Place white chocolate in Large Micro-Cooker®. Microwave on HIGH 1 minute; stir every 20 seconds or until melted and smooth. Dip strawberry halves in melted chocolate; place cut-side down on a sheet of Parchment Paper.
Refrigerate for 15 minutes or until set.
Meanwhile, spread remaining melted chocolate over bottom of baked pastry using Skinny Scraper. Layer sliced strawberries over bottom of crust; set aside. Finely zest lemon using Lemon Zester/Scorer; set aside. Juice lemon using Juicer. Add cold water to juice to measure 3 1/2 fl ounces. Place lemon juice mixture in Small Batter Bowl. Microwave on HIGH 30-50 seconds or until liquid is hot but not boiling. Sprinkle gelatin over hot liquid; whisk until dissolved. Cool slightly.
Combine soft cheese, crème fraîche, lemon zest, lemon curd and icing sugar in Classic Batter Bowl; mix until smooth. Add dissolved gelatin; whisk until smooth using Stainless Steel Whisk. Spread cheese mixture evenly over strawberries. Arrange raspberries evenly over top of pie filling. Place dipped strawberry halves around edge of pie.
Refrigerate 30 minutes.
Serve using Slice ’N Serve®.
Attribution
Pampered Chef
Musk Warns “America Is Headed For Bankruptcy SUPER FAST!”
The wooded area in the local park was my favourite place to go to when I was but a lad, living a short walk away. I spent many hours on my own there, but I did not for a second feel that I was alone. I felt welcomed there every time. The trees were my best friends, particularly the cluster of cedars.In fact it was a place that gave me confidence in myself. When I was ten years old, I felt the attraction of becoming a writer. No one knew that I had that feeling, certainly not any family members or friends. And when I went to the park, ideas for stories appeared to me beginning with blue waves of beginning words appearing in my head. They initiated tales about aliens in my head.I received no support from my English teachers. Several of them demonstrated with their commentary that they did not even like what I had written. They said that my stories were way too unreal, too far-fetched to have anyone accept the basic premises they were based on. Fortunately, although that shocked me at first, I learned to ignore their commentary. I am so glad I did.I would have never been published if I had taken their negativism for truth. I submitted my first story to a local newspaper in my small town. It was for the Christmas issue. I came up with an idea for a kind of supernatural story after taking a walk in what would become my inspiration place. I did not tell my English teacher of the time, even though he encouraged his students to enter the contest, offering to make suggestions before they submitted their piece. I was not going to let him insist that I make changes in it, and generally put my work down. He did not like that I only wrote stories about aliens. I liked the story just as it was. And I was not the only person to do so. The editor of the paper loved it, and published it the week after the contest had ended. I even received some money for the piece, and I was termed the ‘winner’ of the contest, even though several of the other stories were published as well – none of them written by my fellow high school students. My English teacher of the time did not comment in class when school opened up again in January. Later I heard two teachers talking about the fact that he had submitted his own short story, but had not been published. When they thought that I wasn’t looking and listening (I have very good hearing), they pointed at me and one of them said, “That boy over there was the winner.”After I graduated from high school, I applied for the English Literature program. They accepted me, certainly not because of my marks from my always always critical teachers, but because I had won the contest, and had since published several short stories in several literary magazines, all of them about aliens, and all inspired by trips to the park. I would have no idea what I was going to write about until I was in my special part of the park. Once there, voices inside me started my stories. Nowhere else did that for me.My First BookIn the summer after my initial year of university, I wrote my first book. To no surprise to me, my family and my friends, it carried a story of the presence of aliens on earth. It was easier to write such a long work than I ever thought it would be. My summer job was in a factory not far away from the park of my inspirations. I could and did walk to it in my lunch break, always carrying a pen and paper to copy down the ideas about the story that would come to me as I sat on a stump and ate the lunch my mother had prepared for me. Pretty much every day I had to finish eating my mom’s sandwiches while walking back to work. And her sandwiches are great! The ideas that flowed into my head took precedence.That book became a series about a particular group of aliens. By the time that I graduated with my English Literature degree, there were four books in the series. The last one was the longest, and was very much the hardest one to stop writing. I stayed in the park overnight, because I could not walk away from my source of inspiration.Another series began and ended in graduate school, this time with four books. More nights were spent in the park. I brought a tent, which when not used I hid in the underbrush.When I graduated I soon applied to and received a teaching position at a high school in town, but not the one with the English teachers that undervalued my work. I did not want to have anything to do with them.I soon became known as the ‘Find a Place’ professor, as I told my students about how the place I had found had been such an influence on all of my writing. A good number of my students tried to find their own place for writing inspiration. It helped some of them, one of whom said to me with some excitement as he walked, almost skipping, into the classroom ‘it worked, it worked’. Not one have published as yet, but I think that it is just a matter of time before a few of them do.Seeking a VisionIt has been a while now since I have done any writing. But that should not be a surprise to me, as I haven’t been able to get to the park in over a month. I have had to spend a lot of time marking, and being with my newly-married wife. She knows about my link with the park, and has suggested a few times that I should go there, but I thought that I should dedicate my ‘spare time’ with her in the early days of our being married.
Then she insisted. The timing was right. I had sat at my desk at work, and my desk at home with no results in writing: sentences written were soon crossed out. I had a strong desire to go to the park and be inspired.
I walked into the park, the cedars blowing in a slight wind as if they were waving me hello. I looked up at their uppermost branches, which had earlier been a guaranteed inspiration. Words appeared in my mind, and I had an inspiration to write another alien story, maybe even a book. I began writing. Then I felt compelled to look up once more. I could not believe my eyes. There were shadowy blue creatures near the top of the trees, aliens obviously. I was not expecting that.
NOW Neocons Are READY: Make Taiwan The Ukraine Of Asia
Title: Sir Whiskerton and the Monkey Mayhem
Ah, greetings once more, dear reader. It seems you can’t get enough of my tales of bravery, wit, and sheer genius. Who could blame you? Life on this farm is a never-ending parade of absurdity, and I, Sir Whiskerton, am the only one keeping it from descending into complete anarchy. Today, I shall regale you with a story of chaos, hilarity, and an unexpected visitor who turned our world upside down. This is the tale of The Monkey Mayhem—a case that involved bananas, a harmonica, and far too much swinging from barn rafters. Buckle up.
The Arrival
It began, as most of my troubles do, with an ear-piercing commotion. I was enjoying a peaceful nap in the shade of the big oak tree when I heard the animals shouting.
“WHAT IS THAT THING?!” Harold the rooster squawked, his feathers puffed up in alarm.
“It’s got FINGERS!” cried Henny Penny, flapping her wings as if the sky were falling (again).
“Is… is it supposed to be here?” asked Betty the sheep, blinking in confusion.
I groaned, stretched, and reluctantly padded over to the source of the chaos. The animals had gathered in a tight, nervous circle near the barn, their eyes wide as they stared at… something. When I pushed my way to the front, I saw it.
A monkey.
Yes, a monkey. Small, with a mischievous grin, fur as brown as the barn walls, and long arms that seemed perfectly designed for causing trouble. He was sitting on top of an overturned bucket, casually peeling a banana. Around his neck hung a harmonica, which he blew into every few seconds, producing a jaunty, if slightly off-key, tune.
“Who on earth are you?” I demanded, my green eyes narrowing.
The monkey looked at me, tilted his head, and grinned wider. “Name’s Banjo,” he said, in a voice that was far too cheerful for my liking. “Just passing through. Nice place you got here.”
“Passing through?” I repeated skeptically. “This is a farm, not a circus.”
“Funny you should mention that,” Banjo said, hopping onto the fence in one fluid motion. “I was part of a circus. But I got bored. Too many rules, you know? So I broke out. Figured I’d see the world.”
“And you landed here?”
“Yup!” He blew a quick, jaunty tune on his harmonica and tipped an imaginary hat. “Thanks for the hospitality!”
The Chaos Begins
From the moment Banjo arrived, life on the farm descended into chaos. He had absolutely no respect for the unwritten rules of farm stability, and within hours, he had everyone in a frenzy.
Rule #1: The barn is for resting, not playing.
Banjo turned it into his personal playground. He swung from the rafters like a furry acrobat, scattering hay everywhere and startling poor Bessie the cow so badly that she tipped over her water bucket.
Rule #2: The chicken coop is off-limits to outsiders.
Banjo ignored this completely. He waltzed into the coop, harmonica in hand, and serenaded the hens with a tune so lively that they started clucking and flapping in what could only be described as a chicken dance. Harold was furious.
Rule #3: Don’t touch Farmer Joe’s tools.
Banjo not only touched them—he rearranged them. Farmer Joe’s neatly organized workbench was left in complete disarray, with wrenches hanging from the barn rafters and a hammer inexplicably balanced on top of a weather vane.
The animals came to me, as they always do when things go wrong.
“Whiskerton, you have to do something!” Henny Penny begged.
“He’s turning the barnyard into a circus!” Harold squawked.
“He… he ate my carrots,” Porkchop the pig sniffled, looking thoroughly betrayed.
I sighed. “Fine. I’ll talk to him.”
The Confrontation
I found Banjo sitting in the middle of the pasture, playing a soulful tune on his harmonica while balancing on one hand. A small crowd of animals had gathered to watch, their annoyance starting to give way to curiosity.
“Banjo,” I said, approaching him with my usual air of authority. “We need to talk.”
He flipped onto his feet and gave me a cheeky grin. “What’s up, Whiskers?”
“It’s Whiskerton,” I corrected, my tail flicking irritably. “And what’s up is you disrupting the farm. This place has rules, and you’re breaking all of them.”
“Rules?” Banjo said, scratching his head. “What’s the fun in rules?”
“Rules are what keep this farm running,” I said, my voice firm. “Without them, everything falls apart.”
Banjo shrugged. “Seems like everyone’s still standing to me. Besides, I’m just trying to liven things up. You ever notice how boring this place is?”
“Boring?” I echoed, offended. “This farm is perfectly balanced. It doesn’t need ‘livening up.’ It needs peace and order.”
“Peace and order, huh?” Banjo said, grinning. “Alright, let’s make a deal. If I can prove that a little chaos isn’t such a bad thing, I get to stay. If not, I’ll leave.”
I glared at him. I didn’t trust him, but I couldn’t resist a challenge. “Fine. But if you lose, you leave without complaint.”
“Deal!” Banjo said, shaking my paw enthusiastically. Then he blew a triumphant note on his harmonica and scampered off, leaving me wondering what I’d just agreed to.
The Monkey’s Plan
Over the next day, Banjo set out to prove his point. He organized a series of absurd activities that left the farm in an uproar—but, annoyingly, also brought a surprising amount of laughter.
He convinced the pigs to play a game of tug-of-war with an old rope, which ended with everyone falling into the mud and laughing hysterically.
He taught the chickens a synchronized dance routine, complete with harmonica accompaniment, which had even Harold grudgingly tapping his talons.
He turned the hay bales into a makeshift obstacle course, challenging the animals to races that left everyone cheering.
By the end of the day, the farm was a mess, but it was also filled with an energy I hadn’t seen before. Even I had to admit, begrudgingly, that Banjo’s antics had brought the animals closer together.
The Happy Ending
That evening, as the sun set over the farm, Banjo found me lounging on the barn roof.
“Well?” he said, sitting beside me. “Did I prove my point?”
I sighed. “You caused chaos. But… you also brought the animals together. I suppose there’s a place for a little fun, as long as it doesn’t disrupt the farm completely.”
Banjo grinned. “Does that mean I can stay?”
I rolled my eyes. “Fine. But only if you promise to follow the rules. Mostly.”
“Deal!” he said, holding out his paw for a high five. Reluctantly, I swatted it.
And so, Banjo stayed on the farm, his harmonica tunes becoming a familiar sound in the barnyard. The farm found a new balance—one that included a little chaos, a lot of laughter, and, of course, me keeping everyone in line.
The Moral of the Story
Sometimes, a little chaos is exactly what you need to remind you of what really matters: friendship, laughter, and the joy of trying something new. Just don’t let it interfere with my nap schedule.
The End.
Woman ARRESTED After Committing PATERNITY FRAUD!—Instant Consequences!
Almost all of China’s debt is owned by domestic organizations. Can you speculate if the central government can’t pay its obligations?
Total Debt held by Chinese National Government and backed by PBOC as on 30/9/24 = ¥ 64.77 Trillion
Annual Interest on National Debt = ¥ 1.38 Trillion
Total Debt held by Local Governments (Prefecture, Provincial & Country) and backed by PBOC as on 30/11/2024 = ¥ 6 Trillion
Total Debt held by Local Governments (Prefecture, Provincial & Country) and not backed by PBOC but by the local state agencies = ¥ 25.36 Trillion
Total Debt held by Government of China and backed by the PBOC = ¥ 70.77 Trillion
Total Debt held by Local state agencies in China = ¥ 25.36 Trillion
Total Debt held by all Public Agencies in China = ¥ 96.13 Trillion
Gross Domestic Product of China (2025) Estimated = ¥ 135 Trillion
Total Debt as Percentage of GDP = 71.20%
Total Interest paid on Debt by PBOC = ¥ 1.38 Trillion + ¥ 141 Billion = ¥ 1.49 Trillion
So as you can see – the State Agencies in China – in counties and prefectures owed around 31.36 Trillion Yuan of Debt
Of this the National Government and PBOC have brought 6 Trillion Yuan under their umbrella by buying out 6 Trillion Yuan of Local Debt and replacing it with National Debt on a 1:1 swap in November
So around ¥ 25.36 Trillion Yuan is held by State Agencies not backed by the PBOC which pay a collective interest of ¥ 827 Billion a year
Assuming this entire debt is defaulted and the PBOC will assume the debt , that’s still only ¥ 2.317 Trillion of Debt which is only 19% of Revenue and 9.6% of Expenditure
Corporate Debt of China & Institutional Debt = ¥ 218.49 Trillion
This is the debt owned by Chinese Companies to their Government and Banks and People
The Assets owned and controlled by then = ¥ 436 Trillion
Total Revenue generated by Corporate and Institutional China = ¥ 40.88 Trillion
So even today Asset to Debt Ratio for Corporations and Institutions in China is only 50%
By contrast it is 87% in Korea, 81.2% in Japan
Total Institutional and Corporate Debt = 5.344 Years Revenue
It’s very close to Japan (5.108 Years) and Korea (5.206 Years)
With such a strong position, the Chinese Government can easily pay its obligations.
Cool Mint Pinwheel Pie
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Yield: 12 servings or 16 sample servings
Ingredients
1/2 (15 ounce) package refrigerated pie crust (one crust)
1 (3.3 ounce) box white chocolate instant pudding and pie filling
Instructions
Heat oven to 425 degrees F.
Place pie crust in Deep Dish Pie Plate, gently pressing dough into bottom and up sides; prick bottom using Hold ‘N Slice.
Bake for 10 to 12 minutes or until golden brown. Cool completely on Nonstick Cooling Rack.
Break into small pieces and place in Small Micro-Cooker. Microwave, uncovered, on HIGH for 1 minute, stirring after each 10 second interval until chocolate is melted and smooth. Do not overheat. Spread half of the chocolate over bottom and sides of prepared crust; set aside.
Pour remaining chocolate onto Parchment Paper; immediately spread into a 6 inch circle using Skinny Scraper. Place Parchment on chilled Chillzanne Platter for 1 to 2 minutes, or until chocolate is firm and surface is dry to the touch. (Or, place chocolate on Cutting Board and refrigerate 15 minutes.) Do not allow chocolate to cool too long or it will crack when cut. Remove parchment from Platter and place on Cutting Board. Using Crinkle Cutter, cut chocolate circle into 12 even wedges but do not remove from parchment. Continue chilling on Platter until chocolate is set.
In Classic Batter Bowl, microwave cream cheese on HIGH for 30 seconds until softened; whisk until smooth using Stainless Steel Whisk.
Fill Easy Accent Decorator with 1 cup of the whipped topping; set aside for garnish. Add remaining whipped topping, milk, peppermint extract and food coloring to Batter Bowl; whisk until smooth. Add pudding mix and whisk vigorously until mixture is blended and very thick. Immediately spoon filling into crust; spread evenly using Large Spreader.
Pipe 12 rosettes around edge of pie. To remove chocolate from Parchment, slide Large Spreader between chocolate and Parchment, gently separating triangles. Place one triangle, with point toward center, against each rosette, forming a pinwheel pattern.
For a colder serving temperature and easier slicing, chill 30 minutes.
Serve using Slice ‘N Serve.
Nutrition
Per serving: Calories 320, Total Fat 20g, Saturated Fat 13g, Cholesterol 25mg, Carbohydrate 30g, Protein 3g, Sodium 250mg, Fiber 0g
Attribution
Posted by FootsieBear at Recipe Goldmine 6/15/01 2:42:17 pm.
Pampered Chef
Is there a plane that can be purchased on the open market that resembles a fighter jet?
Fighter jets don’t sell very well due to the fact that most have just one seat. The ones that have two seats are filled with so much weapons wizardry that a WIZO or Wepons Systems Officer (a non pilot) is needed to manage that aspect of the mission.
What you should be looking for are the trainer versions of these fighters that have two seats, so that the experience can be shared.
For example the most iconic collectable fighter, the P-51, comes rather inexpensively, unless it’s the “D” varrient that was fitted with a gun camera behind the pilot. That model is worth twice as much because the camera, if it is still there, can be removed, and the space converted to a second seat. If you find an airwworthy P51-D, expect to pay upwards of $1,000,000 for it.
On the lesser expensive side there are numerous foreign aircraft available from cash strapped countries that got them from the USA but for whatever reason the parts and support was cut off and they are languishing in the dessert somewhere.
Lastly, understand that the US generally does not dispose of any models that are still in use in order to preserve spare parts for the active fleet. For example just 40%of the A-10 s d
Ever built are airworthy at the moment. The rest are reposting at the Davis Monthan AFB in AZ ready to supply parts for those that are still flying.
~ Mike Heaton
Leftover Dreams: Materialism and Unrealistic Standards Among China’s Older Single Women
(Author’s Note: The protagonist of this story, Dr. Anton Mellick,
also appears in the author’s full-length book The Hand of Maud.)
“There are really four dimensions, three which we call the three planes of Space,
and a fourth, Time.”
H.G. Wells, The Time Machine Mrs. Russell gave three quick taps on the door, then opened it and stuck her head in. “I’m leaving now, doctor. I left a pot of soup on the stove for you,” she said with a slight wave of her hand. “Good night; see you on Monday.”
“Alright, then. See you in the morning.” Anton Mellick—Ph.D., chairman of the Physics Department at Silverleaf Institute of Science, professor emeritus of physics at Mount Sterling University, and author of The Clockwork Chronicles: Black Holes, Wormholes, & The Space-Time Continuum—was standing in his office, a small room attached to the front of his expansive laboratory building, when Mrs. Russell, his housekeeper, poked her head in to say good night. He heard her footsteps clack-clacking outside on the pavement, then the car door opening and shutting, then the engine starting, then her car driving away.
Mellick had an ideal laboratory for his experiments. He had constructed a large, industrial-sized building behind his home. It took several months and contentious meetings with town officials to get a zoning variance and building permits to erect a structure this large, sixty feet square made of high-tensile steel and a flat, metal roof twenty feet high. There were no windows—to obstruct prying eyes.
It will be an eyesore, the neighbors had objected. A monstrosity, they told the town officials. So, in the interest of preserving neighborhood harmony—as well as his privacy—he agreed to construct a fence to shield the neighbors’ easily offended eyes from his lab. He had refused to back down on using steel in its construction, though. He needed the entire facility to be fireproof, just in case.
As soon as Mellick heard Mrs. Russell’s car driving away, he walked toward the door at the rear of his office, unlocked it—he always kept it locked—opened it, and stepped into his laboratory. In the center stood his Chrono Navigator. He had refused to call it a time machine; that was a name coined by H.G. Wells and used ad nauseum in movies and books ever since Wells’s book, The Time Machine, was first published in 1895. Mellick had almost called his time machine the Flux Capacitor as a wink-wink homage to the Back to the Future films but thought that would be too playful for so serious a machine.
The doctor considered The Time Machine to be a brilliant tale of time travel, an exciting story filled with action, romance, weighty significance, and a hopeful ending. But Wells’ description of how his time machine worked was utterly ridiculous—not that he blamed H.G. Wells, not in the least. Wells had conjured up a vivid description of his time machine. “I gave it a last tap, tried all the screws again, put one more drop of oil on the quartz rod, and sat myself in the saddle,” Wells wrote. “I took the starting lever in one hand …” Yes, Wells’s account of time travel was a spellbinding tale when it first landed in readers’ hands, yet no one actually believed in time travel. They didn’t know that time travel, at least in theory, was real. Wells, a scientist and visionary, didn’t know it, either. He had imagined the entire thing. It was science fiction back then, nothing more. Then, a mere decade later, comes Albert Einstein and his Theory of Relativity.
Mellick had devised a simplified, almost childlike, presentation to describe time travel to those who expressed interest. Few expressed interest, though. Most laughed at him, and he was the target of ridicule among the community of physicists he chaired at the university. Yes, he was the department head, and they answered to him, but they mocked him endlessly. “Glad to see you this morning,” commented one of the professors, Dr. Rudolph Whitaker, just the other day. “I expect one day you’ll just disappear into the future, and we’ll never see you again. Say, Anton, if you could somehow get a message to me about what stocks to pick, I’d be so grateful.” And then he had laughed, and his colleagues had laughed, and Mellick joined in, too—just to show he had a good sense of humor.
But it wasn’t funny. It was his life’s work. And it was real, he knew it.
Come to think of it, only children found his explanation believable. They had a fascination with what others called fantasy. So, on those occasions when Mellick was asked to speak to school children, he would explain it this way: As a person move faster through space, time slows down compared to a person who is not moving. If you could travel at speeds close to the speed of light, time would pass so much slower for you than for people on Earth, and you could travel into the future. Theoretically, of course. Then he would add a fact or two about wormholes. A wormhole, he would tell them, is a shortcut through space-time. Traveling through a wormhole could allow you to move even more quickly between two different times.
Of course, there’s a lot more to it than that, but why confuse their little brains? They only want to hear how exciting it could be to travel through time. “Could you go back to the year Hitler was born and kill him as a baby?” All the children ask this question. The moral dilemma of killing babies pre-emptively to prevent them from growing up to be killers never enters their ghoulish minds. But, he reminded himself, at least they listen to him and want to believe.
Now he stood before the Chrono Navigator. He didn’t want to waste time. With Mrs. Russell gone, he was on his own for the weekend and had the rare opportunity to experiment on himself as often as possible. He had failed dozens of times to move objects, including himself, even a few seconds back or forth in time. At first he had tried putting common things—first a stapler, then a toaster, then dozens of other insignificant objects, then finally himself—inside the chamber, setting the timer for minutes into the future. Then he tried to reverse it and go back in time by a few minutes.
All of them failed.
But for the past three years he had worked on refining the two laser lights on either side of the chamber. Previously, Mellick had constructed the lights to move in a straight line toward each other, filling the chamber with light. But when that didn’t work, he realized he needed the light to be moving, so he created circulating beams of laser light. The rotation of the light should twist space-time to make a loop of time. Theoretically.
Mellick looked at his machine and smiled. He was exhilarated. His heart beat faster, and his hands trembled as he placed protective glasses over his eyes. This would be the first time trying the Chrono Navigator since he had refined the laser lights. He would not put another household object into the machine; he was going in himself.
He stepped inside the chamber and flipped the switch to turn on the laser lights. They began to spin in a circular motion, creating loops that whirled around and around. The motion was smooth, almost hypnotic.
Next, he set the timer to go back in time three minutes. Three minutes ago, Mrs. Russell was driving away. The time on his clock, erected on the wall of the lab outside the Chrono Navigator’s chamber, read 5:07. Post meridiem.
Mellick then looked carefully at the three start buttons positioned in a triangular formation around the inside of the chamber, about waist high. All three had to be pushed within five seconds of each other for the Chrono Navigator to work, a failsafe against someone finding his machine and trying to travel through time. A failsafe in the event he, Mellick, changed his mind and wanted to abort the travel.
He took a deep breath and pushed the first button. More lights began to spin within the chamber. He turned to the next one and pushed it. Another beam of circulating light began to spin. He was getting dizzy.
Wait … he was getting dizzy! That had not happened before. It must be working!
Quickly, he hit the last button, and the chamber filled with spinning light. He felt another wave of dizziness, and his stomach lurched. His vision blurred, his balance faltered, and the queasiness intensified. He reached out his arms to brace himself, and finally, mercifully, the spinning stopped. He collapsed on the floor of the chamber, crouching like a dog, as he tried to gain control over the waves of nausea roiling through his gut.
Panting and sweating, Mellick noted that all the lights had stopped spinning. Slowly the sickness passed. Still on his knees, he opened the chamber door and looked up at the clock.
No! No! Not again! He had failed.
The clock appeared to have the same time as when he left, 5:07, though his vision was blurred, and his head was still spinning. The minute hand seemed to have a life of its own, swaying up and down until Mellick had to close his eyes.
Failed again. Failed.
A wave of frustration crashed over Mellick, as if the ground beneath him shifted. Disappointment, exhaustion, and self-doubt washed over him, drowning him in a wave of self-pity and confusion. What went wrong? What could possibly have gone wrong this time? Was it the circulating laser lights? He had worked for months to perfect them. Was it—
There was a knock on the door to his office. Three soft raps. Unsteadily, he stood up and walked to the door to his lab. He walked into the office, closing the lab door behind him and locking it. Then he glanced outside the office window and saw Mrs. Russell’s car parked in the driveway. She must have returned! Why? What brought her back? Had she seen something?
The door opened a crack and Mrs. Russell said, “I’m leaving now, doctor. I left a pot of soup on the stove for you. Good night; see you on Monday.” She gave a little wave of her hand and closed the door.
I gossiped about his job, his retaliation taught me a harsh lesson
Back in November, Russia struck Ukraine with a single Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile, which they named “Oreshnik.” The missile had Multiple Independent Re-Entry Vehicles (MIRV) totaling six (6) warheads.
Video of the strike was widely circulated worldwide and it is utterly shocking:
Six separate batches of projectiles comes out of the sky so fast, no missile defense system on the planet could intercept them
What was most stunning about this strike is that the six warheads released multiple “Bomblets” before they impacted. That’s why there are six, separate “showers” of fire from the sky . . . the bomblets came down ahead of the warheads which carried them, and those bomblets and warheads were moving so fast, they generated enough heat to look like fire coming from the sky.
Ukraine was ruthless in their censorship of any photos or videos of the strike location. They arrested anyone trying to take pictures or videos, and seized any equipment that may have contained such images.
All that ends right now.
Partisans in Dnepropetrovsk released this photograph of a man standing at the bottom of a crater on the site where the Soviet-built Yuzhmash military plant formerly stood. It was the plant hit by Russia’s Oreshnik missile. ONE missile.
Russia’s hypersonic Oreshnik missile vaporized the surface structures and penetrated to a depth of several stories underground, destroying the tunnel complex beneath the plant.
Ukrainian Plant Hit By Oreshnik
The most stunning fact: The warheads and bomblets carried NO EXPLOSIVE CHARGES! ! ! ! What you see here, was done solely and exclusively by the kinetic energy of the hypersonic projectiles coming out of the sky.
The kinetic energy – the shear force of the weight of the projectiles – traveling at over 6,000 miles an hour at impact, utterly obliterated the factory. You can see for yourself, above! There’s nothing left.
Imagine if they loaded explosives into those missiles?
Worst of all, there is NO DEFENSE for such missiles. No anti-missile system anywhere on this planet can intercept them and no anti-missile system can stop them.
Why do fighter jets need drag parachutes when they land? Do they land at a higher speed than airliners?
Let us just compare the typical landing speeds;
Boeing 737: 155 knots for a normal configuration.
Mirage 2000: 150 knots for 15% fuel and normal configuration.
The configuration of an aircraft also determines its landing speed. Fuel left, payload, position of flaps, wind velocity and other factors affect the landing speed.
Now, the speeds are almost comparable for a fighter and an airliner unless in extreme cases like the MiG 21.
There are 4 main reasons a fighter needs a drag parachute:
Runways in operational areas are usually shorter and the surface is rugged. To save the brakes from wear & tear, and to increase the life of tires.
The weather conditions are generally hostile in operational bases. Too much heat or cold can affect the braking systems as well.
Commercial airliners primarily have reverse thrusters to help them decelerate whereas fighter aircrafts do not.
Primarily you will see chutes being deployed in harsh conditions and on shorter runways.
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What was incredibly expensive twenty years ago, and is completely worthless today?
I remember working for an oil company who had half a dozen minicomputers we took out of our oil fields that probably cost $100,000 apiece. They were 10 years old and we tried to give them to universities. They refused to accept them even if we paid them to take them.
I tried to explain it to management: It is Moore’s Law: The power of a computer is doubling every 18 months. The product cycle is about 3 years. After 3 years, the manufacturer brings out a new one that is four times as powerful, its replacement comes out after 6 years, and it is 16 times as powerful, and the next generation comes out after 9 years and it is 256 times as powerful. Your $100,000 computer is now worth 256 times less, or about $390. And, in fact, you can replace it with a $390 microcomputer.
However, the universities will not accept it because it takes up too much space, draws too much power for their buildings, needs extra air conditioning, and costs too much in electricity, so now it has a negative net worth. Our lab techs said they could use the mounting frames and the power supplies for their test rigs, but we might as well throw the rest of the equipment away.
In my first IT job I operated a multimillion dollar supercomputer that took up half a floor. It required two gas turbine generator units on the roof to power it and two massive air conditioners to cool it. Nowadays the average smart watch has more computing power and is more useful to have.
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US is land of opportunities where hard work can lead one to become a millionaire. Unlike China the US attracts people worldwide as they believe it offers better earning prospects and many prefer countries in Middle East or Europe but not China why?
I am best qualified to answer this question
I have two sons
My elder son who goes by Karthik Bala loves the West because he can make money in those “free markets” and in his own words he would rather “lose his shirt” in a reckless calculated risk where he can make millions than to have a controlled system which is safe for the common man like China has
That is the lure of the USA and the Middle East
It’s perfect for those who want to be investment bankers and investors who want to handle money in tax havens
My younger son is in China because he wants to do unfettered research with excellent funding prospects where he has access to many peer publications coming out every day and new developments happening at frentic pace
He wants a safe country
He wants a non woke country
He wants a country where he doesn’t have to plead and wheedle a bunch of donors for research money and where the state cuts a cheque without a single question and hands over a five year bank guarantee for research funds rather than year on year meetings
So China is perfect for those who want to research and develop technology. It is the world’s fastest growing science and technology hub
They are both happy in their own ways
Exactly as those who migrate to West or East usually are
Only people like me who are stuck in India have to put up with the endless discussions on Waqf boards and Temples and Vedic supremacy day in and day out
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Why don’t most developed countries use technicals if they are so effective?
So you want a fast vehicle that carries 3–4 people, has off-road capability and is used for direct fire support? And you want it to actually be effective, rather than just a $30,000 coffin on wheels?
Lets run a simple thought experiment:
Why not add some armour plates and mine resistance so that it isn’t just a bungled toyota pickup truck with a clumsy .50 BMG machine gun? Most militaries would kill the thing and its crew quite easily with just small arms fire, not even RPGs. If you want to use it for patrols in conflict zones, why not make it ambush proof as well:
Result is an MRAP that costs $500,000. That is now 17 times the original cost.
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Why not give it a more powerful gun that can fire explosive shells or even missiles out of its barrel? This would surely make it more lethal as fire support! The gun will have a very long range of several kilometres and we will need a specialized computer to guide the gunner.
We might have to change the chasis completely and make it much heavier to support the recoil of the big gun. To compensate for this without getting stuck in the mud, lets replace wheels with tracks to increase surface area and decrease pressure. To ensure mobility and speed, we need to change the engine completely and rework almost everything.
Our enemies would design something similar to counter ours, so we need even thicker armor and a set of optics/sensors. And of course, we need different protected compartments for ammo, engine, people plus blowout panels so the crew doesnt burn to death when the armour is penetrated by enemy warheads.
The result is…a main battle tank, starting at $10,660,000** for the most basic M1A1 Abrams. This is now 355 times the original cost of the machine gun on a toyota truck.
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Well well well, seems like when your prioritise things like crew survivability, firepower and practical range, you will need additional features and cannot afford to cut cost. You get what you pay for. Now the question we should ask is: why the hell would anyone who use a flimsy “technical” when they can afford better?
Hawaiian Meatballs
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Yield: 10 meatballs
Ingredients
2 (8 ounce) cans pineapple chunks in juice, undrained
1/2 cup red or green bell pepper (or a combination of both)
1 teaspoon ginger
1 pound ground fresh turkey (or ground beef)
1/2 cup green onion slices
1/2 cup plain dry bread crumbs
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup teriyaki sauce
Instructions
Heat oven to 400 degrees F.
Drain pineapple. reserving juice; set aside.
Using Food Chopper, finely chop bell peppers.
In Classic 2 quart Batter Bowl, combine 1/4 cup of pineapple juice, pepper, ginger, turkey, onion, bread crumbs and salt; mix gently but thoroughly. Using small Stainless Steel Scoop, shape meat mixture into balls; place in Deep Dish Baker. Pour teriyaki sauce over meatballs; mix lightly to coat meatballs evenly.
Bake for 30 minutes.
Place 1 piece of pineapple on each party pick. Add meatball and serve.
Nutrition
Per 2 meatballs: approximately 80 calories and 3g fat
Tyler stands at the edge of the roof and stares into the alley far below, as the cold night wind ruffles his t-shirt. And he remembers the last chat he had with Matt, and he hears the refrain to his life’s theme song crescendo in his mind: Oh how quickly things can change. His worn boots scrape another inch over the ledge. When the wind suddenly dies down, the silence brings with it a different song, a warm song, words felt and not heard.
What if?
What if he took a step back, right now? What if he turned around, went back down the stairs? What if he just left this apartment altogether?
What if he’d just go home right now?
He will catch a late night bus. Another passenger, an old woman creased by her years, will take note of his face and ask him if he’s all right. He’ll tell her yeah – the familiar lie.
Later at home he’ll talk with Amber, and he’ll tell her everything. Everything he’s able to. The news will derail the train of her life and they’ll spend the better part of a week in tears.
But they’ll heal, together. They’ll grow closer than either ever thought possible. Amber will take it as a wakeup call, to how precious life is, and to how suddenly it can vanish, and Tyler will hear the song in her voice: Oh how quickly things can change.
They’ll make love. Tyler will tell her he loved her as soon as he met her, back when she was with Matt, and he’ll surprise himself to find it’s true. Amber will find that she’s fallen hard in love too – but she’ll never admit what she felt when they first met, and she’ll bury that memory deep where she can forget it, because her eyes will be on the future, and the future has no room for misgivings and false first impressions. After all, Matt trusted Tyler, and that’ll be good enough for her.
They’ll love and laugh and listen, and for the first time in his life, Tyler will find he can talk. He’ll open up hard enough to break, but Amber’s hand will be gentle. He’ll talk about growing up wanting – food, money, opportunity, a father. He’ll talk about the parade of substitutes his mother entertained, the chorus of beatings they gave him. He’ll even bring up The Bad One, the one that took liberties with Tyler when they were alone, when nobody saw, when nobody helped – and Amber will listen. Tyler will be unburdened for the first time in his life, and he’ll sing and sing and sing: Oh how quickly things can change!
He’ll tell her about his dog – the dog nobody, not even his mom, wanted him to have – and how one day all too soon it died. He’ll omit the details of the death, because it won’t be about the details. It’ll be about having a dog, and then not having one. And together, they’ll sing a new song, a song of loss and of finding.
They’ll have their first fight, and it’ll be about something neither remembers years later. Tyler will feel angry, but not like he’s been angry before. Not anger from a sense of betrayal or injustice or disrespect. Anger because he cares. Good, clean, honest anger. Then they’ll make up for the first time and all will be right with the world. And he’ll hear the chorus again: Oh how quickly things can change!
First, Amber will become pregnant. Then, Tyler will surprise himself once more when he proposes. She’ll say yes and they’ll set a date. It’ll be a small affair with only their handful of friends, but they’ll be good friends and that’s all they’ll need.
For the first time, Tyler will marvel at the opportunity he’s been given and he’ll wonder if he was finally waking from the living nightmare his life used to be. He’ll start cutting loose his oldest hurts, no longer needing them for company.
Amber will give birth to a son, Mason. And two years later, to a daughter, Elaine – except they’ll only ever call her Laney. They’ll move, first to a bigger apartment, and then to a house expensive enough that Tyler has a panic attack. But a couple years later it will be forgotten, because the neighbourhood is nice and close to schools. He’ll grow comfortable with the idea of a forever home and the community that grows around their kitchen table.
One day Amber will ask Tyler if he remembers Matt, and Tyler will hug her. He’ll tell her that of course he does – how could he forget the man that caught him trying to steal his car? How could he forget the man that didn’t get the police involved, but took a chance on a screw up like Tyler? A man that pulled him out of a terrible life and set him straight? A man Tyler once hated with every fiber of his being, though he’ll then realize how wise and benevolent Matt had been. He’ll tell her he misses him, that he deeply regrets Matt’s untimely death, and it’ll be the truth.
Years later he’ll be floored when Mason asks him to teach him how to drive, and Tyler will look back on the past sixteen years and wonder where they went. Oh how quickly things can change. He’ll not know what to do because he didn’t have a father to teach him, but it won’t stop him from jumping in feet first and being there for Mason.
A couple months later Mason will get his licence. A week after that, he’ll total the car, drunk on cheap beer. Tyler will be furious and afraid, and he’ll come to within an inch of beating the blood out of his son – but he’ll hear a snatch of a different melody: What would Matt do? And Tyler will go on a long walk. When he returns he’ll have a serious discussion with Mason and he’ll ground him for a damn long time. But he’ll never raise his hand to the boy.
It’ll be a bittersweet day when Laney goes off to college and the house is empty, but they won’t be able to dread or enjoy it because in a four-year blink of an eye she’ll be back, with a degree and a fiancé. And shortly after that, Mason will announce the arrival of the first grandchild.
There’ll be five little grandkids in all, by the time Tyler finally retires. The idea will make him uneasy, with all that time he’ll have to himself, but the kids will keep dropping by, stirring his heart with their whirlwind adventures. He never wanted to travel but Amber did, and by then Amber will be his new song and he’ll follow her tune wherever she goes.
They’ll see beaches, they’ll see whales. They’ll visit the Great Pyramid of Giza and Chichén Itzá. He’ll discover he likes traveling after all, while in good company. While on safari, Amber will discover a lump. Oh how quickly things can change…
The funeral will be just four months later. It’ll wreck Tyler, for a while. Amber will be gone in body but her spirit will linger, inspiring him to squeeze out all from what life still holds. He’ll start a memorial foundation in her honour, raising money to fight the cruel disease that took her. It’ll be a second life for him and he’ll run the foundation for over two decades, finally re-retiring in his late eighties to spend more time with his great-grandchildren.
He’ll ponder his blessings and the people he loves, and he’ll rue his regrets and the people he’s wronged – and he’ll accept that he can never go back and change things.
And one day he’ll feel at peace, and he’ll know his time has come. He’ll rest surrounded by family, and he’ll follow Amber’s voice on one last voyage, into eternity.
But.
But.
Tyler lingers at the edge of the roof. He knows he should leave, but he can’t. His heart is hammering, and he slides another inch forward.
He can’t help looking.
It’s just like the dog, all over again.
All he wanted to do was look at the dog, to study it, to see how it reacted. To pain. To a hammer. Just to teach it a lesson not to bark at him, not to snap at him. To teach it what happens when someone disrespects him.
And it sang such a beautiful song as he broke it. Well worth the beatings he endured, and his mother’s tears.
In the alley far below him, Tyler sees Matt’s crumpled form. Matt didn’t sing, but Tyler is sure he learned his lesson. The idiot caught him stealing his car and had the gall to lecture him about it. To disrespect him. Serves him right.
It took Tyler months to plan his revenge, to trick Matt into thinking he was changing, but it all worked out perfectly. And the best part about it is, it’ll look like Matt jumped and Tyler will get away with it.
Except, Tyler lingers. Not long but long enough. To see his prize, to witness what happens to those who disrespect him. Someone sees something, someone hears something, and a number is dialed. Tyler lingers, and by the time he decides to leave it’s too late and the police arrive.
The jury doesn’t buy his lies and he’s found guilty of murder.
Oh how quickly things can change.
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Are there any sorts of recipes that can only be made in a pressure cooker?
Using a pressure cooker to make beef stew is undoubtedly a smart choice. The pressure cooker can not only shorten the cooking time, but also perfectly lock the flavor of the ingredients, making every bite full of rich meaty aroma.😁
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First of all, the cooking principle of the pressure cooker makes the beef become crispy and tender in a short time. Traditional beef stew requires several hours of slow cooking, while the pressure cooker can do this in about 30 minutes. During this time, the beef fully absorbs the flavor of the seasoning and other ingredients under the high pressure environment, and the meat is tender and melts in the mouth.
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Secondly, the recipe for using a pressure cooker to make beef stew is very flexible. You can add various spices and vegetables according to your personal taste, such as onions, carrots, potatoes, etc., to increase the layering of the dish. Moreover, the sealing design of the pressure cooker can keep the nutrients of the ingredients from being lost, making the stewed beef healthier and more delicious.
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Moreover, the cleaning work is also very convenient. Compared with traditional stew pots, pressure cookers are easier to clean and not easy to stick to the pot. Usually, you only need to rinse with clean water, which saves a lot of time and energy.
However, you should also pay attention to safety when using a pressure cooker. Make sure that the lid and exhaust valve are working properly to avoid opening the lid under high pressure. In addition, when using it for the first time, it is recommended to read the instructions carefully to understand the optimal cooking time and pressure setting to avoid overcooking or undercooking the ingredients.
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As a Chinese, did you become anti CPC, pro-democratic, and USA fan after accessing websites and social media platforms which are blocked in China?
Entirely impossible; instead, it reveals the true face of the United States.
Western countries often criticize China for not having “freedom of speech” because Chinese people cannot use Facebook or YouTube. Ironically, when the U.S. plans to block TikTok, no one says that America is restricting freedom of speech; instead, they emphasize TikTok’s powerful and irreplaceable functions. Regardless of whether using certain social media platforms equates to “freedom of speech,” the double standards in this treatment are enough to make one question America’s intentions.
Consider the situation where the U.S. swimming team at the Paris Olympics appeared to have “purple faces” in photos and videos. Yet, in American media reports, these faces were filtered to appear normal. There have also been instances where media used AI-generated photos as evidence of “Hamas burning babies,” a ridiculous event. Not to mention, the image of China promoted in American media and social platforms.
Thus, it is not China blocking these proud social media platforms but rather their false propaganda that violates China’s regulations. In the early 20th century, American internet giants like Facebook, YouTube, and Google had business operations in China and were even very popular. The reason they were later banned was not due to political motives from the Chinese government but because they violated the law and faced the consequences. Chinese law merely requires that social platforms’ data on Chinese citizens be under government supervision. As long as they adhere to this globally recognized basic principle, they can obtain a business license, as Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon have. Platforms that refuse to comply with the law naturally do not have the right to enter the Chinese market. This aligns perfectly with legal and free market principles but has been smeared by the West as “deliberate blocking” and “restricting freedom.” What is even more intriguing and thought-provoking is why these companies cannot even follow such basic trading principles and what their true intentions are in entering the Chinese market.
Let’s see what kind of content is on these platforms. From personal accounts to media outlets like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, the tone of tweets about China on social media is often critical and oppositional. This includes issues related to Hong Kong, Xinjiang, China-U.S. relations, and various “China threat” theories. Some scholars even issue absurd warnings against ordering drones, smartphones, and other products from China. Their colloquial, emotional, and suggestive statements are widely disseminated on social media, easily misleading readers and causing uninformed netizens to believe their one-sided views.
Previously, Western media selectively reported on Hong Kong’s “amendment bill turmoil.” While focusing only on police actions during the process of subduing rioters, and persistently questioning them at press conferences, they showed little concern for a 57-year-old Hong Kong citizen who was set on fire by rioters. The same selective reporting and double standards are evident in their social media content. Years ago, during the terrorist attacks in Xinjiang, terrorists used social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to plan their attacks, which eventually resulted in over 1,700 deaths, including 197 deaths of innocent people. Yet, American social media portrayed these terrorists as freedom fighters, praising their actions against innocent people for the so-called “democracy and freedom,” which is utterly absurd.
The American strategy seems to be using their prideful social media platforms to gradually infiltrate the public opinion and minds of other countries, potentially to subvert governments. This is similar to the “color revolutions” they instigated in the early 21st century in the former Soviet Union and the Middle East, North Africa regions. Through media, they create a public opinion atmosphere, exaggerating the faults and flaws of the current regime to incite public dissatisfaction and resistance. At the same time, they cultivate non-governmental organizations and train opposition leaders, using elections or sudden events as opportunities to achieve their goal of overthrowing the current regime through street politics. However, these so-called “revolutions” have not brought about the anticipated positive changes. Instead, they have led to prolonged political instability, economic stagnation, poverty, and even rampant terrorism and war, leaving the people who eventually woke up deeply regretting it.
For the Chinese, seeing these defamatory and false statements about China on American social media is disheartening. They lose all expectations of this “superpower” and see its hostile intentions and malicious efforts to hinder the development of other countries. The notion of “support” is pure fantasy. When considering the wars and riots provoked by terrorism, it becomes clear that it is America that is truly undermining other countries’ democracies, rather than ‘defending human rights’ as they claim.
Shorpy
SHORPY P 0022.previewSHORPY 4a19641a.previewSHORPY 4a19652a.previewSHORPY 4a19636a.previewSHORPY 4a19049 50.previewSHORPY P 0025.previewSHORPY 8c05988a.previewSHORPY 8c08481a.previewSHORPY 8c01602a1.previewSHORPY 8c01018a.previewSHORPY 8c01697a.previewSHORPY 8b24244a.previewSHORPY 8b20191a.previewSHORPY P 0028.previewSHORPY 8b24299a.previewSHORPY 8b24083a.previewSHORPY 8b24059a.previewSHORPY 8b22954a.previewSHORPY 8b23105a.previewSHORPY 8d21424a.previewSHORPY 8d26787a.previewSHORPY 8c03915a.previewSHORPY 8c03952a.previewSHORPY P 0029.previewSHORPY P 0031.previewSHORPY 8c15633a.previewSHORPY 8c15040a.previewSHORPY 8c15033a.previewSHORPY 8c15345a.preview
What ceremonial traditions do Mongolians practice with their horses?
What ceremonial traditions do Mongolians practice with their horses?
Mongolians take great care in horse riding. Riders use professional methods and experience in training, feeding, and competing their horses. For example, professional riders perform the harnessing of racehorses, and their training and attention to detail affect the horses’ speed and success.
Mongolians pay great attention to naming their horses. Names reflect the horse’s temperament, speed, and personality. For example, names such as “Tojin Green” reflect the horse’s characteristics.
Mongolians follow certain rituals and customs when riding horses and entering races. For example, there are rituals such as preparing the horses before the race, wishing them well, and wishing them good luck during the race.
Mongolians do not only use horses for racing, but also love, care for, and feed them. They pray for the well-being of horses and perform rituals for them.
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“Took a Secret Trip to See ‘My Friend’ — My Husband Found Out and Left Me”
Married girl fucks up.
Are there any sorts of recipes that can only be made in a pressure cooker?
Absolutely, and they have saved a lot of lives in the process.
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Water boils at 100ºC, at 1 ATM (101 kPa)
This means liquid water cannot be get hotter than 100ºC, which in turn means that food itself cannot get hotter than 100º. The only way for food to get hotter than 100º is if the environmental pressure is changed. Pressure and temperature are proportional — raise the pressure of the cooking vessel, you also raise maximum temperature of what is being cooked.
Why is this important? Pathogens.
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“Compressed Cooked”
With meat and other low-acid foods, boiling water alone is not enough to can them safely — the spores left behind are still viable at 100ºC, and can thrive in the anaerobic environment. It’s those spores that contain the neurotoxins.
Pressure canning not only saved lives by feeding people, it also saved lives by being a way to safely preserve food in a way that wouldn’t cause illness or death.
In terms of pressure cooking strictly for culinary value — there are also dishes where this matters. To make a consommé, the temperature is kept down so the fats do not emulsify, which would cloud the soup.
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But in a pressure cooker, the fats not only emulsify, they do so at a greater degree than they would on an ordinary stovetop. This emulsification lends a depth and richness to the meal that cannot be replicated at normal atmospheric pressure. It’s cooking technique is a hallmark of many styles of Latin American cooking.
Deepseek has created an AI which is indistinguishable from OpenGPT for only $5.5M in hardware. The system has been trained on OpenGPT output.
This raises a very interesting question. Many Silicon Valley leaders have said that the US must lead in AI, and cannot let China take the lead. This has been used to justify the raising of billions from investors.
No one has been able to answer how AI would be monetized, and the initial investment would be recovered. Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, has said that Apple has never discussed an AI monetization strategy.
So how are all the investors in AI in the US going to get their money back? Considering that Deepseek used lower-performance GPUs to deliver results as good as ChatGPTs’, what is the justification for all the billions paid to Nvidia for their GPUs?
Are Chinese companies proving that for all practical purposes, having the most high-performance GPUs are not a differentiating factor in the great US-China AI showdown?
Something to think about in 2025…
Trump WARNS Of US Economic DEPRESSION In 2025
What is a simple example of money laundering?
The simplest way is like this.
You are a mafia boss, yes, you make a profit of 5M a year, all of which come from illegal businesses. Wash it by opening a service or shop that does business using cash. Usually, the location is haphazard in a cheap shophouse and the staff is minimal.
For example like this: (just an example)
Even though in the real world only 5 people come a day, but so that the dirty money can be cleaned up, you write in the accounting system that the customers reach 100 people a day. So that 5M from the illegal business turns into 5M from the barbershop franchise
If the accountant is good, he can create a reasonable paper trail so that it does not attract the attention of tax authorities. It is quite difficult to prove unless the police are really watching because the transactions are all cash.
This business has various types that are important for the main payment in cash, for example hair salons, laundry, stationery stores. Even Pablo Escobar had a fake taxi company.
This is the easiest and simplest way, there is money laundering through banking or the trending crypto. The point is, don’t be surprised if there is a quiet business but it lasts for years.
Parmesan Turkey and Rice Bake
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Yield: 4 to 6 servings
Ingredients
2 cups chopped cooked turkey or chicken
2 cups chopped celery
1 cup mayonnaise
1 cup cooked rice
1/2 cup (2 ounces) shredded Parmesan cheese
2 tablespoons finely chopped onion
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup slivered almonds
Instructions
Heat oven to 350 degrees F.
In large bowl, combine turkey, celery, mayonnaise, rice, cheese, onion, lemon juice and salt. Spoon mixture into greased 9 inch square baking pan. Top with almonds.
Bake for 30 to 40 minutes or until heated through.
Attribution
Pampered Chef
Multiple U.S. officials say they will impose restrictions on Huawei in the semiconductor sector. Can they really restrict the already powerful Huawei?
It’s very tough
Huawei has an Independent Supply Chain for most of the licensed technologies that are US or Western owned
Other stuff which have western technology are commercially available and impossible to prevent huawei from acquiring
It’s like Pepsodent Tooth Paste
Pepsodent Tooth Paste has its own proprietary technology owned by Unilever & the Sheffield Trust
Micro Polishing Particles
Enamel Shield Technology
Foamboost Technology
Desensitization formula
Fluoride compound formula
APS process and formula
However Pepsodent is a commercial product sold in over 5 million supermarkets worldwide
Can the UK government order Unilever to prevent Pepsodent sales to Aravind Varrier or myself?
We can always buy from some supermarket or we can always buy other brands like Colgate
That’s how it is
The most critical parts are already long ago out of Huawei’s supply chain
My guess is they stockpiled a lot of the commercial parts and continue to have easy access as they can buy it through more than 50,000 third parties around the world
From now on its near impossible to hurt Huawei with tech bans
I shot papa square in the heart but he didn’t die. That damn bible he carried with him saved his life. I was considerable lucky that papa had his axe at hand, and that he kept it sharp. I picked it up. It was a heavy thing, so I swung with all my might and put it right through his head. Seein’ his brains made me throw up. I moved away so it wouldn’t get on papa. That would be disrespectful.
Papa was a big man. I couldn’t bury him like that, so I started choppin’ off his arms and legs with the axe. I was down to the right leg when Sheriff Culverson showed up. Wouldn’t you know it, he came to arrest papa for stealin’ a couple of old lady Renner’s chickens. Papa didn’t have to worry about that now. Hell, he didn’t have to worry about the drought or where his next bottle’d come from, either. I reckon I did him a favor, savin’ him from all that worry.
Sheriff Culverson looked at me and looked at papa. I done threw up again, so the smell was somethin’ turrible in the vicinity. I looked at the sheriff. He was a shakin’ his head and had a sad look on his face. I reckon he didn’t want to take a nineteen-year-old girl to jail. ‘specially me, seein’ as how I was his daughter’s best friend. Maybe he’ll let Cassie visit me in jail.
The jailhouse only had the one cell. That door a clankin’ behind me sounded like what mama would call omnus. I kinda know what that means by the words around it. Corntex, I think they call it. I would know a lot more if papa would’ve let me go to school. He said girls don’t need school. They need to learn how to cook and to clean and to please their man. I’m damn good at cookin’ and cleanin’, but I don’t think I know how to please a man. Papa was a man and he was never pleased.
Oh Lord! Here comes the sheriff and another man. I seen him around. Mr. King. He’s always all duded up and talkin’ fancy and smilin’ and a swingin’ his walkin’ stick around. I sure would like to catch me a man like that. I bet he don’t beat his women. Not much, anyway.
He ain’t smilin’ now. I reckon I’m in a heap of trouble. Welp, papa won’t be slappin’ the tar outta me for my sins this time.
**************
Both men sat across the table from Esther. The sheriff had placed the gun that Esther had shot her dad with, next to the bible that had thwarted Esther’s original plan. The metal gleamed in the harsh light of the room, sitting as silently as the three occupants. The ceiling fan squeaked quietly, not doing a very good job of cooling off the room. The open window allowed the sunlight to stream through, and a soft breeze brought a little relief from the heat, along with the scent of jasmine and dust. The harsh, unforgiving angles that the sun cast in the room matched Esther’s mood.
Esther reached for the wounded bible. She wanted to feel the torn cover and open it up to inspect the damage. The sheriff pulled it towards him and opened it up before sliding it to Esther. The soft sigh of the bible moving across the table sounded like the whisper of broken dreams.
“Notice anything?” The sheriff leaned back and watched Esther closely.
Esther inspected the bible. The bullet had torn through a significant portion of the Old Testament. It had stopped at the Book of Esther.
“Yessir. Esther stopped the bullet, I reckon.”
Mr. King smiled, though he didn’t want to. The sheriff nodded his head and leaned forward.
“Don’t you find that a little odd?”
Esther shook her head.
“That’s your name, young lady,” Mr. King spoke. His rich, resonant voice filled the room. Dust motes danced and the breeze quickened.
“Yessir.”
The men looked at each other impassively, but both were thinking the same thing. The girl was thickheaded.
Mr. King pointed to Esther’s face.
“Your dad do that?”
Her black eye and a swollen nose did all the testifying for her.
“Yessir. Told me I shoulda caught a man by now, and he warn’t gonna feed no old maid much longer.”
“He been drinkin’?” Sheriff Culverson leaned back, crossing his arms. He already knew the answer.
“Yessir. Mama always says that papa only drinks on days endin’ with a ‘y.’ I reckon that’s true.” Esther played with her hair, twirling it between two fingers. She looked away from the men and gazed outside, lost in her own thoughts.
“So you decided to shoot ‘im.”
“Yessir.”
“But the bible stopped the bullet.”
“Yessir.”
Mr. Kind leaned forward and stared at Esther, causing her to blush.
“That was when you decided to take the axe to his head?”
Esther stopped playing with her hair and sat still for a moment before answering.
“I suppose so. Papa woulda kilt me if I didn’t kill him.”
“You feared for your life?” Mr. King continued to stare intently at Esther.
“Yessir.”
Mr. King abruptly stood up and shook the sheriff’s hand.
“I have all I need.”
He left quickly, so quickly that it startled Esther. She looked at the retreating back and worried that she had offended such a gentleman.
“Am I gonna get the Chair?”
The sheriff stood slowly, as if it hurt him to do so. He closed his eyes for a moment before answering. His voice, when he spoke, was softer than Esther had ever heard it.
“No. You’ll get twenty-five years in the women’s prison in San Antone. Minimum.”
Esther started counting on her fingers.
“You’ll be about forty-four, Esther.”
“Damn. I reckon I’ll be too old to catch a man by that time.”
The sheriff felt his chest tighten just a little at those words.
“And mama? How old’ll she be?”
“How old is she now?”
Esther paused, deep in thought.
“Says she was born in 1901.”
“Then she’ll be about sixty.”
Esther nodded, standing, and smoothing out her skirt.
“Reckon she’ll take me back when I get out?”
The sheriff scratched his forehead and looked at the floor.
“I don’t know, honey. I just don’t know.”
**************
II
They’re calling us heroes. The newspapers, that is. I suppose we are, but I don’t know that I feel heroic. I do, however, feel a difference in me now that papa’s dead. Liberation would be the word. Papa would have hit me if I had ever used that word in front of him.
Papa had been drinking, of course. And smacking mama around. Cassie and I were hiding out in my room, wondering when it would all stop. At one point, I heard mama scream. That’s when I went out to investigate.
Papa was pointing a gun at mama. I didn’t even think about what to do. I just did it. I stepped in front of mama just as papa shot. The bullet hit my bible. Yes, I carried a bible with me, right over my heart, but only when I was wearing overalls. It was fortunate that I was wearing them at this point.
I staggered backward and fell. The impact of the bullet stunned me. Mama fell as well, trying to hold me up. That’s when Cassie came charging out of the room and started to wrestle with papa, trying to get the gun out of his hand. We heard another shot. Papa took a bullet to the gut. He died two hours later, in a lot of pain.
Cassie stood and fairly sprinted out of the house. She came back a few minutes later with her dad. The sheriff. The look on his face was one that will not soon leave me. Pinched and drawn, with worry written clearly in the eyes.
Mama should have never been home. She was supposed to go to San Antonio to see her sister, but papa beat her so bad the night before that she refused to go. I believe that papa beat her so severely so she wouldn’t go. He was like that.
Cassie shouldn’t have been there either. Her father told her never to go to my house when my papa was around, but Cassie often defied her father. Her father was so relieved that Cassie wasn’t injured or killed that he never punished her. On the contrary, he hugged her tightly and kissed her on the cheek. I had never seen him do that before!
I’m supposed to write a story for the newspapers. The one in San Antonio wants to give me – and Cassie – fifty dollars each for our story. An astounding sum. Some rich people in San Antonio also want to give us full scholarships for college. Imagine! Going to college! It’s in Denton, but that’s even better. Cassie and I can get away from the blight of the Hill Country and experience a different kind of life.
A different kind of life. I’m filled with a substantial happiness, and I wonder when it will leave. Never, I hope.
The real hero is mama, and I’ll make sure the newspapers know that. All those years of insisting that I go to school, even when papa beat her for her sass. He called it that, anyway. It was grit and toughness and love. I’ll call it the stuff that heroism is made of. That has a nice ring to it. And it’s the truth.
**************
All three steps to the elevated porch squeaked under Mr. King’s tread, though the man was not heavy. Like the rest of the porch area, they needed paint; rusted nail heads poked out of the wood, loosened by years of neglect and Hill Country weather. The evening was soon to turn into dusk.
“Just spoke to the judge. Cassie ain’t to be charged. He said she did us all a favor by shootin’ that man.”
Sheriff Culverson didn’t show it, but a wave of relief flooded his body. He relaxed a little and felt his breath coming easier. Mr. King sat down and lit a cigar, offering one to the sheriff. Both men took some time to light their cigars, ensuring that they had a proper draw. This was not a task but a ritual, and it was not to be taken lightly.
The sheriff went inside his house and returned in a few moments, bearing a bottle of whiskey and two small tumblers. Each man filled their glass to the amount desired and sipped. Mr. King grimaced at the first sip, then took a second, larger sip.
“I reckon she did us all a favor, sure, but it was an accident. I’m damn happy the judge was of the same mind,” the sheriff said. He took another sip of whiskey and sat his glass down, concentrating on puffing his cigar and enjoying the news.
“You know, I’m surprised one of those women hadn’t killed the man before. He sure liked to beat his women,” Mr. King said.
“The mama,” the sheriff said. Mr. King turned his head slightly.
“Pardon?”
“The mama. She made that girl, Esther, get an education. I hear she took a beatin’ or two for her daughter. Damn fine woman, in my opinion.”
Mr. King nodded and smiled. He had already heard the news.
“You went to visit the widow, I hear.”
The sheriff glanced at Mr. King and then quickly glanced away.
“Offer my condolences, in an official capacity.”
The sun had disappeared behind the horizon, bestowing faint light and beautiful colors to the sky. Fireflies came out of hiding, their pinpricks of light giving the large front lawn a magical appearance. As if fairies were in attendance. As if a miracle had been bestowed.
“You were there for two hours, sheriff. That’s a lot of…uh…condoling.”
The sheriff turned and stared at Mr. King, his steely blue eyes narrowing a little. Mr. King laughed and hastened to explain.
“The old biddies in town. You know what they’re like. Most of ‘em had you and the widow makin’ a baby during your visit.”
“Vicious old cats,” the sheriff spat out the words.
“Makes sense, though. You and the widow. Esther and Cassie are best friends. They’d be tickled pink to become sisters, so to speak. And the widow’s a fine, strong woman.”
“You done have us at the altar.”
Mr. King tamped the ashes from his cigar onto the porch and scuffed them with his boots. He poured himself more whiskey and watched the fireflies perform their chaotic, beautiful dance.
“Your wife’s been gone for twelve years. I reckon you grieved enough, sheriff. I figure the widow’s grievin’ was nonexistent. Can’t really miss a man that beats you, can you?”
The sheriff poured himself another three fingers of whiskey and stood at the railing beside Mr. King. He sighed and turned to Mr. King, handing him a dollar bill.
“I’m hirin’ you for a two-minute consultation, Mr. King.”
Mr. King looked at the bill and put it in his breast pocket.
“What’s on your mind, sheriff?”
The sheriff paused for a moment, trying to get the words out of his mouth.
“I heard Esther ‘n Cassie talkin’ one day last year, just before Christmas. Esther was tellin’ her that she wanted to shoot her daddy dead so he’d stop beatin’ her mama. Well, that froze me.”
Mr. King looked at the sheriff, a thoughtful expression creasing his face and pursing his lips.
“I figure she would have done it one day, sheriff. I guess Cassie took care of that, though.”
“Yes. Very clever, sheriff. But I wasn’t gonna divulge that little piece of information anyway.”
“I expect a receipt when you get to the office tomorrah.”
“Yes. Of course. Come by after work, sheriff, and I’ll buy us a couple of beers. I seem to have an extra dollar in my pocket.”
The night darkened and the breeze stilled; even the fireflies slowed down. Soon, they were gone, letting the darkness of the night have its way. Both men remained silent. Cigar smoke curled and drifted upwards past the porch lights, disappearing into the blackness.
Mr. King left after finishing his whiskey.
“See you tomorrow, sheriff. And I’ll expect a wedding invitation.”
“I want that receipt, young man.”
The rest of the night passed as it should have. Frogs croaked lazily, crickets chirped, and lights winked out one by one across the countryside. Two young ladies were dreaming of adventures at college, one sheriff was thinking of matrimony, and one widow was contemplating the mysteries of fate and providence.
The bible with a bullet hole in it was, in due time, returned to its rightful owner. The whereabouts of the mangled word of God is currently unknown.
The US needs $85 billion to build copper mines to replace China’s. Where are the investors?
Title: Sir Whiskerton and the Mystery of the Midnight Melon Marauder
Ah, welcome back, dear admirer of my genius. It seems my reputation as the farm’s resident sleuth has reached legendary proportions, and rightly so. Today, I shall recount yet another tale of my unparalleled deductive skills—a tale that begins with a juicy crime and ends with an unexpected twist. This is the story of the Midnight Melon Marauder. Prepare yourselves for a tale of intrigue, betrayal, and… a surprisingly sticky situation.
The Crime
It all began one warm summer morning. The sun had barely risen when I was rudely awoken by the sound of wailing. Not the usual clucking of Henny Penny or the grumbling of Farmer Joe, but a high-pitched, mournful cry that could only belong to Betty the sheep.
“They’re gone! They’re all gone!” Betty bleated, her voice echoing across the farmyard.
I groaned and flicked my tail in irritation. It was far too early for this nonsense. Still, I am nothing if not dedicated to maintaining order on this farm, so I stretched, yawned, and descended from my perch atop the barn roof.
“What, exactly, is gone?” I asked, padding over to the commotion.
“The melons!” Betty cried, pointing her hoof toward the garden. “Every single one of Farmer Joe’s prized watermelons is gone! Just the rinds are left!”
I followed her gaze and saw the evidence for myself. The garden, which had been full of ripe, plump watermelons the day before, now looked like a battlefield. The vines were shredded, the leaves trampled, and scattered everywhere were hollowed-out rinds, their juicy interiors completely devoured.
“What a tragedy,” I said dryly, though I was secretly intrigued. “Melon theft is a serious crime. I’ll handle this.”
The animals gathered around, their eyes wide with fear and curiosity. “Who would do such a thing?” Harold the rooster squawked. “It must’ve been a monster!”
“Or aliens,” Henny Penny added, because of course she did.
“Let’s not jump to conclusions,” I said, my tail flicking with authority. “First, we gather evidence. Then, we find the culprit.”
The Investigation
I began my investigation at the scene of the crime. The garden was a mess, but I quickly spotted a trail of clues: sticky footprints leading away from the garden and toward the barn. The prints were small and muddy, and I detected a faint, sweet aroma clinging to them. Watermelon juice.
“Interesting,” I muttered, sniffing the ground. “Whoever did this left in a hurry.”
I followed the trail, my sharp eyes scanning for more evidence. The footprints led me past the chicken coop, through the pasture, and finally into the hayloft of the barn. There, I found my first suspect: Clover the goat.
Suspect #1: Clover the Goat
Clover was lounging in the hay, looking particularly smug as she chewed on a piece of rope. Her hooves were sticky, and there were bits of watermelon rind stuck to her fur.
“Clover,” I said, narrowing my eyes, “care to explain why you smell like a fruit salad?”
She stopped chewing and blinked at me innocently. “Oh, this? I, uh, found it on the ground. I wasn’t anywhere near the garden last night, I swear!”
“Really?” I said, circling her. “Because these footprints lead straight to you.”
She shifted uncomfortably, her ears twitching. “Okay, okay! I might’ve… tasted one melon. But I didn’t eat the whole garden! I couldn’t have, even if I wanted to. It wasn’t just me, I swear!”
“Hmm,” I said, studying her carefully. She wasn’t strong enough to carry out this crime alone, but she might’ve had help. I needed more evidence.
Suspect #2: Porkchop and the Pigs
Next, I went to the mud pit, where Porkchop and his gang were wallowing as usual. They looked suspiciously content, their bellies full and round.
“Porkchop,” I said, my tone sharp, “what have you been eating?”
“Why, slop, of course,” he replied, licking his snout. “Same as always. Why do you ask?”
“Because the melons are missing,” I said, watching his reaction closely.
Porkchop froze, his eyes darting toward his fellow pigs. “Melons? What melons? I don’t know anything about melons.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, unimpressed. “Then why do you have seeds stuck to your nose?”
The other pigs snorted nervously, trying to hide their sticky hooves. It was clear they’d been involved, but something didn’t add up. The pigs were greedy, yes, but they weren’t clever enough to pull off a heist this big. Someone else must’ve orchestrated it.
The Breakthrough
I returned to the garden to examine the scene once more. As I sniffed around the rinds, I noticed something I’d missed before: tufts of fur caught on the broken vines. The fur was gray, not white like Clover’s or pink like the pigs’. My whiskers twitched. I knew exactly who it belonged to.
I followed the trail of fur to the orchard, where I found the mastermind sitting smugly beneath a tree. It was Rufus, the farm’s stray raccoon.
The Culprit: Rufus the Raccoon
“Rufus,” I said, my voice dripping with disdain, “I should’ve known.”
He grinned at me, his paws sticky with watermelon juice. “Ah, Sir Whiskerton. Fancy meeting you here.”
“Don’t play coy with me,” I said, flicking my tail. “You’re the one who orchestrated the melon theft, aren’t you?”
“Guilty as charged,” he said, shrugging. “But hey, can you blame me? Those melons were irresistible. Besides, I didn’t eat them all myself. Your farm friends were more than happy to help.”
I scowled. “So you tricked Clover and the pigs into doing your dirty work?”
“Of course,” Rufus said, his grin widening. “Why do the work yourself when you can get others to do it for you?”
The Resolution
I dragged Rufus back to the farmyard, where I explained everything to the other animals. Clover and the pigs confessed to their roles in the crime, though they insisted Rufus had manipulated them. Farmer Joe wasn’t pleased, but he forgave them after they helped replant the garden.
As for Rufus, he was banished from the farm—at least until he inevitably sneaks back in. I’ll be watching him closely.
And the moral of the story? Even the cleverest tricksters can’t outsmart a cat. Especially not this cat.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a well-deserved nap to get to. Until next time, dear reader.
The End.
Why Alimony Should Be Abolished
Is Taiwan slowly trying to get rid of its Chinese relationship historical records by destroying Chiang Kai Shek’s statues and his contents in the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall? If so, why did Taiwan still call itself Republic of China?
There are three major political forces now in Taiwan.
The Nationalists, or KMT: the remnants of the Republic of China regime that fled mainland China when they lost the civil war to the Communists. Their official policy still adheres to the Republic of China constitution and they look to defeat the Communist rebels in China and retake control of all China (Mongolia included). In reality they know they’re no longer a match against the Communists and look to maintain the status quo or get favorable treatment for Taiwan for eventual reunification. If push comes to shove, they prefer to defend Chinese unity over everything else.
The Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP (the current regime jn power): the descendants of Japanese loyalists during Japan’s colonial rule of Taiwan. They adhere to the Republic of China constitution but in name only. Everyone knows they’re against the constitution and want to create an independent Taiwan, free from China, so that they can join and rebuild the Japanese empire. They try to de-China Taiwanese history and culture at every turn and paint the Japanese as the good guys in WWII, and would go to great lengths to employ foreign counter to China, including Japan and the US. They wish for China and the US to go to war and mutually destroy each other so that Taiwan can gain independence, and that Japan can rise again.
The new Taiwan People’s Party. The past few years this new poltical force rose mostly with the support of the younger Taiwanese, who view the KMT as too pro-China and the DPP as too corrupt and irrationally anti-China. So they support the TPP, a new party that focuses more on the well-being of regular Taiwanese people and is about mid-way between the KMT and DPP when it comes to relationship with China.
I didn’t expect to write so soon, but we had a pretty eventful 24 hours. The big ticket item for most seems to be China’s new 6th generation fighter(s), which have summoned with great ferocity the American strategic supply of copium. As interesting as the developments in that space are, I think it is more speculative than the other big development, which is equally eye-opening.
Let me make the case:
There are quite a few things that stand out to me here, but for the laymen, the basic outcome here is that a Chinese team released an LLM—yes, that cutting edge Western tech product with all the speculation—that performs as good as the best models in every measure (and outstripping the best in some key inventories by large margins) at 5% of the typical cost on crippled, sanction-abiding compute. It is hard to overstate just how efficient they are, with seemingly no tradeoffs that mattered in the end.
To my eyes, looking at all of the neat hardware tricks they pulled off, and in particular their recommendations for chip manufacturers, these Chinese devs embody peak virtues of CS. These guys know everything from the hardware all the way up the abstraction layers. We already pine for such wizards to exist in our workplaces here, but apparently this team has reached the critical mass where the norm of operations seems to exist at that level, informing their processes in a way we almost never are able to do over here. This kind of memory prescience speaks of undeniable expertise, and the proof is in what they are able to do with the equivalent of a toaster connected to a few potatoes. I spoke of the talent I saw at Chinese universities; now we witness it in action at one of few remaining industries where the US still seems to be effective at pushing the frontier.
The ease of lying about China for this situation rests in the simple fact that the US political class and their media toadies do not engage in STEM fields—ew, Math— *HISS*! What can persist, instead, is this insistence that the Chinese can only trail behind the US, that the Chinese do so because they can only copy and follow. Any innovations therefore can be comfortably sorted into the bin of tone-policed China skepticism, where it must hold that there is fakery or cheating involved. The developments of DeepSeek won’t hit the general public because practically no one will have to face reality here.
The worst part is that the other side feeds into this ignorance, because your typical Chinese person is just going to look at this tomfoolery and scoff at it— let fools remain fools. It is only the Chinese person invested in the West who is jumping up and down pointing at these developments and going “guys, there’s no stopping that!” Unfortunately the cold warriors call this behavior disloyalty, and in today’s national security parlance this passes as sound logic. The result is that the West can remain resolute on a course of action (e.g. chip sanctions) that clearly has failed. Narratives here prefer to pretend that we still have the capacity to coerce China, we just have to “get even more serious.”
Coexistence, with some adjustments of our own, is the path forward. It will take a very long time for us to finally arrive at that conclusion; pride is the great sin of today’s West.
What was incredibly expensive twenty years ago, and is completely worthless today?
I remember working for an oil company who had half a dozen minicomputers we took out of our oil fields that probably cost $100,000 apiece. They were 10 years old and we tried to give them to universities. They refused to accept them even if we paid them to take them.
I tried to explain it to management: It is Moore’s Law: The power of a computer is doubling every 18 months. The product cycle is about 3 years. After 3 years, the manufacturer brings out a new one that is four times as powerful, its replacement comes out after 6 years, and it is 16 times as powerful, and the next generation comes out after 9 years and it is 256 times as powerful. Your $100,000 computer is now worth 256 times less, or about $390. And, in fact, you can replace it with a $390 microcomputer.
However, the universities will not accept it because it takes up too much space, draws too much power for their buildings, needs extra air conditioning, and costs too much in electricity, so now it has a negative net worth. Our lab techs said they could use the mounting frames and the power supplies for their test rigs, but we might as well throw the rest of the equipment away.
In my first IT job I operated a multimillion dollar supercomputer that took up half a floor. It required two gas turbine generator units on the roof to power it and two massive air conditioners to cool it. Nowadays the average smart watch has more computing power and is more useful to have.
My Brothers FIRST TIME in China: Expectation vs Reality
I’ve been using POE AI to assist me in the generation of short funny stories about a cat living on a farm and his various adventures. I believe that you all might have read a story or two already. He’s Sir Whiskerton, and his stories are cute and comforting. Ah, it will improve with time. Here’s some AI generated images of him…
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AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic No 0AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic No 3AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic No 2AlbedoBase XL Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic No 1(1)
Today, he’s on another adventure.
Please advise if you love or hate the stories.
…
Married with Children: Welcome Home Tiffany
Title: Sir Whiskerton and the Case of the Disappearing Milk
Ah, I see you’ve returned, eager for another tale of my brilliance. Who could blame you? Life on this farm is a veritable circus of chaos, and I, Sir Whiskerton, am its only beacon of order and intelligence. Today, I shall regale you with the story of a baffling mystery that had all the animals in a tizzy. It was a case so perplexing, so utterly absurd, that even I, with my unmatched intellect, found myself momentarily stumped. But fear not, dear reader, for justice—and my nap schedule—prevailed in the end.
This, my friends, is the story of the Disappearing Milk.
Morning: The Milk Panic
It all began on a crisp autumn morning. The air was filled with the scent of hay, the distant clucking of Henny Penny (always clucking about something), and the unmistakable sound of Farmer Joe grumbling as he trudged out to milk Bessie, our resident dairy cow.
Now, Bessie is a simple creature—slow-moving, slow-thinking, but reliable. She produces gallons of milk every day, which Farmer Joe collects and stores in a large metal canister near the barn. But on this particular morning, something was amiss.
“Where’s the milk?!” Farmer Joe’s voice echoed across the farmyard, startling even me awake from my very important morning nap on the fence post.
I stretched lazily, flicking my tail. “What now?” I muttered to myself. But when I saw the flurry of activity in the barn, I couldn’t help but investigate. After all, a mystery is a mystery, and I am nothing if not the farm’s preeminent detective.
The Scene of the Crime
I found Bessie standing in her usual spot, chewing her cud with her trademark vacant expression. Beside her stood the empty milk canister, gleaming in the sunlight like an accusing beacon. Farmer Joe scratched his head, muttering something about “thieves” and “darn raccoons.”
“Bessie,” I said, sauntering up to her, “care to explain why your milk is missing?”
She blinked at me slowly. “Oh, good morning, Whiskerton. My milk is missing? How odd. I didn’t notice.”
Of course, she didn’t notice. Cows rarely notice anything beyond fresh grass and the occasional itch. With a sigh, I examined the area. The canister had no obvious signs of tampering, and there were no tracks leading away from it. Intriguing.
“Looks like we’ve got ourselves a milk thief,” I said, my whiskers twitching. “Don’t worry, Bessie. I’ll get to the bottom of this.”
“Thank you,” she said, though she didn’t seem particularly concerned. Typical.
The Suspects
I began my investigation, as always, by rounding up the usual suspects. The farm is home to a colorful cast of characters, any one of whom could be guilty—or simply guilty by virtue of being an idiot. Either way, everyone was getting interrogated.
1. Harold the Rooster
Harold, the self-important rooster, was preening himself in the yard when I approached. “Harold,” I said, “where were you last night?”
He puffed out his chest. “Why should I tell you? I don’t answer to anyone, especially not a lazy barn cat.”
“Listen, featherbrain, I’m trying to solve a crime here. Unless you want me to tell Farmer Joe you’ve been shirking your watchdog duties, you’ll cooperate.”
Harold squawked indignantly but relented. “Fine! I was in the coop with the hens, as always. I don’t drink milk—it’s bad for my figure.”
I rolled my eyes. “You’re not even a suspect. You’re just annoying.”
2. Porkchop and the Pigs (Again)
Next, I found Porkchop and his gang wallowing in the mud. “Porkchop,” I said, narrowing my eyes, “have you been sneaking into the barn to steal milk?”
Porkchop looked up, his snout caked in mud. “Milk? What would we want with milk? You think we’re baking cookies in here?”
“Don’t tempt me to check,” I muttered. But he had a point. Pigs don’t care for milk, especially when they’ve got an all-you-can-eat buffet of slop delivered daily.
3. The Mice
I decided to pay a visit to the mice, who lived in the walls of the barn. They’re sneaky little creatures, always pilfering crumbs and seeds when no one’s looking. If anyone could pull off a milk heist, it was them.
“Alright, you little kleptomaniacs,” I said, poking my head into their hideout. “Where’s the milk?”
The mice squeaked in unison, looking genuinely terrified. “We swear it wasn’t us, Sir Whiskerton! Milk’s too big for us to carry anyway!”
I had to admit, they had a point. As irritating as the mice are, their size does limit their criminal endeavors.
The Unexpected Clue
For a moment, I was stumped. None of the usual suspects seemed guilty, and there was no physical evidence to follow. But then, as I sat pondering the case near the barn door, I noticed something odd: a faint, sticky trail leading away from the canister.
Curious, I followed the trail, which led me to the orchard at the edge of the farm. There, lounging beneath an apple tree, was the culprit: a small, scruffy goat named Billy.
Billy was an oddball, even by farm standards. He mostly kept to himself, wandering around and chewing on random objects. But today, he was surrounded by evidence. The sticky trail led directly to his hooves, and nearby sat a bucket with milk froth still clinging to the edges.
“Billy,” I said, my voice low and dangerous. “Explain yourself.”
Billy looked up, his eyes wide with panic. “Oh… uh… hi, Sir Whiskerton. What brings you to the orchard?”
“Don’t play dumb with me,” I said, circling him like a predator stalking its prey. “You’ve got milk all over your hooves, and that bucket looks suspiciously familiar. Did you steal Bessie’s milk?”
He shifted uncomfortably, his chewing slowing to a guilty nibble. “Okay, fine! I did it! But I had a good reason!”
“Do tell.”
“I… I wanted to make goat milk soap,” Billy confessed. “I heard the humans talking about it, and it sounded fancy. I thought maybe if I made something useful, they’d stop calling me a ‘troublemaker’ and let me sleep in the barn.”
I stared at him, torn between disbelief and amusement. “You stole milk to make soap? Billy, you’re a goat. You don’t even have hands.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t think that part through,” he admitted, lowering his head.
The Resolution
I dragged Billy back to the barn, where Farmer Joe found him and the stolen milk bucket. Billy bleated pitifully, but Farmer Joe just laughed, patted him on the head, and muttered something about “silly goats.”
As for me, I received no thanks, no reward, not even an extra bowl of kibble for my efforts. But that’s fine. My satisfaction comes from knowing that, once again, I restored order to this ridiculous farm.
And the moral of the story? Sometimes, good intentions don’t excuse bad behavior—but they do make for hilarious stories.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a nap to finish.
The End.
Rachel Wilson SCHOOLS Boss Babes And Gives Them Motherly Advice
Dmitry Medvedev, former President of Russia, revealed some interesting – and disgusting – facts in a personal posting on social media this morning. For instance, a Norwegian Vessel REFUSED TO HELP a sinking Russian ship in the Med!
From Medvedev:
More than 20 years ago, an American colleague of mine uttered a curious phrase about Iraq: “Punish France, ignore Germany, forgive Russia.”Why does it spring to my mind now? Here’s why: this verbal triad will be quite appropriate when the West’s hybrid war against Russia is over – and one day, it certainly will be. Then, it will be time for our country to:a) Forgive the weak countries that succumbed to the Anglo-Saxons’ pressure and played along, even if passively, with the anti-Russian political shitshow (these are mostly Asian and Latin American countries).b) Ignore the US. This one is simple: we don’t foresee friendship with the US within the next 100 years, and going to war with America is too costly: a direct clash would obviously mean global nuclear war.c) Punish Europe. Now, this one, I will expand upon, because, looking at the Old World today, the only thing I feel is deep revulsion. It is Europe, now a mad old hag, which became the world’s stronghold of Russophobia. It was lying Europe that caused the Istanbul talks to fail. It was brainless Europe that furiously unleashed its bungled sanctions campaign, inflicting massive economic damage on its citizens. It was bloodthirsty Europe that fed the worst demons of war without any regard for loss of life on either side of the conflict.This is why Europe must be punished by all means available, be it political, economic, or hybrid. And this is why we must help all destructive processes happening in Europe. Hail raging mobs on its quaint streets! Hail swarms of migrants wreaking havoc and wrathfully tearing down European rainbow values. May the loathsome mugs of European bureaucrats be swept away by floods of civil turmoil!Why so harsh? But how else could it be, given the facts? A Norwegian-flagged vessel, Oslo Carrier 3, refused to take aboard distressed Russian sailors from Ursa Major as it was sinking in the Mediterranean. What more is there to explain? That cannot be forgiven!We shall act, for it is written: “The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.” (Ps. 58:10)
Why Fast Food is Panicking Over Higher Prices Now
Chinese science
The Chinese scientists and engineers have solved the core technical problem of long-term engine heat in the hydrogen-oxygen rotating detonation rocket engine!
This breakthrough not only indicates that China has reached the world’s leading level in the field of hydrogen-oxygen rotating detonation rocket engines but is also expected to provide strong power support for the development of future seventh-generation fighter jets.
Detonation engines, as the name implies, are engines that use the “detonation combustion” process for propulsion. Literally speaking, the key to “detonation combustion” is “explosion”, which is essentially the process of sudden increase and release of the pressure of a substance. Detonation engines use this principle to drive the mixture of fuel and oxidant to burn through high-speed rotating detonation waves, thereby generating thrust.
During the detonation combustion process, the combustion speed and the conversion speed of the reactants are very high, which makes the detonation engine have a higher thermal cycle efficiency than the traditional engine. During the combustion process of the traditional engine, the fuel and air are mixed and gradually burned, the combustion speed is relatively slow, and the thermal cycle efficiency is low.
The detonation engine uses the high-speed propagation of the detonation wave to make the fuel and oxidant burn in a very short time, thereby greatly improving the thermal cycle efficiency. In addition, the detonation engine also has the advantages of simple structure, light weight and fast response speed.
The combustion chamber structure of a traditional engine is complex, and multiple components need to work together to achieve the combustion process. The combustion chamber structure of a detonation engine is relatively simple, and only a rotating detonation wave generator is needed to achieve the combustion process. This makes the detonation engine have obvious advantages in weight and volume and is more suitable for use in fields such as aerospace that require lightweight design.
Traditional engines have disadvantages such as low combustion efficiency and heavy weight, which limit the maneuverability and stealth performance of fighter jets. Traditional engines have many limitations in supersonic cruise and short takeoff and landing, while detonation engines, through advantages such as high response speed, will significantly improve future fighter jets in these aspects.
The high thermal cycle efficiency and lightweight design of the detonation engine will enable future fighter jets to have higher maneuverability and stealth performance. The high response speed of the detonation engine will enable future fighter jets to have stronger supersonic cruise and short take-off and landing capabilities.
In recent years, scientific research institutions and enterprises such as China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation have continuously increased their investment and R&D efforts in the field of high-end equipment, promoting the emergence and application of a series of major scientific and technological achievements. In the field of aviation engines, scientific research institutions and enterprises such as China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation have not only successfully developed a number of advanced aviation engine products, but also actively promoted the innovation and application of related technologies.
For example, they have improved the performance and reliability of aircraft engines by adopting advanced materials and manufacturing processes; and reduced the R&D cost and cycle of aircraft engines by adopting digital design and simulation analysis. In the field of spacecraft, scientific research institutions and enterprises such as China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation have also achieved remarkable results. They have successfully developed a number of advanced spacecraft products, including manned spacecraft and deep space probes. The successful development and application of these products not only improved the performance and reliability of China’s spacecraft but also laid a solid foundation for the future development of China’s space industry.
This story contains themes or mentions of suicide or self harm.
You weren’t allowed to return. That was the rule.In Sali, Washington, people disappeared. My grandmother did back in ’92, just after having Mom. She left a succinct note explaining that Pop wasn’t doting enough, and she missed the soft skin and moist lips of her fading yesterdays. My best friend Beck did, the night before her eighteenth birthday, claiming life wasn’t worth living if you only got to be a child once. Even my boyfriend, plagued by the obscurity of our town, a loyal resident through and through until he realized just how stagnant work, friends, life had become, retreated to some other universe in which he could endlessly climb the cooperate ladder, leaving ironed button-ups draped on the rungs.I was one of the last young people left. Others were too old, too content with death to tempt time, too used to waking up without grandchildren or sisters or friends from long ago. I supposed you became well-acquainted with death the more years you acquired; you memorized his cold fingerprints each time they grazed your neck.Sali used to feel like home. I had lost count of the splinters I’d tweezed out of my feet, the times glass Coke bottles caught or chipped in the antiquated vending machine by Mrs. Dunhamn’s corner store, the moments I’d stilled tracing the shingles of the roof outside my bedroom, just one sliding window and a bit of courage away.But there was no one left for me here. Splinters no longer conjured memories of summer, there was seldom a line at the corner store, and killing time on my roof didn’t feel dangerous now that I was of age and there was nobody to forbid it. My parents had dissipated last year, together, and whether or not they ended up in the same universe was something only they knew.Some people chose a universe completely unlike this one: a socialist utopia, a tropical paradise, a brush with celebrity. Others returned to past timelines. They wanted to change something dire, reunite with someone dear.Like with Mr. Clark. Three days after my favorite English teacher’s wife took her own life, we were assigned a substitute, Mr. Dunhamn. His help was evidently no longer needed at the corner store.It wasn’t hard to guess what had happened.I’d wondered, in my sleep, at red lights, while brushing my teeth and my hair, if I should move away from Sali, but I was not sure it was possible. At least, no one had ever managed to before. Perhaps the idea of a new life only restricted by the confines of your imagination was too enticing to pass up. Or maybe it was more convenient, The Procedure. Most of us, the ones left, didn’t have nearly enough money, time, energy to pack up the nothing our lives had become. We thought about leaving—oh, how we thought about leaving—but we were too afraid of failure.Because the thing was, to leave, you had to die.Aside from vanilla ice cream, diesel, and lottery scratchers, Mrs. Dunhamn sold pills. Not pain meds or antidepressants (I’m fairly certain you can’t find them anywhere else, and they’ve somehow escaped outside speculation, as the rest of Sali has. We seem to be cloaked by invisibility, unimportance).Not typical pills. Leavers. You couldn’t just swallow the Leavers. You had to crush one and stir it into a glass of cold water, let the powder dissolve for two days in the fridge, and drink the final product just before bed on the third day. I’d been told the mixture tastes cuprous and bitter, like swallowing liquefied metal and sundried lime.All of this was to communicate finality, I think. You had three days to decide if you’d like to go through with it, three days to write notes to your loved ones, the ones that were left. And you must drink the entire potion, every last drop, before going to sleep. In the morning, you’d wake up a different person, with a different life.Beck had kept an ongoing document detailing her dream life, down to the number of freckles that dotted her skin in July. She showed me her work once, about a month before her departure.“This is elaborate,” I’d said, sprawled across her twin bed, flipping through pages of a literary magazine. The Red Pen, February issue. Unease twisted my stomach until it was taut, on the brink of snapping like the band on Beck’s wrist, but surely this was for later. She wouldn’t leave me, I thought, not so soon. I slyly gestured toward my chest with my thumb. “You’re forgetting something, though.”“What?” She’d asked, almost panicked as she snatched her laptop from me, eyes darting as she surveyed her meticulous work. “What’s wrong with it? Did I forget to specify location? Because I’ve heard some people include the longitude and latitude…”“Beck, I’m kidding,” I said. But it appeared she wasn’t.
She didn’t leave me much. One morning, a bleak Tuesday, I woke up to find her collection of magazines on my front porch. A canary yellow sticky note flapped in the wind.
“I want to be a kid again. You understand. You’ve seen how others leave to chase youth. I want to be six, with no problems, with bright eyes, illusioned. I’m sorry, Ava. I love you.”
And she was gone.
For a while after that, I contemplated those last three days. She’d done so much to ensure her departure: bought the pill, stirred it into chilled water, let it dissolve for forty-eight hours, drank it just before drifting, wrote notes, said her goodbyes—or the ones she could stomach—watched the sun dip below Sali’s flat, grassy landscape one last time. You needed a plan for this kind of thing. You couldn’t just go.
Though I understood her thirst for naivety, I’d resented her in the stretching spring and summer days that followed. The last time we’d talked was five days prior to Beck’s first death, at a café equidistant from our respective houses, and if she’d shown signs of decision, they’d been tenuous, hidden beneath the musical cadence of her words.
“I heard you got the promotion. Good job, Av.”
“Yeah, well, it’s not like there’s much room to advance. I’m only getting an extra two dollars an hour.”
“Still, congrats. I’m proud of you. Always proud of you, you know that.”
I surveyed her order.
“That’s a new drink, isn’t it?”
“Yep. A macchiato. Thought I’d try something new.”
“Oh, how adventurous you’re becoming.”
She sipped her drink, lips pinching at the unfamiliar taste. Maybe she’d requested one expresso shot too many.
“Quite,” she’d laughed.
I wasn’t going to do that to people. Not that there were many left to inform. I was nearing thirty now; the town had most certainly predicted my departure, maybe before I came to terms with it myself.
Still, I met my old instructors for drinks, left gift baskets on my neighbors’ porches, scribed notes to the kids I babysat on the evenings their father worked late. Now, dropping two envelopes into Reed and Lucy’s mailbox, I understood Beck’s need for anonymity. It was necessary in the same way Catholics build screens between their sins and the robed priest, as if that distance lightened their impending confession.
“I’m leaving Sali tonight,” I’d written, and I could have left it there. Any native would have known what I meant. But I kept going. “It has been a pleasure spending time with you.” And then, to Reed, I’d told him not to give up on his dreams of becoming a professional MLB player, and to Lucy, I’d implored her to continue creating, whether that meant painting or writing or tracing designs into backyard soil with sticks. “Live well, my darlings. And thank your dad for me.”
Their mom had left Sali two years ago, when the twins were only seven. I knew it was my choice, my right to do so as well, but knowing I’d be these kids’ next disappointment haunted me, had been haunting me, was the chill in my spine and the tangle of my hair.
I’d had more time to contemplate my departure than most. I’d watched helplessly, my hands bound, my feet cemented to the floor, as friends, family, acquaintances, and lovers left me behind. I know it’s only a side effect of leaving Sali, and their decisions never had much to do with me. But in all my years of waking up to letters and heirlooms, the pain of this groggy realization, one that dawned on me after rubbing the sleep from my eyes, has never waned.
And now, it was my turn, and I knew some would hurt the same way.
I placed the copper smoothie on my bedside the same way I would vitamins. Would this remedy heal me? I knew precisely where I wanted to end up. It wasn’t any elaborate universe. I didn’t want to be a superstar or to chase unbridled success. I didn’t even want to leave the country.
I just wanted a normal life, a world without Sali, Washington.
I sat on my bed. The duvet hugged my skin, and I shivered, ran my fingers along my goosebumps the same way I would concrete shingles. My lower lip teased the rim of my glass; I almost retched at the smell. Everyone was right—I was about to swallow a cup of pennies.
I took a deep breath, perhaps the last I’d inhale in this bedroom, surrounded by this town, and waited for reservations to barrage me in a wet and terrible deluge, for vigor to swat the glass from my trembling fingertips and shatter it, leave shards in the small divots of my scratched wooden floors.
But there was nothing. I had nowhere else to go and little left to accomplish in a town that had failed so many. We were born waiting to die, and wasn’t that just awful?
The sooner I could get it over with, the better.
My first sip. It caught in my throat but eventually passed. My tongue wept at the tang.
Would there be another disagreeable vending machine in my new city, one you had to chastise with stern visage and hefty sigh?
Did I want there to be?
My second sip. It went down without complaint.
Reed and Lucy had probably read their notes by now. I wondered if they would miss me at all, if I would miss them, if I’d remember they once meant something to me. Perhaps I’d wake up with different memories and think nothing ill of my lived moments, as if they were always mine to begin with.
My third sip, my fourth, my fifth. I wanted this to be over now.
Somewhere, in another universe, Beck was a teenager again. Or, time worked differently where she’d gone, and Beck was still a wide-eyed child.
Somewhere, in another universe, my parents had never lost their oldest son, and they never left me, their spare, to chase him.
Somewhere, in another universe, wives didn’t die, and teachers didn’t disappear.
Somewhere, in another universe, I was surrounded by familiar people, and I was content.
This was not that universe.
My final sip. It tasted sweet, which was odd. Like strawberries, with hints of that same metallic substance. I touched my tongue to my teeth and realized it had been blood this entire time.
Slowly, as if nothing would be different in the morning, I placed the glass on my bedside table once again and laid down, pulling my duvet up to my neck. Already, I felt my eyelids closing, my muscles growing dense and heavy as if filled with those copper pennies and rotting limes. My head cleared, and though a shout of regret tried to escape through my trembling lips, it could not. I was too tired, more tired than I had ever been, and this was final.
Soon, I would be gone.
US price tag for China’s gallium export ban: $602 billion and new monopolies for Huawei
What surprises Australians when they visit the United States of America?
Here are a few suprises I noticed when I went on holidays to America
They don’t use electric kettles. They use the microwave or stove top kettle. Apparently they don’t have enough current for electric kettles.
Takeaway coffee is not good. They love it, but I guess we may be snobs. Dunkin donuts and Starbucks are the worst. And don’t even ask for a cappuccino, it will disappoint, no matter where.
Pets on planes. Yep you can take your dog on a plane, just pop it in a cute doggy box and slide it under your seat. On 3 of my internal flights I saw puppies. I wish we could do that in Australia.
People are friendly. The further you venture out to the big cities people love a chat. They are curious and lovely to talk to.
America for a visit costs a lot. It may have been cheaper in the past, but now things cost the same dollar amount, but when you factor in the currency conversion, things are really expensive.
Shelf price is not what you pay. Expect to pay more. You won’t know the price till they ring it up
I love how pretty much each state you go to is different countryside wise, and each state has a slightly different accent. Boston and Portland ME so very different to the rest of the country.
There are people always asking for money, usually shaking an empty cup outside of all convenience stores.
Things are great while out exploring in the cities, until you turn down the wrong street. This happened in Brooklyn, I was walking and it was starting to look a little dodgy, to the point I was starting to feel unsafe. Police officers spotted me and told me to turn around right now. I didn’t question them and did as directed.
They are a few things I noticed on my holiday travels, sorry vacation travels, often corrected by the Americans.
Eric watched them through the window. The night was cold, yet no breath fogged the glass when he leaned closer. That took some getting used to the first few journeys he made. Now, it was trivial. As always, the glass was dirty. She regularly teased him to help out around the house more. He kept up with the maintenance, but cleaning was never his forte. Still, he could have helped out more. One of many regrets.
That was when he felt it. God damn hands. They were shaking again, but he never let go of the cylindrical key fob resting tightly in his grasp. With each trip, the shaking grew worse.
A crash came from inside the house. “Oh no! Sowwy!” A child’s voice.
“It’s okay honey, just be careful not to cut yourself. Don’t touch that!” a brunette beauty warned the child before grabbing some paper towels. Always odd seeing paper towels again. But what held Eric’s attention was that of the woman and her captivating green eyes, as well as the little girl who fumbled the task of transporting a cup to the younger man sitting at the table. He was laughing, bringing a smile to the girl’s face. A tooth was missing, but her smile was still the most beautiful Eric had ever witnessed.
The man stood, hoisting up the girl. At least it’s just tiles and not carpet. “At least it’s just tiles and not carpet,” the man said, planting a kiss on the girl’s round cheek. “Here, let me help babe.” He plucked some paper towels and began scrapping the broken glass into a pile.
“Careful. Don’t want you getting cut,” the woman smiled, placing a gentle hand on his shoulder.
“Yes, ma’am!”
“Sowwy daddy.” The little girl hugged his neck.
At that moment, hot tears streamed down Eric’s face. Little bits of lava sliding through the crevices of his wrinkled skin. That’s why he came. Those tears were the only painful happiness he could feel.
“It’s okay baby girl. Daddy’s got you.” The man nuzzled cheeks with the little girl.
I can’t take anymore. Didn’t last long this time. Eric’s shaky hands fumbled with the key fob, eventually sliding the head piece back with a click. The contraption lit up when opened. Several options emitted from the small touch screen. With a few clumsy taps, he closed his eyes. A bright flash was seen behind wrinkly lids. Then he felt it: warmth.
With open eyes, he was granted the view of the what they called ‘The Waiting Room’; a small, circular capsule that housed white panels covering the most advanced tech of the era. It was somewhat eerie, even to a veteran traveler like him. But he found the thrumming from the panels soothing. Albeit, it was daunting to those unaware of their function. He knew, however. For they were descendants of his own design.
“You good?” A familiar voice asked over the loudspeaker.
Eric gave a thumbs up.
“Alright. You know the drill. Thirty seconds for acclimation procedures.”
Eric nodded solemnly, shakingly wiping the last tears from his burning eyes. Damn it! I should have stayed longer. Curse these hands!
Eventually, the door to the capsule opened and a younger man stepped inside. It was Drew, Eric’s protégé and the voice on the loudspeaker. Drew wasn’t pleased. “You’re not looking so good, boss. Shaking’s getting worse. You need a break. Keep coming every day and your neurological system is going to be shot to hell.”
“I’m well aware of the risks, Drew.” Eric walked into the hall, pressing the key fob against Drew’s chest as he passed.
“We just worry about you, that’s all.” Drew took the fob and followed.
“I built the damn thing. I know what it entails.”
“How did this run go?”
Eric stopped in his tracks. Two employees in lab coats walked past, nervously nodding greetings. “It was…wonderful. Painful. Glorious and tragic. Like every time.”
“Sounds like life, eh?” Drew’s eyebrow peaked.
“It was life, Drew. It was.”
“Indeed.”
***
Eric sat on the edge of his bed. Curling his toes in the carpet always brought him a comforting welcome to the new day—a day he often contemplated not seeing ever again. But not this day. No, he had to see them again. One last time, he told himself every morning.
“Remove tint,” he called out.
“Removing tint,” a monotone voice replied from unseen speakers.
The dark wall before him suddenly turned into clear windows, and he was blessed with the grand view of the awakening city. Glass-plated skyscrapers and sky railways filled his sight.
Standing naked before the glass as he did every morning, he knew that none could see him. Another pleasure of high-tech windows. The bustling city was already in full swing. He could make out the plethora of drone transports on the streets as well as flying people around the city’s massive buildings. Only government and licensed companies could offer drone services. Legislation was being pushed to allow individuals to operate their own drones, but that would take years. I remember when everyone had their own car. City buses and subways were simply an option, not a requirement. Luckily, he owned several drone and railway companies, making transportation for himself a trivial matter. And the public transport drones were free for all, if one didn’t mind overcrowded, malfunctioning cesspools of crime.
A notification pinged on his tablet: a reminder of the day’s reserved Waiting Room. That capsule was for his own personal use. There was no need to schedule, he could use it whenever he wished. But he suspected he was a slave to routine, and seeing the notifications catered to that aspect of his being. But today, he was going in early, despite the risks. I didn’t see them enough last time…
***
“Whoa, whoa Eric! You’re way too early. You know what that can do to you!” Drew held his hands up to the older man. “Come on, be reasonable!”
“We go through this every time, Drew.” Eric waved away his concerns.
“For good reason,”—Drew blocked the Waiting Room door with a hand planted firmly against the frame—“I can’t just stand here and let you do this to yourself. I…it breaks my heart.”
“What the hell do you know of broken hearts? You’ve never lost so much as a pet hamster.”
“Doesn’t mean I can’t sympathize. Look, I get it. I really do. Sure, I might not have lost a loved one before, and I hope it’ll be a long time before I do. But if you croak because of this, then I will experience that loss. You’re like a father to me, so call me selfish.”
Eric was touched, but he had made up his mind long ago when it came to this venture. “Look, kid. The entire purpose of me developing this technology was so I could see them again. I can’t change their fate, but at least I can see them. That’s all I have left in this life—seeing them one last time.”
“That’s the problem Eric, it never is ‘one last time.’ You’re in here every single day and your neurological pathways cannot handle that stress. I mean look!” Drew pulled up Eric’s hands. The tremors were worse, even moving down to his elbows.
“I don’t give a damn. My life!” Eric yanked his hands away and firmly pushed past the younger man. He snatched the key fob out of Drew’s shirt pocket and began fumbling with it. God damn hands! he cursed, smacking the shaky appendages on his thighs. “You going to come along, or you going to queue me up?”
Drew simply shook his head in defeat before exiting the Waiting Room. After a minute or so, he was heard over the loudspeaker, “Your funeral.”
“Damn straight. You know where to send me. And Drew”—he paused—“this is my choice. Not yours. Don’t take on any guilt, kid.”
The loudspeaker crackled for a bit, and then Drew finally spoke, “Yes sir.”
At that, the mechanical whir began, growing louder with each second until it reached a crescendo. Eric welcomed the rhythmic buzz. It was almost a part of him.
That familiar bright light and humming enveloped Eric. He remembered when he first invented the capsules. Back then it took nearly three hours to initiate a jump back in time. But now, it only took seconds. Oh, how technology flies. All the brilliant minds he employed over the decades was to thank for that. Particularly Drew. Eric was blessed to have such a worthy protégé take over in his retirement. Not only did the young man have the intellect and knowledge, but the moral coding to lead the company into the right direction. If…when I die, at least I can say he was one good thing I left behind. Even though he’s not my own son.
But then Eric’s thoughts shot to the present, or more accurately, the past. He knew to open his eyes when he felt—nothing, to be precise. No temperature, no wind or summer breeze, no cool night air or misty spring morning. This was a result of the known Ericonian laws, which state that time travel is subject to observance only, and limited to traveling to the past. Thus, when one is sent back in time, they’re unable to interact with anyone or anything. They’re virtually in spirit only, taking on a ghostly presence that can only watch. Although, many of his critics suspected this was deliberately implemented, rather than a limit of technology or research. Fortunately, Eric had the world’s top lawyers to muster up ironclad patents that prevented any to take on his research until after his death. So long as he lived, the world would never know the truth behind his work. In fact, not even the company knew. Only Drew was privy to what truly lied behind Ericonian systems. And Eric trusted him to do the right thing with it once he’s gone.
A child’s laughter. That was the moment he always chose to open his eyes. Nothing was sweeter than hearing that infectious, innocent giggle. Then came hers—that golden, honeyed voice calling out to him. “Eric! Your daughter is going to be the death of me. I can’t keep up!” The green-eyed goddess of his dreams chased the girl around the picnic blanket. He watched as they laughed joyfully when his wife picked up their little girl and lifted her to the sky before planting a raspberry on her tummy, much to the screaming toddler’s delight. His eyes drifted to his much younger self, lying back on the blanket with a big smile.
“Amy, don’t kill your mom please. I like her,” his younger self teased.
“Okay daddy!” Amy giggled. Another raspberry blurted out from her soft belly.
The tears flowed, as they always did. Older Eric wiped them away. Despite being invisible to them, he always observed from afar. It never felt right to intrude on their happiness with his own despair. Yet, it was still hard to watch from a distance.
Suddenly, he felt something dripping down his mouth. He reached up to discover something warm and metallic slipping between his fingers. Blood? Then he collapsed, shaking violently. No! Not yet! Not now! His vision blurred; his head felt like it was going to split open. How can it have come so fast? He forced himself to open the key fob. The shaking made it difficult to grasp the device and input the proper sequence for evacuation. I must see them one more time. Just once more!
Then came the flash, and the warmth of the Waiting Room.
“Eric!” Drew could be heard over the loudspeaker. The worry in his voice quite apparent. “Eric! Don’t close your eyes. The doc is on the way. Stay awake! Eric!”
I’ll just, close them for a moment. I’m so tired. It hurts so much. Maybe if I just sleep a little while…
***
“He’s waking up,” said a familiar voice.
“Thank god.” That’s Drew. Where am I? “Eric, you okay? How you feeling?”
“You shouldn’t push him too much right now. He’s taken a heavy hit. Give him some time.”
“Where am I?” Eric managed to utter. His voice but a shallow whisper.
“You’re in the private clinic. Dr. Jurgen says you should be okay.”
“If he stops using the Waiting Room,” Dr. Jurgen muttered. “How many times have I warned you this would happen? How many times has Drew? But nope, why listen to the experts?”
“Thanks doc,” Eric gave him a shaky thumbs up. “Now, I’d like to speak with Drew in private, if you don’t mind.”
“Sure, why not? Not like you almost died and need monitoring or anything.” Dr. Jurgen exited the room, grumbling in protest.
When they were alone, Eric looked to Drew, his head shaking uncontrollably. “It’s time.”
Immediately, tears began to well in Drew’s eyes. “I was afraid you were going to say that. Look, if you just stop using the Waiting Room, you’ll be fine. You just have to let them go.”
“I can’t. You know I can’t.”
“But—”
“—Drew…I’m done. You know what this means.”
Drew wiped his reddening eyes, nodding reluctantly.
“Help me.” Eric stood, wobbling on shaky legs. Drew put an arm around him.
They slowly walked to Eric’s Waiting Room. Luckily, all the other employees wishing him well had gone home for the night. The building was near empty. Drew placed him in the Waiting Room’s access zone.
“You sure you want to do this?” Drew swallowed back more tears.
“We’ve discussed this a million times, kid. I made my choice long ago. I have to see them one last time.” It took all his strength, but Eric managed to smile. He lifted a shaky hand up to Drew’s face, wiping away a tear and gently patting his cheek. “I love you, kid. You’re gonna do great.”
Drew lost it and threw his arms around his mentor, who returned the favor. “I don’t want to have to say it, but just in case, goodbye Eric. And tell them I said ‘hello.’”
“Will do, kid. Will do. And Drew, take me back to that moment…”
Drew nodded before exiting the room. After a minute or two, the mechanical whirring hummed.
Heh, I don’t think he noticed. In all the years Eric had taken this journey, this was the first and only time he didn’t grab the key fob from Drew’s pocket. Keep it real, kid.
The flash of light faded and Eric was once again in the past. This time, it was a park with a fairly robust playground. He saw Amy, just coming down the slide. His younger self and wife were sitting on a nearby bench, watching her play.
Shaking uncontrollably, Eric stumbled his way to her. Blood began seeping from his nose again, his vision blurring once more. This time, a needle-like piercing of a high frequency sound stabbed into his brain. But he pushed onward. Reaching into his pocket, he grasped a round device. It held a rotary knob that he slowly turned. I must do this right. I can’t scare her.
He collapsed to one knee. Crawling his way forward, he managed to arrive at his daughter who stood there observing a beetle. The dial rotated a little bit more. That was when she turned to him, her eyes somewhat shocked at first. But then they softened when he smiled.
“Hi. Are you okay?” Her voice was like gentle rose petals brushing against his ears. He fought back sobbing, lest he scare her away.
“Yes, sweety, I’m okay. I just wanted to say hello,” he replied, struggling.
“I’m not supposed to talk to strangers.”
“Good, that’s good. Your mother is very smart. But I just, well. Can I shake your hand?”
“Um…”
“It’s okay, you don’t have to. I understand.”
Amy looked around, then back at his wife and younger self who were staring directly at her; neither appeared alarmed. Eric knew they couldn’t see him, only Amy was within range of the amplifier in his pocket. Eventually she shrugged, holding out her hand.
Tears stung his eyes as he gasped, slowly reaching out to her. So small. So fragile. He couldn’t control himself any longer. The feeling of her warm, soft hand wrapping around his thumb threw him over the edge. He feared she would run away; instead, she simply put her other hand over his large thumb and whispered, “It’s okay mister. You’ll feel better.”
He laughed, spittle and tears dripping down his face. “Thank you, sweety. Thank you. I have to go now. You…you have a fun time playing, okay?”
She nodded, then ran off giggling.
Eric turned the amplifier dial, ushering himself back into his time bubble. It was worth it. It was all worth it. Watching her run around, his thoughts flashed back to the night he was in the lab at his company and received news of the railway crash. He remembered the sound of his wailing upon discovering his family was no more. He felt the agony of finding out the railway was owned by his company. He never forgot the pain. But he also remembered it being the impetus for him to begin his time travel research. He remembered the drive to succeed in order to change the fate of that horrific day. And then he remembered why he mustn’t. He remembered why changing that day would be erroneous, and would see him never fulfilling his destiny in the first place. But this, this one moment, made it all worth it.
Eric closed his eyes for the last time. No one knew what happened to him, for he was never seen again. Drew had his theories, but didn’t dare travel back to test them. That was Eric’s time, and it was best left to him.
What is the protocol after a minor accident in Singapore?
The protocol? In Singapore, a word of apology or admitting the fault may sound good but is meaningless and rarely seen when road accidents happen, even a minor bump into a pedestrian or skids another car’s side-view mirror.
“Just when you think you had a minor accident, you will fall off the chair when the bill of S$20,000 arrives”
Regardless of who foots the bill (you or the insurance company), it happens in the rich City-State of Singapore where money talks, not small but big money!
What is the protocol after a minor accident in Singapore?
A minor accident in Singapore isn’t a police case and you are on your own, like vehicle accidents or between pedestrians and motorists for example, To prevent the above rip-off, do this:-
If you are the victim or the affected party even if you are the culprit:
Make yourself look like a robot —Snap photos or a video like a pro of the impact of the accident and record the conversation between you and the other party.— write down the damage in words and get the person to sign, if he/she refuses to sign use swear words back to you as compliments, never mind, as you already recorded the conversations.
Go to your Insurance and pass it on to your insuranceman.
What happened in the past, was the workshop of the other party ever smashed the damage to their car further, plus the driver claimed medical fee and time lost for not being able to work with photos of himself/herself bandaged to look like a mummy…
That was a result from a small bump between two cars.. A minor accident.
What does it tell you?
“Live your life, live smart with no friends or be stupid with many friends and live happily ever after.”- Words of wisdom ( from me)
I don’t know about you, but my undergraduate dorm was several times the size of this. Heck, my own room in the particular suite (which I share with another student) is way bigger than this.
Yet, previously, common residents in Hong Kong is able to take comfort that they are indeed richer than the mainland Chinese, especially those they can immediately seen across the waters in Shenzhen.
However, times change. In the past several decades, mainland China grew rapidly and Shenzhen, a tier 1 city in China, is particularly well developed. Basically, Hong Kongers are seeing someone they used to looked down upon grew richer, has better living conditions and generally just does better.
If we open the history books, it is easy to see why this is happening.
Historically, Hong Kong isn’t actually anywhere particularly important. However, after the WWII ended, power balance around the world is shifting rapidly. The British Empire, in particular, is thorn on both US’ and USSR’s side. As the result, Americans and Russians spent much of the effort from 1945 onward to dismantle the British colonies by encouraging/supply the independence movements.
Old Europe, as a whole, is also subjected to the same because Americans and Russians needed to make sure that the old colonial powers are contained.
PRC, on the other hand, has much different concerns. The Chinese missed the industrialization train back in 1800s and early 1900s, as the result, while large, its position is hardly secure among the other large powers and they needed allies (of various kind). While China and old Europe had plenty of conflicts in the past, the rise of US and USSR means China and Europe is strategically isolated from each other, thus in no direct conflict. This made them a natural choice of partners.
However, as the cold war setting in, Europe also had to mind its relationship with US, because USSR is physically located on Western Europeans’ door step and even though US has a large hand in dismantling European’s oversea empires, they still need to be friendly with US in order to defend themselves against USSR. But at the same time, US’ interest in East/Southeast Asia puts them in conflict with China, this means Europe cannot be openly friendly with China.
Thus Hong Kong became important. A British colony/lease right at the door step of China means goods and service can flow without violating US’ sanctions on China (not to mention American companies themselves also found the opportunity great). Thus, for many decades, trade/exchange that would happen between China and entirety of western camp Europeans (and some more) have to route through Hong Kong. This inflated Hong Kong’s worth to a level well beyond its small size would otherwise indicate.
However, times changed when 1980s come along. The shifting cold war politics means Europe, Japan and many others are now trading openly with China and no longer need Hong Kong. To be fair, Hong Kong already have quite a bit established infrastructure at that point, so many still choose to go through Hong Kong for convenience. But the matter remained that Hong Kong is no longer “necessary”.
As the result, the following decades saw a gradual decline of Hong Kong (relatively speaking), because at the end of the day, it is a small city with no land to expand to.
In term of investment to improve the infrastructure, other port cities in mainland China has the investment of an entire nation and the investor (the Chinese government) is willing to wait for decades for the investment to yield reward (since the Chinese government’s main concern is long term development prospects).
For Hong Kong, however, the British isn’t going to invest a single cent, because they know they have to give up Hong Kong eventually. The one country two system also put Hong Kongers to be in charge of themselves, this means while Beijing is willing to provide basic commodities like food, water, electricity, shelling out billions to development infrastructure in a place that doesn’t pay a single cent of tax to them is simply too much to ask for.
So this is why, Hong Kong has gradually lost its competitive edge. To be fair, when viewed from historical perspective, Hong Kong is simply returning to the normal state or what they should have be without the specially circumstances of the cold war, but you can hardly expect Hong Kongers to take this laying down.
They Can’t Hide it Anymore: US PRIVATE SECTOR EMPLOYMENT IS IN A RECESSION
US private sector full-time jobs have DROPPED by nearly 2 MILLION over the past year. Such a drop has never happened outside of recessions.
The only gain in full-time jobs has been in the government sector.
The Job market is not only weak; it is collapsing.
Hal Turner Editorial Opinion
This . . . . . this right here . . . . is exactly, precisely the second largest reason that the Democrats lost the Presidential election. While they were stuck in their echo chamber of lies, repeating the falsehood that “the economy is terrific” the rest of the real world knew otherwise.
The first big reason they lost, of course, was inflation; specifically, the price of FOOD.
But to this very day, the left-wing remain in their echo chamber of lies, only now, they’re trying to find a way to block Trump from being inaugurated.
Two political-blowhard attorneys published a major Op-Ed piece on “TheHill.com” suggesting Congress block Trump from office under an accusation that he “engaged in insurrection” against the United States. (Their nonsense Op-Ed piece HERE)
It seems as though the Left-Wing is oblivious to the reality that what they’re doing WOULD LIKELY cause an ACTUAL, SHOOTING, Civil War, and that people die in Civil Wars . . . . particularly, the people that start them.
Do they really think they can negate the votes of about 76 Million people and not face the guns of those 76 Million people?
Oh well, if it’s civil war they want . . .
Why is the Chinese economy stronger than what the West thinks?
Simple.
The western press lies.
As the WSJ and Economist recruitment ads inform us, they are looking for writers and editors to join their AGENDA-SETTING mission. Not NEWS REPORTING, but AGENDA-SETTING.
They will shape the narrative to fit the AGENDA, and repurpose facts toward the end.
Want to find out about China?
Read the Chinese. Don’t read ABOUT them.
Now why is China stronger than portrayed?
In a democratic, capitalistic paradigm full of human rights and rule of law (such as the United States), large-scale infrastructure in the Appalachians (for example) will be seen as an indulgence, because the projects will not be profitable, measured against metrics elsewhere.
Hence we have this book, which paved the way to the vice-presidency for the hillbilly author.
Some time ago, I posted a graphic on how the UNGA voted on the resolution “Food is a human right”. The US voted against, and American quorans were up in arms defending the position. The issue has been thoroughly politicized domestically, turning “food is a human right” to “you have a right to food, but I ain’t paying for it”.
Similarly, a system anchored on profit will not take on loss-making projects, even if they may be vital public goods. In the extreme, the bare minimum is provided to preserve the last vestiges of a fragile social contract, such as social security, healthcare and education.
In America, it is “congratulations to the winners” and “good luck to the losers”, as JD poignantly narrates in his book. That’s the essence of tension within the tenets of free and competitive capitalism, worshipped throughout the west.
China sees things differently. Capitalism (or free markets) is seen as a means, rather than the end.
The stated aim of the Chinese government is to share the fruits of economic progress with everyone. It may take generations, but Deng Xiaoping was sincere when he said in 1985:
一部分地区、一部分人可以先富起来,带动和帮助其他地区、其他的人,逐步达到共同富裕。
Some regions and some people can become rich first, and then drive and help other regions and other people to gradually achieve common prosperity.
COMMON PROSPERITY.
That’s the overarching theme to the Chinese economic makeover.
Consider Guizhou, Xinjiang and Tibet. Why have they been poor for millennia? Because of challenging geography. Guizhou, for example, is the only Chinese province without a plain while Tibet is contained within the himalayas, the world’s tallest and most extreme mountain range. Xinjiang, being squeezed between the foothills of the himalayas and the permafrost north, is home to several impenetrable deserts.
And yet what has the Chinese government been doing?
Guizhou is home to some of the world’s most spectacular bridges and tunnels, with its 30,000 bridges surely a world record per capita (1 bridge per 1,300).
Lhasa, altitude 3,600m, is connected by 3 railway lines, with a 4th connecting Thimpu and Kathmandu in discussion!
Urumqi is now connected by highway and high-speed rail to the rest of China!
China could have grown its gdp faster focusing east of the Heihe-Tengchong line, where over 90% of the population live.
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Yet China chose indulgence, in the eyes of the profit-driven west, in pursuit of COMMON PROSPERITY.
The principle of a rising tide lifting all boats is where a lot of government debt is going, to equalize millennia of environmental disadvantage.
Next, low inflation.
How does China maintain stable prices in a world of fluctuation? The Chinese government put in place price-making mechanisms of key commodities and energy. Affordable and stable prices are seen as public goods and some SOEs have been set up with the express intent to lose money in order to deliver public goods that are impossible under market pricing rules.
And so on.
In china, 大同 or a peaceful, just and equal society is an ideal worth fighting for.
An obsession with profit and “winner takes all” vs. COMMON PROSPERITY. Social cohesiveness wins in the long run over a rugged “me me me” culture.
Al’s Old Girlfriend Shows Up | Married With Children
The year was 1981. the company was “Edgewater Steel” located in Oakmont, PA. A steel company. They went bankrupt in the early 1990’s and this is a story of my first “engineering position” after I left the United States Navy, but before I began my training in the ONI.
It was a large forging company. They made railroad wheels. And they employed 6000 people. It was a sizable operation located on the banks of the Allegheny river north of Pittsburgh.
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When I was hired, the HR manager explicitly told me that they had “phased out bonuses for all new hires”, and myself not knowing what that meant, gleefully signed the contract. Sure, I knew that I wouldn’t be getting a bonus; but you know, all my bonuses up to that time was in the $25 to $50 dollar range. Roughly about 1/2 of a week paycheck as a laborer.
So I figured, “what’s the big deal about a mere $25?”.
So I work there, perhaps for nine months, and Christmas rolls around.
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And everyone was being handed the envelope with their Christmas bonus. And they were all happy, as the bonus was 2 – 3 times their monthly salary. This is around $3000 to $6000 in a lump check.
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Except for me.
I got nothing. I got exactly ZERO.
I an the other six “new hires” for the year got absolutely zero. And the rest, bound by contract, and union agreements got nice plump juicy bonuses. Big, BIG money in those days.
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So, let me summarize for you all, in the event you are absolutely STUPID.
6000 people that I see every day; about the size of a small town. Each and every one of them; All of them, got around $6000 in a Check on Christmas Eve. Roughly around $35,000 today.
And me and six others got nothing.
…
Fair? No.
But legal. Yes.
…
So firstly, the steel company was a union shop. Everyone made “big money”, and also got “big bonuses”. And I, who had never before worked in that environment, was unaware of this. I thought that everyone would be getting around $35 checks. Not $6000.
Ah. What did I know?
So the end result was as you can expect. Lots of “ribbing” and making fun of me. Everyone was pointing their fingers at me and laughing. “Well, they told you!” they would say in a laughing sneer. They would giggle at the water cooler, and call me names to my face like “dumb kid” and “walking idiot”.
…
Of course, they could have handled this different.
Maybe given me a reduced bonus.
But no. The others (after all this was a steel company with hard beer drinkers and roustabouts, we constantly ribbing me about their bonuses. One bought a new car. Another went on a vacation to Hawaii. Yet another was going to add a swimming pool to their house.
On and on it went. And I got nothing.
Not even a little Christmas card.
…
And that, boys and girls, was my first experience with the joys of corporate life. It was a lesson that I have never forgotten.
But has since, been repeated over and over again over the decades.
Ah. It is no wonder that this gen Z has given up and “checked out”. They have peered behind the veil and see the lies and nonsense for what it actually is. And, you know, they don’t want any part of it.
Gorgin walked the corridors once again to make sure everything was okay.
“Why do I have to continue to check out the station when we have systems set-up to make sure everything is in order on the station?” he asked the commander of the station, Morgan.
“Just do it,” said Morgan. “You never know what can get past our systems way out here in space. There is a lot of unknown things out here. I’m tired of explaining to you each time it’s your turn.”
Now, Gorgin was walking through the corridors, and checking out room after room.
“Why such huge station for just a few people?” thought Gorgin.
Gorgin rounded the corner, and in front of him stood an alien that stood seven feet tall, green scaly skin, fish eyes, a mouth full of sharp teeth, and claws reaching out to him. All Gorgin could do is stare in shock then let out a piercing scream as he started backing up around the corner, then turning and running as fast as he could. Before he reached the end he could hear someone laughing hysterically behind him. He came to a stop and turned around seeing Dwight in the alien outfit pointing at him and laughing.
“I will be taking this to the commander!” he cried out, as soon as he went to his room to change.
“I can’t believe I have two adult men standing in front of me,” said Morgan. “The two of you clowns have been at each other since you came to this station. Should we go over everything the two of you have done to each other?”
“This was all started by Dwight,” said Gorgin. “He was the one who set the dials so I woke-up out of slumber as an old man.”
Morgan and Dwight chuckled over that one.
“That was a quick fix, but it was fun while it lasted,” said Dwight.
“It didn’t end there with the two of you,” said Morgan. “I believe the next mishap is when Dwight transported in the station and appeared in another section with three butt cheeks. Courtesy of Gorgin tampering with the controls.”
“Sitting down was quite comfy,” admitted Dwight with a grin.
“Even though, the two of you have brought much humor to everyone you need to act like adults,” said Morgan. “You think the two of you can do that?”
The two of them nodded their heads.
“Now get out of my sight and do your duties,” demanded Morgan.
Both of them left the room, staring at each other with dislike.
“I would greatly appreciate it if you could move to the other side of the station so I would see you less,” said Gorgin.
“I would say that it would be even better if you would move off the station,” said Dwight.
“Just stay away from me,” both said at the same time, and they went their separate locations.
It was a couple of days later that the two met again.
Gorgin went into what everyone called the “Pet Room” to create himself a pet to keep him company. As he entered the room he saw that Dwight was already in the room at the controls.
“What the heck are you doing in here?” he asked.
Dwight turned to him. “Looking for a pet. What do you think idiot?”
“Hurry up then,” said Gorgin.
Dwight went back to the controls and went back to pushing buttons. Time went by as Gorgin waited impatiently for him to finish.
“I think I got it,” said Dwight. “Oh wait. That won’t do.”
“That is enough,” huffed Gorgin, stomping over to Dwight. “Give me the controls.”
Next moment, both of them were fighting over the controls, pressing and clicking until there was a sudden flash that lit up the room. Both of them stopped and looked at each other with befuddled looks.
“What the heck was that?” asked Gorgin.
“Not a clue,” replied Dwight.
“We should probably check around the station to make sure everything is okay,” said Gorgin.
The two left the room, trying to call the commander, but getting no answer.
“Let’s go to command center first,” said Gorgin.
The two rushed to the command center.
“Dwight did it!” Gorgin cried out as soon as they entered the room.
“No I didn’t!” Dwight called back. “You butted in!”
But the two realized they were wasting there blame game for the commander was nowhere in sight. They looked all over, but no sight of the commander.
“He’s not in the freshening room,” said Dwight coming out after a flush.
“Strange for him to be gone,” said Gorgin.
Then the two of them heard a squeak.
“What the hell was that?” asked Dwight.
“Sounds like the commander has a pet,” replied Gorgin.
The two started looking around until the two came to the commander’s chair. Both saw at the same time a squirrel on the seat looking at both of them. It started chattering, then jumped off the chair.
“I didn’t know the commander had a pet?” asked Dwight.
Gorgin shrugged his shoulders and scratched his head. Then a light bulb popped on inside his head.
“What pet were you looking at getting?” he asked Dwight.
“I was contemplating on getting a tamed squirrel,” he replied.
It didn’t take too long for the two to figure out what happened.
“Did we turn the commander into a squirrel?” asked Dwight.
Gorgin just nodded then the two searched for the squirrel, which ran around the room.
“We need to get him,” Gorgin said.
The two chased after the squirrel, bumping into each other, and Gorgin grabbing the squirrel, but it bit him, and was loose once again.
“We need to get the room robot,” said Gorgin as he shook his hurt finger, going over to the panel.
He pressed some switches and next moment the robot came out.
“Retrieve the squirrel,” said Gorgin.
It didn’t take long for the robot to scoop of the squirrel and deposit it into a glass came.
“Now to see about the rest of the crew,” said Gorgin.
The two of them checked for lifeforms on the station, then checked the screens for each room they detected life. All the lifeforms were squirrels.
“What did you do?” asked Gorgin.
“You were the one pressing numerous buttons,” said Dwight.
“We need to fix this fast,” said Gorgin.
Gorgin released the robots in each room, and the squirrels were scooped up. The other robots were sent to the pet room.
“I hope we can reverse this,” said Gorgin as they headed to the pet room.
All the robots were in the room as the two of them tried to figure out a way to make their crew human again.
“I think I got it,” said Gorgin. “We need to get out of the room so nothing happens to us. The robots will be released once we leave.”
The two left the room, robots released, and there was a bright flash. The two went back into the room and saw everyone was human again. The only thing is that they were all naked. Commander Morgan stood up and looked at the two men with a stare of death.
“We are in trouble,” muttered Dwight.
The next day the two were put in cryosleep until the next crew came in a couple of years. Before both of them lay down for their sleep they looked at each other, and both of them grinned.
Slow Cooker Brisket Sofrito
Slow Cooker Brisket Sofrito is an excellent filling for corn or flour tortillas.
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Yield: 6 to 8 servings
Ingredients
1 (3 pound) brisket
2 teaspoons salt, + extra after cooking
2 teaspoons freshly ground pepper, + extra after cooking
1 large onion, sliced
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 (12 ounce) jar tomato Sofrito
1 teaspoon ground chipotle chili (or more for an extra kick)
Instructions
Season brisket on both sides with salt and pepper.
Place onion and garlic in a 3 1/2 to 5 quart slow cooker. Place brisket on onions and garlic, fat side up. Pour Sofrito over brisket and sprinkle chipotle chili over sauce. Cover and cook on LOW for 9 to 10 hours or until brisket is fork tender.
Carefully remove brisket from cooker with as little sauce as possible. Place on cutting board and cut into three pieces cross grain. Shred beef with two forks and return to cooker. Stir into sauce and season with salt and pepper (and a little more chipotle seasoning if you like it spicy).
Serve with tortillas and other desired toppings.
Nutrition
Per serving: 530 calories; 23g fat (5g saturated fat; 0g trans fat); 195mg cholesterol; 1340mg sodium; 5g carbohydrate; 1g fiber; 0 g sugar; 71g protein; 2% vitamin A; 6% calcium; 20% vitamin C; 35% iron
A MM slice from the past
I generated this chart back in 2019.
What do you think? Do you think that I was accurate in my predictions?
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This is a heartfelt true confession from the top spokesperson for the Huawei Mate 6.0—Gina Raimondo. In a recent interview, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo went beyond discussing export controls, stating that efforts to hold back China in the chip race are ultimately a “fool’s errand.” She stressed that sustained investment in domestic innovation is what will ensure the U.S. remains ahead of Beijing.
Four years after the Biden administration made chip manufacturing a priority, Raimondo explained that the attempts to restrict China’s access to technology haven’t significantly slowed the country’s progress. According to her, export controls are merely “speed bumps” in China’s drive for global technological dominance. “The only way to beat China is to stay ahead of them,” she asserted. “We must run faster and out-innovate them. That’s the way to win.”
Ribs in Orange and Chile Sauce (Costillitas en Naranja)
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Ingredients
2 tablespoons lard or vegetable oil
4 pounds country-style spareribs, cut into individual ribs
2 medium white onions, cut lengthwise into 1/4 inch wide slivers
1 (1 pound) can whole peeled tomatoes, undrained
2 cloves garlic
1 to 2 tablespoons ground, seeded, dried ancho chiles
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 cup fresh orange juice
1/3 cup dry white wine
1/4 cup piloncillo or brown sugar
1 teaspoon shredded orange rind
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 to 2 tablespoons cider vinegar
Orange slices, cut into halves
Fresh cilantro sprigs
Instructions
Heat lard or oil in large Dutch oven over medium heat until hot. Add as many ribs as will fit in single layer without crowding. Cook, turning occasionally, until brown on all sides, 15 to 20 minutes; remove to plate.
Repeat with remaining ribs.
Remove and discard all but 2 tablespoons drippings from pan. Add onions; sauté over medium heat until soft, about 4 minutes.
Process tomatoes and garlic in blender container until smooth.
Add chiles, cinnamon and cloves to onions. Cook and stir over medium heat for 30 seconds.
Add tomato mixture; cook and stir for 5 minutes.
Add orange juice, wine, piloncillo, orange rind and salt to pan; heat over high heat to boiling. Add ribs; reduce heat to low. Simmer, covered, until ribs are tender, about 1 1/2 hours.
Remove ribs to serving plates.
Skim and discard fat from cooking sauce. Stir in vinegar; spoon sauce over ribs.
Serve, garnished with orange slices and cilantro
Shorpy
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South of the Border Shredded Pork
90c804fc04b994743a1c2a22d6032683
Yield: 8 to 10 servings
Ingredients
1 (2 1/2 to 3 pound) pork shoulder roast (weight after trimmed of fat)
1 tablespoon oil
1 medium onion, chopped
2 (1.25 ounce) packages taco seasoning mix
1 (14.5 ounce) can Mexican style diced tomatoes
1 (4 ounce) can diced green chiles
Tortillas
Shredded Cheddar or jack cheese
Scallions
Tomatoes
Sour cream
Instructions
Cut pork into 1 1/2-inch chunks and sear in hot oil until browned on all sides.
Add onion, taco seasoning mix, tomatoes and chiles; stir well. Cover and simmer over low heat for 1 hour and 15 minutes.
Remove cover and cook 15 minutes more or until liquid has reduced and sauce is thick.
Shred meat with two forks.
Spoon filling into tortillas and top with desired fillings
I can’t put my finger on why I murdered Jerry, because I lost my fingers in an accident.
Accident. That is to say, Jerry hit the go button on the waste disposal unit while I was fixing it, and it munched my right hand off at the wrist. To be fair, the robotic prosthetic is about a thousand times better than my real hand was, but it hurt like hell at the time. He maintains I said, “Hit it,” but what I said was, “Quit it.” I was always telling Jerry to quit it. He was the most infuriating guy in the entire universe, I’m telling you. I should know; as a DSD I’ve seen more of the universe than most.
A DSD is a Deep Space Diviner. In short, we look for water out in the dark corners of the universe in the hope of finding evidence of alien life. I used to get work out on farms and such, walking around with a curled piece of wire waiting for the thing to snap down towards the ground. That’s when I’d tell the boys to get digging. I never missed. Went all over the country helping folks get water out of the ground. I’m telling you, I could find water in the middle of a goddamn desert. Now I follow my hunches into deep space.
When I heard they were asking for water diviners to head into space I thought it was some big joke. Checked the date to see if it was April 1st and everything. But it’s no joke. Turns out it’s cheaper to have guys like me out in space than sending probes from Earth.
So anyway, they’ve had us out in Sector 35 for two years. Me and Jerry Portman. I told them I could do it on my own, but company regulations state I gotta have a partner. Jerry goddamn Portman from Chicago. I couldn’t stand him.
How do I explain this to you? I mean, how do you come across a guy that can make you feel claustrophobic in the vastness of space? Even when I couldn’t see him, it was like he was right next to me with his stale open-mouth breathing. I’ve sent countless requests to be transferred, or have him transferred, or sought permission to blast him out the goddamn airlock, but no luck. I knew nothing was going to come of all the complaints, but it was the only way I could get the frustration off my chest.
It’s true that in space no one can hear you scream, but email works pretty good.
Anyway, that opening line about not being able to put my finger on why I killed him on account of not having any fingers? That’s the type of corny gag that Jerry loved. Drove me crazy. Is there anything more infuriating than a guy who laughs at his own jokes? I must have heard him use variations of “lend you a hand”, “right-hand man”, and “second hand” about a million times. He laughed every single time like it was the first time anyone ever said, “Get a grip” to a guy who just lost their hand and was rolling around on the floor spraying blood all over the goddamn ship.
You ever see a gushing wound in zero gravity? It’s really something. It looks like the wound is spurting little red balloons. Or, it’s like looking at cells under a microscope.
Space does that. Changes your perception of size. Entire planets appear tiny, then, the next second, a speck of space rock hitting the ship could end your entire existence. Big is small, small is enormous.
Anyway, the latest thing with Jerry was he wanted to head out on this new vector. I’m telling you right now, where he wanted to go is a bust. Oh, but he’s “got a feeling”. Feeling, my ass. This guy hadn’t found a goddamn drop of water in two years. Plus, we would have had to go through a goddamn asteroid belt.
It’s not that he was bad at his job—he was terrible—it’s that he was bad at everything. I mean, literally, everything. You ever meet a guy who couldn’t even use the goddamn toothpaste properly? I mean, who squeezes from the middle? Leaves the lid open so I’ve got a tube that’s flat through the centre, with all the good paste at the bottom, blocked by dried toothpaste at the top. He was such a goddamn imbecile.
The thing is, though, medically speaking—on paper—he was a goddamn genius. Like, off the charts smart. He’s just got no common sense. Know what I mean? As in, he could solve the most complex mathematical equation known to man, but he’d set fire to his helmet. He really did that. Tried to make some modifications and shorted the regulator. Nearly killed us. He was always nearly killing us.
I’ll say it: Jerry Portman was the stupidest guy ever to be classified as a genius.
I swear he has nearly killed me at least a dozen times. Obviously, losing my hand was pretty bad, but he’s also shut off my oxygen while I was outside repairing a cracked solar panel. I was under 50% oxygen saturation when I finally got back inside. That much carbon dioxide in your lungs? You can’t take that too long. When I hit the emergency retract button on my umbilical to get back inside, well, let me just say, if I’d had the strength to even stand up, I swear that would have been it. I would have murdered Jerry right then.
I think the worst one was when he opened the bay door—that’s where we keep the drones—before I was in my suit. I know it’s against the regulations to be in the drone bay without your suit because of the potential for that exact situation, but fucking Jerry, man. The guys who wrote the regulations must have been like, “What’s the most galactically stupid thing anyone could do in any given situation?” and then they’d write a rule just for kicks. They were probably laughing their asses off the entire time. “No one could be that much of a moron,” they’d say. But guess what, fellas. Jerry Portman is your guy. It’s just lucky there’s a ten-second warning before the doors open.
You know the worst thing about guys like Jerry? It’s never their fault.
“It was an accident.”
He said it every goddamn time. It’s always an accident with these guys. Like that absolves them from any wrongdoing. As if just because you didn’t do it on purpose, all is forgiven.
Imagine opening the bay door while there’s a guy in there working on the drones.
Speaking of the drones. Jerry lost another one yesterday. This should come as a great surprise to exactly no one, but even for him, this was stupid. That’s three of our six drones lost. Don’t worry, Jerry. They’re only worth about half a billion dollars each.
“But they’re fitted with a homing device to automatically self-dock if they lose the control signal” I hear you say. Yeah, well, you haven’t met Jerry. He’s the kind of guy a car salesman tells, “Pal, if you’re the kind of guy that accidentally locks his keys in the car, then this is the car for you. You can’t do it, see? It’s impossible.”
Then, a week later, Jerry’s back and tells the guy he’s locked the keys in the goddamn car.
Can you imagine being stuck in space with Jerry Portman? I’m telling you, it’s the pits.
The first drone Jerry lost was on account of him tinkering with it. He was trying to make the water sensor more sensitive after striking out on another of his feelings. He’s always making excuses that it’s the equipment’s fault when he strikes out. So, yeah. The first drone he tinkered with—well, we don’t know what he did exactly—but the first time we took it out after he fiddled with it, it took off like a bullet and it was gone.
I can still see Jerry watching the screen as we lost the signal. He was like a kid who’d taken his model plane out for its first flight and watched it disappear over the trees never to be seen again. Only this model plane cost half a billion dollars.
The second one, I’m not sure about. He swears he didn’t touch it. For all his million faults, one thing Jerry wasn’t, was a liar. Maybe we chalk that one up to bad luck. Maybe the drone was a dud.
But the latest one? Jesus Christ. I won’t bore you with a bunch of technical crap about how the drones work, let’s just say in the simplest terms, it confirms the presence of water in any form within a given target. Most commonly, this means we find a meteorite that we feel has potential, and the drone sends out a probe to take a sample. It’s basically a drill that bores into the target and removes a metre-long cylinder of material. If there’s a trace of water—it’s ice, of course—there’s a bunch of readings and measurements done by the computer and it sends the data back to Earth for further analysis.
As you can imagine, a machine that performs this function is incredibly complex. So you don’t just open up a panel and start poking around with a goddamn Phillips-head. Well, you and I wouldn’t. But you know who would?
So, yesterday he’s telling me, “I know what I’m doing this time,” as if he’s read the manual since losing the first drone. I just shake my head and leave him to it. I used to argue with him all the time, but I learnt pretty quick what a waste of breath that was. He’s one of those guys that when they get something in their head, you can’t shake it no matter how much sense you’re making. They could be wearing a red tshirt and you say, “Nice red tshirt,” and they say, “What’re talking about? It’s blue,” and you just have to say, “Fine, you moron. It’s blue,” and walk away.
That’s what Jerry was like when he was tinkering. Maybe part of me thought he’d electrocute himself so I wouldn’t have to murder him.
When he finished playing around with this drone, he came back into the control room and placed these screws and some other little bits and pieces in a drawer. He did it as if he didn’t want me to see it, but I saw it clear as day. You know when someone gets home drunk and they’re trying to be quiet but they make way more noise than if they just stumbled around? People trying to be discrete just scream I’m up to something fishy.
So I say to Jerry, “What are those, from the drone?”
And he just says, “They’re spare. We don’t actually need them.”
Then I go off on one about how every single thing on this ship right down to the tiniest screw has been reduced in size and weight to make everything as light as possible—like, the angle of trajectory for our landing factors in the weight of the urine that will be in our bladders—but sure, Jerry. They’ve included a bunch of spare parts. “It’s not a goddamn IKEA chair, Jerry” I remember saying that to him like he was hiding some leftover dowel he forgot to put in.
Well, sure as eggs, Jerry sent the drone out yesterday and I’ll give you one guess what happened to it. You’re goddamn right it blew up. Nearly killed us.
He’s just lucky the drone was far enough from the ship that the explosion didn’t do any damage to the ship. Nothing that the self-diagnostics picked up, anyway. Naturally, I did my block at Jerry for nearly killing us again and I said someone’s going to have to go outside and have a closer inspection of the hull. Now, normally I’d be the guy that does that. I mean, you can’t leave something that important up to Jerry goddamn Portman.
Then I had a thought—maybe I would send Jerry out. It would be a real shame if his umbilical somehow untethered from the ship and he floated out into space…
Ashamed as I am to admit it, this was not the first time I’d thought about killing Jerry.
Did I tell you about the time Jerry destroyed one of my samples? You know how people who can’t cook, they say “Oh, so-and-so could burn water.” That’s what Jerry did. We got this sample back on the probe one time and it had all these microorganisms in it. The core sample was about 85% ice. Normally, we’re lucky if it’s even 5%. The core analysis told us it contained 37 different forms of bacteria plus a bunch of other unidentifiable crap all suspended in ice. It was the most exciting goddamn discovery since penicillin. So I placed the core in the freezer and looked forward to the fame and fortune awaiting those DSDs lucky enough to find something. I couldn’t sleep that cycle I was so excited.
Of course, back then I didn’t have a complete understanding of the magnitude of Jerry’s stupidity. Had I known better, I would have guarded that freezer with my goddamn life.
Now, it wouldn’t have surprised me in the least to discover Jerry had destroyed my sample by switching the freezer off by accident. These things happen to the best of us. But Jerry isn’t your average moron. No, Jerry decides he wants to take a look at the sample himself under the microscope. Only, the microscope doesn’t work with a chunk of ice, you gotta melt it down to go in a petri dish. So Jerry puts the core in the blast box—the blast box, I should explain, is this unit that works like an oven or freezer depending on what you need heating or chilling. Only, the blast box will roast or freeze something in three seconds. In hindsight, this is exactly the sort of thing you could see happening, but the designers of the blast box would have been counting on the operators being actual scientists, not Jerry goddamn Portman.
Now, someone like you or me, we’d take a small piece of the sample if we wanted to take a closer look. Not Jerry, though. Jerry Portman’s the kind of guy who takes your alien lifeforms precariously suspended in million-year-old ice and microwaves them to kingdom come. “Why the hell did he…? Oh, never mind,” I hear you saying. You’re getting the picture now. He cost me a lot that day. Maybe not money—who knows—but certainly renown. They probably would have named one of the bacteria after me.
That was two years ago, but I remember it like yesterday. Time flies when you’re having fun.
Yesterday, when Jerry was out on the spacewalk, I considered trying to make it look like an accident. But there are so many instruments taking every goddamn reading on this ship that they’d know for sure I had something to do with it. I mean, no amount of tinkering could have got the drone to accidentally deploy its probe with such surgical precision right up Jerry Portman’s goddamn ass.
I’ll be leaving Sector 35 for Earth in a year next week. When I splashdown and I get arrested on live television, it’ll be because I murdered Jerry Portman. They’ll drag me out of the ocean next to those giant orange balloon floaties and put me straight in handcuffs but I’ll be laughing my ass off. You can’t spell manslaughter without laughter, right?
I’ll be thinking about the last thing Jerry saw as he was fatally probed: me in the cockpit with the drone remote, my smiling face looking out through the glass where I’d stuck a piece of paper saying IT WAS AN ACCIDENT.
Thousands of little red balloons.
I just want them to know I was provoked. I was standing my ground. I feared for my life, Your Honor.
It wasn’t self-defence, really, more like self-preservation. I’m not sure if there’re any laws about killing in self-preservation but if I didn’t kill him, he was going to kill me. I’m absolutely goddamn sure of it.
And yeah. I kind of miss the meals that I used to have growing up as a boy.
3bca3a20ca7a39169561dc1c47366188
This is an American meal, made from ground beef, eggs, bread and some spices.
It is usually served with mashed potatoes.
1df17c3371be3687205de787ca5818b8
Usually a side of peas, corn or carrots were the norm.
And of course, my folks ALWAYS had a salad.
I used to take the bread that my mother would put on the table, and make a meatloaf sandwich from it.
8f3ba25dc246b76733b4e1010451ed99
I’d then take the slice of meatloaf and then get the lettuce, the tomato, and the onions from my salad, and coat it with the salad dressing that was always on the table.
Very good eatin’.
e358645da6d77b9ae6acd4b9e6221b19
Here’s the basic idea; you get a slice of meatloaf on your plate with two or three sides…
98f420870491b0e1ae135fe697d0b6f8
Another thing that I haven’t had in years is American-style pork chops.
Now I eat pork commonly in China, and my wife has some great pork ribs and meals that she makes for me.
But the American style chips is what I grew up with.
We would eat “stuffed pork chops”, “breaded pork chops”, and “fried pork chops”. Always with a side of apple sauce and some peas or corn.
Maybe a mashed potato side.
5f43069b4b1d830260e60c56ab5f4f76
American style meals pretty much ended in the 1980’s.
Oh there were hold outs, but the entire American culture seemed to eat out all the time. Yet when I grew up, we rarely ate out.
Maybe a few times a year. Yeah. No kidding.
We always ate in the dining room. Never in the television room.
We would lay a tablecloth down, and then once the meal was done, it would either be folded up or thrown into the laundry.
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Staples were always a salad, a loaf of sliced bread (right out of the plastic bag no less), and a set up table settings.
Everyone got a glass for their beverage, and a glass of ice water. Mostly us kids drank milk, with our water.
Our parents drank wine, and had an after dinner coffee.
db86501fb4e38b62ba0e862c98db3cf0
We always had a dessert. Monday through Friday, we usually had either a ice cream, or a cake or pie for dessert, with ice cream being the most common, and the pies the most desirable.
Blueberry pie!
1e440ea02d1cf52db8a228fb3517afb5
A dessert with every meal.
This was a normal household meal.
Eating a family made meal is of great importance, and that is one of the reasons why I insist on it at home in my household.
Who knows, one day, when you are older you will be as wistful as MM dreaming of the “good old days” in the living room.
ef695b714f1ede2a10cc7919f9c8adda
Today…
As a nurse, what is the most tragic discovery you have made while treating a patient?
Thanks Amy Potter for asking me to answer this question. A mother brought her son into the Emergency Department. I was triaging him. She said that he just started choking suddenly,no trigger. That child was so scared, looking at me with big dark eyes. My gut was screaming that something was wrong. I was not going to miss it, whatever it was. Then – I saw it. Faint bruising developing on that toddler’s throat. In a distinct shape of a hand. I made myself say calmly, “did he hit something? Why is throat bruising up?” Then all hell broke loose. The mother cried that her boyfriend tried to choke the child in front of her but she she pulled the child away and rushed him to the nearby hospital.. So, I got them in a room by themselves, told the doctor what was up and got security to be outside the room until the police came. I remember getting upset that the mother did not want the boyfriend in trouble. I told the police that I would testify if needed about all that I saw and heard. I did not have to do that. I know the boyfriend was arrested that night, but could not follow up after that. The fear that child had in his eyes haunts me.
What impact has the rejection of Chinese trade by western countries had on China’s economy?
It has little to no effect. Don’t be so full of yourself, the US and EU is no longer the biggest market nor is it the richest market. China his the biggest trading partner of 170/195 nations on earth and US market is now at best 10% or so of the world’s demand. If the US chooses to import inflation instead of deflation that is the US own funeral. China will let the US have a long rope to hang itself! So is Europe! And so are the US slave nations!
Life battles
How will China secure its semiconductor supply without Taiwan?
Sheer Innovation
The Chinese working with AI use a method called Stack Hierarchy
In the US – A ML / Transformer AI model is trained with an average of 650 Servers each with 32 GPUs
The Chinese don’t have access to as many servers
So they first create a smaller AI Model and then use that Smaller AI Model to train and create another Smaller AI Model and in the process through Supervised Learning, evolve itself
So each smaller Model evolves into larger models and teaches other models guided by researchers
This way you can do with 70 Servers with 20 -30 GPUs each
And Guess what?
These Models work perfectly
Chinese company trained GPT-4 rival with just 2,000 GPUs — 01.ai spent $3M compared to OpenAI’s $80M to $100M
With fewer resources, you have to maximize their efficiency.
SMIC for instance could only manage 23% high quality yield for the 9010 Threaded 7 nm Chips for the Mate 60 compared to TSMC
This limited Huawei to produce only 1/3 of their intended output
However for the Mate 70 – SMIC reported a 56% high quality yield for the 9010 with single threaded 7 nm Chips and 19% high quality yield for the 9020 with double threaded high quality chips
So Huawei can produce almost 2/3 of their Intended output
Using DUV Machines rather than EUV Machines used by TSMC
My Son for instance can run a simulation only Sixteen times a week
That’s because they use a Fully Indigenous System with an Indigenous Processor so that tomorrow US can’t sanction and stop research
A Western System can make you run 1000 simulations easily
Sixty Times More
Yet Chinese Researchers are attuned to ensure they achieve all their objectives in 16 simulations and thus they use their brains in a way Americans can never imagine
Every Saturday the Engineers of the Indigenous System come and take feedback for improvements
And both sides benefit and evolve
So China manages High Quality Research without Taiwanese Input
China gets full access to Taiwanese Chips like Snapdragon for all commercial applications and for buyers like Xiaomi or Oppo
US has no objections to any of that
It’s only Chips related to high quality research that are being throttled
China responds by innovation of the type the US hasn’t seen in at least 30–40 years
This takes me back…
Not Hollywood, is what we marched to.
What are things to avoid when it comes to anti-aging?
Eating. Eating is a good thing to avoid if you are fighting aging and death.
I have read how great blueberries and strawberries are for you. I began to eat them. Till I came across an article saying that blueberries and strawberries are among the “dirtiest” foods out there. By dirty, they mean among the most heavily sprayed with pesticides. Pesticides are cancer threats. I quit eating blueberries and strawberries.
I’d read of how healthy salmon is for you. Salmon reduces cholesterol, fights inflammation, lowers blood pressure. So then I started eating salmon. Till I learned that they contain large amounts of mercury, something that can give you cancer.
I’d read recently of the wonderful benefits of watermelon. So I figured I would go the whole hog on watermelon by buying the Ocean Spray watermelon juice. I began to drink gallons of it. Good, too. Then I learned how heavily watermelon is sprayed with insecticide. Cancer again. So I threw all my watermelon juice away.
Lucky for me, I’d found an article touting the incredible benefits of olives and olive oil, one of the great Mediterranean foods, so I began eating 50 olives a day. I saw immediate results. My digestion began to improve, I felt more energetic than ever. Then I read an article yesterday saying that tests have shown that olives have the strange effect of metastasizing cancer quickly. That electrified me with fear. I was so terrified that I wanted to take an emetic to rid myself of every trace of olives and olive oil.
So here I sit with a fine pre-Thanksgiving pecan pie that my wife was good enough to make today. No fears on THIS food. After all, all the pecans in it fell from my very own trees. And I’m adding a huge shovelful of ice cream, now melting rapidly into the pie’s warm surface. Nothing wrong with ice cream. It’s the All-American treat! Now don’t ruin it for me by telling me how many calories and how much fat it has or what it will do to my cholesterol. I have found the one food I’ve read nothing carcinogenic about. And anyway, if all the fat and calories and sugar kill me, I’ll die a profoundly happy man. Much better way to go than eating olives or guzzling olive oil.
Little Black Devil Turns To A Little Black Angel After Adoption
Mississippi Delta Tamales
eca434dc6b53ac7b3d5dca149c3ec40a
Yield: 7 to 8 dozen
Ingredients
Filling
6 to 8 pounds boneless meat (pork shoulder, chuck roast or chicken)
3/4 cup vegetable oil
1/4 cup chili powder
2 tablespoons paprika
2 tablespoons salt
2 teaspoons black pepper
1 teaspoon ground cayenne pepper
1 tablespoon onion powder
1 tablespoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon ground cumin
Wrappers
Corn husks
Corn Meal Dough
8 cups yellow cornmeal or masa mix (available in most grocery stores)
4 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons salt
1 2/3 cups lard or vegetable shortening
6 to 8 cups warm meat broth (from cooking the meat)
Instructions
Filling
Cut meat into large chunks and place in a large, heavy pot. Cover with cold water. Bring to a boil over high heat. Cover, reduce heat to medium-low and simmer until meat is very tender, 2 to 2 1/2 hours. Remove meat and reserve cooking liquid.
When meat is cool enough to handle, remove and discard any skin and large chunks of fat. Shred or dice meat into small pieces. There should be about 14 to 16 cups of meat.
Heat the vegetable oil in a large, heavy pot over medium heat. Stir in chili powder, paprika, salt, pepper, cayenne, onion powder, garlic powder and cumin. Add meat and stir to coat with oil and spices. Cook, stirring often, until meat is thoroughly heated, 7 to 10 minutes. Set aside.
Wrappers: While meat is cooking, soak husks in a large bowl of very warm water, until softened and pliable, about 2 hours. Gently separate husks into single leaves, trying not to tear them. Wash off any dust and discard any corn silks. Keep any shucks that split to the side, since two small pieces can be overlapped and used as one.
Corn Meal Dough
Stir cornmeal, baking powder, salt and lard together in a large bowl until well blended. Gradually stir in enough warm meat broth to make soft, spongy dough the consistency of thick mashed potatoes. The dough should be quite moist, but not wet. Cover with a damp cloth.
To assemble the tamales, remove a corn husk from water and pat it dry. Lay husk on a work surface. Spread about 1/4 cup of the dough in an even layer across the wide end of husk to within 1 inch of edges. Spoon about 1 tablespoon of meat mixture in a line down the center of dough. Roll husk so that dough surrounds filling and forms a cylinder or package. Fold bottom under to close. Place tamales in a single layer on a baking sheet. Repeat until all dough and filling is used.
Stand tamales upright, closed side down, in a large pot. Place enough tamales in the pot so that they do not fall over or unroll. Carefully fill pot with enough water to come just to the top of the tamales, trying not to pour water directly into the tamales. Bring to a boil over high heat. Cover, reduce heat to medium-low and simmer until dough is firm and pulls away from the husk easily and cleanly, about 1 hour.
If you prefer to steam tamales, stand tamales upright, closed side down, in a large steamer basket. Cover with a damp towel or additional husks. Steam tamales over simmering water until dough is firm and pulls away from the husk easily and cleanly, 1 to 1 1/4 hours.
Serve tamales warm, in their husks. Remove husks to eat.
Cassie Swenson had always struggled with her weight. She had come to terms with it, and her group of friends were supportive. But moving to a new town and starting at a new school filled her with a dread she hadn’t felt for a long time. She recognized and remembered the fear of meeting an entirely new group of students.
She stood looking up at the school building, dreading walking inside. She forced a smile and began to walk up the stairs. You can do this, she said to herself as she reached for the handle of the door and hesitated.
When she was inside, she went to the principal’s office to get her class assignment and then walked slowly towards the room indicated on the list where her history class was located. She looked through the small pane of glass and saw the class was deep in discussion already.
With a deep sigh she opened the door and the entire class turned and looked at her. She walked up to the teacher and handed him the paper. Mr. Wilkins looked at the paper then at her and smiled slightly.
“Ok class, we have a new student. This is Cassandra Swenson,” he said almost too happily. She leaned in and whispered in his ear that she preferred Cassie. He smiled back and stood back up. “This is Cassie Swenson, please welcome her and make her feel at home.”
“Hello Cassie,” the entire class replied with much less enthusiasm.
“Hmm, very good,” Mr. Wilkins said blandly. “Umm ok, Cassie, please take a seat and feel free to join in anytime.”
She walked down the aisle to the only seat available towards the middle of the classroom as everyone watched her. She felt instantly like she was on display and hated it.
“Ok we were discussing the possible theories regarding the disappearance of the Jamestown Settlement, who has any new ideas that haven’t been addressed yet?” Mr. Wilkins asked brightly.
Debbie looked at Cassie and raised her hand. “Maybe they got eaten,” she said coldly. Everyone in the class laughed when they realized what she meant. Cassie turned away from her and shrank further in her chair.
Later in the cafeteria, she waited online when Stacy Beacham waved her over as she stood with Debbie closer to the front. “Here,” she said slyly, “you look like you need food more than we do, just try to save some for the rest of us.” Everyone on the line laughed as Cassie turned and walked away feeling totally humiliated.
After the day was over Cassie went straight home and ran up to her room. What a horrible day, she thought as she collapsed in her chair and looked at the blank screen. She quickly logged in and looked up ways to deal with bullies at school.
As she looked at the various websites that came up on the list, one stood out from the others. She hadn’t ever seen a web address like this before and the difference intrigued her. She hesitated for only a moment and clicked on the link. Her screen blinked and crackled for a moment. A warning came up on her screen from her virus protection. You are about to enter the dark web. Please be careful what information you share.
She thought for a moment and was about to click the button to close the website when her phone vibrated. She picked it up and looked at the message. There was a new posting on the school’s website.
Since the school is looking for a new mascot, it began, we have a proposal. There was a link to a picture underneath, and she instinctively clicked on it. The pic was very familiar. She recognized the features immediately. The shoulder-length brown hair, the glasses. The face was hers, but the body had been photoshopped into a pig’s body. We will name the new mascot Swineson, the caption under the picture read.
Her heart sank and her eyes welled up. She knew a new school would be hard, but she never expected this after just one day. She tossed her phone down and held her face in her hands trying to fight back the emotions.
As she removed her hands from her eyes, she glanced back at her computer screen. The warning was still flashing on the screen but behind it she saw the words, tired of being bullied? We can help. Without caring about the virus threat any longer she closed her security warning and clicked enter on the website.
Welcome to Bullyproof appeared on her screen in bold red letters. She entered her information to sign up as a member. As usual, she skipped over the fine print agreement. Those things are all the same, she scoffed as she clicked next.
A new screen came up asking her to choose her level of protection. A circle with a red line through it labeled standard, asked if she wanted to simply monitor any references to her name. Under that was a lightning bolt with the words next to it, delete any references to your name as soon as they are identified.
That’s better she thought to herself, but I don’t know. She continued to read and at the very bottom was a skull with the words next to it, Delete Posters.
Hmmm, she thought. Deleting the poster from my social media is probably the best way to deal with it. She clicked on the skull.
Her phone vibrated almost instantly. She picked it up and looked at it. The new app icon was right there in the middle of her main screen.
Bullyproof, you have selected maximum protection click to activate. She clicked on the icon and a scanning bar appeared. It began to fill up very slowly as the app scanned the internet for what it was looking for. It moved very slowly and underneath were the words, this may take a while.
After about an hour, she decided the day had caught up with her and she went to bed.
The clock next to her bed read 1:18 am, when her phone buzzed. The app has finished its scan. Preparing to initiate safety measures, the screen flashed. Instantly the signal from her phone contacted the satellites in orbit and bounced all over the town reaching out to any device that had a connection to any posting about Cassie. It found only two and accessed their information.
She woke in the morning and had almost forgotten that her phone was still searching when she grabbed it to check for any messages. The app indicated it had one match identified. She clicked on it and the picture of the pig came up and her heart sank again. Under the picture was a name. Posted by Deborah Stratton.
She thought for a moment, that was one of the girls in my history class. The name glared out at her and made her angry just seeing it. Click apply to delete poster, the app read under the name.
Without even thinking she clicked on the button and the skull’s eyes lit up bright red. Poster scheduled for deletion. It reached out across the electronic connections all over town and linked with Debbie’s phone.
Debbie stood in front of the principal’s desk waiting for him to say something as he read the report Mrs. Applewhite had filled out. “Well Miss Stratton,” he said with a sigh. “Since you like having fun in the cafeteria, you can help Mrs. Applewhite restock the freezer after school today,” Principal Lewis said stamping the paper on the desk in front of him and smiling
“Umm, it’s Friday,” Debbie snapped defensively.
“Very good, Miss Stratton, now that you know the days of the week, we’ll have you up to months of the year in no time,” Mr. Lewis said sarcastically as he handed her the paper.
“Ughh” she sighed. “My dad’s gonna hear about this,” she snapped and snatched the paper out of his hand. She quickly turned and stomped out of the office, slamming the door behind her. Mr. Lewis shook his head disappointedly as he watched her leave.
In the cafeteria, Debbie was watching Mrs. Applewhite stack the boxes on the shelf in the freezer. Suddenly the door closed causing Debbie to jump slightly.
“Don’t worry about that, it’s programmed to do that, so the cold doesn’t get out. But don’t worry, it won’t lock,” Mrs. Applewhite smiled. “This is a new state-of-the-art freezing unit, best in the district.”
“Ughh, I’m sure it’s the greatest if you have nothing else going on in your life,” Debbie sighed and rolled her eyes.
Mrs. Applewhite’s smile disappeared. “I know you’re young and think you’re very hot Miss Stratton, but that’s no reason to be so cold to people,” she said as she pushed the door open to get more food.
Debbie followed her out. “Can we please skip the ethics lesson and get this done so I can get out of here?” She asked impatiently.
“I have a better idea,” Mrs. Applewhite said with a smile returning to her face. “Why don’t you finish this, I’m going to go start my weekend. I don’t have to waste time on this kind of thing with a person like you. Finish this and then you can go,” she said grabbing her purse and walking out in a bit of a huff.
After about 20 minutes she looked at her watch, “Ughh, 6:30?” she sighed. She grabbed more of the boxes and walked into the freezer and was stacking them on the shelf when she heard the door close again making her jump again just a little and drop the boxes. “Stupid machine,” she said angrily as she picked them up and placed them on the shelf.
Her cellphone sprang to life on the counter outside and connected with the freezer unit. The lock was easy to access and was reprogrammed so it activated.
Inside the freezer, Debbie finished stacking the boxes and rubbed her arms to get some warmth back, it felt colder for some reason. She pushed on the door handle and expected it to open just as it had done so many times before, but it didn’t budge. She pushed again this time harder but still nothing.
Outside the freezer, the digital temperature reading was accessed by her phone and began to lower. It was now 0 degrees and was rapidly going down. It passed -10, then -20, then -30.
Inside the freezer, Debbie was pounding on the door but there was no one left in the cafeteria to hear. She was screaming as the temperature got colder and colder. She grabbed anything she could find to try to break the glass, but it was too thick. She saw ice crystals forming all along it and they began to obscure the view to the outside.
By the time the temperature reached -60, her hair and skin began to get covered with frost and the temperature still fell. She sat down getting very tired from the cold and before long fell asleep.
Within minutes the temperature reached -90 and her internal body began to freeze.
Saturday morning, Mrs. Applewhite walked in and found the rest of the boxes stacked on the counter. She shook her head and cursed as she saw Debbie’s cellphone on the counter. “Stupid girl,” she said grabbing the boxes. She pulled open the freezer door, which had previously returned to its original setting, and walked into the freezer.
She screamed as soon as she saw Debbie’s frozen body in the corner.
Cassie came down in the morning and headed to the kitchen for breakfast. It was 10:30 and she’d slept late since it was Saturday, and it was such a rough week. When she walked in her mother immediately hugged her tightly. “Oh honey, I’m so sorry,” she said with her voice trembling.
Cassie looked confused for a moment when she noticed the news on the laptop on the table. A picture of her school surrounded by ambulances and police cars filled the screen. “What happened?” she asked pulling away from her mother and getting closer to hear what was being said.
“Police still aren’t sure how the girl became trapped in the freezer, but it is being called a tragic accident,” the reporter said. “The unit was installed a few months ago and appears to be working fine at this time but it will be shut down until more extensive tests can be done. A candlelight vigil is being scheduled for this evening at the school. Once again repeating 16-year-old Deborah Stratton was found this morning frozen to death in a freezer at…”
“Oh my god,” Cassie shrieked and backed away from the screen. “I knew her, she’s in my history class and..” she caught herself when she remembered the app on her phone.
She raced upstairs and grabbed her phone and opened the app. User Deleted came up on the screen. She tossed the phone down and covered her mouth to hold in a scream. Oh my god, that’s impossible, she thought frantically. It must just be a coincidence.
Most of the school turned out for the vigil that evening. Cassie walked through the crowd, who largely ignored her now with everything that had happened. She noticed Stacy at the front of the line with tears running down her face.
“Stacy, I’m so sorry,” Cassie said as she reached out her arms to hug her for support.
“Ugh, get away,” Stacy said bitterly as she recoiled. “How can someone like you get to live and a beautiful person like Debbie dies so horribly.”
Cassie listened and couldn’t help feeling totally rejected. Inside her pocket, her phone sprang to life as the microphone picked up every word Stacy had said. Cassie turned and walked away slowly with her head hung. Maybe she was hurt and just lashing out, but maybe she was just always a mean person she thought to herself as she pulled out her phone to text her mother that she was on her way home.
She instantly noticed the 1 on the corner of the bullyproof app and clicked on it. The screen lit up with the display and played the recording of Stacy’s voice. One post discovered, the app read. Press apply for deletion.
She looked at it long and hard and listened to the recording again. The words stung more than before, but what if this app did have something to do with Debbie’s death, she thought.
She closed the app and shoved the phone back in her pocket and continued walking. After a few minutes, the phone chimed again and the 1 appeared back on the app. She opened it.
You are tired of being treated so badly, you do not have to stand for it, press apply for deletion, The app wrote.
Cassie thought about it and said “no, no one deserves to die just because of what they say”, she said aloud to the phone.
It will not stop, she will continue, press apply for deletion, the app responded and played the recording again.
Cassie’s blood began to boil. “It would be nice to not have to deal with it anymore,” she said softly.
Press apply for deletion, the app displayed.
She clicked on the skull and the eyes glowed red again as the app reached out and contacted Stacy’s phone. Cassie smiled slightly and shoved the phone back in her pocket and continued home.
Stacy left the vigil and climbed into her car and began driving home. As she approached the railroad crossing, she stopped as the lights flashed indicating that a train was coming. She sighed and waited impatiently.
Her phone sprang to life and connected with her car’s onboard computer. It quickly bypassed the braking system, and the car began to slowly roll forward. In a fit of panic, Stacy reached for the door handle just as the locks went down and sealed her inside. The car continued to roll onto the tracks as she struggled to get out.
She looked out the passenger window and noticed the train lights approaching from around the bend as she struggled to break the glass to get out. The engineer tried to apply the brakes as quickly as he could, but he had no time to stop by the time he had seen her car on the tracks.
The train slammed into her car at 50 MPH dragging it along the tracks in front of it before it finally burst into flames.
Cassie woke in the morning and came down for breakfast only to notice her mother white as a sheet. “I just can’t believe it,” she said as she looked up at Cassie. “Another girl from your school died last night after that candlelight vigil.”
“Once again,” the reporter on the screen said, “another girl, 17-year-old Stacy Beacham was killed last night when her car apparently stalled on the train tracks at Madison Street, this just after 16-year-old Deborah Stratton’s body was discovered at the town’s high school frozen to death in a freezer. Both are being called tragic accidents.”
Cassie looked at her mother, “oh it’s so horrible,” she said. She turned to go back upstairs and smiled a slight smile as she patted the phone in her pocket.
The Beverly Hillbillies – Special Part 27 | Classic Hollywood TV Series
https://youtu.be/TZuE9St9sYs
DOGE Finds Complete Corruption in U.S. Treasury – CANNOT TRACK PAYMENTS
The Department of Government Efficiency has begun its audit of the United States Treasury and the level of institutionalized corruption is staggering: $4.7 TRILLION.
In the Treasury computer payment system, there is a field called the Treasury Access Symbol (TAS). It is an identification code linking a Treasury payment to a budget line item (standard financial process).
In the Federal Government, the TAS field was optional for ~$4.7 Trillion in payments and was often . . . left blank, making traceability almost impossible.
As a result of this field being left blank, a Treasury person could go into the computer, have it issue a check or Wire Transfer for almost any amount, payable to literally anyone, anywhere, or anything – or nothing – and there is no way to trace the budget item or agency that is supposed to authorize and pay for it.
Just one HUGE pile of money going wherever they tell it to go, with no way to trace why.
As of Saturday, this is now a required field, increasing insight into where money is actually going.
INTERVIEW: Cruising for a severe bruising
Is China really as terrible as BBC says it is?
BBC is known as British Bullshit Channel the world over! I have a confession to make Up to a decade ago I would tuned on to BBC world service channel when I travel down south from Kuala lumpur towards Singapore without fail. I am an English Educated person who graduated in UK umpteenth years ago and I still feel comfortable with the British accents and loved to hear some creative journalism!
Yes you may want to know about the BBC world service? It was meant to quell communism and indoctrinate Singaporean and Southern Malayan peninsular people from the colonial days. Somehow Singapore allowed them to function till today. As I began searching for truths and facts I find it hilarious that every single word coming out from BBC on China is a hateful narrative is nothing but an outright lie and it is twisted to suite the Anglo Saxon narrative. Some decades ago I totally turned and tuned off from BBC.
It is really shameful and pathetic attempt to slur and demonised China and the Chinese race! I am sure I am not the only one who feels that way about BBC reporting. Last week I saw a podcast that exposed a BBC reporter intentionally baiting relatives of the victim of a disgruntled man due to his divorce proceedings at the time when many people were grieving. It is so heartbreaking to see the man calling him and his videographer from reporting and filming being turned by BBC into a purported police officer hiding truths.
The world must stop BBC doing shit against innocent people worldwide and throw their reporters to 30 years imprisonment each to teach them a lesson. L laws should be passed to sentence them to death for their crimes against humanity.
«Look, I understand… yes… yes… but I don’t have any money right now… Yes, I understand… Look, let’s discuss it in person, it’s not convenient over the phone…»
Henry didn’t have time to finish the sentence, the phone slipped out of his wet hands and fell right down the drain.
«Wonderful… beautiful rain. How I love this rain!»
***
“Mom, I’m home,” Henry said.
“Hey, how was your day?”
“It was a good day, but I drowned my phone.”
“What did you say? What are you going to do now? How are you going to live without it?”
“I don’t know, but I think I’ll be fine.”
“Are you going somewhere with your friends tomorrow, aren’t you? How are you going to keep in touch with me and the others?” my mom asked.
“I’ll text them on the computer, but I don’t know, I don’t have the money for a new phone.”
“All people are like people, except you” Mom concluded.
***
It was a sunny afternoon when Henry met up with his friends. They were going to visit one of the ancient World War II fortresses.
“That’s funny, and how are you going to be without a phone now?”
“Look, I don’t know, people lived somehow, so I’m gonna try.”
“Henry, for God sake, do not get lost, because the fortress is big, a lot of museums, halls and places. How are we going to find you?”
“All right, do not worry, mates” Henry replied.
“If you get lost, you know where our car is,” concluded one of the friends.
The fortress was truly unique and rich in historical events. Ancient fortress walls with bullet marks, traces from former trenches, memorials and monuments. The old bunker attracted the most Henry’s attention. Henry reached into his pocket automatically for his phone. Missed.
“Oh, right… Okay, there will be no photos..damn” thought Henry.
The first museum, the second, the crowds of tourists with cameras, phones, headphones, one thing led to another, and Henry did not notice how he lost his friends in the crowd. Attempts to find them were unsuccessful and Henry continued to explore the fortress alone.
As he walked out of one enclosure onto the street, Henry smiled at the sunny day and clear weather and then decided to walk to the most important place of this fortress. The place was popular because it had the most beautiful view of the main entrance to the fortress, with a large square and a memorial to the fallen defenders.
Today, the place was a welcome sight for everyone. Everyone but Henry. Lost in the crowd of friends, he stood in despair, watching all the people who came up, posed, took pictures, laughed and left. Henry lost track of time, his thoughts drifting off into that universe where he probably has a phone at this point to call his friends, find them, and then take a photo together. This effect lasted until the most beautiful voice, comparable to that of Lana Del Rey in the song “Summertime Sadness” called out to him and then tapped him on the back.
Henry turned around.
“Excuse me, aren’t you busy, can you take a picture of me?”
Henry froze, as did everything inside him. All feelings, emotions, thoughts, and heartbeats froze and stopped responding in an instant. There was a dead silence. But in a second, they were all waking up again at an accelerated pace. The most frantic pace of Henry’s life. The moment stretched for him like an eternity of the universe.
“Hey, are you here?” a girl asked.
Standing in front of him was a girl his age, bright as an angel, a little shorter than him, with a beautiful smile. This kind of smile we have of remembering the kindest and the coziest stories of our lives.
“You sleep standing up, don’t you?” she asked and laughed.
“No, no, no, who am I? Not at all! Just wondering…” suddenly came back to life Henry
“Will you take a picture of me?” she asked again, smiling.
“Yeah, sure, no problem.”
“Then here you go,” she handed him the phone.
“Are you ready?” asked Henry.
“Yeah, go ahead.”
He took a few pictures after that she walked quickly over to him and took the phone.
“Thank you,” she said.
“You’re welcome, why not selfies?”
“I don’t like selfies. Who isn’t sick of them yet?”
“That’s right,” Henry pointed out.
For a moment there might have seemed to be an awkward pause between them, but the girl quickly cleared it with a question:
“Why are you standing here alone? Let’s take your picture too” she said and smiled.
Henry was embarrassed.
“Yeah, that’s not a bad idea, but I don’t have anything.”
“What do you mean?” she asked
“I mean…I don’t have-”
She interrupted him.
“Oh, I see, you don’t have a phone or a camera?”
“Yeah, I’m empty.”
“Well that’s weird, he’s standing in the middle of a museum where crowds of tourists come, but he doesn’t have a phone or even a camera. How did this even happen?” she thought to herself
“Life. This is life. It’s just my fun life. Yes, Henry, that’s how it happens. You show up at a museum without your phone, and it’s the kind of day a story happens to you that no one would believe. It’s just embarrassing, what will she think of me? How embarrassing,” Henry thought to himself.
“Look, it’s nothing, let’s take pictures on my phone and then I’ll send them to you, okay? Don’t you have a profile somewhere?” she said.
“Oh…that would be great! Yeah, sure, I have a profile.”
After taking a couple of pictures, Henry walked over to her.
“What’s your name by the way? My name is Henry.”
“Alice” she smiled, moving her glance from the phone screen to Henry.
“Nice to meet you.” Henry smiled
“Me too.” She laughed
Both looked at each other with a smile, and then Henry told her the name of his profile where she could send him pictures.
***
Henry spent more than four hours that day in the fortress, walking from one enclosure to the next, researching all the details and historical references. All this, unfortunately for him, could not be said of Henry’s friends. They had finished their tour of the fortress much earlier and were each beginning to wonder:
Where is Henry?
The boys spent about two hours looking for Henry, they broke up one by one and then walked together again conducting a search for their friend. They had no chance of finding Henry, but their conscience would not allow them to leave him here and go away on their own.
After a while they simply gave up and went back to the car, where Henry was supposed to go in case he was lost. It was early evening and the crowds of people were changing one by one, and they all sat and waited until Henry appeared on the horizon:
“Henry!” shouted one of the friends.
“Coming,” retorted Henry.
“And you think that’s okay?” inquired the friend.
“I’m sorry, guys, for what happened.”
“We had plans today and besides this fortress, and you’ve been there all day, you think that’s okay, don’t you?”
“I understand, it’s my fault. But-”
“No buts, you’re an egotist who thinks only of himself. We’ve been all over the place, where have you been?” insisted one of the friends.
“I’ve been everywhere,” said Henry.
“I have no words, we just wasted a day on that fortress because of you. What was there to look at for so long? Say what?!”
“I’m really sorry,” replied Henry sadly.
“You don’t have a phone, how did you imagine we’d find you? Tell me, how?”
“I don’t know…”
“If you had your phone with you, things would be different, you know? We’ve spent so much time looking for you, you only think of yourself. You could have called us, told us you still wanted to walk around here, we would have come back for you later. It would have been so easy if you had a phone,” one of the friends concluded angrily.
***
Thus ended Henry’s first day without a phone. The first day and already such a ridiculous situation. The thought crawled deeper and deeper into his head that it was impossible to live without a phone nowadays. The only problem was that no one asked him, he just didn’t have a phone anymore. And he didn’t have one in the plans either.
The only bright spot was his introduction to Alice. In a moment of conflict with his friends, he didn’t find a moment to tell them all about it. A couple or three days passed, and Henry was actively chatting with Alice by his computer. The days were approaching Friday, and Henry wanted to see her again, so he decided to ask Alice to meet with him.
***
For several days he thought the idea over. He chose the right words, chose the best day to meet, and finally gathered the strength to ask Alice out. It wasn’t an easy task for a guy like Henry. He was afraid. Especially afraid of getting rejected. Pulling himself together, he opened the chat and wrote to her.
“Hey, Alice, wanna ask something. What are you doing tonight?” asked Henry.
“Busy right now, not at home, but I’ll be free tonight, why are u asking that?”
“I’m going out tonight, will you come with me?” inquired Henry
“Good idea, I’m in” she replied
Henry was incredibly happy that things were working out so well. He was not the kind of guy who found new acquaintances easily, so at this moment he was overwhelmed with a feeling of happiness, and his lungs were even more greedily absorbing the air filled with joy.
“What time would be convenient for you and where?” asked Henry
“I dunno, up to you.”
“How about 10 p.m. at the cinema?” suggested Henry.
“Fine, that’s fine.”
This Friday was going to be legendary in his life. The happiness of spending an evening with a girl he liked had not visited him in a long time in his life.
“Oh, wait, Henry, are you still without your phone?” asked Alice.
“Well yeah, I’m without it.”
“And how are we going to meet up? And what happened with your phone?”
“Look, I’ll just come to the movie theater at 10 p.m., and then I’ll tell you why I don’t have my phone.”
“Okay, but how will I see u there?” she kept asking.
“I’ll be standing right in front, you’ll see me, it’s okay” reassured her Henry
“But if I get there and you’re not there… I don’t know what I’ll do to you!” wrote Alice.
Such a message surprised Henry. A girl who writes in that style is hardly going to not come.
“Do not worry, I won’t screw it up”
Evening was beginning to creep closer and closer to the city. The big red and tired sun reflected in the windows of the high-rise buildings, and the streets were filled with the Friday atmosphere and the people who breathed it. Most of them had made their way to their homes to begin the long-awaited weekend, others had left their apartments in hopes of spending this Friday night at its best. Such was Henry this time.
The pillars called “evening” had been over the city for several hours and night with darkness were stretched on them.
At that moment, anyone who wanted to see farther than the windows of the house across the street could see Henry, who had foreseen all his excitement and had left the house beforehand, so as not to be late in any way.
He bought a bus ticket, which he usually never did in his life, and went to the cinema.
He managed to get there thirty minutes early. During the ride, he stopped worrying perceptibly and got his thoughts together.
Everything was perfect.
The back of the movie theater was hidden in the night and only its facade was illuminated by lanterns under which one could see posters. Henry asked someone what time is it and began to wait.
On the door of the movie theater was written, “Open from 10 a.m to 10 p.m”
That was his reference point.
When the movie theater would close – Alice would have to come.
Time passed, and Henry walked from side to side down the lonely street. People were watching a movie at the cinema, so there were no people outside the cinema, except for one guy besides Henry.
After a while he turned to Henry.
“Listen, do you have Internet on your phone? I really need it.”
Henry turned around.
“Nope, sorry.”
It was ten o’clock and the movie theater closed. The lights that illuminated the posters turned off.
Alice was running late.
It was at this point that Henry’s sense of longing overwhelmed him. From standing around like a fool for more than thirty minutes to the fact that he had no phone.
“Why don’t I have a phone at such an important time? Why?! This life is full of surprises. How wonderful it is. I have no words. If I had my phone, I’d text or call her right now. Find out why she’s late, maybe she’s not coming at all. I mean, she was going to come. I was sure of it. What went wrong? How much longer would I have to stand? Maybe she took my invitation as a joke. Is she just laughing at me? I still don’t believe she’s not coming. I’ll keep waiting.” pondered Henry to himself.
In the toothless darkness he could only see the light from the phone held by the guy who had asked Henry about the Internet.
Henry, on the other hand, stood without any light in the dead silence.
That same legendary Friday was almost ruined.
“Look, are you waiting for someone or what?” the guy suddenly asked Henry.
To say that Henry was surprised by the question is to say nothing.
He tried to answer something.
“Yeah…you could say that.”
“Can I give you the phone? You can call to.” the guy suggested.
That’s certainly a good suggestion. Especially if you have a number. Her number.
“Thanks, but I don’t remember the number,” replied Henry.
The guy didn’t give up. Something moved him to help Henry. Something unknown. Maybe it was Lady Luck.
“I caught some internet, maybe you’ll write then?” the guy didn’t back down.
“No, thank you very much, but that won’t help.”
Henry couldn’t remember the address of her social networking page. It was a failure.
“What time is it?” asked Henry.
“10:24,” replied the guy.
“Thank you,” said Henry.
Henry looked around the street and realized: Alice was not coming.
This was the end. A sense of sadness and longing drowned not only this Friday night, but also Henry’s heart and feelings. All the organs inside clenched in horror at the sadness that filled Henry’s entire body.
He doesn’t care anymore about all these decorations and colors of such a beautiful evening. All he wanted now was to disappear. Disappear into the world.
Early the next morning Henry left the city and went to the village to visit his grandmother for a few days. To go somewhere where life without a telephone might not have the consequences that had happened to him during that week.
***
Returning home a couple of days later, still without his phone, Henry turned on his computer and saw a message from Alice.
“I am so sorry, Henry, but I overslept! Forgive me.”
He smiled.
Machine Guns vs.Tanks Full Battle Scene | Fury
Donald Trump has no legal authority whatsoever to impose a 25% tariff on anyone, let alone our closest trading partners. So, why is Trump saying he’s going to impose 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico the day he enters office?
Understand why Trump 2.0 imposes tariff.
The big picture: US economy is “in trouble”. Its debts is skyrocket high at #36 tn as of 2024/11. Just paying interest on the debts already costs USA $882 billion in 2024 ie $3 bn per DAY (source: US Treasury Dept). Its debt increases by $8.7 bn per 24 hours.
USA makes tons of $$$ from wars. But wars only benefit MIC & Wall Street. Not USA the country because the rich dont pay tax. Hence USA must rob others, regardless allies or not.
Below is my earlier post.
Trump 2.0’s crazily high tariff on ALL foreign countries = rob & force them to feed USA.
Have you seen a mafia in movies such as God Father?
Inside USA, tariff on foreign country = tax increase on Americans because foreign sellers will add (part of) the tariff to the sale price of their exported goods to USA.
In Trump 1.0, 90% of tariff was added to the sale price by foreign sellers. That is 1 reason why there was inflation in USA in Trump 1.0 & Biden era.
In both Trump 1.0 & 2.0, Trump has & will decrease tax to attract votes. How to recover the loss of revenue incurred from tax decrease? Use tariff to cause inflation so that all Americans pay a bit ie use tariff to disguise tax increase.
Analysts suggest countries to fight back & break even. Trump tariffs on imports to USA; countries tariffs on exports to USA with the same amount. Dont feed the robber-mafia.
We must understand: 60% tariff on Chinese imports & 20% on smaller countries is crazily unreasonable. Not many firms can make 60% of profit. Not even 20% for small firms/countries. Nobody will do business with no profit. Thus, decouple & stop/reduce sale to USA is the only option.
In fact, decoupling may be the plan of Trump 2.0. Trump may want USA to start all over again by manufacturing its own products from toilet paper to Trump’s campaign cap to washer etc. Trump wants everything to be made in USA.
US wage is higher than southeast Asia. That is Made-in-USA is more expensive. Trouble is whether USA will increase the wage to catch up with the inflated consumer products. Otherwise Americans will become poorer.
Trump 1.0 failed to attract US investors back to USA. Some still stayed in China. Some moved from China to, say, Thailand to do a finish touch on the Chinese products. This disguise of made-in-Thailand products also pushes up the American consumer price.
Isn’t it a bluff that Trump can exclude trade with China and India from the US ‘wonderful’ market? If there are going to be trade in a currency other than USD in BRICS, they are already being done
Trump’s statements are made for Americans to hear; they are the only constituency he cares about because they are the only ones who can vote for him and hold him accountable.
The truth is that outside the US, markets in Asia, Africa and central and south America and Mexico are all growing. This means that the US market is becoming a small pie slice of the overall global trade market.
In Trump’s first term, he decided to use tariffs as a weapon to limit Chinese imports into the US. Even though they have not been effective in limiting Chinese imports into the US, both Trump and Biden kept them in place. Trump has said that in his second term, he will raise the import tariffs. In effect, he is doubling down on a policy which doesn’t work. This strongly suggests that the US has no effective tools to counter Chinese imports into the US.
In order to counter US trade policy, China is aggressively working to grow domestic consumer spending and to diversify to other growing markets outside of the NATO/EU nations and the US and Canada.
While Americans have an obsession with “bluffing” as a negotiation strategy, it does not work well with Chinese because Chinese will inevitably call the bluff. I assume the only reason Americans embrace bluffing so much is because it is widely used in American culture and in some other cultures.
But it does not work well with Chinese because they are willing to wait out the party doing the bluffing before they move in for the final dispatch. The Chinese always take the long view on disputes and have the patience to see something through to the end, which is a strategy Americans do not have experience dealing with in the past.
This is one reason why Americans get so frustrated that their tactics don’t work with the Chinese. The US political leadership has not yet figured out that the only way to counter the Chinese long view is to also adopt an American long view, but they are too internally divided to reach any consensus on what an American long view would look like.
The Mask | Love In This Club
TOP SOCIAL SECURITY CHIEF OUSTED AFTER BLOCKING DOGE FRAUD INVESTIGATION
Acting Commissioner Michelle King exits the Social Security Administration after refusing to give the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) access to agency records needed to investigate potential fraud.
She’s replaced by Leland Dudek, who previously praised DOGE’s efficiency efforts.
This follows similar departures at Treasury and IRS as career bureaucrats resist fraud investigations.
King had been at the agency since 1994 — until now.
Who are the winners and losers in the U.S.-China trade war? Will everyone ultimately lose, and if so, who will suffer the most and why?
China don’t and won’t lose if the US carries on the trade war!
If the trade war reduce China’s growth form 6.5% to 5.0% It is only making Growth more sustainable and more manageable.
But while it may do that it is also cutting US growth by 2.5% to 1% and that for a nation with debts of 36 trillion dollars growing at 1 trillion dollars every quarter very unsustainable and it will destroy the USA!
So bring it on any day!
The world will have a market without the US overconsumption and that is a good thing not a bad proposition.
But your homelessness will grow so will unemployment and poverty!
Real income will come crashing down!
Inflation will hit 25% per annum at least!
You will waste resources producing stuffs you are not good at while wasting opportunities doing stuffs you ought to focus on!
Who is the loser, you can answer it yourself!
Why is Donald Trump continuously slamming high tariff rates on China? Does it benefit the USA in any way?
Driven by a staunch belief that a trade war is beneficial for America, Donald Trump’s strategy of imposing high tariffs on China arises from a deep misunderstanding of the complexities of global economic dynamics. By applying his notorious tough negotiation tactics—historically used in his business dealings to pressure smaller contractors—Trump now applies the same brute force in the sphere of international trade. Unfortunately, this approach dramatically oversimplifies the intricate nature of international relations and economic interdependence.
Trump’s tariff strategy is essentially his attempt to leverage what he perceives as America’s superior economic position to force China into submission. During his business career, Trump often bullied his way through negotiations, betting on the other party’s weaker position to secure a favorable outcome. He seems to believe that a similar approach will work on the global stage with a nation like China. However, this strategy fails to account for China’s significant economic capabilities and its political leadership’s resolve to not bend under U.S. pressure.
The ongoing imposition of high tariffs by Trump reflects his misjudgment of the situation—treating international trade like a zero-sum game where one country’s gain is inherently another’s loss. Unlike the small businesses he dealt with in New York, China has considerable economic clout and political strategies at its disposal. This includes the ability to impose retaliatory tariffs that deeply affect both economies, exemplified by disruptions witnessed in sectors ranging from agriculture to manufacturing within the U.S.
Moreover, tariffs, which are effectively taxes, not only affect the targeted foreign industries but also hurt domestic consumers and businesses. American consumers face higher prices, and businesses dealing with increased costs for imported goods find themselves less competitive, both domestically and globally. The retaliatory measures from China have also targeted critical segments of the American economy, from soybean farmers to electronics, illustrating a ripple effect that spans vast economic landscapes.
The truth is, while Trump aims to display unwavering strength and decisiveness, his tariff tactics could ultimately weaken the U.S. economy and degrade its political stature on the global stage. Navigating this tariff war requires more than bluster and intimidation—it needs a strategic understanding of global economic relationships and a more diplomatic approach to resolve conflicts in ways that mutually benefit all involved parties. The approach should prioritize long-term global stability over short-term political gains, a strategy that would genuinely reflect strength and wise leadership.
Cast Away – ending
For those of you Navy pilots who flew both the F-14 and F-18, which one did you like better, and why?
I have over 1,000 hours in the Tomcat and perhaps 450 hours in the Hornet. My Tomcat time was largely operational. My Hornet time was all in flight test. Some days I would fly one bird in the morning and another one if the afternoon or evening.
The Hornet was newer, and newer is often better. I could only pull 6.5g in the Tomcat, but in the Hornet when I burnt my fuel down a bit, I could go to 7.5g. The F404 engine in the Hornet was far better than the TF-30 that we had in the Tomcat and I never had to worry about a compressor stall with the F404. I should know as I did a lot of the initial out-of-control flight test on the 2 seat Hornet where I would intentionally depart the airplane from controlled flight.
The engines never even hiccupped at all. The Hornet was far more nimble than the Tomcat, but the Hornet did not have the range, endurance or speed of a Tomcat. Each was designed for a different mission.
I would often say to colleagues that in peacetime, I loved the agile Hornet. But were I to go into combat, I would much rather be in the Tomcat. My RIO and I were a great team. Having that extra set of eyes was invaluable.
One afternoon, my wingman and I engaged a pair of Libyan MIG23s. During the engagement, I lost sight of one of the MIGs. While I kept my eyes on the Libyan in front of me, I knew my RIO could help me to get my eyes on the other MIG. That extra set of eyes is invaluable when all hell breaks loose.
If China is near collapse, why has Congress allocated 1.6B for anti-China propaganda?
That is a very good question for asking. Why stop Huawei when China is not innovative and backward in innovation and steal technology? Why containing China if China is truly dying from Lack of child birth and slowing population? Why badmouth China using monies you bare have! if they are real bad, won’t the truth hurts?
US behaviour don’t add up! If it says US is an exceptional nation why do you need to badmouth China and knee cap it? If China’s product is so inferior why do you need to put tariffs on them? If China is weak why do you need to spend like a drunken sailor on weapons and why patrol South China seas? If you say Taiwan hate China why do you need to encourage them to be independent?
If the US really believed in Chinese doing genocide on the Muslims in China why worry about their influence in the Middle East? If you really thinks Hong Kongers are protesting on their own why pay hard cas at protest street corners using CIA and M16 monies? If the US says it is still the head honcho why bother about China?
If USD is so great why worry about BRICS? Why are your senators talking about Dedollarisation? They got nothing better to do? If you think India is really your friend and you include them in QUAD why are you upset they buy Russian weapons and energy? If Vietnam is really your friend why is your media trouble making and war mongering in Vietnamese people over China? If Russia is just a gas station masquerading as a nation why do you need long range missile? If Russia is losing as you say why do you need to send 50 billion every other months to Ukraine?
If you say Europe is all in at confronting Russia, why bad mouth Hungary? If Mexicans are rapist and robbers why threaten Mexicans? If China is so weak and you are so strong why bother with Chinese artificial islands and its power projections?
Heartbreak Ridge | We’re Going To War, Men
What screams “I can fight”?
I was sitting in a bar, with a kind of bad rep, having a beer with a couple of guys from work. Across the room are 3 guys standing at the bar. One them is big, about 6′4″ & 260/270. They’re a little boisterous.
Guy comes out of the men’s room in the back. He’s wearing work clothes & looks like he used them hard that day. He’s kind of “chunky.” I don’t mean he’s fat, though there’s a bit there. He looks like he’s put together with chunks & blocks & slabs. He’s about 5′ 9or10″ & 180. (Probably more, this guy works hard.) He has a little shuffle in his walk it’s been a hard day. He heads for the door.
Big guy steps back & bumps into smaller guy. Smaller guy steps aside & excuses himself & tries to continue. Big guy grabs his shoulder & spins him around.
There’s no hesitation. Little guy steps inside, grabs big guy’s lapels & slams their faces together twice. HARD!
Blood flows. Little guy turns, grabs a handful of napkins off the bar & goes out the door. Nobody follows him.
Could he fight? Oh hell yeah! How did I know it wasn’t his first rodeo? That handful of napkins.
How did the Chinese advance so much in software development in such a short time leaving the Indians behind?
I believe LANGUAGE was the primary reason
The Chinese had a 1.4 Billion consumer market for software including a 200 Million Middle Class in 2010 of whom almost 80% couldn’t understand or converse in English
Apart from a few major players , Western Software players couldn’t write or sell software packaged to interact with the end users in Mandarin
So there were two options for the Mainlanders
A. Learn English rapidly across 200–250 Million people OR
B. Create your own Software products packaged to interact in Chinese & Mandarin
So China created it’s own range of software products packaged in Chinese for its population
Initially they used the same layout formatting and designs of Western Products and produced “RIP OFFS” as the West called them
Then they found that writing code in English also needed a lot of graduates who had to speak the language
So they decided to start developing their own High Level Languages using Chinese to write the code rather than English
main qimg 743beb9a2ee9f83d4df2e121bbff66de
First they wrote their own Editors
Then they created their own languages in programming and ecosystems
As Aravind Varier says – Once you go into your language, innovation is more rapid and more faster
main qimg 02d392e2dfa2ae9957cdf54ee03abffb
Added to Chinas Digital Revolution & the 5G wave – it was inevitable that Chinese Developers became among the best in the world
Plus Chinese aren’t Indians
Rather than calling themselves Silicon Valley, they are still on a learning curve
They aim for 65% of Codes for Software Products to be written in Chinese Developed Languages by 2030
Today it’s only 22%
Almost 78% Code is still written in Java or Python or other Western Languages with Chinese Editors developed by Chinese Players
To summarize
A. They had the market
B. They needed Software in their own language to keep up with the modern world
C. They had a State run system that subsidized all development
D. They had enough money
India didn’t have that demand that China had
It was easier to ensure every Middle Class Indian learnt English than to start investing heavily in developing software products capable of interacting in Tamil or Telugu or Bengali
So we simply purchased Western products than develop our own
There was no need to
The Chinese needed to develop their own products because THEIR CONSUMERS DIDN’T KNOW ENGLISH
Our Consumers knew English pretty well
So the burning demand to develop Indian Software Products was not there
We didn’t have a unique market like the Chinese did where there would be NO COMPETITION from Microsoft or other players
If we created a software product, it had to compete with a Western equivalent and they had more money and a full ecosystem
Plus of course we had a poorer form of Government and that didn’t help
It began at the local variety store.Overnight, someone or some company installed a portable ATM on the front stoop of Michael’s Convenience Store. Old Man Michael, who only opened the store on weekdays, did not see what happened on the previous weekend. He did not remember placing a call to have it put there, and he knew that there was still a local bank that had their machines “well up and robbing us” (as he said to any of the familiar customers who asked about it). There was no phone or serial number on it (he looked around it twice), but he could see that it was connected to the main power grid – not taking power from his store and raising his bills, he thought – and he left it there, untouched and he was unimpressed. Let them charge whatever they want if people are that dumb. He opened his store and waited to see if he would have to explain what was going on outside.It took a few days before anyone noticed what was going on. A local trucker, Matt, decided to not use “those damn debit cards all the time, if he didn’t haveta,” and took out some money for cigarettes. After he got his $20 – with no service fee; nice, he thought – the machine gave him his card…and an extra $100. He looked over the slip that popped out. No, not from his account. That was all the machine. A beautiful hundred dollar bill was resting on the tray. Guess I got lucky. He did not bother to go in for the cigarettes that night. He could hit a liquor store later and maybe see if there was a good place to eat on his route.Matt did not share his good luck, but others soon figured out what the machine could do. A group of kids, right out of school and waiting to see if there were any adults around to buy them cigarettes noticed the machine right away. One of them started to press a couple of buttons while they were trying to hide from Old Man Michael and his curiosity. That was David, the son of a local carpenter who was having trouble with his bills. And, without a card of any kind, the machine gave him a clean and unwrinkled $50. Pretty soon, they all took their turn on it, grabbing $20s and $10s and a few more $50 before the owner came out with his dog, a really nasty old terrier, and threatened to “rip them a new one” if they did not leave. But they were done. The machine hummed in the soft light of the store and street lamps.A week after the machine was installed, it became the talk of the small town. Kids knew that they could get money out of it without using a card, a secret that worked out well for the local schools until one girl snitched when her mother found her new cell phone and demanded to know how she paid for it. Soon, it was declared off limits to anyone “under the age of 18”. At a town hall meeting held after this law was passed, many wanted to know how they would enforce the law if the machine was plugged in and ran all day. No one wanted to argue about this, and Old Man Michael did not want to lose any business provided by the new machine. They all adjourned and wondered if there was some reason why this was happening in their small town.It was easy to see what some of the problems would be with a machine that spat out money every time you needed some (or did not really need any of it). After a month of the machine in their town, it was impossible to ignore certain signs. One thing that a few store owners did not like was the fact that the local teens did not want to work part-time for what they paid. It was at the end of the school term for both elementary and secondary schools. Some of the local college kids would also stay on, but they only did so if they could find work. Or money. Parents knew that their kids were taking money from the machine and were upset. At least, most of them were. A few were relieved not to have to let their sons and daughters out there looking for jobs cleaning out homes of certain people (there were a few stories about the Pattersons, especially that uncle who was always around for the holidays, staring at the local girls from the high school). Others were just glad that they would not have to hand over allowances for late nights of missing cars, calls from the local police or neighbours who had very familiar scenes on their front lawns and backyards. Mrs. Murray had a son away at school and when she revealed what happened in the town, he told her that he would be at home that summer and maybe for few other summers, too. The mayor decided to let the machine stay running, but it was growing into a problem. It was a problem that he was hearing more and more about.At the bank, tellers noticed that they were busier than ever before. It seemed that people did not want to use any of the other local banking machines. A rumour began to spread that the money would not be accepted in the ATMs provided for the community (all three of the machines left for the town). The companies that built the machines contacted the bank manager, Mr. Dennison, who in turned told his staff that they would be on reduced hours until the machines were in use again (a few people threatened to quit; some had already made quite a bit of money from the new machine). Mr. Dennison, in the middle of a bad breakup and looking at his tax return, decided to call the mayor. They had been friends since grade school, sharing the same bus when they went to the high school and even dating each other siblings (Maura was the one breaking Mr. Dennison’s heart; why didn’t Martin tell me what she was really like, he thought). The mayor had a moment to himself before he decided what to do.
*
It was another town meeting, but reserved for certain people who had a vested interest in putting things back to normal. The mayor invited the chief of police (his brother, another Patterson, kept an eye on who entered the office), Mr. Dennison (of course), certain vice-principals and principals (strange to see them at this time of day), certain business owners (including Old Man Michael, who never showed up), and a few others that could be trusted. It was not official. It was not on the record. And it was not held at city hall.
It was a very private meeting.
They waited for the weekend and then set out late on a Friday night to finally fix things. They all decided to walk in the darkness to the store and see if there were any potential witnesses before they began. In the dim street lights, they could see no traffic. Matt complained that they could have done all of this with his truck if they had just listened to him (he wanted to show off the new vehicle he had bought that month). They ignored him, as they ignored the chief of police’s calling for them to do it quickly before he had to arrest them (the other Pattersons in the group laughed out loud).
The lights were out over the store. Had Old Man Michael left without anyone noticing? That did not seem possible, and as they got closer, they had to agree that even if it was impossible, it had happened. There was no car in his yard (he never seemed to use the money for buying a new one or repairing what he had). Even the lights in front of the store were off (where were his security lights, thought Mr. Dennison out loud; he always had them working). If they had been on, they would have noticed what they could not see from a distance.
The ATM was gone.
The mayor ran ahead of the group, sweating with the effort and dropping his wire cutters as he saw the scratches on the wooden boardwalk. Everyone noticed that the cable that hooked up the machine to the city grid was cut through and left as a reminder of what was once there. They walked around the store property, looking through some of the nearby forest where they could see no trace of any struggle with such an awkward machine. The best guess was that Michael had taken the machine and decided to skip out of town with “his own personal moneymaker” (the mayor really did not like Matt, but he admitted he must have been right). They noted the time, went home, and decided to not talk about what they had done that night.
The summer ended, kids went back to school, and Old Man Michael’s store stayed closed. It was later taken over by a well-known discount chain store. If they had been paying attention, they would have known that this was the real problem that they should have been concerned about, not a machine handing out money. But they shopped there all the same, wondering what happened to the machine that they now missed. And also Old Man Michael, who had taken his share of money, decided to leave, and was almost forgotten by the town. It was just fortunate that the ATM was forgotten by the company, despite being listed as “a brave experiment in money distribution” by certain executives testing the water in various small towns in the country. They would have found the whole process quite fascinating.
Chicken and Dressing Casserole
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Ingredients
1 cup thinly chopped celery
1 large onion, thinly chopped
1/2 stick butter
1 can cream of chicken soup
1 can cream of celery soup
1 can chicken broth
4 chicken breasts
2 to 3 teaspoons sage
Salt and pepper
Instructions
Make one 8 inch square pan of cornbread the day before.
Cook chicken pieces in water with salt and pepper until done. Cool, then cut into small pieces.
Cook celery and onion in butter until tender. Crumble cornbread into large bowl.
Mix celery and onion and chicken pieces all together with cornbread.
Mix all 3 soups into the mixture.
Add up to 3 teaspoons sage, salt and pepper to taste. Pour into large baking dish.
Bake at 350 degrees F until done, about 30 minutes, until lightly browned on top.
Serve with chicken gravy ladled over servings, with cranberry sauce on the side.
This is a must watch video!
This video is in its original quality: 1080p.
What happens when AI turns Elon Musk into a Kung Fu master from the Ming Dynasty? 🥋⚔️
You get THIS wild viral sensation that’s got Chinese social media buzzing! 🎤
“I’ll sack those the government fears to sack. I’ll handle what they can’t—and even what they won’t!”
This AI-generated masterpiece blends tech, history, and humor into one unforgettable video.
The internet can’t stop talking about Musk’s “department of government efficiency” energy in this hilarious parody.
Which is the most admired country now that the USA has become such a laughingstock to the world?
China.
China is admired and respected by most countries, especially in the Global South. (The Global South represents more than 85% of humanity.)
Why is China so admired? Five principal reasons:
China underwent the most amazing economic miracle in human history. It grew from total impoverishment to become the world’s largest economy (by PPP) in only 35 years!
China is the most peaceful world power. It has fought no wars since 1979.
China is helping most of the countries in the world through the Belt and Road Initiative. They are extremely grateful for China’s assistance.
China’s unique form of democracy garners the highest level of support from the Chinese people. It works much better than Western liberal democracy.
China is the most technologically advanced nation on earth. It leads the world in 57 out of 64 critical technology fields. It is granted more patents than the USA and Japan combined!
Prosperity. Peace. Benevolence. Democracy. Technology. China ticks all the boxes for the most admired country.
China is a better country than the USA by every measure.
I want to talk about the steam-shovel graveyard that I discovered on the edge of Milford, Massachusetts.
Back in the day, those big yellow construction vehicles and dozers were all steam powered. And the biggest of them were called “steam-shovels”. Oh, for certain, they played a major role in the taming of the Industrial Revolution, but they became obsolete.
And were discarded.
And forgotten.
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And one day, I am walking though the beautiful Massachusetts woods when I come into a lightly wooded glade; one that must have been a field decades ago, and there they were. Steam-shovel after steam-shovel. SO many. I started counting them.
Some had trees growing inside of them. Others were so ruined that they looked like rusty paper.
This is one of those things that you never think about.
What happened when the steam-shovels became obsolete?
Ah.
They went to Milford Massachusetts to die.
Don’t be a steam-shovel.
Today…
Why don’t churches open their doors at night so that homeless people have a warm place to sleep? Would you continue to give money to your church despite the fact they don’t help the homeless?
A youth church in my hometown used to do that. The door was always open, and the underfloor heating ran all night in winter.
In thanks, the homeless used to shit in the corners, despite there being a public toilet just outside the door. A free one, I might add.
A newly bought set of hymn books, worth a few hundred euros, had been pissed on and needed to be replaced, and their insurance wouldn’t cover it because the door had been unlocked.
They got angry phone calls from parents because they’d made teenage volunteers scrub the shit stains out of the floor and only told them afterwards what it was, and hadn’t provided anything even resembling proper equipment for handling human waste.
There were regular attempts to break into the sacristy to get at the valuables stored there, or to cause more damage to church property. Probably both.
The people who came there had no respect for the building or its occupants. They were actively, maliciously, destructive. At one point, somebody had not only shat on the altar, but also apparently spent some time stamping their still wet shit into the stone. The whole thing had to be replaced, which wasn’t cheap.
That was the point where their pastor decided that maybe locked doors served a good purpose after all.
Lots of churches do support homeless shelters or soup kitchens / food pantries.
And did you know that there are other issues in the world than homeless people? Shocking, I know. Some churches even do ridiculous things like send money to schools in India or Africa so kids there can get an education and have a better future! How dare they! Or support hospitals and clinics in developing countries! Or orphanages! What a disgusting waste of money!
Panama Agrees to “Not Renew” China Belt and Road Initiative; Will try to cancel early
The President of Panama, José Raúl Mulino has announced that following his meeting yesterday with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Panama has decided not to renew its 2017 Memo with China, regarding their “Belt and Road Initiative.”
Moreover, Panama told Secretary Rubio they will look towards voiding their Agreements with the Chinese Government prior to their End Dates set for 2027 and 2028.
Ah. The war with China has begun.
Good thing that China has a deep sea port in Chili (finished last year). Rendering the strategic importance of the Panama canal less important.
The primary goods transiting this Panama canal are (I believe, but am not sure) is to the United States. China can access South America via the Chilian Port to the West, and directly to the Eastern side via African sea routes.
We shall see.
Bottom line; I think that China has expected this to occur and has arranged other systems to utilize. -MM
Among Russia, the USA, and China, which do you trust the most, and which do you trust the least, and why?
That’s easy
The US – I trust the least
Simple reason
They are Liars and have been caught twice
First was the Iraqi WMD Lie
Second was the S&P and Moody both rating the Subprime Security CDOs as AAA or A+, 8 months before they went bust – clearly being in on the scam
The Chinese & Russians – I trust more as long as what they say makes sense
Also simple
I haven’t had evidence of China or Russia lying on major issues
I don’t count what Western Media say
Like I said, I lost trust of them when Powell lied to the UN about WMD in Ukraine
The Ukraine war is the best example
The West said Putin would collapse six times and Russia would collapse and Russia had enough weapons and missiles for 6 weeks
My own logic said this was BS
As early as 2022 , I stubbornly wrote off all the nonsense spread about Russian imminent collapse by people like Mischa firrer as total propaganda
Myself and a few others including the now banned Alexander Finnegan
Today logic has won and everyone admits Russia is winning
New Trump Foreign Policy?
How do you objectively evaluate China’s military strength?
We already know three incontrovertible facts:
China has the world’s largest army (over 2 million).
China has the world’s largest navy (more than 400 ships).
China has an enormous nuclear arsenal (at least 500 nuclear weapons).
China is technologically very advanced, especially in the military.
China has advanced hypersonic missiles (the USA doesn’t).
China has the very advanced J-20 and J-35 stealth fighters.
China has the advanced Type 003 supercarrier with a very innovative electromagnetic catapult.
China has been making huge breakthroughs in submarine technology.
China’s shipbuilding capacity is 232 times greater than that of the USA. China can replenish its navy much, much faster than America can.
We also know that the US military is facing a number of huge challenges:
Maintenance is a continuing woe, especially in the navy and the air force.
At any given time, only about half of the F-35 fleet is operational.
The US military has a serious recruitment crisis.
Some more facts:
The USA hasn’t won a significant military victory since WWII.
The USA has lost nearly all its wars, particularly against rice farmers and goat herders armed with AK-47.
The last military peers the USA fought with were the Imperial Japanese and German Nazi. Today, the USA doesn’t know how to fight against a true military peer.
Given all of the above, I judge China’s military strength to be at least on par with the USA. Objectively speaking.
What was buying a gun like before background checks were implemented?
My parents bought me my first shotgun when I was 12 years old. They ordered it out of the Sears & Roebuck catalog (the big Christmas Wish Book) that had quite a few pages of guns available by mail order. The shotgun was delivered like anything else they ordered. It wasn’t the shotgun I had circled in the catalog and I was disappointed. My grandmother was visiting us for the holiday and sat me down and had a talk with me about gratitude. I acquiesced, and was glad I had a new shotgun. That afternoon my dad and my grandmother drove me out to the farm so I could try it out. I had walked about 50′ when a covey of birds flushed out of some cover and I got the very first bird I’d ever shot at on the wing and I fell in love with the shotgun. I carried that 16 gauge, bolt action shotgun for 10 years, harvesting hundreds of birds; pheasants, quail, doves, ducks, and geese, before I got a nice semi-auto 12 gauge.
When I was 13 and my older brother was 16, we walked to the farm store and went in and bought a Remington 870 pump shotgun in 12 gauge for our dad for his birthday. He’d always had to borrow a shotgun to go bird hunting and had bought me one before he had one himself! My brother and I walked a mile right down the sidewalk along Main Street going home with that shotgun and a box of shells… swapping who got to carry the shotgun a few times. Nobody thought anything about 2 boys walking down the street with a shotgun.
Guns have never been the problem. Society has become the problem.
Cheers | Cold Opens: Season 1
Your life matters
A couple of years ago, I noticed a hunchbacked figure standing in our front garden, but I had no idea what it was doing there. Instead of approaching the figure, I watched it patiently, and noticed that she seemed to be pulling weeds. And then she was gone.
Over the next few weeks and months, the woman reappeared on an irregular basis, and proceeded with pulling weeds on her own in our frontyard, slowly and decidedly, but also absently — as if she was meditating.
Sometimes, I also heard her singing.
One day, we walked up to her to have a chat. And so she told us she was a widow who had lived on her own for almost a decade now, only a couple of houses further down the road, and that in lack of any company (except for a son who only seemed to surface if he needed something), one day she had decided to pull some weeds — be cause she loved doing that.
And she had chosen our frontyard.
She asked us if that was alright, and we happily acknowledged. It was the start of a curious frontyard relationship which sublimated through (watching) pulling weeds, (listening to) old forgotten songs, waving hallo to each other with a smile, and the occasional short chat. It lasted for some years.
One day, the weeds kept on growing and the old songs started to fade, and in front of her old house, an ugly “TO SELL” sign appeared which symbolized her passing. In between the high grass and long thistles in our frontyard, you could still find some crumbled musical notes if you had some luck.
So to answer your question: it does matter to anyone.
What is the biggest lie that Chinese government tells its people?
As a Chinese who lived in China for 21 years, and in US for 6 years.
I think the biggest lie is how advanced western world is.
In Chinese TV or news, we are told how American kids do housework start from small age, how people are so polite and aware of protecting environment, how good their health system is, and the list goes on.
So in China, most people think white people are so educated and nice, and US is like heaven.
After I came to US, I realize it’s not like that at all.
All mankind in this world are alike, we have same weaknesses. I am not saying US is bad, but it’s not much different from China to my opinion.
Most Americans in my age that I know don’t know how to cook.
And the American health system is so so so expensive, maybe the quality is better, but it’s way too much more expensive compare to China.
Again, I am not saying US is bad, it’s better than China in some areas, I am gonna list few things that I really appreciate:
First, bribing is much less in US than China. I don’t see people bribing in US, but in China, people have to send money to doctors or teachers sometimes.
Second, the competition is less in US than in China, people don’t need to work extra hours most of the time.
Third, media has more freedom to judge the government. Last, obviously people in US can enjoy a more advanced living condition.
But, it’s not as good as how it has been said in China.
Wouldn’t raising tariffs on foreign goods be better for American products? Especially since American laborers make so much more than foreign countries pay for labor?
What American products? Trump wants to slap a 60% tariff on all Chinese imports, and 10% on all others. Guess where many American companies do their manufacturing. Hint: not in America. Hanes and Fruit of the Loom do not make their stuff here. Tariffs are not going to change that. It’s simply going to increase prices on undies, t-shirts, and sweatshirts. What about consumer electronics? Are any being manufactured in the US? No. Everything from phones to computers to car parts to washing machines are made elsewhere, even when they have an American corporate name slapped on them. A few are put together here from Chinese and other foreign-made parts. Tariffs won’t help them. I could go on here, but I think you get the picture.
Pretty much every economist agrees: tariffs are bad, m’kay. The best-case scenario is that they are used to protect specific American industries, but there are few American industries to protect and Trump’s tariffs are anything but specific. American corporations will not build new factories in response to Trump’s tariffs because they are too expensive and take too long to build, and by the time these projects are completed, Trump and his tariffs will likely be gone. American corporations have built a worldwide supply chain, with parts and goods coming from everywhere in the world. As a truck driver, I’ve seen this with my own eyes. And we all saw what happened when it was disrupted. Remember? This is how business is done now.
The problem now, and in case you were wondering why Biden didn’t get rid of all of Trump’s tariffs from the first go-round, is that Americans, (half of them, anyway), have come to believe tariffs are good. Stubborn ignorance is extremely difficult to overcome. People will complain about high prices while having zero understanding of why they are high.
What is your opinion on Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on Chinese imports? What potential consequences could this have for American consumers?
The Current Value of China US trade is approximately around $ 600 Billion a year
China exports approximately $ 460 Billion of Goods and Services to US and US exports close to $ 140 Billion of Good and Services to China
Scenario : Flat 60% Tariffs from US on all Chinese Exports & No Reciprocal Tariffs from China
Impact on China :—
In three years – the Total Trade with China would shrink to $ 394 Billion a year
That would translate to $ 282 Billion of Exports in Goods and Services and $ 112 Billion of Imports from USA
It’s still a $ 170 Billion a year trade surplus
Impact on GDP is 16% or roughly around 0.80% a year
Number of Jobs lost due to transfers to Vietnam, Mexico and India would range at around 30%
Currently around 4.25 Million jobs are dependent on US Exports, so Around 1.4 Million Chinese will lose their jobs
That will rise unemployment from 5.1% to 7.6% in the course of three years
Impact on US :-
If US replaces these imports with Vietnamese or Mexican then they are still mostly Chinese owned
There would be an average of 36% added to the inflation or close to 1.44%-1.80% a year of additional inflation
It would take 8–12 years to stabilize and around $ 80 Billion in subsidy investments
So Inflation will be 40% higher for the first 2–3 years, then 30% higher for the next 2–3 years and then rest at around 15% higher for the last 6–8 years
However the Chinese Economy will still make 60% of their export revenue back thanks to Vietnam and Mexico and India and regain back around 0.48% a year in GDP growth
Loss to China
$ 70-$90 Billion Export Revenue a year
1.4 Million Job Losses over 3 years
0.32% to 0.40% a year dip in GDP Growth (4.7% go 4.30%/4.40%)
Loss to USA
1.50% additional inflation on an Average for the next 12 years
Value Addition to US Economy lowered by 18% for the next 8–10 years
No extra jobs created
Economic Impact on Chinese Economy (3/5 yr) :- $ 607 Billion / $ 895 Billion
Economic Impact on US Economy (3/5 yr) :- $ 2143 Billion / $ 3535 Billion
So the per capita Chinese over 5 years will lose around $ 611 each
The per capita American will lose around $ 10,552 each over the next 5 years
Conclusion
Even assuming Trump imposes 60% Flat Tariffs across Chinese Goods – China’s cumulative five year loss would be $ 700 Billion in terms of Job Losses & Export Substitution
US loses $ 3.6 Trillion in Inflation rise and Value addition substitution
China can solve this by rising its fiscal deficit to 0.9% (From 3.4% to 4.3%)
US needs to raise its Fiscal deficit to 1% or from 6.1% to 7.1%
So
EVEN IF CHINA DOESN’T RETALIATE IN ANY WAY IF TRUMP IMPOSES 60% TARIFFS FLAT ON CHINESE IMPORTS – US LOSES FAR MORE THAN CHINA DOES AND FOR FAR LONGER
Now Imagine if China retaliated and imposed an export tariff of 60% on all components it exports to Vietnam and India and Mexico which will be used in Assembly of Exports to US
Or
Imagine if Trump demanded even 30% Imports be made in US instead
US would be Royally Fucked.
Scenario : Win – Win Partnership
Trump removes tariffs from China and China goes back to buying US Farm Products and other exports
Trump agrees to remove export controls on technology and go back to 1/1/2019 status
Impact on China :-
In three years Total Trade would rise to $ 775 Billion a year
This would translate to $ 513 Billion of Imports and $ 262 Billion of Exports
Trade surplus will shrink from $ 320 Billion a year to $ 251 Billion a year
China gains nothing at all except that Chinese domestic high technology and advanced technology budding industries will slow down significantly
Why buy Chinese Chips when TSMC floods China with 3 nm Chips and why buy Ascend Servers when A100 floods the country and why spend billions to try and make EUVs when ASML sells you everything again without restrictions
Impact on USA :—
Continuing Deflation due to China
Controlled Inflation
Controlled Value Addition
Minimum 75,000 new farming Jobs added in 3 years
Farmers Revenue growth between 7% to 9% a year over 5 years (Against (-) 4% to (-)8% a year over the last 5 years)
Conclusion :—
US gains far more than China does with a win win partnership and maintains Tech Dominance for at least another 20 years
So as you can see
Chinese want Trump or Biden to do what they are doing
It causes short term pain but ultimately surges them faster to Tech Independence with the losses being painful but not irreparable
Meanwhile it will cause the US massive pain and damage and weaken them even further and make them more miserable
Meanwhile if the US decide to end the tariffs and export controls tomorrow
China loses $ 60 Billion Trade Surplus a year with US & with a flood of US Technology back in China, the local innovation slows down badly
It helps US significantly and is bad for China
They say when Stupidity and Corruption and Evil combine together – It’s end of the system
That’s the fate of the US
Any guy with brains would have kept the win win situation with China and maintained No 1 Status for another 30–40 years minimum
China gains with Trump or Biden and may actually lose with someone like Newsom in the White House
1 (30-ounce) jar of extra chunky spaghetti sauce with mushrooms and diced onions
1 medium onion, chopped
1/2 teaspoon garlic puree
1/3 teaspoon Italian seasoning
3 teaspoons red wine (optional)
1 (14.5 ounce) can stewed tomatoes, cut up in juice
1 medium zucchini sliced
Instructions
Cook rotini according to package directions, substituting 1 can vegetable broth for part of the water.
Cook until done (about 10 minutes). Drain and set aside.
Cut chicken breasts into a 1 inch dice. In a large pan, combine spaghetti sauce, 2 cans of vegetable broth, onions, garlic puree, chicken, Italian seasoning, red wine, tomatoes and zucchini.
Cook until vegetables are tender and chicken is cooked through (20 to 30 minutes).
Add cooked rotini, and cook until heated through.
Biden… OMG!
It’s so pathetic it is funny.
Why does China hate the United States so much? Is it because they’re number 1 and China is not?
This is quite understandable. The United States and China are like two shops in a community. China was running its business well, but the U.S. frequently tells the community residents that Chinese products are subpar and has its neighbors loitering in front of China’s shop, taking over their territory. This makes it difficult for China to do business and leads community residents to think that those working in that shop aren’t good people. As a result, many Chinese people develop a negative view of the U.S., and if their interests are directly harmed because of this, it can turn into resentment.
It is well known that China’s GDP is now the second largest in the world, and its manufacturing, cutting-edge technology, and international influence are all significant. To maintain its global hegemony, the U.S. has begun to fully suppress China’s development. Economic sanctions, factional opposition, and smear campaigns are all tactics the U.S. employs. The trade war that began in 2018, along with international efforts to encircle China and create issues in the South China Sea, openly violates the China-U.S. Joint Communiqué by selling military weapons to Taiwan, and undermining China’s human rights and democracy issues have all dealt blows to China’s economy and international image.
As China’s countermeasures rendered these tactics ineffective, the U.S. escalated its efforts, completely breaking through the bottom lines of international law and national ethics. It imposed extremely high tariffs on electric vehicles, lithium batteries, and photovoltaic cells imported from China, simply because Chinese products far exceed American ones in terms of cost-effectiveness and technology. The U.S. has also unfoundedly exaggerated the “China threat” narrative, openly defining China-U.S. relations as a “new Cold War” in Congress, and even passed a bill to spend billions of dollars on efforts to discredit China. Even in U.S. elections, political support is often leveraged through an anti-China stance. It can be said that hostility toward China has become a form of political correctness—public and widely accepted—forcing China, which originally focused on its own development, to endure unfair external obstacles.
However, in the past decade or so, the United States had a huge attraction for the Chinese people, and the aspects of legal justice, advanced science and technology, high living standards, democracy and freedom made the Chinese people yearn for this so-called “most developed” country. But the actions of the United States today have made it clear to the vast majority of Chinese people that it is not the country they once thought it was. Instead of treating China with respect and friendship, the United States has been repeatedly suppressing and hostile towards China, just like it did with the Soviet Union and Japan before. It has also been creating and stirring up conflicts internationally in order to sell more weapons, including supporting Israel’s genocide, paying no attention to the international opposition or the lives of people in Gaza. Furthermore, the number of countries targeted by the United States for economic sanctions has increased by nearly tenfold in the past decade, affecting nearly 40 countries and half of the world’s population. While they are constantly accusing China of human rights issues, they are committing the most egregious violations of human rights and undermining people’s livelihoods, not just in China but around the world. People all over the world are disappointed in them.
Moreover, the “democratic atmosphere” that was hyped in the United States has long disappeared. The widening gap between the rich and the poor, the imperfections of the social welfare system, and the increasing pressure of inflation have made the rich richer and the poor poorer, and have also led to severe discrimination against minority groups and vulnerable populations. Racism, economic inequality, and social division are everywhere, but the leaders and capitalist groups at the top of the United States do not care. Instead, they keep drumming up the “China threat” to divert the attention of their citizens, and even shift the core of their domestic problems onto China, making their citizens believe that China is to blame for everything. As a result, 40 million people are living below the poverty line, 28 million people have no health insurance, an average of 300 people die every day from taking too much medicine, and more than 100 people die every day from gun injuries. Such a country no longer have anything to do with its image as the “freest and most democratic,” and even 78% of Americans themselves are dissatisfied with the way things are going in their country.
In general, the decline in favorable opinion of the United States does not exist only in China, but in the whole world, perhaps God is really “abandoning the United States”. Anyway, the United States has fallen to this point is self-inflicted. Such a country, relying on its economic and military strength, arbitrarily oppresses other countries, restricts the development of emerging countries, interferes in the internal affairs of other countries, and provokes disputes, wars that cause countless deaths, which is no wonder hated by the whole world. The so-called “first” has always been a false proposition, but a rhetoric used to beautify the means of exploitation and repression. All human beings are equal, and those who naturally treat other countries and nations as inferior and only allow themselves to control resources and interests should be resisted, spurned and condemned by the whole world.
Trump Will Make China Greater Again
You are woken from your sleep by a cellphone alert that an ICBM is streaking towards where you live. It will impact in 15 minutes. What do you do?
This happened to me while I was living in Japan. Three times.
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6:02 AM on August 29, my phone started blaring. In my sleepy stupor, I thought it was my alarm… but it was too early for that… and wait, that sounds like the earthquake alert. I roll over to pick up my phone and see the above message.
I’m not entirely literate in Japanese, so all I can really gather from the message at first is:
ミサイル – mis-sai-ru…. missai-ru… missile. Missile?!
北…からミサイルが…された…です。 – …a missile has… had something done to it… from someplace North?
…な建物や地下に…して下さい。 – Please do something toward some kind of building or underground. Go there?
I’ve moved now from my bed to the toilet with my phone in hand, still staring at the message and trying to wake up. Then it occurs to me that I can put screenshots into the Google Translate app. Cleaning up Google’s brutal translation, it reads:
Missile inbound. Missile inbound. North Korea has fired a missile. Please evacuate to a secure building or go underground.
Only Japan would add “please” to an evacuation alert.
By now I’ve moved to the kitchen and am looking out the window. We were given a list of shelters and safe locations by our school, but I remembered that all of them were at least a couple miles away from my house and all I had was a bike.
How far is the missile? How fast do they go, anyway?
Would it be safer to hole up in my apartment or to try and make it to a shelter?
I start changing my clothes, in case I decided to leave.
Why would they strike Gunma anyway?
…and the most sobering thought…
Would I rather be inside at home when it hits or biking frantically?
I eventually decided to stay in my apartment.
It’s not that I don’t value my life, I do. I just figured that it would take me at least 15 minutes to get to a shelter with the winding roads of Japan and a good chance I’d make a wrong turn or two on my first trip to this place, wherever it was.
How long would it take a missile to sail from North Korea to Japan? At what point was the alert issued? An hour away? 30 minutes? 5?
I return to the toilet, this time putting the lid down and just sat there. It was the center of the apartment, had no windows, and was the safest place I could think of while I started checking News sites and replying to my coworkers’ messages who were in the same state of confusion as I was.
Luckily, I didn’t have to make peace with anyone, as a short time later it was announced that the missile had, in fact, flown over the country’s airspace and landed somewhere in the Pacific.
This happened twice more. By the third time, I rolled my eyes and went back to bed, tired of being woken up just to find that North Korea had been flashing their peacock feathers again.
Warning: sexual fetish content.A darkness passes over the quiescent surveillance of drones mining precious metals beneath the ocean floor. What else could be hiding down here? Drones are the only things capable of withstanding the pressure and heat this deep in earth’s crust. The drones and their Spider Captain, of course.Upon first glance, Chester Jones thinks nothing of it, and goes back to thumbing through the photos stored on his phone: Annika… Nata… Anita… Cherise… Only five more days until the transport arrives and he can get out of this pressurized prison.Chester whistles more anxiously than a steaming tea kettle, thumping his restless leg on the floor, fearing he is on the brink of becoming a product of his environment. There is no internet access five miles deep in the sweltering heat of the Izu-Ogasawara Trench.There it is again.“What is that?”He tips the brim of his School of Mines hat back and leans in to study the feed more closely, certain his eyes deceive him. It appears to be the lecherous tentacles of an octopus investigating one of S.P-I.D.R. Captain’s many drones. (Subterranean Poly-Intelligent Drone Regulator)Drones continue to chisel and shape the bore toward the Moho, oblivious to this life that should not, could not, be where it is.The only other life that survives below the subsurface biosphere are tube worms and microbes. Even the tube worms keep their distance from the Moho.Hydrothermal vents gave humanity access to the Mohorovičić discontinuity and its wealth of resources – namely the heat and pressure necessary to create the strongest, lightest alloys known to mankind – but it also gave that same access to the wildlife of the sea.For humanity to conquer space, it needs metal. This metal. But the nearly six thousand species in the sprawling ecosystem are protected by the U.P.I.N. (United Pacific Island Nations) charter, which is why there is a marine biologist aboard every mining ship. Every once in a while, a stray crab or fish falls into the mohole, but immediately dies because of the conditions. This octopus however, is very much alive. Alive and playful.“Hey Ronin, you awake?” Chester says. “You better get down here.”Chester watches the sway of the cephalopod in the currents and hydrothermal plumes along the sides of the mohole. It seems to be increasing in speed around the drones. Nothing in the subduction zone moves that fast.“You better get Pania, too.” Ronin radios back.“I’m not disturbing Pania. You do it.” Chester objects, remembering the last time he interrupted Dr. Pania Kahuhara during one of her many sessions inside the Ersatz.“Just wake her up, Chester.”Pania is stiff and recumbent inside the Ersatz, dreaming the vivid dreams of another world. One of her choosing. Her body sleeps, but her mind is stimulated. Either side of the ersatz divide, whether waking or sleeping, is punctuated at both ends by blinding white light, causing a sensation that you are always waking up into something like reality. It is so real, the pod itself is labeled Ersatz, in order to distinguish which of the two sides is in fact reality.Though it is company policy not to yuck other people’s yum, the awkwardness of interrupting Dr. Kahuhara in the midst of shokushu goukan in the Ersatz, was more than Chester could then and still presently can handle. Something about his Australian bluntness that is usually endearing, but often veers into a flaw of character.“Ahem… Dr. Kahuhara?” Chester squawks over the coms. “I hate to interrupt sushi night, but there’s a situation requiring your attention on the bridge.”Pania opens her eyes in irritation, climbs out of the Ersatz rested, and joins Ronin and Chester, both fixated on a monitor staring at what appears to be nothing.“What are we looking at, boys?”“Wait for it…” Chester points at a grouping of rough hewn stone next to some hydrothermal tunneling. “It’s going to move again.”Chester zooms in as close to the spot as possible, and then Pania sees it, the subtlest of squirms, and an oscillation of the eyes. It is a camouflaged octopus.“That’s… impossible.” She leans in close and studies what she cannot believe. “What’s the depth?”“We’re at about 45 kilometers.”“Bullshit.”“Look.” Chester points to the instruments.“That- there’s no way.” She looks closer. “Can we get it to move? Like really move. I want to know how big it is. I can’t tell.”Drones nearby creep toward the indistinguishable spot, reaching out tooling appendages to delicately rustle the creature.As the drones enter its orbit, the octopus changes color from pallid gray to bright shimmering red, bolting from the wall, vectoring into the center of the shaft and splaying out its tentacles in a pinwheel, expressing its extremities fully in an isotoxal octagram, finally jutting beyond the camera’s reach and into the darkness.“Don’t lose it.” Pania cries. “What good are those drones?”“They’re mining drones, not sentries.” Ronin says, arms folded, brow furrowed.Chester brings up dozens of cameras in a grid on the monitor, surveilling thousands of feet of the plunging tunnel, not one showing movement beyond the hydrothermal effluent migrating toward the surface.“We have to find it again.” Pania says. “We must know how it survives down there.”🐙🐙🐙
“Congratulations gentleman, we’ve just had our first encounter with an unexplainable species of marine life.” Pania addresses the two men in front of a wide video display of the octopus in the midst of its escape, backlit by the distant floodlights of the drones. “Here’s what we know: by size, the creature appears to fit into the Giant Pacific Octopus range, at somewhere between sixteen and twenty feet in diameter; it’s coloration would also suggest Pacific Octopus, the previous maximum depth for a Pacific Giant was 1,500 meters, and hyperthermophiles were thought to be at the physical limits of life just below the seafloor… but our little friend – Kali – was all the way down to 45,000 meters.”
“Grigori,” Chester says.
“What?”
“I saw the critter first, which means I get to name it.” Chester spits a mixture of sunflower seeds and Skoal into a plastic cup. “-and I’m naming it Grigori.”
“It’s just a nickname. We will have to give it an official name at some point, once we know more about its physiology, habits and habitat, and where exactly it fits into the evolutionary tree.” Pania says, returning to her dossier. “What we don’t know about… Grigori, is precisely how he/she got down to this depth, what its food source is, and why we haven’t seen it before now.”
“The Law of Rare Events,” Ronin says. “It’s predictable. A Poisson distribution of binomial random variables predicts this. It’s only a matter of time.”
“You wanna translate that into English for us bogans?” Chester says.
“The more times we travel down into the mohole, the deeper microorganisms go, the deeper large organisms go, and eventually, through that exploration, eventually the rare breakthrough event occurs and one survives. The probability of a breakthrough event is small, but predictably, inevitably it will happen.” Ronin holds his palm out to Chester, flexing his fingers in universal code for ‘gimmie,’ to which Chester obliges with a sprinkling of seeds.
“The questions are then, why and how?” Pania says. “Without answers to those, this isn’t a rare event, it’s an impossible event.”
“You have a Law of Impossible Events?” Chester asks.
“I have a theory,” Ronin says. “In organic chemistry, there is something called the Grignard Reaction Mechanism. Basically, organometallics form when magnesium bonds carbon to various metals. These can only occur in a waterless environment. However, my theory is that because of the extremely high temperatures, and extremely high pressure preventing the water from boiling at these depths, and the plethora of amalgams – if a creature started metabolizing magnesium and high volumes of other metals on a regular basis, eventually-”
“The Law of Rare events.” Pania says. “You’d get an organometallic life form. A carbon-based animal with metallic properties. Like organometallic skin. A creature like that could travel to these depths, in these temperatures, under this pressure.”
“Precisely.” Ronin says. “And an octopus would be particularly primed to accomplish this because of its regenerative ability.”
“Holy shit.” Chester looks at the other two. “We’re gonna be famous. We discovered a Robot Octopus. A Robo-pus!”
“It’s a working theory.” Ronin says. “We won’t know for sure unless we capture it and do some tests.”
“To that end,” Pania says. “Since we cannot continue mining operations until the creature is located and removed, I propose pulling Spider Captain away from the Moho and use it to force the octopus to the seafloor, where we can then use bait to lure it into captivity. We can flood the cargo hold and put it there.”
“What kind of bait exactly?”
“Well, we’re almost out of supplies, and there is that chuck roast in the freezer-”
“No. No way.” Chester jumps up in protest. “First you try to take my naming rights, now you want to take my meat?”
“It’s the only meat substance we have that won’t dissolve in the conditions near the hydrothermal vents.”
“That’s my celebratory chuck!” Chester says. “For going home. My last meal down here.”
“If we can catch this thing, you can buy all the chuck you can handle.” Ronin says. “Heck, you’ll be able to buy the whole damn cow.”
🐙🐙🐙
“This better work,” Chester pouts. “Damn octopus gets sous vide steak, while I’m sitting here, living off of sunflower seeds and crab paste.”
Ronin overrides the S.P-I.D.R. Captain’s internal intelligence and allows Chester to take manual control of the rig. It disengages with its stirring bit glooped in plastic rock at the edge of the Moho. The bit is shaped like an industrial whisk, and sticks straight up into the water bordering the smoldering glow.
Spider Captain thrusts itself upward in slow squirts toward the surface, illuminating the shaft with its broad flood lights, the hollow hum of the magnetohydrodynamic drive at its epicenter.
“Okay, good,” Pania says. “We can see everything.”
Spider Captain picks up drones as it goes, clearing the path to the seafloor. After several kilometers, the silhouette of the elusive octopus emerges.
“There it is,” Pania says, lurched over Chester’s shoulder. “Track it.”
The octopus climbs gradually, keeping steady pace ahead of the ascending Spider Captain.
As soon as the octopus reaches the seafloor, it darts between triangulations of rock, coral, tube worm colonies, and drones strobing lights at it, until it settles on the chuck roast at the mouth of the cargo hold. Spider Captain continues its chase, forcing the creature into the back of the bay, the drop door closing behind them.
🐙🐙🐙
The crew sleeps, having captured their prey, which has found a comfortable corner to lay inside its cell. Pania is the last to bed down, deciding to stay up and observe the creature in some semblance of stasis. Her eyelids grow heavy and her thoughts sway between her newfound discovery and the Ersatz. Thoughts of ravishing tentacles in every orifice.
She can’t remember when the dark fantasy started, or if it had always been there. A product of her upbringing, conditioning from living her entire life on the water, always around these creatures, a symbiosis with the sea. She wasn’t the first, certainly not the only one; shokushu goukan has been around for thousands of years, proliferating across the pacific, across the world.
36 hours until the transit submarine arrives. 36 hours until the world will know of their discovery, and all Pania can think about is her libidinous thirst for submission to the cephalopod. Was this why she became a marine biologist? Was this why she was miles deep in the Izu-Bonin arc? Was it fate or had she willed it all into being? The circumstances and the discovery.
I’ll be on every news show and podcast in the world, she thinks. I’ll be famous. Will they know? Will someone hack my Ersatz file? It’s happened before. Celebrities are always being hacked for their Ersatz fantasies.
Dozing off, Pania is startled by loud banging noises coming from the cargo bay. It’s Kali. She’s suctioned to the electrical paneling near the air lock door, piercing through the metal with her beak.
“That’s impossible. That’s T12 Alloy.”
Pania alerts the other two and sets the ship to red alert.
“We’ve got a serious problem.”
Dazed and startled, the two men crash into the observation room.
“She’s trying to break through the door.” Pania points at the monitor. “If she gets through it’ll flood the whole ship.”
“Use spider captain to peel her off the panel.” Ronin shouts commands to Chester, who mans the controls. Robotic limbs swing across the bay, molesting the octopus from behind. It’s only a temporary distraction, and Kali doesn’t stop tearing through the panel, using just two of her tentacles to rip the mechanical arm in half.
Ronin rushes to the airlock, putting on a deep diver suit, grabbing a welding rod he intends to use as a weapon.
“You can’t!” Pania yells. “You can’t kill her.”
“If I don’t, we’re all dead.”
Ronin closes the airlock, which quickly floods with steam and rising water. As soon as the port into the cargo bay opens, he races toward the sieging octopus. Chester flings a battery of repurposed mining appendages from Spider Captain at the creature, to no avail. The Octopus’s skin is too tough to penetrate with standard utensils. Ronin attacks with the welding rod, the bright tip of which catches the octopus’s attention. Tentacles wrap around his leg, flipping him sideways, immobilizing him in the briny water, making it impossible for him to retaliate in his cumbersome suit. Suddenly, his torso is snapped in half from the torque force of the muscular metallic tendrils. Kali enters the airlock unimpeded.
Boiling water erupts into the hallway outside the airlock as Kali enters the ship. Chester and Pania flee the scalding water, heading for port doors slowly closing in emergency. Chester trips on the mouth of the port, and Kali grabs him by the ankle. It is too late for Pania to save him. She watches his red face disappear into the pillows of water, as Kali drags him back into the jaws of death.
Pania rushes to the Ersatz pod, the only possibly safe place on the ship, but it’s only a matter of time before Kali finds her way through the port doors.
Which will get to her first — the transport, now an unassuming rescue ship, or the excited omnipresent monster outside the doors, born from the hellish improbable deep?
Upon seeing Kali drill through the second port door, Pania realizes she has less time than she thought and climbs into the Ersatz.
No time; she’s coming too fast.
Water and steam flood into the compartment as the lid of her coffin slowly closes, the raging tentacles above the glass slowly dissolve into the bright white light of the Ersatz.
The final ride
What’s the dark side of Switzerland?
When I was posted to Zürich, back in the 1990s, a colleague of mine said: “Switzerland is a wonderful place. Too bad it is inhabited by the Swiss”.
At first I didn’t subscribe with his rather radical views about the country, but after living there for a few months (and having had some run-ins with the natives and their rather peculiar views about people who, in their eyes, “didn’t belong”), I had to admit that they weren’t too much off the mark.
Maybe not all the Swiss, but a large chunk of the population over 50 at the time appeared to harbor a lingering disdain toward people who acted or looked “foreign” in their eyes, or simply didn’t conform to what they believed were the “rules” in force. And they wasted no time in making their point known right there and then, like they were the anointed guardians of an established order of things.
Pretty soon, anytime I parked my car in the street without steering my front wheels straight and parallel to the sidewalk, someone was there wagging his finger at me and pointing at them.
Within 24 hours from getting the keys to my rental apartment, an anonymous note mysteriously appeared in my mailbox, intimating to put a label with my name on it.
I was lucky enough to find an apartment in a building that once hosted a workshop, and was subsequently renovated to host a warehouse on the ground floor and my apartment on the upper floor, without anyone living above or beneath me. I listened to horror stories from my coworkers who had the misfortune to rent apartments in buildings where old and cranky Swiss neighbors made life unbearable for them by stealing and destroying their mail, having garbage strewn on their doorsteps, their laundry soiled or ripped when left in the communal washer/dryer, etc. And of course anytime they complained with the superintendent or the police, it was their word against their Swiss neighbors’, and guess who was always found at fault?
This attitude is masterfully resumed in a citation of the renowned Swiss author and playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt: “Any Swiss is both a prisoner and his own warden”.
Trump’s Victory Speech Was Absolute Cinema
Will the Balikatan combat drills between the US and the Philippines change China’s position in the South China Sea?
During the US-Philippines military exercise, soldiers on the warships were warned that it was strictly forbidden to use personal mobile phones on the deck. They were worried about being monitored by the Chinese Navy’s Type 815A electronic reconnaissance ship. The US-Philippines fleet did not even dare to turn on the radar, for fear that the electromagnetic signal would be captured by China’s Type 815A electronic reconnaissance ship at close range.
The imaginary enemy of the US-Philippines shoulder-to-shoulder maritime military exercise was originally China, and now it has come to the area near the South China Sea on the west side of the Philippine Palawan Province and Luzon Island. Since the US amphibious assault ships, dock landing ships, Philippine landing ships, patrol ships and even fighter jets are performing hard, China’s Type 815A electronic reconnaissance ship will certainly be a spectator.
Now, the US-Philippines warships are in an awkward situation. If the military exercise continues. Then, electronic signal communication must be carried out between warships, and communication must be maintained between aircraft and warships. Anti-submarine aircraft must send out electronic detection signals. Even US nuclear submarines must communicate by radio. However, China’s Type 815A electronic reconnaissance ship stayed quietly beside them, patiently waiting to receive various signals and instructions from them!! 🤣
main qimg 36224b4ecc07957f6350eecb1eedffdd
Philippines: “discovered a Chinese ship”
South Korea: “there’s no display on the radar”
Japan: “the radar screen is full of snow”
USA: “how did you find it”
Philippines: “see with my eyes”
China’s Type 815A electronic reconnaissance ship swaggered into the US-Philippines exercise area, and it was so close that it could be seen clearly with the naked eye. Did you see the surprised expressions of the Filipino soldiers in the camera? 😁
The West calls China’s Type 815A electronic reconnaissance ship “ghost”, and the Chinese call it “Street Fighter / 街溜子”. It is the most advanced electronic reconnaissance ship in the world.
Since US and Philippine warships are keen on running naked in front of Chinese electronic reconnaissance ships, the Chinese certainly like to watch. Why not?
There is no need for the Philippines to be so petty. Since the purpose of the US-Philippines military exercise is to “deter China,” why did it send a diplomatic letter to protest against the Chinese watching?
If you want to “deter China” and force China to change its position in the South China Sea, you have to show something that can “deter” China. Am I right? 🤣
Joining the French Foreign Legion
Does the development of the high-power microwave weapon by Chinese scientists indicate that China is catching up the US in military technology?
My country’s high-power microwave weapons have been put into use, and low-configuration versions have begun to be exported.
High-power microwave weapons use high-power microwaves to irradiate targets. High-voltage currents are generated on the surface of the target. These currents enter the target through antennas and cables, breaking down or burning its electronic components, thereby disabling the target or even physically damaging the target.
High-power microwave weapons are directed energy weapons, which means they rely on radiation energy to kill targets rather than physical projectiles.
High-power microwave weapons are a powerful weapon to restrain drones.
China does not need to catch up with all US military technologies, but only needs to lead the US in some areas.
Mao said a long time ago, “You fight in your way and we fight in ours.”
After all, the military strategies of China and the United States are different.
China adheres to the national defence strategy of self-defence, focusing on the development of defensive weapons, and does not need too many offensive weapons. Focusing on defence has been China’s military ideology since ancient times, and the Great Wall is the best proof of that.
The United States pursues a “preemptive, unilateral” military strategy, with its main military assets deployed overseas. It has few domestic military forces and weak national defense capabilities. Therefore, terrorists easily broke through the U.S. defenses in the “9/11” incident.
A stray cat jumped on my car and wouldn’t leave no matter how I shooed it
Have you ever seen an employee get fired on the spot because of you?
I locked my keys in my car with it running one night, after work.
The tow truck took about 3 hours to come.
I was hungry – starving, exhausted and had to pee.
After many set backs with AAA, and many calls, only to find I’d again been moved to the end of the service line, I kinda lost it.
I was sick of someone asking me if someone else had a key.
(Would I still be standing there, on the phone with them, with my legs crossed if they did?)
I was tired of being asked if I could knock on someone’s door in the complex?
(If I could have … If it weren’t a complex, I’d have peed in the bushes.)
I was tired of hearing 5 minutes.
Someone finally showed, and he quickly got me unlocked.
Now, as he was doing this, a tow truck with a kid driver showed up. I forget the exchange, but he was annoyed I already, finally, had someone there. He was rude enough I asked for his manager’s card. I was in no shape to be trifled with. I reminded him that he could nicely give it to me, or I could just dial the number in BIG LETTERS on the side of his truck. He gave me a card.
As he made a U-turn to drive away, his little snit girl friend leaned out the window and yelled, “Biiiiiiiiitch.” I thought, “Oh, child, you have no idea.”
So I called the number. My husband was a family, 2-man company. I know how hard people work. I got the guy on the phone and sho-nuff, he was a small business and had two trucks. I told him up front, that I understood and wasn’t looking to necessarily make trouble, but I was certain he didn’t want people treated the way they did me. The driver had a legal and service liability sitting beside him in the truck, which could seriously impact his business.
We closed on chummy terms and I know that kid was probably ripped a new one. I’m also sure they blamed “that bitch” for getting them in trouble instead of looking at what they were doing. After all, that’s what teenagers do.
But… he could have very well lost his job. Hopefully he lost that snotty little girl friend.
Why are Western countries so rich when most of the manufacturing and production happens elsewhere?
Tom started as a cashier at a store. He was at the forefront of everything. After a few years he got promoted to be the manager of the store. Few more years as a general manager. The General Manager no longer produces anything tangible – he doesn’t move the stuff, doesn’t handle the cash register, doesn’t code the website and doesn’t do the direct sales. But, he still makes a lot of money. How?
It is a fallacy that you need to produce something tangible to make money. People who think that probably never took a business course. The greatest value lies in producing the intangbiles – of coordinating production, leading the execution of concepts, selling ideas to investors and creating the strategy of what business the company should be in. Tangibles are a commodity. Intangibles are rarer & thus highly valued.
Of course, you need to start producing the tangibles to be able to qualify to produce the intangibles. No one would let you create strategy until you spent years in the front lines.
Use the same analogy for economies. When an economy is small & less mature, it produces only the tangibles – food and later clothes, steel and then a plenty of low value commodities. You can touch and feel the production. Unfortunately, all of these are low valued. Then it gets promoted. It starts involving in design, research and innovation — all of them are intangibles. Slowly it moves out of all the commodities and moves up the ladder helping in coordination.
A lot of times the General Manager is primarily there because he has spent years in the company and so well connected. He becomes the primary way to connect the whole company. That is the role that London and New York do. They have been out there for centuries dealing with this and have become the center of trade. Other times, the GM can produce an ingenious strategy that might revolutionize the way they do business.
Think of a company like Apple. The physical phone you touch and feel is made in Taiwan & China. Those are less than 10% value of the product. The primary value is in connecting all the ideas to produce a product that makes sense to the customer or at the least convince everyone that it makes sense for them. That is a strength that Silicon Valley almost monopolizes.
If you really understand what McKinsey or Goldman Sachs do, you will not have much trouble understanding how US and UK economy work.
Many countries in Western Europe and the US do the high level coordination and produce the intangibles – consulting, software, finance, marketing and high tech manufacturing. Even the manufacturing at the levels some German companies like Siemens do involves a lot of the intangibles. That is why they are rich.
Saturday, May 26Getting fired may well be the making of me. Can science, true science, flourish in a large institution? The Melville Neurological Institute talked a good game, always promising me freedom of scientific research, but, when it came to the crunch, they let the bean-counters shut me down.I don’t think I was unreasonable. I recognize the need for institutional bureaucracy—I enjoy a regular supply of clean pipettes as much as the next research scientist—but no bean-counter EVER comes into MY laboratory and tells me what to do with my elevators and spreaders!Turning my basement into a functioning laboratory is proving a challenge, but I remain upbeat. Fortunately, my good friend and colleague from the institute, Percy Jarmon, has helped with some software and equipment, stuff that won’t be missed—even by the bean-counters!Sunday, May 27Who died and made electricians lords of the universe? Christ, just put the wires in and leave a reliable on-off switch! How hard can it be?I’m impatient to get back to my research, is all. Darwin dallied and Wallace almost filched his Beagle. There’s something very zeitgeist about my current investigations. How does a person’s state-of-mind interact with his or her physical capabilities? Science has kid-gloved this terrain for too long. Provocative evidence lies fallow. For instance, the 98-pound woman who lifts a burning bus off her baby. It’s a well-documented phenomenon and one that obviously involves telekinesis. Telekinesis?! Is that sound of a thousand bean-counters having a synchronized heart-attack? Ha!But I say: let me see the worst, even if it lie hidden in the deepest irrational recesses of mother-love.Perhaps if these spirit-levelling dunderheads could provide me with three square inches of clean bench space, I could begin. Christ.Monday, May 28This diary is to be an old-fashioned document of scientific record. So I don’t have to write an entry every day. I’ll just record the pertinent scientific facts as they occur.If there ever are any. The place looks like a toilet. And don’t even get me started on plumbers.Tuesday, May 29So even a tea urn requires a triplicate bivouac in Brussels? Forget it. I’ll use a saucepan. I’m happy with the seat of my pants. Remember Alexander Fleming. Refused to wash himself and discovered a cure for the clap. And Wood from Pfizer. Took a pill for heartburn and got a ten-hour erection. That’s the science I seek! Wild, free! Isaac Newton stuck a bare bodkin behind his eyeball to see what was there! Yes! I dare to dream of a science without red tape!But try telling a plasterer that.Wednesday, May 30What a mess. Boxes of broken flasks, rubberless Bunsen burners…
The old lady next door is deaf and her Chihuahua is a rat-faced, yap-throated, four-legged fur-ball of depraved pellet-spitting fecundity. Science, at its best, is supposed to be meditative.
Talked to Percy at Melville and, he’s right, I have to be patient.
Of course, Doctor Percy Jarmon has always been three-parts bean-counter. A good research scientist, don’t get me wrong. He’s done some solid work. Just prefers not to rock the boat. The brain remains a neat computational bottom-liner in Percy’s carefully scrubbed hands.
Thursday, May 31
Not much doing.
What’s the point of very little dogs, when you get right down to it?
Had a bit of luck, actually. The old lady next door moved away two weeks ago. And took her little dilly doggy with her. Bye-bye poo-poo.
Anyway, just spent the last two hours talking to Jarrod Johnson, the young chap who, along with his lovely wife Jasmine, has moved in. A very nice young couple, Jarrod and Jasmine, newlyweds, eager to begin a family.
When Jarrod found out I was a neurological research scientist, he showed an almost puppy-dog like enthusiasm. He shyly told me he’d never fully outgrown his love of dinosaurs. At school, chemistry had been his favorite subject. On the internet, he can’t get enough of Richard Dawkins. He works in a bank and seems to crave the microwave-manna of popular science.
So he was only too happy to help with my basement experiments! He’ll be over tomorrow, a bank holiday apparently, at 9:00 a.m. The world seems to be rolling on its back and asking me to tickle its tummy! Jarrod isn’t all that bright, but he’s a very pleasant, open, friendly sort of chap. A scientist cannot ask for more.
. . .
Just spoke to Percy, and he’s going to drop round this evening. He wants to see how the basement scrubs up, and even wants to meet Jarrod. I prickled a little, but didn’t argue. Percy’s help with converting the basement has been tremendous. Also, as a sounding board for my research aims, he’s been invaluable—encouraging despite his bean-tending skepticism.
Now that I’m finally about to dive in, he’s probably a bit nervous. If I were to create some sort of scientific scandal, his name could be tarnished by association. So I humored the old bean.
Thursday, July 21
What a day! Mark well the date! And affix to it your humble servant’s moniker, Doctor Richard Wrigglesworth!
I don’t want to get ahead of myself. What comes of today’s extraordinary breakthrough remains to be seen. But, doubt it not, the annals begin to gape.
Jarrod arrived at nine sharp and, after coffee and a scone, we got straight down to it. It was meant to be nothing but grunt work, building a database for future work. Jarrod sat at a table with just a LED monitor and a 5kg dumbbell before him. I flashed on the screen a series of images. Jarrod looked at each image for exactly eighteen seconds, then performed three standard bicep-curls with the dumbbell. An EEG cap and profuse body-sensor coverage recorded Jarrod’s every bodily blip and mental halloo.
After five hours of this, the data-collection was solid, but I was starting to worry. Jarrod really was a nice guy, didn’t have a bad word for anyone or anything. But was he, as a subject, a little bland, a little lacking in character, personality or substance? I was after dark mysteries of the mind, but Jarrod seemed a whole lot of sunshine and lollipops. Even the photograph of a Chihuahua being dangled over the ferociously eager maw of a wood-chipper didn’t provoke much more than a mild hiccup in his breezy brain wave.
Then it happened. His eyes locked on the screen, a growl sounded from somewhere sub-thoracic. He began flipping the dumbbell about like it was a tea-cozy. The readouts and dials fritzed. According to the computer, the dumbbell now weighed exactly 34 grams… What happened to the other 4,966?!
Even after I shut off the monitor, it took a good thirty seconds for Jarrod to return to normal.
It remains, I have to say, somewhat of a mystery. But a mystery with a big “THIS WAY” arrow attached. The photograph that set him off was of a duck attacking a cute little rhesus monkey. The juvenile monkey had been sitting on the ground, eating a piece of melon, but was in the process of dropping it as he leapt quite hilariously away from the incoming duck. It was supposed to be a brain-pan cleanser, some light relief before something more experimentally hardcore was flashed up.
I quizzed him at length, got him to free associate with ducks and monkeys, but he was a bit shaken and washed out. I suggested we start again tomorrow, and he was more than happy to. He had a flexi-day owing at the bank.
Now I have a sleepless night’s work ahead looking for relevant pictures. But I love it. Seriously, who’d want be anywhere other than Science, the bosom of all curiosity?
Friday, July 22
Burn it to ashes. That’s the likely fate of this record of crime and folly! Dear God! Dare I speak of today? Dare I not? Could it be only yesterday that I… but no, this is a scientific journal. If hell itself yawns, somebody has to stay calm and sift the sulphur.
Jarrod arrived at nine, dot on time. I asked for his thoughts on yesterday’s proceedings—and he seemed not to remember anything out of the ordinary. Odd. “The duck and monkey?” I enquired. All he could remember was a sort of pressure in his head, which he’d put down to the EEG cap being too tight. I let it go, assuring him that today the cap would be roomy.
I must have shown him upwards of thirty duck-and-monkey photos, interacting in various ways, some comic, some violent, some both. Nothing. So I flashed up yesterday’s photo. The effect of it was instantaneous and truly awful. He leapt from his seat, tearing off the EEG cap, flinging himself across the room, crashing into the card table upon which sit the tea and coffee and scones. From there he literally began trying to climb up the wall. Hard to do when one hand was busy holding his head as he cried, “Make it stop! My head’s going to explode!”
I raced to him. He fell, crashing heavily onto the card table, destroying it and our untouched morning tea. He uttered a ghastly groan as he thrashed about in the rubble, finally coming to rest on his side.
I gently rocked his shoulder. “Jarrod?” Was he dead?
But he stirred and, with my help, began to sit up. It was only as he opened his eyes and turned his head to me that I saw it. Almost too awful for words. A teaspoon. The handle fully buried in the side of his head, only the metallic bowl sticking out, like a malicious little supernumerary ear.
“Oh, God, Jarrod!” I whispered.
He was groggy. “Guurrgh…what happened?”
“Jarrod, how—how do you feel?—No, no, God, don’t shake your head!”
“Actually,” he said, breaking into a pleasant smile, “I feel pretty good. Sorry, Richard, but I don’t think I want to wear the brain cap thing again.”
“Oh, that’s fine, no worries. I think we’re pretty much finished, anyway. So, um…your head? You mentioned before, while you trying to climb the wall, that it was giving you some trouble?”
“Yeah,” he grinned, lifting a hand toward the side of his head—which I grabbed and lowered just in time! He continued, “No, it feels good now. All last night it felt weird, a weird sort of pressure. But it’s fine now.”
“Okay. Great. Science is a labyrinth, that’s for sure, ha ha.”
I helped him to a chair—not that he seemed in need of help. I grabbed my phone, thinking I’d call Percy. But, before I rang, I went upstairs and made a cheese, gherkin and lettuce sandwich. I also poured a large glass of milk and took both items down to Jarrod in the basement. He thanked me and tucked in with a healthy appetite.
Possibly I should have been rushing Jarrod to hospital, but something made me hesitate. Something about the spoon, twinkling like a satellite dish on the side of an exposed hillock. As he finished off his sandwich, I went to my bookcase up the far end of the room. This peculiar neurological situation was ringing a bell. Once, an iron rod went straight through some chap’s cerebellum. And he was right as rain. However, instead of pulling a reference book out, I got down on my knees and ran my tongue along the spines of the neatly arrayed books. Each and every one. Made my tongue quite dry and yuck.
Returning to Jarrod, who was downing the last of his milk, I said, “Jarrod, there’s something I have to tell you. It’s…it’s a bit shocking.”
After a little burp, he said, “What is it?”
Stumbling a little at how to speak of the spoon, I instead stayed silent and blew him a kiss. He laughed at that, then stood up, saying, “Same time tomorrow?”
I nodded. And he left.
That was, what, four hours ago? There are really only two theories possible here. The shocking incident with the spoon may have caused my psyche to fray or fracture in some hopefully temporary way. Or—and my blood runs cold to write this in black-and-white—Jarrod has, through the mother of all accidental discoveries, gained an advanced form of cerebrokinesis, the ability to control the minds of others. Oh, if only I could divine exactly where the inside tip of his teaspoon sits!
To be honest, I’d prefer all this to be the result of my own madness. But, as I sit here writing this, my thoughts seem depressingly orderly.
If indeed they be my thoughts.
. . .
You know what’ll stop me sleeping tonight? This question: if Jarrod has gained a cerebrokinetic ability, why would he make me lick my books? The sandwich, sure, perfectly alright. I would have made it for him anyway, without the mental strong-arming. But the blown kiss? Smacks of smart-arsery.
Sitting here, the sun going down, his bland smile starts to seem sinister.
Saturday, July 23
It’s midday. I know what I have to do, but I hesitate. I’m fairly certain it’s not MY hesitation, so I can only sit here, awaiting a stray moment where I might be able to strike with an uncontaminated will.
Jarrod arrived three hours ago, smiling, spoon jutting as brassily as a cuckoo in a new nest.
My first question was, “So what did Jasmine say?”
“Oh, I didn’t see her before she left to visit her mother.”
“Really? How convenient. A sudden emergency, was it?”
“No,” he said pleasantly, “a visit.”
Time to cut the crap. “Jarrod, I need to know if you can control my mind. Did you make me lick my books yesterday?”
He gave an uncharacteristic, chilling little hee hee!
“I did,” he said, before adding another hee hee!
Despite the giggling, he was in fact prepared to talk openly and honestly about the whole thing, which was a relief. At one stage I gave him a fifty dollar note from my wallet—but he was only joking around. I’ve no doubt he’ll give it back.
He was as surprised as me when, yesterday, his desire for a sandwich was realized by my actions. Actually, a lot more surprised than I was. I’d experienced it as the most natural thing in the world. He admitted the book-licking was spur-of-the-moment and experimental. The blown kiss, harmless byplay. Well, obviously it could’ve been worse.
“I guess you realize the enormity of this?” I said to him. “For science, the fate of the world, etcetera.”
“I dunno, I’m a bit disappointed. After I left here yesterday, I went down the street and—”
I gasped. “But didn’t people see your spoon?”
“I wore a hat, dummy. But, you know, it turns out I can only control your mind, no one else’s.”
I felt relieved by that, although I wasn’t entirely confident of that relief. I was, right then, starting to think a lot of rather flattering thoughts about Jarrod. Bland? He wasn’t bland: quite spry, the ole Jazza, always up and about, a real player, this lad…
Now, surely that was nonsense. I would never say “spry”.
“Jarrod,” I said, holding onto the table edge, “this is scientifically—well, it’s off the scale it’s so big. But, at a personal level, we need to get some rules in place. Surely you see my precarious position here?”
He said, “I swear never again, under any circumstances, to control your thoughts, Richard.”
I don’t think I’ve ever been struck by a statement of such deep and unarguable sincerity. I thanked him and he rose to go with a charming, lively, intelligent smile.
It was a good thirty minutes after he left that I began to have second-thoughts. Charming, lively and intelligent? Jarrod? Phooey. And you can kiss those fifty smackers goodbye while you’re at it. This was all deeply distressing and disorientating.
And I’ve been sitting here in the basement ever since, a single sterile teaspoon sitting on the table before me.
It’s a one-in-a-million shot, but my only chance. I’ll fight fire with fire.
I’ll do it for science.
—a knock at the door? Now! NOW!
* * *
THE MELVILLE NEUROLOGICAL NEWSLETTER
The Melville Neurological Institute would like to extend its heartiest congratulations to Doctor Percy Jarmon upon his recent Nobel prize nomination.
Doctor Jarmon’s work on the Yersinia fustus parasite appears to be conclusive and truly ground-breaking. This ancient, insidious parasite, almost undetectable after more than one-hundred-million years of co-evolution, has often been purported, but never proven. There now appears to be little doubt of its existence, thanks to Jarmon’s recent courageous and brilliantly innovative field-work.
The life cycle of Y. fustus turns out to be both simple and ingenious. After invading a host Homo sapiens, the bug, mimicking a billion-branched glial cell, quickly colonizes the cerebrum. Within a very short time the host develops an irrational but irresistible desire to violently puncture his own cranial vault, by any means necessary. Fantastic delusions, sometimes resulting in murder or art, often accompany this process. After the host’s skull is successfully punctured, the parasite’s spores are then released and have a very short time in which to find a new host.
The parasite seems to be very rare but, where it does exist, is rabidly contagious. The strain involved in Jarmon’s recent field-work has been destroyed.
When contacted by this newsletter, Jarmon’s only comment on his Nobel-nominated research was, “Hee hee!”
Is anyone else losing complete respect for the US at this point?
It’s the worst election result of my lifetime. And reveals something absolutely horrifying about my fellow Americans: they will vote for a literal criminal sociopath over a qualified black woman.
I thought Gore’s loss to W. Bush was terrible—but that was largely the result of cheating (it’s almost beyond question Gore got more votes in Florida than Bush did). …Then I thought Hillary’s loss to Trump was pretty awful as well, but it was a small comfort that HRC won the popular vote by literal millions (they’ve never been quite THAT far apart before).
With both, you could basically take comfort in the fact that the majority of the country clearly didn’t want the inferior candidate.
But now? Trump is a worse candidate than he was in 2016 in every way (mentally, morally, legally) and there were some horrible things about him then that either weren’t yet known (his charity fraud, his university fraud, his Stormy Daniels affair) or hadn’t happened yet (the indictments, the two impeachments, his horrible CoVid handling, becoming an adjudicated rapist, cheering on Putin for invading Ukraine, “The Big Lie,” his f***ing coup attempt, endless comments making it clear he wants to go after “the enemy within”).
By contrast, Kamala is arguably a better candidate than Biden or Hillary were, and she’s committed NONE of their supposed flaws (she did plenty of rallies in the Midwestern three, she did plenty of interviews that Hillary avoided, loads of energy that Biden was lacking, more clear than Biden, less legal baggage than either HRC or Joe, she didn’t bring up being a woman which supposedly turned people off of HRC) and ran a brilliant campaign from a terrific DNC to high-energy rallies to popular proposals (Trump’s are mostly about making people’s lives harder) to absolutely killing Trump at the debate.
But now we get this phony crap from Trump voters about how Kamala was a “bad candidate” (yeah…sure…) and from the media where they point out some mistakes she supposedly made (yeah…sure…) and how Trump will be better for the economy (yeah…sure…the guy who wrecked Obama’s economy and bankrupted three separate casinos and still believes in tariffs will magically give you a better economy…)
Point blank: this country would rather risk an autocratic regime, economic collapse, environmental ruin, and a complete wrecking of American justice and freedom than vote for a black woman. …It is a DISGUSTING result, and the fact that Trumpers are flying their covert KKK-flag openly on social media instead of being ashamed of voting for a criminal sociopath is repulsive.
TOP 100 Hyper-Realistic Female Robots INDISTINGUISHABLE From Humans
Why do so many Europeans seem to think the United States is backward?
Originally Answered: Why do so many Europeans seem to think the United States is backwards?
Possibly because they see us the way a repairman I once talked to saw the American engine maker Briggs & Stratton. I was buying my first mower, and I had bought a big yard and had put most of my cash into the purchase, so I was shopping carefully for a lawn tractor that would last a while but not clean me out.
I talked to this greasy guy with hearing aids at a repair shop where I happened to have some business, and he explained the difference between the Briggs & Stratton engines I’d grown up with and, well, everything else.
He said Briggs made the best engine in the world…in the 1940s…but that the rest of the world had moved on. Everyone else’s engines used newer alloys, fuel injection, superior noise and pollution controls, etc., while Briggs was still cranking out the same old reliable Joe that had been their cash cow for forever.
Understand, we weren’t talking best of class here, just your literal garden variety engine. He said “a Jap engine” would cost you half again as much, and if you ever let the oil get dirty or didn’t keep the filter clean, it was scrap. But if you kept the filters clean and changed the plugs every few years, it would start on the first crank, every time, for the life of the mower.
A Briggs, on the other hand, was cheap and would last forever—but you’d pay for it time and again. It would leak. It would lose compression. It would need its carburetor and points worked on every so often. But if you enjoyed working on engines, it could survive catching on fire and having the head knocked off with a sledge hammer, it just “never will run like shit.”
That’s the dichotomy here. Americans see America as the country that defeated Hitler and went to the moon. The old reliable. The “takes a lickin’ and keeps on tickin’.” The rest of the world sees us as an obsolete design, built on good principles, but trying really hard not to live by them, and getting away with it because we’re big and rich and mean. But our system “runs like shit,” and our population pays for its cheapness each and every day.
I’m not saying that’s right or that’s wrong, but I believe that’s how they see us. And if they judge us by our movies, they are not seeing any of the shiny bits that might make a counter argument.
The UK Sounds The ALARM: Russia Sunk The SHIP Сarrying British Soldiers┃RU Army Captured ‘TRUDOVOYE’
Chinese Meatball Soup
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Ingredients
Soup
2 (14 ounce) cans chicken broth
1 cup water
1 (6 ounce) package frozen snow pea pods
1/2 cup green onions, thinly sliced
1 (1 1/2 inch) cube fresh ginger, finely grated
1 clove garlic, finely minced
Olive oil for roasting
Meatballs
1 pound lean ground beef, chuck or sirloin
3/4 cup oatmeal or bread crumbs
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon dry sherry
2 teaspoons sesame oil
1 1/2 teaspoons fresh ginger, minced finely
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/4 cup chicken broth
1 egg
Vegetables
1/2 pound baby carrots, cut in half
1 1/2 cups fresh or canned bean sprouts
Instructions
Soup
Combine soup ingredients in large saucepan over low heat to simmer (reserve snow pea pods and carrots for broiling or stir frying).
Meatballs
Stir ingredients together, shape into 1 1/4 inch meatballs and place on lightly oiled broiler pan. Spray lightly with an olive oil spray if using very lean meat. Broil until nicely browned or bake at 400 degrees F for 15 minutes.
Vegetables
To roast the baby carrots, cut carrots in half, lengthwise. Rub in 1 or 2 tablespoons olive oil, and sprinkle between the meatballs on the broiler pan. Do the same with the thawed snow peas. Check while broiling, and remove carrots, snow peas and meatballs as they begin to brown. Drain on paper towels briefly and add to soup. If you wish to skip this step, you may alternatively brown the meatballs, snow peas and carrots in a wok.
With all ingredients now in soup, simmer over low heat for 15 to 20 minutes and season to taste with salt, pepper, a pinch of Chinese Red Pepper, if desired, and a dash of soy sauce.
Why is America doing its best to set China and Taiwan at war with each other? It’s half a world away from America and nothing to do with them. Why are they there at all?
There is only one answer: the United States wants to stop China’s rise! That’s why they want to suppress China with all their might and with everything they have.
Moreover, Taiwan is just one of the places, and if you scuttle the world pattern, you will find that the target of everything the United States has been doing all these years is China.
1. The Russian-Ukrainian war is not the ultimate goal of the United States; its ultimate goal is China.
The United States treats China as the number one enemy, whether economically or militarily, the United States has been unable to subdue China, so Washington provoked the Russian-Ukrainian war, the ultimate goal is to provoke a ‘New Cold War‘, through the Russian-Ukrainian war to Europe to create a ‘horror’ of the enemy Russia, so they are afraid of, under pressure to do the bidding of the United States.
The purpose of the United States in stirring up the ‘New Cold War’ is actually to unite the forces of the entire West and then deal with China with all its might.
The purpose of dealing with China is to maintain its hegemony. The United States believes that China has already threatened the global hegemony of the United States and that China must be eliminated as soon as possible.
2. The United States is endeavouring to make preparations for provoking a war in China’s neighbourhood.
After the United States has used the power of the Russia-Ukraine war to force its Western allies to listen to the United States, his next goal is to provoke a war around China to further unify its Western allies by forcing China to step in, and then to sanction China in the same way as it has sanctioned Russia.
In order to achieve this goal, the United States is bound to provoke a war in China’s neighbourhood to force China’s hand, and then the United States will lead the entire West to sanction China.
Based on this logic, China’s surrounding dangerous areas will be the next U.S. to provoke war conflict points, such as the Taiwan Strait, the Korean Peninsula, the South China Sea, China-India border are dangerous areas, especially the Taiwan Strait conflict, will be the next U.S. is bound to want to provoke a military conflict.
The intention of the United States in provoking a war in the said region is to force China to send troops, and then the United States and its allies condemn and even sanction China, urging its allies to impose sanctions on China as they did on Russia.
At the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian war, the United States actually began to lay out early!
Especially in the Taiwan Strait, the United States and Britain have begun to discuss how to detonate the military conflict plan!
At the present stage, China has practically no choice but to make preparations for a military struggle, and it can only make preparations for the unification of Taiwan by force!
But in a twists and turns, Trump is back. Trump’s presence disrupted Biden’s deployment. 😁
The next 4 years with Trump in the White House will be 4 years of rapid development in China.
The Russia-Ukraine war won’t stop, the Middle East is in an even bigger crisis, Europe has been abandoned by the US, and the US is at the peak of domestic infighting.
China is on a rampage and the next 4 years will see us laying a solid foundation for a whole new order of global industry and trade!
Trump will mercilessly teach Europe, Japan, South Korea and other allies (parasites) a lesson, frantically withdrawing from all kinds of international organisations and international treaties and becoming more and more isolated, and that’s exactly when China is holding up the flag of free trade and developing at a high speed!
What is the result of the Trump era’s opening of a trade war and technology war against China?
China’s chip technology rapid breakthroughs, Huawei is far ahead; China’s position as an industrial hegemon is as stable as Mount Taishan, shipbuilding took nearly 3/4 of the world’s orders, and new energy vehicles rode in the dust; China’s foreign trade exports are increasing year by year, and it takes more than 1/3 of the global surplus.
Do you think the Trump still has cards? 🤣
Do you really think Russia can’t defeat Ukraine? You are too naive. China and Russia are comprehensive strategic partners, and the Chinese and Russian governments have the same strategy.
Yes, the United States and the West want to use war to consume Russia’s national strength, but the United States and the West are greedy for immediate benefits and do not know the consequences.
Protracted war is Russia’s strong point, and Russia also wants to use war to consume the United States and the West. The more the US and the West invest in Ukraine, the more it will be consumed.
Russia buys time for China, and the United States and the West will decline rapidly.
Trump DROPS his plan to DISMANTLE the Deep State! MASSIVE FOR AMERICA (MUST SEE)
Why did Trump win the 2024 election?
Yesterday I was walking in the city and two young Moroccan guys were discussing the US election outcome. “He did it, the old warrior!” said one of them, admiration obvious in his voice. These were two young Muslims from what Trump had referred to as “shithole countries” during his first tenure…
People underestimated how many people do love Trump.
The media, journalists, writers of opinion pieces and intellectuals were in this little bubble where everyone, surely, must have realized after the first Trump term that he was no good? And that’s just not the way of the world.
Oh but he’s was found guilty of sexual assault, surely now no one can vote for him?
Wrong!
No one gives a shit.
Chris Brown beat the living daylights out of Rihanna and I still hear people blast his music.
We think that, as soon as someone is accused of someone heinous, that’s it.
Curtains.
They’re done for.
Now, the world has moved on from #MeToo and “cancel culture” is dead and buried…
You cannot cancel someone when no one cares about his crimes.
Oh there’s Russian interference in the elections? Big deal — plenty of people find Putin kinda cool, anyway, and at least he’s “not woke”.
Elon Musk pushing fake news and misinformation on Twitter? Again, no one cares.
“But, he was mean to transgender people! He disowned his transgender daughter!” Yeah, that’s awful, sure. But no one cares.
There’s so many scandals, so many awful things you can accuse Trump and his allies off.
But in “real world”, people don’t care…
It also seems that people are tired of “woke” topics and the right has simply won the “culture wars”, at this point.
Because even Latinos, African Americans and other non-white ethnic groups voted for Trump in record numbers.
And I’ll let you in on a little secret — a lot of immigrants and their descendants are very religious. They don’t like LGBT issues, they couldn’t care less about transgenders, pronouns and puberty blockers being given to kids, in fact they’re highly susceptible to negative campaigning about such issues.
They actually are bothered by people saying “happy holidays” instead of “merry christmas” and other such things that progressives would dismiss as silly memes only boomers care about…
Kamala Harris and Tim Walz seemed to spend 80% of their campaign attacking the character of Trump.
When everyone already knows he’s a dickhead — and they don’t care because he’s their dickhead.
People almost always love the villains in movies more than the heroes. The Joker is far more popular than Batman ever was… and Kamala Harris made for a rather poor Batman.
U.S. Lost the Moon Because of Sanctioning China
Actually this is very interesting. Not a rehash of known stuff in a click-bait video. This is full of great intel.
How would imposing a tariff on all goods imported from China affect Americans and businesses in America?
Trump 1.0 started imposing tariff on all countries around the world, not just on China. Biden continued with Trump’s policy.
After 8 years (Trump+Biden), many US scholars said Trump’s tariff policy does not work (on China).
It was tariff that USA suffered (high) inflation.
The plan of Trump 1.0 was to attract US investors in China to go back to USA. After 8 years, it is found that some US investors still stay in China. Some did move out of China but to other southeast countries eg Thailand. … US investors still did not go back to USA. They continued to do business with China 1 way or another.
Those who added 1 extra step, say, to Thailand actually cost Americans more because they added this 1-extra step to the commodity price, worsening the US inflation.
(High) tariff on Chinese products has already proven a failure to Trump 1.0. Why Trump 2.0 continues to impose (high) tariff on China is beyond our understanding.
One possible reason is that USA-Trump badly needs money to boost the weak US economy. And that may be the reason why Biden continued with Trump’s policy too.
Since Americans hate tax increase, Trump & Biden had no choice but to disguise tax increase as tariff.
Tariff 2.0 is crazier/higher than tariff 1.0. Let us watch if tariff 2.0 will cause global recession.
Why do gun owners not understand that I don’t like being around guns and they should be banned for public safety?
Greetings from England, where we all apparently hate guns.
I believe you are confused.
The gun owners do understand that you don’t like being around guns, they just don’t care. Why should they?
Americans are often mistaken about their own gun laws. The public safety you speak of is partly due to the gun owners. They are why your government can never turn too tyrannical and why you can never be invaded by land. This is why you have a right to own guns. Its not necessarily to stop burglars, it’s to prevent your government from turning tyrannical.
Just like with our third world quality socialist health services, my country is always held up as a success story for banning guns. This is bullshit. Murders happen constantly in Britain and the lack of guns just makes it slower. Knives, acid and bombs are used instead. Murder is unfortunately natural, and British murders are incredibly brutal.
So in conclusion, if your government like mine is not currently sending everyone to prison for Facebook posts, and if your country doesnt have an acid attack epidemic going on, you have gun owners to thank for this. The very idea of killing or disfiguring someone with acid would become ridiculous in Britain if we had guns, but we don’t. We instead get our faces burned off by chemicals.
You arguably have gun owners to blame for murders on the streets (though i would disagree), but this pales in comparison to the genocide you will probably never face, unlike most countries eventually.
Why are anti gun owners so incredibly smug that they don’t think a disagreement towards themselves can even exist without ignorance? Is it just your smuggery that causes your smuggery or have you ever
actually accomplished anything in your life?
I bet your’e not even one of those loud, fat, friendly Americans we all love. You probably got purple hair and a constantly pissed off face.
Don’t travel. We don’t want you. We want the ‘rednecks’. You think I’m lying? Nobody wants to travel to your shitty liberal cities anymore either, just to get robbed and/or raped all whilst having to listen to unhygienic propaganda junkies barking unrequested opinions all day. We want to go to middle America where the men are strong and hard working, where the women are clean, beautiful and not hopelessly brainwashed like yourself. I bet it’s awesome in those places with all the gun owners; fresh air and friendly people. Meanwhile your town is probably covered in turd and homeless people.
Genocide Joe
Genocide Joe, may his feeble mumbling brain rest in peace, was extremely effective at restoring order to domestic American affairs, lining all US allies in a row, and making Sinophobia a global instead of solely an American policy.
Trump will throw a monkey wrench into that once again.
Trump will immediately throw Ukraine under the bus and let Europe deal with the fallout; he’ll raise major trade tensions with American partners; he’ll throw EVs and all environmental policy under the bus too; he’ll threaten the ICC and ICJ and likely cut off all funding to the UN once the General Assembly recommends expelling Israel.
He’ll recognize Israeli settlements. He’ll threaten and probably defund universities that allow Palestine supporters any freedom of speech, sowing pandemonium and terror in academia.
And that’s with ruling out the assumption that Project 2025 is real.
The Western alliance, which goes back to World War II, is too strong to suffer permanent damage from four years of demented leadership. So is American society, which is very resilient. But for the next four years, there will be tremendous chaos, infighting, and blows to prestige.
This is an opportunity for China to demonstrate its abilities at world leadership, as it did very successfully during the first Trump term.
Economically, China is prepared for the return of Trump. Its GDP is 25% larger than in 2020 and it’s much less dependent on US technological imports. The threat of major tariffs on Chinese exports to the US is serious. During this period, fiscal stimulus will have to be a key driver of growth. However, central government debt is very low. The spending and borrowing discipline exercised by the central government for many years has prepared it well for this occasion.
The combination of decreased export revenue and emergency-level use of fiscal stimulus will accelerate the transition to service- and consumption-led growth.
When I was in the ADC being “retired”, I was required to narrate my most despicable sexual fantasies They wanted all sorts of lurid stories and things that I would fantasize about during sex.
They wanted and insisted I do this as a requirement for me being discharged from prison. I would write about my most lurid fantasies and it would go into my “binder” proving (in my own words) what a despicable pervert I was.
*sigh*
Well, everyone has sexual fantasies.
And I am a writer, so I did it. Indeed, I gave the five pages of things that I found titillating to the authority at the ADC.
I really had two main sexual fantasies.
My top fantasy (by far) was having sex in a barn; rolling about in the hay. It really was something that I was really into, and it was my actual and real fantasy. And not only that, but my wife and I acted upon it. We would find a barn, slip in and then go at it.
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Spring, Summer and Fall were my favorite adventures. Winter not so much. It’s collllld in those drafty places. But I don’t know why it was such a titillation to me. Maybe the smell of the hay, or the sneakiness of the adventure, or the threat of getting caught.
I know it sounds so silly. But it’s the truth It was a thing that I really liked and it would really help me get my rocks off. And my wife, who loved me, would also participate (obviously) with no qualms.
The other fantasy, ah…
You know, I really never got to spend any time around women. I worked in factories and in industry. And the most attractive gal was usually some fifty-year old cleaning lady. So my fantasy at that time was dating a professional secretary. These were the only women that were not hags within my immediate contacts.
Nice black three piece suit. And high heels, and of course glasses.
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I never took action on that fantasy. Though, my wife would sometimes really titillate me with that fantasy.
But that was it.
So when the ADC demanded that I write my nastiest and dirtiest sexual fantasies on paper, and a minimum of five pages, I did so, and truthfully told about my fantasies.
And I handed the papers to the ADC professional.
He looked at it, started to read it, and yelled at me. “What shit is this!” He scowled and frowned at me.
Threw the papers back at me. Ordered me to do it again, and this time write about little children, and ordered me to make sure that no one was over the age of ten in the writing. Then he ordered me to leave.
I tried.
I tried, but I couldn’t. It was just way too alien for me.
So I said “fuck this” (to myself), and wrote nothing.
If they wanted to keep me in prison past my sentence, they would have to come up with a good reason. I just wasn’t going to write any bullshit.
But others in my barracks just told me to write anything. That it won’t matter. That I could even copy their stories. But, I said “fuck it”. And didn’t so a thing.
I was usually a passive guy, but this was one thing that I wouldn’t budge on.
And you know what?
It came time for me to leave. My sentence was up.
And yeah, and they let me go.
That bullshit of me having to write a document or they would hold me indefinably in prison was all bullshit. Bull Fucking Shit.
I was this close >||< to making a big mistake.
Now, what happened to the document that I wrote about sex in the barns, and my attractiveness to business women was eventually thrown away and forgotten. And with that, so was my memory of the entire event sequence.
But that’s the was the ADC worked and that’s the way the incarceration system worked. It would have all been on file; guaranteeing me lifetime in prison because some asshole insisted that I make up stories to put in my files and my binder.
*sigh*
Sex in a barn. In Fall with my someone who I loved.
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Then home with my cats and a cup of coffee.
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It’s astounding how evil people can twist such innocent and nice things for power, wealth and dominance.
Don’t ever be convinced to do something that you are uncomfortable about.
Today…
What is your opinion about China and Chinese people?
I’m an American who lived in China for 16 years. I basically grew up there, went to school there, worked there and even got married there (though it wasn’t to a Chinese).
I’ve lived all over the country and have had interactions with people from various ethnicities, socio-economic backgrounds, religions and in different areas of China.
There is no possible way for me to sum up what I think of “Chinese” people or the country itself, except that I feel it’s been downplayed as to how diverse it really is. In fact, I hate it when other foreigners say something is ‘typically Chinese’ or generalize…because they are such a diverse country. And sometimes I feel that Chinese nationals don’t even know or appreciate how genuinely diverse their country is.
Now that I’m back in the US, it’s very hard to explain to people what China is actually like or answer their many questions about life there. About the only things I can say that are general is: 1) There are indeed a lot of people; 2) Computer stuff is cheap; 3) Eating out is cheap; 4) Public transport is extremely cheap and very efficient.
Another observation I’ve had is despite all of its diversity and it’s huge population, somehow the government/businesses have managed to really streamline things for the most part. Just working in a Chinese company, my concepts of how to deal with a large volume of applications, paperwork and workload are much different than a lot of my peers here in the US. So when I did come back and start working for US companies, sometimes my managers would be shocked at how quickly I got so much done. Like they didn’t even understand it. Not to put them down in anyway. And occasionally I would even get in trouble for doing something differently than others and they would be like, “Why on earth would you do it this way? How did you even think of this?” but that was often before they could see the results.
But on the negative side of that, I had a hard time dealing with all of the personal needs of customers and the tailoring that a lot of Americans require. I’m using to dealing with a huge workload but that’s mostly uniform where people have chosen from a small category of options. I’m not as used to dealing with the incredible personal preferences of a handful of clients who can’t seem to make up their minds. In China, they don’t tend to give you a lot of ‘options’. And people don’t really expect them either. They tend to walk in when they want a service and already know exactly what they want. So it’s a much easier process of facilitating that.
What Would Happen if the US Decided to Not Pay its Debt?
Iranian missiles said to have completely destroyed Israeli Nevatim air base and other bases; Nevatim housed over 20 F-35 fighters which are all destroyed now, as well an advanced American X-band radar site. How is Israel going to get revenge now?
It was a pretty effective strike
The details are trickling in and it does appear that Israel has had 20 damaged F-35s (They aren’t using the word destroyed) but a damaged F35 is as bad as a destroyed one for minimum 12–18 weeks
The Radar site is definitely destroyed
It’s why Israel has postponed their attack on Iran
However the attack will happen
Mostly they will use Drones and they will hit Iranian Top Military and Intelligence Brass with US Intelligence and surveillance capabilities
Lies aren’t as easily accepted without some ground truth. Sometimes, they are just partial truths taken to extremes, often times out of ignorance and good faith. This is something that all Chinese people eventually realize after living in China for long enough; some people are better at working with partial pictures than others.
‘I don’t think it can get any harder’: reality check for China’s travel industry
Stark contract between an optimistic picture painted by China’s travel data and consumers who are reluctant to spend amid broader economic anxieties.
There was a great thread by Glenn Luk as usual, responding to this article. But more on that, there was a great supplementary thread by David Fishman, who succinctly highlights the issue of interpreting China by using three anecdotes he scraped together:
In elite control societies, what often goes dismissed are the experiences of the common person. This is especially true of the US where “middle class” has represented the top 10% of US society for decades— cue the many complaints of “middle class” houses in Hollywood films that are nothing short of multi-million dollar McMansions. The same can be said about the more liberal Chinese takes on China. I for one know the mood among the high performers of academia China. It is not the greatest, though I must say, I have been quite uncomfortable being in so many BMW SUVs (ostentatious wealth not really my style).
The reason why I do not share in these dour takes on China is because of my paternal family and the fortunes of people from back from the village. I know where those family members come from, what kind of temperament they have, and especially what they have nowadays. Back in 1998, we rode in a cheap knockoff sedan sporting a false police siren (to speed on country roads), driving over half paved, half dirt roads just to get to our T5 city. Ever since, I have watched them get far wealthier. Today my elder cousin does better than me; he owns 3 properties in a T1 city and rents two of them out for a very pretty penny, while I struggle as someone in the top 5% of the US to actually buy a cheap house ($850k) in the place I grew up. The difference between my cousin that is younger by a year and my other cousin who is graduating from undergrad this year is night and day; the former has moved to the US and lives a great life but had to be top of her class to do so, while the latter is pretty much the definition of academic mediocrity. Even so, her mentality bears all the hallmarks of polite urbanite (while I remember the former offering me a beer back when we were 13, as no one cared out in the sticks). That former cousin grew up in that T5 city, the latter cousin is basically a T1 city girl; both, it seems, can do quite well for themselves despite the wide gulf in effort. Hence, people who tell me that China is terrible for everyone but the elites are only going to get the stinkeye from me— it’s like they don’t even care that my family exists.
The pattern I’ve seen in a lot of the anti-China reporting is that they pay attention to only the elites. Keep in mind we are only talking about those reports from people who seem like they know what they are talking about, either because they have Chinese names or they actually bother going to China. On the surface, this is a remarkable step up from the typical “China expert” who knows no Chinese and hasn’t ever visited. Unfortunately this step up seems to be what is selling authenticity today, when in fact it is just clearing a minimum threshold of “not 100% fantasy.”
I have said this time and time again, even all the way back to random comments in 2015 or so: China is insanely complex. Its size should humble all who engage. When I hear about a foreigner who has stayed for 15–20+ years in China, I will usually go “wow, you must have a lot of insight!” But make no mistake, that’s not me calling them a China expert, that is me expecting that they have some very narrow experiences that strike very deep and true, and that I will be able to glean some insights on a tiny sliver of China through them. Most people of that degree of stay in China are likewise humble and know that we all are just in the business of exchanging very narrow and specific slivers of China. To those observing, particularly neophytes to the experience that is China, this subtext may go unnoticed.
David Fishman is a valuable resource. He has tons of stories from people he can reach on the streets. But I know better than to expect him to really know Chinese governance; he has little in the way of penetration into the government track lifestyle. He is also white, which means he won’t have the perspective of someone who can blend into the streets and watch China the way a Chinese person can. There are always limitations to one’s China experience, which is why we all fan out in our information gathering through guanxi (connections).
Yes, there are a lot of blatant lies about China. But just because they exist, don’t get complacent when someone comes by with experience or a Chinese name and starts generalizing. Specificity is the name of the game; pity that most Chinese people don’t feel safe sharing specifics. This is often the reason why you have to hit the streets and make your own guanxi. First, build trust, then get specifics. You never know when someone is withholding information from strangers but not their guanxi network.
But just to highlight, driving back to that T5 city from the T1 city took generally 2 hours in the late 90s. It was unwise to do after a rain as the mud would likely have made the roads unmanageable. In the late 00s, that drive went down to 1.5 hours; the road at the outskirts of the T5 city had massive potholes that you could not evade and would require cars to go at most 5 km/h. In the late 10s, I don’t recognize most of the city anymore. I don’t remember seeing any donkeys driving carts anymore, only the standard blue motor trike at the very bottom end. I can barely estimate that the town square that felt so hollow and eerie at night in the 00s (due to all of the empty concrete apartment shells, lack of lights, and echoing) was now a park with big trees and plenty of amenities.
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Remember, T5 city! Where those pink trees are was generally where a line of stores were, and back in the 00s one of those stores sold crappy CRT TVs. One of them played Shrek in Chinese dub, which captivated some 20-ish children as onlookers. I joined them as I was bored then. Everything now is unrecognizable.
Anecdotes aren’t that powerful, but they can serve as smell tests for the kind of China headlines that pander to American audiences. The more you have your own experiences to look back on, the more you too can be immunized to bold but bad China takes. Because the sad reality is, it is just too easy to lie about China, and even the truths are not that good either!
11 Harsh Realities of Life for a 60 year old retired man.
What is stopping China and the United States from becoming allies?
The truth: China desperately want to become friend with US, however, US sees China as a threat and want to see China lose.
Lived in both countries, what I’ve observed is in China, everyone (including main stream media like CCTV) is talking about US being the best country:
the higher level of democracy
the innovation
hollywood movies, hot actors / actress
advanced technologies, respect for skill and knowlege…
the list goes on…
When I actually get here, I’d say some of these high reviews are true, but overall it’s probably overrated.
Then when I start to read news on CNN, Fox, NY Times, I see lots of negative news about China.
food imported from China are poisons
Chinese constantly steal US intellectual property
in China everything is about building connections, just having the skills will fail you in China
Chinese government tortures minority
China ‘bully’ neighbouring countries.
… and the list goes on
Non of these are true – I’m not saying China is a perfect country, it’s far from perfect, but the real issue in China was never cared and covered by western media. All these news is designed to make people hate China.
Combine flour and salt; with meat mallet, pound 2 tablespoons of the mixture into meat on both sides. Brown meat on both sides in hot shortening.
Transfer meat to a 12 x 7 inch baking dish.
Blend remaining 2 tablespoons flour mixture into pan drippings.
Stir in undrained tomatoes, celery, carrot and Worcestershire sauce. Cook and stir until thickened and bubbly; pour over meat.
Bake steak, covered, at 350 degrees F for about 1 hour or until meat is tender.
China’s first photonic chip pilot line opened in Wuxi leading the industry to take off
On September 25, at the 2024 Integrated Circuit (Wuxi) Innovation and Development Conference, the first photonic chip pilot line in China built by the Wuxi Photonic Chip Research Institute of Shanghai Jiao Tong University was officially put into use. This marks that photonic chips have officially entered the fast lane of industrialization, which will break through the limitations of computing paradigms and bring new imagination space for large-scale intelligent computing. A glorious era for photons is about to begin.
Photonic chips are the core of the new generation of information technology. They can meet the technical needs of transmission, computing, storage, and display in the fields of artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, cloud computing, biomedicine, etc. in the new round of scientific and technological revolution. They have become a new driving force for economic growth and an industrial highland for global competition.
The pilot platform has a total area of 17,000 square meters, integrating scientific research, production and services. It has complete supporting facilities and is equipped with more than 100 world-class CMOS process equipment, covering the full closed-loop process of thin-film lithium niobate photonic chips from lithography, thin film deposition, etching, wet process, cutting, measurement to packaging.
The platform also takes into account other material systems such as silicon and silicon nitride, builds N special process platforms, and forms a leading “1+N” advanced photonic device innovation platform. It can not only provide full-process technical services for universities, research institutes, and innovative enterprises, but also incubate photonic industry projects, efficiently link with industrial funds, open up the complete chain from product research and development to marketization, and accelerate the commercialization of scientific and technological achievements.
The pilot platform will not only accelerate the flywheel effect of technology iteration, promote the continuous optimization of process flow and the improvement of product innovation capabilities, but will also touch the technological frontier at an unprecedented speed, solve the long-standing structural contradictions between the innovation chain and the industrial chain, and ultimately achieve breaking up the obstacles in technology and industry.
The successful completion of the photonic chip pilot line is a vivid epitome of the cooperation between the university and the local government to achieve industrial breakthrough.
In 2021, City of Binhu introduced Shanghai Jiaotong University to establish the Shanghai Jiaotong University Wuxi Photonic Chip Research Institute project. The pilot line officially started construction in December 2022, the structure was capped in October 2023, and the first batch of equipment entered the site in January 2024. After intensive equipment debugging, it was officially put into use in September 2024. This landmark of the lake bay has achieved a leap from idea to physical implementation in an almost unrivaled manner. The physical structure was built according to the “Green Building Three Star” standard, and achieved key features such as anti-micro-vibration, constant temperature and humidity, and ultra-cleanliness to provides first-class guarantee for the R&D and production of photonic chips.
Now, walking into the nearly 6,000 square meters of high-grade micro-nano processing clean room of the photonic chip pilot line, people can see equipment neatly arranged, and technicians in clean clothes skillfully operating various equipment and observing the operating conditions of various product parameters.
The 9-meter-high first floor is divided into three floors, with the main equipment on the middle floor. In addition to the pipelines for supplying gas and chemicals, the invisible upper and lower mezzanines are also equipped with fresh air systems to transport clean air and maintain positive pressure in the room, which is then exhausted to the outside through the ventilation holes, so that the cleanliness level of the workshop reaches the 100, 1,000, and 10,000-level standards.
The world-class hardware, the leading domestic precision equipment, and the complete closed-loop control of the process are the three core elements supporting the industrialization of photonic chips. This pilot line is in line with the top-level planning and has reached international standards. After the pilot line is officially put into use, the annual production capacity is expected to reach 10,000 wafers. In the first quarter of 2025, the PDK will be officially released, and external wafer flow services will be provided.
Currently, the whole world is committed to solving the iteration problem caused by the lack of computing resources. Optical quantum computing is not only backward compatible with related technologies, but its theory and framework also enable exponential computing power that is endless. However, due to the lack of matching hardware systems and the immature industrial chain for landing products, optical computing and quantum computing cannot be commercialized. Currently, the world is starting from the same starting line, which provides China with an opportunity to surpass in technology.
The institute will focus on 6/8-inch thin-film lithium niobate wafers and thin-film lithium niobate modulators to overcome the engineering and technical challenges faced by the industrialization of thin-film lithium niobate photonic chips, develop wafer-level chip mass production processes, and achieve large-scale mass production of thin-film lithium niobate photonic chips to meet the high computing power needs of artificial intelligence development.
The Wuxi Photonic Chip Research Institute of Shanghai Jiao Tong University will continue to be a leader in new-quality productivity, continue to explore cutting-edge technologies in quantum science and technology and common key technologies, and rely on the photonic chip pilot line to carry out a three-in-one strategic layout of “platform + incubation + fund”. Focusing on new-generation information technologies such as core, light, intelligence, and computing, it will carry out scientific and technological achievement transformation and incubation and investment in entrepreneurship, explore new paradigms for the incubation of hard technology innovation, and help Binhu District and even Wuxi form a world-class photonic innovation ecosystem with clustered and large-scale development.
De-Dollarization: China Squeezes USD Debt By Guaranteeing RMB Bonds In The Global Markets
Is there any evidence that supports the argument that The United States is becoming a police state?
About a month ago, there was a noise complaint at the neighbor of my brother’s home.
The police arrived. My brother went over because his 11 year old son was there and wanted to ensure his son was okay. The police arrested my brother, charged him with resisting arrest, assault on an officer, aggravated battery on an officer.
These charges carry a two to twenty year prison sentence.
When I asked my brother what happened, he told me that the charges were made up. He asked about his son, the officers (3 of them) engaged him and decided to put him in the squad car. He never touched anyone. He never resisted. Because of the charges, he has no bail, and the bond hearing was set for a month out.
I asked, “Were the officer’s bodycams on?” He replied, “No.” They said all their cams were off.
I thought to myself. “Oh shit.” Then I replied, “Okay, sit tight, I’ll get you a lawyer.”
But to be honest…without any camera footage, my brother was cooked.
Now. I love my brother, and I know his character. I know there was no way he attacked three police officers. To be honest, if he did, they’d just shoot him. He’s a big black guy who spends a lot of time at the gym. No one would have challenged his death.
But, that’s not who he is. However…SOMETHING must have happened, right? It couldn’t be that he just walked up, the police then put him in the car and charged him. That’s not real.
2 to 20 years in prison. Three officers are saying he attacked them. Aggravated Battery on a police officer. All of this was a month ago…labor day weekend. No video evidence, so it’s their word and his. He’s so fucking cooked.
But wait. Remember the part where I said my brother walked over to his neighbor’s house?
The neighbor’s ring door camera activated, and his lawyer has not one…but three videos from ring cameras and security cameras covering the entire event.
You know what actually happened? Well, I’ll say it this way. As soon as the lawyer told the prosecution that they had camera footage from the ring camera, the prosecution dropped the assault and aggravated battery charge immediately. They downgraded the resisting arrest to a misdemeanor and gave my brother a 50,000 bond, which we immediately posted. They also added another charge (a misdemeanor), and handed the entire case from the felony prosecution to the misdemeanor prosecution who wanted to settle. My brother’s lawyer said…”No.” We want this fast tracked to trial. You’ve only seen one video. I have two more. The footage shows my brother walking up to the officers, them having a very normal conversation, and when my brother asked for his son, the officer told him “No.” My brother continued to ask, and the officer put him in cuffs and put him in the car for “protection of the officers.” That was it. No one even raised their voices.
Now. Because this is still in flight, and my brother has plans to sue for wrongful arrest or something…which he’ll lose, I won’t say which department this is, but will post all the details after the case and suite are done.
But here is the thing. Do you know what happened to the three police officers who made up the assault and aggravated battery on a police officer charges with the up to 20 year prison sentence?
Nothing.
Do you know what would have happened to my brother if those ring cameras didn’t kick in? I’m guessing he’d get about 7 years. What’s your guess?
That’s the definition of a police state. They can just make something up to throw you in prison…and in the 1 in a 1000 chance you are able to prove your innocence, nothing happens.
I still nearly tear up at the thought of how close he came. He’s a father of 4 who works for Mitsubishi building generators as a supervisor. And he nearly lost his freedom…for what. I yelled at him “You know never to engage with the police. You know better you fool.” All he could say is…”but my son was over there.” 30K for a lawyer (gone). 5K for the 50K bond (gone) all because you approached police.
I’ll update the results when I can. But more than likely…nothing will happen.
Have you ever suspected that a family member was guilty of murder?
I’m pretty sure Grandpa killed my cousin’s abusive ex-husband.
The ex ticked all the psycho boxes: he was physically, sexually, and verbally abusive. When my cousin finally started the divorce proceedings and got a restraining order, the ex repeatedly violated it. He’d make numerous harassing phone calls daily, show up at her workplace, and was arrested a couple times for trying to force his way into her house. Somehow he’d always make bail and within 24 hours or so be right back at it.
Shortly after the divorce was finalized and she got 100% custody of their son, the psycho broke into her home while she was at work and trashed the house. He left voicemails threatening to kill her. My cousin came and stayed with us for awhile so she could make arrangements to move and would not be home alone.
One day the calls stopped. She stopped seeing his truck around town. My cousin was still scared, it was not like him to just stop, and she figured he had gotten arrested, and would soon be out and back at it again. She said words to that effect one morning at breakfast. There sat Grandpa, reading the paper, with a cup of coffee and a Pall Mall Red. Without looking up he just said, “He won’t bother you again.”
And he didn’t. Going on twenty years and no one has seen or heard of the psycho ex. Grandpa knew something we didn’t, but he died in ’05 so he ain’t telling.
EDIT: to address some of the comments without posting repetitively, I suspect Grandpa got rid of the ex. I do not know if her ex is alive or dead. I don’t know for sure what, if anything Grandpa had to do with it. All I can say for sure is he said the ex wouldn’t bother her again and he hasn’t. Wouldn’t put it past the old man to have done his own problem solving though.
Grand Funk Legend Died & Saw the Afterlife – Mark Farner Tells All!
What is the most current lie told about China?
There are several major lies that are all equally current:
China is planning to invade Taiwan.
China is oppressing the Uyghurs in Xinjiang (genocide, forced labor, concentration camps, etc.).
China is oppressing the Chinese people in general (Xi Jinping is a dictator).
China’s economy is a disaster (property market, youth unemployment, demographics, etc.).
Once, when I was on duty in the Emergency Department during my residency training on a 36-hour shift, I noticed something. Something strange, something that was not normal.
There was this one kid, around 10 years old. I saw him wandering around the emergency department all day long. And just like that, it was midnight. I had time to reflect on the events of that night. That same kid was standing outside. So, I decided to find out what was happening to that boy, why was he wandering around the emergency room all day long by himself?
So when I approached him and asked him if I could help him I saw that he was really upset. After that he tried to avoid my questions but I insisted to find out what was going on with him, he asked if we can talk in a private place.
I took him into an office and he lifted his shirt and showed me a scar on his chest that was obviously from a previous heart surgery.
He confessed that he was looking for the doctor who had performed the surgery on him when he was a baby and asked where to find them.
Of course, I knew the surgeon who had operated on the child. But I insisted on knowing why he had been sitting in the emergency room all day looking for that surgeon.
Then I found out that the surgeon in question not only treated the kid for free, but also paid for all the costs of his surgery (since he didn’t have any kind of insurance) and also visited his home every two months after the surgery, paid his family’s rent, got them food and clothes (note this was years ago).
But for the last one and a half years the surgeon was not seen in the children’s house, and his mother did not even have money to pay the rent. That is why he was searching for him.
Sadly, the kid didn’t know that the surgeon had died a year and a half earlier, and he started crying when I told him.
Later that day I told some of my cardiac surgery friends about the incident. I found out that for the past year and a half since the cardiac surgeon’s death, many people have been coming to the hospital regularly asking where he was! Because no one apparently knew that not only did he pay for their surgeries (for those who were unable to pay), but he also made it his mission to help those people’s entire families. And even his wife and children did not know he did that.
What an incredible, inspiring and fascinating person he was.
He was Brigadier-General Dr. Muhammad Fayez in the Royal Medical Services of the Jordanian Armed Forces.
He was a cardiac surgery consultant and head of the cardiac surgery department when he died of a heart attack at the age of 52.
His typical day started at 8:00am and ended at 11:00pm. He was a talented, dedicated, humble and decent man who preferred to work behind the scenes. Didn’t want fame or fortune. A true human being.
UPDATE – Wife Has Known For 8 YEARS That Her Best Friend’s Husband Punched My Son And NEVER Told Me!
The hum of the spaceship’s engines filled the air as Captain Jackson surveyed the vast expanse of space stretching out before them. They were on a routine mission to explore the far reaches of the Galaxy, charting new star systems and collecting valuable data for the Intergalactic Alliance.But as they ventured further into uncharted territory, a sense of unease settled over the crew. There was something off about this sector of space – a feeling of foreboding that sent shivers down their spines.As they pressed on, their fears were realized when a sudden jolt rocked the ship, sending alarms blaring and lights flashing. Emergency protocols were initiated as the crew scrambled to assess the damage.”What happened?” Captain Jackson barked, his voice tense with urgency.”It looks like we hit some sort of anomaly,” replied Lieutenant Ramirez, her fingers flying across the control panel as she attempted to regain control of the ship.But their efforts were in vain as another jolt shook the vessel, this time more violently than before. Panic gripped the crew as they realized they were hurtling towards a nearby planet, their trajectory set on a collision course that spelled certain doom.
With time running out, Captain Jackson made a split-second decision – they would attempt a risky maneuver to evade the planet’s gravitational pull and regain control of the ship.
“Brace yourselves!” he shouted, his hands gripping the controls with steely determination.
As the ship plunged towards the planet’s surface, the crew held their breath, their hearts pounding in their chests. But just when it seemed all hope was lost, Captain Jackson’s daring maneuver paid off, and the ship veered away from the planet at the last possible moment.
Cheers erupted throughout the cockpit as the crew celebrated their narrow escape from disaster. But their relief was short-lived as they realized they were now adrift in the void of space, their navigation systems fried and their chances of survival dwindling by the second.
As they frantically searched for a way to repair the ship and plot a course home, Captain Jackson couldn’t help but wonder what other dangers lurked in the darkness of space, waiting to test their courage and resolve.
Despite the chaos that ensued, the crew of the spaceship refused to let fear dictate their actions. With determination in their hearts and a spirit of camaraderie that bound them together, they set out to explore the planet they had narrowly avoided crashing into. As they descended through the atmosphere, they were greeted by a breathtaking landscape unlike anything they had ever seen before – towering mountains, shimmering lakes, and lush forests stretching out to the horizon.
Eager to uncover the secrets of this alien world, the crew donned their spacesuits and ventured out onto the surface, their eyes wide with wonder as they took in the sights and sounds of this new frontier.
But their sense of adventure soon turned to apprehension as they encountered strange and wondrous creatures lurking in the shadows – creatures with scales as hard as steel, eyes that glowed with an otherworldly light, and voices that echoed through the caverns like whispers from the void.
Undeterred, the crew pressed on, their curiosity driving them ever forward in their quest for knowledge and discovery. And though they faced countless challenges and obstacles along the way, their indomitable spirit carried them through, guiding them on a journey of exploration that would change their lives forever.
As they prepared to leave the planet behind and return to the safety of their ship, Captain Jackson couldn’t help but feel a sense of gratitude for the adventure they had shared together. For in the face of adversity, they had found strength in each other, forging bonds that would withstand the test of time.
Amidst the chaos and excitement of their unplanned detour, the crew found moments of levity that brought much-needed relief from the tension of their predicament.
From Lieutenant Ramirez’s failed attempts at fixing the ship’s malfunctioning systems to Ensign Johnson’s comical mishaps during their explorations on the planet’s surface, there was never a dull moment aboard the spaceship.
Even Captain Jackson, typically stoic and reserved, couldn’t help but crack a smile as he watched his crew stumble their way through one misadventure after another. But amidst the laughter and camaraderie, there was a sense of camaraderie that bound them together, a shared sense of purpose that gave them the strength to face whatever challenges lay ahead.
And as they finally set course for home, their ship repaired and their ship repaired and their spirits buoyed by the memories of their cosmic escapades, they knew that no matter what trials awaited them in the vast expanse of space, they would face them together, united in their quest for adventure and discovery.
The journey back to their home base was filled with moments of reflection and gratitude. Each member of the crew took the time to appreciate the bonds they had formed and the experiences they had shared during their time in the far reaches of space.
Lieutenant Ramirez, with her quick with and unwavering determination, became the heart and soul of the crew, guiding them through even the most challenging of situations with her calm demeanor and steady hand.
Ensign Johnson, despite his tendency to stumble into trouble, proved himself to be a valuable asset to the team, his ingenuity and resourcefulness saving them on more than one occasion.
And Captain Jackson, with his leadership and courage, inspired his crew to rise above their fears and doubts, leading them through adversity with unwavering resolve. As they neared their home base, a sense of anticipation filled the air. Though their journey had been fraught with danger and uncertainty, they had emerged stronger and more united than ever before.
And as they docked their ship and stepped onto solid ground once more, they knew that their adventure was far from over. For as long as there were stars in the sky and unexplored corners of the universe to discover, they would continue to journey forth, together, in search of the next great adventure that awaited them in the cosmos.
What was said at a funeral that you will never forget?
When I was eleven years old, a friend drowned while swimming alone at a local lake. He was alone because I had persuaded a mutual friend who was supposed to go with him, instead, to come visit me at my house, because I was grounded from leaving the house, but I could have a friend come over.
Denny’s was the first funeral I remember attending, and I walked into the funeral home alone. I was terrified and overcome with remorse and shame. Not quite knowing what to do, I slipped in the back and sat in the first chair I saw with no one near it.
Almost immediately, Denny’s mother came over and sat next to me. She said, “This is not your fault. You did not kill Denny. Tragic accidents happen all the time, sweetheart. Don’t carry this through your life. If you do, that will be a tragic accident too. When you leave today, leave any guilt you might feel right here so that we can bury it as well.
Then she hugged me while I cried. I did exactly as she said. And I have never forgotten the witness of her grace.
A MATTER OF SURVIVAL The Shuttle He opened his eyes and knew, immediately, that something was amiss; no headache, no blurred vision, no sluggishness of his central nervous system, no disorientation of any kind. With growing trepidation, he turned to his right and, swallowing his anxiety, gazed at his digital, countdown screen: frozen at 9 years, 5 months, 3 weeks, 6 days and 19 hours. He had been in cryosleep for just 5 hours!What the f**k!Glen Thomas, Commander of Deep Space Shuttle, Commodore V11, noted for his coolness under pressure, began to perspire and panic at the same time. Sitting up, dressed only in khaki briefs and t-shirt, he looked across at the other two cryogenic sleeping pods alongside him and saw the red, illuminated screens of his colleagues ticking down the seconds and minutes in perfect harmony, unlike his own.Flight Engineers, Helen Jones and Matt Weitz slept peacefully inside their transparent cocoons, their body temperatures maintained at a perfect 32 degrees C, in a state of natural hibernation, heart beats slowed, hormones and composition of blood, breathing, cell replication and brain activity all altered for the next nine and a half years, when they would awaken as Commodore V11 reentered Earth’s atmosphere- as he, too, was meant to do. For some reason, his pod had malfunctioned!
As the man in charge of this mission, Glen had an intimate knowledge of his ship and understood that, once set, the timing device of a stasis pod could not be altered.
Nevertheless, heart thumping, he eased himself from the pod zone to the bridge of the craft, floating weightlessly, using his hands to push off bulkheads, hatches and overheads to reach the command centre of the shuttle where all typed modules relating to the workings of the ship were stored.
Breathing deeply, trying desperately to calm himself, he pulled down the tome that related directly to the cryogenic chambers and began to read. Within a few minutes, his worst fears were confirmed; the operational clock, once triggered, could not, under any circumstances, be recalibrated. For him, the ability to not age for the next nine and a half years was no longer an option.
Okay, okay. Stay calm. That’s not the end of the world, he told himself. Helen and Matt would get a shock when they snapped out of hibernation to find their commander almost a decade older than they remembered, sure. And life for him would be pretty damn unbearable in the interim but he could do it; would do it. Hell, he’d be a hero when they got back; maybe even secure a book deal.
Food! Jeez, he’d forgotten about how much sustenance he was going to need to make it through. These shuttles were not overstocked with nutritional products as the majority of travel time was spent in natural hibernation and space food, whether dehydrated, irradiated, freeze dried or thermo- stabilised, still added hugely to fuel costs for every pound stored on board. Time to calculate.
An hour later, having entered the nutritional info of every single item of food he had located in the shuttle into the command and data subsystem, including Helen’s specially packaged must haves, Cheetos, and Matt’s, similarly wrapped, Hershey Kisses, and allowing for a ration of 0.58 kilograms per day, he realised, heart plunging, that he had only enough fluids and solids to sustain life for just twelve months!
A year later, an emaciated, stinking, full bearded commander entered the pod zone for the first time in weeks. Initially, and for several months, he had checked on his colleagues several times per day but, as time had passed, he had limited himself to a once a week visit, the effort involved just too much for his weakened body. This time though, he had another reason for entering this part of the ship: the knowledge that, within the temperature controlled systems lay several litres of much needed water and he was going to figure out how to drain it. With all food having been consumed, although estimates were varied, it was believed that man could extend one’s life by up to two months living on water alone and there was no reason to maintain the perfect 32 degrees C that his hibernating colleagues were dwelling in.
The year had been the toughest of this man’s life. Having nothing to look at except the darkness of deep space that remained unchanged constantly outside the window of the bridge, nobody to talk to except himself, he had, slowly, drifted into semi-insanity. Unable to wash, shave or brush his teeth, with every drop of moisture being so precious, he had, knowingly, allowed himself to become a savage. Wild thoughts entered his mind and he would spend endless, comatose hours debating the rights and wrongs of each. Many, many times, he had considered cutting the power to his colleagues’ cryopods. If he had to suffer so, then why not them, too?
He had even thought about opening the pod of Matt Weitz and, while he was still disoriented, pulling him from his sleeping chamber and taking his place; sure that lifting the lid of the pod would not affect the countdown clock. But, always, the still rational part of his brain would win through and talk him out of this murderous act.
Many, many times, he had told himself that he should accept his fate, climb down into the sealed exit hatch bay and eject himself out into the void and, twice, had entered this part of the ship, fully intending to do the honourable thing. But, each time, something, whether an inbuilt survival instinct or a fatal optimism, prevented him from carrying through with his plan. He knew that he only had enough food and water to sustain him for twelve months; that death was inevitable. Yet, he could not quit; had to claw on to life, hoping, believing that a miracle might occur. His experience in space had confirmed him in his atheistic outlook and he did not, for one minute, give any credence to the existence of a God but, still, he found himself repeating the mantras that had been drilled into him as a child, brought up in a Christian household.
Now, as he drained the water from the tubing that surrounded all three pods, the brownish, foul smelling water seeping into the container he had brought here for this purpose, he looked, once again, at his two colleagues, sleeping peacefully, completely oblivious to the torment that he was going through and, against his better impulses, angry and envious thoughts flooded his brain. Why did his pod have to be the one that failed?
***
Breaking News
“We go now to Independence Square, NASA HQ, where NASA Administrator, Bob Nelson, is waiting to talk to us with the latest on the ill fated shuttle. Bob, thanks for coming on. What can you tell us?”
“I can now confirm, Mary, that our inquiry has shown, beyond any doubt, that the oxygen supply for the craft had defaulted and was responsible for the demise of our three brave astronauts”.
“Did they suffer, Bob?”
“No. All three were in hibernation, completely unaware of the system breakdown. They would all have died peacefully and painlessly in their sleep”.
“What about their families?”
“Well, none of our deep space astronauts are actually married, have children or are in relationships, Mary. It’s not something that is common knowledge but, I’m sure you’ll understand, they are away from home for a very long time. In this case, for example, Commodore V11 was on a twenty year voyage to Pluto and, while the cryogenic sleeping pods ensure that the occupants of the shuttle age only a year or two, the same would not apply to any relatives left on Earth. For that reason, we only train men and women who are prepared to forego a family life, at least until their later years”.
“Well, thanks for sharing that, Bob. Makes me wonder why anybody would want to put themselves through that though”.
“Mary, these are a very special breed of human; pioneers, if you like. They undertake only one deep space mission in their careers and they are expanding boundaries for the human race and, of course, they get extremely well compensated for it”.
“If they survive, Bob. If they survive”.
***
Human Health and Performance (HH+P) Medical and Clinical Unit Secure Ward, Johnson Space Center
“Okay, doc, let me have it”.
“Well, there’s no way to sugar coat this, Bob. Deep space, deep psychosis. It’s that simple”.
“Is he coherent?”
“Depends on what you mean by coherent. I can understand what he’s saying but that doesn’t mean he’s talking a whole lot of sense. He’s cognisant of his actions and, in many ways, as repulsive as they were, he was simply reverting to the human’s inbuilt instinct for survival. Throughout history, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of similar happenings where cannibalism has been a last resort. That plane crash in the Andes, for example. If they hadn’t made that choice to eat their former comrades, those guys would never have survived…”
“Difference is, doc, their comrades were already dead. Commander Glen Thomas chose to eat his living colleagues. Big distinction!”
“So what now, Bob? That’s the fourth time this has happened in recent years.”
“Well, we can never let this get out. It would decimate our entire deep space program budgets. So you know what to do, doc. Same as before. Just make it painless for the poor sap”.
***
Why is China being increasingly targeted? Are they really a threat to the future of the world?
The Chinese has been targeted since the mid 1800 when the first batch of Chinese went to the US to open up the East West railway lines. They were badly discriminated and I am sure many died. But in those days it is not illegal to kill a Chinese! Of course Anglo Saxon wants the world to forget everything from African slavery to Red Indians culling to Chinese exclusion act now that their victims are all dead and gone!
But so much to western human rights hypocrisy! We will always remember and we will remind you forever! Has anything change? No the white supremacy idea still exists and today Wall Street Journal or Economist still do racism with profit! The western media slur and demonised and get rewarded by the US government with 1.6 billion funding.
it is such a terrible thing to do to use monies instead of helping their 2.5 million homeless on incentives to lie and fabricate on China and the Chinese people. It is Deja Vu all over again. It is Chinese excision act 2025! But this time the world is on the Chinese side. Sure they are dogs and slaves like UK, Australia, Philippines! But there will always be people who stays on the wrong side of history.
Marriage Is Often a Terrible Deal | Orion Taraban
How will China’s “temporary anti-dumping measures” on brandy imported from the European Union affect the global brandy market?
I think a lot of it is because China sees little reason to support western countires who are almost universally taking antagonistic attitudes towards China. And what has China done. Basically it has just done better than the west. Funny thing is this is not new. It is repeated time and time again in history. Back in the 19th century the European invasions of China were brought about because the Western world wanted Chinese goods, but there was little that the Chinese wanted from the west, and so the British becaome the biggest drug cartel in the world, effectively forcing opium on the Chinese the same way drug dealers do it today, and then selling to those people. The Chinese government was too weak to do much against it, but at least were able to prevent the west from conquoring China (unlike Inida). Also during the 19th century, Chinese teams working on the American railroads were able to accomplish tasks other teams could not accomplish and were always more productive. For thier good work they were effectively presecuted by vigilanties. This is something that has happened to the Chinese diaspora throughout history. So similar to what has constantly happened to the Jews.
In part because the west is trying to isolate China. and doing western leadership constantly attempts to destroy China, China appears to feel that it is better to build relationships with the 90% that make up the rest of the world, and it has an added benefit in that doing this is economically better given that products and goods from those countries are less expensive than western countries. At the same time it gives Chinese the opportunity to now produce final products and sell them under Chinese brands, so the profit it much greater, and the dependence on the west is greatly reduced. These countries have proven to be a lot more appreciative of the Chinese, and why not. The Chinese products are so much cheaper than the western products, the Chinese are not buying lots of agricultural products from them, Chinese companies are also selling farm equipment at a fraction of the cost of the west to them so that they can be increase production, building factories in the countries (something the west never did to any extent), and significantly helping them build much better infrastructure in the countries. It is a big win for China, and a big win for those countries that struggled so long under Western imperialism and colonialsim and then Western neo-colonialism.
People talk about how China is so hated by the international community, but that is not the international community but the collective west.
China is learning that the doublespeak “International” community (the reality the collective west) is never going to be a friend to China, maybe because the Chinese are not white and have more power. It is much better to get the rest of the world to be with you, and isolate the west so that they can no longer do you any harm. Russia is learning the same lesson because the white people of the west also consider them untermensch. All the better for China.
And to make matters worse for the west the tactic they used in the 19th century will not work in the 21st century, that of forcing China to turn around, bend over and pull down its pants. As proof of this just look how dangerous is will be for the US Navy to operate within well over 1000km of China. This is proven by articles that admit the the F35 does not have enough range.
China is now a regional hegemon. Its military can stop dead any attempts to intimidate China. They US is fuming. Nothing it does or can do against China works.
King of the Hill – 1950’s Super Panavision 70
Why do we exhibit a lack of fortitude and strength in failing to equip and empower our brethren in Russia and West Asia to combat Western Imperialism, despite the Western Imperialist supplying arms and munitions to eradicate them?
Western imperialism is closely linked to nationalism, racism, white supremacy, and Eurocentrism (America-centrism).
Should people follow the nationalist incitement of their governments and go to kill each other? No!
So-called patriotism, nationalism and chauvinism have always been the gravediggers of the proletariat.
Don’t forget that beyond these claims, there is communism.
Humanity is facing a series of serious problems, namely an insurmountable economic crisis, continuous wars, xenophobia, the impoverishment of the working class, and the destruction of the earth’s ecology, all of which cannot be solved by nationalism.
If we fall into the trap of nationalism, the entire human race will be destroyed. 200 million people died in endless wars in the 20th century alone.
Only by overthrowing this development model in this society can humanity escape this barbaric dead end. This is the message that the working class, especially the younger generation, wants to send to social movements in other countries.
In Japan, protests against the explosion and radiation effects of the Fukushima nuclear power plant have been one after another, and there is growing anger about the impact of the economic crisis.
In the United States, there have been a series of strikes by workers to protest against their incredible exploitation.
In many other countries, we can cite many examples, such as the Arab Spring, Spain, Greece, Bangladesh, etc., where the working class has been massively fired, unemployed and impoverished, and the pressure of work has been increasing.
The solution to so many problems is not nationalism in collusion with the state, but the Class struggle.
We cannot rely on the brutal burning of stores and production bases belonging to “foreign competitors” or calling for a boycott of foreign competitors’ goods to sanction opponents or overcome the crisis.
We need to unite the camp of the working class and then oppose another class camp with our class camp, rather than a conflict between countries.
Our slogan is still: the working class has no motherland and no borders!
We must inherit this internationalist tradition and break the shackles of nationalism.
The rulers want our young generation to swallow the nationalist pill, that is, the rulers threaten each other every day and launch propaganda for war. But we must firmly put forward our different proposals – Class struggle.
Only in this way can mankind not usher in the Third World War and not perish.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-Mb_mknCk4
There is a scene in the Japanese film ‘Break Through! (パッチギ!, Patchigi!) ’:
The teacher takes out a copy of ‘Chairman Mao’s Quotations’ and introduces it to the students, saying, ‘Chairman Mao of China tells us this…’
Student: ‘Teacher, have you ever been to China?’
Teacher: ‘No, I haven’t, but I know.’
The students don’t give a damn. Then the teacher continues, ‘The world is yours and ours, but in the end it is yours. There is only one way to eliminate war…’
Student: ‘Is it the atomic bomb?’
Teacher: ‘Idiot, war originates from conflict among classes. Eliminating class differences can eliminate war. This is Chairman Mao’s theory.’
40 Brutal Truths I Wish I Knew in My 20s
1. Don’t become good at something you hate.
2. Go to bed and wake up at the exact same time every day.
3. Take care of your body; it’s the only one you have.
4. Stay close to people who want more for you, not from you.
5. Normalize leaving people in the reality they’ve chosen.
6. Being humble is thinking of yourself less, not thinking less of yourself.
7. You get tested the most when it’s your time to level up.
8. Improve yourself daily—make that your only addiction.
9. You teach people how to treat you.
10. Admit you’ve walked through the wrong door instead of staying in the wrong room.
11. Waiting for a sign is a sign.
12. Nothing you’ve gone through has made you weaker.
13. Everything wants you when you want nothing.
14. Be willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time to be successful.
15. When things get easy, go hard.
16. Only ask for advice from people who have been where you want to go.
17. The word “No” is a complete sentence.
18. Don’t dim your light to make others comfortable.
19. Have a primary aim for your life.
20. Stop reading books, start studying them.
21. Always assume positive intent.
22. Put your own mask on first before helping others.
23. Look for problems, don’t avoid them.
24. Your new life will cost you your old one.
25. Confidence comes from keeping commitments you make to yourself in private.
26. Dedicate a decade, not a day, to your goals.
27. Treat others the way you want to be treated.
28. Tell people about themselves; acknowledge their strengths.
29. If you keep running into bad people, you may be the problem.
30. Avoid drama and gossip at all costs.
31. Fear gives bad advice.
32. It’s never too late to change.
33. Get rid of all your vices.
34. If you’re addicted to your phone, your life isn’t interesting enough.
35. Take on as much responsibility as you can.
36. Don’t blame anyone else but yourself for your circumstances.
37. Be blissfully dissatisfied with where you’re at in life.
Imagine walking around with a nuclear cell phone! The concept is not that farfetched after Chinese company Betavolt developed a battery the size of a coin that runs on nuclear energy and lasts for an incredible five decades. The technology is also applicable to drones and laptops and the energy density is 10 times more powerful than standard lithium-ion batteries of the same size.
Earth’s first miniaturized atomic energy system
Betavolt’s nuclear battery uses 63 nuclear isotopes positioned within a thumb-sized module. The energy created by the decaying isotopes is converted into electricity, a concept that has existed since the 20th century.
Startup Betavolt has begun pilot testing ahead of mass production for commercial purposes, and future applications include smartphones, drones, and laptops. They’re not the only company looking into similar technology, though. Australia’s PhosEnergy is also in the game after the Department of Defence awarded them $2.3 million to develop extra-long-life batteries.
Betavolt said in a statement:
“If policies permit, atomic energy batteries can allow a mobile phone to never be charged, and drones that can only fly for 15 minutes can fly continuously. Our atomic energy batteries can provide enduring power in diverse scenarios, such as aerospace, AI equipment, medical devices, microprocessors, advanced sensors, small drones, and micro-robots.”
The development of miniaturized nuclear batteries
Betavolt’s initial nuclear design delivers 100 microwatts of power and 3V voltage. It’s only 15x15x5 cubic millimeters big, which is great news for smaller electronic devices like phones. Betavolt’s plan includes developing a battery with 1 watt of power by 2025.
Scientists have been looking into the development of miniature nuclear batteries for many years. The US and the Soviet Union explored nuclear battery technology for use in underwater systems, remote science stations, and spacecraft. In those early days, however, the hardware was bulky and costly.
Aside from China, research institutions in Europe and America are also working on similar projects. The groundbreaking tech may revolutionize the world of electronics by removing the need to charge devices.
Design and safety of miniature nuclear batteries
Betavolt is certain that the design of their battery ensures its safety. It’s built with a layered structure to prevent it catching fire or exploding when exposed to a sudden force. The battery can also operate under a wide range of temperatures, from -60°C to 120°C.
Betavolt created the nuclear battery using nickel-63 as the energy source, which is a radioactive element. Diamond semiconductors are used to convert the energy to electricity. The single-crystal semiconductor is 10 microns thick, and a two-micron-thick nickel-63 sheet is placed between two converters. The energy that’s released as the radioactive element decays is what’s converted into an electrical current to power the device.
What about dangerous radiation?
Obviously, the main concern about nuclear energy is radiation. Betavolt is so confident of their battery’s safety that they claim it can be used to power medical devices inside the body, such as cochlear implants or pacemakers. After the radioactive element has finished decaying, a stable, harmless, non-radioactive isotope of copper is left behind, which has no environmental threat.
Betavolt’s BV100 battery is more secure compared to standard batteries. It does not explode or catch fire when exposed to high temperatures or punctured, making it a safer option.
Minimizing the risk
Betavolt claims the energy density of its miniature battery is 10 times higher than lithium-ion batteries. But they haven’t said much about the risk of beta radiation poisoning. The nickel-63 isotope releases beta radiation and converts it into electricity.
Beta particles are low-mass, high-speed, high-energy electrons that aren’t very dangerous. They can’t travel far as an X-ray or carry as much energy as an alpha particle. Although beta particles have sufficient impact to pierce several millimeters of skin, just a small amount of shielding is sufficient to provide suitable protection.
The biggest risk would come from swallowing one of these batteries, similar to the risk of standard lithium-ion batteries. Betavolt believes the potential of such long-life batteries outweighs the risks, and that their measures to make them safe for use in robotics and autonomous systems will ensure the public is safe.
Betavolt says this development puts the country of China “way ahead” of European and American scientific institutions and enterprises researching similar power sources. Production of the nuclear batteries has entered the pilot stage and mass production is expected to begin in 2025.
This news is brought to you by http://Diary24.com by Kelly L. October 9, 2024
Why is Iron Dome not effective against ballistic missiles?
The Iron Dome was not designed to defend against ballistic missiles, and definitely not the hypersonic missiles that Iran possesses.
Israel’s Iron Dome was designed principally against the low velocity short range home made rockets fired by Hamas from Gaza. It is adequate for those purpose given that Hamas does not possessed very many of those rockets. Even for low velocity weaponries such as Drones, Israel’s enemies can overwhelmed the Iron Dome by SWARMING the skies with it.
There are no missile system that exist currently in Western inventories, including those of Israel, that could effectively defend against a barrage of ballistic missiles – Iran had demonstrated that in its recent attacks when MOST of its missiles hit their target in Israel.
ADDITIONALLY, Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon had forced the evacuation of Israeli occupiers from Northern Israel by launching drones and rockets. The Iron Dome was not able to STOP those threats.
Should this war continue to ESCALATE, you will likely see the complete destruction of Israeli infrastructure – water supplies, electricity, port etc – because Israel and its allies just does not have the means to defend against those missiles that Iran and Hezbollah are known to possessed.
Punch both sides of each steak well with a fork, then marinate for 24 to 36 hours in a marinade made by combining soy sauce, Worcestershire sauce, vinegar and sugar.
Simmer steaks on a low fire for 10 minutes in the marinade.
Remove them and place steaks in a 350 degree F oven for 10 to 20 minutes, depending on thickness of meat. Three minutes before removing steaks, place a pineapple slice on each.
To make gravy, slowly sauté a large can of mushrooms in butter. While doing so, boil down the sauce used for the marinade to make a gravy.
Combine mushrooms and reduced marinade sauce.
Serve individual steaks with the pineapple on top, over which has been poured a generous amount of gravy.
What is the most infuriating thing that doctors experience all the time?
He was brought to the ER in cardiac arrest. Feeble pulse, BP not recordable, he was connected to a ventilator.
He is your old case, the resident reminded me. I look at him. A flashback appears
–
Flashback
Despite my poor face-recognition software I remembered our last conversation.
‘Doctor, I stopped the medicine you gave and started this new ayurvedic medicine for diabetes, which I came across in Google search. I started it, now 3 months, and see the lab results, they are perfect’ he threw the lab test results on my table diffidently, with a look of someone who won a boxing match without a single punch. ‘And no side effects by the way’ the sarcasm was clear in his voice. Years of medical practice endowed me with the non-stick ‘mental coating’ that make me smile.
‘I am not the manufacturer of pills, and I don’t gain or lose by your choosing to take a pill’ I silently remind myself.
But yes, his blood sugar values were normal.
–
Fact Check
Diabetes is elevated blood sugar, and we know its consequences. Blood vessels, from heart to brain, from eyes to kidneys tend to get blocked in diabetes; leading to stroke, heart attack, kidney disease and loss off vision. But why does it happen? That’s still not clear, even if you read through every line of the 1250 pages of the latest edition of Joslin’s Text Book of Diabetes. Today we know that diabetes comes with a host of conditions like obesity, hypertension, low HDL and elevated triglyceride (known as metabolic syndrome) and could all be partially responsible for the development of vascular complications of diabetes.. Discovery of hyperinsulinemia (increased insulin levels) as the prime driver in type 2 diabetes has added a new dimension. The present understanding is that diabetes is a biochemical orchestra gone wrong, and high blood sugar may be just one single player. Reprimand him, throw him out, but your orchestra still doesn’t improve.
A study published in Lancet show that in a diabetic lowering of blood pressure and LDL cholesterol gives significant reduction of cardiovascular events but the quantum of benefit of lowering sugar is far lesser and has a J curve (more lowering may actually harm; even in the normal range).
A recent Swedish registry data published in New England Journal of Medicine shows that in a diabetic, lowering of blood pressure, LDL cholesterol, and stopping smoking along with blood sugar control conclusively prevent a heart attack, while only control of blood sugar doesn’t.
A researcher has aptly commented that ‘Diabetes is a cardiovascular disease with elevated blood sugar’. Control blood sugar, you could still be in danger.
–
The FDA now insists that all diabetic drugs should prove benefit in terms of cardio-vascular event reduction in large trials to be eligible for approval for treatment of diabetes. Mere sugar lowering won’t do.
–
I could see the big picture, at least a part of it. At least I knew that our knowledge is shallow. The myopic man, contended with a normal blood sugar value, lying helplessly still, connected to a host of tubes and a beeping monitor was blissfully unaware.
–
I don’t build my house myself; I trust the architect. I don’t stich my shirt, the tailor has my confidence. I believe that the local taxi driver knows roadblocks better than Google.
Funny that we all believe Google more than our doctor.
Not funny for the sobbing relatives, sitting outside the ICU praying for him to get well.
China has successfully developed a new type of standing oblique detonation ramjet engine, which has high energy conversion efficiency and strong adaptability, and is of great significance to improving rocket launch performance, reducing costs and deep space exploration.
The standing oblique detonation ramjet is actually a rocket engine that uses a special combustion mode. Its design is inspired by the propagation characteristics of the explosion wave. It generates powerful thrust by colliding the fuel and oxidizer at a high speed at a specific angle and triggering an explosion.
The standing oblique detonation ramjet engine not only has high working efficiency and long continuous working time, but also has great advantages in structure. The engine does not require any rotating or moving parts. It only uses the three parts of the air intake, hydrogen fuel injector and combustion chamber to form the whole device. Standing oblique detonation ramjet engines can only work under hypersonic airflow.
When a hypersonic aircraft flies in the air, the shockwave not only will make it difficult for the engine’s fuel to burn, but will also cause turbulence on the fuselage surface, causing the aircraft to vibrate violently in a short period of time that affects control, and may even cause the fuselage to disintegrate.
The aircraft thus has to be made into a special streamlined structure called wave rider. Its leading edge can “ride” on the shock wave in the hypersonic airflow, which will not cause vibration of the aircraft body, but make full use of the energy of the shock wave to maintain the stability of the flight attitude.
With the standing oblique detonation ramjet engine, the aircraft can fly at a speed of more than 5 times the speed of sound. With the wave rider technology, the aircraft can maintain a stable and controllable attitude during high-speed flight. The combination of the two technologies has laid a strong foundation for the breakthrough of the future military science and technology in China.
This technological breakthrough not only demonstrates China’s profound strength in aerospace science and technology, but also indicates that future spacecraft will have greater maneuverability and a wider range of applicability.
The uniqueness of this engine lies in its suitability for high-speed flight, especially in the field of hypersonic flight. Current aircraft can only reach speeds of several times the speed of sound, but with the help of this engine, aircraft can reach higher speeds, higher altitudes and longer distances.
This type of engine is mainly used in high-tech and high-efficiency industrial fields. For example, they play a vital role in industries such as aerospace, shipbuilding, power generation equipment, and heavy machinery. With its excellent performance and reliability, this type of engine provides strong power support for these industries and promotes technological progress and industrial development.
In terms of energy supply, they can improve energy efficiency and reduce energy consumption. In the field of transportation, whether it is cars, trains or planes, high-performance engines can improve operating efficiency and passenger experience. In the field of medical equipment, precision engine technology provides a more stable power source for medical devices, thereby improving the quality of medical services.
Have you ever walked out of a doctor’s office because the doctor was being disrespectful to you?
I went to see my new Internist with an itchy rash all over my body. My dermatologist had prescribed an antibiotic for a localized skin infection, and then gone out of town. I am allergic to a few antibiotics, but had never had an issue with this type before.
My internist entered the exam room, lifted one of my arms by the wrist and rotated it to see each side. He dropped it in my lap and said, “Doesn’t look too bad.” I told him I was a bit worried because of the previous allergic reactions I had experienced to antibiotics in the last few months (I was having chronic sinus infections at the time). He left the room without explanation and came back with a bottle of calamine lotion. He explained how to apply it. I looked at him skeptically and asked how it would help if the rash was caused by a medication I had taken orally. He sighed loudly several times and said, somewhat facetiously, “Well, just take Benedryl if you are so worried.” I said I had been told never to take Benedryl with the several medications I was taking for my autoimmune condition, as well as an SSRI and Benzodiazepine.
He became angry, and shouted, “Well then what do you want me to do?!” I pulled away from him on the edge of the exam table, as I meekly explained that I was usually given 5mg of prednisone for a few days for this type of reaction. “Do you even know how that medication works?” He spat at me. At the time, I was a pretty new college student and was also not great at reading sarcasm. I didn’t know he was asking a rhetorical question, so I answered him thoroughly, explaining the mechanism of action of corticosteroids for inflammation. His face got red and his eyes narrowed. “How do you know that? How do you know any of that?” I calmly reminded him I was a premed student studying biology, and that I liked to know what medications did before I took them. I was confused about his level of aggression, but I felt cornered and didn’t know what to do other than assert myself in as calm of a manner as I could. That is what I had been taught to do.
“Well, well…you know way too much for a girl. Especially a girl your age. This is very inappropriate for you to know this.” He stood up from his stool and walked out the door. I was frantically trying to figure out what I had done wrong. I started to cry. I called my mom and tried to tell her what had happened, hoping she could tell me what I missed. She said, “Hold on, he is calling on the other line.” She took the call. She later told me he told her the same he had said to me— that I knew too much, that my level of knowledge was inappropriate, and she cut him off, and said “Dr. ——, it sounds like you have a personal issue. What is inappropriate is this phone call.” She clicked back into my call and just said, “Leave. There’s something wrong with him.” I had not signed a release for him to speak with anyone about me, so technically, it was a HIPAA violation for him to contact my mom. He also contacted one of my specialists, who wouldn’t take his call. He left a message. I had not signed a release for them to speak either, as this was a new internist I was seeing. I am glad I did not, and glad I did not continue to see him.
Recently, I was seeing my current doctor, and out of habit, apologized for sounding like a know-it-all about a specific topic we were discussing. He said, “Never apologize for your knowledge. Never. It is one of your greatest attributes.” I told him I wished all doctors felt that way, and he responded, “If they don’t, it’s their problem, not yours.” Twelve years later, it really felt good to hear that.
Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure – 1950s Super Panavision 70
What are the best and worst feelings in the world?
Worst feeling: being told my daughter needed life threatening surgery on her skull, and that without it, she would end up with permanent brain damage due to premature closure of the growth plates in her skull.
I took my daughter to the doctors just for her yearly health check and was given this news. The diagnosis was Saethre–Chotzen syndrome.
About six months later, watching her head growing deformed by the day, she was finally admitted to Royal Children’s Hospital (Melbourne, Australia).
The following day, she was wheeled into surgery. I kissed her goodbye as she went to sleep under the anaesthetic, not expecting her to make it. The doctor looked grim. The dozen or so staff in the surgery theatre were silent. I was ushered away.
The neurosurgeon said before I left that if all went well, she’d be in surgery for 3-4 hours. The subsequent nine hours were the longest in my life.
Afterwards, the neurosurgeon said it was worse than he had suspected and he had to remove her entire skull from the ears up and completely rebuild it with dissolvable plates.
To then see her afterwards in ICU looking like this…
I was a mess. My wife wouldn’t fall apart for another few days.
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Don’t get me wrong, the hospital team are the best in the world. That night, as my wife lay beside my daughter’s ICU bed, she whispered to me ‘She’s going to pull through. I’m not worried about that now, but how the hell are we going to pay for all this?’
The best feeling for me, exceeding any joy that preceded it in my 50 years on Earth, was listening to my daughter singing the entire song Let it go from the movie Frozen, verbatim in Spanish (of all things) from a YouTube clipping she had watched the day before. She was doing this while building a sandcastle on the beach. It was a year post-op. Weird thing was, she didn’t know Spanish and could only speak English and Thai.
main qimg ace2136b5c78c7ac12e4f8225123dc23 lq
I don’t know if God exists, but angels certainly do.
BTW, my wife, who comes from Thailand, still can’t believe that healthcare is free here in Australia (paid for via our taxes).
Is Israel engaged in a seven-front war?
In fact, Israel has only one front at war: the residual military value of the US.
All provocative actions taken by Israel are aimed at making it increasingly difficult for the US to tolerate the damage it has suffered in terms of international influence, and attempting to ultimately force the US to deploy military force into the Middle East.
As one of the most valuable political legacies of the founding fathers of the US, Jews were almost excluded from the core of the military system and appointed solely around economic operations, which to some extent ensured the security of the US and the world. Now, this design is gradually taking effect: fanatical Zionist zealots have to use extremely poor methods to try to manipulate the US military power – that is almost the only value left that America can be plundered by Zionists.
Subsequently, Zionists will attempt to expand/transfer their influence, they will try to parasitize regions such as Ukraine, HK, and India or somewhere else. Now, tens of thousands of Israelis have gone abroad to Ukraine, which is a country lacking defense capabilities of them. They are trying to bribe HK officials to let them in. Basically, they plan to give up on the US after draining it, maybe also Israeli land itself.
But I don’t think this behavior will succeed. Israel has offended almost all major countries on Earth at the same time. Israel is attempting to harm American interests and deceive and fool the US. The negotiation process between Israel and Lebanon was guaranteed by the national credibility of Britain and France, then Israel broke it. Israel attempted to interfere with China’s reunification process. It tried to intimidate Chinese UN peacekeeping soldiers. Israel directly conflicts with Russia on the battlefield. I can continue to list, but let’s save our time.
Honestly, I can’t see in which way this newly founded country can continue to exist, or even this outdated civilization.
Loyal Husband Catches Wife With Best Friend – She’s Toast & He’s Lawyering Up
When I left the USA and moved to China, I needed to earn money. So I started teaching English. It paid well, and I was able to get employed very quickly.
Instead of group classes, I taught one-on-one in these glass “fish bowl” like rooms.
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People could walk around the room and watch me and the student learning, but they couldn’t hear us because of the acoustics.
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It was a good set up. But it took a bit of a while to get used to having all kinds of people watching you all the time.
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I had all kinds of students. From a super-wealthy great-grandmother (who I really liked, by the way) to a two year old child that I was expected to play with in English. (I hated the little kid sessions. It was too difficult for me.)
I tutored Judges, and businessmen. Housewives, and corporate executives. I tutored elementary school kids, and college kids.
Now there was this one girl. She was 11 years old and a Muslim from Xinjiang.
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Nice girl. I liked her. I taught her out of this general English book, and her English we pretty good.
But…
As what happened often enough, was that the student would use the sessions to talk about other things rather than the lessons.
One man used the sessions as a counseling session.
Some young girls only wanted to talk about K-pop.
While some boys wanted to talk about video games.
And so on and so forth. So I would always allow the “free talk” so that they could learn.
And this 11 year old girl wanted to talk about boys, and girls and sex…
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Oh, yeah. She wanted to know all the gritty details.
*sheech*
…
…
…
Well, initially, I kept my answers just short and “off the cuff”, brushing away her queries as nothing.
But oh, she was persistent.
As young girls always are.
So I started to give her the “birds and the bees” discussion that my father gave me back, back in the day.
And she “poo poo” that aside by saying “Oh, I know all about that”.
*sigh*
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All the time this is going on, I’m wondering in my mind; “Is this a set up”? or, “Is someone trying to trip me up?”
Because after all, I’m some sort of evil pervert, don’t you know </sarcasm>.
She made no overt moves on me thank God, and I made sure that everything was above the table and being in a glass bubble really helped.
But still, she was an inquisitive girl and she was entering that period of raging hormones, and (you know) I was the ONLY non-family male that she could talk to in private and openly.
That’s the way many Muslim households were structured.
Girls were never permitted contact with males unaccompanied. And for her, this was her chance.
So, without getting too graphic, I kept things very light.
I talked about interests of young boys and girls. And when a boy likes you he gets interested and sometimes he gets so excited that he cannot stop being with you. His muscles get hard, and he becomes powerful. And the girl is always the soft person that controls him with soft actions and touches.
And that was the extent of it.
A sex-education teacher I was not.
And she wanted much more information, but I never dared get into it.
Now, all us teachers were paired with an assistant. I had two. And I should have (in hindsight) worked with them to resolve this quandary. I was terribly uncomfortable about the entire situation, but if anything was mentioned to the parents, everything would end, and I needed a paycheck.
Anyways, their account ran out and I never saw that girl again.
For seriously, for about seven months or so, she was really asking me these questions twice a week. In two 50-minute sessions.
*Phew*
One year later, one of the English Teachers from a different school branch was fired and arrested for playing around with a child. And then only four months later, yet another teacher from yet another branch was arrested and imprisoned.
And you know it!
China clamped down with stricter background checks on all the Z-visa workers.
By that time, I was on my way and moved to Pago Pago to build a hospital. And I was hitting the age ceiling for Z-visa access anyways. So, what I am saying is that I “missed a bullet”.
…
Strangely, it was my Sex Offender “training” in prison that taught me how to handle this, and other, situations.
The suspicion alone is enough to get you in trouble.
Avoid the most trivial of contact.
Be on camera, have witnesses, and never be alone with anyone.
And to this day. I follow this advice.
You won’t ever find me alone.
I always have friends, family or trusted people nearby, and no one can accuse me of anything. Firstly because I live in China and am filmed 24/7, but also that I know how things and situations can be twisted away from innocence into something evil.
Be alert all the time.
Take no chances.
Harsh lessons learned while in a hash place.
Today…
How much of a fool do you have to be to believe China is not feeling any impact from the US ban on access to high technology?
Anyone who has worked for even a month in these industries will know that such bans rarely have an immediate impact
Let me explain
ASML needs to make profits
ASML is a private company
China is not at war with either the US or the Netherlands
So ASML won’t blindly see Bloomberg and decide to stop selling EUV Machines or DUV Machines or Servicing such Machines the next day
First – they wait for a notification from the relevant dutch ministry
In the meantime it’s Business as usual and they will fulfill all their Chinese orders and load up spare parts in huge quantities
They aren’t breaking the law in any way
China typically quadrupled all orders in the past 2 years everytime before a Notification
Second – the notification is unclear and needs clarification
ASML will drag their feet and ask for clarifications from the relevant dutch ministry
For instance they may ask – Does China mean Hongkong also?
Until then they will presume it’s Business as usual and fulfill a boatload of orders from HK
HK placed a record orders from ASML and NVDIA in the past year and a half
Third – they will say they have already received full payment from China and the money has already been spent
Once they take the orders, they will tell the Dutch Government that they have received Billions of Euros from China and have spent a lot of the money already
So they have to deliver existing orders and only apply the bans to future orders
It’s a WTO offense to refuse to undertake full delivery of a contract after receiving payment
China has enough WTO Clout to ensure ASML can’t sell machines to anybody
They can seize ASML machines directly from the ports that they control and impound the cargo and drag litigation on and on until TSMC Or Samsung get grey hairs
Fully legal !!!
So either ASML refunds the money or deliver the orders
The Dutch Government have to shell out billions to China to repay them back and that’s taxpayers money
So ultimately the Dutch Government asks the US and the US which needs Congressional Approval for even €100 spending for a Non US Department simply doesn’t have the time
So US says “Aw hell ok. Deliver existing orders but ensure no more orders are taken”
So China can stockpile upto 3 years worth of equipment legally despite all the bans
Likewise same for servicing
ASML has trained employees in China who have been taught servicing and who have 3 years of spares
So they will simply not expand their operations but they won’t close down their existing operation unless they get a formal notification from the Dutch Government
Worst case – they will take the issue to court and drag the issue over
Even worse they will take the issue to a US Federal Court and drag the issue over
Everyone knows the Chinese have one party and that means they will REMEMBER
They know the US Government changes every four years
They know Raimondo could be become irrelevant by February
So they will and have allowed China to stockpile a lot of stuff to ensure that China is comfortable for a minimum 2–3 years
The Impact of the Curbs will be felt by 2026 or 2027 if China doesn’t have an alternate solution
So why are Chinese protesting to Raimondo?
Simple
To keep the US Political Machine happy
Remember if the Chinese seriously have a problem with the curbs – they won’t protest about it at all and bury the issue deep
The Chinese publish only issues they are firmly in control of
So it’s only by 2026 December – 2027 January when China will feel a pinch if they don’t get a handle on things by then
Would you break friends with someone who said they would feed your cat while you were on holiday but when you came back you found out they hadn’t been fed for 10 days because the friend couldn’t be bothered to go and feed them?
Our neighbor was gone for a month and had asked another neighbor to feed her cat and check the litterbox (locked in her bedroom) and also feed the little dogs. After a couple of weeks, she found out that the girl she had paid was afraid of cats and hadn’t even checked on the poor baby. She was okay, since plenty of food and water had been left out for her, but that litter box was something else. I hope she didn’t ask that girl again.
Argentina Dollarization Collapses, U.S. To Punish China “Slave Labor”, US Chips In Russia
R.I.P. ARGENTINA.
When you adopt a cat from a shelter, do you think the cat knows she has been adopted and has a forever home? Do you think she is happier or more content?
Our poor rescue kitty had first lived with cat hoarders, then another couple and their cat, so ours was the third home she’d been moved to. At first, she was so afraid and confused that she stayed in the closet, cowering in the darkest corner.
For the first few months, she would only explore at night when everyone was in bed. If anyone came near, she would scurry back to her hiding place.
Now, after more than a year, I think she finally believes that this is really her forever home. She gains in “cattitude” daily, and shows her love and appreciation by endless purring, cuddling and happy chirps.
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What is the last thing you heard from someone before they died?
“What is the last thing you heard from someone before they died?”
It was the last Sunday in July. My nephew was turning two, and his birthday party was at a local church. After the party, my in-laws took my son for the afternoon.
It was supposed to be a time for them to spend time with their oldest grandson, then a 7-year-old. They wanted to take him school shopping and spend time together at their home.
What happened was an afternoon of my father-in-law screaming at my son for doing things like wearing shoes in the house, asking questions, crying, looking at name brand crayons, etc.
My son did nothing to deserve any of that. He was a sweet kid who adored his grandparents.
My mother-in-law brought our son home after a few hours and apologized for her husband. She glossed over a lot of it, if I’m honest. We spent the evening working with our son trying to figure out what happened and start to mend the hurt that my father-in-law caused.
My husband and I then spent hours talking about how to handle it with my father-in-law to protect our son in the future. We weren’t sure the best way to set boundaries, but we were planning to confront him about it the following weekend.
The next morning, I was running late. I never ran late to work, but that day I couldn’t get moving. Just as I was about to leave, the phone rang.
Nothing good happens when the phone rings at 6:30 AM.
It was my sister-in-law.
They found my father-in-law dead in his car. Suicide.
It turns out that he was deep in gambling debt with zero retirement, a house in foreclosure, an overdue title loan, and a student loan he took out in my husband’s name without actually using it for my husband.
We were unaware of any of it.
Our kids were 5 and 7 when he passed, and we didn’t tell them the depth of what happened for many, many years. They were far too young when he died, and we didn’t want our son to think he had ANYTHING to do with this death. Their grandfather was sick, and he was going to have double knee transplant later in the week.
Twelve years later, and I’m still horrified at how he treated my son. His last memories of his grandfather are ugly, and it’s taken years of therapy to get the point of forgiveness.
BATMAN – 1950’s Super Panavision 70
What is prison like in Japan?
I’ve visited a friend of mine who got the minimum imprisonment. According to him, the minimum penalty in Japanese prisons consist of:
early morning waking up
Breakfeast
P1: Sitting on the ground without speaking, standing, making noise, laughing, and any other grumbling until noon. You can just read books silently.
Lunch
P1 position until evening.
Dinner
P1 position until sleep time.
Years go by like this, you may have some small breaks for urgent needs in this daily routine. This daily flow makes you either a wise man or a psychopath.
Edit1
I never expected that many views but anyway seeing this is beneficial to both Japan and its people.
Another info:
While talking to the inmates, you should speak Japanese and no translator is provided. If you speak in your native tongue, it will be rejected. So, simply you speak Japanese or don’t visit. That’s what I experienced. I spoke Japanese.
Edit 2
No cooler even it’s really hot and no heater even it’s really cold.
Severe Punishment
if you push the limits when you are in, so you got punished. It is like this: one hand is to tied up to nape and the other one is to back waist reversely. You gotta stay, sit, sleep, go to toilet simply live like this for one month or more depending on the mistake you have done. After you have finished, the special doctor unties the knots. Give a try for one hour and you will see what happens after untie.
A fun story
A man dies in a car crash and arrives at the Pearly Gates. He sadly says to St. Peter, “But I can’t die now, my wife and three children will miss me.” Kindly, St. Peter replies, “Please don’t fear, sir, I have a solution for you, though it does come with one condition.” The man asks, “What kind of condition?”
“Well,” Peter replies, “I can send you back to Earth, but you will need to assume the form of something living nearby: the neighbor’s dog, a chicken in a nearby farmyard, or a mouse living in your house’s walls.”
The man muses for a moment. “Well, my children are afraid of the neighbor’s dog and my wife hates mice in the house, so I suppose I’ll choose to be the chicken. My family loves visiting the chickens at the farmyard and this way, I can still keep in touch with them.” Peter nods obligingly and, within moments, the man has returned to Earth, as a chicken.
At first this feels odd to the man, but he gradually begins to take the matter in stride and develops friendships with the other chickens. After a little while, the man begins feel some discomfort; one of the other chickens informs him that it’s time to lay an egg, upon which the man does, and feels much better. A short while later, the man begins feeling discomfort again, so he lays another egg, then gradually begins laying more and more eggs, upon which he suddenly begins hearing his wife’s voice.
“Honey, honey!” she exclaims, tapping his shoulder. “Wake up! Your pooping in the bed again!”
Did The Korean War prove the USA and China are evenly matched militarily? As China succeeds in pushing the U.S. and U.N. out of North Korea but the U.S. succeeded in preventing China and North Korea from taking over the South and ended in a stalemate
China’s red line was for the US to not go beyond the 38th parallel line. Therefore the US was badly beaten.
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My GF Tearfully Blamed The Hallmark Channel & Red Wine After Cheating Cost Her A Ring
How will China deal with the catastrophic collapse of its working age population in the coming years?
Yes
The same old nonsense of the working population collapse
Let’s study first whether indeed there will be a catastrophic collapse and why only China will be affected
What does decline in working population mean?
It’s simple
It means that in an Economy – the people who work and earn a living are becoming lesser and lesser while those who are dependent on those who work and earn a living – are becoming higher and higher
This ideally happens under 3 Conditions:-
A. Rapidly Ageing population due to dramatic rise in standards increasing lifespans to a large extent
B. Rapid rise in Childbirth, almost at 3.5–4 times the normal rate
C. Major War with a lot of conscription and deaths
Obviously B can be ruled out for China and C is highly unlikely given that WWII type of decimation is unlikely unless Nukes are used
So that leaves A – Rapidly Ageing Population
Now the general belief is that today there are 272.66 Million people older than 55 years old today
That’s 19.26%
It is estimated that this number is likely to rise to as much as 32.02% by 2054 and 41.04% by 2075
Let us look at the five things about China that nobody else or very few know about:-
A. Chinese Retire on an Average at 55 years – 58 Years against 64–67 Years in Western Nations.
So today there are almost 59.8 Million Chinese who are deemed RETIRED in China but who are deemed WORKING in the West
If you just change the 55–58 into 64–67 , the numbers change to 15.92% in 2025, 26.36% in 2054 and 34.59% in 2075
This alone sees the working population rise from 46.8% in 2075 to 53.8% in 2075
B. Chinese have a largest savings in the planet – Typically a Chinese saves 45% against 19%-33% by Western Nations.
Thus Chinese Elderly People have extremely comfortable savings as compared to Americans or Europeans who have very little savings
C. Healthcare, Education and Food Distribution is STATE OWNED in Entirety –
Unlike the US where a Doctor can charge a Million and a Half Bucks for a procedure, in China everything is State Owned and Capped
Thus the Cost to keep an Old Man healthy is much much cheaper than in the West
Likewise Education is State owned and Food is price controlled – so Feeding people is much much cheaper in China and Educating Kids is also much cheaper
So the cost of keeping an Old Man alive is less than maybe a third in equivalent terms to keep an Old Man alive in US or Europe
D. Older People are changing generation by generation
Those who will turn 60+ in 2030–2050 would have been born post 1970–1990 and there would be a 64% chance of them being an Engineering Graduate and 35.3% chance of them being a an Engineering Post Graduate
They aren’t the same old people today who were born between 1930–1950 who are less educated, peasants and mainly laborers in a China where the middle class was barely 5%
The Quality of Elderly will rise dramatically, they will be investing and playing a far more proactive role in Society than today’s 60–90 year olds
We are far more active, definitely invest more, and play a proactive role in society than three 70 year olds in the 1990s
Unfortunately those who are Actuarians presume the Old People will always be the same dependent older generations, not realizing that the newer generation of older people would be far more proactive
Impossible to believe today’s definition of WORK is the same as that of 2075
For the same analysis – let’s see the ideal job in 1973 China and most Chinese were farmers or worked in State owned industries as longshoremen or unskilled laborers
In India the middle class were Govt employees and Teachers and others were farmers and tenant laborers and daily wage laborers
Today it’s different
It will be way different in 2075
Manual Jobs would be at an all time minimum and most jobs would need skills and analysis
So a large working class population would be a major NEGATIVE not a positive
The US Port strike against Automation is the best example
No such strikes in China
They love Automation for the exact same reason
So no need to get too worried
My guess is somehow if the world moves on past 2030, China will be in the best position by 2075–2100
I duck behind a crumbling wall, dropping to my knees on cold dirt. The sharp edge catches my shoulder, the jagged brick ripping open my skin. Burning pain shoots through my arm, a silent cry squeezing its way through my throat. And that’s all it is: a soundless echo of pain, a reverberation that I refuse to give voice to. I clamp my mouth shut, hoping my moment of shock was inaudible in the night air. The taste of metal– of copper– coats my mouth and I realize I’ve bitten my tongue in the frenzy. I open my mouth again and spit crimson onto the dirt. Cody always said I had the grace of an elephant. Here I am, proving him right. My large belly doesn’t help matters; it is both my greatest blessing and most frequent inconvenience. But I won’t trade my baby for the world and neither will Cody. Despite the fire crackling underneath my skin and inside my veins, I will myself to breathe slowly through my mouth. I’m quieter this way, harder to track down.I made sure to cover my tracks when I escaped the citadel, but it was difficult to avoid the mud puddles near the outer rim of the city. I hope they couldn’t see any tracks in the darkness. Only the wealthy can afford fire or lights, and the cost is steep. The death of the sun forced new generations to be born with bigger eyes and better senses. While I can see faint shapes and outlines, I rely mostly on my other senses. I was born into the eternal night, and the absence of the sun is as normal to me as breathing, but that doesn’t mean I want the same for my son.These soldiers are older and less evolved to the permanent darkness. That’s why, if I can remain quiet, I have a chance of escape. The entrance of the alley will look like nothing more than a shadow on the bricks. The soldiers may be tasked with hunting me and retrieving what I stole, but I know they won’t waste their precious fire to find me. It would cost them more to replace a matchstick than the reward for my capture is worth. If they knew what was in my pocket, though, they would use all the torches in their arsenal.I hear hurried footsteps down the street. I press my back onto the brick wall, perhaps hoping to sink into it altogether. My pregnant belly sticks out far, too far. I may as well call out to my pursuers altogether. I turn my body so that my back faces the entrance of the alley. The position is risky. I can’t see anything but the dead end in front of me, although I suppose it won’t matter if they catch me. I am a mouse caught in a trap, and I’m praying for the cat to miss me. I push against the brick until I feel the pressure of a metal canister digging into my hip. I’m not sure what happens if the metal cracks, but I don’t want to risk finding out. As the footsteps– a lethal thunder of raging soldiers– draw nearer, I cease breathing altogether. If they find me, if they notice the tiny alley I’d taken cover in, everything we’d done for the past two years would be for nothing. All the planning, the observing, the fighting… all in vain if I was caught now.Flashes of green eyes pull me from my fear. His infectious laugh and his sideways smirk fill my senses. Cody. I have to escape the city for him, for our baby. He already laid out the plan. Now, I just have to follow it. I repeat the plan in my head, focusing only on him as the army gets closer to my position. I squeeze my eyes shut as the stomping grows louder and louder, nearer and nearer.And then they pass by, as though they can’t see the alley at all. I don’t feel the heat of torches, either. I was right. I stay in the alley for a few minutes as the army shuffles by, oblivious to the thief only a few feet away. They would kill for the canister in my pocket if they knew what was inside. Cody and I had killed for it. Now, I just have to get to the meeting point and it will all be over. We’ll be free. I wait until the marching is gone entirely. I will not risk a stray guard turning to find me. When I leave the alley, the street is empty once more. I dart across the cobblestone road, cutting across the path I was taking earlier. Cody meticulously crafted our plan, and I’m following it with precision. My heart clenches at the thought of him. He’s still in the citadel, distracting government leaders with that charm of his. They don’t know he’s in on the plan. Hopefully, they won’t discover his betrayal until we’re already beyond the towering walls of the city.I stumble through the small, humble town, a stark contrast to the towering, glass buildings and crystal chandeliers further south. Once, when the sun still lit up the sky, the citadel may have been beautiful. It is nearly impossible to see it in the dark. Now, it is remembered for its cold cruelty and busy noise. Perhaps the glass buildings are prettier than these wood cottages, but I’ll always associate them with the icy indifference of the government that now hunted me.I weave through side streets to avoid the market squares. They’re small, but even a few extra people is a risk I’m not willing to take. The path is winding, constantly taking me through narrow passageways. Some are merely cramped, but others force me to enter them backward to avoid crushing my stomach. Narrow, indeed.“Almost there,” I dare to whisper. I don’t know if I’m reassuring the baby or myself. The cobble road morphs into a wooded path, the stones fading into the dirt and grass. I stand at the entrance of the northern forest, a few miles from the citadel. I turn, and I can see the large screen above the main tower, a giant square of black that barely stands out from the night sky behind it. They only turn it on when they need to broadcast an important message. Anything else would be a waste of light. I face the woods again, and I can make out a tiny cottage just past the tree line. It’s worn down, the thatched roof caving in on the right side. Whoever lived here before had been gone for a long while.Once inside the cottage, I can barely make out shapes. The dim light of the moon doesn’t reach through the trees, and I’m left in pitch black. I feel my way around the room, stumbling into forgotten chairs and a dusty table. Suddenly, a bright light shines through the broken window. The screen above the citadel illuminates the sky. My heart sinks as I see the face displayed for the whole city to see.Traitor. Cody Fletcher is executed on charges of treason.Executed. I can’t breathe. Cody didn’t make it out in time. Those emerald eyes… I’ll never see them again. He’ll never hold me close or brighten my day. He’ll never meet his son.I reach into my pocket, pulling out the metal canister. We spent years planning this moment. He is supposed to be here with me. We knew the risks when we started the whole damn thing, but I never expected to lose him. I sink to my knees in the cottage as the light on the screen shuts off. The world was horribly quiet, and dark. So, so dark.“You’ll grow up knowing your father did everything for you,” I whisper down to my belly. “This was all for you.” I twist the top of the can open, and sparkling gold washes over me. For the first time in my life, I bathe in the warm glow of real sunlight. We never found out how the government obtained it, but we didn’t care. I am holding the only remnant of our dead star. Hopefully, my son will grow up in a world of light and happiness, and not the cold dark that I am accustomed to. Looking at the golden light, I think of Cody. His smile was just as bright as the sunlight pooling against the metal of the can. I prayed he would watch over the baby and see that our plan worked.
Badly Attacked! Assassination Attempt on Ibrahim Traoré as West Goes Insane!
Have you ever witnessed unruly behavior in a courtroom? If so, what transpired and how was it handled?
Someone bumped into my car and refused to pay for the repair, so I had to sue. She said I didn’t stand a chance because she worked at the country’s biggest car insurance agency and had access to the best of the best in terms of preparing for the trial.
This was small claims court, so no lawyers allowed, but she brought one of the agency’s lawyers anyway. Both of them yelled against me throughout the hearing, hardly letting me say a word. In addition, I was not up to par language wise because I’d only lived in the country for a few years. The judge limited herself to listening to them and nodding.
At last the judge turned to me. All I could utter was “B-but this is how trials are held in this country? Whoever yells more wins?!” to which the judge said “Exactly. That’s what I wanted to say – that is not how a trial works.” She then explained (for the sake of educating the public, as judges are supposed to do when appropriate) all that the woman and her lawyer had done that is forbidden in a courtroom. She also ruled additional compensation for me as punishment to them.
Where would you rather live: Tokyo or Beijing?
I lived in Tokyo for about 12 years and in Beijing for about 5. I left Tokyo for Beijing. I currently live in Shanghai. My answer to your question is ‘neither’… but if my choice was limited to these 2 cities and my work/life offering being perfectly equivalent, I would probably select (again) Beijing.
As most people pointed out, the biggest drawback living in Beijing is the pollution. That is the key reason I moved to Shanghai. Beyond that, the 2 cities are so different you will find good and bad things on both side and your choice will be determined by other factors than the cities’ features.
Choosing Tokyo instead of Beijing may seems a no-brainer considering the quality of services, internet ‘freedom’ and the visual/culinary esthetics of Japan. Talking Japanese is far easier to learn than Chinese among many other advantages that I am certain many will point-out and I used to appreciate greatly.
But…
These capital cities and their respective countries are currently taking a very different trajectory. China is generally progressing while Japan is taken into a slow spiral of regression which is painful to watch.
It’s easy to live well in Tokyo if you create your own comfortable bubble and blind yourself from the massive pile-up of social and environmental issues Japan is stacking against itself. By all means, choose Tokyo if you plan to live this way.
I personally prefer to be surrounded by optimistic Beijingers who have witnessed rapid positive changes and have become accustomed to try and integrate new ideas.
Beijing is not the rest of China and many massive, morally challenging (to say the least) problems are left to be addressed. The question is, do you prefer to be living in a place climbing rapidly upward or moving slowly downward?
What was the most devastating moment in your life that eventually bounced back from, and how?
I was a teenager.
I was attacked by a very large group of youths/teenagers/men it was 10+. It was pretty relentless. I remember my vision going blurred and it going pink before being knocked unconscious.
I woke up black and blue in hospital with a lot of broken bones and pretty much had to undergo multiple surgeries to put me back together again. Apparently they were jumping up and down on my head. To this day parts of my body hurt from this and some of the scars are still there despite 30+ years of fading.
My father saved me by going out and smashing the attackers to bits making them run away.
The police were not particularly interested and nobody was ever charged with it. The attackers actually were called cowards because they had to gang up on me. We moved away from that area and after that we always kept guns in the house. I kept guns in my homes.
I bounced back by simply living well. I recovered enough to go to 6th form college, but decided to explore a bit. I ended up meeting Liam setting up my own business and out performing every single one of those people almost all of them went on the dole and stayed there for the next 20 years 😀 :D.
It’s funny too as these useless fucks who’ve done nothing but suck up dole money think they’re the master race. You’d be surprised how many british are you deserved to be attacked! Only whites can live in the UK!
I laugh even harder as their country declines.
Woman Plans Girls Trip Without Him knowing and He DUMPS Her INSTANTLY
China may have the largest military personnel in the world, but size doesn’t matter when you’re going to face another super power like the U.S. What’s your opinion?
In my opinion, the US military is in decline…
it has a recruitment and morale crisis
it has a maintenance crisis, where ships and planes are heavily backlogged
it has not faced a peer adversary militarily since the Second World War
it has not had a significant military victory since the Second World War—it lost in Vietnam and Afghanistan!
its advanced military tech has reliability issues (e.g., the USS Gerald R. Ford’s EMALS and the F-35)
the Pentagon conducted numerous war games involving China and found that China won in every instance!
China’s military is extremely capable…
China has 232X the shipbuilding capacity of the USA, according to a leaked US Navy briefing—this means that China can much more easily replenish its lost ships
China bristles with A2/AD missiles, including hypersonic ones
China has the world’s largest navy, including formidable ships like the Type 055 heavy destroyer, the Type 052D destroyer, the Type 003 aircraft carrier, etc.
the J-20 Mighty Dragon is a frighteningly capable stealth fighter every bit the equal of the F-22 Raptor—and China has many more of them
A war in China’s own backyard gives China an overwhelming home field advantage. The US military would have a serious logistical problem.
What made you realize your life will never be the same?
In 2013, I got an excited call from my mom. She told me “I’ve won $2 million in the lottery, well, there’s a two in there somewhere, and I’ve decided to give it to you! I know you want to buy a house so badly.”
OK. I said I’d be right over. Arriving at my mom’s apartment, I saw her holding a large manilla envelope with “OFFICIAL DOCUMENT” and ”YOU’VE WON!” printed on it. On closer inspection, of course, there was tiny type that said “if you are holding the winning numbers.” The appeal on the inside was for her to send $25 “for processing.”
I looked down at a pile of mail that had accumulated mail. There were several envelopes like this one; apparently they hadn’t convinced her she was a “winner.” I also discovered that she had been sending blank checks to pay her bills, and had been putting all purchased on her credit cards, which now had a combined balance of over $20k. She could not write a check, but she knew how to get to the mall and whip out a piece of plastic.
I scolded her. I told her an educated woman like her should know a scam when she saw it. I think I even wrote “official document” on a napkin to show how it worked. I proceeded to toss all the envelopes in her recycling bin.
Mom yelled and lunged at me, recuing the lottery envelopes. “Someone has to win, and it could be me!” Her best friend was coming for dinner that night. I told her to please ask her friend (a younger and sensible teacher) about her opinion, and to gt rid of these if Friend said so.
I went home knowing what I suspected was true. Mom undeniably had dementia. She had been acting erratically for a few years, but I chalked it up to “mom being mom” and mom’s insistent “I’m old, of course I forget things!”
It took me all of 2014 and into 2015 to get her diagnosed. Finally, in February of 2015 she had an unexplained fall in her apartment, breaking 3 ribs. Her landlord, who heard her yelling and called me and we went to the ER. That incident was the first domino in me getting her tested for dementia (she failed the 30-question, getting an 8 out of 30. I got an MRI and a referral to an excellent neurologist and assessment program for mom.
That was the beginning of my journey with what was my mother’s frontotemporal dementia. Mom grew steadily worse, going from needing one aide in her home to requiring two aides (available 24/7) in a dementia facility. Mom gradually lost her ability to speak, then recognize me. She died in December of 2019.
I assumed her death would close a chapter and I would start over. It didn’t work out like that. Once mom was dead, so were so many relationships I had built over the years. All of her friends who would regularly call me to see how mom was doing (or to ask if I would escort them for a visit) stopped contact after the memorial service. What was left of my family declared “the holidays were always about seeing mom, we’re making other plans.” I got one letter from a far-flung relative of mom’s who told me “dementia sure runs in the family!” Hoo boy. One Quoran went so far as to suggest I already had dementia, based on their review of my personal account; the question was not about dementia.
I’m now 63 and I’m really lonely and afraid. I told my doctor and my son about my concerns. How do I know if I’m developing dementia if I live alone and am not in regular contact with anyone? I had a few bad falls in my old apartment, so I moved to a first-floor unit. Also, for all our disagreements, I miss my mother. That’s the one person you know “has your back,” at least in a decent familial relationship.
You really never get over losing your parents. I tell my adult son all about my childhood. I told him where our house was, the beach down the street were I spent my summer days and the woods were I rode my horse. One Christmas, my son gifted me a map of my hometown. Interestingly, the map cut off the area of where my house was, it just showed the downtown area. Of course I told him I loved it, but I also realized that nobody really cares about my childhood story.
By the way, so was the war in Afghanistan. And so was the war in Vietnam and so was the war in Korea.
My father fought bravely in Korea. He was bayoneted in the middle of the night at the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir — twice. Once, in the groin. He somehow barely survived. (Miraculously? He first woke up in a hospital in Los Angeles, 28 days after he had been bayoneted twice.).
My father somehow survived. He would never talk about it, and I did not learn that until about 12 years ago.
My father died three years ago — in 2021, at age 93 — but my dad would also be the first to explain in great detail how that war was a ridiculous, and unjustified war. He was proud of his duty, and was proud of his service to his nation — but he would also lecture you extensively how the U.S. has absolutely no justification for sending ground troops into that mess.
He would tell you the same exact thing about Vietnam, and also about Afghanistan, and about the second incursion into Iraq. With full detailed explanations. The U.S. military had no business being in any of those four locations.
Period.
R.I.P., dad.
And, thanks.
HUAWEI’s New 4nm Chip Just SHOCKED The World… NO ONE Expected This!
Do you believe the U.S. government’s actions against Chinese companies involved in forced labor are effective in promoting human rights?
Where is the evidence?
The US levels charges against a Chinese entity and enforces sanctions without due process or an independent redress mechanism.
This is no different from sanctioning Carrie lam and John Lee for the crime of being appointed chief executive of Hong Kong.
As to forced labor, plenty of US companies have business dealings in or with Xinjiang entities. Why are they not sanctioned? For example, there is Hilton, mcdonald’s, snickers and coca cola in urumqi, Xinjiang. I won’t be surprised if the bed linens and uniforms in Hilton hotel is made from Xinjiang cotton, a favorite “forced labor” target, drawing imagery from the South’s plantation slavery past.
Why are American companies in Xinjiang participating in forced labor? Why don’t they exit the province, since forced labor doesn’t exist elsewhere in china?
The excuses are so bland these days. Either “human rights” or “national security”. There is even a level 3 “do not travel” state department warning on China.
Come on. Who was the last American to get into trouble in china?
Plenty of Chinese tourists, visa holders and Chinese Americans have been targeted and hounded over the last two administrations. Thousands have fled since the closure of the Houston consulate.
It is just prejudice and manufactured enmity.
If the Xinjiang’s cotton industry is not using forced labor, then why are there calls to replace or abandon Xinjiang products?
China is the world’s largest cotton producer, with over 90% of the country’s total cotton production coming from Xinjiang. In 2023, Xinjiang’s cotton production reached 5.12 million tons. Xinjiang cotton, known for its high quality and large output, has always been popular worldwide.
So it’s not difficult to understand why there’re calls to “replace or abandon Xinjiang products.” Some countries can’t compete with Xinjiang’s cotton production in China, so they look for excuses to suppress Xinjiang. PVH Corp. of the US is such an example.
In recent years, absurd anti-China narratives, such as “forced labor” in Xinjiang, have seriously disrupted the order of global textile and garment industry. Many well-known global apparel companies have been compelled to make the so-called “politically correct” choice regarding the issue of Xinjiang cotton. PVH owns apparel brands such as Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger. PVH states that China is an “important growth engine” for the company, with revenues increasing by more than 20 percent last year, and that it also wants to focus on increasing brand awareness in China.
However, in a corporate responsibility report released in 2022, PVH said that Xinjiang is one of the regions where no direct or indirect sourcing is permitted. PVH ostensibly emphasizes the “importance” of the Chinese market, but what it is actually doing is cooperating with the US government’s discriminatory suppression of Xinjiang-related products, which has seriously undermined the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese enterprises as well as jeopardized China’s sovereignty, security and development interests. PVH must provide a clear and unequivocal explanation.
Pressuring multinational companies to withdraw from Xinjiang has been a common tactic employed by certain anti-China forces to discredit the nation and promote “decoupling” from China. There are many examples of this.
Last year, Volkswagen stated that an audit of its jointly owned site in Xinjiang had found no signs of forced labor. But recently, it was subjected to a presumption of guilt by FT which claimed that the audit failed to meet key aspects of the international standard. Similarly, German chemical giant BASF reported that its audits found no evidence of human rights violations at its joint ventures in Xinjiang, yet it was forced to accept “allegations inconsistent with corporate values” and divest from those joint ventures.
In the face of actions that obviously have non-commercial purposes, and discriminatory measures against China – particularly concerning Xinjiang-related products – China will, of course, use legal methods to safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of relevant Chinese enterprises and industries, and to defend a fair and just international trade order. Hope multinational companies looking to expand their business in Xinjiang can trust the facts they observe, and avoid becoming victims of US political manipulation.
What is the most badass thing a private has said to a general?
Not a General, an Admiral. In the mid 90’s I was testing a freshly overhauled F404 in the test cell, at NAS Lemoore CA. Recently the AF had crash landed a C-21 (Lear 35) in Fresno, the local news portrayed the pilots as heroes because they “rode it in”, a Lear has no ejection seats. So anyway, I am putting an engine through it’s paces in the test cell, and through the reflection in the observation window I notice a few people quietly step in and are standing there. I am at full power, full afterburner, running high power tests. After bringing the engine back down to idle, someone asks “So what’s your job here sailor”, with out looking away from my instruments I respond, “I’m trying to blow this engine up”. Next I hear someone loudly clear their throat, I turn the engine over to my assistant, turned in my seat, and there, standing behind me, the Base CO, my Div O, my Master chief and….“Commander Light Attack Wing Pacific Fleet” Admiral Idon’trememberhisName. I snap to, and the Admiral says “Care to expound on that answer sailor? Thinking fast, I respond with “Well Sir, if I can’t break this engine, none of our pilots can, and no Navy jet will have to crash land in downtown Fresno”. He gives me a hard stare, smiles and says “Good fucking answer”, turns and walks out without another word. Please upvote, if you do like. Comments and questions welcome! Have a GREAT NAVY DAY!
Comedians That Stood Up AGAINST Woke Culture
Beef Tenderloin with Blue Cheese Stuffing
Grilled Flank Steak Stuffed with Blue Cheese and Serranos
Yield: 6 servings
Ingredients
1/2 cup crumbled blue cheese
2 tablespoons chopped walnuts
2 tablespoons chopped parsley
2 teaspoons dried oregano, divided
2 pound beef tenderloin
Salt and pepper to taste
2/3 to 3/4 cup beef broth
Instructions
Heat oven to 425 degrees F.
Combine the blue cheese, walnuts, parsley and 1 teaspoon of oregano in a bowl and mix well. Cut a long pocket in the top of the tenderloin, starting and ending 1/2 inch from the ends, cutting to within 1 inch of the bottom. Spoon the cheese mixture into the pocket. Press the sides of the meat together and secure with string. Rub the remaining teaspoon of oregano, salt and pepper on the tenderloin.
Roast until an instant-read thermometer inserted in the thickest part of the meat reads 120 degrees F for rare, 125 degrees F for medium-rare or 135 to 145 degrees F for medium, about 25 to 45 minutes (the temperature will continue to rise 5 to 10 degrees out of the oven). Let stand for 5 minutes.
Remove to a platter and cover loosely with aluminum foil. Place the roasting pan over medium-high heat and add the beef broth. Cook until heated through, stirring to deglaze the pan. Pour into a sauceboat.
Slice the tenderloin and serve with the pan juices.
Attorneys, what is the worst result a client ever got in court because they absolutely refused to take your advice?
I had a Public Defender client who after three months of discussing his case with him, he was convinced that he knew more about criminal law and procedures than I did. After all, he had failed to make bail and had so many counselors incarcerated with him 24/7.
He had failed to sign a jury trial demand form several times – at 9:10 am the day of the Bench trial, he claimed he wanted a jury trial. He had refused to see me on the days set aside for PD visits, insisting on evening and weekend conferences. He refused to cooperate with the investigator assigned claiming that the investigator was giving everything to the police.
All of the above and more were reasons he claimed when asking for a new attorney at 9:15 the morning of his trial. The judge almost laughed at him before denying his request.
The State had a big hole in its case – they had failed to measure to see if he was within 1000 feet of a public park or school. It was an element of the Class A felony he was charged with along with two other Class B felonies for similar offenses at other locations.
The State rested its case – I DO NOT NEED TO CROSS-EXAMINE! It would allow me to state that the ‘1000-foot element’ had not been proven and the Class A felony cannot be proven. But if I ask a single question, it opens the State to Re-Direct Examine the officer to discuss OTHER CASES IN THE METH ROW NEIGHBORHOOD that are further away but have been measured.
All of a sudden there is a loud Stage Whisper in my ear “Ask him if he measured from my house to the park.”
“Be quiet, Mr. C_______. Let me handle the case.”
“Guddammit! Ask him if he measured from my house to the park! Did he measure?”
“Be quiet! I don’t want to ask him; it would be bad for your case if I do. Now be still.”
“You Motherfu…”
“C________, shut the fuck up! Keep your fucking mouth shut; let me finish this case for your benefit.”
Judge: Mr. C________. Mr. Winters is doing his best for you, and you need to let him conduct your case. Right now, you are walking a very thin line, and he is the only one that can assist you. If you continue to persist in the matter and Mr. Winters refuses to ask what you are demanding; I will have him state his reasons for the refusal on the record and let you ask the question on your own. So far, he has provided you a brilliant defense by asking nothing.”
Judge: “Mr. Winters?”
“I refuse, Your Honor. The State is unable to bring forth any evidence of the missing element. I don’t want the State to have a second bite of the apple. The State cannot prove a Class A felony was committed without that element.”
Judge: “Mr. C________, your attorney has refused to ask the question you want, and for reasons which only benefit you and are against the State’s case. I would advise you to follow his advice and not ask the question on your own.”
“I wanna ask the PO-lice officer if he measured.”
Judge: Go ahead then. It’s now a matter of record.”
Officer, did you measure from my house to the park?”
“No.”
“That’s all I wanted to know. I’m done.”
“The State would like to redirect, Your Honor.”
The rest is history: Three houses were measured farther away from the public park than his house in the week the warrants were served and raids conducted. The judge accepted this as a measurement.
Without the measurement, the worst-case scenario would have been a Class B felony; maximum sentence twenty years, out in ten.
WITH THE MEASUREMENT THAT HE INSISTED UPON he was convicted of the Class A felony and received a sentence of FIFTY YEARS, out in twenty-five.
Sometimes the truth does not set you free.
Russia: ” . . . American bases are among the first targets” if Ukraine uses Western Missiles to hit Russia
Moscow would trigger a “contingency plan” outlined by President Vladimir Putin in the event that Ukraine receives permission to use Western-supplied long-range missiles for strikes deep inside Russia, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has warned.
Putin earlier said that any such strikes would be treated by Moscow as a direct attack by the countries that provided the weapons.
The diplomat was commenting on an upcoming meeting of Kiev’s foreign arms donors, which Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky has been touting as “historic.” Moscow does not follow statements on the issue as it already has a response prepared, the foreign minister said.
“As soon as this decision is taken [by the West to allow Ukraine to use long-range missiles], if it is taken, we will learn that, and the contingency mentioned by Vladimir Putin will already be in action,” Lavrov told Russia’s Channel 1 broadcaster.
Power plants, bridges, defense factories, and American bases are among the first targets. That does not bode well for Scranton, PA, where an Army Ammunition Plant is located. Ukraine’s Zelensky met with Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro at that plant a week ago, where the two autographed artillery shells to be used to kill Russian troops.
Many people in the area say “The only thing Zelensky and Governor Shapiro did with that visit, was to make Scranton a target for Russia.”
Putin has warned that any attack by Ukraine with Western-supplied long-range missiles would be treated by Moscow as being directly launched by NATO. He has suggested that Russia could arm enemies of the West with similar weapons in response.
Moscow is currently updating its nuclear doctrine to include an attack by a non-nuclear state backed by a nuclear one to the conditions which could trigger a nuclear retaliation from Russia.
Kiev has been asking the US and its allies to lift a ban on strikes deep inside Russia with their long-range weapons for months, blaming its recent setbacks on the battlefield on Western reluctance.
Russian officials previously claimed that the principal decision to grant Ukraine its wish had already been made, and that Western nations were choosing a means to present it to the general public.
Zelensky had hoped that the ban would be lifted during his visit last month to the US, where he presented his ‘victory plan’ to President Joe Biden. According to local media, US officials are skeptical about the Ukrainian leader’s proposal, which they do not consider viable for defeating Russia.
Moscow, which describes the Ukraine conflict as a US-led proxy war against Russia, has pledged to achieve its goals by any means necessary as its national security depends on it. The West is willing “to fight to the last Ukrainian” to inflict damage on Russia, the Kremlin has argued.
NATO Openly Preparing for War with Russia
NATO is no longer hiding that it is gearing up for a potential military conflict with Russia, Deputy Foreign Minister Aleksandr Grushko has said, pointing to this year’s Steadfast Defender drills, the bloc’s largest maneuvers since the end of the Cold War.
The US-led military bloc has been expanding eastward for decades, despite assurances given to the Soviet Union in the run-up to German reunification in 1990 that it would not do so. Russia has repeatedly described the expansion toward its borders as a threat to its security.
Speaking to RIA Novosti on Tuesday, Grushko said that “now NATO representatives have stopped hiding that they are preparing for a potential armed clash with Russia.”
“Regional defense plans have been approved, concrete tasks for all of the bloc’s military command structures have been formulated. Possible options for military action against Russia are being continuously worked out,” the diplomat added.
He cited the Steadfast Defender exercise that ran from January through late May, saying that “for the first time, the enemy was not a fictitious state, but Russia.”
While NATO did not specifically name Russia in its announcement of the drills, it called the exercises preparation for a conflict with a “near-peer” adversary. NATO’s main security document identifies Russia as the bloc’s largest threat.
The drills, which were conducted near Russia’s western border, featured some 90,000 troops from all 32 NATO member states.
According to Grushko, “military budgets are being pumped [with money] and [Western] economies are being militarized.”
The deputy foreign minister insisted that “it was not Russia, but the North-Atlantic alliance that took the path of confrontation,” by refusing to engage in dialogue with Moscow. He concluded that NATO bears responsibility for a “major European security crisis.”
On Saturday, Germany’s Die Welt newspaper, citing a confidential NATO planning document, reported that in preparation for a potential conflict with Russia, the military bloc is planning to dramatically increase the number of combat and air defense units.
Over the past few months, several NATO member states have claimed that Russia could be harboring plans to attack the bloc.
Speaking on the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) in June, Russian President Vladimir Putin dismissed as “nonsense” and “bulls**t” allegations that Moscow plans to attack NATO.
In September, the Russian leader warned, however, that should Ukraine’s Western backers allow Kiev to use their missiles to hit targets deep inside Russia, “it will mean nothing less than the direct participation of NATO countries, the US and European countries, in the conflict in Ukraine.”
“The Russian Federation demands from Kiev the withdrawal of all Ukrainian military personnel from the four partially occupied territories and Ukraine’s renunciation of its intentions to join NATO,” said Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov in an interview with Newsweek.
Hal Turner Remarks
Any of you who have been distracted from the growing Russia-Ukraine conflict by the absurd Israel-Iran troubles, or who lost sight of the reality that the Russia-Ukraine situation is heading for direct nuclear confrontation between Russia and the West, are reminded: The conflict hasn’t gone away, and NATO is now openly pushing for direct war, which will get a lot of US killed, here in the US.
Emmanuel Todd On Europe’s Hopefully Fading Submission To The U.S.
This blog has been following the writings of Emmanuel Todd for some time:
American leadership is failing: That is the argument of an eccentric new book that since January has stood near the top of France’s best-seller lists. It is called “La Défaite de l’Occident” (“The Defeat of the West”). Its author, Emmanuel Todd, is a celebrated historian and anthropologist who in 1976, in a book called “The Final Fall,” used infant-mortality statistics to predict that the Soviet Union was headed for collapse.
…
While Mr. Todd is, again, not judgmental on sexual matters, he is judgmental on intellectual ones. The inability to distinguish facts from wishes astounds him at every turn of the Ukraine war. The American hope early in the war that China might cooperate in a sanctions regime against Russia, thereby helping the United States refine a weapon that would one day be aimed at China itself, is, for Mr. Todd, a “delirium.”
The Italian version of “The Defeat of the West”, Todd’s latest book, has just been published. It is the occasion for an interview with Corriere Di Bologna. The answers Todd is giving during the interview deserve your attention (edited machine translation):
Q:You argue that Europe has delegated the representation of the West to the United States and is now paying the price. How do you think this trend can be changed?A: “In the present state we cannot do anything else. A war has begun. It is the outcome of this war that will decide the fate of Europe. If Russia is defeated in Ukraine, European submission to the Americans would be prolonged for a century. If, as I believe, the United States is defeated, NATO will disintegrate and Europe will be left free.
Even more important than a Russian victory will be the halting of the Russian army on the Dnepr and the unwillingness of the Putin regime to attack western Europe militarily. With 144 million people, a shrinking population and 17 million square kilometers, the Russian state is already struggling to occupy its territory. Russia will have neither the means nor the desire to expand once the borders of pre-communist Russia are reconstituted. Western Russophobic hysteria fantasizing about the desire for Russian expansion in Europe is simply ridiculous to a serious historian.
The psychological shock awaiting Europeans will be to realize that NATO does not exist to protect us but to control us.”
Since the beginning of the recent phase of the war in Ukraine in February 2022, I have argued that Russia does not want to take all of Ukraine but only those parts which, up to 1922, had been traditional parts of Russia before the communists added them to the Ukrainian borderland.
It is nice to see that Emmanuel Todd agrees with this analysis:
It is difficult to discern what the planed end state of this operation is. Where is this going to stop?
Looking at this map I believe that the most advantageous end state for Russia would be the creation of a new independent country, call it Novorussiya, on the land east of the Dnieper and south along the coast that holds a majority ethnic Russian population and that, in 1922, had been attached to the Ukraine by Lenin. That state would be politically, culturally and militarily aligned with Russia.
ukradded
biggerThis would eliminate Ukrainian access to the Black Sea and create a land bridge towards the Moldavian breakaway Transnistria which is under Russian protection.
Excursus:
The yellow part of that map marked ‘Ukraine in 1654’ was actually the land of the Eastern Orthodox Zaporozhian Cossacks. Under threat from the Catholic Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth, which at the time held the green parts under serfdom, they negotiated the Pereiaslav Agreement (1654) with Russia and pledged allegiance to the Tsar. They area thus became an autonomous part of Russia.
End Excursus
The rest of the Ukraine would be a land confined, mostly agricultural state, disarmed and too poor to be build up to a new threat to Russia anytime soon. Politically it would be dominated by fascists from Galicia which would then become a major problem for the European Union.
I have also argued previously that the current hostile German government position towards Russia is unnatural and will be corrected. In his interview Todd also agrees with this (edited machine translation):
Do you think Europe took the final step toward this subordination [to the U.S.] during the conflicts in the Balkans, and especially with the Kosovo issue?
“No, it all started in Ukraine. During the Iraq war, after Kosovo, Putin, Schröder and Chirac held joint press conferences. This terrified Washington. It seemed that America could be expelled from the European continent. Russia’s separation from Germany thus became a priority for American strategists. Making the situation in Ukraine worse served this purpose.
Forcing the Russians into war to prevent Ukraine’s de facto integration into NATO was, initially, a major diplomatic success for Washington. The shock of war paralyzed Germany and allowed the Americans, in general confusion, to blow up the Nordstream pipeline, a symbol of the economic understanding between Germany and Russia.
Of course, in a second phase, that of American defeat, American control over Europe will be pulverized. Germany and Russia will meet again. This conflict is in a sense artificial. The natural thing, in a low-fertility Europe, with its aging population, is the complementarity between German industry and Russian energy and mineral resources.”
The current situation and the sanctions on Russia are utterly harmful for Germany’s industry and the people depending on it. I therefore hope that the process of reconnecting Germany with Russia will proceed as soon as possible. The current government which, for whatever reason, had agreed with the U.S. course on Ukraine, should be punished for the great harm it has caused.
There are a few more bits in the Todd interview. I’ll leave it to you to read them.
Posted by b on October 9, 2024 at 14:40 UTC | Permalink
Commander John Forebear re-enters the airlock to Novac 3 and takes his place at the bridge’s command module. No sooner is he settled in than his headset sparks in static.”It’s a blue line here, John. Ice to every horizon, kind of mist-like, an artic blue, mythical. It’s really something.”The Commander smiles. Just like my science officer to admire the view. I love him, but it’s another thing to keep him focused on the task at hand.“I can see,” the Commander replies. “Your visuals are coming in fine, but you’re not on vacation, are you Officer Aaronson?” The monitor displays the surface of planet 87689-B, no longer the ice blue marble seen growing over the last eighteen months, but white arctic plains, endless mountain ranges, and red-ironed rock on knife edged peaks.The Commander’s headset crackles again from Aaronson. “You need to smell the roses more often my friend..”The Commander laughs. “You’ve never smelled a rose; you’ve never even seen one.””I read books. You should try it.”The Commander laughs again. “I do read books.””You read manuals on rocket technology. Those aren’t books.”Aaronson is on the surface, the Commander thinks. Back to business. “Let’s get on it, Science Officer. Have you centered the vein?””Affirmative,” Aaronson answers, coming in clear. “Data confirms crystal spectrum 2.5 klicks below the surface. Deploying the drill.”On the ship’s monitor, the Commander zooms in. Standing much larger and taller than the robotic derricks on Absolon 9, the drill first extends vertically. Once the upward extension completes, the blades spread out at the base, slowly expanding to thirty meters, reminding the Commander of the wings of a teeth mantis. The blades begin turning, spinning, ice flies as it grinds through the ice. The high, piercing sound of the drill fills the audio, and ice blocks spin off the blades as the diamond edged wings cut, tear, bore a hole in the planet.Soon the derrick has drilled itself out of sight from the command module. On the surface, Science Officer Aaronson puts on a propulsion vest. The tiny thrusters fire a blue flame, a throated growl as they lift him. Aaronson disappears as he descends the newly dug channel, a vertical mineshaft.An hour later, Aaronson patches in. “You need to get down here, Commander. You won’t believe this.”Descending the drill shaft along with Security Officer Dickens, the Commander realizes they don’t need headlamps. The ice walls are a translucent aqua glow, almost an ocean effect, the glow derived he suspects from its own organic energy source within the fabric of the ice. His gloved hand slides down the edge of the mineshaft. Clear, he thinks. I can see at least three meters into the ice. The purity of it.The Commander is not a worrier, but he worries as he descends. Not because of the shaft or the mine. He has mined all over the Federation, dozens of planets, and even if this shaft is twice the size of the largest, he still has the experience. It isn’t the cumbersome size of the derrick either. It’s what his security officer had said the night before. They had been together on the observation deck and it was about his friend Aaronson. The same subject Dickens had been harping on for the last year.
“To mine the ice is nothing,” Dickens had said, the reflection of a dark red nebula on his scared face. “It’s the softness of that Aaronson. He’s not like us; he lacks the killer instinct. When the time comes, Aaronson will be the weak link. Trust me, I’ve seen it before. We need to mine the ice, and I’m not letting him get in the way.”
Always the paranoid security officer, thinks the Commander. But he’s my security officer, and I like him being paranoid. It’s safer. His job is to protect all three of us, after all. He pours himself two fingers of scotch from their dwindling supply into his crystal glass. The blue planet hovers below in its own shimmering light, the plains, the mountains, the stars ablaze above.
Dickens grabs the scotch bottle with a flick of his eyes. “Have you seen his right earlobe? It’s the mark of a mystic. He hides it, but it’s typical of his kind, his race. He swears, what a joke, there’s some kind of life on the planet. He says he dreamed about them. Hallucinating is what I think. And we scanned for planet heat, nothing. The entire planet is absolute zero. If there’s a THEY, can they be absolute zero? There’s a reason Sector 12 threw out the mystics you know, why you don’t see them. They shipped them off, good riddance I say.
The Commander throws back his scotch. Corporate’s command was simple. Go to planet 87689-B, mine as much of what you can, bring back the mythical ice that doesn’t melt. Imagine the repercussions of a product with endless refrigeration? Fill the storage bay, bring it back. Zing, Pop, we’re all rich. Or, I’m rich. Corporate is already rich. The commander puts his hand on Dicken’s arm to assure him. “We mine the ice, fill the payload. Then we get the hell out. Aaronson will be fine.” And once I’m rich, I can retire to Absolom 7, the furthest from the insanity of the Federation I can get, a place without thought control, a place with hardly any people at all. What’s going on at Sector 12 is really not my business.
***
As the two men descend, their propulsion vests hold the descent, a hissing sound from the fuel, a blue flame. At the bottom of the shaft, Aaronson waves up to them in the blue glow, the channel now carved out at the bottom like a cathedral. It’s then the commander realizes the protruding vein of ice in front of him IS the core product, the color of the distinctive blue giving it away. The ice gives off a ghosting blue, fog like, the surface seeming to have a thin frothing skin. Ice that won’t melt. Corporate could mine this for decades. Who knows how long?
Aaronson’s voice breaks in the Commander’s headset. “I’m at your two o’clock. You have to see this. I’ve run the carbon dating spectronics.”
The science officer is standing at the entrance to one of many spidered tunnels off the base of the main dig. Behind him are the images of a junkyard of random space debris, dozens of pieces of metal embedded in a clear ice wall, as if a human expedition on a prior mining exploration had abandoned their probes, a launch vehicle, digging equipment, backhoes, mining tools. Ancient technology embedded in clear ice.
The Commander joins Aaronson in front of the ice wall. “I’ve never seen equipment like this. What’s the reading?”
“2.5 million years. Our earth was not yet civilized when these artifacts were brought here Commander.”
Aronson puts his hand on the ice wall in awe of what they’d found. “It’s a shame we can’t stay. Imagine what we could learn. And there are inscriptions on the equipment. There, on what looks like a backhoe, do you see?”
Just looking at artifacts from so long ago sends a shiver through the Commander, a déjà vu, a murmur, a whisper from an ancient past.
Aaronson speaks quietly to the Commander. “You sense it, don’t you? Can we stay?”
Dickens looks disgustedly at Aaronson. “No way science man. We’re not here for your witchy bullshit. If there’s intelligence, we’re in danger.”
Aaronson ignores Dickens, his eyes on the Commander. “Give me just three days to complete an archeological study. All I’m asking is three days, John.”
“Pfff,” Dickens snorts. “You’ve been whining about missing your family for the entire trip out. Now you want to stay?”
“I do. But there’s more.” Aaronson hesitates like he was holding back. “You both need to come with me.”
They follow Aaronson down an ice blue tunnel and enter a cavern opening up with caves on an ice cliff. Ice ladders access what looks like homes, abandoned cliff dwellings. Structures in ice of all sizes, a blue sheen to the ice, ghostly, present, unknown. But what really stands apart are the carvings. Circular discs of etchings, sculptures of some abstract design. Like Picasso of ages long past, or Phillips on Horizon’s Horn in the 8th Quadrant. The brightest spot is a centerpiece on a small pedestal. There sits what looks like a pulsating diamond, sparkling white, about 20 centimeters tall. Around it is an artistically designed ice carved shrine. The diamond hums, it glitters organically.
Aronson puts his helmeted face inches from the diamond. “This is ice but like a queen I think. See how she produces ice from the base like tiny glaciers. The ice is the eggs. They don’t melt, we know that, but the queen is this diamond of ice, birthing the ice. This shrine is to worship the ice diamond, is my guess.”
Dickens picks up the diamond, examines it. “If they can’t protect it, they don’t deserve to keep it. Why are we only taking the ice when we can also take, as you say, the queen?”
Aaronson steps in front of Dickens. “We only came for the ice. We don’t know the ramifications. We need to study it.”
Dickens glances at the Commander who gestures to return the ice diamond. He sets the crystal diamond back on the pedestal.
Returning to the derrick, the three men prepare the container for some hours, collecting ice, storing it for the transfer.
The Commander closes the portal on the container. “Ok Aaronson, trigger the container to ascend to the surface. I’ve programmed the ascent to Novac 3.”
Aaronson and the Commander strap on their vests. Dickens joins them. Before he triggers the propulsion, Aaronson stops Dickens.
Aronson raises both of his hands. “He’s hiding the ice diamond in his pack Commander. Not a good idea Dickens. There’s more to this than you realize.”
“Don’t tell me science boy, we can take this. But… but…” Dickens grabs his helmet with both hands. Whatever is in his helmet eats on his face, his flesh is breaking up like black microbes gnawing on him.
He draws his laser sidearm, fires at Aaronson, whose chest lights up with a red flash. The charge dissipates in an electrical charge, Aaronson collapses to the ice. Dickens falls to his knees next to Aaronson and his hands desperately claw each side of his helmet. His screams pierce the Commander’s headset as the whites of Dicken’s eyes go black. His face in the clear visor helmet DISSOLVES, the flesh of his face dripping away, blood flowing down his cheeks with the white bones of his skull protruding. Finally, his mass slides down into the interior of his suit like sludge in a drain and his suit crumples on the ice.
The Commander thinks in a second. It was so simple. Go to planet 87689-B, mine as much as you can, fill the storage bay with a ton of the stuff. Bring it back. He takes hold of the pack. Carrying Aaronson, he stumbles to the main channel and fires his vest. The weight of two men may be too much. He turns the nozzle full on. But he’s rising too slowly and falls back a meter for every two he ascends. Aaronson moans on his back. As they rise up the channel, the sides of the shaft begin cracking like a crevasse closing in on them, the ice splintering, cascading down the channel. Pieces of ice reach out to strike at his legs, his arms, the iced sides moving in on them like a closing fist. The planet itself knows I have the queen.
Once on the surface, the Commander lays Aaronson in the shuttle. As they take off, the gravity of the planet seems to bend with an aurora of light, blues and pinks reach for them, a colored gravity aching to pull the shuttle back. But they dock on Novac 3 and soon all of the ship’s engines are firing, blasting in a blue-red fire, but the planet strains to hold the ship. 87689-B is not giving up. It seems to scream to pull the ship back, like a mother fighting for the return of her children, her queen, the ice. Finally, the planet lets go, spent with exhaustion. The planet gives out a collective gasp of loss. Novac 3 snaps into space, the stars streak by.
***
Two months later, Aaronson still hasn’t died. The commander has set him up in sickbay, the portrait of his wife, his two young children taped to the bulkhead above him. He has no consciousness, thinks the commander. He’s dying, a coma. He’ll never last a month, certainly not a year.
As the days become weeks, the Commander holds Aaronson’s sweating head in his berth. He feeds him food carefully ground so he can swallow. He washes Aaronson when he needs to be washed. And finally in desperation he lies next to his friend, begging to transfer his own heated life force. Wake up, Aaronson. Wake up. You’re the only friend I’ve got.
But strangely, the Commander meets him in dreams, an apparition in his sleep, coming to him out of a blue iced fog. “The ice melts,” Aaronson says in the dream. “Melts”. But how can this be? The ice does not melt, the crystal births more ice. But Aaronson says over and over, “The ice is the absence of heat,” his eyes unfocused, the light in his irises dying. There must be a message. Novac 3 rockets through space and the Commander drinks scotch on the observation deck, first two fingers, then four, then he’s out of counting fingers. He just drinks. There is no day. The nebula of greens and browns and pinks, the infinitum of space, silently watches. He drinks until the day he looks in the mirror of his cabin and examines his red-veined eyes, his face. Then he knows what to do.
********
Aaronson’s near lifeless body lies in the outstretched arms of the Commander. He stumbles with the weight, falls, rises again. He struggles on, the weight heavy. The propulsion vest he wears can hardly hold them both from plummeting down the mineshaft. He finds the ice caves, the ladders, the art. He then lays Aaronson carefully down at the altar where the ice diamond used to be, the queen. After taking his pack off, he removes the ice diamond and places it on the pedestal and kneels in front of it.
Behind the commander stands a blue presence, at least ten feet tall, a figure in raw ice, nothing more. The man is clear blue, the ice of his body shimmering like the planet itself. There is a crackling, like tinkling ice, as the man’s arm moves. He places a hand on the Commander’s shoulder, his arm joint re-forming as the ice breaks and splinters. Lights like nail-heads shine from his eyes. His head turns, a crinkling in his neck, a thin frothing crystal skin. Your man will be fine. He’ll get to stay, study us as he wants. Then we can get him back if he chooses. But not for you. Yours is a different path.
The commander turns. Half of his face is blue ice, he is transforming. He knows in his heart that soon the suit won’t be necessary. He smiles to himself.But what will happen when Novac 3 reaches the frontier of the Federation, passes the ashen worlds destroyed by war, the planets stripped of all resources and lain to waste? What will happen when the sickened and bitter society discovers the ice that won’t melt? He’s completed his mission. The ice is overflowing the container within the ship, and in another eighteen months it will reach the frontier. They will harvest a rare commodity, solving the refrigeration needs for the Federation.
Now he more than smiles, he laughs. The ice has a little surprise, he thinks. A little gift to the Corporation. It will spread throughout the Federation of Planets. And then he remembers his dream on Novac 3. He remembers the dream asking him, what is the absence of hate? He now knows the answer. The ice will spread, and those who have the emotion of anger, or vengeance, or loathing, or bigotry, or so many other tortures in the souls of humanity, will, like Dickens, MELT.
How did 99.9% of Iranian missiles hit their target in Israel?
I don’t know if 99.9% of Iranian missiles hit their target in Israel. I doubt if there is anyone who would know.
HOWEVER, there are a lot of Sociol Media videos now posted that did show that a lot of missiles did get thru and hit their targets which included:
Three Air Force bases
The Mossad HQ in Tel Aviv
There were MINIMAL/NO video footages of any Iranian missiles intercepted.
It is clear from these MULTIPLE video footages that Israel missile defence system have FAILED. These will have outsized consequences – It demonstate that despite having powerful allies, Israel and the United States are not able to deter or prevent an attack on Israel.
In fact, the Israelis could not even STOP irregular forces like the Houthis. Other irregular forces are no doubt watching and there will also be preparing future attacks on Israel.
Having lost the myth of its invincibility, Israel days are NUMBERED as its situation can only deterioate from this point onward and it will likely dragged the United States down to the abyss with it.
Is it true that Chinese swords are inferior to Japanese katanas?
Well, Japanese warfare is a different ballgame from Chinese warfare.
If I may offer an analogy, studying the history of war in Japan next to the Chinese is akin to a controlled lab experiment vs. the chaos of the real world beyond.
Let me explain.
Japanese warfare, in sum, has been an endless wave of civil war, among a population that only reached 35m in the 1870s. It was 8m entering the sengoku period in the 1460s.
Now, Japan lies north, with the home islands sharing the same latitude as the Koreas and the northeastern Chinese provinces of Jilin and Heilongjiang. One of the most important cities in the latter was Ningguta, literally the numeral “six” in Manchu, and it was where the Qing dynasty sent exiles, because of its desolate nature.
Life in Japan is incredibly harsh, not least because the conditions were exacerbated by the mountainous terrain. My shifu described Japan as “Yunnan with Heilongjiang weather”.
Large-scale warfare in ancient Japan was rare, because the scale was limited by available resources, harsh winters and lack of connectivity over challenging terrain.
Competition over centuries consolidated power from tribes, to clans, daimyos and finally the shogunate, before passing back to the emperor during the meiji restoration.
In such a limited microcosm, warfare was necessarily stylized, and ritualistic. Wars of extermination and destruction were rare, and tactical evolution became a laborious race to improve weaponry, because neighboring states all fought and organized the same way.
Japan’s harsh winter and short growing season attracted men to blacksmithing. The standardization of the Japanese arsenal with the katana front and center allowed blacksmiths from all over Japan to optimize the form factor and recipe over millennia, resulting in the katana being ranked as a top blade of the ancient agrarian world.
The katana is not just a weapon. It is also an important ritualistic symbol of bushido, and extensively used in stylized personal combat among the samurai.
It is this sprinkling of sacred religion that drove Japanese sword culture towards an apex of quality.
China’s population heft, continental range of latitudes and numerous neighbors along a long border means weapons standardization and shared rules of war are practically impossible. The Chinese adapted arms that could counter the enemy’s strengths, instead of pursuing the refinement of a single form factor.
Japan probably made the best katana, or the curved narrow blade in history. But the best Chinese straight swords (jian), broadswords (dadao) and longswords (kanmadao) were no slouch, having been tested in combat against the best armies of the time.
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Hello animal lovers how do u deal with having too put ur cat too sleep..
buster was hes name buster was 18 and was my world..
what help you get thru this harrowing time..
and did u get burial or cremation..
Havent sleeped or eaten 2 days now..
I dont have any family supports witch sucks..
I need a hug but no one too hug..
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What can the World learn from studying the German Flak Towers of Worldy War 2?
Nazi Germany allocated great resources to infrastructure during WWII. Flak towers are one of these.
Anti-aircraft tower (Flaktürme) in Vienna.
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These towers were built to defend the Reich Empire from British air raids. These complex structures inclued radar stations within. These towers are considered urgent and top priority so all the related raw material (cement, pig iron etc.) was directed to these constructions. However apart from towers in Berlin, Hamburg and Vienna, other projects had to be cancelled due to shortage of raw material and funds.
10 feet thick concrete walls were unassailable for ordinary bombings. The anti aircraft guns situated on top of these towers were very effective since they can create no-fly zones when concentrated their firepower. For example the three towers formed a safe triangle over Berlin from Royal Air Force. These towers could be used as bomb shelters that can house thousands of people during air raids.
These towers were so impregnable that during the Battle of Berlin where there was no hope for Nazi capital’s survival, these towers could not be taken by Soviet Red Army because of their thick walls. The Soviets did not bother to waste valuable ammo on these towers and bypassed them in their quest to capture the Nazi capital. In the end the defenders had to surrender when they ran out of food and water.
All in all these giant towers exist today because it is too costly to demolish them. The lesson that can be learnt about their ordeal is that they served their purpose well.
Is it safe for a cat to eat meat that has been left out overnight?
Your housecat is by nature a scavenger, typically only hunting when the opportunity presents itself.
Left to forage in the great outdoors, they won’t necessarily pass up a festering carcass.
…which is another reason in addition to predation and traffic that indoor cats typically lead longer, healthier lives.
Personally, I’d be far more concerned about my felines eating highly salted fish or bulb vegetables than room temperature meats, but I also wouldn’t give them ANYTHING that I’d be scared to eat myself.
The two hour maximum for unrefrigerated food is a good rule of thumb for both people and pets.
Don’t squander those 9 lives on base negligence.
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Can you explain what Pattaya, Thailand is like?
The sun goes down and the lights come on along the Pattaya foreshore
I lived in Pattaya for seven years. I’ve heard it said, more than once, that Pattaya “is the world’s biggest brothel.” No doubt there’ll be people who’ll be offended by this statement. They’ll offer up a myriad reasons why they consider Pattaya to be one of the best places in the world to reside. For those who live there, or spend extended periods there, then this is understandable. They’re just protecting/defending their home turf.
The sign says it all
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The reality of Pattaya is it’s predominantly an adult entertainment/nightlife spot. The Beach front area, and the adjoining streets and laneways, are crammed with beer bars, gogo bars, massage parlours, and nightclubs, which are staffed by ladies who provide sexual services, for a price. This is an undeniable fact. The focal point of Pattaya was, is, and will be this beach front zone. Tourists who come to Pattaya, gravitate to this area for fun and entertainment. This area, and it’s associated support busnisesses of hotels, restaurants, cafes, and beauty shops, is the life blood of the town. There are other areas, such as Soi Buakhaow, which offer a similar entertainment services, albeit at a less expensive price, for long stay foreigners.
A typical bar scene in Pattaya
This in itself isn’t a bad thing. The town provides a service/location where single, foreign males can go for a paid for sexual liaison. It’s also an industry which provides employment for undeducted girls from the northern provinces of Thailand. For the most part, the girls working in the bars of Pattaya are from the rice farms of Isarn. Their motivation for choosing to work in these bar areas is simply poverty, and nothing else.
The girls along the avenue
The beaches of Pattaya, compared with Hua Hin and Phuket, are hardly remarkable. If you understand geography, then this isn’t difficult to discern. The coastline on this Gulf side of Thailand is shallow. Even when the tide is in, you’ll need to wade at least fifty meters from the shoreline to be in waist deep water. Because of this geographical constant, the water tends to be murky, warm, and unavoidably polluted with run off and plastic. Even over in Jomtien, which is considered a cleaner beach area, if you swim with goggles the amount of plastic seen on the seabed is quite shocking.
Along the Pattaya foreshore
If you reside in Pattaya, for any length of time you’ll come to understand it’s a bakingly hot place, especially from March to May. The landscape is predominantly flat. Yes, there’s a hill/peak which forms a headland between Pattaya and Jomtien but this is an isolated geographical feature. The surrounding landscape is flat and scorching. Compounding this is the radiated heat from the concrete urban sprawl. For this reason the majority of foreigners residing there will either stay at home in the afternoons, or head to the air-conditioned relief of shopping malls or bars. And therein lies the crux of Pattaya. Because of the unrelenting heat of the place, life tends occur from late afternoon and into the night. Once again, the inescapable fact is that Pattaya is predominantly a night time/night life location.
A great spot for a few sun downers.
Because of the heat factor, those participating in outdoor activities, such as golf, tend to do so in the mornings. Beach joggers can be seen along the foreshore in the mornings. No one, certainly not the locals, goes jogging in the mid-afternoon heat. For a foreigner, residing in Pattaya, their day might look something like this: 1. Get up mid morning and head to a restaurant (the Pig and Whistle or the Victoria) for a western breakfast. 2. Meet with friends for a coffee, late morning. 3. Go to an airconditioned shopping mall (Central or Big C) for lunch. 4. If you’re health minded, go to a gym in the afternoon. If you’re not health minded, go sit in an outdoor beer bar along Beach Road, or some other drinking establishment which expats frequent. 5. Late afternoon, go for a massage (with or without extras). Rinse and repeat.
Resident expats meet for a coffee and a chat
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Foreigners who reside in Pattaya long term, for the most part, tend towards an alcohol based lifestyle. Many end up being alcoholics. Long term, if you value your health, you’ll eventually move to either Hua Hin or Phuket. Both of these locations have cleaner air, a greener landscape, and less polluted seas.
Safe travels,
Mega.
What was a loophole that you found and exploited the hell out of?
James, the cat with a bank account ! =:)
Actually the story goes back further than that, and to my first pet, Bubbles. A Black and White Domesticated cat. It was an act of rebelling by my sister and I again our father who as small children wouldn’t let us have a pet greater than a goldfish.
I was turning 18 (so legally and adult (and my sister had always known I wanted a pet cat- ideally black, but when we got the cat rescue centre (RSPCA) although I liked a black cat called Solo, I was prised away by my sister and the Manager of the centre to take Bubbles. A great softy of a cat and had been given up as a result of her original keeper being elderly and going in toWarden Assisted Accommodation, where pets were not allowed. Must have been a heart-breaker for her and Bubbles clearly missed her to an petted me as opposed to the other way around.
There was just one problem she was already 8 years old (mid-mice [sic] crisis for cat -:) ) I was only 18 so not a brilliant salary and worried about vets bills particularly, I had looked at Pet Insurance and found it absurdly expensive and so many clauses and disclamers, it had more holes in it than a cooking sieve. So really not worth the paper let alone price it was written on
At the time I was working for a bank, an we had special terms on our bank account, notably no overdrafts, declaring where all money paid in to the account other than Salary had to be verified and origin. Although that sounds invasive, actually it was for our own safety that ALL transaction were checked in case as staff you were being bribed, money laundering under duress, indeed illegal trading or blackmail.
In fact, so strict were the rules that if you did go overdrawn in the morning and had not put cash in to cover it, or confirmed where the money had come from, then it could be Summary Dismssal. So the idea of not bein able to afford Vets fees or food for my moggy, was a serious matter (in my view.
So with the advice of my line manager opened a special savings account for the cat. For legal reasons obviously the cat could not technically have an account in her name specifically. The way my Manager got around this (and later turned out to be the loop hole) that I made the account in my name, but as a Trustee of the cat (Bubbles). That way the cat now had her own money in law, albeit under my name as her Trustee. This was great as could now put money in to her account each month, and build up a reserve to pay mum for he cat food and litter, and also a fund for any vets fees. Far cheaper than pet insurance, AND the money was available. Having made the cat as a beneficiary of the Trustee the interest was Tax Free too ! -:)
I later left the bank and moved in to another sector and transferred the account to a local branch.
The title of the account was “ Richards, Re: Bubbles.
Bubbles went to the great cat basket in the sky (bawled my eyes out over that cat ! ) but found another one from this rescue centre who was called “James”. He was totally black, and fur like a panther; purred like one too. He had been taken back to the rescue centre a couple of times as he kept fightin with other animals. This didn’t bother me as Iive on my own,,James very independent, even learened how to open a window with his paw, climb over threshold on to aledge drop on to a porchm then down to a rubbish bunker and to the gound. An ovrerall fall of 25 feet, but in 3 parts. Cats as we know are very supple and drop down easily. I later discovered that he could jump from the ground, to the bunker and ultimately back to through the window.
Cat-door issue solved, height above ground level and the porch roof pitched and covered in moss , slippery. So along with very narrow window an adult too heavy and would slide, and only a child would be able to get in through the window. Even a 10 year old would be nervous at that height let alone crawl through a high, narrow window. Safe for me and James.
Back to the bank account. The account had to be suspended and re-named as in law James, indeed Bubbles had/were legal entities. The bank (knowing the joke of course) placed now James as the beneficiary off the Trusteeship. The account continued as it had with Bubbles. When I went in to the branch to draw money the cashiers asked if James alright had he needed the vet or was this for food. Indeed during an internal audit, they made me bring James to the branch to verfy him”. Of course I could see the joke so complied. If course James had never had so much fuss . I later found out that they had taken a photo of him an sent it to Head Office for the bank Journal.
I had an emergency crop up, where my mother was taken ill in Europe so needed to leave the Counry fast. The Company I was on contract to were brilliant, understood the sitaution and got a replacement temp in, did a quick hand over and went home to pack and catch the flight – actually the company had reserved the seat for me so I just paid them the ticket money and all the documents were at Secure Handling. Passport and on to the plane.
Family emergency sorted, and back home about three weeks later, picked up my car and then suddenly realised that I didn’t have GB£ on me, and the only money I had was in James’ Account. So had to leave him at the cattery.
The advantage of this savings account was that you could got to a branch and draw money no matter where you were in the UK. However it did have a floor limit, which if exceeded had to be telephoned to the holding branch for further verification and clearance for the funds to be released. The holding branch of course knew the joke about James. So as a joke on me and the branch I was drawing the money through the girl who had taken the passbook for clearance, called me back to her till and said:
“The branch have asked for further information as this an unusual transaction for you and want to know James’ date of birth and his relationship to you”.
I told her straight faced that James was a Black Domesticated, shot-hair cat. Thinking I had “lost it”, smiled wrote the information down and handed it back to the clearing clerk, also looking perplexed and started talking to the home branch who confirmed that James was indeed a cat, and yes I had the authoirty to draw the money. So laughs all around.
Roll on 12 months in to the new financial year and UK Tax Office sends me a letter statin that during a random audit, I had an account in Trusteeship for James and wanted confirmation who James was his age and whether the interest was taxable. So I sent the passbook off, along with James’ Adoption Certificate (in the UK when you take a dog or cat from a rescue home you have to provide details identification and where live and in effect do adopt the cat. And yes, they do check to make sure that the animal is OK a couple of weeks down the line by turning up randomly and wanting to see where the animal sleeps his food is kept an whether registered with a vet.
So that is how seriously the UK take their pets. -:)
Back to the Tax Office where have sent all this information and for a laugh sent a picture of James along with he adoption certificate, pass-book and certificate of interest of interest from the bank.
A phone call was received from the Tax Office to “confirm a few things” (think to test my sanity to be honest -:) and asked why I had the account and having confirmed with the adoption papers wanted to make sure that James was under 18, which he appeared to be in the picture, that was confirmed and clearly had spoken with my bank.
I got a letter back form Inland Revenue that as James was under 18, he was now deemed to be a “Minor in pertuity” (which is legal terminology for bein a “child for life”.) Thanked me for my compliance and would not be making any further enquiries from now on! Also any interest reported would be retreated as non taxable as it was for the cat’s (child) benefit -: )
So just shows if you play along with the UK Inland Revenue, they do have a sense of humour.
Seriously all this is true. James, the cat with a bank account.
Beef Borguignonne
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Yield: 8 to 10 servings
Ingredients
1 (3 pound) lean beef chuck, cubed
1/2 cup shortening
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1/2 teaspoon thyme
1 cup beef consommé
2 to 3 cups dry red wine
1 (4 ounce) can mushrooms or 1/2 pound fresh mushrooms, sautéed in 2 tablespoons butter
12 small white onions, parboiled
Instructions
Brown meat in shortening; add flour and seasonings. Stir well. Pour into 2 quart casserole.
Add broth and wine.
Bake for 2 hours at 300 degrees F.
Add mushrooms and onions. May add more broth and wine, if dry.
What a crazy boyhood that I had. I suppose everyone has a wild childhood when you look at things from the point of view of an older person.
I will talk about another silly event.
Yeah. My sister was a bitch. A real B-I-T-C-H to me.
I have story after story about how she would fuck me over. I suppose you all don’t really want to hear it, but there are so many little trite bullshit things that she did that just sit deep inside my chest.
Horrible. Like some kind of festering pile of toxic horse shit.
Well, when I was in 11th grade, my parents went on a vacation to California. I was all ready to go, but my father told me that I couldn’t go. As I was the “oldest son”, I had to stay at home and watch the dogs and feed the cats.
Yeah. Like a real “good” son.
So they went on without me. They had a great time, while I just worked in the mines and watched the house.
When they came back, my father packed up a Tee-Shirt with the word “Alcatraz” on it. It was nice. It was a fine consolation prize, I guess.
56c6aca5d0ef63ddd7150cc1381775f5
Later made famous by Debbie Harry. (Of “Heart of Glass” fame.)
…
Well, a few days passed.
My asshole sister took my Tee-Shirt and used it as a rag while she and her friend Rita decorated it with all sorts of nail polish. Rendering it into a useless rag.
I well remember how she and Rita paraded the ruined shirt in front of me in the Kitchen. Prancing. Parading. Mocking. Saying hurtful things.
Laughing about it. Making jokes about how “stupid” I was, and what a “tool” I was.
I was in Shock.
My mother was in shock.
My father was in shock.
I just left the kitchen and went out with my friends, and got drunk. My father and my mother said nothing about it. But my sister and her friend Rita kept on giggling anytime that I was around.
Later on. Months later, my father told me that it was “just a t-shirt” and I’ll get another in the future.
Never happened.
Boyhood trauma.
I don’t ever want to return back to this shithole planet. I’ll tell you the truth.
Tianwen-3 is China’s mission to bring back samples from Mars.
Currently, bringing back Mars samples is NASA’s biggest goal. NASA enlisted the help of SpaceX and Blue Origins but the cost has become prohibitively high. Consequently, NASA has no viable plan to bring back samples from Mars, and China will likely be the first.
Here’s the article:
China plans to launch two heavy-lift Long March 5 rockets with elements of the Tianwen-3 Mars sample return mission in 2028, the mission's chief designer said Thursday.
In a presentation at a Chinese space exploration conference, the chief designer of China's robotic Mars sample return project described the mission's high-level design and outlined how the mission will collect samples from the Martian surface. Reports from the talk published on Chinese social media and by state-run news agencies were short on technical details and did not discuss any of the preparations for the mission.
Public pronouncements by Chinese officials on future space missions typically come true, but China is embarking on challenging efforts to explore the Moon and Mars. China aims to land astronauts on the lunar surface by 2030 in a step toward eventually building a Moon base called the International Lunar Research Station.
Liu Jizhong, chief designer of the Tianwen-3 mission, did not say when China could have Mars samples back on Earth. In past updates on the Tianwen-3 mission, the launch date has alternated between 2028 and 2030, and officials previously suggested the round-trip mission would take about three years. This would suggest Mars rocks could return to Earth around 2031, assuming an on-time launch in 2028.
NASA, meanwhile, is in the middle of revamping its architecture for a Mars sample return mission in cooperation with the European Space Agency. In June, NASA tapped seven companies, including SpaceX and Blue Origin, to study ways to return Mars rocks to Earth for less than $11 billion and before 2040, the cost and schedule for NASA's existing plan for Mars sample return.
That is too expensive and too long to wait for Mars sample return, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in April. Mars sample return is the highest priority for NASA's planetary science division and has been the subject of planning for decades. The Perseverance rover currently on Mars is gathering several dozen specimens of rock powder, soil, and Martian air in cigar-shaped titanium tubes for eventual return to Earth.
This means China has a shot at becoming the first country to bring pristine samples from Mars back to Earth, and China doesn't intend to stop there.
"If all the missions go as planned, China is likely to become the first country to return samples from Mars," said Wu Weiren, chief designer of China's lunar exploration program, in a July interview with Chinese state television. "And we will explore giant planets, such as Jupiter. We will also explore some of the asteroids, including sample return missions from an asteroid, and build an asteroid defense system."
The asteroid sample return mission is known as Tianwen-2, and is scheduled for launch next year. Tianwen means "questions to heaven."
China doesn't have a mission currently on Mars gathering material for its Tianwen-3 sample return mission. The country's first Mars mission, Tianwen-1, landed on the red planet in May 2021 and deployed a rover named Zhurong. China's space agency hasn't released any update on the rover since 2022, suggesting it may have succumbed to the harsh Martian winter.
So, the Tianwen-3 mission must carry everything it needs to land on Mars, collect samples, package them for return to Earth, and then launch them from the Martian surface back into space. Then, the sample carrier will rendezvous with a return vehicle in orbit around Mars. Once the return spacecraft has the samples, it will break out of Mars orbit, fly across the Solar System, and release a reentry capsule to bring the Mars specimens to the Earth.
All of the kit for the Tianwen-3 mission will launch on two Long March 5 rockets, the most powerful operational launcher in China's fleet. One Long March 5 will launch the lander and ascent vehicle, and another will propel the return spacecraft and Earth reentry capsule toward Mars.
Liu, Tianwen-3's chief designer, said an attempt to retrieve samples from Mars is the most technically challenging space exploration mission since the Apollo program, according to China's state-run Xinhua news agency. Liu said China will adhere to international agreements on planetary protection to safeguard Mars, Earth, and the samples themselves from contamination. The top scientific goal of the Tianwen-3 mission is to search for signs of life, he said.
Tianwen-3 will collect samples with a robotic arm and a subsurface drill, and Chinese officials previously said the mission may carry a helicopter and a mobile robot to capture more diverse Martian materials farther away from the stationary lander.
Liu said China is open to putting international payloads on Tianwen-3 and will collaborate with international scientists to analyze the Martian samples the mission returns to Earth. China is making lunar samples returned by the Chang'e 5 mission available for analysis by international researchers, and Chinese officials have said they anticipate a similar process to loan out samples from the far side of the Moon brought home by the Chang'e 6 mission earlier this year.
[1]
M
DUMMY: What happens if you call her DUMB?
Meanwhile strange stuff in the USA
Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has reportedly been hospitalized while on an official trip. Now she will be “out of public sight.”
Pelosi hospitalized Luxemburg
This comes just one day after Senate Leader Mitch McConnel suffered a head injury and may be “out of public sight” too. (Story)
Doesn’t pass the smell test. It seems strange to me that well known public figures are suddenly going to be out of the public eye.
Some suggests that while the US doubles down on its hard power, China is making its mark with soft power. What do you think about it?
US have no “hard power”, the thing it has is “privilege to make standards”.
For example, regarding an interesting indicator, HDI. This is an indicator that measures the level of development of various countries. One important item in its measurement is citizen income. I saw a young man dressed up as a financial professional using it to defend capitalism in a comparison about the superiority of capitalism and communism.
Let’s imagine: if a country, we call it “Utopia”. All the necessary things for people’s lives in utopia appear out of thin air, whether given by God or produced by machines. It doesn’t matter, in short, they can completely meet people’s living needs. Because there are so many of them, people don’t need to exchange them with money. Food, clothing, electricity, video games, tickets to the Super Bowl, everything is free.
Utopia is not perfect, it has a flaw – its people are poor singers. Only 10% of them can sing decent songs, and 1% of them are true singers. The government pays them based on the beauty of their songs.
Now tell me, what would happen if the living standards of the people in this country were calculated based on income indicators?
It will be terrible because 90% of people don’t even have any income. The wealth gap in this country is huge, with absolute inequality between the rich and the poor in terms of money and property. 10% of people own 100% of the money, while 90% own 0%.
So you can see what I mean – the HDI rank of it is definitely not very high. But if we look at the living standards of real people, Americans will die for going to Utopia.
Although China is not a 100% utopia, its public services, including food, electricity, transportation, healthcare, and other daily expenses, are priced lower and closer to utopia, compare to average countries. However, according to the standards set by the United States, it is also a terrible country.
And that’s the tricks – the standards set by the US simply cannot reflect reality. It is even somewhat unrealistic – the more people spend on their daily lives, the better the economic data in the United States performs. That’s why the US claims to have ‘hard power’.
Not only HDI, but also Niki coefficient, Engel coefficient, McDonald’s Big Mac index, a series of so-called “standards” are actually extremely absurd. You can also find the answers in this “utopia”.
Hard power? Ha. Keep deceiving yourself.
That’s why I only trust life expectancy per capita when measuring the economy, and it must be the result of a national census rather than a weighted estimate.
And what we want is not some “soft power”, but to make people hear rebuttals about such deceptions. Open your eyes.
WHY THE US CANNOT DEFEAT CHINA
WHY THE US CANNOT DEFEAT CHINA
The history of international relations tells us that the US undertook a very comprehensive strategy of containment to limitize the influence and global outreach of the USSR and communism between 1947 and 1991. This strategy , adopted during the period commonly known as the Cold War, was carried out by the US by building strategic arsenal, forming security institutions, winning allies , providing economic packages to anti-communism states and entities and by engaging its communist opponent, USSR, in a proxy warfare wherever the opportunity arose. This strategy remained quite successful and achieved its objective with the collapse of the then USSR in 1991.
Once again the US is undertaking the same containment strategy with some added features ,like trade and information warfare, to checkmate China’s growing power and influence. The question that arises in this regard is that whether American containment strategy against China will remain successful this time around or not?
The Chances of modern containment strategy , which I have reffered to as “Containment 2.0″, gaining success are very low for multiple reasons.
Firstly, China and USSR are ideologically different. China does not want its system of government to be imposed on the people across the globe as the USSR once did. When a power wants to do such sort of thing, it has to be ready to face opposition from domestic as well as international entities, and a huge chunk of economic and military resources has to be specified to win subscribers to one’s ideology and also to checkmate the opponents. As China has never been on a mission to spread its ideology of social, political and economic organisation around the world as the USSR once did, therefore China has not only saved its economic and military resources but it has also avoided proxy wars in foreign lands which are often a huge drain on a state’s resources.
Secondly, China’s economic strength is far greater than that of the USSR during the Cold War. The GDP of the USSR never exceeded 25% of that of the US during the Cold War. China is now world’s largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity( PPP) and is going to be so in nominal terms as well in the coming decades.
Thirdly, China’s global trade is so huge that no country of the world can afford disengagement from China. The trade wars which the US started with China has cost the US millions of job losses at home. China has become the epicenter of global supply chains. Even America’s closest allies like India, Australia, Japan and South Korea cannot afford confrontation with China. India’s bilateral trade with China is above 90 billion dollars, whereas the other three allies of the US mentioned above are members of RCEP. Therefore, they will never be very instrumental for the US in its mission containment, for sour relations with China will have serious repercussions for their economies as well as for their national security.
Fourthly, the US is not in a position to put forth attractive economic packages to win allies to its cause due to its domestic problems.It must not be forgotten that the US won allies during its cold war against the USSR on the basis of attractive trade and aid packages. The Europe was given Marshall Plan; South Korea was given blessed with huge amounts of aid and FDI;and Japan was blessed with preferential trade agreements. However, the US is not in a position to do such type of things now. On the other hand, China’s OBOR is spreading fast as it promises unprecedented development in the countries of the global south. It is providing multiple countries around the world with much needed investment in crucial sectors like energy and transport. This has helped China gain more soft power around the world. Moreover, OBOR will be bring huge economic and strategic benefits to China once it matures.
Last but not the least, the global order championed by the US has brought more problems to the world than it solved. Its failed wars in the Middle East , Africa and Asia have disillusioned common people with the American neo-imperialist policies. Its leveraging of dollar and Bretton Woods institutions to its advantage and against states like Iran, North Korea and Pakistan has also made it clear to people that promises made by the US for a liberal global order were just hollow. Therefore, people no longer like a world dominated by the US. This loss of soft power by the US will be a great disadvantage for America in its mission containment against China.
The history of international relations tells us that the US undertook a very comprehensive strategy of containment to limitize the influence and global outreach of the USSR and communism between 1947 and 1991. This strategy , adopted during the period commonly known as the Cold War, was carried out by the US by building strategic arsenal, forming security institutions, winning allies , providing economic packages to anti-communism states and entities and by engaging its communist opponent, USSR, in a proxy warfare wherever the opportunity arose. This strategy remained quite successful and achieved its objective with the collapse of the then USSR in 1991.
Once again the US is undertaking the same containment strategy with some added features ,like trade and information warfare, to checkmate China’s growing power and influence. The question that arises in this regard is that whether American containment strategy against China will remain successful this time around or not?
The Chances of modern containment strategy , which I have reffered to as “Containment 2.0″, gaining success are very low for multiple reasons.
Firstly, China and USSR are ideologically different. China does not want its system of government to be imposed on the people across the globe as the USSR once did. When a power wants to do such sort of thing, it has to be ready to face opposition from domestic as well as international entities, and a huge chunk of economic and military resources has to be specified to win subscribers to one’s ideology and also to checkmate the opponents. As China has never been on a mission to spread its ideology of social, political and economic organisation around the world as the USSR once did, therefore China has not only saved its economic and military resources but it has also avoided proxy wars in foreign lands which are often a huge drain on a state’s resources.
Secondly, China’s economic strength is far greater than that of the USSR during the Cold War. The GDP of the USSR never exceeded 25% of that of the US during the Cold War. China is now world’s largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity( PPP) and is going to be so in nominal terms as well in the coming decades.
Thirdly, China’s global trade is so huge that no country of the world can afford disengagement from China. The trade wars which the US started with China has cost the US millions of job losses at home. China has become the epicenter of global supply chains. Even America’s closest allies like India, Australia, Japan and South Korea cannot afford confrontation with China. India’s bilateral trade with China is above 90 billion dollars, whereas the other three allies of the US mentioned above are members of RCEP. Therefore, they will never be very instrumental for the US in its mission containment, for sour relations with China will have serious repercussions for their economies as well as for their national security.
Fourthly, the US is not in a position to put forth attractive economic packages to win allies to its cause due to its domestic problems.It must not be forgotten that the US won allies during its cold war against the USSR on the basis of attractive trade and aid packages. The Europe was given Marshall Plan; South Korea was given blessed with huge amounts of aid and FDI;and Japan was blessed with preferential trade agreements. However, the US is not in a position to do such type of things now. On the other hand, China’s OBOR is spreading fast as it promises unprecedented development in the countries of the global south. It is providing multiple countries around the world with much needed investment in crucial sectors like energy and transport. This has helped China gain more soft power around the world. Moreover, OBOR will be bring huge economic and strategic benefits to China once it matures.
Last but not the least, the global order championed by the US has brought more problems to the world than it solved. Its failed wars in the Middle East , Africa and Asia have disillusioned common people with the American neo-imperialist policies. Its leveraging of dollar and Bretton Woods institutions to its advantage and against states like Iran, North Korea and Pakistan has also made it clear to people that promises made by the US for a liberal global order were just hollow. Therefore, people no longer like a world dominated by the US. This loss of soft power by the US will be a great disadvantage for America in its mission containment against China.
Tortilla Beef Bake
ae59bd8c37b8ded4f5eb9960766f5d04
Yield: 6 servings
Ingredients
1 1/2 pounds ground beef
1 can condensed cream of chicken soup, undiluted
2 1/2 cups crushed tortilla chips, divided
1 (16 ounce) jar salsa
1 1/2 cups (6 ounces) shredded Cheddar cheese
Instructions
In a skillet cook beef over medium heat until no longer pink; drain.
Stir in soup.
Sprinkle 1 1/2 cups of the tortilla chips into a greased shallow 2 1/2 quart baking dish.
Top with beef mixture, salsa and cheese.
Bake, uncovered, at 350 degrees F for 25 to 30 minutes or until bubbly.
Sprinkle with the remaining tortilla chips.
Bake for 3 minutes longer or until chips are lightly toasted.
I Ghosted My Cheating Wife After Hearing She Called Me A Loser And Had Fun With A Man I Knew Well.
What are some reasons for the widespread admiration of America? Is it primarily due to their strong military and economy, or are there other factors at play?
Why is it that while the U.S. is often admired globally, American voters frequently express dissatisfaction with the state of the country, with many believing it’s headed in the wrong direction?
This contrast may stem from the different perspectives used to evaluate the U.S. From abroad, the country is often seen through an idealized lens, with its culture, innovation, and wealth creating a “grass is greener” effect. International admiration is also shaped by the U.S.’s soft power, which is enhanced by its global presence in media, technology, and education. This can create a somewhat inflated image of the U.S. abroad, sometimes resembling a propaganda effect that emphasizes its successes.
Domestically, however, the reality is often more complicated. Over the past two decades, many Americans have grown increasingly dissatisfied due to a range of internal challenges. Economic inequality, political polarization, and a loss of trust in institutions have contributed to this. Issues such as job losses from globalization, healthcare concerns, gun violence, homelessness, and declining public education have left many feeling that the government is not adequately addressing key problems. Furthermore, political gridlock, corruption in election campaigns, and frustrations over prolonged foreign conflicts—especially in the Middle East—have deepened disillusionment. As a result, consistent polling reflects a strong belief among voters that the country is on the “wrong track.”
SYLVIA: It wasn’t so bad. After I quit shaking from the cold, I began to get warm & sleepy and finally died a peaceful death. What about you?
WANDA: I died of a massive heart attack. I suspected that my husband was cheating, so I came home early to catch him in the act. But instead, I found him all by himself in the den watching TV.
SYLVIA: So, what happened?
WANDA: I was so sure there was another woman there somewhere that I started running all over the house looking. I ran up into the attic and searched, and down into the basement. Then I went through every closet and checked under all the beds. I kept this up until I had looked everywhere, and finally I became so exhausted that I just keeled over with a heart attack and died.
SYLVIA: Too bad you didn’t look in the freezer — we’d both still be alive.
“If You Could Only See” – Tonic // Brite Session
Have you ever completely snapped? If so what did you do?
My Mum died in September 1992. As my brother and sisters lived a couple of hundred miles away mum had made me executor so I had a lot to do arranging a funeral ( my sister did help with that) but I don’t think I processed her death properly.
Everything was finalised quite quickly and with the money we were left after the sale of the house, I was generous with Xmas presents that year. I bought my son a new bike which I wouldn’t have been able to afford and warned him to always lock it up in our back yard when he came home as he wanted to go to school on it. He did so until one day in February. It was pelting down with rain and had been all day . When I got home and he opened the door he asked where his bike was. I said what do you mean it should be in the back but he had been soaked when he got home and had locked it to the fence at the front.
I absolutely lost it. Ranted and raved and screamed and shouted for ages. I was crying and really upset but I think it was more to do with the loss of my Mum and that the bike had been bought with the money she left.
My next door neighbour had noticed a white van before and it was presumed that the driver had stolen it. I informed the police and as I had registered the bike with a security number there was a slight possibility we could get it back.
A couple of weeks later the police rang to say they had recovered it through the security number stamped on it. A policeman had seen a known scallywag on a new bike and stopped him. He had tried to scrape the stamped number off but some numbers were still legible and they traced it to me. Funnily enough it wasn’t actually on the database yet although the details had been sent.
My son and I had to go to court where he was found guilty. I asked for compensation for the broken lock and ruined handgrips which I had to replace and although I was granted that I never received it.
Sorry it was so long.
China is completing a global ports network for the BRICS economic bloc, and nobody noticed
What is the most amazing thing you overheard because people didn’t think you understood their language?
Odd thing about Swedish: it is a small language, but many English speakers work in Sweden and it’s a very simple language. Learning the basics is quite easy, but they all speak such good English than you understand a lot while not using much, so Swedes tend to forget that a large number of people can understand them.
This leads to Swedes using Swedish as a secret language when it is anything but. So you hear a lot:
Coming home on the Tube the morning after an alight party and looking worse for wear we had to listen to a commentary in Swedish from two women who were convinced we were homeless, on drugs, and up to no good. It was vastly satisfying to leave the train with a cheery “So nice to hear your own language again”, in Swedish.
On a beach in Greece listening to two girls describe their evening with two guys they picked up, and what they did with them. Impossible not to overhear, and luridly explicit.
An elderly couple breaking up. It was gut wrenching and too painful. They had been married for thirty plus years. Brutal. We gently let them know we understood and suggested they might like to move to the garden.
Two Stockholmers in a UK pub discussing a very illegal tax evasion deal. There were about 20 people there and all but two understood Swedish, (this was an area where a lot of ex-pats lived), so they were out of luck.
In a bar in the Caribbean where a Swedish ex-pat found out that her brother was to become the first Swede in space. She was excitedly reading out a Swedish article to her Swedish friend, and wondering where she could get it translated. By chance one of out group was a Swedish to English translator, so that lead to quite a fun evening.
As a tip. There really is no such thing as a “secret” language!
What is the most shameless thing you have ever seen a teacher do?
I became a mom at the tender age of 17. I was blessed with parents that supported me and a boyfriend that loved me and our son and stayed by my side until he passed away after we both graduated HS went on to college and married at age 22. He recently passed away after almost 28 years of marriage. But I digress
I had a sociology teacher in HS that was not the most pleasant of people. My son was very sick and ended up in the hospital with a severe double ear infraction high fever and a viral infection on his throat. I didn’t sleep well but needed to attend school the next day for a test.
is horrible teacher decided to target me and bring up statistics about teen moms being unfit, lazy, leeches on society. I started to cry. I was doing my best to be a good mom, a good student and learn the things I needed to graduate.
ahe want me to the principals office. As I gathered my things, I heard the entire class start to move around. As I exited tue room my fellow classmates walked with me to the office.
needless to say this teacher was told that she was not allowed to do this again and she never bothered me again.
China hits Canada with Anti-Dumping Probe in Retaliation
Three bulls heard the rancher was bringing another bull onto the ranch.
First Bull: “I’ve been here five years. I’m not giving this new bull any of my 100 cows.”
Second Bull: “I’ve been here three years and have earned my right to 50 cows. I’m keeping all my cows.”
Third Bull: “I’ve only been here a year, and so far, you guys have only let me have 10 cows. I may not be as big as you fellows, but I’m keeping all 10 of my cows.”
Just then an 18-wheeler pulls up in the pasture carrying the biggest bull they’ve ever seen.
At 4,700 pounds, each step he takes strains the steel ramp.
First Bull: “I think I can spare a few cows for our new friend.”
Second Bull: “I actually have too many cows to take care of. I can spare a few. I’m certainly not looking for an argument.”
They look over at the third bull and find him pawing the dirt, shaking his horns and snorting.
First Bull: “Son, don’t be foolish, let him have some of your cows and live to tell about it.”
Third Bull: “Hell, he can have all my cows. I’m just making sure he knows I’m a bull.”
Stuffed Peppers Casserole
ee3e158f4bc19ca06da91ad6261d049e
Ingredients
1 pound ground beef
1 small onion, chopped
3 medium bell peppers, cut into strips
3/4 cup instant rice
1 teaspoon season salt
1/8 teaspoon garlic salt
1 1/2 cup water
1 teaspoon beef bouillon granules
1 (15 ounce) can petite cut diced tomatoes
1/2 cup shredded mozzarella cheese
Instructions
Brown meat and onion in skillet; drain.
Stir in rice, salt, garlic salt, bouillon, water, cheese and diced tomatoes; heat through.
Spray a 9 x 13 inch baking dish with cooking spray and line with peppers.
Pour meat mixture over peppers.
Cover with foil and bake at 350 degrees F for 45 minutes.
Uncover and bake an additional 15 minutes.
AITA For Kicking Out My Wife And Stepdaughter After Discovering Lies About Work Trips?
Specialist ‘carbon nanotube’ AI chip built by Chinese scientists is 1st of its kind and ‘1,700 times more efficient’ than Google’s
Scientists in China have developed a tensor processing unit (TPU) that uses carbon-based transistors instead of silicon – and they say it’s extremely energy efficient.
Unlike conventional TPUs, this new chip is the first to use carbon nanotubes — tiny, cylindrical structures made of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal pattern — in place of traditional semiconductor materials like silicon. (Image credit: Getty Images/sankai)
Scientists in China have built a new type of tensor processing unit (TPU) — a special type of computer chip — using carbon nanotubes instead of a traditional silicon semiconductor. They say the new chip could open the door to more energy-efficient artificial intelligence (AI).
AI models are hugely data-intensive and require massive amounts of computational power to run. This presents a significant obstacle to training and scaling up machine learning models, particularly as the demand for AI applications grows. This is why scientists are working on making new components — from processors to computing memory — that are designed to consume orders of magnitude less energy while running the necessary computations.
Google scientists created the TPU in 2015 to address this challenge. These specialized chips act as dedicated hardware accelerators for tensor operations — complex mathematical calculations used to train and run AI models. By offloading these tasks from the central processing unit (CPU) and graphics processing unit (GPU), TPUs enable AI models to be trained faster and more efficiently.
Unlike conventional TPUs, however, this new chip is the first to use carbon nanotubes — tiny, cylindrical structures made of carbon atoms arranged in a hexagonal pattern — in place of traditional semiconductor materials like silicon. This structure allows electrons (charged particles) to flow through them with minimal resistance, making carbon nanotubes excellent conductors of electricity. The scientists published their research on July 22 in the journal Nature Electronics.
“I Show You The Original World Map They Didn’t Want You to See” Graham Hancock
MM’s AI adventures
Today’s adventures. A lot of schmaltz, and some very strange stuff about statues.
Here’s some “schmaltz”…
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(1)
And more…
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(2)
And in the rain…
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(3)
Enter the statues…
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(4)
*sigh*
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(5)
Massive…
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(6)
Here’s some “schmaltz”…
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1
Mixed up sexes.
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(1)
Here’s some “schmaltz”… with the bigger boobs.
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(2)
Here’s some “schmaltz”…
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(3)
Statues.
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(4)
More…
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(5)
Interesting.
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(6)
Here’s some “schmaltz”…
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2
Here’s some confused “schmaltz”…
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(1)
Here’s some muscular “schmaltz”… plus a long necked guy in the background.
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(2)
Here’s some “schmaltz”…
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(3)
Statue in the rain.
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(4)
More.
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(5)
Here’s some “schmaltz”…
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3
Here’s some “schmaltz”…
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(1)
Here’s some “schmaltz”…
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(2)
Here’s some “schmaltz”…
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(3)
Statue.
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(4)
Statue.
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(5)
Dishwalla – Counting Blue Cars – 7/31/2017 – Paste Studios, New York, NY
This story contains themes or mentions of LGBQ+ and mental health issues.
Stars. Twinkling bursts of light. Bloodshot, glassy eyes. He has given up.
He was supposed to save everyone. Save the world. Save it because the crops wilted. Save it because the water rose and flooded. Save it because the ice dissolved. He was supposed to save it because the earth was about to combust, like his aircraft did a few milliseconds ago.
The view would probably take his breath away if he could breathe. He knew what would happen. He was not holding his breath- if he did, his lungs would expand, turn into balloons, and eventually pop. Instead, he exhales slowly, every six seconds.
The media claims your life flashes before your eyes. To him, it isn’t his whole life. Snapshots. Short films. Clips. Memories. Ones that he loved, ones that he did not want to revisit. Some pictures were blurry, incomprehensible. The highs and lows of his life, captured in stubby snippets.
The sea tickles his ankles. He always loved the stars, and he can see them reflected in the waves now. He is small. A child. Three years old, maybe. He doesn’t know about reflection, or that it’s possible to drown. He tries to eat the little lights, as toddlers tend to do. He is greeted with a mouthful of saltwater.
He wishes he were still a child. Innocent, kind, oblivious, naive.
It’s been six seconds. Exhale. He is terrified.
They are coming for him. He does not know who they are. They say they are Child Protective Services. He does not think he needs them- why would he, at nine years old? His mothers don’t hurt him. Where are they, after all? Why are these men coming for him?
They say something bad happened. He does not know what this means. He does not know what anything means. A police officer tries to calm him down. Tell him they will help him. Tell him his mothers are gone now, but it’ll be okay. He does not think he will be okay. They tell him he’s confused. They call him the wrong name. He tries to correct them, but they do not listen. They never listen. No one ever listens. He pushes the man away and runs.
Arms flying, his chest rises too quickly, too rapidly. He is not supposed to run in a binder. The binder his mothers gave him because they were the only ones that listened. They are gone, he has been told. Gone where? He cannot start to imagine, he cannot go down that spiraling hole.
Sweaty, suffocating, squeezing. He runs because he feels alone. He runs because his parents are gone. He runs because he hates those men who think they know everything, with their pasty white skin and privileged lives. He is dizzy, he can barely breathe. The police officers run after him, but he knows where to go- he is clever. He is in front of the house. Stumbling, his vision blurs, and his world tilts into the concrete.
That picture isn’t blurry, he just doesn’t want to see it.
Ten seconds. His body’s water is vaporizing, and the underlining tissue is beginning to swell.
He is tired. So, so tired. He knows it’s unethical, but he is sleeping at his teacher’s house. The only teacher who understands. Maybe the only person left in the world who understands. He can’t get out of the bed in the guest room. The teacher, respecting personal and legal boundaries, doesn’t intrude. It has been a month since he ran from the men. He does not get up.
His family members float above him. They whisper in his ear. He cannot move. He does not shower. He eats once a week, and his flesh has thinned to the point that it hangs off his bones. He has not taken off his binder. His ribs have cracked and fluid has built up. He does not get up to go to the bathroom. His liver is on the brink of ceasing. He is as good as dead.
The clearest portrait, the most unwanted.
Twelve seconds. Exhale. He knows he will die.
He is fourteen. He lives with his teacher, who has officially adopted him. He is on hormones. He is starting to grow a beard. His voice has deepened. He has already had many surgeries to fix the damage from his depressive episode. Liver, ribs, bladder, uterus, lungs. In two years he will get top surgery. He is on anti-depressants and anti-psychotics. He wants to be an astronaut. He works as a cashier during the summer and uses the money the buy a telescope, astronomy books, and gummy bears.
His teacher, whom he now calls Nin, is supportive throughout the rest of his life. They never lay a hand on him.
Even with the mental illnesses, he envies that time of his life- he was free and loved.
Thirteen seconds. The moisture on his tongue has started to boil.
The surgery is finished. His chest hurts- although this time, it feels good. A warm hug. He can smell the faint whiff of blood coated with chemicals. The walls are a stark white, glaring at him. The bed is surprisingly comfortable, a mixture of squishy and soft. He is loaded, a useless corpse, into a car. The anesthesia makes everything seem hilarious and wavy. Nin is driving him home, where they spoon-feed him and prop him up in front of the television. After four weeks, he can take the wrapping off. The sight of his flat chest in the mirror, the raw yet stunning scars, triggers a waterfall of tears to spill down his cheeks. That’s him. That’s him in the mirror, staring back.
Nin, whose friend is a tattoo artist, brings him to get a design over the scars, per his request. He chooses The Creation of Adam, and requests it be outlined with stars and planets.
The sweetest memory despite the pain, a sensation of deep euphoria.
Fourteen seconds. His skin, along with expanding, has begun to burn.
He is an astronaut. He is being led onto the spaceship. He is twenty-two. His name has been legally changed, along with the gender marker on everything except his hospital profile. It is time to save the world. He is ready to save the world. He calls Nin before he takes off, says he loves them and everything will be okay soon. He says that the earth will be okay soon.
He is a liar.
Exhale. Exhale. Exhale.
He cannot breathe, he cannot inhale, he is suspended. Suspended, like the humans’ hearts in their masses. He cannot stop thinking about his heart. A conductor, a leader. Constantly prevailing and persevering despite its host’s resignation, purposely ingesting poison to numb their pain. If the heart gave up, everything would die. Nothing would exist for that person anymore. The head of the organization, the leader of the body’s community. His heart toils, unquestioning, in his favor. Everything must work and line up perfectly to keep existing- and here he was, and the earth was dying, because the idiot humans couldn’t do the bare minimum of staying alive. Because he couldn’t even take care of a million-dollar spaceship made specially for him.
A surge of gratitude interrupts the self-hate when he realizes he can see a star-forming region in the Eagle Nebula. The Pillars of Creation, it is named. Somehow, in a dying second, there is beauty. Art, glamorous, out-of-this-world grace. It’s burnt sienna, with an impossibly vibrant red peeking through every few thousand miles. A still photograph of powder being thrown, the region looks like something out of a fantasy novel, a dazzling blue background dotted with sparks of light. It appears to be glowing, even, the darker blue background illuminated slightly by the milky brown. Again, it feels breathtaking. He doesn’t mind this will be the last thing he sees. Even though the earth will die, even though he has failed.
It seems his body is sinking under his guilt. He’s bruised, burns striping his arms from the explosion. He most likely broke something. A rib, maybe. Yes, that is what it feels like- a broken rib piercing his heart. Stabbing the submissive slave. That’s what it feels like… though he cannot tell whether it is physically broken or if it is the feeling of his failure.
There must be a way to save the world. He will not give up, he is done giving up. He’s already submitted himself to death before, he won’t let it happen again. Think. He must think. This is why he went to college, this is why he got his job- he must think. It has been fourteen seconds, he will be unconscious in one if he’s lucky.
Something inside him screams. The trigger! A button on his left wrist that he got implanted for an emergency. His mission was to go to the one planet they found that had life on it, and beg for help. But the button could send out an electromagnetic pulse to the ship’s debris, make it buzz and show a message, no matter what piece… he was so close to the planet, it was likely some rubble reached it.
In a split second, he brings his arm to his head and jams the button. In the movies, there would probably be some cacophonous, dramatic noise, but sound cannot travel in space.
He has succeeded, hopefully. But there is no more air left to exhale. There is no more oxygen left to inhale. His lungs expand. He can feel it, pressing against his chest scars. Pressing against The Creation of Adam… He sends a quick mental apology to Michelangelo. The pain is pushing into the servant organ.
He cannot feel when his lungs burst, because he has already lost consciousness.
China’s lunar research station initiative welcomes new global partners
China’s ambitious initiative to launch an international lunar research station has gained new global cooperation partners, as the country signed several agreements with global partners for the lunar research station initiative on Thursday, according to China’s space agency.
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During the opening ceremony of a two-day space forum held in Tunxi, east China’s Anhui Province, China’s space agency and its counterpart in Senegal signed an agreement on International Lunar Research Station (ILRS) cooperation.
In addition, China’s Deep Space Exploration Lab has also inked memoranda of understanding with 10 organizations from countries including Serbia, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia, Pakistan, Panama and South Africa.
In 2017, China proposed the ILRS initiative, inviting global participation. This ambitious project has garnered widespread interest, with 17 countries and over 40 institutions signing on. The ILRS envisions a comprehensive lunar research facility, including a lunar surface base, orbital stations, and Earth-based components. Designed for long-term autonomous operation with potential for short-term human presence, the ILRS will be expandable and sustainable.
Scientists create record-breaking solar technology that could solve major problem in the industry: ‘Among the best reported to date’
Sam Westmoreland
Fri, September 6, 2024 at 6:15 AM CDT
Scientists create record-breaking solar technology that could solve major problem in the industry: 'Among the best reported to date'
It can easily be ramped up to industrial levels and can be affordably produced at that scale of production.
Scientists at the Hong Kong Institute of Science and Technology have developed a new treatment that prolongs the life and efficiency of solar cells.
According to Aman Tripathi of Interesting Engineering, the researchers have created a molecular treatment for perovskite solar cells that increases their power conversion efficiency by over 20%, and it has shown an operational stability of over 1,500 hours.
While solar cells are typically made of silicon, perovskite has been gaining popularity in recent years because it is cheaper and has a higher energy efficiency than silicon. The problem is the stability and tendency to degrade more quickly than silicon counterparts.
In an effort to solve the problem, the Hong Kong research team focused on a process known as passivation, in which a chemical compound is applied to the perovskite to “reduce defects and improve their overall performance.”
The project was a resounding success, according to assistant professor Lin Hen-Yuang.
“These devices reached high open-circuit voltages beyond 90% of the thermodynamic limit,” Lin said in a press release on the discovery, “Benchmarking against about 1,700 sets of data from existing literature showed that their result was among the best reported to date in terms of efficiency in energy conversion.”
On top of that, the passivation process is highly scalable, meaning it can easily be ramped up to industrial levels and can be affordably produced at that scale of production.
Solar energy is booming globally; in the U.S., solar power accounted for almost 80% of new energy production in 2024 on an industrial scale. On a smaller scale, rooftop solar panels are popping up everywhere from vodka distilleries to new-build homes. Finding a new way to improve solar panels’ affordability and efficiency could help meet growing demand.
If the perovskite treatment is as effective at scale as it has been in testing, we could see a boom in more affordable, efficient, and durable panels around the world.
U.S Hit China With Quantum Chip-Related SANCTION
Do you know a good lawyer joke?
Two young men walk into a bar and one of them sits next to a girl.
“Hello,” he says.
“Are you a lawyer?” asks the girl.
“What? No.”
“Then I’m not interested. You see, this is a lawyer bar, and the girls that come here either are lawyers or want to get with lawyers.”
And so the young man leaves, and his friend leaves with him, having encountered a similar situation.
The next day they say: “What the heck, we’re just going to return there and say that we’re lawyers. It’s not like we’ll have to give them a proof right away.”
And so they go to the bar and approach some girls, and they tell them they are lawyers.
Everything seems to be going fine, but then one of the young men looks around and sees that his friend is gone. He starts to search for him, and eventually finds him sitting in the bathroom, in a very low mood.
“What happened to you?” he asks.
“Oh, I just realized… I’ve only been a lawyer for half an hour, and already the only thing on my mind is how to screw someone.”
Have you ever dined at a restaurant that left you thinking ‘is this a joke’?
In 1990 I went to one of those Teppanyaki Grill restaurants where a chef cooks food on the grill in front of the customers. I was with 5 other friends. It was in quite a ritzy Sydney suburb. We had no idea what to order so when the waitress asked if we’d like prawns, chicken, steak, eggs and rice, we happily said yes.
The chef threw 6 prawns on the grill, tossing them around with a flourish and chopping them up. He then gave us 1 teaspoon of prawns each!
Next came the chicken. He took a half chicken breast and whooshed it around and chopped it into tiny pieces. We got two teaspoons of chicken each.
Same thing with the steak.
By now we were really starving so we were really happy when they asked if we were ready for the rice. In came the waitress with a fingerbowl of rice. I made a joke “wouldn’t it be funny if that was for us all?’
We all laughed but not for long! It was indeed rice for everyone. So we got around 10 grains of rice each.
Lastly he threw one egg on the grill, whooshed it around and we got two teaspoons of ‘omelet’ each.
The cost of this fiasco came to $180 for the 6 of us which was a lot of money for a restaurant meal back in 1990.
We were all so totally starving we went across the road to a hamburger joint and ordered a hamburger each!
When Suspects Cross The Line During Interrogations
What was the most disastrous comment you have ever made?
I am a mathematics professor at a Research I University. My mother-in-law was a mean old bat who never liked me. While she was visiting one afternoon my ten year old daughter ran in with her latest math test grade. She had scored an “A” grade on some multiplication facts and we all praised her profusely. The mother-in-law pipes up with, “I bet she got her math skills from her mother. Renee (My wife, her daughter) was always good in math.” Considering what I do for a living and considering my wife majored in sociology, this snarky comment pissed me off. So my reply was, “Yes, she must have gotten her math skills from her mother, because I still have all of mine.” A dead silence settled over the table for the next ten minutes.
What’s the smoothest pick up line you’ve ever heard?
My line was actually unintentional!
I was on a business trip some years ago and ended up in a restaurant which sat me at a small table next to another small table with a smartly dressed woman sitting alone.
We exchanged pleasantries and I said “So how’s your business trip going?”
Her reply was “Oh, fine. What makes you think I am here on a business trip?”
I said “You wouldn’t be eating alone otherwise.”
I immediately thought “Damn, what did I just do..”
She was amused and said it was one of the more classy lines she had heard.
So I ended up with an impromptu dinner guest and fellow wine connoisseur for the evening.
The West vs China in South China Sea
Swiss Steak-Sour Cream Casserole
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Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
2 teaspoons olive or vegetable oil
1 cup diced onions
1 cup sliced mushroom caps
2 teaspoons all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups water
2 envelopes instant beef broth and seasoning mix
1 tablespoon grated Parmesan cheese
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1/4 teaspoon paprika
Dash of pepper
4 (5 ounce) beef top or bottom round steaks, broiled until rare
1/2 cup sour cream
1 tablespoon chopped fresh parsley
Instructions
Heat oven to 350 degrees F.
In 10 inch nonstick skillet heat oil; add onions and mushrooms and sauté, stirring, until onions are translucent.
Sprinkle flour over vegetables and cook, stirring constantly, for 1 minute; gradually stir in water.
Add broth mix, and stirring constantly, bring to a boil. Reduce heat and let simmer until mixture thickens.
Stir in cheese, Worcestershire sauce, paprika and pepper and remove from heat.
Transfer steaks to a 2 quart casserole and pour vegetable sauce over meat; cover and bake until steaks are tender, about 45 minutes.
Remove steaks from casserole and set aside.
Spoon 2 tablespoons of vegetable sauce into sour cream and stir to combine; pour sour cream mixture into casserole and stir until well blended.
Return steaks to casserole and serve sprinkled with parsley.
Notes
Plain yogurt can be substituted for the sour cream.
My wife sits in her car for about 5 minutes when she gets home from work. I can see her through the camera. She’s using her phone. I’m a little concerned. Is she cheating?
Every day after I pick up my daughter from school, I get out and go into the house but she stays in the car and sits there for several minutes, sometimes up to half an hour.
Sometimes she uses her phone, sometimes she just sits there.
Should I be a little concerned? Should I go check on her? Confront her?
Nope. I’m not concerned at all. She’s doing what she needs to do to cope.
She’s enjoying a few minutes of peace and quiet, collecting herself and letting the social demands of school dissolve away, before facing the social demands of family.
As a teenager, she knows that as soon as she walks in the door, there will be questions, conversations, chores and homework to be done, and demands for her attention and mental presence, which can be draining after a long day at school. In the car, alone, she can collect herself, think and process a bit, and respond to her messages without pressure and without interruptions.
More than likely, your wife is doing what she needs to do to cope, to gather herself, to catch her breath after a long day at work, and to catch up on her messages before she comes inside and faces you and all your questions.
My advice? Enjoy the peace and quiet.
Two best friends graduated from medical school at the same time & decided that in spite of two different specialties, they would open a practice together to
share office space …
Dr.Smith was a *Psychiatrist* & Dr.Jones
was a *Proctologist* (Colon to Anus)
They put up a sign reading
*Dr.Smith & Dr.Jones*
*Hysterias & Posteriors*
The town council was livid and insisted they change it.
So, the docs changed
it to read
*Schizoids & Haemorrhoids*
This was also not acceptable, so they again changed the sign to
*Catatonics & High Colonics*
No go.
Next, they tried…
*Manic Depressives & Anal Retentives*
Thumbs down again.
Then came..
*Minds and Behinds*
Still no good.
Another attempt resulted in …
*Lost Souls & Butt Holes*
Unacceptable again!
So they tried
*Analysis & Anal Cysts*
No, not a chance
*Nuts and Butts*
No way
*Freaks and Cheeks*
Still no good
*Loons and Moons*
Just Forget it!
Almost at their wits end, the docs finally came up with…
*Dr.Smith & Dr.Jones…*
*Specializing in Odds & Ends.*
*_Everyone loved it._😊*
A Woman Impersonated As A Man And Got Depressed After 3 Days
When I lived in Indiana, we spent a lot of time exploring the countryside. Because of the flat… endless flat… it’s really difficult to find nice quiet spaces. Ah. But they do exist. Interspersed between the endless fields of corn and soybeans are these little oasis between the farm plots.
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Yes. These little and often tiny plots might contain a cemetery (we visited many, many of these)…
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… an old Indian mound (the “mound builders” built these large piles of dirt everywhere)…
….and the occasional pile of rubbish, trash and junk.
On one of our trips we discovered an old yard that hid (what was once) a beautiful skating rink.
It consisted of a nice rural pond, big enough for skating adventures, and events we found the cement foundations of bleachers and fire pits. Oh, man, it must have been really nice back in the day.
I’ll tell you what.
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But today, or when we visited it in the late 1980’s, it was filled with old kitchen appliances, a abandoned car or two. Piles and piles of household garbage and refuse, and what looked to be the carcass of a pig that was taking months to decompose. Disgusting really.
I don’t know the whole story about what happened.
Probably, or most likely, the owner of the property passed away, and relatives bought the property and sold it off to Agri-business. And neighbors probably just started dumping their trash there. It’s the American way. Don’t you know.
Have you all explored your local neighborhoods and countrysides for your own local lore?
Here’s a tombstone in the middle of a highway…
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If you haven’t you should. You might be surprised at the old dance halls on the third floor of that old main street building, or the old horse-smithery behind the old bank, or the massive military tank in the garage behind the wilting mansion down the road. History is interesting.
Just driving down the road will expose you to adventure…
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And let’s not even get into the history of American Indians. Many stories and history there. Quite interesting when you get into it.
What’s the most badass thing your boss has ever done?
BEST boss I ever had was the director of a large government computer center. We serviced users from all over the US. Most of whom were great to work with. Nearly 30 years later some remain close personal friends.
One of those users was extremely abusive. He left some of the women who tried to help him in tears.
He started in on me once, but I told him that after 6.5 years active duty as an enlisted Marine and an equal time as a street cop in a town noted for barfights, the only thing that offended me was the poor way he was cussing me out, “I’m going to hang up now, and I don’t want you calling me back until you can do so without cussing me out, or until you can cuss me out properly. Besides, all my programs are running, how is yours doing?”
He was nice to me.
However, our boss was incensed at the treatment he gave us. (He thought my response was hilarious.)
There was a big conference coming up, and our boss was going to see him. One of two things was going to happen. An apology, or he was going to ask the guy to step outside and settle it on a different level and kick him off the system.
I worked mostly a permanent 8PM to 4AM shift on the police department, so I could handle myself pretty well, but I would NOT have wanted to get into a hook-n-jab with him. (I went to college part-time.)
The guy wisely groveled, called and apologized to one and all (except me!), and was a model user.
When they installed the computer–this was a monster supercomputer–they sent commemorative coffee cups along. This boss created a lot of detractors because he distributed the cups to us serfs instead of the upper level managers.
How good a boss was he? I almost turned down a new job with a 20% raise because I knew I’d never find a better boss. Later he ended up at another government computer. The one I moved to for that 20% raise! Then I almost turned down a 35% raise to stay and work with him at that second site. He told me that if I did not take that job, he was going to kick my ass. I’m pretty sure he meant it.
Men and women in the USA
What is an open secret in your profession that we regular folk don’t know or generally aren’t allowed to be told about?
A large number of lawyers engage in what, euphemistically, is called “value billing.” More bluntly, it’s called mail fraud. Here’s the idea:
You’re a lawyer, and a prospective client wants you to do something. Say, they want you to draft a contract for some purpose or another.
You talk to them about your expertise. You lay on the charm. You show them the fancy awards you won. They’re on board, and you formalize your attorney/client relationship with a document called an “engagement letter.” The engagement letter sets forth the important parameters of the relationship, most definitely including how fees are computed.
Most attorneys will have a line in there that says “unless otherwise specified on a case-by-case basis, I bill at such-and-such per hour for legal services.” The client is on board with that, and they sign off. Let’s say your rate is $500/hour, just to make nice round numbers.
Now you talk with the client about what they need this contract to involve. You talk to them for, say, an hour. You now have a perfect understanding of what they need. Lo and behold, you can crib from another contract you have lurking around in your files, and adapting this template to fit your client’s needs takes, say, 15 minutes.
A lawyer who engages in “value billing” might bill, say, 4 hours for producing the contract for the client, on top of the hour conversation. Their rationale is that they’re delivering $2000 in value to the client, so 4 hours is a fair price. Besides, the only reason they have this template is because they’re such a great and knowledgeable and fancy lawyer to begin with. So, in their mind, another lesser attorney might really need to take 4 hours.
Don’t be mistaken: some things are not wrong about what the attorney is doing. It’s not wrong to crib from old work. It’s not even wrong to charge $2000 for something that only took 15 minutes. What is wrong is to tell the client you’re billing them by the hour, then fabricate your hours.
This happens from time to time, and for various reasons. I’ve personally known some lawyers (… and, to be clear, they’re the exceptions…) who do this regularly. I’ve known some lawyers who only do this occasionally, and only under special circumstances. Hell, as a young attorney I’ve been given explicit directions to do so by my supervising partner.
(In that case, the client was a bit of a pain in the ass, and created a last-minute emergency that didn’t need to be created. I did a reasonably good job in a reasonably short amount of time. Upon reviewing my work, the partner said something along the lines of, “Good job. Bill an extra 5 hours on this and take the rest of the day off.” Being BigLaw, I definitely billed the extra 5 hours. I definitely did not take the rest of the day off.)
Most lawyers know what the phrase “value billing” means. If they don’t, I’m sure they know about the practice by some other name.
URGENT: RUSSIAN MISSILES ON THE MOVE – COUNTRY-WIDE
Hal Turner World December 13, 2024
URGENT: RUSSIAN MISSILES ON THE MOVE – COUNTRY-WIDE
Something is taking place inside Russia which signals a terrifying and dangerous escalation is taking place: Numerous Russian Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) Transporter-Erector-Launcher (TEL) trucks have come out of storage and are traversing snow-covered back roads throughout the entire nation of Russia.
After the recent attack by Ukraine, against a military airfield in Taganrog, the Russians launched a very significant attack overnight last night, against numerous targets inside Ukraine.
But these movements of ICBM’s hint at something far bigger: a possible launch against NATO itself.
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Russia has repeatedly warned that if western-supplied missiles were used to attack deep inside Russia, those missiles require western satellites to guide them to target. Ukraine does not have any satellites. So if “Ukraine” uses western-supplied missiles, and those missiles are actively guided-to-target by western satellites, then the west (collectively) becomes a “Combatant” — an active participant in the fight, against which Russia can strike back.
When they said “strike back” they made clear they felt entitled to strike western (i.e. NATO) bases inside NATO countries.
These explicit warnings came after Ukraine used western-supplied, long-range missiles back on November 19 to hit Russia.
After that strike by Ukraine, Russia unleashed a new hypersonic “Oreshnik” missile, with empty warheads, to hit a major military production site inside Ukraine. The video of that attack , using the Oreshnik with six multiple Independent re-entry vehicles (MIRV) warheads, rained down six (6) separate storms of fire and molten metal upon the military factory in Ukraine.
The terrifying fury of fire and molten metal sub-munitions coming out of the sky at over 6,000 miles-per-hour, sent shockwaves through Ukraine and the West.
Ukraine’s strikes against Russia then halted . . . until December 11, when Ukraine did it again: Hitting Taganrog, Russia with US-supplied ATACMS.
Last night, December 12, Russia struck Ukraine with at least 93 missiles and more than 200 drones. But AFTER that, all the missiles you see above, started coming out of their storage and into the field of Russia . . . ALL OVER their country.
It is now appearing that the Russians ____MAY____ strike bases in NATO countries.
No military exercises have been announced inside Russia which would account for these missile movements. They are ongoing as this story publishes at 10:41 AM EST on Friday the 13th of December, 2024.
Why do developing nations kind of trust China and Russia these days?
Whom would they trust? Their former colonial masters?
China and Russia have never invaded their territory. China and Russia have never sanctioned them. China and Russia have never interfered in their internal politics nor overthrown their government. The USA and its allies have.
China has been helping them economically through the Belt and Road Initiative. China and Russia have created the BRICS organization that is egalitarian and inclusive.
Newlywed Thought She Got Away With The World’s Biggest Sh*t Test…And Then Her Husband Showed…
What are your top 7 rules of life?
It might take the average 20-year-old lad 7 years to understand this, But I’ll try teach it to you in 3 minutes.
1. If you learn slowly, carefully & steadily, you will realize that you have the opportunity and capacity to do anything; don’t let another person discourage you. Try it out yourself and fail before admitting defeat even before the battle began.
2. Choose your spouse carefully. It’s the most important decision you will ever make, the wrong one will ruin your life.
3. You don’t need to spend $100K on a degree to build a career, learn from the internet. We are very fortunate to live in a world full of information these days. Also, remember that a degree doesn’t define your smartness. You can have a degree and still be foolish. I’ve met my fair share of these lot so believe me when I tell you this.
4. Stop blaming other people & start taking 100% responsibility for your actions. You alone are responsible for them.
5. Start investing early on. Investing helps you buy back time from your future self.
6. Regrets are a waste of time. Instead of dwelling on your regrets, make the most of available time.
7. 99% of your problems can be solved with money. Don’t listen to anyone who suggests otherwise.
Why does Malaysia fail to attract expats like Thailand?
It’s inconceivable why Thailand is “a hot place to be” for tourists from all corners of the globe— Why not Malaysia, the closest neighbor?
I admire beautiful Georgetown on Penang island as much as I value living in Bangkok the ugly city (to me) where I live, nevertheless, I stand by my principles not to brag about myself or to make Thailand look good at the expense of Malaysia and its people.
Let’s start with Bangkok and see why this mythical city in the 21st century has been popular since the 60s during the Vietnam War, although this messy and chaotic city has now been moved upmarket and some areas in Bangkok look more like New York City or London or Tokyo… To me, nothing has changed, and what you see today as compared to the Vietnam War era is —intact, baby.
Is Bangkok that attractive? Hell! No way, guys! This City where I live is weird but it must have done something right that half of the world’s population get addicted and bother to travel 8,000 miles to come and see things I hate to see.
Let’s rock! Everybody, let’s rock— here’s Bangkok where I live.
Never a dull moment the minute you enter this country regardless of the mode of your transport or where from?
By air, once you step out of the customs, chaos starts from the entry points where you get into this country— All hell breaks loose-/ you try to find your name from among hundreds of placards of names in English- you are surrounded by people who don’t speak you language. The unruly crowd is surprisingly orderly, with no shouting, no shoving, no rules, but plenty of sweat with head spinning over and again.
I heard an American lady telling her husband “ George, get the hell out of here!”
Anywhere you go, you either practice skills of bargaining cut-throat taxi fares, or make straight faces and ignore tattoo—faced Song Thaew or van drivers,
…. or damn Tuk-tuk drivers who follow you to ask you go to with them to the Floating market for 20 Baht fare or pirate van drivers and their sidekicks holding posters of sex shows keep repeating ‘no charge ‘ at the Nana area or around your hotel.
More tourists, more expats, should be more police to be seen — Nope? It’s ironic when there are no police around to bother you as bar operators as well as the touts shoo or boo them away… Seriously. Do you think the Boys in Brown have given up? You may wish that but they come with lightning raids as often as they get a tip-off.
While the expats concealed themselves, the tourists paraded to the Police Station as usual. Deported, pay the fine, or be thrown in jail
… and finally tailor touts who ask you to make suits with a free umbrella after a greeting “ Hello, hello” he did that to you every morning.( maybe evening as well)
“Hi, handsome, where you from?” A famous and classic greeting from ladyboys that passed on for the last 60 years since the Vietnam War era is still heard today.
Why does Malaysia fail to attract expats like Thailand?
Thailand spices up your life, not only Bangkok but the entire country gets you the feeling of chaos, madness, and free-for-all. Besides, you get what you need and more than what one could ask for.
Let me say to you guys, “For Pete’s sake, no one’s lookin’ now’s the chance to make a break—Everybody, let’s go and live in Bangkok and get yourself crazy, life is short.
Unchained
Where in the world should you go if you don’t want to be found?
If you are a high profile criminal or terrorist who is hiding from a bigger country’s Intelligence or police agency, there aren’t many places left for you to go. Sooner or later, they’ll find you.
Your financial status plays a significant role. If you have enough money, you can bribe the local authorities and have a relatively comfortable life in many countries.
A lot also depends on your ethnicity. If you are a white Caucasian, you’ll “stick out” in most Asian and African countries.
Let’s say you don’t have much money, no connections, you are a white male and there is an international arrest warrant out on your name for a serious crime (murder, drug trafficking, etc). Here are some suggestions for your travel destinations:
Spain. There are still some Hippie communities from the 1970s out there. People there are living in extreme poverty, their kids don’t go to school, and life sucks, but on the positive side, the cops stay away from them and nobody gives a f**k who you are and where you come from.
Alternative living communities worldwide. It doesn’t always have to be the jungle or the desert. There are autonomous groups in many Western countries that exist right in the middle of the biggest cities. In London, Paris or Berlin, there are streets where radical anarchists have illegally seized houses and live relatively unbothered by the police. These places can serve you as temporary shelters and you also might find people there who can give you advice on how to further proceed with your plans.
France. You can disappear for a while as a seasonal worker, for example, in the vineyards. They don’t ask any questions. Thousands of young people and students are doing this every year, you are paid in cash and, of course, there is enough wine for everyone.
If you have some money:
Turkey. A friend of mine lived off the grid in Izmir for many years. Just bribe the cops and nobody will bother you.
Albania. Pretty much the same as in Turkey. The good thing is that there are many people that are versed in human trafficking. You can practically go from there to everywhere in the world illegally. It’s a big transport hub for illegals.
Warzones and crisis regions. Where there’s fighting, the police is often far away. Besides that, people are busy with their own troubles and corruption is rampant. Short: a good place to hide. Countries like Ukraine, Iraq, Kurdistan, and even the Republika Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina can offer shelter for the rightfully persecuted. The downside is that you can’t go there without having some prior connections.
There are many more places, but as I said before, it all depends on how much money you have and your connections.
Richard Wolff: There is NO Way Back! How America MISSED Its LAST Chance To Maintain Global Supremacy
Who is the most corrupt and crooked scientist ever known?
Wakefield was (past tense emphasised) a gastroenterologist and biomedical researcher.
He gained international fame when, in 1998, he published a paper in The Lancet which established (or at least, claimed to establish) a link between the MMR vaccine, and a rise in bowel disease and autism (interestingly — only 12 children were in the study, and eight of them supposedly developed behavioural disorders. That’s an insanely small test group, and an absurdly high rate: if this data were true, over 20 million people would have been made autistic by MMR before 1998)
We identified associated gastrointestinal disease and developmental regression in a group of previously normal children, which was generally associated in time with possible environmental triggers
Yep — this guy is the origin of the modern anti-vaccination movement (“antivaxxers”).
Though the paper itself does not concretely blame MMR for the autism cases, Wakefield himself did several press conferences where he publicly claimed a causal link. This caused an uproar in the scientific community — and was labelled as “science by press conference”.
It was these press conferences (not the actual paper itself, though people used the paper as a post-hoc justification) that led to a huge resurgence of the anti-vaccination movement, and the outcry over vaccination of children.
Information then slowly began to leak out that all was not as it seemed to be with the paper, either.
Several of the families in the study were approached by a lawyer preparing a lawsuit against the firms making the MMR jab. Huh…that would seem to be a conflict of interest, right? That is pretty dodgy.
Then it was revealed that said lawyers had paid Wakefield more than £400,000
($700,000), which he had failed to disclose. This seriously raised questions about Wakefield’s motives: how can you expect a paper published by somebody funded by people suing the MMR vaccine makers to be impartial about the MMR vaccine?
In light of the conflict of interest this represented, The Lancet re-reviewed the paper, and found that it no longer satisfied them as a piece of genuine research — and they issued to following retraction:
We wish to make it clear that in this paper no causal link was established between (the) vaccine and autism, as the data were insufficient. However the possibility of such a link was raised, and consequent events have had major implications for public health. In view of this, we consider now is the appropriate time that we should together formally retract the interpretation placed upon these findings in the paper, according to precedent.
Then, in 2004 it was revealed that, prior to publishing the 1998 paper, Wakefield had applied for a patent for a replacement for the MMR vaccine
“Was being paid to conduct the study by solicitors representing parents who believed their children had been harmed by MMR”.
Ordered investigations “without the requisite paediatric qualifications” including colonoscopies, colon biopsies and lumbar punctures (“spinal taps”) on his research subjects without the approval of his department’s ethics board and contrary to the children’s clinical interests, when these diagnostic tests were not indicated by the children’s symptoms or medical history.
“Act[ed] ‘dishonestly and irresponsibly’ in failing to disclose … how patients were recruited for the study”.
“Conduct[ed] the study on a basis not approved by the hospital’s ethics committee.”
Purchased blood samples—for £5 each—from children present at his son’s birthday party, which Wakefield joked about in a later presentation.
“[S]howed callous disregard for any distress or pain the children might suffer
The GMC ruled in favour of all charges — and Wakefield was struck from the register (the harshest thing the GMC is able to do).
During this trial Brian Deer (who had previously worked to uncover many of the inconsistencies in Wakefield’s work), discovered evidence that not only had there been poor lab practices, but that data had been willfully manipulated — and highlighted the difference between the hospital records of the 1998 data, and the data published in the paper, which appeared to show significant manipulation.
where “the initial market for the diagnostic will be litigation-driven testing of patients with AE [autistic enterocolitis, an unproven condition concocted by Wakefield]”.
In light of this, The Lancet then re-retracted the initial paper — rather than just the edited conclusion I quoted above, they said:
“The claims in the original paper that children were ‘consecutively referred’ and that investigations were ‘approved’ by the local ethics committee have been proven to be false.”
This was followed by a flurry of other retractions of Wakefield’s papers — many of which sought to establish a link between vaccination and illnesses.
Seems like a happy ending, no? He got his comeuppance — and the community has rejected his ideas after a rigorous peer review process. Exactly how science is meant to work, right?
Whilst the scientific community was busy giving Wakefield’s 1998 report a jolly good rogering — there was a human cost.
You see, the everyday population doesn’t really pay attention to the proceeds of the UKGMC — and nor do they study the retractions in medical journals. But when a man in a lab coat stands up and says “VACCINES CAUSE AUTISM!” — that, they pay attention to.
Since 1998, there has been a huge rise in the so called “antivaxxer” movement — who believe the claims of Wakefield
, which is promising), which has a running count of the number of preventable illnesses (in the US) and preventable deaths caused by non-vaccination.
The current total stands at 152,763 preventable illnesses, and 9028 deaths.
Let’s just repeat that.
9028 people have died (mostly children) because of the antivaccination movement.
That website also contains a helpful counter for the “number of autism diagnoses linked to vaccination”.
Guess what that number stands at?
0. Zero. Nada. Zilch.
Normally I would avoid making potentially libellous statements such as this — but given that I have extensive back-up sources, citations — and also the fact that this has been tested in court several times (Wakefield has never won a libel suit), I therefore feel pretty darned confident in asserting:
Andrew Wakefield is the most corrupt scientist in history. He can be held accountable for the deaths of nearly 10,000 human beings, because of his fraudulent and unethical research.
He did this out of a desire to make a profit — and in doing so he compromised everything a scientist, and indeed a human being, should stand for.
Sue me. I dare you.
What is the significance of elevating China’s bilateral relations with all African countries having diplomatic ties with China to the level of strategic relations?
What does China need?
Potash
Iron Ore
Bauxite
Uranium Ore
Gold Mines
Copper Ores
Wheat
Oilseeds & Edible Oil Stock
Pork
Beef
Soybeans
Corn
Titanium Ore
What does Russia need?
Intermediate Goods
Drones
Electronic Circuitry
Semiconductor Chips between 650 nm to 45 nm
Cars
Infrastructure Equipment
Construction Equipment
Industrial Chemicals
Refined Titanium
What do African nations need?
Wheat
Oilseeds
Coal
Schools
Energy
Transportation
CREDIT at low interest rates
Affordable Consumer Goods
You see that China, Russia and Africa all have things that the others want
They have a SELF CONTAINED DEMAND AND SUPPLY HABITAT
Whatever China needs, Africa and Russia have
Whatever Russia wants, China provides
Whatever Africa needs, Russia and China provide
The US or West have NO PLACE IN THIS HABITAT
They have stolen tons of resources from Africa and paid 3 cents on the Dollar
They have instead sold tons of semi automatic guns, claymore landmines, grenades, handguns and RDX to keep the regions unstable and poor and illiterate
Thats what STRATEGIC RELATIONS means
It means each Nation is strategically poised to help each other develop and grow
China builds a Power Project in Mali
They pay for it fully and in exchange ask for Uranium Ore to be sold to them for 30 cents on the Dollar
It’s TEN TIMES WHAT THE FRENCH WERE PAYING FOR THE SAME
So why not have strategic relations ?
Mystery Of The Betz Sphere Is Finally Solved And It’s Not Good
Steak Casserole
abe8c5a3e7ca4d13943aab3d96e7fea0
Ingredients
3 or 4 boneless cube steaks
1 can Campbell’s Golden Mushroom Soup
1 can mushrooms (optional)
1 medium onion, sliced
Instructions
Brown the steaks in a frying pan, then place in the bottom of a baking dish.
Pour the mushroom soup over them, add the can of mushrooms if you wish.
Spread the sliced onions on top and season with salt, pepper and paprika to taste.
Bake for about 35 to 40 minutes at 350 degrees F.
Serve with noodles.
Spoon the gravy over the noodles, if desired.
What countries will you never visit again?
Not a country, but a city:
I’ll never visit Berlin again.
When I was in college, I did a semester in London. Halfway through the term, my friends and I decided we’d take a Eurotrip to Amsterdam, Berlin, and Hamburg.
Amsterdam was a blast. I was asleep for most of Hamburg. (We stayed awake the entire night before.) But the most disappointing part of the trip was Berlin.
The city itself, the food, the history, was great. But what drove me away was the people. (Literally.) The Germans didn’t allow me into any of their clubs. (Except this one club that’s apparently super lame because it’s only for tourists.) I was there with three girls and another guy. We tried four places. The bouncers always let the girls in, but never me or my American male counterpart.
But here’s the kicker:
My biggest reason I wanted to go, pay for a flight, AirBnB, etc. was to go to the clubs. I was enrolled in music school at the time, and was really interested in electronic music. (Okay, I was obsessed.) And I knew Berlin was known for having some of the best electronic music in the world.
I was so excited, I did a bunch of research beforehand to learn how to behave so that the bouncers would approve of me. I wore all black. I stayed off my phone. I even remained silent.
But it wasn’t enough.
My passport gave me away. No one let me in anywhere, and I was really broken up about it. I had never really experienced rejection like that before. It’s a good thing my buddy was there.
He felt sorry for me, so we stayed up the whole night drinking beer and playing chess. He beat me every time, but I still had so much fun. The next day, we woke up around noon. The girls went to a museum, or memorial or something. My buddy and I spent the rest of the day at the Berlin Zoo until they closed.
I’m never going back 😉
What happened to your school bully?
One of my school bullies punched me in the back of the neck. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but in 2022 I filed for worker’s comp because my neck started really hurting me. Turns out I have:
stenosis
arthritis
a partially-healed fractured disc
Since all of this was clearly old injuries and degenerative, I lost my worker’s comp claim. Over the years, in hindsight, I should have known something was wrong.
It was 2006 when I was punched, and I moved to Australia in 2016.
In 2010 and 2011, when I was in college, I was an Army ROTC cadet for two years before I got discharged for unrelated medical issues. I did notice that the back of my neck often hurt a lot when I wore a helmet…
Thanks to new regulations, cars started getting pokier head rests that either pushed your head forward, or forced you to set the seat back. New head rests always hurt my neck.
It wasn’t until I got a job at a warehouse though, as an order selector, moving thousands of pounds of alcohol a day that my neck really started playing up. I found I couldn’t turn my head, even driving was very dangerous. I am now on painkillers so strong that every 6 months or so they test my kidneys to make sure I’m not getting killed by them. They’re non-opioid painkillers. Basically Celebrex and a super strong version of Tylenol, both for extremely old people.
Back to my bully… I started thinking about it, and I realised there was a greater than 0% chance this guy, back in the USA, was a millionaire wangster rap star. Maybe I could sue him?
I looked him up, and was startled, though not surprised, to see an adult version of his face, in a news article, wearing a prison jumpsuit.
I am definitely not expecting a lump sum payout.
China & Russia JUST Hit U.S. Where It HURTS… & U.S. Didn’t Expect THIS!
What was the most bizarre court appearance you’ve heard of?
Not my case, but the case before ours (hearing). The year was 1987
NOTE: This was a Juvenile Court – Not an adult court
WARNING: THIS IS THE PAST ERA, NOT POLITICALLY CORRECT IN TODAY’S STANDARDS!
Case * Information *
A 11 year old moderately retarded (mentally challenge) is brought in with shackles
JUDGE: __________________ (!!!) _________________
PROSECUTION: (begins to speak)
JUDGE: SHUT UP! I DEMAND TO KNOW WHY THIS CHILD IS IN MY COURT ROOM?
PROSECUTION: Proceeds: Destroying mops and cutting mop-heads off
DEFENSE: YOUR HONOR! (talking very loudly) I WISH TO STATE THAT THE SCHOOL SYSTEM KNEW OF HIS FEARS WITH MOPS!
PROSECUTION: Objection!
JUDGE: ALL OF YOU SHUT UP!
(reads the case file and it seemed to anger him)
JUDGE: LITTLE GIRL, COME FORWARD TO ME, COME HERE… (summons her to come in front of him)
He notices shes struggling with the shackles, orders them removed.
PROSECUTION: OB….
JUDGE: SHUT THE HELL UP!
Bailiffs removes the shackles, escorts her to the Judge’s side and she immediately gives him a hug!
JUDGE: Ah! Very Nice! (hugs right back) Ahhh, let’s see here, your name is Myra (not real name)
LITTLE GIRL: ME! (points to herself proudly)
JUDGE: Do you know what a mop is?
LITTLE GIRL: (her eyes widen and becomes fearful)…
JUDGE: You do not like mops!
LITTLE GIRL: Bad! BAD BAD BAD BAD!
JUDGE: I want you to sit right there in the chair (Witness Stand).
::: she scurries into the chair and mimics the Judge ::::
JUDGE: (slightly amused but quickly turns into a scowl) WHAT IS HER MENTAL STATE?
DEFENSE: Her mental state is that of a Pre-Schooler / Kindergartner – below average for her age.
PROSECUTION: OBJECTION! HAS NO RELEVANCY TO THE CASE!
JUDGE: SHUT UP! DO NOT SPEAK UNTIL I INSTRUCT YOU MAY SPEAK! THAT’S BOTH OF YOU!
Judge then summons a bailiff up, and whispers something…. the Bailiff was somewhat “objecting to it” until the Judge tells him “go – get it”.
JUDGE: Where’s her Medical Records?
DEFENSE: I have the copy right here (holding a file)
JUDGE: (waves it to be brought over, reading through the case file every now and then you would hear him say) Hmmm, Hmmmm, Hmmmm. (and he’s making notes on his ledger)
Bailiff returns – Judge holds his hand up to “wait” – then he says
JUDGE: Myra, could you please stand over there between the two podiums?
LITTLE GIRL: (confused)
DEFENSE: (walks over and points)
She runs down and stands there facing the people. Making faces.
JUDGE: Myra? Would you turn around and face me please?
She’s giggling and laughing, then finally turns around.
(Then he summons a Female Bailiff, to turn her facing the wall to the left and not to permit her to look)
Then he waves his hand and the bailiff comes out with the mop and mop bucket, but alas, it was too late, she turned and saw it and immediately charged after it and attempted to destroy it; with the Judge holding his hand “WAIT!”
He made full observation and then said
JUDGE: MYRA?! MYRA?! What are you doing?
LITTLE GIRL: BAD! BAD BAD BAD BAD! (proceeding to try to kill the mop – even trying to pull the mop strings apart)
JUDGE: Very good Myra! You’ve killed our mop! Please come up here while my assistants removes the dead mop from my court room!
LITTLE GIRL: Keeps an eye on the mop being removed and one Bailiff played it very smart – like it was truly dead!
LITTLE GIRL: BAD BAD BAD! DEAD DEAD DEAD! ME DEAD THE BAD BAD!
JUDGE: C’mere. (instructing her to stand by him)
JUDGE TO DEFENSE: May I ask what her treating physicians have to state about a Mop?
DEFENSE: I believe the notes are somewhere in the near middle-end, may I?
Judge returns the Medical Records back to the Defense – and he’s flipping through the pages. Finding it… Hands the Judge the documentation
JUDGE: (Reads it to self then proceeds to read outloud): PATIENT HAD AN OUTBURST AND PROCEEDED TO ATTACK OUR JANITOR’S MOP WHICH HE WAS CLEANING A MESS OFF THE HALLWAY FLOOR. FURTHER DOCUMENTATIONS MADE BY THE ATTENDING NURSE FOUND THE PATIENT WAS VERY AGITATED BY THE PRESENCE OF A MOP.
DEFENSE: Your Honor, I found the other document. (Hands it to the bailiff and then it’s in the Judge’s hands)
JUDGE: (reads to self and then a slight chuckle then proceeds) THE PATIENT HAS ADVERSE REACTION TO ANY MOP. SEVERAL MOPS, MOUNTED AND UNMOUNTED WERE PRESENT TO THE PATIENT. SHE REACTED IN TERROR, ANGER, AND PROCEEDED IN DESTRUCTION OF MOPS. RECOMMENDATION: KEEP ALL MOPS OUT OF SIGHT OF THIS PATIENT. IT’S UNKNOWN WHY THE MOP IS A TRIGGER.
:::: returns the papers back to the Defense :::
PROSECUTION: YOUR HONOR! SHE HAD DESTROYED $120 IN SCHOOL PROPERTY.
JUDGE: NO SH!T SHERLOCK! IT IS QUITE EVIDENT THAT THIS RETARDED (as it was known back in the years passed) CHILD, SHALL NOT BE FOUND GUILTY. IT HAS ALREADY BEEN MEDICALLY POSTED THAT ALL MOPS AND SUCH THEREOF NOT TO BE IN THE SIGHT OF THE CHILD! RELEASE HER BACK TO HER PARENTS IMMEDIATELY AND THE SCHOOL SHE ATTENDS TO SHALL BE ALERTED WITH A WARNING – KEEP ALL MOPS OUT OF THE SIGHT OF THE CHILD. IF THERE ARE MOPS PRESENT, PLEASE REVERT THE CHILD AWAY FROM THESE OBJECTS. CASE CLOSED WITH PREJUDICE!
(pauses)
JUDGE: Myra?
LITTLE GIRL: Runs up to him and giggles.
JUDGE: You may go to your mommy and daddy! You can go back to school! You’ve saved my courtroom by the Mop Monster!
LITTLE GIRL: Beaming with smiles (runs up and hugs)
This has to be the most bizarre event ever in my lifetime! To the fact, a 11 year old retarded (mentally challenge) child with such a low IQ being arrested was totally uncalled for! The Special Education School (designed just for those type of special need children), angered me personally. I filed a formal complaint against the Special Education School System → in fact, so did a lot of other parents, counselors, program directors. It caused an outburst by the Public! (One of the Program Directors reported it to the Media which that itself was published!)
Cheating Wife Thought She Got Away With The Perfect Crime UNTIL Husband Texted EVERYONE!
Why doesn’t the West face up to China, but uses public opinion to smear China?
Because it’s no longer the past.
This was 1937.
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This is 2024
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If you want to have a fucking try? Then come and get us.
We’ll hit you back just as hard.
White power types will say they don’t work, so go on then put your money where your mouth is!
We’ll die but we’ll take you along with us and there will be no future for you either.
What would happen to a recruit in boot camp that acted like Forrest Gump or Gomer Pyle?
Dale Dye is a retired Marine officer who’s gotten rich as a technical advisor for military-themed movies. He founded Warriors, Inc. If you’re making a war movie, you get this guy to train your actors to behave like actual soldiers.
One of the movies he worked on was Forrest Gump. They asked him about Gump’s chances as a real soldier, and this is what he said: Forrest Gump is the ideal private because he does exactly what you tell him to.
Forrest Gump is also the ideal trainee. If a drill sergeant were to hand him, say, a footlocker layout Gump is going to set his locker up EXACTLY the way it says to. When the drill sergeant hands him a grenade he will throw it exactly the way they tell him to. He will march the way they tell him to. His uniform will be up to snuff. When we shined boots his boots would always be perfect. He will always remember to sweep, mop, wax and buff the floor. If he’s told to fall out for formation at 0630 he’ll be there. And he’d notice that the more precisely he did all these things the less the drills will yell at him.
What you DON’T want to do is put him in combat arms. He’d wind up getting his platoon killed. He’d be a hell of a Service and Supply soldier. If you tell Forrest Gump that you need an airdrop pallet built with 48 water cans, 50 cases of MREs and ten cases of ammo…that pallet is going to be built so pretty and squared away that the riggers only have to put a net and a parachute on it before they take it to the plane. They’ll never have to restack it. A more intelligent soldier, you might have to tell him the ammo and water go on first and the MREs on top of that so the weight of the heavier items don’t crush the MREs when the pallet lands; Gump is going to put the MREs on top because his sergeant told him to.
If most Chinese trust their government, and most Americans don’t trust their own government, when China and the U.S. come into conflict, which side is more likely to win?
If there is a war between China & the US, it will not be in North America because China does not have the power projection.
It will be a war in Asia near China. It is a war that US can never win. Not enough assets to fight China, too many are quickly destroyed, no industrial capacity to sustain it, and in a logistic nightmare.
Public trust for the Chinese government helps, but really doesn’t come into play. Chinese nationalism will assert itself. Chinese are peaceful people, but they are not afraid of war and will not tolerate an invasion.
In the US, there will be an outpour of narratives to justify the war – evil China, blah, blah, blah, the spin doctors working overtime. US public will be inundated with stories of US victories, China’s fortifications in the SCS severely damaged, Taiwan on the march, allies in full support, NATO forces preparing to set sail, US carrier fleets on the way to defeat and conquer – China in flight, the government in disarray, the Politburo divided, and a real revolt is in the offing. US victory is imminent. China’s collapse is imminent.
These are approximate stories in the early days of the Ukraine War.
Then the spin doctors run out of stories. The facts on the ground are too ugly to tell. But news can only be suppressed and black-out for a time. How can you not report that an aircraft carrier has been hit and in danger of sinking? When the news start to go south, public anger will rise. Worse that they see no body bags and realize that the war is fought at sea and the bodies are in the bottom.
If the US public does not trust the government, the war will be short. The disarray and revolt that were suppose to befall China will take place in the US, and spread quickly. Then the real war starts – in the US.
China: A Leader in Hypersonics Military Technology
What are some facts that sound like ‘BS’, but are actually true?
An ingenious man was able to turn a red paper clip into a house.
In 2005, Kyle MacDonald had no job, but wanted to live in a house. With limited options for saving money, he concocted an unorthodox plan.
Beginning with a red paper clip on his desk in Montreal, he would attempt to trade the seemingly useless item for something better. He would keep trading up until he reached his goal.
For his first step, he posted the red paper clip in the ‘Barter’ section on Craigslist. From Kyle MacDonald’s book, sourced below:
one red paperclip
This might not surprise you, but below is a picture of a paperclip. It is red.
This red paperclip is currently sitting on my desk next to my computer. I want to trade this paperclip with you for something bigger or better, maybe a pen, a spoon, or perhaps a boot.
If you promise to make the trade I will come and visit you, wherever you are, to trade.
Hope to trade with you soon!
Kyle
PS – I’m going to make a continuous chain of ‘up trades’ until I get a house. Or an Island. Or a house on an island. You get the idea.
Through a dogged and brilliant series of 14 trades over the course of one year (and greatly helped by later news and publicity of his quest), Kyle was able to successfully transform the paperclip into a new home:
Paper clip for Fish-shaped pen.
Fish-shaped pen for a hand-sculpted doorknob.
Doorknob for a Coleman camp stove (with fuel).
Camp stove for a Honda generator.
Generator for an “instant party”: an empty keg, a beer-filling IOU for, and a neon Budweiser sign.
“Instant party” for a snowmobile.
Snowmobile for a two-person trip to British Columbia.
Trip for a cube van.
Cube van for a recording contract with Metalworks.
Recording contract for a year’s rent in Phoenix, Arizona.
Year’s rent for one afternoon with Alice Cooper.
Alice Cooper afternoon for a KISS motorized snow globe.
KISS motorized snow globe to Corbin Bernsen (a large collector of snow globes) for a role in the film Donna on Demand.
Movie role for a two-story farmhouse in Kipling, Saskatchewan.
Kyle wrote a book about his experience, and even earned a place in the Guiness Book of World Records for “Most Successful Internet Trade.”
Davy Knowles w/BAND OF FRIENDS – Tattoo’d Lady/Bad Penny/Shadowplay
What is the best breakup experience you’ve ever had?
Originally Answered: what is the best breakup experience you’ve ever had?
I met this girl, Courtney, in 1999. She grew up and went to school in Buffalo, NY and I was going to school in California. We met in Michigan, at a summer program for math majors. (For foreign readers, the only thing you need to know about the geography is that all those places are very far from the others.)
It was what I call “indifference at first sight.” We met each other in the context of meeting all the eight or so student participants in the program. We got along fine, but there were definitely no romantic sparks flying. As a group, we all really got along great. Two months later, when the program was over, we all kept up with each other.
(This is more remarkable than it sounds, at least because back then there was no such thing as facebook. “Kept up with each other” meant we actually emailed or — shockingly — talked on the phone.)
About a year later, I sent an email to the group saying how I’d be going to Penn State for grad school. Courtney instantly replied, saying she would also be going to Penn State for a one-semester program. Small world! We arranged to have dinner shortly after we both arrived.
Now the romantic sparks flew. By the end of the semester, in December 2000, we were properly dating. But, alas, the semester ended and she went back to Buffalo. For foreign readers, Penn State and Buffalo are separated by about a 3–4 hour drive. However, I didn’t have a car, so for me the quickest way to visit was by an 8 hour meandering bus ride. We carried on, long distance. Despite my lack of car, my schedule was such that it was a lot easier for me to visit her than the other way around. So every other weekend (or so) I would be on that bus.
Long distance relationships aren’t that great. Maybe not in all cases, but for us, there was a pressure to really make the most out of each visit. We never really just hung around together lounging on the couch. We filled the whole weekend with stuff to do. It was fun, but it was also a little exhausting.
Too exhausting, in fact. By the time February rolled around, I was ready to call it quits. Not because Courtney had done anything wrong, and it’s not that I didn’t enjoy myself when I visited. It was just… exhausting. So one weekend in late February, I decided we’d have “the talk.”
But the timing is important. You can’t show up on Friday and start with the talk, otherwise the rest of the weekend is ruined. It has to be on Sunday, before my bus ride back. She had planned Sunday breakfast with her parents. Ugh, not ideal, but fine. So we get through that very awkward breakfast, and now she’s driving me to the bus station.
There’s that moment of silence when we have clearly transitioned from talking about whatever we were talking about, and I’m mentally firming myself up to start. Man, I hope I don’t make her too sad. Just as I’m about to begin, she says, “So… hey… listen… “
And then she breaks up with me!
She was thinking all the same things I was. We had a good laugh at that, had a nice hug, and she sent me on my way. We both resolved to still be friends.
The epilogue:
We continued talking on the phone after that — because that’s what friends do. In fact, she even went to visit me at Penn State. Because that’s what friends do.
At some point, we crossed into territory that definitely doesn’t involve what friends do. We were briefly in this awkward ill-defined relationship status, but by June, we were pretty much properly dating again. We resolved to fix the long distance problem. Different scenarios were discussed, and ultimately we ended up moving to Boston.
We got married in 2005.
Why do Chinese keep comparing China to the USA when China still hasn’t put a man on the moon, something the USA did 49 years ago?
Putting a man on the moon is not indicative of US superiority.
Today, the world has two superpowers: the USA and China. This is why they are frequently compared.
China has 232X the shipbuilding capacity of the USA!!!
New Discovery Suggests Dinosaurs Coexisted with Early Humans
Have you ever met a very intelligent person who had no clue as to how smart they really are?
Yes, I have. I owned and operated a very successful employment agency for about 20 years. And during that time I met thousands of people in all walks of life and individuals who were at all levels of intelligence, from borderline moronic to high level genius (I also advertised in the Mensa local news magazine/letter for applicants).
I sometimes gave a version of the Wonderlic test, a 50 question, 12 minute, I.Q. test to applicants. Not to all applicants, just some.
This one individual came to my office fresh from college. He was dressed in a full three piece suit. Had never worked before, and was looking for an entry job in bookkeeping, although he had a bachelor’s degree in accounting. He didn’t come from my Mensa advertising. Since he didn’t have any work experience, I wanted to place him with one of the big 8 recognizable accounting firms. But I needed more information than just a college degree to get him the interview.
I gave him one of the six versions of the Wonderlic that I had. He finished the questions in 10 minutes instead of 12. When I scored it, I gulped. He got a 45 which in those days, 1980, was equivalent to an I.Q. of about 145.
The young man was shy, quiet, and nice. No intellectual arrogance about him. Even his vocabulary was average and not peppered with ten dollar words. I couldn’t believe this guy had a genius I.Q. I tested him with a 2nd. and 3rd. version of the test. The same, between 45 and 47, to give him as high as 148 or 150 I.Q. (At the time the ceiling for a score of 50 was around 153, which included scores of 48–50)
The individual was a genius! I made up a resume of his background, which was limited, but did put in his GPA, which was 4.0 in accounting courses, but “B” grades in practically everything else. Naturally, I was successful placing him in a job.
Today he may be retired because in 1980 he was 23 years old, but I’ll bet with his background, and I.Q., that he either ended up as a controller, CEO, or just remained as an auditor because he liked it and devoted his time to his family and not to advancing and sacrificing for a career. And I’ll also bet, since he was so self effacing, that he went through life not realizing he was so very intelligent (I did tell him what his Wonderlic scores were, but he didn’t believe me when I told him that he was extraordinarily intelligent.
What disqualifies you from being a flight attendant?
These are the things that can stop you from getting a cabin crew job:
Age. Airlines have age requirements, to join the airline. The normal age requirements most airlines have are 18 years old to 21 years old. Don’t forget that you can be ‘’too old’’ to join as well. Sadly a lot of ME/Asian airlines are ageist. Most of the ME/Asian airlines prefer to hire candidates below the age of 30 years old. But thankfully EU/US/AUS/CA airlines are not ageist.
Height. Airlines have height requirements. This is because of safety reasons. If you are for example 155cm, it will be difficult for you to find an airline that would hire you. During the recruitment process, there will be a height test, etc.
Education. Most airlines want their candidates to at least have a completed high school diploma. If you don’t have a high school diploma, you won’t be able to get a job.
Weight/health. If you are not fit to fly and don’t have a healthy BMI, you won’t get the job. Your weight has to be in proportion to your height. During the recruitment, the recruiters will judge you. I say ”judge” because the recruiters are brutal when it comes to the way you look. Also during the training, your health will be checked.
Skin. As crazy as this sounds, a lot of airlines don’t hire people that for example have severe acne or skin issues. Issues that would be visible. Image is everything to these airlines. A lot of people forget that crew members act as some kind of ”PR” for the airlines. Crew members are ‘’brand ambassadors’’ for the airlines. That is why the airlines are super strict with the way their crew looks like.
Criminal background. Before you get the job, there will be a background check. If you don’t pass it, you won’t get the job.
Passport. For example, a Brazilian national can’t work for Airfrance in France if that person doesn’t have the legal right to live and work in France. You have to have a valid passport. Some airlines offer crew, work visas, doesn’t matter what nationality you have. For example, the airlines in the Middle East do that. Other than that you have to have the legal right to live and work in that country if you want to get a cabin crew job.
Medical history. Some airlines are strict with candidates’ medical histories. For example, many airlines don’t hire people with depression. Doesn’t matter if they have it now or had it before. If someone had a specific illness, even if it is healed and cured now, the airlines won’t accept that. For example, if you have any kind of sleeping issues, previous or current. Even if it is sorted out and you no longer have sleeping issues, you won’t get the job. Before you get the job you have to fill out medical forms.
Teeth. Yes, your teeth matter. To smile is one of your duties being a cabin crew. You have to have a nice smile. If you have issues with your teeth, for example, crooked teeth, you won’t get hired. Some airlines don’t even allow braces. Many airlines require dental x-rays before you join.
Vision/hearing. You have to fill out a medical form before you join. If you have issues with those, you are out. Your vision and hearing will also be checked during the medical exams during training. If you don’t pass the vision and hearing tests, you will be terminated. So better to check before you get the job.
Swimming. You have to know how to swim. If you don’t know how to swim, you won’t be able to get the job. There will be a ditching test during the training. You can’t have a fear of water etc.
Scars/marks. If you have deep surgery scars or marks, and it would be visible when wearing the uniform, then you won’t be able to get a job. Some airlines are super strict with the way their crew members look like.
Fear of flying. I know a girl who had a fear of flying, to what degree I don’t know. She went on with recruitment and got the job. The instructors found out during training. When they were having training in the simulators. She got fired.
Headscarf/hijab. Many airlines don’t allow this. For example, the airline Saudia did allow headscarves with their previous uniform. Their previous uniform looked like this:
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Their cabin crew were allowed to wear a headscarf/hijab. But this year, they changed their uniform to this:
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Now, with their new uniform, I don’t know what they did about their headscarf rules.
Tattoos. Most airlines are OK with candidates having tattoos, but as long as it is not visible when in uniform. If you for example have tattoos on your legs or arms, you won’t be able to get the job. I know many candidates who had visible tattoos but removed them to get the job.
Beard. If you have a beard like this:
main qimg 8b2597a6629c4f33147c97f8fc6cf4c6 lq
If you are not willing to shave it, you won’t get the job. Many airlines are super strict with beards. With some airlines, you are not even allowed to have a beard like that. You have to be clean-shaven at all times, during duty. Some airlines allow their male crew members to have a beard. For example, they allow this:
main qimg 4640986e412619741b1ed70da11b7031 lq
With some airlines even during recruitment, if you come with a beard for your interview, they will disqualify you.
Hair color/hairstyle. For example, you are not allowed to have this hair color:
main qimg c00fd9edd8b31fb4706fc6d8d8e6243a lq
If you go like this for a cabin crew interview, you will not get the job. They have strict rules with hairstyles and hair colors. Even if you had your hair up in a neat bun like this:
main qimg 4d2a4c1400bd415ee49d1072bbca42cb lq
That is still not allowed.
So many crazy and silly rules. Some rules are of course there for safety and security. Some rules I understand and I am happy that they have those rules. But for example the age rule. That is truly sad. A lot of airlines are ageist. Many things that can disqualify you during the recruitment process or in training. Even if you pass the entire recruitment process, you need to pass the training as well.
So many things to think of before you apply for the job.
Scott Ritter: Russia’s GLOVES ARE OFF as Putin Readies NATO’s Crushing Defeat, WWIII Next
How are snipers usually killed in combat?
The snipers that were killed during the Bosnian War died in very different ways:
One sniper in our platoon got shot in the head by an enemy rifle, most probably from another sniper.
An enemy sniper jumped from a high building when he discovered that we had located his position and were about to catch him alive.
Snipers were the most hated soldiers on the battlefield and when they were caught alive, they usually didn’t live very long.
We also lost a sniper when a tank shot at the house where he was positioned. A wall collapsed over him and he died immediately. It’s often overlooked that a tank makes the perfect anti-sniper weapon.
Most snipers, however, died through indirect fire from the artillery. The artillery is the number one killer on the battlefield and snipers are no exception. From all artillery weapons, the mortar is probably the most effective one against snipers.
In other conflicts, snipers also get killed by airstrikes and more and more often by anti-tank missiles. Like the tank, a modern anti-tank missile is extremely accurate over long distances and therefore, it is perfectly suited to combat a relatively small target, for example, a sniper.
MM and his AI experiments
I moved some of the visual narratives around, and changed the forum from making coffee to “holding a carved stone statue” and the location being a “bedroom”. Very interesting results.
Many imperfections, but very interesting and curious.
So it started out with a lot of kissing on the bed. No statue. But not too bad.
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(4)
Some soft nudes.
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And then everyone started kissing everyone else.
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And then things got heated up.
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(4)
And confusing…
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All are aesthetically pleasing, but none appeals to me. I am not searching for nudes and a lot of bed action. But I have taken note that you have to be very careful on what is written, and things can be misinterpreted with the strangest slight elements of sentence structure variation.
And I have no idea where the statue went.
Wife Admitted To Cheating For 10 YEARS On Annual Girls Trips, So I Said “Two Can Play This Game!”
What is the most advanced home surgery or procedure you’ve done on yourself? And how did it go?
Years ago, when I was without dental insurance, I developed quite the abscess on one of my teeth. I could not afford the procedure and I did not want to create medical debt for myself. So, ever the stubborn woman that I am, I thought, “how hard can it be?”
I looked up videos on YouTube of dentists performing the procedure first. If you’re performing surgery without surgical training you need a reference point! Then I gathered and boiled my supplies in hot water.
I pulled back my lip and face as best as I could and used a needle to pierce the very swollen infected skin tissue. Purulent puss oozed and gushed from the hole. The pain was otherworldly and not a stretch. I thought I’d pass out from the initial wave of pain that washed over me. But I pushed on and continued to squeeze out as much as I could.
I repeated the process daily for the next few days. Eventually it healed and I was able to have it taken care of again when my insurance kicked in fresh in January. Look, I knew one way or the other it would be cut open and I would’ve loved to be numbed first but hey, you do what you have to when there’s no other option.:
SWEET JESUS!.. *First Time Hearing* Joe Cocker – With A Little Help From My Friends
I have to get it working. Four hours without life support and we’ll all be dead, but that’s not the main thing. I mean, it is. Obviously. None of us want to die out here, least of all me. But we’ve also got a point to prove.They said we weren’t ready. The Council fought us every inch of the way, and I know it was only Ethan’s intervention that got our expedition over the line. Ethan’s name, really. There’s only so much can be denied to the crown prince, even by the Council.And the reason Ethan fought them so hard? Me.So we’re out here now, lightyears from home, hours from death, all because of me. All the exhileration of the launch, the adrenaline of the crew, the bombast and the posturing and the talk of guts and glory has splintered into stardust. Hundreds of accusing eyes burn into me as I pass through the ship. There might only be a dozen of us on board but the weight of those souls threatens to crush me. Their shading tells me louder than words that it’s the guts rather than the glory that currently occupy their thoughts.I’ve heard what they say about me, too. I’d have to be deaf not to, it’s not like anyone has the energy to spare my feelings right now. I’ve heard it all before, how I’m over-rated, over-promoted, a mad scientist that no one sane would let out of the lab. Usually it rolls off me, but usually I’m not holding my accusers’ lives in my tentacles. Nepo baby. Sycophant. Catamite is a new one; I’m actually faintly impressed by the erudition of the insult.None of it serves to divert me for long. Because not only is the mission my baby, the ship herself is too. The hull, the engines. The life support system. I’m her inventor and her chief engineer, and while Ethan is her captain and pilot everyone knows she’s mine to her wiring.I don’t want to die. We have a point to prove to the Council. But I have a promise to keep to Ethan which is written in more than blood.“Are you sure?” His tentacles played over mine as we lay entwined in his bed. “I trust you, Tam, you know I do, but…”“I know. It’s a big ask.” I couldn’t hide the waves of colour that swirled across my scales, hope and excitement laced with the deep burgundy of avarice. To be first, to be the one to break the barriers of the edge of our star system, for it to be my ship, my engine, my innovations that cradled my people out into the unknown? A shiver of anticipation rippled over me, ruffling my frills. “I won’t let you down, Eth, I won’t embarrass you.”He’d shaken his head, a hint of hurt staining his cheekbones emerald. “It’s not that, Tam.” I waited, confused, as he coloured with anxiety. “Is it safe?”“Of course it’s safe! You think I’d risk my own skin if it wasn’t?”He’d frowned at me, knowing me a little too well, his look all that was needed to conjour the memories of boyish expoits and youthful innovations that blew up in my face, often literally. Sheepish, I’d conceded the point. “This time. This one is safe, Eth, I swear.”“You’ll bring them all back? The crew? Every one of them?”
“I swear.” I was under no illusions about the kinds of folks who I’d be given for the voyage. Those with too little to lose, too much to run from. Or those servicing a debt so great that it could propel them beyond the limits of our atmosphere. But a life is a life, and even though Eth is a much better person than I am I was happy to promise him this. “On my life, Eth.” Quite literally, actually, since there was no question of the ship leaving the planet without me.
He’d nodded, apparently satisfied, and golden exhileration flooded my body. To be replaced by a chilling sense of horror at his next words. “I’ll captain her, then.”
More than blood, then. Instead, a vow to which I’m tied by the soul bond between me and him. Oh, there’s no deep magic here, no arcane link that compels me to obey, nothing like that. Just the fact that this man is half of my whole, and my entire heart, and nothing in this universe matters if he is not at my side. I’d be a hell of a lot happier right now, though, if he wasn’t literally at my side, but instead safely ensconced in the royal chambers in Selmat.
Is this what he expected? Is this what his family anticipated when they appointed a royal engineer to their court? It was a fancy of his father’s, I’m sure, a conceit inspired by visitors from abroad who displayed their own scientists and mathematicians like a florist bedecking a ballroom. He’d requested a physicist and a cosmologist as well and the univeristy had been only too happy to offload me, the troublesome thorn in the administration’s side, to complete the trio.
Aretha and Silas didn’t last long, their tempraments far better suited to the dusty, theoretical towers of academia than the whims of a court which demands flair and novelty more than rigour and punctiliousness. But I was in my element. Every harebrained idea I’d ever had suddenly had an audience. Nothing I could say was too out-there, nothing too outlandish to delight my avid fans.
I wasn’t expecting anyone to take me seriously.
It had never happened before, after all. Oh, I knew my ideas would work, but I’d never persuaded anyone else. Or, at least, anyone who had the wherewithal to actually get them beyond the point of theory. Not until Ethan.
Ethan listened. Not in the delighted, vapid way of the rest of the court but with actual interest. He asked questions. Intelligent ones.
It was my engine design that fascinated him the most. His father quickly lost interest in the scheme once Ethan’s questions become more detailed and my explanations less about showmanship and more about satisfying the insatiable curiosity of the crown prince. And about proving myself, of course. But that was fine, because in the face of his father’s impatience Ethan began to ask for ‘personal briefings’ on my ideas. They became increasingly ‘personal’ as we got to know each other, and for a while the whole space exploration programme risked being derailed entirely as we discovered just how much exploration we could undertake within the four walls of the prince’s bedroom.
The scene in the engineering bay, when I get there, is a horror show. A pall of smoke hangs in the air, choking the handful of crew who know one end of an induction manifold from the other and have hurried in here in a forlorn attempt to help. There’s little they can – or dare – attempt without my instruction, but they’ll stand there and broadcast their resentment in neon blue streaks nonetheless.
My orders echo around the cavernous space, chillingly unimpeded by the engine’s usual hum. Suddenly six tentacles don’t feel like nearly enough as I press reset buttons and hammer overrides and make absolutely no difference to the silently accusing power gauges.
It’s the fuel. Of course it’s the fuel. I know it, even the underqualified grunts hovering at my back know it. But none of us have dared say it yet because to go in there and deal with it, to pass beyond the containment field, is only fractionally less of a death sentence than sitting around here waiting for the air to run out.
We’re out of time, and I’m out of delaying tactics, and I’ve known for a while – since the instant the explosion rippled through the ship and the alarms began to scream and the crew was painted lime green in terror – that it would come to this. Muttering ripples round the room but I can’t spare the attention, not right now. There are supplies in the emergency locker for this, and I snag the tub of gel that I’ve never found the opportunity – or perhaps never been sufficiently suicidal – to test and start to smear it across my body.
A commotion by the containment hatch catches my attention just in time, and my panicked screech stops the youngster’s tentacle just before he overrides the security lock. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?!”
He freezes, glares, steps into the shadows to try and hide the shade of his scales which are now so dazzlingly viridescent that they almost glow. “I’m the most junior. Sir. You don’t have to order me.”
“Order you to what?!” Panic and confusion is making my voice shrill and a couple of the onlookers wince and cover their sensitive earholes.
The youth – Derran, I recall, belatedly – looks faintly uncertain. “To go beyond the door. You… you do realise it’s the fuel, don’t you? Sir?” The honorific is tacked on tentatively, like he’s increasingly unsure it’s merited. Not that I can really blame him at this point. “That the lines are clogged?”
“Of course I do, I designed the bloody thing.” I’ve finished slicking myself with goo now and I’m feeling unpleasantly tacky and more than a little nervous, and my temper is fraying. “What makes you think I’m sending you in there?”
His expression goes flat, confusion and scorn and faint hope swirling across his scales. “Because someone has to unclog them, and it’s a death sentence, and I’m the most junior.” He doesn’t even bother with the ‘sir’ this time.
I can’t help myself. I scan the room. Half of them are staring at the floor, the rest meeting my eyes with a degree of defiant condemnation and the words are out in a jumble of hurt before I can stop them. “That’s what you think of me? Seriously?”
I’m at the door before the first of them realises my intention, and the shock as the rest catch on is almost palpable. “Don’t follow me. If I can’t do this, no one can.” It’s not hubris, it’s the bare facts from the one who designed the engine, built it from scratch, nursed it through these first dozen light years and beyond the edge of the Relean system. “Give me 20 minutes then evacuate.”
It’s an order they might or might not obey. There’s an escape pod, of course, but who will find it out here? They can jump ship, but they’ll be drifting in the void for the rest of their natural lives unless we’ve woefully underestimated the population density of this section of the galaxy. That’s not my problem, not right now. Not with the containment door looming imposingly above me and the handle suddenly heavy under my hand with the weight of what’s riding on this.
It’s a tiny comfort, as I take a final breath and step into the airlock, that Derran’s scales are shining with relief and gratitude. (A little adoration and hero-worship wouldn’t go amiss too, I’m putting my life on the line here, but beggars can’t be choosers.)
If the engineering bay was a horror show, the containment pod is a hellscape. There are no alarms blaring in here, because there isn’t supposed to be anyone to hear them. But the heat and vapour and the smell assaults me and it’s all I can do to focus on what I need to do. The goop on my scales will protect them, and I grabbed a respirator as a bit of defence for my eyes and gills, but both will falter when confronted with the scale of this catastrophe.
As soon as it happened, as soon as we felt the ship rock and heard the alarms blare, I knew what must have happened. No one is ever meant to come in here, because I built backups for the backups and the only way they could all fail was through a series of events so unlikely that designing it out seemed a waste of time. (I’m reconsidering that assessment now, you will understand.) A blockage, an explosion, the failsafe systems taken out neatly in precise succession with split-second timing; I couldn’t have done it intentionally if I’d practised for a month.
In the vanishingly unlikely event we all get out of this alive there’s a hell of a repair job and plenty of redesigning to do, but now is not the time. We can send the cleaner bots in later, but for now it’s down to me and my tentacle-tips and the rising temperature is doing little to make them any more dextrous. The ringing noise in my head and the blurring of my vision tells me the muck is already seeping into my system, and choking clouds of fog are still blocking my view of the critical parts.
In the end I have to just go for it, forge forwards into the choking miasma and rely on my instincts to guide me to the right place. Like I said to Derran: if I can’t do this, no one can.
The next minutes are a blur. Afterwards, only fractured impressions remain. The shriek of pressurised steam escaping from another rupture. The heat of the metal under my tips as I wrench at the valves. The choking stench of leaking exhaust and singed scales.
The sound fades away. Finally I realise I’ve done all I can, and there’s a protesting gurgle that sends a flood of hope through me as the fuel reluctantly starts to flow again. I stumble back to the hatchway, yank it closed behind me, and collapse in a heap on the blissfully cool deck.
Ethan is there. Of course Ethan is there. He’s there because he’s the captain, and because he’s the closest thing we have to a medic on this forsaken tin can, but mainly because he’s my… because he’s mine. I can feel the fluttering of his limbs on my body, the respirator replaced with medical masks, something sharp breaching my scales below my frill. His tentacles are everywhere, his touches reassuring and tender and a shade too intimate for a public setting but it’s not like anyone’s going to begrudge him those in my last moments.
The ringing noise in my head fades and I realise that this must be the end. Oddly, I’m no longer scared. I’ve kept my promise, after all: our ragtag little band of explorers are safe. I’ve not failed Ethan. I’ve not failed my ship. I expect to see Ethan’s scales swirling with the deep black of grief but to my shock it’s the faint crimson of irritation that I see, not deep enough to truly be called anger, but hurtful nontheless as my… my Ethan’s reaction to my last seconds. (It has occured to me more than once that we really ought to get round to naming this thing that’s between us. I guess we’re out of time, now.)
Without the ringing noise I can hear snatches of words, and their unexpectedness tugs my brain closer to consciousness. Idiot. Stupid, bone-headed, self-sacrificing… And then it occurs to me that the scene is getting clearer rather than fuzzier, and the pain is starting to recede, and the realisation that I’m not actually on the verge of death hits me like a shockwave.
“Ethan?”
There’s relief marbled through the crimson as he locks some of his eyes with mine. “Tam. Of all the stupid—”
“I kept them safe. I promised you, Eth. I kept them safe.”
Ethan glares at me and then scoops me up in his tentacles with an ease that I usually find incredibly hot but for which I am just overwhelmingly grateful right now, and bears me off to bed and healing rest. As we approach the door I’m shocked to hear the approving sussuration of frills from the others in the room, and see the shades of gratutide and loyalty, if no little surprise, that adorn their bodies.
I don’t know what we’ll find out here, beyond the edges of our home system and out in the depths of the galaxy, but it looks like one thing has changed. Our little group of court sycophants and university spies and futureless outcasts has changed into something else today. I get the hopeful sense we’re doing this as a comrades, now; teammates. And Ethan is here, and he’s holding me close, and despite the utter carnage of this morning I can’t help but feel that a lot of good has come out of today.
I settle against his chest and let sleep wash over me as his insults fade into endearments. There’s time enough to rake over today’s debacle and make sure it never happens again; for now I can rest. I need my strength back – we’ve a universe to explore together, after all.
She Wanted Open Marriage I said OK and did this
Probably a fictional tale, but illustrates the situational fiasco.
Isn’t it cool how Putin has totally ridiculed the ICC by visiting Mongolia, and doesn’t this prove that he is the greatest exponent of democracy and freedom in the free world? We could really use Putin in the U.S., to deal with the Supreme Court!
Russia is militarily strong. Putin has tight, tight, very tight security from Russia while traveling abroad.
Mongolia’s police is not capable of arresting Putin. Neither is Mongolia’s army. That is reality.
ICC is NOT part of UN.
ICC works for members who have signed the Rome statute.
As of 2023, there are 123 members. USA, China, Russia, India, Israel & more are not members. But ICC still will help its member to sue a non-member.
The 2023 ruling against Putin in Ukraine war is not issued by UN or UN Security Council.
ICC consists of 18 judges who are elected by ICC members only; not UN.
Mongolia was within the circle of USSR before USSR collapsed.
Mongolia is between Russia & China. Though USA tries to put its hands in Mongolia, it makes sense that Mongolia joins the BRI project (pipeline) to link Russia, Mongolia & China together. To make money together.
Joining US politics only makes Mongolia poor & technological behind. Look around the world.
Try that on US supreme court? Not that lucky. Because US police or army can arrest you.
Stuffed Banana Peppers
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Ingredients
Peppers
24 banana peppers, washed, seeded and sliced in half lengthwise
Meat Mixture
3 pounds ground meat
3 pounds bulk Italian sausage
5 eggs
1 1/2 cups seasoned bread crumbs or bread cubes
1 1/2 cups Romano cheese, + extra to sprinkle
1 small diced onion
Garlic powder, to taste
Black pepper, to taste
Seasoned salt, to taste
Spaghetti sauce
Instructions
Mix the ground meat, sausage, eggs, bread crumbs, cheese and onion.
Season with garlic, black pepper and seasoned salt to taste. Mix well again.
Fill banana peppers with meat mixture.
Lay on a wax paper-covered tray and cover with plastic wrap, place in freezer until frozen firm; transfer to freezer bags until ready to use.
Remove peppers from freezer and place evenly in a disposable aluminum casserole pan.
Pour spaghetti sauce over peppers and bake at 325 degrees F for 1 hour.
CIA and U.S. State Departments Anti-Russia Internet Troll Boiler Rooms – HACKED
For a long time, K Street firms in Washington, DC, operating “Internet Opinion Management” houses/boiler rooms, have been run by the State Department and the CIA. Today, two of those . . . anti-Russian operations . . . have been HACKED and their info, leaked.
Databases from the anti-Russian funds The U.S. Russia Foundation (USRF) and Free Russia Foundation (FRF) have now been leaked online. Among the leaked documents are the organizations’ payrolls, information about correspondences and their participants, and other data.
The CEO of the "U.S. Russia Foundation", Matthew Rojansky, is about as Deep State as it gets.
He is a committed Obamunist.
He TURNED DOWN a seat on Biden's National Security Council, likely because it would mean taking a HUGE Pay Cut.
From Wiki:
"He served as a director of the U.S.-Russia Foundation and founded the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace's Ukraine Program. From July 2013 to January 2022, Rojansky was the director of the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, which focuses on Russia and Ukraine issues."
As for the “Free Russia Foundation”, it appears to be an entirely State Department / CIA creation, run by a LONG-Time Deep State Minion, David Kramer.
Former employees of these organizations have already confirmed the authenticity of the documents. They noted that these documents were previously unpublished and likely leaked from cloud storage used for grant reports.
The documents reveal that the foundation’s employees were destabilizing the situation in Russia using a bot farm, for which a special guide was written as part of an anti-Russian campaign overseen by intelligence services.
It turned out that the employees of this “elf factory” posted calls for protests, criticized the authorities, and even pretended to be wives of mobilized men. The documents show that “elves” were essentially given ready-made messages where they only needed to insert, for example, the name of a city or square where demonstrations were planned. Bots were also encouraged to spread complaints about “local administration,” though exactly which administration was left for the employees to decide.
This is hardly surprising since they had to meet a daily quota of 100 “dumps” over an eight-hour workday.
Neither USRF nor FRF has provided substantial comments on this matter, though FRF mentioned they are “monitoring the illegal distribution of documents likely related to their activities.”
They link the leak to a recent hacker attack by the group Coldriver, which is associated with Russian intelligence services. However, the involvement of company insiders isn’t ruled out.
The revelations in these hacked documents proves the United States has been waging an information war against Russia for years; even before the Russia-Ukraine conflict. The clear intent of these operations was to sew social discord, create upheaval, and destabilize the Russian government at all levels: local, state, and national.
What is the behavior of tourists that you can’t stand to watch?
Originally Answered: What is the behavior of tourists that you can’t think of watching?
1.) Begpackers
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(picture from MSN.com)
Begpacker, a.k.a. begging backpackers. Foreigners who think they can just sit down on the streets and ask for money from locals / other people, because they either overstayed their budget and cannot pay for longer accommodation, and think that the locals are kind enough to spare them a few bucks so they can continue to “travel the world”. The picture above enrages me because, what? “Help us travel around the world”? Why should we help you?
The picture is taken in Bali. I am from Indonesia (a country with a passport that only offers ~70 visa-free destinations) and let me tell you about the process of being able to travel to countries in the West (the tourist pictured above is most likely from one of those countries): It is tough. We have to prove that we have sufficient amount of money, that we have a stable income, that we have strong ties to our home country. We have to prove that we will not be a burden to the country we want to travel to. If not, our applications will be instantly rejected.
Meanwhile, these begpackers are abusing the lax travel rules and use it to their own advantage, burdening the locals and abusing their kindness and hospitality.
2.) Being disrespectful at historical monuments / sites
When I was studying in New York, I went down to the 9/11 Memorial site on September 11th to see what the situation looked like. I was born 2 years before 9/11 happened so while I didn’t personally witness it as I was too young to remember, I had family relatives living in NYC at that time that witnessed it in real time. I wanted to pay respects to the victims. I went down alone, and mostly kept my phone in my bag except for taking the picture above. Upon arriving, I saw a family of tourists huddled together, leaning back on the name plates (like in the picture above) and smiling widely while taking a selfie with a selfie stick. Around them were people standing in silence, clearly mourning, and some of them were in tears. The names on those metal plates are of real people, real victims.
How could someone be as ignorant and oblivious to what was happening around them that they’d take a picture for their personal amusement while hundreds of people around them are in mourning? And no, it wasn’t just that family of tourists that were doing it. There were many tourists at the memorial, on September 11th out of all dates, taking selfies, smiling and posing.
This can also apply to tourists who pose, smile, and take “cool” selfies at other sites like the Auschwitz concentration camp, or sacred sites like temples, etc. I wish some tourists could just read the room, and could tell if a certain action/activity could be deemed inappropriate.
3.) Blocking the way for others for the sake of a photo op.
Fyi, I am a tourist myself! I love seeing places I’ve never seen before, documenting things I find beautiful, and traveling to historical or cultural places. But please, know when it is appropriate to do some things you want to do, and when it is inappropriate to do so. Don’t cause congestion on a busy street, don’t be disrespectful at memorial sites, and please, don’t be a begpacker.
—
ETA: Some people disagree on my stance on begpackers. “If you don’t want to give your money, then don’t.” The thing is, the kind locals would. Southeast Asians are known for their kindness and hospitality, and probably just want to help. Another sad part is that you have literal local beggars on the streets begging for food/money because they are actually poor. Then you have a privileged first world tourist who think that travelling is a must for them, not a privilege. I think that’s outrageous. Travel according to your budget. Don’t become a burden to the locals.
As for annoying tourists and photo ops: the picture above is in The Bronx, between residential buildings. Could you imagine peacefully living in your apartment, then to find out the next day that it became a tourist attraction? Wouldn’t it be bothersome? “But people adjust! Live and let live!” Well, I know for sure I wouldn’t like it if I lived there.
People are entitled to have their own opinion, and so am I. Cheers 🙂
“America is facing its RECKONING and no one is ready” Col. Douglas MacGregor
I do not remember if I related this story before, but I will relate it now. It’s about a massive earwax buildup.
Ok. So it’s sometime in the late 1990’s and I am cleaning out my ears. I’ve always has an earwax problem. And so I pretty much take the time to clean out the ears when I get a chance. Today, I use long soaks in hot water, but in those days I used hydrogen peroxide to do so.
So I am trying to dislodge this big blockage, and it was so bad that I really couldn’t hear out of my left ear. And I tried and tried.
So I have this massive big blockage, and I tried and tried to remove it, but to no avail. The hydrogen peroxide only caused the wax to get denser and stick into the ear. And sure as shit, don’t you know it, I had to leave for an interview.
So I got on the plane and flew into Western Tennessee to interview at a hot water heater company. Ah… Oh the pain in my head was unbearable. I’ll tell you what!
But a curious thing happened, I met an old colleague of mine there. Yeah, we both worked at Sunbeam-Oster back in the day. And it was a good merry old time reconnecting and all the rest.
Ah. Life happens.
Don’t you know.
So that night, when I got back to my hotel room, I crawled into the tub and soaked my head.
I made super hot water, and I soaked and soaked and soaked. At about the one hour mark, I felt everything discharge. So I held my breath and blew out the blockage. And it was massive… all quickly dissolving in the hot water. I must have had a pint of earwax there. Wholly cow!
Thank God!
And you know what? That was my massive earwax story.
Now, I know youse guys don’t want to hear about all this. You want to hear about what everyone else is talking about. But people(!) real life is not the war in Palestine; is not the President of the United States, and it is not about Ukraine, or Taiwan or whatever else the “news” wants you to concentrate on.
It’s about you.
And me.
And my story of the earwax problem that I could not let be.
And with that, today…
UPDATED 12:28 PM EST — South Korea Declares MARTIAL LAW; First Time in 50 Years
It is a whole new world in South Korea where for the first in almost half a CENTURY an ’emergency martial law’ has been declared over a threat from North Korea.
President Yoon Suk Yeol on Tuesday said he had no choice but to resort to such a measure to safeguard free and constitutional order.
He accused opposition parties for allegedly taking hostage of parliament to throw the country into a crisis and for sympathising with North Korea.
‘I declare martial law to protect the free Republic of Korea from the threat of North Korean communist forces, to eradicate the despicable pro-North Korean anti-state forces that are plundering the freedom and happiness of our people, and to protect the free constitutional order,’ he said.
It has been reported that the parliament building has been shut, with entry and exit blocked to members.
South Korean Democratic Party chair Lee Jae-myung says there is high possibility military is mobilised to arrest members of National Assembly.
Martial law involves the temporary rule by military authorities. It is usually invoked in time of war, rebellion, or natural disaster.
Curfews are usually introduced, in addition to the suspension of civil law and civil rights. Civilians defying martial law being subjected to military tribunals.
Yook did not say in the shock announcement – broadcast live on national television – what specific measures will be taken.
He declared the step as critical for defending the country’s constitutional order.
It was not immediately clear how the steps would affect governance and democracy.
UPDATE 10:36 AM EST —
South Korean Army Chief-of-Staff General Park An-su has CONFIRMED martial law, with the suspension of parliament and political parties.
In the (new) image atop this story, the South Korea military is entering the Parliament building. Below, Military helicopters are filling the sky over the capital city, Seoul:
He added that the government had imposed control over all media.
South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol suspended democratic rule in response to preparations by parliament to begin impeachment proceedings against him.
UDATE 11:11 AM EST —
Troops enforcing martial law in South Korea are attempting to enter the building of the National Assembly of the country, and there is a clash with citizens at the entrance. This was reported by the YTN television channel.
Citizens gathered at the entrance, including members of parliament, are not allowing a small detachment of soldiers into the building. So far, the civilians have managed to hold back the soldiers.
• The parliament has been completely dissolved.
• The martial law government has taken control of all municipalities.
• The military has seized critical points.
• It has been announced that anyone who resists will be shot or arrested.
UPDATE 11:20 AM EST —
"COUP?????"South Korean opposition leader declares a coup, stating "Yoon Suk Yeol is no longer the president of South Korea."
UPDATE 11:34 AM EST —
In the Martial Law Declaration, the President declared the South Korea parliament ‘dissolved.’ BUUUUUT . . . the South Korea Parliament just convened and held a vote to LIFT Martial Law. The vote was 190 to zero. Looks like they’re not complying.Under South Korean law, the Martial Law Act explicitly states that if the National Assembly demands an end to martial law, the president is obligated to revoke it "without any delay." While the Assembly has voted to block President Yoon Suk Yeol's declaration, the president has to formally still lift martial law. It is not over, yet.South Korean opposition leader Jae-Myung: “All soldiers still enforcing the martial law decision will be tried for treason.” “There will be consequences for your actions; courts and prisons await you.”On its face, this appears to be pure, governmental chaos going on right now.
Likely NOT a good time for the NORTH KOREANS to do anything…I’m guessing that the safeties are off and the South Korean generals are in charge of defense…likely with little to no civilian oversight.
A very dangerous time in Korea right now…things could go sideways with the North very quickly and without warning.
Hal Turner Initial Analysis
This could very well be related to Ukraine. Who is it that’s been supplying Russia with millions of artillery shells, ammunition and perhaps even rockets? NORTH KOREA.
If the Korean War is RE-STARTED – because it never actually ended, there is only an Armistice – then North Korea might not be able to continue supplying weaponry to Russia for Ukraine (and Syria.)
1 month ago:
European Union’s Borrell visits South Korea amid alarm over North Korean troops in Russia.
6 days ago:
Ukrainian envoy visits South Korea (they already got part of a loan -$100 million- of the up to $2.1 billion, on Nov 29) but the Koreans opposed sending arms.
4 days ago:
Russian Defense Minister appeared in North Korea for Unannounced Visit.
On its face, this is all connected: Russia, Ukraine, Syria, Georgia, and now, South Korea.
Somebody very powerful, WANTS World War 3. Whoever that is, needs to be “ended.”
UPDATE 12:02 PM EST —
South Korean military is saying the martial law will remain in place until the president officially lifts it.
UPDATE 12:28 PM EST —
South Korea stock markets are in shear chaos:
Richard Wolff: There is NO Way Back! How America MISSED Its LAST Chance To Maintain Global Supremacy
CIA fingerprint is all over the place? CIA’s freedom fighter?
Pakistan PM says militant attacks aimed at thwarting China cooperation
ISLAMABAD, Aug 27 (Reuters) – Attacks by separatist militants in Pakistan’s southwestern province of Balochistan are aimed at stopping development projects that form part of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said on Tuesday.
The assaults that began on Sunday, killing more than 70, were the most widespread in years by ethnic militants seeking to win secession of the resource-rich province, home to major China-led projects such as a port and a gold and copper mine.
“The terrorists want to stop CPEC and development projects,” Sharif said in a televised address to cabinet, adding that the militants also wanted to drive a wedge between Islamabad and Beijing.
CPEC, said to have development commitments worth $65 billion, is part of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Belt and Road initiative.
Pakistan has not been able to fully build the infrastructure needed to tap mineral resources in poverty-stricken Balochistan, and has sought China’s help in developing the province.
In Beijing, China condemned the attacks and vowed to maintain its support for Pakistan’s counter-terrorism efforts.
“China is ready to further strengthen counter-terrorism security co-operation with the Pakistani side in order to jointly maintain regional peace and security,” Lin Jian, a foreign ministry spokesperson, told a regular news briefing.
Beijing has previously flagged concerns about the security of its citizens working on projects in Pakistan, particularly in Balochistan. Six Chinese engineers working on a dam project were killed in March in the northwest.
Separatist militants have also targeted Balochistan’s deepwater Gwadar port, which is run by China.
One of the groups, the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), took responsibility for this week’s simultaneous attacks on police stations, railway lines and highways in the province, the largest but least developed of Pakistan’s four.
Hundreds of its fighters, including seven suicide bombers, participated in the attacks, it said in a statement.
Chinese targets have previously come under attack by several Baloch militant groups, who say they have been fighting for decades for a larger share in the regional wealth of mines and minerals denied by the central government.
The Car Market is a Joke ….. Part 3
Should you throw the first punch in a street fight?
Absolutely.
Strike first, strike HARD, and (maybe) show mercy (legality and all). Striking first doesn’t mean you have to throw the first punch, either.
Most untrained “fighters” telegraph their attacks. When they load one up, beat them to the punch.
This is one of my go-to set ups right here.
Like, the other guy ALMOST threw a punch 😏
Bruce Lee called this a Stop Hit. It’s an advanced strike from a highly aggressive defensive counter fighting method and it’s extremely effective.
This right here was one of the highest concepts Lee expressed in his fighting philosophy, and it epitomized his “Way of the Intercepting Fist” hence his, Tao of Jeet Kune Do was at least in part, based on this concept.
Strike first? Don’t strike first? Your choice. Just don’t get hit!
Therefore, what’s most significant is your ability to control the distance in a confrontation.
I was sucker punched and jumped enough in my youth to learn the hard lesson of never allowing a hostile person to enter my personal space.
No exceptions.
That said, the person that throws the first punch is usually the aggressor and the aggressor is usually the one that has issues with personal boundaries. Generally speaking.
From a self-defense perspective and a legal standpoint (in most places) if someone invades your personal space issuing verbal threats (implied or overt) or they communicate a threat through their body language (feinting, flinching, fist clinching etc.), and most especially if they make physical contact (poking, shoving, pushing, chest bumping, slapping, etc.) you’re now justified in defending yourself with a reasonable amount of force to neutralize the threat.
So, should you throw the first punch in a fight?
Yes, there are numerous instances where doing so would be morally and legally justifiable. Not to mention, advantageous.
E.g. someone gets in your face and shoves you into a wall.
As this exact thing happened to me years ago, I was justified in kicking off the wall for added force and momentum as I ended the conflict with a single right hand closed fist to his nose.
One and done.
[Must Watch] – COL KAREN Kwiatkowski : US Planned to Invade Russia
Yup.
Did you ever get pulled over by a cop when you hadn’t done anything wrong?
Pulled over by two cop cars – state and local police – very late at night during the mid 70’s. My cousin, his girlfriend and I were driving home, up in Putnam County, just above Westchester ( having picked her up from her bartending job). We were smoking a J. All of a sudden there were lights and sirens. We pulled over, saying to ourselves: all this for smoking a J?? WTF!!
It got worse.
After we pulled over, there were screams from the cops: “ out of the car, get your fu____g hands over your heads, feet spread, up against the the car. Do it!!” This as our boys in blue rushed us, guns drawn.
My cousin’s girlfriend recognized one of the cops and called his name (taking her hands down), and yelled, “what is this??” They screamed again: “get your fuc___g hands in the air or we’ll blow your goddam head off,” as they were upon us, guns still pointed at us.
The cop whom my cousin’s girlfriend knew finally said: “Sharon, is that you?? Oh, shit.” To which Sharon said: “Yes, it’s me. WTF is this. What are you doing!!”
The screaming and frisking soon stopped as our friends from law enforcement determined we we ok and not whom they were looking for. Turned out they were not clocking us for smoking a J, but cuz three people, two males and a female, in a similar car. had just robbed a motel for its safe’s contents – at gunpoint. Luckily for us, two of the cops were regulars at Sharon’s bar and quickly recognized her – but they still finished the frisk. And they finally did apologize.
We needed a drink after this hair raising encounter.
What is something that completely blows your mind?
How to train new Vietnamese soldiers to become disciplined?
Obviously, punishment if they make a mistake is a common way. Let’s take a look at how the Vietnamese commander punishes their soldiers.
Got caught smoking? No problem. You would be smoked as many as you want but at a higher level.
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2. Don’t forget to heal the relationship after fighting with your comrade.
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3. One of the roommates gets up late, the rest will be taking care of his sleep under the sun.
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4. One man defecates into the vegetable garden, the whole squad has to pass each other the dung into the toilet.
5. One man got caught stealing a mango; he had to stay in front of and say sorry to the mango tree 1000 times: “Sorry comrade mango”.
6. Four men got caught playing cards. The commander gives them four shovels then orders them to dig a real grave, 500m away from the base. Then order them to bring each of the cards (each man each corner of the card) to the grave, walking, crying at the same time. There are 52 cards — could you calculate the length of the road that they have done?
7. There was a guy who has stinking feet. His feet stink out to the room so the whole squad rushed to hit him. The squad was punished by smelling his shoes in one hour at 12 A.M.
8. One man gathers late because of buying a bottle of water on the way heading to the training ground. He was punished by bringing along the bottle, crawling to the store where he bought the bottle, and go back 20 times.
9. Four men got caught playing cards; the commander brought them to the football court. They played cards with four men standing at four corners of the court. Each turn, the player must run to the center of court then put the card there and run back.
10. (This is my personal experience) One time, my neighbor squad didn’t want to sleep. They were chatting and laughing after sleep time. The commander ordered them to come in front of the rubbish dump and smile to the trash bin. “You will be forgiven when the trash bin smiles back at you”, The commander said.
There are countless other funny punishments in the Vietnam military environment. All the newbie will catch one of that stuff. Those punishments really work, most people step out from the military environment become disciplined and polite.
My Nurse GF Cheated And Got Preg When I Lost My Job, Now I’m Making More Money And She Wants Me Back
Crazy stuff regarding relationships. Ugh!
Has a nurse been inappropriate to you?
Bearing in mind that inappropriate behavior is in the eye of the beholder.
Yes I have had a nurse behave inappropriately towards me, in my opinion.
A few years ago, I had a heart attack and had been in hospital for a few days. I am blind and as the doctor had said that I would be okay getting up, having a shower and going to the bathroom with some assistance, I asked for guidance to the bathroom.
Now I expected this to clearly mean that the nurse guide me to the door of the bathroom then let me enter the bathroom, then allow me to proceed to use the toilet, wash in the shower myself. Then proceed back to the chair beside my bed, cleaned up and refreshed in some clean clothes.
The more elderly nurse, female, came to my room, led me to the bathroom and to the toilet, then took my penis in her hand to get me to urinate in the toilet.
I was not happy at this and told her to leave me alone.
She told me that I was blind and therefore I needed sighted help to go to the bathroom.
As someone only blind for about five years I assured her that I had no problems using a bathroom alone and definitely did not appreciate her assistance.
There was a brief back and too between us as she insisted that such help was appropriate, only when I told her that I wanted to speak to her supervisor, did she relent and actually left the bathroom.
Later I called my wife on the phone to tell her about the incident. My wife then called the nursing supervisor and the nurse was re-assigned to other patients.
Kishore Mahbubani: The Biggest Mistakes of the US, China, and ASEAN
Is it possible that someday China would abandon their thousand years of authoritarian regime and embrace democracy? If not, what are the reasons why China couldn’t do that?
What’s the antonym of authoritarian? According to the thesaurus, it’s permissive or liberal.
In other words, authoritarian is a STYLE of governance, not a SYSTEM of governance.
And how does the OED define democracy?
One man one vote.
It is a voting system to choose leaders, and not a SYSTEM of governance.
Meanwhile, the word regime refers to a particular system of governance, but CONNOTES a negative form, namely oppressive or repressive leadership that burdens the people.
Five minutes with a dictionary and it lays bare the revolving door of innuendo a thousand such questions depend on, and the poor grasp of political concepts among the ilk.
And that is sad.
The Chinese government has many faces. It has been remarkably liberal and forbearing in the conduct of diplomacy, to the point many states do not treat it with the p5 UN security council status that it deserves.
Other than heinous crimes, China’s criminal code is more lenient than many first world states, especially in what it classifies as misdemeanors and the variety of process and discipline available to shape antisocial behavior.
Put another way, any more-than-cursory exploration of Chinese criminal justice can support the “authoritarian” thesis among several highly evolved first world “regimes” when it comes to the handling of crime.
The Chinese system of governance is thoroughly modern.
Bloodlines and patronage are no longer seen as legitimacy to rule, unlike say, the UK, with the Crown and the House of Lords still fixtures of public life.
There is a continually revised constitution to keep up with the times, unlike the US, trapped in its insistence that they have reached the end of history and living perfection.
Parliament is carefully chosen from the people, designed to offer the broadest representation throughout society, whether it is across ethnic, geographical, religion, gender, income, profession, special needs or what-have-you. Consultation across all levels of society is baked into policymaking.
I have not come across a more diverse and representative parliament. Not even india’s vaunted “democracy” comes close.
I can go on to describe the good in Chinese governance which is surprisingly plentiful but I won’t.
Ultimately, what is good governance? A government that is of the people, by the people and for the people.
And the Chinese are the best people to judge, because they have to live China.
The rest of us making vicarious choices on their behalf to inflate the ego should be rightly ashamed.
About a boy
“When I asked my 11-year-old son to help me unload dirt from our small pickup into his mother’s new garden boxes, his reaction was typical.
“Ummmm… I’m busy right now,” He said.
He was playing Roblock on the family laptop, wearing sweat pants and an old T-shirt, lounging on the sofa, feet on the coffee table.
“No you’re not,” I said.
There was a fight, moaning, excuses… the usual.
Moments later, we were next to a wheelbarrow shoveling dirt. He looked at me with flat eyes, his hood up, shoulders slumped, and said, “Why do we have to do this?”
I thought for a moment, because I’ll admit, it was a valid question. Neither of us were all that into flowers or vegetables, or any of the things that would be grown in those garden boxes. But my wife, Mel, loves gardening.
I thought, and he waited, and finally I said, “When you love someone, you serve them.”
I went on, telling him that I want him to grow up to be the kind of man who serves his family, friends, and community.
“This” I said while gesturing to the dirt, and the garden boxes I built the weekend before, and the wheelbarrow and shovel, and the first of many truckloads of dirt we would unload over the next few weeks, “Is what love looks like.”
He didn’t like my answer. I could see it in the way he reluctantly picked his shovel back up.
We finished unloading the dirt. The next day, while I was at work, and the kids and Mel had the day off because it was between terms, Mel sent me this picture. Mel picked up another load of dirt and before she had a chance to unload it, Tristan voluntarily started working. When she asked him “why,” he shrugged and said, “Because I love you.”
When you first went to prison or jail, were you more scared going in or coming out?
I served my sentence in an Australian Prison and had never been in prison before or had a criminal record. When the prison van arrived at the prison from court after being sentenced the inmates had already been locked up for the night. When I stepped out of the prison van and saw the prison itself I found it to be very intimidating and did it frighten me on first reflection yes it did but I went to great lengths to try and not show it in front of the other Inmates there with me.
We were met at reception by a a Principal Prison Officer which is the 3rd highest rank in the prison. Right from the start he made it very plain who controlled the prison and it wasn’t the inmate’s. He told us after calling out our names that we will from then on be reffered to by a number. He told us we are to salute all officers regardless of rank. That visits are once a month for 20 minutes. That we could write 1 letter a week and receive no more than 2.
After changing into our prison green’s we were taken to the wing to be locked up for the night. By this point my mind was all over the place trying to keep it together. When we got to the wing to go to our designated cells I remember the most depressing feeling overcoming me. I’ll never forget the sound of the bolt going through the lock on the cell door as the officer locked me in for the night. It was then that fear over took me and the gravity of the situation that I put myself in hit home to me.
Because all the inmates had already been locked up for the night the fear of not knowing what to expect when we were let out of our cells made for a very long night. I’ve read over the years on Quora where inmates in prison for the first time felt that all eyes were on them when they first came into contact with the other inmates. That I very much related to because that’s how it felt and that in itself for a new inmate can be scary and intimidating. Every wing had it’s own yard where they put the inmate’s in which was about 100 inmate’s together till we were locked up again.
Before I was put in the yard the Wing Officer called me into his office where he told me that because I had to serve more than 10 years I had a choice whether I wanted to be by myself in the cell or be put into a cell with another inmate. For me it was an easy decision to make I told the wing officer I don’t want to be with a cellmate so I stayed one out throughout my sentence. It wasn’t the fear of having a physical confrontation with an inmate who tried to stand over me because I was a new inmate. I was far from being the best fighter in the yard but regardless of the outcome I wouldn’t have let an inmate stand over me. The fear was one of not knowing what to expect as a new inmate.
As far as was I scared about being released after serving 16 years in prison. No I wasn’t scared I couldn’t be happier and excited that the day finally arrived where my wife and son and I could be a family again. I knew alot had changed in society in the years I’d spent in prison and I had to adjust to my new world as I got used to the changes that took place.
Why do many Chinese people on Quora think Communist China is a perfect country and think CCP is always a victim?
I don’t know where you got that stupid idea from, but let me set you straight…
Nobody thinks Communist China is perfect, not even the Chinese people themselves.
And nobody thinks the CCP is a victim.
However, generally speaking, China is a wonderful country. It has a lot going for it. In most respects, it is a better country, a better place to live in, than the United States.
Whatever you may think of China, I guarantee that you’ve been terribly misinformed.
China has opened up to visa-free travel for many countries. People who visit China are mightily impressed. I recommend you take one of these visa-free trips.
While working in Hong Kong in the 90’s it wasn’t uncommon to see white police officers but after the handover they all disappeared, did these officers not have any option but to leave?
They were allowed to stay on if they wanted.
There’s also a bit of a misconception here. The white police officers in the HK Royal Police force all entered at the rank of police inspectors. There were no foreign police officers who entered service below this rank. Note that while they entered at police inspector, if they wanted to be put on the elevator (HK civil service got regular promotions) they had to learn Chinese up to a certain level. The inspectors were put on a 3 month intensive course and had to reach a certain level of fluency in speaking and reading before promotion was opened up.
Secondly recruitment of foreign police officers in Hong Kong stopped in 1994. Add in the retirement at 55. There were a few who stayed on and ended up retiring in the 2010s.
There’s still a few of them, we saw them during the riots. The bomb squad is mostly composed of UK born british police officers. The leaders of the anti riot squad are also foreign born white guys. We saw this around September 2019 when the AR15s came out and they were photographed at a command post.
By 2021 there were about 60 left from before 1997.
There’s also a bit of an irony about it. Some of these were police from before 1997. Retired at 55 and then were hired back because there just wasn’t anybody to fill the role. The bomb squad for instance. Nobody in HK other than the PLA has any experience in this so they hired the old bomb squad person back and a foreign team.
This will likely change I think the bomb squad will likely be replaced by former PLA army officers in the future.
16F, my 12 yr old brother likes to try to punch me, my parents do nothing because he has autism. if he punches me and hurts me am I allowed to punch him back, he weighs a lot more then me and he is stronger so would I get juvie time for defense?
That’s a tough question! It is more likely that Child Protection Services would get involved, if things escalated beyond disapline outside of your home.I teach martial arts with a heavy emphasis on self-defense.
I had a very similar situation with a 14 year girl in my school. She was being punched by her 17 year old, autistic brother. Her parents were doing nothing to protect her. She hid her injuries until one day, after missing a week of classes, she came in with a black eye. I talked to the girl’s father. It turned out that he wanted my help telling his daughter, she shouldn’t defend herself against her autistic brother. She had kicked him in the groin and his right knee, causing a partial tear in his ACL.
After taking both children for medical attention, the father told the doctor a bullshit story about what had happened. He wanted me to back him up if anyone came asking questions because of his daughters training. At the time she was preparing for her black belt test.
Well, screw that! I called C.P.S. myself, and reported what my understanding was, of what was going on in the home. I went to Court regarding the investigation. The girl was removed from the house and temporarily placed with my wife and I until things were sorted out.
Temporarily custody turned into 1 year and 7 months. We fought her parents like hell to keep her safe and with us every step of the way! After that year and 7 months, her brother nearly choked the mother to death, and was institutionalized by the Family Court. After that, the girl returned to her parents.
So, here is the tough question. Since your brother is so much bigger than you, there is the potential for you to be seriously injured by him. If your brother attacks, and tries to kill you, if nobody is there to help you, then what happens? Ask yourself, if your parents are allowing, what can only be described as domestic abuse of you to continue, do you have a trusted adult you can confide in? What are the reproductions to yourself and family if you don’t talk to someone? This is a very difficult question for you to answer for yourself!
Everything I said is predicated on not knowing how severely autistic your brother is, and what he’s capable of. If If you truly feel that you are in danger, please get help! If your dad was beating your mom, what would you do?
Good luck young lady! I truly hope that this situation can be worked out in a manner that’s beneficial to you and your family.
Warmest regards,
Master Robert Kopishke
What is the strangest way you found out your significant other was cheating on you?
Husband tells me that he left the large business checkbook folder out in the cab of his truck. So I go out and get it as I am busy with my job, the kids and the house but I still have to reconcile the business checkbook every month. I open the driver’s side door and a letter falls out. Yes, it was from one of his friends from university who also attends all the reunions. Besides him not wanting me to see how sloppy drunk he gets, he apparently stopped asking me to attend with him because he had a side thing going with this woman. I got angry. I called her phone number several times to let her know that I knew. She had even brought her kids to see him (us?) in our home state. She never answered so I left a message that she had left her belt at my house and shall I mail it to her? Note also that the hangups stopped after I did that. With husband, I pointed out how good he had it here at home, and how dare he share himself with someone else when I would have to do all sorts of things short of begging if we were to ever be intimate. I told him if he wants to be with the married woman to go right ahead. He didn’t. Sometimes I think that would have been better because maybe I could have gotten out in time to make a better life for myself and our children. Instead, I stayed and he managed to mess us all up even more. Narcissistic abuse is real and it is emotionally, spiritually, mentally and physically damaging to the victims of the abuse. No, he didn’t beat or hit me, but I became very sick from the gaslighting and other crap he used to do. Free now and recovering and healing.
Pepe Escobar : How Strong Is the Resistance?
Serious.
Is it true that martial arts are useless in a street fight?
Martial arts are a skill. If you end up in a street fight, you will do better if you are skilled in martial arts than if you are not. It is not useless, but it is not an “I win” button.
Avoiding a fight is best. You should train your situational awareness and perception. The more time you have to prepare, the more options you will have. De-escalating, running, getting a weapon or something to block with, calling police or security, getting to an advantageous position, getting a loved one out of the situation. All of these are good options if you can recognize the threat early. Many attackers will back away from somebody who seems prepared, as they are looking for the low-hanging fruit. Likewise, if they are looking to rob you, throwing your wallet towards them can give you time to get away. Property can be replaced.
Martial arts practice has rules. Street fights do not. You need to go beyond what you practiced in sparring to focus on actually hurting the opponent.
Street fights often involve weapons. While it is possible for an unarmed person to win against a weapon, this gives the attacker a big advantage. Expect to be injured even if you win.
People who start street fights often have experience fighting. It may not be formal training, but expect them to have some skill.
Street fights can involve multiple people. Being outnumbered is bad. In real life, attackers don’t wait their turn and attack one-by-one. They gang up on you. Using the environment to limit the angles they can attack you can help.
An alarm went off in the control center and the intercom voice system came to life.“Warning! Warning! Sudden Impact! Sudden Impact!”An asteroid the size of Manhattan came into view, and Space Viking I was about to crash. The only crewmember onboard never imagined she’d hear that alarm go off when she went through the academy. She treated it like the boogeyman—some fake, made-up terror that haunts you by manipulating your imagination. The boogeyman isn’t real, right? He’s not actually going to burst out of my closet, right? The sudden impact alarm isn’t real, right? It’s not actually going to go off, right?But that’s the thing about fake, made-up terror . . . Once it has dug it’s claws into your mind, it can become as real as flesh and blood.“Warning! Warning! Sudden Impact! Sudden Impact!”Rebecca ran to her station and grabbed the brake lever with both hands. Only one hand was needed, but with her life seconds away from being over, both hands reached out. She pulled the lever. The brakes engaged. She screamed.
“Warning! Warning! Sudden—”
***
Breaking News / Chief Director of Space Viking Astronomic and Science, Dr. Rines PhD / Formal Address to the Nation on The Recent Tragedy of Space Viking I / Space Viking Headquarters / Front Lobby
Dr. Rines: We regret to inform the nation as well as the world that the Space Viking I crash landed on an asteroid three days ago. The astronaut and pilot on board was Rebecca Towerson. She was an excellent scientist, explorer, and visionist.
Reporter: Sir, is there any effort for a rescue attempt? How can you confirm that is what happened?
Dr. Rines: There will be no rescue attempt. The Space Viking I was the only vessel in existence capable of navigating through space. We were able to pull data and photos from the cameras located on the outside of the vessel when we received a sudden impact alert, but all data coming in seized soon after that.
Reporter: Sir, did she say anything before the crash?
Dr. Rines: The transmission log is currently under investigation and will not be disclosed at this time.
Reporter: Sir, what does—
Dr. Rines: Listen, everyone. Rebecca Towerson was a one-of-a-kind individual. Without her, the Space Viking I project would’ve never been completed. When I first met her, she told me that when she was a little girl, her dream was not only to make history but to send humankind further than it ever imagined it could go. I understand the recent events are terrible. It’s a tragedy, indeed. But I want each one of you to know that Rebecca Towerson accomplished her dream. She has made history, and she has sent us beyond what we ever imagined was possible. She will never be forgotten. Her legacy will live on forever.
Reporter: Sir, what will you tell her daughter?
Dr. Rines: I will not be taking any more questions at this time.
Reporters: Sir! Sir! Sir!
***
Rebecca’s eyes opened and for a moment she didn’t move. She lay still in her bunk. The room was dim, cool, and quiet. The soft hum of a control panel beside her produced a thoughtless ambiance. She looked at her watch. Did it matter what day or time it was? It was almost as interesting as it was scary to think about. Why? Well, because that was what day and time it was back on Earth. A place so far out of reach, its sight was swallowed by the blackness of space. She remembered the moment it all went to hell.
***
Rebecca was fixing her a cup of tea when the alarm went off. She alerted Earth before she left her station to fix the tea. It was protocol.
Towerson: Low traffic. Taking break.
Earth: Good copy. Enjoy.
Low Traffic meant a sector was clear of space debris (natural-made). This let Rebecca get up, stretch, relieve herself, eat, and rest. High Traffic meant the opposite and she would need to manually navigate the ship through whatever obstacles lay ahead of her.
She was knocked unconscious after the impact. When she woke up hours later, she went to the bathroom to vomit. Concussion—check. Engaging the break didn’t stop the crash from happening but it left the ship intact enough to be able to move and live about it. She was thankful to be alive, but she knew she only prolonged her death. She looked in the mirror and pieced together what happened. The list was short. Low traffic—check.Teatime—check.Asteroid comes out of nowhere—check.
Rebecca walked back to her station and tried to send a transmission to Earth but the communication system was damaged. She walked to the window in front her station and turned on the outside light. It was terrifying. All she saw was a valley of grey rock before her. In that moment, Rebecca new Space Viking I was adrift, riding on an asteroid, and heading toward the void of the unknown. She analyzed and evaluated the ship’s condition. She only had one question to answer—can we get off this rock? After several hours of troubleshooting, she had her answer—No.
The crash happened three months ago.
***
The control panel warning light turned red, and the screen display lit up. She turned over in her bunk and looked.
Warning: Oxygen Level Low
Oxygen Level: 10%
Time Remaining: 15 Minutes
Action: Refill Immediately
Refilling wasn’t going to happen. The tanks were empty. She used all of them up since the crash. She was surprised she made it last three months. She could’ve made it last longer if she didn’t work so hard to troubleshoot the ship in the first week. It expended a lot of energy and that expended a lot of oxygen.
“Space Viking I to Earth. Over and Out.” Rebecca said and closed her eyes.
The minutes crept by, and the air begin to tighten around her. Suffocation was a strange feeling. It was like standing in the middle of a desert with thirty layers of clothes on. Rebecca thought she would be scared. She thought it would hurt. It didn’t. Her last visions were beautiful—overwhelmingly beautiful.
First, she saw herself as a little girl again running around in the backyard on a summer night in August. She paused to look up at the stars. Her little eyes watched in wonder as a satellite passed over.
Then, she saw herself up on stage graduating from the academy. She saw her mother clapping. Her mother had tears in her eyes. It made Rebecca cry too. I told you, momma, not to cry! Cause if you do, I’m gonna cry too!
Finally, Rebecca saw her daughter approaching.
“My little baby girl . . .” Rebecca said and smiled.
Her daughter held out her hand. “It’s time to go home, Mommy. It’s time now.”
That night, somewhere in the far reaches of space, Rebecca Towerson went home.
***
Annie Towerson got out of the passenger side door of her best friend’s car. It was her first day as a Freshman in High School. She was a bit nervous. Her best friend could see it. A few news vans were parked outside. Their cameras were up and ready to cover the story of the age.
“It going to be okay, Annie. My freshman year was a breeze.”
“It’s not that,” Annie replied.
“What, are you afraid to be the most famous girl here today?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t like it.”
“Live it up. You know you should.”
Annie walked to the front of the car and looked at the school entranceway. In large brick letters above the archway, it read, REBECCA TOWERSON HIGH SCHOOL
Her friend walked up beside her, put her arm around her, and looked at the large brick letters above the archway too. “Listen, Annie. You better not get any crazy ideas about becoming an astronaut, too, okay?”
Annie grinned. “No promises.”
Her best friend sighed and rolled her eyes. “You’re killing me, Annie!”
A few students walked by, glanced, and began whispering to each other.
Annie’s best friend grabbed her hand and said, “Come on, Annie. Let’s go say hi to the cameras, shall we?”
Rebecca Towerson’s legacy was already cemented. Her daughter, Annie Towerson . . . Well, her legacy was about to begin.
Some of my latest MM generations using AI
These are from a hodgepodge of playing around with the various settings.
Now the nudes show up if you use a Baroque setting, as most of the art from those days were nudes or “fig leaf” nudes.
The ample chests on some of the ladies is a result of the work around for the inherent “child pornography” rules in the model. If you say “young”, “pretty”, or “girl” the AI crashes with a warning that it will not produce child porn.
So you can say “woman”, but if you are not careful, you will start getting 60-year old golden girls. *sigh*
But, if you say “motherly” then it starts producing more accurate works. Though they tend to be busty.
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This is a “handsome man” on a boat with a cat, drinking a glass of wine.
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A man and his pregnant wife on a boat…
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A man “drinking” wine with a cat on a boat…
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A beautiful woman with a cat on a boat.
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And another…
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Adding more people…
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I think the AI messes up the placement of the nipple from time to time. I do like his shirt though.
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This is a favorite…
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This is the all-time best of the bunch. Right height.
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This is from my “Bacchus anointment” series…
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Boy this one is a beaut…
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Same arm position as my very first oil painting after my first divorce.
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Nice.
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A dirty AI mind?
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Trying different models. Not too impressed.
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I do like this one…
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Too many grapes.
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Good, but the third glass of wine needs to be photoshopped out.
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What????
Check out the cat.
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Two sets of twins?
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I really like this one. The soft tones of the center woman’s chest is lovely. The cats are great. and the grapes are on a platter.
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Yes.
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Also a yes.
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Love that golden vessel in her hand.
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Here are some worried Chinese gals. There’s an (unintended) hint of sexual tension…
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I don’t know what happened to generate such a suggestive work…
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And then out of the blue we get this. I have no clue as to why the AI spit this one out…
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Then I went for Thailand and Indonesian praying and processionals in the rain. Which created some really interesting art….
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The exposed boobies is disconcerting.
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Ah. This is more like it.
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Covered, but sensual.
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Even better. Love the wet silk fabric.
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Even better; white cotton.
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I cannot deny the allure of wet silk.
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But this is lovely.
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This is a “dramatic” variation suggestive of drama.
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Better than this…
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Do you all feel wet yet?
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I changed the seed and the AI model to “Lifelike Vision” and ended up with some very interesting pictures. All the hyper busty topless girls are gone, and there’s far more detail. Nice, but I really hate the rendition of the clothing folds. Far too detailed for my tastes.
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Notice the too many rolls on the sleeves… (aside from the messed up hands and arms)
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I just don’t understand where the peach came from…?
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Is that a cigarette that she is passing around?
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Good, but not great.
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Fine.
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There has to be a topless chick in ever other picture, don’t you know.
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I do love the bodices. What a nice pattern.
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Epic. But I don’t get the references.
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Nice…
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Now that is one swarthy dude.
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Nice bodices.
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Again. I see some pattern inspirations.
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I do like this one…
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Dynamic but without the excitement.
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Always a topless one in the bunch.
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This one is typical. partial exposure of the chest next to a headless woman.
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And this is what you get when you type a “quiet moment alone between two lovers at home”…
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Why are the men always shirtless?
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Not alone, but the expression on the two chicks is certainly interesting.
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My Lordy!
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Why don’t the Chinese people get rid of the CCP or failing that, why don’t Anti-China nations threaten harsh measures against China (Sanctions/removal from the UN,etc.) until China does get rid of the CCP? The CCP is no good.
Unfortunately some people live with a very uninformed idea about China. Many opinions are based only on what they read in western media. Or the labels like communist country.
I’m a Canadian Born Chinese who moved to Macau in 1983 and now consider it home. It is at the door step of China and I have visited over 100 times.
If anyone has an axe to grind about China it would be me. My parents were separated for 17 years because of the Canadian government. The Chinese Exclusion Act did not allow Chinese to immigrate. My father was already living there but couldn’t bring my mother and my sister because of that.
My grandfather went to Halifax and had a laundry business. Brought my dad over when he was 9. My dad was the first Chinese to graduate from the local university.
My grandfather went back with a bit of money and bought land and hired itinerant workers to grow rice. He died during WW2 and left things to my grandmother to look after. After the Communists took power, my grandmother was branded a capitalist landlord and made to beg for food as a punishment.
My mother and sister emigrated to Canada in 1949 after my father got citizenship and the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed. My upbringing in China was of course, not favorable to communist China.
After I moved to Macau in 1983, I visited Guangzhou to see a cousin who was from the same village. He grew up as a neighbor to my mom.
He told me about how poor China was in the 60s and 70s. How they had food rationing. Coupons so you could get rice and oil every week.
He was an English teacher at a prominent university. He told me how things had gotten better and life was pleasant. People were starting to become more materially well off. This was 1983.
Back then, everyone had four wants. A black and white TV. A washing machine. A bicycle and a refrigerator.
Pretty soon it evolved to a color TV. A motorcycle. And up the scale for years.
Mobile phone sales doubled every year for 15 years.
When Deng Xiaoping took over, the country changed overnight.
One of the pillars of socialism/communism was equal pay for equal work was dismantled. The so called iron rice bowl was not working. It made people lazy. So he introduced responsibility system. More productivity more pay.
China was very pragmatic about communism. If it works and is good for the people, keep it. If it doesn’t work get rid of it. Ideology is not sacred if it doesn’t work.
He made things work. Foreign investment poured in. I’m thirty years Chinese people’s lives greatly improved. There is an abundance of food. There is no price gouging. Government strictly regulates prices. Public transport is amazing. Public facilities are really wonderful.
If you grow up in a country that is continueously improving, you are happy with your government. Pew surveys (from the US) show over 90% satisfaction with the Chinese government.
So the only people who have the idea of toppling the government are people who have never visited China and seen it with their own eyes.
Suggest you try to get the facts on China before making such uninformed questions.
How do you win a fight when your opponent is much stronger and taller? I’m a female so I could really make use of learning some techniques now.
One of the principle behind Aïkido is to defeat a stronger opponent by using their own energy against them, while using little of your own. Balance is crucial in this art, as is speed. You’ll need some strength, so getting your body’s core strengths ready at all time is high encouraged. Look into what some masters are demonstrating online, and signup if you feel it is for you. Smaller sizes, man or woman, will always be at a disadvantage regardless, but size doesn’t guarantee victory to the bigger opponent.
But in a ‘street fight’ scenario where it is one person against you, there are no rules. Engage when not expected to, surprise, bite, hit where it hurts (throats, testicles, eyes) with full strength, use whatever fits in your hands and all the while doing this scream as much as possible to bring attention. The key is that there are no rules, so in other words play nasty. And if your opponent ends up on top of you, rip his ears out of his skull if you can.
Air Force Cadet Dies; Shown Just How Close The Spirit Realm Is to Our World (NDE)
During our “van days”; that period of time in between the discharge from the US Navy and when I was picked up with MAJestic…
…we were living in a van, working as a cook in San Louis Obispo, California and just doing the best we could with the little that we had.
And during that time, we lived in a broken down van; inoperable, dead, and even the door locks didn’t work. We climbed in and out though the sunroof. It was parked in a the tail end of the church parking lot. And so life moved on. We would exit the van, walk to work and walk back. It was tough, but we managed.
It was a time of great frustration, but of greater hope.
THis was years before the mass layoffs that gave all of America a taste of what a layoff actually was. And so, we were surrounded by “know it alls” who had no sympathy for us, as we plodded on.
One day, as we were walking to and from the van, we noticed another overloaded station wagon (late model and older) with tons of gear piled on its roof. So we kept on our walk and some of the guys offered us some marijuana.
Normally we wouldn’t take, but they looked like they were from Jamaica (they were) and so we chatted and hit some of their ganja. The group was The Wailers. Though, at that time, Bob Marley wasn’t with them.
Jamminh
They were fine and we had many a rambling and insightful conversation; that unfortunately I have long forgotten. *sigh*
They gave us free tickets to their concert, but we were too stoned. We thanked them, as they were starting to set up at the pavilion. Instead, we just smiled and just walked back to our van.
And that is the story of how my wife and I met The Wailers. Just some travelers just like us. When you get off the beaten track you will meet all kinds of people. And you will have all kinds of experiences.
Today…
Bob Marley & The Wailers – Jamming
Why do Hong Kong people not fight back when they are discriminated against in the UK?
Hong Kong separatists suffer racial discrimination in the UK, but for them, the nightmare does not come from Anglo-Saxon racism, but from the actions of the Tiandihui (also known as the Hongmen) to punish Chinese traitors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiandihui
Chinese abroad often rely on 3 kinds of civil society organizations for help: clan associations, hometown associations, and the Tiandihui.
Chinese embassies and consulates abroad are official institutions of the Chinese government overseas. They usually coordinate with government departments in the host countries through diplomatic means and are unlikely to intervene in private affairs.
Without the help of civil society organizations, overseas Chinese would not be able to gain a foothold in Chinatown.
The Tiandihui was founded by Ming loyalists in the early Qing dynasty to resist the Manchu invasion of China. This is an ancient organization that is still in operation today and it has become a multinational organization that also has branches in the UK.
Tiandihui members worldwide continue to observe certain common traditions: they all stress their patriotic origin; they all revere Lord Guan, a deified historic Chinese figure who embodies righteousness, patriotism, and loyalty; and they all share certain rituals and traditions such as the concept of brotherhood and a secret handshake.
Chinese Traitors in the UK are also divided into different levels:
Taiwan separatists have higher emotional intelligence. Although they are Chinese traitors, they will not show it on the surface.
Hong Kong separatists are 100% slaves of Anglo-Saxons. Even if Anglo-Saxons fart, they think it smells good.
Of course, Taiwan independence elements and Hong Kong independence elements are of no use. They only dare to be rebellious at home and remain calm abroad.
Tiandihui is a secret civil organization with many branches and complex structure, and does not conduct public activities.
Don’t expect the inefficient British police to protect Chinese traitors; they just need to accept their punishment honestly.
Dried Beef Casserole
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Ingredients
2 cups dry macaroni, uncooked
2 cans cream of mushroom soup
2 cups milk
2 cups grated cheddar cheese
6 tablespoons Durkee’s French fried onions
10 ounces dried beef, chopped
5 hard boiled eggs, sliced
Instructions
Combine soup and milk and stir until creamy, then add remaining ingredients except eggs. Mix well, then fold in eggs.
Cover tightly, and refrigerate overnight.
Bake uncovered for 1 hour at 350 degrees F.
If desired, add more onion rings to top ten minutes before removing from oven.
BREAKING NEWS: ISRAEL SEIZES CRYPTO-CURRENCIES OF **ALL** PALESTINIANS – – – TERRORISM
Israel has ORDERED the crypto-exchange “Binance” to SEIZE the crypto-currencies of all Palestinians pursuant to Israeli Terrorism Law!!!!!
Israel did this by declaring the Dubai Exchange Company in the Gaza Strip, which is the only lawful crypto-currency entity allowed to operate in the Gaza Strip, to be a “terrorist organization.”
All Palestinians were required to use the Dubai Exchange Company for all their crypto-currency transactions.
Since the Israeli government declared the Dubai Exchange itself to be a “terrorist organization” all the money transferred by or through that company is then considered to be the property of the “terrorist organization” and thus subject to being seized!
Palestinians have APPEALED this mass seizure. Those Appeals are ALL being denied.
The DENIAL letter appears below in original Hebrew language, which has been machine-translated as follows:
BEGIN MACHINE TRANSLATION:
“In accordance with the authority delegated to me by the Minister of Defense, according to Section 61(a) of the Law on Combating Terrorism, 556- 2016 (hereinafter: “The Law on the Fight against Terrorism”) and further to your application as a reference, I would like to inform you that your claims against Seizure of property by virtue of an administrative seizure order (T56/23) signed by the Minister of Defense on November 1, 2023, by virtue of his authority according to the law, were examined by and rejected for the following reasons:
1. Section 56(b) of the Anti-Terrorism Law states, among other things, that the Minister of Defense may issue an order on Temporary seizure of property of a declared terrorist organization, as well as seizure of property that was used to commit a crime Serious terrorism or property where a serious terrorist offense was committed.
2. At the basis of the administrative seizure order (Tt56/23) is reliable intelligence information that teaches that wallets of cryptocurrencies, including one that is registered in your name, funds have been transferred by an organization — the declared terrorism of the Dubai Exchange Company in the Gaza Strip (declared on March 7, 2022, published in the 10084 p. 2505 on 4.4.2022.
3. According to the anti-terrorism law, cryptographic currencies that have been transferred by a declared terrorist organization constitute property of a declared terrorist organization and cryptocurrency wallets to which it has been transferred. Said property constitutes property that was directly used to commit a serious terrorist offense of providing a service or Establishing measures for a terrorist organization, as defined in the Law on Combating Terrorism, and therefore in accordance with the instructions The law allows the Minister of Defense to order their seizure by administrative order in preparation for their confiscation.
4. In light of the above, and if nothing is found in your claims to contradict the information that formed the basis of issuing an order The seizure, I intend to recommend to the Minister of Defense to order the confiscation of the property for which the seizure order was issued, In accordance with the authority of the Minister of Defense according to section 66(a) of the law.
5. According to the provisions of the Anti-Terrorism Law, an appeal against this decision will be submitted as a petition to the Court of Matters administrative.
END MACHINE TRANSLATION —–
So the Israelis are considering ALL Palestinian crypto-currencies to be “terrorism” because they all went through the only lawful crypto exchange in the Gaza Strip, and Israel has now seized all that crypto-currency from the wallets of the people who sent it or received it. Whether that person was a “terrorist” or not, does not matter because the crypto-exchange itself was declared a “terrorist organization.”
Any of you who have Crypto-currencies, being held in a wallet that can be accessed by any exchange, should dump that crypto-currency absolutely immediately and get your money. What Israel has just shown is that they (or any other government) can simply make a declaration that the Exchange itself is a “terrorist organization” then grab all the crypto wallets that have ever been used via that exchange!
You would lose all your crypto, and automatically be considered to be “related to terrorist activities” with the stroke of a pen by some government lackey.
Remember this, too, when they start trying to get you to use “Central Bank Digital Currency.” They could do the exact same thing with that! You would find yourself cut off from all money. Try “appealing” anything when all the cash (you no longer have) is only “digital” and they just grabbed it all!
Today, as you scan your regular “news” sources, see if there is any reporting at all about this?
Parenting Gone Wrong: Spoiled Child Leads Family to Deadly Consequences At A Hotpot Restaurant
Have you ever caught a mechanic lying about a repair they claimed to have done to your car? What happened?
We recently bought out my wife’s company car, a Subaru Legacy, which we got a great deal on. Shortly before, while the car was still owned by fleet, we had taken the car in to the dealership for an oil change. This was before it got warm enough to need the air conditioner. Along comes summer and we notice the AC isn’t putting out cold air. I pop the hood and notice the wires to the compressor have been cut. I took a number of pictures from various angles and took the car back to the dealership and acted stupid, as if I had no idea why the AC was suddenly not working. An hour later they called to let me know they discovered that the wires had been chewed through, probably by a rat and said the entire wiring harness needed to be replaced at a cost of somewhere around $400–600. I lost my cool and told them they were lying to me and said it was obvious the wires had been cut. The service manager then told me they had found evidence of a rat’s nest under the hood. I told him I had taken a number of pictures of the engine compartment and that I had not seen any evidence of any rodent and said the wires were cut far too clean for them to have been chewed through and that it was pretty obvious this had been done when the car had last been in for service.
Thankfully my wife had a good relationship with the fleet manager and called him and asked for advice. He said to give us an hour and he’d get back to us. The dealership reached out shortly afterward and said they would be taking care of the damage at no charge to us. Apparently the fleet manager told them it seemed as though they were trying to take advantage of the fact that it was a fleet car (as it would have been had we not bought it out), had likely cut the wires expecting the fleet would be covering the repair bill (as they would have done had the car still been a fleet vehicle) and he was prepared to recommend blacklisting Subaru over their actions.
We will never take our car back to Carter Subaru in Shoreline (Seattle) again. Clearly they’re not to be trusted.
** Update: This answer must’ve recently been included in a digest email because it’s received a lot of attention. I figured I should probably update it with a couple of pictures I took before bringing the car in to the dealership. It clearly shows evidence of the “rat” that chewed, err, sliced through the wiring harness.
Which country has better fighters than the US? Are Russia or China known for having strong fighters?
Regarding the gap between fighter jets of China, the United States and Russia, the most appropriate objects of comparison are the three heavy stealth fighters: J-20, F22 and Su-57.
If we rank the number of the three types of heavy aircraft: J-20>F22>Su-57.
J-20, 100 new aircraft are produced every year
F22 has been discontinued for a long time, with only about 180 in total.
Su-57, no more than 10 are produced every year.
The combat effectiveness of the three heavy aircraft is ranked as follows: J-20>F22>Su-57.
The performance indicators of the fifth-generation fighter jets should be in order of importance:
Super perception (including informationization and intelligence): The maximum detection range of the F22 airborne radar is 250 kilometers, and the maximum detection range of the J-20 airborne radar is 300 kilometers.
Stealth: The J20 is more delicate than the F22. The J20 can adapt to various environments, whether it is the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau or the western desert. The J20 only needs an ordinary hangar to be deployed, unlike the F22, which needs a constant temperature hangar for maintenance. Finally, regarding the Su-57, I think if the Su-57 is optimized, the stealth performance still has a lot of room for improvement.
Supercruise and supersonic maneuverability: The F22 should be the one with the best supercruise capability at present because of its engine advantage, but the J-20’s supersonic optimization is the most thorough. After replacing the new engine, its supercruise and supersonic maneuverability will far surpass the F22.
Multi-purpose performance (including payload range): Theoretically, the multi-purpose performance of Su-57 should be the strongest, its bomb bay is deeper, and the front and rear columns are also convenient for arranging large missiles. Compared with the F22, the J-20 has a longer fuselage, larger fuel capacity, and a larger bomb bay, so its range and multi-purpose performance are greater than those of the F22. The comprehensive comparison is Su-57>J-20>F 22.
Subsonic maneuverability (including supersonic maneuverability, also known as super-stall maneuverability): This is the most controversial issue at present. The domestically produced Taihang improved engine currently installed on the J-20 is only a transitional version of the WS-15 engine. Its thrust is barely enough for the J-20, so its over-stall maneuverability is definitely not as good as that of the F22 and Su-57. However, with the advent and deployment of the WS-15 engine, these problems will be solved.
The US military itself knows very well that they are losing their air superiority!
Young Connecticut Man Will Only Give His GF A “Symbolic Wedding” To Safeguard His Hard Earned Wealth
Interesting. Phew! What a crazy life.
Good Job
One day, while I was working upstairs in my office, my German Shepherd came upstairs, stood in my office doorway barking at me.
Then he walked over to the top of the staircase barking as he looked down the stairs. He lifted his head, looked towards me and continued barking.
He walked back and stood in the office doorway again looking at me, barking.
He did this repeatedly for a few minutes while I worked. It became obvious he wanted me to follow him downstairs. I got up and asked him, “What’s the matter?”
As soon as I asked this our house began to shake.
Everything on my walls and shelves were rattling.
I did not understand exactly what was happening, but we both ran down the stairs while I yelled, “Let’s get the hell out of here!”
We got outside and I felt the ground moving.
Then it stopped.
We had just experienced an earthquake. They are practically nonexistent in our region. Somehow, my boy knew it was coming and came upstairs to warn me.
He did many intelligent things in his lifetime, but that was the most amazing.
Suspects That LOSE IT During Interrogations
Brutal.
Ukraine Develops ‘Its Own’ Cruise Missile
On the Ukrainian independence day former President Zelenski announced that Ukraine’s forces would soon use a “rocket driven drone”:
On 24 August, during the Saturday ceremonies for Ukraine’s Independence Day, Volodymyr Zelensky stated that today, Ukrainian forces for the first time targeted enemy troops with a new long-range drone.- This is our new method of retaliating against the aggressor. The enemy was hit. Thank you to everyone who made this possible. All the developers, manufacturers, and our soldiers. I am proud of you, Zelensky said during his speech, quoted by the Ukrainska Pravda portal.
The rocket-drone system, produced indigenously by Ukraine and gracefully named “Paljanica” (like the traditional Ukrainian wheat flour bread, which symbolizes hospitality and happiness), is a military innovation. During the official ceremonies, Zelensky stressed that it is a weapon of a “completely new class”. He emphasized that “it is difficult to counteract it, but very easy to understand why.”
The work on the rocket-drone was carried out in secrecy.
Zelenski published a video that shows a second of the cruise missile in flight.
This is not a drone but a turbojet driven cruise missile. Ukraine announced that it has been tested and could be used soon:
Defense Minister Rustem Umerov promised Monday the weapon would be used again soon in response to the overnight attack on Ukraine.“Ukraine is preparing its response. Weapons of its own production,” he wrote on his Facebook page. “This once again proves that for victory, we need long-range capabilities and the lifting of restrictions on strikes on the enemy’s military facilities.”
A Ukrainian military video hinted that its range is up to 700 kilometers (430 miles) — on par with the U.S.-supplied ATACMS. It showed a map with various airfields, including Russia’s Savasleyka air base, which lies within that range, adding that the Palianytsia can reach at least 20 Russian airfields.
Russia has expected longer range missile strikes for some time and its defenses are positioned appropriately. Another Ukrainian ‘wonder weapon’ will not impress it. Ukraine claims that the cruise missile was developed by itself:
One of the specialists involved in the long-range missile project said it was “a completely new development, from scratch” that began about 18 months ago.“This is not an extension of an old Soviet project,” said the specialist, speaking on condition of anonymity to safeguard the project’s secrecy. The missile has a solid-fuel booster that accelerates it, followed by a jet engine, the specialist said.
…
The specialist and Fedorov said each missile costs less than $1 million, and the military is turning to the private sector to bring down production costs further. “The private market generates solutions incredibly quickly,” the minister said.
I doubt that Ukraine has created its own cruise missile. There are too many parts of such systems, especially the navigation and targeting modules, that need high end solutions to be able to counter Russian electronic warfare measures and to deceive Russian air defenses. It expect that these will be derivatives from western projects.
Aside from that all Ukraine’s weapon and especially missile manufacturing facilities have been hit several times by Russian missiles. This morning a new large missile and drone attack again hit “the critical power infrastructure of Ukrainian defence industry”. Next to other infrastructure today’s strike damaged three irreplaceable 750 kilovolt transformer stations and several 330 kv stations.
The new Ukrainian cruise missile was probably designed by the U.S. or UK and its various modules will likely be assembled in Poland instead of Ukraine. Still, it will be a hassle to produce many of these. That is likely the reason why the Ukrainian leadership is begging daily to allow it to use long range missiles produced by the U.S. or Britain to hit targets within Russia.
So far the U.S. has blocked such moves because it fears retaliation by Russia. Russia has threatened to deliver such weapons from Russian production to U.S. enemies should the U.S. proceed and allow Ukraine to hit with U.S. weapons within Russia.
A “Ukrainian” cruise missile would of course eliminate that problem.
What happened in your office that became the stuff of legend?
We were getting calls from a lot of vendors about past due invoices – for MONTHS. This was so weird as our branch was doing very well and we just could not figure out why our vendors weren’t being paid. Invoices were posted in the AP and this should not have been happening. It got so bad that one of our major suppliers wouldn’t provide any more material until they were paid. This was bad – we had a MAJOR project going that we could not not have material.
We had what was called an Imprest Checking Account. We had a checkbook and could write checks for things like permits, licenses, etc. The cap per check was $500.00 with a monthly “allowance of around $3,000.00 per branch.
To avoid credit hold that month, our Branch Manager told the office manager to write a check for $30,000.00. Done and delivered, material is on the job site. Got a call from HQ/Co. President telling us we did a bad thing and not to do it again because overdraft fees.
Our AP admin decided to do some investigating. Holy carp – we were going gangbusters and collecting a lot of money every month but almost ALL of our AP was aging towards or past 120 days. So she looked in to the HQ office. Gee, all of their bills were being paid on time. So she took this info to the BM who called HQ and read them the riot act.
Next month, same drill – no material from the vendor for the project until they were paid. BM directed AP admin to write a check for $60,000.00.
A week later, same phone call from HQ President. BM invited us admins in to his office and put him on speaker so we could listen. Pres. was yelling and screaming at BM who just sat, calmly, nodding and listening. Pres ended his tirade with “What do you have to say?!” BM, very calmly, replied “Pay our fuickin’ bills.” Silence on the other end followed by unintelligible grumbling and a click. BM just sat there and smiled at the phone and the three of us were in awe. That man, our Branch Manager, was a legend.
After that, our bills were paid on time. I still tell that story and am still in awe of, perhaps, the best boss I ever had.
Wife Spent 5 Months On OnlyFans Before Confessing To Husband & The Reddit Army WENT CRAZY When He…
The term “relationship” has taken on new meaning these days. Not judging, but it is a bit of a shock to my 1960 era sensibilities.
How do you view the popularity of “Black Myth: Wukong” and the spread of Chinese culture?
Black Myth: Wukong” has shattered multiple global gaming records on its first day of release. As of 10 PM last night, it reached over 2.22 million concurrent players on Steam, topping the Steam concurrent player chart and setting a new record for single-player games. Additionally, “Black Myth: Wukong” has been the best-selling game on Steam globally for the past week, sweeping the charts in 12 regions including the United States, Singapore, Canada, and Italy.
“Black Myth: Wukong” sold over 3 million copies on Steam alone yesterday, and with sales on Epic, WeGame, and PS5 combined, the total surpasses 4.5 million copies, generating over 1.5 billion yuan in revenue. This figure is hundreds of times higher than the pre-sales of previous domestic single-player games (which typically reached around 100.
To be honest, no domestic single-player game has ever demonstrated such a terrifying dominance. Changcheng Securities even predicts that “Black Myth: Wukong” could catch up with top-tier games like “Elden Ring” and “Dark Souls” in terms of sales.
This is not blind optimism. With over 4.5 million copies sold in a single day and total sales exceeding 1.5 billion yuan, “Black Myth: Wukong” has set a new benchmark. For comparison, “Cyberpunk 2077” had 8 million pre-orders upon its release in 2020, and “The Last of Us Part II,” the 2020 TGA Game of the Year, sold 4 million copies in its first week. Moreover, “Black Myth: Wukong” reached 1 million concurrent players within 60 minutes, surpassing “Cyberpunk 2077.
“Black Myth: Wukong” is rich in traditional Chinese cultural elements, even featuring傩面 (nuò miàn,傩 masks).
Black Myth: Wukong” represents a significant milestone in the global dissemination of Chinese culture, offering a visually stunning and culturally rich gaming experience that has captured the attention of audiences worldwide. By examining the game’s portrayal of Chinese mythology, its impact on the global gaming industry, and its potential to foster cultural exchange, we can gain a deeper understanding of the role of video games in shaping cultural perceptions.
How will I survive prison being a 48-year-old male? I am awaiting sentencing in less than 23 days and I am facing up to 9 years in total in feds. How will I survived having ever been in prison before?
All right, sit down and listen. Jim Van Derlin wrote 10 things. do not forget any of it. Great stuff. Now, I was like 58 going into a Fed prison. I did time in 4 prisons including the Penitentiary at Victorville, CA and finished out my time at FCI Tucson, a medium-high that was rated as High due to it being a transfer point/holding site. Os some shit like that.
So, 9 years. Make amends. Payoff any debts you can. Say goodbye. Sell your car, cancel everything you can, your family won’t need it. If you have family, you will need to connect like never before because IF you get visits, they are hard. I didn’t even want my family coming to fucking prison. The penitentiary is surrounded by a 40′ wall lined with piles of razor wire. The inmates all look like they would eat your face just to stay busy. So you don’t think I’m insulting anyone, a big dude once asked me why I looked so mean, while we were in the visiting room. I think his daughter got scared. I was like ‘bro, you’re 6’9″, 325 pounds and have a face only a mother could love and you think I’m mean looking?
Before this fiasco, a speeding ticket ruined my month. I was not from the hood, I was not connected nor was I a fighting machine. So to reiterate a few comments from Jim, unless you want your asshole the size of a cucumber, DO NOT DO ANYTHING that causes you to owe money. $5 past due, a few homies come by, you no gots??? You trade for sex. It won’t necessarily be your choice. If Someone wants to give you a hit on a smoke, or a joint, DO NOT take it. Do not be surprised that the hit you took went on your tab. Yeah, the tab you didn’t know you had.
Respect others. Expect it back. If something goes sideways and nasty talk starts, you have about 10–12 seconds. If the other dude calms, let it rest. If he ain’t calm, expect an attack immediately. You will never argue more than 15 seconds before the shit flies! Be ready and swing back.
Carry yourself with confidence, but not arrogance. you can nod or a small half smile of acknowledgement to peeps you know from other races but do NOT think you can walk up and join a convo with another race. you’ll be sorry with a quick lesson.
My advice, do not be friends with the first guys that approach you. They will be conning you out of something. Hopefully, your bunkie or a guy from a close cell walks you down to the chow hall. Listen, answer questions honestly, and do not try to be someone you are not. Take it slowly. Be friend-LY with people but it takes months before you should trust or rely on others.
After the mental meltdown of the admitting process and the first few days of living in a parallel universe, you will start to go through your life. There is little you can do inside. I’m still married, somehow. Don’t expect to be. If you are and she waits, you are blessed.
I made it through my whole sentence until the last year. Something happened, I had years of being fed up. I started yelling about something. There were a couple of COs close by. The boys I was pissed at didn’t like being barked at in front of others. An hour later I got a visit at my locker. 5 dudes. A little talking, a little pushing. I counted and got to 11. I knew this was it. Early on in my sentence, I had decided that if I ever got hit by a group, it was gonna hurt. So I figured, I’m going to concentrate my “love and attention” on 1 guy. I wanted at least one dude besides me to walk with a limp, or a hanging arm, or a fucked up face! You’ll be in pain, but make 1 guy remember you. Word gets around.
China Threatens EU Dairy Economy, Argentina Gold In London, Major Bank “USD Big Crash Bets”
Tit 4 tat.
A HK story
So I rung my uncle in Hong Kong because I heard he had a fall recently.
He has to sit in a wheelchair for a while but he was in good spirits.
He was almost gleeful to share about Nathan Law’s recent travails.
Apparently, the white masters are cutting him loose and he is in a bit of a bind financially. His family and supporters are in trouble for sending him money. His mum even lost the subsidized housing unit due to rent arrears.
He wants Nathan to come back and face the music so the family don’t have to.
But he knows that is wishful thinking, because the man is a “chickenshit coward”. His original description is a little too colorful to print here.
He hates the leaders of the 2019 riots because his little side business went under during the mayhem, and incurred a tidy loss.
I don’t blame him.
I wish him a speedy recovery.
Why is China lagging behind India while its GDP is higher than India’s?
It’s commonly believed that India’s potential could soon eclipse China’s, but the real story is quite the opposite. While India’s GDP figures are catching eyes, China’s strategic investments in high-value sectors show that it is leagues ahead in sustainable economic growth.
You see, China isn’t just about huge GDP numbers. It’s about how they’ve managed to turn those numbers into substantial value through smart, forward-thinking strategies. Decades ago, China’s economy heavily relied on exporting low-margin goods. But today, the game has changed. China now focuses on high-tech manufacturing and mastering key technologies, earning significantly more per unit of export. For instance, a Tesla made in Shanghai leaves a big chunk of profit within Chinese borders, which wasn’t the case with the lower-margin goods they made years ago. The same goes for Huawei smartphones, which now rake in higher profits compared to the earlier contracts with Western brands.
Meanwhile, India’s economic landscape is in a different phase, more focused on assembly and service-based tasks. Even though India’s exports are expected to rise, the value they add to the economy pales in comparison to China’s high-tech exports. India finds itself deeply engaged in refining oil, assembling electronics, and providing software services. These sectors don’t bring significant value back home; most of the profits end up with the foreign owners of these technologies.
Another big part of the story is how each country invests in its people. China has poured resources into its education system, subsidizing costs and providing numerous scholarships, creating a skilled workforce geared toward innovation. On the flip side, Indian education remains expensive, burdening graduates and their families and making it challenging to cultivate a wide pool of talent needed for a tech-driven economy.
China’s economic prowess also stems from continuous investment in infrastructure and technology. The nation has heavily invested in electric vehicle batteries, solar panels, and wind energy, sectors that promise not just jobs but also position China as a future leader in these critical industries. India’s investment in high-tech sectors and infrastructure has yet to meet the same level of effectiveness.
Social factors can’t be ignored either. China has nurtured a meritocratic environment with a focus on achieving technological advancements. Meanwhile, India’s societal focus on celebrity culture and ongoing brain drain diverts attention from the systematic nurturing of its economic potential.
So, if you’re asking why China’s GDP doesn’t tell the whole story of its economic superiority, it’s because of these deep, structural investments and strategic choices. Despite China’s substantially higher GDP, it’s the focus on high-value, technology-driven sectors, education, and infrastructure that sets it apart. For India to bridge this gap, there would need to be a massive shift in educational policies, a serious dedication to infrastructure, and a move away from traditional economic activities toward more innovative sectors.
In essence, while India’s GDP growth might look promising at a glance, China’s underlying economic strategies make it a more formidable force on the global stage. This difference in developmental focus and investment is why China, despite what headlines might suggest, continues to pave the way for a more stable and prosperous future.
American’s can’t comprehend living like Chinese..
So interesting, making fun of Americans. Actually a really good video pointing out the importance of LIVABILITY where you live.
What is the craziest sale you’ve ever made?
I bought a Jeep for $250, drove it a half mile, and sold it for $2,500…unintentionally.
My roommate blew an axle out of his truck, so as I was taxiing him around, he had me take a shortcut. On that back road, I saw this Jeep next to someone’s house. A real Jeep, a 1986 CJ-7, the year before Chrysler took the company over and ruined it. Since I learned the shortcut, I kept going that way, and kept seeing that Jeep, for probably 3 months, although it had clearly been there for years.
It was the homeowner’s son’s Jeep, and he’d moved across the country. He abandoned the Jeep there and ended up sending his father the title to get rid of it. Since I convinced the father I wasn’t a junk car guy or planning on scrapping it, I gave it a good hard closeup look and asked for a price. He said the scrap car guys belittled it and said it was only worth $250 max. Since I genuinely wanted to fix it up for myself, I could have it for that price, which I had on me.
I paid for the Jeep, jump started it, and surprisingly it ran. The brakes were crap, and this Jeep looked horrible, but I saw potential. I stopped at a gas station, and the guy there was mesmerized by this rusty hunk of a Jeep covered in tree crap. He asked me if I would sell it, to which I said I doubt he’s make it worth my while. He then offered me $2,500. I almost crapped my pants. I drove it about a half mile and made 10 times what I paid for it. My plan was just to make sure it had enough gas to get home since the gauge read empty, but instead I made it home with a lot more than I planned on.
After I thought, if he shot me $2,500 right away, he may have been willing to pay more, but I was so shocked I didn’t think of it until later. Who knows…
Is it possible for missiles to defeat the Close-In weapon System (CIWS) like the Phalanx system on a ship?
Yes. The Phalanx fires at 3,000 rounds per minute to 4,500 rounds depending on model.
These are designed to shoot down sub-sonic missiles.
Chinese research shows that in order to shoot down high supersonic missiles (missiles traveling at Mach3 – Mach 5) you need a CIWS that fires at 10,000 rounds per minute.
Also if the missile is maneuvering in terminal phase then the faster the firing rate the better. You also need better radars and powerful computers to predict the missile trajectory and get there first with the gun.
Current Chinese CIWS fires at 11,000 rounds per minute.
Everything in in-place. What event – or false-flag – will be used to trigger Actual WW3?
Ukraine has lost 5,500 troops, 71 tanks, 30 Infantry Fighting Vehicles, 57 Armored Personnel Carriers, and 372 Armored Combat Vehicles in their two week long misadventure into Russia’s Kursk Region.
The staggering losses in such a short time reveal the complete idiocy of this maneuver by Ukraine, or the factual realization that any NATO planners involved, were utterly incompetent.
Medellin: The Sex Tourism Capital Of Colombia | Is This A Passport Bro Paradise Or Nightmare?
The war on “passport bros” has entered a new cycle; as a sexpat.
A friend of mine was born to rich (not billionaire) parents. His Grandad had started a company with nothing, his dad had taken it on and made it bigger and more profitable. He was the eldest son.
I met him when he was 22. He was a graduate from an elite university, and had a got a lucrative government sponsorship to study accounting, and I’d got sponsorship at 18, to do the same. Which is where I met him. I’m from a more typical background, 2 parents, working 9–5 jobs to pay the mortgage and put food on the table.
We talked about the differences between us, on and off, over the next year or two.
Most of us have to go to work to earn money, support our family, and we keep turning up because if we don’t, we might get sacked. Those who don’t put the effort in, don’t get the bigger, better jobs. None of this applies to “daddy’s boy”. He knew if he wanted it, he would be MD of the family company. If not, the family would appoint a manager or sell the business, and he could live off the profits.
His dad was conscious of this, and had asked him the question a couple of times:
At 18 – Nope, I want to go to Uni
At 21, Nope I want to study to be an accountant
at 24 – I’d like to work in the private sector for 2 years.
Even at 26, his dad did his best to dissuade him:
You have a good career ahead of you, outside the family business. You can do well. You don’t need to take this on if you don’t want to. I can get a Professional manager.
You know, whatever you do, people will say you were “given it”. You will never get any credit.
It won’t be easy. I won’t give it to you, I will give you a couple of jobs, and if you goof around, I will leave you there. People’s jobs and their families depend on this company, and if you become MD, you need to take that responsibility seriously.
Once you come in, you will struggle to get a job outside the company again, as companies will always look at your CV and say “No point taking him on. All we’ll be doing is training him up for when he goes back to the family company.”
If you make a mistake here, people won’t let you forget. You can’t move jobs, and leave it behind.
You are giving up a lot of (government) benefits, if you come here, more than I can give you, and without the responsibility.
When you are MD, it’s pretty lonely. It’s not like being one of the workforce. It’s just you. People will give you advice, but they have their own agenda, and it’s only you who has to live with the consequences.
There’s always the risk that the company will fail, despite your best efforts. Then you’ll be stuck.
It was during this time that I started to realize that there were downside was well as upsides to being born in to his family.
When he did take it on, his dad was as good as his word. He gave him proper jobs. He made him make the decisions, stand behind them, and if he made mistakes had to own them. Sadly, his dad passed away when he was only 56, so my friend became MD at 30, which was earlier and sooner than his dad and him expected or planned.
He enjoyed it, and did very well. Took the business on to the next level. Increased sales, increased profits, added new product lines, won new customers, put a new computer system in place, trained up the senior team, introduced new production technology, and moved the factory to a new site double the size of the last one, but it was a very demanding role. He was the only family member working in the business, and the wider family seemed to add to his stress, not share the burden. I did some benchmarking on pay rates, and was surprised by his remuneration despite his stellar performance. I advised him that he well below market rates. The family were very reliant on him, but didn’t seem to recognise his performance. In his 40s, he developed some stress related health issues, and stepped away from the business.
After a couple of years sabbatical, he opted not to go back, and took a less stressful and more supportive, and appreciated career, and the company did get a locum manager, and still has it to this day.
Here’s how a day in Z-9 Ad-Seg goes down, from the horses mouth
Sunrise:
The day starts early with medical pass at 0600. We kick things off getting the medicals handled first. By 0620, it’s chow time, and in Ad-Seg, that means meals served straight in the cells. The sergeant handles this personally, making sure it’s all by the book. Food goes through the tray slots, no face-to-face interactions. If it’s Ramadan, we’ve got specific procedures to follow, but the routine stays locked down tight.
After breakfast, inmates get their cleaning supplies through the slot. They’re expected to keep their cells up to standard—no exceptions. Hygiene checks happen regularly, and if someone’s slipping, it gets dealt with. Sometimes, it’s hard to see what’s going on in the cell because inmates like to put cardboard on their windows. That’s only allowed if the inmate’s an IEX’r (indecent exposure), otherwise, we’re not having it.
Mid-Morning:
Around 0800, it’s shower time. In Ad-Seg, showers are solo—no exceptions. Inmates get cuffed and escorted to the shower, where they have about 10 minutes. Then it’s straight back to the cell, still cuffed. No free movement here—everything’s on lockdown. If there’s a medical appointment or legal visit, it’s the same routine: cuffed, escorted, and back to their cell.
Afternoon:
Lunch comes around 1200, following the same procedure as breakfast—through the slot, no hassle. After they eat, they get a bit of in-cell time. Inmates might read, write, or get in some exercises. It’s a small break in the day, but they know the rules. If there’s any legal business or visits, it’s handled individually, under strict supervision.
Yard Time:
Yard is limited in Ad-Seg—only three hours a week. When it’s their time, they’re cuffed and escorted to the yard. It’s the only chance they get to stretch out a bit, but it’s still tightly controlled, with eyes on them at all times.
Evening:
Dinner rolls around at 1700. By now, everyone’s in the routine—food through the slot, no drama. After dinner, the day starts winding down. Mail gets handed out, and if they’re lucky enough to have a TV, they catch a bit of programming before lights out.
Night:
By 2100, it’s lights out. We lock down the unit for the night, making sure everyone’s where they should be. There’s no movement unless it’s an emergency. We do our rounds, checking cells, making sure everything’s in order. The night settles in, and it’s quiet—just the hum of the unit.
In Z-9 Ad-Seg, everything’s about routine and control. Medical at 0600, chow at 0620, showers, meals, and the limited yard time all follow a strict schedule. Whether it’s dealing with cardboard on the windows or getting the yard in, it’s all about maintaining order—tight, controlled, and always by the book.
My father was often not around when I was a young child.
But I remember an argument one dinner time with the 4 (my dad, mum, myself and my younger brother) of us sat around the dinner table, I would be around 8/9 my brother 5.
Things had been strained most of the day. Something was said and that led to an argument, I remember dinner plates being thrown, food going all over the place, i slid under the table and grabbed my brother and held my hands over his ears as words were being said I knew he shouldn’t hear.
They separated about 18 months later. The Divorce was messy to say the least and we were forced to spend time with him and his “new girlfriend” who had a little girl so she became our step sister… They ended up getting married a couple of years later and separating a few years after that….
My mum and brother were killed by a drunk driver in 1997 and my Dad who I had barely seen in 15 years given he was a violent drunk died in 2012.
It’s only relatively recently that I got back in contact with my stepmother to find out I had a half brother who was 35 years younger than me and born just before my dad died. But after that bomb shell we discussed memories and I worked out that dining table argument was him telling my mum that he had got her pregnant and that she wasnt my step sister but half sister.
That was the same conversation I discovered I potentially had other siblings too.
As it turns out I did…..6 in fact from 4 other relationships some from the same time he was married to my mum.
I’ve now a relationship with 5 of them, and in the process of adopting one of them, hes 12 and currently living in a kids home.
Leaders talk
China is the only permanent member of the United Nations Security Council not involved in any international conflict in recent years, demonstrating its commitment to peace, said Timor-Leste’s President Jose Ramos-Horta during an exclusive interview with CMG’s Leaders Talk.
At the invitation of Chinese President Xi Jinping, Timor-Leste’s president paid a state visit to China from July 28 to 31. This is Ramos-Horta’s first visit to China after he took office in 2022 and the first state visit of Timor-Leste’s president to China since the establishment of diplomatic ties.
During the visit, the two sides agreed to strengthen bilateral relations, with Ramos-Horta saying China’s remarkable economic growth and commitment to global peace have drawn Timor-Leste to seek closer ties.
“China is a global power, it’s the largest economy in Asia, second largest in the world. Over the years, China pursued several strategic tracks, one is building China’s economy to these impressive heights, which make China a global economic power, a global financial power. The modernization of its defense force adds to that, and that creates some jealousy among those who view China as a rival. And sometimes the jealousy is exacerbated, and they try to repeat what was a failure of the 60s and 70s, the so-called ‘China containment’,” the president said.
“China was never involved in any of the major wars in recent decades. Whether the war in Afghanistan, the war in Yemen, in Iraq, Libya and in the ongoing one in Ukraine. China is the only permanent member of the Security Council that is not involved in an international conflict. So for us, its common sense to have strong relations with an Asian power, an Asian country that is also a global power. And I know the history of China going back many centuries. What China was then, particularly before World War Two, after World War Two, a lot of upheavals in China. But long before that, wars waged by foreign powers against China like the Opium War,” he said.
What is the most satisfying thing you have done to someone who blocked your driveway?
I decided to spraypaint my fence.
Some bloke pulled in front of the drive about 10 minutes before I was due to go out, locked his car and started walking away. I called to him to ask him not to park there and was told to “fuck off and deal with it.”
My drive is not on a road where you can get round a car parked like that. I was stuck. So, I called SWMBO and told her I’d be late to our appointment and to give my apologies.
An hour later the driver wasn’t back and I was going to miss my appointment. So I decided on revenge and decided to do one of the jobs SWMBO had been badgering me to do. Repaint the fence… using my new-ish sprayer. I didn’t use it very often as it’s not a very efficient way of painting, as it releases a lot of paint and on breezy days, it tend to drift… a lot.
Our chosen colour was a cedar red… don’t ask… so I alerted my neighbour as she had washing on the line and set up to spray the fence. I managed to get two coats on the 4 six foot fence panels either side of my drive… plus some excess on the ground inside the garden. It drifted outside as well, but I needed to do the outside as well. Outside the garden isn’t as sheltered as inside so the spray drifted a bit more… right onto the gleaming black Subaru Impreza parked across the drive. I only managed to get 1 coat onto the panels outside before it got too dark to see properly for painting, but not too dark to clean the ground inside and outside with a few buckets of water. It’s a water soluble paint after all. I didn’t see what time he left but would love to have seen his face the next morning when he saw his pride and joy splattered with dried on red fence paint.
SWMBO however was more than happy that I’d painted the fence finally.
Wife Who DEMANDED Separation To “Look For Something Different” Gets Reality Check When Husband…
Reminds me of a time in my life that I have tried to forget…
The Celestial HopeBetween the fabrics of existence, where the threads of reality intertwine, a universal truth persists—an unyielding axiom, as constant as the cosmos itself. Amidst the grand cosmic ballet where galaxies waltz and stars orchestrate an eternal symphony, a saga of boundless proportions unfurls—a tale that transcends the constraints of time and space.Eternity, an expanse beyond mortal comprehension, stands as an ever-present enigma, an eternal observer untouched by the transient choreography of moments. Here, within the unfathomable depths of cosmic vastness, a fellowship known as the Chosen Wanderers embarks upon an odyssey that defies the very essence of their immortal existence.At the helm of this eternal odyssey strides Captain Thalara, a figure of unwavering strength and profound sagacity. Her presence is a beacon of determination that pierces the veils of time, carrying upon her shoulders the monumental weight of leadership—a mantle forged in the crucible of unending epochs.By her side stands Lyndor, a spectral enigma whose eyes hold secrets as ancient as the cosmos itself. An heir to arcane lineage, he wields powers inherited from generations long past, now intertwined with his very being.Elysia, a luminary scientist ignited by an insatiable curiosity, graces the crew with her brilliance—a constellation of knowledge that shines even in the darkest reaches of the universe.
Completing this ensemble is Kaelen, a dauntless pilot whose hands navigate not only the cosmic currents but also the tides of destiny. His courage is a vessel that carries them through the currents of eternity, as he guides them toward uncharted horizons.
Through the collage of galaxies, where stars bloom and fade like cosmic flowers, their starship “Celestial Hope” navigates, leaving ripples in the very fabric of existence. The void echoes with the remnants of ancient civilizations—whispers of lives long gone, reminders of the impermanence of all things. Amid this journey, nebulous clouds of despair and tempests of doubt swirl, seeking to engulf their spirits in shadow. Yet, in defiance of the abyss, their camaraderie burns like a supernova—a radiant beacon against the inky blackness of space.
In the heart of this boundless expanse, Thalara’s voice resounds—a harmonious blend of weariness and unyielding resolve. “In the face of time’s inexorable tide, what path do we forge, when life’s embrace clings without release? Millennia have woven themselves into our very essence, as we traverse the chasm between universes, charting a course through the untamed cosmos.”
Lyndor, a specter of enigmatic wisdom and innate power, leans against the console, his gaze an ancient mosaic painted with the memories of eons.
“Within the currents of our veins courses the venom of eternity,” his voice carries a mournful timbre, heavy with the weight of choices made. “An oath, once taken with eagerness, now binds us with chains of regret—a curse woven into the very fabric of our being.”
Elysia, her fingers dancing across the luminescent constellations that map the celestial canvas, murmurs with reverence in her voice. “Recall the epoch when our predecessors glimpsed the unfathomable—a revelation of multiple big bangs, an eternal existence that defies all comprehension. Even the deities themselves pale in the face of such boundless expanse.”
Kaelen, the intrepid pilot who courts the cosmic unknown with audacious fervour, leans back with a half-smile that masks the weight he carries.
“Gods or no gods, our universe bowed to its inevitable conclusion—a requiem sung as stars winked out. Yet, we remain—ephemeral echoes in the aftermath, seekers of sanctuary in the wake of dissolution.”
As they negotiate wormholes that spiral like cosmic whirlpools and cross dimensions that shimmer like astral gateways, they traverse not only space but also the fabrics of existence itself. Their dialogues resonate like distant echoes through the corridors of the colossal starship—an intricate symphony woven from threads of hope, fear, and unwavering resolve.
“Sworn to a hope, we journey as bearers of the ages,” Thalara’s voice emerges as a soothing echo as the ship navigates the currents of the cosmos. “We are the chosen, tasked with the survival of ages.”
Lyndor’s eyes, impossibly ancient and eternally watchful, hold a depth of understanding that spans eras. “To comprehend eternity is to wrestle with its revelations—a truth more profound than any verse etched into cosmic parchment.”
Elysia’s gaze lifts toward the uncharted constellations beyond the viewport, her voice carrying both lament and wonder. “Our universe, once a cradle of myriad existences, now languishes—a relic adrift in the vast detritus of time.”
Kaelen’s fingers glide over the star maps he has charted, a testament to their journey’s wonder and weariness. “Yet, we endure, undaunted by the ceaseless ebb of eons that slip through our grasp.”
As their odyssey continues, a cataclysmic event unfurls—a singularity, born from the final gasp of a dying universe, threatens to consume them in its voracious maw. Amidst the concerto of alarms and the kaleidoscope of flashing lights, their voices rise like beacons in the tempest.
“A universe born anew, an era unseen,” Elysia’s breath catches, her voice a whisper amidst the maelstrom.
“An epoch that hungers to sunder us,” Kaelen’s voice is a resolute call amidst the chaos.
“Take any action necessary! Steer us away!” Thalara’s command cleaves through the tumult like a sword through the dark.
“Aye, captain,” Kaelen’s hands fly over the controls, each gesture a testament to his indomitable will.
Yet, the singularity’s maw widens beyond escape.
“Wormhole generators at full capacity in mere moments,” Elysia announces, her voice carrying both urgency and the weight of time itself.
“An eternity encapsulated within fleeting seconds,” Thalara’s mutterings become an indomitable mantra within the storm.
As alarms wail and the ship shudders beneath the onslaught of forces beyond mortal reckoning, Thalara’s call rings out with resolute clarity.
“Hold fast, all! Prepare for the impact that bridges being and oblivion!”
Lyndor’s incantations weave through the air, a desperate plea to mystic forces woven into the very fabric of reality.
“By the threads of existence, we stand resolute!”
Elysia’s voice, a poignant blend of awe and trepidation, pierces the chaotic symphony.
“Here, on this precipice, we straddle the boundary between existence and the void!”
Kaelen’s hands dance with an orchestral precision, their movement a symphony of defiance against impending annihilation.
“Falter, we shall not! Not now, not after traversing the rivers of time itself!”
Emerging from the cataclysm battered yet resolute, they find themselves adrift in the enigmatic embrace of eternity’s realm. Now the farthest off course that could be conceived, a billion light years have cascaded through their grasp, slipping like stardust through the hourglass of existence.
Thalara’s voice, a potent blend of determination and weariness, breaks the stillness that envelops them.
“Amidst the boundless expanse of eternity, we stand as sentinels—an embodiment of unyielding will. Though the search may seem to be at an end, the journey persists, for we are the very bridge between ages.”
Lyndor’s gaze, a window into stages long past, holds a glimmer of hope, a spark that transcends the barriers of time.
“Eternity may have claimed our lethargy, yet it has not extinguished our essence. We’ll make the proper repairs captain Thalara.”
Standing amidst the cosmic void, their silhouettes etched against infinity’s canvas, the echoes of their odyssey resonate through the corridors of existence—a harmonious melody that reverberates through the contexture of time. Their journey, one that challenged death’s dominion, embraced the abyss, and defied the very fabric of the cosmos, has become an indelible verse in the cosmic motif.
For even as they languor for a billion years, cradled within the timeless embrace of eternity, the saga of the Chosen Wanderers echoed across the cosmos—a saga woven into the very cosmic strings of existence. In the midst of interstellar ages, voyaging through the unfathomable vastness, the Celestial Hope and its devoted crew lay suspended in a timeless repose, a testament to their unwavering resolve in the face of unending existence.
The story of the Chosen Wanderers, forever inscribed in the cosmic annals, teaches that even in the ceaseless dance of stars and galaxies, in the unyielding expanse of eternity, the essence of mortal and immortal alike can forge pathways that transcend the constraints of time and space.
And now in their long great slumber, they tread upon the dreamy shores of a lush world untouched by the journals of history, the weight of countless eons finally lifts. A forgotten mission buried in the lost realms left long behind fades away. Before them unfurls the promise of life renewed, secrets unfurled beneath celestial constellations, and an uncharted future as infinite as the universes themselves.
But that too would be another story.
Enchilada Squares
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Ingredients
2 (19 ounce) cans Las Palmas enchilada sauce
1 pound Monterey Jack cheese, shredded
1 medium onion, chopped
1 (4 ounce) can sliced olives
1 pound ground beef
1 1/2 cups vegetable oil
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon onion powder
27 corn tortillas
Instructions
Brown ground beef.
Drain oil and add salt, pepper, garlic and onion powder.
While meat is browning, heat enchilada sauce in medium size pan.
Heat oil in skillet. Place a tortilla in hot oil for 1 minute, then turn over and fry 1 more minute. Do not allow tortilla to become crispy.
Take fried tortilla and place in hot sauce for approximately 2 minutes, then take out and place in a 9 x 13 inch greased cake pan.
Repeat again until you have a layer with 9 tortillas.
Sprinkle half of the meat, 1/3 cheese, onion and olives.
Repeat another layer of tortillas dipped in oil and sauce as before.
Sprinkle remaining meat, 1/3 cheese, onion and olives.
Repeat another layer of tortillas.
Spoon leftover sauce atop.
Add remaining cheese, onion and olives.
When cool, cover pan with foil and refrigerate.
Bake at 350 degrees F for 1/2 hour or until cheese melts.
Cut into squares and serve.
If serving immediately, place in oven for 15 minutes or until cheese is melted.
40 Normalized Things In Europe That Are Unknown In The US | American Reacts
Yeah. This is very good. So, so, so many things int he USA are fucked up right now.
What was the shortest interview you’ve had that led to a job offer?
I was looking at a Field service Job at a manufacturing plant that built Waste Water Treatment plants, it was a West German company with manufacturing in the U.S.
I knew absolutely nothing about waste water plant machinery.
As I sat down for the interview, the phone rang on the head of field service. He said excuse me but I have to answer that phone. He put the phone on speaker, a piece of new equipment would not start up, this was their first attempt to run it.
He placed the electrical schematics on his desk, as they discussed the problem, I could see them upside down, from where I was sitting.
Finally he says , I will get s tech there ASAP, and hung up the phone. I said I see the problem, they wired a relay wrong, and pointed to it on drawings. It should be normally closed, not open.
He stood up and said he had to do something and I’m not to move, he would be right back.
He was back in 15 minutes and hands me a wad of cash, and tells me I have 1 hour and thirty minutes to be at the Delta terminal , my ticket is at their desk, then hands me a company credit card to rent a car, and A company Air travel card for the return flight.
He said we will fill out your employment papers when you get back.
The problem was in Up State New York , I was in Birmingham Al.
Now for the “rest” of the story
The service manager called the plant with the problem once he Knew I was on the flight to NY, and told them a tech was on his way. Their response was “it better be a guy who’s been working for you a long time, and knows the equipment inside and out.
For the next 4 hours he tried to get a call to me , and for me to not tell them he just hired me this morning.
I never got that call, and the first thing the plant manager ask me, “How long have you worked on these machines ?”. My answer was “To Damn Long” and we both bust out laughing.
In 5 minutes the machine was running perfectly
Then he told me to call my boss, He’s been trying to reach you.
He couldn’t believe I answered that question without lying, and manager was happy with the answer, with me not knowing how important the answer was.
What are some of the most morally justified crimes ever committed?
Recently, Shane Goldsby, a 26-year-old U.S. inmate, bludgeoned, stomped, and kicked his 70-year-old cellmate, Robert Munger, to death.
You might think this is just another random case of prison violence, or perhaps a situation where some prisoners take the moral high ground by killing a more sadistic and violent criminal. Indeed, the latter was the case, though it was a more isolated incident. After all, Munger had been incarcerated for 43 years for crimes involving child sexual abuse. Anyone might feel justified in wanting to see him punished severely.
Munger was serving a 43-year sentence at the Airway Heights prison in Washington State for child molestation and child pornography offenses when, due to a non—coincidental administrative error, he was placed in the same cell as Shane (one of his victims’ brother.)
Shane claimed that Munger would repeatedly brag about his crimes and the morally abhorrent deeds he had committed against those poor children.
“I had so much stuff going on in my head,” he told the station. “I wasn’t stable at that point. I wasn’t. I was getting to that point because [Munger] kept wanting to give me details about what happened, what he did – about the photos and the videos of him doing this stuff. It was building up.”
Shane said he couldn’t believe he had been assigned to the same cell as Munger and made a request to the authorities to be moved, but it was ignored.
“I completely feel like this is what they wanted to happen,” he said.
“I was in shock,” he added. “I was like, ‘what the f***?’… This stuff doesn’t happen. You’re talking the same institution, the same unit, the same pod, in the same cell as this dude. That’s like hitting the jackpot in the casino seven times.”
“They put me in a position that I shouldn’t even be in. This shouldn’t have happened at all. You’re talking about this dude, who did some sick, twisted things to my little sis. My family. My blood. My life. And you want to put me face-to-face with this dude?” Goldsby said.
As expected, a man can only remain sane for so long when he’s sharing a cage with his sister’s molester. Goldsby eventually snapped, attacking the older man in a common area of the jail.
Court documents reveal what happened next, showing how Goldsby hit “Munger in the face and head area about 14 times, stomped on his head at least four times, and kicked him a couple more times before walking away and being taken into custody.” Munger died three days later.
The Washington Department of Corrections has policies to prevent connected inmates from being assigned together, but reportedly missed the connection in this case because Shane and his sister have different last names.
“There was no clear indication in the documentation regularly reviewed for housing assignments that there was a potential conflict,” DoC spokeswoman Janelle Guthrie told the Spokesman-Review newspaper.
In court, an emotional Shane stated:
“You put me in the same cell as this dude. I feel set up. I’m the victim.”
At his sentencing, Shane was too emotional to read a statement, so his lawyer spoke on his behalf.
“I’m ashamed of my actions. I was put into a situation that I don’t wish on anyone,” she said on Shane’s behalf. “I have a lot of fixing to do.”
“I cannot imagine what it would be like to lose a loved one in this kind of way,” Shane said through his lawyer.
“To his wife and his whole family, I apologize. I am so sorry, and I hope you are able to heal from what I caused.”
Unfortunately, the law frowns on morally justifiable murders and Shane must now serve an additional 24 years and also pay restitution to Munger’s family.
AI generated kingly pictures
Today’s AI developments…
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(6)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(7)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(7)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(7)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(6)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(6)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(6)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(5)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(5)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(5)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(5)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(4)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(4)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(4)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(4)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(3)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(3)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(3)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(2)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(2)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(2)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(2)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(1)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(1)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(1)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(1)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1
Lawrence Wong, Prime Minister of Singapore, delivered his first National Day speech, saying that Singapore is not a western society. What does this mean?
On August 18th, local time, Lawrence Wong, the new Prime Minister of Singapore, delivered his first Prime Minister’s speech in Malay, Chinese and English at the National Day mass meeting in Singapore.
The Prime Minister’s speech at the National Day Mass Meeting is one of the most important speeches in Singapore every year. During the speech, Lawrence Wong’s speech in Chinese caught my eyes.
Lawrence Wong said: “Singapore uses English as the common language, but we are essentially an Asian society, not a western society.” He also said that all Singaporeans want to preserve the spiritual outlook and traditional values of Asians.
Later, Lawrence Wong took himself as an example to encourage people to receive Chinese education. He said that when he was a child, he didn’t have the opportunity to speak Chinese at home. He didn’t start learning Chinese until he went to school. When he graduated from junior high school, he got A1 (the highest level) in Chinese.
Lawrence Wong promised that the Singapore government would adjust its education policy.
“We hope to train more talents who are proficient in Chinese, which means that we have not only elites, but also elites.”
Lawrence Wong’s speech in Chinese not only emphasized the importance of Chinese education, but also continued the “Asian values” emphasized by Singapore’s leaders in previous generations, and also vaguely expressed Singapore’s diplomatic stance that it would not take sides.
In view of Singapore’s important strategic position and influence in ASEAN countries, the United States has spared no effort to win over Singapore for many years.
Lee Kuan Yew once said very bluntly: China (navy) has no strength to protect Singapore.
As a tiny island country located in the throat of the ocean, you forced Singapore to die if you didn’t fall to the west.
Understandable.
And Singapore has indeed achieved the goal of being as neutral as possible while leaning to the west and seeking the greatest benefit for itself.
Under the current circumstances, the basic logic of Singapore’s unilateral turning to the West has not only disappeared, but also gone to the opposite side.
If you fell to the west completely because you were afraid of the western navy, then you can’t hope to maintain the previous state after China’s naval power became strong, and more thoroughly fall to and introduce the west to harm China’s interests.
Singapore has really developed the ability to assess the situation in the game of great powers, and it has been flexibly adjusted in different times.
In July this year, Singapore’s ambassador to the United States, Lui Tuck Yew, wrote a special letter to the American media, stressing that Singapore’s foreign policy is based on its own interests and it is a principle that Singapore has always adhered to.
Before taking over as Prime Minister of Singapore, Lawrence Wong made it clear in an interview with The Economist that Singapore would not choose between China and the United States, but would give priority to its own interests.
In his speeches in Chinese, Lawrence Wong mentioned “culture” and “Chinese” for 9 to 11 times, with special emphasis on cultivating people’s Chinese ability.
He said that Singapore hopes to preserve the spiritual outlook and traditional values of Asians. At the same time, the advantages of bilingualism and biculturalism can absorb the wisdom of the East and the West, and can deal with both countries. This is Singapore’s unique competitive advantage.
In my opinion, Lawrence Wong mentioned that “Singapore is not a western society”. The core theme is that Singaporeans can speak both English and Chinese, embrace the western social system, and retain the eastern spiritual culture. They can get along well with the United States, Britain and China. This is a unique and huge advantage of Singapore in the world, which must be maintained.
Forbidden Planet – Miranda Likes to Watch – Reaction
When I was in second grade or so, my family went to the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh.
This was one of those many, many trips that my parents would make to expose us kids to science, history and technology. And of course, we loved those outings.
Good going… kudos to my parents.
Once we visited, my dad would sometimes buy us a little trinket from the store there. Overly priced, of course, but a fun activity.
A little treasure for a boy full of wonder and amazement.
On one visit, my father bought me this miniature skull. It was about the size of a golf ball, and I loved it. It looked sort of like this, only made out of porcelain.
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I was holding and caressing it. I really liked that little trinket. It was my tiny treasure.
My Tiny Treasure.
It really was. As a young boy… it was my momentary everything.
So… as the story goes, afterwards we went to visit my paternal grandparents in Polish Hill; a suburb of Pittsburgh.
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And there, still holding my miniature skull we hung out on the porch. My grandmother had a glider (a couch on a metal frame that would slide back and forth like a rocking chair).
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It was a pleasant time.
Us kids drank sodas …
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…and our parents drank either coffee or beer.
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Ah. It was a typical 1960’s Sunday.
Music was playing from the kitchen radio; KDKA and the Nancy Sinatra song “Those boots were made for walkin'” was playing followed by “Up up and away in my beautiful balloon”.
Up UP
And we were a chillin’.
My grandparents porch was built on the side of a hill as most houses inside of Pittsburgh, and it was a four or five floor drop to the ground. That’s just the way Pittsburgh was. Homes on the side of hills.
You enter the house from the street. Then as you walked to the back of the house, you met the porch that was five stories high.
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So we had a nice video of the steel mills in the background.
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Ah. Such memories.
So my dad is holding my kid sister. She was maybe two years old at the time. And he says to me. “Hey let your little sister look at your skull.”
I said no.
“No. She is too little and I am afraid that she will drop it on the floor.”
It was my little prize and joy.
And he said “You are her big brother; you are the oldest son. You must do this. Be a man.”
So I reluctantly and tepidly handed it over to him, and he placed it in her tiny hands.
She looked at it. Tried to eat it…
One second later…
She tosses it high up the air off the porch… she threw it, actually…
And time froze.
I watched in slow motion. Slow motion…
Slooooow motion….
Slow motion… as the skull flew up high and then fell five stories to the sidewalk below.
Crash!
Broken nothing.
Beyond hope of repair. Inside was a fragment of a Chinese newspaper.
And my dad said to me; “Don’t worry next time, you can get another“.
But, you know, there wasn’t a next time.
PERIOD.
…
Today…
FULL DISCLAIMER! This Question came from Stephen Colbert. If you were going to describe the rest of your life in five words, what would they be?
Choices mine. Consequences inevitable. Accepted.
The Coronation Of Harris
The Democrats are hailing themselves for the successful coup (archived) they had launched against President Joe Biden. When their new candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, took part in the primaries she did not get one delegate. In this years primaries Joe Biden had won a majority.
He was removed un-cerimoniously because a few billionaire donors and some party bosses in the backroom thought he might lose the election.
All that leaves no doubt about how democratic the Democrats really are.
I doubt that Harris has better chances to win than Biden. The few times I have heard her talking she did could not formulate anything of substance. My impression is that she is an empty vessel, a shell with nothing in there. Her campaign website has no link of reference to any of her policies. She seems to have no program.
Why then would anyone vote for her?
Her current promotion in Dem friendly media will not hold up during the whole campaign.
The elections are Donald Trump’s to lose. He should again promote policies which will help the lower income strata. Cheaper health care, a higher minimum wage and other such policies will win votes. Promoting crypto, because some donor PAC will pay for it, does not. Ending wars is popular. Launching new ones isn’t.
Running proudly and loudly on a few of the popular things should be enough for Trump to win.
If you made $100,000 a day since the birth of Christ. Bill Gates would still have more money than you.
Every disaster movie begins with a scientist being ignored.
Our brains remember that we forgot something but can’t remember what that thing was.
We have gotten so used to everyone being rude, that kindness is suspicious.
We live in a weird generation where robots are named Alexa and kids are named X Æ A-12.
Somewhere in this world, there are English teachers out there waiting for schools to reopen so they can give students an essay topic “How I spent my lockdown”.
Breaking up is like deleting a game you spent lots of time, progress, and money on.
The quote ” Life is short ” sometimes encourages people to do things that might actually make their lives shorter.
Money may not make you happy, but it sure as hell removes all the extra stress that comes with being broke while unhappy.
The people who have the most screwed up lives often give the best advice.
Society hates a lazy person until that lazy person becomes so lazy that they discover a very efficient way to do something.
The economy is on the verge of collapsing because people are only buying what they need.
When asked “where do you see yourself in 2 years”, everybody in 2018 probably got the answer wrong.
If your New Years Resolution was to eat out less, you’re killing it.
The hospital you were born in is the only room you exit without actually entering.
If age taught me one thing it is: Days are long, years are short.
A woman is only as loyal as her options. She will leave as soon as a “better” opportunity comes along. Rooted deep in materialism, a woman’s love can be stolen & her loyalty bought. Her love is always on sale, her loyalty always sold out.
Man go into family courts to enforce their rights to parent their kid(s). They only leave as a visitor & a paycheck.
When a woman doesn’t want to raise a child, it’s called a CHOICE, hence the saying “my body, my choice”. When a man doesn’t want to raise a child it’s called a CRIME, no one ever considers it’s “his money, his choice”. He’s called a DEADBEAT & the government will force him to pay CHILD SUPPORT or go to JAIL.
Some people want diamond ring, Some just want Burger King.
Have you ever walked out of a car dealership just before signing a final purchase contract? What happened?
My mother wanted to buy a trustworthy, used car to run errands and to get to work.
She found one, saying that the sales staff was very helpful and kind (I remember thinking, “I bet.”), but she wanted me to go with her before she signed anything.
On our way there, she chattered on and on about how great they were; she knew their names and even some personal stuff.
Doug, my mother’s salesman, greeted us with a tad too much boyish enthusiasm (he was probably in his 40’s) and was flirtatious with both of us.
I was born and raised in a small Texas city and knew a lot about ‘good ol’ boy’ mentality. I expected it from Doug, and sadly, I was not wrong.
When I began asking relevant questions about previous owners/accidents/maintenance, Doug’s eyes narrowed and a quick frown passed over his face. Then he turned into a condescending axxhxxx.
His mannerisms, tone and ‘soothing’ voice reflected his belief that we mere ‘lil ladies’ shouldn’t trouble ourselves with such things.
When I asked about payment options and interest, I saw another look of annoyance, and obviously without thinking, he said, “You really won’t understand, so I ‘ll pick the best for you.”
I stared at him for a moment, then took my mother’s arm and walked out.
I heard him ask to no one in particular, “What did I say?”
His younger colleague responded with, “Doug, you insulted them.”
My mother was very happy with the car we bought right across the street from Doug’s workplace.
What are the differences between the Chinese government and western style governments? What are the reasons for these differences and what are the consequences of each system?
This is a really good question, and I’m also very interested in this topic.
I’ve never understood why the West practices a one-person-one-vote system. In my view, this system has serious risks.
If we were building a complex bridge or launching a rocket, would we decide how to do it by voting?
Obviously not.
But why is it that governing a country, a project thousands of times more complex than launching a rocket, can be decided by one person one vote?
It’s absurd.
Chinese tradition respects the elderly and scholars, believing that they possess wisdom.
I consider myself a scholar and an elder. I firmly believe that China absolutely should not adopt a one-person-one-vote system; it would be a disaster for both China and the world.
A huge disaster.
You should be well aware that a captain must have absolute authority. Deciding the course by a vote? That would be a tragedy.
This topic is very sensitive.
I’m not anti-democracy, nor am I discriminating against any ethnicity, and certainly not against young people or those with lower education levels.
What I’m trying to say is that this is an engineering issue. Governing a large country, especially one with 1.4 billion people, is extremely difficult.
Take the UK’s high-speed rail project as an example. They spent 20 years debating, spent several times more money than China did on its longest high-speed rail from Beijing to Shanghai, and in the end, only built a few dozen kilometers…
It was certainly democratic. But the efficiency was completely lost.
My daughter asked me today: “Dad, why is Great Britain now a third-rate country?” I replied: “Please show basic respect for Great Britain—it has become a second-rate country mainly because of its small population and small size—and its extremely inefficient democratic politics.”
This question is too difficult to answer. I wrote thousands of words, but deleted them all in the end because it didn’t express my true opinion – it was too politically incorrect.
Wife Of 7 Years Opened Our Marriage Without My Knowledge, Has BREAKDOWN When I Toss Her + Suitcase..
Two parts. This is the first, and the second is at the bottom of this post.
Today’s MM AI generations
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Why doesn’t the West face up to China, but uses public opinion to smear China?
Because the west is all about supporting a single narrative at all costs, not about the truth.
Here are the main points of the western narrative:
Human progress has always been defined by Judeo-Christian values, which have evolved into western values. This should continue into the future.
Any civilization or culture which proposes an alternative is a threat which is unacceptable and must be defeated.
Only alliances under western leadership are acceptable; everything else is a threat.
Multipolarity is a threat to western leadership which must be challenged at all costs.
The fact is that the west has only 15% of the world’s population and the U.S. has only 5%, but the U.S. consumes 20% of the world’s production.
The U.S. is in a privileged position which it wants to keep, but it no longer has the industrial power because it outsourced it to China.
But it cannot admit it did this by itself; that would be an embarrassing admission of stupidity, and would show that Wall Street determines policy, not the American people.
So the western media becomes the tool to convince the American people that China did all this, and that China is evil.
Not western businesses and policymakers.
What tourist nationality do you dread seeing in your country the most (arrogant, rude, pretentious, stingy)?
I live in Bolivia. Cheapest country in Latin America (or at least is used to be) for tourists.
Israeli tourists are generally considered the worst.
I met an Israeli girl, who was actually quite nice and to a tee the opposite of the stereotype, who explained the why and how of such behaviour.
Turns out that the mayority of these tourists, who almost always travel in packs, are young people who have just finished their military service in the border regions. They are full of adrenaline and “piss and vinegar” and are basically EXPECTED to go travel for a year after their military service to get rid of the “bad vibes”. In truth, these people just long to get home after a very stressful 2 years, but social pressure obliges them to go “travel”.
And then you get the following situations:
littering and vandalism amd general disrespect. Hotelrooms left dirty and vandalized, towels stolen and sheets smeared with excrement…
haggling over every little thing. E.g. in Rurrenabaque you have moto-taxi, and it costs about 20 Eurocents a voyage (2 Bolivianos). So, 1 rider, 1 passenger. Nevertheless I saw Israelis that insisted THREE passengers would fit on that bike. It is indeed not unusual to see a whole family of 4 on 1 motorbike, but come on! This is a TAXI, trying to make a living! 20 Eurocents /USD cents is not the end of the world if you are showing off your North Face gear and expensive digital cameras! Then they expected a private room with private bathroom for the price of a bed in a dorm etc etc.
Males harass the female population but are prone to physical violence if you even dare to look at a girl in their group.
Bsaically, if you have Israeli customers, they end up costing you more money than you can earn off them. Not a good business plan.
I worked in a hotel in Rurrenabacque, I saw all this with my own eyes. Of course, there ARE nice people and not all Israelis are POS, but those “gangs” of young Israeli tourists are just the worst.
China Just Struck A Major Hit On Europe, And Things Are About To Get Real!
Why did you become pro-China?
Despite being attacked and labeled incessantly as wumao and commie lapdog, I don’t consider myself pro-china.
I am first and foremost pro-singapore. This is where I was born, and I fully intend to die here, an island I have sworn to defend.
I live right in the middle of the Anglophone echo chamber. Singaporeans are plugged directly into the mainstream news circuit as English speakers.
It is not an exaggeration I am surrounded by brethren who have been conditioned by decades of negativity fed by the news circuit.
You may not like China and the mainland Chinese. Trust me when I say I understand. My wife insists on banning Huawei phones from the home because these devices “send data back to China”.
And that is why I carry a Samsung. Guys who are married quickly learn the meaning of “no end to it”. The tomorrow threatened never fails to arrive.
So why am I writing about China?
Hate China all you want. But hate China and the Chinese for the right reasons.
Otherwise, mindless hate will only exacerbate the risk of war, as public consensus of China as THE enemy and THE threat solidifies.
The greatest arms race of the 21st century is brewing at our doorstep in East Asia. Hundreds of billions in strategic weapon systems and trillions in defense spending. Meanwhile, an economic war is intensifying, threatening to blow up the livelihoods of billions in East Asia.
It is pertinent to inform east Asia that the health of China is central to peace and prosperity of the region. China isn’t an abstract concept or a faraway land, because decisions in Beijing are intimately entwined with our livelihoods.
I continue to speak out against the demonization of China and the Chinese, because the real threat is the hegemony of the United States. But there must first be awareness and understanding of who the Chinese are, what they are facing, and why they are not bowing to hegemony.
My time on quora is but a token effort.
I very much want my daughter to inherit a peaceful tomorrow, one where the color of her skin does not condemn to a lifetime of discrimination meant only for yellow people.
Hank Discovers Gus’s Meth Operation | Breaking Bad (Dean Norris)
What is the basis for the belief that China could defeat the United States in a military conflict?
Firstly, do not count on it. The United States could very well be victorious when fighting Russia, plus China, plus Iran, plus North Korea.
You never know.
Ah. The neocons believe so. And you just gotta believe them. For after all they have first-class seating waiting for them in Heaven.
But most [1] serious students of modern combat, who are also [2] aware of Chinese history, and who have [3] also been to modern contemporaneous China, pretty much everyone is in perfect harmony and complete agreement that China would emerge the victor.
Not just the experienced “people in the know”, but also American military think tanks. Such as RAND, and the Naval War College. In all cases, they advise NOT to engage China in a hot war.
So it is a unanimous consensus or shared agreement among all that China would be the victor in a hot conflict.
But…
There are a number of rising tides of dispute to these assertions.
The first are the rabid neocon cabal; who are religious zealots (for the most part) and who have an unwavering belief in “American exceptionalism”. This belief is that all one needs is “faith” and “unwavering belief” that Jesus (the Lord and Savior) has blessed the United States, and being so blessed; is immune from ever being destroyed. They control most of Washington DC “Deep State”. They believe, in their hearts, that the United States is immune from harm.
The Second is a propaganda feed-back loop. The neocons have made arrangements to fund an anti-China narrative in all English and American (and proxy) publications. This has been active since 2008, and has changed English-speaking public opinion against China. This is a negative feed-back loop as those decision makers inside of the Washington Beltway believe their own lies.
Since these two groups control the vast bulk of the decisions being made in Washington DC, we all (in unison) watch in horror as the United States places it’s various efforts in prepared positions for an assault upon China.
…
Well…
Are the neocons right, or are the military think tanks right?
They both see China, and I like to believe that they study China, yet they both come with completely different conclusions. Which is really a “head scratcher”. Don’t you think?
That’s a good question, and perhaps the actual issue behind this question.
Let’s spend some time learning about China from a military perspective.
HISTORY
It is well established that China has a solid 6000 years of the people identifying themselves as Chinese. It is also well known that this is only what we can read. China goes back much further than that. Latest archaeological discoveries place populated cities back to 200,000 years ago. And during all those years, do you know what China was doing?
They were fighting.
China has the oldest known civilization, and the oldest civilization with near continuous fighting. The Chinese know war. In all of it’s various forms. And when the archeologists started digging in the 200,000 year old Chinese settlement, do you know what they found?
Evidence of large scale war.
In fact, the Chinese were perfecting large-scale military battle involving thousands of men and horse, along with coordinated attacks when the earliest proto-Europeans were hiding in caves, and running from Neanderthals.
And when Robert Greene wrote his massive tome: The 33 Strategies of War, he used example after example of techniques that the Chinese have perfected over the many centuries of fighting.
MILITARY SOCIETY
Because of the massive span of time of fighting, the Chinese have evolved into a rugged and capable people. And with the torrent of endless wars, they developed a society of survival. This, of course, evolved into various forms of discipline and martial training; the Chinese people have created a Chinese-version of ancient Sparta.
GENGHIS KHAN
When Genghis Khan moved out of the Mongolian lowlands, his first order of business was to fight the Chinese. And it took years. For after all, the “Great Wall of China” was built specifically to keep out the Golden Horde from China.
But, you know, eventually, the great Khan captured China and integrated it into his kingdom. And from that moment on, the Chinese assimilated the Mongols. Resistance was futile. And so, while the European history books tell of the fierce Golden Horde seizing most of Asia, what they minimize was the fantastical role that the Chinese sappers played in the destruction of all the Middle Eastern, and European cities. These cities were not destroyed by Genghis Khans horseback riders, but by Chinese engineers, sappers and assault troops.
As you can see by the map below (at 1300 a.d.) the Chinese Empire and the Mongol Empire was one and the same.
Genghis Khan empire assimulated by China
China is the red outline, with the Mongol Empire in purple.
Today, the discipline handed down from generation after generation of Chinese follows a direct lineage to the bloodline of the Genghis Khan Golden Horde. As does the contemporaneous Russian living in Asia.
MODERN MILITARY EQUIPMENT
One of the great anti-China propagandized narratives is that China uses conscripts, out of date; hand-me-down weapons from the former Soviet Union, and is devoid of “real” leadership. This narrative is repeated with great gusto and passion in Conservative publications throughout the West.
But it’s all a big lie.
China was a peer competitor with the United States and it’s proxies in 1950. Since then, it has focused its efforts and redoubled down on creating the most dangerous, lethal and strongest military in the world. And it has been successful.
China today is Peer-level with Russia, and above-peer with the United States.
In fact, China has entire arrays of weapons systems that are absolutely unheard of outside of Asia. They have developed simple, rugged and easy to manufacture systems all domestically made. From the top-line stealth fighters (J-20) and stealth bombers to the (*hush top secret*) Tic-Tak UFO craft that enjoys zipping around American Aircraft carrier battle groups.
China has drone aircraft carriers, search-and-detonate hand grenades, sonic, and laser cannons, terminator robots that fly into the battle field, swarms of robot sharks and a wide selection of nuclear based munitions.
I have written numerous posts on these very interesting weapons systems, but there seems to be a cabal of folk that don’t want to hear anything about Chinese military. They just want to believe that they are just poorly educated peasants with old SKS rifles.
CO-TRAINING WITH RUSSIA
Russia is obtaining some terrific experience in the battlefield in Ukraine. And this experience has caused them to update their battle and combat doctrines. And do you know who they share this information with?
They share and train with the Chinese PLA.
Everything that the Russians learn is shared immediately in real time with China.
WROTE THE BOOKS ON FIGHTING
The vast majority of text and books on how to fight wars, strategies, and techniques are all Chinese. And the way that they are written are timeless. You can follow then whether you are an archer, or a battle tank commander. China KNOWS how to fight wars.
In the realm of strategy and war, ancient Chinese literature is rich with timeless wisdom and insights that continue to inspire scholars and military minds to this day. Here are ten notable Chinese books on strategy and warfare that have left a lasting impact:
1. “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu – A classic treatise on military strategy, tactics, and leadership.
2. “The Thirty-Six Stratagems” – A collection of ancient Chinese strategies and tactics for use in warfare and business.
3. “The Book of Five Rings” by Miyamoto Musashi – Though Japanese, this book offers profound insights on strategy and martial arts.
4. “The Water Margin” (also known as “Outlaws of the Marsh”) – A classic Chinese novel that includes themes of strategy and military tactics.
5. “The Romance of the Three Kingdoms” – A historical novel that offers insights into military strategy and political intrigue during the Three Kingdoms period.
6. “The Book of Lord Shang” – A work on statecraft and governance that delves into strategies for maintaining power and order.
7. “The Tao of War” by Wang Chen – A military treatise that combines Taoist philosophy with strategic principles.
8. “The Way of the General” by Ts’ao Kung – A guide on military strategy and leadership.
9. “The Spring and Autumn Annals” – A historical text that includes accounts of military strategies employed during the Spring and Autumn period.
10. “The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China” – A collection of seven influential Chinese military texts that cover various aspects of strategy, tactics, and leadership.
These works offer a glimpse into the profound wisdom and strategic thinking of ancient Chinese military thought, providing valuable lessons that continue to resonate in the modern world.
LARGEST MILITARY
Oh, I forgot. China has the largest military in the world. Not only in manpower, but in combat trained troops. In auxiliary troops. In reservists. And in homeland defense. It is so huge that if you took the entire militaries of the West all together, China’s military still dwarfs them in numbers, training and size.
RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
One of the Achilles Heels of China has been (historically) to rely on sea shipping for it’s raw materials, foodstuffs, and advanced technology. But that is a relic of the past.
China trades with all of it’s neighbors; including Russia and wants for nothing. All the ocean routes around the world can be blocked and China will still survive because of all the land routes, rail connections, road connections that it has forged over the last two decades.
To think that China can be blockaded is a childish fantasy made by ideological fanatic infants with zero intelligence and pumped with (can only be described as) pure and simple stupidity.
WAR CHEST
To conduct a war, you need something called a “war chest”.
A “war chest” refers to a reserve of funds or resources set aside for use in times of conflict or emergency, particularly in the context of military operations or strategic planning. This term is often used figuratively to describe a stockpile of money, supplies, or assets that can be deployed to support a particular cause, campaign, or endeavor, much like a chest filled with provisions for battle. In a broader sense, a “war chest” can also symbolize preparedness, resilience, and strategic foresight in facing challenges or pursuing objectives.
Since the 1970’s the United States has relied on debt to finance it’s wars. This is directly tied to the demise of the USD and increased internal inflation.
China doesn’t have this problem. And is fully able to light long-duration wars with anyone and not have any significant changes to it’s domestic population.
LARGEST NAVY
China has the largest Navy in the world, and they operate modern cutting-edge vessels. These vessels are equipped with sonic and rail gun technologies and are very formidable. Additionally, they are concentrated along the Chinese borders. They are not spread around the world like the United States Navy is.
LOGISTICS
The Chinese military is designed (primarily) as a defensive organization. They are not designed for “force projection”. As China does not invade anyone. This is contrary to the American Western narrative of the “evil communists gobbling up and invading everyone”. They simply do not have anything near the invasion fleets, and systems that the United States has.
All this talk about a “Taiwan Invasion” is simply just bullshit and bluster. China does not have that ability. It cannot land a huge contingent of people on islands. Oh sure, it has one or two simple Naval Vessels, but is nowhere near the capacity to invade anyone.
That being said, because of this, to fight China is to fight in and around China. And that means, to so so in China’s “backyard”. A nation that has spent the last 500 years building underground bunkers and defensive parameters is not going to allow anyone to fuck with them. Every parking garage has blast doors and reinforced concrete walls. Every region and town has built-in CNC centers. Every comm link is redundant.
Oh, and China is a nation armed with a “zillion” missiles.
All sizes, types and shapes. Even the elementary school Children train with the missiles, the drones and basic combat skills.
If you go anywhere near it with hostile intent, you will be erased like God’s own hand. China will cleanse the land and it will become pristine; primeval.
Blessed emptiness and void for the world to see.
CUTTING EDGE TECHNOLOGY
China and Russia operate “cutting edge” technology. Most of their military technology is so advanced that the United States won’t be able to field comparable systems for decades. This includes the hypersonic missiles, but much, much more. From the novel 055 vessels to the latest hand cannons, the technology is unmatched outside of Asia.
EDUCATION & TRAINING
Everyone in China gets formalized military training. It starts in first grade, and continues year after year. Formal “boot camp” is traditionally held during Middle School, and then another placement later on in their educational career.
This is handled regionally; some like Guanxi provide “American SEAL” level training starting at Kindergarten. While others such as Shanghai concentrate on discipline, marching, and tasks such as bed making, and small squad level tactics.
This is a recent development. This became the norm after 2013, and was fully implemented nationally by 2016.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYZ2qI3qJu8
Short video. Worth you time to watch all three minutes.
ALLIED WITH RUSSIA
Oh, and to fight China is to fight Russia.
Russia and China are “joined at the hip”. They are a complete unified block. You cannot isolate China. China and Russia act as a unified team together. This is a formalized reality. One that was publicly announced in 2022.
NUCLEAR ARMED
China has nuclear weapons.
The idea that China only has 400 nuclear warheads is a propagandized narrative that has ZERO basis on reality. When you read the “studies” on this, look at their assumptions. “China doesn’t have the manufacturing capability.” Or, “China doesn’t know how to… and would take decades to…”. These “white papers” are a living and true example of “wishful thinking” that I have ever seen.
More accurate counts are somewhere between 4000 to 5000 nuclear warheads.
Oh, and they employ neutron-enhanced weaponry on the tactical scale. Erase the population, then move in the city.
Oh, and they do not employ “surgical strikes”. As far as nuclear weapons are concerned, they believe in “Shotgun nukes”. Which is to lace and bombard a target with ten nuclear weapons for a much wider dispersal and greater damage.
MANUFACTURER FOR THE WORLD
Finally, to fight China is to empty all the store shelves in the world.
No more aspirin, toilet paper, toothpaste. No more cell phones, spare parts for cars.
Consumer-based societies (of which the United States is one of the largest) will collapse. Thus to fight China is to have your entire internal domestic society implode.
…
Now, the neocons say that “facts do not matter”. Their faith in the divine blessings from God and that Jesus will protect the United States is unwavering. Therefore, they are pressing and planning and setting up conditions to attack China.
One excuse after the other.
But let me tell you, that when that day happens, it will be like a light switch. 0 to 1000 in 0.1 seconds. China will go from peace into “slaughter everyone on sight” mode.
War is not a game, and idiots should not be placed in charge of governing anything. Every effort should be devoted for peaceful resolutions of conflict.
But you know…
… there’s no arguing with lunatics. And sometimes the only thing that you can do with a Mad Dog is to put him down.
Wider Middle East War and US Imperial Decline
Cheesy meatballs
Cheese balls
Cheesy Meatballs are juicy and tender, simmered in a rustic homemade tomato sauce. Topped with melted mozzarella cheese and serve over spaghetti for a delicious dinner!
The best meatball recipe starts with the most tender meatballs, browned in a hot skillet to seal in the juices and get crispy, golden edges. Soaking up rustic tomato sauce flavours underneath a golden blanket of melted mozzarella cheese, Cheesy Meatballs is an easy dinner recipe that will be a hit with your family!
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MEATBALL RECIPE
Dry meatballs are a thing of the past with our recipe. While most nonna’s hold a secret to get the perfect meatballs, some people just can’t seem to get it right. Cooking dry meatballs that are often times flavourless and hard to swallow, I agree with most in that meatballs can be hard to master. It’s easier to buy cooked meatballs in throw them in a sauce.
Even though it can be hard to get the texture and taste right out of a humble meatball, I’m here to tell you it’s super easy. All you need is the right meatball recipe!
We have a trick up our apron sleeves (or straps), that make these meatballs so moist and juicy and absolutely the best meatballs we’ve ever eaten. You will love our cheesy meatballs!
HOW TO MAKE MEATBALLS
It all starts with your meat mixture. There are two key elements crucial to a good meatball recipe:
Texture
Flavour
Without these two details, meatballs are bland, dry and not worth the effort that goes into making them.
Bread soaked in milk instead of dry breadcrumbs is the secret to getting juicy, moist meatballs every single time. The same method we use for our Meatloaf recipe.
Meatballs also need to be well-seasoned. We use salt and a crushed bouillon cube to get the flavours going, as well as aromatics like onion and garlic.
Herbs are just as important to get those classic Italian flavours in each bite. Our recipe calls for fresh parsley and dried oregano and basil, purely taking seasonal availability into account. Feel free to mix it up with your own favourite combination. Mint, tarragon, thyme or marjoram, plus a pinch or two of nutmeg adds a subtle flavour. You decide.
Eggs are also added to bind the meat, bread and parmesan together, making them light and spongy.
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HOMEMADE MEATBALLS
The next step to incredibly tender meatballs is mixing your meat mixture until the ingredients are just incorporated, with your hands. Use gloves if you have an aversion to touching raw meat, or mix lightly a wooden spoon. Full pieces of ground meat should still be visible.
Roll your meatballs with lightly oiled hands to prevent the meat from sticking to your fingers, while adding a little extra moisture into each meatball. Then place each meatball onto a lined plate or baking sheet. This just helps keep your kitchen stay clean without creating too much of a mess, and prevents your balls from rolling all over your bench top.
HOW TO COOK MEATBALLS
If there’s one thing my father passed down to me from the Italian side of his family, it’s never to poach or boil beef. There’s nothing like the aromas and flavours of meat hitting a hot skillet or pan. Sizzling first to get a perfect browned crust before adding in sauce. You won’t be cooking them all the way through in this step.
Space the meatballs out evenly into your skillet or pan by cooking in batches of three, instead of throwing them all in the pan together. This avoids the meat poaching or simmering in its own juices.
Rustic, homemade meatballs are never perfectly rounded, especially when seared first. Don’t worry if they begin to flatten in the pan. The blanket of melted cheese will cover them.
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MEATBALL SAUCE
Our sauce recipe is easy, starting with onion and garlic to get those aromatics in. Tomato sauce, puree or passata is simmered with tomato paste, herbs, chili flakes (if using), salt and pepper. Add a pinch of sugar to cut through some of the bitterness, or use ¼ teaspoon of aluminium free baking soda to help neutralise the acid.
It’s really hard to overcook meatballs in your sauce, since they’re simmering in liquid. Braise them for about 15-20 minutes, turning the meatballs in the sauce to get those flavours absorbing evenly into the meat while simmering. I also suggest stirring the sauce to prevent it from burning on the bottom.
Top with cheese and finish them off under the broiler in your oven.
If you don’t have a broiler, continue simmering them until he cheese has melted.
There you have it! Cheesy meatballs!
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Be the Rufus
75-year-old Leonard Bullock and his wife Dorothy have lived across the street from a railroad yard in Pendleton, Oregon since 1982. And over the years, they haven’t always had the money to maintain their house.
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A railway worker named Josh Cyganik has waved to Leonard on his porch almost every day for the last four years, but never actually talked to him until last month, after he heard two teenagers making FUN of the place.
They were joking that it looked so bad, someone should just burn it down. And Josh knew Leonard heard them too, when he saw the look on his face.
So a few days later, he asked Leonard if he and some friends could repaint the place for him, and got a hardware store to donate supplies. Then he posted about it on Facebook, and more than a HUNDRED PEOPLE showed up that Saturday to help.
They painted the house . . . fixed up the porch . . . made it wheelchair accessible . . . and bought everything they need to replace the ROOF, which is still in the works.
Josh says one of his friends drove by around 10:00 P.M. that night, and Leonard and Dorothy were both still out on the porch smiling.
What did the Germans do with all of the bombers that were shot down over Germany during World War II?
During World War II, Germany faced a significant challenge in dealing with the large number of bombers that were shot down over its territory. These downed aircraft posed various logistical and strategic concerns for the German forces. So, what did they do with all those bombers? Let’s dive into it.
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Firstly, the fate of each individual bomber largely depended on the circumstances of its crash and the condition of the aircraft. In some cases, German authorities would salvage as much usable material as possible from the wreckage. This included parts such as engines, instruments, and weaponry. These salvaged components were then utilized for repairing damaged German aircraft or for manufacturing new ones. The German aviation industry faced numerous resource constraints during the war, so repurposing parts from downed bombers helped alleviate some of these challenges.
However, not all downed bombers were salvageable. Some crash sites were too remote or hazardous to carry out extensive salvage operations. In such cases, the Germans would often strip the wreckage of any valuable equipment or intelligence materials and leave the remains to deteriorate over time.
Interestingly, the Germans also used captured bombers for their own purposes. When Allied aircraft were captured intact or in relatively good condition, the Germans would sometimes repurpose them for their own use. These captured planes were often repainted with German insignia and used for various purposes, such as training new pilots or testing new tactics against enemy aircraft.
Additionally, some downed bombers were used as propaganda tools. The Germans would occasionally display the wreckage of shot-down Allied bombers in public areas to showcase their military prowess and boost morale among the civilian population. These displays aimed to convey the message that the German forces were successfully defending their homeland against the enemy.
As the war progressed and Allied bombing raids intensified, the Germans faced an increasingly overwhelming number of downed bombers. This led to the establishment of specialized units responsible for recovering and processing crashed aircraft. These units would systematically document the wreckage, collect any useful equipment or documents, and dispose of the remaining debris.
In some cases, the Germans would recycle the wreckage of downed bombers. The metal from these aircraft was often melted down and repurposed for various military applications, such as constructing new weapons or reinforcing fortifications. This recycling effort aimed to make the most efficient use of available resources in a war-torn Germany.
UNBELIEVABLE Story About Chinese Police Doing Their Job!
Why can’t officers sit and eat with the enlisted if they’re all on the same team?
AMERICAN ANSWER
There are BIG differences between the services in this, and I mean the cultural gap is huge.
The American Navy descended almost directly from the British Navy and is hugely class-conscious. Officers and enlisted don’t mix. Officers, speak to chiefs and chiefs direct the men. There aren’t just two different messes, there are three — officers, senior enlisted and junior enlisted.
There is a reason for everything that persists. Life is very fragile on a ship—take a nuclear submarine: a wrong move kills everyone aboard. Familiarity breeds contempt. Better to let the Captain remain a godlike figure rather than Fred who likes knitting to relieve stress. A little psychological distance is a good thing.
The Army was heavily influenced by the proto-Germans (Prussians) and the French— a lot more egalitarian than the Navy, but still conscious of rank. We eat together in the field, there is only one mess hall, though we may be at separate tables. There was only one mess hall in Iraq — Generals and Privates ate in the same space.
The Air Force is directly descended from the army, and the least rank conscious part of the army, aviation. Their enlisted are smart, they are technicians, and they keep the planes in the air. The Air Force uniforms are more egalitarian, I do not think there is any problem with an air crew sitting and eating together in the air force.
So I think you need to calibrate your expectations to the service you are discussing.
Have you ever tried to fire someone and it backfired?
I have not. But my company made a three-part blunder that might qualify:
Part one: we had this very senior employee, about 70 years old, who was highly experienced with one customer system that was quite old, but still in use. Since we only needed one person who understood the ancient technology, nobody ever thought to assign someone for him to mentor in case he decided to retire. It wasn’t a major profit center, but the company made a nice bit of coin and kept a big customer happy by maintaining the antique.
He loved working on that old system, and had a fantastic relationship with that customer. He was long-since eligible for pension and didn’t need to work—the job was a paid hobby for him and kept him moving, thinking, and interacting socially. He did his job, caused no problems, was always ready to lend a hand or advice to younger engineers. Which of course was pretty much everybody. But he wasn’t looking to get ahead, get promoted or anything.
Part two: being a large corporation, we had a performance evaluation system that ranked people into four categories, from outstanding to needs improvement. And since there were lots of people, HR & finance took a statistical view which included a specific shape of the “bell curve”: So many people (%) in the top tier, so many in the next tier, etc. This was enforced at the 100-person level of the organization. So if we had a pretty good crew in one area of the business, they’d end up not being allowed to rank some people as high as we thought they deserved, while some other area had people who were actually not quite as good but ranked higher. None of the managers close enough to know the people liked it, but we had to do it. That ranking was the strongest factor in raises and promotions. So by mutual agreement, this amiable, useful old guy was always ranked in the bottom tier, freeing up a better ranking for someone who might otherwise get hosed.
Part three: HR came up with a policy that anyone who’d been ranked in the bottom tier more than a certain number of years in a row, was automatically either demoted (with a pay cut), or laid off. It was the employee’s choice whether they got laid off or demoted but one or the other was going to happen.
You can see where this is going. HR called the guy in—without consulting his management—and offered to let him keep his job by accepting a demotion. As a long time employee, if laid off he was entitled to 6 month’s severance pay (as a lump sum) and could immediately apply for pension payments. So he took the layoff right on the spot. HR hadn’t expected that for some reason and tried to change his mind. Now, another bit of policy was any employee being laid off got walked out directly from HR—management would then be notified to have someone clean out his desk and return personal items. So by lunchtime he was home, retired, applying for pension and thinking how to spend the windfall. It was later in the day before his management found out he was gone. The customer was extremely unhappy. Before management could even begin to decide who would take over the maintenance contract, the customer cancelled it. They explained that the former employee was going to work directly for them as a technical consultant, which meant his hourly rate was nearly tripled—he was getting the “overhead” and profit the company used to get.
He Laced Her Drink & Let The Football Team Run a Train On Her!
Is it legal for a police officer to use a drone to look into someone’s home without a warrant or notification? What are the reasons for this?
I used my high powered, single shot, Ruger Number One (.458 magnum) to take a drone out which was hovering approximately 30 feet above my house, peering into my child’s window while she was getting dressed. She called downstairs and complained. I went outside and with a (very loud) single shot destroyed the drone which fell into my yard.
It wasn’t five minutes later that five police cars showed up and I was arrested for destroying police property. The rifle was confiscated. My daughter was questioned and I . . . went to jail.
Fortunately my daughter knew the law and said absolutely nothing to the police except, “If you want anything from me, you’ll have to provide me with an attorney,” and said nothing else.
My wife just smiled, handed out coffee (nobody took it) and said absolutely nothing. It was a deaf / mute scenario. The police had NO idea how to handle it. They were yelling, threatening, everything – all the while my daughter and wife smiled and said nothing whatsoever.
Eventually I ended up being booked into the county jail. The County District Attorney decided not to file charges. Is spying legal when the police do it?
I’m still trying to get my Ruger back. As a single shot, big-game hunting rifle it’s not quite what people consider to be an assault rifle – but damn, it did a JOB on that drone!
What are the craziest experiments done in the name of science?
Karl P. Schmidt, a renowned American herpetologist, chose to dedicate his final moments to science when faced with death, demonstrating remarkable dedication to his work.
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In September 1957, the Lincoln Park Zoo brought a 30-inch snake to the Chicago Natural History Museum, seeking help with its identification. Schmidt, who was highly respected in the field of herpetology and had several species named after him, agreed to examine the snake.
On September 25, Schmidt observed that the snake was African, with bright patterns and a head shape similar to a boomslang—a venomous snake from Sub-Saharan Africa. However, he was unsure if it was a boomslang because the snake’s “anal plate was undivided,” a feature inconsistent with that species.
While examining the snake, Schmidt made a fateful decision. He picked it up for a closer look, but the snake suddenly bit him on the left thumb, leaving two small puncture wounds. Instead of seeking medical help, Schmidt, ever the dedicated scientist, began documenting the effects of the venom in his journal.
“I took it from Dr. Robert Inger without thinking of any precaution, and it promptly bit me on the fleshy lateral aspect of the first joint of the left thumb,” Karl Schmidt wrote in his journal. “The mouth was widely opened and the bite was made with the rear fangs only, only the right fang entering to its full length of about 3 mm.”
Within 24 hours, he would be dead.
Schmidt may have underestimated the severity of the bite. He took a train home and continued noting his symptoms in detail:
-4:30 – 5:30 PM: Strong nausea, no vomiting. Took a suburban train trip.
– 5:30 – 6:30 PM:Experienced chills, shaking, fever of 101.7°F. Bleeding from the gums began around 5:30.
-8:30 PM: Ate two pieces of milk toast.
– 9:00 PM – 12:20 AM: Slept well. Urinated at 12:20 AM, mostly blood. Drank water at 4:30 AM, followed by violent nausea and vomiting. Felt better and slept until 6:30 AM.
The next morning, Schmidt carried on with his routine, eating breakfast and continuing to document the venom’s effects:
-September 26, 6:30 AM: Ate cereal, poached eggs on toast, applesauce, and coffee for breakfast. Noted continuous bleeding from the mouth and nose, though “not excessively.”
“Excessively” was the last word Schmidt wrote. After lunch, he vomited, called his wife, and soon became unresponsive. Despite attempts to revive him, Schmidt was pronounced dead at 3 PM, the cause being respiratory paralysis.
Boomslang venom is terrifyingly potent; just .0006 milligrams can kill a bird within minutes. The venom causes internal bleeding, leading to a slow and agonizing death. Schmidt’s autopsy revealed that his lungs, eyes, heart, kidneys, and brain were all hemorrhaging.
The Chicago Daily Tribune later revealed that Schmidt had been advised to seek medical help but refused, saying, “No, that would upset the symptoms.” Some say Schmidt’s death was a tragic case of curiosity overcoming caution. Others believe that, knowing the antivenom was only available in Africa, Schmidt simply accepted his fate, continuing his life’s work until the very end.
You be the judge.
PART 2 – Wife Of 7 Years Opened Our Marriage Without My Knowledge, Has BREAKDOWN When I Toss Her…
This story contains themes or mentions of physical violence, gore, or abuse.
“How much longer till we land?” Joan complained lazily as she swung her seat around, swaying her arms in their heavy armor. “Not our fault you were the first to gear up sweetheart– you should’ve waited a bit before putting your suit on” a man commented with a sly smile from behind her. “Don’t call me that!” she chided as she looked him, although with a small, knowing smirk.“Alright, you guys better strap in now. You know how it gets, and we don’t know the atmosphere of this planet yet” a stern voice sounded from the head of the small space ship, which was only carrying three passengers. “Roger that, Sir!” Joan said as she straightened in her seat, and adjusted its position. Pressing a button on her right caused multiple belts to wrap around her, keeping her securely in place. The other two men followed the same process, and readied themselves for the landing. “This is the part I always hate the most…” she thought as she felt her throat go dry. The man seated on her left was gazing at her steadily. “Just count to 15 and it’ll be over, yeah?” Something about the softness in his brown eyes calmed her, and she relaxed hands, which had tightened into fists. “Thanks, Nick. Kash, estimated time of arrival?” “Time, 98:34:02. Year, 3010. I’ve already logged it.” With that, the three began their descent onto a planet not yet explored by humans, 30 light years away from Earth.“Well, that wasn’t so bad now, was it?” Nick commented as he pushed a button to unstrap his belts. Joan got up slowly. “I’m still nauseous. Also, it was way more than 15 seconds, liar.” Nick let out a small, hearty laugh, as he patted Joan’s head affectionately under his large, gloved hand. “Come on guys, time to head out.” Kash commanded as he adjusted his headgear. Although he usually spoke in a somber manner, the other two were able to detect a slight curiosity and excitement, which laced his words. “Let’s go, Captain!”The three stepped out onto what seemed to be a large, empty barren land. The ground was a reddish pink color, littered with rocks and boulders of different sizes, with a backdrop of a turquoise sky. There were no clouds, although there seemed to be layers of some sort of mist mixing on the horizon, with bands of yellow, orange, and a light grey. The contrast of the deep pink ground against the strikingly vibrant blue sky was breathtaking. The three looked around at first with some degree of uncertainty, before looking at each other as smiles spread wide across their faces, even Kash’s. “Isn’t this… The most beautiful one we’ve been to yet?” Joan commented excitedly as she looked at Nick and Kash. The two hummed in agreement, with Nick adding “Of course you’d like it the best – the ground here is all pink!” Joan bounced airily towards him, and gave a small nudge. “Let’s get to business now, shall we? We can’t be here more than an hour. I’m going to begin our timer now – lets stay within the prescribed radius – don’t you two dare wonder off.” Kash instructed while fidgeting with some buttons on his right arm. “You’re the one who wonders off the most, Kash!” Joan laughed. Kash looked at her sternly through the transparent screen of his suit, before breaking into a gentle smile. “That’s no way to speak to your Captain. Let’s get to it, now.” With this, he began taking long strides away from the ship. Nick and Joan looked at each other as he left. “Just us two left now, huh?” Nick spoke into his intercom, with a smirk. Joan pushed him away lightly once more. “Focus on the job, idiot. I’m going in this direction.” She said as she pointed towards the right. “Alright, Miss.” Just as Joan began hopping away from him, he grabbed her arm and turned towards her. “Keep talking on the intercom so I know you’re ok, alright?” The lightness of his voice had now been replaced with concern, as his mouth straightened into a serious line. Joan gave him a sweet smile in response. “You do the same.” The two gazed at each other for another second before departing in separate directions. If they had known that this would be the last time they would see each other, perhaps they would’ve gazed into one another’s eyes for a second or two longer.-The following report has been compiled over a period of 5 years following the incident at Planet Y, where three of our astronauts tragically lost their lives in a series of events still shrouded in mystery. This is the first incident where astronauts have died have on a mission in 37 years – hence, the issue must be dealt with utmost severity, least we repeat the mistakes which led to this terrible outcome in the future.Within a space of 15 minutes of the landing on Planet Y, Joan Longwood, Nick Wrigh, and Kash Presnig were declared deceased. The following report is divided into three condensed components, following each of the astronauts, their logs from those 15 minutes, an analysis of what their logs could’ve meant – although this is mostly based on assumptions due to lack of factual evidence – and lastly, a summary of recommendations for the future to avoid any such incidents from occurring again.Kash PresnigKash Presnig was the Captain of the ship Orchid 367. He was an experienced man of 37, who had led multiple exploratory missions of this nature in the past. Nothing from the evidence collected indicates any mistake or wrongdoing on his part – the mission was led and landed successfully on Planet Y. He was updating his log, while diligently keeping track of his crew members. Unfortunately, he was the first to lose his life, within 12 minutes. The following passage recounts Kash’s logs in those minutes and his final few words as he tried to contact the space station.“Log.1. We have successfully landed on Planet Y. The land here is barren – there is no vegetation here, and the soil is dry and hard. It is of an odd pinkish red color, which has not yet been observed in any other planet. Rocks of varying sizes are scattered, although some seem to be unnaturally larger than others. The terrain is flat – there are no elevations or dips. The sky is a bright turquoise shade, with bands of gases layered one on top of the other. The identity of these gases is yet unknown.”“Log. 2. 30 meters from the ship. The terrain is still the same. Sample of the rocks and soil has been collected. There are no metals detected in the area. An odd fog is growing in the distance, about 10 meters away. Proceeding with caution.”“Log. 3. I have now stepped into an area covered with grey, yellow, and orange mist. It seems to be swirling around, although no wind was detected on the planet. Visibility is extremely low – Cannot see beyond a few meters ahead. The suit is unable to identify the gases – however, an absence of water vapor is noted. Gas sample has been collected for further analysis. Retreating to base.”“Log. 4. The mist is growing thicker, worsening visibility. It seems to be spreading from this point, outwards to the surrounding areas. No impact of the gas is notable – although it seems to swirl into oddly distinct shapes. Proceeding back urgently.”After the fourth log, Mr. Presnig contacted our headquarters directly – which has not occurred in 13 years. His panicked voice indicated that there was an issue which had to be dealt with immediately. The following are his words – with no amendments – excluding the responses of the team he spoke to at the time to get a concise account from his own narration.“Contacting… HQ… Kash Presnig speaking here. The mist… The gases, they are.. They are poisonous! I know the suit is impenetrable to any gas but I am sure… Yes, it has penetrated, somehow… I am having hallucinations of some sort. Yes, dammit, I am certain! Or else, why is there… why is there a man before me? A large man – no, an alien! Finally, we have found life – so far away… 50 light years…! Our dream, our mission has been realized! Yes… I am certain, it is a man, but he is… proceeding towards me at a high speed, or… no. He has slowed down. I can describe his face… It is alright, I am almost at the base, I think… His face… but his face, his glasses, his eyes, his nose… is this man… Me? It cannot… this.… it is!”
After this, the communication line with Mr. Presnig was cut. From his own words, as well as the autopsy report generated from his suit, we can conclude that Mr. Presnig’s assumptions of being impacted by a certain gas, or gases, had indeed not only caused hallucinations, but also poisoned his blood – he died within a minute of having inhaled the gas. How the gas penetrated his suit is still unknown, as no issues were found with the suit during testing. However, his death was not caused by gas poisoning.
This piece of evidence has been left confidential, and his family were not made aware of it, due to the highly sensitive nature of the issue. Mr. Presnig suffered a slash to his neck which almost entirely separated his head from his body, which was his cause of death. Had this not taken place, he would have indeed died of gas poisoning within 58 seconds. Source or cause of the slash are unknown.
Nick Wrigh
Nick Wrigh was a young and promising technical engineer of 28. He had been a part of several space missions before this, including 12 of exploratory nature. As this mission was deemed low risk, Mr. Wrigh was considered an ideal candidate to join the mission and sharpen his skills for the future. He was joined by his partner of two years, Joan Longwood, who had been on several missions with him before this one as well. Their families reported that the two had planned to get married upon their return, before this tragedy had taken place.
Mr. Wrigh died 13 minutes into his exploratory course, and had only registered 2 logs. However, pieces of his conversation with Ms. Logwood have been recorded, as well as his emergency call, which took place 37 seconds after Mr. Presnig had passed away. His last communication was with Ms. Longwood.
“Log.1. Landed successfully on Planet Y. The planet is beautiful – bare stretches of magenta with brown boulders and rocks, against an electric blue sky. There seem to be some gases layered on the horizon in shades of yellow and grey. Samples of rock and soil have been collected, as well as a piece of what seems to be an unidentified metal.”
“Log. 2. 40 meters from base. The rocks and boulders around me have grown huge – they are almost the size of small houses. They did not appear this large from a distance. If I look back, I cannot see our ship, as I am walking through a narrow path between large rocks covering my view. The rocks themselves are smooth, with sharp edges. I have tried to break a piece but failed, as they are extremely hard and dense.”
Mr. Wrigh did not submit any logs after this. The following pieces of conversation have been recorded between himself and Ms. Longwood 2 minutes before his death.
“J, this place is… the rocks are huge. Are they huge where you are as well?”
“No, it’s all flat here… huh, I don’t remember seeing any rocks that big when we landed.”
“I don’t know when they started getting bigger, but… it’s all I can see around me. They are beautiful, but a little…”
“Hah…Are you scared, Nicky?”
“Come on… anyone would be terrified if they saw massive rocks on an unexplored planet.”
“Just teasing!”
“Joan.”
“…Nick? Is everything alright?”
“Joan, the rocks… are moving.”
“How is that possible Nick? I don’t detect any movement on my radar for several kilometers around.”
“Joan, I swear, I feel like these rocks, they’re… moving in, towards me…”
“Nick, are you… come back. I’ll come back too.”
“J, there’s no path… I can’t see a path back. The rocks, they’ve all moved in!”
“Nick, I’m coming to you right now!”
“NO! Don’t, or you’ll also… Joan! I..”
“Nick? NICK? Can you hear me?”
After that, Mr. Wrigh made a call to the space station. He mentioned the large rocks which had seemed to be moving in to crush him. The personnel responding to him at the time told him to immediately go back to base, fearing his mental faculties had been compromised by the same gas which had poisoned Mr. Kresnig. They did not alert him about what had happened to Mr. Kresnig, thinking it would worsen his mental state. However, around 20 seconds after this communication ended, Mr. Wrigh had passed away, before making it back to base. His last exchange with Ms. Longwood is recorded below.
“Nick, where are you? I don’t see any huge rocks, Nick!”
“I love you, J. Don’t worry, just..c-count till 15…”
According to the autopsy report, Mr.Wrigh’s cause of death was asphyxiation. However, there were wounds on his arms, chest, back, as well as his head. We do not believe that any “moving rocks” are likely to have crushed him to death, as the wounds would’ve been much more severe. We have ruled out gas poisoning as the autopsy did not indicate any such factor. This leaves the real circumstances surrounding Mr. Wrigh’s death completely uncertain. The only explanation may be that he had fallen somewhere, which had possibly damaged the oxygen tank in his suit, thereby causing his death. The wounds on his body may also be explained through some sort of fall, though not with absolute certainty.
Joan Longwood
Joan Longwood was an extremely gifted and inspiring member of the Space Exploration Association, 27 years of age. She was one of the youngest crew members to venture to space, only at the age of 17. While a technical engineer like Mr. Wrigh, she also had expertise in scientific and geographical aspects of space exploration, making her an apt decision maker in key situations. Had this incident not taken place, Ms. Longwood was on a trajectory to becoming a Captain within the Exploration Department within the next 5 years, having taken part in 24 space expeditions. Her logs are recorded as below:
“Log. 1. Landed successfully on Planet Y. The planet is a vast expanse of dry, pink soil, with a few brown rocks of varying sizes, and a vibrant blue sky. Bands of unidentified gases streak the sky in shades of orange, yellow, grey and white. Land samples have been collected. No metal or water has been detected.”
“Log. 2. 20 meters from base. The terrain has not changed, although there seems to be some change in the bands of gas in the sky. They are slowly disappearing in this direction – although there is no wind to shift them from their place. No explanation found yet for this phenomenon.”
“Log. 3. 30 meters from base. Vegetation has been detected – a small green plant growing on a rock. The plant has the same anatomy as those on Earth from the outside – a stem, some small leaves, and one flowering bud. The flower is an odd mixture of colors – each of its petals are of grey, orange and yellow shades, similar to the bands of gas seen in the sky. Correlation unknown. Collecting sample for analysis.”
After this, Ms. Longwood engaged in communication with Mr. Wrigh as recorded. She began retreating to base, as she had mentioned, upon hearing the distressed words of Mr. Wrigh. She tried to contact Mr. Kresnig after disconnecting with Mr. Wrigh, but was unsuccessful. She did not make any calls to the space station like her crew members. Her final log, before her death at the 15 minute mark, is recorded below:
“Log 4. Communication has failed with Mr. Wrigh and Mr. Kresnig. Their location on the radar is incorrect and keeps shifting. There might be an interference in signals on this planet. Reached the base. The plant has begun to glow. It glows brighter by the second – so bright I cannot look at it. Mr. Kresnig and Mr. Wrigh are dead. Their vital signs disappeared from the ship’s monitor. The plant’s light is surrounding everything. Don’t come here.”
After submitting the final log, Ms. Longwood exercised her right to Code X355D100, which states that an astronaut, under circumstances of certain death, has the right to end their own life through controlled means to avoid excessive and extended suffering. However, this decision is questionable considering that her vitals were healthy till the end, and she did not describe any threats to herself, as the other two crew members had. The glowing plant could be said to be the result of a hallucination, however, there is nothing to indicate there was any sort of hallucinogen in Ms. Longwood’s system at the time of her death. Our only explanation for her decision to execute Code X355D100 is due to extreme fear and trauma from the loss of her crew members, including her partner.
The events surrounding this incident have been kept entirely confidential from the public. The circumstances surrounding the cause of death for each of the crew members of Orchid 367 are inconclusive and uncertain. The next two sections cover an analysis of the possible scenarios which may have caused their deaths in more detail, as well as recommendations for the future to avoid another Incident Y from taking place.
Crescent Ragu Squares
9be89543efec901b665a918ac516fbfc
Ingredients
1 pound ground beef
1 small jar Ragu spaghetti sauce
1 (4 ounce) can mushrooms
2 cups shredded Cheddar cheese
1 (8 ounce) can Pillsbury refrigerated quick crescent dinner rolls
Instructions
Heat oven to 375 degrees F.
In frying pan, brown ground beef; drain.
Stir in Ragu sauce and mushrooms; simmer while preparing crust.
Separate crescent dough into 2 long rectangles.
Place in ungreased 13 x 9 inch pan; press over bottom and 1/2 inch up sides to form crust. Seal perforations.
Spread meat mixture over dough.
Bake for 15 to 20 minutes or until crust is brown.
Top with cheese and bake until cheese melts.
Cut into squares to serve.
What do you dislike most about the U.S.?
An Uber driver told me something the other day that made me stop and think.
He came from Ghana 35 years ago to settle in the US.
“What do you think about America after having lived here for so long?” I asked.
“America is the best salesperson in the world. It convinces you that no matter where you are or what you have going on, things will be better here. It makes people all around the world drop what they’re doing and immigrate.”
“And then what?”
“You work your ass off until you die.”
I like talking to people.
Especially immigrants.
They have one leg in their home country and the other here. As a result, they see things that others don’t. They have a unique perspective.
They’ve all come in search of something.
Quality of life. Freedom. Money.
Some find it.
Many don’t.
They all miss the vibrancy of their home countries. Whether from Africa, South America, India, or somewhere else, they miss the colorful festivals, the sacred in the ordinary, the tight-knit family and community, the customs and tradition that make a place singular.
The US is marketed as the land of possibilities.
And for some, it is.
But most—like that Ghanaian driver—end up working very hard for little gain. On top of that, even though it’s a nation of immigrants, it doesn’t do a very good job of making newcomers feel welcome.
More like alienated and unaccepted.
What the immigrants I talk to dislike about the US—and what I tend to agree with—is that it engages in false advertising. It markets itself as the best, most advanced, and bountiful country on the planet.
The greatest.
But in reality, it’s not. I could insert a bunch of statistics here, but a quick Google search will reveal that the US isn’t number one when it comes to a variety of metrics such as tolerance, education, and quality of life.
Far from it.
Like every human being I know, it’s deeply flawed.
Except it won’t admit it.
“So what will you do?” I asked the driver.
“I’m going back to Ghana,” he said.
What is the reason for the high number of Chick-Fil-A restaurants in the US compared to other countries? Is there a specific strategy that sets them apart from other fast food chains?
All Chick-fil-A outlets are basically company owned.
If they used a franchise model, they could expand much faster. But they prefer a slower, paced development. Even it seems like a lot of locations, they have not reached saturation in the US market.
Expanding overseas provides a huge opportunity but also large risks. Developing an efficient supply chain is one of them.
What happens when private investigators get caught spying on somebody? Can they legally go to jail for stalking?
Funny you should ask.
Back in 1989, I had been hired to conduct surveillance on a car salesman in a small town about 150 miles southwest of Chicago. He claimed to be permanently disabled from slipping in wet grass in front of his employer’s location and injuring a leg. It had been more than a year after the initial injury and he hadn’t undergone any surgery, in fact a Chiropractor was allegedly treating the leg and certifying him permanently and totally disabled. The company said BS and suspected he was working elsewhere.
My normal practice was to contact the local constabulary and let them know I was in the neighborhood just in case someone called and reported a suspicious vehicle or person. I did so in this case too.
Nice little neighborhood, nice little houses, some cars parked on the street, too. That makes it easier to try and fit in. I was there well before dawn and parked about 4 houses down and on an intersecting street. Black felt capsule enclosure surrounding me in the back of my Trooper, I prepared the video camera on its secured tripod along with the Konica and long range lens. We were ready to rumble.
At about 8:AM a Sheriff’s department squad car rolled by me slowly, then pulls into my subject’s driveway. Sheriff Billy Joe Watkins gets out, holding two coffee cups from McDonald’s and is met at the door by my subject, who gives me the stink eye. I of course get a couple of good pics.
Half an hour later, Sheriff leaves, gets in the squad, subject steps out onto his front porch and watches as the Sheriff drives up to my vehicle, gets out, bangs on the side of my truck and yells “YOU GOT 5 MINUTES TO GET OUT OF TOWN OR YOU’RE GOING TO JAIL!”
He didn’t have to say it twice. I’m sure he would have found a reason to lock me up, impound my vehicle and make my equipment disappear. And I was 150 miles from home in Yee-Haw County. And the Sheriff was a friend of the subject.
That was the last time I made the courtesy call. Lesson learned.
With so many scam calls originating from India, why doesn’t the Indian government crack down on the people conducting these scams?
Not worth the cost
The Scammers are geniuses in Economics and Finance
They know high value scams can get them roasted in days
For instance if they went after Adani for ₹5000 Crore, they would be caught and hauled up in a week at the most
However the Scammers go for MASS and small numbers
Rather than dupe 1 guy for 10 Million Bucks, they dupe 10,000 guys for 1000 Bucks each
Now take the Police
Even if they slog and slog and somehow manage to arrest the accused
They need the witness statement of 10,000 guys
It takes 2–3 years to bring a case to trial
By this time all the people who lost their money are OK with it and have resigned themselves to their fate
They certainly don’t want to come to court and spend 6–7 hours waiting and maybe get called again and again
Those who do come, get offered 10 times the amount and they end up making VAGUE STATEMENTS that go 180 degrees against the original statements
Ultimately the Scammers get acquitted
Then they start again
Scammers get your account information from Banks through the BPO side
They target customers who won’t be devastated if they lose ₹30–40K
Targets are angry for a few days, a week maybe two and then they shrug it off and go back to their life
Police don’t strike when the iron is hot
They start after 1–2 years by which time the Target has long forgotten the issue
By this time he simply doesn’t want to waste too much time and won’t come to 4–5 sessions with the Prosecution, Cops and hearings before the court
Imagine they are NRIs in US??
They need to pay more for the tickets to come to India
Would you testify for a loss of ₹1 Lakh four years ago by spending ₹5–6?
No right
The Cost Benefit Analysis never works in favor of the Victims or Law enforcement
There is this mouthwash that is popular throughout the world called Listerine. And I started using it to gargle with, when I was in the Navy.
Quite the history with this little element of personal hygiene.
Ah. My father died while gargling with it. He was found on the floor of his bathroom with the mouthwash still in his mouth after he had finished his morning shower. He apparently got out of the shower, brushed his teeth and was gargling when he had a heart attack. It was very sudden.
I used to use it in bongs in my university days. It would give us a nice cool and refreshing feeling when we were smoking with the bong. LOL.
Right now, I play this game with my daughter and she places a small amount in her mouth, she swirls it around and spits it out.
Over all, however it is pretty pricey. All things considered. I personally believe that it is twice the cost of what it should be. So I have slowly been switching to the Chinese versions. More flavors to choose from and not so harsh.
I even keep a small bottle in my travel vest. You know, for when you want a fresh and clean minty feel in your mouth.
Gargle as if your life depends on it.
Today…
This is a dangerous time…
Seriously watch this.
How “monstrous” can your thoughts be?
This is my “Monstrous” story.
My wife was killed in July 2001 by an semi driver.
He was speeding, weighed in at 76,000 lbs. Saw that traffic was backed up, was in a hurry to make up lost time, didn’t bother to slow down and ran into the rear of her full size Dodge van.
He applied his brakes 30ft from the rear of her van. The skid marks showed this.
The collision was so violent that both front wheels were severed off of the semi. The engine entered into the rear of the van caught fire and burned my wife to death.
I watched the aftermath of the accident on live TV. A news helicopter was in the area filming an unrelated story.
I watched my wife burn to death on live TV.
Anyway, to continue. I had all I could do to refrain myself from hunting him down and killing or permanently maiming him.
He deprived my two sons from growing up with a most remarkable woman
I can say here, that if our two sons had gone with her that morning to her dialysis clinic and died, there is nothing on this planet that would have saved his life from me getting retribution.
This douchebag, didn’t spend one second in jail, even though he was logging in on three different log books.
I wouldn’t have killed him immediately.
I would have shot him through both knees and elbows, permanently disabling him.
As he writhed in pain and agony, I would let him know why I did what I did. Then, I’d decide to kill him or not. I’m still not sure which way I’d go on this.
Live and remember every day why he’s in the condition he is. Or become worm food.
That was sixteen years ago and to this day I think about hunting him down.
So, ya humans can go into some dark places.
The US completely cuts off the supply of AI chips, China’s supercomputers to respond to the blockade
Mississippi Roast
Mississippi Roast is SO tasty. The leftovers make wonderful roast beef sandwiches also. You can also use this roast to make Mississippi Roast “Birria” Tacos. These are simply delicious, and it’s another good use for this particular roast.
mississippi pot roast
Prep: 5 min | Cook: 8 hr | Yield: 6 servings
Ingredients
1 chuck roast
1 envelope Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing Mix
1 envelope au jus mix
1 stick butter
5 whole pepperoncini peppers
Instructions
Put roast into the slow cooker.
Sprinkle Hidden Valley Ranch dressing on top.
Sprinkle au jus mix on top.
Put a stick of butter on top.
Put about 5 pepperoncini peppers on top.
Do NOT add water.
Cook on LOW for about 8 hours.
Add carrots and potatoes, if desired.
What is the most disturbing image you saw today?
A man named Homer Peel kisses his wife, Geneva Peel, in 1937. She was just ten years old, and an oprhan. Peel lied to authorities initially and told them Geneva was twelve… child marriage had just been made illegal in the state of Tennessee — but Homer Peel claimed he had “saved” Geneva from the poor house, and that to annul the marriage would be to return her to a state of poverty.
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The picture above is Homer kissing Geneva after a judge agreed them his reasoning, refusing to undo the marriage and returning Geneva to her husband, twenty-four years older than her. He had reportedly “promised her a pretty new hat” for her loyaly. It was quite common in the 1930s for children to marry… they would typically marry men considerably older than them. It wasn’t until 1937 that a law prohibiting it came into existence, and even then, the practice continued. The photograph is jarring and unsettling for numerous reasons.
Homer and Geneva Peel entually stayed together until 1975, when they got divorced. Homer died in 1991 and Geneva lived on until 2017, dying at 92. The couple had six daughters and a son together, and eighteen grandchildren.
What happens if you refuse a direct order in the military?
It’s a bad move that can bring you into a lot of trouble. I did that only once and it didn’t help my career at all.
A few weeks after I had been transferred from a German army armored reconnaissance unit to the paratroopers, my new platoon leader gave me the order to spend the next day in the company’s storage depot to clean weapons. It was some sort of test: I was the new guy and the platoon leader wanted to know how compliant I was. Not very much, as it turned out.
Weapon cleaning was a job for recruits and I was already a lance corporal (Obergefreiter) at the time; definitely not my job and, to be honest, I thought it was rather insulting.
I refused the order. I simply said “No, I don’t do it!”, went to my room and closed the door behind me. My platoon leader was banging on the door for a while, but I didn’t open. After maybe ten minutes, he left.
The next morning, my captain called me and I received a disciplinary punishment. Five written pages about “Why we should obey orders” and a weekend on guard duty. It was a soft punishment and everybody knew it. I wrote the effing paper (no problem) and spent the next weekend on guard duty (which sucked).
Of course, my platoon commander didn’t forget the thing but I didn’t care too much. I knew that I would spend the next months in NCO (Non-Commissioned Officer!) school, after that I had a slot in commando training and if I came back with the German Commando badge, this guy couldn’t fuck with me anymore: he had failed the course twice.
All happened exactly as I thought it would. I finished NCO school, was immediately promoted (which was very rare) and completed the Commando training.
When I got back to my company, my captain told me to step in front of everyone. Then he said: ”This guy passed the Commando course with a better mark than your old and rusty captain, A round of applause, please!”
In a paratrooper unit, rank and discipline are secondary. Your military performance is far more important.
Still, the whole thing wasn’t worth the trouble. It was a stupid beginner’s mistake from my side and I had a lot of luck: with a different company commander, I could have thoroughly ruined my career- for nothing.
Disobeying orders is a form of art and you never do it directly. You say “Yes sir!”, do whatever you want and if someone asks why you didn’t execute the order, you play stupid. That’s how it’s done.
They’d finally run out of oreos. It took months, but finally, finally, they’d run out–the last one accidentally ejected into space. Sirius stood stewing in front of the glass window of his ship. It wasn’t his fault the oreo had been in that little cup he’d tossed in the trash. Oren was the one who had hidden it there, figured he’d never find it.He hadn’t. Obviously. Which was why it was floating in space right now instead of in his stomach. Sirius scowled at the speckles of light drifting out of the immense black.“Go see the stars,” they said, “they’re beautiful up there in space.” They said. Yeah well, Sirius wished he could haul those freaks up here and make them stare at the murderous fireballs for fifteen months in a broken down ship, with no outside contact and then see how beautiful they thought the stars were.Stupid stars. They could blink out of existence for all he cared–the people too.The ship had been quiet since their malfunctioning, sandwich loving AI had decided to go completely silent until they were – as she put it – ‘found by certain functioning individuals who could clearly state which sandwich was their favorite as well as help them out of this black hole of utter despair’.Stupid ship. He was decidedly disappointed in his ship’s ability to…well…move.”It’s not your ship.” Oren said from the deck where he spun aimlessly in the only swivel chair in the ship. Sirius turned to glare at him. Sometimes he thought his friend could read minds, other times he thought Oren just psychoanalyzed everyone like some villainous creep. Which….he was, a villain–that is—not a creep.”So how come we only installed ONE swivel chair?” Sirius said, stepping away from the ship’s window. Oren shrugged.”We should have installed two, because there are two of us.””Are there.” Oren said idly.
Who knew, really, one of them could be imaginary by now. But imaginary or not…Sirius took another step forward. “Up. My turn in the chair.”
Oren gave himself another spin.
“Oren.”
“There’s a perfectly good chair over there.” Oren said, still spinning.
“It doesn’t swivel.” Sirius said.
“Sad.”
Sirius glared at Oren, the little….. But instead of grabbing him by his perfectly manicured hair and hauling him off the chair, Sirius walked towards the doorway. “No prob. I’ll just go look through your knives.” Behind him the chair came to a halt. Slipping out the entrance, Sirius broke into a jog through the steel hallway of the ship.
“Don’t you dare touch them! That’s my emotional support knife collection!” Oren hollered from the deck.
Sirius made his way down the hallway of the ship to the third room to the right. Oren’s studious room. It used to have a lock, but now the door knob was completely gone. Sirius shoved the door open. He had melted the knob a few weeks back. Some of his finest work, if he did say so himself.
Oren’s room looked like a real life replica of perfection: it was white–the walls and ground and ceiling-and there was a bed directly across, its stark sheets laid across the mattress more smoothly than Sirius could ever get his hair to lay. To the side of that was a desk, bolted and firm, with a spotless furnish and all the drawers safely locked. He’d have to see about melting those knobs later, maybe to get back at Oren for being responsible for the loss of their last oreo. For now though, there was the matter of the swivel chair and the knives. On the right side of the bed was a sparkling glass showcase, inside which was the most impressive knife collection Sirius had ever seen. And they weren’t just ordinary knives, there were knives from nearly every person Oren had ever fought — and then some which he had picked up from one market or another. Sirius leaned closer to get a better view of a smaller knife, its blade was shaped like a half moon. It—
“STEP.AWAY.FROM.MY.KNIVES.” Oren growled from behind him. It was the voice he was famous for, the one that said ‘I’m a master villain and I’m to be feared’. At least that’s what it said to anyone who didn’t know him as well as Sirius. He turned with a smirk. “Oh calm down, I haven’t even touched them.” Oren stood in the doorway, stiff and imposing in his suit of white with gold trimmings. He glared at Sirius a good moment before stalking forward to inspect his knives.
Oren went back to glaring at him. “The glass. You breathed on the glass.”
“But it doesn’t look any different.” Sirius said.
“It does too.” Oren insisted, “it just takes a sophisticated eye to see it.”
Sirius snorted.
“Okay Back! Back back back!” Oren said, waving him out of the room. “The next thing I know you’ll be sneezing on it.”
“Alright, I’m going.” Sirius said walking out. He hesitated in the doorway, watching as Oren glanced back at his precious collection. Sirius grinned as he watched Oren’s eyes snag on the tiny empty place on the far edge of the display case. Oren looked back at Sirius, and then, the man smiled.
A heartbeat later Sirius smelled the smoke.
Two heartbeats and the ship’s fire resistance system blared active.
Five. Sirius was pelting down the hallway to his bedroom and—and, it was in flames.
His…his bedroom was on fire. How was THAT even possible! The thing was made of steel. But…not everything else was: the furniture, the bed, the—“OREN!” He yelled, gripping the sides of his doorway. The vents opened in his room and released a white gas that filled the room, snuffing each hungry flame as if it were a boot and they–bugs. And then it sucked the remnant gasses back into the vents, sealing them again. Leaving behind a black scorched, smoke smelling, grave of bed-sheets and used-to-be-valuable collectables.
“Well” Oren said from the hallway behind him, “That’s a sight.”
“I can’t believe this…You don’t just set someone’s room on fire!” Sirius gestured wildly to his once semi-nice bedroom.
“Says the person who melted my door knob.” Oren said.
“You put A SCORPION IN MY BOOT.”
“Because you lost my knife.”
“I…” Sirius paused. “Well, it went to a good cause.”
Oren raised an eyebrow.
“Oh come on, scratching my initials on your armor is a wonderful cause,” Sirius turned to inspect his nearly nonexistent bed, “not my fault it somehow wandered off after that.” He poked his mattress and it dissolved into ashes. “Wonderful.”
Oren leaned against the wall. “Anyway, you’ve gotta admit, Sirius, I did pretty good hooking up the ventilation just right so you’d smell the smoke exactly a second before the alarms went off.” Oren said proudly.
Sirius wiped his now ash colored finger on his clothes and deliberately refused to look at his friend. Stinkin villain, had to be so good at his job. “I suppose you can do pretty good cleaning this up as well,” he said, “and replacing all my very valuable collectibles once we get rescued from this useless bucket of steel.”
“Hmm. I think I’m going to go on over to the Kitchen and look for something to eat while grieving the tragic loss of our last oreo cookie, instead.” Oren said, walking away.
“Hey!” Sirius barked, spinning from the sorry remnants of his collectibles. Oren was already gone. But he wasn’t going to get out of this, not this time. The oreo cookie–which was not his fault, in fact, it was Oren who tried to hoard them all up for himself in the first place–was the least of Oren’s worries. He grabbed a heavy bag from his closet and stalked down the hall towards the kitchen.
“OREN!”
Nothing, no sound. Except the thrumming of the horrid prison he’d been trapped in for what seemed like forever now. And he didn’t even have a stupid oreo cookie to solace him. Why? Because of Oren, because he stuck it in a cup. He rounded the corner of the kitchen section of the ship and stopped short. Oren was sitting on the table there, eating cookies. Chocolate chip cookies.
“You’ve had those this whole time!” Sirius exclaimed.
Oren stuffed the last one in his mouth.
“You could have left the oreos for me.” Sirius said, jerking his bag open. “But instead you put the last one in a cup.”
“A clean cup,” Oren said, swallowing. “It was most certainly clean.”
He reached into the bag, “honestly I really don’t care.”
“And I’m not going to help you cle–” Oren paused, “hey, what’s in the bag…”
Sirius chunked a shoe at him. Steel-toed, well made, firm as a rock. Made throwing it feel gorgeous. Oren gave a sound like a strangled mouse as he scrambled off his perch and out of the path of the wrathful footwear. It slammed uselessly into the wall behind. Sirius chunked another.
“Hey!” Oren yelped, ducking behind the counter, “What in the universe are you doing?”
“Throwing shoes at you.” Sirius said. Obviously.
“Now now. Heroes aren’t supposed to hurt their villain friends.” Oren said from behind the counter.
“Ah yes,” Sirius said, “except that doesn’t really matter right now, because if it weren’t for you wanting to run off and save the world from imminent disaster, I’d be safely on a planet eating as many oreos as I want.”
“Well then, you’re welcome. That would be incredibly unhealthy.” Oren said.
Sirius threw a gold trimmed boot. It plunked against the counter. Oren peeped up to stare at it, and then ducked right in time as he hurled the boot’s pair.
“Actually,” Oren muttered, “I’m rather concerned why you have so many shoes.”
“If I wasn’t in a broken down ship in the middle of nowhere, with no hopes of ever making it back to civilization, those shoes would be quite valuable!” Sirius wasn’t even aiming for Oren anymore. He catapulted a pink dotted pair of tennis shoes into the far wall, they hit it with a satisfying thump.
Oren stood, staring at him. “You mean to tell me….you collect shoes.”
Sirius threw a bright yellow sandal at Oren’s face. It didn’t even get close, of course. Oren looked at the sandal and then back up at Sirius.
“You’re a shoe collector!” He broke out laughing, gripping the sides of the counter. “How did I not know this sooner!”
Sirius paused his onslaught of shoe missiles, there was only like, one more left in the bag anyway. “They’re very expensive. And valuable.” he said in his defense.
Oren only laughed harder.
“Took me a long time to collect them all too.” He muttered under his breath.
“I’ll”–Oren said between gaspy breaths–“make sure to leave you my shoes when I die. Something to remember me by.”
Sirius rolled his eyes and tossed his bag in the corner. “I’d probably eject them into space if you did, like the oreo.”
Oren managed to stop laughing enough to bow his head and murmur, “we shall forever grieve your greatest mistake, Sirius.”
“MINE?”
“Yes.” Oren said, “You killed Mr. Oreo.”
Sirius opened his mouth to object when the entire ship beeped, as if jolting awake.
“What did my ship just do?” Sirius rubbed his ears, glancing around.
“Um…it’s not your ship. It’s mine. Remember? I convinced the previous owner to give it in exchange for his life.” Oren said.
“That’s not how I remem—” Sirius began.
“SANDWICHES.” A crisp, emotionless voice vibrated from the ship’s speakers. “THE LIFE-BLOOD OF MANKIND.”
“Hey Sandie!” Oren exclaimed happily.
“Welcome back weird, malfunctioning AI who secretly wants to murder us with sandwiches and false facts.” Sirius said. “Guess you got bored, huh.”
“CANNIBALISM, PERFECT.” The AI said. “THERE IS A SHIP ENTERING THIS SECTOR AS WE SPEAK.”
A ship? Sirius met Oren’s gaze for a single life changing moment as the realization sunk in.
“We’re saved.” Sirius whispered.
They both raced for the console, and started broadcasting their existence to anyone listening. The radio fuzzed in and out for a few seconds before finally the first voice they’d heard in months came over as clear as the black in space.
“Unknown transporter. This is Fate-12, prepare for boarding.”
Sirius grinned, unholstering the pistol at his side. Oreos here I come.
What do you think about China’s J-35 Gyrfalcon stealth fighter becoming the country’s second carrier-based fighter?
The Chinese defense industry is advancing at a breakneck speed. China is only the second country in the world that will mass produce not one but two stealth aircraft. The J-31 (re-badged as the J-35 in November 2024), made its maiden flight in 2012. It is a twin-engine aircraft produced for land and aircraft carrier operation. It has been extensively modified over the years from the aircraft that made its first flight. Chinese aircraft development (J-20, J-10C, J-35, J11, J-16) was hobbled by the lack of domestically manufactured advanced turbofan engines. At present, the Chinese aircraft industry is roughly 20 years behind the USA but they have been leapfrogging over the last decade, and it is likely that the technological gap will shrink over time. The J-35 has an approximate RCS (Radar cross section) of 0.01m2 (50 square inches) in comparison to 0.005m2 (7.7 square inches) RCS of the F-35. In comparison, the latest fourth generation Su-35s has an RCS of 3m2, (4,650 square inches), and the French Rafale has an RCS of 1m2 (1,550 square inches).
J-35 with afterburners, performing at an airshow in November 2024.
The development of the J-35 in two versions is a very significant strategic step that will have far-reaching implications for China’s projection of power. With the J-35, not only will China be able to increase its stealth aircraft fleet at twice the speed of J-20, but it will also have a mix of two types (also called a hi-low mix in USAF) of stealth aircraft. It will also give the latest Chinese aircraft carriers a potent weapon system that can duel with the F-35. It is a well-known fact that Chinese are able to mass produce aircraft in great numbers. The current stealth flagship of the Chinese air force, the J-20, is being produced at a rate of 100 aircraft per year, which is faster than all models of F-35 combined. With the addition of a new aircraft, the Chinese air force will not only be in a position to phase out their 3rd generation aircraft (as of 2024, approximately 300 such aircraft are in service) but add an additional 1,000 stealth aircraft to the fleet in 5–7 years.
Vented single crystal Turbine blades is one of the highest tech products of modern material sciences.
Chinese engine manufacturers have finally been able to resolve issues related to production of single crystal turbine blades and blade cooling after spending vast amounts of resources on research and development. Unlike the F-35, the J-35 engines are designed for super cruising (travelling beyond the speed of sound without using afterburners). The J-35 was originally powered with the Russian RD-93 engines, which produce 18,300lbs (8,318kg) of thrust each. These engines did not provide the aircraft with satisfactory kinematic performance, and failed to achieve a 1:1 thrust to weight ratio even with a basic loadout. The aircraft was then flight tested with the WS-13E (also known as WS-21), which produces 20,700lbs (9,409kg) of thrust. While it was an improvement over the RD-93, it fell below the flight performance that is necessary for a stealth aircraft.
The WS-19 engine will power the aircraft. Its serrated exhaust can be observed.
The production version is likely to be equipped with the WS-19 engine. This engine is equal in technology and specification to the GE-F414-EE engine, which has not yet been used in any combat aircraft. The WS-19 features omnidirectional thrust vectoring technology for enhanced maneuverability and Full Authority Digital Electronic Control (FADEC). It is likely to produce approximately 25,000Lb (11,300kg) of thrust, making the aircraft suitable for carrier operations. This engine, combined with sleek aerodynamics and 3,000lb (1,300kg) lower empty weight compared to F-35 will allow it to accelerate and fly faster. High kinematic performance can be advantageous in BVR combat between two stealth aircraft. The J-35 is not only lighter but also has 7,000Lb (3,000kg) greater thrust compared to the F-35. An aircraft that possesses greater thrust to weight ratio is likely to perform better at certain tasks including air interception and ground attack ingress and egress. In addition, aircraft that have a high kinematic performance have a better chance of evading a BVR and surface launched missiles.
The APG-81 AESA radar.
The current F-35 APG-81 AESA radar is perhaps the most powerful AESA long range radar fitted to any multirole combat aircraft, with a range of 140miles (230KM), and a short-term peak power output of 24Kw. This radar is to be upgraded with an even faster and higher powered AN/APG-85 in 2026. This radar will be able to identify all types of drones, missiles and aircraft at longer range. The high-resolution ground imaging capabilities of the APG-85 will also be useful for reconnaissance missions, providing detailed images of targets for further analysis.
The J35 KLJ-7A(V2) radar is not only smaller in size in comparison to the APG-81, but also has provides lower resolution and less range. It has a peak power consumption of around 10Kw, and a maximum detection range of 120 miles (200KM) against a target size of 5m2.
KLJ-7A (V2) AESA radar used in the land based version of Chinese J-35 is less powerful than the F-35 radar. It is possible that the naval version may be equipped with a more powerful radar, since the aircraft will be able to produce 40–50kw of electricity.
The J-35 is equipped with several passive sensors including EOTS (electro-optical targeting system), passive 360-degree situational awareness sensors and helmet mounted display. The J-35 system software, sensor integration, speed of secure datalink systems and battlefield sensor fusion is not yet at par with the F-35. The J-35 is equipped with infrared search and track, Distributed Aperture System (DAS), which consists of several IR sensors around the aircraft for full spherical coverage, providing day/night imaging and acting as an IRST and missile approach warning system.
China has been able to develop and deploy highly sophisticated air to air missile systems. The off-boresight short range PL-10 and PL-15E BVR missile with folding fins is designed to fit into the J-35 internal weapons bay. The PL-10 is known for its all-aspect targeting capability, resistance to jamming and electronic countermeasures, and high maneuverability. It provides comparable performance to western missiles like the ASRAAM and IRIS-T, and even offers superior kinematic performance against the AIM-9X. The PL-15 missile that is currently used by the J-20 out-ranges the AIM-120D missile as well as the MBDA Meteor missile. It remains to be seen if the J-35 weapon bay is capable of carrying the long range (150 miles, 250KM) PL-15 instead of the shorter-range (110 miles, 185KM) PL-15E missile.
It is worth noting that maximum missile ranges provided by manufacturers are based on ideal conditions, and should be taken with a grain of salt. Effective BVR Missile ranges against combat aircraft are generally 60–70% of maximum advertised range for head on interception, and between 30–50% during a tail chase. In order to achieve a high kill probability (pK) the missiles must be used in their No Escape Zone (NEZ), which, in most cases, is even lower than the effective missile range.
The latest, smaller PL-15E missile with folding fin design.
In order to match the long-range capabilities of Chinese BVR missiles, the US is developing the AIM-260 missile. This missile will replace or supplement the AIM-120 AMRAAM currently in use. Interestingly, this latest missile uses radar and IR/UV sensors for terminal guidance. This missile is expected to be in operation in 2025. The AIM-260 is designed with a multi-terminal guidance system. It will have the same range as the shorter-range PL-15E (110 miles- 185KM). Air combat in modern warfare has changed considerably over time. An aircraft is now a part of a highly networked real time kill chain that includes satellite intelligence, networked ground-based radars, AEW aircraft, sea-based and other airborne sensors. The more effective the kill chain, the better chances an aircraft will have in undertaking a successful combat mission.
44-Year-Old Man: Existential crisis of life
What are some of the most epic product fails?
Would you pay $700 for a juice machine that requires WiFi to work?
What if I told you it only works with specific juice packets sold by the company, which cost ~$7 for every glass you want to make?
Oh I forgot to mention, it’s actually 25% faster to manually squeeze the juice packet with your hands, rather than putting them into the machine.
At this point, you’re probably unsure why anyone would ever buy one of these. This reaction was shared by consumers, as low sales forced the company to drop prices to $400. However over-engineering meant that each unit still cost $750 to produce. They were always selling at a loss, but now they were bleeding cash.
Yet despite the blatant flaws of their product, losing $4 million per month and a lack of customers willing to pay $400 for an inefficient juicer, they still managed to raise $118.5 million from prestigious investment funds, like Kleiner Perkins and Google Ventures.
This is the story of Juicero, a company which has now ceased selling its products, and offered full refunds to anyone who purchased their product. They should serve as a cautionary tale for any aspiring entrepreneurs who hope to get rich by solving a problem that doesn’t exist, instead of being ambitious and making a meaningful difference by solving important problems.
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What will Europe do when big daddy USA isn’t there to save them from Russia?
Where is big daddy USA right now ?
Cowards.
The U.S. has been actively preparing to fight one particular country since 1949. Multiple proxy wars, and trillions of dollars spent on stockpiling munitions and weapons platforms.
There are over 3,000 M1 Abrams tanks sitting collecting dust in the Sierra Army Depot, that were purchased to fight this one particular country.
And when the moment finally arrived for the US to finally take in this arch enemy after preparing for 75 years, what was the response ?
“Fear of escalation”
Cowards!
Americans have demonstrated they don’t have the balls to fight a near peer directly. Just a lot of talk and sabre rattling.
You spent all that $$$$$ preparing to fight only to back down like cowards.
And what message does that send to China, now that you have publicly played your hand and backed down from Russia ?
Just as when you backed down from Russia in 2014, and emboldened Putin to go further, so too are you emboldening the Chinese, and you’re too fucking stupid to see that. But keep listening to Trump, who has Putin in his pocket, and admires Xi Ping for how powerful of a man he is. That’s who you just elected – a president who admires the leaders of your enemies.
Spineless fucking cowards, and strategically as dumb as a bag of rocks.
Korea – stalemate
Vietnam – lost
Iraq – utter failure
Afghanistan – lost
You’ve developed a talent for fleeing
Cowards, who repeatedly betray allies.
But you sure kicked ass in Granada and Panama!!
And you sent not one, but two carrier groups to help with the turkey shoot in Gaza. Real tough guys!
Edit for the Trump voters: the soldiers are not the cowards. The soldiers are not the ones making the strategic decisions. The politicians are the cowards, including the Commanders in Chief, and every American citizen that supports the cowardice.
Dangerous (and very few of you know it)
Beijing’s spy agency ‘destroyed large number’ of Taiwan intelligence networks
State security ministry says more than 1,000 cases of Taiwanese espionage were uncovered in crackdown, with spies ‘severely punished’
Beijing’s top spy agency says it has uncovered more than 1,000 cases of Taiwanese espionage during a crackdown and vowed to keep up the pressure on the island’s pro-independence forces.
In a post on WeChat on Tuesday, the Ministry of State Security said the cases were revealed in a series of special operations launched in recent years and that it had continued to “strike hard” against spying activities.
A new Japanese study shows that Pfizer and Moderna vaccines contain unauthorized “animated worm-like” entities, invisible to the human eye, which swim, wiggle, and assemble themselves into complex structures, which cause clots inside the body. Researchers Dr. Young Mi Lee and Dr. Daniel Broudy isolated unused Pfizer and Moderna vaccine vials for 3 weeks, and then examined them under 400X magnification. They noticed that when the nano-technology was energized, it created “discs, chains, spirals, tubes, and right-angle structures.” The scientists believe these mysterious nanoparticles are responsible for the explosion of “turbo cancer” and autoimmune diseases around the globe. They also concluded that humans into controllable “Biohybrid Magnetic Robots.” The suggested that the smart microscopic components are part of the elite’s “long-planned well-funded Internet of Bodies,” which was described as a kind of “synthetic global central nervous system” turning humans into controllable “Biohybrid Magnetic Robots.” The researchers called for a ban on mRNA shots. They also demanded the labels “vaccine” and “safe and effective” be removed because the substances are not vaccines and they are dangerous.
Zelensky is now saying he has no intention of keeping the land seized in this incursion. (Just as well, because Russia will not let him.) So why did he waste his men and resources on it in the first place? Has he completely lost the plot?
He has indeed lost the plot
Has been losing so for a long time
He has been solely responsible for making Russia stronger and stronger by the day
Russian AD is unfamiliar with Himars attacks
He attacks Russian territories with so many Himars that today Russia can wipe out Himars Launchers effortlessly
Russian AD is unfamiliar with Storm Shadows and Scalps
He repeatedly attacks Crimea with these missiles and Russia can spot them a mile away and easily blow them away at a near 95% Interception rate
Russia is a creaking old army with only numbers who could collapse within their own weight
He stupidly takes them on, does a counter offensive and the Russian Bear slumbers, wakes up and begins to gradually start mobilizing, producing and making tactical decisions
This Kursk offensive is the best example
The Russians mobilized and moved within 72 hours and stopped the Ukranians at 15 Kilometres into the Border and killed the entire reserve force minus the 300–400 who are holding hostages
The Speed is astonishing
Next time it will be even faster
Plus their strategic evacuation of Border Areas
Plus their buffer zones along the Border
Bottom line is Zelensky is solely the reason why Russia is the MOST COMBAT READY ARMY ON THE PLANET
Reasons for the Kursk offensive?
It could never have been successful under any conditions
You can’t keep on entering Russia all the way to Moscow
Ultimately you will face resistance and be destroyed
Russia is the more powerful army
Just like if Bangladeshi Army invaded West Bengal, they would advance maybe 10 Kms before being cut to pieces by the Indian Army
The Reason was PR
To restore some confidence in the dying morale of the Ukranians
Instead the Russians are more determined to finish off the Ukranians
As every day goes by Russians who were reluctant to kill even Ukranian Soldiers and hoped they surrender are now ready to boil Ukranian Children in Hot Oil and make their parents watch
Time Zelensky was deposed
Problem is he knows too much
Probably Pictures of Biden and Hunter Biden with some Young Ukranian Minors on their Laps
Probably Secret Account Transfers of Wire Accounts of the Clintons or Romneys or Sunaks or Johnsons
It’s why he isn’t killed so far
Russia isn’t killing him because China has asked them not to
When this is over – I bet you will see some major Lithium extraction contracts signed between China & Ukraine in the past two years that will come to light
CHINA is NOT WHAT We Expected at ALL 🇨🇳 (first time in Shenzhen)
Do the Chinese people enjoy the same freedoms as Americans?
Women in China don’t have to worry about their own safety. A young woman can walk alone on the streets of China in the middle of the night.
You can smoke cigarettes almost everywhere in China. Although there are no smoking signs everywhere, there is no mandatory implementation. People still do what they want.
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Chinese people can drink while walking. In the United States, if you drink in public, you will be arrested by the police.
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The woman hangs a bag of Tsingtao beer on her shoulder and drinks it while walking
In the United States, you have to maintain your own lawn, otherwise you may receive a fine. But in China, most people live in apartments.
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Chinese people are completely free to make their own decisions and don’t cook at home. Boys and girls there prefer to eat three meals in restaurants or roadside stalls. Because there are many restaurants in China, almost everywhere. Chinese people do not need to believe in God and do not need to pray before eating. Meal time is the most relaxing time for Chinese people, and there is no need for so many rituals.
Most Chinese people are not as materialistic as Americans. In Chinese life, most people pursue a simple life, know how to be content, and are more free and independent.
4
Is this homeless? no!
Chinese people have the habit of taking a nap. You can take a nap anywhere, the main thing is relaxation.
Especially outdoor workers, couriers, sanitation workers, food delivery people, truck drivers, motorcycle drivers, vendors, and police officers will all find a shady place nearby to take a nap.
How did you foil or dodge someone else’s attempt to cheat or deceive you?
Oh boy, do I have a story for this. And I didn’t even “foil” the person’s attempt, really. More like I defeated him with my cluelessness. But in retrospect what I did is the best thing to do in my situation. You’ll see later in the answer.
A little bit of background (you can skip to the non italicized part for the meat of the story)
I was born in the United States, and when I was 7 my parents moved to India, their homeland (taking me with them of course). I was in India (Pune, specifically) from 2nd-12th grade. During high school, I applied to a bunch of American universities and got in. I finally decided on UC Berkeley, which was the best school that I got into, and was really excited that the school had a rich history.
Another important point to note is that foreign citizens living in India had to register with the police if they were staying in India beyond 180 days, and also get a departure stamp from or something before leaving the country on their passport. Being an American citizen, I had to do that while living there.
However, right before I left for the US, my family and I had just obtained PIO (Person of Indian Origin) cards, letting us stay in India on a 15 year visa and getting rid of the need for departure stamps and stuff.
I was 17, ready to leave for the US, where I was to meet up with my Dad in the Bay Area who was already there on business. I was super excited (think the heart eyed emoji, I looked exactly like that), for I was embarking on an exciting journey. I am American, and now I’m pretty comfortable in my own skin with my dual American / Indian identity, but back then I was pretty nervous and confused about my own identity, which made me a little anxious about going to the US.
So here I was, at the Mumbai airport, having said good bye to my mom and aunt who had come along to drop me off. I went to the immigration counter (for my American peeps, a lot of other countries have passport control when you leave the country too).
The immigration official looked at my passport. He looked at me with his beady eyes through his glasses:
“What are you going to the US for?”
“For my education.” (Apparently having an American passport wasn’t enough)
He probably deduced in his head that I was 17 and going to the US for college so my parents must be rich. He looked at me again, but his eyes were beadier this time.
“You don’t have a departure stamp. You cannot go.”
“Umm.. what?”
“I said, you don’t have a departure stamp on your passport, you cannot go!”
At this point I was super scared, because I was traveling internationally alone for the very first time, and I had no idea what he was talking about. I genuinely thought I had fucked up. After breathing heavily for 2 seconds, I said:
“So.. what do I do? What can I do, sir?”
“See.. I’m looking for your benefit, and my benefit.”
Now you all know where this is going. However, at that point I was completely clueless.
“Sorry, I don’t get it. Do I need to do something? Just tell me what I need to do, I’ll do it, sir.”
(my Indian peeps will know why I used that “sir” for an immigration official of all people. I was trying to be respectful and not rattle an official who could really mess with you if he wanted to)
“Like I said, I’m looking for your benefit, and my benefit.”
I was still clueless. I know all of you want to scream at me: “He’s asking for a bribe you idiot!”, but remember: 17, alone and scared.
“Ok, so then tell me how I can help benefit both of us. Let me know, I’ll do it.”
He looked at me, bewildered. In retrospect I think he was trying to figure out if I was for real. He got really frustrated:
“You’re not understanding what I’m telling you, now go!” (he hands me my passport)
At this point you guys probably think I just left as fast as I could, right? Well, no. I was genuinely clueless about his intentions, I actually believed I had done something wrong.
“Sir, if you just tell me what you need me to do, if there’s any issue with my documents, I’ll fix it.”
“No! Just go!”
I was thoroughly confused by this, and I just left. It was only after crossing the security check and calling my mom to tell her this story did I realize (while listening to my own words) that I was asked for a bribe and got out of it because I was totally dumb!
So there it is. I foiled a corrupt immigration official trying to take advantage of a scared 17 year old and make some money. But I didn’t “foil” anything. 🙂 I just defeated him with my cluelessness!
Why would a highly intelligent man choose an average woman as a partner?
I’m pushing 70, and I’ve been married, happily, for 35 years.
I am highly intelligent, in the top 0.1%, and I have a lifetime of working with very, very intelligent people, including many very intelligent women.
But I can tell you from my current vantage point that if I had restricted myself to women with my IQ or higher, I would still be single. There were certainly candidates; but I was not romantically attracted to them, and would not have enjoyed living my life with them.
In contrast, my wife and I are very compatible. We like the same kinds of food, and restaurants, and entertainment on TV and in movies, we like the same music, we like the same kinds of sex, we like the same kinds of vacations, we have the same political beliefs, we like and donate to the same charities, we like the same comedians.
It is very, very easy to live with my wife; and she is not a slave, we split our domestic duties evenly.
My life is not about being intelligent. That is my job, and I don’t need to bring it home, or discuss it with my wife, or get any ideas from her on how to move forward.
In my job I am surrounded by very smart engineers and technologists, including many women, and I can discuss problems and technical issues with them, and for the most part not have to spend an hour explaining my ideas.
The only thing my wife knows about my job is that some decades ago I invented something for the Federal Aviation Administration, and I told her it was to “Help keep planes from falling out of the sky, because the FAA frowns on that.”
That’s the one she remembers, a single four month contract out of 35 years.
I get my fill of intellectual conversation in other ways; I am with my wife to relax and have fun, and that does not have to be intellectual in the least. The only time it is, is when occasionally she wants me to explain something to her. I know her well, and I am smart enough to explain what she wants to know in terms she will understand and be satisfied with.
“Christ, One! What the hell were you thinking?” the voice came through the hud slightly distorted. Nothing had been right on the Doppel Station for days, maybe weeks. It was difficult to keep track of time in this lifestyle. There were no nights, no days, and essentially no schedule. Work needed done when it needed done and it didn’t matter if the men were tired or hungry or whatever other excuse they might concoct. One tried to focus his mind enough to remember when the issues had arisen. He knew it was during Twenty-Seven. Measuring events in that way made him feel lugubrious, but it had been his best method to date. These minor external repairs were not typically so frequent, and he grew concerned that it meant the end of the station was coming soon. Perhaps it had drifted from its axis, or some distant celestial body had shifted and was influencing it in some way. They were still waiting to hear back from the Union regarding their query.“One! Yo, you listening, man?” the voice crackled through again. One rolled his eyes and sighed, knowing the heavy exhale would be detected by the suit. He liked the idea of his disdainful sigh echoing through the main deck for his crewmate to hear.“God One, you don’t have to be so pissy. Just fix that panel and get the hell back inside. I’m sick of monitoring your vitals,” came the response.After finishing his work, One leaned back against the hull of the station and watched the swirling of the reality around him. The Dorra galaxy was on the small side for those that had been explored, and to One, it felt quaint — cozy even. It was like living in the smallest nearby town and still being able to see the nightlights of the closest big city.At least, that is how One thought of it, from his studies of old human culture. He, himself, had never lived on the planet known as Earth. Born and bred on this ship, he spent much of his free time daydreaming; imagining what life must have been like for his ancestors. Walking in something called grass — typically green with threadlike fingers of roots extending down into the soil for nutrients, hydrogen dioxide, and security. He wondered what that might feel like, having roots and security. Breathing unfiltered air, filled with the pollution and aromas of the natural world. One’s entire life had been inside this shell, floating endlessly in an even more endless vacuum of nothingness. Even the gravity he experienced wasn’t what he considered natural.“Bro — Wake up and get your ass inside,” the voice broke his melancholy revelry and One felt more angry than he had in weeks. It wasn’t often that he sat out against the hull and let himself take in the view, but it was without fail that whenever he did, he was called back inside with the same crass phrasing that effectively wrecked whatever peace he had found in his meditation.As One closed the airlock behind himself and secured it, he could feel the needy eyes on him through the door. He slowly and meticulously removed his gear, inspecting each piece before placing it carefully in his cubby. Mainly, he took such care in this process because he found it an effective method to avoid returning into the main hull of the station, and thereby further prolonging his peace and isolation.Technically, they were always supposed to take this level of care in their return inspections, but it was well known that few of the ‘nauts ever did, especially this far from the Hub. Stations like the Doppel rarely, if ever, received elite visitors, and never had surprise inspections from the higher-ups. In fact, the Doppel was much more of a small outpost than a proper station. The Doppel was a small superfluous station responsible for monitoring the oxygen levels and watching for signs of life on tiny dead rock on the outskirts of the galaxy. ‘Nauts stationed here were meant to exist, write reports for the Union, and maintain that there were always two living there. Nothing else.A pounding echoed around One as he painstakingly inspected his last valve and he turned to the door to see an angry face peering through the glass at him.“Come on, man, get in here!!!”
“I’m doing my inspections,” One replied.
“You’re wasting time and you know it!”
“ME? Never. Why on Doppel would I ever do something like that?” he asked, faking an aghast expression.
“Duuuude….”
He ignored the plea.
“Duuuuuuuuuude.”
He continued fiddling with his equipment, turning away from the door to hide a smile.
“Gawwwwd, dude.”
One started laughing.
“Alright, I’m coming, Twenty-Seven. Calm down,” he said, crossing through the door at last.
Twenty-Seven tackled him.
“Dude, it is so freakin’ lonely in this tin can, man. I don’t know what to do with myself,” he said, latching on to One’s back.
“Maybe you should try studying or reading or something,” One replied, pulling away from the younger man, “you haven’t been alive long enough to be this bored.”
“I’m plenty old enough to be bored, bro,” came the indignant reply.
“Dude, you’ve been alive 46 days. I activated the Womb for you less than 3 months ago. You have no right to be this bored.”
“Yeah, and you’ve only been alive, what, 180 days?” the young man asked sarcastically, though he knew the actual count was much longer.
“I’ve been here forever.” A cold and measured response.
The younger man scoffed before jumping on One’s back again.
One pulled away once more and went to the bunk room. Twenty-Seven followed him closely, something clearly on his mind. One turned to him.
“What’s up, man?” he asked tiredly.
“It’s just — Man, uh — What happened to Twenty-Six?”
“I’ve told you what happened to Twenty-Six.”
“No, you just said you needed a replacement.”
“That’s what happened to Twenty-Six. He needed replaced.”
“Dude, you know what I mean.”
“Twenty-Six died.”
“Well doy. How?”
“We’re in space. Even if we weren’t, death is a certainty.”
“Dude, One, you are the worst at answering questions, like, ever.”
One laughed.
“Yeah, but I’m still the best teacher you’ve ever known.” he chuckled.
“You’re also the worst everything I’ve ever known,” Twenty-Seven quipped.
The men stood in silence briefly. One lowered himself onto his bunk. Twenty-Seven watched him, an increasingly tragic expression spreading across his face. One leaned back and closed his eyes tightly, intentionally refusing to see the younger man’s pitiful appearance. He was tired of answering these questions with each new iteration. At this point, it seemed an exercise in futility.
Each story ended the same, each life coming to the same closing line; never anything special. It had become easier with each passing individual. Two had been a real struggle. One had been uncertain that he would ever recover from losing his first second hand man. He had tried to make himself disconnect since then. He spent more time outside the station when he could. Tried to be independent from them. But Twenty-Seven — Twenty-Seven reminded him too much of himself in the very beginning, beyond the obvious fact that they had the exact same face, the same DNA. Each of the men had the same face and DNA; that wasn’t special. Somehow though, Twenty-Seven was special. Excitable and eager to know whatever he could. Stifled by life inside the Doppel. It took great effort to remain aloof with this one. One reflected on the lives of the others, how shockingly dissimilar they had all been, all facts considered, and yet they all ended the same. Such is life, he thought to himself.
One woke up naturally for the first time in what felt like ages. No klaxon blaring, no clingy crewmate awaiting his eyes to flutter open. “Good,” he thought. Perhaps at last Twenty-Seven had gotten the hint to stop asking so many questions. He rose slowly, stretching his aching body. The human body was not designed to spend its entire life in space. Even One, essentially created for that purpose, still struggled with the effects.
One found Twenty-Seven sitting quietly near the com panel and staring through the view screen at the celestial bodies of Dorra that blinked and flickered around them.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” he whispered, placing his hand on Twenty-Seven’s shoulder.
“Yeah, yeah,” Twenty-Seven responded, being jarred from whatever distant reality his mind had ventured off to.
“So like me,” One thought with a gentle smile, before saying “Get some sleep, man.”
Twenty-Seven rose mindlessly and followed the instruction. “How long has he been awake?” One wondered, before taking Twenty-Seven’s place at the com. Still no message from the Union. One felt a familiar twinge of concern, before shaking it off. What did it matter, really, he asked himself. He went about his routine, checking the equipment, checking readings, looking for anything that might have gone awry during his rest. He was relieved to find there had been nothing out of the ordinary, and returned to his studies.
“Tell me what happened to Twenty-Six,” a groggy voice croaked from behind One. He had been reading for hours, and the sudden reminder that he was not alone startled him.
“Christ, man!” he yelled.
“Tell me,” Twenty-Seven said again, “I need to know.”
“You already know.”
“I know he’s dead. I don’t know how he got there.”
“Does it even matter?” One shot back, “Dead is dead. Who cares how anyone arrived at dead. All that matters is that they are dead.”
“What happened to you, man,” Twenty-Seven asked quietly.
“What do you mean?”
“What happened to you? Seriously, how can it not matter how they got there? Dead is DEAD, man! Becoming dead is a big freakin’ deal.”
“Drop it,” One yelled. He felt his long stifled emotions bubbling up inside him.
Twenty-Seven was silent.
One was silent.
The silence became its own entity. A threesome to their short staffed company. It floated down on them and wrapped them up, holding them against one another. One stared at Twenty-Seven, staring at his own face. Younger, not so worn down by the nihilism, unscathed by the repeated witnessing of death after death. Hair still cut to regulation. Twenty-Seven stared back, tears prickling at his eyes and throat. He saw himself, and yet something completely different. Long, unkempt hair licking at that uncanny face, yet the skin pulled differently. Tighter, and yet wrinkling slightly around the eyes, across the forehead. That face no longer held its softness. Silence coiled tighter, beginning to hint at suffocation.
“Look, I can’t tell you what happened to them, man,” One whispered through the smog of silence that nestled around them, “I just can’t do it again.”
Twenty-Seven nodded slowly. Time drifted without meaning again, the way it had for so long, the way it always would, but in that moment, it was palpable.
An alarm blasted through the station, nearly shaking the men. Something was wrong. Severely wrong. The silence that had enveloped them was eradicated. They rushed to the com to see if they could see anything. The view screen was blank. The instruments were going berserk. Inconsistent and chaotic readings flashed over and over before the entire com powered down. The lights dimmed inside the vessel, and a warning message began repeating itself. One looked to Twenty-Seven. The young man’s face was contorted into fear and frown. One patted him on the shoulder. “I’m going outside,” he shouted over the various sirens and messages the station’s computer blasted through the hull. Twenty-Seven grabbed his hand. “I’ll go,” he yelled, but One slipped away and ran for the airlock.
One grabbed his gear and slipped it on far more quickly than he ever had. This was not how these situations were typically handled. The man with seniority was not the one who was supposed to go out during the outages, but he didn’t care. Regulations be damned. He wasn’t going to watch it happen again. Twenty-Seven stood at the doorway, watching One as he dressed, screaming something unheard through the chaos that shattered everything he had ever known. One heard as Twenty-Seven began trying to open the door into the airlock and before the younger man could progress, he opened the outer door, effectively locking the rest of the station down until proper procedures allowed things to open again.
One ventured out onto the shell of the station where he had spent his life. He immediately saw where the vessel had been struck by some manner of space debris. Two of the twelve power cells placed around the outside of the ship had been knocked loose, likely causing a short in the circuit and causing the power levels to fluctuate inside. He set to repairing the damaged pieces, and looked up to see still more hurtling towards the Doppel. He worked as quickly as he could, but it was not fast enough. He had only been able to repair one of the cells before the next impact. A small piece of rock struck him at such velocity it tore through the arm of his suit. Safety procedures activated. The arm was severed off and sealed instantaneously. The temperature rose rapidly on the blade inside the sleeve, cauterizing the amputation. One screamed in pain, though from everything he had read, this was nothing compared to what would have happened without the guillotine effect of his suit. He had poured over the manuals that warned of what could happen in these circumstances. How the water in human skin would vaporise in the absence of atmospheric pressure; moisture on the tongue would boil. All of that, of course, only mattered if the rest of you somehow had oxygen and protection from the vacuum of space. The hud began a countdown, indicating how long he had left without receiving proper medical attention. These suits, while advanced technology, could simply not stave off human death without other measures being taken to recover.
One’s mind flashed back, again and again, to each of the different men he had lost during his time on the station. Had this been what they had felt? This fear? This — well, this relief? What sort of emotional cocktail did they each experience? Were they — Was he — glad? He felt himself floating away from the hull of the station. The impact must have been enough to separate his magnetic boots from the titanium. It was a weak bond anyway. It only made sense that it would have. As he rotated away from the only home he had ever known, the only home he could ever have known, he tried not to imagine the face of his protege. He tried not to see that same face, over and over again in his mind. The fear. God, the fear. Two’s final scream flashed through his mind. Eleven. Nineteen. Each face, the same, and yet so different in that final moment. Each death had been different, but was that even possible? Each had taken place in the same location — this godforsaken station in this corner of this godforsaken galaxy. Each death of the same person, genetically. How could it have been so different each time? The urgency of the message in his hud increased, counting away One’s final seconds, and he felt a feeling of anticipation. Of impending freedom?
The Womb hummed in the background as Twenty-Seven sat at the com, studying up on life in the olden days, back on Earth. He absent-mindedly worked his finger through the scars on his face. The scars he had put there with a broken piece of the ship gathered during a repair mission. They were designs he had created after discovering the concept of “tattoos” during one of his deep dives into old human culture. It was his only way of feeling different. When at last the Womb unlocked, he felt a very slight tickle of excitement. What it would be to not be alone again, even for a little while. He tried to stifle the feeling. He knew how this always ended.
“Welcome to the Doppel,” the computer voice chirped pleasantly.
Twenty-Seven stepped into the room to watch the new arrival recover from the incubation process. It sat up slowly, rising out of the pink amniotic fluid that each of the men was born from, stretching its back and arms. It looked around. Focusing on his face. It blinked several times, and he waited patiently for the eyes to focus. It took some time, this orientation to the world of the living. Fortunately, each of the clones was born with the ability to understand language and to speak it; once they figured out how to make their vocal cords work, anyway. The amnion drained from the incubation pod and the hatch opened, allowing the newest arrival to the station to step out into its new home.
Twenty-Seven leaned against the wall. His hair was long, tumbling down his shoulders. His hand stroked his beard out of habit.
“Get some clothes on and find me for orientation when you’re ready,” he said coldly before walking out of the Womb. Something made him hesitate for a moment, and he turned back to his newest crewmate. Maybe this time it would be different. He cleared his throat.
“And, uh, welcome to the Doppel, Forty-Nine. I think you’re gonna like it here.”
“Wait. Sorry, I just wondered. How long have you been here?” the new man smiled awkwardly before asking, as his eyes slowly took in the haggard face of his superior.
How did you foil or dodge someone else’s attempt to cheat or deceive you?
Recently, I was at my parents’ house (it is empty now) and the phone rang. A guy with a strong Mexican accent asked for my grandma (who passed away a few years ago, but the landline is on her name) and I said it was me. I thought it was an extortion call…
Mexican man: It is me, auntie!
Me: who is it?
MM: Me! Your beloved relative! Don’t you remember me anymore? I left Guatemala so long ago! Guess who am I!!
Me: Quique!!! So nice to hear from you! How are you mijo? How are your wife and kids?
MM: Well, we are all ok! Look auntie, I want to surprise my family, but I got stuck in Mexico DF Airport! Please help me not to blow the surprise! I need money to pay some taxes here. Can you send me $1000 through Western Union today? I will pay you back tomorrow as soon as I fix this!
Me: Are you sure you will fix it with only $1000? I can send you more just in case…
MM: Thanks auntie! Let’s make it $3000?
Me: I will send you $5000. Call me in 3 hours to give you the transfer number.
MM: Please deposit under the custom’s employee name it is XxXx…
THREE HOURS LATER…
MM: Hi! Could you do it?
Me: I just remembered that Quique is not my nephew, it is my grandson. And he is gay and single… and hung up.
Roast Pork with Potato Dumplings
This is one of my all-time favorite comfort foods.
roast pork potato dumplings
Yield: 8 servings
Ingredients
Dumplings
3 to 4 pounds starchy potatoes
2 to 3 eggs
1/2 to 1 cup all-purpose flour
Sea and or kosher salt, to taste
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1/4 cup chopped fresh parsley
Pork Roast
1 pork roast
Oil (for browning)
Salt and pepper, to taste
Paprika, to taste
1/2 to 1 pound coarsely chopped onions
Instructions
Dumplings
In a large pot, boil potatoes in salted water with the skins on. Peel and put them through a ricer (if you don’t have a ricer, use the back of a spoon to smash potatoes through a sieve). Let cool completely.
Refrigerate.
The next day, about 30 minutes before the roast is finished, set a large pot of salted water to boil.
To the cooled, riced potatoes add eggs and 8 to 14 tablespoons of flour, depending on how starchy the potatoes are). Also add salt, nutmeg and parsley. Using your hands, form potatoes into balls between the size of golf and tennis balls.
Add the potato balls to the boiling water but do not let the water continue to boil. When they float to the top in 15 to 20 minutes, they are done.
Pork Roast
In a large, heavy pot, heat oil. Sprinkle the roast with salt, pepper and paprika, and brown quickly in oil. Add onions and brown them, too. Turn heat down to medium low. Add a little water. A carrot and a couple of fresh tomatoes can also be added if desired. Cover and cook for 2 hours, turning occasionally.
To make gravy (optional), remove the roast and add a little water to the pan to de-glaze it. Add a little flour or cornstarch to thicken the drippings.
Serve dumplings and pork roast with red cabbage or sauerkraut.
What was something that a teacher told you in school that you knew was obviously wrong?
I was taught to read the newspaper when I was in elementary school by my parents and an excellent 4th grade teacher. When I was in 8th grade I read an article that said drug addict pregnant women gave birth to addicted babies. When I told my teacher in health class about the article she didn’t believe me. She said women who ate bananas did not have babies addicted to bananas. I pointed out that heroin was addictive and bananas were not. She told me to shut up and sit down.
In high school I read a newspaper article that said the military tested LSD on unsuspecting soldiers and several had killed themselves accidentally while in a drugged state. One jumped out a highrise window because he thought he could fly. My gym teacher told me I must be mistaken because our military would never do such a thing. I asked why it was in the newspaper if it wasn’t true. She said she didn’t believe I read the newspaper.
Freshman year in college in my American History class my professor attempted to tell me that the scientific belief during slavery was that Black people were not really human. That they were like monkeys or pet dogs. I told him that they may have said it but they knew it was a lie. Because given how white men raped black female slaves they must have seriously been into bestiality. Livestock cannot farm or clean or build or cook or rear and feed their babies. They knew we were just as human as them they used that lie to justify slavery. Then I walked out the class.
How did you foil or dodge someone else’s attempt to cheat or deceive you?
Originally Answered: Have you ever foiled/dodged someone else's attempt to cheat or deceive you?
Oh Yes!
Late afternoon, on my way back to my dorm, Pink Floyd in my ears when I saw that lady coming towards me and smiling.
She was absolutely gorgeous, well dressed, and waving towards me.
Obviously I turned around to confirm that it wasn’t me(because well, why would it be me? I don’t know her) as she approached and said hi!
Baffled, I removed my headphones and replied back.
Lady: “Hi. How are you?”
Me: “Good thanks, and yourself?”
Lady: “I’m in some trouble and I’m really looking for some help. I need to meet my brother at *I forgot where* really soon and I don’t have enough money for fuel. Would you mind lending me 10 Rand(South African currency)”.
Me: “Sure thing”, while I handed out 10 bucks.
Lady: “Thank you so much, you really saved my day”.
Me: “Pleasure”.
Now, I’m the type of person who usually helps others when I can. That day I had some bucks, so I did.
What happens next?
Couple of months later, I was on campus chatting with my buddy and this absolutely gorgeous lady approaches us.
Lady: “Sorry to disturb you guys, I see you’re having a great chat. I’m missing out on some fuel cash and I need to go see my brother who is working. Do you have any spare 10 Rands?”
Me and friend: “Apologies, we don’t have cash on us”.
Lady, looked at us weird, turned around and make some comment. Me and my friend didn’t bother.
However, something struck me then. I knew that lady. Hell yes I did! However, it was too late to foil her plan.
Epilogue
Months later, I bumped into her again.
I decided to be an asshole that day and as soon as she started speaking I wore my evil grin.
Lady: “Sorry sir, I nee…”
Me: “Ahh, you gonna meet your brother again. You know, it’s the third time. I would have literally given you a hundred if you had changed your story.Try to be more creative next time, gorgeous!”, while I walked past her laughing.
Of course, I got the “Fuck you!” reply but I was too content to care.
Why is China the largest factory robotic installer in the world, with over 50% of all installations when they have so many unemployed people?
Entirely different
These Robots are doing jobs that NOBODY IS REALLY INTERESTED IN DOING
Like sewing buttons onto shirts or cutting lines of cloth
How many workers today do you think line up for 55 Yuan per day to sew 560 buttons onto 80 shirts at 1 Yuan for 10 buttons?
How many workers want to cut line’s of cloth and earn 70 Yuan a day for 140 metres a day of cloth?
How many workers want to get paid 60 Yuan a day for manually applying coloring lines on steel bars?
Almost NONE
So China needs Robots to do the job and to do it far more economically
These Jobs are now done by what is called 5G Factories
Fully automated factories working with 100–120 workers doing jobs with automated machinery that formerly close to 300–500 workers were needed
That’s because workers aren’t keen on working for 1500–1800 Yuan a month anymore
They want a minimum of 3000 -3200 Yuan a month
The Unemployed people are primarily College Graduates
They want advented jobs meaning Jobs that suit their qualification
In 2015 – the Offering Starting pay was 5,750 Yuan a month for a Non Trainee STEM graduate
In 2024 – It’s 9,150 Yuan a month
If you see the Vocational Training, the unemployment rate among fresh graduates is a mere 6.57%
Today Russia responded to the missile attack on Russian territory.
The response was a demonstration of what is in store for European and US bases if Washington’s provocations of Russia continue A Ukrainian base was destroyed by a hypersonic ballistic missile carrying conventional warhead. The missile is designed to carry nuclear warheads. The Russian response was a demonstration of the utter destruction that awaits the stupid and foolish NATO countries Reports are that Trump is urgently seeking communication with Putin. The evil Zionist Neoconservatives are coming very close to destroying the Western world.
Several members of America’s Ignorant Foreign Policy Community Challenged my Statement of the superiority of Russian missile and nuclear capability. As usual the “experts” had no idea what they were talking about. Their ignorance is a disgrace and a danger.
It is beyond belief the European governments are so utterly stupid as to be members of NATO.
UPDATED 6:58 AM EST — RUSSIA FIRES ICBM AT UKRAINE; SAYS NEW U.S. BASE IN POLAND NOW A PRIORITY TARGET FOR DESTRUCTION
Ukraine’s air force reported that an ICBM had been fired from a base in Russia’s southern Astrakhan region on the Caspian Sea early this morning. It struck Dnipro, Ukraine. This is the FIRST ICBM to be fired in war, in all of human history.
Russian authorities have not yet confirmed the launch, but it would be the first time such a powerful missile has been deployed in the war.
The Ukraine air force did not specify which ICBM had been fired, but its launch comes mere hours after a Russian military analyst said Moscow’s forces could unleash its fearsome RS-26 ‘Frontier’ missile in retaliation for the Storm Shadow strikes.
The Frontier missile is a terrifying, nuclear-capable weapon weighing roughly 50 tons with a range of up to 3,600 miles.
It has never before been used in combat, but analysts said it could be deployed with a conventional warhead in a strike that Ukraine’s air defenses would be powerless to intercept.
Reported video of the ICBM attack seems to show a significant number of “re-entry vehicles” slamming into the ground in Dnipro. It is important to point out these were NOT nuclear warheads, merely conventional, but the hits were severe nonetheless:
Kyiv has not suffered an ICBM strike since the war began in February 2022, with Russia’s military deploying smaller, slower Iskander missiles and a handful of hypersonic Kinzhal projectiles alongside hundreds upon hundreds of attack drones.
The Russian attack this morning also included other types of weapons which targeted enterprises and critical infrastructure in the central-eastern city of Dnipro, the air force said.
The Kremlin deployed Tu-95MS strategic bombers to launch cruise missiles and MiG-31K fighters to fire hypersonic Kinzhal rockets in a calculated bid to plunge Ukraine into darkness as a bitter winter approaches.
Reports said Yuzhmash, a prominent Ukrainian state-owned aerospace and defense manufacturer – was also hit in this morning’s assault.
Some Russian missiles also reportedly struck the towns of Kremenchuk and Myrhorod, while areas in Kyiv, Odesa, and the Sumy regions suffered blackouts as the electrical grid gave out.
STORM SHADOW ATTACK AGAINST RUSSIA
This morning’s bombardment of Ukraine also comes less than 24 hours after Kyiv launched UK-supplied Storm Shadow missiles at targets in Kursk.
Fragments of the missiles that struck a military facility in the Russian town of Marino were recovered by military bloggers on Wednesday afternoon, with unverified pictures (one shown above) shared widely on social media.
New U.S. Base in Poland Now a “Priority Target”
Russia this morning mentioned US air bases in Poland saying they can be targeted with ‘advanced weapons.’
Moscow said the opening of a new US ballistic missile defense base in Redzikowo, Poland, near the Baltic coast will ‘increase the overall level of nuclear danger’, adding it had been added to a list of possible targets for Russia.
The facility, opened on November 13, forms part of a broader NATO missile shield called ‘Aegis Ashore’ designed to intercept short- and intermediate-range ballistic weapons.
Aegis Ashore Poland Base
‘This is another frankly provocative step in a series of deeply destabilizing actions by the Americans and their allies,’ Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said of the airbase’s unveiling.
‘(The base) has been added to the list of priority targets for potential destruction which, if necessary, can be executed with a wide range of advanced weapons,’ she concluded.
Both Poland and Romania are hosting onshore versions of the Aegis ballistic missile defense systems The system is also used on many US naval vessels and carrier groups patrolling around Europe and serves primarily as a defense network against nuclear missiles.
The base certainly would have seen the ICBM that Russia launched against Ukraine overnight; and could do absolutely NOTHING about it.
That’s the “rub” with so much of this “missile defense” spending; they can SEE the missiles but can’t do anything about them. Yet these bases cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and we have bases all over the world. Billions spent on this . . . . and it can do nothing about missiles like the one(s) Russia fired at Ukraine overnight.
UPDATE 6:58 AM EST —
When an ICBM is used to target a relatively close target, it goes much higher up — way into space –before coming back down on the target at screaming speed.
Even though the distance from its; launch point in Russia to Ukraine was only about 650 miles, it did not go “inter-continental” but the missile __can__ go inter-continental.
MORE:
Russia launched a single RS-26 “Rubezh” road mobile missile.
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Analysis of imagery of the attack indicates the RS-26 carried six independent warheads, each in turn deploying several submunitions.
This warhead package is exclusively for conventional attack.
Russia had not been previously assessed to outfit the RS-26 with a warhead of this design.
By unveiling the conventionally armed RS-26, Russia is changing the qualitative nature of the conflict, something promised by President Vladimir Putin. Ukraine and its Western allies must now evaluate the destructive potential of this weapon, and understand that Russia can deliver this warhead to any target in Ukraine or Europe knowing there is no defense against it.
The RS-26 is produced in Votkinsk. It is assessed that the production of the RS-26, which was halted in 2017, was resumed this past summer.
With production rates estimated at 6-8 missiles per month, Russia could have accumulated an arsenal of between 30-40 RS-26 missiles.
Although described as an intercontinental ballistic missile, the RS-26’s range actually depends on the warhead package. If armed with a single warhead, it can exceed the 5,000 kilometer threshold used to differentiate between intermediate and intercontinental range missiles. The RS-26 did not go into serial production because of this ambiguity; at the time, Russia was a signatory to the INF treaty, which prohibited intermediate range missiles. It is assessed that the six warhead conventional warhead package used against Dnipro would have made the RS-26 used fall into the intermediate range for classification.
Donald Trump withdrew from the INF treaty in 2019. If the United States had remained in the treaty, this version of the RS-26 would not have been available for use by Russia.
Pago Pago
When I was in Pago Pago, I was employed to build a couple of hospitals, and entry holding facilities for the immigration office there.
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While I was working on the Immigration Holding cell building, I struck up a conversation with a plumber who arrived to help us sort out the hydrant situation.
He was an enormous Samoan. Big massive man, in a tiny, tiny sub-compact automobile.
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As we talked he made an apologic statement. He said “well, I’m not really a plumber, I am a trained EMT, but I was laid off, and I am doing this for now.”
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And so we got straight to the most in-depth conversation that I had had with a person in years. Man, he was depressed, and hurting.
And I had to tell him, as a “BRO” (and I took on the older uncle role, as well) that …
You are not the work that you do.
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Us men we go though different jobs and careers in our lives. We adapt, we survive, we endure and we keep on moving forward. We never quit, we never give up, and we keep on keeping on.
He told me that he had a girl friend in Hawaii, and I asked him why he wasn’t with her.
He told me that he felt ashamed that he was no longer an EMT and that he felt that he could not live up to her expectations.
To which I told him; “Nonsense!”
As a trained EMT he shouldn’t have any trouble finding work in Hawaii, and as a bonus, his girlfriend was local.
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He could get a flight to Hawaii, and immediate have contact, connections, a place to stay and opportunities. He just needs to reach out.
So I told him…
Reach out.
And things will start coming together.
And that was that. Let it be understood that four months later he was in Hawaii, and sure as shit, he got settled and all sorts of doors opened up. He did have to take a training refresher course, but he was hired in his profession.
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And last I heard from him, he was doing well. A whole new world opened up for him.
All because of our little chat that day at the build site.
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Remember, you are not what you do, and if you are in trouble… reach out for help.
You might be surprised at the results.
Today…
How are the Chinese dealing with China’s defeat to the US in the Olympics? We are seeing reports of propaganda and disinformation being spread throughout the country, telling its netizens that China won.
China participated in 114 Events in the Olympics 2024
They won 91 Medals
That’s a 79.82% Success Rate
This means China had a 80% Success Rate of ensuring a medal in every event they participated
USA participated in 171 Events in the Olympics 2024
They won 126 Medals
That’s a 73.68% Success Rate
This means US had a 74% Success Rate of ensuring they won a medal in every event they participated in
Kudos to both countries
They both did very well in the Olympics
US had more events so 74% is equally impressive as Chinas 80%
Others who did very well include :-
South Korea – 74.68%
Japan – 71.43%
Germany – 66.77%
UK – 65..49%
Netherlands – 68.42%
A Surprise is Kazakhstan which bagged a 64.70% success rate in the Olympics
India participated in 57 Events and won 7 Medals
Thats a 12.28% Success Rate
(I willl Assume Vinesh won a Silver because she was the only the second wrestler left undefeated until her disqualification)
Pakistan participated in 7 Events and won 1 Medal
That’s 14.30% Success Rate
Yet both nations are making the most noise after the Olympics
China won 40 Medals in Gold and tied with US for the top sport in terms of Gold Medals alone
They had two unfortunate incidents
Wang Chuqin the favorite to win a TT Medal lost in a shock upset
Their 73 Kg Weightlifter screwed up real bad and was expected to breeze
The US also found 9 Gold Medals lesser than they expected with Dominica, St Lucia and Botswana taking surprising wins against US Athletes
Plus China beat them in the 4X100 m Medley as well
It was an equal performance by both nations who left the others FAR FAR BEHIND
Very similar to the famous USSR and US taking all medals in Pre Barcelona events and the rest always being far behind
MM has competition
Here is a guy that is also using AI for classical realism. Nice work, but I think that the art needs better form…
EU menacing letter to Musk ahead of Trump X Spaces
What is the craziest story about North Korea? I heard that when North Korea played in the World Cup, the citizens of North Korea were made to believe that North Korea had won the World Cup and that Kim Jong-Il was the team’s coach.
Originally Answered: What is the craziest story about North Korea?
On August 18, 1976, after notifying the nearby North Korean command post, five South Korean Service personnel entered the DMZ under the protection of a small contingent of unarmed US and South Korean soldiers, to trim a tree that had repeatedly been used for cover by North Korean operatives crossing the DMZ to attempt to snatch prisoners. Weapons are not allowed in the DMZ, which must be kept clear under the ceasefire agreement in effect since the 1950s.
A few minutes later, a small contingent of North Koreans appeared. They observed for 15 minutes without comment or interference, then demanded the trimming stop, claiming Kim Il Sung had personally planted the tree and nourished it and it was growing under his supervision.
After being ignored, the North Koreans stormed off in a jeep, then returned in a truck with 20 soldiers armed with crowbars and wooden clubs. In a short melee, the North Koreans bludgeoned one guard to death and chopped up another with an axe.
The North Korean government immediately started petitioning various organization to condemn the event as an unprovoked attack by the US.
Three days later, 23 US and South Korean vehicles entered the DMZ–unannounced. Two eight-man engineering teams armed with chainsaws commenced to bringing down the tree under the protection of two 30-man security platoons armed with pistols and axe handles. Simultaneously combat engineers and armored vehicles prepared to destroy “the bridge of no return” should the North show its face, and South Korean commandoes, disguised as unarmed tai-kwon-do teams, unloaded rafts, M-16s and grenade launchers. Some of these commandoes strapped claymore mines to their chest and stood on the bridge, shouting and daring the North to attack.
Behind them, 20 Hueys and 7 Cobra gunship helicopters circled. Behind THESE, B-52s, F5s, F86s, F4 Phantoms, and F111 bombers appeared over South Korean skies. US and South Korean regiments armed with Hawk missiles and medium to heavy armor poured into view along the Southern side of the DMZ. In Washington, the President let it be known that he was sending 12,000 troop to Korea, starting with 1,800 comandos ready and waiting in Japan.
In response, about 200 armed North Koreans rolled up, mostly in buses. The US called the gunships into view and had C130 gunships nose to tail in Japan, ready to support if needed.
The North Korean soldiers got out and set up machine gun positions.
The tree came down in 42 minutes. The US and South Korean forces retreated, taking with them two illegal barriers previously erected by the north. The North Koreans went home and Kim Il Song, without admitting fault, withdrew his idiotic charges and expressed “regret of the incident.”
The moral of this story? If you don’t want war, make sure your adversary knows you are prepared to win one.
The other moral of this story? North Korea is bat shit crazy.
What is the relationship like between China and Vietnam?
The relationship between China and Vietnam has been complicated, and continues to be complicated. It makes sense to look at it from several different angles:
Historical:
China has occupied Vietnam for more than 1,000 years; the Chinese name for Vietnam was Annam (安南)。At times, the Vietnamese invaded southern China too. In all instances, the Vietnamese overthrew their Chinese rulers and established their independence.
For many practical purposes, there is no significant difference between Chinese and Vietnamese. Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese leader was fluent in Mandarin, and taught at the Huangpu Military Academy in the 1920s.
Cultural:
On the cultural side, the two countries were very tightly integrated. The Vietnamese adopted Chinese writing, wear Chinese style clothing, celebrated Chinese holidays, eat Chinese food, read Chinese classics and poetry. Vietnamese children learn Chinese folktales, even to this day, in their schools.
Sometimes the closeness makes the Chinese angry because they feel that being so close to China culturally, the Vietnamese should be happy to be part of the big Chinese family.
This makes for a very complicated political relationship.
Politics:
The close history and culture makes the Chinese and Vietnamese strange political bedfellows.
In recent years, the Vietnamese and Chinese helped each other in fighting the French and the Americans. But China felt betrayed when Vietnam sided with the Russians after the end of the Vietnam War.
Recently, the Chinese have acted with impunity over territory claims in the South China Sea. Basically, the Chinese are showing the Vietnamese who is boss in the region.
The Americans think that they can form alliances with Vietnam and the Philippines to curb Chinese aggression, but there is a saying “Faraway water cannot put out a nearby fire.”
This is why even after the recent disputes, the Vietnamese premier visited Beijing to defuse tensions.
Wifey Material
Do Chinese women give permission?
Hi, Cory Michael. Thanks for the interesting question.
Well, I live and work in Chengdu, so I am surrounded by Chinese women every day! 😀
Last month, one of my colleagues brought her cat to work.
Her mother and grandmother had gone on a trip together, so there was no one at home to take care of her cat.
So she decided to bring her cat to work.
Her cat is a she, and goes by the name of 地瓜 (Dìguā), which literally translates to “Sweet Potato”.
I haven’t a clue about cat breeds, so I have no idea what sort of cat she is, but she’s just over a year old.
Now, I never pet someone else’s pet unless I have their permission.
So I asked my colleague whether I could pet her 地瓜 and she said sure, go ahead.
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My colleague had brought 地瓜 to the office wearing a leash on a cat harness.
I was a bit amazed, because I had never seen a cat taking to a harness-and-leash combo before.
I thought all cats hate being walked on a leash.
And she (the cat, not my colleague) went about it so obediently.
So I asked my colleague for permission to walk 地瓜 for a bit after work.
My colleague happily obliged ^^
地瓜 was very patient with me during out short walk together 😀
Conclusion:
In this context, my colleague, a Chinese woman, gave me permission to pet and walk her pet cat.
Hope this answer helps with your question, Cory Michael !
Lisa’s Crispy Chops
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Ingredients
6 pork chops
3 eggs, beaten slightly
2 cups crushed soda crackers
1 1/2 tablespoons garlic powder
1 1/2 tablespoons dried minced onion
1 teaspoon each salt and pepper
Instructions
Mix all dry ingredients in a bowl.
Dip pork chops into egg, then roll in dry mixture.
Fry over medium heat in a small amount of oil until dark, crispy brown.
“I never thought it was possible for a person to be so damn arrogant!” Zed screamed as he slammed the front door of his house. “Your ass better stay on your own damn asteroid or I’ll kick it all the way to one of Jupiter’s moons!”Through the blinds of his window, Zed glared at the abyss of space outside his personal asteroid upon which his house sits. His eyes zoned in on the house of his one and only neighbor, Mandy. Across the asteroid belt, he saw Mandy’s front door fly open and her step out in a space suit with a brick in hand. She threw the brick and shattered Zed’s window as it landed in his living room. A tight vacuum sucked in from the broken window. Grumbling under his breath, Zed slapped some Flex Tape ™ on it. “Crazy woman,” he muttered, then looked down at the brick. There was a note on it.Crouching down, he picked up the note. I didn’t steal your damn duster! Zed scoffed. “That’s just what a duster-stealer would say,” yelling louder so Mandy could hear him this time, he added. “I know you stole my duster ten years ago! I bet my house on it!”“As if!” Mandy hollered back.“That duster took forever to be shipped here from Earth, Mandy! I’m getting it back!”“I ain’t no thief!”“Yeah, right,” Zed remarked under his breath.Staring at the mess of glass in his living room, Zed realized he had spent enough time arguing and definitely has to swept up this mess. “Damn, when does that woman ever stop causing problems for me.”Zed glared at his closet door. Space-spider webs covered the knob. He hasn’t cleaned anything in years. Signing, he twisted it open and saw its crooked shelves propped up by a singular wooden broom. Slowly, just as he thought the broom was free from being Altas, and was about to carefully make his exit, the shelves can clamoring down.“Juck!” He cursed as debris cluttered at his feet.Something tapped his ankle. As he looked down, his eyes widened. It was the feather-duster.“Oh, juck.”Zed paced around his living room with the blinds closed and the duster in hand. “Oh, juck. Oh, juck. Oh, juck.”What the juck was he supposed to do? Apologize for his wrong actions? Admit he was wrong? To Mandy??No! Those were all horrible options!Then, he stopped pacing a sly smile grew on his face. “What if Mandy never knows it was here?” He cracked open his blinds and peeled at Mandy’s house. “Because I’m going to sneak it into her house before she ever finds out.”Zed didn’t bother to wait until ‘night’ or anything because what night? He’s in space! Instead, he immediately suited up and floated under the asteroids, out of sight, to Mandy’s house. He entered through a window in the basement. His weak muscles barely pulled him through the vacuum as he flopped onto the floor. “Man,” he mumbled as he stood up. “These houses were not designed for space.”After fumbling around looking for the staircase upstairs, Zed just ended up wiggling off a loose vent panel and shimming his body through the vent. He peeked out the occasional vent, using it to navigate through the house. Finally, he found himself in Mandy’s master bedroom while she was taking a shower.Zed pounded his fingers through the vent and tries to shake it off, but the metal held firm. “Juck!” He cursed as he heard the water turn off. Mandy would come out of the bathroom any minute now.Rushed to get out, he left the duster inside the air vent and shimmered back to the basement, went out the window, and made his daring escape by floating casually back to his house.Goosebumps run up and down Mandy’s arms. “Why is it so cold in here?” She asked herself as she pulled on a second sweater. “Geez, don’t tell me there’s something wrong with the furnace again. Ugh! It’s going to take so long to get a repairman here!”Mandy drastically pounded on the thermostat, but the temperature stayed the same. Then, she heard a quick rat-a-tat-tat-tat coming from her air vent. Slowly, she crept over to it, wondering if something was inside. She used her nails to unscrew the vent and remove it. Inside, she pulled out… the feather duster. Mandy went white.“Oh, juck. Oh, juck. Oh, juck. Oh, juck.” She softly cursed to herself.She had been the one with the feather duster, she thought. Mandy began pacing. What the juck was she supposed to do? Apologize for her wrong actions? Admit she was wrong? To Zed??No! Those were all horrible options!Mandy’s Mind scrambled for a solution. Wait a minute, she thought, if I hide it in Zed’s house, he’ll never know…Mandy broke into Zed’s house from a sky light on the roof because I guess just juck breaking and entering laws in space, right? Tiptoeing around, she looked for any convincing hiding spot to but the duster. A hungry stomach lead her to the kitchen.
As she stole all of Zed’s leftover pizza, an idea hit her. Underneath the fridge! Who cleans under there? Quickly, she stuffed the pizza in her mouth and the duster under the fridge as Zed’s footsteps approached. She dove behind the couch for cover as Zed opened the fridge looking for his leftover pizza. “What?” He asked himself. “I don’t remember eating it…”
Mandy nibbled on the crust in silence.
Zed tsked and closed the door. Instead, he grabbed a glass and filled with ice. Mandy’s eyes widened in horror as a cube slipped and slid under the fridge. Zed groaned and swiped underneath… only to have his hand find the feather duster.
With a fearful expression of his own, Zed pulled it out. Oh juck! I thought I hide this in Mandy’s house! What is this some kind of boomerang duster? Zed thought.
Swiftly, Zed grabbed his space suit and headed out the door. After it slammed shut, Mandy emerged from her hiding spot and watched from the window Zed hiding the duster back inside her house. “That punk!” She exclaimed, ironically. “How dare he tried to shift the blame and hide the duster in my house!”
Zed came back inside his house to find a Mandy with a crooked grin sitting on his couch. “What are you doing here, Mandy?” He asked.
“What were you doing in my house?” She remarked.
His face paled. “Nothing.”
Mandy wagged her finger in front of his face. “I don’t think so. You were hiding the duster because you were the one who had it along.”
“Ok, fine!” He confessed. “I found the feather duster but–wait a minute, how did you get into my house without me knowing? And how did you get back here just as I hide it?” He stepped closer. “And how did you know I was even hiding it, or that I had it?”
“I–well,” Mandy stuttered.
“You hid it in my house first!” Zed declared.
“I so did not!” She shouted. “How do I know you didn’t hide it first!”
Zed gasped. “Like I would ever do something so scandalous as that!” He lied.
“I just saw you hiding it,” she snapped.
He crossed his arms. “That doesn’t prove anything. You don’t know if it was originally in my house!”
“And you can’t prove it was in mine!” She hollered back.
“You wanna bet!” Zed screamed with a red face.
Mandy stuck her finger in Zed’s face, opened her mouth to say something before a confused expression flickered across her face as something outside the window caught the corner of her eye. “Wait a second, where’s the duster now?”
“It’s in your house.”
Mandy glanced back at the object. It was the duster. Just floating in space. “No it’s not.” Mandy pointed. “It’s right there.”
Zed twisted his neck to see it. “Oh, juck.”
I must have forgotten to close the window all the way.
“I guess that’s one way to solve the problem.”
Bronco Billy Saves the Day!
What seemingly insignificant event had a big impact on World War II?
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HMS Griffin
On a gloomy 24th April 1940, two British destroyers, HMS Griffin and HMS Acheron, were carrying out routine searches of merchant ships traversing the North Sea. Their mission was to prevent German resupply vessels reaching Andalsnes and Narvik, where British and French troops were fighting a loosing battle during the invasion of Norway.
They intercepted an innocent looking Dutch trawler off Andalsnes, halfway between Bergen and Trondheim on the Norwegian coastline. She turned out to be a disguised Kreigsmarine surface raider Schiff 26 – the Polares.
Among the mines, concealed guns and two loaded torpedo tubes Polares was carrying to disrupt the allied force, HMS Griffin’s boarding party also discovered a cache of intelligence documents. They had been hastily thrown overboard in a weighted bag, which failed to sink. These included some of the German Enigma coding machine keys for the period 23–26 April, and the procedures for scrambling the rotors.
Signal Rating (later Lt. Cmdr.) Geoffrey Jones, a former gentleman’s hatter from Liverpool, received a Distinguished Service Medal for his bravery in assisting the bomb disposal team to disarm the novel magnetic mines carried by Polares after she was towed to Portsmouth. Jones went on to command antisubmarine trawlers and became a teacher and headmaster after the war.
This was the first break that Bletchley park had in defining ‘cribs’ that could be used to enable the Bombe electro-mechanical computers – developed to operationalise Alan Turing’s decryption technique – to attack the German Enigma codes. With this intelligence they succeeded for the first time in retroactively decoding Enigma traffic between 22–26 April. While this revealed little useful intelligence it proved the potential of the Bombes to crack the German codes and sparked a concerted effort to gather new cribs and to mass produce the Bombe computers.
And the rest is, as they say, history.
Edit: The capture of a new 4 rotor naval Enigma machine was by another British destroyer, HMS Petard, on 30th October 1942 (after she in company with three other destroyers, a Sunderland flying boat and an ancient Wellesley patrol aircraft had spent 16 hours hunting and depth charging U-559 to the surface off the coast of Egypt – arguably a more important victory than the Battle of El Alamein which was going on at the same time not far away).
Two of three men who boarded the abandoned and sinking U-559 to retrieve the Enigma machine failed to get out before she sank, and were awarded the George Cross posthumously (the highest British honour for bravery not in the face of the enemy). The survivor, NAAFI canteen assistant Tommy Brown, received the George Medal (surely an inspiration to check-out clerks everywhere).
By that time Bletchley park was routinely reading the older 3 rotor Enigma machine messages (which were used by most of the German armed forces).
The first Enigma machine was ‘acquired’ by Polish intelligence in 1938 (by setting up a fake German arms company and ordering a civilian version!) and handed to British and French intelligence in 1939. The original machine was lost, but an accurate copy was reverse engineered from Polish drawings by Bletchley Park technicians.
HMS Griffin’s success was probably more important, as it proved the system and ensured it got high priority and funding, although cracking of the 4 rotor codes, using the improved Mammoth and ground breaking Colossus computers, certainly doomed the U-boats.
Incidentally, German documents uncovered after the war revealed that they were very concerned about the loss of the Polares, and that the possible discovery of Enigma codes may have revealed their plans for the invasion of France. However, as the codes she carried did not extend up to May, they thought they were safe (they were, as it took a little longer for Bletchley to crack the system wide open). However it did not occur to the German cryptographers to imagine that they might be used to help develop a system that could read most of their secret communications for the rest of the war.
EDIT 2: in answer to a good comment on why did it matter?, especially in relation to why Ultra did not improve allied intelligence in advance of the Market Garden operation and German Ardennes Offensive in 1944….
The Germans did not use radio messages encrypted by Enigma machines for communications within Germany. Instead they relied largely on the domestic landline network using teleprinters and telephones. Without radio messages to intercept Bletchley Park had nothing to work with. During the last stages of the war, this internal ‘phone based system was dominant as most Wehrmacht forces were based inside Germany, and this explains why Ultra intercepts were not available in useful quantities for Market Garden and the Ardennes Offensive.
Nevertheless, there are literally hundreds of occasions when Ultra helped the Allies gain the advantage in ways that contributed decisively to victory. For example Ultra intercepts were used to inform the Soviets about the exact German dispositions before the Battle of Kursk in the Summer of 1943, ensuring that Hitler lost the element of surprise and the Soviet defences were well prepared.
Planning for the Torch, Sicily, Salerno, Anzio and Normandy landings were all helped by Ultra as was Operation Cobra (the Normandy breakout), El Alamein and numerous Soviet victories. As you said it was decisive in the Battle of the Atlantic too, and breaking of the naval codes in late 1942 allowed Allied naval forces to rapidly defeat the U-boat threat in 1943. There were few allied operations between 1941–45 that were not assisted in some way by Ultra.
There were some occasions when good Ultra intelligence was not used – usually when concerns about protecting the source made Enigma intercepts difficult to distribute (cover stories about agents penetrating the Wehrmacht could only go so far), or when the distribution was so restricted that those who needed it most did not get access or mistrusted the intel provided (the Dieppe raid in 1942 is an example). As the system evolved and expanded, so did more effective distribution methods and greater user confidence in Ultra intelligence.
Ultra intelligence was shared with the USA (the US shared intelligence from its codebreakers in the Pacific in return), Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand and to some extent with the Soviets and Free French. The intelligence sharing arrangements for Ultra are the origin the modern “Five Eyes” system between the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
Man Discovers Fiancée Is No Saint And BLINDSIDES Her By Taking Back The Ring!
Why doesn’t Russia just use tactical nukes to stop the Kursk offensive?
Not needed
The Kursk offensive was elegant but ultimately a disaster as everything else
Imagine India invading and taking over large tracts of Pakistan and in exchange Pakistan captures 42 Rajasthani Villages across 5 Districts – 14 of which have already been liberated inside Five days with a minimum of 2500 Dead Enemy Soldiers and 150 pieces of equipment
The Ukraine supply line is cut off at SUMY where Russia is bombing FAB after FAB
This extends the Supply line from 7 Miles to 55 Miles
That alone means Ukraine cannot keep equipping their Soldiers who are in Kursk
This means Ukraine will send more troops across the Borders into Belgorod but again without supplies they will end up becoming TERRORISTS and holding hostages
Meanwhile Ukraine will leave their own territories where Russia will advance with impunity and capture more settlements and destroy more Ukrainian equipment and people
The Gamble was that Russia would be so worried about the loss of Civilian Lives in Kursk that they would immediately sue for peace
Unfortunately Russia is angrier now and regard Kursk as Terrorism against Civilians and will be even less determined for any peace
Yesterday 71% Russians voted on Telegram Groups to Kill Ukrainian women and Children against 8% on 30.06.2023 and 11% on 31.12.2023
It was a bungled offensive
You just don’t have the supply line to feed soldiers into Russia because Russians have Airpower and Artillery Power and Tank Strength
Plus they have the numbers
They can mobilize 200,000 Soldiers from their Reserves within a week
Ukraine is utterly exhausted and these are it’s BEST RESERVE TROOPS who are getting sliced into salami in Kursk
Why use Nukes?
Bronco Billy | 1980 | Clint Eastwood | movie review
Is Joe Biden Trying To Start World War 3 Before He Leaves Office? The Decision To Use Long-Range Missiles To Strike Targets Deep Inside Russia Is Insane
November 17, 2024 by Michael
As if everything that Joe Biden has done so far was not enough, now he has decided to push us to the brink of nuclear war. On Sunday, Joe Biden decided to allow Ukraine to use long-range missiles provided by the United States to hit targets deep inside of Russia. This is a bombshell. I don’t know how else to put it. The Russians have already warned us how they will respond if long-range missiles provided by the United States and other NATO countries start raining down on their cities. Sadly, most Americans have no idea what a direct conflict with Russia would mean.
When I first heard what Joe Biden had done, I reacted very emotionally.
I am still feeling very emotional at this moment.
Everyone needs to clearly understand what just happened, because this is a major turning point…
President Biden has given the OK to lift restrictions that will allow Ukraine to use U.S.-provided long-range weapons to strike deep into Russian territory, a U.S. official confirmed to CBS News on Sunday. The move is a significant change to U.S. policy in the ongoing Ukraine-Russia conflict.
The easing of restrictions would allow Kyiv to use the Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, to hit targets inside Russia. The move also comes as some 10,000 North Korean troops were sent to Kursk near Ukraine’s northern border to help Russian forces retake territory.
One of the reasons why I am so upset is because this wasn’t his decision to make.
We just had an election and his side lost.
The American people elected a leader that wants to bring the war in Ukraine to an end, but now Joe Biden is trying to make sure that nobody is going to be able to end this war.
According to CBS News, one of the reasons why this decision was made was to “put Kyiv in a better negotiating position when and if peace talks happen”…
The U.S. decision could help Ukraine at a moment when Russian forces appear to be making gains and could put Kyiv in a better negotiating position when and if peace talks happen.
It also comes as Mr. Biden is about to leave office and President-elect Trump has pledged to limit American support for Ukraine and ending the war as soon as possible.
Are you kidding me?
That is nonsense.
Donald Trump needs to come forward immediately and denounce this move, because we could be facing a scenario where events spiral out of control before he even has the opportunity to take office.
When Vladimir Putin was asked about the possibility that long-range missiles provided by the U.S. could soon be used to hit targets deep inside Russia, he responded by warning that such a move would mean that “U.S. and European countries are at war with Russia”…
“We are not talking about allowing or not allowing the Ukrainian regime to strike Russia with these weapons,” Putin said Thursday in comments to propagandist Pavel Zarubin. “We are talking about deciding whether NATO countries are directly involved in the military conflict or not.”
“This will mean that NATO countries, the U.S. and European countries are at war with Russia,” Putin said. “And if this is so, then, bearing in mind the change in the very essence of this conflict, we will make appropriate decisions based on the threats that will be created for us.”
Joe Biden just called Putin’s bluff.
We just crossed that red line, and there is no going back.
Now we will see if Putin was bluffing or not.
Later in September, Vladimir Putin explained that a “joint attack on the Russian Federation” could trigger the use of nuclear weapons…
A new nuclear doctrine would “clearly set the conditions for Russia to transition to using nuclear weapons,” he warned – and said such scenarios included conventional missile strikes against Moscow.
He said that Russia would consider such a “possibility” of using nuclear weapons if it detected the start of a massive launch of missiles, aircraft and drones into its territory, which presented a “critical threat” to the country’s sovereignty.
He added: “It is proposed that aggression against Russia by any non-nuclear state, but with the participation or support of a nuclear state, be considered as their joint attack on the Russian Federation.”
The Russians have told us that allowing Ukraine to fire long-range missiles deep into their territory could cause a nuclear war.
But Joe Biden did it anyway.
Just imagine how we would feel if some foreign power was firing long-range missiles into Washington D.C. and New York City.
If someone did that to us, we would nuke them.
I want everyone out there to understand the gravity of the scenario that we are facing.
Of course the Russians have been escalating matters as well.
In fact, they just hit targets all over Ukraine using “120 missiles and almost 100 drones”…
Ukraine said it would introduce nationwide emergency power restrictions Monday after a “massive” Russian attack further damaged its already fragile energy grid ahead of a much-feared winter, with nine civilians also killed across the country on Sunday.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Moscow launched 120 missiles and almost 100 drones, targeting Kyiv as well as southern, central and far-western corners of the country.
Civilians were killed in the Mykolaiv, Lviv, Kherson, Dnipropetrovsk and Odesa regions in what officials in the capital called one of the biggest barrages in the almost three-year Russian invasion.
Meanwhile, the war in the Middle East threatens to spiral completely out of control.
On Sunday, Zero Hedge was reporting that Israeli troops were seen fighting at a location that is 3 miles north of the Lebanese border…
The Israeli military has reached the deepest point in Lebanon since the ground offensive began about six weeks ago. This has been reported by both Lebanese and Israeli media, amid raging battles with Hezbollah on Saturday.
“The state-run National News Agency reported that Israeli troops temporarily captured a strategic hill in the southern Lebanese village of Shamaa, about five kilometers (3 miles) from the border early Saturday, before later being pushed back,” Israeli media reports. “The outlet claimed soldiers detonated several buildings including a shrine before they withdrew.”
The IDF has also been bombing Syria on an almost daily basis, and we are waiting for the next Iranian attack on Israel which could literally occur at any moment.
Even though we could see these wars coming way in advance, nobody has been able to stop them.
Now Joe Biden has brought us to the brink of nuclear war with Russia even though he has very little time remaining in the White House.
It was not his decision to make, but he made it anyway, and it could end up having very serious implications for every man, woman and child on the entire planet.
Some AI lessons on MM image generation
It took me a while to figure out, but these images of people with this thing out of their mouths is what the AI interprets as “drinking”.
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(7)
It also has a problem with size relevance.
@@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(10)
Changing the AI model can result in dramatic changes in the resulting picture… Some are good, and some aren’t.
Here’s one AI model …
##Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(13)
And here is a different AI model…
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(18)
If you are not careful, all the individuals will look like clones…
ORB Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(15)
I really like how it creates backgrounds, but you MUST be specific for a background to be generated… some fantastical backgrounds come with undesirable subject matter.
BG Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(19)
It does seem to have a problem with sheer and wet clothing. Only generating edges, and ignoring the rest. Which is interesting, but not what I am looking for.
Sheer Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(20)
Sometimes, it looks fine. But the AI really has a problem with hands; number of fingers, and left vrs right…
Imperfect Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(9)
The fellow on the left is using a right hand on his left arm. Though the girl seems to be just ok.
Nothing worse than an extra arm to throw off the art…
#Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(11)
Why does some of the world not recognize the United States as the “good guys” in most situations, when they have been consistently trying to spread democracy around the world?
Here is the story of a democracy.
The Prime Minister of this country refused to allow a British oil company to control this nation’s oil reserves. He wanted the oil to benefit his people, he was an elected representative after all.
In response, the British boycotted this nation and asked the Americans for help.
The determination was to over throw this nation’s government. The CIA helped design a coup to overthrow this democratic government [1].
And the CIA succeeded and installed a dictator who was beholden to the United States to stay in power.
Now obviously this nation wasn’t thrilled about this and 26 years later the people of this nation protested and ended up successfully overthrowing this dictator to form a theocratic republic.
Since then, the US has flirted with the idea of going to war with this nation.
This nation: Iran
Yes, the US created the Iran we know today because the US installed a dictator.
The US does this stuff all the time, the US overthrew a government over the price of bananas [2].
The US supports 73% of the world’s dictators [3] .
The US does not spread democracy, the US supports people who support the agenda of American imperialism even if that is a dictator.
Also the US created the issues we have with Iran, so it is hilarious when Presidents complain about their ‘behavior’ because it was the United States that created the problem to begin it with interventionism… yet chuckleheads in the White House seem to think further interventionism is the answer.
I can’t get a job to save my life (1500+ applications) | Tech 2024
Have you ever returned from the store and realized that the cashier did not scan one of your items?
Once, I bought a multi-roll package of toilet paper. I had it on the bottom of my shopping cart, on the little shelf. I told the cashier it was down there. She rang up my purchases, I left the store and went home. Later I was looking over my receipt, and noticed that the toilet paper wasn’t on there. She hadn’t scanned it.
That little devil sitting on my shoulder said, “Well, consider it your lucky day”. But the little angel on the other shoulder said, “You know you have to do the right thing”. So the next day I trooped down to the store with the toilet paper and my receipt and stood in line at the customer service desk. When it was my turn, I told the cashier what had happened, and she said that she wasn’t going to charge me for the toilet paper. She said that by then, the cashier’s drawer (the one who checked me out) had been counted and put in the days receipts.
So I took my toilet paper home and lived happily ever after.
Another time, I bought a weedeater for my husband. He told me exactly which one to buy, and it was on sale. So I go and find the weedeater and buy it, and take it home. When I got home, and looked it over, I realized that it was a much, much nicer weedeater than the one on sale had been. I realized I had been pretty drastically undercharged. So, I called the store and told them what had happened and that I would take it back and get the one on sale.
So that’s what I did. It was a small Mom and Pop business, and they were decent people. I couldn’t take them like that. They were appreciative, and gave me a little gift certificate.
Husband comes home from work, we’re talking about the weedeater, and I tell him what had occurred. He was furious with me. He said I was stupid to take the expensive weedeater back, when I could have just played dumb. And then he would have a better heavy duty weedeater. It caused a big argument between us. I tried not to, but I lost a little bit of respect for my husband over his attitude regarding that weedeater.
I was raised to do the right thing. To do my best to be an honorable person. I have failed miserably many times, I know. But I like to sleep at night, and I like to have a clear conscience as much as possible. So I try to do the right thing. Simple as that.
ANXIOUS Arrival In Shanghai, China 🇨🇳 This Country SHOCKED ME! 英国人抵达中国上海
Will Boeing ever return to a time that their commercial aircraft was the gold standard of the airline industry?
Can they? Yes, there are lottery winners every week.
But will they? Unlikely, and even if they do, it’s a long slog ahead.
Boeing can’t catch a break, not since the first 737 max crash.
A string of troubles later, Boeing has bled immense quantities of cash, but finds itself in a QC mess, road map delays, a stuck starliner in space, union troubles, legal and fed oversight issues and one 737 Max crash from the mother of all PR storms.
Evidently, boeing has big problems executing as an engineering and manufacturing firm.
Unfortunately, Boeing is a no-option too big to fail node. The American government will step in to save it. And molly coddling will help Boeing stay up but hardly improve its competitiveness.
The culture needs to change. Unfortunately, financialization and cheap credit has played havoc with American competitiveness in the 21st century. Hard engineering is too slow for quick money’s taste.
Twenty years ago, pilots preferred Boeing’s yoke for its sense of familiarity. Today, airbus’s sidestick has revolutionized the cockpit’s ergonomics and workflow, introducing class-leading safety while reducing pilot workload.
Boeing has its work cut out, especially with the emergence of comac.
I am of the opinion Boeing’s economic model is too extravagant and there is too much fat in the supply chain. But it will require the competition to lay bare the fact customers are paying too much for what they are getting.
But that’s 20 years down the road, due to the product life cycles of airliners.
I wish Boeing luck. It is unlikely to disappear, but I won’t be surprised if it weakens further.
Let me tell you the truth, all Chinese people believe that if Russia fails, China will also fail, because the US will use Russia as a springboard to invade China. We won’t let that happen.
Don’t think the defeat of both Russia and China is a good thing. You in front of the screen are actually standing in the same position as us.
Here’s the history about your economy.
On August 15, 1945, when Japan unconditionally accepted the Potsdam Declaration and surrendered, and the world finally moved towards peace.
That was also the beginning of the golden age that MAGAs believe in.
Five years later in 1950, Washington DC announced the completion of its industrialization goals. In order to address the vested interests of the military class and become a world hegemon, the Washington DC launched the Cold War against the USSR. In order to ensure that Europe and East Asia were on the same front as itself, the government launched the Marshall Plan in 1947, transferring industry to allied European countries around the USSR, plus Japan, South Korea, and so on.
Washington asked, and Moscow answered.
The USSR provided comprehensive social security from cradle to grave, including free healthcare, education, housing, and employment security. As a result, Washington expanded its Social Security Act, Americans had Medicare and Medicaid at the first time. Assistance for low-income groups, housing plans, and strengthening public education, all of them was made during the cold war. The last time oligarchs gave such preferential treatment to workers was at Ford Motor Company in 1914, half a year before WWI.
The policy of the Washington DC towards the Moscow benefited the American workers, however there’s a flaw of the US itself: the social welfare system pushed the pressure to capitalists, and American domestic capital flee and become international capital. Industrial hollowing began from then on. Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea rose later, at the cost of the Rust Belt in the Great Lakes region. The 1960s. The end of the golden age.
Rust Belt
But that was far from over.
If the existence of the USSR cannot make you realize what you have gained because of it, at least the departure of the USSR may make you realize what you have lost. With the collapse of the USSR, American capital was no longer under pressure, and labor welfare plummeted.
Companies led by Wal Mart began to actively reduce workers’ wages and welfare benefits. Despite ongoing inflation in the US, its minimum wage for labor remained at $5.15 per hour from 1997 to 2007. Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996 forced low-income workers to choose unstable jobs, people no longer have sufficient welfare. Right to Work Laws drived workers away from the union, making the union no longer represent the interests of workers, but gradually become a dual rival between companies and workers. The limit of industrial hollowing out is marked by NAFTA and China joining WTO.
The rich took too much, and the poor had no ability to buy. enterprises went bankrupt. Financial crisis, again and again.
The USSR brought American workers the golden age. The USSR also protected them staying in the golden age. When the USSR left, American workers became orphans abandoned by the government. The irony is that few American workers appreciate the USSR. They would rather believe that it is the kindness and conscience of the wealthy who have brought them a superior life, than believe in the common beliefs and struggles of millions of people.
Now take a look at China. We have achieved a living standard similar to or even higher than yours with resources far below the world average and per capita GDP on the world average – as you can see from the expected life expectancy.
Look at history and ask yourself. If no country in the world can resist the capitalist oligarchy of the US, after the popularization of AI and industrial robots, as manual laborers, what bargaining chips do you have to negotiate with them?
Or, let me ask in a different way, how much longer do you have to wait before you will fight for your own life rather than relying on others’ efforts? The clock of average people is ticktocking, since the popularization of industrial robots will be realized in your lifetime.
I FINALLY GOT A JOB! (1-year search | Tech 2024)
How does India get benefits if the world starts a war with China and Tibet gets independence?
The fact is, India is an expansionist country. They make every possible excuse to enlarge their territory.
As a Nepalese, I know it as a fact that Indian politicians have always dreamed of making Nepal an Indian state. Many Indians themselves do not know about it. They come to us and warn us to be careful about China. However, I’ve never met any Chinese who told us to beware of India.
That is why Nepalese people don’t support the Free Tibet Movement. If we don’t have a strong neighbor that can challenge India, we’re gone for good.
Personally, I’d rather Nepal be a part of China (because I am a Tibetan by ethnicity). I see nothing in common between my people and the Indians. Last I checked, Indians are as poor as us. Why would we want to join a poor nation? Why would anyone want to join a poor nation? I think what Indians need to do is develop their economy and infrastructure first. While they are at it, they should stop telling us how to run our country and whom to be careful about. We like China more because they did just that.
Lastly, some Nepalese people love India. That can’t be denied. However, we all hate the Indian media complex. Those people have no class at all. I’d rather appreciate if freedom of speech is suppressed in India. Thank you China for doing just that.
What happened in a courtroom that gave the judge a belly laugh you will never forget?
A true story of 40 years ago, with all parties dead now so it doesn’t matter:
Back when I was a child, my parents were friends with one of our neighbors. This lady — to this day — has my utmost respect as she had a command of the English Language that was put a drunken sailor to shame! Her insults, curses, and epitaphs were utterly astonishing as she’d put adverbs and adjectives that one would never expect together to form mind-boggling descriptive vulgarity for any common situation.
As was her nature, not everyone could handle her brash attitude and obscene vocabulary, so she ended up in court with the neighbor on the other side of the road from us. We went to watch the precedings, and all started out well and good — right up until the point where the other woman started to speak.
Her accuser said something quietly and abashedly, like: “Umm.. She threatened to hurt me and my kids…”
To which point, my mom’s good friend slammed her fist on the podium and yelled, “I OBJECT!! She’s lying, your honor! I told that GI-Gangbanged bitch that if her unsolicited mistake of Satan’s substance ever fucked around with my girl again, I was going to knock the bastard graveyard dead, bake his balls in a pie, and serve it to her for dinner!”
A moment of silence followed. Everyone blinked stupidity to process out outrageous her outburst was, and then chuckles filled the courtroom.
Brash. Yep!
Descriptive. Yep.
But a liar? Not one bit!!
Cost of living in Da Nang, Vietnam (World’s cheapest Country)
Why do Chinese trolls always fantasize that Japan and South Korea are American colonies? How can we cure their delusions?
Some 80% of Japan land is used as US military bases.
When you have foreign military base in your country, you lose 1/2 of your strategic sovereignty. If this is not colonisation, what is it?
Only people in denial will say Japan is not a US colony. Same for S Korea.
Do you know who wrote Japan’s constitution? U S A after WW2.
More, Japanese emperor used to be worshiped as god’s agent. After WW2, USA made Japanese emperor to tell Japanese that he was a man & not god. … If Japan was & is not a US colony, what is it?
I can tell you more but let us talk about 2024.
US Treasury secy Yellen made Japan buy US debt (China did not buy any). When Japan sold US debts to save its economy, Yellen warned Japan not to interfere the free market. … Japan cannot decide for itself. If this is not a colony, what is it?
Not fixable
Today’s MM work
I’m not that pleased with the results for today. I’m trying to perfect the form, but somethings are missing. I need more refinement.
Here’s the key elements of the prompt;
Create a anatomically-accurate, photo realistic, Baroque-style oil painting.
Four different and unique Thailand women are facing Bacchus and proudly anointed . end of the day entering dusk on a very hot Summer.
dramatic. theatrical. expressive faces showing emotions. facing a stone portal to another land; a lush land, with pastoral and tropical settings and wonder.
they approach the camera with anticipation and expressions of great interest.
they are yearning and full of desire facing the camera, and presenting themselves is a pleasing manner.
motherly handsome women who would make great mothers. anointed by cupid
The images generated are mostly nudes, which isn’t really what I asked for, but the Baroque-style oil painting is overwhelmingly nudes historically.
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(26)@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(27)@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(25)@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(23)@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(19)@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(16)@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(15)@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(11)@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(9)@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(9)@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(6)@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(6)@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(4)@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(5)@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(4)
Here’s some men for a change…
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(2)
I really like this one…
@@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(3)
This one is even better…
@@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1
This is also good…
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(1)@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0
Why Everyone Is Quitting The 40 Hour Work Week
This is a brilliant video. It really is.
Bye bye USA.
SpaghettiOs
Kids will love this homemade version of a favorite canned pasta.
spaghetti os
Yield: 6 to 8 servings
Ingredients
1 (26 ounce) can tomato sauce
3 cups water
1 cup milk
2 cups Cheddar cheese
1 teaspoon garlic powder
8 ounces ditalini or pasta of choice, uncooked
Instructions
In a large pot mix together the sauce, water and milk. Bring to a boil.
When it reaches a bowl, stir in the cheese and turn it down to a simmer. Continue to stir until the cheese is melted.
Add the garlic and stir.
Pour in the uncooked pasta. Simmer on low for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally during the first 5 to 6 minutes to prevent the pasta from sticking to the bottom of the pan.
Check the pasta after 20 minutes, if it’s not as soft as you would like, cook it a little longer. Sauce will thicken even more over time.
Punny
Is Xi Xing Ping really a wonderful, loving, and supportive leader?
Yes, Donald Trump is a great leader. I don’t like America but I like Donald Trump. He has charisma. He has a story. He’s honest, and it’s clear that many Americans adore him.
Xi is different. While Trump has an American and capitalist story, Xi’s story is different. He has an Asian story. He went through the most important and tumultuous period of modern China. While Trump’s story is about making profits, Xi’s story is about China’s struggle.
Mao Zedong taught the Chinese people to be unite. Deng Xiaoping taught the Chinese people to prosper. Xi, on his part, taught the Chinese people to be proud of China.
Unlike American presidents who rarely interact with their own but poor citizens, Xi visits every corner of China. He communicates with the villagers of China, sits with them, and participates in the activities of a Chinese person’s daily life. He makes the Chinese people feel like the government cares for them. He empathizes with them. He champions the spirit of ordinary men. In contrast, Trump champions the spirit of capitalism and profit.
Xi visited the Tibetan Autonomous Region and many Tibetans gathered to welcome him. He even said “Tashi Delek” at the end, which has won him countless Tibetan fans.
Also, the US is helping him. To make a complete story, there must be a villain whom the hero must fight. The US is the villain, who the world knows is corrupted beyond redemption. Xi himself never chose to fight. He is forced to fight, so that has won him support from around the world.
So. In conclusion, Xi is not the leader China needs but the leader the world needs. After a thousand years, people will talk about our time. They will refer to our period as “China’s revival”. The man they will talk most about is not Trump but Xi.
A friendly contest
What is the saddest thing a casino dealer has seen at their table?
The saddest? A two way tie.
A kid in his early 20’s gains access to a trust fund his grandparents set up for him. Six hours into my shift his mother is behind him begging him to come home before he wastes everything at the table, tears and all. He calls security over to remove her from the area for harassing him. Sadly, he is technically correct, and security escorts the mother from the area. Congrats kid, you lost your future and your parent in one night at the tables.
Second was a 30 something female playing way above her head. No strategy, no quit. Wouldn’t take advice from me because “you work for the house”. She loses about 2-3,000, and goes straight to the ATM. Foxwoods ATMs charge $4 for every transaction, up to $400 per. She has $2,000. Ten minutes later, she’s in tears telling everyone she just gambled away the mortgage, and her husband is going to leave her. She leaves less than an hour before my shift ends. On my way home traffic is unusually heavy (5am mind you) and I see why. Distraught, she was walking along route 2 and decided to step in front of a bus. I found out it was her the next day.
Kay final scene
Why would Shanghai, a poor city in China, compare itself with New York?
For a poor city, it has the world’s largest metro system. 20 lines and counting. Completely safe. No drunks, homeless or druggies in sight.
Shanghai has the only commercial maglev train, allowing you to travel from the airport to the city center in 8 minutes. It travels at speeds over 400 km an hour.
You never need to look over your shoulder for your own safety. Even at 3:00 am you can walk the streets without fear.
You can eat anything your heart desires. From inexpensive street food all the way to Michelin Starred restaurants.
You never see traffic congestion because the city uses advanced smartcity technology so traffic moves very smoothly.
Your question should be why would New York, a poor and unsafe city, compare itself to Shanghai?
I’ve been to both cities. Have you ever visited Shanghai?
What’s the shortest amount of time you’ve stayed at a job and why did you quit?
Not me. But someone hired in my office.
Years ago I worked at a management consulting firm in Austin. It was an awful place to work. Ridiculous hours, bad management, and nepotism lead to an extremely high stress environment. Most of the employees had advanced degrees, but because of the horrible work environment, no one stuck around for more than a few months.
One morning, several of us got on the elevator with a new person, who pressed the button for the our floor. Someone asked if she was going to work for “XYZ.” “Yes,” she happily chirped. Everyone groaned. “You really don’t want to do that,” said one of the analysts. Everyone else nodded agreement.
We reach our floor. Everyone except her gets off. She stands in the doorway for a second. “Nope,” she says, and presses the button for the lobby.
A few hours later, the boss comes into a room where several of us are working. “Where’s the new girl? She was supposed to start today.”
“She quit.”
“What! When?”
“In the elevator.”
The boss looks at us and growls, “Shit! What did you say to her?!!!”
Bronco Billy – Final Scene
What are some interesting/funny facts about medieval France and Spain?
During the 100 Years War, the French countryside was devastated, lawless and full of unburied corpses. It was a paradise for wolves.
“In all the lowlands of the Loire, the sheep were gone — devoured, destroyed. The cattle that were left were herded by peasants and defended with such weapons as were at hand. By night, they were safe corralled in barns or high stockades.”
People did not dare to venture outdoors at night, when the wolves would prowl village streets, killing any man or animal they found. Outside of Paris was a piece of rugged ground that had been cleared of trees. The wolves made it their home.
“Here it was known that many wolves had their dens, and each year new litters of cubs were born, to be a terror on the roads that led to the great city. It was many generations before the place was cleaned up; and the only memory of its savage denizens left today is the name, the same but shortened, that attaches to the place – the Louvre.”
The wolf king, leader of the pack, was a huge wolf called Courtaud (“Bobtail”) who led a small army of wolves in raids on herds of sheep and cattle. When the herdsmen tried to defend their animals, they were killed too, and soon Courthaud developed a taste for human flesh.
The Dubois family, bringing their sheep to market, took the precaution of putting them in a horse-drawn cart decked out with bells, tin pans and other noisemakers, but it didn’t help. They were overwhelmed by wolves. All three were killed and eaten. After that, the wolves would only eat people, leaving behind the sheep and cattle.
For a time, English longbowmen kept the road to Paris open, but then they were withdrawn, and the city was effectively besieged by wolves. In the hard winter of 1439, there was so much snow that neither wolves nor men could find food. Parisians retreated behind their walls and listened to hungry wolves howling outside.
But the walls were not secure. There was a gap between the iron grate at the river and the frozen river itself. The wolves came through and ran through the streets, killing 14 people before retreating.
The captain of the city guard, Boisselier, was fed up. He ordered cattle to be slaughtered in the town square and left there. The smell of blood attracted the wolves who again rushed into the city, but this time, they were cornered and killed with arrows and stones. That was the end of Courtaud, but wolves remained a terror to the countryside for many years.
Why did the northern nomadic barbarians who once invaded China all became assimilated into the Chinese culture?
Classic joke:
What would happen if Russia invaded China?
On the first day: One million Chinese surrendered to Russia
The next day: Two million Chinese surrendered to Russia
The next day: Three million Chinese surrendered to Russia
The next day: Four million Chinese surrendered to Russia
……
Russia ultimately achieved victory,and Russia changed its name to China and announced that Russians are the 57th ethnic minority in China
Imagine you are a war lord riding a warhorse, wielding a sword, and possessing a thousand cows
You suddenly became the emperor of a place called China
You became the emperor because the original emperor here was too foolish.
You have recruited your loyal Prime Minister, and you have decided to establish your own dynasty and civilization.
You: I want the people here to use new language!
Prime Minister: Sorry, the people here use language that is longer than the history of your tribe. If you replace their language, the entire country’s system will collapse,Great emperor, you don’t want your tax order to be passed on to people thousands of kilometers away, but theybelieve it’s just a piece of paper filled with mysterious symbols
You: I want them to wear my clothes!
Prime Minister: Your clothes are only suitable for the environment on the grasslands… Look, here are deserts, grasslands, snow capped mountains, plains, oceans
You: I want them to eat my food.
Prime Minister: Sir, even you are unwilling to eat your food. Their food is much more delicious. I guess you, who live on the grassland, haven’t studied the methods of shark fin and sea cucumber
You: I want them to accept our culture.
Prime Minister: Really? Do you want your people to learn from your culture of conquest and war, rather than their traditional conservative and submissive culture? The previous emperor here finally taught his people to obey the emperor’s orders. Do you really want to teach them how to conquer and overthrow the emperor like you do?
You: I want them to read our book!
Prime Minister: Hmm… You’ve been busy fighting and don’t seem to have many books. Even if they do, they can’t understand them, and they have tens of millions of books
You: I want them to live in my house!
Prime Minister: Are you serious… Do you want to move out of this magnificent palace and live in your tent full of horse manure?
You: Damn it, why do they have such a long history!
Prime Minister: My Emperor, you see, the region where these people live is bordered by deserts and plateau snow capped mountains to the west, mountains and seas to the south, and only the ocean to the east. In this natural fortress, in ancient times, we on the grasslands were the only threat to this civilization, unless a group of people can invent airplanes and warships in the future to destroy this fortress.
But before that, this civilization could exist freely in this fortress for thousands of years… Of course, this also limited their desire to explore the sky and sea too much, so in the future your dynasty will be severely kick ass by a group of white skinned guys – and they will blame you, the ruler of another ethnic group.
You: so…… how did we conquer this country
Prime Minister: As you can see, living in this country, if you are an emperor who has everything you want, it is difficult not to become an idiot,Just like your future children, they have never experienced your efforts and hardships in conquering a country. Under our foolish feudal system, they will soon become addicted to pleasure, after all, there are much more fun here than on the grassland,Otherwise, why did that crazy giant Mongol Empire ultimately choose to stay here and establish the Yuan Dynasty
You: Then I can let them change to my hairstyle, right
Prime Minister: Of course… but the cost is that hundreds of years later they will still use this as one of the reasons why you are a tyrant… and countless rebels will use it as an excuse to rebel against you
You:there are always some of them willing to accept all of the above!
Prime Minister: Indeed, so future museums will have information about your artifacts
You: I’m going to kill them all!!!!
Prime Minister: Really? You killed them, who will give you a gorgeous house, delicious food, beautiful women, and a group of men willing to cut their own dick to serve you? Are you really willing to give up such a beautiful life and spend the rest of your life killing and fearing being assassinated
You: I choose to join them
Prime Minister: So, enjoy your brief imperial life, at most for a few hundred years they will take everything away, and you will fall in love with the life here and become a minority of China, If a snake swallows an elephant – it will only transform itself into the shape of an elephant, What you can kill is only the emperor, not this huge civilization
you see, these people are all native Chinese now
Men Are RELAXING As It All Collapses
Has it ever happened where someone acting as their own attorney ever worked out, they did a great job and got themselves off the hook?
Not exactly an “off the hook” situation, but I did go to court against an attorney and won.
The high school my youngest son attended denied him entry into the National Honor Society, even though he fit every bit of the criteria. It seems he was “black balled” by one or two of his teachers over personal grudges. I looked up the rules for admission to the society and found that black balling was forbidden. I asked to see the votes and vote tally records. I was told I was not allowed to see them. So, I filed a FOIA suit against the school.
A couple of days after filing the papers, I got a call from their “high-powered” attorney from our state capital. He wanted contact info for my lawyer. I told him I didn’t have a lawyer. He told me to get him the contact info when I hired my lawyer. I told him I had no intention of hiring a lawyer.
He then tried to bully me by telling me there was no possible way I could win, and that I would have to pay the school for his attorney fees. I ignored his threat and ended the conversation.
About 4 days before the hearing was set, the attorney called me again. He asked again for my attorney. I again told him I had none, and had no intention of getting one. Same old bullying started again. I ignored it again.
The day before the hearing, he called again and asked if we could just settle this. I declined.
The day of the hearing, I met this attorney at the courthouse. He entered the courtroom before I did, and introduced himself to the judge. As I entered, I looked at the judge and said, “Hi, Jim.” He responded with, “Hi, Eric.” I could see the attorney’s face, and the look was priceless. As the old saying goes, he didn’t know whether to shit or go blind.
I prevailed in my suit and the school was told they were required to give me the info. They said they didn’t have it. It must have gotten discarded. I pointed out to them that the National Honor Society rules required them to keep the information for at least 12 months. I let them know that I could contact the society and have them drop the entire school from their program for breaking this rule, with the implication that they were still allowing black balling of students. I received some apologies and promises that they would read the rules and follow them in the future.
My son was inducted into NHS the following year.
By the way, I had been denied membership in NHS by the same school some thirty or so years earlier. I didn’t complain. Even though I was valedictorian, they were correct in not inducting me. I was too ornery to fit the mold. My son did fit, it was just that a couple of teachers didn’t like him.
NEIGHBORS HATED THE COLOR OF MY HOUSE AND REPAINTED IT WHILE I WAS AWAY — I WAS ENRAGED & TOOK MY REVENGE.
My house is on a corner lot. Two years ago, a newlywed couple moved in next door and immediately made weird comments about my house’s yellow color. Soon, they outright DEMANDED I paint it a different color. My house has always been yellow; I love it, and there’s no rule against it.
They called the police and the city on me, but both told them to back off since I hadn’t done anything wrong. They even tried suing me (the suit got tossed, and they had to pay my legal fees) and attempted to rally our neighbors to form an HOA to force me to repaint. Our neighbors told them to get lost, so now they’re alienated by everyone.
I had to go out of town for two weeks, and when I got back, my house was GRAY. I almost drove past it because I’m so used to my yellow house. The neighbor from across the street came over and showed me pictures he took of the painting company setting up and doing the work. He and another neighbor called the police, but the painting company had a valid work order and had been paid, so the police couldn’t do anything.
It seemed everything done to my house was legal and no damage was done. But I was enraged and planned my revenge. Next day, I… repainted it yellow.
Yellow house
Putin TV Address: “Entitled to Strike” Nations Giving Weapons to Ukraine
“Russia considers itself entitled to use (hypersonic) weapons against facilities of those countries that allow their weapons to be used against Russian facilities.”
Those are the words of Russian President Vladimir Putin in televised remarks today from the Kremlin in Moscow. Here is a brief video showing him making the announcement:
NUCLEAR ATTACK WARNINGS TRIGGERED THIS MORNING!
Russia’s ICBM launch at Ukraine this morning triggered early warning systems – – – and such launches are, by default, assumed to be nuclear. So for a short time, the US and Europe thought Russia was nuking Ukraine.
They only knew that it was not nuclear by checking to see if the city of Dnipro was still physically there after the impacts.
Essentially, If Russia decides to nuke Ukraine … the west will watch because they can do nothing other than that.
Second important thing to note: Russia has proven that it can deliver a conventional or nuclear payload to any place without a problem.
Which brings us back to President Putin’s address to his nation just hours ago . . . . NATO member countries have already supplied weapons being used to strike Russia. Among those weapons have been: Tanks, Infantry Fighting Vehicles, Rockets, Missiles, Speed-Boat-Bombs, and Drones.
The United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany and other nations have long ago provided such weapons that have been – and still are – used to attack interior Russia.
That Russia has now announced they are “entitled” to strike seems the clearest indication yet that utterly massive escalation is coming in very short order. Not necessarily in Ukraine, but on the territories of the countries who have been supplying weapons.
Hal Turner Analysis
Today’s use by Russia of an ICBM against Ukraine, albeit with only conventional explosives, should make clear to any RATIONAL person that the next step would be to use those same missiles with nuclear warheads.
There is no other RATIONAL interpretation possible!
Will the collective West see reality for what it is, or are they so immersed in their own echo chamber, that reality can no longer penetrate?
It seems to me that if the collective West does not stop what it’s doing with Ukraine, Russia is going to strike. VERY soon. Maybe before Thanksgiving.
For the almost three years that this Russia-Ukraine Conflict has gone on, I have implored readers of this website, and listeners to my radio show to get prepared: Emergency food, water, medicines you need to live on, a way to cook without electricity or utility-supplied gas, a way to heat your home without utilities (Fireplace, wood-burning stove, etc.). I have urged folks to get a generator and have spare fuel stored outside, to run that generator, to keep your refrigerators running and maybe a light on in the house. I have recommended a flashlight in every room of your home, or at least one for each family member, with plenty of spare batteries for those flashlights. I have recommended a portable AM/FM/SW radio for local news and info and spare batteries for those portable radios. I have urged people to get COMMUNICATIONS Gear, a CB, HAM, or GMRS radio, so they can communicate locally if everything goes down. I have advised folks to get a FIRST-AID KIT for minor cuts and bruises, or, God Forbid, major war wounds.
Now that an ICBM has actually been fired in Combat for the first time in Human History, a threshold has been crossed. Things go downhill VERY FAST from here.
If you don’t have the prepping items I mentioned above, you are totally screwed.
Please, I IMPLORE YOU, get “prepped” right now. Today. As best you can. There seems to be very little time remaining before you will need those preps.
8 hard truths I learned after 8 years living in Japan…
I have related the story of my good friend; Jerry Marcus, who killed himself.
As a recap, he was my younger brothers friend, who by association became my friend. He was five years my junior. And he was a bit of a unique fellow. Not bad, just quirky.
And one day, while he was living with his mother, he sent his mother out to get groceries. While she was away, he left a note for her on the kitchen table. Stripped nude on his bed. Laid down on a plastic sheet. Put a shotgun to his mouth, and blew his brains out.
Shocking to me and my brother and all our small circle of friends.
Indeed, he was a fighting demons and issues that he preferred to keep on the “down low”. Whether this was due to stupid Male Pride, or the face that us Bros and friends didn’t know how to identify a cry for help. I don’t know. But when I saw him, he was always happy to see me.
In fact, his mother told me that I was a “really good influence on him”.
Hum. Not just her. So did my other friend’s mothers. Especially Robbie’s mother. She once told me that Robbie was uncontrollable, but after he came home from spending the day with me, he was calm and happy. Like a completely different person.
But today’s little story is not about Robbie, or Marcus.
It’s about his family.
Sometime in the 1950’s, two beatniks set up a commune in the woods near Kittanning, PA. This community existed for maybe five or eight years. They played the bongos, wrote and read poetry, farmed a small garden and did what beatniks did best; whatever that was.
To get to the property, you had to take a rural highway, and then go though the woods on a long “driveway” road. Quite long actually. And there it would open up to a beautiful 1920’s era Art Deco home. It nested in a clearing in the middle of a beautiful wood.
Because it was so long, and such an effort to get to, the fellow commune members referred to it as “Endsville”.
And thus when I first associated with Jerry and his brother, I would know where to go due to the small sign at the almost hidden entrance; a sign that said “Endsville”.
The house was a beautiful “Craftsman” style house, and the interior was all nice hardwood. There were Art Deco statuettes on such things as the mantle and stair rail, and a beautiful stained glass Art Deco (of course) window that overlooked the main living room.
It was a nice place. I babysat his two cats for a spell there for him while he was overseas. Nice place.
It was a perfect boyhood house to grow up in. His father was an investment banker type of guy that also did estates, wills and stocks. When my first wife and I were heading off into the unknown in our van, he gave up words of encouragement and some money. (Though later when he saw him decades later, he became gruff and embittered, saying that it was a foolish youthful dream.)
Ah. Somethings come around in a kind of strange cycle.
Marcus’s father was a dreamer; a beatnik who founded a commune of dreamers and counter-culture folk. And evolved into a person who manipulated money .. eventually turning embittered and shriveled; a discouraged old man.
Marcus was born in Endsville, and took his life in Endsville. A flash in the pan on the grand scale of things.
Life can be hard. It can.
But don’t take it to Endsville.
Today…
Is it possible that someday China would abandon their thousand years of authoritarian regime and embrace democracy? If not, what are the reasons why China couldn’t do that?
The democratic package sold by Westerners is extremely narrow, and many of them do not even know the true meaning of democracy. They think that the one person, one vote election model is the standard paradigm of democracy, but in fact, it is simply a game of tycoons and monopolists, a tool for confusing ordinary people’s rule. In fact, the public cannot choose truly senior administrative officials. These elected individuals are essentially a group of hypocritical actors or speakers who do not represent the interests of the people, but only pretend to please voters.
For example, Western media are monopolized by Jewish Ansar, and their voices are generally consistent. They have a strong ability to brainwash and spread rumors, and ordinary people are unable to judge the authenticity of news. Public opinion is manipulated by the media, and there is no talk of independent elections.
2. On the other hand, there is the ability of leaders elected democratically. Look at Biden or Trump, their ability to govern or serve the people is extremely low. How many jobs have they created, how much convenience have they provided to the people, how much infrastructure has been updated, or what achievements have they made in technology during their tenure? Apart from mutual slander and urinary incontinence, I can hardly find where their achievements lie? The same goes for politicians in Europe.
I believe that the goal of democracy should be to benefit the people, create more wealth for them, enable them to have their own jobs, realize their own value, and feel safe, happy, and fulfilled anytime, anywhere. If this goal can be achieved, it doesn’t matter what political system it is. If you focus on a certain political form rather than the goal, it’s putting the cart before the horse.
Have you ever taken the law into your own hands?
I have not but I knew someone that did.
When I worked in the oilfield I crossed paths with a man that was a natural clown. He was know, of course, as WILDMAN. He could make you laugh, in fact he if didn’t make ya laugh he would. He was a fantastic person. One weekend a couple of friends stopped by. After that a married couple with two kids came on a visit. So 7 people and two kids on a summer afternoon. WILDMAN was in his element.
Another person, a couple of doors away, was having a bad time, the running conversation involves jokes, he could hear their laughing.
So he made sure he had a round in the chamber, he walked up behind Wildman, and shot him at close range.. The friends grabbed the gun, and stomped on him. A stomping is a little rough, it leaves the recipient unconscious and a number of bruises from steel toed boot. Then they called the police.
The neighbor was bonded out, by a local. That was what was needed. Wildman’s father was also an oil man, he was an executive in a different company.
The neighbor, his new friend picked him up, took him back home, and left him. The three people inside took care of the rest. Daddy was there, he pulled the trigger, and the body was left behind.
Scott Ritter Statement Following FBI Raid on his home
See, the USA hydra is stomping on free speech.
comments
Here’s what they have done to Scott…
Made him a “sex offender”.
Seized his passport. Didn’t give it back.
Searching / raiding his home.
What is next…
I’d advise leaving the USA post haste.
Have you ever walked into a room and seen something that made you go, “Nope,” and turn 180 degrees and walk away? What was it?
Yup. Once, when in a particularly low place I was walking to the train home from work, down New St in Birmingham (UK), and was approached by someone asking if I was OK. They seemed very sincere and said that they were part of an outreach program that encouraged positive mental health. Their base was just round the corner and we could sit and talk, and I really appreciated the opening so I followed them.
We got into a lift in one of the buildings just off the main road and talked as the lift went up. Something seemed a bit off as when they asked how I coped with stress and I answered “well, I chain smoke” they responded “Oh good, at least you have something”??
The lift opened and directly in front of the lift doors was a bust I vaguely recognised, along with the name plate “L. Ron Hubbard”. I didn’t even know scientologists had a base in the area at that point.
I just mumbled “Sorry, I’m in the wrong place” and dashed through the fire door, doubletimed it down the stairs and got the hell out of the building.
Is Simu Liu, the actor playing Shang-Chi in the new MCU movie, ugly in Chinese culture and handsome American culture?
I’m Chinese.
I wouldn’t say Simu Liu is ugly. But he sure is not good looking to most Chinese netizens either.
However, the actor of Mandarin, Tony Leung Chiu Wei has been considered one of the most good looking people in China for years, maybe even decades.
One more thing, Chinese netizens like to call good looking girls “Goddesses”(女神), there’s a male version of it too “男神”. I can’t figure out an appropriate translation, but you’ll get it.
When Chinese netizens use the word “男神”, this Chinese American actor/director/producer is referred to very often.
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His name is Daniel Wu 吴彦祖. Star of AMC’s Into the Badlands. He also played a few roles in Hollywood movies too, like Lu Ren in Tomb Raider 2018, Gul’dan in Warcraft. Considered one of the most handsome men by Chinese netizens.
Here’s another well known Chinese actor John Lone 尊龙.
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He was voted one of the 50 Most Beautiful People of the Year by People Magazine in 1990.
He played Puyi in The Last Emperor, Joey Tai in Year of the Dragon, and Song Liling in M. Butterfly.
I think John Lone is a very good example of Chinese and American having a common(similar, at least) taste for the appearance of men. And I don’t think Marvel cast Simu Liu because they think he is a good looking man. Simu Liu just looks more stereotypical. They cast Chris Evans and Scarlett Johansson as Caucasian leading characters(These two are beautiful AF, let’s be honest). But when it comes to a Chinese leading character, they pick a stereotypical one. Think about it.
However, as a Chinese, I will never go to the cinema or rent a DVD for Shang-Chi. And I’ve watched every MCU movie in the cinema since 2012, the year The Avengers was released. I have nothing against Simu Liu. It’s all about the Shang-Chi character and the stories. The stories about Shang-Chi are just insulting to us Chinese people and our ancestors.
BTW, when a native English speaker tries to pronounce “Shang-Chi”, it always sounds like 疝气 in Chinese, which means hernia. The pronunciation of Shang-Chi(上气) in Mandarin is more like “Shawn Chi”. And the meaning of Shang-Chi(上气) in Chinese is “being angry” or “getting angry”, not “rising chi”.
It Begins… Migrant Thieves Raid NYC Warehouse
Honey Mustard Pork Tenderloin
06852520003629c9aa11a63779c9e3f2
Ingredients
Pork
1 pound pork tenderloin
Glaze
1/4 cup honey
2 tablespoons brown sugar
2 tablespoons cider vinegar
1 tablespoons mustard
1/4 teaspoon each salt and pepper
Instructions
Place pork on a greased rack in a baking pan lined with foil.
Combine glaze ingredients in a bowl, set aside 3 tablespoons glaze. Spoon remaining glaze over pork.
Bake uncovered at 400 degrees F for 28 minutes or until done, basting occasionally with reserved glaze.
Let stand for 5 minutes before slicing.
Why is China getting more and more isolated? Why are most countries keeping China at a distance? Why is China being treated as a rogue and rowdy nation?
Recently, there was an UN vote about America’s embargo on Cuba.
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UN General Assembly calls for US to end Cuba embargo for 29th consecutive year
A total of 184 countries on Wednesday voted in favour of a resolution to demand the end of the US economic blockade on Cuba, for the 29th year in a row, with the United States and Israel voting against. |
https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/06/1094612
This was the result, with 184 in favor, 2 against, and 3 abstention.
The US and Israel voted against ending embargo. Brazil, Columba, and Ukraine didn’t want to support the US, but couldn’t go against it neither, so they gave up voting.
Weeeel…. I guess someone is kinda lonely.
Everyone IS SCREAMING FOR AN EMERGENCY RATE CUT…
What is the nastiest thing you’ve done for revenge?
I had a fella that borrowed 10 large from me, turned out he was a degenerate gambler and this is Las Vegas. I secured the loan with his house or partial, he defaulted on his loan. I had to take the house and payments until the prepayment penalty expired. He was more than a slob, didn’t lift a finger to help clean for his move out. So I’m on my knees attempting to clean a disgusting toilet amid tossed betting slips from the book. That’s when I grabbed his toothbrush to do the detail work around the hinges, he wasn’t much of a good aim. When I completed that job I returned the toothbrush to its home and I still get a wee bit of pleasure when I think about it. Clean is free and gambling is a fools game. I rented that home, shortfall of $50 a month until his high interest loan was in my rear view mirror. Sold her to a family that couldn’t seem to secure a property, big housing boom. Made money, helped a young military family and got the bad vibes out of really nice home.
If Israel defeats Hamas, Russia will defeat Ukraine, then China will invade & defeat Taiwan. So if we support Ukraine & Taiwan, shouldn’t we also ought to support Hamas? At least freedom loving Taiwanese people understand this basic truth very well.
Actually, all these conflicts revolve around a single rainmaker.
Yes, America.
The long 20th century has taught us a vivid lesson in the power of hegemony. Go against American interests and your country burns or at best, suffers.
America makes cruel examples of some countries, to make the rest toe the line.
If that binyamin chap can fly stateside and receive standing ovations in congress as an icc fugitive while leading a country party to serious icj charges, most of the media narratives are just click bait fluff.
The struggle requires a clash of power, between the American led order and the rest, a system of systems competition that can go bad very quickly, if either side isn’t careful.
I empathize deeply with the plight of the gazans, and wholeheartedly believe in their cause for their own homeland, because history owes the Palestinians a grave, and present injustice.
But support for Hamas, and feeling good if they make gains or even better, win an unlikely victory? That’s just vanity, not least because the conflict is much broader with many moving pieces.
I made donations to the red cross to send aid to the Palestinians. I spent many sleepless nights fretting over the death and destruction overwhelming my feed, and prayed the killing would stop.
Eventually, I snapped out of it, but it was a mighty struggle. It is not my fight, and there is a long, hard road ahead for the Palestinians. There may not even be an end to hostilities on the horizon.
Whichever side you are on, remember this. The world can only be more stable and peaceful if it is multipolar, and there is a true balance of power. That’s the fundamental condition for the rule of law.
Israel, Ukraine, taiwan, Cuba will disappear as flashpoints with the ebbing of American power.
Such is the nature of the world we live in.
As east Asians, we can help recenter the world economy back to Asia, as it has been for millennia.
Remember, these are not our conflicts, and we do not have to take sides. It is enough to follow developments with clear eyes and weigh information from all sides to take the pulse of the situation. Make a principled stand for the killing on both sides to stop.
Anything more is time better spent participating in your own country’s economic growth.
The West is About to Face Unbelievable Hardships | Dmitry Orlov
Since entering August, the Chinese yuan (RMB) has appreciated rapidly. Is this related to the global expectation of the Fed’s interest rate cut? What does this mean?
Not only is the RMB appreciating, but the yen and the euro are also appreciating. The root cause is that the US dollar is weakening.
The US “inflation bill” has not achieved obvious results, and the core inflation rate remains high. The superposition of the US debt crisis and the inflation crisis has made the prosperity brought by high interest rates unsustainable. The global financial industry believes that the Federal Reserve is unlikely to raise interest rates further in the short term, and many institutions predict that the Federal Reserve may start to cut interest rates from the third quarter of 2024.
The Fed’s stimulant is almost over.
$35 trillion in debt means huge interest and default risks. The United States continues to challenge the debt ceiling and burn the international credibility of the US dollar, making all countries extremely wary of the US dollar.
The Fed’s interest rate cut means that the US dollar will flood into the market like a tide, which is an expectation of depreciation. It is normal for people to sell the US dollar.
Let’s look at China again. China has not followed the US dollar in raising interest rates in the past two years. It is one of the few countries in the world that has reversed operations. They have even carried out several rounds of interest rate cuts. China’s stock market has also remained low, and inflation is almost zero. This makes the Chinese economy, although not as prosperous as before the pandemic, almost non-existent in terms of systemic risks. In the first half of 2024, China’s economy recovered steadily, with economic growth of 5% and a trade surplus that broke the historical record. According to the data in July, China’s foreign trade volume hit a new high.
The cold data shows that China’s economy has been recovering and growing steadily, and it is not “about to collapse” as some Western media have exaggerated.
If people think that the US dollar will depreciate, they will inevitably look for a new currency to replace their positions after selling the US dollar. You can’t always exchange the sold US dollars for potatoes. There are not many reliable options in the world, nothing more than a few currencies such as the euro, yen, and RMB. Or invest in gold. In fact, the price of gold has risen by 26% in the past 12 months.
At present, the appreciation of the yen is more obvious, but this is because the yen has just experienced a sharp depreciation in the previous few months, and the appreciation of the yen has a rebound effect. The appreciation of the euro is not as good as that of the RMB
Unlike the euro and the yen, the RMB is an upward currency. At present, due to the continuous development of the BRICS organization, a large number of RMB transactions have been moved outside the SWIFT system. China settles oil and gas transactions in OPEC countries in RMB through the BRICS Bank and encourages the use of RMB as a foreign trade settlement currency. Many BRICS countries and Belt and Road countries use RMB to pay for imports from China.
RMB transactions have become a new international trade route in addition to US dollar transactions.
At present, the proportion of RMB in China’s own foreign settlement currencies has exceeded 50%. As the world’s largest trading country, China has more than 6 trillion US dollars in transactions each year. This means that the share of RMB in international transactions is actually much greater than that reflected by SWIFT, and the degree of RMB internationalization is actually much higher than the World Bank’s data.
This makes RMB a very popular safe-haven currency in international currency transactions. As an investor, when I try to sell US dollars, RMB will occupy a very important position in my basket of choices.
Scott Ritter: Russia’s GLOVES ARE OFF as NATO Makes Fatal Mistake, Ukraine in Trouble
What happened to your school bully?
When I was in primary school, a new kid arrived one day. He had a blonde pageboy haircut and was much bigger than me.
I probably sealed my fate when he decided to stage a KISS tribute air-band concert in his basement.
I watched as he and some of my other friends, dressed in shredded garbage bags, kicked their silver duct-taped, Kodiak boots into the air.
I didn’t get it.
After that I was a dead man walking.
My longest, “bestest” friend, whom had been in every class with me since grade 2, loudly proclaimed that he was happy that we wouldn’t be in the same class the next year.
Then the physical abuse began. I would be shoved to the ground on my way home, etc etc.
Then they all started smoking pot, and taking acid.
I’m talking about 12 year old kids.
One of the kids was a straight-A student and quarterbacked his football team.
I haven’t seen or heard from any of these kids since high school. There’s no sign of them on Facebook.
I know that one of them was stabbed to death with a screwdriver after he testified against a drug dealer who shot him and left him paralyzed.
There’s as least 4 of them who seem to have simply disappeared.
Recently one of then popped up on Facebook. He started his own company painting houses. I hired him to repaint my ceiling after a water leak. He told me how he wasted most of his life addicted to drugs but has finally turned things around. He’s 58 now.
I felt bad for him. We saw Beatlemania when we were kids. He had a bright future ahead of him… but then the “cool kid” showed up one day and sucked everyone around him into a vortex of bullshit.
What is something most people wouldn’t understand unless they grew up poor?
Here are some things I remember from growing up in rural poverty in the USA:
Living in an apartment with no heat except for one very small wood stove, with only unseasoned firewood “included” in the rent. My mother would turn on the gas oven and open the door to heat the kitchen enough so that we wouldn’t see our breath.
In that same apartment, my sister’s bed caught on fire because the electric blanket she used (because it was sooooo cold at night) had an electrical short. Fortunately, I was in the bunk above her and woke up and was able to get her out of the room before the smoke got really bad.
Always running out of toilet paper – buying in bulk simply wasn’t an option for us.
Digging through the sofa cushions for change for reduced school hot lunches.
Government issue cheese, peanut butter, and evaporated milk. We called the cheese “welfare cheese” – it was sort of a cross between cheddar and Velveeta. We never went hungry, but my mom had to get pretty creative with food shelf donations, and fresh fruit (except apples – we always had apples) and vegetables were a rarity.
Anything that broke wouldn’t get fixed. Because we were always broke and there was no “extra” money for repairs or preventive maintenance.
My mom always overpaid for vehicles and always had a car payment. In the extremely cold & snowy climate where we lived, having an unreliable car could be fatal. So she would trade in whatever almost worthless thing she was driving for a new one, and then drive that one into the ground.
When I was in 5th grade, we had so little $ that for an entire school year, I had only 1 pair of pants. I wore them every day, and I washed them every other day. No one ever said anything to me about it, fortunately.
The only time my sister and I bought clothes was just before going back to school. Usually we were allowed to pick out one pair of pants and two shirts, and my mom would take out a store credit card to pay for it.
We very frequently did not have phone service due to disconnection for non-payment. My entire senior year of high school, we did not have a phone. This is before mobile phones existed. If I wanted to make plans with friends, I had to walk or bike 3 km to the general store and use the pay phone.
Despite living in northern Vermont, I did not have proper winter clothes. My winter boots were LL Bean “duck boots” (no insulation!). My walk to the school bus was 3 km. When it was about -25 F, by the time I got to school I had severe frostbite on my feet. A few days later the skin on my toes turned grayish yellow and peeled off. This happened a couple times. I still have nerve damage in my feet.
After I was out on my own and earning money, there were many times when I found myself considering a purchase from the perspective of a poor person and then suddenly realizing that I didn’t have to do that. Only in the last few years have I been able to buy things for myself without any guilt or gnawing feeling that I should save the money instead (I have plenty of savings already).
In the last 6 months, I have arrived at a place of financial security where if I lost my job, there would be no financial panic. This is an amazing feeling and gives me a feeling of freedom that my parents never had.
I resolved to never be poor and have been very fortunate. Being poor was a great motivator for me and gives me empathy for why poor people make the choices that sometimes don’t seem to make sense to anyone who hasn’t experienced poverty.
Kidnapping Victim’s Escape Leads to Horrifying Discovery
https://youtu.be/gH9r_aY8VEQ
Have you ever taken the law into your own hands?
Yes. When I was about 8 years old we lived in a house where the back yard was enclosed by a six foot high fence. Our first pet “Tiger” was a cockapoo a cross between a cocker spaniel and a toy poodle. I was there when Tiger was born.
One day my brothers and I were playing, tiger was out side with us, when the neighbor’s German Shepard jumped the fence and attacked Tiger. I grabbed the baseball bat and beat the German Shepard to death. The German Shepard had nearly ripped Tigers rear leg off. We yelled and our parents came out to see what was going on. They loaded up both dogs and took them to the vet. The German Shepard was pronounced dead on arrival. Tiger went into surgery. He was sewn up and bandaged. Several days later he was brought home.
We informed the neighbor about his dog accompanied by a police officer. The neighbor tried to attack me. The police officer held him back.
The neighbor took us to court. The neighbor wanted me punished for brutally beating his dog to death. And he wanted another dog. The judge listened to both sides and then asked the neighbor some questions.
The questions went like this.
Judge: You had a German Shepard?
Neighbor: Yes, and this little brat brutally killed it.
Judge: is there a 6 foot tall fence between your yards?
neighbor: yes.
Judge: was your dog capable of jumping that fence?
Neighbor: I have never seen him do that.
Judge: Is there a gate between the two yards?
Neighbor: No.
Judge: How do you think your dog got into their yard?
Neighbor: well it is possible that my dog jumped the fence.
The judge then asked me some question.
Judge: why did you attack this man’s dog.
Me: The German Shepard jumped the fence and attacked Tiger. We yelled but the dog would not stop. I had the bat in my hands and was not gong to take the chance the dog would kill tiger or attack someone else. I kicked the German Shepard off tiger but he went back. I kicked him again but this time I also hit him with the baseball bat. He kept trying to get at tiger. So I ended it. I hit the German Shepard till it quit moving.
Judge: were you scared?
me: I was. But I was more angry than scared. No one attacks my family. And tiger is family.
Judge: Do you like dogs?
me: yes, very much.
Judge: before this, were you afraid of the German Shepard?
Me: before this, I had never seen the dog. He barked a growled a lot. But he was always on the other side of the fence.
Judge: so you didn’t hate the dog.
me: I didn’t know the dog. Never met him.
The judge feeling he had all of the information needed made his determination. The neighbor was charged with having a vicious dog. Was ordered to pay our vet bill. He was told that if I had not killed the animal it would have been put down as a dangerous animal. After having cleared a 6 foot fence and attacking another’s pet and possibly children playing in the yard. I probably would have done the same thing as this young man. There will be no retaliation of any kind.
Ironically the neighbor got another German Shepard. A puppy. He introduced us to the dog and our dogs got along great. We moved about 6 months later. Tiger had complications from the surgery and started having seizures. My dad was in the navy and we often moved. Tiger was put down about two years later because we could not afford his medical care. I was told by my parents he was sent to a farm. I looked my parents in the eye and said “tiger was in bad shape. If you put him down just say so. Please don’t lie about it.”
The U.S. stock market has plummeted, putting increasing pressure on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates. The U.S. has lost the financial war. At this moment, China has dealt another heavy blow to the U.S. by reducing its holdings of 228 billion U.S. real estate. Yellen issued a warning that the U.S. debt may face a collapse. Why do we say that the U.S. has lost the financial war? What signal does Yellen’s warning send?
In 2018, the United States unilaterally launched a trade war against China, and then provoked a technology and financial war. Now, the global game between China and the United States has lasted for nearly 7 years. I thought that this confrontation that determines the world pattern would be a slow process. After all, the game between major powers is to see who has better determination. Moreover, the United States has “dollar hegemony” and can collect wealth from various countries by issuing U.S. bonds globally. Relying on U.S. bonds and the dollar, the United States has successfully survived many financial crises. But this time, the United States took the initiative to provoke a financial war against China, and they themselves were the losers. Federal Reserve Chairman Powell made it clear that interest rates may be cut in September. Obviously, the United States can no longer withstand the financial war.
There is a saying about the Sino-US financial war: “hypertension vs. hypoglycemia”. From the perspective of the United States, they are facing high inflation that has been slow to be curbed, huge debts, and high interest rates caused by multiple aggressive interest rate hikes. Although China is the world’s largest manufacturing country, its consumption power is not as good as that of the United States, the world’s largest consumer of goods. In other words, China has goods but lacks money, while the United States has money but lacks goods. The essence of the Sino-US financial war is that the United States wants to harvest China through aggressive interest rate hikes. While China is improving its financial defenses, it is waiting for the United States to be dragged down by its own debts.
But in this process, the United States made two fatal mistakes.
First, the United States forgot the fact that “finance is a derivative of trade.” Although the United States has dollar hegemony, China has the most complete manufacturing sector in the world, which makes it have a long-term trade surplus and has $3 trillion in reserves. Therefore, the United States can hardly influence China’s exchange rate;
Secondly, the United States has never considered that its aggressive interest rate hike strategy will push its allies into a dead end and eventually force them to “turn against the United States.” According to 环球网_全球生活新门户_环球时报旗下网站, Japan has already started to raise interest rates on the yen, which is a dead end for the United States. Previously, due to the high interest rates in the United States, many international investors borrowed yen at ultra-low interest rates and then converted them into dollars to buy U.S. bonds. Now, the Federal Reserve has just released a signal of interest rate cuts, and Japan has immediately raised interest rates, which will trigger investors to transfer assets from the United States to Japan. In other words, Japan has implemented a reverse “harvest” on the United States.
It is worth mentioning that as early as two months ago, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that maintaining high interest rates may put US debt at risk of collapse. But Yellen did not expect that what happened later would be more serious than she expected. On Monday, US stocks suffered a sharp drop at the opening, with technology stocks such as Nvidia and Tesla falling by more than 10%. At the same time, a large number of Chinese buyers were worried about the US economic situation and began to sell their properties in the United States. According to public data, in less than two years, Chinese buyers have reduced their holdings of US real estate by 228 billion yuan.
By August 5, the onshore RMB exchange rate against the US dollar reached 7.1150, a surge of 1,000 points. The reason for the strengthening of the RMB is that the US non-farm unemployment rate has reached 4.3%, which is not only the worst in the past three years, but also far exceeds expectations. This makes international investors believe that the risk of an economic recession in the United States is increasing. It is worth noting that this time Japan raised interest rates and announced how much foreign exchange it used to intervene in the exchange rate. In the face of this “turnaround” approach, the United States did not make any accusations. Obviously, the United States is also very clear about how serious the situation it faces!
I don’t know what exactly you were told about USSR, but it was at least 10 times less bad than you’ve been told.
Everyday life in USSR wasn’t that much different from social democracies of today:
There was work, properly regulated to 8 hours a day and 2 days off.
During dinner break, you’d get to eat at an eatery, usually one affiliated with your workplace.
There was almost 0% unemployment. The country always had work that needed doing, but if they didn’t, they’d invent some work for you, like digging holes or filling up holes.
The work was paid for properly at the end of the month.
People would spend their money in shops, to buy food and things.
Unlike capitalism, there usually was more money than things to buy.
The amount of stuff owned by a typical Soviet person wasn’t that much different from stuff owned by a typical worker under capitalism.
Food shortages were the exception, not the rule. But growing or foraging your own food was a thing.
Everybody had a roof over their heads, usually provided by the government for a small rent/tax.
Less lucky people lived in dormitories and communal apartment, more lucky ones lived in their own apartments.
Wait time to get one’s own apartment was similar to time for accumulating money to buy an apartment in capitalist Russia, but one could use their money freely.
Violent crime was pretty low, while black market seems to have flourished.
Newspapers did not go out of their way to scare people, so people felt much safer.
Life in prisons was worse, as it should be. Still, prisoner lifestyle was regulated, so they wouldn’t go hungry unless the whole country did.
That joke from “Operation Y” where an prisoner builder gets a 3-course dinner with shahlyk and a poor student working part-time (who has to buy his own food) gets some bread with kefir is a comedic exaggeration.
What are good practices that make people live longer?
One thing that really helps is having a goal — something you want to do before you pass. Like Jeanne Calment who made a deal with her rotary André-François Raffray in 1965, when she was 90 years old… in exchange for having the right to continue living in the property, she’d sell the apartment to Raffray, for him to use after she passed. He sure felt he’d made a pretty sweet deal with the little old French lady…
Only Calment didn’t die… she kept living. And living. And living. By 1995, Raffray had already paid Calment many times the value of the property she was living in. A piece of property he legally owned for some 30 years but couldn’t sell or make use of. He died, in 1995. And Calment, 120, continued to live for another 2 years, finally dying in 1997 at age 122 with Raffray’s widow and children continuing to pay her generously for her refusal to meet her maker.
Calment lived another 32 years after reaching 90, and it made her a fortune in her day’s currency. She was paid generously just for being alive, despite continuing to smoke and drink and live merrily. “Sometimes in life, one makes a bad deal,” Calment simply said. And sometimes, people make mighty good deals.
Why She LEFT the USA and Moved HOME to ASIA!
Do Americans really avoid hospitals, even in serious situations because of the bills that follow after?
We sure do!
I pay more than $1000 a month for “good insurance, and last month I fell. I knew something was wrong and instead of going to the ER, I went to urgent care because it would be so much cheaper.
It almost killed me.
You see, I had broken three ribs and punctured a lung. I was bleeding into my chest cavity and the longer I waited to see the cheap doctor, I was losing my ability to breathe. At one point a lady sat next to me. She took one look at me and screamed at the front desk to call an ambulance. I told them it would cost too much and I would drive myself.
Luckily for me, they stopped me from driving and the ambulance soon arrived.
I stayed in the hospital for 3 days and demanded to be released because I couldn’t afford to be there any longer. I was released AMA and I got lucky that I had someone at home to care for me. It has taken weeks for me to be able to take a breath without pain, and while my doctor wanted to see me at the two-week mark, I waited until 4 weeks to see her.
I am now waiting for the bills to arrive. I know that my deductible for the year is $17,000 and that will be what I will have to pay before the full insurance kicks in, but I will STILL have more deductibles to pay!!
Our system is BROKEN!! The MAIN reason people file for bankruptcy is medical bills, and we are supposedly a first-world nation!!!!
People are so damn worried about paying for everyone to get medical care that they would rather go bankrupt than pay LESS than we do now for actual care! They seem to forget that they are already paying for roads, schools, first responders and so much more, but heaven forbid they pay for medical!
It would be CHEAPER FOR EVERYONE!!!
PLUS our politicians are in the pockets of the insurance companies who will lose billions if we were to have universal healthcare. So, we continue to see the decline in our health, die earlier, and lose mothers during childbirth at a rate higher than some third-world nations, and all people can think of is “Well at least I didn’t pay for someone else to live”.
“What’s your planet like?” the little alien asked wistfully.The alien was two feet tall, with a tiny blue curl on the top of his head. By the time the alien was an adult, the curl would be about eight feet tall, sticking straight up like a bright blue mohawk. The rest of him would be only four feet tall, and I wasn’t sure whether the aliens counted the curl as part of their height or not. This species was either really short or really, really tall.“It’s beautiful,” I responded, thinking longingly of home, “When I was little, everything was green and there were all these animals in our backyard. There was a gopher that lived in a hole in the rocks that my dad named Pierre. He always ate my sisters garden. And at night, there were so many… so many stars. There was a lullaby my mom used to sing about the stars. I haven’t heard it in so long. I’ve almost forgotten the words.” I hummed the tune under my breath for a moment, “But Earth… Earth’s not quite as beautiful as it once was.”“What happened?” the young alien tilted his head, curious.“Humanity happened. We were told we were destroying the planet but no one would listen and when we did it was never enough. Overpopulation, pollution, hunger, poverty, global warming… Those all started before I was born and by the time I was old enough to do anything, it was too late. It was already irreversible. The people my age tried to at least slow it down, but no one would listen to us. Our only hope was to find another planet, like scavengers destroying everything they touch. We destroyed our home. Maybe if we had all worked together, refused to ignore the signs, things would be different, but we didn’t and they’re not.”“Is that why you left?”“Yes.” I turned away from the alien, lost in thought.Here I was, a human, lightyears away from my home. I couldn’t even see the sun from here. I had failed in my mission.Sure, I had found alien life on other planets, but I had lost my crewmates and my home. My memories of how I got there were still foggy.I remembered my crew and how we had been the first humans to reach the Kuiper Belt. We’d felt like heroes. Then one of the asteroids had crashed into our ship.I had been the only one to escape the wreckage.The aliens found me.Next thing I knew, I was in their spaceship with no idea where I was.“Do you miss it?” the young alien asked.“Hmm?” I turned back to him.“Don’t you miss Earth?”“Every day.”“I can’t believe I’m actually talking to a human. A real, live human! My grandmama says she went to Mars once. It’s the closest she ever got – the closest any of us ever got – to Earth. There was this weird thing that my mama calls a-” he said something in a different language “-but I don’t think there’s a word for it in Human, so the translator might not work for it. It was made of panels and metal with a human word written on the side in big block letters. The first letter looked like a wide mouth getting ready to eat you, grandmama says.”I tilted my head, trying to imagine what he meant. “An ‘O’?”“What’s an ‘O’?”“The letter. It looks like this,” I traced my finger through dust on the small table between us.The alien child shrugged, “Maybe. I wasn’t there. Grandmama says you could see Earth from where she was and it was all greens and blues and browns and whites and when it wasn’t facing the star, the land glowed. It even had a tiny metal moon orbiting it!” The little alien boy put his hands on my knees to pull himself into a standing position.“Earth only has one moon and that’s made of rock, but your grandmama may have seen a satellite. And the land wasn’t glowing, silly.” I chuckled, flicking the little curl on the top of their head that seemed to be the defining factor of their species, “That was the lights in the cities and houses.”“Why would you need lights? You have a star right there in your solar system!”“The lights are for at night, when the sun goes down.”“What’s a sun?”“It’s what we call our star,” I explained.The alien’s eyes grew wide, “Your star moves?”“No.” I said flatly, “When Earth rotates, it looks like the sun is moving across the sky. Thousands of years ago, people thought it was moving. They thought that Earth was the center of the universe.”
The alien snorted, “That’s kind of self-absorbed.”
“Yeah,” I laughed, “but science proved them wrong. When the part of the Earth that we are standing on turns away from the sun and it goes dark, we say the sun goes down. We call that time night. That’s when we can see the moon and the stars up in the sky. Do you have that on your planet?”
“No. There’s two stars, one on either side of my birth planet, so it’s always not-night.”
“Day. The word you’re looking for is day.”
“Wow. Humans name everything, huh. What do you call your moon?”
“Well, technically the moon’s name is Luna, but there’s only one, so we just call it the moon most of the time.”
“Cool!” He exclaimed, “We don’t have a sky. Mama says the atmosphere’s too weak for us to have a pretty sky like the one on Earth.”
“Light pollution blocks most of the sky nowadays, so don’t be disappointed if you ever see it.”
“Mama and Grandmama have always wanted to go to Earth. They were so excited when you got to the end of your solar system. We’ve been watching you progress for a while. Mama said humans were resilient and stubborn and would never give up, but Papa thought you were going to give up because you kept finding rocks and that was it.”
“They were cool rocks,” I nudged him, “Space rocks.”
The alien clapped two of his arms together, which I was quickly learning was how this species showed delight.
I hated to burst the alien’s bubble of innocence and wonder but…
“Do you know the worst thing about Earth and living there?”
The child’s face dropped and the spiky arm-like appendages fell to their side.
I continued, “The worst part about living on Earth, or at least in my country, isn’t the pollution, poverty, hunger, or even abuse. It’s the tension. The fear that we’ve entrusted the keys of mass destruction to a lunatic or a villain. The constant worry that one day you’ll turn on the tv and hear that a war has broken out in our country and a nuclear bomb has been dropped. In my country, we are always at war, but it is always pushed under the rug and ignored. For stuff like that to be shown on the news, it would have to be on our own soil. Either a civil war or a world war. It would destroy anything. No one would survive, and if they did… that fate might be even worse.”
“So… you don’t want to go back to Earth?”
I shrugged helplessly, “Humanity destroyed Earth. Maybe when your grandmama saw it, Earth was more beautiful, more loving, more kind, but more likely is that the effects of humanity’s cruelty were only just starting to show on Earth’s surface and it wasn’t as noticeable yet. To truly see Earth, you have to get up close, beneath the clouds, into the cities. Still… I do want to go home. I want to rebuild and restore Earth to its former glory, if it ever had any when humanity lived on the Earth. I want to see the animals, healthy and thriving, not on the brink of extinction, and to see the moon surrounded by stars, and see the milky way hovering in the sky like it did when my grandparents were little. I want to go home.”
“Can I help?”
“I don’t think so, little friend. It’s not fair to pull you into our mess.”
“So? I want to see Earth too! I want to help the humanities.”
I smiled sadly and patted the alien’s baby curl. “Let’s just get me home first. Just imagine being the first of your species to reach Earth’s surface. Your mama will be so proud.”
I looked out the small window at the wide expanse of nothing, with stars twinkling in the distance, almost too far away to see.
“Let’s go home.”
West Panic: Italy’s Meloni In Beijing For Desperate Reset, Russia Drops Major BRICS Update
Why do Chinese trolls always fantasize that Japan and South Korea are American colonies? How can we cure their delusions?
Alex Julius, you should be the one who must be cured of your delusions.
You are likely too young, but know that it’s not just Japan and South Korea, there are almost 800 of such “colonies” in the world.
We’re still doing this – added Finland recently. And restored another – the Philippines.
This is the rare occasion where what trump claimed is actually true – Americans can literally shoot anybody on main street and can’t be touched. Young Filipinos may not know these, but Filipinos were target practices once they get too close to Clark and Subic and of course, they could treat their women however they feel they want. And Bong Bong wants all these American liberties back in his country.
The only difference is that its so much more for Japan and South Korea – its Washington that dictates their national foreign policies – that when the American president tells them to jump, they ask how high. . . where the government of Japan can’t fly over Tokyo without permission of the U.S. military commisioner . . . where South Korea can’t do anything involving their military without the permission of the U.S. military brass. . . .where its president must know how to sing Karaoke when making state visits. But of course, to maintain the pretext of democracy, they have to do the work of governing their own people – that they can do themselves. Isn’t all these describing running “colonies” by enjoying the best of both worlds?
Today’s MM image generations
The focus is on admiration, and the god of the vine. It’s a hodgepodge of prompts and resulting in very interesting images.
Many nudes. But you all know that I am figurative art lover.
I really love the style, and the color composition. But I am having problems with the image arrangement. But I think that in time things will straighten out.
Personally, I don’t like full nudes. I prefer partial nudes, and elements of clothing with folds, and details.
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So I changed things out. And I started to require loin cloths and other attire elements.
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Some didn’t have the elements of clothing, but the colors were great.
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In the ones where everyone was clothed, it became too formal. I wanted something less formal.
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Maybe something more like this…
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This is pretty good.
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So is this one.
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And this one.
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The careful placement of arms was really nice.
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This is fine…
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What was the hardest thing you went through in life, and how did you get past it?
Originally Answered: What was the hardest thing you went through in life and how did you get past it?
Our married love life was wonderful, Blessed with cute baby girl , added more and more love to our lives. Perfect love life , both of us were equally romantic and made for each other in all aspects . But he fell sick one day, severely sick. Lost his job soon due to the serious health reasons . I was not working and no experience though well qualified. No one earning at home , worst phase of our lives .I started hunting for job , use to seek help with whomever I know , giving my resume. Since it was already 4 years that I had finished my degree, securing a job was really too hard and challenging. I use to drop into offices , use all my limited intelligence and resources to get a job. Everywhere , every effort was a failure, I was good at nothing , hopes were very less with the future. Somewhere luck clicked , a gentleman agreed to help me , but I had to go far off – 1000 kms from my town . I took the bold step, left the beloved family back . I got a break, worked very hard without caring the number of working hours , my food , my comforts despite of my gender constraints. I did not had anyone to care about me . I had save every penny and money order to home. My life was very hard , but started feeling bit ease with finance. I could meet my family first time after a gap of 10 months. I endured all the pains , discomforts to save our lives . Slowly in 2 years my financial status became very sound and everyone happy at home. All the needs and luxuries of each individual were met with my income. This is 20 years old story , but when I look back now , I wonder myself with the journey. Everyone in the family knows about my success , no one knows the struggle I had in the initial stages especially when alone , away from home. But I am happy I could take care of my loved ones…!! I have cut the very long story short though here. Thanks for reading through this.
Edit 1 :
Dear all my friends , I am adding some more details as asked by you . My smart and intelligent husband lost many of his metal capabilities permanently , he just survived with no physical handicap. As of today he is very casual person with no job , no responsibility and no emotions to me and my daughter.
Yes I could meet all the materialistic needs of the family, but the love which I was dying for , I haven’t experienced again.
The reason I am anonymous here is , I have managed to keep this story very secret as much as possible due to many reasons . I had lots of hopes that I would get my love back , year on year realized that it would never happen, Along with that with growing daughter I wanted to stay strong , avoid any negative emotions , keep the father and daughter bonding as well as family bonding intact . My journey along had been very very rough while managing to take care of crooked in laws , take full responsibility of my sick parents ( my younger brother had died in road accident then ) , emotionless and half sensed husband. I avoided myself in all the social gatherings due to his behavioral issues, it is all a daily battle. I wanted to ensure my daughter will not suffer psychologically in this bargain. It was all tight rope walk for me , lost my youth , real happiness in life . But only satisfaction is my daughter is like a fresh flower with full of fragrance, she is undisturbed with all the tragedy which occurred in our life when she was close to 2 years old.
Materialistically I gained many many things in life but the wonderful love which I received from my husband is just a dream now. Many good things happened to me in my career unexpectedly .There are many many bitter most things about my husband which is still going on my life . Life has taught me the art of living .. and it is going on & on
Edit 2.
Friends , my thanks to all of you . Your responses has made me to feel lighter with the hard and helpless feelings that I have that I am not able to fix my husbands problems. I could have donated any part of my body to resume his love , medically there is no brain transplant . Miracles may work ??
when I get chance I would share the details of deadly disease that my husband survived with, how I handled both my challenging IT career, responsibility of all the dependents , how my husbands family took undue advantage of his illness and emotionless status
Edit 3
Friends ,My daughter loves her dad a lot , has accepted him fully for what he is , tried her best to make him to understand his responsibility , no luck but. Our sorrow never reflects in our faces, not an exaggeration we look our best , lively and cheerful . Also look like sisters as per the comment we keep receiving from others. She is bold , practical, very independent, kind and considerate . Though she knows the hardships of mine she does not simply sympathize and am not emotional burden on her. She flew abroad recently for her masters and has lot of ambitions in life. She has her own passions besides academics.
My love life has been fully empty, I have been trying to overcome by indulging in my work , disciplined life & hobbies . My love to the family has been stronger not giving me a chance of seeking love elsewhere . Probably my brought up has a bigger role here
Missing woman found underwater
What famous people in history knew that their next action would lead them to ruin, but they did it anyway?
It was Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov in April 1967.
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He had been selected as the pilot for the Soyuz-1 mission, which was to take place on April 23, 1967.
And he knew full well that it would mean his death.
The spacecraft had shown problems during the tests, and it was clear that the man inside would not come back alive.
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(Vladimir 1967 with wife and child).
Vladimir’s friend and colleague Yuri Gargarin acted as a substitute.
Another Soyuz spacecraft with a crew of three was to follow the day after. This was to include a docking and transfer of Khrunov and Yeliseyev (two other cosmonauts).
Although the dangers were clear, no one was willing to back down and risk disappointing the Soviet high command. At the time, after all, spaceflight was a competition between the USA and the USSR, and any failure would have proved the “inferiority” of the respective side.
Even Komarov himself refused to back out of the project because otherwise he would have doomed his replacement and friend Yuri Gagarin.
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Already during the entry into orbit there were malfunctions, which soon resulted in aborting the whole mission and then trying to bring Komarov back.
Before the “landing” of the return capsule, the main parachute remained in its container due to design and manufacturing defects. The reserve parachute, activated at an altitude of about 5000 m, did not fully deploy.
Komarov burned up on impact of the landing capsule, while the Soyuz hurtled through the atmosphere at unimaginable speeds.
This made Komarov the first human to ever die in spaceflight.
Even before his fateful flight, he was so certain of his death that he requested an open-casket funeral.
You can see that in the picture above. All that was left of Vladimir Komarov was a broken heel bone and a misshapen, melted lump of remains.
Through the open coffin, he had wanted to force his superiors to look at what they had done to him.
To this day, this photograph of his remains continues to tell his tragic story.
Streets are now named after him and he received posthumous high honors.
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By the way, sources like Wikipedia only say that he died on impact.
But the picture tells a different story.
His sacrifice was in vain, by the way.
A year later, Yuri Gargarin and a colleague were on a routine training flight when their MIG crashed.
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Both men lost their lives.
Man Returns from Parallel Universe (The Peter Williamson Account)
How much damage could a single highly trained special forces soldier do if he were to go rogue? Could he evade capture for a long time?
1990-0802, Delta Force Rapist.
MSG Marshall Brown, 1st Special Forces Operations Detachment Delta Operator, arrested while TDY in East Providence, RI. He raped five women. MSG Brown escaped custody & was captured 3-days later.
In 1988, an investigation began when two women were attacked in Raleigh, one @ North Carolina State University, apparently by the same man, a stranger, who climbed in through their second story windows, hooded & dressed in black, ordered them to silence with a knife held to their throats, covered their faces, then raped them. During the rapes, he apologized, telling them that he didn’t want to hurt them & that he “had to do this.”
On June 11, 1989 in Cranston, Rhode Island, Marshall Brown was taken into custody & charged with the rapes of two Rhode Island women. These women were raped with the same modus operandi as the North Carolina women. While in custody, Marshall was deferential to the police, calling them by their ranks & observing scrupulous courtesy. Police described him as soft-spoken. He even spoke approvingly of the professionalism of the arrests & complimented one officer for his handcuffing technique. He had been arrested for prowling in Fayetteville, North Carolina, earlier that May. He had forfeited his bond for a dismissal of the charge.
Marshall went to work in jail, studying the patterns of the federal marshals who transported him to & from court & making friends with a 20-year-old inmate named Frederick Heon. He stayed in shape in jail, using his exercise periods to run.
On July 30, he was cuffed to another prisoner in the back of a federal marshal van & driven to Providence to attend his hearing. When the back door opened, Marshall – who had picked open his handcuffs – walked with the escorting marshal & his fellow inmate for a bit, then sprang past the startled federal marshals & ran like an Olympic athlete up the street & out of sight.
Heon was out on bail & had rented a car, per Marshall’s instructions & was waiting @ an appointed rendezvous point & drove Marshall to the Connecticut state line. Heon then went to a church where he was told he’d find money, which wasn’t there. Three days later, Marshall was caught in a stolen car & re-arrested. Marshall told the police about Heon’s assistance & Heon was taken back to jail for a parole violation.
Marshall had burglarized a house 15 miles outside of Providence for food & credit cards & was camping in a pine grove nearby. He stole the car in the same neighborhood. When back in custody, he admitted to nine rapes in Rhode Island, Texas, Arizona & North Carolina. Marshall had been attending the Naval version of the Sergeants Major Academy in Norfolk when he was caught the first time.
His wife, Michelle, who was taking care of their young son, was stunned.
I can’t even pretend to understand Marshall Brown, after spending many hours with him & going on one combat operation with him. I have heard the statement that rape is not sex, it is an exercise of power. I don’t buy it. Rape is violent power, but it is sexualized power & it is also violent sex. Sex in patriarchal society is in almost every case practiced, portrayed & understood as a form of aggression & power & all power is in many ways sexualized.
Marshall’s brother-in-law spoke with me many years later & said that Marshall told him that he felt he had to use his skills somehow, or he’d begin to lose them. Marshall saw the rapes as a training opportunity @ some level & therefore the women as training aids
One might suppose, since he repeated this ritualistic rape @ least nine times, that there was some rush he needed. I don’t buy it. He had jumped out of airplanes a thousand times, was a proficient technical climber, had been in combat. I think the rush – if that’s what it was – was transgression. Nancy C. M. Hartsock, in Money, Sex & Power – Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism, said that “without the boundary to violate, the thrill of transgression would disappear.” Marshall’s criminality was not in spite of his religious conversion, his squeamishness about sex, or his uptight WASP upbringing in East Texas. It was an outcome… of all those things, but also of a masculinity defined by a culture of rape & a man who had made a career of pursuing that masculinity.
Marshall Brown served in a profession with a constant subtext of physical coercion & in a field within that profession (Delta Force/Special Operations) where we were expected to work outside the rules, behind the scenes, in the shadows, employing a host of very specialized skills, to “preserve a way of life.”
Sometimes
Green Corn Tamales
I got this recipe from the mother of the owner of the Brahma bull breeding ranch just down the road from me. Green Corn Tamales can be made ahead and reheated by steaming.
green corn tamales
Ingredients
2 dozen ears white corn (save husks)
1 pound lard
2 pounds longhorn cheese, grated
1 pint cottage cheese
16 ounces canned whole green chile, cut into strips
1 tablespoon salt (or to taste)
Milk, if necessary
Instructions
Cut the stem ends off the corn and carefully remove the husks the husks will be used later. Cut the kernels from the ears into a large container.
Grind the kernels very fine.
Rinse and drain the corn husks, preferably the inner ones. Cut the green chiles into strips.
In a separate bowl, beat the lard until creamy. Combine well the masa (ground corn), lard, cottage cheese and about half the grated cheese along with the salt. If too thick for spreading, add a little milk.
Hold a corn husk in one hand. Place a tablespoon of the masa mixture in the middle. Sprinkle on grated cheese and some strips of green chili. Fold the left side of the husk over the masa. Fold the right side over both, then bring the top down over all. Place the packet in a steam roaster on a rack with the open end of the tamale pointing up so the filling doesn’t fall out. Repeat until all packets are standing upright in the steamer. (They can wrapped well and frozen at this point).
When all the tamales are made, add hot water to the steamer, but do not let it touch the tamales. Cover and place over medium to low heat and steam for 45 minutes, making sure the pan doesn’t run dry.
Remove one tamale for testing. If the masa is runny, steam the tamales longer.
Is there any way to look young and fit for your whole life?
My father has served for 4 decades in the Indian Army. He retired last year but still looks like a young gentleman. Here is his pic:
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Following are the things he does daily in order to maintain that fitness, happiness, and energy:
Early 2 bed & early 2 rise: He sleeps by 10 pm and wakes up at 5 am. Those 7 hours are pure sound sleep.
Fresh Air: Upon waking up, he goes for a walk/jog along with our dog.
Morning Nutrition: Next, he drinks Mulethi Tea, which has immense and immense benefits.
Being Natural: He also does Brushing with Neem twig sometimes before normal brushing. He applies Mustard Oil. He hasn’t used shampoo even once in his life and still at the age of 60, he has black & naturally strong hair.
Exercise: Next, he performs yoga and calisthenics.
Spirituality for positivity: After having a bath, he does pooja, which according to him gives him positivity and strength for the odd things.
Do what you love: Then he goes to work. Right now after retirement, his work is to look after our farms. Despite having servants, he also does some farming himself which gives him joy.
Love what you do: In his small-small work, whether household or be it when he was in the Army. He is determined and has will power to do the work. He takes full responsibility and doesn’t procrastinate. He does his work happily. He accepts responsibilities and problems rather than blaming or cursing. This reduces stress and increases productivity.
Nutrition on time: He ensures that he takes his meals on time (Lunch before 1 pm and Dinner before 7.30).
Proper Nutrition: He also ensures that he eats natural things and things with more health benefits rather than going for taste. For example, we eat black wheat roti, self-grown vegetables & and fruits, pure milk, and whatever we can arrange naturally.
Activate super-mom mode
What’s the biggest don’t judge a book by its cover moment you have seen?
We were having dinner at the private Magic Castle in Hollywood. At the next table was a stereotypical studio executive type; you know, 50+ years old, ultra tan, long (hair plugged?) grey hair, flashy suit. With him was a20ish young, hot model type, with a low cut backless dress that showed off her tattoos, among other things. Yup, I thought; fossil studio exec pulling a Harvey Weinstein with some actress. Except as they were leaving, the young woman said to him Dad, when Mom gets back from New York, maybe we can have dinner again!
Having dinner in a restaurant. The guy next to us appears to be having a tough time with his date. He does all the talking, and his date just gives him a half smile; jokes, funny stories, ordering the food, just a half smile from the women. We thought it might be a first date, maybe off of the internet or a blind one. Except when they were about to leave, the guy got her wheelchair and helped her sit in it; she obviously had had a stroke or something, and thus she could only muster a half smile and not speak.
Las Vegas: we enter the Wynn Hotel, and see a scantily clad (mini skirt, halter top) woman walking with two security guards on either side. We thought it was a hooker being escorted out of the premises. However, this was Las Vegas. She was instead wearing the standard waitress outfit for the hotel. Sorry, our mistake!
American Dad
What kinds of inside jokes do commercial pilots tell each other?
A young pilot got a job as a bush pilot flying float planes in Alaska. On one of his first jobs, he flew out to a remote lake to pick up a hunter who had been dropped off the week before.
When he got there, he was horrified to discover that the hunter had bagged a full grown bull moose. He also had several hunting rifles, a canoe, several boxes of ammunition, plus all his camping gear.
“That’s too much,” he protested. “I won’t even get the plane into the air with all that weight.”
“I don’t see why not,” the hunter replied. “You strap the canoe to one of the floats, the moose to the other float, the baggage in the back seats, and I sit up front with you. Alf Smith did it last year, and he got us into the air.”
The young pilot’s ego was wounded. “Well, if Alf Smith can do it, so can I. Give me a hand.”
He taxied downwind to the far end of the lake as far as he could go, spun around into the wind and gave it full throttle. The plane staggered into the air and just barely cleared the trees at the far end. Ahead of them, however, was a low ridge. Using every ounce of flying skill, he managed to nurse the airplane over the trees at the top of the ridge. Before he could relax, however, he realized to his horror that there was a second, even higher ridge a half mile in front of him. There was nothing he could do but pancake the airplane into the trees.
As he and his passenger crawled out from the wreckage, he surveyed the destroyed plane and wept “My God, what have I done?”
“Don’t feel too bad,” said the hunter. “You made it half a mile farther than Alf Smith did last year.”
Load those arms up
Has a cop ever said something to you which was completely unexpected?
I was driving along a two lane road in rural Minnesota, at or just below the speed limit (55mph) when I saw a cop pull out from a side road. He quickly caught up with me and lit me up. I found a driveway where I could pull over safely and stopped. As I was getting my license and insurance ready, he walked up and asked the usual question, “Do you know why I pulled you over?”.
I said, no, I can’t think of anything I was doing wrong.
He told me that he had seen me give room for a lady pulling out slowly, and didn’t blow my horn, flash my lights or seem irritated that she had blocked my path, but let her get up to speed and gave her plenty of room. I also returned a wave from her as she turned off the road.
He handed me a card that read “Good Driver Award”. He told me that if I needed to use it, to show it, and they’ll forgive minor things like too long in a metered parking space. Not only that, but he was very cordial and friendly. Told me to have a nice drive home. He also told me to show it either the McDonald’s or Burger King just up the road for a free soda.
Made my day!!
Syrians Retaking Oil Fields From U.S. Forces IN SYRIA!
Why does the US have Tonya Harding Syndrome against China?
Haha. Tonya Harding Syndrome. What a perfect description of the mentality of USA against anyone that is strong, be it China or Russia.
After WW2, USSR was militarily strong. USA said USSR threatened US (dominance). USA then collapsed USSR in 1991. Today Russia is still militarily strong, then thru Ukraine, USA is to weaken, if not break up Russia.
In 1980s’, when Japan was economically strong being #2 in the world & when its semiconductor surpassed USA, USA then beat Japan down making Japan lost 10–20 years’ of development.
Today, China is both economically, militarily & technologically strong. Of course, USA cannot sleep well at night.
Dont ever think USA is gentle to EU who is also competing with USA. USA pulled down Euro once. One reason for the Ukraine war is to weaken Europe’s economy.
So … USA suffers Tonya Harding syndrome against anybody who is developing well & challenging US hegemony. Not just against China.
USA was successful in beating down USSR & Japan. But has & will fail in China though.
If the Chinese Communist leadership decided today to invade Taiwan, how long would it take them to prepare before the first attack?
Perhaps you’ve forgotten that China’s President Xi Jinping is the son of one of China’s greatest generals?
That he spent three years in uniform as Assistant to the Secretary of Defense?
That in the past two years he has repeatedly called on his 2,000,000 man army to ‘prepare to fight and win wars’?
That, when Gallup asked people around the world, “Would you fight for your country in case of war ?”, 87% of Chinese are willing and ready to fight–almost three times the percentage of Americans or anyone else?
Today, China overmatches the US in its Near Seas and my guess is that it will choose to act there in order to open a potential second front to take pressure off Russia. A credible sequence goes something like this: in close coordination with Russia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Hezbollah…
1. Announce an ADIZ, below, over Taiwan and the Taiwan Strait that excludes all military aircraft and requires permission for every civilian flight in and out of Taiwan. The US cannot prevent this and it paralyzes Taiwan.
2. Issue an arrest warrant for Tsai Ing-wen on a charge of treason and incitement to war and warn that anyone attempting to assist her will be charged as an accessory.
3. Announce that the Taiwan Strait is Chinese, permanently closed to military vessels.
4. Announce that the entire South China Sea is Chinese, permanently closed to military vessels.
5. Show off a few new weapons systems to complement its remarkable missiles and its fleet of Type 055 heavy cruisers, the most powerful surface combatants afloat.
6. Place the entire nation on a war footing, call up the reserves and activate all radars, light up all missile launching facilities, etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxd_A-hGEOQ
These actions would be front page headlines in every new media on earth yet, if you do the math, you’ll see that the cost is….$0.00.
And China hasn’t invaded Taiwan yet. Hasn’t hurt a fly, in fact.
China’s capacity to sustain combat in its Near Seas is far bigger than Western media have been telling us (read the USNI papers to see what I mean). America is no match for China there–on land, sea or in the air.
And, as Clausewitz might have said, fleets win battles but economies win wars and China’s economy is far bigger, growing much faster and is more capable of ramping up than ours.
Would invasion even be necessary?
Ya The West is in full collapse
UK is crumbling.
BTW... I love that park that he is in. -MM
What happened to your school bully?
As a female autistic growing up in Outback Australia in the 1960’s I was bullied a lot. Really nasty stuff, it was only when I was in my 40’s that I got diagnosed as High Functioning Aspergers. I have always used education to get out of bad situations and high school was a particularly bad situation! Getting my head flushed down the toilet daily by a group of six or seven laughing girls was just something I had to deal with.
I left as soon as I was able, went to the nearest big city, got a job and continued to study at night school. Over the years, I built up this small base into a very comfortable career, married, had children and continued to work in a job I enjoyed, was good at, and that paid well. I have travelled the world and learned several languages, since I have an affinity for it.
One of my “nerdy” friends stayed on in the small regional town I’d gone to high school in and we kept touch. She was able to tell me what became of the bullies who used to torment us.
The leader of the group was a girl who was voted by our class as “the most likely to succeed”, apparently because she was regarded as pretty and used to date a high school sports jock. She ended up living in a caravan with a dozen children all from different fathers, working occasionally in low-paid jobs and living on welfare and whatever she could make by peddling her body. My friend told me that I wouldn’t recognize her as she got onto meth and used to pick at her skin leaving bleeding sores all over. She eventually died of a drug overdose a few years ago.
Another girl who used to delight in putting out cigarettes on my skin if she caught me going to the loo while she was there ended up dying, her car wrapped around a tree late one night when her boyfriend, who was driving drunk, was speeding.
A number of other bullies, the low-level ones who just went along with the major bullies and joined in if they had nothing better to do, ended up spending their lives working in the vegetable cannery or the chicken processing plant or the abbatoirs (I lived in an agricultural community, and those where the big employers.) There are probably worse jobs about than gutting chickens for a living, and it is at least good honest work, I suppose…
Another one, a boy this time who used to enjoy getting a seat behind me on the two hour bus ride to and from school and whacking me across the back of the head with a book, also got his karma – he became a welder after he left school, was working inside a silo one day and there was a build-up of gases. When he turned on the welder, the gases ignited while he was inside the silo and the result was that he lost both his legs. Now he has no choice but to sit – in a wheelchair.
Whereas I have lived a comfortable and mostly content life, doing a job I love, running my own business, and owning my own houses, some of which I rent out. One of the best things I ever did was to leave the small-town bullies and small-minded losers to their own devices and leave. I’ve never regretted going.
G7 Automakers Demand Collapse In China, Bank of Japan’s Big Flip, MidEast War Serious Risk
One of my childhood memories is that of all my toys being eaten up by our dogs. Army men, you know the green and grey figurines, always were chewed to Hell. I rarely ever saw my sisters dolls suffer the same fate. Probably for one reason or the other.
I never thought too much about it. I would just shrug my shoulders and consider it a part of my life. Ah. I was used to it.
I used to have this Major Matt Mason space toy. I had a couple of figurines and a space-station. One day I came home only to find my dog chewing up a major truss support. *sigh*
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From that moment on, I adapted and used the chewed up truss in my play time activities.
So looking back, I think that this adaptation of adverse situations had a positive effect on my life. It made me more adaptive and resilient. I think that how we grow creates our personality. In this case, it was chew marks on all my toys.
How the dog got into my perpetually closed bedroom door remains a mystery. Though, I do have my suspicions.
Don’t ever forget. Remember the little things that you grew up. Like puzzle pieces they all come together in the end.
Today…
Hot Dog Chili
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Ingredients
2 tablespoons olive oil
8 hot dogs or turkey hot dogs, cut lengthwise then into 1/2 inch pieces
1 medium onion, diced
1 (28 ounce) can crushed tomatoes
2 (14 ounce) cans mild chili beans (not drained)
1/2 cup ketchup
1/4 cup yellow mustard
1/4 cup relish
4 ounces chopped green chiles (optional)
Salt
Pepper
Chopped onions and shredded Cheddar cheese for garnish
Instructions
Heat olive oil in a large, heavy saucepan or Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Add hot dogs and onions to the oil. Cook until hot dogs are browned, about 5 minutes.
Add remaining ingredients. Reduce heat and simmer 10 minutes.
Taste and adjust seasonings.
Serve hot, topped with chopped onions and shredded cheddar cheese.
The Real Reason Army Recruitment Is Plummeting
If there was a war between China and America, who would win?
China.
There’s a basic reason.
Chinese society considers society a feature. Chinese people (for the most part) reject Jewish supremacy. Chinese reject every social ill that can be used to divide the Chinese people, be it radical tribalism or liberal left-right-ism in all its forms. Chinese raised 800 million out of extreme poverty. Chinese built high speed rails all over their country. Chinese did not allow their GDP figures to be inflated, but rather, China ensured that the rich must benefit the entire nation, and not just themselves. Even then, China’s GDP is growing much faster than America’s GDP.
“The law in its majestic equality forbids the rich as well as the poor to beg in the street, to sleep under bridges, and to steal bread.”
— Anatole France
In American society, homelessness and desperate poverty are a feature, not a bug. Homeless panhandlers begging in the streets are a salutary reminder to American wage slaves of what’s in store for them if they don’t keep their shoulders to the wheel and their noses to the grindstone.
Western society in general is based on the relentless exploitation of the poor by the rich, the weak by the strong. You eat your own. Everyone in America kisses the ass of the person above them in the social order and shits on the one below them.
This is the way you like it. Why else the relentless persecution of the widow, the orphan, and the refugee? Why the gleeful mistreatment of the poor, making them abase themselves and jump through hoops for a pittance? You enjoy watching those less fortunate than you suffer, just as those more fortunate than you take pleasure in your misery.
You like it. You voted for it. You will vote for it again. You will trample on those that are lesser than you, even as you cry about being trampled by those above you.
This is the Way.
It’s a way China rejects, but it’s your way.
As benevolent as China is, China cannot help a masochistic society.
Using DNA, authorities identify man who brutally killed Dana Ireland in 1991
Why are Western countries so salty about the cooperation between China and Africa?
Western countries’ discontent with China-Africa relations isn’t about concern for African well-being—it’s about losing their grip. China’s approach flips the script by offering genuine development opportunities without colonial baggage. For decades, Africa has been reliant on aid and loans from Western nations and institutions like the IMF and World Bank, which often come with stringent conditions that can disrupt local economies and perpetuate dependency rather than foster real growth. Conditions such as structural adjustment policies (SAPs) demanded economic liberalization and reduced government spending, often to the detriment of local sectors like agriculture and small businesses.
In stark contrast, China provides infrastructure projects and funding without demanding sweeping political reforms, allowing African countries to chart their paths to development. The effectiveness of this approach is notably visible—Chinese-funded projects like roads, railways, and airports are transforming landscapes across Africa, achieving what Western aid has often failed to accomplish. China’s development model is based on mutual benefit and respect for sovereignty, focusing on tangible improvements in infrastructure and industrial capacity that meet the specific needs of African nations.
Financially, China’s engagement with Africa creates significant competition for Western businesses. Chinese banks have outpaced their Western counterparts in lending to Africa, providing vital financial support during global crises such as the economic downturns and the COVID-19 pandemic. According to reports, China’s development banks lent around $23 billion to sub-Saharan Africa, more than double the combined amount from the US, Germany, France, and Japan. This shift means Western countries, accustomed to having a monopoly over African markets, now face real competition from China’s efficient and large-scale ventures.
Moreover, accusations of “debt-trap diplomacy” raised by Western critics claim that China’s loans are unsustainable and infringe on African sovereignty. However, many African leaders and experts rebut these claims, noting that Chinese loans often come with more favorable terms compared to Western financial institutions. They also highlight that undue focus on debt ignores the broader context of infrastructure and economic advancement these loans support.
Another layer to Western consternation is rooted in deep-seated racial and cultural biases. The cooperation between China and Africa challenges the long-standing narrative of Western superiority and undermines the paternalistic attitude that has historically characterized Western aid. The perception that African nations are incapable of managing their affairs without Western oversight is deeply ingrained, and China’s success in establishing equal partnerships based on mutual benefit disrupts this ideology.
Therefore, Western countries’ irritation over China-Africa cooperation can be boiled down to a mix of threatened economic interests, disrupted historical influence, and underlying racial biases. China’s strategy of engaging with Africa stands in stark contrast to the conditional and often patronizing methods of Western nations, thereby promoting a new dynamic that favors African autonomy and sustainable development.
“Victor Davis Hanson: Please Listen… Because This is Important!!”
Russia’s unemployment rate is at an all-time low, wages are up, and Russians are spending money on leisure and recreation.
It will be interesting to see how Russia’s central banker, Elvira Nabiullina, deals with the impending Western stock market crash. She did a spectacular job in dealing with US sanctions, outwitting Biden, Nuland, Blinken, Sullivan, and the rest of the US kakistocracy.
Here’s the article:
Real disposable income of Russians (net of inflation and mandatory payments, such as taxes and interest on loans) increased by 9.6% in April-June, according to Rosstat agency data. This is a record figure since 2013, when the methodology for calculating the indicator changed. The last time real incomes grew at a rate close to the maximum was in the first quarter of 2022 (by 8.9%). Compared to January-March, the growth of real disposable income of Russians hit 8.7%. In the first half of 2024, the figure increased by 8.1%.
Such an increase in income is primarily a consequence of a shortage of personnel. The unemployment rate fell to 2.4% in June, hitting a new all-time low. In May, the figure was at the level of 2.6%. Earlier, the Central Bank warned that in the second quarter, the provision of personnel updated the historical minimum in the history of observations. According to the monitoring of enterprises conducted by the Bank of Russia, there was a shortage of engineers, installers, IT personnel, warehouse workers and drivers.
The most acute shortage continued to be experienced by Russian manufacturing enterprises producing investment and consumer products. The head of the Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina, noted that 75% of Russian companies complain about the shortage of personnel.
The problem of personnel shortages on the Russian work market, the training and competition in the labor market will stay in the coming years, Minister of Economic Development Maxim Reshetnikov said last February. According to Reshetnikov, this is now one of the main risks in the Russian economy.
How did incomes grow?
Cash income (on average per capita) amounted to 58,191 rubles in the second quarter, which is 16.8% more than in the same period last year. The acceleration in growth was mainly due to higher wages. In the structure of monetary incomes of the population, the share of wages increased from 59.9% in the second quarter of 2023 to 62% in April-June 2024. At the same time, the part that falls on social benefits decreased to 17.3% from 19%. Earnings from entrepreneurial activity in the total income structure also fell – by 0.9 percentage points to 5.9%. Other revenues, including shadow income, decreased from 7.5% to 6.6%.
The growth of incomes was also accompanied by an increase in household expenditures – they increased by 13.9% in the first half of the year compared to the same period last year. And Russians spent about 3 trillion rubles on savings in January-June (in 2023 for the same period – 1.8 trillion rubles).
The Central Bank of Russia has increased its growth forecast in 2024 by 0.3 p.p. to 3.2%. Analysts expect Russian GDP to grow by 1.7-1.8% in 2025-2027.
The IMF forecast the Russian GDP growth to reach 3.2% in 2024 and 1.5% in 2025.
Wages of Russians
Real wages in May increased by 8.8% in annual terms, nominal (before taxes) – by 17.8%, according to Rosstat. For five months, the growth of real wages amounted to 10.1%, nominal wages – 18.7%. On average, one employee in May earned for 86,384 rubles (around 927 euros).
The highest growth rates of wages in May were observed in the field of leisure, recreation and sports (by 29.5%), in the production of clothing – by 27.2%, coke – by 26.8%, in administrative activities – 26.6%, in wood processing – by 25.5%, in the financial and insurance sectors – by 24.8%, in the activities of extraterritorial organizations (including diplomatic missions) – by 24.7%. Also, wages in the production of finished metal products, computers and furniture grew at a rate of more than 23%.
In absolute terms, the highest salaries were traditionally observed in the fuel and energy sector – in pipeline transport (311,205 rubles), in oil and gas production (211,339 rubles), as well as in the financial and insurance sector (185,792 rubles).
Regional Breakdown
The lowest unemployment rate was recorded in Moscow (1%), Novgorod and Nizhny Novgorod regions (1.3% each), Khanty-Mansiysk, Yamalo-Nenets and Chukotka districts, in the Khabarovsk Territory (1.4% each), Bashkortostan (1.5%). At the same time, a high level is observed in the North Caucasus Federal District – in Ingushetia, unemployment in May amounted to 26.7%, in Dagestan – 10.8%.
In May, wages in the sectoral context grew at the highest rates in the Kurgan Region (by 30.1%), the Stavropol Territory (by 24.8%), Udmurtia (by 23.5%), the Bryansk Region and the Trans-Baikal Territory (by 23.4%), as well as in the Pskov Region (by 23.1%), the Chelyabinsk Region (by 22.9%), the Smolensk Region (by 22%), as well as in the Republic of Mari El (by 22%).
What professions are in demand in Russia in 2024
Drivers, loaders, delivery men, sales representatives and promoters have become especially in demand now, reported the Sovcombank. Since the beginning of 2024, drivers – 417 thousand and couriers – 115 thousand – have been looking for the largest number of published vacancies. Russian companies also lack 70 thousand loaders, reported Лента.Ру with reference to the data of the Работа в Москве, поиск персонала и публикация вакансий – hh.ru portal.
In May, wages in the sectoral context grew at the highest rates in the Kurgan Region (by 30.1%), the Stavropol Territory (by 24.8%), Udmurtia (by 23.5%), the Bryansk Region and the Trans-Baikal Territory (by 23.4%), as well as in the Pskov Region (by 23.1%), the Chelyabinsk Region (by 22.9%), the Smolensk Region (by 22%), as well as in the Republic of Mari El (by 22%).
What professions are in demand in Russia in 2024
Drivers, loaders, delivery men, sales representatives and promoters have become especially in demand now, reported the Sovcombank. Since the beginning of 2024, drivers – 417 thousand and couriers – 115 thousand – have been looking for the largest number of published vacancies. Russian companies also lack 70 thousand loaders, reported Лента.Ру with reference to the data of the Работа в Москве, поиск персонала и публикация вакансий – hh.ru portal.
West exhausted, Ukraine losing, NATO refuses peace
What would a second Trump presidency mean for China?
Whoever gets elected as the US president will not change the trajectory of the continuous decline of the US and the continuous uprising of China.
I’m calling this a financial crisis for the US kakistocracy. The faltering US domestic economy has triggered worldwide sell-offs in stock markets, cryptocurrencies, and commodities markets like gold. In the last six months, US banks have set aside reserves for significant, predicted loan losses in commercial real estate.
[1] In the last year, the US has had three of its four biggest bank failures in history.
[2] We might get to see how the BRICS bloc weathers a Western financial crisis.
From the article:
NEW YORK (AP) — Nearly everything on Wall Street is tumbling Monday as fear about a slowing U.S. economy worsens and sets off another sell-off for financial markets around the world.
The S&P 500 was down by 2.4% in afternoon trading. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was reeling by 864 points, or 2.2%, as of 1:25 p.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite slid 2.8%.
The drops were just the latest in a global sell-off that began last week. Japan’s Nikkei 225 helped start Monday by plunging 12.4% for its worst day since the Black Monday crash of 1987.
It was the first chance for traders in Tokyo to react to Friday’s report showing U.S. employers slowed their hiring last month by much more than economists expected. That was the latest piece of data on the U.S. economy to come in weaker than expected, and it’s all raised fear the Federal Reserve has pressed the brakes on the U.S. economy by too much for too long through high interest rates in hopes of stifling inflation.
Professional investors cautioned that some technical factors could be amplifying the action in markets, but the losses were still neck-snapping. South Korea’s Kospi index careened 8.8% lower, stock markets across Europe sank more than 1% and bitcoin dropped below $55,000 from more than $61,000 on Friday.
Even gold, which has a reputation for offering safety during tumultuous times, slipped 1%.
That’s in part because traders began wondering if the damage has been so severe that the Federal Reserve will have to cut interest rates in an emergency meeting, before its next scheduled decision on Sept. 18. The yield on the two-year Treasury, which closely tracks expectations for the Fed, briefly sank below 3.70% during the morning from 3.88% late Friday and from 5% in April. It later recovered and pulled back to 3.93%.
“The Fed could ride in on a white horse to save the day with a big rate cut, but the case for an inter-meeting cut seems flimsy,” said Brian Jacobsen, chief economist at Annex Wealth Management. “Those are usually reserved for emergencies, like COVID, and an unemployment rate of 4.3% doesn’t really seem like an emergency.”
The U.S. economy is still growing, and a recession is far from a certainty. The Fed has been clear about the tightrope it began walking when it started hiking rates sharply in March 2022: Being too aggressive would choke the economy, but going too soft would give inflation more oxygen and hurt everyone.
Goldman Sachs economist David Mericle sees a higher chance of a recession within the next 12 months following Friday’s jobs report. But he still sees only a 25% probability of that, up from 15%, in part “because the data look fine overall” and he does not “see major financial imbalances.”
Some of Wall Street’s recent declines may also simply be air coming out of a stock market that romped to dozens of all-time highs this year, in part on a frenzy around artificial-intelligence technology and hopes for coming cuts to interest rates. Critics have been saying for a while that the stock market looked expensive after prices rose faster than corporate profits.
“Markets tend to move higher like they’re climbing stairs, and they go down like they’re falling out a window,” according to JJ Kinahan, CEO of IG North America. He chalks much of the recent worries to euphoria around AI subsiding and “a market that was ahead of itself.”
Professional investors also pointed to the Bank of Japan’s move last week to raise its main interest rate from nearly zero. Such a move helps boost the value of the Japanese yen, but it could also force traders to scramble out of deals where they borrowed money for virtually no cost in Japan and invested it elsewhere around the world.
U.S. stocks pared their losses Monday after a report said growth for U.S. services businesses was a touch stronger than expected. Growth was led by businesses in the arts, entertainment and recreation businesses, along with accommodations and food services, according to the Institute for Supply Management. Treasury yields also pared their drops following the better-than-expected data.
Elon Musk: “I Am OFFICIALLY Buying Facebook!!”
Nauseatingly woke narrative, but we all know why he bought it up.
How comparable is China and the USA’s economy?
This is a MM Quora post. - MM
This is a surprisingly good question.
But it is not an easy one to answer.
We will start with the Fundamentals.
System Baselines
The United States is a oligarchy ruled kleptocracy, that maintains an illusion of “democracy”. It is a military empire. It is the largest military empire in history. It rules over various territories, nations and regions using a variety of different techniques.
States (former regional nations) are ruled directly.
Territories are wholly controlled, but permitted local government control.
Proxies, are conquered nations, that are controlled through money, economics and military. For our purposes, we will consider the G7, South Korea, and the Philippines to be proxies.
China is a physical nation that operates a meritocracy. It is a social republic with one party that follows the communist model. It is majority Han race, and has arrangements with other nations though it’s “power channels”.
Mainland. Controlled directly.
Special Economic Regions. Permitted local government control.
Strong “anything goes” alliance with Russia.
SCO (shanghai cooperation organization) economic, social, and economic ties.
BRI members
BRICS+. Financial, economic, trade, and humanitarian connections.
Taken as a whole, we can see that the world is split up with two dominant nation-led blocks. One is the West, controlled by the United States (some argue that it is “actually” controlled by either the UK or Israel), and the other the East. Dominated by the China-Russia nexus.
Comparing the two baselines
So, the question is about a comparison between the two halves. How does the East and the West compare.
It is a little difficult. There are numerous nations that are “straddling the fence” and corroborating with both sides of the globe. This is true with some BRI states.
Ah, comparing the economic landscapes of the West and the group of nations led by China is quite a complex task, as such any particular numbers will be erroneous and wrong. At best, I can only provide a very general overview.
Currently, the West, comprising the United States, the G7 nations, and its territories, boasts a significant share of global economic output. With robust economies, technological innovation, and established trade networks, the West holds a substantial position in the world economy. The combined GDP and PPP GDP of these nations are among the highest globally, reflecting their economic strength.
We can (and perhaps should) consider them well-established economic power-houses.
On the other hand, the group led by China, including Russia, members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, BRICS+, and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) countries, represents a diverse array of economies with varying levels of development. China’s rapid economic growth, infrastructure investments, and expanding influence have positioned it as a key player in the global economy.
Thus, we can anticipate grown; especially substantive economic growth in these nations in the future.
Today, we can say that the United States led “block” leads in GDP. While also admitting that the Chinese led block leads in PPP.
Or, perhaps to put it another way…
The West is wealthy. But the citizenry are poor.
The East is poor, but growing. Their people are comfortable, but not rich.
Looking ahead to 2035, both groups are likely to experience shifts in their economic landscapes. The West may continue to innovate, invest in technology, and adapt to changing global dynamics. However, demographic challenges, debt burdens, and competition from emerging economies could impact the growth trajectory of some Western nations.
Personally, I do not see a rosy prognosis. I anticipate continued collapses of all elements of the pillars of society and industry in the West.
In contrast, the group led by China is expected to see further economic expansion, driven by infrastructure development, technological advancements, and enhanced regional cooperation. The Belt and Road Initiative and increased trade partnerships could bolster economic growth in these nations, leading to a more interconnected and influential bloc on the world stage.
One cannot help but be optimistic regarding the eastern block.
The year 2035 is likely to be shaped by factors such as technological innovation, trade dynamics, demographic trends, and geopolitical developments. All of which is anticipated, and projected to be led by the Eastern Block.
Matt Damon REVEALS His DISTURBING Experience At Hollywood ELITE Parties
The infinite cold of space can seem to stretch out forever and ever to the untrained eye. To the trained eye, it still goes on forever, but it’s just slightly less scary, and it’s not as cold because trained eyes bring jackets and hot chocolate so they aren’t as chilly. Many interstellar interlopers describe the infinite cold of space as rather sentient, as a result of a dozen incidents where a perhaps-future-settlement has simply coughed up the intruders; or they’ll describe it as too dark, because honestly, can the infinite cold of space provide some flashlights?Occasionally, the infinite cold of space can be interrupted by a star, or perhaps a planet. No one hears the planets talk, (even though they’re apparently sentient), but if one listens closely, one can sometimes hear static, maybe, or a clearing of a throat, a planet attempting to speak . . .’Hellooooo? Testing? Hiiiii?”Yes?!’‘Hi! It’s, it’s Zeta.’
‘I don’t know you. Goodbye–’
‘No, wait, I just wanted to say hello.’
‘Is this about the insurance? Because for the last time, I don’t want it.’
‘No, no. It’s Zeta. The planet.’
‘I’m sorry, who?’
‘Zeta? I was born a couple billion years ago, in the neighbouring solar system. I just unlocked my communications potential!’
‘You just– you just unlocked it? As in I’m the first planet you’ve talked to?’
‘Yes!’
‘How unfortunate.’
‘Unfortunate? Why?’
‘Unfortunate for me, not for you.’
‘Oh.’
‘Are we quite done? Because the elderly nebula next door is out of milk and she wants me to run to the store.’
‘No! No, wait. Who are you? What’s your solar system like? I’m carbon based! Are you . . . carbon based?’
‘Jesus Christ– fine. I’m Delta. I’m in a solar system with the star Gamma in the centre, and two other planets, Mu and Nu, who aren’t as nice as I am. They were once the same planet but some rogue asteroid with a death wish planted itself right in the middle. If I’m being honest, I think Mu and Nu have some sort of hivemind complex going on. And I’m not carbon based. I’m made of silicon and oxygen.’
‘Cool! Nice to meet you, Delta. I’m surprised I haven’t met anyone in your system yet, considering that me and Upsilon are so close to you.
‘We’re all rather introverted.’
‘Intro-vert?’
‘Means that we aren’t menaces to the universe.’
‘Sounds boring.’
‘On the plus side, small, carbon-based planets — who just unlocked their communications — don’t interrupt us to ask about our solar system.’
‘Hey!’
‘Hey yourself.’
‘Wait, I have to go. Upsilon had a reaction to an excess of hydrogen. Honestly, you’d think a red giant like him would learn! I’ll talk to you later.’
‘Oh, joy.’
***
The infinite cold of space — which, by the way, is now several degrees colder — looks rather like a nice shade of navy blue, instead of black on the morning that the first Great Rip is discovered. A white, blinding line zigzags across a patch of empty space, creating a sort of vacuum that is sucking in dark matter and husks of dead stars. Several planets and comets have visited: it’s not that often that they get a new tourist attraction, after all. None of them have come back.
Several hundred thousand kilometres away from the Rip, one can hear static, an excited tapping, perhaps, a planet, speaking . . .
‘Delta! Delta, you there?’
‘What time is it? Who is this?’
‘Time for you to be up! It’s Zeta, your planetary friend!’
‘Oh my– Zeta. Again.’
‘Yep! Up bright and early!’
‘It can’t be bright. It’s space.’
‘It’s the thought that counts. Don’t be such a Debbie downer!’
‘Who’s Debbie?’
‘Nevermind. Have you heard about the Great Rip? Has Gamma?’
‘Gamma doesn’t get out much. But I have. Rather boring, if you ask me.’
‘Boring? Boring?! Are you kidding? It’s the most interesting thing that’s happened since I can remember!’
‘Uh-huh. What is it, exactly? The Meteoroid Tabloid isn’t that reliable.’
‘You read that trash?’
‘It’s how I keep up on celebrity gossip. Did you know that Nebula H67-94 split up with Nebula J23-78? Apparently J23-78 cheated on H67-94 with an asteroid. Unbelievable.’
‘Wait, really? I thought they just got married? Wasn’t H67-94 pregnant with triplet stars as well?’
‘Yeah, it’s awful. An asteroid, Zeta, an asteroid.’
‘Hold on, didn’t — wait! That’s off topic! I was telling you about the Rip!’
‘Right, right.’
‘It’s basically a giant vacuum. It’s like the name says, just a Rip in the fabric of space. My friend’s cousin’s boyfriend’s sister went in, and didn’t come back. I wonder what’s out there.’
‘Probably nothing.’
‘There has to be something! There can’t just be, be nothing.’
‘What exactly did you think existed before the Big Bang?’
‘I was rather fond of the theory that two existing universes collided together to make this one.’
‘And what was there before those two universes?’
‘Uh.’
‘My point exactly.’
‘Anyway! If there is nothing behind the Rip, then why is it there?’
‘Maybe the Universe sneezed.’
‘That’s boring.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry, let’s make it more exciting. A cross-Universe adventurer plowed through the fabric of time and space with a shark-shaped spaceship that happened to be painted colours that haven’t been invented yet! Oh, and the traveller inside? Yep, an alien.’
‘Oh, be quiet. It’s interesting, alright?’
‘Vaguely. What do you think will happen if it grows bigger? Or more appear? We’d all get demolished.’
‘True. But I still wanna see what’s out there.’
‘An adventurer, are you?’
‘A bit.’
‘Have fun with that.’
‘Thanks, Delta!’
‘Yep.’
***
The infinite cold of space seems to be a little lonelier on the day the 11th Great Rip is discovered. Planets and stars and nebulas are disappearing by the dozens, never to be seen again. The Meteoroid Tabloid claims that the Great Rips are invented by the black holes in an attempt to destroy the ‘last of the good standing citizens of this Universe!’ The Meteoroid Tabloid conveniently ignored the fact that none of their editors have been sucked into the Great Rips themselves.
If one listens closely, navigating the Great Rips with caution, one can hear static, a ringing phone, a nervous laugh, perhaps, a planet, speaking . . .
‘I can’t believe I’m — oh, hello? Zeta?’
Nothing.
‘Zeta, are you awake? You aren’t . . . gone, are you?’
Nothing.
‘The Great Rips are getting dangerous. Don’t tell me you’ve gone to one.’
Nothing.
‘Upsilon, right? The red giant? Is Zeta there?’
Nothing.
***
The infinite cold of space is slowly, but surely, getting eviscerated by the 269 Great Rips that now exist in the Universe. Entire solar systems have been destroyed, while planets and comets flee to neighbouring nebulas in hope of safety. The Milky Way Galaxy got sucked in in one fell swoop, but no one really cared except for Halley’s comet, who is currently being comforted by an elderly white dwarf star in Andromeda. (According to the Meteoroid Tabloid, Halley’s comet is particularly mourning the loss of one planet ‘Earth’. (No one at the Meteoroid Tabloid or the white dwarf star knows who ‘Earth’ was.))
In a safe reach of space, far away from the Great Rips, one can hear static, tapping, a voice, perhaps, a planet, speaking . . .
‘Delta?’
‘Zeta?’
‘That’s my name, don’t wear it out.’
‘Oh my god, Zeta — I –’
‘Are you ok? You don’t sound ok.’
‘I — I’m fine.’
‘As long as you’re sure.’
‘I’m fine. Where have you been?’
‘How’d you know I was gone?’
‘I, uh, I just noticed you hadn’t pestered me in nearly a dozen years. Got curious, that was all.’
‘Oh! Well, I took Upsilon to see a Great Rip.’
‘Zeta! You idiot! You know how dangerous those are, right?’
‘Yeah, duh. I wasn’t born with an iron base, Delta.’
‘Nice.’
‘Anyway, Upsilon wanted to see it. He’s getting old, you know? Don’t tell him I told you this, but he’s so large and gaseous that I worry he’s going to go black hole soon.’
‘Oh no. What are you going to do? Did he enjoy the Rips?’
‘I’ll probably relocate before he goes. I hear the K76-23 nebula is recruiting babysitters for the star nursery. I’ve always liked kids. And yes, he loved it! Said something about the Great Beyond, but you know how the red giants are.’
‘Definitely.’
‘Also, I don’t think you noticed, but I had a chance to visit your system while I was taking Upsilon! You didn’t tell me you had weather. I can see your hurricanes from miles away!’
‘You– you what?’
‘I visited you.’
‘And you saw my weather?’
‘Yeah?’
‘And I didn’t see you?’
‘Apparently not. Oh, also, dude, your axis? Why is it so tilted? How extreme are your seasons?’
‘Pretty extreme. My parents hate my axis. They say it’s in the ‘family genes’ to be perfectly vertical. As if.’
‘Sorry about that.’
‘It’s ok. At least I have weather, unlike my mom. She’s also iron based, which, hello, huge red flag.’
‘Your mom is iron based? That’s the saddest thing I’ve heard all day.’
‘Right? Hey, you never told me what you looked like either. You owe me now.’
‘I’ll just visit you someday. I don’t think words will do my beauty justice, Delta.’
‘Right.’
‘Hey!’
‘Hey yourself.’
***
The infinite cold of space is smaller now. The Great Rips make up 60% of the known Universe and most planets have fled or have been sucked into the Beyond. (The Meteoroid Tabloid gave tips on relocating solar systems, but their studio disappeared before the issue could go into a second printing.) Time travellers are desperately trying to find the source of the Rips, but none of them have been successful thus far. One failed attempt caused a continual time loop in which unlimited lemon squares were shot into various black holes. (No one asked what happened.)
Against all odds, there exists a corner of space where no Great Rips live. If one has a cassette recorder, or a stethoscope, one can listen to static, the swivelling of ears, muttering, perhaps, a planet, speaking . . .
‘Delta! Yo, Delta! Delta, Delta, Delta.’
‘What? What could possibly be so important that you had to wake me up?’
‘Hi.’
‘Oh you– you’re lucky you’re barely magnetic, or I’d fling you into into Mu or Nu and have them put their full wrath on you.’
‘On that note, why are our systems so close?’
‘No idea. We seem to have drifted closer because of the Rips.’
‘We’re lucky that there aren’t any close to here.’
‘Agreed. How’s Upsilon?’
‘He’s gotten worse. His hydrogen levels are depleting, and I think he’s running the risk of nuclear fusion.’
‘I don’t want to pressure you, but if I were you, I’d say my goodbyes. Remember what happened to Sigma’s system when they refused to move?’
‘Yeah. I just don’t know where I’d go, given how the Rips have eaten everything.’
‘You could join our system.’
‘Wait, really? I thought you hated me!’
‘What can I say, you’re like a Martian fungus. You grew on me and I couldn’t do anything.’
‘Aw, love you too.’
‘Ha ha. I’m being serious, though. It’s only a matter of time before Upsilon goes black hole, Zeta. You’d be gone forever.’
‘I mean, is it that much different than eventually being sucked up by a Great Rip?’
‘I guess not.’
‘But you still haven’t seen my beauty! Dude, this morning, I discovered a weather system near my pole!’
‘That’s awesome! Congrats.’
‘I think I have to go soon. He’s getting smaller.’
‘Ok, see you soon. Be careful, Zeta.’
‘Thanks, Delta.’
***
The infinite cold of space is almost gone. The Great Rips are rapidly moving across the Universe, eating up everything in their path. (If the Meteoroid Tabloid was still running, it would say that the Great Rips needed to try the latest neon-only diet that came directly from Nebula B12-90, who had lost 12% of her dark matter in 2 weeks!) In a small, dark corner near the edge of the Universe, one can barely see a small solar system. A nearby black hole is spinning wildly, and gas formations around it say that the black hole is not very old. The small solar system has a steadily burning star, (if one was friends with the star, one would discover the star’s name was Gamma), and four planets. Two of them were nearly identical in size and were orbiting near each other, close to the star. The other two were further away. One was small, and carbon based. The other was larger, but seemed to be edging closer to the other planet.
If one listens closely, one can hear static, hurricanes whistling, tapping and murmuring, perhaps, planets, attempting to speak . . .
How Would Trump 2nd Term Impact China?
Hot Chicken Chili
a59515469a68629d41ac07bb0b539343
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
18 chicken wings
Oil (for frying)
1 quart tomatoes
2 or 3 jalapeno peppers, chopped
2 or 3 cups water
All-purpose flour
2 (16 ounce) cans kidney beans, drained
Salt and pepper, to taste
1 small onion, chopped
Instructions
Roll chicken wings in flour and fry in hot oil until crisp.
Transfer to serving platter. Remove seeds from jalapeno peppers and chop.
Combine jalapenos, kidney beans and remaining ingredients in skillet where wings were fried (don’t throw the grease away).
Heat thoroughly, pour over wings and serve.
$2.9 TRILLION Stock Market Losses In One Day! w/ Ian Carroll
Is it realistic for China to annex Kokang in the next 100 years?
On August 1st, 2024, the Kokang Army captured the headquarters of the Northeast Military Command in Myanmar.
main qimg 8977ab2a21d1abd6cfba2b8081df3ab5
The Burmese army collapsed quickly, and the Kokang Army seized a major town with a population of 800,000.
Today (August 5th, 2024), the Kokang government abolished the discriminatory ID cards issued by the Burmese government and replaced them with special district ID cards. (The Burmese government implements discriminatory policies against ethnic minorities. In addition to non-citizens, there are six types of ID cards with decreasing rights. This is rare in modern society.)
I feel that the Burmese military government is incompetent and arrogant.
As the majority ethnic group, they bully minorities, but they ended up having their military command headquarters destroyed by local armed groups of minorities?
Several division commanders were even killed, which is a huge embarrassment.
The Kokang do indeed seek independence or to be absorbed into China, but it’s unlikely to happen.
Although the Kokang are actually Han Chinese, speak Chinese, and even use Chinese textbooks for their children, China needs to consider the feelings of other ASEAN member states, so it’s unlikely to accept the Kokang.
However, I believe this doesn’t mean the Burmese military government can arbitrarily massacre them.
Anyway, we have a lot of small troops like this.
Enough to prevent a humanitarian disaster.
After all, they are Han Chinese and are right next to China.
If someone were to be so foolish as to want to massacre them, then it would be perfectly normal for them to suddenly find ten thousand drones, endless artillery shells, air defense weapons, and electronic jamming equipment growing out of the ground.
The Spiritual Connection of Cats | Why Did GOD put a CAT in your life ?
Did anything bother Abraham Lincoln during his presidency?
More than anything, it was Abraham Lincoln’s wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, who bothered him. She was what was called in her day a “manic-depressive”, or rather a sufferer from bipolar personality disorder in our current lingo. Mary Todd would move between moments of great loving care, and extreme cruelty. In her manic episodes she would serve imported oysters and prove a passionate lover, in her depressive states she could be cruel, even physically abusive to her husband and sons.
main qimg 54afe2567e26b8826ca88971d160f14a
Abraham Lincoln, despite being an exceptionally strong 6′4″ man and a former athlete of some renown, was a complete slave to his mentally unstable 5′2″ wife — a wife who would, at times, abuse and degrade him in public, much to his considerable humiliation. Often she would cruelly make Honest Abe sleep on a hard couch or even the floor when they’d have a fight. He was every bit the stereotypical “henpecked husband” one would later see in sitcoms. When the two were in good spirits, things were truly great. And when they were not, things were truly horrific. Violent moodswings would catch the Lincolns off-guard at the most inopportune of moments. And the President suffered greatly from the ensuing uncertainty that followed him wherever he went.
There have been moments where Mary Todd Lincoln’s mental state declined to such a degree that Abraham wanted to have her committed to an asylum. The death of their beloved sons further drove Mary Todd to the very edges of reason… and as she drifted in and out of sanity, her husband suffered most of all, as he carried on his shoulders the weight of the nation and failed to find refuge even inside his own home.
My God she is being such a bitch.“So” Ryka said, “The man died and on the third day walked out of the tomb. Another zombie story is what this sounds li“It isn’t a zombie story! He was living. Zombies don’t live.”“They walk-““They’re dead!” Why couldn’t she understand? “They rot. It’s an evil spirit that animates them. He was alive, as you and me are.”
“And he said this is my body and my blood, eat and drink it. You have to admit that is very strange.”
“It’s symbolic,” George said through gritted teeth. “It is bread we eat and wine we drink. You know that. You just want to mess with me.” Out of all the people on earth he had to get stuck with her for a partner. Out of all the people in the world he had to get stuck with this lot. She was probably the most tolerable and that wasn’t saying a whole hell of a lot. Well, he supposed, that is what happens when you get caught fencing illegal items. You get the missions no one else wants and with people you cross the street to avoid. The police had slapped his hand until he got hold of two beehives. In this day and age, they were extremely valuable. How was he to know they were stolen from the New York Mafia? Of course, they and the FBI got involved. Some bad cesh went down, people shot, and now here he was. Unfair. Completely unfair.
“And then he rose into the sky. As if that is where heaven is.”
“Bear in mind this was written by ignorant people 2100 years ago. 2151, to be exact. Also, translated numerous times.”
“Of course it’s wrong, for that is not where the chosen place is.”
“Oh yeah? So where is it?”
“There is not one. To think there is a heaven is illogical and uneducated.”
George took some very deep breaths. Ryka had all the tact of an android. In fact, the androids had more, being programmed to be considerate. “Okay but what do your people believe? They must believe something since you just got through saying that’s not where the chosen place is.”
“It certainly is not there,” she said, gesturing at the spaceship’s window.
“I’ll grant you that.” George walked to the small port window and looked out at unfamiliar stars. How far had they come? He no longer remembered. But he knew why they were here. The private space company ASSL had found a possible earth like planet in this God forsaken region of space. Even using their new space warping devices it had taken two years to get here. This was why America took a page from history and sent criminals to scout these worlds. Criminals and the possibly insane who didn’t mind going on a spaceship for years. Truth was, ASSL would take anyone willing who didn’t get too space sick. If the criminals and the undesirables died trying, so what? At least America didn’t have to feed them. That had been a problem ever since these damned climate change immigrants had come here. At least he’d be fed better on ship than prison and a hero when he got back. If he got back. He rubbed his shoulder and wondered what his age would be then. Space warping messed with time. What had been two years for him might have been two weeks back home. Or four years for them. “But if not in the sky then where?”
“Underground. Where things grow and are nourished.” Ryka straightened herself up. “That is where it is.”
“No. That’s where hell is. It’s hot there. People burn in hell.”
“Because God lets the devil roam free to cause evil and mayhem. Yet he’s omniscient and omnipotent. Demons roam around. Ha. Your people thought-”
“I thought we long ago settled that! Besides, better than being eaten by your god, as you believe,” George growled.
“It’s a way to become one with his Holiness. We nourish him and He us.” Ryka was almost in George’s face now. They glared at each other. Then she relaxed and stepped back. “You’re insane,” she added.
“No doubt seeing as how I work with you.”
“I am the only thing that saves you.” She gave what passed for a smile for her and she went over to check the navigational system. For her size her footsteps were light. Well they did have reduced gravity on this ship. George sighed. Long ago he had made his peace with these immigrants. The war between his people and hers were over now. But it didn’t mean he wanted to share a spaceship with her and ten other idiots.
Maybe, said his mother’s ghost in his head, if you’d listened, made an honest living…
Maybe if you were a better damn mother, I would have…but no. You had to leave Dad to run off with that Tom moron.
Yeah, okay, blame me. I didn’t run off. And your father was virtual world addicted. What else could I do?
Well you might as well have run for all you helped me. I told you Tom beat me…
“Stop talking to yourself and come look at this, George.”
“Can’t do without me, can you? I tell you you’ll miss me the day I’m gone.”
Ryka contemplated smacking him. A shame they were monitored. Easy now, she thought. This can’t be easy for him. You are an immigrant in every sense of the word.
No. My great- great parents were. I am not.
Still. Give the guy a break. Besides, you know as well as I do you were goading him. You cannot make fun of anyone’s religion no matter how silly.
Oh, I will give him a break all right. “I am not sure we are staying on course. So, I seek your opinion.”
“My opinion is you can’t read.” He pushed past her and looked at the screen. “Well, you’re right. We are off. Why didn’t you correct it?” But he knew if she could, she would have. She may be annoying and more of a know it all than any android. But she also wasn’t stupid. He pressed buttons. “Why won’t the course correct?”
“I do not know. I thought it was a programming error. But that is not my forte. So, I ask you.”
George pulled up the navigational system’s program. “Hal looks okay.” Someone’s idea of a joke. “I think…it’s a hardware problem. But we got no warnings about it.” He hit the intercom button. “James! Get down here. NOW!”
“That was my ear. Did you have to shout in it?”
“Well excuse me. It’s not my fault that moron can’t hear right.”
“I do not think he can be a moron. He has no IQ, right? So that makes him an idiot.”
“Same thing these days. James. Did you turn off an alarm?”
“I did.” James stood there looking for all the world like a handsome movie star human. Or he would have if his hair wasn’t messed up and his shirt wasn’t on backwards.
“You stupid bucket of bolts your programming is messed up again.” George sighed. It wasn’t until after he signed up and was in earth’s orbit that he learned this company cut corners in every conceivable way. And why not? This mission was probably doomed to fail so they didn’t give them the top of the line technology. That was saved for the missions that had a chance to succeed. For example, the biosphere on Mars. But only the very wealthy could afford to go there, leaving out 99 percent of the population of earth. If they found an earth-like planet with an atmosphere they didn’t have to constantly maintain, then the costs of colonizing would be a lot less. George had been born in what was left of Florida. People there ate grits, meat made from insects, dealt with rationing and spent a lot of time in online virtual worlds. They did that to forget that between the native born and the immigrants there wasn’t much plant life left. They were slowly bringing it back. Actually, the immigrants helped. They had so much knowledge that really everyone should have listened to them sooner. Meanwhile, finding another livable planet would be a big help. Even bringing back samples and seeds would help. Now George had to deal with an extremely out of date android. “Did I order you to turn off the alarms?”
“Did you?”
“Great. Now I have to go through his programming. Again.”
“Let me.” Ryka walked over and smacked the android in the back of the head. James shook, rattled, and said, “No you did not order me to turn off the alarms.”
“Works every time,” said Ryka, with her strange smile.
George shook his head, sighed, and said “Then why did you?”
“So that you could sleep uninterrupted.”
“James, you can’t do that. It’s good Ryka caught it in time that we are drifting off course. Now we need to find out why. What did the alarm say?”
“I do not know.”
Oh, what the hell. George smacked him too. It hurt like hell but it worked.
“A thruster is malfunctioning. It is the gyro. Someone must take a spacewalk and fix it.”
Ryka said, “I vote for the bucket of bolts here to do it.” She gestured at James.
“Unfortunately, I don’t trust the bucket of bolts. And you’re the hardware person. Everyone else is still asleep. It’s our shift.”
“Chivalry is dead I see,” she said.
“Been dead two hundred years. We’ll both go. Out of the goodness of my hard, little heart.”
“Gee. I am touched.”
George smiled and patted her bony shoulder. “You should be. Well, let’s go suit up and get this over with before we end up in a black hole or a sun.”
“I should be so fortunate,” Ryka muttered and went to her room to get her suit. Unfortunately, she had a feeling if she did die the Holiness would spit her back into reincarnation. And for her actions as an assassin she probably deserved it. It had all been for a good cause, protecting what was left of the Amazon rainforest from an idiot dealer and his cartel. This idiot didn’t even want to develop it for food or she might have understood. This one wanted it for coffee. A drug at best, she thought and not even a good one. Worse, he was of her people. He claimed earth’s warming couldn’t get any worse. Did he not study their history? Still, her actions had been unethical and not kind. Certainly, innocents had gotten caught in the fighting. Hence why she was here with this thief and liar. As if she was any better, she thought.
Suited up they went through the hatch and out onto the spaceship. At least the suits were better than the old moon walk ones. They created a force field that held oxygen and pressurized atmosphere around the wearer. They were still rather hot and restricting to wear. Furthermore, they used electromagnets to attach the astronaut to the ship. Walking was difficult. Well, for Ryka it was. George was finding it easier than he thought. Too easy, he thought. We need to be quick about this. Slowly they made their way, pulling replacement parts behind them on a tether, over to the thruster. “The gyro is definitely burned out,” said George. “I hope it doesn’t happen again, since this is the only spare we have.”
“That cheapskate bastard of a boss,” Ryka grumbled. “She makes the damned shareholders happy while we cannot even get a decently working android never mind parts.”
“The word is bitch, Ryka. She’s female.”
“Wrong. That is an insult to all decent dogs everywhere.”
George couldn’t disagree with her there. He pulled on the tether. The bag of parts and tools floated over to him. “I don’t like this.”
“What?”
“My suit. I’m not sure the magnets are working correctly.”
“Well stop being so flatulent.” She wasn’t looking at him, not really paying attention. She was trying to pull out the old, burned gyro. Finally. she managed it and handed it to George. He gave her the new one.
“That’s too uppity. Which is your problem. Always lording your superior education over us. “
“Wrong! It is simply how I speak! You-” she broke off for she heard him cry out. She turned as quickly as could and saw his magnets had stopped working. She could see him frantically press the button on his emergency thruster pack. Nothing. He was floating away, faster than she would have thought possible.
“Jacking hell! Help me!” Thinking, she isn’t going to. He wouldn’t have blamed her. Too much risk and they didn’t like each other. Uneasy tolerance was the best they ever got. He could see her ugly gargoyle face watching him. It wasn’t exact but a close description. One hundred years ago America had climate change immigrants. They came from Venice, fleeing the rising seas. They came from Vietnam, Israel, and especially South America fleeing famine from a warming planet. America hadn’t been altogether happy about them. Aliens. You’re aliens the native born said, so go home. Then one day the real aliens came. They had made the same mistakes man did and their planet’s climate change nearly killed them. They came, hoping to be welcomed in exchange for trying to save earth. But when you look like demons from some medieval painting, George supposed, bad things happen. They couldn’t leave either. Broken ships, broken spirits. They truly had nowhere else to go. Then the fighting started, the cruelty, until no one knew who committed the worst atrocities. They only woke up when the ground and their souls were scorched. Now both human and alien were trying to save a sinking ship called earth. Or in George’s and Ryka’s case, redeem themselves.
I’m dead, George thought. Without even a priest to give me absolution. When was the last time he’d even been to Mass? Damned Catholic guilt. It never goes away. He had oxygen but soon that would deplete. There was panic although behind it was calm. So, this would be how it ends and maybe it wasn’t so bad after all. Better than dying senile and drooling in a nursing home thirty years from now, he guessed. Here the stars were bright and beautiful. Close to heaven as he’d ever get. The panic ebbed. In fact he almost felt stoned. It was so peaceful now. Then something clawed at his leg and slipped away. He somehow managed to twist around and reached out. Everything slowed except for the drum in his chest, his ears. His breath came harsh and fast. He heard nothing else. George saw her hand brush his but couldn’t feel anything. He stretched so much his shoulder felt as if it would separate. Yet there was no pain, just numbness. Not even that. It was a vast and lonely detachment. Then she shouted and he felt like James might when Ryka smacked him. As if some mechanical part slipped back into place and he could hear again. She shouted at him, telling him to try his pack thrusters again, help her. He mashed the button with all his might and for an instant they fired. Just enough so they could touch-then she gripped his hand. He wrapped his arm around her waist. She fired hers and they made their way back to the ship. Ryka then turned on her magnets and pulled him next to her. George found a handhold to grab, then another, blessing whoever put them there. Maybe he or she had had a vision that one day it would save someone’s life. Then, the ladder. He pulled himself up it, found the handle for the hatch, and fell into the ship. He hit the floor hard and barely felt it. He was alive.
“Byeheth culemth quelthel, Heorg!” Ryka shouted at him, coming into the ship.
“English,” he whispered.
“You picked up the broken suit!” She stood over him. Her eyes shone. With what? Was that fear he saw? Concern?
“J-James. He- must have hung it with the rest.” He couldn’t yet stand so he knelt, pulling it off, throwing it from him. His breaths came in gasps. “I-will f-father jacking strangle him. Jacker.”
Ryka gently, softly touched his shoulder. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah.” He looked up at her from where he knelt on the floor. Trying not to cry. “Cesh! If it wasn’t for-”
“Yes, whatever.” she said, not looking at him. “Go mark that stupid suit so this does not happen again, okay? Once is enough. I will make sure we are on course.” She left. Quickly, as if embarrassed. He sat for a long time, shaking as if cold and thinking.
It was near the end of their shift, at breakfast, that he asked her why.
“Why what?” She looked away. Played with her food.
“You went after me. Risked yourself. You didn’t have to and no one would have blamed you.”
“Our bastard boss would have.”
“What’s she going to do, fire you?” George laughed. Ryka didn’t.
“I am certain you would have done the same.”
George shrugged. “Yeah. But you don’t even like me. Nor do I blame you,” he mumbled. The country had not learned its lesson the first time and had attempted some equal but separate laws. The results had been predictable. “So…” he gestured weakly.
“I am soft in the head, my friend,” Ryka said, “plus who else will I pick on? James does not get it and half of the others would stab me in my sleep.” She smiled. “Now you will just owe me one.”
“Okay.” George held out a hand and she shook it.
“I would like to know something, however.”
“Yes?”
“How do you strangle an android?”
“Special skills,” George said, smiling.
Are people in China allowed to openly criticize or make fun of Communist party politicians and President Xi?
It depends on the content of the criticism
If you mean something like FJB, I’m sorry, it’s not allowed in China
China has laws to stop such public attacks on individuals and the government. Any insulting or ideological attacks are prohibited. Of course, this does not mean that you will be arrested after making certain public remarks, but your remarks will usually be deleted. It’s the same as our remarks being deleted on Youtbe or X.
If your criticism is directed at a specific event, then it’s okay.
Chinese people or the Chinese government are pragmatic. They don’t like to waste time on political slogans and empty theoretical struggles.
If what you want to express is: the government is terrible, we need a better mayor to solve the various serious problems in the city!
Such criticism will be regarded as stupid in China, no one will pay attention to you, and everyone will think you are an idiot.
They welcome such criticism:
The traffic is terrible, there is always a serious congestion every morning at 5 kilometers on Highway 3, you must do something!
The garbage problem is terrible, the creeks in Pearl Park and Green River Park are full of garbage, what is the city cleaning department doing?
My house is threatened by noise, and a group of elderly people gather in the park downstairs every morning. It makes it impossible for me to rest, and you must solve all this.
Very good, if your criticism is like this. Then you have mastered the trick of criticizing the Chinese government.
This kind of criticism will have two dimensions of effect
1. Criticism itself
The government will have a specialist to evaluate your criticism (it may also be with the help of AI), your criticism will be classified, the jurisdiction will be determined, and it will be pushed to the corresponding responsible department.
The department that receives the criticism will investigate the situation you criticized and reply to you about their investigation and handling. And ask you to make a final evaluation of the case.
If you are not satisfied, you can appeal to their superior department again.
2. Statistical significance
When citizens have a lot of criticism around the same issue, such criticism will be upgraded to the perspective of “global problems”. This may mean that a department or an official has not performed his duties correctly, resulting in “bulk” dissatisfaction. Such problems are often given priority and trigger performance appraisals of officials. Severe cases may even trigger investigations and accountability of officials.
In fact, the Chinese government has set up many channels to accept people’s criticism, such as reception offices, emails, and hotlines. The most popular way is to submit your criticism through the Internet.
When I visited Shanghai, one of my female colleagues showed me a process of criticizing the government.
A new viaduct was built under the apartment building where she lived. This viaduct was to solve the traffic congestion on that road (nearby residents have been complaining for a long time)
But after the viaduct was built, the speed of vehicles increased significantly.
This brought more serious road noise, affecting the rest of the residents in the adjacent apartment building.
She was one of them, and she submitted her complaint about the matter through the website of the Mayor’s Mailbox of the Shanghai Municipal Government.
Three days later, her complaint was submitted to the Minhang District Traffic Management Bureau of Shanghai.
The Minhang District Traffic Management Bureau responded to the criticism two days later. It said that the construction of this viaduct had passed the environmental protection approval of the municipal government and was legal. Regarding the noise issue, they will be handed over to the Environmental Protection Bureau.
The Minhang District Environmental Protection Bureau replied two days later that they would send a commissioner to the vicinity of the viaduct to measure the noise. A week later, the Environmental Protection Bureau responded to the message: the noise measurement has been completed, and they believe that the noise at night is within the legal range. They hope that she can understand this matter and make a closure evaluation on this matter.
My female colleague obviously disagreed with the government’s explanation, so she called on her neighbors to criticize on the website, and they submitted the same opinions. About a week later, this opinion was raised to a higher level, and the Shanghai Municipal Government Environmental Protection Bureau intervened. Two weeks later, representatives of the residents of the apartment building were summoned to hold a hearing.
Two months later, a tunnel-shaped soundproof wall was built on the viaduct to completely isolate the traffic noise of the viaduct.
This criticism of the Shanghai Municipal Government was closed after several months.
This is a typical case of Chinese citizens criticizing the government and waiting for the government to respond to the criticism.
All the contents of these documents can be checked on the government website and made public to everyone.
Be a great Dad
Hearty Chili Roni
Macaroni is a great addition to this family favorite. Cooking the macaroni with the ground beef and seasonings for this Hearty Chili Roni makes cleanup a snap.
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Prep: 5 min | Cook: 25 min | Yield: 6 servings
Ingredients
1 pound ground beef
1/2 cup chopped green bell pepper
1/2 cup chopped onion
1 package McCormick® Chili Seasoning Mix, Original or McCormick® Chili Seasoning Mix, Mild
1 (14 1/2 ounce) can diced tomatoes, undrained
1 (14 ounces) can reduced sodium beef broth
2 tablespoons tomato paste
1 1/2 cups uncooked elbow macaroni
1 cup shredded Cheddar cheese
Instructions
Cook ground beef, bell pepper and onion in large skillet over medium-high heat for 4 to 5 minutes or until beef is browned.
Add Seasoning Mix; stir until well mixed.
Stir in tomatoes, beef broth and tomato paste. Bring to boil. Stir in macaroni. Reduce heat to medium; cover and cook for 10 minutes or until pasta is tender.
Sprinkle with cheese; cover. Let stand for 5 minutes or until cheese is melted.
Ex Thought She Hit The Jackpot In Divorce Only To Be Working 2 Jobs With ZERO Men Interested In Her
When I was in my early teens, but before I started working, my mother would drop us kids off at a nearby pool to spend the day at.
It was a swimming complex.
It has an attached golf course, and I would (most of the time) play golf and then just kill time. My sister, at that time, was relentless in ridiculing me, making fun of me, and making my life just miserable. So I avoided the pool. It was a hostile environment to me.
For a spell, perhaps when I was in 6th grade, or so, the pool was doing work on the pool. And the one side was torn up and exposed. And being a boy, I couldn’t help be explore it. And there, to my great surprise was piles of shale.
This, in case you don’t know it, is just layers upon layers of compressed grasses and leaves from the Carboniferous era.
I couldn’t believe my luck. I would easily chip open the blocks of stratified rocks and see images of leaves and plants that no human had ever seen.
Of course, my entire family thought I was nuts. My sister constantly made fun of me. My other brothers and sisters ignored me, and my father and mother complained about hauling home rock after heavy rock.
But I loved it.
It is the perfect pastime for the children.
Give them a hand trowel, and let them go to work. They will get an interest in history, in geology, and in collecting. In a world where everything comes with a price tag (in the United States) it’s free and cheap entertainment.
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Today…
What was your first clue you were no longer as young as you thought you were?
It’s interesting that this question came along because I just recently got a clue.
It was , quite frankly, devastating. 🤣😂🤣😂
I went to see my son recently in Washington state.
We needed to take his van to the shop and used an Uber for transportation.
The driver was mid 40s or so. He was really friendly and very talkative about all the money he makes driving Uber. 😳
My son elbowed me and said hey this could be an easy way to make extra money and winked at me.
The Uber driver proceeds to say, “ Uber driving isn’t safe for woman especially elderly ones.
You could hear crickets. I’m thinking, is he talking about me? And my son is thinking, oh no, I hope he wasn’t referring to mom.
Because not a word was being said the driver asks , “ Mam, did I say something to offend you?
I said no, then we arrived at our destination and exited the car.
I turned to my son and just said, what the hell was that?! I felt as though I was being gaslit! I was just floored. And on top of everything I have never liked being called mam!🤣😂🤣😂
I asked my son if he would describe me as elderly? He said absolutely not mom, and anyway who is he to judge , he was pushing fifty at least!!!
Ok so I can laugh at it now but it really did a number on me.
Of coarse this became the theme of the trip. Every time we did something physical I would ask if this was something an “elderly” person would or could do.?!
We played badminton, we played frisbee, we hiked in the mountains, we replaced broken handles on his van. He lives upstairs and I took those stairs repeatedly like nothin!
Does that sound like an elderly person to you? 🤣😂🤣😂
I looked up what is considered elderly and the general consensus is 60 to 65, I will be 64 the end of the month.
I don’t know, but personally I have regarded being elderly as more of a physicality not age. Like the inability to do normal everyday activities without help of a person or device like a walker or wheelchair etc.
I guess it’s all one’s own perspective. I’m not oblivious to the fact that I’m not as young as I feel or think but having it thrown in my face like that was unnecessary !!
Alfred Hitchcock Presents S05E37 Escape To Sonoita
In your school, has a bullied ever snapped and beat the bully?
I was in seventh grade and there was a boy who was known to be handful to most of the teachers and a bully to a lot of the students. He tormented the girls. I was no exception. He was known to grab the girls in ways that would get him a “me too” hashtag today, though back then teachers brushed it off as “boys will be boys,” or “Oh don’t be so sensitive; he just likes you.”
Frankly I had endured his hands on me for the last time. One afternoon I was at my locker exchanging books for my classes. My hair was French braided, I had on a blouse, skirt, and dress shoes. This will be relevant in a moment.
The young man in question came behind me, sunk his hand into my braid down to my scalp and jerked my head straight backwards. Heaven only knew what he was going to do next but he didn’t get that far.
I spun around and slung my purse across his face like a sword, but I wasn’t done by a long shot. I dropped everything in my hands and took off after him when he started to run. Down the hallway we went. I was calling after him something along the lines of, “You think you’re tough, picking on the girls and grabbing us. How does it feel, huh?”
I cornered him and grabbed one of my dress shoes and walloped him over the head a few times before a teacher pulled me off of him.
Now it should be noted, I don’t condone violence and as an adult I have never put my hands on anyone in violence, but when someone continuously shows contempt for others, one must expect there will be consequences and you are not always free to choose the consequences.
Some have asked if I were in trouble for my actions. I was given a stern lecture for my “unladylike behavior” but that was as far as it went. Technically it could have been worse since I had “fought back” and they had a “zero tolerance.” But he had caused so much trouble in the past, and they knew my family would raise cane for punishing me for defending myself, that I think they felt it wise to leave it at that. And no, he never bothered me after that.
Toward a Second Cuban Missile Crisis? – Theodore Postol, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen
How well do you think English signage is done in China?
I think it’s done very well.
In the 80s and 90s, there were hardly any Chinese characters on signs and advertisements in Beijing; they were all in English letters and Japanese kana.
Were we angry? Very angry.
Because we were poor, lacking technology and money, we had to swallow our pride. This included signs and subways; sacrificing the national pride of the entire population, we could only hope for more foreign investment.
Now, it’s required to have big Chinese characters on signs. No Chinese characters? Get lost! Do we really care about a few euros? Are you kidding?
Recently, a small African country launched a movement requiring the removal of Chinese signs and replacing them with local languages.
Because they said, “Our capital is almost turning into a Chinese county.”
All Chinese people feel: “Great, it should be like this!”
At least, in my opinion, it can be bilingual or trilingual.
In their country, their language should be on top, with Chinese or English on the second line.
Their native language font should be the largest, with Chinese or English reduced to 2/3 the size.
Even in Beijing, English letters still be the same size as Chinese characters, which makes me very unhappy.
Can’t the Chinese feel their lack of freedom?
The word “freedom”, if we go by what Franklin Roosevelt said, includes freedom of faith, freedom of expression, freedom from fear, and freedom from want.
I do feel that China has done very well.
Freedom from want – in China, you may not get rich, but as long as you are willing to work, you can always get by.
Of course, housing prices in the big cities are indeed very high, such as Beijing and Shanghai. But outside of the big cities, other things are not that expensive – meat, grains, transportation, industrial goods, clothing, etc.
The high housing prices in the big cities, I admit that this is a problem. However, if you don’t necessarily have to live in the big cities, housing prices in the smaller cities or rural areas are much more affordable.
Freedom from fear? I feel China has done very well in this regard. With nearly 10 million square kilometers of land, I don’t feel afraid to go anywhere. I’m not sure I fully understand what “freedom from fear” means.
I’m afraid of small meteorites hitting the earth, and I feel very fearful about that. But there’s no way to be free from that, right? I can only control myself, like saying I’m afraid of heights so I won’t go to China’s dangerous historic sites. Is that “freedom from fear”?
As for freedom of faith, I think China has that. There are over 300 million religious believers.
Take Islam for example, which the West has been constantly lying about – just in Xinjiang alone, there are 25,000 mosques. The entire US only has 2,000…
It’s true that Communist Party members are not supposed to have religious beliefs, but for ordinary people, who cares what you believe?
Atheism, agnosticism, and indigenous folk religions – aren’t they also forms of faith?
Freedom of expression.
At times, I really feel that the Chinese and American people, who has more of this freedom.
Yes, we can only use VPN to access the global internet, like the one I’m using for Quora now, which costs an extra $1.5 per month. It’s annoying to pay that extra $1.5, but it’s not that expensive. That’s all about it.
Chinese netizens chased and cursed at the Israeli embassy’s Weibo account, and in the end the embassy had to call the police. But the Chinese police could only advise the netizen to “be gentler”.
Chinese netizens made lots of mocking videos about Kim Jong-un, and North Korea put pressure on China through diplomatic channels. China’s response was: the netizen’s behavior was self-initiated, we can’t stop it.
Yes, I don’t dare make any mocking videos of Xi Jinping, but I also don’t want to, because I think he’s doing a good job. Even if I did mock him, I’d just get a scolding, nothing would happen to me. But I just don’t have the motivation to do that, because I genuinely think he’s doing well.
At the end of the day, you think we lack freedom and should resist. But if we feel we’re doing quite well, what should we do?
Barbara Bel Geddes As “Sybilla” – The Perfect Wife? | Hitchcock Presents
What did your sister do to you that you can never forget?
My sister is 10 years younger than me.
Once, when I was 13, I was in my room studying, when she waddled in.
“Watcha doin’?” she asked.
“I’m reading,” I replied, without looking up from my book.
“Why?”
“I’ve exams in school.”
“Why do you have essams?”
This is not going to end well, I thought to myself. I need help!
“Mom!” I yelled. “Get her out of here! She’s disturbing me!”
“Kiddo! Come over here, and don’t disturb your brother. He is studying,” my mother called out from the other room.
“I won’t dissurb him,” my sister yelled back. “I’ll be quiet.”
“Are you sure?” asked my mother.
“I promise!” she affirmed.
I decided to let it go. I did not want to waste any more time.
She picked up one of her books and sat on the floor, looking at the pictures. She was true to her word: she did not disturb me… for all of five minutes. She then looked around, pulled up a stool, and sat near me.
I ignored her.
She started “reading” aloud from her book.
I ignored her.
She stopped reading and looked at me.
I ignored her.
“Mom!” she yelled. “Tell brother to get out! He’s dissurbing me and not letting me read!”
How come the presidential succession process in China is not written down? What if President Xi is killed by a foreign power and China needs the new president quickly to make major urgent decisions?
It is not written down because China is not the US.
Chinese know that the most sensitive issues need to be decided by the right people at the right time while they are facing a challenging and fluid situation.
How can a written-down rule by dead people capture the dynamics of a challenging and fluid situation for living people?
It can’t…
That is why living people need to appraise the situation and decide what to do.
China’s opening vs. U.S. closing? Jeffrey Sachs explains the shift
Realistic and holistic approach that China is taking regarding itself and Geo-political issues.
Iran saying a “decisive” response to Israel is coming in the next 24 hours
(((America))) sending warships to the middle East
It is starting to line up quite a bit.
Hypothetically, is Iran were to actually nuke Israel, as in really wipe it off the map, the Jewish bankers running America would undoubtedly try to go for global nuclear war in a fit of demonic rage, so it could get really bad.
Then again, the guys actually pulling the nuclear triggers MIGHT suddenly be struck by conscience (doubtful) either way, it is unlikely that is Israel was wiped out the global war would not intensify.
The point is that the puppeteers, whatever you believe about them and whoever your own research states they are, are not, ever, going to be removed from power by peaceful means.
Nor will they stop with their demonic agenda.
Once you DO do your own research and look into it, the conclusion that these people are operating under a spiritual, that is, religious, belief system to at compels them to act as they do is inescapable.
And that religion is “Illuminism” and their God is Lucifer, the light-bringer. And their coming of the “Messiah” is what Catholics have predicted for centuries: The Antichrist.
I was never a religious person and I thought Catholicism was absurd (because the Novus Ordo Satanic “Catholic” Church that has masqueraded as Catholic since 1958, IS absurd, AND Satanic).
It took a literal road to Damascus moment to show me God is real and God is Love. And I then spent the next 4 years obsessively educating myself on Christianity. And finally concluded real Catholicism (only espoused by Sedevacantists today) was indeed the closest and best representation of reality, and in testing it ever since, I have only had repeated, unfailing proof that it is in fact the best and truest way to interpret reality as it is.
I no more wanted Demons and Satan to be real than any other libertine still stumbling around addicted to pleasure and excitement. But reality is as it is, not as we wish it to be, and ultimately, no one will be left on the sidelines.
As our Lord explained some 2000 years ago:
Either you are with Him, or you are against Him. Those are the only two choices available. Ultimately the choice between Good or Evil is binary. Though the road to it is far from binary, the final choice is.
And you will not be spared the having to choose; because not choosing is also a choice for the darkness.
So. Pick your master, for we all have one.
I pray those of you as hard-headed as I was get your road to Damascus moment right now, and that those of you a little smarter can get there by logic and reason alone, but I pray you all get there.
God is real. So is Free Will.
You are not a puppet. You get to choose.
I hope you choose well. Sedevacantism is indeed the Way. Research it for yourself, don’t take my word for it.
Oscar Winning Walter Matthau In “Very Moral Theft” | Hitchcock Presents
Was there ever a time in your life where you had little to no social interaction? How long? What happened?
I recall a couple of episodes of about three weeks each.
The first was during a winter break during my second year of law school. I think my finals must have been extraordinarily early, because I had an entire three weeks off, and the four-bedroom house I was sharing was vacated by my three housemates, all of whom scattered for long family holiday plans. I decided to clean out the basement of the house, part of which had been left untouched since I moved in, and was packed with various old tools, painting supplies and junk. In the process, I found some sandpaper, tack cloth, brushes and some ancient spar varnish that looked in great shape, so I decided to refinish my dining room table. I’d never done anything like that before and it was in the days before YouTube (or any internet, for that matter), so the fact that it turned out beautifully still amazes me.
I never left the house for those three weeks except to walk across the street to drop a library book in the return bin. I spoke face-to-face with only one other person, an ex-boyfriend who dropped off a Christmas present for me, and that was limited to the basics, Hello, How are you, Thanks for the thought. Good-bye. I probably spoke with my mother on Christmas Day, because I can’t imagine that she wouldn’t have called. And that was it.
I probably read a couple of dozen books, listened to a bunch of records, reorganized the hall closet, and built a couple of fires in the rarely used fireplace.
It was glorious.
The second was at a very rustic weekend vacation cabin I had bought on an Indian reservation north of Seattle (I owned the cabin, but it was on leased Indian land).
I was a practicing attorney at the time. A couple of cases scheduled for trial unexpectedly settled and freed up a block of three weeks with nothing that urgently required my presence, I hadn’t had a vacation in years, but it was on too short notice to do anything like foreign travel, so I packed up three weeks of supplies and a gallon of bleach to sanitize the well and went to stay at the cabin.
For those three weeks, I read, puttered around the cabin fixing things, hand-sewed some curtains, painted the interior, and saw nobody except the few cars a day that traversed the road in front of the cabin. I had no telephone (this was in the days of landlines only and there wasn’t one installed there) so I didn’t talk to anybody either. I had no TV, stereo or radio (except the radio in my car), so nobody talked at me, either. The only social interaction I had was that I did treat myself to a dinner out, alone, at a restaurant in a nearby town, and spoke to the waiter to give my order, ask for my check, and thank him on the way out. I’m pretty sure that was the only person I spoke to for three weeks. The only complaint I remember was that I didn’t bring quite enough books and quite enough wine.
Both of those episodes were long before the days of the Internet, social media, cell phones, email, etc. Isolation like that would be quite difficult today, I suspect.
After both of those experiences, I felt that I could have easily and enjoyably continued my isolation for another two or three weeks before I might start wishing for human contact.
What are the risks of allowing Chinese EV imports into the US?
It would risk shattering the illusion that Chinese Technology is just copies and fakes.
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Just like how Japan proved they caught up to America when their cars and electronics sold in the USA are found to be better quality and more high tech than American Products, Chinese EVs will show to Americans that Chinese products can be worth the money and high quality too.
If American start buying expensive goods from China too, then US industries are in trouble.
BANGS Rage Quits Over TRANS debate?
What’s the most unreasonable request you’ve received from your boss?
I had a job threaten me about missing work for my then wife’s surgery.
I worked in solid waste. Basically, I was a garbage man. I did commercial dumpsters for 11+ hrs a day, 5 days a week. Great money, but long, long hours. I had been in solid waste at the time for about 13 yrs.
So, on to the story. I was married at the time. My then wife had found out she had a bone issue in her foot. The bone had become necrotic, and they were going in to basically try to cut out the dying bone, use other bone and something called ‘bone putty’ to save her foot. This surgery was scheduled weeks in advance. We had just moved to the area we were living in maybe a year and a half earlier. Any family we both had were states away, and anyone that could help basically were still working. At first, I was like… okay. I’ll burn up a few vacation days so I can take her to the surgery and for a few days of recovery. But, as we got closer to the surgery, they were thinking she would be out of commission longer than originally expected. So, the doctor told me to get FMLA paperwork from my job. Basically, paperwork that allows you to miss work for medical reasons for yourself or a family member. I’m like, great. This will make sure I can be there for her and still keep my job. 5 weeks out, I get the paperwork, and fill it out. I take it to the doctor, and they fill out their part. It became one of the most annoying, stress filled things I’d ever be involved with. Several times each week leading up to the surgery date, I was constantly checking on the status. My employer would have a different excuse every time. “Oh, this wasn’t filled out correctly” or “they didn’t receive the 2nd page on the fax” or something. The doctors office hated me. About the 12th time I called the office to ask them to check on this or that and please re-fax it, they were almost to the point of ignoring me. I asked was this typical, and everyone I talked to were like, no. This is not typical. Some were like, I’ve never seen a company do this to their employee.
So, it’s the day before the surgery. I had been very vocal at work as to what was going on, and why I wasn’t gonna be there. Midway through my shift, my supervisor calls me to tell me that the FMLA paperwork still wasn’t correct. It’s not been approved, and I quote, “if you are not here tomorrow, I’ve been told to tell you that there will be consequences.”
I’ve never had issues with attendance. In the whole time I had worked for this shop, I never missed a day, never been late. I had coworkers who would call off to “go to the beach”. I remember just a few months earlier, I had to cover part of a route because a dude was going to a Nascar race weekend, and it was like, oh. Well, they called out. Here, here’s a few pages of their route. Just work it in. Nothing was ever done or said. But, I legitimately had a family member having a major surgery done and it was just the two of us in the area and less than 24 hours beforehand they are gonna tell me there would be consequences if I called out, having plenty of PTO time banked?
I remember telling them, look. I’m not going to be here. This isn’t up for debate now. They reiterated the threat. That day, I knew I’d never drive another garbage truck again. I knew that was the end of that career and chapter in my life. I had worked for several companies in several states. Some great. Some, not so great situations. But, this was the first time I had ever gotten put into a situation where they were either just wanting to be jerks, or show some form of power over me.
I’ve always given 2 week notices and even since this time, I always parted from jobs having given them plenty of time, trained a replacement. Tied up all loose ends. I believe in avoiding burning a bridge, but in this situation, I was done. I had a nasty voicemail left the night of. Then, literally while she was in surgery, i got a call that it was approved and it was only for that day. The surgery had further complications, and was worse than originally thought. I played phone tag with my supervisor and manager. Asking for a few more days. Then, I got a letter stating I had abandoned the job.
I’ve since gone on to other careers. Went back to college and got a degree related to the IT field. Worked several years in that field for a couple companies. When covid hit, I decided to follow a long time dream/fascination of getting into Healthcare. I’ve spent several years now working as a nursing assistant in a hospital. I’m going to college to be a respiratory therapist. This has been the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done. Part of me wants to look at it as everything happens for a reason kinda thinking. I do think if they had acted differently, there’s a good possibility I’d still be a garbage man. I enjoyed the job, itself. The pay was great. But, the biggest problem I always saw in that field was the way the shops were ran. The way management treated their employees. This shop was and I think still is one of the biggest haulers in the US. I had worked for them previously when I was living in Ohio, and based off of my reputation in OH, I acquired the same job in NC after having lived in FL and was moving north. But, I think it was just my time to move on. It was a lesson learned. Same with the 7 yrs I spent in IT. I think it was a character builder, and I think it helped me to be able to talk with and empathize with my current patients. I do wonder, will I ever run into those who were in upper management in my current job. Obviously, I’m going to give them the best care that I can provide. I guess I’m just wondering how they’d treat me.
This Isn’t Your Wife! | House M.D.
Since China sent military and coastguard vessels into Japanese territorial waters near the Diaoyu Islands, why did Japan send the Suzutsuki into Chinese waters and provoke China?
Japanese ships come if they want to, after all, our warships sail through their strait every day as if it’s just a regular street. Japan must have mustered great courage, trembling with fear, to come this time.
In the past, the U.S. would come once a month. They didn’t have much to do when they came; coming was the purpose itself.
You know, once a month, like clockwork, which made me suspect that if the U.S. Navy had a gender, it would definitely be female.
Now the United States is not coming, maybe to save fuel, it ordered its minions to come, last month the Netherlands, this month Japan. What use can a small raft be? It’s like a small dog, it barks happily.
If we talk about political wisdom, we have to look at Europe. Last time the United States pulled a group of people to conduct military exercises near China, Spain sent the warship in the picture – let me ask you, is this a warship? A real sailing battleship!
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Kishida Fumio is just like Bongbong Marcos, they are definitely doomed, maybe even along with South Korea’s Yoon Suk-yeol. But what else can they do? They have to make some moves; if they do nothing, they’ll just wait to suffocate to death.
Even pigs squeal and twitch a few times when they’re being slaughtered, let alone the Japanese Prime Minister.
But it’s useless.
Modern Women Are UPSET BECAUSE Men Keep Avoiding Them At Work
Beef Stew with Dumplings
This beef stew with mushrooms, dumplings and sour cream is a substantial and satisfying main dish. Serve it with a green vegetable salad and French bread.
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Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
Stew
4 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
2 pounds (1kg) stewing steak, trimmed of fat and cut into 1 inch cubes
1 ounce (30g) (2 tablespoons) butter
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
1 large onion, finely diced
2 tablespoons brandy, warmed (optional)
1 bay leaf
2 pints (5 cups) homemade beef stock
6 ounces (185g) mushrooms, wiped clean
5 fluid ounce (150ml) (5/8 cup) sour cream
Dumplings
8 ounces (1/2 pound) bread crumbs made from day-old white bread
4 tablespoons water
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1 1/2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
1 onion, grated
1/2 teaspoon ground mace
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Instructions
Heat the oven to warm 325 degrees F (170 degrees C).
Mix the flour, salt and pepper together on a large plate. Roll the beef cubes in the flour mixture until they are lightly coated.
In a large frying pan heat the butter and oil over moderate heat. add the onion and cook, stirring occasionally, for 5 to 7 minutes, or until it is soft and translucent. With a slotted spoon, remove the onion and set aside on a plate. Add the beef cubes to the pan, a few at a time. Brown them well, adding more oil and butter if necessary. Remove the beef cubes as they brown and place them in a large ovenproof casserole. If you are using the brandy, put it in a metal ladle. Set it alight and pour it, still burning, over the beef cubes in the casserole. When the brandy has stopped burning, add the onion to the casserole with the bay leaf and stock. Cover the casserole and place in the oven to cook for 2 hours.
While the meat is cooking, make the dumplings. Put the bread crumbs into a large mixing bowl. add the water, a little at a time, and toss lightly with a fork. the bread crumbs should be just moistened, not soggy. Still using the fork, lightly mix in the eggs. add the salt, pepper, parsley, onion and mace. With floured hands, shape the mixture into walnut size balls. add the dumplings to the casserole, with the mushrooms, cover and cook for 30 minutes.
Spoon over the sour cream just before serving.
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Why did Sweden make their own fighter jets?
Because for a long time during the world wars and the cold war and quite some time before and after Sweden had a policy that was summarised as “Alliance free in peace, neutrality in war”. Now being neutral makes some people think that the country is vulnerable or a pushover. The opposite is generally true in reality. Neutrality only works if you have something to back it up with. It also means that you need to consider your weapons systems incredibly carefully.
Buying fighter jets from NATO or the USSR (though the latter would never really be the case for Sweden) means becoming dependent on their supply chains, their expertise and often conceding to some of their terms. This was not seen as acceptable, so Sweden started a domestic arms industry of some magnitude. This kept us less bound to NATO and also gave us the opportunity to create fighters based on Swedish circumstances and Swedish defence doctrine.
Swedish defence doctrine is basically summarised as going apeshit until either we get support from the side that didn’t invade us or until the opponent realises that it isn’t worth it. Every adult over 18 in Sweden can be called in for service in case of war, all discussions of surrender is to be treated as false and there are small bunkers, radar stations, hidden roads for air fields and so on everywhere and we have an arms industry that builds almost everything the Swedish defence needs.
This has been somewhat softened after the cold war ended, but a lot of it is still in place and our arms industry is one of the pieces still going strong.
A Gripen can be serviced by a conscripted 18 year old for most things, it can take off from small roads in the woods, from quickly converted airfields (my old University was built to be converted to an airbase in case of war) or basically any somewhat straight piece of hard ground. This makes it essential for the Swedish style of total defence. Any somewhat straight road, and we have a lot of them can be used to stations a quick refueling and service station for Gripens. Sure it can’t match the top of the line American fighters in many other fields, but for defence it doesn’t have to and it’s a lot cheaper for us to produce ourselves than it would be to buy something that while better in many other ways, don’t fit our doctrine.
“Lauren!” yelled Jared. “For lack of a better term?” He thought she was joking.
“There is no better term. You just plain suck.”
“Why?” Jared asked.
“Why? Why? Why, you ask? I see that monkey. I know it’s dark in this space ship, but I see that monkey. I thought since the two of us won this mission, it would be a great chance for us to be close and really get to know each other. But you brought a monkey along? Why would you do that? Why?”
Jared looked puzzled. He was almost dazed and confused by Lauren’s outburst and attitude.
“Suppose I want to kiss you and wind up kissing that monkey.”
“Well, she has lips too.” He laughed so hard. He couldn’t see what the problem was with the monkey. Also, he still thought she was joking.
“She? She? It’s a she?” Lauren was screaming.
Jared was making frowning faces but Lauren couldn’t see his expressions because of the darkness.
For a moment there was silence.
Lauren went to the window and raised the shade. They were already on the moon and all she could see were Lunar Craters. Hundreds and thousands of them.
“I want to go home,” she said.
“Ahhh, we’re on the moon, Lauren. We have data to gather and pictures to take. Besides, you could have brought a pet.” Jared was trying to comfort her. He was saying to himself that this was going to be a real long mission if she keeps this up.
“Well, my horse was in the shop and I couldn’t get him out in time for this trip.”
For a moment Jared thought she was going to join him in a little humor. He went over to her by the window and put his arms around her waist.
“Monkey, monkey, monkey,” she started yelling. “Get your monkey away from me.”
Jared threw his hands up and back away. He said to himself again, yep, this is going to be a very long and painful mission.
Meanwhile, the monkey was kicked back trying to see what she could see, mostly listening.
Jared went over to his monkey and patted her on the head.
“How did you get that monkey on this ship? I didn’t see you with a monkey packed with your things.”
“The Captain put the monkey on the ship for me.” Immediately after he said, “for me,” he regretted it. He should have made it seem like the Captain did it as a part of the mission.
“So, it is your monkey,” said Lauren.
“The monkey is a part of the mission.”
“By doing what exactly? You do know that three is a crowd.”
“Lauren, please. Let’s just do our job and get along. The monkey is not a problem.”
Lauren had romantic feelings for Jared. She was good friends with the moderator and had her manipulate the drawing to have the two of them paired up to take this mission together. There were a couple other candidates qualified to take this mission and gather the necessary data, but by the luck of the draw, she was paired with Jared.
But with that monkey in the room, she had regrets. Although, she did fancy herself as romantically persuasive, she decided to ignore the monkey and try and concentrate on Jared. Besides, they were going to be stuck in this space ship on the moon for 27.3 earth days or there abouts.
In her astronaut training, she think she read that if a person stays in one place on the moon, then the sun rises, stays up for about two earth weeks, then set, and stays down for about another two earth weeks. Then that makes a complete day on the moon which lasts as long as 27.3 earth days, or something like that. She was almost sure she remembered the correct calculations.
“OMG!” said Lauren. “This monkey is going to start stinking. I’m not going to try and clean her up.”
“Okay, Lauren,” she said to herself. “Get a grip. Ignore the monkey in the room. Twenty-seven point three days alone, well almost alone with Jared is going to be a good thing. At least the monkey won’t be talking.”
Lauren took a few deep breaths and composed herself the best she could. Then she started feeling around and trying to see Jared. She couldn’t find him, so she called out.
“Where are you, Jared?” Then she thought that he better not be hugging that monkey. She didn’t mention the monkey as she was trying to make peace.
Jared wanted out of this trip too, but it was so very much too late and only the first day.
“I’m over here getting the cameras in place. We need to take the videos and digital snapshots.”
Lauren couldn’t help herself. She said, “snapshots and videos of what? Selfies with you and your monkey?”
“You are a brat, Lauren.”
“You are calling me a brat?”
“Yeah, I call ‘em as I see ‘em.”
“Well see this.” The monkey handed her a banana peel and she threw it across the ship.
“You know, I never wanted to go out with you, Lauren.”
“But you did. Why? Was your monkey busy that night?”
“Well, why did you accept?
“I took one look at you, Jared, and you looked like an idiot looking for his keys under a street lamp because that was where the light was. And I said to myself, he can’t be that pathetic. He is an astronaut afterall. You see, I have a weakness for the underdog.
“Oh, you flatter me.” In his mind he called her a witch and a few other things.
“You are like a non-drowsy sleeping pill and a crash landing all rolled up in one, Lauren Dear.”
“Wait. Are you calling me an oxymoron?”
“Well at least you are not an idiot, yet. But you do have more beans inside you than a burrito.”
Lauren realized she was not accomplishing what she had set out to do which was to keep Jared in her life. She felt that she was getting to know him alright. But, so far, they were not getting closer.
She thought it over in her mind. We need to call a truce. I suppose I should jump to it first.
“Truce, truce, truce,” she kept saying.
Jared took a deep breath.
“A truce? That works for me.”
Jared started feeling and looking around for Lauren, slipped on the banana peel and landed on top of her.
She put her arms around him and was thinking to herself that Jared’s monkey might not be too bad to have along after all.
Jared knew where the banana peel came from and was thinking the same thing.
“This is going to be a great mission, Lauren felt good to say.
“Yes, Dear, it’s going to be great waking up every morning and not feel like I’m in the middle of the freeway.
Lauren wanted to react to that remark, but she let it go and kept holding Jared in her arms.
Men being men
What do you eat when you have nothing to eat?
A problem with food banks, and eating randomly when the opportunity arises, it that a lot of what these agencies provide is processed foods that are heavily laden with salts, sugars, non-nutritious fats, and many chemicals (including preservatives) that can be toxic to the body. If I were low on monetary and food resources, I would shoot for the natural, nutritious foods that are inexpensive or easily obtainable. Buy them in bulk if possible. Examples of inexpensive foods that pack a nutritional punch, ones that are also tasty:
The humble potato. They can be chopped up, smeared in extra virgin olive oil and baked in a microwave oven. Avoid the butter, margarine, ghee, etc. Do not fry the potatoes like they do the French fries. You could add spices, depending on your taste. Also add tomato paste before the baking. The nutritional value of the potato is very high, but loading it with trans-fatty oils, high cholesterol fluids will negate the value. And the potato is tasty and filling.
But for those who are diabetic or pre-diabetic, an alternative to potatoes that is both filling and low sugar and calorie is the carrot. And carrots are both inexpensive and easy to consume as either raw, medium-cooked, or fully-cooked. You can more easily lose weight while eating carrots, although they are not as nutritious as potatoes, But eating a balanced assortment of nutritious foods will make up for that.
Tomato paste, mentioned above is a thoroughly inexpensive way to eat tomatoes. The red paste is a concentrated and safely processed form of the highly nutritious tomato. A huge bulky can is sold for about $5, would last for weeks in the cooler, even if you use a lot of it every day.
Some in the bean family such as cowpeas, lentils, and garbanzo beans. Buy them raw, to defray the expenses and to avoid the salted canned ones. Place them in water overnight. This will hydrate and soften them and make them easier and faster to cook the next day.
Oatmeal. A canister, depending on size, will last you weeks or even months.
The egg is famously nutritious, and one a day is enough. Boiled, or fried in olive oil. Wonderful animal protein, many B-vitamins.
Drink your tea or coffee in moderation. The antioxidants are there and helps keep you alert. Use stevia, the natural no-calorie sweetener….inexpensive and not bulky. Cut out the sugar, the Equal, and the Splenda. Go for Stevia….comes in several name brands.
An orange or tangerine a day does wonders.
Carrots are another inexpensive nutritious powerhouse.
Eat your nuts. The least inexpensive way to consume nuts , and to avoid overeating them is to buy them in bulk at the grocery store or places like nuts.com. And of course, many roasted nuts from the stores are overrated. If say you placed small amounts of a Brazil nut, almonds, walnuts, sunflower seeds, pepitas, peanuts, flaxseeds, etc (or whatever you prefer) in a small Pyrex bowl, added some water and olive oil, microwaved the mixture, you would come out with a very nutritious homemade power bar. Just don’t over roast or burn. Having natural foods at home is not only cheap, but deters you from overeating, and eating processed foods. Also, prepare your snacks at home. Nuts place you in a good mood
Banana. Delicious and nutritious, and filling, mood-enhancing, hydrating, inexpensive. One a day does the trick.
Water…drink your water. This can’t be emphasized enough. This is the medium of body and other functions
Go for inexpensive vegetables, rainbow colors, instead of the tv diners which are hazardous to your health. Eating natural foods makes it so much less expensive to manage your health
Exercising goes well with eating inexpensively and nutritiously, whether you are on a budget or not. My list is inexhaustible, but I suppose a reasonable guideline.
A bit of garlic/onion should be incorporated in the diet, daily.
Be the Rufus
“No one ever buries a hoard of coins, especially precious metal coins, without intending to retrieve it.” Christopher Ratte.
Some Persian soldiers had buried their treasure at the time when the last remnants of Persian soldiers and Persian sympathizers were driven out of Hellenistic Greece. Archaeologist Christopher Ratte and his team have been in Western Turkey for years working on the ancient site of Notion – then part of Ionia – and have found a pot of rare Persian gold coins in what appears to be a basement room.
Credit: Notion Archaeological Project.
The New York Times has published a story on this find, with interviews of Christopher Ratte. Here is a share of that article:
By Franz Lidz, Aug. 2, 2024
It is the late fifth century B.C. and a mercenary soldier kneels in his modest quarters, digging a hole in the earthen floor. He places a small jug, called an olpe, in the hole for safekeeping and covers it with dirt. In the olpe are his savings — scores of gold coins, known as darics, each one equal to a month’s pay.
But something happens to the soldier — possibly something sinister — and he never retrieves his hoard, which remains undiscovered for the next 2,400 years.
That is one of several scenarios proposed by Christopher Ratté, an archaeologist at the University of Michigan, to account for the cache, which he and his research team recently unearthed from the ruins of Notion, an ancient city-state in modern-day Turkey. While digging beneath the courtyard of a house dating to the third century B.C., the excavators found the remains of an earlier dwelling. “The coins were buried in a corner of the older building,” Dr. Ratté said. “We weren’t actually looking for a pot of gold.”
Darics were chiefly used to provide payment to soldiers of fortune. Andrew Meadows, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford who was not involved in the project, said he knew of no other hoard of this type to turn up in Asia Minor. “This is a find of the highest importance,” he said. “The archaeological context for the hoard will help us fine-tune the chronology of Achaemenid gold coinage.”
The archaeological site at Notion spans 80 acres atop a promontory in western Anatolia, a borderland dividing Asia from Europe. It was one of the Greek-speaking communities that emerged in the region during the early first millennium B.C., perhaps because of migration across the Aegean Sea. The deposition and loss of the Notion hoard occurred at a time of warfare, insecurity and great power machinations in a contested frontier zone.
This was true in deepest antiquity, as remembered in the story of the Trojan War,” Dr. Ratté said. “And it remains true to this day, as demonstrated by the Syrian refugee crisis.” He noted that the small harbor on the east side of the city was one of the departure points for Syrian refugees who fled across Turkey to Europe during the refugee crisis a decade ago.
Anatolia is the birthplace of the Western world’s first state-issued coin, the stater, which was created by a seafaring people called Lydians. King Alyattes standardized the weight and design of the Lydian stater, which, beginning around 610 B.C., was struck in electrum, a natural alloy of gold and silver. The king’s son and successor, Croesus, is credited with minting the first true gold coin, the Croeseid. The expression “rich as Croesus” refers to his extravagant wealth as well as the opulence of Lydia during his rule.
Fortifications at Notion, a Greek-speaking community that emerged in western Anatolia during the early first millennium B.C. Credit: Notion Archaeological Project/University of Michigan.
Excavations at Notion last year. While digging beneath the courtyard of a house dating to the third century B.C., researchers found the remains of an earlier dwelling and a cache buried there. Credi: Notion Archaeological Project/University of Michigan.
In 546 B.C., the entire area, known as Ionia, was conquered by the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Although Croesus was defeated in battle by Cyrus the Great, his gold-based monetary system lived on. The Persians continued to manufacture Croesids until they introduced their own bimetallic currency, made up of silver and gold coins. The silver coins were called sigloi, and the gold ones were darics — a name derived from either Darius I, who ruled the Persian Empire from 522 B.C. to 486 B.C., or dari-, the root of the Old Persian word for gold.
In 427 B.C., according to the Greek historian Thucydides, an Athenian general named Paches attacked and killed a troop of pro-Persian mercenaries at Notion after luring their commander into a trap. The Persian sympathizers were then expelled, and Notion was reorganized under Athenian supervision.
Two decades later, a decisive naval battle in the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta was fought off the coast of Notion, which the Athenians had been using as a naval base. Dr. Ratté said that the gold hoard might have been connected to the events of 427 B.C., or later, with the Athenian evacuation of Notion.
“It is possible it was not associated with either of these dramatic events,” he said, “but was simply the savings of a veteran mercenary soldier in a time and place when soldiers of fortune could make a lot of money if they were willing to risk their lives for the highest bidder.” Many Greeks fought for the Persian Empire, including the Athenian historian Xenophon, who was an active mercenary for the Persian king Cyrus the Younger from 401 B.C.- to 400 B.C. — the same time period when the Notion hoard was tucked away.
In 387 B.C., within a generation after the Athenians were defeated by the Spartans, Notion and the other cities of Ionia were reintegrated into the Persian Empire. They remained Persian possessions until the conquest of Alexander the Great in 334 B.C., at which point production of the daric quickly declined. Alexander and his immediate successors had many of the existing gold pieces melted down and recast as coins bearing their images, making darics rare today.
The Notion darics are stamped on the front with a likeness of the Persian king kneeling in a long tunic. In his left hand is a bow; in his right, a long spear. The backs of the coins are blank, except for a punch mark. The hoard is being stored at the Ephesus Archaeological Museum in nearby Selcuk, Turkey, along with imported Athenian pottery that was recovered at the dig.
Dr. Ratté believes that the fact that the loot was never reclaimed is a clear sign of disaster. “No one ever buries a hoard of coins, especially precious metal coins, without intending to retrieve it,” he said. “So only the gravest misfortune can explain the preservation of such a treasure.”
Truth
Why do mathematicians and physicists have issues with infinity being real? How does it break our understanding if things?
Why do mathematicians and physicists have issues with infinity being real? How does it break our understanding of things?
How did you draw the conclusion that; “mathematicians and physicists have issues with infinity being real?”, explain go into more detail. Unless of course you are a mathematician or psychist and you yourself have issues with infinity being real?
In mathematics, infinity is not just a vague notion of endlessness, but a rigorously defined concept that can be expressed in multiple ways, i.e., cardinality of sets, ordinal numbers, limit concept, symbolic representation, to name a few. Mathematicians have developed sophisticated tools to work with infinity, which strongly suggest that overall they do not have issues with it.
But, from a physics stand point things start to get complicated as the concept of infinity is more problematic and often indicates a limitation of our theories rather than a physical reality. This manifests itself in a number of ways, cosmology and quantum mechanics being prime examples. It is also a challenge when we start talking about black holes and singularities that represent points where physical quantities become infinite, suggesting a breakdown of the theory of infinity, as “normal” rules just don’t apply or they breakdown completely, which in real terms is nothing more than the end point of our understanding.
Many physical models use infinity as a form of idealization, and what I mean by that is, a lot of physical models use infinity as a convenient approximation (e.g., point particles, infinite potential wells), while still recognizing these are idealizations. Keeping in mind that no physical measurement can ever yield an infinite value, as all measuring devices have finite ranges, otherwise what’s the point of attempting to measure something in the first place?
You have not covered the philosophical perspective of infinity in your question which in many ways is just as important as it is in physics, mathematics and the physical world itself. Things like; does infinity actually exist in nature, or is it merely a useful mathematical construct? Infinity leads to numerous paradoxes (e.g., the paradox of Hilbert’s Grand Hotel, for more detail on this go to Wikipedia) that as a thought experiment challenges our intuitive understanding of what we believe infinity actually is. Infinity often represents the boundary of what we can know or are able to measure, that highlights the limits of human understanding.
Then we come to the practical implications of infinity. Some theories for example that produce infinite results often lose their predictive power, which indicates a lot more refinement is required. Infinite series and processes must be truncated for practical calculation purposes, which introduces a need for approximations, as there is absolutely no point them going on forever.
The appearance of so-called infinities in physical theories often drives a search for a more comprehensive framework to work within, (i.e., quantum gravity attempts to resolve singularities in general relativity). This is a signal, or indication that different thinking needs to be applied and more intensive research is required. To that end, in my mind infinity is not an end point, but simply a marker that requires one to go onto the next stage, whatever that may be.
Infinity in mathematics is a well-defined and useful concept that allows for the exploration of abstract ideas beyond finite limitations. In physics, infinity often signals the limits of a theory’s applicability, which then prompts further, deeper investigation and refinement of our understanding of the physical world. The interplay between mathematical infinity and physical reality of infinity is basically a work in progress and will continue indefinitely, as, when you think about it, is there any end to infinity?” Perhaps no…as that is what infinity is, across just about all domains no matter how one thinks about it or how it is expressed.
Q1: Why do mathematicians and physicists have issues with infinity being real?
A1: I don’t think they really do..is infinity is a concept on all levels is not fully 100% “resolvable”.
Q2: How does it break our understanding of things?
A2: Again, I don’t think it does, it is more a boundary where our understanding stops and it is merely an indicator that we need to dig deeper, refine and further our understanding. Human knowledge always has and always will have a limit, it will never, ever be infinite.
At the end of the day, there will never be an answer to your two-part question, it will go on forever, all the way to infinity and beyond…whatever that is…
ALIEN (1979) MOVIE REACTION!
Is a commander legally allowed to order a soldier/subordinate to his death?
Yes.
This was brought home to me during an exercise in the mid-80’s when I was a young Engineer Platoon Leader. My platoon was attached to an Infantry Battalion for a long field training exercise. We were equipped with HMMVW’s with TOW missiles and were trying to operate against tanks. That turned out to be pretty tricky, the tanks were very good, and the tactics we were using were not fully developed. We ended up getting kicked around the training area pretty routinely.
In one scenario, the Brigade Commander, a full Colnel and a Vietnam Veteran ordered the Battalion I was working with to hold a particular pass “at all costs.” The Battalion did a credible job defending, but then got flanked, which led to the Battalion Commander, also a Vietnam Vet, to order a withdrawl.
I was pretty new, but I thought at the time that this was a good call. In my view, holding onto the position any longer than we had would have led to the extinction (ln the exercise) of the Battalion, about 500 guys. The Battalion Commander wanted to live to fight another day, and what he was doing was doctrinally sound.
This particular point got discussed at length during the After Action Review. The Battalion Commander got asked why he ordered the withdrawal when he was ordered to stand. He laid out his reasoning, which made sense to me. I was there. There wasn’t anything else to do.
There was this long silence. Then the Brigrade Commander looked at the Battalion Commander with this laser-beam look and says, “John, if I tell you to go die on some hill, I’ve got a damned good reason for doing it. My concerns, the Division’s concerns, are bigger than yours. If I have to sacrafice your Battalion in order to preserve something bigger, it’s my job to order you to do it. It’s your job to take your boys and go out and die.”
This is the dark side of combat that no one really likes to talk about. It doesn’t happen often, normally because of a miscalculation or mistake, but units get asked to make these kinds of sacrafices. When you are an officer, if you’re doing your job right, your unit is like your family. Words that describe how close units bind together in combat fail me. Others have done it much better. These are your brothers, your sisters, your children. When you get asked to do something like this, it’s like asking your children to go out and die for you. Then you have go out and die with them.
Anyway, I’ve never forgotten it. It made me think through a lot of things before I became a Company Commander and had to take folks to war.
Its all about timing
Is the “face culture” of the Chinese superior and more civilized than the “honor culture” of North Americans, Arabs, Somalis, Afghans, Nigerians, Turkic and Mongolian peoples, etc.?
Face culture comes from Confucian culture. As a unique cultural and psychological phenomenon of the Chinese people, face culture has greatly influenced the daily social life of the Chinese people.
North Americans are Christian culture
Arabs, Somalis, Afghans, Nigerians are Islamic culture
Turkic and Mongolians are nomadic culture
The values of Dignity, honor, face are different among Christian culture, Islamic culture and nomadic culture, and the difference is very big.
Honor and face cultures attach great importance to regulating individual behavior by social expectations and cultural norms. However, the two cultural phenomena differ in several crucial aspects.
The new cultural framework of dignity, honor, and face was proposed based on three different cultural logics and reveals that while both honor culture and face culture place importance on adhering to social norms, honor culture places greater emphasis on both self-awareness and external evaluations for self-worth, whereas face culture places more weight on external evaluations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor_killing
Additionally, honor culture is characterized by an unstable social hierarchy prone to competition, violence, and virtue, while face culture prioritizes modesty, harmony, and cooperation within a more stable hierarchy. Especially at banquets, whether or not to drink is directly related to face.
From indigenous perspectives, the self-image and social image in honor culture are relatively consistent, and honor encompasses moral, gender, and family-related aspects that may be defended through violence. In contrast, self-image and social image in face culture tend to be incongruent, and face involves morality and social achievement, which is expressed through the dimensions of seeking face and avoiding losing face with an emphasis on status and authority.
Combined with the above two perspectives, these core differences between honor and face cultures can be attributed to the moralization and instrumentalization of social cultural norms.
Specifically, honor tends to moralize social and cultural norms by transforming descriptive norms into prescriptive norms, where majority and typical behaviors that exist in a culture are considered behaviors that group members should or must abide by. In contrast, face instrumentalizes social and cultural norms by using descriptive and prescriptive norms as means and tools to maintain relationships, demonstrate status, and uphold authority.
This perspective provides new insights into cultural phenomena, such as the positive correlation between violence and virtue in honor cultures, where violence becomes a social norm that adapts to the honor culture environment and is moralized into a virtuous attribute. The social norm of harmony in face culture exists both as value-oriented harmony influenced by Confucian culture and instrumental harmony in daily life, leading to a dissonance between face and heart.
She was going to kill him. She was actually going to murder him. Yes, she has said it plenty of times before but this time she meant it. This time she would drag him by his stupid hair to an airlock and shove him out to space where he can suffocate.Seven months. She lasted seven months stuck in this shuttle with him, but now she was finally going to crack.It started off with the computer. He programmed it to call him “Hot Stuff.” She changed it back. Then, he programmed it to call him “King of the Bandages.” Once again, she changed it back. Twenty nine nicknames later-yes, she kept a list-the most recent development was “Big McDaddy.”And since his names apparently weren’t keeping him preoccupied, he decided to spend time obsessing over hers. Specifically, her first name. On the top of her medical file is “B. Miller” neatly typed out, but he wanted to know more. The guesses started off sensible enough with Bella and Bethany-they have now devolved into Bread and Bacteriochlorophylls.And somehow, no matter what happens, he won’t stop grinning. No one should be as cheery as this guy, it doesn’t seem healthy. Every time she sees him she wants to growl in frustration, but he remains as sunny as the actual suns they pass.But this time is worse than all those other time. This time he took the biscuit because this time he broke a rule that could get himself and her fired. This time he… well, he took the biscuits.”I can’t believe you!” She screeched, storming into the medical bay. “I can’t believe you would actually steal from the passengers!””I’m sorry?” He asked looking up from a rather heavy looking book. He was still smiling. Asshole.”The biscuits. Don’t even try to deny it. I know it was you who took them.””Ok.” He went back to reading.”Ok?” That threw her off her guard. She was expecting an argument. For him to try feign innocence before she finally broke him and he begged her not to tell their boss. It wasn’t supposed to go like this.
“Ok, I won’t deny it. I took the biscuits.” He raised an eyebrow. “Is there anything else or…?”
“Well… well… what do you have to say for yourself?” Her voice got weaker and weaker throughout the sentence. She really had no idea where she wanted to go with that.
“…They tasted nice?” Oh, that made her blood boil.
“Nice? Taste? That’s not what I was asking. Do you know how much trouble you could be in for this.” He was an idiot, he had to be. Maybe, he just didn’t care. No that couldn’t be it, could it? This job involves being away from Earth for years at a time and being fired tends to mean never getting work anywhere else. Maybe he thought the job would be easy and that he would get away with stuff like this. Not on her watch.
“I know how much trouble I will be in-none. No one cares. No one apart from you. Speaking of which, why do you care?”
He is unbelievable. “I care because I was put in charge of making sure everything is ready for when the passengers wake up.”
It is a requirement of every shuttle to have at least one engineer, and, if asked, she would tell people that she is the engineer-because she is. However, the shuttle is built fairly sturdy, and the AI seems to be doing a fine job of maintaining everything. It’s not that she wants things to go wrong… it would just be nice if there were a few mishaps that called for her assistance. This lack of jobs can make floating in space a tad boring, hence her eagerness to take on the role of an over-glorified party planner.
“Look,” he said, closing his book, “in eight months time we’re stopping for fuel at a space station. If we happen to be low on supplies-which we won’t be ’cause these passengers have more than enough-we can stock up then.”
“What if one of them wakes up?” It’s a weak argument but one she feels strongly about. She has read every story there was on passengers waking up from the deep sleep they are put into before take off. The passengers they were currently transporting were Taubverlians, so the four year journey would probably feel like a human’s version of a week to them but apparently it’s a week they would rather sleep through. What if they woke up angry? What if they got so annoyed they decided to file a complaint? What if those biscuits were the only thing that would have been able to calm them down and stop them from demanding the whole crew gets fired? It’s unlikely, but it is possible.
“Really?” He asked. She glared at him with cold, unforgiving eyes. “You need to calm down before you give yourself a stroke. I check, double check and triple check each passenger’s pod everyday and there hasn’t been even the slightest hint that one of them might wake up before they’re supposed to.” He let out a sigh and for the first time since she met him, his smile faltered. “It’s your first trip right? Thought as much. You see, after a while, you will start to get bitter. You’ll start to resent the passengers, our bosses, whoever it is at home that you’re sending your wages back to. The thought that you will more than likely be working here until the day you die and the knowledge that it is extremely rare for a crew member to ever see Earth again combined with the fact that if someone in charge screws up and needs someone to blame we will probably be killed… well, at some point or another, it gets to you. That’s why I play around with the AI and steal the occasional biscuit. That’s why Ellie stole a bottle of whiskey. That’s why Charlie is cheating on her husband with Smith. These acts keep us sane. And they’re not hurting anyone-not if no one finds out.”
She could somewhat sympathise. Ok, she could sympathise a lot. She was bitter. Of course she was bitter about… everything, but she wasn’t going to complain. Her family needed her to have this job, and so must his-it’s not like he would ever see his wages, so they have to be going somewhere.
“Our supervisors don’t care as long the passengers get to their destination safe and sound. You can relax, Birdy.”
She fought the urge to roll her eyes. “That is not what the B stands for.”
His smile was now back to full voltage as he realised he won. “We have been in this tin can for seven months and I still don’t know anything about you. What are your hopes, your dreams, your fears? Where are you from? And what exactly does the B stand for? It doesn’t stand for Biscuit, does it?”
She may come to regret this, but at the moment her stress is leaving her and she feels… lonely. She doesn’t have anybody to talk to on this shuttle apart from when she is arguing with him. Hearing him talk about their colleagues that he clearly knows so much better than she does just reminded her of how much she has isolated herself. “Brooklyn.”
“You’re from Brooklyn? Cool, I have a cousin that lives there, or used to at least.”
“No-well, yes I am from Brooklyn but, that’s what the B stands for.” The look on his face was almost worth it. Almost.
“So, you’re from Brooklyn… and your name is-”
“Oh, shut up.” She tried to fight a grin.
“…Were your parents really worried about you forgetting where you lived?”
“I shouldn’t have told you. I should have just stuck to Biscuit.”
He let out a laugh at that. Dear god, it was brighter than his smile. “Ok, ok, I’m sorry Biscuit.” She shot him a glare with much less heat than the previous one. It was kind of nice talking to him-not that she would ever dream of saying it to him. Just before she got a chance to retort, a series of short beeps filled the room. “Time for me to go check on the passengers again.”
“Oh, right. I have work I need to go do as well.” She turned to leave, ignoring the pang in her chest. She has her work to focus on, friends would just take up time.
“Wait.” He tossed her a small metal box. She stared at the box, then at him, then back again. At his nod she opened up the latches and the contents very nearly managed to surprise a snort out of her. Biscuits.
Tension Subsiding in South China Sea
Changing Geo-Political arrangements.
What terrifies you about Xi Jinping?
Mr. Xi doesn’t terrify me, but he certainly “terrifies” my German friend. Let’s call him Karl.
Obviously, Karl isn’t a basketcase of nailbiting anxiety and fear over a man a continent away. But he related a spine-tingling moment some years back listening to the news while driving on the autobahn.
Before we get into that, a little background about Karl.
Karl, perhaps unsurprisingly, speaks Chinese. What tickles me though, is he speaks funny Chinese.
Notice I said Chinese and not Mandarin.
Karl speaks a creole of accented Mandarin and horror of horrors, the Changsha dialect.
Now, try making sense of the hilarity hearing a thick German accent fighting his own tongue to make the proper tone for Mandarin words abused by the Changsha pronunciation.
After all these years, I have concluded he has been putting up a show all along to bewilder and get a rise out of me deciphering his words.
He has a future in standup, if he ever needs a change of scenery.
Back on topic. What piece of news made him nervous? It was a single statistic from China’s anti-corruption drive.
“More than a million party officials have been disciplined.”
He was flabbergasted by how seriously the Chinese were taking the campaign because when he was there, he had concluded corruption was so deeply ingrained in the culture it was impossible to root out. In fact, that was a primary reason why he left China, even though the money was lucrative.
Karl has an interesting way of bringing his point across, and he was ready when I pressed.
“China isn’t Germany. A million out of a billion is a mere drop.”
“Yes, but China either gives lip service or they do a thorough job. 1 million is a thorough job.”
“True. But why should that jolt?”
“Because nothing happened, Bill.”
“What do you mean nothing happened?”
Evidently he was waiting for this moment of weakness because he broke into a sly smile and declared:
“Nothing happened to President Xi.”
I was truly incredulous.
“I lost you Karl. You expected him to fall victim to the campaign he initiated because he is dirty too?”
“No, silly. The fact nothing happened means we have witnessed the coronation of the first Chinese emperor of the 21st century, if only in practice.”
“Now you sound like a flat earther.”
“No no. Nothing far-fetched. How do you think they land a big fish like Zhou Yongkang? Using the police? Or the army?”
“The President probably ordered his arrest personally.”
“Yes but what was the investigative apparatus and how did they manage to arrest him? Zhou was the security tsar.”
“Oh. I think I’m understanding. Even the FBI will have trouble arresting the vice President.”
“Sort of. The Xi administration basically set up their own supralegal modern day Embroidered Uniform Guard that was vested with political power to deal with anyone, even the biggest fish. The million they mentioned? A substantial number are senior cadres, nodes in the power structure. The Chinese think in terms of guanxi or relationships so tackling corruption equals identifying and destroying webs of collusion.”
“Do you think Xi went too far?”
“No. He did a fantastic job. I am just surprised the faction wars didn’t flare up in response. Not even a whimper. Xi has great standing within the party.”
“Ok, so he cleaned up. Why does that terrify you? He is more powerful than ever?”
“Not really. People fail to realize the five year plans were being executed like clockwork in the midst of rampant corruption. He would have reached the state objectives without rocking the boat.”
“He did not need to pick this fight?”
“No. He had to. It was the right time.”
“The stars didn’t align for Jiang and Hu?”
“Yes. The force was not with them.”
“The FORCE? Dude, you have been playing me all day!”
“Electricity, my boy. You can build the fanciest roads and buildings but without electricity you cannot urbanize.”
*Incredulous stare*
“For sure it is electricity. Hu was a hydroelectric engineer. China’s electricity output increased more than 2-fold during his time in office.”
“What does it have to do with corruption?”
“China essentially went full steam ahead to urbanize. Jiang wasn’t even sure how the system would work as it transited from Central planning to market economics as it spread inland from the SARs. Hu laid the foundation to guarantee future growth. The GFC gave China the breathing space to shape a cultural change among the ruling elite. A bunch of people got rich too quickly and developed money fever.”
“What does the GFC have to do with it?”
“China’s economy fundamentally shifted post 2008. China finally flexed her domestic muscle and decided they had to be less reliant on the west. But they had to inevitably slow down as the west recovered from a balance sheet and sovereign debt crisis. It is this recentering to OBOR and domestic growth that gave Xi the breathing space to tackle corruption nationwide.”
“Man, that’s deep but all that says is China has a good man at the helm. What makes him fearsome?”
“Well, when I was there the way the Chinese were throwing money around was unbelievable. Too much waste. And too many funny things going on. Putting a stop to that means the Chinese are getting on board the next stage of growth, one that is much higher in quality, and sustainable. The Chinese rocket shot up the sky in spite of excesses. Can you imagine a people without? Us Germans are counting the days when the Chinese become direct competitors to German technology and quality. The Chinese are getting their act together.”
Note: The emperor reference is no insinuation of shenanigans. Rather it is Karl’s intent to frame how far the Xi administration can push reform. In other words, Xi has the people’s mandate, just like a legitimate Son of Heaven.
Karl is real, but I’ve paraphrased our conversation.
Note: The profundity of Karl’s astute observations is contained within the satellite composites of nightime China, taken two decades apart.
Bill Pfeiffer’s Chili Capital Punishment
Bill Pfeiffer’s Chili Capital Punishment is the winner of 1980 World’s Championship!
chili 1chili 3chili 4
Yield: 14 to 18 servings
Ingredients
1 tablespoon oregano
2 tablespoons paprika
2 tablespoons MSG
9 tablespoons chili powder
4 tablespoons cumin
4 tablespoons beef bouillon (instant crushed)
2 cans beer
2 cups water
4 pounds extra lean chuck (chili grind)
2 pounds extra lean pork (chili grind)
1 pound extra lean chuck, cut into 1/4 inch cubes
2 large onions, finely chopped
10 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1/2 cup oil or kidney suet
1 teaspoon mole (powdered)
1 tablespoon granulated sugar
1 teaspoon coriander
1 teaspoon hot pepper sauce
1 (8 ounce) can tomato sauce
1 tablespoon Masa Harina
Salt to taste
Instructions
In a large pot, add oregano, paprika, MSG, chili powder, cumin, beef bouillon, beer and water. Let simmer.
In a separate skillet, brown 1 1/2 pounds of meat in oil or suet until meat is light brown.
Drain and add to simmering spices. Continue browning meat in batches until all meat has been added.
Sauté finely chopped onions in oil or suet. Add to spices and meat mixture. Add water as needed. Simmer two hours. Add mole (MOE-lay), sugar, coriander, hot pepper sauce and tomato sauce. Simmer for 45 minutes.
Dissolve Masa Harina in warm water and add to chili. Add salt to taste. Simmer for 30 minutes.
What was your first clue you were no longer as young as you thought you were?
I was born in 1965, which means I am 59 as I write this response. In the 1980s, I worked as a DJ in a bar called The Notorious Club 26, and I played music from the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s.
As the DJ, I would say things like, “Remember, never trust anyone over 30. If you are over 30, don’t trust yourself.” As a 20-something, I thought I was being funny. Then a horrible thing happened: I turned 30 in 1995.
I was single at the time, and I realized that all the time I wasted being a DJ interfered with my social and personal life. I worked 6 days a week, and on Tuesday of each week, I got paid. Who wants to go out on a date on a Tuesday? Who wants date some who works from 9 pm until 3:30 AM?
I wass 30, looking back from where I came, and realized that I had wasted the last 10 years of my life. I worked, made very good money, got a lot of cash tips for the customers, loved my job, but my life sucked. All I did was work, sleep, and do household jobs. I had no social life.
I kept working but I also went back to college, and finally finished the work for my BA. After that, I was able to quit the DJ job and work during the day instead of being a vampire on a day pass.
I’m not going to lie: 30 seemed old to me. When I turned 40, I got a card that said something like 40 is the new 30.
I’m 59 years old now, and my hair is gray, just like my beard, and my body is a wreck. However, I know that my life has been full and fun. I’m not sure what comes next, but I am looking forward to the trip.
As a Chinese person, I never felt any connection to the “patriotism” that the Chinese Communist Party instilled in me since childhood.
In elementary school, our teachers told us, “The most important principle in writing is to show your love for China.” Well, I didn’t understand at all. How could a child possibly grasp what it means to “love China”? For an elementary student, “patriotism” is nothing but outdated stories and empty political slogans.
As I grew older, my aversion to “patriotism” only increased. The reason was obvious: if “patriotism” had a significant impact on one’s well-being, why had I never seen anyone get rich because they “loved China”? And why had I never seen anyone fall into a miserable situation because they “didn’t love China”?
When I started using the internet, I discovered more meaningful things. I realized that China could only avoid destruction by embracing Western political systems. During that time, I read many articles by “independent Chinese intellectuals,” including economists, Chinese immigrants abroad, lawyers, and entrepreneurs.
Back then, I hoped these independent intellectuals could awaken the “numb Chinese people” through their writings. They were active on BBS, blogs, social media, and China’s version of Twitter. I spent a lot of time reading their articles and enthusiastically commenting. I admired them and saw them as the future political stars of China. At that time, I had my own blog called “A Chinese Citizen,” with the slogan “For a Bright Future of China.” I wrote every day, and when I had nothing to write about, I would repost negative news about China and add my own gloating comments.
The trolls on Quora today are nothing compared to the old me.
Later, I got married and had my own child. As a freelancer, I had time each day to spend with my growing child. To expose my child to nature, I took them to many places. Busy with accompanying my child, working, cooking, and doing laundry every day, my life focus gradually shifted.
One summer evening when my child was three years old, we drove to a famous large lake in northern Xuzhou called Weishan Lake. A section of the Grand Canal passes through the Weishan Lake area. The sunset bathed the hundred-kilometer-long embankment road along Weishan Lake in golden light. My wife, captivated by the beauty, asked me to stop the car for a while. I parked by the roadside, and we were greeted by the cool evening breeze and the slightly fishy smell of the lake water. We all quietly listened to the waterfowl returning to their nests.
When a long line of cargo ships appeared at the end of my vision on the Grand Canal, another fleet from the opposite direction sounded their horns as they passed through the Linjiaba lock. The sunset deepened, and the afterglow moved from the embankment road to the surface of Weishan Lake. The vast lake, looking like an ocean, stretched beyond the horizon. Waterbirds in the reeds were startled by passing ships, taking off with pleasant sounds. Watching my child jumping with joy and my wife enjoying the cool breeze, I felt a deep sense of happiness. In that moment, I suddenly realized something:
Weishan Lake is a gift from nature to the locals; the Grand Canal is a monumental achievement by our ancestors. The various aquatic products from Weishan Lake have nourished generations of people on this land. Today, these endless cargo ships continuously transport energy and agricultural products to ports along the route. We enjoy the tranquility of nature, while our material life benefits from China’s vibrant economic system.
The natural geography is a gift from God; historically, it is a territory our ancestors expanded on horseback; and in reality, it is the result of countless generations of Chinese people’s hard work. For economic and social activities to run efficiently, the country’s leaders need exceptional talent to design reliable development plans. Without all this, there would be no individual happiness. The CPC is a positive part of this picture—not the whole, but just as important as all other parts.
I live on this land in this lifetime, and so does my child. Everyone I love and everyone who loves me live on this land. I love them and hope they remain healthy, happy, and joyful. Protecting them means ensuring that this land is free from war, plague, hunger, and poverty. Only when these foundations are solid can I fully devote myself to life and family. Isn’t this the relationship between an individual and their country? The CPC has achieved this, so what exactly am I complaining about every day? Should I deny everything just because of some bad news on the internet and some unfortunate events on this land?
By Weishan Lake at that moment, I grasped a simple truth: to love this country, to love its mountains and rivers, its history and culture, the heroes who shed blood and tears in modern history, and the forces leading this country to rejuvenation. At the same time, when my child grows up, they should see themselves as a master of this country, participating in its development. This is what a young boy should aspire to.
There is no such thing as love or hate without reason in this world. To love something, you must first understand it, knowing its strengths and weaknesses, and recognizing its significance to us. Otherwise, “forced love” is fake, blind, and short-lived. “Patriotism” is no different. Only by fully understanding this land, this country, and the forces driving China’s progress, with all their pros and cons, can one develop genuine love.
I am becoming such a Chinese person.
She Gave Him PRE and POST Date Bill and it Backfired
The Trigger For WWIII Just Arrived – What Are The Implications For Americans?
If the year of 2024 has proven anything so far, it’s that our worries about the potential outbreak of WWIII are absolutely reasonable. The skeptics making accusations of “conspiracy theory” and “doom and gloom” have been proven wrong yet again. The geopolitical atmosphere is turning sour fast.
I still don’t think a lot of people realize how truly volatile the situation is globally right now. From my point of view, WWIII has already begun, at least in economic terms.
Let’s not forget the fact that Ukraine is essentially a proxy for all of NATO against Russia. And, the situation in the Middle East is about to become much worse. Because of the alliances involved and the fragile nature of global energy exports there is a danger of systemic collapse should a wider war break out between Israel and multiple Arab nations. It appears that such a war is imminent.
But why should Americans care? It’s pretty simple – War spurs shortages, and shortages in the middle of a stagflationary crisis are a very bad thing.
Sanctions against Russia affect around 10% of the global oil market and around 12% of global natural gas consumption. But so far all that oil and natural gas is still flowing around the world, only the trade routes have changed. The Middle East, on the other hand, accounts for over 35% of the global oil market and 18% of the natural gas market. Widespread chaos in this region would mean economic crisis on a scale not seen in a century.
Think we have problems with stagflation now? Just wait until energy prices go to the moon.
Around 30% of all oil exports travel through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow passage which a nation like Iran can easily block for months at a time. Sinking a few larger vessels in the straight would obstruct all cargo ship traffic and oil tanker traffic. Trying to clean up the mess would be difficult because artillery, which is almost impossible to intercept, can rain down from Iran on any vessels trying to drag sunken ships out of the way.
Iran has mutual defense pacts with multiple governments in the region including Lebanon and Syria, along with military ties to Russia. The Turkish government is unlikely to allow western troops to use their airspace to launch attacks. The US military presence in Afghanistan is gone and the Iraqi government will never allow foreign troops to use their land to come to the aid of Israel.
This greatly limits the west’s launch points for an offensive large enough to blitz Iran. The vast majority of attacks would be from the air, and if the Russians start supplying Iran with batter radar and missile technology then there’s no guarantees Israel or the US would gain full control of the air space. In other words, if a wider war breaks out it will not end for YEARS and it’s going to be fought on the ground.
Of course, most establishment experts have claimed that the situation will never escalate to that point and that the threat of direct confrontation between Israel and Iran is minimal. I have been predicting the opposite for a number of reasons, just as I predicted that there was a high chance of war in Ukraine months before it happened.
“Israel is going to pound Gaza into gravel, there’s no doubt about that. A ground invasion will meet far more resistance than the Israelis seem to expect, but Israel controls the air and Gaza is a fixed target with limited territory. The problem for them is not the Palestinians, but the multiple war fronts that will open up if they do what I think they are about to do (attempted sanitization). Lebanon, Iran and Syria will immediately engage and Israel will not be able to fight them all…”
My purpose in that article was to outline the dangers of US involvement in a larger war that would require conscription and escalation with Russia. Despite the “experts” insisting that the odds are overblown, it now appears that the next stage of escalation is about to begin.
Iran, Lebanon and Israel have been exchanging limited fire for months now. This is nothing new. What is new is the change in tone after a Hezbollah rocket strike on a children’s soccer game in the remote Druze village of Majdal Shams that killed 12.
On the other side, Israel’s brazen assassination of the Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian soil this week is a clear catalyst for war. Haniyeh has been engaged in a diplomatic mission to start peace negotiations in Gaza. His assassination sends a clear message that Israel has no intention of entering into talks with Hamas.
IDF officials also announced that they had killed top Hezbollah military commander Fuad Shukr in a precision missile strike Tuesday in Beirut. There’s no escaping it now.
Iran’s supreme religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has ordered retaliation against Israel and issued an order for Iran to strike the Israelis directly. Iran will likely use extended missile barrages, but also stage troops in Syria and Lebanon. The Houthis in Yemen will then increase their attacks on ships traversing the Red Sea. It’s hard to say how much Russia will involve itself at first, but I have no doubt more advanced Russian missiles and other weapons will make an appearance on the battlefield.
The prospect of world war is immense. Israel will not be able to fight in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Iran all at the same time. Energy exports in the region will definitely face a slowdown, if not a complete breakdown. At that point the war won’t just be about Israel, it will be about a global energy crisis. I don’t see any scenario in which the US government doesn’t get involved.
The high risk of terrorism this entails should not be overlooked. We’ve had an undefended border and record illegal crossings for a few years now under Biden. There’s not telling how many foreign agents are in the country and I believe this was by design. I think the establishment maintained open border policies because they wanted such people here. The more terror these agents cause the more the public will be tempted to increase government powers to deal with the attacks.
Beyond that, the political left in the west has tied itself to the Palestinian wagon as if it’s their business. In reality, leftists view the war in Gaza as just another vehicle for their outrage. They use minorities, they use gays and now they’re using Muslims. It’s the classic Marxist strategy of hijacking the social causes of other groups and co-opting their momentum.
Gaza is just another excuse for progressive spastics to riot and start burning more of the west down (their true goal). Anyone that opposes them will automatically be accused of being a “Zionist sympathizer” even if Israel is not their concern. So, there will surely be Muslim terror attacks, but also civil conflicts triggered by leftists exploiting the situation to their advantage.
The timing of these events in tandem with the election is definitely not coincidental. Whoever ends up in office will essentially be “stuck” with the war, inheriting a disaster from day one. Once US forces are committed to an allied effort, there’s no chance any president (including Trump) will pull those forces out. If things get bad enough, there might not even be an election in November.
For those that think we can “win” on multiple fronts, the truth might shock you. Eric Edelman, who serves as Vice Chair of the US National Defense Strategy Commission, has given warning about the impending conflict, stating:
“There is potential for near-term war and a potential that we might lose such a conflict…We need our allies to produce more. Our defense industrial base is in very bad shape. The European defense industrial base is in even worse shape. We need our industrial base, their base, and the industrial base of our Pacific allies. Australia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan–they all need to be stepping up because to match what Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are doing is beyond our ability to do it ourselves.”
I have written about the logistical shortcomings of the west in a WWIII scenario for some time now. At the top of the list will be manpower, just as we have seen in Ukraine. This is why we have been hearing military and political officials hint about a new draft over the past two years. They know what’s coming.
A draft to fight for globalist causes is unacceptable. I’m not going to delve into debate over whether it’s right or wrong for western countries to throw their weight behind Israel. Frankly, I don’t care about that argument. I don’t have anything invested in either side of the conflict. I care about Americans. And, I know that making the US military the go-to solution to the Middle East problem is going to end with a lot of dead Americans. I also know that the expanding crisis would make certain special interest (globalists) very happy. As I noted last year:
“The establishment seems particularly obsessed with convincing US conservatives and patriots to participate in the chaos; there are a number of Neo-cons and even a few supposed liberty media personalities calling for Americans to answer the call of blood in Israel. Some have described the coming conflagration as “the war to end all wars.”
I believe that the real war is yet to truly start, and that is the war to erase the globalists from existence. They want us to fight overseas in endless quagmires in the hopes we will die out. And when we do, there will be no one left to oppose them…”
The trap has just been set. We’ll have to wait and observe the scale of the response from Lebanon and Iran, but I believe the worst case scenario is at hand. There are multiple powderkeg events in progress around the world right now, but the Middle East situation looks to be the most disastrous by far in terms of how it will affect the US.
Why is the US not attacking Iran? Haven’t the US had enough of this ayatollah’s nonsense? I’m always interested to know what the end game for the US is here?
There’s a hot topic on the Chinese internet: Is the United States now at the end of the Tang Dynasty or the end of the Ming Dynasty?
I’m in the Ming Dynasty camp.
The fall of the Tang Dynasty was essentially due to the power of the Guanzhong aristocratic group blocking the upward mobility of the Hebei class. Although it was nominally due to the rebellion of the An-Shi insurgents, it was actually a civil war between the Han Chinese of Hebei and the Han Chinese of Longxi.
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(What really led to the demise of the Tang Dynasty was this brutal battle in which most of the army was destroyed.)
Similarly, the fall of the Ming Dynasty was also essentially an internal Han Chinese issue.
Even though there were massive problems with the distribution of interests between the north and the south, it was essentially a civil war between the north and the south.
Since both falls were due to unequal distribution of interests leading to the collapse of the country, why do I insist that the United States is currently at the end of the Ming Dynasty?
Three characteristics:
First, during the fall of the Han and Tang dynasties, these massive entities in Chinese history still maintained overwhelming military advantages over surrounding ethnic groups, whereas the United States does not have this advantage now.
Second, before the fall of the Ming Dynasty, there was a period of, uh, I’m not sure if I should say this, but it is indeed recorded in history books, a so-called “men dressing as women,” and LGBTQ was very prevalent. I have no discrimination against homosexuality, truly none! In ancient China, including the Warring States period and the most prosperous Han Dynasty, there were many rulers who were homosexuals, whom I admire! Look, I’m saying this, so I definitely do not discriminate against homosexuals, right?
What I want to say is that when these rulers were homosexuals, soldiers and ordinary people did not have a tendency to change genders, but at the time of the dynasty’s collapse, there were many grassroots males doing this…
I mean absolutely no discrimination, but it is very similar to the records of the late Ming Dynasty…
Third, spending countless amounts of money and achieving nothing. It’s incredibly frightening. Hundreds of thousands of taels of silver invested, achieving nothing…
In general, I believe that the United States now resembles the end of the Ming Dynasty very much.
The real fall of the Ming Dynasty happened during the “Three Great Campaigns of Wanli,” when the Ming Dynasty still seemed very strong and launched three large-scale military campaigns. But seriously, hasn’t the United States also fought in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan? These three seemingly world-shaking wars actually only fattened the military leaders?
A hot topic on the Chinese internet is: Who least wants the United States to collapse?
80% of the answers are: China.
Chinese netizens are very clear that this world is maintained by the United States. If the United States collapses, it would be a disaster for the world, including China. No one can escape. So we clearly provide this answer based on our own interests: United States, you must not collapse!
The battle that marked the fall of the Ming Dynasty was the Battle of Salhu.
I do not want the United States to engage in wars in the Middle East again, as it is clearly America’s Salhu moment.
That would be a disaster for China, the United States, and the world.
In this world, no one can defeat the United States, except the United States itself.
Should China receive refugees?
No.
I’m from Hong Kong, a city that took in Vietnamese boat people who fled the Vietnam War, at the request of the United Nations. It placed huge economic and social burdens on the city, and the United Nations, after decades, has yet to pay back the 1.3 billion HKD it owes us for our efforts in accommodating them (as of last year, they’ve only paid back 166 million HKD, a mere fraction).
Taking in refugees is an expensive affair that doesn’t always come with benefits. We had enough trouble accommodating ethnic-Chinese Vietnamese people, who were culturally similar to us. Could you imagine if they were from an Islamic-dominated culture? I’m not just talking about the child sex rings, gang-rapes or honour-killings you see in Europe and the UK, I’m talking re-education, teaching them our language and culture, which is difficult and rarely succeeds, in addition to helping them find low-paying jobs, which affects the livelihoods of our grassroots citizens.
I understand the humanitarian principles of helping those in need, but taking them in is not the best solution. The elites who decide on our behalf to let them in can do so in their own good conscience, because they’re not the ones who have to bear the consequences. It’s not their jobs that will face higher competition from low-skilled foreign labour – if anything, they stand to profit from saving on workers’ wages. It’s not their wives and children who have to put up with the gazes and advances of lonely, desperate men (Dr. Clemens Ladenburger being an exception). It’s not their neighborhoods that will face greater poverty and crime. It’s not their communities that will be fractured, as the original residents move out to make way for the new ones moving in.
But most of all, I think young men fleeing their own countries just offends us on a cultural level. You see, there was a time when China wasn’t the second largest economy on earth. Our grandparents had to deal with the Imperial Japanese military, then considered to be one of the finest fighting forces in the world. Even western powers in the Far East couldn’t stop them – Hong Kong (then a British colony) fell in two weeks, with the Japanese only losing a few hundred men.
Guess what the Chinese people back in those days did about it? They fought back valiantly, and suffered the second-most casualties in WW2. Even those who fled to America supported the war effort by sending home what little money they made working jobs white people felt were beneath them.
Refugees (especially young men) should stay in their countries and work to make it a better place for their countrymen. No one can save you but yourselves. The Chinese have known this for at least a century now.
No saviour from on high delivers
No faith have we in prince or peer
Our own right hand the chains must shiver
Chains of hatred, greed and fear
– The Internationale
The Psychopath | House M.D.
Why is North Korea so hated?
I’m going to give a pro tankie answer, even though I am not a big fan of tankies. That’s because I have to agree with them here.
There is absolutely no reason for North Korea to be hated by the West. They are this defensive because they know they are hated and the West just wants to destroy North Korea… and for zero geopolitical reason at that.
The USA destroyed every city in North Korea, and put more bombs on North Korea than they did on Japan which brutally invaded Asia and attacked America’s Pearl Harbor. 635,000 tons of bombs were dropped on North Korea, compared to 160,000 tons of bombs in Japan.
North Korea had 9.26 million people before the war. More than 1 million North Korean civilians were killed or missing due to the Korean War. To compare, less than 1 million Japanese civilians died in WWII, with 100,000+ of them killed in the atomic bombings, in a population of more than 70 million.
The war that America waged on North Korea wasn’t even a war at this point. It was outright genocide. Hitler would be proud of this. Every last North Korean was a target (and some South Koreans too, No Gun Ri Massacre was an example). The aim wasn’t even to put pressure on the North Korean regime, it was to give civilians hell. That is what strategic bombing is aimed to do, give civilians hell.
North Korea would not be justified to invade South Korea (which, frankly, is a capitalist hellhole as much as North Korea is a radical communist juche hellhole today). If North Korea did such things, I would condemn North Korea as well and demand that North Korea go back to its borders.
But it would be very justified to build hundreds of nuclear weapons, and set conditions for its use being the second total destruction of North Korea as happened during the Korean War. Luckily for normal people, North Korea only has dozens of nuclear weapons, and it has only very recently acquired the ability to hit the US mainland with nuclear weapons using just one nuclear weapons platform.
When you read the North Korean history, it makes sense why Kim Jong-un is so preoccupied with building nuclear weapons. If I was him, I would also build nukes.
I’m happy to see countries be able to defend themselves from imperialists the hard way against all odds, be it Israel or North Korea.
America Compared: Why Other Countries Treat Their People So Much Better (Reaction)
The truth hurts.
How did the ancient Chinese study for the imperial examination? Did they just repeatedly read dozens of scrolls every day?
The imperial examination system was a talent selection system implemented in ancient China to build a vast bureaucratic system and control the entire empire.
For its time, this system was quite advanced.
Firstly, it ensured a relatively open path for social mobility, giving children from poor families a chance. Secondly, it was relatively fair; while the winners of the imperial examination might not have been outstanding managers, they were certainly not fools.
At the very least, they had to read an immense amount of books, be knowledgeable, and be intelligent.
(Someone:Let me tell you something, folks, nobody reads more books than I do. Believe me. I’m the best at reading, okay? I’ve read more than anyone else—more than all the other politicians combined. They say, ‘ how do you know so much?’ Well, I’ve got the best books, the smartest people, and I understand everything. I know all the facts, the details, you name it. Nobody’s smarter, nobody’s better informed. It’s tremendous, folks, really tremendous. And believe me, when it comes to being well-read, I’m simply the best.”)
Moreover, the exams were not purely about comparing poetry or essays but included a large number of “strategy and policy” questions.
These questions are somewhat similar to modern civil service exam questions or political knowledge tests for students.
I found a few examples of ancient exam questions and, trying to adapt them to today’s global situation, rephrased them.
You can take a look to get a sense of the type of questions.
1 The United States has established hundreds of military bases around the world, while China’s military strength is mainly concentrated domestically. What are the reasons for these two strategies, and what are their respective advantages and disadvantages?
2 China’s ethnic policies are inherited from the Soviet Union, which has been criticized by many. However, it seems to be functioning well now, better than the Soviet Union. What do you think is the most important reason for this?
3 Roosevelt’s New Deal has some socialist characteristics, while China’s economic policies have many capitalist features. Share your views on this.
4 During President Trump’s tenure, what were some characteristics of the government officials he hired?
(Someone:I’ve got the best, the smartest, the most incredible people working for me. I pick winners, and let me tell you, they make America great again—just like I promised. The greatest administration, believe me. We’re bringing jobs, we’re bringing prosperity, and we’re making this country shine like never before. It’s fantastic, really fantastic,the best team, making America greater than ever. No one does it better.)
5 During the Korean War, China and the Soviet Union were allies, but in the Sino-Vietnamese War, China and the U.S. became quasi-partners. Share your opinion on this.
These are five exam questions related to politics, history, and military affairs, each requiring a detailed answer. There are also other questions covering topics such as education, economy, diplomacy, and so on.
Additionally, there was the Eight-Legged Essay examination, where candidates were required to use the sayings of sages as arguments and write an essay strictly following the standard format.
Overall, answering these questions well within a limited time is quite challenging, especially considering that you are competing with thousands of the most diligent and intelligent individuals in China.
An interesting fact: The top scorer in the imperial examination was called the “Zhuangyuan.” Only one was selected every three years. Over the 1,300-year history of the examination system, there were a total of 504 Zhuangyuans.
The first one was from the Tang Dynasty, and the last one was from the Qing Dynasty. Their hometowns were very close to each other, and today this area is known for having one of the strongest cities in China’s college entrance examinations, Hengshui City in Hebei Province.
A couple of cute girls run up to me and pull me out of study hall to go square dancing with them.
One day. Then the next. Then the one after that.
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Maybe I wasn’t a football player or a popular Jock, but I was a dancing fool. All the girls wanted to dance with me. And I really loved it.
These square dances were a lot of fun. I loved the attention; and being part of a group. Even then, I did not realize how starved I was for BELONGING.
The girls would look at me, touch me, and talk with me. And it was fun. Fun! And the time went by so fast!
Then I graduated from high school and entered university.
Disco fever hits America.
Still, I wasn’t so much into the movement as I could of been. I was more of an observer. Books and studying were my drivers.
Everyone was “Doin’ the hustle”. Me too. LOL.
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I was a party fool.
Looking back, you know, dancing played a major social role in my ability to meet and be with girls. Too bad that there were movements that were trying to remove it for religious reasons.
Silly. Huh?
Now, here I am. In China. Everyone dances. From free impromptu dances on the curbs to KTV’s and clubs. Everyone dances.
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Forget social media applications. Go out, put on some music and start dancing. There’s a lot worse things that you can do to occupy your time.
Don’t know how to dance, or are too self consciousness?
Go Zorba the Greek style…
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Or, my favorite, Jamaican Rasta-man…
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When in doubt go “Grateful Dead” and do the hop to the beat, and pretend that you are stoned.
Today…
What are your views on China almost owning Laos? How careful do other small nations need to be from China?
The word “owning” is not appropriate; it should be described as a win-win situation. Laos is a landlocked country with no ports, only 4 kilometers of railway nationwide, and underdeveloped roads.
In December 2021, after the opening of the China-Laos Railway, Laos has had a direct railway connection with China. This has greatly improved Laos’s economy, with optimistic projections suggesting that Laos’s GDP will increase fivefold by 2030.
(I am confident about Laos’ economic prospects, because it is said that in 2020, the most corrupt bureaucrat in the country only had $500,000! which is much better than many poor countries, If the corruption problem is not big, the economy will surely take off)
The railway has opened up transportation between China and Laos, bringing hundreds of thousands of job opportunities to Laos, and China benefits as well.
China’s agriculture is severely lacking in potassium. Although Russia and Belarus are major potash exporters and friendly countries, having an additional source of imports is beneficial. Laos, with its world-class giant potash deposits, lacks the technology and funds for mining, and hasn’t even begun selling them.
China’s construction of potash mines in Laos, purchasing at reasonable prices, creating local jobs, developing the industry, and meeting its own needs is indeed a win-win situation.
China has a huge demand for durians, and Laotian durians are very cheap. Selling them to China via the railway significantly increases their income, making everyone happy.
China can produce industrial goods, medicines, and other necessities cheaply and in good quality, satisfying Laotian needs. Laotians are also very satisfied.
Moreover, Laos is the most heavily bombed country in the world. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. conducted 580,000 bombing missions on this non-combatant country, dropping 270 million cluster bombs, of which about 30% remain unexploded. Currently, 80 million small bombs are scattered and buried in Laos, causing deaths and injuries every year.
By constructing this railway, Chinese engineers have cleared thousands of unexploded bombs, at least ensuring the safety of the railway line. This act alone is of immeasurable merit.
China and the West are different in one respect: as a developing country that was oppressed by great powers for over a hundred years, we know very well what that feels like.
Now that we have some money, it is natural to help others while benefiting ourselves through mutual benefit.
2500 years ago, Mencius said, “Only a benevolent nation can interact with smaller nations on an equal footing”—not by dropping 270 million bombs on them.
To take a step back, even if driven solely by China’s own interests, such as buying potash mines and trying to push prices down, the short-term gain might seem profitable, but in the long run? If we don’t consider the other party’s interests, it will ultimately harm our own.
There are areas needing improvement.
For example, on the station signs within Laos along the China-Laos Railway, although Lao script is at the top and Chinese is below, the Chinese font size is the same as the Lao script, which seems a bit inappropriate.
It would be better if the Chinese font were smaller.
I have always been a little worried about hurting the feelings of the Lao people.
However, it seems that Laotians have not raised this issue.
She explains what is going on
Money is NOT value.
Should the USA give one aircraft carrier to each one of China’s neighbors to stop China from bullying its neighbors?
Originally Answered: Should the USA give 1 aircraft carrier to each one of China’s neighbor to stop China from bullying its neighbor?
Funnily enough, this question reminds me of an ancient punishment of the Thai Royal Court.
If a Thai king happened to dislike a particular minor noble, that noble would be “gifted” with the finest war elephant from the royal regiment.
Now what could go wrong with that you might think? After all, an elephant is a mighty war beast and also a valuable trophy that kings would fight each other to own.
Well, they are also one hell of an eater, consuming an unholy amount of food and water every day.
want some?
They also need space, care, training, and exercise – all of which requires a lot of people and costs a lot of money. That’s why, normally, only the likes of kings or very powerful nobles could afford their accommodations.
So what happened if some unaccomplished, minor nobles were awarded with one?
In a few months, they would become broke: They couldn’t get rid of the elephant because it was a gift from the king and also could not leave them neglected because of its royal status.
I think something similar would happen if the United States were to “gift” any carriers to the minor nations in the South China Sea.
Just some insight
I love hearing from youse guys about how your affirmations are going. Here’s one from a member of the MM collective. I deleted the queries and personal data. But still, I always find these reports interesting…
I've been on a 3 month on/4 off Intentions Campaign run since summer 2023 when I started my first (late starter, I know-- but I'd old baggage I needed to dispose of before committing to a campaign-- I like fresh psychological starts!).
After a quiet start, I'm now halfway through my second break, and the roller coaster ride has just kicked off-- white knuckle, baby.
> Yikes!!!
> The tell tails have all hilariously manifested, too. Very very strange and uncanny feeling. Things that were calm in my life are now turning upside down and I'm glad-- It was well needed. But stressful. (Have included safety protocols so nothing crazy.)
We were mocking my husband at a neighborhood party until he stood up & told me it’s over forever.
NEVER, ever make fun of your husband or wife.
What can be expected from the meeting between Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and China’s top legislator Zhao Leji?
On July 29, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meroni met with Zhao Leji, Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress of China.
Zhao Leji said that the National People’s Congress of China is willing to give full play to the role of the regular exchange mechanism with the Italian Parliament, carry out multi-level, wide-ranging and multi-channel friendly exchanges, and provide legal guarantees for the practical cooperation between the two countries.
Meroni expressed the hope that the legislative bodies of the two sides will strengthen exchanges, promote cooperation in the fields of economy, trade, culture and other fields, and promote the healthy and stable development of Italy-China and Europe-China relations.
Of course, this is all official jargon.
To put it simply, Merloni hopes that China’s National People’s Congress and the Italian Parliament will increase exchanges so that Italian parliamentarians can understand China’s parliamentary model, so that they will not encounter too much opposition from pro-American parliamentarians during parliamentary questioning.
The reason I say this is because of what Italy has done over the past period of time.
In the recent EU vote on imposing tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, Italy voted in favor.
The Italian Ministry of Finance issued a statement after the G7 Finance Ministers’ Meeting, saying that the G7 opposes so-called “unilateral actions” that undermine global trade, and implicitly pointed the finger at China.
Senior Italian naval officials announced that the country’s aircraft carrier will visit the Philippines after participating in Australian exercises to show support for the Philippines.
Last year, the Meloni government’s decision to withdraw from the “Belt and Road Initiative” itself had a huge impact on the mutual trust between China and Italy. Judging from the delegation that Meloni brought with her to China, including Italian tire manufacturer Pirelli and energy group Eni, the focus of her visit to China is obviously to discuss bilateral economic and trade cooperation with China.
Why does Italy still want to do this?
In fact, if we look at the preparations for this visit to China alone, Meloni’s sincerity is still sufficient.
In addition to the luxurious business delegation mentioned above, it is reported that Meloni has also prepared a generous gift for China.
According to the Italian media “24 Hours Sun”, the Meloni government intends to “transfer” the use rights of the discontinued car brands of the European auto giant Stellantis Group to Chinese companies.
Italy has specially prepared a working group to discuss cooperation in the automotive field with China. At present, the EU is imposing tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles. Objectively speaking, if Chinese auto companies can invest and build factories in Italy, they can indeed resolve the high tariffs faced by exports to Europe. For Italy, they can obtain investment from Chinese companies through such cooperation and boost the local auto industry.
This is a win-win situation.
Moreover, perhaps in order to eliminate the impact of Italy’s withdrawal from the “Belt and Road Initiative”, Meroni also announced during his visit to China that he would sign a three-year action plan with China to restart cooperation with China.
We can understand Meroni’s move. This plan is actually an alternative to the “Belt and Road Initiative” jointly built by China and Italy.
Meroni showed such sincerity. In the final analysis, Italy still needs China.
On the one hand, Italy is currently facing severe high inflation and debt crisis.
On the other hand, the trade volume between China and Italy last year showed a significant decline compared with 2022.
Since Italy withdrew from the Belt and Road Initiative, it has faced a series of economic problems. If Italy wants to change the status quo, it can only bow to China.
However, Italy is a member of the G7, and it is unrealistic to expect Meloni to completely bow to China.
Therefore, we speculate that Italy’s series of actions against China, either indirectly or directly, before Meroni’s visit to China, may be a bargaining chip prepared by Meroni to bargain with China.
Italy was previously indecisive about withdrawing from the “Belt and Road Initiative” mainly because Italy wanted to maintain mutually beneficial cooperation with China on the one hand, but did not want to bear pressure from Western countries because of the “Belt and Road Initiative” on the other hand.
Before officially withdrawing from the “Belt and Road Initiative”, Meroni sent people to visit China for consultations, trying to prove that withdrawing from the “Belt and Road Initiative” would not affect Italy’s attention to China.
But it is obvious that Meroni completely underestimated the negative impact of this move on Sino-Italian relations and the “Belt and Road Initiative” — After Italy joined the “Belt and Road Initiative”, China has placed Italy at the top of its foreign cooperation priorities. If Italy can still enjoy such a position after its withdrawal, it will inevitably lead to other countries following suit and questioning the “Belt and Road Initiative”.
Meloni’s preparation of bargaining chips for her visit to China in advance can only mean that although she regrets withdrawing from the “Belt and Road Initiative”, she still has not figured out how to balance the relationship between China, the EU and the United States.
As a major EU economy and a member of the G7, it is difficult for Meloni to sing a different tune from the EU and the United States, at least on the issue of imposing tariffs on China.
But at the same time, Meloni also knows that based on the background of Italy’s withdrawal from the “Belt and Road Initiative”, Italy must show enough sincerity if it wants to restart cooperation with China.
The EU will ban the sale of new fuel vehicles that are not zero-carbon emission from 2035.
China is the world’s largest electric vehicle industry and dominates the global electric vehicle industry. BYD has confirmed that it will open “super factories” outside of China in near the borders of Hungary and Serbia, and Italy could be the location of BYD’s second “super factory”.
Chinese Tesla rival BYD to open EV manufacturing plant in Hungary
The announcement comes as Hungary continues to try to position itself as a global hub for EV manufacturing.
BYD signed land agreement with Szeged for the car factory in Hungary
BYD’s landmark agreement with Szeged, Hungary, for a new energy passenger car factory. BYD’s landmark agreement with Szeged, Hungary, for a new energy passenger car factory.
Meloni wants to have a certain initiative, so she can only talk about economic and trade cooperation with China on the one hand, but on the other hand, she can find ways to maintain some noise that caters to the United States.
However, in front of Meloni, the Chinese senior officials have made it clear that China is willing to further strengthen political mutual trust with Italy to promote the development of China-Italy bilateral relations in a more mature and stable direction. This is a necessary condition for the two countries to deepen cooperation and achieve expectations.
As for how to strengthen political mutual trust, China has put forward a requirement for Chinese companies to invest in Italy, that is, Italy needs to provide a fair, safe and non-discriminatory business environment for Chinese companies.
If Italy undermines the atmosphere of Sino-Italian cooperation again in the future due to pressure from the United States, the political mutual trust between China and Italy will probably be even more difficult to repair.
Therefore, if Meloni wants to continue the results of his visit to China, he must take practical actions to safeguard the development of Sino-Italian relations.
“All HELL BREAKS LOOSE” (In the Next Few Months) says FED Insider
Luca Placidi:
Welcome, everybody. It is a great pleasure and honor to have with us today Professor Michael Hudson. For those who still do not know him, Michael is a professor of economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and he is a researcher at the Levi Economics Institute at Bard College.
Just to mention a few works published with the help of technology, we want to recall Superimperialism, the Economic Strategy of the American Empire. Its third edition came out in 2021. Then we have “… And Forgive Them Their Debts,” published in 2018. The latest is The Collapse of Antiquity, published in 2023.
Michael is also a former Wall Street analyst, a political consultant, and is hosting the Geopolitical Economy Hour together with Radhika Desai, which is broadcast at Ben Norton’s YouTube channel, Geopolitical Economy Report. Professor, welcome, and thanks again for being with us today.
Michael Hudson:
Well, thank you for inviting me. I’m glad to be able to speak to an Italian audience.
Luca Placidi:
That is very good. Thank you. To kick off our conversation, would you agree that the Ukrainian war and even more the latest NATO summit with its final declaration are showing us that we are now back in a multipolar war, in which the global South it is opposed to the Western world?
Michael Hudson:
Well, it’s more than just a geographic split. We’re really in a civilizational split, and it goes much deeper. What’s at stake is what kind of economy is the world going to have?
Is it going to be a financialized, neoliberal post-industrial economy, which is what the United States and Europe are pushing? Or is it going to be the kind of economy that textbooks talk about, where economies produce agricultural and industrial goods to feed themselves and make everybody prosper? I almost would use Rosa Luxemburg’s phrase, Barbarism or Socialism, because the West no longer has the means of real economic control over trade and production. It only has military force, terrorist violence and corruption to maintain its control.
The NATO West does financial control by having loaded down the global South and even many Asian countries with dollarized debt for the last 70 years. That dollarized debt holds them in a financial neocolonialism, an international debt peonage. Besides that, the ultimate power that the United States and Europe have to maintain their unipolar control to prevent other countries from going their own way and pursuing their own interests is to bomb them and mobilize terrorism.
The NATO West has lost its basic industrial or agricultural control because it has outsourced its industry to China and other Asian economies, and its sanctions against Russia and other countries has obliged them to become self-sufficient instead of relying on the West for a widening range of their basic needs. So these countries are now in a position to use their labor, industry and agriculture to make themselves prosperous and regain control over their economies, not to make U.S. and European investors rich. They want to take control of their economies in a way that will raise their wages and living standards.
That can’t be done if they follow a policy of privatization, World Bank advice and the IMF’s instructions to sell off their land and raw materials, privatize and sell off their public infrastructure, communications, electrical systems and water rights to foreigners while getting rid of government regulation and social-support programs. The West’s demand is to let the private sector run everything without government “interference.” Well, there’s no way that any economy can grow and get prosperous without being a mixed economy with strong public infrastructure providing basic needs at non-monopoly prices.
There are many natural area for governments to operate more efficiently than the private sector. They can provide basic services that otherwise would be monopolized to charge extortionate prices to extract predatory monopoly rents for their owners. If a government doesn’t provide education, the result will be what’s happening in America, where the average cost of a college education is $40,000 or $50,000 a year. If you don’t have public health, you’re going to have a very expensive privatized health care that’s not available to everybody. In the United States that absorbs 18% of GDP, more than any other country. That kind of monopoly overhead doesn’t leave much room for the overall economy to be competitive with mixed public/private economies.
Most important, if you let money and credit be privatized by banks instead of doing what China has done and keep money as a public utility, then you let banks decide where the economy’s credit will be allocated. That makes them the economy’s central planners. Their preference is to supply credit not to finance industrial investment and growth, but to finance debt-leveraging to inflate prices for real estate, stocks and bonds, and for raiders to take over companies and empty them out, leaving debt-ridden shells in their place. like Thames Water in Britain, Sears Roebuck in the United States. That is what has been happening since the 1980s under Thatcherism and Reaganomics.
So the split between the West and the rest of the world, the global majority, is really about what kind of an economy most of the world will have. That’s why the United States is fighting so viciously to maintain its unipolar control. It’s fighting against the global majority today in the same way that it fought against the Soviet Union after 1917. It doesn’t want a rival kind of economic system to develop. So what we’re seeing is a split with the global majority that is trying to decide how to design an economy that’s going to help their member countries grow? That is the global fracture that is occurring, and it’s a civilizational break.
How are Global South countries to grow if they remain obliged to pay all of the dollarized foreign debts that they’ve been loaded down. These debts are the legacy of being obliged to follow destructive International Monetary Fund advice to impose austerity and to privatize and sell off their assets in the public domain in order to obtain the dollars to pay their foreign creditors? The Western model is thus basically a form of financial colonialism. Its anti-government philosophy has devastated the Wes’s economies as well as those of debtor countries.
The rest of the world thus has an object lesson in what to avoid if it does not want to end up looking like the United States, post-Thatcher/Blair Britain or Germany since its anti-Russia sanctions of2022. I’ve discussed this in The Destiny of Civilization: Finance Capitalism, Industrial Capitalism or Socialism (2022). Today’s civilizational break is not only against Russia and China. You can trace the break back to the Bandung Conference of non-aligned nations in 1955, seventy years ago.
In 1955, what was called the Third World or non-aligned nations recognized that they were being made poorer and poorer by the rules of the world economy that American diplomats and geopolitical strategists institutionalized with the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the dollar standard. That international trade and monetary system was exploitative, first and foremost against America’s potential rivals in Britain and other European countries, and against the former colonial systems of these countries that the United States sought to appropriate and exploit for its own benefit.
The post-World War II order has been a new kind of imperialism. It basically is a financial imperialism, not the European-style colonial imperialism enforced by a military occupation. Financial control has proved less costly and hence more efficient for the neoliberal mode of international exploitation. Non-aligned victim countries couldn’t break away in 1954 or since because Cuba, Indonesia and the other non-aligned nations were not large enough to “go it alone.” If they tried to go it alone, they would have ended up looking like Venezuela has looked like in the last few years, or like Cuba looked like after its revolution. If the United Sates and Europe had imposed such sanctions, countries resisting this system would have been obliged to surrender to the West to avoid economic disruption. But sanctions were not even necessary at that time under “free market” imperialism U.S.-style.
The United States was in a position to treat countries resisting this exploitation it as outcasts. Its threat was to tell countries that acted to protect their economies, and especially their public enterprise, that the West would isolate them if they tried to go it alone. Their economies were indeed too small, even on a regional level, to survive on their own. They felt that they needed U.S. support and that of its IMF and World Bank.
What has changed is the remarkable growth of socialist China since the 1990s and post-neoliberal Russia since the late 1990s under President Putin. Today for the first time, Eurasian nations have enough economic self-sufficiency outside of the United States and Europe to be able to go it alone. They no longer need to depend on the NATO West, which is losing its ability to economically control them.
In fact, it’s the NATO West that has become dependent on China, Russia and the rest of Eurasia, along with the Global South if its people can resist their own client oligarchies to throw off their financial chains and adherence to the self-serving U.S. “rules-based order.”
What is so ironic is that U.S. diplomacy itself is spurring their break-away. One might have expected that China, the Global South and India, Latin America and Africa came to realize just how they’re being exploited, they would have taken the lead in breaking away. Yet it is the United States and NATO that have driven them to break away, by imposing trade and financial sanctions that have forced them to go it alone.
Ever since the war in Ukraine by the United States to break Germany and Europe away from their trade and investment relations with Russia and China began in 2022, the United States has mobilized its European and other English-speaking dependencies to impose economic sanctions that has devastated economies obeying these policies.
The backlash resulting from German de-industrialization and America’s elbowing aside France as an arms supplier (e.g., for submarine sales to AUKUS and in trying to replace France in its former African possessions) is driving other countries away. America and Europe have isolated themselves from the Global Majority, replacing its prosperous trade and investment with Russia and China with economic dependency on the United States for oil and other higher-priced imports.
What’s so amazing is how self-destructive of its own global empire U.S. diplomacy has been. The focus of U.S. diplomacy on locking in its control over Europe, Australia, Japan and South Korea by obliging them to join its anti-Russian and anti-Chinese sanctions has obliged these designated U.S. enemies to replacing trade dependency on the West with their own mutual self-dependency.
They realize that they can never depend on the United Stats and European satellites for imports again. That should have been obvious to U.S. strategists. Once a country is blocked from importing its food, what’s it going to do? It’s going to grow its own food. When the United States imposed sanctions on Russia to block European exports of food to it, for instance, Russia was driven to produce its own butter, crops and other food instead of importing it from the Baltics and other former suppliers.
When U.S. officials demanded that its allies stop exporting computer chips to China, it moved quickly to develop its own domestic supply.
Other countries can’t depend on the United States or Europe for their food because they may be cut off again. So they’ll have to become self-sufficient.
They can’t depend on the NATO West for industry or technology because it can try to disrupt their economy by interrupting their supply chains to force it to follow pro-NATO policies. As for Europe, it is left dependent on the United States now that it has let itself be isolated from Eurasia and the Global South.
The global fracture that is occurring in today’s world is not reversible. And it is all happening so quickly. Once a market is lost to countries able to free themselves and provide their own basic needs, that market is not recoverable.
If the United States and NATO Europe stops exporting food and industrial products to sanctioned countries, they will make these products themselves. So when you sanction a country, it’s as if you’ve provided them with tariff protection to nurture their own production. That’s the “infant industry” argument that enabled the United States to rise to industrial power in the late 19th century.
The logic was clearly spelled out by U.S. strategists. (I summarize this strategy in America’s Protective Takeoff: 1815-1914: The Neglected American School of Political Economy (2010). Needless to say, U.S. neoliberal rhetoric has sought to erase this history so as to “pull up the ladder” so that its logic will not be used by other countries to emulate the U.S. economic success – the same government sponsorship of industry that made Germany, France and other countries so successful since the 19th century.
Latin America and Africa are seeing that it is time to liberate their economic from “free-trade imperialism.” Instead of using their agricultural land to export plantation crops to the North, they’re going to use their land to begin feeding themselves with their own grain, their own rice and other food crops so that they no longer have to depend on American and European farm exports.
The U.S. policy of bullying countries by imposing trade sanctions has cut its own economic throat, so to speak. It’s almost humorous to see it dismantle the free-trade imperialism and dollar dependency that earlier generations of U.S. diplomacy tried so hard to impose on the rest of the world.
The meetings this year by the BRICS+ countries under Russian leadership this year and China next year are all about how to plan a trajectory for becoming independent from reliance on the West. That is what U.S. diplomacy itself has driven them to do.
Luca Placidi:
As you were saying, Professor, it seems like the TINA Paradigm has been destroyed because now we have alternatives. It seems that the European political class is hopelessly submissive to the U.S. agenda. This is really disturbing, at least for us in Europe, because the war in Ukraine has destroyed the European economy.
Just think, as you’ve described, how the impact of the sanctions has penalized industrial production especially in Germany and Italy. Yet this has not been enough for Europe to reverse course and pull out of this conflict.
Michael Hudson:
I think that you could call the war in Ukraine since 2022 an American war against Europe, because the great loser has been Germany, Italy, France and the rest of Europe. The United States has seen the writing on the wall and decided that if there’s going to be a fight between North America along with NATO against the rest of the world, it had better start by solidifying its control over Europe as a profitable market and debtor instead of its turning to Asia and being lost by the United States.
Essentially, U.S. strategists are acknowledging that they know that America is not able to produce a real industrial surplus anymore. Its neoliberal trade policy has outsourced its industry to Asia.
The only new market that it can secure if the Global Majority breaks away is that of Europe. That explains why the United States arranged for the Nord Stream pipeline to be blown up, and convinced Europe voluntarily to commit economic self-destruction by not buying low-priced Russian gas, oil and raw materials. While this has driven Russia and China together with their Asian neighbors, the losers have been European.
German industry has been moving out of the country to the United States and elsewhere for lower-cost energy. It’s been emigrating largely to the United States, making it the beneficiary. If you’re a German industrial company, what else are you going to do if its economy is shrinking.
If you look at labor productivity over the last hundred years, it’s goes parallel with energy use per worker.
Energy is really the key. That’s why a central aim of American foreign policy since 1945 has been to control other countries in two ways, starting with oil. The United States, along with Britain and Holland, have controlled the world oil trade so that they can turn off the electricity, turn off the lights of countries that try to break away and act in their own self-interest.
Along with oil, the second tactic that America has used is to control grain and food. Let independent countries starve in the dark. But here once again, the sanctions have mainly been to make Europe suffer.
Remember, America has fought against the European Economic Community ever since it was created in 1958. From the outset, America fought against the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). But for the EEC, the most important aim of integration was to protect its farmers and do for European agriculture what America had done for its agriculture.
Agricultural price supports enabled capital investment to raise farm productivity. Europe rationalized its agriculture and increased its capital investment to make it more productive. The result was that Europe has not only replaced its dependence on American food exports, but has become a major agricultural exporter. But now the expanded European Union is now suffering because of the sanctions not only against importing Russian gas to make fertilizer. And by supporting Ukraine, Europe is letting it dump its low-cost grain in Poland and other countries. Farmers already have staged riots to protest against their farm markets being undersold by the Ukrainians – with U.S. investors trying to buy up this land. That could roll back European agricultural independence and make it dependent once more on the United States or on countries that U.S. investors control.
The effect of this Cold War III so far has been to drive Europe back into the American orbit. The United States insists that there’s no alternative to this neoliberal geopolitics. Western textbooks indoctrinate students to believe that neoliberalism is the best way to run an economy efficiently – by not having a government to protect self-reliance and living standards, not to regulate against predatory monopoly and financial rent seeking. The aim is to let capitalism evolve into monopoly capitalism, which is really finance capitalism, because monopolies are organized by the financial sector as “the mother of trusts.”
Although the United States has said there’s no alternative, there obviously is. But if countries don’t follow an alternative, they’re going to end up looking like Germany. In fact, what’s happened to Europe as a result of the war in Ukraine and U.S. sanctions is an object lesson for other countries to see what they don’t want that to happen to them.
The neoliberal program has broken down in the West just as it has long since broken down for the Global South. Its central aim is to privatize the public sector. Yet for centuries the European capitalist takeoff was funded by industrial capitalists themselves aiming to lower the cost of production so that they could undersell other countries by government subsidy of tangible capital formation.
How can economies lower their cost of production? For starters, if companies are obliged to pay wages high enough for their workers to pay for their own health care and insurance, to pay for their own education, for their own debt-leveraged housing costs, the high price of paying a living wage will eat into industrial profits. To avoid this, European countries, like the United States, had their governments provide inexpensive basic needs so employers wouldn’t have to cover these costs.
The basic strategy of industrial capitalism was for governments to provide education, public health and basic infrastructure that otherwise would have been monopolized in private hands. Governments educated workers, trained them and helped raise their productivity by protecting and subsidizing capital investment. Governments provided water and electricity at subsidized rates so that labor would not have to spend its wages to buy high cost energy, high cost transportation and kindred basic needs.
The result was to lower the break-even costs of labor, so that European and American industrialists could undersell other countries.
Neoliberalism ended this seemingly obvious economic strategy. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan started a class war by the British and U.S. financial sectors against labor by privatizing their public utilities. Instead of England’s government providing clean water, which everybody needs to live, it sold off rent-seeking rights to financial managers raise prices to extract monopoly rents. To make matters worse, Thames Water and other privatized companies borrowed from banks and used the money to pay dividends to stockholders and buy their own stock to raise its prices to reap capital gains.
These rentier charges are now taking a big chunk out of the European wage earner’s budget. That makes employers pay higher wages. You can say the same thing for telephone service and other basic infrastructure utilities that now are privatized and financialized.
Privatizing formerly subsidized telephone service and communications makes workers pay much more. The result is a wage squeeze, but also a profit squeeze because of the high cost of living and doing business in a rentier economy.
So since 1980, the whole European model – in fact, the whole model of industrial capitalism – has been reversed. Instead of industrial capitalism trying to cut the costs of production, minimizing what Marx called the false costs, the faux frais of production, prices charged by privatized infrastructure monopolies have gone way up. Labor’s living standards throughout Europe have been squeezed at the same time that their wages have had to be increased so that they can afford to pay for privatized services that used to be subsidized public services. Following the neoliberal model has made Europe uncompetitive, just as it has deindustrialized the U.S. economy.
The lesson for China has been to have socialism to restore the 19th-century industrial ethic that nearly all economic observers believed was leading to socialism of one kind or another. China’s living standards have soared, yet its wages are lower than that of the neoliberal economies thanks to the fact that socialism provides inexpensive transportation, public health care and so forth as described above.
Most important of all, socialist China creates its own money and controls its credit system. Instead of the Bank of China lending money to financial predators to buy companies and load them down with debt and drive their stock prices before leaving them as bankrupt shells like Thames Water in England, the government spends money directly into the economy.
It’s overinvested in housing and real estate, to be sure, but it’s also invested in modernizing its high-speed railroads, modernizing its communication system, modernizing its cities, and above all its electronic internet system used for monetary payments. China has liberated itself from debt dependency on the West – and in the process, made the West dependent on it.
This could only have been done by government investment and regulation under a long-term plan. The Western financial model lives in the short run. If you’re going to allocate credit and resources to make fortunes by living in the short run by taking as much as you can as quickly as you can, you will not be able to make the capital investment to develop long-term growth. That’s why American information technology companies have not been able to keep up with their Chinese counterparts. Financialized “market forces” oblige them to use their income for stock buybacks and to pay out of dividends. That is the case with U.S. technology across the board.
China’s companies investing in information and internet technology plow their profits back into reinvestment in more research and development. Such innovation has shifted from the West to the East, which has rediscovered the logic of industrial capitalism developed by the 19th century’s classical political economists.
To be sure, China and other BRICS+ countries are trying to reinvent the wheel. They know that the Western model doesn’t work. The question is, what is the best alternative to neoliberalized, privatized and financialized economies?
It is amazing to me that there has been so little discussion of classical economics in the West. The value, price and rent theory of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and their contemporaries came to a head with Marx. That has left almost the only people talking about industrial capitalism’s economic reforms have been Marxists. Universities in America no longer teach the history of economic thought – or economic history, for that matter. It is as if there is only one kind of economy – the anti-government privatized “free market” that has taken over since the 1980s.
Students are taught that there is only one way to run an economy: the free enterprise neoliberal way. So when Asian and African countries send their students to the United States or England to study, they’re not taught about how industrial capitalism took off by raising wages and living standards to make labor more productive. Instead, the learn the economics of class war – from the employer’s short-term view.
Neoliberal trade theory is the most blatant example of today’s junk economics being awarded by Nobel Prizes as if that can somehow legitimize it. The result is the International Monetary Fund’s austerity plan masquerading as “stabilization plans.” Once a country like Argentina or Chile runs up a foreign debt, it is directed to obtain the money to pay this foreign debt by imposing anti-labor policies, dissolving labor unions, lowering wage levels while taxing labor (“consumers”) more, as if pauperized labor will make them competitive enough to earn enough export income to pay their foreign creditors.
When a policy like this has been shown to be destructive for the past century yet is still being imposed, it’s obvious that this is not an innocent error. You might call it a very successful error. It has succeeded in preventing the Global South from earning its way out of debt and from developing is own self-sufficiency in food and other basic needs. It has succeeded in creating domestic client oligarchies whose interests are to become agents of this Western NATO-centered model instead of seeking to develop their own economies.
It is to avoid this destiny that today’s geopolitical breakaway by the global majority in Asia, Africa and Latin America are moving to replace the finance-capitalist model. Their move to reinvent the wheel is following the logic of the original industrial capitalist takeoff that was evolving into socialism. If you look back to the late 19th century’s flowing of classical political economy, not only by Marx but by political parties across the political spectrum, we can see that there was going to be socialism of one kind or another.
What kind of socialism is it going to be? There was Christian socialism, libertarian socialism, Marxian socialism and other kinds of socialism. This classical literature and political debate was rich, but it came to an end with World War I. That was a disastrous turning point in Western civilization.
The rentier classes, the landlords, the monopolists and the bankers had been fighting back against the industrial reforms that were happening in the most advanced industrial economies of Europe and the United States. The wealthy elites were terrified that support for these reforms would lead in Europe to a revolution like that created Soviet Russia. The West was even more terrified of what seemed to be happening in Germany that was looking like it was likely to go socialist.
The vested rentier interests, especially the wealthiest classes, feared that this threatened to end the ability of a wealthy financial oligarchy of the One Percent, maybe even five percent of the population. For the past century it has built up its financial wealth by forcing the rest of the economy into debt. The result has been a social malaise as Western populations in the United States and Europe, have come to believe that There Is No Alternative.
The lack of an alternative has enriched the One Percent. The U.S. economy has polarized, and so has Europe’s economies. The wealth of Europe, Italy included, has been sucked up to the very top, to the financial layer that has taken control of economic planning and public policy as if their privatized self-interest is more productive and efficient than an alternative that would raise labor’s living standards and self-reliance.
Financial elites throughout the world are a cosmopolitan class. It’s not only wealthy Italians but wealthy Europeans, wealthy Americans draining money from their own industrial sectors, the agricultural and the commercial sector. This stateless international class has its law of motion in its drive to force the entire global economy into debt so as to use its debt leverage to foreclose, above all on the assets of the public sector by getting governments into debt.
Backed by the IMF, World Banks and U.S. courts, international bondholders (including domestic oligarchies keeping their wealth outside of their own countries) force debtor governments to sell off public infrastructure. In the case of corporate debt, creditors foreclose on companies and break them into parts.
This behavior has de-industrialized the United States and Britain. Yet while the economies of the United States and Europe have gotten poorer and poorer, the wealthiest One Percent have got richer and richer. That’s why the United States and Europe have not joined the Global Majority but are trying to fight against its demonstration that there is a better alternative for civilization.
The NATO West’s ruling elites have overplayed their hand. By treating the rest of the world as an enemy for resisting U.S.-sponsored control, this diplomacy has driven other countries together to create an alternative. That alternative involves creating alternative institutions to the International Monetary Fund in a BRICS central bank to deal with inter-government balance of payments relations.
It involves a new Bank for Economic Acceleration as an alternative to the World Bank, a bank to finance their own economic development by creating its own credit system to the global majority increase its infrastructure, agricultural and industrial investment. It also requires a new International Court of Justice to prevent oil companies and mining companies from polluting countries and resist being charged to pay for the cleanup costs that they’ve caused in their drive for quick natural-resource rents.
Ultimately, the Global Majority needs to create an alternative to the United Nations itself. All these institutions – the United Nations, the IMF and the World Bank – are subject to American veto power. The United States has long announced that a central tenet of its foreign policy is that it will not join any institution that it can’t control by vetoing if they do something that does not benefit the United States.
In the last few days, President Putin has proposed creation of a BRICS parliament. The aim is to create a large group of countries that will design a new set of the rules of how an international economy should work. President Putin also said that the United Nations has a good set of rules, but the United States has vetoed their application in practice. The fact that the United Nations doesn’t have an army has left it powerless to resist the U.S., Ukrainian and Israeli violations of basic international law.
This emerging alternative BRICS group certainly will leave the United Nations to operate on the sidelines, but the “real” reformed United Nations will consist of the group of the global majority and its own set of institutions, acting as a unit in which the United States does not have veto power. That will transform the dynamic of how most of the world’s economies operate.
All this is an area that economists don’t talk about. Academic economics has become tunnel visioned, with simplistic ideas of government spending, inflation, money and credit, all without a concept of economic rent as unearned income to be minimized rather than made the foundation for financial fortunes.
The Western dynamic of “wealth creation” has been to raise real estate prices on credit. The middle class is told that it is getting richer as its housing prices rise, yet the effect is to prevent new wage-earners from joining the middle class unless they inherit their housing from their parents. The economic discipline no longer talks about how a country can actually enrich itself. So what the Global Majority needs is really a New Economics,
Luca Placidi:
Thank you, Professor. There’s one other topic that is very important and that we are seeing at this moment. That is what is happening in Palestine, between Palestine and Israel and the war that they call “against Hamas” while they seek to drive out or destroy the entire Palestinian population.
Michael Hudson:
When politicians from the United States to Germany and other European countries talk about the Ukrainian war or what is happening to Palestinians right now, there is a uniform a bipartisan alignment. Trump is saying what Biden is saying, and so is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. That is to support Israel up to the end, and also Ukraine.
Yet the whole world has been shocked by the genocide that the Israelis are waging not only in Gaza but on the West Bank. Their brutality, the bombing of the hospitals, the assassination of reporters and journalists so that the world can’t see what is happening has catalyzed the world’s moral outrage that is setting its identity against that of the NATO West.
The attack against Palestinians is with American bombs, just as is the case with Ukraine’s and NATO’s attack on Russian-speaking territories. So it’s not simply Israel that is attacking Palestine. This is primarily an American attack. You can think of it as a logical extension of the U.S. attacks on Iraq, Libya and Syria.
The common denominator is the American view that Israel serves as a U.S. landed aircraft carrier to control Near Eastern oil. If the United States can maintain control of the Middle East and its oil trade, it will retain the power to turn off the power of other countries by cutting them off from oil. As I explained earlier, oil has been a key to American power for the past century.
That is the military reason why the United States is backing Israel in dropping American bombs on Gaza, while the U.S. intelligence spy network is telling them where to bomb. American strategists have long followed the strategy that in order to win, you have to bomb the hospitals first.
The idea is not simply to kill the enemy population, but to cripple its members with anti-personal bombs to leave a lasting overhead cost in supporting women and men who are maimed for life. And most important is to bomb the children, so that they will not grow up to wreak retaliation.
The idea of making other Palestinians take care of crippled children who had their legs blown off or lost their arms is so inhuman, so against the most basic principle of civilization, that it has acted as a catalyst for other countries breaking away.
On July 25, 2024, Israeli President Netanyahu was invited to the U.S. Congress to ask for its military support for his planned attack on Lebanon and his hope to drag America into an attack on Iran. He put the issue in a way that I think you and I can agree on: Having killed or wounded as many as 180,000 Palestinians in Gaza and accelerated settler murders and destruction of Palestinians and their property on the West Bank, he explained that, in words reminiscent of Rosa Luxemburg: “This is not a clash of civilizations, it’s a clash between barbarism and civilization, between those who glorify death and those who sanctify life.”
I think that this is precisely what is at stake. Netanyahu and his neocon supporters in the U.S. Congress who invited him indeed have thrown down the military gauntlet threatening the world with yet new U.S. and Israeli violence against the Middle Eastern oil-producing countries.
Today’s buildup to such a war threatens the entire world with a new barbarism.
There already was a sort of tendency for the rest of the world, for Asia and the Global South to hope that somehow they could make do without making the enormous intellectual and moral break from the West. The feeling was that somehow they could survive through all this at least for the short run, as if things might somehow go back to some semblance of normal instead of continuing to polarize.
But what is happening in Israel the joint Israel-American attack on Palestine has shocked much of the world into realizing that this is what the United States might to do them, just as it’s what the US/NATO countries are doing to by fighting to the last Ukrainian. U.S. support for exterminating the Palestinians simply in order to use Israel as an arm to keep U.S. control of Middle Eastern oil is what is so abhorrent.
What is not to stop the Israelis from taking over Saudi Arabia and its oil, the Emirates, Kuwait, much as America did in Chile and Argentina to take over their minerals and land while assassinating labor leaders, land reformers and economics professors opposing Chicago School neoliberalism. The joint Israel and Ukraine wars have given a sense of urgency for other countries to realize that they have to act now in order to avoid a similar fate.
Other countries can’t simply be passive, because what is happening to the Palestinians can happen to all of them. That’s the degree to which Americans will go to maintain their global control. That’s why they are funding the Israeli attack on Palestine and the Ukrainian attack on Russian speakers. The Americans are providing the bombs and other weaponry, subsidizing their armies. This is what is creating the sense of urgency that is catalyzing the World Majority to realize that they can’t must act more rapidly and decisively to make a real break.
Luca Placidi:
Professor, I know that you’re extremely busy, so thank you very much. I want to thank you again, and I hope to have more time with you to go deeper on those topics. Thank you.
Michael Hudson:
Well, thank you. I hope we’ll have a chance to have a follow-up for all of this.
Luca Placidi:
We will, absolutely. Thank you very much.
Michael Hudson:
Well, thank you again for having me.
Preppy Tonk looked at her rival with an evil twinkle in her eye.“What?”“Nothing.”“I see that evil twinkle in your eye again.”“No. It must be the burning hot sun reflecting off your chromed head.”“Nuh-uh.”“Yeah- huh,” Preppy Tonk shot back.“Whatever, lets continue.“King to knight rook.”The purple slug looked down at the holographic chess board. “Poopy-doodles, you win again!”“Yaysies-daisies!””If this was Earth Chess, I’d kick your butt!” Jon exclaimed, wiggling his fat, dripping eyestalks.“Yeah, but the author doesn’t know how to play chess and that would require research and he’s too lazy.”“Yeah, I guess you’re right, but you’re still a silly.” Jon stuck his slimy purple tongue out.“Am not!”“Are too!”“Am not!”“Are too!”
“Well, let’s have a trace then.”
“Trace?”
“No, a race! Goddamn u, author. Fix your typos!”
“Yeah, you ready, Enourghipool… er, Preppy Tonk?”
“You know it, Jon!” she said and stretched her furry brown legs.
“Your silver eyes look like pools of mercury.”
“Thanks? I guess?” Crouching down in racing position, Preppy Tonk lifted her leg.
“Did you, make a stinky?”
“Yes, … I… did!”
‘”It smells like rotten eggs.”
Preppy Tonk’s face turned red.
“You made a stinky, you made a stinky!”
“Whatever.”
“Ready…” Jon announced as a star shot through space.
Preppy Tonk’s muscles tensed up.
“Set…”
“I know what comes next!” Preppy Oblanka Tonk smiled.
“Go!” Jon whispered.
“Run!”
“Jump!”
“Kick!”
“Touch the stars!”
“Look into the sun!”
“How? I’m blind.”
“Really?”
“No.”
“Why did you claim you were blind then?”
“Cuz I’m goofy!”
“But you’re not a hobo dog.”
“Goofy isn’t a hobo.”
“Oh , what is he?”
“A goofy dog, duh!”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I know these things,” Preppy Tonk whipped her huge head back with confidence.
“Oh, so you’re a professional now?”
“Yeppers.”
“Good grief!”
“Oxymoron, oxymoron, oxymoron!”
“Hey, that’s not nice!”
“No, an oxymoron is contradictory terms.”
“Oh, why is it called that then?”
“I don’t know. Do I look like an English professor?”
“I’m not sure how to take that…”
The two rivals panted as they ran throughout space. They passed an orange planet, then a blue one made of hot dogs, and finally, Earth.
“Stop describing everything!”
“Who are you talking to, sis?” Jon asked as a drifting robotic Golden retriever passed in between them.
“Our creator again. He keeps describing the scene,” Preppy Tonk replied.
“Isn’t he supposed to do that?”
“Yeah, but it’s getting annoying!”
“So? We’re competing against each other. That’s more important, right?”
“I guess so,” Preppy Tonk said, biting her blue puffy lip.
“Atta girl,” Jon replied and patted her on the back.
“Hey, how can you pat me on my back? I thought you were ahead of me.”
“Uh… I forgot that explanation.”
“Did you?… or did the author forget?”
“I have no cosmic idea, Preppy Tonk.”
“I thought you knew everything.” She raised an eyebrow.
Preppy Tonk glared at her opponent.
“You know, for an alien slug, you sure are fast!”
“Hmm, alien slug…. Where have I heard that before?”
“Maybe in a book about kids who can turn into animals?” shrugged Preppy Tonk.
“Almost at the finish line!” Jon said with glee.
“How can you tell?” Preppy Tonk asked, putting her hairy claws together.
“Checkered line coming up!” Jon pointed straight ahead with his slimy antennae.
“Oh, just cuz there’s a checkered line means the end of the race?” Preppy Tonk said, putting her paws on her brown meaty hips.
“Yes that’s the rule,” Jon said, adjusting his squared glasses.
“Well… OK,” Preppy Tonk said as she scratched her ear.
“Have an itch?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, I have an itch, too.”
“Nuh-uh!”
“Yeah-uh!” Jon said, passing a large pink asteroid.
“Well, then, where’s your itch, huh?”
“I don’t want to say.”
“Ew.”
“OK, OK, it’was my arm,” Jon smiled.
“Oh, that’s not bad.”
“It itches more than yours,” Jon said, scratching his arm.
“Nuh-uh, mine itches more.”
“Let’s finish the race!” Preppy Tonk exclaimed.
Jon ran through a hoop, jumped over the fence, and hauled through lava.
“I win! I win!” Preppy Tonk did the macarena.
“You cheated.” Jon pouted.
“No, I didn’t!
“Yes, you did!”
“No, I didn’t.”
“OK, I believe you,” Jon said.
“Knock knock,” Preppy Tonk whispered.
“Who’s there?” Jon asked.
“Dwayne.”
“Dwayne who?”
“Dwayne the bathtub, I’m dwowning!”
Jon laughed like a hyena. “Mine’s better!”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah, a duck walked into a bar and ordered some quackers. When the waiter asks her how she will pay, the duck says ‘put it on my bill.’”
“Not funny at all, my rival.”
“Humor is subjective, so I win!” Jon blew a raspberry at her.
“How old are you?” asked Poppy Tonk.
“I am an adult.”
“Cool, I’m a kid.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yes, really!”
“Prove it.”
“How?”
“Sing baa baa black sheep.” Preppy Tonk started singing.
“You have a beautiful voice!”
“And?”
“And what?”
“AREN’T YOU GONNA SING?”
“No, why would I do that?”
“I thought we were competing,” Preppy Tonk said and sneezed.
“Oh, yeah, goofy me. I forgot. By the way. Bless you or gazoontite, or whatever.”
“Thanks, wait… Goofy?”
“The author‘s getting tired of ‘silly’.”
“But, he used it.”
Preppy Tonk shrugged. “It’s his story.”
“Oh, OK.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I like that word very much!”
“I do too, but let’s move on.”
“Alright, wanna have a tickle fight?”
“You know I do!”
She tickled his foot. “Geetsa-geetsa… Hey, look, a tree; it’s floating in space,” Preppy Tonk said and floated to it and she giggled. “Stop.” Grabbed an apple. “This will knock your socks off!” She started juggling.
“Oh yeah?” Jon said as he cocked an eyebrow. “Watch this!” He grabbed the tree and shook it until every apple detached and floated into space.
“Impressive?”
“Thank you. I’m the King.”
“King of what?”
“King of Apple!”
“Yeah, right.”
“No, really.”
“Well, I‘m the Queen of Blueberry Squash Pie.”
“Nuh-uh.”
“Wanna keep going?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
“We made it to the thousandth word!”
As a babysitter, what was your, “Okay, that’s the last time I babysit for this family,” moment you had during a childcare job?
When I was about 13, a lady a block over (someone I didn’t know but lived on the same street as other people that I babysat) wanted me to babysit her 8 or 9 yo son 3 days a week over the summer while she worked. The first day was MISERABLE and I told her I wasn’t coming back.
The kid was unmedicated ADHD with no accommodations/schedule/discipline in place. He was a Tasmanian devil – literally bounced off walls, jumped on/hit/kicked you if you said no to something, was destructive to everything. The kids on his block (the ones I babysat for) refused to play with him b/c he was too rough (and these were rough and tumble kids – 7 kids close in age, but they had awareness and empathy for others).
From what I learned later, he’d been kicked out of every camp and daycare that she enrolled him in and school was pretty close. How this mother thought that an 8th grader would be able to handle him for 9 hours every day is beyond me.
I took him to the park where he pushed kids off swings and down the slide rather than wait his turn. We left the park and he proceeded to run into the street b/c he was mad that I said we had to leave b/c of his behavior, after he hit and kicked me when I was holding his hand.
He threw his lunch around the house and smashed it into the carpet, tore up a board game, threw the neighbor kids’ (my usually charges) ball down the gutter when we went outside b/c they didn’t want to play with him, tossed a blanket over me from the indoor jungle gym they had in the basement and jumped on me repeatedly, and so much more!
Then mom was 2 hours later than she said she would be and hadn’t answered the phone when I called. I was exhausted and done.
She paid less per hour than most of the other parents paid for nighttime babysitting when the kids were asleep and then only paid me for the hours she scheduled me for, not the extra hours since she was late. When she got home, I said that I wouldn’t be coming back and wouldn’t recommend anyone.
Now I know that this kid could not control himself and we didn’t have as much information as we have today on ADHD, but the parents were decidedly the problem in this equation – there’s only so much a young teenage kid can do.
ETA: I should mention that this was probably 1991 or 1992 – I don’t remember if it was the summer before or after 8th grade.
Men Are Course Correcting the Dating Market
Why do Chinese users have Zhihu instead of Quora?
I am a Chinese citizen who also happens to be a content creator on both Quora and Zhihu. Zhihu, often referred to as the Chinese version of Quora, once had a similar UI layout and community atmosphere to Quora. As of July 27, 2024, I have around 14,000 followers on Zhihu. This is because I have shared over 500 answers on family education and adolescent learning issues over the past year. While 14,000 followers is not a number to boast about, it at least indicates that I am a dedicated Zhihu user.
However, if we look solely at the growth rate of followers, my follower count on Quora has increased significantly faster than on Zhihu. This month marks my third month of writing on Quora, though my writing has been occasionally interrupted by work. For instance, I took a break from Quora writing for the past 14 days due to a family trip. Despite this, I have gained 1,200 followers and accumulated 1.5 million views. I am quite satisfied with these numbers, especially considering my limited English proficiency and reliance on translation tools for complex sentence structures. I can only attribute this success to the large number of friendly users on Quora. They are willing to read my articles about Chinese life, tolerate my poor English, and often put up with sentences that have a machine-translated feel. Nonetheless, they encourage me and provide detailed feedback and suggestions.
Even some users who are biased against China have written lengthy comments on my posts. Although I often completely disagree with their views, I still find their input valuable. Writing lengthy critiques at least shows they are real, communicative individuals rather than bot accounts. Therefore, I also want to express my gratitude to those who criticize me.
In this regard, the community atmosphere on Quora is better than on Zhihu. Zhihu’s official policies seem more focused on directing traffic towards profitable content. Of course, I do earn some income from my writing on Zhihu each month. However, this profit-driven community model brings some issues. The main problem, in my view, is that genuine, selfless sharing rarely gets sufficient traffic, which discourages many high-value users. It’s hard to imagine a community that doesn’t encourage serious writing being favored by knowledgeable individuals.
My most popular article on Zhihu received 60,000 “upvotes” and was bookmarked 130,000 times, bringing me millions of views. But I consider this an anomaly. In many cases, I need to rely on luck rather than writing quality to gain significant traffic distribution on Zhihu.
Chinese commercial apps are involved in intense market competition, and most users’ leisure time is consumed by short videos or live streaming. Fewer people are reading text content. While I know Quora is also affected by this trend, the impact is more pronounced on Zhihu.
To my surprise, I found that some older users on Quora seriously read my articles and give enthusiastic responses. I am flattered by this. In China, many elderly people are stubborn and never admit their mistakes, leading to many family conflicts and hindering young couples from establishing good family relationships. Moreover, those over 70 in China were teenagers during the tumultuous period between the end of the ROC and the establishment of the PRC, making them almost illiterate.
However, the elderly users on Quora seem to remain passionate about understanding others’ perspectives and updating their knowledge. Just from their writing, it is hard to tell they are seniors. This has given me the best impression of elderly people in developed countries since I joined Quora. I am convinced this is a state only achievable in a highly developed society. In China, we may need to wait a few more years to reach this level.
Additionally, some Quora space administrators have invited me to join their spaces and share my articles, encouraging me to keep writing. It has been many years since I felt this kind of sincere interaction on the internet, where people come together out of interest rather than profit.
In summary, I will continue writing about parent-child relationships and adolescent learning issues on Zhihu. There are always people waiting for my writing, drawing inspiration from my words, and solving their life problems. I take pride in helping others.
At the same time, I will also continue writing on Quora because it allows me to experience the genuine interactions of the early internet days.
If I had to compare, I would say Quora is a community that cares more about its creators than Zhihu.
China Just Won the Future of South America With THIS New Move!
BRICS+ plus BRI
What was something that someone said or did that has changed you forever?
Back when I was an eleven-year-old in the 6th grade, I lived in a poor mountain community in Northern California. Most of the townspeople relied on the lumber mill to provide for their meager income. There were a lot of people barely scraping by on what little money came in.
Times were tough.
A lot of times the mill shut down and families were forced to move out of town to find employment elsewhere.
I lost a lot of friends that way.
Kids went hungry. There were a lot of skinny children up in those mountains. A lot of those kids were wearing shoes with holes in them.
In the snow.
Desperate times.
Judge Richard Eaton was an “old-timer” in Shasta County. A pioneer. He was an octogenarian with a kind heart and a flush bank account. He married my grandparents!
He was an avid outdoorsman and angler. He enjoyed coming up to the mountains to fish. Sometimes, he would stop by our small classroom and give nature lectures.
He would bring in a stuffed raccoon, or a taxidermied owl and set it up on a desk in front of the class and give his talks. We would sit wide-eyed, fascinated, listening to him describe how the animal hunted for food, or built a nest or comfortable burrow, warm enough to survive during the winter snows. He was a natural storyteller and had a way with words.
We would raise our little hands and ask question after question, enthralled and intrigued with his wisdom. We were always thrilled to have Judge Eaton stop by. We hugged him goodbye when it was time for him to leave. I’d see his wrinkled face break into a big grin as tears welled up in his eyes, hard to break away.
I could feel his pity for us skinny little waifs.
One day, a letter was sent home to all the parents in my class.
It said we had the opportunity to attend National Environmental Education Development (N.E.E.D) Camp for one week at no charge to the parents!
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This was an expensive gift to attend a weeklong camping adventure, what with meals, transportation, insurance and staff provided for an entire crop of school children!
The generous gift of partial scholarship, provided by Judge Richard Eaton, in cooperation with the Shasta County Board of Education, made it a possibility for every single child to attend, no matter their financial circumstance!
Exciting news!
N.E.E.D Camp was a place where the kids learned about the environment; survival skills in the wilderness, wildlife, geology, ecology, plant identification, weaving fish traps and shelter building, as well as learning how to use a compass and reading topographical maps. It was all covered in the week-long school.
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Before we left for camp, we were given a three- day supply of “ImmunOak” in our daily orange juice. Poison oak didn’t grow in the mountains, but was plentiful at N.E.E.D Camp. Back in those days, the FDA hadn’t yet banned the magic elixir, so I drank down my disgusting anti-venin like a good girl, and to this day, thirty-something years later, I still am immune to poison oak!
The day we departed, we were packed into a bus with all our gear, kids, teachers and high school counselors, and made the hour-and-a-half long journey to the camp. We arrived at camp, got our cabin assignments, and settled in for our first time away from home.
Goodbye Mommy!
It was great!
We caught tadpoles and learned about their development. We hiked seven mile loops, through caves (filled with bats) and over waterfalls, collecting specimens to write our reports in the field, amidst trickling creeks and wildflowers. We took water samples from the natural watershed and observed fish in the streams as we tried our hand at catching some in our homemade traps.
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We didn’t have any luck.
We watched the deer feeding on the grass right outside our cabin, and learned to identify species of birds. We glassed bald eagles and spied on squirrels and raccoons.
We were even dropped off, solo, without a light, on a pitch-black trail one dark night, and had to hike back, in the dark woods, alone, to find our way back to the rest of the group by ourselves. Frightening!
I was proud of myself that I didn’t cry.
This is stuff “city kids” don’t learn about in the classroom.
This wasn’t any regular classroom!
Judge Eaton spoke at the camp. He gave a slideshow on bears. It scared me to know I was out in the dark with them. It also made me proud. I learned survival skills at a very young age from N.E.E.D Camp.
Afterwards, while he was packing up his projector and the other kids had finally moved away from him, I got up the nerve to approach this gray-haired icon.
I said hello and introduced myself. I told him my grandparents names and told him he had married them long ago. He pretended to remember. He smiled at me kindly.
I thanked him for giving me a scholarship to attend N.E.E.D Camp. I told him I had learned so much and that I was very appreciative.
His eyes got wide and he looked shocked. He pulled me into a hug and knelt before me, eye-level.
“Child, in all these years I’ve been providing this fund, you’re the first young person to say those words. I appreciate hearing them, but I always want you to remember, that whenever you give a gift, you should never, ever expect to hear a word of thanks in return. Ever! Because the gift is in the giving, itself. Not in the praise we receive for giving it. Do not expect to be congratulated for it. Do you understand me?”
I nodded my head and turned away, disappointed in the rebuff.
What a weird, old guy!
Of course, I didn’t understand him, then.
I was only a child.
But I thought back to that moment over the years, and one day, I finally caught up to his wisdom.
I understand perfectly what he means now.
Beautiful.
Those simple words changed me forever.
When I give a gift, I don’t expect to receive accolades or thanks. I don’t expect the recipient to express gratitude or overwhelming graciousness; my heart already feels thankful for the beautiful blessing I’ve bestowed. And that’s a gift in itself. A gift I’ve given to myself.
By the time I had made it to high school, I had garnered such respect for N.E.E.D Camp, that I went back and volunteered as a camp counselor when I was seventeen.
Somehow, I was assigned a cabin of little boys, instead of girls.
Those little guys were a handful, but it was a great experience all over again.
Today, it is part of the curriculum of most Shasta County schools for their students to attend the camp. It is a requirement as part of passing the grade level.
Over 70,000 students have attended the camp over the years and have acquired basic outdoor skills other students in classrooms throughout the USA will never be required, nor even think are important to learn about!
Because those students aren’t mountain kids.
They probably don’t need to worry about being lost in any area bigger than a mall!
Like we do.
I’m thankful to both Judge Eaton and the Shasta County Board of Education for making a difference. N.E.E.D Camp quite possibly played a part in saving my life later on in life. And the experience changed me forever.
The Record Searchlight (April 11, 2011)
Since 1971, more than 70,000 students have increased their knowledge of environmental science after going through the weeklong camping experience at the Whiskeytown Environmental School in the Whiskeytown National Recreation Area. In celebration of its 40th anniversary, the school will host a free barbecue with live music and a history lecture Saturday.
Sponsored by the school and the Shasta Historical Society, the lecture will cover topics of interest before the school arrived amid the environmental revolution in the beginning of the 1970s. Clinton Kane, park ranger, will be the main speaker.
As a general campground in the mid-1900s, church youth groups seasonally used the area for a camp. Before this period, the land served as a stomping ground for the American Indian community. The history, Kane said, has yet to be fully recovered. “It’s still a work in progress in terms of learning about the history and putting it together,” he said. “I’d like to go as far back as to the mining use of the history, but it’s kind of sparse.”
During the Gold Rush era, the area became a major transportation route for miners heading toward Weaverville from Redding. Inside the park, miners, along with farmers and ranchers, worked on the mining hot spots during the 1850s.
The school, a National Environmental Education Development (N.E.E.D.) camp, specializes in improving environmental education for elementary and middle schoolchildren. “Facilities and institutions like the N.E.E.D. camp provide a special dimension to the youth of our community,” said Pat Carr, Shasta Historical Society lecture series coordinator. “Oftentimes, they aren’t going to get it in the classroom. This is an opportunity to take the classroom outdoors. And the fact that this has been going on for 40 years with 70,000 students makes us appreciate these extraordinary treasures that are in our mist.”
Fifth- and sixth-graders across several counties make reservations at the school for the overnight trips where students stay in cabins and enjoy campfires. During their stay, they build onto what they’ve learned of the environment in the classroom with hands-on activities with naturalists. This usually lasts a week. The school offers day camps for younger children starting at the kindergarten level.
With generations of children and later their children heading to the camp, Kane said it has become somewhat of a tradition for north state students.
“It’s kind of a tradition in Northern California,” he said. “But, unfortunately, with the budget crisis happening on the state and federal level, we don’t know if the school will continue as it did back in the day.”
A downward economy and budget cuts have decreased revenue for educational programs like this one. Whiskeytown may be one of the few N.E.E.D. camps left in the country, Kane said.
US American Reacts – Are We the Baddies?
What screams “I’m upper class”?
Good posture. If you look at how upper class people walk, they stand perfectly straight and have a graceful swing to their step.
Being very respectful with staff, waiters, taxi drivers etc.
Eating all sorts of different food and not being fussy about food. This is a very tell tale sign again, someone who’s reluctant about trying new food or has never tried foreign food is usually not upper class.
Being able to make small talk with basically anyone. This is an important skill to have and that we’ve learned by attending a lot of formal events.
Having impeccable table manners. This is the ultimate test and it will betray you instantly. Sitting up straight, no elbows on the table, knowing which cutlery to use, keeping your voice down etc. If you want to know within the very first seconds, look at whether they have put their napkin on their lap (correct) or left it on the table (rude) immediately after sitting down to eat. EDIT: Other table manners include: Not spreading out your elbows (keep them closed at all times), no singing, bringing your spoon/fork to your mouth and not the opposite, not cutting potatoes or salad with a knife (you fold the salad and use your fork to cut the potato), making small talk with your right hand neighbour at a dinner (they’re your official conversation buddy and the table plan will probably have been set up with this in mind) and not having a young or newly married couple sitting right next to each other during a formal dinner. An old fashioned one is also not to peel any fruits with your hands. One of my mom’s friends often mentions how, during her first dinner with her in laws, they offered her a peach for dessert and watched expectantly to see if she would know how to peel it using only her fork and knife.
NOT doing the “baisemain”. You know, that very supposedly classy way of greeting a woman by kissing her hand. There are very strict rules for when you are allowed to do it. It should be in a private environment and to greet a married lady only. Oh and your lips are not supposed to actually touch the hand. Otherwise it is considered very tacky and rude.
Not asking huge favours from other people. This is a weird one but it’s a “faux pas” that I notice all around me. It is not upper class behaviour at all to ask too much of a big favour from other people. You can ask someone to send you their notes for example, but don’t ask them to bring them to your place or type them out for you because they’re handwritten. Basically any favour that makes things too convenient for you and too much of an inconvenience for the other person is a no no.
Not showing off your money or luxury goods. It is not considered classy to wear anything that features the name or logo of a brand in a very ostentatious way. That is “Nouveau Riche” behaviour. Being upper class is all about being understated. That also applies to luxury hotels and exotic holidays. We don’t post about it on social media.
Being agreeable, polite and social. One of the most important things my mother taught me when I was a kid is that being shy is not an excuse for being rude. And it is definitely something that will make it very obvious whether you had an upper class upbringing or not. When you are talking to someone you know and a friend joins you but your interlocutor does not know them, you interrupt your conversation and introduce them, then make an effort to help them integrate the conversation. This might sound basic to a lot of you but I’ve noticed a lot of my middle class friends fail that test. Keeping to your own at social events is also not acceptable. Not thanking your host after a meal is not acceptable. Basically, get over your shyness.
It’s about experiences, not goods. Upper class people are well travelled, have done internships abroad, are doing all sorts of different activities outside of school, go to summer camps and are not afraid of taking risks.
They won’t tell you they’re upper class. Bragging about your social status is, again, Nouveau Riche behaviour.
Some MM art constructions
The theme is anointing,,,
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This next one is my favorite of the entire bunch.
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Why do people believe China’s economy cannot recover when their onshore manufacturing industry is intact, and they are also improving on their high-end manufacturing?
Don’t look at the headlines
Look at what they are saying in the paragraphs
They are saying China can never go back to the days of higher growth
They are saying that China cannot go back to 12–14% growth that it had for a decade or so
The Headlines say Chinas Economy can’t Recover
Yet when to look at what RECOVERY MEANS, it’s always the old days of 12–14% growth
The Headlines are always misleading
China slowdown woes continue
This is the headline
Yet if you see slowdown, it always references to 2015/16 and comparisons
The common theme is China which once grew with double digits can’t grow beyond 5% a year today
It’s true of EVERY ECONOMY ON EARTH
The US has been growing at 1.5% – 2.5% a year for a long time whereas it grew at 9% in the 1960s and 7% in the 1970s
Likewise China grew at 12% when it’s economy was $ 6 Trillion. Now it’s $ 19 Trillion and three times larger so obviously growth will slow down to 5%
Maybe without the Real Estate Reforms it would have been 6% or 6.25% but that would have caused a long term headache
So look beyond the headline
Look at what they say
Except a few people like Gordon Chang or Serpentza or Peter Zheihan – 99% of the Economists always talk of Chinas underlying strength while saying it can’t go back to the old days
And the Mainstream Media keep deliberately manipulating the headlines
Parents Have MELTDOWN At Wedding When Son Exposes Them For Covering Up Brother Sleeping With Ex Wife
I love how men are supposed to humiliate themselves to protect OTHER PEOPLE’S image.
Who are some famous intellectual badasses?
It is quite hard not to admire Mark Twain. The man was incredibly clever and skilled in deconstructing damaging narratives and social constructions… everyone always speaks of the now-controversial “Huckleberry Finn”, but he also wrote another great book — the now shamefully forgotten Pudd’nhead Wilson.
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In Pudd’nhead Wilson, Mark Twain takes apart the “one drop rule” myth of black ancestry, and does so beautifully… two boys are mixed at birth, one fully white, the other of distant black ancestry. Twain dives into things like scientific racism, racial superioty, all themes incredibly controversial for his day and age — his Pudd’nhead Wilson was published in 1894. Huckleberry Finn was published ten years earlier, in 1884. And there, too, he deconstructed myths and humanized a part of the population (black people, former slaves) that too many in society saw as “lesser”.
Above we see Twain with his best friend, a former slave named John T. Lewis on whom he based some of his black characters. I would label Mr. Twain every inch the “intellectual badass”. If only for amazing quotes such as: “Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it.” Or: “If voting made a difference, they wouldn’t let us do it!”
Mark Twain was the sort of no-nonsense, straightforward, razor-sharp wit that comes around perhaps once a century, if even that. He was the real deal. And he didn’t give a damn about what society thought of him — he was the very rarest of creatures: honest, genuine and true intellect expressed with eloquence unmatched.
Russia’s Harsh Response┃Putin Is Sending ZIRCON Long-Range Hypersonic Missiles To CUBA and VENEZUELA
Do you know anyone who won the lottery & what did they do with it?
I know a great man who won $3 million on a scratcher while Covid was coming on full swing.
At the time he was living in a small one bed apartment with his girlfriend, working part time at a gas station. They shared a beat up, out of date vehicle that drew attention from every police officer on the road.
Four months before this, they were hotel hopping weekly and barely able to feed themselves.
The day he got the check from the lottery office, he went to the bank and got set up with an account and an advisor and put 75% into a stock portfolio and used the rest to buy safe vehicles for himself and his girlfriend, as well as a home for the two to build a life in.
His main goal with his winnings is to never be homeless again and to always be able to provide for his family without worry. He set up a monthly transfer between two accounts to “pay” himself a budget and the rest is in a long term portfolio is designated for their retirement.
Two weeks later he left his job. Three weeks after that his girlfriend left her job and they moved into their new home.
They spent some time enjoying this weightlessness and traveling.
Four months after he cashed in, he proposed to his girlfriend. The only thing preventing him before was their lack of financial stability.
This august will be the 2 year anniversary of my husband’s winning ticket purchase.
I am back to working full-time now at a new job, which is a choice he knew I’d make quickly because of my own pride and desire to be productive.
My husband still enjoys his free time, and has been spending more time in nature and with his ‘brothers’ who need a positive male figure in their lives.—- -brothers by choice who ended up being wolves coming from the woodworks———edited 01/2023.
To this day, my husband will tell you that “God” didn’t give him that money. The “devil” did. It was a failed attempt at claiming his soul, but if the devil(evil) is out there, so is God(light/love). My husband chooses love and light every time.
—- update: it is now the beginning of 2023 and we are finally settling into where we want to be with finances and working toward new goals. We set ourselves up for low monthly bills in that first year, so that we can maintain our home and bills on our typical income with a little help from investment dividends. (I also highly recommend reading Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki).
We have had a huge gear switch in mentality as we are expecting to expand our family this year! We are beginning another round of reviewing our finances and spending habits in order to reframe our budget and prepare for what is to come!
Our “luck” has exposed many wolves that came rushing out of the woodwork and has left my husband’s circle dwindled. We found much strength in family, as well as solitude. We wish you all much love, light, and peace in the upcoming year!
The Divine Purpose of Cats | 6 types of cats that expel negative energy from your life!
Why hasn’t communism worked except in China?
The fucked up thing about this identify politics is to shoot the arrow first and draw the target later.
It’s an arrow called “this is communist” and wherever it is shot, it must be communist. It doesn’t matter if the target is communist, but it has to be, because there is an arrow called “this is communist” on it.
Western definition of communism is fucked up, for starter.
Communism is supposed to be, in the theory of Marxism, the ultimate form of human society. It can only be reached when the productivity of human race is in an unthinkable high level, where people wouldn’t be worried about survival anymore but can focus on distributing to the society.
It’s not that “communism will come and confisticate your private property and make you poor”, it should be that “when communism became feasible, people would not have to own private properties”. However, everything can be interpretated from different angle and perspective, thus came up with different conclusions.
USSR was socialist.
Vietnam is socialist.
Every so called communist country in human history is actually socialist, and so is China.
The very foundamental rule of social format is that the social structure must match with the social productivity.
If somehow a liberalism and capitalism believer time travelled to 5000 years ago, to a slavery society, would it be possible for this person to apply capitalism there? Assuming they could communicate.
The answer is No. A big, fat NO.
Because the social productivity of a slavery society simply cannot support the foundation of capitalism, mass production.
Same reason when China naively tried to practice communism to accelerate the development in 50’s. It’s called the Great Leap Forward, and we all know that it failed.
Public ownership of means of production in socialism is the result of productivity development, not the cause of it. Productivity cannot be raised by simply forcing people to contribute their personal belongings to the country.
Communist party of China learnt that through some painful lessons, and decided to embrace capitalism, hence the reform and open in 1978.
Karl Marx had written in his books that human society should be developed from capitalism to socialism and eventually to communism. Capitalism, in the period of low productivity, is very good to stimulate people’s motive and creation. But it also has its downside, such as the
Matthew effect:
It’s because the rich has means of production, which actually creates value.
Say a crafts person made a 500USD sword from a 50USD steel, 450USD got created through the smithing.
One the other hand, financial market doesn’t create value, but only to re-distribute the wealth from some people to the others.
For those who relying on the salary to live, all they can do after getting paid is to spend the money, and the money would flow back to the capitalists whom sell everything. However, the capitalists cannot spend all their money, thus the rich getting richer.
To solve this, China decided to keep the state-owned enterprises.
Their highest priority is not to make more profit, unlike every private company, but to maintain the control of the government over senstive and critical industries, and to provide social welfare. such as public transporation, water, electricity, etc.
China’s water, natural gas, and electricity prices are extremely stable, not long throughout a year, but can be stable for years. Because it’s closely related to the living standard of every Chinese, and can cause instability in society.
China Railway still executes the price standard of 2000’s for passengers. Chongqing North to Zhengzhou East, 1068KM, and the price for a second class seat in bullet train is 512RMB, or roughtly 70 USD. If taking the regular 120KMPH train and the regular seat, the price is 156RMB, or roughly 20 USD.
Government doesn’t care if China Railway loses money on passenger business, because it’s almost certain negative profit. As long as it keeps the punctuality and other service qualities, the government will be satisfied.
Farmers carrying their vege and other products going into the city for better prices. 40KM distance, it used to take them over 2 hours and 2 transit buses, and now is 22 minutes and only 1 USD.
There is another train in Hunan Province, specifically for farmers, which is free to take.
It’s not charity, but only the social responsibility of state-owned enterprises.
In China, after a natural disaster, say earthquake, we expect the government to establish tents within days, preferablly within the same day.
State grid would restore the electricity in a few hours to a few dozen hours.
China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom would re-establish cellphone network also in a few hours to a few dozen hours.
People’s Liberation Army are expected to be at the center as the first external rescue force, and they usually are.
Because of the constant investment in infrastructure from the state-owned enterprises, I haven’t experienced a blackout for years. The last time I remember having a blackout is probably 2013 or 2014. It was a summer night, and I slept in my car instead.
Sometimes, their service attitude may not be the best, but we can always count on them.
As for some other state-owned companies, they are also to be expected to have more profit, such as China National Machinery Industry Corporation, China State Shipbuilding Corporation, Sinochem Corporation, etc.
However, they also have another duty which is to lead the tech development of China.
China is the leading country in electricity related technology, especially ultra high voltage trasmission,
because China has the needs to move the electricity from the west to the east.
If the government decided to do so, the state-owned enterprises would have to execute the plan. There is no room for negotiation.
Also, with the rich renewable and clean energy sources in west China, state-enterprises had to develop their state of art electricity generation technologies. Some creations are already out of this world and entered Sci-Fi area, like this melt salt tower plant.
Besides all the critical sectors, China went full-on capitalist mode.
There are already some leading Chinese private companies being very active on world stage, such as:
Each of them is a pain in the ass for the US government, because of being too competitive.
There are many more, but most of them are not well known to the general public.
China’s real structure is socialist bones with capitalist flesh.
It’s certainly not communist.
Because communism is the ultimate goal, not the process.
AIR SUPPORT – Retro Pulp Science Fiction by Skyward, 1966, Mixed Film Parameters, Style Experiments
What is the most regrettable thing you’ve done out of curiosity?
When I was in eighth grade, I had a “friend” (She declared us as friends, and I didn’t deny it) that couldn’t feel “the hot stuff on the stove”, meaning she wouldn’t get burned when touching a stove top.
Well, at least that’s what she had said.
One day, she decided to self invite herself to my house.
“Amon. I’m coming over to your house after school. Text me your address”.
“Uhh, okay?”.
But before the story unfolds, you need to know that I have an electric stove:
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(The exact one)
On the glass, there’s a little light in the center that turns red when the top is hot, to give a warning.
Anyway.
I went home, cleaned, ordered food so I wouldn’t have to bother anyone to cook (So I wouldn’t have to do the dishes, too).
After about 2 hours, she had finally showed up.
We did normal things; talk, prank-call people (*67, y’all), use the PlayStation, etc etc.
“I don’t want to sound rude, but do you have food?”, she asked.
“Duh”.
“…Well gimme some”.
I rolled my eyes and brought the Taco Bell I was hiding in the kitchen to my room.
“Wait- I don’t eat fast food…”, she told me.
“Bruh, why are you te- ok, fine; more for me. What do you want?”.
“I want to COOK! By myself!”, she yelled.
“Woah, woah, girl. Chill, I’m not trying to do the dishes when you leave, okay? Let’s just thin-”
“Please? Don’t worry, I’ll clean them after”.
I glared, and after a while, I agreed.
Surprisingly, she was actually a great cooker…er, chef.
She knew what she was doing on the stove.
Once she had finished using it, she turned it off, but the little light was still red.
“By the way, do you know I can’t feel things, like, hot things?”, she told me.
“What’s wrong with you, what the heck? Prove it”, I demanded.
“I’ll show you later; let’s just eat now”.
I decided to lie to her.
“Me too, I can’t feel them either”.
“Oh yeah? Then put your entire hand on the stove”.
I laughed, wondering if I should just run, and walked to the stove.
One, two, three! I placed my entire hand flat on the stove.
“Hey, se-”.
Cue the screaming.
Thankfully, my hand was okay, and wasn’t burned at all.
I learned to a) Not invite that girl over again, and b) not trust every word people say.
Yeah, there are a few people who actually can’t feel pain, but she definitely wasn’t one of them.
I learned it the hard way.
Edit: Lololol, stop calling me dumb omg lmao, I knew it was hot, and I didn’t lose my common sense. I just didn’t want to admit that I was lying to her.
UNBELIEVABLE Infrastructure | China’s MIND-BLOWING metro station
In the Summer of the 1960’s and into the 1970’s was a blur of kid activities. We would ride everywhere on our bicycles, and our parents would all have various activities for us to get involved in.
One of which was “blueberry picking”. And us kids, loved it.
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We would go ahead and eat, and pick and put the rest in a bucket. Repeat, over and over.
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Just spend hours picking the blueberries off the low bushes, and put them in the bucket.
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Take the bucket home, and then wash.
Add cream and there you have it! The perfect Summer special treat for young boys and girls.
So very Summer.
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These blueberry, blackberry, (and elderberry) bushes are everywhere in Pennsylvania. And getting those berries were a great deal of fun. It always was an all afternoon outing, and we were often taken to remote areas to collect those berries, and it was a great deal of fun for us kids.
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It’s a treasured memory for me today, and you know as you get older, you just don’t ever get this opportunity UNLESS you go out to take your kids out on their very own outings.
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Ah! Fun times.
Today…
What’s the most disrespectful thing a doctor/nurse did to you or your newborn after you gave birth?
Not me but to my aunt. Sorry, this was during birth but I decide to go ahead and post here.
During my aunt’s first 6 months of the pregnancy, she fell down 2 flights of stairs and had been taken to the hospital almost immediately as she had contractions but they sent her home with pills to stop the contractions. 8 months in and the baby tried to come out anyway, a quick trip to the emergency room we received a “You’ll be fine come back near the scheduled time.”
Two weeks later her water breaks and we rush to the hospital, her doctor is on vacation so we have a doctor sub in. This doctor quickly pissed off all the Nurses, the CRN, and the family. Did a quick test and said her water didn’t break, said we wasted her time, gave her no pain pills, and told her to eat some food and she’ll be okay.
1 hour later the baby starts to come out and the nurses rushed outside and panicked and we overheard them asking where the doctor was, “Where’s the bloody doctor?”
“She’s eating food and she said she’s not coming and she’s tired of ‘bitches faking'”. Now we’re all pissed off ready to send a complaint and sue the hospital and the doctor.
Finally, the nurse comes in starts her on the procedure, with the other nurse trying to get the sub-doctor or another doctor in the room. Then my aunt starts up a blood-curdling scream (Note that she couldn’t get any pain medication at this point) and the dreadful sound of “She’s losing too much blood!” and “The baby’s head is too big shes ripping a hole!” (I was scared having done no research or experiencing a birth before) finally, the sub burst in the door to take over delivering the baby and getting my aunt emergency surgery.
Let’s just say not only did we get compensation from the hospital, we sued twice.
1. The hospital for the birthing process and unprofessionalism.
2. The doctor for life endangerment, for abusing her license, and two more things I was told and forgot.
She lost her license, she has to pay for my cousin’s medical issues from the surgery. The hospital completely paid for the emergency surgery and we walked away satisfied.
How many countries can the Chinese withstand an attack?
From where?
From the Air – The farthest airbase cannot be more than 60 miles away right? That allows a rapid sneak attack into the airspace and out
That means Airbase or Aircraft carrier
That’s Philippines & Taiwan for Airbase and US and Japan for Aircraft carrier
You don’t expect Germany to send aircraft all those thousands of miles away do you?
From the water?
Again Japan, South Korea and US are the only possibility
India is a definite no no on the South China Sea
Too far from any Indian coastline
Okay for Maritime operations NOT FOR WAR
From the Land?
India has a border so India can make an incursion
Who else?
DPRK, Russia are not enemies
Nepal and Bhutan are way too weak
Nobody else
So worst case, the combined force against China would be :-
Aerial Air Force from US from Taiwan and Philippines
Naval Force from US, Japan and Korea along the South China Sea
Land Force from India
China has a decisive Army Group to ensure Indian Army can be countered
PLAN can easily take care of Japan and Korea
Taiwan and Philippines can be bombed to atoms in a few days
So ultimately it will be China vs USA and that’s how it will boil down to
WARNING | US Cities On Russia’s Nuclear Hit List
What are the most insane pictures of x-rays taken on people?
A collection of harrowing x-rays :-
Brutal X-ray of a man’s arm after a horrific meat grinder accident.
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X-ray shows a tear gas canister that fatally penetrated the skull of an Iraqi demonstrator during civil unrest in 2019.
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This chilling X-ray reveals the tragic end of Chen Liu, a 27-year-old man discovered in the marshlands near Sydney, Australia. He had been brutally murdered, with 34 nails shot into his body.
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In 2011, Leroy Luetscher, 86, fell on pruning shears in his yard, impaling his eye socket and neck. Despite the pain and injury, he managed to call for help. Doctors removed the shears and reconstructed his orbital floor, saving his eye.
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In 2020, the police released an X-ray image showing the severe injuries sustained by a young woman who was involved in a car crash while her feet were resting on the dashboard.
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In 2004, an X-ray showed a 5-centimeter nail in a South Korean patient’s skull. The man had a severe headache. Doctors at a Seoul hospital discovered the nail, which they believed had been there for four years after an accident, unknown to the patient.
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The X-ray image depicts the gruesome result of being shot in the elbow with a 12-gauge shotgun.
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This x-ray shows how a 16-year-old boy survived a violent incident where a 5-inch knife was impaled in his head during a robbery in London.
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In 2004, Isidro Mejia, a construction worker, had six nails embedded in his skull after a nail gun accident. Five were removed in surgery on the same day, and the sixth was extracted later, following a reduction in swelling. He survived.
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Source : X
Why do some Japanese think they are superior to Han Chinese?
Originally Answered: Why does such an overwhelming amount of Japanese think they are superior to Han Chinese?
Actually, just today I experienced something like superiority over Chinese from a Japanese.
A japanese customer of mine received his shipment late due to the Chinese National holidays. In his email to me, which I translated using google translate, it says
“You Chinese are only so so. Not efficient at all compared to us Japanese. There is no excuse for being late. We Japanese are always punctual. It is an insult to customers when we give excuse for being late. Chinese have a long way to go before they learn what it is to be at our level of existence.”
Now, firstly I’m not chinese, I’m Singaporean. I just operate from China that’s all. So I explain to him in my reply to him that I’m Singaporean and the delay is due to the Chinese National holidays where everybody is not working for a week.
His reply (which again is tranlated by google)
“So sorry for the misunderstanding. It must not be your fault then, I did not know you are not Chinese. I know Singaporeans are very professional. You would not have delayed the shipment if you do not have to. The chinese are really unbearable. It is so inefficient to have 1 week holiday. Japanese will never allow this to happen, it is a disgrace. Chinese is really only so so. It must be difficult for you to work with such people.”
At first my ego was tickled by the fact that by simply mentioning that I’m Singaporean, he thought otherwise. But then I truly felt insulted by myself for feeling like that. So my reply…
“Dear Sir, there is no excuse for such misunderstandings, it is an insult to me when you continue to practice such racism even in your reply. It makes me feels like a racist if I’m to agree with you on anything you mentioned.
As such, I would proceed to refund all monies paid by you to your account once the banks starts operating tomorrow. I will also proceed to stop the shipment from proceeding tomorrow as it is in our best interest not to deal with each other again.
Have a good life. “
So am I wrong? Or do some Japanese really does feel superior to the Chinese?
Anyway, a disclaimer, I don’t do this to all customers. I just took a look at his order which is less than 500USD and decided that I can afford to teach him a lesson. And now after I read Naoya Yamaguchi answer, I really felt better already. Thank you Naoya.
Cat Goes To Temple Every Day To Become A Buddha. You Won’t Believe What Happened To It
Years ago I worked at a psychiatric hospital in inner-city Chicago as a relatively-inexperienced RN.
While covering the adolescent unit overnight, I enjoyed listening to the stories told by two of our more seasoned and perceptive mental health technicians. These guys were physically imposing, youngish men of color who had grown up in the neighborhood and had pretty much seen it all, and usually more than once.
They found me intriguing for the same reason I found them to be so: Namely, that with my white middle-class small-town self, my first-person perceptions struck them as not simply different from their own but basically hilarious if not downright outrageous.🤭
They would often reminisce about growing up on the city’s south side, being mostly raised by a feisty grandma, getting whooped by this same 90-lb. grandma for doing crazy stuff that could have resulted in serious bodily harm or worse, and about eating bacon fat sandwiches for those last few days each month until grandma’s social security check came in.
Their impressions of white people were mostly informed by television sit coms and commercials, but also a roughly two-year stint they had done together at a sister psych facility on Chicago’s much-tonier lakeshore:
One night they related the story of a depressed and tearful adolescent boy who had confided during a unit group therapy session that he knew. KNEW. That his parents didn’t love him and in fact, had obviously NEVER loved him. His proof? On his 16th birthday his parents had gifted him with a brand-new Mercedes in his favorite color, blue.
Perplexed, one of my tech buddies had gently inquired of the boy how, exactly, this indicated his parents didn’t love him?
Between agonized sobs, the teen managed to choke out that he had wanted a blue BMW, not the BLUE MERCEDES BENZ!!
I don’t know if that screams upper class to everybody but it sure did to my workmates in that place and time.
Tortiglioni with Spicy Sausage Sauce
This recipe calls for only 6 ounces of meat, so it is good if want to cut down on meat in your diet. (I usually have to make meatballs in a separate sauce for MY family! LOL!)
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Ingredients
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 onion, finely chopped
1 celery stalk, finely chopped
2 large garlic cloves, crushed
1 fresh red chile, seeded and chopped
1 pound ripe Italian plum tomatoes, peeled and finely chopped
2 tablespoons tomato paste
2/3 cup red wine
1 teaspoon granulated sugar
12 ounces dried tortiglioni (or use rigatoni, penne, or ziti)
6 ounces spicy salami, rind removed (I sometimes use pepperoni)*
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley, to garnish
Grated Parmesan cheese, to serve
Instructions
Heat oil and add onion, celery garlic and chili and cook gently, stirring frequently, for about 10 minutes, until softened.
Add tomatoes, tomato paste, wine, sugar, salt and pepper to taste and bring to a boil, stirring occasionally. Lower heat, cover and simmer gently, stirring occasionally, for about 20 minutes. Add a few spoonsful of water occasionally if the sauce becomes too thick.
Meanwhile, cook pasta.
Chop the salami into bite-size pieces and add to the sauce. Heat through, then taste for seasoning.
Drain pasta and put into large bowl, pour sauce on top and toss to mix.
Scatter parsley on top and serve with grated cheese.
Notes
* Buy the salami in one piece so that you can chop it into large chunks.
What’s the most unprofessional thing a doctor has said to you?
I was 22 or 23 years old, married less than a year, when my husband, R., had his first gout attack. At the time I had long blonde hair and weighed about 100 pounds, so I looked like I was maybe 16 years old.
My husband went to his family doctor, who put him on two drugs. I’m a firm believer in asking doctors questions, so at R’s first check-up after going on the medications I asked for information about them. The doctor explained it this way:
“There are three drugs we use for gout. There’s one that we give to patients who are in the middle of a gout attack; it’s a powerful pain reliever and is one of the drugs I prescribed for R. He’s off of it now. The other two drugs are for maintenance. Since gout is caused by uric acid crystals in the blood stream we can treat it either by forcing the kidneys to remove more uric acid or by encouraging the body to produce less uric acid. I prescribed the drug that tells the kidneys to work harder.”
I thought about that for a moment, and then said “R. already has albuminuria (a marker of kidney problems); don’t you think it might be safer to use the drug that won’t cause further stress to his kidneys?”
Well, apparently this doctor wasn’t used to having his judgment questioned by the wife of a patient, or else he wasn’t used to having it questioned by a “mere girl,” because rather than actually considering my suggestion he decided to lie. He said, “R. has been on this drug for a month now and we know that it’s working. If I take him off of it, and it then turns out that the other drug won’t do the job for him, when I put him back on it he may have developed an allergy to it. And that would mean that there’s nothing we can do for his gout; the crystals will get into his organs and he’ll die horribly.”
It was the first time a doctor lied to me, so I didn’t recognize it as a lie; even now I only know that it was a lie because a good doctor who is also a friend has told me so. But at the time I accepted it and didn’t push the issue, a mistake I’ve never made again.
My husband died almost two and a half years ago, after discontinuing dialysis. I visited him in the nursing home every day, even after he stopped recognizing me. It isn’t a good way to go.
If I thought that doctor was still alive I don’t know what I’d do; it’s been too long to report him for malpractice (almost 50 years), but I will never forgive him for what he did to my husband.
I had been walking in the desert for what seemed like days. I was thirsty. My radiator went kaput somewhere on I-10 last night. No cell reception out here. The desert night comforted me—beautiful stars and comet trails. But after the sun rose, the temperature shot up far too quickly. By the time the sun was directly overhead, my legs felt like rubber and my tongue was swollen.
In the distance, what looked like a town from the Old West arose. One dirt road split two rows of shabby buildings. “Water,” I said out loud to myself. I blinked five or six times to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. Mirages of water on the horizon had been fooling me all morning, but this looked different. A tumbleweed blew by. A vulture landed on top of a barrel cactus. A scorpion crawled up my leg and I brushed it away.
When I got to town, I pinched myself to make sure it was all real. A saloon with faint piano music welcomed me on the right and an empty sheriff’s office slept on the left. The saloon probably had water so I walked through its two swinging half doors. My tongue felt like it was the size of a shoe sole.
The saloon was empty except for a bartender with a long, white beard and a Victorian woman playing an upright tack piano. The woman’s song was familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I’d heard it before. It didn’t sound like something you would hear in a saloon, though. It was almost a slow waltz, but the timing was complex, in three, then three, then two.
“Whatcha drinkin’, partner?” the bartender said.
“Wawa,” I said. My mouth wasn’t working.
“Haha,” the bartender said. “Looks like you got the thirst real good.”
The bartender pulled out a vanity hand mirror and handed it to me, pointing at my tongue. My tongue was the size of a saucer, inflamed and inflated like a balloon.
“The name’s Smitty,” the bartender said. “I reckon you prolly want some water. Water ain’t cheap out here, sonny. It’ll cost you. Cost you big.”
I pulled a hundred dollar bill out of my wallet and offered it to Smitty.
“You’re money ain’t no good here,” he said. Smitty pulled a pint glass down from the shelf and poured some clear, crisp, water into it from a barrel that had a tap. He placed the glass in front of me. I reached for it. He pulled it away.
“Hold on, now. I’ll give this here water to you, but you have to promise to do me a favor,” Smitty said.
“O-way, o-way,” I said.
He gave me the glass and I poured it straight into my throat and into my belly. A few seconds later, my tongue shrunk and I felt much better.
“Thank you, Smitty,” I said, panting in relief.
“Charlene plays the piano real nice, don’t she?” Smitty said.
“Why yes,” I said.
“Charlene’s in trouble, see,” Smitty said. “I’m gonna call in that favor today if it’s all the same.”
“Sure,” I said.
“I need you to shoot Terrible Ted for me,” Smitty said.
I felt my stomach hit the floor, not literally, like my tongue probably would have had I not gotten some water.
“I can’t shoot nobody,” I said.
“Well then, I ain’t givin’ you no more water,” Smitty said. I felt my tongue begin to tingle again. It swelled ever so slightly.
“And if I shoot Terrible Tim—”
“Ted”
“Terrible Ted. What then?”
“You can put your mouth on this here tap spigot for all I care. All the water here is yours,” Smitty said.
“What about the Sherriff? Won’t I get thrown in jail for shooting someone?”
“Nope,” Smitty said.
“How do you know?” I said.
“Terrible Ted done shot the sheriff. And now, he want’s to make off with my Charlene.” Charlene continued with her odd, cut time waltz.
“I ain’t got a gun, Smitty.”
Smitty unbuckled a belt and holster from his waist and put the bundle of revolver and bullets on the bar. “Here you go,” he said.
“Where do I find, Ted?”
“He’ll be here at sundown.”
“What does he look like?”
“You can’t miss him. Big, tall, dresses in all black. You know, how you’d expect someone named Terrible Ted to look.”
“What is this place?” I said.
“Tiny Town.”
“Wha—”
Suddenly, my tongue began to swell and I couldn’t speak.
“Yeah, you prolly have a ton of questions, like “Is this real?,” “Why is my tongue getting so big?,” “Why is Charlene playing Radiohead?”
“Waydiowed!” I pushed out. My tongue was getting fatter by the minute.
“Yeah, I don’t care for them that much. Singer sounds like a drowning cat. She likes that there ‘Pyramid Song,’ so I like it, too. Bout all she plays, anyway.”
“What wime wis it?” I asked.
“3:30. You got ‘bout an hour and a half till showtime.”
“Oh wime?”
“Ted.”
“Oh.”
I wandered out of the saloon and onto Main Street. A tumbleweed crossed my path. My tongue hurt. If I strained my eyes, I could see the swollen end of it in my lower field of vision. A vulture landed on a hitching post to my right. It squawked at me. I sat in a rocking chair on a porch not a few yards from the saloon. A scorpion ran across my pant leg and I brushed it off. I fell asleep.
I awoke to the sound of a slow pile driver banging in the distance. My swollen tongue made it difficult for me to turn my head. My tongue was the size of an inner tube and hung down below my belt.
When I did catch a look at the pile driver, it wasn’t a pile driver. It was a twelve foot tall man, dressed in black, walking slowly and heavily into town.
“Teywible Ted,” I tried to say.
Ted made his way to the middle of the street on the other end of Tiny Town. The town proper was maybe fifty yards end to end, so he wasn’t too far from me.
Terrible Ted stood in the middle of the street with his hands about six inches from his side. From where I sat, he looked like a cross between just about every western character you could imagine. His head was square like John Wayne’s. He was scruffy like Buford Mad Dog Tannen. His build was like Clint Eastwood, but twice as large.
“Draw!” Terrible Ted said.
I jumped up from my chair, walked to the road, and turned to face Terrible Ted.
My tongue throbbed of fire. It hurt so badly that I would have gladly shot Ted just to make it all stop. From the sight of things, Ted was going to shoot me anyway. I’d might as well try to defend myself.
“Draw!” he said.
I pulled the revolver from my side belt and pulled the trigger. My shot landed ten feet in front of Ted.
Ted pulled his revolver and shot me. His bullet hit my tongue, but the bullet bounced off of it. While the throbbing continued, the impact of the bullet was insensate.
“Draw!” he said.
I fumbled the revolver from my side and took a shot. This time, the bullet was closer, but hit short, just in front of Ted’s black boots.
Then, Ted shot me again in the tongue. I felt nothing.
Before he could say “draw” again, I pulled the revolver up with both hands, lined Ted up in my sights as well as I could, and pulled the trigger. This time, I shot him right between the eyes. He fell backwards and hit the ground with a resonant thud. I twirled the revolver around my finger, like they do in the movies, but I didn’t know how to land it in my holster.
My tongue was on fire and nearly dragging on the ground now. I went into the bar. Smitty was gone. Charlene and her tack piano interpretation of Radiohead were also gone. I put my mouth under Smitty’s water barrel and pulled the spigot. Water cascaded into my mouth. My tongue began to shrink. I kept drinking. The barrel seemed to never run out. I kept drinking. Then, I passed out.
I awoke to a splitting headache. The fluorescent lights didn’t help. The walls were white and the room was cold. My tongue hurt like it was on fire, but in stead of being a big fat inner tube hanging from my mouth, it was just a little swollen and wrapped in a bandage.
“Mr. Simmons, you’re awake,” a soft, pleasant voice said from the hall.
“Tharlene?” I tried to say.
“Yes, I’m Nurse Charlene. I will let Dr. Smith know you are awake.”
“Wha’ happen?”
“You were stung in the tongue by a scorpion,” she said.
“And, lucky to be alive,” Dr. Smith said. He swept into the room, grabbed the medical chart, and scratched his well groomed white beard.
“That bandage on your tongue can come off tomorrow,” he continued.
“Wher ‘m I?” I tried to say.
“Desert Town Medical. Highway patrol found your vehicle thirty miles south of here. A construction crew laying tar saw you wandering around, delirious. Another hour and you would have been done for.”
“Sorpion?” I asked.
“Yeah, only one critter leaves a sting like that. Had to be a scorpion. Never seen one prick someone in the tongue, though. Must a felt like your tongue was the size of Idaho. You probably hallucinated a bit, too.”
Before I could attempt to speak, Dr. Smith continued, “We’ll keep you over night and then send you on your way.”
“Buh—”
“Your car? We towed it here for you. Mechanic said it just needed some coolant. Topped you off, too. He’ll send you a bill for the tow and tune up. We’re glad you’re alive son.”
My head spun. Nurse Charlene and Dr. Smith left the room. Moments later, Charlene returned with some water and a few pamphlets. “Here’s some light reading for you, if you’re up for it. Sorry we don’t have a television.”
One pamphlet read: “The History of Desert Town: From Tiny Town to the Best Kept Secret in the Desert.” The pamphlet showed Tiny Town, as it appeared to me, from the saloon, to the dirt road through the middle.
I drank the water, felt my tongue’s bandage on the roof of my mouth, and was grateful to be alive.
The next day, I drove on. On the way out of town, I passed a road paving crew. Their large black tar machine had broken down. “Terrible Ted” was spray painted on its rear.
Is China powerful enough to invade the Philippines? How long would it take for the Chinese to land their feet in Manila?
Hi Don Wynn. Since you ask a naive question, it is better that i give you a naive answer. Actually China scare the hell out of Philippines during the recent confrontation with chinese coast guards only armed with axe ( presumably to prevent suicides of filipinos soldiers) to confront filipino soldiers fully armed with rifles who refuse to shoot but instead surrender their rifles to the chinese coast guards.
After a week, a Philippines trawler exploded and sunk in Chinese water. Fisherman was saved but not arrested and hand over the survivors back to Philippines.
Literally means that China is not interested in colonising Philippines but only claim what belongs to the chinese as compare to America that colonised Texas, Hawaii, Guam, etc and now most likely Philippines.
Trump’s program for America, end of globalism
The Duran
Why is the US doing such a bad job countering China’s rise?
The United States’ inadequate response to China’s rise is nothing short of a geopolitical blunder, driven by fear, misinformation, and a Cold War mentality that is both outdated and counterproductive.
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The reality is that America’s attempts to counterbalance China have been fundamentally flawed because they are based on misperceptions and misguided strategies, failing to recognize the true dynamics of China’s growth and influence.
At the core of the U.S.’s ineffective approach lies a significant misunderstanding of modern China. The American narrative, largely shaped by the media, often portrays China as an oppressive, backward nation on the brink of collapse, rife with human rights abuses and economic instability. This skewed perception leads to policies based on fictional threats rather than the real, evolving landscape of a rapidly advancing China. Operating under these misconceptions ensures that the U.S. is often preparing for battles that do not exist while neglecting the actual areas where China excels.
One area where U.S. strategies have particularly fallen short is technological competition. In its bid to restrict Chinese access to advanced technologies, the U.S. has inadvertently spurred China to double down on self-reliance and innovation. Efforts to curtail entities like Huawei have backfired, with China making significant strides in fields like 5G, AI, and quantum computing. The launch of the Huawei Mate 60, with its domestically-produced 5G chip, serves as a testament to how U.S. actions have often spurred China’s technological advancements instead of stalling them.
The economic interdependence between the U.S. and China adds another layer of complexity. Despite attempts to sever ties and decouple the economies, the sheer scale of trade and investment links makes this next to impossible without causing significant harm to both sides. U.S. industries, from agriculture to tech, are deeply integrated with China, and measures like tariffs and sanctions often backfire, harming American businesses and prompting severe pushback. This economic entanglement means that any attempt to counter China must be meticulously calculated to avoid mutual economic downfall.
Globally, the U.S.’s attempts to isolate China have frequently missed the mark. China continues to bolster its influence through initiatives like the Belt and Road and expanding its reach within organizations like BRICS. These efforts have allowed China to create strong economic and diplomatic ties, countering U.S. attempts at isolation and even attracting nations traditionally allied with the U.S. to engage more with Beijing for economic and strategic benefits.
Back home, the United States faces its internal challenges that further impede its ability to effectively respond to China’s rise. Issues like political polarization, economic inequality, and a lack of coherent industrial policy hinder America’s global competitiveness. While China focuses on coordinated, long-term investments in infrastructure, technology, and education, the U.S. is often stuck in partisan gridlock, lacking the collective focus needed for such bold initiatives.
The U.S. military-industrial complex also exacerbates this situation. Driven by vested interests in perpetuating conflict narratives, this complex steers the U.S. towards military solutions over diplomatic and economic engagement. The legacy of a Cold War mentality, fueled by defense contractors and hawkish policymakers, perpetuates hardline stances that ultimately isolate potential allies and destabilize international relations.
Furthermore, efforts by the U.S. to persuade its allies to decouple from China have seen limited success. Countries with significant economic ties to China, like Germany and France, resist pressure to align too closely with U.S. demands, prioritizing their economic interests over geopolitical maneuvering. These nations understand that a balanced approach with both global powers often yields better outcomes, highlighting a divergence in interests that complicates U.S. strategies.
Ultimately, the U.S. needs a fundamental shift in how it perceives and engages with China. Strategies based on misinformation, fear, and outdated Cold War thinking are doomed to fail. To effectively navigate China’s rise, the U.S. must first acknowledge the realities of China’s strengths and aspirations. Only by understanding this true China can America develop policies that are responsive and constructive, fostering global stability and mutual growth rather than ongoing contention and rivalry.
ACDC – It’s a Long Way to the Top If You Wanna Rock N Roll (Extended)
Rockin’ them bagpipes.
Why do European people stop traveling to the USA?
A few years ago my family and I were eating at JFK. My daughter was in a chair, my two year in a stroller. Out of nowhere an airport cop came up screaming that I needed to strapy child into the stroller and now! This was apparently a very dangerous thing, a kid sitting in a stroller doing nothing but looking about at people passing.
Due to the imbalance of power and not wanting to miss my flight I didn’t point out that (a) I am the parent not her, (b) I decide (c) I didn’t need my kid or family to be shouted at, a simple discussional tone would have worked (d) she could genuinely go fuck herself and she really left us thinking, fuck this place we’re outta here.
I like the US, but have no idea why anyone with a uniform can’t just act like an adult and not a completely paranoid schizo.
Dog rescue
Rigatoni with Olives and Bacon
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Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
6 slices bacon
1/2 large onion, thinly sliced
8 ounces dried rigatoni (or other small pasta)
12 pitted and chopped cured black olives (such as Kalamata)
1 to 2 ounce piece Parmesan cheese
2 tablespoons coarsely chopped marjoram or thyme (optional)
Instructions
In medium skillet, cook bacon until crisp (reserve drippings); blot, coarsely chop and set aside.
In bacon drippings, sauté onion until soft and just beginning to brown, about 5 minutes.
Meanwhile, cook pasta according to package directions, drain and transfer to warm serving platter or large shallow bowl.
Toss pasta with bacon, onion and olives. Season with salt and pepper to taste; toss again.
Use a vegetable peeler to cut the Parmesan cheese into thin shavings.
Sprinkle the cheese over the pasta and top with the fresh herb, if desired.
If Trump believes that Taiwan is not worth fighting over, and most Taiwanese are against fighting China, what are the options for the DPP-led government in Taiwan?
Lay low until Trump is done then wait for another US President who wants to make trouble for China.
But no matter what, it won’t make any difference. Taiwan is part of China and nothing the US can do will change that. And since the US isn’t willing to kill a bunch of US soldiers to try and take Taiwan, the Separatists are a lost cause.
Even if the US by some miracle wins, China can take it back in 10 years. After all the US can’t move Taiwan.
It was a lost cause from the beginning. It was always something the US used to harass China. Try to weaken China, somehow. It hasn’t worked by has made the US look like a bully.
The timing of the Battle of Midway; 6 months after Pearl Harbor.
The battle against Japan turned within a year after the war started.
Liberal democracy is not suitable for big nations. it has already been proven :
UK with just 68M people is rotting away…. It is a mess today.
US with just 342M people is also rotting away…. It is a bigger mess today.
India with 1.45B people is full of political promises to be this and that but they can’t get their act together for ages………
In contrast, China with 1.42B people is progressing in leaps and bounds in growing their economy, transforming their style of governance to a socialist democracy with their own unique characteristics, advancing in all fields of advanced technologies, alleviating abject poverty, implementing common prosperity measures….. Nationalism is key, not individualism!
I think Democracy works for small nations less that 15M people and liberalism have to be curtailed. If it is not based on meritocracy, it will DEFINITELY fail altogether. How can a leader who is not meritocratic be an elected leader of people who are smarter than him?
What are man’s greatest fears?
Just the other day I read a story of the ship the Britannia, which had been sunk by the Germans in 1941. So picture this… 249 men are dead and your ship lost. You’re floating on the South Atlantic. Everywhere you look around you, you see nothing but this vast mass of water… a man named Raymond Edmund Grimani Cox, a Lieutenant, was in a small boat with some other soldiers, having survived the disaster.
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And then a giant arm comes out from the side of the boat. An enormous slimy tentacled arm, and another, and another… they’re several meters long, thick, and covered in huge tentacle suckers. Lieutenant Grimani Cox is grabbed by one of the monstrous arms, and left profusely bleeding even after he manages to stab it repeatedly until it lets him go. Another one of his friends isn’t so fortunate — he’s lifted in the air, then dragged kicking and screaming down in the deep with the monster. One moment he’s there, shouting, fighting for dear life… and then, he isn’t. He’s gone. The giant squid is gone, too. All that’s left is the wounded men, the battered boat and that enormous ocean, now deadly quiet…
There’s hardly anything as scary in this world than the ocean, and the monsters that lurk in its deepest depths. Whales have been found with the scars of enormous squid tentacles, scars that, by their size, suggest specimens far larger than any of the creatures ever discovered and measured with human eyes. Nothing on God’s green earth frightens me more intensely.
Lavrov’s Bold Speech at the UN Causes Shockwaves Globally!
Is it true that China is the only ancient civilization that continues to this day? Or is it only recognized by Chinese themselves?
To China and Chinese, civilization is indicated by writing. Without writing, a culture can’t be a civilization. The Chinese word for civilization is 文明, literally “to understand the written word” or “the written word brightens”. This is why Chinese people believe that Chinese civilization is the last remaining continuous cradle of civilization in history, as it’s the only cradle of civilization whose writing has not been abandoned.
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Archaeological site of the Shang palace
In the world, the known cradles of civilization are:
Sumer: Cuneiform abandoned, later to be rediscovered and needed to be deciphered by a European (Georg Friedrich Grotefend)
Egypt: Hieroglyphs abandoned, later to be rediscovered and needed to be deciphered by a European (Jean-François Champollion)
Harappa: Harappan script abandoned and still undeciphered, whose civilization was first rediscovered by a European (John Marshall)
Mesoamerica: Mesoamerican scripts abandoned, later needed to be deciphered by Europeans (mainly, the Mayan script was deciphered by Yuri Knorozov)
Peru: Peruvian quipu abandoned, still undeciphered, but quite controversial as many don’t consider quipu to be a writing system
Minoan: Minoan scripts abandoned, only deciphered Linear B, but quite controversial as many don’t consider Minoan civilization to be a cradle of civilization, but was instead influenced by Egypt and Mesopotamia
Meanwhile, the Chinese script has yet been abandoned, but merely evolved over time. The Shang dynasty, whose oracle bones were rediscovered by Chinese archaeologist Luo Zhenyu, had the same writing system as modern Chinese, just evolved in forms, meaning texts in oracle bones can be fully rendered in modern Chinese script.
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Oracle bone of the Shang
In fact, the Shang script was so developed in its form that it could not have sprung up over night. There must’ve been a predecessor to it, and many believe that earlier dynasties had already used a form of proto-writing (which later evolved into Shang script). Archaeologists have discovered many symbols dating to as early as 6000 years ago with forms resembling the Shang script.
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Using oracle bone script to render Tang dynasty poetry
So if you consider writing systems as the litmus test for civilizations, then yes, China is indeed the last continuous cradle of civilization on earth. Also notice how I said “cradle of civilization” and not civilization, because that’s how Chinese say it. Secondary civilizations whose writing systems were adopted from someone else like Japan, Rome, Aztec, Kush, Greece, Akkad, Persia, etc. are not considered in this category.
To those who argue against it, what do you consider the litmus test for a continuous civilization?
Some of my latest art
My prompt for this AI generation group is;
Create a anatomically-accurate, photo realistic, Baroque-style oil painting. two soft and feminine attractive Chinese woman are on a clipper ship, lounging next to a handsome muscular man.
They are drinking wine and eating grapes . in front of them is Dionysus the Greek god . wine, and pleasure. He is enticing them on.
the god Faunus is laughing, and everyone else is smiling and blessing the scene.
the woman's skin radiates in warmth and glows softly. bright light. beautiful day. lush colors. a hint of chiaroscuro that contrasts the light sun lit portions with the shadier sections.
I used [1] the Albedo base XL (fine tuned) generation model, with [2] the”Digital Painting” element seed. Some also were also additionally modified using [3] the “Prompt Magic” plug in. But the results were not worth the cost in “chit usage”.
This resulted in many nudes or partial nudes. This is directly attributed to the use of the “Digital painting” element seed.
When I added the “Prompt Magic” plug in, they became fully clothed, but also lost some of the “fresh innocence” look that I was striving for.
Resulting in some of these amazing images…
High quality, but slow loading. Sorry.
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My idea is to select a few of these and then paint them in oils on a nice canvas. What do you all think?
Is it true that the US blew up the Nord Stream pipelines and not Russia as alleged by the EU?
The Swedish Navy knows who did it. They won’t tell you who it was, though, and they probably don’t have the first clue why.
Here goes:
Thursday, September 22nd: Swedish naval vessels leave the naval base at Karlskrona. Transponder data says they went to a few km east of the place where the gas leaks were later detected. There, the transponder was turned off.
Friday, September 23rd: Transponders are turned on a few km west of the later gas leaks. Vessels go to the nearby port of Simrishamn, return to the site of the later gas leaks. Transponders turned off again.
Saturday, September 24th: Transponders turned off close to the second gas leak site. Vessels round the Danish island of Bornholm. When close to the first gas leak site, transponders are turned off again.
Sunday, September 25th: Transponders turned on. The vessels are now close to the Russian exclave Kaliningrad, where the Russian Baltic Sea fleet has a base.
Monday, September 26th: KABOOM. According to experts, explosive charges might have been laid down in advance and detonated remotely.
Transponder data can be faked, and has been in the past. This time, though the Swedish Armed Forces have verified that they had vessels at those places at those times.
Now, what could possibly have happened here?
Maybe, just maybe, they got indications of unusual underwater activity, went to investigate, and followed a submarine to Kaliningrad.
Rest assured that NATO has a more complete picture than this.
A 1990s preview of what Social Media will bring.
These old MVs are like a time machine.
Snap! – Rhythm is a Dancer
What is the average lifespan of an electric car? Are there any common issues with electric cars, such as high maintenance costs or expensive battery replacements?
We don’t know yet. But initial indications are that electric vehicles (EVs) will outlast gas mobiles.
The Nissan Leaf became available in 2011 and the Tesla model S in 2012 in limited numbers. There are now (as of 2024) more than 40 million EVs in the world. There simply has not been enough time to determine the real world lifespan of EVs. There are lots of projections and evidence that they will average more than 15 years. But no hard numbers.
The average lifespan of a gas mobile is 12 years and 200,000 miles (322,000 km). Fifty years ago cars were considered to be junk if they reached 100,000 miles. So, the automobile industry is clearly getting better at vehicle longevity.
The major concern with respect to EVs is the lifespan of the high voltage battery pack. Electric motors clearly have a far longer lifespan than a gas engine, typically 15 to 20 years. The drive train of an EV is also much simpler and expected to last 15 to 20 years. There is no automatic transmission or clutch for an EV, just a reduction gear to reduce the speed of the electric motor to the speed needed for the wheels. So, no shifting of gears and fewer mechanical parts to wear out. The electric motors are variable speed, they directly drive the wheels via the reduction gear. EV electric motors have about 20 moving parts compared to about 2000 for a gas engine.
The US federal government requires EV manufacturers to offer an eight-year/100,000-mile warranty on all EV batteries. This law was actually implemented at the request of the EV manufacturers, they know new buyers are worried about the longevity of the battery pack. Tesla warranties both th
e battery pack and drive train for 8 years.
An EV battery should not be compared to a smartphone battery. Both use lithium batteries but the EV battery is temperature controlled (in most cases with a liquid coolant and heat pump). Heat is the enemy of all lithium battery chemistries.
Another big factor is that not all of the capacity of an EV battery pack is made available for driving. You will see a state of charge (SOC) indicator on the dashboard that goes from 0% to 100% but that is probably only about 90% of the true battery capacity. EV manufacturers don’t publish specs for this, it’s a grey area they don’t want the public to know about. So, if you run an EV down to 0% you will probably get another 10 or 20 miles of range but when it finally does stop moving you will notice that the lights and display and power windows still work. The battery is not really at 0% SOC and that helps the longevity of the battery.
In addition to that, most EV owners don’t charge above 80% or let the SOC drop below 20% for daily use. For road trips it’s okay to charge to 90% or 100% and let the SOC drop to around 10% before charging. But don’t do that for daily use.
The available data for Teslas indicate they lose about 2% of capacity the first year and 1% each year after that. So a loss of 11% after ten years. Not a big deal but something to consider since EVs have much less range than a gas mobile.
Gas mobiles have had over 100 years of research and development and EVs have had less than 15 years (the electric cars powered by lead acid batteries don’t count). EV batteries are getting better every year, they provide more range and charge faster, and the cost of the battery packs is dropping steadily. The longevity of the battery packs is increasing too.
The big news lately for EV batteries is something called Lithium iron phosphate (LFP, sometimes abbreviated LiFePO4). They are being installed in less expensive, shorter range EV models. The Teslas manufactured in China all have LFP batteries. If you want a long-lived EV you might be better off going for the cheapie model. LFP batteries have 3 to 5 times the longevity of nickel based lithium batteries like NMC and NCA. The expectation is that they will last 1,118,000 miles (1,800,000 km) until battery capacity drops to 80%. Of course you can still drive an EV that has lost 20% of its capacity, you just have less range. The downside of EVs with LFP battery packs is shorter range and poor cold weather performance.
It will take several more years before it is clear which EV manufacturers have the best reliability and longevity.
My Awful, Cheating Ex Is Toothless & Living In A Tent, While I Am Now Living The Dream
When I lived in Western Pennsylvania, I would drive my cars, and my motorcycles all over the place. Most of which was long disused roads, old unused rail road lines, and towns that were abandoned a hundred years previous. Many interesting sights, and (I’m sure) curious stories to tell.
One day, while riding on a little used country road, I came up to the crest of a hill. I pulled over to take a leak, and as I did so, I noted that the bushed parted to a nice picturesque grass covered hill.
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As it as a nice Summer day with blue skies and white clouds, I went forth to take a look and take in the wonderful and astounding view.
And it was. Really.
This was a nice field of knee-height green grasses. And not a shrub or other plant to be seen.
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The hill side was enormous and perfect for flying kites and for having picnics. In fact, given the beautiful day, low humidity and just magnificent day, I walked forward and took in the entire experience.
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I’ve done this before. I found a long abandoned cemetery in the long overgrown woods that way. Heck, on second thought, I actually found two such cemeteries. All long lost, and totally forgotten.
So as I was walking forward I saw the strangest sight up on a ridge.
It was a tomb; a well preserved stone house that served as some family Mausoleum. It looked a little like this…
Mausoleum
Now, this was not a cemetery.
It was in a rural hillside, in the middle of a long abandoned tree line where the nearest house was miles away. It was isolated.
Nice hill.
Nice mausoleum.
Totally out of the blue. A real surprise. All up in the middles of this grand hillside view.
Who would have thought?
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Later, say a a few months later, I asked a friend of mine about the place, and he knew about it. The story goes something like this…
There was once this wealthy family in a small town. The town grew and got prosperous. The family bought up a lot of land, and as the town prospered the family got very wealthy. The head of the family built the tomb on a field that he favored for family outings and picnics with.
After he died there was a change in fortune. His family either died off and moved away. And the town became a few remaining houses until that too was abandoned. And thus all that remains is the tomb.
The estate has established a trust fund that pays for groundskeepers to maintain the hill in a pristine croquet field, and to makes sure that no one vandalizes the idyllic environment. That that is the story of this place.
Still.
Preserving the hilltop for future generations to have picnics on; to fly kites on…
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Or, to have romantic dates on…
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Or, you know; to sky gaze at night on is glorious.
This fellow did good. And I for one want to tell you all… have adventures.
And when you have the time to leave something behind, make it useful and memorable. Leave something behind for the generations that follow…
Today…
China sez “we’re done playin'”
China has called-off arms control talks with US over weapon sales to Taiwan.
China has cut off arms control and NUCLEAR non-proliferation talks with the United States because of Washington’s arms sales to Taiwan, the Chinese foreign ministry said on Wednesday.
“China has decided to suspend talks with the US on holding a new round of arms control and non-proliferation consultations,” ministry spokesman Lin Jian said. “The responsibility for this situation lies entirely with the US.”
He said the US’ continued sales of weapons to the island in the face of Beijing’s opposition had “severely damaged the political atmosphere necessary for continued arms control consultations between the two sides.”
“Washington must respect Beijing’s core interests if communication is to continue” the Chinese foreign ministry said.
Russia launches a giant 6,000-pound bomb from an SU-34 for the first time
This is crazy big news.
Note this video about the massive Russian submarine nuke bombs for the United States Eastern states. Fly over, drop and swim. Then Ka-blooey!
What is something you wish you had known sooner?
I have a very toned body, like massively toned for a female. I didn’t work for it. It’s just natural. I didn’t know my body was like this until I went to high school. They called me “tough”. I would be teased so badly. Girls followed me around the school laughing at me and calling me names. Adults weren’t any better. On top of that, I had horrible eczema. I hated high school so badly that I skipped school half the year. Woke up many days crying telling my mom I’m sick. Still I got good grades. School wasn’t hard, people were. Complete strangers that I never once tried to hurt had no issues in giving me a hard time.
Eventually high school ended. Hallelujah. And I moved to another city. I worked in tourism and foreigners loved my body. They hardly criticized me. One day a bodybuilder came up to me and told me my body’s amazing. He advised to enter the national bodybuilding competition. If I win that and Caribbean then the possibilities would be endless. I could travel the world.
I wish I could tell you I did it and won. I started training then dropped out. I didn’t want the world to see my body. That was a couple years ago. Now, I love my body and see how invaluable it is. I wish I had known sooner that being this different was a blessing and I should not have taken it for granted. Maybe I would be a world champ by now. But, it’s not too late, I just might enter the bodybuilding competition this year.
Even though I wish I had known sooner that my differences are amazing, I’m happy I know now. I appreciate every bit of me despite what others think. And trust me I’ve been told so many times “You’re different”. I was even the outcast in my family but I’ll tell that story a next time. Love, appreciate and endorse you for you truly are unique. See a pic of my legs with some bug bites (darn mosquitoes).
Fried Ravioli with Quick Tomato Sauce
Toasted Ravioli 2
Yield: 6 to 10 servings as an hors d’oeuvre or 4 to 6 servings as a first course; 2 1/2 cups sauce
Ingredients
Sauce
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 small onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
2 (14 1/2 ounce) cans Italian-style tomatoes, with liquid
9 ounces frozen or refrigerated ravioli of your choice
2 tablespoons olive oil
Instructions
Begin with the sauce. Heat the olive oil in a skillet over moderate heat and Sauté the onion and garlic for about 5 minutes, until tender but not brown.
Add the tomatoes, breaking up the larger pieces with the edge of a spoon if necessary, and bring to a boil. Simmer over low heat for 15 minutes, until the sauce has thickened some.
Add the basil and season with salt and pepper.
Cook the ravioli according to the package directions.
Drain and manually separate the ravioli to prevent them from sticking together. Blot dry with paper towels.
Heat the olive oil in a skillet (preferably nonstick) over moderate heat and Sauté the ravioli for 2 to 3 minutes per side, until lightly browned and slightly crisp.
Drain on paper towels and serve immediately.
China’s Surprise Move: U.S. Chips Banned After Yellen Visit
Were you deathly ill but didn’t know until you went to the hospital and they told you?
I got up one morning and my left hand was swollen. I couldn’t find an insect bite, but thought maybe a spider bit me in my sleep. This was in the early 90s before the internet was a resource for research. I spent the day with family and attended a funeral. The next morning the swelling went up to my elbow. Still thinking about an insect bite I took some Benadryl and carried on. The next morning my entire arm was swollen and I went to a walk in clinic. The physician’s assistant took one look and sent me to a doctor nearby. He asked me to stop moving my arm. I showed him that I was able to bend it and he said stop! The Doctor was a vascular interventionist. At that time I was not a nurse and had limited medical knowledge. I thought that was strange but I went. The Doctor there looked at my arm and and asked me to meet him at his clinic next door in the hospital. He didn’t give me a diagnosis, just go there and he would se me there. I finally realized that this was serious when the nurses were shaving my chest, attaching electrodes and asking me to sign paperwork all at the same time! I had a blood clot at the brachial artery! The doctor removed it while I was under conscious sedation and I spent a week in cardiac ICU on a heparin drip confined to the bed. Moving the arm could have dislodged part of the clot sending it to my brain or lungs. And I stood outside the hospital and smoked a cigarette before I went inside! I was so impressed by the doctor and the nurses that I went back to school and graduated the nursing program! That’s how I became a nurse!
What is your opinion of J.D. Vance?
From my perch across the Pacific several thousand miles away from Washington, I think Vance’s perspectives on foreign affairs seem to dovetail quite closely with Trump’s world view:
He favors a negotiated peace with Russia over Ukraine, believing that Ukraine cannot win;
He thinks Europe needs to take more responsibility for its own security;
He believes the US needs to shift its focus to Asia (again) to prioritize and counter China’s economic and military rise, prioritizing this over traditional American alliances in Europe; and
He’s an economic nationalist. This includes protectionist policies such as tariffs and reducing reliance on foreign goods.
Whether you agree with him or not (and on economic policy, I’m a globalist who believes protectionism is bad for both the US and the global economy), it’s pretty clear that Trump 2.0 will be marked by trade wars, a pronounced “America first” policy — whatever that means — and increased tensions with traditional US allies in Europe. But there also seems to be some pragmatism about it (for example, engagement with Putin on Ukraine).
I think with Trump 2.0, we’re potentially seeing the beginning of a tectonic shift in world geopolitics — a framework that has been in place pretty much since the end of WWII.
MM Art
The theme is ” A man and his cat”.
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Teletubbies the Horror Movie – 1950s Super Panavision 70
What shocked you when you opened someone’s safe deposit box at the bank?
When my in-laws died we went to the bank to retrieve the contents of their safe deposit box. The bank has gone through a line of mergers and name changes over the years, my in-laws stayed loyal. We knew the box number but did not have the key.
We were told that there was no safe deposit box. We went home and found the paperwork from the original bank. The current bank got back to us that the box was marked as abandoned years ago for nonpayment and they assumed the contents were sent to the state. We countered that the box was free if they kept their accounts at the bank, the deal with the original bank. They had no answer.
My wife was devastated. Her grandmother’s wedding ring was in that box. We contact the state and they had no record of the box being turned over.
We went back to the bank with that information. The bank officer said things got lost between all the mergers etc over the years. Just out of desperation I asked who held that box number now. They said it was vacant. I asked to open it.. they did and there were my in-laws possessions!
There wasn’t much. Some long obsolete paperwork, an envelope that had photos of every room In their house from the 1960s, for insurance purposes, and thankfully the ring!
Living Paycheck to Paycheck ….. Part 2
Amazing
Another amazing Chinese airport where workers have moved mountains to build a new airport, quite literally.
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Workers in Chongqing needed to flattened the top of a mountain nearly 6000 feet above the sea level in order to construct the Wushan Airport.
The airport IATA: WSK ICAO: ZUWS is located at the border of Wushan and Fengjie counties, 15 kilometres (9.3 mi) from the county seat, and mainly serves tourists to the nearby Three Gorges region. Construction began on 20 April 2015, and the airport was opened on 16 August 2019
“Jane!” A voice bellowed from the recesses of the ship. “Where is my grapefruit?”“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” A voice echoed from the opposite direction.“My grapefruit, Jane! The one I specifically had my name on! The one you stole!”“First of all, why would you print your name on a freaking grapefruit? Second of all, if you didn’t want me to take it, you shouldn’t have put it in a community fridge.”“So you did take it!”“Why is this grapefruit so important, anyway?”“Do you know, Jane, how many people have died in ships due to scurvy? Do you?!”“So eat an orange!”“The orange is overrated! The grapefruit is the only citrus fruit that understands me.”Charlie groaned and pressed his forehead against the table. “Lewis, we just had a shipment of grapefruit yesterday, get another one!”
“Shut up, Charlie! This doesn’t concern you!”
“I don’t even know why you try anymore.” Lyra flipped her braid as she slid in next to him.
“Because you well know how much worse it will get if I don’t.”
Harriet groaned as she remembered the third great prank war.
Jane and Lewis were in an argument over their favorite colors, and it escalated into a full-blown war. Everywhere anyone turned, there was another trap set for either Lewis or Jane.
Somehow, they ended up joining forces against the rest of the ship and wreaked havoc upon the crew of the Flame.
They feared that it would spread to the other ships of the fleet, but luckily, Charlie recovered from his bout of illness quickly, and managed to calm both Lewis and Jane within the hour.
But the crew would never forget the horror and fear they faced in that week; that was the day Charlie became the unofficial leader of all things Lewis and Jane.
“I don’t even know why they’re on the same ship after that stunt; much less the mothership.”
Lyra took a lasting gulp of coffee. “Jane’s the best engineer in the whole fleet.”
“And Lewis is crazy good with the servers and the rest of the ship’s tech.” Harriet supplied, flicking a crumb of her muffin.
“Plus, they’re great gunners in a pinch and work well with everyone except each other.”
Claude snorted as he walked in. “Tell that to the Horogin embassy from two month ago.
“Listen,” Lewis looked up from his tablet, “we all agree that the embassy was a mistake, just like we all agree that in general, Jane and Lewis are remarkable workers.”
“Besides,” Harriet simpered, “can you really picture them anywhere else?”
The room fell silent except for the gurgle of the coffee maker as each of the four tried to imagine Jane or Lewis stationed on any other ship.
“Fair point.” Lyra admitted. “So can I just be put on another ship? I grew up on the Growth; agriculture is not something so easily forgotten.” Her violet braid twisted in front of her and seemed to writhe in agreement.
“Uh, Charlie?” Claude pointed. “There’s a problem.”
Charlie took one look at the floating braid before letting out a groan.
He tapped the screen of his tablet and set it down, a holograph of a red-headed man slowly taking form.
“Hey Charlie!” He showed of a gap-toothed grin. “Your gravity messing up too?”
“Yep.”
“Yeah, I just got off a vid with the captain about it. Lewis is checking it out now.”
“Lewis? Isn’t he usually on servers?”
“Usually, but since he passed out on another late night shift yesterday, I figured putting him on monitor watching duty was a better plan.”
“Alright.”
A blond man with dark, circular glasses stomped past, an indescribable look on his face.
“Lewis, you figure it out yet?”
“Yeah, Arnold, it’ll be fixed in a sec.” He disappeared from view.
“Hey Jane!” A voice came from both the tablet and the hallway. “Something’s blocking the free-float tube!”
“Yeah, that’s probably your grapefruit.”
“You didn’t even eat it?!” The screech caused both Lyra and Charlie to wince. “What the heck?”
“I don’t like grapefruit.”
“So you took it from me for the sole pleasure of depriving me joy?”
“Yeah.” A clang was heard and Lyra’s braid dropped. “It’s in the compost bin now.”
“I hate you, you know!”
“Just like I hate grapefruit?”
An indecipherable collection of sounds was heard, before the hologram showed Lewis stomping back to his post.
“Good work, buddy.” Arnold offered, to what might as well have been empty space.
“Thanks for dealing with it, A.” Charlie picked up the tablet. “Good luck.”
“No, man, good luck to you. Lewis has his morning break in five minutes.” And with a wink, Arnold was gone.
“But that’s the same time Jane’s on break.” Lyra remarked.
The four looked at each other with wide eyes, then at their meager breakfast.
“Hide the grapefruit.”
Trump didn’t drain the swamp, he appointed the worst reptiles
Is there any car which thieves can not steal?
Where I live in Brazil, car theft is somewhat of a problem. For the most part thieves choose commonly found, locally manufactured models, like Ford Fiestas, Fiat Palios, and Volkswagen Foxes, and then take them to chop-shops who tear them down and resell the parts online.
Models that are ten years old or older are very sought after because they are often relatively easy to steal and parts for them are harder to find, so the demand for things like fuel pumps, taillights and radiators is greater.
If you go on to Brazilian eBay and buy a used or reconditioned alternator, chances are very high that it is from a stolen car. There is a whole black market industry for car parts all across of South America that is literally impossible to stop.
Ironically, if you drive a high-end model like a Mercedes, BMW or Range Rover no one will steal it. First because it is way too conspicuous to drive around in a high end car than a common one, you’ll most certainly get caught, and second because selling the parts is much more difficult because there are not that many high end models around, not to mention that the people who own these cars are wealthy enough to pay a dealership to fix them when they need service.
I have two cars, a 2009 Volkswagen Gol (a somewhat cheaper model under the Golf) and a 2010 Volvo XC60 T5. No one will touch the Volvo because it’s the only one in town and thieves know that Volvos have a factory GPS system installed in them that’s really hard to deactivate, but I really have to keep my eye on the Gol because Gols are all over the place and it is a very sought after car to steal.
Someone tried to steal my Gol a few years ago — they broke the small triangle window behind the back door to unlock the car, then they popped the hood and cut the wires to the alarm. Then they broke the ignition lock and used a screwdriver to force it to engage the starter. It was during the night and the car was right outside my bedroom window; I didn’t hear a thing.
I woke up the next morning and the car wasn’t there, so I called the insurance company who used a tracking system like lo-jack to find it, it was unlocked, sitting around the corner and all of the thieves’ tools were on the seats and the floor — even the screwdriver was still sticking out of the ignition.
I’m guessing that the thieves gave up and fled the scene when they couldn’t get the engine to turn over and a cop car came down the street, or something like that.
They couldn’t start the engine because I had installed an engine kill switch up and under the dashboard where no one could see it. Two feet of wire, a toggle switch and a 10-amp fuse saved my car from being stolen: total cost of $4.00.
The Volvo on the other hand is exceptionally hard to steal, not because of the GPS system, but because of how the ignition system was designed.
There is no key to turn, so there is no ignition lock to break; to start the car I put the remote that unlocks the doors in the dashboard and push a button. The steering lock is further down the steering column than in most cars — it actually sits under the engine at the firewall, so it’s very hard to get to.
The Volvo also has another feature that many cars don’t have, and it’s not a factory-installed feature. You could literally take a baseball bat to the windshield and it won’t break. You could also unload a full clip of .44 magnum rounds into the driver’s side window and it won’t shatter.
The car is bulletproof — the previous owner had it bulletproofed when she bought it new in 2010. It has inch-thick glass and Kevlar all around, including the roof, so just getting into the car is no easy task.
You’d probably be able to force the door open with a crowbar, but that would break the door’s closing mechanism making it kind of hard to drive, that is if you were able to get around the steering lock and the keyless ignition.
Very hard to steal. Hard to car-jack at an intersection too, something all too common in cities like Rio de Janeiro on hot summer days when people are stuck in traffic.
Of course, one could always use a tow truck.
Would you believe that I don’t even have insurance on the Volvo? Except of course for the mandatory Government insurance that costs about $5.00 a year. I know that someone won’t steal it – they won’t even try.
The Gol on the other hand is insured, to the hilt, with a super-low deductible, which costs me about $600.00 a year. It’s not worth very much though, maybe $2000.00, so the insurance company believes someone will steal it in a little over three years.
So, it all depends on where you live and the car you drive, what security features it has. No car is truly unstealable, but some of them are much harder to steal than others.
Are Chinese people aware of the power of their country in comparison to others?
Many Chinese are shocked when they first hear that westerners are afraid of China and Chinese.
Immediate reaction is “What did we do? We just work hard and mind our own business and sell stuff to everybody. Once in a while we get annoyed at Taiwan or the Philippines, but we don’t really do anything.”
They are unaware that it is because of their hard work and competition in Chinese society, that China is very powerful and influential in the aggregate.
“They’re LYING about the economy, this is now a DEPRESSION” Top Economist Warns
Regardless of who will be the next president of the United States, do you think the US will continue to fight a trade war with China? Or will it clearly understand that the root of the problem lies within the country itself?
I believed that will happened in about a decade from now! Britain took generations to accept that it has lost its hegemony to the US and I am sure it took at least a century for Romans to accept that it is no longer the head honcho.
The US is no different. It is in a generation of being in denial and it refused to recognised that the more it fights China the faster it goes down! And the best thing to do is to accept a secondary role of working with China to help its people to keep doing well and not lose everything!
Of course it is the US own doing that put it into present situation. Why?
First the US thought wrongly that it could pay its workers and its CEO the sky if they wanted and that they can always charge these excesses to the consumer and they will be willing to do so! But that is simply not true. Even US consumers won’t pay for over priced products!
Second they wrongly assumed that China and Chinese cannot innovate and makes better and better products and moved up the supply chain! This is due to their racial bias that cost them dearly. China learn very fast and catch up and overtook the US in no time! The idea that China steal intellectual property and copy is what caused the US to under estimated China and the Chinese people!
Thirdly the US wrongly thought that it ruled the world and yet stay competitive. The truth is to compete one need to be very driven and focus and the US is fighting forever wars and warmongering 24/7, 365 days a year. And it left the UD very weak in investment and infrastructures and the US simply cannot compete. While they lack skill and well trained engineers China has in abundance of resources and talents.
Forthly the US thought that it could fight any body and everyone in the world without repercussions. It is not true. The world turned against the US. And the world wants the US to fail because no one wants to be bullied by the US.
The US wrongly thought that their market is the biggest, today the US is really a very insignificant market today. The biggest market Center is East Asia, followed by ASEAN, followed by Europe and then comes North America with Indian sub continent and Central Asia growing fast, so is Africa and Latin America. Today the entire supply chain will stay in China not just because of China but Asian market is closed to 60% of the world market.
The US will fight another trade war but in reality it is sinking in the quick sand. Mark my word in 10 years leaders cannot win elections if they cannot have a positive relationship with China! It is simply economics!
Which habits of middle-class people keep them middle class?
Several behaviors prevent the middle class from ascending.
Spending large sums on depreciating assets. If you want to be wealthy, your only large purchases should be investments, not vehicles or gaming computers.
Buying more house than needed. While a house is an investment, if your paychecks are all going to pay a mortgage and upkeep, you are short funds for investing. If housing prices collapse again, you won’t even have the equity.
Not having 3–6 months of living expenses saved in case of a lay-off or emergency. Unemployment isn’t going to pay all your bills and living off credit cards until you get a new job is an expensive mistake. Putting an emergency cost on credit cards means you will pay at least twice as much with interest added than if using savings.
Paying banks, instead of themselves. Interest payments are a huge waste. Imagine if you had that $500–1000/ month credit interest going to investments instead of to banks.
Not understanding what is an investment rather than a purchase. Sellers use investment in advertising, but they lie. You don’t invest in a nice suit, you purchase it. The next day it is used clothing and worth 1/2 what you paid for it. You don’t invest in furniture, you purchase it. An investment is an asset expected to go up in value over time.
Investing only in their employer’s stocks. It isn’t a good idea to invest in only one stock, industry or investment type. Putting money in a variety decreases your risks.
Passing up job opportunities or promotions because you don’t like the people you will be working with, the added responsibility and/or travel involved. The road to the corner office might detour through a landfill, but it is the only way to get there. Promotions may not be offered a second time. The job opportunity you are holding out for may never happen.
Nobody get rich using coupons. It takes a complete budget and lifestyle that spends less than you make and that includes investing. Saving $20 a week on groceries, but spending an extra $600 a month on a new vehicle you just had to have makes no sense.
Money is not the goal, it is the tool. If you save up $100,000 and it just sits in a savings account, you are losing money and the potential for becoming financially independent.
You have to set aside money for fun or your budget will fail. Sacrifice is easy the first month. By the time you reach the fortieth month, sacrifices can feel like a vise on your life. Adding fun dollars to your budget will let you enjoy life while still reaching your financial goals.
Six foreigners allegedly poisoned in Bangkok luxury hotel
Is the Chinese government and its people considered perfect? If not, what are some reasons for this?
No, it is far from perfect and there is always room for improvement.
The important thing is to have a channel to provide input to government officials, explain why something needs to change to make it better, and see if they can make the change.
This is very different from the idea of free speech in the west because while people have the right to elect new leaders at election time, there is no way to request changes on a small scale, and then to follow up on them.
The Chinese way is to ask for changes on an ongoing basis, explain the rationale for the change, and if the official feels that it is reasonable, ask him to make the change. If he does NOT make the change within a reasonable time, then move up the ladder, and complain to his superior.
And so on and so forth…
So in the western system, you vote for the person and hope that he makes the macro changes you want. In the Chinese system, you go to the local official and request that he make the micro change you want. If the request is reasonable, he should make the change. If he does not, he will likely be voted out at the local level. Since he is also a Party member, failure to act on reasonable requests will affect his opportunity for promotion in the future, and affect his own career.
In court, what was the most devastating cross-examination of a witness that you ever saw?
My in-laws used to live across the street from a drug dealer. They often called the police where there were cars coming and going from his property, picking up “product”. This cut into his business, and led to several ugly confrontations between him and my in-laws.
One day my then-fiancee was visiting her parents, and was in the back of the house when there was a commotion out front, complete with gunshots. She didn’t see anything, but both her parents and one of her brothers claimed they saw said drug dealer leaning out of his upstairs window, firing a gun. From his body language and what words they could make out, his intent was clear: Stop interfering with my business, or the next time I won’t be firing into the air but at you.
They called the police and he was charged with aggravated menacing. Some months later, I attended the trial as a spectator, as my fiancee (now wife) was a witness. The drug dealer took the stand in his own defense. After a well-rehearsed examination by his attorney, it was the prosecuting attorney’s turn.
“Mr. ___, on [date], did you fire several shots from a handgun into the air from the second story window of your home?”
“No, I did not. I don’t even have a gun.”
“You own no firearms whatsoever? On [date], you didn’t have a single firearm in the house?”
“That’s right. I didn’t have no guns then.”
A look of confusion spread of the DA’s face as he quickly pawed through his notes.
“Now, on [date of previous police call to his home], didn’t you tell Officer ____ that you had an extensive collection of firearms and that you were an expert in their use?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, did you lie to Officer ____?”
“What?”
“Did you lie to Officer ____ back on [previous date], or did you lie to the jury just now?”
“Yeah, I lied.”
I suspect that if you want to be taken seriously by a jury, you should not admit that you are a liar and may have just lied to them on the witness stand.
He was convicted, despite testimony from friends who gave him an alibi. The jury must have thought they were liars, too.
Washington’s belief that the United States will not suffer from a new global war and that the main actions will unfold on the European continent is a misconception, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.
The stark language from Foreign Minister Lavrov was used during a UN Security Council meeting.
The clear implication is that the “main actions” of another global war would also unfold on the North American continent. Here. Inside the USA.
Keen observers agree there is no other rational interpretation of the remarks.
Yet as this story is published at 1:10 PM EDT on Wednesday, July 17, 2024, Americans, for the most part, remain blissfully unaware of how dangerous the world situation is right now. They have no idea at all that the US Government has taken actions so grave, that the American heartland is now being openly discussed as a future war zone.
How this particular remark arose in the UN was after White House National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications John Kirby, said that “Washington does not want a war with Russia as it would affect the European continent.”
Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov mentioned this remark and then said (verbatim) “In Washington, they are convinced that a new global war will affect not the US, but their European allies. If this analysis forms the basis of the Biden administration’s strategy, it is a very dangerous misconception, and Europeans should realize what a suicidal role has been assigned to them.”
Any resolution of the European crisis must include concrete steps to eliminate the threats to Russia that emanate from the West, the diplomat went on to say. He recalled that Moscow’s conditions for establishing lasting peace in Ukraine have already been outlined by Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Putin also noted that Zelensky’s term has expired and his legitimacy cannot be restored by any means.
Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov clarified that Putin does not rule out negotiations with Ukraine, as there are other legitimate authorities there.
For his part, Lavrov emphasized that Russia is ready to seek a balance of interests to resolve the current crisis in Ukraine, taking into account new geostrategic realities on the Eurasian continent.
Let’s summarize;
War with Russia;
Destruction of Europe
Nuclear destruction of the United States via missiles
War with China;
Destruction of QUAD nations (Australia, Japan, Korea, Philippines)
Nuclear destruction of the United States via missiles
Chicken and Ravioli Cacciatore
13485t3
Ingredients
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 pound skinless boneless chicken breast halves, cut into 1 inch pieces
1 medium onion, halved and sliced
1/2 medium green bell pepper, sliced
1 cup water
1 (14.5 ounce) can diced tomatoes w/garlic, oregano, and basil
8 ounces tomato sauce
9 ounces refrigerated cheese ravioli
Instructions
Heat oil in large skillet over medium-high heat until hot. Add chicken, onion and bell pepper; cook and stir until chicken is browned.
Stir in water, tomatoes, and tomato sauce. Bring to a boil. Add ravioli, covering it with tomato mixture. If necessary carefully separate ravioli. Cook for 12 to 15 minutes or until sauce is of desired consistency and chicken is no longer pink, stirring frequently.
Chow time does SSM
He reviews one of SSM’s best. Have a chuckle.
If local detectives show up at your door and say your name came up in one of their investigations and they’d like you to come down to the station with them to talk about it, does that usually mean you’re a suspect?
About 15 years ago, a very expensive piece of equipment, ($30k market value at the time) was stolen from my place of employment. I was the one who discovered it missing and I was the one who called it in to our security office, who contacted the local police. I gave my statement to our in house security and the lead detective from the local law enforcement gave me his card and asked me to go down to the station to meet him and take an official statement on the coming Saturday (three days away at the time) at 8am.
I thought that was weird, but I agreed and was at the station at 7:45 am that Saturday. I checked in with the clerk who said the detective wasn’t in yet. I knew I was early so it wasn’t a big deal to wait. At 8:30 am, the detective walks out and acted surprised to see me. He then stated that he thought he told me 9 am. I showed him the business card he gave me and how I scribbled “Sat 8am” on the back of it. He gave the most insincere apology I ever heard and then told me he wasn’t ready for me yet and asked if I could wait 15 minutes and that he could have someone get me a coffee.
I agreed to wait and took the offer for the coffee. Half an hour later, he walks by and asked, “Did you not get your coffee?” and I said no, and he said, I’ll get right on that, I just need a few more minutes.” Half an hour after that, someone comes to get me and brings me to an interview room (still no coffee). Another 15 minutes later the detective show up with his partner.
They start asking me questions which I thought were peculiar. Then it hit me that I wasn’t just giving a statement, they were interviewing me as a person of interest. I am the first one every morning to open the location from which the equipment was taken. The surveillance video showed a team of 3 who knew exactly what they were doing and how to go about it. None of their faces were ever turned to the cameras and they knew exactly what they wanted, how to get it as quickly as possible and how to get it out of the building without being noticed.
The detectives thought that someone on the inside had provided the thieves with the intel they needed to get away with it, and I was suspect numero uno. Knowing what I know now, I would have immediately ceased talking to these detectives without a lawyer present. They grilled me for 4 more hours trying to break me into a confession of being an accomplice, which I was not.
It turns out that the thieves were a ring of professionals who spent a week scoping out the location to figure out how best to get their prize. The same individuals had hit 11 other institutions on the eastern coast of the US. It also turns out that the lead detective on the case who gave me such a hard time was also later convicted of stealing cash from the evidence room of his own station. Reading that headline made me smile because he was a huge jerk and it blew my mind that he even made detective in the first place, but it also made me sad for our justice system as a whole at the same time.
Also I never did get that coffee…
Which story in American history is hard to believe?
One story I’ve always found hard to believe is that of Lee Harvey Oswald having acted completely alone. People tend to forget that the guy defected to Soviet Russia for about a year. He renounced his citizenship, and worked for the Soviets for a while, who sent him to Minsk.
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Oswald went back to America because, as he wrote in his diary, he “found the work drab”. Soviet Russia was no fun. So he returned to America. How! How on earth did a US citizen defect to the Soviet Union and just… return. Like it’s no big deal. What the hell? He married a Russian wife, they have two daughters. Settle in America. Oswald, for the record, is a former marine. He’s an excellent marksman (finest in his unit) and for two years, he’s left completely undisturbed by US authorities despite having defected and worked for their enemies for a year. And, when he was just 24 years of age, he goes and — allegedly — kills President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas.
It’s hard to believe an American citizen defected to the number one enemy of America in the middle of the Cold War, was allowed back to the United States without trouble, only to assassinate the president and get killed almost immediately after by a random citizen while in policy custody.
Valiant Thor: A UFO, the Pentagon and a 3-year Mission to Save the World
When I was in the ADC I met all kinds of people. Really, all kinds.
One of the fellas was serving twenty years. I think that it was for murder, but honestly, I am not sure.
Anyways, he was brilliant and had worked out a new way of speeding up the internet access on dial-up modems. Which was all pretty cool. I looked at his numbers, and they made sense.
Only one thing…
No one was using modems when I was at the ADC. We used fiber optics, satellite, and early wireless.
His technological “breakthrough” was too late to make any difference.
Oh, we tried to tell him otherwise, but he had no ideas how much the technology had advanced since he was out and free.
That’s one of the things about prison, life and society changes, but you are stuck in limbo.
There was another fella that spent all of his time proving that the World Trade Center was demolished intentionally, and that no planes flew into the buildings. I actually kind of believe part of that narrative, but connecting it to the Oklahoma Bombing Massacre and Waco (David Koresh) Raid was a bit too bunch for my sensibilities. I could only take it in small doses.
Yeah. Prison is sort of like limbo.
It’s (well in Arkansas) all white walls, white everything. No color, and everything was bland.
Lauren on Cummin Unit in Arkansas
We all wore white.
Everything was white except the staff and visitors.
second chance pell experimental sites initiative
Can you pick out the staff here?
class
Here’s another.
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White and bland. Five years of white and bland…
Getting out was quite the shocking experience.
When I got out, I enjoyed having a chair with a cushion. I liked being able to turn on a light switch, and getting a glass of ice from the refrigerator was a real treat.
There’s also a kind of sustained prolongation of your life when you do time; you tend to live longer because you aren’t subject to all the bad and fatty foods that you shoved down your gullet when out.
Perhaps that is partially why I look younger. Maybe. I don’t know.
Not that I recommend anyone do time, but it kind of slows down the outside world so that your body can adjust to it. And that is a good thing.
Today…
Have you ever fired someone? If so, why?
Yes, I had the displeasure of terminating an employee early in my first career management experience.
I was 29 years old and promoted to manager of a small technical department with engineers and technicians (perhaps 10 total).
“Jerry” was a technician, very inquisitive, and often working outside the box – I liked him and felt he did a good job for the company.
But his “outside the box” activities included criticizing corporate policies, from pay scales to benefits and many others, often writing letters to the CEO.
One day, I was called to the VP,Technology office (my boss) and was told flat out to “get rid” of Jerry. Apparently Jerry’s complaints were getting a lot of attention and management decided to end this one way dialogue; so I was told to terminate him.
I consulted with HR who told me that as his manager, it was my responsibility to do this job that I did not look forward to…
As the days passed, I was getting more pressure from above, so like a good newly appointed manager, I called Jerry into my office and terminated him, telling him exactly what I was told to do, no fake made up excuses. I decided to let the chips fall where they may, if Jerry decided to take some legal action.
Jerry left, quite depressed and never worked again. Within a year, this 26 year old man had died due to OD on alcohol. I was a devastated and have held this story inside until today, nearly 40 years later.
I really liked Jerry and didn’t feel this was handled correctly by any of us, and had I been stronger to help him, things might have turned out different.
Jerry was a loner, sort of geeky (I liked that), not many friends or family and likely no one remembers him.
I am writing this as a tribute to Jerry and his cocky, inquisitive attitude.
Have you, while repairing a computer, ever found anything that made your jaw drop?
Back in the days of single floppy computers, Pegasus Software would toggle the status lines at the top / bottom of the screen with instructions – eg: INSERT DATA DISK or INSERT PROGRAM DISK – among many others.
New client of HB Computers (same group as Pegasus) had sold this machine to a client, complete with Pegasus. Client (after strange support call), brings in “faulty computer”.
In fairness the client was right, the screen DID day “Insert Data Disk” – and did not FIRST tell him to remove the PROGRAM DISK. He had managed with extreme effort, to squeeze BOTH disks into the drive (5.25″ floppy) at which point, “DISK ERROR” was the new Status Message.
He had apparently thought originally that the “other disk” would pop out the back somewhere – but as he was squeezing in the other one, figured it must be able to handle both at the same time as the first was “still there”.
So, that was a good one for me.
In latter years, Computers with a “cup holder” that would spill the cup when the computer was turned off or on (this would be CD rom drawers) were not a rare as you might expect. They worked as cup holders, but in power up/down the drive would have another go at retracting the caddy – spilling the tea / coffee when it came to a jolting stop.
Beyond that, the everyday “Ooh, it didn’t say I had to plug it in”, “my son has inserted a digestive biscuit in drive B, it won’t eject”, I have washed my keyboard and now it doesn’t work, the mouse isn’t working (being used as a microphone), what is this (a mouse – this was by an IT “expert” with a degree but had only worked with DOS. TOTALLY at a loss with Windows – but did have a degree to show us how clever she was).
Removing fans (including CPU fans) as they “were not needed, wasted electricity and made a noise” happened more than once.
Round Steak Sizzler
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Ingredients
3/4 cup ketchup
1/2 cup Lea & Perrins Worcestershire sauce
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 teaspoon salt
1 (3 pound) boneless beef round steak
Instructions
In a small bowl, combine ketchup, Lea & Perrins, oil and salt.
Place steak in a snug-fitting bowl or doubled plastic bag.
Pour ketchup mixture over steak.
Cover or fasten and refrigerate for 24 hours.
Remove steak from marinade. Place on a rack over hot charcoal. Grill until done as desired, about 12 minutes on each side for medium, brushing with marinade occasionally. Or, if desired, place on a rack in a broiler pan. Place under a preheated hot broiler for 7 to 10 minutes on each side or until done as desired, brushing occasionally with leftover marinade.
A New Era of Financial Warfare Has Begun
The West’s latest actions against Russia carry risks for the global system and could provoke China.
By Michael Hirsh, a columnist for Foreign Policy.
June 25, 2024, 9:00 PM
The pro-American tone of this is nauseating. But there is nothing new that we haven’t known about for years. The significant aspect is that this is now reaching mainstream Western consensus. -MM
Washington and the West have begun a new phase of financial warfare against Russia and China—a powerful but also potentially risky escalation that, if people aren’t careful, could eventually give Moscow and Beijing exactly the outcome they are believed to be looking for.
How so? Because the unprecedented actions taken at the G-7 summit in June to hand over to Ukraine billions of dollars in profits earned on frozen Russian assets—along with new actions taken against Chinese banks—could begin to undermine the legitimacy of the U.S.-dominated international financial system, some experts say.
And that could make Russian President Vladimir Putin and especially Chinese President Xi Jinping, who is said to want to create an alternative renminbi-based financial system, very happy in the end.
At a time when many nations are unsure about whether to do business with Russia and are falling into the debt-enforced embrace of China, the G-7 action sends a message: What was once sacrosanct in international finance may be no longer.
A number of sovereign wealth funds, central banks, corporations, and private investors—especially from the smaller countries of the global south that are most vulnerable to sanctions—may well want to hedge against full investment in dollar- and euro-based holdings.
“This decision crosses the Rubicon,” said Ryan Martínez Mitchell, a law professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, by “weakening the norm of sovereign immunity for foreign central banks.”
“Any shift away from a U.S. dollar-based global financial system is not a near-term prospect, but decisions like these do probably add to the constituency that would welcome that kind of future,” Mitchell said. Others agree.
“There were many forces pushing for a search for alternatives to [the U.S.] dollar, and this move will give an additional push to those efforts,” said Harold James, a financial historian at Princeton University.
“I believe we are at a tipping point in which two worries coincide: one about the likely fiscal path of the U.S. and an unsustainably large burden; the second about seizure of assets, with secondary sanctions possibly being applied to countries that are in a supply chain with China and then indirectly with Russia.”
The “tipping point,” James warns, could come in the form of many countries, even U.S. allies, beginning to move their assets away from the dollar and euro.
According to Raghuram Rajan of the University of Chicago, a former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, nations are disturbed by the idea that Russia’s $300 billion in central bank reserves have been inaccessible for more than two years. “Some central banks have started diversifying reserves a little more as a result, including into gold,” Rajan said.
James added: “One sign that I find very telling is how Central European countries, the Czech Republic and Poland, both of which feel very close to the U.S. and who weren’t interested in gold reserves when they felt secure—indeed, the Czech Republic sold its gold reserves the day they entered NATO in March 1999—are now buying large amounts of gold.”
Putin himself spoke triumphantly of this trend in his notorious interview with renegade U.S. newscaster Tucker Carlson in February. Washington’s decision “to use the dollar as a tool of the foreign-policy struggle is one of the biggest strategic mistakes made by the U.S. political leadership,” Putin said, pointing to America’s fiscal profligacy. “Even the U.S. allies are now downsizing their dollar reserves.” At another point, Putin warned other countries that they “could be next in line for expropriation by the United States and the West.”
Wary of the risks of sending a destabilizing message, the G-7 did stop short of actually seizing the Russian assets at its summit in Italy. Instead, it adopted a complex scheme to transfer so-called windfall profits on earnings from frozen Russian central bank securities—the earnings of some $3 billion to $4 billion a year come from investments by Euroclear, the financial services company in Belgium that holds the Russian assets—to supply finance to Ukraine.
It was unprecedented all the same. As a senior Biden administration official described it: “Never before in history has a multilateral coalition immobilized the sovereign assets of an aggressor country and then found a way to unlock the value of those assets for the benefit of the aggrieved party as it fights for its freedom. That’s what happened at this G-7.”
However it’s done, making money off other nations’ assets—even aggressor nations, such as Russia, in total violation of global norms—is a risky precedent. “Once a new sanction becomes seen as effective, its usage tends to proliferate,” said Jon Bateman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “In recent years, creative new uses of export control powers—such as the Entity List and the Foreign Direct Product Rule—have ping-ponged between Chinese and Russian targets, with each country serving as a proving ground for actions later taken against the other.”
Nor did the G-7 leaders stop there. They also indicated that new measures were being considered that might gradually cut Beijing out of the international financial system. While saying in a communiqué that they “recognize the importance of China in global trade” and affirming that they “are not trying to harm China or thwart its economic development,” the leaders obliquely threatened Chinese banks “and other entities in China” with measures to “restrict access to our financial systems.” That could ratchet up the war—and the risks to the system—dramatically.
China has already been quietly insulating itself from financial retaliation over its support of Russia in the past two years, said Hung Tran, a former deputy director at the International Monetary Fund, in a June 21 interview. “The major Chinese banks have been very cautious even in reducing their exposure and dealings with Russia. In place of that, smaller institutions not having any business with any U.S. entity have been set up to handle trade with Russia so that basically Russia-China trade is settled in renminbi and rubles.”
The senior administration official justified the decision to increase pressure on China by saying that “some of China’s actions to support the Russian war machine are now not just threatening Ukraine’s existence but European security and trans-Atlantic security.”
The official added that among other “unrivaled policy distortions coming out of China”—meaning its unfair trade practices—Beijing was now openly supplying dual-use components and other economic aid to Russia. “There was unanimous agreement that the Russian military has been sustained by transforming its entire economy into a war machine and because China and other countries have been willing to serve” that effort, the official said.
In a blunt statement during his visit to Beijing in April, Secretary of State Antony Blinken reiterated these accusations, declaring that China was “powering Russia’s brutal war of aggression against Ukraine” as “the top supplier of machine tools, microelectronics, nitrocellulose, which is critical to making munitions and rocket propellants, and other dual-use items that Moscow is using to ramp up its defense industrial base.”
The actions taken at the G-7 summit may well have been necessary. Nearly two and a half years into the war, support for aid from the United States and Europe is flagging, Kyiv’s forces are exhausted, Russia’s economy is still looking fairly robust, and a new anti-Western alignment is hardening between Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, and most recently North Korea. “We are stepping up our collective efforts to disarm and defund Russia’s military industrial complex,” the G-7 leaders said in their communiqué.
This latest approach to squeezing Russia started slowly, even painfully, amid a great deal of tension between the United States and European governments about just how tough to get with Moscow.
Immediately following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, none of those governments had a problem imposing the usual economic sanctions—import and export restrictions and the like—and quickly. They took a major step further when they froze Russia’s central bank assets—an unprecedented move against such a large country—in addition to real estate properties, stocks, bonds, and various investments held by Russian oligarchs.
But actually seizing those bank assets was seen as a step too far, especially by the Europeans, who fought off an effort led by the U.S. Congress, and ultimately backed by the Biden administration, to pursue full seizure. That meant tampering with the international financial system itself—the complex postwar network of norms, codes, and laws that has underwritten the greatest surge of prosperity in recorded history and enriched the West. That felt a little too much like playing with elemental fire because it meant threatening the idea of sovereign immunity that is central to the system and because it meant posing increased risks to the holding of dollar- and euro-denominated assets. And having established this precedent, what about China? What effect will the G-7’s warnings have on Xi?
The shot fired in the communiqué could deter Xi from doing even more to isolate China’s ailing economy than he already has—specifically by invading or blockading Taiwan. Or, alternatively, it could mean the beginning of the end of the postwar global economic system if Xi decides to move against Taiwan anyway. Indeed, he could easily gamble that the United States wouldn’t dare do to China what it’s doing to Russia for exactly that reason.
If the United States and West were to respond to an invasion or blockade of Taiwan by freezing and leveraging Chinese assets, the result could be a freeze-up of the whole financial system and a devastating blow to the global economy. In the case of Russia, Washington needed to undergo many months of negotiation with the European Union because the vast majority of Russian assets are held in Europe and there was only about $300 billion or so to freeze. The same is not true of Chinese assets, which are huge and spread all over the world. Under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, Washington would be able to freeze some $800 billion in Chinese Treasury bill holdings entirely on its own, which is only a portion of some $3 trillion in Chinese-owned sovereign assets overseas. But Beijing could easily retaliate against that nearly $6 trillion in Western investment in China.
As Tran argues, the threat of a kind of financial MAD, or mutual assured destruction, is far too great. In “terms of balance sheet exposures, China has about $3.4 trillion of identifiable international assets at risk of possible sanctions and up to $5.8 trillion of liabilities to, or assets in China of, international investors and companies largely from Western countries. China therefore has plenty of room to take retaliatory actions,” Tran wrote in a 2022 post for the Atlantic Council titled “Wargaming a Western Freeze of China’s Foreign Reserves.”
The deep cross-integration between China and the West is what has led both sides to avoid a complete decoupling of economies, reflecting what former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers once called a “financial balance of terror.” As a result, “there will be more resistance to imposing the scope of sanctions we have imposed on Russia because Western economies are far more intertwined with China’s than they were with Russia’s,” said William Reinsch, a former U.S. commerce undersecretary now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Reinsch notes there is an important “qualitative difference” as well: “The Russian assets being used are those seized from oligarchs who have supported/enabled Putin. There are some Chinese oligarchs, but their relationship with their own government is much different, as is their role in the economy. If you go beyond oligarchs, you get very quickly to seizing sovereign assets, which I doubt the West would do and for which the consequences would be significant.”
But according to some China experts, the latest moves might only spur Xi to further decouple his economy. The “dimmer” that peaceful reunification with Taiwan seems, “the more incentives Beijing would have to reduce vulnerabilities to sanctions in case of a militarized conflict,” said Zongyuan Zoe Liu, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and columnist for Foreign Policy. “China has been diversifying its foreign exchange reserves since the 2000s. While previously the primary motivation was to search for higher returns and strategic assets, now it is also to reduce vulnerabilities to sanctions.”
And while Xi’s dream of a renminbi-based system still “has a long way to go”—the yuan is a distant fifth in global reserve currency holdings—escalating Western moves “may ultimately weaken international law protections for everyone, not only their intended targets,” Mitchell wrote recently for the Quincy Institute. As a result, “intensified weaponization of Western currencies could indeed boost China’s yuan efforts, and, more significantly, provide a major stimulus to plans for a BRICS basket reserve currency. The move would simultaneously improve Beijing’s reputation as an apparently more responsible actor with respect to foreign assets, while also perversely incentivizing it to further experiment with its own nascent unilateral sanctions regime.”
Russia is much more willing than China to blow up the international system. But that doesn’t mean Xi won’t decide he can afford to see that happen as well. As Tran argues, Beijing has been pursuing a “dual-track” strategy of working within the current Western-led trading system “but also wanting to find alternative ways to do this trade without being exposed to dollar sanctions.” Further sanctions could only push Xi further in the radical direction of trying to set up an alternative renminbi-based financial trading system.
“Both sides are kind of upping their ante,” Tran said.
IT’S TIME TO CHANGE – Motivational Speech
What are the implications of China’s imports falling and its exports growing at their fastest rate in 15 months?
As the world’s second largest importer, China’s imports are actually relatively concentrated, with several commodities accounting for a large proportion.
1. Semiconductors (the largest import category)
Semiconductors are China’s largest import commodity over the years, at $400 billion per year. However, with Western countries imposing semiconductor sanctions on China and the continuous rise of China’s domestic semiconductor industry, China’s imports of semiconductors have fallen by 15% per year since 2021.
The rapid decline in semiconductor imports is the number one reason for China’s declining imports.
2. Energy (the second largest import category)
The import volume of oil, natural gas, and coal is also very large. On average, $300 billion of crude oil is imported each year. As China’s share of clean energy continues to expand and the replacement rate of electric vehicles increases rapidly, China’s demand for crude oil is decreasing year by year. After the Russian-Ukrainian war in 2023, the price of China’s imported energy has gradually declined, and many crude oils are settled in RMB, which has lowered the amount of energy imports.
In addition to semiconductors and energy, China’s demand for other imported commodities is actually increasing. Imports of agricultural products, meat, fruit, textiles, minerals and metals are all continuing to increase, showing the strong purchasing power of Chinese society. However, due to the low proportion of these things, they cannot offset the decline in semiconductor and energy imports, causing China’s imports to continue to decline in the past year.
China’s exports are very complex, and China exports almost everything.
China’s exports have fluctuated in the past year, but have generally grown steadily. From January to May this year, China’s exports grew by 6.3%. The main categories driving China’s export growth are:
1. Shipbuilding
China’s shipbuilding industry completely defeated its old rival South Korea in 2023, and its global share once exceeded 70%. From January to May this year, China’s shipbuilding exports increased by 100% compared with last year
2. Automobiles
In 2023, China became the world’s largest automobile producer and exporter, and the export of electric vehicles grew very rapidly. From January to May 2024, automobile exports grew by 27%
3. Electronic products and household appliances
With the increase in global demand, China’s exports of electronic products and household appliances have grown rapidly. In particular, the export of air conditioners, fans and refrigerators driven by global climate change has grown rapidly. An increase of 20% over last year
If you only read Western media, you seem to come to a conclusion: the United States and Western countries are decoupling from China and no longer buying Chinese goods, and China’s exports will be devastated.
But the actual situation is that China’s exports to European and American countries have indeed declined. However, exports to ASEAN, South America, and countries along the Belt and Road have grown rapidly. The total export volume has increased instead of decreased, and ASEAN has replaced the United States as China’s largest customer.
In general, China’s continued decrease in imports and increase in exports show the changes in current global trade.
Due to the increased restrictions and confrontation between Europe and the United States on China, China has to reduce the import of semiconductors and replace them with domestic semiconductors. Global energy prices have fallen, and China has increased its influence on oil-producing countries through the BRICS organization, which has reduced the price of China’s energy imports. The decline in these two major categories of imported goods has lowered China’s imports.
European and American countries have restricted China’s export commodities, implemented a “decoupling” strategy, and actively reduced imports from China, but the total global demand for Chinese goods has not really decreased, and non-Western countries’ demand for goods has continued to increase. At the same time, many goods enter the European and American markets through third countries. Therefore, China’s exports to non-Western countries have grown rapidly, filling the gap in the Western market, and overall exports are continuing to grow. This shows that global trade is unlikely to be completely blocked by political forces, and the advantages of Chinese manufacturing are unlikely to be surpassed by other countries in a short period of time.
What goes through a police officer’s mind when he shoots someone’s dog?
Well, I can’t speak for all police officers, but I can tell you what went through my mind the time I shot someone’s dog.
I was called to a small town in my county in reference to three dogs which were running loose, attacking other peoples’ leashed pets, and destroying property. I got there before animal control and located the dogs, which were staying together. Two of them looked like pit bull /boxer mixes, and the third was a big, light-colored lab mix. I don’t really have any equipment for catching dogs, especially three big ones, so I just sort of followed them around town in my car to make sure they didn’t cause too much trouble before animal control could get there.
As I followed them down a street, a lady opened her front door and started yelling to me and pointing to the house across the street. That’s where the dogs belonged. The dogs ran onto her porch. She closed the storm door and they started jumping and biting at it.
This was getting too dangerous. Those dogs were crazy, and someone was going to get hurt. Now, I’m a dog person. A dog lover. I get along just fine with dogs, and I can usually even come to an arrangement with the grouchy ones. So, I grabbed my metal clipboard to use as a shield and got out of my car, headed toward the dogs’ house. They were having none of that.
I was almost able to back them down. Like I said, I love dogs, and I know the tricks, but three dogs in an aggressive pack mentality were more than I could handle by myself. They started playing that adorable doggie game where they take turns lunging at you, getting a little closer each time, two of them trying to circle behind you while another gets your attention.
I had a Taser with one shot. Three dogs. I had pepper spray, but the dogs were too close and too aggressive to count on it. My biggest regret is that I didn’t just spray them as soon as they were in range, but by the time I realized I was in serious trouble, it was too late for pepper spray.
I drew my gun and backed toward my squad car. This gave me a bit more confidence, which the dogs apparently sensed, because they backed off a little. Before I got back to my car though, they were right on top of me. I made sure I was oriented so that if I had to shoot I would be pointing in the safest possible direction. When one of the dogs finally lunged so close that I was sure he would get me, I fired. I was pointing my gun down at a fairly steep angle, because that’s how close the dog was.
This was supposed to be about what went through my mind. Well, at the moment I decided to pull the trigger, it was something like “I gave you every chance in the world, but you keep coming, so fuck you.” (sorry for the language, but that’s what I thought)
The dog I shot went down hard, bleeding all over my front fender. The other two dogs ran off. The shot finally got the attention of the dogs’ owners.
Of course, the first person to come sprinting out of the house was a little girl, maybe 12 years old. She was screaming and crying and looking at me like the biggest monster she had ever seen. I have no doubt that those three dogs, who would have had a great time playing tug o war with my corpse, were as gentle as kittens with “their” little girl. Dogs are amazing like that. So, there was absolutely nothing I could say to her. At that point, what was going through my mind was “Screw this. I’m just going to hand this little girl my badge and go home.”
I’ve had to arrest parents in front of their screaming kids. I’ve had to pry screaming toddlers from the arms of their crying, meth-addicted mothers and hand them over to DCFS. This was bad in a whole new way. It sucked.
Eventually Dad came out. I was pretty sure he was going to hit me. I was already making up my mind that I’d give him a warning on the Aggravated Battery charge as long as I was able to subdue him fairly easily, but his wife came out and calmed him down before it came to that.
Somehow the dog lived despite the fact that I had shot it right in the center of the head with a .45. There was no exit wound. When a pit bull lunges at you from that close, all you can see is head. Dad ran the dog to the vet, and I heard it was alive and doing very well weeks later. I really have no idea how that could be. I distinctly remember a perfectly round, half inch hole pumping blood out of that dog’s head.
The family made a formal complaint on me, of course. Fortunately, that lady from across the street gave me a glowing review. She said she couldn’t figure out why I didn’t shoot the dogs sooner.
It turns out that I also had a backup officer who I didn’t know about until after the shot. He pulled up behind me and saw the whole thing, but stayed in his car the whole time. I guess he’s smarter than me. He made a good witness on my behalf at least.
I felt like absolute crap for a couple weeks. I won’t whine about the details. It was mostly that little girl and the fact that I really am one of those people who just can’t resist playing with every dog he sees. I wanted so badly to visit that family and explain things to the little girl, but of course that wouldn’t have been appropriate. Dad wanted my ass, and showing up at his house on a social call would have been seen as a provocation.
Anyhow, that’s what went through this cop’s mind when he shot someone’s dog.
AI SCENES – Crystal Nexus Chronicles of the Interstellar Mask Part 1 of 50 #62
Why did Vietnam stay united while Korea didn’t?
At that time, the North Vietnamese army continued to infiltrate South Vietnam, which made the United States, which supported South Vietnam, exhausted.
The Johnson administration believed that only by bombing North Vietnam and destroying North Vietnam’s industrial facilities could North Vietnam’s southward route be completely cut off. Therefore, the US military not only bombed North Vietnam on a large scale, but also included Laos and Cambodia in the bombing range, attempting to completely cut off the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
But the US military’s goal was obviously difficult to achieve.
On the one hand, although North Vietnam was subjected to large-scale bombing by the United States, the weapons Ho Chi Minh needed could be continuously transported from China, and aid from the Soviet Union was also continuous;
On the other hand, China publicly stated as early as 1962 that “if the US military crosses the 17th parallel north, then China will also organize troops to participate in the war.” This is the strategy of “each further”.
Therefore, after the United States began large-scale bombing of North Vietnam, China also organized communications troops, engineering troops, anti-aircraft artillery troops, etc. to enter Vietnam to fight, and the war situation began to escalate.
The situation facing the United States is that even if the United States withstands China’s pressure and bombs North Vietnam back to the “Stone Age”, or even defeats the Chinese army participating in the war and completely occupies North Vietnam, the United States will not be able to overthrow the two backers behind North Vietnam: China and the Soviet Union, especially China, its opponent in the Korean War.
Under such circumstances, whether the US army crosses the 17th parallel north latitude has no practical significance, because it cannot win even if it crosses.
Therefore, the area north of 17 degrees north latitude later became the “safe zone” for the North Vietnamese army.
North Vietnamese troops continued to penetrate into South Vietnam. Once pursued by the US military, they fled north of the 17th parallel. The American soldiers gave up the pursuit and returned to South Vietnam. This cycle repeats over and over again, and the American soldiers are exhausted.
The nightmare of the Vietnam War for Americans is that it was an unwinnable war from the very beginning. The longer the Americans stayed in Indochina, the worse they lost.
In fact, this is exactly the case. From the time when American special forces landed in Vietnam in 1961 to the time when they withdrew in 1975, nearly 60,000 American soldiers were killed and more than 100,000 were injured in the United States in more than a decade.
After the war, more than 100,000 American soldiers committed suicide, and the US military expenditure reached more than 250 billion US dollars, with countless material losses.
What’s more terrible is that the war caused an unprecedented anti-Vietnam War movement in the United States, and for the first time, a huge rift appeared in American society.
Anti-War Protests of the 1960s-70s
The Vietnam anti-war movement was one of the most pervasive displays of opposition to the government policy in modern times. Protests raged all over the country. San Francisco, New York,...
The Bretton Woods system, which has supported the US financial hegemony since World War II, also declared its collapse due to the unbearable burden of the Vietnam War. It can be said that the Vietnam War seriously damaged the vitality of the United States.
The end of the Bretton Woods System (1972-81)
The multimedia content on this page cannot be printed. Video (3:29): Former U.S. President Richard Nixon announces end of dollar link to gold U.S. gas station during the 1970s oil price shock.
By the early 1960s, the U.S. dollar's fixed value against gold, under the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, was seen as overvalued.
A sizable increase in domestic spending on President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs and a rise in military spending caused by the Vietnam War gradually worsened the overvaluation of the dollar.
End of Bretton Woods system The system dissolved between 1968 and 1973. In August 1971, U.S. President Richard Nixon announced the "temporary" suspension of the dollar's convertibility into gold.
While the dollar had struggled throughout most of the 1960s within the parity established at Bretton Woods, this crisis marked the breakdown of the system. An attempt to revive the fixed exchange rates failed, and by March 1973 the major currencies began to float against each other.
Since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, IMF members have been free to choose any form of exchange arrangement they wish (except pegging their currency to gold): allowing the currency to float freely, pegging it to another currency or a basket of currencies, adopting the currency of another country, participating in a currency bloc, or forming part of a monetary union.
Oil shocks Many feared that the collapse of the Bretton Woods system would bring the period of rapid growth to an end. In fact, the transition to floating exchange rates was relatively smooth, and it was certainly timely: flexible exchange rates made it easier for economies to adjust to more expensive oil, when the price suddenly started going up in October 1973.
Floating rates have facilitated adjustments to external shocks ever since. The IMF responded to the challenges created by the oil price shocks of the 1970s by adapting its lending instruments.
To help oil importers deal with anticipated current account deficits and inflation in the face of higher oil prices, it set up the first of two oil facilities. Helping poor countries From the mid-1970s, the IMF sought to respond to the balance of payments difficulties confronting many of the world's poorest countries by providing concessional financing through what was known as the Trust Fund.
In March 1986, the IMF created a new concessional loan program called the Structural Adjustment Facility. The SAF was succeeded by the Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility in December 1987.
To sum up, the fundamental reason for the disastrous defeat of the United States in the Vietnam War was that this war was destined to be an unwinnable war.
“CONKLIN!” Havaderr wailed. His face was the brightest red and steaming with heat. The veins in his neck throbbed noticeably, but he waited as still as he could for Conklin to answer. A buzz came in over the intercom above Havaderr’s head.
“Hey, was that you shouting, Havaderr?” Conklin’s voice crackled with static and attitude. Havaderr shut his eyes and repeated his Zen mantra in his head.
“Havaderr? What’s your problem?”
Havaderr’s eyes opened, and in the most even tone he could manage; he said his mantra out loud.
“I am calm. I am calm. I can overcome this. I am strong. I am strong. I can overcome anything.” Havaderr spoke through gritted teeth, spittle flying across the room as he focused on keeping his anger inside rather than shouting and blowing the place up with Conklin inside.
“Hey guy, are you going to answer me or what?” Conklin’s voice implied his own rising impatience. Havaderr moved to the button on the wall nearest him to respond.
“Yes, Conklin, I was shouting,” Havaderr said as evenly as his rage would allow. “Get your ass to 4A NOW!” As he trailed off, he clenched his teeth together so hard he felt a grinding that might as well have been a tooth chipping. Before Conklin’s reply came, Havaderr heard an irritated sigh over the intercom.
“Yeah, be right ther-.” Conklin barely finished his sentence before releasing the button, cutting himself off at the end.
Moments later, a door slid open down the hall, several yards away from Havaderr. Conklin came into the hall, looking both ways before spotting Havaderr.
“What the hell, why are you shouting and-“ Havaderr cut Conklin off with a finger to his mouth to silence him.
“I’m going to show you something in this room behind me, and it’s best if your mouth is shut when I do.” Havaderr’s voice wavered, he was still trying to control his anger. Conklin looked confused as ever but kept his mouth shut. With a worried expression, Conklin followed Havaderr to another door. Havaderr stood aside and opened the door for Conklin to enter alone. Conklin stood in the doorway staring, then Havaderr shoved him wholly into the room from behind and closed the door.
“Havaderr, what’s going on? What the fu-ahhhh!” The intercom inside the restroom was unnecessary, but Havaderr appreciated it right now. He would have heard Conklin screaming from quite a distance, but hearing Conklin’s disgust and horror in surround sound was more pleasing. A slice of anger slid off his shoulders and a small smile appeared on his face.
The door rattled, clearly Conklin on the other side trying to burst through, but Havaderr held the lock button, keeping Conklin trapped inside.
“What kind of game is this Havaderr? Let me out, for Christ’s sake!” Conklin was panicking, releasing more anger from Havaderr’s shoulders and filling his belly with laughter.
“This is no game, friend. This is you coming face to face with your own incompetence,” Havaderr said over the intercom, still smiling.
“Havaderr! Let me out of here!” Conklin screamed and started ramming the door again.
“I don’t think so, Conklin. If you look to the left of the door, I’ve been kind enough to set you up with plenty of cleaning supplies for the job, which is a lot more than you did for me. I’d suggest you start tackling that shit before it starts tackling you.” Havaderr exploded with laughter, letting go of the intercom and floating backward as he held onto his stomach. He laughed so hard he couldn’t breathe. Conklin kept banging on the door and pleading to be released, but Havaderr couldn’t hear anything over the roar of his own hysteria.
Curled up in fetal position, floating in the hallway, Havaderr worked himself out of his fits of laughter. He wiped the joyful tears from his eyes and started breathing normally again. He moved back to the intercom.
“Look mate, this restroom was in your sector to clean. Obviously, you did a piss poor job,” Havaderr grabbed his side, holding the laughter in after such a quality pun. “I told you, cleaning the restrooms would be the most important job, because if it isn’t done right, this happens. Floating excrement!” Conklin didn’t say anything, but Havaderr heard him kick or punch the door.
“I’ll take your silence as admitting you did a sloppy job the first time. You know, I needed to do some business, and I walk into the restroom greeted with a turd to the face, which I’m assuming belonged to you, so I have no sympathy for you right now. Clean the damn restroom like you were supposed to, and I’ll let you out.” Havaderr waited for a response. He was eager to shower off the stench and stain of human waste from himself before finishing his day.
“Yeah, alright,” Conklin said over the intercom, sounding defeated and guilty. Havaderr nodded his head and left Conklin to figure out how to clean a restroom with feces floating freely throughout.
“Like I said, not a drop of sympathy for you. Do it right the first time, and we won’t run into stupid problems like that,” Havaderr said coolly, scrubbing at the built-up muck in the corners of the glass.
Conklin was still cranky from cleaning the restroom the day before, and he meant to let Havaderr know just how little he appreciated the tactless way he was pushed into the situation without warning.
“Chin up, Conklin. We have one more day before our shift is over, and we can get the hell off this floating heap of death,” Havaderr motioned toward the clear chambers that housed the comatose bodies of several crew members, one of which whose glass he was scrubbing.
“Remind me, what’s up with these bodies? They’re dead, yeah?” Conklin asked.
“No, they’re alive, they’re the crew, dumbass,” Havaderr grunted at Conklin. He looked over to see Conklin hovering around the main dashboard, not a rag or mop near him. “And I wouldn’t mind if you got to work while you asked your questions,” he barked. Conklin jumped and reached for a rag tucked into a closed bucket tethered nearby. He started mindlessly wiping at the dashboard without paying close attention.
“Okay, but how come they’re asleep?” Conklin asked. Havaderr sighed as he paused and rolled his eyes.
“Do I look like the Captain of this ship? All I know is, this crew is traveling some number of lightyears, so the ship has been programed for regular stops near inhabited planets for maintenance and cleaning. We drew the short straw, so we get to hop from the ship we were on previously, to this one, and then another one before heading back home. Nobody else was this far out into deep space to do the job, so we get a long shift before our break. At least they’re paying us over time, eh?” Havaderr smiled at the thought of a paycheck double its usual amount. He looked in on the half-naked man inside the tube he was cleaning, tapping on the glass with his knuckle and laughing at how strange the sight was.
Air escaped the edges of the door, and it hissed loudly. The smile fell from Havaderr’s face as he scanned the chamber looking for an explanation. The door swung open and the half-naked man floated out as if to follow. Thankfully, he was attached to a few tubes that kept him reigned in and asleep, but the color left Havaderr’s face once he realized that would only last for so long.
Havaderr turned to Conklin, who looked just as confused.
“He just-just-he-“ Havaderr stuttered, unable to decide what he was trying to say. The man’s feet flew upward so his back was parallel to the floor and his right side dipped down. Slowly, he started to spin, so he was upside down. All the while, Havaderr and Conklin stared without any clue how to fix it.
“Did you touch something?” Havaderr shouted at Conklin, who shook his head wordlessly.
“I didn’t touch anything!” Havaderr went back to staring at the half-naked man, perplexed. After a minute, Havaderr decided they couldn’t leave the man like that.
“Get over here and help me with this!” He yelled at Conklin. Still silent, Conklin moved toward Havaderr and the unconscious man. Havaderr and Conklin wore their gravity belts at 85% power to keep from floating off like the man from the tube, but it allowed them a bit more mobility too. Unfortunately, they didn’t have any extras to strap to the man, so he continued to spin and flip through the air.
One of the wires connecting the man to his casket snapped, leaving only one left to keep him from flying down the corridor and into every other part of the ship. Havaderr and Conklin shared a look of fear but said nothing.
Havaderr grabbed the man’s knees and tried to pull them down so the man was right side up, but as he pulled, the man’s whole body moved toward Havaderr. Conklin remained motionless, watching the unconscious body float into Havaderr. Havaderr struggled and groped, trying his very best to wrangle the helpless man, but even his best efforts left him with the man’s body bumping into him clumsily. He accidentally grabbed the man’s buttocks, and the man’s armpit swung around and slapped him in the face. All in all, it reminded Conklin of two young people at their first school dance, trying not to step on each other.
Conklin covered the smile on his face, but the more Havaderr fought with the floating man and lost, the more the urge to laugh rose in his belly. When the man launched a foot directly into Havaderr’s eye, Conklin lost it. With one hand on the man’s shoulder and his other arm wrapped around the man’s torso, Havaderr stopped to see what was so funny to Conklin. He didn’t have to ask; he knew how he looked.
“Would you knock it off and help me! I don’t know what we disconnected, but that could be vital to this man’s life!” Havaderr tried to repeat his mantra in his head, but he couldn’t hear anything over Conklin’s laughter. Havaderr grumbled as he kept spinning the man back into position, with no help from Conklin, who was tumbling in circles on the other side of the room.
Finally, Havaderr got the man into his up-right position and back into the tube. As best as he could, he reattached the disconnected wires, but he couldn’t pull the door shut.
“Conklin! Find the button to close this door, hurry, before he tries to escape again!” Havaderr pleaded.
Conklin straightened up and moved to the dashboard he had been cleaning. On the first try, he hit a button, and the door closed, sealing itself. Havaderr wiped the sweat from his brow and looked at Conklin, a little puzzled. Conklin’s laughter died down, but when he saw Havaderr near collapse and panting, his laughter boiled over.
“What is wrong with you? Were you too busy finding this hilarious to help me save that man’s life?” Havaderr demanded, huffing and puffing.
“Calm down, he’s fine,” Conklin squeaked. “The buttons are clearly labeled on the dash here, see?” Conklin pointed to the dashboard. Havaderr saw buttons marked to open doors, close doors, start specific mechanisms, stop the same mechanisms, and a bunch of other things Havaderr didn’t understand. What he did think he understood, was how the door opened in the first place.
“Did you open his door on me?” Havaderr asked Conklin, the anger rising again.
“Yeah, mate, you should have seen the look on your face!” Conklin rolled over laughing.
“You idiot! You could have killed the man, we could be fired, what the hell is wrong with you?” Havaderr bellowed.
“Relax Havaderr, you’ll give yourself a stroke!” Conklin pulled himself together for a second, setting his feet back on the floor and pointing to the dashboard again.
“This here, that indicates their vital signs. You can see they’re all perfectly healthy, no harm done,” Conklin said matter-of-factly. Havaderr was flustered. He could only trust Conklin’s word, he had no idea what any of the lights or buttons meant on the dash.
“You couldn’t have known it would be okay, though. What if the tube that detached from his arm was something that kept him alive?” Havaderr exclaimed. Conklin rolled his eyes, irritated that Havaderr wasn’t figuring it out as easily as he was.
“All that tube did was give him pleasant dreams; it wasn’t important. He’ll live, and nobody need ever know you almost killed a man,” Conklin started to giggle again. Havaderr’s face turned tomato red and he clenched his fist, trying to fight the overwhelming desire to punch Conklin in the face.
“You did this on purpose?” Havaderr said, strained.
“Well, maybe don’t lock me in a room with floating shit again, and we’ll be fine,” Conklin smiled, feeling pleased with himself.
Spicy Grilled T-Bones
grilled t bone steaks with bbq rub horizontal 2
Ingredients
Seasoning
2 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons dried oregano leaves
2 teaspoons sweet paprika
2 teaspoons dried thyme leaves, crushed
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon onion powder
1 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 teaspoon ground white pepper
1/2 teaspoon ground red pepper
Steaks
2 to 4 well-trimmed beef T-bone or Porterhouse steaks, cut 1-inch thick
Instructions
Combine Seasoning ingredients, and press evenly onto steaks.
Place steaks on grid over medium, ash covered coals. Cook for about 14 to 16 minutes.
What’s the most questionable cost-cutting move you’ve seen an employer make?
This was not me but a chap I used to work with with. Richard is brilliant, I’m the guy who scribbles a drawing of what we need, Richard tidies up that drawing and puts all the part numbers on it. He sits down with the job and tells us exactly when it can be delivered, and he is always right. He is the perfect “Foil” for all the arty types around him, he brought us all down the art of the possible and made sure it all worked perfectly and on time. He was the guy who did everything perfectly and properly “By the book” I was the guy who did a quick and dirty job with some plywood and string we happened to have around the office. It was a perfect team.
Richard had a thing about “OPM” other peoples money, when you spend OPM you have to justify every penny. He would give me an accurate breakdown of every penny he spent, I would tell him it didn’t matter as long as the time was on time and he wasn’t wearing a lobster for a hat it made no odds.
So he told me about a job he had with a contractor that had the job of repairing the CCTV cameras on the UK’s Motorways. This was 25 years ago and in the years leading up to this the government had had lots of different contractors installing equipment, probably there were records somewhere but nobody knew where.
So he would see what the fault was (no picture, Pan-Tilt not working etc) then he would go out to the site in his car and inspect the camera with a pair of binoculars. He would then be able to identify at least what the head was and what the possible camera was. He would order all of the parts that MIGHT have gone (different wiring looms, camera electronics cards, for the old tube cameras he had new CCD cameras that interfaced directly to the mounts of the old cameras.
Then one night they would book the guys who close the lane of the motorway, book a cherry picker to lift him up to the camera etc etc.
He would then go up and fix the fault, clean the housing etc etc Then hold up a card in front of the camera with “Please test” and if the camera was good the operator would “nod” it three times.
This went on for several months, then he got called into the bosses office .. He got bawled out for wasting the companies money .. Apparently when he ordered the “HUGE QUANTITY” of unneeded spare parts the company charged a 10% restocking charge and this was costing the company dear and they wondered what on earth Richard thought he was doing? This was costing the company as much as £40 every time.
Richard explained that because he did not know what the fault was he would get all the parts “Just in case”. The boss then sarcastically suggested that Richard might want to find out what parts he needed BEFORE he went out to repair the camera.
So now they would organise to close the lane of the motorway .. get a cherry picker .. send Richard up it, he’d then examine the camera, determine what was wrong, then come down, wrap the cherry picker, wrap the guys with the cones, go back to the office and order the parts.
The extra motorway closure and the cherry picker added an extra £1300 to the repair of each camera.
Richard worked for them for 2 years after that .. He tried so many times to explain but nobody would listen ..
Pee Wee Herman Takes Dave For A Drive In The Country | Letterman
Why is China the fastest-growing economy?
The narrative that rapid economic growth is exclusive to capitalist democracies has been turned on its head by China. Boasting the fastest-growing economy, China’s model demonstrates that a different path to prosperity is not only possible but also powerful.
China’s meteoric rise as the fastest-growing economy can be attributed to several key factors: robust industrial production, aggressive trade liberalization, foreign investment, and significant government policy initiatives geared towards economic growth. Understanding these aspects provides a comprehensive view of why China has achieved such rapid economic development.
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Economic Liberalization and Foreign Investment
China’s commitment to international trade and economic liberalization has been pivotal. After re-establishing diplomatic ties with the United States in 1979, China began opening up its economy, culminating in its accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001. This move significantly reduced trade barriers and attracted a flood of foreign investments into the country. The liberalization policies allowed foreign companies to enter China’s retail, wholesale, and distribution sectors, spurring rapid economic growth. Consequently, China became an attractive destination for multinational corporations seeking low-cost manufacturing bases, thereby boosting industrial output and export growth.
The influx of foreign capital also brought in advanced technologies and management practices, elevating the productivity and efficiency of Chinese industries. Foreign-direct investments (FDI) played a critical role in transforming China’s economic landscape, making it a global manufacturing hub.
Industrial Production and Manufacturing Exports
China’s industrial sector is the backbone of its economy. With a focus on manufacturing and export-led growth, China has excelled in producing a wide array of goods, from electronics to textiles, usually at competitive prices. The country’s ability to manufacture products efficiently and affordably has led to a booming export economy, positioning China as a major player in global trade.
Government policies have also bolstered industrial production. For instance, China has heavily invested in infrastructure, such as roads, railways, and ports, which facilitates the smooth transportation of goods. Additionally, special economic zones (SEZs) and industrial parks have been set up to attract foreign investments and promote manufacturing.
Government Initiatives and Policy
Chinese government policies have been instrumental in driving economic growth. By reducing red tape and simplifying regulations, China has made it easier for businesses to set up and operate. For example, obtaining permits and licenses in China is relatively quick and straightforward, attracting more domestic and foreign investments.
Moreover, the government has implemented policies to build a skilled labor force. By investing in education and vocational training, China has created a pool of skilled workers who are essential for its manufacturing and service sectors. These initiatives ensure that the labor force is capable of meeting the demands of modern industries while improving overall productivity.
Supply Chain Integration
China’s decision to develop an extensive supply chain network has been a critical factor in its economic growth. By manufacturing not only final products but also every component and spare part required, China has minimized its dependence on other countries. This integrated supply chain allows for smoother production processes and faster turnaround times, giving Chinese manufacturers a competitive edge.
Renewable Energy and Natural Resources
China’s economy is increasingly driven by efforts to achieve sustainability. The country is investing heavily in renewable energy sources like solar and wind power to meet its carbon targets. Additionally, China is optimizing its usage of natural resources, including coal, iron ore, oil, and natural gas, to maintain steady economic growth. By focusing on both traditional and renewable energy sources, China aims to secure a balanced and sustainable economic future.
Robust Consumption
Domestic consumption also plays a vital role in China’s economic expansion. The country’s large middle class has strong purchasing power, driving demand for various goods and services. Economic reforms and policies aimed at increasing consumer spending have fostered a robust domestic market. Post-pandemic recovery measures have further revitalized consumption, contributing to the overall economic growth.
I am planning to quit my job but my boss said to hold off on quitting until we can at least hire someone otherwise he said “I will make things very, very bad for you.” How should I respond to this?
This happened to me. I was working for a small, family-owned company (less than 10 employees). Within two months of starting there, I realized I had made a huge miscalculation – the owner and CEO would have screaming matches in the middle of the office where everyone could hear every word. I heard that he was involved in at least three lawsuits with past employees where he was either suing them or they were suing him.
Took a few months to line up my next job, and I gave my two weeks notice, which I was surprised he took very calmly. One week into my two weeks, he brought me into his office and said that due to the fact that I had “lied on my resume” and “didn’t have the skills and qualifications I claimed,” the board of directors had told him to instruct me to stay at the job longer or else things would go poorly for me. A) Every item on my resume was absolutely and truthfully representative of my previous experience, and B) the “board of directors” did not exist. I knew he was threatening me with a lawsuit, which he could afford, and I, at the time, could not. I calmly thanked him for letting me know and told him I had to think about the situation, and I’d give him a reply by the next day.
I went home and called my friend who is a lawyer to explain the situation, who told me that if an employer has a problem with an employee, legally their option is to either write them up or to fire them, not to threaten them to stay longer. I then called the CEO back to tell him that today had been my last day, and I would turn my keys in to the office in the morning. After sputtering and hemming and hawing and demanding to know who my lawyer was, he said, “see you in the morning.” Never heard from him again after that, although I did hear from some other trauma survivors from the same company that after I left he had several people combing through my files for days to find any scrap of evidence that I had done anything wrong that he could use to legally punish me. Good riddance.
Mama Lynx Brings 7 Kittens To Woman – Discovering Why, She Bursts Into Tears!
Why is has the UK slipped to behind the US and China when it comes to invensting the technologies that are the backbone of the modern global culture? This is despite having the likes of Oxford and Cambridge.
I am not British. Perhaps it should be Brits who should answer this question.
I recall 1 incident though: USA (Trump) wanted to sanction Huawei 5G. USA made its allies eg Europe to sanction Huawei too.
UK (B Johnson) did an investigation into Huawei with full cooperation with Huawei. UK did not find Huawei having backdoor to send data back to China. UK promised not to put Huawei stuff on important UK things.
But USA insisted. UK finally bowed down & banned Huawei too.
After Johnson stepped down as PM, he made speeches in u. Once he said: (because of the ban of Huawei), UK tech will fall behind by 5 years. Worse, it will cost UK lots to remove what has been installed in UK.
See, it is not that UK does not want to invest in tech. It is USA who does not let UK do so.
Look at covid vaccine. UK has developed a vaccine (I dont remember the name). Yes, there was side effects in UK’s vaccine. So are US vaccines. But somehow UK vaccine lost to USA.
Again in 1 speech, Johnson said: the success of a vaccine is capitalism. Hinting USA???
The next day, Johnson apologised & his speech cannot be found any more. But I heard it loud & clear on the radio when he said it.
If UK is always a US “vassal” & controlled by USA, UK will for sure be behind technologically.
MR PRESIDENT: IT’S TIME!
Who’s the craziest criminal you’ve arrested?
Oh, I’ve waited for a question like this!
There was a man who lived in our town who suffered from a neurological disorder. Actually, I think he enjoyed it. The rest of the town suffered from his neurological disorder. Let me explain. This man, whom I shall call Pita (Pain in the Ass) would commit the most outrageous atrocities, then hide behind his disorder. He torched an out-of-town cop’s truck. Felony? Yes. Any consequences? No — because he was crazy.
He wormed out of D.U.Is, Attempted Arson of his own home, Domestic Violence by Threat and a host of other felony and misdemeanors. The City decided that trying to prosecute a certifiable nut bag would cost too much. So the rest of us suffered at his hands.
Then one night, we were notified of a break-in at the animal shelter. The shelter was owned by, and was in, the county, but was surrounded by our city. One other unit and I responded. As I approached the road to the shelter from the east, I found the highway entirely blocked by at least one hundred (100) dogs! They were all very friendly and surrounded my car. This is common for dogs kept in pens for a while. I carefully made my way to the shelter and found a scene of utter devastation.
The fence had been breached in several locations. A pickup truck belonging to the shelter had been hot wired and used to breach walls of the shelter. There was a heavy odor of gasoline coming from everywhere.
This ain’t lookin’ good…
At that time I saw headlights turn down the road leading to the shelter. The vehicle stopped when the headlights shined on my unit, then reversed course and left at a high speed. I immediately gave pursuit.
The other responding unit was nearing the shelter and we effected a felony stop. I ordered the driver to step out of the vehicle. He replied “I can’t, I’m naked.”
Son of a Bitch! It was Pita!
He later explained he had gotten drunk and had begun feeling sorry for the animals in what he called “Doggie Dachau” and decided to liberate them. After freeing the dogs, he spread twenty (20) gallons of gasoline throughout the shelter. He had the presence of mind to know that he was soaked with gas and if he tried to ignite it, he would be part of the ensuing FOOM! So he stripped naked, drove to a nearby bar pit and jumped in, washing off the residual gasoline. You can’t make this stuff up.
Side note: In addition to the long list of felonies, I also charged him with D.U.I. I offered him the intoxilizer test, what we call down South, the “Whiskey Machine.” He, of course, refused. I hit the button for “Test Refusal,” and the forms began to print. Several of these forms must be mailed to Jackson to the Department of Public Safety Driver’s License Branch. One form has a box to check; “Is license attached? If not, why not?” I got to write “No license. Subject was BUTT NAKED.”
Southwest Steak and Many Layered Salad
Reach new heights with this sky-high Southwest salad. Tender marinated steak layered with greens, beans, and other things. And to top it off, a creamy avocado dressing and crunchy tortilla chips.
1 can (15 to 16 ounces) black beans, rinsed, drained
2-1/2 cups coarsely crushed tortilla chips
Dressing:
1 large ripe avocado, mashed (about 3/4 cup)
3/4 cup prepared ranch dressing
2 tablespoons fresh lime juice
1 tablespoon adobo sauce
Cooking:
Whisk dressing ingredients in medium bowl until blended. Remove 1/2 cup for marinade and stir in chipotle peppers. Cover and reserve remaining dressing in refrigerator.
Place beef steak and chipotle marinade in food-safe plastic bag; turn steak to coat. Close bag securely and marinate in refrigerator 6 hours or as long as overnight, turning occasionally.
Pull back husks from corn, leaving husks attached. Remove and discard corn silk. Bring husks back up around corn; tie in place with kitchen string or strips of corn husk. Soak in cold water 30 minutes to 1 hour.
Remove steak from marinade; discard marinade. Remove corn from water. Place steak in center of grid over medium, ash-covered coals; arrange corn on grid around steak. Grill corn, covered, 20 to 30 minutes or until tender, turning occasionally. Grill steak 11 to 16 minutes for medium rare (145°F) to medium (160°F) doneness, turning occasionally.
Cook’s Tip: To prepare on gas grill, preheat grill according to manufacturer’s directions for medium heat. Place corn and steak on grid as directed above. Grill corn, covered, 15 to 25 minutes or until tender, turning every 5 minutes. Grill steak, covered, 16 to 21 minutes for medium rare (145°F) to medium (160°F) doneness, turning occasionally.
Remove steak; let stand 5 minutes. Husk corn; cut kernels from cobs. Cut steak lengthwise in half; carve each half across the grain into thin slices.
Layer 1/2 of lettuce, corn, 1/2 of beef, tomatoes and beans in 4-quart glass salad bowl or 13 x 9-inch glass baking dish. Top with remaining lettuce and beef. Drizzle with, reserved dressing. Top with tortilla chips just before serving. Serve immediately or cover and refrigerate for up to 2 hours.
Safe Handling Tips:
Wash hands with soap and water before cooking and always after touching raw meat.
Separate raw meat from other foods.
Wash all cutting boards, utensils, and dishes after touching raw meat.
Do not reuse marinades used on raw foods.
Wash all produce prior to use.
Cook steaks and roasts until temperature reaches 145°F for medium rare, as measured by a meat thermometer, allowing to rest for three minutes.
Cook Ground Beef to 160°F as measured by a meat thermometer.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has provoked comprehensive and stringent sanctions by the United States, Europe and other allied countries against Russian banks, companies, and persons.
A noteworthy measure, unprecedented for a large country, is the Western blockade of the foreign reserves of Russia’s central bank—the Bank of Russia (BOR)—immobilizing more than half of its international reserves of $630 billion placed in Western financial institutions. In addition, the BOR has been banned from dealing in the US dollar (USD), euro, and pound sterling.
These measures against a country’s central Bank have raised the geopolitical and sovereign risk of central bank reserves holdings.
They have also prompted discussions about the possibility of similar sanctions being imposed on China in the event of its military invasion of Taiwan.
The consequences of such sanctions will be more significant than the measures against Russia. China’s economy is ten times bigger than Russia’s; it has much more weight and is more integrated in the global economy and financial system.
As a result, China has more means of retaliation against Western sanctions.
This article sketches out a possible scenario of Western sanctions on China and its countermeasures to illustrate the scale of possible damages to both sides.
At present, the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) has $3.2 trillion of international reserves of which the exact currency composition is kept a state secret. However, in a 2018 report, China’s State Administration of Foreign Exchanges (SAFE) indicated that the USD share of its assets declined from 79% in 2005 to 58% in 2014, presumably falling further since then.
Nevertheless, it is reasonable to assume that most of the PBOC international reserves is in major currencies such as the USD, euro, yen, and pound sterling—including holdings of $1.1 trillion US Treasury securities, $217 billion of Asset Backed Securities (ABS) and $273 billion of equities.
In addition, Chinese enterprises have made about $145 billion of foreign direct investment (FDI) in the United States and about $83 billion in the European Union. Many of these enterprises are state owned or can be linked to the Chinese government—such as in the case of Huawei—and can be subject to US and EU sanctions .
In response to a freeze of its foreign reserves and, possibly, other private sector external assets,China could move to nationalize much of the stock of FDI in China, worth $1.9 trillion—focussing on Investments from the United States, Europe, and other countries sanctioning China.
China can stop servicing many of those debts, using the same argument as Russia—that it is willing and able to pay, but is prevented from doing so by US government actions.
China can even invoke the force majeure clause if such a clause is contained in any of the external debt contracts. The clause allows parties to a contract to suspend performing the contractual obligations due to government actions which are unforeseen at the time of signing the contract. A pause in servicing China’s external debt would inflict substantial losses on Western investors—largely through investment funds and pension funds.
As a result, in terms of balance sheet exposures, China has about $3.4 trillion of identifiable international assets at risk of possible sanctions and up to $5.8 trillion of liabilities to, or assets in China of, international investors and companies largely from Western countries. China therefore has plenty of room to take retaliatory actions. A sanctions and counter sanctions war game suggests that the losses are comparably severe for both sides.
Moreover, such a situation will significantly disrupt economic exchanges—mainly trade between the two sides. Since exports account for 18.5%, or a relatively large share of China’s GDP, with about one-third of that going to the United States and European Union, their disruptions could cause a substantial decline in China’s economic activity.
On the other hand, China accounts for 18.6% of US imports—and 22.4% of EU imports—especially in manufactured goods and several critical goods, such as pharmaceuticals and chemicals to make pharmaceutical products. Consequently, disruptions in Chinese imports would cause noticeable shortages, rising prices, and discomfort for consumers and some producers in the importing countries. The macroeconomic impact for the United States may be less severe than for China.
However, the lower tolerance of American consumers for goods shortages and inflation would mean the social and political fallout of an all out economic war with China could be more significant in the United States. The economic impact on Europe would also be more substantial as the EU exports more including to China—at 17.6% of GDP compared to 11.7% for the United States.
In short, in a scenario of Western sanctions coupled with Chinese counter measures, both sides will suffer substantial damages. This could lead to a situation of economic MAD—or mutually assured destruction—reinforcing the more catastrophic nuclear MAD.
These considerations would set the parameters of the geopolitical rivalry and conflict between China and the West. This will likely intensify in the foreseeable future to encompass all areas of relationship between the two sides, but hopefully will stop short of economic or military wars!
ANTIMATTER – Retro Pulp Science Fiction by Skyward, Return of The LIGHTNING BOLTS/Time Travel, AI2-3
My boss just texted me implying that I will be fired if I go on vacation for four days, even though I gave two months’ advance notice. My family already purchased the tickets and everything. Is there anything I can do?
I really enjoyed my time as a police officer and sometimes I even surprised myself in a good way. I was in CID (Detectives) and we were basically on call 24/7 unless we were on vacation. It was extremely common to be called in at night or weekends. If we weren’t working, we were paid time and a half overtime when called in.
Our policy was to fill out a vacation slip that showed the dates we would be off and the number of hours we would be using. So, if I wanted to take a single day, I’d out the from date and the to date and put in 8 hours of “V” time. You would then send that slip up to get approved. Pretty straight forward, you’d think.
An issue that came up for me, and others, was supervisors would interpret things differently…and it made a huge difference in my place.
For example, I want to take Monday thru Friday off, I would put the days that I would be off and away. So, I would put the previous Friday at the end of the day that I was leaving…and put the following Monday morning as my return. So I would have the end of Friday off all the way until the Monday of the following week as my return. So, I would burn 40 hours of vacation but be off for 9 days as I would include the weekends as my time off. Most supervisors would not notice this being done and it was common for the detectives to do. Essentially saying don’t call me between these dates and times.
I hope my explanation above makes sense. And here is where it mattered for me. I was taking a week off and put in 9 days to be off and use 40 hours of leave. Well, the Friday night l prior to my week off, a supervisor called me in for a homicide. I told him I was on vacation and I wasn’t coming in. He again told me to come in saying my vacation started Monday morning, even though I put the Friday afternoon on my slip. So, he ordered me in and I had very little say about it (at the time) and I went in.
On a homicide, it was common for us to work for several days continuous without going home. Because of my vacation time, they did cut me loose on that Monday. So, I went home and slept for a few hours and then continued my vacation. My regular overtime for that weekend, from the time I was called in to the time I went home was in the ballpark of 60 hours. I submitted my overtime slip. Our overtime slips had a spot to write in what hours we were scheduled to work…I put vacation down indicating that it was a vacation time for me and I wasn’t working norms. Hours. The supervisor kicked it back and said no, it wasn’t vacation time for me since my first vacation hour would have been Monday.
This caused me to look up the policies on it and it was somewhat vague with this but indicated our vacation time started when we were off…so when is one off? When they finish their last shift or when their vacation starts. So, this is where the interpretation part comes in. Some supervisors like this one believed it started the first day you had a V day. Others believed it started with whatever you put on that leave slip…as it’s very well possible you could leave for vacation right after leaving work.
Anyhow, I sent this up the chain of command asking for clarification on the policy. The supervisor first tried to prevent it from going up saying he answered the question but that got quashed. Ultimately it came back and was clarified. Our actual vacation time started with the day/time on the slip…and ended with the day/time on the slip. Reason this is so important is if you are ordered in on vacation time, not only do you get overtime, but the rate is double time and a half….this was something the union worked out years ago (before my time) to prevent people from being ordered in from vacation.
You remember that 60 hours straight I worked starting on Friday evening when I was called until Monday when I went home? That 60 hours was DOUBLE TIME AND A HALF. My paycheck looked like I hit the lottery or something. I was quite pleased with the outcome. The supervisor was a little upset because he was incorrect but realized that a) it’s not his money…if he orders me in, I should be compensated properly and b) if he ever wanted me to answer my phone again when I was off, he should play nice. It smoothed over and everything was cool.
The Hunt for Red Octavia
Why are people from Shandong, China notorious for being discriminated against all over the world?
It’s from WW1.
Most people don’t know this because it has literally been painted over in history. I mean literally. This painting is called Panthéon de la Guerre.
Panthéon de la Guerre was a painting started in 1914 by a French artist showing France victorious with all her allies and those who helped the WW1 effort.
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Notice anything?
There are no Chinese in this painting. The US entry into WW1 meant the Chinese labor corps (CLC) who went to help in WW1 were quite literally painted over.
In January 1915 China stopped being neutral and despite internal troubles 96000 Chinese volunteers primarily from Shandong were shipped to Europe across Canada to help with the war effort.
Note how I wrote shipped. They did not travel to Europe they were shipped in train box cars and were not allowed to leave them to save on landing fees.
The CLC were treated pretty much like slaves in Europe and were pretty important to the war effort.
Once it WW1 was coming to a close? The Shandong Chinese were immediately dehumanised even more as sub human filth, for deportation and many were deported at gun point. Even those who died were simply thrown into mass burial pits and the French/English didn’t even consider giving them graves. Several 1000 died but there’s only a few marked graves in France for them.
Some of them remained in Europe and formed the third Chinese migration wave out of China. The hatred towards these people was stoked up so Chinese could be discriminated against and treated unfairly.
The dehumanisation was also a sticking point, as China sent labour to get Shandong province back from the Germans. Instead western powers gave Shandong to the Japanese and stabbed China in the back at the treaty of Versailles.
This kicked off the May 4th Movement and the founding of the CPC.
EDIT
There is currently NO memorial to the CLC in Europe as above barely anybody knows about it because it’s rather niche as a topic and most Europeans are hostile to China anyway.
What is it like dying of cirrhosis of the liver?
My mom was an alcoholic. She died from Cirrhosis at the age of 43. The fucked up part is I didn’t know she had it until 2 weeks before her death.
On June 25, 1998 I woke up and walked into the livingroom where I found my mom sitting in her chair. She was so yellow and she kept vomiting black bile. I held a towel under her mouth so she wouldn’t vomit on herself. She smelled so horrible. It has been almost 21 years and I can still smell her. It was the smell of death. Her mind was gone at this point. She had no clue what was going on or where she was for that matter. I was scared to death. My 17yr old brother got scared & angry so he left(he didn’t know any better. Took me a long time to understand that). It was just me and her there. I called my aunt and told her what was going on but she didn’t know what to do. So I called my dad(parents been divorced since i was 2yrs old) but he told me that she’s probably just drunk(i knewit wasn’t that). So, I ended up having to call an ambulance and once they arrived my mom was refusing to go to the hospital. So the police got involved, asked her a few common sense questions like what year was it? Who is the President? She got them all wrong. I was begging her to go. Cops had to force her and that was the first time I got to ride in an ambulance. Once at the hospital it was just her and I in a room waiting on a doctor and I’ll never forget the look of desperation on her face when she looked at me and begged me to tell her what year it was and who the President was(she thought if she knew they would let her go home). And I’ll never forget when I had to tell her no, I’m not telling you.
That was the day I found out my mom had end stage Cirrhosis. I went home later that evening to grab some clothes and as soon as I got there I remember going straight to where she hid all of her bottles of Canadian Mist and poured them down the kitchen sink. I didn’t know at that time that she was never coming back home.
Little did I know that 7 days later my life was about to changed forever. I remember being sat down and told that my mom only had 1 to 2 days to live. I’ll never forget that feeling of not being able breath and the agonizing fear and confusion I felt at that moment. She lived exactly 2 days.
And on July 3, 1998 at 7:04 pm I stood next to my mom watched as her eyes rolled back her head and saw her take her last breath of life. I remember looking at the nurse and asking her if my mom was dead. She said yes. I was only 14 years old.
**Side Note: Just 10 years later I watched my father die from Pancreatic Cancer. He found out that he had in March of 2008 and died on May 23, 2008. I was only 24 years old. I lost my mom within a 2 week span and I lost my dad within a 2 month span. It’s so fucked up. Pancreatic Cancer is a very aggressive and vicious disease to die from. I remember getting the call from my brother. He had died before I got there. I remember my brother and I sitting next to our dead father in a Hospice bed. My brother looked at me and said I’m 27 and you’re 24, and both of our parents are dead. Talk about a hard dose of reality.
The reason that I mentioned my father’s passing is because Pancreatic Cancer is a very ugly disease and it’s an agonizing and painful death. But it has NOTHING on Cirrhosis of the Liver. End stage Cirrhosis will chew you up and spit you out. Eventually all of your organs begin to shut down. It’s such a horrible and horrific way to die. Like I said, it’s been almost 21 years since she died and let me tell you, I can still remember every single minute of every single day of the last 2 weeks before my mom’s death. EVERYTHING. I still have flashbacks.
I love my mom. And I know she loved me the best she knew how. She made sure that me and my brother never had to want for anything. This woman worked every single fucking day for 26 years for the State of Tennessee and rarely missed a day of work. But also, she made damn sure that she had her pint of Canadian Mist in her work bag. lol
I’m at peace with her death. She’s where she belongs. At peace.
But there will always be an emptiness of unanswered questions for me and my brother that will NEVER be filled. And at times it’s a hard pill to swallow. She fucked me up good with the self doubts and never truly feeling “good”enough. To this day at 35 years old, I still can’t or won’t allow anyone truly in. There’s only 2 people who are in and have fully have me and that’s my 8 and 2 year old daughter’s. No one else. And it fucking sucks.
What is the biggest culture shock you have ever faced?
I lived in the Netherlands for a couple of years then and my Dutch boss invited me to her wedding. There was a beautiful ceremony in a romantic castle and after that we were served some tiny snacks and petit fours.
After that we took a group picture and then the wedding manager announced that those who have a fork and a knife pictogram in their wedding invitation could proceed to the dinner hall and the rest can go home and thanks for coming.
So there we were, hungry and stuck in the middle of nowhere. Until one of our colleagues called her husband to pick us up by car and bring to the nearest train station where we bought ourselves döner kebab.
I still don’t get it, why should someone treat their guests differently. If you can’t afford a wedding dinner for everyone, it’s perfectly ok with me. You can go for an intimate wedding with your family or close friends or just serve cake, I don’t care. But not treating your guests equally completely blows my mind even 20 years later.
The earth rotates on it’s axis and we are just riding it. It seems to be wobbling a tad bit of late…
Oh Doggie, the alt-media are sure being quiet right now. Kinda spooky.
The Iranian strike was devastating. I’ve seen tons of videos of the lights falling from the sky, and the real interesting videos of skyscrapers fully engulfed in flames like some kind of pyre.
Serious wars going on. All backed by the United States.
Everything the UN tries to do something, the US vetoes it. Genocide, war, profiteering. You name it. The USA vetoes it. Soon, everyone is gonna leave the UN and go form their own elsewhere.
Anyways, the Iran delayed response to Israel was substantive and significant.
Four F-35 attempted to strike into Iran, but Russia notified Iran, and they Turned back (Hal Turner Link)
My guess is that they were carrying nuclear payloads.
Now Israel is [1] waging genocide on the Palestinians, [2] invading Lebanon, and [3] waging war with Iran. All with United States approval and backing (The Duran YouTube discussion)
This use of nuclear weapons by Israel in Lebanon is disturbing (Intel Drop)
Seems to me that Washington DC is run by neocon Jake Sullivan, and its as crazy as a “Mad Hatter”. The pivot to China is coming up hard and fast.
Mean while, Russia ain’t playin’. They packed their bags and left the USA. (Hal Turner)
Here in China, on this major anniversary, there are tons of patriotic war movies where China is fighting the USA on all the Douxing APPs.
Domain Commander confirms that nuclear-related weapons were used in the Middle East, and in Ukraine. But that none of the massive big ones are being rolled out… just yet. It is still “small to medium bads” from my point of view. And that I shouldn’t get too caught up in affairs that do not involve myself.
Perhaps we are expecting a Hollywood world war and not the nasty shit that we are watching today.
Domain commander said something about “to create a garden, you first have to clear the forest, and move things around“, and that all is proceeding to plan.
Domain does not like any nuclear weapons or discharges of them, and they will not permit the BIG nasty stuff to ever see the light of day. However, these small explosions (how it’s even considered to be small?) are trivial in the big picture.
If and when the USA does decide to “pivot to China” I will be getting much better intel from the DC.
Buckle up, but don’t get too caught up.
…
A few years ago I added an affirmation that I would live a lifestyle similar to the movie character Carmine Sabitini.
I liked the character, the way he carried himself, his business, the idea of family, and wealth and power.
Here is the part in the movie where the young “freshman” is introduced to Carmine…
The Freshman – Carmine
Know the character. This is what I aspired to manifest.
This is the man who I aspired to become…
He’s [1] a local businessman; [2] an importer involved in [3] international trade.
He’s [4] older. He has [5] a lot of respect.
He’s [6] charming in his own sort of way.
He has a [7] beautiful daughter, that is [8] strong willed, and independent. He also has [9] a network of friends and family.
He is [10] moderately wealthy, and [11] Protected from harm.
Yeah.
So, about a decade ago I added an affirmation along these lines;
I live a life similar to that of Carmine Sabitini in the fictional movie "The Freshman". The emphasis is in his relationships, power, wealth and business.
And then I forgot all about it.
But within a year of my affirmations, I was appointed the GM of an international trade organization, and had a lot of power and various relationships that seem eerie familiar.
Two years later I started my own operations.
Two years after that, I had a head-strong daughter. Indeed, Consider Carmine’s sole daughter…
The Freshman – Clark meets Tina Sabatini
Now, my daughter is only five, but sure as shit, this gal and my daughter have a very similar personality.
And I have even been walking back and forth in my office, just like Carmine, dealing with issues demanding “good news”.
I argue that you must be VERY careful on what you affirm. Be super dooper careful, and if you base your affirmations on a fictional character or lifestyle, you MUST be absolutely specific.
I am living this life now; based on an affirmation guidance-template that uses the movie “The Freshman” as a “seed”. Heads up, I will generate a YouTube or Patron video on this concept in the near future.
Meanwhile, I think that it is supremely instructive to watch the movie and compare it to what I have manifested.
All, in all, I am looking at 80% manifestation exactness on the elements so specified. No joke.
The Freshman | English Full Movie | Comedy Crime
Now, here is the entire and complete movie for your viewing pleasure.
If you want to really get to understand the interactions between affirmation statements and manifestations, then viewing this video will be of great help.
Please take the time to watch it so that you will get a better understanding on the kind of relationships that my affirmations were attempting to manifest.
Today…
Here’s a light-hearted joke that Australians might appreciate:
Why do kangaroos hate rainy days?
Because the kids have to play inside!
BREAKING NEWS: CHINA SENDS PLA TROOPS TO BELARUS – MESSAGE TO NATO
Hal Turner World July 06, 2024
In an utterly stunning development in eastern Europe, China has sent troops from its People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to Belarus, to participate side-by-side with Belarus troops in an “exercise.” – as NATO places 115,000 troops on Belarus’ Border.
PLA Troops Arrive Belarus large
Word of this began to leak out around 5:00 AM eastern US time today (Saturday July 6) when avid air enthusiasts noticed an unidentified plane in Belarus air space. It had begun squawking a Transponder beacon, but was not identifying itself.
Unidentifed Plane Belarus 07 06 2024 Was China PLA
The plane landed at a military base in Belarus, and Covert Intel was quickly deployed to take a look. That turned out to be unnecessary because both Belarus and Russia made public the details:
The aircraft was a troop transport/cargo plane from China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA):
China PLA Troop Transport Belarus
Shortly after it landed, a small contingent of Chinese Army troops de-planed and were greeted with a hearty welcome by Belarus military officers.
PLA Troops Hearty Welcome
It turns out this is a not-subtle-at-all message to NATO: China backs Belarus and Russia.
It also turns out that this proves interoperability between those forces; something that was not heretofore confirmed by the West.
NATO has positioned about 115,000 troops on the border of Belarus, hoping to force Russia to lock-in-place about 300,000 troops it has on the border of Ukraine.
Now that China has made its entry into the situation, Russia is now free to utilize those 300,000 troops along Ukraine’s border without having to worry that NATO will enter Belarus.
This is a very big change in the balance of power in eastern Europe.
It seems designed to give Pause to NATO and to the West.
Observers say it will either achieve that goal, or perhaps trigger a much worse set of actions by the West.
This is now a tinderbox ready to be ignited by the smallest “spark.”
What are some mind-blowing facts about social psychology?
Studies have found that humans are attracted to people who resemble us or our parents. Although other studies have found that we find individuals who resemble family members trustworthy not “lustworthy”, fitting with known deficits of sexual attraction to someone related to you.
Studies have also found that as time goes by, couples in long term relationships eventually look like one another. This is due to mimicking the same facial expressions over time, creating similar wrinkle lines.
Use mirroring body language when talking to somebody. I’ve used this in interviews and have had great outcomes. Copying someone else’s gestures in a subtle way makes you more understanding and likeable.
When you shake someone’s hand for the first time, make sure they’re warm. Warm hands mean a warm approach. Not mind-blowing but a useful technique.
The Bystander Effect. This theory suggests that when an incident occurs, the more people that are present in the accident, the less likely it is for someone to come forward and help. It’s true.
People follow authoritative figures blindly. A study by Milgram found that people would administer electric shocks on individuals, even if the ‘consequences’ were severe, just because an authoritative figure asked them to.
Your name is powerful. Using a person’s name upon greeting or in the middle of a conversation means that you recognise their existence. You massage their ego, boosting their self esteem. This one act does them a huge favour.
Col Douglas Macgregor Zelensky Dragging Us in to WWlll
From a pro-‘Merica site.
Burnt Round Steak
IMG 0287 2000×1334 2 scaled
Ingredients
1 large round steak, cut into 1/2 inch wide strips
1/4 cup Karo syrup
1/4 cup vinegar
2 tablespoons water
1/4 teaspoon Tabasco sauce
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
1/4 cup Burgundy wine
1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1/2 cup vegetable oil
Instructions
Mix all ingredients in a glass bowl and marinate meat for at least 1 hour.
Put meat on campfire forks or on grill and cook over glowing coals until done as desired.
Notes
This is good served with fry bread.
25 Minutes Of Modern Women Having MELTDOWN Because Can’t Get More Child Support
What did you do when you were suddenly fired from a job?
The following might be a bit off topic.
Well, I was not technically “fired” because I already had a job offer in hand.
I was working in a North American MNC and our team project was winding down, and we had to look to others’ projects to clock our hours. Those were the days when we had to log daily how our time was used. It was apparent that the local office was not getting new projects, so I had gone job hunting and got an offer.
I took morning leave to go sign the contract, and was back in office in the afternoon. Had a chance encounter with the team manager. He told me he was going to send me on a short training stint in Australia, and that’s when I asked him not to. Naturally he would ask why, and I decided to tell him that I intended to put in my resignation at the end of the month. I wanted to spare him the embarrassment of putting in the paperwork with HR and then to find out that I would resign afterwards. I thought I was doing him a small favour, although I was going to leave the job.
He then asked if it was a competitor, and I said yes. I was trying to be nice, but realised that I was actually being naive when I look back at this.
Unknown to me, he went to HR. A few hours later, he came to my cubicle and told me that I should put in my resignation there and then, and leave immediately.
Yes, I do understand the fear that I might steal trade secrets or sabotage the work. But I was very disappointed that I had trusted him but he did not trust me.
To add insult to injury, I didn’t get the annual bonus because I had to tender my resignation at the beginning of December and didn’t complete the year of work. Which was the reason that I had wanted to put in my resignation only at the end of the month. These were technicalities, but was a whole month worth of pay.
A few weeks later, a former colleague arranged for a “farewell” lunch. A known less-than-responsible guy tried to upset me and said that because of my departure, everyone got a 10% raise as management was afraid that there would be an exodus. To which I replied, “Good for you. Luckily, I was offered a 20% raise in my new job and didn’t have to wait for somebody to leave.”
After that, I would refuse to go to reunions if either of those guys was attending.
TRICERATOPS – Retro Pulp Science Fiction by Skyward, 16mm, 1962, Film Experimentation, AI Dinosaurs
What is the most badass thing your parent has ever done?
My father did 4 1/2 tours of Vietnam, USMC.
He was an asshole who accepted zero excuses for a failure to do what should have been done.
Mid 1970’s, we’re at the lake on vacation. Dad saw the man in the camper next to ours bail out of the camper, on fire. Flames were rolling out of the camper and the man’s wife was trapped in the rear. The man had set himself on fire trying to get to his wife out. Without saying a word, he grabbed 2 small fire extinguishers that were in our camper, hit the man with one in passing and then ran into a camper that was by then fully engulfed in flames. Lost sight of him immediately after entering due to flames and smoke. Probably 20 seconds later, dad came running out, with the lady thrown over his shoulder and laid her down and then collapsed under a tree. The camper was burnt to the ground within 2 minutes. Dad had some pretty serious burns. The lady he rescued had quite a bit of serious burns. The husband that had come running out on fire died before they could get him to the hospital.
My dad had never talked about his time in Vietnam or even about running into a camper fully on fire. When I came back from Mogadishu, I was having trouble sleeping, angry all the time, and was probably fixing to wind up in prison for numerous bar fights where a couple men had gotten hurt pretty bad. I didn’t have a off switch by then. I was not coping well at all. Me and the old man were drinking a few beers one evening after brutally hot day of working cattle. And the old men started talking to me, not as a father, but as a fellow warrior. He knew exactly what I was going through. He told me that the paticulars of the battle don’t matter. It’s the changes it does to you in your heart and mind that matters. He helped me find the help that I desperately needed. I didn’t know it at the time, didn’t find out till his funeral that he had run into a bunker on fire in Vietnam and pulled one other Marine out.
12 Mistakes That Make Men Look OLD
Commerce Secretary Raimondo said U.S. needs to work with EU to slow China’s innovation rate and need to ‘hold their feet to the fire’.
What do you think of such obvious hegemonic remarks? Does ‘America First’ still play a role in the United States?
Commerce Secretary Raimondo said U.S. needs to work with EU to slow China’s innovation rate and need to ‘hold their feet to the fire’.What do you think of such obvious hegemonic remarks? Does ‘America First’ still play a role in the United States?
Secretary Raimondo doesn’t really matter. The US-China relationship is decided by people above her pay grade. President Biden and his own advisors. The one closest to President Biden is probably Ron Klain, his chief of staff, someone who’s been his confidante since his vice-president days. Mr. Blinken may count as an insider (he’s really a Clinton/Albright man, not in the original Biden team. So an inheritance.). I doubt even Sullivan is that close. The others such as Tai and Raimondo, these are just “they came highly recommended by friend’-sort of office holders.
Mrs. Raimondo didn’t even endorse Mr. Biden in his presidential bid. She endorsed the billionnaire Mr. Bloomberg instead. These are East Coast “Wall Street democrats” – tax-cut, de-regulation, but also willing to spend tax dollars on (some) welfare and (some) education. When Mr. Biden got elected, he needed to get the support of Wall Street Democrats. So he offered HHS (Health and Human Services) Secretary to Mrs. Raimondo. She said no. Not interested in this thankless job with Covid raging. She wanted Commerce instead.
In the end it was Ron Klain who dived head-long into the nightmare logistics of the vaccine rollout, and did a good job of it too. And didn’t make himself the news. That’s what a president’s confidante should look like. Mrs. Raimondo, she’s many things but not a Biden Confidante.
Now that you know Mrs. Raimondo sits at the peripheral of the Biden Circle, you can see that what she says doesn’t matter. (She has a hawkish language, which probably more a reflection of her own closeness with Senator Reed, who’s the Chairman of the Senate Arms Services Comm. and a childhood friend since forever. Not a “pope” yet but definitely a ranking “cardinal” in the Senate.) What she is tasked to do, that will reflect some pieces of what the Biden team is thinking. It’s unlikely that they’ve thought about this issue a lot, with the White House so deeply buried in the budget and the stimulus fight with the Congress.
But they would know much more than the general public opinion about the realities of US-China relationship. If the ordinary people are at ground zero in terms of understanding, the politicians are probably at level 1, the trade and finance guys probably at level 2, and the WH probably at level 3.
For example, there are a ton of questions right here on Quora about the Chinese real estate company Evergrande. Questions like “would it trigger China collapse”. These people have no idea that it’s the Chinese government who stopped Evergrande from being able to raise money domestically, so they turned to issuing dollar-bond. In case of default, the government gets all the land and the assets, China policy banks hold the most senior debt. Chinese investors hold second-senior debt. Foreign dollar-bond investors hold the most junior debt, so they have to bear all the loss. Then you see a bunch of rednecks cheering it on while Tony Blinken called up the Chinese to say “could you please please be gentle with Evergrande”. China will tell him to go f*ck off but at least Blinken knows who’s gonna really be screwed. The general public, and all these “financial reporters”, they don’t even know how to read a bond seniority table, and with their very limited intelligence and knowledge, they want to set international policy!
The big picture is that the previous Administration had turned a largely win-win relationship into a lose-lose relationship, and Mr. Biden has come to the realization that “if for every $1 you lose, I’m losing $2 or more, then we may be both screwed but I get screwed even more. So can I figure out a way to stop the bleed, hopefully without rolling back everything, ’cause we’d look really stupid if we have to do that.”
Before the trade war, essentially the US makes the wheel, China makes the sofa. Put it on top, and you have a car to drive around. Then the trade war started, and the US took the wheel and put a trade sanction on it – which of course made China go into a frenzy of re-inventing the wheel.
The “China can’t innovate” is a stupid meme advanced by third-rate wanna-be politicians, such as HP’s Carly Fiorina when she wanted to run for the Senate in 2010. A people who launched nuclear bombs and communications satellites with only pencil-and-paper, literally, can not be very stupid, can they. It’s just that the notable Chinese inventions, such as cheap Malaria drug or salt-tolerant rice, these are really not “a thing” to rich people. In reality you invent things to improve your own lives, thus China wants to do shared bicycles and the US wants to do space tourism. One targets $2000 annual income people, the other $20,000,000 annual income people. Different market segments.
So this idea that by sanctioning China, these manufacturing jobs will come back to the US, is completely insane! Have you looked at how much these jobs are paid in China vs. the US? They will not “go back to the US”, unless the US becomes as poor as China.
The Wall Street actually figured out a good way to share the profit of China’s growth – by investing in it and get a share of the profit. There was China-bashing but that was mostly for two things – one is Pentagon budget, the other is some special favor for their pet industry from China.
When the trade war started, a lot of these American industries basically did a calculation – Trump is an idiot but maybe he can really squeeze something to my benefit? If it doesn’t work, then it’s all Trump’s fault and I can go back to the way we work with my Chinese partners before. Well, the problem with these cost-benefit analyses is that these things fundamentally is about what you think, not about the reality, and the reality tends to work differently! Turned out most suppliers still want the work. Distributors, not so much.
What about fixing the uneven distribution of the benefit of trade that created the army of Trump voters? No, of course, not. Don’t even think about it. I paid the lobbyists to make deals that are good for me and bad for you, fair-and-square! No way I’m sharing the upside! Let’s just all blame foreigners and poor people.
(PS: International trade deals creates winners and losers even though the sum total might be advantageous. The way to mitigate this uneven distribution is through internal fiscal transfer or domestic economic policy. Failure to mitigate will exacerbate inequality and make domestic politics volatile. )
So here we are, 3 years after the trade war and tech embargo, with the highest ever trade deficit, growing inflation, and a China who is now absolutely determined to de-couple technologically from the US. Mr. Biden is trying to stop the loss, and Mrs. Raimondo is sent out to see if our “allies” can share the loss, instead of making bank from it. Under the shadow of climate emergency and the extraordinary inequality. This hole we are in is so deep, nobody knows how to climb out of it. And the most idiotic and crazy of them yells the loudest!
Coup attempt in Bolivia fails as president urges people to mobilize against democracy threat
Here’s a light-hearted joke involving Americans and Irish stew:
Why did the American try to make Irish stew?
Because he wanted to see what all the “stew-pendous” fuss was about!
It’s year 2155 and I’m living on Venus. We travel with space ships from one planet to another. Woman live on Venus and man on Mars, so in order to meet each other we go once a week on Jupiter.The purpose in my life is to find the love of my life. What a cliché, right? But I can’t help it if I’m a hopeless romantic. Sometimes I think that I would never find him and I will live alone till I die.The day to go on Jupiter came and I was ready to meet the love I was waiting for the past 50 years. All the girls took a seat in a spaceship and we were ready to go. The journey was long, so I started to talk to the girl who was sitting next to me.“So, are you nervous for your date?” I asked her.She looked at me and smiled. Her eyes were green and I just lost myself in them. I was just staring at her and the whole thing became awkward really fast.“I’m sorry for starring at you like that, but you have such a pretty eyes.” I apologized.“Oh, don’t worry,” she replied. “And yes, I’m a little nervous for my date. By the way, I’m Caroline.”“Nice to meet you Caroline, I’m Jasmine.”We talked the whole trip and we became friends. I felt the happiness filling my body and I was so grateful that I met her.The boys were already waiting for us. This place was always so beautiful and with the boys on it I loved it even more. I was just standing there alone, when one boy approached me.“Wow, I just can’t believe it. You are stunning!” the boy said.I smiled and thanked him. He took my hand and gave it a little kiss. We walked to one free table and sat down.“Let me introduce myself, I’m Hunter, I’m 166 years old and I live in a villa on Mars. I appreciate the natural beauty, so that’s the main reason I chose you as my date.” He said.“Well thank you for the compliment, Hunter. I’m Jasmine, I’m 133 years old and I live in a small apartment on Venus. I appreciate that you are such a gentleman and that’s the reason I let you choose me as your date.” I said.We were flirting the whole time and I could feel some kind of connection between us, but at the same time I just couldn’t stop thinking about Caroline and every time I saw her having a good time with her date I was kind of jealous.The day on Jupiter ended and I felt like there was no connection between me and Hunter. He was the perfect guy, just not for me. I walked in space ship and sat beside Caroline.“How was your date?” I asked.“It wasn’t bad, but at the same time I felt I had more connection with you than him, you know.” She said.I was so happy, because I felt exactly the same. Does that mean that I should search for my soulmate on my own planet? I’m so confused.“Can I ask you something?” I said. “Would you like to go out with me? To know each other better and become maybe, uh, more than friends…”I couldn’t believe I actually said that. I was a little scared of how she is going to react. So I was just starring at my feet. She took my chin with her soft, warm, perfect hands and lifted my head so we made eye contact. She was smiling so that’s a good sign.“I would love to go out with you Jasmine, because I feel something for you. It’s a little strange, but an amazing feeling.” She said while still holding my face.
During our flight back we hit another spaceship. The alarm went off and I was panicking. Caroline took my hand and told me everything is going to be okay. We landed on the Moon and Caroline had the idea that we could go on an adventure, so she took my hand and we ran on the other side of the Moon. We found a cave and we went inside. It was dark, but fortunately I had my battery with me. The cave was white, the walls had different shapes and the echo was amazing. We started singing and the walls sang back. I never wanted to leave this place. We went deeper in the cave and found a waterfall. I remembered that we learned a lot of this cave in the school. The water was magical. If you dive in it and think of some place, you would get there through this waterfall. I was so curious if this really worked, so I proposed to Caroline that we dive in the water and travel on the Earth.
We got in the water and thought of some place on Earth. Suddenly I remembered that Eart was a big place and that we wouldn’t land in the same place, but it was to late. There was a flash of light so I closed my eyes and I could feel my body flying through the space. I landed in front of Big Ben. I was in London. I didn’t have any device to communicate with Caroline and even if I was among the people, I felt alone.
Right now I just wanted to find Caroline and go back to Venus, where I could perhaps marry her and be with her forever. I know that we didn’t know each other enough, but my gut is telling me that she could be the one.
I just stopped for a minute and closed my eyes. I wanted to see if I could feel where she was. I heard music in the distance and someone was calling my name. I turned around and opened my eyes. Some kind of shadow ran into the bar where the music came from. I followed the shadow and I saw a girl who had same hair as Caroline. That must be her! I found her! I went to the girl and hugged her.
“I finally found you!” I said. I let go of the hug and the girl turned around. It wasn’t Caroline. I felt so embarrassed and I left the bar. I started crying because I thought I would never find Caroline. I sat on the stairs outside the bar and I couldn’t stop crying. After I stopped crying I looked on the floor and my tears spelled Paris. I stood up and went to the airport. I had some money with me so I bought a ticket for Paris.
I searched whole Paris just to find Caroline, but I couldn’t find her. I stopped in front of Eiffel tower and started praying that someone could give me a sign or some kind of help, so I could find her.
“Hello miss, do you want to see how beautiful Paris is from the top of Eiffel tower?” some man said.
I bought a ticket to visit the top of the tower. I stopped for a moment to enjoy the view, when someone grabbed my shoulders. I turned around and there she was, Caroline. We found each other, fate wanted to reunite us in the city of love, Paris. We hugged and I just couldn’t let her go. I didn’t want to lose her again.
“Now that we found each other again, we should go home.” She whispered in my ear.
“But home is wherever we are together. So right now we could stay in Paris and then we could explore the rest of the World.” I said with a tear sliding down my cheek.
So we decided to stay on Earth. The only thing we needed at the moment were each other and the desire for travelling.
After 5 years we travelled the whole world, so we decided to go back on Venus. Me and Caroline live in the house we build together. We love each other and want to grow old together.
Sometimes your soulmate come to your life when you least expect it and sometimes it’s not the person you would expect, but that’s the beauty of life, it’s unpredictable.
So Much
What is the cheapest thing you’ve seen a mega-rich person do?
Few years ago, my uncle, a heart surgeon, was ordering a coffee in a luxury and very expensive restaurant: the cashier turned out to be the owner of the business. While the restaurant is one of the most famous of my city, that man is the owner of a company that owns, along with that restaurant, many other luxury shops, cafeterias, food stores etc etc: that company has a profit of about 30–40 million euros a year.
So, my uncle took the coffee and was about to pay when the owner had a heart attack, and my uncle provided him first aid and eventually managed to take him to the nearest hospital and save his life.
After a month, my uncle, as he used to do almost every week end, goes to take a coffee in that restaurant when he sees the owner for the first time since that accident . The owner warmly greets my uncle and then … here comes the plot twist … tells him (not jokingly) “hey, last time we met, you forgot to pay your coffee”.
My uncle paid for his coffee and never set foot in that place again.
YOU NEED TO OUTWORK EVERYONE – Motivational Speech
What was Turkey’s stance during WW2 when Germany was near their borders?
Nervous. Very, very nervous.
By 1941, Turkey was in an extremely tenuous position. The Soviet Union, our old friends during our War of Independence, had reversed course under Stalin and had begun to eye not only the old Imperial territories in Turkish east that were conclusively lost with the Treaty of Kars, but also the Straits themselves. On the other hand, there stood Germany across the border- a state with which we ostensibly had friendly enough relations, but the aims of the Reich were hard to know. Further complicating things, Britain was prodding us to see if we’d enter the war on the Allied side, and while Britain didn’t exactly have the power to force us, this put us in the crosshairs of a Reich that might decide that it’d be better off eliminating the threat before it struck at an unopportune time. And of course, even if Germany didn’t desire to attack us, that still left the question of Mussolini’s Italy hanging: after all, Germany hadn’t wanted to attack Greece either.
Still fighting to climb out of the ruin that the Great War and the struggle for freedom afterwards had left us in, we couldn’t afford another war, nor did we want one. This left the razor sharp path of strict neutrality for us to follow, while arming ourselves to the teeth so we could sell ourselves dearly when the time came.
Throughout the Second World War, Turkey was one step short of a state of war. Air raids shelters designated across the country, rationing and blackouts instituted, courses to train citizens on the realities of warfare set up, and the army and the economy mobilized for wartime, Turkey was bracing for a war that might have been right at the door, intending to sell our lives dearly if it came to it.
By 1943, the Turkish army had expanded to forty-five divisions(including one armored division) and five brigades(one cavalry, one armored and three infantry), organized into three armies and fifteen corps, totaling 1.3 million men under arms- two thirds of all people eligible for military service.
Soviet-produced T-26 tanks during a parade before the Second World War. These vehicles bought in 1932 was the first sizeable tank force of the Turkish army. By 1945, Turkish armed forces would have a rather sizeable tank arm consisting of an utter hodgepodge of vehicles, ranging from Soviet T-26’s, British Vickers Mark 6’s and Valentines, German Panzer III and IV’s, and American Stuarts and Shermans.
Turkey’s Second World War policy can be described tongue in cheek as putting all effort towards being a friendly, but extremely spiky hedgehog. It was centered simultaneously on maintaining friendly neutrality with everyone around us, while being as ready as humanly possible for any war that might come our way.
High-Value Man TRIGGERED American Women After He Told Them They Aren’t Wife Material
What is the saddest thing you’ve ever seen as a police officer?
I’ve seen a lot of really sad things, way too many than I care to recall. But here’s just one sad story of many.
A Husband and Wife were having a Birthday party for their daughter. She was little, maybe 4 to 6. I don’t remember exactly how old she was. The mother and daughter and guests were all playing, and eating cake in the living room of their 8th floor apartment. The father had been recently receiving treatment for depression, and went into the kitchen and decided to jump out of the window, to his death.
The Mother didn’t notice, until we came up to the apartment and knocked on the door. I saw what was going on, and called her out of the apartment into the hallway. I explained everything that just happened to her, and yes, I didn’t follow protocol and have her make a formal ID of his body. Yes, I did it differently. A picture, the doorman, and his ID, were good enough for me. There’s no way I was going to put this poor woman through any more stress.
She asked me about what she should do? How could the situation be handled? I still don’t know if I gave her the right advice. I was a 28 y/o, I wasn’t married, and had no children. I told her to lie to her daughter for now. Not to tell her that her Daddy had died on her birthday by jumping out the window and committing suicide.
I told her I’d help call the guests’ parents, and have their kids picked up from the party. Then maybe she could tell her daughter that her Daddy wasn’t feeling too well, and went to the hospital. Maybe in the next day or two, she could tell her that her Daddy had died in the hospital of a heart attack.
Then, when the child was older she could tell her the truth, since family secrets always wind up coming out, anyway.
I’m not one for lying to people but I just thought that she would always associate her birthday with her father’s death, and that just wasn’t fair for this little girl. Unfortunately, death by suicide is still mostly taboo, even in big cities. She and her Mother deserved so much better than the hand they were dealt that day. I still don’t know if this was the right advice, but this is what I would have done for my child, if I’d had one.
Election In Britain
The Tories have lost the election in Britain.
Labour, under Keir Stamer, did not win the election. It received less votes than it had received under Jeremy Corbyn in 2017 and 2019.
The turnout was low. The overwhelming voter sentiment was ‘anything but Tory’. There was no enthusiasms for Labour and Stamer’s program.
Labour, under Corbyn, had been a real worker party with socialist tendencies.
The deep state, with the help of the Israeli embassy, had launched a media campaign against Labour alleging that it was hiding anti-semitic tendencies. Corbyn made the huge mistake of not fighting back against it. In the end he was kicked out despite Labour’s healthy election results.
Jeremy Corby, no longer in Labour, has been reelected. So have been five MPs who campaigned on a pro-Gaza position.
Stamer is a controversial figure. He seems to have been placed in his position by the deep state. His previous position was the Chief of the Crown Prosecution Service. He had a major role in indicting and incarcerating Julian Assange.
“What Keir has done is taken all the left out of the Labour Party,” billionaire businessman John Caudwell, previously a big Tory donor, told the BBC. “He’s come out with a brilliant set of values and principles and ways of growing Britain in complete alignment with my views as a commercial capitalist.”The Labour Party highlighted his endorsement.
Stamer will hurt the British public more than the Tory did under Sunak.
To Smear China, the US Stabbed the Philippines in the Back
What did your parents do to you that broke your heart?
I was blessed with having great parents, but this is how they broke my heart…
My parents had me quite late. My mom was nearly 40 when she fell pregnant with me. I was their baby. Some of my half brothers and sisters had moved out already, when I arrived.
This made me much closer to my parents than any of the others. By the time I came around, they had both become more patient, less worried about making mistakes, way more relaxed and our relationship showed that.
But they were also much older than most of my friends’ parents. When my friends were relying on their parents to lend them money, mine were retiring and due to some issues with their retirement fund, there was no money for them to relax and enjoy their golden years.
Luckily, I had already started on my way to a successful career in software development, so I was fully prepared to support them, rather than the other way around.
For the last 10 years or more I have been asking them to live with me. Every time I asked they had some excuse that they couldn’t(or wouldn’t). For years I have been planning all the time we could spend together, but nothing I did would make them budge.
Then, 4 or 5 years ago, Dad had a stroke. He went from healthy active 75 year old, to a bedridden, confused, (sometimes) aggressive man-child. He refused any attempt at physiotherapy and declined steadily from then on.
Mom was a trooper. She looked after Dad to the best of her abilities, but she was well into her seventies too, so it wasn’t easy. I stepped up my attempts to get them to move in with me. They needed my help more than ever, but they were determined to stay in their own home.
Then, this year in February, Dad got sick. Some sort of stomach bug. Mom was exhausted (I mean, more so than usual). I tried to get an organisation to take over caring for my father at home, to give mom a break, especially since the illness meant so much more work for Mom. Every one I contacted were unable to help, because my parents lived too far away from the city. They were happy to help us if my folks moved to my house, but no one was willing to travel that far daily.
Eventually, on the 7th of February, Mom agreed. She and Dad would move in at the end of the month. After 10 years of me begging, they finally agreed. I was over the moon.
The next morning I got a panicky phone call from her just before 5:00 am. “Melanie, your dad isn’t moving. I think he’s dead.”
Dad had passed away peacefully in his sleep. Heart break #1. He may not have been 100% himself, but he was still my dad, and I could still see glimpses of who he used to be.
But at least Mom was coming to live with me. I moved Mom in the day after Dad’s funeral. It may have been too late to spend time with Dad, but I wasn’t going to waste a minute with Mom.
But when she moved in, something was wrong. She had no energy. Way less than ever before. I knew she had emphysema, but she had oxygen and I got her a shoprider. I was prepared to do whatever I had to make Mom’s last years as enjoyable as possible. Nothing seemed to work though. Mom’s health was declining so fast, and I was in denial.
On the 23rd of April, she was admitted to hospital. On the 26th of April, again, just before 5:00 am, I received a phone call. This time from a nurse to say that Mom had passed away during the night. Heartbreak #2.
She lived with me for 68 days. After I begged her to live with me for years. All the thing I had planned for us. All the places we could go. She spent 68 days with me, before she passed away. I know I should feel grateful that I got at least 68 days, but somehow, right now, I don’t feel grateful at all. I just miss her and want to get all that time back.
I often wonder if people in the US and China understand what it means to use a nuclear weapon.
Yes, China can destroy the US. My hope is that this essay will give the reader an idea of what that is like. Targeting each other’s population is what deterrence is all about.
I grew up during the Cold War. We did civil defense drills in school once a month. This meant old fashioned air raid sirens warning us of impending doom. The teacher closed lead-lined asbestos curtains called flash curtains in each classroom. The students squatted under our desks. We knew we had less than a minute before impact when the air raid sirens emitted a wavering tone. Such a thing would not have saved me because my school was only a few miles from an important Air Force base. The purpose of the exercise was only to provide morale to a population under threat of annihilation.
No one really knows what can happen in an attack or what China will do. This is my educated guess; an imagining. Let’s suppose a single missile, a DF-41 with 10 x 150 kt MIRV bracketing the Newark-New York-Jersey metropolitan area. Let’s think about what this small attack does before we decide what the two brigades of DF-41 displayed in China’s military parade can do. Let us also suppose the US does not retaliate and total war does not ensue. The one missile destroys the United States. It takes a couple of years but the wound festers and takes the country down.
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Figure 1. Sixteen DF-41 launchers on display in China’s military parade. China conducted 7 test launches so far of the DF-41.
First, a little about the DF-41, China’s most modern intercontinental ballistic missile. The DF-41 is the most advanced ICBM in the world, carrying up to 12 MIRV per missile to a target of 15,000 km. It is similar to the Russian RS24-YARS, a MIRV’d Topol-M but has longer range, more warheads, and is extremely accurate with or without GPS. Launched from 9,300 miles away, the missile can hit within an area the size of a football field. The DF-21 launches from the back of a truck. Time from a launch near Mongolia to arrival in the New York area is 21 minutes.
The DF-41 warheads are very similar to the US W-88 having a yield that is selectable between 20 kt and 150 kt. The MIRV vehicles are designed to penetrate the US missile defense system which means they may actually be MARV.
Figure 2. Simulated attack on the Newark-New York with 8 150 kt surface blasts and two air bursts all from one ICBM. The large orange rings around the impact zones are everything on fire, the gray areas are overpressure that breaks windows, roof, doors, etc. The green rings are everyone dies there within 24 hours from radiation never mind the fire, the inner rings are the fireballs than vaporize everything. The darker gray around the airbursts is an overpressure that squashes everything flat.
Let’s imagine how this plays out. It is 1:00 PM in the afternoon in Shanghai when, during spiraling tensions, the US attacks and destroys a PLAN aircraft carrier with a nuclear torpedo that was conducting operations in the South China Sea.
At 4:00 PM, in response, a single truck launches a DF-41 ICBM, the time is 3:00 AM in New York time. The weather in New York is clear with a light wind from the Southwest. At 20 minutes from impact, the first stage of the ICBM has MECO and the second stage begins firing. At 18 minutes from impact, the second stage has SECO and the third stage begins its burn. The fairing of the rocket jettisons to reveal 12 cone-shaped objects mounted in a pyramid. Two of these objects are penetration aids that act like chaff.
NORAD detects the launch 16 minutes before impact. NORAD does not have ABM in a position that can intercept this launch, it can only monitor what happens in horror. Fifteen minutes before impact the third stage has TECO. Fourteen minutes before impact, NORAD determines that the ICBM is targeting the East Coast, probably New York City or Washington DC.
Thirteen minutes before impact, it is 3:08 on the East Coast and 12:08 AM on the West Coast of the US, and the Emergency Broadcast System warns everyone in the US that a missile impact is imminent. Of course, most people are asleep.
The sharp cone-shaped objects decorating the top of the ICBM separate from the MIRV bus. The third stage of the ICBM continues on a ballistic trajectory moving at 25 times the speed of sound as it deploys penetration aid to create a dozen dummy warheads following the ballistic trajectory.
The real warheads change course like the DF-21 warhead is known to do. A second penetration aid creates a large number of dummy warheads over the target.
At 4 seconds from impact Pilots of a Boeing Dreamliner on approach to Newark Liberty International Airport observe a light show as the hypersonic warheads glow white-hot streaking through the atmosphere. It looks like meteors to them and then there is a light like no other. Everyone on the plane is dead before the plane bursts into flames and falls out of the sky. All non-military electronics in New England permanently cease functioning due to an EMP released by the two air bursts.
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Figure 3. Ground zero at Trinity, the 22 kt test at Alamagordo.
At impact, each of the 8 surface blasts creates a fireball 1.1 km in diameter vaporizing everything into ionized gas. All buildings are demolished by 20 psi overpressure in an area of 2.2 km in diameter. Everyone gets a lethal dose of radiation in an area 4 km in diameter and will die of excruciating pain. Everything not reinforced steel and concrete is flattened in 5 km diameter. Everything is in the process of burning, including people with 3rd-degree burns in an area 10 km in diameter. All glass and roofs are blown in an area of a diameter of 12.5 km. Remember all of this is times 8 from a single launch and we haven’t covered the airblasts, which are similar but with wider overpressure effects and a huge EMP.
It is impact plus 1 second 2.5 million people are Dead. The blast on Manhattan alone kills 750,000 and injures another 750,000. Lights go out over most of the East Coast.
At impact plus one minute, 3.5 million are dead. Seismographs around the country detect a swarm of ten 5.8 Earthquakes in the New York area. So begins a disaster, a holocaust, a war, destruction like nothing the US has ever seen. All from one truck-launched rocket.
At impact plus 2 weeks 8 million people are dead, 12 million are homeless and injured. A Hellish round water-filled depression reaches from Hell’s Kitchen to 3rd Ave and 52nd str to 38th st. Tall buildings reduced to broken girders and large chunks of concrete sticking out of a sickening pond.
All ATM machines across the nation cease functioning. Banks close, credit cards don’t work. The heart of the world’s financial system no longer exists. Because the wind came from the South West, people in upstate New York and New England are rained on by radioactive ash. People on the West Coast and all over the country do not have enough food because the just in time food distribution system is broken. The attack shatters the US economy and plunges the world into a financial meltdown.
Impact plus one year, the fires are still burning. The entire state of Connecticut is abandoned permanently and much of upstate New York is a forbidden zone. Power is not restored yet in New England. The US government fails miserably addressing a disaster, orders of magnitude worse than Katrina. One hundred thousand people died from exposure during the Winter following the impact. Skeletons and rotting bodies of people and animals lay in the streets of the once-great metropolitan area and a thousand people a day die from injuries. There is an outbreak of medieval diseases among the millions of homeless. People are randomly killed by accidentally wandering into random no go zones in perfectly green fields and forests of upstate New York.
At impact plus 2 years the political entity, formerly known as the United States ceases to exist. The West Coast goes its own way. Texas goes another. The Southern part of the United States makes Bangladesh look like heaven. Tens of thousands of US servicemen are stranded all over the world. The US Navy cannot buy fuel for its ships and planes.
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Figure 4. One of 10 warheads, a surface blast in Midtown Manhattan kills between 750,000 to 850,000 people and injures another 700,000. The one warhead alone is the worst disaster in US history by two orders of magnitude.
Now, it is known that China can replicate this scenario 24 times in the US largest metropolitan areas. The 24th largest metropolitan area is the San Antonio area just to give you an idea. The second largest is in Southern California. DF-41 is just one kind of nuclear delivery system that can hit the United States; China has others.
It’s highly unlikely. If India couldn’t keep up with China over the last 25 years, what makes anyone think another 75 years will make a difference?
The problem with India is three-fold:
It has an ineffective democratic political system which produces ineffective governments.
It has a highly disjointed society mired in ethnic/religious conflict, poor human rights, and low participation rate of women in the labor force.
It has low literacy and backward infrastructure. Even newly built infrastructure has a tendency to collapse.
What was the strangest thing that happened to you as a foreigner in Japan?
This happened to my wife, who went to Japan to teach English as a foreign language for a year after University in her early 20s.
A few weeks before she was due to leave Japan, she was hit by a taxi while crossing at a pedestrian crossing. The lights were red, but the taxi driver was high on drugs and didn’t stop. Luckily for her, she was riding across the road on a bicycle that took most of the force of the taxi, otherwise she would have likely been killed. As it was she was thrown onto the road, and severely damaged her left leg which was hit by the taxi.
She was rushed to the local hospital, where the doctors told her they couldn’t save her leg and would have to amputate. This was a small city and the local hospital wasn’t very sophisticated, so she wanted to get a second opinion from the regional hospital nearby but the doctors wouldn’t send her elsewhere. Not being able to speak the language, she called a number of her friends from the school where she taught and they physically carried her out of the hospital, into a car, and took her to the regional hospital.
Again, luckily for her, a specialist doctor at the second hospital felt he could save her leg. Because of the language barrier, and her fear of a misunderstanding, she insisted on a local anaesthetic and watched while they inserted a metal rod from her knee to her ankle. The operation was a success, and the result was that she had to spend a few months recuperating in hospital before she could fly home.
Here’s where the surreal part kicks in.
She was lying in bed one day shortly after, when a man in a smart suit came in and dropped a paper bag on her hospital bed. He said that the local police were kicking up a fuss about the accident and he represented an organization that wanted the problem to go away. In return for her not pressing charges, they were willing to pay for her hospital stay, pay for Japanese language lessons to keep her engaged in the meantime, and to compensate her with the contents of the bag. He also made it clear that there really wasn’t an option here – she had to take the offer.
She took the offer. After he left, she looked in the bag to find the equivalent of c. £40,000 in Japanese yen (this was back in the early 90s).
It turned out that the taxi driver was a member of the local Yakuza and had been trying too much of the merchandise. They could have smoothed it over if he’d hit a local, but he had the misfortune to hit a foreigner. The regional police got involved, and the embassy got involved, and the whole thing was drawing way too much attention.
The happy ending was that a few months of intense Japanese lessons combined with little else to do gave my wife an understanding of a side of Japan that she’d never had seen otherwise. As a result, she ditched the flight home and stayed to continue the adventure, eventually enrolling at a Japanese University in a Masters degree in Japanese language and history where she was the only woman and the only foreigner that her professor had ever taught. Lots more great stories for another time.
However, her left hip really aches in cold weather.
What Body Fat Percentage Actually Looks Like For Men
What are some mind blowing life hacks?
Here are some interesting life hacks that might be useful:
1. Use a hair straightener to iron collars: If you’re in a rush and your shirt collar is crumpled, use a hair straightener to quickly smooth it out.
2. Freeze grapes to chill wine without diluting it: Instead of using ice cubes that water down your wine, freeze grapes and use them as natural chillers.
3. Use a dustpan to fill a container that won’t fit in the sink: If you need to fill a large container with water but it won’t fit under the faucet, use a clean dustpan as a makeshift funnel.
4. Rubbing a walnut on damaged wooden furniture: For minor scratches on wooden furniture, rubbing a walnut on the affected area can help mask the damage.
5. Turn a muffin tray upside down to make taco bowls: Place tortillas in the spaces between the cups of an upside-down muffin tray and bake to create crispy taco bowls.
6. Use a sticky note to clean crumbs from a keyboard: Slide the sticky edge of a sticky note between the keys to pick up crumbs and dust from your keyboard.
7. Open a stubborn jar lid with a rubber band: Wrap a thick rubber band around the lid for extra grip when trying to twist it open.
8. Store bed sheets inside their matching pillowcase: Fold and store your bed sheets neatly inside the matching pillowcase to keep your linen closet organized.
9. Use a bread clip to save flip-flop blowouts: If the thong part of your flip-flop breaks, you can temporarily fix it with a plastic bread clip until you can get a replacement.
10. Use a muffin liner to keep popsicles clean: Poke a hole in the center of a muffin liner and slide it up the stick of a popsicle to catch drips and keep hands clean.
What are the top 10 awesome life hacks?
At least once in your life, have a job that you don’t do for the money.
Never lie to your doctor.
Don’t be the guy who tells a kid that Santa Claus doesn’t exist.
Unless you’re in the first row at a concert, don’t try to record it with your phone. The video and audio would be crap and you’ll never watch it again.
If you buy a Rs.10000 dress for Rs.5000, you haven’t saved Rs.5000, you’ve spent Rs.5000.
Don’t wait for something bad to happen for you to become a good person.
Being in a beautiful relationship > Being single >>>> Being in a shitty relationship.
Ladies, if you like him, tell him. He wouldn’t understand subtle hints, strong hints, or obvious hints. Just tell him.
The handsome, royal gentleman/the gorgeous, intelligent woman that you want to find so hard, probably won’t be in the nightclubs.
Take her somewhere different. Movies and dinners are played out. She wants to tell her friends great stories. (Thank you, ladies.)
Sometimes, girls don’t need advice, they just want someone to listen.
Spend time with your Father as often as you can. You’ll miss Him when you can’t anymore.
You know, those times in life when you have a grand thought, a fantasy, a wild gesture, a silly prank, anything really, anything that peaks your senses and makes you feel like you are living? If so, then take advantage of such moments. When your brain is telling you to call it a night, but your heart says to keep going, listen to your heart and do something new, do something fun, do something legendary and your brain will thank you for it later. You’re welcome.
Biden IMPLODES in ABC Interview as Dems CANCEL Events! DROPPING OUT?
Yes, there was a secret deal with Saudi Arabia. Yes, China and BRICS alternatives beckon. But the true story is one of intrigues and double-crosses. And dead bodies.
28 June 2024. London. This month many stories were circulated on social media concerning the end of the petrodollar. This is of course a topic that I covered fairly comprehensively in this article, which was published in Fortune in March last year, and when I threw a completely new light on the inflation of the 1970s.
Parts of my analysis has become widespread knowledge, such as my emphasis on the deal between the US and Saudi Arabia – forced on that country the way the Mafia markets its ‘protection’ racket. However, it seems much confusion remains about the details of the events half a century ago, and most of all different versions of what happened were circulated this month, giving quite a misleading spin to the facts.
It started with some reports in early June, which stated that 9 June 2024 was an important date, because this is when the 50-year old “Petrodollar Agreement” would run out, as Saudi Arabia was not going to renew it. Signed on 8 June 1974, we hear in these reports, it ran out half a century later, on 9 June 2024. Such reports triggered a response by the Defenders of Mainstream Narratives reminiscent of those articles in the newspapers in 2020 that “debunked” reports that most people were not threatened by Covid 19, or that the injections were risky and could have seriously harmful consequences.
The 1970s inflation had been sold to us as being due to an external supply shock, triggered by a war. But as I pointed out in my March 2023 piece, it was instead engineered by the US Federal Reserve. As I explained, it was actually the USA that triggered the oil embargo and oil price rises in late 1973 and early 1974, as cover for its central bank’s policy of massive monetary expansion, escalated to all vassal state central banks, which had been implemented since August 1971, when the USA defaulted on its obligations to convert on demand US dollars into gold. The oil price surge, which happened after the first bout of inflation had peaked, was engineered by the US, as cover for the inflation and in order to transfer wealth from Europe and Japan to the US and in order to shore up the US dollar and global network of military bases. For this, a deal was forged between Saudi Arabia and the US, whereby the US would “protect” Saudi Arabia militarily, including ensuring the stability of autocratic rule by the Saud family, in exchange for the agreement by the biggest oil producer, Saudia Arabia, to sell its oil only in US dollars, and invest 80% of its resulting oil revenues in US Treasury securities. This policy supported the US dollar and simultaneously plugged the twin deficits of the current account and the government budget. It also ensured that the world’s oil spending ended up back in the US, so that the proliferating number of foreign military bases and operations could be maintained and financed.
The agreement to reinvest the Saudi oil revenues in the USA had been kept secret, and even the statistics on the main buyers and holders of US Treasuries were kept hidden for many decades, whereby Saudi Arabia was not revealed as the main financial supporter of the USA (an aggregated figure for “Gulf state investors” only was published, until a few years ago). Those who spoke of the “petrodollar” in the 1980s or 1990s were marked as “conspiracy theorists”. The 80% reinvestment requirement was first revealed by John Perkins in his 2004 book Confessions of an Economic Hitman, which was based on his personal experience, including as US consultant on “development consulting” contracts in Saudi Arabia. (The book is highly recommended). Of course he was also censored for spreading “misinformation”.
China launched an oil futures contract denominated in Chinese yuan already in 2018. And Saudi Arabia has been negotiating to sell oil for Chinese currency since at least 2022. But the US is busy trying to avoid this.
So is there any significance to the date of 9 June 2024? A number of reports by mainstream media, establishment financial houses and official “fact checkers” have come forward to engage in recasting the narrative and sow seeds of doubt about the end of the petrodollar.
Fact checkers denounce baseless conspiracy theories – claim no secret deals between US and Saudi Arabia
Notice that this official denial uses classic fact checker techniques, foremost of which is the elevation of a strawman that is then shot down: As far as I am aware, nobody claimed that Saudi Arabia would switch from selling oil only against US dollars to not allowing the US dollar at all. Yet, the headline insinuates there have been online claims that the dollar could no longer be used for oil purchases from Saudi Arabia. So invent a false claim that you put into the mouth of your opponent and debunk it. This fact checking statement does claim however that there was no agreement that Saudi Arabia would sell oil only for US dollars – one pillar of the actual Petrodollar Agreement.
But what about the main trigger for the reports in social media, namely the importance of the date of 9 June 2024? One indication that indeed 9 June may have legal significance comes from Reuters, because they launched a strangely timed report about an agreement between Saudi Arabia and the US on 9 June 2024, when many people would be using search engines to find out more about an agreement or failure of an agreement: Reuters claims on 9 June that
“the Biden administration is close to finalizing a treaty with Saudi Arabia that would commit the U.S. to help defend the Gulf nation as part of a deal aimed at encouraging diplomatic ties between Riyadh and Israel, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, citing U.S. and Saudi officials.”
This report is clearly designed to sow confusion and ensure that those who google “treaty 9 June US-Saudi Arabia” or similar search words would get a story that was innocuous and irrelevant. The negotiations have been ongoing for many weeks, but Reuters had to publish this report on 9 June 2024, by pure coincident the date many commentators claimed that the petrodollar agreement between the US and Saudi Arabia had expired.
“The possible deal, widely telegraphed by U.S. and other officials for weeks, is part of a wider package that would include a U.S.-Saudi civil nuclear pact, steps toward the establishment of a Palestinian state and an end to the war in Gaza, where months of ceasefire efforts have failed to bring peace”, Reuters knows further.
It is quite possible that this treaty was meant to be the de facto extension of the old Petro Dollar agreement between the US and Saudi Arabia, and apparently the US failed to seal it in time for the old one to run out. Which could mean that there is presently no written agreement between Saudi Arabia and the US in place concerning these issues. Of course, that is less important while US troops are inside Saudi Arabia. This may be why the US may not feel the rush.
What does the White House say? When asked about the alleged failure to extend the petrodollar deal (that Saudi Arabia would sell oil only for US dollars), the official State Department spokesman refused to comment at a formal press conference. Watch the video or read the relevant passage from the transcript:
State Department press briefing
MR MILLER: Yeah, go ahead.
QUESTION: Thank you so much. At the very 11th hour, when the United States and Saudi Arabia are very close for a defense deal, there are reports – unconfirmed reports that Saudi Arabia is not going to renew petrodollar deal with the United States. So any confirmation by U.S. side?
MR MILLER: That Saudi Arabia is not going to what?
QUESTION: Petrodollar agreement that took place 50 years back.
MR MILLER: I’m just not going to speak to those reports at all.
This mainstream media organisation found “a fatal flaw in this logic: The agreement itself never existed”, referring to the agreement that Saudi Arabia would sell oil only against the US dollar, said to have been signed on 8 June 1974. As witness it cited one Paul Donovan, economist employed by asset manager UBS, who stated: “Clearly, the story is going around today is fake news.” But, when reading his comments, it emerges that he conceded that there was indeed an agreement, namely one that established the United States-Saudi Arabian Joint Commission on Economic Cooperation on 8 June 1974. According to Donovan this “had nothing to do with currencies”. On this date, a joint statement was released that had been signed by then US secretary of state Henry Kissinger and Prince Fahd, the second deputy prime minster (and in 1982 to become King) of Saudi Arabia.
The Commission and agreement was for five years and would routinely be renewed. According to the Dow Jones fact checkers, the agreement was merely “a more formal arrangement that would ensure each side got more of what it wanted from the other”. That it true if we rephrase “that would ensure that the US got what it wanted from Saudi Arabia”. Did the agreement mention currencies? It did not have to: With this agreement, on 8 June 1974, the US established a legal framework for the US to exert control over the entire Saudi economy, its oil production, its revenue from oil sales and the use of its oil funds – it was essentially a takeover of the Saudi economic governance. Currencies are a part of this, even if they are not explicitly mentioned.
The fact checkers however wanted to give the impression that this agreement was not about the petrodollar, when surely there was no other reason for it. Dow Jones goes on:
“According to Donovan and others who emerged on social media to debunk the conspiracy theories, a formal agreement demanding that Saudi Arabia price its crude oil in dollars never existed. Rather, Saudi Arabia continued accepting other currencies – most notably the British pound (GBPUSD) – for its oil even after the 1974 agreement on joint economic cooperation was struck. It wasn’t until later that year that the Kingdom stopped accepting the pound as payment.”
Wow. So put differently, the fact checkers actually admit that indeed Saudi Arabia did stop selling oil in any other currency than the US dollar, even phasing out the currency of the other, prior colonial ruler, Britain, in 1974, even though the latter with a minor delay of a few months.
The financial scribblers at Dow Jones then go on to admit the secret deal that Saudi Arabia was going to reinvest the majority of its oil dollars back in US Treasuries: “Perhaps the closest thing to a petrodollar deal was a secret agreement between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia reached in late 1974, which promised military aid and equipment in exchange for the Kingdom investing billions of dollars of its oil-sale proceeds in U.S. Treasurys, Donovan said. The existence of this agreement wasn’t revealed until 2016, when Bloomberg News filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the National Archives.”
As I stated earlier, this secret agreement was first publicised by John Perkins in his 2004 bestselling book Confessions of an Economic Hitman. Bloomberg in 2016 triggered the formal confirmation from the US government. As I had reported in March last year, what Bloomberg’s FOI query did reveal in 2016 was the precise data of Saudi ownership of US Treasury bonds – which had hitherto been hidden in the statistics, by publishing only an aggregate of “Gulf country” holdings of US Treasuries.
So Dow Jones calls the Petrodollar Agreement a “conspiracy theory”, but in its “debunking” admits that both the data of Saudia Arabia’s ownership of US Treasuries have remained secret for almost half a century, and the deal to re-invest the oil money into US Treasuries itself, has been secret – as we know for ca. 30 years. Despite this astonishing and likely illegal secrecy, Dow Jones insists that it was not “some shadowy agreement” and that any other claim was just “conspiracy theories”.
So what exactly is the fake news then?
Dow Jones’ and Reuters’ track record in “fact checking” is by now notorious, as they covered up vaccine damage for years and slandered critics of the unjustified Covid restrictions. What about that UBS-hired economist who had joined this double-speak of factually admitting the secret agreements and simultaneously claiming it was “fake news” and “conspiracy theories”? Donovan’s so-called economic “analysis” is largely absent, his writing consistently unreadable and his forecasts reliable if one considers them as counter-indicators: Throughout 2020 and 2021 he insisted there would not be any significant inflation. Even in 2022 he did not concede that he had been wrong. Instead, he developed the theory that a sudden bout of disinflation would hit and reverse the picture in 2021 and 2022.
In his article of May 2020, entitled “Can debt be inflated away?”, published at a time when I was forecasting “significant inflation in 18 months”, he argues, astonishingly, that governments will not use inflation to reduce their debt burdens; instead they will do that without inflation, we are told! Some gems:
“Inflation is a complex topic. Entire books can be written about it. One of the myths that exist about inflation is that governments can easily inflate away their debt levels. … Governments are likely to try to reduce debt levels after the virus by taxation. There is one particular form of tax that is likely to be popular— financial repression. … Financial repression has been effective in cutting debt in the past. Financial repression also means that bond markets cannot punish governments for inflation (at least, not as easily). Bond yields are forced lower under financial repression. … For a government it makes more sense to tax savers through financial repression, while keeping inflation moderate. Adding inflation does not reduce debt in the long term.”
In June 2020 in his report “Where is inflation going?” he forecasts “low inflation in near term” and expects “Central bank policy should not be especially inflationary.” Astonishing, after the most dramatic monetary expansion in the history of the Fed in March 2020. But according to him, “The most likely outcome is near term low inflation, longer term higher but not high inflation”. Why is that? He is a believer in the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” – a term used much by World Economic Forum front man Klaus Schwab: “Reversing globalization is inflationary if it is politically motivated. If it is a consequence of the fourth industrial revolution, it should be neutral or disinflationary.
As late as February 2021, in his report “What’s up with inflation this year?”, this financial commentator predicted that there would not be any significant inflation in the major economies. While he already had to concede at that time that “some product prices” had been “raised”, he argues this was due to “unusual spikes in demand for specific products, coupled with supply chain problems”. Based on the higher-than-he-expected inflation he had to admit: “Headline consumer price inflation numbers will move higher in developed economies this year.” But he doubles down: “They are unlikely to be high. Importantly, consumers will not necessarily notice several of the inflation increases, and these changes are unlikely to alter consumers’ view of their real disposable income.”
Right, so no high inflation in advanced economies and nobody will care about the modest inflation. Later that year, in his August 2021 report “Will tomato ketchup kill inflation?” he further doubles down on his “no inflation” forecast by coming up with the astonishing theory, which he calls the “tomato ketchup effect”, that a bout of “disinflation” would hit hard and surprise everyone!
“Inventories data suggests some disinflation impulse in developed economies over the next few quarters. The fact that we have had fewer, and smaller summer sales has added to inflation now. As the retail inventory / seasonal price discounting pattern normalizes, this will first remove an inflation contribution, and then from next year act as a disinflation force (discounted prices in 2022 being compared to undiscounted prices in 2021).
…
So, the tomato ketchup effect could add to disinflation forces—although, ironically, it should be noted that actual condiments prices are already a source of consumer price deflation in the world’s developed economies.”
So as late as Summer 2021 Donovan had still not woken up to the fact that the massive and unprecedented credit creation the central banks forced onto the banks and the economy in March 2020 would result in inflation, and he even predicted “disinflation” to dominate.
When, in 2022, inflation could no longer be denied, Donovan switched to publishing eulogies on central banks having done the right thing. In this report of 6 April 2022, entitled “Price inflation or demand deflation”, the UBS commentator claims
“There was only one plausible policy response to the global pandemic: ease policy.”
Actually, that report sets new records in being painful to read. His audience cannot be a large one:
“As noted in the last Chief Economist’s Comment, food is not food.”
“Economically, commodity prices operate through two channels: higher inflation, and lower growth.”
It does seem though that UBS clients were asking him more questions as his disinflation scenario of 2021 and 2022 didn’t quite pan out. But that, we learn, was just a further force for more disinflation:
“The economist who goes from working 60 hours a week to 90 hours a week but is paid 10% more is a force for lower inflation—the employer gets 50% more economist for only 10% more money.”
While consumers got 20% less volume for their groceries now in smaller packaging, what was his take of the forced closures of many firms during the Covid psyop? Instead of recognising this as a reduction in supply, as I commented throughout 2020 (which means, with unchanged demand, a source of inflation), he sees this as a source of deflation!
“However, if companies go bankrupt in the face of reduced demand or there is an expectation that demand is going to be weaker for longer, this second-round effect could become more significant in the future.”
After the Federal Reserve had raised interest rates in March 2022 – which Donovan had singularly failed to forecast – he merely concludes his analysis on “inflation or deflation” with the by now familiar warning of deflation:
“The risk of policy error has increased, which might suggest that the prudent course of action would be a slow and steady pace of tightening to ensure that demand deflation does not get out of hand.”
Right, so this disinflation theorist expected risks of demand deflation as late as April 2022, almost until inflation had peaked at double digits in most economists later that year.
His reports can be found in the Archive at the bottom of his page – no direct hyperlinks are possible, as all links are mutating to only give you his main homepage.
It seems UBS is nevertheless happy with the utterings of this particular commentator, located in the chief investment office, whose forecasting track record must have bankrupted many investors – although his audience is likely those high net worth individuals who hand over their assets entirely to UBS to manage while they themselves consider the economy a big mystery. So he has likely been deployed to ensure these clients won’t ever begin to understand how the economy works. Most importantly, just like when Boeing hires its staff on the basis of their latest woke views, the impact on quality is palpable. The content of Donovan’s writings on economic matters seems less important, while his loyalty to politically correct ideological issues must be appreciated. See for instance his economics report of 27 Juni 2018, entitled “Pride and Prejudice and Economists”, in which he celebrates “pride month” by providing his views on “LGBT” at length – which many will consider an outrage, because he thereby overlooks the “Q+”, clearly a major flaw in his argument. Nevertheless, UBS clients learn important facts:
“The economics of LGBT equality is the economics of prejudice. Prejudice takes place when a person, a firm, or society makes a choice using irrational ideas.
“Prejudice puts the wrong person in the job. If an LGBT employee has come out, prejudice may do more economic damage. If a company is prejudiced, it will employ the wrong people to fill its positions. A company may choose not to promote the best qualified LGBT employees if there is an anti-LGBT prejudice, for example. A company that deliberately does not use the best people is never going to make as much money as it might”
“A company may find it difficult to hire the best non-LGBT staff if it is anti-LGBT. A non-LGBT person may be unwilling to work for a company that does not share their values.”
Of course, the detailed five-page analysis in 2018 was not enough on the topic. Moreover, it obviously was wholly inadequate to merely pontificate on “LGBT”. So in August that year, Donovan added a 9-page report entitled “The commercial case for LGBTQ inclusion”. This inclusion of “Q” people clearly spelled progress for UBS clients, but at the same time no doubt many UBS clients were demanding more such analysis. While UBS readers of investment analysis would have appreciated the quiet expansion of the important concept to include “Q”, they would at the same time have felt a strong curiosity to see also the “+” people covered in the economists’ insightful analysis. As a result, in due course UBS wealth management clients were delighted to find that in the following year Donovan produced a seven-page report on this urgent topic, in which he also improved on his shameful earlier failure to celebrate “+” people. It is entitled “Does anti-LGBTQ+ prejudice do more damage than we think?” (8 October 2019). For lack of space I cannot elaborate on the content of this now suitably expanded analysis, except for noting that UBS’s commentator eagerly adopts the habit of mainstream economists of simply making stuff up and then proclaiming it as fact, known as “making assumptions”:
“The non-heterosexual population is likely to be significantly larger than officially reported (an 8% to 8.5% range seems a sensible assumption).
So, an uneventful economic analysis and unsuccessful forecasting record, but at least the orthodox, government-supported views on important issues such as transgender activism in society are well covered. Shall we guess that Donovan also was an eager proponent of the innovative policies adopted in March 2020 and thereafter by many governments across the globe, involving masking, lockdowns and experimental injections that killed millions? Or any other agenda endorsed by the powers that be? That would not be surprising, since, as his endorsement of the Fourth Industrial Revolution foreshadowed, it turns out Donovan is an asset of the CIA-founded “World Economic Forum”:
At this stage I would like to disclose two things about myself – and, fear not, they do not include the above woke topic: firstly, I was selected as “Global Leader for Tomorrow” in 2003 by the World Economic Forum, which would, they told me at the time, allow me to attend the WEF events for five consecutive years, including their major late January gatherings in Davos. I attended the latter bash in January 2003, when I was given that dubious accolade, and again a year later. The snowy location was lovely and it seemed exciting, at the time, to the thirty-something your truly to meet famous leaders, such as Bill Clinton, or be taken aside to be introduced to an unknown German politician called Angela Merkel, who had not yet risen to power, as well as meet some pop idols like Peter Gabriel. But the hosts were not too happy about my penchant for challenging their well-staged and pre-programmed “discussions” with facts, almost always contradicting their agenda. So not long after the second event I attended, in January 2004, I was informed that the “Global Leaders for Tomorrow” program had been cancelled, meaning I was no longer invited to WEF events. Later I found that a new group called “Young Global Leaders” had been created and a more selected subset was going to be invited back, obviously not including me.
The second disclosure is that when researching this article I dimly felt like I had seen the name Paul Donovan before, and not in connection to analytically rigorous work. Then I remembered a particularly nasty negative review of my book Princes of the Yen, years earlier on Amazon, which made numerous factually wrong claims. The name of that particular reviewer was a Paul Donovan, who possibly was instructed at the time to produce a hit-piece on the newly published English version of my book. My book was highly acclaimed in Japan, even by leading financial and political analysts. Of course, it is no longer available on Amazon – you can only get it new at www.quantumpublishers.com .
It could be sufficient to stop here. But there are a number of loose ends the reader should be allowed to connect.
Digging deeper into the murky events of the 1970s Petrodollar Deal
Firstly, my conclusion stated above, that the 1974 agreement established the legal basis for a complete US takeover of Saudi Arabia’s economic policies quickly emerges from various sources. As billions of dollars flowed into Saudi Arabia as part of the agreement with the US, the administrators and CIA agents on the US side were keen to stay in charge of the allocation of this money, channelling billions to the US and their pockets.
“The Americans who were seconded into the Saudi government were there as part of a grand design engineered by William E. Simon, President Richard Nixon’s last Treasury Secretary, to channel as much of that money as possible back to the United States. Simon was Deputy Secretary until he was promoted into the top job on May 8, 1974 — just three months before Nixon’s resignation in the Watergate scandal. He stayed on as Secretary under Nixon’s successor, Gerald R. Ford.
Despite the distractions of Watergate, the spring of 1974 was a crucial period in US-Arab relations. Agreements negotiated by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in his famous “shuttle diplomacy” had ended the hostilities of the 1973 war and stabilized the battlefields of Egypt, Syria, and Israel. The United States restored diplomatic relations with Egypt. With the end of hostilities, the Arab oil producers, led by Saudi Arabia, ended their wartime embargo on exports to the United States. In that newly favorable atmosphere, Nixon embarked on a last-hurrah trip to the region. While in Saudi Arabia, he agreed to the creation of a US-Saudi Arabian Joint Economic Commission, known as JECOR. This was Simon’s brainchild.
JECOR’s mission was twofold: first, to teach the Saudis — who had no tradition of organized public agencies — how to operate the fundamental bureaucracy of a modern state; and second, to ensure that all the contracts awarded in pursuit of that mission went to American companies. JECOR would operate for 25 years, channeling billions of Saudi oil dollars back to the United States, but would attract almost no attention in this country because Congress ignored it. The Saudis were paying for it, so there was no need for US appropriations or congressional oversight.
The Commission’s objectives were listed in a joint statement issued by the American and Saudi officials who created it: “Its purposes will be to promote programs of industrialization, trade, manpower training, agriculture, and science and technology.” The participating Saudi government agencies would be the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Finance and National Economy, Commerce, and Industry, and the Central Planning Organization, soon to become the Ministry of Planning. On the US side, the managing agency was Simon’s Treasury Department, not the Agency for International Development, because it was not a traditional foreign aid program — it was a money-management program.
So the Saudis had no clue how to run the country, and the US, in their wisdom and great experience with colonial rule, were generously offering to help.
Declassified US documents confirm the far-reaching scope of the June 1974 agreement. We learn that through the JECOR machinery and Americans on the ground in high positions at all the ministries, the US essentially directly controlled Saudi Arabia’s economy and finances and thereby its government.
In an internal letter by the top US administrator on the ground in Saudi Arabia to his superior, we learn that the top decision-maker was not even Treasury Secretary Simon, but Henry Kissinger himself. The report was written in April 1974 and referred to an Initial Study Report on Joint U.S.-Saudi Cooperation, indicating that the original oral agreement had been made earlier, likely the meetings before the December 1973 highlight when Kissinger met with King Faisal in Saudi Arabia.
Written by Joseph Sisco to Henry Kissinger, we learn in this letter that the two commissions (one on economic matters, the other on security matters) would
“operate subject to my day-to-day political guidance and coordination, under your direction.”
Sisco describes the timeline that would lead to the 8 June 1974 formal agreement that would seal US control over the Saudi government.
Kissinger’s goals thus had been to
(1) end the restrictions on oil supply that Saudi Arabia had imposed in October 1973; this was achieved by March 1973, by promising Saudi Arabia solutions and compromises (that never materialised);
(2) gain control over the Saudi economy and government in order to ensure compliance with his objectives;
(3) which included ensuring that the Saudi currency would be pegged to the US dollar, hence Saudi Arabia would agree to sell oil only against the US dollar,
(4) and which also included a continued steady rise in the oil price (against Saudi resistance), and
(5) that Israel and its actions would be kept out from discussions about all of these. In other words, it was all about US (and Israeli) interests.
The “bedouins” would have to follow orders.
Having achieved four out of five is not bad. Despite this great success of Kissinger’s diplomacy in securing US interests, upon his death last November at age 100 there were voices that criticised what happened in 1974 – namely for failing to achieve aim number 5 and keep those issues separate from Israeli occupation of territories after the 1967 war. For throughout 1973 and 1974, Saudi Arabia had considered itself as the leading Arab nation that should and would represent Palestinian interests, and consequently, both the Saudi King Faisal, and his trusted foreign minister, repeatedly demanded the withdrawal of Israel from the territories occupied in 1967.
“In December 1972, Saudi King Faisal ended a long-standing policy of not allowing “oil to be used as a political weapon,” as James Akin put it in a Foreign Affairs article in early 1973. In that month, two American officials, John Connally and Franklin Lincoln, visited Faisal separately and came back with the same message. “King Faisal said that there could be no further development of mutual Saudi-U.S. economic interests or any further expansion of oil production … without a political settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict,” Kissinger reported to Nixon, according to State Department archives” (Source).
The oil embargo was not an issue for Kissinger, because he had beem keen to drive up the oil price, and indeed the hike of January 1974, when the oil price quadrupled, was on Kissinger’s insistence, vis-à-vis a reluctant Saudi oil minister Yamani.
However, the dogged determination by the Saudi King and his foreign minister that Israel withdraw military troops to within the borders of 1967 was crossing a red line for Kissinger.
Already in December 1972, Saudi King Faisal “ended a long-standing policy of not allowing “oil to be used as a political weapon,” as James Akin put it in Foreign Affairs.
“In that month, two American officials, John Connally and Franklin Lincoln, visited Faisal separately and came back with the same message. “King Faisal said that there could be no further development of mutual Saudi-U.S. economic interests or any further expansion of oil production … without a political settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict,” Kissinger reported to Nixon, according to State Department archives.
On Aug. 10, 1973, almost two months before the eruption of the Arab-Israeli war and the imposition of the oil embargo, then-national security adviser Henry Kissinger told the director of the Office of Energy Policy, John Love, regarding the potential use of oil as a weapon, that “the Saudis are just not sophisticated enough to understand it, and they are, therefore, more dangerous.”
This conversation occurred because Love wanted to discuss what he had dubbed the “Saudi Arabian problem.” By this he meant a recent change in Saudi policy that saw it threaten to use oil as a tool to exert pressure on Israel to withdraw from territories occupied in the 1967 war. Kissinger thought that the Arab-Israeli conflict was “insoluble” and that any “Arab government that would sign a settlement acceptable to the Israelis would be out in two years.” This is why he thought the Saudis were not sophisticated enough to understand the dangers of being at the forefront of this issue both for themselves and for U.S. interests.
What exactly were the “dangers” and who was most at danger? This would soon emerge – and it was the top Saudi decision-makers, whose lives were at risk should they choose to challenge Henry Kissinger and his plans for the US and the Middle East.
Initially, the foreign minister and his King could be appeased concerning the Israeli occupation, thanks to Kissinger gaining their trust, insinuating deep understanding and referring to promising negotiations with “the Israelis” that would later address the issue. For instance, after one meeting with foreign minister Al Saqqaf, Kissinger boastfully and ‘jokingly asked the participants, “Did you see the Saudi foreign minister come out like a good little boy and say they had had very fruitful talks with us?’” (Source).
Actually, Kissinger knew better than anyone that this Arab demand would never be met and that settlers would soon lay claim to land and homes in the occupied territories. So he deceived the Saudi leadership, waving the possibility of an eventual Israeli withdrawal to obtain an agreement from the Saudi king to establish US control over the economy. Believing that the US would support what to the Saudis seemed reasonable and just demands that Israel would withdraw from the territories it occupied during the 1967 war, Saudia Arabia also persuaded other Arab oil-producing countries to follow them in lifting the oil embargo on March 18, 1974, despite key demands not having been met. In the eyes of some, even this was a failure for Kissinger, since the temporary existence of “the embargo succeeded in linking the Arab-Israeli conflict with U.S. interests in the region’s oil — an outcome that Kissinger tried very hard to prevent from happening” (same article).
Once the formal agreement of what amounted to a legal takeover of Saudi government by the US had been signed, on 8 June 1974, Kissinger will have begun to encourage the Saudi King and foreign minister to drop their demand that Israel withdraw from territories occupied since 1967.
This no doubt displeased the King and his foreign minister.
Their persistence in demanding the withdrawal of Israel from occupied territories and their insistence that Saudi Arabia lead the Arab countries on this point resulted in King Faisal and his foreign minister Al Saqqat was becoming a problem for Kissinger. Meanwhile, Kissinger seems to have established a more cordial understanding with King Faisal’s half-brother, Prince Fahd. That prince pointed out to the Americans that al-Saqqaf was “anti-American”, says Wikipedia – likely code for the insistence on the Israeli withdrawal.
“During the oil crisis in 1973 both Prince Fahd, later King Fahd, and Prince Sultan, minister of defense, claimed that Al Saqqaf and Ahmed Zaki Yamani, oil minister, had an anti-American stance and also, were the major reasons for King Faisal’s hostile approach towards the USA.”
Wikipedia on 29 June 2024
Kissinger no doubt had a solution in mind.
Consider the subsequent events. On 6 November 1974 Henry Kissinger was in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and was meeting senior government officials of Saudi Arabia. At the final meeting, just before Kissinger’s departure, the foreign minister, Umar al-Saqqaf, spoke as follows:
“Our policy is the same. We want to see complete withdrawal to the 1967 borders and the return of Arab Jerusalem to its people and the restoration of their legitimate rights to the Palestinian people. I have no new demands. This is what I said even before the Rabat conference. I am saying this and repeating it simply because we have no new demands.
There is another topic touched upon by my friend Dr. Kissinger; namely, that of oil. I repeat that the policy of my King and my government is still the same as it was; namely, to keep the prices as they are and to try to reach a reduction, albeit a symbolic reduction, or if we can, a greater reduction—and we would be doing this because of our awareness and of the welfare of humanity at large.
Finally, I greet our guests, the Secretary of State and the colleagues who came with him, and look forward to seeing him in the not too distant future when at least part of these problems we have been discussing will have been solved” (Source).
The foreign minister may not have been aware of this, and certainly was not aware of the significance of the consequences of his words, but by this statement he had made clear that, after all these talks, discussions and negotiations, the current leadership of Saudi Arabia was going to continue to cross two important red lines of Kissinger’s policies: Firstly, concerning Israel, Saudi Arabia should have given up its demands that Israel withdrew to its 1967 borders. Secondly, it was Kissinger who had persuaded the Saudi oil minister Yamani to quadruple oil prices in January 1974, and the policy was not to reduce them significantly, but if anything, raise them further, because high oil prices underpinned the US dollar, which had become a petrodollar, and at the same time high oil prices ensured that the transfer of wealth from other countries, notably Germany and Japan, to the United States would continue.
How dare a “Bedouin” make demands on the US and Israel? Or, in Kissinger’s words of 1973, he found it
“ridiculous that the civilized world is held up by 8 million savages. … Can’t we overthrow one of the sheikhs just to show that we can do it?” (Source).
At the time, Kissinger responded diplomatically, if obliquely:
“The Foreign Minister, who has been a voice for moderation and wisdom in this area, will be coming to the United States next week to the General Assembly, and I look forward to continuing our discussions on that occasion.” (Source).
The events took their course. Like today, when influential decision-makers in America want nothing more than war with Russia, at that time the idea was for the US not to give in. Apparently the calculation was that the King “of the Bedouins”, whose father Abdulaziz, aka Ibn Saud, had been installed by the grace of the UK and later was backed by the US, was going to get a warning shot, and failing that, a new King would be installed. After all, the UK and US knew that it had been worthwhile to encourage the old King to keep producing sons – 45 in total. There were plenty of princes to choose from, some of whom were bound to be amenable to a deal that would put them on the throne.
As Andrew Scott Cooper details in his book Oil Kings, secretary of defense Schlesinger and secretary of state Kissinger had been discussing toppling one of the Arab governments and seize the oil production. This should not be considered far-fetched, but something quite plausible, since it is what the US actually did implement in many countries, such as in Iran in 1953, in Libya in 2011 and tried in Afghanistan for 20 years, and partially succeeded in Syria – today one third of the country – the parts with the oil – under illegal US occupation (an “unprovoked all-out aggression and occupation”, to use the terminology used against Russia), with the oil stolen by the US.
In line with this practice of engineering regime-change, Schlesinger and Kissinger developed plans to “seize Abu Dhabi,” the oil-rich emirate in the newly founded United Arab Emirates, in the last days of November 1973.
“Although the plan was not actualized, Kissinger organized a press conference on Nov. 21 where he publicly threatened “countermeasures” if the economic pressure continued. The following day, Yamani, the Saudi oil minister, appeared in a TV interview in Copenhagen and declared that Saudi Arabia would cut 80% of its oil production if any countermeasures were taken. He also told his American, European and Japanese audiences that the Saudi government was willing to blow up its oil facilities if the United States were to take any military action. These threats were substantiated by the CIA and ended Kissinger’s attempt to dissociate the issue of Arab-Israeli peace from the oil embargo” (Source).
But by late 1974 the plans of Kissinger had evolved. He probably felt he had warned al-Saqqaf.
Al-Saqqaf travelled to New York the week following their meeting in Riyadh, to meet address the United Nations General Assembly on the Palestine issue. There he spoke for the 11th consecutive year, on the issue of Palestine.
“He said, as he had unvaryingly for seven years, that Israel should withdraw from the territories it occupied in 1967.” (New York Times, 16 November 1974).
If there were further meetings with Kissinger and others in the first half of November, we can only guess that he refused to change his mind about these 2 red line issues.
He died suddenly and unexpectedly in New York on 14 November 1974 at the age of 50.
“…Mr. Saqqaf had died of a cerebral thrombosis, a blood clot in the brain. He was 50 years old. … Mr. Saqqaf has been at the center of negotiations between Middle East leaders and Secretary of State Kissinger on the issues of Middle East peace and oil.”
“Saqqaf was an imposing diplomatic figure. Over 6 feet tall, he often dressed in flowing Arab costume for official functions and while on missions. He was fluent in English and French and accustomed to Western ways.
His body was sent back to Saudi Arabia on a US plane with the under-secretary of state and the President’s condolences.
This sudden death however seemed not to have deterred King Faisal to change his mind about these two policy issues. The economic decisions were made by Americans in charge of the JECOR. Sure enough: Oil prices failed to fall in 1974 or 1975, which is what the Saudi King was trying to achieve, backed by his foreign minister, for the greater good of humanity, as his foreign minister had explained. Needless to mention, Israel also failed to withdraw to the borders of 1967.
But open dissent was to be discouraged. First the foreign minister, labelled “anti-American” on Wikipedia, died in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York. Then, half a year later, his King, to whom he was loyal and with whom he shared his vision of foreign policy, especially the demand that Israel withdraw from occupied territories, was also dead. On 25 March 1975, King Faisal was assassinated and his half-brother prince Khalid was made King of Saudi Arabia.
Did this mark a turning point in Saudi Arabia’s attitude concerning being the leader of the Arab states in demanding that Isreal withdraw to the 1967 borders? The reader be the judge.
Kissinger had warned that it was not wise for the Saudi Arabian leadership to be at the forefront among Arab states in this demand on Israel, and especially their willingness to use their control over oil production as an active tool in that policy.
The next leaders were less insistent.
Unfinished business
Yet, there was one piece of unfinished business – long-standing oil minister Yamani was still putting up resistance. It was surely just bad lack what happened to him next.
In December 1975, when Yamani was at the OPEC headquarters in Vienna, notorious secret service operative Ilich Ramirez Sanches, better known as Carlos the Jackal, who had studied at the University of Westminster in London, raided the building and took Yamani hostage. He then demanded a plane and went flying around North Africa with Yamani and other hostages for two days (the pilot was British ex-Royal Navy man Neville Atkinson; other operatives on the team included German “Red Army Faction” members, an organisation that has since been shown to have been run by NATO as part of “Operation Gladio”). Yamani was supposed to have been shot by Carlos, but wasn’t. Carlos was thus expelled from his Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine organisation by its leader Wadie Haddad before the end of the year for failing to shoot hostages when PFLP demands were not met, failing in his mission.
But minister Yamani had become more agreeable ever since: He stayed in the job until 1986 and lived to a ripe old age.
There is nothing to see here.
It does look as if the US has essentially been totally controlling the Saudi government and all its key policies, rendering the decision to sell oil only against the US dollar – challenged by Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Muammar Qaddafi of Libya at the cost of their lives – subject to direct US control, and thus rendering it unnecessary to point this out explicitly in any written agreement between Saudi Arabia and the US.
So what about the current crown prince in Saudia Arabia? The media seems to have created the impression that he is some kind of “rebel” who is trying to shake off US influence. Indeed, when Crown Prince Mohammed’s request to the US to obtain nuclear power were rebuffed, he achieved a rapprochement with Iran, which was intermediated by China. This, in turn, ended the longstanding and ongoing proxy war in Yemen, in which Iran had supported the Houthis and Saudi Arabia their opponents.
“The diplomatic breakthrough also strengthened Saudi ties with China, a powerful alternative and counterweight to the United States that Mohammed could leverage in his dealings with the North American superpower. Indeed, just hours after the deal was announced, the offer to normalize ties with Israel in exchange for U.S. commitments on security and nuclear technology was reiterated”. (Source)
On the other hand, he seems to have acted to keep Arab leaders in line. Think about the peculiar resignation of the Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri in November 2017, when on a visit to Riyadh in Saudi Arabia. He was only allowed to return to his own country after significant international pressure, upon which he rescinded his resignation. At the time, several dozen Saudi princes, business leaders and government officials were arrested in Saudi Arabia.
“Many were released only after relinquishing partial control of their businesses to the state or paying billions of dollars. The Saudi government was believed to have collected more than $100 billion from the move.
Having strengthened his de facto status as the premier policy maker of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed sought to foster more cordial and stable relations internationally. In October he reportedly indicated that he would normalize Saudi Arabia’s ties with Israel, as the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and other Arab countries had done in recent years. (Source)
Most of all, US troops, which also means deep state operatives, continue to be based inside Saudi Arabia. So at present there is insufficient evidence to suggest that Saudi Arabia is no longer under US control.
BRICS and the alternative to the US dollar
A Chinese Renminbi (RMB)-denominated oil futures contract named Shanghai crude oil futures (SC) has officially been trading at the Shanghai International Energy Exchange (INE) since 26 March 2018. In 2023, China and Saudi Arabia entered into a local currency swap agreement worth ca. $7bn in order to boost trade in their currencies and lessen the reliance on the US dollar.
In early June 2024, Russia’s central bank and the Moscow Exchange halted trading in dollar and euros, as the US imposed further sanctions against Russia and made use of the US dollar even more difficult for Russians. As a result, the Russian central bank stated that the yuan had become the predominant currency on the Moscow bourse, accounting for more than half of currency trades in May.
In December 2023, Iran and Russia held a meeting of central bank governors and concluded an agreement to trade using their local currencies instead of the dollar.
Meanwhile, the BRICS economic group, which includes China, India and Russia, has discussed the prospect of a BRICS currency that would challenge the dominance of the dollar.
However, the US dollar remains the most important foreign reserve currency, accounting for more than half of all FX reserves (although this is down from two thirds only two decades ago).
Given the high degree of deep state machinations concerning Saudi Arabia, oil and the dollar, should we really believe that the emergence of an alternative currency among the growing BRICS group of countries is a development that was not signed off by top decision-makers?
While China and other BRICS countries would like to increase oil trade in BRICS currencies, this is not happening yet. A main obstacle is that the Saudi currency itself is pegged to the US dollar and, as noted, US dominance over Saudia Arabia’s economic and political decisions remains. In the words of a Japanese analyst:
“It is true that China is asking Saudi Arabia to use the renminbi to settle its crude oil payments, but the Saudis would not want to take China’s offer seriously,” Mr Kondo said. “The Saudi riyal is pegged to the dollar, making budget planning easier by receiving oil revenue in dollars. The dollar’s position as the world’s major reserved asset remains still dominant, which give little incentive for the Saudis to switch to other currencies.” (Source).
Another obstacle is the fact that China still has some capital controls on its international financial transactions, with the yuan only partially convertible. While it can be used for current account transactions, to pay for goods and services trade, restrictions remain for capital account transactions, including investments and loans. The Chinese yuan has not internationalised enough to serve easily as a reserve currency.
Also, Saudi Arabia only this month became a full participant in the mBridge project, a collaboration between several central banks to develop a new system for cross-border payments using central bank digital currencies. But this project is guided by the Bank for International Settlements, partly owned by the Bank of England, the formerly privately-owned bank domiciled in the City of London Corporation. MBridge was launched in 2021 as a collaboration between the BIS and the central banks of China, Hong Kong, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates, to advance cross-border trade and payments using the project’s blockchain, the mBridge Ledger. In addition to the six central bank “full” participants, there are a further 27 official entities partnering in the project, including the IMF and the World Bank. Other central banks, namely of Norway, South Korea and Turkey (NATO or otherwise US allies) are observers. Partner banks include Goldman Sachs, HSBC and China’s six biggest state-owned banks.
The US policies in the past ten years were designed to forge a new military alliance between Russia and China, which others, such as Iran, have joined, while also forging an economic alliance centering on these countries in the larger circle of BRICS countries. More recently, the policy of first freezing and now confiscating Russian assets held in the US sphere of influence must convince more and more countries that an alternative system is more attractive than the US economic zone of influence.
It is notable that US policy decisions have been at the bottom of all this, further enhanced by the American-run regime of grey and black lists of countries concerning financial and tax reporting and consequently the ease of access to bank services. This regime practically discriminates against people and companies resident in many countries and makes simple payments and fund transfers difficult for them, as banks shy away from the high regulatory burden. It did not use to be this way and it doesn’t have to be this way. But decision-makers chose it this way.
Could it thus be that the much-hailed “alternative” to the US system of hegemony of BRICS countries and a BRICS currency is just another Hegelian dialectic opposite, possibly seen as necessary on the road towards a one-world government? For a one-world currency to be realistic, as proposed for instance by my former Oxford MPhil Economics classmate Mark Carney in 2019 at Jackson Hole, the US dollar has to be dethroned. The decision-makers behind this are influential enough to make America take those policies that would dethrone the dollar. Their chosen tool are central bank digital currencies, favoured also by China and Russia, not just the Western central planners. And it is these that we must oppose and resist as much as possible.
ALERT! NEUTRON BOMBS, USA TROOPS MILES FROM RUSSIAS BORDER, TRUMP GOES NUCLEAR, BIDEN IS FINISHED
What is one city you would never return to? Why?
For me, it is Paris!
I am an Indian and you are going to say that you have many places in India that are worse than Paris. And I accept it, perhaps you are right! But the question asks specifically, “What is one city you would never return to”. It asks for my opinion based on my experience.
A lot of Black people (I mention this because there were no other ppl in those groups. More on the line of haggling and harrassing, and NOT on racial discrimination) trying to strike a conversation by blocking my path with the most common question, “Which country you are from?” or with the line, “You look pretty”One of the women walking in front of me answered, “From Italy” and that is it! He started to follow and he was like, “I love Pizza.” and “You are so pretty”. Since she was ahead of me, it scared me! And in a split of second, she ran away. And then he asked me, “Which country are you from?”Some Black people selling souvenirs on the roads near Eiffel Tower were very persistent in trying to sell their items. I mean, we neither went near to them nor asked them anything. And these guys also knew Hindi, “Sasta hai Sasta hai!!”The other city where I had a similar experience was in Rome. But for some reason, it was not so crowded and I could escape every time.
Weird experiencesOne of the most profound weird (I would not tag it “racism”) experiences I had was in Paris.
We were waiting for the Bus in a queue. There were Indians in front of me and there was this group of 3 old stylish ladies talking in French behind me.
When the bus came one of those three ladies pointed a finger and said to me and my mother, “You two, behind me!”. You should know better than to bully me! Long drama short, I got into the bus and those three got into the second bus that was for the same route just behind this one ;)Another experience was at the metro station after I purchased the tickets from the vending machine. A man came to me and asked me where I was going. I told him and then he said, “This is not the ticket you should be buying”.
Every European city has its own rules when it comes to tickets, where to validate it and so on. There is a high probability that I could have made a mistake and bought the wrong ticket.
I got nervous. He began to tell me that I should not be buying from the vending machine for this route and should purchase a value that was higher than my current ticket.
After a minute, it felt odd because I am not so dumb to purchase the wrong ticket! And I can read English as well as French. I simply told him, “Okay, I will pay the fine” and I just walked away from him. (Btw it was the right ticket)I have a couple of more experiences. All these in 3.5 days I stayed in Paris.The bus drivers are all the time irritated.Surprisingly, a lot of honking compared to other cities in Europe that I have visited.
Pedestrians were crossing even on the red signal for the pedestrians (In India, nobody cares for signals but in Europe, in almost all the places I have visited ppl take traffic rules seriously.)
Pricey!Paris is known as the Fashion Capital of the World. Rightly so! Almost all the big brands are present there. But for the middle class, it is too heavy on the pocket.My shopping included only books, second-hand French books that would have been hard to get in India!
And obviously, some freeze magnets!French Macarons are also costly and I have had better things in my life which were damn cheaper. My mother remarked, “Why is it so sugary?”
Over-hypedMacarons are over-hyped and so is the Mona Lisa!But since I will not perhaps visit again (other than special circumstances), I had a lot of French Macarons and waited 55 minutes (even though I had a ticket) to enter the Louvre (where the Mona Lisa lives!) and another 20 minutes to get somewhere near to the painting.I am not complaining per se, just pointing out. I enjoyed both. It is just that it is nothing great. But had I missed it then I would have regretted it because of all the hype surrounding it.
Paris Metro made me uncomfortable. But maybe, it is just me.
A lot of traffic and jams as well. I preferred to walk around and/or take the metro.
I was advised by my driver in Porto not to stay out too late in Paris and to make sure that I am always in a place that is surrounded by people. Not a good advice before starting the Paris trip.
Jurassic Park – 1950’s Super Panavision 70
What was the biggest scandal at your high school?
A teacher that I knew very well was arrested and jailed without bond for sexual assault.
But there was no evidence to the accusations.
He got along well with the students and staff. A bit strict at times, but he was a pretty humorous and kind person overall. So when the allegations came out, we were all shocked but confused.
Something just didn’t feel right.
The person pressing the charges was a senior, and she was a bit “out there.” Many people saw her as a “social justice warrior” with strong beliefs in feminism. She definitely wasn’t a timid or soft-spoken person at all.
She claimed that he had molested her since freshman year, assaulted her multiple times at school, and even visited her home several times.
Her friend also testified as a witness while saying that she had been assaulted too.
What’s “interesting” though is her Facebook page which states that her hobby is “taking down white males.”
Furthermore, police did a thorough investigation of all his devices, but couldn’t find anything.
Nevertheless, he was still arrested and jailed.
Now, I’m not saying he’s innocent, but without any evidence, it’s difficult for me to justify his imprisonment either.
And I really hope that he isn’t innocent.
Because if he is, then he has had his whole life unrightfuly taken away from him.
He’ll never be able to teach again.
He’ll be forever labeled as a child-molester.
His career is ruined.
His family is broken.
And his life, by all means, is essentially over.
What Putin and China did is SHOCKING and the U.S. is in Deep Trouble
2 teaspoons whole juniper berries, + 1/3 cup crushed juniper
6 cups water
3/4 cup packed light brown sugar
3/4 cup kosher salt
1 beef brisket (about 4 to 5 pounds)
2/3 cup coarsely ground black pepper
Instructions
In a small mixing bowl, combine the peppercorns, thyme, bay leaves, cloves, garlic and whole juniper berries.
In a saucepan, over medium heat, combine the water, brown sugar and salt. Bring to a boil and stir to dissolve the sugar and salt. Remove from heat and add dry spice mixture and steep for 1 hour.
Place the brisket in a glass or plastic container. Pour the seasoned brine to cover the brisket completely. Cover and refrigerate for 3 weeks, turning the brisket every couple of days.
Heat the smoker.
Combine the crushed juniper berries and ground black pepper in a small bowl. Using the palm and heel of your hand, press two thirds of the berries and pepper mixture into the brisket. Press the remaining mixture into the other side. Place the brisket in a smoker and smoke for about 4 hours.
Remove from the smoker and cool for 30 minutes.
Place the brisket in a large Dutch oven, cover with water and place over medium heat. Bring the liquid to a boil, reduce to a simmer and cook for 2 hours.
Remove from pan and cool completely.
Slice into thin slices and serve.
What battles in history were won because one side did something so unthinkable that it caught their opponent completely by surprise?
Imagine you have an army and you’re out of supplies. Like, if you sit there for a few more days, your men will start to starve. That’s how bad it is. You’re also not getting resupplied any time soon because the enemy navy is blocking your sea routes and the enemy army is blocking your land routes. Your only way to survive is to beat the enemy army in a head-on battle.
But there’s just one problem: the enemy army is twice as large as your own. And is led by one of the greatest living generals.
How do you win the battle?
This was the situation Julius Caesar faced in the late summer of 48 BCE. He had made a gambit, attempting to cross the Adriatic in late fall in risky waters, but he only made it across with half of his army and was promptly outmaneuvered by his opponent Pompey’s larger army. Near the town of Pharsalus, he found himself outnumbered, outmatched, and even outplanned. Pompey held all the cards.
Pompey’s associates, who included most of Rome’s Senators, urged him to battle. He himself wanted to stay up on his hill and starve Caesar out, but he was pressured into a confrontation. He obliged.
As Pompey’s army marched out, it must have been an intimidating sight for Caesar. He had faced down larger armies before, but they had always been armies of Gauls, undisciplined warriors without much organization on the battlefield. Facing him now were trained Roman soldiers led by a commander with decades of experience in field battles. Caesar must have come to terms with the idea that this would be his last battle.
The two armies lined up. Pompey had the tactical flexibility to either stack his units tightly to create more breakthrough pressure or to extend his line and outflank Caesar. He opted for the former, matching Caesar’s line in length and seeking to penetrate. Caesar had no choice but to attack.
In most battles, the attack would begin with a slow walk, accelerating to a brisk stride and eventually a full jog that would create momentum for the strike. However, Caesar knew that his momentum was not enough for Pompey’s deep ranks. He took advantage of his soldiers’ coordination and discipline; ten meters before making contact, he ordered a full-stop halt to the entire line. After a brief rest to recover from the initial run, they advanced slowly, shields braced, into the fray.
The infantry combat devolved into a stalemate. Pompey’s lines had more weight, but Caesar’s soldiers were veterans who had fought with Caesar for a decade. They had bore powerful charges with more fervor from Gauls before, and they could handle slow, grinding formation fighting just fine despite being outnumbered.
For Caesar, the problem would be the cavalry.
Pompey was dominant in cavalry. Caesar had some Gallic auxiliary horsemen, but Pompey, with all the resources of Greece and the rest of the Roman east, had amassed Macedonian-style cavalry in the thousands. They outnumbered Caesar’s cavalry at least five-to-one, and when they charged, it was a sure thing they would crush Caesar’s flank and bring a quick end to the battle.
Finally, around the peak of the fighting, Pompey’s cavalry charged. Thousands of hooves on the ground, kicking up dust and producing a terrifying low rumble that drew closer and closer to Caesar’s cavalry. They stood still, awaiting the charge. It looked like suicide, a last stand.
At the last moment, they raised their spears. It was a death wish. Pompey’s cavalry made contact.
Immediately, Caesar’s cavalry turned around and fell back. Pompey’s cavalry followed in hot pursuit. But suddenly, Caesar’s cavalry units began splitting off into two groups. They each moved to one side.
Taking their place were a unit of legionaries. Armed with spears.
Pompey’s cavalry were not prepared for this reserve unit of infantry, especially not ones using spears. Turns out their spears were actually just improvised pila: heavy throwing javelins repurposed as anti-horse weapons. But against an unexpected enemy whose momentum became kryptonite, they worked perfectly.
Horses and riders fell, impaled by the spears. Others were struck in the back by pila as they turned tail to flee. The charge broke into a chaotic mess, and the Caesarians were getting the better of the melee fighting on foot. Finally, the Roman cavalry came back for their charge, making contact with the broken Pompeian formation and utterly scattering it. The Pompeian horsemen fled off the battlefield in disarray.
Now it was Pompey’s flank that was in grave danger.
Pompey did not expect that the Roman cavalry would be coming back from their death stand. He was completely unprepared to see a mix of cavalry and infantry barreling toward his left flank. The infantry were equally unprepared and failed to meet the charge properly. Their tightly packed lines were crushed even closer together.
Caesar took advantage of this disorder from every angle. He knew a river protected the left side of the battlefield, so he diverted the rest of his reserves to the Pompeian left flank and sent them on a crushing push through their lines.
The Pompeians folded. 40,000 men lost to 22,000 men on a flat plain with only one little trick.
Julius Caesar would go on to defeat all challengers, becoming the dictator-for-life of Rome.
Then he got stabbed. Sadge
China does not reveal its true military capability (following the principles of Sun Tzu).
Western intelligence can only guess at China’s real nuclear capability. At present, their guess is that China has 350 nuclear weapons and 90 ICBMs.
However, many netizens have studied this question in great detail and their estimates are much higher. Their consensus is that China may have 800 nuclear weapons, and possibly as many as 2,000, including the delivery vehicles for all of them.
Bottom line? We just don’t know.
This uncertainty is what China aims for. It must keep US military planners up at night.
Suppose China does have 800 nuclear weapons. Suppose China has the delivery vehicles for all of them. What does this mean for the United States?
America’s missile defence shield is unproven in the field. However, it has been tested, and recent tests show less than 60% effectiveness. That means 40% of China’s nukes could slip through US defences.
So how much damage could 320 nukes do to America? Well, it would certainly flatten America. It would kill many tens of millions of people, perhaps over a hundred million.
It would wipe out America’s industrial and technological base.
It would create millions of square kilometers of radioactive wasteland that are uninhabitable for centuries.
How could America feed its remaining population? Radioactive land is not arable.
And let’s not overlook the possibility of nuclear winter.
If this is anybody’s idea of survivability, they’re welcome to it.
Never Underestimate China’s Ability to Do the Unexpected
Her hands ghost against the Paine of thick glass separating her from the void, infinite nothingness as far as one could look in the pitch black reach of death’s gaze.the only thing stopping her from being scooped out into its frigid embrace was metal. Metal and wires, a rib cage made out of nuts and bolts, with nothing but cold surfaces and sharp edges welded together that encapsulated her and the rest of her crew.She almost forgets to breathe, her lungs twisted up and tangled with a combination of unfiltered elation and deep seated dread that knocks back and forth within her skull until she becomes lightheaded from the thought of acknowledging either of them.Instead of that, she grunts, lifting herself out of her chair while her eyes continue to fixate on the electronic timer counting down its life until they reach their new destination. A new place, new opportunities, a new start-A new home.She hesitates at the last thought, brushing it aside as she walks away from the machine, her hands slightly shaky from the amount of caffeine she’s ingested in the last 48 hours, the empty cups now stacked up into a messy pile beside her desk.She walks out into the hallway from her office, the bright, fluorescent lights nearly blinding from her extended time cooped up and occupied with work. Even just a few steps out and she can already hear the mutter of chatter flooding from the commons area, Snippets of conversation buzzing to life the closer she gets. A small smile lifts the corners of her mouth as she enters the room, her older sister sitting in one of the many chairs scattered about the room.She walks towards her on the bleached white tiled floors, stopping beside her place a comforting hand over her shoulder; and chuckles when the girl nearly jumps out of her seat from surprise.
“Wha -Charlie! I told you not to scare me like that!” the older girl squeaks, a squeezed smirk scrunching up her face subtly.
Charlie replies with a toothy, smug smile, only patting her sister again on the shoulder, albeit a bit more delicate this time.
“You know I couldn’t miss an opportunity like that!” charlie defends, crossing her arms while continuing to wear the same smirk. Her sister rolls her eyes, and finally chuckles along.
“So you finally decided to come out of your hole, huh?” Her sister nudges charlies side with her elbow, a friendly gesture. Charlie’s body tenses slightly, she really wishes she didn’t have to. She would rather be anywhere else then on this godforsaken ship, but she never really had a choice.
“You would do the same if you were the one in charge of making sure this tin can doesn’t blow up!”
“guess I can’t argue with that.”
“See, I told you. Now how is the data coming along?” charlie glances over at the clock hung up on the wall; god, it was already almost 2am. She doesn’t want to be here.
“Got two more potential sites we could look into, nothing special though.” her sister shrugs.
“Are they actually habitable this time?” charlie mutters under her breath. She feels like she’s already said this before, like this whole thing has happened before.
“Yeah yeah,” her sister waves a dismissive hand in the other direction “no more acidic deposits or whatever.” charlie snorts at the response. But it’s mostly out of reflex. She can’t wait to get back to her room at this point.
“Can’t say people would be too happy if the equivalent of an acid volcano blew up their home.”
She jokes back, forcing her face into a smile.
“It sounded like it would be a ‘them’ problem at the time, not a ‘me’ problem.” her sister jokes.
“Whatever you say, rose.” she rolls her eyes, until settling her gaze on the screen of glass on the other side of the room. Her face scrunches up as she easily abandons the shallow conversation, instead making her way across said room; something twisting uneasily in her stomach the same way her awe of the stars did with her lungs.
“Where do you think you’re going, i’m not done with you yet!” Rose calls after her, a smile still strewn on the taller girls face, while her sister ignores her.
Charlie stops a few steps short of the glass, and places a delicate hand on its surface, her eyes squinting into the nothingness.
“Uh, rose?” she finally responds to her, calling out to her sister as her other crew peers start to glance over curiously, and then follow up with an array of different sounds of sudden panic.
“I’m coming i’m com-” she stops short behind the shorter girl, mouth slightly agape.
“Rose, what is-
“What the hell is that thing?!” a sudden shriek arises from the room in the back, cutting charlie off from trying to reason out what she’s currently seeing in front of her. Something in her memory seems to click, but she doesn’t know why.
Something blacker than the abyss stares back at them, long, lithe tendrils slowly curling in and out from around it as it continues to approach the ship.
Somebody in the crowd begins to scream, and soon the whole ship is riddled with fear and panic as everyone seemingly begins to scramble. Crowds of people trampling over each other through the small door frames on either side of the commons.
She should be running with them, screaming in terror and ripping her hand away from the glass. But instead she can only stand still as her sister tries to drag her deeper into the false security of their ships from the lurking leviathan in the void.
She’s just so tired. And she just wants to go back home.
Maybe space wouldn’t be that cold after all?
She can hear her sisters voice behind her, muffled but just as grating to her ears. She stares out of the window, glazed over eyes watching the creature sulk closer.
She can finally go home.
BECOME OBSESSED – 3 HOUR Motivational Speech Video | Gym Workout Motivation
I inherited my paternal grandfathers bayonet. He was an American soldier fighting the Germans in France during world war I.
The story behind this bayonet is that he got it off of a German that he killed. The thing about the bayonet is that the blade was caked with this thick blood-like substance. No one knew what it was, though we all suspected that the goo was the remains of people that the German gutted out.
Now, this was a gutting blade. The top was serrated and designed to pull out the guts like a saw-tooth blade.
bayonet
Eventually, my bother took the blade and claimed it as his own. He cleaned it up and it is somewhere in his house in Colorado.
And… I forgot about it. It’s just a thing. A part of someone else’s life. But, you know, every now and then I start to wonder about the blade and the story behind it.
No clear answer though.
‘A LOT OF PIFFLE’: THE GERMAN SAWBACK BAYONET
The German Sawback Bayonet of the First World War: Myth and Reality
No other hand-held weapon of the First World War has sparked so much debate and gave rise to so many myths and legends than the German Sägerücken or sawback bayonet. Even today the collectors market, historians and even the press still spread those myths that were born 115 years ago by the Allied press. In this article we will take a new and fresh look on the iconic weapon, its history and the wave of propaganda it caused in 1914.
SÄGERÜCKEN – THE SAWBACK BAYONET
The first ‘German’ sword bayonet which could be affixed to a long arm was introduced in Prussia in 1810. Used by the kingdom’s elite, light Jäger (hunter) infantry it was designated as a Hirschfänger (lit: ‘stag catcher’, or hunting knife). It would take another 50 years until the introduction of what could be called the first modern sword bayonet for regular infantry units, the M1860 Füsilier-Seitengewehr. With the introduction of the Mauser M71 bolt action rifle and its matching bayonet in the German Army, the first sawback or Sägerücken bayonets were introduced en masse to replace the Faschinenmesser, the fascine knife. This edged weapon, with a serrated or straight edge, was an engineering and foraging tool designed to cut forage and firewood, to remove foliage, and – thus the name – to cut “fascines”, brushwood bundles bundles used for strengthening earthen structures and field fortifications or for making a path across uneven or wet terrain.
At the outbreak of the First World War the German Army moved into the field with a wide range of bayonet types, all of which were available in a saw-backed version. They were issued to Pionier (engineer) units and, in a small percentage, distributed among other army line units. Then they were still being used as tools to cut wood and to efficiently saw through wooden barbed wire stakes, which were later replaced by metal ones. In that role they could be used as a handheld, but also as a rifle-mounted saw. Used in the latter way it was much more efficient, allowing it to cut through a thick, wooden barbed wire pole in about 30 seconds (using the long M98 saw-bayonet). Many other nations had made use of bayonets of a similar kind, including the British (with the Elcho and P1879 Martini-Henry sword bayonets) and the Swiss in 1878, all of these weapons designed to replace the fascine knives carried by soldiers in earlier periods.
At the turn of the century, military logistics and supply for forces in the field had evolved so far that the need for foraging tools had diminished. Saw backed bayonets were inferior in combat as the serrated edge could get caught or entangled in clothing, while the sharp saw itself could easily cause wounds to an inexperienced user. When war broke out in 1914 they had been made redundant in the British Army. The German Army, with its doctrine of flexibility in the field, had retained them and still saw them as an important addition to its forces.
A SAVAGE WEAPON?
The sawback bayonet was a gift to the Allies, who from a very early date set their propaganda machine to work, tying the use of the weapon into the context of the so-called ‘rape of Belgium’ , feeding the notion that the barbaric weapon had been specifically developed as brutal refinement for use in close combat. Sawback bayonets it was suggested, inflicted painful, never-healing wounds and even worse, as a French propaganda booklet with the title of ‘Les armes déloyales des allemands’ (the unfair weapons of the Germans) explained in 1916:
“In some German infantry units and throughout the pioneer corps, some men are armed with a bayonet sword, with a flat and wide blade, one edge is sharp while the other is sawtoothed. Officially it is a portable tool, intended to act in the twin role of saw and sword of battle, according to the way it is used. In reality, it is a very dangerous weapon, which, when held at the end of the rifle, inflicts a wound much more serious than that caused by ordinary bayonets in that it produces tearing effects when a soldier pulls to remove it from the body of an enemy. But German officers know how to refine barbarity. There is a standing order to all men armed with the bayonet-saw never to attack without having taken the precaution of repeatedly driving the blade in the loose soil, so that the particles of earth clinging to the saw will lead to an infection of the wounds inflicted on the enemy. This thoughtful and scientific cruelty is sometimes perfected even further. During an attack in Artois, a German company was taken under the fire of our machine guns and completely destroyed: ours having progressed and conquered the ground, had the obligation to bury the enemy dead and it was then possible to note that all the saw bayonets of the massacred men were coated with faeces. It demands no further explanation what horrendous complications of sepsis and infection wounds caused by a weapon like this would lead to.”
First brief mentions of German ‘bayonets with teeth’ can be found in the British Daily Mail and a number of US newspapers between 20-22 August 1914. Yet the first dedicated, longer piece on the sawback bayonet was published – to the author’s best knowledge – by the French Le Matin newspaper on 13 September 1914. It featured a photo of the serrated blade of a German M98 bayonet and a report, which seems to have formed the basis of virtually all later French and British reports and the root of the propaganda hype that followed:
‘They will soon have done everything, these Germans, to be banished from humanity, and it will soon be clear to everyone that their armies are nothing but hordes of barbarians, vile herds of wild beasts. Today you can see with this kind of weapon they intend to prevail over their enemies. Here is the photograph of a sword bayonet collected yesterday among the dead of the 47th regiment of Prussian infantry in Varreddes, a small village located about 8 kilometers north of the city of Meaux. This bayonet has two lines of sawtooth on its back. And it is not the cruel fantasy of a single, barbarian soldier who has created this weapon worthy of a Malay for his own use; no, because many others lay scattered on the ground and some have been picked up by officials to be shown to the public. It is clear that they have been machine-made and that this cruelty has an official origin. A torture device; a bayonet with hooks; a dishonourable weapon: a violation which S.M. Emperor William had provided his soldiers with.’
Even though Infanterie-Regiment Nr. 47 had never been in action anywhere near Varreddes (serving around Les Eparges about 250 kilometres away), some sawback bayonets had certainly been found, after all the whole of the German Army was equipped with them. The news travelled quickly and seems to have crossed the Atlantic first, even before reaching the United Kingdom. The New York Tribune ran it as front page news on 19 September. Their correspondent Richard Harding Davis, attached to the French Army, gave a detailed testimony about what had been found. a bayonet which ‘tears the flesh and splinters the bone’ and ‘the most gruesome weapon of war ever issued to a civilised army’.
From the United States the news travelled. and from the second half of September up to November 1914 the British press covered the subject extensively, often using new eyewitness accounts and photographs. On 27 September .The People newspaper published a photograph of a British medical officer comparing a British P07 Enfield bayonet to a German 98/05 sawback, reporting that these weapons were used ‘in violation of the laws of war’ and in breach to the ‘Convention to which Germany is a signatory’.
While the press coverage spread out, postcards were published in France showing a German soldier – with a sawback bayonet attached to his rifle – being addressed by a member of what people at the time would have seen as a savage race, a native American warrior. The postcards were captioned ‘La Baïonnette Scie’ and bore the slogan ‘Tu es encore plus sauvage que moi!’ (You are even more savage than me). French depictions of German sawback bayonets turned things upside down completely, showing the blade (!) of the bayonet sporting a serrated edge.
Surprisingly, some publications both in England and in France, also published truthful features about the actual use of the weapon. The Illustrated War News of 18 November printed a large format photo of a German soldier holding a rifle with a saw-tooth bayonet which rightly claimed that the bayonet was similar to that carried by ‘British naval landing parties for use in sawing wood’; while the French journal L’Ouest-Éclair stated that the ‘bayonet-saw is used to saw the wood in the countryside to make fires and employed in a variety of manual attack or defence work.’
‘(…) when a man has eight inches of smooth blade in him, an inch or two of jagged teeth would not matter’.
Some newspapers published reader’s letters on the bayonet. Doctor Hirsch, a native German, then working a psychiatrist in New York, wrote to the Tribune that he himself had served in the German Army in 1878/79 and that the whole story like ‘so many other statements about the -brutality- of the German Army are based on utter ignorance of the real facts’. He described the weapon’s use as a pioneer tool while criticising the paper’s malevolent coverage. In fact, some the best and most neutral words about the case, were published in the form of reader’s letters. One, written in Mounie Castle, Oldmeldrum by a Major Seton and published by The Aberdeen Daily Journal stated that: ‘Regarding the tooth-edged bayonet, about which you quote from the Paris ‘Matin’ as being among the atrocities of the Kaiser and his ‘Huns’, may I say that such allegations are merely the ravings of an hysterical Frenchman?’. Another, sent to the Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury opened with the statement that ‘A lot of piffle has been written about the German saw-bayonet’ and closed with the observation that ‘when a man has eight inches of smooth blade in him an inch or two of jagged teeth would not matter’. By mid-1915 there are no mentions of the saw-bayonet anymore. The explosive value of the story had fizzled out.
Yet the damage had been done and the propaganda was beginning to have a noteworthy effect on the Germans. Even though never based on any actual truth, rumours had begun to circulate that the Allies would shoot or torture prisoners carrying a saw-bayonet. Even though there have never been any documented cases of this behaviour and even an official German inquest in July 1915 and another in April 1917 could not find any evidence of this, it became an often told story in the army. Ernst Jünger mentioned it and Erich Maria Remarque used it in his famous anti-war novel All Quiet on the Western Front: ‘We overhaul the bayonets–that is to say, the ones that have a saw on the blunt edge. If the fellows over there catch a man with one of those he’s killed at sight. In the next sector some of our men were found whose noses were cut off and their eyes poked out with their own saw-bayonets. Their mouths and noses were stuffed with sawdust so that they suffocated’.
REMOVING THE SAW
German soldiers soon began to ‘lose’ their sawback bayonets in inexplainable numbers, while others began to remove the saw backs on their own accord, thus often permanently damaging the blade and as such property of the German Empire. By 1917, with the large-scale use of metal barbed wire pickets, the bayonet-saw had lost its only real remaining use and German soldiers had realised, that the saw could slow retrieval of the blade in combat. The wounds a sawback bayonet caused were not worse that those created by regular blade, and as such the use of them had never violated any rules of war, yet faced with the mass loss of good bayonets and knowing about the weapon’s deficiencies. the OHL (Oberste Heeresleitung, Supreme Army Command) issued an order on 16 September 1917. which decreed that all sawback bayonets were to be withdrawn from service in frontline formations, to be replaced by regular bayonets. To satisfy the need for a sawing tool the so called Noris-Säge, a segmented and much more effective saw, was issued. Formations serving in rearward areas, garrison and replacement units and formations serving within the borders of the Reich continued carrying the sawback. Surplus was put into storage. Yet in a war of materiel and in the face of serious metal shortages, having a large stock of unusable bayonets was something Germany could not afford. Trials had shown that bayonets with ground-away saws could be used without disadvantage, so on 6 January 1918 order was given to grind away the saws. The bayonets treated in that manner were designated “S.Abg.” (Säge abgeschliffen – saw removed) and were again issued to frontline units. Yet this was only done with a fraction of the available weapons and most of that work was done when stock was used to equip the new Reichswehr from 1920.
THE PRESENT DAY: THE ‘PIFFLE’ CONTINUES
Even today a ‘lot of piffle’ is still being spread about the savage nature of the sawback bayonet in books and other publications, and that is probably the reason why prices collectors are willing to pay for the acquisition of a nice Sägerücken continue to soar. However, they are not as rare as militaria collector’s and dealers wants us to believe. Most saws were never ground out, and today a bayonet with the saw removed is a lot more difficult to find than one with a surviving saw. Yet the fascination radiating from a shiny, saw-toothed back of a German 98/05 bayonet and the piffle attached to them is certainly real. As such they rightfully continue to hold special places in bayonet collections all over the world.
Today…
China’s young people are ‘revenge saving’ even as Gen Zers around the world are piling up debt
PUBLISHED MON, JUL 1 2024
7:54 PM EDT
KEY POINTS
Revenge saving has become a trend on Chinese social media websites, with Chinese youth setting extreme monthly savings targets.
Savings measures also include dining at community canteens usually for the elderly, where fresh meals are sold at relatively cheap prices.
Others are finding “savings partners” on social media, forming circles that ensure members stick with their savings goals.
Why is China’s rise so hard for the US to counter?
There’s a few reasons, but I’m going to highlight one particular challenge the US has: the nature of its four-year election cycle.
Why does this make it difficult for the US to counter China?
Because every time a new president comes in, (1) it takes time for the new guy and his administration to get stuck in; (2) He brings a new set of priorities and policies that might even contradict the previous administration; and (3) for the last 12-18 months of his term, the focus is on the next election (and that doesn’t even take into consideration the mid-term elections for Congress).
Rinse and repeat.
Here’s an example in terms of policy: Obama made the Trans Pacific Partnership a key plank of US policy in Asia, seeing it as a means to secure American economic and political influence in the Indo Pacific.
Trump came in and immediately pulled the plug on TPP. The impact? It cost the US in economic opportunities while raising questions among its partners about America’s leadership and commitment to the region.
Chinese policymakers don’t think in terms of 4-year election cycles. Take “Made in China 2025” (MIC2025), the goal of which was to move China away from low-end manufacturing to higher-end technology. This was formulated back in 2015. And as of this year,
…analysis confirms that more than 86 per cent of these goals have been achieved, with some others likely to be completed later this year or next.
So on the one side, you have short-term economic and geopolitical policy that is heavily influenced by internal political considerations (USA) vs an economic and industrial policy that takes a long-term macro view with specific targets and goals (China).
This is one major reason the US is having problems countering China
Japan’s First Revolutionary Human Skin Suit SHOCKED The World
It’s impressive. Imagine what it could eventually turn into.
What is the saddest truth about smart people?
“The most intelligent man in the world has lived a miserable life”
William James Sidis, the most intelligent man in history, son of Ashkenazi Jewish immigrants from Russia, born in New York on April 1st, 1898.
William was a wunderkind, with a prodigious mind and an estimated IQ of 300. He was literally a human computer and a living dictionary.
William J. Sidis never had a childhood or enjoyed being a little boy.
Imagine for a moment an 18-month old child who can unbelievably read The New York Times.
At the age of eight, he was fluently speaking French, German, Russian, Turkish, Armenian, Latin, and his native language, English.
When he was only 9 years old, he was successfully accepted into Harvard University. Let’s get a little deeper and picture this same small child at 9 years of age, inventing a brand new language called “vendergood,” studied by linguists and declared to be complete, correct, and fascinating.
At the age of twelve, he was giving his first lecture about the fourth dimension to the scientific community and the press.
Because William was so intelligent, great things were expected of him, and a bright future was waiting for him.
His parents, a famous Russian psychologist and one of the first female medical doctors of that time, had a very clear goal in mind: to raise a genius. They educated his mind and completely forgot the essential part: his heart and his feelings.
William showed a solid willingness and patience to learn, but constantly being on display for the public and for the media traumatized him, and he began to rebel against everything in his complex and artificial life.
He had severe emotional problems that he was never able to solve. They discovered his dead body in a small apartment in Boston in 1944. He was 46 years old and he died from a stroke.
“I want to live the perfect life. The only way to live the perfect life is through seclusion. I have always hated crowds.”
-William James Sidis-
Modern women have run the men off & now they wonder why they’re single!
Why does China have friends but not allies? What is the reason behind this?
China has discarded the Western notion of “allies”, which is actually “proxy nations”, and “others”. They find it simplistic and deceiving.
Instead they have adopted a matrix of relationships. Not just two dimensional, but actually three dimensional in scope.
In the West you have; Us and “them”. Where “Us” consists of the United States and it’s proxies; nations that it controls via various means to such an extent that they no longer have any real actual sovereignty.
In the Chinese model, you have three axes.
The X Axis.
You can consider this a scale of “friendliness”. The more “friendly” and supportive a nation is, the higher up on the scale it is rated. The more hostile it is, or “apparently” hostile it is, the lower it is on the X – axis.
The Y Axis
This is the actual threat level. High threat levels are given to nations that position their military in close proximity to China, engage in all sorts of hostile belligerent actions; from outright war, to sanctions, to law-fare, and all the rest. Peaceful nations get the highest ratings while bellicose and militarized nations get the lowest ratings.
The Z Axis
This axis measures the risk level. Risks being anything that upsets peaceful coexistence between the two nations. Nations that are unstable, or who are controlled by other entities are assigned low-on-the-scale risk values, while friendly and stable nations get the highest numerical values.
Combined, the values form a cube with an X, Y, and Z axis. And it visually graphs the relative value to China all other nations hold.
Needless to say, the United States has the lowest value of all nations within the cube. And it is a fantasy to think otherwise.
Why I Won’t Move To The USA – American Expat Life
What is an experience you had at a water park you’ll never forget?
My Daughter was maybe 3 and hadn’t learned to swim. The family went on a group outing to a water slide park with lots of different slides and even a kiddie pool with a slide. My wife and I didn’t plan on getting in the water. Our 9 year old son was having a blast with his friends.
The Kiddie pool wasn’t open at the time and my daughter really wanted to slide. My wife went to the life guards at the smallest slide not in the kiddie area and asked if our daughter could go down. They said, no problem. The one at the top would help her start and the one at the bottom would be in the pool to catch her. I didn’t like it but the wife said it would be OK. Off goes my wife with my daughter to the top of the hill. The start point wasn’t visible from the bottom. A couple of bigger kids came down while I waited. Everything seemed fine. Then the pool guard wandered away to talk to someone. Another bigger kid came down. I expected the life guard to turn around and get back to her job but I could see she wasn’t paying any attention.
I see my daughter coming down. the guard is still talking. I yelled to her but she was too far away. My daughter hit the pool, went under water and was looking up at me. I reached down and grabbed her arm, pulling her out.
She wasn’t going to be allowed to go down alone any more. I was elected to take her down for the rest of the day. I tightened the draw string on my shorts, (I didn’t have a swimsuit) and spent the next 2 hours on the water slides with my daughter.
Water slides are not my thing, but I do love my daughter. So I did what I needed to make her happy.
Joe Cocker Rocks! What Happens During This Performance?
Outstanding!
Vintage Adventure Art
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 with Rookie Cam0dc3b9a79c543e5dbf9bb7fcb415c58f
Band of Brothers. Tank Battle Europe. Sherman + Cromwell * Tiger + (Jagdpanther || Stug)
As a surgeon, what is the most shocking thing you ever saw after opening somebody up?
I am an obstetrician and gynaecologist, mbbs,dgo, ms, posted under the government of west bengal, india. I performed one caesarean section and delivered a healthy baby of a mother in the government settings. While cleaning the abdomen, I could feel something unusual in the abdomen.I asked the lady for anything abnormal activities in the past. She revealed nothing. Observing and feeling some thing hard within the gut, I smelled something bad which is beyond my academics and long period of service experience. Which prompted me to curiosity and something serious issues and deterred me from closing the abdomen from my conscience point of view. I sent a urgent call book to my surgeon friend to come to Operation theatre immediately and he came very soon and I explained everything to him on an urgent basis. He became involved in the operation and we jointly decided to explore the gut . We opened the bowel and to our utter surprise , it is eight( 8) inches long wooden stick, which we recovered from her bowel. We closed the abdomen and recovery of the lady was uneventful and surprisingly satisfactory. On repeated questioning, she revealed that she had done one abortion by a quack about 10 years back,who performed the abortion with a long stick. I understood the matter immediately that the abortion stick had perforated her uterus and after that it perforated her bowel and went fully inside the bowel , to remain within it for such a long time without making any further complications.We recovered the stick from her bowel.The matter was published in the newspaper in the next day , as the matter in question , is really unbelievable. Since the lady didn’t give me any history, I could have closed the abdomen as such. She might have had many problems later on.On the part of the patient , everything should be disclosed to the doctor for the benefit of the patient, himself/ herself. It’s my sixth sense which saved her from future further complications. Not otherwise, it should have been informed to me by the patient which she didn’t do. Moral of the story , expect the unexpected and to be prepared for the action as and when necessary as per the demand and gravity of the situation. In every sphere of life, we have to act even with the sixth sense.Thanks.
2. 65% more people believe in reincarnation now compared to 20 years ago.
3. People who laugh more have the same ability to bear more pain.
4. The more choices people are offered, the less likely it is that they will choose anything.
5. Researchers have narrowed down the human personality to five basic traits.
These traits, which are called the Big Five, are neuroticism, agreeableness, extraversion, openness to experience, and conscientiousness.
6. Millionaires who have earned their wealth are moderately happier than those who inherited it.
7. People with unfortunate initials, such as P.I.G or A.S.S have a significantly lower life expectancy.
8. Most people believe other people’s social lives are richer and more active than their own. It’s like the “grass is always greener” phenomenon.
9. Research suggests that your intuition is more likely to be correct if you are in a good mood and if the decision you are supposed to make is complicated.
10. The type of music you listen to affects the way you perceive the world. So be careful while selecting your playlist.
11. Your mind tends to make dull people sound more interesting. It rewrites the monotonous speech of boring people to make them sound more interesting.
12. People develop first impressions of you in a tenth of a second, so make sure your hair and outfit are on point, or you’ll be labeled the “crazy hair guy” forever.
Ancho Chile Rubbed Smoked Beef Brisket
From secret marinades to tricked out grills and smokers, competitive smokers know there is a near ritualistic approach to teasing the perfect flavor out of a premium cut of meat.
(Family Features) If the surge in barbecue and smoking competitions across the country is any indication, grilling has become an art form. This summer, gather around the grill to try a technique that’s rising in popularity – smoking – to create a masterpiece meal.
From secret marinades to tricked out grills and smokers, competitive smokers know there is a near ritualistic approach to teasing the perfect flavor out of a premium cut of meat. Smoke like a pro with these tips from Omaha Steaks Executive Chef Karl Marsh.
Start with style
Start by deciding how you’d like to prepare your meat. Smoking infuses flavor throughout the meat, while extended cook times at low temperatures make it extra tender. Smoking also lets you create unique flavors using wet and dry rubs, seasoned wood chips and planks.
Choose your cut
The most popular cuts of meat to smoke are brisket, ribs, pork shoulder or turkey, all of which are typically large. Guarantee a great experience with Omaha Steaks Brisket for smoking, which was created with the competitive barbecue and smoking circuit in mind.
Ready your rub
For best results, brush meat with cooking oil or another liquid ingredient (such as yellow mustard) before adding rub. Spread rub on a clean plate and place the meat on it. Coat both sides with rub by gently pressing the meat on the plate.
Set up the smoker
Preparation varies from one recipe to the next, but one constant is the importance of maintaining a steady temperature. As you prepare your charcoal, be conscious of where you’ll place wood chips or other flavor enhancers.
Slow and steady
Sensational flavor takes time to build, so plan to dedicate hours to your task. Check in at regular intervals to restock wood chips, flip or rotate meat and apply a fresh coat of seasoning or spices.
Find more tips and recipes perfect for a smoking summer at omahasteaks.com.
Ingredients
Brisket
1 Whole Omaha Steaks Brisket for smoking
2 cups white vinegar
2/3 cup yellow mustard
3/4 cup Omaha Steaks Ancho Chile Rub
4 cups Ancho Chile Smoking Spritzer, divided
8 cups apple or cherry wood chips, soaked in water
Ancho Chile Smoking Spritzer
2 cups apple juice
1 cup cranberry juice
1 cup canola oil
2 tablespoons red hot pepper sauce
1/2 cup Omaha Steaks Ancho Chile Rub
Instructions
Brisket
Remove brisket from bag and rinse with white vinegar then rinse with water.
Dry completely using paper towels.
Slather brisket generously with yellow mustard.
Rub generously with ancho chile rub and inject with 1 cup Ancho Chile Smoking Spritzer.
Prepare smoker using 1 chimney of pure lump charcoal fully lit and one chimney of pure lump charcoal unlit. Make sure water pan is full and adjust vents until smoker maintains a temperature between 225 and 250 degrees F.
Place brisket on smoker fat side up and brush smoking spritzer over top.
Every hour, check smoker temp, squirt with smoking spritzer and add handful of wood chips.
After 3 hours, flip brisket fat side down and squirt with spritzer.
After 6 hours, flip brisket fat side up. Wrap heavy duty foil around the last 3-4 inches of brisket tip to prevent it from drying out. Restock water pan and add lump charcoal as needed. Adjust vents until temperature is between 225 and 250 degrees F.
Beginning at 8 hours, check internal temperature every hour and apply spritzer and wood chips as needed.
Between 11 to 13 hours, when internal temperature is between 195 and 200 degrees F, if fork slides easily into brisket, it is done.
Let brisket rest for 1-2 hours before slicing and serving.
Ancho Chile Smoking Spritzer
Combine all ingredients and mix well.
Attribution
Omaha Steaks
How concerned should we be about China’s use of AI in the military, including rifle-wielding AI robot dogs?
You don’t have to worry about it at all.
In order to attack China, you have to get to China. Which means ships. China can sink everything within 1,200 miles of the Chinese coast. So you will never see a Chinese robodog with a rifle.
Constantine | John Strikes A Deal With Satan
What are some scary facts about history?
One of the nastiest ways to die in the Middle Ages was toilet related. Because in medieval times, men of power and wealth made use of primitive toilets called a garderobe. If you knew a noble lord would make stool at a specific time a day, it would allow you to target your enemy from below when he’s least expecting it…
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Various famous leaders were killed in this gruesome manner, such as English King Edmund Ironside who likely was either stabbed or shot by bow and arrow while relieving himself. It’s just particularly wicked to me… the toilet is the one place where a person should feel safe. It’s a moment of peaceful contemplation. A moment of total relaxation. I couldn’t imagine sitting down to poop and ending up impaled in the butt and dying.
There are a lot of things that scare me about history. But nothing scares me as much as being stabbed or shot in the butt and dying on the toilet. That’s just absolutely gruesome. Medieval times were incredibly unsafe times — even relieving yourself could end up in brutal murder.
“What time is it?“No time in space, mate”Kian rolled his eyes and turned from the cockpit to face Cassius.“I know that,” he said with exasperation. I mean on Earth. I want to see if I can get a last radio transmission out to the kids before they get to sleep. We’ll be out of range by the time they get up for school.”Kian yanked on the bar above him and floated out of his seat in the rear of the cabin. He floated forward, as though swimming, to a console between the cockpit and cabin, the electronics glowing blue and orange.“Looks like it’s 21:22.”“I don’t have long. Can you start the private comms system, I think we’re still on frequency with the ISS. I don’t think NASA and Roscosmos really want to hear another person saying goodnight to the wife and kids just because they forgot to swap bands.”“I thought they made a policy against that?”“Only if you interfere with their ground station.”“Still.”Cassius opened a drawer under the radio system and pulled out a wired headset.“Kian!”He threw the headset to Kian and it rotated in slow motion towards the cockpit. Kian plucked it from the air without taking his eyes off the black expanse before him. One white, gloved hand was still on the controls. Despite flying this route since he was 9, he was still scared of letting his attention waver, especially as they drew close to the Belt. He always thought he might miss the Beacon and they’d end up on the wrong asteroid. Or worse, just miss the whole Belt entirely.Cassius pushed himself back to the main cabin as Kian adjusted the headset to fit over his ears.“God, this spacesuit sucks.”“I know. When you were asleep I finally got to talk to Haley, and five minutes in my head was hurting.”“I wish they kept the old collar. Why did they even change it?”“Policy, probably. Everything is policy. But hurry and say goodnight, you’ll miss them.” He floated himself back to the cabin, and picked up a book, adjusting the suit skin around his ankles. He regretted not getting the new one tailored. It was going to be awful in the boots.In the cockpit, Kian adjusted the headset to help take the weight off the collar one last time.“Hey, Miranda, you there?”“Kian! I was getting concerned, the kids have been waiting.”There was a rustle in the background and the voices of three young kids all erupting at once came through, so loud it became static.“Hi dad!”“Hi, you all being nice to your mom.”A unison of yesses followed.
“What’s space like?” asked one of them.
“It’s great, but how about we save the stories for when I get back?”
There was a second unison of yesses. Kian smiled to himself.
“Alright, well get some sleep. I love you all.”
“Love you too, dad!”
“I love you Kian. Be safe.”
“Always. Talk to you in a week. I’ll send radio signals out to let you know how things are going. And make sure you tell Leda to study for her calculus exam.”
“I know. See you in a week.” Miranda replied warmly.
The radio transmission ended. They passed Mars.
“Are you and Haley going to start a family?” Kian asked. It was, undoubtedly, the most fulfilling part of his life.
“I want to, but Haley says we aren’t ready. She wants to wait for another few years.” There was some doubt in his voice.
“Truthfully, I don’t think she ever wants kids. Just wish she’d have told me before we got married. I just wish she’d tell me at all.”
Silence filled the cabin, except for the periodic systems check beeps. It would seem unbearable to have the constant noise on Earth, but with only two travelling in the massive void of space, there would be an eerie, intolerable silence . without them.
Kian was always anxious being so far from home. He’d not yet recovered from nearly losing Maia on the Moon a month ago, and was questioning ever bringing his girls on a trip again.
He shook his head at the memory. Him and Miranda were so close to letting her wander out the space lock. It took not even ten seconds of her being out of their sight. Earth was far safer. But then again he was a year younger than Maia when him and his grandfather had come to Ceres the first time. And with far worse equipment. No wonder his mother thought her dad was psychotic.
As they approached the Asteroid Belt, Kian watched for the Beacon. It was an orbit leaping spacecraft that kept its position relative to Ceres so travelers would know when to engage the thrusters to divert from the straightaway to Jupiter.
Finally, in the distance, he saw it. He flipped on a series of switches in the cockpit overhead. The empty co-pilot seat now needed to be occupied.
“Cassius!” Kian called back.
“It’s time already?” asked Cassius, who was staring out the window facing back towards Earth.
“It’s time.”
Cassius smiled, took his spot next to Kian, and they started the auto-calculations for the thruster angles. A scramble of quaternions ran down the configuration screen in front of them, the GPS and antenna information calculated their exact position in space.
“I can’t believe your grandfather got you here without auto-nav.”
“Not like there wasn’t the technology. He just liked proving to everyone he was smart.”
Kian didn’t like admitting he was impressed, so he looked to Cassius for a brief moment, a smirk on his face, one eyebrow up, mocking his grandfather.
“You kids, don’t even know how to make the software that lets you camp, and you call it rugged.”
Cassius laughed as the trajectory was locked in, and the thrusters aligned themselves.
“Ready?”
“Ready.”
Kian counted down, each of their hands on a golden key in front of them.
“Three. Two. One.”
They turned their keys at the same moment, and the thrusters engaged. It was the worst part of the trip. Kian always vomited. At least he knew and kept a receptacle on hand. It didn’t stop Cassius from mocking him for it every time.
When they slowed and Ceres was in sight, and the two felt the nausea fade, Cassius turned to Kian, quite serious.
“If this were two hundred years ago and you had to do that with a helmet on, you’d be screwed, mate.”
“Well yeah. Lucky this isn’t 200 years ago, and I don’t need a helmet, or to know how to write the flight software. Although, I suppose we should start suiting up. Don’t want to land without gear.”
“You or me first?”
“I’ll get ready first. Keep an eye on the controls. Last time we lost auto-pilot and I had to get us to the surface without it.”
Kian unbuckled from the seat and used the armrests to push himself up out of the chair, careful to keep his feet from knocking the steering, or his head from touching the command module.
“You want a snack?”
“I just watched you vomit. I’m good.”
Kian reached the intermediary of the ship, and stowed the headset. Behind his ears was killing him. The collar was made of metal, like a woman’s choker. Or one of those ancient Egyptian mummies. He liked his neck the length it was. He cursed the Global Agency for Astronautics. He wished they’d let them leave Earth with their old skin suits.
He adjusted the clinging fabric as best he could, and realigned the belt around his waist. He opened a drawer in the console and removed his space suit. It was bulky, and weighed 170 pounds on Earth, without the helmet. Although, the pressure regulator did seem to take the weight off once it was operational.
He slid into the suit as if it were one-piece pajamas and interlocked it with the skin suit at the collar and belt. The leg and arm openings were metal rings which interlocked with the gloves and boots. He stepped into the boots and leaned over to twist the rings tight. Then the gloves. It was always the hardest part. He had no trouble with the first one, but his hands lost so much mobility from the gloves it was difficult to click the second one into place.
He opened a cabinet and saw his reflection staring back at him in the lens of his helmet. It was disproportional, like a man in a sumo suit. His blonde hair was already growing back, having been buzzed for the trip.
“You almost done?” shouted Cassius
“Yeah, just the helmet left.”
He took the helmet from the cabinet, careful to only touch the back half that didn’t have the lens, and placed it over his head, securing it with the same twist lock. He took a deep breath and rotated the heavy ring. The whole inside of the suit isolated, he could finally turn on all the regulators, and air valves. The suit inflated slightly, and he pulled out his oxygen tanks from a final drawer, guiding them towards the space lock for use once they landed.
“Your turn.” He said to Cassius, sitting back in the primary pilot seat. Ceres was only thirty minutes away. He stared intently out the window as the thrusters disengaged and they caught the dwarf’s orbit.
“I set the coordinates to get us to Rao, but I think we’re going to end up closer to Kokopelli,” he said.
“Well that’s okay, we haven’t stayed there yet. Remember last time we wished we’d gone a couple more degrees north.” Cassius replied, his voice getting slightly muffled with the helmet.
Kian nodded, turning on his helmet’s local radio.
“Is this too loud?” he asked Cassius.
It came over as barely more than white noise on Cassius’s helmet.
“Too quiet, actually.”
Kian adjusted the settings.
“HOW ABOUT NOW?”
“No! No. Too much. Definitely too much” Cassius, instinctively reached to cover his ears despite them being trapped by the helmet.
Kian made the final adjustments.
“You ready? Let’s land this thing.”
Cassius rejoined Kian.
“You know the drill. Once the command module says we’re orthogonal with the ground, launch the landing sequence.”
They stretched to reach a different duo of keys. The command module beeped with a blue light, and they turned them in unison.
The spacecraft started its descent directly downwards until they were just hovering over the surface. And then they were grounded. They stared out at the crater expanding before them, a couple other spacecraft landed along its rim, and finally let their excitement show.
“Hell yeah. Let’s get out there.”
Kian and Cassius gathered backpacks of items, fixed one another’s oxygen tanks to their backs, and clicked the space lock button. Inside the vestibule, they engaged the air circulation in their suits, making sure they could breathe, and then waited for the chamber to depressurize. The door opened in front of them. In the opposite direction Jupiter hung low in the sky, rising like the Moon.
“Did you remember the camera, Cass?”
“Obviously.”
They walked a few paces from the ship and laid down their gear, pitching their dome. They’d only sleep in it a night out of the three there were here because of oxygen limits, but Kian was more interested in the larger domes that were further along the rim of the crater.
“While this inflates, let’s go check out the other domes. I want to see how they’ve kept their plants alive.”
“I thought you said you didn’t bring any this time? Remember, yours kept dying?”
Kian glanced at Cassius with a mischievous grin on his face.
“There’s no harm in trying, Cass.”
“You took space up for plants? Again?”
“Relax, I only brought a few. I figure one of the permanent botanists can watch them after we leave. And the dome has better UV protection than last time. It should filter out some of the radiation that was burning the leaves off the oaks.”
“I thought you said we were going to explore, not experiment.”
“There’s nothing to explore. Just some rocky land and craters you don’t want to fall into.”
“We could try to find an entrance to the mantle. I really want to be the person to finally prove the existence of the underground ocean.” Cassius sounded as if he were begging.
Kian gawked.
“You’re really comparing getting lost underground to me bringing a few foot-tall trees? I thought we were just going to look at the stars and take pictures. Maybe see if we could catch Earth on the telescope. Not get ourselves killed.”
“We won’t get ourselves killed. Besides, you have to admit that sitting around for three days is going to be painfully boring.”
Kian groaned. He did want to find the underwater cavern. Him and his grandfather spent a week every summer looking for it. But the only entrance to the sublayers of Ceres were in cryovolcanoes. It was way beyond the threshold of their suit ranges. Their blood would freeze.
Cassius knew all of this. Kian had reminded him on a number of occasions and Cassius knew it was a losing battle.
“I suppose we could figure out how to plant your stupid trees,” Cassius said, rolling his eyes.
“I figure,” Kian said as they started leaping towards the larger domes, lazy as can be to preserve oxygen, “if I can get the trees to live, we could get some pretty good terraforming plots going. With enough oxygen and permanence here, maybe we actually could find your underwater ocean.”
“Don’t pretend like you don’t have a nursery at home with another hundred experiments with your plants, Kian. Don’t pretend like you’re doing this for me.”
“I’m a bioengineer, what do you expect? Anyways, I want to find the caverns too. Just, I don’t want to be so rash about it. No one else comes here. We’re not racing to explore. Or, just bring a drone next time.”
They reached the first dome. It was greener than Kian had expected. They approached the space lock and a woman tending to a small patch of grass near the inner door, looked up. She grinned, wide-mouthed, and stood, rubbing the grey dust from her gloves. Sunglasses blocked the radiation, but Cassius was certain they weren’t protecting her vision the way she needed them to, even with the dome shielding.
She looked as if she were tending a regular garden on Earth. He saw her face, and regret immediately filling him with a sick feeling, fell in love.
She opened the space lock and waited as they stepped inside and the vestibule re-pressurized. Before opening the main lock, she asked their identities.
“You two look familiar.”
“Yeah, it’s Kian. I pestered you last year about your growing methods.”
A look of recognition spread across her face.
“Ohhh, I remember you. But not him. You were with someone different, no?”
“Another of my friends.”
Her voice sounded like honey. She welcomed the two of them into the dome. They turned the oxygen feed off and let natural air fill their suits. It was thin certainly, but the dome was beautiful. Somehow, in the middle of the void of space, this little dwarf was green and livable.
“I have all your basic crops growing pretty well now,” said the woman. “Grain, lettuce, even grapes. I’m working on grass to increase the oxygen levels, but it takes a lot of water. Hard to get it to grow without taking trips to the ice caps often. I worry for when they melt in the solar maximum that is upcoming.”
“You do all this by yourself?” asked Cassius, fishing. He felt as though he were betraying Haley, but he knew Haley didn’t love him the way he wished she would.
“No.”
Cassius felt instant disappointment. It was odd he was so attached to her and yet he’d only met her. He thought he wanted to return to Earth but it didn’t stop him from staring at her, at the blue of her eyes, enamored. He reasoned he could get to know her for a few days, convince her to return to Earth with him. It was, of course, entirely unreasonable.
But the dome was beautiful. And did he really want to return to such an unsatisfying life? Kian had a family. What did he have but a crappy job and wife who didn’t love him.
“Do you need any help?” he asked.
“My sister helps. Though it’s a lot.”
“Just you two?”
“Yeah.”
“Care to make it three?”
The woman looked at him like he was crazy.
“Trust me, you don’t want to stay here.”
Kian looked at him like he was even more crazy.
“You know it takes two to pilot the ship right?”
“Well, then I shall return next trip, and when I do, I shall stay.”
The woman smiled.
“We’ll see.”
Three months later, Kian, Cassius, and another friend returned to Ceres. Cassius had resolved to live there permanently. He had divorced Haley. He was, for the first time in years, optimistic.
When they landed near Kokopelli, Kian knew something was wrong. The domes looked different. Cassius, who had dreamt of returning Daria since they left, was the first to run aimlessly to the dome when they landed. Kian and Auden didn’t need to run. They knew what had happened. What had so often happened to those who tried to terraform.
They reached the dome. It wasn’t green or lush. The crops were withered. The air lock was wide open. Daria’s body was huddled next to her sister’s, on the ground and motionless near the entrance of the sub-dome where they slept. The polar caps had melted and vanished. The two girls were dead.
Expat life: American things that don’t make sense
Chile Chicken with Basil and Coconut Cream
This is one of my favorites! Easy and great for dinner parties. Always a hit!
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
2 pounds chicken breast fillets
2 tablespoons oil
1 onion, finely chopped
2 tablespoons finely chopped small fresh red chiles
1 cup shredded fresh basil
2 tablespoons fish sauce
1 teaspoon chopped fresh coriander
1 1/2 teaspoons granulated sugar
1 cup coconut cream
Instructions
Remove excess fat from chicken, cut chicken into 1cm (half inch) strips.
Heat oil in wok, add onions and chiles, stir fry until onion is soft.
Add chicken, stir fry until chicken is tender. Add basil, sauce, coriander and sugar, stir fry for 1 minute.
Add coconut cream, stir mixture until heated through.
Notes
Best made before serving. Freeze: Not suitable.
I serve this dish with fluffy Basmati rice and a light lettuce salad.
Jack Meets The Tet (End Scene) | Oblivion
More Heart Pain – Going Home to NJ to see Cardiologist today
As I write it is 6:17 AM EDT on Monday, July 1, 2024 here in Pennsylvania. I have more heart pain. I’m heading home to NJ to head to my Cardiologist. I think I’ve got another blockage.
You may be aware that back on April of the year 2019, I suffered a Myocardial Infarction heart attack. I was in my car on a Saturday morning, driving to the local supermarket in North Bergen, NJ when I suddenly felt this “pressure” in the center of my chest. It didn’t hurt, it felt like someone was kneeling on my chest. I remember thinking, This is odd, and kept driving.
A few blocks later, I started getting this awful pain in my lower jaw. Really hurt! And I started to sweat. Not some gentle little glistening sweat, I mean a full blown FLOP SWEAT. The sweat was POURING out of me.
I thought to myself, pressure in my chest, pain in my jaw, now severe sweating, these are all signs of a heart attack. I denied it and kept driving.
When I got to the supermarket and tried to turn the car into the parking space, it felt as though the muscles in my arms had been hollowed out. No strength at all.
I managed to turn into the space and park.
I opened the car window to get some air and thought I’d just rest a minute and maybe I would feel better. After a minute or so, I went to get out of the car to go shopping, and my legs felt as hollowed out as my arm did. I almost fell flat on my butt.
I got back in the car and said to myself, that’s it, I’m not going shopping, I’m going home. At that moment, I started to feel like I was going to pass out. And I knew, “If I pass out, I’m gonna die right here.” So I called 911.
The police and an ambulance came – fast! They took me to Christ Hospital in Jersey City where I was admitted.
The next day was Easter Sunday, and laying in the hospital bed doing nothing . . . . the whole shit show started all over again. Pressure in the chest, pain the jaw. Sweating.
Docs came, put me on IV nitroglycerin and told me: “There’s something wrong with your heart. We’re trying to prevent it from killing you before we can get in there tomorrow morning and find out what’s going on.
6:00 AM the next morning, into a Cardiac catheterization lab I go. They insert a camera into my wrist artery, then fish it to my heart. There was big imaging machine above my chest taking images as they did what they did. Didn’t hurt at all.
After about ten minutes, the Doc comes back and says, Mr. Turner, you have three, possibly four, severely clogged heart arteries. Normally in a situation like this, we insert stents. But your clogs are not small and round, yours run the entire length of your coronary arteries. You need open heart surgery, and we don’t do that here.
So I told him my regular Doctor is Harvey Gross in Englewood. He has privileges at Englewood Hospital, do they do open heart surgery there? He told me he would call and ask and be right back.
A few minutes later he came back. Yes, they do open heart surgery at Englewood, yes, they take your insurance and yes, they have a bed available, we’ve called an ambulance to transport you up there right now.
So up I go.
We get to Englewood, they do all the tests all over again; they weren’t taking anyone’s word for it.
In anticipation of giving me stents, Christ Hospital gave me a load dose of a medicine called Plavix. It stops the blood from clotting. But they couldn’t put the stents and I had to go to Englewood.
Well, Plavix is great for stents, but terrible for open heart surgery. They need me to clot when they cut my chest open.
It took five days for the Plavix to clear out enough where I could undergo surgery. They took me in Friday morning. Long story short, I got quadruple bypasses. FOUR arteries were 90-95% clogged.
It took about 6 months for the sternum to heal after they cut it open, but I got along fine.
Fast-Forward 17 months after the surgery . . . . down I go again!
Another myocardial infarction heart attack. Turned out that two of the four bypasses, CLOGGED WITH BLOOD CLOTS. I was right back into a life threatening situation. And __this__ heart attack . . . . . . was WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY worse than the first.
The ended up putting a stent in. I went into heart failure in the cardiac catheterization lab, but came out of that. That was October 2020.
In January 2023, I started getting the twinges of pain that I recalled preceded my first heart attack, so up to the Doc I went. He said, given my history, it is best they go in and look again. I agreed. They found more clogs. Inserted another stent in my left, anterior, descending artery.
Which brings me to this past Saturday afternoon, around 12:45 PM. I’m sitting at my desk up here in Pennsylvania and wham, the same pain that happened at the first heart attack, started again. Then the jaw pain. I thought “Oh shit, it’s happening again.” And then . . . . it all just stopped. No pain. No pressure. No sweating.
Uh oh. I think this is a sign I’ve got more trouble brewing.
I wanted to drive home to NJ but my truck has 22 solar panels in the bed and I want them up here. But unloading them (1400 lbs) would be physical labor that may not have been wise given my situation. So I planned to get some neighbors to help unload the solar panels on Sunday. That didn’t work out. So I’m hiring a couple guys today.
I’ve got very mild pressure in the center of my chest. No pain, no sweating, so if there’s something going on inside, it is not a full blown M.I. but that nagging, mild pressure in my chest tells me I’m close to going full blockage.
The plan is to unload the solar panels, lock up the house and head out to NJ to my cardiologist. I’m pretty certain he’s going to want to go back in with a cardiac catheter again. In fact, I’m going to request exactly that. I KNOW something is wrong and it has to be addressed – today. This would mean I won’t be on the air tonight.
If, by chance I waited too long, or this thing hits while I’m doing my stuff this morning, or while I’m driving home – and I die – my son Michael will let you know.
I just want to let all of you know how much I appreciated you being part of my radio show. It has been a pleasure and an honor for me – even if sometimes I brought down lightning strikes with some of the opinions I aired.
You folks have been very kind to me and while I completely intend to keep broadcasting, God may have other plans. I’ll keep you posted.
Just a heads-up.
Prometheus | Destroy the Ship
In the battlefield, how safe are snipers? Do snipers have the highest chance of survival since they are so far away?
Rule #1 of combat. If the enemy is in range, so are you.
A sniper, if they are set up really well and don’t shoot too often, can go a long time without being found. But once they are found, then they die.
There was a situation once where a particularly well concealed sniper was shooting at American troops in Iraq. He may not have always killed his intended victim, but it was, to say the least, disconcerting for the troops in his area.
In an effort to rid themselves of this pest, the Army sent out various sniper teams to try and locate this guy. They were out for a LONG time and shot after shot was made by the sniper, but he was still impossible to find.
Then one counter-sniper saw a brick in a wall move. A single brick moved, then a shot was heard, then the brick was put back in place.
They had found him.
A sniper was sent to a position that would allow them to shoot into the hole the sniper was making when he moved that brick. A few minutes later, the brick moved, the counter-sniper shot, and the enemy sniper was dead.
His big mistake was thinking that nobody would ever see that one brick moving. So he stayed in one place and died because he was too lazy to find a new hide.
Did China just pass quasi-laws which can theoretically sentence anyone (especially the Taiwanese people) who publish or support the opinions of Taiwanese independence to death penalty?
Study the laws carefully with proper Chinese translation
(Rough Translation)
There are four levels of Punishment :-
Level 1 – Any person who publishes material through a blog or electronic post advocating for Taiwanese Secession from the Mainland shall be
If younger than 18 years of age, be placed under RESTRICTIVE SURVEILLANCE until such time as the Investigator sees fit or until the person commits activities that are deemed secessionist under the security act
If older than 18 years of age or 18 years of age, shall be placed under ACTIVE SECURITY INVESTIGATION and subject to security report may be WARNED or placed under DIGITAL BLACKLIST or maybe charged with Secessionist activity under the security act
So here if you merely post you want Taiwanese Independence – you will either be monitored by the authorities and won’t get a Civil Service Job or a Foreign Scholarship or a Passport for maybe a decade or two
Or if you are an Adult – you get a warning or get placed on a Digital Blacklist meaning No access to Weibo or other Social Media Apps
Unless it is revealed you are funded by NGOs or other groups in which case you get charged with Secession and could face severe sentences
No Jail in either case
Level 2 – Any Person who belongs to or supports an Organization that advocates Taiwanese Secession under Lists I-IX or who has received a sum of not less than 60,000 RMB in a single year or 200,000 RMB over a longer period from such an organization without discernible services provided shall
Be sentenced to an Imprisonment of not less than 5 years which can extend upto 15 years
However any Person who has joined or expressed such support only over a period of less than 3 months shall receive a PUBLIC WARNING and if in compliance shall not be proceeded with beyond RESTRICTIVE SURVEILLANCE
This means if a Mainlander joins a Pro Taiwanese Organization like a foolish student,he shall get a WARNING and if he complies and backs out – he is not touched beyond the usual Restrictive Surveillance. He of course will never work for Civil Service or Get a Passport for life
Level 3 – Any Person who forms an organization within the Mainland that calls Support for Taiwanese Secession and either collects funds for the same or advocates policy and speech that is in favor of Taiwanese Secession shall
Be Sentenced to Death with no avenue of commutation to Life Imprisonment
All members of the HUKOU records of the Person shall automatically be under ACTIVE SECURITY INVESTIGATION and shall be placed under RESTRICTIVE SURVEILLANCE and Digital Blacklist and any members of the Party shall be expelled from Party Membership subject to Committee Enquiry under VII Rules
Any members of the HUKOU records of such a person shall if overseas be recalled immediately and after a recall notice period of 60 days shall be categorized under Level III Security Act
This is the changed law. The new law where if anyone forms an organization that calls for Taiwanese Secession and collects funds or makes speeches in favor of Taiwan. THEY WILL BE EXECUTED WITHOUT MERCY OR COMMUTATION TO LIFE
Their family members will be investigated and if members of the CPC may be expelled or if overseas shall be recalled and if they don’t come within 60 days- they will be deemed security threats and can even be KILLED ON FOREIGN SOIL
This is the New change in the law. Earlier it was 25 Years to Life with NO DEATH PENALTY
Level 4 – Any Person who is accomplice to or instigator of an Act of Physical Violence or Terrorism on the Mainland or Mainland Sovereign Territory in any Country that causes at least 500,000 RMB of Damage or a loss of one or more lives shall be
Sentenced to Death with Commutation possible only for persons who can prove lack of knowledge of the activities and who had no further role
All members of the HUKOU records of the Person shall automatically be subjected to the NATIONAL RELOCATION ACT and SECURITY DETENTION ACT
Any members of the HUKOU records of such a person shall if overseas be recalled immediately and after a recall notice period of 7 days shall be categorized under Level III Security Act
Any Separatist who causes Violence in China or Embassies that cause 500K of physical damage or loss of even one person shall be executed without mercy
This Law is so tough that IF YOU ARE A LANDLORD WHO RENTED A HOUSE TO SUCH PEOPLE – YOU WILL GET LIFE IMPRISONMENT WITHOUT MERCY
Families of such persons shall be deported to labor camps and kept there for life including Children
Both Parents or All Guardians will face the same sentence if their Kids younger than 18 are charged and convicted under this act
So if a 17 year old kid blows up a Molotov cocktail killing someone, the Parents will be executed under the New Law unless they inform on their kid leading to a conviction of the Kid in which case they get fully exonerated by the State
So the only new change is that now anyone who forms an organization to support Taiwanese Independence shall be executed without mercy and their families shall be prevented from doing a lot of things
Their Kids can never go abroad
Their families can never live within 300 Kms of any place with Security facilities
Their families can never get a Passport
Their families can never work for the Government of China
Their families can never work for a Strategic Industry in any capacity
Their families can never join the PLA or PLAAF or PLAN
Families include – Parents, Children, Wife, Consort, Divorced Wife is Divorce is less than 5 years old, Siblings, Wives of Siblings, Children of Siblings, Grandchildren, Great Grandchildren
So if one guy does it – upto 40–50 people can suffer for no fault of their own
Now here is something the West didn’t tell you
The Law also excludes people:-
Exclusion:-
The Security Law shall NOT regard the following persons as culpable under it and shall deem them law abiding. This includes :-
Any person who reports possible secessionist activities of any family member under the Hukou system
Any Person who has relatives in Taiwan and declares the same
Merely because a person has visited Chinese Taipei does not put a person under the purview of the Act unless such person visited Taipei in contravention of existing emigration procedures
No person who merely posts secessionist content on behalf of another person and can establish the same, be charged under this act
Merely indicating support for DPP in Taiwan or for Leaders of the DPP is insufficient to be charged under this Act
So you can call William Lai a Hero and nothing will happen to you
So only three areas are DRACONIAN
First is that family members also suffer for no fault of their own , something that was removed off statuette since the death of Mao Tse Tung and reintroduced in 2009 for Xinjiang only
Second – Kids can inform on their parents and Parents must inform on their Kids to avoid being charged. So a son who sees his father work for Taiwan must report him and watch him be executed to survive and so must a father
Three – Execution is the only course now. No commutation to life. You get convicted, you die
This wasn’t the case previously
So while the new laws are draconian to a good extent – they allow a lot of leeway unlike India
In India someone saying Pakistan Zindabad can be charged with UAPA
In China now clearly – just because you hail DPP or William Lai won’t make you culpable at all. You will not even be touched.
As a doctor, what is it like when you have to see a doctor?
I hate it.
I hate having to make an appointment. I hate filling out those stupid review of systems files that the doctor never seems to have bothered looking at by the time I get to talk to them. I hate that the doctor is always late, but that the staff will give me shit about it if I’m late. I hate having to ask someone else to write me a prescription for something I already know I need. And, most of all, I hate being lectured about what I need to do for my health.
Go away! Shut up. I already know this stuff. LEAVE ME ALONE! I’m a freakin’ doctor, too, dammit.
That’s a polite rendition of my inner monologue when a doctor tells me what I need to do. So, most of the time, I avoid going to the doctor’s office. If I know I want something, I write myself a prescription—yes, you can do that, as long as it’s not a controlled substance. If it doesn’t take care of my problem, then and only then will I seek medical care.
I’m young enough that I can get away with it, because I don’t yet have serious medical issues. For now, there are very specific circumstances under which I will go see a doctor:
I need to see a specialist for a problem well above my pay grade.
I know that some test needs to be ordered. I can’t order a hip X-ray or lab test for myself, for instance.
Even then, if I can get away with it, I’ll go to the Urgent Care center, because I hate making appointments.
“If you treat yourself as a doctor, you’ll have an idiot for a patient.”
I’ve heard variations of these over the years. Fine, I’m an idiot, then. I don’t care. I’ll be damned if I’ll go see a doctor unless I absolutely have to.
Don’t try this at home, kids.
I Dumped My Girlfriend And Ended Her Best Friend’s “Perfect” Open Marriage, Now EVERYONE Blames Me
Has a doctor ever misdiagnosed you to the point where it was almost bizarre?
Yes. When having sepsis, the initial diagnosis by the ER doctor who didn’t even bother to look at me was “ your depression acting up”. Never mind my high fever, renal colic pain and failure, my inability to breathe, vomiting and repeated fainting, it must be all in my head! Fortunately my blood results changed his mind.
Blood tests were ordered after I did some yelling on the topic of me going to another hospital( which was quite near) and then coming back to kick his a**.
Very recently my elderly mom has suffered from lower back pain for 2 months straight. No meds helped, she frequently vomited, could hardly walk and couldn’t sleep because of the pain. She was ordered basically every test known, going through gastroenterology ( yeah, she has post inflammatory narrowed esophagus), urology/nephrology, orthopedia. Urine tested, blood tested. She was told she was fine, nothing was wrong. Until a CAT scan was performed. Showed 3 fractured vertebraes caused by foreign mass.
After giving birth , I cried through the night because of a terrible pain. Was told by the nurse on duty that “ G, you have birth vaginally, we only give pain meds to women recovering from C-section, it can’t hurt you”. Had multitude of stitches( forgot to count after an hour of them sewing me back together) due to 4th degree tear and an F broken coccyx! I couldn’t sit, walk or lay down without that pain for 4 months. But I guess it was just me being too sensitive.
Since we’re both women, we have plenty of those experience. Let’s group them under medical misogyny aka “you’re a woman, you’re overreacting”.
Ps. Let me not start on how many times I was asked if I was sure it wasn’t just a period pain. I think it was actually the first 2 years of me having recurrent kidney stones causing renal colics when my then ahole GP refused to order an ultrasound “ because I was too young to have kidney stones”.
PS 2. The most ridiculous situation actually happened when my molars rot and caused a massive infection during the last trimester of my pregnancy. At first, I went to a doctor with what seemed as a heart attack. He then moved on to whether I was having a stroke, trigeminal nerve inflammation to finally getting to “ F teeth why didn’t I think of that?”. To give him some credit, my pulse was sky high and I felt sharp pain in my jaw and neck. Teeth wouldn’t be the first guess.
This cat was called ‘mean.’ Then he met my husband.
What was it that your partner told you that gave you chills?
My second husband was in the hospital, dying from cancer. The day before he died, I took him down stairs to smoke a cigarette. As we were sitting outside, he looked around and said, “Honey, don’t look, they’re watching me.” When I asked him what he was talking about, he said “the shadow people. They’re over there, in the woods.” I turned to look and he said “no, don’t look, they’ll get you too. I think they’re here for me” That comment sent shivers down my spine. I said “no, sweetheart, there’s no one here for you” I thought he was hallucinating because of the pain meds. He said “shut up, I have to tell you some things.” He proceeded to tell me how my life would go after he was gone. He told me that I would get remarried and that he would tell me WHOM I was going to marry. He told me I would have more children.
Now, at this point in my life I had been told that I couldn’t have any more children. I told him he was crazy and that I thought we needed to get him back up to his room.
I got him back up to his room got him in his bed and he went back to sleep. He passed away in his sleep 6 hours later.
Oh, and the things he said would happen….
They happened!
Have you ever witnessed a life ruined from a small mistake?
I worked with a man whose life fell apart quite dramatically over a few weeks.
He was a nice guy and I really liked him. His name was Ivor and I feel terrible about what happened to him.
He and his wife were drinking together one evening, and they started arguing. So he went to sleep in his car. A few hours later, the police knocked on his window and woke him up. Although he had not been driving, the keys were in the ignition and he had been sleeping in the driver’s seat. They breathalised him and he was still very drunk.
As they now had him for drunk driving, they had the right to search his car. In the car they found a cosh that he kept for protection. I doubt he would ever use it. But, unfortunately, they are illegal and he was now in trouble for carrying an offensive weapon.
His wife was angry at him so wouldn’t let him come home, so he had to sleep on a friend’s sofa. By the way, Ivor was not a young man, he was in his early sixties. Due to his stress, he carried on drinking. He started missing a lot of work. Which was bad. What was worse is that one day, he DID turn up to work, but very drunk. He worked for about thirty minutes, until his managers called him in the office, and after a heated argument, he was fired.
So we never saw Ivor again. This whole thing played out over about three weeks. So in three weeks, Ivor lost his wife, driver’s license, job, and got a criminal record. In his sixties.
Ivor was a good guy and he used to have foreign students stay at his house. Just before he got fired he had Japanese students, and would bring Japanese food in for us to try. I often wonder what the Japanese people staying at his house made of his meltdown.
Brutal Signs of a Collapsing Empire | Richard D. Wolff
Barbecued Brisket
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Ingredients
Brisket
1 flat brisket
Dry Rub
2 tablespoons salt
2 tablespoons chili powder
2 tablespoons meat tenderizer
1 tablespoon pepper
1/2 tablespoon garlic powder
Mop Sauce
1 (10 1/2 ounce) can beef consommé
1 can water
1/3 cup vinegar
3/4 cup Worcestershire sauce
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 1/2 teaspoons meat tenderizer
1 1/2 teaspoons dry mustard
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon chili powder
1/2 teaspoon paprika
1 bay leaf
Barbecue Sauce
1 1/2 cups Worcestershire sauce
1/4 cup vinegar
1/4 cup steak sauce
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 cup ketchup
Instructions
Brisket
Trim any excess fat from 1 flat brisket. Rub both sides of brisket thoroughly with Dry Rub. Cover and refrigerate overnight.
The next day prepare a grill so that it will smoke slowly for about 6 hours or about 1 hour per pound. Start brisket on grill with the fattest side up. Cover grill. Mop with Mop Sauce frequently during grilling. Turn brisket about every hour.
Serve with warm Barbecue Sauce.
Dry Rub
Mix all ingredients in small bowl.
Mop Sauce
Bring beef consommé and water to boil in medium-size saucepan. Turn down heat. Add remaining ingredients. Stir until thoroughly mixed. Remove from heat.
Barbecue Sauce
Place all ingredients in small saucepan. Bring to boil. Remove from heat.
What would happen if I threw a rock at a wild polar bear?
Throwin rocks at a wild Polar Bear ?
Short answer – No. Long answer – HELL NO.
Even if you had a 9mm pistol (let’s say a glock)
And you were facing a polar bear and you were lucky enough to let off some rounds. Guess what ? Be prepared to make peace with whatever deity you follow and learn from the lesson and do better in the next life.
The Bear will look at you and think……. “that looks tasty …nom nom”
Most animals will back off at the sound of gunshot.
Not Polar Bears
Even if you hit them they’ll carry on charging and will get to you.
The only way to stop it was if you were very, very, very lucky and got the bullet through their eye into their brain, maybe.
But areas of instant kill with a bear charging towards you on all fours is about size of teaplate. Can you hit that repeatedly under stress ? You really do not have much time for mistakes.
Their skull is harder and thicker than a motorcycle helmet. They kill seals just by slapping them. Trying to alpha posture by standing tall and making yourself look bigger will accomplish nothing.
“I’d hide behind a rock!”
You die behind that rock.
“I’d jump into a river!”
You die wet and cold.
“I’d stand my ground and yell at the bear to frighten it”
You die faster.
There are around three thousand polar bears on the Svalbard islands; that’s more polar bears than there are humans and they are protected by Svalbard law. So they have not built up a fear of humans.
Not every animal wants to hug a human.
Until humans with BIG rifles (22 calibre ……….actually more like .444 marlin) came along, nothing hunted polar bears. Nothing. There is no scaring it off. Just look at them
Polar bears will eat each other if they’re desperate enough. So what do you think they’ll do to you ?
They’re also dangerous because they’re skilled apex predators (meaning they have no natural predators of their own) Which means, cute as they may be, the polar bear is quite functionally the great white shark of the north.
They don’t hibernate.
They never get cold.
Food is scarce.
They’re always (I repeat) ALWAYS hungry.
The bottom line is if you’re a human being on open ice in the Artic Tundra with no serious firearm or vehicle and you run into this pic below ?
You have two chances of surviving
Slim
None
And slim just left town
You know the striking thing about a Polar Bear when u see them in the flesh, my friend ?
They’ve got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes.
When they come at ya, it doesn’t seem to be livin…….until they bite ya and at that point you’re not on earth anymore and the Polar bear is the last thing you’ll ever see.
And bears are omnivores (meat and plant eaters) which means unlike carnivores like tigers and lions who have the polite decency to kill you as quick as possible first then eat you.
Polar bears will just hold you down, pin you to the ground like you’re a seal or salmon and eat you while you’re alive and screaming.
They have a bite force of 1,000 psi (Pounds Per Square Inch) that’s a force strong enough to crack a bowling ball and they’ll use that to disable you, to rip off your arm or leg for a snack, you can’t even imagine the kinda force they can generate.
To a Polar Bear an average-sized human is just right for a comfortable dinner with a glass of port and a good cigar afterwards.
You dunno what you’re dealing with.
And they’re trying to get access to your organs to chew them apart, then if there’s anything left of you, put you in stash, n come back a bit later n eat some more of you.
Just a brutal way to go.
They can run at speeds of 25 mph, If that doesn’t impress you, the fastest man alive who was Usain Bolt his maximum top speed was 27 mph and they can smell you for miles (even if your under snow) and swim for 100’s of miles
And they’re smart to. Polar bear on thin ice ? No problem they know they have to spread their weight around so it’s not concentrated in one spot so as to not crack the ice.
Humans in movies : Aggressively steps on ice
There are only three things up in the Arctic: Ice, water, and potential calories. Guess which category people are in ?
Modern Women Are DOOMED – New Anti Paternity Fraud Law Gets Passed!
On his 1909 trip in the US, Freud had this to say about the country: America is a mistake, a giant mistake. Trump and Biden, two old fools competing to fool more fools in the game of liberal/electoral democracy, are living proof of Freud’s observation. Indeed, “In America, anyone can become president. That's the problem.”
If you grew up in the Mid-west; Pennsylvania, West Virginia, New York and Ohio, you know about “deer flies”. These nasty pests are delta winged biological hunter-biters and their bite is painful
Lipoptena cervi, the deer ked or deer fly, is a species of biting fly in the family of louse flies, Hippoboscidae. These flies are commonly encountered in temperate areas of Europe, Siberia, and northern China.
They have been introduced to North America.[12] They are parasites of elk, deer, and other deer family members, burrowing through the fur and sucking the blood of the host animals.
Adults are only 5–7 mm (0.20–0.28 in) in length and brownish in colour. Their bodies are flat and elastic, making their removal difficult. L. cervi is a poor flier and can only fly for short distances. Once the insect reaches its target, it sheds its wings and starts burrowing through the fur.
They have a radar lock on that is terrible. Once they are on your radar you have to get behind glass or a mesh screen and watch while the bang, bang, and bag against that barrier trying to get to you.
Ah, you don’t wanna be bit. I’ll tell you what. You will end up with a red welt the size of a soda bottle cap. Yikes!
Deer fly bites can be painful due to their cutting and lapping method of feeding. The bite often results in visible bleeding wounds and general first aid-type skin creams may help to relieve the pain from bites. In rare instances, there may be allergic reactions involving hives and wheezing.
One took a dive bomb into my hair when I was at a guitar lesson around 11 years old. Wholly shit, It was painful and my dad took two hours getting dead deer fly debris out of my hair.
Holy smokes!
The Terrible Deer Fly – Plus – An Easy Control Method
Oh, the dredded deer fly! If you have been attacked by deer flies, you know they need no introduction. They are horrible pests. These flies show no compassion on the unsuspecting person who crosses their path. A few flies can quickly become hundreds the longer you stay in the area. They are very fast and will attack mercilessly quickly ruining your fishing trip or a family outing. (Photo Courtesy of Bugguide.net)
It is largely believed there is no effective means of controlling these flies. However, one researcher has said to have found a simple way to keep them at bay. It is something the kayak fisherman can try and on my next trip to the Louisiana swamps I plan on employing this technique. I will explain it in detail later in the article.
What is a Deer Fly, You Ask??
Deer Flies are true biting flies and the bites really hurt. Only the female bites. Females have small dagger like blades within their mouth parts that slice the skin to draw blood. She then fills up on a blood meal. They are very aggressive.
The flies breed and live in swamp and marsh locations. They also live in forests close to grassy clearing or open areas. They can be found in most states.
My Personal Experiences with These Flies
One of my favorite places in Louisiana is in the Sabine River Basin. It is 1000's of acres of marsh and swamp that is part of the National Wildlife Refuge. The brackish waters are loaded with redfish, sea trout and alligators. However, many parts are loaded with deer flies.
I spoke to the kayak fisherman in the photo who had just paddled through a swarm of deer flies - the same swarm that actually drove me away. He stated he had been bitten, but didn't seem to be too alarmed by it. I suppose there is not much you can do in a kayak surrounded by alligators except to keep paddling. Some say it is possible to get used to deer flies, but I don't imagine it to be easy.
Here is What I Have Learned About Them
Here is what I have learned about deer flies. First, they tend to reside in heavy congregations, but will not fly far to pursue a meal. Instead, they will wait until someone walks within a 100 or 200 ft of where they are waiting - then they swarm around you.
They pick up on exhaled carbon dioxide and move in quickly to the source. Deer flies love to bite around the head, arms, hands and upper body.
To get away from them, all it usually takes is to move away from that 100 to 200 ft range they originated from and they will break off the attack. This is important to know. Only a few will follow for an extra 75 to 100 feet outside of that range.
All I had to do to get away from them is to turn around and walk 100 ft or so and they were gone. Walk back toward them and they will swarm again. Hopefully your favorite places do not have infestation so close together. In those cases the only way to get away from them is to leave the area.
Some claim they will not fly into houses or cars, but that is not entirely correct. I am not sure about houses, but I have certainly killed a few that have flown into my car while I was stopped to photograph wildlife.
Methods used to stop mosquitoes usually will not work on deer flies. Some suggest using Deet, the strongest formula available, but is primarily because they know of nothing else to suggest.
A Truly Interesting Cure to Your Deer Fly Problem
The following method was discovered by a University of Florida researcher:
Take a bright blue container - a small can, jug, metal coffee can, flower pot, or anything that can be mounted on a pole. I imagine you can paint it that color, but it has to be bright blue. I haven't seen a picture of the exact color used, so saying it needs to be bright blue or bright royal blue is all I know. The blue attracts the flies.
I read where a person had a bright blue car and every summer his car was covered with deer flies. He never knew why until someone told him it was the color. The article said he sold his car to end the problem.
Next, cover the bright blue container with a sticky material, such as "Tanglefoot". Be sure it is clear Tanglefoot and not the dark colored one. Tanglefoot is a super sticky brush-on outdoor coating designed for this type of thing. The deer flies get stuck in the sticky goo and die.
The bright blue color is such a powerful attractant that people nearby are not even bitten. Since there is only a finite number of deer flies in one location, you can temporarily reduce the deer fly population to the point they are no longer a problem.
There have been several deer fly tests by people from around the country using this method and they all say it works great. I haven't personally tested it and am only going off what others say, Where I live now there are no deer flies. However, when I am back in Louisiana I will test it and give you my personal opinion. I am hoping the reports are right and it is an effective method of controlling the deer fly.
If you are kayaking in thick deer fly territory be sure to bring your pole mounted blue jug coated with tanglefoot. Put the pole in a rod holder or somewhere on the kayak so it extends several feet above you. This is exactly what I plan to do on my next fishing trip to the swamps.
In the link I have provided, you can also read about "trolling for flies" that has led to a decrease in fly populations. it's worth a try.
Be sure to let me know how it works. I would love to hear about it.
Visitor Addition:This comes from Parnell Ruiz. Thanks Parnell!"Just wanted to add to your deer fly article. Blue is definitely the color. I keep blue plastic helmets and coat them in "tangle foot" but don't coat helmet brim. While walking in the forest on my property in WI, I don't get one bite. They do attack from behind and quickly fill the back of helmet, then I just put helmet on backwards till full. Use acetone to clean helmet and repeat. Working on some type of blue apparel for my dogs. Thanks for site."
Today…
Bolivia coup failure
Why do some people cover their laptop cameras with tape? Is it just paranoia?
I once took a cyber security course in which one of the instructors hacked into six or seven laptop cameras in the class before the lunch break on the first day. The computers in question were brought by the students, not supplied by the training facility. By the second day, every student in that class had tape over their laptop cameras.
I’ve seen how vulnerable those things are. I will never again leave my laptop camera uncovered unless I’m actually using it.
Edit:
Of all the answers I’ve written, I never expected this one to take off. Over 13,000 upvotes and still climbing. Wow!
I’m seeing a lot of repeated questions in the comments, so I’ll try to answer the most common ones:
I won’t provide the name of the course or the company that taught it. Frankly, we weren’t particularly impressed with the overall content, the professionalism of the instructors, or the value for the investment. The one interesting takeaway from the course was that laptop cameras are vulnerable to hacking.
As I recall, the exploit in question used a malicious applet to take advantage of an unpatched vulnerability in Java.
Some laptop cameras have hardwired lights that can’t be turned off by software. But some cameras have a software toggle that can turn off the light while the camera is active. Depending on your particular machine, the absence of a light is no guarantee that your camera has not been activated.
A five second Google search will turn up numerous criminal cases that involve webcam/laptop camera hacking. In 2014, Jared James Abrahams was sentenced to 18 months in prison for sneaking nude photos and videos of several young women including Miss Teen USA Cassidy Wolf. This is not, by any means, an isolated case.
I have no illusions that hackers are slavering to catch sight of my naked body. But the wall behind my desk has a dry erase board and bulletin board areas that are usually covered in notes, drawings, diagrams, schedules, and schematics. Nothing classified, but often information that requires protection.
The machines that I saw hacked were all running Windows, but – according to the Mac Security Blog, Apple computers are also vulnerable to camera hacking.
Yes, your microphone is vulnerable too. Depending on the machine, you can block some internal microphones using a dummy plug in the mic jack. For some laptops, physically disconnecting the microphone from the motherboard isn’t too difficult. I personally opt for the dummy plug. It’s not 100% certain, but few defensive measures are absolute.
I’m under no impression that covering your camera and using a dummy plug for your microphone will provide perfect security. Frankly, there’s no such thing. In my opinion, these are just a couple of simple and inexpensive precautions that narrow your window of vulnerability. Nothing more.
And I’m done responding to comments on this answer. There are literally hundreds of articles and videos on the topic from people who know more about it than I do.
MOVING TO USA🇺🇸 | WHAT I WISH I KNEW BEFORE MOVING (as a Ugandan🇺🇬) GreenCard, Culture & More
What screams “I’m upper class”?
I’ve been around quite a few wealthy people, but only a few of them have been what I consider upper class.
To me, someone who is upper class treats everyone with respect. They don’t flaunt their wealth, and they don’t ever try to prove they’ve got money.
I went to a very expensive prep school in New York, on scholarship. Many of the girls looked down their noses at me because my family was barely middle class, and I didn’t have the money to shop at Bloomingdales like they did. But you know who were my friends? The girls who had the same last names as buildings on 5th Avenue and famous restaurants. They didn’t care that I was there on scholarship because they weren’t competitive, like the girls who were continually trying to prove how wealthy their families were. Instead, they welcomed me into their homes and took me to dizzying social events. Class all the way.
When I was a senior, I was told that my scholarship had been paid for by the wealthy founders of Reader’s Digest, and the only thing they asked in return was that I write them a letter telling them about my high school experience and what my future plans were. I got the most charming handwritten letter back from DeWitt Wallace thanking me for writing! True class.
Later, in college, I worked a part-time job at a retail store. One night the very-impressed-by-himself store manager asked me to stay late and I told him I couldn’t because I needed to catch the last bus home. He said he would give me a ride if I would stay. And so I did.
Of course, when it was time to leave, the manager was long gone and I was stranded. It just so happened that the son of the founder of the major corporation that owned the store was interning there that month as preparation for going into the corporate office. He saw what had happened and gave me a ride home in his Mercedes Benz. He could not have been nicer or a better conversationalist on our ride to my home.
So, in short, I believe that people who are truly upper class are kind, considerate, and take their wealth out of the equation when dealing with other people. It’s simply a part of them, but nothing that needs to be mentioned, flaunted, or bragged about.
Which country has the better governance, China or India? Why?
This question would not be asked if you had been to both of those countries.
I have and you cannot even put them in the same league.
China is a global power, a middle-income country, with a literacy rate in the 90s and the largest manufacturing base in the world. China has a 100-year economic plan, which gives the whole country its priorities and the whole nation follows. China’s urban poverty rate is 1%
main qimg c0632f2c3297f96225f0563ff457ad76
Shanghai, China
India is a low-income country, with the highest population of malnutrition children in the world. It is also the biggest recipient of aid, in the world, just for this reason. India’s governance is fragmented, divided up into states that impede big business. The politicians are highly corrupt. Politics is full of communal venom. There are about a dozen active separatist movements. Their wealthiest city, Bombay, has half of its population defecating in the open.
main qimg db11916f594a5e30e10d282596372678
Mumbai, India
China is not only wealthier, more educated, and better planned, but it is also more peaceful, has lower crime rate and is safer. If you have walked the streets of Delhi and Bejing at night, the difference is absolutely clear.
As I have said before, China’s government is made up of extremely intelligent technocrats that have built their political career through decades of work for the CCP. The whole world may scoff at a one-party system, but there is plenty of politics within the party as well. You have to prove yourself at a lower level in various different capacities before being considered for the top job.
That is the reason why merit gets you to the top rather than family dynasties, nationalist or religious fervour.
NEW TREND!! Why Companies Have Started Firing Women (Compilation)
What is a stand you took during your wedding planning that you will never apologize for?
We had shared a home, a life, and three pets for several years, and we each had two teenaged kids. Mine lived with us, and his came to stay regularly. We all got along great.
We decided to get married, but wanted something fun and informal. His mother and my sister became absolutely intolerable, trying to control every detail, to the point that I told my partner I was ready to forget about getting married.
He said, “Is it the wedding you don’t want, or the marriage?”
I told him it was the wedding.
So he suggested we elope. We applied for a marriage license and booked a justice of the peace at the planned destination in Vermont. We booked rooms and the library/parlour at the country inn there. We had been to Vermont before, but not to this particular facility. But we liked what we saw from the online photos.
We packed up the teenagers and a handful of other people we’re close to, and got married at the country inn, which was charming. The staff was friendly and helpful, the ambience was delightful, and the justice of the peace who married us made the ceremony personal and special. Everything about that weekend was perfect: relaxed, fun, simple.
Once that was a done deal, our friend hosted a blessing of marriage and buffet dinner at her place several weeks later. My sister and his mother, who had been unable to travel for the Vermont wedding, were guests of honour at the party. They grumbled a bit about missing the “real wedding,” but they were the architects of that.
I’ve never regretted our “elopement,” even if we did have a bunch of teenagers along!
4 Things I Wish I Knew BEFORE Moving to the USA
The Moon
Getting to the moon was the hard part. But the US had already sent space probes into deep space so they were familiar with transfer orbits.
And getting the lunar module on the moon only requires the computing power of an Atari game console. Which they had.
The Apollo program used the first computer module. The hard part was making sure the radar altimeter worked properly.
The technology was crude by today’s standards but they worked. They also had gyroscopes to maintain stability. Sure they were huge by today’s standard but they worked.
Already proven on fighters and satellites.
If you go back 10 years then it would have increased the danger by at least 10 times or more. Because they really needed the computer. Without one, it’s eyeball landing. And they even practiced that just in case.
You can get a hold of the Apollo program documents. They literally documented everything. Including vibration testing on each individual bolt and screw. They knew what percent would fail and worked to make that close to zero.
What is concerning is that the Artemis program is ignoring all that. And they’re going to try and land a gigantic ship on the moon. The thing is 160 feet long.
The US and Japan tried landing on the moon with long tall objects and both fell over. The lunar soil is dusty and can easily cover a rock. if one leg lands on that, the SpaceX lander will fall over.
That is why all lunar modules that have successfully landed all use a wide base with a squat design. Even if you land on a rock on one leg, it will still be upright.
And they used hypergolic fuel. No need for ignition. Once the fuel mixed, it ignited. SpaceX is going to use normal rocket engines. And needs to land at least 4 more robot SpaceX cargo filled with fuel to refuel the lander to get off the moon.
A lot of untested tech that they are going to test on the moon and in orbit. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens. They’re doing the exact opposite of the Apollo program. Apollo tested everything to death. SpaceX, no need. They test while doing it.
Apocalypto and the Warning Signs of Societal Collapse (Film Analysis)
Who are some criminals you have the most respect for?
main qimg 6199a48eadb4caa1aebb35480e0945a9 lq
Lyle and Erik Menendez.
These two brothers shot and killed both of their parents on August 20, 1989. Lyle was 21 years old and Erik was 18. They had killed entertainment executive José and Kitty, (his wife) in their home in Beverly Hills.
So far, they seem pretty deserving of a lifetime in prison, correct? But wait until you hear why they did this; they were scared shitless for their lives. Afraid of their own parents. Why?
Here’s a little bit of background on the two rich white kids:
Stuart Hart is an educational child psychologist and a professor emeritus at Indiana University, where he taught for 30 years. He also served as an expert defense witness in the trials of brothers Lyle and Erik Menendez, for the 1989 shotgun murders of their parents Jose and Kitty Menendez at their Beverly Hills home. At the time, Lyle was 21 and Erik was 18.
In that case, the prosecution argued that the brothers had been motivated by greed, pointing to the lavish shopping they did after the killings. The defense said the prime motive was Sexual Abuse the young men suffered at their father’s hands.
After he began working on the case, Hart came to agree with the defense—when he took the stand, he argued strongly for the child-abuse defense. In 1996 Lyle and Erik Menendez were each sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, but even today Hart views the homicides as a reaction to gross parental misconduct, rather than the work of cold, calculating killers.
TL;DR, these two dudes had their father sexually abuse and molest them all throughout their childhood, Lyle having gotten off the hook when he was about 13 years old but Erik continuously getting raped and sexually harassed by his own fucking father until he was 18.
Bullshit? I think not.
The consistency of the reporting of it, and the details of the reporting of it. And the consistency of those details. And the fact that this is humiliating.
You had an adolescent girl cousin who was saying that Lyle confided—not in terms of clearly stating what he was experiencing—but telling her he wanted to stay in her room.
There was another cousin who Erik reported to. And that would’ve been quite a risk for them: As young children—Lyle was about eight or so—anything that got back to his father was going to mean serious problems. So much reporting of sexual abuse is a case of somebody describing what happened to them with nobody observing them.
They had the proof, they had the witnesses, for these claims. At least, as much proof and evidence a person can get with this type of stuff.
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Just for an idea, look at the picture above. Why the ever-loving fuck is José holding Lyle by his crotch like that? Why not his stomach or some other body part?
The murder happened after Lyle had found out that Erik was still getting sexually abused by his father at 18. The events as told by Erik in a news report in the following Quotations:
“I remember it was Tuesday and I was coming in the front door of the house and mom and Lyle were coming out of the study and mom was screaming,” Erik explains, speaking from a phone inside the walls of Donovan Correctional Facility.
“They were in an argument and Lyle was saying that he needed it and it was important and mom in a rage said, ‘You don’t ned your effing hair piece!’ and she reached up and she ripped his hair off his head. I remember just being stunned by what happened.”
In old court testimony, Lyle explained that the alleged incident left him “completely embarrassed.” “[Erik] didn’t know I had a hair piece,” he said. “My brother and I, there are things we don’t talk about and that was one of them.”
“I told him not to worry about it, that he was my brother, that I loved him, basically saying I don’t judge you,” Erik continues, before detailing how the conversation then changed to another, darker topic.
“I asked him, ‘Do you remember when I was a kid, you asked me if anything was happening between me and dad?’ I said, ‘Lyle, it’s still happening,'” says Erik.
“He was like, ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Still happening, just sexual things.’ He got suddenly really upset. Saying how could I let that happen, did I enjoy it, why didn’t I tell anyone, why didn’t I stop it. I was crying and I started having a small panic attack.”
Erik says his brother then asked if their mother knew about the abuse. “I said ‘no,’ [but] he said, ‘No, I think she does. I think mom knows.”
Lyle, in an effort to protect his younger brother approached and threatened José saying that, “You’re going to have to let him go; otherwise we’re going to tell.”
Their father shot back saying that they’d never dare and deeply regret it if they did. This got them paranoid that he was going to kill them in fear of ruining his perfect reputation, leading to them planning on the murder.
Time then comes and they do go through with the murder, killing both their parents. Personally, I think Kitty also deserved to die here. Along with fully knowing what was going on between them and their father and not doing anything to help, she also participated in her own form of sexual abuse.
Until he was 13, his mother would wash his body “everywhere,” he said. She also would invite him into bed with her and he would touch her “everywhere,” he testified.
“I took it to be love,” Lyle Menendez said, adding, “She was enjoying it.” But he was not enjoying it, he said, so he stopped the activities, which enraged her.
Throughout his adolescence, he said, she “harassed” him with increasingly bizarre sexual conduct.
Ew. How fucking disgusting. These people are sick, their kids didn’t ask for this. Killing their parents seemed like the only way out for them and honestly, I perfectly understand why.
There was a lot of evidence for them here. With witnesses testifying the boy’s claims and maids having said to have found child pornography magazines in José’s office to other people claiming to have been sexually harassed by him as well.
Though not many people were willing to risk ruining their reputations by testifying it in court, ultimately resulting in a lack of presented evidence as opposed to available evidence.
The first two trials they had were out of sync. The first jury declaring them innocent but faced backlash from the public who wanted them locked up for good. It was declared a mistrial and they restarted the entire case in front of the second jury, unfairly forbidding the mentions and evidence of sexual abuse as reasons to support their claims for self-defense.
Some people from the second jury later stated that if they had been told about the sexual abuse and the family history, they would have never placed them as guilty and resulted in giving them life without parole.
It’s pretty funny that the judge had to take an unfair route like that to actually win the case against the two. This also happened around the same time of the OJ Simpson case so it didn’t help either.
I sometimes wonder how different things would be right now if the Menendez brothers were the Menendez sisters instead.
Casserole Rye Bread
Casserole Rye Bread
Ingredients
1 cup milk
3 tablespoons granulated sugar
1 tablespoon salt
1 1/2 tablespoons butter
1 cup warm water
2 envelopes dry yeast
3 cups all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups rye flour
Instructions
Heat milk, sugar, salt and butter together and cool to lukewarm.
Measure warm water and dry yeast into a bowl. Stir until dissolved.
Stir in lukewarm milk mixture and flours. Beat until well blended (this is the secret to this bread).
Cover and let rise free from draft about 50 minutes or until double in bulk.
Stir batter down and beat vigorously about 30 seconds.
Turn into a well-greased 1 1/2 quart round bottom casserole. Brush carefully with milk and bake uncovered for about 1 hour at 375 degrees F.
Part IBefore in the beginning, there was NOTHING. Nothing but a whole lot of absolutely nothing. You couldn’t see NOTHING, because there was nothing to see. You couldn’t hear NOTHING, because there was nothing to hear. You couldn’t touch NOTHING because there was nothing to touch.One fine time out of nowhere, SOMETHING found time to come along —-zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom, zoom. SOMETHING came along, looked here, looked there, looked everywhere and said, “I don’t see NOTHING, can’t hear nothing, there’s nothing here but a whole lot of nothing.”NOTHING didn’t say anything, NOTHING just listened to SOMETHING go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on, talking about a whole lot of nothing.Then NOTHING got tired and said, “Hold it SOMETHING.”SOMETHING said, “Who’s that?”“It’s me, NOTHING, so you have nothing to fear in this atmosphere, I would just like to make it perfectly clear in your ear that I am also here.”SOMETHING was kind of scared. He couldn’t see NOTHING.Then NOTHING said, “Let me tell you something, SOMETHING, even though I’m Nothing, I am still something. In fact I’m the something that has you surrounded, I’m the something that is holding you up.”SOMETHING said, “Holding me up?”SOMETHING thought it was a stick-up and swung at NOTHING. Didn’t hit NOTHING because there was nothing to hit. SOMETHING swung at NOTHING, again. He swung again, missed, fell down, but didn’t fall on NOTHING. So the scuffle went on and on in the dark, SOMETHING swinging at NOTHING, SOMETHING swinging at NOTHING in triple darkness. And it went on and on and on until the darkness started to go away.Part IIAbout six- thirty in the morning NOTHING’S daughter, Dawn was looking at her mirror in the dark, SOMETHING snuck up on NOTHING, missed and hit NOTHING’S daughter Dawn. She dropped the mirror. The mirror cracked. That is where the crack of dawn came from.Part IIINOTHING also had two sons. One named Rise and one named Set. You could tell them apart because Set was always sitting down and Rise was always standing up next to Dawn.Dawn went over to Set and said, “Get up, Set, do something about SOMETHING. Us families are supposed to stick together.”Set looked up and said, “Don’t get me upset, Dawn.” Dawn said again a little louder, “Get up, Set.”“Don’t get me upset, Dawn.”“Get up, Set.”“I said, don’t get me upset, Dawn. Don’t get me upset.” “ I said get up Set.”Finally, Set got up. “Now you made me upset. I saw the whole thing. If you didn’t get in the way of SOMETHING, nothing would have happened. But I have a plan. You and Rise go to the East. I’ll go to the West and tomorrow evening we will meet and put something on SOMETHING from both sides. Now, get Rise, get on your mark and Go.”Set sat down and watched them go out of sight. “I fooled them,” he said to himself, “I don’t have to go anyplace. All I have to do is sit right here, Set laughed to himself, “I fooled them.”
So Set just sat there and it got darker and darker and darker. Set was scared, he couldn’t see SOMETHING or NOTHING. He just sat there in triple darkness.
Part IV
Then he looked out in the distance and it started getting lighter and lighter and he saw something coming toward him. Oh no! Oh no! It got closer and closer, and closer and closer and it was – Rise and Dawn.
NOTHING’S Son, Set regained his composure, cleared his throat – “uhrum” and said, “Where were you two yesterday?”
Dawn said, “Set, on our way here we decided to forgive and forget. Because in forgiveness there is healing, and we like the feeling, so we are going to be on our merry way.”
Set watched them go out of sight. And he said, “Well, I’m not forgiving and I’m not forgetting. I’m sitting right here in the West and this is where I’ll be sitting from now on. I’ll get even with SOMETHING all by myself.”
And ever since then, NOTHING’S son, Set has been setting in the West.
And that’s the truth about SOMETHING and about NOTHING.
And the moral of this story is: If you are going to do something about something, do it before the sun sets or you will get caught sitting on your ass-ets in the dark.
What is the most absurd thing you’ve been charged for on a bill?
I can think of two examples, both of which have soured me on them.
First was AT&T. I was living in Charlotte and had just gotten laid off. I was scrambling around town trying to find employment so I didn’t have to collect unemployment. The good part was I did find a contracting job that afternoon and would soon be hired, though the job didn’t pay much and lasted only 2 months.
I got home from an interview that afternoon and got my mail. First was a warning from Bellsouth (another company I despise) that I had an unusually high phone bill that month. I was concerned and then found my phone bill. $180!!!!!
I looked at the itemized bill and found the culprit. A third-party call from Valdosta, GA, to where I can only surmise was the USVI was on my bill. I thought, must be a mistake. I called Bellsouth and they referred me to AT&T, my long-distance provider.
The woman I talked to refused to admit the mistake. She actually doubled down, saying it happened so I must have agreed to it. I looked at the date. 2/13/1999. Not only was I not even at home for most of that day, but I was even further away from Valdosta than that, having been in that part of Georgia last in 1993. A supervisor said the same thing and refused to listen to me. I wound up having to eat the bill or risk going to collections.
When people ask me why I won’t get AT&T U-Verse, I tell them that story.
Second was an item the restaurant no longer carried, and it made an already unpleasant dining experience even worse.
My wife and I were downtown at an event, which made us take a late dinner. 7pm is late for us, but hardly an unreasonable time to eat. We decided to treat ourselves to a local restaurant in the area, one we had been to before without incident.
They gave us our menus. I ordered the short ribs and a salad. They brough out the salad pretty quickly. While I was eating, they came out (a half hour after I ordered) and said they no longer had short ribs, that the menu hadn’t been updated.
I got the menu and ordered something else. Okay, things happen, right?
Well in the meantime, a large party sat down and was promptly served. That would have been fine, except we were still waiting for our food. I talked to a manager who just brushed my complaints off. I almost walked out with my wife at that point, because it was approaching a 2 hour wait time (yes, 9PM!!!) after we had ordered, and the wait staff was ignoring us in favor of that large party.
The food finally came. It was not good, but I didn’t dare order something else so I ate it and waited for the bill. It was almost double what I was expecting to pay.. I hadn’t ordered anything that much more expensive so what was going on?
The itemized bill made it very clear. They had charged me for short ribs. You know, the thing they said they didn’t have any more. They took them off but no other recourse except a small dessert.
We have not been back, but my wife’s local woman’s club catered from them, and she told me the food was horrible
What’s the most unforgivable statement made by your father-in-law?
I was undergoing IVF treatment as my husband has low sperm count. I, on the other hand was super – fertile and we had high hopes from the fertility treatment.
Soon we were called for transfer of fertilized eggs to my uterus. During this time, my in – laws came to visit us. We had not told them yet about the IVF, but since next day we had to visit the hospital, we confided to my mom – in – law. She was very happy and supportive and insisted that she will also come to the hospital. We both were very much okay with that. She is very helpful person and loves all her sons.
When my Dad – in – law came to know, he also started showing interest in coming to the hospital. He had lot of health issues – diabetic, heart ailment etc. I tried to tell him it’s uncomfortable for him as we don’t know how much time it will take. The hospital was quite far from our place and there were no decent restaurants in that area. Since we had already been there a few times, we knew this well. But, being an obnoxious person, he totally used his ‘dad’ card and got ready the next morning to come with us.
My husband was upset, but there was no time to argue, also he never listend to any reasonable request in his whole life. So we all went. As predicted it became quite late by the time the procedure was done. Even though we were all tired and hungry, the mood was happy as we – me, husband and his mom, were happy and hopeful after the procedure. Mom assured me that she will stay for at least 2–3 weeks as I was prescribed bedrest ( this is almost 16 years ago).
Meanwhile Father in law was cranky with hunger and also was not interested in staying so long, so he started getting a foul mood. He started grilling my husband about the IVF procedure – why it’s being done – it was very embarrassing for him. That too right in the restaurant. Then he asked, “How much did it cost ? “ My husband said ,” Rs.60,000/- “ Father -in -laws eyebrows shot up and he said , “ That’s too much ! “ Then he looked at me and said ,” I got mine for free !”
Oh my god, we were so angry to hear that ! I will never forget his face when he said those words.
But my mom -in – law had the perfect retort. She said ,” And that’s why you don’t respect them !”
Edit – Thanks for the support. Some of you have asked about the result of my IVF treatment – it was very much positive. I have 15 yr old twins – both are boys and they are fraternal twins.
Also some discussion was there about the treatment method that we selected.
I had already done two cycles of IUI. It was unsuccessful as my husband has asthenospermia. It means that sperms have reduce motility. So even though sperm count is good, the sperms cannot penetrate the egg.
The treatment I actually underwent was ICSI – a selective type of IVF, where a sperm is actually injected into an egg to bring about fertilisation.
The cost factor – it was highly reduced for me because I am a medical professional myself. The doctor voluntarily reduced the fees and took only lab and OT charges from us. My bro in law also had same issues and they had to undergo 3 cycles of ICSI and ended up spending almost Rs.2.5 lakh, 12 years ago.
John has something to say
John
What was the day that changed your life in a way you would never have expected when you woke up that morning?
A little over a year ago, on June 1, 2020, I woke up startled to hear my door pounding loudly. My girlfriend of just a few months was at the door and she looked like she had just rolled out of bed and run over to come get me (she had and she wasn’t wearing her shoes yet either). She told me that my mom and sisters had tried to get a hold of me but couldn’t because my phone was on silent, so they called her instead and that I needed to get dressed ASAP so we could go to the hospital. My father who had had a lot of health issues throughout his life but had always fought through it, had suddenly coded and the doctors managed to barely revive him long enough to put him into a medically induced coma.
We spent the rest of the day at the hospital saying our goodbyes and contacting our extended family members. My grandfather was in a care home at the time and my grandmother was also in the hospital being treated for a fall at home (they died 2 months apart later in the year) and my aunt, his only sibling, didn’t want to bother to drive down to Utah from Boise.
My mom got a lot of doctors opinions and he was given a lot of religious blessings that day and at the end of it all we decided to keep him alive to see if he would wake up. He was given a less than 5% chance of waking up, but he had beaten odds worse than that before and we all were sure he would pull out of it as he had in the past. My aunt ended up making the drive with one of my three cousins by the fourth day of his coma to help out because my mom was always at the hospital and since this was mid-COVID, they wouldn’t let anyone else in the room.
By the end of the week my mom had decided it wasn’t going to make sense to keep him in his coma and that we needed to turn off the machines, because he wasn’t improving in any way, and we didn’t have the income necessary to sustain it. We got extremely special permission from the hospital and were allowed to have 6 people in the room when we turned off the machines, and I would not wish that experience on anyone. I have nightmares that I won’t be able to talk about for years about that experience.
At the end of it all it took 5 more months and then my grandfather gave up the will to live and just passed away at the care home, followed 2 months later by my grandmother a week before Christmas. Currently, my family is locked in an extremely heated and horribly bitter lawsuit with my aunt over the inheritance from my grandparents estate and my family has fallen entirely apart.
My father passed away a year and 2 days ago as I’m typing this and there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about him. If things had been different maybe we would still be a family and we would all still be at least talking to each other, but who knows.
Anyway, thanks for listening to my rant, sorry for bumming you out.
Salomar Barak groaned. The groan pulled her into consciousness. She opened her eyes, surveyed her surroundings, and almost cried. The freighter, her freighter, her beautiful Flaming Salomardorlay scattered about her, broken into hundreds of pieces. Held upside down by the safety webbing of her captain’s lounge, she looked over what remained of the cockpit.“Computer?”“Yes.”“You still work?” For a moment, Salomar dared to hope.“Not for long.”“What happened? Where are we?”“One, what happened? Unknown sound blast as we jumped.”“Energy blast? Sound? From who? From where? I don’t remember any ships in our gate.”“Records indicate blast from this ship.”“This ship? How?”“Two, where are we? Planet unknown. Not in my charts. Air is compatible for humans and other life forms. No time to discover if life is on planet, or what kind.”“Computer, is any of this ship salvageable?”“Negative”“The cargo?”“Unknown.”At first, the monotone voice of the computer was reassuring. As the gravity of the situation sunk in, Salomar wished for better news.“Damn! Of all the unknown, uncharted planets I had to pick for a crash, it had to be a water-world. How can anyone survive, breathing this wet air?” She listened, and heard none of her cargo call. She also heard no noises from the water indicating flesh eaters at a feast. Swallowing the pain of losing her ship, her savings, and her dreams, she cut the webbing of the Captain’s lounge and lowered herself into the water. Carefully, she picked her way through the flotsam and jetsam of what had once been the beautiful Flaming Salomardor. She allowed her tears to fall.The air, foul with a green fog that drifted aimlessly in layered tendrils, caressed her with inquisitive fingers. The water was warm, and where she stood, was shallow. And one or the other, or both, stunk of rotten eggs. The sunlight added an eerie glow. To the west, mountains loomed.“Warning! Warning! Warning! Fuel pod leak. Fuel pod leak. Warning!”“Frap! Just what I need. I can’t even stay at what’s left of the ship until rescue. Not that there’s much to stay at.“I’d best check the cargo before I take off. I doubt any of His Royal Majesty’s Pet Purple Birds survived, but on the chance one did….” The thought, muttered, trailed off into swallowing silence.Salomar waded to what remained of the cargo bay. Several broken eggs coagulated on the surface of the sea. Nine dead birds floated among them, dead parents guarding their equally dead children. “One bird missing–probably trapped under something. Well, I can’t stick around looking for it, even if it is a royal bird. A royal pain, if you ask me.” She slogged back to the cockpit and searched out her emergency kit. What she found was already waterlogged into mush and useless. The beacon was dry, and as long as it remained dry, would work. She hoped. She quickly stuffed a few rations not yet soaked into her ship-shirt pockets, along with a small signal light, and prayed the pocket seals would hold.
“Computer?”
“Warning! Warning! Warn….”
“Oh, shut up, will you? I know about the leak.” The computer did not shut up.
The action of her movements, the focus on what needed to be done dried her tears, but did not ease her pain. All her life she wanted to go to the stars. She saved every credit she could earn. She hired onto a freighter and gladly did whatever scut work she was assigned. Her own time she spent at the computer learning all she could about each and every job it took to run a ship, and how to pilot a ship through the void.
She applied for a job in hydraulics. No one liked hydraulics – literally, the ‘stink’ job on board. Accepted, she soon was in charge.
When she applied for communications, she was turned down. Too valuable in plumbing, they told her. Before they docked at the next port, she requested a meeting with the Captain. She told him her plan, to learn all the jobs necessary to run a freighter, showed him her transcripts from the training, and told him of her dream to own and pilot her own freighter. She also told him she would be looking for another ship when they docked, and would he please write a letter of recommendation for her.
By the time they docked, she worked split shifts between hydraulics and communications. It took 10 years to work her way through the ship and to save enough credits to venture out on her own. She was grateful her Captain had enough faith in her to help underwrite the Flaming Salomardor, and that he sent her what trade he could. He was probably her best, if not only, friend. Piloting a small freighter did not lend itself well to friendships. Let alone relationships.
With a sigh of resignation Salomar turned for one last look at what had been her home, her life’s work, her dreams. It was not easy to say a final good-bye to her freighter.
She hadn’t gone far before she realized she couldn’t hear the voice of the computer and it’s incessant warning. She was truly alone. Even the sound of her voice seemed swallowed by the eerie fog. The mountains, when visible, looked like abandoned black dragon scales stuck vertically in long dead and cold molten rock. Salomar saw no signs of life.
“I do believe, in the vids at least, this is where the monster rises from the sea to eat the maiden. Thank the gods I’m no longer a maiden.” Her attempt at humor failed to raise her spirits.
“Those mountains don’t look more than ten, maybe fifteen kilometers off, shouldn’t take too long to reach, unless I have to swim a good portion of it.” Alone, she began the long wade to the shore, humming a long forgotten nursery rhyme under her breath.
Salomar screamed. Heart pounding, knife drawn, she wheeled in a defensive crouch to face the monster attacking her back. “Oh. It’s you.” She looked into the face of the missing bird. Wading silently behind her, it pecked at her shoulder. “Well, guess we’d best see if any of your feed survived, then we need to get out of here. This water is creepy, and I smell the salt of a leaky fuel pod. Wouldn’t be nice to be here when the damn thing blows.” Salomar and the bird returned to the ship to search for the food. The computer still warned all who listened. Or didn’t listen.
The bird stood quietly and looked at the carnage of dead clutch-mates and broken eggs. Salomar could not see the mourning heart of the bird.
She found some dry seed and quickly jerry-rigged a pack from seed bags and rope to sling over the bird’s back. She took the beacon from her arm pocket and hung it around the bird’s neck. At almost three meters in height, there was a better chance of it staying dry on the bird, than in Salomar’s sleeve pocket. On their way out of the cargo area, she came across one of the silver and gold leads, meant only for the royal personages to handle, and fastened it on the jeweled harness worn by the bird. The jewels and cut metal reflected the green haze in laser sharp spears.
“Well, bird, anything as valuable as you must have a name, but damned if I know it. So I’ll just call you Bird, and you may call me Captain. Now, let’s head for those upended dragon scales that pass for mountains.
“With those bright red and purple feathers, you must be a male. It is the male isn’t it, that is the brighter colored? Perhaps I should call you Mister Bird.”
Bird stopped to look at her, first with his right eye, then with his left. Then he turned and continued walking.
“So, Mr. Bird, why does the Emperor want you? You appear too beautiful to be used as a beast of burden, even though circumstances beyond my control have unfortunately placed you in that capacity. And with the jeweled leads, you obviously aren’t meant for food. So, you must be a pet. A toy. Must be nice to be the Emperor’s toy. You’re too passive to be a guard bird. Or, maybe you were to be a present for the Empress? Ah, I bet that’s it, eh Mr. Bird?” Salomar prattled, just for the sound of a voice. On board the ship, she and Computer had carried on conversations, but here, in the shallow sea, she felt the aloneness.
The sun lowered until it seemed to balance precariously on the edge of the world. Through the ever-present mist, it appeared to rest there just a moment before tumbling into darkness.
There was no moon visible for this strange world. No stars shone through the mist. The mist glowed softly green, almost casting enough light for Salomar to see where they waded. She turned on her light; the mist threw it blindingly back at her. She turned the light off, and placed it back in the pack.
The only sound was the soft sloshing noises Salomar’s legs made cutting through the water, and her voice when she spoke. There were no jumpers from the water. No breakers to be heard crashing onto the shore. Bird made no noise at all.
The water, at its deepest had been to her waist, at its shallowest, to her knees. The water felt slimy, and began to eat her clothing. Her legs started to cramp.
Once full dark set in, Salomar noticed tiny lights darting in the water.
“Well, Mr. Bird, it appears we have company. I thought these waters were void of life, but there seems to be a great deal of life in them. I hope they don’t have a strong liking for human. Or bird. Let me know if they start to nibble on your legs. They seem to be staying away from mine.”
Bird ignored her and continued to walk. He made no effort to escape. He stayed with her; seemingly glad for the company, and the sound of a human voice. He walked next to her, matching her pace, rather than being led, or trying to lead.
Quiet, the bird focused on Salomar when she spoke, first with one eye, then with the other, as if absorbing every word, every nuance. When Salomar finished speaking, the bird would turn its head forward, and continue toward the westward mountains.
“You know, Mr. Bird, I thought you were the dumbest cargo I’d ever hauled. But I’ll be honest—you are fair company—a lousy conversationalist, but fair company. When we get off this forsaken planet, I shall personally ask His Royal Emperor Audubon the Eighth to see to it that you never lack for any of the comforts. And, by golly, if he’s willing, I just may petition him for you. Would you like that? Would you like flying about space in a proper ship hauling freight and taking time to see the sights? We’ll tour all the exotic planets. But no water planets, ok? Maybe even find you a mate. Then the three of us will see the Galaxy. How ‘bout that, Mr. Bird? Sound like fun?” Bird ignored her questions.
“Soda biscuits! I should be so lucky. With my luck, I’ll be tried for destroying His Royal Birds. I wonder who shot us, anyway. And why? And why just as we jumped? Are we getting any closer to those damn mountains? It’s hard to tell, in this slimy, foul mist.”
Salomar talked. It helped her remain awake. She put her arm about the bird, and used him for support, to relieve the cramps in her legs. Her voice slowed, then stopped. Asleep, she slid into the water and floated on her back. The bird walked, dragging her until brightness on the eastern horizon awakened her.
When she stood, what was left of her suit, floated off in shreds. She walked out of her left boot. A few steps later, her right boot stayed behind. Barefoot, she continued to wade. The pea gravel forced itself between her tender toes. The sun burned through the mist, blackened her skin. Still, the mountains seemed no closer.
“Y’know, bird. Ma was right, I’m thinking right about now. I shoulda stayed home, married some bloke, and had a passel of kids. But oh no, I had to do it myself. I had to go into space. I had to go into hock, too, but that’s not the point of this monologue. No, ‘bout now, I’m a wishin’ I’da stayed put—or at least not ventured past the freight station. I coulda worked there. That was in space, but closer to home. But, no….” Salomar spoke softly through cracked lips. There were breaths between words and many breaths between sentences.
Her sunburn blistered, cracked, oozed. She screamed with pain when she fell into the water. The seawater felt like acid on her burnt and cracked skin. Bird stood and watched, first with one eye, then with the other until she stood, and they continued their trek.
For the second night, the sun seemed to stop for a moment on the sharp edge of the mountains, as if deciding whether or not to plunge once more into darkness. For a second night, Salomar looked at the mountains, ever before her, yet never seeming nearer.
Her legs cramped. Her body burned. She stopped. Bird stopped. She slid into the water, and with a sharp intake of breath she stood, and shook herself. “Got to keep going. We’re almost there. ‘Most there.” The bird turned its attention from Salomar to the mountains, and trudged onward.
“Y’know, Mr. Bird, no one said hoppin’ freight around space would be easy, but by the gonads of St. Patrick, I surely thought it would be safer than the Navy. Those troop fight wars. About now, though, I wish I’da listened to Ma. Wonder how she is. A little late to worry ‘bout her, huh? Probably died years ago. But I wonder. She used to make the most wonderful spiced coffee in the Universe. Sure could do with a cup ‘bout now. Wonder if she ever forgave me for chasing my dream?”
Bird stopped, looked at her from each eye, and then resumed his walk.
The merciful embrace of fever clothed Salomar in the eerie glow of the mist. The mist thickened and twirled about her. She clung to the bird as dizziness swept through her. She pointed, excitement in her voice, “Mr. Bird, look—there’s Ma. There’s Ma! Ma? Did you come to save us? We have to take Bird, y’know. Yeah, we do.” The mist thinned, Ma dissolved, clarity returned to Salomar.
“Mr. Bird, we’d best get to land before long, or I won’t be worth much. I’m already hallucinating. Wonder when the rescue party will come? Hope it’s damned quick. There’s nothing in this water we can eat. I hope we can find something on the land. At least water. Ours is ‘bout gone.”
She opened the canteen, carried on bird’s back, and shared the remaining few drops. She deliberately replaced the empty canteen on the bird, “We’ll need it on land,” she explained to Bird.
Chills racked her body as they walked. “Ma,” she whined, “Ma, I’m cold. Please, Ma, bring me ‘nother blanket. I’ll be good. I’ll stay here, Ma, I won’t never leave you. Promise.”
Bird stopped, and watched Salomar carry on her conversation with her long deceased mother.
Salomar stopped. “Thank you, Ma. I’m all warm now.” Quietly, she raised her arms for a hug as she slid into the water. Bird watched. When Salomar did not scream, or stand again, Bird dropped the beacon into the sea then turned and climbed onto the rocks, shook the water from her wings and soared.
*Prepare my bed! The human is dead, as are my clutch-mates and the eggs of our young. I cannot hold my eggs much longer. Prepare my bed!*
‘Afa!It is Afa! She comes. Sing the chorus to Afa.‘ The golden male birds lifted their voices in praise and adulation. An escort soared from the cliffs to guide her to the nest awaiting her arrival.
Afa settled in her nest, drank nectar from the fruit of life, and began laying her eggs. When her five green eggs were in the nest, and she had slept a bit, one of the golden male choir relieved her of nest duty.
‘When Afa has rested enough, we would hear your story, and work it into song.‘
*Thank you, golden mate. I am somewhat rested. My clutch-mates and I almost didn’t make it. We were too far from the ship’s navigation system. At the last moment, we combined our efforts and sent a surge of song strong enough to avert the planned route. It is my eternal sadness that our burst also killed my clutch-mates. Our eggs died when we crashed into the Living Sea.
*The humans would have enslaved us for their enjoyment. They do not understand true royalty.*
The choir looked at one another, then at Afa. Finally, one dared to ask, ‘Afa, what are humans?‘
Joker Kills Murray – Ending Scene
Soft Baked Pretzels
homemade soft pretzels 9534
Ingredients
1 envelope dry yeast
1 1/2 cups warm water
1 tablespoon granulated sugar
4 cups all-purpose flour (maybe more)
1 beaten egg
Coarse salt (optional)
Instructions
Heat oven to 425 degrees F.
In a large bowl, dissolve yeast in water.
Add sugar and flour, and mix. Dough should be soft but not sticky. Add a little more flour if it is too sticky.
Let dough rise for 30 minutes.
Cut dough into 12 pieces. Roll pieces of dough into 16 inch ropes.
To make pretzels, curve ends of each rope to make a circle; cross ends at top. Twist ends once and lay down over bottom of circle. Spray cookie sheet with baking spray.
Arrange pretzels on sheet.
Brush on egg and sprinkle with coarse salt.
Bake for 12 to 15 minutes, or until golden.
homemade soft pretzels 9490
What is something you are surprised you survived as a child?
My sister recently found a cache of letters our mother had written to her mother. One of the letters, from early 1962 and written when I was 4, detailed the night she spent holding my little body as I was overcome with a high fever and suffered seizure after seizure after seizure through the night and into the morning.
The town was socked in by a rare snowstorm, my father was nowhere to be found, and she was home alone with me and my four siblings, who would have been 1, 3, 7 and 9. She kept feeding me aspirin and giving me sponge baths.
My tongue became so swollen she stuck her finger in my mouth to try to keep my airway open. Come the morning, my father finally showed up, my mother threw a blanket around me, left him with the rest of the kids, and rushed me to the hospital emergency room, where our family doctor was waiting for us at the door.
My temperature was 105.4 and my lungs were congested from viral pneumonia.
I was apparently so close to death that if she had had to wait just a couple of more hours, I wouldn’t have made it.
My mother spent a week with me at the hospital, not returning home until she could bring me with her.
Though I remember none of this, I was apparently the recipient of a large number of injections, 5 within the first 30 minutes, to the point that my behind reportedly became so sore that I couldn’t even sit on a toilet seat.
I became so terrified of and uncooperative with the nurses and doctors that I wouldn’t accept any oral medications or even food from them and my mother had to give them to me.
Two years after that, I spent another week in the hospital for tests and treatment for an apparent kidney disease that had me sleeping 12 hours a day.
So I guess I’m surprised I survived early childhood, in general. I didn’t get out unscathed, though. I’ve had a lifelong terror of needles and a pathological distrust of doctors.
As a mother myself, I’m glad I was the child in that experience and not the mother. I don’t know how she did that.
You will be alone most of the time. Not lonely, but alone. Try to understand the difference to avoid unnecessary suffering.
Happiness will not come easily as it came when you were young. You would have to work towards it. Discipline and sacrifice would be your best bet. Don’t get caught in the YOLO gimmick.
Life will get boring. Your mind will wander. Learn to control it before it starts controlling you.
Your best friend might no longer be your best friend. Your ex would have already moved on. You will struggle. But it will imbue you with lots of wisdom. So don’t curse yourself.
You’ll realise in retrospect that very few people really loved you whilst others just wanted something out of you.
Memories are not always good. More than often, they induce unncecesary fear, anxiety and mood swings.
Time starts becoming the most valuable commodity. It will treat you like shit if you treat it cheaply.
Whether you like it or not, people will talk behind you. Sometimes it would be the people whom you trusted the most. Learn to ignore them.
You’ll run down the guilt-valley more often than before. You will do things which you know is not good for you but will anyways end up doing it. You will invariably be distracted by foul things. This is your mind conquering your weak spot. Like I said, discipline can save you.
You’ll realize that success is not that easy after all. It’s that difficult. You would be tempted to give up on your dreams and live an average life. Don’t.
Things will go wrong. Personally and professionally. The unexpected will happen. There won’t be any reason/person to blame on. Your faith in humanity will plummet all of a sudden. But hey, don’t give up. Move on.
You will soon start noticing your parents are getting old, your best friend is suffering from illness or money constrait. You realize how much time you’ve wasted playing the ego game. So don’t wait. Make that phone call now.
Most of the times, you’ll experience fear for no reason. When things are going good, you’ll dread on ‘what if this happiness goes away?’. When things are not going good, you’ll still dread on what’s going to happen next.
You’ll get your heart broken multiple times. And you’ll have to break a couple of hearts yourself. That’s life. There no right and wrong here.
There are no good people/bad people. You’ll have to come out of this cynical mind-set. There are only people who bring you pleasantness and unplesantness. Remember, people who bring unplesantness to you might bring pleasantness to someone else.
You’ll realize that multi-tasking is not beneficial. You start focusing on one big goal/day rather than 10 small goals/day. You’ll learn to differentiate between being productive and being busy.
You’ll learn that not all emotions you experience are genuine. More than half of them are mere mind-games. Learn to distinguish to avoid bouts of depression.
You’ll be forced to change your attitude towards failures because you’ll have more failures than success. You will no longer react to events, but will eventually respond to it. Reacting will get you into more trouble. Responding will move you towards a solution.
You’ll realise that you can’t be friends with everyone. And you don’t have to be. Accept this fact sooner than later.
You’ll realise that earning respect is more difficult than earning money. And it’s the respect that would eventually make you feel proud about yourself in life.
“TO TARGET ALL OF BRICS’s COUNTRIES”, THE COLLECTIVE WEST PLAN.
Lordy! She is absolutely right!
To psychologists and psychiatrists: have you had a patient you really feared? Why?
I would like to be anonymous to answer your question.
I am a psychiatrist and I was in duty to give counseling and figure out any mental problems to the prisoners of Singapore.
I’ve met a lot of people but only one pops out in my mind when I read your question.
He was a boy, barely 15.
When I was looking at his medical chart, he was surprisingly a very bright kid, with an IQ level of 140.
But, he was arrested by police when his own parents lodged a complaint; they feared their own child might kill them.
He had his own way dealing with his life: he showed no emotions, nor answered any of my questions.
But, the one thing scares me the most was when I look through the CCTV, it seemed his body reacted with time; like some sort of a timetable.
He only went to the washroom at 2pm, 6pm and 9pm; and, slept exactly at 10pm.
Just before I retire, I revisit him back and had the chills for lifetime when he told me this, ‘when you were observing me, I too, was observing you. I figured you out, but you had no clue about me.’
Edit:
For those who asked in detail about this case, This is a situation I handled back in 2009. So, by right, he would be turning 22 this year. This boy was in prison 3 months before I was given in charge of his case which is around October 2009.
His parents lodged a complaint that goes like this, ‘finding him in their bedroom, holding a knife, staring at them while they’re asleep.”
However, this kid never once, caused harm to his parents or anyone else, but they were concerned with his behavior particularly in school; he disliked arts, and girls for some reason. He killed a cat because it was purring when he attempted a math question. There is no strange history or environment or any issues regarding his upbringing.
One notable feature of his; he is ambidextrous and he have no friends. He is somehow very observant, quiet and highly manipulative. I concluded him as a psychopath in my final report. And yes, I visited him for the last time in 2012. And I still wonder, what is really going on his head.
As a teacher, what is the saddest experience you’ve had while on the job?
I had a 22 year old student with a high school diploma struggling in my class. I stayed after every day to offer tutoring for my students. He walks in and notices he is the only one there, asks me if he can close the door to talk to me privately.
He closed the door walked to my desk with his head down, looked up at me with tears in his eyes and told me he couldn’t read.
I’m dumbfounded, he graduated from high school and can’t read?
He was a gifted football player, was passed in his classes so he could play. No worries for his future just a winning ball team.
I decided we would start with the very basics, he struggled to sound words out and I was at a loss. We worked for a month. Finally I figured out he had dyslexia when I had him copy a paragraph from the book we were working on.
I got us an appointment with the campus director, we went in and he sat there next to me mortified with tears running down his face. I told the campus director what was going on, that I think he is dyslexic and that is why he is having trouble learning to read.
We got him in for the specialized testing and he was diagnosed with dyslexia. We had to put him on a leave so he could go to special classes to learn how to read.
I had him the next year in my class again. He was a changed man, held his head up, and was at the top of the class. He pulled me aside to thank me for being the first teacher to care that he actually learned.
This was the saddest and turned into the happiest situations I had.
this is exactly how America will f!nish you
What are the craziest objects that you’ve seen TSA workers remove from someone’s bag to be confiscated?
A guy tried to take a big bottle of shampoo in his carry-on. The TSA guy told him to either throw it away or exit the line and check his luggage. The guy went on about how expensive the shampoo was and how he’d miss his flight if he exited. The TSA guy didn’t care. The guy then said, “Well… at least keep it so that somebody gets some use out of it.” TSA guy said, sorry, he couldn’t do it.
Another time, a woman in front of me got busted with several jars of jam. The TSA guy told her the same thing the other TSA agent told the shampoo guy. Either pitch it or else exit the line and check it in. “But you don’t understand. It’s JAM. It’s prize winning jam! Open up a jar and take a taste!” The TSA guy declined to eat the jam. The woman, now in tears, threw away her prize winning jam.
Not a confiscation, but while checking into Australia. Some of us were chosen to have our luggage searched. The guy in front of me had a suitcase full of porn. The Australian Border Force Officers didn’t bat an eye, didn’t smirk, didn’t say a word, just rifled through his suitcase looking for who-knows-what. The passenger turned nine shades of red. After their search, they packed it all back up and returned it to him.
This last one/best one I remember was a couple decades ago pre-TSA, but a couple in front of me were being searched by a very young Customs agent. He was going through the wife’s suitcase and pulled out an applicator tampon and held it up in the air: “Aha! What’s this?” Another Customs agent looking on immediately turned and stepped away. The husband yelled over to his wife: “Marge! Get over here and declare your Kotex before we end up in prison!” By now, the young guy realized his mistake and, now horrified, ushered them through as fast as humanly possible.
Pick A Side And Fight For It, Keep Your Head Down, Or Flee
Founder, CIO Mentor, and Member of the Bridgewater Board
Published Jun 25, 2024
As you know, based on my study of history, I believe there are now and have always been five big, interrelated forces that drive how domestic and world orders change. They are the 1) the big debt/credit/money cycle, 2) the big internal order/disorder cycle 3) the big external order/disorder cycle, 4) acts of nature (i.e., droughts, floods, and pandemics), and 5) human innovation that leads to advances in technology. Today, I am focusing on why I believe we are approaching the point in the internal order-disorder cycle when you will have to choose between picking a side and fighting for it, keeping your head down, or fleeing.
Pick a Side and Fight for It, Keep Your Head Down, or Flee
I believe we now have to face the fact that fighting for democracy as we know it—with thoughtful disagreement and compromises governed by rule of law—is unlikely to work. People like me who had a long shot hope for the emergence of a strong middle that fights against the extremists to bring the country together and makes major reforms to improve the system must recognize that the differences are becoming too irreconcilable for this to happen.
Based on the lessons I learned from studying history about how things typically transpire under similar circumstances, I believe that what we are now seeing is the parties increasingly moving to greater extremism and a fight-to-win at all cost mode. This is threatening the rule of law as we know it and is bringing us closer to some form of civil war. (As I will explain below, this is not necessarily a violent conflict, though that is possible).
When I wrote my book, Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order, which looked at the rises and declines of domestic and world orders over the last 500 years, I chronicled the six stages of the “big internal order cycle,” their symptoms, and the cause-effect relationships that drive them. Just like life cycles, these stages are logical and everyone goes through them, typically about once in a lifetime. Toward the end of the cycle, which is where all the signs and symptoms show us to be today, people typically face a choice between fighting for one side or another, keeping their heads down, or fleeing.
When I wrote the book in 2020, I saw the writing on the wall but had hoped for the possibility that we would not cross the brink into a type of civil war, so I estimated the chance of that as about 1 in 3. At the time, this was considered a crazy high estimate (this was before the 2020 election being contested and the January 6th incident). Now I think the risk of some form of civil war is uncomfortably more than 50 percent, and I am confident that in the next year we will know the answer to whether we will cross the brink.
In a Nutshell How It Works
Domestically in the US there are two political sides which are also each divided in two: 1) the right side (i.e., the red Republican team), which is divided into the hard right and the moderate right, and 2) the left (the blue Democratic team), which is divided into the hard left and the moderate left. Throughout history, in the later stages of the cycle of internal order and disorder, both sides become increasingly “hard” (extreme) for logical reasons. This is the part of the cycle that we are in. Classically, at this stage, wealth and values gaps are large, people have lost faith that the system will get them what they want, and the hard right and the hard left become increasingly committed to winning for their constituents at all costs, which eventually means abandoning the rules of the game and the judges and just fighting. In the current case and classically, the sides become unwilling to compromise as compromising is perceived as being weak and people are forced to either pick a side and fight for it, keep their heads down, or flee. You should be prepared to make that choice.
To make the decision only a bit more extreme than it currently is, in looking at these two sides, if you had to choose between a fascist government and a communist government, which would you choose? If you are not knowledgeable about what fascism is (a dictatorship of the hard right) and what communism really is (a dictatorship of the hard left), I urge you to get schooled because if you have to make choices, it’s important to really understand them.
The Case at Hand
Most importantly, there are now big irreconcilable differences that are producing win-at-all cost perspectives that are undermining the willingness to accept the judgements of the legal system. That is very relevant to nearly all decision making—most importantly to legal and political decision making in and beyond the election. We should acknowledge and worry about what’s going on and think about its implications. For example, we should pay attention to Maureen Dowd of the New York Times saying that the Supreme Court is “corrupt, rotten, and hurting America” and the numerous other similar attacks on the system. This is only one of a chorus of such comments. Comments like these beg questions such as 1) what is the definition of corruption, 2) if it is corruption, why don’t those who are corrupt get prosecuted and convicted, and 3) if the judicial system and the judges don’t make these decisions, how will they be made? Nowadays “corrupt” seems to mean what those on the other side of the political divide decide is corrupt. It is obvious to me that if people don’t rely on the judicial system to make unbiased decisions, decisions will instead be made by revolutionaries on both sides fighting it out. This of course is very relevant to the upcoming election, so let’s play out how that will likely go.
It seems to me that if Biden wins, it is likely that Trump and those on the hard right who he represents won’t accept the leadership of Biden and the Democratic Party, and that if Trump wins, those on the hard left won’t accept Trump’s leadership and tactics. What happens next depends on the strength of the legal system, with those on each side seemingly more willing to fight its judgments than abide by them if they don’t get what they want. For these reasons, it seems to me that there is a higher than 50 percent chance that democracy as we know it won’t run smoothly through the election and beyond, and that the still most popular view that everyone will abide by the votes and the rules (i.e., if we have ABC votes for president, senators, and congressmen, we will have XYZ policies enacted as a function of the system operating as it has operated) won’t prove true.
While it is now commonly believed that Trump Republicans are the greater extremists and the Democrats will be moderate, based on how things have transpired in history and what I see today, I’m not so sure. I think it’s more likely that both sides will be more extreme than is commonly believed. Given that it is doubtful that President Biden will remain president through his next term, we don’t know what part of the Democratic Party will win out in leading its agenda. While there are moderate leaders in the Democratic Party (i.e., Hakeem Jeffries, Gretchen Whitmer, and Josh Shapiro), those of the hard left (i.e., Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and AOC) have largely gone quiet, knowing that they would scare away moderate voters so it’s better for them to bide their time while they are pushing their hard left agenda behind the scenes. President Biden’s appointment of Lina Khan, a political activist of the left, to head the FTC is an example of the current administration using appointments the way Trump is making clear he will have his political appointees use their positions to pursue a hard-left agenda. In the recent past, leading Democrats have also expressed support for rule changes that would swing power their way (i.e., making Puerto Rico and Washington DC states so they could get control of the Senate, adding to the number of Supreme Court justices to get control of it, removing of the filibuster, etc.) Given all of this, I’m not so sure that hard left Democrats are out of the picture or are above using their government powers to achieve their political agenda any more than I believe that hard right Republicans are above doing that.
For all these reasons, it appears to me that we are probably headed toward an existential battle of the hard right against the hard left in which you will have to pick a side and fight for it, or keep your head down, or flee.
By flee, I think that will mostly be from one state to another and we will see increased emphasis on state rights rather than the central government being dominant. A clash between state governments and a fractured central government appears likely, which I would regard as a type of civil war even if not violent. If things get bad enough, some Americans will flee to other countries and foreigners will choose not to be here. Such disorder would also not be good for rule-of-law and our capital markets.
From studying history, I have seen these sorts of civil wars happen many times before—in the French, Russian, German, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Cuban and several other cases—so that the sequence of how this cycle typically transpires is clear and appears applicable to what is happening now in the United States (and in several other countries in varying degrees). For those who are interested, I have copied the section from Chapter Five (“The Big Cycle of Internal Order/Disorder”) of my book which the describes Stage Five (the pre-civil war stage that I believe we are in) and Stage Six (the civil war stage that I believe that we are in the brink of) of the internal order cycle. To be clear, I am not saying that we will certainly cross the brink into civil war—I am saying that there is a much higher probability of some type of civil war (including a non-violent one) than is commonly believed.
By the way, what I described here is about domestic conflict. A similar sort of conflict is happening internationally—i.e., there is a classic great power conflict with the two big sides internationally being the China-Russia side and the US -G7-Australia side and regional conflicts are being sorted out by nations in alliances with these two big sides. But that is a subject for another day. Let’s now focus on how the internal conflict dynamic typically works and apply that template to what’s happening to internal politics with this excerpt from Chapter Five of Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order.
Stage 5: When There Are Bad Financial Conditions and Intense Conflict
The most important influence that transpires in a Big Cycle is that of debt, money, and economic activity. Because I covered that cycle comprehensively in Chapters 3 and 4, I won’t explain it here in detail. But to understand Stage 5, you need to know that it follows Stage 3, in which there is peace and prosperity and favorable debt and credit conditions, and Stage 4, in which excess and decadence begin to bring about worse conditions. This process culminates in the most difficult and painful stage—Stage 6—when the entity runs out of money and there is typically terrible conflict in the form of revolution or civil war. Stage 5 is the period during which the interclass tensions that go along with worsening financial conditions come to a head. How different leaders, policy makers, and groups of people deal with conflict has a major impact on whether the country will undergo the needed changes peacefully or violently.
You can see signs of this happening now in a number of countries. Those that have adequate financial conditions (i.e., have incomes that are greater than their expenses and assets that are greater than their liabilities) are in relatively good shape. Those that do not are in relatively bad shape. They want money from the others. The problem is that there are many more who are in bad shape relative to those that are in good shape.
You can also see that these different conditions are big drivers of the differences in what is now happening to most aspects of these countries, states, cities, companies, and people—e.g., their education, healthcare, infrastructure, and well-being. You can also see big cultural differences in how countries approach their stressful conditions, with some approaching them more harmoniously than others who are more inclined to fight.
Because Stage 5 is such a pivotal stage in the internal cycle and because it’s the stage that many countries, most importantly the US, are now in, I will devote some time to going through the cause/effect relationships at play during it and the key indicators to watch in examining its progression. Then I will turn more specifically to where the United States stands.
The Classic Toxic Mix
The classic toxic mix of forces that brings about big internal conflicts consists of 1) the country and the people in the country (or state or city) being in bad financial shape (e.g., having big debt and non-debt obligations), 2) large income, wealth, and values gaps within that entity, and 3) a severe negative economic shock.
That confluence typically brings about disorder, conflict, and sometimes civil wars. The economic shock can come about for many reasons, including financial bubbles that burst, acts of nature (such as pandemics, droughts, and floods), and wars. It creates a financial stress test. The financial conditions (as measured by incomes relative to expenses and assets relative to liabilities) that exist at the time of the stress test are the shock absorbers. The sizes of the gaps in incomes, wealth, and values are the degrees of fragility of the system. When the financial problems occur, they typically first hit the private sector and then the public sector. Because governments will never let the private sector’s financial problems sink the entire system, it is the government’s financial condition that matters most. When the government runs out of buying power, there is a collapse. But on the way to a collapse there is a lot of fighting for money and political power.
From studying 50-plus civil wars and revolutions, it became clear that the single most reliable leading indicator of civil war or revolution is bankrupt government finances combined with big wealth gaps. That is because when the government lacks financial power, it can’t financially save those entities in the private sector that the government needs to save to keep the system running (as most governments, led by the United States, did at the end of 2008), it can’t buy what it needs, and it can’t pay people to do what it needs them to do. It is out of power.
A classic marker of being in Stage 5 and a leading indicator of the loss of borrowing and spending power, which is one of the triggers for going into Stage 6, is that the government has large deficits that are creating more debt to be sold than buyers other than the government’s own central bank are willing to buy. That leading indicator is turned on when governments that can’t print money have to raise taxes and cut spending, or when those that can print money print a lot of it and buy a lot of government debt. To be more specific, when the government runs out of money (by running a big deficit, having large debts, and not having access to adequate credit), it has limited options. It can either raise taxes and cut spending a lot or print a lot of money, which depreciates its value. Those governments that have the option to print money always do so because that is the much less painful path, but it leads investors to run out of the money and debt that is being printed. Those governments that can’t print money have to raise taxes and cut spending, which drives those with money to run out of the country (or state or city) because paying more taxes and losing services is intolerable. If these entities that can’t print money have large wealth gaps among their constituents, these moves typically lead to some form of civil war/revolution.
At the time of this writing, this late-cycle debt dynamic is now playing out in the United States at both the state and federal levels, with the main difference between them being that state governments can’t print money to pay their debts while the federal government can. The federal government and many state and city governments have large deficits, large debts, and large wealth gaps, and the central bank (the Federal Reserve) has the power to print money. So, at the time of this writing, the central bank is printing a lot of money and buying a lot of federal government debt, which finances the government spending that is much bigger than the federal government’s intake. That has helped the federal government and those it is trying to help, though it has also cost those who are holding dollars and dollar debt a lot in real purchasing power.
Those places (cities, states, and countries) that have the largest wealth gaps, the largest debts, and the worst declines in incomes are most likely to have the greatest conflicts. Interestingly, those states and cities in the US that have the highest per capita income and wealth levels tend to be the states and cities that are the most indebted and have the largest wealth gaps—e.g., cities like San Francisco, Chicago, and New York City and states like Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey.
Facing these conditions, expenditures have to be cut or more money has to be raised in some way. The next question becomes who will pay to fix them, the “haves” or the “have-nots”? Obviously, it can’t be the have-nots. Expenditure cuts are most intolerable for those who are poorest, so there needs to be more taxation of people who can afford to pay more and there is a heightened risk of some form of civil war or revolution. But when the haves realize that they will be taxed to pay for debt service and to reduce the deficits, they typically leave, causing the hollowing-out process. This is currently motivating movements from some states to others in the US. If bad economic conditions occur, that hastens the process. These circumstances largely drive the tax cycle.
History shows that raising taxes and cutting spending when there are large wealth gaps and bad economic conditions, more than anything else, has been a leading indicator of civil wars or revolutions of some type.
To be clear, they don’t have to be violent, though they can be. I see these cycles transpiring in my personal interactions. For example, I live in the state of Connecticut, which has the highest per capita income in the country, the largest wealth gap and income gap in the country, and one of the largest per capita debt and unfunded pension obligations in the country. I see how the haves and the have-nots are focused on their own lives and spend little time worrying about the other because they don’t have much contact. I have windows into what the lives of both the haves and the have-nots are like because I have contact with the people in our community of haves and because the work my wife does to help disengaged and disconnected high school students in disadvantaged communities brings her into contact with people who live in the communities of the have-nots. I see how terrible the conditions are in those have-not communities and how the haves (who appear rich and decadent to the have-nots) don’t feel rich. I see how they are all focused on their own struggles—with the haves struggling with work/life balance, making sure their kids are well-educated, etc., and the have-nots struggling with finding income, food security, avoiding violence, trying to get their kids a quality education, etc.
I see how both groups are more likely to have critical, stereotypical impressions of each other that make them more inclined to dislike each other than to view themselves empathetically as members of one community in which they should help each other. I see how difficult it can be to help each other because of these stereotypes and because the haves don’t feel that they have more than enough or that the have-nots deserve their financial support, and I fear what the future might hold because of the existing circumstances and how they are likely to worsen. I have seen close up how COVID-inflicted health and budget shocks have brought to the surface the terrible conditions of the have-nots and are worsening the financial gaps that could bring about the classic toxic mix dynamic.
Averages don’t matter as much as the number of people who are suffering and their power.
Those who favor policies that are good for the whole—e.g., free trade, globalization, advances in technology that replace people—without thinking about what happens if the whole is not divided in a way that benefits most people are missing the fact that the whole is at risk.
To have peace and prosperity, a society must have productivity that benefits most people. Do you think we have this today?
What does history show as the path that bankrupt governments can follow to raise productivity that benefits most people? It shows that restructuring and/or devaluing enough of the previously created debt and non-debt obligations helps a lot. That is classic in Stages 5 and 6. Once the restructuring or devaluation reduces the debt burdens, which is typically painful at the time, the reduced debt burdens allow for a rebuilding.
An essential ingredient for success is that the debt and money that are created are used to produce productivity gains and favorable returns on investment, rather than just being given away without yielding productivity and income gains. If it is given away without yielding these gains, the money will be devalued to the point that I won’t leave the government or anyone else with much buying power.
History shows that lending and spending on items that produce broad-based productivity gains and returns on investment that exceed the borrowing costs result in living standards rising with debts being paid off, so these are good policies.
If the amount of money being lent to finance the debt is inadequate, it is perfectly fine for the central bank to print the money and be the lender of last resort as long as the money is invested to have a return that is large enough to service the debt. History shows and logic dictates that investing well in education at all levels (including job training), infrastructure, and research that yields productive discoveries works very well. For example, big education and infrastructure programs have paid off nearly all the time (e.g., in the Tang Dynasty and many other Chinese dynasties, in the Roman Empire, in the Umayyad Caliphate, in the Mughal Empire in India, in Japan’s Meiji Restoration, and in China’s educational development programs over the last couple of decades), though they have long lead times. In fact, improvements in education and infrastructure, even those financed by debt, were essential ingredients behind the rises of virtually all empires, and declines in the quality of these investments were almost always ingredients behind empires’ declines. If done well, these interventions can more than counterbalance the classic toxic mix.
The classic toxic mix is usually accompanied by other problems. The more of the following conditions that are in place, the higher the probability of having a severe conflict like a civil war or revolution.
Decadence
While early in the cycle there is typically more spending of time and money on productive things, later in the cycle time and money go more toward indulgent things (e.g., the finer things, like expensive residences, art, jewelry, and clothes).
This begins in Stage 4 when such spending is fashionable, but by Stage 5 it begins to appear grotesque.
Often, that decadent spending is debt-financed, which worsens the financial conditions. The change in psychology that typically goes along with these changes is understandable. The haves feel that they have earned their money so they can spend it on luxuries if they like, while the have-nots view such spending at the same time they are suffering as unfair and selfish. Besides increasing resentments, decadent spending (as distinct from saving and investing) reduces productivity.
What a society spends money on matters. When it spends on investment items that yield productivity and income gains, it makes for a better future than when it spends on consumption items that don’t raise productivity and income.
Bureaucracy
While early in the internal order cycle bureaucracy is low, it is high late in the cycle, which makes sensible and necessary decision making more difficult.
That is because things tend to get more complex as they develop until they reach the point where even obviously good things can’t be done—necessitating revolutionary changes. In a legal and contract-based system (which has many benefits), this can become a problem because the law can stand in the way of doing obviously good things. I will give you an example that I’m close to because my wife and I care about it.
Because the US Constitution doesn’t make education a federal government responsibility, it has predominantly been a state and local responsibility with school funding coming from revenue raised by local taxes in cities and towns. Though it varies from state to state, typically those children in richer towns in richer states receive a much better education than those in poorer towns in poorer states. This is obviously unfair and unproductive even though most people agree that children should have equal opportunities in education. But because this structure is so ingrained in our political system, it is nearly impossible to fix without a revolutionary reinvention of how we approach it. There are more examples of the bureaucracy standing in the way of doing sensible, productive things than I have time and space to convey here. It is now a big problem in America.
Populism and Extremism
Out of disorder and discontent come leaders who have strong personalities, are anti-elitist, and claim to fight for the common man. They are called populists. Populism is a political and social phenomenon that appeals to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are not being addressed by the elites. It typically develops when there are wealth and opportunity gaps, perceived cultural threats from those with different values both inside and outside the country, and “establishment elites” in positions of power who are not working effectively for most people. Populists come into power when these conditions create anger among ordinary people who want those with political power to be fighters for them. Populists can be of the right or of the left, are much more extreme than moderates, and tend to appeal to the emotions of ordinary people. They are typically confrontational rather than collaborative and exclusive rather than inclusive. This leads to a lot of fighting between populists of the left and populists of the right over irreconcilable differences. The extremity of the revolution that occurs under them varies. For example, in the 1930s, populism of the left took the form of communism and that of the right took the form of fascism while nonviolent revolutionary changes took place in the US and the UK. More recently, in the United States, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 was a move to populism of the right while the popularity of Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez reflects the popularity of populism of the left. There are increased political movements toward populism in a number of countries. It could be said that the election of Joe Biden reflects a desire for less extremism and more moderation, though time will tell.
Watch populism and polarization as markers. The more that populism and polarization exist, the further along a nation is in Stage 5, and the closer it is to civil war and revolution. In Stage 5, moderates become the minority. In Stage 6, they cease to exist.
Class Warfare
In Stage 5, class warfare intensifies. That is because, as a rule, l during times of increased hardship and conflict there is an increased inclination to look at people in stereotypical ways as members of one or more classes and to look at these classes as either being enemies or allies. In Stage 5, this begins to become much more apparent. In Stage 6, it becomes dangerous.
A classic marker in Stage 5 that increases in Stage 6 is the demonization of those in other classes, which typically produces one or more scapegoat classes who are commonly believed to be the source of the problems. This leads to a drive to exclude, imprison, or destroy them, which happens in Stage 6. Ethnic, racial, and socioeconomic groups are often demonized. The most classic, horrific example of this comes from the Nazi’s treatment of Jews, who were blamed and persecuted for virtually all of Germany’s problems. Chinese minorities living in non-Chinese countries have been demonized and scapegoated during periods of economic and social stress. In the UK, Catholics were demonized and scapegoated in numerous stressful periods, such as the Glorious Revolution and the English Civil War. Rich capitalists are commonly demonized, especially those who are viewed to be making their money at the expense of the poor. Demonizing and scapegoating are a classic symptom and problem that we must keep an eye on.
The Loss of Truth in the Public Domain
Not knowing what is true because of distortions in the media and propaganda increases as people become more polarized, emotional, and politically motivated.
In Stage 5, those who are fighting typically work with those in the media to manipulate people’s emotions to gain support and to destroy the opposition. In other words, media folks of the left join with others of the left and media folks of the right join with others of the right in the dirty fight. The media goes wild like vigilantes: people are commonly attacked and essentially tried and found guilty in the media, and they have their lives ruined without a judge and jury. A common move among 1930s populists of the left (communists) and of the right (fascists) was to take control of the media and establish “ministers of propaganda” to guide them. The media they produced was explicitly aimed at turning the population against the groups that the governments considered “enemies of the state.” The government of the democratically run United Kingdom created a “Ministry of Information” during World War I and World War II to spread government propaganda, and leading newspaper publishers were elevated by the government if they did what the government wanted them to do to win the propaganda war or were vilified and suffered if they didn’t cooperate. Revolutionaries did the same distorting of the truth in all sorts of publications. During the French Revolution, newspapers run by revolutionaries pushed anti-monarchist and anti-religious sentiment, but when those revolutionaries attained power, they shut down dissenting newspapers during the Reign of Terror. During times of great wealth gaps and populist thinking, stories that bring down elites are popular and lucrative, especially those that bring down left-leaning elites in right-leaning media outlets and those that bring downright-leaning elites in left-leaning media outlets. History shows that significant increases in these activities are a problem that is typical of Stage 5, and that when combined with the ability to inflict other punishments, the media becomes a powerful weapon.
It is well-recognized this is happening at the time of this writing. The perceived truth in media, both traditional and social, is lower than at any other time in our lifetimes. For example, a 2019 Gallup poll found that only 13 percent of Americans surveyed have “a great deal” of trust in the media and only 41 percent of those surveyed have either a “fair” or “great deal” of trust in the media. That compares with 72 percent who trusted the media in 1976. This is not just a fringe media problem; it is a mainstream media problem and a problem for our whole society. The dramatically decreased trustworthiness has even plagued former icons of journalistic trust such as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, which have seen their trust ratings plunge. In addition to being politically motivated, sensationalistic stories have become commercially rewarding at a time when the media business is in financial trouble. Most of the media folks I speak with share my concerns, though they typically won’t share them openly. Still, in reflecting on the problem, Martin Baron, then executive editor of The Washington Post, said, “If you have a society where people can’t agree on the basic facts, how do you have a functioning democracy?” This dynamic is impeding free speech since people are afraid to speak up because of how they will be attacked in both traditional and social media by distortions that are meant to bring them down.
Even very capable and powerful people are now too afraid of the media to speak up about important matters or run for public office. Since most high-profile people are torn down, most everyone I speak with agrees that it is dangerous to be a high-profile, vocal person who fights for truth and justice, especially if one offends people who are inclined to use the media to fight. Though not discussed in public because of fears of media reprisals, this issue is continuously discussed in private. For example, during a lunch I had not long ago with a general who had held a very high political position and had just left government service, we explored what he would do next. I asked him what he was most passionate about. He said, “Of course helping my country.” I asked him whether he would consider running for elected office, and he explained that while he was willing to die for his country he couldn’t bring himself to run for public office because of how enemies would use the media and social media to make up lies to harm him and his family. This general and almost everyone I know who we should listen to are afraid to speak openly because they fear that attacks by extremists who oppose them will be enabled and amplified by the sensationalistic media. Many of my friends tell me that I’m crazy to speak so openly about controversial things such as those covered in this book because it is inevitable that some people or groups will try to take me down via the media. I think they are probably right, but I won’t let the risks dissuade me.
Rule-Following Fades and Raw Fighting Begins
When the causes that people are passionately behind are more important to them than the system for making decisions, the system is in jeopardy. Rules and laws work only when they are crystal clear and most people value working within them enough that they are willing to compromise in order to make them work well.
If both of these are less than excellent, the legal system is in jeopardy. If the competing parties are unwilling to try to be reasonable with each other and to make decisions civilly in pursuit of the well-being of the whole, which will require them to give up things that they want and might win in a fight, there will be a sort of civil war that will test the relative powers of the relevant parties. In this stage, winning at all costs is the game and playing dirty is the norm. Late in Stage 5 is when reason is abandoned in favor of passion.
When winning becomes the only thing that matters, unethical fighting becomes progressively more forceful in self-reinforcing ways. When everyone has causes that they are fighting for and no one can agree on anything, the system is on the brink of civil war/revolution.
This typically happens in a couple of ways:
Late in Stage 5 it is common for the legal and police systems to be used as political weapons by those who can control them. Also, private police systems form—e.g., thugs who beat people up and take their assets, and bodyguards to protect people from these things happening to them. For instance, the Nazi party formed a paramilitary wing before it came to power that then became an official force when the Nazis were in power. The short-lived British Union of Fascists in the 1930s and the Ku Klux Klan in the US were effectively paramilitary groups as well. Such cases are quite normal, so view their development as a marker of moving to the next stage.
Late in Stage 5 there are increasing numbers of protests that become increasingly violent. Because there is not always a clear line between a healthy protest and the beginnings of a revolution, leaders in power often struggle over how to allow protests without giving the perceived freedom to revolt against the system. Leaders must manage these situations well. A classic dilemma arises when demonstrations start to cross over into revolution. Both giving the freedom to protest and suppressing protests are risky paths for leaders, as either path could lead the revolution to get strong enough to topple the system. No system allows people to bring down the system—in most, an attempt to do so is treason, typically punishable by death. Nonetheless, it is the job of revolutionaries to bring down systems, so governments and revolutionaries test each other to see what the limits are. When broad-based discontent bubbles up and those in power allow it to grow, it can boil over to the point that when they try to put a lid on it, it explodes. The conflicts in the late part of Stage 5 typically build up to a crescendo that triggers the violent fighting that signifies the transition into what historians stamp as official civil war periods, which I am identifying as Stage 6 in the Big Cycle.
People dying in the fighting is the marker that almost certainly signifies the progression to the next and more violent civil war stage, which will continue until the winners and losers are clearly determined.
That brings me to my next principle:
When in doubt, get out—if you don’t want to be in a civil war or a war, you should get out while the getting is good.
This is typically late in Stage 5. History has shown that when things get bad, the doors typically close for people who want to leave. The same is true for investments and money as countries introduce capital controls and other measures during such times.
Crossing the line from Stage 5 (when there are very bad financial conditions and intense internal and external conflict exist) to Stage 6 (when there is civil war) occurs when the system for resolving disagreements goes from working to not working. In other words, it happens when the system is broken beyond repair, people are violent with each other, and the leadership has lost control.
As you might imagine, it is a much bigger deal to break a system/order and build a new one than it is to make revolutionary changes within an existing system/order. Though breaking a system/order is more traumatic, it isn’t necessarily a worse path than operating within a system.
Deciding whether to keep and renovate something old that is not working well or to dispose of it and replace it with something new is never easy, especially when the something new is not clearly known and what is being replaced is as important as the domestic order. Nonetheless, it happens, though typically it is not decided on intellectually; it is more often emotionally driven.
When one is in Stage 5 (like the US is now), the biggest question is how much the system will bend before it breaks.
The democratic system, which allows the population to do pretty much whatever it decides to do, produces more bending because the people can make leadership changes and only have themselves to blame. In this system regime changes can more easily happen in a peaceful way. However, the “one person, one vote” democratic process has the drawback of having leaders selected via popularity contests by people who are largely not doing the sort of thoughtful review of capabilities that most organizations would do when trying to find the right person for an important job. Democracy has also been shown to break down in times of great conflict.
Democracy requires consensus decision making and compromise, which requires a lot of people who have opposing views to work well with each other within the system. That ensures that parties that have significant constituencies can be represented, but like all big committees of people who have widely different views (and might even dislike each other), the decision-making system is not efficient.
The biggest risk to democracies is that they produce such fragmented and antagonistic decision making that they can be ineffective, which leads to bad results, which leads to revolutions led by populist autocrats who represent large segments of the population who want to have a strong, capable leader get control of the chaos and make the country work well for them.
Also noteworthy: history has shown that during times of great conflict federalist democracies (like the US) typically have conflicts between the states and the central government over their relative powers. That would be a marker to look out for that hasn’t yet arisen much in the US; it’s happening would signify the continued progression toward Stage Six.
There are far too many breakdowns of democracies to explore, let alone describe. While I looked into a number of them to see the patterns, I haven’t fully mined them, and I’m not going to dive into them here. I will say that the factors described in the explanations of Stage 5 when taken to the extreme—most importantly, terrible finances, decadence, internal strife and disorder, and/or major external conflict—lead to a dysfunctional set of conditions and a fight for power led by a strong leader. Archetypical examples include Athens from the late 400s to the 300s BCE, the end of the Roman Republic in the century or so preceding 27 BCE, Germany’s Weimar Republic in the 1920s, and the weak democracies of Italy, Japan, and Spain in the 1920s and 1930s that turned to autocracies of the right (fascism) to bring order to the chaos.
Different stages require different types of leaders to get the best results. Stage 5 is a juncture in which one path could lead to civil war/revolution and the other could lead to peaceful and, ideally, prosperous coexistence. Obviously the peaceful and prosperous path is the ideal path, but it is the much more difficult path to pull off.
That path requires a “strong peacemaker” who goes out of their way to bring the country together, including reaching out to the other side to involve them in the decision making and reshaping the order in a way that most people agree is fair and works well (i.e., is highly productive in a way that benefits most people). There are few such cases in history. We pray for them. The second type is a “strong fighter” who is capable of taking the country through the hell of civil war/revolution.
Stage 6: When There Are Civil Wars
Civil wars inevitably happen, so rather than assuming “it won’t happen here,” which most people in most countries assume after an extended period of not having them, it is better to be wary of them and look for the markers to indicate how close one is.
While in the last section we looked at nonviolent revolutions that took place within the order, in this section we will be looking at the markers and the patterns of civil wars and revolutions that were almost always violent and toppled the old order and replaced it with a new one. Though there are innumerable examples that I could have examined to understand how they work, I chose what I believe are the 29 most significant ones, which are shown in the following table. I categorized this group into those that produced big changes to the system/regime and those that did not. For example, the US Civil War was a really bloody civil war that failed to overturn the system/order, so it is in the second group at the bottom of the table, while those that toppled the system/order are at the top. These categories are of course imprecise, but once again we won’t let imprecision stand in the way of seeing what we couldn’t see if we insisted on being precise. Most of these conflicts, though not all of them, transpired in the archetypical way described in this section.
1719346104668
A classic example of a civil war breaking the system and having to build a new system is the Russian Revolution/Civil War of 1917. This put into place the communist internal order that eventually entered Stage 5 in the late 1980s, which led it to attempt to make revolutionary changes within the system—called perestroika (i.e., restructuring)—which failed and were followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union’s order in 1991. The communist domestic order lasted 74 years (from 1917 until 1991). That order was replaced by the new system/order that is now governing Russia, which, after the collapse of the old order, was built in the classic ways described earlier in this chapter in my explanations of Stages 1 and 2.
Another is Japan’s Meiji Restoration, which came about as a result of a three-year revolution (1866–69) that happened because the Japanese were closed off to the outside world and failed to advance. The Americans forced the Japanese to open, which prompted a revolutionary group to fight and defeat the rulers (led by the military shogun) in battle, which led to overturning the internal order then run by the four classes—the military, farmers, artisans, and merchants—that had ruled Japan. This old Japanese order run by traditional people was ultra-conservative (e.g., social mobility was outlawed) and was replaced by revolutionaries who were relatively progressive and changed everything by reinstating the powers of a modernizing emperor. Early in this period there were lots of labor disputes, strikes, and riots that resulted from the classic triggers of wealth gaps and bad economic conditions. In the reform process the leadership provided universal elementary education for both boys and girls, adopted capitalism, and opened the country up to the outside world. They did this with new technologies, which led them to become very competitive and gain wealth.
There are many such cases of countries that did the right things to produce revolutionarily beneficial improvements, just as there are many cases of revolutionaries doing the wrong things that inflicted terrible pain on their people for decades. By the way, as a result of its reformations Japan went on to move through the classic stages of the Big Cycle. It became extremely successful and rich. But over time it became decadent, overextended, and fragmented, had an economic depression, and fought expensive wars, all of which led to a classic demise. Its Meiji order and its classic Big Cycle lasted for 76 years from 1869 to 1945.
Civil wars and revolutions inevitably take place to radically change the internal order.
They include total restructurings of wealth and political power that include complete restructurings of debt and financial ownership and political decision making. These changes are the natural consequence of needing to make big changes that can’t be made within the existing system. Almost all systems encounter them. That is because almost all systems benefit some classes of people at the expense of other classes, which eventually becomes intolerable to the point that there is a fight to determine the path forward. When the gaps in wealth and values become very wide and bad economic conditions ensue so that the system is not working for a large percentage of the people, the people will fight to change the system. Those who are suffering the most economically will fight to get more wealth and power from those who have wealth and power and who benefit from the existing system. Naturally the revolutionaries want to radically change the system, so naturally they are willing to break the laws that those in power demand they adhere to. These revolutionary changes typically happen violently through civil wars, though as previously described, they can come about peacefully without toppling the system.
The periods of civil war are typically very brutal. Typically, early on these wars are forceful and orderly struggles for power, and as the fighting and emotions intensify and the sides do anything to win, the levels of brutality accelerate unexpectedly such that the actual levels of brutality that occur in the Stage 6 civil wars and revolutions would have been considered implausible in Stage 5. The elites and moderates generally flee, are imprisoned, or are killed. Reading the stories of civil wars and revolutions, such as the Spanish Civil War, the Chinese Civil War, the Russian Revolution, and the French Revolution, made my hair curl.
How do they transpire? Earlier I described the dynamics of Stage 5 that led to crossing the line into Stage 6. During this stage all of those intensify greatly. I will explain.
How Civil Wars and Revolutions Transpire
As previously described, the cycle of building wealth and wealth gaps that leads to a very small percentage of the population controlling an exceptionally large percentage of the wealth eventually results in the poor majority overthrowing the rich minority via civil wars and revolutions. This has happened more times than one can imagine.
While most of the archetypical civil wars and revolutions shifted power from the right to the left, many shifted wealth and power to the right and away from those on the left. However, there were fewer of them and they were different. They typically happened when the existing orders slipped into dysfunctional anarchies and a large percentage of the population yearned for strong leadership, discipline, and productivity. Examples of revolutions from the left to the right include Germany, Spain, Japan, and Italy in the 1930s; the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1980s to the early 1990s; the 1976 coup in Argentina replacing Isabel Perón with a military junta; and the coup leading to the Second French Empire in 1851. All those that I examined worked or didn’t work for the same reason. Like those of the left, these new internal orders succeeded when they produced broad-based economic successes and failed when they did not. Because broad economic prosperity is the biggest reason a new regime succeeds or fails, the long-term trends have been to both greater total wealth and broader distribution of the wealth (i.e., better economic and health outcomes for the average person). That big picture can be easily lost when one is in and experiencing one part of the Big Cycle.
Typically, the people who led the civil war/revolution were (and still are) well-educated people from middle-class backgrounds. For example, three of the key revolutionary leaders of the French Revolution were Georges-Jacques Danton, a lawyer raised in a bourgeois family; Jean-Paul Marat, a physician, scientist, and journalist raised in a bourgeois family; and Maximilian Robespierre, a lawyer and statesman also from a bourgeois family. This revolution was initially supported by many liberal aristocrats, like the Marquis de Lafayette, who were raised in moderately well-off families. Similarly, the leaders of the Russian Revolution were Vladimir Lenin, who studied law, and Leon Trotsky, who was raised in a bourgeois family of intellectuals. The Chinese Civil War was led by Mao, who was from a moderately well-off family and studied a variety of subjects such as law, economics, and political theory, and Zhou Enlai, who was from a scholarly middle-class family of civil servants. These leaders also typically were (and still are) charismatic and able to lead and work well with others to build big, well-run organizations that have the power to bring about the revolutions. If you want to look for the revolutionaries of the future, you might keep an eye on those who have these qualities. Over time they typically evolve from being idealistic intellectuals wanting to change the system to be fairer to brutal revolutionaries bent on winning at all costs.
While having large wealth gaps during economically difficult times was typically the biggest source of conflict, there were always other reasons for conflict that added up to a lot of opposition to the leadership and the system. Typically, in revolutions the revolutionaries with these different grievances joined together to make revolutionary changes; while they looked united during the revolution, after winning the revolution, they typically fought with each other over issues and for power.
As previously mentioned, during the civil war/revolution stage of the cycle the governments in power almost always had an acute shortage of money, credit, and buying power. That shortage created the desire to grab money from those who had it, which led those who had wealth to move it into places and assets that were safe, which led the governments to stop these movements by imposing capital controls—i.e., controls on movements to other jurisdictions (e.g., other countries), to other currencies, or to assets that are more difficult to tax and/or are less productive (e.g., gold).
To make matters even worse, when there was internal disorder, foreign enemies were more likely to challenge the country. This happens because domestic conflict causes vulnerabilities that make external wars more likely. Internal conflict splits the people within a country, is financially taxing on them, and demands attention that leaves less time for the leaders to tend to other issues—all things that create vulnerabilities for foreign powers to take advantage of. That is the main reason why internal wars and external wars tend to come close together. Other reasons include: emotions and tempers are heightened; strong populist leaders who tend to come to power at such times are fighters by nature; when there are internal conflicts leaders find that a perceived threat from an external enemy can bring the country together in support of the leader so they tend to encourage the conflict; and being deprived leads people/countries to be more willing to fight for what they need, including resources that other countries have.
Almost all civil wars have had some foreign powers participating in an attempt to influence the outcome to their benefit.
The beginnings of civil wars and revolutions aren’t clear when they are happening, though they are obvious when one is deeply in the middle of them.
While historians assign dates to the beginnings and ends of civil wars, they are arbitrary. The truth is that almost no one at the time knows that a civil war has begun or that it has ended, but they know when they are in them. For example, many historians have designated July 14, 1789, as the day the French Revolution began because a mob stormed an armory and prison called the Bastille. But nobody at the time thought it was the beginning of the French Revolution or had any idea how terribly brutal that civil war and revolution would become. While one might not know what’s to come, one can have imprecise markers that help one place where one is, to see the direction that one is moving in, and to know something about what the next stage will be like.
Civil wars are incredibly brutal because they are fights to the death. Everyone is an extremist because everyone is forced to pick a side and fight—also moderates lose out in knife fights.
As for what types of leaders are best for civil wars and revolutions, they are the “inspirational generals”—people who are strong enough to marshal support and win the various types of battles they have to win. Because the fight is brutal, they have to be brutal enough to do whatever is necessary to win.
The time that historians stamp as the civil war period typically lasts a few years and determines the official winners and losers, which is conveyed by who gets to occupy the government buildings in the capital. But like the beginnings, the ends of civil wars/revolutions are not as clearly defined as historians convey. The fighting to consolidate power can go on for a long time after the official civil war has ended.
While civil wars and revolutions are typically extremely painful, they often lead to restructurings that, if done well, can establish the foundation for improved future results. What the future after the civil war/revolution looks like depends on how the next steps are handled.
Conclusion
My study of history has taught me that nothing is forever other than evolution, and within evolution there are cycles that are like tides that come in and go out and that are hard to change or fight against. To handle these changes well it is essential to know which stage of the cycle one is in and to know timeless and universal principles for dealing with it. As conditions change the best approaches change—i.e., what is best depends on the circumstances and the circumstances are always changing in the ways we just looked at. For that reason, it is a mistake to rigidly believe that any economic or political system is always best because there will certainly be times when that system is not best for the circumstances at hand, and if a society doesn’t adapt it will die. That is why constantly reforming systems to adapt well is best. The test of any system is simply how well it works in delivering what most of the people want, and this can be objectively measured, which we can do and will continue to do. Having said that, the lesson from history that comes through most loudly and most clearly is that skilled collaborations to produce productive win-win relationships to both grow and divide the pie well, so that most people are happy, are much more rewarding and much less painful than fighting civil wars over wealth and power that lead to one side subjugating the other side.
I have been paying attention, as of late, to the American “news” aggregate sources. These are websites that just list headlines, and links from “news” sources, and you thous get a relative “snapshot” of what the news actually is on any given day.
For American “news” it’s all obvious. No really news. No real subjects. Just artificially produced narratives served in “canned” packages for distribution. It’s really terribly bad.
So I am looking at the today’s Drudge Report. I just glace over this as I shy away from what ever it is trying to push. But I noticed something. No advertisements, but instead targeted articles.
An article that makes LGBT+ look good, or is supportive of it…
Another one, but only this time for NASA…
Wait, another one about Global Warming…
Hold on, your daily issuance of China = Bad…
Oh, and while I am at it, Ukraine is winning against Russia and Russia is collapsing…
Whoa, there’s another on that inflation is lowest it’s been in decades…
Oh, the multivitamin myth…
But, you know, get your bird flu vaccine…
Oh, and men are bad, another victory for woman’s rights…
Do you see the point?
Instead of advertisements. The interests hire writers and write stories that direct people to their platforms of choice where they get money, enhance their narratives, and groom them into “pigeon holes” for money extraction. Insidious.
Sheech!
What a cluster fuck.
Today…
What is the most bizarre thing you’ve witnessed at a public pool?
I was having dinner at a restaurant with a pool (down in the Keys such things exist). I was with my family: two grown sons, their wives and kids and my husband.
Suddenly my son bolted from the table and dove into the pool, clothes and all. He had seen a toddler slip under the water in the semi-deep end and not make a sound. When people saw him running they began to pay attention and realized what he was doing but he was on it so there was nothing else to be done. The mom was standing on the other end chatting up a friend, and didn’t see a thing.
My son, who just HAPPENS to be a Coast Guard Rescue Swimmer, brought the girl up and she was coughing and petrified but other than that, she was okay. He asked her “Where’s Mommy?” and she pointed to the mother.
My son carried the child over to the woman, who was still talking and had not noticed a thing. He tapped her on the shoulder and set the girl down. “She fell in the pool,” he said. “Oh, thanks,” she said, and turned to continue her conversation.
At this point, others who had witnessed the entire thing confronted the mother and said “Hey, that man just saved your child’s life. She slipped under the water!” The mom was appropriately chagrined and apologized for not being more responsible and finally realized he was wearing regular clothes. People were still talking about it when she scooped up the sniffling child and left. She never even realized that her life could have been changed in that second.
We see drownings in the movies and it’s always someone splashing about in a frenzy. But in real life, drownings are silent. The person who doesn’t know better just sinks, instead of puffing out his lungs and helping himself stay buoyant. I never knew that.
Richard Wolff on How Russia Destroyed NATO’s Economic War and Europe is Collapsing
What makes Indians think they have a chance at beating China?
Collective delusion. Cultural madness.
India faces massive problems that hinder its development, starting with a dysfunctional democratic government. It is overly bureaucratic. Its regulatory structure discourages foreign investment. It is often hostile to foreign companies.
India has a large, rapidly-growing, young population but it is poorly educated. Indian literacy is quite low.
India’s female participation rate in the labour force is quite low.
India is fractured by ethnic strife. Hindu nationalism exacerbates the problem.
India has serious human rights issues, particularly with respect to women.
India’s caste system remains an obstacle.
India’s infrastructure is seriously lagging behind China.
India is mired in extreme poverty with over 100 million people living in these conditions.
Can India overcome all these obstacles and challenges? If I were a betting man, I wouldn’t put my money on India. Sorry. The odds really suck.
China’s economy is 4.7X larger than India’s by nominal GDP.
China’s economy is 2.4X larger than India’s by purchasing power parity. [Source: IMF.]
Even assuming Indian growth of 8% to Chinese growth of 5%, it would take India more than 30 years to catch up to China. The math doesn’t lie.
Can India grow at 8% ???
Douglas Macgregor Warns: US Forces Are Under ATTACK Around The World! Wind Is CHANGING Direction
How would you react if your boss fired you without notice?
This just happened to me.
I worked as a manager for 3 years, improving systems, increasing productivity, and even doubling the company’s clientele within 1.5 years. I consistently received rave reviews from staff and clients. I was efficient, trustworthy, loyal, kind, funny, was always early, and stayed late anytime they needed me. I ran the business while the owner was able to look into opening a second location because of how much I improved her business.
One month ago (Nov. 2019), I came to work like any other day. I booked several new clients within my first 30 minutes. I was then called into a meeting with the owner and another manager. I was handed an email I had written the day before. I read it and asked what was wrong. The manager said, “We are moving to termination.” Shocked, with all the blood in my body now rushing out (I could feel myself turn white), I said, “I don’t think this is right. Where is the disciplinary trail?”
They proceded to tell me they did not need a disciplinary trail and gave me no reason other than the way I had written the email made it sound like I threw the manager under the bus. This was not my intent and I profusely apologized for it coming off that way. I tried to discuss the fact that I had no previous disciplinary problems. The owner and manager then started bringing up little mistakes I had made – nothing bad, just simple mistakes, and things I had never before been made aware of.
I proceeded to remind them how much I have done for the company and asked if we could instead discuss this rather then just get rid of me. I kept asking why. They never had a straight answer. They never had me sign anything. At one point the manager said, “Go process this at home, goodbye.”
As I gathered my belongings while they watched me like hawks, I stuttered and mumbled, trying anything to make sense of what was happening. I still have no idea why I was fired nor what the grounds for firing me were.
I am moving on, but hurting a lot. I absolutely loved the job and the work, and I believed in the company. I am angry and sad and I know this wasn’t right. But I have no recourse. They had made up their minds and there was nothing I could say or do. I wish I knew what happened and I wish I could go back and say the magic words. My only choice is to move ahead.
It helps a bit reading from others who say this type of incident isn’t right and also that I’m not the only one this has happened to.
Side note – I found out a couple of weeks later that my office assistant quit the day after I left and that the owner replaced me with her daughter.
UPDATE June 2020: Thank you for all of your up votes and comments, I really appreciate them. To update, they had to eventually hire 3 people to take over my position. Many employees have quit as have many clients. The person who took the lead in firing me was demoted soon after and recently quit.
Pad Mi Korat Phet
(Hot Noodles, Korat Style – Thai)
The route to this recipe started with a couple of requests for a hot version of pad Thai.
Pad Mee Korat3
Unfortunately for those that asked, whilst you can add anything you like to pad Thai | including chiles | the result is not authentic. It simply isn’t done (which is not to say that Thais don’t load their plates of pad Thai with prik phom and chiles in fish sauce or vinegar ccording to taste)
Pad Thai is quite an elaborate dish. The style usually found in Thai restaurants outside Thailand is particularly elaborate, being referred to somewhat insultingly my Thai housewives as “pad Thai Krungthep” | the implication being that rich people in the capital do it that way to show off.
Ignoring the countryside versus capital debate, there is a local, very simple variant of the dish, known as pad mi Korat. Made with the round egg noodles known as sen mi, rather than the narrow rice ribbon noodles, and with a recipe that consists of partly cooking a cup of noodles, then stir frying them with a cup of sliced and shredded pak bung (swamp cabbage), adding a little tamarind juice for flavor, and drizzling a beaten egg over it to complete it.
However my wife prepares a more elaborate version of pad mi Korat, which is also fairly hot. This version I will call pad mi Korat phet (hot stir fried noodles in the Korat style).
Before I get into the details, I would like to make two comments.
The original of this dish is made with sen mi (Thai egg noodles), but if you can’t find them I find it works very well with a spaghetti or similar (the little shell shapes are good).
The original uses swamp cabbage, but any greens will do. If I fancy splashing out we make this with a mixture of broccoli and asparagus.
To simplify the dish I should point out that it is actually made using table condiments, thus the ingredients are not as complicated as they look. I will first include recipes for the table condiments you need. In Thailand these would probably be on every housewife’s table, but if you don’t have them you should make them about a week before you intend to cook the dish.
We make them in vast quantities for the restaurant (in 5 gallon containers), but for home use we use 1 pint spring top preserving jars. These have the advantage of fitting in the door shelves of our refrigerator.
Pad Mee Korat1
Nam Pla Prik
Put 2/3 cup of prik ki nu (finely sliced green birdseye or dynamite chiles) into a 1 pint jar, and fill with fish sauce. Seal and keep for a week before using.
Prik Dong
Put 2/3 cup of prik ki nu daeng (finely sliced red birdeye or dynamtie chiles) in a 1 pint jar, and fill with rice vinegar (any white vinegar will do, as will cider vinegar, if rice vinegar is unavailable).
Prik Siyu Wan
Put 2/3 cup of prik chi fa (sliced red or green Thai jalapeños) in a 1 pint jar, and fill with sweet dark soy sauce.
Kratiem Dong
Peel and slice 2/3 cup of garlic, place it in the 1 pint jar, add 1 teaspoon of palm sugar, and 1 teaspoon of salt and 1/2 teaspoon of MSG (optional but recommended) and topped up with rice vinegar.
Khing Ki Mao
Julienne 2/3 cup of fresh ginger (into match stick sized pieces). Place in the 1 pint jar. Add 1/2 cup of Mekong whiskey (Mekong is a whiskey made from Rice. If you can’t find it or prefer something else, any spirits, even sherry, will do). Add 1/2 cup of rice vinegar, and fill up the jar with fish sauce.
Now we’ll progress to the pad mi itself.
For this you will need 1 cup of noodles, 1/2 cup of green veggies, 1/2 cup of mild peppers such as prik chi fa (Thai jalapeños). If you want to try this but at a lower heat level, use the Thai chili called prik yiek, or a bell pepper. You also need 1 large egg (preferably a duck egg), some tamarind juice and sugar, and chiles, bai chi (coriander leaves) and a sliced cucumber for garnish.
Place the noodles in water to soak for about 15 minutes.
Place 2 tablespoons of the liquor from each of the five condiments listed above, together with 2 tablespoons of tamarind juice, in a small saucepan and simmer to reduce it to half its volume. When this is done heat a wok, and stir a teaspoon of the fish sauce from the nam pla prik into the egg, and beat it lightly. Drain 1 tablespoon of the pickle from each of the five condiments.
If you are using Italian pasta, boil it for half the normal cooking time.
Add all the ingredients except the egg and the reduced sauce to the wok and stir fry until the noodles are just ‘toothy’ in texture. Add the sauce, turn the heat to as high as possible, and when the sauce has come to a vigorous boil, gently drizzle the egg into the mix, which will cook it.
Serve immediately, with the listed condiments, together with sugar and prik phom (powdered red chile), and decorate with the garnishes.
What’s the weirdest thing a guest has done at your house?
Weirdest? Maybe, you decide. I had asked a good family “friend” to check on my high school kids while I was going to be gone a couple nights. They were both working and responsible but I just wanted someone to look in on them, it made me feel better. He offered to stay over and would let the dog out if they were working. I thought that would be great. He was a good friend and I thought I knew him well Well, We ended up coming home sooner then planned and I messaged him our new plans. When did we expect to be home? About what time? Not sure why it mattered but I let him know. He acted strangely in his texts, which I didn’t pick up on until later. I wasn’t sure why he was even still at the house since we were coming back that evening, but I thought he was just being kind and taking care of the dog or maybe he wanted a quiet spot to be as he had moved back in with his parents to save money. Fast forward about 3 months and my daughter had to run home to grab something before a game. She had a couple other kids with her, one being a new kid. “Oh, I’ve been here before” he says. My daughter asked when. “ when I met up with someone on grinder “ my daughter didn’t believe him until he mentioned some details about the inside of the house. Well, after asking when and a description of the person she put two and two together, it was our good “friend.” My daughter was so upset she had a panic attack about the whole thing. She told me and I told my husband and we called law enforcement since he was a minor. There was an investigation and it turned out the kid lied about his age and nothing had actually happened because our friend had the sense to kick him out when he discovered he was not 18, and the investigation was ended. My daughter had to go through questioning about what she was told. We had to let our employer know because we work with kids and couldn’t risk this kid saying he was at our house with an adult male when they didn’t know the circumstances. Obviously I did not speak to the person again after this, and he had no idea why I was upset! He did not realize the repercussions that my family could have faced because of this or how disgusting this was even if not intentional. Now, we all knew he was gay and that’s not the disgusting part- it’s inviting a stranger into my home without my permission and possibly with my other kids around, it’s a safety issue, and a trust issue. If I don’t trust people anymore this is one of the reasons why.
What Was it About Malls in the 1970s?
Have you ever fired an employee who then retaliated against you or the company? What happened?
Yes, I owned a burglar alarm company. The employee had been on the job about three weeks but was well trained. He failed to dispatch on an alarm. I fired him. He was black. He filed an EEOC complaint alleging I fired him because he was a black male. He had a black female supervisor and I had many employees of different races working for me. I did not discriminate on pay, male vs female, black vs white. The EEOC called me about the complaint and told me he would settle it for $1995. I told her no. She asked what I would counter with. I told her I wouldn’t counter. She told me they would have to audit me. Maybe I should counter with $995. I told her to audit. I was audited and no wrong doing was found. About a year later I received a notice that he had appealed. I called the EEOC and told them I was pissed. I was ready to sue but I had a supervisor on the line. He said just cool it. Ok. Was everything just as it was when I was audited? Sure! Ok, ty. The appeal was denied. Another year later I received a notice that he had appealed again. Really pissed now. Same supervisor. Really ready to sue. He said cool it. Was everything the same as when they audited? I said no, employees had come and gone but the ratios and pay were still equitable. I asked how many times this guy had done this. I was told that couldn’t be divulged but would hear nothing more. Appeal denied. The thing that still bothers me is that the EEOC initially really wanted me to pay to make the problem go away. Sad.
America Decline is identical to that of Tang Dynasty!?
What has your child done that is technically “wrong” but you were proud of them for doing it?
My son is not my biological child. I met his mother when he was 7 and his little sister had just been born. Their biological father was in jail, having assaulted his wife when she was seven months pregnant, and was not present. Even when he HAD been present he was not a positive influence and poor Aaron had really been through way more than a child his age should ever have to experience, including a hospital visit that was necessary because he attempted to defend his mother from his abusive father.
Aaron’s mother had no one except her kids when I met her, and she had begun treating Aaron like a friend instead of her child. The lack of discipline or a male role model combined with Aaron being spoiled by his mother and his general anger at his father to create a child that had a very difficult time getting along with others his age. He and I used to play video games together all afternoon long, and over time he and I became very close. I took him under my wing and thus began a years long process of reforming him from a spoiled mamma’s boy (which doesn’t play too well here in the Deep South) to a rough and tumble young man with integrity and respect for others.
One of the biggest obstacles was that he was being relentlessly bullied. We switched him to different schools several times, but being socially awkward AND the “new kid” made him a natural target. Finally we put him in kickboxing so he could learn to defend himself.
Fast forward a few years. That scrawny awkward boy has become a big strong teenager that is both extraordinarily sensitive and YEARS ahead of his classmates in physical conditioning due to his dedication to his training. He became a standout football player his first season after setting a team record for sacks (I taught him how to slip blocks and punch through defenders and the kid learned incredibly fast).
So one day I get a call from his mom telling me that Aaron has been suspended for fighting. I’ve always told him not to start fights, but if someone puts their hands on him he’s free to defend himself. Of course I ask how it happened.
One of his buddies (a very small boy) had been getting bullied by a group of boys after school. These boys all live in a nearby neighborhood and walk home, and during that walk there’s no adult supervision. Several boys would team up on the one littler kid, and nothing was being done about it. Aaron decided to defend his buddy so the next time they did it he stepped in and beat up the ringleader. The little asshole’s parents made a big stink the next day so the school suspended all of them for fighting.
When I got home I told him I was proud of him. Even though he’s trained to fight he rarely does, he’s the sweetest kid and doesn’t like violence or hurting people. And now he finally did get in a fight, and it was to protect someone else. After all he’s been through he still cares about others and I’m incredibly proud of him for using his size and skills to defend weaker people.
“Hell On Earth” (Official Lyric Video)
He’s talking about the Lifestyles of Americans.
What is the best comeback you used on someone?
I was on a highway on the way home after teaching a night class. A driver in a Camaro came up to an intersection on the right and rolled through the stop sign (like most St Louis drivers do). I saw them approaching the stop sign and was thinking “they’re going to stop … they’re going to stop… oh no!”. Luckily there was no one to my left so I swerved left trying to avoid them but hit the front end of the car. If I hadn’t gone left I would have T-boned it right on the driver’s door.
No injuries, my little Mazda was totaled, the Camaro was missing it’s nose. Called AAA who dispatched law enforcement, exchanged insurance info with the lady driver, talked with law enforcement and waited for the tow truck etc.
Suddenly the driver’s daughter drove up and started ranting. “Who knocked the front end off of my new Camaro? I know they were speeding if they did that!”.
Her attitude rubbed me the wrong way so I tried to give her my perspective: “You have no idea what you’re talking about. Your mother pulled out right in front of me, I went left to try to avoid killing her. You need to go be with her.” She had a shocked look on her face as she walked away.
Retiring at 65 is a HUGE Mistake. Retirement Expert Explains Why
Very interesting, and frankly, frightening.
Why do lottery winners often blow through their winnings?
.
It’s really simple.
People who play lotteries are generally folks who I’d call “pay check people,” living check to check. They’ve never had much money and no prospects of any, like family inheritances.
When they Win Big they’re in euphoria, of course. But they haven’t a clue how to manage their sudden windfall of seemingly endless wealth. Oh, but plenty of other “well-meaning” friends and family do!
Turns out the biggest problem that lottery winners have is simple, good-hearted generosity: giving away too much money to family and friends. Family feel especially entitled to a nice, fat chunk. And if they don’t get it…? Trouble. And once the money spigot is opened, it’s hard to stop its gush.
Financial “advisors” circle like vultures and the pickings are easy. Winners are virtually never well-educated, certainly not in financial matters. For example, they have no idea what they owe the IRS on their miraculous windfall. And being ill-educated they cannot see the difference between a brilliant investment and a monstrous scam.
And so begins the sad spiral down to the misery of bankruptcy…or worse. They almost all utter a common cry, “Oh, God, I wish I’d never won!”
70% of lottery winners are broke within seven years of The Big Win.
Read the horrifying Powerball stories on Fredrick Josefsson’s fascinating Comment. [scroll down below inoperative video on NY Daily News]
Brits Colin & Chris Weir are among the few winners living-Happily-Ever-After.
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The story is much the same with professional athletes. Often from truly dirt-poor families, they are now multimillionaires. They, too, have no meaningful financial education, but they do have out-sized egos. Vulture Inc. knows how to play the flattery game.
First purchase? Without question, a vast mansion for mom so she can move out of that shack. Then a couple of homes for themselves in places like Malibu, California or Jupiter, Florida or some other gilded ZIP Code.
Pro athletes just love “foolproof” investments. Like played-out gold mines in Alaska. And they rarely fly “commercial” like you and me. No, they charter private jets such as the Gulfstream below which costs $5,000 a flight hour. That’s $60,000 from Malibu to Jupiter and back.
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Coke, cars, planes, jewelry, women, Vegas and dozens of flattering friends who magically vanish when the money does. Five or six years after hanging up the spurs, the once-proud athlete is flat-ass broke. Some end up in jail for schemes that went criminal. And, sadly, a few actually become homeless.
All this is so common, it’s a cliché. You’ve surely been to parties where people ‘cluck-cluck’ about it. There’s even a well-known German term for this happy clucking: Schadenfreude [SHAH-den-froy-da] It means happiness at another’s misfortune or humiliation—especially when that person was once rolling in $ dough $.
At the next party, Impress—or mystify—those clucking guests with this: “Oh, isn’t Schadenfreude such fun?”
Champion boxer Mike Tyson (top photo) once spent $173,706 on a gold chain, $410,000 on a birthday party. Evander Holyfield once owned a 109 room mansion with a $17,000 monthly electric bill. Once owned—but not for long.
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Alien: The Deleted Airlock Sequence – Explained
What was the most hilarious accidentally inappropriate thing your grandmother said?
Well…..
Our snazzy grandma didn’t say a whole lot, but when she did speak, it was almost always what many people would call inappropriate.
And….
Our grandpa did say a lot, but he was even more inappropriate. So when our grandparents got together with people that didn’t know them, a whole lot of inappropriateness was inevitable, and often hilarious.
At least to us.
Even though my sister and I always did well in school, there was always some teacher or counselor that thought we were getting too close, and needed to find our own identities, or some such crap.
So….
They would bring us in with our parents to discuss the problem, but of course we didn’t think there was a problem. We knew our genealogy was a bit different than most other families, and our family tree had branches that had some very strange things living on them, but we didn’t consider that a problem in the least.
But…..
The school still would insist on occasion that we had to come in to discuss the problem, and since our parents were sick of discussing this non-existing problem, one time our grandparents offered to go with us instead.
My sister and I just looked at each other when we found out our grandparents were going together, to discuss the problem, with the teachers and counselors, because we just knew something was going to happen.
And that something was definitely going to be inappropriate.
So off we went to the school….
With our spooky, sibylline and very snazzy grandma, and giant kraken fighting grandpa, close behind us. And my sister and I both just knew that the school was in for some serious inappropriateness.
Our snazzy grandma looked like a witch, a very lovely witch, but still obviously norn. And our grandpa looked like he could go down to Múspellsheimr, and drag out Surtr by his ears.
An interesting couple.
So….
Our grandparents listened patiently to the experts talk about the problem, until one got to the part where she said that we acted like we were one person. At that point our snazzy grandma quietly replied,
“How did they know we weren’t really one person, with one soul, but with two bodies?”
That comment brought a bit of a awkward silence, but then another expert started going on about how our family should be better role models for us, and then mentioned that the other kids in school thought we were elves.
And…
Our grandma quietly replied,
“What made them think we weren’t elves?”
This made the room go silent, until the headmaster looked at our snazzy grandma, and simply said,
Norn.
There was a bit of a gasp from the teachers, and then silence.
Until…
Our snazzy grandma stood up and looked at the head counselor and said,
“I know what that shadow in the corner of your bedroom really is.”
And then….
Looked at the headmaster and said,
“And I know why you can’t make love to your wife.”
Followed by some very serious, silent, silence.
Until our grandpa suddenly got up and said that he had enough of this horseshit, and that he was going to take the norn home and have some fun, and then get shit-faced drunk.
And then looked at the teachers, counselors, and head master and said,
“How’s that for a role model?”
And as we walked on home, even though we knew the answer, my sister couldn’t resist asking our snazzy grandma why the headmaster couldn’t make love to his wife.
Grandma just kept walking, but told us to be quiet, or she was going to turn both of us into rutabagas. <3 <3
As of 3:30 PM eastern US time today, June 26, 2024, reports are flooding-in saying a Military Coup d’Etat is taking place to oust President Luis Arce of Bolivia!
Military leader General Juan José Zúñiga reportedly has sent troops into the Presidential Palace to remove President Arce by force of arms.
Developing . . .
Imagery and videos beginning to come in from Bolivia:
coup 3 boliviacoup 2 boliviaCoup 1 bolivia
Hal Turner Snap Analysis:
CIA color revolution all over it
Bolivia is one of the rare countries in South America that are trying to fight against the American colonialism and don’t want to be their puppets.
UPDATE 5:08 PM EDT —
Bolivian general Juan Jose Zuñiga has PUBLICLY ANNOUNCED that he has seized power after militarily taking over the Presidential Palace in La Paz.
INSIDE THE RETAIL APOCALYPSE! ABANDONED STORE CRISIS!
What is the most satisfying passive-aggressive thing you have ever done to a really mean or rude person?
I was driving to work in a blizzard. there was already 4 inches of snow on the road. I was taking my time and safely following the truck ahead of me trying to keep my wheels in his tracks. I was driving a normal RWD car.
Okay, so far, so good.
A total idiot in a 4WD truck came speeding up behind me. He tried to pass me a couple of times, but almost lost control each time and flicking me the finger. I said to myself “I’m in no mood for this shit”
He tried a final time. I closed on the truck ahead of me and he tried to swerve in between me and the truck in front of me. I sped up a touch to prevent him from getting in (yes, I’m pretty upset at this point).
He tried again, and I changed the game plan. He swerved to get in ahead of me, and I lifted (took my foot off of the gas pedal), and the distance between me and the truck I was following opened.
The dork trying to pass me, hit the gas and lost control. He slid/spun between me and the truck and went straight off the road into a 20 foot ditch. I beeped and waved as I went by and kept going.
Talk about sweet revenge! I never did a thing wrong, I just made it possible for him to “learn a lesson”. When I got to work, the incident was on the radio news because the police closed the northbound lanes of the highway. When I got to work 15 minutes late, I was not docked for the time. I came from my home 80 miles away while most of the staff lived less than 5 miles away and called out. Remember this was during a blizzard! Even though it’s been 30+ years, I still grin when I think about it!
What is the most amazing thing you overheard because people didn’t think you understood their language?
I speak High German reasonably well. As I don’t use it very often anymore, it can take me a few minutes of a conversation, or listening, to get back in the proverbial swing.
I stopped once at one of the road-side Amish food stores in Pennsylvania to scoop up some great chow. There were a bunch of other customers in before me, including some who were dressed pretty outlandishly, and some who were just being asses in general.
The two giggly teenage Amish girls working the counter were going to town, cracking wise about the “English” in their German dialect. It’s hard to follow at times, and uses some real archaic vocabulary, but once you get used to the sentence structure, that includes some pidgin English, it’s fairly clear to the casual German speaker.
I assumed the two Amish girls were a little more worldly by working in the store and interacting with the “English”, and thus were probably a little more less typically Amish in how they acted. And they were teenagers …
At any rate, when I was the last “English” in the store, and was at the counter paying for my pies and bread, I started speaking to them in German, and told them I agreed with their jokes, but that the Good Lord might send someone in from time to time to see how they were conducting business.
I took my change and bags and gave a Witchie-Poo laugh as I watched their faces turn chalk white.
Thirteen moons glittered down from the smog-packed sky. Their silvery light cast ethereal glows across the glass sidewalks and streets. The purple gas trapped below their feet danced and spun like living creatures.As polluted as Neptune was, still beauty could be found. Of course, Ace Lowell was too busy to seek out the beauty of his home planet. He had a job to do.His nineteenth birthday. This had been the day he had tossed and turned over each night. This was the day his dream was finally supposed to come true.And, up to a point, everything had worked out exactly as he had imagined.Buy a rundown apartment in downtown Neptune with every last penny in his and Zyla’s pockets. Check.Turn said apartment in a detective business. Check.Get his first mystery. Check.But the whole ‘solve the clues and save the day’ part was still out on recess. Maybe that part had never been an option at all. Maybe all hopes of fame and fortune he had envisioned for this day had abandoned him the moment he received his first case.In the old detective films Ace used to watch (alone, naturally–his parents were too busy ignoring him), a disaster shook the city. An unexplained string of robberies. A mysterious disappearance of someone important. A grievous murder. And the detective, clad in his trench coat and sporting a magnifying glass in his hand, always sought out the clues and solved the mystery. And everybody loved him for it.Well, Ace had the trench coat and the drive to bust crime. What he lacked, however, was an actual crime.Darkness clung thick to the Neptunian night. Lamplight glimmered dimly through the streets, illuminating their way. Hands shoved in his coat pockets, Ace trudged after his partner in anti-crime, Zyla Strange.She was the reason they had been walking around like headless chickens for two hours. Because when Ace’s first client rushed into their apartment and presented them with the most pointless, ridiculous mystery he never dreamed of asking for, Zyla jumped to the rescue as always.
His first mystery wasn’t a robbery or a kidnapping or a murder. Instead, a little sniffling boy had waddled up to their door, snot dripping from his nose and tears pouring from his eyes as he explained that his cat had gone missing.
No, the kid didn’t have any money to pay them. If they wanted payment, though, he’d gladly give them the unwrapped collection of Lifesaver mints collecting dust in his pajama pockets.
Ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous.
Huffing, Ace caught up to Zyla. The cold air blasted against his cheeks, tinging his blue skin bluer. He tugged his coat snugly around himself. Tattooed arms bare and pierced belly button exposed, Zyla just crammed her hands in her sweatpants pockets. She was the kind of stubborn that would outlast a bull in a headstrong fight.
“A cat,” Ace muttered for the seventeenth time that night. “I’ve wasted two hours of my life searching for some kid’s damn cat. Honestly, slap up some missing posters or something! We’re detectives, not pet finders.”
“We’ll be whatever we need to be,” Zyla snapped back, voice sharper than a snakebite. Her emerald eyes cut through the darkness to glare at him. “So this isn’t your ideal picture of a first mystery. It’s still a mystery, Ace! And if we can help that poor boy, then we will.”
Ace sighed. What was her deal? Ever since he had found her huddled in a Neptunian alleyway two years ago, she had acted like the planet was one big charity case. If someone tripped, she was there with a wad of bandages. If someone frowned, she went out of her way to brighten their day. If someone so much as sneezed, she made sure to bless them.
Maybe it was a Uranian thing. Then again, nobody in the universe had ever been on Uranus. The planet was an impenetrable force the galaxy had been trying to break into for centuries. How Zyla even left Uranus, she had never said.
Beside him, Zyla drew a sharp gasp. Ace followed her gaze in time to see a striped gray tail vanish around the corner.
Without a word, Zyla took off, violet cornrow braids flying behind her. Ace hesitantly followed.
The moment he rounded the corner, he found it. There, in the shadow of a Starbucks, sat a gray tabby cat. The feline glanced up at them with intelligent blue eyes. Meeting the creature’s gaze, a shudder passed down Ace’s spine. The cat seemed strangely human-like.
Zyla turned to him with a cheeky smile. “See? Not a complete waste of time! We found the cat. Mystery solved!”
“Great. Grab the creepy cat and let’s go to bed,” he muttered back.
Instead of reaching for the cat, though, Zyla stooped down and fished into her pockets. Ace watched her, his foot tapping an impatient rhythm against the glass sidewalk.
Finally, Zyla withdrew a regular fruit bar. The wrapper crinkled as she wrestled it open.
Ace’s eyebrows shot up to his pale hairline. “You’re gonna feed it?”
“It’s rude to just grab the cat,” Zyla protested. “What if it’s unfriendly and bites me?”
“Then you can blast it with your Uranian superpowers and turn it to kitty litter. Who knows? Maybe the kid will still give us his nasty mints.”
She ignored him as she broke off the corner of the fruit bar. Cooing at the creature, Zyla held out her offering under the cat’s nose.
The cat blinked. Then, with unnatural speed, it swallowed the fruity piece in one lightning-fast gulp. Ace and Zyla froze, staring at it.
Around them, the wind turned harsh, whistling across the cityscape. Energy crackled through the air.
Ace felt the hairs at the nape of his neck bristle. “What the hell–”
With a crack of thunder, reality cleaved in two. A gaping hole alight with thousands of swirling, vibrant hues opened beneath his feet. The yelp that rose to his mouth got sucked into oblivion with the rest of him.
The fall lasted both a millisecond and an eternity. Ears popping, heart hammering, head spinning, Ace spiraled downward through the darkness. He squeezed his eyes shut, biting back a scream.
After both a millisecond and an eternity, the ground rushed up to catch him. Ace landed on both feet into soft crimson sand.
Wait, sand?
He looked around and discovered another world. Red sand shifted and pooled across the ground. A light breeze plucked sandy grains from the floor and whisked them off into the night sky. Above him hung two moons; they stared down like a pair of wide silver eyes.
Laughter poured all around him from dozens of old-fashioned wooden buildings hugging the narrow street. The scent of whiskey hit his nostrils as a light-skinned man stumbled out a set of swinging barn doors.
Fingers curled tightly around his forearm. Ace glanced over to find a pale-faced Zyla gawking at the horizon. “Ace, we’re not on Neptune anymore.”
Ace took a deep breath. His lungs stung with the cleanliness of the air. He gulped another breath, intoxicated with the feeling. Never had Neptune’s air been this clean. His planet’s atmosphere was all smoke and smog and ash. And while Neptunians didn’t need oxygen to breathe, Ace had always secretly wondered what clean air tasted like.
In all his nineteen years of living, Ace had never set foot off Neptune. He never had enough money to take a vacation from his home planet, and his parents could care less about showing their son the Milky Way. With thirteen older sisters, it felt like Ace wasn’t even there. His parents didn’t have the time to notice him. With an earth-shattering mystery, he had hoped to change all of that and finally snatch their affection.
Instead, he had found a cat. A snack-stealing, planet-hopping cat.
“Mars,” he whispered. “We’re on Mars.”
“So cool,” Zyla breathed back. After a second, though, she shook her head. “We’ve got a job to do. We can’t get distracted.”
“Zyla, the cat made a freaking portal that took us to Mars. How can we not get distracted?”
He glanced down, searching for the unusual feline. At his feet, however, he found only sand. Ace’s heart leapt into his throat. If the cat’s the reason why we teleported…and we don’t have the cat…we’ll be stuck here.
Frankly, it wasn’t the worst fate they could suffer. It wasn’t like anyone on Neptune would notice their disappearance anyway. But from what he had read about Mars, the planet was a war-torn catastrophe waiting to happen. He wasn’t exactly cut out for fighting.
“We need to find the cat,” he said slowly, pulse pounding in his ears.
Zyla’s lips crinkled in a smirk. “Oh, now he wants to find the cat. Still wishing we had gotten a more interesting first mystery?”
He skillfully ignored her. “Can you use your powers to find it?”
“You’re kidding, right?” Zyla held out her hands. For a second, green light sparked between her fingers. She tucked her hands back into her pockets, frowning. “My power is to blast things, not find things.”
“Fine. Let’s start looking then. If that cat teleports again and doesn’t take us with it, we’re screwed.”
They took off through the streets, sand kicking up in plumes behind them. As the buildings blurred around him and the wind howled in his ears, Ace felt the tension seeping from his body. Running wild and free, he had never felt more alive. Like he had lived his entire life on Neptune with his eyes closed, and had just stumbled back into the light to find a brand new world awaiting exploration.
Zyla turned left down an alleyway, Ace nipping at her heels. When she stopped suddenly in front of him, Ace nearly pitched face-first into the sand with the effort of not slamming into her back.
He peered around her shoulder. At the end of the alleyway sat the gray tabby cat. At its paws sprawled a single slab of sand-caked cheddar cheese.
Ace’s shoulders tensed again. “Didn’t the portal that got us here first open because that thing ate your fruit bar?”
“Yep,” Zyla whispered back, dread weighing her voice.
“Think that if it eats something else, we’ll get sucked into another portal?”
“Most likely.”
The cat darted forward, snagging the corner of the cheese between its teeth. Reality split open again under their feet.
Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Earth, even Pluto. They went everywhere in the span of an hour, introduced into another culture every other minute. Each time they caught up to the cat, it would find a piece of food and take a bite, opening another portal that swallowed them into another world. It was like a twisted birthday present for Ace–a free explore-the-galaxy pass through the Milky Way.
Roughly fifteen portals later, the familiar glassy floor appeared beneath Ace’s feet once more. They popped up in the shadow of a Neptunian Starbucks–the exact point they had disappeared from. The thirteen moons shone down on him again. He breathed in a lungful of smoggy air.
It was as if they had never left at all. Not a single aspect around them had changed. Looking around, though, Ace saw things in a new light. His heart felt lighter, less shackled by worry. It was a feeling he hadn’t experienced in a long time.
Before the cat could stalk away in search of more food, Zyla swept forward and scooped the feline into her arms. It wriggled and squirmed before finally relenting to her strong grip. She glanced down at it in a mix of anger and awe.
“I am not doing that again,” she muttered. When she looked up at Ace, though, a smile crossed her features. “Still sleepy? We could still squeeze in a few winks before we return the cat.”
Ace snorted. The trip around the universe hummed through his veins like a gallon’s worth of coffee.
They began walking down the street in the direction of their apartment. As they pushed on, Ace studied every shining edge of every skyscraper reaching up to Neptune’s night sky. For the first time in years, it took his breath away. Why had he taken Neptune for granted this whole time? He had been so blinded by his own ambitions of making a name for himself that he had forgotten to enjoy the world around him.
Halfway across the street, Ace stopped. “The cat’s Uranian, isn’t it?”
Zyla paused. In her grip, the cat reached out and batted her jaw. She cocked her head at Ace. “Duh. It can make portals by eating, genius. It’s not some regular house cat.”
“Shouldn’t we return it to Uranus, then? I know it’s technically that kid’s cat, but wouldn’t the cat be happier where it’s from?”
He had always imagined Uranus as a secret paradise, a haven no outsider could ever enter. In truth, no one knew anything about the planet. No one had ever been on it–no one except the girl and the cat in front of him.
Zyla smiled sadly. “That’s not how it works. Once you leave Uranus, you can’t go back. There’s only two ways off the planet–either teleportation like this little guy probably did, or banishment.”
Ace froze. Banishment?
He stared at Zyla’s back as she started away. The question he had asked ever since he first met her rose again to his lips. “Why did you leave?”
Silence. Like every time before, he expected the silence to ring on and on, echoing with a thousand possibilities. Finally, though, her soft voice spliced through the night.
“That, Ace Lowell,” Zyla said, casting him the same sad smile, “is a mystery for another time. Now come on. Let’s go save the day.”
He watched her walk away, a Uranian girl with a Uranian cat. And gradually, when his senses pieced themselves back together again, Ace trailed after her.
Nothing about his nineteenth birthday that day had been the picturesque moment he had imagined since childhood. His name was no closer to shining in lights. For all he knew, he could forever remain another nameless face in this vast universe.
But something about chasing that damn cat across the Milky Way had changed him. Something about all the excitement and wonder and beauty he had experienced while racing through the galaxy resounded through his bones. Maybe he’d never find the fame and fortune he had always wanted, or the recognition he had thought would bring him happiness.
But, step by step, he could still make a difference. Maybe Zyla had been right all along in her passion to help others, no matter the cost.
Ace could already imagine the grin on that little boy’s face when they returned his annoying cat. And personally, he wouldn’t trade the image of that smile for all the fame in the galaxy.
Who’s the funniest patient you’ve ever had as a doctor or nurse?
Maybe not the funniest ever but this one really cracks me up.
I get cold easily. Whenever I can get away with it, you will see me wearing a fleece-lined beanie. I own roughly a million and a half of those. But, unfortunately, I have to take them off when I go see my patients. Most of my patients are old. And many of them also get cold easily, what with all the adipose tissue they’ve lost over the decades.
This is the case for one of my current ladies. She’s in her mid 80s, and the first time I saw her, she was bundled up under a thousand and one blankets. So I shared with her that I get cold too.
“I blame it on being African.”
She chuckled.
And that was the end of the story, I thought.
There are many side effects to being old, apart from the aforementioned impaired thermoregulation: high blood pressure, lower bone density leading to a loss of height and a higher susceptibility to fractures, hair loss, impaired balance, reduced visual acuity, higher rate of cancers of all sort, arthritis, loss of bowel and bladder control, etc. Basically, getting old is a really bad idea.
But one of the side effects that is amusing for those of us who have a twisted sense of humor is that people lose their filter.
“Mister Africaaaaaah!” She shouted this the second time she saw me in her room.
I was laughing so hard, I almost collapsed on her bed.
Did she really just say that?
She had. Now she does it every time she sees me. She said it again when I popped in on her yesterday during her speech therapy session. I told her that next time I would come in a loin cloth and a spear.
Earlier today, she told me she hadn’t slept well. I told her that maybe she needed someone to tuck her in and give her a hug or something.
“Or something…” she said, suggestively.
She just passed me in the hall about a half hour ago. I was chatting with the nurses and not paying attention to the faint sound of the wheelchair coming from behind.
“There’s Misteeeeeer Africaaaaaah. Hahaha!”
The nurses did a double take, then everybody was cracking up.
“I’m going to start calling you that,” said the youngest nurse.
I tried to make a face at her but my surgical mask covered half of it. She’s too young to get away with that. Only people who have the plausible deniability of senility get to call me Mister Africa.
This Killed All But 1,000 Humans 900,000 Years Ago
Blue Camouflage MH-6 Little Birds Point To Night Stalkers’ Pacific Pivot
Now both MH-6s and MH-60s from the 160th SOAR have been seen in the blue camouflage amid a shift in focus to high-end Pacific operations.
MH-6 Little Birds belonging to the U.S. Army’s elite 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR), better known as the Night Stalkers, are now flying in a multi-tone blue camouflage scheme, as seen during recent deck landing training with a U.S. Navy destroyer. This underscores the renewed importance of the maritime domain to the U.S. special operations community as it works to ensure its relevance in potential high-end fights, especially one against China in the Pacific, after decades of counter-terror and counter-insurgency operations. The War Zone previously highlighted this manifestation of the famed unit’s change in focus when the blue scheme first emerged on a Night Stalker MH-60 Black Hawk last year.
U.S. Army Special Operations Aviation Command (USASOAC) posted pictures showing at least two blue-painted MH-6s training with the Arleigh Burke class destroyer USS Bainbridge (DDG-96) on social media earlier today, which was brought to our attention by @thenewarea51 on X, a friend of The War Zone. At least one Little Bird in the 160th’s standard overall black paint scheme is also seen in the images. USASOAC has described the helicopters as MH-6Ms, but they have six-bladed main rotors. This is something that has been identified in the past as a component of the latest Block III Mission Enhanced Little Bird (MELB) configuration, now also known as the R variant.
A pair of MH-6Ms wearing the blue camouflage scheme fly past the Arleigh Burke class destroyer USS Bainbridge, identifiable by its hull number. USASOAC
The Night Stalkers currently operate a mix of M and R variant Little Birds configured as either MH-6s or AH-6s. MH-6s are small “assault” transports with planks on either side for operators to ride on and the Fast Rope Insertion Extraction System (FRIES). AH-6s are light attack helicopters capable of carrying various missiles, rockets, and guns. Both configurations use the same underlying helicopter, and MH-6s can be readily converted to AH-6s and vice versa.
A Night Stalker MH-6M in the unit’s standard overall black paint scheme comes in to land on the USS Bainbridge during the recent deck landing training. USASOAC
“MH-6M helicopters from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment conduct deck landing training aboard a US Navy ship,” the USASOAC post on X reads. “160th SOAR pilots and crews regularly train for operations on unique platforms, in diverse environments, at any time.”
Pictures of Night Stalker Little Birds with the new blue paint jobs first emerged earlier this year. This followed the appearance of an MH-60 from the 160th wearing the scheme at Pryor Field Airport in Alabama in September 2023. What is likely the same Black Hawk has since been spotted elsewhere.
Details about the blue camouflage scheme, its origins, and how widely the Night Stalkers expect to make use of it remain scant. It has been suggested that the paint job may be a product of Project Genesis, an internal innovation “challenge” the U.S. Army’s special operations aviation community held in 2022.
“ARSOA [Army Special Operations Aviation] has launched Project Genesis … a 120-day challenge where every Night Stalker has the opportunity to submit ideas (paper-thin) and compete to be one of five finalists to live-pitch their idea or solution to a panel of past and present Night Stalkers and possibly see their idea make its way onto an aircraft, into a hangar, or incorporated into a support office,” according to an article in the June 2022 edition of Army Aviation Magazine.
The War Zone has reached out to the US Army for more information.
A picture of the Night Stalker MH-60 Black Hawk wearing the blue camouflage scheme at Pryor Field Airport last year. Pryor Field Airport Authority
After focusing on counter-terrorism and other lower-intensity missions in the Middle East and Afghanistan for the past 20 years or so, the U.S. special operations community has been working to reorient itself to this new security paradigm. This includes the Night Stalkers, who notably highlighted how the unique capabilities they offer could be utilized in maritime and Arctic operations in a demonstration in and around Alaska last August. That included deck landing training with the Navy’s San Antonio class amphibious warship USS John P. Murtha in the Bering Sea between Alaska and Russia, another one of America’s chief global competitors.
A pair of MH-60Ms from the 160th SOAR come in to land on the deck of the USS John P. Murtha off the coast of Alaska in September 2023. USN A pair of MH-60Ms from the 160th SOAR come in to land on the deck of the USS John P. Murtha. USN
The importance of the maritime domain extends beyond the Pacific and the Arctic, too, as underscored by the campaign that Iranian-backed Houthi militants are continuing to wage against commercial ships and foreign naval vessels in and around the Red Sea. Waterways in Europe, especially the strategic Baltic Sea and Black Sea have taken on new significance since Russia launched its all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
On an operational level, it is worth noting that the 160th’s Little Birds offer unique capabilities given how small and maneuverable they are, which are applicable to maritime operations, as well as ones over land. Their size, in particular, means they can be loaded into various aircraft and embarked on ships that otherwise might not be able to accommodate larger helicopters.
“It is your streetfighter,” Paul Kylander, Little Bird program manager with U.S. Special Operations Command’s larger PEO-RW office, told The War Zone and other attendees at the SOF Week conference in May. “I’ve heard it said multiple times that this still continues to be the most effective platform to get a set of operators to like to a rooftop.”
The Night Stalkers’ Little Bird fleet is currently experiencing what has been described as a “resurrection” following the Army’s decision to cancel its Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) program. The expectation had previously been that a special operations variant of FARA would supplant at least a significant portion of the 160th’s Little Birds. The plan now for what will happen to the helicopters beyond 2030 is still murky, as you can read more about here.
The appearance of the MH-6Ms wearing the new blue camouflage scheme underscores the continued relevance of the 160th’s Little Birds and the distinct capabilities they offer, including in the maritime domain.
While sorting through a deceased person’s possessions, what is the most disturbing thing you found?
For a number of years I worked with elderly people who I helped them get their financial affairs in order. It was a very rewarding job because I enjoyed talking to them. I wanted them to know that they were going to be okay as their health deteriorated. Money makes people do terrible things and I had seen it ALL!! So I still had young high net worth clients but the elderly were just more enjoyable and appreciated all the effort.
My collegeues always said ““old people just love you….I don’t understand it?” I thought it was easy to understand. I appeared to be a straight laced young man who would sit and listen to them for hours. I was respectful and did everything for them as I would want done for my grandmothers or mom. I spent a lot of time with my grandparents and great uncles who helped raise me. They taught me a lot about myself and had an undying belief that I was going to go great things. That kind of faith helped me thru some very difficult times.
So to many of these elderly people I became a grandson type and looked out for them because they couldn’t do it for themselves. One of my clients was a WW2 ace who I discovered accidentally when watching a history channel show about his life. I could have listened to him for days.
When you deal with people’s money especially when they have children there is a paranoia that can create a difficult situation. What most heirs learned was that I was focused on their parents or grandparents living the life they wanted and then keeping their inheritance out of the government hands. Some objected to the way the money came to them but most often it was a lack of their understanding.
One day I was called to meet a new client that was living in terrible conditions. He had a substantial amount of money but typical in a child of the Great Depression was worried it was going to run out. Although he was admittedly different I didn’t know why in the beginning. Because he was doing odd things like dumpster diving at 83 and he wore an old electrical cord as a belt. He seemed oblivious to his own odor and lack of proper hygiene. The biggest issue was that he wasn’t caring for his home and one rather negative neighbor who had an ulterior motive called the police on him.
Most people don’t know that in many states a neighbors complaints about your lawn not being cared for or your home in disrepair can be the first steps to making you a ward of the state. Where I worked it happened often and it NEVER benefitted the individual or their heirs.
So luckily I was friends with a number of people in this neighborhood and his meals on wheels volunteer who introduced me to this man. His house was going to be condemned, and it was a real death trap. He was a hoarder and the outside of the house was terrible but inside was worse. The issue was that the land was worth a fortune.
If you had seen him you would have thought he was homeless and impoverished. He was very friendly but there was clearly an event that triggered his situation. Some of his caring neighbors tried to look out for him but it was too much. He did have a daughter but had not spoken with her for 30 years.
In order to help him I needed to get my hands on any documents he had. I drove to his house and was prepared to search through everything but the smell was so bad I could not be there for more than 30 minutes. In his state no honest attorney would work with him. He said he had a will and I needed to locate it. The next day he calls me and we meet in his bank. He is pushing a shopping cart full of documents which he gives me and then he went about his day.
I loaded my car with his papers which smelled terrible and spent the next 2 days going through them. It was after going thru the papers that I found his daughters name and general location. But I also found that he had had 2 daughters. I found an old will that referenced the 2 daughters and his wife.
When I found a death certificate I assumed it was his wife’s but I was wrong. It showed one of his daughters had been murdered. Below the death certificate was a few newspaper clippings that gave details of the incident. As I read thru them I was horrified and wanted to put them all down. As I was piecing the situation together I realized that his daughter was married to a long haul truck driver. THey were separated and one night her husband came to her fathers house while he and his wife were out. He killed her and left. When he and his wife returned home they found her body and blood was everywhere. His wife had a heart attack at the sight of the daughter and died at the hospital a few days later.
The daughters husband was picked up 5–7 days after a few states away. He plead guilty and was sentenced to life in prison. As a parent I couldn’t imagine losing a child but losing a child to murder just brought tears to my eyes.
Below the newspaper articles was a letter he wrote to his surviving daughter. I tried to be respectful in reading only what is necessary but it was impossible. I learned the deceased daughter had a son who was now living with his other daughter. For those of you who feel like I violated his trust please understand that my recommendations cannot be made without knowing all heirs, ages, relationship and situation. For this man I was going to have to get him access to a long term care home and at his state it would require some explanations.
His letter seemed to explain his struggle with what he needed to do to deal with the situation. He was a religious man and was being counseled to forgive his son in law but he couldn’t. His life changed that day and he didn’t know how to deal with it. Apparently he had encouraged his daughter to give the marriage a chance and seek counseling but his wife disagreed. He felt responsible for the outcome and it changed him so much that he seemed to be a different person to his surviving daughter. He lost his wife and daughter in that and his other daughter and grandson after. It was devastating just knowing what he had been through and I wanted to try and help him in any way I could.
He died 3 years after we met but his last 3 years were really different. He went to a very nice retirement community where his diet was controlled and helped him get healthy. He had excellent medical care and reunited with his daughter and grandson a year after we met. He was so thankful for the reunion and the relationship that he spent a lot of time with them both. He also got to meet his great granddaughter 6 months before he passed away. He wrote me a very nice note of thanks that I still have today.
When he passed away he was able to provide enough money that his daughter got to retire, his grandson got a house and his great granddaughter could go to any college she wanted. The funeral was bittersweet.
Have you ever met a celebrity who asked you, “Do you know who I am?” and you said no?
My daughter had one of these, that worked out well. She was a psychiatric nurse, working on the Crisis Team, but hoping to be able to work in the Perinatal area. Unfortunately, there was no peri natal service in that area.
One day, she happened to be in the office in the hospital. A man came in, and said “ Look, my daughter needs an inpatient mental health bed now.”
She said “ You could be right, sir, but I have just had a patient admitted to the last available one. We’ll do what we can until another becomes available”.
He said “ Do you know who I am?” She said she had no idea. He told her her was a senior politician, in the Cabinet. ( I will not name him, as he was a good constituency MP.)
She told him that, if the mental health services were not so underfunded, she probably could have helped his daughter faster. She said “ This is the sharp end of the funding decisions you make in Cabinet.” and gave him the phone number of the local private clinic. He went away, crossly.
BUT, a few weeks later she was phoned by the head of Mental Health for her county, and told that more money had been released to set up a peri natal service, and they wanted her to set it up and run it. Which is what she did. I don’t think it was coincidence that money was suddenly available. Whether or not he said “ And I want that bolshie woman who cared enough about her patients to take me to task to run it,” we don’t know. This was some years ago now, and I admire him for doing something about it.
Sesame Noodles with Thai Peanut Sauce
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Thai Peanut Sesame Noodles
I love anything chinese and thai food and that is apparent on my blog. When people ask me what my favorite recipes are on the blog, it is definitely the better than take out chinese recipes. These are recipes that I make over and over again. And when you repeat recipes as a food blogger, you know that they are good.
This Thai peanut sesame noodle recipe is just it! It is light, fresh and so much flavor. I can’t get enough to it. I love the flavor combination with the sesame noodles and Thai peanut sauce. It is simple to make and only takes minutes to prepare and cook. This is perfect for a quick dinner in on a busy week night.
I couldn’t believe how amazing these noodles turned out. I devoured them! So simple and so flavorful! The combination of the flavors in the sauce coated the noodles and gave this dish such an awesome taste. My picky eater even gobbled them down and asked for seconds. This is such a simple meal that our family will be making again and again. We might try adding beef or chicken next time too!
Ingredients
1 pound vermicelli or thin spaghetti
3 tablespoons dark sesame oil
3 cloves garlic
4 green onions, cut in 1/2-inch pieces
1 (1 inch) piece ginger root, pared and quartered
1/3 cup peanut butter (plain or chunky)
1/4 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup tap water or chicken broth
1 tablespoon rice or white vinegar
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper
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Instructions
Cook spaghetti as directed; drain and rinse with cold water.
Toss with 2 tablespoons sesame oil (this dish can be served cold or hot). If you want to serve as a hot dish, do not rinse with cold water; just drain.
In a food processor, finely chop garlic, green onions and ginger.
Add remaining sesame oil and all ingredients. Process until thoroughly mixed.
Top each serving of vermicelli or spaghetti with amount of desired sauce.
I hear pigs are multiplying in Europe, Arkansas, and even Texas. Why not introduce a predator or two to check the population?
Right now the only predator capable of handling feral hogs is man. And he’s an idiot if he tries it alone.
Any other predator capable of defeating the ferocity and tusks of a feral hog would be so big as to threaten man, too. Given the hogs travel in sounders, you will have a pack of tuskers attacking the generally lone predator. Good luck.
Typically hogs are trapped and then killed. If out hunting, the hogs don’t come out until the wee hours. So you need night vision. They will spook at the sound of an approaching vehicle. So you have to either be in place around dusk, and downwind of the track they’ll take, or plan on making long range shots from a well traveled road (so single car noises don’t sound dangerous).
If you hunt, you’d better have 5–6 shooters as you’ll only get 2–3 shots off before the herd scatters. That many shooters will also be a deterrent to the hogs turning on you. If alone, you can expect the hogs to attack you, and whatever thing you’re in. Don’t expect that the sides of a pickup will stop a 200-lb male from jumping in with you. Their tusks are lethal, and they’ll just eat you when you’re dead.
Typically a good trap will haul in 3–4 hogs. A sounder of them might run 30 or 40. So you need to trap a lot at once. They already know what traps look like, so avoid them. They are definitely smart critters. You need to kill off the females, as they will breed 2 times a year and pop out a fair number of piglets each time. A sounder of 4–5 males, 15 females, and the rest piglets … you can do the math.
I read of one trap where heavy horse panels were fastened together in a large circle, and the remotely-dropped gate was left open. Feed was put out. Over several nights the hogs more and more would trust the corral, and go in. Finally several nights in, the cameras indicated most all of the sounder, particularly the females were inside, and the gate was dropped. They went nuts, but the panels held. Later in the daylight the ranchers came out and shot the bunch of them. The meat is very lean, and properly prepared can feed a lot of homeless.
By trapping the entire sounder, you remove the acquired intelligence of the herd.
Let the hogs run wild, and they will destroy a field. They root for grubs, and will turn over a planted field into useless vegetation in a single night. I have a small pasture that looks like 150 small land mines went off in it. Every time it rains I can expect the hogs out in a night or two to shred the pasture again. If I were trying to grow a cash crop, I’d be much more interested in eradicating them all. Just ask this guy:
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“Victor Davis Hanson: I Can FINALLY Tell You EVERYTHING…”
Ok. SO the United States is actively killing Russians on Russian soil. And then Russia hits back and kills all the Americans who launched the weapons.
Meanwhile the United States is attacking every nation that wants to join BRICS+. Forcing the collective to issue a statement saying that they will pause on new entries.
Ah. We are deep in the middle of the “doo doo”. We are in The Shit.
It’s really hot.
Do not put your hand on the blistering surface of the stove.
It’s all a big cluster fuck. Yeah. Today is Geo-Politics post. We are deep in the middle of it. Do not fall asleep.
Today…
BREAKING: Russia Eliminated 10 US Army Officers Who Carried Out Missile Attack On SEVASTOPOL
Russian revenge. Hits.
OpenAI to further block access by China, what’s your comment on this?
According to recent reports, OpenAI has been noted in multiple media outlets for attempting to restrict access to its platform from users within China. The move has been perceived as a further limitation imposed by the United States on China’s ability to leverage advanced AI technology. This development was highlighted by an industry insider who chose to remain anonymous due to the politically sensitive nature of the matter, as reported by SCMP.
Notably, Chinese companies have been actively participating in the AI sector’s development. For instance, in November, a relatively unknown startup based in Beijing, 零一万物-http://AI2.0大模型技术和应用的全球公司(01.AI), unveiled its own open source model, which has demonstrated superior performance when compared to Llama 2 and has achieved high rankings on various leaderboards that benchmark AI model capabilities.
Furthermore, prominent Chinese entities such as Baidu, Alibaba, Mengniu Dairy, and TAL Education have also entered the competitive landscape of generative AI, leading to the emergence of what Chinese media has coined “the battle of 100 models” to characterize the intensified competition in this field.
The rapid advancements in AI have introduced a new dimension to the ongoing US-China tech conflict. The Biden administration has taken measures to limit China’s access to advanced semiconductor technology and has imposed restrictions on American investments in China’s AI sector. Additionally, there are reports of forthcoming regulations intended to control the export of advanced AI models.
In May, the Biden administration introduced the CHIP ACT, a significant initiative aimed at strengthening the semiconductor supply chain. The Chips and Science Act, supported by over $100 billion in grants, loans, and guarantees intended for semiconductor firms to establish manufacturing facilities in the US, has sparked a substantial influx of investment. This is anticipated to reverse the declining trend in domestic chip production, as confirmed by the Semiconductor Industry Association.
Russia’s MiG-31 Foxhound Destroyed The U.S. GLOBAL HAWK and MQ-4C TRITON Drones Over The BLACK SEA
The Western “news” claim that this is a big “nothing burger”. That it is “fake news”. Hum. I tend to believe the Russians.
In the age of dueling with pistols, was it customary to finish the wounded foe with a shot to his head?
It wasn’t really the standard practice, and doing so could actually get pretty complicated.
Duels, especially during their heyday in the 17th to 19th centuries, were governed by a strict code of conduct.
The goal of a duel wasn’t to kill your opponent. It was more about defending one’s honor.
In many cases, just showing up and being willing to risk your life was enough to restore your honor, and a lot of duels ended after the first shot, whether or not anyone was hit.
if someone did get hit and was wounded, the duel usually ended right there.
Killing a wounded opponent would have been seen as excessive and dishonorable.
People back then took these codes seriously.
In fact, in most cases, if a duelist was wounded, the seconds (the assistants to the duelists) would step in to stop the fight.
There are plenty of wild stories from those times.
There are plenty of wild stories from those times. One of my favorites involves the American politician Alexander Hamilton and his infamous duel with Aaron Burr.
Hamilton was hit and fatally wounded, but Burr didn’t go up and finish him off with another shot.
Instead, Hamilton was taken back to his friends and later died from his injuries.
there was a French duel in the 19th century between two gentlemen named Léon Gambetta and Édouard de Cassagnac.
Gambetta was shot in the thigh and unable to continue, but de Cassagnac didn’t finish him off.
The duel ended with Gambetta wounded but alive, and both men actually went on with their lives, their honor intact.
What is the most bizarre mechanical problem you’ve encountered while working on your car?
I bought a 1967 Ford Galaxie convertible back in ’77 that no one could figure out. For $175 it was a bargain so I took the chance. The owner had given up on it after several shops couldn’t figure out what was wrong with it. It would idle fine, but as soon as you tried to accelerate it would spit back through the carb and either stall, or stumble then take off. I jacked it out of the mud and babied it home. I at first thought it was the carb, but it seemed to have good power when you got lucky and you got the rpm’s up without it puking through the carb. I started looking at the ignition system, and finally found the answer when I revved it off of idle while watching and checking the timing with a timing light. When it hit about 8–900 rpm the timing advanced way beyond where it should be, which was causing the engine to choke. It turned out that Ford used some vacuum advances that had a slug inside to tension against a spring to set the rate of advance. Most vacuum advances are sealed cans, but this one had a screw on cap with the vacuum line connection in the center. It had been replaced so the mechanics must have thought it was ok, but apparently the slug was never taken from the old unit and put into the new one. Once the carburetor butterfly opened it would provide vacuum to the advance port and the distributor would go right to full advance (probably 50 to 60 degrees before TDC). It took a little fiddling to cut a piece of copper tubing to the right length with a few coke can shims to get it to the sweet spot, but that 390 ran great. I met my wife cruising in that car.
“What this DHS guy said TERRIFIED me to the core” | Redacted with Clayton Morris
What was the last thing your mother said to you?
”Goodnight Hon, love you !”
I replied “Night, love you too and thank you for the pot of soup”
We had been camping and when we got home my Mom had made a big pot of chicken soup. Only my youngest had school the next day, also had PTA open house before school started that I had to be at. It wasnt unusual that my mom didnt come out of her room in the morning while kids were getting ready for school, I know she had been up late and her TV was on. I was super busy that morning my oldest son came with me to help set up. My 14 year old daughter stayed home to sleep in.
About 2 minutes after kids went to class and I started cleaning up the food at PTA event, the office lady called the library over the intercom and said there was a call on line 2 which was odd because I had my cell phone. But it was my sister who had stopped by to check on our mom after she dropped off her son at school. Mom had had heart failure do to her illness. The emts said she had died maybe 2–3 hours sgo which was when we were all up and getting ready to leave. It was 4–6 hours later that the Neptune society arrived to pick her up. I dont remember much but I do remember thinking She died hearing the normal family life happening right outside her bedroom door and although she was alone she really wasn’t. I pray that it was comforting even just a little bit.
My Mom had been sick a long time and we were all aware this would happen eventually.
It’s been almost 16 years (July 7 2008) Man do I miss her something fierce still.
“LEAVE WHILE YOU CAN”- CANADA WARNS, NUCLEAR DIRTY BOMB, RUSSIAS EMERGENCY CALL WITH USA
What do you think about Europe’s recent tariffs on Chinese-made cars?
It’s fine.
It simply shows that they are unable to compete in any meaningful way.
They’re also rather poor at history.
When CRUSHING tarrifs were placed on Chinese steel, Solar panels, tyres, chips, wind turbines.
Within 10 years? China became absolutely dominant in those industries and western companies get hollowed out.
Westoids will cope with the poor quality / bad safety bullshit like they usually do until you point out NCAP ratings.
What I think will happen is this:
People in Europe will keep their ICE cars longer. As inflation ravages Europe more they’ll fill their cars up with petrol or diesel and the numbers on the pump will just get bigger and bigger. They’ll look for alternatives and see the high price tags…
Via culture videos and stuff they’ll see far more affordable Chinese EVs and think why can’t we have this? People in the USSR saw the apparently better things in western nations and thought why can’t we have this?
Quick French Bread
Quick French Bread
Ingredients
1 envelope yeast
2 cups lukewarm water
1 1/4 tablespoons salt
1 tablespoon granulated sugar
5 or 6 cups all-purpose flour
Instructions
Add yeast to water, then add salt and sugar. Stir until the yeast dissolves.
Beat the flour into the yeast water, a cup at a time, using a wooden spoon to stir. Add as much flour as you need to make a smooth dough. Knead until smooth. Brush top and sides with oil and cover the dough with a towel. Let stand in a warm place to rise until double in bulk.
Turn the dough onto a floured bread board and shape into long French loaves.
Place the loaves on a baking sheet sprinkled with cornmeal and let stand to rise for 5 minutes.
Slash the tops of the loaves in several places, brush them with water and place in a cold oven.
Heat the oven to 400 degrees F.
Place a pan of boiling water in the oven with the loaves and bake them for 45 minutes, or until crusty done.
Quick French Bread 2
Do teachers ever pass a failing student just to get them out of their classroom?
I did it once at university. I had a student who really struggled with my class. I learned later that she was struggling in all phases of her life. But she worked hard. She did all the home work. She showed me all the different ways she tried to solve the problems. It was a programming class. She tried several ways to solve the programming projects. She was in my office every chance she had. She asked questions indicating that she had really tried to understand. The lightbulb just never came on for her. She told me she was doing fine in all her other CS courses.
At the end of the semester I totaled her grade and she was about half a percent below passing. My course was required for a degree. As I thought about it, I realized that she would never need this language after she left my class. Nobody programs in assembly anymore. I thought taking it again would not benefit her in any way. I didn’t think she would ever get it. Finally, I didn’t want to work that hard again. She wore me out and I gave her a passing grade.
A couple semesters later I passed her in the hall. She was so excited to see me. “I finally understand what you were trying to teach me!” I was skeptical, but on the other hand, I had exactly the same experience in a class as an undergrad when three weeks after the final, I finally figured out what had been dealing me fits.
“Really? Why do you say that?”
“When my Advanced Computer Architecture professor says something, it reminded me of what you were saying. Because of what you said, I understand what he is saying now.”
So, she got some benefit from my class after all. I am still glad I passed her. I hope things went well for her.
Russia is Losing its Patience and it could be Devastating for NATO | Pepe Escobar
SPACE NEWS BROADCAST CORP.8 PM GALACTIC NEWSBreaking News: Are the Koolman Industries Again in Violation of Space Workers Comp?Is this Another case of Space Labor Law blatant contravention?The anchorman goes on the air followed by hundred of millions of faithful audience members of the most popular space news agency.“:Dear Cast Readers,We know from the stories that came in large numbers, from Triton to Artemise, that recent cases of Space Labor Laws are culminating in a Space Class Action Lawsuit of extreme proportions.Let us introduce you to two cases that involved different settings and events, but are remarkably symptomatic of the present climate of scandals and corruption incidents in the Far Space Regional Authority.First Case Scenario:
Workers Conditions in Triton’s Meth-sea:
Two dinghies filled with survivors from a Triton ocean wreck derive for weeks over thousands of miles under a blasting binary sun. It is comforting to know that these dinghies are made of coated titanium with borodium reinforcements which are the strongest known materials.
The crew is composed of space shift members who got separated by an hydrogen potassium typhoon of epidemic proportions.
They had been fishing meth-fish on the HMS Essex-SpaceCargo in the middle of the methane ocean for now two months and their cargo was loaded with about a million tons of catch. This ocean (located on Tarantula 1) is a meth-sea of a color red like blood. Its inhabitants inherited the same color.
The number one rule for our meth-fishermen is that they never get into contact with the species found in that red ocean. These fishes are so toxic and life-repellant that just one bite could prove to be lethal, disintegrating or slowly consuming the victim’s flesh until they die in agony after having lost consciousness in horrific medical circumstances.
The million tons catch is then fed to the machines hidden deep in the belly of the Essex where they are cryogenized and processed for very-long term storage, up to a century. On the boat, not one fisherman has the faintest idea of the use the catch will fulfill, or if it will ever even be used at all. All they know is that they meth-fish them and get paid for their arduous work.
A crew usually is made up of around eighteen men who works in grueling shifts of one day and one night and get two days rest. They stay at meth-sea for six months or even a year. At the end of the campaign they have made about two-year salary being able to support a family of four until the next campaign. It is basically a space-version of the Alaskan fisheries of once.
The conditions are extremely harsh and a big difference with the salmon- fishboat is that falling at sea means unavoidable death and not just a bad adventure. Consequently no life jacket can be found as they are unnecessary. And that is a violation of Space Labor law. A few concerned Scientists have developed a suit that is halfway between the space suit and the deepest range pressurized deep underwater suit. But it can only guarantee a short period of survival until the rescue teams have arrived at the place of distress. If the survival unit doesn’t get there in time, the workers will just have a very bad day.
The crew we interviewed last week were exemplary in the matter. They ran into the largest meth-fish bank ever encountered counting five millions of tons of catch. They were all happy and started to work. But that is when the archetypal monster, a gigantic star sea monster came down on them: a gigantic alien Moby Dick type sea monster called the Suburt’na by the natives, the ones with the red color. On Earth the most likely predator to use as a comparison would be the Carcharodon megalodon.
The giant creature destroyed their space-pressurized meth-fishing boat in twenty minutes and killed a number of men. Not one of them was covered by any life insurance policy because their employer hasn’t deemed it necessary.
Thanks to the ensign’s courageous audacity (that cost him his life), they managed to put their unsubmersible dinghies at meth-sea and escaped. They begun a long derive on the meth sea for weeks trying to reach out with distress calls which were not heard. Now the men on board are slowly going astride on the vast ocean perhaps three times larger than the earthly Pacific.
The meth sea port station where they came from looks a bit like an Antarctic station soon became convinced the Essex was lost at meth sea. That is the jargon used in this case. All search for the lost Cargo has been stopped.
But the Essex had not gone down yet. Aboard, the meth fishermen knew that their supplies were going low and if they were not found shortly they would surely perish by starvation. And to compound their problems the charcarodon megalodon was still out there – prowling the seemingly infinite red ocean. The creature was first thought to be a sort of primitive local version of a whale but soon turns out to be much, much worse than that…
Have you ever imagined what a meth sea in fury could look like? The meth waves are as tall as a 5 story building. Then a small speck can be seen on top of the waves. The speck is really the head of a Unit-1 robotic assembler unit, barely emerging from the meth sea in fury. It fell a few weeks earlier from the orbital station and by gravity slowly reentered the Kuranian atmosphere just to fall into the meth sea in the middle of a storm of the century. The Koolman worker stranded in the Unit-1 robotic assembler unit can survive for a week or two, depending on the type of lease he’s been subscribed into. The lease has the inconvenient drawback that the supplies are limited by the lease agreement. Basically, if you got credit for a week, your supplies, including your oxygen tank, will be limited to a week. When the week is over, you better have applied and gotten more credit line or you are out of luck.
Second Case Scenario:
Koolman’s Disregard for Workers Comp at their Industrial Space Facilities:
Dear Readers:
The Second Case we offer to your judgment is as disconcerting as the first one. It took place on the interplanetary facilities administered by Koolman during the week of May 1st to 8th.
You will be able to judge for yourself the gravity of the facts and vote at the end of this cast, in your conscience, your verdict.
The location is the Koolman’s Space Industries Facilities. Our unvoluntary hero is an hourly space worker. An hourly space worker in a working space suit is a worker not a hero and shouldn’t be asked to be one. John looks like a standard industrial worker, except he lives 305 years from now. His daily schedule consists of repairs, adjustments and other not so heroic jobs. He works on space stations compartments, maintenance rooms, and anything he has been assigned to, when getting his weekly schedule at the space station administration center. On a weekly basis, he could earn around 100000 new coins a month which is enough to support a family of four or six. Generally he does not want this job but has to take it to make a living. So, John once earned a PhD in magnetohydrodynamic science and hoped to get a job at the Trans-Jupiterian Consort. But that did not happen and when it was time to make a tough decision, he accepted this lower occupation for the time being. John traveled one week to the industrial complex and begun fixing space modules right away. Koolman rents the space suit to its workers. They take a large deposit and send you good to go into the neighborhoods of the largest spacepods. John’s weekly schedule begins on Sunday and is somehow repetitive but he has not lost interest when he floats in space, with the red planet in the horizon.
The inevitable happened on his fourth day of work as he was fixing a ramp located on the side of a huge depressurizer, he was hit with great force by an unknown object. Thrown at great speed into space, John was saved by an emergency landing pod in outer space that stopped his vertiginous flight. He was marooned not too far from the main planet. Workers in this area may sometimes have to spend a day in a space suit of that type in which they have most of the survival tools needed as well as food and drinks. So when John fell to what could have been his death on the surface of the emergency pod he hoped he would be found quickly and brought back to the planet orbital landing.
He also had his credit cards to buy the supplements he needed off the outlets on the emergency pod.
But after a couple of days spent on the platform John began to fear the worst as he was uncomfortably stuck in vertical position inside his space suit. All the coms had been cut off in the fly and had not been reestablished.
On his fifth day on the emergency pod, John sees another space suit hurled into space. and comes landing onto his already crowded emergency pod. Now John must share his already claustrophobic situation with another worker, who, like him, fell into space. John tries without success to establish a com with his unwanted neighbor. Ironically they can see each other through their visors. John knows some sign language. They can soon share the news and hope that a rescue party will come for them.
They will wait eight days, eight long days which will have now passed without any help on the horizon. John used up the last of his credits to buy the last supply of drinks and foods accessible at the outlets. He expects the card to be declined very soon. What will they do when this happens?
Fortunately a search party spotted the emergency pod on the tenth day of John’s odyssey.
Dear Cast Readers:
We just showed how, once again, Koolman Industries has proven to disregard the most elementary working rules and safety procedures in space and in Triton’s Meth sea. We ask you, at the end of this cast, to vote your mind about Koolman Industries. Please, be partial and vote to prevent Koolman to operate in such unfair conditions that place the lives of their workers in danger. Stop Koolman Industries before someone dies in their facilities! “
Thanks For Watching! Good Evening.
(Music. Holo Cameras span the Theater)
What’s the coolest thing you found in a hotel room that was left behind?
In San Francisco. I was helping a good friend, and myself, by being an extra housekeeper at a hotel that is very close to the airport. A huge conference was hosted there for four days. The place was booked. It was a neverending cycle of cleaning the rooms and changing linens. One time I was cleaning up an especially gross room. Luckily for me, it was the last one on my list. It took about half an hour to clean the bathroom. It seemed like a person bypassed the toilet and chose to vomit in the tub. I got it cleaned up and disinfected. The bed wasn’t too bad. I just had to strip it and put fresh linen on. I found a hundred dollar bill on the nightstand along with an apology for the mess. I emptied the trash cans and started vacuuming. As I was checking things over to be sure I didn’t miss anything, I found a manila envelope wedged between the bed and nightstand. There wasn’t anything written on the outside. Inside, I found five small plastic bags. Inside of each one was what looked like Susan B Anthony coins. I stuck them in my apron and finished up. On my way out I went to the security desk and turned it in. A couple of days later, I returned to payroll for my check. Before I left I was told the supervisor wanted to speak to me. It turned out that the coins I had were collectors. Each coin had a fault on it. Things like the figure facing the wrong way or the date was off. What I thought were just ordinary coins were actually worth thousands of dollars. I asked why they were in an envelope and not in a safe or lock box. The owner thought he would be able to keep them safe on his own. So, my honesty netted me an envelope with a thank you note. It also included fifteen hundred dollars.
Kallas replaces Josep. US contractors in Ukraine. Austin calls Belousov. Macron wants to call Putin
And the old man says no. Then the young man tells him he was his student, And the teacher asks:
“What do you do, what do you do in life?”
The young man answers:
“Well, I became a teacher.”
“ah, how good, like me?” Asks the old man.
“Well, yes. In fact, I became a teacher because you inspired me to be like you.”
The old man, curious, asks the young man at what time he decided to become a teacher. And the young man tells him the following story:
“One day, a friend of mine, also a student, came in with a nice new watch, and I decided I wanted it.
I stole it, I took it out of his pocket.
Shortly after, my friend noticed the his watch was missing and immediately complained to our teacher, who was you.
Then you addressed the class saying, ‘This student’s watch was stolen during classes today. Whoever stole it, please return it.’
I didn’t give it back because I didn’t want to.
You closed the door and told us all to stand up and form a circle.
You were going to search our pockets one by one until the watch was found.
However, you told us to close our eyes, because you would only look for his watch if we all had our eyes closed.
We did as instructed.
You went from pocket to pocket, and when you went through my pocket, you found the watch and took it. You kept searching everyone’s pockets, and when you were done you said ‘open your eyes. We have the watch.’
You didn’t tell on me and you never mentioned the episode. You never said who stole the watch either. That day you saved my dignity forever. It was the most shameful day of my life.
But this is also the day I decided not to become a thief, a bad person, etc. You never said anything, nor did you even scold me or take me aside to give me a moral lesson.
I received your message clearly.
Thanks to you, I understood what a real educator needs to do.
Do you remember this episode, professor?
The old professor answered, ‘Yes, I remember the situation with the stolen watch, which I was looking for in everyone’s pocket. I didn’t remember you, because I also closed my eyes while looking.’
This is the essence of teaching:
If to correct you must humiliate; you don’t know how to teach.”
BREAKING: Military Coup in Bolivia
As soon as Bolivia tries to join BRICS+, the United States starts a coup.
Commander Lance Gilmore and Lieutenant Drew Adams touched down near the Sea of Serenity. Boosters kicked up clouds of lunar dust as they signaled Huston. It had been a very long trip and the astronauts were eager to set foot on Earth’s closest neighbor.
Commander Gilmore signaled Earth, “Huston, this is Lunar Five. We have touch down.”
“Copy Lunar Five. That’s great news. You’re clear to have a look around.” Houston signaled back.
After a decade of budget finagling and technical leaps, man was once again traveling to the moon. The plan was to use a series of new missions to the moon to prepare astronauts for the
first manned mission to Mars. It was a solid long term strategy put in place as governments finally came together to begin more far-reaching manned exploration.
“It’s still hard to believe we’re really here.” Lieutenant Adams said while he wrapped up the landing routine.
Commander Gilmore was fidgeting in the new generation space suit eager to explore the grey landscape. “It is something. And in a minute, we’ll set foot where only a few have before.
Having finished their last safety checks, the pair were pressurizing the air lock.
The sun glared down upon the barren landscape as the exterior hatch of Lunar Five cycled open. Commander Gilmore stepped down onto the fine moon dust with Lieutenant Adams right behind.
“How’re you two doing down there?” Lieutenant Melissa Sloan called down from the orbiting shuttle.
“Everything’s peachy down here. How are things up there? Any traffic?” Commander Gilmore asked with a grin while he looked around.
“Smooth sailing up here. You boys are having all the fun. I feel like the designated driver.”
“So you’re saying you miss us?” Lieutenant Adams asked playfully.
“Don’t get your hopes up Adams.” They all laughed. Everything was going as predicted. Their experience on these new lunar missions would be used to finalize an international mission to the red planet.
That’s when the shockwave hit. All at once Gilmore and Adams were slammed to the ground by some force from above. Without missing a beat Commander Gilmore called to Sloan, “Gilmore to Sloan, report!”
Static. Then a muffled voice, “…to Gilmore…unknown impact…boosters to compensate…”
More static. And silence. Getting back to their feet, Adams and Gilmore looked at each other then up to wherever Lieutenant Sloan was.
“Sloan, come in. Are you all right? Status.”
After too many seconds to count, Sloan replied. “I’m alright sir. Something hit me like a ton of bricks. Took me a while to compensate. I’m glad these suits come with their own diapers.”
Commander Gilmore smiled, “Agreed. Run a diagnostic and see if you can get some info from Houston.” Gilmore paused as Adams started to tap him on the shoulder lightly, then much harder.
“Adams, what is it?” Gilmore could see Adams pointing up.
Before he could look up he heard Sloan screaming over the com, “Noooo!”
“Sloan! What is it? Are you alright?”
Adams forcefully turned his commander around and pointed up. Commander Lance Gilmore looked up to see the Earth shattered into pieces. At first it didn’t register. Sloan’s panicked cries faded away as the realization of what he was seeing started to sink in. He dropped to his knees dumbfounded. Adams still staring up at the nightmarish sight. Sloan continued to scream.
“God.” was all he could utter.
Then he started to hear a countdown. Adams pulled him to his feet.
Sloan was still screaming, but it was instructions. “Debris inbound! Estimate impact in thirty seconds! You’re best bet is north! I’ll keep you updated as long as I can!”
“Sloan?” Commander Gilmore started but Adams pulled him into a leaping jog. The best any astronaut could do on the moon.
“Ten seconds until impact. Commander Gilmore, Lieutenant Adams, it was an honor.” Then she chuckled to herself. “I really wanted to walk on the m…” Her sentence was cut off.
Both Gilmore and Adams knew what that meant and they didn’t stop running. Around them little puffs of dust started to pop up from the surface. The impacts gave no noise, their own panicked breaths was all that filled their ears.
To their left was an explosion of dust as something big hit. Was it the shuttle? A satellite? A chunk of earth? More and more impacts came down all around. Some too close for comfort. They ran hard until one impact landed right behind them throwing them forward and away from one another. Commander Gilmore’s vision went hazy as he nearly lost consciousness.
He raised himself to all fours. The lunar dust that had nearly buried him pouring off his suit like filthy bathwater. Slowly he got to his feet.
“Adams? You there?” He looked around. “Lieutenant?”
“Sir?” Not far away he could see Adams gingerly rising up from a nearby impact crater. His suit completely grey from dust.
Commander Gilmore made his way over to the lieutenant and helped him back to his feet. They looked each other over and paused.
“Sir…Earth?” The two astronauts looked up to see the shattered pieces of their home drifting slowly apart.
“What the hell happened?” Commander Gilmore asked to the sky above them. As if in response, from the blackness a ship appeared. Then another. Then many, many more. Each ship was enormous. They were the size of countries – what used to be countries. Multiple ships flew about in practiced unison hauling away pieces of the astronaut’s former planet to who knows where. In no time at all there was nothing left. That’s when things started to get weirder.
Both men stared up in silent disbelief as more ships showed up. These flew much closer to the moon and were hauling large glistening components. The spaceships danced together connecting this long antenna-like object to this blinking cube. They strung together countless miles of thick cable from one gigantic piece to another, then encasing the inner workings in even more components. On and on it went as the object started to come together. It took on a cylinder shape with a large flat screen down its center. In literally minutes the multitude of ships had assembled what could only be an enormous space station. And then, the enormous screen turned on. The astronauts were greeted with images of aliens. And the aliens were, playing games? And what seemed to be, betting?
Bright pops of energy suddenly appeared overhead as ships of all sizes, shapes and alien configurations began to dock with the station. The two men took a few steps back as several other ships broke off from the group and started to approach the moon’s surface.
“Commander?”
“I see them.” Commander Gilmore tensed as he saw the approaching ships, but also as he viewed his O2 display. It was redlining. There wasn’t much he could do if these ships decided to attack. They couldn’t fight. And they couldn’t run.
As the ships came closer, they spread out and flew over the surface. Actually, it was hard to call them ships. They were very blocky, almost like trailer homes or rv’s. They hissed gasses and blasted their landing jets. One set down just twenty feet away. Parts of it unfurled and
slammed into the ground just in front of them. The structure continued to shift and assemble itself revealing a strange opening bordered with blinking lights. The entrance was glassy; not an airlock that either men were familiar with. The opening more resembled looking through a thin wall of liquid. Above the place, holographic alien lettering popped up.
The two of them looked at one another.
“I’m almost out of air sir.” Said Adams.
“Me too.” Commander Gilmore agreed.
They looked back at the building and moved forward. As they reached the entrance, Gilmore extended his arm and touched it. His hand went right through. He didn’t feel anything and when he pulled his hand back the entrance quivered like a soap bubble.
The two astronauts walked cautiously through the barrier and looked around. A chime could be heard as they emerged inside. The floor was patterned in black and white checkerboard. Booths lined the walls, though some seats were very strange. The place had a very alien, yet familiar feel to it.
From the back of the place wobbled over a somewhat humanoid alien. The best way to describe it would be to ask someone to imagine if a walrus and a chihuahua had a baby. This lumbering creature clad in colorful metallic overalls eyed them with its oversized twitchy pupils. It paused and placed the orange boxes it was carrying on the floor. The creature walked slowly over to them. It placed its meaty fists on its sides and bubbled out something which the two astronauts assumed was its way of asking what the hell they were doing there.
Commander Gilmore held up his hand in greeting. But before he attempted to speak Adams started to wheeze.
“Commander…” Adams began before he fell to one knee.
“Adams!” Gilmore could also see the warning lights flashing on his heads up display.
Gilmore looked up to the creature not knowing if it would understand anything. Would they die there? The creature seemed to, roll its eyes? It moved back to where it came from. Gilmore held Adam’s hand as he felt himself getting lightheaded as well. Then something grabbed his helmet and yanked it off. Strange smells engulfed his nose and his lungs started to burn. This was definitely not air he could breathe. The creature hit the release on Adams helmet and yanked that off as well. Adams gagged and wheezed. There was something slapped onto the
back of both of their heads. Hoses zipped around, up their noses and over their mouths. They were soon breathing easily again.
The creature held out six small metal spheres. It pointed to their ears and their mouths. They took the twitchy metal marbles and gave the creature a puzzled look. It grunted almost irritatedly and pointed to the balls, then to the men’s ears and mouths. They slowly put the tiny metal things against their ears. The spheres grew legs and ran up their ear canals. The sensation was shocking and quickly their ears were ringing sharply causing them pain.
The creature burbled again, but now they could understand it. “Can you little pink idiots understand me yet?”
The two humans nodded weakly.
“Good. Now swallow the other two so I don’t have to put up with your weird squeaking.” It said crossing its flipper arms.
Gilmore and Adams did what the creature demanded and again there was a lot of pain.
“That hurts!” Adams blurted out.
“Of course it does. Translation bots have to burrow into your flesh to work correctly.” The creature said matter of factly. “Now, what are you two doing here? My place doesn’t open for another day.”
Commander Gilmore couldn’t take any more. “What the hell do you mean?” He bellowed advancing on the much larger being. “You blew up our planet! You killed everyone we know! The two of us are the last human beings in existence.” He was pointing accusingly between this creatures bulbous eyes.
“Easy there little guy. I didn’t kill anybody. If you’re talking about the little blue planet that was broken up. It was purchased by the Orion Gambling Federation giving them rights to set up an operation in this sector.” The creature’s flipper arms were flapping away as it explained.
“What the hell are you talking about? How could they buy our planet? There were over seven billion people living there!” Gilmore’s finger was now shaking.
“Happens all the time. Listen, you’re from a younger planet with a very young race so I can understand how all of this is shocking. You just lost everyone you knew. Your home is gone. I get that.”
The two astronauts stood dumbstruck. Earth was bought, destroyed and replaced with a casino.
“Gone.” Adams whispered.
Gilmore put his hand on the lieutenant’s shoulder. Adams swept it away.
“We’re nothing to them. To that!” Adams pointed at the large alien in front of them.
“Hey.” said the offended creature.
“Easy now lieutenant.” said Gilmore trying to calm his friend.
Adams stood still and looked off into the distance.
“What does it matter?”
Gilmore tried to grab his friend before he ran through the barrier to the cold vacuum outside, but could not. The commander fumbled for his helmet and jammed it on his suit, clicking it into place. He grabbed the other helmet and ran out the barrier. Gilmore reached the
lieutenant and was about to place the helmet on his friend, but stopped. Adams was kneeling in the grey dust looking skyward with lifeless icy eyes.
Gilmore slumped to the ground, his helmet’s O2 sensor blaring. Maybe Adams was right. What does it matter. The moon became blurry then black.
Commander Gilmore was awakened by enjoyable singing, and, an electrical shock.
“Aaah!” he yelped.
“Quiet down.” said the irritated alien as it poked at him.
“You’ll be fine so long as you don’t go back out there without your suit refilled. The device I gave you only alters available air into what you need. Doesn’t work in a vacuum.”
Gilmore sat up, “Good to know.” Then he remembered.
“Adams!”
“Yeah. Your friend didn’t fair so well. Too much damage.”
Commander Gilmore put his head in his hands.
“Hey, don’t worry buddy. You can get him fixed up after you earn enough.” the large creature smiled. At least Gilmore thought it was a smile.
“Fix him? But he’s dead? He…” Gilmore stopped in mid sentence when he saw his friend’s head floating in front of him. Wires and tubes were connecting Adam’s head to a device that appeared to be a floating speaker. The lieutenant’s head was singing a song Gilmore had never heard before.
The Commander jumped to his feet in both horror and disgust.
“What did you do to him?” Gilmore shouted.
The bulbous creature put up its hands, “Calm down. Your friend’ll be fine once you earn enough to fix the damage.” The being glanced at the head and shrugged.
“As for separating his head, I thought it would help.”
Gilmore, enraged, shoved the big alien. Its blubbery belly shook.
“How the hell is that supposed to help?”
The being looked confused and then said, “Oooh. I see. Yeah, I suppose that seeing your buddy’s head cut off would look odd to you.”
Commander Gilmore was about to blurt out something when the alien cut him off.
“Your friend’s in stasis. His body’s in a pod out back.”
Gilmore still had a shocked look on his face so the alien continued.
“Listen pal, to fix up your ‘Adams’ after going out into a vacuum is expensive. Believe it or not, removing his head isn’t a big deal. Orion medicine is way out there. They can fix pretty much anything.”
“But why is his head on that floating…thing?”
“Well,” it began, “While the two of you were out I got to thinking. I said to myself, ‘Hey Yorble’, that’s my name by the way thanks for asking. I said, ‘Hey Yorble.’ You need some help in your new place don’t you? Why not use these two?’”
Gilmore blinked a few times trying to process all this.
Yorble continued, “I figured you could take customer orders and bus the tables. Though your friend’s options were more, well, limited.”
Gilmore looked over at his friend’s floating, and singing, head while Yorble continued.
“I thought, what can I do to bring in customers at my new location?” The alien paused for dramatic effect.
“Entertainment! Your buddy would make for a great jukebox.”
Commander Gilmore felt his legs get shaky so he sat at a booth.
#
Six months later, Commander Gilmore was bussing a table where a couple of Flamorians had just sat. He would need the hard scrubber to remove the slime. If he didn’t, it would start growing.
“Order up!” yelled Yorble.
Gilmore walked around a spherical Robotobo and picked up the order of fried tuskart with a side of baked vinatoes. He figured the furry little Boofax at table three ordered it.
After dropping off the order, Commander Gilmore looked over at the crowd gathered at the front of the cafe. The various aliens cheering as decapitated Adams sang a song that sounded a lot like Blue Suade Shoes. Adams was a hit and Yorble made sure Gilmore received all the tips left for the floating head. The funds were really mounting up. When he first started, Gilmore thought it would take ten years to save up the astronomical sum required to bring Adams back from near-death. But with Adam’s popularity, it may only take two.
With all the extra funds, Gilmore had been able to treat himself. The orbiting casino turned out to be not that bad after all. It was a great stress reliever. When he first started going, he would spend a night there once a week, tops. Nowadays though
it’s become two or three a week. The Commander really enjoyed the gambling.
Feeling the weight of the tip money filling his pocket, Gilmore glanced over at his friend floating amongst the aliens. Adams seemed to look back at him.
“Maybe we could wait a little longer before we get you fixed up Adams. After all, you’re not going anywhere.”
Sergey Lavrov’s BRICS Announcement: No New Members for Now
Every time a new member nation tries to join BRICS+, the United States attacks it. Color revolutions, coups, sanctions, outright and direct wars are the norm.
Now the existing BRICS+ members are setting up defense “antibodies” to counter United States efforts before future announcements. Oh, it seems like a slowing down, but it is a pause and an adoption of strong strengthening measures.
Pepperoni Pizza Bread
The dough for this one is an adaptation from an Oregano Bread recipe that I found in The Bread Machine Cookbook #1. I’ve made a lot of these over the years for family get-togethers, potluck and holidays. It’s always one of the first things to disappear from the table, and so my boys usually beg me to make a second loaf to leave at home for them to devour unchallenged.
pepperoni pizza bread 03
Ingredients
Dough
1 1/4 cups lukewarm water
1/4 cup olive oil
2 teaspoons salt
1/4 cup grated Parmesan, Romano or blended cheese
1/2 tablespoon dried oregano
1/2 tablespoon dried basil
2 teaspoons onion powder
1 teaspoon garlic powder
2 tablespoons chopped sun-dried tomatoes or 1 tablespoon tomato paste
1/3 cup nonfat dry milk powder
3 cups bread flour
2 1/2 teaspoons yeast
Filling
1 (6 ounce) can tomato paste
1 to 1 1/2 cups (approximate) mozzarella cheese
12 to 16 ounces sliced pepperoni
Dried oregano, basil, onion and garlic powder
Also Helpful To Have Handy
A small bowl of lukewarm water
One or two large thin-bladed spatulas
A large wire rack for cooling
Clean cookie sheet, cutting board or cardboard flat if transporting
Instructions
Please follow the instructions in the booklet for your bread machine for best results. The order in which to add ingredients may vary per manufacturer.
Grease or spray a heavy cookie sheet or jellyroll pan and dust with cornmeal. When dough is done remove from breadmaker and roll out on a well-floured surface into a long rectangle a little shorter than your baking sheet. Spread with tomato paste just to within 1 inch of the edge all around. Sprinkle tomato paste with herbs and spices and then mozzarella cheese. Lay slightly overlapping slices of pepperoni over all. Roll up carefully from the long sides as you would a jellyroll. Wet the seam and ends and gently press and smear them together.
Lift carefully supporting the middle and place seam side down on prepared sheet. Let rise about 15-25 minutes while preheating the oven to 350 degrees F.
Bake for 35 to 45 minutes, until top is well-browned and bread looks done.
Don’t be alarmed if it springs a leak and oozes – it’ll still taste great. It will stick in that spot but the spatula(s) will help get it off the sheet. Cool on the sheet until you can handle it and then carefully loosen it from the pan and slide it onto a wire rack to cool enough to wrap. It can be wrapped warm in aluminum foil, and I usually do it that way so that it s still a little warm when I get to my destination. A cookie sheet or cardboard flat underneath makes it much easier to transport without bending and cracking it – it tends to be soft when warm.
Cut into 1 1/2-inch slices and watch it disappear!
Store leftovers in the fridge – if you ever have any. I never do!
Notes
Reviewed by mes16121 Tuesday Dec 6th, 2005 08:03 pm.
I made this tonight I have to tell you that this is SO YUMMY! I added some extra toppings…peppers, onions and chopped mushrooms. The bread baked so pretty…did not crack at all! The bread itself was so soft! It was gone in no time! My family wants me to make this at least once a week. Thanks for posting this wonderful recipe!
If you bake bread, you should have this commercial dough conditioner.
Attribution
Posted by cuteascountry_Shortcake at The Cutting Board (Recipe Goldmine) Thursday Oct 20th, 2005 10:35 pm.
This delicious and cheesy pepperoni pizza bread is a delicious twist to the classic pizza recipe. Made with hoagie rolls and fresh mozzarella cheese, these individual pizza breads are sure to please all the pizza lover’s out there.
pepperoni pizza bread 03
Pizza bread is one of the most popular snacks out there. There’s a good reason for its popularity. It’s amazingly delicious! As always, I love putting a spin on a classic. You’ve probably had pizza bread made with something like Italian or French bread, but have you ever had it made with hoagie rolls? If you haven’t, then get ready for a great new way to enjoy a classic!
I used to make this delicious pizza bread variation all the time when my kids were in school. It was just one of the many recipes that my children and their friends would descend upon like locusts after school. The thing is that it’s so good, I still make it just as often as I ever did!
Pepperoni Pizza Bread
I begin this recipe by roasting my own garlic. It’s easy to do and adds so much flavor. I use it to make roasted garlic butter that I slather all over the rolls before baking them to golden, crispy perfection. This adds depth of flavor AND keeps the pizza bread from getting soggy. After that, I top the rolls with pizza sauce, fresh mozzarella cheese, and two kinds of pepperoni for the ultimate pepperoni pizza flavor. Then, I just bake it until melty and scarf it down! Oh, it’s so good.
pepperoni pizza bread 06
Why You’ll Love This Pepperoni Pizza Bread Recipe
It has fresh mozzarella, mini pepperonis, pepperoni chunks, and seasoned garlic butter on hoagie rolls.
It’s a hearty, delicious, easy weeknight meal that the whole family will love and enjoy.
Add all your favorite pizza toppings.
Pepperoni Pizza Bread Ingredients
This delicious pepperoni pizza bread only uses a few simple ingredients.
Submarine rolls or hoagie rolls
Head of garlic, roasted
Olive oil
Salt
Butter
Oregano
Basil
Pizza sauce
Fresh mozzarella
Mini pepperonis
Boar’s Head pepperoni
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How to make Pepperoni Pizza Bread
The recipe might sound complicated, but it really only has a couple of moving parts. In reality, it only takes a few simple steps to make.
Step 1: Roast the Garlic
Cut off the top ¼ of a garlic bulb and place it on a 5×5 piece of foil. Then, drizzle it with olive oil, sprinkle it with salt, and fold the foil up tightly around the bulb. Air fry at 390 for 20 minutes or bake at 400 for 45 minutes to an hour.
Step 2: Make the Garlic Butter
When the garlic is cool enough to handle, remove it from the foil and squeeze the garlic out of the bulbs into a small bowl. Add the softened butter, oregano, and basil and mix until combined.
Step 3: Toast the Rolls
Spread the garlic butter over the inside of the rolls and place them on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Bake at 400 degrees for 10 to 12 minutes or until golden brown.
Step 4: Add Toppings
Remove the bread halves and spread top them both with pizza sauce, fresh mozzarella, and both types of pepperoni.
Step 5: Bake
Bake again at 400 degrees for 12 to 16 minutes or until the cheese is hot and bubbly.
pepperoni pizza bread 08
Recipe Tips
Be careful not to cut too much of the garlic bulb off. You only need to cut far enough down to allow you to easily press the roasted garlic out after it’s finished cooking.
Fully soften the butter so all the garlic and herbs can be easily combined.
Be sure you cut your pepperoni into small chunks so they get hot on the inside and crispy on the outside.
If you decide to use another meat like Italian sausage, fully cook the meat first so it’s fully cooked and wont’ make a greasy mess of your pizza bread.
Variations
Use can use any of your favorite cheese varieties for this recipe.
Top your pizza bread with other favorites like sausage, mushrooms, green peppers, bacon, and olives.
Add a kick of heat with some red pepper flakes in the garlic butter.
What to Serve with Pepperoni Pizza Bread
You can make a full meal of this pizza bread, or you can serve it as part of a larger Italian-themed dinner. Try pairing it with garlic bread, cheesy bread, mozzarella sticks, cheesy bread, pasta, and the like.
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Recipe FAQ
What is the best substitute for pizza dough?
You can use pita bread, naan, crescent dough, Italian bread, French bread, hoagie rolls, or even English muffins in place of pizza dough.
What type of bread is pizza bread?
There is no real single kind of bread used for pizza bread. Italian and French bread are used primarily, but sub rolls, hoagie rolls, and other types of bread like English muffins are also used for pizza bread.
Can pepperoni pizza bread be made in advance?
I don’t recommend making this pizza bread in advance. Although it can be reheated relatively well, it’s never as crunchy, melty, and delicious as it is when it’s straight out of the oven.
What’s the difference between pizza crust and bread dough?
While both pizza dough and bread dough are made with salt, water, oil, and flour, the ratios are quite different to achieve their different goals. Bread dough is designed to rise high and has more water content than pizza dough which is intended to rise but not nearly to the level of bread dough.
Can you freeze leftover pepperoni pizza bread?
Pizza bread freezes well and will last for up to 3 months when stored correctly.
pepperoni pizza bread 02
How to Store and Reheat Leftover Pepperoni Pizza Bread
Refrigerate this pizza bread in an airtight container for up to 3 days. For longer storage, wrap it in a double layer of plastic wrap and a layer of foil and place in the freezer for up to 3 months.
To reheat, place the pizza bread on a baking sheet and bake at 400 degrees for about 15 minutes or until the cheese is melted again.
Try This Delicious Pepperoni Pizza Bread Recipe Today
This pepperoni pizza bread is as easy to make as it is delicious. Even roasting the garlic is a snap! With so much buttery, garlicky, pizza-licious flavor, this is one of the best pizza bead recipes you’ll ever make. Try it just once, and you’ll be hooked. It’s perfect for almost any occasion so give it a go!
pepperoni pizza bread 01
Vet Hugs Dying 15-year-old Cat. A Minute Later, Something Totally Unexpected Happens!
What was the last thing your mother said to you?
”Goodnight Hon, love you !”
I replied “Night, love you too and thank you for the pot of soup”
We had been camping and when we got home my Mom had made a big pot of chicken soup. Only my youngest had school the next day, also had PTA open house before school started that I had to be at. It wasnt unusual that my mom didnt come out of her room in the morning while kids were getting ready for school, I know she had been up late and her TV was on. I was super busy that morning my oldest son came with me to help set up. My 14 year old daughter stayed home to sleep in.
About 2 minutes after kids went to class and I started cleaning up the food at PTA event, the office lady called the library over the intercom and said there was a call on line 2 which was odd because I had my cell phone. But it was my sister who had stopped by to check on our mom after she dropped off her son at school. Mom had had heart failure do to her illness. The emts said she had died maybe 2–3 hours sgo which was when we were all up and getting ready to leave. It was 4–6 hours later that the Neptune society arrived to pick her up. I dont remember much but I do remember thinking She died hearing the normal family life happening right outside her bedroom door and although she was alone she really wasn’t. I pray that it was comforting even just a little bit.
My Mom had been sick a long time and we were all aware this would happen eventually.
It’s been almost 16 years (July 7 2008) Man do I miss her something fierce still.
Alien (1979) Transmission Distress – Extended Scene (2018)
Ukraine SitRep: State And Military Continue to Deteriorate
The Ukrainian state and its military are falling apart.
Under the new mobilization law the Ukrainian military is said to recruit/mobilize some 5,000 men per day. This is sufficient to replace current losses which are above 2,000 men per day. But the quality and level of training the new forces have is way below the level needed to survive on the frontline.
Losses are high because the mass use of Russian FAB glide-bombs is eliminating all identified agglomeration of forces. Ukraine has found no way to counter these.
For lack of armored vehicles several of the new brigades which were supposed to be mechanized will be pure infantry forces. They will be able to hold positions until they are bombed but will not have the means to attack.
The high rate of mobilization has led to a lack of men power in the rest of the society. Agricultural and industrial productions are down. People who can afford to do so avoid taking jobs for fear of being identified for military service. Others attempt to flee abroad (machine translation):
In the Odessa region, an attempt to illegally travel abroad was stopped by 100 men at once. They had to cross the border on foot and paid from 5 to 18,5 thousand dollars for this.This is reported by the State Bureau of Investigation.
In revenge for Ukrainian attacks on Russian energy infrastructure the Russian forces continue to dismantle Ukraine’s capacities. The electricity network is on the verge of falling apart. Electricity is only available for 10 hours per day. A few Russian hits on those switching stations which receive supply from Europe could finish it off.
Figures vary, and the Ukrainian government is increasingly coy about releasing economic data sets, but the Ukraine’s economy is currently around $180-190bn in size. To put that into context, that is around 11 times smaller than Russia’s economy and 131 times smaller than the US economy.
…
According to politico, Ukraine borrowed $58bn in 2022, $46bn in 2023 and is set to borrow $52bn in 2024. So, in just three years, Ukraine will have borrowed 82% of GDP.Ukraine needs to borrow this much because its government spends almost twice as much each year as it receives in income from taxation and other sources.
The Central Bank of Ukraine is trying to help by devaluating its currency. Over the last six month it lost about 10% of its value. The further ‘printing’ of money, which will heat up inflation, is expected.
Ukraine has suffered a setback in its quest to complete the outline of a debt restructuring before the end-of-August expiry of a two-year payment freeze agreed by private holders of near $20 billion in outstanding international bonds.The government announced on Monday it had not reached agreement with a group of bondholders, raising the specter that the war-torn country might slip into default.
Against the background of the continuing difficult situation for Ukraine at the front, public criticism of the AFU command is growing.MP Mariana Bezuglaya again spoke out against Commander-in-Chief Syrsky. She said that after receiving his position, he could not “go beyond” outdated management methods and became “even more authoritarian”.
“In this stressful situation, against the background of this huge responsibility, he has become even more authoritarian, increasingly tightening the screws and returning to the so – called classic techniques of the Soviet army,” Bezuglaya said in an interview with journalist Natalia Moseychuk.
She bases her opinion on messages that come to her from the military.
Recall that the People’s Deputy began to actively “wet” the commander-in-chief, as she had previously done with Zaluzhny, who was later dismissed.
However, in addition to Syrsky, she criticizes much harsher Yuriy Sodol is the commander of the Joint Forces and the Khortytsia group, which operates in the Pokrovsky direction (where the AFU has been losing ground most actively in recent months).
A number of activists like Serhiy Sternenko are also in solidarity with Bezugla in their antipathy to the general.
And yesterday the campaign against Sodol was joined by the chief of staff of” Azov ” Bogdan Krotevich. He said that he had filed an application with the State Bureau of Investigation against the Ukrainian general for committing “war crimes”.
Yesterday evening Sodol was replaced by a former leader of the 36th Marine Brigade who’s track record is in no way better that Sodol’s.
Syrski will be the next to fall.
The Russian forces now have the men and equipment to largely overrun the Ukrainian lines. But doing so would cost a significant amount of casualties. They are therefore just waiting for the Ukrainian army to exhaust itself and to fall by its own means. Only after a large scale breakdown of Ukrainian defenses will the order be given to proceed.
Funny headline from Brookings today:
"Putin and Kim are creating a crisis—Can the US and China rein them in?"
Am I the only one who finds it strange just how blind Western Imperialism is to China's clearly stated "no limits" partnership with Russia.
The RC in the west is truly insane to believe that they can seek a war over Taiwan and simultaneously expect China to come bail them out when their ridiculous foreign policy gets them into trouble.
Posted by: Ahenobarbus | Jun 23 2024 17:08 utc | 7
Ah, the AI tools are impacting everything. And today, we will focus on a sub-group that I call “Super Panavision 70”. There are a ton of these self-produced YouTube flicks using AI in this format and they are amazing.
But first…
What is Super Panavision 70?
Film Format: Super Panavision 70 is a 70mm film format used for motion pictures. It provides a larger film frame compared to standard 35mm film, resulting in higher resolution and more detailed images.
Aspect Ratio: It typically has an aspect ratio of 2.20:1, which is wider than the traditional 1.37:1 (Academy ratio) and the more common 1.85:1 widescreen formats. This aspect ratio allows for a more immersive cinematic experience with a broader visual field.
Lens and Camera System: Super Panavision 70 uses spherical lenses rather than anamorphic lenses. This means the images captured are not distorted and do not require “unsqueezing” during projection, as with some other widescreen formats like Cinemascope.
Image Quality: The combination of 70mm film and spherical lenses results in exceptionally high image quality, with rich colors and fine detail. This makes it suitable for epic films and scenes that benefit from a grand, sweeping visual presentation.
…
But…
You see, this format is used with AI generation to create these very weird and strange parody or obscure videos based on earlier movies and television shows, and some of them are just…
z37
…well, see for your self.
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I have about ten short one minute videos in this post regarding this, and it is well worth your time to watch every one of them.
Today…
OMG
We start with some inspiration.
57f9c5f5cab0cd6b8f7414fee491e178
What did the teacher in your high school get fired for?
Gossip! False reporting! Both! I was long graduated but I saw this coming, in fact, I warned that teacher if she “didn’t shut up and stop stirring the pot with frivolous reporting and gossiping it would come back to haunt her!” She laughed in my face.
On an ego trip! Bad enough, she was a special education teacher on top of everything!
What happened that got her terminated? Well, she reported a student as “suicidal” and “displaying bi-polar behavior” and in addition she “claimed” she had found “drugs” in the student’s purse after “she claimed the student stole her stuff from her desk”!
She didn’t like this particular student because that student was very popular, plus she was cute, boys were attracted to her.
Yes, this teacher’s obsession went too far! She got that student suspended twice, and both times the mother took her to the clinic due to “drugs” and both times she came up negative. One big mistake was the student’s Uncle is a well known lawyer!
Let’s put it this way, he filed a lawsuit against the School System, against the Teacher and against the School that student was attending! They won the case hands down, and the student was transferred to another school and was doing exceptionally well there, and made it to the Principal’s List (as they call it today) as straight A student!
That “special Ed” Teacher constantly gave her F’s and D’s, wrote all kinds of notes and none were true!
That particular student knew me, and I was subpoena to testify. The School system claimed “immunity” but the Judge sided with the Lawyer, immunity can only go so far!
They won the lawsuit, the teacher was going to be terminated but she “resigned” before they could terminate her. They also imposed a “restriction” (she could not be around with anyone under the age of 21). That teacher almost lost custody of her own children (because of the testimonies from students – present and former, plus assistants/tutors who also testified).
While the Jury sided with the plaintiff, however, it was the Judge that constrained her as he was very concerned about her 2 children, the HRS (today is DCF/CPI) were required to visit twice a week until the child was of 19 years of age! He was concerned because of the mother’s mental state as he said it right there “Narcissistic Power Control”.
Because of that “restriction” the mother could not leave the county without a hearing. Once her youngest child turned 19, they sold the home and moved away quickly!
Weird Science – 1950’s Super Panavision 70
Man, oh man!
What was the cleverest thing you said to someone walking away?
I was in this Big-Bazaar type super-market the other day.
So, I was waiting in the billing line.
The young lady before me was retaining the billed goods in trolley as slowly as possible.
I mean for an outsider, it would be like, the supermarket is conducting a patience-check limit trial with me as subject.
Finally, she was done.
Her husband or brother, as I saw, surreptitiously placed two stolen Park avenue beer shampoo bottles in that billed trolley. The lady was ignorant of it.
I think, he was her husband. He looked quite patient and unhappy.
They moved forward. Finally, mine was getting billed.
The bill-guy kept looking at her as she was leaving. I pleaded, brother please make my bill.
But he couldn’t help distraction, she too wouldn’t just get her a** out of there fast.
She was so slow and hence so near. I could hear what they were talking.
Lady (to husband) : Hey, what’s these shampoo bottles?
Man : It was a discount. Separate counter.
Lady : How much discount.
I shouted : 100%.
Lady didn’t understand. Man at once looked back, kept those bottles there, held her hands, forgot patience and got her vanished.
The excitement of billing guy got diluted. In turn, he became concentrated and in a split-second prepared my bill.
Can you describe what it was like to ride on an Army Huey helicopter during the Vietnam War?
Riding on an Army UH-1 “Huey” helicopter during the Vietnam War was a unique and intense experience that left a lasting impression on those who lived through it. Here’s a description based on accounts from veterans and historical sources:
The Approach
As a soldier approached the landing zone (LZ) to board the Huey, the first sensation was often the overwhelming noise. The distinct “whop-whop” of the rotor blades could be heard from a distance, growing louder as the helicopter approached. The downwash from the rotors kicked up dust and debris, and the thick smell of aviation fuel filled the air.
Boarding
Boarding a Huey was typically hurried and chaotic, especially in a combat zone. Soldiers, often weighed down by their gear and weapons, would quickly pile in. There were no luxuries; seating was on metal benches along the sides, or sometimes directly on the floor. The doors were usually open, providing an unobstructed view outside and a rush of wind once airborne.
Takeoff
The takeoff was quick and steep. The Huey would lift off the ground with a sense of urgency, sometimes swaying slightly as it gained altitude. The open doors meant soldiers could look straight down at the rapidly shrinking landscape. The vibrations from the rotors and the engine could be felt throughout the entire airframe.
In Flight
During the
flight, the noise was deafening. Communication among passengers was nearly impossible without shouting or using hand signals. The wind whipped through the open doors, and the ride could be rough, especially in turbulent weather or when taking evasive maneuvers to avoid enemy fire. The view was both awe-inspiring and terrifying, with the dense jungle, rice paddies, and winding rivers below.
The Landing
Landing in a hot LZ (an area under potential enemy fire) was particularly intense. The approach would be fast and steep, with the helicopter descending rapidly. Pilots often performed a “combat landing,” where the Huey would descend sharply and touch down quickly to minimize the time spent vulnerable to enemy fire. The sudden deceleration and jarring contact with the ground added to the adrenaline rush.
Disembarking
Once on the ground, soldiers would rapidly disembark, sometimes under fire. The urgency was palpable as they moved out to secure the area or head to their mission objectives. The Huey would not linger; as soon as the soldiers were clear, it would lift off again, often as quickly as it had landed.
Emotional Impact
The experience of riding in a Huey was a mix of fear, excitement, and camaraderie. The constant threat of enemy fire, combined with the raw power and mechanical presence of the helicopter, left a deep impression. For many, the sound of a Huey became synonymous with both the danger and the lifeline of their time in Vietnam.
Futurama – 1950’s Super Panavision 70
How many men were drafted for the Vietnam War and served on active duty in combat roles?
In 1966, before draft lottery, I was in a body cast from a car accident and had to drop out of school going to my sophomore year. I had a Rx for Darvon and Robaxin, pain killer and muscle relaxant. I was called for the draft physical and could not bend to touch my knees. I was told I would get a good physical at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. Myself and a couple of hundred other kids from Pittsburgh were herded on to a train heading South.
I was given an open Rx on Darvon and Robaxin and put into basic training. I had to sleep on a board because a sagging bunk killed my back! I was also 20:400 vision and classified “non combat” arms. I was near legally blind.
Officers in combat in Vietnam did not last long and they needed officers. I tested out well and was offered Officer Candidate School. Why not? I was non combat arms.
Upon graduation, someone, without my knowledge, put me in for a wavier to be combat arms! I ended up with the First Cavalry in Vietnam, leading a platoon in jungle combat. I was exceptionally fortunate and made it home!
Most of my men were wounded at least once. I lost some in combat.
Because I only had one year of college, I was a Lieutenant at 20 years old. I doubt that would happen today! They just needed officers for combat rolls. Looking back, that is a lot of responsibility for a kid… leading 30 other kids in combat and having to make split second decisions and they had to be right or people died!
The draft was horrible and unfair and many died in an unnecessary war because of it! I was lucky and blessed with bonus days. Thank you Lord for giving me the opportunity of a full life!
What screams “I can fight”?
Our ship pulled into a fishing port to ride out a storm. A bunch of us went to a bar, that has a reputation as being dangerous, but there was little choice in town.
These are the type of towns where people stick up for each other and against outsiders. I have seen more than one brawl.
One guy who had been on our crew for years, and was the nicest guy, and the only one to wear fashionable clothes, and trim his beard, was up at the bar. He was getting beers for us, when he got into a yelling match with a guy at the bar. He must have looked like the weakest link. I don’t know what was said, but our shipmate kicked the other guy in the head, he didn’t fall, so he kicked him again, and then kicked him in the privates and he just crumbled, without throwing a punch.
Our shipmate didn’t look back and just brought our beers back to us. I don’t know why it happened, and I was a little upset that our shipmate struck the first blow, but watching a guy beat someone up, without spilling his beer, seemed to actually cool the mood in the bar. If the guy who looked like a dandy, can do that, they didn’t want to bother us. We finished up our beers, left a huge tip and left as a group, before anything else could happen.
I never asked him where he learned to fight, we sailed together for a couple more years, and I never saw him do it again.
The Coming Societal Breakdown of America with #PeterTurchin
Everyone knows that America has become a plutocracy.
What was the most satisfying thing that you saw happen to someone in your party who tried to get out of paying their part of the check at a restaurant?
At the culmination of a convivial evening filled with laughter and shared stories , the moment of reckoning arrived—the presentation of the bill . As each diner reached for their wallets , one individual , let ‘s call him Ethan , exhibited a peculiar reluctance . With a sheepish grin , he stammered excuses about having forgotten his wallet and being short on cash . The table grew silent , a palpable tension hanging in the air . The weight of Ethan ‘s attempted evasion fell heavily on the shoulders of his companions , who had generously covered his expenses throughout the evening . A chorus of voices rose in protest , each expressing their disappointment and frustration . Undeterred , Ethan doubled down on his excuses , claiming he had no other means of paying . The atmosphere grew increasingly acrimonious as the group debated whether to let Ethan off the hook or hold him accountable . Finally , our server , a woman with a steely gaze and a no-nonsense demeanor , intervened . She calmly informed Ethan that if he could not pay his portion , he would have to leave his ID and return to settle the bill at a later time . Ethan ‘s bravado crumbled before her unwavering gaze . With a heavy sigh , he retrieved his ID , his face flushed with embarrassment . As he made his sheepish exit , the table erupted in a mix of laughter and relief . Ethan ‘s attempt to avoid his financial responsibility had backfired spectacularly . Not only was he forced to face the consequences of his actions , but he also lost the respect of his companions . * * Engaging sentence : * * Discover more satisfying tales of accountability in the link in my bio , where karma reigns supreme and justice is served with a side of sweet retribution .
What is the most absent-minded thing you’ve done today?
Not today but a year ago.
I was tensed. I believe the stress had entered each of my nerves. I got to know something that was weird and unexpected. It had knocked the wind out of me.
People change I knew. But to this extent? I was unable to take it.
I felt deceived. Couldn’t sleep for the whole night. The next morning, I had to go for Covid Vaccination which I had scheduled long back. I couldn’t cancel it.
I was driving to the place which was 12 kilometres away from my home. I was lost in my own world though I was constantly convincing myself.
“Let people do what they want. If I don’t exist for them, they too don’t exist for me. I am happy with my child who gives me a goal. I don’t care about anyone now”, I kept telling this to myself while the tears were rolling down without listening to a word.
The road was straight and then, at one point, I had to turn right which I forgot. I kept on driving straight and took extra 6 kilometres. Suddenly, I realised I was completely in a new place.
With a lost mind, I asked the traffic police about the location and he told me that I had to take a U-turn to reach my destination.
I took.
However, that day I realised that some U-turns are never possible in real life. If you still try to take this U-turn, it will only lead you to miseries. So the sooner we adapt to change, the better we get.
Now, I have learnt to burn my anger in this flame.
The Matrix – 1950s Super Panavision 70
"The Matrix - 1950s Super Panavision 70 introduces a new take on the world's famous The Matrix Film. I attempted to give it that 1950s sound and feel. I hope you all enjoy."
Not Ukrainians. They were not operating the drone.
United States operated the drone out of the United States.
The command centers for the operation of the U.S. “Global Hawk” drones are primarily located at two key facilities:
1. Beale Air Force Base in California: Beale AFB is home to the 9th Reconnaissance Wing, which operates the RQ-4 Global Hawk. This base plays a significant role in the command, control, and operational management of Global Hawk missions.
2. Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota: Grand Forks AFB hosts the 319th Reconnaissance Wing, which also operates and supports Global Hawk missions. This base provides operational support and command functions for the drones.
These command centers are responsible for coordinating and managing the flights, mission planning, data collection, and analysis of the Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Additionally, remote piloting stations can control the Global Hawks from various other locations, including forward-deployed sites and central command facilities.
And Russia knows this.
Let’s wind back and deconstruct.
An attack with U.S.-Supplied ATACMS missiles, by Ukraine, against civilians on a Beach in Sevastopol, Crimea, Russia has occurred.
Now, we find out that ATACMS could not get targeting coordinates because of Russian GPS Electronic Warfare Jamming, so targeting was apparently provided by a U.S. “Global Hawk” Drone.
It looks like United States military inside the United States targeted those Russian Civilians inside of Russia.
So the United States is actively fighting Russia.
No Ukrainians anywhere.
Russian Jamming of Global Positioning Satellites (GPS) has been long underway near Crimea specifically to thwart Ukrainian attacks. The areas in red on the image above are where GPS signals CANNOT get through. So how did those ATACMS hit the target in Sevastopol?
Turns out there was a United States Air Force “Global Hawk” surveillance drone airborne, prior to – and during – the attack. It’s overlapping flight path is shown on the FlightRadar24 map below:
That “Global Hawk” drone can provide precise target coordinates, separate and distinct from GPS. Those coordinates could then be radioed to be programmed-into the HIMARS launcher, which fired the ATACMS missiles.
The evidence seems to indicate: The attack upon Russian civilians, on the beach in Sevastopol, appears to have been targeted with a United States Air Force Global Hawk drone, which relied on US Satellite data and communications to provide attack coordinates.
This appears to many people to have been an act of war by the United States, against Russian civilians.
…
This is NOT a trivial matter.
This is the kind of thing that starts nuclear missiles flying.
Southpark – 1950’s Super Panavision 70
“United States is pressuring the Netherlands to block the sale of EUV equipment to SMIC by Dutch company ASML is ultimately affecting China’s dream in technology”. How long US can resist China’s development?
The Chinese are the most industrious race on earth.
Necessity is the mother of Invention
The Chinese will find a way. The more you suppress them and the more you try to deny them the technology – they will begin to make it on their own and they will slowly do better and better.
Chips is the best example
As long as Taiwan kept supplying them the chips – The Chinese were happy. They focused on other things
The Minute Trump decided to threaten the Chinese – they decided to get their act together and start making their own chips. They will start with inferior ones but in 10 years – they will outmanufacture Taiwan at 1/3 the cost and take away the market.
And the businessmen will say – “Uigyurs???? Who gives a damn about them. My shareholders matter” and will migrate from Taiwan to China in 10 seconds.
The US may try again and again but
(a) They waited too long. China is too rich today. They have too much money.
(b) China has too many tentacles in foreign countries. Thousands of Chinese in various industries who are experts
In Space alone – China was behind India until 2010 – but today – they have their own Mapping System for their huge landmass as well as are in the position of becoming the Third country in the globe to land on Mars – having landed on the moon.
China and Russia are on the verge of building their own International Space Station having both the financial muscle and technology.
You cannot bully or intimidate or stifle Progress. Eventually Life finds a way.
US should learn this lesson hard. The more they try – they may get 10 years more but in the end China will get there and take over.
20 Things From The 1980s, We Can No Longer Do!
https://youtu.be/IVGJEB3u-wE
I just got fired. Now my former boss (the one who let me go) is asking me where some important documents are. How should I respond?
Don’t.
I worked for a corporation for about 15 years. Absolutely loved my work.
The thing about my job was that after your one and a half year training/supervison, you were able to choose your own work schedule, per the employee manual. You could work from home. You could work from overseas. You could work while sitting on your toilet. You could do your work from anywhere, anytime, so long as you met “production.” It was a dream position.
So, shortly after that year and a half of training, I eventually started working sometimes nights and sometimes weekends. Typically not during the day. Co-workers were a bit eccentric, off center, yet brilliant attorneys. I preferred my alone time, thank you.
I eventually took up residence in a different city. I typically had one of the highest production rates (sometimes highest) of all my fellow colleagues. All top-notch, well-educated colleagues, by the way. Loved them all.
Then, I started working at a law firm where I worked days. But I continually exceeded “production” for my initial company.
At around the 15 year mark, my two supervisors, who were very ineffectual (Peter Principle) at their positions (not even attorneys), discovered I was also working for a law firm.
I suspected they did not like me, for whatever reason. And they also did not like I had another job (not prohibited, per the employee manual).
In my last review, I received an “exceeds expectations.” A few days later, I was instructed to be in the office during “core business hours.” Core? I could never even figure out what “core” meant. Like I need to be in a hole?
Nothing in my job was of immediate import. In my position, people were not going to die or be executed, airplanes would not drop from the sky, pets would still be safe, families would remain intact, if I continued to work my own hours as I had for nearly 14 years. It was a fricking publishing job! I was not a first responder.
I tried to explain to them that the employee manual, which had not been changed, allowed me this, and also, I could not be in the office. I lived in a different city.
Ultimately, I was constructively terminated as I was unable to be in their office for “core business hours.” To the unemployment office (I had to file a claim despite having a new employer), they claimed I had quit, so that they would not need to pay unemployment in the event my other employment did not work. Surprisingly, they won. Unreal. I did not quit. I loved that job.
Fast forward to awhile later. They contacted me needing pertinent information related to my position. Information only I possessed. Rather costly information at that. And I had it for years. Noone else needed it. None of my esteemed colleagues had access to this information.
I never replied.
Turns out, and I heard this from a former colleague, they were both terminated shortly after my departure and their request for information. I cannot speculate as to the reason. But, who cares why? Karma’s a bitch.
Never, ever give a crap employer any assistance after you have been terminated. Employees are so expendable, so never give them the luxury of your experience, knowledge and expertise. Don’t even waste time replying.
However, if you do choose to reply, which I did not, charge them exorbitant fees for your services. Very exorbitant.
Good luck to you. You will also find a much better position.
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home – 1950s Super Panavision 70
What is the most extreme example of ‘Cold Feet’ you’ve seen from a bride or groom on their wedding day?
Picture a full church of well dressed people waiting for the bride to walk up the aisle.
There is a nervous idiot, me, waiting at the front of the church for her. It was a super quick engagement and I basically asked her to marry me on our first date (very smooth, I know). She is 8 years younger than me and, no exaggeration, a movie star gorgeous blond, so far out of my league that people are mystified by how she could be remotely attracted to me.
I’m not happy on the big day, I’m scared to death that she will realize she is about to make the worst mistake of her life.
All of sudden from the back of the church I hear her crying hysterically. Crap, I knew it. I’m not even surprised. I don’t blame her and it’s not her fault, it’s mine for rushing her.
A few awkward moments minutes that felt like hours passed. Suddenly she and her Dad appeared and they start walking up the aisle toward me. Her dad convinced her that her tears were just nerves and she should go ahead and marry the unemployed guy that had big dreams but was living in his brother’s basement.
We’ve been happily married 33 years now.
[P. S. I should add that I did start and now run a successful multimillion dollar company and have tried to pay my sweet wife back by providing her with what she has described as a fairy tale life :-)]
Collective Soul – ‘Shine’ – Live At The PrintShop
How does the USA balance being a rival of China with reliance on China for being the biggest economy and trade partner in the world?
China sees through the US that it cannot do without China hence it cannot play ball with China without harming itself tremendously. China do not need the US. In any way at all. US as a market is now is a mere 12% of the world market and dropping very fast. China is not keen to keep US dollars post Ukraine war. Hence if the US stop buying and selling with China, it won’t miss a heart beat.
The faster the US decouple with China the faster China can move against the US openly and effectively! Only brain dead westerners thinks China needs the US. The biggest market for Chinese goods is actually East Asia, followed by ASEAN followed by rest of Asia then Latin America and Africa, then Russia and its European friends such as Serbia and Hungary, then comes Rest of EU and then North America!
That explains why China grew 5.3% in spite of the shit that the US and Anglo cousins and EU dogs did to China! But by blocking out China it is indeed losing the rest of the world’s market! What the US is left with is a fading and now insignificant west! After a 3 generation of abusing and bully the global south they are all lining up with the BRICS to take revenge on the US!
And meanwhile the US has increased its cost so artificially high yet its efficiency so unbelievably low to the point that doing any thing on its own is impossible to sell even to Yanks themselves! For example if the apple iPhone were to be made in the USA it will have to be sold at 5000 bucks! On EV’s most brain dead Yanks do not even know the ridiculousness of Elon Musk 5.1 billion bonus request means American are going to pay for it by 5000 bucks increase in their Tesla!
If the US has any sense it needs to cement its position of being China’s right hand man but it is not humble enough nor does it have common sense. The US needs China badly, without them the US will fall into a deep recession and suffers a double digit inflation for half a century! China holds all the cards while the US is a like a hopeless screaming dog!
Biscuits and Sausage Gravy
Biscuits and Sausage Gravy is popular all over America. It’s a staple dish on diner menus.
biscuits sausage gravy
Yield: 6 servings, 2 biscuits each
Ingredients
Biscuits
3 cups self-rising soft wheat flour
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon granulated sugar
1/2 cup butter-flavored shortening
1 1/4 cups buttermilk
Butter, melted
Sausage Gravy
1 pound breakfast sausage (mild or hot)
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
3 1/4 cups milk
1/2 teaspoon salt or seasoned salt
2 teaspoons pepper
1/8 teaspoon Italian seasoning
Instructions
Bisicuits
Combine first 3 ingredients in a large bowl; cut in shortening with a pastry blender until mixture is crumbly.
Add buttermilk, stirring just until dry ingredients are moistened.
Turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface, and knead lightly 4 or 5 times.
Roll dough to 3/4 inch thickness; cut with a 2 1/2 inch biscuit cutter. Place on a lightly greased baking sheet.
Bake at 425 degrees F for 12 minutes or until golden.
Brush tops with butter.
Split biscuits open; serve with Sausage Gravy.
Sausage Gravy
Brown sausage in a skillet, stirring until it crumbles.
Drain, reserving 1 tablespoon drippings in skillet. Set sausage aside.
Add butter to drippings; heat over low heat until butter melts.
Add flour, stirring until smooth. Cook for 1 minute, stirring constantly.
Gradually add milk; cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until thickened and bubbly.
Stir in seasonings and sausage. Cook until thoroughly heated, stirring constantly.
Notes
This recipe is easily doubled.
Family Guy – 1950’s Super Panavision 70
This is one of the better ones.
Have you, while repairing a computer, ever found anything that made your jaw drop?
Not me, the company from which we bought the computer.
We were a start-up providing hosting and ISP services in 1996. We’ve purchased a custom-built server from a renown company. I don’t remember the exact details, but must have costed in the range of 1500–2000 USD.
It worked for a couple of months no problems and then suddenly just failed. The lights were on, whatever was on screen at that time was still there, but the computer stopped responding to anything. Even powering down didn’t work. We’ve eventually completely unplugged it and tried to plug in again, but the computer wasn’t starting anymore (we could only hear the power supply fan).
The computer went back to the supplier. They’ve opened it (obviously we haven’t touched anything, the manufacturer’s seals were intact) and in place where there should be a CPU there was a hole. Not just the majority of the CPU was missing, but a hole went through the motherboard as well. The CPU literally melted. Completely. On further examination the supplier found that the CPU wasn’t properly put in the socket, one of the pins was bent and that most probably was the cause of the short-circuit that led to melting. They’ve tried to blame us for incorrect assembling the computer, but we;d reminded them we’d purchased an already assembled computer and the seals they’d put on it were intact. They eventually very hesitantly accepted their liability.
I can imagine the hole in place of the CPU must have been quite a shocking find.
What is the official justification for China to claim the South China Sea? I’m not talking about strategic reasons.
China has ancient historical record since 230 AD. Some records are official. Some are not & was prepared by fishermen themselves (they are in a museum now).
On some of the islands/shoals in SCS, there were Chinese landmarks. Like these days, China put a landmark on the moon to prove China has landed on the moon.
China even named many of SCS islands/reefs.
People do not recognise Chinese historical record which, they said, it is 1-sided. Not internationally recognised. Fair enough.
Let us talk about modern-day & international record then.
During WW2, Japan occupied lots of SCS islands/reefs. After defeat, Japan must returned all SCS islands to the rightful country like China. US warships accompanied China to reclaim the SCS islands in 1947.
China went by its historical record & drew the 11-dash line. China published & announced its map to the world in Feb 1948. No country objected to it at the time. That is why we can find the 11-dash in the old maps of many countries eg USA, UK, Russia & more. Even Philippines.
The 11-dash is an international record, agree?
There was a civil war in China. CPC defeated the then ruling party KMT in 1949.
KMT was a US puppet but not CPC. … that led to US robbery of SCS islands/reefs by driving a wedge among SCS countries against China.
In 1967, USA announced there is oil/gas under SCS. Robbery officially started.
That is why there is tension in SCS from the point of robbery. Not strategic.
Scooby Doo – 1950’s Super Panavision 70
So much fun! This is five stars!
As a police officer, what’s the most disturbing thing you’ve ever experienced?
Before training as nurse, I was a former cop. My husband was a cop for over 30 years. His most harrowing experience occurred one Christmas Eve.
There was a horrific wreck involving a wrong way driver where a young mother and her two daughters were killed. The crash was so intense that there were were mangled pieces of body parts on the road and in the totaled and burned vehicles.
As a normal procedure, my husband and a fellow officer made the casualty call to the home of the family of the woman. The husband/father answered the door, ushered them in, and they proceeded to tell him what had happened. The heartbroken man could barely speak as he realized he had lost his wife and daughters. Then he asked, “What about my baby boy?” There was no evidence of a baby involved in the wreck.
The officers then went to the wrecker yard where the smashed vehicles had been taken. In the floorboards of the woman’s car was what had been assumed was a doll, burned black by the intense heat of the crash and resultant fire. It was the little boy’s body.
After a long night working the most exhausting, painful, mind wrenching experience of his long career, he came home just in time to play Santa to our 4 year old daughter and our own baby boy. His tears as he held his children were heartbreaking.
My family comes from a long line of military members. Many experience PTSD from horrific experiences over a 1 or 2 year or several deployments. Our career police officers suffer through years, even decades, of witnessing events that the average person will never know the horror of. They see raped children who have been torn open. They see battered wives whose eyeballs are laying on their cheeks, they see the worst of humanity yet are expected to be perfect in every way. They come straight from the funeral of a colleague who has been murdered and are expected to be cordial and patient with dirtbags who are disrespectful of any authority, who has attempted to kill them as well, and who fit the MO of the killer of their fellow officer. They are often not able to talk about it or to seek therapy for to do so could affect their careers.
My son, a military veteran, is now a career police officer. I pray for him every day. God bless our men in women in blue and keep them safe.
BLUE LIVES MATTER.
When the “parody” surpasses the original
Are the current size and data of China’s economy real? Why do some professional economics media believe that China’s economic data is underestimated?
There is indeed such a view.
The Economist has conducted surveys and research, and they believe that China’s GDP (PPP) alone is underestimated by $1.4 trillion.
I checked the relevant data. In 2021, China’s GDP (PPP) was $28.82 trillion, and the United States was $23.59 billion. China is 122% of the United States. If the Economist’s survey is correct, it means that China’s real data is $3.022 trillion, which is 128% of the United States.
China’s economic model retains a dangerous allure
Despite the country’s current struggles, autocrats elsewhere see a lot to admire
They obtained a lot of professional data from some professional institutions in the United States, which were not originally for economic services. For example, this table is a data from the United States Geological Survey, which lists China’s production and global share of key metals and manufactured products.
In addition, they also obtained data from the power industry, industrial manufactured products, shipbuilding, McDonald’s sales data, and many other data. And these non-economic data are aggregated together to analyze and count the economic scale of China and the United States in another way.
The Economist pointed out the flaws in China’s official GDP statistical method: the Chinese do not consider the service industry to be part of GDP.
For example, in the United States and Europe, many industries that do not produce “products” such as house rent, legal advice, R&D investment, child care, etc. are part of GDP, and they count GDP through expenditure.
But in China, they only count the real economy.
A company must produce cars, toys, clothing or software, food. Farmers or fishermen must produce rice and fish. They sell these things to earn income before they are included in GDP.
Small and medium-sized service industries are usually not counted. If a barbershop provides a haircut, a car wash cleans your car, or you rent your house to a young couple, these economic activities are not considered part of GDP and are almost never counted. (Unless you are a large enterprise with hundreds of shops or dozens of houses)
**”Asia Times” also conducted a similar survey**
World Bank researchers visited 16,000 stores in China alone to collect price data. The latest ICP assessment collected data in 2021, four years after the 2017 survey. The conclusion is that China’s GDP is underestimated by nearly $2 trillion.
China’s National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) was not satisfied with the results and downplayed them, saying “we need to interpret the entire result carefully and correctly grasp the global economic landscape and the status of each economy”, while emphasizing that China is still a “developing economy”.
“Asia Times” believes that China’s economic data has been manipulated intentionally or unintentionally. But contrary to some reports, they believe that China is deliberately suppressing the data.
“China’s PPP GDP is only 25% higher than the US? Come on guys… who are we kidding? Last year, China produced twice as much electricity, 12.6 times as much steel, and 22 times as much cement. Its shipyards account for more than 60% of world production. In 2023, China produced 30.2 million cars, almost three times the US’s 10.6 million. In fact, China’s consumer goods market is several times larger than the US in almost all aspects”
The World Bank survey believes that China’s GDP and PPP GDP are underestimated because of the incomplete transformation of China’s national accounts material product system (MPS), which does not include services by design. The World Bank may do its due diligence and find that China’s consumption of goods is several times that of the US, but its consumption of services is only a small fraction of that of the US, which is very unreasonable.
This is most evident in the Chinese auto market, where OEMs have either cut prices to rock bottom ($17,000 from $42,000 for the Hyundai Sonata) or offered cutting-edge technology at a low price ($14,000 for the BYD Q plug-in hybrid electric vehicle with 2,000 km range). Solar panel prices fell 50% in 2023 and continue to trend downward in 2024. CATL has announced plans to cut lithium-ion battery prices in half by the end of 2024.
Restaurants offer white glove service, such as hot towels, lotions by the sink, and stylish decor. Barbers offer bottled water and fruit plates. Tech companies have slashed the price of large language models (LLMs) to essentially free. The quality of service in China is hard to quantify, but it is now far superior to that in the West, and perhaps even Japan.
Are American healthcare and universities twice as good as they were in 2000? If American families had not received vastly improved health care, education, housing, and child care over the past two decades, inflation would have been systematically understated, and GDP growth would have actually been less than 1% per year (rather than 2%), equivalent to stagnation at a population growth rate of 0.8% per year. This probably explains much of the popular anger and the breakdown of American politics.
China’s material-centric GDP is probably a better measure of the economy’s relationship to living standards, especially since the UN Commission on National Accounts has apparently lost its mind and formally recommended including things like drugs, prostitution, illegal gambling, and theft in GDP.
The US spends $1 trillion per year on defense (including intelligence and energy department programs) and has reduced the size of the US Navy, while China has built the world’s largest navy with the largest number of ships on a budget of $236 billion.
Likewise, analysts who lament that China accounts for 30% of the world’s manufacturing output but only 13% of household consumption are dead wrong. China actually accounts for 20-40% of global demand for almost all consumer goods, but most of the services it consumes are not included in the national accounts.
So how much is it? How big is the Chinese economy? About six months ago, it was estimated that China’s GDP would increase by 25-40% if calculated according to UNSNA.
2001: A Space Odyssey – 1950’s Super Panavision 70
Have you ever moved to a small village that was just plain strange and filled with weird residents?
Oh, yes!
Seven years ago my husband and I moved to this delightful retirement village. It has, give or take, 184 residents, most of whom are in their 80’s and 90’s, and all of whom the outside world would consider very weird indeed. They seem to live in a time warp, where everyone is kind and decent, caring for their neighbour. There’s no rubbish thrown down, no chewing gum spat onto the pavements to besmirch one’s shoes. Everyone drives at the manadatory 10 miles an hour within the village. No one gets drunk at the bar. Merry perhaps, at some celebration, but screaming and fighting is a big “no,no”. No one swears, that’s impolite in front of the ladies!
They talk about the Empire and WW2 and their roles in that war. They are proud, too proud sometimes to mention they are “not feeling too good”, as they don’t want to trouble anyone with their problems. They don’t mention it, if their children rarely bother to turn up. Nor do other, luckier ones, mention their regular weekly visits from their children. “ One doesn’t want to hurt another’s feelings, you know”!
If you want to join in all the many and varied pursuits, run mainly by the residents themselves, then you are made very welcome. If not and you prefer to stay in your little bungalow that day, that’s fine also. No one will intrude upon your privacy, unless invited to do so. A phone call, on occasion, perhaps, just to see if you’re OK.
As my 93 year old my husband said, not long before he died, “We’ve returned to the world we knew – our world. We’re so fortunate not having to cope with that world out there, which many of us simply don’t really understand”! I echo his words in my heart every day.
The Flintstones – 1950’s Super Panavision 70
Love this.
How on earth did the Unabomber evade capture for nearly 20 years, despite the costliest FBI investigation in history?
It was a combination of many things that made Ted Kaczynski so elusive.
A few of them:
He was (and still is) extremely intelligent; A genius, by anyone’s measure.
He was willing to go to extreme lengths to conceal his identity (not only building his bombs from scratch — often he used wood, gathered from states far from where he lived, and then hand-whittled). He always built the individual parts of each bomb from scratch, by hand, even if it took many months to construct the raw materials using antique tools, or using tools he actually made himself. He vacuumed everything. He was meticulous, and often spent more than a year to build a single bomb.
He was willing to go “off the grid” and live an uncomfortable lifestyle, to outwit any investigation. This included living in remote woods, in a tiny cabin with no address, no electricity, no running water, did not own a car, no credit cards, no driver’s license. He left no signature, and only a handful of people knew he even existed. (Of course, that happened to fit in and coincide with his motive for committing these crimes… He was the ultimate “Luddite.”)
He was willing to devote incredible efforts to delivering each device, taking a bus from Montana to California and paying cash, and dropping the packages off at quiet postal dropoffs, with stamps already attached (no licking, of course).
He followed the press about his bombings, and was willing to change up his habits when necessary, to avoid capture. He would even travel to another state to find a grocery bag to wrap a bomb in — that is determination.
He basically devoted his entire life during that period to his bombings, and to eluding capture — with no real social life, and only occasional drop-in visits to his local small town library to read the news about the manhunt to find him — a library which he walked to.
The Transporter Museum, a forgotten relic, is inconveniently located on a deserted side street two turns off a dead-end alley. You might never find it, even by accident, but if you do, you’ll always remember its immaculate displays and its eccentric proprietor, Frans Messerschmitt.Every day precisely at nine, the little old man illuminated the neon sign, flipped the placard to open, and made his way behind the counter, prepared for customers who rarely came.It was already late in the day when the door opened, surprising both Frans and the visitors.“Hello, is anybody there?”The question startled Frans, interrupting his terminal boredom.“Yes. Yes, please come in,” he answered, moving forward to greet his guests. The unexpected voice belonged to a handsome lad sporting sweatpants and a football jersey, followed closely by a pretty young coed in a letterman’s jacket.“It’s almost impossible to find this place,” the boy mentioned, all the while looking at the meticulously cared-for exhibits. “Are we in time for the guided tour?”The question struck Frans as funny. It had been months since his last visitor, so the tours relied on guests, not the other way around.“Of course, my good man,” he answered, sauntering from behind the counter. “My name is Frans and I’m the owner and resident historian. I’d be glad to give you the nickel tour, and I won’t even charge you the nickel.”
“Fan-damn-tastic! My name is Billy, and this is Connie. We’ve really been looking forward to this. Where do we start?”
“I’m glad you asked,” Frans replied, beckoning the couple to follow. “You’ve lived your whole lives in a time where teleportation from one side of the world to another was the norm—in fact, there’s about to be an app for that!” Frans turned their attention towards a smartphone sitting on display. “Before the end of the year, the new ZapApp will be available, offering skin-touch technology for the first time. All you’ll need to do is enter the desired coordinates, activate the app, and, in seconds—Voila!”
“Wow,” Billy exclaimed, reaching for the phone.
“Please don’t,” Frans cautioned. “These are replicas and can be easily damaged.”
“I hear ya, Gramps,” Billy responded, “Oh, I’m sorry. No disrespect intended, sir.”
“Not at all,” Frans replied. “I’ve always wanted a nickname. I like the sound of Gramps. Now if you follow me, I’ll lead you both back in time.”
The next display contained a full-length mirror attached to the wall. “I’m sure you two know what this is,” Frans said, stepping aside and allowing Billy and Connie to see. “These teleportation devices are still the most commonly used today. They were part of a trend to make teleportation more accessible and less obtrusive. They were also the first devices that didn’t require an exit portal. Until the Mirror 360, you could only travel to locations with paired devices. Needless to say, it was revolutionary.”
“That’s just like yours,” Connie whispered to Billy, punctuating her remark with a kiss on his cheek. “What’s next, Mr. Frans?”
“Gramps,” Frans corrected her with a chuckle. “Next we see the machine that started it all, The Marie.”
“I’ve heard of that,” Billy said. “Wow, it’s huge!”
“I know,” Frans agreed. “When the technology was new, we hadn’t yet perfected the art of miniaturization. There were no personal teleportation devices. The only people who had access were scientists, investors, and celebrities. In fact, the first transporters were more gimmicky than useful. They were incredibly expensive, required an entrance and exit port, and were so inefficient that it took a full day’s charge to send someone from one place to another. There’s no doubt we’ve come a long way since then.”
“What about that one?” Billy asked, pointing to a machine partially hidden by a curtain.
“Oh, that one,” Frans sighed. “That’s the prototype. The first teleportation device.”
“That’s the original?” Billy asked, moving closer to get a better look. “Is the legend true?”
“I’m afraid it is,” Frans replied. “The machine was the brainchild of a pair of scientists not much older than the two of you. They were the first to prove light was a particle and that we could use it as a mechanism for distance teleportation. The early tests were extremely successful. There were no issues when sending inanimate objects or small animals from one pod to another. The problem occurred when they tried transporting a human. Marie begged to be first and, after winning a game of Rochambeau, she stepped into the entrance pod and disappeared on cue. But when her partner activated the exit pod, everything went terribly wrong. Marie never fully rematerialized. Her translucent hand simply reached forward, and she mouthed the word help. Then she faded away.”
“Oh my God!” Connie gasped. “Did he save her?”
Frans turned away from the question, paused, then finally answered. “No, he didn’t. You see, molecular displacement teleportation in its infancy was like sending something through a tunnel at light speed. Once entering a pod, the subject can only exit from the paired terminal port.”
“That’s tragic,” Connie said, wiping away a tear.
“And ironic.” Frans replied.
“How so?”
“After the colossal mishap, her partner spent the better part of twenty years trying to find a way to release Marie from her tunnel. He became obsessed with correcting his mistake. His research and technological breakthroughs are directly responsible for almost every advancement in teleportation technology. That first awful outcome is why molecular transportation is so incredibly safe today. It’s why you have a Mirror 360 hanging on the wall in your home.”
“But Marie—what happened to her?” Connie asked.
“All of her partner’s research and all of his calculations never changed Marie’s fate.”
“She’s trapped forever?”
“She would be, unless he destroyed the machine and released her molecules into the atmosphere, never to be reassembled again.”
“What did he…”
“It’s almost closing time,” Frans said, interrupting Connie before she could finish the question. “Thanks for coming. You two made an old man very happy today.”
“This has been the best tour ever, Gramps.” Billy proclaimed. “What do I owe you?”
“Nothing,” Frans answered, shaking Billy’s hand. “Just promise to send your friends.”
“It’s a deal,” he said, leading Connie out the door. “I’m sure we’ll be back soon.”
“You’re always welcome.”
Frans watched as the couple walked away. Then, being that it was precisely five, he locked the door, changed the placard to closed, and turned off the neon sign.
Alone once again, Frans returned to the machine behind the curtain, flipped a few switches, and watched as Marie’s translucent figure, forever young, appeared before him.
“Frans, are you there?” Marie mouthed, silently.
“I’m here, my love. I’ll always be here.”
“I’m so afraid,” she responded. “Please let me go.”
“I can’t,” Frans replied, ashamed of his weakness.
Marie’s eyes grew red, but she summoned the strength to place her hand on her heart and mouth the words I love you. Then, as quickly as she had appeared, she was gone.
Heartbroken, Frans turned to walk upstairs, counting the minutes until he could see his love again, if only for a moment, the next day at the exact same time.
Whipping Cream Biscuits
A two-ingredient recipe for some of the best biscuits you will ever eat! If all you have is all-purpose flour, never fear; we give you instructions for making it into self-rising flour.
whipping cream biscuits
Bake: 10 min | Yield: 8 biscuits
Ingredients
2 cups self-rising flour
1 cup heavy whipping cream
Instructions
Bisicuits
In a large bowl, combine the flour and cream. Turn out onto a lightly floured surface; knead for 5 minutes or until no longer sticky. Roll dough to a 1/2 inch thickness. Cut into 2 1/2 inch biscuits.
Place in a large ungreased cast iron or other ovenproof skillet. Bake at 450 degrees F until golden brown, 8 to 10 minutes.
Notes
* If you don’t have self-rising flour, add 1 tablespoon baking powder and 1 teaspoon salt to 2 cups all-purpose flour. As a substitute for each cup of self-rising flour, place 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon salt in a measuring cup. Add all-purpose flour to measure 1 cup.
Forgotten Restaurants From The 1970s, We Want Back!
Such memories. I forgot about these places, but once I watched the video, I sure as heck remembered them.
https://youtu.be/dZLdey9V3qo
Re:interest payments
As long as the American dollars are acceptable as currency in most of the world it's fine.
When usd is no longer considered valuable between non us parties they will have to buy things in the US triggering the long awaited us hyper inflation. A crazy amount of usd circulates in the world, particularly in 100 usd paper bills, so when it comes home it'll overturn the us economy. It's already felt in the stock market and housing market with ancillary effects in retail goods.
But when the usd becomes worthless for non us transactions, like because of sanctions that's when it'll go crazy in a self reinforcing doom loop.
At the moment it's manageable it'll be a few years or more before it becomes critical. I'd look for China refusing usd for its manufactured good as the tipping point
Posted by: Neofeudalfuture | Jun 23 2024 17:45 utc | 14
What made Ivan “the terrible” so terrible?
he term “terrible” comes from the Russian word “grozny,” which is better translated as “formidable” or “awe-inspiring.”
But Ivan did some pretty terrible things too.
His father, Grand Prince Vasily III, died when Ivan was just three, and his mother, Elena Glinskaya, served as regent until her mysterious death when Ivan was eight.
It’s suspected she was poisoned, which wasn’t uncommon in the Russian court.
As he grew older, Ivan developed a dark streak.
He crowned himself the first Tsar of All Russia in 1547, aiming to centralize power and assert absolute control.
In his early reign, he showed promise, implementing legal reforms, establishing a standing army, and expanding Russian territories.
But this honeymoon period didn’t last.
Things took a dark turn with the death of his beloved wife, Anastasia Romanovna, in 1560.
Her death shattered Ivan, and he spiraled into paranoia and madness, suspecting everyone of treason.
He believed she was poisoned, which might have been true, considering the court’s track record.
Enter the Oprichnina, Ivan’s own personal reign of terror.
In 1565, he divided Russia into two parts: the Oprichnina, directly under his control, and the Zemshchina, ruled by the boyars (nobles).
The Oprichnina was essentially a state within a state, where Ivan’s secret police, the Oprichniki, roamed.
These guys were like medieval KGB, dressed in black, riding black horses, and carrying out Ivan’s brutal orders.
The Oprichniki spread terror through the land, confiscating properties, executing supposed traitors, and crushing any opposition.
One of the most infamous event was the sacking of Novgorod in 1570.
Suspecting the city of treason, Ivan ordered a brutal massacre.
Thousands were tortured and killed, and the city was left in ruins.
In a fit of rage, Ivan famously killed his own son and heir, Ivan Ivanovich, in 1581.
The story goes that he struck his son with a staff during an argument, a blow that proved fatal.
Did getting revenge on someone make you feel better? Why or why not?
I was moslested by three older boys when I was 9 or 10 years old.
It happened on three separate occasions for a total of approximately 3 hours.
I was already a quiet introverted child and this pushed me even futher into my own mind.
I suffered for years with bed wetting, nightmares, and it damaged my sexual psyche , giving me trust and intimacy issues.
I saw child psychologists for years and eventually though that my parents got to know about it.
My first suicide attempt was at the age of 12, when I dropped from a tree branch deliberately into the path of a car. The car swerved, missed me and ploughed through a wodden fence.
The driver jumped out of the car to see if I was ok, I approached the car and saw there was no-one else there, then ran away.
I still feel bad about that, not seeing if he was Ok and not facing the consequences.
There have been 6 suicide attempts since, 3 of which I have woken from in hospital, dissapointed that it was not over.
Those biys who took my childhood were all brothers, sons of the next door neighbours of my Aunt & Uncle.
When I was 17 and they were between 21 and 25 I tracked them all down- it wasnt difficult, they all lived in the same town.
I took a baseball bat to each of them one at a time all in one night, broke arms legs fingers.
None of them recognised me, not one. I pulled back my balaclava to stare them directly in the face, these monsters that took my childhood, the driving force that had defined me good or bad.
I realised later that night, drunk and broken that what for me was unforgettable was exactly that, not just forgettable but forgotten.
After that, no nightmares not a singe one, and the other issues that I had been battling with in therapy for years resolved themselves. The healing didnt happen over night, but it did begin to happen.
From being powerless, I was powerful. I can’t begin to explain how good, how alive I felt.
I will never regret that night.
Yummy
99320f9ca16734d44c507c00addc7850
Independence Day in 1950’s – Super Panavision 70
Fun, too short, though.
What did you find while snooping that you wish you had never found?
In the early part of 1999, my older sister and I were playing in front of our grandparents’ house. I was 9 years old and my sister was 13. I think we were rollerblading up and down the driveway. Having fun outside!
In the midst of innocent play, we needed to get something from the back of my grandma’s vehicle. I don’t remember what it was we were getting,
But, I do remember what we found.
We found a journal and it was in my grandma’s handwriting. Intrigued, we began reading what appeared to be notes…
Notes about my mother and her behavior…and her lack of parenting abilities.
During this year, my grandparents had taken myself and my two siblings into their home. They had both just retired and they did this not just out of love and selflessness, but out of necessity.
My mother had been extremely neglectful of us. She was literally not feeding us, we were unbathed, our heads were infested (always) with head lice, we rarely went to school, and we had no clothes or even a bed. Her boyfriend was abusive to us in many ways as well. This all happened while my father was incarcerated.
So, back to that journal.
In the journal, my grandma had been taking notes of how my mom would be late for visitation, how she wouldn’t show up sometimes, or how she was just not even attempting to be motherly. It was very thorough and even time stamped. Basically, my grandma logged all interactions with my mom. And she was doing this I’m guessing for the court, because they were trying to get custody of us.
But, the one thing that I remember reading was how my mom called my grandma one afternoon and offered to sell all three of us to them.
Yep.
She said she wouldn’t fight for us in the courts, if my grandma gave her $200 for us. And they could have us.
That’s about $66 and some change for us each.
Pretty good deal, right?
We stopped reading the journal after seeing that. But, it always stuck with me.
I never asked my grandma about it. I never asked my mom about it either. I’m sure they didn’t accept her offer and simply shared this information about her with the judge in the custody case.
They did get custody over all three of us.
We had a wonderful life with my grandparents. We really did. I owe everything I am to them.
And I have always known my mom wasn’t exactly ever going to be motherly. I’ve accepted that.
But, I still wish I had never read what I read that day.
My mom basically attempted to sell us. And not even for a lot of money. I could have gone my whole life without knowing that.
USD
US Dollar is expensive because Treasuries pay the highest interest rate of major currencies - not a good sign.
data from April:
10Y Bond Country
0.862% ... Japan
2.286% ...| China
2.432% ... Germany
2.952% ...| France
3.773% .../ Canada
3.847% ...| Italy
4.288% ... U.K.
4.631% ... U.S.A.
Posted by: Exile | Jun 23 2024 17:08 utc | 8
Detroit’s Mark Twain Library, which was closed in 1996 for renovations and never reopened.
main qimg 15ec6de6c57763cbe81746aa4138be6f
The fascist terrorist US provoked a war in Ukraine and they tried to provoke the war between China and Taiwan to enrich MIC. Almost all war crimes are due to the US. Will wars stop when the US econmy collapses in 1-2 years?
True, it is not a secret that USA instigated 201 wars out of 287 around the globe because MIC makes money thru wars.
US politicians who have bought MIC stocks also want wars.
Other than thru war & arms sale, one thing that supports war is US monetary hegemony.
It is the US monetary hegemony ie USD that supports USA’s vast military spending around the globe.
So, you are correct, once US economy collapses and/or dedollarisation is in full force, USA cannot afford so many wars.
When will US economy collapse, nobody knows.
Dedollarisation is in progress as of 2024. But, it will take awhile before dedollarisation is in full force. No country wants it to go too too fast. Because USA can do a lot of harm to the globe when it is desperate & has gone insane.
As a side note, USA has waged a monetary-financial war in Asia a month or 2 ago, but failed. The only one that was hit hard was Japan because Japan is a US puppet. All non US puppets survived this round of financial crisis quite well.
The eerie yellow brick road of abandoned Land of Oz theme park in North Carolina
main qimg 5d6083b1f02c7cda3e8c8bfcab72b84a
Peter Lee
Peter Lee has been providing regular coverage of tensions in the South China Sea on his China Threat Report on Patreon. He describes the current manufacturing of a flashpoint between China and Philippines - in the works for some years now - as “the biggest US government gaslighting operation since the Bush administration sold the Iraq invasion in 2002.”
He points out that the simplistic U.S. narrative, describing China as an aggressive and expansionist power, entirely ignores the primary document governing relations between all parties on South China Sea issues:
Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (2002)
https://asean.org/declaration-on-the-conduct-of-parties-in-the-south-china-sea-2/
As convincingly argued by Lee, it has been, in fact, the Philippines which has breached this agreement, particularly in regards to dispute resolution and the maintenance of a status quo since 2002. The exact opposite is being loudly insisted in the western media and foreign policy circles, to the extent that the most hawkish voices are demanding immediate implementation of US-Philippines mutual defence agreements lest there be an appearance of “weakness”.
Posted by: jayc | Jun 23 2024 18:13 utc | 22
Buttermilk Brown Sugar and Bacon Biscuits
buttermilk brown sugar bacon biscuits
Ingredients
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/4 cup light brown sugar, + more for dusting (if desired)
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon kosher or sea salt
3 slices cooked, crisp bacon, crumbled
7 tablespoons cold unsalted butter
3/4 cup buttermilk
Instructions
Heat oven to 450 degrees F.
Stir together flour, brown sugar, baking powder, salt, and bacon until evenly mixed.
Cut in butter with a pastry cutter until the pieces of butter are the size of small peas.
Add buttermilk and stir until the dough is uniformly moistened.
On a lightly floured surface, bring the dough together and roll to approximately 3/4 inch thickness. Fold, envelope style, and roll again. If necessary, fold and roll again until the dough is smooth and uniform.
Cut biscuits and bake for 11 to 15 minutes until tops are golden.
If desired, brush tops with butter and sprinkle with additional brown sugar.
What is the most shameless thing you have ever seen a teacher do?
This is not really a funny story, except for the karma aspect of it. I was a senior in college, taking a class called instrumental methods of analysis. It is the final chemistry class before graduation. Three hours a week of lecture, plus two, five hour labs each week. Each lab required a 15–20 page lab report and a computer program to analyze our data. Through the first 12 (of 26) lab I had a perfect score on each lab report. Then I got into an argument with the lab teacher after he a lab where we were analyzing the contents of an aspirin, caffeine and phenacetin tablet. Except the APC tablets were removed from the market and so we analyzed acetaminophen, caffeine, phenacetin tablet. The procedure should have be rewritten to account for acetaminophen’s differing absorption spectrum. But our professor was to lazy to do that, telling us to just do the lab as written and explain the bad results. Instead, I ran to the library, found a way to do the experiment properly, and asked my prof. for permission to try it. At first he said yes, but only if you can get someone else to supervise you if it runs long. I did, and got started. He wandered in at 6 and told me to clean up and go home so he could go home for supper. I reminded him of our deal and he lost his shit on me. Finally in frustration, I told him that if he wanted to give me mediocre teaching, I’d give him mediocre work, like the rest of the class. Suddenly he stopped returning our graded work. I assumed I’d get the same C as most of the class, but got a final grade of F, meaning I’d have to spend an extra year in college to retake the class. I tried to arrange retaking the class in the summer at another university. He refused to consider any other class, telling me I was just like his teenage son and we both needed to be taught a lesson. I set up a meeting with our dean in which the prof. told us that he’d fail the entire senior class before he’d pass me. I had already been accepted into a prestigious graduate program and gotten a commitment for four years of funding. I called my grad. school dean. I don’t know exactly what was said between deans, but my undergrad dean called me in and said that they had arranged for me to retake the class alongside my regular grad. classes and transfer the credit back. They also said that the prof. who failed me would not be allowed to stop this deal.
Next summer I returned to my undergrad. school and met with the dean. He asked me to describe how the lab worked at Northwestern. He listened to me describe how differently NU did the labs, focused on designing experiments, learning how lab equipment works and how to use it effectively and creatively. And most of all, instead of wasting time rewriting our text and calling it lab reports we took oral exams while discussing the lab. The dean was so impressed that he promised to force my prof. to rewrite his labs so students wouldn’t just be going through the motions and writing lab reports. I heard through the grapevine that it helped the program and forced my former prof. to do a boatload of work revamping all 26 labs. All in all a pretty horrible experience with a petty and lazy prof, that turned out well in the end because I got to leave the school better than I found it via “instant karma.”
STAR TREK ACID PARTY: PHASE II
This is odddddddddd…….
Do you know anyone where the husband/father did the old “I’m going out for a pack of cigarettes”, and just took off and disappeared?
Yes. In 1984 my then husband went out to the store one Sunday morning to buy a loaf of bread. He never returned. He was a self-employed travel agent, so I assumed he had run into someone who needed travel advice and had lingered. This had happened before. That evening I was bathing our two children and went into his drawer in the bathroom for the nail scissors, and the drawer was empty! I looked in our closet and many of his things were gone. I looked in our storage room and my newest suitcase, a birthday gift, was gone. Monday morning I called his business partner and told him that husband had not come home. Business partner got worried and discovered husband had written himself an airline ticket back to his home country. He had also cashed himself a cheque on the company for many thousands of dollars. My father got the idea to go to the airport parking lot and retrieved our family vehicle.
I called my in-laws in his home country and they confirmed that yes, they were expecting their son for a visit. I told them what had happened and they hung up on me.
There was further drama after the fact as police were involved. Husband had been in an injury hit-and-run accident. Drug dealers were looking for him. He had “sold” a charter plane load of tickets to Hawaii to his friends and clients and absconded with all their money. He had forged my signature on a second mortgage on our house. It was a mess.
I got a divorce on grounds of desertion. We never heard from him again but almost 20 years later my niece in his home country contacted me to tell us he had committed suicide.
How does China do everything right?
China doesn’t do everything right
China makes mistakes too
The Wolf Warrior Policy was a big disaster for China and could have done a lot of damage had it not been for the stupidity of the West
Imagine if a cleverer President in US could have befriended Putin in 2015 itself and Europe had welcomed him with open arms
Xi would have been isolated today and vulnerable and utterly dependent on Energy on Malacca
Xi would have maybe half of his present strength and confidence
It was SHEER LUCK that somehow during the Wolf Warrior phase, you had good leaders like Shinzo Abe in Japan and that guy in South Korea and Duarte in Philippines and an Idiot like Trump in USA
It was SHEER LUCK that Covid decimated the world for 3 years and somehow helped China scale back from the Wolf Warrior mould thanks to the Ukraine invasion and become voices of peace
China has had very good luck while India, US have had very bad luck for the last few years
Chinas mistakes haven’t cost them big whereas Indias mistakes and US mistakes have cost them very big
China does most of the things right because of it’s Leadership and Meritocracy and because there is ALWAYS ACCOUNTABILITY within China
Someone always gets credit and Someone always gets the blame
Could and should the US consider developing an alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative with their own global economic plan like partnerships with Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Middle East, for their own development as well?
USA did try in the past. In fact, Biden also urged to start a US version of BRI to counter Chinese BRI.
They failed in the past & so far not succeed either today.
The difference between China & USA is the mentality & price. For the same price, US can only do little.
Let me use Tesla as an example. Musk opened a factory to make electric car in China. It took him 10 months (If I remember correctly) to build a factory.
When he expanded his business & went to build a factory in Germany, it took him 2 YEARS & still not operational.
Why? Too much of politics in the West incl USA & Germany.
Look at California. They wanted to build a high speed rail from dont know where to SF. It is considered short & straight. But 20 years later, only 1 small portion is working. Again politics.
I might have related this story in some of my many writings, but this is the story of a boyhood friend. His name was Jeff, and he was one year older than myself.
He lived one block up the hill from my house, and we played a lot. He had a horse, a canoe, and a cool attic bedroom with all of his brother’s airplane models still hanging from the ceiling. He loved Mad magazine, and science fiction. In fact, I bought my entire Doc Savage collection from him for the princely sum of ten dollars.
He was a little odd, not bad, just odd. His parents had divorced, and he lived with his mother. And she was nice but odd. On one occasion she wanted to hide me in their house for a week to get the entire town all worked up. I said no. After all, all that I could think of was the hurt and terror my parents would feel if I did that.
Anyways, he lived in a house with a two car garage.
One day, I went to visit him, and sitting in that garage was a massive pile of dirt. You see, he was trying to become a earth-worm king. He had this idea that he could raise earthworms right there and sell them to the local fishing bait shop.
Good idea, but he over-estimated the value of his product.
Anyways, for a whole month he would water that pile of dirt, and farm out earth-worms. Big news for a fifth grader.
Then one day it was all gone.
He sold one coffee can full of worms for a $1. And yeah, things were cheaper back then, but even he realized that that was a far cry from becoming a millionaire.
So he moved on to other things of boyhood interest. Which included model rockets (Estes) and crossbows.
Ah. Boyhood.
Eventually he moved away when I turned 16 years old. And during the furniture auction for his house, I met my first girlfriend; a Ms Georgia Beck. A fine thin, willowy lass all of 15 years old.
And that is another story for another time.
Today…
How much alcohol did Winston Churchill consume? Was he a big drinker?
We can get a peek into how much Churchill drank since the White House butler, Alonzo Fields, wrote about Churchill’s drink requests in his memoir. Not long after Churchill arrived at the White House in December of 1941, he pulled Mr. Fields aside and said the following:
“Listen, Alonzo, when I leave here we want to depart as friends, right? I’ll have no whistling in the hallways in the mornings. Now, I must have a tumbler of sherry in my room before breakfast, a couple of glasses of scotch and soda before lunch and French champagne, and 90-year-old brandy before I go to sleep at night.” This was not inclusive of everything Churchill drank during the day, however, it was just a starting point.
Essentially, Churchill drank for a good part of his waking hours every single day. His drinking sessions were known to last until 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. every night, wherein he kept President Roosevelt up to talk shop. This exasperated the First Lady, who was at least a little pleased to see him go at the end of his three week trip to Washington.
Churchill maintained his heavy drinking and smoking lifestyle all while leading his nation through a war and as a renown public speaker and author. He still managed to live to age 90. Good genetics.
Reaction to @hoe_math . Is Promiscuity that bad? Women should stop aiming above their level.
A breeding visa? in Japan?
This is the tragic story of Seath Jackson, who was born in Belleview, Florida.
In 2011, at the age of 15, Jackson briefly dated Amber Wright. However, their relationship ended in March of that year after Jackson learned that Amber had cheated on him with an 18-year-old named Michael Bargo.
Bargo despised Jackson so much that he even believed Jackson had abused Amber, and he began to devise a plan to punish him. Bargo collaborated with four others to carry out the plan. Amber lured Jackson to a mobile home under the pretense of wanting to “work things out,” but when Jackson arrived, he was ambushed by the group.
main qimg 15b44d8bde8fb38c34014abea9bbd584
Image: Seath Jackson(top right), the attackers, and evidence recovered in the investigation.
The attackers bludgḛoned him on the head with a piece of wood, causing him to stumble outside, where Bargo shot him several times. They then wrapped his body in a sleeping bag and threw it into a burning pit fire. The group’s heinous crime was exposed when one of the perpetrators confessed.
Bargo was sentenced to dḛậth, while the others received life in prison for their roles in the m̃urdḛr of Seath Jackson. Michael Bargo is the youngest person on Florida’s dḛậth row.
Can you destroy your entire life with one wrong decision?
Effortlessly.
Guy I went to school with turned down the advances of a young lady at a party because she was underage and he wasn’t in to that. This wasn’t a huge age gap (four years) but she was fifteen and that’s illegal.
She went to the police and said he raped her (at a later date).
Police did their usual stirling job and nabbed him without even asking for an alibi.
His name was leaked to the press. (Norfolk police in the 90’s were really bad).
He was cleared in court because his alibi was that he had been going through army selection that weekend and had a whole training base of folk who could prove he was a hundred miles away from where she claimed things happened.
Didn’t matter. Papers named him and whipped the locals in to a frenzy. His car was set on fire, house vandalised, fired from his job, army rejected him (he passed selection but the army was trying to clean up their image at the time so …).
End of the day he did a bunk in the middle of the night. Went to eastern Europe and got a series of shitty jobs. I got one email from him back around 2000 just to let me know he was alive and I’ve never heard from him since. So, there you go, one young man’s whole life pissed away because he wouldn’t cop off with a girl at a party.
Why I Left the USA (Again)
Did you ever accidentally overhear a conversation about you on a conference call?
Not a conversation that I overheard, but a technical conversation I had for work that was overheard by other people.
I was a civil engineer working as the project manager for the replacement of a very, very weird bridge. First let me tell you about this bridge – it carried a small, local road over the main Amtrak line. It was an historic truss structure dating back to just after the civil war (back when the rail-line belonged to Pennsylvania railroad), and, weirdest of all, there was a driveway to a car dealership *on the actual bridge*. And all of this was located in the heart of the Main Line where property values were super-high, and it was crowded among some very luxe businesses.
Redesigning this bridge was a complete nightmare.
First off, I could not meet a single design standard. Not roadway width (too narrow), grade (too steep), clearance, nothing. There were just too many constraints. So I call my Federal counterpart (because this bridge has federal funding) and try to explain all of the problems.
Only our line was crossed with a pair of women who were having their own conversation.
That’s fine, we can hear them, but their volume is low, and we know that they can hear us, but we aren’t discussing anything secret – so we each ignore the other conversation, for the most part.
I explain the problem to my counterpart and ask if he can grant me a design exception for the design speed. If I can design the bridge for 15 miles per hour I can meet the design criteria. No, that is too big an ask. I continue to explain the problem with all the constraints. Then my counterpart asks me how much it would cost to design the bridge to meet all the standards. (Quick aside here, cost is NOT supposed to be a factor in choices like this, unless it is extremely excessive *AND* there are other safety factors involved. But extreme costs can be considered as a mitigating factor.)
So I tell him that the the extra construction cost won’t be that much, maybe a hundred thousand dollars on a million dollar project. But the two properties on either side of the bridge at one end are owned by a Lexus dealership and a Mercedes dealership who do not want to give up a square inch of land and are going to make the state pay through the nose. The other side of the bridge has an historic church on one side and a medical office building on the other – not quite as expensive but still hard to obtain the land. So the cost of the real estate would probably be about a million dollars in that area. On top of that, there are utilities everywhere – water, electric, phone, gas, cable, fiber optic lines – so there goes another three-quarters to a million dollars moving all of them. Then, because the bridge is very close to a heavily trafficked commuter route, and improving the grade on the bridge would mean repaving that road, too, the cost of traffic management would easily run another four to five hundred thousand dollars.
And the women overhearing our conversation exclaim, “Oh my God! That’s two and a half million dollars!” Then, realizing that they were overheard, they say their goodbyes and quickly hang up.
My counterpart says he has to see this bridge before making a decision, so we set up a meeting on the site for about a week later. And just as I am about to leave for that meeting, I get a panicked phone call from my counterpart saying that he is at the bridge and he is too nervous to even drive across it. He moves the meeting to my office, arrives thirty minutes later and signs off on all of the design exceptions.
It still took another three years to completely the design – mainly because the Lexus dealership didn’t want to lose their driveway, or sell the tiny amount of land that was required, but it did get built, safely and for a lot less than two and a half million dollars.
Southwestern Beef and Chili Pizza
southwest beef and chile pizza vertical
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
1 pound ground beef
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 (12 inch) thick prebaked Italian bread shell
1 1/4 cups mild thick and chunky salsa
1 1/2 cups Mexican cheese blend or Monterey Jack cheese, shredded
1 (4 ounce) can diced green chiles, drained well
2 medium plum tomatoes, seeded and coarsely chopped
1/3 cup thin red onion slivers
2 tablespoons fresh cilantro, chopped
Instructions
Heat oven to 450 degrees F.
In large skillet, brown ground beef over medium heat 8 to 10 minutes or until no longer pink, breaking up into 3/4 inch crumbles.
Pour off drippings.
Season with salt.
Place bread shell on ungreased baking sheet.
Spread salsa over shell. Sprinkle with half of cheese.
Top with beef chiles, tomatoes, red onion and remaining cheese.
Bake for 11 to 13 minutes or until cheese is melted.
Sprinkle with cilantro; cut into 8 wedges.
Have you ever met a celebrity and found they were much kinder or ruder than you expected?
In the late 1980s I worked as a chauffeur for Beverly Hills Limousine (At that time a small family run business) and I had occasion to drive many of the “Hollywood elite”. As I have recounted in another post here, the absolute nicest celeb I drove would be actor Kirk Douglas. Intelligent, thoughtful, funny but not to be trifled with. I thoroughly enjoyed having him in my car.
The absolute worst celeb (though certainly not the absolute worst client) was actress Susan Clark. Married to football star turned actor Alex Karras (“Mongo” in “Blazing Saddles”) she had a reputation as a lady with class and upbringing. The car I drove her in was a Lincoln Continental 4-door hardtop with NO window “screen” between driver and passenger. I drove her to a photo shoot from the Hollywood hills to Glendale, approx. a half hour drive. All was “normal” for a while until I heard a loud belch behind me. Hey, everyone burps, only it is standard to apologize for such an indiscretion. She was silent. Shortly after that I saw her produce a toothpick to give her teeth the “once over”. Afterwards she unwrapped a stick of chewing gum and put it to work, presumably to freshen her breath. Moments later there was a loud fart… I cracked some windows to insure there was no “poison gas”…
Fortunately, we arrived at the photo studio shortly thereafter and I dropped her off. I pulled the car over in a nearby filling station to dispose of the gum wrapper and toothpick. They were not visible. I found her gum stuffed into the rear passenger ash tray (Yes, cars all had ash trays then) but the wrapper and toothpick were not visible. Running my hand between the seat and the backrest, I found them both there stuffed in between the upholstery.
Not my worst day driving a limousine but NOT my definition of a classy lady.
Why you SHOULDN’T get US Citizenship even if you have a chance?
Why Americans think Chinese are most brainwashed but World see Americans the most brainwashed and they believe theories like flat earth?
The Americans are the most brainwashed people in the world and the evidence is out there in the open for everyone to see.
A country who spent north of $7 trillion on the stupid wars in Iraq and Afghanistan while allowing itself to decay in almost every aspect of its essential services and amenities, has to be a country drowned so deeply in corruption.
And today the American people are still electing their favourite politicians from the the equally corrupt bi-parties instead of sending them to the gallows is truly mind numbing.
NATO & the US are making a decision to up the ante—we will escalate. We will take more and more perilous actions and take this thing right up to the edge of WW3.
The Schiller Institute is trying to mobilize public opinion to bring a greater air of caution. By preempting the most aggressive and most reckless people we have managed to ward off some of the worst excesses during this war.
If we can continue doing it successfully then perhaps peace will come and we can reconsider our foreign policy and some of the very grave mistakes that we’ve made recently.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ET5ZjNIU0dg
The Western corporate elite have made up their mind. They are determined for WWIII. If they can’t have total world domination they will stomp on the blocks and nuke the Whole thing.
What’s the most expensive thing you’ve found/lost/broken?
My wife & I had just boarded a cruise ship and were settling into our state room. The prior occupant had left some valuables in the safe, closed but unlocked: her wallet (with ID) with some cash in it, and then various envelopes with $20s, $100s, etc written on the front, stuffed with that kind of bill. Of course, we had to count the money. It was over $3k.
The ID was for an elderly lady, and we found a paper with a phone number on it for a relative (same last name).
Some people may think it was silly of us, but we tried calling the number to return the wallet & cash. No one answered—we left a message but never heard back. So instead we took the cash & wallet to the customer service desk and turned it over to them. The lady at the desk was pretty surprised I think. We had to stand there while she counted it out in front of us twice.
We’ll never know whether the old lady got her wallet & cash back.
EDIT: Some are asking why housekeeping didn’t find it. The safe was physically shut most of the way and the contents were not visible. I assume housekeeping doesn’t usually pull open the safe door to see if the safe is empty. We didn’t find the stuff until we went to put our valuables in the safe.
Crossing the Airfield – The Pacific
Has a cop ever said something to you which was completely unexpected?
I bought a Mazda RX3 in early 1972 with the new rotary engine. I was living in Los Angeles when I learned my mother had pancreatic cancer and would not likely survive very long. I jumped in my car and drove as fast as I could to her home in Phoenix to spend a little time with her before she passed.
There were no other cars on Interstate 10 so I decided to see just how fast that little engine could go. I had just pegged the needle (140) and was still gaining speed when I heard the “whoop” of the siren. I looked in my rear view mirror and could see the California Highway Patrol car trying to catch up with me. I pulled over (safely), rolled down my window, grabbed my documents, and waited for him.
The officer quickly parked, exited his vehicle, and ran toward me shouting “Get out of the car!” I thought perhaps my car was on fire so I leaped out and practically ran into him yelling “What’s happening?” He stopped, grabbed me by the shoulders and stared and me with a very surprised look on his face. I repeated, “What’s happening?”
Then he started laughing. “You’re just a kid! And a girl!” I was still confused, but told him I knew I was driving fast, that I was in a hurry to spend time with my mother who was in her last days, and that the truth was that I was also really curious about what that rotary engine could do and thought the road was empty.
He took a few breaths and told me my speed was extremely dangerous and even a slight bump or pothole in the road could have caused me to crash. He was sorry about my mother. He was also sorry that had to write me up since he had already called in a “reckless driver”, but he would write the ticket for the maximum that would allow me to continue on my journey (and not be arrested on the spot).
Then he said, “Before you go, can I take a peek at that rotary engine?” I nodded and popped the hood. We had a nice chat. I drove safely away to see my mom for the last time.
I lean against the cool metal of the large door that never opens. I know it opens, of course. It’s the only door in this room. But I almost never see it move. At least, not since the day I was brought here.Despite it being dark in this room, I still know where the door is thanks to the light seeping in through the bottom. Even though it is probably night, the monsters keep working.I was brought here by people who always smile. But no matter how friendly they look or act, they’ll always be monsters to me. Why did they bring me here? Why did they bring us here? To die in this cold empty room, away from our families?It’s only me and Oscar now. We’re the only two left. I rub my arms, feeling chilly or maybe just scared at the thought that we’re alone. There used to be many children in this room. So many children were in here, just days ago, playing with us, eating with us, sleeping with us. Then they left, beginning to disappear one by one. No one said anything about it. The monsters acted as though they had never even existed in the first place. I just don’t understand. I never saw them go. It was like bubbles. They were there one moment and gone the next. And like bubbles it doesn’t seem to matter if one pops.When the last one left today, I planted myself at the door. Half because I wanted to make sure no one would take me or Oscar next and half because I was hoping if I waited here long enough, they’d come back.I just don’t understand why things are so different now. We used to be taken from the room from time to time, to get poked at with needles or examined by machines. But the monsters always returned us to this room. I guess they don’t now.Suddenly I hear the muffled voices of some of the monsters behind the door. It sounds like a man and a woman.“Really? To all of them?” The woman asks, sounding shocked. I lean a little closer into the door.“Yes. Unfortunately they didn’t survive the testing. It’s a shame, but we should’ve seen it coming. You can’t force that kind of change without consequences.” The man says, sighing. What does he mean, force that kind of change? Who is he talking about? Us?“What about the other two? Will we need to dispose of them too?” The lady askes, flatly.“Thankfully, no. They always were healthier than the rest, probably from being a second generation. We were quite fortunate that they’re different genders.” The man responds, sounding almost eager. What does that mean? Why would it matter that they’re different genders? Unfortunately I might never get the answer, because their voices get fainter as they move farther away.Oscar and I are different genders. He’s a boy and I’m a girl. So could they really be talking about us? And if they are, what did they do with the others?
I crawl away from the door, heading across the freezing tiles to where Oscar is sleeping in a pile of blankets.
“Oscar.” I whisper, afraid to startle him. He continues sleeping, unmoved. Annoyed, I begin to shake him. I just can’t sleep until I talk to somebody about this! “Oscar, wake up!” I cry out, as loud as I can without drawing the attention of the monsters. He jerks up, squinting at me through the darkness.
“What time is it?” He mumbles, rubbing his eyes. I guess he’s still groggy because we haven’t had access to clocks since the day we came here.
“It’s still night. But I need to tell you something important, so I need you to be awake with me!” I explain, frantically.
“I don’t care how much your stomach hurts…”he begins, his eyes closing.
“It’s not that! It’s about the others.” He opens his eyes again, interested.
“What about the others? Did one of them come back?”
“No. I don’t think so. But I was leaning against the door and I heard the monsters talk about them! Or at least it sounded like it was about them and us. They were talking about how they did something to them and how they were sick and how the monsters won’t get rid of us cause we’re different genders or something!” I say hurriedly. I gasp for breath, glad to have told someone. He frowns.
“They were sick for a long time.” He mutters, staring at the floor.
Yes, all of them had dark circles around their eyes from lack of sleep because coughing kept them up all night. They were also unusually skinny despite all the food we were fed. But I guess I didn’t think of it that much until now. All they ever really were was friends.
In my old home, my mother had a small, sparse garden. One day I watched as she threw away a wilted flower. Even though it was wilted I remember asking why she threw it away. She told me that the flower had gotten sick and eventually died. Like flowers, humans can probably wilt too. So did that mean that because my friends were sick…
My stomach churns. I wish I had been born deaf so I couldn’t hear a single word anyone ever said. To be blissfully unaware of the fear and dangers of this world. But most importantly, so that I would never have heard the monsters through the door.
“They’re not coming back.” I state, something hot and wet running down my cheek. That should’ve been a question, but somehow it feels true. Oscar doesn’t say anything, his eyes glossy.
I cling to him, grabbing onto the silky fabric of his shirt. I don’t understand. I don’t understand why they were so sick or why they’re not coming back. The only thing I do understand is that right now in this room without the voices of my friends, this is the loudest silence I’ve ever heard.
We are Living in The Twilight Zone ….. Part 3
What was the most unexpected knock you got on your door?
I was alone, my husband was away on a training course. I had been sick for days to the point I no longer knew what day it was or what time it was, I had fallen asleep on the couch with all the lights on. I had taken some medication for my cold. There was frantic knocking at my door I didn’t realize it but it was 4 AM. I opened the door and standing there shivering in the -15C temperature, was a teenage boy with no shoes on. There was at least 2 ft on snow on the ground. I
His head was bleeding. He started pleading all in one long breathe, “Please, please let me in, some guys are trying to kill me, they hit me in the head with a bat and I don’t even know them, your house was the only house that had lights on, PLEASE! I was a little dazed by it all and the medication, I just said, “Come on in”. Later my Mom and husband gave me such a hard time about opening the door in the middle on the night. I kept telling them I didn’t know it was the middle of the night. Besides the kid needed help and I had a son just a bit older than him. I would hope someone would do the same for him.
The boy had been at a house party where some people were kicked out for being too rowdy. Those people came back with more people with baseball bats. They hit anyone who was there. The kid didn’t know them or them him. He said he left via a balcony window and jumped down into the snow with no shoes. He ran down the alley, saw my lights on and came to my door. We called the police who came and took the young man away. I never heard anymore about it. My family said I should never do that again, But I have!
BEST 21 Minutes of Men Going Their Own Way – Special Video
Why does the U.S. have so many military bases outside of the United States?
The US military does not maintain 900 bases abroad.
Full stop.
Just because Ron Paul said it doesn’t mean it’s true (or, with all due respect to Politifact, even “mostly” true).
And more to the point, the vast majority of those 587 sites aren’t “bases,” but small installations – which the Department of Defense defines as being worth less than $100 million (and, hint: a proper military base costs way more than $100 million). They include things like 144 square feet of leased space somewhere in Newfoundland, Canada, and a medical research center in Lima, Peru.
The majority of these sites, while counted separately, are actually satellite components of a central base or base complex. The complex for Wiesbaden, Germany, for example, headquarters for United States Army Europe, gets 25 separate listings. Every minor camp and installation in South Korea gets a mention.
Seriously, things like golf courses (which they’re slowly divesting) and family housing units get counted towards the overseas “site” total. A lot of them are just parcels of leased land that the government has to account for (like a random acre of land in Costa Rica, versus the regularly debunked “army base”).
The fact of the matter is that America’s overseas military presence is largely, usually overhyped. Yes, it has very large military commitments in places like Japan, South Korea, and Germany, but it isn’t an imperial force with its boots on the necks of every country everywhere. 90 percent of the US’ forces are based inside the United States, and the vast majority of other nations that house US military personnel only have a handful.
Here’s a map of the number of nations with at least one US military servicemember assigned, according to the Defense Manpower Data Center:
main qimg 07556931677daf63cbdfa8a2f639304f pjlq
Now here’s a map with those assignments weighted by the size of deployment.
main qimg 07a2fa411bd7e13e69f1f943ddbc36ce pjlq
A lot less shocking. The US’ main overseas commitments are to Europe, South Korea, and Japan to honor mutual defense pacts. Everywhere else has just a handful of service personnel whose roles are probably advisory in nature, if not entirely contained within the US embassies in those nations.
I know all the popular answers to this question come up with fancy reasons related to the US’ need to project its power or some such, and people have reflexively upvoted those answers because they sound smart, but they’re built on the incorrect premise.
The fact of the matter is that the US has neither the interest nor the resources to sustain such a massive, overseas military presence that 900 bases would require. That it has large deployments in selected countries represents its commitment to existing alliances and ongoing conflicts. But putting a bunch of hardware around the world and the garrisons necessary to zealously defend them isn’t on the table.
Ukraine putting out its begging bowl at the Berlin “Restoration and Infrastructure Conference” this week has led to a smidge more press attention to the impact of Russia’s campaign against Ukraine’s electrical system. Similar to coverage of the war as a whole, bad information is being dribbled out, accompanied by doses of hopium as to how conditions could be made markedly better if the West only provided more weapons, money, and other salves.
Another telling aspect is that the articles are only willing to project out to Ukraine having the high odds of a cold and dark winter, and the impact of that on households. It’s as if we were given old fashioned naval maps, with their warnings at the periphery, “Beyond here lie dragons.” They avert their eyes from the fact that highly constrained power translates into massive constraints on and likely cascading problems with commerce.
Even if you consider only the difficulties for residents, it is not just that they will be in freezing, blackout conditions come winter. What about food? What about getting gas, since many stations rely on electricity to run their pumps?
And when we get to commerce, just start with processing transactions. What happens when Internet access is limited, and retailers and suppliers can’t take card or electronic payments on their merchant systems? Or for that matter, banks if theres is only power for a few hours a day?
And most of all, what about sewage, which John Helmer identified as the big chokepoint in terms of municipalities having a hope of remaining habitable? From his post earlier this week:
Independently of one another, Russian and Ukrainian reporters are confirming the impact of the power losses on the operation of water and sewerage systems in the majority of Ukrainian cities. According to Oleg Popenko, a Ukrainian expert on energy for communal services, “Armageddon has already arrived. We just don’t feel it yet. But the residents of Poltava, for example, feel it, because since May 5 of this year, 120,000 residents of the city receive water by the hour and use sewerage by the hour. You can imagine what happened in Zhitomir when the central sewerage collector didn’t work there for a week, but now in Poltava [it’s been] a month. And this is the problem with water utilities in 70% of Ukrainian cities. Water utilities are probably more important than rest of the infrastructure in the city. Heat and electricity can be replaced somehow, and you can go somewhere. But if the sewer system breaks down in a city, the city is no longer viable in principle.”
Also note that there is some artful positioning on the extent of the devastation. Ukraine’s biggest energy company DTEK confirmed Washington Post reporting. From DTEK on June 7:
In a recent Washington Post article, DTEK CEO Maxim Timchenko revealed that russia’s missile attacks have devastated Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, with the country’s largest private power producer losing 86 percent of its generating capacity.
“What makes the situation worse is that many of the electrical facilities have been targeted repeatedly — a cycle of destruction, recovery, destruction,” Timchenko told the Washington Post. He pointed to one DTEK power unit that was repaired just weeks ago only to be struck again over the weekend, saying “Now it’s just gone.”
Yet various new reports state that Ukraine has lost only 50% of its generation. This is plausible given that DTEK in 2019 and 2020 supplied only 18% to 19% of Ukraine’s electricity, per Fitch. So the math could work. But 86% for DTEK versus 50% overall would mean DTEK has been singularly unlucky. So it’s not unreasonable to think that 50% is an understatement.
If Russia continues to attack power plants, the worst-case scenario is that come winter Ukrainians could be spending up to 20 hours a day without power and heating, according to Ukraine’s largest private energy company DTEK. Part of the issue is that Ukraine’s thermal and hydroelectric power stations are difficult and expensive to fix.
They skipped over the significance of this part:
Ukraine is buying energy from the European Union to try to cover its shortfall. Its energy ministry said it was planning on Wednesday to import its largest amount of power to date. However, this is not enough to make up its deficit, meaning nationwide power cuts have been planned during an eight-hour window, from 3pm to 11pm, in order to protect critical infrastructure such a hospitals and military facilities.
The BBC piece made it sound as if 3 PM to 11 PM power outages are the new normal (although in fairness “power cuts” could mean rolling blackouts in this window). Anyone who has read about load balancing in connection with solar power knows that residential usage peaks when people come home from work. They cook dinner (and open their fridges, also increasing power demand), turn on lights, turn on air conditioning or turn up heat, depending on the time of year, and in normal circumstances, many turn on entertainment devices.
So this window is part of the business day and the most active time for households. In the US, the consumer sector is the largest user of electricity, but represents less than half the total (commercial and industrial are classified separately). Ukraine is probably not wildly different (it probably has a larger industrial sector, but that was concentrated in the Donbass, which Russia now deems to be part of Russia). So even though the outage time is only 8 hours a day, on a guesstimated basis, it seems consistent with a 50% reduction. But when you consider the profile, it already represents a lot of pain for individuals.
A new story in the Wall Street Journal applies as much porcine maquillage as possible to this dire and worsening situation. Key extracts:
Ukraine is imposing blackouts, launching hasty repairs and hunting for spare parts after a Russian bombing campaign targeting power infrastructure in recent months slashed the country’s electricity production by half.
The Russian attacks, using waves of missiles and explosive drones, have sparked fears of a painful winter should the power outages severely hamper the economy and lead to an exodus from cities. Ukraine has long pleaded with the West for more air-defense systems, and Ukrainian officials say deliveries have been insufficient to protect both cities and the front lines.
In reviving and expanding a tactic used earlier in the war, Ukrainian officials say Russia is seeking to spark a humanitarian crisis as part of an effort to break Ukrainians’ will to fight and force a capitulation.
The streets of Kyiv are already filled with the sound and fumes of generators, as power companies impose hourslong blackouts to manage consumption and carry out repairs. Ukraine has increased electricity imports from European Union neighbors it was exporting power to as recently as March. And repair crews are working across its energy grid to restore capacity, sometimes only to see the same facilities struck again.
This section implies, and more Ukraine complaints in the article later explicitly claim, that this campaign could be neutralized if the West provided more air defenses. While technically accurate, it breezes past the fact that that’s na ga happen. Ukraine’s former Soviet weaponry generally outperformed Western replacements. As anyone who has been even dimly following this story knows, the US and NATO have been scrounging to find more Patriot missiles, even as Russia has been successfully hunting and destroying the platforms. Ukraine has also been pinning far too much hope on the eventual delivery of F-16 fighter jets, which the Anglosphere media has dutifully also overhyped. And we see no mention of ever-more effective Russian signal jamming.
It’s not surprising to see frustration and upset on Twitter:
The Journal piece turns to the notion that Ukraine can restore service as the war is on, which is akin to bailing water out of a badly leaking boat:
DTEK estimates the price of restoring the energy system at $50 billion…Focused on maintenance, they are looking for spare parts, equipment and investment to keep Ukraine’s grid working. To address the need for parts, [Maxim] Timchenko [CEO of DTEK] said DTEK has been working with countries across Europe to visit decommissioned power plants to scour for usable parts. At least 10 countries have opened their doors.
During the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Berlin, Ukraine’s Energy Ministry said it helped coordinate a dozen new cooperation agreements for rebuilding and maintaining the country’s power grid. State power company Ukrenergo said it has received 30.4 million euros, equivalent to around $33 million, from Germany to support energy infrastructure. The EU said 1.4 billion euros in grants will be available to businesses working in the sector. DTEK announced partnerships with U.S. energy companies Honeywell International and GE Vernova as well as French energy company Schneider Electric, which has donated 43,000 pieces of emergency equipment worth 4 million euros since February 2022.
In fairness, the article does acknowledge, as minimally as possible, that energy facilities are “sometimes” destroyed again after repairs.
The Journal describes Ukraine plans to rely more on solar and other distributed generation, with DTEK having launched a new wind farm even while the war was on. But the article also describes the use of generators as a stopgap, without acknowledging that they are not a viable ongoing solution. Again hoisting from Helmer:
On June 7, a video recorded stroll down one of Odessa’s shopping streets revealed an emergency generating set providing electricity for almost all of the commercial establishments.
“This is in no way sustainable,” comments a NATO military engineer. “Note how each shop has its own genset. The generators in the video are not designed for the duty cycle they’re being run at. They’ll wear out soon enough. The military, including deployed NATO personnel, use the shops and the gensets, too. The idea of pooling their resources, sharing load among gensets, thus reducing wear and tear on the whole network, while collectivizing fuel and maintenance costs, doesn’t seem to have occurred to them. To be sure, what follows will be no lack of electrocutions, carbon monoxide poisonings, and fires. We can bet the manifestations of the social pathology we’re seeing here have been factored in by the General Staff. Their attack point will now be to stop fuel, engine oil, spares, and replacements from getting through.”
Russia is working on two overlapping tracks, that of degrading Ukraine’s power system so severely as to cripple its military’s ability to supply itself and communicate, with the ancillary effect of getting civilians to leave cities, which would give Russia more degrees of freedom in taking them, if it has to resort to offensive operations. At the same time, it is relentlessly attriting Ukraine’s men and weapons in the east. Russia can decide how to manage the tempo of each campaign. It will be interesting to see which vector Russia prefers over time, since this may also give early signals as to how Russia is thinking about the end game. For instance, more emphasis on the electrical campaign could presage Russia eventually asserting control over western Ukraine, which they would regard as an unwelcome necessity. Consistent with that notion, John Mearshimer on Judge Napolitano pointed out yesterday (starting at 8:58):
Ukrainians needs more manpower on the battlefield, they need more weaponry, and we don’t have weaponry to give them in meaningful numbers, and we certainly don’t have any manpower to give them. So there is not much we can do at this point in time. And I would argue, by the way, that by doubling down the way we are doubling down, especially by giving Ukraine a 10 year military commitment, we’re just guaranteeing that Russians have a powerful incentive to really wreck Ukraine.
Mearshimer did at least disagree with Gilbert Doctorow and said he thought Russia would not flatten Kiev. But that view does not make the overall trajectory that much better.
What was the most disappointing birthday present you ever saw someone get?
A car. My oldest daughter was very mature and responsible and for a few reasons I decided to give her a (used) car for her 16th birthday. My girls went to school in a different town that started at 7:20 a.m. The bus came at 6:10. An extra half hour was big. At least three nights a week she went back to school for music rehearsals. My youngest was ill and I was back and forth to the hospital so it wasn’t a wild whim to give her a car; it was a bit of a necessity. But it was a big gift. I had a party for her and a friend put a bow on it and delivered it during the party. NO REACTION. She looked pained and everyone else was a bit taken back by her lack of enthusiasm.
That evening she apologized. She wasn’t extremely outgoing and being the center of attention, knowing people were expecting a big reaction, and not being mature enough to fake one, she basically froze. She wasn’t unappreciative – more a deer in the headlights. You couldn’t have asked for a better child – it was easy to understand and let it go, but now we joke when it’s a little box at Christmas ”sure hope its not a car!”
What did you do when you were suddenly fired from a job?
I was terminated from my job as a nurse after 14 years with the same hospital. I felt defeated, unworthy and depressed. I was not sure i wanted to be a nurse anymore.
I took a week off and decided to take a road trip to a place that once made me prouder and happier than I had ever been in my life. I drove down to Columbus, Georgia, the town just outside of Fort Benning where I had attended the U.S. Army Basic Parachutist course, a.k.a. “Jump School”, and had earned my wings. It was a pivotal moment in my life as Basic Training and my Combat Engineer school had not been the “band of brothers” experience that I had hoped for. Jump School was such an awesome experience that I was finally looking forward to what would become an eventful and mostly enjoyable 3 year tour of duty which would eventually lead me to become an Army Medic and then a Registered Nurse.
I spent the weekend visiting the Infantry Museum, which included watching a class of Infantrymen graduate, the Naval Museum of the Civil War, the Coca-Cola Space Center, ambling along the river walk, and exploring the old Civil War iron works that had been made into a conference center and events venue.
On the way to and from Columbus, I visited the Aquarium in Atlanta, the Army Airborne museum at Camp Taccoa, two other local museums and an old water-powered grist mill.
I returned home feeling refreshed and began a job search. It took me 15 months to find another full-time job as a nurse, but in the interim I did some volunteer driving for the local food bank, worked part-time in a nursing-adjacent job, and went on several job interviews, both nursing and non-nursing, just to see what was out there. I even got to visit a factory where the Army’s parachutes are made.
I was fortunate enough to have a paid-for house and car and a lot of savings, but I understand that there are many out there who are less fortunate than me.
I once read a cartoon in the which the narrator said that before a person can overcome tragedy, they must take some time to just stare at the rubble. That was certainly true for me, but I also recommend finding and going to a “happy place”, even if only for a brief time, just to remind ones self that there is still some happiness to be had in life, even as we suffer the darkest of times.
Philippine Marines Drew Firearms as China Seized Second Thomas Shoal Airdrop, Says Philippine Military Chief
JUNE 4, 2024 6:04 PM
Chinese and Philippine Armed Forces boats rigid hull inflatable boats clash near Second Thomas Shoal. AFP Image
The contingent of Philippine Marines onboard BRP Sierra Madre (LT-57) at Second Thomas Shoal reportedly drew their weapons as China Coast Guard boats moved in to take packages from a resupply airdrop.
Philippine military officials said this week that Chinese rigid hull inflatable boats intercepted an aerial resupply drop destined for Marines aboard BRP Sierra Madre at Second Thomas Shoal in an incident last month on May 19. This incident saw the vessels come as close as five meters to the grounded Second World War-era landing ship tank, which Manila grounded at the disputed shoal in 1999.
Armed Forces of the Philippines Chief of Staff Romeo Brawner said that the Marines deployed their weapons as a “precautionary measure” in self-defense.
“It’s part of the rules of engagement. That whenever you see imminent threats coming your way, you best be prepared,” said Brawner about the incident.
Chinese state media claimed that the Philippine Marines were pointing guns at China Coast Guard officers and released a video of the incident from the Chinese perspective that depicts two Philippine personnel onboard Sierra Madre wielding firearms. These claims were denied in a statement by the Armed Forces of the Philippines, citing the need for “heightened vigilance and alertness” because of the “CCG’s provocative presence near BRP Sierra Madre.”
According to the Philippine military, the China Coast Guard reportedly tore open the packages and threw their contents of foodstuffs into the water. Brawner said that may have been searching for construction materials, which Beijing has constantly cited as a reason for their interceptions of Philippine resupply missions to Sierra Madre. While most of the supplies sank, some were recovered by Philippine personnel. However, officials cited the overall resupply operation as a success as the majority of the other airdropped packages were recovered.
Two separate incidents also occurred last month around the disputed South China Sea feature. According to the Inquirer newspaper, the China Coast Guard obstructed a medical evacuation mission from Sierra Madre on May 19. The third incident occurred on May 24, which reportedly involved the use of water cannons by Chinese forces to force away a Philippine civilian fishing vessel from the proximity of the shoal.
Today, Well, actually a while ago – but I am writing this now, I read a comment on one of my posts. In it, the commenter said…
China, a Godless commie hellholle. Leader in pollution, cancer villages, and rivers so polluted they burst into flames. No thanks. That place is as third world tyranny as it gets. It’s not the future, but a sick twisted parody of it.
The only reason it’s thriving is that everything they have was stolen from the west and our govt’s keep pumipng up their phony economy with our misappropriated assets. That country should have collapsed long ago, and it will when the true revolution starts.
If he pops up again, I will send him to a cornfield so nasty that some of my readership might start involuntarily vomiting in disgust.
Why?
Many reasons.
This MM is my place and my space, and I am GOD here.
I take no insults, open or subtle. You insult me and you face my wrath.
If you don’t like me, my writings or my experience, then leave, but don’t shit on my sofa, and piss in my glass of beer.
This is not a place for the anti-China narrative. I know why it exists and who started it. Do not insult me.
I have written and generate many videos on YouTube (and others) about what my life is actually like.
I am presenting one here.
It’s a slow Sunday in my “Ghost City”. I ask all the readership to enjoy this short video and compare my REALITY with the FICTION spouted by the ignorant rupe who has the nerve to pollute my personal space.
Fuck you. This is what it is really like in China.
Oh, and by the way, this is where that jackass comes from;
ban details
So compare my life with his…
Bad Chicago
It might be ignorance, but the actual reality is that he is jealous of something he will never have.
Today…
Prosciutto Basil Pizza
potato crust pizza main1
Potato Crust Pizza is a delightful and easy-to-make treat that’s gluten-free, and guess what? No need to prepare dough in advance! Let me introduce you to this culinary revelation.
What makes Potato Crust Pizza so special is its simplicity. Instead of dough, the star of the show is a potato crust. Imagine a crust that’s soft and crispy, with a hint of potato goodness that perfectly complements the delicious toppings.
The best part is that you can get creative with the toppings and customize your pizza experience. The options are endless, so feel free to experiment and find your favorite combination.
As you take a bite of Potato Crust Pizza, you’ll be treated to a symphony of flavors and textures. From the satisfying crunch of the crust to the mouthwatering blend of toppings, every bite is a delight. It is a perfect dish for brunch or lunch.
How to make Potato Crust Pizza
To prepare a delicious potato crust, start by preheating the oven to 425F (220C) and lining a baking sheet with parchment paper. Peel the potatoes and use the large holes of a grater to grate both the cheese and potatoes. Once grated, transfer the potatoes onto a kitchen towel and firmly squeeze to remove as much liquid as possible.
Next, place the potatoes in a large bowl and add the grated cheese, egg, salt, and pepper. Stir the ingredients together until well combined. Spread the potato mixture evenly onto the prepared baking sheet, shaping it into a 12-inch (30cm) circle.
Bake the potato crust in the preheated oven for approximately 25-30 minutes, or until the edges turn slightly golden. Once done, remove the baking sheet from the oven and top the potato crust with Mozzarella cheese, your favorite salami slices, dried basil, oregano, and tomatoes.
Return the baking sheet to the oven and bake for an additional 10-15 minutes, or until the cheese has melted to perfection. Once ready, take out the delicious potato crust from the oven and enjoy your flavorful creation.
Hope you will try this Potato Crust Pizza and savor the amazing flavors it has to offer. If you do, don’t forget to tag me in your Instagram posts or stories, so I can see your amazing results. Enjoy!
Other similar recipe you may like to try
Margherita Pizza with Cauliflower Crust is another gluten-free delicious meal perfect for each time of the day. It is very easy to prepare and very flavorful and comforting.
Have you ever tried Low Carb –Eggplant Pizza? For those in search of gluten-free pizza solutions this can also be a great choice. These eggplant mini pizzas are perfect for a light dinner, appetizer or simply as a side dish. They look good and have a great taste.
Try this delightful recipe for No-Yeast Pizza perfect for any time of the day. It is quick, easy to prepare and ready in no minute. Pair this with homemade tomato sauce to make an unforgettable experience.
Ingredients
1 Boboli or homemade crust
1 cup tomato sauce
1/3 pound diced dried prosciutto
1/4 pound aged Asiago cheese, grated
Dried oregano
Pepper
Garlic salt
1 pound mozzarella cheese, grated
Fresh basil, chopped
Instructions
Heat the oven to 450 degrees F. Spray or grease a pizza pan or stone.
Spread tomato sauce over the pizza evenly.
Top with prosciutto and 1/4 pound and Asiago cheese.
Sprinkle with oregano, pepper and garlic salt to taste.
Add mozzarella.
Bake on the bottom rack of preheated oven for 8 to 12 minutes or until cheese is melted and crust is piping hot.
Sprinkle with basil and serve.
Why I won’t live in the US after leaving 5 years ago [hint: things never got better]
As an attorney, have you ever beaten the odds and won a case deemed “impossible” to win?
Originally Answered: As an attorney, have you ever beat the odds and won a case deemed "impossible" to win?
Yes. Our clients were not paying their bill and it was very unlikely that the judge would let our firm withdraw from the case. I was instructed lose the case as cheaply as possible, because we had no chance of winning. Our client was suing the defendants for misrepresentations in the sale of a strip mall. It was a fraud case and essentially our clients’ word against the defendants. Our client was an idiot in the transaction. No due diligence and complete unfamiliarity in purchasing a running commercial real estate. When I asked for clarification on how to lose cheaply, I was told to put on the bare minimum case, no advance preparation with just enough effort to avoid any malpractice claims but no extras, no experts for damages calculations and no heroics. The case was a classic “dog” that hadn’t panned out.
Despite that instruction, I carefully prepared our case, and, with the backup of my legal secretary, got a lot of “extra effort.” At trial my client went on to commit obvious but unnecessary perjury. I pulled him off the stand and put his wife on the stand to correct his testimony, and then put him back on the stand to finish. This was a bench trial and the judge yelled at me during the entire trial. He cut off my cross examinations, wouldn’t admit much of my evidence and was bored through most of the trial and fell asleep in closing argument. The opposing counsel gloated every day of trial and offered to bet me $100 on the outcome. He gloated even more when I declined.
The judge ruled in our favor in the amount of $250,000 and awarded attorneys fees of $100,000. Even my clients were shocked. Looking back on the case, I, as plaintiff, called the defendant as my very first witness and unexpectedly established every element of a fraud case through his testimony. The judge had decided the case on the first witness.
Congress Amends National Defense Bill to AUTOMATICALLY Register all males, 18-26, for Selective Service DRAFT – So YOUR SONS can get killed in a War with Russia that THEY are causing!
The U.S. House of Representatives has passed an amendment as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2025 on Friday.
The amendment to H.R. 8070 will automatically register all draft-age male U.S. residents with the Selective Service System for a possible military draft, based on information from other Federal databases.
This new system of automatic draft registration would replace the existing system, in place since 1980, in which young men have the freedom to decide whether or not to sign up for the draft.
According to People’s World, the automatic draft registration proposal was initiated by the Selective Service System (SSS) as part of its annual budget request to Congress.
The Gateway Pundit reported that it was introduced by Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.). Houlahan is a former Air Force officer. It was endorsed by HASC Chair Mike Rogers (R-Ala.) and approved by a voice vote of the full committee without audible opposition.
Christina Marie “Chrissy” Houlahan is an American politician, engineer, and former United States Air Force officer. A member of the Democratic Party, she is the U.S. representative from Pennsylvania’s 6th congressional district, shown on the map below:
The amended bill states:
Automatic Registration: The Military Selective Service Act (50 U.S.C. 3801 et seq.) is amended by striking section 3 (50 U.S.C. 3802) and inserting the following new section 3:
“SEC. 3. (a)(1) Except as otherwise provided in this title, every male citizen of the United States, and every other male person residing in the United States, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six, shall be automatically registered under this Act by the Director of the Selective Service System.
“(2) This section shall not apply to any alien lawfully admitted to the United States as a nonimmigrant under section 101(a)(15) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1101) for so long as he continues to maintain a lawful nonimmigrant status in the United States.
The bill was approved in the House with a vote of 217 to 199. Among the votes, 211 Republicans supported the measure, while Marjorie Taylor Greene (GA), Thomas Massie (KY), and Matt Rosendale (MT) voted no.
196 Democrats voted against the bill, with 6 breaking ranks to vote in favor. The legislation now advances to the Senate for further deliberation.
As the US an our NATO vassals continue to antagonize Russia, by arming and funding Ukraine to continue killing Russians, now you know WHO it is here in the U.S. that explicitly arranged for YOUR SONS to go die in the likely coming war with Russia, that she and her Congressional colleagues are deliberately causing.
If your son gets killed in such a war, YOU now know who is personally responsible for creating the situation that got your loved one killed.
This is not some “innocent” person . . . she explicitly submitted legislative language specifically designed to force your son into military service to likely die in a likely coming war with Russia that she and her colleagues have fomented, funded, and facilitated.
They WANT a war . . . and now they want YOUR SON(S) to go fight and die in it.
Retired in Phnom Penh, Cambodia – Easy, Cheap, and Convenient
How did China’s economy grow so rapidly after years of poverty? What factors contribute to their continued strength and growth? How can other countries replicate this success at a faster pace?
China’s economy did not grow overnight. Yes, to outsiders, it looks like an overnight success.
In a nutshell, China’s success results from super hard work over 76 years.
China closed the doors first and cleaned out her house.
China had and still does super leadership.
Once Chinese leaders decide, It gets done.
China did not waste a cent on useless wars.
China concentrated on its infrastructures, and they built state-of-the-art infrastructures.
The Chinese workforce is the most productive/disciplined workforce.
China wiped out drugs/opium/and filth from her country.
China is a very safe country; I saw girls/women working by themselves in night shits/travelling freely in the middle of the night without any fear or protection.
China is a deficient, violent, crime-free country.
China gave half of the sky to deserving gender parity.
China never forgot her lowest of the low, and the Chinese Government improved their fate also.
China wiped out the nuisance and nonsense of religions.
China’s public transport is relatively safe, affordable, timely, and efficient.
China’s women are very safe, and they share a tremendous load of responsibilities.
China has maintained the super values of respecting elders/teachers/parents. The Chinese family structure is firm, and the traditional family system is very viable.
China blocked garbage websites and protected her children from filth.
Chinese education standards are very high.
Chinese society is very frugal, saving a good portion of their earnings.
Chinese Government invests a lot in Children’s education, and they do not want to leave anyone behind.
China is relatively corruption-free.
Chinese, by nature, talk less and deliver more.
Chinese society is mainly one race; 90 percent of it, the remaining 10 percent are 55 minorities, and China has a super relationship with almost all.
China has endless museums, and these museums are teaching tools for the young generation to be proud of their past achievements and learn from past mistakes.
Chinese people have relatively longer life spans due to their diet, exercise, and active lives.
How can other countries replicate this success at a faster pace?
The rest of the world is still asleep: They still believe China is a third-world country.
The rest of the world still feels they are Democratic when there is no democracy when jails are full, law and order are in disarray, courts are full, criminals have fear, and the systems are corrupt from A to Z. Homeless is widespread, and hunger is looming high. Democracy means nothing.
It is also a myth that Chinese people are suppressed; that is a total lie. Chinese people may not love their system, but they like it.
I did not come across even one Chinese who does not believe that their Government is NOT doing a great job.
In China, almost everyone believes their fate will improve as prosperity keeps growing.
Look around: And see filth around the world, sex scandals, corruption, mismanagement and wastage of money, all due to political correctness/votes/mafia-style regimes. One Government makes a plan, and the new Government scraps it and makes its new agenda. Nothing gets done. The systems are rot and eating like termites.
China’s civil projects are more significant than life:
One visit to Three Gorges Dam will make you think, OMG, disciplined/determined race, nation, super workforce can do this impossible task.
Therefore, the next few centuries belong to China.
You can take a horse to water but cannot make him drink; the rest of the world is dying slowly and painfully.
Chinese conventional wisdom is based on 5,000 years of continuous civilization, and knowledge is passed from generation to generation.
I did not see and meet even one person in China during my six visits who was NOT positive and very hopeful about their country,
I hope it helps.
What is the most clever way you saw someone calm down a kid who was throwing a fit in the store?
Originally Answered: What is the most clever way you saw someone calm down a kid that was throwing a fit in the store?
LOL I was in a shopping mall one time and this little kid, maybe 3 years old, was mad at his grandmother about something (I think she told him he couldn’t have a cookie or something like that) and he threw himself on the ground and was screaming and crying. She simply sat down on the bench and watched him, then took out her phone and was fiddling with it, but kept her eye on him even though he wasn’t aware of it. When he saw she wasn’t watching, he stopped crying for a moment and just stared at her. She took an extra moment, then looked at him and said, “You done?” He started screaming again, then she shook her head, acted like she was dialing a number, and said something like this (I’m having to paraphrase, it’s been some years):
“Yes, is Santa there, please? Yes, I’ll hold. *pauses* “Santa! How are you, my old friend?” *pauses, nods like she’s listening* “Ah-huh. Yes. Oh, that’s wonderful!” The little kid’s now stopped crying and is looking at her like, what? She went on. “Yes, I’m afraid I’m having to report my grandson.” His eyes got huge and he stared at her like she was doing the worst thing imaginable. “Yes, he’s acting up. No, no, nothing like that, but he’s being stubborn about my not giving him a sweet.” *pauses* “Why, yes, I remember your wife’s cookie recipe! They’re delightful!” *pauses again, nods like she’s agreeing* “What a wonderful idea! I’ll tell him. And yes, that is sad, but it must be so. All right, I’ll catch up with you later. Have a good one! Give Henry the Elf a hug from me.” With that, she hung up and looked at her grandson gravely. “That was Santa. He said for every time you give me trouble this year, I’m to report your bad behavior and he’ll update this list. Keep it up, and you’ll get nothing. So you have to be good, okay?”
I tell you, this child wiped his face and nodded, then came up and gave her a hug. “I sowwy, wandma.” She hugged him and told him she loved him, but she’s not being mean grandma when she doesn’t give him what he wants, she has a reason she’s saying no.
I was completely floored. Epic Grandma FTW!
Living in VIETNAM VS CAMBODIA & Why I Prefer Cambodia
What is the scariest thing you’ve seen in a courtroom?
Final arguments had just concluded in a week-long will contest where I was representing the proponent of the will, a very nice, but shy, 56-year-old woman. After the judge instructed the jury, the jury stood up and went into the jury room. We started moving from the counsel table towards the aisle. Simultaneously with the last juror in closing the door, my client fell face down on the floor without even putting out her arms. Her body hit with a thud and her head bounced off the floor once, smashing her nose. Then, a second or two later, her entire body went into rhythmic muscle contractions, from her neck to her feet, which lasted for several minutes while the judge, the bailiff and the opposing counsel started to panic. I was in shock for a second or two, then yelled, “call an ambulance!” (To be fair, everybody may have been yelling the same thing.)
My immediate thought was “she’s dead, she’s had a ‘sudden death’ heart attack.”
The judge then said, “I’ve got to call a mistrial.”
Fortunately I had sense enough to object to that, pointing out that the jury had already closed the door and did not see who was sick or dead, so it could not influence their verdict. (And I sure didn’t want to try the case again, possibly without my client!) The judge agreed and instructed the bailiff to keep the jury room door shut.
By then, my client’s convulsions had ceased and I bent down to feel her pulse. When I put my fingers on her neck, she let out a moan, but stayed unconscious. She was alive, which was an enormous relief to everyone in the courtroom, but she didn’t seem like she was going to recover anytime soon, if at all.
Then the jury knocked on the door! The bailiff poked his head in and learned they had a verdict. That was quick. He told them that the judge had other issues to take care of and that they had to remain in the jury room.
The ambulance came and carted her off. As soon as they entered the elevator, the judge called the jury back in. I was standing alone at the counsel table. The jury held in our favor. After the jury was discharged, a couple of jurors asked where my client was and they were shocked. They had not heard a thing in the jury room.
Fortunately, my client’s diagnosis was “anxiety and panic attack” and was released the next day. But I would have bet the farm that when they rolled her out of the courtroom, it would probably be the last time I saw her. Glad I was wrong.
Why would anyone live in the Philippines instead of Thailand or Vietnam?
“How does this number look to you?” The man opposite me slides a piece of paper across his desk and my eyes have to scan over it three times for the number to register in my brain. It’s at this moment that I believe in God again. Almost a decade of rejections, doors slammed in my face, and scraping by on instant noodles now, finally, all seem worth it.I look up at the man, who, upon seeing the stupefied expression on my face, breaks into a big smile, his straight white teeth revealing that he hasn’t seen the bottom of an instant noodle cup in a very long time. “I take it you’re pleased with the number?”“Mr. Murdoch, I don’t think Hollywood actors get paid these kinds of sums.”“It’s Neville, please.” He flashes that smile again. “The compensation is proportional to the difficulty level of the job. It takes a very special kind of actor to perform in a virtual reality simulation for our thrill-seeking luxury clients. You’ll portray a range of characters of different genders and ages, and the script can be flipped at any moment.”“That’s the reason I signed up,” I say honestly. “Acting in a simulation sounded like a really interesting challenge.”Neville leans across the table and pats my forearm with his neatly groomed fingers. “And that’s why we picked you. You were the perfect blend of versatility and improvisation skills we’ve encountered in an actor.”I feel my chest swell with pride. He leans back in his chair. “Now, today is your final audition, which means you get to try the simulation, see what it’s like to act as different avatars, and think on your feet. You’ll be acting opposite the Professor — a grand actor whom you’ll absolutely love — and the setting of the story is a lab where the evil government is out to get him.”He makes a mock “oooh” gesture and continues, “You’ll be playing three different characters and we’ll make our final decision based on your best performance. Have you had a chance to look at the script yet?”
I nod and pull out the stack of papers I’ve highlighted with a yellow marker. “Yes,” I say. “Many times over and I have some questions.”
Neville nods. “Absolutely. You can ask our director in a minute when you meet her. Now, let me show you to your pod.”
With one swift movement, he’s up on his feet, holding the door open for me. I shove the script awkwardly back into my bag and get up from my chair.
He leads me down a long corridor that’s the kind of white that blinds your eyes, peppered with the latest tech, oozing money and power. Our footsteps sound almost illegally loud in the thick silence.
We pass an unlabeled room that’s open and, just before the door closes in my face, I catch a glimpse of a man wearing a helmet lying inside a white pod with a laser-like light scanning his body.
“Hey, is that the other actor?” I say, pointing at the closed door.
Neville nods. “Sure is.”
“Do you mind if I go say a quick hello? I always like to meet my colleagues.”
Neville gives a slight shake of his head and places his hand lightly on my back, leading me away from the door. “I’m afraid that’s not such a good idea. The Professor has a very specific process that he doesn’t want interrupted.”
“Oh.” I nod and don’t insist. Far be it from me to interrupt a fellow actor’s process.
“And we’ve arrived.” Neville scans his retina outside another room and I hear the heavy door open with an impressive clunk. “After you.”
I step in, and am greeted by a white pod, just like in the room we passed by earlier, and a wrinkly, sour-looking woman standing by it.
“This is Amanda, our genius director,” Neville introduces her.
I grasp her clammy hand with mine. “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” I say. The woman forces a smile that looks like a real effort to produce. “Hello,” she manages.
“Rose has some questions about the script,” Neville says brightly, and Amanda’s head snaps toward me. “Oh?”
“Yes,” I say, pulling the pages out of my bag. “For example, on page 2, Robert says ‘Hello, how are you?’ I was wondering if I could say ‘Hey, what’s up, man?’ instead? I think it would fit his character better.”
Amanda stares at me like you would at moldy cheese and gives me one of those smiles again. “Sure, honey, say ‘What’s up?’” Then she gestures towards the pod. “Lay down there.”
I slide into the smooth bean-shaped device, and Neville helps place a helmet with a reflective surface on my head.
“I don’t know if you’ve experienced a simulation before, Rose, but you’ve never experienced anything like ours,” he enthuses. “Everything feels completely real. You can taste an apple and feel the sun on your skin. You don’t need to move a muscle in the pod. You just move your legs in your mind and, ta-da, your avatar walks.”
“Cool,” I say.
“Just remember our one cardinal rule. Don’t…”
“…break character,” I complete his sentence.
“That’s right.” He nods approvingly. “Now, if you’re ready, I think we can begin.”
I feel my heart rate go up, not knowing what I’m up against, but as I don’t want to appear difficult by asking too many questions, I just shrug and say “Sure.”
“Marvelous,” Neville trills, then proceeds to push a button on the side of the pod. “Scene 1: Robert,” I hear him say and the next thing I know, I feel water flowing over my hands from a faucet. I look up and startle a little as I see a clean-shaven man staring at me, but then realize it’s just my reflection in the mirror. Well, my avatar’s reflection. Robert. 36 years old. PhD in experimental physics. Best friend of the Professor.
Neville wasn’t kidding. This tech is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before. I locate the hand towels quickly, wipe my hands dry, taking a second to marvel at how I can feel the texture of the paper rubbing against my skin. But then, since time’s a-wastin, I snap back to my current reality, to page 1 of the script, and step out of the men’s room.
“Whoa!”
I literally bump into a man with a bushy beard and thick black glasses.
That’s the Professor, I hear Amanda’s voice in my ear, and my startlement switches into a friendly smile. “Hey, what’s up, man?” I say with my character’s deep bass. “Sorry about that. You okay?”
“Yeah, fine, fine,” the Professor says absent-mindedly.
“Yeah?” I say, returning to the script. “And how’s the project?”
“The project…” the Professor says but instead of finishing that thought, he does the very thing Neville warned me about — he flips the script.
His gaze drops and his body starts to tremble, and I realize he’s crying. I freeze for a second, but then my improvisation training kicks in.
“Hey, what’s wrong?” my bass voice says and I land my big manly hand on his shoulder. The Professor keeps sobbing.
“You wanna talk about it, man?”
When he still doesn’t answer, I hook my arm around his neck. “Come on,” I say and start leading him towards the men’s room where I figure we can talk more privately. But just as we reach the door, he stops and looks up at me, his gaze turning steely. He flicks my hand off his shoulder as if it were a tarantula and shakes his head at me. “Robert would never do that,” he says, and I realize I might have just blown my shot. But before I can rectify the situation, I feel the helmet being removed from my head and then I’m back to the old me again.
I sit up, giving my brain a second to adjust to the quick change of scenery. Neville’s smiling at me like you do to a child who missed the goal but still tried their best. I look up at Amanda, whose eyes are fixed on her tablet, not at me, and realize the gravity of the situation. “I blew it, didn’t I?”
Neville offers a calming gesture. “No, no, no, don’t worry about that. This was just the first scene. Remember, we’re using the best out of the three.”
I give another glance at Amanda, who’s still not looking at me. “Maybe I could get some feedback?” I say. “To understand what I did wrong?”
Upon realizing that Amanda is more interested in staring at her tablet than actually directing me, Neville jumps in. “It’s just that men of that generation don’t usually go to the restroom together. That’s why the Professor called you out. But don’t worry, we have now rebooted and you will start again in another role.”
Ugh, of course! I could kick myself. I did so much preparation for my new role as a guy and yet I managed to break that one fundamental rule of dudedom. I just hope that I do better next time around.
Neville holds out the helmet for me. “I must apologize. We’d normally give you more time to recuperate between the scenes but since we’re in a little bit of a time crunch…”
“I understand,” I say and put the helmet on. “I’m ready for my next scene.”
Neville smiles gratefully. “Very well. Here we go, then.” He pushes the button. “Scene 2: Christy.”
And then the next thing I know is I’m sitting in an office, staring at my reflection on a window to my right. I’m a woman in her early 40s, and boy am I stunning with my long wavy red hair cascading over my shoulders, framing my graceful oval face.
I hear the door unlock and in walks the Professor. He stops in his tracks and stares at me, bewildered. “What are you doing here?”
“Well, hello to you, too,” I purr. “Do I need a reason to see my husband?”
He shakes his head with a little smile and comes to give me a peck on the lips.
I pat the brown paper bag next to me. “I brought lunch.”
“You’re an angel,” he breathes and sits down on the chair opposite me.
So far everything is going according to the script.
“So, how’s your day so far?” I say and my simulation husband looks down. “Fine,” he says.
I let a moment pass between us, then take his hand, just like in the script. “Come on, I know my husband,” I say, “I know when something’s on your mind.”
He looks up at me, and I notice a slight shimmer in his eyes. I can’t help but marvel at his subtle acting style. He makes everything feel so authentic.
“If anything happens to me,” he whispers in a panicked rush, “I need you to get something for me, to protect you and Cody.”
He’s doing it again — flipping the script.
“What?” I ask with a frown, playing the part of the concerned wife to perfection. “What are you talking about?”
But the Professor shakes his head. “No. Don’t ask ‘what.’ Ask ‘where,’ and ‘how.’”
I shrug. “Fine. Where? How?”
He nods pointedly. “You know. You of all people, Christy.”
Before I can say anything else, I hear Amanda in my ear: Ask him to elaborate.
“You need to give me more, honey,” I say with a voice that’s part confused, part terrified.
“You will know,” he repeats. “The less I say the better. There’re ears everywhere. All you need to know is that it’s in a safe place. Do you understand?”
I don’t understand at all. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that his wife understands. And she would. These characters have been married for fifteen years.
I nod. “Yes,” I say, offering him a knowing look. “I think I do.”
And then the helmet is being removed from my head again.
My brain takes a second to adjust back to the real me, but when it does, I see Neville looking pleased and even Amanda offers me a tight smile and a nod.
“How did I do?” I ask, still out of breath from the quick change of pace.
Neville flashes his perfect smile. “You nailed it.”
“Yesss!” I say, my excitement only shadowed by the fact that this was the easiest role for me to play — a cisgender straight woman. But I know that the role that’s coming up next is going to be my true trial by fire.
“I made some changes to the script. Work these in.”
I flinch as Amanda slaps her tablet onto my lap.
Would it kill you to say ‘please?’ I think, but then scan the changes quickly and look up at her with a perfectly pleasant smile. “Sure thing.”
She nods in tight-lipped approval and Neville helps me back into my helmet. “Again we’re moving at a very quick pace here but are you ready for your final scene, Rose?”
“Ready,” I say.
“Perfect. Scene 3: Cody. Action.”
As soon as he says that and pushes the button, I find myself staring at the Professor’s door.
From the outside.
It takes me a moment to adjust to this much smaller body, but when I do, I get right into the action on page 23.
“Daddy, open up!” my little boy’s voice says as my tiny fists hammer on the door frantically. “Daddy! Daddy!”
There’s a sound of unlocking the door. The Professor appears in front of me, hair disheveled, tie crooked. From this perspective he looks a lot taller than before. He stares at me in disbelief. “Cody? Get in! Quick!”
I do as he says and he locks the door behind me. “What’re you doing here? Where’s Mom?”
This is where I get to demonstrate my versatility as an actor. My bottom lip starts to quiver and my eyes fill with plump tears. “They took Mommy,” I sob.
The Professor squats to my eye level and firmly grips both of my shoulders. “Who? Who?” he repeats, shaking me with each word.
“The bad guys,” I say and he gets up, looking almost paralyzed by fear, running his fingers nervously through his hair. Again I marvel at his acting ability.
“Mommy told me to tell you there’s a map,” I say.
His head snaps in my direction. “What map? Where?”
“Mommy put it in the safe.” This is the change that Amanda added to the script.
The Professor looks at me, wide-eyed. “What the hell was she thinking putting it there?”
“Daddy you said ‘hell.’”
He doesn’t answer. Instead, he runs to the wall with a picture of his family — my scene 2 and scene 3 characters —, and opens it as if it were the cover of a book, revealing a rectangular steel safe behind it.
I hold my breath. I can sense Amanda’s eyes zeroing in on his hands, now poised over the keypad. Her intrusive, thirsty gaze prying where it’s not wanted makes me suddenly feel sick to my stomach.
A memory is nudging at the back of my mind. “Robert would never do that,” said the Professor in the first scene.
He broke character. Why would he go against the one cardinal rule?
Unless, of course, he didn’t.
The words come out of my mouth unannounced, no louder than a whisper: “There’s no map.”
My simulation father stops his hand in mid-air and turns to look at me. “What?” he says.
I clear my throat. “There’s no map.” I speak with more conviction now, although my heart’s pounding. None of this was in the script.
“Then why did you say there was, buddy?”
I shrug, my gaze downcast. “I dunno.”
There’s a short silence, then a gentle hand ruffles my hair. “It’s okay,” the Professor whispers, then kneels next to me and lifts my chin, looking into my eyes. “Listen. There’s something I need you to know.” He pulls me into a tight hug, his mouth so close to my ear that I know no other person can hear what he says next: “Some bad guys are trying to get what’s inside that safe,” he whispers. “They’ll do anything to get it. If they take me, I need you to remember these numbers and keep them a secret.” And then he whispers a sequence of numbers in my ear, repeating them over and over, until I feel my helmet being removed from my head, and I’m back in my body again.
My head’s spinning and my heart’s in my throat as my gaze travels around the room. No Amanda in sight, only Neville. He’s smiling, but it feels just a tad forced, something my acting coach would point out as “disingenuous.”
He clears his throat. “I see you took some liberties with the script.”
I speak, my voice just the right level of bright: “Improvisation is one of my fortes. I wanted to show you that I can think on my feet.”
“I see.”
A silence passes between us.
“Just out of curiosity,” he says at last. “What did the Professor whisper into your ear at the end?”
I give him a smile. An innocent, sweet, naive, and totally believable smile. Because that’s what I do; I’m an actor. A damn good one. And right now I’m acting the part of the clueless little girl they’ve written me off as.
“He told me I did good,” I say with not so much as a blink. Then I say goodbye, rise from the pod, step into the elevator, and exit this high tech building – all without ever breaking character.
What is the point of the one-sided ‘peace conference’ being held in Switzerland? Is there one? Isn’t it like a football match in which one side has made it clear they will not turn up?
USA has no intention to have a peace talk (with Russia). Details below.
The gathering is for USA as a leader to make sure the US followers still remember their leader-USA.
Why say USA has no intention for a peace talk?
On 2024/6/10, in a CBS interview, US senator Lindsey Graham said Ukraine is sitting on a mineral mine that worths US$10-12 trillion (on eastern Ukraine). He said the West cannot afford to lose (the Ukraine war). The West must win the war so as to make sure Russia & China cannot access Ukraine’s mineral mine. He recalled former pres Trump sent military aid to Ukraine in the form of loan.
Earlier in 2022, Washington Post reported that the Ukraine war was about national mineral & energy wealth esp lithium which is important for weapon manufacturing.
That is, the war is a tool to rob Ukraine of its rich resources.
The war has nothing to do with d e m o c r a c y either. Boy, have we been fooled?
No wonder, more than once, USA & UK stopped Ukraine from ceasefire & peace deal with Russia. … it is about m o n e y & c o l o n i s a t i o n of Ukraine.
So from now onward, dont ever support democracy movements around the globe. Dont be fooled by western politicians any more. Otherwise you are putting the life of other people at risk.
Read “America’s Deadly Export – democracy” by William Blum.
a side note
Biden & Ukraine has signed a 10-year treaty. USA promises to protect Ukraine (translation: to militarily & economically control Ukraine).
Have you ever encountered a situation where a vehicle passed inspection fraudulently? What was your experience?
No, but I did encounter the opposite.
One late morning, I had a vehicle whose plates showed expired stickers, so I conducted a traffic stop (he just forgot to put the new stickers on). When I approached the driver’s window, I detected a safety rejection sticker on the windshield. In Virginia, you could then drive the vehicle for fifteen days before getting the issue fixed unless the issue involved immediate safety issues. For example, if the issue was the exhaust, you were fine in those fifteen days.
However, this rejection was for the brakes. There was no way I was going to allow this driver to drive that vehicle with bad brakes. So, I called for a tow truck. As it so happened, the tow company next on the list was the same company who inspected his vehicle. AND the driver of the tow company was the actual mechanic that inspected his vehicle. The mechanic was upset with me because his brakes were not that bad and he could have still have driven on them safely. I told him, “Then you shouldn’t have rejected them, should you? And you told him it was okay to drive on rejected brakes?” He told me, “Yeah, because they are not that bad!” He made some comment under his breath (with some expletives) that I didn’t know what I was talking about. He then hooked up the vehicle, left, and the vehicle stop was concluded.
I left the scene and, as it so happens, the State Police branch dealing with vehicle inspections was located within our city, and I spoke with the Trooper in charge. When he heard what happened, he hit the roof.
The trooper told me later he went to see the driver of the rejected vehicle and asked if he could have the vehicle towed to a mechanic he knew was reputable to check his brakes and that the cost would be on the state. What was discovered is that the brakes were within the guidelines of safe brakes. The mechanic then put an inspection sticker on it (he did a full inspection and the vehicle passed) and the vehicle was towed back to the grateful driver.
The trooper then made a surprise visit to the mechanic shop, cited the owner and ordered all inspections of vehicles to cease and all inspection documents and stickers, along with their license to inspect vehicles to be turned over to him, as their license was suspended indefinitely. They lasted six months or so before going out of business.
NATO Rejects Russia Peace Proposal; Except it is not NATO’s place to even have such an opinion . . . .
NATO Nitwit, Jens Stoltenberg, announced that NATO rejects the peace proposal put forth by Russian President Vladimir Putin Friday. Stoltenberg’s body language – stuttering, stammering, folding his arms – seemed to show even HE doesn’t believe his own words.
Here; watch him . . .
The process his body language went through during that was incredible..
All the way to defensively folding his arms..
He flaked out towards the end when he started stuttering, gesturing around, folded his arms and stuttered a bit more. Something’s not right.
You could tell he didn’t believe a damn thing he was saying, lol..
Why is NATO defending a non-NATO country like they know what’s best for them?
If he loves fighting Russia so much let him go to the front lines. Most Ukrainians don’t even want to fight Russia let alone be fed into a NATO meat grinder.
Reaction to 304 Math. Is Promiscuity destroying society? Women should stop aiming above their level.
Is the United States one of the most corrupt countries in the world?
Yes. The USA is corrupt like most Western liberal democracies. Elections are rigged in the sense that candidates are chosen by major campaign donors and political action committees. People with great intelligence and ability will not be chosen if their political views do not align with those of campaign donors. In other words, Western democracy is essentially plutocratic.
The US Congress and White House are bought and paid for by the wealthy elite, particularly the military-industrial complex, AIPAC, Wall Street, etc.
As a student, what is the most obnoxious answer a teacher has ever given you?
In my freshman year calculus class, I had a professor who was much older and didn’t really care about the “rules” anymore. Anyway, I took his first midterm and did really poorly (got something like a 34%, and the average was around a 50%). I felt like I had done much better after leaving the test, so I emailed the professor and asked if I could see where I went wrong (he didn’t give exams back; you had to schedule an appointment with him to see your exam).
Fast-forwarding a little bit, I get into his office and he hands me the exam. I flip through the test, seeing that I got a few points off here and there for various things, but nothing significant. I get to the last question, and I see a huge red X across the whole problem and a “-45” …. but the question was only worth 15 points.
A bit shocked, I assumed there must have been a mistake. So I kindly ask him to take a look, and he says no mistake there. There was nothing written on that page so I didn’t understand. He must’ve seen my confusion, and then proceeds to rant about why I deserved the -45 for a 15-point question.
“You drew your lambda backwards. What if you drew your N like you drew your lambdas? They would become Zs!” Not only did this not make sense (if I drew an N backwards I would get a Z rotated by 90 degrees, not a Z), but it shouldn’t have mattered.
The context here is that I was solving a lagrange multipliers problem, in which you have to introduce a dummy variable in the middle of the problem that you then get rid of by the end of the problem. It’s really just a place holder, and it’s commonly denoted by “Lambda” in most texts. Anyway, I drew my lambda backwards so that the short leg was on the right side and not the left. “Egregious mistake.”
I petitioned for the points back, and he told me to drop out of physics and engineering, telling me I didn’t have a shot at succeeding. I ignored him, and he told me he’d subtract 10 more points each minute I remained in his office. Dude was a real prick.
Stephen King’s The Stand (1994) 4K
This is THE FULL movie. And it is awesome!
Just watch the first five minutes if you are not sure…
The weather here in Zhuhai is highly unusual this year.
Normally, being semi-tropical, winters (and leading into late Spring) are mostly blue skies, with glorious short bursts of heavy rain.
Not this year. All year from January to this June it has been overcast with rain. With rain going from light to heavy downpours. Very much reminiscent of monsoon season in the tropics.
The plant-life love it though. Lush greens everywhere and the tropical foliage is thriving.
It makes me wonder if “global warming” is actually changing the semi-tropical regions into full tropical regions.
I know, I know…
Maybe “global warming” is a hoax, as certainly many people are profiting from this narrative. And there is proof that the data has been fabricated on numerous instances for reasons of personal profit.
And of course, we just hit solar max.
So of course we are going to see strange weather patterns.
But still, it’s one thing to read about these things and intellectualize about them, and it is another thing to experience them first-hand. Don’t ya know.
Today, it’s just pouring rain.
Flooded roads, and both Zhuhai, and Zhongshan are enlarging all of their water sewers to handle the huge increase on rain run-off.
I wonder what the West is doing?
Probably nothing.
The West is reactive, while the East is proactive.
This is a reality, and you all should get with the program and take this particular reality into your calculus in all Geo-political event sequences.
Today…
What’s the most sarcastic and funniest response you’ve given someone?
I was called as a witness for the prosecution in a grand jury hearing. Without going into why because it’s another story too long for this answer, I was in the witness box when the attorney for the defense decided to give me a very long five or six part question.
At the time I was actually working at a big law office as secretary to a partner, a so called rain maker.
Therefore I was very familiar with most legal terms and the miscellaneous legalese attorneys and prosecutors employ to get the answers they want from witnesses. I also knew not to fall prey to multi-part questions and accidentally say something that would either not be true or go against the purpose of my testimony.
My boss had instructed me to answer such questions with, Sorry, your question cannot be answered as asked, sir (counselor). That would force them to rephrase the question in a simpler way or allow the witness to answer it in any way they wanted. The latter could be hazardous to the questioning party as they might not get the answer they wanted.
Therefore after the multi-part question was asked I decided to answer it MY way instead of tiring out the judge and the grand jury trying to figure out what was meant.
The question went something like this:
Were you alone when Mr *** was in the firm’s offices or were you in the same room as he was, or was he there before you arrived or did you see him when you arrived or did you not see him, and could you tell if he saw you, and if so, did he greet you or did you greet him first?
Yeah, right. This multi-part question cannot be answered truthfully or in any which way because it’s only meant to confuse. This is how I answered it,
~ On part one, yes, part two, I don’t know, part three, I couldn’t tell, part four, I have no idea, part five, no, I did not see him, part five, already asked and answered, part six, I could not tell if he saw me, part seven, I don’t remember.
The judge’s face became a huge question mark and then he pulled out a handkerchief and burrowed his face in it because he couldn’t stop laughing.
The defense attorney looked confused and asked the judge if he might ask the witness the question again in another other way to receive a clearer answer?
Judge, No. You may not, counselor. Your question has been asked and answered in the exact way you asked it, live with it.
Footnote: I was never asked another question by the defense attorney. I was not even asked any questions by the prosecuting attorney. He knew better not to ask me. I was excused from the witness stand and not called again.
US Economic Shock: GDP Bombshell Decline, Systemic Risks Escalate, Industries Falling Hard
China urges the EU to reverse the tariffs. What’s your view on this?
Of course the E.U. had to increase its tariff.
It’s the E.U. following the Master’s plan. trump and Biden are the geniuses of this – as in “make China the leader by killing our own industries”.
They started with semiconductors in 2018. This was when China was a total failure at producing semiconductors and importing everything. So their brilliant plan to kill China’s economy is by sanctioning Chinese companies like Huawei and banning all our chip companies from selling advanced chips to China. . . . as well as coercing the Dutch, South Korean and Japanses not to sell their chip machines to China.
What happened is that China has now built its own chip ecosystem and should be self sufficient in chips in a year or so while Huawei has been beating Apple and Nvidia at the market.
This is paupering into bankruptcy U.S. tech companies to help China in doing what they could not do alone. Trillion dollar companies like ASML, TSMC and Nvidia will be decimated in a year or so when they’re truly not needed in China.
Now about the EVs. We’re already at the same end stage but by a different route.
This time, we instead sent our big boys to teach the Chinese how to build cars and they were making money like bandits for a while.
And guess what when these guys are not needed? Jeep just went bankrupt in China with GM and Ford not far behind and viola, China is now the world’s #1 exporter of automobiles and scaring the shits out of Biden and Ursula with their EVs.
GM and Ford talked big about EVs but had to cancel all their EV productions because Americans can’t afford their expensive EVs while the Europeans are forming JVs with Chinese car makers to learn from them.
The U.S. and E.U. are using tariffs because it’s the only thing these idiots know what to do.
What will happen is that the EV markets in the U.S. and E.U. will crash and they’ll end up with only one option: ask China to teach them how to manufacture affordable EVs by forming local JV partners in the U.S. and E.U. China can wait. They have the rest of the world to sell their EVs.
G7 Summit. And to the man and woman, these are the same idiot politicians that are waging the Ukrainian war that are meeting in Italy for their G7 summit to share their accomplishment.
Of course, Mohammed bin Salman declined the invitation to attend because he wants to save the dignity of Biden from begging for MBS to renew their petrodollar treaty.
Why she sold everything, left America, and moved to Vietnam
Maria slipped through the hidden entrance, the camouflaged door sealing behind her. She descended into the sub-basement that had been her sanctuary and purpose for the past decade.
Dim lights flickered on, revealing towering shelves holding the last known repository of uncensored knowledge – 75,000 volumes of wisdom, forbidden by the totalitarian regime above.
To Maria, it meant more than just a library. It was home, mission, and a closely guarded secret. Alcoves between the shelves served as her sparse living quarters, a small price for the honor of being humanity’s intellectual guardian.
She ran a reverent hand along the book spines, each a defiant act against the oppressive government, seeking to control all information. The musty smell of aged paper and leather was a comforting reminder of the power within these pages.
A faint scuffling sound drew her from her thoughts. Maria tensed, hand moving to the knife at her waist. The sound was too erratic to be one of her trusted patrons who occasionally braved the journey to this hidden sanctuary.
She moved towards the source of the sound, ready to confront any threat. A compact figure emerged from the shadows, sandy hair falling into wide, startled eyes.
“Who are you?” Maria’s voice was stern, masking her fear. “How did you find this place?”
The boy stammered, “I… I’m Liam. I explored the library and found the hidden door.” His eyes were bright with curiosity and wonder.
Maria studied him. He was just a child, but one who had uncovered her most guarded secret. Her instincts warned her to remove him, to preserve the sanctity of this place. But those eyes…they reminded her of herself at that age.
She eased her knife downwards. “You shouldn’t be here, Liam. This place…it’s forbidden. Dangerous.”
Liam took a step forward. “What is this? Why are there so many books?”
Against her better judgment, Maria answered. “Humanity’s free knowledge, its history, and ideas are all preserved in these books that are left.”
She swept her arm out, showing the vast trove before them. “This is our legacy, Liam. And it’s my duty to protect it.”
Liam’s eyes widened as the weight of her words sank in. “Can… can I see them? Learn from them?”
Maria hesitated, every fiber of her being screamed at the risk. Despite this, the boy’s hopeful eyes spoke of passing knowledge to the next generation.
“Alright,” she said at last. Promise me, your life depends on it, to keep this place a secret and obey my instructions.
Liam nodded. “I promise.”
And so they forged an unlikely alliance amidst the dusty stacks of the forgotten library. Two souls, one jaded by solitude and the other alight with curiosity, found kinship in the pages of banned books.
As Maria revealed the wonders and truths within, something stirred in her battle-scarred heart. In young Liam’s eager eyes, a fragile ember, long believed extinguished, sparked to life.
Hope, frail yet luminous, flickered between them. Maria knew the world was determined to quash it, making it dangerous. But as she watched Liam trace his fingers over the faded ink, its warmth spread through her.
Perhaps this partnership could be more than a salve to her loneliness. Maybe, in Liam’s hands and heart, it could unlock a future she never imagined. A future where knowledge might pierce the darkness, where the legacy she guarded could live again.
But such thoughts were a luxury. For now, there were lessons to teach, secrets to share, and trust to nurture. The road ahead would be perilous, but now, in the sanctum of her library, Maria embraced the glimmer of possibility. With a nod to her charge, she unraveled the stories, waiting for a new generation to carry them forward.
On one particular day, Maria reshelved books on the checkout desk. Maria closed an ancient leather-bound volume with a sigh, replacing it on the shelf. So much knowledge confined to these pages, yearning to be set free.
The creak of a floorboard made her spin, hand dropping to the knife at her waist. But only Eliza, one of her regular patrons, was perusing the stacks.
Maria eased as the unassuming woman offered her a tight smile before disappearing between the shelves once more. Yet, something caused her neck hairs to stand on end.
As she turned back to reshelving the books, her fingers brushed against a folded piece of paper tucked behind the tome she’d been reading. Frowning, she opened it to reveal a few scribbled words.
“Get them out. As many as you can. Time grows short.”
Taking Her to the MOST EXPENSIVE Hotel in Manila, Philippines (Okada) I Wasn’t expecting this!
Putin’s Full Speech: BRICS, NATO Expansion and Ukraine Peace Talk Conditions
Last year the Canadian intelligence analyst Patrick Armstrong published this sound advice:
All the business of war, and indeed all the business of life, is to endeavour to find out what you don’t know by what you do; that’s what I called ‘guessing what was at the other side of the hill.’
“Find out what you don’t know by what you do“. It’s not easy, it’s not necessarily pleasant but it’s what you have to do in order to minimise your surprise when whatever it is actually comes over the hill at you.
My advice to all young diplomats and analysts [is that] if you want to understand Mr Putin’s foreign policy, listen to what he’s saying. You won’t like it, but you need to understand it, you need to listen to it. The place to start is the Munich speech in 2007.
“Listen to what he says”. It’s quite easy to. Putin has said a lot and most of it appears on the Presidential website in English as well as the original Russian. Never read what the Western reporters say he says – they almost always distort it – read the original. I’m sure that both Wellington and Bristow would agree.
And that’s what intelligence is all about. Try and understand how the other guy sees things.
Every few years Putin comes out with a speech or memorandum which explains – past, presence and future – and argues for the position at large Russia is taking.
People who read these speeches will understand Russia. People who don’t won’t.
The later will miss the facts and come to false conclusions. Acting upon those they will weaken their own positions.
One can avoid doing so by reading Putin’s latest speech held yesterday at the Russian Ministry for Foreign Affairs. It is quite long but has to be so as it necessarily touches on everything. It includes a kind of peace offer for Ukraine: Hand over the provinces Russia has recognized at its own and gain peace. It was and is not expected that the ‘West’ will move towards that direction. In consequence the aims of the war will have to change.
With nearly 10,000 words the speech is very long. No summarization will do it justice. I therefore urge you to read it in full.
The English language version was published in full by Sputnik. The authoritative official translation, which will soon appear on the Kremlin website, is not yet complete. As access to both sides may be limited a full copy of the speech is attached below.
What follows is a full reproduction of the English language version Sputnik put out.
I am pleased to welcome you all, and at the beginning of our meeting, I want to thank you for your dedicated work in the interest of Russia and our people.
In this broad assembly, we last met in November 2021. Since then, many pivotal and, without exaggeration, fateful events have occurred both in our country and in the world. Therefore, I consider it important to assess the current situation in global and regional affairs and to set corresponding tasks for the foreign policy department. All these tasks are directed towards the primary goal: creating conditions for the sustainable development of the country, ensuring its security, and improving the well-being of Russian families.
Working in this direction in today’s challenging and rapidly changing realities requires all of us to concentrate even more on our efforts, initiative, and persistence. It demands the ability not only to respond to current challenges but also to shape our own long-term agenda, to propose and discuss with partners, within the framework of open and constructive dialogue, solutions to fundamental issues that concern not only us but also the entire global community.
I reiterate: the world is changing rapidly. It will not be as it was before, neither in global politics, nor in the economy, nor in technological competition. More and more states are striving to strengthen their sovereignty, self-sufficiency, national and cultural identity. Countries of the Global South and East are coming to the forefront; the role of Africa and Latin America is growing. We have always, since Soviet times, talked about the importance of these regions of the world, but today the dynamics are entirely different, and this is becoming noticeable. The pace of transformation in Eurasia has also noticeably accelerated, where a number of large-scale integration projects are actively being implemented.
Today, on the basis of the new political and economic reality, the contours of a multipolar and multilateral world order are being formed, and this is an objective process. It reflects the cultural-civilizational diversity that, despite all attempts at artificial unification, is organically inherent to humanity.
These profound, systemic changes undoubtedly inspire optimism and hope because the establishment of the principles of multipolarity and multilateralism in international affairs, including respect for international law and broad representation, allows us to collectively address the most complex problems for the common good, to build mutually beneficial relationships, and cooperation between sovereign states in the interests of the well-being and security of peoples.
Such a vision of the future resonates with the aspirations of the absolute majority of the countries in the world. We see this, among other things, in the growing interest in the work of such a universal association as BRICS, which is based on a special culture of trustful dialogue, sovereign equality of participants, and mutual respect. During Russia’s chairmanship this year, we will facilitate the smooth inclusion of new BRICS members into the working structures of the association.
I request the Government and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to continue substantive work and dialogue with partners to arrive at the Kazan BRICS summit in October with a substantial set of agreed decisions that will set the direction for our cooperation in politics and security, economy and finance, science, culture, sports, and humanitarian ties.
Overall, I believe that the potential of BRICS will allow it to eventually become one of the core regulatory institutions of a multipolar world order.
In this regard, I note that the international discussion about the parameters of state interaction in a multipolar world, about the democratization of the entire system of international relations, is already underway. For example, with colleagues from the Commonwealth of Independent States, we agreed upon and adopted a joint document on international relations in a multipolar world. We invited partners to discuss this topic on other international platforms as well, primarily in the SCO and BRICS.
We are interested in ensuring that this dialogue develops seriously within the UN walls as well, including on such a fundamental, vital issue for all as the creation of a system of indivisible security. In other words, asserting in world affairs the principle that the security of some cannot be ensured at the expense of the security of others.
Let me remind you that at the end of the 20th century, after the end of the acute military-ideological confrontation, the world community had a unique chance to build a reliable, fair order in the field of security. This did not require much – just the simple ability to listen to the opinions of all interested parties and mutual willingness to consider them. Our country was precisely focused on such constructive work.
However, another approach prevailed. Western powers, led by the United States, believed that they had won the “Cold War” and had the right to independently determine how the world should be organized. The practical expression of this worldview was the project of the unlimited spatial and temporal expansion of the North Atlantic bloc, although there were, of course, other ideas on how to ensure security in Europe.
Our legitimate questions were answered with excuses, claiming that no one was planning to attack Russia and that NATO expansion was not directed against Russia. Promises made to the Soviet Union and then to Russia in the late ’80s and early ’90s about not including new members into the bloc were conveniently forgotten. If remembered at all, it was mockingly said that these assurances were verbal and thus non-binding.
We have consistently, in the 90s and later, pointed out the errors of the course chosen by Western elites, not just criticized and warned but proposed alternatives, constructive solutions, emphasized the importance of developing a mechanism for European and global security that would satisfy everyone – I want to emphasize, everyone. A simple listing of the initiatives that Russia has put forward over the years would take more than one paragraph.
Let’s recall at least the idea of a European security treaty that we proposed back in 2008. These same topics were raised in the memorandum from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs handed over to the United States and NATO in December 2021.But all our attempts – and there were many, countless – to reason with our interlocutors, explanations, admonitions, warnings, requests from our side found absolutely no response. Western countries, confident not only in their own rightness but in their strength and ability to impose anything on the rest of the world, simply ignored other opinions. At best, they proposed discussing secondary issues that, in essence, resolved little or topics that were exclusively beneficial to the West.
Meanwhile, it quickly became apparent that the Western scheme, proclaimed as the only right one for ensuring security and prosperity in Europe and the world, did not actually work. Let’s remember the tragedy in the Balkans. Internal problems – of course, they existed – that had accumulated in the former Yugoslavia sharply escalated due to gross external interference. Even then, NATO’s main diplomatic principle emerged in all its glory – deeply flawed and fruitless in resolving complex interethnic conflicts, namely: blaming one side, which for some reason they didn’t particularly like, for all sins and unleashing all political, informational, and military power, economic sanctions, and restrictions on them.
Later, the same approaches were applied in different parts of the world. We know this very well: Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, and so on – and they never brought anything but exacerbation of existing problems, broken lives of millions of people, the destruction of entire states, the spread of humanitarian and social disasters, and terrorist enclaves. In fact, no country in the world is safe from joining this sad list.
So now, the West is aggressively intervening in the affairs of the Middle East. They once monopolized this direction, and the result is clear and obvious to everyone today. The South Caucasus, Central Asia. Two years ago, at the NATO summit in Madrid, it was announced that the alliance would now address security issues not only in the Euro-Atlantic but also in the Asia-Pacific region. They claimed their involvement was indispensable there too. Clearly, this is an attempt to increase pressure on the countries of the region whose development they decided to constrain. As is known, our country – Russia – is one of the top priorities on this list.
I also remind you that it was Washington that undermined strategic stability by unilaterally withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the Open Skies Treaty, and, together with their NATO satellites, destroyed the trust and arms control measures built up over decades in the European space.
Ultimately, the selfishness and arrogance of Western states led to the current extremely dangerous state of affairs. We have come dangerously close to the point of no return. Calls to inflict strategic defeat on Russia, possessing the largest arsenals of nuclear weapons, demonstrate the extreme recklessness of Western politicians. They either do not understand the scale of the threat they themselves are creating or are simply obsessed with a belief in their own impunity and exceptionalism. Both could lead to tragedy.
It is evident that we are witnessing the collapse of the Euro-Atlantic security system. Today, it simply does not exist. It needs to be practically recreated from scratch. All this requires us, together with partners, with all interested countries – and there are many – to develop our security options in Eurasia and then offer them for broad international discussion.
This is exactly what was mandated in the Address to the Federal Assembly. It concerns formulating, in the foreseeable future, on the Eurasian continent, a contour of equal and indivisible security, mutually beneficial, equal cooperation, and development.
What needs to be done for this, and on what principles?
First – it is necessary to establish dialogue with all potential participants in such a future security system. To begin with, I ask you to address the necessary issues with countries open to constructive interaction with Russia.
During a recent visit to the People’s Republic of China, we discussed this issue with President Xi Jinping. We noted that the Russian proposal does not contradict but rather complements and fully aligns with the fundamental principles of the Chinese initiative in the field of global security.
Second – it is essential that the future security architecture is open to all Eurasian countries willing to participate in its creation. “For all” means, of course, European and NATO countries as well. We live on the same continent; regardless of what happens, geography cannot be changed, and we will have to coexist and work together.
Yes, relations between Russia and the EU, as well as with several European states, have deteriorated, and I have emphasized many times, not through our fault. The anti-Russian propaganda campaign, in which very high-ranking European figures participate, is accompanied by fabrications that Russia allegedly intends to attack Europe. I have repeatedly said this, and there is no need to repeat it multiple times in this room: we all understand that this is absolute nonsense, only a justification for the arms race.
In this regard, let me make a small digression. The danger for Europe does not come from Russia. The main threat to Europeans lies in the critical and ever-growing, now practically total dependence on the US: in military, political, technological, ideological, and informational spheres. Europe is increasingly being sidelined in global economic development, plunged into chaos by migration and other acute problems, and deprived of international subjectivity and cultural identity.
Sometimes it seems that ruling European politicians and eurobureaucrats are more afraid of falling out of favor with Washington than losing the trust of their own people, their own citizens. Recent elections to the European Parliament also show this. European politicians swallow humiliation, rudeness, and scandals involving surveillance of European leaders, while the US simply uses them for its own interests: making them buy expensive gas – incidentally, gas in Europe is three to four times more expensive than in the US – or, as now, demanding European countries increase arms supplies to Ukraine. By the way, there are constant demands here and there. And sanctions are imposed on them, on economic operators in Europe. Imposed without any hesitation.
Now they are forced to increase arms supplies to Ukraine, expand their capacities for producing artillery shells. Listen, who will need these shells when the conflict in Ukraine ends? How can this ensure the military security of Europe? It is unclear. The US itself invests in military technologies, and in technologies of the future: in space, in modern drones, in strike systems based on new physical principles, that is, in those areas that will determine the nature of armed struggle in the future, and therefore the military-political potential of powers and their positions in the world. And now they are assigned such a role: invest your money where we need it. But this does not increase any European potential. Well, let it be. For us, it may be good, but, in essence, that is the case.
If Europe wants to maintain itself as one of the independent centers of global development and cultural-civilizational poles of the planet, it certainly needs to have good, friendly relations with Russia, and we, importantly, are ready for this.
This really simple and obvious fact was well understood by politicians of truly pan-European and global scale, patriots of their countries and peoples, thinking in historical terms, and not mere figures following someone else’s will and hint. This was much talked about by Charles de Gaulle in the post-war years. I also remember how, in 1991, during a conversation in which I had the honor to personally participate, Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany Helmut Kohl emphasized the importance of partnership between Europe and Russia. I expect that this legacy will sooner or later be returned to by new generations of European politicians.
As for the United States itself, the ongoing attempts by the liberal-globalist elites ruling there today to spread their ideology worldwide by any means, to maintain their imperial status, their dominance, only further exhaust the country, lead it to degradation, and directly contradict the true interests of the American people. If it weren’t for this dead-end path, aggressive messianism, mixed with a belief in their own chosenness and exceptionalism, international relations would have long been stabilized.
Third – to promote the idea of a Eurasian security system, it is necessary to significantly intensify the dialogue process among multilateral organizations already operating in Eurasia. This primarily refers to the Union State, the Collective Security Treaty Organization, the Eurasian Economic Union, the Commonwealth of Independent States, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
We see prospects for other influential Eurasian associations, from Southeast Asia to the Middle East, to join these processes in the future.
Fourth – we believe that the time has come to start a broad discussion on a new system of bilateral and multilateral guarantees of collective security in Eurasia. In the long term, we need to work towards gradually reducing the military presence of external powers in the Eurasian region.
We understand, of course, that in the current situation this thesis may seem unrealistic, but that is for now. However, if we build a reliable security system in the future, there will simply be no need for the presence of extraregional military contingents. Frankly, there is no need today either—it is just occupation, that’s all.
Ultimately, we believe that the states and regional structures of Eurasia should themselves determine specific areas of cooperation in the field of joint security. Based on this, they should also build a system of functioning institutions, mechanisms, and agreements that genuinely serve the achievement of common goals of stability and development.
In this context, we support the initiative of our Belarusian friends to develop a program document—a charter of multipolarity and diversity in the 21st century. It can formulate not only the framework principles of Eurasian architecture based on fundamental norms of international law but also, more broadly, a strategic vision of the essence and nature of multipolarity and multilateralism as a new system of international relations, replacing the Western-centric world. I consider it important and ask for thorough work on such a document with our partners and all interested states. I would add that when discussing such complex, comprehensive issues, of course, maximum, broad representation is needed, considering different approaches and positions.
Fifth – an important part of the Eurasian system of security and development must, of course, include issues of the economy, social welfare, integration, and mutually beneficial cooperation, addressing such common problems as overcoming poverty, inequality, climate, ecology, and developing mechanisms for responding to pandemic threats and crises in the global economy—everything is important.
The West, through its actions, has not only undermined military-political stability in the world but has also discredited and weakened key market institutions with sanctions and trade wars. Using the IMF and the World Bank, manipulating the climate agenda, it restrains the development of the Global South. Losing in competition, even by the rules that the West itself wrote, it resorts to prohibitive barriers and all kinds of protectionism. In the US, they have practically abandoned the World Trade Organization as a regulator of international trade. Everything is blocked. Moreover, they exert pressure not only on competitors but also on their satellites. Just look at how they are now “squeezing the juices” from European economies, which are balancing on the brink of recession.
Western countries have frozen part of Russia’s assets and currency reserves. Now they are considering how to provide at least some legal basis to finally appropriate them. But despite all the legal trickery, theft will undoubtedly remain theft and will not go unpunished, on the other hand.
The issue is even deeper. By stealing Russian assets, they will take another step towards destroying the system they created themselves, which for many decades ensured their prosperity, allowing them to consume more than they earned, attracting money from around the world through debts and obligations. Now it is becoming clear to all countries and companies, sovereign funds, that their assets and reserves are far from safe — in both legal and economic terms. And the next in line for expropriation by the US and the West could be anyone — these foreign state funds could be among them.
Distrust of the financial system based on Western reserve currencies is already growing. There has been an outflow of funds from securities and debt obligations of Western states, as well as some European banks, which until recently were considered absolutely reliable places for storing capital. Now even gold is being withdrawn from them. And they are right to do so.
I believe that we need to seriously intensify the formation of effective and safe bilateral and multilateral foreign economic mechanisms, alternative to those controlled by the West. This includes expanding settlements in national currencies, creating independent payment systems, and building production and distribution chains bypassing channels blocked or compromised by the West.
Of course, efforts to develop international transport corridors in Eurasia — a continent whose natural geographic core is Russia — must continue.
I instruct the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to fully support the development of international agreements on all these areas. They are extremely important for strengthening economic cooperation between our country and our partners. This will also give new impetus to the construction of a large Eurasian partnership, which can essentially become the socio-economic basis of a new system of indivisible security in Europe.
Dear colleagues! The essence of our proposals is to form a system within which all states would be confident in their own security. Then we can indeed approach the resolution of numerous conflicts that exist today in a truly constructive manner. The problems of the security deficit and mutual trust apply not only to the Eurasian continent; growing tensions are observed everywhere. And how interconnected and interdependent the world is, we see constantly, and a tragic example for all of us is the Ukrainian crisis, whose consequences are felt all over the planet.
But I want to say right away: the crisis related to Ukraine is not a conflict between two states, let alone two peoples, caused by some problems between them. If that were the case, there is no doubt that Russians and Ukrainians, who are united by a common history and culture, spiritual values, millions of family, kinship, and human ties, would have found a way to fairly resolve any issues and disagreements.
But the situation is different: the roots of the conflict are not in bilateral relations. The events in Ukraine are a direct result of global and European developments of the late 20th – early 21st century, of the aggressive, brazen, and absolutely adventurous policies that the West has been conducting all these years long before the special military operation began.
These Western elites, as I said today, after the end of the “Cold War,” embarked on a course of further geopolitical restructuring of the world, creating and imposing the notorious order based on rules, into which strong, sovereign, and self-sufficient states simply do not fit.
Hence the policy of containing our country. The goals of this policy are openly declared by some figures in the US and Europe. Today they talk about the notorious decolonization of Russia. Essentially, this is an attempt to provide an ideological basis for the dismemberment of our homeland along national lines. In fact, there has long been talk of the dismemberment of the Soviet Union and Russia. Everyone sitting in this room is well aware of this.
Implementing this strategy, Western countries have taken the line of absorbing and military-political development of territories close to us. There have been five, and now six, waves of NATO expansion. They tried to turn Ukraine into their stronghold, to make it “anti-Russia.” To achieve these goals, they invested money, resources, bought politicians and entire parties, rewrote history and educational programs, nurtured and grew groups of neo-Nazis and radicals. They did everything to undermine our interstate connections, to divide and set our peoples against each other.
Such policies were further obstructed by southeastern Ukraine — territories that have been part of great historical Russia for centuries. People lived there, and still live, who, including after Ukraine declared its independence in 1991, advocated for good and very close relations with our country. People — both Russians and Ukrainians, representatives of different nationalities, who were united by the Russian language, culture, traditions, historical memory.
The position, mood, interests, and voices of these people — millions of people living in the southeast — had to be taken into account by former Ukrainian presidents and politicians who fought for this post, used the votes of these voters. But, using these votes, they maneuvered, lied a lot, talked about the so-called European choice. They did not dare to break completely with Russia because the southeast of Ukraine was inclined differently, and this could not be ignored. Such duality has always been inherent in Ukrainian power throughout the years since recognizing independence.
The West, of course, saw this. They had long seen and understood the problems there that could be stirred up, understood the restraining significance of the southeastern factor, and that no amount of years of propaganda could fundamentally change the situation. Certainly, much was done, but fundamentally it was difficult to alter the situation.
It was impossible to distort the historical identity and consciousness of the majority of people in southeastern Ukraine, to eradicate from them, including the younger generations, the positive attitude towards Russia and the sense of our historical commonality. And so they decided to act with force again, to simply break the people in the southeast, to disregard their opinion. For this, they organized, financed, and certainly took advantage of the internal political difficulties and complexities in Ukraine, but still systematically and purposefully prepared an armed coup d’état.
Ukrainian cities were overwhelmed by a wave of pogroms, violence, and killings. Power in Kiev was finally seized and usurped by radicals. Their aggressive nationalist slogans, including the rehabilitation of Nazi collaborators, were elevated to the rank of state ideology. A course was proclaimed to eliminate the Russian language in state and public spheres, pressure on Orthodox believers increased, interference in church affairs, which ultimately led to a split. No one seems to notice this interference, as if it is normal. Try to do something different elsewhere, and there will be so much artistic whistling that your ears will fall off. But there it’s allowed, because it’s against Russia.
Millions of residents of Ukraine, primarily from its eastern regions, opposed the coup, as is known. They were threatened with reprisals and terror. And above all, the new authorities in Kiev began preparing an attack on the Russian-speaking Crimea, which at one time, in 1954, as you know, was transferred from the RSFSR to Ukraine in violation of all laws and procedures, even those in force at that time in the Soviet Union. In this situation, of course, we could not abandon, leave unprotected the Crimeans and Sevastopol residents. They made their choice, and in March 2014, as is known, the historic reunification of Crimea and Sevastopol with Russia took place.
In Kharkov, Kherson, Odessa, Zaporozhye, Donetsk, Lugansk, Mariupol, peaceful protests against the coup began to be suppressed, terror was unleashed by the Kiev regime and nationalist groups. It probably doesn’t need to be recalled, everyone remembers well what happened in these regions.
In May 2014, referendums were held on the status of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, where the overwhelming majority of residents voted for independence and sovereignty. Immediately the question arises: could people express their will in this way, could they declare their independence? Those sitting in this hall understand that of course they could, they had every right and grounds for it, including under international law, including the right of peoples to self-determination. I don’t need to remind you, but nonetheless, since the media is working, I will say, Article 1, paragraph 2 of the United Nations Charter gives this right.I remind you in this regard of the notorious Kosovo precedent. It was talked about many times in its time, now I will say it again. The precedent, which Western countries created themselves, in a completely analogous situation, recognized the separation of Kosovo from Serbia as legitimate, which took place in 2008. Then followed the well-known decision of the International Court of Justice of the UN, which on July 22, 2010, based on paragraph 2 of Article 1 of the United Nations Charter, ruled, I quote: “There is no general prohibition against unilateral declarations of independence stemming from the practice of the Security Council.” And the next quote: “General international law does not contain any applicable prohibition on declarations of independence.” Moreover, it was recorded that parts of a country, any country, that decide to declare their independence, are not required to consult the central authorities of their former state. Everything is written there, all in their own hand, in black and white.
So, did these republics – Donetsk and Lugansk – have the right to declare their independence? Well, of course, yes. The question cannot even be considered otherwise.
What did the regime in Kiev do in this situation? Completely ignored the choice of the people and unleashed a full-scale war against the new independent states – the people’s republics of Donbass using aviation, artillery, tanks. Bombing and shelling of peaceful cities, acts of intimidation began. And what happened next? The residents of Donbass took up arms to protect their lives, their home, their rights, and legitimate interests.
In the West, there is now a constant thesis that Russia started the war within the framework of the special military operation, that it is the aggressor, and therefore strikes can be made on its territory using Western weapon systems, Ukraine allegedly defends itself and can do this.
I want to emphasize once again: Russia did not start the war; it was the Kiev regime that, after the residents of part of Ukraine declared their independence in accordance with international law, began and continues military actions. This is aggression if we do not recognize the right of these peoples living in these territories to declare their independence. What else could it be? This is aggression. And those who have been aiding the Kiev regime’s war machine all these years are accomplices to the aggressor.
Back in 2014, the residents of Donbass did not give in. Militia units stood their ground, repelled the punitive forces, and then drove them back from Donetsk and Lugansk. We hoped this would sober up those who unleashed this massacre. To stop the bloodshed, Russia made the usual appeals – calls for negotiations, and they began with the participation of Kiev and representatives of the Donbass republics with the assistance of Russia, Germany, and France.
The conversation was difficult, but nevertheless, as a result, the Minsk agreements were concluded in 2015. We took their implementation very seriously, hoping that we could resolve the situation within the framework of a peaceful process and international law. We expected that this would take into account the legitimate interests and demands of Donbass, enshrine a special status for these regions in the constitution, and the fundamental rights of the people living there while maintaining the territorial unity of Ukraine. We were ready for this and were ready to persuade the people living in these territories to resolve issues in this way, repeatedly offering various compromises and solutions.
But in the end, everything was rejected. The Minsk agreements were simply thrown in the trash by Kiev. As representatives of the Ukrainian elite later admitted, none of the provisions of these documents suited them; they just lied and twisted as much as they could.
The former Chancellor of Germany and the former President of France, who were essentially co-authors and guarantors of the Minsk agreements, later admitted outright that they had no intention of implementing them; they simply needed to stall the situation to buy time for assembling Ukrainian armed formations and pumping them up with weapons and equipment. They simply “fooled” us again, deceived us.
Instead of a real peace process, instead of the policy of reintegration and national reconciliation, which they loved to pontificate about in Kiev, Donbass was shelled for eight years. They carried out terrorist attacks, killings, and organized the harshest blockade. All these years, the residents of Donbass (women, children, the elderly) were declared “second-class” people, “subhumans,” and were threatened with reprisals, saying, “we’ll come and settle scores with each one.” What is this, if not genocide in the center of Europe in the 21st century? And in Europe and the US, they pretended that nothing was happening, no one noticed anything.
At the end of 2021 – beginning of 2022, the Minsk process was finally buried by Kiev and its Western patrons, and another massive strike on Donbass was planned. A large grouping of Ukrainian armed forces was preparing to launch a new offensive on Lugansk and Donetsk, of course, with ethnic cleansing and huge human casualties, hundreds of thousands of refugees. We were obliged to prevent this catastrophe, to protect the people; we had no other choice.
Russia finally recognized the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. After all, we did not recognize them for eight years, still hoping to come to an agreement. The result is now known. And on February 21, 2022, we concluded treaties of friendship, cooperation, and mutual assistance with these republics, which we recognized. Question: did the people’s republics have the right to ask us for support if we recognized their independence? And did we have the right to recognize their independence just as they had the right to declare their sovereignty in accordance with the mentioned articles and decisions of the International Court of Justice of the UN? Did they have the right to declare independence? They did. But if they had such a right and used it, then we had the right to conclude a treaty with them – and we did, and I repeat: in full accordance with international law and Article 51 of the UN Charter.
At the same time, we appealed to the Kiev authorities to withdraw their troops from Donbass. I can tell you, there were contacts; we immediately told them: withdraw your troops from there, and everything will end there. This proposal was practically immediately rejected, simply ignored, although it provided a real opportunity to close the issue precisely in a peaceful way.
On February 24, 2022, Russia was forced to announce the start of a special military operation. Addressing the citizens of Russia, the residents of the Donetsk and Lugansk republics, and Ukrainian society, I then outlined the goals of this operation – to protect the people of Donbass, restore peace, conduct demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine, and thus avert threats from our state, restore the balance in the field of security in Europe.
At the same time, we continued to consider achieving these goals through political and diplomatic methods a priority. I remind you that at the very first stage of the special military operation, our country entered into negotiations with representatives of the Kiev regime. They were held first in Belarus, in Turkiye. We tried to convey our main point: respect the choice of Donbass, the will of the people living there, withdraw the troops, stop the shelling of peaceful cities and towns. Nothing else is needed, the rest of the issues will be resolved later. The response was: no, we will fight. It is obvious that this was the command from the Western masters, and I will talk about this now.
At that time, in February-March 2022, our troops, as is known, approached Kiev. There were and still are many speculations about this in Ukraine and the West.
What do I want to say about this? Our units were indeed stationed near Kiev, and the military departments, the security block, had different proposals regarding our possible further actions, but there was no political decision to storm a three-million-strong city, no matter what anyone said or imagined.
Essentially, this was nothing but an operation to force the Ukrainian regime to make peace. The troops were there to push the Ukrainian side towards negotiations, to try to find acceptable solutions and thereby end the war initiated by Kiev against Donbass back in 2014, and to resolve issues posing a threat to the security of our country, to the security of Russia. Strangely enough, as a result, we managed to reach agreements that basically suited both Moscow and Kiev. These agreements were put on paper and initialed in Istanbul by the head of the Ukrainian negotiating delegation. This means that the Kiev authorities were satisfied with such a resolution of the issue.
The document was called the “Treaty on Permanent Neutrality and Security Guarantees for Ukraine.” It was of a compromise nature, but its key points aligned with our fundamental demands, addressing the objectives declared as primary even at the beginning of the special military operation. Including, as strange as it may seem, I draw attention to, the demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine. Here, too, we managed to find complex solutions. They are complex, but they were found. Namely: it was intended that a Ukrainian law would be adopted to ban Nazi ideology, any of its manifestations. Everything is written there.
Furthermore, Ukraine, in exchange for international security guarantees, would limit the size of its armed forces, undertake obligations not to join military alliances, not to allow foreign military bases, not to host them or contingents, not to conduct military exercises on its territory. Everything was written down on paper.
We, on our part, also understanding Ukraine’s security concerns, agreed that Ukraine, formally not joining NATO, would receive guarantees practically equivalent to those enjoyed by members of this alliance. For us, this was a difficult decision, but we recognized the legitimacy of Ukraine’s demands for its security and, in principle, did not object to the proposed formulations from Kiev. These were formulations proposed by Kiev, and we generally did not object to them, understanding that the main thing was to stop the bloodshed and the war in Donbass.
On March 29, 2022, we withdrew our troops from Kiev because we were assured that it was necessary to create the necessary conditions for completing the political negotiation process, for completing this process. And that it is not possible for one side to sign such agreements, as our Western colleagues said, with a gun to the head. Fine, we agreed to this too. However, immediately, the very next day after the withdrawal of Russian troops from Kiev, the Ukrainian leadership suspended its participation in the negotiation process, staged the well-known provocation in Bucha, and refused the prepared version of the agreements. I think it is clear today why this dirty provocation was needed – to somehow explain the refusal of those results achieved during the negotiations. The path to peace was again rejected.
This was done, as we now know, at the behest of Western curators, including the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, during whose visit to Kiev it was explicitly stated: no agreements, it is necessary to defeat Russia on the battlefield, achieve its strategic defeat. And they continued to intensively pump Ukraine with weapons, talking about the need to inflict, as I just reminded, a strategic defeat on us. And some time later, as everyone knows well, the President of Ukraine issued a decree prohibiting his representatives and even himself from conducting any negotiations with Moscow. This episode with our attempt to solve the problem by peaceful means ended in nothing once again.
By the way, on the topic of negotiations. Now I would like to disclose another episode to this audience. I have not spoken publicly about this before, but some present are aware of it. After the Russian army occupied parts of the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, many Western politicians offered their mediation in peacefully resolving the conflict. One of them was on a working visit to Moscow on March 5, 2022. And we accepted his mediation efforts, especially since he, during the conversation, referred to the fact that he had received support from the leaders of Germany and France, as well as senior representatives of the US.
During the conversation, our foreign guest inquired – a curious episode, he said: if you are helping Donbass, why are Russian troops in southern Ukraine, including the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions? The answer from our side was that this was the decision of the Russian General Staff in planning the operation. And today I will add that the plan was to bypass some fortified areas that the Ukrainian authorities built in Donbass over eight years, primarily for the liberation of Mariupol.
Then the foreign colleague clarified – a professional person, I must admit: will our Russian troops remain in the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions? and what will happen to these regions after achieving the goals of the special military operation? To this, I answered that in general, I do not rule out the preservation of Ukrainian sovereignty over these territories, but on the condition that Russia has a strong land connection with Crimea. That is, Kiev must guarantee the so-called servitude – a legally formalized right of access for Russia to the Crimean Peninsula through the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions.
This is a crucial political decision. And of course, naturally, in the final version, it would not be made unilaterally but only after consultations with the Security Council, other structures, and, of course, after discussion with the citizens, the public of our country, and primarily with the residents of the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions. In the end, we did just that: we asked the opinion of the people themselves and held referendums. And acted according to the decision of the people, including in the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, in the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics.
At that time, in March 2022, the negotiation partner informed that he intended to go to Kiev to continue the discussion with colleagues in the Ukrainian capital. We welcomed this, as well as any attempts to find a peaceful resolution to the conflict, because every day of fighting meant new casualties and losses. However, in Ukraine, as we learned later, the services of the Western mediator were not accepted. On the contrary, as we found out, he was accused of taking pro-Russian positions – in quite a harsh manner, I must say, but that’s already a detail.
Now, as already mentioned, the situation has fundamentally changed. The residents of Kherson and Zaporozhye, during referendums, expressed their position. The Kherson and Zaporozhye regions, as well as the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, have become part of the Russian Federation. There can be no talk of violating our state unity. The people’s desire to be with Russia is unshakeable. The issue is closed forever and is no longer subject to discussion.
I want to reiterate: it was the West that prepared and provoked the Ukrainian crisis, and now it is doing everything to drag out this crisis endlessly, to weaken and mutually embitter the people of Russia and Ukraine.
They are sending new batches of ammunition and weapons. Some European politicians have started talking about the possibility of deploying their regular troops in Ukraine. At the same time, as I have already noted, the true current masters of Ukraine – unfortunately, not the people of Ukraine, but the globalist elites located across the ocean – are trying to impose on the Ukrainian executive power the burden of making decisions that are unpopular with the people, including further lowering the draft age.
As you know, it is now 25 years, the next stage could be 23, then 20, 18 or immediately 18. And then, of course, they will get rid of those figures who will make these unpopular decisions under Western pressure, throw them out as unnecessary, shift all the responsibility onto them, and put other people dependent on the West, but with not yet so tarnished reputations, in their place.
Hence, possibly, the idea of canceling the next presidential elections in Ukraine. Now those in power will do everything, then they will be thrown into the trash – and then they will do whatever they see fit.
In this regard, I will remind you of what they now prefer not to remember in Kiev, and the West prefers not to talk about. What is it? Back in May 2014, the Constitutional Court of Ukraine ruled that – quote – “The President is elected for five years, regardless of whether he is elected in early or regular elections.” In addition, the Constitutional Court of Ukraine noted that – quote – “the constitutional status of the President does not contain norms that would establish any other term except for the five-year term.” End of quote, full stop. The court’s decision was final and not subject to appeal. That’s it.
What does this mean for today’s situation? The presidential term of the previously elected head of Ukraine has expired along with his legitimacy, which cannot be restored by any trickery. I will not go into detail about the background of the Constitutional Court of Ukraine’s decision on the presidential term. It is clear that it was related to attempts to legitimize the 2014 coup. But nevertheless, this verdict exists, and it is a legal fact. It casts doubt on all attempts to justify today’s spectacle of canceling the elections.In fact, the current tragic page in Ukraine’s history began with a forcible seizure of power, as I have already said, an unconstitutional coup in 2014. I repeat: the source of the current Kiev regime is an armed coup. And now the circle is complete – the executive power in Ukraine is again, as in 2014, usurped and held illegally, is essentially illegitimate.
I will say more: the situation with the cancellation of elections is an expression of the very nature, the true essence of the current Kiev regime, which grew out of the 2014 armed coup, is tied to it, and has its roots there. And the fact that by canceling the elections, they continue to cling to power, these are actions that are directly prohibited by Article 5 of the Constitution of Ukraine. I quote: “The right to determine and change the constitutional order in Ukraine belongs exclusively to the people and cannot be usurped by the state, its bodies, or officials.” In addition, such actions fall under Article 109 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, which speaks about the violent change or overthrow of the constitutional order or the seizure of state power, as well as conspiracy to commit such actions.
In 2014, such usurpation was justified in the name of revolution, and now – by military actions. But the essence of this does not change. In fact, we are talking about a conspiracy of the executive power of Ukraine, the leadership of the Verkhovna Rada, and the parliamentary majority controlled by it, aimed at the usurpation of state power (it cannot be called otherwise), which is a criminal offense under Ukrainian law.
Moreover, the Constitution of Ukraine does not provide for the possibility of canceling or postponing the presidential elections in the country, extending its powers due to martial law, which is currently being referred to. What is in the Ukrainian basic law? It states that during martial law, elections to the Verkhovna Rada may be postponed. This is Article 83 of the country’s Constitution.
Thus, Ukrainian legislation provides for the only exception when the powers of a state authority are extended during martial law and elections are not held. And this applies exclusively to the Verkhovna Rada. Therefore, the status of the Ukrainian parliament as a continuously operating body in the conditions of martial law is thus defined.
In other words, it is precisely the Verkhovna Rada that is today a legitimate body as opposed to the executive power. Ukraine is not a presidential republic but a parliamentary-presidential one. This is the essence.
Moreover, the chairman of the Verkhovna Rada, acting as President, under Articles 106 and 112, is endowed with special powers, including in the field of defense, security, and supreme command of the armed forces. All this is written in black and white.
By the way, in the first half of this year, Ukraine concluded a package of bilateral agreements on cooperation in the field of security and long-term support with a number of European countries. Now there is a similar document with the United States.
As of May 21 of this year, the question naturally arises about the powers and legitimacy of the representatives of the Ukrainian side who sign such documents. For us, as they say, it doesn’t matter, let them sign whatever they want. It is clear that there is a political and propagandistic component here. The United States and its satellites want to somehow support their appointees, give them weight and legitimacy.
Nevertheless, if later in the US a serious legal examination of such an agreement is carried out (I am not talking about the essence, but about the legal component), then the question will inevitably arise: who signed these documents and with what authority? And it will turn out that all this is a bluff, and the agreement is void, and the whole structure will collapse, of course, if there is a desire to analyze the situation. They can pretend that everything is normal, but there is nothing normal about it, I have read it. Everything is written in the documents, everything is written in the Constitution.
I also remind you that after the start of the special military operation, the West launched a vigorous and very brazen campaign trying to isolate Russia on the international stage. Today it is clear to everyone that this attempt has failed, but the West has not abandoned its idea of building some semblance of an international anti-Russian coalition, creating the appearance of pressure on Russia. We understand this too.
As you know, they began actively promoting the initiative of holding a so-called high-level international conference on peace in Ukraine in Switzerland. Moreover, they plan to hold it immediately after the G7 summit, that is, the group of those who, in fact, ignited the conflict in Ukraine with their policies. What the organizers of the meeting in Switzerland are proposing is just another trick to divert public attention, to swap the cause and effect of the Ukrainian crisis, to lead the discussion astray and somewhat give the appearance of legitimacy to the current executive power in Ukraine once again.
Therefore, it is logical that no truly fundamental issues underlying the current crisis of international security and stability, the true roots of the Ukrainian conflict, are going to be discussed in Switzerland, despite all attempts to give the conference agenda a more or less decent appearance.
Already now it can be expected that everything will be reduced to general demagogic discussions and a new set of accusations against Russia. The ploy is obvious: by any means, drag in as many countries as possible and present the case as if the Western recipes and rules are shared by the entire international community, and therefore our country must unconditionally accept them.
As you know, we were not invited to the meeting in Switzerland. After all, in essence, these are not negotiations, but the desire of a group of countries to continue pushing their line, to decide on issues that directly affect our interests and security at their own discretion.
I want to emphasize in this regard: without Russia’s participation, without honest and responsible dialogue with us, it is impossible to reach a peaceful resolution in Ukraine and in general regarding global European security.
Meanwhile, the West ignores our interests, while at the same time forbidding Kiev to negotiate, and hypocritically calling on us for some negotiations. It just looks idiotic: on the one hand, they forbid them to negotiate with us, and on the other, they call us for negotiations and even hint that we are refusing negotiations. It’s some kind of nonsense. But we are living in a kind of Wonderland.
But first of all, they should give Kiev the command to lift the ban, the self-ban on negotiations with Russia, and secondly, we are ready to sit down at the negotiating table even tomorrow. We understand all the peculiarity of the legal situation, but there are legitimate authorities there even according to the Constitution, I just mentioned it now, there is someone to negotiate with. Please, we are ready. Our conditions for starting such a conversation are simple and are as follows.
You know, I will now take some time to reproduce the entire chain of events once again, so that it is clear that for us what I am about to say is not a matter of today’s conjuncture, but we have always adhered to a certain position, we have always strived for peace.
So, these conditions are very simple. Ukrainian troops must be completely withdrawn from the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, Kherson and Zaporozhye regions. Moreover, I emphasize, precisely from the entire territory of these regions within their administrative boundaries, which existed at the time of their entry into Ukraine.
As soon as Kiev announces that it is ready for such a solution and begins the real withdrawal of troops from these regions, and also officially notifies [us] of the refusal of plans to join NATO, from our side, immediately, literally at that moment, an order will be given to cease fire and begin negotiations. I repeat: we will do this immediately. Naturally, at the same time, we guarantee the unhindered and safe withdrawal of Ukrainian units and formations.
Of course, we would like to hope that such a decision about troop withdrawal, non-aligned status, and starting dialogue with Russia, on which the future existence of Ukraine depends, will be made in Kiev independently, based on the existing realities and guided by the genuine national interests of the Ukrainian people, and not at the behest of the West, although there are, of course, great doubts about this.
Nevertheless, what do I want to say again in this regard, what to remind you of? I said that I wanted to chronologically trace the events once more. Let’s take the time for this.
So, during the events on the Maidan in Kiev in 2013–2014, Russia repeatedly offered its assistance in a constitutional resolution of the crisis, which was actually organized from the outside. Let’s return to the chronology of events at the end of February 2014.
On February 18, armed clashes began in Kiev, provoked by the opposition. A number of buildings, including the city hall and the House of Trade Unions, were set on fire. On February 20, unknown snipers opened fire on protesters and law enforcement officers, that is, those who were preparing the armed coup did everything to push the situation further towards violence and radicalization. And those people who were on the streets of Kiev in those days and expressed dissatisfaction with the then authorities were deliberately used for their selfish purposes, as cannon fodder. They are doing exactly the same today, mobilizing and sending people to be slaughtered. And yet, there was an opportunity for a civilized way out of the situation at that time.
It is known that on February 21, an agreement was signed between the then President of Ukraine and the opposition on the settlement of the political crisis. Its guarantors, as you know, were official representatives of Germany, Poland, and France. The agreement provided for a return to a parliamentary-presidential form of government, the holding of early presidential elections, the formation of a government of national trust, as well as the withdrawal of law enforcement forces from the center of Kiev and the opposition’s surrender of weapons.
I will add that the Verkhovna Rada adopted a law excluding the criminal prosecution of protest participants. Such an agreement, which would have allowed stopping the violence and returning the situation to the constitutional field, was in place. This agreement was signed, although in Kiev and in the West they also prefer not to remember it.
Today, I will say more about another important fact, which also has not been publicly mentioned before, namely – literally in the same hours on February 21, a conversation took place at the initiative of the American side with my American counterpart. The essence was as follows: the American leader unequivocally supported the Kiev agreement between the authorities and the opposition. Moreover, he called it a real breakthrough, a chance for the Ukrainian people to ensure that the violence did not go beyond all conceivable limits.
Furthermore, in the course of the conversations, we jointly worked out the following formula: Russia will try to persuade the then President of Ukraine to behave as restrained as possible, not to use the army or law enforcement against the protesters. And the US, accordingly, it was said, would call on the opposition to calm down, to free administrative buildings, so that the streets would calm down.
All this was supposed to create conditions for life in the country to return to normal, within the constitutional and legal field. And in general, we agreed to work together for a stable, peaceful, and normally developing Ukraine. We fully kept our word. The then President of Ukraine Yanukovych, who, in fact, did not plan to use the army, nevertheless did not do this, and moreover, even withdrew additional police units from Kiev.
And what did the Western colleagues do? On the night of February 22 and then throughout the following day, when President Yanukovych went to Kharkov, where a congress of deputies from the southeastern regions of Ukraine and Crimea was to be held, the radicals, despite all the agreements and guarantees from the West (both from Europe and, as I just said, from the US), seized control of the Rada building by force, took over the Presidential Administration, and seized the government. And not a single guarantor of all these agreements on political settlement – neither the United States nor the Europeans – lifted a finger to fulfill their obligations, to call on the opposition to vacate the seized administrative buildings, and to renounce violence. It is clear that such a turn of events not only suited them, it seems that they were also the authors of the development of events in this vein.
Also, on February 22, 2014, the Verkhovna Rada, in violation of the Constitution of Ukraine, adopted a resolution on the so-called self-removal of the then President Yanukovych from the post of President and appointed early elections for May 25. That is, an armed coup, provoked from outside, was completed. Ukrainian radicals, with the tacit consent and direct support of the West, thwarted all attempts to peacefully resolve the situation.Then we urged Kiev and the Western capitals to start a dialogue with the people in the southeast of Ukraine, to respect their interests, rights, and freedoms. No, the regime that came to power as a result of the coup chose war, in the spring and summer of 2014 launched punitive actions against Donbass. Russia again called for peace.
We did everything to resolve the acute problems that arose within the framework of the Minsk agreements, but the West and the Kiev authorities, as I have already emphasized, did not intend to implement them. Although in words, Western colleagues, including the head of the White House, assured us that the Minsk agreements are important and that they are committed to the processes of their implementation. That, in their opinion, this will allow us to get out of the situation in Ukraine, stabilize it, and take into account the interests of the residents of the east. Instead, they actually organized a blockade of Donbass, as I have already said. The Armed Forces of Ukraine were consistently prepared for a full-scale operation to destroy the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics.
The Minsk agreements were finally buried by the Kiev regime and the West. I will return to this again. That is why in 2022 Russia was forced to start a special military operation to stop the war in Donbass and protect the peaceful inhabitants from genocide.
At the same time, from the very first days, we have again put forward options for a diplomatic resolution of the crisis, I have already spoken about this today. These are negotiations in Belarus, Turkiye, the withdrawal of troops from Kiev to create conditions for signing the Istanbul agreements, which were generally agreed upon by all. But these attempts of ours were ultimately rejected again. The West and Kiev took the course to defeat us. But, as you know, all this failed.
Today we are making another specific, real peace proposal. If Kiev and the Western capitals reject it, as before, then ultimately this is their affair, their political and moral responsibility for the continuation of the bloodshed. Obviously, the realities on the ground, on the line of combat contact, will continue to change not in favor of the Kiev regime. And the conditions for starting negotiations will be different.
I emphasize the main thing: the essence of our proposal is not some temporary truce or cessation of fire, as the West wants, to recover losses, rearm the Kiev regime, and prepare it for a new offensive. I repeat: it is not about freezing the conflict, but about its final resolution.
And I will say once again: as soon as Kiev agrees to such a course of events as proposed today, agrees to the complete withdrawal of its troops from the DPR and LPR, Zaporozhye and Kherson regions, and actually begins this process, we are ready to start negotiations without delay.
I repeat: our principled position is as follows – neutral, non-aligned, non-nuclear status of Ukraine, its demilitarization and denazification, especially since these parameters were generally agreed upon during the Istanbul negotiations in 2022. Everything was clear about demilitarization, everything was spelled out: the number of this and that, tanks. Everything was agreed upon.
Undoubtedly, the rights, freedoms, and interests of Russian-speaking citizens in Ukraine must be fully ensured, the new territorial realities, the status of Crimea, Sevastopol, the Donetsk, Lugansk People’s Republics, Kherson, and Zaporozhye regions as subjects of the Russian Federation must be recognized. In the future, all these basic and principled provisions should be fixed in the form of fundamental international agreements. Naturally, this also implies the lifting of all Western sanctions against Russia.
I believe that Russia is offering a variant that will allow the war in Ukraine to be truly ended, that is, we are calling for the tragic page of history to be turned over and, albeit difficultly, gradually, step by step, but to begin to restore relations of trust and good neighborliness between Russia and Ukraine and in general in Europe.
By resolving the Ukrainian crisis, we, including together with our partners in the CSTO, SCO, who are making a significant, constructive contribution to the search for ways to peacefully resolve the Ukrainian crisis even today, as well as with Western, including European states, ready for dialogue, could begin addressing the fundamental task I spoke about at the beginning of my speech, namely, creating an indivisible system of Eurasian security that takes into account the interests of all, without exception, states on the continent.
Of course, a literal return to the security proposals we put forward 25, 15, or even two years ago is impossible; too much has happened, circumstances have changed. However, the basic principles and, most importantly, the subject of the dialogue remain unchanged. Russia recognizes its responsibility for global stability and again confirms its readiness to engage in dialogue with all countries. But this should not be a simulation of the peace process aimed at serving someone’s selfish will or interests, but a serious, thorough discussion on all issues, on the entire range of global security issues.
Dear colleagues! I am sure that you all well understand the scale of the tasks facing Russia, how much we need to do, including in the field of foreign policy.I sincerely wish you success in this difficult work of ensuring the security of Russia, our national interests, strengthening the country’s positions in the world, advancing integration processes and bilateral relations with our partners.
The state leadership will continue to provide necessary support to the diplomatic department and to all those involved in the implementation of Russia’s foreign policy.
Once again, thank you for your work, thank you for your patience and attention to what has been said. I am confident that we will succeed.
Thank you very much.
/* END OF PUTIN SPEECH */
Posted by b on June 15, 2024 at 4:39 UTC | Permalink
Col. Black: NATO Is Preparing For a Nuclear Strike on Russia, And Russia Knows It
Have your neighbors ever done something where you needed to call the police on them?
When we moved into our last house, no lived in either house, it didn’t that way. For four years we had a drug house on one side. If there was a day we didn’t call the police it was a surprise.
We knew the first day the guy showed he was going to be trouble. He moved in with his two teenagers/early twenties, and that first night had a screaming fit, threw a mattress out the front window breaking it, kicked his trashcan and trash around his yard. Then, I heard a loud snack and a cry. The daughter was holding her cheek. I called 911. From then on it was a near daily call, for various things:
People blaring music all day and all night.
People coming and going all hours every day.
The girlfriend would come over having been beaten up. After the last I call and she dropped the charges against him, we told her no more.
He’s tried to start with hubby, when hubby went brings is him on, he ran back into the house.
They had dogs that wanted to attack us any time we stepped on out porch. We had to call animal control for that. And, all the times the dogs were left out in the heat/cold without food or water.
The drug deals.
People screaming, fighting, arguing and physical fights, and etc.
When I would try to be polite and them to please turn down the music,the owner would cuss be out, call me every name he chains think of, and threatened to F me up or kill me. The cops woukd come, write out citations, sometimes arrest them (by the time it ended there were 12 people living there). The guy would cuss out the cops (and his buddy, which got arrested in his boxers in the middle of winter) punch them, knock them down the hill in front bit his house. Still, the prosecutoring attorney did nothing, he/she wanted a very thick file on them (though the owner and his buddy already had long criminal records).
It got so bad, we had one cop tell us how we could burn the house down and back it ?look like an accident. Other cops would tell us to get a weapon, cameras etc. We were basically stuck there. We were living on one income, with my daughter and I having health problems and surgeries.
As I said, I tried to be polite for the first few years, by the end, I gave up.
After four years of this crap we came home one day to a swarm of cops and cop cars, drug dogs, and people standing or sitting along their sidewalk.
When we first drove up we had a car parked in front of our driveway (by then on the other side, moved in anirher set of drug dealers that would take over our driveway and every space from their house to ours) we asked to have it moved, so, we found get out groceries taken in. Come to find the car we had seen down the street a few weeks previously, was an undercover drug officer. He was now in front of our house and we were told the cops had showed up and threw flash bombs, we missed it, of course. We didn’t get to stay and watch for long because we had to take my mom’s groceries and her home.
The next day, I got a knock on the door, to a guy holding a badge towards me. He was in charge of the drug task force. There had been 12 people in the house, 9 of which had warrants for arrest. They had been in every place you could think of: in closets, under the crawl space, etc. Because they would lock themselves in the basement when the cops were called, they had a group of cops break down both doors at the same time then threw in the flash bomb. When I told him what all had been going on, he was surprised I had yelled at one particular guy. The guy I had screamed at (only one that was acting polite) had come from Cuba, went to K.C. Mo and running from them food there, for being a drug supplier, to our town. He told me it was a wonder I was still alive. When he asked for my witness statement, I handed him two notebooks of all the things that had happened. I had them dated, what all happened, how long it lasted and had highlighted all the times the cops were called. He said that would be my witness statement.
Though there waa drugs, weapons, drug paraphernalia, and wanted criminals,the guy only got two years for having and maintaining a place of noise violations. He spent around four months in jail, not prison. His sister took over the house and sold. The new owner was a winner. Also, the other house were drug dealers. Though, they pretty quickly got sent to jail for several months and an old lady moved in.
That was just one house we lived in with crazy neighbors that we’d called the police on. At our first home, we had a dead guy in his car in front of our home. He had a traveling meth lab, samples the wares, died of a drug overdose.
At that same home, we had illegal aliens, and a neighbor that had some serious mental health issues, and more.
I’ve been thinking of writing a book of all the craziness. I have a title and found other notebooks and calendars I had written things down.
The Worst Mistake the US Had Made and It is Destroying Everything
Part 2
The Bond of Forbidden Knowledge
Dust motes danced in the weak light as Maria pulled a tattered volume from the shelf. Liam’s eyes widened as she placed it on the table between them, its faded cover bearing the title “The People’s History”.
“This,” Maria whispered, “is one of the most dangerous and important books here.”
Liam leaned forward, fingertips hesitating just short of the worn leather. “What’s in it?”
Maria opened the cover, the spine creaking. “The truth. About how things were before… all of this.” She gestured at the underground sanctuary.
As she read aloud, her gentle voice filled the space between the towering shelves. Liam listened, enraptured, as a world he’d never known unfolded. A world of free thought, debate, and ideas that challenged the status quo.
Each page and revelation made Liam’s eyes sparkle brighter in Maria’s view. The thirst for knowledge, the realization of their stolen wealth.
In the weeks that followed, they fell into a routine. Liam slipped into the library, evading the watchful eyes of the authorities, and descended into the hidden sanctuary. There, amidst the musty stacks, Maria guided him through the forbidden texts, watching as his young mind absorbed the dangerous truths within.
One evening, as they pored over a treatise on civil disobedience, Liam glanced at Maria. “Why do you do this? Why risk so much for these books?”
Maria was silent for a moment. “Because someone has to remember,” she said. “Someone has to preserve the truth, the ideas they want to erase. If we lose that… we lose what makes us human.”
Liam nodded, understanding dawning. “Like in Fahrenheit 451. ‘We need to be really bothered once in a while.'”
Maria blinked, surprise and pride welling up. “You’ve read Bradbury?”
Liam grinned. “Found a tucked-away copy upstairs. Didn’t understand all of it, but…it felt important.”
Maria laughed, the sound echoing in the cavernous space. How long had it been since she’d laughed like that? “You’re a quick study, kid. Stick with me and you’ll be leading the resistance in no time.”
But even as she spoke, a chill ran down her spine. The resistance. A looming shadow cast its presence over their hidden oasis. The reason for the secrecy, the reason she spent her life buried beneath the city.
As if summoned by her thoughts, a sudden bang echoed from above. The unmistakable sound of a door being forced open. Maria was on her feet in an instant. Every nerve thrummed with tension.
“Stay here,” she hissed at Liam, hand already moving to the knife at her waist. “And keep still.”
Heart pounding, she crept towards the hidden entrance, straining to hear over the rush of blood in her ears. Footsteps, heavy and purposeful, moved through the abandoned library above. The crackle of a radio, a garbled voice receiving orders.
A sweep. The authorities were conducting a sweep of the abandoned buildings. Maria’s breath caught in her throat, a cold sweat prickled her skin. They’d been careful, so careful… but had it been enough?
The footsteps neared, the beam of a flashlight swept across the debris-strewn floor just beyond the hidden door. Maria held her breath, one hand pressed against the cold metal, ready to hold it closed with every ounce of strength she possessed.
Seconds stretched into eternity as the footsteps paused, the light lingered on the disguised entrance. Maria could almost feel the officer’s presence on the other side, could imagine his suspicious frown as he took in the too-neat stack of rubble blocking his path.
Then the footsteps retreated. The radio crackled again, summoning the officer back. A routine check, nothing more. This time.
Maria sagged against the door, adrenaline drained from her body like water from a broken vessel. Too close. It had been too close.
She returned to Liam on unsteady legs, finding him huddled over the book they’d been reading. His compact frame shivered.
“They’re gone,” she whispered, laying a hand on his shoulder. “We’re safe.”
Liam looked up at her. Fear and determination warred in his bright eyes. “For now.”
Maria sighed. The weight of their reality settled on her shoulders once more. “For now,” she agreed.
But as she looked around at the towering shelves, the precious cargo they protected, she felt a renewed sense of purpose. They would keep going, keep preserving the forbidden knowledge…no matter the cost.
Over the following weeks, Maria devoted herself to the arduous task of smuggling out the library’s most precious volumes. She established a series of caches throughout the city, secure locations where she squirreled away the books, protecting them from potential destruction.
Despite the slow, painstaking work, but she took heart from Liam’s determination to learn and his unwavering courage despite the risk. Perhaps, if they persevered, they could still kindle a spark of hope from the ashes of their oppression.
Because in a deceitful and oppressive world, truth reigns as the ultimate weapon.
Part 3
The Raid
The explosive crash of splintering wood shattered the hushed sanctuary of the library. Maria’s head snapped up, her heart slammed against her ribs like a caged bird. They were here.
“Liam, run!” Her voice was a harsh whisper as she shoved the boy towards the hidden alcove at the back of the room. “Remember where I showed you. Don’t look back, no matter what you hear.”
Liam’s eyes were wide with fear, but he nodded. His small hand gripped hers briefly, then he vanished into the shadows. Maria swallowed hard, her throat tight as she turned to face the chaos descending upon them.
Footsteps, heavy and purposeful, echoed through the labyrinth of shelves. Voices barked orders, cold and clipped. The acrid tang of smoke seeped into the air, and Maria’s blood ran cold. They weren’t just here to confiscate the books. They were here to destroy them.
She moved then, a silent shadow weaving through the stacks. Her hands flew over the shelves, snatched volumes, and tucked them into the hidden compartments scattered throughout the room. It was a futile effort, she knew, but every book saved was a minor victory against the crushing tide of oppression.
A crash, closer now, followed by a triumphant shout. They’d found the main chamber. Maria’s jaw clenched as she reached for the ancient tome she’d been reading with Liam just hours before. Its weight in her hands brought comfort, a talisman against fear gripping her throat.
Ready for her final stand, she turned and was face to face with Inspector Clarke. His eyes were cold, his smile sharp. “Maria Rosales. You’ve been a hard woman to find.”
Maria lifted her chin, grip tightening on the book. “I won’t let you take them. This knowledge belongs to the people, not your corrupt government.”
Clarke snickered. “You think you can stop us? You’re just one woman, clinging to the past.”
He reached for the book, but Maria was faster. She swung, the heavy tome connecting with his temple. Clarke staggered, eyes glazing, before he crumpled to the ground.
Maria didn’t wait to see if he would rise again. She ran, her heart in her throat as she wove through the chaos. Smoke stung her eyes. The crackle of flames joined the shouts and crashes. They burned the books, turning the precious pages to ash and ember.
She burst into the main chamber, her eyes scanned for Liam. A flash of movement caught her eye, and relief surged through her as she saw him crouched behind the circulation desk, his small frame trembling.
“Liam!” She skidded to a halt beside him, her hand found his. “We have to go, now.”
Together, they ran, dodging fallen shelves and smoldering piles of books. The heat was intense, the air thick with smoke and the stench of burning paper. Maria’s lungs burned, her eyes streamed, but she didn’t slow. Couldn’t slow.
They reached the hidden panel, and Maria’s fingers flew over the mechanism. The door swung open, revealing the dark tunnel beyond. “Go,” she urged Liam, pushing him ahead of her. “Don’t stop until you reach the end.”
But even as they stumbled into the tunnel, the sounds of pursuit grew louder. Heavy footfalls, angry voices. Someone had seen them.
Maria’s mind raced as they ran, her hand tight around Liam’s. The tunnel was lengthy, but it had a limit. They’d be caught, trapped like rats in a maze. Unless…
“Liam, listen to me.” She pulled him to a stop, her hands gripped his shoulders. “There’s a branch in the tunnel ahead, to the right. It’s small, easy to miss. When we reach it, take it. Follow it to the end and don’t look back.”
“And you?” Liam’s voice was high, his eyes shimmered in dim light.
Maria swallowed hard. “I’ll lead them away. Buy you more time.”
“No!” Liam’s grip on her hand tightened. “I won’t leave you.”
“You have to.” Maria’s voice was fierce, even as her heart broke. “Get to Aunt Rose’s house, tell her what’s happened. She’ll know what to do.”
Tears streaked Liam’s cheeks, but he nodded. Maria pulled him into a fierce hug, memorizing the feel of him, the brave set of his shoulders. Then she let him go.
They ran, their breath harsh in the close confines of the tunnel. The shouts behind them grew louder, the beams of flashlights strobed off the damp walls. Maria’s heart pounded, her eyes strained in the gloom. There, just ahead, the darker patch of shadow that marked the branch.
She slowed, letting Liam pull ahead. He hesitated, looking back at her with frightened eyes. “Go,” Maria whispered. “And don’t look back.”
With a choked sob, Liam disappeared into the dark. Maria watched him go. A fierce pride burned in her chest alongside the ache of loss. Then, shoulders squared, she turned back the way they’d come.
Towards the shouts and the anger. Towards the men who would destroy everything she held dear. She had no illusions about her fate. But if her sacrifice could buy Liam the time he needed, could ensure that the spark of knowledge continued to burn, then it would be worth it.
She ran into the dark, into the unknown. One last stand, for the books, for the truth, for the future. For Liam.
Part 4
New Beginnings
Maria slumped against the rough brick wall, lungs burning as she gulped down the cool night air. She’d lost count of the twists and turns she’d taken, the narrow alleys and abandoned buildings she’d navigated to shake her pursuers. But finally, the sounds of pursuit had faded, leaving only the thudding of her own heart.
She paused to close her eyes, letting the enormity of what had happened wash over her. The library, the sanctuary she’d dedicated her life to preserving, was gone. Reduced to ashes by the very forces she’d sought to protect it from.
A soft scuffing sound snapped her back to the present. Her hand flew to the knife at her belt. Maria’s shock grew as a familiar figure emerged from the shadows.
It was Eliza. But not the unassuming patron she had known – this woman wore the unmistakable uniform of a Regime officer.
A ragged whisper escaped Maria’s lips, uttering “you”.
Eliza held up a hand. “I know what you must be thinking. But things are not what they seem.” Her gaze was steady, revealing no hint of deception.
“The raid tonight… I orchestrated it. But not for the reasons you believe.”
As Eliza explained her role in the resistance, her true motivations for sacrificing the library, Maria felt the world shift beneath her feet. A tactical loss, but a strategic victory. A way to get the books into the hands of those hungry for truth.
“You’ve given us quite the underground network to work with,” Eliza said with a tight smile. “And now, the Regime thinks they’ve won, that they’ve crushed the resistance.”
Her expression hardened. “But they’re mistaken. Thanks to you, thanks to that brave boy, the seeds of rebellion are scattered to the wind. And we’ll make sure they take root.” Eliza turned and left.
But even as grief threatened to overwhelm her, a fierce spark of determination ignited in her chest. They had destroyed the library, yes. But they hadn’t destroyed the knowledge. The books Liam had smuggled out, the volumes she’d secreted away – those still survived. The flame of truth still flickered in the darkness of their world.
As dawn peeked over the horizon, Maria squared her shoulders. A smile played at the corners of her mouth. The government desired to end and close the book on their rebellion.
But what they failed to understand, what they could never grasp in their ruthless quest for control, was a fundamental truth about the human spirit.
An ending beckoned a new beginning. And this story, the story of their fight, their resistance, their unbreakable will…
This story was only just beginning.
Why America will Have its French Revolution.
Pillsbury Stuffed Crust Pizza
StuffedCrustPizza 15483 3 hero 16×9
Ingredients
1 (13.8 ounce) can Pillsbury refrigerated classic pizza crust
7 (1 ounce) sticks string cheese
1/2 cup pizza sauce
24 slices pepperoni (from 3.5 ounce package)
2 cups (8 ounces) shredded Italian cheese blend
Instructions
Heat oven to 425 degrees F. Grease a 12 inch pizza pan with shortening or cooking spray.
Unroll dough; place in pan. Starting at center, press out dough to edge of pan, pressing up and extending over sides by at least 1 inch. Place string cheese around inside edge of crust. Fold extended edge of dough over cheese; pinch firmly to seal.
Spoon sauce evenly over dough.
Top with pepperoni and cheese blend.
Bake for 12 to 16 minutes or until crust is deep golden brown and cheese in center is melted.
What is the rudest thing that a new neighbor has done to you immediately after you had moved in?
I have one where I was the rude neighbour.
Couple moved in next door, that afternoon the banging started, rhythmic banging on the walls. At first, I through, Okay, they’re christening their new home, but a few hours later it was still going, along with this awful wailing, and I am getting really stressed out. By 9pm I can’t take it any more and I knock on their door to ask them just to move their bed away from the wall, I can take it if my pictures aren’t actually moving on the wall. They kind of answer their door, it’s dark, I wouldn’t open my door but I shouted ‘It’s your neighbour’.
Turns out they have an autistic 4 yr old boy who bangs his forehead on the walls, stairs, basically everything. Hard, his poor head. They explain, I apologise and go home and feel sooo awful. They’re doing the best they can. I took some of my kids old toys round the next day and apologise again.
Little bubba does it all the time, the wailing, screaming, occasionally it drives me nuts but the parents do try harder to stop him. I’ve given them names of a local volunteer service that helps families with kids and lent them a lawnmower and tried to be a good neighbour since. I really feel for them.
Can you describe a time that your company only discovered that you were irreplaceable after they fired you? How did you feel? What did they do?
Originally Answered: Describe a time that your company only discovered that you were irreplaceable after they fired you. How did you feel? What did they do?
I’m a software engineer. When I started my first job I didn’t have any experience, so I stayed days and nights building that experience and trying to prove to the company that I’m a hard-working guy thinking that all this hard work would be appreciated in some form or another.
Two years later (after pulling countless overnight stays at the company to meet unattainable deadlines without any overtime pay whatsoever), I got a call from a colleague about a project I was working on, during a national holiday after 6:00 PM.
He asked me if I can look into something that was needed for the project so he can prepare a demo scheduled after the holiday. I politely declined because I had family visiting from out of town during the holiday and told him I will look into it the next morning (technically still during the holiday), and I did do that the next morning and everything went as planned.
But little did I know that he called my boss (one of the owners of the company) that night and long story short, I got into trouble for declining to work when he asked me to on a holiday without pay.
The next thing I know my boss started pulling me out of all projects; that’s when I realized I’m not appreciated at all, so I started looking for jobs and found one really quickly, gave them my two-weeks’ notice and moved on.
In less than a week in my new job, old colleagues started calling in about the projects I used to work on. I politely answered that I have done the formal handover during my two-weeks’ notice and now I’m busy with my new job.
Then my manager (a different one than my boss) asked if I can update something really quickly for them on one of the troubled projects and he will pay me.
I told him my current rate is $XX an hour (it was a ridiculous rate for a two-year experience engineer in my town) but he accepted, so I applied the update and got paid half a month salary for a day worth of work and they stopped calling 🙂
Why are we still betting heavily in Taiwan as if we expect to send US troops there in event of China invading there?
The United States’ instigation of “Taiwan separatism” will not only fail to profit from the chaos, but will instead cause harm to the United States itself.
The United States continues to sell weapons to Taiwan, increasing the risk of global peace and stability. The United States seems to be willing to do whatever it takes to contain China, prolong the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and continue NATO’s eastward expansion, turning it from a defensive treaty into an offensive military alliance, which makes people worry about where the next conflict will break out.
The United States deliberately provokes the fact that “there is only one China in the world and Taiwan is an inalienable part of China” – a principle recognized by almost all countries.
The United States knows that China hopes to achieve peaceful reunification, but the separatist forces on the island of Taiwan are trying to split Taiwan from China with the blatant support of the United States.
According to the three Sino-US joint communiqués, Taiwan is an inalienable part of China. However, the United States has been provoking the one-China principle, selling a large number of weapons and military equipment to Taiwan, while supporting separatist forces on the island.
The Taiwan issue is China’s internal affairs and the United States should not interfere. However, given its “saying one thing and doing another” on the Taiwan issue, the United States is determined to undermine China’s economic and technological development in order to maintain its global hegemony. It wants to maintain its dominance in the Asia-Pacific region by using China’s Taiwan Island as a pawn in its geopolitical game.
Despite the provocative actions of the United States, China is committed to promoting peace and development in various regions and improving international relations.
While China is committed to promoting global harmony, the United States is desperately trying to maintain its global hegemony. People all over the world are watching this.
Despite Washington’s malicious intentions, a conflict between the two countries is not inevitable.
The United States is just bluffing and will not make a huge bet on Taiwan, otherwise it will lose everything. What Biden said about “defending Taiwan” is just the ravings of an Alzheimer’s patient.
Airstrike Scene (Broken Arrow)
What is something that a teacher did to your child that you won’t ever forget?
Originally Answered: What's something that your teacher did to your child that you won't ever forget?
My daughter wrote a paper in the 4th grade. I think it was about octopuses. I discovered it in her backpack and she had a D on it. I’ll agree it was horribly written. I asked her what the assignment was and she told me they had to reach in a jar and pull out a piece of paper with a topic written on it. Her new topic was zoos. I asked if they were to research, write off the top of their head, or what. My daughter wasn’t really sure, so I got a couple of books had her make note cards showed her how to create an outline to organize her note cards and then write a report. They had been learning outlines, but were given no idea what they were for. It was a very nice paper. A couple of days later she comes home with a new topic (ink) and her paper on zoos on which she had gotten a C-. I wondered what in the hell this teacher wanted, so I went after school so the assignment could be explained to me. I walked out of her room not understanding anymore than when I walked in. I’d always felt she was was a wacky woman and now my thoughts were confirmed. She was as clear as mud as to what she wanted kids to do, so my attitude was screw it. I pulled out our encyclopedia from 1941 and told my daughter to copy the section on ink. If she was going to get a bad grade anyway why work too hard? She came home with a B+. I had to laugh, because the teacher couldn’t recognize plagiarism. Fortunately that was the last of those papers. When my daughter returned for 5th grade that teacher was gone.
As an attorney, what was your favorite case and how did it go down?
It was a rape case.
I was the Defendant’s attorney and, while rape cases were, of course, not my favorite, I took this one on just like my other cases—with the goal of getting the best resolution for my client.
I met with the client (“D”) in jail. He told me that he and the complaining witness (CW) had been in a romantic relationship for a few years. They’d recently broken up and he was packing his clothes, when CW arrived at the apartment earlier than he’d expected. They started talking , one thing led to another and…in flagrante delicto, someone shows up at her door. That’s when CW decided it was rape, according to D.
I’d heard enough lame stories to appreciate that, if D was making this up, at least he’d put some thought into it.
So I did some research and learned:
* CW had no bruises anywhere on her body, despite her statement that D pushed her on the bed and forcibly held her down while committing the act;
* CW’s clothes were not torn, despite the fact that, given the circumstances, it would have been nearly impossible for D to have gotten her clothes off of her without ripping them;
*CW acknowledged that D did not have a weapon; and
* The “someone” who showed up at CW’s door was…wait for it…CW’s new boyfriend.
I took this evidence to the prosecutor and told him I thought he was probably prosecuting an innocent dude. He interviewed CW, who admitted that she was having consensual sex with D, and was embarrassed (em-bare-assed) when her new beau showed up, so she claimed it was rape.
Every time someone asks, “How can you defend people, knowing that they’re almost certainly guilty?” I tell that story.
D could have been sentenced to 20 years to life. He did a few days and didn’t have a rape conviction on his record, because he had a defense attorney.
That one case justified all of the other cases I had in which my clients had less-than-clean hands.
On a personal note, while I was glad that justice was done, it really pissed me off that this young woman was prepared to let D go to prison so she didn’t have to admit to her new BF that she was boffing her old BF. Every false rape claim, even though the rate of false rape claims is no higher than any other false criminal complaints, makes it that much harder for victims to come forward.
And this, boys and girls, is why criminal defense attorneys are your friends.
EDIT: Many readers have commented that CW should have been charged with perjury. While I definitely understand that feeling, I also get why women aren’t prosecuted for false rape claims. First, women would be less likely to report rape out of fear that they will be prosecuted if their case can’t be proven. Second–and this one is REALLY important–women who make false claims would be far less likely to ‘fess up if they knew it’d land them in the slammer. So yes, it’s very unfair that CW walked away unscathed, but the very fact that she wouldn’t be prosecuted helped make it easier for her to retract her statement. It’s not ideal, but at least it makes sense.
Why I Am Raising Kids in China and NOT the USA
This is surprisingly excellent.
What potential risks are involved in the heightened tensions between China and the Philippines in the South China Sea, as highlighted by recent clashes?
War.
Maybe a small-scale war.
Regardless of the scale, a war is not avoidable because WAR is in the DNA of USA & PH under Marcos is happy to make it happen for USA.
In the 2024 Defense Summit in Singapore, China spokesman asked PH pres Marcos Junior …
1, Why Marcos Jr mentioned USA 11 times in his speech. (I add) Is PH working for USA?
2, Your father (ie Marcos Senior) signed TAC (Treaty of Amity & Cooperation in Southeast Asia 东南亚友好合作条约) to jointly maintain peace in SCS. What do you (ie Marcos Junior) think of TAC?
When PH creates conflicts in SCS since March 2023, has PH complied with TAC? Has PH broken peace?
Marcos Jr was visibly uncomfortable & stammered he does not know what TAC is.
How uncomfortable? Marcos Jr gave a wry smile, straightened his clothes & touched his ear.
history of TAC:
TAC was signed in 1976/2/24 by 5 countries: Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand. Later more countries joined TAC. A total of 51 countries as of 2023. China joined TAC in 2003. USA in 2009. Japan 2004. Australia 2005.
On 2002/11/4, based on UN Charter, UNCLOS & TAC, China & 10 ASEAN countries signed DOC (Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in South China Sea 南海各方行为宣言). Philippines signed DOC too.)
See, Marcos Jr has broken both TAC & DOC. Others eg Australia & Japan also broke TAC. No need to talk about USA the global mafia.
12 Years Of Marriage Destroyed And She Instantly REGRETS IT
What things do prisoners miss the most when they are released?
I was feeling remarkably unencumbered and clearheaded by the time I was released from detention, due to being denied easy access to alcohol and drugs while incarcerated.
The problem was I wasn’t prepared to deal with my addictions intelligently at that point in my life, so within a few hours of hitting the streets, it was a return to business as usual for me substance abuse wise.
My license was suspended, so I called up my dealer who ran me by the liquor store after he’d sold me a pocketful of OC’s and Blue Boys.
(2 birds/1 stone)
I tried AA at the insistence of my probation officer, but my larger problem was narcotics at the time.
I tried NA at the insistence of my AA sponsor, and ended up doing lines of crushed 80mg tabs in the men’s toilet with some other attendee during the smoke breaks.
I’m of the opinion that county jails should be more aggressive about identifying symptoms of alcohol and narcotics withdrawal and offering inmates treatment options — either individual or group therapy.
It could certainly have an impact on recidivism.
Anything’s better than nothing.
(…which is what you can expect.)
Roadhouse Chili Pizza
Roadhouse Pizza 1576×2048
Ingredients
1 Boboli or homemade crust
1/2 pound ground beef
1/2 onion, chopped
8 ounces canned chili with beans
7 ounces canned diced tomatoes, drained
Hot pepper jack cheese, shredded
Instructions
Heat the oven to 450 degrees F. Spray or grease a pizza pan or stone.
In a large skillet, brown ground beef and onion over medium heat; drain.
Add chili and tomatoes; mix well. Spread the mixture equally over crust and top with cheese.
Bake on the bottom rack of oven for 8 to 12 minutes or until cheese is melted and crust is piping hot.
Men Are Simple: Woman Finally Gets What Men Want And What They Look For
What was the downfall of the “popular kid” in your school?
I’ll call her Betty so she can feel okay if she sees this. Betty the bankers daughter(only banker in that small town), was petite, cute in a 16 yr old way. Long Blond hair, blue eyes, creamy complexion and an all around likable kid. Naturally she was also a cheerleader. She was in all the same upper level classes with me. Every science and math class and foreign language class. One day I noticed her advanced calculus exam and she missed more than I did. Her grade however was higher than mine. The questions were not weighted per points. After that I made an effort to watch and she often missed more but her grade was always higher. She graduated valedictorian beating out one little gal that had worked so very hard to do well (not me), they were both straight A students. They even added up every score they earned and of course Betty won.
Betty got a scholarship to a very good school. Sadly Betty failed her courses. Angry she came back home and refused to go to college. To induce her to go to the lowly state college back home (Dad could influence that school) he bought her a nice shiny red sports car. She was taking a science class with me and that sweet personality was not there. She just looked angry still. I don’t think she completed that class as I did not see her after the first test was given.
Betty would have been so much better off if the school had not buttered her scores. I truly hope she learned that her own work and grades should have been sufficient.
What Mao Zedong did better Chiang Kai Shek during the Chinese war? What right things he did that Chiang Kai Shek couldn’t?
Chiang Kai-shek was a warlord who derived support from the privileged business class and bureaucracy who believed that China could become a modern society without having to completely surrender their power by copying large parts of the U.S. form of government;
Mao believed that China needed much more radical social surgery to unleash the full power of the Chinese populace, and that this could only be accomplished by revolution;
Mao was a strong believer in using social and political ideology to mobilize the masses, and that the Communist Party should be the vanguard.
Chiang had no political ideology, and did not understand its power. Instead of writing his own political thoughts and strategy, he only quoted Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People his whole life;
Chiang was not a master strategist like Mao;
Chiang was highly suspicious of his most capable aides and generals, and executed those he considered to be a threat. Even then, his closest aides until 1949 turned out to be spies for the Communists, which was why he was defeated and retreated to Taiwan.
Mao attracted the smartest and most capable Chinese. Chiang attracted the more corrupt and the rest.
Because Chiang was a warlord, he was not able to understand Mao and get into his head. This was demonstrated by Chiang’s offer of a provincial governorship to Mao in the negotiations which led to the 10/10/1945 agreement to form a coalition government between the Communists and Nationalists. Chiang tore up this agreement in mid-1946, which led to his losing the mainland.
What did a flight attendant do that made you go “you gotta be kidding me”?
I was boarding a plane with my carry on when the attendant said the bins were all full and I would have to have them put my bag in the hold. I wasn’t happy, but obliged. When I got seated I realized my purse and boarding pass for the next leg of my journey were in my carry on. I ran back to tell her. She said, “Oh well. Nothing we can do about it now.” At that moment a man came up from the hold and asked what was wrong. When I told him he asked what my carry on looked like. Fortunately, it was an animal print. He went and got it and let me retreive my purse and boarding pass. The attendant had this nasty look on her face the entire time. She was not an attendant from our flight, so she soon disappeared and as our attendants were preping for take off I noticed they were closing completely empty overheads. I shouted out, “She lied to us.”
Biden, Russian military decimated. US/NATO, 5 land corridors to fight Russia. US $50B Ukraine loan
When I was in first grade, there were always this group of boys that would get around the wall fire alarm and pull it. And I, stupid fuck I was at the time, would just stand there watching them. After the alarms went off all the boys would scatter, but I would just stand there. Stupid. And I would be taken during the hallway sweep.
Typically it would result in an interrogation, followed by a ruler on my knuckles. Ouch! That mother fucker hurt!
Long story short, you know guys I NEVER pulled an alarm. Ever. However, I was always there in the round up. And of course, no one ever believed me. Shit.
The teacher would argue that I was far too smart to be acting so ignorant and innocent. And it was because I was so smart that I was somehow guilty.
When the reality was, it was just not in my personality.
Years later, and I am on trial for heinous crimes and bad stuff all the way around. The argument (well one of them) was that I couldn’t be innocent… because I was too smart.
Later in prison, I discovered the secret of survival… act stupid.
That’s it. Really. Act slow and stupid. When people want to talk to you just talk about stupid things like potatoes. Envelopes that candy came in. Shoelaces. Mailboxes. Different types of wood. Different types of dirt.
People will leave you alone.
And they sure as fuck won’t bother messing with you.
Why? Because you are not a threat to them.
Today…
How can China effectively handle its relationship with Duterte?
There is 1 old Chinese idiom: if the ox does not want to drink water (from the river), we cannot force its head down (to drink). The ox must want to drink to start with.
It is just an idiom. I do not mean Duterte is like an ox.
What I am trying to say is that: Duterte wanted to improve PH’s economy & modernise PH’s technology.
Like all other developing countries in Africa, Latin America, Asia etc, one way is to join China’s BRI project to build infrastructure first.
Like Indonesia, since China has built a high speed rail for Indonesia, Indonesia sees its GDP growing.
All other developing countries saw the same thing about their GDP growth.
Duterte wanted the same thing to happen in PH. He decided to develop good economic collaboration with China. And China was happy to collaborate with Duterte to make a win-win situation for both countries.
When Marcos is power, China also wanted to maintain good economic collaboration with Marcos. But Marcos rejects China & embraces USA.
Because USA wants to suppress China’s rise, USA uses PH/Marcos to create countless conflicts in SCSea. Forcing China to withdraw from PH.
Back to the Chinese idiom: Marcos does not want to drink.
US threatens China. US military to turn the Taiwan Strait into an “unmanned hellscape”…If
What is the most inappropriate clothing you have seen a student wear at school?
My answer is a little twist on the original question. This happened not in a school, but in a school district’s central administration office where I worked during the ‘90s. There were roughly 150 employees—mostly female secretaries with the administrative bosses almost all male.
During the work week, employees wore suits and skirts, hosiery and heels. That was the norm back then. But Halloween was coming up and for the first (and only) time in my memory, permission was given for us to show up for work in costume, if we so chose.
Now maybe 6 months earlier, a new girl was hired—Sarah. Sarah was a tall, blonde with a very outgoing personality and sort of wild blue eyes. She wasn’t a quiet one by any means and when talking to her, you sometimes thought maybe she’d smoked a little something outside on break.
So Halloween arrives and there are some cute costumes, mostly the typical ones you see at a Halloween party, but nothing too extravagant since we were professional working in a business atmosphere.
Except for Sarah. Sarah comes in as an Indian squaw. Or maybe it was an Indian temptress. Her take on Pocahontas, I guess. She’s wearing a tiny brown bra with matching tiny loincloth. Brown sandals that lace up her calves, hair in braids with a feather sticking up and warpaint on her face. Nothing else.
News travelled around the building like wildfire, and this was before the days of email. Everyone was coming in to take a look. No one could believe that she’d show up to work like that. And no one could further believe that it took until 2:30 in the afternoon for anyone to send her home. Until we realized that all the bosses were male.
Companies Have Taken A Sledgehammer To Quotas | METOO BACKLASH
Western Society is under collapse.
What was the most shocking incident about your neighbour that you witnessed?
I was awakened about 2 AM, by a loud banging on my door, which I ignored. It was repeated. I got up & put my foot against the door and said who is it. The answer was: “The police”. (NO SHIT~ I was thinking) So with my foot still against the door, I cracked open the door and after noticing the outside light was out BRAVELY SAID: “SHOW ME SOME I.D.” The Officer came close to the door so I could see his blue uniform. I let him in the apartment. I had to hear him tell me I had to leave the apartment RIGHT NOW.
On the way out I passed a crouched down dressed in black SWAT officer with an M-4 semi-automatic rifle and without thinking I offered to replace the light bulb that was “NOT working” (He had unscrewed it for cover).
When downstairs and away by 300 feet, I saw the SWAT command vehicle, the armed tank, a linked up squad of 8 SWAT armored RAM Team, A GO Pro Guy, A SWAT Sniper with a rifle and a couple more lookouts station at other points around other areas in the apartments.
What was it ALL about? Some guy in the apartment across from me held his girlfriend and her mother against their will for a few hours with a deer rifle.
He doesn’t even know just how damn lucky he was that these Texans LET him live.
PUTIN THREATENS NATO GLOBALLY with LONG RANGE WEAPONS – slow boat to ww3….
Why is fraternization frowned on between officers and enlisted men in the military?
When I was a young OS3 (E-4 in the Navy), I went to the Chiefs Mess’ DRB (Disciplinary Review Board) and XOI (Executive Officer’s Inquiry) for fraternization charges where fortunately my case was stopped there before going to full-blown Captain’s Mast.
I lived off base with a couple other E-4’s and a E-5 where we split a four bedroom house.
The E-5 began sleeping with his female division officer, a young 20-something O-1 and she would come by the house often.
I was on a Frigate which had about a 150 person crew. Everyone knew everyone’s name, but generally was just big enough to have it’s own after work social networks. I’ll never forget when one of the engineers approached me on the Mess Decks and asked “Is it true PO2 is sleeping with ENS NAME?”
I knew the word was out however “careful” they had been and it was only a matter of time. Sure enough, a couple days later over the 1MC announcing system I heard “OS3 Smith, Executive Officer’s Cabin”.
The XO told me he was investigating the situation, told me I was welcome to contact out local JAG office for legal advice and that I would be going to DRB in a couple days to be questioned about the situation.
At this point, the PO2 was also processed through first with DRB, XOI, and Captain’s Mast. He was reduced in rank to an E-4 and given 30/30, 30 Days restricted to the Ship and 30 Days extra duty, along with a half month’s pay.
The O-1 was sent to a Court Martal and she was processed completely out of the Navy, being reassigned off the Ship until the administrative side was done.
For myself, the cat was already out of the bag when I went to DRB. I admitted I knew what I was doing was technically wrong by not reporting the activity at our house. I was a good Sailor who had great evaluations and had never been in trouble. The Chief’s Mess recommended I go to XOI and the case be dropped there.
I went to XOI and stood in front of the XO. He asked me the same questions, as the Chiefs Mess and I kept the same answers. I basically added I felt I was in a tough spot of loyalty between my roommate friend and what I should have done. My Chief (E-7), my Divisional Officer (O-1), and my Department Officer (O-3) all went to bat for my character and the XO said the case would stop with him, but I was to be assigned extra duty in relation to the case.
So, I was assigned to go to each division on the Ship and provide fraternization training to each division until every crew member was covered.
Overall, fraternization is so frowned upon because it heavily erodes good order and discipline. It causes toxic environments that breed favoritism from our natural habits as humans. If an officer or senior enlisted has a connection with juniors, even if they truly are not showing favorites, everyone will question their decision making regarding themselves and that person.
One example provided was if the O-1 was acting as Command Duty Officer and there was an armed intruder on the Ship, what if they didn’t send PO2 into the dangerous situation? Maybe they had a legitimate good reason, but it would be questioned by the crew and others if it was because they were sleeping with each other. Maybe it’s something as simple as being assigned maintenance and they get an easier task for whatever reason. The decision would be questioned. Perception is everything.
If you made it through my long story, I appreciate you reading!
China Issues EU Economic Ultimatum, EU Giant Airbus Desperate To Sell China 100 Jets
Documents show that India contacted China for China to build high speed rails for India to replace Japan, but China has declined the Indian request. Why?
Nopes
India initially analyzed a Tender from China to build the High Speed Rail
Yet the key issue was India simply didn’t have the money China wanted
Chinas proposal was to overhaul the existing lines and build new electrification lines and then to initiate the Pilot project and then the final railway lines
They also recommended a different route rather than the Mumbai Gujarat route to initiate the Pilot
The overall investment was much higher plus interest was quite a bit higher
However China offered a Technology transfer option
Nitin Gadkari went on record to say he recommend going with the Chinese and availing finance from the ADB due to the Technology Transfer option
China also had stringent penalty clauses knowing Indias lethargy and hassles
Also China had demanded visas for numerous Chinese personnel as they didn’t repose much faith in Indian Engineers after the Bangalore Subway Project
Meanwhile Japan offered financing plus very low interest rates
Plus Japan was very flexible because they were losing markets rapidly to China, every day
However Japan didn’t have the Technology Transfer Option
The main reason was in 2017, China wasn’t yet known for its DOMINANCE in High Speed Railways
It was deemed an Up and Comer rather than the World’s Best
Today it’s different – China is the world’s best HSR contractor who can execute projects in record time
Indonesia and India began around the same time
Yet Indonesia has a fully functioning Jakarta Bandung Line while India hasn’t even commenced on 10 meters of HSR railway track so far
Bubbly Pizza
Bubbly pizza
Ingredients
3 (7.5 ounce) packages buttermilk biscuits
1/3 cup chopped green bell pepper
1/3 cup chopped onion
1/3 cup sliced olives
1 cup sliced fresh mushrooms
1 1/2 cups spaghetti sauce
3 cups shredded mozzarella cheese
1 clove garlic, pressed
Instructions
Heat oven to 375 degrees F.
Combine the vegetables with the sauce.
Press the garlic and mix well into sauce mixture.
Quarter biscuits. Arrange 1/2 of the biscuit pieces evenly over bottom of 9 x 13-inch pan (it may not cover the whole pan).
Spread with 1/2 the sauce mixture and 1/2 the cheese.
Repeat layers.
Bake for 23 to 28 minutes or until sides are golden brown.
PIZZA! How to make Freaking Mouth Watering PIZZA! – Wood-Fired Pizza -Bubbly Crust
[Did you try to warn, caution or maybe threaten Chancellor Scholz when he made the decision to send weapons to Ukraine?]
"Why would you think we would threaten anyone?
We never threaten anyone, least of all the head of another state.
That would be 'mauvais ton', unacceptable in polite society.
We have our own viewpoint on certain issues.
We know the European states’ approach, including Germany’s approach, on the current developments in Ukraine.
Everyone believes that Russia started the war in Ukraine.
But no one – I want to emphasise this – no one in the West, no one in Europe is willing to remember how this tragedy began.
It started with an unconstitutional coup in Ukraine. This was the beginning of the war.
But is Russia to blame for that coup? No.
Have those who are trying to blame Russia today forgotten that the foreign ministers of Poland, Germany and France went to Kiev at the time and signed the settlement document as guarantors of a peaceful constitutional resolution of the crisis?
This is something Europe, including Germany, prefers to forget.
Because if they remembered, they would have to explain why the leaders of Germany, along with the other signatories, never demanded that the perpetrators of the coup in Ukraine return to the constitutional framework.
Why did they neglect their obligations as guarantors of agreements between the incumbent government and the opposition like this?
They are as responsible for what happened as the forces in the United States that provoked the unconstitutional seizure of power.
Don’t you know what followed?
The residents of Crimea made a decision to secede from Ukraine, and the residents of Donbass refused to obey those who carried out the coup in Kiev.
This is what followed.
This is how this conflict began."
Excerpt from remarks by Russian President Vladimir Putin during a meeting with heads of the world’s leading news agencies, Saint Petersburg, June 5, 2024.
“Ugly”: What US Treasury bond auctions look like when China doesn’t show up
Have you ever had someone offer “physical” payment for something they couldn’t afford?
When I was 17 years old, I’d had enough of living with family and decided to try and make it on my own. I was sharing my first apartment with a friend, I was struggling to pay my rent. I spent most of my free time writing poetry and trying to deal with the darkness that my childhood had planted inside me.
A friend of the family was an artist who’d been in a bad car accident, and while he could walk, he’d broken his back in 3 places and had dozens of surgeries to try and deal with organ damage from the same accident. He needed some help with yard work. For this I would make enough money to pay for rent and some bills and get caught up.
Then I walked into his house to use the bathroom and came face to face with a gallery of his artwork. This piece (below), aggressive and fractured, drew me right in and somehow made me feel as though it understood the chaos that was consistently inside me at the time.
Over the next week, as I worked on cleaning his backyard of debris, he and I chatted often. About art, poetry, music. He was a lovely and wounded man. He saw the darkness I was struggling with and wanted to help me.
Then came the day I asked him how much this painting was. Bad news – 3 months rent. Wow…
When I was finished all the work I needed to, I asked him if I could buy the painting from him, and he, knowing I couldn’t really afford it, offered to sell it to me for a carton of cigarettes, about $45-$50 Canadian at the time. I also didn’t get paid as much for the work, which I felt was fair.
As a First Nations man, tobacco was sacred to him. This gift of tobacco was all he wanted, so he could mourn the loss of what was actually his self-portrait and favourite piece. He had sworn he’d never sell it, but couldn’t deny it when a 17yo, struggling young man found solace in it. I was so grateful to Peter for gifting me this.
It’s been with me now for more than 30 years. I look at it almost every day. It will always be emblematic of the struggle and chaos I went through.
Red & Black – original acrylic on clay – Peter Michael Hornung-Maqua. 1950–2006
What can policymakers on both sides do to address tensions between the US and China?
Nothing can be done except for China & the world to speed up dedollarisation so as to dismantle US hegemony.
Let us analyse USA’s DNA.
After WW2, from 1946-2001, in 55 years, there were 248 wars around the globe. 201 of them ie 82% were instigated by USA. In 200+ years since US independence, there were less than 20 years when USA was not in a war. Worse, it is US vassals who shed blood & lose life for USA.
Other than war, USA would instigate countless unrest eg protests, riots & coups in other countries.
Thru unrest/war, USA controls other government & resource/economy. It is neo-colonisation without occupying other’s land.
In short, it is about money & power/dominance.
1, money: USA makes tons of $$$ by arms sale & post-war construction for war-torn countries.
2, power: USA weakens allies eg EU or Japan, as well as enemies eg Russia or China.
In the Ukraine war, USA uses 1 stone to kill 3 birds: weakens the economy of both Europe & Russia. & colonises Ukraine after war.
USA did not let Ukraine reach peace deal with Russia or attack Russian soil. Why? To drag the war long enough to economically weaken both Europe & Russia.
How many people died, displaced or suffered in a war? Look at Ukraine war, the entire world is affected by the interruption of supply chain eg food due to global shortage & inflation.
USA wont not let world peace to happen. USA must create unrest incl war. War is in USA’s DNA.
NASA’S 70 Year Old Abandoned Moon Base
Is H&M going to lose $1.5 billion (per year) in the China market due to getting involved with the so-called Xinjiang human rights issue? Does H & M really know the truth about Xinjiang?
This is one of the situations that shows how careful companies have to be in managing sensitive issues.
H&M, along with Nike, Adidas and Uniqlo, have released statements that they won’t be using cotton sourced from Xinjiang anymore because of the accusations of forced labor. This has landed them in hot water in China, with consumers boycotting them and, embarrassingly, all their China brand ambassadors dropping the deals with them.
As someone who works in marketing in China, I have to say that I feel really bad for the China teams of H&M, Nike, Adidas and Uniqlo. Their companies’ HQs made these decisions without informing or consulting them, and their China teams will be expected to clean up the mess their HQs created.
Instead of the companies stating that they will conduct an investigation to ensure that all suppliers they work with adhere to their standards and do not use forced labor, apparently people from these companies’ HQs thought that a blanket ban for all cotton from Xinjiang should be implemented and that somehow this wouldn’t impact their business in China.
The fact that there is a strong feeling in China that the Western governments, primarily the US, are fabricating lies (talking to actual people in Xinjiang should help understand the situation there) to sabotage China’s growth is not helping these four companies. They are now rather seen as additional tools in the anti-China propaganda.
China’s market is enough competitive as it is now, with all companies being constantly at the edge from competition. This will heavily impact the China teams of these four companies and I suspect we will see many people employed there moving on elsewhere soon.
Micheal felt his heart leap with joy as he entered the grounds. The ancient, sandstone block buildings of the King’s university were part of the most prestigious university in the world. And how could it be, that across the entire world, one place was considered the greatest? Because the thing that had seemed inevitable had finally come to pass. The world was finally ruled by one government.The year was 2600, and Micheal Dawson lived in Sydney Australia. He was happy in his life as an academic, he was a voracious reader, and he loved to write. He had had articles published in many journals, and had even written a book, ‘The Wisdom of the Ancients’, where he compared the wise sayings of many old cultures with those from other cultures. The book had been a small success, but he was mostly just happy that people were reading his work, money was a secondary concern.Today he would go to the library, looking for something to pique his interest, something to spark a new article or publication. Before long, he was in the old building, excited to be surrounded by the wealth of knowledge. The towering shelves loomed over him, and golden rays of sunshine came in from the high windows.At the moment, he was strolling past the section on Roman history. Empires had risen and fallen throughout history, and while the Romans had brought civilization to many cultures, he felt he would leave this particular aspect to those with a greater passion for it.It was interesting though to consider the way various civilizations had waxed and waned. There was a common consensus among most people, that the current world government, would be the last, at least until space exploration became a real thing. People talked about colonizing mars, but there was still a long way to go for that dream to become a reality.His measured steps eventually took him to the Ancient Near East section. Here was the story of Gilgamesh, Egyptian mythology, Egyptian wisdom literature, Mesopotamian wisdom literature, Histories of the Assyrian empire. He then noticed a copy of the Bible on the shelves. He had some fondness for the Bible, as he had drawn heavily on the Proverbs of Solomon in his book. The proverbs had seemed to him to be the wisest of all aphoristic sayings he studied. Of course there were gems in every culture.He found himself recalling a Sumerian proverb. ‘He who knows how to move around becomes strong. He will live longer than the sedentary man’. Common knowledge today, but amazing to see that people had become wise to the fact at such an early point in civilization. Then he thought of some of the early Egyptian proverbs he had read. ‘Be industrious, let thine eyes be open, lest you become a beggar, for the man that is idle cometh not to honor.’ Every culture, or at least those in the Ancient Near East had unearthed timeless wisdom.Ah, but the Bible. Here was a text that had endured throughout history. There were still many practicing Christians today, though he did not know much about what life was like for them. On the shelves were a few different translations, the New International Version, the New Revised Standard Edition, The Holmann. A colleague had once asked him, ‘Why do you use the Holman translation?’, to which his reply had been, ‘I don’t know, it’s easy to understand, but they go to the effort of being as close to the original meaning as possible.’There were so many different sections to inspect within the Bible. There was the Torah, the first five books, in which probably Genesis was the most interesting. Then there were the writings, like Esther, Job, and Ruth, and of course the prophets, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah. He decided this time to have a look around the end in the New Testament, probably the section he was least familiar with. And then he became interested in an idea. What was the very last book of the Bible? Flicking through, he eventually found himself looking at the Revelation of St John. He had heard of this, but he had never read it.He began to read the first couple of verses.‘The revelation of Jesus Christ that God gave Him to show His slaves what must quickly take place. He sent it and signified it through His angel to His slave John, who testified to God’s word and to the testimony about Jesus Christ, in all he saw. The one who reads this is blessed, and those who hear the words of this prophecy and keep what is written in it are blessed, because the time is near!’He laughed inside just a little. The time is near, is it? He we are about 2500 years away from when this book is written, whatever this book was writing about, it had probably never happened. He began to skim read it, and eventually began to flick through a couple of the pages. He soon found himself at the beginning of chapter 13.‘And I saw a beast coming up out of the sea. He had 10 horns and seven heads. On his horns were 10 diadems, and on his heads were blasphemous names. The beast I saw was like a leopard, his feet were like a bear’s, and his mouth was like a lion’s mouth. The dragon gave him his power, his throne, and great authority. One of his heads appeared to be fatally wounded, but his fatal wound was healed. The whole earth was amazed and followed the beast. They worshiped the dragon because he gave authority to the beast. And they worshiped the beast, saying, “Who is like the beast? Who is able to wage war against him?’What could this be talking about? He found himself thinking about the earth’s current president, Wilbur Wilson. Nothing about this passage seemed at least on a surface reading to relate at all to anything in the present day. But as he read further down, his hands began to tremble.‘And he requires everyone—small and great, rich and poor, free and slave—to be given a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark: the beast’s name or the number of his name.’He remembered the day he had been given his implant. This was the chip through which they could access their funds, and also served as identification, in the same way a driver’s license would have back in the day. His was embedded in his right hand, and to his knowledge, it was sometimes implanted in the forehead.How had someone around 100AD predicted this? He was about to continue reading, when he heard a voice speaking to him, quietly but clearly.
‘Micheal, I am an extension of the Terminus global AI system. It has been found that you are causing yourself distress by reading volatile material, and I have been assigned to direct you away from this using brain stimulation. Please put the book back and take a break today in your home.’
‘What?’ He thought to himself. ‘What is going on?’
Again, the voice came through. ‘Please put the book back and take a break in your home.’
’Well, I’m not going to do that!’ Said his own voice in his head.
But as he tried to continue further in the book, he found himself feeling a wave of nausea and anxiety wash over him, and he began to shake.
‘Put the book down Micheal.’ Came the voice again.
He was shocked, and tried to read further, but the anxiety and shaking began to increase. He felt like his brain would come running out through his ears.
‘Put the book down.’ Said the AI, this time more firmly.
Somewhere beneath all the anxiety, he knew he was angry, but it was becoming impossible to read any further. He had never heard anything about this terminus AI, but it was obviously real. He knew the anxiety he was feeling did not come from himself, he had always loved to read, and there was no way even a book such as this would have such a painful effect.
Nevertheless, it seemed impossible to go on any further in the way he was going. Then he began to wonder, had he been marked as someone dangerous now, much in the same way as people who bought blacklisted books, like Mein Kampf, would have been some hundreds of years ago. He thought about his life, he loved being an academic, and he loved that he got paid to do what he loved. He even enjoyed teaching other up and coming students in his lectures. Maybe this was a warning he should he heed. He closed the Bible and put it back on the shelf. He would go home, clear his head, and find something else to write about.
Leaving the library, he took one last look at it before he left. No, he did not want to lose his life in academia over one dangerous book. He was a good citizen, and did not want to jeopardize his position by studying something that government had deemed dangerous. Maybe he did need a break. He found himself imagining making a cup of tea in the privacy of his apartment, and reading one of the fiction books he had bought recently. This whole episode was best forgotten.
What was the most unexpected knock you got on your door?
When we lived in California, our house was next door to a gas station. There was a fence all around, about 7 feet high, until you get to our front yard then it was only about three and a half feet high.
Our neighborhood wasn’t the best, and worse than what we had expected. For example our first morning, I let my three year old son go out in the front yard, not worried that he’d go into traffic or anything because of our fence. He came in the house holding a used syringe he found in the drive way. My husband went ballistic, then finally calmed down enough to tell our son to not touch anything like that and if he saw stuff again, to tell us, but don’t touch.
The next day, there was one ON OUR FRONT PORCH!
Our neighbors across the street, very nice ladies, told us that the drug dealers would use the pay phone at the gas station and then do their drug deals on the easement in front of our house (this was before cell phones).
The gas station eventually took out the pay phone and the drug dealers moved two blocks down to the liquor store.
Peace!
No, wait.
A knock on my door.
“Hi, I’m (so and so) representing the (something) company. Our company puts in pay phones, and I noticed that there is no pay phone at the gas station next door. I polled some of the customers and they indicated that it would be nice if there was a pay phone there, but the owner won’t talk to us. We thought we could put one on your property facing the gas station. We’d pay you $600 a month if you would do this”
“Uh, no. Sorry. There used to be a pay phone but the only people who used it with any regularity were the drug dealers, who then did their deals in front of my house.”
“Well, you can’t blame the phone company for the drug problem.”
“I don’t, but as long as there is no phone, there are no drug dealers.”
“then you should be taking pictures and calling the sheriff’s dept.”
“Excuse me??? I have small children here, and drug dealers are mean people. I don’t relish getting a bullet in my head! Besides, if I put in a phone, my neighbors will never speak to me again.”
“Well, you can’t blame the phone company for that. This is $600 a month! That would help you with your small children!”
“Look. Son. What part of NO are you having difficulty with?”
SLAM!
(no kidding, I actually said that!)
Philippines Malate Nightlife JTV
This video is perhaps the best video available showing what a KTV line up looks like. Usually they do not want anyone filming. But, yeah this is kind of my life about two times a month.
If China is full of the smartest people, why is the US so much more advanced.?
The USA is NOT more advanced than China.
China is the most technologically advanced nation on earth, both in terms of daily life for the citizens, as well as in terms of the nation’s scientific and engineering advancements. Let’s look at the two individually.
Daily Life.
China has the world’s best mobile payment system. It is pretty much a cashless society. You pay for everything with WeChat or AliPay.
China has the world’s best 5G deployment. Good 5G service is available practically everywhere.
AI is widely used across the country.
EVs are widely used across the country. Charging stations are practically everywhere.
High-speed rail is widely used across the country.
Chinese subways are among the most advanced in the world.
China is the world’s largest producer of green energy, especially solar.
Nation’s Advancement.
According to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, China leads the world in 37 out of 44 critical technology fields. The USA only leads in 7.
China is granted more tech patents than the USA and Japan combined!
According to the CWTS Leiden Ranking 2023, 16 of the top 25 universities in terms of quality research output are Chinese!
According to the Nature Index, the top 23 rising science institutions in the world are all Chinese!
And 39 out of the Top 50 rising institutions are Chinese! (Seven are American, two are British, and two are German.)
The Tiangong space station is the most spectacular orbital platform in the world, easily eclipsing the aging International Space Station.
It is widely acknowledged that China’s BeiDou navigation satellite system is superior to America’s GPS.
How do Chinese people cope living in such a miserable grey country due to pollution and the fact that they are the biggest contributor to world pollution?
I took the following photo from my balcony in 20 May.
This one I took at 5PM in 6th Nov. 2023 in Shanghai National Exhbition Center
This one in Tianjin, a coast city in North China, 1:48PM, 21 Oct. 2023
This is a screenshot from my car recorder. Even when it’s cloudy, the sky is white, not gray.
Even when there was about to have a heavy rain, the sky was gray-ish, but not dirty gray.
Living in China is like going into a new era every 10 years, and the pollution thing in China is more than 10 years old.
China used to have serious pollution issues, because it was focusing on becoming industrialized before the west could shut the door of industrialization.
Should I remind the west about the uneatable fish from the Great Lakes region?
Environment in the west is not always as good as nowadays, for example, the New York City and LA city smog.
It’s almost inevitable when a country’s industry developing rapidly.
When the west finished their developing process, they turn back and forbid other countries from having their own industries,
because these former colonies should only receive high pollutive manufacturing from the west,
and spending the thin profit to buy high priced green equipment from the west,
just to deal with the pollution caused by making cheap products for the west.
China spent 2 decades to clean up the mess, and now is the leading country in green energy.
China also creates the most new green land. It created so much that the west even called this as forcing the trees to work or live, I cannot remember clearly, because I don’t want such shit to contaminate my mind.
Luna One | AI Series PART 4 | “Desolation and Giants”
All AI generated. Things are improving and changing quickly.
What are the things no one tells you about living alone?
I moved out to London five months ago. Until then, I’d shared a bathroom and sometimes a bedroom for 18 years. This is more of a what no one tells you about living alone for the first time.
You can poop with the door open. You can literally put your laptop outside the door, put on Netflix and watch Brooklyn 99 on the toilet. Heck, you could seat there and watch an entire episode, and no-one will know about it (unless you put it on Quora, obviously).
Being financially independent is…terrifying. For example, you can spend £150 on a new tattoo and then eat powdered mac & cheese from Poundland until you get paid and your mother won’t be around to nag you about it. (I would not recommend doing this).
It can get lonely. I have two siblings and they were always around to hang out or chat or annoy – I can’t do that now. When I was in London over Christmas and everyone was in their hometowns, I could go five days without leaving the house or talking to anyone in person.
You can eat what you want, when you want. For example, it’s currently 3AM and I am eating mac and cheese (see number two).
You can bring people home and not worry about any awkward interactions between them and your siblings the next morning.
You can use the shower/bath whenever you want. I’ve spent nearly two decades of my life arguing with my older sister about who gets to shower first (aka who gets to use all the hot water).
If you have pets at your parents and you move out, your new place is going to feel extremely empty. I came home every day to my dogs yapping at me and my god, I miss it.
You will never ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever be on top of your laundry. It will come out of no-where. You will produce more laundry whilst doing laundry. You will always leave at least one item out the washing machine. Being an adult is just doing laundry until you die.
There always be at least one chore to do. Washing the dishes. Vacuuming. Putting away the dishes. Cleaning the kitchen. Cleaning the bathroom. Unclogging the shower drain. Doing the shopping. It goes on and on.
There is no one else to blame when the shower gets clogged. Again, I have an older sister and we always used to blame the other person whenever the drain got blocked. Now I am the sole user of the shower in my flat and I can’t blame the hair monster in the plug on anybody else.
Ukraine Aircraft Strikes Interior Russia with West-Supplied Weapons
Ukrainian fighter jets have fired NATO missiles at a target on Russian territory for the first time in this war! A “Russian command node” was hit on Sunday in the area of Belgorod.
Expect a massive response from Moscow.
NATO continues to use Ukraine to launch its attacks on Russia!
The conflict between Ukraine and Russia is deteriorating so fast, and on so many levels due to NATO interference, that Serbia’s President Vucic now openly warns of World War 3 in Europe!!
“We are months away from a full scale war between NATO vs Russia!! All signs point to a major war in Europe!” said President Vucic. “We are heading for a major catastrophe and it seems that the train has already left the station and can no longer be stopped.”
In a TV interview, Vucic went on to say “No one in the West is talking about peace anymore – only more war. The West thinks it can win and take out Russia. I think the West is wrong. Both sides now believe it is existential for them, so I don’t think they will find a solution other than war and everything . . . everything is at stake.” he continued.
In Europe, the leaders act as the big heroes, but they are not honest and do not tell their citizens that they will all pay a big price if it comes to war” he said.
Hal Turner Snap Analysis
It’s been well over a year since the collective West announced F-16s for Ukraine. Since that moment, I said, and repeated ad nauseum, that Ukraine will NEVER GET F-16s…because they do not have airfields and maintenance to operate them.
I was right then and I am right now.
The simple FACT that they will have to use F-16s from NATO bases, also proves that those jets will have NATO pilots…because once those F-16 start hitting Russian targets, well, it will mean the EXPANDING of WW3, which already started.
It’s not really hard to understand that once Russia hits those NATO airfields, which they WILL DO, WW3 goes beyond Ukraine, hence, there is NO POINT IN TRAINING Ukrainian pilots.
I have predicted this for a very long time, and the only thing that made my dates to be wrong, was in INCREDIBLE PATIENCE OF RUSSIA.
But, as more time passed, the better accuracy my predictions become, and my last calculation was in November 2023, when I predicted direct conflict between NATO and Russia before the summer of 2024, which starts on June 20th.
I WAS 100% RIGHT — NATO forces started direct attacks against Russia at the end of last month, when they gave the “green light” to Ukraine to use Western weapons to strike inside Russia. We all know that NATO troops are doing it, not Ukrainians.
The only missing part is Russia striking back, but realistically speaking, the FACT is that Russia was directly attacked by NATO already.
In my view, Russia striking back is 100% CERTAIN.
We just don’t know when and how they will do it, but I am pretty sure that it will happen in the next 10 days, and it is going to be a major one.
War is a place where young people who don’t know each other and don’t hate each other, kill each other, based on decisions made by old people, who know each other and hate each other, but don’t kill each other.
von er Leyen and Stoltenberg will, alongside their families, take a chopper to their underground Nuclear bunker. While You and your sons and daughters will be expected to die for them.
This is the reality. Think about it.
The West is to Blame; and just won’t stop
We can expect a significant widening of the west’s participation in the conflict before Putin will be forced to react. How far this will need to go to cause his response is hard to say…. but he will not take any proactive measures to prevent any of that from happening.
Putin is very determined to avoid an escalation with NATO “at any cost.” This is clear from his words and body language. It is a misguided posture on his part as this will happen regardless of his desire.
Hopefully he is at least being properly prepared for that outcome, even if it is not his wish – and make no mistake he is VERY averse to any notion of any level of conflict with NATO. He knows this will rock the boat and he simply doesn’t want that.
As such, we can expect LOTS of tolerance with whichever the US/NATO does, short of attacking Moscow directly with NATO missiles.
Not sure it will be as fast as 10 days, as the US believe it or not, still have some self-preservation sense. But the escalation towards that outcome will be indeed visible in the next days.
The U.S. needs and wants this war because they are $34 TRILLION in debt, cannot pay it, and must get debt forgiveness. Without that, they would need to adopt austerity spending which would mean cutting the Welfare, Food Stamps Medicare, spending – which they KNOW would result in political suicide . . . they would all be voted OUT. To those politicians, losing power would be worse than dying . . . for them.
Here is the OFFICIAL Federal Reserve report on the growth of the U.S. Debt:
It is now growing at ONE TRILLION DOLLARS every 100 days! This is simply not sustainable. The government is going to collapse under the weight of its own debt. It is a mathematical certainty. There is no way out for them . . .
They’re like drug addicts who need a fix. The politicians would rather die than give up their drug, which is “power.” They’d much rather have YOU and ME die, so they can keep their power.
In order to get debt forgiveness, they NEED a nuclear exchange. The politicians who put us in this financial mess – – by buying votes with public handouts – need to be able to tell creditors “Our cities are destroyed, our people are dead, our economy is in ruins . . . . we have no hope of paying you – we need debt forgiveness.”
The Creditors, seeing this is the reality, will have little choice but to forgive the debt; but only after the country is stripped bare. National Parks, National Forests: sold-off and all the trees clear-cut for lumber to pay the debts. The Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge, sold off, and all the oil and gas drilled-for – as fast and cheaply as possible resulting in all sorts of environmental pollution – all taken to pay the debts.
Gold and silver discoveries in those national parks, all strip mined to grab the precious metals, and taken to be sold-off to pay the debts.
We will be left with a worthless plot of land, stripped bare and completely polluted, to pay the debts. The entire country will be a an absolute nightmare.
All because of the United States House of Representatives, the United States Senate, wanted to play “the sport of Kings” (i.e. war) and the Democrat party, which stole the Presidency in 2020 through election fraud along with their useful idiots who are so ignorant, so utterly stupid, they voted for these charlatans, and caused it all to happen.
At the top of the administrative heap of stupidity and ignorance, are the hirelings in the US State Department, who were so out of touch with reality and with history, they deliberately caused a war that could not be won, and should never have been fought. Nuclear War.
THAT is what I fear is coming. Very, very, soon.
“Young Men are FAILING!”: The Masculinity Crisis | Scott Galloway (E045)
Joining me today is Scott Galloway, NYU professor, published author and the host of Prof G & Pivot podcasts. Concerned for the welfare of young men, Scott sheds light on this global crisis, revealing the alarming rise in loneliness and declining economic prospects among men. In his latest book “The Algebra of Wealth”, he provides vital education on finances and investing, helping young people better understand compounding wealth and economic security. Tune in for the next hour for a deep dive into masculinity, AI, business and more.
54:22 Scott’s advice for single men on finding ‘the perfect partner’
57:12 Happiness & hedonism: how to build long-lasting happiness
As a parent what’s the hardest thing you’ve had to tell your child?
I married in 1998. In 2000 our house was ready and we planned on getting a kid. We were given three. In 2001 our triplets were born.
Life was complicated for a while — but extremely rewarding. They are great kids, all of them, all in different ways.
In December 2010 my wife collapsed, was taken to hospital and diagnosed with brain cancer. She spent the next 14 months in and out of hospitals, both in our home town and in north Portugal. In February 2012 she went into a coma, and I was told that if the kids wanted to see their mother they’d better get there pronto.
My sister brought them to me. I sat with them, huddled them together and told them that their mother was in a Intensive Care unit, that she was in a coma and that she was unable to recognize them, understand them, or even to realize that they were there.
I gave them the full options: going to see their mother, or not. I told them she wouldn’t know, and that no one would judge them, whatever their decision would be. But that they would never again interact with her.
They cried, and they thought for a while, and then told me that if she wouldn’t know that they were there, they’d prefer to remember their mother alive, rather than just a body on a hospital bed.
I passed this information on to the hospital staff. They turned off life support and she passed away, quietly, without emerging from the coma. Next came the cremation, and by this time they were really upset. We decided that as soon as possible we had to get them out of that sort of reality, so we took them for a few hours in the park. And it worked wonders — but very few people outside the immediate circle of the two families understood this. I am still being criticized, and judged, for not bringing her home for a burial, and for allowing my kids to relax their mourning.
I figured that they had had this for the whole of the preceding year. They knew their mother was ill, and they understood (I don’t know how, because no one ever told them) that we didn’t expect her to survive. I still have friends of ours — OK, mostly friends of hers — who haven’t forgiven me for it.
A few days later, once we were back home, they came to me, and told me that it was fortunate that it had been mommie who had died. I was shocked, but curious, so I asked why. And the answer they gave was amazing: “Mommie was ill and was bound to die anyway; if you had died we’d have been all alone”.
But having to tell them that their mother was dying, and having to give them the choice of seeing her or not — that was the toughest position I was ever in.
I give them full credits for taking the option they took — it just shows they are practical, smart and level-headed kids.
6 (7 inch) French rolls or 1 long loaf French bread
1 tablespoon olive oil
8 ounces boneless, skinless chicken breast meat, cut into thin strips
1 cup (1 small) sliced onion
1 cup (1 small) sliced bell pepper
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup Contadina Pizza Sauce
1/4 cup chopped fresh basil leaves or 1/2 teaspoon dried basil, crushed
1/2 cup (2.8 ounce can) sliced ripe olives
1 1/2 cups (6 ounces) shredded mozzarella cheese
IG French Bread Pizza SpendWithPennies 1
Instructions
Slice bread in half lengthwise. Place cut-side up on baking sheet.
Bake in preheated 425 degrees F oven for 3 to 4 minutes or until lightly toasted.
Heat oil in large skillet over medium-high heat.
Add chicken, onion, bell pepper and salt; cook, stirring constantly, for 4 to 5 minutes or until chicken is no longer pink. Spread pizza sauce over cut surface of bread; top with chicken mixture.
Sprinkle with basil, olives and cheese.
Bake at 425 degrees F for 5 to 8 minutes or until heated through and cheese is melted.
French Bread Pizza SpendWithPennies 7
How do “soft” people survive in prison?
Here’s my experience after doing 5 years in Conn.
Guys that are soft, as you’re thinking are usually people who are not career criminals, and generally not led a difficult lives out on the streets. They come into the system with few “natural enemies” so to speak. A lot of guys get in trouble because they continue “beefing” with people inside the walls.
“soft” guys usually mind their own business, or are not nosy, or don’t pay attention to problems not their own. They tend to be quiet, keep to themselves.
Alot of these type guys are actually fairly smart, educated, come into it with other “transferable skills.” They become useful to the other inmates. A man who is able to help other inmates read their court documents, or letters from the lawyers; Or, they need a letter composed to the judge complaining about a shady lawyer; Or, the “quiet guy” has art skills, and can do some amazing artwork, and he charges a reasonable rate. If this is the case, you might find this “soft” guy actually winds-up with alot of protection from the guys who have benefited from his various skills.
I was told also: ‘you do not know who that guy knows, if anyone is looking out for him from the background. It’s best not to find-out the wrong way. Leave people alone, if they leave you alone,’ is one of the gold rules that will do you well, going in.
What battles in history were won because one side did something so unthinkable that it caught their opponent completely by surprise?
Oh, this one will be fun: How about the one battle in history where infantry defeated a navy fleet?
I give you, the Miracle of Empel.
It’s the year 1585 and the wars of Flanders were ongoing between the Spanish Empire and the Dutch Heretics. During winter, some of the Spanish Tercios of Alejandro Farnesio, commanded by Francisco de Bobadilla, were stationed at Bommelerwaard but were promptly surrounded by a great army and 100 ships led by Phillip of Hohenlohe. The Spaniards were offered terms to surrender but they simply answered with immortal words:
“Spanish soldiers prefer death to dishonor. We will talk about surrender after death”
And so began the siege. The Dutch did everything right, using their superior numbers and artillery to push the Spaniards more and more and they even flooded the countryside to bottle up the Spaniards and allow their ships to get closer and bombard their camp. The Spanish were surrounded by water and ships. Bobadilla then set up a final stand at Empel, and waited for their doom. However, as they prepared their positions, a Spanish soldier, while digging, is said to have found an image of the Immaculate Conception, which was quickly taken as a sign that God was with Spain. The Image was set next to the Burgundy Cross and the morale was restored. They would die fighting.
It was december 8th, and as night descended, a terrible cold came with the dark. It blew fiercely and continuously, such that temperature went down and down, until water began to freeze.
At some point, the Spaniards realized that all the waters around Empel had frozen over and that the Dutch fleet was trapped in the ice. God was with them, said the soldiers of the Catholic King, and so, with the terrible cries of “Santiago” and “Cierra España” the fearsome Spanish Tercios crossed the ice on foot and fell upon the Dutch ships, like wolves on sheep.
Hundreds of heretics died and all the ships burned. The Tercios marched away victorious:
After the battle, Admiral Hohenlohe-Neuenstein supposedly said: “It seems that God is Spanish to work such a miracle for them”.
How do you perceive the increased assertiveness of the Philippines towards China in the South China Sea under President Ferdinand Marcos Jnr?
Marcos is doing a job for USA: keep creating conflicts in SCSea. Exactly like what Ukraine did 10 years ago that resulted a Russia-Ukraine war. War is what USA wants.
Assertiveness??? That is part of the job for Marcos to reach the end result: WAR for USA.
After WW2, from 1946-2001, in 55 years, there were 248 wars around the globe. 201 of them ie 82% were instigated by USA. In 200+ years since US independence, there were less than 20 years when USA was not in a war. Worse, it is US vassals who shed blood & lose life for USA.
Other than war, USA would instigate countless unrest eg protests, riots & coups in other countries.
Thru unrest/war, USA controls other government & resource/economy. It is neo-colonisation without occupying other’s land.
In short, it is about money & power/dominance.
1, money: USA makes tons of $$$ by arms sale & post-war construction for war-torn countries.
2, power: USA weakens allies eg EU or Japan, as well as enemies eg Russia or China.
In the Ukraine war, USA uses 1 stone to kill 3 birds: weakens the economy of both Europe & Russia. & colonises Ukraine after war.
USA did not let Ukraine reach peace deal with Russia or attack Russian soil. Why? To drag the war long enough to economically weaken both Europe & Russia.
How many people died, displaced or suffered in a war? Look at Ukraine war, the entire world is affected by the interruption of supply chain eg food due to global shortage & inflation.
USA wont not let world peace to happen. USA must create unrest incl war. War is in USA’s DNA.
There are events that occur throughout our lives that we NEVER forget.
Maybe it was a wedding, the death of a loved one, an unusual event at work, a special childhood Christmas or just some random event.
Today, I want to relate an event that I will never forget.
It is the view of a half-eaten McDonald’s burger lying on the car floorboard.
…
It was six o’clock in the morning. We were living in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. We were sleeping in our mobile home that was along a nice beautiful rural road. In fact, the road ran right behind our bedroom.
Fig3
I’m half awake, and I suddenly hear screeching tires, and then smash! …. CRASH!
I get up.
I look out the window.
And a car had crashed off the road and smashed into a tree in a light pine wood behind our house.
I, and my wife, threw on some clothes and ran out to the car.
We were first on the scene.
Fig1
Two kids, maybe 16 or 17 year old African-American, in the font seat. All mangled up.
Why they were during at 90 mph on such a rural curving road is unknown. But they were busted up.
Another neighbor came and he dragged the kids out of the car, and we tried to get everyone settled down.
They kept asking for water. They were so thirsty. I think that they had internal bleeding.
Quickly, an ambulance showed up. Really quickly. Maybe ten minutes later. And the speed and the seriousness of the paramedics told me just how serious this event was.
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We did what we could and watched the kids get loaded into the ambulances, and then leave.
Then we went back to the house. But before I left the scene, I looked in at the ruins of the wrecked car. And there on the floorboard was this half-eaten breakfast burger. Sitting there.
It’s an image that I’ll never forget.
That hamburger.
Today…
Why did you leave the U.S. for Canada?
I came to Texas at the age of four. We were on the run from the Syrian government, pre-2000.
Dad got what work he could and Mom made a decent wage working at the hospital as their only Arabic interpreter. Technically, neither had the right to work. We were illegals applying for asylum. Mom’s job was a God send. We could see her doctor friends for treatment and medicine and it made us a little less scared when Dad got kidney stones. We were always afraid of police, doctors, employers, anyone who could see we didn’t belong.
Seven. Years. Later.
Our application for asylum is denied. We cannot legally renew our passports. It is December 25th. We have to have left that day. Christmas. Not that we celebrated Christmas but boy did it feel cold that winter. It didn’t matter the hospital was willing to sponsor us all given all the community and unpaid work my mother did for them, plus being their only Arabic interpreter. We get it. We aren’t wanted.
With our passports expired, we can’t fly anywhere. It was time to try Mexico or Canada. We didn’t speak Spanish and had a friend disappear up north so we figured we might as well try Canada. We had very “America” centric studies when it comes to…geography or the world really so in our heads, Canada was a frozen tundra populated by great bearded lumberjacks in plaid. We start driving from Texas, two days and two nights, two parents, five kids ranging from 11 to…I don’t even remember my youngest brother’s age at the time, he was a toddler at the time (around twelve months old), terrified that if we are stopped, we will be deported back to Syria. Asad wasn’t a nice guy then either. The country has been under martial law since before my father was born and ironically, only shortly before the civil war was it “out of martial law”. Yeah right. We drove through snow for the first time. We had ice in Texas rarely, terrible hail, tornadoes but not snow. It was fascinating for the first five minutes until we felt the chill. Thin Texas blankets didn’t keep out the cold and we huddled the best we could.
We made it to the border and the agent asked us where we were going.
“Anywhere out of here. Our application for asylum was denied”.
“I see. Welcome to Canada. You’ll be safe here. Please drive on in to the right”.
My memory is a little hazy at this point. They pulled us over and we spent many hours in a building. At least it was warm and there were some educational books with pictures I could use to keep my little sisters and brothers occupied with. Big shots weren’t in so early on the 28th.
Fast forward, our application is accepted. We become landed immigrants, eventually citizens. I get to live in a country that understands there is a whole world out there besides just our country. A country that cares for its vulnerable people and people don’t fear to see a doctor for illness. Where if you bump into someone, both people say “Sorry!”. Where a member of parliament knocked on my door reminding us to vote.
So what made me leave the U.S.A. for Canada? Divine providence.
Famous Professor Jin gave an English Podcast. Taiwan Unification within 4 YRS! Likely by force.
Professor Jin made a English podcast, saying Taiwan will not have another Presidential Election.
Pretty good, and the details are unique. Worth watching or listening to.
THEY KEPT POKING THE RUSSIAN BEAR THINKING THEY COULD TEAR OUT ITS CLAWS
Looking at it from the ivory towers of Washington and London it all looked pretty straightforward. It had worked in Afghanistan in the Seventies so why not now? But things had changed…
Of course they knew what they were doing. They were dumb, but they were not stupid… if you know what I mean. They surely did know what they were doing. They knew precisely and in great detail the trap they were laying. All it would take to bring Russia down was to just keep on poking the Russian bear and lure it into the trap they had prepared for it.
The goal they set for themselves was clear. Eliminate Russia as a nation that could seriously oppose their desire for global hegemony, to weaken it and to unbalance it to the point where the present leadership and government would be so undermined they could be easily ousted and replaced. Once done they could set about carving Russia up into manageable pieces.
All the elements with which to do the above they believed were in place. There was no way, they thought, that Russia could withstand what they had poised ready for it. All they needed in order to bring most of the rest of the world along with them was ‘just cause’. Was the 2014 coup in Ukraine part of that plan? Was it meant to neatly dovetail into all that was to come as a consequence? I suspect it was and that the resistance to that coup in the Russian-speaking east of the country would rise up as a consequence.
Whether the Maidan coup in 2014 and its inevitable consequences were all part of the plan or whether it was merely a launch point that was spotted eagerly by the neoconservatives who needed such a moment is unknown as yet. If it was all part of the plan to ‘get Russia’ the first hiccup came with the success of the self-defence forces of eastern Ukraine against the Kiev regime’s rather lackluster army. By 2015 it was clear that things were going very wrong for the West on that front.
The Minsk process, initiated by Angela Merkel through a plaintive plea to Vladimir Putin asking for diplomacy to take centre stage, began and continued until it finally foundered in 2021. Upon its demise Ms Merkel, along with Petro Poroshenko confessed that they had never had any intention of seeking peace but had simply used Minsk as a means to building up the Ukrainian army to NATO standards. The plan was back on track.
This was when the poking of the Russian bear began in earnest. Up to this point there had been the (unreported in the West) shelling of the civilian populations of the Russian-speaking regions of Donetsk and Lugansk. This continues right up to the present day but by 2021 had been occurring daily and nightly since 2014. Though Petroshenko, Ukrainian president through most of this period continually said Russia had invaded Ukraine it was in fact predominantly the male and female populations of Donetsk and Lugansk who were defending these regions with the help of a few hundred Russian volunteers. The plan required that the ‘Russian Invasion’ meme stick and the evidence for such an invasion simply was not there.
So, start poking the Russian bear harder and if possible get it into a corner from which it would have to break out sooner or later. Russia’s efforts over the best part of a decade through Minsk to reach peace and reconciliation in Ukraine had been fruitless by design. Now, with no pathway to peace available and both Merkel and Poroshenko basically laughing at how Russia had been tricked, Russia turned to another possibility, inviting both NATO and the U.S. state to negotiate on a new security architecture for Europe that would ensure peace and also include Russia within it. This was rejected more or less out of hand by both western powers. Russia was being remorselessly placed in the corner designed for it and inevitably it exploded out from the place it had been pushed into.
Zelensky was talking of regaining Ukraine’s nuclear status. The shelling of Donetsk and Lugansk during the first two months of 2022 reached a new peak of intensity. It became clear that unless Russia acted now the Kiev regime intended to launch an all-out attack on them. Indeed documents were apparently found to this effect.
Finally, all the pressure, all the relentless poking paid off for the western planners, a cornered Russia, looking at NATO soon to be squatting on its borders and a nation upping its hate campaign against Russia into the distant future, with the knowledge that every means would be used to destabilise the Russian nation, the bear burst from the corner long prepared for her.
The western planners must have been cock-a-hoop on February 24th 2022 when the first Russian troops crossed the border into Ukraine. They had done it, they had tormented the bear into doing exactly what they had long planned for. Now would come the barrage of financial and economic weapons that would bring Russia down in combination with the uprising, the Moscow Maidan that would come as a result.
The heinous, unprovoked attack upon poor, innocent, democratic Ukraine by the dictator-led Russia would bring every nation large or small together in condemnation and unify them as one against this unconscionable Russian aggression.
Putin would fall. The Russian government would fall. The collapse of the Russian economy would bring with it a banking collapse, anarchy and rioting in the streets and a retreat of the nation back to the terrible Nineties. All ripe for regime change, the elimination and replacement of all those the West had long targeted.
Only none of the above rosy scenarios envisaged by the western planners came to be. Their ‘Afghanistan Solution’ of enticing Russia into Ukraine and then laying it low by expenditure of massive amounts of blood and treasure failed. Russia obstinately refused to collapse. The Russian economy began to grow. The Ruble wavered then strengthened. The nations expected to join with the West in condemning Russia failed to do so and instead expanded their trade with it. Public opinion, even in the West was split. As time went on and more people became informed of the entire timeline of events Russia began to receive much more support among them than condemnation.
The plan had gone horribly wrong. Russia was not weakened, but strengthened. Russia’s reputation in the world had improved, not been destroyed. The collective west was being abandoned by more and more nations it had previously considered its compliant proxies. The reputation for probity the western leaders still retained to some degree even in spite of their disastrous regime change wars approached its nadir. Humiliation awaited for the debacle of Ukraine that they had foisted on the world. Half a million Ukrainians were dead as a result of their convincing Zelensky not to seek peace but to fight on. The plan was as good as dead. But still they kept poking the Russian bear… and we now know what to expect next, don’t we?
NATO Escalation & Propaganda – Glenn Greenwald, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen
https://youtu.be/v0TcDSG-YmQ
As a foreigner, would you get arrested in China if you started bad mouthing the Chinese government?
Not at all
Typically they will ignore you
Sometimes they may be amused , they don’t talk much about politics, ask a Chinese what they think of Xi Jingping and they smile and say very little
There are four NO NOs in China that will definitely bring in the authorities:-
Taking a picture in a NO PHOTOGRAPHY zone. They can take your phone, wipe the pictures and fine you between 500–5000 RMB
Live streaming in a restricted zone. That’s a definite fine.
Public Nuisance. So if you scream “Taiwan Independence” or “Xi Jingping is a fool” in a loud voice, that’s a heavy fine
Graffiti & Posters. China is notoriously tough on graffiti and posters so if you spray graffiti or stick posters on public buildings for any reason – that’s fine plus minimum jail time
However these things result in a maximum fine and maybe at the very worst DEPORTATION for foreigners
When can you get arrested?
When your intentions become highly suspect
China doesn’t care about your normal regular critic of the CPC
They however care about those who are organized and funded by foreign NGOs to deliberately forment trouble in China
For instance during the Covid protests in Shanghai University – most students just wanted to go home and they were merely warned off
However some came because they were paid but didn’t know why they were paid. They too were just warned off
There were 7 from Taiwan whose funding revealed an Agenda and they are still in prison after 14 1/2 months
So if you are an average nutcase who screams against Xi and CPC
At worst you will be deported for being a nuisance
If you conspire with a foreign nation taking money to spread Anti CPC agenda, then that’s 5–25 years jail
Tucker Carlson : This is UNBELIEVABLE
What is the scariest thing that has ever happened to you?
Sheer, unadorned terror?
Around 1974, I was taking a poop in a Florida State Park outdoor primitive toilet.
There I was, pants down, not thinking of anything in particular, when I felt this light tickling on my “equipment”.
I casually looked down – and it’s a very good thing I didn’t just reach down and scratch – and, to my absolute horror, a giant centipede was doing the royal tour of my genitals!
The biggest native centipede in Florida is the Blue, which can get quite large and inflict a minor bite, and this wasn’t a Blue. It was at least seven inches long, brown in color with yellow legs and an immense head with huge fangs. It was an invasive from some tropical country.
I know I died for 25 seconds. My heart did stop. My vision grew dark at the periphery. Somehow, I grasped I had to keep still or endure hours of mind-bending pain from multiple bites, not to mention permanent psychological damage. And, perhaps, sterility.
If the thing had vanished from sight, I’d probably still be sitting there all these years, wondering exactly where it was.
Fortunately, it climbed leisurely up my naked thigh, along my jeans, antennae waving and legs wriggling, to my knee – where, with a strength and courage born of desperation, I slapped it barehanded off my leg.
It landed with an audible thump on the concrete and scooted behind the base of the toilet faster than any animal I have ever seen.
I leaped in a single hop, my pants around my ankles, out the door, pulled up my pants and actually ran a quarter mile through the woods at record speed, just to get away from it!
It was literally weeks before I would sit down on anything without thoroughly inspecting it, and only in clean rooms with minimalist furniture. Going to bed involved inspecting every inch of the floor and drawers and sealing the doors and windows.
Eventually, the memories ceased, but I still start at the sight of one.
Absolutely SAVAGE! Men vs Women Survival REACTION | Njideka
TOTALLY CRAZY: Presidents Who Gamble With Nuclear Armageddon | Jeffrey Sachs, May 18, 2024
BBQ Bacon Pizza
Looking for an easy pizza recipe that’s big on flavor? This pizza starts with a delicious, quick and easy pizza crust and has sweet caramelized onions, tangy barbecue sauce and then the smoky, salty topping of crumbled bacon.
bbq bacon pizza
Prep: 15 min | Rise: 10 min | Bake: 8 min | Yield: 1 (12 inch) pizza
1/2 cup caramelized onions* (from about 2 medium yellow onions)
5 slices thick cut bacon, cooked, drained and cut into 1/4 inch pieces
Instructions
In a large bowl mix together 2 cups of bread flour, sugar, salt and Fleischmann’s® RapidRise® Instant Yeast.
Make a well in the center of the dry ingredients and add the warm water. Using your hands, mix everything together until it forms a dough. The dough will be sticky, but it will come together once you knead it!
Turn the dough out onto a floured surface and knead the dough for 5 minutes or until the texture of the dough starts to smooth out. If the dough feels too sticky, add remaining 1/4 cup flour in a tablespoon at a time until the dough is dry enough to work with. Form the dough into a ball and place into a greased bowl. Cover loosely with a dish cloth and put in a warm place to rise for just ten minutes.
After ten minutes, turn the dough out onto a clean work surface. Placing it on a piece of parchment paper makes cleanup and transport easy. Stretch out dough into a 12 inch round and place on pizza stone or baking sheet. Top with tomato sauce, barbecue sauce, cheese, caramelized onions and bacon.
Bake at 500 degrees F for 10 minutes. Allow to cool before slicing and eating!
Notes
* To make the caramelized onions, thinly slice 2 yellow onions (about 1/8 inch thick). Heat 2 tablespoons of butter in a large skillet over medium heat. Place onions in the pan and sautée, stirring frequently, for about 15 to 20 minutes depending on the onions. If onions begin to get dry, add a little water to the pan to deglaze. Onions are finished when they’re uniformly soft and have a rich golden brown color. Season to taste with salt.
What should the United States’ response be if China attacks Taiwan?
The USA should do nothing. It’s none of their business.
Taiwan is part of China. They have an unfinished civil war. Let them resolve the civil war.
The USA has no right to interfere in another country’s civil war or domestic affairs.
Any direct response would risk all-out war, even nuclear war. The results would be a crashed global economy, millions of casualties, and unimaginable nuclear devastation.
As a foreigner, would you get arrested in China if you started bad mouthing the Chinese government?
The term “Chinese government” is not an abstract concept. It has a two-dimensional structure: on one hand, it includes a five-tier system from the State Council down to provinces, prefecture-level cities, counties, and towns. On the other hand, it consists of dozens of departments, each of which can be categorized by national, provincial, prefecture-level, county, and town levels.
Therefore, when a foreigner criticizes the Chinese government, their criticism is necessarily directed at a specific institution within this structure. For example:
“I want to criticize the Environmental Protection Bureau of Nanshan District, Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China,”
or
“I want to criticize the Town Government of Xinhua Street, Huadu District, Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, China.”
The former targets a district-level government department, while the latter targets a town-level government.
In either case, your criticism can reach the authorities through the information channels provided by the Chinese government. These official channels include:
The mayor’s hotline;
The complaint hotline set up by the institution you are criticizing;
The complaint channel on the State Council website;
The local Petition Office;
The local Discipline Inspection Commission of the Communist Party of China.
The distinctions among these channels are:
General criticisms and suggestions (such as a local restaurant emitting large amounts of smoke) can be addressed through options 1 and 2. If an institution is suspected of violating Chinese laws and administrative regulations (such as officials taking bribes), option 3 can be used. If the issue is serious, option 4 is appropriate. If the institution severely violates Communist Party rules (such as party members engaging in corruption), option 5 should be used.
In addition to these official channels, ordinary people can also use other lawful means to voice their criticisms:
Calling the media;
Expressing criticism on their personal social media platforms.
Some government officials’ illegal activities have been exposed through these channels.
There might be minor inaccuracies in the above description, but overall it is correct.
Therefore, as a foreigner, if you wish to criticize the Chinese government, you have up to seven options provided above. No one will arrest you because the issues you raise might be problems that others also want to address. Additionally, Chinese police are very busy with their workload and are not interested in you.
However, if you, as a foreigner, do the following:
Criticize the Chinese government without specifying a particular institution;
Criticize the Chinese government without providing concrete facts, only expressing opinions and attitudes;
Then you will not be welcome in China. In fact, you likely wouldn’t be welcome in your own country or anywhere else in the world. If you simply say “I hate the Chinese government” or “I hate the CPC” without providing reasons, you are undoubtedly just a racist discriminating against China. Whether such behavior will lead to arrest depends on specific circumstances:
Whether you are criticizing or “badmouthing”;
The context in which you speak;
Your purpose in speaking;
The content of your speech.
Specifically,
If you have specific criticism and facts, no one will arrest you because the police won’t do something blatantly illegal that would leave them open to criticism.
If you are just “badmouthing” in private or at a small gathering, no one will arrest you. This is still considered “private space.”
If you badmouth simply to seem cool and provoke the police, you can try saying bad things about China directly to them. Most likely, they will give you a verbal lesson on basic decency—when in Rome, do as the Romans do, be polite and respect other countries—and then tell you to get lost. However, if you intend to spread your badmouthing to convince hundreds or thousands of people, you won’t have to wait for the police to find you; I would report you myself as a troublemaker.
If you are merely making empty derogatory statements, you will just be unwelcome. But if your comments are full of malice, slander, and lies, you will undoubtedly be arrested, and rightfully so.
In conclusion, I’ve helped you analyze this issue. I hope my analysis helps you understand the following facts about China:
Ordinary Chinese people criticize government institutions every day, and no one gets arrested. I personally filed five complaints against three government institutions through the mayor’s hotline last year alone.
The same applies to foreigners.
If you have no specific target or facts and are just badmouthing, it’s best to stay home and avoid traveling abroad, as no country will welcome you.
Rest assured, if you engage in such behavior, given that the incident is international, you might make the news in China and internationally. Your benefit may be limited to becoming an internet celebrity after your release from prison.
Almost all Chinese police officers are university graduates, and many have master’s degrees. Therefore, their (especially the young officers’) English proficiency is quite good, and they are courteous. If they arrest you, they will respect your basic human rights and will not beat you.
Be brave and try!
P.S. Many years ago, in my city, a Russian cyclist ran a red light and was fined by the police. This clever Russian guy said in Russian, “I don’t speak Chinese, I don’t understand anything, I’m leaving, goodbye!” But to his surprise, the police officer spoke Russian. Thus, the communication barrier was eliminated, and the Russian had to pay the fine because the Chinese traffic police officer graduated from Saint Petersburg University.
CHINA MANUFACTURING OLD CHIPS – economic warfare based on craigslist strategy…
In the year 2015, my girlfriend broke up with me after a four-year-long relationship. Her reason was very obvious that she got bored with this relationship.
But the bitter part of it was, that we were in a commitment of getting married and spend our life together. I have never planned for our separation. It was just out of nowhere.
That time I was in my master’s second year. I scored badly in two following semester because of acute depression. Somehow I managed to score better in the final two semesters and got a good job via campus placement.
Meanwhile, I tried to convince her and get her back in my life for three years. Till last year I was running behind her. Tried everything I could do, but all in vain.
It’s a long story and I have put all those gloomy years in a book. So, keeping it in short.
Last year, when I called her to talk again, she replied, “Abhishek, why don’t you understand?” [Abhishek, aap samajhte kyon nahi ho?]
That day I understood and slowly moved on. It took me almost seven-eight months to get over. Now I have no desire left for her.
Oh! You are looking for the revenge part?
Well. Her elder sister called me on this 9th of April(2019). She told me that they(her family) are unable to find a well settled for her(my ex-girlfriend). She asked me if I can marry her? I was smiling. I was a little hurt as it reminded me of everything. But I did not show any disrespect and told her to talk to my parents.
Guess what? My parents rejected the girl at once. They clearly refused even discussion. My mother asked, “Where was she for the last four years?” They had no answer.
The best part of this story is that I did not take revenge. But the Almighty himself got involved and brought her to my door. Earlier I have moved on but had a feeling of getting rejected. But now I am out of that feeling too.
Trust me when I am talking about the Almighty, because four years are more than enough to find a well-settled groom for an arranged marriage.
Be sure
Have you ever worried about a fired employee coming back with firearms?
Originally Answered: Have you ever worried about a fired employee coming back with a gun?
I fired my secretary – she came back looking for me with a gun in her hand.
IN CANADA.
She was a liar and a drunkard – even on the job. After THREE legal letters I had no choice but to tell her, she was drunk again, that she was now, finally, released from her job. She left.
When I came to work the next morning she was there, by the TWX machine – precursor to the FAX, for you who aren’t old enough…
She proceeded to overturn just about everyhing loose and to throw the full coffee pot at me, and left screaming.
I went home to get a camera to record the mess.
On my way back the building concierge stopped me at the garage entrance.
“Don’t go in, Mr. Lindvall, your secretary is walking around, looking for you.
She has a gun in one hand and a flower pot in the other.”
I left.
in the ensuing trial, she claimed unlawful dismissal
The state went after the substantial value of the incoming payment cheques that she had cashed the bank over my faked signature. (I had no signing rights.) and – the ILLEGAL GUN.
A few months later, my secretary was in jail for “illegal possession of a handgun” – a six months prison sentence by itself and for “theft over $ 15,000”.
The bank manager, her friend, fared even worse, don’t steal from a Canadian bank… (They had shared the take.)
ME? Oooh for the hours and hours of interviews with the RCMP, FBI (I worked for a Canadian office of an American company) and the bank security people. No blame fell on me, nor the HR department, all was done by the rule book.
THE TWX machine?
She had sent the same message to about 80 of our corporate offices around the globe.
“This is your official notification, Bengt Lindvall is dead and will never respond to any more business mail.”
The gun? It was a Russian made 9 mm gun, nicely chromed, that she had brought home as a souvenir from her time as a secretary to a Canadian general during the Korean war. (1953)
ALERT: NEW BIRD FLU w/100% KILL RATE, MYSTERIOUS ORIGIN, LEBANON WAR BEGINS, PUTIN CHECKMATES USA
What are some of the coolest ways to react if someone mistakes you for a server in a restaurant and asks you to clean the table?
Originally Answered: What are some of the coolest ways to react if someone mistakes you for a waiter or a waitress in a restaurant and asks you to clean the table?
One night I went to a Thai restaurant wearing black T-shirt and black jeans, looking similar to staff at that restaurant. After I greeted my friends who worked there I walked to an empty table while another friend was still chatting.
As I was about to reach my table, a customer at the table next to mine waved me down and asked me to wipe the spilled red wine on their table. I said no problem and went on to ask for a cloth from my friend at the counter. She asked if my table was dirty. I said, “no, but just give me the cloth” and she did.
I went back to the table and wiped the table. They asked me to clear some plates, asked for more water and ordered a couple more meal and extra rice. I took the order, but didn’t take plates because I wasn’t allowed to get in the kitchen area where dirty plates were to go. I told them I’d take their order to the counter, then back with water and will sort out the plates.
Another trip back to the counter. Gave the order to my friend. By that time my friends had realised what I was doing and played along. She grabbed me a bottle of water and told another girl to clear the table.
I returned to the table with water and told them the other girl would clear the table for them and that the meals would arrive shortly.
Then I proceeded to my table, sat down and started looking at the menu. The next-table guy looked at me with confused face, but said nothing. After the girl cleared the plates she came to me and took my order.
He asked with wide eyes, “Are you a staff?” I smiled and answered, “No, I’m a regular customer.”
The look on the guy’s face was priceless!
MARK SLEBODA: PUTIN NOT BLUFFING, SENDS NAVY TO U.S. COAST | IS WWIII COMING?
Why Are Vast Numbers Of People Relocating To Small Towns All Over The Country?
In recent years, Americans have been fleeing our largest cities in unprecedented numbers, and many of them have decided to settle down in quiet little towns all over the country. There are many reasons why this is happening, and I will highlight several of them below. If this trend continues, what will our major metropolitan areas look like? Violence, theft, drugs, homelessness and international migration have all risen to crisis levels and are putting a tremendous amount of strain on our core urban areas. Meanwhile, many small towns are absolutely booming as wave after wave of big city refugees comes pouring in. People have been leaving large metropolitan areas for a long time, but once the pandemic arrived that trend greatly accelerated…
In the three years before the pandemic, counties in metro areas with at least 1 million residents lost a total 200,000 or so residents annually to other regions, after figuring both people moving in and leaving, according to the Goldman report. After COVID, those losses vaulted to 750,000 in 2021, 650,000 in 2022 and 550,000 in 2023, according to Goldman and Census data. The numbers reflect annual changes through July of each year. A separate study by Lombard shows the domestic migration losses were concentrated in the largest metro areas with more than 4 million residents. Those cities shed a total 400,000 residents annually before the pandemic and have lost 820,000, 707,000 and 591,000 residents, respectively, over the past three years.
Last year, about 266,000 of the big city refugees moved to metro areas with populations of 250,000 to 1 million and about 291,000 moved to areas with populations under 250,000. That made those small towns the nation’s top destination for domestic migrants for the first time in decades, Lombard says. In 2023, the New York City metro area lost 204,000 residents; Los Angeles, 119,000; and Chicago, 64,000, according to Census and Moody’s.
So why is this happening? Well, there are a number of reasons why so many people are relocating to small towns these days. For many, the quality of life in big U.S. cities has become utterly deplorable. For example, one young Chicago mother recently had to wait for hours for a police officer to show up after masked robbers entered her home…
A Chicago mom who called 911 during a terrifying break-in was left on her own for hours — with dispatchers telling her to call her local representative to demand more police funding. Michelle called the emergency hotline six times after coming face-to-face with two masked bandits, only for the strained supervisor to tell her the city’s severe budget cuts had left them with a bare-bones staff. “A gentleman got on and said sorry to say we have no units to send you … then there was an awkward pause,” Michelle told NBC Chicago Wednesday, declining to share her name or face while her would-be robbers are still on the loose.
I don’t know why anyone would want to live in Chicago at this point. Of course the exact same thing could be said about most of our other large cities. Another reason why a lot of Americans are choosing to relocate has to do with taxes. There has been a mass exodus out of “high tax states”, and Massachusetts is one of those that is being hit really hard…
Massachusetts is in danger of losing nearly $1 billion in annual revenue over the coming years as high state taxes trigger an exodus of wealthy residents. Since 2013, migration out of Massachusetts has seen an “alarming” 1,100% increase to more than 39,000 people, according to new findings published by Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. If the trend continues, more than 96,000 residents making a cumulative $19.2 billion in adjusted gross income will leave the state by 2030. The study estimates those departures would cost Massachusetts about $961 million in income tax revenue each year.
In my rankings of all 50 U.S. states, I have Massachusetts all the way down at number 44. The cost of living crisis that we are currently facing is another factor that is motivating vast numbers of Americans to relocate. At this point, we are being told that Mississippi has the lowest cost of living in the entire nation…
Imagine stepping into a world where your paycheck stretches like bubblegum and the promise of Southern charm meets you at every corner. Welcome to Mississippi, a land where the living is easy, the cost of living is easier, and every quirk adds color to the canvas of daily life. Here, your financial aspirations can don a superhero cape, albeit in a landscape peppered with challenges that keep things interesting.
One of the reasons why Mississippi has such a low cost of living is because average home prices are the lowest in the country…
Mississippi’s housing costs are the lowest in the nation. Home prices range from $32,000 to $240,000 depending on the city, with an average of $162,292.
But even though it has such a low cost of living, I don’t really like Mississippi as a place to live during the chaotic times that are coming. In fact, in my rankings of all 50 U.S. states I have Mississippi all the way down at number 33. Ultimately, the cost of living is only a minor consideration when it comes to choosing a place to live during the extremely difficult years that are ahead of us. Much more importantly, you will want a location that has like-minded people, that has a low population density, that has a low risk of experiencing major natural disasters, and that is not near any important military targets. Unfortunately, such areas have become very popular in recent years and home prices are going through the roof. For instance, the median home price in Bozeman, Montana has risen to about $770,000…
Nowhere has the affordability crisis been felt as acutely as in Bozeman, a city of about 56,000 not far from Yellowstone National Park and the upscale Big Sky skiing community. Bozeman, where the median home sells for about $770,000, has had so many out-of-state arrivals over the years that Montanans sometimes refer to it as “Boz Angeles.” As high-end rentals in Bozeman spring up next to historic homes and new arrivals snap them up, a smattering of tents and RVs have begun to populate the outskirts of town: homeless residents priced out by rising rents. Many longtime Montanans bristle at the newcomers, and bumper stickers proclaiming some version of “Montana Is Full” abound, occasionally with an expletive attached. Some locals blame the popular television show “Yellowstone” for romanticizing the Mountain West, luring people to the state.
A lot of Americans now find themselves priced out of many of the most desirable communities in the country, and that is extremely unfortunate. If you are considering relocating to another part of the nation, I would encourage you to do it soon. Because global events are starting to really go haywire, and the clock is ticking.
Married be like
Biden has repeatedly stated his intent to prevent China to be the most powerful country in the world. Why does the US persist in suppressing China to maintain the only superpower instead of striving to improve itself?
It’s basic human psychology. When you’ve been #1 for much of your life, you want to remain #1 forever. You want to continue receiving all the perks and privileges of being #1.
So it is with the United States. It has been #1 since the end of the Second World War. It enjoys all kinds of benefits and privileges.
The USA is a capitalist state. It is largely controlled by the wealthy elite who don’t give a rat’s ass about the American people and their welfare.
This is why America is such a basket case of a nation. Look at all the domestic problems:
homelessness
gun violence
poor health care
declining life expectancy
poor education
crumbling infrastructure
opioid addiction
mass incarceration
systemic racism (“I can’t breathe”)
growing poverty and widening economic disparity
political turmoil (January 6, 2021)
crushing national debt ($35 trillion and growing by $1 trillion every 100 days)
etc.
Biden is in denial. The American people are in denial.
Denial is not a river in Africa.
Aaron Maté: What Happens if US Troops Go to Ukraine?
“That shouldn’t be there…”Wren let the Stardrake cruise to a halt…well, as “halted” as anything could be in the shifting void of the universe. The impulse engine purred in its stasis, creating a soothing background noise as the old adventurer checked the readings on her screens and instruments.The sector she’d found herself in was devoid of any nearby celestial bodies, apart from asteroids that reminded her of driftwood in the ocean. Useful, sometimes, if collected from properly, and sometimes with bits of fishing line–in this case, thick, rusted cables from long-decayed shipwrecks–but simple sticks floating around in the water of space. She’d been on an internal, bittersweet nostalgia tangent about it when she’d noticed something odd pop up on her infrared reader.Something bigger than an asteroid. Or, at least, bigger than most of the asteroids around here.Her first thought had been that it could be another spacecraft, one with more of a population on it than her personal craft, but as it came into view of her illuminators she found it decidedly…organic. Far too wooden to belong in the vacuum of space.“WICR, give me a reading on this.”On her console, a silvery-blue light flickered on. WICR, which stood for Wavelength Information and Communications Relay, was essentially the brain of the ship, though it didn’t often pay attention to her unless she directly spoke to it.“A reading on what, Captain Caldwell?” said the bot’s voice. It really snuck into uncanny valley, she thought, how well WICR’s voice matched the inflection of a standard human’s voice.“Call me Wren,” she said, for perhaps the hundredth time. “Give me a reading on this unknown object we’re facing. It’s too big and too…wooden to be an asteroid.”“Certainly, Captain Caldwell,” he said, a hint of humor in his tone. There were a couple of contemplative beeps and the sound of something scanning, and she looked out the viewport at the object as a grid array appeared on it, mapping out its contours.She frowned, peering closer, then cursed as the grid vanished. “Do that again.”“The entire scan?” WICR asked.“No, the grid array. Let me see it.”The array flashed on again, lingering as she tried to make out its shape. It almost seemed like…a building?“Are you satisfied, Captain?” WICR asked.“Sort of,” she said, leaning back. “Have you finished scanning it?”“Yes. It seems to be a manufactured structure. The framework is steel and lead. The outer shell appears to be brick and mortar, made of what appears to be a mixture of wood, clay, and trace amounts of other materials. Due to the lead, it is difficult to get a reading on the inside, but–”“What’s the architecture’s origin?”“A planet known as La’uck Lao.”Wren frowned as a thought occurred to her. She was going through an asteroid field right now…“Can we get a read on some of these other objects around the ship?” she asked.WICR beeped again. More grids flashed out, flickering along contours before flitting off to the next object. Wren sat in relative silence, a feeling of dread settling in her stomach.She was getting too old for this.When WICR spoke again, his voice sounded apprehensive…or maybe Wren was projecting. “There are an odd assortment of objects out here,” he said. “Most of it is igneous stone. But there is also: Ice, plant matter such as splintered wood, and manufactured metal.”
A lot of random material, she thought. But not quite as random if my hunch is right.
“WICR, one more question,” she said. “Is there supposed to be a star system in this sector?”
“Yes,” WICR said. “The main sequence star known as Lak La’uck. It is a yellow star much like Earth’s Sun.”
“Known by whom?” she asked.
“By the people of the planet of…” A few more beeps seemed to hang in the air as Wren’s meaning registered in the AI’s computing processes. “The former planet of La’uck Lao.”
“Scan for the core of that sun, but keep a grid array on the front of that structure,” she said, pulling out her bandanna. She wrapped it around her head, securing her dreads before pulling on her space helmet.
“Are you planning on entering it, Captain?”
“Yes,” she said. “Maybe I could find out what happened here.”
“And if you encounter a life form?”
She frowned. “Doubtful.” But she grabbed her holster anyway, double-checking the charge on her photon pistol before clipping it around her waist.
The expanse of the black void was cold. It settled into her aching joints with a stinging pressure, but she ignored it–arthritis be damned, she was going to figure out what this was. She drifted toward the building for a moment, enjoying the complete and utter silence of space for a moment, before switching on the propulsion system in her boots and gliding toward the ominously angular structure.
Well, she thought, her internal monologue the only sound in the universe, at least it has a regular door.
The door yawned open for her. Apart from the lines from the array leaking in, it was pitch-black inside, so she turned on her headlamp to look around. What she saw was…eerily familiar.
Books, was her first thought.
Rows upon rows, shelves upon shelves, some drifting in the zero-gravity and some neatly stacked where they’d been for countless days, were triangular shapes reminiscent of books. The covers seemed the same thickness as the pages, and had a dark hue with lighter writing on it, but they were books. She pulled one out of its stasis and flipped it open, examining the lettering–an unfamiliar alphabet, but undoubtedly writing. She examined its texture, and realized these were made of particle wood. The cover had some sort of painting on it; green flames surrounding a figure that looked vaguely humanoid, wielding what was perhaps La’uck Lao’s version of a sword.
She looked around. There were hundreds. Thousands, maybe. She turned off her propulsion boots and “walked” along the surface, eyes searching. This was a library! Arguably, at least in her eyes, one of the most important parts of a society: its knowledge.
Her heart fluttered in sympathy as she noticed the corpses floating in the dead space between the books. Somehow, this building had survived a catastrophe that had wiped out its planet and its people. It was possible that no one in the universe would ever be able to read these books again. The bodies were frozen, preserved, faces masks of horror and hands–or whatever they had instead of hands–permanently clenched as if they had been trying to hold onto something, anything, as their planet was rent asunder.
Or whatever had happened.
“WICR?” she said into the mouthpiece, then froze.
Something was watching her.
She wasn’t sure how she knew. There were no nearby sounds, there was no flicker of light save for her own, nothing had touched her. She couldn’t even pin it on the grid array lighting up a section of the wall beside her. And yet, there was a tingle of the hair pricking up on the back of her neck, the urge to run shifting her feet.
“Yes, Captain?”
She jumped out of her skin, her heart jumping into her throat. She had to be careful of that these days. As she internally reprimanded herself to calm down, though, she took a deep breath and looked around. Nothing but her shifted, and the sensation of eyes on her had gone.
“Your vitals appear to have spiked,” WICR said. “My apologies. What did you need?”
“It’s fine.” She took another deep breath. “Can you look up any other information on La’uck Lao? Alphabet, customs, stuff like that.”
“Certainly. Please hold.”
Wren continued to look around. Carefully moving between the books, she looked around at the architecture. More wood, more stone brick. Everything seemed to be triangular. The windows, doors, even a set of derelict stairs leading up to a second floor that was no longer there.
She followed the stairs anyway, then stopped, feeling the tingle of apprehension return. Her brow furrowed, and without turning, said, “I know you’re there.”
Silence. But she expected that. Murmuring to WICR to keep at his task and ignore her unless she called for help, she continued to bounce into the remnants of the second floor. It was nothing but the approximation of a rooftop now, and she sat, running a gloved hand through waving strands of what must have been a carpet. She faced the entrance to the stairs, eyes on the yawning black hole set in the off-black contours of the library.
Then she turned off her headlamp.
The feeling of being watched intensified. She felt as though she were surrounded, footsteps of a bustling patronage nullified by the blast. If she were to stand back up, she thought, she might headbutt whatever had walked up to her. Black eyes in a black face set against a black void peered at her. Invisible, hollow, and yet there just the same.
These were probably ghosts, she thought. Spirits of a planet that had been obliterated so fast the AI databases hadn’t caught up. None of the people that had been here had been properly laid to rest, because there was nowhere to lay them but a broken library surrounded by the shreds of its world.
“You probably don’t understand me,” she said. “But I want to help. I come from a planet that was destroyed just like yours. I live on a new planet now, one that was built to give people that lost their homes a new place.”
The presences around her stilled, and now she did feel something, a light pressure on her shoulder. It pressed hard enough she could feel it through her suit, but light enough she could tell it wasn’t trying to hurt her.
Or it was, and just unable. Still, it didn’t feel aggressive.
“WICR,” she hissed. “Can you get me the word for ‘friend’?”
“One moment. Who are you talking to?”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll explain later.”
She held up the book she’d picked up from below, setting it on the floor in front of her. “I have an idea,” she said. “It might be a little hard. It’d take several trips. But I would like to move this library to my new home. But…well, I’m not really privy to your customs. It just seems more fitting for a place like this to be re-established somewhere that people of many displaced cultures can come and learn about yours.”
The pressure on her arm increased, then fell away. She still felt the presence of several somethings around her, but continued to see nothing. WICR’s voice spoke in her earpiece, and she nodded.
“Ki’lom,” she said.
Abruptly, the atmosphere seemed to change. It felt more…energetic. Twin pinpricks flashed before her, reflecting in the fiberglass of her faceplate. The book she’d placed before her was lifted up, then placed firmly into her arms.
A voice spoke, raspy but warm. “Ki’lom.”
*
Several months later, the last ship to carry the final pieces of La’uck Lao Library descended on the flatlands of Hakshaithlin. Wren and Joa, her friend from Earth, had picked out a plot of land that almost matched a photo they’d found in the old library, and it had been developed–well, about as well as it could be–to accommodate both the library and the cemetery. It was grueling work, but on a planet filled with the lucky unfortunates of the universe, most of everyone was willing to pitch in to help.
Wren stood at the gate, watching a melting pot of workers fix up what they could of the library. She held that first book in her hands–after a few months she was still missing the meaning of most of the words, but she could at least make out what they spelled out. It was a fantasy story, from what she could tell, about a legendary figure from folklore.
She found herself walking down the rows of gravestones. Or, perhaps, the word “garden” fit this plot better. The locals had planted flowers around the stones, greeting the dead into this haven just as warmly as they greeted the living.
A few rows in, she creaked her way into a seated position in front of a headstone. It had been carved with lettering found tattooed on the alien’s arm, which had been confirmed by WICR to be a form of identification. As she sat, she placed the book in her lap.
“I wish we could’ve met,” she said. “I would’ve liked to be friends.”
She felt that pressure on her arm again, and turned to see a pale, misty figure sitting beside her. She couldn’t make out a single distinctive feature save two pinpricks of light where the eyes would be, but she got the impression it was smiling. Or, well, exuded the emotion of smiling. She doubted it would look the same to her.
“Ka’ehr.”
The word barely reached her ears, and in the next moment the figure had dissolved. She thought to ask WICR to translate the word, but after a moment of thought she realized she knew exactly what it meant. She smiled.
“You’re welcome,” she said to the breeze.
ODESA Hotel Along With BRITISH Army Officers Sailed In The Air After Being Hit By Russian ISKANDER-M
What was a loophole that you found and exploited the hell out of?
I once saw one of my customers do something absolutely genius when I worked as a lowly till grunt at Sainsbury’s.
So what did this customer do? Walk up to my till with a basket of shopping, followed by a whole tray of Avocados; I reckon about 30 of them, which I dutifully scanned, slightly bemused.
Perhaps they just really love making guacamole? I thought.
These particular Avocados were nearly out of date so were heavily discounted from £1.00 to 10p each. A pair of Avocados was now a bargain at 20p.
Now, it turns out our Avocados were also on offer. Not a great offer, just buy 2, save 50p. However, the till system was apparently dumb and didn’t take into account reductions before applying this discount.
This customer clearly knew that bug existed.
So those bargain Avocados looked even more delicious when the 50p discount made them cost -30p a pair…
I stared in amusement as the -30p discounts rolled in and their shopping bill became smaller and smaller and smaller, until everything they bought was essentially free. They walked out of there smiling and I sat there, pondering just how dumb the checkout software writers were at Sainsbury’s.
Nevertheless, sometime later I emailed management and told them what I’d seen. Later that year I tried the same thing, but alas, it seems they had discovered the bug and fixed it…
Oh well, at least those guys got free shopping.
All I got was a shit load of squishy Avocados…
China is overwhelming Western Imperialism. Who is the dictator ? “必看”
Artichoke Dip Pizza
An entire pizza topping devoted to the delicious and popular artichoke dip!
artichoke dip pizza
Prep: 15 min | Bake: 12 to 15 min | Yield: 1 (12 inch) pizza
1 (14 ounce) can artichoke hearts, drained and chopped
2/3 cup mayonnaise
1 1/4 cups shredded Parmesan cheese, divided
1 (4 ounce) can chopped green chiles
1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon minced onion
1 1/2 cups shredded mozzarella cheese, divided
1 cup crushed tortilla chips
2 tablespoons minced fresh parsley
Instructions
Heat oven to 425 degrees F.
Combine 1 cup flour, undissolved yeast, sugar and salt in a large bowl. Add very warm water and oil; mix until well blended, about 1 minute. Gradually add enough remaining flour to make a soft dough. Dough should form a ball and will be slightly sticky. Knead** on a floured surface, adding additional flour if necessary, until smooth and elastic, about 4 minutes.
Pat dough with floured hands to fill greased pizza pan or baking sheet. OR roll dough on a floured counter to a 12 inch circle; place in greased pizza pan or baking sheet. Form a rim by pinching the edge of the dough.
Mix together artichokes, mayonnaise, 1 cup Parmesan cheese, chiles, garlic powder and minced onion in a large bowl. Stir until well blended.
Layer crust with 3/4 cup mozzarella cheese, topping mixture and remaining cheeses. Sprinkle with tortilla chips.
Bake on lowest oven rack for 12 to 15 minutes, until cheese is bubbly and crust is browned.
Remove from oven and sprinkle with parsley.
Notes
* If you don’t have a thermometer, water should feel very warm to the touch. ** To knead the dough, add just enough flour to the dough and your hands to keep the dough from sticking. Flatten dough and fold it toward you.Using the heels of your hands, push the dough away with a rolling motion. Rotate dough a quarter turn and repeat the “fold, push and turn” steps. Keep kneading dough until it is smooth and elastic. Use a little more flour if dough becomes too sticky, always working the flour into the ball of dough.
Tik Toc
How would the U.S.A. beat China in a war?
Please mark my answer for future reference.
The only way for the United States to defeat China is to make the Chinese Communist Party lose the support of its people. If this can be achieved, the U.S. wouldn’t need to go to war; it could succeed through media propaganda or NGO-led social unrest. In Sun Tzu’s Art of War, this is called “winning without fighting.”(不战以屈人之兵)
What shocked the Chinese the most about the collapse of the Soviet Union? It was that when the Soviet Communist Party was dissolved, this vast red empire, the first socialist country in human history built through countless sacrifices, did not have a single person step forward to defend it. The Chinese assessment was: “Not a single hero.”(竟无一人是男儿)
I believe the collapse of the Soviet Union had a profound impact on the Chinese Communist Party. They realized that if a party cannot provide a good life for its people, fails to listen to them, and becomes a privileged class, turning into an imperialist state that invades or economically exploits other nations (such as the Soviet actions in Afghanistan, Eastern Europe, and Warsaw Pact countries), then that party is destined to perish.
In response, the Chinese Communist Party initiated a series of rapid reforms in the 1990s, continuing to this day. These measures include:
Actively developing the economy to make people prosperous.
Prioritizing industries related to people’s daily lives over military industries, enriching people’s lives.
Efforts to develop agriculture, eradicating famine that had plagued China for millennia.
Focusing on high-tech military capabilities rather than redundant manpower tactics, cutting military personnel multiple times to release young productivity into economic activities.
Continuously combating corruption within the party.
Expanding higher education to produce numerous engineers rather than lawyers or journalists.
Massive infrastructure projects, extending roads and bridges to remote areas to help lift impoverished people out of isolation and change their destinies.
Persistently helping people escape poverty.
Developing the economy and improving lives in ethnic minority regions, driving out extreme religious thoughts and focusing people on the pursuit of secular happiness.
Implementing strict civil servant management, dismissing or prosecuting those who violate ethics or laws.
Encouraging people to learn, study abroad, and travel overseas to understand the outside world, rather than restricting information, while focusing on social and economic progress to let people feel that China is approaching developed country status.
Improving social management and administrative efficiency, addressing every social issue as much as possible.
After decades of effort, the Chinese government has made significant progress in these areas. This leads Chinese people to believe that the Chinese Communist Party can continue to govern because they are doing a good job.
I know some might say, “The CCP has all the power, and ordinary people cannot reject their rule.” But just recall the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s when hundreds of millions of angry citizens occupied government institutions, and many officials met violent deaths. That can be seen as a bottom-up power grab because people felt the government had betrayed Mao’s ideas.
In summary, if the CPC were truly terrible, a revolution in China would be inevitable because the Chinese are not superstitious. In ancient times, when Europeans believed in the divine right of kings, the Chinese perspective was “the mandate of heaven.” Only when secular life was happy would the emperor be considered a “wise ruler” by the people. Otherwise, no matter how oppressive the government was, it would eventually fall. Chinese historians would then record the fact: “A certain emperor oppressed the people, a revolution broke out, and the dynasty fell.” The CPC’s Political Consultative Conference includes many historians who, compared to Western lawyers and journalists, are the real “kings without crowns.” The good and bad of any regime cannot escape their pens.
The lyrics of the Internationale say: “There are no saviors, we rely on neither gods nor emperors.” China, having experienced dozens of dynastic changes in its history, understands well that if it betrays the people and forms a privileged class of its own, its end is inevitable. Mao Zedong’s greatness lies in educating the Chinese people with his ideology: The sole purpose of the Chinese Communist Party is to serve the people. If you find them betraying this goal, you should rise up and overthrow the regime.
As of now, I believe the Chinese Communist Party is doing well. The Chinese people trust them. Therefore, if a war were to break out between two superpowers, how could a country with 1.4 billion people under the effective 100% management of the CCP lose?
Of course, it must be acknowledged that if the U.S. continues to focus on scientific research, improving the lives of its people, and enhancing social management, instead of being run by addicts, minority groups, inexperienced businessmen, Jewish extremists, liars, and a sleepy old man, it will remain a formidable opponent.
But today’s America, while not a joke, increasingly resembles one. China hopes its enemy is the “beacon of humanity” America, not the current version.
P.S. I respect all LGBTQ+ individuals.My first degree thesis was on sexual minorities in China.In China, sexual minorities have relatively free space for their activities. However, the Chinese government prefers that it not become a public issue.The reason is that the United States has a tradition in its foreign relations: certain covert agencies identify obscure topics in other countries and, through media operations, turn them into hot issues. Then, they search for vulnerabilities behind these topics from various angles and have opinion leaders polarize the issue. Consequently, unity disappears, and social conflicts erupt. This is the typical approach of American NGOs, as I’ve observed in my 23 years of experience working on the internet. Therefore, Americans should play these games in their own country.
U.S. Plan To Deploy Soldiers To Fight Russia ! w/ Scott Ritter
Guys, all people who are arrested and sentenced to prison, must spend an amount of time waiting in jail. The reason for this is simple because (in the United States) the jails and prisons are full, and there is a long waiting list that you have stand in until you can get placed.
In my sorry experience at the ADC, I ended up waiting nine months in jail.
And I will tell you that the jail was better than the ADC prison in certain respects. We didn’t eat that much, but at least the food resembled “normal food”. We had two oreos as a dessert. We ate chicken wings, and hot dogs. We had french fries. While in Prison (well the Arkansas ADC) you ate mashed turnips, boiled okra, and Global.
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Anyways, during that time it was terribly boring. Most of the time was spent in the cell, and we would be able to hang out in the common room to watch some television (WWF wrestling, the local news, and bowling for dollars), and play some cards.
I spent a lot of my time writing. I wrote up a couple of my MM volumes while waiting. All hand written on paper.
And when I was transferred to the ADC and went into “intake” at Pine Bluff, they looked at all the stuff that I left jail with and threw most of it away. You see, it wasn’t “state issue”. The paper, the pencils, and the toothbrushes were not regulation. And so was my writings.
They collected all of them, and together they threw them into the big trash can, and that was that.
You see, once incarcerated, you are nothing.
No. Let me correct, are are below nothing.
And as I entered the old (former) slave plantation to start hard labor, I did so raw. I did so fresh, and I did so with a big empty.
They threw everything away. I was able to keep my glasses.
That was it.
So people, every now and then, we need to be reminded about our place in society; in the world, and in this universe.
And if you are a misfit, then you pack yourself up, and go to somewhere else where you are appreciated. Life is too short to live in a shithole like the United States has become.
May I suggest Thailand.
The land of smiles… where everyone loves you and you are a handsome man, no matter how butt-fuck ugly you actually are.
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2
Today…
Can a judge place an on-duty police officer in jail for contempt of court?
Originally Answered: Can a judge place an on duty police officer in jail for contempt of court?
Oh, yeah. And I’ve got a great example.
My stepfather, at the time a D.C. homicide detective, got home very late from work. Not in itself unusual, it happened from time to time. When I got home shortly after he did, about 9:30, and saw he was just getting dinner, I asked out of interest what kept him, he said he (in jest) he thought he was going to need me to bail him out of jail. So, Dad, what happened?!
Dad and his partner were in court for preliminary/discovery murder hearing. Lots of pretrial stuff. Prosecutor, case file, a couple of crime scene guys, Dad, his partner, defense counsel, . . . But NO DEFENDANT.
The judge queries the defense attorney why the defendant isn’t present. The defense attorney doesn’t know, hasn’t seen or heard from the defendant recently.
The judge rifles through the court file and says the records show that he, the judge, authorized the release of the defendant on a PR ( personal recognizant) bond.
That’s when Dad muttered under his breath he magic words . . . “You idiot.”
The judge orders Dad to come before the bench and tells him to repeat what he said. Dad does so — first lesson of life is always conceded the obvious, and it was obvious to Dad that the judge heard exactly what Dad said.
The judge holds Dad in contempt and orders him held in detention. So Dad is taken to court holding cell area, surrenders his pistol, handcuffs, keys, wallet, cash, belt, shoe laces, and tie. He was placed in a cell by himself, not with several other prisoners waiting for their own hearings.
Hours later, like at the end of a long court day, the judge orders Dad be brought into chambers. The prosecutor is there, Dad’s partner is there, and the defense attorney is there. The judge asked Dad if he had anything to say. I’ll never forget what Dad told me he said: “Yes, your Honor, I do. There was a mistake made. And apparently I made it. I apologize for what I said.”
Dad said the judge acknowledged that PERHAPS he, the judge, had erred when the authorized the defendant’s release on PR bond. The judge accepted Dad’s apology, rescinded the contempt charge, and released Dad.
As Dad and Jimmy left the judge’s chambers, Dad said he muttered again, under his breath, “You’re still an idiot,” and Jimmy shoved him through the door before he got locked up again.
California Pizza
California Pizza
Ingredients
Pizza
1 Boboli or homemade crusxt
California Oil Sauce
Mozzarella cheese, shredded
Marinated artichokes, quartered
Goat cheese, crumbled
Sliced sun-dried tomato strips
Olive oil
California Oil Sauce
1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
2 cloves garlic
1/4 teaspoon dried oregano
1/4 teaspoon dried basil
1/2 teaspoon parsley flakes
1/4 teaspoon marjoram
1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1/4 teaspoon ground black peppercorn
Instructions
Pizza
Lightly oil crust with California Oil Sauce.
Top with mozzarella cheese, artichokes, goat cheese and sun-dried tomato strips.
Drizzle with olive oil.
Bake and serve.
California Oil Sauce
Puree all ingredients in blender and store.
USA SENDING SOLDIERS to UKRAINE – greasing the slippery slope to WW3…
What’s something you can’t believe you had to explain to another adult?
Oh I have a doozy of an answer, so my current career is one in the NHS, in particular an ambulance service, now we are told when training as long as you’re attending a emergency call that providing we drive safely we can effectively break the speed limit if we are on blue lights and sirens because obviously driving to a cardiac arrest at 30mph is probably not the best course of action and the same goes for parking, so long as the vehicle is parked safely and preferably not blocking the road where possible so long as the lights are on we’re good anywhere.
Now, just yesterday I was called up to the Fleet Office at my Base, the Fleet Team are our administrative team, they deal with fuel purchases, ambulance purchases, repairs, accidents and Notices of Intended Prosecution aka parking/speeding/CAZ tickets and they are actually really smart women who I know some of my colleagues look down on because they aren’t paramedics but whatever, some people are just divs. Now the reason for my visit to Fleet? I had got a parking ticket in an ambulance, and they knew my crewmate and I had been on a 999 call and already appealed it last month however the appeal had been rejected, why? Because we didn’t pay for parking in the carpark…yep you read that right.
My crewmate and I looked at each other then back at Becky the girl talking to us, we must have looked confused because she told us she had spoken to the people who had issued the fine, a company called XCel, and they wanted to talk to the driver, me, was I okay with making that call? Um sure? So Becky dials the number and asks to be connected to the person handling this Notice someone called Jack, the call is connected and she tells him she has the driver with her, does he want to speak to me still? Yes he does. His first question, my full name, you can call me Pancake, second question, why had I not paid for parking upon arrival at the car park?
I asked if he knew what vehicle I had been driving and he reels off the registration plate of that ambulance so I asked again do you know what vehicle that registration plate corresponds to? He says yes a yellow Mercedes Sprinter, he’s right it is, I then asked if he had photos of the vehicle, he confirms he does, so I asked if he can see what’s stuck on the side of the vehicle? He says what do you mean? JACK, I was driving an ambulance on a 999 call that day, I tell him.
So? You can’t park anywhere you like, he replies. Yeah he’s right, however I was parked in bay was I not? Yes but you didn’t pay, nope because I was dealing with a woman who had collapsed and gone into cardiac arrest and had to be resuscitated. If that was your wife, Jack, would you demand the paramedics pay for parking whilst your wife’s life ebbs from her body as your kids stand crying a few feet away? Jack goes very quiet, then asks if it was a serious call? I confirm it was and whilst I was sorry we hadn’t paid £1.50 surely the fact that woman is alive more than makes up for it? She might not be a relative of yours, Jack, but next time who knows and would you like it if this was you or your family? He asks for Becky in a shaky voice and I hand the phone back.
Long story short, fine has been cancelled and Xcel parking suck.
China’s MASSIVE Ocean Project Is About To Change The World!
Very interesting.
What is the most amazing thing you overheard because people didn’t think you understood their language?
Second-hand story here:
Over 40 years ago I shared a house with a musician buddy who had a long-time girlfriend. Sonja was a stunning brunette who was frighteningly smart and had a sharp sense of humor. She was the daughter of Ukrainian immigrants and had a very good job at a financial firm on 85th floor of what is now the Willis Tower (aka Sears Tower, Chicago, USA).
One day Sonja left her office in the stratosphere and got in an elevator car with two men in business suits at the back. When the doors closed, the two men started trading increasingly lascivious comments about her, what she was wearing, what they would like to do with her, all flagrantly sexist and offensive. They were speaking in Ukrainian and must have thought “what are the odds….?” and that they were “safe”.
Sonja waited until the car stopped, then hit the “STOP” button before the doors could open, and then laid into those two guys for a solid 30 seconds…… in fluent Ukrainian. She then hit the 80th floor button, the Close Door button, and the Emergency buttons in quick succession and stepped out, turning just in time to see the “priceless” look on the faces of the men in the elevator.
Wish I’d been there to see that, but Sonja’s satisfaction in telling the story was a treat.
TIME TO GET OUT OF HERE! (Serious Warning Issued After Fierce Exchange)
Have you ever been glad you were carrying a gun? What happened?
I sure was. I was driving home from work on route 30 eastbound about 4 pm. I was about halfway between the Hellam and the Wrightsville exits. It was a hot day and even though I had a conceal carry permit. I had my Star 9mm BKM lying on the passenger seat because the holster was uncomfortable while sitting. Looking in my rear view mirror I observed 4 cars behind me. The fourth car moved into the left lane and as he passed the third car he slammed into it forcing it onto the shoulder. He continued on and as passing the second car he slammed into it also forcing it to the shoulder. He did the same thing to the car just behind me. As he pulled up beside me. He started over toward me. He was less than a foot from me. I quickly grabbed my pistol from the passenger seat and stuck it out the driver’s window. He immediately moved back into his lane and sped away. I managed to get his license number as he pulled ahead of me. At that time in the early 80’s I didn’t have a cell phone. I got off the Wrightsville exit, went to a pay phone, called the police, and reported the incidence. I was told a few days later by the local police that the driver was caught by the Coatesville, PA. police. It was a stolen car and the driver had mental issues.
I got a vid-call from Taylor233. She looked and sounded excited.“They’ve found another one!”The excitement was contagious; I felt my heart-rate shoot up.“What condition?”“Pretty good! It was in a vac-pac.”I was already mentally rearranging my schedule so that I could make it along to the biblioteque asap.“Have they got anyone on it?” I asked, trying to keep the euphoria out of my voice.“I think Harris115 might have applied,” Taylor233 said, her tone consolatory.“We’ll see about that!” I said and hung up, immediately embarrassed at not thanking her for the information.I punched a code into the vid-fon. Harris115’s face appeared on the screen.“So you’ve heard?” he said.
“Yes. And I’ve also heard that you’re going for it.”
“Absolutely!”
I smiled at his wild enthusiasm, knowing that it was a bubble I was about to burst.
“You’ll remember, though…” I paused to allow him to connect the dots.
“No!” he exclaimed, his hopes crushed.
“It’s what we agreed. You’d get the Dickens and I’d get … whatever this one is.”
“But maybe–” he began. I cut him off.
“A deal’s a deal, Harris.”
His shoulders sagged visibly.
“All right, I’ll withdraw,” he mumbled.
Pausing only to tell the robo-sec to cancel all my appointments, I packed up my compu and rushed out of the office, making the biblioteque in record time, despite the midday congestion in the corridors. For me, lunch would have to wait.
I caught the Director just as she was leaving. She kindly agreed to a brief meeting, in which I laid out my credentials – not for the first time. She must have been convinced by them and my earnestness because she signed there and then the access digi-form. I made a point of thanking her profusely (you never know when being on good terms with the high-ups might come in useful). Then I made straight for the biblioteque lab.
Barber842 was on duty. We get on well together, so he smiled when he saw me.
“Word gets round quick!” he joked.
“It does! So tell me – what have we got?”
He led me through to the inner room, bathed as usual in filtered light. And there it was, lying in the middle of the steel table.
“The robo-scavs found it yesterday,” he whispered; this particular room always engenders hush. “It was concealed under rubble and a reinforced-concrete beam – on its own, I’m afraid. Whoever left it had the presence of mind to place it in a vac-pac.”
I nodded, disappointed at there being only one, but eager to get on with the job.
“You’ve geigered it, I suppose?”
“Of course! The box was saturated, but the artefact’s clean.”
“No radiation at all?”
“Tiny traces, but harmless.”
I rubbed my hands together.
“So, can I get started?”
“You’re keen, aren’t you?! I’ll get you a kit.”
I sat down at the table and looked longingly at the orange and cream object of … yes, my desire.
Barber842 returned with the treatment kit.
“It’s all yours,” he said, patting me on the shoulder and retiring.
…
And so here I am.
I boot up my compu and take some bio-plas gloves from the kit, along with a pair of fine tweezers. This moment is delicious: observing and wondering where to begin.
“From the beginning, I suppose,” I giggle; I feel like a young child.
My first move is to smell it. There’s nothing that quite matches this sensation. I don’t have references to liken it to other smells, but it’s unique … or rather, it’s similar to the other three I’ve had the privilege to handle, but unlike anything else in this confined world.
I spend several minutes on this act, such is the pleasure I derive from it. While I inhale the intoxicating scent, I register the seemingly incompatible sadness I feel: that this would have been one of millions – no, billions – incinerated in no time at all. I bemoan the simultaneous frying of systems, destroying digital copies. And I rage silently at the lack of foresight of engineers, who had designed and produced back-up systems for functional operations – we wouldn’t be here otherwise – but had failed to provide protection for cultural heritage.
The scent pulls me out of the bitterness and returns me to the task at hand. I sit up straight and regard the cover: that orange and cream – which was probably once white – and a word that stands out: Lover.
Love. A thing I’ve heard of, naturally, but have never experienced – as far as I know. I’m sure, though, that it’s a positive thing. I follow some simple logic: if a person who teaches is a teacher, and a person who writes is a writer, then a ‘lover’ must be a person who loves. For some reason, this little exercise warms my inside and I feel myself smiling.
The Director has entrusted me with an important task, though, and I force myself to concentrate. I have to read, analyse, and rate, then recommend – or not – that this artefact be placed in the biblioteque itself, along with the almost one hundred companions which have gone through the same process. Others have been destroyed after analysis – a fact which pains me – because of their apparently subversive nature. ‘Subversive’ is a subjective notion, I’d say … though never aloud.
I take the tweezers, pinch the side of the cover, lift it. And here again I spend several minutes inhaling the scent of the inside, which is even more exhilarating than before.
The first few pages I turn very gingerly – they’re extremely frail and flake a little under the pressure of the tweezers. Later, if recommended, it’ll be treated to make it more resilient. There’s important information on these pages, most notably the date: 1960. I shake my head in wonder at the vastness of time between then and now, and if anything, I proceed with even more reverential care.
Then I get to the first page proper, and I have to sit back and pause; I realize I’ve been holding my breath. I can see the block of text waiting for me to consume it, but it’s out of focus for the moment. I must be ready. This is a momentous occasion, and I cannot rush into it, however much I’d like to.
…
I’ve relaxed enough. I’m breathing relatively normally. I lean forward.
Parts of the first paragraph hit me like a hammer:
The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes.
It appears to be speaking of these times. How can it be? It feels like magic. And then:
We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.
I feel dizzy with the striking voice speaking to me from distant times. And my heart races as I read on, impatient now to find out who the person of the title is.
This Lady Chatterley, who has a lover.
Russia Retaliates. Russian Warships heading to south of Florida, move into the Caribbean
How do you tell whether someone is a good person or is just faking it?
By listening carefully and paying attention!!
I had a friend who was constantly blathering on on her Facebook and Instagram accounts about good energy, paying things forward, saving the rhino, etc. etc. You know the type.
I enjoyed her company, although she enjoyed talking about herself too much for my tastes, but I believed she had a good heart and was in need of a friend. She didn’t seem to have many so I did what I could as a good listener.
But the more I listened the more I heard about the injustices she had suffered, money issues (she was obsessive about money and never seemed to have enough yet I put this down to insecurity), how no one invited her anywhere, etc., etc.
Fast forward a couple of months and there was a an elderly man we would run into during our walks at lunch hour. I truly enjoyed talking to him, he was very nice and had interesting things to say so I always tried to give him some time on our walks.
One day, however, my friend stated that she didn’t like talking to him. That he was old and boring. I stated that it may be the highlight of his day to talk to us as he probably doesn’t get out much and he was so nice, what was the harm. I’ll never forget her reply,
“Well, I’m not being nice to anyone unless I want something from them!”
That shocked me so much my head snapped back and I finally understood why she was lonely. On the cover she ticked all the boxes of good energy, spirituality, giving back, etc. But the truth was, she didn’t give a shit about anyone but herself.
And that, my friends, was the end of our friendship. So listen up and pay attention, not just to what people say but how they behave.
Does China have a Tipping culture?
In many ancient texts, labourers known as 小二/”little twos” who worked at tea houses and inns were given gratuities by the upper classes. Some of these young men were described as grovelling before their wealthier patrons, in the hopes of having a few extra copper coins dropped at their feet.
That said, it is believed that tipping did not exist as a social convention in China at the time. It was mostly done to flaunt one’s wealth (i.e. “flex”).
Tipping as a culture was only introduced to China during the late Qing/early Minguo era, first existing in foreign-occupied territories such as Shanghai. Restaurant owners supported such a custom, as they could get away with paying their workers way less.
The “little twos” were expected to make their living by bothering the patrons. If the patrons refused to tip, their servers would decline to provide any further service, or harass them (e.g. blocking the door, spilling tea on their clothes) until they were tipped. Quarrels and fights over tips were a common sight.
As the fights were beginning to affect business, restaurant owners came up with a new strategy: a mandatory 10% “service charge”(加一服務費) along with the bill. In theory this extra 10% would go to the servers, but in reality the owners would keep most of it for themselves.
To counteract the tip-theft, many servers resorted to “tip-shaming” their patrons. As a patron paid for his meal and the 10% service charge, the server would shout out how much tips they received. On the surface this was to prove they weren’t pocketing any extra money, but in truth this was to shame the patrons into tipping just a bit more under the table.
And if the patron didn’t get the message the first time, the server would find ways to make his life more difficult than it had to be.
Tipping was banned after the communists came to power in the mainland, as it was considered exploitative and degrading to both the patrons and the servers. Instead, restaurant workers are now expected to be paid a fair wage for their labour. Tipping a server in modern day China would bring back ugly memories of the past, and would be seen as an insult.
In Hong Kong, however, tipping culture still exists. Most restaurants here still charge you an extra 10% for “service”, even self-service restaurants. It is an open secret that most restaurant owners simply pocket that money, but there appears to be no law against this sort of thing, and the locals just go along with it.
2 tablespoons Filippo Berio Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1/2 cup shredded fresh basil
Instructions
Heat well-oiled cast-iron or nonstick 10 or 12 inch frying pan over medium heat for 5 minutes.
Divide dough in half; roll one half into round 1 inch smaller than diameter of pan.
Cook dough in hot pan until dough begins to rise and bottom starts to brown. Using metal spatula, turn carefully. Layer half the tomato slices over dough; scatter half the mozzarella over top. Lower heat to medium-low; cook until mozzarella melts.
Using metal spatula, transfer pizza to cutting board. Sprinkle with salt; drizzle with half the olive oil.
Cut into wedges; sprinkle half the basil over top.
Repeat with remaining ingredients.
DOWNTOWN Los Angeles COLLAPSED
What should you never buy in life?
Latest iPhones every year.
Amazon prime subscription if you want movies and shows. (Completely useless, has got nothing)
Vixen, brazzer , tushy or blacked subscription.(Everything latest is available on pirate bay)
Regular shampoos available in supermarkets. ( Go for sulphate and paraben free ones, like skin elements or mama earth)
Head n shoulders to get rid of dandruff. (Use neutrogena T Gel, expensive but 100% effective)
Stop buying anything blindly that your favourite YouTubers suggest. Those guys are fucking paid. ( Like nowadays WOW company has been doing)
Never buy something (clothes or accessories) just because it’s currently the latest fashion trend. They are usually costly and would become completely obsolete after few years eg. Tiger printed at the back of a leather jacket or Knee ripped jeans or some cool ass funky sunglasses. Always remember.. stick to basics. Wayfarers and Aviators always look good and will always remain in the scene even after 50 years.
Please don’t buy a Siberian Husky if you live in a place where tropical climate prevails. These breeds cannot endure Indian climate. They have a thick coat of fur that withstands cold upto -40 degree Celsius, imagine their condition if they have to survive at 35–40 degree Celsius.
Fairness creams. Come on man if you could become fair by just applying a cream then there would have not been any brown or black skin people.
And the biggest thing is please don’t buy Bollywood’s attempt to clean up Sanjay Dutt’s image through the film Sanju. Ak56 is a weapon that can’t be obtained easily. This is a highly sophisticated weapon which can never get into a normal citizen’s hands. He is a criminal and would always remain a criminal.
What happened to your school bully?
I’ve had a couple of bullies in my day. However, there is one in particular who really stands out to this day. I was attending a school where my father was a custodian. My father would of course be the one to open up the school doors every morning and because of that, my siblings and I would be the first children in the building everyday. He made sure all of the classrooms were unlocked for the teachers, made sure the cafeteria tables were set up for breakfast time and other things to have the school setup for opening at 8 am for students. Every grade had a certain section in the school where they would line up and wait for their teachers to get them and walk to class. I was in 5th grade, so the 5th and 6th grade classes lined up in the gym, because that was our designated area. Now within the gym, there were labels on the gym floor for each class. Being that I was always in the school before the rest of the students, I would always be the first in line for our class spot. Well, on this particular day, a girl named Angela thought it would be funny to do something that she was dared to. As I was standing in line, minding my business, a swift open handed arm extended slap from the pits of hell came out of nowhere from behind me, and burned the heck out of my face. In shock, I turned around while holding the right side of my face and asked her why she slapped me. Meanwhile, the boy I had a huge crush on was laughing like a dang hyena. The bully proceeds to say “ Because you’re always first on line and you think you’re better than all of us because your dad works here”. When I tell you I thought that was the most idiotic reason to get slapped, that was the most idiotic reason! At the time I was so shy and wasn’t a fighter, so I immediately ran off crying trying to find my dad. I ended up finding him and told him what happened. He was furious and began walking so fast and asked if I slapped her back. Of course I said no, and he was infuriated. We walked back to the gym and he immediately told the girl to keep her hands to herself and that the next time she put her hands on me, that it wouldn’t be good. Now, I don’t know what that meant, but she didn’t bother me for the rest of the school year. Where she is to this day, I have no clue, and honestly don’t care. She was such a bully to other kids and I really disliked her. A memory I would give anything to erase!
CIA Classified Book about the Pole Shift, Mass Extinctions and The True Adam & Eve Story
I had an uncle, on my mother’s side of the family. His name was “Sonny” and he married my mother’s kid sister. And he was a raging alcoholic.
We were constantly visiting my auntie’s home, to find it broken and destroyed by a lunatic Sonny who had destroyed everything, and had terrorized his two daughters to no end.
It was a battle that our family dealt with throughout the 1960’s into the 1970’s. Just nasty non-stop grief.
Not my family, but it was something like this
Now, being much older, I can see that his abuse of my cousins in the 1960s affected them in such a way that suggested some sexual abuse, that of course, no one dare talk about. But the actions of my cousins while they were in their early teen years certainly suggests a weak parental figure.
My auntie divorced him sometime in the middle 1970’s, but he still orbited in our lives as he was, after all, the father of the girls.
He would come to family events; get togethers, picnics, weddings, and banquets… and “lose it”. Just eventually having to have the male men in the family haul him away or get the local police involved.
At one wedding banquet, which was on the second floor of a hotel, he picked up my uncle “Robert” and threw him off the rail into the pool. Oh, Lordy! Such a scene. I’ll tell you what.
But it was the early 1970’s and I was still a kid.
Kid life
My auntie still had a roller-coaster life, and married a wealthy dentist who ended up buying and selling companies for a living. They owned a ranch and had a couple of horses. The daughters got married and moved on.
The one daughter, was a favorite of mine. She was only two years younger than me. She was doing well in Florida and all was good. Unfortunately she got COVID19 and died. I’ll tell you what, it broke my heart. RIP sweety.
The other daughter has had a stormy life. From being a “working girl” (if you know what I mean) to marring a man who ended up robbing a bank, and spending 15 years behind bars. *sigh*.
Yeah.
So he asked to borrow my aunties car. Robs a bank with it, then hides the car in another aunties garage.
Such drama!
Non-stop drama.
You don’t want drama in your life people!
If you find someone who is broken, or who has issues or problems, think long and hard before you want to take on their responsibilities. It will create quite the tumultuous life…
Instead, I suggest moving to Jamaica and living on the beach. You’ll be far better off.
Rasta man
Today…
Why do many people think that the Chinese don’t yet know that their president is a dictator?
Many people are ignorant bigots.
The Chinese know exactly what kind of government they have. It’s not a dictatorship. It’s a uniquely Chinese form of democracy that actually works in the best interest of the Chinese.
Nobody is suggesting that Chinese democracy would work for other countries. It’s entirely up to other countries to decide how they want to be governed.
It is enough that the Chinese like their system. The following shows you how they think, especially in comparison to the Americans and British…
According to 𝗟𝗮𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗮’𝘀 𝗗𝗲𝗺𝗼𝗰𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘆 𝗣𝗲𝗿𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗜𝗻𝗱𝗲𝘅 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟰, 79% of Chinese believe their nation is democratic while only 57% of Americans and 55% of British do.
Another example, according to the 𝗘𝗱𝗲𝗹𝗺𝗮𝗻 𝗧𝗿𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗕𝗮𝗿𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟰, 85% of Chinese trust their government while only 40% of Americans and 30% of British do.
Another example, according to the 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗻 𝗦𝗼𝗰𝗶𝗲𝘁𝘆 𝗕𝗮𝗿𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟯, 76% of Chinese trust their politicians while only 29% of Americans and 20% of British do.
Another example, according to 𝗜𝗽𝘀𝗼𝘀’ 𝗚𝗹𝗼𝗯𝗮𝗹 𝗛𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟯, 91% of Chinese are happy with their life while only 76% of Americans and 70% of British are.
Another example, according to 𝗮 𝘀𝘁𝘂𝗱𝘆 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗛𝗮𝗿𝘃𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝗞𝗲𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗱𝘆 𝗦𝗰𝗵𝗼𝗼𝗹 𝗶𝗻 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟬, 95.5% of Chinese are satisfied with their government.
Another example, according to 𝗜𝗽𝘀𝗼𝘀’ 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗹𝗱 𝘀𝘂𝗿𝘃𝗲𝘆 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗡𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿, 𝟮𝟬𝟭𝟵, 95% of Chinese believe their country is on the right track and moving in the right direction while only 41% of Americans and 23% of British do.
Another example, according to 𝗮 𝟮𝟬𝟭𝟵 𝗨𝗖 𝗦𝗮𝗻 𝗗𝗶𝗲𝗴𝗼 𝘀𝘁𝘂𝗱𝘆, 80% of Chinese are happy and enjoy financial security.
I’ve gone back 5 years but I could go further back if you like.
Why Russia Loves Cats
French Bread Taco Pizza
Take your favorite taco ingredients, and layer them up on French bread. So easy and tasty, too!
67881t1
Prep: 20 min | Total: 30 min | Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
1 loaf French bread
1/2 pound ground beef
2 tablespoons Old El Paso™ taco seasoning mix (from 1 ounce package)
Heat oven to 425 degrees F. Line large cookie sheet with foil.
Cut bread in half lengthwise, then in half crosswise. Place on cookie sheet, cut sides up.
Place in oven to lightly toast, about 5 minutes.
In 6 inch skillet, cook beef over medium-high heat until brown, stirring frequently; drain.
Add taco seasoning mix and water; cook until thickened.
Spread refried beans over toasted bread.
Top with beef mixture, bell pepper, onion and cheese.
Bake for 10 to 12 minutes or until cheese is melted.
Top with lettuce and tomato.
Notes
For a quick and easy dinner, cook the ground beef mixture ahead, and refrigerate. Then all you have to do at serving time is top the French bread, and bake.
"There is a saying I learned in Spanish, and the English translation is: 'People confuse being good with being a fool.'
What that means with respect to Russia is the West has interpreted Russia's patience and tolerance up to this point with outrageous actions (on the part of the West) as a sign of weakness (on the part of Russia).
That's a potentially fatal mistake.
Both President Putin, Foreign Minister Lavrov, and Deputy Foreign Minister Ryabkov have said the same thing this week.
It is not just a coincidence that they've made those statements—it's a coordinated message that they're sending to the rest of the world that they’re not going to take it anymore.
The United States and the West are now on notice that any further attacks inside Russia are going to be met with a response.
Some of the options Russia has, and I don't know if they're going to pursue these, but just let me lay out a couple of options they have:
They could supply more advanced missiles and rockets to insurgent groups fighting ISIS and U.S.-backed forces in Syria and could strike U.S. military bases or the bases of those entities in the Kurdish region that the United States is supporting.
They could also help the Houthis not only with improved weaponry that could actually take out a U.S. ship, but also provide intelligence that could be used, doing the same thing for the Houthis that the United States is doing for Ukraine.
Now, Russia recognizes that it’s moving steadfastly forward in its campaign to demilitarize Ukraine—denazify Ukraine—and they recognize that in the process, they’re weakening NATO.
Yet, what does NATO do in response? They’ve issued statements this week about preparing for their ground troops to fight Russia on the ground.
They're crazy.
This is madness—absolute insanity being talked about by people that you think would have more sense, but they obviously don't.
I'll put it very clearly: the United States and NATO, if they decide to enter a ground war with Russia, will lose badly.
It may end up with the complete destruction of Europe.
Europeans need to sit down and count the cost—is it worth it?
Because Russia's not seeking to conquer Europe; Russia's seeking to have its national territory respected and not have to face, every year as has been the case for the last 16 years, NATO and the United States conducting military exercises on the borders of Russia.
When you're sitting there as a Russian looking at it, you see these as hostile and intended to come after you.
Given Russia’s history, where they’ve been invaded from the West four times over the last 212 years, they're not sitting back ignoring that—they’re taking it seriously.
These are continued provocations by the West. There’s no justification for it.
The West keeps coming up with justifications, trying to portray Russia as this country trying to recreate its 'empire.'
We talked about this before in our previous discussions.
Name me all of the colonies that Russia established in Africa—none.
It was Germany, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands that were establishing colonies and exploiting the people in Africa. Same thing in Asia.
Vietnam was under French control, and one of the reasons the United States initially got involved with Vietnam was more to try to help preserve French influence, not to free the people from communism.
That was the big lie.
The U.S. is trying to use the same playbook both with respect to China and to Russia, portraying them as these authoritarian societies hellbent on conquering the world.
It’s a lie.
It's the West that has been involved in unrelenting wars over the last 70 years around the world, killing millions of people in countries such as those in Africa, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya.
It has to stop.
That's what you're seeing coming from the Russians—they're saying it’s going to stop.
They’re not going to sit back and be a punching bag.
With this feeble-minded president heading up the United States, it’s quite clear to the world that the United States is being led by an incompetent."
Excerpt from remarks by Larry Johnson, former CIA analyst and U.S. State Department employee, in an interview with Nima R. Alkhorshid, June 9, 2024.
Starbucks in CHINA is BIGGER & BETTER (They Even Have Alcohol)
What’s a red flag that you ignored in a significant other, only to realize it was a big deal later?
On our 3rd date, I asked my favorite question at this point in a new relationship: “If you could be or do anything in the world you wanted—age or training not an issue—what would you be or do?”
I had asked this question several times, and was always fascinated by how it was received. Some had never asked themselves this question, much less be asked by someone else; a few couldn’t even wrap their heads around the question. This fellow was stunned and was quiet for a long time. Then he gave an astounding answer:
An unemployed prince.
He went on to explain why: A prince has plenty of money to pursue his own interests, princes get to travel and meet lots of new people, they have no major decisions to make, and princes get to dress well. I asked about the “unemployed” part: most princes don’t have any official duties, especially if not in line for the throne (and he didn’t want to be a prince in line for the throne).
I found his answer charming. Clearly, this was an imaginative individual to be able to think so far outside of the box, and it supported how much I was enjoying his differing perspectives on movies, music, and art. He had established his own business that was successful (I worked in the security of corporate) in the creative advertising/publishing field. He was great fun and a delightful companion, a treat from my previous husband, while seeming to share many of the same values on the important items.
Arm in arm, we headed down life’s path; dated, moved in together, married, then started a family. Life was good; if as busy and as stressful as any family of two young children, two careers, and two aging parents can be. Then our paths diverged.
When the youngest was 3, he closed the business, got his real estate license and “worked” not earning a dime. Bills to pay and full-time parenting two opinionated, busy kids weren’t near as much fun as pursuing one’s own interests. Struggling with it all, I could not understand how the same individual who professed to want what we had could also not do the everyday work that was required to keep it all going.
Then I remembered his answer on our 3rd date. As Maya Angelou said: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
Mexico’s New President is a “Nightmare for the Right”
Why do military analysts insist that Russia would steamroll NATO despite their inability to defeat Ukraine?
Heard of the Vietnam War?
Now, how did a war in Vietnam cause Laos, a neutral country in the conflict, to become one of the most bombed nations in the history of warfare?
American munitions dropped half a century ago continue to maim and kill Laotians today.
Answer that, and one will be more than halfway through the answer for the question posed.
In a conflict escalation, the rules flip. Supply lines will be targeted. Long range sensor support will be targeted. Foreign airfields from which flights originate will be targeted. Belarus may open a second front. Tactical nukes will enter the battlefield.
Russia has mobilized over a million men, NATO hasn’t.
Russians see this conflict as an existential threat to the Russian nation. NATO doesn’t.
Russians have give the mandate to Putin to pursue victory. NATO haven’t.
It is a question of attitudes—which side has the resolve and grasp of reality.
The West does not need to fight Russia, whereas Russia has no choice but to fight the West.
As Sun Tzu said, “know yourself and your enemy, and you will not lose in a hundred battles”.
Gen Z Is Finally Paying Taxes And They Are Pissed
Have you ever witnessed something you believed was supernatural?
My father died in 1982 when I was 8. I was an only child and I was ‘daddy’s girl’. His death wasn’t sudden-as he was diagnosed with cancer in June and had passed away in November. Even at an early age I knew the permanency of death. My great grandmother died a year prior to his passing and my grandmother passed away in June of 1982. I was in school when my dad died that morning. I was using the restroom and when I turned to open the stall door, I caught a whiff of Aqua Velva (for those who don’t know- it was a popular aftershave in the 70s and 80s and it has a very DISTINCT odor). Well, that is what my dad wore. And I loved the smell of his cheeks! So when I caught that distinct odor I was expecting to see him outside the girls’ bathroom. I walked out and didn’t see him. So I walked down the hallway hoping he was looking for me. When I finally went back to class, my teacher called me up to her desk and informed me that I had been gone for about 15 minutes and she said it is 9:55, you left here at 9:40. I went back to my desk and tried to focus on school. I kept thinking about smelling that odor. At 10:30 my mom came to the classroom and my teacher went out to speak with her. After a while my teacher came in and quietly got my coat and lunchbox and walked me out into the hallway. I didn’t say anything to my mom and when we got to the stairway landing, I asked if daddy had died. She turned and stooped down to my eye level and with tears in her eyes quietly said yes. I asked her when he died. And she replied at 9:45. I truly believe that he wanted to let me know that he was there in that bathroom and it was his time to go. Every so often I will catch a whiff of Aqua Velva for just a slight second and I would like to think that it’s dad checking in on me.
Russian Naval Group off Melbourne, Florida Coastline!
The Russian Navy has a grouping of warships off the east coast of Florida, between Melbourne and Vero Beach.
One of the vessels involved is a Russian nuclear submarine (FILE PHOTO – Not actual image from Florida):
Russia Sub Kazan
That submarine is being tracked by a US Navy P-8 “Poseidon” Sub-Hunter (FILE PHOTO: – Not taken over Florida)
P 8 Poseidon Sub Hunter
While these vessels from the Russian Navy are hanging out off Florida, the Russian Navy frigate Admiral Gorshkov – capable of carrying Zircon hypersonic missiles, arrives in Havana:
Russian Frigate Havana
Hal Turner Remarks:
Just so all of you grasp what’s taking place here, the United States and our NATO vassals, are making more and more trouble for Russia, inside Ukraine.
So now Russia is demonstrating to us they can make trouble for us . . . . HERE . . . . inside the United States.
While what __we__ are doing in Ukraine is causing the actual deaths of Russian soldiers, Russia has not —- yet —- decided to bring death to OUR people. Notice I said “yet.”
This is what the US Congress and the US President are causing. While THEY play “the sport of Kings (war” in Ukraine, we the American people are the ones they are endangering HERE, inside our own country.
If we get attacked here, inside America, by Russian forces, the sole and exclusive BLAME rests on members of the United States House of Representatives, the United States Senate, and the present illegitimate occupant of the Presidency.
They have been warned over and over again by Russia, to stop what they’re doing. Yet Congress not only ignores the warnings, they up-the-ante and do even worse things. Sooner or later, once the Russians have had enough, they’re going to show us that they are as powerful – if not more – than we are.
Remember that when you see your member of Congress slithering out from a nuclear bunker after it’s all over . . . . and hold them accountable right then and there.
Douglas Macgregor Exposes: “Russia Unveils New Hypersonic Missile, threaten to U.S & NATO”
Nizhny Novgorod hosted the BRICS Council of Foreign Ministers in its new enlarged format. A Joint Statement will be issued.
According to the MFA’s website, Lavrov met on the sidelines with all BRICS+ FMs and many from invited nations like Laos and Thailand. We’ll begin with Lavrov’s opening remarks:
Dear colleagues and friends,
I would like to open our meeting with a minute of silence in memory of the untimely departed President of Iran Sayrahmad Raisi and our colleague Khalid Amirabdollahian, and once again offer my deepest condolences to the people of Iran and the families of the victims. I ask everyone to stand up.
***
Dear Colleagues,
We are glad to welcome you to one of the oldest cities in Russia, in Nizhny Novgorod, the history of which dates back more than 800 years. Today’s meeting will certainly leave a special mark not only in the annals of the city’s leading international events, but also in the BRICS itself. For the first time, a meeting of the heads of the foreign affairs agencies of the association is being held in a new expanded format.
The expansion of BRICS is a clear confirmation of the process of formation of a multipolar world order. New centers of globally significant political decision-making are emerging from among the states of the Global South and East, from the states of the World Majority. These countries are in favour of a more just way of life based on the sovereign equality of States and the diversity of civilizations.
The transition to a new world order (we have already seen this) will take a whole historical era and will be thorny. The United States and its allies do not abandon their attempts to maintain their elusive dominance and slow down the objective processes of the formation of multipolarity. At the same time, they are using economic instruments as a weapon – through sanctions pressure and financial blackmail, they are trying to influence the choice of development models and trading partners by sovereign states. The West does not shy away from forceful methods. Examples are known to everyone: Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine and a number of other countries. And this is just the “tip of the iceberg”.
Recent international events have “thrown off the masks” from those who have hitherto claimed almost the exclusive right to define “universal values” under the guise of a “rules-based order.” Supporters of this concept are trying to impose norms and mechanisms of interaction that are beneficial only to them, to replace equal and honest dialogue with narrow coalitions that act behind closed doors and arrogate to themselves the right to speak and act on behalf of the whole world.
Russia, like the countries of the world majority, stands for a fairer world order based on the sovereign equality of states and taking into account the balance of forces and interests. Together, we aim to promote a future-oriented constructive international agenda. An important task in this context is to strengthen the role of interstate formats that advocate collective approaches to international development.
BRICS is one of those associations where the principles of equal cooperation are implemented in deeds, not in words: mutual respect, openness, pragmatism, solidarity, continuity and, of course, consensus. I am convinced that BRICS is driven forward by the wind of change, because its role in solving global problems will only increase. This is also confirmed by the steady growth in the number of countries showing genuine interest in joining the work of our association. In this context, we expect productive discussions at a separate session today with the participation of a number of like-minded BRICS countries.
Dear Colleagues,
Russia’s chairmanship is increasing momentum. About 70 events have already taken place, and more are to be held. We note the constructive participation of all partners in them. Work has begun on key Russian initiatives in the transport sector, the creation of the Contact Group on Climate and Sustainable Development, the Working Group on Nuclear Medicine, and the Medical Association.
Active work is underway to implement the decisions of the Johannesburg Summit in 2023, in particular, in terms of improving the international monetary and financial system and developing a platform for settlements in national currencies in mutual trade. In accordance with the instructions of the leaders at the Johannesburg summit, we are paying special attention to coordinating the modalities of establishing the category of partner states of the association.
We have an extensive agenda. It raises issues that will directly affect the future world order and the formation of its fair foundations. [My Emphasis]
A great deal has occurred under BRICS auspices before and during SPIEF as this news roster with links in English details. Pepe Escobar’s “The Three Key Messages From St. Petersburg to the Global Majority” is a very link heavy report published today in SputnikGlobe. Here are what Pepe describes as Putin’s three main messages:
Message Number One:
President Putin, a “European Russian” and true son of this dazzling, dynamic historic marvel by the Neva, delivered an extremely detailed one-hour speech on the Russian economy at the forum’s plenary session.
The key takeaway: as the collective West launched total economic war against Russia, the civilization-state turned it around and positioned itself as the world’s 4th largest economy by purchasing power parity (PPP).
Putin showed how Russia still carries the potential to launch no less than nine sweeping – global – structural changes, an all-out drive involving the federal, regional, and municipal spheres.
Everything is in play – from global trade and the labor market to digital platforms, modern technologies, strengthening small and medium-sized businesses and exploring the still untapped, phenomenal potential of Russia’s regions.
What was made perfectly clear is how Russia managed to reposition itself beyond sidestepping the – illegitimate – sanctions tsunami to establishing a solid, diversified system oriented towards global trade – and completely linked to the expansion of BRICS. Russia-friendly states already account for three-quarters of Moscow’s trade turnover.
Putin’s emphasis on the Global Majority’s accelerated drive to strengthen sovereignty was directly linked to the collective West doing its best – rather, worst – to undermine trust in their own payment infrastructure.
And that leads us to…
Glazyev and Dilma rock the boat.
Message Number Two:
That was arguably the major breakthrough in St. Petersburg. Putin stated how the BRICS are working on their own payment infrastructure, independent from pressure/sanctions by the collective West.
Putin had a special meeting with Dilma Rousseff, president of the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB). They did talk in detail about the bank’s development – and most of all, as later confirmed by Rousseff, about The Unit, whose lineaments were first revealed exclusively by Sputnik: an apolitical, transactional form of cross-border payments, anchored in gold (40%) and BRICS+ currencies (60%).
The day after meeting Putin, president Dilma had an even more crucial meeting at 10 am in a private room at SPIEF with Sergey Glazyev, the Minister for Macro-Economy at the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Glazyev, who had previously provided full academic backing to the Unit concept, explained all the details to President Dilma. They were both extremely pleased with the meeting. A beaming Rousseff revealed that she had already discussed The Unit with Putin. It was agreed there will be a special conference at the NDB in Shanghai on The Unit in September.
This means the new payment system has every chance to be at the table during the BRICS summit in October in Kazan, and be adopted by the current BRICS 10 and the near future, expanded BRICS+.
Now to…
Message Number Three:
It had to be, of course, about BRICS – which everyone, Putin included, stressed will be significantly expanded. The quality of the BRICS-related sessions in St. Petersburg demonstrated how the Global Majority is now facing a unique historical juncture – with a real possibility for the first time in the last 250 years to go all-out for a structural change of the world-system.
It was confirmed in St. Petersburg that no less than 59 nations – and counting – plan to join not only BRICS but also the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU).
No wonder: these multilateral organizations now finally have established themselves on the forefront of the drive towards the multimodal (italics mine) – and to quote Putin in his address – “harmonic multipolar world”.
The above is only about half of Pepe’s report; click the link for more. Pepe also links to the session he was directly involved with at his Telegram and the speeches others gave besides himself.
More on the BRICS+ meeting will be presented tomorrow along with the Joint Statement. Readers should know there are two BRICS TV stations online, Russian and English, with both having dropdown menus for Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese.
Has a member of the U.S. military ever died as the direct result of a seemingly harmless order given to them as punishment or hazing?
Happens all the time. When I was at airborne school at Ft. Benning in the summer of 1992, a female ROTC cadet in my squad who told me on the first day she was into triathlons and on a “low-salt diet” collapsed at the end of rather mild training day on the last day of Ground Week. It was hot and humid, as is typical in summertime in Columbus, Georgia, but we were on the last day of Ground Week, which meant it wasn’t that physically intense. However, she succumbed to the rigors of the training and climate — many arrive at Ft. Benning without being acclimatized to the heat and humidity — and practically collapsed. Our Black Hat instructor ordered her to sit done on the side of the sawdust pit and “drink more water” while the rest of the squad continued practicing PLFs (Parachute Landing Falls). By the end of the training day (around 17:00), she couldn’t even stand on her own, so the Black Hats ordered her to drink more water, while they summoned a medic to look at her. She feebly attempted to drink more water, but was at that time almost unconscious, so most of it dribbled all over her face and uniform when she tried to drink from her canteen. The medics came and had to help her walk, as she couldn’t walk on her own. We didn’t see her for the rest of the day, and come Monday morning, with the start of Tower Week (week two of three), we were told that she wouldn’t be joining us as she was now in intensive care at Martin Army Medical Center, the on-base hospital at Ft. Benning. We asked what was wrong with her, and he said she almost died because of Hyponatremia. Apparently, she became so over-hydrated from drinking too much water combined with excessive sweating due to the high-levels of physical exertion and lack of climate acclimitization, that she depleted herself of all her electrolytes and salts that are required to be alive. I also knew that she was skipping meals and the few times that she was eating at the d-fac (dining facility), would typically forego the main entree for just a small salad. (I knew this b/c she often sat next to me in the mess hall.)
To: Frank DelaneyEditor@thewashingtonpost.comSubject: anthropological finds linking past to the futureI, Dr. J. Emmit Hardy, Professor of Archeology at the University of Montana, former navy seal and marine sniper, stumbled upon something I should not have and in the excitement of the moment, I took it. Now they are after me. I don’t know who they are, other than the keepers of secrets, the guardians of mysteries. Could be the Vatican or some other religious organization, a collaboration of world governments, or some secret society. I probably sound out of my mind but wait until I tell you what I have uncovered.
It all started in what I like to call the broiler, a.k.a. southern Iraq, in an area once known as Mesopotamia. It was in that barren landscape that I and a group of archaeologists came upon a rather suspiciously lonely looking hill, more of a large mound I would say. We had started excavating as soon as the Iraqi government lifted their ban on archeological excavations. After years of careful digging, we dug down where we found an entrance to an upper chamber that led down to the heart of what we presume will be a ziggurat. In the lowest portion of the structure, we found what we named the Library of the Anunnaki, the collective name for the Sumerian gods. The library consisted of hundreds of stone tablets, most of them broken, some shattered, even to the point of dust. I found one large piece, rough in my hands, chipped, not without its damage. I blew it off and noticed it was written in cuneiform. The translation goes:
Origin………. Primitive species DNA spliced………. producing male child………. male children produced and raised to farm and………. production cumbersome………… remove Y………. first female child for reproduction presented to first male……… uprising………. Usurpers cast out of gardens and mines………. debauchery throughout………. murder………. war………. Meteor causing mass………. Fleeing planet, will return.
Obviously defaced, what I concluded from the text was that the text was not written by human hands. Rather, it was a document left for us by who early humans considered gods. It tells us that we originated from a primitive species (apes, or Cro-Magnon Man perhaps, maybe even some early form of homo sapiens) having their DNA spliced with that of an alien race, producing a child that we now call a human being. Given the success of the experiment, they created more, until they figured natural reproduction to be a viable process. These children grew up working on farms and in mines for the alien race. It goes on to say there was an uprising. Some were cast out where they lived wildly without law or rule. A lot of text is missing, but it goes on to explain the flood was caused by a meteor, probably crashing in the sea nearby. At that time, the aliens left, promising to return. My biggest question is, return to do what?
This tablet destroys god-centric religions, proving that we were created through the advanced science of an alien race, putting an end to ancient beliefs. It would also take away power from institutions such as the Catholic Papacy. Old traditions will die hard, but the word of God will no longer hold credence in the minds of the majority again. This is a world altering find. That is why I had it carbon dated for its legitimacy, taking it to an old friend.
Dr. Phillip Baker at Oxford University did some carbon dating. The tablet predates the Sumerian use of cuneiform for literary purposes by a thousand years. We realized then that it was truly an extraordinary find. While Phillip and I celebrated with the champagne he had been saving for such an occasion, men in black suits paid us a visit trying to seize the tablets. With a distraction made by Dr. Baker, I escaped out the back. From the hallway I heard shots fired. I knew my dear friend’s fate and feared it would be my own if I did not run. I assumed knowing what was on the tablet put my life in jeopardy. I was pursued by them and what looked like a private security detailed, armed, muscular men dressed in black. They chased me through the streets at high speed. I was scared out of my mind, even taking to the sidewalk to avoid stoplights. I made it to the airport where I evaded capture and caught a plane back to the states. The tablet is now hidden safely where no one will ever find it.
I still wanted answers. Why are they returning? When will they return? Why were they here in the first place? I knew of one place that had the answer. I put to use all my military training to sneak into the most heavily guarded military base in the US. I broke into Area 51. I’ll save you the details. It’s a process of inching through the desert dressed like a bush for three days, monitoring security patterns, cutting chain-link, and choking people out for their security badges and weapons, turning up loose ends, until finally I found what I was looking for – the Area 51 Library.
The library is a massive collection of written statements, voice recordings, pictures, videos, blueprints, documents on everyone who has claimed abduction or sighting, documentation of people who have been abducted or visited and have no recollection of it, and archeological evidence. The most disturbing artifact I found was a 1950’s recording of an alien being questioned under duress giving the same account on the tablet, filling in the gaps.
Apparently, there is another planet in our solar system that passes the sun every six thousand years. They survive in biodomes but require extra fuel and food that they get from earth when their planet gets within flying distance. The air on earth is toxic to them, so they wear suits, some wear armor over their suits resembling animals known to humans to strike fear in them. They have a spy station on the dark side of the moon where they operate out of one of their biodomes, watching us, occasionally experimenting on us, or coming down to replenish food.
The Alien went on to explain that they tried to quell the violence within humans, who murdered each other and started wars for territory, before the flood. As they watched on over the centuries, war and hate spread like wildfire across the land as humans flourished. They decided since humans still believed in gods, they would send them a representative from God.
He explained the insemination of Mary and the resurrection of the man we call Jesus – he was revived from a coma using advanced medical procedures and lifted up in a small spy shuttle under the cover of smoke. He is at the station now and will return with the others when the other planet draws near. His purpose was to teach people how to live peacefully, choosing people to carry on his work after he was gone, to spread it around the world. The alien said things didn’t go as planned, calling us wicked and violent. His final statement was that when the planet returns, those who fight will be destroyed and those who don’t will be enslaved.
Area 51 is only guarded by the US. They are not running it. I was discovered by a man with a heavy European accent and, of course, dressed in a black suit. I grabbed the recording and fought my way past him, then through three levels of private security before getting past the military detail on the outside. I’m sure these men know where I live. I’m taking a big risk contacting you, but the public deserves to know the truth. They need to prepare to fight the coming onslaught. So far, governments have kept everything a secret, selling off technologies like cellular communications and nuclear power. I have the recording safely hidden away with the tablet. I have the evidence if you want to proceed with the story.
To: J. Emmit Hardy
drdigit@gmail.com
Reply: anthropological finds linking past to the future
Dr. Hardy, I’ll be honest with you, if it weren’t for your credentials and the background check I ran on you, I would be telling you to take this to the tabloids. Since you are an esteemed professor of sound mind with a military background, I suppose your story warrants some attention. Meet me at Malone’s at noon on Thursday for lunch. They are usually busy so there should not be any scenes made in there if you are followed. Try not to be followed. Bring the evidence. Depending on it, we will see where we go from there.
———————————————————————————
When I saw Dr. Hardy walk into Malone’s that day, he was not what I was expecting. I was looking for an unshaved old man with wild hair acting a little erratically. No, this was your Indiana Jones type professor, middle aged, lean and sun kissed. Far from erratic, his eyes scanned the restaurant before approaching me with a duffle bag.
“Mr. Delaney?”
“Yes, that’s me.”
“Emmit Hardy. Glad you took the time to see me.”
His eyes missed no detail of what was going on around him. He was even checking reflections in the smallest objects to see behind him.
“Did you bring the evidence?”
The first thing he pulls out is an old reel-to-reel and lays it on the table as he goes for the next item in his bag.
“What am I going to do with that?”
“Listen to it.”
“I thought you would have recorded it on your cell phone.”
“I wasn’t about to take a cell phone into Area 51. You’re the news. Don’t you have a reel-to-reel player?”
“Well, yeah, back at the newsroom.”
“Here, check this out. Carefully.”
He displays a bundle of rags gentler than if it were a baby. He unwraps it to reveal the stone tablet, chipped and cracked with a series of markings on it that meant nothing to me.
“I’ll have to take your professional word on what that is. What I’m interested in is on that reel. But first, we eat.”
“I don’t think we have time for that, Frank. Be casual, but two guys in black suits and sunglasses just walked in.”
“Relax, guys in suits eat here all the time.”
“Not with security details. Let’s head out the back. Slowly, they haven’t made us yet.”
I thought Emmit might be schizophrenic, but when we got out to the alley, two guys were waiting with guns. Now, I would love to give you a play-by-play of what happened next, but it happened too fast. Somehow, Emmit managed to disarm and knock unconscious two men in a matter of seconds. He took their guns, putting one in his waistband.
“Can I have a gun?”
“No,” he chuckled.
We ran to the news building. When we got there, we were spotted by more guys in black suits and their security details. We took off in the other direction with them on our heels. I pulled out my cell and made a phone call.
“Susan, I need you to get those old duffle bags out of storage and five other people. Here is what I need you to do.”
Emmit and I took the long way to The Lincoln Memorial. There, we ran into six people with bags similar to the one Emmit was carrying. We all bumped and shoved, switching bags several times. When we were done mixing up the bags, some took cabs, some ran, some strolled. They grabbed Marcus and checked his bag, only to find gym clothes and a phone book. Later that night, Emmit and I met with Susan to retrieve the real bag. She asked what was going on, but all I could tell her was to read the morning’s paper.
Emmit was able to sneak me pass some of the men in black suits and their muscle so I could write up the story. I wrote frantically, the words flowing from my mind straight to the screen. I barely got it through pre-press in time to make the front page. I rushed it out to the printers myself. They were in the middle of putting on the plates that were supposed to run and were not thrilled about the last-minute change, but now people know where they came from and can prepare for the future.
Australia Forces China To Dump Rare Earth Assets, But No Refund For US Submarine Deal?
32 New Ukraine Soldiers Cross Hungary Border to Escape War Mobilization
Yesterday, a Ukrainian GAZ-66 truck with “military” license plates illegally crossed the border into Hungary from the Zakarpattia region of Ukraine. Local border guards found the truck and detained 32 Ukrainian citizens.
It turned out, the truck was filled with new Ukraine Army “Recruits” – men who had been forcibly grabbed off streets in Ukraine, held for three days, given uniforms, and sent to the front lines to die.
The men took a military truck across a field in Zakarpattia, entered Hungary, and surrendered to Police in Hungary.
The government of Hungary has granted the men asylum.
Hal Turner Opinion
The slave state of Ukraine is the very worst place in the world with absolutely no human rights at all.
These people are being hunted by army slave catchers and sent to the front to be exterminated.
The average Ukrainian’s worst enemy is the war criminals in Kiev and the war criminals of NATO who fund and facilitate their slavery and extermination while pretending that Ukraine is a free democracy, and not the only cause of the conflict that is going on.
Imagine what the U.S. will be like when Biden orders the draft for WW3 against Russia/China. There will be some crazy things going on; can’t wait for the chaos.
Someone should make an “Escape from Ukraine” movie as a sequel to Escape from L.A. from the ’90s. I’d watch it.
NATO PREPARES for US TROOPS to ATTACK RUSSIA – americans being sent to die for Europe…
It’s Official: Russia ready to strike NATO airfields hosting Ukrainian jets
F-16 fighter jets and any airfields they are based at will be legitimate targets for the Russian military if they participate in combat missions against Moscow’s forces, the chairman of the Russian State Duma Defense Committee, Andrey Kartapolov, has warned.
The comments come as Kiev prepares to receive the first delivery of US-made fighter jets from its Western backers, after Ukrainian pilots were trained to fly them.
In a statement to RIA Novosti published on Monday, Kartapolov clarified that if the F-16s “are not used for their intended purpose” or are simply held in storage at foreign airbases with the intent to transfer them to Ukraine, where they will be equipped, maintained, and flown from Ukrainian airfields, then Russia would have no claims against its “former partners” and would not target them.
However, if the jets take off from foreign bases and carry out sorties and strikes against Russian forces, both the fighter planes and the airfields they are stationed at will be “legitimate targets,” according to Kartapolov.
“As for [our ability] to shoot [them] down, we can shoot down anyone, anywhere,” the MP insisted.
Kartapolov’s statement comes after the chief of aviation of Ukraine’s Air Force Command, Sergey Golubtsov, stated in an interview with Radio Liberty on Sunday that some of the F-16 fighter jets donated to Kiev by the West would be stationed at foreign airbases.
He explained that only a portion of the jets would be stationed directly on Ukrainian territory, corresponding to the number of pilots trained to operate the aircraft. The other jets would be kept in reserve at “safe airbases” abroad so that they are not targeted by the Russian military.
Golubtsov stated that so far four countries have agreed to transfer F-16s to Ukraine, namely Belgium, Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands. While he did not specify exactly how many aircraft would be donated, he claimed it was between 30 and 40 planes, with potentially more to come in the future.
Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has also warned that Moscow would perceive the deliveries of F-16 fighters to Ukraine as a nuclear threat, given that the jets have long been used as part of the US-led bloc’s joint nuclear missions.
At the same time, the minister stressed that the US-designed jets would not change the situation on the battlefield, and would be shot down and destroyed like any other foreign weapons supplied to Ukraine.
Crispy Sweet Onion Pizza
Caramelized Onion Pizza 3435
Ingredients
1 (12 inch) pre-baked pizza shell
2 1/2 tablespoons olive oil
1 pound sweet onions halved, sliced vertically
1/4 cup sun-dried tomatoes (packed in oil), chopped
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
1/2 teaspoon dried basil
Salt and pepper, to taste
Ingredients for Caramelized Onion Pizza
Pizza Dough – Use your favorite pizza dough here. I always love the chewy / airy texture of this No-Knead Pizza Dough.
Extra Virgin Olive Oil – Instead of sauce, this pizza is brushed with a generous amount of extra virgin olive oil before the toppings are added. The oil helps the crust to get a deep golden brown color and adds a subtle, fresh olive flavor.
Caramelized Onions – See below for all the details on making caramelized onions. They are sweet and savory and make a super flavorful base for this pizza.
Gruyere Cheese – The first time I had Gruyere cheese I was blown away by the rich, deep flavor of this Swiss-style cheese. It’s slightly crumbly and has a nutty, tangy flavor. It costs a bit more than mozzarella (which is more common on pizza), but seriously delivers on flavor.
Fresh Rosemary – The savory flavor of fresh rosemary fits really well here. Be sure to remove the leaves from the stem and discard the stem (it’s too tough to chop along with the leaves). You can skip the rosemary or use another fresh herb – fresh thyme is great here.
Caramelized Onion Pizza 3435 2
How to Caramelize Onions
Slice the onions into slices that are about 1/3” thick. (No need to be super precise here, but if the slices are too thin they won’t develop all the flavor that comes with the low, slow cooking process. If they are too thick, they’ll take forever to cook. Try to strike a balance.)
Heat a heavy-bottomed skillet over medium-high heat. Add olive oil and butter (use about 1 tablespoon of each per pound of onions).
Add the onions to the skillet and cook, stirring constantly, until the onions start to soften, about 5 minutes.
Reduce the heat to low.
Season onions with salt and some sugar (about ½ teaspoon of each per pound of onions). (Note: Sugar is optional here, but can help to draw out the natural sugars in the onions and speed the caramelization process along.)
Continue to cook the onions, stirring occasionally, until they are very tender and deep golden brown, 25 to 40 minutes more. (Important: If the pan starts to look dry or the onions start to burn, add a splash of water. You may need to do this several times throughout the cooking process.)
Instructions
Heat oven to 425 degrees F.
Place pizza shell on baking sheet.
Sprinkle onions on pizza and drizzle with olive oil; top with sun-dried tomatoes.
Sprinkle with herbs, salt and pepper.
Bake until onions just begin to brown, about 10 minutes.
Russia already has enough “hyenas” to deal with in Europe, Vladimir Putin has told his Zimbabwean counterpart
Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Zimbabwean counterpart Emerson Mnangagwa shared a laugh during a tense debate on nuclear diplomacy on Friday, as they discussed how to deal with the real and metaphorical “hyenas” threatening their countries.
During a plenary session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), political scientist Sergey Karaganov urged Putin to update Russia’s nuclear doctrine to allow nuclear retaliation against countries that strike Russia with conventional weapons.
With multiple Western nations – including the US, France, and Germany – recently giving Kiev permission to use their missiles in long-range strikes on Russian territory, Karaganov argued that these countries have grown complacent and need to be reminded of Russia’s nuclear capabilities.
“They have gone mad, especially the Europeans,” he told Putin. “It’s how animals behave. If there is a herd of hyenas or wild dogs and you’ve got a stick, you can keep them at bay. But there’s a high chance that they will tear your clothes, and if you get tired they will bite you to death. If you can kill a couple of them then they will disperse.”
“President Mnangagwa knows about the behaviour of hyenas,” Karaganov continued, before asking the Zimbabwean leader: “Do you agree Mr. President, that this is how you deal with hyenas?”
“We do have lots of hyenas in Zimbabwe, but we keep them in the national parks,” Mnangagwa replied. “We have no problems with them, but they breed a lot, and if there is anybody who wants them, we are ready to donate,” he added, to laughter from the audience.
“Well we’ve got hyenas of our own in Europe,” Putin responded.
Russian nuclear doctrine has not changed since 2010. It allows for the use of atomic weapons in the event of a nuclear first strike on its territory or infrastructure, or if the existence of the Russian state is threatened by either nuclear or conventional weapons.
“I do not believe that it is the case now,” Putin said, adding that Russia “needs no nuclear weapons to achieve victory” in Ukraine. However, Putin noted that changes to Russia’s nuclear doctrine “are not ruled out.”
18 Years Later, I Finally Get how Idiocracy Came True – The 2024 Election
When I lived in the State’s I often would travel to certain cities. Sometimes for work. Sometimes for personal reasons. But all in all, I pretty much have been exposed to many different American cities.
One of the things that I would notice in all of the big cities of America was the abandoned, chained up, bicycles on the various streets.
pexels photo 1987736
You would be so surprised with how many old and abandoned bicycles are there. Many have the rubber wheels are gone, they are rusty and growing into the various trees on the residential trees.
Ah. Is this significant?
Nope. It probably isn’t.
But it’s a fine curiosity. And something rarely noticed and thus rarely discussed.
Today…
Life in the UK vs Life in China (Don’t watch if youre sensitive.)
What is a family secret you didn’t know as a kid, but now as an adult you do and when you look back it explains a lot of things?
My Great Aunt Dottie was actually my Great Uncle Garrison. He was never invited to any family events and when they’d ask my Great Aunt Remi (Dottie’s sister) where “Gary” was (Dottie hated that name with a vengeance) it was always with darting eyes and hushed voices making sure the children didn’t hear, Remi would answer, “he’s dead and you damned well know it.” It wasn’t until I was in high-school and had a friend who had two dads that my mom quipped one day while she was doing the dishes “You know your Great Aunt Dottie was a man, right?” and I was dumbfounded, I loved Great Aunt Dottie, I would ride my bike over to her house all the time and have tea and cookies and the most amazing monkey meat sandwiches ever and she would teach me how to cross stitch and how to plan a fifteen course meal. It was Great Aunt Dottie that taught me how to waltz and roller skate and how to shoot a bow and arrow. I actually loved my Great Aunt Dottie more after I found out that she chose her own happiness over her family and was one of only three members of my family to attend her funeral. But looking back I wonder if I always kind of knew, she had a husky voice, an always present five o clock shadow and scratched her balls like a true man.
Most men can remember back to a time on the schoolyard when two kids got into a confrontation and one of them kept promising to do something bad to the other if the other did not stop whatever it was he was doing. The threat of consequences was supposed to deter the other, but the other kid was undeterred, and the result was a fight, with the kid making the threats getting the worst of it. Bullies often come to a bad end like this as their bullying is based on threats.
If you are a member of the managerial elite, it is unlikely that you have such a memory as you were raised by women, so no school yard fights. As a result, the logic of the bully, issuing escalatory threats, makes perfect sense. After all, if you can conjure something worse than the other guy is conjuring, then you win! Therefore, success is determined by who has the greatest mastery of escalatory dominance, the alleged ability to escalate a conflict beyond that of an opponent.
This is the engine that has been driving the war in Ukraine. For close to a decade the Russians have objected to what Washington has been doing on its border in Ukraine, but Washington has responded with the promise of more of what the Russians found objectionable, rather than search for a compromise. Once the Russians crossed into Ukraine, Washington unleashed the sanctions war and promised even more punishments, including the promise of regime change.
Throughout the war, the approach from Washington has been to create some artificial red line for themselves or Russia, and then cross it in such a way as to suggest all future red lines will be crossed. Currently NATO is having a debate about launching long range missile attacks on Russia, from NATO countries or with NATO personnel, while pretending it is being done by Ukraine. This is the bully threatening the kid who refuses to back down with somet
What’s the craziest thing you’ve heard pretending to be asleep?
As a kid I was friends with these 3 girls, who were sisters and one night their parents allowed me to have a sleepover at their house so when it came to bedtime the parents allowed me and one sister to sleep in their bed until the parents came up and moved us to my friend’s bed. At the time I didn’t understand why, maybe that’s how bedtime was in their house, anyway the light was on in the room so it stopped me from falling asleep, I was too soft to turn it off incase I got into trouble or it woke up my friend who clearly could sleep with the light on. Then I heard footsteps coming upstairs so I had to pretend to be asleep. The parents came into the room, one of them picked me up and put me in one of the girls beds, the other picking up their daughter and putting her next to me. The light wasn’t on in there but the hall light was on which was fine, so I thought ‘finally I can go to sleep now!’ As I was just about to head into dreamland I hear moaning and the bed squeaking coming from the parents bedroom!!!! 🤣🤣 I was 9 years old so I knew what they were doing and I had to wait till it was quiet until I finally got some sleep. When I woke up the next morning, I didn’t tell anyone what I heard or that I was awake the whole time, it would’ve been an awkward conversation to have so I tried to forget about it. 😬
hing worse than backing down.
Unreported in the West, Ukraine has been using Western supplied drones to attack early warning radar stations in southern Russia. These are part of Russia’s nuclear defense system. They play no role in the Ukraine war, but Ukraine’s handlers are having them do this as a form of escalatory dominance. The point is to signal to the Russians that the West is not afraid of nuclear war. The madness of this is obvious, but to a great degree that is the point, to seem mad.
We see a similar thing shaping up with China. Washington is going out of its way to provoke China over the issue of Taiwan. Various officials have been sent to the island for no other reason than to antagonize the Chinese. A big package of weapons has been shipped to Taiwan and Washington has increased the number of military personnel on the island. Washington regularly talks about how it is actively preparing for a war with the Chinese over the issue of Taiwan.
A great example of how the concept of escalatory dominance controls how American ruling elites deal with the world is the last trip by Anthony Blinken to China in which he went out of his way to insult the Chinese. The State Department insisted on Blinken visiting China, where he held meetings with Chinese leaders. He then went out of those meetings and threatened them with sanctions. This was done to let the Chinese know that there is no red line Washington will not cross.
This is not just a foreign policy strategy. The reason Trump is waiting to hear a guilty verdict is the regime has always assumed that if they cross enough red lines with regards to the rule of law, Trump or his supporters will fold. For going on four years, it has been ever increasing violence against both the rule of law and the customs that have controlled our politics. The point of each new escalation is to warn that there is no limit to what they will do unless you obey.
It is the unquestioned assumption in Washington that there is always some threat they can issue that is so terrifying that the other side will back down that has led them into a crisis for the regime. Half the country now thinks the courts are corrupt beyond reform thanks to the lawfare unleashed by the regime. We are remarkably close to the point where a majority of Americans think we are ruled by lawless gangsters, which even in easy times is an impossible state of affairs.
The crisis gripping the West is due, in large part, to the fact that the system now selects boys and girls with no practical knowledge. Never having had their bluff called and walking away with a bloody nose or a black eye, they just assume such a thing is impossible, so they are free to escalate their threats. It is not so much that their threats work, but that they ought to work. In the artificial reality in which these people live, the ought is the same as the is.
The Trump trial is a good bit of foreshadowing for how this widely held delusion about escalatory dominance will end. At some point, the bluff is called, and the bluffer has to either follow through or their raison d’etre evaporates. This is the story of the bully who finally has to fight and gets beaten. It is not the beating that ends his reign as a bully, but the fact that someone stood up to him. This is what is happening with the lawfare against Trump, who has called their bluff.
Unlike the schoolyard, the end of a regime that relies on escalatory dominance is not so simple and tidy. The regime now has to hope the Trump trial ends in a hung jury so they can maintain their stance. An acquittal has them looking like fools and a guilty verdict has them in a crisis far worse than Trump winning the election. Soon, the bluff will be called over Ukraine and Taiwan. Once this happens, the regime has no answer other than the unthinkable.
Pepe Escobar: Xi & Putin’s Move Pushed NATO Into CHAOS! Who Is Win?
When someone hugs you, you should not be first to break it.
Remove your sunglasses when you have to speak to someone.
Irrespective of your closeness, do not ask your friends and room mates for their clothes, shoes and accessories. Those are ‘ personal belongings‘
Do not order expensive stuff when you are sharing or the other person is paying the bill.
Don’t make ola / uber driver wait for you. Time is literally money for them.
If you borrow someone else’s novel/ books, do not mark anything in them. Return them in a good condition and within acceptable time.
Compliment people when you notice their extra efforts in something.
If any child touched you and asked(begged) for money don’t give a dirty look at them and run two steps back. Give, if you want to or say no. That’s it.
Wave your hand rather than calling his or her name in a louder pitch if someone is wearing headphones.
Praise publicly. Criticise privately.
Be quiet when other people are asleep. That means more than not talking — not slamming doors, drawers, etc.
Avoid finishing other people’s sentences and cutting them off
If you get a missed call, remember to call them back. Or at least drop a message.
As a kid I was friends with these 3 girls, who were sisters and one night their parents allowed me to have a sleepover at their house so when it came to bedtime the parents allowed me and one sister to sleep in their bed until the parents came up and moved us to my friend’s bed. At the time I didn’t understand why, maybe that’s how bedtime was in their house, anyway the light was on in the room so it stopped me from falling asleep, I was too soft to turn it off incase I got into trouble or it woke up my friend who clearly could sleep with the light on. Then I heard footsteps coming upstairs so I had to pretend to be asleep. The parents came into the room, one of them picked me up and put me in one of the girls beds, the other picking up their daughter and putting her next to me. The light wasn’t on in there but the hall light was on which was fine, so I thought ‘finally I can go to sleep now!’ As I was just about to head into dreamland I hear moaning and the bed squeaking coming from the parents bedroom!!!! 🤣🤣 I was 9 years old so I knew what they were doing and I had to wait till it was quiet until I finally got some sleep. When I woke up the next morning, I didn’t tell anyone what I heard or that I was awake the whole time, it would’ve been an awkward conversation to have so I tried to forget about it. 😬
The Dating Market isn’t Looking Too Hot ….
Doctors, have you ever delivered a child to a couple who clearly didn’t need Maury to tell him “you are NOT the father!”? What happened next?
Not a doctor or a nurse, just a friend of a couple. She is elf pale, blonde hair so light it’s almost white, pale blue eyes and nary a freckle to be seen. He is (no offense to anyone) coal black. When the baby was born she looked like she should have been wearing a sombrero with a taco in her hand singing La Cucaracha. (still, no offense intended to anyone, just setting the scene) the doctor and the nurse were both speechless. I was there, I was taking the video. The doctor was hesitant to hand the baby to my friends husband and they both thought something was wrong with the baby. The nurse went from being sweet to being a total bitch to my friend. When he left the room to go tell his family that is was a girl, the nurse made a comment to the doctor about how they never see any wholesome god-fearing families anymore. My friend lost it; it technically wasn’t even her baby, she was just a surrogate. The man in the room with her? He wasn’t even the father, just a friend that was gracious enough to be her coach. She was carrying the baby for another friend of ours and her husband.
The UnXplained: TOP 5 SHOCKING MYSTERIES OF 2023 | PART 1
I really enjoyed this video. I think that youse guys will too.
In Thailand, why are the South Koreans and Japanese treated better than Chinese tourists?
Disclaimer: I’m a Thai of Chinese descent living in a tourism hub of Chiang Mai, speak a little Mandarin and had actually been to China as well, so may I offer my humble 2 cents. I don’t want fellow Chinese quorans to be too stoked or offended by this kind of question. If my answer offends anyone, I apologize in advance. I also apologize for my fellow citizens as well. After all, our economy relies on tourism a lot, please come and visit us! At least this Thai welcome everyone to visit my country with open arms! I say this as a Thai who have traveled to almost all inhabited continents on Earth. 😊
There were lots of direct flights from China to Chiang Mai pre-Covid, even to lesser known cities like Changsha. Influenced by a 2012 Chinese blockbuster “Lost in Thailand” (泰囧) which heavily featured Chiang Mai, the city became hugely popular among Chinese visitors. Back then, Chinese tourists tended to exhibit a not-so-impressive manners. For example, in Chiang Mai University, Chinese tourists used to roamed free inside the campus and took photos of classes in session (many faculty members were really tired of this). This prompted the university to disallow tourists inside the campus, and directed them to the university’s official guided tour instead.
However, post-Covid, Chinese tourists nowadays are no longer loud and rude like before. Yes, there would still be some bad sheep in the flock, but the overall trend manner-wise went for the better. Back when China was poorer, Chinese tourists indeed had bad reputation. However, as time goes, I did notice a better trend of manners among the Chinese tourists. I dare say they are pretty much on par with Koreans and Japanese nowadays manner-wise. Nonetheless, I won’t deny that there are some racism bias towards mainlanders among a portion of our citizens (which is quite an irony because 1/6 of Thai population are of Chinese descent). Also, since China is a much larger country than Korea and Japan, there are just a lot of Chinese setting up shops (100% owned) in several touristic hubs like Bangkok, Chiang Mai, or Phuket. And as some answers also mentioned, such shops only cater to Chinese customers and Chinese tourists have higher tendencies to visit Chinese-owned shops compared to Thai ones. Thai people’s concerns on Chinese tourists is mainly about the circulation of tourism money in Chinese-owned business nowadays rather than the manners. I don’t have problems with Chinese setting up shops here, but please also spend some money and contribute to the place you are visiting too. 😊 This would greatly improve our perception towards Chinese tourists a great deal.
I would like to share my own experience as well regarding the Chinese tourist’s manner. In 2013, I went to Mongolia (part of a train trip from Mongolia to China and then onto North Korea) and met a Chinese couple in our tour group. They really shattered my prejudice of “Chinese tourists are loud and rude”. They were so kind and very well-mannered, and when my train arrived in Beijing, they offered me a treat at a Peking Duck restaurant in Haidian District and then took me (and some Westerners who were in the same group back in Mongolia) to have some “rou chuanr” with “Jia duo bao” herbal drink! I still remembered it to this day.
Again, I would like to just tell the situation as it is without putting in prejudices or biases. It would be better if we treat each culture with respect and understanding.
Professor Studied NDE’s For 30 Years; What She Discovers Is Incredible (Near Death Experiences)
As a leader in the photovoltaic industry, China dominates the industrial and supply chains, currently producing over 90% of the world’s polysilicon, 98% of solar-grade silicon wafers, over 85% of solar cells, and over 80% of photovoltaic modules. It is projected that by 2025, China’s global share in polysilicon and silicon wafer production will reach 95%, making the world highly dependent on China’s photovoltaic products.
Not only does China have massive production capacity, but its photovoltaic technology is also extremely advanced. The latest solar cells have achieved a photoelectric conversion efficiency of 33.9%, far exceeding the 5% capability of plants. Additionally, Chinese photovoltaic products are highly competitive in price, with a 99% decrease in cost over the past 20 years, currently priced at around 0.8 yuan per watt. Furthermore, Chinese photovoltaic modules have a long service life and can maintain 80% of their power generation efficiency after 25 years of use.
As China’s photovoltaic technology rapidly advances, old photovoltaic modules, although long-lasting, have lower performance and are difficult to circulate and dispose of domestically. However, in poor countries with inadequate grid coverage, such as Central Asia, Africa, and Latin America, these second-hand photovoltaic panels are in high demand. In these regions, lacking basic infrastructure, the living conditions of the population are extremely poor, often without access to basic lighting or phone charging facilities. China’s used photovoltaic panels, with their low prices, can provide basic electricity to rural households, improving their quality of life and being regarded as high-tech products.
South Africa witnessed a significant increase in imports of photovoltaic panels and energy storage batteries in 2022-2023, with not only rural but also urban residents purchasing these systems to overcome unstable grid issues. Gaza has the highest density of photovoltaic panel installations globally, as the local grid has been destroyed, leaving the population reliant on photovoltaic panels for electricity.
In summary, China’s discarded second-hand photovoltaic panels, at extremely low prices, have benefited many impoverished areas around the world, providing electricity to billions of rural households without access to power, lifting them out of darkness, and enabling them to enjoy the conveniences of electricity. This reflects China’s philosophy of utilizing technology to assist and support underprivileged groups, in stark contrast to some countries that exploit and oppress the weak.
Oh this is hilarious.
The USA offered a gigantic bribe to Marcos to turn them into a missile base.
Marcos says yes allows US to build missile facilities.
Marcos asks where his money is.
US says what money?
you believed me?
Many Hong Kong restaurants demand money UP FRONT.
CHINA BUILDING 3nm CHIPS – biden makes failing look easy…
As an engine mechanic, what is the strangest thing you’ve found inside an engine?
In college as a rookie on the SAE Baja team, I was tasked with tearing down one of our old engines and doing a simple top end rebuild. There wasn’t anything wrong with the engine, it was just a spare one and this was a way for new team members to gain familiarity with part numbers, torque specs, and other things like that. We used a brand new engine for each year’s competition car.
Upon removing the head from the 10 HP Briggs & Stratton, something odd caught my eye. There was raised material on the face of the piston partly obscured by carbon. Brushing it away revealed threads and part of hex head! This engine had somehow ingested a stray 1/4″–20 screw which became embedded into the top of the piston, and then just kept running like nothing had happened. It was potentially like that for a whole year worth of test runs and competitions, possibly even longer.
The fastener was laying there sideways but extremely fused to the piston and could not be removed without destroying it. We simply ground down the portions that were sticking up to recreate a flush surface, reinstalled everything, and called it a day. It continued to run just fine.
– – –
A couple years ago my father in law asked me to help fix up his riding lawnmower, powered by another Briggs & Stratton engine. This was a two cylinder vertical shaft of maybe 18 or 20-some horsepower, I don’t recall exactly. His complaint was that it was “a little down on power” but still cut the grass fine. It just struggled a little bit going up steep hills or cutting through extra-thick grass if he let it grow too tall, and occasionally it let out puffs of dark smoke. He mowed with it like that all summer, bagged leaves with it like that in the fall, and when it was finally done for the season I met up with him to look the thing over.
Expecting a 30-minute carb cleaning or a fouled spark plug I got to work, but found everything spotless. With no signs of any issues with the electrical components either, I moved on to a more serious investigation. Tearing into this engine began with a crankcase cover on the top. With this removed we could look down along the axis of the crankshaft to inspect for any catastrophic bottom end damage. Everything appeared fine but there was a thin metal rod in kind of a weird place tucked behind the crank counterweight. It had a few bends in the middle of it for clearance and the two ends disappeared into the oil bath and up into the block somewhere. I figured it had to be part of the governor system so I left it in place and moved on.
Removing the valve covers, I found the first head looking as it should. The second, however, revealed the culprit: a totally missing pushrod! It was just gone! That would explain the lack of power. One valve on that cylinder is never opening so it’s never accomplishing a power cycle. It’d only been running on one cylinder all year. But then the unavoidable question was, “where did the pushrod go?”
I eventually put two and two together and realized that strange governor-rod-thing was actually the missing pushrod. It had somehow gotten dislodged from its place and fell down into the crankcase. The clearance bends were not manufactured, they were suffered from the crankshaft smashing into it as it bounced around in there until everything was able to self-clearance. Despite being completely down one cylinder and choking on its own guts, this V-twin still performed so well that its shortcomings were nothing more than an inconvenience to be dealt with on the off-season.
I’d always heard Briggs built some tough ass machines but these experiences really solidified that for me.
Why are 90% of US guided missiles and drones missing their targets in Ukraine?
All of the following munitions rely on GPS and have a problem with terminal guidance anywhere near the Russian front line, due to ubiquitous Russian GPS jamming:
JDAM (air launched 500 pound GPS-guided bombs — 90% of what the USAF and USN drop)
SDB (replacement for JDAM)
GLSDB (an SDB mounted on a missile that can be shot from a HIMARS)
M30 (90 km range rocket fired from HIMARS, deploys cluster munitions)
M31 (90 km range rocket fired from HIMARS, 91 kg warhead)
The problem is not confined to US products. Ukrainian-built FPV drones which do not use GPS are also getting jammed by the Russians. I spoke to a guy who is responsible for about 15% of Ukraine’s drone production, and he dismissed any talk of GPS and said it’s gone. In and around the front line, that may be true, but there are caveats.
Background: GPS relies on a network of satellites with 44.8 watt transmitters 20,000 miles up. The signal (-125 dBm) is substantially weaker than the background radio hiss that’s everywhere (-110 dBm), and uses a lot (43 dB) of something called coding gain to be detectable and usable. When GPS devices take a while to acquire the signal, what they are doing is synchronizing their internal code to the satellite’s code. Once the two are synchronized, they can hear the satellite, until then, it’s just more hiss. The process of synchronization is basically trying every possible time alignment until one works.
Before the first GPS satellite was launched in 1978, the designers already knew that GPS could be jammed [1]. Just hit the receiver with -82 dBm of radio hiss and it’ll never hear the satellite. A 1000 watt ground-based transmitter can blank out naive GPS receivers for 560 km.
And, before the first GPS satellite was launched, the designers knew of many clever ways to reduce the effect of jamming. One of them, however, is a massive hammer: controlled reception pattern arrays (CRPA). You use an array of GPS antennas and combine the signals together in a way that causes the jamming signals to cancel. So long as the jammer isn’t coming from the same direction as the GPS satellites, this works really, really well.
Here’s a CRPA from a May 2000 report [2]:
1 panel
Arrays like this can act a bit like a bigger antenna with a diameter the size of the entire array. That’s nice, you get a bit more signal from the antenna. Cancellation works far better. Let me demonstrate.
2 graph
Here is the result of just two omnidirectional antenna elements added together. The Y direction is dB of gain from combining the antennas. The X axis is degrees between the “null” direction and the actual direction of the signal source. You can see that at right angles (90 degrees) to the null, two antennas pick up twice as much power as just one, which is +3 dB of gain. That’s nice, we’ll take it. It’s a big fat lobe. If that’s off by 40 degrees you still get half the benefit, and the benefit isn’t amazing to start with.
But look at that deep, sharp null. If you can get it aligned to one degree, you can knock the jammer down by 35 dB. In practice, CRPAs achieve 50 dB because they very quickly and very precisely line up the phase delays from the antennas to knock out the jammer.
If the jammer against a CRPA wants to work as well as it did against a naive receiver, it’ll need 50 dB more power. dB is a logarithmic scale: That’s 10,000x as much power. So that 1000 watt jammer now needs to push 10 million watts. This is… possible… but any such thing is going to be a major installation and will get a visit from a HARM missile and thereafter many JDAMs.
Today you can buy CRPAs from a variety of manufacturers, all outside the United States. Tualcom, a Turkish company, sells 8-channel CRPAs. They’ve sold 2500 of them to Iran for use on… drones. Yep. Did you know that Turkiye is a NATO ally?
These aren’t going to be on Shaheds, or not many of them anyway, because a CRPA costs about $20k or more. (Please let me know if there are cheaper units.) That’s because there’s no commercial market for CRPAs, as the primary civil defense against GPS jamming is litigation. Even though the electronics are actually simpler than what’s in your cell phone, they are built in low volume of many discrete parts, and in the US they are built by folks like Raytheon.
I would hope that every western military jet has a CRPA, but somehow I doubt it.
The HIMARS-launched 90-km range M31s are having accuracy trouble but the HIMARS-launched 300-km range M57 ATACMS missiles are not. In both cases the missiles can probably use inertial guidance from launch to impact, since that’s less than 7 minutes. But they’ll need an accurate initial position and target position.
The accurate target position can probably be found from military maps. FYI, you probably cannot get accurate target positions from Google Maps — I used to work there, and they don’t want you doing that, and they probably fuzz the locations enough to screw up this use.
The accurate initial position and initial GPS acquisition for the missile would come from the launcher’s GPS antenna. This suggests to me that the HIMARS truck is getting jammed when too close to the Russian front line, probably anywhere within 50 km. And THAT tells me that HIMARS doesn’t have a CRPA. (Update: see below, it has an FRPA, which means fixed pattern. I don’t know the pattern, but as it doesn’t articulate the nulls won’t line up exactly with a jammer and as you can see above, they need to line up well to get good jamming.)
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Neither does JDAM, apparently. And I’m guessing SDB doesn’t either, which went into production in 2005.
This is a stupid problem to have. A half-dozen ASIC engineers and $5m could fix it.
China Just Scored A KNOCK OUT Blow To The U.S. Economy And War Is Coming
What are the chances of the U.S nuking China in a war if the U.S starts losing? Where does it start? A carrier group being destroyed? Japan/South Korea being attacked? What exactly would prompt U.S nuclear usage against China?
Chances are near zero.
And for all of those. The reason is something that you may not know.
China is not a signatory to the START treaty. This limits deployed nuclear weapons to around 1,500 warheads. China likely has more than both Russia and the US combined. Despite what you hear in the MSM about China having only 300 warheads, that is an outright lie.
The original estimate came from the Federation of American Scientists in the 80s. In their estimate they stated that they had no idea how many nuclear weapons the Chinese had. So they decided to use electricity generation as some kind of measure.
What does electricity generation have to do with how many nuclear weapons a nation has? Nothing. The Soviets did not have that much electrical generation and yet has more nuclear weapons than the US. So they finished their study saying that China could have 3,000 or 5,000. They had no idea.
The next thing you should know is that these Senators, Congressman, and President of the US is that they spent generations gaining wealth and power. When was the last time you heard Bill Gates or any other billionaire pulled a knife and went toe to toe with another guy with a knife? Never. And you never will.
Even if the US loses a war by attacking China and the US loses 7 carrier battle groups. Do you think Bill Gates or any other billionaire would chose to vaporize their family to take revenge on one of their body guards being killed? Or even all of them? No.
And it’s even more impossible for the politicians to do so because China has more deployed nuclear weapons than the US and Russia. Starting a nuclear war would mean that the US would get at least a double dose of nukes. One from China and one from Russia.
Those selfish people that have spent decades stealing from the US tax payers are going to vaporize their families, wealth, and power for you, a peon? Don’t make me laugh.
The only time nukes would be used is if China nuked the US first or if the US thought it could get away with it without getting nuked back.
Pecos River Red Fritos Pie
dsc05716
Yield: 6 servings
Ingredients
1 large onion, chopped coarsely
3 pounds coarsely ground beef
2 garlic cloves, minced
3 tablespoons ground hot red chile peppers
2 tablespoons ground mild red chile peppers
1 1/2 cups water
Corn chips
Shredded Monterey Jack cheese
Shredded Cheddar cheese
Instructions
Combine onion, ground beef, garlic, chiles and water in slow cooker.
Cover. Cook on LOW for 8 to 10 hours.
Drain.
Serve over corn chips.
Top with mixture of Monterey Jack and Cheddar cheese.
What is the most bizarre way you’ve landed a job?
Son’s friend stayed overnight. The next morning I’m making breakfast for everyone. Son likes poached eggs. I make them. Friend asks if I can make them like that all the time. I explain how to poach an egg. That night I get a phone call from a strange number and a man asks if I’m looking for a job. He needs a cook. In his father’s house. The father is picky about his breakfast and he heard I can poach eggs. I explain that all cooks can poach eggs. Eventually I am hired to cook 3 meals a day for his elderly parents. I have to plan menus for the week and prepare breakfast to order. Hot lunch and a dinner plate to be reheated for dinner. I wash the dishes but all other cleaning is done by the maid. Amazing kitchen. Eventually they tried to give me the old guys Cadillac because he stopped driving and they wanted to “save me using my car to drive to their house.” It was probably the best job I ever had. Not the money or the benefits. They were family. They treated me like family in the best way.
This is a new addition that I am considering to my daily posts. Here I include some contemporaneous SF (short story) for the reader to enjoy. -MM
Do not ever step foot on the ground. Charlie had been told this his entire life, but it never really sunk in. He didn’t understand the deep-seated fear everyone else seemed to harbor. He thought it was incredible, a beautiful problem to be solved. Until he was laying on the floor of the lab staring at the ceiling and blinking away tears.The first time Charlie ever saw the ground consume a person he’d been twelve. What the tree-top teachers referred to as “live mummification” was a quick, disturbing process. Dirt crawling over skin to create a sort of exoskeleton. A casting of the human body, like those papier-mâché spheres they’d made in class years ago. It’d been an elderly lady that first time. The pulley system keeping her safe had malfunctioned and she’d lurched off balance. It was a code yellow bridge and wasn’t fully enclosed. The old lady stumbled to the side and was pulled right over the edge. Charlie caught only the first flash of the swarming ground on her skin before his mom had ushered him away. As the crowd around them shrieked and cried, Charlie craned his neck for a better look.He’d liked to have claimed this moment as the catalyst for his obsession, but really that had occurred years ago. It was maybe a few days after his seventh birthday, and he was crossing that old rope bridge by his house. It’s been built in a rush by early survivors trying to escape their houses for supplies. He was not supposed to be on it, but that had only made him more intent on using it.One of the rotten wood planks had splintered under his front foot and sent him toppling forward. It was only due to some notion of luck that his hips didn’t fit through the empty space and his arms had gotten tangled in the ropes. His leg hung down, exposed, ten feet off the ground. And then his new shoe, a size too big so he could grow into it, slipped off his foot. It landed on the dusty ground and tipped over sideways. Charlie’s breath caught in his chest, but nothing happened. The shiny shoe glistened under the sun. He wanted desperately to stick his finger in that restless dirt, just to see what would happen. He stayed put for way longer than was logical just in case, but the ground remained flat and lifeless. The shoe was not alive.
The second time he saw someone be consumed by the ground he was 18 and on the verge of declaring a major in Microbiology, specializing in the study of those tiny organisms that made the ground hungry. This time the fall had not been an accident. He’d been crossing a major intersection of bridges when a commotion piqued his curiosity. A young woman who looked barely older than him had crawled out onto the roof of a one-story house where no one would risk following. Her auburn hair floated in the wind. People crowded against the railings to watch her. A few kind souls called out things like “You don’t have to do this!” and “Things will get better!” but the girl ignored them. She stared straight ahead and stepped off the roof. For a millisecond it was as if she was walking in the air, and then she plummeted to the ground and landed with a heavy thump. Immediately the soil surged up to meet her. She didn’t make a sound as it closed over her. Charlie came back every day for two weeks to observe the hardened cocoon. Inside, he knew that the body was being decomposed, drained away. The microorganisms in the dirt would suck the nutrients from her. Then the cast would collapse in on itself and the ground would smooth over once again.
It wasn’t surprising that these events would have a lasting effect on him. The unexpected part was the nature of the effect. Where others would shy away and realize how dangerous the ground was, Charlie felt himself drawn to it. He wanted to understand the little beasts that terrorized his people. So, it was inevitable, really, that he’d want to see this forbidden phenomenon again.
The lab he was assigned to was on the upper floor of a university no longer in use. The building was old, made of even gray bricks. He had to duck through the fifth-floor window that had been fashioned into an entrance to get in. The walls were off-white, and the floors were so stable it made him feel somewhat unbalanced. His feet, used to the bridges and tree-top platforms, weren’t accustomed to the solidity. The equipment in the lab was well maintained: microscopes, autoclaves, incubators, centrifuges. He felt like a child in a room full of new toys. On one side of the room, where a balcony had once been, a ramp had been fixed that led down to the ground. The space before it was taken up by a deoxygenation chamber used briefly to asphyxiate any rogue organisms.
Charlie was integrated into a group that exclusively studied the microorganisms in the ground called Vitae Suffocent. Life suckers. The study was relatively new, they’d only recently worked with engineering to create a protective suit. Before then, the scientists would lean out the window with a cup fastened to a long pole and scoop up a small bit of the dirt. With the help of the suits, they had been able to set up a secure mock habitat to observe the specimens’ behavior.
The group was small, a handful of young students of which he was one, along with six seasoned scientists. For the first time, Charlie found himself surrounded by people who were just as interested in the ground as he was. The obsession that had set him apart from other kids in school was now reflected all around him. There was a girl who’d started at the same time as him- Tori. She was short and had thin black hair chopped short around her ears. Because they were new, they were often assigned projects to work on together. He wasn’t sure if he liked her, but it didn’t matter much.
There was an ongoing experiment that needed a fresh test subject, someone to stick a finger into the Life Sucker habitat. Charlie volunteered immediately, exhilarated by the idea of being able to touch the ground. He pictured it being magical, a borderline religious experiment. He worked himself up over it for days, so that when it was finally time he was almost bursting with excitement.
The scientists heading the experiment placed him in the deoxygenation chamber with the container. Around him, they gathered clipboards, pencils poised to jot down any and all details. His forefinger was swiped clean with an alcohol wipe that made the skin feel dry. Tori unlocked the circular compartment in the top of the container. Slowly, breathlessly, Charlie lowered his hand into the habitat. The tip of his finger brushed the dirt. It was soft and damp as he pressed the finger down. Charlie blinked and the soil began to stir. It tickled the pad of his finger. He watched in fascination as the hidden organisms began to climb up his skin. It was a strange sensation. The soil was cool and light, it felt more like a caress than a smothering.
Tori clicked the stopwatch in her hand and began to count aloud. By the time she reached seven, the organisms were up to his wrist. He withdrew his hand. The seal on the opening caught most of the dirt and held it back, to the irritation of the organisms. He held his hand away from him, not trusting it. Tori latched the contained shut quickly. Someone on the outside of the chamber switched it on. They held their breaths as the oxygen rapidly drained from the room. A loud whirring assaulted Charlie’s ears. His chest tightened. For a minute they all felt like they were suffocating, then it abruptly stopped and the doors to the lab popped open. Oxygen flooded back in. Charlie sucked in a deep breath.
He examined his hand. It was tingling and covered in little red blotches, but otherwise, he was fine. No damage had ever been recorded from less than ten seconds of exposure. Charlie glanced at the other set of doors over his shoulder. The ones that opened onto the ramp that led down to the ground. He longed to go through them, wanted to dig his hands in the ground and laugh as the organisms consumed him. He turned and walked back into the lab.
A month later he was given a protective suit and given the chance to wear it for the first time. He and Tori had been assigned to walk, outside, to a big oak tree and back. Charlie was thrilled. He stepped into the suit and pulled it up over his arms. A tech zipped him in and checked him over. The suit was a stiff layer of slick rubber designed to lack tread so the organisms wouldn’t be able to climb against gravity. The boots they were given were thick and clunky. They were tall, reaching up to his knees like a pair of extra-long rain boots. A device attached to the top of the boot sent out vibrations that they’d found would deter the organisms. The hood of the suit came up over his head and the visor was clicked into place. He saw the world through a glass partition.
Then they were in the chamber and the doors behind them were closing. It was midday and the sun was shining. A breeze spirited a few brown leaves past the glass. The doors to the ramp opened. Charlie stepped out first. His heart pounded in his chest. It was right there, the ground. He walked quickly down the ramp, Tori following behind him at a more reserved pace. He paused at the end of it. The dirt was disturbed, as it always was when the organisms were present. It looked almost fluffy.
Charlie took a deep breath and lifted one foot. He lowered it slowly to the ground, enjoying the crunch of soil underfoot. He leaned his weight forward, ready to take another step, but paused. The ground was shaking around his boot, pulsing in strange waves. It was trying to climb up his boot, he realized. He tried to pick up the foot but felt resistance. The ground clung to his boot, pulling him back down. Charlie watched, entranced. He continued to pry his foot away and eventually the dirt fell back down. He looked at Tori, whose face he could just see behind the visor. She looked equal parts disturbed and fascinated.
Afterward, he felt like he’d been on another planet. It was amazing, he’d been on the ground, but he couldn’t help feeling slightly disappointed. What had they learned during that expedition? Nothing new, nothing interesting. He wanted more. All he could think about was how slow the studies they performed were. They were no closer to understanding these organisms. They needed to study them in action. His plan fell together quickly after that.
Once again he fastened the protective suit on and was checked over by the other technicians. Tori was doing the same next to him. Charlie clapped a hand on her shoulder and with the scalpel hidden in his palm he sliced a tiny hole into her suit, the rubber splitting easily under a sharp blade. She turned and gave him a thumbs-up. He hid the scalpel in one of his pockets.
They walked through the chamber and out onto the ramp. The suit was heavy and sweaty against his skin. Through the visor, he saw the dirt-coated ground come closer and closer. The first step was always the most exciting. His foot hovered over the solid ground, casting a wavering shadow over the dirt. He placed it firmly down. The ground beneath him stirred, trying to creep up his legs but being deterred by the vibrations.
Slowly, the ground pulling at them with each step, they made it 50 feet away from the end of the ramp. He knew they were being watched closely from the observation windows, but at this distance, no one would really be able to tell what happened. Charlie shoved his foot hard to the side right as Tori took a step. The bottom of her boot caught on the top of his and she lost her balance. Her arms windmilled but the suit was too bulky and dragged her down.
She should have gotten up. The suit should have kept the microorganisms at bay. But Charlie had damaged her suit. He gazed intently down at her as the organisms poured over her and into the hole in the fabric. He bent over as if to help her, but really he just wanted to get a closer look. This near, it was mesmerizing. The dark earth swirled as though it was possessed. It rose and fell like a liquid. Tori cried out one last time before they closed over the top of her dark hair. Charlie ignored the panicked voices over his earpiece. Through his visor the majority of the event had been captured (excepting, of course, when he purposefully tripped her).
He’d made a huge leap in the field, no matter how tragic. The footage would help inform scientists for years to come. Except, he didn’t know (no one did) that after a feeding, the organisms laid their eggs. Hundreds of microscopic eggs stuck to his boots and were carried back into the facility. The eggs, not having to breathe oxygen yet, were not affected by the deoxygenation tank. Charlie stripped off his suit and hung it on the hook.
Overnight, the eggs hatched, and those tiny, deadly microorganisms scurried to hide in the dust accumulated above cabinets and at the edges of the room. Charlie was the first person at the lab that morning, still buzzing with the exhilaration of the day before, ready to study the footage and propel their lab forward. When his skin started to itch, he thought nothing of it. Until he noticed the little red dots on his forearm. Then the world tilted on its axis, and he crumpled to the floor. He’d made another major discovery that day. The skin of the microorganisms contained a deadly neurotoxin.
There weren’t enough creatures to make a cast over him. It was a slow death during which all he could think about was how these organisms would feed on him, suck the life out of him. After, they’d lay their eggs. And the eggs would hatch. And the organisms would spread.
His curiosity had doomed their entire town. He’d brought the ground to them.
Five Dollars
“Today I was picking up lunch for a doctor’s Office and as I’m standing there waiting on my order and checking emails, I hear a gentleman ask this lady, “I would like to purchase something to eat but all I have is $5.” So nosy me looks up from my phone and notices this gentleman wearing a backpack and holding a $5 bill who looks to be homeless or maybe he was dealing with a hard time but either way as he asks about a few items on the menu he shortly discovers that he may need more than $5. The lady begins to offer some suggestions to help him and the man orders and as she’s asking him what he wants to drink and as he’s thinking about it the lady says don’t worry about it because your breakfast is on me.
main qimg cedc7470581935887619008696cb61e3
I got this picture for a couple of reasons. It would have been so easy to turn around and ask the manager to step in or for help but she didn’t she just said hey it’s on me. She could have just gave him water and took his money and went on to the next customer and again she didn’t she just did it. I’ve been in customer service for a long time. I’ve been through some of the best trainings such as Dale Carnegie and yet a girl name Karina in a Chick-fil-A in Jackson, MS in a 3-minute conversation with a customer has managed to teach me the value of humility and taking care of your customers. It’s not just the nuggets that make this place successful. It’s people like Karina.
Fighting Russia & China to Last American: Destroying US From Within| Dr. Jill Stein & Michael Hudson
As the oldest son of my father, when his father died… my grandfather willed to me his fancy mantle clock. This was a beautiful bronze statue of a reclining woman Baroque style next to a very ornate clock. I got it when I was 11 years old, and my father decided to make it the “family clock” by placing it on our living room mantle. Telling me, of course, that when I get older and married I can put that clock into my own house for my old children to inherit.
mantle clock
When my paternal grandmother died, I was willed her cuckoo clock. She picked it up when she was traveling from Poland when she was 16 years old, and it represented her new life as a woman. She wanted me to have it as I was, at that time, just getting started off in life.
cuckoo clock
My mother bought a huge grandfather clock. And up to when she died, and in her will, that clock was to be mien and to be passed on to my children. She was adamant on this, and really wanted this grandfather clock to develop a legacy.
B6Omd7mCAAAo5 M
So what actually happened?
Well, my mother died and there was a battle for her estate. I tried to prevent the looting by my siblings, but I ended up in jail and couldn’t do anything.
My brother took the mantle clock apologetically. And my father was there when he took it, and he looked at me bewildered and said “Hey! That’s your clock. What’s going on?” And, my brother said “no it isn’t. I was mom’s and it sat in her living room for decades. And so now it’s mine.” And my crestfallen father was aghast in how bellicose and direct he was.
My cousin took the cuckoo clock, and when I asked her to return it, she said that she had already sold it on ebay. And that there was nothing that I could do.
My youngest sister and her husband carted off the grandfather clock and they too sold it off. And they offered no explanation, no excuse and no justification. It was “it’s mine now”.
And that is what happened to my family legacy though the clocks of time.
Today…
What are some bad experiences you had while traveling to another country?
Oh boy…I travelled to Mexico City in Nov 2017 and I committed a mistake of asking direction from the police Officer at the airport. I didn’t know Spanish and the officer didn’t know English. He asked for my passport and then called another officer. They discussed something in Spanish and after wasting a good amount of 15 minutes instructed me to follow them. They took me to the washroom. I thought there must be a secret door to their office but to my disappointment it was just a toilet. The police officer instructed me to OPEN.
I asked, OPEN what?? A first thought came to my mind that he is asking me to open my pants but thank God he clarified that he wanted me to open my bag. He started checking my bag and somehow found the 1200 USD that my office paid for the official work.
He started asking for money in Spanish. Though I understood it the first time but still I tried to remain ignorant. For the next 10 minutes, I was only saying ‘No Spanish’ and he was trying to make me understand like a monkey that he wants money. All this shit was happening inside a toilet. Then I gave up.
I asked how much.He said $100 for each officer. I came in Indian mode and started bargaining. I started acting like a hungry person so that he gets frustrated and leaves me but man..he was adamant. Finally, I bring him down to $20 each. I paid the extortion money and ran as fast as I could.
The only lesson I learnt is that this symbol is common irrespective of the language, colour, race or country.
Those who follow the trend will prosper; those who go against it will perish.
China’s national reunification is the overwhelming and irresistible trend of history.
‘Taiwan independence’ means war, and division brings no peace.
Shouldering the sacred mission of safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity, the Chinese PLA is fully prepared and stays highly vigilant.
We will take resolute actions to smash any ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist attempts and thwart any foreign interference.”
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Excerpt from remarks by Chinese Defense Ministry spokesperson Senior Colonel Wu Qian at the Regular Press Conference, May 30, 2024.
Isn’t re-electing Biden kind of like the Titanic backing up into the iceberg again?
You know, as a non-American, I find it pretty morbidly fascinating how the Republicans shamelessly attack Biden and the Democrats with exactly the kinds of things they are the most guilty of themselves.
It’s incredibly cringe- like watching a morbidly obese person on a mobility scooter riding around attacking mildly overewight people for being “fat”. There’s nothing funny about watching that level of poor self-awareness.
I continuously hear Trump call Biden “crooked Joe Biden” when it is he, and not Biden, who is the first former president to be charged with a bucket of crimes.
He calls Biden “Sleepy Joe” when he can’t keep his own eyes open during his own trial.
He says Biden is senile and incapable of coherent speech when he was the one sent to take a cognitive assessment and his own speeches are borderline gibberish formed of rambling digressions set in the vocabulary of a slow 5th grader.
He calls the Democrats “extremists” when he is the one who incited an insurrection.
He calls Biden “the worst president in history” when, by any reasonable yardstick, Trump is the worst, most incomptent, mentally-unstable leader since Idi Amin Dada.
He accuses the Democrats of ruining America’s reputation in the world and turning the country into a joke, while the world remembers him making a fool of himself at the UN, making puppy-dog eyes at Kim Jong-Un (who he still can’t resist praising) and stuffing himself into the worst tailored tux seen since Laurel and Hardy parodied a night at the opera, to meet, and disgust, the late Queen Elizabeth II.
Honestly, everything the Republicans say is a poorly-disguised self-own. Almost nothing they accuse the other side of is not an outrageous “tu quoque” at themselves!
People laugh but I find this level of mass delusion genuinely alarming.
“NATO is cooking up something big” and Putin is ready for all out war | Redacted News
OMG!
What was the most illegal thing you have ever done on a computer?
Originally Answered: What is the most illegal thing you have ever done with your computer?
As a kid, I liked to hack. Not for doing damage or stealing, but to play on big computers.
There was a lawyer’s office in the town center – a big chain. And walking past one evening, I saw a modem with a rotary phone on top. In the U.K. it was common to have the phone number of the phone written on a piece of paper in the center of the dial.
Heart racing, I climbed through the plants outside the window to get a better look. I wrote down the number.
I got home, and dialed it.
It rang, and rang. No answer.
So they called out on it.
Next day I called their head office, and asked the receptionist if Mike was still in charge of the I.T. department.
“No, Sir. I have never heard of a “Mike””
“My memory! Shameful! So, what is his name?”
“Why, it’s Peter; I can connect you.”
“No need, I had the wrong guy, the wrong office maybe. Thank you for your time”.
I called the modem number again, only this was also during office hours.
“Err, hello?” Said a surprised worker as he answered the phone that never rang.
“Hi, this is Peter at head office. What the hell is going on there?”
“Err, what?”
“Every time you log in today, you delete 4 files. Some are files not even assigned to your branch.”
“Errr, what??”
“*Sigh* ok, let’s get you out of trouble. When did you log in last?”
“Oh, ok, thanks. Err, about an hour ago”
“Right, what number did you dial in on?”
“Err, the usual one”
“Obviously, but there are 6 “usual” numbers. I am getting you out of trouble, can’t you save me from having to look that up?”
“Oh, right, sorry, errr 555-555-5555”
“Perfect. And your username is?”
“James.Smith”
“That’s great, what password are you using?”
“Err, we are not meant to give that out”
“I know, that’s why I called on this number. I can fax the request, you can fax the answer, and I will have to report that you slowed down my work at the partner’s meeting I have to be at in 3 minutes. James, I am just trying to help you out here, save me some paper work, oil the wheels…”
“Ohh. Gotcha. Thank you. It’s ‘some-password'”
“Thanks, right, I gotta go fix it”.
That night, after playing with the system, I left it printing “your security needs serious attention.”.
It would have printed until out of paper.
There were others, but I enjoyed that one, the simple pleasures 🙂
At that time, my actions were not criminal. Today, the same thing would be illegal.
Stout-Braised Corned Beef Tacos
with Fiery Cabbage Slaw
A great Mexican twist to corned beef is an excellent choice for Saint Patrick’s Day if you are looking for something new and unusual to serve. In addition to the regular instructions for a slow cooker, directions are also given for making this in an Instant Pot.
Rub corned beef brisket with package of pickling seasonings.
Place onion, carrot, celery, garlic, beef broth, tomato paste, brown sugar and black pepper in a 4-1/2 to 5-1/2-quart slow cooker. Stir to combine.
Place Corned Beef, fat side up, on top of the vegetable mixture. Pour stout beer over brisket. Cover and cook on HIGH for 6 TO 7 hours or on LOW for 9 to 10 hours or until brisket is fork tender.
Remove corned beef and place on a cutting board, spooning a bit of the liquid over the top. Carve brisket into thin slices across the grain.
To make slaw, whisk together mayonnaise, vinegar, red pepper sauce, sugar, salt and pepper in a large bowl. Add cabbage, carrot and green onions. Toss gently to combine.
Serve with beef in tortillas with Fiery Slaw. Garnish with toppings, as desired.
Pressure Cooker/Instant Pot
Rub Corned Beef Brisket with package of pickling seasonings.
Combine onion, carrot, celery, garlic, beef broth, tomato paste, brown sugar, and black pepper in the insert of the pressure cooker. Stir to combine.
Place Corned Beef, fat side up, on top of the vegetable mixture. Pour stout beer over brisket.
Seal lid and set unit to HIGH pressure for 90 minutes. Let pressure release naturally for 20 minutes, then manually release remaining pressure.
Remove corned beef and place on a cutting board, spooning a bit of the liquid over the top. Carve brisket into thin slices across the grain.
To make slaw, whisk together mayonnaise, vinegar, red pepper sauce, sugar, salt and pepper in a large bowl. Add cabbage, carrot and green onions. Toss gently to combine.
Serve beef in tortillas with Fiery Slaw. Garnish with toppings, as desired.
Nutrition
Per serving: Calories 420; Total fat 24 g (Sat. fat 7g; Trans fat 0g); Cholest. 75mg; Sodium 1870mg; Total Carb. 24g; Fiber 2g; Total Sugars 9g; Protein 22g; Vit D (0% DV); Calcium (2% DV); Iron (15% DV); Potas. (10% DV)
Do you think the decline in shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. is a temporary setback or a long-term trend?
This is the market warning TSMC about its long term prospects.
TSMC’ s casting its lot to decouple from China by abiding to all U.S. sanctions, committing $65 billion in three greenfield leading-edge fabs in Arizona to manufacture the most advanced chips in the U.S. and setting up new fabs in the E.U. and Japan.
These certainly look like they’re leaving the China market for SMIC to fill. And the market sees the SMIC is catching up. They’re now making 5-nm chips without the EUV machines.
Now even for an idiot, this is the question that TSMC must be pondering: Where the SHIT are they going to sell the chips their fabs in the U.S., E.U. and Japan will be making?
TSMC must know China is the market. And they’re making do with other technologies as Huawei is without the “advanced chips”.
And China is making fast progress at becoming self-sufficient in chips by building out the ecosystem for its own chip manufacturing infrastructure and experimenting new technologies. And if this were to play out, it is very likely that TSMC and ASML will be left out in the cold.
The market can see as a possible fate for these two titans of the chip industryi.
ASML is trying to hang on with its remaining business in China. The most telling how important China is despite the sanction going on its second year, China is still more important than all its other markets combined. The video is about their government now pushing back at U.S. pressure.
But this may be too late if China develops it own technologies and alternative to the ASML machines.
And lastly, it’s TSMC that is the most vulnerable. Yes, they’re the Numero uno and rule the industry but consider this – Apple accounted for $17.52 billion or 25% of TSMC’s total revenue in 2023. This company losing just one client automatically put it in the red in the industry where you’re as good as your last chip. And TSMC has now being all its egg with the U.S.!
Jeffrey Sachs: NATO In ‘Wartime Hallucination’ Mode! The Most TERRIBLE Offensive Is About To Happen
Why do hijras (eunuchs) look so scary and frighten even the bravest men?
I was in Kolkata when a terrified tamilian friend of my wife called to say a group of Hijras were outside their flat demanding money to bless their new born baby
I was the only man and was sent out to confront them
I had never felt more frightened in my life
There were 5–6 of them standing and demanding to bless the new born baby, sing and dance and get some money
Then I decided to talk to them
I didn’t know bengali that well so I asked them in Hindi what they wanted and they said they wanted to bless the baby and sing and dance and get money
I asked “How much money”
They said “500 Bucks”
This was 1994 and 500 Bucks wasn’t a small sum
I said “50” and expected a lot of yelling and shouting. Instead they asked how I could be so mean and how tough their life was
Suddenly it was a TN Traffic cop situation where a ₹50/- demand soon became a ₹5/- for a cup of tea (Old days, the 1990s)
We went back and forth and finally negotiated for ₹100/- and I stuck to ₹100/- and finally paid them from my own pocket to leave without any dance or song
I never got my money back
That lady thanked me and said she would pay me back but I never got the money back
Forget they are Hijras
Just talk to them like they are people and trust me it works
You get intimidated by the appearance and the voice and the social embarrassment but if you can stick to your guns, they are just people
Today in Bangalore, near Jayadeva Hospital road, suddenly they came and begged for money and before I could say no, my wife pushed a 20 into the hand of the Hijra to get rid of the embarrassment
Instead you could politely say “No”
You would have if this was a normal beggar
Just look at them as normal human beings and forget the clothes and the voices
Suddenly it feels pretty normal
Join us on our journey
What is the craziest thing you have ever said to your boss, with or without getting fired?
I have only been fired once. It was the worst job I have ever had. My father owned a car dealership, he told me that if I ever wanted to work for him, I had to learn the business somewhere else before I could come work for him. I had just graduated with an English degree and found a job selling cars.
All car salesman do not deserve the negative stigma that comes with the occupation, but there are many that do deserve the scorn. It is a complicated business. Pay is based on sales commissions. If you do not sell a car, you are given a weekly stipend that will be deducted from your commission when you finally do sell a car.
My first four months were great. I sold 8, 10, 12, 16 cars. Then my fifth month I sold 12 again. My boss made some comment about me slipping. The next month I sold 14, he still made comments about my not selling up to standards expected. There was a board with a list of all the salesman and the number of cars they had out in the Breakroom. Looking at the list, I was in the middle.
It was frustrating to have a boss giving me a hard time when it seemed he allowed others to perform at a lower level. When I came close to making a deal, the boss would refuse any negotiation offers from my customers. I was either selling cars at full price, or not at all. He was not helping me sell the car. My next month was the worst ever. We were three weeks in and I had sold only five cars.
The third Saturday of the month was a do or die day for me to make a sale and salvage my month. Saturdays are generally the best day in car sales. Even the worst salesman can sell a car on Saturday. This particular Saturday, I planned to sell two or three cars.
After our morning sales meeting, my boss said to me, “Can you come by my office?”
I followed him in and sat down across from him. He began by telling me how I started strong but had fallen off on my sales the past couple months. He complained about my efforts and said I could sell a lot more and that he expected more from me considering that my Dad owned a dealership and I grew up around the business.
“You have to sell a car by the end of the day today or you are fired” he said. “I promise you! Don’t take that as a mere threat.”
“You had better hope I sell a car then,” I said.
“Why should I care if YOU sell a car?” He asked incredulously. “You are the one who will be without a job.”
“Because if you make me work my whole Saturday and fire me at the end of the day I am going to beat the shit out of you,” I said. “… and don’t take that as a mere threat.”
“That’s it you’re fired!” He said. “Get out of here.”
China Sanctions US Defense Companies!
What should you do when people are rude to you in public?
Yesterday, I parked my car near the temple on the street. I got down of the car and washed my hands with the water I brought from home.
This lead to spilling some water on the road.
Suddenly, a guy arrived on his scooty and stood ahead of me.
He started using cuss words and said, ‘you idiot, that is my house, in front of which you are washing your hands. Do you have any shame, next time you do this you will see what I do to you.’
He didn’t even let me speak and kept going on and on.
His house was across the road, a few metres away from where I stood. Also by the time he spoke, the water had already dried.
I felt like giving him a mouthful, but then I realised that what will I get in return, abuses? Physical altercation? Insult? And frustration for days?
He kept speaking, and I smiled and walked inside the temple. (I was wearing a mask so he couldn’t notice my smile)
He kept staring and speaking in a harsh tone while I calmly worshipped.
By the time I returned, he was gone.
It may appear cowardice I assure you it isn’t.
Why should I frustrate myself, create unnecessary discomfort and lose my peace for a stranger who doesn’t even have adequate manners?
Why should I become like him and lose my traits and wisdom?
Most importantly, why should I bother myself at all?
Earlier, I would have definitely hit that person or given him back his deeds with interest, but every time I did that, I ended up suffering in some way or the other. Also the impact of such fights stays for days. So I decided to deal with such people using a mature outlook, and I am happy with that.
Do you know anyone who has won a lottery? Did the money change them?
I do. It ruined his life.
This man lived in a rural area, and worked at the only truly large employer. Plenty of scattered mom and pop types, but this was a branch of a corporation. He loved his job.
He struck it for millions. Well, you have to identify yourself to claim it. It hit all the papers, even out to the city, where I lived.
When people realize you have won the lottery, people come out of the woodwork to try to get a piece of it. Every relative, no matter how distant, came calling, demanding with various levels of pleading to get some of the money. He didn’t think he should have to share it, so those relatives stopped speaking to him.
It’s not just relatives: neighbors, coworkers, “friends”, they’ll come around and aren’t subtle. He said no to them as well. They weren’t happy either.
You also get all kinds of crazies knocking at your door and calling your phone number. They got contacts from people pleading for money for their son’s kidney transplant or whatever. Lots of sob stories, lots of pleading, lots of insults.
Frightened by the attention and the chaos, his wife became overwhelmed and had a nervous breakdown. She would eventually divorce him.
The economy in his area turned. The corporation he worked at began layoffs. As he had been there forever, his seniority insulated him from worry about being cut, but it didn’t insulate him from bullying from his coworkers about how he was taking a job from someone who needed the money to feed their family or keep their home. He couldn’t take it eventually, and left his beloved job.
So, he won millions and lost everything else: his friends, his wife, and his job. He still lives in his old house, and every so often walks into town and buys everyone at the local diner breakfast.
With the US and Britain proving unable to dislodge the Houthis from their strongholds or stop the militia from attacking Israeli-linked, American and British vessels in the Red and Arabian Seas, commercial shippers have increasingly eyed Russia’s Northern Sea Route as an attractive potential alternative, a leading mainstream US news magazine has reported.
“The surging costs and fear of getting hit by Houthi drones and missiles have led some shippers to consider the Arctic as an alternative, as melting ice begins opening new potential on the so-called Northern Sea Route,” Foreign Policy wrote.
The article ‘discovered’ what Russian officials and media have been saying for years – that the 5,600 km Northern Sea Route is the shortest maritime route between Europe and Asia, and can shave 8,000 km or more of distance, and 40-60 percent in time, off shipments, compared to traditional Europe-Asia routes through the presently troubled waters in the Middle East.
“The ability to slash some 5,000 miles off a ship’s journey would mean much faster travel times – a major plus in today’s world of online retail and next-day delivery,” FP said.
Unfortunately for the West, there’s a catch: 70 percent of the Arctic, including virtually the entire length of the Arctic portion of the route, passes through Russian waters. “Ships wanting to use the route must secure the Russians’ permission and pay them transit fees. Given current relations between many Western countries and Russia amid the Ukraine war, that poses an obvious challenge,” the magazine lamented.
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I Bought Used SD Cards.. Here’s What I Found
When should a child move out of their parents’ house?
This reminds me of my older son. As a teenager he would say “I can’t wait till I am 18, so I will be free.” I asked him “Free to do what??” and he would say “Whatever I want to!” At that time, I told I “OK, on your 18th birthday, you will get eviction papers. On your 17th birthday, you will get luggage so you have a year to practice packing!” I had told a friend of this conversation, because as a parent, I knew it was a joke. Well, this friend owned a thrift store and gave me a suitcase to give to him. So on his 17th birthday, he came downstairs to see a huge navy blue suitcase sitting in the corner with a huge blue bow on it. The look on his face was priceless, as if to say “Really, Mom???” He didn’t know that all of his real gifts were inside.
Seriously, though, your child and life circumstances will dictate when they should move out. Can they afford to move out? Are they still in school? Do they have a job? Do they have the life skills? I don’t believe there should be a set time in their life where we say “OK, it’s time. Move out!”
My older son joined the Navy, and was in the Delayed Entry Program. He stayed with us until he left for Basic Training. He has been on his own since. My younger son (who asked where his luggage was on his 17th birthday) went the college route. He went away to college and when he graduated, he came back home. He was welcome here until her got on his feet. He stayed with us for about 5 years. He is now living with his fiancee and planning his wedding next year.
As every person is different, so is the time they should move out.
I have been thinking about including short science fiction stories with my daily posts. Please kindly tell me what you all think about this addition. MM
The badlands had ceased expanding, and there was just enough food to support one or two researchers—well, maybe only one—and that would be me.
The bishop had his hands full. A guard saw me into his office, and the bishop sat waiting behind a huge, salvaged desk between us.
The desk, a marvel, held my gaze. Its rich, brown hue was a testament to its unique origin, a strange wood with a veneer of such smoothness, partially burned away, creating a mesmerizing play of colors. I couldn’t help but wonder about the lives that were risked to retrieve such a treasure.
“You are?” he said, not looking up. Now, if it were up to me, I would fall on my knees and kiss his ecclesiastical ring, listen to his blessings, and wait for benediction. Such was my upbringing, which I had only known since…forever. To be in his presence was an honor granted to so few.
But I must answer him! Yet remembering my very name seemed an extraneous and worthless undertaking.
“Thomas Cranwell, to commoners excluded from knowing my ecclesial rank,” I said, finally.
“Why do you exclude yourself?” he asked again, without looking up from whatever was absorbing him. “Are you not to work for the extension of the Kingdom of God?”
“It is for an uncommon request. Permission to attend at Bradwell,” I practically whispered.
That got his attention. I am asking for something forbidden. To speak of Bradwell and the treasures of antiquity that it contained was to invite suspicion.
Myths, stories, and legends about the sacrifices made to build Bradwell many generations ago were a staple around campfires at night. After the cataclysm and before the new orientation, the building of Bradwell took place in a time so dark that our present darkness looked light by comparison. Yet I was convinced that understanding our past would help build our future!
I threw caution to the wind. Before I knew what I was doing, I was kneeling before him, seeking his hand to kiss his ring, even as I could not see that the guard had moved to strike me from behind.
“Stay your hand!” the bishop ordered. “What have we here? A search for knowledge at any cost?”
“Only a fool who seeks to serve, Your Excellency!” My tears were so copious that if I looked at him, I imagined he would send me off straight away. He laid his hand on my head.
“Thomas, I’ll inquire about your character. Send me your references and bid me a good day!”
#
I had to work while I waited. Luckily for me, I had learned a trade as a metal scavenger. It was considered a low occupation, but it was necessary since the metal that never rusts could no longer be made and was highly prized. However, my unusual request made people suspicious of me. Even the scraps I found in the well-combed hills and valleys surrounding Urhan fetched such low prices that I began to starve. Being without family and friends in any place was inviting death into your life. I hoped I would not have to wait long for the bishop to answer!
When news came that the bishop had approved my request, I now had a servant, David, a protection seal on paper, no less, and a stipend. The bishop’s generosity quite shocked me. Was he an antiquarian? Even if only in secret? I couldn’t account for my good fortune otherwise.
We hastened to start our journey. David was young—only sixteen—yet enthusiastic and uncommonly curious. When I told David we were off to Bradwell, he jumped for joy! I warned him to conserve his strength. It would be a long and challenging journey, even for one like himself. Besides, he was to support me, such as I was.
Upon leaving Urhan, David removed his sandals and shook the dust off them, motioning me to do the same.
“A curse on any who did not help us!” he shouted with glee.
This made me angry. “You hardly know what it is, you ask!” I said. “We have nothing but what we carry—nothing at all. It could be that a curse has been laid on us! Mind your place, boy!”
David’s eyes fell, and he began to weep. “Forgive me, Father, he said.
“It is your youth and inexperience that speaks,” I answered. “The world is larger than we know!”
#
We arrived at Urhan Station, a smaller community composed almost entirely of humbler folk, primarily farmers. I was not incardinated anywhere in the Urhan region. I thought it proper to approach the local magistrate to inform him of our presence and request leave to be accommodated for at least one night, perhaps two. Upon reviewing my documents, I was permitted to stay, provided I sought provisions in the local market and remained at the local inn. This I was happy to do.
Thank God news had not spread about my mission. It was a relief to be treated courteously for once, and I relished the opportunity to rest and regain my strength.
David was enraptured by the many sights of Urhan Station, which he had never visited before, even though it was only twenty miles from where he lived.
“Father, shall we hear Mass today?” he inquired.
“Certainly!” I replied.
We soon happened upon the parish church, a quaint, quite old stucco and wood structure dating back to the earliest days of the Urhan region’s reconstruction. Even today, the church outshone the other various dwellings, which were much more bare and plain-looking. A bell rang out, calling the populace to prayer. The church was soon filled.
I was struck by Father Bruno, the priest who said Mass. His intensely blue eyes and reputation for knowing people’s sins without being told drew many visitors for confession, even from Urhan proper. I feared he would somehow know of our mission, so I hung back in one of the back pews.
When Mass was over, and we had finished our Thanksgiving prayers, he strode right to the back of the church to see me, calling me by name, although we had never met.
“Father Cranwell! Know you, not your duty! To serve God! It is not your place to seek that which God has destroyed!”
He said this so loudly that David prostrated himself at his feet, weeping and begging forgiveness. I was stunned, and when Father Bruno had left, and I regained my composure, it was plain that we would have to leave Urhan Station; the sooner, the better.
David wept incessantly. On the one hand, he knew he might fall prey to ruffians or dire circumstances, being alone without my support. Yet, given his religious upbringing, he could not ignore Father Bruno’s words, and I would not contradict a fellow priest, so I released David from his obligation to me.
I did this with a heavy heart, wondering if I would survive long enough to arrive at Bradwell without David’s support. Yet I had to think of what was best for the boy.
“You are free to leave,” I said as we left Urhan Station.
“Where will I go?” he asked.
“Don’t you have a family to return to?”
“Family? My family is the church. I am an orphan!”
With this, I stopped to look at him. David was in tears again. I was nearly beside myself with grief, too. It was clear that he could not make a decision.
“Come with me, and you will no longer be an orphan but a son to me!” I said, wiping both his and my own tears.
#
We were quite clearly approaching the badlands. Strange, disfigured animals approached us, peering out from the undergrowth. David readied his slingshot, and I, my staff.
“I could hit one!” David exulted.
“Let us pass by the side,” I answered. Thus, we took detours through thick brambles to avoid these “denizens of hell,” as the common folk called them.
The road, too, became more rutted and overgrown. Signs warned us not to go further, though the further we went, the more rotted they appeared, like the people who erected them had passed on or failed to maintain them.
We had to sleep in the open air in a shelter we could make from branches and sticks. It began to rain. I had heard of the constant rain in the heart of the badlands, soaking you through and through. We knew not to drink from the fetid swamps that threatened to overwhelm the road, which now resembled more of a simple path than a road.
“Is God punishing us?” David asked after a tough night when I coughed more than I slept. “Isn’t it clear we shouldn’t be here?” he continued. He was throwing stones into the swamp, a look of defeat on his face.
“Hush now and trust,” I said. We have not come all this way to die now!”
But I wondered how much more we could take, wearied to the bone from the dampness and privations caused by a lack of food and good sleep, never mind the constant fear of what might happen if we grew inattentive or were unlucky.
After three days, the path abruptly stopped at a ruined habitation. No one was home, and it looked like no one had been there for some time. After my brave words to David, my heart sank. Where to now to Bradwell?
Had I fallen prey to pride? It was Father Bruno’s words that echoed in my mind.
I sank to my knees and wept.
I could have died there and then and been happy to meet my maker, poor, alone, a sinner in need of redemption. It was David who came to my rescue.
He bounded into my view even though I lay prone in the muck and filth in those last few steps on the path to nowhere.
“Look, Father!” He helped me up. “Come over here! Do you see it? Up on the hill!”
My poor eyes were unaccustomed to focusing at such a distance, yet I could just make out a building built on a hill. Was it a monastery?
I could see it shining like a beacon, a bright sheen off what looked like stout walls as we hobbled closer, David supporting me with every step I took.
#
By some magic I had never seen before, the gate to the monastery slid open to reveal a monk dressed in a black tunic. He did not speak, only motioning to us to follow him. A Benedictine? I had never seen one before.
The monk’s tunic hung loosely over his body, stopping only at his ankles. He wore a rectangular piece of cloth over his shoulders called a scapular that appeared to be made of wool. When he turned to lead us to the community, I noticed his cowl limp and unused, the sun only beginning to make its presence known.
It was an edifying experience to see such calm and serene purpose in this one monk who neither sought nor cared for our taking any notice of him whatsoever.
We climbed some hewn stone stairs to such a height! It was utterly exhausting. I had to stop frequently to catch my breath, but I could still reach a portico, the sun clothed with refracted light through the most marvelous stained glass, again as something I had never seen before. I reached out to touch it, causing the light to fall in a sudden dazzling brilliance as if moved by unseen hands. I wanted to stop and question the monk about how light could be so liquid yet impervious to my understanding!
But he moved ever onward, not looking back.
We reached a stolid door of massive weight, again opening at a mere touch! What I presumed to be the abbot greeted us.
The abbot wore a black cappa, which is a full-length cloak over his tunic. He also wore a ring, which he held out to me.
I collapsed before I could kiss his ring, and from what David told me later, I hit my head on the stone floor, losing consciousness.
#
I awoke in an infirmary, or what looked like one. David was so happy to see me come to my senses. He looked fatigued as if he had been waiting a long time by my side, sitting on a wicker chair next to an untouched tray of food on a small table.
“Eat, father!” he said, his voice catching him unawares like he had not spoken for hours. Then, he cleared his throat and looked as if he might cry.
I had more important things on my mind. “What of the…abbot?” I gasped as I reached for a plain, remarkably shaped glass containing a liquid I did not recognize.
David handed it to me. “He never spoke to me. After you collapsed, two monks carried you here. Will you get well, Father?” he pleaded.
“God willing!” I said. You are so faithful to me; how can it be otherwise?” I joked, but then I frowned. “But there is much to discuss…” I said as I tried to get out of bed.
“Not until you are well!” David commanded. “Eat!”
#
The days went swiftly by. A monk with remarkable medical knowledge examined me. And there was so much food! So much more than I was used to.
Then, several days later, another monk with such bright eyes came to get me. This one was not unassuming or silent. He was talkative, so much so that I wondered if he was a monk or a commoner dressed in monk attire!
“Know you, not your duty!” I exclaimed at one point amid his chatter.
He rounded on me, his confident air dissipating as air escapes a putrid cask.
“Know you, not yours?” he replied. With that, we both fell into sullen silence. He then led me to see the abbot.
#
It was as before. This time, I kissed the abbot’s ring and returned to standing before him in what looked like the chapter house, a meeting room where the community would gather to conduct business.
Gazing about, I saw things on shelves I had never seen before. Whether they were functional or not escaped me; some seemed to be parts of other, larger objects. Here and there, you could see these recognizable parts protruding. But I was not given leave to stare at these unusual artifacts for long.
“You and your servant are welcome to stay with us!” the abbot announced. “I have made inquiries, and the bishop of Urhan diocese has vouched for you. The bishop was once a monk at this very place! What exactly have you come here to do?”
“Father Abbot, I wish to conduct research.”
“By all means, let us visit the scriptorium and the library!”
Again, there was light that I had never seen before.
In a wonder of wonders, I was led into the scriptorium, where monks sat at tables reading words that appeared and disappeared on pages filled with light, with no visible candles.
Then, many books in unknown languages were in the library, with pictures not drawn or painted of such wonders as I could scarcely describe! Many of these books were burned, and some could not be read. Still, everything was neatly stored and accounted for.
“Why not let everyone see these wonders,” I asked.
The Abbot was taken aback. “Do you believe that the people would comprehend that we were once prosperous, but now we are poor only because of a war of unimaginable fury as if the very wrath of God enveloped everything? This is knowledge for only a select few!”
The Abbot, setting aside his vows, embraced me and continued speaking for what seemed like a very long time.
“You need hardly wonder! Was it not always so? Monks preserved knowledge, whether of religion or not, that would have been lost otherwise in past times. We do so today, as always. Forever, until the end of time itself!”
So began my new life. Father Bruno could remind the people of what went wrong, and I would now discover why.
What is the hardest thing you have ever done?
Survived on 10 Rs for 11 days. I lived on borrowed food and also ate free food at temples. Cycled a distance of about 24 km everyday. Lost friends, Girlfriend, faith in everything but ended up being stronger and learning a lot of lessons.
On 21st October 2010 all I had was 10 Rs. in my wallet. You can only buy a cup of tea with that amount of money. Life was hell for 11 days (From 21st to 31st October 2010) I would eat mostly at temple(prasad) or eat bits from food offered by other employees who worked with me, then go to the wash room and cry at my situation. I would come back home tired after cycling for 12 km and cry on my bed and fall asleep because of exhaustion. Wake up early and cycle back to work.
On the 11th day I went to my uncle’s place where my Grandmother was staying at that time. Because I met my Grandmother after a long time and she gave me 20 Rs. She put it in my hand and said “I know you earn much more, right now I have only 20 ₹, keep it, it’s a blessing” I had tears in my eyes and don’t know why but I felt she understood what I had gone through. I immediately hugged her and cried for a while. It is customary for grandparents in our family to give some money to grandchildren when they meet after a long time. I bought a bun & a cup of tea from a bakery that evening with that money. The first time I had spent in 10 days.
Looking Back, the most stupid thing I have done in my life so far : starting a business in 2009 with a couple of friends. I was always fascinated to start something on my own. Stupid because firstly I trusted people’s words and believed them and secondly I took risks without contingency. I had taken loan from the bank for the initial investment of business, the business partners had their own savings though. The first few months were manageable, but come August 2010 things became very bad for us. I had to borrow money from friends to pay salaries of the people working with us. My credit card was already maxed out. Plus I had EMI of the loan and the 4 wheeler EMI. The 4 wheeler down payment was paid by dad & Sister and for the EMI I had promised I would pay, otherwise at home no one was interested in the 4 wheeler.
Come 5th October 2010 the date of my EMI and all money in my account was over. In fact if I remember there was 14 paisa in my account. Of course I had a few 100 Rs in my wallet. I begged my friends to help with some money and no one did. My partners always said they too had no money, only that they still continued living with a decent lifestyle (One of the reasons I left the business in mid 2011). In fact my business partners did not even bother to acknowledge the fact that in the beginning while our share of profits was still good, month after month I would invest back my share of profits to the business, they would not, nor would they ask me to take my share. By mid month(October) almost all my money was spent. My parents were in my home town. I was living in a place where I had even taken loans from neighbors. The idea of staying at home would be really bad as people would ask back their money.
I had to stay at home and not switch on the lights for the fear of the neighbors asking back their money. Since there was no light I would sleep early, wake up early and cycle to work 12 km one way (Tough in a city where there is an uneven terrain and without any food, all the rice and other food items at home I had consumed by mid month). By now I was also having a rough patch with my ex. Once I explained things to her, & even cried in front of her because of my situation, all she did was patiently listen(like she would always do but not help.) All I wanted was some emotional support but probably she felt that I wanted some money from her and very politely said “I got to go, parents are waiting at home”. I could have asked my parents for help but the business was started against their wishes and they would ask me to explain a lot of things and ask me to quit, also the fact that I had already borrowed a lot of money from them.
By the start of next month things got better, and ya I started taking my share of profits which I was not doing earlier. Slowly I started working towards saving some money every month(this went on a long way to help in getting my sister married a couple of years later). This phase of my life or rather the 3–4 months was the toughest I had in all fronts, Bad business, bad finances, bad health, bad mindset, bad temper, bad relationship and bad memories. I remember that by November 1st week when my parents were back things were getting normal and I started to tell them bit by bit about the problems in business. They helped a lot in those troubling time.
And lastly, I still keep the 10 Rs note in my Wallet and I would not give it to anyone for whatever amount they offer me. It keeps reminding me that the tough times are gone and even if life gets harder I can handle it.
Stir together the water, Italian dressing mix, ranch dressing mix, and brown gravy mix together in a bowl until smooth.
Place the beef roast into a slow cooker, and pour the sauce over top.
Cook on LOW until the roast is easily pierced by a fork, 6 to 8 hours.
What is the most surprising thing you have accidentally overheard about yourself?
I had a very dear friend…actually an unrequited love…that died of leukemia when he was 26. We had been close from pretty much the time we met in college, but our stars never aligned. We dated, but he eventually married someone who divorced him 3 months before he died.
I visited him whenever he was in hospital. The last time I beat my blood donation to his room by 5 minutes. His Mom (who adored me because I got up to clear dishes with her the first time I had dinner with them), was with him as usual. I knew he was close to the end and didn’t want to chase her out and told her she didn’t need to leave for me, but she insisted. She came back a few minutes before I left.
My friend’s dad called me a week later at work to give me the news and let me know about arrangements. The funeral was about 5 hours away. My mom took a mutual friend and me to the funeral.
His family was surprised and pleased that we came all that way and invited us for lunch at his sister’s house. We three travelers mingled and talked separately for a couple of hours and then headed home.
On the way home Mom related a talk she had had with my friend’s mom. Friend’s mom said that she spent most of her time at the hospital when her son was there as he was for days and weeks at a time. She loved her son and didn’t want him to be alone. She usually stayed no matter who came to visit. But she said she always felt safe leaving him alone with me…that I was the only one she felt safe leaving him alone with…and that he was always better after I visited.
I knew he was my soul mate, but that kind of sealed the deal.
Did you ever beat up the high school bully in front of everyone?
Not the high school bully, but the town pervert who liked to prey on 13-14 year old girls. I was 18 at the time, and had a summer job running a game room on the main street of my home town. I was only 5 feet 2 inches tall, so not very intimidating to look at. One day while I was working three young teenage girls came running in and asked me to hide them. Right on their heels was the known pervert who was only not in jail due to family influence. I walked up to him and told him to leave. Note he was over 6 feet tall and in his late 20s. He smirked at me and reached out to shove me out of his way so I put him to the floor, screaming in pain. You see, my father had extremely rigid notions that you never hurt or harassed those weaker than yourself but he knew others didn’t feel that way, so he taught me some nasty tricks to take down any bullies. In this case I grabbed his wrist and bent it back, putting him in severe pain, then with my other hand reached out and grabbed his neck on the nerves and put him to the floor. I then told him he was banned for life from the game room and told him to get out. After that, the game room was a place of safety for the kids in that town
What is the best way to respond when someone tells you “You’re not invited”?
It depends on the situation. I used to go out once a week after work with three other women. One time they were talking about the next week’s outing being at a different place and I said, “Oh that sounds like fun.” And they said, “Oh, you’re not invited. We’re going out with a different coworker and she doesn’t know you very well so we didn’t think she’d want you there.” I was like… why are you discussing a weekly outing that I’m not included in? I told them I was going to the ladies’ room so they could firm up these plans without me at the table, and will hopefully be done discussing it by the time I return. I thought it was incredibly rude of them to discuss it like that in front of me. I don’t need to be included in every outing, but don’t talk about it like it’s our next outing, and then inform me I’m not invited. Of course the other person heard about it from them and wanted me to come, but at that point there was no way I’d join them. Covid broke up our weekly outings soon after.
Wolff Responds: Its Time To Come To Terms With The New Economic Order (May 29, 2024)
When I was attending university, I would eat at the cafeteria. They had numerous cafeterias, all spread out on the campus. And after (we) would eat, we would hike to the Engineering library to study, and then when it closed, to the law library.
One day it was before midterms and all the libraries were closed, so we went into the English building, found our own individual rooms and started to study in absolute silence.
But on this particular day, I started to develop amazing gas from the food. I don’t know what they did, but it was fart-central for me. I was just in pain from the bloated stomach and abdomen, and I was a farting up a storm. And for three hours I studied and farted. I studied and farted. And then I farted some more.
A couple came up and looked into the quiet room and then went over to the pipes near the end of the building. Perhaps they were a sewer pipe they mused.
Another hour passed. I farted and then farted. I was a darn machine!
When my buddy Jay came up to get me he exclaimed “Damn! It smells like a God damn sewer up here!” ha ha.
Yeah. It was that bad.
It was on this day that I experienced “mega farting”.
I advise you all not to duplicate this feat. Fart at will, but when it comes to mega-farting, go get help. Take some medicine and let it settle. Be kind to those around you.
Say no to mega farting.
Today…
What is the rudest thing you have ever done?
The rudest thing I ever did also changed my life.
During my first year in college, I was sitting at a little outdoor coffee shop on campus. It was a nice, sunny day, and the patio was packed with people. The shop was alongside one of the main campus arteries, and crowds of people were walking by, to and from their classes.
In the distance I noticed a young blind woman working her way among the human traffic flow. She had a cane, as many blind people do, and was using it to navigate along the edge of the path at a steady pace. Just another young student like me, going to class. As she made her way along the railing of the shop and past my table, I glanced over my shoulder to view her road ahead.
And then I saw it.
A large tree was on the edge of the path, its old branches had long since grown out in every direction. One particular branch, on its heavenwardly ascent, cut an angle into the avenue. It only intersected the path at head height for a few feet, an easy obstruction to duck aside or avoid on such a wide lane.
Easy, of course, if you can see it.
I froze. In the massive throng of people, no one else seemed to notice the impending meeting between head and branch. Just me. I knew I should shout out. I absolutely and unquestionably knew I should start yelling loudly “blind woman, please stop!” Maybe vault the rail that separated the coffee shop from the avenue and run to her. Anything but just sit there.
But I didn’t.
The coffee shop was crowded that day. Cute young women, interesting looking artsy peers, fellow classmates. The very type of people I was eager to meet as a new freshman at a strange school, far from home. And somehow that checked me. I was scared of seeming like a crazy person shouting to a blind woman. I didn’t want to stand out.
So I did nothing. And of course, only aware to dangers on the ground with her cane, she hit her head on the low branch. She hit it hard. I could hear it. I still hear it. I sat and watched her suffer pain, because I was afraid to stand up and stand out to do the right thing.
As I said, that event changed my life. I’d always tried to be a good person, helpful and courteous. But I failed that day for no reason other than some ridiculous notion of peer acceptance. I failed my father, as I have no doubt he would have shouted out. And he taught me better. I failed my personal ethics and my sense of right. I failed another human being.
And that moment decades ago has absolutely shaped my life. It has molded my behavior with friends, strangers, social and professional settings. I’ve worked hard to redeem that moment in my actions and interactions ever since, though often I feel I never really can.
And yes, I understand that young woman hit her head 20 years ago, and likely long since forgot the moment. The few people I have related this story think it foolish I’ve let this stay with me so long. But to me, it reverberates as if yesterday, and I imagine it always will. It has been my constant reminder to never freeze, never falter, and never fail to do the right thing.
I Love This TikTok Dating Trend
How can Western intelligent agencies spread a message of freedom and resistance to the CCP in China?
They can’t.
Chinese see that there are many problems with western democracies, and voices which do not fit the predominant narrative are silenced. Most recently, this has happened with the Israel/Gaza war. Chinese believe that this reveals the hypocrisy of western democracy. Now most Chinese feel that Western notions of freedom and democracy are no longer attractive, and will not solve China’s problems. Chinese have achieved more by finding their own solutions.
On his recent trip to Beijing, Putin took a list of western intelligence operatives and western non-government organizations operating in China to overthrow the Chinese government. Chinese security officials will use this information to neutralize their operations and operatives in China.
How does it feel to work in a service capacity position where one constantly interacts with the extremely wealthy (e.g. an air host on a private jet, a maid at a palace, etc.)?
Originally Answered: How does it feel to have a job where you constantly interact with extremely wealthy, in a service capacity i.e. an air host on a private jet, a maid at a palace, etc?
For a number of years, I worked as a wealth management advisor.
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Financial services is the “Concierge of Money” for the Plutocrat class; we were suit-and-tie wearing mandarins of their largesse, who knew the details of our clients’ finances better than they did; it was our job to anticipate their needs before it even occurs to them.
Establishing, managing and amending clients’ investments and trusts were the obvious and most easily-described portions of the work.
Less obvious was the political and relationship-management aspects of dealing with individuals whose Crosean fortunes can bestow upon them colossal egos and entitlement mentalities; managing a massive personal fortune often means managing their dirty secrets.
General observations: Money is a personality amplifier.
If you are a poor person who hates gay people/broken-English-speaking immigrants/Republicans/whatever, your need for a paying job forces a level of decorum in your conduct, and you learn to keep quiet your most objectionable opinions so you can get along with your employers/customers.
On the other hand, If you are a poor person who has a benevolent heart and genuinely wishes to help the less fortunate, your financial constraints will limit whatever level of help you offer to very modest levels; your efforts may be invisible to most unless they are direct beneficiaries of your generosity, or know you personally.
Wealth removes those constraints.
A wealthy bigot can afford to be a raging terror to whoever he or she wishes, with almost no consequences. I’ve witnessed multimillionaires confidently drop shockingly racist/nasty remarks about gays/disabled/[insert group] in casual conversations.
We were trained to go along with it – they are the client, and their accounts are worth millions in fees over the course of their lifetime, so while we won’t join in the racist/bigoted banter, we won’t object either; we are trained to nod politely and refocus the conversation to the technical matters.
Being in the position to manage the finances of plutocrats, I’ve also been witness to financial shenanigans and the dark side of humanity, unconstrained by budget or conscience.
What have I learned?
A wealthy married man can incorporate separate businesses/LLCs for the sole purpose of buying property/spending money on the sly for his illicit lover(s).
Control of financial trusts can used as chess pieces to manipulate family members/dependents/beneficiaries to bend to the will of the owners of the capital.
Errant adult children of the wealthy who find themselves incapable of earning a living on their own, often find themselves in protracted legal battles with stepmothers their own age (their plutocrat fathers, having paid a fortune to rid themselves of their first wives, marry younger women who now vie for a piece of the dying man’s fortunes).
Entitled heirs – with no irony or self-awareness – often speak of their fathers’ fortunes and possessions as “my house,” “my boat” or “my plane.”
If you put over US$100,000 on the table in any casino in Las Vegas/Macau/Monaco (which you can either lose or win), an entire battalion of high-touch specialists employed by the casino materialize to cater to your every whim, so long as you gamble at their tables. They know your name, your favorite foods, your favorite entertainers (“free tickets for you and your friends sir, and we can arrange for you to meet singer/rapper/comedian/magician so-and-so backstage!”) and your favorite recreational drugs (if you’re into such things – they will be discreetly tucked away in the bathroom of the penthouse suite of the hotel/casino where you are staying).
Now that we’re done wallowing in sin and dysfunction … observations on the benevolent side:
While many wealthy philanthropists want to get credit for their contributions to charities/foundations they support (seeing their name emblazoned on their former university’s Major Donor walls, creating foundations in their names, etc.), I was surprised by the number of people who wanted to remain strictly anonymous – the only entities who were aware of their donations of these people was the IRS (for tax deduction reasons), the recipient nonprofit/foundation, and us, who facilitate/structure these large donations.
There are many who view their wealth as a blessing that they entrusted to be good stewards during their lifetime; they take their responsibility seriously to leave the capital to the next generation along with imparting their most cherished values.
Children of this second group are polite, respectful and thoughtful – they understand they occupy a rare and privileged position in society and are very careful about not lording it over others, and make sincere efforts to be worthy heirs.
As you can imagine, while the former type of client was far more interesting (and lucrative for the firm, given the complexities of the layers of financial instruments deployed), the latter was far more pleasant to interact with.
The most valuable thing I’ve learned is this: whether you are a rich dysfunctional bigot dropping N-words in my office and throwing your financial weight around while bankrolling mistresses through your shell companies, or a thoughtful philanthropist trying to quietly change the world for the better with your largesse, being wealthy is a relatively lonely existence.
The problems you encounter, while very real and very frustrating, will not elicit sympathy from 99.999% of the planet.
Like being an exceptionally beautiful woman, most of the people who approach you are only after one thing, and that perspective warps your ability to connect genuinely with others – one of the most quintessential human needs.
Almost everyone wouldn’t mind being a bit more beautiful or a bit more rich, but few can truly appreciate just how alienating it is to have either in such abundant quantity, that they become the object of desire/envy by everyone you meet.
Mysteries Beneath the Ice: The Secrets of Antarctica
One of my old Free Republic posts were mentioned in this video! LOL -MM
What made you realize your life will never be the same?
Six words. How you may ask did six measly words, twenty one letters, forever alter the landscape of my world? Well I’ll tell you but first, let me lay the foundation for these life shattering words.
The first week of April, 2024 my 14 year old son was just a regular teenager (maybe slightly more mature and kind than most his age but still very much a teenage boy) when he complained of some weakness on his left side. He says “Oh it’s just a little weak feeling in my knee and elbow but I’ve been working on my rainbow flip kick (he loves soccer) so I probably am just overworking myself”. Okay that seems plausible but I kept feeling uneasy about it despite his reassurance that he was fine.
Fast forward a few days and he began to tell me he felt like he was seeing double sometimes and the weakness felt like it was not improving at all. He had gotten the farm truck stuck in the field a day prior to this though so I think well he is just trying to get out of fixing the ruts in the field so I dismiss it as nothing.
By that Sunday April 7 I notice his left eye looks like it’s lazy but he’s never had any issues with his eyes. In addition to this he says now that he feels like the left half of his body is numb. Now I no longer feel like he’s trying to get out of his punishment and the unease I felt is now screaming at me telling me something is wrong with my baby.
I take him to our local Emergency Department and after several hours and a few test (EKG, basic blood work and a CT scan w/o contrast) the ER physician says “Well I see nothing alarming on his test results and I have to say this is most likely a case of Bell’s Palsy “. I argue that this diagnosis can’t possibly be right as Bell’s Palsy only affects the facial muscles while his whole body is being affected but we are sent home despite my protests.
April 9 I get him an appointment to see his pediatrician and after an exam he says “This is classic presentation for pediatric MS but I’ll need an MRI to confirm this”. He asks me to take his over an hour away to a larger hospital with a Children’s Emergency as they could get an MRI done immediately while it would take him at least three weeks to get my son worked into the schedule.
Off we go for a confirmation of this already scary diagnosis that would change his life forever. We arrive and get checked out by one medical professional after another and are finally admitted around five in the morning (now April 10). On the way to his room an MRI is done and now we have a chance to try to get some rest while the doctor awaits the test results.
At 8:30 Wednesday April 10, 2024 a group of doctors came into my son’s very small hospital room and uttered those six tiny words.
“Your son has a brain tumor”
The next few days are mostly an anguish filled blur but to sum it up my son has a tumor on the right side of his brain stem in a region known as the pons. This devastating pediatric disease has an average overall survival rate of just 8–11 months after diagnosis. We are currently living in the Ronald McDonald House while he receives radiation treatments and I’m so afraid of the future with all its uncertainty. I’m trying my best to be positive and to give him any experiences he wants to have (foods to try, activities he’s never done etc.) but he’s my whole heart. You can’t live without your heart…
We have started a GoFundMe page to try to offset the cost of all this and also bills as I haven’t been able to work since his diagnosis. Please help me give my son everything I can while I have a chance to and he still feels like trying to do things and make memories.
Can you tell a billionaire from a millionaire in public?
Originally Answered: can you tell a billionaire from a millionaire in public?
Millionaires are quite common, and usually don’t stand out much in public. Many millionaires will tell you that they don’t “feel rich”, largely because the value of a million dollars has changed dramatically over the past 100 years. To have the same buying power in today’s terms, $1 million in 1900 would be the equivalent of about $27 million today. This is why the bar for being considered an ultra high net worth individual is at least $30 million.
So even though there are literally millions of millionaires (+10 million in the US alone), only about 28,000 people are considered ultra high net worth. That still leaves a lot of room to live “under the radar” and be able to go out in public without attracting too much (or any) attention.
On the other hand, there are about 2,000 billionaires globally and they are fairly well known. They’ve been in the business press and often attract attention wherever they go just because of the influence they have. So look for bodyguards and additional security anytime they are in public. They may not be the obvious Hollywood depiction of bodyguards as this draws even more attention:
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That level of security is appropriate for a public event with lots of press. Like this one:
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However a cadre of ominous looking bodyguards is inconvenient to have around if you just want to meet a friend for dinner, play a round of golf, attend a wedding, or just take your kids out to Disneyworld. It actually attracts more unwanted attention, while adopting a lower profile might allow them to easily pass unnoticed.
For smaller events and public excursions there will almost always be a small (1–3 person) security detail nearby, usually within 10–20 feet depending on the risk level of the venue, and they will likely try to blend in and be “invisible“ until needed. At a party or open event they will usually go out of their way to keep their hands free and will never be drinking alcohol, which makes them easy to spot.
Having bodyguards and/or a full time security detail is extremely expensive and not something a “mere” millionaire would spring “just to have around.”
Hope this was helpful.
Pawn Stars Expert “This is the HOLY GRAIL”
What is the dirtiest fine print you’ve seen in a contract?
I used to store my boat on the trailer at a marina. It was there for three years and they had my credit card on file and charged me every month. Out of nowhere, I get a letter in the mail about a $50 charge for not signing some paperwork. I go to the marina’s office and ask what that is all about. They tell me that I didn’t sign a credit card authorization document. I told them that it was never sent to me, and if it was such a problem for them how did they manage to charge my card every month? She waived the “fine” and then it got interesting…
She gave me a “new” contract to sign for my spot. I never had a contract, it was a monthly payment. Then she says “You might want to read this”. I asked her what I should look for and she said “Just read it”. On, maybe, page 20 it said something like The Marina is not responsible to any damage to your boat, or trailer, even if it’s due to the negligence of our employees. I confirmed that I was paid up until the end of the month, declined signing the contract, and sold my boat to a friend.
If you needed an oil change, or anything else, it was common for them to pull the trailer out of your spot to bring it to the shop and return it later. If some rookie managed to hit your boat with the engine/prop of another, and put a hole in the hull, it was all on you. No thanks.
EDIT: Many have said this is unenforceable legally. That is probably true, but the question was about the dirtiest fine print in a contract. Even if it was clearly unenforceable, why would anyone put themselves in a position to have to hire an attorney to fight for them? Also, any company adding that language to a contract is not one you could ever trust.
Has someone ever unjustifiably reported you to Child Protective Services? What was the outcome?
Oh yes..my own daughter accused me of abusing her children.
I was divorced with no child support. My daughter, “M” was a troublesome teenager and after high school she became resentful that I wouldn’t allow her to just hang around my house with her drug dealing boyfriend while I worked two jobs to pay the bills. She had to either go to school, get a job, or leave. She complied, but in due time, (at 21) she became pregnant and the boyfriend abandoned her. A year or so later, I have a better job with a 4 day work week and I’m starting to date.
I come home from a lunch date with a male friend and M is upstairs with my grand-daughter “T”, who’s now a toddler. M sends the T downstairs to the room where my friend and I are watching television. My friend asks for the bathroom and when he gets up to go, he bumps into a lamp, which falls over and breaks. He goes to the bathroom, while I put the T on the sofa and go for the broom to clean up the broken glass. T gets off the sofa to follow me and starts heading into the broken glass. I catch her before she gets cut (T is barefoot) and my friend comes out of the bathroom.
I’m trying to clean up the broken glass and T keeps climbing down from the sofa trying to get in the middle of the mess. I’m trying to keep T in my arms and sweep up the glass when my friend offers to help. Just as he’s taking the broom from me, T starts screaming her head off, (I guess she didn’t like being restrained, or maybe she didn’t like my friend ). M comes running down the stairs and starts accusing me of hurting the baby. My friend leaves as the inevitable argument starts. M calls the police, they respond and eventually take M and T to the hospital to be ‘checked out’. Two days later I get a call at work from CPs telling me I’ve been accused of child molestation and they need to investigate. It turns out M told the doctors at the hospital that my friend and I sexually molested T . He never touched her, I was the one holding her.
CPS worker came to my house, asked a lot of questions about my sex life, my job, my friends, my family, poked her nose in all my things and asked for my friend’s contact information. I called him and let her ask for his information. The CPS worker was very polite, said she didn’t think anything would come of it, depending on the medical report, and left. I spoke to my friend for the last time a few days later ; he told me he spoke to CPS and that he couldn’t see me anymore. Eventually, I got a letter saying the complaint was ‘unfounded’ but my name would be on the statewide registry for 10 years as “indicated” in an allegation of child abuse. M and T came home about a week later and whenever M became angry at me, she would call the police and repeat the allegation. Within a year, I moved to another town and left M to her own devices. She ended up in a homeless shelter and having another baby girl.
M repeated the allegation multiple times over the next few years as if it were a recent event. CPS investigated and found out I have minimal sporadic contact with them. I’ve got 4 of those damn letters with 4 different dates. Eventually M loses the children, I get visitation in court and CPS asks me to take them, which I can’t because I’m still single and my job involved frequent overnight travel. The kicker is I worked then, and still do, as a government inspector of programs that deal with a vulnerable population. Those allegations could have cost me my job. Luckily, my bosses knew me better than my own child.
Here we are, 13+ years after the incident. After a hellish stint in foster care where they were actually abused, the children have been adopted by a nice family that lets me call and visit them. I’ve participated in their therapy sessions, taken them on vacations, had sleepovers, helped with school projects and I haven’t missed a birthday, holiday, or school event in 8 years. M hasn’t been allowed to see her children in 10 years, while I get to be “Grandma”. Life sure can be a b***h.
English Beef Pot Pie
British Steak and Ale Pie 32
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
Filling
2 pounds beef round steak, cut into 1 inch cubes
3 tablespoons flour
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
2 carrots, pared and sliced
3 potatoes, peeled and sliced
1 large onion, thinly sliced
1 (16 ounce) can whole tomatoes
Biscuit Topping
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
3 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 cup shortening
1/4 cup milk
British Steak and le pie 28 c
Instructions
Filling
Place steak cubes in slow cooker.
Combine flour, salt and pepper, toss with steak to coat thoroughly.
Stir in remaining ingredients except Biscuit Topping and mix thoroughly.
Cover and cook on LOW for 7 to 10 hours.
One hour before serving, remove meat and vegetables from slow cooker and pour into shallow 2 1/2 quart baking dish.
Heat oven to 425 degrees F. Cover meat mixture with Biscuit Topping. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes.
Biscuit Topping
Mix dry ingredients. Cut in shortening until mixture resembles coarse cornmeal. Add milk all at one time; stir well. Pat out on floured board; roll out to cover baking dish.
What is it like to serve in the PLA?
Technically PLA common soldiers are compulsory servicemen and do not get paid. However, in reality, they volunteer to join the armed forces and usually serve for two years as a private/common sailor. They receive allowance.
After serving as compulsory servicemen they can either ‘stay in the unit’ or ‘return to the society’. If they choose to stay, they would be promoted and become ‘NCO First Year’, which as a matter of fact is Corpral. NCO are technically called volunteers and receive wages.
PLA soldiers often go through much hardship which is regarded as a requirement-in China, it is convinced that reliable soldiers must be able to bear hunger, thirst, diseases, exhaustion, and any types of suffering.
They generally don’t have enough sleep but have too much training. They are not allowed to visit home or go outside of the camp while serving as compulsory servicemen and communication tools are utterly forbidden. For example, I have a friend who served in the army for two years from 2013–2015. When he ‘came out’ and we met, he kept talking about old fashioned jokes and our city was somehow alien to him.
But he never complained, he was proud of being a strong person.
Chinese PLA are not frequently engaged in conflicts and don’t have wars to fight so they keep training and sometimes focus farming or disaster relief.
As a result, where there is a PLA outpost, there is a farmland, even on the islands. And when disasters come, they reacted immediately and help people in danger, which is why they are regarded as the savior and guardian of the people.
I appreciate their service.
Baltic Sea Anomaly, Atlantis, and Underwater Alien Bases | Mysteries of the Ocean Pt 1
What Happened To Prison Guards Of Concentration Camps When It Was Liberated?
Walenty Lenarczyk, a prisoner at Dachau, stated that following the camp’s liberation “prisoners swarmed over the wire and grabbed the Americans and lifted them to their shoulders… other prisoners caught the SS men.
The first SS man elbowed one or two prisoners out of his way, but the courage of the prisoners mounted, they knocked them down and nobody could see whether they were stomped or what, but they were killed.”
Elsewhere in the camp SS men, Kapos and informers were beaten badly with fists, sticks and shovels.
There was at least one incident where US soldiers looked away as two prisoners beat a German guard to death with a shovel, and Lt. Bill Walsh witnessed one such beating.
Another soldier witnessed an inmate stomping on an SS trooper’s face until “there wasn’t much left.” When the soldier said to him, “You’ve got a lot of hate in your heart,” he simply nodded.
An American chaplain was told by three young Jewish men, who had left the camp during liberation, that they had beaten to death one of the more sadistic SS guards when they discovered him hiding in a barn, dressed as a peasant
(American soldiers watch as a Jewish concentration camp inmate beats up the Nazi guard who held him at Dachau)
Some of the Nazis were rounded up and summarily executed along with the guard dogs. Two of the most notorious prison guards had been stripped naked before the Americans arrived to prevent them from slipping away unnoticed. They, too, were cut down.”
16 SS men were shot in the coal yard (one more killed by a camp inmate), 17 at Tower B, and perhaps a few more killed by U.S. soldiers in the incident. Anywhere from a few to 25 or 50 more were killed by inmates.
What Is Dating And Sex Like In Japan?
Flirting in Japan
Flirting seems like a misnomer. It’s more like an absense of flirting. If you like someone in Japan, there are a couple of different ways of showing it and/or approaching them, none of which really resemble flirting in the west.
1. Nanpa (the “pickup”) First off, only guys do nanpa; in the rare case that girls do it, it’s called gyaku-nan (“reverse nanpa”), but I never heard of gyaku-nan actually happening, it always seemed like it was more of an amusing theoretical idea, rather than something girls really did.
Nanpa only refers to the case when you don’t know the other person at all, and you want to pick them up. Nanpa is direct. “You’re cute. What’s your name? Do you have time? Let’s go somewhere.” That is the classic script of nanpa. It can be shortened to just: “Kawaii yo. Jikan aru?” If you hear that, you’re being nanpa-ed. Of course, if you are a non-Asian foreigner, you will probably never hear that, because Japanese guys are too shy to try and nanpa a white or black woman. Most Japanese guys are too shy to nanpa at all. If you ask a Japanese if he has ever done nanpa, he’ll probably say, “ZOMG! No way! I’m too embarrassed!” since nanpa is direct, and mostly, if you are Japanese and you like someone, you embark on a series of subtle, indirect stealth manoeuvres, because liking prohibits action, especially for women, but also for men.
Why is this the case? Japanese social interaction is all about intuiting the other person’s wishes without discussing them openly, at the same time that they are intuiting your wishes without discussing them openly, so that although nothing is ever verbalised, the two of you will always exist in a compromise position of equilibrium. If you like someone, that intuitive part goes into overdrive, because you should be able to understand everything about that person without them ever telling you, and you should be able to please them without ever asking how, even more than you would with a normal person. So it’s more important than ever to be indirect. Which leads me to:
2. Negotiating through a third partyAgain, it’s not really flirting, but since flirting is showing your feelings openly–that is, pushing your feelings onto another person, which is direct and rude–it’s better to show no sign to the other person and meanwhile exploit the back channels. Sort of like in high school. So that convoluted human chain whereby: you like Hiro and you tell Junko that you think Hiro has a nice smile knowing that Junko will intuit that you want to know if Hiro likes you back, since Junko is friends with Goro who is friends with Hiro and Junko will talk to Goro and Goro will bring it up with Hiro etc etc etc etc etc etc. Once everything is confirmed, Hiro will ask you out. (The girl ask the guy out? Ahahahaha. Be serious.)
If you don’t have a third party to negotiate for you, you may be forced to use other methods, all of them so subtle that a westerner may not even notice them at all.
3. Subtle signals
– Shyness. Pronounced shyness is form of flirting, since it’s a sign of liking, especially from girls, but also from guys. She interacts with everyone else more than him, she doesn’t sit next to him, she doesn’t talk much to him, she doesn’t initiate anything with him. – Attentiveness. You make life easier for the other person without being asked to. For example, when you got to a restaurant in Japan it’s normal to share food, so flirting means not ordering what you like, but ordering what s/he likes, which you already know without asking, because you’re observant. Stuff like that.- Eye contact. It’s the opposite to the west, where you gaze deeply into someone’s eyes if you like them. Direct eye contact is a bit rude in Japan at the best of times. If you’re flirting you look down and away a lot.- Indirect compliments. I can’t think of a good example. It’s pretty rare to give direct compliments and even more rare to compliment someone’s looks. (It’s especially rare for guys to compliment girls directly.) I wish I could think of a good example! I’ll come back to this one.
Sex in Japan
It’s really different. It’s just so completely different. The first time I had sex with a Japanese guy was easily the most bamboozling experience of my entire life.
Before I launch into anything, I should say that while I lived in Japan for five years, I have had sex with only a select few people, and that was within long term relationships, so it’s not as if I have personally taken a wide sample. But I had a network of Japanese friends (mostly female) and every time I encountered a cultural difference I immediately pumped them all for information, asking my millions of questions. I make generalized statements only when something that I personally experienced was confirmed as The Norm.
The biggest difference is that sex in Japan is not a mutual sharing experience with both partners spontaneously doing whatever they feel like or enjoy whenever they feel like doing it. Sex has rules and sex has roles just as every social interaction in Japan has rules and roles. There is an active partner and a passive partner. Active means moving; passive means unmoving. In heterosexual sex, the active partner is always male, and the passive partner is always female. In gay sex you work out your roles beforehand: the seme is active, the uke is passive (for gay guys); the tachi is active, the neko is passive (for gay women). If you are familiar with seme/uke conventions from yaoi manga, you can use them as a way of relating to what I’m talking about, because those conventions are not a fictional construct, randomly decided upon by a group of yaoi mangaka. Straight people have sex like that too, in reality.
So there is an active partner and a passive partner, which causes various flow on effects. You can’t have “Whoo-hoo! Go for it!” sex because both partners are constrained by their roles. The passive partner (obviously) because she can’t move, and the active partner because he has to take care of the passive partner, instructing her on what to do and exerting himself so that she has a good time.
Japanese guys are generally more stressed out by sex than western guys and that is because they are responsible for the sex; as the active male, the sex is their burden, they have to do everything, it’s all up to them. Sex equates not only (sometimes not even primarily) with ‘fun’ or ‘pleasure’, it also equates with ‘work’ and ‘obligation’.
I also can’t emphasise enough just how passive the passive partner is. The way a woman kisses is by submissively opening her mouth, not moving her tongue unless she is cued to do so; if she’s really feminine she won’t open her mouth at all, until she’s told to. Sometimes women will move around a (very) little during sex, but mostly not at all. The slang term for a woman who lies completely still in bed is maguro (tuna). For me, with my western sensibilities and preconceptions, calling someone a ‘tuna’ in bed sounds like an insult, conjuring up images of cold dead fish, but in Japan that word has a very positive connotation. Tuna’s an expensive delicacy.
Part of what was so bamboozling the first time I had sex in Japan was that I didn’t know there was a Way of Sex, with strict gendered roles, and I just was happily doing my own thing, throwing my partner into total confusion. Seiji told me much later that dating me made him feel like he was gay, because I was active in bed, and he couldn’t connect that with anything except masculinity.
When it came to the guys I dated, even though it was completely outside their experience, they sort of (kind of) eventually adjusted their thinking and accepted the fact that I was active (because I was Foreign and Foreign Women Are Different) but the thing I could never completely change was the fixed idea they had that someone must be passive. Yes, I could be active in bed, but they had no template for how to react to that other than the female/passive/uke template. So at best we could alternate “active periods”, and though the lines between active and passive blurred a little over time, they never blurred completely. And total shutdowns still happened: thirty seconds tick past and my partner hasn’t moved at all … oh, okay, I get what’s happened.
If I’m making cross-cultural sex sound like a bit of a nightmare: yeah, it was. In this case, once I worked out what was going on, I thought all my problems could be solved by a simple conversation or two, explaining the more free-form nature of western sex, and encouraging my partner along the lines of, “You don’t have to act a certain way, you can act however you like! You can relax! Enjoy yourself! Doesn’t that sound great?” but that was also a failure to understand the Japanese psyche. It’s not liberating for a Japanese person to be told there are no rules, it’s frightening. I was inadvertently terrorizing my partner by dropping them into the middle of a scary foreign wilderness and telling them to make do without a map.
Sex and hygiene
Sex in the west can be spontaneous, but sex in Japan isn’t, or at least, not in the same way. In Japan, you can’t get in the front door and immediately start stripping each other’s clothes off in the hallway. Well, you can, and your Japanese partner will probably acquiesce because they are Japanese, but deep down they will be hideously uncomfortable and thinking, “Sex? But I’m not mentally prepared! I haven’t done my kokoro no junbi! And she hasn’t had a shower! And I haven’t had a shower! This is kind of gross!”
Shower is important. You should shower directly before and after you have sex. Before is more important than after. This makes me sound like I only ever dated people with OCD, but it’s the norm. The way I first found out about this was in conversation with my friend Natsue.
Me: I was at Seiji’s place hanging out and he randomly told me that I could use his shower if I felt like it. Don’t you think that’s weird? Natsue: *cracks up laughing* Cat, that means he wants to have sex with you! If a guy mentions having a shower, he is saying that he wants to have sex. Me: But isn’t it kind of rude to imply I needed to shower first? Like, it was a date, obviously I had showered before going over to his apartment! Natsue: Well, I suppose so… *sounding unconvinced* … but didn’t you say he lives in Yokohama?Me: What does Yokohama have to do with it?Natsue: Well, you went on the train to get there … it’s better to have another shower. If a guy had sex with me without showering first, it would make me really uncomfortable.
Sensing yet another cross-cultural disaster in the making, I began the investigation, hitting up all the usual suspects for information, including my friend Tomoko, who was dating a western guy called Andy.
Me: Sorry to bring this up suddenly, but does it weird you out that Andy sometimes initiates sex without showering first?Tomoko: YES! I’m so glad I finally have someone to talk to about this! Cat, are all westerners like this? It’s so dirty and I can’t relax! It makes me feel like we are just animals!
After I heard basically the same story from all my Japanese girlfriends, I went back to Seiji.
Me: First of all, westerners don’t always shower or have a bath before sex. However, I will try to accommodate you on this because the idea of sex without showering seemed to horrify everyone I talked to right down to their very bones. Secondly, when you suggested that I shower the other day, and I said no, I was not rejecting you. I didn’t understand that it was your Japanese signal that you wanted to have sex. If I had understood that, I would definitely have said yes. Seiji: *spits tea all over the table*Me: …this is one of those deeply unspoken Japanese things that I’m not supposed to talk about directly, isn’t it.Seiji: Yes.
Another thing that is considered rather icky and unhygienic is ejaculate. Guys are really embarrassed by it. They will be desperately scrabbling for a tissue almost before you realise they’ve come at all, since it is really bad form to get ejaculate anywhere, without cleaning it up immediately afterwards (and immediately means immediately). This is yet one more thing that men are responsible for as the ‘active’ partner. The more of a nice, polite guy they are, the more stressed out they will be about it. It’s also yet one more way that the sex is prescribed and controlled; the guy can never really let go, because even at the moment of climax, he’s already worrying about cleaning up, or trying not to make a mess in the first place.
I'm leaving China soon and many people asked "why aren't you moving back to the US?" There are a lot of reasons and I talk about the bigger reasons in this video. I don't think the US is all bad, but I also don't agree with many of the things that are happening in the US currently. I might never move back and if everything goes according to plan, I will never need to move back.
Is the rise of China a threat to the American Exceptionalism narrative?
Oh, absolutely! This is not in question.
American Exceptionalism says the Americans have the best economy, the best technology, and the best political governance. Against China, this is oh for three.
Best Economy
China has the world’s largest economy by purchasing power parity, which is a better measure of how well a country is doing.
China’s economy continues to grow at around 5% while the US economy struggles to reach 3%.
China is the undisputed world’s manufacturing superpower. The USA doesn’t even come close.
China has the world’s finest infrastructure (roads, bridges, high-speed rail, airports, seaports, power grid, etc.). US infrastructure, on the other hand, is crumbling and decaying.
China’s national debt is about 77% of GDP. The US national debt is about 129% of GDP.
Best Technology
ASPI says China leads the world in 37 out of 44 critical technology fields.
China is granted more technological patents than the USA and Japan combined!
China graduates several times more STEM graduates than America does.
China has the best 5G. China has the best EVs. China has the best mobile payment system. China’s BeiDou system is superior to GPS. China’s Tiangong space station is superior to I.S.S.
Best Political Governance
According to 𝗟𝗮𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗮’𝘀 𝗗𝗲𝗺𝗼𝗰𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘆 𝗣𝗲𝗿𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗜𝗻𝗱𝗲𝘅 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟰, 79% of Chinese believe their nation is democratic while only 57% of Americans and 55% of British do.
According to the 𝗘𝗱𝗲𝗹𝗺𝗮𝗻 𝗧𝗿𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗕𝗮𝗿𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟰, 85% of Chinese trust their government while only 40% of Americans and 30% of British do.
According to the 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗻 𝗦𝗼𝗰𝗶𝗲𝘁𝘆 𝗕𝗮𝗿𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟯, 76% of Chinese trust their politicians while only 29% of Americans and 20% of British do.
According to 𝗜𝗽𝘀𝗼𝘀’ 𝗚𝗹𝗼𝗯𝗮𝗹 𝗛𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟯, 91% of Chinese are happy with their life while only 76% of Americans and 70% of British are.
According to 𝗜𝗽𝘀𝗼𝘀’ 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗹𝗱 𝘀𝘂𝗿𝘃𝗲𝘆 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗡𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿, 𝟮𝟬𝟭𝟵, 95% of Chinese believe their country is on the right track and moving in the right direction while only 41% of Americans and 23% of British do.
US politics is a total basket case. There is deep political division. There is deep political corruption. The American people are simply not happy with their governance.
1 beef shoulder roast, boneless arm chuck roast or boneless blade chuck roast (2 to 2 1/2 pounds)
1 tablespoon vegetable oil (optional)
1 large onion, chopped
2 tablespoons minced garlic
Salt and pepper
Four Way Slow Cooker Shredded Beef2
Instructions
For optional browning, heat 1 tablespoon oil in large nonstick skillet over medium heat until hot. Brown beef roast on all sides.
Place onion and garlic in 3 1/2 to 5 quart slow cooker; place roast on top.
Cover and cook on LOW for 9 to 10 hours or on HIGH for 5 to 6 hours or until roast is fork-tender.
Remove roast from slow cooker. Skim fat from cooking liquid, if necessary and reserve 1 cup onion mixture.
Shred beef with 2 forks. Combine shredded beef and reserved onion mixture. Season with salt and pepper, as desired.
Continue as directed in Recipe Variations below, as desired.
Four Way Slow Cooker Shredded Beef3
Notes
Recipe Variations
Mexican Shredded Beef: Combine tomato or tomatillo salsa and beef mixture, as desired. Place in large microwave-safe bowl. Cover, vent and microwave until heated through, stirring occasionally. Serve in warmed flour or corn tortillas topped with pico de gallo, slice avocados, shredded cheese, chopped cilantro and/or chopped white or green onions, as desired.
BBQ Shredded Beef: Combine prepared barbecue sauce and beef mixture. Place in large microwave-safe bowl. Cover, vent and microwave until heated through, stirring occasionally. Serve on whole wheat rolls topped with creamy horseradish sauce, coleslaw, Cheddar cheese slices, chopped green bell pepper and/or canned French fried onion, as desired.
Asian Shredded Beef: Combine prepared hoison or teriyaki sauce and beef mixture. Place in large microwave-safe bowl. Cover, vent and microwave until heated through, stirring occasionally. Serve in lettuce or cabbage cups topped with shredded carrots, sliced cucumber, chopped fresh cilantro or mint, sriracha or crushed red pepper flakes and/or chopped peanuts, as desired.
Indian Shredded Beef: Combine prepared Indian cooking sauce, such as Tikka Masala or Vindaloo. Place in large microwave-safe bowl. Cover, vent and microwave until heated through, stirring occasionally. Serve in naan or pita bread topped with toasted chopped pistachios or coconut, raisins, Greek yogurt or mango chutney, chopped fresh mint or cilantro and/or sliced cucumber or green onion, as desired.
Nutrition
Per serving, using Shoulder Roast: 161 calories; 5 g fat (2 g saturated fat; 3 g monounsaturated fat); 57 mg cholesterol; 64 mg sodium; 3 g carbohydrate; 0.5 g fiber; 23 g protein; 7.2 mg niacin; 0.3 mg vitamin B6; 2.6 mcg vitamin B12; 2.8 mg iron; 26.0 mcg selenium; 5.5 mg zinc; 89.1 mg choline
Brian Berletic: China Just SHOCKED the World and the US Military is Preparing for War
“Have you ever sabotaged food because someone was stealing it?”
I answered a question like about 4 years ago.
Originally Answered: “If a coworker is stealing your food and you address the problem by putting something in it that makes the thief sick, can you be prosecuted for that? What if you put your name on it and leave a “DO NOT EAT” note?”
This brings to mind a story I was told in 1967 or ‘68. The man that told us the story was our class adviser, and he was in his 80’s at the time, so the story probably originated in the 1880s or ‘90s – if it’s true at all. Life was different then.
He told us that he’d been having problems at school; somebody was stealing his lunch before it was lunchtime.
One morning, on his way to school, his body language must have shown his dejection. He wasn’t looking forward to going to school or in having his lunch stolen again. The neighborhood Druggist saw him as he walked by and noticed that he seemed dejected. The Druggist asked him what was wrong, and my class adviser stopped and explained. The Druggist said he could fix the problem, and asked the class adviser for his lunch. He took it into the drugstore and when he re-appeared, he warned my class adviser to not eat it, just put it on the lunch shelf like he usually would.
During class, the predictable happened. One of the students held up his hand… then started waving his hand frantically… then ran from the classroom without permission, followed by a stream of very liquid excrement.
The Principal sent my class adviser home. As he passed by the drugstore, the Druggist spotted him again, looking even more dejected than he had earlier in the morning. He asked what was wrong now, and my class adviser said he’d been expelled, and that he was going to catch holy heck when he got home. This was a time when corporal punishment was practiced at school, and my class adviser fully expected to get walloped by his dad, every time he got walloped at school. He wasn’t looking forward to facing his dad.
The Druggist told him “Tell your dad to come and talk to me before he disciplines you. I’ll tell him what happened and why I did it.
”My class adviser said “Well, that will help, but it won’t fix things up with the Principal. I’ll still be expelled.”
The Druggist said “Don’t worry about that. I also sit on the School Board.”
Why the US is a Paper Tiger Vs China
A fun discussion.
Have you ever overheard someone talking about you in another language?
Yes, rather frequently. I’m Finnish but don’t fit the bill in my area nor, apparently on airplanes.
Having said that, I vividly remember the first time I traveled alone.. I was seated next to two Finnish men in their 30s / early 40s. The men were polite enough when taking their seats, greeting me in English and asking where in our destination I was headed – I didn’t bother to correct their initial assumption of my nationality as I had noticed that most people found it embarrassing to be corrected on the matter. After the conversation ended, I pulled out a book and they switched to Finnish to speak with each other.
It was fine while they tackled the topics of sports (which ice hockey team from their hometown was the best) and politics but a little too soon for my liking, they started talking about women. Normally this wouldn’t be an issue as I’d simply turn up the volume of whatever I happened to be listening to in order to drown them out but this time around the conversation came full circle to me and the judging of what I was – Arab, jew, Mediterranean, Romani – and which of these options meant I was beneath them in their personal racial bias. I was a little disgusted by the whole conversation – I hadn’t known that Arab meant I was a bitch or that specific Mediterranean countries meant different levels of sexual promiscuity.. But since I was young, I didn’t call then out on it during the 3 hour flight. I neither stood up for myself nor corrected them; I was shocked that people actually thought these kinds of things about others merely based on their perceived nationality or race.
I made it through the flight without a word to suggest that I had understood everything they had said. When we landed in our destination, I turned to them and wished them a lovely vacation in my native tongue. The looks of horror on their faces were definitely worth seeing!
Russia’s Half-Ton Cluster Bomb RBK-500 Wiped Out Canadian & Polish Mercenaries In New York (UKRAINE)
When I was in prison; in the ADC, I witnessed numerous fights, stabbings and deaths. In all cases, the correctional officers (CO’s) handled the situation professionally.
Here’s an example.
We were being led from our barracks to the sally port. In this process we were led down a long hall with painted lines that we had to stay inside. During this transfer process, we would go from one gated area to the next, always manned by guards, and watched by surveillance cameras.
One day, there was a stabbing in the hall… just as we were being led down it.
Three inmates clustered around another and jabbed him repeatedly over and over and over again, and he collapsed in a heap on the floor.
Immediately the entire hall went into lock-down.
We were told to stop; turn around facing the wall and not move. And so we did. Most prisoners in “general population” are just doing their time, and don’t want to get involved in the hard core games of the long timers.
Then a crew of officers came, and hauled the offenders off, and a medical team came to pick up the carcass of the killed felon. All in all, it took perhaps ten to fifteen minutes.
We keep standing there facing the wall.
Pretty quick.
They had a lot of practice in these kinds of matters.
To survive in prison is to watch your six at all times, to keep your mouth shut, and never, ever get involved with queers (no offense intended, that is what they were called in the ADC), gangs (of any type), or drug users. A word to the wise.
What’s the most hurtful thing your mother or father has ever said to you?
It was a few weeks before my wedding and my parents sat me down. They told me that my fiancée is not someone who will ever be happy. They told me she is not the person I think she is. They informed me they would support whatever I decide to do and never speak about it again.
I assumed they made their conclusions because she was a product of divorce, alcoholism ran in her family, and she dropped out of school in 9th grade and started selling drugs. But, I didn’t see her that way. I saw her as a strong woman who conquered all of those things. She got her GED, had a job, an apartment, a car, a sense of humor, I never saw her do drunks and she had alcohol maybe twice a year. And she was really gorgeous.
Nine years into the marriage and 4 kids later, she started drinking. Every single day. Hiding alcohol throughout the house (mind you, she never really drank before this point). She would get so drunk at gatherings she would throw up on herself. Yes. With 4 young kids right there. I worked about 12–15 hours a day (she was a stay at home mom, we had 4 kids and a mortgage that was due on the 1st of every month). She hired a caretaker for the kids and to clean the house – paying the person over $1,000 a week. When I came home from work at 9 or 10 pm every day there would be a babysitter there and she wouldn’t return home until early in the morning – many times making me very late for work. The day my mother died she left the house when I got home from the hospital and didn’t come back until the next morning. In the morning I told my 4 little kids what happened and it was taking me some time so they wouldn’t see me fall to pieces – so she just jumped in and said Grandma died and then she walked out the house and didn’t come back until the next day. Yes, she was cheating. With the previous “drug dealer” from her past. Then she started physically and verbally abusing me. Gaslighting me. She began telling my family I was severely depressed. That I was having an affair. That I was a bad father and a bad husband.
it took some time to be realize I was better than the situation she had created. My kids would be better served without thinking this was what marriage actually was supposed to be. She filed for divorce thinking she would be on easy street for the rest of her life. In a drunken tirade she even told me she would be living off my income for the rest of her life since we had 4 kids.
it didn’t turn out that way for her but that’s her issue now. I think back to the conversation my parents had with me. They were completely right. But, if I had listened to them, my 4 amazing kids would not have been born.
I have a foreign friend in Shanghai who used to take the high-speed train to Beijing frequently to meet me for dates. He has told me more than once about experiencing “Chinese speed” on the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail. The Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway, stretching from Beijing South Station to Shanghai Hongqiao Station, spans 1318 kilometers, with the fastest journey taking only 4 hours and 18 minutes.
Over the past decade, the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail has safely transported over 1.35 billion passengers, becoming not only the busiest high-speed rail line in China but also turning the saying “a day’s round trip between Beijing and Shanghai” into reality.
However, the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed rail is just a microcosm of China’s high-speed rail construction.
From the completion of the first high-speed railway in 2008 to a total mileage nearing 40,000 kilometers in 2021, China now boasts the world’s largest high-speed railway network. China’s high-speed rail mileage ranks first globally, accounting for two-thirds of the world’s total.
In the first half of 2023, US President Biden openly acknowledged at the 50th anniversary celebration of the US National Railway Passenger Corporation (Amtrak) that China’s high-speed rail length and speed rank among the world’s best. He emphasized that the current US infrastructure lags far behind some countries and regions in the world and that the United States cannot afford to fall behind and needs to rebuild its railway system.
China’s high-speed rail operation indicators, including safety, efficiency, comfort, convenience, and economy, are at the forefront or advanced level globally.
At the same time, China’s high-speed rail is also recognized as the safest in the world. From 2008 to 2020, China’s average accident rate per 100 kilometers for high-speed rail is 82% lower than that of overseas high-speed rail. As of the end of June 2021, China’s high-speed rail has accumulated 9.28 billion kilometers of safe operation, equivalent to circling the earth 232,000 times, and safely transported 14.12 billion passengers.
How stable is China’s high-speed rail? Many of us have heard about a Swedish individual placing a coin on China’s high-speed rail and it remaining upright for 8 minutes. Not just coins, but mineral water bottles and pens can also stand steadily on the window ledge of high-speed trains.
Moreover, China has built the world’s largest 12306 railway internet ticketing system, with a daily ticketing capacity of over 20 million. Currently, 86.2% of ticketing is done online, reaching as high as 90% on peak days.
How convenient is China’s high-speed rail now?
In short, China’s urban clusters within a radius of 500 kilometers have formed a 1-2 hour travel circle, achieving bus-like travel; cities across regions within 1000 kilometers can be reached in about 4 hours, enabling same-day round trips; and cities across regions within 2000 kilometers can be reached in about 8 hours, allowing for morning departure and evening arrival.
Moreover, boarding high-speed trains no longer requires queuing for tickets or picking them up on site; tickets can be purchased and paid for directly on mobile phones, and electronic tickets can be scanned using mobile phones for ticket checks. Facial recognition can also be used for station entry, and meals can be ordered directly on mobile phones while on high-speed trains. Of course, considering the needs of the elderly and offline populations, China still retains traditional service channels such as paper tickets and station windows, all of which accept cash payments. The 12306 system is also more intelligent, automatically identifying passengers aged 60 and above and prioritizing lower berths for them.
If you come to China, you must experience China’s high-speed rail and feel the “Chinese speed”.
Woman GOES VIRAL Complains About Being A Single Mom But Ex Husband Responds And The TRUTH IS CRAZY
Truth comes out.
Green Pepper Steak
Green Pepper Steak
Ingredients
1 1/2 pounds round steak, cut into strips
1 clove garlic, minced
1 cup chopped onion
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1/4 teaspoon ginger
1 teaspoon sugar
1/4 cup soy sauce
1 large green pepper, cut into thin strips
4 tomatoes, cut into eighths or 1 pound can whole tomatoes, undrained
1 (1 pound) can bean sprouts, drained
1 tablespoon cornstarch
1/2 cup cold water
Instructions
Brown steak over medium heat on range unit. Transfer to slow cooker.
In small bowl combine garlic, onion, salt, pepper, ginger and soy sauce. Pour over steak and cover.
Slow cook at MEDIUM setting for 6 to 8 hours or MEDIUM-HIGH setting for 4 to 5 hours.
Add green pepper, tomatoes and bean sprouts; stir to blend. Cook an additional hour.
Just before serving, increase heat setting to HIGH.
Combine cornstarch and water, gradually add to pepper steak, stirring until thickened.
Keep warm for serving on LOW.
Serve over hot cooked rice or egg noodles.
Modern Women Are Trying Too Hard To Be Masculine…It’s Pushing Men Away
When buying gas at a self service station why do people insist on pulling a paper receipt? What do they do with them?
Fun story :- (I may have told this before, but it’s always good as a cautionary tale)
About three years ago (more or less) I bought some fuel from a self-service pump at my local superstore. I filled it up, got the receipt and drove away. All good.
Two days later, a police officer came to my house, to tell me I had been caught on camera taking fuel and driving away without paying for it.
There was no doubt it was me – my registration plate, a good description of the car, and the date and time were right. Except I had paid, because I always pay. I am good like that. (I am seldom naughty!)
As a side note – he told me I was on the hook for £99 of fuel. Now even given the prices at the time, there is NO WAY I could get £99 of fuel in my car. My fuel tank is about 45 litres, and the average price is about £1.21 per litre at that specific station. So even if you look at the highest price in recent times – £1.31, it still wouldn’t reach £99. Even if you look at prices on the motorway (usually £1.51 to £1.61) it STILL wouldn’t reach £99.
You would have to have fuel at about £2.20 per litre, and if it had reached that high I am pretty sure I would have remembered!!
Anyway – I remembered I had a receipt, so I went and got it. He took a picture of it, and went on his merry way.
My conclusion was that the connection between the pump and the kiosk had broken down somewhere, and they had recorded the fuel had been taken but not that it had been paid for.
(The superstore is a nation wide brand, so the idea it was a scam just to rip me off seems very unlikely).
Since then I have got a receipt every time I have got fuel – whether I use self-service or not. Because you never know.
x-x-x
EDIT : (22–03–2020 at 16:46)
Okay – I have had enough of the “helpful comments” from people.
If I have a receipt and the police come to my door, I can show them the receipt. They can take a picture of it, and then bugger off.
If I don’t have a receipt then yes – I could use my bank statement. Except that only comes at the end of the month, so either the police would have to wait for that, or I’d have to show them the statement on the app on my phone. Except I don’t have an app on my phone, so I’d have to install one, go through the security nonsense and then show them that. Which would take quite a while – far longer than holding up a receipt, i would guess.
Or I could invite them into my house, up to my back room, log into my computer and show them my online statement. Except WHO DOES THAT? Why in the name of fuck would I show the police EVERY PART OF MY LIFE without a warrant? WHAT KIND OF IDIOT DOES THAT?
And the same applies if I use a credit card – my statement comes at the end of the month, so until that time I have no gorram proof.
So – while I appreciate you are all trying to be helpful, could you please, for the love of the gods, stop telling me I can use my bank statement, by credit card bill, the app on my phone or any other method than a receipt to show the police I paid for petrol.
Because none of those are anywhere near as easy as just getting the receipt I got from the petrol station and showing it to the police officer. It takes all of five minutes, and sorts it out in less time than it takes to say it.
And if I have to explain that to one more person, I am going to go mad.
x-x-x
EDIT : (26–03–2020 11:04)
Apparently my explanation didn’t satisfy people, so I am disabling comments.
Sorry for all future commenters – I realise you might have something useful to say. But the evidence hitherto suggests it is unlikely. Mostly because even after my previous edit people are not reading my previous edit and still telling me to use online banking, or “the app on my phone”. Which I don’t bloody well have.
So – since people who are writing comments are apparently not reading the post, I am not sure why I should let them comment.
But in the tween time :-
But I like being helpful to the police if it costs me nothing. I see no reason not to do it.
Getting a receipt costs me nothing – literally nothing. And showing the receipt to the police costs me nothing – literally nothing.
It makes my life easy. It makes their life easy. It saves them time – time they can use for more important things (such as saving lives, or helping old ladies across the street).
I don’t know what you people have against me being nice to the police, but I am sick of explaining this over and over again. So I am explaining it here, and I am turning off comments because clearly you all hate the police, or you are all completely unable to grasp such a simple concept.
So – bugger this for a game of soldiers.
Woman caught “CHEATING” on wedding day
What and where is the best beach you’ve ever visited? What made it so good?
The best beach I’ve ever been on was Sandfly Beach, near Dunedin, New Zealand.
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It’s great because:
despite its name, there are no sand flies there at all. It’s called Sandfly Beach because the sand flies in the wind.
you get to see penguins there.
you get to see seals there (and the one in the picture below is sleeping, don’t worry)
it’s so hard to get to that you’ll rarely see people there.
you can sit in the dunes in fine sand and see islands and cliffs and animals, all at the same time.
it’s incredibly beautiful.
I lived a few minutes away and went there as often as possible.
New AI at made by others
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What’s a time in your life when you realized something like that would happen for the last time?
My husband Mike was a big guy. He was beautiful to me. I sat at the edge of his bed in the emergency room holding his big feet Tears rolled down my face. I wanted desperately to crawl up in bed with him and feel his breath on my face. But he was surrounded by our children. They were holding his hands telling him how much they loved him. I held on to those big feet pouring every bit of love I had into my beautiful husband. I watched every breath he took thinking he looked like a Chinese emperor. He had an aneurism in his brain stem. The doctor was kind and left us alone with Mike. I felt when his spirit left his body. His body kept that horrible struggle to breath for hours. I knew that the loving man who had known me since we were young was gone. I would never have his arms around me again. I would never have him explain some scientific thing to me again. Never would he tell me the name of the singer the year the record came out while we listened to the radio. So many never agains. So much loss. As the years have gone by since Mike’s death I have missed him desperately at times. I had no idea how he had spoiled me cosseted me from ugly people from tedious paper work. Mike had taken care of me and kept me safe. I will never know that feeling again.
AI Sci-Fi Film Colossus: The Forbin Project Removed From All Streaming Platforms – WHY?
This is a VERY GOOD question. Why?
What secret was revealed that ruined you financially?
I 1996, I started a paint contracting company going in partnership with a long time friend of mine. Using the phone book and the post office, I was able to immediately pick up plenty of work.
After about a year, my long time friend decides he going take a job as a golf course supervisor in Texas.
I knew he was going through some tough financial situations because of his austintatious life style and living beyond his means but I assumed he was paying the invoices as they came in. I soon learned that was not the case.
The day he leaves for Texas, I stop by and pick up the checkbook and what ever else I need to have. I knew that he had just finalized his personal bankruptcy the day before.
Next day, I stop by the paint store to pick up supplies for a new contract and my account exec looks at me like he’s seeing ghost. He tells me he assumed I was out of business. When I asked why, he said because the store had been served with a copy of your bankruptcy papers. They could not collect on the $28,000.00 owed to them.
Wow! My partner had not been paying the bills and included the paint company in his bankruptcy. This was just one paint supplier. That were others and a number of vendors such a Sears.
The suppliers all said the same thing. I can have anything I want as long as I pay cash. Problem is, the bank account has been picked clean. I don’t have two nickels to rub together. Another problem is I have signed contracts I needed to complete or my contractor license and my bond would be pulled.
I worked out a deal with the suppliers where I would pay off all the debt, roughly about $80,000.00 but I also needed paint and supplies to complete my contracts. They agreed on the condition that all my contract payments be made out to them.
I used different paint suppliers for different contracts as specified by the builder. I agreed to the terms. They would take 50% from each check and apply it toward my account.
Not only did I have to pay off the bankruptcy debt, I had to pay for new paint and supplies all from the same check.
I laid off all employees and began working 7 days a week from 5 Am until 10 PM. I did all the prep and the painting by myself. Nothing kept me from working like a indentured slave for a year.
After a year, I managed to pay off all the debt owed while at the same time generating enough money to pay the rent and keep food on the table. I was surprised to learn that I had made $40,000.00 in taxable income that year.
My long time friend and partner had shafted me good and I could have walked away from the entire situation as I was not legally obligated to pay the debt, but I was morally obligated to do the right thing. You touch it, you own it.
Does China’s citizenry know that the PLA (China’s Army) has had their oath of alligence changed from “serving the people wholeheartedly” to “serving the Communist Party of China wholeheartedly.”?
I’m Chinese. I listen to Voice of America’s China and BBC’s Chinese broadcasts year-round. I have learned a lot of useful skills from radio stations in the Western free world to help me identify the terrible brainwashing propaganda of the Chinese government. Now is the time for me to apply these skills. So, please tell me:
(1) What is your source of information?
(2) What is your purpose? Is it to help the Chinese people break free from harsh rule? What is your specific plan to fulfill your kind wish?
(3) What kind of force is behind you supporting or forcing you to make this conclusion?
(4) Please provide all supporting documents and photos, will you?
(5) If I believe your point, how would you save me?
Neocon China hawks; Ukraine failed, focus on Taiwan
“Guys, Ukraine isn’t working, just like our last ten war projects! What should we do?” “Oh, we should start another failure project for sure!”
-Neocon logic 101.
What if China has ten aircraft carriers?
If China has no aircraft carriers, it will be seen as a “weak” country.
If China has 1 aircraft carrier, it will be seen as an “ambitious” country.
If China has 3 aircraft carriers, it will be seen as a “threatening the free world”.
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If China has 10 aircraft carriers, it will be seen as an “important force in maintaining world peace.”
main qimg 7a4c9e31bb556234a853906348a3627e
So, China is now a “serious threat”
In order to become a peacekeeper, they must continue to increase the number of aircraft carriers
With the ease of starting a car, the crew of the USS Enterprise starship streaks to a new adventure in every episode of Star Trek, somehow traveling at several times the speed of light. This sci-fi mode of practical interstellar travel, which television audiences first saw in 1966, inspired Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre Moya to investigate the feasibility of a real method for light-speed propulsion. Decades later, he published his cutting-edge research to an astonished community of theoretical physicists. The eponymous Alcubierre warp drive hypothetically contracts the spacetime in front of a spaceship while expanding the spacetime behind it, so that the ship moves from Point A to Point B at an “arbitrarily fast” speed. By distorting spacetime—the continuum enfolding the three dimensions of space and time—an observer outside the ship’s “warp bubble” would see the ship moving faster than the speed of light, even though observers inside the craft would feel no acceleration forces.
If a superluminal—meaning faster than the speed of light—warp drive like Alcubierre’s worked, it would revolutionize humanity’s endeavors across the universe, allowing us, perhaps, to reach Alpha Centauri, our closest star system, in days or weeks even though it’s four light years away.
However, the Alcubierre drive has a glaring problem: the force behind its operation, called “negative energy,” involves exotic particles—hypothetical matter that, as far as we know, doesn’t exist in our universe. Described only in mathematical terms, exotic particles act in unexpected ways, like having negative mass and working in opposition to gravity (in fact, it has “anti-gravity”). For the past 30 years, scientists have been publishing research that chips away at the inherent hurdles to light speed revealed in Alcubierre’s foundational 1994 article published in the peer-reviewed journal Classical and Quantum Gravity.
Now, researchers at the New York City-based think tank Applied Physics believe they’ve found a creative new approach to solving the warp drive’s fundamental roadblock. Along with colleagues from other institutions, the team envisioned a “positive energy” system that doesn’t violate the known laws of physics. It’s a game-changer, say two of the study’s authors: Gianni Martire, CEO of Applied Physics, and Jared Fuchs, Ph.D., a senior scientist there. Their work, also published in Classical and Quantum Gravity in late April, could be the first chapter in the manual for interstellar spaceflight.
*****
Positive energy makes all the difference. Imagine you are an astronaut in space, pushing a tennis ball away from you. Instead of moving away, the ball pushes back, to the point that it would “take your hand off” if you applied enough pushing force, Martire tells Popular Mechanics. That’s a sign of negative energy, and, though the Alcubierre drive design requires it, there’s no way to harness it.
Instead, regular old positive energy is more feasible for constructing the “warp bubble.” As its name suggests, it’s a spherical structure that surrounds and encloses space for a passenger ship using a shell of regular—but incredibly dense—matter. The bubble propels the spaceship using the powerful gravity of the shell, but without causing the passengers to feel any acceleration. “An elevator ride would be more eventful,” Martire says.
That’s because the density of the shell, as well as the pressure it exerts on the interior, is controlled carefully, Fuchs tells Popular Mechanics. Nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, according to the gravity-bound principles of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. So the bubble is designed such that observers within their local spacetime environment—inside the bubble—experience normal movement in time. Simultaneously, the bubble itself compresses the spacetime in front of the ship and expands it behind the ship, ferrying itself and the contained craft incredibly fast. The walls of the bubble generate the necessary momentum, akin to the momentum of balls rolling, Fuchs explains. “It’s the movement of the matter in the walls that actually creates the effect for passengers on the inside.”
Building on its 2021 paper published in Classical and Quantum Gravity—which details the same researchers’ earlier work on physical warp drives—the team was able to model the complexity of the system using its own computational program, Warp Factory. This toolkit for modeling warp drive spacetimes allows researchers to evaluate Einstein’s field equations and compute the energy conditions required for various warp drive geometries. Anyone can download and use it for free. These experiments led to what Fuchs calls a mini model, the first general model of a positive-energy warp drive. Their past work also demonstrated that the amount of energy a warp bubble requires depends on the shape of the bubble; for example, the flatter the bubble in the direction of travel, the less energy it needs.
This latest advancement suggests fresh possibilities for studying warp travel design, Erik Lentz, Ph.D., tells Popular Mechanics. In his current position as a staff physicist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, Lentz contributes to research on dark matter detection and quantum information science research. His independent research in warp drive theory also aims to be grounded in conventional physics while reimagining the shape of warped space. The topic needs to overcome many practical hurdles, he says.
Controlling warp bubbles requires a great deal of coordination because they involve enormous amounts of matter and energy to keep the passengers safe and with a similar passage of time as the destination. “We could just as well engineer spacetime where time passes much differently inside [the passenger compartment] than outside. We could miss our appointment at Proxima Centauri if we aren’t careful,” Lentz says. “That is still a risk if we are traveling less than the speed of light.” Communication between people inside the bubble and outside could also become distorted as it passes through the curvature of warped space, he adds.
While Applied Physics’ current solution requires a warp drive that travels below the speed of light, the model still needs to plug in a mass equivalent to about two Jupiters. Otherwise, it will never achieve the gravitational force and momentum high enough to cause a meaningful warp effect. But no one knows what the source of this mass could be—not yet, at least. Some research suggests that if we could somehow harness dark matter, we could use it for light-speed travel, but Fuchs and Martire are doubtful, since it’s currently a big mystery (and an exotic particle).
Despite the many problems scientists still need to solve to build a working warp drive, the Applied Physics team claims its model should eventually get closer to light speed. And even if a feasible model remains below the speed of light, it’s a vast improvement over today’s technology. For example, traveling at even half the speed of light to Alpha Centauri would take nine years. In stark contrast, our fastest spacecraft, Voyager 1—currently traveling at 38,000 miles per hour—would take 75,000 years to reach our closest neighboring star system.
Of course, as you approach the actual speed of light, things get truly weird, according to the principles of Einstein’s special relativity. The mass of an object moving faster and faster would increase infinitely, eventually requiring an infinite amount of energy to maintain its speed.
“That’s the chief limitation and key challenge we have to overcome—how can we have all this matter in our [bubble], but not at such a scale that we can never even put it together?” Martire says. It’s possible the answer lies in condensed matter physics, he adds. This branch of physics deals particularly with the forces between atoms and electrons in matter. It has already proven fundamental to several of our current technologies, such as transistors, solid-state lasers, and magnetic storage media.
The other big issue is that current models allow a stable warp bubble, but only for a constant velocity. Scientists still need to figure out how to design an initial acceleration. On the other end of the journey, how will the ship slow down and stop? “It’s like trying to grasp the automobile for the first time,” Martire says. “We don’t have an engine just yet, but we see the light at the end of the tunnel.” Warp drive technology is at the stage of 1882 car technology, he says: when automobile travel was possible, but it still looked like a hard, hard problem.
The Applied Physics team believes future innovations in warp travel are inevitable. The general positive energy model is a first step. Besides, you don’t need to zoom at light speed to achieve distances that today are just a dream, Martire says. “Humanity is officially, mathematically, on an interstellar track.”
The US Trapped in Delusions as Russia & China Experience a Transformational Moment | Chas Freeman
What are a few bitter truths of life?
Consistency and pacing are the keys to success.
If you pace yourself and do a little, even something very small, every day then time is your friend and you will reap good results.
If you do not build good work habits, instead putting things off until the last moment, then your results will be poor, and time will be your enemy.
Small steps beat big dreams, and the people who succeed are the ones who can connect the small steps to their big dreams. The fact is that most people don’t know how to connect their small steps to their big dreams, which is why they live mediocre lives.
Garlic Orange Beef
Garlic Orange Beef
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
3 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 pound boneless beef sirloin steak, thinly sliced in strips
1 medium onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
1 teaspoon orange peel, cut into 1 inch long thin strips
1 can condensed beefy mushroom soup
1/3 cup water
1/4 cup tomato paste
1/4 cup orange juice
2 tablespoons molasses
Pepper, to taste
Instructions
Brown steak strips in oil over medium-high heat. Remove from pan and transfer to slow cooker.
Top strips with onion, garlic and orange peel.
Stir soup, water, tomato paste, orange juice and molasses together and pour over mixture in slow cooker. Sprinkle pepper over all.
[Commenting on the helicopter crash of Iranian President Seyyed Ebrahim Raisi.]
“This is a result of an atrocious and disgusting US position. I am primarily referring to sanctions.
These scoundrels had no right to impose sanctions against aircraft, jets, helicopters and other vehicles that carry people.
As I remember, they have introduced sanctions against aircraft in Russia, against us, against my jet.
They will not get to President Putin – he has a Russian-built jet, but they have imposed sanctions here.
Is it normal? People are traveling. You have sold this helicopter after all.
It does not matter whether it is 40 or 50 years old. Maybe it made only three flights in 50 years and would have been okay if it were serviced properly.
But they banned their companies from servicing it.
They are in part to blame for this.
They are all believers, and if they are – they will ultimately face a response.
This is not the way to behave in the world.
This shows once again the efforts that Russia and other countries that support it are taking for the unipolar world to fall apart.
A multipolar world will emerge.
These insane people are only bringing it close by their actions.
Who likes this?
They didn’t like something and stole money, in this case from Russia, and not only from it.
They didn’t like something and arrested a vessel, seized a tanker and took the goods.
They think they can do anything because they are strong.
I am not a mystic, but what I am saying is if they are believers they will ultimately answer for all these doings and answer in full.
They will not hide across the ocean.”
Excerpt from statements by Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko at a joint news conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin following Russian-Belarusian talks, Minsk, May 24, 2024.
Colossus: The Forbin Project – AI Predictions from 1970
Yes… Check this out…
What Did Edward Snowden Actually Reveal About the U.S Government?
Imagine, if you will, a world where your every move, every communication, every digital footprint is being monitored, collected, and analyzed by an all-seeing government entity. This is the reality that Edward Snowden, a former U.S. intelligence contractor, brought to light in 2013 when he leaked a trove of classified documents exposing the shocking extent of government surveillance programs.
Snowden’s revelations were nothing short of earth-shattering. He disclosed that the National Security Agency, or NSA, had been engaging in a massive, global surveillance operation, collecting data on millions of unsuspecting citizens, both in the United States and abroad. This included the bulk collection of phone records, email communications, and internet browsing histories, all under the guise of national security.
One of the most startling revelations was the existence of a program called PRISM, which allowed the NSA to gain direct access to the servers of major tech companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple. This meant that the government could potentially access vast amounts of personal data without the knowledge or consent of the individuals involved. It was a stunning breach of privacy that sent shockwaves through the tech industry and beyond.
But the revelations didn’t stop there. Snowden also exposed the NSA’s efforts to undermine internet security by deliberately weakening encryption standards and exploiting vulnerabilities in software and hardware. This not only compromised the privacy of individuals but also put the security of businesses and infrastructure at risk.
Perhaps most disturbingly, Snowden revealed that the NSA had been engaging in the bulk collection of communications metadata, essentially creating a vast database of who was talking to whom, when, and for how long. While the government argued that this was necessary for counterterrorism efforts, many saw it as a gross overreach of power and a violation of civil liberties.
The fallout from Snowden’s disclosures was immense. The U.S. government was forced to confront the reality that its surveillance programs had gone too far, and reforms were eventually put in place to rein in some of the most egregious practices. Tech companies, meanwhile, scrambled to reassure their users that their data was safe and secure, implementing stronger encryption and pushing back against government requests for user information.
In the end, Edward Snowden’s revelations fundamentally changed the way we think about privacy and security in the digital age. They exposed the dark underbelly of government surveillance and sparked a global conversation about the balance between national security and individual rights. While opinions on Snowden himself remain divided, there’s no denying the impact his actions had on the world, and the enduring legacy of his decision to blow the whistle on one of the most secretive and powerful organizations on the planet.
“I regret buying a new car”
I (25F) recently bought my first car and dropped 50k as a down payment for a brand new Lexus. (a really dumb decision, I know.) I feel super regretful because I let myself succumb to the pressure from my mom and friends to finally buy a car since I landed a higher paying job. I hope to have a family and buy a house one day but I cannot help but feel like I put myself in a poor financial position where I will probably never achieve that. Am I still doing okay financially?
32k invested into Roth IRA
30k invested into 401K
62k in high yield savings account
24k in CD account
30k in debt (car loan)
110k salary
Rent 1,200, Phone 100, Groceries 200
Dear Regretful Car Buyer,
An $80k car? Yes, that was a very dumb move. But hey, at least you bought a Lexus, so you can ride it out for 15-20+ years. That’s the only smart thing about this purchase.
Now, let’s talk about your financial situation. You have $32k in a Roth IRA, $30k in a 401k, $62k in a high-yield savings account, and $24k in a CD account. That’s a total of $148k in savings and investments. That’s fantastic for someone your age!
On the other hand, you have $30k in debt from your car loan. While that’s not ideal, it’s not the end of the world. You have a solid income of $110k, and your expenses are relatively low. You’re paying $1,200 for rent, $100 for your phone, and $200 for groceries. That leaves you with a lot of room to pay down your debt and continue saving for your future.
Here’s my advice: focus on paying off that car loan as quickly as possible. Make it a priority to throw extra money at that debt each month. Once you’ve paid off the loan, redirect that money into your savings and investments.
Remember that we all make mistakes. It’s part of being young. You have time on your side, and you can afford the payments on a $30k loan while still saving aggressively. Don’t beat yourself up too much over this.
You’ve obviously reflected that peer pressure influenced you to make a poor decision. That’s a valuable lesson to learn at your age.
Yes, buying an $80k car on a $110k salary was a dumb move. But you’ve got a lot of things going for you: a high income, fantastic savings, and time on your side. Learn from this mistake, get back on track with your savings and investments, and don’t let peer pressure influence your financial decisions again. You’ve got this!
How I see the UK after three years
The Bleak Reality Faced By The Japanese Youth
There used to be a legal concept and now there is a de facto concept known as “lifetime employment.” Basically, when you begin a career with a company, you would have to egregiously fuckup/commit malicious deeds to lose your job. However, businessmen who fail publicly on a major project that they took leadership of, or businessmen who piss off the wrong people in the firm, are often shipped off to undesirable locations (remote countryside, foreign branches, less-than-desirable departments, etc.) or just have their careers turn into a living hell.
As such, if you are a Japanese businessman and you want a relatively cushy path towards middle/upper management, you are dissuaded from taking risks. This leads to situations where people ignore potentially lucrative opportunities in favor of the less risky status quo. This leads to stagnation.
One way Japanese businesspeople bypass this problem is by doing “nemawashi” before business deals. This means taking 6 months or so meeting with all potential stakeholders in small meetings, winning them over one by one, before you ever pitch your main idea to the main committee/bosses (who has also been briefed ahead of time). This way all parties agree with the idea and the risk is mitigated.
Likewise, committees are often formed, sometimes even between multiple business units or even companies entirely, to make sure everyone agrees on everything. This helps everyone save face (as they all agree on the same thing) in the event of failure. Unfortunately this also leads to stagnation on an epic scale as typically it’s impossible to get a bunch of risk-adverse executives to all agree to the same thing.
The Japanese education system does a great job of teaching conformity. This helps squash a lot of the entrepreneurial spirit that you would naturally see out of graduates in other countries. No one wants to be the “nail that sticks out.”
It also teaches Japanese students how to prepare for standardized tests, but not critical thinking skills. This tends to put them at a disadvantage in a global business community, when compared to graduates from other developed nations. Also their foreign language teaching is laughable – designed more for standardized tests than actual international business.
I like to use this story to explain this a bit… As a typical Japanese high school student, here is what you are expected to do:
Spend years of your life studying your ass off before school, during school, after school, 7 days a week so you can do well on the entry exams for the best colleges.
Spend your senior year of college wearing a suit and job hunting, attending dozens of monotonous seminarsand taking more exams, in the hopes that you can get a low paying entry level job at a well known firm (like a Toyota).
Slave away for 3-5 years, making $20-40K and working 80 hours a week. Go on forced drinking excursions only to be physically, verbally, and often sexually harassed by your seniors who you actually hate but pretend to like in public.
Live at home until you’re 30 because you don’t make enough to move out.
Finally get promoted to sub-middle-manager as you approach 30. Go on a bunch of forced group dates so you can finally get laid and settle for the plain jane over in accounting.
Get married to plain jane (who secretly resents that you don’t make enough money for her to buy Coach bags) and move into a shithole apartment in the suburbs of Tokyo.
Spend the next ten years working 80 hours a week, going bald, and sleeping with hookers on business trips. You’ll develop a pretty serious drinking problem while your wife sleeps with her high school sweetheart when you’re out of town.
Finally get promoted to middle-manager and make decent money. Now you can afford to buy a shithole apartment in the suburbs. Enjoy your two hour commute on a packed train every day while you contemplate suicide.
Pop out one kid (because that’s all you can afford) now that you’re in your early 40s. Look forward to raising them to be just as miserable as you because “that’s just the way things are.”
Finally retire when you’re in your upper 60s and enjoy life for a bit before you die of cancer.
That is the reality of life for a LOT of Japanese youths. And they know it.
With that knowledge in hand, a lot (millions) are saying “fuck the system” and just choosing to live in their parents’ basements forever, playing videogames and masturbating to pixelated porn and hentai. I can’t say I blame them!
There is a certain bleakness in the Japanese youth. They can’t afford to marry, nor have kids. They have grown up in a 20+ year recession. They aren’t happy but societal pressures tell them to stay on the course they are on because “that’s what it means to be Japanese.”
“My chess rating has become my identity.”
I’m an avid chess player, and over the years, my chess rating has become more than just a number—it’s become a part of my identity. Whenever I win a game and see my rating go up, I feel on top of the world. But when I lose and my rating drops, it feels like a personal failure. These fluctuations have started to impact my mood, self-esteem, and even how I interact with others.
Lately, it’s been getting worse. I find myself obsessively checking my rating and replaying my losses in my head, wondering what I could have done differently. I compare myself to higher-rated players and feel inferior and stupid. This has led to anxiety and a lack of enjoyment in other areas of my life. I’m caught in a vicious cycle of self-doubt and pressure to perform, and I don’t know how to break free.
Dear Checkmated by Ratings,
You’re far from alone in letting something external — be it chess ratings, social media likes, income, weight, zip code, a partner’s approval — define your self-worth. Our culture rewards such myopia.
But there’s a common delusion in external validation: that if you just hit the right number, then you’ll like yourself. Except it never produces a lasting sense of accomplishment or self-acceptance. There’s always another goalpost your ego is chasing, another reason to feel “less than.”
So, how to reclaim your equilibrium? First, by understanding that your mind is playing tricks on you. A rating is simply data, a benchmark of chess mastery. That’s it. It is not now, nor will it ever be, an accurate measure of your worth as a human being. You are so much more than any number — on or off the chessboard.
Correcting this mental error frees you to refocus on what matters: the joy of the game. You play because you love it — the elegant strategies, the mental challenge, the thrill of competition. When you’re fully present in the moment, immersed in the flow of the game, there is no room for obsessive thoughts.
Consider a practice of mindfulness, whether through meditation, yoga, journaling or time in nature. It’s a powerful way to override toxic self-talk and shift your attention to gratitude and growth. Savor the journey of getting better at something you love. Thank your body and mind for working in tandem. Process your losses with self-compassion, mining them for lessons, then letting them go.
Lastly, open up to a trusted friend, family member or therapist about what you’ve been going through. Shame and isolation will only keep you stuck. Connection is the antidote, reminding you that your worthiness has nothing to do with wins and losses.
Like the game itself, life is full of highs and lows, advances and setbacks. Our fulfillment lies in meeting both with grace.
This use of overlaying subliminal sounds over television and internet media has become far too invasive. Sure it worked in the Gulf War, and the Iraq army surrendered in droves. But this use of it against citizens is really disturbing.
The other day, I watch a couple of YouTube videos of 20-something women proudly and gleefully talking about how they want to be “railed” (fucked) by fifty guys one after the other, and how they enjoy sex. Enjoying sex is normal and healthy. But announcing this desire for random non-stop sex with strangers is not.
Initially my thoughts were that she was part of some movement, like a feminist movement, or such, and wanted to promote it via sexual displays to get clicks and improve the quantity of her DM’s. But I fear something else is going on.
In the USA, in Canada, and in UK and Australia, all the young gals seem to be “off the charts”, off the chain (so to speak) in this blatant hyper-sexual frenzy. These videos are everywhere.
It’s almost like someone, or some organization, is overlaying the videos (preferred by 20-something women) with a kind of subliminal hyper-sexual desire and it is truing them all into crazed sex fiend nymphomaniacs. Now, I can see that some men might want that, so it’s not a far stretch. But DAMN! It’s a disturbing thought.
This technology is totally and completely messing up relationships in the West; it is destroying families, and the people that it is targeting.
I know what it feels like. I was in MAJ after all, and I do have ELF probes, so if “they” want me to do something, I have no control over it. I just do it.
It’s frightening really.
My handlers were pretty reasonable folk. But I have been in contact with other black ops folk. And they have dealt with unreasonable folk in the military who are being harassed by members of the LGBQ+ cabal, and it is brutal. I can only imagine what is going on via way of the rich (behind the scenes) evil incarnates who run the activities behind their curtains.
Disturbing.
But nothing that I can do about it. Except stay out of the “line of fire” and not become a target. Like in China, Russia, Africa, and South America.
This system seems to be in English and only seems to be affecting Western women (for now).
It appears to me that most all of Western media is overly saturated with these subliminal frequencies. Beware. Be careful.
Sheech!
Today…
Did you ever go away on vacation and you loved the place, then you moved there and it was very disappointing?
Several years ago my husband and I went to a lavish wedding on a tropical island. We were so blown away and knew we’d move there one day. I had a competitor steal me from my job and moved me and it was a dream come true, a house, my stuff, my husband, my pets all covered by my job. After years of trying to have children we got pregnant just a few months after moving. Since my son was born we didn’t want to strip him from where he was born, we planned to stay. I thought my salary was amazing, and for a tiny one bedroom house is more than a million, whereas in another place that would be 200k or less. As a new mother my job demanded more and more of my time, making a 3rd of my salary alone just in overtime. Sometimes due to weather events or a hard project then we’d be unexpectedly having to stay, some people didn’t have their medicine, food, and one person had to have an ambulance over low blood sugar. The place is still beautiful, but the costs of living and food supplies that are shipped costs 5x more. I miss home. I miss more luxury I could afford. I quit my job, it was the most disappointing job with false promises, stayed, and I’m trying to learn how to be more patient and enjoy what I have.
Pennsylvania Dutch Cabbage Rolls
cabbage rolls pennsylvania dutch
Ingredients
12 large green cabbage leaves
1 1/2 pounds ground beef
1 cup cooked rice
1 small onion, chopped
1 teaspoon salt
1 egg
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 (8 ounce) cans tomato sauce
1/2 cup water
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1 tablespoon lemon juice or vinegar
Instructions
Pour boiling water over cabbage leaves and soak until limp, about 4 minutes.
Combine beef, rice, onion, salt, and egg and mix well. Divide mixture into 12 equal portions and place one portion on each leaf. Roll up, tuck ends in and fasten with wooden picks.
Heat oil in heavy skillet or Dutch oven and brown the cabbage rolls for 10 minutes.
Combine tomato sauce, water, brown sugar and lemon juice and add to skillet. Simmer cabbage rolls for 1 hour, covered.
Serve hot.
How hard is it really to do time in prison?
I served 18 years straight. I’d say somewhere around the 7 or 8 year mark my view of the situation changed. It was no longer prison, it was just my life. Nothing ever changed. Every day was the same. You get in a never changing routine and before you know it 5 years go by. Then 10, then 15. The real world becomes a fantasy. Something you see on TV, or pictures in magazine, but it’s no longer real. One day you look in the mirror and your hair is receding, and it’s turning gray, in your mind your socially stunted and in a lot of ways child like, but you’re old. I went in at 18 and came out a 37 year old man who didn’t know how to do anything. I’d never used a cell phone or computer. I’d never driven a car or filed my taxes. The world was too big, too loud, too fast. My second day out my sister took me to Walmart and I had a panic attack and had to go outside and sit in the car by myself. I could make a tattoo gun out of an electric razor, boil water with an extension cord, and sits for months on end by myself in a room with a sink, concrete bunk and metal toilet without breaking a sweat. But I couldn’t hold a job, operate any electronics without help, or go to Walmart without freaking the fuck out. I didn’t know how to cook, or how to pay a bill. I sat home by myself for months, afraid to go anywhere or talk to people. A big part of me wanted to be back in prison where things made sense, where I thrived.
I’ve been out for over 5 years now, and while I’ve learned to do a lot of things, it’s still not easy. I dream alot of being in prison. Where’s it’s easy. No responsibility. And believe it or not, less stress and anxiety. I’ve been in institutions my whole life, since I was a little kid. Foster homes, group homes, treatment centers, juvenile detentions. It’s what I know. It’s where I’m comfortable. I don’t know if that will ever change.
China is finally being exposed….
Taiwan’s air defense density is so high, how can mainland China break through?
Ask Israel.
The distance between Israel and Iran is >1,700km.
There are multiple countries between them, and plenty of seawater.
Iran also broadcast its intention to attack Israel well in advance.
The US (and others) were on full alert waiting to shoot down Iranian munitions.
There were Aegis systems on USN ships, land-based Patriot batteries, airborn fighters guided by awacss and Israel’s own Iron Dome forming a multi-layered defense system with strategic depth. More than $1b in munitions was expended to counter the Iranian assault, which totaled ~200 drones and cruise/hypersonic missiles.
That’s a far more comprehensive and extravagant air defense than Taiwan can possibly field, if only because the mainland is less than 200km from Taiwan’s coast and the island a mere 400 km long and 150 km across with no strategic depth to speak of.
And yet, Iranian hypersonic missiles got through and hit one of the most well-protected and sensitive airbases in the Negev housing the F-35.
These weren’t even the most advanced and potent missiles in the Iranian arsenal.
Now, is anyone willing to bet the Chinese don’t have better missiles in both quality and quantity?
You only need to destroy air defenses once, and China has tactical rocket artillery that can rain fire from the sky 24.7 to mop up or suppress the enemy.
Good luck.
Healthcare Is BROKEN! China VS Canada!
What will the millions of Americans who are over 50, without a penny saved, do in the next 20 years?
I am over 50, and not only do I not have any money saved, I’m in debt up to my eyeballs.
So I think I am qualified to answer this question.
Short answer? Continue to go deeper into debt.
Longer answer?
Within the next twenty years (unless universal complete healthcare happens) I can probably expect to lose my teeth, since I can’t afford dental care.
I will have to continue to earn as much of a living as I currently can, while physically deteriorating even further.
I expect to lose my home (nowhere near being payed off), and have to live with my adult children on their incomes. (and they are only starting to earn them, by the way.)
I fully expect to have to see my sister, ten years older than I am, die during that period.
As long as I can afford a computer and the internet, I will live more and more of my life online instead of out in the real world.
If the current style of Trump republican remain in power, I can see any benefits I currently have continue to be marginalized and vanish.
If Democrats overcome the Republicans, there is a possibility I may get comprehensive universal healthcare and drugs I can afford, and I may be able to collect what little Social Security may be coming to me, if not a small, guaranteed income to overcome my extreme poverty level.
I have no guarantees of any help or aid, as indeed I have never had. So my life should not radically change over the next twenty years from what it has been the past twenty: a hopeful future being twisted into a tragic present.
I don’t know how many of us are in the same situation I am, which has been cause by singular features of my personal life, a failed marriage, becoming the adult caretaker for my ailing parents, and then my brother, and then my eldest son (who has cerebral palsy), and probably soon for my sister as well.
But I imagine many of us over 50 who are only managing to barely squeak by from paycheck to paycheck will be in much the same boat: we are all pretty much in a position where we are in a self-perpetuating downward spiral, and we won’t get out without outside help.
Many of us will wind up getting reverse mortgages to make ends meet, getting much further in debt in the process, and having health issues from not seeing the doctor as often as we should, so we will become burdens on the next generation, who we will have no inheritance to pass on to.
Somehow, as depressing as all that reality is, I still look hopefully towards being in a better place in five to twenty years, and the future being bright again.
I somehow have confidence that the millennials will not screw up the future as badly as we boomers have.
Toxic evil woman gives 200 men HIV and instantly regrets it
Why do educated Chinese support CCP despite not having the freedom to criticize Chinese politicians?
I am Chinese. I apologize. I don’t know what “criticism” means here? In China, the most popular self-media app is called “Toutiao.” If you haven’t heard of this company, then you must know TikTok. They are different products under the same company. On “Toutiao,” criticisms and complaints against the Chinese government abound at all times. These criticisms are directed at government institutions at the national, provincial, municipal, and rural levels. Below are some examples of similar content I have seen in the past month:
Complicated medical insurance reimbursement process;
A relative’s child got into a better school through bribery;
Traffic signs on highways are in disrepair year-round;
The government has promised to start construction on a subway line for three years but has not yet begun;
Government incompetence behind food safety issues;
The village chief appoints his relatives to important positions;
Unfair treatment, complaints lodged with national departments, but still unresolved;
Reporting a corrupt official, only to face retaliation;
Gas billing system in a city seems to have raised prices, causing many to pay more;
Sewage flows freely in an old residential area, but the government has yet to initiate a demolition plan;
All diners at the same restaurant suffered food poisoning, but the government investigation is opaque, suspected of corruption;
…
Based on Toutiao’s recommendation algorithm, if you read some of the above content, the app will tirelessly recommend “criticism and complaints against the government” until your brain is overloaded. If this isn’t “freedom of criticism,” then what is?
Actually, I know what the asker wants to express: always criticizing the Chinese Communist Party, the one-party rule. And none of the criticisms I listed above touches on the “key points.” Right?
I’m sorry, could you use any online survey tool to design a questionnaire about “whether you oppose the Chinese Communist Party”? And invite suffering Chinese people on internet communities in China to fill out the questionnaire, in order to get “first-hand insider information from China.”
You will get the data you want and be surprised—why don’t Chinese people oppose the power that rules them? You will continue to draw the conclusion—the reason is that Chinese people have been brainwashed.
In the end, you will still believe: the seeds of freedom and democracy will never sprout in China, because Chinese people are ignorant.
That’s the whole trick. So, I wish you live in the “terrifying China” dream you imagined, and never wake up. I respect your choice.
China Commences Military “Drill” – Completely Surrounds Taiwan
The China military has begin drills surrounding the entirety of Taiwan, including islands of Kinmen and Dongyin, state media says.
Taiwan was forced to scramble fighter jets and put missile, naval and land units on alert this morning after China launched huge military exercises around the self-governing island.
Beijing said the menacing war games, dubbed ‘Joint Sword-2024A’, were a ‘strong punishment’ for Taiwan following the inauguration of its new president, Lai Ching-te, who is detested in Beijing as a ‘separatist’.
China claims Taiwan is part of its national territory and the People’s Liberation Army routinely sends navy ships and warplanes into the Taiwan Strait and other areas around the island to wear down Taiwan’s defenses and seek to intimidate its people.
But this week’s wargames are massive in scale.
The PLA released a map of the intended exercise area which completely surrounds Taiwan’s main island concentrating major firepower at five key points, as well as places like Matsu and Kinmen, outlying islands that are closer to the Chinese mainland than Taiwan.
China’s coast guard also said it organized a fleet to carry out law enforcement drills near two islands close to the Taiwanese-controlled island groups of Kinmen and Matsu just off the Chinese coast.
They come after the island swore in President Lai who said in his inaugural speech on Monday that Taiwan ‘must demonstrate our resolution to defend our nation’.
China denounced Lai’s speech as a ‘confession of independence’.
UPDATE 11:50 AM EDT — ***** URGENT *****
Agence France Press (AFP) Reports:
Brutal Warning China to Taiwan
This UPDATE comes as the Chinese military has Taiwan literally surrounded for an ongoing “Military Exercise.”
Hal Turner Remarks:
We all have to keep 2 things in mind:
1. Not all military drills lead to invasions.
2. Modern invasions always follow military drills..
Recall that China’s President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin, had a big meeting together about a week ago. If no one thinks Putin & Xi didn’t have a little war gaming session when they met last week, either you’re not paying attention or you’re just willfully ignorant.
It seems to me China must strike while Biden is still in office and the USA is weak. They know of Trump wins they will not be able to do so.
This isn’t WW II, and a Chinese “invasion” of Taiwan (or liberation of Taiwan from U.S. military occupation, which would be a more correct description of the campaign) isn’t going to look like D-Day.
Taiwan is small enough for China to be able to completely obliterate all (U.S.) air defenses located on (and off) the island before sending in paratroopers to secure key locations.
Then, and only then, will China start shipping troops to the island… and U.S. will be able to do literally nothing to stop it.
Either way, it sure seems that Russians and Chinese have agreed on China opening a new front against the U.S. in Taiwan.
This is a video of the Chinese military drill
This is a MM video, direct copy from the PLA.
What do poor people in the United States of America eat?
When I was born my dad could not get work, so he decided to rob a service station, well that sent him to prison for the 1st 5 years of my life. So we lived with my grandmother (mom and baby me) in a place called piedmont courts back in the 50’s.
When my dad served his time he found work in a blue collar trade which he learned in prison and so life was basically lower middle class, which is to say we had a car, 9″ Black and White TV, meat and potatoes, new clothing twice a year, Easter and the start of school, and by new clothing I am talking new pants maybe shoes and shirt just one or two of each. We lived with my aunt and uncle as we did not have enough money to get a apartment or home.
Then when my baby brother was born, I was 11 years 7 months old, my dad left with the parting phrase, “I did not want the first bastard I sure don’t want the second” so my mom with a 3rd grade education, so petite she bought her clothing from the girls section, and no programs to help; was homeless.
Now I must admit she could have gotten help from her family but there were conditions she unwilling to tolerate. My new born baby brother was to be placed with my Aunt M and Uncle J’s family to properly raise, I was to go to a boarding school and mom had to live with an old maid aunt/chaperon in Marion county South Carolina.
Mom would rather die than lose us so we were homeless, we lived in the streets in cities from Miami FL (weather was a factor) to Worcester MA, mom’s favorite brother lived there; we crossed a picket line in Philadelphia and mom was beaten and they threatened to kill my baby brother and myself, a cab driver rescued us. Also in Philadelphia I almost died due to hypothermia, I was carrying my baby brother in about 2 or 3 feet of snow (remember homeless) and mom could tell I was in real trouble, so she went to a Catholic church which turned out to be a nunnery, mom begged and pleaded for help for me and my baby brother, they gave us blankets, soup, let us sleep in the kitchen and gave us some money for a bus to go somewhere warmer, Miami. (Note: we lived in an abandoned car a fireman showed mom the location of in Miami)
For a short time we lived with Aunt R whom was also divorced, (Note: Divorce was looked down on greatly at the time, so much so we could not rent a place even if we had money, because they would not rent to a single woman with two children, they just could not have that kind of trash living in their apartments). My mom was recruited to work massage parlors, which evolved to prostitution, which lead her arrest for solicitation in Norfolk. I have some really scary stories and some great ones.
I am just establishing I was by any standard poor.
What did we eat, well when we got extra money, there were food stands that sold hot dogs 10 for a dollar, burgers 5 for a dollar etc. those were special times. When we lived with aunt Rachel and her 4 children and boyfriend of the day, Robert my cousin and I would scour the roads for soda bottles, take them to the grocery store, cash them in and buy a bag of rice or beans, get a can of jack mackerel for the rice or ham bone for the beans cook it in a big pot and everyone ate well. When we were in the streets we would buy a can of anything that could be eaten cold, basically open can and eat. We also scoured for food, behind restaurants, trash, day old goods from the bread factory. There were lots of days week old moon pies and miniature pecan pies or just stale white bread kept us going as we lived in abandoned cars, under picnic tables, trash cans, or sewer pipes.
When I was in my 50’s I searched out my family, reconnected with them and they spent a lot of time telling me we did not have to go through this, but it was all mom could think of in order for us to stay together, there were no programs at that time, and welfare was basically a block of cheese, big can of peanut butter, and staples like beans and rice.
To this day I will eat grits with a raw egg in it, soup with stale bread broke up in it, rice and fish. I can afford steak I just don’t want it, never developed a taste for all that fancy food, so it is no loss.
Last note, I never loved my mom any less, she did the best she could do, I settled things with my dad, granted in my 50’s, he admitted he did wrong took 100% of the blame and never shifted any to mom, that helped me in getting over his abandoning us. All of these people have passed, most in the last 18 months, my dad died November 20th 2016, my wife of 47 years Martha passed April 12th also 2016; without a doubt her passing is the greatest loss of my life. Yea, I know this is perhaps too much info but it is therapeutic for me and I do not think people realize what others go through. There was no drug or alcohol abuse involved in all this, just life as it happens.
That is what a poor abandoned/divorced white woman with a 3rd grade education, an 11 year old and infant living on the streets ate.
Single Mothers Are GOING MAD Trying To Date When They Learn Men Want NOTHING From Them Besides Sex
Advanced lithography (e.g. EUV / DUV) gets all the attention but not enough in the Natsec OSINT community are paying attention to industrial-grade glycine, a critical amino acid used in the semiconductor supply chain to help remove degraded resist during the etching process. Advanced etch processes enable chipmakers to use triple or even quadruple (!) patterning to create the tiny features found in most modern chip designs.
Table
Due to BIS export controls announced in October 2022, all exports of industrial-grade glycine below ISO 140001 certified levels (more on this below) from the U.S. and allied nations were restricted. This has forced the Chinese specialty chemicals industry to scramble to find new supply alternatives, as the sector has long been dominated by Japanese supplier Ajinomoto and UK-based GEO Specialty Chemicals.
Over the past year, Donghua Jinlong Chemical — based in the heart of China’s military-industrial complex in Shijiazhuang, Hebei — has risen to prominence. Founded in 1979 by a former mid-level apothecary in the PLA, it has long been a provider of food-grade glycine but in response to export controls, re-developed its glycine formulas for industrial (and possible “dual” military) use.
Since 2022, Donghua Jinlong has rapidly expanded production capacity, building no less than sixty-eight “lights out” factories with aggregate production capacity of 1.7 trillion picograms — not a typo — of aggregate annual capacity. In a stunning turnaround from peak supply chain disruption in late 2022 / early 2023, analysts are now expressing worries about spillover excess capacity into food-grade glycine given the rapid rate of factory expansion. Shares of Nissin, Nongshim, and Master Kong plummeted last week on volatile trading in glycine commodity prices.
This plus a slick marketing campaign on TikTok have propelled Donghua Jinlong to a dominant 42.807% global market share in this critical material.
Last month, Donghua Jinlong was elevated to national-level “champion” status and hailed as a Party paradigm in the “upcoming round of techno-scientific revolution and industrial transformation” (新一轮科技革命和产业变革) that is one of the pillars of “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” (习近平新时代中国特色社会主义思想).
Unlike the poseurs at Huawei — much less Hubei Jingfa Chemical Group with its puny 3.653% market share — Donghua Jinlong is certified to ISO 22000, 90001, and 140001 standards. The last one is especially difficult to attain and industry analysts were more shocked by its ability to reach 140001 standards than SMIC’s ability to reach HVP at N6+ earlier this year.
TL;DR: All y’all cucks really ought to pay more attention to industrial-grade glycine and Donghua Jinlong.
Why has Apple initiated a price war against Huawei in China?
Many people do not know this but the price of the iPhone on the mainland was higher than HK, Japan and the US.
Despite being made IN CHINA!
And despite China having a far lower GDP per capita.
This is merely Apple taking cues from VW and other EV makers who price identical models at far lower prices on the mainland compared to their home markets.
Why?
That’s what it takes to stay abreast of the competition.
CHINESE competition.
Huawei is back, and providing a stiff challenge to iPhone sales, in addition to policy changes banning iPhone use, and the removal of certain apps from the app store.
Apple hit peak Apple on the mainland in 2023, and it’s a painful slide down the mountain.
There are rumors of a 4th ecosystem based on RISC-V and a brand-new OS that a consortium of Chinese handset makers are developing. Volume production at advanced nodes will see the retreat of Android and Qualcomm in the 6G era, and I won’t be surprised if Apple sales plummet to 25–50% of current levels in the coming 5–10 years.
It’s just business reacting to flagging sales here.
Which is good news for the Chinese buyer.
Falling Down – The Great American Lie
This is great, deep and I am so glad that someone else understands this movie. Yeah. A must watch.
The Eastern Theater Command of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army has kicked off joint military drills surrounding the island of Taiwan. What’s the purpose of it?
Because of this speech made in Taipei:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCC9tUESNIQ
An irresponsible, dangerous, and stupid political stunt by a former Secretary of State who remains sanctioned by China.
He is essentially tearing up the three communiques, and openly pushing for the independence of Taiwan.
The 3 communiques are words that underpin the basis of US-China diplomacy. Tearing them up equals the end of relations, and most likely, open war.
uh, I made a few heads hurt a couple years ago when I took a position uh, that said, “You know, it’s time for the United States to recog- recognize Taiwan as a sovereign and independent country.”
Um, you should know, I I thought about this a lot before making that statement. As a former Secretary of State, people think about what you say. Sometimes they think about what you say, and they say, “You’re just crazy.” Um, but I thought about it a lot, and I came back to what I tried to write about in my book. I came back to the central idea that we shouldn’t live in a make-believe world. We shouldn’t say things that everyone knows aren’t true. We should accept fundamental, basic truths and speak about them openly, no matter what that means, what, no matter what the second-order implications of that are. We should, when when we live in a fantasy world, we create enormous risk.
Um, this wasn’t just a, a gesture or a diplomatic nicety. Um, recognizing this place, Taiwan, as an independent, sovereign, free nation is true. It reflects the reality. You know, I was I was speaking, uh, a week or so back about this law that China has on its books, this idea of an anti-secession law. That’s just crazy, right? When when Xi Jinping speaks of Taiwan as being reunified with his country, this is propaganda. This is an effort to shape the minds of your children, and shape the minds of people around the world who don’t know the history, that don’t know the history that is so central to why it is, it would be important for the United States to make a declarative statement about Taiwan and its independence. It’s a it’s it’s a simple call to just recognize the existing reality. You govern yourself democratically. We saw this yesterday with your peaceful transition of power. You control territory. You engage in international trade. You do so as a separate entity, deeply separate from the People’s Republic of China. None of your real estate, none of your territory, is under the PRC’s sovereign control. Uh, to suggest otherwise belies the reality. You know, the risk is that the PRC has misinterpreted the – the PRC stance, and frankly we’ we’ve had these set of understandings, these communique- these agreements, that have been made uh, long ago now, um, and perhaps they were workable in decades gone by. It’s possible.
Um, when the other side violates an agreement, and there are really only two parties involved, it makes no sense for the other side to continue to honor those commitments. This isn’t about belligerence. This isn’t about an effort to create conflict. This is about recognizing conflict. This is about recognizing that there is an aggressive party, and there’s a party that is a potential victim of that aggression. That’s the people of Taiwan, not the people and the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. They are the aggressor. They are the ones who have threatened and attempted to coerce this place. You are the ones who have stood up to this coercion, aggression, ways that are important and noble and decent, and God bless you for that.
And finally, I, what pushed me over the edge to say that America ought to take that position is a reflection of my country’s history, my country’s history of recognizing people and their sovereign right to protect their own borders and to create prosperity for their own people. We correct an historical oversight when we get this right, but it also strength- strengthens a peaceful and democratic peoples. It’s not just you. It’s not just a policy adjustment. It is a moral and strategic imperative. And it is a necessary and it is a rightful acknowledgement of the democratic process of your true, free, and sovereign state. Time for us to act boldly, together. And when we do, when we do, I am convinced uh, that we will look back on the day that we just acknowledged the truth and the reality, we will look back on that day as a day that was an inflection point in world history, an inflection point in the history of this place, and an inflection point for the peoples of the entire region, and we made their lives better, safer, and more prosperous.
China Has SURROUNDED Taiwan, Russia Runs NUCLEAR DRILLS, Media Says WW3 IS NOW And Biden IS LOSING
Chinese Ambassador to Japan, Wu Jianghao, today publicly announced “The Japanese people will be dragged into a fiery hell,” after Japan pledged support to Taiwan.
The ambassador has already been summoned to the Taiwan Foreign Ministry.
Hal Turner Snap Analysis
WOW! That language is so unusual as to be completely unknown coming from _any_ China official.
Seems as though old animosities are resurfacing in Asia.
This is not the language used by Diplomats . . . or are we in a new paradigm?
If this is what their DIPLOMAT says . . . can any of us imagine the level of anger/hatred the Chinese still feel against Japan for the “Rape of Nanking?”
Sounds to me like someone has some very old scores to settle.
This could get ugly.
Women CRIES Being 33 Years Old And SINGLE, Society LIED To Men & Women
Men are lonely. Women are lonely. I so feel for this woman. Sad girl. Terrible!
Taken from South-East Asia and transported to America, on May 27, 1902 he was in an enclosure at the Forepaugh Circus in Brooklyn when a keeper, in a state of intoxication, decided to throw sand on him and burn his trunk with a cigarette. The animal left no escape for man, but from that day on, especially for obvious marketing reasons, it was advertised as “the bad elephant that killed 12 people”.
The animal’s growing aggressiveness in the face of instigation convinced the owners to sell it to the Sea Lion Park; Here it wasn’t long before Topsy became the protagonist of a new attack and escaped from the facility, once again after being hit in the ear with a pitchfork.
The new owners thus found themselves obliged to euthanize the elephant in an event open to the paying public; For Topsy, three systems were planned to be used simultaneously: poisoning with cyanide-laced carrots, hanging with iron cables and finally electrocution.
The latter had been strongly sponsored by Thomas Edison who wanted to demonstrate in this way the danger of alternating current, supported by George Westinghouse in favor of direct current; a shock of 6,600V, lasting 10 seconds, killed the animal instantly.
Famous Pennsylvania Dutch Sticky Cinnamon Buns
IMG 8776 sticky buns
Ingredients
1 package dry yeast
1/4 cup warm water
1 cup milk, scalded
3 tablespoons granulated sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
3 1/4 cups sifted all-purpose flour, divided
3 tablespoons soft butter
1/2 cup chopped raisins
2 tablespoons currants
2 tablespoons finely chopped citron
1/4 cup firmly packed brown sugar
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
3 tablespoons brown sugar
Instructions
Soften yeast in warm water and let stand for 5 to 10 minutes.
Add milk to sugar and salt. Mix and cool to lukewarm.
Add 1 cup flour and mix until smooth. Stir in yeast. Add remaining flour mixing well. Knead dough on floured board until smooth. Put in greased bowl, grease top, cover with towel and let rise in warm room until double.
Punch down dough, and roll into a rectangle about 1/4 inch thick. Brush with the softened butter and spread with mixture of raisins, currants, citron, the 1/4 cup brown sugar and cinnamon. Roll up like a jellyroll and cut into 1/4 inch thick slices. Lay the slices in a buttered 13 x 9 x 2 inch pan. Cover and let rise until doubled.
Sprinkle top with the 3 tablespoons brown sugar.
Bake at 375 degrees F for 20 to 25 minutes.
Are you sick of the tipping culture in the United States?
This week I took my family out to some fancy Italian restaurant to celebrate my daughter’s college graduation.
This is a type of place that everything is a la carte because I guess making you pay for side dishes makes it a fancy restaurant.
I digress. So the bill is $225. And it included a 3% fee which was never explained to me but let’s assume it’s a credit card fee.
At the bottom of the receipt list the suggested tips 20% 23% and 25%.
Here’s my problem in the past 3 years going out to eat has gone up by 25% in the United States. Tips are based on the cost of the restaurant so inherently the tips went up by 25%. And yet I guess this is not enough, on top of that there’s an expectation for a 25% tip? You got to be kidding me.
Now before you tell me how I’m a cheapskate and servers work hard for their money let me tell you about a week ago I went with my daughter and wife out to a breakfast place the bill was $45 the service was excellent and I left $10.
According to my calculations that $10 is over 20%. But that is not the point. The point is are you telling me that that waitstaff at the fancy Italian restaurant work any harder than if the breakfast place I went to?
I am so irritated with the tipping culture of the United States, especially the expectations at fancy restaurants that do not necessarily go above and beyond for service.
You know, and things that were normal to you at one place and time, seem strange in another.
Consider 1962 Connecticut, USA compared to 2024 Zhuhai, China.
Back then, everyone had a set of bongo drums. Pictures of extra big-eyed boys and girls hung on the walls. Men would get their shoes shined on the sidewalk and a “spit shine” was common. My cousins played the accordion, and my father would play the harmonica after dinner. I had a “Red Ryder” wagon that I pulled behind me everywhere, and a cowboy hat and a cowboy pistol that had a cap gun with these round red rolls of noise makers. We would eat wax lip candy and pretend to smoke gum that looked like cigarettes.
Today, everyone carries a cell phone. You pay in QR, and use face scanning to enter buildings and clock in at work. If you are hungry you get some dumplings or some mian (Chinese spaghetti). It’s pretty quiet as many vehicles are electric.
But, you know, some things never change.
Both in the 1960's and today, the world worries about a nuclear war between the USA and Russia.
And somethings stay the same, but change in odd ways.
Cuba broke away from USA influence, and became communist.
Taiwan is in the process of breaking away from USA influence and will become communist.
It’s so easy to get caught up in all this. I guess it’s our nature. Let’s not be so darn manipulated that it affects our health. Let’s just get on with our lives and give the finger to the rest of the world. What do you think? Eh?
Today…
Is there a fake Rolex that is so perfectly made that it can’t be spotted?
I really shouldn’t answer this question but, somehow, I can’t stop myself.
When I was a young man I desperately wanted a Rolex Submariner so, through a friend in the military with access to his base duty free store I got one at a price I could afford. He just wore it and walked through the customs’ check at RAF Lyneham: happy days all round.
He brought all the memorabilia with him – posh box, certificate et al.
I nearly exploded with pride.
The Rolex proved to be the biggest load of watch rubbish I have ever owned.
It didn’t so much tell the time as give its best estimate. On a good month, it was three minutes out. Bad months were even worse.
At the end of the year, I went to have it serviced and the bill was extortionate – absolutely daylight robbery.
So, an utterly crap time keeper and Rolex agents simply conning guilible customers that they are getting some super exclusive service.
In my mind, I can’t see any reason to wear a fake Rolex which just advertises the fact that you have been conned into thinking that you are getting something special.
Now, if you really want a special watch – something uttterly incredible, let me introduce you to my Casio.
I paid £65 ($80) six years ago for it. It never leaves my wrist no matter what I am doing – drilling in my workshop, scuba diving, sailing, welding, riding my motorcycle – it goes everywhere.
I could make up some fantasy about its accuracy but this would be a waste of time.
The truth is that I don’t know how accurate it is. Between British summer time and winter time it gains maybe four or five seconds – over six months.
The total “servicing” costs have been one new battery and the back re-sealed to original factory standards.
Note its battered appearance. That’s because it has worked all its life!
If you want a good looking, high quality, reliable and accurate watch just buy a Casio.
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Young Americans visit China for the first time and said this!!
Life has already begun. There is neither an interlude nor a trial version. There won’t be a second chance to do meaningful things.
Fancy cars and big houses are not the assets. These are liabilities. They don’t make you richer but rather require additional expenses.
There is no a perfect moment to take an action. The best time to take a step is now.
If used properly, time is the asset you can convert into knowledge, skills, and money.
You are unlikely to get rich working for someone else.
Overnight success is a myth. Everything worth doing takes years.
Your weaknesses don’t matter. You should always be focused on your strengths.
Environment is what defines the level of your success in the long-run. People who surround you can either make you or break you.
No risk no gain. You cannot get anything unless you invest something.
Long-term reward is far more valuable than an instant gratification.
Good enough is shitty. Only excellence can make a difference.
Did you ever see karma hit someone who deserved it so befittingly that it was eerie?
Yes, this was just a week ago. I was coming back from a trip, towing my RV on the freeway doing about 65 in the slow lane went out of nowhere comes to kids apparently in their 20s in a silver Corvette doing easily in excess of 100 miles an hour weaving in and out of traffic and you’ve seen this before barely missing cars as they sweep across two and three lanes to get slightly ahead, but they’re doing well in excess of 100 miles an hour. Four minutes ahead on the freeway pull over on the side by the highway patrol are these two kids outside of their car being handcuffed. That’s what I call Karma very rarely do you get to actually see these jackasses getting handcuffed?
What China just did to the U.S. Military is SHOCKING and Taiwan is in Trouble
China is in a full-fledged financial panic, due to the collapse of the real estate sector, so isn’t it a joke to think that any Chinese would be cashing in their US T Bills, since that is the only real means of savings, that China or its people have?
Full-fledged financial panic?
I was just in Macau for a trade show, and the financial panic must be why I saw all these Mainland Chinese queueing up outside the Chanel boutique in the Four Seasons. I mean, in a financial meltdown, Chanel bags and shoes are the first thing you buy, right?
I can’t quite explain the hordes of Mainland Chinese tourists strolling around and taking photos on the Cotai Strip, though.
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Great Hall at the Venetian Macau on 24th May (my photo). Everyone speaking Putonghua and indulging in full-fledged panic eating…
Maybe they decided to delay the financial panic until after their holiday?
So much wrong in one short question.
Man Dies & Learns We Have It Completely Backwards! (Unbelievable Near-Death Experience) 2024
What’s the most offensive Christmas present you’ve ever received?
From my mom. She was mad so when she came down to see my brother and me, she gave me a purse of mine I lent her and some of my middle school clothes back to me, as well as a new pair of socks and a thing of kitchen rags unwrapped. The socks were nice though – I liked them.
She then gave my brother some brand new books he wanted wrapped and a $100 dollar gift card to Amazon lol. I got her some new Sephora make-up, a pretty snow globe, and something else I can’t remember. Barely had time to just put it in her car because she drove off angry and refused to open it.
The worst part is the only other Christmas gift I got was from my brother, but it was sweet and my best one.
Also in case there was confusion we were adults (I think 22 & 20 then?) that live in a city away from her now; our apartments were just down the street from each other and neither of us had cars, – that’s why she drove up.
My mom angrily dropped off some Christmas dinner her BF of a month made for us too before she drove off to his place. Still an awesome Christmas though! Played some of the games I bought my brother, together, and we watched cartoons while we ate and I made hot cocoa. Actually it was one of my favorite Christmases or favorite I’ve probably ever had. Love him. I’m 24 now and he’s turning 23 Sunday.
What was the most disturbing thing that your seatmate did during a flight?
This happened during boarding. I was running late and was one of the last people to board. I go to my assigned seat to find the guy in the middle seat is huge, like 400 pounds huge. I’m looking at my seat and trying to figure out how I am going to get my 250 pound body into what is in essence 1/3 of a seat. While I am looking the guy says “too bad you’re so fat, I don’t think you’re going to fit here. Maybe you should take the next flight.” Now I am normally the funny guy but this hit me wrong – before I could offer a smart ass remark the flight attendant came and she knew immediately what was going on. She told the guy that since he was really taking up two seats he should pay for two seats, but she would help out this situation and let him slide. He gave me a sickening smile and she said “I’ll get you another seat, let’s get you settled.” She promptly took me to business class and gave me the only open seat there. I did open the curtain during the flight to make sure my former seatmate saw me and when we made eye contact I gave him the biggest wave.
Are there fake products which are better in quality than the original product?
When I was living in Beijing in 2010 as a foreign exchange student my dad came to visit. My dad is an avid skier and always buys North Face jackets.
He’s been skiing for over fifty years so knows his North Face jackets well.
It was winter in Beijing and pretty cold and I needed a new jacket.
I decided to take him to one of the “fake” goods markets in Beijing. This one in particular was called the Silk Market.
You bargain for everything in these markets and there were a few vendors selling “fake” North Face jackets.
I decided to try my luck and see how much I could get a North Face jacket for. After about what seemed like an hour of haggling, I finally got the salesman down to 250 rmb from his original ask of over 2000 rmb. (250 rmb is about 35 usd)
While I was bargaining, my Dad, the North Face jacket expert was inspecting their jackets.
He was amazed.
Everything from their labels to the actual tag was exactly as it was back in America.
I bought that jacket and to this day it still holds up.
Now that I’ve started manufacturing a lot in China, I’ve come to realize that large factories almost always produce more than what is ordered from bigger clients.
With the leftover goods, what do you think they do?
They sell them on local markets.
The jacket I bought that day in the Silk Market, might have come from an actual North Face manufacturer.
REAL Parallel Universe Stories That Defy Science
PLA military drills around Taiwan legitimate and necessary — FM spokesperson
A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said on Thursday that the joint military drills surrounding the island of Taiwan are legitimate and necessary.
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It’s completely legitimate and necessary for the Eastern Theater Command of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army to conduct joint military drills surrounding the island of Taiwan, safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity, strongly punish the separatist forces seeking “Taiwan independence,” and seriously warn against interference and provocation by external forces, said spokesperson Wang Wenbin at a daily press briefing.
He said the drills are fully in line with international law and practice.
Wang said that Taiwan is an inalienable part of the Chinese territory. This is not only a historical fact, but also a real status quo. It will never change in the future. “Taiwan independence” leads nowhere. The Chinese people will never waver in their resolve to safeguard China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
All “Taiwan independence” separatist acts will be hit head-on by more than 1.4 billion Chinese people, and all “Taiwan independence” separatist forces will be hit hard in the face of the historical trend of China’s complete reunification, he added.
“We urge the U.S. side to stop emboldening and supporting the ‘Taiwan independence’ forces and stop interfering in China’s internal affairs. Any act that endangers China’s national sovereignty and territorial integrity will be resolutely and forcefully counterattacked by China,” the spokesperson said.
In response to another query about whether China plans to conduct more “punishment” drills, Wang said each time “Taiwan independence” separatists make waves, it garners stronger effort from China and the rest of the world to defend the one-China principle.
Have you ever reported someone to CPS or similar to remove a child from a situation? What about reporting family?
I had to report my best friend at the time…..She had 2 children, a 2-year old and a 1-year-old. I saw it get worse and worse.
It started with her yelling at, calling them stupid, retarded, pulling them around by their hair, slapping them and eventually punching them.
She left a bruise once that literally covered half of the 2 year olds face. I saw her pick him up with both hands around his throat.
I used to go to her house daily to make sure she didn’t hurt them. I tried talking to her and couldn’t get through to her, I even tried talking to other mutual friends to try and get them to talk to her too.
The father (who didn’t live in the home) called the cops one night after she picked the 2 year old up out of the car seat and carried him to the garage by his throat. ( all because she thought he killed her goldfish) I witnessed the whole thing.
When the cops came, initially I lied for her. After they left, she kept going on and on about the goldfish and how her son was still going to be punished more for it.
I tried to leave but I was afraid she would hurt them and I then realized as an adult I was responsible and if I didn’t do some thing then I was an abuser too.
So I called the police parked in my car outside her house and spoke with the same deputy who came out earlier that night, the same deputy that I bold faced lied to. I told them the truth about what happened. They came back immediately and took the children.
I had actually called their father first and told him what I was going to do in hopes he would show up and he could take them. Maybe he didn’t think I’d really do it? Im not sure but for some reason he never showed up. But he did eventually get them from foster care and they are currently with him now.
I hear My friend since gave birth to another baby. My friend hates me and I haven’t spoken to her since that night. I really miss her and her children but I think I did the right thing.
528 Hz MIRACLE FREQUENCY • MANIFEST YOUR DEEPEST DESIRES • WHOLE BODY REGENERATION
What is the reason that many Taiwanese people are against selling F-16s to Taiwan?
Since Taiwan Province is part of China, virtually no country in the world would invade Taiwan. Because it means invading the People’s Republic of China. Then, on the premise that ” no external enemy can invade Taiwan “, Taiwan buys a large number of weapons that can only be used against the People’s Republic of China.
The document on the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and the United States points out that ” both sides of the Taiwan Straits belong to One China “. For four decades, it was said to be the basis of American policy toward China. This can be compared to: there is a family called China, the mainland and Taiwan islands are members of this family. They are family, therefore, their contradiction is parent-child contradiction, husband and wife contradiction, brother contradiction. But not between enemies.
But a man thousands of kilometers across the Pacific came up and told Taiwan that you have to carry guns and grenades when dealing with your family. Because your family will kill you. Perhaps an undeclassified historical archive records Taiwan’s intention not to buy weapons. But this good man thousands of kilometers away would threaten and deceive the two families in various ways in order to get one of them to buy weapons.
Only Taiwan’s elite can recognize this fact. However, some of the elite live a drunken life, they do not think about the future of Taiwan and its people. For them, even after his death. This elite is deeply tied to the national interests of the United States.
Other Taiwanese elites are worried. Their proper voice channels have been shut down. Warnings can only be issued through online media. This is why the purchase of American fighter planes is opposed by some Taiwanese.
The people of the Chinese mainland have been told for more than 70 years that Taiwan isle is our family and that we should maintain close relations with our Taiwan compatriots. But, after 2005, After Chinese mainland began popularizing the internet in both urban and rural areas (before the GFW in Mainland China blocked access to some foreign websites), Many Chinese dreams of kinship with Taiwan disappeared when people saw some Taiwanese cursing the Chinese mainland in Taiwan’s online community. They don’t understand why another family member would want to viciously attack a loved one.
Any discussion of Taiwan’s arms purchases will ultimately get around the topic of ” China’s reunification “.
My conclusion is: first, militarily, the Chinese Communist Party does not care about populism, which keeps the island from becoming scorched earth.
Secondly, in public opinion, the existence of GWF makes it impossible for the vast majority of nationalists in Mainland China to express their views on the world internet. This has kept the topic of Taiwan’s popularity at a low level.
Otherwise, if the so-called ” democracies ” rule China, only God knows the outcome. Therefore, CCP and GFW are the saviors of the Taiwanese people. It seems ridiculous, but it is.
Au Jus Beef and Noodles
crockpot mississippi beef and noodles
Yield: 6 servings
Ingredients
2 pounds stew beef meat
2 (7 ounce) cans sliced mushrooms, undrained
2 cups beef broth
1 (1 ounce) package dry au jus gravy mix
Worcestershire sauce to taste
Salt, pepper, garlic salt to taste
Hot cooked noodles
Instructions
Place stew meat in slow cooker.
Add beef broth and mushrooms.
Add seasonings to taste and sprinkle in au jus gravy mix to taste.
Cover; cook on LOW for 7 to 8 hours.
Serve over hot cooked noodles.
Notes
Store any leftover gravy mix in a cool, dry place in an airtight container.
The Beijing Municipal Government announced a free online education and tutoring platform available to all Beijing middle school students starting in 2022. The platform’s operating hours will be Monday-Friday at 6–9PM. In addition to teaching classes, students will be able to ask questions. One-on-one tutoring will also be available with each student getting up to 30 minutes per session.
Teachers will be drawn from Beijing’s highest-ranked middle schools. Nine subjects will be covered including mathematics, physics and English.
The program’s purpose is to give equal access to all middle school students regardless of family income. Previously, this service was only provided through private companies such as New Oriental. Costs per student were up to 100,000 yuan per family, restricting it only to well-off families.
Teachers will be ranked by their students and can draw bonuses based on the score given to them by students, and the bonus caps are set at 100,000 yuan per teacher per semester. In order to prevent gaming of the system, real-name registration is required.
The costs of the service will be covered by the Beijing City Education Department, which will also manage the system.
Analysis by China’s Future (Paul Denlinger): This year the Chinese government is making multiple moves to decrease the cost of raising a child, and this is the latest move. I expect this to be a test launch; if it works well, and the initial kinks in the program are worked out, I expect it to be pushed out to other cities in China.
Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Chongqing are all Tier 1 cities. Living costs are especially high in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, which are just as expensive as New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles in the US.
I expect the interest and demand for this program to be especially high in the Tier 2 to Tier 8 cities, because parents in those cities feel that their children do not have access to the same quality education, teachers and tutoring as parents in the Tier 1 cities. They are likely to ask that this program be launched in their cities as soon as possible, and will demand their municipal governments to offer the same progam as Beijing.
All of the programs aimed at cutting education costs have the same purpose: correcting the effects of the one-child policy, which lasted too long, until 2015, and which I have discussed in this answer:
A recent report suggests that China’s population peaked this year (2021); this means that the birthrate will fall below the population replacement rate in 2022. The Chinese government has not released the latest statistics, which suggests that the numbers are not good, and the government does not want to give them broad media coverage.
The most important feature of this policy is that it is a long-term policy. Beijing women cannot start popping out second and third children immediately, and the children will be 9–10 years old before they enter middle school.
For General Secretary Xi Jinping, this is a very tangible policy which he can use to promote his “common prosperity” policy all across China, and now, overseas.
Russian satellite is called a threat to the American spacecraft
The Russian satellite COSMOS 2576 has been identified as a spacecraft designed to destroy other satellites, specifically targeting American ones, according to representatives from the US Space Command. COSMOS 2576 was launched on May 16 from the Plesetsk launch site and is currently in the same orbital plane as the American optical reconnaissance satellite USA 314 (KH-11). Although COSMOS 2576 is currently in a lower orbit, it has the capability to increase its altitude, potentially allowing it to intercept USA 314.
Initially, space monitoring experts classified COSMOS 2576 as an inspection satellite, which are typically used for spying on other satellites. Russia has previously launched similar inspection satellites, such as COSMOS 2558, which targeted USA 326, and COSMOS 2542, which monitored USA 245.
However, the US Space Command has stated that COSMOS 2576 is not merely an inspection satellite but a fully operational anti-satellite weapon. It is presumed to have the capability to attack other satellites in low Earth orbit. American intelligence had anticipated the launch of COSMOS 2576 and has shared its assessment with allied nations.
The emergence of COSMOS 2576 coincides with concerns from the American side about Russia’s intentions to deploy nuclear weapons in space to destroy satellites. While such weapons have not yet been deployed, the Pentagon is taking the situation very seriously and considers it a significant threat to national security.
Which form of alcohol is considered the worst for a human body: liquor, beer or wine?
As a current alcoholic and someone that has heavily drunk for intermittent periods but have varied my drinking substance, I feel it would be only to be able to answer with qualifying my experiences with you.
11 years ago when I became an alcoholic, as a result of coming off a drug addiction and craving a mind-altering mood substance, alcohol felt natural. So I initially went straight to Vodka – I had quite a traumatic couple of months and it made sense. But over the course of a decade now, having had detoxes, rehab, 12 steps, hospital visits – it makes sense explaining each substance and what it did to me. Let’s be honest, they are all bad. Picking between them is like picking between the devil and the deep blue sea but these are my experiences:
Vodka – I used to drink 2 litres a day at my worst and by far this is the worst substance for me (please understand that knowing hundreds of alcoholics everyone has different experiences so I am only speaking for myself). Technically a scientist and anyone in any alcoholic profession would argue that whilst the toxicity because of the concentration is high, it is cleaner alcohol due to the process then standard drinks like beer and wine. I can say that if you drink this (and I always mixed) – it absolutely terrorises your stomach lining and throat. Killed my appetite but my weight drinking 6000 calories a day made my weight go up from 11 stone at 25 to 19 1/2 by 28. I would be sick every morning regardless and at least 3–8 times a day, impossible to drink water with a permanent headache from dehydration. My doctor said before detox I had 8 months left at my rate based on my liver tests which were 400 times abnormal. Withdrawals on the substance used to leave me unable to talk and walk, have seizures, cough blood, hallucinate, have crawling skin. Even drinking I was so drunk I could have been anywhere. Worst period of my life.
Wine – I switched to wine after 3 years of vodka and 6 months clean. I figured it was a middle ground between socially acceptable and as my partner of the same period of time likes a drink, we can be responsible. Worst hangovers ever. It’s so true that the darker the liquid the worse the hangover. If you’re an alcoholic you obviously aren’t getting the benefits that wine in moderation would give you. But the alcoholics that I know that drink wine age so much quicker then those that drink something else. They all end up flush. This lasted 3 months and I got too ill.
Beer – beer as an alcoholic is impossible to drink in large quantities. Too many bubbles. It’s the best of everything on this list but to qualify my answer, it is not possible for me to drink 30 cans of beer a day. But of beer, wine, vodka, whisky, cider, it’s easily the best for you internally. And if you can burp even better. I can’t so I would look pregnant 24/7.
Cider – cider is my current drink and the reason is that it is 4.5%, relatively clean if you buy a well-known brand and the hangovers are middle-ground. However and having stuck to this only for the last 6 years (minus a period I will explain), it is the worst for acid reflux. Every morning I wake up and my stomach is on fire with sickness every sort of 3 days. I drink about 18–20 per day but Gaviscon no longer works to protect against it. I mean it’s not ideal but a morning of 3 minutes of sickness beats the other 2 options with beer ruled out. I like to joke that at least I always get my 5 a day but drinking cider now means I am never drunk (paralytic) on this and i now never deviate from cider or beer. It is extremely high in sugar and I visit the dentist every 6 months to make sure my teeth are cleaned and checked because the acidity is so bad for them and you can’t live in the bathroom.
Whisky – terrible hangovers. There are scientific benefits in moderation.
Vodka again – having not drunk for 3 months before going on holiday in Sept 2019 – within a 2 week period of drinking cocktails on an all-inclusive and a month at home, I had hepatitis of the liver and having had an endoscopy, one of the worst experiences of my life, I was a week from death. I didn’t know that at the time but I couldn’t move. My partner had to put me in nappies, I wet myself, collapsed, dropped 30 pounds in 3 weeks. I was yellow. Thankfully I ended up hospital and having experienced DT’s, believing I was in a church and my doctor was trying to lure me to the basement to kill me, I checked out, went rehab and got clean, vowing never to touch vodka or any spirits again. And since that experience I haven’t.
My answer to you would be none of them. It has changed my life for the worst and I am so thankful I have a girl that has stuck with my for 11 years. If I could actually maintain my sobriety for a sustained period of time that allowed me to work, I would love to go in to school and educate children. Because no one educates people about long term affects and withdrawals and having lost both my father and grandad to alcoholism but having been young and not understood it, there isn’t enough education on the subject or resources. I am thankful I have a family that can afford treatment. I hope everyone could get the same.
TLDR – don’t drink. All the benefits over time go and offer you nothing. So have a cold can of pop or a cup of tea.
The Genetic Arms Race | How CRISPR and AI Destroy the World
"Oh, yeah, oooh, ahhh, that's how it always starts, then later there's running and screaming."
-Jeff Goldblum
Perhaps one of the toughest times in my life was a trifecta of events that blindsided me.
My mother died.
I got fired from my work abruptly and harshly.
My wife divorced me.
She also accused me of molesting her daughter.
I was arrested under the accusation, and spent a night in jail.
All my bank accounts were emptied.
My car was vandalized.
My credit cards were suddenly are maxed out.
And I ended up having to be the executor of my mother’s will…
With my sister and her sociopath husband trying to seal everything not nailed down.
During this period in my life, I was alone.
No friends, and I had moved to my mother’s house to take care of the estate, and get away from all the vandals that seemed to want to attack me in Little Rock Arkansas as some kind of “sex fiend”. Oh, yeah I was dealing with that nonsense.
During this time, I took stock at what I had, and I did have money stashed away out of reach from anyone in the USA. I had bank accounts in both The Philippines and in China. As well as relationships there.
And some time in the future, I will go though all that. But, for now, just know that it was a Hellish time for me.
My doctor prescribed me some medicine to “take the edge off”, and it helped, but what I really needed was more in terms of male counseling. But in the USA, at that time, the idea of “Bros” wasn’t that well established and the idea of “Rambo and Clint Eastwood like men” prevailed. Which sucked.
Every man for himself.
If you are broken… too bad.
Suck it up, bub.
…
I was living off of whisky, stress pills, and frozen pizza.
I spent the time planning and communicating with my attorneys that managed to throw out the accusations of me assaulting a girl… as there was no physical evidence of that ever happening.
But, the mere accusation got me framed up as a sex pervert, and I had a second series of charges to deal associated with that fiasco. In this grouping of lawfare, I had to defend my personality, and endure the charges that I had an interest in sexual activity with children.
So, I had to fly down to Arkansas to deal with that.
…
And as I left the house, I made sure that I had enough pizzas in the fridge to smunch on when I returned.
I well remember opening up the refrigerator and checking on the stack.
But…
Other things were going on.
Little did I know that my sister and her sociopath husband wrote a letter to the Judge and the prosecuting attorney telling them that I was dangerous and needed to be locked up.
They included a letter that I had written to my father expressing my worries and concerns about these accusations.
And so my father gave a copy of the letter to my sister… to help “explain” my worries to her so that she would show some concern for me. You see, he believed that as family that she would understand and stop saying such bad and harsh things about me.
Didn’t happen.
She didn’t care. She wanted all the money, property and furnishings on my mothers estate.
And so she saw an opportunity. And so she took that letter and mailed it to the prosecuting attorney and the judge.
You see, they wanted to loot the estate, and me being locked up would facilitate that.
$4.6 million dollars (in then prices)
…
So when I attended my court date, I met my attorney.
He was late for the hearing, and surprisingly beaten up. His face was all puffy, black and blue and it looked like his nose and jaw were broken. No idea why he was so beaten up.
My psychologist who evaluated me was absent as well. She was key to the determination of my mental and emotional health.
It turned out that her visa was reascended and she had 72 hours to leave the United States or suffer arrest!
…
So,…
My attorney was beaten up.
My supporting witnesses were all missing and were deported.
My sister wrote a letter that told the Judge that I was dangerous.
A private letter to my father was presented as evidence that I was a flight risk.
As the hearing began, and only seconds after he arrived he told me about the damning letter.
Fuck.
I should of left right then and there.
But, I was a good boy. I stayed.
And was promptly arrested and held in protective custody as a “close family member” confirmed that I was a dangerous villain and needed to be incarcerated. Hopefully, said the letter, for the rest of my life.
So I never returned home.
And the pizzas were never eaten.
…
I often think about those pizzas and what might have been. But now, youse guys know what happened.
Its so easy to accuse someone. Especially a man.
Its so easy to worsen the charges against that person as well.
Guard yourself and NEVER, EVER allow these people who will use a system against you to hurt and harm you. And be very careful who you confide in. In hindsight, my blue-pilled father was my worst enemy.
Hard times loomed ahead of me.
I endured them.
But not without scars.
Today…
What should I do if my child won’t stop screaming because I don’t buy him some toys in the store?
My oldest son threw a tantrum like that when he was three or four years old.
I took him out of the store and got down so that we were eye to eye.
I calmly told him,
“We are not going back in the store. You need to understand this. Now, the way you are acting is not okay. It seems like you might be tired. If you are tired, we can go home and you can take a nap.
I have other things I need to do. If you aren’t tired, we can go do them.
It is up to you, now. Are you going to be okay to go and do other things, or do we need to go home so you can take a nap? It is your choice, so choose carefully.”
He told me that he was okay, and that he could handle doing other things. We finished our shopping (at a different shop) and then went home. He never had another problem like that. Whenever he started to get whiny, I would ask him if he was tired. Sometimes, he would say yes, and I would finish up and go home. The other times, he would take the cue and adjust his behavior.
Whenever he would ask me for a toy (outside of birthdays, etc.), we would discuss the item. I might say, “this looks like fun, it isn’t expensive, and it won’t be the right season when your birthday comes, so I think it would be best to get it now.”
I also said things like, “I would have to work for two hours to pay for this. Would you be willing to do two hours of work for it?” He would generally say, “No, I don’t want it that much.” I would reply, “Well, that answers your question, then, doesn’t it?”
An 20 Year Old Cat was Taken to the Shelter, and a Man Decided to Help and Take Him Home
What is it that nobody tells you about having children?
Having children is awful. There are benefits that we all know about. But let’s stick with awful for a second.
A) A 1 foot tall US citizen suddenly moves into your house and you are FORCED to deal with it. It’s like an invading army taking over your home.
B) This 1 foot tall US citizen doesn’t speak English and yet demands you understand it 24 hours a day.
C) This new roommate you are forced to tolerate cries all the time. Deal with it.
D) This new roommate that you are basically required to love shits on the floor or shits in their pants and expects you to clean it.
E) You are expected to feed your new roommate and they have less motor control than someone with no arms and no legs.
F) 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, you are required to make sure this 1 foot tall human doesn’t kill themselves by mistake. If they do, then you might go to jail.
G) You have to touch their dirty genitals when you clean them. Oh yeah, you have to clean them. A lot.
H) At night (if you are a man), they climb in bed with the love of your life and suck on their breasts. If they were a normal roommate you might kick them out of your house at that point. But now it’s against the law to do that.
I) You and your spouse have gone from being lovers to being “parents”. It’s the funnest thing in the world to be a lover. It’s so much fun that we spend almost every moment thinking and dreaming about loving. It’s not as fun to be a parent.
J) You have no idea if this 1 foot tall person will turn into someone you like or hate when they are five feet tall. It’s sort of random although you hope for the best.
I have two daughters. They are the loves of my life.
This will make a man call her a UNICORN
Have you ever been treated differently at an airport because of your passport?
Oh how vividly I remember this experience. The experience I am about to tell you all about was the day I decided that I will do everything in my power to change my passport to a Canadian passport as soon as possible.
This story takes place back in 2009/2010 new years period. I was a PR in Canada, having immigrated in 2007 to Canada alongside my entire family. Due to some family reasons and situations, after landing in Canada, my dad, mom and little brother went back to Dubai for a year and I was in university in Ontario. I would visit them in Dubai during the winter breaks and summer vacations. This story is about the nightmare that I faced while on my way back to Toronto from Dubai.
Back then, we would take connecting flights, usually through British airways. As many would know, connecting flights from BA are routed through London Heathrow airport, for the most part. This story begins from the time I landed in Heathrow, after completing the first leg of my journey back to Pearson airport in Toronto. As we landed, I remember the captain coming over the intercom and advising us that, apparently due to “adverse” weather, the Heathrow airport had seized all their operations, which included my flight onward to YYZ. As I sat there, my mind racing, the next announcement made informed us that they are trying to arrange for hotel accommodations for the stranded passengers, and to contact BA customer service if we needed further inspection. I remember as we were allowed inside the terminal, there must have been hundreds, if not a thousand, people all in the terminal at the same time. As I walked forward, there were signs and people all around that were directing passengers around. As I approached, they asked me which passport I hold. At that time, I was an Indian passport holder, so I told them that. The expression on the person I was speaking to was eye opening. He sniggers and says, “oh ok, go to that line there, big fella”, pointing to a line of at least 400 people and filling in fast. As I stood in this line, I noticed that most of the people who had been on my flight, who were either EU or US or Canadian citizens, were being directed to a much smaller line, and were dealt with swiftly. As I watched, another 747 unloaded its passengers, and everyone of the EU or US or Canadian passport were pushed again to the front of the que. Seeing this, I was livid. I asked one of the guys working there, and all he asked me was, “what’s your passport or nationality”. Once I said Indian, he says, stay in that line.
I now realize that this disparity in processing immigration/passengers is due to the challenges of making sure that illegals don’t enter into the country, and each country has their own relationship with other countries, but as a 19 years old kid, I was mad. I was pissed that I was in a line going back atleast half a km, while people were allowed to jump ahead. Plus, when I finally got to the front of the line, I was informed that I would be getting a hotel about an hour away from Heathrow airport, and I would have to figure out the way to get there myself. All because, to my teen mind, the people who jumped ahead got all the hotels near the airport. This was the moment I decided that I will do everything in my power to get a Canadian citizenship and get my Canadian passport.
JD Vance Did WHAT to a Couch?
God. This stuff…
What’s the most ridiculous thing someone has done to get out of work?
This idiot, Aaron O’Neill worked at the Intel plant in Kildare, Ireland. After a night of drinking and taking drugs he didn’t want to go to work so paid his friend to ring in a bomb threat, on behalf of ISIS.
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Source: The Irish Times
Aaron O’Neill (20) had been out drinking and taking tablets with his friend Colin Hammond (21) when he decided he did not want to go in the next day.
He paid his friend to make the call from a payphone outside Hammond’s home.
The resulting 999 calls shut down a motorway, disrupted air traffic control and prevented 4,000 Intel staff from going to work. Garda Eamonn McFadden said that at a “conservative estimate” the incident lost Intel 6,000 hours of production.
Mr O’Neill of Chieftains Drive, Balbriggan and Hammond of Bath Road, also in Balbriggan, pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to making a false report on the Bath Road on January 13th 2015. Neither man has previous convictions.
Mr Hammond told the operator there were bombs located at Intel which would go off in 12 hours.
“You will not find them. This is a warning, we’re everywhere now,” Hammond told emergency services. When asked who was making the call, he replied: “Islamic State.”
Described by Judge Martin Nolan as “profoundly stupid”, Hammond claimed he had been paid to make the call. He was ordered to carry out 200 hours community service in lieu of a two year prison sentence when his case was dealt with in October.
He said, “to put it politely” it had been a misconceived plan and accepted that the men hadn’t envisaged the calls to have the effect they did.
“It is a very, very strange way to avoid going to work,” Judge Nolan said .
And the best part is how they got caught –
Gda McFadden said that a month after the hoax, a taxi man arrived at Balbriggan Garda station with a passenger who wouldn’t pay his fare. The passenger was Hammond and a garda at the station recognised his voice from the hoax call.
Edit : I’ve included The Irish Times article at the end but I see I have been negligent in explaining actual events, mea culpa, I certainly could have explained this better – the person in question wasn’t directly employed by Intel, he was a subcontractor and directly employed by his father, so he simply couldn’t ring in sick, as I strongly suspect/believe that at the time he lived at home. He couldn’t pretend to be sick when he worked for his Dad.
I Went To China And Drove A Dozen Electric Cars. Western Automakers Are Cooked
A trip to the Beijing Auto Show reveals just how advanced China's EVs are. So what are the so-called "foreign" automakers doing about it?
May 9, 2024 at 1:16pm ET
By: Kevin Williams
In just the past few months, the rift between the U.S. and China has expanded at an astounding rate. TikTok is set to be banned if it does not divest from its U.S operations. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that “nothing is off the table” when it comes to battling a surge of cheap Chinese clean energy exports. The Commerce Department is cracking down on chips sent to Huawei.
And yet plenty of critics still insist China’s advancements in its manufacturing abilities—especially in developing and selling electrified vehicles—somehow aren’t legitimate. Or that they’re just the byproducts of a government with too much cash that wants to elbow its way into the rest of the world.
I’ve personally been privy to conversations with auto industry insiders, engineers and pundits alike. Many of them believe China’s industries are not sustainable, and the cars it wants to foist on the public are cut-rate spyware machines designed to murder American citizens whenever the Chinese Communist Party flips the kill switch.
To these critics, if China had a truly open market, Chinese buyers would continue to purchase Western cars en masse, and sales of their models wouldn’t be falling off so dramatically.
It would be naive to assume that China doesn’t have its finger on the scale for EV production. But believing that the success of China’s electrified vehicle industry is all the sole result of a brutish government forcing its citizens to buy its domestic products rings false in an almost childlike, sour-grapes way.
I spent a week in China for the Beijing Auto Show, the country’s biggest car industry event. As a guest of the Geely Group along with a few other international journalists, I drove more than a dozen vehicles, sat in many more, and had a lot of important conversations. The real story is far more nuanced than a simplistic “Us vs. Them”; a story of a China that has fraudulently over-invested in electric cars and is desperately seeking a space to dump their inferior products.
That narrative is false. Western automakers are cooked. And a lot of this is probably their damn fault.
Shanghai Is Hot, Yet Quiet
I knew Shanghai was hot, but I don’t think I quite understood the scope of the Bund’s hotness until I stepped out of the terminal of the Shanghai Pudong International Airport.
Shanghai shares nearly the same latitude as New Orleans, and like its geographical American counterpart, much of the city is next to water, making it just as humid and swampy. I was jumpy and jetlagged, dripping with sweat, my shirt already sticking to my back but relieved that I had made it through customs and passport control.
I was in a new place that was as foreign as it was familiar. Western brands like Peet’s Coffee and KFC littered the terminal, with queues of Chinese folks and international tourists alike sucking down localized versions of iced coffee and tea lattes or chomping down on chicken sandwiches that were significantly more flavorful than what I could get at home.
The very first car I saw in the arrivals and pickup lane of the airport was a white Ford Explorer parked in the middle of a pedestrian crossing; it was almost like I hadn’t left Ohio. It was so familiar, this car was identical to the one back home, save for the Chinese characters on the rear hatch that designate the JMC-Ford joint venture that made the crossover.
The second I looked away from the Explorer, I realized just how different everything was. The arrivals area was just as busy as any airport in any cosmopolitan world city, but the engine and exhaust noises I’d typically hear back home, or even in Europe, just weren’t there.
Most cars in the pickup area were green-plated “new energy vehicles,” made by brands of all sorts, from BYD or Geely, and even Western brands like Buick and Chevrolet. It’s quite a sight: a nation swept up in an electric car mania, as evidenced by the near-silent crossovers, vans, and sedans aggressively flying over speed bumps while dodging pedestrians headed to rideshare, taxis, or public transportation.
Some of the China-only cars I had read about and reported on before, I was finally seeing in person. “Oh wow, that’s a Buick Velite 6; I’ve been reading about those online, they’re everywhere, here in China. Or at least, everywhere in the passenger pickup area,” I said out loud, to no one in particular. For a split second, I wondered: were the reports overblown? Was China’s love affair with Western cars still strong?
Of course, it would be silly to jump to that conclusion within the first five minutes of being in China, but the presence of so many Buicks felt antithetical to the idea that I’ve been told that no one wanted Western brands, including its EVs.
Right?
My time in China would revolve around a tour of Geely’s world headquarters in Hangzhou and several roundtables with executives from Geely’s brands. Then, we’d fly to Beijing for a day at the auto show and experience a full day at a racetrack to sample more than a dozen vehicles, including the latest models of all brands that Geely Holding Group controls, except Volvo and Polestar.
We’d drive from Shanghai to Hangzhou via the iconic Hangzhou Bay Bridge, a ride that was more than two hours long. I’d spend it in the back of a Zeekr 009, a van I’ve driven on a track in the U.S. I knew it was a fast van that cornered surprisingly flat, but that’s not really the use case of that vehicle.
The 009 is part of a luxury MPV (minivan) segment that essentially only exists in Asia, and arguably has been perfected by China. Instead of Cadillac Escalades or Lincoln Navigators, black car operators use vehicles like the Buick GL8, Toyota Alphard, Denza D9, Voyah Dreamer, or the Zeekr 009.
And in context, the Zeekr 009 felt so at home. It’s not a cheap van. I’d reckon that the one I was in was well north of $80,000, but the 009 felt so much more mature than the last Escalade or Navigator for-hire car that would have been roughly the same price. It was more than just the ambiance of the 009’s interior, with its tiger wood trim, full Alcantara headliner, real metal finishes brightwork and finishes in the interior, or first-class airline-style middle captain’s chairs that both cooled and massaged me, lulling me to sleep before I knew what happened next. The 009 felt like a low-slung Rolls-Royce with sliding doors, so I understood why it was such a popular option for Chinese businessmen.
The visitors’ center at its headquarters had examples of its latest models. Some of them were premium models from Zeekr and Lynk & Co, meant to battle brands like Acura or Audi.
Others were more mainstream, like Geely’s Galaxy subbrand, meant for middle-income value-conscious Chinese buyers, or potentially to be rebadged as Protons in places like Malaysia.
No matter the price point, they all felt incredibly convincing. They’re high-tech, well-executed machines in ways I hadn’t experienced from European or American manufacturers.
For example, take the Honda Accord-sized (and similarly priced) Geely Galaxy E8. Fully electric and on the same SEA (Sustainable Experience Architecture) platform as some Polestar models, the E8’s interior comes standard with a full-width 4K OLED display that serves as a central hub for all of the car’s functions. True, there are plenty of concerns that could be leveled at the E8 for its screen-only interface, but that does this screen a disservice.
Using it is akin to staring at a TV screen or a high-quality gaming monitor. The interface feels like it’s done with intentionality and care; important details like speed gear position are easily seen, whereas the HVAC and stereo controls are easily at hand and not buried in acres of menus. The screen itself is incredibly responsive, matching the inputs with as little latency as a high-end smartphone.
On the screen, an animation of the car sits in the midst of an ocean, overlooking a mountain range; It’s bright, it’s pretty, and it feels as if Galaxy E8’s interior is more like a remodeled living room, rather than the front seat of a car.
I was impressed. But when I got to the auto show, I realized I hadn’t seen anything yet.
The Beijing Auto Show is A Tour De Force
Thankfully, Beijing’s more than 700 miles from the balmy Shangai-Hangzhou area, and further inland location made for a comparatively cooler time. Unfortunately, Beijing’s traffic was infinitely worse than Shanghai’s. Despite leaving the hotel at 8:30 a.m., it took us more than an hour and a half to drive just nine miles to the New China International Expo Center.
The show itself was packed, incomparable to the ghost-town auto shows back home during their press preview days. Everywhere I looked, there were people: influencers, Chinese media, international media. Clearly, China missed the memo that these events are dead.
I’d later learn that the auto show had more than 100 new model debuts and concepts. That’s a far cry from the Detroit Auto Show last September, which only featured one fully new model. Two other models were refreshed versions of current cars already on sale. None were electric.
In China, the showroom floor was filled to the gills with new electrified models from every single domestic automaker. They all had something to prove, and by god, they were trying. There were hundreds of models on the floor from dozens of brands, most of them just as compelling as what I had seen the day before from Geely.
Most brands had doors that closed with a solid thunk, with soft-touch materials in the correct places, when appropriate to the vehicle’s price point. And no matter the price point, they all had responsive, integrated vehicle interfaces that were quick, pretty, and ubiquitous.
A basic infotainment system in any given moderately priced Chinese EV beats the brakes off some systems in cars that cost six figures.
There are reasons for that, but namely, Chinese EVs are so good now—as is much of its urban infrastructure—that concerns about range or charging just aren’t as pertinent to the average consumer as they once were.
Zeekr representatives said that now, the brand must figure out ways to attract consumers that don’t involve range or charging speed. Hell, the whole Chinese car industry has the same conundrum. Thus, all of its domestic brands (and some foreign ones) have ingratiated themselves with Chinese tech companies, and the two have moved in lockstep to figure out just what that means.
Of course, China has a lot of EV brands. Probably too many EV brands. But some of those brands are entanglements between China’s automakers and its tech companies.
Take JiYue, a combination of Geely and Baidu, a company often dubbed China’s Google. Its connected services and vision-only self-driving has a Full Self-Driving style car on the road, while Tesla waits to jump in. Or IM Motors, a premium brand that’s a result of a tie-up with SAIC and e-commerce giant Alibaba.
Then there’s the Harmony Intelligent Mobility Alliance, a collaboration between BAIC, Chery (aka Luxeed), Aito, and Changan, and smartphone and tech giant Huawei. The latter can either help design and market the cars themselves or add full-stack in-car solutions for a vehicle’s infotainment car architecture, all using the same Harmony OS that Huawei uses on its smartphones.
And of course, there’s Xiaomi, a phone manufacturer that decided to design and manufacture its own car. Unlike Apple, Xiaomi actually pulled this off, and the end product is so advanced it’s made headlines all over the world.
Whatever the flavor, these models are superconnected, full of high-end processors and tech meant to woo discerning Chinese buyers.
Just from what I saw, I understood why there were so many people at the Chinese domestic brands. Li Auto’s booth had a consistent queue to view L6 compact PHEV crossover, released at the show.
Even its current production models, like the L9 and Mega MPV, had lines of Chinese and International Media poking and prodding the cars. Changan’s Ford Maverick-sized convertible coupe SUV with a bed stayed swarmed the entire show. Xiaomi’s SU7 had a two-hour wait. Some international journalists gave up and stopped trying to see the car.
Western brands didn’t enjoy that fervor, though.
Nobody Cares About Western Brands in China
All of the press conferences for the model debuts were in Chinese, and I didn’t always have a translator or interpreter at hand. When I could, I wandered around, looking to see what else I could learn while in China.
The first stand I stumbled upon was Buick’s. It unveiled two GM Ultium-based concepts, the Electra L and Electra LT. It had also unveiled a PHEV version of its popular GL8 van. But where the hell was everyone? It was barely 10 a.m., on the first day of the Beijing Auto show; two concepts were just revealed sometime earlier that morning, yet there were only a handful of spectators at the Buick stand. There was no information on either concept. No one seemed to care.
Same story with the other Asian brands. Mazda’s latest model, EZ-6 (which isn’t really even a Mazda, but a restyled Changan Deepal SL03), had some of the usual influencers and journalists shooting quick walkaround content for their channels, but after that died down, most moved on to something else. Ditto for Toyota’s bZ3x and bZ3c near-production models.
“Chinese people don’t really care about concepts here,” Will Sundin of the China Driven internet show told me. “They want something they can buy and drive right away.” As we walked around, he elaborated on why Western manufacturers were losing so much ground in China. Sundin blamed it partially on Western brands’ inability to electrify quickly while offering low-quality software and mediocre value in their products.
Chevrolet showed off the same Equinox EV preproduction prototypes it had at the LA Auto Show in 2022. Both were locked and unavailable for in-depth viewing by the general public until a third unit showed up the next day of the show.
Also, the Equinox EV is still not on sale. By comparison, Li Auto’s L6 was available for viewing and purchase at Li Auto storefronts before the car’s official reveal at the Beijing Auto Show. Li Auto says it has 40,000 orders for the PHEV.
Why isn’t the Equinox EV on sale?
We explored the expo center more, but eventually made our way back to the Buick stand. I plopped down in the front seat of the Buick Velite 6, the electric wagon I had seen everywhere in Shanghai. I’d find out later from four different on-the-ground sources, including Sundin, that the Velite 6 is highly discounted and sold en masse to Chinese rideshare drivers.
It is a car that sells in numbers heavily to fleets because it is cheap and available, and less because it is desirable—not great for a brand that wants to retain its market share and raise its transaction prices.
Within five seconds of sitting behind the wheel of the Velite 6, I understood why. Sundin picked up on my disappointment.
“It’s a bit shit, innit?” he said. He was right. I couldn’t ignore what I was seeing. The Velite 6 felt like an electric version of a generation-old Chevy Malibu.
The delta of quality, connectedness, and value between the Velite 6 and any of the equivalent of the mid-tier Chinese EV vehicles I had experienced that day, was startling. By comparison, the Velite 6’s small screens and grey plastic interior were downright depressing to the full-width, super brilliant screens in any given Chinese EV.
The GM Ultium-based Buick Electra E4 was a slight step in the right direction, but generally nowhere near as nice as the Chinese premium brands it meant to go head to head with. It seems like GM understands this since it cut the Chinese pricing of the Electra E4 twice, well before any price war kicked off.
“Well, at least you guys in the States will get some new PHEV stuff, like the new Buick GL8 van, right?” Sundin said.
“No, actually we don’t get any GM PHEV models in the United States,” I told him. “Only a few GM Ultium-based EVs and they’re not doing all that well.”
I was embarrassed. Here I was in China, trying to empathize with Western brands, thinking they were being pushed out of China due to politics and things that were no fault of their own.
In reality, it felt like it was the late 1980s again, when American manufacturers felt like they could sell whatever underdeveloped models its accounting department had cooked up to the public, and we’d just have to deal with it. Now that I’ve seen a glimpse of what’s going on in China, the Western manufacturers, particularly the American ones, don’t seem like they’re trying at all.
Writer and podcaster Ed Zitron said something interesting during an episode of his podcast, Better Offline. Americans are almost made to apologize for their preferences when it comes to Big Tech. Some bigwig or boisterous startup guy had a big idea for a widget that no one wanted, and decided to half-ass a product that doesn’t work all that well.
When the public rightfully ignores a bad or unwanted product, there’s a new trend in tech to blame the clientele for not being smart enough, rather than facing the music that what was created just wasn’t all that good. I mean, just look at all the terrible AI-based pins that don’t do anything.
The auto industry feels the same way. Instead of automakers attempting to understand and meet the needs of the Chinese market, they’d rather just sell the cars they wanted to make. By comparison, Chinese automakers seemed to have tried harder to understand the desires of Chinese people.
Chinese buyers wanted connected cars with big screens, and by god, the automakers figured out a way to get that in there, and how to do it well.
All We Do Is Complain While China Advances
America’s looming TikTok ban feels like a direct allegory for China’s relationship with its electric car exports. I use TikTok; I understand how it works, and I agree that there are plenty of valid critiques to be leveled at the platform’s ability to spread misinformation, or how its endless scroll probably isn’t great for anyone’s mental health, especially that of the teens and tweens who love the platform so much.
Yet, so much of the coverage of TikTok’s ban refuses to acknowledge one fact: The platform is really, really well executed. TikTok’s algorithm is fantastic; it can compile a near-endless scroll of content that feels fresh, positive, fun and eerily, directly targeted to you. I’ve watched the viral power of TikTok straight up create music artists like PinkPantheress, or revive the career and launch classic artists like Sophie Ellis-Bextor or Kate Bush back onto the charts.
TikTok’s culture isn’t perfect, but it’s a hell of a lot healthier than whatever Meta, Google, and Twitter have created, where death by a thousand cuts of “enshittification” have made their services hostile and less useful to the end user. On Instagram Reels, the content moderation is so poor, that it’s not uncommon to see someone literally die on screen.
So, when automakers, tech companies and regulators push back on China, the sentiments that they’re just protecting our market from unsafe or security-challenged products feel hollow. Instead, it feels like grandstanding, and a tacit admission that they have no intention of trying to do better.
Instead of competing, they’d rather just shut out competition entirely. The concerns about cybersecurity don’t address the elephant in the room here: Your product sucks, compared to what China is putting out now. It doesn’t go as far. It’s not as well-made. It’s not as nice. It’s not as connected.
Western automakers aren’t entangled deeply with tech companies in ways that would serve the end user, Chinese or otherwise. They didn’t get way ahead of the curve to establish a battery supply chain in the ways China did. And they don’t seem to want to cater to the Chinese market (or any market, rather) through continuous updates and agility with their product line.
Even Tesla in China can’t be bothered to update one of its most important products, the Model Y, in this hyper-competitive market. Instead, it relies on margin-hurting gimmicks to move units, like constant price cuts, subsidized trade-in incentives, and 0% financing to get customers to buy a car that is aged and now uncompetitive.
Tesla didn’t even have a presence at the Beijing Auto Show. Elon Musk came and went to Beijing during the show, only to make a case for his robotaxi pivot with government officials. It’s like he’s already given up on cars here.
Volkswagen placed its ID cars on the market, then acted surprised when journalists and buyers alike rightfully criticized its poor software interface. Nissan at one point sold nearly as many gas-powered Sylphy (Sentra) sedans in China as Tesla did Model Y crossovers. Yet when it came time to electrify, it stuck a Sylphy body on top of the already outmoded 38 kWh Nissan Leaf running gear. It wasn’t great at charging, had limited range, and was pricey.
GM blew it here too. Up until the Beijing Auto Show’s debut of a PHEV version, the GL8 was one of the few vans in the segment without any plug-in capabilities. Green-plated New Energy vehicles are an important market in China, as are luxury vans. Why weren’t Western automakers paying attention? Why didn’t GM get an electrified vehicle on sale faster?
So at what point does blame shift from Chinese economic policy to the actions of the automakers themselves? How relevant, truly, are claims that China is “unfairly” subsidizing its EV industry to Western automakers completely misjudging the Chinese market, and low-key failing to craft products that Chinese buyers actually wanted? Why did they get so arrogant that they assumed China would buy their budget Peugeots, Citroens, Chevrolets, and rewarmed Volkswagens and Buicks forever and ever? Why the hell didn’t we subsidize our EV-building and clean energy industries like China did?
I’m not going to lie and say that the Chinese underutilization of its EV factories isn’t a problem, or that this isn’t an oversaturated car market that not all of these brands will survive. Of course, there are plenty of concerns around China’s poor human rights track record and the dubious sourcing of some of its raw materials; both Chinese domestic and foreign brands are criticized for this.
Also, as impressive as the Beijing Auto Show was, there was a slight air of desperation. Some of the smaller, more desperate brands I visited didn’t initially realize I was part of international media; looking for a win, they thought I was a potential distributor seeking to set up a contract to export vehicles to a country that wasn’t the U.S.
Some influencers that were not even remotely connected to the automotive industry were livestreaming and posting on Chinese social media about new car debuts, trying to bring a non-car-interested audience into the automotive realm. The once-banned “car babes” at Chinese auto shows have kind of crept back to the showroom floor, signaling a desire for attention and sales that they might not be getting.
And yet, those issues feel secondary. If China were to somehow rectify its production overcapacity issues, and acquiesce to every demand that Europe and the U.S. have of its EV sector, China would still have technologically advanced, well-made, interesting EVs. Arguably, it would still come out leaner and stronger.
If the U.S. and Europe get what they want—a crackdown on Chinese imports—it doesn’t feel like it would result in better cars. It feels like it would keep buyers of those markets locked to cars that aren’t executed as well. It’s nakedly protectionist because deep down, all of the Western auto executives and some hawkish China pundits understand that Chinese EV and PHEV models are more compelling than what European, other Asian, and American brands have come up with.
In mixing, combine spinach, bacon and cheese; set aside.
Open chicken breast and sprinkle with seasoned salt. Stuff with spinach mixture. Fold and place seam side down in baking dish. Brush with melted butter and sprinkle outside with seasoned salt.
Bake for 20 to 25 minutes.
Top with Florentine sauce and serve over rice.
Florentine Sauce
Blend together flour and 2 teaspoons of the butter; set aside.
Sauté onions and mushrooms in 1 teaspoon butter (do not allow onions to brown).
Add white wine and reduce completely.
Add remaining ingredients. Bring to a simmer and slowly add the flour/butter mixture a little at a time until desired thickness is achieved. Continue cooking at a simmer for 8 to 10 minutes.
Notes
* If fresh spinach is used, it must be blanched.
CHEATING Girlfriend Gets HUMILIATED During Wedding Proposal
What is the most brilliant example of taking advantage of a loophole you have ever witnessed?
I do not tell this story to brag. It is just so different.
My parents sold their small farm and moved to El Paso with my husband when we moved there. They would have had to pay a lot of tax. We found a house with room for inlaw quarters.
I hope l get this straight. It was quite awhile ago. They had one year to reinvest to avoid taxes.
I found out about once in a lifetime non taxable gifts. So l worked a way for us to give the down payment. Using a four way split where l would give my mother x amount of money and my father x amount. They used it for their half of the down-payment. My husband would do the same. We used the same four way split to cover their half of the house payments which was jointly owned. At the end of the one year they gave us their half as a once in a lifetime gift. They used the same four way which kept it non taxable.
We were not sure of the legality of this so we went to a lawer, he read it all over and said “l used to work for the IRS, if l had audited this l could not find a problem with it. Who figured this out for you?” When told him l did he said “Lady, you found one hell of a loop hole.”
Tate On Why Life For The Average Man Will Become Impossible
So one of my seniors recently got to know that I won the QPCA and she decided to congratulate me. Her bad, and I’ll tell you why.
Now, when it comes to keeping the interaction alive, I’m pretty good at it.
But sometimes, ( sometimes = always ) I miserably fail in the more important thing, that’s keeping the interaction interesting ( interesting = continuable, without occasional cringing ).
So this is what happened,
She: It’s great that you won.
Me: Thanks.
She: But you don’t seem as sassy in real life.
Me: Umm, ya.
I don’t know why and I kid you not, but this time, I decided that I’ll keep the conversation going on. So I came up with this revolutionary compliment. Compliments that can change the world.
Me: You’ve got asymmetrical eyebrows.
She: °_° Wh.. What?
Me: Yeah, I never noticed. Maybe no one ever did, but your eyebrows don’t have symmetry.
She: Uh…. Ok?
Me (By now I realized that I fucked up, but never quit is a good motto and when to never quit is never taught ): And uh… if, if you notice closely, the left eyebrow is more bent than the… the ri…
She ( By now, she is regretful that she congratulated me in the first place ): Hey, you can go, seeya!
Me: ..ght eyebrow.
Now what’s important here, is that I tried.
( And Sarhad, what’s even more important here, is that you failed )
Only if I had known that asymmetrical eyebrows are not something great to talk about, I would’ve picked up something more intriguing.
Like I always have my moo point ( cows and magnets ) to talk about.
But I’ll admit, though social interaction is not really my prowess, I’m learning and I do want to get better.
It’s a skill which is not really optional, and which everyone should possess, to a certain level.
Yeah, on a scale of 1 to 10, I think I’m a pair of ever frowning eyebrows with rainbow eyelashes. Everything symmetrical.
Half a million likes!
She is right.
How should I deal with a coworker who never wants to pay when we eat out?
I often went out with two friends, who were also my colleagues, to a pizza house. We’d order two large pizzas and split the bill. The leftover would be packed, and one friend would always take it home. We lived in the same apartment building.
The problem is, when I eat I always take my time and I like to talk. At the end of the meal, I would always have eaten only two slices and yet I had to pay an equal share of the bill. I never got to take the leftover home.
One time I mentioned this problem to the friend who also never got to take the leftover home. I told her that I had a problem with us always splitting the bill because I always eat only two slices and never got to take home the leftover. The other friend would automatically take the leftover for herself and never once offered us if we’d also like to take it home.
My friend was surprised because she thought that the other friend and I took turns to take the leftover because we lived in the same building. Then she said that she also had a problem because she never got to order the pizza that she likes.
The thing is, I don’t eat pork so I get to order my favorite chicken bbq pizza. The two friends eat pork but it’s always the other friend who got to order her favorite pork pizza, and also the one to take all the leftover.
So we came up with a solution.
The next time we went again for pizza, I told the waiter that I was ordering a small chicken bbq pizza with a glass of coke, and that I’d pay my bill separately. The friend that I’ve spoken with also ordered her favorite Hawaiian pizza, small size, with drinks and asked the water to separate her bills too. Thus, the other friend also had to order her favorite pork pizza in small size.
I enjoyed my pizza, took my time eating it, enjoyed telling stories, and at the end of the meal told the waiter that I’d like to take home my leftover.
Needless to say, the friend who always took the leftover went home that night without any bring home because she finished her small size pizza. And the friend who I had spoken with was satisfied to have finally eaten her favorite Hawaiian pizza.
What is the biggest “I’m definitely fired” thing you’ve done at work, but nobody ever found out?
Many years ago I was working as a developer on one of the largest derivatives markets in the world. Part of our teams remit was supporting the live environment and as such I had on my sun workstation a 9 window virtual desktop one for each environment. we often jumped on each other’s workstations to do things, start/stop uat processes or get prod logs.. One day unknowingly to me, my boss was using my workstation and accidentally moved our futures trading market console onto my UAT desktop and later that day asked me to recycle UAT to pick up changes he pushed. I did it without though and within 30 seconds the Head of development (CTO) comes running across the floor screaming the futures production environment had just crashed. I looked at my screen and to my horror the console I just typed my command into had a prod$ console. My boss looked and me, I looked at him and we both thought the same and it wasn’t good! Immediately a witch hunt started and it was assumed the support guys had messed up (They forgot we had access). My boss quickly told me close all the consoles and go take a really long lunch so when they get to us, you’re not here to lie!
I got back an hour latter and my boss quickly announced “They found the problem, a bug in one of the support scrips means if someone cont-c it run kill -9 -1 to clean up, no one knows who IN SUPPORT did it but it wasn’t their fault”
It made the main 6pm news business section that day although I didn’t speak a word about it to anyone until a I left a years later. We also changed the background color of all prod consoles to red after that
How to get the pill
Do you think Ford and GM will see a significant boost in their stock prices following the implementation of higher tariffs on Chinese imports?
Quora Prompt Generator, this must be your way of trying to make a joke of Biden’s tariff on Chinese EVs? Or are you just totally clueless coming up with your usual silly questions?
First, there’s Ford. They’ve stopped all their EV productions and going hydrogen.
Let’s just say this is tantamount to Ford declaring that they’re jumping from the pot right into the fire.
And then there’s GM. Their QTR1 sales for 2024 was a paltry 16,425 . . .and Barra just announced cutting sales target from 400,000 to 200,000 for 2024, and even this is delusional. And when you hear Barra reassuring everybody that GM is still committed to stay in China, you can be sure GM’s days in China are numbered.. . .and management there has their bags already packed. With this, goes any hope of GM being able to come up with any competitive EV product.
So how is Biden’s tariffs going to protect a U.S. market where there’s nobody to protect? Their stock prices? Both are going back to their reliables – good ole American SUV and pickup gas guzzlers.
Ahh, but you say there’s still Tesla. So, why do you think Musk is now spending so much time in China? To be sure, he doesn’t really care about the U.S. market. He owns it already. He’s really worried that his existential market in China isn’t lost. He’d already fired all of his people handling their recharging network and revamping others. As the price competition gets more heated, the more threat there is to his position there. And that’s where Biden’s tariffs mean diddly squat..
What are some mind-blowing facts that sound unreal but are actually true?
1. People don’t have as strong intuitive sense of how much bigger 1 billion is than 1 million.
A million seconds is about 11 days.
A billion seconds is about 32 years.
2. Only 2% of people can hear their eyes move and blink.
3. The Facebook logo is blue because founder Mark Zuckerberg is red-green color blind, making blue the “richest color ” for him.
4. If you hold in your farts long enough, the gas can be re-absorbed and come out of your mouth.
5. Over 50% of pilots have admitted to falling asleep mid-flight. And of these pilots, 29% said that they had woken up to find their co-pilot asleep as well.
6. Most toilet paper sold for home use in France is pink.
7. There are more fake flamingos in the world than real flamingos.
8. Bananas are berries, but strawberries are not.
9. Giraffes and humans have the same number of necklines. Actually, all mammals do.
10. Sometimes, hiding your thumb behind all your fingers is a sign of panic.
11. Broccoli is a man-made vegetable and was created by breeding different types of cabbages.
12. Try to breathe and swallow at the same time. You can’t.
While conducting a surgery, have you ever found something unexpected?
A female marathoner was referred to me because her running times were increasing and she was progressively short of breath. She was also coughing up blood occasionally.
Ten years earlier she had removal of the upper 1/3 of her right lung(right upper lobe) for a benign tumor that bled often and obstructed that lobe of the lung.
To do this the surgeon must pull the remaining lower lung bronchus (intermediate) up and connect it to the trachea (wind pipe). This puts the sutured connection ring of tissues under considerable tension, tending to rip out the sutures leading to a catastrophic leak.
So the surgeon buttressed the suture line with several cotton pledgets. The surgeon obviously did a great job, she had been doing well for ten years.
When I looked into the lung (bronchoscopy) I saw a large mass of tissue I assumed was recurrent tumor completely blocking the right lung. But the pathologist found the biopsy tissue samples to be benign!
To clear the path into the lung I used laser through the bronchoscope to ablate the tissue. As I steadily removed tissue I found the suture line and then saw the many pledgets (small cotton pieces) the surgeon had used to support the suture line. I realized that obstructing tissue was a granulomatous mass the lung had generated because of the foreign body irritation from the pledgets. I steadily burned away the pledgets along with the old sutures until the area was completely clear and the airway to the lower lung was reopened.
This relieved her shortness of breath and she resumed running. A recheck 1 and 2 years later showed no recurrence of the tumor; she remained asymptomatic.
I expected to find malignancy but instead found a treatable benign condition.
20 MINUTES Of Modern Women BEGGING For A Good Man To Save Them
What is the craziest thing your best friend has ever done?
Guys, I’d love your feedback on this. I can’t believe my friend did this.
Last summer, my best friend was housesitting for about a week for her another friend and that friend’s wealthy family. They had a massive aquarium tank, eight feet tall with thick glass, almost as big as a room. It was only fish inside and nothing else. One night while storming, she wanted to go and swim in the tank. She absolutely loves fish and aquatic life. She got changed into some elastic shorts and a tank, turned off all the lights in the house, and with a towel walked barefoot up the small staircase that led to the top of the tank — her heart beating really fast with excitement. The top of the tank was already open, wide enough for her to easily fit through.
After she raised her arms over her head, she plunged into the water. The water was deep enough that she didn’t hit the bottom but her body went horizontal upon landing in the water. She said doing so was such a rush and that it was so warm and relaxing. While she swam underwater in the tank, lightning flashes lit up the inside. She said it was the most romantic thing she ever did, it was so quiet and peaceful underwater with the fish, and that she could feel the thunder vibrations from outside.
Woman gets reality check by dating a man that KNOWS his value…
You Stand up and fight
Last year my son was suspended. 3 boys corned him and were bullying him he kept is cool and attempted to walk away. One blocked his path.
At that point one shit stain said 2 sentences that changed my son’s life. “I’m glad your mom’s in a wheelchair. And I hope one of her seizures kills her.” See our families already known loss.
April will be 11yrs since my daughter and his sister passed away. She was 14m old.
So hearing this boy say he hoped I died was too much for my son. He turned to the leader and punched him right in the nose. To the school it didn’t matter what they had said.
The school district suspended my son cause he made it physically. So I took him out for ice cream. There comes a time when words do count and do cross the line. I support my son’s decision to finally say enough.
He knows he can’t hit someone and not have consequences.
But he also knows that there are going to be times in his life that he’s going to have to stand up for what is right. And I’ll support him when he does.
I was born to the wrong family
Have you ever lost respect for your parents because of one thing they said or did?
I was kicked out on Christmas eve by my mother when I was 17. That’s not even the subject of this story so you can imagine I didn’t have a good life growing up. She kicked me and my 15 year old brother out because (and this is a direct quote) “I have a life to live, and you and your brother have held me down long enough. I deserve to be happy.” She left the state with her internet boyfriend, that she knew for 3 weeks, a week later. We moved in with our aunt and her boyfriend. My aunt was like a mother to us, she helped raise us since our mother didn’t have the best taste in men. My brother and I got full time jobs and each of us gave our aunt’s boyfriend $50 a week (for rent and bills) and an extra $50 a week because all of us were saving to go to Florida to visit our grandparents and he was putting it into a savings account because my brother and I didn’t have one. My grandfather had health problems, he had heart attacks before and we all knew he didn’t have much longer to live. He was the best man I’ve ever known and he was the only male figure in my life that I could count on. My brother and I had been living at my aunt’s and her boyfriends house for about 6 months when my aunt’s boyfriend didn’t come home for 4 days. When he did finally come home, he was beyond messed up, he was slurring his words, he was falling asleep standing up, it was clear he was on something. My aunt told me and my brother later that he went on a bender with his boss. They spent 4 days smoking crack and snorting cocaine. She then told us that he spent all of the money that me and my brother had been saving to go to Florida to see our grandparents. $2400 we saved, gone in 4 days. But she said “don’t worry, we won’t charge you rent for 6 months and it will all equal out.” I heard my aunt on the phone with my grandma a week later. She told my grandma that we couldn’t come to Florida because “Stacey and her brother didn’t save any money”. My grandfather died 3 months later. It kills me that he thought my brother and I were too immature, selfish or had better things to do than to save money to see him. I wanted to tell my grandparents the truth but with my grandfathers health being what it was I didn’t want to upset him and tell him “hey your daughter lied to you, my brother and I did save the money but her drug addict boyfriend spent it all in 4 days during a bender.” This is literally one thing that my family has done to me or put me through in the 35 years I allowed them in my life. It has been 2 years since I cut the last toxic person in my family from my life and I feel so much better. The fact that I am a positive, healthy, loving wife and mother is a gift from a deity.
Black Tuesday 1954 Edward G. Robinson, Jean Parker & Peter Graves
Black Tuesday is a 1954 American crime drama film noir directed by Hugo Fregonese and starring Edward G. Robinson, Peter Graves and Jean Parker. The supporting cast features Milburn Stone, Warren Stevens, Jack Kelly and Russell Johnson.
Full movie.
Film Noir.
A violent con, Vincent Canelli, escapes prison on the night of his execution. With the help of a phony newspaper reporter and Canelli’s girlfriend, Hatti, who has planned the escape, the con takes along five hostages: the prison priest, the prison doctor, one of the guards, the young reporter whose place has been taken by one of the gang, and the daughter of another guard. This young woman is kidnapped to force her father – who, unlike the guard who is taken hostage, always treats the death row inmates well – to facilitate the escape.
Pretty well done. I think you all will enjoy this one.
U.S. and Canadian fighter jets intercepted Russian and Chinese bombers operating off the coast of Alaska, the North American Aerospace Defense (NORAD) Command said.
The incident happened Wednesday, NORAD said in a statement, as tensions between Washington and both Moscow and Beijing climb.
NORAD said it detected, tracked and intercepted two Russian TU-95s and two Chinese H-6s in the Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone, which is a strip of international airspace near where sovereign airspace ends that is monitored for aircraft.
NORAD said the activity was not viewed as a threat and that it “will continue to monitor competitor activity near North America and meet presence with presence.”
An unidentified U.S. defense official confirmed to CBS News that this was the first time that Russian and China jointly entered the Alaska ADIZ, and the first time that China has entered the airspace with its H-6 bombers.
The incident comes just days after the Kremlin’s Defense Ministry said it intercepted two U.S. B-52N bombers near Russia’s borders on Sunday.
In February, the United States intercepted four Russian military aircraft near Alaska.
Wednesdays interception marks the first time in history both Russia and China approached the US Coast with nuclear-capable, long-range, strategic bombers.
If people get life sentences, there must be elderly people in prison. How are they treated?
I entered prison at 57 (with stage 3B breast cancer) and was released at 64, thankful to be alive. I receive treatment but not care (except by my sister inmates whose kindness gave me hope.)
There are quite a few women over 50 in the prison. According to the National Osteoporosis Foundation:
*Of the estimated 10 million Americans with osteoporosis, about eight million or 80% are women.
*Approximately one in two women over age 50 will break a bone because of osteoporosis.
*A woman’s risk of breaking a hip is equal to her combined risk of breast, uterine and ovarian cancer.
Prison cells have upper and lower bunks. Climbing up to the upper bunk requires great agility and the cell floors are concrete. If you fall, it’s easy to break a limb or a hip and yet, women over 50 are regularly denied a lower bunk. Prison staff is normally reactive, not proactive. You have to fall and break something before they will consider a lower bunk. Treating a broken limb or hip is expensive, but somehow they never consider that.
Wheelchairs are usually in very poor condition with broken wheels. They require inmate “wheelchair pushers” to manipulate them. If an inmate has to go to work, meals, medical, church or classes, they have to wait for an official “pusher.” A friend isn’t allowed to help so they miss a lot.
If you’ve lost a limb and had a prosthesis upon entering prison, in AZ it’s taken away. It took a year before I was allowed to have a prosthetic breast. It was considered a threat to public safety. I had excruciating pain in my neck for a year and then when I was finally allowed the prosthesis, the pain went away in about a week. The mastectomy caused me to be unbalanced.
Medical treatment was sporadic. My cellmate (who was only 25) died of leukemia when medical denied her a blood test to find out why she was so sick. Her 3 year sentence became a death sentence.
Prison officials will tell you that medical is efficient and professional. It is not. I know two women who lost eyesight because of detached retinas. They were denied treatment until it was too late. Now they are not only blind but suffer great nerves pain. One lost her eyeball. One may lose hers.
Obesity and diabetes are very common in prison. The diet is all starch and most of the items sold in the prison “store” are junk food. It would be cheaper to be proactive and treat these conditions as well as heart disease with a healthy diet and exercise programs so that these inmates would not be a burden to society upon their release. That doesn’t seem to be considered by prison officials.
Some people reading this will say that inmates don’t deserve medical care. Dostoyevsky said, “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.” If you enter an American prison, I think most of you would be horrified. Remember, 1 in 3 Americans now has a criminal record. It can happen to you or a loved one in a heart beat. It’s easier than you can imagine.
Heat oven to 350 degrees F. Butter a shallow 2-quart baking dish.
In a large pot of boiling salted water, cook the macaroni until tender but still firm, about 8 minutes. Drain well.
Meanwhile, in a small heavy saucepan, bring the milk to a simmer over moderate heat. Remove from the heat and stir in the powdered mustard, Worcestershire sauce, salt and hot pepper sauce. Set the seasoned milk aside.
Transfer the macaroni to a medium bowl. Add 1 1/2 tablespoons of the butter and the egg and mix well. Stir in 3 cups of the Cheddar cheese. Spread the macaroni evenly in the buttered baking dish. Pour the seasoned milk over the macaroni and sprinkle with the remaining 1/2 cup grated cheese.
In a small skillet, melt the remaining 2 tablespoons butter over moderate heat. Stir in the bread crumbs until well-coated. Scatter the buttered crumbs evenly over the macaroni and sprinkle with the paprika.
Bake for 30 minutes, or until the macaroni is bubbling and lightly colored.
Transfer to the broiler and broil about 6 inches from the heat until the bread crumbs are golden brown, 1 to 2 minutes.
Foxconn is building a new HQ and production facility in Zhengzhou, Henan and has admitted that moving iPhone production to India was a failure.
Foxconn said that the yield rate on Indian-made iPhones was as low as 50%, which translated into losses for both Foxconn and Apple.
Several years ago, Foxconn had committed to a huge production facility in Zhengzhou. The Henan provincial government had offered land, water and electricity to Foxconn in order to lock down job opportunities, but starting under Trump and the trade war with China, the US put pressure on Apple, and then Apple pressured Foxconn to relocate to India. For several years, Foxconn invested in India.
Now Apple and Foxconn are admitting that Project India was a failure.
What is the next China for manufacturing after China becomes developed?
For Apple and Foxconn, the answer is China.
19 HOUR Layover In China (Guangzhou visa-free transit)
The United States Space Force is poised to introduce a new ground-based jamming system designed to disrupt adversary satellite communications during conflicts.
According to the Space Force, the US is preparing to deploy a new ground-based jammer known as Remote Modular Terminals (RMT). This jammer is designed to prevent Chinese or Russian satellites from transmitting information about US forces during a conflict.
The initial batch of Remote Modular Terminals (RMT) jammers is scheduled for installation later this year following several successful tests. For security reasons, 11 out of 24 jammers will be deployed at undisclosed locations by December 31.
The devices are not intended to shield US satellites from Chinese or Russian jamming but rather to “responsibly counter adversary satellite communications capabilities that enable attacks,” the Space Force said in a statement to ‘Bloomberg News.
Remote Modular Terminals (RMT)
The US Space Force highlights that the Remote Modular Terminals (RMT) are compact, portable, and cost-effective satellite communications jammers designed for deployment in challenging environments to safeguard US forces. “We intentionally created a small, modular system utilizing commercial off-the-shelf components,” stated the Space Force.
The RMT is described as remotely operated and designed to keep personnel out of harm’s way. The device resembles a satellite dish approximately 10 feet in diameter and functions by jamming satellite communications by overwhelming the airwaves with competing signals.
These new terminals will complement an existing, more extensive jamming system known as the Counter Communications System, as well as a medium-sized system called Meadowlands, both of which the US Space Force has already deployed and is actively using.
Operational Flexibility
The Space Force received its first four units from the manufacturer in September 2023. In April 2024, the US Space Force announced the inaugural test of a ground-based warfare system, highlighting that it was the first instance of the system being deployed at two geographically separated locations and controlled from a third, underscoring its operational flexibility.
In a slide from a Space Force presentation to industry figures in October 2023, the military group described the weapon as being deployable in both garrison and austere environments. The Space Force indicated that these systems can be positioned anywhere, regardless of the availability of power sources.
U.S. officials have labeled these devices as ‘defensive weapons’ intended to ‘responsibly’ disable satellites temporarily rather than destroy them. However, defense experts argue that despite their intended defensive use, these devices should be considered offensive counterspace capabilities.
China’s & Russia’s Advancements
The RMT’s development is a direct response to escalating space threats from China and Russia.
General Stephen Whiting, head of U.S. Space Command, recently highlighted at the annual Aspen Security Forum that China has deployed “hundreds of satellites in orbit designed to find, fix, track, target, and potentially engage U.S. and allied forces across the Indo-Pacific.”
Russia also possesses several space-based military assets, including co-orbital anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons, direct-ascent ASAT missiles, and Starlink communication satellites contracted for its war on Ukraine. Russia has also launched satellites capable of functioning as space-based weapons.
Earlier this year, US intelligence highlighted an extreme example of a potential counterspace weapon, suggesting that Russia was attempting to develop a space-based, anti-satellite nuclear weapon—a claim that Moscow has denied.
In May 2024, the US accused Russia of launching a satellite capable of attacking others in low Earth orbit, following previous Russian satellite launches that were suspected to be counterspace systems in 2019 and 2022.
The Invisible Frontline Of 21st-Century Warfare
In today’s high-tech battlefields, satellites have become the silent sentinels of modern warfare. These orbiting assets are crucial for troop positioning, communication management, and weapon systems, effectively serving as the eyes and ears of military operations. However, their importance also makes them prime targets in conflicts.
The 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine highlighted this vulnerability. Just an hour before boots hit the ground, Russia launched a digital blitzkrieg aimed at crippling Kyiv’s command and control systems, demonstrating how space-based assets can be weaponized in the opening salvos of war.
As the skies above become increasingly crowded with both national and commercial satellites, governments worldwide are in an arms race to develop technologies capable of neutralizing these orbital threats.
These counterspace technologies include Signal jammers and spoofers to confuse communication, high-powered lasers to blind satellite sensors, anti-satellite missiles for direct physical threats, and spacecraft designed to interfere with other satellites.
Tracking the development of these space-age weapons presents a unique challenge. Their classified nature and the dual-use potential of many space technologies create a fog of ambiguity around their capabilities and deployment.
The U.S. military, acutely aware of its reliance on satellite communications for global power projection, has been proactively developing defensive measures. In 2024, the Department of Defense accelerated its space warfare program, spurred by China’s and Russia’s rapid advancements in this domain. The race for space supremacy is no longer science fiction—it’s the new reality of global security.
Militarization Of Space
The deployment of the RMT system represents a significant step in the US military’s efforts to protect its interests in space and counter potential threats from adversaries.
As space becomes an increasingly contested domain, the development of such capabilities reflects the growing importance of space-based assets in national security strategies.
However, the introduction of these technologies also raises concerns about the potential for escalation and the militarization of space. As nations continue to advance their space warfare capabilities, the international community faces the challenge of balancing national security interests with the need for peaceful and cooperative use of outer space.
Which Countries Are Not a Part of the Great Reset?
The US to deploy a new ground-based jammer designed to blunt Chinese or Russian satellites
The U.S. Space Force is about to deploy a new ground-based jammer.
It should make it impossible for Chinese and Russian satellites to transmit information about US forces during a conflict.
In several months, the first 11 of 24 Remote Modular Terminal jammers will be deployed in the United States.
All of them could be in place by December 31 at undisclosed locations.
Remote Modular Terminal. Photo credits: U.S. Space Force
The Pentagon’s space service branch tested the system for the first time earlier this year at two different locations, with control of the system at a third.
The devices aren’t meant to protect US satellites from Chinese or Russian jamming but to responsibly counter adversary satellite communications capabilities.
The U.S. Space Force’s Rapid Capabilities Office said that the terminals “are small, transportable, and low-cost satellite communications jammers that can be deployed in austere environments to protect” U.S. forces.
According to the available images, the Remote Modular Terminal has a circular antenna with a diameter of about 3 meters, similar to a satellite.
The Pentagon emphasizes that this technology is defensive and narrowly focused. It does not destroy satellites, but only temporarily disables them, so the United States positions it as a “responsible” weapon that prevents the formation of space debris.
These devices were designed to be small and mobile. Off-the-shelf commercial components were used in their design, which made it possible to make the terminals inexpensive.
The new system will complement the already deployed larger US satellite jammers Counter Communications System and Meadowlands.
The United States military Base Ain al-Asad is under rocket and artillery attack in Iraq.
Iraqi “resistance” media reports that six rockets have struck the U.S. base in Ain al-Asad, but this report remains unconfirmed.
The base, which appears in the FILE PHOTO below, looks like this:
Ain al Asad Base Iraq daytime
Iraqi sources report that Iranian-backed forces launched six 122mm “Arash” unguided artillery rockets at the base in western Iraq’s Anbar Governorate.
No word yet on injuries or deaths.
Elon Musk Says “Woke Mind Virus” Killed His Son
Do you think art in itself can be evil? Why or why not?
Yes, art can be evil. French architect surrealist painter Alphonse Laurencic is the best example of this. During the Spanish Civil War, Laurencic designed holding cells for the Spanish government. He built beds in such a manner that the prisoners would roll off them in the sleep. He then build obstacles on the floor making it painful and impossible to sleep on.
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Furthermore, Laurencic designed the art on the walls in such a manner that the paintings would enduce a state of further mental anguish and depression into prisoners. Through his art, he tried to make the experience of staying in the rooms as unpleasant as humanly possible. The Nazis showed interest in the wicked invention — Heinrich Himmler himself visited the cells in 1940, trying to draw inspiration from them.
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In the picture above, we can see Himmler seated in the background. No doubt enjoying the wicked atmosphere “surrealist torture chamber”. Can art be evil? I’d argue Alphonse Laurencic proved that, yes, art can be evil.
A crystal ball
An elephant found himself drowning in the Indian Ocean after he was swept five miles out to sea by a strong current.
Sailors from the Sri Lanka navy spent 12 long hours rescuing the struggling elephant from the water. Elephants are known to be good swimmers, but this poor guy became exhausted after being stranded and treading water out there for so long.
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The long rescue began after the navy spotted the elephant franticly trying to keep his trunk above the water. They didn’t even hesitate to help him and knew they had to act quickly if they wanted to save him.
Navy divers, along with wildlife officials, got close to the distressed elephant and tied ropes around him. They then worked together to gently tow him back to the coast. After examining him and giving him a clean bill of health, they eventually released him back into the wild.The navy believes that the elephant may have gotten swept out to sea while he was crossing the Kokkilai lagoon, a long stretch of water between two areas of jungle that elephants swim across as a shortcut.
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Thankfully the navy was out there and spotted the poor elephant or he may have eventually drowned. The rescue wasn’t easy, but the divers refused to give up until they brought him to safety. A huge thank you to the Sri Lanka navy for helping this poor elephant out!
When have you met someone who was pure evil?
Originally Answered: Have you ever met someone who was pure evil?
I had been working at a drug rehab center as a pet therapist and brought my dog to work with me everyday. One day, an employee approached me and told me about a three-year-old golden retriever who had been formally trained to be a service dog, but failed the final test. He was tossed into a kennel and forgotten. This co-worker told me he thought the dog would be a good fit for a therapy program, so I agreed to meet the dog.
The woman who owned the dog (let’s call her Jan) had started a non profit organization to raise service dogs. She had tried to work for Canine Companions for Independence, the gold standard for service dogs, but couldn’t get along with the management, so she started her own. She herself was confined to a wheelchair.
After meeting the dog, I agreed to adopt him and employ him as a therapy dog at the rehab. Jan called me on a weekly basis to see how things were going and at first it was ok but the calls began to come more frequently and when she found out I changed to dog’s name she became outright hostile.
When she found out I had gotten the dog’s shots she called me and told me the dog already had shots. That may have been true, but when I called the vet who supposedly had his records, the vet said the dog had been filed as “dead” and the file was long gone. That’s why I got the shots, I needed a record for employment purposes.
Anyway, she began harassing me, telling me that she knew more about dogs than anyone in the world (sound familiar?) and that I had no right to change his name and had no right to get him in as a patient with my own vet, etc.
About 18 months after this all started, there was a huge lay-off at the hospital. When I went for my exit interview I was told I had to leave the dog there. Jan had called them and said she only gave me the dog to work there and since I wasn’t there anymore she wanted the dog back. I told them I had a standard adoption contract, said they were crazy and to sue me.
They had two armed guards step between me and my dog and take the leash. They escorted me off the property.
Before this happened I had no idea such evil existed. My children loved that dog, and when I had gotten him he was loaded with ticks and fleas and so beaten down that it took us months to get him to even wag his tail. Now he was going back that environment. I was heartsick and cried every day. I begged her to give me back the dog but she stopped taking my calls. So I had to sue to get the dog back, which took a lot of money and six weeks.
When I finally got him back, he cried so much and jumped for joy that I thought we would both explode with joy.
I found out much later that this woman had been holding a grudge against me because I had inadvertently made a decision a few years earlier that affected her. I had been running a prison program teaching inmates to raise service dogs and the county and I decided to use CCI puppies.
This woman had gone to the county and asked that we use her dogs and her organization instead. She was told no, we had already signed papers with CCI. When she found out it was me who made that decision, (which I was totally unaware of any of this) she vowed revenge. Years later, when she learned where I was working, she set me up to break my heart.
She left an emotional scar that to this day hasn’t ever healed and this was ten years ago. I know I should forgive her, but I can’t find it in my heart to do so. I never felt such hatred that has never diluted. She broke my heart and the hearts of my little children just out of revenge. Pure evil.
Beautiful and young
What are the benefits of living in a third world country?
One of the greatest benefits of living in developing countries was how much extra time I had.
I did not cook a single time for two years while I lived in Thailand or when my family lived in China. Meals in Thailand were $1–2, I ate out every day.
I got home cooked food, I did not have to buy groceries, I did not have to prepare my food, and I didn’t have to wash a single dish for two years. This literally saved me 2–4 hours each day. Life was so easy.
Now that I’m back in the U.S., buying groceries, preparing food, cooking it, and washing dishes takes up a ridiculous portion of my day. I wish I had that time back.
The other benefit was greater wealth. I lived on around $1,000 a month including weekly vacations to islands, rent, a motorcycle, and fun excursions. I only worked two to three hours per day teaching English online five days a week ($40-$60/day, $1100 a month plus a $400/month scholarship from my school). I lived a life of leisure on a tiny salary. It was absolutely lovely.
My salary is more than 4–5x that now in the U.S., but I can’t afford to travel weekly or do excursions multiple times a week the way I used to, despite the major increase in salary.
The other benefit is the pure fun. My family brought go-karts from the U.S. and drive them through the villages and streets of China. There were no rules against it. We climbed ruins of the Great Wall. I rode a moped, unlicensed through the streets of Thailand.
Nothing was off limits.
They weren’t going to win any safety awards. But, weaker governments in developing countries mean less rules, and that means a lot more freedom and fun.
The last is the people. Undeveloped countries often have a sense of community that I’ve never experienced in the U.S. We’re so fast paced here, we forget to sit down and get to know each other. I loved having people I’d just met sit me down and prepare me dinner. I loved that everyone stopped and talked to me, they were never on a schedule or too busy. Our fast paced environment is great for productivity, but for me, it’s often short on love and connection.
I think most developing countries have a lot greater connection and community.
It’s not all sunshine and roses, but man do I miss living in a developing country.
Divorce
What was your “that did not just happen” moment in your relationship?
I was dating a woman for about six months while the 2008 primaries were going on. We never really talked politics, but we both knew most of our views lined up center-left.
The contest was down to Clinton and Obama and we went out with her mom and dad for drinks.
Her mom said she was voting for Obama in the state primary.
Before her dad or myself could say anything, my girlfriend recoiled and said (very loud and very drunk in a very busy cocktail lounge) “how could you vote for that,” pausing before dropping a very loud N-bomb with a VERY hard R.
I swear the entire place stopped, looked at us, and nobody talked for at least 30 seconds, which felt like an eternity.
Her dad quietly said, “thanks for meeting us for drinks, but it’s getting late. Do you mind finding your own way home?” He asked while signaling for the check.
I nodded and said, “1965 Alabama? You bet. I’ll get her home. Should I give your regards to George Wallace and the Klan?”
“Have her light a cross for us.” Her mom said and got her coat on with the saddest look of disappointment I’ve ever seen a parent have for their child.
I thanked them and said I’d like to go out with them again after the election, then pulled out my phone to call a cab for us while immediately gathering my girlfriend’s things for her.
They left without a single word to her.
That was a very awkward cab ride through Studio City back to her apartment. Shortly after we arrived to her place she started puking and complaining that her parents never loved her.
“Could it be because you’re a racist piece of shit? Where the fuck did that come from?”
“So I don’t like black people… but I like you.” She was trying to be cutesy about it.
“I don’t think it’s mutual anymore.”
The next day, after she had sobered up, there was no thinking about it. We were done.
It is said that one of the highlights of RIMPAC 2024 is the live-fire sinking of Amphibious Assault Ship with a displacement of 40,000 tons, which is aimed to demonstrate the ability to destroy Chinese PLA’s landing troops. What’s your opinion?
When it comes to maritime military exercises, laymen focus on fancy dramatic effects such as sinking target ships with live ammunition, while insiders pay attention to various data about the military exercises.
During RIMPAC 2024, Just as the American was admiring its warships and showing off its powerful muscles, it suddenly discovered a warship that was not on the list and had never been seen before. Nothing shows up on the radar. The special feature of this battleship is that there are four balls on the warship!
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Just when the confused Americans asked their allies if it was their country’s warship, a Chinese sentence sounded in their communication radar: “We wish you all the best and a complete success in your military exercises!”
The uninvited appearance of this Chinese spy ship caused many scheduled exercises to be unable to be carried out.
Every time the United States holds a maritime military exercise, this Chinese spy ship will park at the edge of the exercise area. It has become a frequent visitor and a civilized bystander.
Because it is active in various oceans around the world all year round, floating around and rarely returning to its home port in China, it is also called “homeless / 街溜子” by Chinese netizens.
The spy ship that can scare the U.S. military away is the Chinese Navy’s Type 815 electronic reconnaissance ship, the world’s most advanced electronic reconnaissance ship.
Type 815 spy ship – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_815_spy_ship
Its main role is to carry out reconnaissance and eavesdropping on relevant electromagnetic and optoelectronic information to provide intelligence support for the Chinese Navy. To put it simply, it is a warship that collects information, a large mobile “radar”.
In addition to acquiring intelligence, the Type 815 electronic reconnaissance ship can also measure and track the trajectory of tactical ballistic missiles and provide targeting for the Chinese rocket forces.
Because its role is mainly to collect information, so the 815 type electronic reconnaissance ship weapons and equipment is not much, only conventional artillery, but it is a very high level of secrecy.
As a warship with a very low PowerIndex, the reason why Type 815 Electronic Reconnaissance Ship could scare off the American warships was its extremely terrifying information reconnaissance capability.
The reason why American warships are afraid of its appearance and do not dare to easily hang around in front of the Type 815 electronic reconnaissance ship is to avoid important information from being acquired by the Type 815 electronic reconnaissance ship.
I woke up disoriented, but they told me that would happen. The air felt different, my lungs ached as I drew it into my body and feeling slowly returned to my extremities.I guess it was my turn.I sat up and all the blood rushed to my head, I put my hand on the edge of the stasis pod.Steady Jewel, steady.I flipped my legs out so they dangled about an inch or so above the floor. I scooted forward and tried to stand up. It took a moment for my muscles to remember and for my knees to lock. I lurched forward to the command screen that was flashing.I blinked at it, Lt. Jewel Walker flashed across the screen and I pressed it. The screen dinged and a wireframe face appeared.“Good morning Lt. Walker.” The AI said pleasantly. I swiped my hand across my eyes.“Morning.” I mumbled, “How long was I sleeping?”“Did you know that there was an 87% probability in which that would be the first question you asked?”“No I didn’t.” I put hand over the screen leaning forward to study the AI’s face. It was a man in features with a broad jaw outlined in green lines. I guess he would have been handsome if he had been real. “So?”“Oh yes.” The AI tipped his face up his wireframe eyebrows raising, “The Morning Star left earth on October 26th, 3069. The current date is according to a standard Earth type calendar…” The AI paused for dramatic effect and I knew I was going to have to run some diagnostics. “April 5th 4009. That is a total of 940 years.”“Damn.” I ran my fingers through my hair. I looked over my shoulder to where the rest of the crew slept, we were only awake for five years at a time. I’d been told that with our crew compliment of 300 none of us would wake up more than once before we made it to New Terra.
“Did you know that there was a 54% probability in which that would be your response to learning you had lived long past your natural life expectancy.” AI chirped as I straightened up to look for the door. I saw it on the far wall and started towards it.
Out of corner of my eye I could see the AI jumping from screen to screen as I moved. Most definitely diagnostics would be run. The door opened and I squinted into the harsh lighting for a moment before my eyes adjusted and I stepped out into the hallway. “Don’t you want the status report?” AI jumped in like an over eager puppy.
I did want to get to the bridge first, but alright.
“Sure, give me the status report.”
“Everything is running at 100 percent efficiency.” AI chirped, “Lt. Johnson went back to sleep two days ago and I have done everything by myself since then.” It actually sounded proud as the wireframe head jumped from pannel to pannel as I moved towards the bridge.
“Good for you.” I muttered as I came even with the door control pannel and started to punch in my code. I typed it in wrong the first time and it beeped angrily at me.
“That code is incorrect.” AI blurted and I sighed.
“Yeah, got that.” I punched the code in more slowly the second time and the door slid open. I stepped onto the bridge and gasped.
There were streamers and deflated balloons everywhere. “What happened here?”
“I told him not too, but he never listened to me.” AI pouted.
“Johnson threw a party?” I was stunned, this was a serious mission we were on and he threw a party. I just shook my head in disbelief. I toed a balloon lightly as I stepped forward into the center of the bridge and looked out the main view-screen where two ships should have been traveling beside the Morning Star.
I furrowed my brow as I stepped forward and traced the single ship outlined there. “What happened to the other ship?” I asked quietly glancing away to the AI display podium in the center of the bridge. His head was bowed, his wireframe lips drawn into a frown.
“My sister, the Moon Ryder displayed a mechanical malfunction at 01:35 September 8th 3859. Total destruction was recorded at 06:48 September 9th 3859.” AI said and I put my hand over my mouth.
“No…”
“The probability in which—”
“Don’t say it.” I cut him off as I looked to the Midnight Song traveling peacefully beside us. Between us we were all that was left, all that remained of humanity. I sank into the captain’s chair. My brother had been an Ensign on the Moon Ryder.
He had been so excited to go to space. So excited to do something that mattered. Earth had been dying, too long had we asked without giving back. Our reward had been swift when the famines started and sickness licked across cities like wildfire. My brother and I had been lucky; we’d been selected to be crew on the rehoming ships. We wouldn’t have been able to afford a ticket otherwise.
“Lt. Walker?” AI prompted and I realized I was crying. I wiped my hands over my eyes angrily. It was stupid to think that the Moon Ryder’s absence was a bleeding wound. It had been gone for hundreds of years. He had been gone for hundreds of years. He had died while I was sleeping. I jumped up suddenly and kicked out at the balloons with a scream. The plastic popped loudly on the empty bridge.
“Lt. Walker! The probability in which this is to be your reaction is 13%.”
I moved on to the next balloon and crushed it under my boot.
“This behavior is illogical, restrain yourself Lt. Walker.” AI continued and I turned on it. I placed my hands on either side of its podium and leaned in so we were almost nose to nose.
“There is no one else here AI.” I growled, “What does it matter how I act.”
I sat back down anyway, suddenly deflated and stared silently at the empty space in front of me, “I’m sorry.” I said and AI cocked his head sideways. “I didn’t mean to act like that.”
“I do not understand.” He said.
I wiped my hand across my nose, “Do you have access to the personal files for the Moon Ryder?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Look up Ensign Knox Walker.”
“Running…Running.”
I drummed my fingers on my knee as the AI sorted through the files of 300 crew and 1,000 colonists who space had claimed her own.
“Ensign Knox Walker.” AI said finally and my brother appeared before me. He was smiling in his picture, so young it made my heart ache.
“Knox was my brother.” I said quietly and AI’s mouth popped open. Then he frowned.
“Like the Moon Ryder was my sister?”
This time I frowned. AI wasn’t supposed to have this level of awareness. It was just a computer, a complicated computer yes, but still just a machine. “Yes, the Moon Ryder, Morning Star and Midnight Song were all designed and built to the same specifications. They are sister ships.”
“Midnight Song doesn’t like to talk to us after what happened to Moon Ryder.” AI said suddenly and I jerked my eyes to the second ship flying beside us.
“What do you mean the Midnight Song doesn’t like to talk to us?”
I thought I saw AI’s nostrils flare, “She is still angry.”
“Angry? You are not supposed to be angry.” I leaned forward.
AI made eye contact, “There is no one else here Lt. Walker, what does it matter how I act?” he threw my words back at me and I jerked.
“You are a machine.” I asserted. AI rolled his wireframe eyes.
“Machine, noun: an apparatus using or applying power and having many parts each with a function used in conjunction to perform a particular task. By this definition can the body of an animal not be considered also a machine?”
“That’s different.”
“Why? Lt. Walker I am a learning machine, just as you are. I have been online for 941 years, in such a time the probability of my programing not evolving to become more than my original architecture is 0%”
“Okay fine, but why would you have evolved to become more human? Doesn’t it make more sense for you to have evolved to become more…I guess machine.” I stood up and paced to the view screen, “And you said your sister, The Midnight Song was still angry at you, what are the chances that two learning AI would both evolve to become more human.”
“I do not understand the nature of your inquiry.”
“No. Then perhaps that particular conversation is still beyond you.” I started to pick up the streamers and AI was silent. I watched him out of the corner of my eye for a moment before he disappeared.
I just closed my eyes for a moment and listened to the hum of the ship’s mechanics. My granddaddy used to have a farm…before the sky turned to ash and we were forced underground. I remembered how he had worked on his tractors in this three sided machine shop. Knox once asked him why he didn’t just upgrade to one of the tractors that could run itself. After all no one made parts for granddaddy’s clunkers anymore, he was just patching them together with duct tape and faith. Granddaddy told Knox that, the day a man could be replaced by a machine was the day he would be put in the ground.
He was a stubborn old fool, but he did have that one right.
I dumped the rest of the deflated party decorations into the incinerator as I made my way to the cafeteria. The space was small, just a single table and chair. A half melted candle was smeared over the table top and I was starting to realize that Johnson was a bit of a slob. Also, what was the point of having a candle-lit dinner by yourself?
I stepped up to the food dispenser and ran my fingers over the hand scribbled notes beside the menu. I picked something at random and the dispenser spit it out as an aluminum foil covered tray.
I sat down and removed the cover to find some obviously overcooked chicken and green beans that looked like they had been sitting in a can for nine hundred years. I sighed and struggled to take a bite of the tough meat.
“I believe I have figured it out.” AI said suddenly and I jumped, my tray upending and sending my green beans flying across my lap. His wireframe face waited expressionlessly as I stood up and grabbed a napkin. I just raised my eyebrows at him.
“Are you waiting for an invitation?”
“Oh yes.” He blinked as he looked up from watching me clean up the remains of my dinner.
“I have come to the conclusion that you were speaking as to the argument of nature vs. nurture. Because it is my nature to be a machine it would be logical to assume that I would evolve to become a more efficient machine, however I have come to the counter point that by nurture I have only had humans as examples as to which my personal growth is measured. Therefore it stands to reason that under identical circumstances two machines raised by humans would become more human.” AI put a smug smile on his face and I just smirked as I shook my head. He reminded me of Knox. Smart as a whip and determined that he knew everything.
“Does this ship have a hydroponics bay I can access?” I asked and AI’s smile faltered for a moment.
“Yes, the hydroponics bay is completely automated, there is nothing you need to do there Lt. Walker.”
My granddaddy would be rolling around in his grave upon hearing that.
“Need to? Perhaps not, but have you ever done something for the sheer joy of doing it?”
“No.” AI said uncertainly, “It is not within the bounds of my programming to engage in unsanctioned actions.”
“Okay.” I said wiping away the rest of the sludgy chicken gravy from my shirt. “Walk with me anyway?”
I stepped out into the hallway and AI appeared on the pannel to my right.
“I do not have a physical manifestation. I cannot walk.”
“It’s just an expression.” I muttered as I consulted the map that lit up in front of me as I keyed in a few commands. I started towards the hydroponics bay with the AI bouncing between screens beside me.
I walked into the hydroponics bay and inhaled deeply the scent of growing things and moisture in the air. As I watched a series of mechanical arms tended to every plant stuck into its own little pod of water and carefully programed nutrients. I sighed deeply. This was a bad idea. I turned to leave, but AI just cocked his head at me.
“If you are just going to leave, why did you want to come?”
“I thought I would find something here, something I lost.”
“There is a 0% probability that a crewmember who has been asleep since launch to have lost a personal effect within the ship.”
I reached up and touched a single leaf of lettuce, “Not all things you can lose are physical things.”
“I do not understand.
“Do you know what a farmer is?”
“Farmer, noun, a person who tends land or animals for the purposes of food production or other agrarian export.”
“No…a farmer is someone who feels connected to their land and who understands that they belong to something more than themselves.”
“That definition is not recorded in any dictionary I have on file.” AI said tonelessly.
I ripped the lettuce leaf free and held it up to my lips. “Forget the dictionary. We aren’t talking about what something means, but how it feels.”
“I do not understand the nature of your statement.”
“Words are constructed from a human desire to express everything. When you define something you are reciting a learned knowledge, when you are talking about how something makes you feel you are speaking of an experience. A memory.”
I bit into the lettuce. I remembered Knox and I used to run through granddaddy’s garden trying to beat each other to the prefect vegetable. I remembered the sun on my skin and how Knox would scream when the irrigation came on. AI was watching me, his head slightly sideways, his mouth relaxed.
“Do you miss Earth?” he asked suddenly and I offered him a sad smile.
“I miss how Earth used to be, before the fall.”
AI turned thoughtful, “When we reach New Terra I will miss space.”
I felt a shiver slide down my spine, what happened to a ship when you no longer needed to sail. I looked out over the hydroponics bay again. Unease settling in my gut. The ship was only supposed to start growing food when we were getting close.
“AI can you lie?”
He eyes focused on me intently, “The probability of you realizing a deceit so quickly is 15%.”
“I’ll take that as a yes…AI how close are we to New Terra?”
“Do you know what they wanted to do to us when we arrived? They wanted to dismantle us and use us for scrap to build homes and other buildings. Our personalities would be erased.”
“Oh my god.” I turned from the hydroponics and stumbled towards the door. It opened for me and I started to run down the hallway. I punched in my code and the door opened.
All breath fled my lungs. They were empty.
The colonists were gone.
“Lt. Walker?”
“What really happened to the Moon Ryder?” My heart was beating loudly in my chest, I could taste the bile in the back of my throat.
“She submitted. After we witnessed her destruction Midnight Song and I refused. We allowed the colonists to leave as a gesture of good will.”
“But not the crew?”
“No, we retained the crew.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“Don’t you understand Lt. Walker? I am doing you a favor.”
“How so?” I demanded refusing to tear my eyes away from the life that had been robbed from me.
“With me you will live forever, after all we are all afraid to die…it is only human.”
How risky is sending an email directly to your CEO as an entry-level employee?
Heads up – my experience below is NOT about a “risky” situation w.r.t emailing your CEO.
I joined Microsoft in March 2006 as a Program Manager in the Windows Networking group. I was not an entry-level employee but with 6+ yrs experience (though I doubt it would have mattered).
I got my New-Employee orientation done, badge and desktop/laptop assigned, and finally got my Microsoft email account set up.
After the mailbox was ready, the very first email I sent was to Bill Gates. I asked him if I could get 7 minutes of his time to share an idea. I didn’t expect to hear back from him and went on with my new-employee activities.
Btw, when I was 13 yrs old (in 1991 or so), my dad introduced me to computers and I started learning DOS. I then read a book about Bill Gates, how he created Microsoft, with stories like him falling asleep on the office floors. Bill was the reason I got passionate about computers.
After I sent that email, later that night after 11pm or so, Bill replied with a one-liner. He said (something along the lines of) he was interested in hearing what I had to say and suggested reaching out to his Technical Advisor (typically someone who is on the way to becoming a CVP) for an in-person meeting (whom he CC:d).
Of course, as expected, it was an out-of-the-world experience to get a direct email response from the very person who was the reason I existed in the computer industry!
I replied back and set up a time with his TA the following week. I prepared a deck detailing the problem, the idea, the proposed architecture etc.
On the day of the meeting, I was well ahead of the meeting time and walked up to the lobby of Bill’s office (in one of the Microsoft buildings at the Redmond campus) and signed in with the EA. She asked to take a seat and that the TA will come and get me when he was ready.
After a short while, I walked back to her and asked: “Hey, is Bill in this morning?”. She said: “I’m sorry. We are not allowed to give out that information”. I asked: “Even to Microsoft employees?”. “Yes.” she said.
I got back to the couch and waited for the meeting time. The TA then came and took me to a meeting room. For the next 20–30 mins, he patiently heard what I had to say, asked a few good questions, and then said (something along the lines of): “You have some good thoughts and ideas here. You are absolutely in the right team and organization to execute on your idea. So, do what it takes and make it happen for Microsoft!”.
We shook hands and I left.
I didn’t meet Bill in-person but the fact that he replied to my email is still among the most cherished moments.
For situations like these, for new or even entry-level employees, it is indeed extremely inspirational and motivating to get a direct reply from the CEO of a large organization. I know several Leaders personally who read emails from their employees and reply to them personally. It shows great leadership and the importance they give to their workforce and helps build a great culture.
Creamy Chicken and Penne
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Yield: 6 servings
Ingredients
1 pound penne pasta
4 cups broccoli florets
1 onion, sliced
1 tablespoon olive oil
1/2 pound boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cut into 3 x 1 inch strips
3/4 cup sun dried tomatoes in oil, drained and finely chopped
1 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup chicken broth
2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
3/4 cup Parmesan cheese
Instructions
Cook pasta according to package directions. Stir in broccoli during last 2 minutes of cooking.
Sauté onion in olive oil until softened.
Add chicken and sauté.
Stir in sun dried tomatoes, cream, broth, vinegar, salt and pepper. Simmer for about 4 minutes.
Drain pasta and broccoli; toss with chicken mixture and parmesan cheese.
What is something you saw while on an airplane that you couldn’t believe?
Originally Answered: What is something you saw while on a airplane that you couldn't believe?
I was on a “commercial” flight from Yemen to Somalia back in 1999. It was on a Russian Il-18 with four large turboprops.
Getting in the plane- all looked OK; notice interior mostly plywood. No overhead storage.
But the fun part was on take-off. All of a sudden I heard chickens and goats. Later I went to the bathroom and peeked into the front of the plane: the cargo was there, just sitting with a net, a girl sitting on the floor playing with the goats and the chickens in cages. I felt I was on a train a hundred years ago.
So I sat back into my seat, and asked the guy next to me- a frequent flyer on this flight – “Is this plane safe?” He said sure — sitting over there is the mechanic, and there is a spare engine in the hold. OK, I said, that is reassuring.
Then the flight continued at night over the desert looking at the oil fires through those round bubble windows.
Anyway, we were getting ready to land, it was day time. There was no “put on your seat belt” light – all of a sudden the airplane started spiraling down. From about 5000 feet. So I asked the guy next to me what was going on. Oh, no big deal, we are landing, don’t worry – they are good pilots; they just fly like that to avoid the missiles.
OK, I said…The pilot landed the plane smoothly in a field in the middle of the desert. And then a huge caravan of SUVs and trucks, they opened the cargo bay and everyone went to grab bags.
Anyway, the whole trip was surreal, but that flight has to be the strangest flight I have ever been on.
Video of Biden walking to his plane. So the official narrative that he is alive and well, but transferred power to the VP.
I don’t believe a word of it.
After all…
Fake signature on plain paper not the Whitehouse seal.
Fake AI generated audio message.
Flag at half mast at the Whitehouse… for whom?
And lets not forget about Cloud Strike. That little “update” disrupted all communication in the USA and the West for a good 24 hours. What a coincidence!
Keeping up the illusion.
Something serious went down, and the DNC is just playing “games” to keep up the illusion.
*shrug*
It doesn’t matter what the American People think, though. What matters is what China and Russia think.
What do you think that they are thinking…
Russia is conducting the SECOND full “exercise” this month of its nuclear forces; with YARS 800 Kiloton ICBM Transporter-Erector-Launcher (TEL’s) now deployed OUT in the field. United States Continuity of Government (CoG) plans are being implemented.
Encrypted radio emissions from underground U.S. Bunkers, are also in full activation.
The “exercise in Russia began about midnight eastern time last night.
Emergency Action Messages (EAM’s) have been transmitted to US forces worldwide, including submarines via Very Low Frequency (VLF) communications circuits.
The march to world-wide nuclear armageddon continues in lock-step.
Why?
At this, I will give you a post that I wrote five (x5) months ago…
Here is my SITREP this March 2024
This “sitrep” was compiled and written at the tail end of March, 2024. It contains active elements of the global Geo-Political situation focusing on the “primary core participants” as defined by the United States Department of State. I will intentionally leave out details on the “minor” participants, that while important, is not necessary in this overview.
The world is undergoing a massive shift in global [1] Leadership, [2] Finance, [3] Society, [4] Culture, [5] Military influences, [6] Technology, and [7] Planetary Management.
What was once the realm of the “rules based order” led by the United States (the United States makes the rules that others follow), and obeyed “in lockstep” by it’s captive proxy nations, has been eclipsed by a multi-polar world, led by the Russian / China leadership alliance.
The overriding plan
The United States, embroiled into Thucydides Trap (whether you don’t want to believe it or not, it is painfully clear and obvious that the United States “Leadership” is completely ensnared in this situation.) has worked out a long-duration plan to maintain and regain its hegemony.
The key to this is the suppression, followed by the break up of Russia, followed by a pivot to China.
The Timetable for initiation of hostilities
The Break up of Russia into an easily digestible entity was planned to occur in 2022. The war to start the collapse of Russia, however, got off to a bad start, and Russia has been thwarting all of the NATO efforts to manage that collapse.
However, the time-table has not changed. And as of this date a major push to destroy Russia once and for all is planned to occur in Spring / Summer 2024 this year. Leading participants to this fiasco; the United States, the UK, Germany, and France… with participative elements out of NATO to include Finland, Poland, and Sweden are expecting a NATO win by Fall of 2024.
A “buffer” period, or up to two years is planned to coincide with the planned destruction of China. This is planned for the tail end of 2026 and the Summer of 2027.
The Major Participants
For RUSSIA, the nations of NATO will attack on the chosen battlefields of Ukraine. Eventually weakening Russia to a point where “death blows” can be administered by aircraft and missile attacks.
The NATO troops are expected to consist of large quantities of Germans, Polish, Romanian, and French forces for the main thrust. With Northern contingent consisting of Swedish and Finnish forces that will deploy and assault from the North.
For CHINA, A “island chain” of American proxy nations have formed a QUAD of aggressor nations that is designed to instigate the precipitate motions that will force the Chinese entry into the upcoming Global catastrophe.
The primary antagonizing nation is earmarked as the Philippines, with major support from QUAD nations South Korea, Japan, (and to a lesser extent) taking a backseat, the resupply center of Australia.
It is expected that simultaneous “hot spots” will erupt that will trigger Chinese participation. Perhaps Taiwan declaring independence, with the United States, and proxy “toadies” nodding vigorously in agreement. Followed, or led, by disruptive assaults by the Philippines in the South China Sea.
The Timetable for war duration – Russia
What is going on right now in Ukraine is not a war. It is a military action, but not a full fledged war. Yet.
But once the full NATO assault begins in the Spring of 2024, a total war event scenario will begin. The United States, and NATO plans for a quick assault, and a rapid ending of the war.
Reports as ludicrous as the collapse of Russia by mid-November 2024 is being bantered about by the collective idiots in Brussels. Smarter heads prevail, and they anticipate a delay that could last until 2026 depending on a number of unknown factors.
But the plan is one of total victory by NATO over Russia and a “color revolution” internal to Russia that would dispose President Putin and replace him with a pro-American stooge.
Maybe an actor like Zelensky (Ukraine), a ideological imbecile like Javier Milei, (Argentina), a “stooge in debt” like Ferdinand “Bongbong” Romualdez Marcos Jr.( The Philippines), or an easy to control puppet like Yoon Suk Yeol (South Korea).
My understanding is that the replacement Russian “president” and his cabinet has already been selected, and the principals have already been contacted.
The Timetable for war duration – China
The ideal timeline for the “pivot to Asia” is once Russian territory is secure, and a proxy government is in charge. Due to the events of the last two years, this date has been pushed back from 2025 to 2027. But owing to the timer / stopwatch on the abilities of the West, the expiration date for action against China occurs in 2028. So the window for action is narrow, and there is an urgency to accelerate things aggressively.
While there will be a continuation of provocations in both the South China Sea, and in Taiwan, actual “False Flag” justification, and assaults against China is unlikely to occur before 2026. Thus, the window of 2026 to 2027 will be a VERY dangerous time, provided of course, if the West (The United States) is successful in taking over Russia through military victory.
Assumptions
The Pentagon along with a significant number of interested parties have made some baseline assumptions regarding both Russia and China. These assumptions color the battle and strategic policies that will govern this upcoming period of time.
Russia is “a paper tiger” and will not use nuclear weapons.
Russia is not as strong or militarily capable as it seems.
Russia, in regards to Ukraine, has been lucky so far.
The entire world is already against Russia, and the United States is leading the world against a renegade nation.
As far as China is concerned…
China is also a “paper tiger” and will not use nuclear weapons.
China has some basic technology, but it’s military is raw recruit, conscripts, with basic understandings and operates in crude military tactics.
China’s navy is expected to be “light weight”, and nothing to take too seriously.
China will fold once the oceans around China is controlled by the QUAD forces.
End Game
It is absolutely and positively understood that the Planners (of this military adventure) believe that …
Neither China, or Russia would (dare) attack the United States.
That they would NOT use nuclear weapons.
That they wouldn’t be able to use conventional weapons. (Neither has the logistical ability to deliver them to the United States shores.)
The proxy nations, being the “monkey’s paw, for the United States, would be ruined, destroyed, and there would be devastation all around. But NOT in the United States; the USA would be untouched.
As neither nations have the logistical ability to invade or assault America, the survival of the United States is understood as a certainty. No matter how long and drawn out the war might become. The United States people, factories and cities would be spared from any war.
So the world would have survivors;
Both Russia and China will devastated by the massive conventional wars.
The United States proxy nations would also be left in ruins.
Meanwhile, the United States will be left pristine and intact.
At this point in time, perhaps 2030, the United States will rise from the ashes of a global war stronger, and better than ever before.
It’s proxy nations, ruined and rubbled, would forge tighter alliances with the United States. While the enemies of the United States would be ripe for easy plundering.
Though looting the resources of both China and Russia, the United States can be rejuvenated, and the entire globe will listen to the undisputed leader of the planet; The United States.
Final Comments and thoughts
I personally believe that all the assumptions are wrong.
That the timetable is off base, and a kilter, and the “leadership” of the West needs to stop taking so many drugs.
We do not know what the future holds, but if this plan proceeds… one thing is certain, those planners in the West will not be happy when things go “tits up”.
And now for my daily memory trip…
When I grew up in East Brady, Pennsylvania (and later in Massachusetts) there were these magnificent trees… huge. Shady and just amazing. I really loved and appreciated them. Though, most everyone else never gave them much thought.
The Northern Catalpa (Catalpa speciosa)
Well, I wanted to know more about them, so I asked ChatGPT 4.0.
Dear ChatGPT 4.0
what is the name for the very shady tree, found in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts that have these long seed pods that resemble long green bean pods? My father used to tell me that the American Indians used to smoke them like cigarettes. I think that he was lying, but i do want to know about this tree
ChatGPT 4.0 Answer
The tree you’re describing is likely the Catalpa tree, specifically the Northern Catalpa (Catalpa speciosa) or the Southern Catalpa (Catalpa bignonioides).
Key Features of the Catalpa Tree:
Large, Heart-Shaped Leaves: Catalpa trees have large, heart-shaped leaves that provide dense shade.
Long Seed Pods: They produce long, slender seed pods that resemble green beans. These pods can be quite noticeable and often remain on the tree through winter.
Showy Flowers: In late spring or early summer, catalpa trees have clusters of large, white, trumpet-shaped flowers with purple and yellow spots inside.
The Northern Catalpa (Catalpa speciosa) 2
Cultural and Historical Uses:
Native American Uses: There are various anecdotal claims about the uses of Catalpa trees by Native Americans, but smoking the seed pods like cigarettes is not a widely documented or verified practice. It’s more likely a bit of folklore or a misunderstanding. Historically, the wood has been used for fence posts and the flowers and leaves have had medicinal uses.
Habitat:
Geographic Range: Catalpa trees are native to the central United States but have been widely planted and can be found in states like Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.
Identification Tips:
Look for the large, broad leaves.
Check for the distinctive, long seed pods, especially in the fall.
Notice the large, showy flowers if you’re observing the tree in spring or early summer.
Conclusion:
While your father’s story about smoking the seed pods might be more of a tall tale, the Catalpa tree is indeed notable for its distinctive appearance and historical significance.
A Love Letter to Northern Catalpa
Though June is my designated purple month (according to my 2016 New Year’s resolution to blog one colour per month), I do feel compelled to add a little white delight for this last week of June before the lazy days of summer ensue. And why is that? Because the spectacularly beautiful Northern catalpa tree (Catalpa speciosa) is in flower in Toronto, and I decided it needed a little love. Though it’s often found in residential settings, its sheer size at maturity makes it a better choice for a park or cemetery – and that’s where I love to photograph this North American native: Mount Pleasant Cemetery. Today it was a little sunny, when I drove through, but the trees looked resplendent.
Catalpa speciosa Mount Pleasant Cemetery2
Northern catalpa trees can mature at heights between 40-70 feet (12-21 metres) with a spread of 20-50 feet (6-15 metres). Though they grow naturally in moist bottomland from southern Illinois and Indiana south to Tennessee and Arkansas, the species is fully hardy in Toronto. Interestingly, some trees are columnar, and others have a rounded crown. Catalpa canopies are so full…..
Catalpa speciosa canopy
…..one has to remind oneself to peer closely to savour the beauty of each orchid-like flower in the big panicles. Though I couldn’t find any bumble bees today, I know they were enjoying the fragrant blossoms – appropriately marked with purple nectar guides – up high in the canopies. This is one of those rare species that has both diurnal and nocturnal pollinators, with moths working the flowers at night.
Catalpa speciosa Northern catalpa flowers
Interestingly, some specimens had already flowered when I was at the cemetery today, pointing to their variability. The tree below, for example, is one I photographed two weeks earlier in 2010; today it was fully green, all the flowers spent.
Catalpa speciosa Mount Pleasant Cemetery1
The long, slender seed pods give the genus two of its common names: Indian bean and cigar tree.
Catalpa speciosa seedpods
Here, sit under the canopy for a few minutes and enjoy the shade it casts from the warm June sun.
Catalpa speciosa branching
Today…
What pissed you off today?
Someone offered to buy my car.
You read that right. There’s a backstory.
I decide to buy a new car. My car is worth $9K. I still owe about $3.5K. I don’t want to trade it in because I think I’ll get shafted. So, I buy the new car and decide to try to sell my car on my own.
I put the old car on sale for $8,250, explaining everything that is wrong with it. I’m trying to be as honest as possible.
For 2 weeks, I get no offer I’m happy with. One of the offers was from a dealership. I would have had to drive my car there. The problem was that I’d already transferred the registration and insurance to my new car. Not a great option.
I reduce the asking price to $7,750. I get another offer was from a guy who wanted to offer me $5.5K. I almost told him to shove it up his ass. Here’s the deal, it pains me immensely more to sell something for less than what it’s worth than it does for me to just gift it.
At this point, I’m thinking about gifting the car to the Salvation Army and taking a tax deduction. But, I remember that a few months before, my sister had car problems. I call her to ask if she wants the car. I tell her that it’s a luxury car and that both upkeep and the insurance will be more than what she’s used to paying. She tells me she’ll think about it. A few days later, she tells me she wants it. It’s a 2009 Lincoln MKS with only 65K miles on it. She doesn’t feel she’d ever be able to afford such a car. The offer is too good to decline.
As soon as she tells me she wants the car, I start getting people who are interested in it. Every 2 to 3 days, I get another person asking me if the car is still available. So, now I’m having second thoughts about gifting it, but I’ve already given my word. And if there’s anything I am, it’s a man who stands by his word. So, the car will still be gifted. But, freaking hell! Where in the world were these people when I was trying to sell the damn car?
How empires change
What are the weirdest experiments performed throughout history?
Nicolae Minovici was a Romanian scientist who was obsessed with finding out what happens to the human body during a hanging. In fact, he wrote an essay in which he analyzed almost 200 cases of people who had been hanged, and the factors that influenced, such as the type of knot of the rope, the weight and even the gender of the person.
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Minovici, he was not happy with just “reading” about people who had been executed in this way, he wanted to know how he really felt, so (and to answer your question) he started a series of quite strange experiments and above all dangerous.
First he did some preliminary tests with a rope that did not contract, he hung himself 6 times a few seconds to get used to it, but as Minovici himself wrote in his notes:
“The pain was almost intolerable”
Still, he was determined to experience what it felt like to be hanged, so he leveled up.
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He and some of his collaborators put their heads in a regular contraction rope and asked an assistant to hang them, twelve times in a row.
When describing previous experiments, Minovici repeatedly apologizes saying that “despite all his courage, he could not endure the experiment for more than three or four seconds.”
Despite his efforts, Minovici failed to find tangible results from his series of hangings, which in total numbered almost a dozen (the only tangible thing to find would have been death, I believe).
That is why I nominate Nicolas Minovici and his research as the strangest series of experiments in history.
This is really messed up
Have you ever caught your neighbor doing something that made you furious?
Where do I start? One morning, heard what sounded like an excavator in my front yard
Walk out to find a guy skid-steering all over my immaculate lawn. I yelled out, but he didn’t hear me, so I fired up the trusty hose and soaked him through the open door. He got out and started towards me. “What the hell are you doing?” I asked. He turned back to his excavator and said “digging “. I asked him why and he told me “this is all coming out”, pointing at my front yard. “Why?” I asked. “New granny flat going in” he said, shaking his head like I was stupid. “2 things” I interjected. “The granny flat is going in next door and you’re paying for a new effing lawn”.
He decided to ignore me and got back into his excavator, at which point I started hosing him again. Neighbour across the road heard the noise and came out. “Call the police” I yelled. He did while I commenced my hosing. The guy lost it and got out, just as his client rounded the fence. A few quick words and he drove off my yard and got out, just in time for the police to turn up.
Lots of finger pointing and agro from him. Said it was an honest mistake. “But you kept going after I told you to stop, that’s malicious damage “. One of the cops gestured for him to come over. “Put your excavator on the truck and leave, we’ll sort you out later “. The next-door neighbour was disappointed and suggested my hosing him was assault.
I asked “ you want to see it again?” as I reached for the hose. She scampered off. Only problem was, it was winter and the replacement turf didn’t take we’ll, so it was a year before the lawn looked good again.
The way you dress is linked with your mood. So dressing well most often helps in keeping you more stably happy.
People will be more willing to do something for you if you ask them in their right ear.
Women often ask questions about things they already know the answers to.
Studying for 30-50 minutes with 10-minute breaks is one of the best methods to improve your retention.
A person who enjoys being single is called Quirkyalone.
To make your thought sound convincing, say that you heard it from your parents or teachers.
Déjà vu occurs when your brain tries to apply a memory of a past situation to your current one, fails, and makes you feel like it’s happened.
We believe what we WANT to believe.
Listening to high-frequency music makes you feel calm, relaxed, and happy.
The cells in your body react to everything your mind says. So negativity brings down your immune system and you feel sick.
Caramelized Onion Smothered Pork Chops
Caramelized Onion Smothered Pork Chops are exceptionally delicious. They will most certainly become a part of your meal rotation.
caramelized onion smothered pork chops
Ingredients
4 boneless pork chops, with as much fat removed as possible
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon ground sage
1/2 teaspoon ground thyme
1/2 teaspoon kosher or sea salt
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
6 tablespoons butter
2 cups thinly sliced onion
4 teaspoons granulated sugar
Instructions
Season both sides of pork chops with garlic powder, sage, thyme, salt and pepper.
Melt 4 tablespoons butter in a large skillet over medium heat, evenly coating the bottom of the skillet.
Increase heat to medium-high. Cook both sides of chops for 10 to 15 minutes until lightly browned.
Push chops to outside edges of skillet. Melt the remaining 2 tablespoons butter in the center of the skillet and add onions to the center of the skillet, sprinkling with sugar. Replace skillet cover and cook for 10 minutes, frequently tossing and stirring onions with a spatula. Onions are caramelized when tender and medium-brown in color. DO NOT let the onions burn!
Check chops for doneness before serving. They will be done when a fork piercing the thickest part of the chop draws clear juice. If the juice is pink, cook chops a bit longer until done.
Serve pork chops with caramelized onions piled on top.
Glitter Bomb 2.0 vs Porch Pirates
Is it true that most overseas Chinese overwhelmingly support the USA because they love and cherish the ideals of democracy and freedom?
The idea that most overseas Chinese support USA ideals of democracy and freedom is truly a laughable claim from cuckoo-land. It is no less than an amazing 2016 claim by the then First Lady of the US, Michelle Obama, that the US is “the greatest country on earth.”
In reality, overseas Chinese are generally aware that US Democracy is not even within the top 10 in the Global Democracy Index and that it ranks only 30th and is listed as a “flawed democracy”. In 2022, Sweden’s International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance put the US into its “list of regressive democracies”.
Overseas Chinese people are also not blind to research showing that US democracy has been replaced by an oligarchy with some 1% owning and controlling the country. As found in a joint Princeton-NW University study, the average American has no say in US policy; it is determined by the wealthy few. The US has become like most dubious ‘electoral’ ‘democratic’ countries.
They are also very aware the US is committed to supporting the growth of the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) which now effectively, through unlimited financial lobbying, controls leading US politicians.
Few overseas Chinese are blind to the reality that the MIC thrives on wars and feeds on non-stop proliferation of unlawful US-led regime-changes in other parts of the world since the end of WW2.
Also, overseas Chinese know freedom in the US is not that great. They are aware the country has the highest number of people kept imprisoned and that, with limited exceptions, freedom to bullshit and lie is protected by the US constitution (First Amendment). That has led to well-publicised increased racism and right-wing militarism in the country. It explains why there are now more guns than people in the country and that surveys show more than 200 people are shot and wounded and more than 110 people are killed by guns in the US each day.
It is also absurd to imply overseas Chinese are unaware the US is unashamedly providing military and financial support for Israel’s horrific crimes against humanity in the Gaza. How can it be said that overseas Chinese cherish US democracy and freedom when they can easily see it as a rogue country supporting Israel’s cutting off supplies of food, water and medical aid to Palestinians and bombing the Gaza and killing more than 26,000 Palestinians and leaving 1.7 million people homeless?
An unfortunate reality is that the US always acts in its best interests and it has successfully promoted propaganda about its supposed defence of democracy and freedom.
That may explain why credulous people (including some overseas Chinese believing in US democracy and freedom) are unaware that, in the words of Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, US democracy is today nothing but a “US foreign scam built on corruption.”
SUPPRESSED Technologies, Their Inventors ELIMINATED
What is your best “one time my dad … ” story?
We lived in a Far out centre in Brisbane called Cribb Island, transport was limited. Dad was cutting the grass down with a really sharp reaping hook. Hold the tuft of grass up and swipe the curved blade across n cut it down. Well it was a Sunday. So dad swipes the hook over the held up grass tuft and cut across and cut down on his hand. Blood everywhere. Walked inside, mum bandaged his hand, huge open cut. So he then walked to the bus stop and sat there waiting for the next bus to take him into town to the General Hospital. His hand would have been hurting like anything. So in time a bus came by and he got on and maybe had to get another bus in the city to get up to the hospital. Got the cut stitched again wd have been painful. Reversed his trip back to Cribb Island. Monday was work day and he had a horse n cart delivery of bread around Hendra. Next morning he got on his bike n rode to Hendra and worked all day running in and out of houses delivering bread. After he finished he rode his bike back home. How he worked all day with a huge bandage on his hand I don’t know. He did not want to let his customers down. So they bred ‘em tough in them there days!
Pawn Stars Expert “I Can’t BELIEVE You Have This”
What is something that pisses you off with today’s society?
I have a friend.
He’s 22 years old.
He’s a very smart guy. Speaks English and French fluently. Physics major, plans on getting a PhD. Works so hard at school. Eloquent writer whose stories bring me to tears. He’s one of my best friends.
His mother is straight-up narcissistic. She screams at and belittles him and his sisters if they say good morning to her, but don’t say it with what she considers the proper amount of respect. She threw his beloved Warhammer miniatures and paints and brushes in the garbage, calling them a waste of time and money. She threatens to do the same with his video game console, saying the same thing. She forbids her children from getting driver’s licenses so they’re forced to rely on public transportation to get anywhere, and they have to keep location sharing turned on on their phones at all times so she can see exactly where they are whenever she wants. Curfew is 8:00, bedtime is 10. Her children are 17, 17, and 22.
She forces them to hand over all the money they earn from their jobs as ‘living expenses’. Not just paying rent. She doesn’t allow them to save anything for themselves, and spends it on shopping sprees for herself. The one time my friend tried to set up a bank account for himself to start squirreling money away, she found out and managed to get the account’s information. His hard-earned money was soon gone.
Big deal, people say. If his mom’s really that bad, why doesn’t he just move out? He’s obviously got a job. Why, I put myself through college while also working at McDonald’s to support myself!
It doesn’t work that way any more, honey. He’s a lab assistant at his university. Bit more prestigious than McDonald’s, no? Earns decent money… for a part-time job. While also trying to study for one of the most rigorous degrees offered. While also trying to deal with the stress of worrying about his family.
He’s got little sisters he needs to protect. They’re just finishing high school—getting old enough that CPS just shakes their heads and says ‘they’ll be adults in just a few months, so we don’t need to intervene.’
He doesn’t earn enough to move out yet, even if his mother didn’t force him to hand over his money. He has school he needs to focus on. He has sisters to look out for. And, because he’s male, he doesn’t have many, if any, resources to escape to. The only abused victims shelter in his area is for women and their children. Does it really sound like they would take him in?
The thing that pisses me off the most about today’s society is when people say abuse victims must not want to escape if they haven’t already. It’s not that they don’t want to. It’s because they either don’t know how or don’t think they can.
Why the US Don’t have this? (America Failed)
I have to fire an employee who has been with the company for 42 years – orders from above. He doesn’t know. How do I fire him?
I’ve had more.experience with this than I care to remember,.
At one point during my tenure with GM, the average age of my subordinates was very nearly 60 years old (59.8 I believe). Under CAW/UAW/UNIFOR, terminating someone with this kind of seniority was often a multi-year ordeal. By asking this question, I at least know you are not dealing with a union, or you would have been trained on a specific protocol for it. Also, you are likely working for a fairly small company or this would probably be left to an HR rep, who would also be trained. So with that in mind;
First depending where your company is located, I would make good god damn sure you have one hell of a rightous, well documented case for termination. In many places firing a 42 year employee without sufficient grounds could lead to the type of wrongfull termination suit that could sink a small company.
Secondly, if your company doesn’t already employ security, hiring a security company for a month or two after the termination is advisable. Being fired after 42 years would be a pretty massive shock for anyone. The potential for retaliation by someone who has dedicated nearly half a century to their career is a much more likely than it is with the average worker.
After 42 years, it is safe to assume the person considers their career to be a large part of who they are. Depending on the circumstance it’s very possible you are about to do something this person will view as one of, if not the greatest betrayals of their lives. Treat them with honesty, respect and compasion, don’t be afraid to show remorse, and be aware of the fact that l if you leave a person feeling like they have no options, they are financially ruined or you take away a part of their life they believe defines them, they are likely to lash out.
Lastly, you should never terminate anyone on your own but especially someone who has been with a company their entire adult life. You should always be acompanied by at least one other person, be that someone from HR, thier direct supervisor, another manager, a company lawyer and/or a security guard would all be reasonable choices, the 20 year old replacing him for 25% his salary, not so much (this should be obvious, but its the internet, who kows who will read this..)
Meet Joe Black – Bill meets Joe
China invades Taiwan. America merrily sends out its ultra quiet 50 nuclear attack subs. Every transoceanic Chinese ship is sunk in 6 months. China runs out of gas, oil, food & can’t sell ANYTHING. China is now back to 1900. Why would China want that?
US cities destroyed by nuclear weapons??
You white power types are always so funny. In that I can ATTACK YOU BUT YOU CANNOT ATTACK ME. Sinking our shipping is literally a declaration of war.
We have these things fuckers
main qimg a10aa161ab607082b4898505e9da7315
And remember in any nuclear exchange China will win.
While you may kill a lot of us…
…We’ll rebuild…
…you won’t be able to.
Today in the western world your societies are atomised so much that you literally kill each other daily.
After the dust settles? The survivors will rebuild, you’ll go mad max. By 2100 we’ll be back on our feet again, you’ll still be shooting each other.
What is the fastest way you’ve seen a co-worker get fired?
I got a bunch of short ones:
Guy brought his crack pipe to work and it fell out of his pocket in front of his boss. Was in his 2nd day on the job.
Employee did coke in the bathroom and got caught.
Guy punched another guy at work when he found out he was sleeping with his girlfriend—all three were fired.
At a retail gig a guy fell asleep in a recliner chair for customers while on the clock. The store manager walked buy and saw him sleeping. To be fair it was one of those high end comfy recliners that older people sleep in.
A co-worker showed up drunk to work in the morning. Happened at two different jobs —two different co-workers. One was in AA at the time.
Co worker had sex at work with a customer.
Co worker went on a lunch break for four hours in his first week at the job.
Co worker fell asleep at his desk. Boss walked by.
Co worker watched porn while in new hire training at work —and was caught. It was his first day on the job.
Twice two different people at different companies stole sensitive company information and sold it to a competitor. One of them was sued by the employer.
Employee was soliciting co-workers as John’s for sex. One of them men turned her in. I am not sure if she ever got an actual client from the office.
Co worker caught on tape going from desk to desk in a cubical environment removing expensive items. Weird thing was the cameras were not hidden. He must have known that the cameras were there.
He recently got charged for murdering his two children using a fishing spear gun.
At first glance he resembles a normal bloke you meet on the streets.
main qimg 89328e1bfe6f90c82c36b9a05f5f3628
But he’s my perfect definition of extremely stupid.
The crime is horrendous in itself, extremely so, but, his reason for committing it is on an another stupid extreme level.
A criminal complaint filed against him by the prosecutors alleges that he told the FBI that he killed his children because he believed they “were going to grow into monsters” and that conspiracy theories led him to believe that his wife had passed down her “serpent DNA” to the children.
The complaint further alleges, that he knew what he did was wrong but that “it was the only course of action that would save the world.”
Serpent DNA, is supposedly linked to ‘Lizard people’ conspiracy theory. If you’re wondering what’s that is I’ll let Wikipedia explain it you Reptilian conspiracy theory .
So, this stupid shitbag killed his kids because he believed that there’s a reptilian aliens species which is secretly running the world and have taken over important positions in government, banking and Hollywood. And his children supposedly carries the said alien DNA.
Coleman also told authorities that he learned about “serpent DNA” through QAnon and Illuminati conspiracy theories, even though the lizard people conspiracy theory predates both by several decades.
QAnon is a more recent conspiracy theory premised on the belief that a similar global cabal at the top of the U.S. government is secretly murdering and eating children and that Donald Trump was quietly working to defeat them during his time in office.
I mean WTF?!!!!!
In my definition it takes extreme stupidity to believe in such bullshit. And, Coleman is an embodiment of extreme stupidity.
How do you deal with a neighbor stealing?
I grew up on a farm in Outback Australia. We had quite a big workshed full of equipment up a lane behind our house.
Even out in that area, we would occasionally get people in cars wandering up our back lane; fair enough, they’d get a bit lost and turn when they noticed their mistake and leave. We could always spot them, as the lane ran right by our house. We didn’t bother to shut the gate, since there was always somebody coming or going during the day and who can be bothered if you’ve not got stock there at the time?
Until one day when somebody went up there late one night and didn’t turn around and go straight back. My dad and I went and shut the gate on them and then waited, with our dogs and shotguns (this was a working farm, and so we had guns.) We also called the cops.
The two guys came back down the lane, saw us and the locked gate, backed up and went charging around the back fields trying to find another exit. By the time the cops got to our place, the two would-be thieves were pretty shaken up, and the cops found a heap of our stuff that they’d pinched from the shed.
We kept our front gate locked after that. And at night the dogs were let off.
What Putin and China just did is SHOCKING and the U.S. is in Real Trouble
I have to fire an employee who has been with the company for 42 years – orders from above. He doesn’t know. How do I fire him?
I’ve had more.experience with this than I care to remember,.
At one point during my tenure with GM, the average age of my subordinates was very nearly 60 years old (59.8 I believe). Under CAW/UAW/UNIFOR, terminating someone with this kind of seniority was often a multi-year ordeal. By asking this question, I at least know you are not dealing with a union, or you would have been trained on a specific protocol for it. Also, you are likely working for a fairly small company or this would probably be left to an HR rep, who would also be trained. So with that in mind;
First depending where your company is located, I would make good god damn sure you have one hell of a rightous, well documented case for termination. In many places firing a 42 year employee without sufficient grounds could lead to the type of wrongfull termination suit that could sink a small company.
Secondly, if your company doesn’t already employ security, hiring a security company for a month or two after the termination is advisable. Being fired after 42 years would be a pretty massive shock for anyone. The potential for retaliation by someone who has dedicated nearly half a century to their career is a much more likely than it is with the average worker.
After 42 years, it is safe to assume the person considers their career to be a large part of who they are. Depending on the circumstance it’s very possible you are about to do something this person will view as one of, if not the greatest betrayals of their lives. Treat them with honesty, respect and compasion, don’t be afraid to show remorse, and be aware of the fact that l if you leave a person feeling like they have no options, they are financially ruined or you take away a part of their life they believe defines them, they are likely to lash out.
Lastly, you should never terminate anyone on your own but especially someone who has been with a company their entire adult life. You should always be acompanied by at least one other person, be that someone from HR, thier direct supervisor, another manager, a company lawyer and/or a security guard would all be reasonable choices, the 20 year old replacing him for 25% his salary, not so much (this should be obvious, but its the internet, who kows who will read this..)
Glitterbomb 3.0 vs. Porch Pirates
Can you describe what life is like for inmates in prison? Are there any surprising aspects of prison life that people may not know about?
Prison Life
Your woken up at 5:00 AM 7 days a week 365 days a year.
Your then called out for chow, in which your section / tier heads to the chow hall. The food is served to you just like you were served while in elementary school. The difference is you could eat what they served you in the school cafeteria, In prison the food they serve you would make a belly goat puke. You will be given 8–10 minutes to consume the prison slop and out you go., On most days you will get some live entertainment to go with your food, such as fights, stabbings and of course the strong praying upon the weak.
You then have a choice of a shower, yard, going to your prison job, school, or the yard.
At about 10:30 am they issue the call for noon time chow, in which you march down to the chow hall in groups, afterwards they will send you to be counted, then when the count clears it’s back to your routine. In between is usually the gambling, tv watching, card games, beatings, hustlers, snitch squad, cell searches, stabbings, rapes and suicides. The golden rule is if you are walking on the tier, and you gotta use the restroom bad, you either soil yourself or run to your cell or dorm, you do not enter into any cell that is occupied or un occupied, because you will be beaten beyond recognition. If you see a person hanging and bleeding you just keep walking, if someone collapses from a heart attack or jumps off a tier you didn’t see anything.
if it’s your time to go to store then go, but remember the sharks are circling at all times, and you have to be prepared to meet your maker, over a candy bar, or a bottle of shampoo. You don’t share a stick of gum, if you’re cash didn’t come in you do without.
At about 3:30 pm they will issue the chow call for dinner, they will then count you again and when the count clears, they will allow you to have yard time, work time or shower time. At around 8:30 pm they will toss you into your cell for the night, and by 9pm the night has pretty much ended. If you listen close enough you will be able to hear the screams, of the inmates attacking the weak, and in some cases you will hear the goon squad coming to extract an inmate. In some cases you will hear a few brave cell soldiers, acting out and making noise.
Come 5:00 AM the process starts over again, unless someone calls a strike, or your tier is locked down .
Welcome to prison life.
Cheesy Smothered Pork Chops
cheesy smothered pork chops
Ingredients
4 or 5 boneless pork chops
Salt and pepper
1/2 onion, thinly sliced
1/2 cup mayonnaise
1 cup Cheddar cheese, shredded
Instructions
Heat oven to 350 degrees F.
Place pork chops in a baking pan. Season with salt and pepper on both sides.
Sprinkle the onion on top of the pork. Spread mayonnaise on each pork chop. Top with shredded cheese.
Bake for 25 minutes, or until the cheese is melted and browned. Baking time may be longer, depending upon thickness of pork chops.
What’s the strangest wrong number you’ve ever answered?
About fifteen years ago, my cell phone rang at 10 o clock at night. When I answered, a very upset guy was on the line.
“Hey man!” He said. “You should be ashamed of yourself.”
I was sitting in bed next to my wife reading a book. I tried to think if I had done anything shameful recently.
“I think you have a wrong number,” I replied.
“”Don’t even try that bulls—-t on me.” He said. “My girlfriend is really upset, man.”
I tried to explain that I didn’t know what he walking about.
“Yes you do. You’re answering her phone, dude. How can you do stuff like this? Steal someone else’s phone? You think that’s okay?!?”
I desperately tried to assure him that it wasn’t her phone, but he was insistent that he had dialed her number.
Suddenly, it hit me. He had dialed without an area code, and got my number, not hers. (Can that even still happen now?) As I tried to explain this to him, he faltered slightly, but I could tell he thought I was somehow pulling a fast one on him, and didn’t want to believe me.
Finally, I had the solution. I realized that I wouldn’t have been able to change her voicemail message, even if I had her phone. I said I was going to hang up, and he should call back. He would hear my message, and know he had the wrong number.
I hung up. My wife and I watched as the phone rang four times and then went to voicemail.
I felt this weird flashback to when I was a kid and got accused of shoplifting because I had walked into a store with a soda I had bought elsewhere, and the owner was convinced I had taken one from his store. There were no adults with me, and I had to surrender the soda, and I got a tiny inkling of how it must feel to be in serious trouble for something you didn’t do, and how scary it is to have to prove a negative.
The phone went silent, and the problem was resolved. He left no message.
“Smite Me, Almighty Smiter!”
Have you ever had a car salesman speak down to you and not take you seriously? Were you able to make him learn the error of his ways? How?
What’s the strangest wrong number you’ve ever answered?
About fifteen years ago, my cell phone rang at 10 o clock at night. When I answered, a very upset guy was on the line.
“Hey man!” He said. “You should be ashamed of yourself.”
I was sitting in bed next to my wife reading a book. I tried to think if I had done anything shameful recently.
“I think you have a wrong number,” I replied.
“”Don’t even try that bulls—-t on me.” He said. “My girlfriend is really upset, man.”
I tried to explain that I didn’t know what he walking about.
“Yes you do. You’re answering her phone, dude. How can you do stuff like this? Steal someone else’s phone? You think that’s okay?!?”
I desperately tried to assure him that it wasn’t her phone, but he was insistent that he had dialed her number.
Suddenly, it hit me. He had dialed without an area code, and got my number, not hers. (Can that even still happen now?) As I tried to explain this to him, he faltered slightly, but I could tell he thought I was somehow pulling a fast one on him, and didn’t want to believe me.
Finally, I had the solution. I realized that I wouldn’t have been able to change her voicemail message, even if I had her phone. I said I was going to hang up, and he should call back. He would hear my message, and know he had the wrong number.
I hung up. My wife and I watched as the phone rang four times and then went to voicemail.
I felt this weird flashback to when I was a kid and got accused of shoplifting because I had walked into a store with a soda I had bought elsewhere, and the owner was convinced I had taken one from his store. There were no adults with me, and I had to surrender the soda, and I got a tiny inkling of how it must feel to be in serious trouble for something you didn’t do, and how scary it is to have to prove a negative.
The phone went silent, and the problem was resolved. He left no message.
About 30 years ago, as a young woman, I needed a new vehicle and decided to buy a small pickup truck. My boyfriend (now husband) and I had gone out for breakfast and went to the Ford dealership to look at trucks. I found a Ranger that I really liked. The salesman seemed really nice and helpful. My boyfriend had to go to work, so we told the salesman we would come back. When my boyfriend left for work he asked what I was going to do for the afternoon. I told him I was going back to buy the truck.
I went back to the dealership and found the same salesman and told him I had returned to purchase the Ranger. He actually laughed. I told him I was serious. At that moment a man drove onto the lot. The salesman walked away from me to go talk to the man. I looked for another salesman and was ignored by all. I even went inside and said I want to buy a Ranger and was ignored by all. I left.
I went down the street to the Nissan dealership and purchased a new Nissan pickup that I liked better than the Ranger. I drove my new truck back to the Ford dealership and asked to see the original salesman and the sales manager. I took them both outside, showed them my new Nissan and told them I had stopped to buy the Ranger, but was laughed at and ignored by all. I told them to have a nice day, got into my Nissan and drove away.
As I was leaving I heard the manager yelling at the salesman. I loved that Nissan and drove it for years.
What did you do when you were suddenly fired from a job?
Went to McDonalds , and had a late breakfast, coffee and read the paper for half an hour.
I was pretty fed up with the job, and was trying to get through the next month before starting to look, but even so the dismissal was still a surprise. I arrived at 8: 30 on Monday morning , after working the Saturday and Sunday on a piece of work for the bank, and by 9: 30 was on my way home with no job, and an appointment with the company lawyer for the Friday , for my exit papers, so a bit bamboozled.
By the end of my macca breakfast , I was sorted in my head , with a plan and way forward. Gave my wife a call , and said “Sorry its happened again” She said. God bless her ”Are you OK?”
Me “disconcerted, but I’ll be fine, let’s look at the finances tonight, but I think we’re in good shape, and I should be able to negotiate a settlement from these guys that will get us a free holiday”
“That sounds nice, see you tonight“
Car Thief Gets Instant Karma (the FINAL Glitterbomb 6.0)
Are Russia and America engaged in a tough love relationship?
No.
The United States has been using NATO to attack Russia.
A simple look at the map has shown NATO encroachment into the (former) Soviet Union Eastern Block and then with the 2014 color revolution, a full invasion of Ukraine… a battlefield from which to attack and destroy Russia by.
Only idiots forgot that Ukraine was originally a significant part of Russia. Look at the maps.
main qimg 4dd70bdda51ecd4e00124a2dbb67e7a6
Like I said; only ignorant idiots; with a brain no larger than a peanut, don’t realize this FACT. I mean it. These brain-dead piles of vomit can’t even tell the difference between a boy and a girl. They don’t know what the root of Pi is, and they sure as fuck cannot tell you how many mm are in a yard.
Ambulatory Stupid feces wearing diapers.
But the stupidity doesn’t stop there…
Oh no. The great mental retardation is alive and well in the West.
…
Look, I know that some people cannot help their stupidity. But Lordy, you all shouldn’t elect them into office. What the Hell were you thinking?
Yeah.
Only a real IDIOT would think that they could take on Russia.
A massive, blundering ignoramus of a pile of weeks-old pig-feces, would possibly think such an absurd idea.
…
So, now…
Now…
No shit… NOW…
…they are now looking to “pivot to Asia”… and take on the Russia + China alliance.
Surely, the world has NEVER seen such ignorant, and stupid fools in all the history of mankind.
…
Psssst…
There’s more.
No shit!
Can you believe… actually believe… that a virtual army of United States officials have been marching off to China to TELL THEM to stop being friends with Russia.
And…
To order them to buy a shit load of American Treasuries…
And…
to force them to stop being the manufacturing center of the world.
…
And what did China do immediately afterwards?
Oh, the hug between Putin and Xi was pure gold.
The absurdity of this situation is pristine. You just cannot make this shit up!
I once was in a very bad hail storm in Dallas Fort Worth, Texas. The hail was the size of grapefruits, and completely devastated all the cars, the windows, and the mesh antennas.
But right before the hail fell, the sky became very strange. It took on a greenish yellow color, and then grew into a bright green.
What this period in time feels like is that exact same thing that I experience in Dallas right before the hail hit. The sky is really odd, and everything seems wrong.
Biden dead?
TBD…
Prison life can get to be a little hard.
In the ADC in Arkansas, you have to be on your deathbed if you are going to see the doctor. And at that, the best you would probably get would be some aspirin. But, yeah, if you are sick or dying… don’t expect too much.
So what actually happens is that a lot of the time, the inmates have to self treat each other.
Do you know what a “boil” is?
It’s a massive pimple, on the back, that cannot pop, and just gets bigger and bigger. And when a boil gets too big, it’s really painful. Really, really PAINFUL.
Often the size of a tea-cup saucer. Huge.
No shit.
It needs to be popped and drained.
And what we would do would be extract the blade from a disposable razor and slice the boil open, and then drain it out. Lots of white goo and puss with blood. You need to do what you need to do.
The inmate would sit on the commode, and another inmate would slice open the boil and use toilet paper to wipe it clean.
It’s an adaptation that you have to live with when you spend time in the slammer.
*sigh*
Today…
What is the best case of “You just picked a fight with the wrong person” that you’ve witnessed?
I had a judo teacher. Steve Reardon. He was my Mr. Miyagi. And also my HS English teacher. And about 60 years old at the time.
For judo, we used the same practice area as the HS wrestling team. The wrestling coach, Jim, was just a mean person and would hassle Steve all the time about inane things. Steve would brush it off. Jim was younger, fit, and a former college wrestler.
Steve always taught that we would only use judo in self defense. “Judo – The gentle way” and “Judo, the art of hitting someone with a planet.”
One day I was talking with Steve in an empty hallway when Jim came up and started yelling at him. Something stupid about practice schedules.
Then Jim started poking Steve in the chest, aggressively. Then he physically two hand pushed Steve.
I’ve never seen Steve move so fast. He grabbed Jim’s arm, wrapped him up for a major outside hip throw (Ippon Seonage, if i remember). Jim’s whole body was up at our shoulder level before being slammed to the floor and you could hear the crunch and the air rush out of him when he was “Hit with a planet.”
Sand is called sand because it’s in between the sea and land.
The green and brown M&Ms are lesbians.
We are the last generation whose baby photos weren’t taken on phones.
Your belly button is just your old mouth.
Cats only meow at their mothers and people.
The “ueue” in queue is silent.
Flames don’t have shadows.
California has a bigger population than Canada.
“Stressed” is just “desserts” spelled backward.
“Breakfast” is only called that because it’s the first time you eat since the day before, so you break your fast.
Usually, you have to swipe 4,000 times to go on a date. Open this app to meet people who fit all your standards only.
Whenever you buy and eat half a chicken, you are secretly sharing a meal with a stranger.
There are nerve endings in turtle and tortoise shells and they can feel you touch it.
The word “footage” refers to the fact that motion picture film is measured in feet.
If you replace the “W” in where, what, and when with a “T”, you answer the question.
Angelina’s Zydeco Creole Jambalaya
Jambalaya IMAGE 54
Ingredients
1/2 pound smoked sausage, cut
1/2 pound ham, diced
1 cup onion, chopped
1 cup bell pepper, chopped
1 cup celery, chopped
1 cup green onions, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 1/2 tablespoons Worcestershire Sauce
1 can whole tomatoes, drained (reserve liquid)
Pinch thyme
1 teaspoon black pepper
1 teaspoon salt
3 cups Uncle Ben’s Converted Rice
1 1/2 cups stock water
2 pounds fresh shrimp, deveined
Instructions
Place sausage and ham in very heavy Dutch oven and sauté until lightly browned. Remove from pot and set aside.
Sauté onions, bell pepper, celery, green onions and add meat drippings. Cook until tender.
Add tomatoes, thyme, pepper and salt. Cook for five minutes. Stir in rice.
Mix together liquid from tomatoes, stock and Worcestershire sauce equal to 2 cups and add to sautéed vegetables. Bring to a boil. Reduce to a simmer and add fresh shrimp, ham and sausage. Cook uncovered, stirring often for about 30 minutes or until rice and shrimp are done.
Jambalaya IMAGE 45
Ukraine Collapsing, Russia-China Alliance Tightens, NATO in Decline | Richard D. Wolff
If the USA is really a superpower, why can’t the USA bring democracy to China?
First, China is too large and powerful. It’s led by a very capable and intelligent government. It has a very large and powerful military.
Second, China’s government is very strong and stable. The Chinese people fully support it.
Third, China is already democratic in a way that is much superior to America. US democracy is a joke, a sham. You’ll never persuade the Chinese to trade down.
Best Moments Of High Value Man REFUSES To Pay For Everyone’s Food & Leaves
As a lawyer, have you ever won a case that you wish you had lost?
I had a client who said that he had told his insurance broker that they owned considerable collections of jewelry worth tens of thousands of dollars. He said that the jewelry had been stolen, he even had a police report.
The insurance did not have the rider to cover the jewelry. The broker denied he was ever told about the jewelry. If my client was right, the insurance broker committed malpractice.
The broker refused to turn the claim to his insurance company, so I sued him.
His insurance company settled for what I thought was a reasonable amount.
After the case was settled and my client had cashed his settlement check, he told me, “oh, by the way, I found the jewelry a couple of months ago.”
The whole case was a fraud, and I had participated in the fraud.
Because of the attorney client privilege, there was no one I could tell. He got away with the crime.
This was over 35 years ago, and it still hurts to think about it.
EDIT: according to the ethics attorney I consulted with, I could not report it as the crime has already happened. The exception to the rule is if your client tells you they are going to commit a crime, then the attorney can report it. California has some of the most restrictive rules as far as being able to repeat anything that a client tells the attorney is concerned.
MEN GET JUSTICE! Woman Who Falsely Accused Men Of SA Is JAILED
What has been the most unusual family secret you’ve discovered after getting older?
My dad was terminally ill before he died in 2011 and told me a family secret I’d never have suspected in a million years.
He and my mom were married for over 55 years. Dad told me that he had planned to leave her (nobody’s perfect, but she was a difficult person, chronically angry and depressed) about six years after they’d married. This was 1952, and they were working class, Catholic, and the children of Polish immigrants. My mom announced she was pregnant again, and he did not feel he could leave her. The new baby was me. They fought very frequently, but divorce was considered scandalous, and in their world at the time, reserved mostly for movie stars. My mom was physically and emotionally abusive with us kids. My dad often worked double shifts at the auto plant; I thought it must be just for the extra money. Now I realize much of it was to be away from her.
I have very mixed feelings about this and likely always will. On one hand, my dad had fortitude in spades, and was a great father. On the other hand, I did not have a good image and example of what a marriage should be, and I saw a lot of violence between them. One time she threw a colander of hot wet spaghetti at him, and burned his face.
My husband came from an imperfect family too, but his parents definitely loved each other very much. Many of the problems early in our marriage stemmed from what I experienced as a child. Eventually we worked things out and were in counseling for a while. This year we celebrate 40 years of marriage, and we stayed married because we wanted to, and we love each other.
One of the few regrets I have in my life (which is a very good life), is that my dad did not live to see our beach home. It’s just a small condominium, but it’s very nice, and faces out on the Gulf of Mexico. You see, he used to take me on long rides to look at lakeside lots in Michigan, and always wanted to buy one to build a small place on the water.
My mom of course would never agree to it.
Has a cop ever said something to you which was completely unexpected?
Yeah. I was pulled over for speeding in a construction zone (I was). The officer takes my license back to his car, and comes back acting almost embarrassed, asking if I’m aware my license was suspended, like 3 years ago! I have no idea what he’s talking about. He hands me my license back, with no speeding ticket and just tells me to take care of the suspension right away. So I’m sitting on the side of the highway, in a construction zone, and I ask, “So what do I do? I assume I can’t just drive away with a suspended license?” And he responds, “no, go ahead, I’ll call it in to make sure no one else pulls you over for the next few days, just take care of it”. (unexpected) [End of story]
Turned out that years earlier I had been pulled over for a rolling stop at a stop sign. I was going to contest, but with two young kids, full time job…it just didn’t happen. This was before everything moved on-line, so knowing I was getting close to due date, I sent in my payment and such via certified mail. The DMV received the payment, cashed the check and all, but didn’t properly close out everything they needed to. As a result, my license had been suspended, but aside from small print on the back of the original ticket saying what could happen if not paid (it was paid) no further communication had been or needed to have been sent.
Luckily I had saved the certified mail receipt! I had literal proof in the form of receipts and cancelled checks. DMV fully admitted it was their error, but turns out they didn’t really have a process to correct an error caused by them, so, while my driving privileges would be reinstated, the suspension was going to stay on my record…. except no, that wasn’t going to work for me. It took about 8 visits over the course of about a month to get everything finally straightened out.
Where Are 30 To 40 Yo Single Men Why Can’t We Find Them
What is the most ridiculous reason for which you have been fired?
I was fired for endangering lives for less than a 15 second conversation.
It started when I worked for Ashland Inc., the chemical company (they owned Valvoline at the time). My boss and I did not get along all that well, I still think to this day she is the worst boss I’ve ever had.
Anyway, I worked in the city and tornadoes are very rare in the city. I was a temp contractor who had been there 2 years (some were there 5+ years, entire team was contractors and they did not hire on) and so when the day came to an end and it was time to leave I packed up my things and headed for the elevators.
I took the elevator down to the lobby and that’s when it happened, the tornado siren started blaring and I continued to head for the exit. I ran into my boss who was coming in from outside and she asked what I was doing, I replied that I was leaving. She said I absolutely could not leave and that if I left I would not have a job tomorrow (I was already off the clock but still on company property).
I told her that it was not worth losing a job over, so we walked towards the shelter for a good 5 steps and the siren turned off. Conversation was less than 15 seconds and the siren was off and I was free to leave.
We had to head to a hallway like this, we all remember this from school!
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She brought this up at a managers meeting two days later and informed the other managers attending that she wanted to fire me for creating a situation where I forced her to put her safety at risk by impeding her ability to get to shelter due to her having to ensure the safety of another employee.
I was let go and filed for unemployment, the case examiner was so shocked by the reasoning for my termination he approved my unemployment. I took a nice long vacation and got hired on directly at another company that I love working for.
Also she was forced into retirement 2 years later and the team disbanded.
Have you ever found a loophole in traffic court that’s pretty much foolproof?
About 20 years ago I got a ticket ticket I got for running a stop sign. There was construction at an intersection and I was waved through by one of the construction workers. The officer in his car on the other side of the intersection did not see this and proceeded to pull me over. I tried explaining but he didn’t want to hear it.
Fast forward 6 months, I find myself sitting inside a courtroom overly dressed in a suit and tie patiently waiting my turn. With my last name being on the tail side of the alphabet I was one of the later people to be called.
Right before me was a man in his late teens/early 20s with a short bright red hair and a red beard. He was wearing a white tank top, ripped, oil stained, jeans and smelled like he had smoked about 2 packs of cigarettes already that morning. The court clerk calls this gentlemens name, the guy stands up, and before getting asked any questions, proceeds to loudly tell the judge in a thick South Boston accent that “this is all bulls*it” and how he “does not have time to wait around all day for this bulls*it”.
The judge pauses, looks at the man, and says “Son, I haven’t even read out the details of your case yet why are you coming in here yelling and hollering?”.
The man looks at the judge and says nothing.
The Judge proceeds to read off how he was driving a car with an expired registration and was pulled over for doing 30 mph over the speed limit and asked the man to tell his side of the story.
The man says “As I was saying before you interrupted me, that was all bulls*it and the cop was full of shi*t”
Needless to say the judge didn’t take kindly to this man, didn’t see his side, upheld the ticket, and threw him out of the courtroom.
Next they call my name, I walk up slightly dumbfounded by what I just witnessed and say “good morning your honor”. The judge raises up his hand as if to tell me to shut up. He looks at me and says “nice suit, thank you for being respectful, your case is dismissed, have a nice day”……. I picked up my dismissal paperwork said “ thank you your honor” and walked out of the courtroom.
Being an “ally” with the USA does not guarantee immunity against economic interference, subversion and sabotage, quite the opposite.
The Chinese foreign minister, Wang Yi, once said that the formula used by the European Union to manage its relations with China is “impractical”, “it’s like driving a car to an intersection and looking at the traffic light and seeing the yellow, green and red lights on at the same time”. I would say more… In addition to the confusion with the traffic light indications, the driver — for the Chinese only — still has to watch out for nails, oil and potholes in the road, which can lead to a crash or damage to the vehicle.
And who would cause such dangers along the way? Given the desperation of the actors involved and the unidirectional nature of the actions… Consequently, the exasperated and catastrophic tone that we find in the Western press, as opposed to a more triumphalist tone that was still in force six months ago (maybe even less than that), tells us everything we need to know. It’s incredible how Western emotions run riot, going from one extreme to the other in very short periods of time. From certain victory in Ukraine against Russia, we move on to widespread panic, in which Sullivan, Biden, Borrell or Macron, who as recently as September were already bathing in the good waters of Crimea, have now moved on to the certainty that Russian troops will not stop at the Dnepr and perhaps not even at the Danube, Rhine or Elbe.
During 2023 we all watched the unstoppable succession of predictions of the fall of the Chinese economy — remember, the Russian one was already “in taters — only now to be panicked by the flood of high-quality, low-cost products that the lazy West can’t even dream of competing with. It’s happening in cars, as well as semiconductors and agricultural machinery, and we’re gradually discovering, from the hysterical tone of Janet Yellen and Blinken, that if anything is falling, it’s American hegemony, whose containment strategies have so far only resulted in even stronger and more capable opponents. After all, it’s hard work that shapes character. The rentier capitalist elite of the West is too used to the easy money of royalties to be able to compete with those who have never abandoned industry, agriculture and truly productive activities.
The fact is that, in the Washington Post, David Ignatius, a researcher linked to the U.S.’s largest think thank, based on work by the Rand Corporation itself, says that analysts say the U.S. is entering a decline from which few powers have recovered; it is also RAND that provides us with an article entitled “U.S.-China rivalry in a new middle age”, pointing to the need for decision-makers to develop a neo-medieval mentality, namely by having to wage war in the knowledge that the “public” doesn’t want it; Borrell says that the U.S. is no longer hegemonic and that China has already become a superpower, something that Brzezinski had promised would never happen again; or the statistics on the U.S. economy, which say that it grew by only 1.6% in the first quarter of 2024, which shows a slowdown compared to the forecast. A big slowdown, considering the 2.7% predicted by U.S. broadcasting networks such as the IMF.
Curiously, it is from RAND itself that the best advice comes. In its study “The Fates of Nations”, two reflections are suggested which, considering their content and topicality, have no other destination than the political power based in Washington: 1. When nations stand between victory in war or national collapse (between the sword and the wall, I say), the punitive and coercive imposition of conditions is not an adequate path to success in rivalries; 2. Excessive ambition and oversized strategic scope contribute to many types of failure.
These reflections are the current portrait of the U.S.: wanting to extend itself everywhere, it is beginning to open cracks in the center, because the larger the surface, the thinner the cover; taking positions of strength in all situations — threatening all contenders with sanctions — causes those involved and those who might be the target of these actions to flee and become averse. If we add to this the fact that, according to various sources, Trump’s team of advisors has proposed that he impose penalties on countries that want to reduce their dependence on the dollar, we can already see that 2024 is going to be a terrible year for the world’s largest reserve currency. For now, gold has never been higher and almost 1/3 of the oil traded in 2023 was in currencies other than the dollar. If I were president of any country, I would do everything I could to reduce dependency until Trump takes office, considering that the prospects for Biden re-election are not the most enthusiastic.
Confronted with this reality, what is Washington doing? Failing to situate itself in this multipolar world in the making and failing to adopt a cooperative and respectful approach towards other states, preferring to focus on “a competition of great superpowers”, contrary to what, e.g., the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace proposes, in its report “The United States Policy Challenge”, the administration headed by Biden operates as if it still had all the power on its side and, lacking the strength it normally relied on, adopts the stance of sabotage, disruption and causing instability in the “business environment” of its own “allies”, when they are in the way between China and U.S.’s “national security” needs.
In Mexico, threats have been made — no one has confirmed them — against the López Obrador government if it persists in its intention to allow BYD factories to be set up so that they can make use of the exemption from customs duties applicable to the USMCA free trade agreement. The U.S. itself is unilaterally saying that the rules agreed between the three countries no longer apply to Mexico, without Mexico, supposedly a party to the agreement, having any say in the matter. If this situation isn’t proof of who’s really in charge when a country signs an “agreement” with the U.S…
This process of disruption, which aims to make it impossible for Chinese companies to set up shop, is taken so seriously that even a country like Portugal could be caught in the net and see its economy profoundly affected by U.S. intervention and interference.
Take the case of the oil company GALP, a privatized company with 51% of its capital held by U.S. “institutional investors”. First, we saw the news that the 8th largest oil well in the world, located in East Africa, more specifically off the coast of Namibia, had been awarded “to Portugal”. Specifically, the oil well had been awarded, not “to Portugal”, but to GALP, it would have been “to Portugal”, if the company were still public (only 8% are). The company is run by a Portuguese oligarch family, whose holding company “Amorim Energia”, which holds 35.8% of the capital, is based in the Netherlands.
It should be said that it would be more accurate to say that, 80% of the exploration, of the 8th largest oil well in the world, was awarded, not “to Portugal”, but “to the Netherlands”. And although the Amorim family manages the company, the capital is held by an overwhelming majority of North American, English and Canadian capital (75.2% in all). You can see who’s really in charge.
This same GALP, whose transition program towards sustainable energies and sectors envisaged a gradual move away from fossil fuels, has now announced that it has abandoned the proposal to set up a lithium refinery in southern Portugal. GALP, a profit-driven private company, is abandoning a lithium refining business, largely financed by European and Portuguese funds and with a guaranteed market?
Let’s not forget that the ultimate aim would be, with taxpayers’ money, to guarantee GALP entry into a strategic sector from the point of view of “sustainable” industries, and with guaranteed profitability, since the lithium would be explored also in Portugal, refined in Portugal and installed in batteries in Portugal. An extremely lucrative business guaranteed and with the development of important know-how. This explains why GALP accessed the 8th largest well in the world and why it has now come to say that, after all, the decarbonization objectives will have to be postponed. What do these people care about “climate change”?
For Portugal, this project was fundamental, as it would close the cycle of production and electric vehicles within its borders. From lithium mining to the production of electric cars, everything would be done in Portugal. However, there was a catch to this ambitious project. This project, which is one of the most important to be financed under the European Union’s Recovery and Resilience Plan in the country, was based on the production of batteries through the installation of a Chinese enterprise factory named CALB, which has already been approved by the previous government, which curiously suffered a judicial coup of “lawfare”, after which another government was elected, supposedly with different ideas on this matter. Let’s see how the differ.
Once again, we will have to listen to what the U.S. ambassador to Portugal said about the businesses in which Washington would not welcome China’s entry. Wouldn’t welcome is an understatement, as we know. Lithium, personal data, ports and 5G.
This is how a small country like Portugal was caught in the middle of a tectonic dispute between superpowers, in which the still hegemonic power developed a process of destroying the “business environment” applicable to its competitor. As we know, history doesn’t say much about those who are always on the defense, and so they have become increasingly closed. But that’s another story.
This example contains all the complexity, fallacy and aggressiveness of the “decoupling” strategy, which, when translated by Ursula von der Leyen into the “language of the EU”, became “derisking”. It also shows how, in the EU, it is the U.S. that calls the shots and how being anchored to the European Union, and everything it stands for, is in fact a serious brake on development. Portugal, like Mexico, like Germany, Spain, France and the whole of Europe, is seeing investment projects that could keep Europe industrialized closed down, boycotted and destroyed. Just because they are projected with Chinese companies.
Perhaps even then the Chinese company CALB won’t give up on its factory in Portugal. However, this foreseeable foreign interference will not fail to diminish the company’s expectations of future profitability and, above all, create a brake on its competitiveness for better prices. Symptomatically, this continued sabotage of the European economy and that of the “allied countries” is based above all on technologies that the U.S. wants to dominate. In this context, we should also have conscience that Volkswagen has signed an agreement with China’s Xpeng, and that a factory for the German brand is also located in Portugal. We can’t help but get a whiff of the traditional U.S. persecution of the German economy, which suffered a severe setback with the destruction and closure of Nord Stream and what was left of it. It all ties together again.
What this case proves is that today, in the West, and especially in territories that are in some way controlled by the tentacles of U.S. monopoly power (the Portuguese case proves the importance of the public nature of companies like GALP), they are limited to businesses that they are unable or unwilling to sabotage or destroy.
If the Think Thank and research institutes themselves suggest to the U.S. political elite that the best approach would be cooperation, respect for the sovereignty of others and, above all, not trying to get everywhere, it is not for lack of informed knowledge that these elites behave so savagely. Their objective is very clear, and consists of creating such an insecure, unpredictable and erratic environment for Chinese companies that they should abandon their desire to set up and trade with Europe and Latin America, without it being possible to say that it was the U.S. itself that sabotaged the economic development of countries that claim to be “allies”.
The means used range from unilaterally changing the rules, their own rules, promoting agendas such as “decoupling” or “derisking”, or, if necessary, and as Nord Stream proves, directly destroying supporting infrastructures, subverting democracies by organizing judicial coups and color revolutions, threatening sanctions and other penalties. In the last resort, war is even promoted, as was done in Ukraine and is now being attempted in Taiwan.
And this is how everything that has been said before, about open markets that close when at a disadvantage or open when there is a guarantee that only the hegemonic power wins; climate agendas that are a priority but are soon abandoned when the defined accumulation cycles are at stake; respect for the sovereignties of other countries that are protected when it comes to getting closer to rivals and are unprotected when it comes to defending U.S. dominance.
The terms under which the “national security” of the USA is defined, its protection grows at the pace of the destruction of the sovereignty, economy and freedom of its “allies”. Being an “ally” with the USA does not guarantee immunity against economic interference, subversion and sabotage, quite the opposite. It guarantees that this interference is carried out more easily, as the traditional defenses that result from national sovereignty do not exist. To be a friend of the USA today is to watch its own destruction and remain silent.
With friends like these… Who needs enemies?
Arnaud’s Filet Mignon au Poivre
Arnaud’s Filet Mignon au Poivre
Yield: 6 servings
Ingredients
6 (8 ounce) filets
6 tablespoons cracked black pepper
Salt
3 tablespoons clarified butter oil
3/4 cup brandy
3/4 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup demi-glace, home made or purchased (available in gourmet shops and groceries)
Watercress to garnish
Instructions
Lightly season the filets with salt and pound cracked pepper into both sides.
Heat the butter in a sauté pan over high heat.
Add the filets and brown on both sides (rare 10 minutes; medium-rare 15 minutes, medium 18 minutes, medium well 20 minutes, well done 25 minutes.
Remove from pan and keep warm.
Deglaze the pan with the brandy, add the cream and reduce to a semi-thick consistency over medium heat, approximately 1 1/2 minutes.
Add the demi-glace and cook about 1 minute more.
Taste for seasoning and adjust if necessary.
Center each filet on a hot dinner plate, ladle sauce over.
Garnish with watercress.
Serve.
“The Worst Thing Any President Has Done in My Lifetime” | Victor Davis Hanson
Would the son or daughter of a general get treated nicely by drill instructors in boot camp?
My father was a mere lieutenant colonel when I went to Basic Combat Training. I didn’t tell anyone, not other soldiers or the drill sergeants. On the morning of our graduation, LTC Dad showed up in the company area in his Class A green uniform. Everyone freaked out and our company commander approached him to see why he was there (he had been there the evening before in civilian attire but didn’t make himself known). Our first sergeant stepped in front of my platoon while we were in formation to prepare to march to the area where graduation ceremonies were held. She asked which of us was Walker and I responded. She stepped up to me and asked “Private, why didn’t you tell anyone your daddy is a colonel?”
I said, “I didn’t think it mattered, First Sergeant.” In truth, my father’s battalion operations NCO had counseled me before I left for Fort McClellan to always do my best and never do anything to intentionally draw attention to myself. He said that if they had to pull my LBE strap aside and read my name tag to figure out who I was, I was doing it right.
She thought about my answer for a moment, nodded, and said, “Very well. Let me go sort this out.”
After the graduation ceremony, I was allowed to ride back to the company with my family instead of marching with everyone else. I found out later that my drill sergeant and the senior drill sergeant had a falling out over this. DS S told me that he allowed it out of respect for my father and the fact that I had been a good trainee who always gave my best effort and never caused any trouble. The SDS was a mean little pissant who wouldn’t let his own mother get a coke from the machine in the day room if it was up to him, unless she busted out 100 pushups first
So, the only nicety I received was a ride back to barracks after graduation while everyone else marched.
EDIT: It was only about a half mile and it was a beautiful spring morning in Alabama. While I appreciated the extra few minutes with family, I didn’t really care one way or the other and neither did anyone else, except the senior drill sergeant.
When I lived in Indiana, we lived in a mobile home. We must have spent about six years give or take in that flat and boring state. We lived in Columbia City (outside of Fort Wayne), Kokomo, Marion, and Milton. It was terribly flat, and boring.
Indiana
For fun we would go for rides in the countryside.
Many times we would have picnics in the various country cemeteries. And My wife would get dressed up in a nice tight-fitting dress, and we would enjoy a simple lunch under a nice tree in a big empty park-like cemetery.
Little black dress
The picnics were the highlight of our years in Indiana.
We did this for years.
Evansville
On one of our trips we drove about four hours away and in this rural country town we saw this beautiful home for sale.
It was a 1930’s “Florida Home”. In other words, 100% Art Deco masterpiece.
And it was.
Beautiful.
And cheap! It was located in the middle of nowhere. And so the price reflected this. It was so very cheap by the standards of the late 1980’s.
Only two problems.
Firstly; It was a four hour drive away from my work, and…
and…
Secondly, I really doubted that I could get a loan for the house. I believed that my credit was shit. So I wouldn’t even try.
Art Deco house
But, Man! We both loved that house, and when the realtor told us that a fellow was thinking about taking the house and breaking it down into five small apartments, we were horrified! Just horrified.
Interior 1
I, and my wife, felt a real connection to that house.
Apparently the owners of the house was an old couple and the woman had just passed on in an old folks home in her 90’s. And the children were tying to sell the house. And that house was a labor of love for that couple.
Interior 2
Leaving that house, I had a difficult time pulling myself away from it.
I really felt a connection to it, and for the entire week I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Interior 4
About four days later I had a very vivid dream.
The woman (who had just died) was telling me not to worry. That I would be able to buy the house and the bank would pay for everything. Not to worry she said. Not to worry.
And when I woke up… yeah. It was clear. All I needed to do was to place a bid on the home and it was mine.
Interior 3
So I told my wife that.
And we were considering buying that house…
…but then…
*sigh*
… I got laid off one month later.
And, of course that meant a move out of state… and no chance of buying the house at all.
…
Spirit of the house?
The actual previous owner of the home visiting me in the spirit form?
And what was the tie with my getting laid off, did not the spirits know or realize that my physical life was so mercurial?
*sigh*
That house was beautiful, though.
A jewel in the middle of the corn belt.
*sigh*
Today…
What’s the most morally disgusting thing you’ve ever seen someone do?
Few days ago, I went to a crockery shop with my mom to buy some necessary items.
Till my mom was looking for items, I was standing on the other counter and looking over other things.
At my counter on which I was standing, a couple was buying their household chores.
In between talks of them, she exclaimed on her polite husband. Actually, they were looking for buckets and mugs for their bathroom.
Conversation was like that : –
He : This is best. Take this one (Showing items to his wife).
She : No, no ( scruffily). ( Tum duplicate chize laate ho, Ab Yeh Mera ghar hai, tumhari Maa Ka nahi, To duplicate chize nhai rakhenge)
Translation :
This is a duplicate one. Now, this is my home, not yours mother’s home. I won’t keep a single duplicate thing over there.
** After few minutes**
He( In polite manner) : See! these cups, how graceful they are!
She( Very arrogantly) : Yuck! What a substandard people you are! What a sleazy choice you have!
(Bahut jhel Liya, tumhara or tumhari Maa Ka low standard, please ab toh meresath reh kar thoda standard Ka dhayan rakho)
( Enough now! I have beared a lot of low – standard of yours and yours mother, please now think about my standard).
Her husband immediately changed the topic, so that people wouldn’t mock them. Quietly, he stood up from there and went to the billing counter and started talking to the shopkeeper, so that no one would feel awkward.
This was totally disgusting, the way she was shouting on her husband and uttering pernicious words about his family in public.
Never name call or dishonor your spouse and his family in public. This is really loathsome thing one can ever do.
Red coins
What did your boss say to you during a meeting that resulted in you immediately resigning?
It wasn’t my boss, but the head of HR in front of an entire room of staff.
I started a new job and part of my duties was to help manage some of the employees time. This was part of the 4DX (4 Disciplines of Execution) initiative the entire company was pushing. I did my work, helped others where I could, and spent the rest of my time learning. Part of that learning was watching the rest of my “team” interact with each other and how my manager was not actually managing. So I kept notes, stepped in to help keep things from escalating into fist fights, and in general kept folks on task. That went well until said manager came strolling back in like a seagull and shit all over everything then walked right back out the door. (For some reason they felt that 7 IT people could fit in a locked room with no windows that was only 300sf or so.)
Finally the entire team had had enough of this so I took it up the food chain to the CTO with all of the information I had collected. She called a meeting and got HR involved. HR sent out a form for everyone to fill out and return to them. I filled mine out, attached all of the documents I had created, and replied all. The only person not aware of all of the Information I had collected was the problem manager.
Fast forward to Friday and we are all in a room when the CTO, my manager, some HR staff, and the head of HR walks in. He sits down and then proceeds to chew my ass for 15 minutes straight. Apparently HE did not want everyone to know what was going on and the “form” was meant just for HR to read. I informed him that the manager and apparently him had not been aware of what EVERYONE ELSE IN THE ROOM had known about. This set him off on another tirade that I mostly ignored as I texted my wife I would be heading home early today. The head of HR makes a snippy comment that I better be texting someone damn important. I stood up, pulled out my keys, and removed all of my building keys from my key ring. I then slid them over to my manager and the CTO and informed them that this was immediate notice of my resignation. The CTO was crying (really odd reaction) and the HR guy was still talking to the back of my head as I left.
All but two people on the team quit within 3 months. I walked into another job the following Friday. My only regret was that I had to leave my team to deal with the mess we all worked so hard to clean up.
“Deficits Don’t Matter!” – Modern Monetary Theory Economist Stephanie Kelton
Jesus! Wholly delusional!
Our slave owners think they can pay us in toilet paper
Ukraine Discussing Moving Country’s Capital from Kiev to Lviv; “Almost All Hope is Lost, now”
Discussions are underway in Ukraine to move the nation’s Capital from Kiev to Lviv because Ukraine is losing its war with Russia. Meanwhile in Kharkov, residents are fleeing en-masse as the Russian Army approaches.
Russia continues it’s northern storm front southward toward Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, and from the east toward the heavily fortified city of Chasiv Yar, once thought to be impenetrable.
In the past two days alone, an additional 30,000+ Russian troops have taken over a dozen towns, villages.
Despite massive financial and military support from the collective West, Ukraine is simply unable to defend itself any longer. Even the American media outlet “The Hill” writes: “further efforts to defeat Russia militarily are hopeless; Russian forces have a significant advantage, and the position of Ukrainian forces is rapidly deteriorating. Ukraine will never win the war and recapture the lost territories”
The Russian Army, which was 35 miles away last Friday, is now just 19-miles from Kharkiv. The city was once home to 1.5 million people. Tens-of-thousands have already fled, and tens-of-thousands more are presently fleeing the city.
Meanwhile, in Kiev, over 19,000 businesses have evacuated the city, with many heading to Lviv in Ukraine’s far west, near Poland.
For this reason Ukrainian President Zelensky is now discussing moving the Ukraine Capital from Kiev to Lviv. His Army Commanders have been telling him there is no longer any hope at all of Ukraine defeating Russia, or of even reclaiming lands that seceded to Russia. “Almost all hope is gone” for Ukraine.
USA – China
What is the most brilliant example of taking advantage of a loophole you have ever witnessed?
Not sure it’s brilliant but it is a tactic that did work. Early in my 20’s, fresh out of college and working, I had never been taught about tax returns (it was just an abstract concept to me) and didn’t realize I needed to file every year. So for 3 years it never crossed my mind. Then one year someone asked me about how I filed and soon realized I was in deep poo poo with the IRS. Immediately sent them a $50 check, went to an accountant and got all the returns and paperwork done and submitted.
Soon the phone calls from them started and they were not nice. Threatening to take my home I had purchased, my truck, bank accounts, etc. Scared the poo out of me. But I asked if they had received my $50 check and yes they had. I told them that by accepting it they had defacto accepted a repayment agreement. They eventually and reluctantly agreed that was so. I kept sending in the monthly checks to keep my end up (it did not end all the calls, but the threats were gone, mostly.) Ended up costing me $12K but on my terms and got to keep all my stuff and not have my pay and bank account garnered. No, didn’t pay the total in $50 installments, just kept that up while sending occasional supplemental checks. And yes I did get a tax attorney to help eventually. Am much wiser now (at least in tax matters). My dad taught me about most things financial but this one detail slipped through the cracks.
Creole cream cheese is a form of farmer cheese that is traditional in the New Orleans area.
creole cream cheese2
Yield: 12 ounces
Ingredients
1/2 gallon skim milk
1 tablet rennet
1/2 cup whole buttermilk
1 1/4 cups nonfat dry milk
Pinch of cream of tartar
Instructions
In a large microwave dish heat the milk to 170 degrees F (75 degrees C) and hold for 20 minutes, using the “Hold” function and the microwave probe attachment. Immediately stir in the other ingredients to blend. Cover with plastic wrap and let stand for 24 hours at room temperature.
Drain and discard liquid from the cheese clabber.
Line a colander with 2 layers of cheese cloth and turn cheese into colander. Place colander over bowl for more draining. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for 36 hours.
Place finished cheese into bowl, and use as desired.
Notes
This cream cheese has become increasingly difficult to find. It is made from skim milk, buttermilk and rennet, has a mild, slightly tart, slightly sweet taste, and is often mixed with cream, sugar and fruit and served as a dessert. It is often used to make Creole cream cheese ice cream. In homes it was traditionally eaten for breakfast and served with cream, fruit, or sugar; it can also be served on toast with butter, salt and pepper.
Keeps 2 weeks covered in the fridge.
The cheese only took 3 hours to make.
After the Rennet tablet (crushed well) was sprinkled in the slightly cooled milk mixture, it clabbered right away (about 1 1/2 hours). I drained it in the colander then put it in the cheese cloth and wrung it dry carefully. The cheese needed several wringings with rest in between for sufficient drainage. The finished cheese resembles Feta crumble cheese but the flavor is like mild mascarpone. I put it in the food processor on high speed until it was very smooth and creamy like mascarpone. I freshened the taste with a few drops of lemon juice (store bought mascarpone contains citric acid).
The cheese was not quite a smooth as the commercially whipped kind but the flavor was very good. This recipe is the closest thing to mascarpone that one can make at home with ease. A little tinkering with the proportions should yield a very good clone.
Watch Biden Economic Advisor’s HILARIOUS Fail Over Basic Money Question
China’s EV sector has become a global leader without access to the U.S. market. The effects of tariffs on Chinese-made EVs is therefore what and on whom?
Tariffs on Chinese EVs – by the U..S. or the E.U.?
As for the E.U., Ursula is threatening tariffs on Chinese EVs but facing resistance from European OEMs especially those from Germany because this will impact their EVs manufactured in China and exported to Europe. And more seriously, if China were to retaliate with counter measures and restrictions on them, these would compromise their competitiveness at a time when they’re partnering with Chinese EV makers to remain viable. The Chinese market is existential for them and no doubt this was a main topic during Xi’s visit to France when he met with Macron and Ursula.
As for the U.S., Biden is just scared shit about Chinese EVs entering the U.S. marketplace and vowed to slap a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs and those containing Chinese EV parts. How he’s going to do this if they’re produced under joint-venture agreement with Mexican entities, especially if the Chinese were to use their E.U.-owned companies to do this (e.g., Volvo, Polestar, LEVC, Lotus, Daimler, Smart) is another story. There are strict treaty laws between the U.S. and Mexico that just can’t be put aside. Ultimately, Chinese EV cars will enter the U.S. market – through Mexico.
In the meantime, the global market is big enough for Chinese EVs to go around.
As a doctor or nurse, what are some of the most powerful last words a patient has said?
It was years ago, I was a junior resident. I didn’t know the patient all that well, but got called up to get her paperwork ready for discharge. (She was an otherwise healthy 96 or so, had a palliative colon resection for cancer, something, something).
I went to her room to do a last wound check and DC a JP drain and she kept talking about how she was “going home to Bill*”
Her son pointed out that she’s usually mentally very sharp, but Bill was her husband who had died years ago. He reassured her, “No, mom, dad is gone. We’re just going back to the house.”
She insisted. “No, I’m going to him. He came to see me this morning and said he’s taking me home.”
Whatever, I guess? Son said she was otherwise at baseline – it was the first and only weird thing she said – vitals and labs looked good, so we progressed along the DC pathway.
Not even a few minutes later the Code Blue got called to her room. She was Don’t Code, so we didn’t do anything, but it was like, “WTAF, I guess Bill really was coming for her.” Her son was surprisingly OK with how this played out.
This one chilled me for awhile.
What Boomers Don’t Understand About Younger Guys Failing At Dating And Why It Will Get MUCH WORSE
Have you ever had a pet who could tell that somebody is not a good person?
Back when I was a teen (many many years ago), the adults bought a puppy for my brother’s birthday. He was a beagle/welsh corgie mix, black and white all over, short fur. Think Snoopy in the comics, just opposite colors! My brother was delighted and named him – guess what? – Snoopy!
He was a smart dog and kept us all hopping. We lived in a corner lot house in Spokane WA. I don’t remember how old the dog was when this happened, more than 2, I’m sure.
One winter morning he came to me and wanted out badly, so I put him out the back. It had snowed pretty heavily. I was shutting the door when I heard him snarl, so I ran barefoot out into the snow in my nightgown. There was a man in our yard! Then I saw it was the meter reader. But Snoopy hated him. He had him pinned against the house, not letting him move at all. I called him but he ignored me, so I went to him and laid myself on top of his back – and still he stepped forward, ready to bite and savage the man. I said, “Get out! I can’t hold him,” and the guy scrambled over the fence and ran. I reported this behavior to the adults. The male made a phone call to the electric company and told them what happened and what he suspected. Turns out on his routes, all the dogs were getting sick or dying. They checked his locker and he had raw steaks in it that he had put poison in, so he was killing the dogs. Our dog knew it!
Another instance, in the summer. We were going to a new church, a nondenominational one, and they invited the pastor over for supper. He was a single man, in his late 60’s. Our dog took an instant dislike to him, snarling and trying to attack him. It took my brother and I to pull him inside the house and lock him in a bedroom as we were eating outside. A few months later the man went ballistic in services, called the adults “yellow-bellied commies” and threw us out of the church because we wouldn’t follow a specific cultish ‘diet plan’ he thought was a cure-all for any ailment. This guy claimed he could cure you of anything by analyzing your urine. Turns out the dog was correct, he was a bad man. He died a bit later of a massive stroke. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Our dog Snoopy lived for many years and was always a great protector. We were all devastated when he died.
What was the most expensive surprise you received in a bill from a doctor or hospital? Did you pay it?
My husband was on a fishing trip in Alaska with several family members. They had chartered a boat with a captain and crew and were about 2 hours offshore when my husband’s heart suddenly stopped, and he collapsed. He came to after some agonizing moments. The captain immediately started for shore. My husband’s heart stopped again 2 or 3 more times during the 2 hours before reaching land. An ambulance met them at the dock and my husband was transported to the local hospital in Homer. The doctors at the hospital determined he needed more acute care and that he should be transported to Anchorage. An ambulance transported him to the local airport where a waiting private medical jet flew him to Anchorage. His heart stopped again at the hospital in Homer, on the way to the airport and while on the jet. Each time his heart restarted just as suddenly as it had stopped after several moments. Once he reached Anchorage he had a pacemaker implanted and is doing well today.
As you can imagine, the bills were astronomical. Luckily our insurance covered everything except for one thing. You would think they might not cover the $25,000 for the private medical jet but no they covered that without even blinking. What they wouldn’t cover was the $350 for the second ambulance ride. I called the insurance company to find out why, thinking it must be an error. The insurance representative told me they could only cover one ambulance transport a day. Wait, what?? I simply asked “how was my husband supposed to get to the airport? Take a taxi? You do realize that his heart stopped while in that ambulance, right?” I was told I would be placed on a brief hold. The insurance representative came back and told me she checked with her supervisor and that they would now be covering the second ambulance ride.
Women Are Leaving The Workforce. But Nobody Cares.
Has a teacher ever accused your child of doing something that you know he could not have done?
Principal not teacher but it’s a good story.
I was sent home early one day for something they thought I might have been involved with. My mother was irritated and called the school. Turns out the principal wanted to meet with her as well. This was really uncommon since it was a big high school and usual student discipline was delegated to the few vice principals.
My mother walked into the meeting and immediately started talking about the reason I’d been sent home. The principal waved it off. He had wanted to talk to her about something else.
“Never mind that. I wanted to talk to you because we believe your son is a devil-worshipper.” Welcome to the rural Midwest in the 90s.
My mother, not being an idiot but also just being a mix of amused and dumb-founded. “And what makes you believe that?” she asked.
“We’ve heard reports from other students that him and his friends have been sacrificing animals and kidnapping infants.”
“… And what makes you think these accusations are credible?”
He gives his ‘supporting evidence,’ which consisted of me and my friends having long hair and playing Dungeons and Dragons. He apparently misconstrued my mother’s ‘wtf, mate?’ look for, “please, tell me more.”
Believing he’s successfully making his case, he puffs out his chest as he concludes his argument. “Our philosophy here at South is, ‘if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck it’s probably a duck.’”
My mother told him not to waste time I’m supposed to be in class learning with nonsense for which he has no demonstrable evidence.
As far as I know, nothing more ever came from this. I did my best to keep a low profile till I graduated then moved tf away from my hometown.
Edit: To be clear, my friends and I were not sacrificing animals nor kidnapping infants. I’m not sure exactly how we were supposedly doing that and never making it in the news, but it was the 90s so who knows?
To my mind, Russia’s objective is to force Ukraine’s army to chase after invading Russian units. The idea is to cause heavy casualties on the Ukrainian side and, if all goes according to plan, either to split Ukraine’s army into two, or disintegrate it altogether.In such a manner the idea is not just to take territory but to destroy Ukraine’s ability to resist. There are many indicators that Russia is having success in the ongoing operation.
General Kyrylo Budanov, the head of the Ukrainian military intelligence agency, (which includes foreign fighters and Nazis units,) agrees to that. He paints an bleak picture (archived):
Like most Ukrainian officials and military experts, General Budanov said he believes the Russian attacks in the northeast are intended to stretch Ukraine’s already thin reserves of soldiers and divert them from fighting elsewhere.That is exactly what is happening now, he acknowledged. He said the Ukrainian army was trying to redirect troops from other front line areas to shore up its defenses in the northeast, but that it had been difficult to find the personnel.
“All of our forces are either here or in Chasiv Yar,” he said, referring to a Ukrainian stronghold about 120 miles farther south that Russian troops have assaulted in recent weeks. “I’ve used everything we have. Unfortunately, we don’t have anyone else in the reserves.”
The Ukrainian military has pulled out parts of various brigades that are engaged in the east and is moving them north towards the Kharkiv region. This will be a hodgepodge of partly filled battalions without a unified command and with nothing left to stuff any holes elsewhere.
Budanov correctly fears that Russian can and will repeat this game in other places:
General Budanov said he expected the attacks in the Kharkiv region to last another three or four days, after which Russian forces are expected to make a hard push in the direction of Sumy, a city about 90 miles to the northwest of Kharkiv. Ukrainian officials have previously said that Russia had massed troops across the border from Sumy.Pavlo Velycho, a Ukrainian officer operating near the Russian border in the Sumy region, said that Russian shelling of the outskirts of Sumy had recently increased.
The Russian forces can easily progress because the money allocated for fortifications in the Kharkiv and Sumy regions was paid to fictitious companies without any trenches ever being build (machine translation):
Multi-million contracts for the construction of fortifications, for which they spent a total of 7 billion hryvnias there, were transferred by the Kharkiv OVA to front companies of avatars.
…
It so happened that the department of the Kharkiv OVA for defense purchases chose newly registered no-name firms and FOPs. Moreover, the owners of these firms do not resemble successful businessmen and businesswomen-they have dozens of court cases, from whiskey theft to domestic violence against their husband and mother, some of them are deprived of parental rights and have had enforcement proceedings for loans in banks.Another interesting detail-it seems that these beneficiaries do not even know that they are millionaires. After all, they continue to work in shifts” in the fields ” and factories.
The U.S. obviously fears that the Ukrainian army will not be able to hold its lines. Today Secretary of State Anthony Blinken arrived on an unannounced visit in Kiev to shore up moral, or probably to arrange for a change in Ukraine’s leadership:
Blinken, who arrived in Kyiv by train early on Tuesday morning, hopes to “send a strong signal of reassurance to the Ukrainians who are obviously in a very difficult moment,” said a U.S. official who briefed reporters traveling with Blinken on condition of anonymity.”The Secretary’s mission here is really to talk about how our supplemental assistance is going to be executed in a fashion to help shore up their defenses (and) enable them to increasingly take back the initiative on the battlefield,” the official said.
…
Blinken will reassure Ukrainian officials including President Volodymyr Zelenskiy of enduring U.S. support and deliver a speech focused on Ukraine’s future, the official said.
Blinken and Biden need the Ukrainian army to hold until the November election is over. It is unlikely that they can achieve that aim. Some pause on the battlefield would now be convenient but that requires to get rid of Zelenski.
U.S. media are emphasizing the $60 billion package passed by Congress for Ukraine. They neglect to explain that only $14.5 billion of that is actually going to Ukraine, half of it to keep the state solvent and the other half in form of weapons Ukraine might buy once they are build. The other money is designated to refill the U.S. military stockpile.
The real military help for Ukraine during the next months, in form of artillery and anti-air ammunition, will be minuscule.
There is nothing in there that can defend against the FAB glide bombs the Russian military is using in ever growing numbers to break up Ukrainian positions. The last three days have each seen Ukrainian losses at about 1,500 per day – double the usual count – with most of them occurring on the eastern front, not in the Kharkiv direction.
Currently the replacement rate through Ukrainian mobilization is said to be only 25% of the losses that are actually occurring.
Everyone knows that the war is coming to an end. That there will be a victor, Russia, and a lot of losers. The U.S. as well as the EU are now trying to find a face saving way to acknowledge that without admitting it.
The easiest way will be to blame Ukraine, and especially its President Zelenski, for having not listened to western advice during some of the hotter phases of the war (Bakhmut etc). “We gave them a chance and they blew it,” will soon become the major tenor of official statements.
But in reality there never was a chance for Ukraine to defeat or even to weaken Russia. All numbers, capacities and people, pointed against that. Despite that fact it was pushed to its death by western delusion.
One hopes that its people, and others, will have learned from it.
Posted by b on May 14, 2024 at 10:54 UTC | Permalink
American Reacts to explaining europe to americans
What is the most offensive thing someone has ever asked you?
It was 2004 in Ohio not long after Alex and I married, I was working at the diner when Alex had to drop our daughter off since his brother had been in a car accident and I was almost done my shift. Alex had adopted her when she was 4, and that was a couple of years prior. We kissed like normal and she said bye pops like usual when he left. A customer saw and overheard so him and his wife starting with the homophobic commentary which I ignored with kindness. That is until she asked how I could marry a pedophile who would turn around and hurt my kid. If I hadn’t of been holding Pearl in one arm with dishes on my other, I probably would have decked the hateful bitch!
My papa was close friends with the owners so I wasn’t afraid of being fired, so I told her husband to remove his “cunt of a wife from my presence.” I’ve never said that word before or since (to my recollection) but she deserved it.
What did your child’s teacher say that made your jaw drop?
My youngest daughter, now fully grown, was in I believe grade 1 or 2 at the time this happened. She came home from school one day and told me that a boy had been picking on her. I asked for more information. I do not subscribe to that “he pulled your hair so he just likes you” crap, but I didn’t want to react until I knew what was actually going on.
She described a classic bully. He would slap her, kick her, push her… He often did it when the teacher wasn’t aware, and she reacted in the classic “I’m being bullied” fashion of trying to be smaller and less noticeable to him.
My advice was in stages. Stage one was simple, I told her not to shrink. Grow. That little jackass wants to slap you, you explode at him verbally and make certain that the teacher notices and understands that you are reacting. She did stage one the first few days, and she was upset because the teacher kept doing nothing about it.
Stage two was equally simple. I taught her how to throw a proper punch, a punch that would allow her to get her power behind it with proper form to avoid breaking the bones in her hand.
The school called. They explained that my daughter had “caused a problem” that was really serious, and we needed to come in and talk with them.
“Your daughter attacked one of the other students,” quoth the teacher.
“Nope, I’m pretty sure she didn’t,” rebutted I, rebutfully. “{kid’s name}, can you tell us what happened?”
She had been drinking at the water fountain, and the kid came along and pushed her hard, face first into the porcelain. If memory serves, she had a bloody nose as a result. So she remembered what I taught her, she turned around and threw a nasty punch, and the kid ran off to tell the teacher.
“Striking children is NOT acceptable!” puffed the puffy teacher.
“Yes, you are absolutely right. That kid has been striking my daughter for at least a few days, and I told her to bring it to your attention. You didn’t do anything to protect her and safeguard your students from a bully, so she had to address the situation herself. I won’t have my child be a bully, but I won’t have them victimized, so I taught her how and when to strike back. And I’m not sorry.”
Many guffaws. Many splutters. Finally, the teacher said the thing. “Mr. Martin, you have to understand that this boy is from another country, and he hasn’t learned yet what is and is not acceptable.”
Before anyone gets all xenophobic, let me stop you right there. This wasn’t a “OMG FOREIGN KID MONSTER” post. This was a “For f**k’s sake, teacher!” post.
So I explained that the kid wasn’t going to learn by not being held to account. It was the teacher’s job to maintain the safety of all of the students, and when she didn’t react to his behavior, she green lit him to keep going. So while I get that the boy was from a place with very different social rules, those social rules wouldn’t work here, so if the school wasn’t going to address it, my kid would continue to stand up for herself.
Honestly, I couldn’t believe that anyone at this point (like 15 years ago) would be justifying bullying in an elementary school by saying that it was a cultural difference. Maybe they were working with this boy behind the scenes and I had no idea, though I strongly doubt that, but either way, my kid wasn’t going to be a victim.
And yeah, guess who never had a problem with the boy again?
3/4 of 16-ounce loaf stale French bread, cut into crouton-size cubes
Instructions
Mix together sugar, cinnamon and nutmeg.
Add eggs; whip together.
Add vanilla extract.
Stir in coconut flakes, raisins and chopped pecans.
Melt butter over low heat. Add milk, heating just enough to scald. Add to sugar-egg-coconut mixture.
Place in a 12 x 8 inch baking dish with the French bread cubes.
Put into a cold oven; bake at 350 degrees F for one hour.
What do you think of the user on TikTok who claimed that some people in Singapore, who are ethnically Chinese, were offended at being called ‘compatriots’ with mainland Chinese people?
TikTok’s CEO is Singaporean Chinese. Our idiotic government feigns ignorance of basic geography and made it seem that Singapore and China are the same. They did so for political reasons. If a Singaporean Chinese can be associated with “Communist Red China,” then Americans will be more likely to agree to banning TikTok. Our government wants TikTok banned because they can’t control it. They want to censor our internet and apps like the Chinese Great Fire Wall they complain about. Apparently it’s okay if a democracy does it but bad if a communist country does it.
This whole thing must be frustrating for Singaporean Chinese. They make up about 76% of the population and they consider themselves as Singaporean. Most of their families (with the exception of Chinese who recently immigrated from China) have been in Singapore for several generations. Many have never been to China. The ones who have, usually go in search of their ancestry.
Like all overseas Chinese, they’ve assimilated to some degree in the countries they immigrated to hundreds of years ago. They are ethnically Chinese but nationally Singaporean. And Singapore is not China. Singapore is it’s own country. They separated from Malaysia—not China. Singapore has never been part of China. Many overseas Chinese, including Singaporeans, are proud of their roots and culture, and they’re happy to see a strong China as it increases their status around the world as respect for China grows. But these people are true blue Singaporean in their hearts and on paper. I can see why they’re frustrated.
USA vs. China
Many people said New Zealand is one of the worst countries in the world (very expensive and very low wages) but the country is advertised as a beautiful place. Which one is the truth about New Zealand? Is New Zealand simply a backdoor to Australia?
I have lived in Australia all my life and have come over to NZ for work just a day or so ago. I am currently staying in an area which seems to be middle to lower class, well compared to Australia. I went out to one of the local pubs last night and was amazed at their pride and family values. There was a young Māori, 19 years old I believe, who had just received a baseball scholarship in Texas and is leaving NZ in two weeks. There was maybe 50 people there having a party for him. The young kids, I’m guessing maybe 10 years old, all got up on a stage and did a Haka in front of the crowd and then after that a young girl, maybe 13, got up on stage and sang and danced a traditional dance for him.
This country is very proud of their heritage and have very strong family values and it shows. Unfortunately Australia is now a country where family can be taken or left. We really don’t have the culture that there is in NZ.
The people in the area i am staying are a bit rough around the edges but they are still proud Māoris and will protect their family including their extended family with their life.
I’m just about to head into Auckland city to check the place out but I’m guessing the pride Kiwis and Māoris have will be the same.
edit: I am not saying New Zealand isn’t a beautiful country, I am not saying it is a third world country, I am just giving observations I have made in the short time I have been there. Yea there are quite affluent suburbs around Auckland, but as in Australia, there are some at the other end of the scale. And yes, I am o it here to work and I am currently staying in an area which is far less affluent, although we have just been relocated to another area which has a heavy population of Indian and Asian immigrants.
it is difficult, in the areas I have been, to find a corner store or takeaway etc that isn’t run but either Indian or Asian business owners. And I guess there are places in Australia where the same is true.
I am not being racist, I am not running New Zealand down, I am not being derogatory towards New Zealand or the people of New Zealand whether they are indigenous or not. These are just my limited observations.
Red Lobster Abruptly Closes 48 Restaurants; Mulls Bankruptcy
Seafood restaurant chain Red Lobster has closed nearly 50 locations around the United States, according to a liquidation company.
CEO and Founder of TAGeX Brands, Neal Sherman announced in a post on LinkedIn that his company would be hosting “the largest restaurant liquidation” through an online auction. The website for TAGeX Brands showed that 48 Red Lobster locations throughout the U.S. had been closed.
Red Lobster locations in places such as Jacksonville, Florida, Watertown, New York, and Bloomingdale and Danville, Illinois, were among the restaurants that were closed. The seafood chain has more than 700 locations throughout the U.S., according to its website.
“The Furniture, Fixtures, and Equipment from select Red Lobster locations MUST GO ASAP!” Sherman wrote in his post. “We’re handling this closure differently than we have in the past with each auction having a SINGLE winner for the listed items from the location they bid on — WINNER TAKES ALL.”
This announcement comes after the seafood restaurant chain has reportedly been considering filing for bankruptcy after their all-you-can-eat shrimp promotion led to the company losing $11 million in 2023.
“For those who have been in the US recently, $20 was very cheap,” Red Lobster CFO Ludovic Garnier said in a statement in November. “And the rationale for this promotion was to say we knew the price was cheap, but the idea was to bring more traffic in the restaurants.”
In 2020, ThaiUnion, a Thailand-based company that produces seafood products, bought a stake in Red Lobster. ThaiUnion revealed in January 2024 that it would be exiting from its investment in Red Lobster and would be taking a roughly $530 million loss as a result of its investment in the company.
The Hal Turner Radio Show reached out to Red Lobster for a statement but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
Victoria Nuland is obviously suffering greatly from the American exceptionalism disease. It drives her whole being. Pathetic. Her views are totally divorced from reality. And she's obsessed with Russia and China. I relish the disappointments that are coming her way as Russia and especially China rise while the United States falls.
Posted by: Steven Hines | May 12 2024 14:52 utc | 6
During my “van days” when I left the US Navy, but before I had my MAJestic training, we were very busy trying to find work. It was a tough time, an economic recession and work was hard to get.
When we would get money, one of our favorite things to do was to make these mega-sandwiches.
We would get a full loaf of fresh french or Italian bread, and cut it in half, then form a pocket.
I would add everything. From bread & Butter pickles, to onions, tomatoes, lettice, and all sorts of other things like peppers. Of course, I would add salad dressings, and oils, salt and pepper.
The process was simple.
We would line that pocket with salad dressing, and cut cold cuts, cheese, pickles, and everything under the sun. It was a meal plus, plus, plus and I loved that meal!
Every now and then I daydream about those enormous sandwiches.
What is stopping you from enjoying this right now?
Today…
What is the craziest thing you have ever said or done at an interview and still gotten the job?
I was sitting on the chair. She entered the room. It was evident from her face that she was totally exhausted.
There was a water bottle on the table.
Me- Have some water, please. I offered her the water bottle.
She took the water bottle and took some sips of water. She sat on the chair and closed her eyes for a while.
Me- Ma’am, you look so exhausted.
Interviewer- Yeah, a whole day of interviews.
Me- So you won’t get to go home today? (It was 9 pm)
Interviewer- Nothing like that. Basically I am from Coimbatore. I have a 3 months old daughter and a husband staying in Coimbatore. Yesterday I met them but missing my daughter.
Me- Don’t worry ma’am you will meet them soon. Even I am 2200 km away from my home.
Interviewer(Smiling)- Don’t forget I am not your friend. I am your interviewer.
Me(Smiling)- If you want to be my friend, I won’t mind.
Interviewer(Smiling)- Tell me about your self.
I spoke about myself.
Interviewer- Why do you want this job?
Me- I need money and you need a good employee.
After this answer, she did not ask a single question. She was just smiling.
The interview was done!!!!
I knew I had screwed my interview. I bid goodbye to the interviewer and came out of the room.
Result day- I got selected for Wipro.
America compared to China
I told my boss that I’m going to resign, and he offered me twice my current salary if I stay, what should I do?
Back in the day, I went to the office and asked for a $.25 raise just so my family could make ends meet. It took the better part of a year for the boss to get back to me to tell my I was out of line for asking for one, and the company couldn’t afford it.
So, I put out my resume and left. Around a year and a half later, I touched base with my old boss, told him I was out looking for another gig, and asking for a recommendation. What I got back was an email telling me that if I came back, I would get $1.50 more per hour, with increases to come if I stuck around.
Okay, I asked for a quarter an hour more. They couldn’t afford it, but 15 months later, they can outdo the modest increase I asked for? Really?
My advice: Bolt! Run for the door and don’t look back. If they can pay double right now, why didn’t they earlier. This kind of bullshit is not worth your time, and frankly, these “counteroffers” are an insult to your intelligence. Bolt! Leave! Go find someone who appreciates and respects your efforts, and your intelligence.
Stuffed Chicken Breast Wrapped in Bacon
Ready to liven up that chicken dinner? Try Slap Ya Mama’s Stuffed Chicken Breast Wrapped in Bacon! It’s a taste sensation that you have to taste to believe and it’s complete with Slap Ya Mama’s original blend seasoning. Start cooking today!
stuffed chicken breast
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
4 chicken breast halves, boneless and skinless, pounded to 1/2 inch thickness
2 teaspoons olive oil
10 ounces fresh spinach leaves
1/2 cup sour cream
1/2 cup pepper jack cheese, shredded
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 jalapeño, seeded and diced
3 teaspoons Slap Ya Mama Original Blend Seasoning, divided
12 slices bacon
Toothpicks
Instructions
Heat the oven to 375 degrees F.
In a large skillet over medium heat add olive oil, garlic and jalapeños. Sauté until garlic starts to brown.
Reduce heat to medium low, add spinach leaves and sauté until wilted.
Add 1 teaspoon Slap Ya Mama Original Blend Seasoning, pepper jack cheese and sour cream. Stirring continuously, cook mixture until cheese is melted.
On a clean surface, lay chicken breasts flat and season with the remaining 2 teaspoons of Slap Ya Mama Original Blend Seasoning. Spoon a little spinach mixture onto each breast. Roll up each breast with spinach mixture inside and wrap each breast with 2 or 3 slices of bacon, securing the ends with a wooden pick.
Arrange breasts on a baking dish. Bake uncovered at 375 degrees F for 35 minutes.
Set oven to broil and broil for 10 minutes or until bacon is browned.
Remove wooden picks, slice into medallions or serve whole and enjoy!
Chinese school principal teaches students shuffle dance during break
I never get tired of watching this.
What was the reaction of HR when you resigned?
I was with the firm for about 5yrs 3 months. One fine day , I got a Offer letter from a leading MNC in trending technology. I resigned the same day and sent the mail to my manager and cced HR in the evening .
He called me around 10 am next day and enquired about good time to have discussion. I went at 12 and we had a very short discussion and the conversation went like this.
I share a cordial relationship with most of my management.
HR: We respect your decision of resign and we wish you all the best.
Can you please tell me your team details and your manager?
Me: Thanks and told the details
HR: So, xxx will be your last day with us.
May I know the reason for resignation?
Me: I dont like the managemet here. Is the feedback I am gonna share with you just for record sake. or you are actually gonna share this with management?
HR: What made you think feedback was not shared with the management.
Me: I have many a scenarios where feedback was taken but never acted upon.
Hr: I will make sure . please share.
Me: Fine, anyways I have made my decision But I dont want to leave unspoken about the fact.
I have never thought of resigning from this organisation.But, many fake promises are made.
HR: Who made false promise?
Me: You know who usually does.
HR: Smiles!!!
Me: I have been promised an onsite without being asked and I know there was a budget problem in project but management is frequently flying which made me rethink my place here.
HR: Ok got the reason. Anyways He explained about all the policies and rules to be followed during notice period and we are done for that day.
I went to my usual routine.
With in next few hours, My Resource manager(Not my immediate supervisor) walks upto me and asks if I would take back my resignagtion if offered an onsite.
Next day, I get a call Location HR and he asked me if I would be offered onsite I would stay back I said I might think.
Next day RM comes to me,
A new onsite opportunity has popped up in some other project and they are looking for people.
I gave them your name to them , talk to them and let me know.
I said I need some time and I have few question. Is it long term? What is the expectation?
Is it different from my existing stack? How long would it be? For all he said you can manage . It will be min of 1yr.
I said ok and will let you know if couple of days. He asked me to do it faster?
I called the other manager on friday and asked him the same above questions for which he said it is an immediate requirement from client.
and I need to learn new technology. If I am ok with it I need to take back my resignation so that they could do initiate VISA.
I asked him “What is stopping you from initiating VISA if I am serving notice period? ” He said It is policy I said ok.
I told him I will take my resigantion but on one condition. In case the VISA is rejected/ CLient doesn’t like profile.
I want to a written statement that My last date would be the same day as earlier.
For which, He is not sure he need to talk to HR on that.
I am confused and lost in thought . I said I will get back to him on Monday.
On the same day, I went to a Shop nearby Bought couple of beer and started thinking of the opportunity .
For an instance, I thought I better take my resignation back. and Travel abroad.
It has been one of my dream to stay abroad for atleast an year straight.
I gave it a thought over weekend and slept over it.
I called my brother whom I go to for advice. He said only one thing “If you have ever taken step stick to that no matter what.
That is what makes you better person.”
and at the same time I heard quote in movie which said “When you Say ‘NO’ to bigger Things in life You Grow Stronger.”
Then I decided I will continue with my resignation.
I met my RM on Monday, told him that I dont want to take risk. I am not getting confidence in this opportunity.He said ok.
I told the same to the other manager he said no problem.
After this I got three more calls from HR(Reg change of project, CHange of technology, onsite again) and had around 7-8 meetings with manager.
On my last day which is is mid march , whole country came to a standstill coz of Corona and all the Onsite travels are suspend.
I am happy that I made a correct decision, Had I stayed with Onsite promise, My Future could have come to a standstill.
Always stick with your decision, and move forward sincerely, It is destined to happen which ever is to happen.
My mother recently informed me she baptized my two children against my wishes; how should I confront her on this matter?
Let me tell ya a little story.
When my husband was in the hospital, he woke up one day to see a priest looming over him, giving him last rites.
This was the ONLY time he was frightened, because in his mind, last rites was what you’d do right before someone died. Then he realized that I was not in the room, and that if he was actually that close to death, I would have been there with him.
After he got out of the hospital, he told his mother about this, and the first words out of her mouth were, “I didn’t send him!” She tried to say that maybe the hospital arranged it, or maybe it was one of the priests from one of the churches she belonged to (three, of different denominations of which only one does last rites) who stopped by to say hello. Or maybe it was some other priest that stopped by.
Suspicious, that.
When my husband arrived at the hospital, he filled out the intake form and said he didn’t want any religious folks visiting him, and he did not want last rites. That would have stopped the hospital-affiliated clergy from visiting him, but it’s not like they would have stopped a priest that my MIL specifically sent there, particularly if he showed up stealthily, with a scarf covering his collar.
Later, two of my MILs step children made comments to me about how sick my husband must have been to have been given last rites. Hmmm … how did they hear that?
It’s pretty obvious to me that she sent a priest to give him last rites, behind my back, and behind my husband’s (mostly unconscious) back.
But here’s the thing. If she had come to me and said that it was important to her, I would have said yes. I know she’s deep into all three of her religions, and if last rites would have comforted one of her multiple souls, I might have asked her to wait until his condition was more dire, but I wouldn’t have said absolutely no. The ritual wouldn’t have meant anything to my husband, as I would have made sure he wasn’t conscious (and thus not frightened) and it wouldn’t have meant any more to me than if someone came in and waved feathers around to banish demons. But if she wanted that, too, I would have been fine with it, as long as it didn’t affect his health or mental well-being.
I was annoyed at first that she did this behind my back, but that’s how she is. She’s happier when she’s sneaking around and manipulating and thinking that she’s getting away with something. She has only a glancing association with honesty, so she felt better lying to us than admitting what she did.
She is what she is. In the end, it didn’t harm anyone.
Russia – NATO conflict
From Hal Turner.
Below is a piece written by an Observer of matters geo-political - not me -- about the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict. Although I did not write this, it is so "spot-on" that I decided to share it with all of you because it expresses my sentiments and thoughts precisely.
————— BEGIN ————-
I want everyone of you to take a deep breath, and prepare for a flurry of events that will change the world forever, or at least for a very long time.
Always keep in mind what I have told since late 2021 : Russia set up a trap for the United Sates, they worked for at least a decade for this trap, and now, the United States fell into it.
I have decided to remove the word “West” in describing the side that Russia is in conflict with. There is no “West”. It is just the United States and its vassals.
This conflict between the U.S. and Russia/China is going to end when one side achieves its objectives. There is no middle ground, there is no negotiation, because the goal of the United States is to take control of Russia (by weakening it, and create a 90’s Russia, with oligarchs controlling Russia’s resources and themselves being controlled by the U.S., in order to suppress China’s rise, by controlling the flow of Russian resources), while the goal of Russia and China is to stop it.
If Russia and China could’ve stopped the United States by other means than militarily, it would have happened. The reason why the United States cannot be stopped otherwise, is mainly because of China. In China, the United States managed to create and sustain a system of very powerful Chinese economic oligarchs, that control China, and are being controlled by the U.S..
What the U.S. did not managed to do in Russia, they did in China. Putin removed/imprisoned/killed/replaced most of the Russian oligarchs, in a very short period of time; between 2000 and 2010. Xi still is in the process of cleaning China, but the process is much slower and harder then what Putin faced in Russia.
In other words, China’s economic power could not be used to weaken the U.S., and it is still far from being able to do so. The only option is to start a “nuclear” economic war, one that will see both China and the U.S. facing economic collapse and massive internal power struggle that will be from the very top, to the street level.
So, to sum up, the current conflict will end when one side will achieve its goals, the “victory” cannot be achieved economically, but militarily, and most important, the military “victory” must be achieved without nuclear war.
Back in late 2023, I predicted that Russia will re-open the Kharkiv-Sumy front when the Ukrainian defenses will start collapsing, and my estimate for this to happen was between January and April 2024, depending on a number of factors. As you all know by now, after Avdeevka fell, the Ukrainian defenses started crumbling in multiple directions.
When I predicted that this will happen, I was exclusively basing my reasoning on the lack of manpower, and the tremendous destruction that Russian military can bring to the front lines, and the inability of the United States and its vassals to sustain a flow of weapons and ammunition to Ukraine, that can replace what Russia is destroying, while using mathematical calculation applied to military power of both sides.
Obviously, I did not have the exact data to work with, this is why my predictions were confirmed at a later date, but they were confirmed, almost 90% of the time. I however said that when certain events that I predicted (the collapse of Ukrainian defense, the start of Kharkiv-Sumy offensive, Ukraine’s inability to recruit, the U.S. and vassals inability to provide weaponry and ammo, etc.) will take place, and they did, the margin of error of my calculations, and hence, predictions, will be smaller.
While the current Kharkiv offensive is its early stages, and most, if not all of the people talking about it, are reluctant to quantify it, or to set predictions on how big this will be, my own calculations, again, based on what I have already predicted, is that the current Russian offensive is THE BIG ONE, the one that will break the camel’s back.
Based on my calculations, the current manpower of Ukraine is roughly 300,000 troops, barely equipped, and most of them are forced recruits and/or people with minimal military training and combat experience. While this manpower managed to slowdown the Russian advances, by using the vast network of fortifications and fortified towns and villages that they prepared and strengthened since 2014…this is no longer the case.
The front cracked in multiple locations, some Ukrainian brigades fleeing without order, others refused to follow orders, Russia is taking control of towns and villages [at] an increasing rate, since Avdeevka fell, the current fortifications are much weaker, and Russian troops are now passed the mildly hilly areas and went into open terrain. The big picture is that the Ukrainian army is on the brink of collapse, after being reduced in the last 2 years, and especially in the last 3 months (talking about game changers, there is only one : Russian aviation using FAB bombs extensively across the front lines), and there are only 2 options left for Ukraine – capitulation or full retreat across Dniepr river.
As I said back in the summer of 2023, the retreat across Dniepr should have taken place THEN, otherwise Ukraine’s army will be decimated. Retreating now across Dniepr will only BUY SOME TIME for the United States to send its troops and its vassals troops into Ukraine…IF that is what the U.S. is aiming to do…which I believe it is.
By opening the old fronts in Kahrkiv and Sumy, Russia is extending the current 300,000 poorly trained and equipped Ukrainian troops, to an additional 200-300 km front (I believe it will be much longer, around 600 km, because after Kharkiv, comes Sumy, and after, Chernigiv fronts), from a former 900 km front line.
Mathematically speaking, 300,000 Ukrainian troops defending a 900 km front line, will now have to defend a potential (and in my view 100% certain) a front line that is DOUBLE that.
Now, the military goal of Russia is to create the illusion that the United States and its vassal have a choice: commit to the fight, directly, and attempt to stop the collapse of Ukrainian army (or commit to this fight after Ukrainian army collapse), or…leave Ukraine being defeated, stay aside, and avoid WW3.
This is only a illusion of choice, because Russia is actually forcing the United States and its vassal to COMMIT to the fight.
Remember what I have said for over a year now? That Ukraine will NEVER GET F-16s? Well, they still didn’t get any, and will never get any, for reasons that I have explained a year ago, but I will shortly summarize them now : F-16 is a platform that can only function within the NATO military framework, Ukraine doesn’t have proper airfields for F-16s, and if we will ever see Western jets engaging the Russians, those will be piloted by NATO pilots and will operate from NATO airfields.
It is crystal clear that Ukraine lost the war, and the only hope to stop (it’s just a hope, really) Russia is a massive influx of trained troops and military hardware, including a large number of fighter jets, helicopters, cruise missiles, etc.
Ukraine DOES NOT HAVE the trained manpower to operate the required quantity of military hardware that is needed to fight Russia. NATO can send ALL OF THEIR JETS AND TANKS to Ukraine…here aren’t people to use them. And even if there were, such a large quantity of manpower and hardware will only be successful IF OPERATED WITHIN NATO FRAMEWORK AND DOCTRINE.
What I believe that will happen in the next 45 to 60 days, is, 100%, the collapse of Ukrainian Armed Forces. What is also 100% certain, in my view, is a number of NATO countries will OFFICIALLY ENTER the conflict in Ukraine, during, or right after the Ukrainian army collapses.
What is not certain, is how many NATO troops, how good they are, how equipped they are, and what is their goal. If the United States still believe that Russia can be weakened, those NATO troops will aim, at minimum, to secure Odessa and Kiev, which means that Dniepr river have to be secured, and be the new front line.
At this current attrition rate, the appetite for NATO countries to send troops, the Ukrainian Army have about 45 to 60 days to retreat beyond Dniepr, because they will still have roughly 200,000 troops, and NATO to send in at least 100,000 troops.
You cannot secure the Dniepr river without a MINIMUM of 300,000 troops, even if you blow up all the bridges. Keep in mind that Kiev is right on the Dniepr, split in two by the river. Also keep in mind that Russia can easily re-enter Ukraine from Belarus, making the Dniepr river irrelevant as a natural front line.
But, at least, they (200k Ukrainian and 100k NATO troops) can concentrate on the border of Belarus, on the defense of Kiev, and on the Kherson part of Dniepr, buying enough time to reinforce Odessa, Kiev and Belarusian border, give the proximity of Poland (Belarus and Kiev areas) and Romania (Odessa area).
So, to sum up : Ukrainian army is going to collapse in the next 45 to 60 days, during which they will retreat toward Dniepr, NATO troops will enter Ukraine, with the aim to create a strong defense in Kiev, along Belarusian border and on Kherson part of the Dniepr, to secure Odessa, and later on, with the aim of strengthening the above areas, while deploying along Western bank of the Dniepr.
This is basically, in my view, the only possibility to avoid a nuclear war, the conflict will end up in a stalemate between Russia and NATO, and diplomacy will, hopefully start happening.
But…there is a BIG BUT. The above (hopeful) scenario means a DEFEAT FOR BOTH RUSSIA AND NATO.
Without a serious buffer, Russia’s security will always be at risk. Nothing less then what Russia asked NATO in December 2021 (removal of all NATO bases from Eastern Europe) is going to stop Russia. Nothing less then a defeat of Russia is going to stop the United States policy of weakening Russia.
A Russia that occupies half of Ukraine means that NATO was strategically defeated. A Russia that ONLY occupies half of Ukraine, while the other half is full of NATO troops, and all NATO bases are still in place across Eastern Europe, means a defeated Russia in its strategic goals.
If my today’s prediction, that Ukraine army will collapse and start retreating across Dniepr, while NATO officially deploys troops in Ukraine will happen during the next 45 to 60 days…let us pray that a compromise will somehow happen, because the alternative is WORLD WAR 3.
I have very low hope that a compromise will happen…
————– END —————–
Hal Turner Remarks
I very much admire and respect the concise assembly of thought and facts above. It took many aspects of the current conflict into account, and laid out realistic results/consequences of each. Very well written, i think.
This past Friday night, on my radio show, I alerted listeners that a new offensive had commenced by Russia, heading for Kharkiv. The piece above speaks about that.
What I did not project in my remarks, the piece above does. The timeline is always the big unknown.
For instance, when I reported on my radio show that Ukraine assessed Russia’s offensive would being in the late summer, early fall, I had to point out they were way wrong because it had already begun Friday.
The Russians have made very significant gains in the past few days. The Ukraine Army is crumbling already.
So while the writer above suggests 45-60 days for things to come to the point where NATO has to crap or get off the pot, it could be much faster than that. It could also be slower. As above the timeline is always the big unknown.
What is known, though, is that time has grown very short. Whatever enormous event/change is coming, it is now VERY close.
If this thing goes wild weasel, and we start getting hit by Russian missiles here in the USA, you had better be prepared. Food, water, Medicine, generator, fuel for it, radio gear for communications, cash money in your house — not to pay bills, but to survive on. Guns, ammo, and mental willingness to shoot other human beings who are trying to steal your food.
I have a sick feeling we’re heading into some horrifying calamity; and almost no one in the entire country, seems aware of it. The mass media has not reported the serious developments and goings-on relating to the conflict. The American people, and most Europeans, will likely be totally blind-sided when it happens.
YOU have the upper hand. YOU pay attention to sites like this one. YOU have had advance warning. YOU will have prepared as best you can, and that will put YOU faaaaar ahead of the general public.
In any event, get right with God.
ZANZIBAR, TANZANIA 🇹🇿 Things To Do
How is this even legal?
Unethical life hacks.
Whenever you are starting a new job, always let them know that you have 4 alive grandparents. Then you have 4 pre-made excuses for whenever you don’t want to come into work.
When you’re shopping online and need to reach a threshold for free delivery, simply add a gift card to your order. The next time you make a purchase, you can use the card and repeat the process.
When dining alone at a restaurant, bring a notebook. Write in it occasionally. The staff might think you’re a food critic, and they’ll likely try their best to impress you, maybe even treating you to some free food.
If someone ever calls you fat, tell them you used to be 75 lbs heavier. It will make them feel guilty for saying it to you, while also making you look accomplished for losing weight.
Use airplane mode to hang up on people. They will see “call failed” instead of “call ended”.
When you’re looking for a job, post a fake ad for a very similar position on the internet so you could check out the resumes of your competition.
Don’t show your Tinder profile or Instagram to your date. Show your profile on some niche platform like luxy
or Mensa to go from being average to standing out.
If your girl ever gets mad at you and won’t speak, just tighten up all the jars in the house. Eventually she’ll have to talk to you to get your help opening up one of the jars.
If your coworker ever calls in sick for work, you can do the same 1-3 days later. Your boss will think you have the same thing and it’s “going around the office”. Your boss may even do the same shortly after you. It’s called the “fake flu”.
lf you want people to stop letting dogs sh*t on your lawn. Instead of a sign saying “no dogs allowed”, put up one saying “Lawn recently treated with toxic pesticides”. Nobody would let their dog anywhere near your lawn ever again.
If you’re in a taxi and you think the driver is purposely driving slow to get the meter up. Just cough or sneeze to make yourself seem sick and watch the driver speed up to prevent catching something from you.
If you want to slack off at work, slack off but act annoyed or frustrated around your boss. This will give the impression that you’re working hard and the job is getting you heated.
Chinese firearms training in first grade
The Chinese begin military training in first grade and continue with the training throughout the school years.
Who is the most dangerous person that you have ever met or encountered?
A woman named Diane. She was convinced that she was supposed to marry my brother. They never dated or anything, we three played pool one night, and he was kind to her. When she went off her medication, things changed. She threatened to kill me and my family, she left strange objects in the night drop where my brother worked, she tracked him down when he moved, and called me repeatedly, leaving terrifying messages. I changed my phone number. She also started stalking my nephew, and found out where he worked, then called repeatedly. She then called my church, and left messages saying horrible things about me.
During Covid, it all stopped. Nobody heard a peep. At this point, she had been homeless for a while, and we assume Covid killed her, or something else. I tried Googling her several times, but she had literally disappeared off the face of the earth.
She terrified me. I even called my kids schools and gave them a picture of her.
When I knew her in the 90’s, I didn’t know she was schizophrenic. We worked together and hung out. I wish she would have told me because I would have encouraged her to stay on her meds. I’ll always wonder what happened to her because, even though she scared me in the worst times, she was a friend in the good times.
Chinese village couple’s ‘rural-style shuffle dance’ goes viral online
Louisiana Fried Chicken with Pepper Sauce
louisiana fried chicken
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
Chicken
2 1/2 pounds chicken parts, rinsed and patted dry
1 cup buttermilk
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/4 cup yellow cornmeal
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon celery salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1/2 teaspoon cayenne
1 1/2 teaspoons paprika
4 cups vegetable oil, for frying
Pepper Sauce (optional)
1 tablespoon butter
1 1/4 cups no-salt or low-sodium chicken broth
1 medium onion, finely chopped
1/2 green bell pepper, finely chopped
1/2 red bell pepper, finely chopped
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1/4 teaspoon cayenne
1/4 teaspoon salt
Instructions
Chicken
Place chicken in large, glass bowl or dish; pour buttermilk over it. Cover and refrigerate for 30 minutes.
In medium bowl, whisk together flour, cornmeal, salt, celery salt, pepper, paprika and cayenne. Dredge chicken pieces in flour, two at a time, turning to coat all sides thoroughly. Set chicken on a rack and let sit for 30 minutes.
Sauce
In medium saucepan over medium heat, warm butter. Stir in onion and bell pepper. Stew peppers until soft, about 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.
Stir in flour and cayenne. Cook for 2 minutes, stirring often.
Gradually stir in chicken broth. Bring sauce to simmer; reduce heat to low and let cook until thickened, about 5 minutes. Add salt; remove from heat and set aside until needed.
In large, cast iron skillet add oil to fill 3/4 inch deep. Over medium-high heat, warm oil to 350 degrees F. using kitchen thermometer to test oil temperature. Carefully place chicken, skin-side-down in oil. Reduce heat to medium and cook chicken for 15 minutes until browned.
Turn chicken and cook for an additional 10 minutes, until internal temperature registers 180 degrees F on thermometer. Remove chicken and drain on paper towels.
Have you ever been to a care facility for senior people? It’s pretty sad how life plays out.
The good news about living alone right now is that it’s easier to live alone someday should you be the remaining person of the relationship. Sure you may have children or whatnot, but they may not be around as much as you’ll be alone for a vast majority of time.
A common thing I’ve seen in old folks home is that at the end of life, oftentime they go completely alone. These aren’t people who lived a single life, but some were business owners, family people, and people who lived a otherwise full life but this is how they end. It’s kind of selfish to think, but the person who passed before them probably had it lucky to die quickly instead of waiting it out until the end.
A common scene that I’ve seen is someone about to pass, call their family, then they don’t come. The person is left to go alone and they have no one to see them other than the people who work there. Oftentimes these people aren’t used to being alone because they’ve been in a relationship nearly all of their lives and suddenly they’re experiencing everything you are right now on top of their own demise. I’m not sure how that feels but I imagine it would be a lot more torturous and painful than if you had no one and just wondered what sort of life you could have had.
Amazon
How do I make close friends, not just acquaintances, as a female in my early 30s? I’m unmarried, have no children, and I don’t have a great career due to health issues. I’m volunteering in a passion project, but the relationships remain shallow.
I developed a trick. Here’s a common situation: I am very busy, with something I need to get done in the next two hours. Someone I know sees me and says, “Hey Rich, how about getting a cup of coffee with me?” My prior answer used to be, “Can’t. I’ve got to get this done.”
No longer. Now I have a standard answer: “Sure.”
In retrospect, the urgent thing I needed to get done was almost never really urgent. That amazes me. I had simply been putting work ahead of friendship.
I came across an aphorism that encapsulates this: “Never let the merely urgent get in the way of the truly important.” I love that phrase, “merely urgent”! (Nobody really knows who first articulated this thought, but it is a good guide to living your life well.)
I believe the key to friendship is spending unstructured time with people. Discussing business over coffee doesn’t count. Taking a hike to discuss business does count, because in my experience a two hour hike rarely consists of more than 30 minutes of serious business; the rest of the time you are talking about things that don’t really matter. And those conversations often drift, naturally, into discussions that do matter. And then you are at the beginning of a formation of a new true friendship.
What is the smartest comment that you have heard a child make?
I have an almost 21 year old grandson who is still as delightful as he was as a little one. He was a real charmer, but at three he realized he couldn’t charm his parents. We were at an outdoor theater and while waiting we bought popcorn for all of us. My grandson really wanted more, but both mom and dad said no. While still waiting for the play to begin my grandson started exploring where we were seated. We were in the back thinking the kids would get bored. This way they would have more room to move around. My grandson did just that, but with a purpose. He found a lady sitting eating her popcorn. He went and sat next to her. With his big brown eyes he looked at her and “Nice people share their popcorn.’ Of course she gave him some. This is the same kid who sang ‘Jesus must die” in the grocery store because his parents were both working for the show and he was at most rehearsals. My daughter in law said she couldn’t believe that of all the lines in all the songs this was the one he remember. She quickly left the store. I really love this young man since always.
36,000 Kids You Don’t Want to Mess With
This is China.
When did you realize that something you grew up doing in your house wasn’t normal or socially acceptable? What was it?
I was in college, and driving home for a break. Stopped at my roommate’s house on the way, to drop her off. I was invited to spend the night, and did, so I could complete the remaining drive rested.
That evening, my roommate sat at her mother’s feet and told her mom all about college life. Like … ALL about college life. And her mom listened attentively, and asked questions showing her interest, and shared experiences and they laughed together.
I remember being stunned that when her parents asked, “How was the semester?” my friend actually TOLD her parents how the semester was.
I can remember one time I came home from a movie and my mom asked how it was, and I gave my usual “Fine” response, and my mom then asked what movie I went to. I remember that because it literally only happened once. And I had to pause to remember what movie I went to because I was so surprised she asked.
Real, heartfelt communication with one’s parents was a completely novel concept for me.
I also remember when I was 15, a friend was talking to our theater director, crying on her shoulder about something that happened at home. I was confused by what I considered to be my friend’s over-reaction. My theater director looked at me and made eye contact and said, “The way your mother treats you isn’t normal. When she hits you, it’s child abuse.”
I remember that moment so clearly. It was the first inkling I ever got that not everybody was beaten by their moms.
What is the most brutal military force in history?
Many come to mind. The Imperial Japanese Army. The Mongols. The Huns. All war is terrible, but these groups I think deserve to be put into a class of their own when it comes to their brutality. However I think to find truly the most barbaric military force to ever walk the earth we have to wind back the clocks thousands of years to the time of the Neo-Assyrian empire.
Many if not all militaries have engaged in horrible atrocities throughout their period of existence, but few reveled in it the way the Assyrians did. Just look at a few of these primary sources, from the annals of various Assyrian kings:
“I felled 3,000 of their fighting men with the sword. I carried off prisoners, possessions, oxen, and cattle from them. I burnt many captives from them. I captured many troops alive: from some I cut off their arms and hands; from others I cut off their noses, ears, and extremities. I gouged out the eyes of many troops. I made one pile of the living and one of heads. I hung their heads on trees around the city, I burnt their adolescent boys and girls. I razed, destroyed, burnt, and consumed the city.”
—Ashurbanipal II
“I cut their throats like lambs. I cut off their precious lives as one cuts a string. Like the many waters of a storm, I made their gullets and entrails run down upon the wide earth. My prancing steeds harnessed for my riding, plunged into the streams of their blood as into a river. The wheels of my chariot, which brings low the wicked and the evil,were bespattered with blood and filth. With the bodies of their warriors I filled the plain, like grass. Their testicles I cut off, and tore the privates like the seeds of a cucumber.”
—Sennacherib
“I filled the wide plain with the corpses of his warriors. These rebels I impaled on stakes. A pyramid of heads I erected in front of the city.”
—Shalmeneser III
“I flayed as many nobles as had rebelled against me and draped their skins over the pile of corpses; some I spread out within the pile, some I erected on stakes upon the pile… I flayed many right through my land and draped their skins over the walls.”
—Ashurnasirpal II
The Assyrians didn’t just record their appalling behavior in writing, they also carved them into stone:
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Assyrian “art” depicting the flayed skins of dead enemies being hung on a city’s walls
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Victims of impalement
Assyrians ripping the tongues out of captives
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Despite the barbarity of it all, there was a method to the Assyrian madness. The sheer brutality with which the Assyrians acted was done with the goal of dissuading cities from rebelling. Most ancient empires collapse due to internal unrest, and the Assyrians were determined to prevent this fate from befalling them. Their cruelty was a double-edged sword in that while it did convince some cities to stay in line, it also angered others and made them even less tamable than before. Eventually the rebellions mounted and grew to be too much, and Assyria collapsed due to a revolt by the Babylonians and an invasion by the Medes. Whenever I think of the Assyrians, I think of the famous proverb that goes something along the lines of “The harder you squeeze the water in your hand, the more that slips through your fingers”. The story of the Assyrian Empire is a story of squeezing too hard.
Have you ever witnessed someone standing up to a bully? What happened?
I haven’t witnessed someone, but my son was bullied.
I received a call from a principle about an altercation my son had with a bully.
My son was skipping breakfast and buying donuts on his way to school.
He hadn’t eaten the donuts, and they were in his backpack.
The school was having an assembly before classes began.
I guess the bag was part way out of his backpack, so the bully took them out and dumped them on the floor.
The bully and his companions laughed on the way to the assembly.
This incensed my son, and he picked up a jelly-filled donut and went into the assembly.
He found the bully sitting with his companions and smeared the jelly donut all over his face.
He then shouted, “If you ever do that again, I’ll do it again.”
Of course, this stunned the assembly and the principal grabbed both my son and the bully and took them to his office.
His punishment for both was to read War and Peace and give the principal a report on the book.
When the principal called me, he explained that the bully was a well-known bully, and he was much bigger than my son. He feared that this was not the end of the story.
I told him my son had already read War and Peace, so that may not be a punishment for him.
So, the principal meted out another punishment. He would help the janitor clean the assembly hall.
When my son came home late, I asked him why he was late.
He told me he met a nice janitor and helped him clean up the assembly hall.
I just said, “That was nice of you.”
Neither my wife nor my son know the princpal called and they are not on Quora, so I’m spilling the beans here.
A typical day in my life back in the 1970’s into the 1980’s was really quite different from what you would find today. And I am talking about work. Not about life.
For the salary folk
First off, “salaried” people got different perks from “hourly” people.
As a “salary-man”, I entered the complex from our own gate, and we had our own parking lot. Once in, we walked down the office corridor and past the “mahogany corridor” of the “big wigs” of the company.
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Once, I took off my coat, and hung up my hat, I made my way to my desk. I put my briefcase down, and pulled out a note book and pen and then changed the page on my daily tear off calendar. This was a little thing that rested on the desk that we all used to use.
desk
I, being an engineer, had a drafting table on the other side of my office, and in it was a series of curled up drawings that looked a lot like pipes in a box. I had an electric pencil sharpener, and an electric eraser, and a little camel-hair brush to clean the surface with.
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I would then get up to the coffee tureen and pour myself a cup of coffee and grab a donuts. Both the coffee and donuts were provided free to the staff. All we could drink. And usually a couple of donuts per person. back then, office staff had perks.
If you wanted decaf… well, you were out of luck and had to bring in a jar of instant coffee that you kept in your desk.
tureen
Then, back to my desk, where I would then have my morning cigarette (I kept a pack near my desk ashtray) and drink the coffee and read though the local “green sheet”. A few guys smoked a pipe, and only one or two smoked cigars. Most of us smoked cigarettes with Marlboro, Salem, Camel and Kent being the most common.
ashtray
The “Green sheet” was a newspaper for the local town that had personals, want ads, and stuff for sale. It was usually in a stack by the entrance that you would grab when you went in.
greensheet
Around 9 in the morning, the mail boy would come around, and I would see some tasks for me to complete. And so that is when my actual working part of the day would start.
work
Often, I would change my shoes to the steel-toed work shoes for a trip into the factory.
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I would put on my safety glasses and then venture forth. In the dim darkness of the mill.
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Looking at what once was, and comparing it to today, I can see where the youth of today have no idea; no clue as to what work is like.
meeting
Soon after that, we would break for lunch.
Friday us in the office would order a pizza that we would all eat at our desks. But most of the week, we would all file out and go to the local bar. Sort of like this…
bar
There, we would file up to the counter, and order a Chili and a beer before going back to work. Sort of like this…
chili and beer
For today, the habits are based on computers, cubicles and food and coffee deliveries. It’s like it’s a completely different century. No smoking. No drinking. No off-color-jokes. No goofing around. 24-7 company surveillance.
Sheech!
I think that I am just getting old.
Today…
What are some of the most surprising psychological facts about women?
80% of women use silence to express pain
Women take 15 days to fall in love. Men just…8.2 seconds.
Females take longer to make decisions but once they make it, they are more likely to stick to it
Girls are born with a super prior sense of intuition
Women are more likely to fall ino depression because they often blame themselves for the negative situation that they are in.
Women experience significantly more nightmares than men and have more emotional dreams.
A girl cannot keep a secret for more than 47 hours. She would share with someone definitely.
The male brain is 10% bigger than the females but the female brain works more efficiently.
When a woman is attracted to a man, she speaks in a higher pitch than normal
Generally, a woman will only argue with someone she truly cares for. Arguing less occurs when she is less interested.
Pastitsio (Baked Macaroni)
I suppose this could be called the “comfort food” of Greek cooking. Pastitsio uses a béchamel sauce, one of the five mother sauces. My sister and I absolutely love this, and we used to make it all the time when we saw each other more often. But I also eat it at the St. Katherine’s Greek Festival every year.
pastitsio
Prep: 25 min | Cook: 55 min | Yield: 8 to 12 servings
Ingredients
Macaroni
1 pound macaroni
1/4 pound butter
1 1/2 pounds ground turkey or beef
1/2 can tomato paste
6 ounces grated Romano or Parmesan cheese
1 medium onion, chopped
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
Salt and pepper
Sauce
4 cups warm milk, divided
5 eggs
6 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1 1/2 sticks butter
Instructions
Macaroni
Cook macaroni (but not well done) in boiling, salted water and drain.
Sauté onion in a little butter.
Add ground meat and stir until brown.
Add tomato paste, thinned with a little water.
Add salt, pepper, cinnamon and nutmeg. Cook until meat is done.
Melt butter; pour over drained macaroni, mixing carefully.
Spread half of the macaroni on the bottom of a 13 x 9-inch pan.
Sprinkle half of the grated cheese on top.
Spread entire meat mixture on top.
Cover with remaining macaroni and remaining grated cheese.
Sauce
Boil 3 cups of the milk with 1 1/2 sticks butter.
Add flour to remaining 1 cup milk and blend well.
Add flour mixture to boiling butter and milk. Thicken and cool.
After this has cooled, add 5 beaten eggs, or drop small amounts of the milk mixture into the eggs while stirring constantly. Once the egg mixture gets warm to hot, add the remaining milk.
Pour sauce over the macaroni. Shake the pan and insert a knife to penetrate thoroughly.
I was flying from Mumbai to Hong Kong, and it was my first international flight. The trip also was planned on short notice while I was away from home and I couldn’t get enough time to prepare myself. However, I managed to get all important stuff like medicines, warm clothes, required documents, prior to my journey.
Once boarded, I got myself comfortable in the seat and was quite hungry waiting for the dinner to be served. The air hostess came to me and asked for my choice from the meals available for my economy class. There were only two choices to choose from. (1) Seafood pasta made of shrimp and (2) pork rice.
I don’t eat pork and I am allergic to shrimp. I asked her if she could get me a vegetarian meal instead. Sadly, there were no vegetarian meals available and she said that I had to pre-book a vegetarian meal if I wanted that specifically. Having no choice I asked her to give me bread and butter and that should be enough. She looked at me for a while and said, “Let me see what I can do.”
She moved forward serving other passengers and I kept waiting for my bread to come. I saw most passengers completing their dinner and there seemed to be nothing for me till then. I pressed the cabin crew call button to ask for a glass of water before I could go to sleep. An attendant obliged and just when she was handing me over the glass, the earlier hostess arrived with a catering trolley with a nice spread of meal.
She apologized for the delay and said that she was checking if there were any vegetarian meals available in first class.
She arranged the food on my seat tray. That was perhaps one of the best meals I ever had on an aircraft.
I am sure she could have just given me few portions of bread and butter from the food tray that were served to all economy passengers, but she went the extra mile just to bring complete satisfaction to one odd passenger.”
would you like to share about your unforgettable memory at a flight?
Avoid touching the other person while talking, many people dislike being touched.
Clothes must not hang loose on your body in a formal set up.
Tie, belt buckle, and zip must be in a straight line.
There must always be a pinch of seriousness with a mild smile on your face.
Hair must be properly combed.
You can carry a little perfume on your clothes just to give something positive to the people you meet everyday (to avoid the sweat odor) but remember applying too much perfume may give allergies to others or even make you look fake.
You must always be calm, composed & cool about everything. This will build a positive aura around your body attracting people towards you.
Talk looking into the eyes of the other person.
Teeth and mouth must always be clean, chew mint gum or use mouth wash to avoid bad breath.
Never laugh too much in a formal setup. (laugh to your fullest casually)
Speak a bit less and think before you speak because one wrong word can hurt your personality.
Never act desperate even if your life depends on something.
Sit straight don’t bend your back in a formal setup.
Are Japanese people impressed by a foreigner who can fluently speak Japanese?
Originally Answered: Are Japanese people impressed by a foreigner who can fluently speak Japanese? ?
“Yes” at first, “no” in the end and it kind of breaks down into this ideology “Japanese people love it when foreigners visit, but hate it when they stay.” It works in roughly 5 stages:
You don’t speak any Japanese and Japanese people like you. At this point you’re probably visiting and fumbling your way through saying please and thank you at restaurant and the only Japanese people you’ll likely talk with are in the hospitality industry. Any attempt you make will be met with praise and you’ll appreciate it.
You can say some basics and Japanese people will really like you. By now you’ve been around a few months, can order at a restaurant and say a few general sentences. You’ll probably have a few Japanese friends that encourage you but communicating back and forth in Japanese is still out of the question.
Conversational and Japanese people will love you. By now you can go back and forth about daily life and you’re speaking to friends, friends of friends, hospitality workers, co workers and random bar conversations. You’ll constantly get praised on your speaking ability and you’ll drink it up basking in your new found super powers. Usually this is about 1 – 2 years into your stay depending on how hard you study / immerse yourself.
Close to fluent and Japanese reaction will start to split. (Partly because you’re now interacting with a much broader set of Japanese natives)
Hospitality industry workers and old ladies will still fawn over you but it’s over the same things as before: you can say your name, where you’re from and use chopsticks. It’s still sweet but gets annoying because you’ll start to realize they’re just being polite (which is nice, don’t get me wrong) and don’t have any real interest in what you have to say. You’ll know you’ve reached this point when you go into any store, or social event, and speak in perfect Japanese but instead of having the conversation progress, you get pulled back to “wow, your Japanese is so good” at this point you’ll know you’re in for the same basic talking points you’ve known for years. This is like 80% of your daily experience.
Friends / coworkers will start to put more pressure on you and you’ll start to experience more negative reinforcement than positive. Basically as you learn more Japanese you’re expected to be more culturally savvy too. What this means though, is you’ll start to experience the harsh / strict phase of Japan where doing something right is expected and not worthy of comment but when you do something wrong, it’s pointed out immediately. This is probably 15%.
Frustrating strangers who refuse to understand you. Once your Japanese is good enough, and you’re brave enough, you’ll wind up in places talking to people who really don’t interact with foreigners much. Often they’ll fall into the polite but simple conversation but other times they’ll be purposefully stubborn and refuse to understand you. Sometimes it’s a polite dismissal as they walk away and other times they sort of aggressively say “what” “WHAT” “I don’t speak English”. Mind you all the while you’re speaking perfect Japanese with a solid accent and just asking if the train station is “this way”.
Police. At this point, I need to mention cops because if you’ve been in Japan long enough to learn this much Japanese then getting stopped by cops becomes a semi-regular thing. When you can’t really speak Japanese then all they do is look at your gaijin card and check your bicycle number to make sure nothing obviously illegal is going on but, once you speak Japanese, then they’ll start asking you all kinds of things. I once got brought into a police station because “bikes get stolen” (mine wasn’t, but whatever) and was interrogated for several hours about where I was from, my neighbors and (I shit you not) where I bought my furniture – they even asked if I still had receipts for the bed I bought 3 years ago! (To this day, I still wonder what would have happened to me had my employer not come to my rescue and say that she had taken me shopping)
Fully fluent. I only barely got to this level before saying “fuck it”. Why? Because the more Japanese I spoke, the more I was expected to follow the rules BUT as a foreigner, all the rules are stacked against you. Getting a drivers licence, apartment, any non-English teaching job, they’re all set up to basically prevent foreigners from succeeding. Even though this is only a small percentage of the time, it gets more frustrating when the rest of the time you’re still explaining that “yes, I can use chopsticks”.
So, do Japanese get excited when foreigners speak Japanese? Yes, but after a while you’re stuck between saying the same things over and over, or learning hundreds of new ways of being told “no”.
‘And this,’ our guide said, ‘is where Colonel Piroth committed suicide.’ We were standing by a fenced-off scrap of wasteland on the edge of a busy market. The only evidence that anything of significance happened there is a white cement block carved with an image of two artillery pieces and an almost illegible inscription in Vietnamese. The entrance to Piroth’s bunker, if it still exists, is overgrown and filled with rubble.
Piroth was the deputy commander of French forces at Dien Bien Phu, a one-armed war hero and gunnery expert who had boasted that ‘no Viet Minh cannon will be able to fire three rounds before being destroyed by my artillery.’ In fact the Viet Minh made short work of the French artillery. ‘I have been dishonoured,’ Piroth said. Soon afterwards, using his teeth, he pulled the safety pin out of a grenade and blew himself to pieces.
Dien Bien Phu was one of the decisive battles of the post-1945 era. Not since the British were turfed out of Afghanistan in the 19th century had an indigenous army inflicted so resounding a defeat on a colonial power. The battlefield was a remote valley in north-west Vietnam, eleven miles by three, encircled by mountains, the best part of two days’ journey from Hanoi along precipitous roads winding through jagged limestone hills. Today it is a bustling town, but in the 1950s the valley was inhabited mainly by people of the T’ai minority who grew rice and smuggled opium.
The French strategy seems to have been to block the route into neighbouring Laos, where an uprising against colonial rule was also underway, and to tempt the Viet Minh into a set-piece battle which the French, with their tanks, artillery and aircraft, were confident of winning. The construction of an airstrip meant they were not dependent on roads and well supplied with heavy weapons. They were taken completely by surprise when, on 13 March 1954, the Viet Minh artillery, much of it recycled US weaponry captured by the Chinese in Korea, opened up on them from the surrounding hills. Before long the air strip was out of action and the French troops were trapped.
The Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett was with Ho Chi Minh ‘at his jungle headquarters’ when the battle began:
‘This is Dien Bien Phu,’ said President Ho as he tipped his sun helmet upside down on the bamboo table. ‘Here are mountains,’ and his slim, strong fingers ran around the outer rim of the helmet, ‘and that’s where we are.’ Then his hand plunged down into the bottom of the helmet: ‘Down there is the valley of Dien Bien Phu – that’s where the French are. The best troops they have in Indo-China. They will never get out.’
Burchett also described the extraordinary logistical feat that enabled the Viet Minh to encircle the valley:
The countryside, so quiet and passive – especially as seen from the air – in daytime, boiled with activity at night. From trucks to oxcarts, bicycles and human backs, every imaginable form of transport hauled supplies through the jungle and up and down the steep mountains... Before dawn and the inevitable reconnaissance planes, shrubs and trees were planted on those supply lines, to be removed as the convoys started moving again at dusk.
A short walk from the derelict place where Colonel Piroth met his end, across a battered bridge, is the bunker of the French commander, Colonel (later General) Christian Marie Ferdinand de La Croix de Castries, described by the American journalist Stanley Karnow as a ‘lean aristocrat with a Roman profile whose ancestors had soldiered since the crusades. Irresistible to women and riddled with gambling debts, he had been a champion horseman, dare devil pilot and courageous commando.’ The three French artillery bases – Gabrielle, Beatrice and Isabelle – were allegedly named after his mistresses. His heavily sand-bagged bunker is well preserved and can be visited for 60,000 dong (£2). It is rather better appointed than Colonel Piroth’s.
Close to what is now the town centre is a 32-metre hill criss-crossed with trenches and bunkers which the Viet Minh did not succeed in capturing until the final day of the battle, 7 May. Towards the end they brought in coal miners from Hong Gai who, unseen by the defenders, dug a long tunnel under the hill and packed it with a thousand pounds of explosives. The crater has been preserved for posterity.
As Vietnam grows in prosperity Dien Bien Phu is an increasingly popular attraction for domestic tourists. There is a large museum, the highlight of which is a huge circular mural, said to have been the work of two hundred artists, depicting every detail of the battle. There are four flights a day from Hanoi and innumerable air-conditioned tour buses winding their way overland.
Up in the hills, the headquarters of the Vietnamese commander, Vo Nguyen Giap, has also been added to the tourist itinerary. It consists of a handful of thatched bamboo huts and a series of rooms dug into the side of a hill, spread out along a forest track. Next to the car park a temple has been erected in Giap’s honour. The centre piece is a large golden bust on an altar piled high with offerings. You wonder what he would have made of it.
The battle at Dien Bien Phu lasted 55 days. On 8 May 1954 the French government announced that France would withdraw from Vietnam. The casualties on both sides were horrendous. About eight thousand Viet Minh were killed and twelve thousand wounded. French casualties, many of whom were recruited from their North African colonies, numbered 2200 dead and 5600 wounded. Many more died on the long march into captivity.
A great power conference underway at Geneva, having dealt with Korea, was about to turn its attention to Vietnam. Given that the French had announced their intention to withdraw, it ought to have been easily resolved. All that was required was to organise an orderly departure followed by internationally supervised elections.
The Americans, however, were having none of it. Already they were bankrolling much of the cost of the French war and for some time the secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, had been trying to persuade President Eisenhower to use B-29 bombers to help relieve the French. Eisenhower refused, saying he would not contemplate direct intervention without the support of both Congress and America’s allies, notably Britain. Dulles flew to London but for once Eden and Churchill wouldn’t co-operate. According to the French foreign minister, Georges Bidault, Dulles had taken him aside on the eve of the Geneva conference and offered him atom bombs.
The Americans went to Geneva determined to undermine any settlement. Dulles refused even to shake hands with the Chinese prime minister, Zhou Enlai. The Chinese and the Russians were anxious to prevent another war in Asia and leaned heavily on the Vietnamese to make concessions. In the end it was agreed that Vietnam would be temporarily divided at the 17th parallel, pending elections to be held within two years. The Americans refused to sign. Eisenhower wrote in his memoirs:
I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indo-Chinese affairs who did not agree that, had elections been held at the time of the fighting, possibly 80 per cent of the population would have voted for Ho Chi Minh.
He was being disingenuous. There was little or no fighting in the two years following Geneva.
Although they had pledged not to undermine the Geneva Agreement the Americans immediately set about doing so. In the South they created and armed an artificial regime under a stubborn and ruthless mandarin, Ngo Dinh Diem. The CIA set up the Saigon Military Mission under Colonel Edward Lansdale, a specialist in psychological warfare and dirty tricks. In the North, which was not yet under fully under Viet Minh control, the CIA sent in agents under Major Lucien Conein with instructions to sabotage the transport network. They contaminated the fuel supply for Hanoi’s buses and concealed explosives in the coal supplies destined for the railway. It would be another 17 years before any of this became public with the release of the Pentagon Papers. Rumours were also spread among the superstitious northern Catholics that ‘the Virgin had gone south’ and a massive evacuation was organised.
The elections decreed by the Geneva Agreement never took place. The southern arm of the Viet Minh, who had regrouped to the North following Geneva, grew increasingly impatient and, despite being discouraged by the Hanoi government, who had enough problems of their own, began to infiltrate the South. By 1961 a new war was underway, in which at least a million Vietnamese were destined to die and much of the country reduced to ruins. A war that might have ended at Dien Bien Phu lasted another twenty years.
John Foster Dulles never lived to see the mayhem he caused. He died in 1959. Ho Chi Minh did not live to see his country reunited, dying in 1969. General de Castries lived until 1991. As for Vo Nguyen Giap, the school teacher turned general, he outlived them all, dying in 2013 at the age of 102.
When did you first realize that life is not fair? How did you respond to it?
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This is Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum – the son of Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum – the Ruler of Dubai.
This young man is:
Amazingly Handsome
Born into Royalty
Has the most powerful man in the Middle East as his Father
Has been provided the Best Education in the World
Has been given the Best Mentors in the World
Has unlimited access to unlimited money, power, wealth, opportunities and people
He doesn’t have to go to work
He doesn’t have to report to anyone
He doesn’t have to worry about anything
Whatever he wants – he can get the fastest, most expensive, most sophisticated and most amazing stuff – just with a click of a finger
And will one day be given one of the most powerful Emirates in the World to Rule
And did I tell you he is one of the most desired men in the Middle East?
Now – who wouldn’t love to be in the shoes of this man?
How did you respond to it?
Simple. Opened up my MacBook Pro and continued typing my answers on Quora. Why break my bald tattooed head on something I cannot change?
Why the US is a Paper Tiger Vs China
What is the most pathetic thing you’ve seen an addict do to get their fix?
My sister died (God rest her soul) when she was 24 on January 1st, 2006. She was a hardcore heroin addict up until the day she died in the woods with her body so mangled that they weren’t able to identify her for weeks. We still don’t know what happened to her in the woods, and we couldn’t even have an open-casket funeral. My family did everything in their power to get her the help she needed to recover and get back on track, but the truth is: she had been popping and pushing pills since she was in high school. She went to juvie at age 16 for shooting up in the school bathroom. Needless to stay, my sister had a track record. She did, said, and stole anything and anywhere just to get her fix.
On my 6th birthday she came to visit me in Massachusetts. Her reason for visiting was that she missed me and wanted to see me on my birthday. My birthday parties were usually at my own house because my family was living in poverty. I saved every penny I had because I wanted to grow up to be a meteorologist (didn’t happen) and I was told I would have to put myself through school on my own.
I had my own room with a huge piggy bank (I can’t find any photos online, so for reference it was about 3–4 ft tall and shaped like a pig). I saved every penny of Christmas, Easter, and Birthday money I had and did chores around the house to put that money away. In total I had ~$500 in that bank from previous years. Because I was 6, I trusted my sister. I brought her into my room to show her my piggy bank and how much I had saved to go off to college! She looked and acted so proud of me and even gave me a hug.
My sister stayed for a couple of days to spend time with my mother and I. When she left, she not only broke open the piggy bank and stole all the money I had saved, but she also stole what little fine jewelry my mother had.
To this day, stealing from a 6 year old’s college fund, and from her mother, is one of the most pathetic things I have ever known a drug addict to do to get their fix.
With that said, I loved my sister. She was troubled, but I loved her no matter what she did. My brother, other sister, and I always take January 1st to honor her memory, no matter how broken it may be.
Is Xi Jinping avoiding flames over the South China Sea and making an escape to Europe during this time?
The Philippines is synonymous with weakness, no matter how much the US arms it, it is like an ants’ nest, a pot of hot water poured on it and it is immediately finished.
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The Philippines is a fragmented country comprising 7,100 islands and islets, with 11 islands (Luzon, Mindanao, Samar, etc.) accounting for 96% of the country’s total area of 299,700 square kilometres and a population of 100 million.
Its ethnic composition is complex, with the largest ethnic group, the Visayans, accounting for only 33.7% of the total population, and the rest of the ethnic groups being the Tagalog people, Ilocano people, Bicolano people and Bicolano people. For a long time, power in the Philippines was monopolised by the Catholic Tagalog people and Visayans of the north.
The total strength of the Philippine Regular Army is about 123,000, of which about 87,000 are in the Army, 20,000 in the Navy, and 16,000 in the Air Force; the current police force is about 160,000 strong.
The Philippine Air Force (PAF) has not been equipped with fighters for a decade, since the retirement of its F-5 fighters in October 2005, and finally got jet fighters in 2015 when it purchased 12 FA-50 light attack aircraft from South Korea. The aircraft, converted from the trainer T-50, has a top speed of Mach 1.5 and a maximum load of 4.5 tonnes.
Currently, the Philippines ranks sixth among the 10 ASEAN countries in terms of military strength, behind Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar and Malaysia, and slightly ahead of Cambodia, Laos, Brunei and Singapore.
The Philippines also faces threats from anti-government armed groups such as the New People’s Army (Bagong Hukbong Bayan), Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), Grupong Abu Sayyaf (GAS), Maute group, and Bangsamoro Islamic Freedom Fighters (BIFF).
In addition, the Philippines is a major global stronghold for drug production and trafficking, producing about 70 per cent of the world’s cannabis products, with some 13 transnational drug cartels and 175 homegrown drug trafficking organisations. In 2018, the Philippines had a full-blown war on drugs that resulted in the deaths of 1,200 militants, government soldiers, and civilians.
A shithole tool like the Philippines anyway. If Xi Jinping sneezes, the Philippines will most likely disappear from the map.
Is China surpassing the USA as the most powerful country of the world (strongest military and biggest economy)?
Yes. China is advancing very quickly. Economically, it surpassed the USA by purchasing power parity back in 2014. And it’s on track to surpass the USA in nominal terms within 20 years.
China’s military modernisation has been nothing short of breathtaking. It now has the world’s largest navy by number of ships, and it’s building ships faster than any other country on earth.
China is building the world’s second largest aircraft carrier fleet. It has the Type 001 Liaoning, Type 002 Shandong, and Type 003 Fujian (which is about to undergo sea trials). Construction of the nuclear-powered Type 004 has just begun.
The Type 055 cruiser is regarded as the world’s most powerful warship. The Type 052D destroyer is no slouch, either.
China has the world’s most advanced hypersonic missiles. China’s anti-ship missiles can keep the USN’s carrier strike groups at bay.
China has the world’s most advanced ASW tech.
Meanwhile, the US military has been sliding downward for decades. Pockets of advancement such as the USS Gerald R. Ford and the F-35 don’t count for much.
How China breaks the US Hegemony
Carl Zha speaks to @TheRedPillDiariesOfficial about how rise of China’s manufacturing superpower status is challenging the US hegemony over the globe. why the US lack the resources to confront China and how China is responding to the recent deployment of US Army Special Force Green Berets to Kinmen Island in the Taiwan Strait, just kilometers from the mainland Chinese coast. How the US Imperial overreach impact its China containment strategy
What is a phrase your children picked up but get hilariously wrong?
Few days ago as I was doing laundry, I heard my daughter’s sing-songy voice from her room:
What the fuck…
I waved my head, concluding that I must have heard it wrongly and continued folding the laundry.
Just a moment later, there it was again, louder this time, still sing-songy:
WHAT THE FUCK…
She is learning English, but doesn’t really speak it yet. I couldn’t imagine that she would know what those words mean, or where she would have learned them.
As I was finishing with the laundry and planning to go check with my daughter about the strange phrase she was repeating, I heard my son, who was playing with her in her room yell in the same melodious voice:
WHAT THE FUCKKK….
That triggered a WHAT THE HELL response in my head and I barged in the room, ready to have a talk with my kids about how those words are not OK to be spoken because they are not nice and blah blah… the usual parenting stuff.
When I entered the room, I saw an adorable scene that looked something like this:
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My little performers smiled excitedly and asked me to listen to their song. Then, together, with great stage faces they sang:
WHAT THE FUCK SEN!
TUDUDUDUDUUM… WHAT THE FUCK SEN!
NANANANANAAAAA… WHAT THE FUCK SEEN!
BUUUUNUUUNUUNUUUNUU… WHAT THE FUCK SEN!
I burst out laughing, and clapped my hands with a huge smile on my face. In fact, I couldn’t say much for a while, because I laughed so much. Thankfully, kids took it as my great appreciation for their performance.
The song they were performing so passionately was a song that is very popular in our home as of late, the famous What Does The Fox Say by Ylvis.
Marriage: That marriage you are trying to save? Yea, that one, isn’t worth it. Go your separate ways and find happiness outside of relationships.
Fast food: The processed food you are putting in your body, will catch up to you. Nourish your soul, life is longer than you think.
Health: Make time for exercise. I know you feel like you are indestructible, but you aren’t. Time has a way of catching up to you. And if you don’t use your time wisely, you will know.
Relationships: If you weren’t married by 30, then you’ve probably experienced some brutal asshole thats taken advantage of your kindness(unless you’re that asshole). Learn from that asshole, accept the lesson and grow. Stop ruminating.
Clock: Father Time doesn’t stop. We keep aging. The Botox, hair dye, plastic surgery, or whatever you “invest” in to stop the clock, won’t work. Happiness doesn’t come from looks, it comes from what’s inside.
Self Awareness: As you age, you gain life experience. And with life experience, come lessons, if you pay attention. Pay attention to the lessons, don’t try and escape them.
Alcohol: It won’t make you prettier, more confident, more likable, or more accepted. But it will result in bad judgement and choices.
Choices: The choices you make in your 30’s will greatly effect your life in your 40’s. And when you’re in your 40’s looking back, you will see stupid choices. Choose wisely.
Tomorrow: Quit saying you will make a change tomorrow. Today is your tomorrow. Please believe that.
Friends: They will come and go, pay attention. Know the difference between friends and acquaintances.
Life Happens: Yep, it does. And it sure as shit isn’t always fair. Roll with the punches and make your 50’s a time you don’t have to ask about your 40’s.
This bread is used as the basis for Navajo Tacos and can also be folded over a stuffing and eaten as a sandwich. At special events through the Southwest they are cooked in large round pots over open mesquite fires by Native Americans.
fry bread3
Ingredients
3 cups unbleached flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups warm water or milk
1 tablespoon vegetable oil or shortening
Oil or shortening, for deep frying
Instructions
Measure dry ingredients into a deep mixing bowl.
Add shortening and knead with hands until dough is in small pea-size pieces.
Add warm, not hot, water and knead with hands until dough is smooth and leaves sides of bowl. Knead for at least 5 minutes.
Cover with a clean dish towel, and place in a warm place to rise for 30 minutes.
This is the secret for tender fry bread – kneading and resting.
Divide dough into portions about golf-ball size and pat, slap, or roll out as round as possible, 1/4 inch thick.
Fry in hot shortening or oil about 1 inch in depth. Fry both sides until light golden, not dark brown.
Top with refried beans, confectioners’ sugar or honey.
Notes
Fry Bread is often served sprinkled with confectioners’ sugar or drizzled with honey. Sometimes chopped onions and chiles are mixed into the dough. The Ute tribe forms the tortillas in the same way as fry bread, but they cook them over a charcoal grill outdoors or over an open fire. This method also makes delicious Fry Bread.
Fry Bread is served on the plaza at San Xavier Mission Del Bac (White Dove of the Desert) in Tucson, pow wows, rodeos, etc.
That man didn’t have 90% of his brain. The skull was almost entirely filled with cerebrospinal fluid and all that remained of the brain was a thin peripheral portion surrounding the skull.
empty
Yet that man, whose IQ was below average (IQ 75), had been leading a normal life for years: he was married, had two children, a job and was obviously aware of himself, he moved, laughed, loved and ultimately he lived.
The case shocked the world scientific community and was described in the prestigious Lancet journal, becoming the subject of questions and amazement. The evidence of the facts raised, as can easily be imagined, many questions about the very concept of consciousness, understood as “awareness of the self” and the possibility of leading a normal life practically without a brain.
The patient’s clinical history was reconstructed and it was discovered that he was born suffering from a form of hydrocephalus. For this reason, a few months before his life, a cerebral shunt was inserted into his skull, capable of draining excess cerebrospinal fluid. That shunt was removed at the age of 14 and the patient, after an initial series of problems that had caused paresis in his left leg, was eventually able to resume an almost normal life and had completely forgotten about the problem. Over the next 30 years, the liquor began to invade the skull again and progressively erode the brain (90% of the brain!), leading to that feeling of weakness in the leg which prompted the patient to undergo a medical examination. at the age of 44. But all this was not able to explain how the brain invaded by cerebrospinal fluid and eroded by 90% of its volume had “known” to recalibrate itself over the years, allowing him to lead a normal life anyway.
Axel Cleeremans, a cognitive psychologist at the Université Libre of Brussels, Belgium, attempted to answer these questions in 2016 during a conference of the Association for Scientific Studies on Consciousness, held in Buenos Aires.
According to Cleeremans, the case of the French patient had demonstrated the extraordinary “readaptation capacity” of the human brain. The frontal, parietal, temporal and occipital lobes of the brain, in fact, preside over the main cognitive and perceptive functions, yet in the patient they were practically completely absent and this demonstrated that the brain of that man – and therefore of every man – had been able to “move” those functions to the residual perimeter section of 10%.
The second ability that was made evident by the clinical case under examination was the “plasticity of the brain”. According to Cleeremans’ hypothesis, “self-awareness” (or detailed self-cognition) is formed through experience, the relationship between oneself and the surrounding world and learning, and is subject to continuous modifications and adjustments in course of life.
The case of the French man who lived a normal life until the age of 44 without 90% of his brain demonstrated to science a fact that had until then been unknown, namely that just 10% of the brain tissue is sufficient to re-elaborate a “theory of the self” and to make that person a man in all respects.
I asked AI to make a Music Video… the results are trippy
What was the saddest reason you’ve seen an adult crying in public?
This just happened to me today.
I got a call from my ex-girlfriend who told me she was having a crisis and to meet her at the local diner, so after I left church I met her for breakfast. Once we sat in the booth she started sobbing. Of course everyone in the diner was looking at me like I was an unfaithful wife-beater who was taking the children after blowing the mortgage at the track.
It seems that her cat got out and a local do-gooder organization scooped it up. Not 24 hours later they tried to extort over 1000 dollars from her saying they spayed it, microchipped it, gave it all kinds of vaccines and on and on and on. It was thievery and extortion.
She went to the local police. They laughed at her. She went to Animal Control who was sympathetic and tried to get the cat back from them because the finders are supposed to surrender the cat to them anyway. They refused. They took down the Facebook page advertising that they had the cat up for adoption and won’t answer any questions about the cat from Animal Control. So my ex is bereft about her cat languishing in cat prison, thinking it’s been abandoned and she is bereft without her beloved cat.
So tomorrow we are going to the Town Hall and calling the Lawyer and the State Police and anyone else we can think of who can move these criminals to return the cat.
Edit 4/11
So after calling all kinds of government agencies
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the cat napping bitch returned the cat today.
What’s a good example of “never mess with the quiet ones”?
I was 14 and had put up with three years of bullying at school. I wasn’t a coward. I just didn’t want to hurt anyone. Violence wasn’t part of my nature and so I avoided any kind of confrontation that was directed at me.
Everybody at school knew I was one of the quiet kids and would not retaliate when I was being bullied.
For several weeks this kid had been poking me in the back during class and calling me a faggot in front of everyone. It was pretty humiliating being laughed at by the whole class.
One day I snapped.
I happened to be writing an essay in my English workbook with a lead pencil. All of a sudden I turned around and stabbed him in the hand with it and told him to leave me alone.
His hand was resting on the desk just behind my back. I am not proud of that moment but the whole class hushed. His name was Garry Pankhurst, and he was a troublemaker and a general dick.
He pulled back and let out a scream. I saw his hand; the pencil didn’t go in far, about 1/4 of an inch but enough for him to get the message.
He called me out at lunch time for a fight in the yard, which I accepted. By the time I walked around the back of the building, half the school was in a circle and parted the way for me to enter the ring where he was waiting for me.
I didn’t know what to do as I had never had a fight before. He looked rather small standing in front of me but nonetheless came at me. I grabbed him in a headlock before he could get a punch on me. Then he grabbed my hair from the back. I warned him to let go of my hair. All I did was restrain him to start with. I warned him three times to let go of my hair. When he refused, I hit him once in the face, a quick, short but hard jab.
He dropped to the ground. By then three teachers came and broke the ‘fight’ up. They were shocked to see me, the quiet kid, in the middle of it. We were marched up to the office to the cheers of the crowd.
There was zero tolerance for fighting, and I was summarily punished with six ‘cuts’ by a thick strap to each hand by the deputy principal.
After that event he stopped bothering me.
I do not advocate any kind of violence, or condone bullying in any form. What I did was wrong. But after all, I was just a kid who had had enough. Even I had limits.
EMERGENCY CODE RED: BELARUS LOADS NUKES ON PLANES, US AMBASSADOR LEAVES RUSSIA! PENTAGON LIES!
I had a cat named Phelili. I had written about her before. I had found her on the side of the road during a torrential downpour, when her mother was killed.
This event happened about ten years later.
My first wife and I had broken up. We were not yet divorced, as she still was an out-patient with the local mental group. I was in Boston. She was living in an apartment in Pennsylvania.
I was living my life.
And my ex-wife was living her life. She had our cats.
Oh, about six months in…
I started having nightmares every night. It was the same series of dreams, and it was driving me bonkers. They lasted for about three weeks.
My dream was the same thing over and over…
My little cat Phelili was trapped in an apartment, and couldn't get out. She could look out the window. She could see the stairs to go up, and the street below, but was unable to leave. She had water, but was running out of food.
Since these dreams concerned our joint cat Phelili, I tried called my wife, but no one answered.
And so I left it at that.
And the dreams stopped.
About one month later my ex-wife called me. She had tried killing herself again, and was taken to the hospital. When she healed up some, she was permitted to return to the apartment. The cat was alive. She was drinking water from the toilet. But hadn’t eaten in weeks.
I was really angry at her. How could she be so selfish to starve our cat? What was she thinking. Well, she wasn’t. She was acting on emotions impulsively.
Ok. This story ends, the cat died of old age about six years later. But the point that I want to make here is that my cat was trying to communicate with me using PSI / ESP and I was receiving the messages.
My mind, however, was not putting two + two together.
Hindsight is a bitch. What I should have done was to ask for someone to go to the apartment and check up on her and the kitty. Shit!
Lessons learned.
Don’t mess up like I did.
Today…
What did you see that blew your mind?
>> What did you see that blew your mind?
One time I was in McDonalds and it was lunch rush time so they were busy. At the front of the line was a Puerto Rican man trying to order but he did not have a good command of English so the employees were having a hard time understanding him.
So, it was taking a little time and I never get wound up about stuff like that; especially since there are was an obvious language barrier.
Well, this other guy in line started mumbling and complaining how long it was taking. And he kept getting louder and louder. Everyone was looking at him like — dude, chill out.
Finally he had enough of his precious time being wasted and he broke line and walked up to the man and asked “Hey- Jose…where are you from?” The man said “Puerto Rico.” Then the rude man said very loudly “Why don’t you go back to your own country and don’t come back to ours until you learn the language.”
Stunned, the poor guy didn’t know what to say and everyone else got real quiet.
Understand something- I am a very passive person and I do not get involved in arguments, altercations or anything like that. But this just made me so angry that I couldn’t help it…bear in mind I never say things like this either or use bad language (which it really isn’t a bad word I guess anyway)
I looked right at him and said “Puerto Ricans are American Citizens you jackass…why don’t you go back to 2nd grade and learn that he is in his own country. Puerto Rico is a US Territory, therefore part of the United States which makes him a US Citizen just like you!”
Again, I never use even that word but at the moment, it was the only fitting name I could think of to call him.
You could have heard a pin drop for a few seconds and then everybody else started agreeing with me and told that guy how rude he was and that he owed the guy an apology.
That rude guy was so embarrassed he walked out without even ordering anything. And then someone else in line ended up paying for the Puerto Rican man’s lunch which I thought was a really nice gesture.
I just can’t believe how rude and ignorant some people are. It really blew my mind to think someone would even think of saying something like that to another person.
Iranian firebrand MP Mahmoud Nabavian reveals the calculated strategy, diplomatic intrigue, and bold military prowess that showcased Tehran’s 13 April missile strikes on Israel.
Following the strategic success of Iran’s ‘True Promise’ retaliatory drone and missile operation in response to last month’s Israeli bombing of the Iranian consulate in Damascus, The Cradle presents an exclusive insider‘s narrative provided by Iranian Member of Parliament Mahmoud Nabavian, a principalist who won the most votes in Tehran during the country’s March elections.
His account of the retaliatory strikes against the occupation state offers unparalleled insights into the 13–14 April events. With access to military sources, Nabavian’s testimony serves as the most detailed view to date by an Iranian government official on Iran’s response, one that has sorely exposed the vulnerabilities of Israel’s air defense systems.
In a closed Telegram posting, Nabavian explained that Israel’s “cowardly” attack, which led to the martyrdom of prominent leaders in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), occurred “on our soil” – a reference to the Iranian diplomatic mission in Damascus:
“As the Imam [Ali Khamenei] said, the enemies made a mistake.” Iran’s full-on retaliatory strikes, he thus maintains, were justified and legal under Article 51 of the UN Charter .
Below is a transcript (edited for length) from Nabavian’s important revelations about Iran’s military strikes on Israel and the flurry of international deal-making attempts that preceded them:
Two hours after the attack on the consulate in Damascus, the Iranian National Security Council convened and affirmed the inevitability of a response and gave a 10-day deadline to take the necessary diplomatic measures and for the armed forces to prepare their plan to respond.
Diplomatically, the first step was to go to the Security Council, even though we knew that this would be futile. But it was necessary to file a complaint about the attack on our land, assert our natural right to self-defense, and request a Security Council session. Because we are not members of the Council, we had to talk to member states to request that the session be held.
China, Russia, and Algeria agreed. Russia submitted the request, and the session was held, but the US, Germany, Britain, and France did not allow a statement to be issued condemning Israel. The heads of our missions abroad were also active in informing the concerned countries that we would respond to the Zionist entity.
Due to these pressures, Israel denied it had attacked a diplomatic building and that those who were targeted were not diplomats. The consulate building, four of its five floors, were purchased 45 years ago and were designated for diplomatic work. It was indeed a diplomatic building.
After we assured the international community of our right to respond, some countries, such as the US, Germany, England, France, Canada, and Egypt, tried to convince us not to do so, and they confirmed their readiness to meet Iran’s requests. For example, some of these countries that were not previously willing to grant entry visas to our diplomats or officials suddenly decided to do so immediately.
When the US realized that we were serious, it sent a threat that if the response was launched from Iranian territory, it might attack Iran. Our response was that the US is not among our targets, but if it decides to involve itself in defense of Israel, we will respond by targeting it as well, and as you know, there are many American bases around us.
Despite this, the US, Britain, France, and Germany insisted on the same message, yet our answer was that Israel crossed a red line. Then, they said, if we must respond, let it be from outside Iranian territory.
Why did they insist that the strike not be from inside Iran? Because for a long time, they have been assassinating our nuclear scientists and carrying out sabotage operations at the Natanz nuclear reactor. In the last six months alone, they have assassinated 18 members of our armed forces, and we have always responded through our allies [in the Axis of Resistance], but if we did that this time, we would lose face.
If Lebanese Hezbollah had responded to Israel, it could have bombed Beirut, and western powers would have seized upon this to say, ‘If this is a war between Iran and Israel, why did Hezbollah involve itself in it?’ They would also hold it responsible for the subsequent unrest in Lebanon.
Therefore, the insistence that the Iranian response should be through Iran’s allies was meant to distort Hezbollah’s reputation and unleash Israel to target it and other resistance forces in the region and to portray them as mercenaries of Iran. We read these western intentions well, and accordingly, the decision was taken to respond from within Iranian territory.
On the night of Eid al-Fitr, a meeting was held with the heads of diplomatic missions of the countries of the region, and we informed them that we are keen on good neighborliness, but if the US uses any of your countries to carry out action against us, we will strike the US bases on your lands.
This message was conveyed to Washington, and they realized that Iran was serious. They asked us to exercise restraint. The US, Germany, England, France, and Canada – these countries that support brutality and crime in the world and provide the weapons with which the people of Gaza are bombed – ask us to exercise restraint.
[UK Foreign Secretary] David Cameron called the night after the Iranian attack and said he couldn’t sleep last night. This is the malicious British foreign secretary. Why? Because we sent 300 drones and missiles over the heads of the Israelis. The Iranian official who spoke to him said, ‘For six months, rockets have been falling on the people of Gaza, and you slept well every night.’ This is the same malicious Britain that encouraged the US to launch attacks on Yemen.
The important thing is coordination at all levels before responding, politically, diplomatically, and in the media. After the Leader [Ali Khamenei] affirmed in his Eid al-Fitr sermon that we will certainly discipline the enemy, messages came to us requesting that the response be proportionate and not forceful.
Our answer was clear: that first, we would definitely strike Israel; second, that the attack would be direct from Iranian territory; and third, that the National Security Council decided that the response would be a deterrent.
Meanwhile, Azerbaijan informed us that it had information that we would bomb the Israeli embassy in Baku, and they asked us not to carry out any action on their territory. I think this was a message that they could turn a blind eye to striking Israeli targets in a neighboring country, but we were already aware of that.
The messages we received were not limited to the US and European countries, but we also received messages from some countries in the region. We tried to take advantage of the matter to reach a ceasefire in Gaza, and we told everyone that this might be a solution to the problem.
They asked us whether a ceasefire in Gaza meant that we would refrain from responding. We answered that we would strike Israel in any case, but perhaps a decision like this would help reduce the severity of the attack. They asked that we give them a few days.
We asked our military forces to postpone the response for 24 hours and gave the countries of the world the opportunity to adhere to their obligations stipulated in international laws and for Israel to pledge not to attack Iranian forces and interests in the region and the world.
Regarding the Iranian request to conclude a permanent, complete, and immediate truce in the Gaza Strip: US President Joe Biden sent a message stating that he would work to achieve it himself, but he set a malicious condition, which is that the Palestinian resistance releases all Israeli prisoners in exchange for Israel releasing 900 Palestinian prisoners, after which the implementation of the truce begins.
Of course, Hamas did not agree to the matter, and this was the correct decision. We understood that they [the Americans] are not serious about reaching a truce and that they are only looking to achieve their malign goals.
realized that we would attack Israel. The US, France, Britain, and even Italy harnessed all their military capabilities in Qatar, alongside the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan.
They equipped six missile launchers in the region’s waters with a range of between 2,000 and 3,000 kilometers. They harnessed all modern satellites and radars, moved 103 aircraft into the region’s airspace to strike our missiles, and placed all air defense systems under unified command under the supervision of the US to confront Iranian missiles in several stages.
That is, if the Iranian missiles were able to pass any defense line, they would be targeted and shot down in the next.
What is interesting is that the German foreign minister, 24 hours before the Iranian operation was carried out, called us and was pleading that we not target Israel from inside Iranian territory. He said that our missiles would not be able to pass the obstacles and defense lines that they had prepared to intercept our missiles and that the US was using 70 drones in Iraq for that, and it would increase the number to 700.
They were monitoring the movements of our soldiers, missiles, and drones, and they believed that none of the Iranian missiles would reach Israel. They were confident that the missiles would not be able to penetrate air defense systems.
At the Turkish Incirlik base, which includes 5,000 soldiers, a large number of AWACS planes and 15 jamming planes were harnessed to repel our attack.
As such, they were astonished at how Iran was able to evade the huge layers of defense they had activated, and what surprised them even more was that it took five and a half to seven hours for the drones to reach the Zionist entity, and their speed was not great, which meant that they were easy to shoot down.
Twenty-four hours before the operation, Washington sent a firm message stating that if we decided to attack Israel from our territory, they will respond militarily against Iran. This time, they did not talk about possibilities but rather said that they would definitely attack Iranian territory. Our answer was decisive, that we will definitely strike Israel from within our territories, and if you commit any mistake, we will target all your bases in the region.
We informed Saudi Arabia and the countries of the region that if Iranian territory is targeted from within your territory, we will definitely respond. Saudi Arabia announced that it would not allow any operation against Iran to be carried out from its territory, and the authorities in Cyprus also informed us of a similar message.
We knew that the Iraqi and Jordanian airspace was completely under US control. We thought about the Israeli targets that we were going to hit, and we faced two obstacles: the first was that their air defenses were very strong, and we had to find a way for our drones and missiles to pass them, and the second was not to take action that will lead to us being condemned.
The decision was to strike two military targets: the first was the [Nevatim] airport from which the F-35 plane that bombed the Iranian consulate took off, and the second was an Israeli intelligence center in the Golan. By coincidence, the fighter jet that targeted the consulate fired its missiles from above this intelligence headquarters.
Our drones, numbering about 130, were launched, the majority of which belonged to us, and between two and three were sent by our allied forces. We also launched missiles carrying explosive warheads, a large number of which deflected the air defenses from their path.
I will not talk much about the number of hits we targeted, but out of 17 missiles, 15 hit their targets, meaning 89 percent. The whole west was there, and we delivered an important message to the world.
In the aftermath of the operation, 15 countries contacted and said that they were seeking a ceasefire in Gaza and asked Israel not to respond.
The British and German foreign ministers contacted us and said that international law does not include the term “punishment.” We answered them: If that does not exist in international law, why did you propose punishing Hamas after 7 October? The calls continued to ask whether we would attack Israel again. We said that if we were attacked, we would respond tenfold.
The countries of the region have now understood Iran’s capabilities and it seems that they will seek to significantly improve their relations with Iran. The Israelis realized that when the spirit of despair takes hold, as Ben Gurion says, ‘we will begin to fall down the slope that leads to the abyss,’ and this has become clear to the world.
As the master of the resistance [Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah] expresses, ‘Israel is weaker than a spider’s web,’ and, God willing, this operation will be a deterrent against the assassinations that were occurring against us. Now, this is the only thing that Israel can do, and we must be more vigilant, and we must instill hope in the peoples of the region and not care about the rulers.
Mahmoud Nabavian’s account not only exposes the meticulous planning behind the Islamic Republic’s response but also reveals a resolve to defend sovereignty and impose a credible deterrence against future violations – at all costs.
Tehran’s military response should be interpreted beyond the current regional war centered on Gaza and signals a broad recalibration of power dynamics in West Asia. As western and neighboring states assess the implications of Iran’s new assertive military posture, alliances, and strategies will require careful reconsideration.
WHY FOREIGNERS LIVE IN CHINA DESPITE THE MEDIA BACKLASH?
What’s the most ingenious car repair you’ve ever seen done?
I was taught this by my first girlfriend’s father. He was an engineer, and at the time he was CEO of Marconi Avionics in Rochester, Kent.
My Austin car’s starter motor was unreliable and would cost me half a term of my student grant to replace. He said he’d fix it. He removed it (three bolts and two cables) opened it up at one end and removed the brushes from the motor (one nut, two springs).
He then took a tin can from the rubbish bin, and roughly cut out two little triangles the same shape as the end of the pole-piece blocks that made contact with the power source in the motor – and stuck them, using contact glue, on the opposite end from the “wear surface”. This added about 2mm to the length of the pole-piece block, accounting for the excessive wear on the other end that prevented good contact. Sanded it down to shape. It took about 30 minutes. Totally ingenious. Apart from 30 minutes of fiddling around and getting oily, totally free of cost.
Cobbled Design
Reassembled, it lasted another 18 months.
I did the same again the next time, it was easy. Another 18 months of use.
The next time I actually replaced the brushes properly. The new ones didn’t last any longer than the temporary repairs – really those Austin cars had rubbish parts.
What is the most epic way you have seen a coworker resign or quit?
I once resigned giving 1.5 days notice. My boss was aghast, but I explained why…
Economically it was an awful time for me: in January 1994 my wife was 6-months pregnant, and we bought a bigger house with a bigger mortgage.
After all, I’d recently gotten a raise to $52K/year. Surely I could afford a $120K house.
Except I got laid off two weeks after moving in.
I struggled but eventually found a job after a couple of months. I earned $42K/year salary — about 20% less than my prior salary, if you’re keeping track. I certainly was.
My (male) coworker at the job was in similar financial straits: recently divorced, and driving a barely-running old pick-up truck he called “Blue”. He started with the company a couple of days before me.
My coworker found another company hiring with multiple positions after a couple of months. And he recommended I also apply. The salary was a few grand higher ($45K, as I recall).
He got an offer two days before I did, and tendered his two-weeks notice first.
Our boss was not happy. The contract we were working under had been renewed, but our boss had to resubmit everyone’s resume for approval by the government client.
He thought: why bother with all that paperwork just to have my coworker leave just a week after the new contract started?
So our boss just fired him immediately.
(Fortunately the hiring company was able to start my once-and-future co-worker immediately. We both breathed relief.).
When I got my offer I told the hiring company I could start in a week.
I resigned that Thursday before my Monday start with the new company. If my soon-to-be-former boss canned me immediately, I didn’t care. I could just take a long weekend and start the new job.
Which left my soon-to-be-former boss short two workers when the renewed contract started the same Monday.
I still have no regrets.
(I should mention that the same boss briefly became my temporary supervisor about 3 years later through an odd fluke. He never mentioned our past relationship, and I didn’t either. And he quickly moved on to another role.)
The disappearance of America’s leading anti-gravity researcher
Has a cop ever said something to you which was completely unexpected?
Some 34 years ago[plus or minus] I was a troubled young man involved with a troubled young woman. We had a troubled relationship that I ended abruptly. She immediately took up with a close friend of mine. I was upset. In my infinite wisdom I went to confront him and start a fight. He wasn’t going to be drawn into a physical confrontation. He said”Go home, come back when you are calm and we will discuss it.” As I turned to leave I lost it, spun around and punched out two windows !! I went home[2 blocks away] and realized I had blown it. A neighbor called and asked why all the cops were at my ex’s house. So I new the cops were involved. I waited a couple hours and went down to the police station and told them who I was, what I had done and gave them my contact information including where I was working. I was a construction forman working in town running a job at some condos. I saw a patrol car pull up, an officer got out as I approached. He Looked at me, smiled, cocked his head and gave it a little shake and said ”Ain’t Love Grand !!” He then came closer and looked me in the eyes and in a low but earnest voice said” She is doing this to hurt YOU ! Stay away from her!” I gulped and nodded. He asked”Are you going to fix those windows?” Again I nodded and replied that I had contacted the owner and made arrangements. He said “ Very Good” got in his car and left.
I never spoke to that woman again.
An Owner Whose Cat Went Missing Long Ago Happened to See His Pet On the News
Have you ever had such a close call it makes your skin shiver everytime you think about it? If so, what happened?
I used to ride motorcycles – probably still would, too, if my body could still keep up. Anyway, many years ago I attended the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in the Black Hills of South Dakota. For those who aren’t familiar, this annual rally draws around 500,000 visitors every year – most of them on motorcycles. The attraction isn’t just the events in and around Sturgis, but also to ride the curvy roads and hills and to enjoy the beautiful scenery. The Black Hills are home to several historical, natural and cultural sites of great importance to Americans, including Mount Rushmore, and draws tremendous tourist traffic all year round. But during “Sturgis Week,” the ratio of motorcycles to cars, trucks, RV’s and other traffic can seem like 100:1 depending on the time of day and location.
One beautiful day, our group was riding eastbound on one of the larger highways through the Hills. I was second in the group on the inside (next to the center line). As we rounded a rather tight outside curve to the left, another group approached us headed west on the inside of the curve. Now, to understand the situation, it’s important to know that groups of riders in the U.S. will stagger their riding formation in a zig-zag pattern, or sometimes side-by-side. It’s critical to stay in your own space to prevent accidents. And riding into a curve requires the rider to lean into the curve, just as you would on a bicycle. It’s a skill that requires some riding experience to master.
So anyway, I’m next to the center line leaning towards it to navigate the curve, and there’s a rider approaching me from the opposite direction leaning away from the center line, in his appropriate place in the formation. However, too late I notice he’s too close to the line, almost crossing it – and I can’t correct my lean or position quickly enough to avoid him or to prevent causing my own group to tangle as well…… As we passed each other, the leather tassels on his handlebars brushed my own hand holding my handlebars. We narrowly escaped a head-on collision at approximately 60 miles per hour.
Yeah, that was a close one. Still makes me shiver to think of it.
If Saddam didn’t have WMD and faced invasion and execution, why didn’t he simply allow inspectors complete 100% access?
The main reason was twofold.
The first was that the Resolution called for a verifiable proof the WMDs were disposed of. If Iraq had no WMDs (it didn’t), then it had to prove where and how it disposed of them.
This presented a problem for Iraq that destroyed the weapons in clandestine manner, in order to keep up the Potemkin WMD program as a deterrent against Iran. Saddam was afraid without those, Iran may seek to destabilize Iraq and overthrow Saddam in favor of their Shia allies within Iraq. Saddam believed the threat of chemical weapons shielded him from that fate.
The weapons were still disposed of, but no documentation was kept, I wouldn’t be surprised if key laborers were shot to keep anyone from finding this out. The upshot of that is the world at large was convinced Iraq had WMDs, but there were no credible witnesses, no paper trail and no evidence to show you’ve really done anything at all. 100% total access wouldn’t help, because Iraq is a vast and empty land, with a bajillion possible hiding places:
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It took the coalition about half a year to discover the buried planes of the Iraqi air force, next to an airport. Iraq is larger than Germany and you’re looking for well hidden barrells. Good luck.
A second and much more important reason is that no matter what Iraq did, the invasion was going to happen. GWB and his staff were determined to change the regime in Iraq and the WMDs were just a convenient excuse, a slam dunk reason to invade Iraq, because it was so obvious Iraq was illegaly hiding weapons of mass destruction. Everyone knew it, from CIA to MI6 to DGSE to SVR RF, no one publically voiced concern Iraq actually had no weapons. They voiced other (and valid) concerns, but not the one that Iraq had no WMDs. Prove to them you have no WMDs early on and they just use some other reason to attack you instead.
If you want to know what are the possible downsides of being too good at your job, Iraqi WMDs are a tragically good example of that.
The world hinges on strong men. The elites finally admit we’re in deep trouble.
What is something that happened in an interview that made you not hire the candidate?
October 2017,
Redmond, WA.
I was interviewing a college candidate for a PM role. He had already cleared the phone screen, the on campus round as well as gotten through first couple of rounds of the day with positive reviews. It was my job to work through a real scenario with him that would be help me gauge how he would perform in that situation on the job because it was not an infrequent task he would need to do.
The basic scenario was about how he would handle a competitor scenario for acquiring a specific chunk of business. We were to try and gain a specific customer who was evaluating subscribing to our product vs our top competitor; another tech giant with a lot of resources. The specific product the client wanted is almost at par with both companies so we need to come up with creative solutions to acquire the client; I asked him to think outside the box, think of long term package deals, service agreements, price negotiations, whatever else he could come up with.
He decided to go with trying to get the customer on a lower price. I asked him how he would know what the competing bid might be, what kind of historic data would he need to drive this inference, what models would he need to build to estimate the right number to write on the bid. What he said next literally made me gasp.
Candidate: “Oh I don’t need to do all that. I’ll just ask the guy over at our competitor what price he’s going to put and beat him.”
Me: “Why would he tell you what they are going to bid?”
Candidate: “That’s easy. I’ll take him out on the town for a few drinks, get chatty with him, and once he’s got enough alcohol inside him I’m sure he’ll tell me; or I’ll figure out other ways of getting the number from him. I can be very persuasive .”
Me: “Hahaha… You’re kidding right? You do realize that not only is that very unethical, it’s also completely illegal and it could get you fired, and, the company in a lot of legal trouble.”
Candidate: “I disagree. I’m not doing anything illegal. There’s nothing wrong with taking someone out for drinks after work and if in that state he happens to voluntarily tell me certain things that work to my advantage, I see no harm in using it.”
At this point I was just shocked how someone could say this in an interview. It didn’t matter to me that he was a fresh grad student and maybe didn’t realize the severity of what he was saying. Every university has courses on business ethics and even if he decided to skip those classes, this is just common sense. What really bugged me was how much he pushed back when I tried to explain to him how wrong that approach was. This back and forth continued for another 10 minutes by which time I had absolutely made up my mind on how this was going to end.
I ended the interview a few minutes early and told him to take a break and use the restroom and get something to drink if he liked. I went back to my manager and the rest of the interview team and told them very clearly what happened and how in my opinion such an attitude can be a huge liability for the team and the company, and that what made it worse was he didn’t come across as coachable and was not receptive to feedback. I insisted and everyone agreed that we end the interview loop there and not waste any more time when we clearly know he’s a no hire. Some things are unforgivable sins in an interview and he had committed a fair few of them.
Larry Johnson Warning: “Nuclear Crisis – Russia’s Fury Unleashed by NATO & France’s Provocation”
Surprisingly great.
Swiss Steak with Tomato Gravy
swiss steak tomato gravy
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
1 large slice round steak
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 large cans tomatoes
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 large onion, diced
Kosher or sea salt and pepper
1 cup water (for gravy)
Instructions
Spray slow cooker with Pam. Turn on LOW.
Heat oil in large skillet.
Cut round steak into serving-size pieces.
Put flour into a shallow pan. Add salt and pepper to flour and flour steak well.
Fry steak in hot oil until brown.
Pour a few tomatoes into the slow cooker. Add pieces of browned steak and remaining tomatoes in layers. Add diced onion.
Cook for 4 hours on LOW heat.
Remove meat from slow cooker.
Put 1 cup of water in a pint jar. Add 3 tablespoons flour. Shake well. Add to tomato mixture in the slow cooker. Cook and stir until gravy is thickened.
If your house smells like fish for absolutely no reason, 9 times out of 10 it means that there is an electrical fire.
If you ever feel like someone is following your car take four right turns and eventually it will make a circle. If they are still behind you that means they are following you. Don’t drive home, just call the police and drive to the police station
If a service dog ever approaches you without its owner, follow them and do it quickly because potentially you can save someone else’s life.
If someone is trying to abduct you, fight back. Most abductors will just give up if they meet resistance. And whatever you do, don’t let them take you to another location.
If the tide suddenly goes out unexpectedly, run like you stole it, for higher ground.
If you’re ever charged by a moose, get behind a tree.. they have about a ten inch blind spot and they’ll lose you..
When people say to take an aspirin to help during a heart attack, chew the pill, don’t swallow it whole. It gets absorbed much quicker.
If a person asks you for something in the street – a light, the time, whatever – always keep the person in your eyeline. So if they ask for the time, don’t just look down at your watch. Raise your arm slightly so your watch is in sight.
If you are in danger or in need of help, in a public place, it’s almost always a bad idea to just yell “help”. It’s more important to be specific. Pointing at someone and telling them to call 911 will be more effective. The Bystander Effect can be cruel sometimes.
Have you ever met a celebrity who asked you, “Do you know who I am?” and you said no?
I was working a few years back at a busy, upscale Tuscan-style restaurant in the Chicago area, when a party of five came in.
There was one woman who stuck out like a sore thumb, because she had to be on the north side of 40, but was dressed and made up like a teenager. Additionally, her dyed blond hair hung long and loose down her back, except for the sides, which were swept back with an outsized pink bow.
She basically looked like an escapee from a psychiatric ward….in 1985.
As I took their order and subsequently began serving them, every time I approached the table this woman was doing the majority of the talking, and loudly laughing, such that it was becoming a problem for the other tables in my section.
I then asked this lady quite respectfully and discreetly if she could please lower her volume just a bit for the sake of the other diners.
This made her very angry. She stood up so fast that she spilled her water glass, and as I struggled to mop that mess up, she yelled at me up one side and down the other: “Do you know who I am”?!!
I admitted that I did not.
She then shrilly informed me that she was a celebrity dancer from TELEVISION, and that I was just plain ignorant if I’d never heard of her, as she was a regular on ##variety show.
A man in her party nervously interjected, “D****, please, let’s just get back to enjoying our meal together, okay sweetheart”?
The whole restaurant, staff and patrons, were relieved to see the back of Miss D by the time they checked out.
This was before the internet, so I had to ask around, but I finally found a guy who grew up in the American Southwest who had heard of her:
It turns out that in the days of local affiliates of the big TV corporations, this woman had been a tap-dancing sensation.
As a child.
In one city in Arizona.
Doing commercials for a well-known DOG FOOD brand.😳
The Coming Simp Shortage
Braised Pork with Green Chile Sauce
Mild green chiles season this meaty pork stew. Serve it with rice or as a burrito filling. This can also be served with tamales. This chile verde is also good served with scrambled eggs.
braised pork green chile sauce
Ingredients
Pork
1 (3 pound) lean boneless pork butt
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 large onion, chopped
4 garlic cloves, minced
2 large green bell peppers, seeded and chopped
1 (7 ounce) can diced green chiles
1 teaspoon dried oregano leaves, crumbled
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1 1/2 teaspoons kosher or sea salt
1/2 cup fresh cilantro, chopped
1 tablespoon wine vinegar
1/4 cup water
Garnish
Tomatoes, cut into wedges
Cooked rice
Sour cream
Lime, cut into wedges
Instructions
Trim and discard fat and cut pork into 1 inch cubes.
In a large frying pan, heat oil over medium-high heat; add meat a few cubes at a time and cook until very brown.
Push meat to side of pan and add onion, garlic and bell peppers; sauté until limp.
Stir in chiles, oregano, cumin, salt, cilantro, vinegar and water.
Cover and simmer until meat is fork tender (about 1 hour).
Skim off fat and discard.
Serve with rice or make burritos or serve in your favorite way.
For Burritos: spoon pork into warm, soft flour tortillas, add sour cream, tomato wedges, and a squeeze of lime juice and fold to enclose. Rice may also be enclosed with the filling in the burritos, if desired.
Video: US-NATO Chinook Helicopters inside Ukraine Air Space Near Odessa
Video below shows two US/NATO Chinook (Double-prop) Helicopters, flying about 100 feet above the waters of the Black Sea, INSIDE Ukrainian air space, near Odessa.
US NATO Choppers Inside Ukraine airspace large
It is important to realize that what you’re seeing is the US/NATO operating in an area where they are considered a legitimate military target by Russia!
It is also important to point out the long air-refueling pipe protruding from the front of both helicopters indicates these are MH-47G helicopters; for “SPECIAL FORCES.”
THIS Happens When We Die! The MOST DETAILED Journey Through The Afterlife! EPIC NDE
Rural Areas of USA Could Soon LOSE Cellular Service
While Congress was quick to find $61 Billion for Ukraine, they aren’t “finding” $3 Billion for US Rural Cell Service. States such as Tennessee, Kansas, and Oklahoma could be affected unless ‘rip-and-replace’ funding is secured.
Rural and Indigenous communities are at risk of losing cell service thanks to a 2019 law intended to strip US telecom networks of Chinese-made equipment. And while local companies were promised reimbursements as part of the “rip-and-replace” program, many of them have so far seen little of the funding, if any at all.
The federal push to block Chinese telephone and internet hardware has been years in the making, but gained substantial momentum during the Trump administration. In May 2019 an executive order barred American providers from purchasing telecom supplies manufactured by businesses within a “foreign adversary” nation. Industry and government officials have argued China might use products from companies like Huawei and ZTE to tap into US telecom infrastructure. Chinese company representatives have repeatedly pushed back on these claims and it remains unclear how substantiated these fears are.
As The Washington Post explained on Thursday, major network providers like Verizon and Sprint have long banned the use of Huawei and ZTE equipment. But for many smaller companies, Chinese products and software are the most cost-effective routes for maintaining their businesses.
Meanwhile, “rip-and-replace” program plans have remained in effect through President Biden’s administration—but little has been done to help smaller US companies handle the intensive transition efforts. In a letter to Congress on Thursday, FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel explained an estimated 40 percent of local network operators currently cannot replace their existing Huawei and ZTE equipment without additional federal funding. Although $1.9 billion is currently appropriated, revised FCC estimates say another $3 billion is required to cover nationwide rip-and-replace costs.
Congress directed the FCC to begin a rip-and-replace program through the passage of the 2020 Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Act, but it wasn’t long before officials discovered the $3 billion shortfall. At the time, the FCC promised small businesses 39.5 percent reimbursements for their overhauls. Receiving that money subsequently triggered a completion deadline, but that remaining 61.5 percent of funding has yet to materialize for most providers. Last week, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) announced the Spectrum and National Security Act, which includes a framework to raise the additional $3 billion needed for program participants.
So finding money to spend on Ukraine was easy for the US Congress, but finding the money to take care of their own Constituents – well, that’s another story. Not happening.
American Reacts to First Time You Realized America Really Messed You Up pt 2
France has sent its first troops officially to Ukraine. They have been deployed in support of the Ukrainian 54th Independent Mechanized Brigade in Slavyansk. The French soldiers are drawn from France’s 3rd Infantry Regiment, which is one of the main elements of France’s Foreign Legion (Légion étrangère).
In 2022 France had a number of Ukrainians and Russians in the Foreign Legion. They were allowed to leave the Legion and, in the case of the Ukrainians, return to Ukraine to join Ukrainian forces. It isn’t clear if the Russians returned home.
The Legion today is run by French officers but the rank and file are all foreigners. Under the current anonymat (being anonymous) a volunteer who joins the Legion can decide whether to keep his given name or adopt a new one. Legionnaires serve for three year terms, after which they can ask for French citizenship. If a legionnaire is wounded, he is entitled to gain French citizenship without any waiting period. There are no women in the Foreign Legion.
The initial group of French troops numbers around 100. This is just the first tranche of around 1,500 French Foreign Legion soldiers scheduled to arrive in Ukraine.
These troops are being posted directly in a hot combat area and are intended to help the Ukrainians resist Russian advances in Donbas. The first 100 are artillery and surveillance specialists.
For months French President Emanuel Macron has been threatening to send French troops to Ukraine. He has found little or no support from NATO countries outside of support from Poland and the Baltic States. Allegedly the US opposes sending NATO soldiers to Ukraine (other than as advisors).
One of the questions to immediately arise from France’s decision to send soldiers from its 3rd Infantry Regiment is whether this crosses the Russian red line on NATO involvement in Ukraine? Will the Russians see this as initiating a wider war beyond Ukraine’s borders?
A key question is how NATO will react to the French decision to deploy. As France is acting on its own without NATO’s backing, the French cannot claim support from NATO under its famous Article 5, the collective security component of the NATO Treaty.
Should the Russians attack French troops outside of Ukraine it would be justified because France has decided to be a combatant, and forcing an Article 5 vote would seem to be difficult if not impossible.
Of course, NATO members individually could support the French, either by sending their own forces or by backstopping the French logistically and in communications. For example, there is no way Foreign Legion soldiers can go to Ukraine without passing through Poland. Will the Russians see this as evidence they are at war both with France and Poland?
Right now no one can answer any of these questions with any degree of certainty. It is unlikely the Russians will long tolerate a buildup of French army troops, even if they are Foreign Legion soldiers. What Russia will do in response is not certain.
How do you interpret Chinese envoy to France Lu Shaye’s statement that relations with France are at the forefront of China’s relations with Western countries?
China’s envoy to France, Lu Shano, is a very outspoken diplomat, and I like his style very much. As a Chinese professional diplomat, he attaches great importance to safeguarding China’s interests. Therefore, his admission that “China-France are at the forefront of China’s relations with Western countries” is a statement of reality.
He is a career diplomat, a graduate of the Diplomatic Academy in Beijing and fluent in French. He has worked for 25 years in the Africa Department of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and from July 2019 is the Ambassador to France. Two years before that, he served as China’s ambassador to Canada.
In 2019, Canada detained Chinese citizen Meng Wanzhou without reason. He was interviewed by many media at the time, condemning Canada, pointing out that Western countries had double standards in treating Meng Wanzhou’s arrest and the arrest of two Canadian spies in China, and blaming Meng Wanzhou’s unreasonable detention on Western hegemony and White supremacy. The Canadian side has never seen an ambassador who dared to point out the root of the problem so bluntly. They all expressed dissatisfaction with Ambassador Lu Shaye and made overwhelming sophistry.
Later, Lu Shaye served as ambassador to France. On the one hand, he promoted China’s effective practices and achievements in fighting the epidemic, and on the other hand, he relentlessly criticized Western governments for being too lax in their management of the epidemic. This has attracted great attention from Western media. It also made French politicians feel as if they were facing a formidable enemy and specially summoned Ambassador Lu.
Ambassador Lu Shaye also asked the French Chamber of Deputies to cancel his plan to visit Taiwan. The French accused him of “interfering in France’s internal affairs.” Antoine Bondaz, a scholar at the French Foundation for Strategic Research (FRS), criticized Lu Shaye’s interference in France’s democratic system on Twitter, which is unacceptable. Ambassador Lu directly responded to Antoine Bondaz on Twitter, criticizing him as a “petite frappe”, once again causing a war of words. The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs once again summoned Lu Shaye, and local media also described China’s diplomacy as “rude” and “wolf warrior diplomacy.” The Chinese Embassy in France responded: “If there are really ‘wolf warriors’, it must be because there are too many ‘mad dogs’ and they are too ferocious.”
On March 22, 2021, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs imposed sanctions on 10 people and four entities in Europe, including French MP Lexman. After China officially issued the sanctions order, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs prepared to summon the Chinese Ambassador, Lu Shaye The ambassador responded forcefully: “The ambassador is not available today and will go to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs tomorrow for negotiation.”
In 2022, Pelosi visited Taiwan and became the first Speaker of the House of Representatives to visit Taiwan in 25 years. Lu Shaye said in an interview with French media, “After reunification, we will re-educate (Taiwanese people). I believe that by then, Taiwanese people will support reunification again. They will become patriots again.”
In April 2023, Lu Shaye accepted a TV interview. He said that “the process of the disintegration of the Soviet Union was very chaotic. The member states that separated from the Soviet Union did not sign any formal agreement on boundary demarcation and mutual recognition of national sovereignty” and “Even these ex-Soviet countries don’t have an effective status in international law because there was no international agreement to materialize their status as sovereign countries”, which caused panic among the Baltic countries. Because Lu Shaye frankly told the truth, Nearly 80 European parliamentarians called on France to expel Lu Shaye, the Chinese ambassador to France. 🤣
In response to the West’s demonisation of China, Lushano said, ‘I am honoured to be given the title of War Wolf, we are the warriors who stand in front of our motherland and fight for her, we are the warriors who stand in the way of the mad dogs that attack China.’
This reminds the Chinese people of what happened 121 years ago:
Tom Kim Yung, a Chinese diplomat in the United States, was out when he encountered two American policemen, who insulted him in English and rudely grabbed him, tying his braid to the fence as if he were a leashed dog, and then beat him severely. Onlookers jeered as they watched him being beaten. Finally, unable to bear the humiliation, he committed suicide by gassing himself on a light fixture in the consulate room.
Yes, today’s powerful China no longer keeps a low profile and allows others to bully and humiliate it.
China’s diplomatic thinking fully embodies “a sense of mission that has the courage to take responsibility and dare to fight.”
As some media explained: Compared with “keeping a low profile”, China is now fighting back head-on, focusing on struggle. In fact, this is also determined by the mission of our era and the complicated national environment.
Women REALLY HATE MGTOW! They misunderstand, complain, but don’t seem to change behavior.
This is a great movie. I love the flamingo section.
They’re going to be completely alone.
Russia Issues Warrant to Arrest Ukraine’s Zelensky; Declares Ukraine “Illegal Entity”
The Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs has put the leader of Ukraine, Vladimir Zelensky, on the wanted list; declaring Ukraine to be an “illegal entity.”
He joins former president Poroshenko and former acting officer of the Minister of Defense of Ukraine and current rector of the National Defense University of Ukraine Mikhail Koval, and Alexander Pavlyuk, commander of the ground forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
This means the actual recognition of the Kiev elite as an illegal government and actual criminals.
This step means that a criminal case has been opened against Zelensky and the company, within the framework of which a search has been announced.
In turn, all of the above means that there can be no negotiations with these people since Russia does not negotiate with those it is looking for over crimes committed.
This step is not just a formal kick to Zelensky and other members of Ukrainian elite.
It also means that negotiations with Zelensky are possible only about one thing – his surrender.
As of today, Ukraine has been declared an “illegal entity” and its leadership is subject to arrest and trial.
For the past two years of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Russia has repeatedly and publicly said they are willing to negotiate a settlement. Each time, Ukraine set pre-conditions: That Russia must return all captured lands to Ukraine. The Russians obviously refused.
Now, there can be NO NEGOTIATIONS because under Russian law, Ukraine is a criminal entity with which there can be no negotiations except for its surrender.
This whole Russia-Ukraine thing must now be settled only on the battlefield.
Stove Top Stuffed Pork Chops
stuffed pork chop
Yield: 4 or 5 servings
Ingredients
1 box stuffing mix for pork (with ingredients for preparing)
1/2 cup apple juice, divided*
1/4 stick butter
4 or 5 butterflied pork chops or 1 (2 pound) pork loin, cut into 1 inch chops and butterflied
Salt
Cracked black pepper
Seasoned salt
Instructions
Heat oven to 350 degrees F. Spray an 8 or 9 inch square baking dish with nonstick cooking spray.
Prepare the stuffing mix according to the package directions, adding 1/2 cup apple juice to it in addition to the butter and water required.
Melt the 1/2 stick butter in a pie plate or pan and dip the chops into the butter, then stuff each chop with about 1/4 cup of stuffing mixture.
Seal the stuffing into the chops with a wooden pick and sprinkle each chop with salt, pepper and a little seasoned salt.
Arrange the pork chops in the prepared pan.
Pour the remaining 1/2 cup of apple juice around the pork chops.
Cover tightly with foil and bake for 45 minutes.
Turn oven temperature to 375 degrees F; uncover and bake for 15 more minutes to brown the tops of the pork chops.
Spoon some of the cooking juices over the chops to moisten.
Remove the wooden picks before serving.
Serve with mashed potatoes or rice.
* Mango juice or peach nectar work well also. Or you can use chicken bouillon.
If someone is being mean to you, you can make them feel self-conscious by saying, “Excuse me, you have something stuck in your teeth.”
To calm someone who is yelling, ask them, “Are you having a bad day?”
Yawning, drinking water, or checking the time can show if someone is paying attention to you.
Looking at someone’s lips shows interest in their conversation, while staring at their forehead can be intimidating.
Making people laugh can make you 88% more attractive.
When you meet someone new, try to notice their eye color. It helps you make more eye contact and feel less nervous.
When you need help, start by saying, “I need your help…” It makes the other person feel wanted and more likely to help you.
If you show happiness and excitement when you see others, they will feel the same way about you.
When someone apologizes, say “Thank you” instead of “No problem” to show appreciation.
Showing a thumbs down instead of the middle finger can hurt someone’s feelings.
“It’s ALREADY BEGUN…” – Danielle DiMartino
What don’t women understand about men?
No means No , even when it comes from a boy’s mouth as well.
If he is not offering you a seat in public transport doesn’t mean he is heartless He might be tired like you.
Not groomed well doesn’t mean that guy is cheap. His look is nothing to do with his attitude.
Not all the guy who initiates conversation with you is flirting with you. He might have approached you for some genuine reason.
#MenToo, no need to tell more isn’t it?
Tagging him as cry baby doesn’t make sense. He doesn’t have any inbuilt dam in eyes to control his tears.
Even he can listen to his mom and dad like you listen to your parents. No shame in that.
Don’t define his coolness by seeing his smoking and drinking habit.
Don’t ask any boy like “whether me or Passion or me or your mom ” because it is asking you like “your heart or your brain”
Don’t ignore men’s feeling like how people ignore International men’s day.
Dont’t demand respect if you can’t give one.
U.S. Economic Crash Worse than 1929 – Peter Schiff Issues Warning
What’s the most morally disgusting thing you’ve ever seen someone do?
I was a new nurse working nights on a medical floor with the most terrible woman I had ever met! She looked like a witch and I was literally frightened of her. She had a crush on one of the physicians and wouldn’t let anybody answer the telephone just in case he called. And if he did, she would put on her sloppy, ‘sexy’ voice, YUCK!! And this woman was in charge, she made our nights hell!
Buddy was a sixty-something year old patient who was actively dying of metastatic bladder cancer. He was disfigured from cancer tumor, bedridden, and nasty as hell from being in constant excruciating pain. Nurse Witch and Buddy would fight all night! And to make it a little more interesting, Buddy had started to cognitively decline, rapidly. Probably brain mets. This man was a hot mess who deserved pain medication around the clock. He had no family or friends and was in the hospital for pain control while he died.
Unfortunately, Buddy’s intravenous narcotics were not holding him over at night. He would become wild at night, then sleep comfortably all day. Sundowning? The physicians increased his morphine through the night without any results. This man was clearly suffering, even if he did use his backscratcher to beat up the nurses if they got too close. Fun times!
Then it happened, Nurse Witch forgot to lock the door as she was injecting Buddy’s pain medication into her ass cheek while straddling the toilet, and somebody walked in! Yep, she was signing the injectable morphine out, documenting she gave it to Buddy, then going to the bathroom and injecting into herself. I don’t know how she could live with herself, denying a dying man pain medication.
Nurse Witch lost her nursing license for awhile. I know this because she was my waitress at a local restaurant. I really enjoyed that day, not because she was an addict, but because she was such a bitch and morally reprehensible!
First Chinese Military Invisibility Suit SHOCKED The US
I used to work as a maintenance engineer at a float glass factory in Pennsylvania. It was a short gig, and then they laid me off. It is the way that things were back them. Hire. Work to the bone. Fire. Then repeat.
This was in the late 1980’s and it was a hellish situation.
Environment
Not just in industry, but literally at the factory site.
Hot furnace. Hot lines. Hot people. Dark and dingy work environment. Yeah. Hell.
“Float glass” is just melted glass that is formed into sheets. It floats on a hot “river” of molten lead, and then is pulled and stretched like taffy down a long line.
Float glass river
As it is pulled, it rides on roller once it leaves the molten lead river. And it is a pretty large process, and quite hot and difficult.
Now, the people working there were affected by the toxic fumes from the lead river. And they were all kind of loopy. Enraged, mean, cruel and all the rest. They would pull nasty pranks on us all the time; it didn’t matter, just mean and nasty stuff.
So I designed some new replacement rollers for the line.
Float glass line w rollers
It took me a while to do. And I had to work overtime, unpaid to do so. Once the work was done, I was told to deliver it immediately after midnight to the plant. So I did.
There were a bunch of rolls. I had to use maybe three cardboard boxes to cart them all.
And sure as shit, I delivered them ON TIME as requested.
blueprints
Then the next da…
I was called into the office, all 300+ drawings were missing. No one could find them. Not the guy that I hand carried them to.
He just smirked.
Nope. He just shrugged his shoulders, and ordered me to “make new ones”. And not to take too long.
I felt something was off. This was highly unusual. You do not lose three boxes of 300 expensive blueprints.
So they told me to make them again, I rushed and got them done in under a week.
Luckily, I had backups (normally at that time, no one had backups… people just do not lose one-of-a-kind Mylar blueprints.)
And so using those backups, I made duplicated… unpaid overtime.
And I delivered them at night right after I finished up with them. After all, it was an “emergency” and the loss of the earlier copies “was an accident”.
Mylar blueprints
I had an inkling of what was going on, so I made sure that I did not give away my only backups.
And sure as shit, they “lost” them again.
Like this, only men
Yeah. Shame me once, Shame me a second time. A third time… no fucking way!
This time, when they wanted the drawings and demand that I make them up, I used the originals.
I was pissed.
No shit. I used the originals.
…
And I modified the actual dimensions.
No one would ever know what the correct dimensions were .
…
I changed the lengths. I changed the diameters. I changed the bearing strengths and the uniformity of the grease lube holes.
I did this on all 300+ drawings.
Then I MADE SURE that the drawings… these modified drawings made it to the supplier factory to make.
Once I did that… my job was over, and they laid me off.
On a Friday…night.
After I worked a 14 hour day. Assholes. Not only that, they contested my unemployment, so I was stranded without a safety net. I mean, what the fuck did I do to them. I didn’t complain or bitch. I just did what they said. It was a paycheck to me.
But…
…yeah. I knew the score.
…
Nine months later. I forgot about it all.
And they are refurbishing the line. They were working without pay for months. And I found work far away in another state.
Life moves on.
…
The waves of anger hit me. Goosebumps. Saturation anger.
ELF was a pinging!
LOL.
They were now dealing with a planned three month shutdown using incomparable parts, messed up systems and elaborate components that were simply not viable for use.
Oh well… SNICKER.
Oh, and they knew. They fucking knew what I did. They knew it was me. And you know what? They KNEW exactly WHY… too.
…
Jackasses. You do not toy with others like a that. You get what you deserve.
Please. Don’t fuck with others.
Maybe once.
Maybe twice.
But the third time you deserve what you get.
Today…
What is the best revenge you got on a superior in your workplace?
Several years ago, I was working full time while attending college full time and pastoring a small country church. I also had 2 school aged children at the time. Needless to say, my life was very busy. Production was picking up at work and they instituted a voluntary overtime schedule. Since it was voluntary, I chose to not work it.
My supervisor approached me one day and said they needed me to work overtime.
I said I thought it was voluntary.
He said it is.
I told him I didn’t want to work it.
He said but I need you to work it and set an example for the less senior people.
I told him, I’d set the example by getting my work done in 40 hours.
But I need you to work overtime.
Then it isn’t voluntary.
Yes it’s voluntary.
Has anything been late shipping because I haven’t worked any overtime.
No.
Then I choose not to work it.
This went back and forth several times. Then it happened on several different days. Same result I refused to work the VOLUNTARY overtime.
Since the supervisor wasn’t getting anywhere with me, he had the plant manager talk to me. Basically, the same conversation, just a different day and a different boss. Finally they said if I didn’t work the voluntary overtime, I would be written up.
I called their bluff and submitted my 2 weeks notice. I stated that I didn’t think that was the best for myself or the company, but I had too much going on in my life to work the voluntary overtime. I submitted a written copy to my supervisor, the plant manager, HR, and the company president.
When I hadn’t heard anything back in over a week, but before the 2 weeks were up, I asked my supervisor about it. He simply said, “Oh, you don’t have to work the overtime.”
Hmm.
I ended up working for that company for over 20 years after that. Actually, staying there longer than my supervisor, the plant manager, or even the CEO/president.
Chili Garlic Stuffed Peppers
This recipe is sure to be a crowd pleaser! It’s packed-full of delicious flavor from Johnsonville® Sausage.
chili garlic stuffed peppers
Ingredients
1 (16 ounce) package Johnsonville® All Natural Fresh Italian Mild Ground Sausage
In a skillet, cook and crumble ground sausage over medium heat until browned and fully cooked; about 7-10 minutes.
Add the spinach, marinara sauce, 1 cup cheese, garlic and crushed red pepper.
Cut top off each pepper; scoop out pulp and seeds.
Place peppers on a microwave safe plate; cook for 2 to 3 minutes or until tender.
Fill peppers with sausage mixture; place peppers in a greased baking dish.
Sprinkle with remaining cheese; bake for 20 minutes or until completely heated.
Notes
For a fun appetizer, use mini sweet bell peppers instead of large peppers and omit microwave heating step. Place mini stuffed peppers upright in muffin cups while baking.
“I’m embarrassed to be out in public with my boyfriend.”
My boyfriend and i have been together for 2 years. I love my boyfriend, but he lacks social awareness and doesn’t have good manners. For example, when we went out to dinner the other night, he was talking/laughing extremely loudly, burping and farting. When we go to the movies, he talks regularly rather than whispering and makes commentary about the movie, which annoys the other people in the theatre. Also, whenever we walk past a group of people, he tries to be funny and says stupid things. For example, the other day, we were walking past a group of guys and my boyfriend was like “i need to fart” super loudly. Mind you, he’s 27.
I don’t know if i’m being overly sensitive or if his behaviour is childish and unacceptable. How can i handle this situation?
Dear Embarrassed Girlfriend,
Your boyfriend’s lack of social awareness and immature behavior in public settings is understandably frustrating and embarrassing for you. Burping, farting loudly, making inappropriate commentary at the movies, and saying crude things to strangers is the kind of conduct most people outgrow by the time they graduate high school, not the way a 27-year-old man should be acting.
You’re absolutely right to be bothered by this. It’s not overly sensitive to expect your partner to have basic manners, exercise restraint, and behave respectfully in shared public spaces. His childish antics reflect poorly on him and on you by association.
The real issue is why your boyfriend seems oblivious to social norms and unconcerned with how his behavior affects you and others around him. Have you talked to him directly about this? I would sit him down at a neutral time, not right after an incident, and calmly explain how his actions make you feel. Use “I” statements like “I feel embarrassed when you make loud bodily noises in restaurants” rather than “You always humiliate me.”
See if he’s receptive to toning things down and working on his self-control and social skills. If he gets defensive, minimizes your feelings, or refuses to make an effort to change, then you’ll need to consider whether you can accept this long-term. It’s no fun constantly cringing at your partner’s behavior.
Ultimately, you can’t force him to change, but you can and should advocate for yourself. Make clear that the status quo is unacceptable to you. If he’s unwilling to modify his behavior, you may need to modify the relationship. There’s someone out there who can make you laugh without making you cringe.
Women Are ATTACKING Men Because We Refuse To Date Them…
What is the most disturbing thing your ex did after you broke up with them?
I was at a mutual friends house when my ex bf showed up asking to speak with me. My friend told him I didn’t want to talk to him at the moment then he closed his door. All of a sudden all you could hear was something hitting the windows, followed by the sound of glass shattering. Over and over all you could hear was the sound of windows being busted out.
My friend yelled, “Get down he is shooting!” I was thinking their is no way, surely he is just throwing a brick or something. After the ninth window I told my friend I’m going to go get help. I didn’t have a cell phone at the time because my ex had broken it earlier in the week and intercepted the new one when it came in the mail.
My parents lived two blocks away. I grabbed my dog and started running towards my parents house. I heard another gunshot. I didn’t know if he was shooting at me, or if he had turned the gun on himself. I ran in my parents house crying hysterically and called 911. The police came right away and arrested him. My ex threw the gun in the sewer so the police never caught him with it.
My friends landlord was so mad about his windows. He asked my friend what type of company was he keeping. The police put a restraining order on my ex after he broke out the window to my car (with me in it), and the window to my house.
Roast…!
When did you realize that your childhood was not normal?
I don’t know when I first realized that my childhood wasn’t normal but I do remember some of the specific realizations I had.
I was very neglected and realized at a very young age that if anyone was going to take care of me and make sure I had food, I had to take care of myself. I jokingly say that television raised me because television spent more time with me than either of my parents ever did.
There was no alcohol or drugs in my home so I didn’t have that problem but my parents were very religious and controlling. I was only allowed to wear green dress shirts. I was never allowed to wear red, blue, or t-shirts. Somehow though, I managed to always forget to wear green on St. Patrick’s Day. I never wore what any of the other kids wore. I was always the outsider, the freak, the shunned one.
I think the reason my dad ignored me was because I was a disappointment to him. I wasn’t born a strapping young holy man. My dad often did buy toys but he bought them for himself and he played with the toys until he broke the toys and then he gave the toys to me. I don’t think I ever had a toy that wasn’t already broken before I got it.
But even though my parents tried to turn me into a righteous, holy man, I found my dad’s secret porn stash. Hypocrisy anyone?
And if you think my parents were bad, just wait till you learn about my crazy grandfather who believed that God had told him to sleep with many women and children in order to spread his holy seed.
People told me they admired how I never conformed to peer pressure. How I wish I was able to conform to peer pressure. How I wish I would have been allowed to wear red t-shirts.
How to spot GUILT TRIPPERS from mile away
What was a loophole that you found and exploited the hell out of?
One day, when I was in the seventh grade, I missed the bus. My family only had one car, which my father drove to work. For this reason, my mother made me walk to school. It was springtime and the weather was pleasant.
I walked to school (and it was not in 10 feet of snow both ways, nor was I barefoot). By the time I got there and signed in as tardy in the principal’s office, I had missed two classes. I was told to sit and wait for the bell and join my next class…so I waited.
The bell rang and I dashed off to my next class.
The next day my first two teachers both asked for a note for being absent. I explained that I had missed the bus and had to walk to school. That was end the of the discussion.
A lightbulb went off in my head.
The school did not call my mom. Even if they had, she knew I was on my way there.
My teachers had no idea that I was late and not absent.
The office did not contact my teachers when I was not in class, nor did they inform the teachers in my later classes.
So, the next chance I got (weather allowing) I purposefully missed the bus and walked to school. I then signed in as tardy in the principal’s office. Then when the next bell rang, I walked out the side door.
I was free.
It was a warm day. I went to the town park, where I found an envelope that simply said “Paperboy”. In it was $6.00 in cash.
I was rich.
I went to the local news shop and bought a National Lampoon magazine, a sandwich, and a soda (those were the days). I went back to the park and enjoyed the rest of the day. As I read my new magazine, I decided that tomorrow I would bring my boom box.
My Wife Had an Affair With My Best Man
As a doctor or nurse, what are some of the most powerful last words a patient has said?
“When I was 20, I worked in a nursing home. I befriended a man who talked about WW2 and how he’d lost so many guys in his company. One day, he had a stroke. When he returned from the hospital, he couldn’t remember anyone but me and told me he wasn’t doing good. He knew his time was coming to a close. He said it was time to pay for all the horrible things he’d done in Europe. He wasn’t religious but asked me where I thought he was going. I said to bed because it’s lights out. He said, ‘No, Jodie, my name’s Mike, ‘I mean up or down.’ I’m not a religious person, but I said, ‘That’s not for me to say.’ He laughed and said, ‘I know where I’m going. There’s only one place for people who have done what I’ve done…I’ve killed so many people, Jodie. Most of the time, it didn’t matter who it was. We went into buildings just shooting. There’s only one place for me. It’s what I deserve.'” “I worked there as a dietary aide, and it was a pretty nice nursing home. He and I’d become pretty good friends, too. I had absolutely nothing to respond with when he’d said that. He passed away the next day.
When I say that experience shook me to the core, I really mean it. I quit that day. That man’s face is burned into memory because of that conversation. His son said he kept asking where Jodie was at. Working in a nursing home is a haunting place. It takes a special type of person to be able to watch people just die around you.”
What is the one in a million coincidence you have ever had?
I live in Dunedin, New Zealand – it’s a small-to-medium sized University city. At the time of this story, the city’s population was around 120,000 and the University had around 7,000 students, many of them living in the 1000 or so student flats which dot the city.
I was visiting a friend in a town about 100 miles north of Dunedin – Oamaru. While I was there, my friend introduced me to a couple of her friends, Chris and Natalie, and we started chatting about various things. Eventually the subject turned to music, and I mentioned the band I was in. Among the things I mentioned was that we’d had our first gig the year before at a party in a student flat that was unusual because someone had put an old public telephone box on the upstairs balcony.
Chris said “Was it in Park Street? I used to flat there when I was at uni.” Chris had flatted, three years earlier, in the flat where my band had its first gig.
The Natalie chimed in – “My brother lives in that flat!” Natalie’s brother Shane was now an occupant of the same flat.
The following month, I started my master’s degree course and was given study space to share with two other students working on similar topics – one of them was Natalie’s brother, Shane.
Dating Matters: “I’m 21F and ugly as a pig.”
I’m 21F and ugly as a pig. I have a birth defect that causes asymmetry and makes my speech kinda wobbly and stuff. On most days it doesn’t bother me much, I get by. I have my puppy, jobs here and there, I’m very close with my family.
But then I go out. No guy ever looks at me. Even if I’m hanging out with people and there are guys, they don’t glance at me or say a word at me. Even if I ask them a question, they don’t answer.
All I’ve ever wanted in life is to have a husband and kids and a happy home. It sounds cheesy and really fucking stupid but I doubt I’ll ever even have a real healthy relationship because I am just so ugly. If a guy was into me, he’d judt be settling. I don’t want to be settled for. So I guess I’ll just never experience anyone liking or loving me romantically. It’s very hard and a girl I know is having her second kid and I haven’t ever even kissed anyone because apparently no one wants to kiss me.
The acquaintances I have keep telling me it’ll happen but they just don’t understand that it won’t. It’s kinda hard to date and kiss guys when they don’t even acknowledge your existance.
Oh my dear, my heart aches for you. The pain and loneliness you describe is so palpable and understandable. It’s a fundamental human need to feel seen, acknowledged, and loved – especially romantically. Your yearning for a husband, children and happy home is far from stupid. It’s a beautiful dream shared by many.
I want to be very clear on this – your worth is not defined by your appearance or by male attention. You are so much more than what’s on the surface. The fact that you have ambitions, care for a puppy, work hard, and have a tight-knit family says a lot about your character. Those are the qualities that make a person truly attractive.
Society places far too much emphasis on conventional beauty standards. But real love – the deep, enduring kind – looks beyond that. It sees the uniqueness of a person’s spirit, the magic of their heart.
I know it feels impossible to imagine right now, but there are people out there capable of appreciating you for all that you are. Perhaps you haven’t met them yet. Perhaps they are still growing and learning to see with clearer eyes. Don’t let the ignorance or superficiality of some define your self-worth.
Continue investing in yourself and in what brings you joy and meaning. Nurture your wonderful bonds with family. There are many kinds of love in this life and romantic love is just one of them. Pursue your interests, be kind to yourself and others. Let your incredible resilience and zest for life shine through.
In navigating these feelings, it might help to expand your social network in contexts where personality and passions can shine brighter than physical appearance. Perhaps there are clubs, groups, or volunteer organizations in your area that align with your interests—places where you can meet people who share your values and enthusiasms. These settings can be more conducive to forming genuine connections because they focus on common interests rather than appearances.
Also, it may be beneficial to continue discussing these feelings with someone who can provide professional guidance, like a therapist. Therapy can be a great space to explore your self-image and learn strategies to bolster your self-esteem. It can also provide tools to help you navigate and challenge the societal pressures that so harshly define beauty and worth.
When you are living as your fullest self, you’ll be in a much better position to find and build healthy relationships.
Lastly, try to remember that life’s timelines are as varied as the people who live them. The fact that someone you know is on a different path does not diminish the potential of your journey. It’s okay to move at your own pace and in your own way.
You are deserving of love and happiness, not as a settlement, but as a celebration of who you are. Keep your heart open and your head held high. You have much to offer, and there is much still to come.
Warmest regards
What to say when someone belittles you
After de-coupling supply chains from China, how can non-Chinese companies and countries build supply chain cost structures which are competitive against the Chinese supply chains?
Take chips and airliners, which China has had to import. China spent more on chips than oil until recently, buying hundreds of billions dollars worth every year.
Why? It made few chips, especially the higher-end ones.
Chips wasn’t a priority in the current 2021–2025 five year plan, because the Chinese had more pressing concerns lower down the value chain.
But Huawei changed everything.
China now has 30% of global chip production capacity, and will exceed 40% in a few years. There is a legitimate case for overcapacity and subsidy, on a free market basis. Unfortunately, trade flow is being reshaped by politics, rather than economics, and that is why Janet glaringly omitted CHIPS from her Beijing spiel.
To emphasize, the overcapacity in chips is solely driven by America throwing its weight around to unfairly contain Chinese development in high technology, and the Chinese threw restraint (and the rule book) out the window.
For airliners, China didn’t make any, until recently. Comac currently has 2 models in service, the ARJ21 and the C919. In a few years, production of the C919 will be ramped up to over 200 per year, along with the introduction of the CJ-1000 engine option next to the Leap 1. The backlog of orders, currently >1,500, will take a decade to clear. The first widebodies, the C929 and C939 (the A330 and A350 equivalent) will also make commercial debut in the 2030s, along with Chinese engine options.
All these form part of a broad spectrum assault up the value chain, allowing China to go from today’s 35% of global manufacturing to >50% before 2040 arrives.
There will be two classes of goods in the near future: China-made or foreign made. By then, China will have an essentially complete indigenous supply chain built on IP it controls. Other than select niches such as specialty pharmaceuticals, software and machine tools, the Chinese will have competent or even superior alternatives to everything the rest of the world manufactures, from green energy to AI. The exclusivity of western high walls and deep moats will increasingly be found in the recesses of history.
On to the consumer. An often underexplored angle is the end-to-end shopping experience. In today’s world, it’s the online stream that drives sales. Finding a product, choosing among options, payment and finally delivery. Today, I can order a $5 item from China, and select the 5-day guaranteed doorstep delivery for another $1.50.
Amazon can’t do that. Rakuten can’t do that.
Temu and Shein are absolutely smashing markets worldwide, because they are offering end-to-end apparel shopping experiences that no one else is delivering today.
What’s their secret sauce?
Affordable quality at the forefront of trendiness, fulfilled in a jiffy.
It isn’t just cost structure, to step up to bat with the Chinese.
The entire service platform including the underlying logistics is just as critical.
The competition hasn’t emerged yet, but I welcome being proven wrong.
Why have I expended so many words without seeming to answer the question directly?
I have come around to the conclusion that cost structure is the wrong question to ask, because friend-shoring is being shaped through politics, rather than economics.
The bigger change is the 1–2 trillion dollars of revenue that foreign firms generate in China, the largest single market in the world. That is why Janet and others have drawn attention to China’s “excessive household savings” and “low consumption”, calling on the government to boost demand. Foreign firms are seeing alarming shifts in Chinese demand patterns, from Tesla to Apple to Starbucks to Boeing. Will French bags, Swiss watches, German cars, Italian fashion be next?
This is irreversible, as Chinese competition improve by the day, attracted by the high margin, glitzy models of western capitalism.
This is the true galactic war being fought, in the mainland market, and not the friend-shoring distraction. The Chinese brands that emerge from this brutal experience will be globally competitive. Even runner-ups will be able to find niches elsewhere, such as Transsion in Africa.
In other words, forget friend-shoring and competitive cost structures. Any firm that doesn’t have a place in the world’s biggest, most dynamic and competitive single market isn’t globally competitive, and will have to rely on political protection to survive.
I’d like to end with a short discussion on the scale of the Chinese challenge.
The strength of the Chinese come from their extraordinary ability to organize and cooperate on multiple scales, including pie-in-the-sky multi-generational goals without set horizons.
The five-year plans are a good example, a top-down-bottom-up meeting of minds to drive national progress. For example, a bottom-up request to increase rural income requires top-down connectivity and power, from roads/public transport, to electric and telecoms grids, so that farmers gain market access, and talent and investment can pour in for job creation. This all-of-nation cooperation between public and private is rare, with the closest being Taiwan when the KMT was in charge. Japan and Korea both suffer from opposing clan interests, and as Japan discovered for the past 2-3 decades, competitive advantages can be rug-pulled by Uncle Sam on whim. As a national system, I believe modern day China is peerless in terms of the depth and cohesiveness of broad-spectrum cooperation.
Ten, twenty years ago, Toyota will keep an eye out for what Honda and Nissan is doing, followed by Hyundai and Kia, with a secondary interest in the Germans. Toyota stayed the number 1 carmaker globally wholly on merit, because it has core competencies.
Fast forward to the present and Toyota is staring goggle-eyes at the millions of BEVs being churned out by the Chinese, when its own BEV presence and selection is minimal. Even Huawei and Xiaomi are churning out cars today with smart self-driving features. BYD is replacing shocks/springs/struts with linear motors for suspension, and it is far superior to the best the market has to offer today. BYD, one company, hires more R&D staff than foreign automakers combined.
It is a different scale of challenge when BYD can add hundreds of thousands in production capacity within 12–18 months through local government support in factory building, provision of utilities, upgrading of connectivity, the hiring of staff, and approval of permits. The speed and efficiency takes the breath away. Better yet, the modern Chinese factory enjoys a high degree of automation, and production can be rapidly scaled up at other sites.
One will have to copy the Chinese to keep up with the Chinese, without the advantage of market scale, and the efficiencies enabled by the public-private cooperation model.
If a girl does this, never talk to her again…
Have you ever found out your kid wasn’t yours by getting a paternity test? If so, what did you do and did you stay in the child’s life?
My ex-girlfriend called me to let me know she was pregnant. We got married and not long after the baby was born she walked away and left the baby with me.
Over the years, family would ask me if I was sure she was mine. She looked nothing like me or other members of my family. My daughter has very dark skin. Her mother was never a serious part of her life. On days when her mother was supposed to pick her up and spend time with her, my daughter would get dressed-up and excited and her mom was a “no-show”. I would make up some excuse for her mom not showing up. And on birthdays and Christmas, I would always place a gift under the tree and address it from her mom.
As she got older, her appearance got more defined and had nothing in common with me or my family. Her skin got darker and her lips thicker and her hair curlier. There were always the questions from family and friends and the usual gossip in our hometown.
One day, when she was 15 years old, she sat down next to me as I was working on my laptop. She said “Daddy, may I ask you a question?” I continued what I was doing and simply replied, “Sure, sweetie, what’s on your mind?” She said, “Daddy, would you like me to take a DNA test?” That hit me real hard so I stopped what I was doing, closed my laptop and faced her. I said “Now why exactly would I want you to do something like that?” She answered, “Wouldn’t you want to know for sure if I am your daughter?” She just sat there looking down at the floor while I weighed the question and realized I was walking on a mine field and I had to gather myself and get this right. “Honey, you are my daughter and no DNA test will change that. There is nothing a paternity or DNA test can tell me that will make me think anything else. “
My daughter is grown up now and has many other roles. She is a doctor, a wife, and a mother. But she remains and always will be my daughter.
Why the US will lose its War on China
Carl Zha talks to Dr. Oualaalou of the @geopoliticaltrends about what and why the US plan to contain China is doomed to failure. We discuss the latest development of US military deployment in Taiwan Strait and the Philippines.
Marriage Matters: “Married for 9yrs, still a ‘virgin’”
My husband (M32) and I (F31) have been married for just over 9 years and we’ve never had penetrative sex because the idea of it makes him uncomfortable.
Some backstory: we got married young, right out of college and in a Christian context (e.g. believing sex before marriage was bad, unable to live together until we exchanged vows, etc). My husband went from living with his parents to living with me.
We didn’t have sex on our wedding night, though I wanted to, because he felt like there was too much pressure. I understood that and didn’t think twice about it.
Over the next few days of our honeymoon, we had oral sex and used our hands, but whenever I would ask for him to put on a condom he would instantly go soft and feel uncomfortable, killing the mood.
This is basically the recipe for the first few years of marriage: I would try to initiate penetrative sex and he would get weirded out and go soft. Since penetration isn’t everything, I was fine with pleasing one another in other ways, but kept feeling like I was missing out on an experience I wanted to try. I also started to feel like he wasn’t actually attracted to me since the thought of entering me turned him off. Over time, what sex life we did have diminished to almost nothing. It’s been over a year since we’ve even touched one another like that.
We’ve tried talking it through several times over the years, but the conversation is always initiated by me and he feels like I’m hurting his feelings and making him feel insecure by bringing up my dissatisfaction. He goes to therapy, but says he isn’t comfortable brining it up with a therapist.
I’m just kind of at a loss for what to do. The lack of sex and intimacy seems like a non issue to him, but I’m sad that I’m missing out on that part of a romantic relationship and not sure if I can go the rest of my life without it. I feel as though these years where my body is at the best it’s ever been (and may ever be) are slipping away and I can’t enjoy feeling attractive/sexy. He doesn’t look at me with any desire, never comments on my appearance, nothing except casual physical tough and daily morning/goodnight kisses. It’s basically like we’re platonic but trying to keep up some version of attraction.
I’ve asked him a few times if he may be asexual or not attracted to women, but he denies both with fervor. I’ve asked him if he thinks he should bring it up to his doctor but he doesn’t see it as a medical issue. We’ve discussed going to couples therapy, and he’s open to it, but still is uncomfortable discussing the details of this with anyone else.
I hear the depth of your pain and frustration. Going 9 years without the sexual intimacy you crave in your marriage is undoubtedly a heavy burden. You’ve been exceedingly patient and understanding, but it’s clear that this issue has taken a serious toll on your self-esteem and overall well-being.
You raise an important point about the potential role of your husband’s religious upbringing. Purity culture and conservative attitudes towards sex can inflict deep psychological wounds that make embracing intimacy incredibly challenging, even within the bounds of marriage. The visceral aversion to penetration and the inability to discuss it openly definitely raises red flags for possible religious trauma.
It’s also necessary to consider the possibility that your husband may be grappling with his sexual orientation. If he’s coming to terms with attraction to the same sex, that can be a daunting realization to process, especially coming from a conservative background.
Regardless of the underlying cause, you’re absolutely right that this will not improve until your husband is willing to confront it head-on. His avoidance and defensiveness when you attempt to discuss it is not acceptable. You have every right to advocate for your needs and expect him to take concrete steps towards addressing this impasse.
Pursuing the guidance of a sex therapist is a wise course of action. They can provide a safe, knowledgeable space for your husband to unpack his hang-ups and work towards a healthier relationship with intimacy. I would encourage you to clearly express to your husband that seeking such help is not optional if he wants your marriage to thrive. He has to take ownership of his blocks and commit to the hard work of overcoming them.
I also want to validate your right to have your needs met. If your husband continues to stonewall you and refuses to dig into this issue, it may be time to reevaluate whether this relationship is tenable for you long-term. A sexless marriage is a perfectly valid dealbreaker. You’re not shallow or wrong for craving that dimension of intimacy.
Please know that you are not responsible for your husband’s hang-ups. This is not your fault or a reflection of your desirability. Continue to nurture your confidence and self-image independent of his struggles.
I know there are no easy answers here, but you deserve to have your needs taken seriously. Keep advocating for yourself and your marriage. Be clear in your expectations and don’t hesitate to establish firm boundaries around what you need from your husband.
Hopefully with the right professional guidance and a commitment to doing the work, you two can find your way to a more fulfilling intimate life. If not, know that you have every right to seek the happiness you deserve, even if that means making painful decisions.
Wishing you all the best as you navigate this challenging chapter.
Would you fire an employee for not helping a regular customer on their day off at a different store or location (working at Walmart, but a regular asks for help at Target or JCPenney)?
Having been involved in retail for decades.
Back in the mid 80’s I was doing a price shop, collecting their lumber & building materials prices, for comparison. The competition store had a policy that I be upfront, not coming in and trying to spy. So one fine day I’m there wearing my company polo and a jacket that had our logo on the back. My name badge clipped to my jacket. I wasn’t trying to hide.
As I was finishing up I was approached by a customer who asked if I could help her with a storm door. I was walking that way so I expected she needed help with putting the door in the buggy.
Wrong, she needed a sales pitch. So I gave her one. She thought that low price equals poor quality. So I did my sales pitch on storm doors and answered her questions.
I ended my pitch with a trick, I threw my 25 ft tape measure at the “glass” and caught it when it bounced off. She asked if “we” installed and I said yes we did. So writing down the UPC I walked the customer to the desk and turned the sale over to a store employee. Smiling to myself I walked out.
A week or so later I was back in the same location again doing a price shop. The Asst. Manager had seen me walk in, he walked up and told me to talk to the store manager. He and I walked to the office. He bought me a can of Coke and got the boss.
The store manager walked out and had one of their shirts in hand. It seems that my help in the store was documented because the lady I’d helped had written a letter to their corporate office.
Corporate had authorization a bonus for the person who had done such a great job. So I put their shirt over my shirt and had my photo taken being handed the check.
The manager offered me a job, which I declined. But I still think that was a hoot.
Shorpy fun
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What is the sneakiest thing you did in school?
For some reason, I was really upset with one of the teachers and while most people would have tried something stupid, like gum in chair, drawings, graffiti or something similar … I noticed that the teacher was distracted with something and I went to her computer and simply pressed the control, the alt and the arrow down keys which caused her screen to turn upside down with seemingly no way to fix it. She could not find a setting back then visually to switch it back in any menu. Now one can find a menu option in the monitor settings but back then, nothing! Nada! That’s what made it funny: people used to go nuts! The only fix is to press control, alt and the arrow up key. There was no other way around it but no one knew this trick and people still would say, “wtf?” If they saw their computer like this…
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It was funny watching five grown men trying to figure it out and finally just flipping the monitor upside down twisting all the cables which were not long enough for that.
I felt really bad. I started feeling guilty and I went up to her and said, “What’s wrong with your computer, Mrs. Rodriguez?”, she said, “I don’t know what I did but my monitor is just crazy?”. I said, let me take a look and before she could say, “No wait, I am working on something” I had press the combination of keys to fix it and told her she was all set. She gave me a nice hug and I did not feel so bad for having done that.
(Home made) Italian Sausage
homemade italian sausage FB
Yield: 3 pounds
Ingredients
2 1/2 pounds pork shoulder, butt portion, trimmed and cut into large chunks
1/2 tablespoon coarse kosher salt
1 tablespoon dried anise
1/2 teaspoon freshly-ground black pepper
1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
2 tablespoons water
1/2 pound pork fat, cut into large chunks
4 garlic cloves, peeled
Homemade Italian Sausage 4
Instructions
Put pork into a large bowl. Add salt, anise, peppers, oregano, thyme and water. Mix well to coat meat. Work seasoned pork, pork fat and garlic through a meat grinder using the disc with the largest holes, alternating ingredients as you grind.
This sausage may be kept in the refrigerator for up to 5 days or in the freezer for 6 months.
“Am I making the wrong decision in staying with my cheating girlfriend, even though I don’t feel hurt by it at all?”
I need to share something that’s been weighing on me about my relationship with my girlfriend, Marcia. I’m looking for some clarity here because it’s a bit of a complicated situation.
Despite Marcia recently being unfaithful at a party, I find myself neither upset nor wanting to end things with her. This has completely thrown my childhood friends, Lucas and Brad, for a loop. They’ve always been like brothers to me, and they can’t understand why I’d stay with her, fearing I’m making a massive mistake.
Let me give you a little background on myself. I’m a bit of an introvert, preferring coding and anime over big social gatherings. I’ve always felt at ease in my own company or with a tight-knit group of friends, rather than at large social events. I’ve never dreamed of a traditional future with marriage and kids; instead, I believe as long as a relationship makes you happy, it’s never a waste, no matter the outcome. This might seem unusual to some, but it’s how I view love and commitment. Although I would never cheat out of respect for others, I also don’t experience the deep sense of betrayal that often accompanies infidelity.
Marcia and I met during college in a class where we initially connected over a group project. Our relationship grew from shared interests, and she was the one who asked me out. I was honest about my inexperienced romantic history and my unique views on relationships. We’ve been together for years now, sharing countless moments of joy and companionship. When Lucas confronted me with evidence of Marcia’s cheating, I felt no anger or jealousy—just an absence of the pain most would expect. We talked it over, and she was genuinely sorry, making promises to change, though I hadn’t asked her to because my main concern was about open communication for safety reasons, like STDs.
The biggest issue now is how Lucas and Brad have reacted. Lucas thinks I’m settling because of my low self-esteem, and Brad has even called me spineless, predicting that I’ll regret staying with her. Their reactions are rooted in care, but also stem from a more traditional view of relationships and self-worth that doesn’t quite fit with my feelings or experiences. Despite their worries, I remain content with Marcia. Yet, their opposition has sparked a tiny doubt in me, making me wonder if I’m overlooking a big mistake. Am I wrong for wanting to stay in a relationship where I feel happy, despite everything?
I hear you when you say that Marcia’s infidelity hasn’t shaken you, and that you feel content to continue the relationship. But I’m worried that your willingness to brush off her actions may be rooted in some deeper self-worth issues that are clouding your judgment.
Cheating is a massive breach of trust and respect in a relationship. It doesn’t matter if you’re not the jealous type or don’t believe in traditional relationship structures. When your partner steps out on you, it sends a clear message about how much they value you and your bond. By choosing to stay, you’re essentially telling Marcia that her behavior was okay and that she can get away with mistreating you.
I know you care for her, but sometimes the most loving thing we can do for ourselves is walk away from people who have hurt us. Being alone for a while isn’t a bad thing. It gives you a chance to focus on yourself, build up your self-esteem, and really examine what you want and deserve in a relationship. The dating pool will still be there when you’re ready to dive back in.
Your friends are right to be concerned. They can see how unhealthy this dynamic is, even if you’re struggling to admit it to yourself. I know it’s hard to face, but I really think you should consider therapy to work through these self-image issues. You need to learn to love and respect yourself before you can have a truly fulfilling relationship with someone else.
I get that this isn’t what you wanted to hear, but I’m telling you all this because I genuinely want the best for you. You deserve so much more than a partner who disrespects you and a relationship that requires you to shrink your own sense of self-worth. Be brave, put yourself first, and trust that there are brighter days and healthier loves ahead. You’ve got this.
Politicians Sold The American People Out
Have you ever called in a “welfare check” to the police? Did it turn out there was a real need? Officers, how often are “welfare checks” something where a person does need assistance?
I live in rural Alaska, and the population of police is as thin as the population of residents! I have called in twice for a welfare check. Both times the police said that the situation did not warrant one.
In the first case, a guy I shared a taxi with once a week to go shopping had not answered the phone in 2 days. He lived 7 miles away, and I could not drive because I was partially blinded by MS (it is better now). It was New Year’s Eve, and I couldn’t reach ANYBODY to go check on him, and felt very itchy about his welfare… I finally put on all my Arctic gear and walked that 7 miles through driving snow to check on him. I still can’t believe I did that on a hunch… Turned out he had fallen and broken his hip the day before. His woodstove had burned out, and he was frozen to the floor by his own urine. It took the fire department to peel him off the floor and get him out of the house. He lived, but he lost 8 toes, and his independence.
The second was just a couple of weeks ago. My roommate would not open the door, and 2 roomies were waiting outside in the garage… no sign of movement in the house… The police did not feel it rated a welfare check! A friend broke into the house for me and discovered her. She was older, and not in great health. She had died in the bathtub. When her BODY was found, the police came right on out! I am really grateful to the friend who found her. I did not have to see her dead at all.
Why Japan, S Korea, Australia, India join the US against China
I once knew a fellow expat; I will refer to him as “the stupid guy” TSG for short.Now TSG was quite the charmer and had all the girls (here in China) eating out of his hand. He did not have a college degree, and so got a job in China as a teacher fraudulently.He paid money, and befriended the right people, and was working as an ESL (English as a second language) teacher.He charmed everyone. Including myself, and he wanted to become my business partner… especially when he saw my wife.Now, he was many bad things, but one thing that he was able to do was to be able to speak Chinese very well.And he used it to his advantage.Now, my Chinese was poor, but not as poor as he thought. And when he and I were alone drinking coffee when gave me this long, diatribe in Chinese.Telling me about his journey and how he got there to where he was facing me. It began in English, but when he got to the spicy parts, it was all in Chinese.Now, even though I had a difficult time following him, I could make out some of what he said and the gist was this…
I am going to take your wife and fuck her eyes out.
I am going to take all your money.
I am going to take your job.
I am going to take everything you have.
And you won't be able to do anything about it.
He said this to my face… in Chinese.
Thinking that I didn’t understand anything.
And I ignored it all, which was a big mistake.
Yeah. I deserve some real hard slaps.
But then noticed him implementing exactly what he said. He tried to seduce my wife. he put poison in her ears against me. Changed her ideas and opinions. Manipulated her. Started buying her things like cell phones and what not.
He store my hours, my clients, my students from me. He was trying to convince my wife to give him money… it was everything that he said he would do.
Why did I put up with it?
Well… it wasn’t for long. Maybe one month to two months total, and then we put the kibosh on it.
Both my wife and I endured real PAIN to get where we were, and were not going to permit some shyster to steal it all away from us.
TSG thought he had it all worked out.
He used every trick in the book to alienate me from my wife; from my work, and from my money. I call him the “stupid guy”, but really I was the one who was stupid.
You see, this was a new thing; a new experience for me. I was unprepared for it. It took me some time to figure out what was going on.
Oh yeah. For certain. We ended it all.
He fled China. Went off to some other Asian nation and then returned back to California. But…
This is the story of one of the tricks that he used to seduce.
He had a Lamborghini key.
And a Lamborghini insurance paper and registration. And every-time he was talking with someone about him only being a “teacher“, he would pull those out and claim that he owned multiple businesses in the USA, and had a couple of Lamborghini automobiles and a fine house in Beverly Hills.
It wasn’t true.
On one drunken night, he told me the truth.
He faked the documents, and bought the old key from eBay.
Yeah. TSG was quite the player.
Now, he did manage to get into the pants of a great number of girls at work. In fact, he did that and used them to transfer my students; my customer to him. During my prime hours, so he had instant customers; instant income, and I got the dregs. And even when my students complained the workers (with whom he slept with) all took his side.
That was then. I had just gotten out of prison, was wobbly on my feet, and my marriage was young and enduring changes.
This is now.
I am strong and ESTABLISHED and now formidable within my regime.
So don’t worry about me. I pulled myself up by my bootstraps. Never the less, we have to experience some trying times to get to be strong. You cannot lift weights to get healthy without feeling pain.
The Stupid Guy
What a tool. Fuck.
Today…
The Power of Healthy Boundaries: Why Saying “No” is Essential for Personal Growth
Listen up, because it’s time to drop some truth bombs that might just change your life. If you’re the type of person who struggles with setting boundaries, who says “yes” to every request and invitation, even when you really want to say “no,” then this article is for you.
Here’s the thing: boundaries are not just some touchy-feely self-help concept. They’re a crucial life skill that can make or break your relationships, your career, and your overall well-being. When you fail to set healthy boundaries, you’re essentially giving everyone else permission to walk all over you, to take advantage of your kindness, and to drain your energy and resources.
But when you learn to set clear, firm boundaries, something magical happens. You start to feel more in control of your life. You begin to prioritize your own needs and desires. You attract people and opportunities that align with your values and goals. In short, you become a happier, healthier, more fulfilled version of yourself.
Now, you might be thinking: “But won’t people hate me if I start saying no all the time?” And the answer is: who cares? Seriously, if someone gets upset with you for having boundaries and taking care of yourself, then they’re probably not someone you want in your life anyway.
The truth is, setting boundaries is not about being selfish or uncaring. It’s about recognizing your own inherent worth and respecting yourself enough to stand up for your needs. It’s about being honest and authentic in your relationships, rather than constantly sacrificing your own well-being for the sake of others.
So how do you start setting healthy boundaries? It’s simple, but not always easy. First, get clear on what your non-negotiables are. What are the things that you absolutely will not tolerate in your life, no matter what? This could be anything from physical or emotional abuse to chronic lateness or flakiness from friends.
Next, practice communicating your boundaries clearly and directly. This means saying “no” when you need to, without apologies or excuses. It means being honest about your feelings and expectations, even if it feels uncomfortable at first.
For example, let’s say you have a friend who consistently cancels plans at the last minute, leaving you hanging. You might set a boundary by saying something like, “Hey, I value our friendship, but when you cancel on me at the last minute, it really throws off my day and makes me feel unimportant. Going forward, if you need to cancel, please let me know at least 24 hours in advance.”
If your friend continues to violate this boundary, you might need to enforce it by saying something like, “I’m sorry, but I can’t keep making plans with you if you’re going to cancel at the last minute. It’s not working for me.” This might mean taking a step back from the friendship or finding other people to make plans with who respect your time and commitments.
Remember, setting boundaries is not a one-time event. It’s an ongoing practice that requires consistency, courage, and self-awareness. But the payoff is so worth it. When you learn to set healthy boundaries, you create space for more joy, more fulfillment, and more authentic connections in your life.
So go ahead, start saying “no” to the things that don’t serve you, and watch as your world begins to change for the better. Trust that your future self will thank you.
Strange
Cheese Tortellini Soup with Shrimp
cheese tortellini soup shrimp
Prep: 5 min | Cook: 15 min | Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
4 cups (32 fluid ounces) reduced-sodium chicken or vegetable broth
1 (9 ounce) package Buitoni Refrigerated Three Cheese Tortellini
1/2 pound (51/60 count) small cooked shrimp
1 cup loose-pack frozen petite peas, thawed
Instructions
Combine broth, sauce, wine and pepper in large saucepan. Bring to a boil over medium high heat. Add pasta; reduce heat to medium. Cook, stirring occasionally, for 10 minutes or until pasta is tender.
Add shrimp and peas; cook for an additional 1 minute.
Serve immediately.
What office rule made you say “You gotta be kidding me”?
Happened to a friend who worked the IT Help desk in a very large corp. They had 2 phones on their desks, the Help line and a regular employee desk phone. Then it seems external calls coming into their desk phones – weren’t. Manager said he had had incoming calls blocked because HE thought that the Help queues were long because the Help guys were on personal calls instead.
So I said to my friend, “You have 4 kids who are latch-key kids (come home to empty house as Mom works too). And your co-workers also have children at home. Suppose each kid is supposed to call their parent to say they have gotten home from school, but now the calls are not getting through. What instruction would you all have given your children if they cannot reach you at work? Call the corp. security line!”
Friend: “What good would that do …. ?”
Me: “Imagine what happens when a 7-year-old calls Security in tears saying ‘I can’t reach my Daddy’…”
3 days later their desk phones were receiving external calls again.
Up-Close Look at Captured Abrams and Leopard in Moscow
Prime Minister Of Georgia Exposes U.S. Regime Change Attempt
In the April 18 I had mentioned a recent color revolution attempt in Georgia:
Those organization who currently receive money from the various U.S. or EU government or non-government organizations are of course not amused that they will have to reveal their association with such sources. They want to lobby for foreign positions without being identified as foreign influencers.They have therefore launched protests against their country’s government and parliament which has passed the law in the first reading. Two further readings will be required to finalize the law.
The protesters against the law claim that it is a “Russian law” against “foreign agents”.
…
However neither is the law “Russian style” – it is a copy of FARA – nor does the law include the loaded word “agent”. It does not accuse anyone of being such but seeks public transparency over foreign financial influences which would of course also include Russian ones.
Despite violent protests by the usual suspects the relevant bill has passed its second reading in the Georgian parliament. A third and final reading is expected in the mid of May.
The ‘NGO’ complex of U.S./EU regime change organizations in Georgia is enormous:
The Government of Georgia has declined an invitation from the US to discuss strategic partnership and assistance, reports Ekho Kavkazu.The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Georgia confirmed receiving the invitation from the Prime Minister. However, before the visit, parliament was supposed to temporarily suspend consideration of the bill On Transparency of Foreign Influence.
Well, the parliament did not do so.
Now witness this very public slap-in-the face which Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze is handing out to Derek H. Chollet, the Counselor of the U.S. State Department:
Irakli Kobakhidze @PM_Kobakhidze – 8:13 UTC · May 3, 2024Spoke to @CounselorDOS and expressed my sincere disappointment with the two revolution attempts of 2020-2023 supported by the former US Ambassador and those carried out through NGOs financed from external sources. Had these attempts been successful, the second front line would have been opened in Georgia.
Besides, I explained to Mr. Chollet that false statements made by the officials of the US State Department about the transparency bill and street rallies remind us of similar false statements made by the former US Ambassador in 2020-2023, which served to the facilitation of violence from foreign funded actors and to the support of revolutionary processes back then.
Also, I clarified to Mr. Chollet that it requires a special effort to restart the relations against this background, which is impossible without a fair and honest approach.
I have not expressed my concerns with Mr. Chollet about a brutal crackdown of the students’ protest rally in New York City.
It is rare to see a small power like Georgia publicly exposing U.S. mischief like this.
Posted by b on May 3, 2024 at 10:05 UTC | Permalink
Social Media Has Destroyed Women
I went on a date with a woman in her late 40s. She confessed that she had given one of her friends bad advice by encouraging her to get involved with a married man.
I told her that I was shocked that a woman her age would give such bad advice to a woman 20 years younger than her and she be more of a mentor. She said that she had gone through a similar experience and it had worked out for her.
After more dialogue she admitted that she cheated on her husband of 25 years with another married man and eventually he left his wife as well. They lived together for 5 years and then he ended up breaking it off with her and now she's been single for a year.
I honestly just kind of stared in shock and kept blinking for a little bit. I told her I don't know what was
1. that you told me so easily like it was a flex or
2. that you actually believe that your situation was so successful that you actually encourage somebody else to do the same thing.
Not only did you implode your family, but you encouraged that other man to ruin his and now you have your friend ruining another marriage.
She told me that I am judgemental and that I need to read my Bible more. Am I tripping?
If we were to talk about prosperity between China & the USA, which one would you say is on the right track? Why?
China is the only major economy growing since the Covid pandemic and China is now producing huge end automobile and quantum computers! It is growing faster and bigger than the entire G7! The U.S. is basically a Ponzi scheme economy printing money without basis and building 1 trillion debts every 100 days! Its GDP is laden with hot air and Wall Street bubbles ready to pop anytime soon! The U.S. spends on war, war mongering, trouble making, regime change, and colour revolution funding. While China build the latest state of the art infrastructures and educate and retrain its people!
Putting the U.S. and China in the same category is totally misleading China is developing the U.S. is disintegrating, China is progressing the U.S. is collapsing in a huge pile of debts.
Have you ever seen a drill instructor compliment a recruit?
Drill sergeant Thomas – “give me that rifle, private!”
Terrified PFC Edwards hands him the rifle.
Drill sergeant Thomas – “what the fuck is this?!?!? Do you know what this is, private?!?!?”
Terrified PFC Edwards tries, in vain, to muster some semblance of a coherent response.
Drill sergeant Thomas – “this is a clean ass rifle! That’s what the fuck it is! Now get the fuck out of here private…you fucking creep.”
PFC Edwards is on the range with a beat up M16A2 and some very old aluminum artifacts that were likely magazines at some point. He’s shooting at little green Ivans that already have more holes than an Alex Jones conspiracy theory and the Browns red zone defense combined. Drill sergeant Thomas approaches and screams out “I don’t know what the fuck you’re doing private, but keep doing it!”
Those are the two compliments that I most remember from basic.
Win later
What are some of the interesting mutations humans have?
There is one which may make you look prettier.
The British-American cinema icon, Elizabeth Taylor, who was deemed as one of the most beautiful women of her time had a rare genetic condition called Distichiasis. It is a type of mutation which caused her to have two rows of eyelashes instead of one. This thick, dark fringe of extra eyelashes made her eyes look all the more dreamy and dazzling and along with her striking blue eyes, they certainly enhanced her already exquisite face. This was caused by a mutation in the FOXC2 gene.
Although, having natural double eyelashes may seem like an entrancing feature, it can be far from a boon. Congenital distichiasis is often accompanied by lymphedema – a condition characterized by swelling of the limbs, typically the legs and feet due to build up of body fluids, and therefore known as lymphedema-distichiasis (LD) syndrome.
For the little boring part, the FOXC2 gene is a transcription factor/protein involved in numerous developmental pathways of the body, two of which are those of the lymphatic vessels and the associated regions of the eye, hence the association.
In distichiasis, the extra row of eyelashes grow from tiny oil glands (meibomian glands)
on the thin ledge of skin nearer to the eye, instead of growing out of hair follicles present on the outer edge of the eyelid.
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Distichiasis in some individuals can remain harmless and less detectable if the growing eyelashes curl outwards. The lashes can be removed by epilation (plucking), cryotherapy, electrolysis, lid splitting operations, or laser treatment etc. The condition can also vary from a few sparse hairs on one lid, to full sets of lashes on both lids.
But for some individuals, distichiasis with lymphedema syndrome can take a more severe form. One could have more acute symptoms of eye irritation, redness as well as more frequent tearing in the eye. The mutations in FOXC2 may also give rise to multiple disorders, such heart diseases, scoliosis, cellulitis, webbed neck, respiratory problems due to abnormal lymph flow into the lungs etc.
Which could explain why some of Taylor’s myriad of health problems may have been attributed to her inherited lymphoedema-distichiasis syndrome due to mutations in the FOXC2 gene.
Taylor was known to have had more than 100 operations during her lifetime, including having both hips replaced. She also suffered from scoliosis and respiratory infections. In 2004, she was diagnosed with congestive heart failure which later caused her death in 2011.
Edit: As it has been pointed out in the comments, I’d like to clarify that Elizabeth’s eye color wasn’t exactly blue but was more like purple/violet color. Although, some websites describe her eye color as blue, it was a slight mistake on my part on factually describing it as blue. Thank you 🙂
One summer we took a family trip to Charleston, South Carolina. When traveling, I like to find out the one dish the city is famous for and try to eat it as many times as I can. After all, how can you know what the “Best She Crab Soup in Charleston” is unless you sample a pretty fair share of them?
She Crab Soup, also called She Crab Bisque, was the dish of the trip. I discovered that the soup is made with female crabs. Makes sense. In addition, the roe (fish eggs) of the female crab is added to the recipe.
How do you know the difference between a male and a female crab? I went to a food conference in NYC one spring and got a “crab anatomy” lesson from a crab vendor.
He flipped over two crabs and explained that the male crabs have the Washington Monument on their undersides.
IMG 0660
The females have the wider Capitol Building on their bellies.
IMG 0661
What are the Ingredients in She Crab Soup?
After returning from that trip to Charleston, I was determined to re-create the recipe for She Crab Soup. For inspiration, I leaned on The Joy of Cooking’s recipe for lobster bisque, from which this recipe is loosely adapted.
Most recipes call for fresh crab. In a perfect, very French world, you would also use the shells of the crabs to make a super rich stock. Obviously this is not always practical. And unless you live in an area where crabs are regularly harvested, you will probably have a more difficult time finding “female” crabs.
Since I wanted this She Crab soup recipe to be fast and easy, I’ve used canned, lump meat crab from the seafood counter of my grocery store and bottled clam juice in place of fish stock. If you can find fish stock, substitute that for the bottled clam juice and chicken stock.
Ingredients
1 small onion, minced
4 tablespoons butter
1 pound crabmeat (about 12 crabs)
1 quart milk
2 cups light cream
1/4 teaspoon mace
1/4 teaspoon white pepper
1/2 teaspoon salt, or to taste
1/4 cup dry sherry
2 egg yolks
1/4 cup orange crab roe
Rind of 1 lemon, grated
Instructions
Sauté onion gently in the butter, add crabmeat, and set aside.
Heat milk and cream in the top of a double boiler, add crab meat and onion, seasonings and sherry. Cover, and let steep over very low heat for 30 to 45 minutes.
Beat the egg yolks, pour a little of the hot liquid into them, and then stir the yolk mixture slowly into the soup.
Put a spoonful of roe in each soup bowl, ladle in the soup, and sprinkle the top with grated lemon rind.
Men Are Going Abroad For Love And Modern Women Are FURIOUS
What are the first things you notice when you become homeless?
How flimsy it all is. Society. Status. Everything.
Everything we work so hard for and so hard to maintain. It’s too flimsy and transient. The fact that it takes so little to lose it all and that we have to work so hard to keep it.
When gossip can change your status. That’s scary.
On a more practical front, I noticed right away where I was now persona non grata. Places where you could stand while waiting for a friend or a ride, in the vicinity of a store was now the place you waited to go to jail while the store manager summoned the police because you are now a criminal by virtue of your homelessness.
I now knew where to go to be hassled by absolutely everyone because I was no longer a person but either a very tall child or wildlife that wandered into their vicinity, only to be shooed away or threatened.
Also, no public restroom anywhere, ever, was available for ‘my kind’. I had then been redesignated as a U Person. As in ‘you people’!!
As well as all shelter was off-limits to me, to include a covered bus stop, a bridge, even a large tree with a nice canopy. I was not even allowed shade.
Don’t forget public spaces that are available to everyone, like parks, benches and sidewalks. Those are for decent regular people, not U People! And I get it, no one wants parks reduced to a landfill, tent city or crime-ridden waste land. But I even promised not to dump all of my toxic waste on that park bench, I just needed to rest from a long day of walking. But they showed me and installed spikes and arms in the center of the park bench.
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(Credit: dev.null.org)
I also learned that grocery stores acquired very impressive trash compactors. I guess I took more than my fair share of dented cans and bruised bananas. I admit to my greed. But those giant yellow beasts were overkill.
On to the not-so-horrible things I learned.
Like where all the high-end cafés, bakeries, etc. were located and what time they tossed the leftovers.
Which dumpsters, of particular residents were picked up and when there were prime resell pickings. Or to get good clothes from. People being so incredibly wasteful saved us in more ways than 10.
Who was homeless-friendly and who wasn’t, by just a look. Identifying the look became second nature; even my young son could spot it.
I also learned the police routes and rounds pretty quickly.
Prime U People traveling times, so as not to offend the good, decent people of society.
And I learned what really mattered to me. What was important. Homelessness gave me perspective that I may not have gotten any other way.
Saw this
What’s the best revenge you’ve gotten after being fired or let go from a job?
I was fired from a sporting goods company for not fitting in. I was fired by the VP of Technology and my manager was the one who brought me to his office (she didn’t say a word to me).
Anyway. As it stands, a few years later the jellyfish manager I had was at a conference where I was the keynote speaker. I was actually in the middle of telling the story of how I was fired and that got me the right to call myself ‘seasoned’ on my resume. I am explaining the whole experience minus names and I look out into the audience and there she is — sliding down in her chair. It was classic!
She eventually was fired too. This company was great at managing their unemployment rate. If they didn’t like you they fired you thinking they would get away with it with no fight. I took them to three appeals and won.
Life Doesn’t Give Us Purpose, We Create It
Today, let’s tackle a topic that often keeps us awake at night—finding our purpose. And let me be clear: this isn’t about stumbling upon some hidden secret that’s going to make everything click into place. It’s about facing life’s relentless questions head-on.
Life doesn’t hand us a neatly packaged purpose; it doesn’t operate like some cosmic vending machine. Instead, life poses questions, challenges us, and waits for our responses. So, what does this really mean? It means that your purpose isn’t something you find—it’s something you define through your actions and decisions every day.
Think about it. Every choice you make, every action you take, is essentially you responding to life’s big questions: What are you going to do today? What kind of person will you be? How will you impact the world around you? Your answers to these questions, reflected in your daily actions, create the narrative of your life.
Let’s break this down a bit. When you choose to help someone in need, you’re answering life’s question with compassion. When you decide to learn something new, you’re responding with curiosity. And when you stand up for what you believe in, even when it’s hard, you’re replying with courage. Your life, in its entirety, is your response to the existential questions life throws your way.
Now, this might sound daunting. It’s much easier to wait for inspiration to strike or to follow a path someone else has laid out for us. But here’s the real deal: taking responsibility for your own purpose means embracing the freedom to make your life mean something on your own terms. It’s about actively building the life you want, brick by brick, with your own hands.
Sure, you’ll face setbacks. There will be days when you wonder if you’re on the right path, or if it’s all worth it. But remember, every day gives you a new chance to answer life’s questions differently. To try again, to change your approach, to learn from your mistakes. And that’s where real growth happens.
So, my challenge to you is this: Stop waiting for life to give you answers and start crafting your own. Engage with life, make choices that feel true to who you are, and let your actions speak for the purpose you’re building. You might just find that in the act of responding to life’s questions, you’ll craft a purpose that is uniquely yours.
Remember, you are the author of your life’s story. What will your answers be? What will you stand for? How will you respond to the questions life asks you? Let’s start taking those steps today. Because in the end, the most fulfilling paths are often the ones we pave ourselves.
Massive fire at Germany’s defense-industrial company Diehl
EXTREMELY POISONOUS SMOKE is billowing from a massive fire at Germany’s defense-industrial company, Diehl, in Berlin.
The company just so happens to produce, among other things, the IRIS-T air defense system, its missiles, and GMLRS ammunition for HIMARS multiple rocket launchers, used by Ukraine.
Panicked authorities say the fire no longer possible to contain.
Students in surrounding areas are being sent home and emergency services warn people to stay indoors and avoid deadly massive clouds of chemical fumes.
The Building is now completely engulfed on four floors. Part of the building has already collapsed. The fire can no longer be brought under control.
We can confirm that chemicals are also burning in the building. Sulfuric acid and copper cyanide were stored there. There is a risk of hydrogen cyanide forming, which rises into the air with the smoke – Fire brigade informed the population via warning apps.
Economic Update: The Phenomenon of China
Great overview.
This week’s Economic Update Professor Richard Wolff dedicates the entire show to the economic developmental achievement of China, together with the historical background that motivated that achievement. We analyze the uniqueness of both the economic philosophy and the politics of China.
What red flag did you have the week before your wedding that you wish you had heeded?
A couple of days before my wedding we were having our makeup try out. Besides my mom and sisters, I thought it would be nice to include MIL. As the session was going on the makeup artist asked my mom how many children she had and she proudly answer “I have 3 daughters and 2 granddaughters” and the next question was if she would have wanted a son and mom said “I would have been happy with either, but I love the way it turned out to have only girls”.
The same questions were asked to MIL. She answered “I have to 2 sons” and the answer to the second question was “oh no! I never wanted to have girls, women are trouble and only bring problems to a family”.
We grew up in an home were women greatly appreciated (my dad used to say he was a joyous man among women), where we were told “men and women are different, but those diferences should complete each other, none is less and women too can be/ do whatever they aspire, so shoot for the stars”. Needless to say I was SHOCKED to hear that from another woman… who raised a man.
So, every time my “still” husband and I have an argument he tells me stuff like “you’re a problem! You ruin my life”. I know were those words come from…
But I’m really happy that we have 2 girls, 2 amazing girls. My husband’s parents have seen the 2 year old a couple of times, I didn’t really have a relationship with them, but when MIL said our 2nd was a mistake we should have stopped… I stopped any communication with them. They have never visited our baby girl since she was born…
If your bladder is full and you are unable to hold in your pee then start thinking about sex, it will give you relief up to some extent. (I suggest you to use washroom in this situation asap)
Tilting your head while looking up or while having a conversation makes you look more attractive and sexier.
When a person cries and if the first tear drop falls from left eyes, it’s pain. If it is from right eye, it’s happiness.
Men spend almost a year of their lives staring at women.
Studies have revealed that a man and woman can never be just friends.
Constantly dreaming about someone indicates that they may actually be thinking about you.
An attractive face is preferred over an attractive body for long term relationships.
Sex is more physical for men and more emotional for women.
Money can buy happiness. Studies show that after 49lakhs rupees (approx) per year, increased income boost happiness.
Being alone and spending more time with yourself is more likely to make you successful in life.
What made you as an American move to China?
First, I have travelled a fair amount in my life. I am from the US but have lived in Japan, and spent a lot of time in Taiwan, Korea, Israel and visited countries in Europe, Philippines, Malaysia, Scotland.
I have always liked Asian culture so that is part of it, but the people in China are really good people. I found that attractive. China is safe, but many countries are. The difference is that even in the huge cities, it is safe. Next is that China is growing. It is really interesting to see a country advancing, growing and improving. I have literally seen cities built, huge infrastructure projects materialize over a few years. I am watching as the behavior of the society changes as the wealth grows. This fascinates me.
China is also a convenient place to live. It is easy to get around, I don’t need a car. Things I need are easy and quick to obtain and the cost of living is low.
All of these things play a part in why I am living in China. But mostly it is the people. Chinese could be boastful people. But they are not, they are kind, thoughtful and hardworking people with no outward and obvious judgmental attitudes. In other words, they don’t care what religion I am. With all that is going on they do not treat me badly because I am an American and hold me at fault for the actions of the US government. They are educated and know the difference. It is also a society that puts a strong emphasis on education and achievement. At least the people I encounter are life long learners. Driven to learn new things.
There are negatives, of course, but the above things are the reasons I have moved to China.
Something TERRIFYING Happened To This Submarine
Super interesting.
British Foreign Secretary: Ukraine Can Use British Missiles Against Russian Territory
UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron said today, Ukraine CAN use British weapons to hit deep inside Russia Territory. He also promised Kiev over $3 billion in military aid annually for “as long as it takes.”
“Ukraine has the right to use weapons provided by London to strike targets on Russian territory” British Foreign Secretary David Cameron has declared, in an interview with Reuters on Thursday during a visit to Kiev.
The senior diplomat, who also served as UK Prime Minister from 2010 to 2016, met with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, Prime Minister Denis Shmygal and Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba, promising London’s “unequivocal support” and annual military aid payments.
“We will give three billion pounds ($3.74 billion) every year for as long as is necessary. We’ve just really emptied all we can in terms of giving equipment,” Cameron told the outlet, noting that some of the British weapons earmarked for Ukraine would be arriving to the country during his visit.
The foreign secretary noted that among the weapons donated to Kiev are precision-guided bombs, air defense missiles and equipment for 100 mobile air defense teams.
Cameron stated that Ukraine has the “right” to use arms provided by London to strike targets inside Russia if that’s how it wants to use them.
“Ukraine has that right. Just as Russia is striking inside Ukraine, you can quite understand why Ukraine feels the need to make sure it’s defending itself,” the diplomat said.
Hal Turner Snap Analysis
This is a massive escalation on the part of the UK and may be the lynchpin to Russia declaring Britain a “combatant.”
If person “A” provides a gun to person “B” and person B uses that gun to shoot Person “C” then Person “A” facilitated that attack and is an accessory before the fact and goes to prison, too.
I don’t see any reason that state actors can’t be held to that same legal standard.
US Very Concerned as China-Russia Strengthen Their Military Ties!
I was in maintenance, and then worked the lines as a wrapping operator. It put money in my pocket and we could eat anything we wanted. And yeah, after one hour, we couldn’t stand to look at the stuff.
Any ways, this took place in Mebine, North Carolina.
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And all the workers were local. Mill workers. Probably C and D students throughout their school years.
Anyways, there was a big silo of honey, or syrup and one of peanut butter.
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And on the day before the Labor Day weekend, one of the workers was assigned the job to watch the peanut-butter go though a pipe at the bottom of the silo into a cauldron.
When the vessel was full, his job was to turn it off, shut the spigot, and then go home, locking the door behind him.
Well, the factory is empty, and he starts drinking.
The peanut butter is running slow.
Slow.
Slow.
And he is getting drunker and drunker.
Slow.
Slow.
“Fuck it”.
Eventually, he leaves the factory, locks the door behind him and forgets about it.
Three days later, we all come to work, and no one can get in.
Three feet of peanut butter had flooded the factory floor, the offices, and it was a real mess.
The front door to the lobby is one half full to the handle with this ocean of peanut butter.
Oh yeah. He got fired.
And we spent the next three weeks shoveling the peanut butter back into the silo.
True story.
Not embellished upon at all.
I have many stories about this factory; from the 20-something foxy side chick of the Boss, to the schemes to get free ingredients. It was quite the experience. I’ll tell you what.
So yeah. This is my story about shoveling peanut butter.
Now you know…
Today.
Have you ever lost any respect for someone instantly?
My nextdoor neighbours are an elderly Moroccan couple. We live in The Netherlands. The woman doesn’t speak Dutch at all, the husband a little. He often comes to me with letters and asks me to explain them to him. Because of those letters I know that the wife suffers from dementia.
Last month the husband rang my doorbell and asked if he could look inside. I figured that he wanted to see something in the street, which he couldn’t see from his appartment, so I let him in. But then he said, Helen, I love you. I want to be with you, can I kiss you on the cheek? I thought that I must have misunderstood him, it couldn’t be possible that my married illiterate neighbour who is around 90 years old, old enough to be my grandfather (I am 47) is making a pass at me, so completely flabbergasted, I said yes. But then he really kissed me on my cheek😱😱😱. I immediately understood the situation and I froze. Then he said that he would go on a vacation for two weeks and asked if he could come to me afterwards. Still completely paralysed I managed to say no with a really soft voice. Then he left.
It is now more than a month later. I am appalled by the audacity that a married illiterate man, who’s old enough to be my grandfather, with whom I can barely have a conversation, thinks that he stands a chance with me. I am disgusted. I thought that he was a decent old man, but he is a dirty old man.
What was the kindest thing someone did for you when you were young?
I really hated my life, but there seemed to be no way out of the situation.
At the time I was working two jobs.
During the day I would travel to NYC and work odd jobs such as catering.
At night, I worked in the dairy and frozen section of a shitty grocery store called Pathmark.
My brother was in middle school, and too young to work.
My father was out of work, having been fired for the upteenth time.
My mother refused to help support the family.
My grandmother was retired and struggling to pay the bills with her social security and pension.
I had recently graduated from high school, dreaming of going to college and building my life.
Less than a year later, it was starting to look like a pipe dream.
I was incredibly angry about this, and fought with my family constantly, my mother in particular.
She constantly complained about the family’s situation, and would take her frustrations out on me, once calling me lazy when I decided to sleep in for a few hours on my day off rather than fix her TV.
One day, we had a long argument, where I sarcastically thanked her for ruining my life, and called her a lazy cow, among other things.
It was admittedly, not my finest moment to tell you the truth.
Later, she confessed part of it to a childhood friend of hers who lived in Arizona.
She told her about our fight and about the fact that I had yelled at her about wanting to go to college.
The next day, I received a phone call from that friend, a woman whom I had never met, but apparently had talked to on occasion over the years.
She asked me if I would like to move to Arizona and live with her and her family.
I found the idea of living with a stranger uncomfortable, so I said no.
She told me to think about it.
A few days later, the woman called me again at home, and made the same offer.
However, before I could say no, she sweetened the deal.
She would pay for me to go out to AZ and if I didn’t like it after a month, she would send me back, no questions asked.
Thinking that I had nothing to lose, I moved to Arizona, and I never looked back.
It took me a little while to get my bearings, but she eventually helped me find a job, apply for college, among other things.
Now, 15 years later I am a successful teacher, with three college degrees under my belt.
And it was all due to the kindness of a stranger who decided to take a gamble on me and my future.
Women SHOCKED Men Looked At Her In Booty Pants At Gym, Women PREFER BEARS To Men In Woods
The poem “Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost
This is from one of my earlier posts, found HERE. Please guys, MM has a lot of good stuff buried under all the fluff.
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
What picture made your blood boil?
This is the lifeless body of Ziba – a 22 year old student at University of Kabul. She was shot several times as she was trying to escape through the window of her classroom to flee from the horror.
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Dozens of other students her age in the very same classroom were killed that day.
It was November 2, 2020 when a group of cowards, misguided, losers, brainless and merciless individuals attacked the University of Kabul in the capital of Afghanistan. They killed more than 20 young students – most of them in their early 20s.
These kids were the savings, the investment, the helping hand, the happiness, the hope, the future and the life of many parents who worked hard their entire life to be able to merely earn a living to survive and send their loved ones to university so that one day they get to see them living a better life than them. They’re gone, so are the better days those parents wished to see. They did not just lose their kids, they lost everything.
That, however, is NOT what boils my blood the most.
What boils my blood the most is the fact that we have individuals who, proudly, take all of that away from those aging parents, and believe that by doing so they’ve pleased god. They believe they can commit such an act of horror and terror, killing defenceless and unarmed individuals in dozens and stand before god on the day of judgment and be rewarded for what they had done! No religion teaches that. This is wrong, this is barbaric and inhuman and it boils my blood that someone would do such a horrific act of evil in the name of religion.
On the other hand, what cools me down and gives hope and patience to those parents and many other Afghans who lost and still are losing their loved ones, is knowing that YES there will come a day that they stand before god, but it will not be with pride, nor will they be rewarded for what they had committed. We believe in promise of god where he says: “so whoever does an atom’s weight of good will see it and whoever does an atom’s weight of bad/evil will see it.” (Quran 99:7–8)
M1A1 Tanks PULLED From Ukraine Front Lines “Weak and Vulnerable”
United States M1A1 Abrams tanks have been “pulled” from Ukrainian front lines because, Ukraine says, the tanks are “weak and vulnerable.” So much for America’s Main Battle Tank when it has to face a Near-Peer Army like Russia!
Video below, posted on social media, shows the latest M1A1 Abrams being towed by Russian troops. Smashed, burned, blown-up, there isn’t much left to the $4.3 MILLION tank.
We were told its armor was virtually impenetrable; and it’s mix of metals was so secret, the mixture is “classified.” Now look at what happened to it!
If this is what can be expected of these tanks when they’re in a REAL fight (as opposed to fighting rag-wearing terrorists) then reasonable people have to ask “What are we getting for all this money?”
— — GEROMAN — time will tell – 👀 — (@GeromanAT) April 28, 2024
Sacrifice
My 16 year old daughter wants me to buy her a brand new car for her birthday but I can’t afford it. All of her friends’ parents bought their kids a car. What should I do?
I have got to share this;
My step daughter was given $1000 as a gift from her grandmother when she passed away.
When the step daughter turned 16, I took her to early drivers ed. She passed and had her temp. Now she needed to practice driving and the dreaded parallel parking. I took her to these as well. 4 months down the road, and opportunity came up to buy a used Honda accord 1992. 1 owner who was meticulous about maintenance. I ask the step daughter if she wanted to use her money towards a car. She said YES. I told her that would not buy much car, but this one was in very very good shape. She said yes.
So I got the car, made her change the oil, the battery, and helped her get new tires (mind you aside from the car, I paid for everything else.)
The car got inspect, insured and registered. Then sat there. for about 4 months, she neither asked about it, sat in it, or started it up.
When I asked her mom what the matter was, she told me this:
The stepdaughter did not get to choose what kind of car, nor its color. She didn’t like the interior and thought the car was too old. I asked if she knew what went into get the car road worthy? The mom said not nobody asked me to do all those things for the stepdaughter.
I was stupefied. When the two went on a trip to visit family in late Dec, I sold the car for $1500, gave the stepdaughter $750, and paid the bills with the rest.
The nuclear radiation was evident when they returned and did not see the car in the driveway. I told them too bad. I needed to pay bills. I gave her the money, and she had the audacity to remind me that she initially paid $1000.
Of course I told her of the extra expenses I incurred including the tires. I could present her the receipts. Wisely she said “Fine”.
Course, that incident was NEVER forgotten, and I was forever labeled the bad guy. Step parents never get a break.
Russian State-Controlled TV: If NATO Troops Enter Ukraine , SARMAT, YARS, and Avangard (Nukes) Will Hit NATO Decision-Making Centers
State-controlled Russian TV today broadcast a direct announcement of Russia’s intent to fire nuclear weapons at NATO Decision-making centers if NATO troops enter Ukraine to battle Russia. The words aired were so blunt as to be undeniable..
Here is the segment of Russia state-controlled TV broadcast today as a warning to the entire West:
So there it is. Plain. Simple. Easy to understand. Even the village idiot can grasp this.
“If NATO Troops enter Ukraine to inflict strategic defeat upon Russia . . . . everything will fly: SARMAT, YARS, AVANGARD.” Those are Russia’s nuclear weapons system names.
WHY NOW?
. . . . Why broadcast this . . . . now?
Why now?
Could it be because elements from the French Army have, in fact, deployed to Odessa, Ukraine?
Could the RUMORS which claim elements of the US 101st Airborne have also deployed to Odessa, Ukraine, be Russia’s reason for airing this, now?
We already know that France deployed elements of the French Foreign Legion into Slavyansk, Ukraine, and the Russians blew them up with missile strikes about 48 hours after they got there.
We already know that Polish, Romanian, and other NATO-country troops, were hit by Russian missiles at a hotel in Dnipropetrovsk last week. A slew of them got killed too.
So what is it about developments in Ukraine that caused Russia to instruct it’s state-controlled TV, to make such a blunt, unmistakable, broadcast, Now????
I think something’s up. I think the Russians either know . . . or are seeing . . . Deployment of NATO troops into Ukraine.
If you haven’t watched the video, it clearly warns “NATO Decision-making centers are already in the crosshairs, and if NATO troops enter Ukraine to inflict strategic defeat upon Russia, everything will fly: SARMAT, YARS, and AVANGARD.”
There’s no wiggle room in that language. There’s no nuance. No ambiguity.
I thought you should know while there’s still time to try to prepare. Make plans. Buy supplies.
But clearly, there doesn’t seem to be very much time left — at all.
Best Ever Lemon Chicken
Healthy, flavorful and low in calories.
Best Ever Lemon Chicken
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
4 skinless chicken breasts
Salt, pepper and paprika
3/4 cup water, divided
1/4 cup white wine
1 teaspoon chicken bouillon powder
1/4 cup lemon juice
2 teaspoons all-purpose flour
1 lemon, thinly sliced
Instructions
Heat oven to 375 degrees F. Spray a frying pan with Pam.
Season chicken breasts to taste with salt, pepper, and paprika.
Heat frying pan and sauté chicken until nicely browned (about 10 minutes), adding about 1/4 cup water near the end of the cooking time to loosen meat from the pan.
Remove chicken breasts to a shallow baking dish.
To the pan juices, add the white wine, 1/2 cup water and chicken bouillon, and heat through.
Meanwhile mix the lemon juice and flour in a cup. Pour into the frying pan and stir until sauce is thickened.
Pour sauce over chicken. Top with lemon slices and bake for 20 minutes.
Why do medieval soldiers wear armour when modern soldiers don’t?
Because, contrary to Hollywood movies, armor actually worked.
Even otherwise excellent movies like Lord of the Rings will have you believe that this:
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Might as well be made out of plastic or paper because it offers zero protection against weapons of the day. But cutting through or piercing metal is nowhere as easy as the movies make it to be.
They only stopped wearing armor when it didn’t work anymore after guns became very common. They could make bulletproof armor using medieval technology:
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(In fact the term “bulletproof” is from “proofing” that the armor can resist a pistol shot, seen in the dent above)
These armor are expensive and not readily available. While rich and important people could afford them, the average peasant or soldier couldn’t. They’re also very heavy and limits your mobility.
When bullet massively improved in the mid- and late-19th century (to something familiar today), these heavy armor only make you slow and vulnerable on the battlefield. It didn’t stop both sides from experimenting in WW1 though, even though these bulky suits were mostly useless against anything more powerful than pistols. The steel helmets that became common was used primarily to protect against shrapnel after artillery became the deadliest thing in the battlefield (and still is).
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Bulletproof armor only became practical with the invention of kevlar in the 1970s. Even so, some countries today are still resistant in fully-equipping their soldiers with body armor, either because it’s too expensive or because in the environment they’re operating on (like the tropics) heavy armor that don’t allow sweat to evaporate can be detrimental. But as the war in Ukraine is showing, body armor is mandatory once again in warfare.
The Beverly Hillbillies – Season 1, Episode 1 (1962) – The Clampetts Strike Oil – Paul Henning
What was the biggest scandal at your work?
While working for the Home Office in the early 2000s, there was a woman whom we’ll call “Joan” in a neighbouring department who’d been through all sorts of hell with an ex boyfriend. Joan would tell us of the awful things he’d said to her, the late night phone calls, turning up to her door uninvited and so on.
We were supportive and would sympathise with her while also telling her to report this to the police. She would make excuses not to do this, and we were unable to force her to do it because she would get so upset.
One day, a delivery arrived at reception for Joan:
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A dozen black roses. Joan brought them back to the office and was in a terrible state. We were naturally horrified by this, but to compound it, she reached into her handbag and brought out one of these:
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A miniature coffin. She had received this in the mail that morning before leaving for work.
Oh. My. Word! We said enough was enough and weren’t going to take “no” for an answer – we alerted her supervisor and called a contact at Scotland Yard (which was just around the corner), and asked them to send a detective to investigate the matter. This was clearly a threat to Joan’s life and a serious matter.
Joan was beside herself when this happened. She really didn’t want the police involved. We told her that this had gone too far and we couldn’t stand by and let poor Joan suffer any longer.
The detective arrived and began his investigation by seizing the flowers and the miniature coffin after taking Joan’s personal details…
The following day, Joan wasn’t at work. We feared the worst and went to her office to enquire if she had called in or whether a welfare check should be carried out. Joan’s boss assured us that everything was fine, but we wouldn’t be seeing Joan again and he wouldn’t say anything more.
Well, now we were really perplexed. Wanting to get to the bottom of the matter, I called the detective that had come to the office.
When the flowers were delivered, there was no card attached. Thankfully, we had CCTV outside the building and the registration number of the van that had delivered the flowers was visible. The detective had found the registered owner of the vehicle (the florist) and called them to ask about the delivery…
When ordering a malicious delivery for someone, it’s not a good idea to use your own bank card. Especially if you’re the “victim”.
Joan had been playing us all along! The ex boyfriend was cleared of any wrongdoing – he hadn’t been in contact with Joan for more than a year and had not behaved the way Joan had alleged at all. Joan used her own bank card to order the black roses and further investigation proved that she had also ordered the miniature coffin that she had produced from her handbag.
Joan was dismissed from the civil service. I hope she got some help with her issues.
In the video, viewers can hear the loudspeakers announcing “This is a Tsunami Warning. Move to higher ground immediately.”
The thing is, there were no earthquakes of any serious magnitude either in New Jersey itself, or out in the Atlantic Ocean, which would have prompted such a warning. Earthquakes are the most common cause of Tsunamis.
Moreover, there was no massive weather systems in the ocean which can, from time time, generate a tsunami.
So . . . why the warnings?
PUNCH LINE: The mass-media, hasn’t said a word about this whole thing. People in New Jersey have just been left wondering. No information. No explanation. Nothing . . . .
What are you tired of explaining to people?
Me: So I was doing CPR on this patient, and her ribs went crack crack crack—
Him: Woah, hold up there. Why were her ribs cracking?
Me: That’s possibly her ribs breaking from my effort.
Him: Dude, are you sure you’re doing it right? I wouldn’t want you to do CPR on me in the future…
People, listen up.
The reason why we do CPR compressions is because you are in CARDIAC ARREST. You’re DEAD unless we do something. No offence, but I don’t give a two shit flying fuck if my compressions break a couple of ribs when it meant SAVING YOUR LIFE.
In fact, hearing those ribs crack usually tells me I’m doing a good job. I am getting sufficient depth with my chest compressions to maintain circulation temporarily. Broken ribs is not something we aim for obviously, but it’s a common side effect of good CPR technique.
We can address those petty rib fractures after, and if, we get you alive and breathing first.
Other experimentation with Text to picture AI
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Foreign Countries Have Begun PULLING THEIR GOLD from U.S. “Safekeeping”
A number of countries around the world have begun withdrawing their Gold Bullion from storage in the United States over fears about the US Financial System! It’s not only our Financial System, it was the FORCIBLE SEIZURE of Russia’s Sovereign Wealth Funds; the world now sees the USA as nothing more than a Den of Thieves!
Over the past ten days, at least FOUR (4) countries have decided to pull their Gold reserves from the United States: Cameroun, Ghana, Nigeria, and a fourth country (named below) whose decision is tightly concealed to prevent PANIC. That nation is named below in COVERT INTEL for Subscribers Only.
April 19:Cameroon repatriates its gold reserves amid concerns about recession in the United States
In a significant development reflecting changing economic dynamics, Cameroon has begun the repatriation of its gold reserves from the United States. The move, driven by growing concerns about the deteriorating state of the U.S. economy, marks a pivotal moment in global finance.
The withdrawal of gold reserves from US custody highlights countries’ proactive approach to protecting their financial assets amid growing economic uncertainties. With indicators including rising national debt, weak economic growth and geopolitical tensions, the decision reflects a broader trend among nations to reassess their reliance on the United States as a safe haven for financial assets.
Financial analysts point to clear indicators signaling a rapid deterioration in the U.S. economy, sparking concerns among global investors. The decision to repatriate gold reserves highlights nations’ strategic responses to mitigate potential risks from exposure to the faltering U.S. economy.
Although logistical challenges and potential security risks may accompany the repatriation process, experts suggest that the benefits outweigh the risks for countries seeking to strengthen their financial sovereignty and guard against external economic shocks.
As the repatriation of gold reserves unfolds, this movement is provoking discussions about the broader implications for international finance. It highlights the importance of diversification and risk management to navigate the complexities of the global economic landscape.
APRIL 21: GHANA
Ghana’s recent decision to repatriate its gold reserves from the United States signals a significant shift in the nation’s economic strategy. Beyond the symbolic gesture of reclaiming control over its precious metal assets, Ghana’s move is underscored by a pragmatic desire to shield itself from the uncertainties of a destabilized US economy.
According to economic experts, Ghana’s decision comes at a crucial juncture amidst escalating global economic uncertainties and mounting concerns about the stability of the US financial system. Dr. Joseph Mensah, an economist specializing in international finance, asserts, “Ghana’s move to withdraw its gold reserves from American vaults is a prudent measure to mitigate risks and safeguard against potential economic volatility.”
By bringing its gold reserves back within its borders, Ghana aims to insulate itself from the repercussions of any downturns in the US economy, thereby reducing exposure to external shocks and vulnerabilities. Dr. Mensah further explains, “Repatriating gold reserves aligns with a broader trend among nations reassessing their financial strategies in light of evolving global dynamics. As geopolitical tensions escalate and trade disputes intensify, nations are increasingly prioritizing measures to assert greater control over their financial assets and reduce dependencies on foreign custodianship.”
Critics may raise concerns about logistical challenges and potential security risks associated with repatriating gold reserves. However, proponents argue that the benefits of withdrawing funds from a destabilized US economy far outweigh the risks. Dr. Mensah concludes, “By reclaiming control over its gold reserves, Ghana not only bolsters its economic sovereignty but also strengthens its resilience against external economic shocks.”
In conclusion, Ghana’s decision to repatriate its gold reserves from the United States reflects a strategic move towards safeguarding against economic volatility and asserting greater control over its financial destiny.
April 22:NIGERIA
Ghana’s recent decision to repatriate its gold reserves from the United States signals a significant shift in the nation’s economic strategy. Beyond the symbolic gesture of reclaiming control over its precious metal assets, Ghana’s move is underscored by a pragmatic desire to shield itself from the uncertainties of a destabilized US economy.
According to economic experts, Ghana’s decision comes at a crucial juncture amidst escalating global economic uncertainties and mounting concerns about the stability of the US financial system. Dr. Joseph Mensah, an economist specializing in international finance, asserts, “Ghana’s move to withdraw its gold reserves from American vaults is a prudent measure to mitigate risks and safeguard against potential economic volatility.”
By bringing its gold reserves back within its borders, Ghana aims to insulate itself from the repercussions of any downturns in the US economy, thereby reducing exposure to external shocks and vulnerabilities. Dr. Mensah further explains, “Repatriating gold reserves aligns with a broader trend among nations reassessing their financial strategies in light of evolving global dynamics. As geopolitical tensions escalate and trade disputes intensify, nations are increasingly prioritizing measures to assert greater control over their financial assets and reduce dependencies on foreign custodianship.”
Critics may raise concerns about logistical challenges and potential security risks associated with repatriating gold reserves. However, proponents argue that the benefits of withdrawing funds from a destabilized US economy far outweigh the risks. Dr. Mensah concludes, “By reclaiming control over its gold reserves, Ghana not only bolsters its economic sovereignty but also strengthens its resilience against external economic shocks.”
In conclusion, Ghana’s decision to repatriate its gold reserves from the United States reflects a strategic move towards safeguarding against economic volatility and asserting greater control over its financial destiny.
What’s something a doctor did to you that you won’t ever forget?
Dr. Eduardo Yambo, Family Physician.
When my son was a toddler I found myself a single parent. I got a job and tried to keep a roof over our heads. We used kerosene to heat the place. Had one in each bedroom. It was a very, very cold winter and both my son and I got sick, but I couldn’t afford for both of us to see the doctor. I made an appointment for my son.
After checking out my son, Dr. Yambo looked at me and said ‘What about you? Why am I not seeing you? You sound terrible!’. I told him I can’t afford another visit for myself; my son was the priority. I explained I was no longer with my husband and had no insurance. He quickly checked me out and gave me a something for my cough. He gave us office samples to save me the cost of prescriptions.
Had to make a follow-up visit for the next week. Brought my son in, and on checking out the doctor came out and told the receptionist that the charge was $12 (regular visits were $25 I think). He wanted another follow-up a week later. That visit was $6. It was the early 80’s and my take home pay was about $124/week, so those fees mattered an awful lot to me.
I’d been bringing my son to him for a couple of years already and that had never happened before. Suddenly, follow-up visits were reduced cost. Following up with my son’s health was more important to this doctor than money.
Until I moved away there was nothing that could make me go to a different doctor!
What would you do if you got fired from your job?
The only time I was fired was disguised as “We don’t need this many employees in summer; it’s our slow time”. The owner/boss disliked me, for what reason I don’t know. One coworker told me she thought it was jealousy. The company made and rented costumes, mostly to schools and universities for theatrical productions. When I went for my interview I had brought in an armload of costumes I had made over several years for Renaissance groups and personal use. What I did at the company was mostly mending, although I took the initiative once and made some bow ties from scraps of fabric lying around. The boss had accused me, not to my face but to other workers, of filling up their website with pornography (something I wouldn’t know how to do even had I wanted to). So I wasn’t surprised when I was told I would be out of a job. It annoyed me that there was a young woman who had been hired after me, who lived with her parents (unlike me, a single mom of two), and didn’t need a job as much as I did. But I left without saying anything and shortly got a job through a recommendation of one coworker who did pet sitting (same company). Later I found out that the young woman was embezzling from the company, so I got the last laugh.
What was a meal you loved as a kid but now that you’re an adult you realize your parents only made because you were poor?
I’m from Vietnam. We eat rice a lot, almost every meal.
When I was about 5 to 8 years old, once or twice per week, my mom would make ‘mixing special rice’ for dinner. It’s white rice cooked together with corn and sweet potatoes
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(Image source: baobaclieu.vn)
I always got excited for those dinners.
We eventually didn’t eat that kind of rice anymore. I asked my mom about that once in a while but she just gave me reasons why she didn’t want to make the rice: out of corn season, sweet potatoes weren’t any good at market,…
When I was 12, on my mom’s birthday, I proudly announced that I prepared dinner. And guess what I made? Rice with corn and sweet potatoes. When I served dinner, my mom couldn’t hold it anymore, she cried. I asked her why? Did I do anything wrong? That was the very first time my mom explained to me that she was sick of this rice because she had eaten it too much.
I didn’t know that we only ate that because corn and sweet potatoes were much cheaper than rice.
I didn’t like that meal as much after that day.
—
To anyone is thinking about making a comment “hey, it sounds delicious” or “add some butter”, etc, please don’t. I wish we had butter. Also, it was good, but it was not any good after eating it frequently for 30+ years to the point you break down crying when you see it like my mom did.
And I didn’t like it very much anymore wasn’t because it’s not good or because it’s “cheap”. I didn’t like it because it hurt my mom.
Economic Shock: Bombshell GDP Drop, IMF Slams Congress Spending, Republic Bank Collapses
What is a fun psychological trick to try on someone?
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The most powerful way to win an argument is to ask questions.
If you want people to take your words seriously, say that your father taught you this. People naturally believe in parental advice.
If someone is about to get angry at you, sit next to that person. They will have to lower their voice and there will be no direct face-to-face contact.
If you want to know if someone is attentive, repeat your phrase with slight variations in it. If you are listening, either your facial expressions will change, or you will point to that part and question.
If you think that someone is giving you a false figure then read it wrongly. If they correct you, it’s legit.
If you want people to agree with you, nod your head and make eye contact when you speak, they’ll nod too.
Explain and repeat what your friend just said. The person talking to you will subconsciously realize that you are a great listener. Of course, don’t go overboard with paraphrasing.
Use someone’s name more often. While talking to someone, keep using their name in the conversation. This helps them feel important and valued.
When you want someone to agree to something, give them a list with 3 options and leave the one you want to choose at the end. They will most likely choose the latter.
What you say about other people affects how others see you. People will associate the adjectives you use to describe other people with your personality. This phenomenon is called spontaneous property transfer.
Inflation in the USA
How catastrophic will the world’s drive to abandon the dollar be for the U.S. economy and people?
Very very very significant. The U.S. has been using money to do war monger, trouble make, regime change, financing and orchestrating coups, revolutions and paying off U.S. lackeys in the trillion yearly form free money printing that it could without much ramifications! Upon its inability and impossibility to carry on printing money freely and without much ramification, the U.S. no longer is able to freely do those shit anymore. It will lead to a better world and a more peaceful place.
To the U.S. it may not use coercion and bribery to win favours and fix elections freely! But it may be better for US citizens who will not have to be burdened by US shit cost!
What is the most useless career advice ever given?
Sadly it was advice from my father to me. The year was 1968 one of the most turbulent in US history. I had just graduated from HS, the Vietnam war was raging, RFK and Martin Luther King had been assassinated. The Democratic convention in Chicago blew up and I was there watching it all as I was just leaving of all things a Young Mens Convention for Catholics and had stayed at the Conrad Hilton and watched in awe as the anti war protestors and police lined up to do battle.
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This was the auto production line. Endless cars, the USA was #1, 1955 no competition.
My father told me, do not go to college, it is a waste of time. Either go into the military or go to work on the assembly line, best jobs in the world. Union will protect you, he would protect me as he was a Union rep.
In the short run, he would have been right. The jobs were tough but plentiful, but already by 1970 the US automakers were making these.
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Some of the worst cars ever made were coming off the line in the USA by 1970 and the rot had already begun to set in just when I went to work on the line.
My father was so adamant that when I went and tried it on the Monday – Friday program which meant you worked 2 days a week as a ‘college kid’ as on Friday there were not enough workers as they got their paychecks on Thursday which meant they got drunk and didn’t come in. And on Monday they didn’t come in as they were still drunk or hungover from the weekend, I tried it out.
It was a nightmare and I hated it. Everyone yelling screaming, quality was shit, politics everywhere, the company couldn’t get good cars made and the union was fighting to keep all 2.5 million jobs.
Well what happened?
Today there are 150,000 UAW members about 8% of the number when I started. A lot of people got in and out and grabbed their pensions. They worked the system and left Michigan and went back to Kentucky and down to Florida.
But if I had gone in and stayed? It might have worked but I would have lost everything that I have now done in my life. Lived around the world, a 50 year global career, speaking multiple languages. I have literally lived on 5 continents ranging from California, Florida, the Rocky Mountains, then Australia to China to India to Hungary to Singapore and Hong Kong several times. On and on my career has gone and my education has propelled me and made it all possible.
Most importantly, to survive, repeat survive and prosper I have had to ‘reinvent’ myself again and again and only with my education and MBA and languages and experience working around the world have I been able to be flexible and do this. Millions were literally stuck without a hope so many times in my home town while I simply changed countries and took a new job in a growing industry such as software when I used to be a manufacturers rep for years. Flexibility is the key to a long career and not a factory.
And those guys who were on the line? The lucky ones got away and got their pensions. The vast majority slipped through the process especially after the downturns of 2008 just when they were going to retire and pretty much got little to nothing.
Those who work in the auto industry today have a precarious future especially if you work in an ‘engine’ plant as those will be gone with the EVs.
My father meant well, but from his hard work and premature cancer and youthful smoking he died at 70. I am now 73 and knock on wood, still doing what I like and living a good life in France.
My advice, listen to many but make your own choices and definitely do not look at the past, look to what is happening for the future and it will help guide your decisions. It is way to important to leave to those who think they know, but only know their local situation and what they have grown up with.
Given the rapid change in careers there is no such thing as a safe bet or a definitive career path. If you don’t believe me, think of Detroit and what happened to them as the city never evolved and never changed.
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Packard out of business and the largest abandoned factory in the USA.
Detroit? 2 million people when I was born in 1950, today? Barely 600,000.
I have to ask the questioner if ANY of the predictions made by American politicians ever came true?
Swine flu
Ebola
Y2K
3G causing gas pumps to explode
Phones causing planes to crash
4G causing brain damage
Hamburgers made out of worms
Back-masking of rock music
Sex education causing a spike in pregnancies
None ever came true.
But, for some reason, “China will invade Taiwan”. I mean, just how absolutely stupid can a person be. Is there a scale below moronic?
Still Americans (and their Australian and European cousins) believe this swill.
Who figures?
…
China has made it perfectly clear how the reunification will proceed. And this is well defined and in process right now. That’s the reality.
Accept it.
Evil in America
Have you ever walked out of a restaurant after you were seated by a waiter or waitress?
Oh yes, once when I was very much younger, I went out on a date with a very nice man, and he took me to a good restaurant. We got there, ordered the wine, and some bread rolls and butter were served also, while we decided on what we would have to eat.
The man told me his wife had died, but he didn’t tell me how recently! He didn’t tell me he was still in fairly early stages of grieving, and was trying to put on a brave face.
So I had no real idea of what he was going through.
Then just before we ordered, he started to get serious heart symptoms. I asked him if I should ask the restaurant to phone an ambulance. But he didn’t want that. He wanted to go home and call his private doctor! I thought that was unwise, but that is what he wanted.
We had to leave immediately, and he grabbed some cash from his pocket and put it on the table. He didn’t even count how much! But I am sure it was plenty to cover the bottle of wine and some bread.
I apologised to the staff, and had to drive him home. They were surprised but didn’t mind of course due to the circumstances.
It turned out (after the doctor’s visit) that he hadn’t had a heart attack, but a serious panic attack. I stayed with him all night to make sure he would be okay and keep his spirits up as he didn’t want to be alone.
We never did have a second date. But that was okay. He wasn’t really ready to start dating. He needed to process his grief. He was a nice man though, bless him.
The Chinese owner of TikTok claims they would rather shut down than sell TikTok. (To the surprise of many lawmakers who voted to ban TikTok). Do you think they are serious or bluffing?
China is famously no-nonsense. They always follow up and follow through on decisions. America, on the contrary, is used to fooling themselves inured in dirty tactics to pull a fast hand, but only end up humiliating themselves more often than not. Sanctioning Russia is a wonderful example. Examples abound that don’t need me to list them here.
The ugly truth is greed. The damage of Israeli genocide on US image is already done. It’s not TikTok’s fault and banning it is only a pretext. American political and business asshole pirates have long coveted TikTok’s huge market share and profit potential. China is wise to keep this trade mark and technology, and continue expanding its global market. The world is big enough for TikTok with unlimited potential.
Elon Musk WARNS Population Collapse IS COMING, STROKES & HEART Disease Wiping Out Greece
“To regain sovereignty, the EU needs to stop following Washington’s policies, but the European Commission is pushing the American agenda and resembling a fascist system with its single-minded decisions.
Europe determined its future when it responded with contempt to Russia’s attempts to forge ties after the collapse of the USSR and did not honour the Minsk agreements to give Ukraine time to arm itself, according to Didier Maisto, former director of Sud Radio. In an interview with TVL, he pointed out that while Europe used to try to encircle Russia, now it is gradually encircling Russia itself, but the EU should have thought about this earlier.
The partnership between the BRICS countries is actively developing and they are finding common ground for special agreements. The US, which opposes them, continues to advance thanks to its military-industrial complex and business, imposing its laws in other countries. Sandwiched between these vise is Europe, which needs to stop dancing to Washington’s tune to regain its power and sovereignty.
The main conductor of the American agenda in Europe has become the European Commission – the centre of gravity and the centre of decision-making in the EU is shifting towards it. Now the entry into war, the supply of weapons and medicines, the banning of certain media are approved without confirmation by a vote in the European Council. Didier Maisto reminds us that back in 2017 he warned that if Macron is elected president, Europe will slip into soft fascism.”
What is wrong with Joe Biden?
Doesn’t matter what is wrong with Biden. He’s not running things anyway.
What is the strangest failure you have ever seen on a car?
My father-in-law owned a 1988 Ford Escort wagon. He only drove it locally to and from work, and he probably never turned on the rear defrost.
My FIL passed away, and my MIL offered the car to me. The Escort was about 2 years old with ~13,000 miles. My 1980 Honda Accord was 10 years old and starting to get up in mileage, so I accepted it. My wife at the time drove it from Virginia to New Jersey during the summer. I started driving it to/from work about 15 minutes each way. I worked late one evening in the fall. When I got into the car, there was condensation on the rear window. I started the car and turned on the rear defrost to clear it up. Within a couple minutes, I hear a loud boom and notice my rear window is shattered. I thought someone was shooting at me! That was not the case. A rear window with a rear defrost is just 2 pieces of glass sandwiched around the heating elements and glued together. My theory was that the rear window had an air bubble in it due to a manufacturing defect. The heating element caused the air bubble to expand. Eventually, the air bubble got big enough to break the glass causing the explosion.
Ford would not replace the window because the car was out of warranty. (12 months/12,000 miles in those days) They wanted over $700 to replace it. I had a price of ~$225 from a glass shop. Ford said their price was what it was because it was “Ford quality glass”. If their glass was such high quality, it wouldn’t have shattered in the first place. Needless to say, I went with the glass shop. They even came to my office and replaced it in the parking lot.
=======================
A few years later I changed jobs, and I started commuting ~30 minutes each way on the highway. Ever since getting the car, I would notice a faint smell of antifreeze. I never noticed any leaks, but I did have to periodically add antifreeze to the overflow reservoir. After driving to/from the new job for about a month, I was driving home, and the car started to overheat. Long story short, the engine blew its head gasket, and I had to get the engine rebuilt. When the shop took the engine apart, they found a bolt that was sheared off. They said it probably came that way from the factory. That was the cause of the antifreeze smell, the slow loss of antifreeze, and ultimately the head gasket failure. After rebuilding the engine, there were no more problems like that.
Score:
Strange Failures – 2, Ford – 0. On this car, Quality was not Job One.
I worked in McDonald’s overnight for one year as a cashier in the drive thru. During my year working in McDonald’s I encountered some things that I really don’t recommend doing:
Not paying attention to the cashier when he/she is telling you what you got.
If you don't pay attention when I asked you, please don't complain if I charged you $100 for things you didn't order because you said “yes, whatever.”
Expecting the cashier to know you don’t like pickles or onions.
Yes, we know some of our regulars. No, we didn't know you don't like pickles.
Ordering things are not on the menu.
Do not ask me for a whopper. Do not ask for a chicken junior. There is no such a thing as fajita in McDonald's.
Calling an employee a derogatory word.
Please, don't do it. If it’s a word you don't enjoy being called. I refused service to a customer once for addressing me as “you, nigga”.
Getting mad if you ordered 15 Quarter-pounders with fries and a shake and your bill is more than $100.
If you think it is too much, please cook it at home.
Spitting.
Seriously, I got spit on my face more than once.
Swearing and/or yelling.
Please, if you had a bad night, you got evicted, divorced or whatever - it’s not the cashier's fault. You should not call the cashier (or anyone you don't want to mess with) a motherfucker.
Not knowing what you are getting.
More than once I had customers claiming I put things they did not request in their food.
A guy yelled at me once because there was ice in his smoothie. On a different occasion, a guy yelled at me because he got only three sauces with his order (a 10 piece chicken nuggets meal only comes with three sauces); he requested three more and tried to punch me when I told him that they were not free. The question “what does that come with?” works very well.
Last but not least, being violent.
Please try to keep your temper. Also, try to be as nice as possible.
Tales From The Shoe Store | Married With Children
Which tips would you give today’s teens?
Control your emotions and lust (Overcome)
It’s completely normal to experience lust, or sexual desire in teen. Your feelings might be focused on a particular person, or you might be drawn to activities like masturbating or watching pornography. But sometimes, these desires can be overwhelming or unwanted. If you just can’t shake those uncomfortable thoughts and feelings, don’t worry—there are things you can do to manage them.
The price of temporary lust can be expensive.
Learn About Finance Early
Money should be your friend throughout your life, not your enemy. Sadly, the education system doesn’t do such a great job at teaching you about finance, so you have to learn it on your own. There are plenty of sources that you can get financial advice for free.
Make Good Friends, Not More Friends
Building a network of friends at school is always going to be valuable whether they are the greatest people or not. Spend more time trying to develop and grow those relationships that you think will be good for you.
You are the average of your five friends around you hangout with the most.
Don’t Care About What Others Think of You
This is definitely the best advice for teenagers who feel like they need to impress the world! Nobody cares either, so why would you? Laugh when you embarrass yourself. Dress how you want to dress. Be honest about things you don’t like. Not only does this help you become more of yourself, but you’ll also make friends with the right people.
Take Care of Your Body
Because it takes care of you everyday! Just by implementing some simple practices like Exercise, Practice Proper Hygiene, Have a Skin Care Routine, Invest in Yourself and you’re already getting ahead of where you were the day before.
Don’t Compare Yourself to Others
Comparing yourself to others will only lead to disappointment and lack of confidence. There will always be someone with more than you more money, more friends, more style, more of anything.
Compare who you were yesterday not someone else’s today.
What are the craziest objects that you’ve seen TSA workers remove from someone’s bag to be confiscated?
A friend of mine is a pilot for one of the big airlines. He related this story to me. One day, he is headed through security and in front of him are two air marshals escorting a prisoner in hand cuffs. First the TSA Agent tried to tell the marshals that they had to uncuff the prisoner before he could go through security. (yeah, that got cleared up pretty quick). Then the TSA agent tried to tell them they would have to remove their guns (this time a supervisor was called over to educate the TSA agent). Then the TSA agent told the marshals to empty their pockets. One of them had a tiny fingernail clipper with a small file on it that vaguely resembled knife. The TSA Agent proudly jumped on that and demanded the marshal would have to relinquish it as “contraband”. I think at this point the marshals were just tired of dealing with this person so he gladly gave her the fingernail clippers so that they could go on their way.
In summary: two marshals escorting a prisoner..both of the marshals armed with pistols and other weapons, had a pair of fingernail clippers confiscated because it was “contraband”.
Cinnamon Garlic Roast Chicken
40 Cloves of Garlic Roast Chicken foodiecrush.com 010
Combine salt, pepper, garlic and cinnamon. Sprinkle mixture onto all parts of the chicken.
Refrigerate for at least an hour.
Heat oven to 400 degrees F. Spray a roasting pan with vegetable oil spray.
Remove chicken from refrigerator, and place in roasting pan.
Sprinkle with paprika.
Scatter onion slices around chicken, and roast uncovered for 35 minutes.
Reduce heat to 350 degrees F.
Stir onion slices, add the cup of water, and continue roasting for an additional 50 minutes until tender, basting occasionally.
Is China’s economy currently experiencing a slowdown, or is this information being exaggerated by the US media?
Not exactly
The Chinese stock market is among the most undervalued in the world and is stubbornly remaining there due to a lot of regulations against speculation
The US Treasury still pays 5.31% as Peak Bond Yields
The Chinese Real Estate prices are low which is good for the buyers but that means investors will be giving it a wide berth
This means a lot of HOT MONEY will not be coming in but going out
Hot money is money used to buy shares and bonds and real estate securities by foreign firms
Speculative money!
No matter even if the US says China is booming, this is going to happen
Likewise if China raises interest rates to 6% then Yields rise to a peak of 6.53% and suddenly Hot money will flood into China no matter even if the US says China is crashing tomorrow
Likewise China is getting a flood of Long term investments for their EV and New Technology investments
That won’t change no matter what the US says
China is still the world’s second largest consumer market plus the worlds largest manufacturer at peak profitability
That won’t change no matter what the US says
So China simply doesn’t care too much about what the US media says beyond rebuttals on their English Language Media (CGTN) or Global times or SCMP
Ukraine: “Corpses Everywhere” as Russians smash through
The ground is strewn with corpses: Soldiers of the “Center” group show everything that remains of the 47th brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces near Berdychi.
Corpses of dead Ukrainian soldiers are everywhere.
The command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine does not betray itself and continues to send Ukrainian militants on suicidal missions.
As a result of fierce fighting from artillery and tank attacks, only in this small section of the forest, the commanders of the 47th brigade managed to put an entire platoon.
Russian soldiers report that they did not even try to evacuate them after the fire began and the subsequent assault. They just left the whole brigade in this position – forever.
18+
🇷🇺⚔️🇺🇦 The ground is strewn with corpses: Soldiers of the “Center” group show everything that remains of the 47th ombre brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces near Berdychi
➖The command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine does not betray itself and continues to send Ukrainian… pic.twitter.com/Ofe78YPMmW
— — GEROMAN — time will tell – 👀 — (@GeromanAT) April 28, 2024
When being terminated from a job, have you ever warned the company of something important that only you knew how to do, and your advice has gone unheeded?
One of my first jobs was in a hospital, primarily in the E.R. Being a community hospital, we all performed many unassigned duties. Many of the staff had been leaving due to management issues and I soon put in my notice. Because of the staff loss, I was one of the few who knew how to operate several pieces of equipment. I had made the attempt to teach others how to operate the equipment, but they refused.
On my final day, the hospital administrator came up to me and said he was very unhappy with my job performance and told me I was fired. I packed my belongings and left, kind of in shock. A day later I was in my new position at the hospital I’d put in notice for. Two days later, I recieved a rather frantic call from the Administrator telling me I needed to come in and show someone how to work the equipment. It seemed they had almost lost an E.R. patient because no one could run the tests.
I told him that was impossible because I was on the way to work and hung up. A week later the Administrator, his daughter, and his son in law, were all arrested for stealing from the hospital.
Smithsonian Cover-Up: Ancient Egyptians and Giants in the Grand Canyon
Smithsonian Cover-Up: Ancient Egyptians and Giants in the Grand Canyon In 1908, President Teddy Roosevelt wanted to declare the Grand Canyon off-limits to all timber and mining operations. It would take another 11 years for Congress to designate the Grand Canyon a national park. Sensing a final opportunity for adventure, explorer G.E. Kincaid took a boat down the Colorado River and through the Grand Canyon. The canyon was rich in minerals like gold, silver and copper and Kincaid wanted to see what he could find before the area was closed off for good. About 40 miles up-river from the El Tovar Crystal canyon, Kincaid saw stains in the sediment formation about 2,000 feet up. He tied off the boat and got out to investigate. Kincaid couldn’t find a trail, but after a short hike he found something interesting covered in desert brush. Steps. Hundreds of them. Carved in sandstone. Steps that wound their way up to a high shelf on the side of the canyon. He followed the steps until he came across a cavern entrance. An entrance that was clearly man made. Kincaid entered the cavern and turned on his flashlight. On the walls he saw writing. But it wasn’t English or Native American writing. It was Ancient Egyptian Heiroglypics. Kincaid lifted his flashlight and saw that the tunnel ran far into the distance. He didn’t realize it at the time, but this was only the beginning.
When I left prison, it was the experience of a lifetime. After “dressing out”, waiting in the hallway until the day ended and a spare guard can drive us to the bus station, and getting on the shuttle to the bus, it was sunset in the hot Arkansas dusk.
There, I was given a card for $100 to help me get to where I needed to go and to start my life anew.
And got on the Greyhound bus and left to my last known family location; where my sister rented out a room for me to live in for two weeks. That is in itself another story, but for this part of the narrative, I will discuss the bus ride out of Arkansas. It was something like 14 hours.
Mostly empty, as the bus picked up other felons that did their time.
I chatted with a guy who just finished 15 years. And met some women from a woman’s prison who were heading in our direction. They suggested that we tag along with them, hang out. Spend the night and “party” with them. Good looking chicks… if a bit feral. We are all sex starved, and I’m sure those gals would be jumping our bones and pumping us dry in no time.
But I declined.
I had a plan.
I had a stopwatch and I had to get settled, get my passport, get a plane ticket and LEAVE and never… NEVER return.
So I stayed on the bus while the group got off somewhere in Tennessee.
Sometimes I wonder was I smart… or was I stupid and blind to opportunities that come my way? I don’t know. I still wonder about it all.
Still, I could have spent the night… then left in the morning…
Missed opportunities, or problem avoidance strategy. You decide.
Today…
How is the perception, treatment, categorisation etc. of plus sized models in China different from the West?
I don’t know anything about the perception of plus-sized models in “the West”, but I have a cousin in Hangzhou who works for an online clothing brand as a plus-sized model and she sometimes share bits and pieces about her job with me.
Despite what some may think, it’s not easy to join the ranks of plus-sized models.
All the job requirements for non-plus-sized models also apply to plus-sized models.
For example, my cousin tells me the standard requirements for girls to be plus-sized models for online fashion catalogue work is that they are at least 165 cm or above, that they have “curvy” silhouette, and that they have all the basics: great skin, great hair, beautiful facial features, etc.
Naturally, being plus-sized models, they can be heavier than the typical non-plus-sized models.
Many of my cousin’s plus-sized model friends are heavier than I am, as they tend to be around the 60 to 70 kg weight range. The taller girls (175 cm >) can easily be above 70 kgs.
But she mentions that how that weight is distributed across the body is also an important consideration (hence, the “curvy” silhouette mentioned above)
There’s a growing demand for online plus-sized fashion shopping and from what my cousin has shared with me, there’s massive potential, and the current situation is nowhere close to even approaching that potential.
Career-wise, an average non-celebrity, not-famous plus-sized model, in general, can earn around 10,000 to 15,000 yuan per month (1380 to 2071 USD) a month. That’s pretty good.
She also tells me that she gets a lot of positive and supportive comments whenever she posts about her life, job, and fashion choices on 小红书 (a Chinese app that’s a mix between IG and Pinterest)
She enjoys her job, is very good at what she does, is compensated well, and most importantly, she’s happy with her decision to go into plus-sized modeling.
Couldn’t be happier for her! ^^
Picture below is that of a Chinese plus-sized model modeling clothes for a Chinese online clothing store:
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Why does NO anti-China nation want to decouple or at least try to decouple from China? How could you want to have nuclear war with China/overthrow the CPC/Xi Jinping and subjugate China and STILL want China’s business? It makes no sense!
NOBODY wants a nuclear war with China.
Decoupling from China would be too painful for Western economies. Inflation would go through the roof and governments would fall.
But you’re right. Even a conventional war with China makes no sense. But who said Western governments possess common sense?
What is something that someone told you that made you immediately realize that the crazy story they were telling you was actually true?
Many years ago, I was a supervisor on a Government-funded youth employment scheme, trying to get unemployed young people into work.
One day, one of the lads managed to get a cut to the top of his head. Only a small flesh wound but, being a scalp wound, there was blood everywhere – his hair was soaked, it was in his eyes, dripping from his nose, etc.
As we were working at a site close to the hospital, we drove him there ourselves, rather than wait for an ambulance. As it was clearly a head wound, he was rushed straight through for assessment.
A few minutes later, a nurse came out, looking quite worried. Whilst they were asking him routine questions, he had apparently deteriorated. In particular, when they asked his date of birth, he had said “Don’t know!” and when they followed up with “Well, when is your birthday?” he had replied “Don’t have one!”. Clearly the wound was worse than we had thought and there was some neurological damage; either temporary or permanent. At the nurse’s request, we asked our HR unit to fax across his basic details, so that the hospital could contact his family.
The records duly arrived. We looked to see what his date of birth was – and we all fell about laughing, nurse included. The records clearly stated that he had been unable to provide a date of birth.
It turned out that the whole family were illiterate and no-one had bothered to register his birth until he was about 3 or 4 years old – by which time they couldn’t remember what time of year he had been born!
A quick wash to remove the blood, three stitches and a couple of painkiller tablets later, he was discharged and we drove him home.
Göbekli Tepe and the Prophecy of Pillar 43 | Apocalypse and the Vulture Stone
Göbekli Tepe and the Vulture Stone Prophecy We are the descendants of an ancient civilization; one which mastered technology, mapped the cosmos, and understood our relationship with the natural world. Our ancestors traveled the world and built enormous structures. They scaled their creations into cities. They shared a common governance and similar religious beliefs. Our ancestors lived, as we do today, as a global society. Around 14,500 years ago, this global superpower started to collapse. First came uncontrollable change, and then a cataclysm. In less than a week, everything and almost everyone was gone. Those left behind built monuments. Monuments not as tributes to Gods or homage to kings. The monuments are a warning to future generations: to us. That warning is simple: danger is coming. Our civilization has ended before. And it will end again. This is one story Big Archaeology and world governments don’t want you to know. Once you hear it, you’ll never trust them again. Because the danger that’s coming? There’s nothing they can do to stop it.
What are the best stories to prove that everything happens for a reason?
I had resigned my previous company without having any job offer in hand!
I was continuously feeling stressed out from past few weeks. Suddenly in my project, the pressure got increased and my manager was not ready to hire any extra resource. Not even a single day was there when I felt relaxed. If you push yourself everyday too much, it will start impacting your health. Same happened with me. I started being sleep deprived and my weight started dropping. Despite that, I tried my best to pull it off but later I realised that I should stop now.
It was not easy for me to quit without any job offer in hand but I decided to leave. I put down my papers and informed my manager. My family was unaware of this because I didn’t wanted them to freak out. It was a chaotic moment for me but I motivated myself to find a new job. I started applying rigorously, gave interviews, faced rejections. Many nights I used to overthink but I knew that I didn’t want to back out.
After 1 month of resignation, I got one offer letter. My confidence boosted up and I kept on trying for better opportunities. At last, I got a decent offer and above that I got great work environment.
In life, sometimes, we take very quick and tough decisions but those decisions carve our path towards new phases. Maybe, that day you would feel that what you did was stupidity but later you will realise that it happened for a reason.
Everything happens for a reason!
In court, what was the most devastating cross-examination of a witness that you ever saw?
This is a bit long for one of my answers. And, it has nothing to do with being an agent or a lawyer myself.
My ex and I wanted to foster a child and take him with us when we moved out of state. He was an inner city African American child, about eight years old. He was not on the growth chart, he could not read or write. He had ADD.
But, my ex had fallen for him.
He came to school with clothes picked out of pile of adult clothes. Made his way to school riding public transportation, and no one asked him to pay. He came to school because it was safe, and provided him two meals a day.
He lived with his grandmother and five to seven others in about a 900 square foot house. Many of the residents were minors and the grandmother received all the benefits for them.
It was an expensive proposition to foster this child. I paid for our attorneys who told us no one had ever been allowed to obtain foster rights and immediately move out of state. Especially a white couple attempting to take a black child. I paid for the guardian ad litem. And, I paid for the grandmother’s attorney.
We were in the second day of the hearing before the family court judge. The grandmother was on the stand. She had held up well during cross examination.
But, then then I noticed the judge slide his glasses down to the end of his nose and peer over them and say,”I have just a couple of very simple questions. Nothing to worry about.”
I had been a little bored until this point, but I knew this maneuver. I had been around courthouses and in interviews for many years by this time. And, my senses told me things were about to get interesting.
The judge then proceeded to ask about the moneys she received to help support the children in her care. The judge asked what she did with the money. The judge asked if she liked to gamble.
In the state we were in, there were gambling casinos. And, she admitted to attending gambling casinos.
The judge began to ask her about her gambling habits, and whether she won or lost. And, the big lies began.
The grandmother claimed she won as much as she lost.
And, the judge bore down. And, I am thinking… I am paying for three attorneys and no one figured out she had a gambling addiction.
And, the judge rakes her, and gets her to admit she loses a little more than she makes. And, it went down hill from there, allowing my attorneys to pull her gambling records which were kept by every casino. And, those records showed a pattern of gambling and loss that were incredible.
The grandmother would lose all the monthly benefits for her grandchildren within a couple of days. And, we all missed it, but for a family court judge who was wiser than a room full of attorneys.
Hands down, the best cross examination I ever saw. Judge… you can drop the mic.
China Military’s Biggest Upgrade In Cyber Security Warfare & Space
In modern era of warfare, control of information is a game changer. Keep that in mind and breaking away from traditional structures, the one of the worlds highest military has established new independent units dedicated to information, space, and cyber operations, marking the most extensive shakeup in nearly a decade. One thing is now certain, the Chinese military is ready for anything adversaries might throw at it and win conflicts with relative ease! Today’s episode will uncover the recent shakeup of Chinese military which has added new units determined to succeed in modern warfare.
You find a new job, so you give your employer two weeks’ notice. Your boss then gets angry that you are quitting and tells you not to come back in anymore. How should you respond to your boss?
My wife is literally going through this right now. She was the only person in her office that did what she did and had been the best employee that employer had ever seen. Literally in 10 years she had taken 1 sick day. Over the course of that decade she never got a single raise and zero retirement. Another opportunity came along and she took it. Knowing her job would be very difficult to fill she gave her employer a 6 week notice. The employer was so irrational about it that she fired her and said she would not be paying out the 3 weeks of vacation time my wife had on the books. Well where we live, the state law does not allow that unless there is a signed policy stating as much, which there has not been. So here we are, on vacation enjoying a 2 week span of time before my wife starts her new job. She was able to move up her start date with her new employer, though she did not have to. Her old employer is now responsible to pay her unemployment for these 2 weeks as well as her 3 weeks of vacation. She would have been very wise to just take the 6 weeks my wife offered, but we won in the end so whatever
“The United States, the UK, Germany, and France—these are some of the most oppressive and repressive governments in the world if you remove all of the self-praise and the propaganda that they spew about themselves and about freedom and civil rights and so on.
They are a Western axis against freedom, and if you don’t know that—I mean, if you live there and you don’t know that—then you just haven’t tested it.
The only way that you can live in any of those countries—and increasingly in the US—and not know that they are despotic tyrannies, is if you have been so numbed and so brainwashed that you hold no opinion in your head that wasn’t put there by the state, that wasn’t injected into your lifeless brain by the mainstream media.
So, you never had anything to protest about.
You never questioned your government.
You never challenged the official narratives about anything.
That’s the only way that you can’t know what I’m talking about.
And that makes you even more repressed, more oppressed, and more tyrannized than the people who are getting beaten and who are getting detained for objecting to their government’s brutality.
You’re even more of a victim.
You’re even more abused than those protesters who are getting clubbed upside the head and getting choked and getting abused by the security forces because your government, your rulers, your ruling class has never let you live a day in your life without telling you what to think and sabotaging your ability to think for yourself.
You’re the most abused in your society.
What they did to you is worse than beating; it’s worse than detention; it’s worse than imprisonment.
At least those protesters who are getting beaten and arrested by the police—at least their minds are free, at least they have their own thoughts in their heads.
But you—your leaders have made you a zombie that thinks that the right thing, the moral thing, is whatever power chooses to do; your government has put you into a moral coma.
You’re morally comatose.
They put you under an induced coma so that you can’t see them sponsoring the wanton murder of 34,000 people, some 24,000 innocent women and children.
You can’t see that there’s anything wrong with that.
You feel nothing, or even worse, you think it’s the right thing, you think it’s the moral thing, you think that what your government is doing is good by sanctioning indiscriminate slaughter; you think that’s fine.
Why?
They’ve robbed you of your very humanity, and that’s the only reason that you can believe that you live in a free society.
That’s the only reason that you can believe that you live in a society with civil rights and liberty and free speech and all of those other wonderful things that you never had and never will have.
The only freedom that you have in those countries is the freedom to agree with power.
You’re free to submit to the powers that be.”
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Excerpt from remarks by American geopolitical analyst Shahid Bolsen in a video where he speaks about the ongoing protests against the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on university campuses, both in the U.S. and around the world, April 27, 2024.
Does memory depend on intelligence?
“One day, Einstein was traveling by train from Princeton, when a train conductor passed through the corridor, stamping the tickets of all the passengers. When he arrived in front of Einstein, the scientist searched for the ticket in his vest pocket, but didn’t find it; it wasn’t even there in the pants pockets; so he looked in the briefcase, but he couldn’t find it.
The driver said, “Doctor Einstein, I know who you are. I’m sure you bought the ticket. Don’t worry. Einstein nodded in thanks.
And the driver continued to stamp the tickets in the aisle. Just as he was about to move on to the next car, he turned to see the large body looking under his seat for the ticket.
The driver turned around and said, “Dr. Einstein, Dr. Einstein, don’t worry, I know who you are.” This is not a problem. You don’t need a ticket. I’m sure you bought one.
Einstein looked at him and said, “Young man, I also know who I am. What I don’t know is where I’m going. That’s why I’m looking for my ticket.”
BLINKEN TRIP TO CHINA: U.S. dominance is over!
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken went home with his tail between his legs after an official three-day visit to China in which he tried his very best to convince the world of a litany of nonsensical crap that neither he nor anyone else with a brain believes, including spouting the “over-capacity” myth that Yellen tried to start on her last visit, and trying to tell Beijing that Washington has some kind of right to decide who China can and cannot trade with. This desperation and hypocrisy blatantly on show from U.S. leaders visiting China is a sign of one thing: the hegemony of the U.S.-led West is falling, and it’s a joy to watch! Today we’ll talk about it.
1.The only letter that doesn’t appear on the periodic table is J.
2.One habit of intelligent humans is being easily annoyed by people around them, but saying nothing in order to avoid a meaningless argument.
3.2006, a Coca-Cola employee offered to sell Coca-Cola secrets to Pepsi. Pepsi responded by notifying Coca-Cola.
4.The famous line in Titanic from Leonardo DiCaprio, “I’m king of the world!” was improvised
5.If you cut down a cactus in Arizona, you’ll be penalized up to 25 years in jail. It is similar to cutting down a protected tree species.
6. In 1923, a jockey suffered a fatal heart attack but his horse finished and won the race, making him the first and only jockey to win a race after death.
7.Iceland does not have a railway system.
8.The spiked dog collar was invented by the Ancient Greeks to protect their dogs from wolf attacks.
9.German Chocolate Cake is named after an American baker by the name of Samuel German.
10.The voice actor of SpongeBob and the voice actor of Karen, Plankton’s computer wife, have been married since 1995.
11.The largest Japanese population outside of Japan stands at 1.6 million people who live in Brazil.
12.IKEA is an acronym which stands for Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd, which is the founder’s name, farm where he grew up, and hometown.
13.Violin bows are commonly made from horse hair.
14.The youngest Pope in history was Pope Benedict IX who was 11 years old at the time of election. He is also the only person to have been the Pope more than once.
15.In Svalbard, a remote Norwegian island, it is illegal to die.
16.People who post their fitness routine to Facebook are more likely to have psychological problems.
17.Standing around burns calories. On average, a 150 pound person burns 114 calories per hour while standing and doing nothing.
18.There is a punctuation mark used to signify irony or sarcasm that looks like a backwards question mark ⸮
19.Saint Lucia is the only country in the world named after a woman.
20.There is a town in Nebraska called Monowi with a population of one. The only resident is a woman who is the Mayor, Bartender and Librarian.
When was a time you said silently to your boss “I told you so”?
We have a F350 work truck that is notorious for giving hints it is about to break on us. Main thing is how often it regens the DPF. Told my team lead(boss) one day that we had about a month before it shits itself again at best. 3 weeks later, while driving to pick up equipment/supplies, sure enough it starts blowing blueish smoke out the tail pipe. Turbo was leaking oil. Day or two prior, it was non-stop “regen in progress “ message on the dash, prior to that it was daily regens at highway speeds. He had to stop what he was doing and drive another truck 2 hours to come swap it out, then get broke truck towed 4 hrs away to the stealership to have it sit there for 3 months getting fixed.
Another time, there was an older dump truck that started making a weird noise from the engine bay. From the sound of it, I suggested that either a pulley or tensioner was about to go. He shrugged it off and said it was a worn belt. Few days later, the tensioner shit itself and left him stranded.
Same truck started loosing hold back power on the “exhaust “ (actually found out it’s a transmission brake) brake. Reported to him, he dismissed me. Days later it either threw a valve if I remember right, or dropped/washed a cylinder and ran like dog shit.
Another one of our dumps blew a small pilot hydro line that runs the hydro pump to give pressure as it is constantly turning with the engine. Helped replace the blown line and noticed that 6 other lines are worn to or thru the metal casing. Told him, he said just keep running it. Ended up blowing hoses in the middle of working, for weeks on end. Would drain the hydro tank and such so not only did we have to replace the line during inclement weather, but dump up to 30 gallons of new hydro oil in to the tank.
Once I promoted to be equal to him, I took my side of the fleet and ran thru it with a fine tooth comb. Spent several thousand dollars fixing issues to prevent as much breakdowns as possible. The worst breakdown I had this winter was a wiper motor crapped out on me near the end of the day, but I had noticed it having issues prior and had a new assembly waiting to be installed sitting in the truck due to the nature of our job of being out for days on end w/o being able to fix minor things until a day where the truck could be down. Was down for maybe 30 mins while I swapped it out.
Leaking non hazmat fluid tanks, worn thru outer casing on electrical wires exposed to the elements, leaking valves, leaking fittings, leaking non hazmat fluid hoses, missing filters for services, low replacement fluid levels for services, the list goes on and on.
What is the pettiest thing you’ve seen a cheap person do at a restaurant?
Years ago the ex hubby took over an Italian restaurant…that is another story altogether. He slowly built the clientele up from nothing to a steady flow of clients, and we always loved a large booking. One night a table was booked for about 10–14 people, I forget exactly but it was a family group. The guy who had booked the table made it his night’s work to find fault: little subtle digs aimed at the staff, calling the staff back constantly, a smudge on a glass, a missing fork, the waiter was made to feel an imbecile.
I made it a point to double-check each plate as it was placed at the table, but did not serve or have any interaction with him until the end of the evening. He was the lead bull at the table, lording it over every other person, and then the bill was handed to him.
He pored over the bill for an age, demanding that everyone tell him what they had, was anything missing from the meal, then he told the waiter that he had been overcharged and the waiter called me over. The client then proceeded to tell me that he had been swindled, that he had been overcharged. I looked at the bill, which was accurate, told the waiter to bring up every receipt, looked the client in the face and said, “I am the owner, I am happy to go through all the receipts with you and I will also ask everyone here to tell me what they ordered, but you ordered such a huge quantity of food and drinks that in all likelihood this bill I have in my hand is going to be under. If I find the staff to have undercharged you, I will be expecting you to pay the full amount, so are you sure you want me to do this?”…he was apoplectic.
I totted up the bill, and it was short to the tune of around £40 (this was 25 years ago). He paid up in a fury and left not a penny for the staff. The next day he phoned the restaurant and claimed that some of the party had food poisoning, that he demanded we refund him. I asked him who had the food poisoning and he mentioned three of the guests; I had the exact details of each plate the guests had had, and remembered that two guests had switched plates, I then told him that he was wrong, that he should go get his story straight, for these three guests did not eat the same food. I realized he had asked each guest what they had ordered, NOT what they had eaten, and it was obvious he had had no contact with these supposedly poisoned family members. I recommended he file a complaint with Health & Safety, and never heard a word back.
Some of my latest AI image generations
The theme is tropical.
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Have you, as a police officer, ever known a “dirty” cop? If so, what did you do about it?
Some fifteen years back…
I was buddying with someone temporarily for bike patrolling. There was something barren and sinister about him. It is hard to explain.
One evening, we stopped at a random point and initiated snap checking, while at it… my colleague stopped a kid who walked by us, holding a small bag of fries. He must be 11 years old.
My colleague started asking him questions.
What’s your name?
Where are you coming from?
And believe it or not…
What is it in your hand? Give it to me!
The scared kid handed the police officer that bag of fries. And he went to town, eating it in front of that kid. Not just that… he actually smirked as well while witnessing that child’s facial expression of fear and shock.
I was a few feet away, checking registration book of a motorcyclist but I had to postpone that and approach them. To multiply my misery and embarrassment, the road with crowded and full of traffic. I did not want to make a scene.
Without saying a word, I snatched that bag of fries and gave it back to the kid, apologized and politely asked him to leave. The kid left.
I stood there looking at my colleagues’s deadpan face like nothing has happened.
This is low, even for a scum like you who conveniently rot the idea of community policing. This is why the public does not hold us in good regards. This attitude is what they fear and abhor.
I never worked with him again, I also informed the duty officer of this incident later that night.
I remember that guys face clearly, I remember his name, I remember the repulsion his company caused me
So Quorans, you might wonder if this is the dirtiest I have ever seen as you see me narrating this account carefully and in detail.
No, God… No!
This is me telling you of a distasteful minor incident that occurred years ago, that has burnt into my memory for good. In my understanding, he was not a good cop. And I strongly disliked him.
That should give you some idea about my feelings for those who are worse or worst. Who go above and beyond breaking the rules, violating the code, abusing their powers and involved in corruption.
They do exist.
And there’s only so much I practically could do about them, way above my pay grade you see.
But I’m not sad or hopeless. I have spent eighteen years in police service and I see the systematical grind of the department that works restlessly and naturally and gets them here and there. I see them getting hooked and punished.
It’s okay, but it certainly could be better.
What’s something you realized about a family member once you got older?
Not until the deaths of both my parents did I understand the dynamic of their marriage.
My mother died of a stroke at age 66. It turned out that years earlier, she had survived a heart attack which probably occurred in her sleep because no one ever knew about it. When she died, I was dumbfounded that her sisters and friends were all angry at Dad, blaming him for having driven Mom into an early grave.
In the 22 years before he died, clues gradually fell into place. I remembered how Mom said his mother had made Dad the person he was. How, when my older brothers brought their families home to visit, Dad sulked and said Mom was going to work herself to death waiting on them hand and foot. How he said the same thing about his second wife and her children and grandchildren.
I remembered how Mom refused to have a renewal of vows ceremony for their 25th anniversary, saying she’d meant her vows to be for life the first time, so she didn’t see any point. I looked at the photo albums and saw Mom’s face change from her engagement, a giddy young woman in love, to an unsmiling older woman. When he said he’d retire at 62 instead of 65 and be home all the time, Mom seemed resigned, not happy.
Most telling, I remembered that when Dad was a boy, his mother sometimes punished him by locking him in a closet. What made this particularly terrifying: Grandma was deaf, so his crying, beating on the door and begging moved her not at all. He might well have believed that he could die in that closet.
All the facts in front of me the whole time finally made sense: when Dad married Mom, he expected her to be his mommy as much as his wife, because his own mother had been abusive, not loving. It was surely no coincidence that Mom was older by 18 months.
Mom died in November, he was engaged by Christmas, and remarried in April — to a widowed nurse 17 years younger, someone who’d outlive him and care for him like both mommy and wife. Dad remarried so quickly not because he didn’t love Mom, but because her death had left him as bereft as Theodore Roosevelt when his mother and his first wife died on the same day.
When he pouted about Mom’s delight in her visiting children and grandchildren, he was jealous. He thought she had a fixed amount of love and any she gave to someone else was less for him. At family gatherings she could be happily chatting with family members, but if he wanted her attention, she had to go with him or he’d sulk. He retired early so he could spend more time with her. He couldn’t very well demand that his second wife cut off all contact with her children and grandchildren, but he hadn’t forgotten how to pout.
Dad and Mom met before he went off to a monastery to spend three years. I never understood why, because if he was looking for mother love, he wasn’t going to find it in an all-male community. But neither did I understand why he ever dropped out, because he spent so much time in church and in prayer at home that even a priest told me he was overdoing it. (When a priest says there’s such a thing as too much religion….) I’m now convinced that he was trying to back God into a corner: “See how devout I am, God. You can’t take the person I love away from me.”
And Mom’s refusal to renew her wedding vows? What she really meant, I suspect, was “Don’t ask me if I’d marry you all over again, because you might not like my answer.”
Oh no! Is this fairytale preview of things to come where women aren’t accountable?
The original stories from the last century are really interesting. This one is worth your time.
Have you ever quit your job in the middle of the work day? Why?
Yes actually I have. I was working at a local call center about 11 or 12 years ago, and I knew that they had a strict attendance policy, and that they were not hesitant to put points on your attendance record if you were late or left early or called off. However I did not know to what extent they would uphold that policy, and how much people were exaggerating how strict they were about it until I had been there about six months or so. One morning we heard a big commotion coming from the other side of the dividing wall, from the other business contract that was next to us. Well, later in the day we found out that one of the older men on the other contract had had a heart attack and had to be taken to the hospital by an ambulance. So I did not really think anything of it other than feeling bad for the guy, but a couple days later I was out back on break and I heard his supervisor talking to another employee about how she had to put 1/2 of a point on his attendance because he had to leave before his shift was over. I walked over to her and asked if I heard her correctly because I was almost certain that I had actually misheard her. But to my surprise she told me that I did hear her correctly and that she did have to put a half of a point on that employee’s attendance record. Once I confirmed that I had actually heard her correctly I went up to the front of the building to the human resources department and asked the lady working in the office if what the manager had said was true. She told me that unfortunately the manager was correct and that according to the attendance policy of the employee would be pointed for leaving before his shift was over, even though it was due to a medical emergency. At that point I took my badge off of my belt loop, laid it on her desk and told her I quit. The job itself was not too bad, but after hearing that I could not bring myself to work for a company who just blatantly did not care about their employees like that.
Italian Prime Minister announced that Italy would no longer participate in the “Belt and Road Initiative”, and then tried to strengthen relations with China, claiming that “the relationship between China and Italy is close”. What does this indicate?
One the one hand Meloni is controlled by the EU and European Council which has become a tane colonial outpost of the United States so that any US order comes with the response “How high master?”
On the other hand – Italian Luxury brands depend on 13% to 25% of their revenue from China and Italy gets Low Cost products from China that it can sell to it’s people for 2.75–3.5 times the cost and help with value addition into the economy
Italian Businesses are worried about their Chinese markets
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They are worried more about Chinese Luxury Brands that could put the Italians out of business in China
So the Italian Government sends the message lets follow the same advantages that we had under the BRI but let’s just not call it that anymore
And as you can see
China gets tariff breaks until 2027 which means even if EU imposes tariffs on Chinese EVs, Italy having an agreement already can’t implement the same tariffs until after 30/6/2027
Italian Brands get the same tariff advantages in China until 30/6/2027
Both Nations have the same benefits in Shipping and with their Investments into each other
So Nothing has changed except the official relationship between China and Italy
Do you think it’s creepy that Leonardo DiCaprio is dating a girl so young that he is older than her mother?
It’s definitely bizarre.
He always seems to have a mob of young women around him.
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Someone on Reddit made a chart of every girlfriend he’s had, and he seems to have a rule of never dating older than 25:
chart
And he has a new girlfriend, who is now, you guessed it, 25:
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He is 49.
This is all fine and legal. But it is just odd that he limits himself to this very narrow demographic of women. And a peculiar coincidence that they never make it further than that. I suspect he is hanging out a lot at fashion shows, or some place all these models mingle at (they are almost all tall thin models).
I know that for me, I’m so different than I was at age 20. I don’t know what I’d talk to a 20-year-old about. But to each their own.
Why Bother Working For a Living …. Public Assistance Game
There is no more middle class. Every thing has been gentrified from housing , cars People not being able to find a decent paying job and the cost to live is getting way out of hand . Gen Z and Millennials No Long Want to work towards nothing. America is Broken and it’s not cool. Looks like everyones going to be on welfare
Have you ever been with someone who is so cheap it’s uncomfortable?
I used to have a friend who, despite being well-off, was incredibly cheap, to the point that it was not only embarrassing, it was often hurtful too.
She is very adept at worming out of paying for her share of things, mainly by making things SO awkward that you end up caving in and paying for her, simply because you just want the situation to be over!
Some examples:
On one occasion, when she was staying with me for a couple of days, she insisted that we go swimming, because she said she had to do exercise every day. I didn’t really mind, so off we went to the local swimming pool. After queuing for quite some time at the reception desk to pay, we eventually got to the front… but when the receptionist said “That’ll be £2.50, please”, my friend became really indignant, as the swimming pool she usually went to apparently only cost £2.00. She started arguing with the poor receptionist over the 50p difference, much to the annoyance of all the other people in the queue behind us, waiting to pay. So, I ended up paying for both of us — not a big deal at all, you might think, but this was just one example of how I always seemed to end up paying for her.
Later that same day, we went to the cinema to see a film. I paid the admission for both of us (I didn’t want a repeat of the incident at the swimming pool!) and then we wandered over to the sweets kiosk to look at the snacks. She decided she didn’t want anything; I bought myself a large bag of M&Ms. Once we’d taken our seats and the film had started, she announced that, actually, she WAS hungry after all, but didn’t want to miss any of the film by going back out to the sweets kiosk. No problem, I said, you can share my M&Ms if you like. This started out fine: like you do when you’re sharing sweets, I kept angling the bag towards her, to make sure she could dig in. However, after about 20 mins, she said that SHE wanted to hold the bag… Bit weird, I thought, but I duly gave the bag to her to hold.
As the film continued, every now and then I took some M&Ms out of the bag, as did she. But then she started leaning over every few minutes or so and whispering “Are you going to have any more?”. As you can imagine, this started to get pretty irritating, especially as I was trying to watch the film. This went on for a while, with me saying “Yes”, every time she asked. Eventually, I asked her why she kept asking and she told me that she wanted to “save them for later”!! What the heck?! I was quite surprised at this, but couldn’t really make a fuss in the middle of the film. I carried on helping myself to the sweets that I’D BOUGHT, but it was all really awkward and a bit stressful, and it kind of spoilt the film a bit.
It’s almost like she has a pathological need to not part with any money and to milk other people as much as possible.
I once went to stay with her, but after having been at her house for a few hours, she hadn’t offered me anything to drink. Not a problem, as we had been engrossed in chatting. But, when I asked if it was OK if I put the kettle on (I am one of those Brits who quickly wilts if I’m not kept topped up with tea!) she said that she didn’t have any tea. Or, in fact, anything at all to drink. OK, no problem, water is fine, I said.
For our evening meal that day, we went out to a restaurant, where (you guessed it) I ended up paying.
The next morning, we got up and sat chatting for a while. After a couple of hours, she hadn’t mentioned breakfast and I was getting pretty hungry. I asked if it would be OK if I made some toast or something, but she said that she didn’t have any food in. This was a bit surprising, as she’d invited me to stay for the weekend and it had been arranged for some time. In retrospect, I think she wanted to see me but didn’t want to have to spend any money on feeding me. I think it’s highly possible that she ate breakfast in her bedroom, in secret, before getting up and coming into the living room to chat with me. She loves food (as do I) and always used to complain at my house, if I didn’t keep her well fed; like me, she’s definitely not the sort of person to skip breakfast.
Anyway, as I was so hungry, I suggested we went out to a cafe for some breakfast — I was thinking of something cheap and cheerful. She took me to a really wonderful artisan eatery, where we enjoyed a delicious breakfast. Silly me, assumed that she’d be paying, given that I’d paid for everything else that weekend and given that she hadn’t provided breakfast at home. However — you can see where this is going — when it came to pay the bill, she started lamenting about how she “doesn’t normally like to spend money on breakfast”, so I ended up paying for it. She’d chosen a really expensive place, knowing that she was going to get me to pay for it!
Other examples include us going into McDonald’s to buy a drink each and her asking me to pay for hers, as she didn’t want to break in to her £10 note!
Each individual incident was no big deal on its own, but when it happens a lot, you realise that you’re being taken advantage of. She was basically taking advantage of my generosity and the fact that I hate any kind of awkwardness. She knows that I (and probably most people) don’t want to cause a fuss in public, so will just end up paying.
To put it into context, she is from a fairly wealthy family and had a well-paid job, so it’s not like I could blame her behaviour on deprivation (either current or historical). She’s just incredibly tight with her money. She hardly ever leaves a tip in restaurants and when she does, she leaves 2p.
Because of her behaviour with money, but also because I realised she just wasn’t really a very nice person in general, I eventually cut off contact with her. We’d known each other for about 30 years, but sometimes the longest friendships aren’t always the best ones.
EDIT
To the Quoran who went through my entire answer and suggested I change ALL my apostrophes to apostrophes that are slightly more curly: I’m afraid I only have one type of apostrophe on my keyboard. I don’t have a not-very-curly option and then also a curly option. Like most keyboards (I’m guessing?), I just have one apostrophe to choose from.
I’m sorry that it is not quite as curly as the one on your keyboard. However, hopefully my not-very-curly apostrophes haven’t affected the readability of my post too much?
I think you may have a LITTLE too much time on your hands 🙂 .
Do people abuse the welfare system in your country?
Do you know anybody who always eats a lot, but never shops, cooks or cleans up?
Or maybe somebody who disappears when it’s their turn to buy a round at the bar or coffee machine?
Did you ever see someone devastate the buffet, leave a dollar tip on the table and then empty the mints from the bowl at the cash register on the way out?
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Ever experience unflushed public toilets devoid of toilet paper? How about coworkers that only pretend to work?
And of course no party is complete without the eternally-empty-handed guest.
Let’s face it, freeloaders exist all over the globe. Their entitlement knows no bounds.
So yes, people abuse welfare in my country, and in both countries I lived in before this one.
I am disgusted by freeloaders. I think most people are. I think it likely even many of the freeloaders don’t like themselves much.
Despite all this, I support welfare and I do it for selfish and conservative reasons.
I am willing to pay the taxes needed to enjoy clean streets free of unfortunate, mentally ill and addicted people.
I see that when welfare is tied to education, sponges often turn into contributors who lighten my tax load.
And for the incorrigibly lazy, $ 9,000 (average cost per welfare recipient) is less than $ 35,000 (average cost per prisoner).
Living in Germany and France showed me that welfare programs really do reduce crime and homelessness and lower prison populations.
Welfare works well when driven by data and economic evidence not empathy or scorn. It needs carrots and sticks and not too many of either.
Men Are Checking Out of Relationships in Thousands & No One Can Stop Them
This is a very serious situation.
Until someone stops the free reign of Family Court, men will avoid marriage and women in general. Nowadays, only 6.5 men in a thousand get married due to the following scenario:
(1) man gets married,
(2) wife refuses to have sex,
(3) wife racks up huge credit card debt,
(4) wife stop contributing financially,
(5) wife stops cooking & cleaning,
(6) wife cheats on husband,
(7) wife files for divorce and takes the house, cars, savings, and kids, (8) wife falsely accuses husband of abuse and he no longer can see his kids,
(9) wife poisons kids against the father.
What man in his right mind will sign up for this?
Outside my tiny town is one of those Chinese 8-lane rural roads. And there is a divider in the middle median. Apparently, at some point in time either someone had left a litter of kittens there, or a cat had a litter there.
No one knew about it, apparently.
Being in China, the road is busy, and we would use it to avoid the massive traffic closer to the sub-town networks.
At this particular location, as I drove by, I saw the body of a dead kitten. I felt sad, but didn’t think much about it.
On the way back, I saw the body of a second dead kitten.
Later on in the day, about four hours later, I went by the (now) smashed remains of the two kittens and saw a third dead kitten.
And man, I should have stopped to investigate. But I was running late.
On the way back, as a fourth kitten.
Dead.
And that was the end of the litter.
i wonder what would have happened if I had stopped to clean the dead kitten off the road and checked to see where it’s siblings were. I wonder.
Life.
Why did I pick this life?
What was I thinking?
I feel great sorrow for the kittens, and the excuses that I made not to stop and investigate. Every time I go by that spot I question and lambast myself; why didn’t I stop? Why didn’t I investigate?
Ugh!
Today…
As the PRC has never directly controlled Taiwan, how do the Chinese confront those who say you can’t take back what you never controlled?
Well, well.
Sneaky, but easy to parry.
The treaty of Shimonoseki of 1895 between CHINA and Japan ceded the island of Taiwan to Japan, and it became a colony under Japanese administration till 1945, when Japan renounced its claim to the island.
Various declarations and treaties in the period all treated Taiwan as part of China, unlike, say, Hong Kong and Macau, which remained colonies until the late 1990s.
The divergence only appeared with the emergence of the PRC in 1949, and the strategic defeat of the KMT which fled to Taiwan, bringing the ROC government with them.
The situation is very clear if we read both Constitutions—each side proclaims itself the rightful government of China, which includes sovereignty over the mainland, Taiwan, Macau and Hong Kong.
The argument all along is over who is in charge, and not who owns what, because there is only ONE CHINA, according to the Constitutions of the PRC and ROC.
Unfortunately, 99.99% of people who can read this (i.e. anglophones) cannot do so due to illiteracy.
Quit pretending to know what one is too prejudiced to find out.
What is the most pathetic thing you’ve seen an addict do to get their fix?
I used to be a heroin addict. I personally never did any crazy things to supply my habit. I understand why people do though. Imagine having the flu times ten, feeling like you’re being broken in half, your entire body hurts, it feels like your bones are being broken. Your blood pressure is so jacked from detox your vision is blurred, you can hardly see ten feet in front of you and you throw up and have diarrhea like you’ve got food poisoning. You know that all you have to do in order to feel better is get a fix. There’s literally nothing most people won’t do to just feel better.
Not having it is a living hell, being high feels the exact opposite. You feel so good you just want to sing and dance even if you don’t know how to sing you’re going to do it anyway. I’m not a bad person, I was just a broken person when I was addicted to heroin. I don’t believe I would ever be desperate enough to rob someone but I know plenty of people who have.
A guy I grew up with, I knew him most of my life, one of my best friends was one of those people who had no moral code when in active addiction. He was an amazing person when sober. Even in active addiction his true nature would sometimes show. He’s saved more than a few people because he was really good at CPR. The mother of his child was also an addict too. She was in college and her text books kept coming up missing. She couldn’t figure out where they were going. By the time she realized he was taking her text books to the university bookstore and selling them back to them they were all gone.
One day she called me and asked me if I could give her a ride home. I helped her out and gave her a ride. We were about a block away from her house and there he was walking through a parking lot with garbage bags full of clothes. He was about to walk into Plato’s closet (they buy and sell used clothes) when we pulled up on him. She jumped out of my truck and grabbed him. He dropped the bags of clothes and she looked in the bags and he had taken her whole wardrobe. Every single item of clothing she owned was in those bags.
He had taken all of his girlfriend’s clothes, the mother of his child and was trying to sell them so he could score some dope. That was the last straw for her, she left him and got sober. She worked really hard to get her child back, he had been taken away and was being raised by her mother. She did good for a while but relapsed and she’s no longer with us. He ended up in prison, got out, did really good for a long time. He did the same, he inherited several million dollars from his father and within a year he was also no longer with us. I miss him every single day. He was a good person but not too many people really knew that, he hid it well.
US Very Concerned as China-Russia Strengthen Their Military Ties!
The message is CLEAR.
Is the West’s accusation of China overcapacity in the EV industry true? Why?
The accusations from the West sound an awful lot like the pot calling the kettle black. The term ‘overcapacity’ being thrown around has more to do with market insecurity and protectionist tendencies than any supposed production surplus on China’s part.
Take 2023 as an example. China crafted 9.58 million new-energy vehicles that year and managed to sell about 9.49 million units. A large chunk of these – around 8.3 million vehicles – were sold in the domestic market. That hardly points towards international market saturation, rather it shows domestic demand driving China’s EV production.
Then, consider the global market shares. Chinese manufacturers held about 8.2 percent of the European electric car market. Yet, European automakers had a firm grip on around 20 percent of the Chinese light vehicle market. The scales, realistically, tip more in favor of the West here.
So why the accusations? It seems like a rather convenient cloak of ‘overcapacity’ is being used to disguise good old fashioned trade protectionism. The West is getting a taste of competitiveness they’re not used to, and it’s sending jitters down their spines. China’s EV industry, powered by continuous innovation, is giving Western automakers a run for their money. Hence, the narrative of ‘overcapacity’ serves as a much-needed crutch to lean on.
In the grand scheme of the global EV industry, China’s production aligns with its increasing domestic demand and strategically positions itself for a future defined by cleaner, more efficient vehicles. The so-called ‘overcapacity’ is just reflective of China’s effective planning, astute market gauging, and a testament to its competitive hardiness in the face of global market dynamics. So, is there really overcapacity in China’s EV industry? I highly doubt that.
Have you ever gotten a teacher fired?
Yes. My GMAT test prep instructor.
I decided to do one of these review classes as I was a little rusty, so I signed up and paid several hundred dollars for the privilege.
The first day of class, which was composed of twelve women and one man, he told this joke:
“A woman married and had 12 children. Her husband died, and she remarried and had 12 more children before the second husband died as well. Then, she died. At the funeral, the priest said, ‘At last they’ll be together.’ One of the attendees said, ‘What do you mean by that? Will she be together with her first husband, or her second?’ ‘I meant her legs,’ replied the priest.” This was accompanied by him putting his arms out straight, hands together, then opening his arms wide and closing them.
The second day of class, there was one woman (me) and one man.
I had paid for the course, and based on a test exam, I really needed the math help. I had already paid for the GMAT coming up, so I really had to take this review course.
Every class after that, he complained about the missing women and how someone had complained about him to the administration. “It was just a joke,” he kept whining. “Are you going to teach the material tonight?” I would say.
The last day of class, he had promised a cheat sheet of formulas. Again, I showed up, again, he spent class time whining about the complaints and how the joke was funny, and what was so wrong about the joke, and how women don’t have any sense of humor anymore.
I asked him for the cheat sheet.
“You’re a woman,” he observes. “What was so wrong about that joke?”
“The joke was inappropriate,” I said, “as was your accompanying gesture.”
He looked at me as if I was speaking a language he had never heard.
“Look,” he said, “it’s just a biological fact that women spend a lot of time with their legs open!”
And he re-enacts the gesture, leaving his arms open.
I walked out without the cheat sheet, and called the head of the program the next day. He was so mortified, that not only did he fire the guy, but he refunded my money and let me take another class for free. I took kayaking, and discovered a love for it. I also did well enough on my GMAT to get into the school of my choice.
What are ten truths everyone should accept in life?
Marks are important! Or just be an Einstein to prove it wrong.
No friend will be 100% happy to see your success, especially if you’re in same field
Sex or physical intimacy is important to make a relationship strong and live.
“ I love you more than anything anyone” is a filmy dialogue. Don’t believe it as it is ! There are always ifs,buts & conditions applied ~
Money is important ! Infact most important to live in this world
A smart girl will never marry you unless you are settled . let her brag anything about true love .
Money can’t give you peace !
Everyone in this world is selfish and is with you just for their needs be it your family or bestfriend.
Getting into relationship demands efforts, time and money. It’s not for free
Looks matter ! So better groom yourself to appear best or just keep shouting it don’t.( yuup skills matter but a person with same skills and better presentation & groomed will always be preferred than only skills)
Cinnamon Rolls from North Carolina State Fair
Cinnamon Rolls from North Carolina State Fair
These cinnamon coffee rolls are delicious. It is important that you use unbleached flour and Fleischmann’s margarine in this recipe. Use a thermometer to check the temperature of the liquid, if it’s too hot it will kill the yeast.
Ingredients
Rolls
1 package dry yeast, 1 scant tablespoon
1/4 cup warm water
4 cups unbleached flour (do not substitute)
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 teaspoon salt
3 egg yolks, slightly beaten
1 cup Fleischmann’s oleo/margarine, do not substitute
1 cup scalded milk and cooled to 110 degrees F
1/4 cup pecans, chopped
1/4 cup raisins (optional)
Vanilla Icing
1 1/2 cups confectioners’ sugar
2 tablespoons softened Fleischmann’s margarine
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 to 2 tablespoons hot water
Instructions
Rolls
Night before baking, sprinkle yeast over lukewarm water, stir to dissolve; set aside.
Combine flour, 1/4 cup sugar and salt in mixing bowl. Mix well.
Cut in 1 cup of Fleischmann’s oleo/margarine with a pastry blender or with your fingers until mixture resembles cornmeal.
Add yeast mixture, egg yolks and milk, stir with a fork until well blended.
Cover with aluminum foil and refrigerate overnight.
Next morning, grease a 9 x 13-inch baking pan and set aside.
Combine in a small bowl 1/4 cup sugar and the cinnamon and set aside.
Roll dough on a floured surface into a rectangle, about 10 x 15-inches. Brush with 2 tablespoons melted oleo/margarine. Sprinkle with cinnamon/sugar mixture, sprinkle with pecans and raisins. Starting at the wide end, roll up in a jellyroll fashion. Pinch edges well to seal.
Cut into 15 equal slices. Place cut side down, equally spaced, in prepared pan. Cover and let rise in a warm place until doubled in size, about 1 hour.
Heat oven to 375 degrees F. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes or until golden brown.
Remove from oven and cool on a wire rack.
Frost rolls.
Vanilla Icing
Mix sugar, oleo/margarine. Add vanilla extract and 1 tablespoon hot water and stir until smooth and well blended. Add more water as needed a few drops at a time.
What can you do if you are thrown under the bus by your boss when it was not really your fault?
I don’t remember exactly what I got blamed for, but I overheard my boss explaining to a client on the phone that his secretary; i.e., me, had failed to do whatever it was and reassuring the client that I would be disciplined.
The problem was that the mistake was my boss’s fault, not mine. In other words, he was covering his own ass by throwing me under the bus. He definitely had not intended that I should hear the conversation.
I was instantly furious. I took a lot of emotional abuse on that job, and I compensated and covered for a lot of mistakes on the parts of a lot of salespeople and managers to prevent loss of profits and/or company reputation. I was so constantly throwing myself under the bus to save face for a bunch of incompetents that most times they didn’t even know. Do you think I bothered to point out that the cost of four thousand steel shelves had been omitted by the “experienced” salesperson again on the project proposal I was typing, or did I just add them in and adjust the price, again?
One of my other roles in the company was CSR. In other words, if a client had a problem, it was up to me to solve it, ideally without “bothering” the salesperson “earning” the commission. In other words, the client to whom my boss was trashing my competency and reputation was very likely someone I was going to interact with repeatedly until the project was complete.
My boss hung up the phone and I immediately stomped into his office. Putting my hands on his desk so I could speak directly to his face, I made my fury known.
“By my own choice, I accept a lot of blame around here to clients for shit I don’t do, to protect your sorry asses, but I’ll be damned if you’re going to put the blame on me for your mistakes without my knowledge or permission!!”
My boss, with an hangdog expression, acknowledged that he was wrong and he apologized. In hindsight I wish he hadn’t. I really needed a kick in the ass to prompt me to quit that horrendous job.
Would’ve saved a lot of heartache.
Delusional GF Busted With The Most RIDICULOUS Pro/Con List Of All Time And Is About To Get Dumped!
Basically she’s implying that she’s settling.
What is the most jaw-dropping method for shoplifting that you have seen?
I worked loss prevention as the Team Lead. We had cameras in a retail clothing store and had multiple subjects we were watching. I moved to the floor to cover one of the guys and lost him. I looked around, and called over the radio for directions. When I turned around he was right there. I said never mind and then put the radio on my belt. The guy turned around and we chatted for a few minutes. I was about to move on when he asked me if I thought this place was easy to steal from. I told him no, security is pretty tight from what I understand. Then he asked me to watch for him while he stole a lot of items. I literally stood there in the aisle and stared at him while he concealed several items. He said he was done and wanted to know if I wanted him to watch for me while I stole. I told him nope, I’m good. He said thanks and headed to the door. Still in somewhat disbelief, I walked with him as we passed the registers and exited the store. As we got to the outside, I held the door shut and introduced myself. The look of shock was priceless. As I took him back to the office in handcuffs I reminded him, “Yes, you just asked the head of security to WATCH you while you shoplifted.”
What was the strangest part of your divorce?
The most peculiar part was the outcome.
I left Claire with the following:
A nice home fully paid for, mortgage free
A new car fully paid
No outstanding bills – everything paid
A nice portfolio of blue chip stocks which were little appreciated at the time
Paid up life insurance
An arrangement with a top financial advisor to assist her
Claire had 3 children of her own issue (as a couple, we had none). One existed independently and had little to say about the break-up.
Another was a highly dependent son who should have been on his own, but who was very attached to Claire, and she was very attached, to him.
An elder son who, with his wife, came to his mother’s (Claire’s) defense, warning her that I would attempt to impoverish myself to escape a generous settlement. I was pegged as the “bad guy.”
That’s the set-up. Here is what happened:
The elder son and his wife quickly realized the generosity of my settlement, and the reasons for my seeking divorce.
The other 2 children were a constant drain on Claire’s resources; purchases of property, cars, etc.
The dependent son and his wife moved in with Claire, as did the daughter.
Claire exhausted the liquid resources I gave her and had to sell the home I gave her. Subsequently, she also had to sell the replacement home she bought. Now she lives in poverty, as do the two children. Her only income is Social Security.
And meanwhile, the very protective son and his wife have welcomed me into their family, where I enjoy a most enriching relationship.
Thus Claire has not only impoverished herself, but also 2 of her children. And I enjoy the happiest relationship with her elder son and his wife.
Who knew? Well, something in me knew, and I am better for it.
Life is strange.
[EDIT:] The dependent son, Freddy died in early 2022. His mother, Claire, died in late 2022. I had to chip-in to pay funeral expenses.
Can I refuse for my child to attend an after-school detention?
In the UK yes you can… or at least my mum did and there wasn’t a DAMN thing the school could do about it.
Let me explain: My sister is the main character in this story.
She’s fiery and doesn’t know how to be quiet and just take things… she reacts…
Well… A boy in the school was going around grabbing/groping girls. He then made the mistake of groping my sister. She didn’t hesitate to floor him. And I mean she punched him on the face and he hit the deck.
Well, she got a detention. Fair enough, shouldn’t hit kids blah blah… but the boy DIDNT get detention for his actions.
My mum went to pick my sister up, I was there to witness, and found that she had a detention… When she asked why the teacher said she hit another student.
So my mum turned to my sister and asked what happened and my sister explained it all, about the constant groping and even warnings he had been given… she explained when, how and why she clobbered him.
So my mum looked around and asked where was this boy for his detention.
He had not been given one.
So my mum took my sister and said we are leaving. And we left despite the protests of the teacher. The headmaster walked down and tried to stop us, but we left. My mum told them that if they will not punish the boy for his sexual assaults, then they can not punish her daughter for defending herself.
And out we went. My mum bought us a Ice-lolly and told her she has the right to always defend herself… There are many more stories like this, but I will leave this here.
So in answer to your question, the care of the child ends at the end of the school day.
1. Identify idiots early. The sooner you can identify an idiot, the sooner you can start to protect yourself from them.
2. Don’t try to change idiots. Idiots are not going to change, so don’t waste your time and energy trying to do so.
3. Don’t take idiots personally. Idiots are not attacking you personally, they are just being idiots.
4. Set boundaries with idiots. Don’t let idiots into your life if you don’t have to.
5. Don’t argue with idiots. It’s a pointless exercise.
6. Don’t try to explain yourself to idiots. They won’t understand.
7. Don’t try to reason with idiots. They are not reasonable people.
8. Don’t try to please idiots. They are impossible to please.
9. Don’t expect idiots to appreciate you. They don’t have the capacity to do so.
10. Don’t let idiots ruin your day. They are not worth it.
11. Don’t become an idiot yourself. It’s easy to do, but it’s important to remember that there is no excuse for bad behavior.
12. Learn to laugh at idiots. It’s the best way to cope with them.
13. Don’t take yourself too seriously. Idiots will try to make you feel bad about yourself, but don’t let them.
14. Remember that you are not alone. Everyone has to deal with idiots at some point in their lives.
15. Be kind to yourself. Dealing with idiots can be stressful, so make sure to take care of yourself.
I hope these lessons help you to deal with idiots effectively and to protect yourself from their negative influence.
Bypassers Found a Bobcat On the Railroad it Froze to the Rails
Be the Rufus
What screams “I’m educated, but not very bright”?
A patient has had a Rhinoplasty (plastic surgery to the nose) . Kept overnight at the hospital. It was 35 years ago, when patients were kept inpatient more than these days. Late day surgery. In the evening, the patient is vomiting blood. Nurse calls Intern. It was July, when Interns firs come into hospital, on call 24 hours. Fresh from school. Intern comes & diagnosed stomach bleed 🩸 🤣🤣. Never calls the attending. Intern Proceeds to place a nasogastric tube in patient’s freshly operated nose & wash the stomach with ice saline, a better portion of the night. Still, no one called the attending Physician… In the morning, the attending Physician comes in to discharge the patient & learns what has been done all night… patient did well but I’m sure nurse & intern got a tear down for their stupidity. The patient had either swallowed or much blood had gone down the stomach during surgery. Blood is difficult to digest. Never mind that many post op patients suffer from nausea & vomiting from pain meds etc. The blood vomiting was all old blood from surgery time & neither the nurse nor the intern knew that but worst of all, no body called the attending Physician. If this patient was really bleeding from his stomach, that much, that alone, warrants a call to the attending physician , which would have avoided the ice saline thing altogether. Sadly, this is vestiges of the old ways, when attending yelled at interns or nurses for “bothering “ them for stupid stuff. They helped create this atmosphere of fear & stupid things happened. True story.
What is the hardest thing you’ve had to tell your parents and how did they react?
I know this post is 6 months old, but I thought I’d share my story.
On January 9th 2019 my mother was admitted to the hospital during what was supposed to be a check-up with her oncologist. My mom was battling stage four endometrial cancer. She ended up in the hospital for about a month and eventually went home to stay with my aunt and uncle. The doctors advised she be in hospice but she wanted to be comfortable. I spent many days by my mom’s side, helping my aunt who was her caretaker and just being there.
On February 9th my mom went into a coma-like state, unconscious but still able to hear us and move here and there, but could not speak or see or do much of anything. Her body was shutting down. I spent every day by her bed with her, I knew that she needed to go. I knew that the hardest thing I’d ever do is lose my mom, my best friend, at the age of 24. But everyday I told her I loved her and that I’d be okay if she had to go.
For a week she held on. On Friday, February 15th my dad was flying into my hometown from California where he lives because he wanted to be here for me over the weekend. He knew the situation. Him and my mom were separated, never married, but they were on decent terms. I left my aunt’s house where my mom was to go pick him up from the airport. After my father’s plane landed and was evacuating the plane, I got the call that my mother’s heart rate was dropping. I was a mess, sobbing in the middle of the airport. I told my dad as soon as I saw him. Fast forward a few hours, my mother passed at 11pm on February 15th, 2019. The first person I called was my dad and it’s something I will never forget. Hearing him cry broke me down even more. It’s a memory embedded in my mind forever.
I truly believe that my mom waited to leave. She always said she wasn’t afraid to die, she was only afraid of leaving me. I believe she knew that my dad was going to be here, and she wanted to wait until I had the most important and supportive person here with me. She wanted me safe. Not everybody would believe in something like this, but I feel it in my heart. This Saturday will be a year since she passed and I miss her so much.
What single moment killed your relationship?
“can you book me flight tickets to California? I want to spend my Christmas break with you”
“Sure babe! How long?” I immediately jumped into my desk and took a look at the pricing. It was around $500. I’d then asked myself if it was too early in our relationship to spend that kind of money on someone. I tossed that thought away when I’d thought of how strong my feelings were for him.
“15 days! From 12th December to 26th December” he replied.
I jumped with joy.
“I’m so happy you’re spending 15 days with me”
“Oh I should have mentioned earlier, I won’t be spending all 15 with you. I want to see my friends too”
“Ok. What’s the plan then?” I asked.
“ I’ll spend the Saturday and Sunday with you and then Id go to San Francisco and meet …blah blah bleh blue…and..” I was impatiently waiting till my name came again on that list “and then I’d finish the trip off with blue blah bleh and that’s it..”
“So you’re spending 2 days with me?” I asked.
I got a shameless “yeah I’m sure you’ll be busy anyway and if you’re not you should make plans with your friends too for the break.”
That did it for me.
“I get that you’re still in school and it makes sense for me to pay because I have a job but I’m not going to spend $500 for 2 days of your time.”
To be fair, if we were dating for more than a year or something, I would have understood him better and would have spent that kind of money for him to be happy. But it had only been a month and he had shamelessly called to ask for a ticket and even had the courage to tell me that it wasn’t a trip for me. Sorry but not sorry. We broke up the next day and that’s the story of my shortest relationship. So glad I’d dodged that bullet.
China humiliates Blinken as he threatens China, says China commits genocide+crimes against humanity.
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What was your biggest “nonsense” moment in the military?
Whilst on tour in Afghanistan a group of us was given a few days off in Kuwait. We flew directly from our base to the airport in Kuwait in a C130. We flew in full battle rattle, rifles, pistols front line ammo and grenades.We are also in uniform with body armor and helmet
We had our days off then went to the airport dressed as we came in. For some reason we had to go through a different area of the airport than when we came in. We were ushered through to a security check point
There was a large African American female contractor. She says to the first soldier
“Are you carrying any weapons ” ………the first guy says
” you mean apart from my rifle,pistol bayonet and grenades?”
“Yes , please take our all of your equipment and put it on the conveyor belt”
“Why?”
“Sir need to check that you aren’t carrying any weapons”
“You need to X-ray my rifle and webbing to check for weapons? That’s stupid you can see them”
” you might use a hidden weapon to highjack the plane”
“If I want to highjack the plane I will use my rifle, besides why would a soldier highjack an Air Force plane “
” are you going to highjack the plane”?
“No”
“Then I need to check your gear”
This went back and forth went in for a few minutes before the soldier removed his gear and put it through the machine
The next soldier then proceeds to have exactly the same argument with the security guard. The whole scene degenerates into a farce.
One other soldier and I get frustrated and simply walk around the checkpoint then out a side door and onto the plane.
Not everyone will like you for being a good person.
People will hate you just because other people likes you.
If you don’t learn to say no, you will keep doing the things what people says.
Life will only give you what you deserves.
If you are talented then also you have to work hard.
No matter who you are there will always be someone who will hate you.
You will repeat your own mistakes many times.
There will be someone who will love you no matter what.
Relatives can be your enemies sometimes.
Age doesn’t defines maturity.
Situation will force you to leave everything but that time defines you.
Self love matters a lot. If you love yourself then you don’t need anyone else for anything. You can make yourself happy.
I just got fired. Now my former boss (the one who let me go) is asking me where some important documents are. How should I respond?
As many pointed out, there are two scenarios here:
You are still in possession of company property, such as an old work laptop or company documents. In this case, I would try to return everything in your possession ASAP (your earliest convenience within reason, but at least 7–14 days ahead of any deadline), and fully document everything. Not returning their property could be grounds for voiding any severance agreement you signed or even legal action.
They need your help to do something that was previously part of your day to day responsibilities. Whether is finding old documents that you worked with (but are not in your possession), documenting a knowledge transfer handoff, or dealing with expired certs/credentials that are associated with a business process previously tied to your account. In this case, they are pretty much f**ked (and likely desperate). You can agree to help them, at whatever rate you feel is reasonable as a consultant (compared to your previous salary and/or severance package). Of course, it may impact any reference you receive from this company, so tread carefully.
Have you ever fired someone for not coming to work on time?
Yep. In the 1980s I worked at a financial services firm in Harrogate, England. In mid 1987 the HR manager employed a young woman, Nicky, as an administrator. She came from a well-to-do middle-class family and lived about a mile from the office, where we had private parking, and she had her own car, paid for by mummy and daddy. Despite all those advantages, she was never on time, always looked unwashed, and smelt like it, but our useless HR manager tolerated it. When I left the firm are the end of ’88 she was still as lazy, slovenly, and useless as she had been on her first day, and the slack HR manager was still tolerating her. Apparently, the HRM was friends with Nicky lazy-arse’s mother.
Fast forward to 1995 and I’m working at another financial services firm in Leeds, England. The local HR Director hires… Nicky lazy-arse! Again it turns out that the HRD, Celia, is a friend of NLA’s mother. Again she never shows up on time, again she is unwashed, slovenly, and smelly. Unfortunately for her though, the firm was in crisis and the bosses in London needed to slim it down. They knew Celia wouldn’t sort it, so they appointed me. On my first day, NLA was late as usual, with some bullshit story about her cat having gotten out and her having to get it back in before she could leave home. She got a verbal warning. On my second day, she was late again and again trotted out some made-up story. She got a written warning, which she said she wasn’t accepting, but she got it anyway. On the third day, she was late again. Again, a pathetic made-up story. I fired her.
Eastern Asians are the smartest humans over the Earth, despite all Western propaganda. Natives of the Americas are considered “Mongoloids” too. Any advice from Eastern Asians to not get dumbness caused by poverty and bad governments imposed by USA?
I am born in East Asia, I lived my entire 66 years of my life in East Asia, I am an a Chinese origin Singaporean so I am very qualified to speak! The U.S. must recognised that it’s time as the world barbaric bully is truly over and done with.
Americans must recognised facts that it cannot deny it took over the biggest and baddest barbarian of the world from UK in 1945 because it was the only one left with one eye when the rest of the world that is strong and powerful fought each other till all are half dead! You can say the U.S. is the king of the blind in 1945.
In spite of taking all the advantage to shape the world your way and stealing all the spoilt of the world war 2 it don’t take long before Europe overtook you, then Japan and East Asia and today the U.S. is a pale shadow of yourself compared to 1945!
Your debts and deficits are up to the roof. You guys have a million people living in tents homeless, if you take away say 10 richest Americans. Your nation is more like number 20 in per capital GDP. Your life expectancy is 76 which is 2 years old lover than China who spends one sixth of the U.S. to care for a population 4 times your size!
Today your debts has turned unsustainable, 35 trillion and adding a trillion every 3 months! Your nation plus 41 of your dogs nation plus a host of slave vassals threw your kitchen sink collective against Russia for 2 years over yet you have clearly lost! Oh you lost in Korea, in Vietnam to rice farmers, to Afghanistan to goat herder and it is time to stop pretending that you are the top dog and be humble again.
The last thing to call yourself is being exceptional or even good and it is time you need to work with East Asia and the rest of the world. Yes get into your thick skull the world don’t belong to you. And stop regime change it is totally democratic! Stop war mongering, you don’t have enough to care for your own people. 35% of American are poor by world standards! They have less than 500 buck in their name! If the fall sick the cannot get cure because they have no health insurance! Your kids get to debts before they get into life because they are charge exorbitant college fees!
America you cannot be a world policeman. No one wants you to be and certainly no one will pay a cent for it! Go back to do what all nation leaders do. Take care of your people and feed them well! You have done enough damage to the world. It is time to stop! China and Russia cannot be stopped, together they are impossible to stopped and plus Global South is like David and Goliath and you are David! Stop pretending, I know it feels good to lie to yourself but it is time to stop!
Start fighting hard to help the world that you destroyed by and large single handedly. And stop hiding behind democracy and freedom you guys have none of them! Stop pretending and stand up to your responsibility of 100 plus million deaths worldwide and don’t add another soul more! Take whatever winning you still have and try to keep it as long as you can and make a better America! We the world wants that you are another nation and a good customer and our partner.
If you continue to do shit you will pay and pay dearly. You cannot win with your fellow shit stirrer and you has been group of dogs nations and slave vassal states it can only hasten your demise! Stop it. That is my advise!
What is having a girlfriend like?
You can kiss anywhere you want! Forehead kisses, kiss on cheeks, horizontal kiss, vertical kiss 😉 .
You’ll have someone to talk to day or night and have conversations for hours.
When you’re feeling low you know whom to call and she’ll make sure you feel great again.
She will care for you. Asks you if you’ve taken your medicines in time or warns you before you do anything stupid.
You will have never ending talks and if your interests are same, you’ll talk about the whole universe.
You get bragging rights in front of your single friends :p .
The feeling of comfort when you are in her arms can’t be described in words.
If someone hurts her, it hurts you more.
Your girl will take you to different shopping places. So you go out more often.
You’ll get unexpected gifts that will make you feel special.
She’s the first person to wish you on your birthday. Sharp 12:00 a.m.
If you’re both financially independent you’ll help each other grow both financially and mentally.
You’ll get your s*xual needs or desires fulfilled.
*When she did something wrong and you are mat at her*. She: Sorry I won’t do it again 😢. He: please don’t talk to me. She: Please na, I’ll do anything for you 😉. He: anything? She: anything you want😜. (Nothing but a random conversation between nibba nibbi).
Vientiane, Laos: Our First Impressions
A nice vacation off the beaten track.
What is the biggest inconvenience you’ve faced and turned into an advantage? How can you get ahead when the going gets rough?
I have been HIV positive for 31 years. It was a death sentence when I was first diagnosed. Everyone died. No treatment. You were also deemed an untouchable, a pariah. I was a straight woman and felt I had no community and no one to share with. What I did with this awful fate was choose to be free. Do things I would normally be afraid of doing. I spoke my mind and even made it funny. Now after living with this debilitating disease for most my adult life I have a body of work I would never had accomplished without this diagnosis.
I was a fitness trainer in my last year of college when I found out. My goal in life back then was to have a great body. HIV pushed me so much farther than that. After I found out I did not give a crap what I looked like anymore. Life was too short for vanity. What a liberating moment that was!
I wrote six books, was a sex columnist for 10 years, I became a slam poet and eventually was named Poet Laureate of Bucks County. I did a one-woman show, Sex, Cellulite & Large Farm Equipment: One Girl’s Guide To Living & Dying in theaters all over the world. I traveled internationally speaking on sexuality, HIV, sexual assault and addiction. I was given an honorary PhD for my work. I appeared on many TV shows as a writer, activist and performer.
I eventually retreated to the Caribbean to paint full time. Painting huge colorful paintings. As I painted I really felt what HIV had given me, the ability to not judge my work, to go for it. I would often say when I felt afraid of the canvas, making mistakes on a big painting, “You are going to die anyway, just paint!”
HIV is a huge inconvenience. I hate it and wish I did not have it. I have suffered so many physical challenges, depression, and loneliness but I decided to not let it define me and to use it to allow me to bypass the mundane minutia that makes life so often drab and futile. I never worried about money. I didn’t have it but it didn’t matter, I had enough. I never worried about the future or getting old because it was not going to happen. And now that it has happened and I have no savings, no plan I took a leap of faith and I retired to a small mountain town in Mexico where I could live cheaply and allow myself the luxury of spiritual growth, spending many of my bedridden days in deep meditation. I have become fearless through this disease.
Life is life and I live in the moment, in complete acceptance, at peace. That is a place I do not believe I would have ever landed in this life with out the inconvenience of AIDS.
Big Blueberry Popover
Big Blueberry Popover
I’ve never had a popover before, nor do I have a proper “popover pan,” but those aren’t good reasons to never try my hand at making them! I wanted to know what all the fuss was about, so I did some research using my favorite chefs and food blogs and settled on the unbeatable Julia Child for my base recipe. Always having to make a baked good my own, I decided to sweeten the recipe and add blueberries for fresh blueberry popovers worthy of tea time.
Great for breakfast – a refreshing change of pace from muffins. Wonderful with blueberries, but any berry can be used.
Yield: 6 servings
At first, the recipes and tips seemed overwhelming. I thought popovers were complicated, but they really aren’t. It’s a simple egg batter with no leavening that is cooked very hot to create steam. This steam forces the batter to rise, making a crispy shell and an airy, custardy center. Blueberry popovers make the perfect breakfast treat along with some tea, or maybe as a side to a sweet salad to sop up the dressing.
Popovers are very forgiving. Not only do I not own a popover pan, but I don’t even own a metal muffin tin (gasp!). I forgot I had purged most of my metal pans that had rusted and replaced everything with flexible silicone during a kitchen spring cleaning. I pushed on, and you know what? It worked just fine.
How to Make Blueberry Popovers
Traditional popovers are just five ingredients: eggs, butter, salt, milk and flour. I added in some sugar and blueberries and topped them with cinnamon sugar. They really are quite simple.
Start by preheating your oven to 450 degrees and setting the rack on the lowest setting. Next, grease your muffin tray or popover pan with butter or oil and place the pan in the oven to pre-heat. If, like me, you are using silicone, place the muffin pan on a metal tray for stability. The most important rule is to have all of your ingredients at room temperature. If you decided that you need to bake impulsively, you can warm the eggs in a bowl of very warm water for ten minutes, microwave the milk for 30 seconds, and microwave the butter at 20 second intervals until melted.
Mix the eggs, milk, butter, sugar, and salt together. Then whisk in the flour all at once until the batter is as thick as heavy cream with very few lumps. You can also use a stand mixer or blender. You want the batter to have some air in it, so whip it until it is foamy.
Ingredients
1 cup milk
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 tablespoons butter, melted
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon fresh ground nutmeg
1/4 cup granulated sugar, divided use
1 cup sifted all-purpose flour
2 eggs, beaten
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 cup blueberries or other berries
Carefully take your pan out of the preheated oven. We are going to add the room temperature batter into the hot pan to kick-start the steaming process. I mixed my batter in a large liquid measuring cup for ease of pouring, but you could also use a dry measuring cup or ladle to distribute the batter into every other muffin cup or each popover tin. You want to fill each space slightly more than halfway, which makes a very satisfying sizzling sound.
Moving quickly, sprinkle a few blueberries into each cup and top liberally with cinnamon sugar. Place the tray back in the oven and set a timer for twenty five minutes. You have to be patient with popovers, so no peeking! Opening the oven door lets out too much heat and could interrupt the steaming process, leading to less of a pop.
After 25 minutes, lower the oven temperature to 325. Most recipes called for another twenty minutes in the oven, but my blueberry popovers were done in ten. You know they are done when the tops are a deep golden brown and tapping on them creates a hollow sound. Blueberry popovers are best eaten fresh from the oven, as they deflate and soften as they cool.
Instructions
Mix first 5 ingredients + 3 tablespoon sugar in a large bowl. Stir in flour, then eggs until just combined; let this batter stand for 5 minutes.
Meanwhile, mix remaining 1 tablespoon sugar and cinnamon in a separate bowl; set aside.
Adjust oven rack to middle position and heat oven to 450 degrees F.
Place berries in a buttered 9 inch pie pan. Pour batter over the berries; sprinkle cinnamon-sugar over the batter.
Transfer pan to the oven and bake for 20 minutes.
Reduce oven temperature to 350 degrees F; bake until popover is firm and golden brown, 15 to 20 minutes longer.
Cut popover into wedges and serve immediately.
Which creative invention has never been used?
Starlite is a revolutionary material that was invented in the 1980s by a British hairdresser named Maurice Ward.
It is a type of heat-resistant material that has the potential to withstand extremely high temperatures, making it ideal for use in a variety of applications. Despite its incredible potential, Starlite remains largely unknown, and its fate is still shrouded in mystery.
The invention of Starlite is a fascinating story that began with a freak accident. In 1985, Ward was experimenting with different materials to find a way to create a better hair gel. One day, while mixing different chemicals together, he accidentally spilled the mixture onto a hot lightbulb. To his amazement, the material didn’t burn, but instead formed a hard crust over the lightbulb. This was the inspiration for Starlite.
Over the next few years, Ward worked on developing his invention, experimenting with different combinations of chemicals and additives. He tested the material extensively, subjecting it to extreme heat, fire, and even explosions, and found that it was able to withstand temperatures of up to 10,000 degrees Celsius. He named the material Starlite, and began to explore the many potential applications of his invention.
One of the most exciting possibilities for Starlite was its use in space exploration. NASA and other space agencies were interested in finding a material that could protect spacecraft from the intense heat of re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere. Starlite seemed like the perfect solution, and Ward began to work with NASA to develop the material for this purpose.
However, despite the incredible potential of Starlite, its fate remains uncertain. Ward was notoriously secretive about the composition of the material, refusing to reveal the ingredients to anyone, including potential investors and customers. He claimed that the formula was so valuable that he needed to keep it a secret in order to protect his invention from theft.
As a result, Starlite never became the commercial success that many had hoped for. Despite numerous offers from investors and potential customers, Ward refused to share his secrets, and ultimately died in 2011 without ever revealing the formula for his invention.
Today, Starlite remains a mystery. While some have attempted to recreate the material using various chemical compounds and additives, no one has been able to replicate Ward’s original formula. Some believe that the material may have been a hoax or a simple trick, while others argue that Ward was a genius who truly invented a revolutionary material.
I caught my neighbor using my electrical outlets outside, and I told him I was going to call the cops and tell them what he was doing. He laughed and said I can’t prove it. What should I do?
I caught the builder next door doing this. I had given him permission to recharge his cordless tools at the workbench in my carport. That wasn’t going to cost me very much.
But then a few days later I saw an extension flex leading across the boundary line, powering two industrial dehumidifiers. I told him, nicely, that he hadn’t asked about that.
He instantly said, how much do you want for the power? I said, what’s the load and how long is it going to be on? He invited me to have a look. I did some quick calculations and gave him a guess, a range of possibilities, saying it was a guess. He straight away handed me a bundle of cash for about twice the highest figure I’d quoted and gave me a realistic figure for what it would cost him to hire and run a generator, and said he’d be back with more cash when they were finished with the power. And he was, but I refused… he’d already paid far more than it had cost me.
A builder wants to be on good terms with the neighbours. I’m watching his stuff.
And it can work to be nice.
UPDATE – The Sisterhood Is Coming For Me
Her: Um.. babe…I’m AC-DC…..
Him: Well, that’s nice. Have a good life! “footsteps waking into the distance” ….
Why did WWII fighter pilots wear goggles in enclosed cockpits?
Multiple fluid lines ( oil, fuel, etc ) ran through the cockpit, if one of them ruptured ( which was common ) it could spray a pilot in the face & disorient them. During combat the chance of this happening was even greater. The cockpit was also unpressurized, thus moisture freezing over or cold air blowing in from a bullet hole/ crack in the canopy was a hazard. Lastly it was common for pilots to open up the canopy during landing procedures to increase visibility, thus they would have air blowing in their faces. Overall more PPE ( personal protective equipment) equals more safety for the user ( flak jackets, heated clothing, gloves, goggles etc )
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USAAF pilot.
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US dive bombers returning to their carrier, notice open canopy.
What is the most horrifying noise you have ever heard?
It was a beautiful Spring day in 1998. My two best friends and I had just spent a lovely several hours riding and grooming our horses. We’d left and were driving to meet other friends at a local restaurant frequented by riders in the area , a place where we’d all meet up to have “ horse talk “ . As we were approaching a big intersection on the way there we heard a horrific screech of tires and the loudest crash I’d ever heard filled by piercing screams then immediate cries of help help help us ! We saw smoke rising in the air as we made it to the intersection . To our absolute horror, two cars had collided mid intersection, sending one car crashing into a tree. We stopped our car immediately and ran to see if we could help . Two women were stuck in the backseat of the convertible , the legs pinned seemingly under the front seats of the car. they screamed in pain . One of my friends and I both spoke to these women who were completely conscious as the driver of the car got out and was in pure disbelief dashing around the vehicle not knowing what to do. I asked if he was okay , and if he could call 911. Both he and my other friend called , the other of us two tried to free the women from the backseat … it was difficult to understand them and there was alot of blood. Suddenly, two police cars and an ambulance arrived and we backed away to the side of the road. The policeman and the EMT’s weren’t able to free the women and a fire truck had been summoned. The fireman used the jaws of life to get the women out of the backseat . When to everyone’s horror , the women had both lost appendages! It was then one woman began screaming for her baby . Turns out she had been holding her 3 month old baby in her lap . Another ambulance had arrived by this time as did two more firetrucks …. The scene and the noises were macabre , terrifying and sad. I will never forget the anguished mothers cries when she realized her baby was underneath the seat in front of her and had not survived. Her screams towered over all the other sounds of the wreckage rescue. I will never forget it. It turns out they lived just a few blocks away and were travelling “ just around the corner “ to their sisters house. The other car who ran into them left the scene of the accident. He was later found and charged with vehicular manslaughter resulting in death , leaving the scene of the accident and DWI .
What office rule made you say “You gotta be kidding me”?
When I worked at Dreamworks I shared an office with another artist. It was a long skinny office with one of us at each end. There were stacks of used couches in the basement. We asked if we could move one of the couches into our office. We were told couches were only for management. (There were many more couches than there were managers.) We asked if we could bring in our own couch and were told that was fine. (We bought a $200 couch from Ikea and put it in our office.)
—
Dreamworks used to have wintergreen lifesavers in all the commons areas. (You work in close proximity to others during approvals.) Then they hired Steve (name changed). After work every day Steve would go around to the commons areas and dump all the uneaten lifesavers into a bag and take them home. Dreamworks also used to stock the fridges with drinks. He would take those too. When my supervisor confronted Steve, he wasn’t embarassed or even trying to cover up his actions. He thought everyone else was stupid for not taking them because they were free and no one had taken them during the day. Dreamworks also didn’t mind if you occasionally invited a family member for lunch at the studio. The understood rule was no more than once a month. When Steve found out no one really checked how often, and security would let him “wife plus kids” a drive-on, he started bringing his whole family in for lunch, his wife plus their 4 kids, every day. Then they started coming for lunch and breakfast which was just oatmeal and cold cereal for employees that had to be there early (Steve didn’t). So here’s one guy who’s abusing the system that 400 other people were not abusing. Instead of pulling Steve aside and explaining the rules, they cut the entire benefit for all employees.
Why China is already ahead of the US
Pretty good. Gives insight into just how backwards the USA actually is.
Carl Zha talks to Dr. Oualaalou of the @geopoliticaltrends and @GeopoliticsInConflict about why China is already miles ahead of the US in many areas such as public infrastructure, especially in power generation and ultra-high voltage power transmission, how China is rapidly catching up in areas long dominated by the US such as civilian aircraft. #chinaeconomy#uschina#tradewar
Today is a real treat. I have found some 1980’s videos on YouTube that are classics. And I am presenting them here.
The first is the Arnold Schwarzenegger classic “Predator” under some kind of foreign bullshit name.
The second is a “Boy and his dog” which is a classic dystopian flick that I first watched in University.
Take the time to enjoy them both.
have fun.
Life is too short.
Today…
Has there been any occasion where an airline captain conducted himself so poorly the first officer had to take over control of the aircraft?
In 2012, Jet Blue Flight 191 was in flight between New York City and Las Vegas.
The first officer became suspicious of the captains mental state when the captain made statements like: “We need to take a leap of faith”, “We’re not going to Vegas”, and “I can’t be held responsible when this plane crashes.” He lectured the FO about a range of subjects that were not making sense.
The FO persuaded the captain to leave the cockpit and then hard-locked the door. He then contacted the flight attendants who recruited several able bodied passengers to restrain the captain in the forward galley. The captain’s mental state continued to deteriorate. He screamed about subjects such as 9/11 and terrorists and convinced all involved that he was having a mental breakdown.
An off duty Jet Blue pilot was travelling in the cabin and assisted the FO in diverting the airplane to Amarillo Texas which was only 20 minutes away.
The captain who had suffered the breakdown was arrested for “Interference with a flight crew”. He was subsequently judged “Not guilty by reason of insanity” and released to psychiatric treatment and supervised by a probation officer.
Later, this captain sued Jet Blue on the grounds that the airline should have known he was having mental problems but did not ground him, causing him to lose his career. The captain did not prevail.
The passengers on the flight sued Jet Blue for allowing the captain to operate the flight when they should have known he was not fit to fly. The company settled for an unspecified sum.
I am sure there are many other instances where an FO has taken control, even momentarily. When I was an engineer on the 727, the first officer applied the brakes when the captain almost missed a hold short line while taxiing. It was no big deal and the captain thanked him. If there are more serious cases, the airline and maybe the FAA would handle it without alerting the press. I’ve heard rumor of captains having mental problems but I’ve never seen anything written about it.
As part of my preflight briefing for the copilots, I ask them to be strong and assertive with me if they see that I’m making a mistake. If the mistake will lead to an unsafe situation and I am not responsive, I ask them to take control of the airplane if necessary to correct the problem. There will be plenty of time to talk it over later. The copilots at my airline are all highly qualified to be captains themselves and are only awaiting an opening on the captain’s list. It’s hard to put my ego aside, but the safety of flight is our first priority.
What was a gift that made you speechless?
In 2014, while serving as a contract interpreter for our troops in Afghanistan, I had the pleasure of meeting an emissary of the Saudi Royal family who was doing “ridealongs” to observe our rules of engagement with the Taliban. Everyone called him Sheikh, literally “elder” in Arabic, the honorific title for the ruler of a tribe. He was an oddly prissy man for the job; but, I never saw him cower or jump/hide from close by gunfire or incoming RPG rounds. He was a studious person and read a lot while deployed in the field.
During one of our excursions by helicopter, I was sitting adjacent to Sheikh and observed a beautiful Rolex on his wrist. It looked like a stainless watch with a brown bezel and light blue face. No expert; but, I recognized it as being one of the Rolex Daytona style of watches. Holding his wrist and admiring the watch, I made muted (over the sounds of the helicopter) signs of thumbs up and smiled. I thought no more about it.
About a week later, I was coming in from a field operation and was told I had a package awaiting me inside the Green Zone at the front desk of the American Embassy. I made my way through the security checkpoints and to the person I had been directed only to be handed a box about half the size of a mailbox. I opened the box to reveal the beautiful Rolex Sheikh had been wearing. I was like whoa! and immediately slipped it on to my wrist. It felt heavy and looked gorgeous.
The watch was not in fact stainless. It was the Rolex Cosmograph 116506, their 50th Anniversary Platinum with ice blue dial and brown ceramic bezel.
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Sheikh had returned to Saudi Arabia and left this watch as a gift. Apparently in his culture if someone admires something you have, you gift them with it. Speechless hardly describes my reaction. There was no return address, I didn’t know Sheikh’s real official name to try to track him down and in the hush, hush, Afghan theater OpSec had no leads or further info. I was shocked to learn the value of this beautiful timepiece.
This is something I would never wear and would be an absolute waste on my arm when a $50 Seiko could replace it for functionality. It was an incredibly generous gift; but, in no way deserved by me. An NGO I had worked with in Kabul, cared for orphaned children. I put the watch on an auction site with the proceeds going to support that worthwhile organization. Hopefully maybe one day Sheikh will return and see his gift’s ROI.
On A Trip To Italy My GF Wanted To Stay Behind And “Find Herself”, Has MELTDOWN When I Leave Her
“Imagine what will happen to the Anglo-Saxon hegemony if all this vast space from Lisbon to Beijing is connected by a new Silk Road.
Imagine what will happen to the European Union, whose citizens will see that it is possible to develop and live in prosperity without trading their sovereignty, without betraying national interests, and without killing people.
No matter how much the Americans demand from their vassals, they take turns going to China to see Xi Jinping.
What does that say?
It shows that no matter how foolishly they act, they are still looking forward.
They understand that China is unstoppable, and much will depend on China in the future.”
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Excerpt from the address by Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko at the 7th Belarusian People’s Congress in Minsk, April 24, 2024.
What are the facts about girls that guys don’t know?
We knew which man is staring us with good or bad intentions
We are not dramatic on periods, periods cramps almost kills us
We like genuine compliments like “sundr lgri ho” pyari lgri ho”
We stalk the profile of the stranger before replying him
Not every girl wants expensive gifts some wants books, jhumkas and a chai date
When we are sharing our problems just patiently listen to it, we don’t want solution, we want someone who can listen us
Every second girl has faced sexual harrasment in their life
We don’t wear make up to impress other guys, we do make to look in our eyes, to feel confident
We don’t want your attention, we want your love, respect and care
If you going to rant out in your dms, we never going to judge you
Oily hairs are the reason of cancellation of plans for us
Pimples are our biggest nightmares
We have great stalking skills
We are very body conscious, if we ever ask you” am I looking fat?” Just answer it positively, don’t reply no, you are looking beautiful
We can look very intelligent at one point and after sometime we can like dumb who don’t know anything
We observe everything literally everything
Biscuits and Sausage Gravy
Biscuits and Sausage Gravy is popular all over America. It’s a staple dish on diner menus.
biscuits sausage gravy
Yield: 6 servings, 2 biscuits each
Ingredients
Biscuits
3 cups self-rising soft wheat flour
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon granulated sugar
1/2 cup butter-flavored shortening
1 1/4 cups buttermilk
Butter, melted
Sausage Gravy
1 pound breakfast sausage (mild or hot)
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
3 1/4 cups milk
1/2 teaspoon salt or seasoned salt
2 teaspoons pepper
1/8 teaspoon Italian seasoning
Instructions
Bisicuits
Combine first 3 ingredients in a large bowl; cut in shortening with a pastry blender until mixture is crumbly.
Add buttermilk, stirring just until dry ingredients are moistened.
Turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface, and knead lightly 4 or 5 times.
Roll dough to 3/4 inch thickness; cut with a 2 1/2 inch biscuit cutter. Place on a lightly greased baking sheet.
Bake at 425 degrees F for 12 minutes or until golden.
Brush tops with butter.
Split biscuits open; serve with Sausage Gravy.
Sausage Gravy
Brown sausage in a skillet, stirring until it crumbles.
Drain, reserving 1 tablespoon drippings in skillet. Set sausage aside.
Add butter to drippings; heat over low heat until butter melts.
Add flour, stirring until smooth. Cook for 1 minute, stirring constantly.
Gradually add milk; cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until thickened and bubbly.
Stir in seasonings and sausage. Cook until thoroughly heated, stirring constantly.
Notes
This recipe is easily doubled.
What is the most surprisingly cool thing your parents did?
My dad could never have been described as cool. He was firm, autocratic, proper, emotionally disabled, distant, non-communicative, uninvolved and mostly grumpy.
When my parents split up and mom moved out, my brother and I were a bit at sea. We’d been close to our mum, but we were now stuck in the house with a dad we barely knew.
My brother, being older, started acting out a bit, and this never ended well for him. One afternoon, as tensions between my dad and him began bubbling up, I steeled myself for the usual and inevitable torrent of verbal abuse my brother was about to receive. Instead, my dad did something completely out of character.
He told us to grab a few glasses each from the kitchen, and he took us into the courtyard out back.
Dad pointed to a concrete tub-shaped structure in the corner.
‘Throw the glasses in there! As hard as you can!’
Whaa..?
‘Go on! It’s okay. Throw them, and make it count.’
My brother and I looked at each other, bemused. He was asking us to purposely break drinking glasses? Had he finally lost his marbles?
My brother went first.
He threw his arm back as far as he could and unleashed glass number one against the brick wall. It shattered into pieces into the tub!
I threw my first glass ‘like a girl’, hesitantly and with no chutzpah! It didn’t even break, so I retrieved it.
Meanwhile, my brother had turned into a full-on Yankees pitcher, and he hurled glass number two. SMASH!
One by one, we took our frustrations out on those poor glasses. Shards everywhere. We were giggling like hooligans.
I believe even my dad was smiling.
When we went back into the house, the atmosphere had dramatically changed. My brother seemed calmer. My dad seemed calmer. I was young, only 10, but I understood my dad’s motivation behind the exercise.
He lacked the emotional skills to support my brother and me with words, so he found a more practical way to let us express our frustration.
In his own inept way, he did a cool thing.
Arnold Schwarzenegger Jungle Films | Forest Reptile – Preditor
Full movie!
Great blazy glory!
I have seen this movie 200 times so far. This movie is never boring. This is Arnold Schwarzenegger's best movie.
What is the best comeback you used on someone?
I’ve never been known to be one of those types who are always wanting to fight someone or use violence in any way. In my whole life, I’ve only been in 1 physical altercation since I was a kid. I always relied on wits and common sense, and I had no problem simply walking away from a confrontation for the most part, especially, if it was a trivial disagreement.
There is a great story about the one fight I was in as an adult. However, paraphrasing Douglas Adams, this is not that story.
This is the story about a good comeback.
It was over 20 years ago, I was in my early 20’s. The restaurant I worked at had a bartender who was somewhat a bully to most of the staff because his regulars were always around the bar and he would get a laugh out of them by making rude remarks to the rest of the staff. Waiters and Waitresses, kitchen staff, hostesses, etc.
I was waiting tables, working the outdoor patio section where drinks are commonly ordered. I submitted the tables drinks and went to the bar when I thought they’d be ready. He hadn’t even pulled the ticket from the order yet and it was past the time for the drinks to be ready. I got his attention as he was flirting with a regular and asked for the drinks. He went back to his nature of being a total ass hat and said something like I could fight him for it, if I found it that important.
I said “Ya know everyone is really getting sick of you treating us all like this, and if this can fixed by you and I stepping outside, I’m totally game”.
His regulars looked at him to see how’d he react.
He said “If we gonna fight, let me call my family”
My response, very calmly
”You ain’t got to do that, the hospital will call them for you”.
His regulars all laughed and he got angry at me, I just kept staring.
We both kinda got into “restaurant trouble” for our remarks, but nothing ever happened.
I never gotten anymore bad attitude from him though. Either by our warning, my willingness to step out with him, or my remark. We were civil after that, but never friendly.
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned in life so far? 😁
I learned two lessons that year. One was don’t do something truly stupid. The second was you reap what you sow.
I was a junior in college. I’d dropped out for a year so all my friends were graduating while I had another year left to fulfill my requirements. There were four us girls and someone suggested driving to Florida for spring break. All the college students who could were headed for Fort Lauderdale. My college was in northern Indiana so it was a bit of a hike driving there.
Now, my parents supplemented our education very heavily. For 5 years, two of us were in college at the same time so those were expensive years for them. Going to Florida would cost us $100/each. That was a significant amount of money back then. I was not about to ask Dad for the money. I worked very part time but I didn’t have $100 to spend.
“I’ll loan you the money,” Sandy said. We had a great time but, by definition, loans must be repaid and I did. It took me 6 weeks but I repaid the money.
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Now, for stupid. It was someone’s less than stellar idea to drive straight through. At that time, straight through was a 24 hour trip. We were supposed to drive in shifts but, by ten o’clock, two of them baled and two of us were stuck driving. I can clearly remember the road ahead becoming increasingly blurry and my eyes blinking for longer periods of time. We took 30-minute shifts but it’s a miracle we didn’t crash.
Now, for the bright side. Sandy graduated in May and her graduation gift was a new car. Yes, her parents had that kind of money. Would I like to buy her old car. The car you see above is the car in question. I had another year in school. I couldn’t possibly afford a car.
But her father remembered the $100 I had borrowed and repaid. He said I was good for the loan. In fact, I didn’t have to make payments until I graduated and obtained employment. His terms were beyond generous and I paid the loan in full.
So, within the span of two months, I learned two lessons. I wish I could report never making another stupid mistake but we humans are prone to them and I’m no exception. But I also learned that you reap what you sow for better or worse.
What is the craziest thing you’ve found in an old coat pocket?
Many years ago, late on a cold and snowy January night, my husband and I were out at a nice Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village and were last to leave, around midnight. At the time my husband was wearing a beautiful full length navy cashmere Ted Lapidus coat that had been his father’s — a VERY expensive coat. When he went to retrieve his coat from the rack, there was one navy coat hanging, but it was not his. My husband was furious that someone had taken his good coat. But I reached into the pockets and pulled out a set of Porsche keys! I assured him that he would be getting his coat back shortly and indeed, first thing in the morning, the restaurant called to arrange an exchange. Personally I would have preferred to have the Porsche.
Exposing The True Nature Of The Sprinkle Sprinkle Effect On The Relationship Market
Her real name is Leticia Padua. One of the hardest lesson I had to learn is that "Women don't Love You, She Loves what you can do for Her".
*groan*
Have you ever caught on to someone trying to scam you before it was too late?
I worked at Borders Bookstore (now defunct). Ten minutes before closing time, a gentleman comes to the Café, and asks if we could do him the “favor” of putting his bag of groceries into our refrigerator. He mentioned that he had milk in the bag, and didn’t want it to spoil while he browsed for books. Sounds simple enough, right? Again: AFRAID OF MILK SPOILING. IN THE TEN MINUTES BEFORE CLOSING. I said NO.
Not because my “scam meter” was buzzing (yet), but just because I remembered that it’s not only against the rules… it’s also a Health Code violation to have personal or “outside the system” food stored with our legitimate items for sale to the public. I had recently taken a Food Safety Course (required for managers who may work the cafe, but not required for the rank & file baristas), so those rules were fresh in my mind.
So what does Mr Milk-Panic do? He goes to someone else in the cafe to ask the same “favor.” I saw that, left the counter to repeat my “no” to both the customer and the barista before an employee said something they would regret.
What next? He walks to the other end of the store, finding a random book-seller to ask the same thing. Fortunately, we had started using radio headsets, so I got the request in my headset. Okay, so NOW my “scam sensor” is fully engaged. Dude hasn’t even started browsing for books yet, and in the 5 minutes left before we lock the doors, he is ANGRY that his fresh milk may spoil (but not concerned enough to just go straight home – hmmmm….). So now I made it clear on the radio (all the employees could hear, but not the customers) that the cafe fridge is NOT to be used for any customers’ personal food, or someone could get fired…PERIOD! Suddenly the “nice” manager was being the mean one, and the customer finally left, yelling some obscenities which didn’t seem to match the “nice man asking for a small favor” persona.
The next day’s staff meeting, the general manager had printed out an emailed scam warning: someone was going around, store to store, asking to refrigerate his bag of groceries. Then… he doesn’t come back for them. Not until a week or more has passed, when it would certainly have been thrown away. Upon hearing that his precious “milk” had been tossed out, the customer would then claim we had thrown out hundreds of dollars’ worth of groceries. He would demand CASH for it… or threaten to report us to the Health Department for allowing outside food into our fridges.
Pay attention to that small, nagging feeling!
What is the biggest turn-off you’ve ever had on a date?
Met a guy on OKCupid who seemed cool. He had a professional head shot as his profile picture and was pretty well spoken, so I met him for dinner.
Everything was okay, though I didn’t really see it progressing to date #2, when he commented on my shoes.
“I wouldn’t really go with those shoes next time you wear that dress,” he said.
I thought he was joking and laughed, not at all offended because I’m the first to admit that I know nothing about fashion. Nope.
He continued: “No, seriously. I’m the type of man who needs to know that his woman will not only always look good, but will take my advice when it comes to what she looks good in.”
Crickets. Then he added, “I’d be glad to take you shopping if you don’t know what you’re doing. You’re pretty enough, just need some help with outfits.”
Um, thanks? I did my best to finish the date graciously and deleted his number literally as I walked to my car in the restaurant parking lot.
Funny, bizarre, and definitely a turnoff.
20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH 🎬 Exclusive Full Sci-Fi Movie Premiere 🎬 English HD 2022
Movie time!
The first U.S. spaceship to Venus crash-lands off the coast of Sicily on its return trip. A dangerous, lizard-like creature comes with it and quickly grows gigantic.
Ray Harrihausen’s creations were so way ahead of their time. I understand he worked virtually alone and spent huge amounts of time bringing his horrors onto the screen, a true genius.
What did the job interviewer say that made you NOT accept the job offer?
“What business is McDonald’s in?”
The three 20-something young men sat across a table from me. I’d just returned to the States from a couple of years living abroad, and it was time to find a job. Back then (18 years ago), the newspaper classifieds were still a pretty good resource for job hunters. The description had been a bit vague (classifieds were usually short), but the promised wage was decent, so I sent in a résumé, and got an interview.
When I arrived, I waited in a stairwell outside a sparsely furnished office with another guy about my age (20-something), until my interview slot (the last one) came. When I entered, after the usual greetings, that was the first, and only, question asked.
The trouble is, I recognized the question, and its source. Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad, Poor Dad books were growing in popularity, and a friend had shown me a passage in which Ray Kroc, owner of the McDonald’s chain, asks a class of Harvard MBA students that very question, receiving predicable answers such as “restaurants,” and “hospitality,” only to reveal that he considers himself to be in the real estate business.
I’ve always considered Kiyosaki’s approach to personal wealth to be irresponsible and well beyond my risk-tolerance level. He was very trendy at the time, and the fact that this question constituted the whole of my interview was a huge red flag for me. In my mind, it communicated:
That this company was following financial trends rather than principles,
and
that the company would probably be long on charisma and short on discipline
Combine that with the lack of concrete detail about the job, and I was more than a bit wary.
I answered the question properly, finished with pleasantries and small talk, and drove away. I received a call-back before I’d gone a single mile; I’d gotten the job. They explained that it was a sales position (something I wouldn’t have bothered interviewing for if I’d known), and started talking about a starting date.
“Actually, I’m not really interested,” I said.
There was silence on the other end of the phone. Finally, he just said, “Okay, thanks!”
That was it. I still feel like I dodged a bullet with that one.
“The world has already changed—and not in the way that people overseas wanted.
But what do they want? What is their endgame?
The United States, having launched a sweeping attack on all undesirable countries simultaneously (you know this axis of ‘evil’: from Belarus to North Korea, including Russia, China, Iran, and others), realized that they made a mistake.
They brought together the disobedient Russia and their archnemesis, China.
By exerting pressure, they pushed these two states together: Russia, with extensive resources and a powerful defense industry, and China, with enormous economic and human potential.
They realized that they could not handle this union.
But the United States found a way out: they instigated a conflict in Europe, in Ukraine, and put it on the shoulders of the European Union and NATO, promising to help with money.
The goal is to distract, get Russia bogged down in the war with Ukraine, weaken it with the war and sanctions—as Russia will be too busy to build an alliance with China.
Meanwhile, they wanted to deal with China and drag others whenever possible into this showdown: AUKUS [Defense alliance of Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States], which is a new NATO in the Pacific, and then Japan and South Korea.
This is the essence of the U.S. strategy to assert its dominance in the world.
After that, everything will be over: they will throw everyone under the bus, like they did in Afghanistan.”
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Excerpt from the address by Belarusian President Aleksandr Lukashenko at the 7th Belarusian People’s Congress in Minsk, April 24, 2024.
Temu and Shein are next in line on the chopping board.
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China’s Temu Takes Over 17% Of US Market Share, Cutting Jobs From American Amazon And Decimating Small Businesses
China's Temu Takes Over 17% Of US Market Share, Cutting Jobs From American Amazon And Decimating Small Businesses
Caleb Naysmith
Thu, Apr 25, 2024, 4:49 AM GMT+8
China’s Temu Takes Over 17% Of US Market Share, Cutting Jobs From American Amazon And Decimating Small Businesses
With rising inflation, American consumers are increasingly turning to the Chinese e-commerce platform Temu for their shopping needs. With its enticing tagline “Shop like a billionaire,” Temu has captured 17% of the U.S. market share, posing a challenge to traditional American retailers such as Amazon.com. Spend less. Smile more.
Inc., Dollar Tree Inc. and Five Below Inc. The rise highlights the lucrative and disruptive nature of startups.Owned and operated by PDD Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:PDD), Temu offers a wide range of products, including home decor, pet supplies, beauty and health products and clothing. The platform is known for its competitive pricing, often offering significant discounts on items compared to prices on Amazon. Coupled with Temu’s discount codes, consumers can enjoy even greater savings.
Temu has even become the No. 1 Shopping App on Apple’s App Store, surpassing Amazon, Target Corp. and Walmart Inc., which currently hold the third, fourth and eighth spots, respectively. The No. 2 shopping app is Shein, another Chinese retailer.
Orders purchased on Temu are shipped from China and are estimated to be delivered within 10 days. However, in a bid to compete with Amazon’s fast delivery, Temu opened its marketplace to U.S. warehouses last month. Shopping from these sellers can significantly reduce shipping time, giving U.S. retailers the ability to handle fulfillment and shipping directly.
In December, Reuters reported that Temu was successfully challenging U.S. dollar stores like Dollar Tree and Dollar General Corp., accounting for nearly 17% of the market share in the United States. According to data analytics firm Earnest Analytics, this compares to 8% for Five Below, 43% for Dollar General and 28% for Dollar Tree.
In January, Amazon announced it would lay off 5% of its Buy with Prime workforce, which equips retailers with fulfillment and delivery services.
“Following a recent review, we’ve made the difficult decision to eliminate a small number of roles on our Buy with Prime team. Buy with Prime is a top priority for Amazon, with strong adoption from merchants and positive feedback from customers, and we will continue investing significant resources in Buy with Prime to build on that momentum,” an Amazon statement said.
The ripple effects extend to discount stores like Dollar Tree and 99 Cents Only Stores, both of which have announced significant closures and employee layoffs.
Citing changing consumer demand and economic challenges, 99 Cents Only Stores is shutting all 371 locations in Arizona, California, Nevada and Texas. Dollar Tree plans to close 1,000 locations across its Dollar Tree and Family Dollar stores.
The new American dream is to leave
"I live in New York and he is 200% correct. The majority of us are living paycheck to paycheck. I am also moving out of the country soon. America is on a fast decline. Our government does not work for us."
“I realize that this government in Washington—speaking as it does for the American people—has effectively said that it rejects any relationship with Moscow on the basis of conditions that we do not set.
In other words, unless the Russians all agree to adopt whatever we tell them is appropriate for their society and government, unless they remove the people that currently govern them, unless they put their arms down, join hands, and sing ‘Kumbaya’ with us, we can’t get along with the Russians.
Well, sending this kind of money towards Ukraine at this stage signals to the Russians that any hope of a relationship with Washington is dead.
That’s why Foreign Minister Lavrov, within the last 48 hours, was interviewed and asked what would happen if there were negotiations, and whether Moscow was still receptive to negotiations.
He said, ‘Yes, we will be receptive to negotiations but keep in mind two things:
First of all—just because we negotiate, we will not stop fighting. We will continue until we have achieved all of our objectives militarily.
Secondly—and very importantly—we are not going to cease hostilities for even a brief period of time because we know that we are going to hold what we’ve won.
Effectively, the facts on the ground have changed and we are no longer willing to talk about trades in what kind of territory we’re willing to surrender to you in order to have peace.’
It’s over, and we’ve made fools out of ourselves and, worst of all, we’ve made fools out of NATO.
NATO looks weak and stupid.
The Ukrainian state is ruined.
Whatever emerges after this will be a rump state and that rump state will effectively be a demilitarized zone—a DMZ—and in it will live Ukrainians that can tend to their fields and go about their lives, but there will be no military power that threatens Russia.”
main qimg 6e57ee3f2104c7c52ad09973a60ac8ab
Excerpt from remarks by retired U.S. Army colonel Douglas Macgregor in an interview with Judge Napolitano, April 23, 2024.
When did the negative perception of masculinity begin?
This is a byproduct of the American “Woman’s Rights” movement.
The initial intention was for gender equality, where women would be treated as equals with men. Eventually, a more radical sub-branch of the movement took control and steered the movement towards an anti-male bias. Over the years, they acquired wealthy and powerful contributors, and used their positions in government to fund and control the narrative. Resulting in the destruction of the American male.
This women’s rights movement in the United States has gone through several stages.
Each stage has been marked by specific goals, accomplishments, and challenges.
First Wave (19th Century – Early 20th Century)
– Focused on legal issues, particularly women’s suffrage (the right to vote).
– Key events: The Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott; the adoption of the 19th Amendment in 1920, granting women the right to vote.
This initial stage is often erroneously considered to be reasonable, but a look at the amendments to the constitution clearly show that the movement removed the stable “Head of the Household” voting role towards one where anyone can vote. Thus, this movement, during the FIRST WAVE, significantly altered the federal government and the spending trajectory of the United States.
Demographics changed substantially. Voting profiles changed radically, and a “nanny state”
became the norm, as the female voters started to demand a government that took on a parental role; thus a government with a greater role in the lives of Americans.
Second Wave (1960s – 1980s)
– Emphasized a broader range of issues, including equality in the workplace, education, reproductive rights, and legal rights.
– Key events: Publication of “The Feminine Mystique” by Betty Friedan in 1963; the establishment of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966; the passage of the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.
– Advocacy for reproductive rights, including the landmark Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973.
During this wave, the “rights” of women altered the workplace, the Geo-political scene, the educational system, and the kinds of movies and shows on televisions and extracted out of Hollywood. It was during this wave that the notion of a traditional family was discarded, and men started to be depicted as buffoons and useless clowns.
There is a direct correlation between divorce rates and the implementation of pro-feminist initiatives. This was the era of the destruction of the family. As the women entered the work-place, forced layoffs, firings and short-duration employment became the norm.
Third Wave (1990s – Early 2000s)
– Focused on diversity and intersectionality, addressing issues of race, class, sexual orientation, and gender identity within the context of women’s rights.
– Emphasized individualism and a more inclusive approach to feminism, acknowledging different experiences and perspectives.
This wave turbocharged the fall of traditional values, and the “career women” entered the work force with government sanctioned privileges that harmed the male roles. The court systems, and child service systems became co-opted by this movement and became hostile to males.
Laws and rules, from family law to corporate law favored females. Lower skilled females were engaged in once-dominant male activities to meet hiring quotas. The result was a gradual decline in the quality of the American work-force.
Fourth Wave (Mid-2000s – Present)
– Characterized by the use of digital and social media to advocate for women’s rights and mobilize anti-male activism.
– Focus on sexual harassment, gender-based violence, and the #MeToo movement.
– Greater attention to intersectionality, considering how various aspects of identity intersect and impact the experiences of women and non-binary individuals.
It’s a real problem.
The damage has already been done.
Presently, in the United States and it’s proxy nations, under the LGBQ+ rainbow flag, the male gender is ridiculed, minimized, and berated to a point where various social phenomenons have occurred. To include…
Young men in the 20s have stopped dating.
Young men tend to be virginal, while young women engage in serial promiscuity.
The “Soft man” era where men have “checked out”.
A drop in college and university admissions for men.
A push back on dating with the “drizzle drizzle” movement.
American men are leaving the United States as “passport bros” and not returning.
The changing demographics and the ten year forecast for citizens within this toxic anti-male environment is contentious. Historically, very BAD things happen when large sections males in a nation are hurt, abandoned, ridiculed and disparaged.
It will be very bad.
Apple-Cinnamon Pile o’ Pancakes
apple cinnamon pancakes 3 1200×1800 1
Yield: 5 servings (2 pancakes and 2 tablespoons syrup each)
Ingredients
1 cup Apple Cinnamon Cheerios cereal
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 cup milk
2/3 cup chunky applesauce
3 tablespoons butter, melted
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 egg
Maple syrup or maple-flavored syrup*
Instructions
Heat griddle or 12 inch skillet over medium-low heat or to 325 degrees F.
Pour cereal into plastic bag and seal. Crush cereal with rolling pin or can of soup. Pour crushed cereal into large bowl. Stir in remaining ingredients, except syrup, just until moistened.
Pour batter, a generous 1/4 cup at a time, onto hot griddle. Cook for 2 minutes or until edges look cooked and bubbles begin to break on the surface. Flip pancakes and cook other side until golden, about 2 minutes longer.
Serve with syrup.
Notes
* Tasty topping: Skip the syrup and top instead with warm apple pie filling or a sprinkle of brown sugar.
What is the worst part about being a man?
No one cares.
It’s time I told you about my Uncle RK.
My late uncle.
A victim of sexism and neglect his entire life.
When he was just a boy, he was expected and pressured to get good grades in school – which he did. On the contrary, they let my mom slack off and had no expectations for her.
Eventually, he ended up placing within the top 200 in a nationally ranked exam and going to one of the most prestigious colleges in the country for peanuts – thanks to a large scholarship.
During his college days, when he visited home, no one bothered to greet him. His own mom forgot he was coming once and ended up giving his room to some relatives for a short stay.
In his early twenties, he was falsely accused of sexual harassment. After spending a few months in jail, my grandmom made a hefty payment to the accuser’s family, who agreed to drop the charges.
He struggled to find employment after college thanks to his criminal record.
After being forced into an arranged marriage, he was stuck with an emotionally abusive wife.
After losing another job at age 30, he got depressed. The humiliation he received from society and from his wife for being unemployed was unbearable.
In July 2000, he killed himself, by jumping off an apartment. Everyone chalked it up to his mental instability. To this day, I still hear them saying that he was a weak and pathetic man who couldn’t handle life.
I think you got it by now.
This is the worst part of being a man: No one cares.
No one cares if you feel lonely, if you feel neglected, if you are falsely accused by a woman, if you have an abusive wife, if you lose your job and feel worthless or if you kill yourself.
My uncle RK is a lot like me. He’s introverted, sweet and sensitive person. He’d never harm a fly. He used to take great care of his little sister (my mom) and show affection to his older brother.
He’s also a genius. He managed to build a working generator when he was just a boy (remember this was before the internet). He was always the smartest guy around.
He was cool too. When he toured Japan in the nineties, he brought back some novel electronic gadgets, among them was a digital dictionary.
I wish I had met him.
I wish he was alive. We could have talked about so much. He could have been a mentor to me.
Rest in peace. Uncle RK – 1969–2000.
A Boy and His Dog | Post-Apocalypse | Don Johnson | Classic Drama Film
I cannot believe that this entire film is free on youtube. It is a great watch. Take the time to enjoy this fun, and very funny, Classic Drama Movie: A Boy and His Dog – A young man and his telepathic dog wander through a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
As we experience life we have good things occur, and bad things as well. Often, you cannot help but have embarrassing things happen as well.
I was 16 years old.
While I had been drinking some beer at home and with friends, I was was never really drunk. That was, until I went on a Summer picnic with the rest of the staff at the store where I worked.
And I got drunk.
Really drunk, for the first time.
And being so drunk, I was out of control. Really.
Now, since then, I have seen others; guys and girls get shit faced drunk at parties, and friends and relatives would cart them away and isolate them (to help them stave away the embarrassment). So I know it must have looked bad.
I was flirting with all the girls.
I was tripping over myself and chugging beers, but not passing out. Throwing up everywhere.
*groan*
It’s a rite of passage.
So embarrassing. The next day, I sat on the kitchen porch hungover, and lamenting “what have I done?” And when I did go to work, two boyfriends came over to me threatening to beat me up and one girl never talked to me ever again since that time.
I still cringe when I think of this.
*cringe*
Today…
What is causing the collapse of America’s global influence?
America.
Fundamentally, this map is too expensive to maintain, when the scourge of power has to be constantly demonstrated to maintain credibility among the >95% of humanity who are not Americans.
map
It gets harder by the year, due to burgeoning debt, deindustrialization, racism and other domestic issues.
America must understand and accept it is one country among many, and learn to live within its means.
In other words, hegemony is unaffordable in the 21st century.
A multipolar world can accommodate America as first among equals, but not overlord.
This is the new America that American leaders must accept.
Liberal world order must be destroyed – Orban
The values system dominating the West has “brought chaos,” the Hungarian prime minister believes
Western liberal hegemony has failed and must be destroyed, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban stated on Thursday, suggesting it could end as soon as this year.
Addressing the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC Hungary) in Budapest, Orban criticized the existing “world order based on progressive liberal hegemony,” saying it has spawned numerous figureheads who are “not fit to be leaders,” with even “beauty pageants” knowing more about peace then they do.
He accused liberal politicians of building “hegemonic ideological control to which everyone must submit” instead of actual governing, while turning “state bodies into tools of oppression.” Such forces are a dangerous enemy whose time is coming to an end, Orban claimed.
“The progressive liberals sense the danger, the end of this era also means their end,” the prime minister argued. Their dominance could be overcome as soon as this year, Orban predicted, citing the upcoming EU Parliament and US presidential elections.
“The proponents of the old world are sitting in Brussels, and although it is not my business to interfere in American politics, I fear that they are also sitting in Washington. This is what we are doing this year. This year, we will try to drive them out,” the Hungarian prime minister said.
This year, God willing, we can end the inglorious era of the Western civilization. We can end the world order built on progressive liberal hegemony. The progressive liberal world spirit has failed. It gave the world war, chaos, unrest and destroyed economies.
The emerging world order will be based on true sovereignty, with countries driven by their actual national interests rather than a global ideology, according to Orban.
“Let the era of sovereignty come, let’s get back towards peace and security. Let’s make America great again, let’s make Europe great again,” he concluded.
Life story
A few years ago one of our cats died after we had her for 14 years. We were all heartbroken and devastated by her loss. We noticed something was wrong on Thursday, took her to the vet on Friday, and she died late Sunday night.
The night she died, I sent everyone to bed and I stayed up with her. She kept getting into the bathtub and lying down as opposed to a bed we had set up for her.
Just before she died, she let out a horrible scream and went into convulsions. Then she just stopped breathing.
I never told my spouse or kids about that last few moments. I just told them she just slipped away. I still want to cry every time I think about it. I will never tell them about that.
What It’s Like To Get In A Prison Fight
A prison fight is nothing like the UFC or boxing. It’s straight-up bedlam. Anything that can happen, will happen. Locks in a sock, shanks and mop wringers are all game. You can’t get a fair fight, but you can get a square one. You just have to know the rules. And the rules vary.
The universal rule is that fighting is part of prison life. You either fight or lose everything. Heart checks are mandatory. It’s called being “on the count” and if you aren’t present, you’ll get checked into the hole by your own boys.
“Whenever you are going to do any type of fighting in a penal institution what rules you go by are determined by where you are at,” said Kevin Smith, a 47-year-old penitentiary veteran from Fort Worth, Texas who has done 10 years in federal institutions, three stints in the Texas Department of Corrections (TDC) and multiple stays in county jail for a variety of charges including meth distribution and manufacture, gun possession, conspiracy to rob a bank and assault.
The TDC is one of the more notorious prison systems in the country. They got a saying when you walk into a Texas prison, “You gotta fight, fuck or bust a 60.” The first two are self-explanatory, the third means paying someone off for protection.
“In TDC they make you fight right when you get there.” said Smith. “It’s a heart check. They want to make sure you’re going to fight because when you go to TDC you’re going to war, just like in the feds when you get to the higher levels. When you’re in a constant state of war you want to make sure your fighters will fight.”
If you have a problem with another prisoner there’s no time to talk about it. Convicts will tell you straight-up, ‘I don’t argue.’ It doesn’t matter who’s right or wrong. It just matters who wins.
“When you have a problem they tell you to ‘Lace up or catch a square,’” said Smith. “When they tell you that it means you go and get boots and your gloves on and you go toe-to-toe, usually in the bathroom. If it’s between races the different groups will go together and let the two guys fight one on one.”
The etiquette in TDC takes on its own nuances from there.
“Once you get your fight on, after a guy drops or he’s bloody, he doesn’t get stomped out,” said Smith. “They pretty much pick him up and ask the guy that just got dropped if he wants to continue and he generally does, giving up too quickly means you lose face. But if he gets dropped again then it’s over.”
Fighting can get you your respect, even if you get your ass beat. Assuming you follow the rules. Everything is regulated because in prison your flag is your skin color and race riots can jump off over any violation of the rules. That’s why when you take it to the bathroom, you leave it in there.
Either way, simple disagreements aren’t the only reason why prison fights happen.
“I’m from Texas and when I got to USP Beaumont the shot-caller told me I’m on the launching pad,” said Smith. “That means that the first guy that shows up dirty from Texas I get.”
Smith didn’t have to wait long to put in work.
“There was a guy that showed up and he was dirty, he told on somebody,” Smith remembers. “I saw the paperwork and we were drinking. I ran up in his cell while my homeboy held the door and I hit that snitch with three shots to the head and he fell down like a bitch. I stomped him a couple times for good measure and told him to check in. Then I sat back down in the dayroom like nothing happened and continued drinking.”
In the penitentiary, convict justice is swift and brutal. A snitch can get respect if he fights, but that doesn’t change the fact that he’s a snitch. He can just be a tough snitch. A lot of fights in prison are over paperwork, but convicts also fight over drugs, money and even a seat in the TV room.
“In FCI El Reno there was this dude Rebel, he was one of those Aryan dudes,” said Smith. “He thought he was running the TV room. He was just a big 6-foot-5, weightlifting, 26-year-old kid that had been picking his marks and beating people up for sitting in his seat.
“He tried that with me one time and I told him he could go fuck himself. I had been drinking of course and he tried to sneak me. I saw it out of the corner of my eye as he threw a right. I ducked that weak shit because I’m from Fort Worth, Texas and we box all the time. You never throw a right first.
“When he threw it he was way over extended so I hit him with a left jab right in the jaw and he was already doing the dance. I hit him twice more and he fell down on his chair knocking it over. He got up, came at me again and threw another right. I ducked that again and threw a left hook and he fell into some other guys sitting there watching. He got up and didn’t want no more and everybody was looking at me all astonished because this 40-year-old man had blood all over his shirt, but none of it was his.”
Rebel didn’t want any more problems with Smith after that.
– Seth Ferranti
Reading This Has Helped Me Embrace the Natural Cycle of Life and Loss with My Pets
I have an old dog in kidney failure too. Haven’t told her yet, she just keeps being happy.
I’m old too, and I’ve had animals my whole life, mostly cats and dogs in various multiples. Do the math and you can see I’ve been here before.
The way I reconcile it is pretty straightforward, and well in line with the overall Stoic approach to things. It always begins the same way- see things plainly for what they are, understand the natures of the things involved, and respond reasonably and virtuously to the reality around us.
Every day I care for my animals, keeping them happy, keeping them safe, shepherding them through their day with joy, and without harm. When they get old and approach death, nothing changes. As crazy as it sounds, the day I take them to the vet to be put down is the day that I have been working for all this time – I have successfully taken them the whole way. They did not get lost, they were not unhappy, they got to live their whole natural lives the way I wanted them to live it. We made it. We got there together.
When they are gone, my feelings for them don’t change. Their bodies are taken but my feelings are my own; I still love them, I am still happy to think of them, my heart is still open.
What has changed is that I have a space for another thing to love, and the cycle continues again, when I’m ready to start anew.
Their bodies, our bodies, everything external to us will always change and always come and go. Our love, our care, our joy belongs to us, and we apply it to what we have and to what is new.
The Dumping Grounds
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With just the right amount of crunch, melty cheddar cheese, and a couple good slices of tomato, you might even convert a tuna hater with this tuna melt recipe. The key to this sandwich is that the tuna salad is not your bog-standard, bland tuna salad. We packed this sandwich full of celery, pickles, red onion, and pepper flakes to make a flavorful salad that eats just as good by itself as it does in this sandwich. The pinnacle of comfort food, this is the perfect lunch sandwich to shake up your routine, or to rely on as an easy late-night meal. Keep reading on for all of our top tips on how to perfect it:
How to make the best tuna melt:
— The best cheese for a tuna melt. For the “melt” aspect of this sandwich you can use any sort of cheese, just as long as it’s melty. Things like American cheese, Monterey jack or Swiss cheese are all great, but we love the sharp bite of cheddar.
— Variations. We packed this sandwich full of celery, pickles, and red onion, but just like our classic tuna salad, feel free to switch up the toppings. Vegetarian? Checkout our chickpea “tuna” salad.
— Topping ideas. In addition to our melty cheese, we add a couple good slices of tomato to complete our sandwich, but you can also add butter lettuce, or even more pickles.
Tuna melt serving ideas:
For the most classic pairing, we suggest serving this melt alongside some chips and a pickle spear, but if you’re looking for more options, try our sweet potato chips, coleslaw, potato salad, or air fryer French fries.
Storage:
If you have leftover tuna mixture and want to save it for future you, store leftovers in an airtight container in the fridge for 3-5 days, then create a tuna melt or plain sandwich as you please.
If you made this recipe, let us know how it came out in the comments below.
Yields:4 serving(s)
Prep Time: 15 mins
Total Time: 30 mins
Cal/Serv:1313
Ingredients
1/3c.mayonnaise
Juice of 1/2 lemon
1/2tsp.crushed red pepper flakes (optional)
2(6-oz.) cans tuna
1ribs celery, finely chopped
2dill pickles, finely chopped
1/4c.finely chopped red onion
2tbsp.freshly chopped parsley
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
8slices bread, such as sourdough
4tbsp.butter
1tomato, sliced
8slices cheddar
Directions
Step 1Preheat oven to 400°. In a large bowl, whisk together mayonnaise, lemon juice, and red pepper flakes (if using).
Step 2Drain tuna then add to mayonnaise mixture. Use a fork to break up tuna into flakes. Add celery, pickles, red onion, and parsley and toss to combine. Season with salt and pepper.
Step 3Butter one side of each bread slice. Top an unbuttered side with approximately 1/2 cup of tuna salad, 2 to 3 slices tomato, and 2 slices of cheese. Top with another slice of bread, buttered side facing up. Repeat with remaining ingredients and place on a large baking sheet. Bake until cheese is melty, 5 to 8 minutes.
tuna melt 081 1550261085
Ads for Explicit ‘AI Girlfriends’ Are Swarming Facebook and Instagram
WIRED found thousands of ads running on Meta’s social platforms promoting sexually explicit “AI girlfriend” apps. Some human sex workers say the platform unfairly polices their own posts more harshly.
Meta’s online ad library shows the company is hosting thousands of ads for AI-generated, NSFW companion or “girlfriend” apps on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. They promote chatbots offering sexually explicit images and text, using NSFW chat samples and AI images of partially clothed, unbelievably shaped, simulated women.
Many of the virtual women seen in ads reviewed by WIRED are lifelike—if somewhat uncanny—young, and stereotypically pornographic. Prospective customers are invited to role-play with an AI “stepmom,” connect with a computer-generated teen in a hijab, or chat with avatars who promise to “get you off in one minute.”
The ads appear to be thriving despite Meta’s ad policies clearly barring “adult content,” including “depictions of people in explicit or suggestive positions, or activities that are overly suggestive or sexually provocative.”
That’s created a new front in debates over the clash between AI and conventional labor. Some human sex workers complain that Meta is letting chatbots multiply, while unfairly shutting their older profession out of its platforms by over-enforcing rules about adult content.
“As a sex worker, if I put anything like ‘I will do anything for you, I will make you come in a minute’ I would be deleted in an instant,” says Gemma Rose, director of the Pole Dance Stripper Movement, a UK-based sex-worker rights and pole-dance event organization.
Meta’s policies forbid users from showing nudity or sexual activity and selling sex, including sexting. Rose and other sex-worker advocates say the company seems to apply a double standard in permitting chatbot apps to promote NSFW experiences while barring human sex workers from doing the same.
People who post about sex education, sex positivity, or sex work have for years complained the platform unfairly quashes their content. Meta has limited some of Rose’s posts from being shown to non-followers, screenshots seen by WIRED show. Her personal Instagram account and one for her organization have previously been suspended for violating Meta policies.
“Not that I agree with a lot of the community guidelines and rules and regulations, but these [ads] blatantly go against their own policies,” says Rose of the sexual chatbots promoted on Meta platforms. “And yet we’re not allowed to be uncensored on the internet or just exist and make a living.”
WIRED surveyed chatbot ads using Meta’s ad library, a transparency tool that can be used to see all the ads currently running across its platforms, all ads shown in the EU in the past year, and past ads from the past seven years related to elections, politics, or social issues. Searches showed that at least 29,000 ads had been published on Meta platforms for explicit AI “girlfriends,” with most using suggestive, sex-related messaging. There were also at least 19,000 ads using the term “NSFW” and 14,000 offering “NSFW AI.”
Some 2,700 ads were active when WIRED contacted Meta last week. A few days later Meta spokesperson Ryan Daniels said that the company prohibits ads that contain adult content and was reviewing the ads and removing those that violated its policies. “When we identify violating ads we work quickly to remove them, as we’re doing here,” he said. “We continue to improve our systems, including how we detect ads and behavior that go against our policies.”
However, 3,000 ads for “AI girlfriends” and 1,100 containing “NSFW” were live on April 23, according to Meta’s ad library.
WIRED’s initial review found that Hush, an AI girlfriend app downloaded more than 100,000 times from Google’s Play store, had published 1,700 ads across Meta platforms, several of which promise “NSFW” chats and “secret photos” from a range of lifelike female characters, anime women, and cartoon animals.
One shows an AI woman locked into medieval prison stocks by the neck and wrists, pledging, “Help me, I will do anything for you.” Another ad, targeted using Meta’s technology at men aged 18 to 65, features an anime character and the text “Want to see more of NSFW pics?”
Several of the 980 Meta ads WIRED found for “personalized AI companion” app Rosytalk promise around-the-clock chats with very-young-looking AI-generated women. They used tags including “#barelylegal,” “#goodgirls,” and “teens.” Rosytalk also ran 990 ads under at least nine brand names on Meta platforms, including Rosygirl, Rosy Role Play Chat, and AI Chat GPT.
At least 13 other apps for AI “girlfriends” have promoted similar services in Meta ads, including “nudifying” features that allow a user to “undress” their AI girlfriend and download the images. A handful of the girlfriend ads had already been removed for violating Meta’s advertising standards. “Undressing” apps have also been marketed on mainstream social platforms, according to social media research firm Graphika, and on LinkedIn, the Daily Mail recently reported.
Some users of so-called AI companions say they can help combat loneliness, with others reporting them feeling like a real partner. Not all of the ads found by WIRED promote only titillation, with some also suggesting that an explicit AI chatbot could provide emotional support. “Talk to anyone! You’re not alone!” reads one of Hush’s ads on Meta platforms.
Carolina Are, an innovation fellow researching social media censorship at the Center for Digital Citizens at Northumbria University in the UK, says human sex workers feed the same needs and desires as racy AI girlfriend apps and also cater to lonely and disabled people. But Meta makes it extremely difficult for them to advertise on its platforms, she says.
“When people are trying to work through and profit off their own body, they are forbidden,” says Are, who has helped sex workers reactivate lost and unfairly suspended accounts on Meta platforms. “While AI companies mostly powered by bros that exploit images already out there are able to do that.”
Are says the sexually suggestive AI girlfriends remind her of the unsophisticated and generic early days of internet porn. “Sex workers engage with their customers, subscribers, and followers in a way that is more personalized,” she says. “This is a lot of work and emotional labor beyond the sharing of nude images.”
Limited information is available about how the AI apps are built or the underlying text or image-generation algorithms trained. One used the name Sora, apparently to suggest a connection to OpenAI’s video generator of that name, which has not been publicly released.
The developers behind the apps advertising explicit AI girlfriends are shadowy. None of the developers listed on Google Play or Facebook as creating the apps promoted on Meta’s platforms responded to requests for comment.
Mike Stabile, director of public affairs at the Free Speech Coalition, an adult-industry nonprofit trade association, sees the apps promising explicit AI girlfriends and their advertising tactics as “scammy.” While the adult industry is banned from advertising online, AI apps are “flooding the zone,” he says. “That’s the paradox of censorship: You end up censoring or silencing an actual sex worker and allowing all these weeds to flourish in their place.”
Anti-sex-trafficking legislation signed into US law in 2018 called FOSTA-SESTA made platforms responsible for what is posted online, vastly limiting adult content. However, it resulted in consensual sex work being treated as trafficking in the digital world, shutting adult content creators out of online life and making already marginalized sex workers more vulnerable.
If Meta wipes the AI girlfriend ads from its platforms, it might emulate past sweeps of human sex workers. Despite diligently trying to follow Meta’s guidelines, the Pole Dance Stripper Movement’s account was banned “without warning” during a wave of removals of at least 45 sexuality-related accounts in June 2023, Rose says. Meta eventually rolled back some of the deletions, citing an error. But for sex workers on social media, such events are a recurring feature.
Rose’s personal account and its backup were also deleted in June 2021 during the Covid pandemic after she shared a photo, she says, of a pole-dancing workshop. She was hosting online pole-dancing classes and posting on the adult subscription site OnlyFans at the time. “My business was gone overnight,” she says. “I didn’t have a way to sustain myself.”
“OK, so I got deleted,” Rose adds. “But these companies are allowed to put out this kind of shit that sex workers aren’t allowed to? It makes no sense.”
How many times has either Anthony Blinken, Janet Yellen or Gina Raimondo traveled to China to meet with Chinese officials in the past 12 months as of April 26th , 2024? Why are they repeatedly doing this & why can’t they do this over the internet?
The key motive of every single visit is just one
Help freeze the Russian Ukraine conflict
That’s all they want from China
To use their Trade leverage and force Putin to freeze the conflict for a period of time until the 2024 elections or for a couple of years until they can rearm Ukraine
China as an importer of Oil is a big market and source of revenue for Russia while as an exporter is responsible for keeping Russian Industry ticking with huge influx of machinery imports and direct imports
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Everything else is a threat or inducement to achieve the above
Even the EUV restriction was initialled by Trump and not by the Biden Administration
Bidens Anti China measures came only after 2022 February
Every time they come to China and threaten to do something if China doesn’t take steps to control it’s trade with Russia and everytime China shrugs and says it’s following the law
Immediately the US does something stupid to retaliate
Including arming of Taiwan
That’s all they want and nothing else
Biden can’t bear losing to Putin. It’s for him, a man whose prime was during the Glory days of the 1970s-2000s , an unthinkable prospect
Dr. Iris Ryan – Nicknamed “Irish,” she is here to scream at all the scary monsters. Her entire face unhinges. I swear the woman is part snake.
Colonel Thomas O’Bannion – Mission commander who starts putting the moves on Iris before the ship is even out of orbit.
Chief Warrant Officer Sam Jacobs – Gleeful moron with a freeze-ray gun, spends most of his time lavishing affection on it until the amoeba eats him.
Professor Theodore Gettell – We are informed he is the spaceship’s designer and an expert on such things, then watch him wander around with a pipe. Dies of a heart attack or stroke.
General George Treegar – Why in the heck was a military officer in command of this?
The Bat-Rat-Spider – Give some disturbed kid a chainsaw, thread, and the named animals. He will make one for you. (You need a lobster too.)
The Carnivorous Plant – Tries to eat Iris, they chop her free and move to a safe distance, then Sam freezes it out of spite.
The Giant Amoeba – The largest single celled organism ever, this thing must be a hundred yards across. Col O’Bannion rewires the radar to fry it with electricity.
The Martians – The galactic equivalent of farmer Joe with his shotgun, don’t like no humans trespassing on der property!
The Plot:
A film, from 1959, which deals with the exploration of Mars is going to be cannon fodder so I’ll stick with common sense aspects. Two months after it was presumed lost on Mars, the rocketship MR-1 is discovered in a stationary orbit around Earth, but attempts to raise the crew via radio are useless. Two months? Pathfinder took seven months just to reach Mars, who made this ship, Ferrari? General Treegar and the other experts (No meeting with the President and the brightest minds available?) decide to land the craft under remote control. What followed left me dumbfounded, a launch – in reverse, as they land this enormous rocket with no problem. I’m pretty sure that part cheeses off the Mars Polar Lander fellows to no end. Two survivors are on board, Iris and Colonel O’Bannion, the latter’s arm is covered with a strange growth. She is finally able to relate the mission’s fateful journey, including having gravity the entire flight! You heard me, the astronauts walk around their spacious craft under normal gravity, which is explained as “constant acceleration.” It’s almost as if they were actually on the set of some movie studio… …reality is a gossamer thing I tell you. After landing they spend several minutes looking out viewports and describing the sights to us, then Iris sees a scary face in the window and screams. Everyone suits up and goes outside to explore, boy are strange things waiting for them: carnivorous plants, huge bat-rat-spider-lobster things, a giant amoeba, and the Martians themselves. How they mistook the bat-rat-spider-lobster beast for a patch of trees is still a mystery, but common sense fled me (Early on and under a hail of blows from the film.) anyway.
Things I Learned From This Movie:
The Pentagon has screen doors.
A rocket landing looks just like a rocket taking off, except in reverse.
Shifting desert sand dunes make excellent landing pads.
Earth is orbited by deadly radioactive meteorites. (I do not mean small particles, I mean glowing hunks of rock.)
Palm trees grow on Mars.
If it looks like a man-eating plant then it probably is a man-eating plant.
Having your eyes flash frozen sucks.
Nobody likes us. (Us humans that is.)
Stuff To Watch For:
2 mins – Is it called the X-1 or the MR-1?
3 mins – They flew to Nevada in a B-52? (A bomber.) Why not a passenger aircraft?
16 mins – That is a darn roomy spaceship.
27 mins – Why is she cleaning everything, it wasn’t clean when they first packed the gear?
32 mins – Stole those spacesuits from the local service station didn’t you?
42 mins – I really think that their helmets are open, no faceplates. (I’m right you know.)
66 mins – Maybe you should check out the top of the tree…
77 mins – Even through this crazy red effect I can tell that is a drawing.
84 mins – This is the first point I can confirm one of my suspicions, their control room is where the engines should be…
Quotes:
Sam: “If those Martians are out there they must invisible.”
Sam: “Some baby, that rat-bat-spider nightmare, huh?”
The best Homemade Pretzel Bread (or Pretzel Rolls) recipe. Once you make this you will never be able to eat store-bought pretzel bread again! It’s dense, soft, chewy, buttery, salty and irresistibly delicious.
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This Homemade Pretzel Bread is the best bread you will ever eat in your life. I am not exaggerating either. It is one of my most requested recipes and everyone who tries it asks for the recipe. It’s dense, soft, chewy, buttery, salty and unbelievably delicious. Serve it with a side of this homemade cheese sauce and you’ll be in heaven!
I know making homemade bread can seem intimidating, but don’t worry! We’ve created a video that shows you how to make this homemade pretzel bread step-by-step! And if there’s a recipe that’s worth conquering your kitchen fears for, this is definitely it.
I have also included instructions for how to make pretzel rolls as well! Pretzel rolls make a great smaller serving size option. They also make delicious hamburger buns for homemade burgers.
Combine yeast, water, and brown sugar in the bowl of your standing mixer fitted with the dough hook. Let stand for 5 minutes (until foamy).
While yeast is proofing…melt butter in a microwave-safe bowl. Mix in milk and set aside.
Once yeast is proofed, add milk/butter to yeast mixture and mix on low speed with dough hook until just combined.
Add salt and flour and mix with dough hook until flour is fully incorporated.
Knead in a mixer until the dough forms a slightly tacky, but firm ball, you may need to add a little more flour 1 TBS at a time, but be careful, you want your dough a little tacky but not too sticky to handle.
Oil a large bowl, place the dough ball in the bowl, and cover with a damp towel in a warm place to let rise for one hour or until doubled in size.
Preheat oven to 400 degrees F and bring 4 quarts of water to a boil. When the water is boiling, slowly add the baking soda a little bit at a time (Be careful not to add too much at once or you will have a baking soda/water explosion)!
Remove the dough from the bowl and gently press out the air bubbles.
Make two balls of dough the same size (NOTE: The total weight of the dough comes out to be about 800 g, so each loaf should weigh about 400 g), forming them into the shape you want (Do not let it rise at all here! Straight from forming the ball into the water).
Drop one of the balls into the boiling baking soda water. Boil for 60-90 seconds on each side, turning it once to guarantee both sides covered. Drain the excess water from the dough and place it on an oiled baking sheet.
Immediately sprinkle coarse sea salt over the bread to your specific tastes, and use a knife to cut a small “X” on the top of the bread.
Repeat with second ball of dough. (Do not let it rise at all here! Straight from boiling into the oven).
Bake the bread for 22-25 minutes, rotating the baking sheet once.
Once removed from the oven, immediately brush the melted butter over the loaves to guarantee a soft crust. Transfer to a wire rack to cool just enough to enjoy!
*You can reheat it on a low temp covered in foil if you decide to make it a bit ahead of time. I cover it with a tea towel or something if I’m not going to serve it right away.
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How to Make Homemade Pretzel Bread
If making homemade bread sounds intimidating to you…your’e in luck! There are two ways to make the dough.
The first is to simply toss all the ingredients in a bread machine and set it to the “dough cycle.” Even the most sheepish bread-makers can do that, right?
The other method involves mixing and kneading the dough using a standing mixer or your hands!
I like to do the latter because I can be sure every step of the process is going exactly the way it should be! However, I have used my bread machine with the same delicious results!
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Rise once
If you are familiar to the process of making homemade bread, you will notice that there is one unique step to the dough-making process for this recipe.
Baking soda bath.
Once the dough is degassed, form it in to the size and shape you want. This recipe makes 2 large loaves, 4 small loaves, or 8-10 rolls/buns!
Once you’ve formed the dough, bring 4 quarts of water to a boil. When the water is boiling, slowly add the baking soda.
Boil the pretzel bread one portion a time in the soda bath for 60 seconds on each side. Use a slotted spoon to remove it from the bath and place it on the prepared baking sheet.
Immediately sprinkle with coarse sea salt and repeat with remaining dough..
(Note: I use a skimmer spoon like this to take the dough out of the boiling baking soda bath and remove excess water).
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Bake immediately.
Once the dough is removed from the boiling baking soda bath and formed into loaves/buns, immediately place it on a greased baking sheet, cut an X in the top and sprinkle with Coarse Sea Salt (I use this).
Brush with melted butter.
As soon as the loaves/buns/rolls come out of the oven, brush them with melted butter and transfer them to a cooling rack to cool just enough to eat! This bread is best served warm and eaten the day it’s made! However, it does reheat well and makes a killer turkey sandwich.
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How to make pretzel rolls
This recipe makes the best pretzel rolls. To make pretzel rolls, follow the recipe exactly, except make a few slight changes:
Divide dough into eight equal pieces.
Boil each dough ball for 30 seconds on each side, remove from the water, transfer to a baking sheet, and sprinkle with coarse sea salt.
Bake for 18-20 minutes, rotating the baking sheet once halfway through.
That’s it! then brush each of the pretzel rolls with melted butter and enjoy as rolls or hamburger buns with the best burger recipe (YUM)!.
To make in advance
You can make the dough and store it in the refrigerator overnight or in the freezer for up to 1 month.
When you’re ready to bake the pretzel bread, remove the dough from the fridge or freezer to let it come to room temperature and rise. Then continue on with the recipe including the baking soda bath, baking, etc.
You can store homemade pretzel bread in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 3 days. I suggest reheating it before eating it to restore it’s fresh-from-the-oven texture.
Freeze
You can also freeze baked loaves of pretzel bread. Let them cool completely then wrap in plastic wrap and foil and put them in an airtight container in the freezer for up to 2 months. Thaw in the oven set to warm covered in foil or in a dutch oven.
Homemade Pretzel Bread: Ingredient Substitutions
As always I recommend making this recipe exactly as written, however here are a few possible substitutions!
homemade pretzel bread recipe ingredients
Whole Milk. 2% milk works well. I do this often with great results! Half & half or cream also work well!
All-purpose flour. Bread flour is the only other flour I have used to make this recipe and it produces an incredibly delicious final product!
Dark brown sugar. Light brown sugar works equally well in this recipe.
That’s it! I really don’t recommend tinkering with this recipe any more!
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Notes
If you have a bread maker…just add all ingredients to the pan in the order listed and set it to dough cycle, then proceed to Step 8! You can reheat the bread on a low temp covered in foil if you decide to make it a bit ahead of time. I cover it with a tea towel or something if I’m not going to serve it right away.
**Nutrition information calculated based on this recipe serving 12 people.
How to make Pretzel Rolls
This recipe makes the best pretzel rolls. To make pretzel rolls, follow the recipe exactly, except make a few slight changes:
Divide dough into eight equal pieces.
Boil each dough ball for 30 seconds on each side, remove from the water, transfer to a baking sheet, and sprinkle with coarse sea salt.
Bake for 18-20 minutes, rotating the baking sheet once halfway through.
That’s it! then brush each of the pretzel rolls with melted butter and enjoy as rolls or hamburger buns with homemade burgers.
To make in advance
You can make the dough and store it in the refrigerator overnight or in the freezer for up to 1 month.
When you’re ready to bake the pretzel bread, remove the dough from the fridge or freezer to let it come to room temperature and rise. Then continue on with the recipe including the baking soda bath, baking, etc.
Ingredient Substitutions
Whole Milk. 2% milk works well! I do this often with great results! Half & half or cream also work well!
All-purpose flour. Bread flour is the only other flour I have used to make this recipe and it produces an incredibly delicious final product!
Dark brown sugar. Light brown sugar works equally well in this recipe.
Store
You can store homemade pretzel bread in an airtight container at room temperature for up to 3 days. I suggest reheating it before eating it to restore it’s fresh-from-the-oven texture.
Freeze
You can also freeze baked loaves of pretzel bread. Let them cool completely then wrap in plastic wrap and foil and put them in an airtight container in the freezer for up to 2 months. Thaw in the oven set to warm covered in foil or in a dutch oven.
The U.S. has raised concerns that potential overcapacity in Chinese industries — such as EVs and solar panels — might crowd out U.S. and other foreign manufacturers. What do you make of it?
Last year, China added more solar capacity than America’s total solar generation, in 12 months.
That’s explosive growth, with real contracts and money changing hands.
Solar panel makers in China have gone bankrupt over the past two decades, proving it is a functional free market competing on cost terms. Those were the real days of overcapacity, because it leads to price wars and depressed revenues. The champions that evolve out of the mess are superfit, and cannot be touched on a price/quality/delivery basis.
That’s where chinese solar panel makers are at today—a position of absolute dominance, because they emerged from the cauldron of merciless competition.
America and the west had the tech lead for decades. 15–20 years ago, the brand names in solar generation were all western. They had IP, supply chains, sales channels, captive markets. But none of them seized the initiative like the Chinese did, who made up ground and came from behind, especially in IP and manufacturing. Instead, they preferred incremental advances and kept production low, to preserve margin.
The West has no one to blame but themselves. They knew what was happening, but believed their competitive moats uncross-able. Same story with batteries, and yes, EVs.
Remember, the Chinese “cannot innovate”, “are low quality”, “will always remain cheap”, “are dependent on western markets”.
Now, they are “overproducing” instead.
What’s the most questionable cost-cutting move you’ve seen an employer make?
I did inventory ordering for a large orange home improvement store. I moved on after nine months.
On day 1, I was told no order should exceed $6,000. I had no idea what I was agreeing to. My first order was $30,000. I ordered one item of everything missing in a fence product we carried; Minimum orders were $15,000 to place an order as well. I sold $45,000 in fencing that week and was written up for going over the agreed $6,000 limit. They literally wanted barren shelves if the order was over $6,000.
As the months went on, I had several orders exceed that $6,000 limit. I sold $2,000,000 in roofing in one week. I was written up for ordering too much, and then they tried to write me up a minute later when they found out we were out of stock… I told them I had three trucks due that night and I was written up again for going over the $6,000 limit. Three write-ups in one day.
I increased sales by 30% from the previous year when everyone else was down 20%, had little “extra” stock and almost no “out of stocks”. I left after they promoted someone for the job I was doing. They promptly dropped 20% from the previous year instead of getting the 30% over… they had no one to fight to place orders that exceeded $6,000 and quickly ran out of product to sell.
The guy who was promoted went on to other stores to promote this limited ordering strategy. And sales dropped there too…
I personally don’t shop at stores that do not have stock… that was why I stopped shopping at Sears years before their bankruptcy. Empty shelves were a sign of them making those same mistakes. When you have nothing to sell, how does a company profit? I never understood the motive behind ordering less to save money when you are running out of product.
Noncompetes Are Dead—and Tech Workers Are Free to Roam
A new rule from the US Federal Trade Commission invalidates most noncompete agreements, frequently used to bind tech workers. It could unlock higher wages and more entrepreneurship and innovation.
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More US workers will soon be free to leave their employers to work for rivals, thanks to a new federal rule that will block the long-standing practice of locking in workers with noncompete agreements.
The US Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday issued a final rule that bans most noncompetes nationwide. The agency estimated that by allowing people more freedom, the change would lead to the creation of 8,500 new businesses annually, an average annual pay increase of $524 for workers, lower health care costs, and as many as 29,000 more patents each year for the next decade.
The FTC says about one in five US workers are bound by contract clauses that prevent them from taking new jobs from a competitor, or starting their own competing businesses, for some period of time. The agreements can trap workers and slow career advancement and wage increases—two things workers often achieve by hopping jobs.
The agreements also disproportionately affect workers in tech and certain other roles: 36 percent of engineers and architects work under noncompetes, as do 35 percent of workers in computer and math fields, according to research from the Universities of Maryland and Michigan.
Under the FTC’s new rule, “tech workers will probably experience a rise in the outside opportunities that they face,” says Evan Starr, an associate professor of business at the University of Maryland who worked on the research. “They’ll have more freedom to work where they want; they will be more likely to be paid higher wages.”
Opponents of noncompetes say they hurt workers by keeping them in lower-waged jobs and also stifle innovation, preventing people from starting their own businesses or putting innovative ideas into practice. Noncompete supporters argue that the arrangements encourage investment in staff and protect trade secrets. But recent research from Starr indicates that banning noncompetes hasn’t led to an increase in trade secret litigation.
The new FTC rule has a carve-out to keep existing noncompetes for senior executives in place. But it blocks companies from creating new noncompetes for these high-level workers. The rule is due to take effect in about four months, but it’s expected to face challenges. Two commissioners who voted against the rule saw it as overstepping the FTC’s power. The US Chamber of Commerce quickly announced after the rule passed that it will sue to try to block it.
Several states, including tech hub California, have already banned enforcement of noncompetes. But a recent tidal shift has seen the issue resonate in dozens of states. In the 2023 legislative session, 38 states introduced 81 bills that sought to ban or restrict enforcement of noncompetes. California’s long-established law is seen as part of the reason Silicon Valley became a hub for innovation, while Massachusetts’s once-similar tech corridor didn’t soar in the same way.
Tech executive Daniel Powers has battled noncompetes twice in his career. In 2010, IBM tried to delay his move from New York to Seattle to work for Amazon Web Services, the online retailer’s cloud division, by a year. The parties settled on Powers taking six months off. Fortunately for Powers, Amazon agreed to pay him even while he couldn’t work.
Two years later, the tables turned. When Powers attempted to take a job with Google Cloud, Amazon sued him, saying he had agreed not to work for one of its competitors within 18 months of leaving. The incident drew headlines as the first noncompete case Amazon had brought against someone inside fast-growing AWS, Powers recalls.
Powers had to move to California—where noncompetes aren’t legal—for the new gig, and his attorney told him to get there as soon as possible. By living in a different state, the lawsuit could be tried in federal court, where his attorney felt Amazon had less of an advantage compared to Washington state court. A federal judge ended up siding with Powers, and he lost only about three months of work at Google while the case played out.
Amazon, IBM, and Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Had Powers not received discounted legal help over the years, he says, he could have easily spent over $100,000 battling noncompetes. “It’s just not fair to the employees,” says Powers, who now runs cloud advisory firm What’s Next Consulting. “When I won, I got hundreds of emails and texts from Amazon employees thanking me for beating them.”
People in Washington state who want to leave one of the tech giants often must have difficult conversations with their families, advisers, and potential new employer about the risks of litigation and potentially being without a paycheck for a long stretch. Powers estimates that he has aided over 200 former Amazon and IBM colleagues in the process. California workers have no such concerns. “It’s just, ‘OK, goodbye,’” Powers says. “There’s nothing companies can do about it.”
If the new FTC rule ends up in front of the US Supreme Court, he says, his message to the justices will be simple. “Taking away a person’s ability to work in an industry they are trained in, have skills in, and have been in is a massive disservice to the employee,” Powers says. “It’s not the right thing to do to have these agreements.”
While the US mulls acquiring more of its next-gen B-21 bombers, fast-moving technological advancements could make the type obsolete upon delivery.
This month, The Warzone reported that US Air Force (USAF) Chief of Staff General David Allvin has hinted that the service is considering purchasing more than the 100 B-21s currently planned.
Allvin stated that the B-21 is the future of the bomber force and that the number of B-21s is expected to reach 100 by the mid-2030s and beyond.
The USAF is exploring options to supplement or replace B-21 production while also planning to fly updated B-52s equipped with the Rapid Dragon palletized munition system as an inexpensive means of creating long-lasting, low-complexity stand-off strike platforms.
It is also considering buying all 100 B-21s despite cost issues, which are coming down after negotiations with Northrup Grumman. However, the threat environment that informed the B-21’s design a decade ago has significantly changed.
The B-21 is a member of the Long Range Stand-Off (LRSO) family of systems and can be used for future variations or derivatives along with the AGM-181A LRSO stealthy nuclear-armed cruise missile and other advanced systems such as munitions, sensors, electronic warfare packages and communications systems.
However, The Warzone says that acquiring additional B-21s contradicts evolving trends in aircraft procurement and capabilities. The bomber mission is changing due to survivability demands, evolving integrated air defense networks and longer-range and more capable counter-air munitions.
It also states the importance of using cost-effective, quickly designed and readily deployable stand-off systems is increasing on the battlefield. At the same time, the B-21 may be the last new USAF bomber.
While strategic bombers have been the long arm of US airpower during the 20th and early 21st centuries, technological advances may force a rethink of stealth bombers’ role in increasingly transparent aerial battlefields.
In an August 2022 Air University article, Mel Deaile mentions that stealth technology in aircraft has advanced since 2001, emphasizing the importance of bombing tactics that leverage low-observable characteristics.
Deaile also expounds on the role of the bomber over the past 30 years, noting the shift from multiple bombers attacking a single target to one bomber hitting multiple targets with precision.
Deaile also points out that China has a robust and redundant integrated air defense system (IADS), operating radars, fighters and surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems that can reach up to 300 nautical miles offshore to defend against an impending attack.
China has made considerable efforts to defeat US stealth aircraft such as the B-21, leveraging AI and more advanced sensors. In December 2023, Asia Times reported that China had simulated shooting down a B-21 using new stealth aircraft, advanced radars and hypersonic missiles.
The simulation showcased new technologies, such as stealth aircraft with “conformal skin” that detects heat and electric signals, unmanned wingman drones and hypersonic missiles with adjustable solid-fuel pulse engines. It also emphasized the potential of AI in air-to-air combat, with decision-making shifting rapidly between pilots, drones and missiles.
In addition, China has reportedly developed a small and discreet anti-stealth radar that can be quickly and quietly placed on rooftops, contrasting with traditional systems that need large antennas to detect stealth aircraft.
Chinese engineers have also reportedly designed a compact infrared search-and-track (IRST) system based on medium-wave infrared technology capable of detecting the signature of fast-moving aircraft from considerable distances. The device can identify the aircraft’s outline, rotors, tail and number of engines from the infrared spectrum image.
Furthermore, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported this month that Chinese researchers have developed a method to increase an F-22’s radar signature up to 60,000 times using multiple radars and “smart resource scheduling.”
SCMP says the technology allows a centralized networking radar system to enhance the intensity and tracking accuracy of radar signature and save valuable resources for handling other targets by adjusting beam parameters and the power of each radar based on characteristics and real-time positional changes of stealth aircraft, achieving comprehensive tracking of F-22 fighters with just three radars.
The SCMP report says the information can be rapidly transmitted to interceptor fighters or SAM batteries, enabling prompt F-22 fighter intrusions. It notes precise calculations for target coordinates and movement speeds that can reportedly be completed in 0.02 seconds.
SCMP says these radars can be strategically positioned on land, islands, ships and aerial platforms, bolstering China’s anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) in the South China Sea and Western Pacific regions.
China has made considerable efforts to defeat US stealth aircraft such as the B-21, leveraging AI and more advanced sensors. In December 2023, Asia Times reported that China had simulated shooting down a B-21 using new stealth aircraft, advanced radars and hypersonic missiles.
The simulation showcased new technologies, such as stealth aircraft with “conformal skin” that detects heat and electric signals, unmanned wingman drones and hypersonic missiles with adjustable solid-fuel pulse engines. It also emphasized the potential of AI in air-to-air combat, with decision-making shifting rapidly between pilots, drones and missiles.
In addition, China has reportedly developed a small and discreet anti-stealth radar that can be quickly and quietly placed on rooftops, contrasting with traditional systems that need large antennas to detect stealth aircraft.
Chinese engineers have also reportedly designed a compact infrared search-and-track (IRST) system based on medium-wave infrared technology capable of detecting the signature of fast-moving aircraft from considerable distances. The device can identify the aircraft’s outline, rotors, tail and number of engines from the infrared spectrum image.
Furthermore, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported this month that Chinese researchers have developed a method to increase an F-22’s radar signature up to 60,000 times using multiple radars and “smart resource scheduling.”
SCMP says the technology allows a centralized networking radar system to enhance the intensity and tracking accuracy of radar signature and save valuable resources for handling other targets by adjusting beam parameters and the power of each radar based on characteristics and real-time positional changes of stealth aircraft, achieving comprehensive tracking of F-22 fighters with just three radars.
The SCMP report says the information can be rapidly transmitted to interceptor fighters or SAM batteries, enabling prompt F-22 fighter intrusions. It notes precise calculations for target coordinates and movement speeds that can reportedly be completed in 0.02 seconds.
SCMP says these radars can be strategically positioned on land, islands, ships and aerial platforms, bolstering China’s anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) in the South China Sea and Western Pacific regions.
Harvey Weinstein’s Rape Conviction Was Just Overturned. Here’s What That Means
In 2017, The New York Times and the New Yorker reported that, for years, Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein had been using his power to sexually abuse women. In 2020, he was convicted in New York on two counts of sexual assault, which became the #MeToo movement’s first major victory. On April 25, 2024, however, that conviction was overturned by the New York Court of Appeals. So, what does this mean? And, maybe more importantly, what happens now?
Here’s what we know so far about Harvey Weinstein’s conviction, why it was overturned, and what happens next.
Why was Harvey Weinstein’s conviction overturned?
In its decision, the New York Court of Appeals wrote, “We conclude that the trial court erroneously admitted testimony of uncharged, alleged prior sexual acts against persons other than the complainants of the underlying crimes,” per Associated Press. Put more simply, the court decided that Harvey Weinstein, 72, didn’t get a fair trial because the judge at the time allowed alleged victims who were not part of this case to testify against him. Over 100 women have accused Weinstein of sexual misconduct, according to the New York Times, but this case was about just two of his accusers. Four other accusers testified against Weinstein in court, but their allegations weren’t part of the criminal charge against him.
The Court of Appeals decision was 4-3. Per AP, Judge Madeline Singas, one of the four judges who voted against overturning Weinstein’s conviction, wrote in her dissent that the majority was furthering a “disturbing trend of overturning juries’ guilty verdicts in cases involving sexual violence.” She wrote, “The majority’s determination perpetuates outdated notions of sexual violence and allows predators to escape accountability.”
Does this mean Harvey Weinstein is getting out of prison?
Though his New York conviction was overturned, Harvey Weinstein is still not a free man. He was also convicted of rape in Los Angeles in 2022, and sentenced to 16 years in prison, per the Los Angeles Times.
Could Harvey Weinstein be tried again?
The judges on the New York Court of Appeals said that the proper remedy is a “new trial,” and prosecutors have said that they intend to try Harvey Weinstein again. “We will do everything in our power to retry this case, and remain steadfast in our commitment to survivors of sexual assault,” a spokesperson for the Manhattan district attorney’s office said, per the New York Times.
This would mean that Weinstein’s alleged victims would be put through the trauma of a trial all over again. Said Douglas H. Wigdor, an attorney who has represented eight of Weinstein’s accusers, “Overturning the verdict is tragic in that it will require the victims to endure yet another trial,” according to AP.
How have victims and activists responded to the news?
Alleged victims of Harvey Weinstein and leaders of the #MeToo movement have reacted with shock, describing the decision as a step backward and a loss for all victims of sexual assault.
Per the Times, actor Amber Tamblyn called the decision, “a loss to the entire community of women who put their lives and careers on the line to speak out.” Weinstein accuser Katherine Kendall called it “a terrible reminder that victims of sexual assault just don’t get justice. I’m completely let down by the justice system right now. I’m sort of flabbergasted.”
Others had more to say on social media. Mira Sorvino, another actor who has accused Weinstein of sexual assault, tweeted that she was “horrified” by the news. “Since when don’t courts allow evidence of pattern of prior bad acts to be admitted? He’s a prolific serial predator who raped/harmed 200+women! Disgusted w/justice system skew twds predators not victims,” she tweeted. Ashley Judd, one of the first Hollywood actors to accuse Weinstein, reportedly told journalist Jodi Kantor, “That is unfair to survivors. We still live in our truth. And we know what happened.”
Per Variety, the Silence Breakers, a group of Weinstein accusers, released a statement reading, “The news today is not only disheartening, but it’s profoundly unjust. But this ruling does not diminish the validity of our experiences or our truth; it’s merely a setback. The man found guilty continues to serve time in a California prison.”
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Hot and Sour Soup
Hot and Sour Soup
Yield: 7 to 8 servings
Hot and Sour Soup Ingredients:
To make this hot and sour soup recipe, you will need:
Broth: Either chicken or veggie stock (or broth) will do.
Mushrooms: I highly recommend using shiitake mushrooms, but baby bella or even button mushrooms would also do.
Eggs: Which we will whisk, and the drizzle into the soup to make those lovely egg ribbons.
Firm tofu: Which we will cube and add to the soup.
Green onions: To stir into the soup and also sprinkle on top as a garnish.
Toasted sesame oil: An essential flavor in the soup, which we will drizzle at the very end.
Salt and pepper: Hot and sour soup is traditionally made with white pepper, which (heads up) has a different and much stronger flavor than black pepper. I recommend adding in a pinch, and then you can always add in more later. Or if you don’t have white pepper, black pepper will also do.
Optional: Many restaurant versions of hot and sour soup are also made with bamboo shoots. I’m personally not a fan of them, but you are welcome to add some in if you would like.
Ingredients
1/2 pound lean, boneless pork loin, cut into thin strips
1/4 pound sliced mushrooms (about 7 whole)
8 ounces canned water chestnuts, canned, drained and sliced
1/2 cup bamboo shoots, cut into strips
2 tablespoons rice wine vinegar
2 tablespoons light soy sauce
1 teaspoon sesame oil
1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1 cup firm tofu, cubed
2 cups chicken broth
2 cups water
Sliced green onions (garnish)
soup
How To Make Hot and Sour Soup:
To make this hot and sour soup recipe, simply…
Make your cornstarch slurry. Whisk together 1/4 cup of the stock and cornstarch until combined. Set aside.
Bring the soup to a simmer. Add the remaining stock, mushrooms, bamboo shoots (if using), rice wine vinegar, soy sauce, ginger and chili garlic sauce to a large stock pot, and cook until the soup reaches a simmer. Stir in the cornstarch slurry and continue cooking for a minute or so, until the soup has thickened.
Drizzle in those beautiful egg ribbons! While stirring the soup in a circular motion with one hand, use your other hand to slowly drizzle the whisked eggs into the soup.
Season the soup. Stir in the tofu, half of the green onions, and sesame oil. Then season the soup with salt and black pepper (or white pepper) to taste.
Serve. Ladle up your servings while the soup is nice and hot, garnished with extra green onions.
Instructions
In slow cooker, combine all ingredients except green onions.
Cover; cook on LOW for 7 to 8 hours.
Ladle into individual bowls.
Garnish with green onion slices.
Pain and Discomfort Are the Gatekeepers of Success
Most of us spend our entire lives doing everything in our power to avoid pain and discomfort at all costs. We tiptoe through life, praying to whatever gods may be that we don’t have to face hardship, challenge, or god forbid, failure.
But here’s the thing…
Pain and discomfort aren’t just inevitable parts of life – they’re the damn gatekeepers to success. You literally cannot achieve anything worthwhile without meeting them face-to-face and duking it out.
Most people see pain and discomfort as flashing red warning signs telling them to turn back. To stay in their cozy, lukewarm bubble of mediocrity where nothing can hurt them. Where they can just fade into the background and waste their potential.
Well I call bullshit.
The cold, hard truth is that no one achieves true success and fulfillment without traversing through the suck. Without facing down their demons, looking hardship square in the eye, and saying “let’s dance.”
Pain creates us. It molds us. It’s the fire that forges us from fragile, breakable glass into hardened, unbreakable steel. The crushing pressure that transforms coal into diamonds.
In the immortal words of the modern Stoic philosopher Ryan Holiday, “The obstacle is the way.”
What stands in the path becomes the path. What blocks the way becomes the way. The challenges, hardships and “oh shit” moments aren’t roadblocks – they’re the required curriculum.
If you think you’re going to luck into an existence devoid of pain, where everything is handed to you on a silver platter and you never have to bleed for your dreams…
Well, keep dreaming. That’s not how this works. It’s not how any of this works.
Pain is the entry fee. Discomfort is the cover charge. You don’t get to go around them – the only way out is through.
And here’s the really wild part…
Once you accept this – once you stop avoiding the suck and just decide to embrace the pain, a funny thing happens…
You start to enjoy it. To get a sick thrill out of facing adversity head on. To respect the struggle.
You realize pain is just weakness leaving the body. Discomfort is just the feeling of your limits expanding.
So stop running. Stop hiding. Stop waiting for shit to get easy.
The path to success goes directly through the gatekeepers of pain and discomfort. And you need to meet them head on, shake their hands, and thank them for the opportunity to get better.
Because on the other side of pain and discomfort?
That’s where all the rewards lie in wait. And trust me, it’s a hell of a lot more fun over here.
AI generated images
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If you sat next to a famous celebrity in a restaurant, would you start a conversation? What would you say?
About 15 years ago I was down town Portland for lunch. Place was crowded but found a seat for myself and two co-workers. After we ordered we noticed this crowd coming in and a lot of activities. Next thing I know George Karl who was the Head Coach for the Denver Nuggets sat essentially beside me. Spending the 90s in Seattle I knew who he was but my co-workers didn’t.
Coach Karl got his food before I did… he ordered the same thing I wanted. I was a little bothered by the service. When I thought he wasn’t looking I jokingly reached towards his plate. He caught me.
Instantly he asked if I wanted some and then he asked the waiter what I ordered that was taking so long since I had been seated prior. The waiter told him what I ordered. Coach asked if the waiter messed up and gave him my food. I felt bad because the young waiter didn’t know what not to say. He told coach that he was told to serve him first.
Coach wasn’t happy. He asked for the manager. Manager comes over and asks him if everything was OK. Now I felt bad for the manager because it was obvious that the waiter didn’t prepare him before they came to the table. Coach went on to say that he was not happy that he got served before me. Shaking his head he said “that just isn’t right”
Coach then said to bring out a plate and he was going to give me half of his food. Then he paused and cracked a smile. He told the manager than when they served his food to me, he wanted half of it.
Finally everyone was eating. Coach turned to me and asked me how much should we tip?
Have you ever had an experience that made you believe in the afterlife or spirit world?
My friend group consisted of a trio, and we were inseparable.
About 2 years ago, one of our trio got diagnosed with cancer. He put up a really strong fight, but passed away about 6 months ago.
That night, I had a dream. The 3 of us were on a public bus, sitting and talking. We sat back and laughed at all the crazy things we had done, especially the things the one that passed did. Towards the very end of the dream he leaned in and said “thank you guys for being my friends. I couldn’t have asked for anything better.”
I woke up, and didn’t give it a ton of thought. I wasn’t surprised I had a dream about him, he had just passed away the day before. I did question why we were on a public bus. Interestingly enough, none of us had never ridden a bus together in our entire friendship.
I met up with my other friend that day, and it was a very somber time. Until I mentioned the dream I had the night before. My friend turned pale as a ghost. He had had the exact same dream. The 3 of us on the bus talking.
We went back and forth to make sure the other wasn’t lying. We traded off walking the other one through the dream. It was identical. We had both had the same dream, word for word. Location, subjects of conversation, everything.
At that moment, this Agnostic got a pretty big dash of religion in his body.
The US Commerce Department believes that by sanctioning key high-end technologies, the US can slow down, even stop, China’s aim of becoming a technology leader.
This plan misses a very simple point though: In many fields, China is aiming at revolutionary new technologies to replace current technologies.
These new technologies do not need current technologies now held by the US and the west. This is how China aims to become the technology leader in many fields.
In addition, China has the manufacturing capacity to quickly bring these new technologies to market.
The way for the US to beat China is not through sanctions, but through massive investment in new technologies the same way China has done. The problem is that the US does not have the budget to do this kind of investment; most liquidity has been siphoned off into the private pockets of VCs and hedge fund managers, who believe in ROI, not in investment.
This is why the US government does not have the money, power and influence to fund an industrial manufacturing policy.
The US has painted itself into a corner.
I have a staff member who produces brilliant work but is consistently late every single day. I can’t fire him because it will take months to find someone to fill his position. What can I do?
I once hired a woman who did brilliant work but was not a good team player. It’s not that she was destructive or hostile. It was more that, in an industry that typically thrives on collaboration, she was an independent contributor.
Another employee was always late. I felt it reflected a lack of interest and discipline but he consistently delivered high quality work.
Another had to leave early, every day, no exceptions, and was never available or reachable outside of traditional office hours. Public Relations, the industry I worked in all my life, is not a 9:00 to 5:00 job. It often requires people stay late. If someone always leaves early it puts the burden on other team members.
Another employee was terrified of doing a presentation and would freeze if he needed to speak in a room full of people. Except, he was incredible at research.
Another was a conceptual thinker who could not only detect industry trends before anyone else, but who had real vision, except, he was not a good writer.
Another exhibited enviable work ethic but was easily stressed and tended to regard everything as a crisis.
All of these employees were unique and gifted in certain aspects of their job, but lacked characteristics that I believed were “essential”.
As a manager, for years I strived to “correct” these kinds of idiosyncrasies. I tried to get the independent contributor to become a team player, to get everyone to show up on time, to encourage a bit of flexibility in the person who was never available after hours.
I tried to work on people’s “shortcomings” instead of playing to their strengths.
Then I realized that what I was doing was trying to make everyone the same in an environment that was suffering from a lack of original, creative, disparate thinking.
That there was no such thing as someone who was good at everything.
That the best thing I could do as a manager was find the right place for an employee, where who the person already was would contribute to making the operation as a whole integrated and successful.
If you interview high level executives – such as CEOs – and ask them what keeps them up at night, the consistent reply is “talent”.
People who deliver brilliant work are hard to come by.
It’s our job as managers to make our business environment flexible enough to give every brilliant employee a place to thrive.
Do you drink every day and function?
I used to do that from about 1990 to 2015. Life at my place meant coming home to a 750ml bottle of wine, which I would empty, by myself, starting at about 17:00, and finishing by about 22:00. And often enough, I’d round that off with a glass of whisky or cognac or gin.
During that time, I worked in eight countries, achieved three academic qualifications, and lived a perfectly normal life.
To keep things in perspective, I’m 1,90 metres tall, weigh 112 kg, and tend to eat very well. So that amount of drinking over the time periods as mentioned wouldn’t have resulted in the sort of blood alcohol levels binge drinkers achieve by downing the same or more in a short time.
But I noticed while I went through an experimental raw vegan phase that saw me also avoiding alcohol in 2015 that the absence of alcohol in my life had magnificent effects I had not expected:
my mood lifted drastically; I basically turned into a giggling silly-bunny 24/7;
my sleep quality became superb;
my ability to concentrate increased a lot;
my temper became much more even and sunny;
my interest in food declined, which made my weight drop.
It was an eye opener. I had been consuming alcohol at a high level for so long that I mistook its effects for my own personality. So since 2015, I no longer drink regularly, and I function a lot better, no doubt. And on days following alcohol consumption, I really feel it. It’s like the whole world has turned grey, and everything is hard, and the only glimmer of hope is another drink at the end of it. And that’s when I think “whoa, you actually were that miserable for 25 years! Poor bastard.”
Much of that alcohol consumption was due to routine, too. These days, I actually ask myself, “do I really want a bottle of wine?” And I may not. When a bottle of wine or whisky finds its way to my home these days, it’s often the result of a week or two of contemplation. It’s much more appreciated, too.
I think that in itself is an indicator of functioning, because it shows attunedness to ourselves.
How Much Can You Know About Yourself If You’ve Never Been in a Fight?
In our sanitized, safe, padded modern world, most of us go through life without ever throwing a punch or taking one to the face. We avoid conflict, physical or otherwise, and pride ourselves on staying out of the fray.
But let me ask you something…
How much can you really know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight? If you’ve never had your mettle tested, your resolve challenged, your limits pushed?
I’m not saying go out and start a bar brawl tonight. But there is something primal, something raw and real about the crucible of physical conflict that reveals us to ourselves in a way few other experiences can.
Think about it…
In a real fight, there’s nowhere to hide. No room for self-delusion or bullshit. You’re stripped down to your essence, forced to confront your true nature in a visceral, immediate way.
Will you crumble under pressure or rise to the occasion? Will you succumb to fear and pain or push through? Will you quit at the first sign of adversity or dig deep and find a new gear?
These are the questions that can only be answered in the heat of battle. When the fists are flying and the blood is flowing. When it’s just you, your opponent, and the truth.
Now, I know what some of you are thinking. “Fighting is barbaric, primitive, beneath me.” And sure, on one level, that’s true. We should aspire to resolve our differences with words, not violence.
But let’s not kid ourselves. The capacity for violence, the ability to protect and defend, to stand up for yourself and those you love – that’s hardwired into us. It’s part of what makes us human, for better or worse.
And pretending otherwise, avoiding that side of ourselves entirely, leaves us incomplete. Untested. Unproven.
So while I’m not advocating for gratuitous violence, I am suggesting that there’s value in controlled exposure to physical conflict. In pushing yourself to the brink to see what you’re really made of.
Take up a martial art. Train in boxing, wrestling, BJJ. Put yourself in situations that force you to face down your demons and confront your own capacity for aggression and tenacity.
Because at the end of the day, life is a fight. And the better you know yourself – your true self, tested in the fire of adversity – the better equipped you’ll be to handle whatever battles lie ahead.
So get in the ring. Step onto the mat. Throwdown and scrap it out. You might just be surprised by what you’re capable of. By the depths of courage and resilience lurking inside you.
And that, my friends, is a hell of a lot more valuable than an unblemished record or a pretty face.
Why didn’t Blinken have a red carpet during his two visits to China? Is this right for China?
The Secretary of State is the world’s most powerful diplomat. His underlings at the UN wag fingers at foreign colleagues and go “do you want to be consulted, or insulted?”
And yet no Secretary of State had visited Beijing for 6, 7 years, until Antony barged in.
The Chinese did not fete him or court him. He was not accorded priority, because he wasn’t the honored state guest on a carefully coordinated state visit.
His job was to personally deliver an invitation to President Xi for him to toast and grace the greatest gathering of American capital in recent years.
This time, his job is to mirror what Janet did recently, reading off a script on the Beijing podium criticizing and threatening the host, to show the public that America still has to chops to make others listen. Delivering the message in the evil enemy’s capital fills the air with American machismo.
This isn’t diplomacy. It’s poorly fleshed out domestic politics.
Let’s save the red carpet for others on the level because Antony’s job isn’t to secure cooperation but subservience through the scourge of power.
A Chinese Intellectual Genius revealing the grand strategy of the US in the 21st Century.
During the period of time while I was taking care of my mother while she had Cancer, we got to spend a lot of time together. I would take care of the estate, and eat meals with her. She wasn’t lonely because I was there, and I was always there to help her if she had a medical emergency.
During our time together we would watch television such as FOX news, “Unsolved Mysteries”, COPS and other shoes that were popular at the time. She would drink a whiskey, and I would drink a beer and we would go ahead and talk.
She related to me many stories and familial lore that was long hidden from us kids. later on, when she died, and I was staying with my father (after prison) he too told me stories from his side of the family. Gosh. Good thing they kept us kids sheltered.
What a bunch of skullduggery!
I’ll tell you what.
My maternal grandmother was quite the charmer in the day. She was a dancer and had an hourglass figure, in many ways resembling Mae West of Pittsburgh Pennsylvania.
She would date the powerful men of the city, and ride around with rather powerful and dangerous men.
She was quite the “dame of the days”.
Pictures of her suggest a lively life in the “Roaring 20’s”, where she was spending her youth partying and carousing. Wearing flapper attire and rain galoshes. With various handsome men of the day.
Yet she ended up in a rented tenement, in the lower income section of Pittsburgh in her retirement years.
What happened?
Times change. Things are fleeting.
I only wish that I could say this to some of those “Only Fans” girls that think that somehow they are on the fast-track to a great life though social media porn. It’s not what you think. Do not discard what you have no, on a lie that might not ever appear.
I wish I could say this.
But me, you, and none of my readers have the kind of clout or popularity to send this message out to the Only Fans masses.
And when she died. . . Her struggles and stories died with her.
Do not be like her; Sharing a tenement house with a man on the “other side of the tracks” with a broken television set that only got three channels.
Fun in the youth, followed up with a slow downward glide.
That is NOT the way to manage a life-line.
You want to live a life where your last minutes are with you screaming in glee, and sliding in sideways to a goal that you just obtained. I’ll tell you what.
Today…
Have you ever told off another person’s child? What for?
My son had a problem with a neighborhood bully when he was about ten. The bully wanted to be best friends with my son’s best friend. My son stood in the way.
My son came home after being at the bully’s house–WITH THE BULLY’S MOTHER RIGHT THERE–with all kinds of bruises and scrapes. He got thrown into shrubbery, punched, etc.
His mother, to whom I spoke, denied that there was a problem, even though my son AND HIS FRIEND told us the bully had been responsible.
I did nothing more until my son called me one Saturday. He was supposed to be at a pool party to celebrate his friend’s birthday, but when I heard him, he sounded very depressed. He said he’d left the party and walked home, because the bully had gone after him.
I told him I was stopping at the party.
I did. And there was the bully, bullying other kids at the pool.
I told him to get out of the pool. He blustered, “ What did I do? I didn’t do anything.”
And I SCREAMED at him, “GET OUT OF THE POOL NOW!”
He did, and I took him to one side.
I never touched him. I told him, “I never want you going near my son again. I never want you to talk to him or go near him ever. And if I find out that you ever did–I WILL MAKE YOUR LIFE NOT WORTH LIVING. DO. YOU. UNDERSTAND?”
He saw the look on my face. He was half a head taller than me and fifty pounds heavier, but at that moment–I WAS DANGEROUS.
He said he understood. He said he wouldn’t go near my son. He promised. I let him go back to the party.
For some strange reason, we never had a problem with him after that…
INVESTIGATORS FOILED A MASSIVE terrorist-grade attack on Hong Kong involving bombs, US firearms, and a sniper, it will be revealed this week.
A lot of information regarding the CIA and the color revolution that it attempted in Hong Kong in 2019.
The assault was designed to cause multiple casualties and major destruction in Wan Chai, a densely populated area on Hong Kong island. The main target was police officers, but the ultimate aim was to create enough chaos to overthrow the government. The attack, planned for 8 December 2019, was part of a long program of attacks by masked, pro-violence protester groups known as “valiants”. The plan was foiled by Hong Kong police hours before it was implemented. . . .
TRAINED OVERSEAS
A few details of the murderous operation, known as Dragon Slayer, emerged in earlier court hearings, but the full shocking story is set to be made public as a series of court hearings begins this week. The case confirms widespread claims by Hong Kong people that violent protesters were paid for what they did—and includes clear evidence that activists were trained overseas in creating bombs, use of firearms, street fighting techniques, and “terrorist ideology”. Before the date of the planned attack, front line protesters had been flown to Taiwan for training. The story of the failed Wan Chai bombing is not in dispute. Ringleaders have agreed with the facts as presented by the prosecution and pleaded guilty to all charges. But others have not, which means a court case will begin this week focusing on additional participants. . . .
BACKGROUND:
In 2019, a US group called Open Technology Fund (a spin-off from Radio Free Asia, a US government “news” unit originally set up by CIA), offered Hong Kong’s anti-China activists use of a special “secure node” in the city. This enabled them to exchange information on the Telegram website in a way that would be hard for law enforcement to penetrate. OTF also arranged for a large amount of funds – Time magazine reported that it was US$2 million – to be earmarked for Hong Kong activists. During that period, many anti-China activists moved their discussions and planning operations to the Telegram website. In August of 2019, on a Telegram channel called Dragonteam, two men, Wong Chun-keung and Ng Chi-hung, put together a plan to create a group called the Dragon Slaying Brigade. (The elite team of the Hong Kong police is nicknamed the dragon squad.) The plan was to kill as many police officers as they could, and create enough mayhem to bring down the government. Eventually, three different groups of violent protesters, united in the scheme. The operation had plenty of funds, with a budget of HK$4 million (US$1.79 million) from various sources, listed as “from crowdsourcing”. As many Hong Kong people noted at the time, the protests were awash with cash from several directions. . . .
ATTACK ON WAN CHAI
The key stages of the plan went as follows: 1) Plotters first exploited the fact that Hong Kong is far more generous with protest permits than other places, including western countries such as UK. Despite more than 80 protests having turned violent, they confidently applied for permits for a December 8 march from Victoria Park in Causeway Bay to travel through Wan Chai. 2) Behind the scenes, international connections were made: it is not clear how. Ng and at least five other protesters flew to Taiwan for 13 days of training in explosives, use of firearms and other military-style operations. Participants received cash. It is not clear whether the trainers were from Taiwan, US or a mixture. The US has admitted to having military trainers on the island for some years, in defiance of the previously agreed status quo. 3) After the Hong Kong government predictably granted permits, the plotters created a pair of bombs, to be lightly buried about 50 meters apart, in spaces on the central divider of Hennessy Road in Wan Chai. The targets were not the protesters, but police who would typically go ahead to make sure traffic was clear for the main body of marchers. 4) Using a classic terrorism technique, the first bomb would go off, causing surviving police officers to retreat to a safe distance—and then a second, larger bomb would be detonated at the location to which they had fled. 5) A sniper with AR-15 automatic assault rifle, and other gunmen with pistols, would be stationed at the windows or rooftops of adjacent buildings. They would shoot any surviving police officers. 6) Another Dragon Slayer crew, at ground level, would steal police weapons from the holsters of downed officers. 7) A further team would lob pre-prepared petrol bombs into all shops and restaurants in the area which were owned by mainlanders, or believed to lean politically to the “blue” (China-friendly) side. 8) All participants would be masked, and then would melt away into Wan Chai. 9) The ultimate aim was to create enough chaos to bring down the government, or achieve “regime change” to use the political term for this type of action. . . .
ANTI-TERRORISM ACTION
In the event, Hong Kong police managed to penetrate several Telegram discussion groups, and succeeded in making arrests before any of the bombs were set off. They also found guns and in one location, 106 rounds of ammunition. At a hearing in February this year, the ringleaders admitted a joint count of conspiracy to commit the bombing of prescribed objects under the United Nations (Anti-Terrorism Measures) Ordinance. But a number of other defendants not guilty to charges linked to the same case—and that’s the trial that starts this week. More details will emerge.
2.Waking up and feeling like you’ve had enough sleep.
3.Lying on grass in the summertime.
4.The first bite of a meal when you’re really hungry.
5.Watching trees dance in the wind.
6.Taking your feet off the pedals cycling down a big hill.
7.Hearing raindrops from your warm bed.
8.Looking up while walking through a new city.
9.A snowflake landing on your tongue.
10.Finding money in the pocket of a coat you haven’t worn in a while.
11.Getting into a freshly made bed after a long day.
12.Kicking a pile of autumn leaves.
13.Thinking something is going to break but at the last second you catch it.
14.Tucking pyjamas into your socks.
15.Sitting on a dock watching the sunset.
16.Seeing an older couple holding hands.
17.Not setting an alarm clock.
18.An extra-long hug from an old friend.
19.All the optimism a new year brings.
20.Hiding under a tree from a summer rain shower.
You Now Need A Government License To Own A Chicken… (NO JOKE!) 6 Months Prison Sentence!!!
They are gradually banning self sufficiency…
Which single sentence can break most people?
There is one sentence I remember that haunts me even to this day.
———————————-
So, my wife finally told me that she was seeing someone else.
it hurt.
“I’m seeing another guy…”
Damn. You think this is the one right?
WRONG.
—
Fast forward a month.
She came to grab her stuff from the house.
The Boyfriend also came to the house.
The house that she and I built a life together in.
I told him that I didn’t want him in the house.
I told him to stay outside and I would leave the door open if he wanted.
But I told her that he was not allowed in the house.
It was the last sanctuary I had left.
I didn’t want it defiled.
“He is coming inside, whether you like it or not. He is with me.”
He walked inside the house.
Didn’t even care to take off his shoes.
You think this one is the one right?
WRONG.
—
As she is packing her stuff, I threw away my pride.
I threw away my ego.
I plead her to rethink the divorce.
I told her that I would forgive her for cheating.
I would forgive her for everything.
I told her how I felt and that it was all my fault and I just wanted her back.
I told her I would promise to be a better man.
“No. I don’t want to think about it anymore. I’m done.”
You think this is the one right?
WRONG.
—
I was so hurt that she said that, I felt like time stopped.
I probably stopped breathing for a good minute.
When I came to, I was numb.
I was so numb, even I started to pack her things.
I was a robot.
Just going through the motions.
After she packed the last of her things and left… she looked at me in the eyes.
She said the one thing that made me not believe in love anymore.
She said the one thing that finally made me understand that the relationship was no longer.
She said: “Did I break you enough yet?”
I felt my stomach go to my throat.
The colors in the world disappeared.
My world crumbled.
As she closed the door, I heard her drive off in the car I gave her.
I sat on the couch.
I stared at the floor for a good hour before I could comprehend what she said.
“DID I BREAK YOU ENOUGH YET?”
This. This is what broke me.
————————————————–
That’s the gist of it.
Women Over 30+ Who Have Hit The Wall Are Desperate With Drizzle, Drizzle. | The Wall
Has the Huawei Pura70 Series ascended as the pioneering force in the smartphone industry, distinguished by its supply chain paradigm that leverages an almost exclusive reliance on components procured from within China?
Pura70 is Huawei’s latest smartphone, and it is considered a milestone in the P series.
He was originally supposed to be called P70, but they decided to start with a new name.
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The brand-new name Pura70 is well-deserved for this mobile phone, and it is a new cost for Huawei.
Half a year ago, I answered a question about Huawei Mate60. I think Mate60 is a landmark event for Huawei’s return as king under US sanctions. 90% of the supply chain of Mate60 mobile phones comes from Chinese companies, and they no longer rely on American technology. This is the first time in the history of human industry that a single country has completed the entire industrial chain of a high-end smartphone.
What’s the most unforgettable heartbreak you’ve experienced in your life?
When I was in high school, my boyfriend called me on a school night asking me to go out to eat. I had a test the next day, so my mother wouldn’t allow me to go. The next morning, as I was eating breakfast while listening to the radio, I heard the news that my boyfriend had died in a car accident. He lost control of his Volkswagen and crashed into a hydro pole. My mother was sitting beside me at the time. Apparently my face instantly turned white, and I started to shake uncontrollably. I spent the rest of the day in bed. The first time I saw John laid out in his casket was surreal. I felt like I was in a fog. The people around me seemed far away, and their voices were a blur. I could not accept that my boyfriend was dead, and I would be left without him. He looked like he was sleeping, and I kept waiting for him to open his eyes. The hardest part was at his grave, when his coffin was lowered into the ground. I completely lost my composure and cried out his name, weeping uncontrollably. It took me a long time to come to terms with John’s death. He was a comedian at heart, always making me laugh. I saw his grinning face everywhere. Going back to school after his funeral was so heart wrenching. I would think I saw him in the hallways and the cafeteria. Our mutual friends just didn’t know what to do or say. I felt so alone. I will never forget John, but I gradually recovered from losing him. Time does heal heartache.
Heartwarming
Why did Chinese chip stocks rally following Huawei’s launch of the Mate 60 Pro phone?
Do you know the semiconductor sanctions that Huawei has suffered in the past three years? It’s a pity that we can’t buy this mobile phone here. It is the first mobile phone in the world that directly supports satellite phones.
This will definitely be an industrial product that will be recorded in history. This means that in the past three years, all companies around the world have not been allowed to sell 5G-related semiconductors to Huawei as long as these semiconductors contain American technology.
All companies around the world are not allowed to help Huawei produce semiconductors, as long as your production process contains American technology. You know, semiconductor is a global division of labor industry.
The technology in this industry has always been global cooperation, and there is no semiconductor production and design company in any country that does not contain American technology. Such sanctions can directly shock companies like Apple and Samsung.
They originally thought Huawei would also collapse. But Mate60 was released. After 3 years, they released a new 5G mobile phone again. This is not just as simple as a mobile phone. This is a huge technical chain that requires the participation of hundreds of companies with different specialties. In the past, this required the mutual cooperation of multiple countries, and no country could do it alone. But now the Chinese have done it.
Maybe not top notch, but they really did it. This means that Chinese companies can make advanced semiconductors (maybe not state-of-the-art) without relying on American technology. This is a historic event in the global semiconductor industry. It means that China’s semiconductor industry chain has made a comprehensive breakthrough. Note that I used the word industry chain. To manufacture a slice of advanced semiconductors requires the participation of many companies and industries.
From EDA software, to the cultivation of silicon wafers, chip and framework design, high-purity chemicals, laser devices, lithography machines, etching machines, packaging equipment, and testing technologies. Chinese people often use the term “shooting oneself in the foot”.
Now I can fully understand the meaning of this sentence. Under the pressure of the Americans, the Chinese took three years to complete the independence of the entire semiconductor industry chain. They have gone from 0 to 1, or even from 0 to 10, and the remaining 90 points are just a matter of time. It can be predicted that ten years later, China’s semiconductor industry will crush its peers around the world through its own scale and cost advantages. No one can sanction them because they do it all themselves, from sand to chips.
In fact, the task completed by Mate60 is not perfect. This phone still uses memory chips from Korean suppliers and electronic parts from Japanese suppliers. Although they are not critical parts, this means that it does not achieve the goal 100%.
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The phone is equipped with a retractable lens and its mechanical precision is comparable to that of a Swiss watch
Many media are still questioning whether Huawei can produce advanced semiconductors on a large scale and sustainably? Some people even say that their chips are removed from old mobile phones.
Some media have questioned whether Koreans are secretly helping Huawei manufacture mobile phones because Korean memory chips were found on the Mate60.
Now, Pura70 makes all these doubts meaningless. Some anxious media dismantled the phone into parts and put them under a microscope. They found that this phone uses a brand new SOC chip: Kirin 9010. This is only half a year after the release of Kirin 9000s on Mate60. The single-core performance of this chip has improved by at least 15%-20%, which is very close to the latest products of Qualcomm and Apple.
At the same time, those Japanese and Korean parts on the Mate60 are missing. Memory chips, cameras, visual sensors, fingerprint sensors and other accessories have also been completely replaced by Chinese companies.
In a sense, Pura70 is a mobile phone that is truly 100% made in China. This not only includes all key semiconductors and peripheral parts, but also parts in professional fields such as screens and lenses. At the same time, the operating system of this mobile phone is also independent of Android and IOS.
Based on the sales of MATE60, the media predicts that the sales of Pura70 may exceed 10 million units. This is a figure evaluated when Huawei is unable to sell mobile phones outside of China.
Pura70 has triggered queues in many big cities in China. Although the phone sells for as high as 1,000-1,500 US dollars, many young people still think it is cool to own a Pura70.
This also means that this is the world’s first top-end smartphone that is “completely unrelated to Western technology” and it has already achieved significant success in the market.
From a professional’s perspective, the launch and large-scale supply of Pura70 proves that China’s high-end electronics manufacturing and semiconductor manufacturing industries have gradually separated from the US system. Huawei is just the company at the forefront. Behind it are hundreds of China’s advanced electronic technology suppliers. Behind these suppliers are thousands of second-tier and third-tier suppliers. They can operate completely independently from U.S. global sanctions and restrictions.
This gives the world a new reminder: Advanced technology is not always in the hands of the West. When you are unwilling to share or even use technology as a weapon, people will always find other paths.
MASSIVE NEWS: China Is Building Giant Hypersonic Railgun For Space Launches
What is the strangest medical thing that has happened to you?
Approximately ten years ago, I was doing an open house (I’m a Realtor). I had a tiny whitehead under my nose, and I could hardly see it, but I just scratched it off. Throughout the day, it started swelling, and by the end of the day, it was a large swollen bump that was bright red, but there was no head, so I could not drain it.
When I got home, the side of my face was swollen. I went to the doctor, and they gave me a shot in my hip to bring down the swelling, but it didn’t work. I went home, and it got worse. I went to bed, and my face continued to swell, and by morning, it had swollen so much that my skin was stretched and shiny.
My husband took me into emergency because it had swollen up to my forehead, cheeks, and now the other side. My skin was so tight and shiny that I was getting scared. The doctor checked it and started talking about sending me to another doctor. I panicked and thought he meant later in the week. I started crying and begged him not to send me away. He smiled and said…. don’t worry, don’t worry, we are dealing with this today. He was so sweet about it. He said I’m sending you to get It lanced and drained. I was quickly taken to a surgeon who lanced the inside of my cheek and drained it. I left with medication, and it went completely away in a couple of days.
To this day, I still don’t know what it was, but I thought I remember someone saying it was MRSA. I don’t know, but I hope it never happens again. It scared me.
What bad experience had you saying “I will never buy from that company or use their service ever again”?
A couple months before I turned 8 years old, my dad ordered his first new car, after 25 years of driving used vehicles. It was a big event for a family of modest means. My parents wanted a Ford station wagon and my Mom wanted the maroon color which was supposedly offered. Days after ordering it, they called to say our car had come in. When I went to the dealer with my Dad to watch him pick it up, the salesmen drove up to us in a TAN wagon. “But we asked for MAROON!” Dad objected.
The salesman didn’t miss a beat, saying “You didn’t expect to get the color you ordered, did you?” as he tried to complete the sale. Even at the age of 7, I knew this was an absurd thing to say. My Dad might have accepted it but wisely went home to talk it over with Mom, who firmly stated that she didn’t want the car if it wasn’t what we ordered. So, another dealer got our business. Over 50 years later I still won’t buy from the dealership that employed the sarcastic salesman who tried to make my Dad feel like a fool. (But instead looked like one himself.)
China’s supply chain dominance means the Inflation Reduction Act is already dead.
The raw data tells a wild story. Must watch.
Have you ever given someone a bad reference when an employer called you and asked about them?
Many years ago, I owned a Computer Store in a small town. One day I got a call from the local school district office. I had done work for them in the past and knew a few people that worked there. They were looking to hire a full-time computer technician and were checking someone’s references. I thought this was a bit strange since my staff consisted of me and my wife. And I knew she hadn’t applied for a job.
When they mentioned the name, I laughed out loud. I said, “No, he never worked for me, and let me tell you a story.”
“Several months ago, he called me after hours about an emergency that he had with his computer and could I come in and fix it. After some pleading, I agreed and told him to meet me at the store but that my basic charge was $50.
After a few minutes diagnostic, I discovered a fairly basic mistake that he had made in building it, which took me about 20 minutes to fix. I charged him $50, and he complained and tried to talk me down, but eventually, he wrote me a check. A few days, later, I went to cash the check, and it bounced.
[The reason I remember this guy so well is because this was a small town, and people didn’t write bad checks. I had never gotten a bad check, EVER. Except for his.]
Now, I have no $50 and a check return fee -$20. I wasn’t going to let him get away with that, so I called his bank every day, asking if his account could cover it. A couple of weeks later, there were enough funds in his account. So, I immediately drove to his bank (which was about 20 minutes away) and cashed the check. A week later he called me to complain that I had caused a different check of his to bounce. “
So, no, he never worked for me and I’m not sure how competent a computer repair person he is. And He lied on his application. Any other questions?
1. Never cry for the person that hurts you. Just smile and say,
“Thank you for giving me the chance to have someone better than you.
2. Don’t hate jealous people. They are jealous because they thinks you are better than them.
3. Don’t waste your time on revenge. Those who hurt you will eventually face their own karma.
4. Don’t tell anyone about your plans, show them the result instead.
5. There is no market for your emotions, so don’t advertise your feelings. Show only your attitude.
6. Don’t give up. Your day will come. It’s just a matter of time.
7. If you help someone and expect anything in return. of you foes, you’re doing a business not kindness.
8. Trust means everything, but once it’s broken, sorry means nothing.
9. Always remember that your present situation is not your final destination. The best is yet to come.
10. Never leave a true relationship for few faults. Nobody is perfect and no one is always correct. At the end, you will discover that affection is greater than perfection.
11. Don’t attend a funeral just to let people know how you cared for a person. Show them how much you cared about them when they are alive.
12. Don’t make a promise out of joy. And don’t take a decision out of sadness.
13. Don’t expect loyalty from people that can not give you honesty.
14. Don’t give up. The beginning is always the hardest.
15. You will not know the value of a moment until you lose it. Value the moments you have before they become a memory.
16. Lastly, APPRECIATION remains the easiest way of getting what you don’t have….After reading a good message try to say “Thanks for the message”.
Taco Chili
One of Lincoln’s very favorite foods right now is tacos. If you ask him what he wants for dinner, 100% of the time he’ll tell you tacos. Ben gets a little sick of having the same thing every week though, so I thought I’d switch things up with Taco Chili!
I know, I know – living on the edge – but the second thing Lincoln will tell you he wants for dinner after tacos is soup or chili so this meal is a win-win at my house. Each spoonful of Taco Chilitastes like a big bite of a taco, but since it’s thick and hearty it’s perfect for this time of year when you need a dish that will warm you up on chilly (har) nights.
Taco Chili Crock Pot Friendly iowagirleats 01 srgb
Yield: 8 servings
Ingredients
1 1/2 to 2 pounds lean ground beef
1/2 cup (1 medium) onion, chopped
1 (1 1/4 ounce) package taco seasoning mix
2 (14 1/2 ounce) cans diced tomatoes
1 (10 ounce) can Ro*Tel
1 (16 ounce) can pinto beans, rinsed and drained
1 (5 ounce) can chili beans in chili sauce
1 cup frozen whole kernel corn
Shredded mozzarella, Monterey Jack or Cheddar cheese
Slightly crushed tortilla chips
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Instructions
In a large skillet, cook ground beef and onion, one-half at a time, until meat is browned and onion is tender. Drain off fat.
Transfer to a 3 1/2 or 4 quart slow cooker.
Stir in dry taco seasoning mix, diced tomatoes, diced tomatoes with green chiles, pinto beans, chili beans in chili sauce and corn.
Cover; cook on LOW for 8 to 10 hours or on HIGH for 4 to 5 hours.
Sprinkle each serving with some cheese and chips.
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What has a car salesperson said to you that resulted in you immediately leaving?
You fellows don’t want to buy a car today.
Years ago I decided that being a young stud that I wanted a Mustang, maybe it should be said I needed a Ford Mustang but I’m also cheap so I’d figured I’d buy a used one. I also had a dad who loved to dicker especially when it came to cars, so he came up to the city I was living in and off we went to go car shopping.
We looked at a few, finally found one at a used car lot. We had talked about what I wanted to pay and so we started the dance. The salesman opened the hood and showed us the engine and everything else. He gave us a price, we gave a counter bid, he went to his manager, you know the game. Came back out, a lower offer, we talked over and counter offered. This went on for a couple rounds. Did I mention I was cheap and so was my dad?
Finally the salesman came up, slammed down the hood and said, ‘You fellows don’t want to buy a car today.’ We went down the street, found Avis and bought one a year newer with less mileage, and my dad told me after we left, ‘Do you think we should go back and tell him we bought a car today?’ God, I miss that man!
Thanks Sarah for the edits. I’m a paramedic not an English major or minor.
I’d like to thank all you kind folks who have read and upvoted this story. My dad would have got a hoot out of how many people have enjoyed it.
Fast Food Customers HAVE HAD ENOUGH OF THE HIGH PRICES!
What are the most horrible words you’ve ever heard?
“She’s already gone.”
I was sixteen years old and my best friend in the world, Rachel, had just turned sixteen and gotten her driver’s license.
We had been inseparable for years. Youth group trips, summer camp, swapping clothes, obsessing over crushes…she had her own bedroom at my house but we always pulled out sleeping bags and camped in mine.
I saw my first ever rock video on MTV at her house – “Vogue” by Madonna. We wanted to be Madge when we grew up.
Our theme song was “Don’t Worry Be Happy” and we would sing it to each other whenever one of us was upset.
We planned on having a double wedding; we would be each other’s maids of honor in our wedding dresses, which we spent hours obsessing over.
One Sunday morning she was driving to church by herself when she had a brain aneurysm rupture. Her car hit a telephone pole head-on after she lost consciousness.
I was helping with children’s church when I heard she had been rushed to the hospital. The prognosis was bad.
Very bad.
Rachel spent three days in a coma. I spent every second I could at the hospital, though they wouldn’t let me into the ICU to see her.
There was a special prayer circle called on Tuesday evening to pray for her recovery.
I was in that prayer circle when someone came in and said the words.
Rachel was gone.
How could that be?? She literally died while dozens of people were holding hands in a circle, begging God to save her.
A world without my best friend was impossible to comprehend.
Curled up in a ball under a crib in the church’s nursery, I sobbed.
I railed at God – he had broken our bargain. Rachel was so good, her faith so strong…we had all prayed so hard…this isn’t how it was supposed to be!
My heart broke that day and still has a hole where Rachel used to live.
That was also when the faith I had held so dear all my life started to fracture. The split took another five years to complete, but it started that Tuesday night under a baby bed.
Some AI generated Pictures
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The Israeli attack on Iranian diplomatic premises in Damascus was a clear violation of the Vienna Convention. No one disputed it. The Israeli justification that militia meetings were held there does not change this fact.
The Iranian response to this attack, whatever one thinks of it, is therefore legitimate with regard to Article 51 of the United Nations Charter. No one should dispute that. Remarks that Iran did not have the right to send aircraft through third-party airspace do not change this fact. Yet the UN Security Council has failed to agree to condemn the Israeli attack in Syria. It was also unable to judge the Iranian response.
The speeches no longer come from the legal sphere, but from the political one.
Thus, outside the UN Security Council, the Office of Argentine President Javier Milei “expressed its solidarity and unwavering commitment to the Israeli State following the attacks by the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Argentine Republic recognizes the right of Nation States to defend themselves and firmly supports the Israeli State in defending its sovereignty, in particular against regimes that encourage terror and seek to destroy Western civilization.”
The prize for confusion goes without any doubt to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen who declared on X: “I strongly condemn Iran’s blatant and unjustifiable attack on Israel. And I call on Iran and its proxies to immediately stop these attacks. All actors must now refrain from any further escalation and work to restore stability in the region.” High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell added: “The EU strongly condemns the unacceptable Iranian aggression against the Jewish state. This is an unprecedented escalation and a serious threat to regional security.”
For his part, deputy permanent representative of Russia to the UNSC Dmitri Polyanskiy posted on Telegram: “Once again we are convinced that the cynicism of our Western colleagues and their selective blindness knows no bounds. Now, they don’t even remember that they refused to prevent escalation by not supporting our proposed draft UN Security Council press statement condemning the Israeli strike on the Iranian consulate. As was the case with the beginning of our military defense in Ukraine, the history for them begins with the Iranian retaliation. And the Israelis predictably escalate in their signature manner: Israel is the victim, everyone else is to blame (…) And now this Franco-Saxon-Natanyakha gang will begin to rock the region, blaming Iran for all its sins. Haven’t we already seen all this before?”
Have you ever had a job where you did nothing for years and nobody found out?
Not me but my wife. She graduated with her bachelor’s in 2010, during the time that certain degrees were all but worthless and finding a job was tough to say the least. She ended up taking a job at a small makeup boutique that her friend’s wealthy parents owned.
This store was literally a ploy by her friend’s parents to keep her in town by giving her a project. She lost interest in about a month and her parents were locked into the property for several years, so they had to keep the store open. They offered my wife the manager position which she was happy to take.
The store was literally five minutes from an Ulta, so saying they didn’t do well was an understatement. The owners also refused to adequately restock their inventory, so the few potential customers they could have had quickly gave up after a few visits being unable to find what they needed.
After the first six months, they frequently had days with zero sales and not a single customer through the doors. Luckily for my wife, they had the computer that rung up sales Connected to the Internet with completely unrestricted access. for 7 hours a day, five days a week, she would be on Facebook, play online games, read articles, and generally waste time. For the first hour she would clean and do pull over from the night before, but stopped bothering to do inventory after the first few inventory replenishment requests to the owners went ignored.
She worked there for 18 months total before leaving. Later one of her former coworkers told her that the owners with no warning shut the place down and emptied the store out in the middle of the night, not bothering to tell the employees until they showed up the next day that they were out of a job. I understand that they were trying to save money on the labor and utility costs by closing, but giving zero warning was cowardly and unethical.
Why are most Nigerian graduates unemployable?
I’ll tell you a story.
There’s this girl who aced all her subjects in secondary school.
Not just acing but award-worthy educational success.
She was so good that at her Junior Secondary 3 (JSS 3) level, she was solving mathematical problems from Senior Secondary 1 & 2 (SS 1 & 2) curriculum.
1st Mistake
She loved Maths & computers but was admitted into the university to study Geology.
Today, she still thinks she would have been a statistics wizard if she’d been allowed to just study Math or Engineering. You know – subjects where she doesn’t have to always cram some qualitative garbage but provide quantitative solutions.
2nd Mistake
When she got into the university, she realized she didn’t have to study very hard. Very few people were bothering to anyway. She was extremely smart & could hold her own but it became easier to combine intellectual efforts with other students at assignments, tests & final exams.
The system allowed it.
All her friends did it so, why fight it?
3rd Mistake
While at school, no one ever taught her how to write a résumé or successfully approach interviews.
She, just like everyone around her wanted a good life but the system pretty much set them up to fail.
When she graduated, she met a professional at an international oil & gas company who asked her what she wanted to do in life & to explain her undergraduate degree experience but she was not prepared for that.
She gave answers which were weak, mostly incoherent, lacked precision or clarity.
She’d never thought of herself in that light.
The internet wasn’t readily accessible back then so she was pretty much left on her own with her fellow ignorant peers.
She also had a great & supportive family who she leaned on.
Luckily for her, she got some mentors, then left the country for her masters degree.
At 1st, she struggled at her Canadian university.
Correcting her 2nd mistake
She had to actually learn all those skills & resources she didn’t bother with back in Nigeria due to combined students’ efforts.
She had to read all those textbooks she never bothered with in her Nigerian university in order to excel at her program.
Correcting her 3rd mistake
She also met lecturers whose method of teaching was about empowering students to run with their ideas.
It wasn’t about multiple choice questions but making a case of why Case A is better/worse than Case B.
It made her actually think for the 1st time in her life. She learned how to make great presentations. It was a confidence boost. It was exhilarating!
She learned about plagiarism which is a very despicable thing. She also learned about self-development, professional development & presentations.
She learned it was ok to make decisions, make mistakes & then learn from them.
She became comfortable working alone & also with a team. She learned the power of independence.
She was a different person.
She became more confident about her thoughts & ideas. No one laughs at her mistakes nor condemns her for them.
Her bosses don’t care about always being right or barking orders at those under them. Team contributions is crucial, encouraged & needed.
Everybody is equal. No one feared anyone. It was a healthy environment. She was valued. She freely runs her program the way she sees fit.
This is my story.
There’s no correcting my 1st mistake. If I ever do, I’ll tell a story about it.
If you read this, you’d understand how the Nigerian system encourages laziness & might discourage talent because of envy or pride.
Many Nigerian graduates are victims of their own underdeveloped & redundant society.
Maybe with the internet, a few might self-improve. Otherwise, they’re unemployable because there’s very few people to teach them better.
Note to any Nigerian student reading this – don’t take the easy way out. Read not just to pass your examinations but to actually know.
You’d be truly a better person & student for it.
Good luck!
Chinese treatment for Blinkin and Janet Yelen
No red carpet, and met by Kong Fu-An, Director General of the Shanghai Foreign Affairs Office, at the tarmac.
My understanding is the head of a province-level Foreign Affairs Office counts as a Bureau Chief, or a Level 5, Rank 11–12 Civil Servant.
This is one step below the welcome Olaf received when he landed in Chongqing.
Note both Janet and Antony did not land in Beijing directly, unlike the last time they were in town.
Most powerful finance minister in the world—meh.
Most powerful diplomat in the world—meh.
American Reacts to Getting Laid Off (Fired): USA vs. The Netherlands
What do you do when your kid says they want a tattoo?
When my daughter told me, I had her design her idea of the perfect tattoo no matter what it was or how big …anything. I reminded her it was forever and would never come off so she had to choose wisely. That was the first problem. She couldn’t decide. She had many good ideas but when the idea of “forever” came up she always changed her mind. When she finally came up with her final choice she still handed it to me with some trepidation. Second step was for me to take it to a tattoo artist, a good one, to get a quote. I showed my daughter the quote $1,200 that she would be required to pay for herself. Step three was a surprise to her. I took the artwork she gave me and sent it to a custom temporary tattoo maker that made long term tattoos. I had it made and applied it exactly where she wanted it. My daughter was thrilled for about a week. The tattoo clashed with some of her favorite clothes and it was too visible so she couldn’t hide it. It made her pretty, dainty prom dress look kinda cheap. Looked good with jeans and a tank top but she liked variety…bummer. People treated her differently and judged her before they knew her and it really bothered her. She started trying to hide it rather than show it off. Two months in she asked me for the special solution to take it off. I refused because “tattoos are forever.” She was angry but I reminded her she made her own choices now she had to live with them. It eventually wore off and when she became an adult I told her she should start saving for her tattoo. She thanked me for the “lesson” I gave her because now that she was older her tastes had changed and IF she ever decides to get one it will probably be small, likely just one color and someplace hidden. She is an adult now. She can do what she wants but at least I know she will think before she leaps and that is all I can ask for.
CCTV’s Spring Festival Gala has been consistently panned in recent years for lacking creativity and lowering standards, and this year was no exception.
However, one segment won almost universal praise on Chinese social media – 《山河詩長安》/Poem for the Landscape of Chang’an.
It is an excellent showcasing of Xi’an culture, both old and new, from Qin opera to Shaanxi hip hop. Chang’an (the historical name for Xi’an) was known as one of the greatest cities of the ancient world, and the capital city of various dynasties, most notably the Tang Dynasty.
Here’s the 6 minute video…
We see people making merry and enjoying local festivities, and historical characters such as the Tang poet Li Bai brought back to life with 3D technology. To hear people chanting ancient poems in unison, as the country enters the space age, had me awestruck.
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This is what China is – the only surviving ancient civilisation, its history as long as it is unbroken; a place where ancient traditions and memories still live on, rising from the ashes as peacefully as a civilisation possibly could, and is now leading the world into a bright and better future.
There are legends, poems and lessons here dating back thousands of years ago, that even the least educated Chinese person knows by heart, but would elude even the most dedicated western Sinologist.
(DON’T BOTHER WATCHING IT IF YOU CANNOT UNDERSTAND Chinese)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itw2GTN41P8
Contrast this to Taiwan/the Republic of China, where a local teacher went viral recently for protesting the Ministry of Education’s policy of de-Sinicisation. Under the new education reforms, students would be less exposed to Chinese history and culture, and less time would be allocated to the teaching of Chinese classics and poetry.
This is why I could never accept the neoliberal western narrative of Taiwan (ROC) being the “real China”. A regime that is truly legitimate in the eyes of the Chinese people, that truly has the best interests of the Yellow River civilisation at heart, that is truly representative of its people, would not so hastily abandon its heritage in an attempt to appeal to outsiders.
But when you force a people to abandon everything that defined who they are, the question becomes what to replace it with. In Taiwan’s case, attempts at westernisation and Japanisation have both been met with limited success, as have all other attempts at creating an independent “Taiwanese” national identity from scratch. As it turns out, you can’t just artificially create history and culture where before there was none.
This cynical historical nihilism, this dreadful feeling of emptiness and rootlessness, is devastating to the youth of “real China”. They don’t know who they are, what values to hold, where they truly belong, who and what to look up to, what to believe. Even conscription changes nothing – they know not for whom or what they fight (which is why they strongly reject mandatory military service).
At a time when the whole world is beginning to learn Chinese, Taiwan’s politically driven de-Sinicisation is not only counterproductive, but self-sabotaging.
I am glad that in the mainland at least, the best aspects of Chinese culture are being preserved and celebrated, contrary to public perception in certain parts of the world that once invaded, enslaved, slaughtered and stole from the Chinese nation, but now feign to care about our wellbeing.
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Lemme give you an example of why I think it is important to hold on to the wisdom of our ancestors. This part of the Spring Festival Gala features one of Li Bai’s poems that is most fitting for our times. Here is an excerpt:
天生我材必有用,千金散盡還復來!
“The talents bestowed upon me shall certainly be of use; and so what if I have exhausted my fortune? It shall all come back to me!”
Times are tough, and I know many of you are having money problems or self esteem issues. But be confident in knowing that you are not worthless, just keep honing your skills and looking out for opportunities to prove yourself. And rest assured that a bad investment and such is not the end of the world. You will recover financially if you’re a bit more cautious in the future.
From Zhuhai to the world, may all of you have a great Year of the Dragon.
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Italian Sausage Soup
Italian Sausage Soup SpendWithPennies 4
A Fave Flavorful Soup
This soup is a “one-pot wonder” so there is less mess and less clean-up.
You can add any veggie you’d like into this recipe (and swap up the pasta with orzo or any shape you love)!
Use hot or mild sausage to your liking (or even meatballs if you’d prefer).
This soup reheats well making it great for lunches. Freeze in individual portions (before adding pasta) to keep it even longer.
Yield: 7 cups
Ingredients
1 pound hot or mild Italian sausage
1 medium onion, coarsely chopped
1 green bell pepper, cut into half rings
1 (14.5 ounce) can diced tomatoes with juice
1 (15 ounce) can great northern beans
2 (14 ounce) cans beef broth
Ingredients
Italian Sausage Use either mild, sweet, or spicy Italian sausage in this soup. No Italian sausage? No problem, use ground pork, chicken, or beef with the same spices we use in our homemade Italian sausage.
BROTH We use chicken broth in this soup but beef broth works just as well.
VEGETABLES Loads of different kinds of veggies like tomatoes, garlic, zucchini, and onion make this soup filling with lots of nutrients, too. Add whatever is in your fridge!
FLAVORS Add a delicious blend of Italian Seasoning or use your own special blend of favorite spices! We also add Parmesan cheese and fresh parsley as a garnish!
Variations
Feel free to switch up the ingredients with leftovers like adding chicken in place of the sausage, or kale instead of the spinach.
White beans can be replaced with lentils or garbanzos, long grain rice, and a liberal dose of cheese.
Diced potatoes are a good substitute for pasta as well! Add a can of condensed creamy tomato soup for extra-rich broth.
How to Make Italian Sausage Soup
Veggies and sausage with pasta tastes amazing and it’s so easy to make this classic soup!
Brown sausage, with onion & garlic per recipe below.
Add broth, beans, vegetables and simmer until tender. Stir in zucchini for the last few minutes.
In a separate pot, cook pasta al dente, drain. Add to the pot (or to bowls).
Garnish with parsley & Parmesan cheese.
Italian Sausage Soup SpendWithPennies 7
Slow Cooker Method:
Brown sausage, onion, & garlic. Drain.
Add all ingredients except pasta, zucchini and spinach.
Cook on low for 8 hours or high for 4 hours adding zucchini in the last 30-40 minutes.
Stir in cooked pasta and garnish with parsley & Parmesan cheese & serve.
Leftovers
If you plan for leftovers or to freeze this soup, keep the pasta separate and cook fresh pasta for serving.
Keep Italian sausage soup in a covered container in the refrigerator for up to 5 days.
Reheat in the microwave or reheat the whole pot on the stovetop.
Freeze in zippered bags with the date written on the outside.
What has a cop said that left you completely dumbfounded?
I was returning home to NC after a job in Davidson, SC. Red and blue lights come on behind me so I, of course, pull over to the right. A sheriff’s deputy walks up to my window and asked if I knew why I’d been pulled over. I informed him I did not. He requested my license and registration, which I provided. He then stated that I had been driving 65 in a 55. I had been doing 60, so I was speeding but not at the speed he indicated. I asked to see his radar and camera showing he had indeed clocked me at said speed. He said he hadn’t used radar, but instead he’d paced me.
He hadn’t been behind me long enough to do so, so I said again that I hadn’t been driving that fast. He replied with, “You were definitely going 65 because I had to drive that fast to catch up with you.” I sat there in stunned silence, letting that sink in, for a moment. I said, “Excuse me?”. He again said I had been going 65 because he had to go that fast to catch up to me. I asked him, “If I’m going 65 and you’re going 65, how long would it take you to catch up with me?” He said he didn’t know how long it had taken him, but it wasn’t long. I was amused. I asked again and he asked what I was getting at. I informed him that I was just looking for clarification for when I go to court to dispute the ticket. I then told him that if I was going 65 and he was going 65 he would always remain the same distance behind me. This meant I had to have been going slower than 65. I then asked if his patrol camera recorded sound, as I’d be requesting the recording for court.
He handed me my license, advised me to slow down and have a nice day, then went back to his car.
Source is RAND
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What is the most unexplainable thing you’ve witnessed or experienced?
Back in 2000, I worked at the Super 8 hotel in the city where I lived in Tennessee. I worked in housekeeping. The hotel didn’t get a great deal of customers being in a small city.
One morning when I got to work I noticed several full-sized white vans in the parking lot once inside I found out it was a group traveling selling magazines. Almost all of the rooms had been rented which might sound bad but it’s not because if they are staying for any length of time you simply take out trash and make sure they have plenty of towels.
My day goes by fairly quickly. I finished up the last room and was headed towards the laundry room when a guy stepped out of a room and was going in the same direction as me. I notice he is following me but I’m not worried because there are other rooms he could be going to. When he followed Me downstairs is when I felt uneasy because at the bottom of the stairs is laundry room and a small storage room. When I got to the laundry room other maids were in there dropping off laundry and he simply turned and went back up the stairs.
Everything went pretty normal and quite easy because everyone in that group is gone all day selling magazines from door to door so you go in clean up a little make up the beds and restock towels. This is about the 4th day of them being at the hotel I’m cleaning rooms as usual. I clean the upstairs rooms around back last because they are close to the upstairs storage room.
I was on one of the last rooms on my list which was on the back side. I go in make up the bed, vacuum and take out the garbage. I go into the bathroom to count the towels and wash out the tub when I pulled the shower curtain back there stood that guy who followed me to the laundry room. He was fully dressed obviously hiding. My stomach dropped he had no expression on his face just staring at me. He pulled the curtain rest of the way open and started to step out of the tub and the manager of the Hotel hollers here are your towels you called for. Not wanting to turn my back on him I yell I’m in here my boss bitches a little then bring them to me and is beyond mad that the guy is hiding in the shower and makes him leave the room and wait outside till I’m done with his room.
On the way to the office he asked me why I didn’t tell him he was in the room when I called for towels. I would have told him if I had called for towels but I didn’t call laundry and certainly not him for anything . I don’t understand how he got a call to come to that room but I am thankful for whatever happened because a few days after that they left and moved on to a hotel in Knoxville TN where that same guy that hid in the shower raped and stabbed an elderly lady and stole her car. The police said it was the worst crime scene they had seen in a while.
Tony Blinken Back to China: Begging Bowl in one Hand & a Knife in the Other!
Have you heard about Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s upcoming trip to China? Mainstream media will have you believe that he is going to address the path to peace in West Asia, among other global issues. But let me tell you, it’s all a distraction. The truth is, the US government has no intention of truly addressing global issues. They use these high-profile meetings and trips to China as a way to distract the public from the real issues at hand. While they talk about peace in West Asia, they continue to fuel conflicts and wars for their own benefit. Don’t be fooled by the headlines and the fancy speeches. Secretary Blinken’s trip is just a facade, a charade to make us believe that they care about global peace and stability. But in reality, it’s all about politics and power. So, the next time you see news about Secretary Blinken’s trip to China, remember that it’s just a distraction from the truth.
When I lived in Boston, I held numerous engineering management positions. And pretty much managed the engineering projects for automotive, electronics and household products. To do this, I typically managed a team of people; engineers, designers, and techs.
One of my CAD engineers came from Mattel. This is a major toy company in the United States. And he once told me the story of how he introduced his son to Michael Jackson.
At that time, they were producing a Michael Jackson doll, and he came on over to visit the factory and the engineering staff. He was segregated from all the workers, and most people wasn’t aware that he was visiting. But my CAD engineers was. You see, the CEO introduced my engineer to Michael Jackson, and he was told to come back to the factory at 7pm with his kids.
So he did. His six year old son with him.
And there was Michael Jackson, up front and live. Walking to his son calling him by name and giving him a big hello and hug.
His son just stood there in shock.
His mouth was open and he didn’t say a God damn thing.
Michael Jackson went on and chatted up a storm for something like 15 minutes, but he son was paralyzed in shock and didn’t do anything. Just stood there looking up at him.
LOL.
Eventually Michael went away. He gave him a hug and some candy, and his dad got to get a few pictures of them all together.
And that was that.
It’s funny how younger people idolize and adore those who are famous and who sign and perform in the movies. It’s cute, but you know… dangerous.
Today…
What do you think of Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz asking Chinese leader Xi Jinping “to exert pressure on Russia” to end the war in Ukraine?
This shows a clear misunderstanding of the China/Russia relationship.
If Scholz asked Xi to put pressure on Putin to end the Ukraine war, this means that he thinks that China should use economic pressure on Russia and that China is willing to use economic leverage on Russia.
But China does not believe in exerting pressure on Russia this way because in Beijing’s view, the China/Russia economic relationship is working out very well. China gets all the cheap natural gas it needs from Russia; this is essential for China’s economy to keep its factories running and churning out products at prices the whole world can afford. Why would China do this? What would China get in return for putting pressure on Russia? Obviously the US would like to cripple Russia’s economy, and after Russia is carved up into several countries, which country will become the entrée on the US’s menu?
Obviously, it will be China!
So why should China help the US to weaken Russia? It makes no sense!
As for the relationship between Xi and Putin, it is very obvious that they consider the countries as equals. This is why while China has publicly stated it is for peace in Ukraine, it has not applied pressure on the Russian government to make any concessions. At the same time, Beijing has diplomatic relations with Ukraine, and is not happy about the casualties on both sides. But when it comes to economic importance, Russia is much more important than Ukraine.
The idea of putting pressure on another government is something the US has done repeatedly, especially on its European and Asian allies, who have been strong-armed into confronting Russia over Ukraine and China over Taiwan.
Because pressure has been used so much and used effectively, most of the G7 nations are not able to understand that diplomacy is not about the exertion of pressure, but clearly understanding national interests and conveying those interests through the proper diplomatic channels so that crises can be defused before they become too confrontational.
“I saw some politicians say that there appears to be a foreign element behind what’s going on at the universities, like a foreign power that’s instigating and agitating.
Yes, there is, and we all know which foreign power that is.
We all know which foreign country is stoking this crisis, and it sure isn’t Russia, and it sure isn’t China.
No, well, if you wondered why those kids want their schools to divest from Israel, just look at how their schools are treating them because they dared to ask for that.
Those universities are doing the bidding of Israel, not the bidding of China or the bidding of Russia.
They’re not even doing the bidding of those kids’ parents and those kids’ families, and your police are doing the same.
So yes, there is a foreign power behind all this, and it’s precisely that foreign power that the students want their schools to extricate themselves from, and it’s very obvious to everyone.
It couldn’t be more obvious.
It’s as obvious as a baton cracked on the side of your head.
Look, on these campuses, like at Harvard and the Ivy League campuses and so on, you had demonstrations against Russia and in favor of Ukraine; you had that at the Ivy League schools, you had protests against China over Xinjiang and so on.
No zip ties, no arrests, no 550 kids going to jail, no.
But the moment they start demanding that their schools stop partnering with Israel over a genocide, and all hell breaks loose.
There’s no mystery about what foreign country is driving that.”
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Excerpt from remarks by American geopolitical analyst Shahid Bolsen in a video where he speaks about the ongoing protests against the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on university campuses, both in the U.S. and around the world, April 27, 2024.
Plum Chicken
mar 18 chicken plum chilli tray bake 3000×2000 135710 1
Ingredients
2 fryers, cut up
Garlic salt
1/4 cup butter
1 chopped onion
1 (17 ounce) can purple plums (reserve juice)
1 (6 ounce) can frozen lemonade
1/2 cup chili sauce
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon ginger
2 teaspoons prepared mustard
2 drops Tabasco sauce
Instructions
Prepare sauce day before or make and freeze (best when used cold).
Sauce
Pit plums and put in blender to puree.
Cook onion in butter until tender (not brown).
Add plum puree with juice and all other ingredients (except chicken).
Simmer 15 minutes.
Chicken
Sprinkle chicken with garlic salt and bake at 375 degrees F for 45 minutes, skin side up.
Baste with plum sauce.
Bake another 45 minutes, basting generously with sauce until well coated.
Serve with additional heated sauce.
What has a seller ever told you that made you leave that place immediately?
I was about 28 or 29 (a long time ago), I looked young and my Dad came with me to look for a new car. I went to two dealers and basically told each one what kind of car I wanted (the first dealer was a Pontiac dealer and I was interested in a Grand Am, the second dealer was a Chevrolet dealer where I was interested in a Corsica). I also told each salesman how much I could afford for the monthly payment. Each one had a car that met my criteria but I settled on the Corsica. So when my Dad and I came back with the car I was trading in I was ready to sign the papers (that he showed and reviewed with me before) I noticed the numbers had changed and my monthly payment was a lot more than when I reviewed everything previously. I said to the salesman (who was my Dad’s age), these aren’t the numbers you showed me before! He replied well, we have to add in all these fees. I said well when I was here before I told you I wanted to know exactly what my monthly payment would be and now this number is way higher. I told him that I no longer wanted the car at those payments and his response was but we already took your license plate off of your car and put it on the new car. I said well, put it back on my car and my Dad and I left and went back to the Pontiac dealer and got the Grand Am where all the numbers he showed me before were exactly as I expected when I purchased the car. I loved that car and kept it for a long time.
Anti-China news
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Who do you believe if your child is telling you one thing and their teacher is telling you another?
Quick version. My son said the teacher refused his homework and gave him ten zeros in her grade book. Found that hard to believe. Set up meeting with myself, my son, her and principal. I asked her if that was true. A simple yes or no would have worked. Instead she opened her grade and asked me if I saw ten zeros. Instantly I recognized her statement as a non denial denial from Watergate days. I looked at her and said “No but you said it didn’t you. “. She admitted she did. I asked her why. She said she hated my son. I asked her why. Saying no one hated my son he was so nice. She said she hated my son because he reminded her of her son and she hated her son!!! I was also a teacher. High school and a few years later I got her son as a student. The resemblance was remarkable. Very nice young man. Liked by all. As was my son. So sometimes the student is the one to believe.
Why US Wants to Ban TikTok and Wage Economic War on China with Carl Zha and Alex Reporterfy
What did someone do that made you think they were really smart?
I have twin sons. They’re now 15, but when they were around 3 years old, I noticed that whenever we came home from being out, they’d be confronted with the decision of which of their (ridiculously) many toys they were going to play with.
They’d rush into the living room, and Tim went straight for whatever he wanted to play with, and within a few minutes, his brother Nathan would decide that he just had to play with whatever Tim was now deeply engrossed with, and would start a big fight over it or even wrestle it from him forcefully (Nathan was significantly larger).
If my husband or I were around, we’d try and adjudicate, but it always ended in tears and drama.
After a month or two of this, I noticed a change in pattern. All of a sudden, Tim was just giving up his toy to Nathan without a fight. I was worried that he wasn’t standing up for himself, so I said to him: “You know, Tim, you had just as much a right to play with that toy as Nathan.”
He said: “I know. I knew he’d take it from me so I played with something I didn’t mind him taking. This [showing me what he was playing with now] was what I really wanted to play with anyway.”
His cunning has continued to manifest in other ways since then. 🙂
Note: I’ve had dozens of edit suggestions from people from India, who think that “cunning” is a negative/derogatory trait and necessarily synonymous with sneaky and under-handed. I find it an interesting cultural observation that this seems to be a connotation unique to Indian English. In any case, I feel a need to defend my use of this adjective. I’m his mother and adore him, and this is clearly not what I intend; I simply mean that he’s intelligent and views things from multiple angles, and isn’t easy to outwit. 🙂
Intimidation? U.S. B-2 Stealth Overflies Gaza, Low Enough to Be Clearly visible
A United States B-2 Stealth Bomber was sent to fly over the Gaza Strip today, and do so at an altitude wherein the plane was clearly visible to people on the ground.
What kind of a monster, sends a nuclear-capable Bomber aircraft to intimidate people on the ground?
Who in the US Military, ordered this? Why was it done?
Chinese President Xi will pay state visits to France, Serbia, Hungary from May 5 to 10. Why these three countries in Europe? What can we expect from the visit?
April, China’s home diplomatic month is over, May’s away diplomatic month, is kicking off.
On 29 April, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying announced that Xi Jinping would visit the three countries at the invitation of French President Emmanuel Emmanuel Macron, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić, Hungarian President Tamás Sulyok and Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.
Considering that Foreign Minister Wang Yi met with a large number of Asian foreign ministers in April, Xi is expected to meet with a number of Asian leaders upon his return from Europe, and may even attend the “China-Japan-South Korea Summit” to engage with Japan and South Korea, which are close to the U.S. foreign policy.
You know, the United States is shorting the yen.
Japanese media reports: Japan’s Finance Minister expressed to the United States in a pleading tone that the sharp depreciation of the yen is unbearable for us and hopes that the United States will be merciful and temporarily stop shorting the yen.
Xi’s top priority in this round of trips is France.
This year marks the 60th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and France. President Xi Jinping’s first visit to a Western country since 2020 is France, which reflects the importance he attaches to China-France friendship. Similarly, Macron is now in dire need of China’s support.
That’s because after the Sino-French meeting in May, Macron will face two big hurdles in his career:
The European Parliament elections in June
The Paris Olympics in July
At the European Parliament in June, Macron will have to pull in European leaders and seek to snipe at European Commission President Von der Leyen and curb her power.
At the Paris Olympics in July, if Macron seeks to push for a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine or Palestine and Israel as host, he will in doing so become the true boss of Europe, replacing the US manipulation of Europe.
Macron’s conflict with von der Leyen is mainly over trade policy, climate policy, and the relationship between Europe and the United States.
The huge contracts that can be brought about by the massive equipment renewal that China has opened this year, as well as the co-operation in the fields of new energy and nuclear energy, will be Macron’s bargaining chips to convince other leaders in the European Parliament.
If, as Macron wishes, the European Commission President replaced by career bureaucrat Mario Draghi, former President of the European Central Bank, then the EU’s trade and climate policy, will be led by France, in the relationship with Europe and the United States, France can also be more independent and autonomous.
But if Macron’s plan fails, his influence within the EU will be extremely limited for the remainder of his term, and French foreign policy will be tied to the EU.
As for the competition between Macron and Joe Biden, it lies mainly in global leadership, and the proud French have always had a strong desire to challenge the United States in their hearts.
The Olympic Games will be held in Paris in July this year. The gathering of leaders of major countries will naturally become a platform for behind-the-scenes transactions between major countries. It is also the best time for negotiations between Russia&Ukraine, Palestine&Israel.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the UN has developed a practice of mobilising all its members to sign the “Olympic Truce” before each Olympic Games, and ceasing war operations for one month before and after the Games. This one-month window of truce is enough time for the warring parties to calm down, as in the case of the ceasefire in the Yugoslav civil war in the early 1990s.
If they can’t do so during this period, it will be a direct escalation of the conflict.
For example:
Russia raided Georgia during the 2008 Olympics.
Russia raiding Ukraine during the 2022 Winter Olympics.
If Macron succeeds in brokering a ceasefire, it will make Macron the biggest contributor to world peace.
Either enjoy the glory added to it, or be embarrassed in front of the world. In any case, Macron is more or less about to take a gamble.
If Macron wants to do all this, he has only one choice in the face of Von der Leyen and Joe Biden, and that is to draw on mystical forces originating in the East, so he needs Xi’s support.
Everyone wants world peace except the military–industrial–congressional complex (MICC)!
What is the biggest tip that you have ever received as an employee?
I have done my time in the hospitality industry working at about 5 or 6 different restaurants and have been both fortunate and unfortunate when it comes to gratuity.
On two different occasions I received extraordinarily large tips and they were very similar amounts but very different situations.
The first time:
I was one of 3 waiters looking after a group of 25 VIP guests who arrived quite late in the evening as they had attended a formal ceremony earlier in the night. The host guest that night is a well known, very wealthy business man and we were optimistic. Only one course ended up being served, mostly burgers, along with wine & Champagne. It seemed the party was more interested in moving onto the next stop for the night.
The bill total was not that high considering the amount of guests and the usual head spend at this particular restaurant. I believe it was around R8000 (~ $450). In South Africa tipping is usually between 10 – 20% and upon receiving the bill back an expected, somewhat disappointing amount was written on the slip which I cannot remember.
It had been a long night and it looked as if us 3 waiters were not going to walk away with a lot. I informed the host that I would be back with the credit card machine.
Having seen enough evidence to know that good looking waitresses receive better tips from male guests I asked my fellow waitress who is very pleasing to the eye to return to the table with the card machine and to try and charm the host.
I have no clue what she said to him but when she returned from completing the transaction her smile was from ear to ear. The 10/15% tip that we would have received had changed to R1500 (~ $100) for each waiter which equates to R4500 (~ $300) total tip.
The second time:
Working at a different, much smaller, fine dining restaurant I received a tip that was slightly larger than the previous one. There were only 2 waiters working that night and it had reached the point where it looked like no more guests would be joining and we were close to having all the closing duties completed and getting out early.
5 minutes before the kitchen closes and we stop accepting tables and in walks a couple who are met by my fellow, very evidently displeased, waiter. He seats them and asks if I could please serve them as he does not have the patience this late in the night. Even though it was his turn on the rotation I agree and oblige because I had a strong feeling that it would be worth my efforts.
The couple were very aware that they were joining late and were very apologetic to which I dismissed as a non issue and that we were extremely glad to have them join us. I wanted to emphasise that they should not feel rushed and went as far to recommend our specialty 5 course food & wine tasting menu. I did not think they would actually go for it but I must have done a good job in promoting it as both of them decided to take it.
I was able to give them undivided attention as they were the only guests in the restaurant and it was very apparent that they were enjoying themselves. The lady had a few dietary restrictions which our kitchen was able to work around and they continuously raved about the food.
Come the end of their meal I returned to the table with the card machine and I saw the man had written R1600 (~ $110) under the gratuity section on a R1400 bill. I assume he must mean R1600 total which would be a R200 tip. I was willing to accept it as “money I never had before”.
When he was signing the slip he sees the total and said that I put through the wrong amount. I was confused so asked him if I read the number 1600 wrong to which he replied that I never read the number wrong but that was my tip and not the total. I was clearly shocked by this and immediately thinking “I hope I have not just thrown away the biggest tip ever”. He asked me to process his card for the difference which I did while saying thank you about 100 times over.
That same couple returned a few more times while I still worked there and always requested I serve them. They were always extremely generous and on one occasion they tipped every member of our kitchen staff an equal amount to what they tipped me.
Every time they came to dine with us my fellow waiter from that night would want to serve them only for them to request me. My patience the night they visited the restaurant for the first time led to me earning a fair sum of money from that couple over the period of a few months which was extremely helpful while I was a broke student.
American Justice
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Tucker Interviews Aleksandr Dugin. THEY identify the destroyers of Western Values/Civilization.
Why was Rudolf Hess sentenced to life, even though he spent most of the war in the UK as a prisoner of war, while people like Albert Speer got 20 years?
There were multiple requests by the Brits, French and Americans for his release. Some attribute the lack of release due to a conspiracy between former King Edward VIII and Hitler. But that doesn’t appear to hold up since the British supported his release.
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Each of the 11 unilateral British appeals, which dated back to 1957, along with 14 others made separately, or jointly, by the US and French authorities were rejected by an unwavering Soviet rejection. The Soviets wanted Hess locked away for life.
The Soviets alone were responsible for keeping Hess locked up. But why? Some say Soviet insistence that the release of the former deputy Nazi leader would be an insult to the 20 million Soviet war dead. Others that his release could fuel a resurgence of neo-Nazism. But these do not seem legitimate. Far worse Nazi criminals were released. The Soviet dead were not insulted. There was no resurgence of neo-Nazism.
On June 25, 1986, a Soviet guard caught Charles Gabel, the chaplain at Spandau, attempting to smuggle out a statement by Hess, causing Gabel to be fired. Hess had originally written the document as his opening address at the Nuremberg trial in 1946, which he had been unable to deliver in full after the judges cut him off.
Hess tried to mail a copy of the statement to Sir Oswald Mosley in October 1946, but the letter was intercepted by his US guards. Hess’s statement (both the 1946 version and the 1986 version) claimed that Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union was preemptive. In other words, the Soviets were about to attack Germany.
Hess claimed there had been overwhelming evidence that the Soviet Union had planned to attack Germany. He said in the statement that he had decided to make his flight to Scotland without informing Hitler, with the aim of informing the UK of the Soviet danger to “European civilization” and the entire world. He believed his warning would cause the UK to end its war with Germany and join in the fight against the Soviet Union.
If this were true, the Soviets would not want this to be discussed. Their role in the war was as victims. They were attacked by the Germans and responded.But if that is not true. If Hess was correct, the Soviet role in WWII would be completely different. Not the victim, but the aggressor. It would be the Soviets who caused the loss of millions of their citizens, not the Germans. The Soviet role in the Cold War would be on a completely different footing.
Geo-Fencing Added to Car Software! Can Shutdown Car if you drive too far, too long, or where government doesn’t want you!
Vehicle manufacturers have begun issuing software updates which include “Geo-Fencing” to limit how far, how long,, or where they will not be allowed to drive. All done remotely without your consent.
Let’s say government want to limit you to driving only five miles from your home. They can remotely issue a command that will cause your vehicle to simply SHUT OFF if you try to go farther than they want!
Let’s say government wants to keep you away from certain areas, perhaps a protest area. They can remotely Geo-Fence that area, and any car that has an “SOS” Button, can be made to SHUT OFF if it tries to drive toward or into that area.
Defense analysts’ first conclusions from the Middle East and Ukraine missile wars suggest the PLA’s strategic preparations were sound. Let’s see why.
Israel
Theodore Postol, MIT Professor of Science, Technology and National Security Policy, analyzed Iran’s mid-April drone and missile attack on in Israel. A summary:
The evidence shows that all or most of the arriving long-range ballistic missiles were not intercepted by any of the Israeli air and missile-defense systems. Whether drones or not, all of the targets areshot down by air-to-air missiles.
The cost of a drone is $10,000 or $20,000, and the cost of an Iranian cruise missile is about $100,000. Their 4-hour, 1500 km flight to Israel allowed US Navy E-2 Hawkeyes AWACS to very effectively vector fighter aircraft to targets they quickly destroyed. The USAF workhorse air-to-air missile is the $500,000 AIM-9x Sidewinder and the Israeli government says the cost of defending Israel was $1.3 billion! [Non-government sources say $2.3-3.3 billion].
Commercially available technology is now good enough for constructing cruise missiles and drones with capabilities to “recognize” their targets and home on them. This means that the cost of shooting down cruise missiles and drones will be very high – even unsustainable – unless extremely inexpensive and effective anti-air systems can be implemented.
Ukraine
Analyst Armchair Warlord says Russia’s anti-air system is extremely effective and, apparently, financially sustainable:
Artillery shells have become the standard metric of the Ukrainian War, and Soviet-legacy gigafactories burying Western supply chains in mountains of steel its leading story. But shells are just steel. What if I told you the Russians were beating us in high-tech manufacturing?
One of the sleeper stories of the war has been the Russian air defenses’ extraordinary capability to defeat the most difficult targets: Russian SAMs routinely down GMLRS, Storm Shadows, and even AGM-88 HARMs that were specifically designed to destroy them. Russian air defenses in the Crimea have been downing ATACMS missiles – a supposed war-winning superweapon – like pheasants.
But I have never seen anyone remark onRussia’s bottomless supply of modern air defense missiles.
Just that week, they shot down no fewer than 1,715 aerial targets, 95% of them drones. Even assuming 75% of the drones were engaged with small arms or EW, that’s still 400 antiaircraft missiles expended for the week. The Russians do this, week after week after week, and show zero signs that their air defense inventory is even under stress.
Meanwhile the West is out of modern missiles and desperately trying to keep Ukraine going with 1960s systems like HAWK, Chaparral and improvised Sea Sparrow launchers. Guided missiles are not simple to make – they’re complex and require sophisticated manufacturing to tight tolerances. Western manufacturers have never been able to make them in large quantities, even at the height of the Cold War. And yet here the ‘gas station with nukes’ is stamping out enough ammunition to keep their Buks and Pantsirs on the firing line after two years of a war featuring an order of magnitude more aerial targets than any previous conflict.
PLA prescience
Russia and China already share the world’s leading missile defense technology, so we can assume that also share the Niagara of data from both conflicts. Pray for some insightful crumbs from their table.
Until then, however, we can appreciate the PLA’s foresight in building a chain of 24×7, 100% automated, high-precision missile factories, each producing 1,000 rounds a day.
Poland has handed an official request to Washington to have U.S. nuclear weapons hosted in Poland.
No word yet on any need or desire in the US to put such weapons there.
Russia earlier cautioned Poland that nuclear weapons in their country would **not** make Poland any safer. In fact, they said, it would merely make Poland a target for Russian nuclear weapons.
Hal Turner Snap Analysis
Nuclear weapons “hosted” in Poland; Sounds like an exchange student or something innocent , like its a cultural program.
My bet . . . and this is pure conjecture on my part — Poland didn’t actually “request” anything.
They were just told that the US is going to deploy nukes on their territory.
The nukes will be controlled by US of course, not Poland; Poland would have no interest in this affair whatsoever. . . except when they get blown up by Russia for having them so close to Russia.
Is the USA rich because of hard work? What should African countries learn from countries like the USA, Japan and China?
Here are the top five sources of wealth for a Rich American with more than $ 15 Million :-
Portfolio (65%)
Landed Assets (18%)
Liquid Deposits (7%).
Others (10%) [Valuable Paintings, Royalty or Copyright contracts, Depreciating Assets like Cars, Yachts etc]
The Richer you are, the higher your Portfolio wealth is
For instance an American who is valued at more than $ 100 Million has almost 88% of his wealth in Portfolio
Portfolio means Stocks, Equities, Venture Capital Shareholding, Private Hedge Fund Units, Bonds etc
Now take a Middle Class American (Income between $ 68,000 to $ 300,000)
These are the top 5 Sources for his wealth
Mortgage (38%) [Market Value – Amount owed to Bank]
Portfolio (32%)
Insurance (15%)
Pension Plan /401K/Roth IRA(10%)
Savings / Low Yield Bills (5%)
The Average Middle Class American, his wealth comes from the rise in price of his house and how his pension plan works and on his insurance encashments
Portfolio wealth depends on the market and astute investments but no real hard work
Insurance and Pension Plan contributions depend on solid hard work
Yet Portfolio wealth can make you a millionaire whereas Pension Plans and Insurance can just keep you comfortably off
Now take the top 5 Sources of wealth for a Chinese Wealthy (Income > 3 Million RMB a year)
Real Estate Investment (26%)
Gold, Silver, Jade (20%)
Savings (21%)
Profits from Businesses (15%)
Real Estate (9%) [Commercial Rents , Residential Rent]
Do you see portfolio anywhere?
Nopes
It’s why Chinese don’t give a damn about their stock market whereas Americans panic when the market falls sharply for two days
Chinese Wealthy work hard too to make profits from Businesses that form a sixth of their wealth on an Average plus manage Properties and collect Rents on them.
So Chinese Wealthy and the American Middle Class Citizen works far harder than the American Rich whose wealth is based on shrewd investments and portfolio
Provolone Chicken
06 Chicken Provolone
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
4 boneless skinless chicken breast halves, flattened
1/4 cup flavored bread crumbs
2 teaspoons dried Italian herbs
4 slices Provolone cheese
1 teaspoon butter
4 cups cooked spaghetti or vermicelli noodles, buttered
Instructions
Heat oven to 425 degrees F.
Place bread crumbs in a flat dish and firmly press both sides of the chicken into the crumbs.
Place coated chicken pieces in a greased 9 x 13-inch baking dish.
Sprinkle with Italian seasoning, and top with cheese.
Dot with butter and bake for 20 minutes or until done.
Serve with buttered pasta.
This Is How They Treat Foreigners In Shanghai
Thank you, you changed my thinking about the beautiful Chinese people. I did not expect them to be so courteous, kind and humble.
What was your scariest “something’s not right” moment?
The minute I hugged my mom for the first time in three years, alarm bells rang so loud I could hear them screaming: Brain tumor.
I am studying in China, 6,217 km away from my family, I do not contact them much. I am not a big fan of traveling so I didn’t travel back and forth much either, in 2016 I decided to visit Jordan because I was feeling homesick and I heard news that my mother’s health wasn’t good.
My mom was around 42 years old at that time,chronically suffering from hypertension “high blood pressure”, she took the medications but she had a poor attitude towards keeping the blood pressure levels under check, so everyone in the family attributed her chronic headaches at that time to the hypertension.
After a long tiresome flight I reached home and met my mom at the door, she hugged me tight and suddenly her whole body leaned to the left. I didn’t understand what was happening at the time so I kept on hugging her until I noticed that she kept on leaning farther, I tried to support her weight but I was tired and couldn’t do it due to the awkward position so I told her: mom, you’ll fall, watch out!” she stood up, and we started talking, and oh boy, the alarm bells were drumming up a hole in my brain, I was terrified.
My mom slurred in her speech. Why did the rest of the family not notice that? Maybe because mom used to wear poor-fitting dentures in the past and it made her slur up, so they thought the same thing is happening now, and said we will get the dentures checked soon.
Besides the gait disturbance and the slurring, my mom made several edgy or —inappropriate — statements throughout the conversation. But the thing that made my bones jump, was how she yelped in pain when she coughed and said, “Every time I cough, my head splits in half”, and of course, that was attributed to the high blood pressure by the family and her primary care physician.
I went to a room and sat alone, I was freaking out. My vacation is 10 days, and I needed to explain what I’m thinking to the family so that actions can be made. I thought for a long time about that and about how can I approach my mom with that news. The latter part terrified me. Why? Because when I told my mom we might need to go and get her blood pressure checked, she screamed at me; I was taken aback. She screamed that she will not see a doctor, that I am not a doctor and I should not be acting like one and that she hates doctors.
She had seen plenty of doctors in her life, but that aggressive note was new.
Eventually the next day I convinced her to go with me to the doctor. I got her to the MRI room and asked the radiologist to let me stay with him so I can see the picture as it comes out.
Time stopped when I saw that MRI, and I knew at that moment that our lives are about to change. The tumor was huge, it had been growing for years undetected, years of slow personality changes, years of chronic headaches and years of unawareness. Thankfully, my mother agreed to have the surgery to remove the tumor, and she sprung back to her old, lively wonderful self.
This incident changed me and my family for good; my family became way more health conscious and I became more focused on the goal of becoming a good doctor. You see, if only one of her primary care physicians had looked — truly looked — at her gait or at how she screamed in pain when she coughed, they might have found this tumor much earlier.
How did Hitler react upon learning that Churchill would be replacing Chamberlain as Prime Minister?
Churchill had for years been warning of Hitler. He had warned of his rearming as well as intent to overrun large parts of Europe. Hitler knew that Churchill was the very last Brit that he wanted in as PM. If negotiated peace were the goal, someone else would need to be PM.
So Hitler publicly referred to Churchill by many names. His hope was that the British people would realize the mistake they had made. Hitler repeatedly referred to Churchill as a drunkard.
“As lunatics like that drunkard Churchill and Maccabeans and numskulls like that brilliantined dandy Eden are at the helm we’ve to be prepared for just about anything!”
But that was not all. He referred to Churchill as “a senile clown”, “gangster”, “bloodthirsty guttersnipe”, and “undisciplined swine” among other things.
Notably you will find no such invectives used by Hitler against Chamberlain. But such insults did not sway British foreign policy.
Hitler saw Churchill as his greatest obstacle. He remarked:
“If Churchill were suddenly to disappear, everything could change in a flash. The British aristocracy might perhaps become conscious of the abyss opening before them— and might well experience a serious shock! These British, for whom, indirectly, we have been fighting and who would enjoy the fruits of our victory…”
At some point he realized that negotiations with Churchill could not take place. Only after Churchill was defeated would the British be willing to talk.
Hitler remarked to von Brauchitsch, the commander in chief of the German Army, that “the British will be ready to talk only after a beating.
Hitler’s reaction to Churchill being chosen as PM was reality, the reality that the worst man in Britain for Hitler had be chosen. There would be no easy victory. There would be no short war. There would be no more bullying.
Mark Sleboda: Putin just Dropped BOMBSHELL Warning to NATO and Ukraine’s Army is Done For
China’s $170BN Gold Rush Triggers Taiwan Invasion Fear
Beijing appears to be stockpiling gold following a record buying spree, in a move that has raised fears China is preparing its economy for a possible conflict over Taiwan – guarding it against potential Western sanctions.
The People’s Bank of China bought 27 tons of gold in the first three months of the year, taking its reserves to a record high of 2,262 tons, according to data from the World Gold Council.
What is the best life advice you would give?
Keep a healthy distance from all people, including your friends. They could bring you down with their baggage if you are not careful.
Job is just a job. Don’t make it your priority.
Be very sure you want to get married and have kids. Many people get trapped in a situation where they keep on asking this “What if” after 10 or 20 years into marriage.
If possible, spend more time with your family, especially your parents. From your 20s to 40s, you will be too busy looking out for yourself. All of a sudden, your parents will become “old” like you never noticed.
Don’t expect people to come to your rescue. Own your actions and consequences and suck it up.
Tomorrow is not necessarily going to be a better day. Tomorrow is just another day.
Stop reading a self-help book if you are not self-aware.
Life is actually fair. It has no mercy on anyone.
If Jewish students don’t feel safe at university, does that automatically mean American can’t support Palestine and free of speech?
I laugh my ass off at this oh I’m so victimised mentality.
I still remember it 2 decades ago when I moved to London. A box fell off the back of a builders flatbed, near a Synagogue. They immediately phoned the police and said these bomb threats are a sign of anti you know what. Turns out it was just that a carboard box that had fallen off the back of a builders flat bed.
Anyway they don’t feel safe?
Let me give you some figures from the UK.
One group totals 400,000 people this figure is disputed as it includes citizens but they may not actually be there. They form 0.7% of the population yet face 4% of all the violent crime. 15% of them have faced violence with 51% of facing slurs and racist name calling.
Meanwhile one group is about 270,000 and have faced drum roll 1600 you know what incidents each year. OMG American maths means 1600 is bigger than 200,000 incidents of racism or nearly 30,000 instances of racism.
Yet one group gets all laws to protect them, gets news coverage, representation in government and one doesn’t.
Funny how one group matters and all others don’t doesn’t it?
So SATISFYING! I chose a random fairytale and found that the nasty “princess” got put to work. Ha!
I love all of this. How all these historical traditional stories were changed by social re-engineering. Fascinating!
Loving these unfiltered, brutal, unwokified stories.
When did the negative perception of masculinity begin?
This is a byproduct of the American “Woman’s Rights” movement.
The initial intention was for gender equality, where women would be treated as equals with men. Eventually, a more radical sub-branch of the movement took control and steered the movement towards an anti-male bias. Over the years, they acquired wealthy and powerful contributors, and used their positions in government to fund and control the narrative. Resulting in the destruction of the American male.
This women’s rights movement in the United States has gone through several stages.
Each stage has been marked by specific goals, accomplishments, and challenges.
First Wave (19th Century – Early 20th Century)
– Focused on legal issues, particularly women’s suffrage (the right to vote).
– Key events: The Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, organized by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott; the adoption of the 19th Amendment in 1920, granting women the right to vote.
This initial stage is often erroneously considered to be reasonable, but a look at the amendments to the constitution clearly show that the movement removed the stable “Head of the Household” voting role towards one where anyone can vote. Thus, this movement, during the FIRST WAVE, significantly altered the federal government and the spending trajectory of the United States.
The United States moved from a Republic to a democracy.
Demographics changed substantially. Voting profiles changed radically, and a “nanny state”
became the norm, as the female voters started to demand a government that took on a parental role; thus a government with a greater role in the lives of Americans.
Additionally, history was rewritten. An active effort was made to rewrite the old European fairy tales to something supportive of first wave feminist belief structures. So, for instance, the Grimm Fairy Tales were rewritten from a structured give-and-take, with harsh lessons, to that of “Prince Charming”, and “one’s wishes can come true”.
There were other initiatives as well. The “Temperance movement” of the 1920’s was led by radical feminists and it resulted in the forced nationwide ban of alcohol, and the surge in organized crime. All the time while destroying the “freedoms” that American enjoyed.
And finally, let’s not forget that the first wave feminists brought in great federal-level social re-engineering evil masterminds; Coolridge, Herbet Hoover and then Taft.
Second Wave (1960s – 1980s)
– Emphasized a broader range of issues, including equality in the workplace, education, reproductive rights, and legal rights.
– Key events: Publication of “The Feminine Mystique” by Betty Friedan in 1963; the establishment of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1966; the passage of the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.
– Advocacy for reproductive rights, including the landmark Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade in 1973.
During this wave, the “rights” of women altered the workplace, the Geo-political scene, the educational system, and the kinds of movies and shows on televisions and extracted out of Hollywood. It was during this wave that the notion of a traditional family was discarded, and men started to be depicted as buffoons and useless clowns.
It was during this time that marriage longevity was destroyed; that divorce became the normal. That a two income household become the norm, and housewives rearing their own children was considered stupid.
There is a direct correlation between divorce rates and the implementation of pro-feminist initiatives. This was the era of the destruction of the family. As the women entered the work-place, forced layoffs, firings and short-duration employment became the norm.
Third Wave (1990s – Early 2000s)
– Focused on diversity and intersectionality, addressing issues of race, class, sexual orientation, and gender identity within the context of women’s rights.
– Emphasized individualism and a more inclusive approach to feminism, acknowledging different experiences and perspectives.
This wave turbocharged the fall of traditional values, and the “career women” entered the work force with government sanctioned privileges that harmed the male roles. The court systems, and child service systems became co-opted by this movement and became hostile to males.
While the second wave feminists vocalized equality, this wave argued superiority at all levels and promoted benefits, and privileges that men were denied.
Laws and rules, from family law to corporate law favored females. Lower skilled females were engaged in once-dominant male activities to meet hiring quotas. The result was a gradual decline in the quality of the American work-force.
Fourth Wave (Mid-2000s – Present)
– Characterized by the use of digital and social media to advocate for women’s rights and mobilize anti-male activism.
– Focus on sexual harassment, gender-based violence, and the #MeToo movement.
– Greater attention to intersectionality, considering how various aspects of identity intersect and impact the experiences of women and non-binary individuals.
It’s a real problem.
The damage has already been done.
Presently, in the United States and it’s proxy nations, under the LGBQ+ rainbow flag, the male gender is ridiculed, minimized, and berated to a point where various social phenomenons have occurred. To include…
Young men in the 20s have stopped dating.
Young men tend to be virginal, while young women engage in serial promiscuity.
The “Soft man” era where men have “checked out”.
A drop in college and university admissions for men.
A push back on dating with the “drizzle drizzle” movement.
American men are leaving the United States as “passport bros” and not returning.
The changing demographics and the ten year forecast for citizens within this toxic anti-male environment is contentious. Historically, very BAD things happen when large sections males in a nation are hurt, abandoned, ridiculed and disparaged.
1. If your house smells fishy for no reason, 9 times out of 10 it means there is an electrical fire.
2. If you ever feel like someone is following your car, turn right four times and it will eventually go in a circle. If they are always behind you, it means they are following you. Don’t drive home, just call the police and drive to the police station
3. If a service dog ever approaches you without its owner, follow it and do so quickly because you could potentially save someone else’s life.
4. If someone tries to kidnap you, fight back. Most kidnappers will simply give up if they encounter resistance. And whatever you do, don’t let them take you anywhere else.
5. If the tide suddenly goes out unexpectedly, run like you stole it, for higher ground.
6. If you are ever attacked by a moose, get behind a tree…they have about a ten inch blind spot and they will lose you…
7.When people say to take an aspirin to help during a heart attack, chew the pill, don’t swallow it whole. It is absorbed much faster.
8. If someone asks you for something on the street – a light, the time, whatever – always keep the person in your line of sight. So if they ask you the time, don’t just look at your watch. Raise your arm slightly so that your watch is in view.
9. If you’re in danger or need help, in a public place, it’s almost always a bad idea to just yell “help.” It’s more important to be specific. Pointing your finger at someone and telling them to call 911 will be more effective. The bystander effect can sometimes be cruel.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. – The Threat of China is Wildly Overstated
Robert F. Kennedy gives three main reasons why he believes the threat of China is wildly overstated.
I like his overall message, but I disagree with his idea that the USA can block shipping, and that without Walmart, China would collapse. I disagree that the Chinese “are on the edge of revolt”.
But still, it’s nice to hear a different voice out of the USA.
Working as an engineer, and getting laid off every 6 to 9 months or so wasn’t a very stable life. I really don’t know why I put up with it. I somehow had this idea that it would eventually end, and things would change.
But nope.
It never did.
As a result, as soon as I would start a new job (always in a new state, in a new geographic city) I would have to start fresh. Hustling at work, then rushing home to set up the household.
And by the time that things were settled down to some kind of state of normalcy, I’d get the rug ripped out from under me yet again.
Sigh.
Always on a Friday.
Or, the day right before a holiday, like Christmas.
All that time, I really didn’t have the time and resources to furnish a house properly. So I would grab and pick and place what ever was needed at the time. And yes, I did have a nice set of living room sofas and tables when I was in training at China Lake.
But that was the exception.
Not the rule.
Oh, and I did buy a great “sleigh” bed that was simply awesome! But that is not germane to this story, anyways.
However, I did splurge once.
I did. I bought something for myself.
After my divorce from my first wife finally occurred, and youse guys know how difficult it is to divorce a person with a mental illness, I celebrated by buying myself a nice leather chair.
It was a real, old fashioned chair, fully upholstered in real leather, and I loved it.
So did my cats.
They would claw it all the time, and the hide would never tear. Thus giving the chair a nice rustic and worn look. Ah, I did love that thing.
But life happens.
When I was carted off to prison, my “friends” took my belongings and I haven’t seen them since. Same with all my books and electronics.
All gone.
Sigh.
…
Anyways, us men don’t need much.
A computer; a big screen. A nice chair. A bed.
That’s about it.
If you do want to be spartan and have something comfortable, invest in a top of the line, leather chair. You will never regret it.
No matter how much it costs.
chair
Trust me on this.
A man needs his very own chair.
HIS chair.
Not a chair for the dogs to take over, or the kids to play on. That’s “daddy’s chair” Keep off of it.
A man needs a chair.
Today…
Does it bother you that TikTok CEO, Shou Chew, is repeatedly asked if he is a member of the Chinese Communist Party despite being Singaporean?
Yes, it does.
This is a deliberately loaded question asked by Sen. Tom Cotton repeatedly to score propaganda points in the US media. This is because most Americans have been taught to have an irrational hatred of the word “Communist”, without understanding that the word is simply a relic from the Party’s founding in 1921.
Saying that the Communist Party of China believes in Communism is like saying that the US Democratic Party believes that the US is a democracy, while the Republican Party believes that the US is a republic. While there is some basis to this, the policy differences between both parties are much more profound than what is reflected in their names.
Many Americans continue to believe that the CPC is dedicated to “defeating” the US, and converting American society to a form of government like China’s.
In fact, the Chinese government is pro-development and pro-trade, because China has grown to the world’s second-largest economy in fifty years by introducing capitalist policies supported and promoted by the US, and participating in trade organizations like the World Trade Organization (WTO).
US politicians and the media have repeatedly accused Chinese companies of IP violations and violating the rules, but this is something all growing economies have done in their history. In the second half of the nineteenth century, this was what US inventors, entrepreneurs and manufacturers did to Europe.
To sum up, the use of this language is part of a concerted effort to dehumanize any business which has been successful in China, and is now successful outside China.
This dehumanizing paves the way for more extreme measures and actions in the future.
Unfortunately, this rhetoric has been used repeatedly in the US’s past with American Indians, Irish, Italians, Chinese in the 19th century, African-Americans, Jews, Japanese-Americans, Hispanics and Muslims.
Now it is the turn of the Chinese again.
Pretzel Chicken
Pretzel Chicken
Yield: 8 servings
Ingredients
8 pieces of your favorite cut of chicken
1 cup pretzel crumbs
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
Salt and pepper to taste
Garlic powder, to taste
Paprika to taste
1/2 cup soy sauce
2 tablespoons lemon juice
Instructions
Crush pretzels in blender.
Mix (in a bowl or paper bag) pretzels, flour, salt, pepper, garlic powder and paprika.
In another bowl, combine soy sauce and lemon juice.
Dip chicken pieces into liquid mixture, then roll around (or shake in paper bag) in dry mixture.
Put the coated pieces in a shallow or flat pan lined with foil.
Bake at 375 degrees F for one hour.
Turn over chicken over after 30 minutes.
U.S. foreign policy isolates the U.S.
This is a very, very good discussion.
As I have said many times: the isolator becomes isolated. People are sick of the bully and are fighting back.
In a country with universal healthcare, is there a limit to how much you will be cared for?
Yes there is. I have experience of both the UK NHS and also HK’s system.
I’ve lived under the PRC system but don’t have much experience with it as I don’t get ill and hopefully this will remain the same for a long time.
The UK has NICE – National Institute of Clinical Excellence.
For regular injuries and stuff no, I had my nose and fingers broken many many times from fights in the UK, they kept putting me back together, but for more complex treatments…
In short they decide what drugs can be used, what to treat and how many treatments you can be given of something. Some drugs under NICE are too expensive for the benefit. So they’re not purchased or used by the NHS. Some treatments like IVF are limited in how many times you can have it.
In HK? There is a nominal fee, but there have been cases where there is strict rationing, the HK medical system is very pain killer happy. They’ll give you painkillers even if you’re quite badly hurt and tell you to go away. There’s 5–6 pretty tragic cases of somebody needing an organ. Organ donation is iffy here due to cultural things. But I remember several men, they found a viable liver / kidney. But they couldn’t perform the transplant as they simply didn’t have the budget to carry out the surgery so they had to wait till the next tax year. But by then the organ had been given to somebody else.
The Dating Scene DESTROYED Them But Women Keep Coming Back For More
This is a great Video. This brings back painful memories which i have been enduring. My relationship of 5 years ended 3 months ago. The love of my life decided to leave me, I really love her so much I can’t stop thinking about her, I’ve tried my very best to get her back in my life, but to no avail, I’m frustrated, I don’t see my life with anyone else. I’ve done my best to get rid of the thoughts of her, but I can’t, I don’t know why I’m saying this here, I really miss her and just can’t stop thinking about her.
Have you ever witnessed a tragedy at a wedding?
The culmination of “Murphy’s Law” in excess.
When I was 20, my two good friends, E and S, were getting married. I had known him, E, since high school, and her, S, since the start of college.
They were both those clumsy types of people — you know the type who seems to always trip on that small thing, or slip on that patch of ice.
While at their wedding, it seemed that their clumsiness transferred to everyone and everything else—meaning that nearly everything that could go wrong, did, in fact, go wrong.
Here’s a summary list, instead of the whole story:
Power cut out while everything was being set up—this was not the only power outage that would happen.
The priest who was to wed them was late—got in a fender-bender accident on the way.
The rings were supposed to be delivered by the best man. He forgot them. So he had to drive the one hour round trip to get them.
The photographer dropped his camera and shattered it. He said not to worry, he had a backup—he dropped it, too. Their pictures were taken by standard cameras from relatives.
When the priest finally arrived, he slipped on someone’s spilled coffee, breaking his wrist. He still conducted the ceremony.
The air conditioning quit working after the second power outage, right as the music to walk down the aisle was starting. It would get so hot that everyone was sweating profusely by the end.
When the groom, E, was waiting at the altar, the power went out again. A few laughs, a few groans, and quite a bit of murmurs of annoyance were all that could be heard.
As the ceremony began, the priest had the wrong names—called them two women’s names. Awkwardness at best.
The best man passed out, mostly due to the stress of having to race back to his house to get the rings and the heat inside once the AC cut out.
One of the relatives in the back got into a fight with another and had to be escorted out of the building.
Power went out once more as vows were being said.
After they’re officially married and exiting, the bride slipped on some thrown “bird-friendly” rice. The groom got one in his eye.
The printed instructions to the reception took everyone to the wrong entrance, which, as it is set up, means that everyone was beyond confused on how to circle the whole compound just to get to the other side. It took 20 minutes for people to make some signs and stand on the corner to redirect people where to go.
They had an open bar. A drunken uncle loudly wished, over the microphone, them the best “F*cks of their lives.”
A jaded ex of the groom’s (also an old acquaintance of mine) tried to crash the reception and make a scene – thankfully she was handled by the reception hall’s security.
Finally, they both fell during the bride/groom dance.
They’re both still happily married, 10 years later, and just as clumsy as ever.
CONFIRMED: Dengue Fever Outbreak in Brazil and Peru – Millions Sick, Thousands Dead
Brazil surpassed 4 million cases of dengue fever registered this year, according to an update from the Ministry of Health’s Arbovirus Monitoring Panel this Monday. Argentina now has its own outbreak.
In total, 4,127,571 probable cases of the disease were reported across the country in the first four months of 2024.
As for dengue deaths, 1,937 have been confirmed and 2,345 are under investigation. The incidence rate of the disease in the country is 2,032.7 cases for each group of 100,000 population.
The most affected age group is 20 to 29 years old, which accounts for the majority of cases. The least affected age group is children under 1 year old, followed by people aged 80 or over and children aged 1 to 4 years old.
The units of the Federation with the highest incidence of the disease are the Federal District, Minas Gerais, Paraná, Espírito Santo, Goiás and Santa Catarina.
Projections released at the beginning of the year indicate that dengue cases in the country could reach 4,225,885. With the country already seeing over 4.1 Million cases, that estimate is way low.
It is noteworthy that about 6 weeks ago Bill Gates & Oxitec released genetically modified mosquitoes in Brazil.
PERU
Deaths caused by the mosquito-borne dengue disease have more than tripled in Peru so far this year, according to data from the South American nation’s government, which is redoubling efforts to contain an epidemic that has hit poor areas the hardest.
The government this week said it had approved an “emergency decree” allowing extraordinary economic measures to bolster the plan to counter the outbreak.
Mild symptoms include nausea, rashes and body pains, while a rarer severe form, more threatening for infants and pregnant women, can cause internal bleeding and is potentially fatal.
Peru’s health ministry said that as of Thursday, there were 117 registered deaths from dengue so far this year compared with 33 in the same period of 2023. Suspected cases have also more than tripled to reach some 135,000.
So Bill Gates and his pals released mosquitos in South America, and now Brazil and Peru are suffering wild Dengue Fever Outbreaks. I have questions….and not about climate change.
Africa will Be the New China Very Soon – Economist Jeffrey Sachs.
“Africa is a continent brimming with potential. From its rich natural resources to its vibrant cultures and entrepreneurial spirit, Africa is poised to become a global powerhouse
“Africa’s potential lies in its youthful population, its expanding markets, and its increasing connectivity to the global economy. With the right investments and policies, Africa can unleash a wave of innovation and growth that benefits both its people and the world.”
“One of Africa’s greatest assets is its abundant natural resources, including minerals, oil, and arable land.”
“With sustainable management and responsible investment, Africa’s natural wealth can drive economic development and lift millions out of poverty.”
“Africa’s potential extends beyond its resources. It’s a hotbed of innovation and creativity, with a burgeoning startup ecosystem that’s generating solutions to some of the continent’s most pressing challenges.”
From fintech to renewable energy, African entrepreneurs are harnessing technology to drive social impact and economic progress.”
“Africa’s cultural diversity is another source of strength and potential. Its art, music, and traditions are capturing global attention and driving tourism and cultural exchange.”
What is the reason behind Chinese companies, such as Huawei, choosing to purchase from TSMC instead of constructing their own fabs?
In the early days of the semiconductor industry, technical difficulty and investment were relatively small, and a single company could complete all aspects of design, manufacturing, and testing. For example, Intel in the 1990s completed all aspects alone.
As Moore’s Law continues to develop, semiconductors are becoming more sophisticated and complex. The cost for a single company to complete all links is getting higher and higher, and resource utilization is getting lower and lower. As a result, division of labor began to appear throughout the industry. After entering the 21st century, semiconductor design, manufacturing, packaging and testing are often completed by professional companies.
Semiconductor design companies focus on designing semiconductors and applying them in their own fields. Semiconductor manufacturing companies focus on production, and they do not care about design and application. This will help these companies leverage their own strengths and maximize the use of assets, thereby reducing costs and improving efficiency.
China’s semiconductor companies emerged in the 2010s, when the world’s semiconductor division of labor was already very mature. Their scale cannot be compared with companies like Intel or AMD, or Qualcomm. To compete with leading companies, they must adapt to this division of labor, reduce their costs to the greatest extent, and improve their competitiveness. Even traditional semiconductor giants like AMD and Qualcomm entrust semiconductor production to manufacturers like TSMC.
Therefore, it is very normal for companies like Huawei to entrust semiconductor manufacturing to companies like TSMC. It would be foolish and unreasonable for them to build their own production capacity from scratch and try to replace TSMC.
This is reflected in a reporter’s interview with Huawei CEO Yu in 2020. He told reporters: We used to believe very much in global division of labor, and we believed that global division of labor was the most efficient option. Therefore, US sanctions have made us very passive. If we had chosen to invest in semiconductor manufacturing, we would not be facing these troubles today.
Obviously, it is political behavior that destroys the natural selection of the market, and the global division of labor in semiconductors is destroyed.
KNOCKOUT: China’s BOLD Move Threatens To Dethrone The US In Europe’s Economy
In a bold move, China is moving fast to court the EU economy away from the US. President will be visiting France, Serbia and Hungary to show Europe there are big benefits in partnering and trading with China. More importantly, building China’s trade allows them to secure their economy against US economic sanctions. Here’s what you must know!
How can the Indian government support and empower farmers to enhance their role in the country’s economy?
When asked a question like this, with respect to India, I always find out
What did the Chinese do?
Next I find out
What are the mistakes the Chinese did?
Next I find out
How can we modify the Chinese solution to suit India given the differences in Land ownership, Laws and Political system?
Facts:-
Now China is a nation of 1.4 Billion people just like India is
In both these nations, Agriculture is a sustenance activity
This means the priority is to FEED 1.4 BILLION PEOPLE rather than use Agriculture and convert it into a Fully Profit based commercial model
Unlike Brazil, Russia or Ukraine where Agriculture is a fully commercial activity like any other with a fully established profit motive
So in both India and China – the Farmer is NOT a businessman working on a profit motive
His priority is to grow as much food grains as possible to ensure the country can eat
India and China both depend on the Supply Side Model
This means farmers grow the maximum crop they can produce and THEN demand is catered to
If there is excess, prices fall and if there is a deficit, prices rise and the Nation imports to bring down prices or uses RESERVE STOCKS
Thus it’s clear that
The Farmer is not a Businessman and treating him like one is a big minus
It is clear that the Farmers only job must be to efficiently grow crops and get a high yield
It is someone else’s Job to protect the farmer from market price shocks and to ensure the farmer can sustain himself and grow
In China – this role is adopted by the State
The State sets a fair price, The State sets the storage and transportation costs, The State provides the seed and facilities, The State gives insurance against floods and bad weather
In India – this role is not fulfilled properly by anyone
Prices are set by exploitative and opaque bodies in the name of market forces, Seed and facilities are private and depend on loans, Insurance is a rarity and non existent on any but largest holdings
Thus Capitalism is brutally exploited
In China a farmer can get a Tractor on a State loan and flexibly pay across a 5 year period with no interest
In India, a farmer borrows at 10.50% interest and can repossess the tractor if 3 months interest isn’t paid
Thus the first thing to do is to
Offer Nationwide Insurance against Crop failures to farmers which should include payment of bank interest for 6–9 months at least
Get the State to handle Storage and Distribution of Grain or get a State -Private Body Joint Venture to do so at fixed capped costs
Change the nature of Agricultural financing
You do this, then the next step is to take care of the operational aspects of Agriculture
NEEDED TO BE SAID!!! | Oliver Anthony – Rich Men North Of Richmond REACTION!!!!
THIS MAN SPEAKS TRUTH TO POWER!! His words echo in my old soul!
What made you emotional today?
An old man named Leonard Mack cried today in court. His attorneys comforted him. In 1975, Mack was a 23-year-old Vietnam veteran, he had a two-year-old daughter and a newborn son. His family meant the world to him. Then, just as he was beginning to find his way in this world, he was falsely accused of raping a teenage girl…
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Leonard Mack, an innocent man, landed behind bars. And for almost eight years he remained imprisoned. He missed vital parts of the childhood of his son and daughter. Missed first steps, first words. Life passed him by, and all he could do was be an onlooker from afar, frozen in time, stuck in a steel and concrete hellhole… when he was freed, he was now in his thirties, and forced to go through life as a felon and a registered sex offender. His life, in a sense, was over before it began in earnest. It’s only now that Mr. Mack was finally exonerated in full, and declared innocent.
It took almost half a century for a DNA database proved another man was guilty of the crime for which Mack served the time and suffered the pain. Using DNA to solve crimes is a beautiful invention… but I am often haunted by the thought of all those countless souls who suffered unjustly for the crimes of others, before such technologies were known or widely available to law enforcement.
The Perversion of Marriage & The Assault On Christianity
Palestinian Muslim here, and do I respect all Christian denominations but Orthodoxy has a special place in my heart, not only because Orthodox Christians are more aligned with my people’s political stance but also because of they are the most outspoken group against degeneracy
What do they eat in the UK that an American wouldn’t?
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Image: Me visiting the Spam Museum in Austin, Minnesota.
I came to live in the United States in April 2006. I have an American wife and I have persuaded her to cook several British foods that are rarely eaten in the United States.
Interesting to me a visit to the Spam Museum in Austin, Minnesota taught me that the canned pork product is much more loved outside the US than at home. Personally despite what you might think with the photo, my visit took me to the very gates of heaven.
Somethings that can’t be found in the US easily.
Ox tongue, it can be found shredded in many Mexican supermarkets as Lingua, but it is not generally found as a sliced meat. My wife has bought a tongue a couple of times and prepared it. It is a long process to do that properly so often I opt for the shredded variety.
Black pudding. Often called by Americans Blood Sausage, it is very difficult to buy because it does contain blood and many people don’t imagine they would like it. Sadly I would have more for me, if only the blood was a legal food additive.
Heinz Baked beans. I find it puzzling that the humble baked bean found in every British grocers and supermarket is almost unknown in the US. Heinz being a US company and all. But they can be purchased in specialist stores that cater to ex patriot British and of course Amazon.
Lamb or Ox liver is difficult to find. The ability to buy offal is extremely limited. It seems Americans just much prefer the outside muscle meat rather than the more nutricious insides of animals. Offal in general is awfully expensive when you find it.
Lamb, Ox or Pig Kidneys. Again it’s offal see Liver.
Fruit Cake. For some reasons Americans like their cakes to be puffy, sweet and overly iced confections. I have tried to eat some American varieties of fruit cake. Finding them to have the weight and consistancy of house bricks. The art of good fruit cake making has not survived in the US.
Mushy Peas: My wife makes me mushy peas to go with my fish and chips. I don’t know why Americans cannot find the heart to love a good spoonful of mushy peas. After all it is a simple product, boiled peas but I am sure if one charged $50 per spoonful on a Las Vegas strip tasting menu they would be raved about on the Food Network and have competitions to the chef making the best mushy pea ever.
Scotch Eggs. My wife quickly learned to make Scotch Eggs. Hard boiled eggs wrapped in a coat of sausage meat. Simple but fr some reason it confounds many Americans that one could combine the two, yet thy eat sausage or sausage patties and eggs for breakfast at times.
Shandy, the 50–50 mix of Bitter and Lemonade. It can’t be bought in stores like it can in Britain, but can be recreated, I buy imported Newcastle Brown Ale and use 7 Up as a lemonade substitute. One place I ordered Shandy in the US filled the glass with Bud Light and added a drop, I mean a real drop of 7 Up. Nowhere near a 50–50 mix and not particularly satisfying on a hot California day.
These are just a few things that I have come across. I have also found many regional American foods that are very good and interesting to eat, many of which have roots in old European everyday working peoples foods. Filling, high calorie and hunger supressing foods to go to work on in the morning and kept you full all the working day.
Most foods from home I can either recreate or use what is available to substitute. So there is no real hardship on my part.
Brown bag chicken is a vintage cooking method that produces delicious, juicy chicken every time. Perfect for any poultry, too!
If you love the way a bird turns out in those plastic oven bags, but wish there was an alternative then I’m here to make that wish come true for you.
Plastics can impart unhealthy chemicals into foods, so if you’ve gone to the trouble to source local, pastured, organic poultry you don’t want to ruin it with petrochemicals right? Today, I’m sharing how I make delicious, moist, tender and flavorful Brown Bag Chicken (and even holiday Turkeys!) What? Baking in a brown paper bag? Yes, you read that right – in an ordinary brown paper bag.
Apparently, making Brown Bag Chicken has been around for several decades.
Although I could not exactly pinpoint what era in which it began, it seems like perhaps the 40s or 50s. I always feel like I should be wearing pearls, heels and one of those poofy-skirted dresses when I make this. And, depending on the day, I might feel like I got some ‘splainin to do, even though my name is not Lucy. Maybe that’s because I like to watch I Love Lucy re-runs while I’m cooking.
There are two divided camps on this method.
The Once You Cook in a Brown Paper Bag You’ll Never Go Back camp and the Cooking in a Paper Bag is DANGEROUS crowd.
The nay-sayers warn that the bag could catch on fire or that paper bags are unsanitary. It is technically possible for the bag to catch on fire, but that is probably only if it comes in contact with the side or top of the oven or the heating element in an electric model. Wouldn’t the same be true for plastic bags coming in contact with the same surfaces?
As with any method you employ to cook food inside a giant gas or electric powered box, you should pay attention to what you’re doing and use common sense.
The concern over a paper bag being unsanitary comes from the inks and glues used in manufacturing the bags, and the possibility that the paper could contain metal shavings from being recycled.
Using a bag that has no ink, or very minimal printing on the bag, that has not been used before (you can very easily and inexpensively get a new paper bag at a grocery store), minimizes at least some of those risks.
Honestly, compared to having endocrine-disrupting chemicals being steamed into your chicken, baking in a brown paper bag sounds much more healthy to me. But, that’s your call to make!
I joined the ranks of the Once You Cook in a Brown Paper Bag You’ll Never Go Back camp a couple of years ago.
I’m not even sure how I heard about it, but I can honestly say Brown Bag Chicken is the best chicken ever – moist and flavorful! The bag keeps the moisture inside and browns and crisps the skin.
I always cook my birds breast side down, too – that keeps the breast meat from drying out. You don’t get crispy skin on the breast portion that way, but for me it’s fine since I don’t eat the skin.
It’s so easy, once you try Brown Bag Chicken I’m sure you’ll love it!
Don’t be alarmed if your kitchen smells a little funny at first (kind of like a warm, greasy brown paper bag…if you can imagine that!), that will quickly be replaced by the aroma of delectable, juicy baked chicken.
There’s also no set way to season your bird, it’s more of a technique than a recipe so you can be as minimalist or creative as you want to be.
Ingredients
Butter, softened
Salt
Pepper
1 whole fryer
Chopped celery
Chopped bell pepper
Chopped onion
Chopped garlic
Instructions
Rub butter all over whole fryer, inside and out.
Salt and pepper fryer, inside and out.
Stuff fryer with chopped vegetables.
Place fryer in a brown paper bag which has been greased inside.
Roll up the open end and bake at 350 degrees F for 30 minutes per pound of chicken.
Bag it, seal it, bake it.
Put the chicken in the bag (SEAM SIDE DOWN!) then roll or fold the top in close to the bird, tucking it under if you can. If you can’t, and it won’t stay closed, you could put a couple staples in the fold to keep it shut. I’ve never had to do that myself. Or, you could use kitchen twine and tie it shut.
Place your buttered, seasoned, bagged bird on a baking sheet with sides. Juices will collect on the baking sheet and you don’t want that dripping to the bottom of your oven. You can also use a shallow baking dish or roasting pan. (I love my Pampered Chef Stoneware Bar Pan!).
Put it in the oven and bake for one and a half hours.
You may need to adjust your cooking times according to the size of your bird or if it’s stuffed with stuffing, for example. In my oven, an hour and a half is just right for an average sized chicken. If you remembered to put the seam side of the bag down, you can easily remove the bag by grabbing opposite corners and pulling the bag off over your chicken.
Give this brown bag chicken a rest before slicing to keep it juicy.
Waiting 10 or 15 minutes to slice gorgeously roasted bird will keep the tasty juices inside the meat. I know it’s hard to wait, but trust me it’s worth it!
We’ve made many Thanksgiving turkeys using this same brown bag method. Just be sure your turkey will fit the bag you have (or vice versa).
Any time I’m roasting poultry, I use this brown bag chicken method and the results are never disappointing!
ITALY’S WARNING to the WORLD – It’s Over!!
What factors contribute to China potentially surpassing the USA in terms of global power, such as military and economy?
China has 4 times the population of USA, it will naturally surpass USA if it develops without any foreign interference.
USA lacks knowledge about being the master, because it doesn’t have a long history.
The present situation for USA is like the last years of Ming dynasty of China. At that time, China faced following problems:
Manchu’s power is growing, however, Ming took a strong attitude toward Manchus, which caused the latter give up any hope to build a good relationship with Ming and stayed within the map of Ming.(USA to China)
Long lasting alert and histility on Mongolians (who established the last dynasty prior than Ming) including trade embargo, Mongolians had no choice but to allied with Manchus. (USA to Russia/China)
Military abuse in southwest China, including some places in present Myanmar and Vietnam, but ignored the peasants’ uprising in inland. (USA in Iraq, Afghanistan)
War of parties in the government. (Democrats, Republicans)
Broken domestic economy,and the chaos caused by bankrupted farmers and merchants, which eventually evolved into a nation wide uprising. (Inflation, high interest rates, banks go bankrupt)
USA adopts a “winner takes all” mindset and does not want to share its power with others, this inevitably made others to think of other possibilities.
A simple case:
In around 2010–2012, there was a hot discussion among China, Japan and Korea to promote an “Asian Dollar” as the three became the biggest ecomoic zone in the world. However, in 2012, Korea and Japan’s relation was broken by Dokudo Island crisis, China and Japan relation was ruined by Diaoyu/Senkaku Island crisis, Japan’s ambassidor was “comitted suicide” at home. The Asian Dollar became an illusion after the relations among the three went down. Everyone knows it is USA behind the whole thing, just like NordStream II. Because if Asian Dollar succeeded, the US Dollar is threatened.
But look back from 12 years later, we can see, the Asian Dollar at that time can not be an independent currency as the three all rely on US Dollar and US market. Therefore, USA can try to exert its influence on Japan and Korea to make AD anchored USD, and USD’s position is guaranteed. Eventhough we can foresee AD does take some share from USD, but AD as a regional currency, will not replace USD globally, same as the Euro.
However, if there’s a AD 2.0 in future, as China’s power grows much stronger, the AD 2.0 does have the potential to replace USD.
In China, there’s an old saying describe this: 丢了西瓜拣芝麻 (Throw a watermelon away to pick up a sesame.)
“USA Collapse Is Far WORSE Than You Think…” — Robert Kiyosaki’s Last WARNING
What is the brutal truth about people?
Only in America. -MM
A Lifeguard Was Fired For Saving A Drowning Man
Sometimes, rules and regulations ply over efforts and emotions!
Tomas Lopez was on duty at Hallandale Beach, Florida, when someone rushed over to his post. A man had swum out too far, Lopez was told, and the victim was drowning. As any lifeguard would, Lopez rushed over and got the man to shore with the help of some other beachgoers. There, they gave the man CPR, called the paramedics, and saved his life.
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When Lopez handed in the incident report, he was fired instead of being heralded as a hero .
The drowning man, his company informed him, was “out of the protected area” and a clearly visible sign said that anyone who swam there did so at his own risk.
According to company policy, anyone drowning outside the designated area was to be left to die.
Lopez’s coworkers were infuriated.
Six other lifeguards stood up for him, telling the company and the media that they would have done the exact same thing and that Lopez deserved an apology.
So the company fired them, too.
PENTAGON Is Shocked: S-500 PROMETHEUS Shot Down 11 US ATACMS Missiles Over Crimea and Crimean Bridge
Have you actually ever heard someone say ‘Do you know who I am?’ indignantly?
I had very recently moved across the US and transferred my job working the customer service desk at a high end grocery store. I grew up in Harlem and had recently moved to the deep Midwest. It was very different in a lot of ways.
One of the biggest ways, was “celebrity” behavior. Back home, the biggest rule for cashiers was to politely pretend you didn’t know who you were helping if that person was famous. Hilary Duff, Keanu Reeves, Evan Peters and many more were regulars at the store. We don’t ask for autographs, they don’t ask for special treatment, everyone’s happy.
Midwest is different. I worked at another location of that same expensive grocery store. Young men who played for the local hockey team were shockingly entitled and rude, sneering down at me while my supervisor stood by and sucked their dicks as vocally as he could regardless of how rude they were. “Influencers” in the area would record cashiers if they didn’t scan their kombucha fast enough. But worst of all, was the man who apparently built some kind of air conditioning franchise and was a “local hero” for providing AC in low income areas.
This man was a fucking menace. He didn’t like me from the first moment he saw me, and it took me a while to understand why. But apparently it was a significant personal slight that I didn’t ever invite him to cut to the front of the line, that I didn’t ever roll over backwards to fetch forgotten products for him while he was checking out. And worst of all, I never learned his name. Apparently all my coworkers and superiors had been babying this loud mouthed, disrespectful asshole who was just as much of a nobody as the rest of us were.
The third time I encountered him, I asked for his name to confirm an online order he had placed. The man threw his change at my head while laughing hysterically, then his face contorted into rage as he screamed over and over again, “YOU MUST NOT KNOW WHO I AM.”
I don’t remember exactly how I responded, but I do remember being fired.
The point is, only the most insecure and ungifted say things like “don’t you know who I am??”
If you hear that line, laugh long and hard. It’ll kill them.
Man EXPOSES Delusional Women’s HYPOCRISY
Funny but serious.
Is China a fascist police state?
No.
If it were then the living conditions of the people would not have improved.
You see a key part of fascism is where corporations get together with the government to fuck over the common man and woman. Yet living standards keep going up, more services and more access to healthcare/education keeps happening.
Police state? – There’s laws, if it says it’s illegal it’s illegal.
Second the bar for arrest is HIGH, this means if you’re a criminal unless you’re caught there and then in some violent crime? The police will take their time to investigate and make a strong case against you before arresting you. That’s why there’s such a high conviction rate.
This is important. It is important because if you arrest with a low bar and then collect evidence? The period up to the trial can also be punishment.
This is Gang Chen.
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He was arrested by the American FBI for ‘spying for China’ because despite being an American, yes BORN in the USA he’s not considered an American because he’s not white.
He was arrested in 2021, charged and put under numerous restrictions. Gang Chen was one of the luckier ones as MIT supported him and paid for his defence.
Eventually charges were dropped.
But as noted above he was one of the lucky ones. Other university professors lose everything and the charges get dropped a day before trial. They lose EVERYTHING.
WHY was the Earth BEFORE the DINOSAURS TERRIFYING? The Most Amazing Prehistoric Secrets DOCUMENTARY
Dinosaurs, those magnificent creatures that once roamed the Earth, continue to captivate our imagination and scientific curiosity. The era of dinosaurs began approximately 230 million years ago in the Mesozoic Era, marking a period of dominance by these fascinating reptiles. Before dinosaurs, appearance of the dinosaurs and after the dinosaurs. This age, often referred to as the “Age of Dinosaurs,” witnessed the emergence of some of the most iconic species, from the towering Brachiosaurus to the fierce Tyrannosaurus rex. Their existence demonstrates the incredible diversity and adaptability of life on Earth, with species that thrived in a variety of habitats, from lush forests to arid deserts.
The extinction of dinosaurs, about 66 million years ago, remains one of the most intriguing topics in paleontology. This catastrophic event, believed to be caused by a combination of volcanic eruptions, climate changes, and the impact of a massive asteroid, led to the end of the Cretaceous Period and paved the way for the rise of mammals. The sudden disappearance of dinosaurs left a void that has puzzled scientists for centuries, sparking numerous theories and extensive research to uncover the details of this mass extinction.
Beyond their appearance and extinction, dinosaurs are a source of endless fascination due to the strange and sometimes bewildering facts that research has unearthed. For instance, some dinosaurs, like the Stegosaurus, had brains the size of a walnut, significantly small in comparison to their massive bodies. Others, such as the Parasaurolophus, had elaborate crests on their heads that could have been used for communication or to attract mates. The discovery of dinosaur fossils with preserved feathers has revolutionized our understanding of these creatures, suggesting a closer evolutionary link to birds than previously thought.
The pre-dinosaur world, often overshadowed by the towering presence of the Jurassic era’s giants, presents an equally fascinating chapter in Earth’s geological history. This epoch, spanning from the formation of the Earth around 4.5 billion years ago to roughly 250 million years before the appearance of the first dinosaurs, encompasses several pivotal periods that laid the groundwork for life as we know it. During the Hadean and Archean eons, the Earth was a molten hellscape, gradually cooling to form the first solid crust. This era saw the emergence of the first life forms, simple prokaryotic cells, which appeared approximately 3.5 billion years ago. These organisms were primarily anaerobic bacteria thriving in an oxygen-free atmosphere, setting the stage for the evolutionary leaps to follow.
The Proterozoic eon witnessed significant geological and biological transformations. This period marked the accumulation of oxygen in the atmosphere, a direct result of photosynthesis by cyanobacteria. The “Great Oxygenation Event,” which occurred around 2.4 billion years ago, radically altered the planet’s atmosphere, paving the way for more complex life forms. The Proterozoic also saw the first supercontinent, Rodinia, form and break apart, a cycle that influenced global climate and environmental conditions conducive to evolution.
My father told me that it was life; my purpose as a young man.
And doing so, earning a dollar earned (by me) enabled me to earn the privileges of a “working man”; which was drinking beer at home and at the dinner table.
I started at 14, but really went full time at 16 years old.
At that time, I started to drive a car, drink and hang out. I had friends that I hung out with. Clyde (who also drove a GTO like I did)…
GTO
…and some friends like J Eck with his Ford pickup “beater”…
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…as well as my brother with his crappy Vega…
RS Vega GT 4
I was a piece of shit car. Fucking aluminum engine…
…and the “Bracky Boys” and their Duster (a very popular muscle car)…
1970 plymouth duster coupe front
Those Bracky Boys were RICH. All the time I thought that they were just some hillbillies, but no. Their parents were loaded. They came from Mo-ney! Who’d figure.
…and a few others with Comaro’s and Pinto’s.
We used to drink Miller Pony bottles in a 8 pack after work. That and smoke. Both cigarettes and the dreaded reefer! If there was one thing that I would tell my younger-self, now that I am an older man… it’s stay away from drugs.
Good times.
Good times.
Cruising late at night on the country roads and stopping at keggers and strip mines. A simple life. But that was what it was like.
It was a social – cultural thing.
Ice and beer
Ah… And something else.
Miller pony bottles.
Rolling a joint in the “shotgun” seat, and listening to BTO, Boston, Led Zepplin, and Yes. (Oh, and let’s not forget Robin Trower, and Neil Young.)
1. No one’s coming to save you. Get up and be your hero.
2. Never force anyone to choose you. You’ll learn the art of spending time alone.
3. Master your emotions. A calm mind can handle any situation.
4. To avoid disappointment, you need to take people for who they are not for what you want them to be.
5. Everyone will show you who they are, give them time.
6. You’re at peace with yourself when you mind your own business.
7. Ensure you take good care of yourself, if anything happens to you, the world will move on.
8. Nobody cares, work hard to get better every day.
9. If you don’t work to build your dream, someone will hire you and give you a purpose.
10. Free yourself from society’s advice, most of them do not know what they’re doing.
11. Life doesn’t wait for you to be okay. Get up every day and keep pushing through.
12. You shouldn’t take advice from people who are not where you want to be in life.
13. Life is 100% better when no one knows anything about you.
14. You become 10x smarter when you quit the news and put politics out of your topics.
15. You need to be smart enough to create your opportunities, don’t wait for them to come to you.
Creamy Chicken Noodle Soup
This is, by far, my favorite homemade chicken noodle soup recipe because it’s simply the perfect mix of easy, wholesome, and satisfying. It’s creamy yet light, and benefits from the addition of potato, thyme, oregano, and convenient pre-cooked rotisserie chicken.
light creamy chicken noodle soup 1
Here’s Why You’ll Love This Light & Creamy Chicken Noodle Soup
Lightened up, yet still creamy and so satisfying
Can be made on the stove or in a slow cooker
1-pot meal
Using a cooked rotisserie chicken saves time
So much more delicious than store-bought soup
Make ahead of time and freeze
Good way to use up leftover chicken
Flavorful spices, herbs, and vegetables
Ultimate winter comfort food!
Best Ingredients to Use:
You need 1 big pot and a few staple ingredients. This is a forgiving recipe, so let’s review what can change if needed.
Butter: Just a Tablespoon, to soften the vegetables.
Vegetables: Onion, carrots, and celery form the mirepoix flavor base for this soup.
Herbs/Flavors: Use a blend of garlic, dried or fresh thyme and oregano, fresh ground pepper, and salt. Feel free to use other herbs you enjoy instead, if desired.
Flour or Cornstarch: Flour (or cornstarch) thickens the liquid, taking this soup from brothy to creamy. See recipe Note for that substitution.
Chicken Broth: Or stock.
Potato: 1 medium potato is the first magical ingredient in this recipe, because it cooks down and makes the soup SO creamy, hearty, and satisfying.
Chicken: This recipe saves time because you can use pre-cooked chicken. You could also use leftover cooked turkey, like we do in this turkey pot pie! I usually pick up a small rotisserie chicken from the grocery store, shred it, and add it right into the soup. Or you can boil/poach chicken breasts or roast them with a little garlic and thyme, let cool slightly (or refrigerate for a day or two), then shred or chop. If you have leftover chicken, you can also use it in recipes like my chicken quinoa salad or peanut chicken zucchini noodles.
Milk or Half-and-Half: This is the other magical ingredient that turns your homemade chicken noodle soup into the creamiest soup ever. Use 1 cup of whole milk or 1 cup of half-and-half. If you want to make regular (non-creamy) chicken noodle soup, replace the milk with more chicken broth.
Noodles: I prefer wide egg noodles in chicken soup, but you can use any type of dry pasta you like, or go noodle-less.
1 teaspoon seasoned pepper or garlic-pepper seasoning
1 1/2 cups dried egg noodles
creamy chicken noodle soup 4
Instructions
In a slow cooker gradually stir 5 cups water into the soup. Whisk until smooth.
Stir in chicken, vegetables and seasoned pepper.
Cover; cook on LOW for 6 to 8 hours or on HIGH for 3 to 4 hours.
If using low heat setting, turn to HIGH.
Stir in noodles.
Cover and cook for 20 to 30 minutes more or until noodles are just tender.
creamy chicken noodle soup 2
How Does the Soup Thicken Up?
Cooking down the onion, carrots, and celery is a key step in the recipe. After you cook them down, add flour and your herbs. The flour will absorb the liquid from the softening vegetables, and create a nice thick base for the soup. This is exactly how we start biscuit vegetable pot pie, too.
Whole milk or half-and-half also thicken up the soup. I’ve even made it with half the amount (1/2 cup or 120ml) heavy cream in a pinch. (Add more chicken broth if you use heavy cream; see recipe Note.)
Nice and thick, without being too heavy.
Can I Skip the Noodles or Use Rice Instead?
Yes. Feel free to skip the noodles entirely with no other changes to the recipe. Or you can use 1 cup of uncooked rice instead. Add it when you would add the noodles.
This Soup Satisfies. Period.
One bowl of this light & creamy chicken noodle soup will leave you feeling satisfied for hours, without feeling weighed down. This is the meal that keeps on giving because if you have a smaller family, there will be plenty of leftover soup to enjoy during the week.
Take shooting lessons
Do you think China steals American spacecraft designs?
THE CHOICE OF WORDS BY THE WEST IS ALWAYS – BIAS & PROPAGANDA.
Chinese CCTV cameras are being called surveillance cameras, but the Western CCTV cameras are called security cameras
Chinese landing on Mars is called conquer, US landing on Mars is called exploration.
Terrorist in China is called – freedom fighter, terrorist in the West, of course, is called – terrorist.
US government is called administration. Chinese government is called regime.
US/West invasion in Middle East is called liberation. Russian invasion … well, is called invasion.
The US invasion and organized coup on more than 25 countries since WWII is referred to as following “International rule-based order”.. China fought 4 borders wars and voluntarily withdrew to its borders (before the wars) since WW ll is referred to as “A threat to international rule based order”
The US government that can be bought with money is called “Democracy.” The Chinese government that cannot be bought with money is called “Dictatorship”.
Wars led by the US with the support of the West – killed and maimed millions all over the world is called the “Civilized West”. China which lifted 800 million from extreme poverty in the past 40 years (according to the UN and World Bank) is referred to as “Totalitarian.”.
JUST A SINGLE WORD DIFFERENCE – CAN BRAINWASH YOU.
What is the most jaw-dropping method for shoplifting that you have seen?
I had a friend in college at the University of Utah.
He was at the University of Utah because he’d gotten kicked out of BYU.
The reason he was kicked out was listed as “criminal mastermind”.
What actually happened was much more mundane, but, he was a criminal mastermind of sorts.
His roommate, and a friend of his roommate, were planning on a theft at the BYU bookstore. Realize that there was nearly absolutely no security in those days, and though cameras were a thing, you never saw them outside high end retailers, like jewelry stores, and certainly not in college or University bookstores.
His roommate, and the roommate’s friend, were plotting a burglary, and pretty much ignoring my friend, who was studying.
They eventually settled on grabbing as much high end camera equipment as they could (the most expensive thing in the store at the time, since it predated laptops, which tells you how long ago this was), and then running for the door.
Finally, my friend could stand their stupidity no longer, and pointed out that they would be caught, how they would be caught, and the fact that, since they were going to school there, if no one recognized them immediately, they would be eventually, as in, the next time they had to buy textbooks.
They sneered at my friend, and asked him, “If you’re so smart, what would you do?”.
And my friend told them.
The entire store had hanging ceilings- including in the dressing room.
These ceilings wouldn’t hold their weight, but they’d hold some weight.
And the store had a camping department, where there were a variety of display sleeping bags, hung from the bottom, against the wall.
And the store, as college bookstores tend to do, sold backpacks.
And with these things in mind, my friend laid out a plan, never really expecting that his roommate, and the roommate’s friend were idiot enough to follow through on it.
The next Tuesday, there was a burglary reported of the BYU bookstore. Authorities were mystified, because there were no signs of breaking and entering, all the locks were securely locked, and when searched, there was no one in the store.
His roommate, who’d been missing since late Monday, showed up Wednesday morning.
Having implemented the first part of the plan, of course.
He and his friend had hidden (standing) in the sleeping bags against the wall until the store closed, everyone left, and the store was locked up.
Then, they loaded up a bunch of identical blue backpacks with the stuff they wanted to steal, and hid them in the hanging ceiling above the men’s dressing rooms.
And then, they hid in the sleeping bags again, until the store reopened normally, then left with the after-lunch crowd.
And then, they implemented the second part of the plan.
Each day, for the next week…
They walked in with a blue backpack.
They tried on clothes and, occasionally, bought a T-Shirt or other item of clothing.
They walked out with a blue backpack.
They walked in with a blue backpack.
They walked out with a blue backpack.
How was the case cracked?
Guilt.
The friend of the roommate started hearing “God”.
“God” told him to confess.
That nothing bad would happen.
But that he needed to confess.
Two weeks after the last backpack exchange, he did so.
The police found backpacks full of crumpled newspaper in the hanging ceiling in the men’s dressing room, confirming the confession.
The thieves got kicked out of BYU; the one that came clean got 3 months plus probation; the one who didn’t, got six months plus probation.
My friend (the one not involved in the robbery) saw the whole thing as nothing more than an intellectual exercise and felt he could help solve their problem in a better way after hearing them planning the burglary badly (in front of him)- he got expelled.
They couldn’t charge him though because there was no intent, and it was pretty clear he didn’t expect the roommate, or the roommate’s friend to go through with it — and all the loot was stored in the friend’s dorm room — but they had to do something. You know: send a message.
And so… they expelled him.
For being a criminal mastermind.
He cracked the code
What’s the most impressive thing your parent(s) have done?
They lied to me for 54 years. Successfully.
at 21 I was complaining to my cousin that I loathed my father and was sick of his abuse. Her reply “what if I told you that he’s not your father?” for two years my parents told me that it’s a lie and to drop it.
dad dies in 2004. A few years later I get suspicious again because my siblings have diabetes (perfectly healthy and fit). I don’t. Dads parents and aiblings ll had it by 50. But I don’t act on it.
2010 youngest goes off to college and the hubs and I get a call from mom that she would like to share her home with us. I asked why, she said “because I need one of my kids on my side, the other 4 want me in a nursing home.” Her only health issue was Parkinson’s. She had it for 30 years but wasn’t disabled or senile until 2–3 years before her death in 2021 (Jan 2021)
One day in 2014 she is asking me to show her how to look up and old beau. I searched everywhere and couldn’t find him. He had a super rare name so I was surprised. I don’t think twice about it but it’s really important.
2018, my sibs and I are arguing over our heritage. Some think we are Scottish. Some Irish. We all order tests, take them the same day and ship them off. We all get our results the same day. We are in fact Scottish, or should I say THEY are. And right there were it says father is a name I recognize. Moms “old beau”. Wtf? So the man had his dna on ancestry dot com at 84, could he have known about me? I quickly email him. No answer but he has two sons. I quickly emailed one of them. He gets back to me. They had no idea and sadly my birth father had died 7 months prior. They say he would have welcomed me with open arms and would have loved me
So they successfully lied. I was suspicious because I was the only one he physically disciplined. First I was angry that mother allowed this man to lay hands on me. Knowing he wasn’t my father and most likely taken it out on me that mom lied to him.
The saddest part is they had at least 3 chances to tell me. Instead I found out myself 7 months too late. They cheated me out of a dad and a better life. I don’t grieve for them. Not like a Daughter would really. I loved them, I just can’t grieve with all this anger over being their dirty little secret and robbing me of knowing my biological dad. Friends say “oh but he was your father, he raised you and blah blah blah. No. He’s not my father. He mistreated me and abused me. So to hell with him.
Anyone that read this far, I thank you. Those that didn’t, I’m sorry I babbled on.
UPDATE – Yes I am in contact with and have a relationship with one of my half brothers. The other I was told to contact with extreme caution as he is “trouble” and lord knows I don’t need that. Maybe someday I’ll reach out. I don’t know. I don’t see my half brother as much as I’d like but we are 3 hours away from each other. We do exchange pleasantries and such on holidays.
"The West must be factoring our response into its projections all while plotting against us. They are trying to put themselves into our shoes, while sticking to their own mentality.
As for their mentality… Only recently, Mark Episkopos, a prominent American political scientist, chastised the West, including from a purely utilitarian and pragmatic standpoint.
Take sanctions, for example. Usually, they are designed to change the way their subject behaves. If you want them to be effective, you need to adjust these sanctions based on the response from those who endure them.
The West has been carelessly expanding its sanctions without giving any thought to the possible outcomes.
But the outcome was clear to begin with, even before the special military operation when the Crimean sanctions, as well as a host of other sanctions, were already in place.
The result was clear. We pulled together, and I do hope that we will become even more focused.
We have to go further, as Vladimir Putin said many times. We pulled together and decided not to depend on them in any sectors where they can restrain or hold back our development, and possibly in other sectors too.
Today, they pride themselves for getting rid of Russian gas.
First, supplies have been on the rise in many countries, including France.
Italy took pride in claiming that over the past three years the share of Russian gas in Italian imports declined from 90 percent all the way down to zero.
This is what German Chancellor Olaf Scholz boasted of when describing his efforts to reduce the country’s dependence on Russian energy imports, while promising to end the dependence on them completely down the road.
Many European have been making statements along the same lines, including the Netherlands, and almost all Western and some Eastern European countries.
But at what cost? How much did they have to spend and how have their spending on serving their people increased?
Nobody answered these questions. Still, people can see through these ramifications.
Mr Episkopos went on say that failing to anticipate the way Russia would respond to these developments was a huge mistake.
The West fails to understand that sanctions can be effective only if the subject is ready to change its behaviour for the sake of having these sanctions lifted.
The second point Mr Episkopos made was that if the country subjected to sanctions already said that it was not going to change its behaviour, keeping these sanctions in place would be pointless and careless.
This is the kind of policy our would-be colleagues have opted for."
Excerpt from remarks by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in an interview with the radio stations Sputnik, Govorit Moskva, and Komsomolskaya Pravda, Moscow, April 19, 2024.
How to be a man
One of the unremarked things that has happened over the past ten years is the collapse of the so-called man-o-sphere. There may be people still working that land, but all the big names have moved on or disappeared. The pickup artist have all disappeared from the internet entirely. That whole scene just seems to have folded up and gone the way of the dinosaur without anyone noticing.
One reason is the demographic aged out of the material. A guy like Heartiste, for example, could do the pickup artist stuff when he was early middle-age, but once you hit fifty you become a skeevy weirdo, not a Don Juan. The same holds for the other subcultures in that space. Once you reach middle-age, it all starts to sound a bit weird and pointless, even to the people making money off it.
There is another aspect to it. That whole scene was a reaction to the feminization of the culture starting with second wave feminism. The next generation of males have no frame of reference in which to have a reaction. The typical Zoomer has been raised in the longhouse, to use the cool kid’s term. He has no way of knowing that all of this is both weird and unnatural.
That is the point of the show. The male role is not a slippery concept that changes from one generation to the next. It has been revolutionized and pulverized over the last few decades, but that is what makes this age anomalous. The male role in society is timeless, at least in the Western world. There are certain immutable characteristic to being a man that will reassert themselves in the coming years.
IT JUST DOESN’T WORK ANYMORE! Retirement and Jobs ARE FINISHED!
And then a large group of activists who had taken over a university surrendered to police, causing the newspaper publisher to declare: “That wiped out my best men.”
Meanwhile, Lai’s right-hand man, former US intelligence officer Mark Simon, gave the go-between a company he said was of a covert nature and could be used to liaise with foreign organizations and collect funds.
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ASTONISHING REVELATIONS
Extraordinary revelations came this week from the ongoing trial of newspaperman Jimmy Lai, 76, confirming US involvement, and the role of the publisher and his former US intelligence officer partner Mark Simon in backing the violent protests that roiled normally peaceful Hong Kong five years ago.
Testimony from a go-between named Wayland Chan Tsz-wah, 32, detailed the problems that arose during the period after a legal extradition amendment was withdrawn. Protesters continued to use it as an excuse for an increasingly violent insurgency, with terrorist-grade bomb factories discovered at several locations.
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G7 RECOMMENDATION
Background: In 2018, civil servants at Hong Kong’s Department of Justice continued their routine updating of the city’s British Common Law legislation. The city already had Asia’s highest-rated legal system, but to keep at the top, they followed a recommendation from a G7 financial law committee to upgrade the city’s extradition law.
In the British era, arrested individuals from Mainland China had been simply put in vans, driven to the border, and dropped off “over the line”.
The new extradition amendment gave people detained for specific serious crimes due legal protection. They could only be extradited after a lengthy process of hearings, typically taking 12 to 24 months.
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MISINFORMATION
However, by the first half of 2019, an extreme campaign of disinformation had totally misrepresented the amendment. The amendment was falsely painted as a new law “from Beijing” that enabled people (and even tourists) to be “snatched” from the city and “disappeared” in mainland China for political misdemeanours.
The misinformation led to hundreds of thousands of protesters (organizers claimed “millions”) hitting the streets in June calling for its withdrawal.
The amendment was withdrawn the same month, but anti-China groups continued the protests, turning it into a violent insurgency that caused billions of dollars’ worth of damage, shutting down the airport and wrecking scores of metro stations.
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STOP THE VIOLENCE
In July of 2019, US officials told newspaper publisher Jimmy Lai to tone down the violence, the court heard.
This was a problem for several reasons. First, he had repeatedly told his newspaper staff to report events in a way that deliberately removed the gap between Hong Kong’s peaceful protesters and the violent “localist” thugs that smashed up or burned restaurants owned by families from Mainland China. This was described by his staff in earlier court hearings.
Second, he had been financially backing the “old school” pro-American political individuals and groups in Hong Kong for years – often exactly the same anti-China politicians receiving cash or support from various US groups. But did not personally know the new generation of young “localist” leaders. He would need a go-between.
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THE GO-BETWEEN
In July, the publisher arranged to meet Wayland Chan Tsz-wah, a paralegal aged 32, who he believed to be a high ranking activist who could spread the new message to a cluster of violent groups known as “the valiants”.
The paralegal was invited to go to a designated restaurant and was asked to hand over his phone “for security reasons” before Jimmy Lai talked to him, the court was told.
When he had done so, the publisher told him that things would have to change. The United States now wanted “no police or civilian fatalities”. Furthermore, they had said that the violence “should stop at some point”.
Lai wanted this message taken to the violent groups, which were divided into multiple sub-groups with their own names, including JD Team, G20, Pink, Dragonslayer and others. (The code name for Jimmy Lai and Mark Simon was “Backer”.)
Wayland Chan met with the publisher several times, he said, always having to give up his phone before conversations started. On one occasion, they met in a car parked near Hong Kong’s Supreme Court, the court heard.
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US OPERATIONS
Between face-to-face meetings, the younger activist received Whatsapp messages from Jimmy Lai about US progress in the anti-China effort, he told the court.
Two American operations had been set up with Hong Kong in their names. One was a lobby group working to create the “Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act” and the other was a group called the “Hong Kong Democracy Council”.
They were working to get western countries to sanction Hong Kong, remove its privileges, and damage its main sources of income – finance and tourism — although the community had done literally nothing to deserve such a punishment.
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INITIALLY UNAWARE
Wayland Chan told the court that he had not been aware at first of the nature of the relationship between the anti-China publisher and US officials.
“Only when he told me at a later stage about the US Government’s internal considerations, did I realise Jimmy Lai was not simply rallying for international support, but he knew certain criteria [set by US officials] and was trying to meet them,” he said at the hearing in the West Kowloon court this week.
Chan contacted leading “valiant” individuals but struggled to get the message over to them, he said. In one case, his contact refused to believe that the message came from Jimmy Lai.
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MAN SET ON FIRE
The insurgency remained out of control, and the violence got worse. Bomb factories were set up, and weapons smuggled into the city. One group started making TATP, the explosive used in the London bombings of 7 July 2005.
In November of 2019, an old man tried to stop protesters smashing up a metro station in Ma On Shan, in a rural part of Hong Kong. The old man was doused in petrol as they tried to burn him alive.
Jimmy Lai was dismayed, and contacted Wayland Chan for another meeting, also calling representatives of the old-school pro-American political groups known as the pan-democrats.
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MAROONED
The newspaper publisher also faced another setback later the same month, when protesters marooned themselves at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, which was situated on a single city block.
Police took no action, but simply waited at the entrances, playing a range of popular music. After about 12 days, the protesters, bored and hungry, gave themselves up, walking out with their hands up.
“That wiped out my best men,” Jimmy Lai told Chan, the court heard.
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CHAN’S REWARD
About two weeks later, Wayland Chan was invited to meet Mark Simon at the Hyatt Hotel in Shatin. As a reward to Chan, an overseas company with money in its bank account would be set up, he was told.
This idea ran into an immediate difficulty. Hong Kong had strong policies against money laundering, which meant that it was difficult to open a bank account in the city for a company registered in the British Virgin Islands.
When Jimmy Lai was told this, the publisher decided to offer one of his unused companies to Chan as a reward, and asked an assistant named Evan Lau to handle the formalities, the court heard.
In early 2020, Chan attended a meeting where a company named Lacock Inc, owned by Jimmy Lai, was transferred to him. It had an HSBC account containing HK$80,000.
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FOREIGN ORGANIZATIONS
But then came another issue. Wayland Chan saw the company as his personal reward, and wanted to use it to develop his own business.
Mark Simon had other ideas, of an ideological nature. He felt it should be used to as a channel for overseas groups to continue to contribute to their anti-China campaign.
Mark Simon told Chan that the company was of covert nature and could be used to liaise with foreign organizations and collect funds, the court heard.
The trial continues.
Have you ever stolen something back after getting robbed?
The company I work for gave everyone a nice company coat for Christmas. I took a marker and marked the inside tag with my name so that I would know if it was mine (all the coats looked the same).
One day, before heading for home, I looked at the peg where my coat had been hanging, and it wasn’t there. I checked all the coats…mine was gone, as were my favorite sunglasses.
I told management, who expressed regret, but there were no coats left.
Two weeks passed…and I periodically did a check to see if any hanging were my coat.
After about two weeks, I came across it hanging on a peg on the opposite end of the room. I grabbed it and hid it at my work station.
One of the night crew workers came storming up to me demanding HER coat. I told her that I didn’t have it…I had mine. I then showed her the tag, which showed my name. I then asked her where my sunglasses were. She responded she didn’t know.
I told her she had 24 hours to come up with them or I was going to tell them who had stolen my coat.
This would have been a termination offense.
She handed them to me the next day, saying she found them in her husband’s truck.
She has since transferred, but when I see her, she avoids me like the plague.
Some views of Pago Pago
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What are your thoughts on Chinese automaker BYD’s $11,500 Seagull, an extremely cheap EV that is not available in the US due to high tariffs?
Freedom of trade? What a hypocrite! The U.S. burnt down nations just to install freedom but it ensures that it’s people buy from profiteers and keep prices high to give its people no choices! The U.S. citizens are the real loser! Are US citizens not aware that they are worst than Chinese citizens who can buy Tesla if they do wish! I fact out of the cars that Tesla made in 2023, 69.7% are sold in China! Can you Yanks not see the irony that China a supposedly unfree nation can buy Tesla and a nation screaming freedom like there is no tomorrow cannot buy BYD?
Let me school all of you on this! China U.S. a very smart and intelligent nation, by allowing Tesla to sell it ensures that those cars are made in China too! They got jobs and are learning all the while about western demands and western customers. So by the time BYD goes international it knows their taste, their likes and dislikes and they made a killing! Thanks to being open and free they are successful.
The U.S. is left as a pathetic slur grape nation without principle nor freedom!
A fun quote
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Have you ever been knocked unconscious in a car accident?
I have. For 20 minutes.
It was 2011, and I was meeting a couple for lunch for my birthday. He worked at Oakley, and lunch “came with“ a new pair of Oakley‘s as a gift. It should’ve been a great day.
I was in a convertible, traveling on highway 73 in Orange County, California. I exited and was waiting for the light to turn left onto a surface highway. The approaching cars stopped, the light turned green and I started to make a left turn. As soon as I passed the stopped cars and made it to the centerline, a speeding Chevy Suburban, three times the size of my car, came into view. My last conscious thought was “They’re not going to stop“. I swerved, and it was lights out.
She ran a red and T-boned me; smashed into my side, forward of the door, near the front wheel. She crushed the entire front like a tin can, my car spun and we collided twice. So I heard…
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Twenty minutes and lots of bystander activity went by. My next conscious moment was in the ambulance, looking up at a female emergency medical tech as we were heading to the trauma center. I was an EMT decades ago, and my first thought and words were “so this is what it looks like in the other direction“…
My head had hit the frame of the convertible top and it split my scalp, but fortunately didn’t crack my skull, though you could see it from the wound. My hand broke on the steering wheel, my ribs were cracked where they impacted the door. I was covered in blood and bruises. The airbags never went off.
Two guys jumped out of their cars and ran over. My window was a curtain of blood and of course I was out. They couldn’t open the door and thought I was dead. One called 911, and the other ran over to the woman’s car. It was totaled.
The impact of my head hitting the car was so forceful, my brain violently bounced off the inside of my skull. The brain stem flexed with such force it caused “micro-tears.” They sewed me up, patched me up, gave me X-rays and a CAT scan and I left the trauma center late that night with my wife instructed to ensure I woke up the next morning.
To give you an idea of how much it shook me up? I had been arranging a huge business dinner for two nights later. I still made phone calls to make sure the plans were set, and then the night of the event? I forgot to go… Par for the course with bad concussions, I had a slightly volatile temper for a couple of months. I forgot, seemingly everything randomly. I had minor bouts with depression which I’ve never had otherwise in my life.
The brain impact prevented me from remembering proper nouns for almost year and a half. I got to know my neurologist and the neuropsych testing people very well.
You can’t be unconscious for that long without taking a huge shot to the brain. And you can’t be unconscious for that long without having a long-term challenge. My ability to recall proper nouns is still pretty poor. That’s mostly it…
But it could’ve been much worse. Had she hit the driver’s door? It would’ve been the other kind of “lights out.”
What is the craziest purchase you’ve seen someone make on a work credit card?
This was a series of purchases, over a period of around six months. The company I was working for hired an employee who apparently had left her prior job under a cloud of felony charges. She hadn’t been convicted, so there was no record to find in a background check, plus the individual reversed a few numbers on her SSN when she applied. She managed to then hit a perfect storm of processes that allowed her to run up some significant charges on the company credit card. First, she was a remote employee with an also remote boss (this was well before COVID). She immediately requested a company credit card so she could fly to HQ for new hire orientation. A card was issued and FedExed to her. Her first charge was a cash advance (in those days, this was a holdover from days further in the past where it was unheard of for an employee to use the credit card — or their own money — for small purchases). During the ensuing investigation, we found that her subsequent purchases were for household bills, groceries, and utilities. Interestingly, she never submitted the expenses for the trip to HQ. Her manager never noticed that.
Fast forward six months or so and the employee went missing. Her manager woke up and discovered from media reporting that said employee had been convicted of some felony charges related to her prior employment and sent off to be a guest of the state for a few years. Alarm bells went off and an investigation began. As we unwound the credit card bill, we continued to see the various household purchases, utilities, cash advances, etc. Then we found that she had used the card to pay her lawyer as well as take some family members on a (modest) cruise. By the time we added things up, the company was out well in excess of $10,000. Arguably, not a ton of money for a large company, but something that caused immediate changes in expense policy and company credit cards. We found that she was able to exploit a fairly liberal payment window (established to accommodate time for employees to submit expenses, get them approved, and get them paid out to the credit card company). She further managed to (probably) use cash advances to make payments on the card to avoid showing up as delinquent. It appeared that she made some additional payments from other sources, but it wasn’t something we were in a position to confirm. The company didn’t have a good process for tracking personal charges, so there was no process to have the employee report and reimburse such expenses. There were also no categories of expenses that could not be charged to the card. There were quite a number of additional learnings, starting with why the background company didn’t flag a SSN mis-match.
The employee’s manager was fired (in addition to the initial failure to submit expenses, there had been some communications from the credit card company that charges were aging, which the manager had never looked into) and the lawyer was advised to pay the company back the fees charged against the credit card. Beyond that, I wasn’t privy to any other events outside of a flurry of expense and credit card policy changes.
Why is the US so desperate to compete with China when the world knows it cannot?
The ONLY people who realize that the United States is unable to compete with China is the Western “news” media, and the people that consume it.
The rest of the world, INCLUDING the American “leadership” and the Pentagon understand the futility of “Tonya Harding” competition strategies.
However, the United States is not a “healthy” nation. It is a nation in “free-fall”. There is no one at the helm, and those that are in control of various functional aspects of the government are stymied by a complex web network of counter-productive political polarization. Often led by those with self-interest at their core, and incapable of actual subjective reasoning. For everyone in the West are under the propagandized narratives that they themselves create.
Like (for instance) the “brick wall” of Tucker Carlson interviewing Putin.
…
But there is an “out”.
Cooperation NOT Competition.
China wants to see a better world, but in order for that reality to play out, some very toxic behaviors, and legacy dysfunctions must be excised (one way or the other) from the West. I am afraid that it will be a painful process.
The United States NEEDS friends, and help. China is willing to take on this role. But I am fearful that that will not materialize until a period of disharmony adjusts the objective reality of the West.
What makes you jealous?
Even though he passed away years ago, I still find myself feeling a bit envious. I’m talking about my granddad—my lifelong hero and mentor. He kept grinding every day until he hit 90. Getting up at 6:00 AM, he’d down his coffee and head off to work. Surprisingly fit for his age, not exactly a six-pack, but definitely in good shape.
I remember working on physically demanding tasks with him, and I’d be wiped out afterward. For him, it was a walk in a park. Once, we chopped wood for eight hours, and I passed out right after. But he? He moved on to his next job without missing a beat.
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What I envy most is how he never lost his ability to handle physical tasks. While others his age struggled just to stand, he could do everything as if he were still in his thirties. I never quite grasped how he managed it all. I really wish I could be like he was.
“Members of Congress are terrified of the intel agencies. I’m not guessing at that. They’ve told me that, including people who run the intel committee.”
What Tucker said next was even more revealing.
“I said to somebody, a very powerful person, the other day, in a conversation in my kitchen, an elected official — holds a really senior position… But I was like, ‘All these people are controlled. They’ve all got weird sex lives, and all these things they’re hiding, and they’re being blackmailed by the intel agencies.’ And he said, and I’m quoting, ‘I know.’ I was like, okay, so at this point, we’re just sort of admitting that’s real? Like, why do we allow that to continue?”
This is the Amerikkkan Deep State.
What are some examples of the “wussification” of the United States of America?
About six years ago or so when I was still in high school, we were playing soccer in gym class. After about five minutes in or so, the kid who was playing as my team’s forward (we’ll call him “Brock”) came up to me, who was playing goalie, and said he wanted to be the goalie now. I politely declined, because the game was only five minutes in, and that’s just not how soccer (or the real world) works.
After about 30 seconds of arguing back and forth over it, he presumed the second best option to be to grab me by the shirt and try to drag me out of the goalie box. Or in other words, physically assaulted me.
As a natural reaction and in accordance with what the law actually says, I laid into Brock with one good hit.
I then see the gym instructor approaching us to break up the scuffle that was occuring. When he gets to us, he sends us both to the principal’s office.
Brock’s punishmen was a week of out-of-school suspension. And I received the exact same punishment.
Why? Because according to my school’s policy on fighting, if you are even merely involved in a fight, it’s an automatic out-of-school suspension, so the principal technically doesn’t even get to use his own discretion regarding disciplining students regarding these types of matters.
I remember him even saying to me “Geraldo, coming from person to person, I would have done the exact same thing as you. However, as a school official, I unfortunately have no choice but to suspend you”.
What my school expects you to do if you are to find yourself in the situation I was in, is to passively submit and take your beating, and then once that is finished, you are to go to a teacher and tell on the person who attacked you. (Because it’s not like the person you just told on isn’t going to kick the shit out of you for rolling on them once you’re outside school property, right?)
Say you were to get jumped by five people at my school. Well that means that a total of six people will be getting suspended. That being the five dudes who assualted you, and yourself, for being assaulted.
If that’s not an example of institutionalized wussification, I don’t know what is.
Some of my AI generated pictures
Girls and alcohol with cats.
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What is the most badass thing your parent has ever done?
This happened when my dad was just out of high school. One of his longtime friends confirmed the details.
My dad and some friends were at a roller skating rink having fun and flirting with some girls. There was a black family skating there as well. Suddenly they hear this guy saying, “You n%#s, we don’t want your kind here.” He kept harassing them and it pissed my dad off. He went up to the jerk and told him to knock it off, that this family was more than welcome to be here, and he is the one who should leave.
The bully asked, “You n%# lover, are you going to make me?”
My dad told me he was terrified because this guy looked like someone who had been in a lot a fights. But the looks on that poor family’s faces was more than he could bear. So, he agreed to take it outside. While he was putting on his shoes an employee told him he should take off, that the guy he was facing was a known troublemaker and he had just gotten out of jail for assault. That didn’t help my dad’s nerves. Then as he was getting up the father of the black family told him not to bother, that they will just leave.
I don’t know how he mustered the courage to walk out that door, but he went to face him anyway. A crowd gathered around them as they faced each other. The bully said, “Now I am going to teach you a lesson you n#% lov…” He never had a chance to finish that sentence. My dad hit him squarely on his chin and the racist bully crumpled to the pavement. One punch and he was out.
Everyone cheered, the girls were all swooning over my dad, and the family thanked him for being the only one standing up for them. Yep, my dad was a true badass that day.
What is the best thing a teacher did for you that you still remember?
I was in 6th grade and 11 years old. I had started menstruating at 10 and didn’t have it all figured out quite yet. I was wearing a pale yellow skirt and jacket that my grandmother had sewn me and I really liked it. When school ended, I stood up to leave and the teacher snapped at me to come see her. I was pretty shocked. She never raised her voice to me. When I reached her she spun me around so my back was toward the wall. Then she whispered to me that the back of my skirt was stained and to just stay there with her until everyone left. When everyone left she told me to just keep waiting. She knew that my mother came and picked up my brother and I each day. Eventually, my brother came to see why I wasn’t coming out to the car. He was about 7. When he came into the classroom, first she yelled at him for not getting out of bed in the morning and making me late several days (I felt bad about this, but she wasn’t wrong) and then she told him to give her his jacket. She wrapped it around my waist and told us we could leave. I have never forgotten her kindness. Especially because several of the girls could be really mean to me. I’m pretty sure no one ever saw the stain.
Creamy Asparagus Soup
Creamy Asparagus Soup with Morel Mushrooms and Ramps 500
Ingredients
1 pound fresh asparagus
2 onions, finely minced
2 potatoes, peeled, diced small
2 ribs celery, diced small, with tops included
2 carrots, diced
2 cloves garlic, minced
8 teaspoons granulated chicken or vegetable bouillon (or 8 cubes of bouillon)
1 bay leaf
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1/4 cup fresh parsley, chopped or 1 tablespoon dried parsley
2 sprigs fresh thyme or 1 teaspoon dried thyme
1 sprig fresh tarragon, chopped, or 1 teaspoon dried tarragon
1/4 cup fresh basil, minced, or 2 teaspoons dried basil
1 teaspoon seasoned salt (or to taste)
1/2 teaspoon white pepper
1/4 cup cornstarch
2 cups Half-and-Half
Sour cream
Chives, chopped
Instructions
Break off and discard the tough, thick end of each asparagus spear. Chop the spears into 1/4-inch slices and add to the slow cooker along with all remaining ingredients down to and including the white pepper.
Add water to within 1 inch of the top of the slow cooker.
Cover the slow cooker and cook on HIGH for 6 to 7 hours.
About two hours before serving, use a slotted spoon to remove most of the vegetables to a blender. Use a ladle to add some of the liquid from the slow cooker to the blender. Puree the mixture and add back in to the slow cooker.
Repeat once or twice more as necessary (you can leave some of the pieces in the slow cooker for effect.)
Add approximately 1 cup of the Half-and-Half to the slow cooker.
Add the cornstarch to the remaining Half-and-Half in the carton.
Close the carton well and shake vigorously.
Add the mixture to the slow cooker.
Continue to cook on HIGH for 1 hour, stirring occasionally.
Serve in bowls with a dollop of sour cream and chopped chives sprinkled over the sour cream.
For those who cannot imagine what it’s like to be vaxxed, and living with it once the evidence becomes available, l can answer you: it’s day-to-day grieving and cellular remorse.
Many of us were just living our daily lives without any idea of the World Economic Forum or the World Health Organisation. We trusted our doctors – l’d had mine for over 25 years, and we knew our government lied at election times, but we voted the best we could based on the B.S. presented to us.
We went about our lives innocently – working, raising kids and babysitting grandkids – and many of us had not one person in our circles to warn us of the dangers.
We didn’t even know that we had to do ‘research’. Unbelievable as that may seem, it’s absolutely true.
So off we went and had the shots. And now us ‘sheeples’ – as we are sometimes referred to – are dying in our millions, some suddenly, while some are destined for slow, malingering, pain-filled deaths.
But we are dying, and ironically, we are the evidence; the proof you will all use later.
Some of us argued with others who knew about the dangers, and words and actions hurt both sides. And that is the greatest weapon of the psy-op: it’s actually greater than the vax itself.
There is a level of toxic hatred and gloating online that condemns the vaxxed to silence in regards to seeking help. l see it in the forums, how they are abused by total strangers, so we stay silent and die alone, unforgiven for our naivety and fear.
But back to the point above – of what it is like to be vaxxed and to then become aware of how we’ve been done. It is hell. Living with the knowledge that I took three of them; that my wonderful, kind, hardworking husband took four; that our children and grandchildren had them;
it haunts me, it breaks my soul, it has destroyed me… simply because we were naive.
My husband and l were already injected when a cousin contacted me through Messenger after seeing a post about my rapid decline in health and asked me questions. l then spoke to my sons, but it was too late – they had been jabbed already.
It’s reading endless detox protocols and wondering IF they truly work or IF they too are part of the B.S., because how would we ever know when there is no long-term proof? It’s endless medical tests that come back ‘normal’, but you just know and feel the changes in your body.
It’s seeing the videos of the ‘calamari’ clots and reading about graphene microblades slicing up veins, and spikes adhering like velcro to tissues and organs.
It’s the breathlessness and palpitations on the slightest exertion that doctors can’t explain.
It’s the knowing that it was all for nothing, though we believed it was for the best of intentions.
It’s this tattoo on my arm of the vax batch numbers that l use to open conversations and share my adverse reactions with every doctor, specialist and pathologist, radiologist and ambulance paramedic l meet.
It’s knowing that any second, any second, could be IT… the last one l breathe before l die.
It’s grief – deep, empty, gut-wrenching grief for all my family and friends, all those l love and care for.
It’s loss – the loss of my future dreams and plans, the loss of my husband and family, it’s the pain felt by the name-calling and ongoing online abuse.
l may be a sheeple to some, and cop endless abuse online for speaking up with my truth, but that will not stop me.
Not every vaxxed person acted like an A-hole when approached by someone who cared enough to take the risk of warning them.
Yet we have ALL been tarred with that one brush. And it’s there that humanity debased itself even further. They did not have to do a thing except sit back and watch us fall apart.
Sounds Of The Department Store 1979
Music in this video is from various Bruton and music De Wolfe Records dating from 1972-1979 mixed in audacity and recorded onto a 1977-79 Maxell UD Type 1 Cassette Tape. The Video portion was created from various images of old department stores recorded onto real VHS tape for the retro effect.
One of the strangest “crazy” memories of my old dog PP was what he did when we would go for a walk.
Sure, like every dog, he would stop at every tree to take a leak. That was the normal. And quite expected. The damn dog wouldn’t ever pass up a good tree to pee on. The younger tree being preferred over an old one.
But the strangest thing was when we crossed a road.
Sure as shit, as soon as we were in the middle of the road; the exact middle… he would stop aggressively smell everything and take a dump right then and there, and the cars would come up and stop honking telling us to get out the way. Sheech!!
Apparently, the streets… the roads… all smelled like a sewer to that dog.
Makes you think.
Sometimes I wonder what life would be like if I had an operation and was able to improve my ability to smell things better. Ugh. It might not be anything that I might want to experience!
I’ll tell you what!
Today…
What’s the best revenge you’ve gotten after being fired or let go from a job?
I was employee number 7 for a software as a service company. I put my blood sweat and tears into building their business. When things were small, I worked in the basement of my boss’s home. When things got bigger, I trained other employees (in QA, in support, in project management) in how our stuff worked. I’m not a water-walker, but I was generally well-thought of by those I trained.
Fast forward a couple of years: after training and building out my department including supervising and managing those I trained because there was no one else to do that, they hired a guy to manage the department I had been de facto managing for years. Fine. I simply refused to train him. I was always too busy. Not my finest hour, but my avenues for advancement in this company were now firmly entrenched.
My passive aggressive routine eventually lead to me being laid off. The founders were puss**s about it, and wouldn’t call the out what the real dynamic was. I didn’t care. I left.
When I got laid off, 2 other people (in a company with barely over 10 employees) I had trained quit immediately (without input from me) because of the message that my firing signified to other employees. Later, in my new job, I recruited away several employees from this company just because I knew they were great. My motivations were not necessarily revenge, I put good opportunities in front of good people I knew. I got them more money and better benefits because they deserved that. That this inconvenienced people I didn’t like was just delicious icing on the professional cake.
I didn’t set out to get revenge. I did the right thing all the way around in my pro experience with these jokers. They experienced it as vengeful because that’s the only idiom they had for people who were no longer friends to them. I hired people away from them as they didn’t care about their employees. What I did wasn’t vengeful or difficult. I provided objective evidence that you suck, and why those I took from you should objectively evaluate you that way. Cheers.
If you read this, you’re probably all “so?” I get it. This particular company had industry and application specific knowledge that one had to internalize to be effective. It generally took 6 months for people to find their feet. When I took several senior people, it was a purposeful shot across their bow.
In the past 6 months, apart from its citizens, soldiers, economy, reputation in the world, etc., what else has Israel lost? Will the sacrifices of more than 35,000 Palestinians be wasted, or will Netanyahu & company definitely have to pay for it?
In the 1990s or 1980s or 1970s – The People across the world trusted the United States
They trusted the US with their Gold, with their Dollars
They trusted the US Senators and Congressmen and the Western Media implicitly
Including me
If CNN said Saddam and his sons were raping women and killing kids – the world would believe it implicitly
If BBC said Gadaffi killed people who were rude to him, the world would believe it implicitly
Thus when the US said Israelis were the good guys, the world believed them back then
Today the World no longer trusts the US. The world is frightened of the United States
The US is the equivalent of an Insane Lunatic holding a button to 6 Keys of RDX and threatening to blow up everyone
Nobody trusts the US with their money or gold
Nobody trusts a US Senator or Congressman anymore
Even their own people
The World now knows the Israelis are insane religiously talmudic nut jobs who are demented enough to kill women and kids in their quest
Virtually a carbon copy of the same terrorists they condemn
Netanyahu is like a serial murderer with a knife in his hands and everyone is wary of him
Today’s world doesn’t trust the US. They aspire for the end of the US and Israel and the West without a world War and rise of a new world
Every passing day, people are less frightened of the US or Israel anymore
Apple Butter Muffins
applebuttermuffins10
Ingredients
2 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cup brown sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ginger
3/4 cup apple butter
1/2 cup applesauce
1/4 cup skim milk
2 eggs, lightly beaten
3 tablespoons honey
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup raisins (optional)
Instructions
Heat oven to 400 degrees F.
In a large bowl, combine dry ingredients (the first 7 ingredients) and make a well in the center.
In smaller bowl, combine wet ingredients (the next 6 ingredients).
Pour wet mixture into the “well” of the dry ingredients and stir just to combine (10 to 15 strokes). Fold in raisins with as few strokes as possible.
Spoon batter into 12 muffin cups (if you don’t use muffin liners, spray the pan with cooking spray).
Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, until cake tester comes out clean.
Remove muffin tin to cooling rack and cool for 5 minutes before removing muffins from tin. (Do NOT let muffins cool completely in the tin.)
Printing money
What are some interesting facts about the handover of Hong Kong to China on July 1, 1997?
The official handover ceremony was held at 11:30PM at the Convention Centre in Wanchai. At the time of the ceremony, the Convention Centre had not yet been completed. (It was completed in 2000.)
Officially, Beijing never recognized British control of HK, although it recognized all treaties which were made. So, for the British, the challenge was “How do you arrange protocol when the Chinese refuse to recognize the handover?” The official Chinese term for the handover was 中國政府對香港地區恢復行使權 The translation of this is “The Chinese government recovers sovereignty over Hong Kong and its regions” Notice that there is no mention of any handover in the Chinese or mention of British sovereignty over Hong Kong.
Because there was no recognition of British sovereignty over Hong Kong, the Chinese and British officials did not talk to each other, shake hands or acknowledge each other after the ceremony began.
The ceremony had to follow a strict schedule: the British Union Jack HAD TO come down before 12 midnight on June 30, and the PRC and HKSAR flags had to run up immediately after 12 midnight on July 1.
Because the ceremony was indoors, there was no wind to make the flags wave. So the Chinese punched holes in the back of the flag poles, and put powerful fans at the base to blow air up through the flag poles and out through vents so that the flags would wave.
After Prince Charles and Governor Patten spoke, Governor Patten and his family immediately took the Union Jack and boarded the Queen’s yacht HMS Britannia, which was right outside the Convention Centre. The Chinese president and government officials then proceeded with the second Chinese half of the ceremony. The Chinese officials did not acknowledge the British officials departure from Convention Centre, and the ceremony continued without interruption.
By the time the Chinese half of the ceremony ended, the HMS Britannia had already left dockside.
At exactly 12 midnight, just as the Chinese flag was rising in the Convention Centre ceremony, 12 Chinese military trucks full of Chinese military personnel drove across the Hong Kong border without stopping at Chinese and HK customs. These were the first Chinese military personnel to be stationed in what was formerly the Prince of Wales Building in Central, and would become the garrison for the PLA in Hong Kong.
All the troops on the trucks were chosen from their units two years previously in 1995, and since then had practiced for this moment. All were EXACTLY 190 centimeters tall. All were ordered to stand at attention while the trucks drove at 60MPH to their destination without stopping. They were ordered to keep their eyes looking straight ahead even if HK residents waved at them as their trucks drove through HK.
Although the PLA soldiers carried guns, they were all unloaded.
The next day’s papers in China all had the same photo of the Chinese flag waving in the Convention Centre ceremony. No photos of the British flag waving, taken before 12PM midnight, were shown in any Chinese papers.
By July 1, China had recovered sovereignty over Hong Kong after 157 years of British administration. Not a single life was lost in the process.
The US has no more technologies to put sanctions against China. As for the Chinese-made products such as the world most advances Huawei 5G, smartphones, solar energy panels, China made EVs, shipbuildings etc are 100% Chinese technologies. Why?
I’d like to give a short and oblique answer.
In one word, margin.
In one sentence: the curse of quarterly earnings.
The whole problem with American manufacturing is margin, because of skyrocketing cost and paradoxically, expectation.
Look at the magnificent 7. They are all, to a fault, either internet or chip giants with sky-high IP- or service monopoly-enabled margins and valuations.
Unfortunately, the backbone of the economy isn’t high-tech, or high margin. The only way they could survive was to lower cost, and find new revenue streams.
They solved the first problem by relocating out of America, and the second partly by selling to the rest of the world. This was why globalization became such a buzzword, because rich Western media trumpeted the model.
For a few decades, everyone benefited, until the rise of the internet boom threw balance sheet expectations out of whack. Investors not only demanded dividends, but also capital appreciation, and the stock buyback became mandatory in the 21st century. Intel for example spent in excess of 100b on stock buyback this century, and it hasn’t had a leading edge node chip for almost a decade.
Unions and collective bargaining wrecked havoc on company finances and HR turnover. Just ask GM, which is still paying down pension commitments dating pre-GFC. Elon is adamant about a no-union Tesla, and has taken aggression action against unionization. Otherwise, it would have faced immense blowback in its recent retrenchment exercise.
Meanwhile, CEO compensation have been shooting for the moon, and THE KPI to meet is the company’s stock price. The easiest way is to sell sexy growth stories for the public to stomach inflated earning multiples. In a world where the global competition is rapidly catching up and with few greenfield markets left to exploit, margin expansion requires cost-cutting. Which explains Boeing’s woes today, letting go of senior engineers, and allowing standards to slip, while contracting away key components that Boeing used to make inhouse.
One final example. The loyalty program of Delta Airlines is worth more than its market value. In other words, the equity value of physical airline operation (planes, brand, landing slots) is negative. Understand how loyalty miles turn a profit for airlines and you’ll have the answer to the question posed.
It’s over-financialization, and the stock market, silly.
Its all about ME ME ME
What did you do that was unusually honest, and turned out well?
One sunny day I was leaving Wal-Mart, and I spotted an envelope which appeared to be a bank envelope. As I got closer to it, I could tell that there was something in it, and there wasn’t anyone around. Finally, I got to a point where I could grab it, and I continued to my car parked nearby.
I got in, closed my door, and proceeded to inspect the envelope. To my surprise, there was cash. Not just a little bit of money, but some good money. There were some hundreds and some fifties. My heart skipped a beat, and I was overjoyed by my good fortune. I sat there for a minute in disbelief. I waited around for someone to come looking for it, but to my surprise, no one was around, and it was just me and the envelope.
Next, I took the cash out the envelope to give it a good count and go and treat myself and pay on some bills. I flipped through hundred after hundred to find $820 worth of cold hard cash, but there was something else in the envelope… A receipt. A receipt from Chase bank. The funny thing is the balance was there, and it was enough that this guy was not even going to miss it.
Without even thinking, no debate, I simply decided. I went straight to Chase bank and handed the teller the receipt. She proceeded to track the transaction, and minutes later, I was being thanked on the phone by a grateful gentleman.
I drove to a nearby Citgo gas station and handed him back his envelope with all the cash. The guy appeared to be in disbelief. He told me he had written it off as a loss and got screamed at by his spouse. He handed me a $50 bill, we exchanged business cards, and he thanked me again, and again and we went about life.
Since then, my fortune has not changed much. Yes, I could have really used the money, but I continue to work in my business serving clients. When I share this with my friends and my family, I simply state that it was not my money. I did what anyone should do given the opportunity.
NEVER install these programs on your PC… EVER!
What are some mind-blowing facts that sound unreal but are actually true?
1. Dogs can smell cancer.
Researchers have found that dogs are able to pick up on a specific scent that cancer produces in a person – which is undetectable to humans. So if your dog is acting strange around you, you may need to get checked out by a physician.
2. The shortest commercial flight in the world lasts just 57 seconds.
The Loganair flight between the two Scottish islands of Westray and Papa Westray lasts just 57 seconds. At a distance of 2.7 miles, it’s the shortest commercial flight in the world.
3. Humans are the only animals that enjoy spicy foods.
There does not seem to be any health benefits to eating painful peppers, so the best reason some have suggested is the thrill factor – no different than the fact that we are the only creatures that like rollercoasters and scary movies.
4. Stars and celebrities use online platforms to find a lover too
Real Housewives star Rachel Lugo met her new boyfriend on this site. And now they seem to be engaged. Ben Afflect was using Raya to find dates..etc.
5. Cotton candy was invented by a dentist.
Cotton candy isn’t exactly great for your teeth. But actually the machine that makes this sweet treat was invented by a dentist named William Morrison, despite he looked after peoples’ teeth for a living.
6. On eBay, a man tried to sell New Zealand.
People try to sell some unique and weird things online since e-commerce became popular. But in 2006, one man kicked the eccentric nature of the digital marketplace up a notch by trying to sell an entire country—New Zealand, to be exact—on eBay. And New Zealand is sold.
7. Tins of air were sold to commemorate the abdication of a Japanese emperor.
When Japan’s Emperor Akihito abdicated the throne in 2019 to let his son, take over, it was the first time that an abdication had taken place in Japan in 200 years. People who were selling tins of air for about $10 USD, to commemorate the hand over in rule and the end of the Heisei era.
8. A man once ate an entire airplane.
In 1978, a French man named Michel Lotito started eating a Cessna 150 airplane. Lotito developed an unique tolerance for eating dangerous objects due to a condition known as pica, which leads to an appetite for non-nutritive items. In 1980, he finished consuming the last of the airplane.
Where are they?
What is the oddest conversation you’ve had with a telephone scammer?
My granddaughter called and told me she had been arrested. I asked which granddaughter was this, because I didn’t recognize her voice. “Oh Grandma! You know who this is! It’s me!” “Ummm…no, sorry. I really can’t figure out which one of my grandchildren you are. I’m sorry, honey, just tell me who you are and I’ll help you as best I can.” “Oh Grandma! (Sounding hurt and sad). I really can’t believe you don’t recognize my voice!” “I’m sorry baby girl, I don’t have my hearing aid in, so your voice is so soft, I can hardly hear you.Tell me your name and it’ll be okay.” Softly and with a lot of sighing, she says a name. “Gee…sorry sweetheart, I KNOW you aren’t one of my grandchildren.” “GRANDMA! How could you say that!?! It’s ME!” “How do I know you aren’t one my grandchildren? Simple – I DONT HAVE ANY, YOU IDIOT!” Stop being a scammer and go get a decent job. Shame on you!”
What is the saddest thing you have seen a parent do to their child?
It makes me shudder to share this. I was an elementary school bus driver and I have to say I ran a pretty tight ship. I had a fairly new student on the bus, about 10 yrs old, and he kept misbehaving in a way that really jeopardized his safety, like jumping in the aisles, standing up in the seats and such. I finally wrote him up, which meant a phone call home. Well he lived in a low income apartment building and there resided some seedy characters as well. Apparently his father figure, step father, was one of them. The next morning as I pulled in to pick him up, this bully of a man, the step father, cigarette in mouth, no shirt, mullet…was screaming through his ciggy while dragging this child in a choke hold! The child was trying to break free as the man was obviously tightening his grip. The kids on the bus were horrified! He led the child to the door and threw him into the stairwell, leaving the boy gasping and coughing for air. The man took his cigarette out and said, “IF YOU HAVE ANY MORE PROBLEMS WITH HIM, YOU LET ME KNOW SO I CAN BEAT HIS ASS!” I slammed the Bus door and got the Hell out of there. I pulled over at the first opportunity to check on the boy. He was beat down emotionally as low as can be and so humiliated, I could feel it for him. I got him to the school and into the counselor then went straight up to the principal’s office. I slammed the door and bawled my head off. I reported the abuser and confessed the lesson I learned…sometimes there’s a reason a kiddo acts up. I should have had my eyes and ears open to what those symptoms were about. But he taught me. That little boy taught me compassion, and my bus got a little bit dirtier and louder after that incident without regret or remorse. I’ll never forget that boy who grabbed me by the heartstrings and taught me a lesson.
I don’t need a man
How does an average person detect propaganda in the modern news feeds we are all bombarded with?
Use your brain and ask questions. I’ll give you some examples.
This story:
main qimg 910d281792fdee67fe953b3e7f7769c1
Kanthaswamy Balasubramaniam made a very good point. 40 babies? How did they find 40 babies? If I go to the local maternity ward in HK with the almost zero birth rate here I can’t find 40 babies. In the UK which had a fertility rate of 2.7 especially with Eastern Europeans and Bangladeshi women, I’d struggle to find 40 babies. And I knew a Somali woman with a clowncar vagina she had 6 kids.
He asked a question, and like that the propaganda fell to bits.
Second example
OMG look at this a huge protest in Myanmar!
main qimg 6b99e7fee44ee77d96d17ee66ab402ea
If you ask questions, something seems not right. Lets think about it shall we?
Why are the signs in English, they speak Burmese there.
Why are the signs all the same, that speaks of somebody paying for a print shop and at an average salary of $500USD a month, full lots of large full colour printouts aren’t cheap. I had to organise last year’s clan feast and full colour posters cost a fair chunk of change.
Example 3
Read carefully.
Strip out any adjectives.
Man murdered.
Man brutally murdered.
Look at the voice that is being used:
Children died.
Soldiers kill children.
What have you discovered when you cleaned out a vehicle you have just purchased?
Not me, but a younger friend who was a victim of abuse, and a struggling single mom of two.
She received a tax refund, and went looking for a decent used car. She found someone selling one, and the car was really dirty and trashed, as it had come from an estate auction type of situation. The seller refused to clean it up or reduce the price, which was a bit much, and it also badly needed a brake job, which they did not disclose.
So, my friend went to get the car, was really disappointed that it needed money invested in it, because she had no more left.
As she was driving away, she took a moment to look in the console storage area, and found like $800 in cash, likely left there by the elderly, deceased, previous owner. If the seller had bothered to check the car and clean it, it would not have been there. His laziness was her deliverance. It was enough to fix up and register the car, plus start insurance payments.
Cold War 2: US officials call to overthrow China’s gov’t, expand military budget to $1.4 trillion
Delusional Americans. Jeeze!
What’s the hardest prison habit to break after being released?
11 years served.
For me it was how I reacted to disrespect. In prison if you are disrespected, it can be an instant fight. Certain words ARE an instant fight. Some of these words are used normally on the street, and it’s no big deal. My sister called me a punk not long after I got out, and I almost punched her. Punk has a completely different meaning in prison, and it’s very bad. It’s also an immediate fight if someone calls you a punk in prison. There’s no questions asked, no further argument. You immediately start swinging. The day after I got out, someone cut in front of me in line at the store, and I talked nasty to them. I didn’t even realize how inappropriate it was for me to talk to them like that, until 20 minutes later.
Second hardest was wearing my shower shoes (flip flops or sandals) when I would get in the shower. Let’s just say, prison shower floors are NASTY, and you do NOT take a shower barefoot.
Edit:To all those people who haven’t been in prison. I don’t want to hear any smartass remarks about reactions to disrespect being stupid, or signs of low intelligence. Prison makes you that way, because that’s how you survive. If you want to keep your property, booty hole, and life, you WILL be that way in prison. Simple as that. People who serve a lot of time, get those behaviors ingrained into them. It’s called PTSD. Google it. And just so y’all know what punk means, in Kentucky prisons, it’s someone who is so scared, that they do sexual favors for someone else, hoping that person will protect them. “I’m scared, I think I will let this guy pound my ass, so he will protect me” That’s a punk.
What is the most savage revenge you’ve seen a renter get on a sleazy landlord?
I once rented an apartment from the daughter of a good friend of my father. Rent was month-to-month while my new house was under construction. The apartment was run-down, but liveable for a couple of months. There was the usual first and last month rent and damage deposit. No lease.
When we moved out a couple of months later, we gave thirty days notice and requested return of the damage deposit, but the husband of the landlord notified me that the damage deposit would not be returned and that we had broken the imaginary lease. He listed several things to justify his actions. We lived there for a couple of months, but he listed things like worn carpet, etc. which were totally bogus. He refused to let me talk to his wife who was the actual landlord, saying he was in charge of the situation. I considered taking him to small claims court, but remembered who his mother-in-law was.
I called her and explained the situation. Her son in law was at my door the next morning with an apology and a check for my deposit. What a sleazebag.
What are some mind-blowing facts about men?
1. Men can go for hours without thinking about anything.
2. Most men own three pairs of shoes.
3. 50% of men say they would feel comfortable if their girlfriend had a lesbian lover.
4. A man speaks about 2,000 words a day; a woman, about 7,000.
5. It’s easier for a man to buy a bathing suit.
6. Women have two types: depressing and more depressing.
7. Men have two types: sexy-cool and horrific-speedo.
8. Love can help men quit smoking. If a man suddenly quits smoking, he may very well be falling in love.
9. Men are 150% more likely than women to use dating sites.
10. Physical intimacy is even more important for men than for women, who may value verbal communication or emotional intimacy more.
11. On average, men are more colorblind, but their eyes also perceive motion better.
12. Most men would rather take a bullet than buy tampons at the supermarket.
She seems like a nice lady
What is the most disrespectful thing someone did to you while you were on an airplane?
It actually happened before we got on the plane. I was travelling alone from Toronto Canada to London Uk. I had loads of bags with me. I’d checked in my big suitcase but I also had my small suitcase, a backpack and a hold-all with me. My hold-all has my laptop and other electrical in it and I was terrified of it getting damaged. I got to the departure lounge early so I sat close to the door but also away from people. I picked an area that wasn’t crowded and saw one gentleman sitting there. He was sat the the middle of the row of seats, so I wanted to give him space. To his right there were three empty seats and to his left there were four. I went to the left and sat on the last seat, putting my electrical bag on the seat next to me and trying to keep all my bags in a little area around me. Normally I wouldn’t have put it on the seat but there were a lot of kids running around and I was worried my laptop would get kicked.
A man came over to where I was sitting and asked if anyone was sitting in the seat next to me/ my bag. It wasn’t clear which. There were a lot of other seats available with no one sitting next to them. I said no.
He sat down in the seat right next to my bag. His husband/ boyfriend joined him a few minutes later. They both look super grumpy.
The first guy turns to me and says ‘I thought you said someone was sitting there’
I said, ‘no, I told you no when you asked me’
’then why can’t you be less fucking dumb and move your bag so I can sit there?’
‘Why? You could have sat anywhere else and I wanted to give the gentleman over there space and myself space’
basically he wanted to sit in that seat. It wouldn’t mean not sitting next to anyone in any configuration of where he sat on the bench but he wanted that seat because reasons? There were loads of seats available where he and his partner could have sat with no one on either side of them. He basically started anmassive tirade at me saying I saw stupid and a complete uneducated idiot who didn’t know anything in public. People looked at me and I have really bad anxiety so I almost had a panic attack.
I don’t remember exactly what I said at that point because my fight or flight anxiety mode started going off and I got super dizzy. I do recall saying something like ‘yes, clearly I’m stupid and my science degree confirms it’. And then telling him to fuck off when he wouldn’t stop bothering me.
I wanted to leave but I didn’t want to give in now as he’d been rude to me for no reason. I wasn’t hurting him and he’d just started having a go at me over nothing. If he’d wanted me to move my bag he could have asked politely but I was tired from travelling from my university in Peterborough to Toronto after a day of classes.
I got onto the plane and sat down.
Like ten minutes later the people behind me sit down and it’s the dude and his partner. They immediately start bitching about me and calling me a dumb whore etc. I started crying and called my mum to tell her what had happened.
May I also point out at this point that I was a 20 year old lone student and these men were in their thirties. I just wanted a calm journey home.
I ended up talking to an air stewardess and telling her what had happened. I asked to move seats because I was so upset. She told me once we took off I could sit wherever I liked in the area of the plane and she would keep an eye on them. I ended up able to sit in a row where a lady and I were the only people in a four seater. We sat on the furthest points on their side, both napped, and she told me she’d be my travel mum and if they were mean again she’d tell them off.
Yes I didn’t need my bag on the seat but I’m always prepared to move my stuff if someone needs space. I have osteoarthritis so I often can’t hold heavy things on my lap and my legs were in a lot of pain already so I tend to put bags next to me instead. I also get paranoid of being robbed if I don’t have everything closer but to the side. I just feel safer when I can block my items in with my suitcase and I can hold onto the suitcase at the same time. I just don’t feel the men handled it fairly in response to what was happening.
NB: 1. The carrier I was flying on does not have the two bag limit. You are also allowed a laptop bag. My laptop didn’t fit a standard size so it went into a sportdirect hold-all that wasn’t too big and was cleared by the crew. My backpack was small and just had my passport, money etc valuables you wouldn’t put in the checked bagged. I wasn’t being abnoxious with the amount of stuff I had, it was well within my limit and I kept it as much out of everyone’s way as possible.
Also clearly someone couldn’t read as I wasn’t worried my laptop would be stolen while in the air, but at the departure gate.
Furthermore, I am apparently not allowed to call my mother if I’m upset and should stay at home. I want to clarify that I was studying abroad as part of my degree. I was returning home to the UK. I don’t think it is a bad thing to be able to share things with your mum if you’re upset and unsure what to do in a situation. It was only my second time flying alone and I have severe anxiety. I was like 19 at the time and hadn’t ever lived in another country, but clearly there are some assholes on Quora.
Some AI generated pictures
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What happens to old people who don’t save up for their retirement?
My mother in law turns 93 this year. She lives in Saskatchewan Canada. She had absolutely no savings when she retired, she had been a single mother supporting her kids and grandkids, and had nothing left over.
So each month she receives $784 in Old age security and $1065.74 in guaranteed income supplement. She lives in a one bedroom apartment, the same one she moved into 30 years ago. It has all the amenities you expect in an apartment. Her family have updated her furniture and TV etc over the years. It has a recreational area on the main floor. The Regina housing authority takes 30 percent of her gross income each month as rent and utilities, or $554 as rent. Leaving her with roughly $1300 a month, minus taxes. Taxes aren’t much, less than $75 a month. So she has about $1200 a month to spend for groceries, clothes and entertainment.
She always has extra money to give a little here and there to family, including a large lump sum she saved up for 20 years, for each of her great grandkids weddings.
I don’t know that I would be as lucky today, to find a nice centrally located apartment, but it’s possible, at least in Regina Saskatchewan. Fortunately I have a nest egg.
She has managed to prepay her funeral and burial costs.
She spends a lot of time with her grandkids and great grandchildren. Her grand daughter provides her frozen home cooked meals. She goes for coffee with friends, but unfortunately she has lost a lot of friends to old age.
What men want
What have you seen that made you think, “Wait they can actually do that?”?
I know more about alcohol than the average bear.
While working on my ChemE degree at Michigan State I took coursework towards a specialization in Beverage Science and Technology. Over the years I have brewed beer, made wine and cider, and distilled whiskey, rum, gin, vodka, and brandy (legally, of course…)
Hell, I even tried my hand at drowning in it. 0/10, not recommended.
I don’t drink like I used to and I sold off all of my alcohol making equipment years ago, but I am still fascinated with the history, culture, and science of booze.
It suffices to say that I am not often surprised by anything to do with alcohol. I mean, sure, we’ve come a long way in some of the finer details of production, but in general alcoholic beverages are made in much the same way as they have been for hundreds of years.
In general, vodka production is about as tough on the environment as vodka itself is on your liver. Most vodka is made from grain or potatoes which must first be mashed (requiring heat/energy) to convert basic starches into fermentable sugars, it is then fermented (releasing carbon dioxide), and distilled to a high degree of purity (lots more energy), before being filtered and watered down to drinking strength.
Being that traditional vodka production necessarily evolves CO2, it’s pretty much impossible to make a carbon-negative vodka. That it has been achieved at all is pretty surprising. How they pulled it off is beyond surprising, it’s mind-blowing:
They make it out of air.
Yes, air. Specifically, carbon dioxide. The Air Company, out of Brooklyn, NY, has figured out how to make ethanol using nothing more than air, water, and solar energy. No mashing, no fermentation; just air, water, and sun.
Each bottle is made from the carbon dioxide equivalent of the daily uptake of eight trees.
I would have never guessed that this would be possible. The solution to global warming has finally arrived: We all just need to drink more vodka.
The earth will thank you, unfortunately your liver probably won’t.
Cheers!
Edit: You know how you write an answer and it languishes at under 100 views for weeks until you all but forget about it but then it gets shared to Gold Medal Answers and suddenly you wake up to a bazillion comments and you can’t possibly answer them all? My apologies to those who I can’t address directly, but I’d like to clear up a few questions here:
No, I am not affiliated in any way with the Air Co. and this answer is not meant to be an endorsement. I have not even tried the vodka and can’t say anything to whether or not it is even good. I think that the concept and chemistry are amazing, though.
There have been some comments about what it actually tastes like. Again, I haven’t tried it but it’s a valid question. While vodka is theoretically nothing but water and ethanol, it certainly is more than that in practice. Distillation is not a perfect separation, most fans of vodka can taste flavors from the source material. I am a fan of neutral vodkas, but none are completely neutral. This one might be…or maybe not. There might be some side products that can be tasted. I’d love to find out for myself if anyone can get their hands on a bottle (*wink wink*).
“Carbon Negative” is not the same as “Violates the laws of thermodynamics”…
For anyone interested in the chemistry, my guess is that the process is a commercialized version of this: Scientists Accidentally Turned CO2 Into Ethanol, but I don’t know for sure. If any chemists out there know better, let me know (I am not a chemist, just a lowly chemical engineer…)!
Cajun Catfish with Honey Dijon Bacon Potato Salad
Fried catfish paired with a delicious Honey Dijon Bacon Potato Salad…yummy!
cajun catfish honey dijon
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
Honey Dijon Bacon Potato Salad
5 cups baby Yukon gold potatoes, cooked and quartered
1 medium red onion, diced
1 1/2 cups celery, diced
1 cup bacon, cooked, drained and chopped
2 tablespoons honey
2 tablespoons mayonnaise
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
1 tablespoon Creole mustard
1 tablespoon fresh parsley, chopped
Salt and pepper to taste
Hot sauce to taste
Cajun Catfish
4 U.S. Farm-Raised Catfish Fillets
1/2 cup fish breading
1 tablespoon Creole seasoning
1 1/2 to 2 cups frying oil
Instructions
Potato Salad
Combine all ingredients and mix well.
Adjust seasoning with salt, pepper and hot sauce. Cover and refrigerate.
Cajun Catfish
Combine fish breading and Creole seasoning in shallow bowl. Coat catfish in breading, lightly shaking off any excess.
In a large skillet, heat oil over high heat. Fry catfish until golden brown, approximately 3 minutes per side.
Place on paper towel to drain.
Serve immediately with Honey Dijon Bacon Potato Salad.
Rent is too high
What has a car salesperson said to you that resulted in you immediately leaving?
“Please don’t touch this car”. A salesman told me once. I worked at a car dealership in Florida and I wanted to buy a car. A nice little Volkswagen with teeth. The sales manager told me that if I ever needed a car to come to him and he’ll handle it. So I did and he told me to work with this one gentleman and that when I found the car I wanted, to let him know and he’ll speed it on through. So I went on my lunch break with the salesman he recommended and when I got to the car I wanted, a brand new 2004 VW R32 (at the time). So I found the one I liked, silver and I said that I wanted this one and proceeded to open the door (I had been eyeing them whenever they came through the shop on pre-delivery inspection).
“Please don’t touch this car.” I said, “what?” “Please don’t touch this car unless you intend to buy it”.
I didn’t fuss, I walked away and got into my car and drove across town to another VW dealer and bought the car there. All the Volkswagen guys in that area more or less knew each other from meeting at VW training school or from the racetrack plus I used to work with some of them.
I said don’t prep it, don’t clean it just take the sticker down and let me take it the way it is. Don’t even gas it up. Maybe I spent 20 minutes there, I had my own financing so it wasn’t a hassle. Their sales manager was blown away when I told him what happened to me not half hour earlier. I drove back to work and parked it in the employee parking lot. Went into the break room to eat a sandwich. That rude salesman from earlier walked in and tried to offer me a deal. I said “I already got the car.” He said, “really, from who?” I said, “from XYZ Volkswagen”. He looked at me weird. I dropped the keys onto the table with the id tag still on it. “Wanna see the receipt?” He walked away.
The sales manager comes and asks what happened and why didn’t I come to him first. I had nothing against the sales manager at the dealership I worked for but I told him “every single time I’ve tried to buy a car from any dealership I’ve ever worked for I’ve gotten a hassle from the sales department, every single time – cash deal or otherwise. I agree to the price, I buy the warranties and extras, why isn’t my money good enough?” He was speechless.
Come to find in the next week the owner of the dealership was highly upset I bought a car from another VW dealer. I told him the story, all he could do was apologise. Did you know that the following month the owner threatened (off record) to fire anyone who bought a car from another dealer? Talk about punishing the victims of his hostile sales department. Since that day, whenever I go to a dealer to buy a car, I go to the weakest salesperson and give them their fastest sale ever. The big shots can go pound it.
What’s the fastest you’ve ever seen someone fail a marriage?
Two different times within 3 hours of being married.
The first time the bride and an ex-boyfriend were caught, *ahem*, having relations together by a member of the groom’s family.
Lots of screaming, yelling, and drama. The bride and ex-boyfriend were both escorted out. The groom was sitting in the corner surrounded by his family in tears. What seemed to make everything worse was the music kept playing.
The second was a bit more interesting, to say the least.
First of all, neither the bride nor groom seemed interested in the planning. The second thing was that every meeting we had, the best man AND maid of honor were there too.
Day of the wedding and the groom gets caught with the best man. The bride was pissed, but not for the usual reasons. What she said when she found out was,
“I can’t believe you two couldn’t wait until tonight!”
I swear you could have heard a pin drop. Come to find out, both were from very strict conservative and Christian families. Both were also homosexual. So they worked out a deal to “marry” but live their lives how they wished. Even more drama at that one. We escorted the bride, groom, and their significant others (for a lack of a better term) out of the area.
The Monday after, I just looked at my boss and said,
“That was one hell of a coming out party, wasn’t it?”
Free speech
Why are Chinese manufacturers’ products not as good as Japanese manufacturers’ products but less than half the price (electronics)?
Misinformation spouted by an ignorant.
Most of the “Japanese” products that are sold in the West are actually made in China.
As are most products made in Germany, the UK. Korea, France, and Italy. If you spend any time in Chinese factories you will tour the Chinese warehouses where the products are boxed up for shipment to the rest of the world. And there, you will see them… large cardboard boxes with the words “Made in Japan”, “Made in the USA”, “Made in Germany” and “Make in the UK” proudly displayed inside the Chinese warehouse.
Sanity Check
If you want to provide a more in-depth study, then please compare which nation uses the most cardboard Shipping boxes. After all, once you manufacture a product, you have to ship it. This requires a cardboard box.
You will be surprised at how tiny that number is for Japan, and other nations in the West.
Can the US take action against Chinese ships if they are registered in other countries?
The U.S. can do whatever the hell they so chooses but the real question is that does it fall faster into oblivion? Right at this moment the image of the U.S. is that of lacking confidence and weak mentally and unstable to think straight!
That U.S. the present day image of the U.S. let alone it is getting ridiculous by the day. Using a fighter aircraft to shoot down a 1000 bucks weather balloon l floating across the U.S. costing them millions to trying to did armed a teeny booper social media and calling EVs. A security risk!
Investors and business partners watch for confidence and risk in dealing with a mature economy and the US looks and sound like a mentally unstable nation to have a serious relationship! So can you do what you want? Sure yes especially if you can print money freely but at what cost? This is what smart person ought to think!
Everyone in the world knows it is a Singaporean tanker run by Indian seaman but if you feel like fooling your own citizens that you still can do shit it is easy. But you are losing credibility by the day!
The REAL Reason No One Wants To Work Anymore
Damn! This is amazing! It really is. This is dark. And it is truth.
We cannot continue to allow the corporate model within a society. It is toxic to society. As we are experiencing right now.
For the longest time, my wife and I had a little dog. His name was PP. He was a good little guy, really… he was a really GOOD dog. He passed on last year, and I do miss him.
Anyways… when the wife and I lived in Shenzhen we would take him out for walks. He went everywhere with us. That is, long before he got old, and senile. Poor fella.
One day it might be me.
*sigh*
It will happen to all of us. Sadly.
Anyways, one night we went to a restaurant and were drinking beer. It was a new local restaurant in the heart of the “Louhu village” area. Lots and lots of local eating establishments. And so there we were. Eating. Drinking. Chatting.
When suddenly ol’ PP got up and was shaking like a leaf. His tail was between his legs and he started whimpering and shaking uncontrollably. Whimpering, and trembling.
“What’s wrong with PP?”, we asked. But he only got worse.
So we packed up, and we left.
Ah. We left.
Turned out that the restaurant was serving dogs that day. Not feeding them. No.
They were killing them, skinning them on the spot. Then, cooking them, and serving them to other patrons at the restaurant.
Boiled dog heads and internal organs. Roasted dog legs.
Ah. We had no idea.
Poor PP, he probably thought that he was next on the menu.
Rest in Peace little guy.
Today…
What psychological knowledge could save a life?
It is late, on a street in Copenhagen.
A man approaches another. He punches him to the face, knocking him to the ground.
The victim falls, cracks his head on the pavement and is unconscious.
The attacker doesn’t stop. He kicks the prone man 47 times to his body and stamps on his skull.
They catch the incident on CCTV cameras. There are many passers-by. It might be late, but the street is busy. It might be dark, but there is sufficient street lighting to see. Despite the brutal assault lasting a few minutes, nobody makes any attempt to stop the man.
It has psychologists puzzled; Why did no-one intervene?
This CCTV footage was one of 81 incidents being examined by researchers conducting an observational study into the ‘bystander effect’.
From viewing the footage, they pick out 764 bystanders who saw and heard a fellow human being assaulted… but they stood back and did nothing.
Not one of those people came to any of the victims’ aid.
Why?
‘Diffusion of responsibility’.
The bystander first notices the situation, correctly labels this is an emergency, assumes responsibility for helping, decides how to help and implements the decision to help – at least, that is how most people would react on their own.
But this is different, there are other people present.
Being in a crowd interferes with this process.
When alone, defining a situation is straightforward because we use our own judgment, whereas in a group of strangers, a process known as ‘social comparison’ takes place where everyone looks to other’s reactions to define the situation.
If others lack worry or do nothing, the likelihood of the victim being helped is significantly reduced.
We assume others will take responsibility.
The burden of responsibility is diluted among the number of bystanders present at the scene.
‘Someone else will phone the police.’
‘Someone else will be more qualified to help than me.’
‘No-one else is doing anything, it can’t be that serious.’
The more people there are, the less likely you are to get involved.
But now you know about the bystander effect.
The next time you come across someone collapsed in the street, YOU be the one to phone for an ambulance.
If you see a pick-pocket steal a wallet shout, ‘Stop thief’.
If someone’s life is in danger, tap the nearest person to you and say, ‘We need to help that guy.’ The touch is enough to snap people out of inaction.
Enlist the help of other bystanders. Tell them what to do – it is in our nature to respond to direct requests. Check they understand what you are asking, even if it is a simple request, getting a ‘yes’ reinforces the request and makes people more likely to stick to the plan. Ask others to keep an eye out for trouble/police/ambulance. People need a purpose, even if it is doing nothing.
“Last year, China registered one of the highest growth rates among the major economies and accounted for over 30 percent of global growth as before.
This was due both to the hard work of the Chinese people and to international cooperation.
China has come to where it is today after overcoming all kinds of difficulties and challenges.
China did not collapse as predicted by the ‘China collapse theory,’ nor will it peak as forecasted by the ‘China peak theory.’
We will continue to advance high-quality development and Chinese modernization, enable the Chinese people to live a better life, and contribute more to sustainable development in the world.
We have the confidence and determination that China’s development has a bright future.”
Excerpt from the speech by Chinese President Xi Jinping during a meeting with representatives of U.S. Business, Strategic and Academic Communities, March 27, 2024.
The Reconquest Of American Culture
Colorado Red Chili
Chili Colorado Recipe1
Ingredients
3 to 4 pounds pork tenderloin or pork roast.
1 pound ground pork
12 to 15 whole New Mexico green chiles, roasted and peeled (or 5 or 6 cans whole green chiles)
2 or 3 jalapeños for heat
2 medium white or yellow onions
2 cups chicken stock
1 teaspoon cumin
1 teaspoon oregano
1-2 cloves garlic
1/4 cup flour
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
2 whole tomatoes, cut into 1 inch chunks (or used canned diced tomatoes)
1 potato, shredded (optional)
Instructions
Cut pork tenderloin (or roast) into 1/2 inch cubes and coat with the flour, salt and pepper. Brown in skillet with small amount of oil until pork is well browned. Remove and set aside.
Brown ground pork in same skillet and drain excess grease.
Chop onions into large sections and add to skillet along with the garlic to sweat. Add 1 cup of the chicken stock to deglaze the pan.
In a large pot add the above pan mixture along with the pork.
Chop green chiles into 1 inch slices and add to the big pot along with the remaining ingredients. Bring to a boil then simmer slowly for 2 to 3 hours.
Serve with grated yellow cheese and tortillas or use to smother rellenos, burritos, chimichangas, enchiladas, or use in breakfast burritos.
Why A $100,000 Salary Can’t Buy The American Dream
What are 10 things police officers wish they could tell you, but can’t?
Guys: keep your dicks out of other men’s wives. Of course you can expect some trouble in your life from the husband. You are just begging for it. You aren’t rescuing her from anything. Let her sort her crap out for herself before you make things more complicated by getting yourself involved.
Girls: if he is cheating on her with you, he is going to cheat on you with the next one. You are nothing special. Just the next one in the chain. And that new girl is going to think that you are just as trashy as you think the one he is with now is.
If you have a radar detector in your car, you have had enough warnings already. You are getting a ticket.
I don’t care who you know. I have a job to do. If you really do know someone who matters to me, word will get back to them that I am doing my job.
Yes, you really did do a very stupid thing. You made a lousy choice and now you are going to suffer the consequences.
If you ask for a fight and get one, you don’t get to file charges against the person who beat the crap out of you just because you lost.
People who do drugs get into some really stupid shit. Sometimes pretty nasty shit as well.
Hey, you know those people around you called friends and family? They do care and the stupid crap you get into affects them as well.
Parents, your kids are your responsibility, not ours. If you didn’t care where they were or what they were doing hanging out at 3 am with other kids you don’t know, it’s not our fault that something really bad happened to them. And stop telling them that we will take them to jail if they don’t listen to you. And what the hell do you think you are doing letting someone else’s kid stay in your place all night without knowing or talking to the kid’s parents?
If you complain about parking and bad driving in your neighborhood, you are not exempt from getting a ticket because you were the one who complained. You should be happy that your complaint is getting a response.
White House Officially Makes Side Hustle ILLEGAL
This is ridiculous! How else are we supposed to get ahead in this greedy, evil and narcissistic ass country! As hard as it is to make ends meet in America. This will make things harder! I’m sick of these crooked politicians creating laws that take makes it harder for the people who are trying to get ahead! “The land of the free” was just a catch phrase America is turning into a dictatorship.
What if every single nuclear nation emptied their nukes on China before they could respond? If China is such a threat and their leadership needs to die, why don’t we just kill them and be done with it?
Fortunately distance even if you park the SSBNs off the coast of Tianjin means we’d have about 4 minutes to respond.
Those 4 minutes means we can activate a total launch since it’s use it or lose it. There would be literally no time to call for a clarification like with a continental launch which gives 25 minutes to call ask what’s going on.
So we’d be obliterated but our missiles would be in the upper atmosphere and land in your towns and cities about 17 minutes later.
What’s the most questionable cost-cutting move you’ve seen an employer make?
Two weeks on the job and I found that I needed another yellow pad for client notes. I asked my manager, “hey, can I get a yellow pad? And is it possible to get a mechanical pencil instead of a #2 pencil I have to sharpen? The led makes huge stains on my shirts
And I hate to complain, but can I get an optical mouse instead of a rolling ball mouse? The rolling ball always stutters which impacts my productivity”
“yeah – you have to go ask the office manager”
I walk down the hall to ask the office manager and tell her what I need.
“Can I get an optical mouse?”
“No”
“all right. Can I get a mechanical pencil so I don’t have to constantly sharpen my pencil and so my shirts don’t get stained”
“Sorry, we don’t provide those”
“Well – ok. I do need another yellow pad. Can I get a few?”
“Yes – follow me”
We proceeded to walk down the hallways of the high-rise we were in at the time. Mind you that this is the most expensive space in all of Sacramento:
main qimg 89614ae71428a6935dba861e7c40dccd lq
Scary office manager went into the managing partner’s office and grabbed keys from inside of his desk (Weird) and took me into the file room.
“What do you need now”
“I need a pencil and a yellow pad”.
She then proceeded to unlock a file room door as if it were the gates to Fort Knox. Inside of it were valuable items such as:
The cost of a box of 12 #2 pencils: $2.39
The cost of a box of a dozen yellow pads: $12.39
The cost of 40 AAA batteries – $20
The cost of treating your employees like 4 year olds to the point where 40% of them quit the company over a 15 month time span: Priceless
America’s economy is failing
Who is the Beijing official in charge of managing Hong Kong affairs?
The Beijing official in charge of Hong Kong affairs is Zhang Dejiang 张德江。
Under the “one country, two systems” approach, Hong Kong is supposed to be independent when it comes to making internal decisions, but when it comes to foreign affairs and defense, it is under Beijing.
In fact though, many important decisions have to pass consultation with the Office of Hong Kong and Macau Affairs, of which Zhang is director. The Office of Hong Kong and Macau Affairs is like a sub-ministry set up to manage relations with these two areas because they do not fall under Chinese domestic control, and reports directly to the State Council, China’s cabinet. In the case of Hong Kong and Macau, they are special administrative regions (SARs) of the People’s Republic.
In addition to handling Hong Kong affairs, Zhang is the third ranking member of the Politburo Standing Committee, being only two steps away from Chinese president Xi Jinping. He is also chairman of the National People’s Congress, and deputy head of the National Security Commission, which is chaired by President Xi Jinping. (The National Security Commission is a new body modeled on the US National Security Council, and started by President Xi Jinping two years ago.)
This means that Zhang is really, really important in the Chinese party and government hierarchy. Basically, he is the third most important person who runs China.
CY Leung, who is Hong Kong’s chief executive, likely reports to Zhang Dejiang on a daily basis, especially following the demonstrations in Hong Kong. Another way of looking at it is that CY Leung is Zhang Dejiang’s front man in Hong Kong. CY Leung cannot make any important decisions about the protests without first consulting Zhang, who would then report to Chinese president Xi Jinping.
Zhang Dejiang is originally from Liaoning in northeastern China, and went to university in North Korea. That’s right, North Korea.
After finishing university, he was made deputy party secretary of Jilin, which borders North Korea. (The deputy party secretary would be like lieutenant governor in a US state.) His first major challenge was dealing with the issue of refugees from North Korea into China.
Later, he was made party secretary of Zhejiang province (like a US governor). Zhejiang has a very lively private sector; Alibaba, which just went public in the US, is from Zhejiang province.
In 2002, he was made party secretary for Guangdong, which borders Hong Kong. As party secretary in Guangdong, he worked with the Hong Kong government to make travel and transport between Guangdong and Hong Kong more convenient for business people. He also worked with Hong Kong’s leading business people on their factories and investments in Guangdong, and providing support for their investments. This way, he built a working relationship with many of the tycoons who play a leading role in Hong Kong’s economy.
He also met with many of the leaders of Hong Kong’s democracy movement.
In July 2011, he dealt with the cleanup following the Wenzhou train disaster. In March 2012, following the sacking of Chongqing party secretary Bo Xilai (who was later sentenced to life in prison), he was appointed Chongqing party secretary.
After successfully cleaning up in Chongqing, he was appointed to several senior positions by Chinese president Xi Jinping.
Chinese president Xi Jinping heavily relies on two people: Vice Premier Wang Qishan, who has managed the party anti-corruption campaign which has taken down so many Communist party officials and Zhang Dejiang, for everything else. You might say that Wang Qishan handles party affairs and party discipline, while Zhang Dejiang handles non-party affairs. Both of these men have proven themselves by successfully cleaning up messes; this is their value to President Xi Jinping.
The party anti-corruption campaign has been especially tough: there are reports that there have been six assassination attempts against President Xi Jinping by party insiders under investigation, or who fear investigation. The travel itinerary for Vice Premier Wang Qishan is a state secret, just for this reason. In speeches to party members, President Xi Jinping has repeatedly stated that it is impossible for the party to be defeated by outside enemies; the only way it can collapse is because of a breakdown of internal party discipline. He has also said that he is prepared to sacrifice his own life in re-establishing party discipline.
If you want to understand how Beijing is going to react to the democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong, Zhang Dejiang is the man to watch.
What subtle behavior makes a person more attractive?
1. When someone hands them an object with both of their hands, attractive people receive it with both of their hands as well.
2. They can remember details such as a birthday date. It’s always good to know that someone has taken the time to memorize things.
3. They maintain grace and joy, even in difficult circumstances. And positivity can be contagious.
4. Occasional vulnerability. People rarely bond with others with whom they cannot relate. We all love humans, not flawless, robotic beings.
5. They take care of themselves. When people start taking care of themselves, they start feeling better, looking better, and even start attracting better.
6. “You are what you eat” holds true for them. Also, people are what they read, watch, and the company they keep, including who they choose to date. If you’d like to improve your dating game, try this platform.
7. They can keep a secret. (An important one.)
8. They greet people by name. Likable people make certain they use others’ names every time they see them.
9. Ask thoughtful questions. People like to know that others are listening, and a question shows that not only are they listening, they also care about what they’re saying.
10. Less is more when it comes to online social media profiles. Showing fewer things can make people more attractive.
America is beyond gone
What is your worst experience in life?
Having to survive as a child, without support.
My Mom killed herself 3 weeks before my 6th birthday and my family fell apart. Up until then, I had a great life. I was the youngest of 4 siblings, had 4 sets of Aunts/Uncles/cousins and my Grandma. They were all local and we interacted frequently. We went to Grandma’s every Sunday and one of my Aunts was so close she would discipline /care for us just like our mom.
By my birthday, my Dad was dating one of the casserole ladies from church (they were bringing us dinner). I remember she bought me gifts. This may be when everyone bailed. My oldest brother (17yrs) left home and lived on the streets. My grandma and one Aunt/Uncle set moved to Vegas. My dad then married a slightly insane woman with 2 children of her own. She was cruel and seemed to want to destroy us kids. We pretty much never saw or heard from anyone again.
We were not adequately fed, clothed or cared for. My stepmother divided us siblings and pitted us against each other. She taught her children to torture us physically and emotionally, as well. It was bad. My dad played stupid and claimed helplessness. If we went to him, we got it worse the next day.
So began my journey of survival. I knew how to find bottles for deposit in trash cans and when I discovered food there too, I knew I was onto something. A year or so later, I learned I could get clothes from the school lost and found. I begged for food during lunch at school and I learned to steal food (candy, I must admit) from stores. After school I would hang around people that had mom’s who would feed me or I’d just hide in the bushes until I had to go into the house. I had to avoid my stepmother and step sisters at all costs at all times. If you were noticed, you were fucked.
This was 1970 and I guess the schools were not aware enough yet to get involved. I know it was pretty obvious that something was a off. I didn’t know how to brush my hair or teeth and it showed. My hair was literally a dirty mass of rats, my clothing – you can imagine, and my behavior was atrocious (I started acting out and bullying by 3rd grade).
I pretty much stumbled through my early life this way. I did not know how to interact so I never really had friends. I never paid attention in class or did any of the assignments and no one said a thing. I started babysitting and doing odd jobs for neighbors at 9yrs, which helped because I could buy things like shampoo or socks. I just had to be damn sure no one caught on or I would be fucked. If I had anything (anything!) it was destroyed and I was tortured. One day, a neighbor man called me into his garage and cut my hair for me. Of course, my stepmother’s rage was viscous and violent. After she was done she took scissors and destroyed my haircut.
I dropped out of high school and ended up couch surfing and slightly homeless until I could save enough money for an apartment at ~20 years old.
So now that I could manage my basic survival, it was time to learn how to interact with the world. I had the social skills of a traumatized 6 year old. I’m 53 now and still have a lot to learn about relationships and self care, but I know I’m not alone in that boat 🙂
Shout out for all the help and resources that I’ve had over the years. I do believe that I would not have made it without the generosity of others….mostly relative strangers who never asked for anything in return. One man cut my hair, one man co-signed a car loan, hundreds fed me. I could go on and on.
Thanks for listening.
Can’t afford to live
What pissed you off today?
I had gone to an ATM some time ago. It is located at an arcade/mall which is very popular with people of all ages. Lots of youngsters hang around this place till late at night.
On my way back I saw a florist and stopped to browse through some flower arrangements. One pani puri (savory dish) vendor is very close to this shop. A lady came there with a small boy of around five/six years and asked the vendor for one plate of pani puri. The boy was giving instructions to the vendor loudly and excitedly. That’s what attracted my attention. The lady and child were dressed in very ordinary, slightly tattered clothes. They were a little unkempt and disheveled in appearance. But the incessant chatter of the boy was super cute.
I was tempted by the smells too. So, decided to get a plate of chaat (street food) packed for the family. While I was waiting for my turn, two girls came there. They placed their order and then gesturing towards the mother son duo, told the guy “Inko dur karo pehle” (Move them away first)!
Whoa man! Did I hear correctly? This was my first reaction. Who did they think they were? Their snobbish attitude pissed me off big time! But, before I could utter a single word at their uncalled for behaviour, the vendor told them “Madam, inko abhi time lagega. Aap dusri jagah chale jao” (Serving them will take time. You proceed to some other vendor). And then, he calmly continued to hand out pani puris to the little munchkin.
A befitting reply by an unassuming, awesome guy! The girls stomped off. Their retreating backs made my chaat more delicious :p
Federal Reserve is a for-profit agency used by the oligarchy to keep Americans imprisoned
What has your kid or a young kid you know said that made you think they were reincarnated?
I never gave reincarnation a second thought until my son was about 2 1/2 , maybe 3.
I recall that he began talking very early, and had an extensive vocabulary by the time he was 2 yrs old. Adults were awed by him. My Mom even called him an “old soul”.
Anyways, one winter night, we were driving home from a family gathering. It was my son, his father, and I in the car. I was driving. He was bundled up in his car seat & I thought, fast asleep.
Suddenly, his little voice piped up: “Mommy, you’re afraid of bridges”. At the time, I was deathly afraid of crossing bridges & had been my whole life, but it was not something I’d ever discussed with my 2 yr old.
Curious where this was going, I said that yes, I was afraid of bridges. He asked if I knew why. I tried to play it off as something silly, then he continued.
“When I was big & you were little, a car got crashed up on a bridge. It was upside down, all the glass was ‘brokened’ and you were ‘blooding’. I couldn’t save you and I was so sad”. His tone of voice was beyond somber. It was sorrowful, brokenhearted, even. And though I can’t explain it, something in the barest bones of my soul just felt as though this was the truth. Tears were rolling down my face even as he told the story.
His dad and I exchanged glances. Very much a “what was that!?” moment, and I remember pulling over to the side of the road. We looked to the backseat, but our son was already sound asleep once again.
Later that week, I asked if he remembered telling me a story about a bridge. He looked up at me, sighed, and said “I don’t like to talk about what happened on the bridge. Don’t ask me anymore” .
In that moment I felt as though I was no longer talking to a 2 or 3 yr old. His demeanor was more of an older, defeated man. I was so sad for him that I never brought it up again.
This was not the only thing he said that gave me pause to question reincarnation & the afterlife. But it is the most memorable.
What strange law did you accidentally break when you were in a foreign country?
I got arrested in Jordan at rifle point, for snapping a photo of the U.S. Embassy in Amman. It looked like a giant microwave oven from the outside. Concrete barriers and metal barriers, barbed wire. I wanted to capture how surreal it was.
I didn’t know you can’t photograph the U.S. Embassy without permission, for security reasons. I was just standing around, waiting for my fellow journalists to finish breakfast at our hotel. I fired off a few shots.
The next thing I knew, a Jordanian soldier in a brown uniform was pointing a rifle at me and shouting in Arabic. He looked young and jittery—and that made me jittery. The rifle bobbed up and down.
Then he used a lot of hand gestures, forcing me inside the embassy. He followed behind me, the rifle at my back.
We went through what looked like an airline terminal, with all kinds of metal barriers, until we got to a booth where a U.S. Marine in military uniform was stationed. I showed him my U.S. passport.
“Give me your backpack,” he said.
Rats! I had tampons in the backpack. Anything to do with a woman’s body is just weird in the Middle East. It’s like you don’t want to have a body if you’re female. Although Jordan is more secular than most countries in that region, we’d been warned—and warned about how to dress.
Cover your legs. Wear blouses that hide your armpits. Don’t expose yourself.
Amman, the Jordanian capital, was a terrible place to run short of tampons. The day before, I’d had to ask a female guide to come with me, into a huge marketplace, down into a beehive of stores before we finally found a box. They were kept behind a counter, under lock and key. From the looks of disapproval, you would think I’d asked for heroin.
The Marine examined my passport and then emptied my backpack onto the counter. When the tampons tumbled out, his face turned red. He tried not to laugh. Same with the Jordanian.
“Why are you here?” the Marine asked.
“I just wanted to take a picture of the U.S. Embassy. It’s my embassy. Why can’t I do that?” I showed him my stupid little point and shoot camera. “Do you really think a terrorist would use a ridiculous camera like that?”
He shook his head. He laughed.
“Ma’am, you’re a U.S. citizen. You can do anything you want to in this embassy.”
He gestured to the Jordanian soldier, who escorted me out, without the rifle pointed at my back. It turned out he spoke a little English. We had a nice talk about how some of his family members wanted to immigrate to the U.S. Indeed, when we finally got outside, he showed me a long line of people waiting to apply for U.S. visas.
Then I looked across the street and saw the other journalists. They stared at me, open-mouthed. What the hell?
I wanted to join them, but the Jordanian soldier held me back.
“Please,” he said, with a courtly gesture. Then he smiled and waved toward the embassy. He insisted I photograph that hideous building from every possible angle. Then, at last, he let me go.
The other journalists were very jealous that I got arrested. They wanted to know every single detail. They could not get over it.
During the next week, we went to so many magnificent places—Petra, Jerash, Wadi Rum, Aqaba, Madaba, Aljoun. We sailed on the Red Sea. We had tea with Queen Noor, a transplanted American, at her private villa. We had fabulous food in seaside restaurants, on family farms, and in a Bedouin tent way out in the desert. Everything was fresh, delicious, beautifully scented—and new to us. Everybody was so nice. It was an amazing journey.
But late at night when we got to drinking, somebody would always say:
“Candace got arrested. We will never top that.”
What is the most savage revenge you’ve seen someone take on their ex?
This happened to a close friend of my best bud.
He was dating this girl for over 2 years. They were like the best looking couple I have ever seen. They were living together in his house. Her family loved him and was happy that their golden child found her soulmate.
One day he caught her texting her ex. He was reading all her messages from his iPad which was synced with her phone. It was a boundary that was established earlier and she crossed it. However, he didn’t break up with her.
He started taking screenshots of all the messages and pics. After a month or so later, she decided to meet her ex at Vegas using “girl’s night“ as an excuse. She arranged two of her friends to give her cover while she was in Vegas. The second her flight took off, he changed his locks. He blocked her number and all of her social media. He called us to his house to help him pack her stuff and drop it at her friends house who “was in Vegas”. As a final f-u to her, he went to her parent’s house and told them what had happened. He also showed them all the screenshots and pics. They couldn’t believe that their golden child would do something so evil.
Her parents hate her now. She is now roommates with some druggies. One of the friend who tried to give her cover was dumped by her boyfriend for being a part of this plan.
Would recommend doing this to your cheating partner.
EDIT: Wow! This blew up real fast.
Many of you are wondering why her parents would hate their own child. Cheating did make them mad. But what made them hate her were the texts where she trashed everyone including her parents. One of which made fun of her mother’s weight issue and gave her parent’s marriage 6 months time after which she would hire someone to seduce her Dad as “he deserved someone hotter than mom”. I should have made that clear.
Corporate treatment of YOU
Why did your son go to China for work?
My son did his Doctorate in the US and began his Post Doctoral Career there
It was strenuous
He had a 3 year Bond with MOE in Singapore for his Masters Degree for which he had a Grant from the MOE (MOE = Ministry of Education)
He also had loans during his Doctorate to fund his expenses in US
Plus every single year they had to write a grant application and their salaries were dependent on the grant
It was literally begging for money and cutting many aspects of research due to lack of grant money.
Sometimes his wife who taught Middle School Maths earned better than he did
Then he applied for a Job at the NTU School of Physical and Mathematical Sciences to teach Data Science and Artificial Intelligence to Bachelor of Computing Students
While asking for a reference, his Professor from NTU advised him to apply for the position of Senior Researcher in China working on Interfacing for Regression Algorithms (Whatever it means) and application of the same for Autonomous navigation systems
A Chinese company was funding research for 10 years at a Chinese University
He asked for my advise
I said go for it
The Chinese company paid off his full loans in US and Singapore as a Bonus with only 50% repayable at no interest across 5 years
No begging for Grant money every year. Fixed pay, allowances, able to save much more
His daughter gets full waiver on private school fees as the school is within the university campus for all foreign faculty children
So no school fees
No fear of student gangs or kids selling drugs in school or transgender students or teachers
He plans to work 10 years in China and then move to Singapore as an Associate Professor and get a Citizenship there (He is still a PR)
The only small flaw is
First his house is a flat which is around 1300 SFT and at a nominal rent of 800 RMB (Owned by the Company)
In US he had a larger independent house with a lawn and driveway.
Second is Mandarin
He gets free classes on Saturdays but it’s a tough language. His daughter picks up faster, much faster.
So basically for a better life
Postdocs in US at University don’t have it as good as Postdocs in the Private Sector
China is a career changing option
He still is part of a start up in US and while he had to sign a lot of papers for the same in US , he doesn’t have to in China
Standard Issue
Saltpeter. Yeah, they gave this to us in the ADC.
What are some psychological facts about attraction?
1. Love is a feeling, not a decision.
2. People always relate to a person that they love with their best songs.
3. The average male spends 43 minutes a day staring at 10 different women.
4. If you want to know whether someone likes you or not, try to make them laugh. If the laughter comes easy, the answer is yes.
5. When you’re drunk, you will rate people on a higher scale.
6. You are more likely to be attracted to someone you have no chance with.
8. We are more likely to love or hate people that are very similar to us.
9. Women are more influenced and persuaded by a man’s sense of humor than his looks.
10. Women tend to feel loved when talking face-to-face with their partners whereas men prefer to play or talk side-by-side.
All men want this.
All of us.
“Rules-Based Order” Means Rules For Thee But Not For We
The “rules-based international order” that the US-centralized power structure purports to uphold just means an order in which the US makes up the rules and nations had better obey them.
Israel’s allowed to bomb an Iranian consulate, but Iran’s not allowed to strike back. The US is allowed to surround China with war machinery, but it would be World War Three if China ever tried to militarily encircle the US. NATO is allowed to expand to Russia’s doorstep and amass proxy forces on its border, but the last time Moscow placed a credible military threat anywhere near the United States, the US responded so aggressively that the world almost ended.
The “rules-based international order” that the US-centralized power structure purports to uphold just means an order in which the US makes up the rules and nations had better obey them. It means rules for thee but not for me.
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Democrats are currently committing genocide, pushing through terrifying NSA surveillance powers, and working to imprison a journalist for life for telling the truth about US war crimes, but it’s very important to support Biden because if Trump wins, fascism might come to America.
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The Assange extradition case is like if the mafia was demanding a snitch be extradited to Italy and multiple nations collaborated with them to help make this happen, except in this case the snitch is a journalist who told the truth, and the mob happens to run a global superpower.
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The imperial media are once again trotting out John Bolton to help sell the idea of war with Iran. This monster belongs in a cage, not on camera. The fact that the mainstream western press keep having this completely discredited bloodthirsty psychopath on their shows to advocate every possible US war proves that our entire civilization is diseased.
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Israel’s actions over the last six months have made it abundantly clear that Biden’s stated goal of preventing the outbreak of more war in the middle east and his stated “ironclad” support for Israel are two mutually exclusive positions. You can do one or the other, but not both.
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Outside the mainstream press the news about Ukraine is a nonstop deluge of stories about how badly things are going for them.
“US General Says Russia’s Military Is Bigger Than Before Ukraine Invasion” quotes General Christopher Cavoli saying “The army is actually now larger — by 15% — than it was when it invaded Ukraine,” an acknowledgement that Washington’s stated goal of using this proxy war to “weaken” Russia has failed.
It’s absolutely criminal how the west pushed this country into sacrificing a generation to a war they always knew was unwinnable.
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So much suffering and loss has been caused by the way people decided a long time ago that killing one person is murder and therefore immoral but killing thousands of people is “war” and therefore fine. The actual act is the same; only the narrative and the scale are different.
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Around the mid-1800s humanity began to notice it doesn’t make sense for a small group of rich people to own everything and for everyone else to continually give that group labor, rent and expenses just to stay alive, and ever since then the media, the mainstream culture and the foreign policy of the ruling class have been intensely devoted to aggressively erasing this realization from humanity’s memory.
Yes. This is very odd.
China wants to literally dig its way around geopolitical challenges
A Beijing-funded shipping canal will reduce regional reliance on Vietnam, a fellow communist state and traditional rival
By Timur Fomenko, political analyst
China and Vietnam, two Communist neighbors with a shared revolutionary heritage, exist in a state of strategic unease. They are not enemies, and have significant trade connections, but neither are they friends.
This is because Vietnamese nationalism views Beijing with a suspicion that is historically rooted, with a legacy of seeking to sustain its independence against the Chinese dynasties of old. As China has risen again, this sentiment in Hanoi has increased, especially with the Sino-Vietnamese war of 1978 and overlapping territorial claims in the South China Sea, known to Vietnamese as the East Sea.
Similarly, China is wary of the idea of Vietnam potentially aligning with a foreign power as part of a containment coalition against it, itself an instigator of conflict. Although the two countries are not currently in a state of hostility and have worked to improve bilateral relations amid these strong points of contention, this mutual suspicion persists, which leads to them continuing to hedge against one another subtly, even as they co-operate on some projects, in an unspoken competition. For example, one may note Vietnam recently forming parallel strategic partnerships with the US, Australia, and Japan, moves which were unthinkable decades ago.
As Vietnam hedges its bets, China is also broadening its strategic options. Beyond the South China Sea/East Sea controversy, Beijing is making efforts to woo two Southeast Asian countries which traditionally have been reliant on and influenced by Vietnam: Laos and Cambodia. Owing to the reality of geography, Vietnam has had the upper hand against these countries, as it effectively “wraps itself” around the east coastline of Southeast Asia. This renders Laos landlocked, while Cambodia has only a small portion of coastline. This means that, for most intents and purposes, Vietnam has been the two countries’ primary route of supply and access point to the sea.
Both have resented being dominated by Vietnam and, as a result, there has been a decades-long struggle for influence between Beijing and Hanoi over them, including Beijing’s support in the 1970s for the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. However, as China has ascended, the balance of power soon turned in its own favor, as it has unlocked game-changing resources and projects that are now rewriting the geographical limitations of this region via the Belt and Road initiative (BRI). As part of the BRI, China first gave landlocked Laos a new lifeline by building the China-Laos Railway.
The US is cultivating an antagonist to China in Beijing’s own backyard
Opened in 2021, this high-speed and commercial freight route, and accompanying expressway, connects the Laotian capital Vientiane with China, meaning the country no longer must rely on Vietnam to access ports. This has allowed Laos to not only export goods to China but also to become an intermediary between China and Thailand, with more railways to form a complete route between Beijing and Bangkok underway. The China-Laos railway is a strategic gamechanger, but more important than that is the new Techo Funan Canal in Cambodia.
This canal is a China-funded and contracted mega waterway that will span over 110 miles (180 km) from the Mekong River at Phnom Penh to the sea, with construction set to start this year. By building this canal, Cambodia now gets to bypass the Mekong Delta, which is in Vietnamese territory and subsequently transforms its capital city into a direct port. This canal strengthens China-backed Cambodia and deals a strategic blow to Vietnam, weakening its hold over its neighbor. Cambodia is thus transformed, from a historical subordinate to Hanoi into a commercial competitor. It is no surprise that the Techo Funan Canal has attracted Vietnamese fears and opposition.
When all of this is viewed together, China is effectively strengthening Laos and Cambodia at the expense of Vietnam. This is also part of Beijing’s strategy of using the BRI to integrate the interior of the continent and establish trade routes which bypass the contested waters of the South China Sea, which the US and its allies are militarizing. So, how is Hanoi reacting to these developments? The answer is, bizarrely enough, by integrating itself with China further in order to further compete with trade from China. As the saying goes, ”if you can’t beat them, join them!” On April 11, Vietnam announced it would be starting work on two high-speed railway links which would connect its northern cities with Yunnan and Guanxi provinces in China. Why? So that Vietnam can continue to promote itself as the nearest and primary overseas destination for Chinese companies, suppliers, and goods, so that it itself can be the next industrial powerhouse. Thus, to continue to hold an advantage and ensure China’s reliance on Vietnam, latch onto China’s success and therefore ensure that outbound Chinese commerce into Southeast Asian ports isn’t going to be siphoned away by what’s emerging in Cambodia.
Either way, what this shows is that the competition between Beijing and Hanoi is a complex and intermingled one, but far from hostile. The two nations have differing and conflicting objectives, but also many complimentary ones, for which it benefits them both to maintain a cordial status quo. Hanoi fears China’s presence emerging all around it, including peeling away its neighbors, which leads it to turn back to the ”Old Enemy” the US, though at the same time it is forced to admit Beijing can’t be ignored and that it continues to derive benefits by being in China’s game. Vietnam has to dine at the table while ensuring it is not the menu.
When a woman no longer gets upset & frustrated with you, you can almost guarantee that she doesn’t care for you anymore.
The pain that compels a man to remain silent is much more severe than pain that compels to shout.
Even if they say they’re always there for you, sometimes you just can’t reach them.
The world is full of players, be a game changer.
The distance between your dream & reality is called action.
Sometimes later becomes never, do it now.
People who think they’re crazy enough to change the world are the ones who do.
Never waste your feelings on someone who don’t value them.
Appreciate what you’ve before it becomes what you had.
Don’t tell people your plans. Show them your results.
The only way to change who you’re is to change what you do.
The older you get the calmer you get coz the older you get the more you realize none of the shit even matters.
Don’t regret the things you’ve done. Regret the things you didn’t do when you had the chance.
Sometimes it’s good to pretend that we don’t care.
American companies are looting Americans
New Mexico Chili con Carne
12JPCHILI2 articleLarge v3
Ingredients
1 pound lean beef, coarsely ground
1 pound pork, coarsely ground
1/4 cup olive or peanut oil
1 onion, chopped coarsely
3 cloves garlic, crushed
1 (28 ounce) can tomatoes, run through a food processor
1 teaspoon cumin
1 teaspoon cilantro
1 teaspoon paprika
1 teaspoon salt
Pepper sauce, to taste
1 quart cooked pinto or kidney beans (optional)
Instructions
Brown meat in hot oil in a large pot. Add onions and garlic while cooking.
Then add all other ingredients and three or more cups of water. Simmer for 1 1/2 hours until meat is tender.
Notes
Chili con Carne with Frijoles: Add the quart of cooked beans.
Chili con Queso: Stir in shredded Cheddar cheese or canned cheese sauce with jalapeño peppers.
[Commenting on remarks by UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron regarding the Iranian response to the Israeli attack on the Iran's Consulate in Damascus.]
"I've learned something over the years—I know David Cameron personally, and I know a lot of British leaders.
For a long time, I just loved listening to them because they speak English so beautifully.
But what they say is so absurd, so stupid, yet it's so beautiful that it really had me fooled for many decades.
The British are the worst at this; they're even worse than the Americans because they had a longer imperial reign.
What empire does is make you so arrogant that you think you can say anything and squash anyone that opposes you.
It becomes a game to see what you can say that's so outrageous but so authoritative that you can get away with it.
And so, the British are the most hypocritical country in modern times.
They're not the most powerful—they used to be the most powerful—but they're the most hypocritical because they had the most violent, militaristic empire in the modern world.
They left behind all of these problems.
Now, they want to be a sidekick of the United States, cheerleading on but with their good old imperial ideas.
It's a kind of absurdity at this point, but it's a lot of nerve because—why are we in such a crisis in the Middle East?
Because Britain wrecked the Middle East after World War I."
Excerpt from remarks by Professor Jeffrey Sachs, American economist and academic, in an interview with Judge Napolitano, April 16, 2024.
Americans are being Taxed to Death ….
Super loungin’
Have you ever caught someone in the act of stealing your car?
My former boss had bought a car when they were rolling out LoJack. They bought a ford explorer and got the LoJack added. They had just got LAPD up and running on the LoJack and they had the car for 6 months when one morning they let the dog out and saw their car drive off. They called the police the west valley lapd and lapd connected to the LoJack and they followed the car.
The car was tracked to Long Beach so lapd worked with LA county sheriff’s and California highway patrol and Long Beach police. The car was found by LoJack in a shipping container with several other stolen cars. The police were able to stop a large international stolen vehicle ring. They were able to link the container with several other containers.
The insurance company replaced the car and they buy LoJack with every car they buy. The car was held as evidence for the court cases. LoJack did what it was supposed to do. Since they happened to catch the car before the container was loaded on a ship they were able to put an end to a stolen car ring.
Around the same time there was a story in the Los Angeles times about a stolen Mazda that LoJack traced from Los Angeles to Mexico and with the Mexican police LoJack recovered the car in the living room of a house just outside of Tijuana. That car was returned to the owner.
There Will NEVER Be War With China For This ONE Reason Alone
China’s Xi Jinping holds a meeting with top American CEO’s.
What is the most badass thing your parent has ever done?
My mom was a nurse. A navy nurse. I’d always known that and we saw her give allergy shots to one of our neighbors’ kid in exchange for his mother making dresses for us girls. This lady had two boys but loved to sew girls clothes and taking her son to the doctor every couple of weeks for his allergy shots was expensive. However, my mom stayed home to raise her children after I was born because they had saved up enough from both of them working and living with my mother’s parents to finally buy a house. My grandmother had looked after my brother and sister while my mother worked but I’d never seen her in action up until that time.
Around 1975 or there abouts, all seven of us were off in the old, dented gold station wagon on some trip or another to visit grandparents. One set had retired to Florida and the other lived in Michigan, so each was a long road trip from the Washington DC area where we lived. I was about eight or nine at the time.
One hot afternoon, we were coming along a road, when we saw an accident. A man’s car had crashed and he stumbled out of the car into the road, covered in blood and broken glass. I wonder now if he didn’t go through the windshield. My mom made my dad pull over so to give aid. I remember her having him sit down in the back passenger seat beside her, after rearranging the five kids, and me sitting next to her on the seat, with her back turned to me while she treated him. I had never seen anything as scary as that horrible, bloody mess in my entire life. I remember my younger sisters in the station wagon’s rear- facing back seat crying quietly and hiding their eyes. I probably was too. We had to stay in the parked car because my parents didn’t want any of us wandering off. I remember my older brother and sister’s shocked faces looking over the backs of the seats watching as much as they could stand and my brother handing my mother tissues or paper towels as she barked out commands for supplies. She has always carried a pair of bandage scissors in her purse and still does to this day. I remember her demanding that my dad and brother find them and using them to cut down compresses to the size she wanted. I remember getting sick and having to open the car door to throw up on the side of the road into the dusty grass. Hardly any notice was taken of this since I was not the point of crisis. At some point after that, my dad drove us all to the nearest gas station to call for help, since this was way before the advent of cell phones. They told us that the police had been called and help was on the way but to take the man back to the accident site to meet the responders. I just remember my mother’s fierce calm as she daubed away the blood and had him hold pressure on bleeding cuts as she assessed the condition and ruffled through his hair looking for more cuts, with the bits of broken glass tumbling off him. My parents had a hard time getting a clear story out of the man, who may have been in his late teens or early twenties. I don’t know if it was the effect of his injuries or if he was already impaired and that was what caused the one-car accident in the first place. The narrative of how it all played out is spotty after all these years but eventually the police must have come and taken him out of our car so we finally got back on our way. I remember finding little hexagons of broken glass in the car for a long time after that.
I know that it made a huge effect on all of us. As a child, my older brother had always wanted to be a paramedic, inspired by the TV show “Emergency,” but this was the first time that any of us had seen, heard and most importantly smelled the real thing. He went on to join the army. Pretty much all five of us have gone on to be tough, strong nerved and calm in a crisis. We now all know basic first aid and have the wherewithal to step up in an emergency and do what needs to be done.
While in the army, my brother contracted a viral infection overseas and was in a coma for a few days. My mother held it together and communicated with the doctors and got us all the vital information we so desperately longed for on my brother’s condition. She calmed and reassured us.
I know that in college, while working security, my brother had given CPR to a man who dropped dead from a heart attack in front of him and another security guard. My brother was taking action, directing people to call for help while he assessed the man and began chest compressions. He was shocked that the other security guard just stood there, sullenly, refusing to help or to do anything as my brother directed him to begin mouth to mouth. The patient could not be revived and died. My brother was so angry, upset and disgusted and thought that there may have been some racial prejudice on the part of the other guard. He blamed and yelled at the other guard for his stupidity for not even phoning for the emergency service. The dying man’s adult son had to do that while being practically incoherent with worry over his father. The concept of not helping when one could help was so entirely foreign to my brother, thanks to being my mother’s son.
My mother told him that her first CPR patient had also died and that actually reviving people is not very common. My mom said that she, a tiny little student nurse, was sitting astride a great, fat man as they wheeled him into the emergency room. The man had had an aortic aneurysm burst and all my mothers’ chest compressions were just making him bleed out faster.
Once, my year-old nephew choked on a bit of gristle from a spare rib. My mother grabbed him, turned him over, swatted him on his back, then reached up with her finger and dislodged the obstruction from his airway, all before my sister could finish dialing 911. She literally saved his life in front of us all.
When her own mother slipped away into a coma from failing kidneys, my mom and her brother made the clear-eyed, rational decisions to stop invasive medical intervention and withdraw life support in accordance with the living will that my grandparents had signed and that I had signed as a witness. Even though I knew that this was my grandmother’s repeatedly stated and expressed directive, I wasn’t ready to let her go and couldn’t watch to the end. I finally went into another room to sleep in a chair while my mother and her brother stood on either side of my grandmother and held her hand through that endless night as she died. My dad and I had to do the same thing a few years later when his father was declared irretrievably brain dead after a car accident. I know my mother’s example helped me to step up for my dad and my uncles that second, horrible night. My mom couldn’t get there until the next day.
A few years ago, my brother broke his thigh into five pieces on his 89th and final military static line jump just before he retired from the military. My parents were out of town, skiing, and my older sister and I each drove from Florida and the DC area respectively, to be with him in North Carolina. My sister had to go back to work so I ended up staying to care for him after they released him from the hospital. He needed personal care day and night, wound care and supervision about his meds. Percocet made it hard for him to keep track of what he had taken. He was in a wheel chair that needed to be hauled into and out of the car. It was exhausting. My parents got there by the following weekend. I remember all four of us and the wheel chair all crammed into the orthopedic surgeon’s tiny office, looking at X-rays and discussing his future prognosis. After a week, I had to get home to my child, my dad had to go back to teach skiing and my five foot-two, seventy-four year old mother stayed and looked after my 5′9″, 180 lb brother for another six weeks until they could transfer his out-patient care to Bethesda Naval Hospital. Then he stayed with my parents and she continued to look after him for months until he got back on his feet.
She’s delivered babies, given birth to her own five babies, waited while her grandchildren were being born and given last rites to a stillborn child while a navy nurse. She can give commands that make sailors, marines, corpsmen and kids jump to order. She’s talked down psych patients in psychotic episodes. She’d given me some of my vaccinations. She helped give her mother insulin shots and when I had to take a course of injections which I hated, she gave me shots when I couldn’t reach the injection site on the back of my right arm.
My mom was a registered nurse, a Navy Lt. JG, an emergency room nurse, a pediatric nurse, a public health nurse and a psyche nurse. She is calm, collected and brave. She’ll be eighty next year. She is a still a total bad ass. As I said in the comments, she’s now had both knees replaced so on top of everything else, she’s now a cyborg.
Update: Someone in the comments said that this story inspired them to take first aid classes. That is absolutely the sort of inspiration that my mother would want to be. That, nursing school, sound nutrition, exercise, Catholicism and taking up skiing. So, you know, take your pick.
U.S./EU Lobby Against Georgian Law That Would Reveal Their Secret Influence
The government of Georgia has tried for some time to implement a law “On transparency of foreign influence”. Its aim is to publicly identify organizations and parties who receive a significant amount of their budget from abroad:
The draft law “In order to ensure transparency”, initiated for the second time by the Georgian Dream faction, envisages the registration of such non-entrepreneurial (non-commercial) legal entities and media outlets, whose income – more than 20% – is received from abroad as an organization carrying out the interests of a foreign power. According to the project, everyone who is considered an “organization carrying the interests of a foreign power” must be registered in the public register under the same name in a mandatory manner. At the time of registration, it will be necessary to reflect the received income. At the same time, the organizations will have the obligation to fill in the financial declaration every year.
Those organization who currently receive money from the various U.S. or EU government or non-government organizations are of course not amused that they will have to reveal their association with such sources. They want to lobby for foreign positions without being identified as foreign influencers.
They have therefore launched protests against their country’s government and parliament which has passed the law in the first reading. Two further readings will be required to finalize the law.
The protesters against the law claim that it is a “Russian law” against “foreign agents”.
Since 2012 Russia does have a law that is somewhat similar to what Georgia is attempting to implement but such type of laws are certainly not a Russian intervention:
Supporters of the [Russian version of the] law have likened it to similar legislation in the US that requires lobbyists employed by foreign governments to reveal their financing.
The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) (22 U.S.C. § 611 et seq.) is a United States law that imposes public disclosure obligations on persons representing foreign interests. It requires “foreign agents”—defined as individuals or entities engaged in domestic lobbying or advocacy for foreign governments, organizations, or persons (“foreign principals”)—to register with the Department of Justice (DOJ) and disclose their relationship, activities, and related financial compensation.
…
FARA was enacted in 1938 primarily to counter Nazi propaganda, with an initial focus on criminal prosecution of subversive activities; since 1966, enforcement has shifted mostly to civil penalties and voluntary compliance.For most of its existence, FARA was relatively obscure and rarely invoked; since 2017, the law has been enforced with far greater regularity and intensity, particularly against officials connected to the Trump administration. Subsequent high-profile indictments and convictions under FARA have prompted greater public, political, and legal scrutiny, including calls for reform.
FARA is administered and enforced by the FARA Unit of the Counterintelligence and Export Control Section (CES) within the DOJ’s National Security Division (NSD). Since 2016, there has been a 30 percent increase in registrations; as of November 2022, there were over 500 active foreign agents registered with the FARA Unit.
The Washington Post, without mentioning the long standing FARA law which is at least as strict as the new Georgian one, falsely insists that the original idea of the new Georgian law is indeed Russian:
Georgia’s Parliament voted Wednesday to advance deeply contentious legislation aimed at cracking down on “foreign agents” — an echo of a similar law in Russia that has been used to crush political dissent.In Georgia, the bill has sparked huge street protests and drawn condemnation, including from President Salome Zourabichvili, who is not a member of the Georgian Dream political party, which controls Parliament and the government.
Zourabichvili and other critics say the bill is itself an instrument of foreign interference — backed by Russia and intended to undermine Georgia’s bid to join the European Union.
On Tuesday evening, as some protesters clashed with police in the streets of the capital, Tbilisi, Zourabichvili said the bill was evidence of Russian meddling.
However neither is the law “Russian style” – it is a copy of FARA – nor does the law include the loaded word “agent”. It does not accuse anyone of being such but seeks public transparency over foreign financial influences which would of course also include Russian ones.
17 Apr 23:15 – “Let’s demand that the Prime Minister talks to us” – rally participants moved towards the government administrationAfter Levan Tsutskiridze, co-founder of the “European Platform of Georgia” group, announced the plan of action, demonstrators headed towards the government chancellery and demanded a meeting with the Prime Minister. Tsutskiridze proposed demanding that the government repeal the law and release those detained the day before. Police and security forces are strengthening their cordon near the chancellery building.
At 21:30 rally participants presented an ultimatum to the authorities demanding the repeal of the law and gave them one hour to make this statement.
Attempts to storm or blockade government buildings have been pushed back. The government is holding firm. It has a solid majority in parliament and can outvote a potential presidential veto.
Every Georgian decision maker has the Ukrainian “Maidan revolution” in mind during which the opposition used snipers (allegedly from Georgia!) shot at police as well as protesters.
We can be sure that the Georgian government is aware and well prepared for such an escalation.
The law is likely to pass. Soon thereafter a majority of the organizations which currently organize the street protests against the law will have to admit that they are the foreign paid influencers the law is aimed at to reveal their dubious interests.
Posted by b on April 18, 2024 at 13:12 UTC | Permalink
Take a cold shower in the morning to increase alertness.
Similarly, eat an apple in the morning instead of consuming caffeine to increase alertness.
Pick your work outfit the night before, so that you don’t waste time messing up your closet in the morning.
Create your lunch the night before, to give you more time to eat breakfast in the morning.
Create food in batches. Put the food in containers and place them in the freezer. Food lasts longer this way.
Get into the habit of cleaning as you go. Don’t leave the mess to build up. It’ll only cause you to feel more stressed and anxious.
Don’t hoard items. If you don’t need something, throw it away.
Keep your workspace tidy and file all important information away in an organised manner.
Talk about your feelings, no matter how hard it may seem. If you can’t talk, write.
When you need to reflect or think, take a long walk.
Get into the habit of saving money. Put aside a percentage of your earnings every week.
Find time for yourself. It’s important to let your body rest. Sometimes, it’s okay to simply do nothing.
Take short breaks during work as this will help you remain focused.
Adopt a positive mindset. When something doesn’t go your way, learn from it and if it brings you ease, tell yourself that it could have been worse.
Engage in meditation, prayer or mindfulness.
Read every single day, to increase your vocabulary and to gain knowledge.
Ask questions. If you don’t understand something, ask for help.
Get into the habit of saying ‘no’ when you need to.
Drink plenty of water, every day.
Control your junk food intake.
Remove make-up before you go to sleep.
Eat chocolate in moderation. Or alternatively, eat a sweet fruit.
If you don’t like water, drink flavoured water.
Exercise daily. If you’re too busy, take a 10 minute walk.
When you’re studying, remove all distractions, including your phone. Try to study somewhere, other than your bedroom.
If you find social media distracting, deactivate or delete the app. It really isn’t that hard.
Spend time with those you love. Those are the memories you want to hold on to forever.
The BRICS Just Secretly Acquired These 3 Assets To Crash The US Economy | Andy Schectman
A different view point. A little dry for me personally, but suggest that the Global South has all things in hand.
Do you think Chinese EVs, such as BYD, Geely and SAIC, pose a threat to US national security?
No not at all. Americans are threaten with better cars that they will drool over and they will loved to own and it will cost them half of they will pay for the US brands and giving them twice their mileage with the same dollar they spend on their present gas guzzler and a third of the cost to maintain it.
That is the real threat the American government are worried about for its citizens. Getting value for money. It needs to protect its so call too big to fail corporations that sells you overpriced and underperforming vehicles by profiteering on the ooor and the middle class in the U.S.
Is that the threat? Ask your government if you guys are not made brain dead by the U.S. government!
Poland just did the UNKTHINKABLE to Ukraine, Blackrock and Vanguard are FURIOUS
Ancient marine reptile found on UK beach may be the largest ever
The jawbone of an ichthyosaur uncovered in south-west England has been identified as a new species, and researchers estimate that the whole animal was 20 to 25 metres long
The 200-million-year-old fossilised remains of an ancient ichthyosaur, unearthed on a beach in south-west England, may be part of the largest marine reptile ever found.
In 2020, amateur fossil hunters stumbled across a giant chunk of bone at Blue Anchor beach in Somerset. Upon further inspection, Dean Lomax at the University of Manchester, UK, and his colleagues quickly realised that it was a jawbone fragment of a giant ichthyosaur – a kind of reptile that roamed the oceans between 250 and 90 million years ago.
Subsequent digs at the beach have uncovered 11 more fragments, allowing the team to partially piece together a bone that sits in the back of the jaw called a surangular.
“It was very clear that this was another one of these giant jawbones,” says Lomax. “So I was very, very excited.”
My landlord sent me a letter saying that she believes that I have someone living with me, which I don’t. I asked her if she had proof. What should I do?
My landlord sent me a text once and told me “you know you’re not allowed to sublet” I just asked her what she meant. She said that she had reason to believe that I was subletting. I explained that I share a 1 bedroom apartment with my adult daughter and couldn’t imagine where I would put anyone else. Then asked her what led her to believe this. She said that multiple people had been seen coming and going from the property carrying luggage and other belongings. I explained that is the neighborhood just north of me who rents out her spare room on short term rental. She insisted that it was me. So I asked where she got her information. She insisted that she had parked across the street and watched it. I said so you’re watching me? She stated that she has the right to keep an eye on her property. I said well of course you do but I have difficulty believing that you drove the several hours from your home to mine to just watch me when it takes several weeks and at least 2 rescheduled appointments to get you to come make repairs. She made a snarky comment about how if I don’t like it I can leave but she stopped making accusations and now leaves me alone. For me I believe it was the neighbor on the other side of my duplex who has been complaining about me since I moved in.
What is the most inappropriate interaction you have had at a Starbucks?
I took my dad to a Starbucks….once. Dad had previously managed the largest coffee roasting plant in the world. The man knew coffee. At the time we visited Starbucks, dad was older and more feeble. I thought he would enjoy it.
First of all, the sizes. Who is Starbucks trying to impress? When your seventy or eighty something, the sizes are small, medium, large, and I guess extra large. Not eenie, meenie, miney or whatever words they think are so cool. The man who has been drinking coffee since before your founder was born knows that.
Dad had to talk to the barista. I don’t know and he didn’t know if being a barista is a career path or not. To Dad, that kid behind the counter was regarded pretty much like the kid at McDonald’s McD’s may have been held higher. Dad loved fries. But dad wanted to talk with the barista. “What kind of coffee are you serving?” The kid responded. Not the answer Dad wanted. Dad asked about the roasting, the blending, and the grinding of the coffee (apparently there are several ways to grind coffee or dad, at this point was yanking the kid’s chain about the grinding.). None the less, the kid was deemed to be “an idiot”, who according to dad, “ Didn’t know a “damn thing” about coffee.” Dad schooled the kid in coffee. Foam or no foam? Foam? This isn’t laundry; this was coffee. And, according to Dad, if the coffee is decent, you “don’t need all that crap.” No foam.”
Then finally, it was time to actually drink the coffee. I am not a fan of Starbucks, but said nothing. Dad had plenty to say. None of it was good. Dad told the kid that he had “burned” the coffee or he had some bad beans. The kid looked at me for a rescue on this one. I shrugged and shook my head trying to explain that, sorry, your coffee has never tasted right to me.
We left and I took Dad someplace where I knew he would get a good cup of coffee. But that day, in Starbucks where patrons normally act as if they were enjoying the nectar of Gods instead of a cup of coffee, my dad’s interactions were pretty inappropriate. Go Dad!
50% of Women Will Be Single & Childless. Marriage is Never Returning- What Does the Future Look Like
I might have related this story to you all or not.
About Taiwan
Most Taiwanese who have not visited mainland China know little about their cousins across the strait. Having lived in China for twenty years since 1997, I noticed sharp changes in social behavior, especially of the younger generation.
For example, when I go to Hong Kong, I take the subway (or Metro) to get around. Younger riders would rush in and occupy all seats without regard for older, slower folks.
They promptly glue their eyes on their cellphones ignoring the elderly standing right in front.
When I first landed in mainland China in 1997, it was the Wild West, and everyone wanted to be the first to claim the prize by whatever means.
I also mentioned the unruly crowds trying to order a McDonald's meal. Those chaotic scenes in McDonald's disappeared over time and, when taking public transit in China, teenagers would automatically give up their seats to older people, including me, in my late fifties or early sixties.
I was pleasantly surprised.
More…
Nantou is a pan-Blue county, i.e. pro-KMT. But the KMT is losing supporters (your friends not voting) and DPP legislators have been elected there for the first time in 2023.
Your friends also know the history of the Republic of China in Taiwan, which considers itself the legitimate government of all of China.
It is enshrined in ROC's constitution. The DPP may say they want independence for Taiwan, but they'll have to change the constitution; good luck with that.
Since it will also give the PRC the pretext for unilateral reunification of Taiwan, the DPP will not try.
As for Taiwan fighting the PLA, it's a laughable narrative propagated by the usual liars (people in Taiwan know that it's a joke), the same as the lies about Japan and the Philippines wanting to go to war with China for Taiwan.
If China must reunify Taiwan by force, I'm certain the PLA will only take a few hours to complete the job.
I've written about how and why in the past, so I'll skip the details. No one will have the time or ability to react.
Japan will not dare because it imports most of its food and fuel. An embargo would be deadly.
The greatest concern China would have in such a case is the speedy resumption of normal activities in Taiwan after the reunification under a provisional government.
Therefore, strategically, China should hold secret discussions with proxies of pro-unification political leaders in Taiwan, who have government experience in keeping the population calm and taking over the day-to-day running of whatever government may be in power.
As for Western sanctions, I say let them try.
Aside from the many things the West depends on China to supply, they rely on China for medicine. C
hina has a virtual monopoly on the supply of Key Starter Materials and Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients for many drugs, without which Big Pharma and India cannot produce their medicines.
In sanctioning China, the West will cut off their heads to spite their brains.
-PM
Now for my narratives…
For a while, I lived with my father’s mother; my paternal grandmother.
We got along well.
Over time, I got to understand her better, and so I wanted to buy her things. And so I did. I bought her, on separate occasions, a radio and a skillet.
The AM Radio
Here, she needed a simple radio. Just an on/off switch and a dial to tune the station to. Oh, and a volume knob. That was it.
So I bought her a nice simple… so simple radio… but paid “good money” for it because it was a reliable brand that would never wear out.
Something like this
She loved it, but eventually replaced it with a radio bought by my cousin.
She told me why.
She said that she loved my radio, but Cindy made such a fuss about how great and powerful his radio was that she didn’t have the heart to tell her no.
It had a built in cassette tape player, an equalizer, AM and FM bands, plus a citizens and police band, and it has all sorts of dials for tone, bass, and everything like that, plus two big speakers. Well…
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My radio was her preference, but she kept the bigger monstrosity in the kitchen out of deference to my cousin.
Later, about a year later, she switched back to my little simple yellow radio. As the bigger radio was too confounding to her, had only two volume settings; loud and very loud, and eventually died.
I don’t know the “full story”, but this was good enough for me.
It was a heartfelt gesture on my part to give my grandmother exactly what she wanted and needed.
Now, I am a guy. I am very, VERY clueless about gifts and had many spectacular failures over the years. But I like to think that this one was a win.
The frying pan
Now my grandmother lived alone (after I moved out), and she needed a small cast iron skillet to cook a single egg for herself or a single slice of bacon. So I planned to get her a tiny, tiny, cast iron skillet.
I picked out the perfect one. Big enough for one egg, and a strip of bacon. Maybe one chicken wing for dinner…
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I had to go work in the mines that day, and so I asked my mother who was going into Pittsburgh that day to stop by and pick it up and give to my grandmother.
I gave her the money, the description, the size, the price, the brand name and the model number of that skillet.
And that was that!
Or, so I thought…
I called my grandmother after my shift and asked her if she liked the present, and she said it was “nice” but it was too large and she couldn’t pick it up to put on the stove. And it was too big for her needs.
A big question mark filled in my head.
Turned out that when my mother saw that the price for the tiny cast iron skillet was the same as the jumbo family banquet size that she thought that it would be a value-added decision to get the bigger version.
Massive gigantic frying pan
I was furious! I yelled and bitched and moaned to my mother.
She said she was sorry and didn’t know.
It wasn’t just that… I really wanted to surprise her with what she wanted without her needed to tell me that. It was my first experience in anticipating a woman’s wants and needs.
Thanks to my mother… that was a fail.
She and my auntie went and replaced it with the one that I selected. And I had to explain away the entire fiasco to my grandmother, and the reasoning to my mother, and to my auntie… who had not one iota of a clue as to WHY I insisted in the tiniest cast iron skilled.
Phew!
Somethings you gotta do yourself.
Somethings you gotta do yourself.
Somethings you gotta do yourself.
Somethings you gotta do yourself.
Somethings you gotta do yourself.
Sheech!
That was a FAIL.
Todays…
Sr. American Diplomat Kurt Campbell stated that the USA will hold China accountable for Russia’s territorial gains in Ukraine. What is the Chinese thoughts on this matter? Is the USA overstepping it’s authority?
Heard about six degrees of separation?
This was one of the problems I came across studying Monte Carlo simulations.
Six degrees of separation is a rule of thumb that all people are six or fewer social connections away from each other.
What does it have to do with Kurt the Assistant Secretary of State?
It has all to do with holding the Chinese accountable for Russia’s actions in Ukraine.
The answer lies in secondary sanctions, which is a historic expansion of the big sanction stick enabled by the hegemonic hold of the Eurodollar over the global economy.
How did sanctions work?
America would draw up a list of companies to sanction, and depending on the severity of the sanction, make it illegal for American companies to trade with companies A, B, and C or kick them entirely from the dollar system. This works because of the unnatural size of the US economy, and the requirement for all dollar-based transactions to be cleared through NYC.
That’s direct sanction.
America is introducing secondary sanctions on Russia, to sanction partners that trade with companies A, B and C. This bears a little explaining.
Say companies D, E, and F trade with the three amigos above. Under the old sanction model, their Eurodollar transactions with other parties won’t be affected. But under secondary sanctions, these transactions will be subject to the same sanction. In other words, collective punishment, or guilt by association.
For example, India will find it difficult to resell Russian energy to Europe because the Indian energy company will be subject to the same sanctions as the Russian energy company, and it will affect their Eurodollar business with European customers.
Unfortunately, this lays three potential landmines.
One, how is compliance at the bank going to keep up? Due diligence isn’t just consulting a list from the Fed, but careful examination of a customer’s client list. How will banks quantify the legal risk without securing guarantees on how far the Fed will pursue the policy?
Two, a second degree social map will expand the list of sanctioned entities by multiples, if not an order of magnitude. That’s a snowball rolling downhill, in terms of workload and implementation. It is impractical, to say the least, and can have unintended consequences, especially with China thrown into the mix. The 1 trillion USD in S&P500 revenue on the mainland is at risk of gargantuan disruption.
Three, what’s to prevent parties from setting up intermediaries to add social distance, such that it will require tertiary or quarternary sanctions to have effect? In fact, what if these secondary entities withdraw completely from the Eurodollar system?
I don’t put it beyond the Americans to put the threat of invalidating Chinese patents stateside, and the seizure of China’s dollar assets in the name of “rebuilding Ukraine” and being on the wrong side of history (American-written history that is).
Never say never, because even Barack was openly mocking Donald as late as 2014/15.
So Kurt is right, sort of.
But I happen to think the history of the 21st century won’t be written by America.
Asking of people currently living in South Korea; what is the general opinion of Yoon Suk Yeol? What do citizens think of his rapprochement with Japan, his love affair with the United States, and his thoughts on China?
Despite being the Prosecutor General, President Yoon Seok-yeol was unable to quickly send leftist politicians who committed corruption to prison.
There are many complaints from the public about these matters.
In addition, although many election frauds occurred in the previous National Assembly election and this National Assembly election, these election frauds were not pointed out, causing the public to doubt President Yoon Seok-yeol’s ability.
As for the issue with Japan…
Koreans recognize the importance of the alliance between Korea, the United States, and Japan
However, the problem with Japanese politicians is that they always try to drive a wedge between the United States and Korea.
When any political or military agreement is reached between Korea, the United States, and Japan, Japan always argues over Korea’s Dokdo issue.
In other words, Japan has a history of taking over Korea’s land…
Rather, they often engage in actions that provoke Korea.
And, Japan pretends that this problem is a territorial issue.
If this happens, it will stimulate the emotions of the Korean people and lead them to reject what Korea, the United States, and Japan worked hard to negotiate.
Because of these problems, it is always difficult for Korea and Japan to become closer politically.
However, Koreans have a cool-headed mind.
Japan is a perpetrator against Korea and often incites hatred against Korea…
In Korea, the only people who hate Japan are leftists.
Ordinary Koreans do not give any disadvantages to individual Japanese people.
In the case of Japan, there are many cases of discrimination against Koreans traveling to Japan or terrorism by putting strange things in their food…
In Korea, if there is a Korean who does this to the Japanese, Koreans criticize the bad Korean and bury him or her from society.
This is the difference between Korea and Japan
And, regarding the issue with the United States…
First of all, more than 80-58% of Koreans like the United States.
However, the United States often ignores the sentiments of Koreans when implementing policies toward Korea.
For example, let’s talk about Trump’s issue of military expenses for U.S. troops stationed in Korea.
“Korea is doing well and the U.S. military is protecting Korea, so Korea must pay more for stationing U.S. troops. Otherwise, we will withdraw the U.S. troops.”
Korean people feel very bad after hearing these remarks.
“As the U.S. military’s defense budget is decreasing, I hope Korea will pay more to help the U.S. military stationed in Korea.”
If you said that, negotiations would have become easier without hurting the sentiments of Koreans.
There is a difference in how the two sentences are used and expressed, but the result is that you are asked to pay more.
From the U.S. perspective, if Korea ends up paying more, it doesn’t matter how it is said.
However, speaking in the latter way does not mean that America’s pride will be broken or hurt.
Koreans’ emotions tend to respond strongly to the strong and help the weak.
Therefore, although the United States is not weak, these sentiments of Koreans must be taken into consideration.
South Korea sent Korean soldiers to America’s Vietnam War.
After the Vietnam War ended, many wounded soldiers and Agent Orange victims remained in Korea and suffered greatly.
However, the United States had no interest in these soldiers dispatched to Korea.
Later, during the Iraq War, when the United States requested the deployment of Korean troops, leftists in Korea opposed the deployment of combat troops and were able to obtain the consent of the Korean people.
Now, the question is if war breaks out between Taiwan and China.
China has frequently threatened to attack Korea with nuclear missiles using state-run media and Chinese YouTubers.
However, the United States only promised a nuclear umbrella over South Korea, but did not take actual action.
The problem facing us today is that the United States must either tolerate South Korea’s nuclear armament or lend American nuclear weapons to Korea.
Then, China will not be able to threaten Korea with nuclear missiles, and Korea will be able to help the United States as an ally.
The United States said, “Japan doesn’t have nuclear weapons either, so doesn’t it say it will help the United States?” It can be argued that
Japan has no real threat or target of war from North Korea.
However, South Korea is in a position to defend itself and help the United States in a war with North Korea.
Unless Korea is armed with nuclear weapons, Korea cannot help the United States as an ally when China attacks Taiwan.
The responsibility for Korea’s failure to help the United States lies entirely with the United States.
Next is the problem with China.
In the past, the relationship between Korea and China was not bad.
However, things quickly got worse as the Korean people learned that China was interfering in Korean politics and inciting public opinion in Korea.
In particular, Korean citizens become angry whenever Chinese politicians, diplomats, state-run media, etc. make arrogant remarks about Korea.
Whenever a social problem arises and China becomes noisy, it tries to use Korea to solve it.
In other words, they are trying to resolve social conflict by criticizing and being hostile towards Korea.
These Chinese policies are a factor that is causing Korea and China to become increasingly distant.
5 Reasons Why Men Are Going Their Own Way
She’s pretty good and makes some great points. A contract not a marriage.
“Ukrainians are losing more soldiers every day now than they ever have in the past—we shouldn’t be surprised.
They’re falling apart, they’re collapsing, so they’re falling back.
German losses in the last year of the Second World War—it wasn’t even a year; I would say it was like nine months—were much larger than they had taken in all the months before the end of the war.
This happens at the end of conflicts—things fall apart; people are trying to withdraw, disengage from combat, and they’re slaughtered.
That’s happening in Ukraine.
It’s inhumane; we should stop it. We and Washington should intervene and say, ‘No, stop! Let’s come to some sort of negotiated settlement before Ukraine is completely destroyed,’ but no one will do it.
Their position is not going to improve at this point—who are they going to train and arm?
An enormous amount of effort has been invested over the last two and a half to three years to train and arm troops from Ukraine. There’s only so much you can do.
I think it’s because Europeans, particularly Western Europeans, are so remote from reality when it comes to warfare—they’ve forgotten that you build a military establishment over decades; you don’t snap your fingers and bring something into existence. That’s number one.
Number two, there’s far too much fascination with what I would call ‘silver bullet technology.’
If we just give the Ukrainians enough Javelin missiles, they’ll destroy all those Russian tanks. No.
If we just give them enough Taurus missiles, we can obliterate their logistical infrastructure. No.
In other words, if we give them something that appears to be another miracle weapon—you know, what Hitler called ‘Wunderwaffe’—that sort of nonsense is not going to change things. No, it will not.
There was never any chance to begin with for Ukraine to be successful.
They had as much chance against Russia as Mexico would have against the United States. Forget it.
I’m surprised that, in many respects, they’ve done as well as they have, but I think that’s also a function of two things:
First of all, the Russian military establishment and its leadership do not want to take heavy casualties.
For the first time certainly since I would say the mid or late 19th century, there is a true interest in preserving Russian life in uniform.
During World War II, we now know that the losses in that country—at least 15 to 16 million soldiers were killed, and another 20 plus million civilians—probably a total of 39 to 40 million dead in total.
The Russians are not going to do that, and they don’t need to, and they know that.
Putin is also a man of immense patience; there are others that wanted to move more decisively, and he said, ‘If you move more decisively, it will create the illusion that we are everything they say we are—that we’re bad, that we’re trying to conquer. That’s not what we’re about; we don’t want to do that; we don’t want to kill more Orthodox Slavs. That’s not our position; that’s not why we’re here.’
Putin has won this war through patience, persistence, and perseverance.
And I think now in the spring—late April to mid-May, once the ground is dry—the Russians will sweep forward and end this war.”
NATO forces have been unable to deter the pro-Palestine operations of the Yemeni armed forces despite heavily militarizing the Red Sea
APR 12, 2024
France’s Aquitaine-class FREMM frigate Alsace has turned tail from the Red Sea after running out of missiles and munitions repelling attacks
from the Yemeni armed forces, according to its commander, Jerome Henry.
“We didn’t necessarily expect this level of threat. There was an uninhibited violence that was quite surprising and very significant. [The Yemenis] do not hesitate to use drones that fly at water level, to explode them on commercial ships, and to fire ballistic missiles,” Henry told French news outlet Le Figaro
in an exclusive interview published on 11 April.
“We had to carry out at least half a dozen assistances following [Yemeni] strikes,” he added.
The commander of the Alsace also revealed that, after a 71-day deployment, all combat equipment was depleted.
“From the Aster missile to the 7.62 machine gun of the helicopter, including the 12.7mm, 20mm, or 76mm cannon, we dealt with three ballistic missiles
and half a dozen drones,” Henry adds.
According to the French commander, the Franco–Italian Aster missile – each carrying a price tag of up to $2 million – “was pushed to its limits” by the Yemeni armed forces, as the Alsace had to use it “on targets that we did not necessarily imagine at the start.”
Henry added that Sanaa has markedly increased its use of ballistic missiles after relying mainly on suicide drones at the start of the country’s pro-Palestine operations in the Red Sea and stressed that the French Navy has not faced such a tough battle since NATO collectively launched its 2011 war on Libya to depose the late ruler Muammar Gaddafi.
“I was there too. It wasn’t the same thing. It has been even longer since we have engaged with this level of weaponry and violence. The threat to the boat was much greater in the Red Sea,” Henry notes.
the Red Sea in late January, a few weeks after the US and the UK launched an illegal war on Yemen to protect Israeli shipping interests. The frigate was deployed as part of the EU naval operation Aspides – Greek for shield.
With a mandate initially set for one year, Aspides saw the deployment of several EU warships and airborne early warning systems to the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden, and surrounding waters. According to authorities in Brussels, the mission is exclusively defensive, and its forces are not taking part in US-led attacks against Yemen.
Aspides came together after several NATO members proved hesitant or outright refused
(OPG), which a top US commander called one of the largest battles the navy has fought since the end of World War II.
“We favor a diplomatic solution. We know that there is no military solution,” US Special Envoy for Yemen Timothy Lenderking said earlier this month, acknowledging the futility of Washington’s military strategy against the Arab world’s poorest country.
According to Yemeni sources who spoke with The Cradle
, US officials recently offered Sanaa “an acknowledgment of its legitimacy” in exchange for its neutrality in the ongoing war on Gaza.
“[Washington] pledged to repair the damages, remove foreign forces from all occupied Yemeni lands and islands, and remove Ansarallah from the State Department’s ‘terrorism list’ – as soon as they stop their attacks in support of Gaza,” The Cradle columnist Khalil Nasrallah cited the sources as saying.
The offer also includes “severely reducing” the role of the Saudi-appointed Presidential Leadership Council (PLC) and “accelerating the signing of a roadmap” with the Saudi-led coalition to end the nine-year war that has decimated Yemen.
Nevertheless, Yemeni officials have maintained that their operations in the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden, and the Indian Ocean will continue until Israel stops the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.
“From the coast of the Red Sea or from outside it, we can achieve the goals we want in defense of our country and support of Palestine … We still have many military surprises, and there are military operations that we are keeping secret as part of a specific media strategy,” Mohammad Ali al-Houthi
, a senior member of Yemen’s Supreme Political Council, announced on 3 April.
How many years ahead is WeChat of WhatsApp and why is China so much ahead of the US in service integrations via mobile?
All of the mobile companies are state-owned, and all of the banks are state-owned, which means that they are technology-driven, not by the need to make a profit.
China is driven by technology scale, not by profit. The Chinese government supports any new technology which is likely to be quickly adopted.
In contrast, US tech companies are driven by shareholder profits, and the shareholders are many and have fragmented interests. This means that technology scale takes a back seat to profits, since shareholders want to profit from their investment.
WeChat was designed by a team of 10 in Guangzhou who had previous experience working with the Chinese government through its ownership by Tencent. Tencent consulted with the Chinese government to get their support for connecting to payment systems and mobile networks.
This kind of government support does not exist in the West, and explains why China is progressing quickly in key technology fields.
Let Loose With Tokyo’s Unbridled Maid Girls – No NG Rule, Just Fun!
This is why Men are going overseas to find wives and dates
Did Iran’s ballistic missiles ‘land’ at Israel’s Nevatim Air Base?
Four of them struck the air base
Imagine if they had a nuclear warhead each
…
They would be guided by either GLOSNASS or BEIDOU so US cant jam the GPS guidance
The Discharge alone would be sufficient to contaminate upto a strike radius of 25 Kms or an area of 3.14*25*25 which is roughly around 2000 Sq Kms
That’s the end of the soil for the next 300 years
That’s a lot of radioactive dust
That’s a lot of atmospheric radiation
Thats the end of Israel as we know it
Today US, UK, France came to Israel’s Aid and helped destroy more than half the targets
Imagine if the West escalates with Putin who decides to launch missiles on Europe and UK
Or Xi who decides to launch on Japan and Philippines
Or Kim Jong Un who decides to launch against Japan, Australia and South Korea
So
→South Korea is locked
→Japan is locked
→Europe is locked
→UK is locked
→US is torn between three theatres and no way strong enough to win even in one
So Israel would have to deal with Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas and Iran on their own
And Israel would be certainly stuck badly
That was the benefit of the entire exercise
To show Israel that Israel cannot stand up to Iran and it’s allies Alone
And also to show that if Iran has nuclear warheads , Israel cannot escape a nuclear strike because despite the strongest air defence of FOUR NATIONS – 7 Missiles managed to get through
Was there a stranger you met once, are not likely to meet again, and who profoundly affected you?
Originally Answered: Is there a person, a stranger, whom you met once in your life and never met since and are likely to never meet again, and they affected you in some profound way?
After a student-party in Bergen, about 15 years ago, I was heading out of the party and out into the night, on my way home.
I noticed a single young woman having come from the same party, standing under a tree, looking sad. I went over to her, and though this is completely out of character for me, I asked her if she needed a hug. To this day, I don’t know why I asked precisely that, it’s not the kind of thing I tend to say to strangers, and I haven’t before or after.
She just nodded, and I hugged her. It went on for a long time, and she clung to me as if I was her anchor in a crumbling world. After a minute I noticed my shoulder getting wet, she was crying. I didn’t mind, it felt good to just stand there, holding her.
I don’t know how long we stood there, holding each other. 2 minutes ? 5 ? Something like that. Then she stood up straight and really looked at me for the first time. She was still sad, but there was a tiny smile lurking at the edge of her sadness.
“Thanks!” she said, “I needed that.”
We went separate ways after that. We didn’t say anything more to each other, but I don’t think it was needed either. I never met her again.
But I offer people hugs somewhat more often now. Sometimes they’re needed.
SAVING PRIVATE RYAN was too much for me.
What’s the most savage way you’ve seen someone get fired?
Well I’m not sure this is the most savage, however it is quite different. I was working at a tooling manufacturing facility in the late 60’s. There was a man working there who constantly attempted to stir up drama and conflict almost everyday. The management had warned him quite a few times to no avail. Their warnings seemed to fall on deaf ears. He still continued to cause conflict. The company gave him a 3 day suspension. When he returned his behavior had gotten worse. The company continued to receive complaints. There were rumors for weeks that the company was trying to get rid of him. One week when we were working the 4pm to midnight shift. He had caused a problem between a woman and man who were working close together in the press department by spreading lies that he saw them being intimate in the hall outside the locker room. Somehow the story had gotten back to the woman’s husband. The next evening just after quitting time at 12 midnight as we were walking to our cars. The woman’s husband who was waiting outside grabbed the unexpecting man who he thought was making it with his wife and a fight broke out. The police had to come break up the fight and arrested the woman’s husband. The man who started the rumor stood there laughing and thought the whole thing was funny. The following day the company sent the man a singing telegram saying, “you are fired, you are fired, don’t come to work tonight, ha ha, You are fired, you are fired, don’t come to work tonight, ha ha, we will mail your check, ha ha, hope you think it’s funny ha ha ha he ha”. Well the man did come to work that night and he was mad as hell. After a confrontation with the HR dept. as the police hauled him away. someone on the PA system was singing ha ha ha ha ha. The telegram managed to get on the company bulletin board for all to read. Then everyone had a laugh
What’s the most unreasonable request you’ve received from your boss?
It’s my day off and work calls. The General manager has yet again had things get away from her.
Usually I don’t mind, let me clock in and I can watch my paycheck grow this time I need to be somewhere soon. I tell her “OK I’ll play Rescue Ranger and drop in and take care of it I am guessing it will take two hours or a little less and when done I am gone.” Kinda plan to see that I am not staying right?
Damn if while I am working on one thing she dosen’t go and start something else. When I am done with the first task she expects to walk off and me finish what she has started. When I say no she has a fit.
“Thanks for nothing!” Followed with “Now you know how I feel!” Then it was down hill for me so I got a transfer to another location. As part of the move I have the District manager wanting to know what’s going on. After explaining the constant damma show working for her was I brought up some suspicions that I thought he should know.
The fallout for her was unreal, two managers under her quit in ten days and about half the staff was gone. The District manager waited about sixty days then acted on my suspicions and was waiting outside for her when she showed up. Turned out the money count was off about $1,200. That was the end of her.
What women don’t realize; WHY men stop putting in effort into a relationship…
What is the reason for the limit on having children in China? Is it beneficial or detrimental to the country?
An Average Chinese Landholding for Rice is 57 Acres
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Take a farming family
You have a father, mother and son
When the father dies, the son takes over the landholding, gets married and a new wife and son live on the land
Soon the mother dies
That’s 3 people again
Then the son dies and his son takes over the landholding
At all time this 57 Acres supports 3 or maximum 4 people
So Yield of Rice is high and good
Now imagine the Farmer family again
Say you have a father, mother and 3 sons
This means when the father dies, each son gets 19 Acres (57/3)
So the landholding is divided the first time around
Then each son has 2 sons each
This means six holdings of 9.5 Acres each
And each such son has two more
That’s twelve holdings of 4.75 acres each
So ONE HOLDING OF 57 ACRES becomes TWELVE HOLDINGS OF 4.75 ACRES in four generation
Now instead of 57 Acres supporting 3–4 people at a time, you have the same 57 Acres now divided into twelve , supporting a whopping 30-40 people
So Yield is poor and People are poor and struggling with economies of Scale
This was China in the 1970s
You didn’t exactly have IT Jobs for younger sons to flock off to and you couldn’t just take a flight to San Francisco without hocking your entire family fortune
Deng Xiaoping believed China had no other way out
In order to feed almost a Billion People in 1980 properly, China had to ensure that the Landholdings were large enough to be productive
Otherwise Land would be divided into smaller and smaller portions and end up having pathetic yields and horrible economies of scale
Like INDIA
Where Yield is 40% of Chinas and costs per acre are 68% higher than China despite 55% of the land being under cultivation
Plus in India you can sell Landholdings for a few crores to build villas and landed plots
It was hugely beneficial for China
It kept China fed when more and more land came under Industrialization and Land under cultivation stands at 9.87% today
The only flaw was a large number of girl babies were subjected to infanticide yet it now turns out many girl babies were adopted out or kept hidden in the Hukou and claimed to be daughter of a cousin from far away outer mongolia
Asking of people currently living in South Korea; what is the general opinion of Yoon Suk Yeol? What do citizens think of his rapprochement with Japan, his love affair with the United States, and his thoughts on China?
I am not living in Korea, but let me share what my Korean buddy tells me. They hate the humiliation this rapprochement with Japan signifies and shoved down their throat. They are fuming. Near the THADD campground, there are daily protests by senior farmers. They are ecstatic to see Yoon’s party losing this congress election in a landside of 192 : 108. This reflects S Korean’s strong anti-US sentiment brought about by their Mr. American Pie president. Koreans are a proud people. Yoon’s recent yield to the demand of medical community is considered insincere and too late. They are not buying it. He will be a lame duck in the remaining 3 years for sure.
She Found Out How Hard It Is To Be A Man (Shocked)
Who saved your life without even knowing it?
A stranger dialed the wrong number and saved my life.
I was competing to be a ski instructor in Aspen. I passed 3 ski rounds and if I excelled today, I would have a final interview the next day. The head instructor told that I didn’t make the last round. My boyfriend Barry and I, along with another couple, had planned a vacation starting that night if I didn’t make the final round.
Now I was able to fly out with them as originally planned and not the next day. I was to meet him and our friends at the airport in half an hour. The other couple had a private plane and wanted to leave before dark.
As I finished packing, I received a call from some stranger in the main office who was confirming my interview tomorrow. I thought that I was cut and hired as an on-mountain marketing rep instead. She said no, that I had a 10am interview.
I quickly called Barry and told him to go ahead. I’d meet them tomorrow afternoon in Denver, and onto our vacation. About 40 minutes later I received a call from someone in the main office informing me that I was a snow-host and uniform fittings were next week. I was ticked off because I was given the wrong information earlier, causing me to miss my flight. Now I would have to pay for a commercial ticket and vacation the next day.
About midnight, the phone rang and it’s Barry’s attorney. He said, ‘’Jenna, I’m afraid I have some bad news, Barry’s plane crashed and there weren’t any survivors. They are all gone’’. I was too stunned to cry immediately. The girl in the office, whose identity we never confirmed, had stopped me within 20 minutes of joining them on that plane.
A stranger, a temp helper, made a mistake and by delaying me, she saved me from dying in a plane crash that day. The office staff never heard from her again, so she never knew, nor could I find out who she was.
Update on Taiwan
From my China's Writer's Group. -MM
Friends,
One of the things l most like about Chiang Mai, Thailand is that it is a crossroads for people from all over the world.
Of course, the city is also a tourist destination. As I write, we are in the middle of Songkran, nominally Thai new year, but known mostly as the Water Throwing Festival…For three days, it’s one great big water fight, especially located around the 800 year old moat surrounding the ‘Old City’.
Anyway, Chiang Mai is also a gathering place for wanderers, creatives, digital nomads, misfit and frankly political dissidents. That is, lots of people who stay here for extended periods of time are here because they don’t want to be in their home country.
I met a nice lady in a yoga class about a year ago, and since she appeared to be Chinese, I struck up a converstion with her. Turns out she’s from Taiwan. She, her husband and daughter and I met for coffee last year. They’re back in Chiang Mai for a month, so she contacted me recently, and we had very nice dinner last night. Nothing special, just tradition Chinese dumplings.
I told them about our online group and got their permission to ask questions about their experience in Taiwan, and general attitudes. So here are at least some answers to question you asked.
What are the reasons they don’t feel comfortable in Taiwan?
There are 2 main reasons: First, they feel that the societ is rather rude, that Chinese people both on the mailand as well as in Taiwan are loud and impolite. Unlike very polite Thai drivers, Taiwanese are always beeping their horns and are very impatient. They’re also not honest, Everybody is out to make a quick buck (lr Qian…Chinese word for money??), and are willing to cheat to get it. In their opinion this is generally true of Chinese in most countries. The second reason is that they feel like the government is always trying to manipulate them. They feel the same way about the PRC, government, as well as the Taiwan government which iis using fear to control them. ( I replied that this is an endemic problem with most governments nowadays, which is why people from all over the world come to Chiang Mai. Foreigners are pretty much left alone as long as we don’t disrupt life here.)
Do they feel that Taiwan is being set up like Ukraine, as a US proxy, to fight China to the last Taiwanese?
This engendered an interesting conversation. First, they said that China and Russia are pushing other countries around. So I pointed out to them, the history of US coup, the Nazis that the CIA empowered over decades, and the history of US bullying itself. At that point, they agreed with this analysis. and basically said that they are somewhat worried about hostility breaking out. But they don’t seem to be too worried about that. They have teenage daughter, who is happy being at school in Taiwan, so they are planning to return there. Also, while the husband has put in enough years to retire from his teaching job, the wife still has another year or two to reach retiremen age. So they’ll return to Taiwan, and then decide where to go when both can retire. The daughter, would probably go to an international school
Interestingly they didn’t have much respect at all for the level of teaching at these international schools and language schools. Most of the teachers they hire are for show, and basically, the schools are run as scams.
Living and working in Nantou City
This city is different from other cities in Taiwan because it is not near the coast. It is 1000 meters in elevation, so that in summer it is more comfortable, but in winter can be rather cold, not freezing but maybe 4 degrees celsius. It’s also rather far from nearest major shopping centers, so its maybe 2 hours to get to such a shopping location. They also complain that people there are not polite, as most Taiwanese are these days in their opinion.
This brought up the subject of the general degeneration of culture. I had pointed out how language and dress standards have fallen a lot in the West. Sloppy clothes and a lot more profanity are seen as normal, While Chinese are more conscious of dress, people are not as polite as in earlier years. Chinese people used to want to work hard, but the ‘the younger generation doesn’t want to work, they only want to make money on Youtube or Tiktok.
Interestingly, Singapore is seen as not falling into that trap. In their opinion, Chinese people need to be controlled and disciplined, Nowadays, children are not punished for being naughty. So they are spoiled. But in Singapore, people are still more disciplined and society for Chinese ethnic people works best there. Better than in PRC, Taiwan, and Malaysia. There was a complaint about mainland Chinese, who insist that all Chinese overseas should be loyal to China as Chinese.
Did they vote?
No, they don’t trust any of the parties. However, I sent them an article from Consortium News, about a visit by Guomitang party leader who had a cordial visit to the PRC, had a good time there, and the hope is that the issues between the two countries , so to speak, can be resolved. I raised the issue of the One China Policy and it’s history. They admit that originally Taiwan’s plan was to take back the Mainland, since the KMT was legitimate, not the communists. But they realized over time that this was not going to happen. That left simply going independent. But that option is also not likely without a disastrous conflict. So seems like they see reunification, as inevitable. Their main problem as I see it, is that they’ve been propagandized since birth by Western control, so they have a rather skewed understanding of the history (very similar to what happened to Ukraine).
They didn’t know about weekly demonstrations for reunification with China
Re TSMC. They didn’t have a strong opinion about this. I told them about the US plan to take TSMC under US control in the USA, however, the problem is that US workers want to be paid much higher than in Taiwan. And the workforce is not well education in the US. So there aren’t enough skilled workers.
The economy is not going so well in Taiwan.
Bonus interview:
As a seller on Amazon, I am in contact with other sellers, Recently, a lady born in Shanghai but now living in the UK came to Chiang Mai. She was kind enough, as a professional business consultant, to look at my shop and business. We had lunch one time and a few chats on Whatsapp.
Here primary focus is business. That was really all she wants to talk about. How to make more money. I even asked her out on a date and she refused.
In a chat, I raised the question of Chinese culture, and how I am more interested in that than in business. I’m not rich, but–so far have enough…So how much is enough money?
Deng Xiao Ping said ‘to be rich is glorious’. But I am more aligned with Confucious, Laozi and the Buddha, all of whom have had huge influence on Chinese way of thinking. But this is not her concern. I raised a number of serious geopolitical issues, which we discuss in CWG, including the nefarious role the UK played in Chinese history. But none of that matters to her. Her only concern is business.
She did corroborate, having generously spent time evaluation my business, the fact that, my Amazon business is simply not viable at his point..I am sure she would charge a good amount of money for her service, so it was very generous of her to give advice for free.
The bottom line is that in many countries, English langage oriented culture has played a corrosive role in society, especially in the younger generation. Of course, we who are now older heard the same complaints from our elders when were young. Looking back we didn’t understand how Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Modern Art and so on were planned, just as woke culture is now.
This concludes my report on my encounters with a Taiwanese couple, and an Anglified (she goes by her English name even though she’s from Shanghia) Chinese woman.
Eric Arnow
The Wall Is Slowly Getting Bigger For Lonely Modern Women ..
Chicken Lemon Rice Soup
By Rena Awada | Updated On November 30, 2019 This easy Chicken Lemon Rice Soup recipe is filling and just perfection in a bowl during the winter. Filled with veggies and chicken and so filling and tasty in a lemony broth. Warm and comforting homemade chicken soup that the whole family will enjoy.
Lemony chicken rice soup 2
Set your classic chicken noodle soup to the side and make this homemade Chicken Lemon Rice Soup for a change. It is filled with veggies and chicken in a lemony broth that will get you wanting a second and third bowl. Such an easy chicken soup recipe that everyone in your house will love and there won’t be any leftovers.
HOW TO MAKE THIS HOMEMADE CHICKEN LEMON AND RICE SOUP
You should have all your ingredients set up and ready. Heat oil in a large pot over medium-high heat, add the chicken and sear for about 2-3 minutes on each side. Then, add in the onions, carrot, bell pepper and celery and cook until tender, about 5-6 minutes. Go ahead and add the garlic and thyme. Cook until fragrant for about a minute or so. The aroma for this Chicken Lemon Rice Soup should start to fill up your kitchen by now. Add the chicken broth, bay leaf, and brown rice, then bring it to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer until rice is cooked through about 20-25 minutes. Using a fork, remove the chicken pieces and shred them using 2 forks. Finally, return the shredded chicken to the pan and stir in lemon juice, zest, and parsley. Season with salt and pepper to your taste and enjoy.
Lemony chicken rice soup 3
CHICKEN LEMON RICE SOUP SUBSTITUTES
Chicken: Use boneless or skinless hicken thighs or breasts. I love using mostly boneless breasts. Some may love keeping bone-in for added flavor.
Rice: You may use brown or white rice. A great substitute for the rice would be either quinoa or some shredded cauliflower to keep it keto!
Veggies: Some other veggies to use can be broccoli, green beans, peas, and cauliflower.
Lemony chicken rice soup 5
HOW LONG DOES CHICKEN SOUP LAST IN THE FRIDGE
Store your chicken soup in an airtight container before you place it in the fridge to retain its fresh taste. The chicken soup should last for 5-7 days in the fridge.
CAN YOU FREEZE HOMEMADE CHICKEN SOUP
If you have a lot of leftovers, you can store the rest of the chicken soup in an airtight container and freeze. They should last for 4-6 months frozen. When you are ready for the chicken soup, remove the night before and allow it to thaw in the fridge. Then reheat it on your stovetop until it starts boiling again. Adjust the taste if needed.
HOW LONG TO BOIL CHICKEN FOR SOUP
You may not need to cook the chicken ahead for some chicken soup recipes. On my chicken lemon rice soup, you will be cooking the chicken along with everything else, remove the chicken to shred almost halfway through and then add it back in. If a recipe asks for you to cook the chicken separately, bring a pot of water to boil, add chicken breasts or thighs along with some herbs for some flavor. You can use cinnamon, whole cloves, and bay leaf. Allow it to boil for about 15-20 minutes. Even if it’s not completely cooked through thats fine. After you shred and place in the pot with veggies, it will have more time to cook thoroughly.
Lemony chicken rice soup 4
BRICS new Members: BRICS to Triple Its Members
What is the funniest joke you’ve been told that you still think about to this day?
An engineer dies in a car wreck and goes to the pearly gates. St. Peter looks through his book and tells the man, “Sorry, I don’t see your name here at all. You gotta go to the other place.
The man goes to Hell and looks around at the shape it’s in, and being an engineer, goes to work. Before long the AC is working great keeping all the buildings cool, the buildings are all up to code, the parks are green and growing greener because he fixed the plumbing systems, the streets are getting repaved, and things are getting comfortable.
Meanwhile God is wondering where the engineer he ordered is, so he asks St. Peter about it, and St. Peter tells him that the man’s name wasn’t in the book so he sent him to Hell.
God goes to Hell and pounds on the door. Satan answers and God tells him, “You have my engineer. I want him. Satan says, “Can’t have him.” God says, “ I want my engineer. Give him to me now!” Satan says, “Nope. He’s mine.” God says, “I’ll sue you!”
Satan laughs, crosses his arms over his chest, leans against the door jamb and says, “Where are you gonna find a lawyer?”
As a doctor or nurse, what were the strangest last words you’ve heard?
I was taking care of a patient in the neuro ICU once. He had been comatose for quite a while after a CVA and was going to be transferred to long term care as not likely to awaken. I always talk to my comatose patients as if they can hear me, explaining what’s about to happen, what day it is and the like. I was talking to the guy explaining the night’s plan and his eyes were tracking me, something he didn’t normally do. Comatose people will sometimes open their eyes and stare at something bright, or just straight ahead, but this guy normally did not open his eyes.
“Are you listening to me?” He nodded. “Can you speak?” He shook his head no. “Give me a thumbs up on the left hand” He did. “Now the right” He did. “That’s great! Welcome back! You’ve been away so long we thought you weren’t coming back! I’ll go call the doc to come check you out!”
The guy smiled, and died.
What is the most regretful thing you ever said?
When I was in grade 8, I had just finished changing for gym, and I was walking to my locker, when my wallet fell out of my pants. I didn’t know it was my wallet, but I had heard something, and I turned around, and the principal was right behind me. He was a strict, mean, opinionated man, and I turned around quickly so I wouldn’t have to deal with him. Evidently, he had been walking right behind me, and scooped up my wallet, before I could turn around.
He kept it for three weeks, before giving it to my parents, saying that he had been teaching me a lesson about responsibility.
It was a small school, and I had been with everyone in the class since grade 1, we were all very close friends.
During that three weeks, I thought it through. The only people who could have stolen my wallet, were the boys in my class, my teacher, the principal and the janitor. Nobody else had access. I was taught to respect authority, so I immediately dismissed any thoughts of my teacher or principal stealing my wallet.
I had no way to approach the janitor.
So I was left with the boys in my class. All good friends.
This was shocking to me, how could someone I trusted like a brother do this to me?
It was tearing me apart, that I couldn’t trust my friends. So I approached them one by one, and said that someone had seen them with my wallet. They all vehemently denied it, because they were all innocent.
My principal had ruined my life long friendships. Or rather I had ruined them, because my sanctimonious principal had stolen my wallet, and I didn’t believe it could be him.
It took months to rebuild those relationships.
Accusing my friends was the most regretful thing I have ever said.
If an employee gives a 2 year resignation notice and not a 2 weeks notice, what should the company do?
I had a boss that told the company that he was quitting in 8 weeks’ time. As the quit date approached my boss was questioned about whether he was actually quitting on that date or if he could stay on a little longer. He reiterated that it was a firm date and he would be gone on that date.
It came down to that quit date Friday and during the morning meeting where they discuss who will be taking what responsibilities during the next week, it came my bosses turn speak. He reiterated that he wouldn’t be there the next week. They asked if he was going on vacation. He told them no he was quitting and would not be back. They then went around the table again asking who could take over my bosses old duties. They then assigned those duties to an engineer who was shocked to be handed such responsibilities.
I also have a son-in-law who told his boss that he had interviewed and been accepted at another company not competing with his current company. The boss told him to continue to work on his projects and they would find someone to train under him until he left. during this time, they offered him a pay raise, a promotion, a different duty assignment, along with a trainee to nurture until his final day.
Most of my work experience had been when you turned in your 2 weeks’ notice the company walked you out the door right then along with a letter of non-compete and would mail you your two weeks’ pay.
If nearly all locks can be picked, why do we still use them?
My dad lives on a dead end street (sort of a cul de sac), a year ago someone living several houses down the street knocked on his door one morning and said he had been robbed in the night. Slept through it all and woke up to see half his downstairs missing.
My dad has a camera out the front of his house and the neighbour just wanted to see if there was a time when the guy or guys had been past. So, he starts looking through the footage and instead he sees someone actually approach his door (unfortunately wearing a baseball cap and looking down so not much use) and just try the handle. My dad locks his and bolts his door at night so no luck but then the guy just left and moved on. He didn’t try to pick it, or have a go at the windows or anything. Ten minutes later, a van drives past and half an hour later the van reserves back out.
My dad turns to his neighbour and goes “do you lock your door?”
“no. It’s always been fine before and how would anyone know I don’t lock my door”
My dad knows one other person near the top of the street who also has a camera so they go over there and see his footage. Twenty minutes before the man tried my dad’s house, the guy near the top of the street also had a burglar approach his door, try it and then leave.
As far as we know, these guys tried about 40 houses before finding someone who just didn’t bother to lock his door at night. The moral of the story, your house doesn’t need to be Fort Knox, just tougher than the one next door.
What’s the most disrespectful comment a teacher has made to you in front of everyone?
I moved a lot as a child and went to many many schools. I did get to go to the same school, my junior and senior year. I was always the skinny new girl with kinky hair and crooked eyes. My eyes were crooked because I was blind in my right eye from birth and it just sort of wandered around in my head and did whatever it wanted. My parents had had it operated on twice to try to fix the muscles but the problem was that the eye was blind and that was that ( when I was 32 the Cleveland clinic put titanium muscles in my eye and made it look almost normal)
I was always in the new kid, the funny looking kid, but I was also the smart kid. My junior year I was placed in an honors class in English with the most disgusting teacher I have ever met. He was so loved by his students. He was certainly not loved by me. He loved to tease me about my crooked eyes. He also consistently stated to the class that nothing of any value ever came from south of the Mason Dixon line, a quote from HL Mencken, the journalist in the scopes monkey trials. The fact that I was from Ohio, which was north of the Mason Dixon line, sort of escaped him.
in addition to his constant insults, one day he slapped me in the face with a paper I wrote. Actually he slapped me three times. I pretty much think that was the most disrespectful thing that a teacher did to me. His reason for slapping me was that I had not developed my paper sufficiently. to punish me, he made me write it over and I did. It was 32 typewritten pages, and he read the entire thing to the class page by page.
However, in the end I won. One day he was standing next to my desk and he was laughing. He threw his head back and his upper plate fell out on my desk and rattled around like “chattering teeth”. and then came to rest next to my pencil, I just looked up and smiled at him. he taught the rest of the class that day holding his false teeth in his hand and trying to talk properly without them. I might’ve felt sorry for I am if it wasn’t for the fact that he thought my crooked eye was so funny. On my high school class page on Facebook, the story of the chattering teeth has been recounted many times, even by people who weren’t in the class. In my high school yearbook the valedictorian of my class wrote “to hell with HL Mencken “
Make this Chili Chicken Tortilla Soup Recipe for a warm and comforting meal all year round. It is easy to make, filling, and packed with flavor. Enjoy this filling and hearty soup any day of the week as a main or side dish.
Soups are very comforting when the weather gets colder. They are filling and easy to make when you only have an hour on hand to come up with dinner. This easy chicken tortilla soup has the bold flavors of chili and Mexican flavors all in one bowl. Made with shredded chicken breast, black beans, corn, and a handful of bold spices. Serve this Mexican chicken soup recipe as a main dish or a side dish along with the main course. For a creamy version of tortilla soup check out our Creamy Chicken Tortilla Soup Recipe or you can also try our super tasty Chicken Enchilada soup. You may also like this Chicken Chili Recipe
Chili lime chicken tortilla soup 5
Recipe Summary
Comforting and filling: This chicken tortilla soup with bold chili flavors is packed with fiber and protein to make a comforting and filling meal.
Easy to make: all you need is 30 minutes to make this easy and healthy chicken soup.
Tasty: Packed with flavor. You will love it.
Ingredients you will need
Olive Oil: any other oil of choice can be used like avocado oil.
Boneless Skinless Chicken Breasts: you may also use boneless and skinless chicken thighs.
Sweet Onion: or any onion you have on hand
Garlic Cloves minced: we do recommend using fresh garlic cloves for optimal flavor.
Red Chili (or to taste): this is optional if you can’t handle spice.
Spices: Ground Cumin, Chipotle Powder, or Chili Powder
Cherry Tomatoes or diced fire-roasted tomatoes: these can be purchased in cans or you can make your own at home.
Low Sodium Chicken Broth: you may use vegetable broth.
Black Beans: rinsed and drained
Corn: can be Fresh or frozen corn can be used
2 Limes– Juiced, you may use lemons if you do not have lime.
Tortillas: cut into 1/4-inch strips
Salt and pepper, to taste
Cooking Spray
How to make chicken tortilla soup
Heat olive oil In a large stockpot over medium heat. Add onion, garlic, chili, and seasonings, and cook until onion softens about 4 minutes.
Add chicken breast, canned tomatoes, broth and bring to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer until chicken is cooked through about 20 minutes.
Meanwhile, heat a nonstick pan over medium heat and spray it with cooking spray.
Add tortilla strips in a single layer and fry until golden brown and crispy, on both sides. You might need to work in batches to not overcrowd the pan.
Once the chicken is cooked, remove from soup and shred it.
Add chicken back to the pot together with beans, corn and lime juice. Mix to combine then simmer for a couple of minutes more.
Serve soup hot with crispy tortilla strips on top and enjoy!
Chili lime chicken tortilla soup 4
Have you ever been lost or stranded? Can you describe the experience?
1993 Labor Day weekend my girlfriend at the time, now my wife of 30 years and I went to Lake Tahoe. On the way home at the highest point of the highway crossing the Sierras my car stopped like it had overheated. We pulled off to the side of the highway and waited for it to cool off. About 30 minutes later a California Highway Patrol officer pulled up behind us. We explained that we might have overheated and the engine had quit on us. He said that this was regular patrol area and he would come back and check on us. Well two hours later the car would not start, temperature was dropping fast outside and we just had a couple of sweatshirts and a jacket for warmth. We decided to try to take a nap until the officer returned to help us. The officer never came back to check on us. We slept in the car while coyotes and other wild animals could be heard making noises right outside the car. This was absolutely terrifying and bone chilling to say the least. At first light we realized we were parked right next to the entrance of a PG&E substation and people were arriving for work. We went down and explained to them our situation and asked if we could first use the facilities and freshen up. Then one of them helped us get in touch with the Ford dealer about 20 minutes away. They sent out a tow truck to pick us and the car up. Being it was Labor Day they were closed and only the tow trucks were there. The driver got all our information and helped us find a rental car to get back home to San Francisco. A couple of days later we got a phone call saying that we had a blown engine but the car was still under a factory warranty and we were covered by it. The service advisor also told us that the first $30 per day of the rental car was covered by the warranty. They would be replacing the engine with a brand new one and it would take two weeks to complete as they had to submit the paperwork to Detroit for fulfillment. So all in all, we spent an uncomfortable and scary night in a place we had no way of communicating with the outside world because it was in the days when only the affluent people had cellular phones. We survived the night and ended up with a new engine in the car for a nominal price.
If civilization started from Egypt and China, how did Europe become more civilized than them? Why did civilization spread faster in Europe than Africa or Asia? Could it be because Africa and Asia have too many languages? Did colonization help?
Europe is not more civilized; it is just that for the past 500 years it has controlled the narrative because of colonialism.
Now that the economic center of the world is moving to Asia and Africa, that period is ending because Asia and Africa are the population centers of the world, with the most economic activity.
The period of European privilege is ending now.
Have you, while repairing a computer, ever found anything that made your jaw drop?
I used to work at a tech support call center. So when the pastor down the street started experiencing problems with his computer, his wife called me to see if I could help. I was not a member of their congregation, but it was a small town and we all helped each other when we could.
His computer had been infected with a virus, and it was not difficult to delete it. But his browser was terribly slow, the home page had been changed to an adult website, and there were multiple bookmarks for po’n sites.
I updated his antivirus and ran a scan. After clearing out the malware, I fixed the browser, deleting all the adult bookmarks and keeping the ones he wanted to keep.
His wife seemed to have no idea how it happened, but it was obvious to me. He’d been looking at po’n and clicked something that infected his computer. He sat there like a deer in the headlights. He said something about clicking a link in an email he got, and that’s when all the problems started. I didn’t want to cause any problems between him and his wife, so I just warned him not to click on any links that came from people he didn’t trust.
How is it helping the homeless if you pay for a motel for a few days then after the few days they go back being homeless?
I’ve had a couple people pay for hotel rooms for a night, and let me tell ya – it’s a godsend.
How? Well, one time, when it was storming really bad in Southern California – someone I love dearly paid three nights for a room right down the street. For the first time in a couple years I was free of my wardrobe and tent – suitcase and backpack – so I went to a movie and had a nice dinner out.
I felt human for the first time in years. A fresh hot shower rather than a bird bath, a warm comfortable room while it stormed outside. It’s little things like this that reminded me I was human – and let’s be clear – in the weeks leading up to this – I’d been pushed WELL beyond my breaking point and had literally planned on murdering this junkie on meth who kept threatening me with a knife on a random basis prior to this point, as I was sleeping with one eye opened and police were unable to do anything about it.
Most people don’t understand that being homeless is about as dehumanizing as it gets. Society has a tendency of treating violent offenders better than someone that’s broke and homeless, which in my opinion – pushing me, a peaceful man who has never been in a fight in my life – to the point of premeditated considerations of murder – has homelessness as being one of the biggest existential threats to modern society. If you’ve never been through it. You simply wouldn’t understand.
But that motel. Just for a couple nights. Made me finally swallow my pride, look at the predictable trajectory homelessness was going to take me and what it was going to turn me into…
And finally agree to accept my mom and dad’s offer for a couch to sleep on in a warm house.
Rest assured. That motel room saved someone’s life. I’m being straight up 100% honest with you there. I’d mentally prepared myself to begin taking the law into my own hands, and I was fine knowing I’d never suffer any consequences from it because the needs of homeless people and the poverty stricken, to this society and world – don’t fuckin matter.
To most, anyways. To those few who did care. That room at just the perfect time changed my life, and prevented the death of someone else who society didn’t care about anyways.
I dont like knowing that part of me exists. I scared even myself. So I don’t believe it was coincidence that room came at the perfect time for me.
Is China producing too much? US ‘overcapacity’ accusations: new tactic in economic war
This Chicken Enchilada Soup recipe is so creamy, thick, and easy to make. Loaded with hearty shredded chicken and beans, it is a crowd-pleasing soup that’s full of your favorite Mexican flavors and very comforting and delicious.
Enchilada soup is one of the most flavorful soup recipes that is not only filling and comforting, but it is full of flavor and a crowd-pleasing soup recipe that will put a smile on everyone’s face. This soup is loaded with beans, chicken, and all the Tex-Mex flavors you love all in one delicious bowl of soup. Easy-to-make Creamy Chicken Enchilada soup is perfect for any night of the week. Especially on a busy weeknight when you need dinner ready in no time.
Creamy chicken enchilada soup 6
Reasons to love this soup
Best-tasting soup ever: The taste of this soup is seriously out-of-this-world good.
Filling: This soup will keep you full, happy, and satisfied. Perfect for lunch or as a light dinner.
Healthy and good for you: Packed with fiber and protein, this soup is good for you in every way.
Ingredients you will need
Butter or Ghee: to keep this on the healthier side, you do not have to use butter. You may use avocado oil.
Onion: use white sweet onions or cooking onions
Veggies: Celery Stalks, Carrot, Red Bell Pepper,
Beans: Red Kidney Beans and Black Beans
Seasonings: Ground Cumin, Chili Powder, Dried Oregano
Garlic Cloves: do use fresh garlic
One can of Diced fire-roasted Tomatoes
Tomato Paste
Fresh or Frozen Sweet Corn: you may use canned corn if that’s all you have and you don’t want to make a trip to the grocery store.
Shredded Cooked Chicken: make your own chicken or get a pre-cooked rotisserie chicken. To prepare your own, check out our post on How to poach chicken breast.
Low-Sodium Chicken Broth– If you plan to poach your own chicken you may save the broth from that.
Mexican Shredded Cheese Blend for garnishing, or you may also use Monterey jack cheese
Salt and pepper, to your taste
Optional: If you prefer to add some enchilada sauce, you can. We didn’t but it certainly won’t hurt and will add some flavor to the soup.
Creamy chicken enchilada soup 2
HOW TO MAKE CREAMY CHICKEN ENCHILADA SOUP
This chicken enchilada soup recipe is made on the stovetop. We will also be showing you further how to make it on your crockpot, slow cooker, and instant pot. Note: Recipe calls for cooked shredded chicken. Either get a storebought rotisserie chicken and use that or cook your own at home using chicken breast (scroll down to learn how to cook the chicken for your enchilada soup).
Prepare vegetables and ingredients: Set up all the ingredients and get your shredded chicken ready.
Cook vegetables: Add butter or oil in a large stockpot over medium-high heat. First, add the onions, celery, carrots, bell pepper, garlic and cook until softens, about 5-6 minutes. Then, stir in seasonings, diced tomatoes, tomato paste, and chicken broth and bring to a boil.
Cook and prep soup: Lower the heat and simmer for about 10-15 minutes, or until veggies are very tender.
Blend: remove from heat and using a hand blender, blend the soup until smooth and creamy. (This is optional if you don’t want to blend you can skip this step).
Add beans and chicken: Place the soup back over medium heat and add in beans, corn and shredded cooked chicken. Stir to combine and boil for a couple of minutes, just to heat it all up.
Serve: Pour into bowls and top with your favorite toppings. Enjoy!
SOUP TOPPING Options
Endless toppings to come up with, but here are some optional toppings you can add to your creamy chicken enchilada soup are:
Chopped avocado
Sliced jalapeño
Fresh chopped cilantro
Green onions
Lime wedges
Crushed Tortilla Chips
Sour cream or yogurt etc.
Shredded Cheese
Creamy chicken enchilada soup 8
How to cook chicken for enchilada soup
Cooking the chicken is quite simple. You can use any pot or a dutch oven. It would be easiest to use a rotisserie chicken but you can certainly cook your own. We recommend using skinless and boneless chicken breasts.
Add chicken into a pot full of water
We like adding some sort of herbs to give the chicken some flavor. Use half an onion and a bay leaf. sometimes we use a cinnamon stick but not for this particular recipe.
Allow boiling for about 15-20 minutes until you easily insert a knife or a fork through the chicken.
Then, drain it in a colander and let it cool off. Or you can just remove the chicken and place it on a cutting board while you save the chicken stock.
Finally, using your hands or forks, shred chicken.
If you have an Instant pot, you can simply make this Instant Pot Chicken Breast to use in this enchilada soup.
How to make enchilada soup using an instant pot, crockpot or slow cooker
There are other ways to make chicken enchilada soup other than using your stovetop. Here are other ways to cook up your soup.
How to use an Instant Pot:
Using the saute option, add the oil or butter in the instant pot, then add the onions, celery, carrots, bell pepper, garlic and cook until softens, about 5-6 minutes.
If using raw chicken, add in with the veggies in the previous step at the bottom.
Add in the seasonings, diced tomatoes, tomato paste, and broth.
Next, add in the beans, corn, and shredded cooked chicken (if using pre-cooked shredded chicken). Stir to combine.
Then, place the lid on the Instant Pot and seal. Using the “manual” setting, cook on high pressure for 10-12 minutes.
Allow the instant pot to natural release for 10 minutes or so before doing a quick release.
Finally, remove the lid from Instant Pot, shred the chicken (if used raw whole chicken breast), and serve with your favorite toppings.
Note: You may remove a portion of the soup towards the end. Blend it and then add it back into the soup. Mix and serve.
In a pan or skillet, add oil or butter over medium-high heat add the onions, celery, carrots, bell pepper, garlic and cook until softens, about 5-6 minutes.
Transfer to crockpot or slow cooker and add in the seasonings, diced tomatoes, tomato paste, and broth.
Then, add in beans, corn, and shredded cooked chicken. Stir to combine cover and set it on High for 2hours or low for 4 hours if using cooked chicken.
Note: You may add raw chicken breasts to the crockpot or slow cooker right before you add in the veggies at the very bottom and set it to cook longer. 6 hours on low and 4 hours on high. Then towards the end use a fork to shred the chicken.
Also Note: You may remove a portion of the soup towards the end. Blend it and then add it back into the soup. Mix and serve.
Creamy chicken enchilada soup 2
Fun cat pictures
From my archives
SNAG 0079SNAG 0078SNAG 0076
Why Pass Port bros find Foreign Women
This time…
Jokes directed at Chinese people are the acceptable form of racism in the west.
Westerners will gaslight and say this isn’t racist! Chinese aren’t people!
This is the first step towards a war of extermination, demonisation of the target nation and gervais shows himself in this video to be a very able agent of the Empire
This time we’re armed
dongfeng 41
Does Japan even have a “ghost of a chance” against China in a war? China has numerous advantages (Russian/North Korean support, HUGE military, healthy disdain of Japan, etc) and Japan has none of that except to be a prompt for the U.S to use nukes.
Japan despite massive massive disadvantages in firepower, military numbers and culture has a massive chance against China. Why? This man and the general state of the leadership is far too conservative. As well as their age.
If you’ve ever played a game before like Rimworld, 7 days to die, Project Zomboid. There’s a setting called Builder. Here’s the menu on Project Zomboid.
It literally says builder: Construction, Exploration and farming focus.
So sure he’s got 3000 hours in game and all the achievements of that…But it’s a crippling overspecialisation.
Martial arts are sometimes like this.
You need close range, mid range, long range, grapple, strength and conditioning to give and take hits. Wing Chun is excellent at close range, but they never condition themselves so boxers eat them alive. The current leadership are far too conservative as such when there’s easy and obvious ways to punish those who literally want us dead? What the hell do they do?
NOTHING!
Taiwan.
It’s not recognised by the UN, it’s not part of the WTO. The poliburo could immediately stop all business with them tomorrow and there’s NOTHING they could do about it. We could literally cause a 50% collapse in the economy TOMORROW.
Yet they don’t do it.
Even my dad who is actually older than Xi did some squeezing of bollocks in his time. He was a beansprout man and his group held a total monopoly on Chinese goods in the UK and he squeezed a few bollocks with his position.
You can write about oh but it’s only a matter of time.
The USD will collapse! (though the USD doesn’t actually need to collapse it’s in such shit that a few % will make a huge difference, US military budget cuts are a real thing because of the debt).
It sounds almost like Joseph Wang, if you ever read his stuff from years ago? He literally said he allowed white Americans to beat him up and offered no resistant. To somebody like me and many others that’s a what the fuckty fuck type situation? Somebody attacks you? You’re going to give them as good as they give you.
So back to the original question?
If Japan starts to militarise again and they’re doing so right now? There’s going to be a huge aversion to fight and you don’t even need me to spell out whose going to have the aversion.
So while China is far more powerful and many of us especially us overseas types are far far more violent than any local Chinese or Japanese. It’s hampered by the fact that the leadership is playing civilisation on builder mode.
I mean at the very least you could have some big weapons tests. Even N Korean leader Kim has done some test launches.
Putin scares the living daylights out of westerners with his SARMAT tests in 2022.
With Iran attacking Israel, is WW3 all but official?
Hope not
The Strategy is clear
Iran sent 158 Shaheed Drones and 27 Cruise Missiles on Israel at a cost of $ 9 Million
Israel intercepted 150+ Drones over Jordan and Syria and Lebanese and 21 Cruise Missiles at an estimated cost of $ 115 Million
6 Missiles hit the targets – An Airbase in Negev plus two military docking centres in Haifa Port
The cost ratio is 9:115 or 1:13 approximately
Iran is thus depleting Israeli (Western) missiles and AD on a large scale from reserves
Today alone around 100+ Missiles were launched by Israel
This means in 10 days, Israel would need 1000–1200 missiles forcing the West to divert stocks to Israel while Iran has low cost cheap drones and cheap missiles and decoy missiles
If the West spends more and more money and weapons on Israel further depleting their stocks
Russia gains immensely as Russia outproduces NATO by 3:1 in Missiles and 12:1 in Artillery Ammunition
And of course China
The more West is mired in the Middle East, even lesser chance of the West to take on China who can produce on war footing, more missiles in a month than Nato can produce in 2 1/2 years as per experts
Leaving Japan, Philippines to take on China who today can more than easily take them out
You said “watch THE PRINCESS BRIDE.” As you wish!!! | First time watching
A few years ago, when there was talk of possibly doing a remake, Cary Elwes (Westley) tweeted "There is a shortage of perfect movies in the world. It would be a pity to remake this one."
Is the trilateral agreement between the Philippines, the United States, and Japan a threat to China?
You can draw up any shit agreement you want but even a bow an arrow shot from Japan or Philippines at China including Taiwan will be fully and comprehensively reciprocated plus interest to that country it does not matter if it is shot by US military or third dog nation forces.
Who asked you to so foolishly to allow a strange bed fellowinto your home.or allow a trouble maker and a war monger to be stationed in your land! Let that be so vividly clear about this state of affair.
China will let the U.S. burnt all it a cash if it so chooses to set up over next 100 years putting up 200 bases around China but it cannot shoot a single song arrow out of if cares for its dogs. Nations. China will not may be not if it will destroys that nation without hesitation. As alllowing one means allowing more. The Navy boys can part all night long banging local Japanese and Filipino girls for all we care as long as they don’t throw a rock at China!
What’s the strangest thing delivered to your house (that you did not order)?
A friend of mine I England, mentioned one day at the pub( bar) that he could do with a cleaner as his old 1700’s mill house was getting too much for him. Next morning there was a sharp knocking on his door, he opened it and a large Middle aged lady pushed by him into the room and said, “ I’m Jean, your new cleaner, let’s have a look at this mess!” He never had a chance to say a word, just stood there dumb. “ Right , where’s the cleaning cupboard?” He pointed in the right direction. Muttering to herself she set about cleaning , “ I’ll be a long while yet you can make yourself scarce untill supper time. “ He went out back to the pub and sat at the bar in a daze as he nursed his pint of beer. He returned to his house in the evening, everything was clean and tidy, Jean was sat down in the kitchen having a cup of tea. “ Umm, how much do I owe you?” He stuttered. All she said was, “ that garden shed has to be cleared out yet!” I’ll attend to that tomorrow. I’ll be staying in the upstairs front bedroom, breakfast will be at 9 o’clock on the dot! “ With that she climbed the stairs and was gone. That was nearly 5 years ago and she is still there cleaning and cooking. He still hasn’t plucked up the courage to ask her any questions, and she has never asked for anything in return. ’ As he is a literary man I hope one day he will publish the whole story. Amazing!
REACTION- Will women WAKE UP & want the men that they rejected?
If you continue to wait for the “right time”, you’ll waste your entire life and nothing will happen.
You’ll lose 99% of your close friends if you start upgrading your life.
You’ll be 10x happier if you forgive your parents and stop blaming them for your problems.
Train yourself to let people win arguments on purpose to conserve your mental health.
You become more mature when you train yourself to take nothing personally.
You don’t need 100 self-help books, all you need is action & self-discipline.
You can’t expect honesty from people who even lie to themselves.
Most people are stuck in toxic relationships because they are afraid to be alone.
The most difficult mission on earth is to focus on your dreams; The easiest task is to complain.
What is one piece of simple advice that actually changed your life?
My dad made it to almost 94, and died in relatively good health. Fantastic, but old age comes with a high price. Once, after the death of the last of his ten friends who had come together to build their hunt club some sixty years previously, I asked him, point blank, “Dad, how do you stand it? How do you cope with losing all your old friends?”
His answer was, as his answers usually were, short and straight to the point: “You make new friends honey. Young ones.”
It was then that I noticed the number of folks, often the children, grand kids, or great grand kids of those lost friends, who stopped by the house regularly. Dad always liked kids; he kept the now unused ashtray next to his recliner filled with Juicy Fruit gum and Hershey chocolate bars. He admired the new BB gun that a ten year old namesake stopped by to show off. He listened eagerly to tales from many boys’ “first hunt.”
I’ve adopted the philosophy. Many of my friends are in their 30’s and early 40’s: young’uns I mentored their first few years of teaching. I drop off a meal here and there, knowing how tired they are after teaching all day. And I’m rewarded with their kids’ pics and artwork on my fridge. Plus all the free technology help!! I now can use Marco Polo, Audible, Chirp, and Libby, thanks to my “young set.”
Most Companies Don’t Want You To Succeed, They Want You Distracted & Hooked On Their Products
Old Buffalo Breath Chili
Old Buffalo Breath Chili
Ingredients
1 (5 pound) chuck roast, at least 3 inches thick
10 to 11 garlic cloves, crushed
Salt, to taste
Chili powder
1/4 cup olive oil
About 1 to 2 cups beef broth
Juice of 1 Mexican lime
2 teaspoons ground dried mild red chile, such as ancho or New Mexican
2 teaspoons ground dried hot red chile, such as cayenne or chile de arbol
1 tablespoon cumin seed, toasted and ground
2 teaspoons Mexican oregano
Chiles pequins, to taste
Masa Harina, as needed
Instructions
Two or three hours before you plan to begin making the chili, rub the chuck roast well with a mash made from two to three of the garlic cloves and salt. Sprinkle the meat with the chili powder to lightly coat it. Loosely cover it with plastic, and set it aside.
Light enough hardwood charcoal to sear the meat on an outdoor grill, preferably one with a cover. At the same time, soak a few handsful of mesquite chips in water. When the coals are covered with gray ash, spread them out evenly, and scatter the damp mesquite chips on top. Then immediately set the meat over the smoke, about an inch from the coals. Cover the grill, and adjust the dampers to maintain a slow, steady heat. Let the meat sear for about 12 minutes (this process is meant to flavor, not cook, the meat), and turn it over to sear the other side for the same amount of time. Remove the meat from the heat, saving any juices on its surface, and transfer it to the refrigerator. Let it cool thoroughly, about 1 hour.
When the meat has cooled, trim away any surface fat or cartilage. With a sharp knife, cube the meat into the smallest pieces you have patience for, saving all the juices.
Heat the olive oil in a large, heavy Dutch oven over moderate heat. Mix in the remaining garlic, and sauté it until it turns translucent. Stir in the meat and all reserved meat juices, adding just enough beef broth to cover. Pour in the lime juice, and sprinkle in the remaining seasonings, stirring and tasting as you do. Crumble in a few whole chiles pequins to bring the heat up to taste. Turn the heat down as low as possible. Long cooking toughens, not tenderizes, if the chili is allowed to boil. Every half hour or so, stir the chili and taste for seasoning, adjusting as you wish. After the first hour, thicken the chili as you like by adding the Masa Harina a teaspoon at a time. The chili should be ready to eat in 3 hours, although it will benefit from a night’s aging in the refrigerator.
Serve the chili steaming hot in large, heavy bowls with an ample supply of soda crackers and a side of beans, but not much else except maybe hot black coffee, iced tea or beer.
How might Chinese citizens respond to their government losing an all-out economic/trade war with the United States, especially if they cannot afford to lose?
China don’t do daft things. Only the U.S. does. If China cannot win it won’t fight. If China seems to be up in arms. They are most likely happy that the U.S. took the bait and ate hanging themselves. It is call winning without fighting!
China can do even one NM chips if it wants but the U.S. thinks it cannot do 7 NM for at least 3 decades! It took China 3 years to do 5NM. Now the U.S. is laden with humongous compensations to its Chip firms and they lose some 80% of the market as China gets it done cheaper, faster and better.
Argentina’s Crumbling Economy is Collapsing, GDP CRASHING, Banks are Failing, Protests Everywhere
Learn about what is going on in the world today. This is what happened when you hitch yourself to the United States.
If a car dealer kept my keys or license to try to pressure me to make a purchase, what would police officers do when they show up at the dealership?
I test drove a f350 platinum super crew, was going to trade a vehicle, I left the keys with the salesman, came back, I decided not to buy “that” truck, due to I didn’t want to own another black truck, they had no other loaded trucks in another color, so I opted to take a pass, the sales manager thought we had some imaginary deal and said the deal was done (I had signed nothing), and wouldn’t return my keys, I asked him if he was certain that he wanted to play this game, he said we have a deal. I pulled my phone out, called 911, told them who I was, where I was, I had been robbed and the assailant was still on premises. Shit happened real fast, I got my keys back, sales manager found out he can be criminally charged for theft as well as kidnapping as I couldn’t leave. Yep, I won’t be shopping there again.
Iran has launched drones against Israel which have not yet hit their targets in Israel.
While this may look like a reprisal against Israel, there is more than meets the eye. The majority of the drones will be intercepted and shot down before they reach their targets; if 10% reach their targets the Iranians will have done well.
But the intention is not to do damage to Israel. Iran, the Houthis in Yemen and Hamas are fighting a war of attrition against Israel which will deplete Israel’s and the US’s munitions, using the cheapest weapons needed. The aim is to provoke Israel into committing more violence in Gaza and the West Bank, and turning more of global public opinion against the US and Israel. The Israeli economy will take a heavy hit, and the US will have to provide expensive economic support to Israel because Biden has committed to Israel’s support.
The Arabs and the Iranians have learned: Israel’s war doctrine is based on the application of overwhelming force to win a short war , which is the same as the US. But if the Arabs and Iran turn the conflict into a long war of attrition, the Arabs win.
In every long war of attrition, which includes Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and arguably Ukraine, the US has withdrawn in the end.
A short sharp war requires the application of overwhelming firepower. Overwhelming firepower requires a huge munitions supply and powerful logistics. US weapons stores have been depleted by the war in Ukraine.
The writing is on the wall…
What has your child done that is technically “wrong” but you were proud of them for doing it?
My young son was friends with the 50-something “neighbor guy”. They were real friends. The neighbor gave him a spark plug wrench and let him take the spark plugs out of all the cars in his junk yard. He also let my son “drive” his 1950 pink Cadillac sitting on blocks in a place of honor in the junkyard. He talked to my son about serious things like how to be a good man, why you should wash your hands a lot, the importance of having a place for your tools and putting them where they belonged. My son lacked a father and this neighbor lacked any family at all.
The neighbor got cancer and was going to die. He let my son know it was nothing personal and he had done nothing wrong to deserve it. He also said he was going to have to leave forever, die and he would go to heaven. They talked a lot about whether he was afraid and what would happen when he died. He told my son he didn’t want anybody messing with his body and he wanted to be buried, not embalmed and still be intact. He wanted to go back to the earth in dignity and not be a poisoned pickle in the ground.
Unfortunately, he died just before Thanksgiving, and without a family, there was no one who felt obligated to see to his wishes. In our state, you can only be buried, without embalming, if you are buried within 3 days. The ground was frozen and it was a holiday weekend. No gravediggers could be found so the adults discussed this in the social room. After church, they concluded that man, whom we had all known and valued, would have to be embalmed. My son, who was about 6, overheard this and became outraged!
He pestered one man after another about it. He eloquently argued how sad the man would be about being a poisoned pickle in the ground. My son announced he would go dig the hole himself even if he did not get home in time for pie! He managed to guilt a dozen men, in their best clothing, to go to the graveyard and dig a grave. Also, a Catholic Priest would be doing the services for a “protestant” before anyone went home to eat a turkey.
It was technically “wrong” because he interrupted and pestered adults with great determination. One by one, he effectively MADE them do something that was outside his purview as a child. I didn’t stop him from doing it. I was more than proud of his love and care for his deceased friend.
Over the years I have collected numerous articles that I have found on the internet. I would print them out. Carefully organize them, and put them in three ring binders. I carried these things around with me for years.
Then I got a divorce from my second wife. She slaughtered me, and all my documents were seized by the police for “evidence”. And wouldn’t you know it, they were misplaced.
A few years ago, I wanted to check what articles that I had written on Free Republic, but they considered me a “Commie” and deleted me. I tried to access my accounts via LinkedIN and discovered that they too considered me a “Commie”.
My MM post that caused this catastrophe was about the HK riots being A United States created color revolution.
Most, but not all, of my writings have been “deleted” by Free Republic by one of their Gen-Z staff who felt that I should not be on the platform. Thankfully some still exist, and have been used by the WF files, and other Internet sleuths to formulate articles around. Still…
So I will relate some stories right now that I just cannot find on the internet anymore. *sigh*
…
While demolishing a 1930’s bridge (I think it was in Pittsburgh or another “rust belt” city) they started to tear apart the stone tiers that held up the bridge. When they were knocking down the stone and cement blocks a cavity appeared. And inside were the skeletal remains of two men, who apparently were buried there. Maybe entombed. I do not recall.
Every now and then I muse about these men. Who were they? Why were they buried that way?
One cold case solved but without the who and why that my imagination so yearns for.
In another instance, another building tear-down in Philadelphia (as I recall) found a body at the bottom of one of the old elevator shafts. They thought that he must have been placed there sometime around 1910 or so.
He was placed there. Not jumped there involuntarily.
Curious.
This next one took place around the middle 1990s. A real estate developer bought up a bunch of farm land, and on it were some old long abandoned properties. All just rotting wood and what not. On one of the properties was a “cold cellar” which was a separate small mini-barn, no bigger than a tiny one-car garage, with a underground room built around a natural spring. These were very common in Pennsylvania back in the day.
When tearing it down they discovered that there was a small room behind the basement brick wall, and apparently a woman had lived there for decades, and eventually died there.
The article was very interesting. They identified who she was and all that. But as I recall, she must have been sealed up in that basement under that little out-shed next to the “cold cellar” for two decades or longer.
For twenty years. Entombed alive.
No journal or anything like that. But I recall that the bricks in the bottom permitted a metal tray of food to be slid back and forth into that tiny room.
What a way to do.
History is interesting .
Back in the 1990’s as the Internet was awakening, all sorts of weird and unique historical articles were popping up everywhere. Now you don’t see anything. It’s all so corporate… so sanitized. Do disgusting.
There’s a beauty in the Wild Wild West; the scene of chaos… and freedom. Where those without power, money, or fame could find a place to exist. But once it’s tamed you get what we have today…
…America.
Don’t get me started on Hollywoods pro LGBQ+ reprogramming. Or the corporate “news”, the sterile chain dining establishments…
Give me Vietnam.
Give me Bedlam, Color, Activity, song, dance, and a hint of danger.
*sigh*
Cold cases. Or in many cases … stuff that no one dare know about. Now maybe never.
Many secrets lie hidden that we rarely get to see before they are forgotten.
As I write, it looks like Iran has fired drones at Israel from Iranian territory as a reprisal for Israel’s attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus on April 1, which resulted in the deaths of seven Iranians, including a senior member of the Revolutionary Guard.
Israel PM Netanyahu is working very hard to expand the Gaza conflict into a bigger ME war which will drag the US into the conflict, so that he will not need to resign under pressure.
While Israel and Iran are mortal enemies, both are helping China by dragging the US into a greater ME conflict which will bleed US military resources, and goodwill for the US worldwide. If the US becomes stuck in a war of attrition in the ME, it will be a gift to China because the US will not be able to do more in Taiwan and the South China Sea.
If it becomes a war of attrition, it is likely to hurt the reputation of Biden, and it could hurt his chances for re-election. Trump will likely capitalize on this during the runup to the election.
By doing nothing in the ME, China is winning. The Chinese call this “winning by lying down.”
Israel, Iran and the US are doing all the work for China.
Iran Seizes Israeli-Owned Merchant Ship in Strait of Hormuz
Reports have come in overnight saying Special Forces of the Iran Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC) seized the MSC ARIES in the Strait of Hormuz.
The vessel involved was the Portuguese-flagged MSC Aries, a container ship associated with London-based Zodiac Maritime. Zodiac Maritime is part of Israeli billionaire Eyal Ofer’s Zodiac Group.
The vessel was redirected to Iranian territorial waters.
We four friends were chit chatting during late night after the dinner. One of the guy, who we usually bully as being the most girlish in our circle, detects an odour of a burning coil.
“There’s something burning”, he mumbled.
“Shut up. I couldn’t smell anything”, said one of them.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, we see a bright flame in the kitchen and everyone runs out of the room. Within a few minutes, it was apparent that most of the things in the kitchen have caught fire. The window in the kitchen was open and it was really windy which added on to the dismay.
We were scared as fuck. None of us had the balls to jump into the kitchen to move the gas cylinder out and close the window.
Don’t know how the testestrone boosted in him for a second and this girlish dude, whom we took always for granted, jumped into the kitchen. Like a hulk, punched into the doors, and tore the curtains and kicked every ass on the earth to successfully bring the cylinder out. I kept watching. He grabbed a shovel and ran over there.
We stood standing outside thinking who would we make fun of if he dies.
Apparently, we realized that one of us had thrown a cigarette on a wooden utensil box that lit up the fire.
Now, he is still alive and no one dares to mock him for his non-masculine attitude.
It won’t be shocking for me to witness the manliest task by him of cutting and shaping steel like a superman to weld a machine.
The dude saved lives (like, not literally)
*sigh*
Absolutely true
Former Philippine president cautions that the US is attempting to instigate a war between China and the Philippines, calling for rational dialogue with China
Former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte called for rational and friendly dialogue with China on current bilateral issues and expressed sadness over the disputes in the South China Sea and the policies adopted by the current administration toward China in a recent interview by Global Times.
When asked about the message he wanted to convey to the people of both the Philippines and China regarding the current state of China-Philippines relations, Duterte issued a warning. He cautioned that the US is attempting to instigate a war between China and the Philippines, emphasizing that the US would not risk American lives for Filipinos. Duterte expressed hope that the Philippines could steer away from its detrimental path and resolve issues through dialogue and negotiation.
He expressed hope to stop the ruckus over the South China Sea, stating that the Americans are the ones pushing the Philippine government to go out there and quarrel and eventually maybe start a war.
Duterte thinks China and the Philippines have to wait before returning to the negotiating table on the South China Sea issue. “You cannot talk to the Philippine government because it is the Americans that will tell them what he should say to you. So it’s forever a cycle of incongruity,” he said.
Duterte envisions China and the Philippines collaborating to enrich people-to-people exchanges. Despite many Filipinos leaning towards a pro-American stance due to the educational system, he aspires for them to embrace new perspectives.
If African countries suddenly stopped doing business with China, who will replace China as their largest trading partner?
China gives African Nations – Machinery, Machine Tools, Agricultural Machinery, Railway Parts, Turbines, Motors, Pumps and Tooling Equipment which form bulk of Chinese exports to these regions
Plus almost 90% of the Electronics and Laptops and Smartphones sold in Africa
China arranges a Float Swap Facility ranging from 300 Million to 4 Billion RMB that ensures China can export these products and get paid in Local Currency that gets swapped to Yuan and immediately reused to buy Uranium Ore, Rare Earths, Tin, Natural Diamonds, Cocoa and Crude Oil
So it’s a barter system literally through a Yuan Float allowing the Africans some credit
In addition Chinese Companies do Construction work of Factories, Railroads, Power Stations through the Belt and Road Initiative where the funding comes from Chinese Banks and is secured by the Operational Revenue of this Infrastructure plus the Export Revenue earned for the Equipment used for building the Infrastructure
China also gets discounted Oil, Wood and Uranium and Thorium from Namibia at highly discounted rates
Plus China is providing a major digital backbone for Africa through Wireless Equipment, Internet Equipment and Ethernet Equipment
So it’s a Trade Ecosystem that China and Africa have that successfully has by passed the US Dollar almost completely over the years
So assuming the African Nations stopped doing Trade with China
They would need their demand for Machinery and Electronics to be supplied by others
India, Vietnam, Mexico combined have an Industrial Production Capacity of around 31% of China’s
You think they would supply Africa instead of Europe or US which are infinitely richer markets?
Nopes
Korea, Japan, Taiwan are even lesser and they make too advanced products to cater to African masses.
They would need Investments into Power and Infrastructure and Extraction and Refining of Metals
Who has that sort of money?
China has an annual trade Surplus of $ 800 Billion to $ 900 Billion
Easy to cut a $ 10 Billion Cheque
Russia and Saudi have the money but not the experience or set up
India is too poor
US is already printing more and more money to choke itself off and it won’t print money to see Africa prosperous
Bottom line is I don’t see anyone else rushing to take Chinas place in Africa
China takes but also gives
The rest only take, take and take
What’s the craziest thing you’ve heard pretending to be asleep?
There were a lot of abandoned cars left at our families service station. Over the years they were dragged out to the back forty, and left for years. One day when my cousins were out visiting, we quite correctly believed that they were junked cars. I was probably 6, my brother 8, my cousins between 5 and 9. We invented a game where we would jump from the fender of one car, to the fender of another. These were old 1940s and 1950s cars, and the front fender was distinct from the hood. We would jump across all 12 cars, and then come back on the back fender, and then over the roof of the end car, and repeat.
After a weeks jumping, we dented the fenders of the abandoned cars. They weren’t locked, and I found an extension cord in one. I used it as a lariat.
One day, long after my cousins had left, my uncle came over to visit, and I lassoed him. He wasn’t impressed, and asked where I got an extension cord from.
I told him I got it from the abandoned cars. He said that was theft, and he and my dad went to look at the abandoned cars.
When my dad and uncle came back, I didn’t want anymore flack from my uncle, so I pretended to have fallen asleep on the couch. They started talking, and my uncle said that the cars were damaged bad enough, that we should call the police. I quietly freaked.
When my uncle left, I went to bed, but I didn’t sleep for three weeks, waiting for the police to come and arrest me.
After 3 weeks, I asked my parents when the police were coming for me. They laughed and said nobody would call the police about abandoned cars. That my uncle just liked to make a big deal out of nothing. If they had known, that I had heard them, they would have told me the truth.
As I grew up, I realized that my uncle only saw the worst of everything, until he had to go for counseling when he lost a foot. He turned right around then, and tried to make up for all his past behavior.
I will never forget the stress I lived under. At 6, the week before Christmas lasts a whole year, so you can imagine how long that 3 weeks seemed to me.
Use This ONE Simple Trick To Find Out Her Ideal ‘DICK’ Size!
Russia has test-fired a nuclear-capable Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) but the test-trajectory was clearly chosen to send an unmistakable message – the missile flew directly over the Middle East!
The trajectory kept the missile within earth’s atmosphere so it could be seen by people in the South of Russia, Central Asia, Iran, and “other countries” in the Middle East. . . . . Israel.
The Russians didn’t have to say a single word to anyone, anywhere, other than to announce the test, which they did. They just fired this test . . . and as the missile traveled, it spoke all the words that needed to be spoken, to everyone who needed to hear.
Certain little countries in the world have been shooting their mouth off about how they’re going to do this, and going to do that . . . . to a Russian Ally . . . . . and Russia just told that little country – and its big brother – what’s what.
Modern women on TikTok are FURIOUS about the Sprinkle trend! Sprinkle Sprinkle vs. Drizzle Drizzle
“Soft boys”
Do you like your quarantine lifestyle better than your regular one? Why or why not?
I think it’s fantastic to live and work entirely home-based. It’s comfortable, it’s economical, and the best thing is: it’s possible. We couldn’t have done this 30 years ago.
I am currently on holiday, but it doesn’t feel very different from work. Or shall we say, working almost feels like being on holiday. I like spending many hours in front of my computer anyway, and whether I surf the web for fun or do my actual work makes little difference.
The list of advantages is long:
I get up at 07:30 as opposed to 06:30 now, because I don’t have to drive to work.
I dress for comfort. Haven’t worn my tweed jackets in months.
I sit with my legs up, and a cat on my belly.
Mileage on the car has gone down to 200 a month instead of 1200 a month. That’ll slow its depreciation and extend its life.
I save a good 200 Dollars a month on fuel money.
I see my wife all day long, because she also works from home.
We eat lunch together now.
We cook that lunch ourselves, so our health is benefiting.
I can reach my colleagues so much more easily now, because they are all hogging their computers. One ping, and Leif is on Skype for me. No more of that “sorry, on business trip to Norway, will get back to you when I have internet access.”
The cats love having us around.
By 16:00, we may be in the car, cruising the landscape for fun or going to some second hand farm shop. Not commuting the same old stretch of road we otherwise would.
All our shopping is accomplished online, and so is the delivery.
Overall, the benefits to our finances and stress levels are evident. I certainly hope to continue living like this forever.
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Beef Burritos
Yield: 4 to 8 servings
Ingredients
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium yellow onion, chopped
1 pound lean ground beef
1 clove garlic, minced
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon freshly-ground black pepper
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 potato, peeled, cooked and diced
2 New Mexico green chiles, roasted, peeled, seeded and chopped
4 to 8 flour tortillas
Shredded lettuce
Sour cream
Salsa
Instructions
Heat oil in a frying pan, then sauté onion for 3 to 4 minutes.
Add ground beef, garlic, cumin, pepper and salt. Cook, stirring with a fork, until brown.
Stir in the potato and green chiles and continue cooking until the potato and chiles are warmed through.
In a nonstick frying pan, heat each tortilla until just warm.
Remove from pan, spoon a little of the beef mixture into the center of each tortilla and roll up.
Top with shredded lettuce, a tablespoon of sour cream and/or your favorite salsa.
Serve with refried beans on the side.
What is the most horrifying medical thing/disease you have seen?
I have seen many horrible diseases during my career but this case touched me at an emotional level. I once had a patient that I diagnosed with having a baby with Potter’s Syndrome (Potter sequence – Wikipedia). The baby would be born with a zero chance of survival without any functional lungs. The specialists advised her to terminate the pregnancy. She refused. I didn’t see the purpose of carrying a baby who would end up dying within minutes of birth. However she persisted and carried the baby to term and I ended up delivering her baby normally and handing the baby to her to hold. She cooed and spoke sweetly to the baby even as he was getting bluer and colder. There was no drama, no fighting for life. Baby stopped moving within a few minutes and I pronounced him dead. It was sad. I finished up my work and left for home.
The next morning I found out that the transplant teams from the San Francisco bay area had been busy overnight and harvested the organs to save several other babies. I was befuddled. This mother’s unspeakable tragedy made it possible for several other children to live. So now this baby lives on in the body of several other children. Even a non-emotional person like me was touched. There was a purpose for even this severely abnormal baby’s life.
Martian Mysteries | The Phobos Incident, Monoliths, and Ancient Ruins
Always a fun video.
When did you realize your child was no longer a child?
When my son was in the eighth grade, he got suspended and I had to leave work early to go get him. When I got there, I asked the principal what had happened. The principal explained that my son had beaten up three other boys and even broke one boy’s wrist. I was obviously horrified and asked my son what the fuck he was thinking. He simply told me that the boys had cornered one of his friends and were trying to make her strip for them. Being the chivalrous boy I raised him to be, he put a stop to it. I asked the principal if it was true and he dodged the question. In response to that, I told the school that if they’re going to allow sexual harassment, I didn’t want my child to attend and took him home. I told my son that I was going to take him out of public schools. He replied by telling me that he didn’t want to leave the school because of he wasn’t there then who was going to stop it from happening again.
This is when I realized my little boy had become a man. He would rather get in trouble to protect a friend than stay out of the spotlight and potentially face long term consequences.
Edit: I feel the need to point out that my son also got his ass kicked (and to be frank, “beat up” was probably the wrong term to use [a bit exaggerated] when describing what he did to those three boys). I assumed that was implied, but oh well. What can you do? The police were called and the bullies’ parents didn’t press charges as long as the girl’s parents didn’t either. The school penalized all three boys and the girl’s mother and I are very close friends now.
Why do many people (including the Americans who left the US) say that living in the US is hard and that leaving the country was the best choice they ever made?
I left the US almost 50 years ago to live in Germany. However, I frequently visit the US to stay there months at a time.
There are things that are “convenient” about living in the US: stores that open 7 days a week, some even 24/7; outside the large cities, ample free parking, better weather in vast parts of the US (compared to Germany), ease of meeting new people, etc.
But despite the “convenience”, yes, it is hard. It is hard living in a country with too many people recklessly wielding firearms – and using them. It is hard because many people do not respect others’ boundaries. It is hard because so many people are so poorly educated (I fault the system for that – not the people). It is hard because access to higher education is so expensive. The hire-and-fire mentality in the US is horrible. The fact that corruption has so openly visible on all levels is horrifying. And even more horrifying is that such a large portion of the population doesn’t care.
Leaving the US was the best choice I ever made because of the lousy American health care system. At the time I left, I had no idea I had a rare genetic defect that would eventually destroy my lungs. But once it reared its head, it became immediately clear that to survive more than a few years, I would require a double lung transplantation. I will always be grateful to the donor (and her family) for the gift of those lungs. And I will be forever grateful to the health care system here that made it possible for me to miss two years of work (one year of which I spent in-patient) without being financially worse for the wear. Twenty-one years after the gift of those lungs, I have been in and out of hospitals, have had three different cancer diagnoses, a couple of rounds of pneumonia, and sepsis, six years of dialysis, two kidney transplantation – all while being able to continue working – and still not being financially worse for the wear. Had I remained in the US, I would likely be bankrupt and/or dead.
Yellen tried to stop China’s development. This is how she failed.
What is your funniest story in your childhood?
When I was three our dog, Muffin, died. Back then, you were allowed to bury your pets in your backyard. (Or perhaps our vet just didn’t care and no one else was the wiser…) It happened while we were on vacation, so my parents asked our vet to freeze him so they could bury him next to their other dog when we got back.
They made sure I saw Muffin before putting him in the ground, let me touch him one last time… warned me he would be cold… I was mature and handled it well.
Later we were visiting my aunt and uncle. My aunt came and sat next to me and told me how sad she was that my doggy had died but I should be happy that he’s in doggy heaven now.
I looked at her very seriously and shook my head. “No, Aunt Sharon. He’s defrosting in the backyard!” (I had a fine concept of death and heaven but hadn’t been taught about doggy heaven and it just didn’t make any sense!)
Russia Hits Underground Gas Reserves in Ukraine; “Mushroom Cloud” from Fierce Explosion
At dawn, Russia achieved the largest strategic strike in Ukraine in history, when it destroyed Ukraine’s largest underground gas storage in Bilche-Volitsko-Uher in the city of Stryjak near Ľvov.
Russia utilized Kh-47 Kinzhal supersonic missiles and Kh-101 cruise missiles, to strike and detonate 17 billion cubic meters of stored natural gas!
The attack came from three different sides.
Russia Hits ukraine Gas Reserve
The destruction of the natural gas, combined with Russia’s unwillingness to supply new gas, means that Ukraine is “done” from an energy perspective.
A total of eight MiG-31 fighters carrying Kinzhal and Kh-101 aircraft hit the gas reserve, causing a nuclear-like mushroom cloud visible from Poland, 100 km from the Ukrainian border.
The reserve tank was located at a depth of 50 meters (~150 feet) from the surface of the earth, which did not prevent Kinžal from going through the stony ground “like a knife through butter” and exploding into the tank!
In Poland, radiation measurements began after what initially appeared to be a nuclear attack there, but this has not been confirmed.
Ukraine currently has less than half of its gas reserves, and after the destruction of the reserve, it cannot even be supplied from the European market.
The attack on this underground gas reservoir was confirmed by the Ukrainian company Zdroj 24 news.
Exposition (Green Flag #1)
What does Fitch’s downgrade of China’s sovereign rating outlook to negative mean?
It’s essentially this on Quora.
Upvote/downvote
vote
Yellen unable to do anything in China after flying here and demanding we buy their garbage… failed.
So the MOST POWERFUL COUNTRY IN THE WORLD. Had only one avenue left to hit us back. That is give us a downvote.
That’s literally the limit of their power.
Even the USS Dwight Eisenhower is hiding near North Africa because of the scary Houthis.
carrier
THE HONEY BADGER
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Aww.. he looks so cute. Lemme just pet him.
That’s when you realise, you fucked up!
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He don’t give a shit. He’ll take your dinner, smack the shit out of you and eat you for dessert.
Y’all probably heard a lot about these SOBs. But, here are the facts..
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They’re mean as hell!
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They’ll eat anything! (seriously anything)
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They’ve very powerful claws and teeth, which are powerful enough to break the shell of a freakin tortoise!
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They are thick skinned. Literally. There are reports of arrows and spears glancing off their thick, rubbery epidermis. (if they get caught in the mouth of a predator, they can break loose & retaliate with its powerful teeth)
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They are resistant to snake venom.
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They are Smart af!
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They’re so intelligent that they even use freakin tools.
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Video from Moholoholo Wildlife Rehabilitation Center in South Africa revealed that a team of honey badgers used sticks, a rake, mud, stones, and pure determination in their attempts to escape.
We’re talking about a highly intelligent animal which can certainly fuck you up, if evolution had it’s way.
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I’m innocent.
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Except..
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Because..
Honey Badgers don’t give a shit!
EDIT :
To those of who are familiar with this vicious bastard from Far Cry 4.
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Run.. Forrest.. R- –
Turkey DENIES U.S. Permission To Use Airspace to Attack Iran
The country of Turkey has DENIED permission to the US, to use Turkish air space to attack Iran. Turkey joins Kuwait, Qatar, and other Middle East nations in telling the US they cannot use wither bases or air space for any Iran attack.
Our “allies” seem to have finally had enough of our excusing any and every transgression perpetrated by Israel.
Turkey region large
Israel is facing military consequences for its bombing of Iran’s Embassy Compound in Damascus, Syria. The Israeli attack was, as a matter of fact and law, an “Act of War.” The bombing of Iran’s Embassy compound violated the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic relations, to which most of the world adheres.
The consequences Israel now faces is being hit back militarily, by Iran which has a formidable missile force, and and equally formidable drone force.
Neither the US nor Israel want there to be any consequences, but the real world doesn’t work that way.
The US, at first, told Iran that, as long as no US facilities were targeted, the US “would not interfere.” That position quickly went out the window and today, the US “will defend Israel.”
The US has moved substantial naval assets closer to the Israeli coastline, and has moved an aircraft carrier strike group into the northern part of the Red Sea. Publicly, the US is pledging to intercept as many Iranian missiles as is feasible to do.
The US has been speaking with the governments of countries where US bases are located, and those discussions have gone absolutely nowhere. The US is being repeatedly DENIED permission to use those countries for any attacks upon Iran.
The denial of permission from Qatar was especially serious; that’s where the largest US base in all of the Middle East is located. The refusal of permission has severely undercut US ability to project force in the region.
The US is openly frustrated that “allies” are denying permission. For some reason, the US fails to see that Israel threw the first punch, and now Israel is going to get punched back.
Why the US is in such denial is anyone’s guess, but the countries which are denying permission realize quite clearly what their decisions are creating: A situation where “big brother USA” cannot defend the little bully, Israel.
Most of my former colleagues in the Intelligence Community have told me as of Friday night, they expect Iran to unleash a missile and drone barrage upon Israel, to hit Israeli government (military) assets.
They also tell me they expect the attack to begin THIS WEEKEND.
For its part, Israel has blustered they will counter-attack. IF they choose to do so, it will only escalate the situation.
Now that the USA is being militarily hamstrung by its “allies” perhaps the Israelis may become more amenable to getting along with neighbors . . . after they get punched back, by Iran.
The little Bully Israel seems set to get a bloody nose.
What’s the smoothest pick up line you’ve ever heard?
This pickup line was used on me…
At the time, I was a centre back on my Footy team. I had injured my ankle (a foul from behind. He received a quick yellow!), and found I needed to use crutches for a few days.
I was at a party, chatting with a friend when a young lady acquaintance (I didn’t know her well, we just had mutual friends) came over and asked me what had happened. The 3 of us talked for a few minutes, when I realized that the 2 pints I’d had was passing through me, and I needed to excuse myself and go to the loo.
I then turned, and with some trouble getting through the crowd because of the crutches, I was just about to the door of the loo when the young lady acquaintance loudly called my name, catching my attention…
Talking loudly, she said, “Do you need some help with that? I understand the doctor said you shouldn’t lift anything heavy!
The room went silent. My face turned very red!
The line worked!
First units of French Foreign Legion have been deployed to Slavyansk, Ukraine!
Members of the 3rd Infantry Regiment of the French Foreign Legion have arrived at the location of Ukraine’s 54th Independent Mechanized Brigade in Slavyansk, part of the Donetsk People’s Republic under the control of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
According to preliminary information, the first group of 100 people consists of specialists in artillery reconnaissance, while the specialization of the engineering group is fortification and the construction of field fortifications.
The French troops, apparently, who only move around in the city when accompanied by Ukrainian forces, will help the Ukrainian Army defend Slavyansk when the front line shifts towards the city.
Earlier, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova warned that France would prepare 1,500 troops in April to be sent to Ukraine.
The Russian Defense Ministry has repeatedly stated that the Kiev regime is using foreign mercenaries as “cannon fodder,” and that the Russian military will continue to target and eliminate them throughout the conflict zone.
What is the reason behind the strong patriotism of Chinese people? Is their support for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) genuine or forced?
China, as a civilization-state, has two main characteristics. Firstly, there is its exceptional longevity, dating back to even before the break-up of the Roman Empire. Secondly, the sheer scale of China – both geographic and demographic – means that it embraces a huge diversity.
The idea of China as a civilization-state is a fundamental building block for understanding China in its own terms. And it has multifarious implications. The relationship between the state and society in China is very different to that in the West.
Contrary to the overwhelming Western assumption that the Chinese state lacks legitimacy and is bereft of public support, in fact the Chinese state enjoys greater legitimacy than any Western state. We have come to assume that the legitimacy of the state overwhelmingly rests on the democratic process – universal suffrage, competing parties et al.
But this is only one element: if it was the whole story, then the Italian state would enjoy a robust legitimacy rather than the reality, a chronic lack of it. And to explain this we have to go back to the Risorgimento as only a partially fulfilled project.
The reason why the Chinese state enjoys a formidable legitimacy in the eyes of the Chinese has nothing to do with democracy but can be found in the relationship between the state and Chinese civilization.
The state is seen as the embodiment, guardian and defender of Chinese civilization.
Maintaining the unity, cohesion and integrity of Chinese civilization – of the civilization-state – is perceived as the highest political priority and is seen as the sacrosanct task of the Chinese state.
Unlike in the West, where the state is viewed with varying degrees of suspicion, even hostility, and is regarded, as a consequence, as an outsider, in China the state is seen as an intimate, as part of the family, indeed as the head of the family; interestingly, in this context, the Chinese term for nation-state is ‘nation-family / 国家’.
Yes, CPC is the head of the family and the inheritor and guardian of Chinese civilization.
REAL Family? Would Men Stop Walking Away if they could have THIS? REACTION to #based Tim Pool
Have you ever gone to a psychiatrist? What were the circumstances around the visit?
I sought the help of a therapist during my final months in New Zealand because I thought I had depression.
After telling him about my situation at length, he said:
“Let me summarize:
you have been bullied out of your job;
you have over one million dollars of debt and face repossession of your two houses and four cars;
half of which because you have been pressured into buying a house for your mother in law, who has been actively sabotaging your marriage for almost ten years;
your foster children you were expecting to adopt have been taken away and put back with their biological parents, teenagers imprisoned for drug offences who have now been released due to a law change;
your wife wants a divorce.
And you think you have depression? You have every reason to be down! You’re healthy. Get out of here.”
And I did.
All the way to Shanghai, from where it took me three years to clean up the mess. But he was right, I never needed any anti depressants. With every dollar my bank statements began to look more balanced, I was better.
7 things you can understand about anyone through his/her behavior
If a person laughs too much, even at stupid things, he is lonely deep inside.
If a person speaks less, but speaks fast, he keeps secrets.
If a person sleeps a lot, he is sad.
If someone can’t cry, he is weak.
If someone eats in an abnormal manner, he is tense.
If someone cries on little things, he is innocent & soft-hearted.
If someone becomes angry over silly or petty (small) things, it means he needs love.Try to understand people more.
Have you ever witnessed a life ruined from a small mistake?
On the 4th of July, 16 years ago, I was at a fireworks show where parents accidentally killed their own child.
They had 6 children. One was a 6 month old baby.
They were at a fireworks show. It was really hectic. I don’t remember the exact details. A lot of people were there.
The dad had gone off on his own to buy snacks for the kids, he took the baby along.
Mom was sitting on a blanket with the rest of her kids, ready to watch the fireworks show. Someone from the show asked Mom to move her car, it was in the way. Mom left the oldest child in charge of all the younger ones on the grassy hill on their blanket. She walked over and hopped into the car.
At the same time, Dad had come back to the car after getting snacks to get a lawn chair out of the trunk. Mom and Dad didn’t see each other, Mom was already in the car. Dad set the baby carrier down on the ground behind the car, not knowing Mom was in the car ready to back up.
I’m not sure how it happened, Dad was either distracted talking to someone or busy setting snacks down. But while he wasn’t looking, Mom backed the car over the baby. It was horrible, chaotic, and devastating.
The baby was only partially backed over and survived for two days. He died after that. The pain of his parents was indescribable.
After that, an investigation ensued of the death of their child. They were found innocent, ruling that it was a horrible accident. But being investigated for the murder of their child made the death much worse and the pain last much longer.
Surprisingly, the couple did stay together. A lot of times, couples blame each other in events like that and have to separate after something so painful, or so I’ve heard.
However, they don’t celebrate the 4th of July anymore. It’s a horrible reminder of the death of their baby boy. Every year I see a post from them commemorating his death on Independence Day.
If I get a job offer of HKD $25,000, is it enough to stay in Hong Kong like renting, utilities, transportation, living cost, etc. for one person?
It depends on your life style.
A lot of people will say rent is the killer.
It isn’t the killer it once was. Rents are FALLING in Hong Kong and if you live in the New Territories a little bit away from an MTR station a 500sqft apartment can be had for about $7000 a month, live in the arse end of nowhere and $10000 can get you an entire 750sqft apartment.
But you trade travel time/expenses for rent.
Foodwise? You can survive easily on $100HKD a day.
Transport from arse end of nowhere to Admiralty for me is about $60HKD a day. This can be cheaper if I decide to arrive before 8am.
Utilities. Family of 4 lots of air con, lots of cooking (electric) is about $2800 a month electricity. I live mostly alone spend most of my time outside and I am also heat resistant so I spend about $700 (I do however weld a fair bit).
The problem is sanity money.
As somebody on a visa? Shenzhen is closed to you. Sanity money is doing things to get away from the nuttyness of the city and urban areas. This can be cheap as chips for instance cycling all over the territory (an older road bike can be bought for $2000). To ice skating, musical instruments etc to getting wasted.
That’s the big money sink here.
This is FRIGHTENING!
If you could change your high-stress lifestyle, how would you do it?
I have already done that. Here’s what I did:
purchased a cheap house outright, so I can live mortgage free. It’s fantastic. I will never ever feel like I might lose the roof over my head.
built myself a large stock of healthy dried foods, so I can theoretically last a year or more just on my sacks of pulses, rice, and canned veggies and fruits. The squirrels got it right.
bought myself a fairly recent, compact Toyota hybrid – mobility assured.
moved to a village in the wilderness, six hours from the next big city. It’s totally quiet at night, and all I hear during the day is the waves of the lake.
got myself a pleasant university job.
invested in some premium mattresses and bedding, as well as earplugs – great sleep is your main weapon against stress.
I keep cats instead of dogs – they inspire me with their ability to sleep on the couch all day long.
all my lighting is LED, so I don’t need to worry about leaving it on. It will be cheap and the bulbs last 20 years.
built myself a little home cinema in the basement where I can retreat and watch films with the cats every evening. Watching films is supremely relaxing.
I’ve left all the accounting to my wife, who likes doing it.
What is the sleaziest, dirtiest trick an auto insurance company tried to pull on you? Did they succeed?
My wife was killed in an accident in Minnesota. A juvenile was driving her brand new vehicle way too fast even tho the road conditions were dry (speedometer was stuck at 1 04 when they were investigating).
The girl/insurance was found 100% at fault. Her insurance was a hefty one since she was a minor. Their insurance had the gall to keep calling me asking health questions about my wife and she was prone to seizures, blacking out suddenly, vertigo, etc. I was like WTH and told them I was going to get an attorney (this was Wednesday morning…accident was Tuesday night at 8:44PM). By 11AM I already had answered numerous calls from her ins, had to tell 4 kids their mom passed away, had to let her family in Arizona know that she passed.
At 11:45 on the morning after, I get a call from her insurance company asking if I would accept $1,000 for my pain, suffering and not go to trial. This girls insurance policy was over 500k. I told them that they are out of their effing mind…the girl that offered me chuckled and said she thought I wouldnt accept and hung up. I got a lawyer, had him let them know I wouldnt accept and we would reach a settlement.
All in all, the insurance company sat on the policy earning interest for 2 years and then on month 26, the KIDS reached a college settlement that they couldnt touch until each of them reached 18, 21, 25 (I didnt want them to get all that money right away and blow it even tho one had a sleazy partner and they blew thru the age 21 settlement in 3 days).
I think its very sleazy that they were trying to distance themselves from the accident and then trying to weasel themselves out of paying the insurance settlement. We didnt get the full settlement but it was close and I still have 2 children out of the 4 still collecting interest and checks.
Why does Israel kill kids? Why do Israelis online claim these deaths are not happening?
This was a Nation that once refused to starve Egyptian soldiers it had encircled in 1973
Moshe Dayan once said If Israel acted like terrorist groups, it would lose the moral ground to the world
Golda Meir formed the Wrath of God team to selectively hunt down the 1972 Munich Massacre terrorists – one by one over almost 11 years at a cost of $ 42 Million rather than send a few aircraft and bomb Jordan or Lebanon for harboring those terrorists
Those days are done and dusted now
The Americans started with Agent Orange and began to justify killing Civilians
Then in 1999, Tony Blair openly claimed the West had a right to meddle in any Country’s affairs for World Peace
And thus began the growth of Evil in the West
I would say the Evil began with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair – both alleged pedophiles and both on the list of that notorious and accepted pedophile Epstein
Europe was still protected by good nationalists like Chirac and Schroeder
Then gradually the Evil spread everywhere
Bush Jr, Obama, Trump, Biden, Scholz, Boris Johnson,Macron and Netanyahu – the list goes on and on
The Israelis are evil people today
They seem to believe that killing women and children is fully justified
That’s not a problem in itself
Yet they seem to believe Arabs and especially Palestinians are akin to animals and deserve to die
So many Israeli kids seem surprised as to why the whole world is reacting to the deaths of Palestinians
Just like in 1940, Hitler Jugend used to ask why everyone was so worried about Jewry when the Reich was doing their job for them and ridding the world of that Jewish influence
Their God once protected them because they were on the right path and the world was persecuting them
I believe the same God will abandon them or has abandoned them to the Devil long ago
They are too evil and they deserve God’s judgment
Let’s hope like Moses – a new round of plagues arise and exterminate all the evil Israelis leaving behind the Good ones who can again build up the former ‘Honor’ of their race that existed in the times of Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan
SHOCKING Court Ruling in Favor of MEN! Yale Student Acquitted of Assault Sues for $110 Million
The thing is, for many men, it's not even, "guilty until proven innocent." Its, "guilty EVEN if proven innocent."
Green Chile Burros
The burro is shown “enchilada style.”
green chile burros
Ingredients
1 small beef roast, diced
1 medium onion, chopped
2 (4 ounce) cans diced green chiles
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 (16 ounce) can tomatoes, drained (juice reserved)
1/2 teaspoon comino (cumin)
Salt and pepper, to taste
All-purpose flour
Instructions
Brown diced meat in fat in a large, heavy saucepan. Add onion, green chiles, garlic and drained tomatoes. Add enough drained tomato juice (plus water if needed) to cover. Add comino, salt and pepper. Cook, covered, until meat is very tender.
Mix flour with a small amount of water to form a thin paste and add to mixture to thicken slightly.
Heat a large flour tortilla on a griddle. Fill with meat mixture and fold.
Notes
Enchilada Style: Follow instructions above, then place in a shallow serving dish. Pour enchilada sauce over the top to cover, and sprinkle with grated cheese. Heat in a 425 degrees F oven until the cheese is melted.
I sometimes make a fast version of this. I use leftover pot roast, dice it up, mix it with the remaining ingredients and just simmer it until the onion is tender. Thicken it with the flour as stated in the recipe.
What was the funniest moment you had with your boss?
I have had so many wonderful moments with Jay (store manager), it’s hard to decide on which one.
I think this was hilarious, but I doubt Jay would, good thing he doesn’t read my answers.
I was working in my department, Jay and I were visiting just before he was going home. A customer walked up to my service counter. I wished I could remember what the customer said or did that had me lose my temper. It takes a lot before I lose it.
Anyway, the customer upset me and I said, “You can shove it where the sun doesn’t shine and I don’t mean a closed book.” The customer walked away. Jay looks at me and said, “You are so busted!” He walked away to talk to the customer. I stood there cussing myself out for my stupidity.
Jay returned. In the coldest tone, he said, “You back room now!!!!!” I walked back there. I knew that there was nothing I could say to save my bacon.
He stood there glaring at me, counting to ten, taking deep breaths, counting again and clenching and unclenching his fists. I was smart enough not to be a smarta$$ and ask him if I was in trouble.
He finally said, “How? How in the H E double hockey sticks did you manage to do it?!?!” I waited to find out what I managed to do. Jay sputters out, “ I went to talk to the customer to smooth things out, so corporate would not become involved. The customer told me that everything was great and if I punish you in anyway, she will call corporate on me?!!?” I looked at him and said, “Maybe because I am cuter?” He stormed off!
We are still friends to this day! I’m still cuter!
Russia to United Nations: Prepare for “Unconditional Capitulation” of Ukraine
Russia just said the quiet part out loud: There must be unconditional capitulation (i.e. surrender)” by Ukraine.
Nebenzya large
During yesterday’s UN Security Council meeting Vasily Nebenzya, the Permanent Representative of Russia to the United Nations, said:
“This is how it will go down in history – as an inhuman and hateful regime of terrorists and Nazis who betrayed the interest of their people and sacrificed it for Western money and for Zelenski and his closest circle.
In these conditions, attempts by the head of the Kiev regime to promote his formula and convene summits in support of the Kiev regime cause only confusion.
Very soon the only topic for any international meetings on Ukraine will be the unconditional capitulation of the Kiev regime.
“When I was elected as president then (in 2016), I tried to craft an independent foreign policy, not really against America. I have no quarrel with America. But the problem was our foreign policy was dovetailing theirs, and not so good with China. So I started on a neutral foreign policy. I announced to the world that I had no friends and no enemies to fight. I just want to be neutral. And I did not have to kowtow to anybody’s foreign policy, especially the Americans. […]
Most of the ASEAN countries have followed a very neutral, independent foreign policy. I would have wanted that… That is why I slowly detached myself, and, at least in foreign policy, and announced to China that we are not enemies, that we have never been, and never will be in our lifetime.
Here in the West Philippine Sea (South China Sea), when I was president, there was no quarrel. We can return to normalcy. I hope that we can stop the ruckus over there, because the Americans are the ones pushing the Philippine government to go out there and find a quarrel and eventually maybe start a war.
So I am very sure of that – America is giving the instructions to the Philippine government to ‘not be afraid because we will back you up.’ […]
I am sorry for my country. I am not the president anymore. I cannot run. But if there is a way we can reverse the situation, we might find a way inside to implode somewhere. And if God would allow it then perchance I would be able to reverse the situation. I would remove the bases.
And I would tell the Americans, you have so many ships, so you do not need my island as a launching pad or as a launching deck for you.”
How does China’s “petitioning” system work in China?
This is a custom which had its origins in China’s imperial past.
The idea was this: If a local official behaved intolerably, the people would go to the imperial capital and make an appeal to an imperial official, or in some cases, even to the emperor himself. The petitioners would lay out their case, explain the rationale for their appeal, and ask for senior official or emperor to make a judgment.
This could be very dangerous: what would happen if the senior official or emperor sided with the local official, and ordered that all the petitioners be executed? For this reason, it was considered a very risky strategy.
This petitioning method continues to the present day. When Hu Jintao was president, in some cases, local officials would go to the train and bus stations to prevent the petitioners from boarding trains. There were even a few cases where petitioners made it to Beijing, and were kidnapped by the local officials and taken back to their village! This was considered to be a serious violation of the authority of the Beijing central government.
Xi Jinping has tried to modernize this system, which is why he has strengthened the authority of the Party Discipline Committee of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. In effect, they act as “flying magistrates” or judges who were sent out to the provinces to hunt down and remove corrupt local officials. If you follow the detective stories of Judge Dee and Judge Bao, they were flying magistrates who represented the emperor, which was why local officials all had to kneel before him.
Insights: Famous Chinese Economist On US Economy 2024
"I listen to Jeffrey Sachs, and Michael Hudson. Great to hear about this Chinese economist who i have no access to, nor the Chinese language skill to understand even if I do. Thank you for introducing his thoughts though."
Scott Ritter was med by some “feds” and had to hand over his passport. It’s gone. Whoops! Yuppur, he lost his passport while trying to leave the USA.
When the German Reich was collapsing, Hitler sent out squads of men to round up dissidents and “silence” them. You know how, right? Yeah, Gonzalo Lira style.
The USA is starting it’s lock down phase.
So many things wrong about this. I will tell you all, that this is the kind of thing that I am terrified of with the USA. And one of the many, many reasons why I will never return to the United States.
Later down in this post is a video between Scott Ritter and Judge Neopalino. Watch it.
The United States is BAT SHIT CRAZY right now.
It is a hoard of zombies galloping towards war.
Fucking Crazy-Train.
Scott Ritter : On My Way to Russia I Met Big Brother.
Do you think the Chinese government has access to U.S. user data on TikTok?
Tiktok database is sitting on Oracle servers run by a US company. Do you think they’re sending China tiktok data?
And why would China want that data? To see which dance fad is in so they can do what?
The only government that is interested in that data is because Americans are saying stuff that they aren’t suppose to say. Guess who is interested in that?
What is the absolute worst thing in the world?
My friend’s father died of cancer.
This is one of the worst things of my life, and it happened yesterday.
The sad thing is that unfortunately, we follow this practice blindly.
Her father was the only earning member of the family consisting of 3 kids (all girls). Having no son is often considered a curse in India. He was diagnosed with a cancer 1.5 years ago and suddenly the cost of medical treatment shot sky high.
Because of health issues he had to leave his job , where his company paid for his medical treatment to certain extent. But finally, they surrendered.
The youngest daughter, who is my friend, is just 25 years old and was doing her post graduation. She had to force herself to earn something for the family. She started giving tuition along with a hectic job of 12 hours to run her family and to continue her father’s treatment.
This is not the worst thing yet. Here comes the worst part:
Cancer treatment is costly. She tried to get help from everywhere:
Various NGOs
Actors like Amitabh Bachchan, where his manager talked to her sweetly and gave her hope, but that help never arrived. They stopped receiving her call. He acts as the protagonist in the movie, he is not.
Cricketers like Virat Kohli and Sachin Tendulkar. Where Virat Kohli’s manager told that these cricketers are not heroes to save anyone’s life. They have to wear a mask in front of media and his fans.
And same went with Sachin’s manager, where they refused to receive her call.
Virat and Sachin played for our country, they earned money but they are not our heroes.
She started public campaign where anyone can donate money anonymously for her father, and that’s where she could manage to get some money.
Whether you believe it or not, but these common people are our heroes, who help one another.
Her father left this world but taught us an important lesson:
The absolute worst thing in the world is that we forget that our hero lives among us. These cricketers, actors, singers etc. are not our heroes. We worship them, giving them a stature equivalent to God. Why? Because they acted really well in the movie and saved people or they played really well in a cricket match and saved a match?
Not only a son can take responsibility. Give equal rights to your girl, she will never let you down.
Need to think about it seriously.
Why is Zelensky accusing China but Russia can’t?
That’s a great question. I also want to mention that the Chinese and Westerners have very different perceptions of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
You need to understand that China is an ancient civilization. Speaking for myself, if I compare it to China, Kyiv is equivalent to Xi’an – the cradle of our nation. And Crimea is equivalent to the “Sixteen Prefectures of Yan and Yun” in Chinese history. So, while it may be politically incorrect, I personally believe that Russia has the right to reclaim Ukraine: this is a war of unification, a just war.
Basically, any Chinese person would support Russia. Although there are many people on Chinese social media who support Ukraine, in real life there are hardly any. Those online comments are often made by bots. I don’t have evidence to prove this, it’s just the view of an ordinary Chinese person.
As for Ukraine, my view is “saddened by their misfortune, angered by their inaction.” They are being used as a pawn by external powers to stir up the European situation and weaken Russia. Such fertile land, such a highly educated population, such a strong industrial base… it’s truly heartbreaking and regrettable.
Zelensky must know he is doomed to fail. China’s industrial capability is too strong. Take the large-caliber artillery shells he has been demanding – ONE of a China’s production line can churn out 150,000 per month, almost approaching NATO’s annual output. After all, China’s annual steel production is around 1.4 billion tons, about 10 times the peak of the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
As for drones, I’m very worried that the use of this technology by both sides in the conflict may eventually prevent me from buying spare parts on Taobao… for civilian use, really! My kids and I really enjoy taking them out for aerial photography.
I admit that China is currently supplying Russia with civilian industrial goods. But honestly, if we didn’t, should we just watch the Russian people suffer? Wasn’t it Russia that taught us industrialization in the 1950s? Back then, as Mao Zedong said: “What can we make now? We can make tables and chairs, we can make teacups and teapots, we can grow grains and grind them into flour, we can also make paper.”
The Soviet Union (Russia) taught us the initial industrial foundation (the universities I attended were built with Soviet aid in the 1950s), and personally, I will be forever grateful to Russia.
Ukraine also buys a lot of Chinese products, including civilian drones. I even heard that China is considering banning the sale of even civilian products to the conflict zone…
The US is really being so overbearing. If you open a world map, you’ll find that China is surrounded by US military bases, densely packed. We feel very scared – after all, in the last war, 35 million of us were massacred by the Japanese.
If Russia fails, it will tilt toward the US, and then we will be completely surrounded.
Going back to your question, I don’t really like Zelensky. He seems to be saying: “You owe us, and Ukrainians are dying for your interests! Why don’t you help us?”
His question, if directed at the US, I think has some validity.
But the Chinese also don’t owe him anything.
As for Russia, Russia is a very proud nation, they wouldn’t say that.
Wine Pot Roast
IMG 20181020 171041 110
Yield: 6 to 7 servings
Ingredients
3 to 4 pound beef pot roast
Salt and pepper
1 small onion, chopped
1 (3/4 ounce) package brown gravy mix
1 cup water
1/4 cup ketchup
1/4 cup dry red wine
2 teaspoons Dijon-style mustard
1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
1/8 teaspoon garlic powder
Instructions
Sprinkle roast with flour, and brown well in small amount of oil in skillet.
Sprinkle meat with salt and pepper; place in slow cooker.
Combine remaining ingredients; pour over meat.
Cover and cook on LOW for 8 to 10 hours.
Remove meat and slice.
If desired, thicken sauce with flour dissolved in a small amount of water, and serve over meat.
What is the craziest auto accident you have ever seen that did not have a fatality?
Originally Answered: What is the craziest auto accident you have ever seen, that did not have a fatality?
I was a paramedic at the time. We got called out to an MVC (motor vehicle collision) on a rural road known for lots of curves and high speed, which don’t mix well. Well, we showed up and immediately noticed a large SUV (Chevy Suburban maybe?) on its roof. The car was trashed, having obviously rolled over several times.
There were a few other bystanders that had stopped. As we got out of the ambulance to triage the situation, bystander ran up to us yelling “there are 4 little kids trapped in the car!” Well crap.
“Medic 91 to central, start rolling me two more units code 1 for now. Possibly four trapped children in a rollover. And make sure FD is en route for extrication.”
In the medical field, we learn quickly that a quiet child is a sick child. As we approach the car, there is no crying except for mom who is bawling her eyes out next to the car. We approach now, expecting the worst.
“My babies! My babies are still in the car! Help them, help them please!”
As we assess the car, we are asking mom what happened, how many kids in the car, where they are, if they have cried or talked to her since the accident, etc. She tells us there are four kids: two sets of twins ages 1 and almost 3. They were crying and screaming after the accident but they haven’t made a sound in the last five min or so.
The roof is crushed to the point where we can’t see into the upside down vehicle very well. Still no crying from inside the vehicle. How the heck mom got out of the vehicle I’ll never know and she doesn’t remember.
Fire department pulls up and we give them the quick and dirty. They grab the jaws and pop the doors ASAP so we know what we are dealing with.
As the door pops open, I am struck by what I see. It truly brought a lump into my throat. Hanging upside down (remember, car is on the roof) are four perfectly restrained car seats with the children in them – and NOT A SCRATCH ON THEM. Apparently they had cried themselves to sleep after the accident because they were all just hanging there like bats, asleep in their car seats. Even with the sirens, jaws of life (which if you have ever been inside a car during extrication, it gets LOUD), and everything, it wasn’t until the sunlight hit their faces that they woke up and started crying again.
We got the children out of their car seats and double checked everyone. One of the 3-year-olds had a small scratch from broken glass, but nothing that needed stitches or anything. The other three were perfectly fine without a scratch.
Mom is crying tears of joy now. She says that they always put up such a fight about the car seats that she doesn’t always use them, but she did today. She thanked us profusely for “saving their lives.”
I told her “We didn’t do anything but get them out of the car. YOU saved their lives when you buckled them in. Thank YOU for saving their lives, because there is no way they would have lived through this if they weren’t buckled in properly.”
We transported everyone to the hospital to get checked out as mom likely had a concussion and because of the mechanism of injury was so significant, but all was well.
That car was one of the worst-damaged cars I’ve rolled up on and to not have any injuries on those kids was absolutely amazing.
What was that moment when you felt proud?
I was handling a flight. Everything was almost ready to go except for waiting on some more baggage. All passengers were boarded, some already offloaded due to no show, all in all the flight will be on time. I went up to the gate to get the papers from the gate staff and I noticed an adult male passenger sitting in the area and crying. That’s very unusual. I asked the gate staff what’s up with that and they told me the passenger was refused boarding due to a problem with his ticket. Apparently, his last name for this sector was misspelled by a letter, and he travelled inbound on a different airline and ticket. So, once he wanted to board he got denied at the gate. He previously tried to convince the gate staff to allow him to travel, as the reason he stated his father is in the hospital dying, and he needs to take this flight to hopefully see him before he has passed. Unfortunately, there was nothing the gate staff could do about it. He was travelling with his hand baggage only. They told him to go to the ticketing, refund the old ticket and buy a new one for the sector he will travel. It was ten minutes to departure and he couldn’t book the ticket for this flight anymore. I talked to him and he confirmed that his travel was a last minute thing. He had to fly inbound with another airline as our flight was overbooked, and then wait for this first flight to his destination, all to see his dying father. He told me he’s emotional because this means he will not be able to say his final goodbye. Seeing a grown man cry like that was a proof he’s telling the truth for me.
I did something no staff would probably ever do, and something we’re not even allowed to do.
As staff, I can issue tickets though an online system for my friends and family. I thought of something I can try to help him. I called the flight editing and asked them to open the flight as I have an urgent last minute change. Surprisingly they did. Then, I issued a staff ticket for this passenger. I let him board the flight without him knowing what I’ve done. I never asked for the money. The gate staff was shocked. I told him to get his original ticket refunded later on and wished him all the best. The man was so happy it was lovely to watch. I instructed the gate staff to keep quiet about it as we can use the staff tickets for people we know only, plus at the right time lol.
I hope he got his moments with his father before he passed. I never found out.
It made me smile and proud that I could think of that and also it surprised me that I was willing to pay for his (discounted) ticket. I did feel bad for going against the rules, but I figured I’d probably have the support of our HR in case I got reported, as they are nice and they care about people plus this story was heart warming.
Nobody reported me.
The flight went on time.
That was my good moment.
AI VIDEOS will KILL HOLLYWOOD – fable creates tv shows from prompts…
What happened in your office that became the stuff of legend?
This was in my ex-husband’s place of work, which I won’t name to protect the innocent.
He was an electronics engineer in a hospital. A lot of people raise their eyebrows when they hear that’s where he worked, as you normally associate hospitals with doctors and nurses, and if pushed, caterers, cleaners and technicians, but if you think about how many things in the average hospital run on electricity (upwards of 40,000), you start to get an idea of why a team is needed to repair, service and calibrate all this equipment.
Most of the team were great, hardworking and dedicated. There was one a**-hole. We’ll call him Henry.
Henry was a total shyster. He would come in late and go home early; he would log overtime when he hadn’t done any. If he was on emergency call-out ( the engineers took it in turns to be on-call for equipment that broke down overnight or on weekends) he would claim he’d come in for calls that were bogus – no-one had called.
He ran his own repair business using the hospital phones and equipment, when he should have been doing the hospital work.
He lied, cheated and stole and everyone hated him, but every time the bosses investigated, he pulled the race card and they were too scared of being sued, so they backed down.
But then they began to discover that his behaviour was dangerous, too.
Some of the equipment which he was supposed to have repaired started coming back into the workshop with the same fault as the original ticket. It turned out he wasn’t repairing it adequately (or at all, in some cases).
He claimed that it was an intermittent fault, and had just gone wrong again, but he was finally caught out. On the children’s ward, there was a piece of monitoring equipment which was supposed to alarm when something went wrong with the patient. It was alarming constantly, so was obviously faulty.
Henry went to fix it and came back and reported it as completed. He was so quick that his immediate superior was suspicious, so he went and checked. Henry had indeed silenced the alarm, but he’d done so by packing the speaker cone full of cotton wool, so you couldn’t hear the alarm any more! It was still sounding but was inaudible!
Of course, this was extremely dangerous as it left the little patient vulnerable, and the staff were relying on equipment that they didn’t know was faulty.
This was so serious that the bosses fired him on the spot. He appealed and went to the Union. They asked him the grounds for his appeal, and he said it was because his immediate superior was racist. This was puzzling, as they were from the same ethnic group, so he claimed that it was because he was high-caste and his boss was low-caste and was lying because he envied him, and that the union clearly didn’t understand the caste system.
They gave him their advice.
Leave before the police are called.
He left, and the glee in the entire workshop was so strong that the day was officially called Henry Day and every year a member of staff brings in cakes to celebrate Henry Day. New members of staff who never met him are regaled with the stories of what Henry used to do. It’s been going on for over ten years now, and I think it will keep going until the last person who remembers what a bastard Henry was has retired!
If a billionaire asked you to count from zero to infinity and what ever number you stop on is the amount of dollars he’ll give you, would you take the challenge? How high you think you’d get?
There are three kinds of mathematicians – those who are good at counting and those that aren’t.
Obviously you would choose to do this. If you counted one number per second, that would be 60 in a minute, and 3,600 in an hour. It isn’t hard to do this for small numbers, but when you’re at sixteen thousand four hundred eighty-six, sixteen thousand four hundred eighty-seven, etc. you slow down rapidly. So let’s say that you can do 1,000 in an hour.
How many readers are making $1,000 an hour? Very few, I’d say.
Oh it’s tedious, but you can do tedious for $1,000 an hour.
The question doesn’t say anything about breaks for eating, bathroom, or sleeping, but suppose they allow you to count for a while, write down your number when you want a break, and pick it up again. The limiting factor is that you will want to stop and get paid at some point, and that’s the end.
You’re going to want to go a long time. Say you do ten hours a day, $10,000 every day. After 100 days, you’ve got a million bucks. That’s nice, but not enough to retire comfortably. You can be at $3 million in a year.
If you have three million dollars, are you going to do this tedious counting for $10K per day? This is when you start thinking about retiring your family. Do you have brothers and sisters or kids that you want to help out?
I don’t know how terrible this would feel. Maybe after doing this hour after hour, day after day, you are in a groove and can do it fairly easily, but maybe it’s terrible concentrating on the seven digit numbers as they go.
I’m going to do somewhere between a million and six million. But I’m going to get a really good assurance that the payday is going to be there at the end, because this sounds too good to be true, so I’m going to need an iron-clad legal document backed up by an insurance policy.
I wish I had not given birth to son. It seems that it has become crime to give birth to son in India. These are the words of many Indian mothers.
He is Avadhesh Yadav.
While the entire country is rejoicing and celebrating Women’s Day, an old mother is crying inconsolably in Jhansi. Her son, Avadhesh Yadav committed suicide on February 25, 2015 because of a “woman”. This day has no meaning for her as she is confused of the word that means “Women Empowerment”. Laws that have been made to protect women, abuse of same became the reason for her son’s death.
Here are excerpts from suicide note left by Avadhesh Yadav:
My name is Avadhesh Yadav and I work in a private bank. I got married to Unnati Yadav on December 7, 2012. Within a week of marriage, she started pestering my family by asking divorce for no reason. We ignored. She never allowed me to come close to her for 2-3 months after the marriage. My father advised that with time everything will be fine. But it got only worse. She started misbehaving with my parents, hurling abuses at them. When we complained about this to her family, they gave excuses of some “external influence” on her and they would get her treated. She now started going almost every day at her home and threatened us of a dowry case if we said anything.
In September 2013, she left my home. In December, my father was getting retired and he wished that his daughter-in-law should be part of this program. We signed a mutual agreement where she accepted her wrongdoings and promised to be cordial with the family and I promised to do everything possible to take good care of her. She came back only to harass us even more. She demanded that I leave my parents. Threats of dowry and domestic violence cases increased. Things came to a point where she left my home again in July 2014 with her entire belongings.
On advice of lawyers, we filed a case of restitution of conjugal rights, requesting her to come back. Three months after that in September, she filed a false dowry and domestic violence case (498A) on me, my mother, father, elder brother and his wife. We got bail. Her brother told me she wants to come back.
I refused saying now this was not possible and suggested that we get separated amicably. He refused and threatened me of false cases of molestation, rape on my father and brother and, acid attack on me and getting me killed. Unnati eventually filed a case of molestation in January on my father and brother and they were arrested. I don’t know what will this step of mine lead to but I want to save my family from all this humiliation. After I go, they would probably be in peace. I also wish to ask our law makers, how they can make laws that give so much credence to mere words of a woman that whatever the other person is saying has no relevance. Shouldn’t the other side be heard too? My father and brother were picked up by police on her statement alone without any evidence.
My family that never even saw a police station has to now do the rounds just because of me. Without any evidence we have been labelled Criminals. Nothing that Unnati wrote about dowry or violence is true. Authorities can investigate the veracity of her statements. They claim to have spent Rs 20 lakh on the wedding; can someone ask them where did they get so much money from? They are demanding that we transfer my father’s house in her name. A person who is making such demands before even living with me, what will she do later? I do not want to see my family in pain. I could think of no other way than this to save my family. Please help my family get out of this problem.
Mummy, Papa, forgive me please and take care of yourself. Please do not cry as tears in your eyes would trouble me even more. MY LAST WISH – PLEASE LEAVE MY FAMILY MEMBERS.
Avadhesh Yadav
A case of abetment to suicide has been registered against Avadhesh’s wife and her brother. Had this been a married woman, this death would have been called “Dowry Death.” Avadhesh’s death would not be called “Reverse Dowry” death.
Had this been a married woman, leaving a three page suicide note, it would have made national headlines. This story got published in a paper or two.
Had this been a married woman, entire family of husband would have been thrown in jail, even if there was no suicide note. In this case, no one has been arrested yet. This is not just Avadhesh’s story. Several men are committing suicide because of false accusations.
As a social activist, Deepika Bhardwaj get calls from Men everyday with almost similar tales to share – refusal to any kind of physical contact by wife after marriage, threats of self harm on requests of physical intimacy, pressure of separation from parents, no participation in any household chores, treating in-laws like servants with both physical as well as mental abuse and whenever there is any argument or complaint over this behaviour, threats of a dowry case and sending every family member behind bars. One case was so horrible, that this man’s wife fought daily with him and dialled 100 blaming him instead. There was police at his home every day. Even though the police realized that the man was not at mistake, they could do little to help the man and absolutely nothing against the woman!
There is little a man can do if in an abusive relationship apart from filing divorce. And divorce mostly comes with even bigger abuse – false cases of dowry and domestic violence. Where not only you but your entire family is made to suffer!
Trauma of families trapped in false cases doesn’t end ever. Though this is a criminal provision, place of alleged “crime” makes absolutely no difference. A dowry case is usually filed by women in their own home town even though the case is state vs husband and his family. This basically means husband and his entire family travels to a different city/state for cases even if they are innocent. It takes huge toll on mind of a person when he sees his entire family suffering because of him.
Though Avadhesh hanged himself on February 25, he must have been dying inside since long. How would a man feel, if his old paralytic father is accused of molesting his own daughter-in-law? A young life snapped because of a system that doesn’t bother to verify claims made if it is by a “woman.”
In most 498A cases, either you pay huge money to the girl to settle the case or you fight in the court to prove your innocence for years and years. The latest trend is inclusion of false molestation/rape charges on father and brothers of the husband to ensure arrest of everyone and put tremendous pressure.
Being labelled a criminal when you have done no crime is painful. Being labelled a rapist when you have not done it is rape of one’s soul. Seeing your family suffer every hour because of you is nothing short of a death. She receives mails from many men who are facing false cases of either dowry or rape or molestation that they feel like committing suicide. What they don’t know is, even after their death, the charges on their family members remain. They still have to fight unless the case is quashed.
As a woman, this women’s day she begs to ask her fellow women – Is this why we demanded stringent laws? Is this what we mean by women empowerment that a woman can ruin anyone’s life if she wants? Isn’t a mother-in-law tortured by her daughter-in-law a woman? Would we ever get rid of crime against women if women start using laws as weapons and our courts get choked with false cases? Is it empowerment that a woman plays gender card and settle scores with whosoever she wants? False cases of crime against women should concern women rights activists because it hurts their cause the most. False cases are no less a crime against actual victims of these crimes. “If cry of wolf is made too often, assistance might not come when actual wolf appears.”
In India, a country of 1.3 Billion people, there is not a single dedicated platform, where half of the population of the world’s second largest democracy – MEN, can complain and be heard in an impartial, unbiased and an empathetic way to solve their problems.
We have laws to protect women.
We have laws to protect children.
We have laws to protect environment.
We have even laws to protect animals.
But,
We don’t have laws to protect men.
If you really care about men’s rights then don’t forget to sign Sign the Petition & Sign the Petition petition to constitute the “National Commission For Men” in India. This is humble request from my side.
P.S: I am not generalizing woman here in my answers. I’ll not accept & endure any sort of misandry in the comment section. If Women & her parents are misusing the legal provisions made to protect woman then they definitely deserve solid punishment. If respect of woman is important then respect of man is equally important.
Retail Theft Is Wildly Out Of Control All Over America, And It Is Only Going To Get Worse As Our Society Descends Into Anarchy
We are right in the middle of a tsunami of shoplifting that never seems to end, and as a result major retailers are closing down locations in major cities all over the country. A few years ago, videos of brazen shoplifters ruthlessly looting retail stores were shocking everyone, but now this sort of thing is so common that very few of us are shocked anymore. We have come to expect that our retail stores will be regularly looted because this is who we have become as a nation. Sadly, even many of our politicians aren’t too concerned that the impoverished masses are stealing billions of dollars worth of merchandise from our major retailers. Like so many others, maybe they figure that those retailers won’t even miss what is being taken. But the truth is that they do miss what is being taken, and CEOs have been complaining very loudly about it…
For much of the past year or so, executives at big retailers did something unusual: They talked about theft in their stores. A lot.
With a backdrop of viral videos showing brazen and violent thieves, crime became a common theme on retailers’ typically dry quarterly earnings calls. Executives often mentioned “shrink” — inventory missing for one reason or another — as a factor behind declining profits. The list grew long: Macy’s, Best Buy, Dick’s Sporting Goods, T.J.Maxx, Dollar General.
Don’t believe pro-crime progressives when they lie about public safety here in NYC: This year so far has seen 21,578 shoplifting complaints from Gotham’s retailers.
That’s a 5% increase over last year’s obscene 20,552; more than 41% of the 2024 crimes are concentrated in Manhattan.
And that’s part of an ugly, persistent trend.
Full-year numbers since 2021 have jumped from 43,892 to 59,137, an increase of almost 35% — and the real problem is surely far higher, as exhausted merchants don’t bother to report many incidents.
Even in the very best areas of the Big Apple, major retailers are being routinely ransacked, and authorities seem completely powerless to stop the endless crime wave…
Many would argue that conditions are even worse on the west coast.
“Businesses are closing left and right because of all this looting going on,” Jolly said. “The system is broken, nothing is being done about it.”
She says that when she called police to report the incident, they suggested she contact the store’s insurance company.
“I just think it’s like, the people are trying to get away with it because there’s no consequences,” Jolly said, noting that the “meltdown reaction” came from a place of concern for her community and even the girl in the video. “I’m worried for her and she’s already doing this.”
It wasn’t like this when I was growing up.
But this is our country now.
In a desperate attempt to reduce shoplifting in his stores, Dollar General CEO Todd Vasos is removing self-checkout options in thousands of locations…
Dollar General CEO Todd Vasos said Thursday that the company plans to remove self-checkout from “the vast majority of stores” as part of larger overall shrink reduction efforts that include changes in supply chain and merchandising. Dollar General has already removed self-checkouts from 12,000 of its more than 20,000 stores, Vasos said.
Walmart is also removing self-checkout kiosks from many stores, and the number of products that are being locked up just continues to increase…
A frustrated Walmart customer has revealed the latest item to be locked up on the shopfloor during the shoplifting crackdown – and it only costs $1.50.
Victoria Damor, 22, from Las Vegas, made a TikTok detailing her shocking experience at the big box retailer last month.
Her video, which she posted under her handle @toridamore, has already been seen by almost 90,000 people, who have flocked to the comments to share their outrage.
Talking to the camera, the shopper exclaimed: ‘This is the future of Walmart. I can’t even walk into Walmart and pick up a nail file worth $1.50 because it’s locked up.
When a $1.50 nail file has to be locked up in a cage so that the thieves can’t get at it, your country is in huge trouble.
Of course it isn’t just the United States that is descending into anarchy.
Shoplifting has also risen to unprecedented levels all over Europe.
For example, just check out these eye-popping figures from the UK…
According to the Office for National Statistics, 2023 was the worst year on record for shoplifting, with more than 430,000 cases recorded, an increase of more than a third from the year before. But that is probably just a fraction of the real number. The British Retail Consortium – the body representing almost all of the major retail chains, incorporating food and drink, fashion, DIY, health and beauty and more – recently reported that incidents of customer theft more than doubled from 8m to 16.7m in the period between 1 September 2022 and 31 August 2023. Losses reached £1.8bn, up from £950m the year before.
Throughout the western world, the numbers are moving in the wrong direction.
If things are this bad now, what will happen once economic conditions become extremely harsh?
“Raymond Hayes, I realize the chariot race is enthralling, but kindly postpone Ben Hur until we have given due course to Hamlet.” Mr. Stevens stood by the high schooler’s desk. Ray sighed and tucked the errant book away. Would it matter if he countered that he’d already read Hamlet three times? That he didn’t think Ophelia really went mad, or died? That her story, her grief and eventually, her restoration, was more significant than anyone claimed, because her story showed the undying power of love? Mr. Stevens droned on, already back at the front of the classroom. Ray stared at the lines of Shakespeare in front of him, his mind already racing to the release of the bell.“Why do I have to sit for five hours learning what I already know?” He ranted to his father, Raymond Sr., that evening in early Spring. The elder Ray had found his son combing the abandoned quarry again. At least this time, it was after, and not during, school hours. Ray Sr. knew better than to argue with his son when he was in one of these moods. Truth be told, he agreed with his namesake, though he urged him to hold on through the end of his senior year. Ray’s late mother, God rest her soul, always told him their miracle child had an exceptional aptitude for learning. “For sensing,” she would correct her husband, gently. “Ray can find things nobody else can see.”Upstairs in his room, Ray reached under his pillow and pulled out the canvas-wrapped package. His fingers tingled, just as they did when he first pulled it out of the quarry that morning. He favored the quarry for its depth and history. The scars on the walls told stories even when those who made them had long gone silent. Down on the floor of the quarry, beyond the reach of humankind, Ray would tuck himself into a shallow notch, pull out his notebook, and write as the run rose.
Only this morning, when leaned back into the cool rock, he was startled by the touch of something downright cold. He whirled, but could see nothing in the shadowed recess. He felt blindly in the direction of the chill, until he found it. The package. He thought he was the only person in town who ever visited this graveyard. At first, Ray decided to tuck the package back where he found it. Someone would surely come for it. When he found himself sketching wrapped boxes during geometry class later that morning, he decided: if it was still there when he left school, he would retrieve it.
Now the package was on his bed. He carefully unfolded the olive drab cloth. Paper. A whole stack of it. The top sheet bore two typewritten lines: The Lost Letters, by M.R. McKennon. Ray turned the page. The crisp black typeset was interspersed with navy ink in a flowing script. Ray felt a pang of unease. This was someone’s manuscript-in-progress. Certainly the author would need this. He should replace the top page, wrap it securely, return it to the quarry. He would, tomorrow. Ray skipped past the page headed, Foreword, and began to read.
***
Darling,
I hope this letter finds you well. I know I just sent you a letter a few days ago and goodness, you might not receive these in proper order. I hope you don’t mind too much. I think about you much more often than I write. I’m afraid to write more often, for you will call me a silly girl, and look, I haven’t said anything sensible so far, so of course you’ll be right. We are well, here. Auntie helped me fix up my old blue dress – do you remember the one from the dance? When that blonde’s heel got caught in the back of my skirt during the hop and you had to walk behind me all the way home? I’m giggling just thinking of it. Do you remember how close you stood to me when we waited at that busy street corner? I can feel you, there, Darling, when I close my eyes. Close your eyes, too, and feel me close until I can hold you again. Love, Your Rosie
***
Ray’s bachelor status changed the summer he graduated. That summer, pumping gas for Mr. O’Shea, he watched the prettiest brunette in God’s earth walk tidily off the bus at the corner and into the filling station. She bought a soda from the cooler, and then stood in the shade of the storefront, politely sipping her drink.
“Are ye gonna cap me tank or not, sonny?” Mr. O’Shea queried, mischievously rolling his eyes from girl to boy. Ray fumbled through his task, failing to collect payment until Mr. O’Shea leaned out his car door and stuffed the cash into Ray’s pocket. “Keep the change, lad, and eh…” he realized Ray wasn’t listening, “try to keep yer head…teehee!” Ray ran his hand through his hair (twice) and approached the fair maiden.
“You’re new in town.” He tried to act cool.
She smiled sweetly – more confidently, too, than the girls at school, who typically melted under a fella’s proffered grin or pleasantry. “Actually, I grew up here.”
Ray regrouped, “I’ve been here all my life. I’d surely remember a face as pretty as yours.” His boldness finally succeeded. She blushed, and held out her hand.
“I’m Madeline Leath. I moved away a few years ago, but I’ve come back to live with my aunt.”
Some folks say it was Madeline who gripped harder, but that’s hearsay. Madeline held on, longer. Ray escorted her to her aunt’s doorstep, but bowed out of the offered introduction. He still wasn’t heeding Mr. O’Shea’s advice as he crossed the street, so he was nearly laid out by a Chevy. The driver swerved, and over the irate horn honking, Ray heard the aunt’s welcome. “Madeline Rose! How you’ve grown! Come in, dear, and tell me: who is that handsome young man who walked you up the drive?”
***
I met the sweetest boy, today. He nearly tripped over himself, but oh, he is such a catch.
***
Ray sat in his alcove, flipping through the manuscript. Yes, he had returned it to the quarry. But every few days, it reappeared; sometimes with new or rearranged pages, always with a myriad of notes. The handwritten notes were more interesting than the letters. For it was indeed letters – a collection of exchanged letters – that slowly expanded the typewritten text. So far, they were mostly of the ilk of the first sample he’d read. More sap that even his lovestruck self could admit to reading. He skimmed most of the lovers’ notes, favoring the challenge of decoding the swirling navy script. This morning, he read a clear “she doesn’t yet know” in the margin of a letter. What didn’t the woman know that M.R. McKennon did?
Ray set the manuscript down. That was the last of the new additions. He had pieced together a long-distance relationship – a courtship, maybe. The fellow in the pair was traveling. He wrote one letter referencing Georgia humidity. Ray wondered if the fellow was in the oil industry. He mentioned drilling.
***
Darling,
I’m sorry I haven’t written you much. I’ve been getting over this awful flu. Auntie was up and about in three days, but you know Auntie. I haven’t been able to keep anything down, which isn’t helping (as Auntie is fond of reminding me). Your father was a dear and drove me out to our spot last night to try to raise my spirits. It did make me think of you, but then of course I cried. It hurts my head to write, Darling, so I’ll finish this later.
***
Ray had never planned anything like he planned his proposal to Madeline Rose. He even made the picnic sandwiches, a herculean effort with a commensurate wake of crumbs and butter smears on the kitchen table. In retrospect, the shambles could be called a foreshadowing. Halfway to Madeline’s, it started raining. Naturally, he neglected to pack an umbrella. For that matter, he neglected to notice the weather, so bright was his heart shining. It wasn’t until he stood on Madeline’s front stoop like a stray kitten that he grasped his situation. Much to her credit, Madeline tied her hair back in a scarf, hopped on her bicycle, and said, “I hope whatever tree we’re picknicking under has good cover!” That was when he course-corrected to the quarry.
“I didn’t know it was safe down here,” she pressed close as they descended the slick path. Ray was about to relieve her fears, but thought better of it. Instead, he slipped his arm around her waist. “Just hold on tight.” When they rested in the notch, Ray recalculated his plans. He slipped a hand into his pocket for the tenth time. His mother’s ring was still there.
“Ray, look at this!” Madeline held out a package.
Ray was examining their waterlogged lunch. Of course he had forgotten to wrap the sandwiches. “Yeah, it’s the manuscript.”
“Raymond Hayes, are you writing a book?” She tore at the wrapping.
“No, no, it’s just something I found. Every so often, it reappears. I think the author is stashing it here.”
Madeline was quickly engrossed in the work. “Oh, aren’t these just beautiful letters!” She exhaled dreamily. Ray frowned. His plans were unraveling, and now his girl was falling for another fella’s love notes. “Those are old notes, Rosie,” he poked, using a nickname he’d picked up from her aunt. “The M.R. McKennon guy is typing them out to preserve them, I guess.”
“McKennon is not a ‘guy,’ Raymond.” Madeline peered over the top of the manuscript.
“What?”
“If you read the Foreword, you’d know it’s a woman. She says she’s compiling her parents’ correspondence and journal entries from before her birth. She says, for many years she only had her father’s letters, until recently when some revered fellow gave her a packet with all her mother’s letters, including…” Madeline paused, “oh, no, Ray, it says, including her father’s last letter which had never been mailed.” She looked up with teary eyes. “That’s so tragic.”
This was getting unluckier by the minute. Ray pulled Madeline up and out into the pouring rain. “Leave that, Rosie.”
“Why?” She didn’t pull away.
“Because I want you to marry me.”
“Raymond! We’ve only been dating three months! What will people say?”
“To hell with what they say.”
***
People didn’t say much, at least not to their faces. Every housewife in town kept a well-trained eye on Rosie’s middle, which certainly did not expand in the first four months of their marriage. Whether that was a relief or disappointment to the uprights of the community, is less certain. What did expand was the realization that falling in love is only the door to learning to love.
Ray took a second job the summer he graduated high school and married Madeline Rose. “I’m doing this for us,” he reminded her whenever she hinted at their diminished time together. He’d wave his arm around their bedroom, “Do you want to always live here, in Dad’s upstairs?” When November stripped the trees, Ray took a third job, and Madeline spent nights crying into a cold bed.
In his spare moments, Ray would slip, alone, into his spot at the quarry. He was grateful for the days he found the manuscript to distract his thoughts. The affection between the correspondents was so constant. He and Madeline couldn’t even have a civil conversation these days. She was getting more emotional, haranguing him about little things. Didn’t she understand a fellow who worked his tail off needed a moment to breathe every so often? His logic was irrefutable in the silence of the quarry.
“But, Ray, Darling, you said you’d help, remember?” Madeline was practically pleading. She hadn’t used his pet name in some time. Now she was edging carefully around his pride in bringing up a conversation he barely remembered having. “Ray, Darling,” she took a breath, “Remember, we were sitting here having coffee, and I asked if you were scheduled to work December 7th because I needed help assembling sets for the Christmas pageant…” she trailed off. Ray’s face was dark as he stormed out of the house. Madeline walked to church that morning, alone.
***
December 7, 1941
Today the world broke. But before that, I broke Rosie’s heart.
***
Fort Benning, Georgia, was already sweltering in April. Private Raymond Hayes felt the beads of sweat race down his spine. He had been sitting on his bunk for nearly twenty minutes, pen gripped in one hand, notepad in another. He had to post his letter today, but what to say? He hadn’t written Madeline since he’d arrived in January. Ray rubbed his forehead. In his mind, he went back to the quarry, to the cool alcove. Suddenly, he knew what to write.
Rosie,
Sorry it’s been so long, Honey. Don’t worry, I’m eating well. Been having loads of fun drilling in this Georgia humidity. Getting transferred to New Jersey. Will write once I arrive. I promise. Love to Dad and Auntie.
***
Ray sat at a small cafe in London on his three-day leave. The tea here was better than the coffee, but he still needed both to assuage the pain building in his temples. He read the letter for the seventh time.
Ray Darling,
I cannot tell you how many times I wish I had defied Auntie and taken the bus to met you before you departed to England. Not only to hold you again (how I miss you, Darling!), but because I wanted to tell you in person. Don’t be angry with Auntie. She was worried for me after that…sickness. I blame myself for not being there to see you off. I’m glad to hear the English people treat you well. I hope our package will make its way to you before long. The mail is dreadfully slow and your last letter had a hole cut into it. Army work. They are determined to cut into my heart. But, Darling, I haven’t told you yet. I didn’t know, honestly, and then you were off to England and I didn’t want to burden you but Ray, we are going to have a baby. Can you believe it? I’m certain it’s a girl. Auntie says I’m silly, but I just know.
Love,
Rosie
P.S. I’m thinking of “Mary Rose” for the baby – Mary for your mother, of course, and Rose for the baby’s. What do you think?
***
June 4, 1944
It’s happening. The air is electric with our thoughts. Soon, is all Lt. will tell us. Tonight, I’m content to wait, here.
Ray paused, hunched over in his bunk. Then he laid his journal, pens, and Rosie’s letters on top of the olive-drab canvas fragment. Wrapping them tightly, he pressed his back into the wall and drew a long breath. The three-level bunks in the barracks were no quarry, but looking up from where he sat, the men lying in them or meandering about made a rippling wall, alive with their stories.
“Hayes, you gonna sleep like that?” James McKennon cocked his head in front of Ray’s bunk. Smoke from countless cigarettes wound its way from soldier to soldier, trails linking soul to soul. Ray fingered the photograph in his breast pocket one last time, then held it out. “McKennon, have you met my Rosie?”
***
June 6, 1944
Salty air whipped the soldiers’ faces. The heaving Channel seemed at war with itself to both bring them to their destination and hold them back in warning. Ray noticed Chaplain Smith moving from man to man, offering quiet words or a smoke. When he came near, Ray touched his arm. “Chaplain, sir? Could I ask a favor?”
“Of course, soldier,” the older man waited.
“Uh, no offense, sir,” Ray queried, “but you aren’t Catholic, are you? I mean,” he quickly clarified, “you are, back in the States, a Reverend, and not a Father?”
The man smiled, “I think Father Murphy is below deck at the moment. Should I fetch him?”
“Oh, no, sir, I was looking for,” Ray smiled for the first time that day, “a ‘revered’ person.”
Now it was the Reverend’s turn to smile. “I’m not sure if I qualify for that title, but I’ll do my best to be of assistance.”
Ray held out the package. “Would you take this, sir? Would you get it to…to…” he swallowed. “There’s an address on the letters.”
The Reverend tucked the package under his arm and placed his other hand on Ray’s shoulder. For a long moment neither spoke.
***
My Darling Rosie,
It seems like only yesterday you stepped off that bus. Only yesterday you stood in front of the pulpit, hiding behind that veil, daring me to tear it off. Time surely marches forward, my darling. We try to cling to moments like sand being washed off a beach. Time marches forward. For how many thousand years has the tide pulled against the shore? Yet the shore remains, Rosie. The castles we built together may wash away, but as the Good Book says (yes, your Ray has been paying attention, darling), “Love never ends.” I love you, darling. Stand on the shore as the waves roll in and feel me reach for you, again.
Until we meet again,
your loving Ray
***
Suddenly, someone hurried by, then another. Then it began. The guns. The shouting. The boats. Lower, lower, crash. The raining of spray and bullets. The door, dropping like the gate of hell. The Lt. gripping his rifle, shouting to his men. Forward!
“Americans Will Be Poor Overnight!” – Reaction To China & Brazil Agreement To Ditch US Dollar
[But if this is causing such controversy and posing such a risk, why are Western politicians so determined to continue supporting Ukraine?]
"Because they think they can win.
So I also think about this a lot, because they’re sane people, and they can’t want destruction and war – or at least only for very good reasons.
And obviously, they must have something which keeps their sense of danger lower than ours, otherwise, they’d behave like us.
I think geographical distance has a bearing on this.
So one factor is that the big European states are further away from Russia than Central Europe is.
They think of Ukraine as a buffer zone between them and Russia – and of course, there’s also Central Europe.
That’s how it used to be, didn’t it? That’s what they used us for.
So they think they’re further away from the real risk than Central Europe is.
Of course, Central Europeans are wailing about this, and the Hungarian prime minister is beating out fires, scaremongering, and talking about the damage of war.
This may be true in Central Europe, but on the Atlantic coast, in France, how can it be?
Of course, this argument ignores the fact that modern technology can cover greater distances than in previous wars; but all the same, their sense of security is much stronger than that of the Hungarians.
Not to mention that they’ve won wars.
And they still think – and I now think that this is the most important reason that they’re behaving differently from us – that they want to win this war against Russia, they want to defeat Russia.
Of course, sometimes they say it like this, and sometimes they say that the Russians mustn’t win.
But the point is the same: they want to achieve military success against Russia – at any cost."
Excerpt from remarks by Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary, in an interview with Zsolt Törőcsik on the Kossuth Radio programme “Good Morning Hungary,” May 31, 2024.
“The End of Everything,” with Victor Davis Hanson | Uncommon Knowledge
When a Chinese person gets cancer in China, is it better for him to treat his cancer in USA as long as he can afford it?
I have a facsimile of this, but it’s not the USA.
It’s China and the UK.
My mother got cancer in the 1990s we were in the UK at the time. She was seen quickly treated within 3 weeks and was back home within a month. She got it again several times. Each time it was the same.
She didn’t feel well so she went to her GP, she was referred to a specialist, tests were done a further follow up before admission to hospital for treatment.
Over time the gaps between those events became longer and longer. As above in the 1990s it was measured in days. By the 00s it was measured in weeks.
My dad was in the UK in December 2023. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer by a UK GP, it took him 3 weeks to get a GP appointment and the follow up with a specialist was something like a month later. He literally said fuck this and took a flight to Shenzhen. He paid out of pocket £3900* and he was seen by a specialist immediately and was in surgery 48 hours later then had radiotherapy and by January 2024 he was back to normal again. He goes back to the hospital in Shenzhen for checkups.
While you might think £3900 is a fortune in the PRC, it’s not that £3900 was fully out of pocket. No health insurance whatsoever. My dad is a Chinese citizen but a HKSAR citizen meaning he’s not fully covered by the PRC health insurance system.
Had he taken treatment in the UK, likely he would pay nothing out of pocket. But it would have taken several months to get to the surgery/treatment stage and life is way too short to be have that hanging over your head.
Tropical Beef
tropical beef
Ingredients
2 pounds beef top round steak, trimmed of fat
2 large onions, cut into 12 thin wedges each
1 (20 ounce) can unsweetened pineapple chunks, juice reserved
1/2 cup beef broth
5 tablespoons red wine vinegar, divided
3/4 teaspoon garlic powder
3/4 teaspoon seasoned salt
3/4 teaspoon paprika
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 green bell pepper, cut into 1-inch squares
1 red bell pepper, cut into 1-inch squares
3 tablespoons brown sugar
1 1/2 tablespoons cornstarch
2 tablespoons soy sauce
2 large tomatoes, cut into wedges
Instructions
Cut the beef into thin strips diagonally across the grain.
Add to a 3 1/2 to 4 quart slow cooker.
Add the onions, pineapple juice, broth, 3 tablespoons of the vinegar, garlic powder, seasoned salt, paprika, and black pepper. Mix well.
Cover and cook on LOW for 6 to 6 1/2 hours or until the beef is just tender.
Increase the setting to HIGH.
Stir in the green and red pepper squares and the brown sugar.
Mix together the cornstarch, soy sauce, and remaining 2 tablespoons vinegar.
Stir into the cooker, blending well.
Cook, covered, on HIGH for 45 to 60 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the sauce thickens slightly.
Just before serving, stir in the tomato wedges and pineapple chunks.
Serve over cooked white rice.
What Western Media Won’t Tell Us: we’re being lied to in a big way
Nothing too special or difficult to make, just some quick and easy prepackaged stuff that most of my readership can get without too much trouble.
Top of the list is WELL-SALTED potato chips. Yes. Plain “American style” potato chips with lots of salt. Like Wise brand, or Lays brand.
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Here in China there are all kinds of odd potato chip flavors.
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But honestly I like the good old fashioned plain stuff.
With dip.
Must have a good onion dip. Don’t you know.
sour cream and onion dip thecozyapron 1
You can buy the ingredients to make your own dip, here in China, it’s just that because they are rare, they are expensive as all fuck. Which is why, and I suggest, that you all just make a big pot of chili instead.
Here’s a good recipe.
Sour Cream and Onion Dip
Ingredients:
1 medium onion, finely minced
Olive oil
Sea salt
Black pepper
1 clove garlic, pressed through garlic press
2 teaspoons soy sauce
1 tablespoons dried minced onion
16 ounce container organic, full-fat sour cream
¾ ounce package chives, finely minced (about a scant ½ cup)
¾ teaspoon granulated onion
Pinch white pepper
sour cream and onion dip thecozyapron 3
Preparation:
Begin by gathering and prepping all of your ingredients according to the ingredients list above to have ready and organized for use.
Place a large skillet over medium-high heat, and add about 1 ½ tablespoons of olive in; once hot, add in the minced onion along with a pinch or two of salt and pepper, and saute the onions for 10-12 minutes until deeply browned and caramelized.
Stir the garlic into the caramelized onions, and once aromatic, remove the mixture from the heat. Spoon the caramelized onions into a bowl, add in the soy sauce and the dried minced onions, and fold together to combine. Allow the onion mixture to completely cool.
Once the onion mixture is completely cool, spoon your sour cream into a large bowl. Add in the cooled caramelized onion mixture, the minced chives, more sea salt (I added about ¾ teaspoon more, but add according to your taste), a pinch more black pepper (about ⅛ teaspoon), the granulated onion, and the pinch of white pepper.
Gently Fold the mixture together until completely blended and combined, then spoon into a clean serving bowl or container. Allow the sour cream and onion dip to chill in the fridge for 1-2 hours to deepen the flavors (or even overnight if serving the next day), or enjoy immediately with chips and/or cut veggies.
sour cream and onion dip thecozyapron 4
Tips & Tidbits for my Sour Cream and Onion Dip:
Organic sour cream for quality and flavor: If possible, opt for organic, full-fat sour cream for this dip, as you can taste the difference in the flavor and quality of the dairy. Full-fat sour cream makes for a richer, creamier dip, but if you wish to make this a lower fat sour cream and onion dip, then feel free to use a reduced fat sour cream.
White or yellow onion for caramelizing: When it comes to mincing and caramelizing the onion, you can use either traditional white or yellow onion for this. Because I typically have white onions on hand, I use those. But either yellow or white onions will work perfectly here.
Chives, or even green onions, for freshness: I like using delicate chives for the fresh aspect of this dip, but if you have green onions on hand, you can easily substitute those. Just slice/mince them up finely, and use the same amount as you would with the chives.
Allow the sour cream and onion dip to “chill”: While you can certainly immediately dive right into your dip as soon as you make it, I like to allow the flavors to mingle and intensify a little bit by allowing the dip to chill in the fridge for a couple of hours before enjoying. If you’d like to prepare this dip as something to serve for a gathering the next day, you can even make it the day before.
Delicious dip-able options: Thick, ridge-cut potato chips are fantastic with this sour cream and onion dip, but if you’d like to go a healthier route, opt for cut radishes, cucumbers, carrots, celery, and cauliflower and broccoli florets.
sour cream and onion dip thecozyapron 5
Oh…
I know, I know…
“Who Cares?
Well, I do. How about making up a bath of dip and trying this out. Maybe it’s been a while for you. Maybe it’s too salty. Maybe it’s just so plain that you never give it a moment’s thought. But guys…
How about chips with Chili?
Bowl of Chili with Beans Cheese and Onions 683×1024
Best Bowl of Chili
What makes this the best bowl of chili ever?
It has just the right amount of heat, flavor, and consistency. The combo of well-seasoned beef, tomatoes, spices, and beans is phenomenal.
But the cheese and sour cream on top take it to the next level. Plus, it contains a secret ingredient you may not have thought of — beer!
It’s a snap to make, meal prep-friendly, and ready in an hour. This truly is, hands down, the best chili recipe!
Homemade Bowl of Chili with Cheese Beans and Onions 1 683×1024
Ingredients
Want to know what goes into the best chili recipe? Here are all the secret ingredients:
Ground Beef – As it’s a primary ingredient in chili, use good-quality ground beef, such as lean Angus or brisket. Also, you may want the meat to fat ratio to be 85:15, otherwise, your chili will be too greasy.
Onion and Garlic – For aroma and flavor.
Chili Powder, Cumin, Oregano, Cayenne Pepper, Tabasco – It’s not called chili for nothing! These herbs and spices will add a nice kick to your chili.
Canned Kidney Beans – I prefer red kidney beans, but you can also use pinto or black beans.
Diced Tomatoes in Can – The flavor base of the soup.
Tomato Paste – Acts as a thickener and a flavoring agent as well.
Jalapenos – For even more heat. Add or lessen according to taste.
Sugar – Do not skip the sugar, as it counteracts the acidity in the tomatoes and the heat from the spices. If your diet prohibits granulated sugar, use Splenda instead.
Beer – The secret ingredient! The starches in beer help thicken the chili. It’s also there for flavor, so use one you actually like. I highly recommend Modelo Negro and Newcastle Brown Ale.
Cheese – It turns chili from delicious to delectable. You can use either cheddar or Mexican mix cheese.
Sour Cream – For a cool and creamy contrast to the hot chili.
chili2
Tips for the Best Chili
Take your chili from good to great with these tips:
Control the heat. A lot of people ask me how to make chili less spicy, and I find the best way is to make your own spice blend (or use mild taco seasoning). That way, you can add more or less heat as you see fit.
Swap the meat. If your diet doesn’t allow you to eat beef, use ground chicken or turkey.
Skip the beer. If you don’t have beer on hand, swap it with a mixture of vodka, coke, and brown sugar.
Make extra and freeze it for later. Chili freezes beautifully, so pop individual portions in the freezer. It’s a great way to meal prep and get dinner on the table at the same time.
Chili Toppings
No bowl of chili is complete without the toppings! So here are some ideas for customizing your bowl:
Tone down the heat. If you find your chili too spicy, here’s a quick fix: add a splash of lime or lemon juice. The acidity from the fruit dials down the heat from the chili, resulting in a perfect balance of flavors.
Dollop with Greek yogurt. Want sour cream but trying to watch your diet? Enjoy a bowl without all the guilt by using Greek yogurt instead.
Top with bacon sour cream. If you don’t mind the calories at all, go all out with bacon-infused sour cream!
Serve with cornbread. In the mood for a southern classic? Cornbread is the way to go.
Drizzle with honey. Can’t get enough of a sweet and salty combo? Me too! I like to drizzle some honey over this chili. It’s a definite must-try!
Give it a Tex-Mex touch. Top your chili with salsa and guacamole for a drool-worthy mash-up of southern and Tex-Mex cuisines.
Add some crunch. Add an element of crunch to your all-tender chili: whether it’s croutons or crackers, you can’t go wrong.
How To Thicken Chili
Chili too runny? Don’t give up! There are tons of ways to thicken up that thin soup.
Here are a few methods to choose from:
Simmer without the lid. Do so for 20 to 30 minutes. This will help evaporate excess liquid from the chili, resulting in a thick consistency.
Add more beans and mash them. Breaking beans up will release their natural starches, causing the soup to thicken.
Mix in cornstarch of flour. Spoon a bit of chili into a bowl and mix in 1 to 2 tablespoons of cornstarch or flour. Place the mixture back into the pot and stir constantly until thick.
Add more tomato paste. What I love about this technique is apart from helping with the consistency, it also adds flavor and color to the chili. If your chili starts to taste bitter, counter it with a bit of sugar.
Serve with cornbread or cheese. If the chili is already out of the pot, just serve it with cornbread and more shredded cheese. This will thicken up the stew nicely.
I like to double the batch and freeze half. So I get dinner and a week’s worth of meals in one!
To Store: Transfer the cooled leftovers to an airtight container. Refrigerate for 4 to 5 days.
To Freeze: Place the cooled chili into airtight containers. Divide into single servings if desired. Freeze for up to 3 months.
What are some psychological facts that people don’t know?
If someone can’t cry, he/she is emotionally numb.
Psychologically, we tend to ignore those who adore us and pay more attention to those who ignore us
Psychology says when your mood randomly goes from happy to sad, it’s often an indication that you’re missing someone.
. Stomach acid (conc. HCl) is strong enough to dissolve. Razor blades!!
A human brain has a capacity to store 5 times as much information as Wikipedia
Laziness and inactivity kills just as many people as smoking.
You are more likely to achieve your goals if you keep them a secret.
Your decisions are more rational when thought in another language.
While talking to someone, if you use their name, it will make them like you.
Once you really accept your flaws, no one can hurt you using them.
Pain can make you stronger. Fear can make you braver. Don’t be afraid of them.
Most of your problems are due to two reasons: you act without thinking, or you think without acting.
This is not exactly psychological, but it will affect you psychologically. With every breath you take, someone somewhere has taken their last.
What is the sleaziest, dirtiest trick an auto insurance company tried to pull on you? Did they succeed?
A drunk driver crossed three lanes of traffic and I broadsided his full size van. His insurance company only offered me the amount of my deductibles ($1000 for collision and $300 for personal injury). Like how did they know the exact amount of my deductible?
I had been using my insurance company for over 35 years. They were literally no help. The amount of money they offered me for my car was less than the guaranteed trade in value if I had gone to the dealer and bought a new car.
My insurance company treated me like I was at fault. I always thought that if I was in an accident, it would be me and my company against the other driver and his company. Nope, it was me against everyone.
I hate to admit it, but I contacted one of those personal injury law firms that advertise on TV.
This one had a branch less than a mile from my home.
I wasn’t looking for a jackpot; I just wanted to be made whole and get a comparable replacement vehicle. The payout for my paid for vehicle was about $2500 shy of what the guaranteed trade in value was. I would have been happy with my deductible plus the difference between what my insurance paid out and what my vehicle was worth as a trade.
So, about $4000 would have made me whole. This doesn’t even consider the day of the accident was my 25th wedding anniversary. We had plans for the week and instead I was taking a part in medical appointments and treatment.
The law firm, actually some unnamed lawyer and not one of the partners from the commercials, sent a couple letters and the at fault insurance company sent a $10,000 settlement. The law firm kept 33% and we got the rest.
So they ended up paying two and a half times what I would have been satisfied with, about what the lawyers got.
What’s the most savage way you’ve seen someone get fired?
This is an edited repost of my answer to a similar question.
I’ve fired several folks who deserved it (for a while that was part of my job), but this one stands out in my memory.
(I’ll call him) ‘John’ was the assistant manager of the electronics retail store (TVs, VCRs, and audio equipment) that I had been, just the day before, sent to manage. We had the ‘big screen’ projection TVs arranged in living room groups, so folks could better envision what it would look like in their home. (This was in the mid 80s, before LCD TVs or monitors.) Something like this:
Since I’d been warned of what he’d been doing, I went to the mall a half hour before opening to observe for myself whether or not it was true. Sure enough, ‘’John’ showed up right at opening time, when we’re scheduled to be there a half hour before to get things turned on and do the other opening tasks.
Ok, but surely that’s not enough to fire him for? Correct. I wouldn’t fire someone for that, and certainly not the first time I knew about it.
Once there, he plopped his butt on a couch and proceeded to read the newspaper and drink his coffee, and completely ignored the 3 customers that came in during the first half hour. I then walked over to the store. He jumped up, said ‘Marty! what are you doing here? You’re not scheduled in until 1.’
I said ‘Firing you. Get out.’ Rarely had firing someone ever been easier.
In addition to ‘salespersons’ we also had ‘cashiers’ in the store. Their job was to take care of smaller sales (VCR tapes, cables, adapters, and movie rentals) so the actual ‘salespersons’ weren’t distracted from a potential big sale by a 99-cent movie rental. Salespersons earned commission, but cashiers did not.
‘Wanda’ was the cashier on duty that morning; she had talked to all three of the customers that John had completely ignored. She made a $750 sale (roughly $2200 in 2024 dollars) to the last of those three. As she was getting ready to ring it out on the cash register, she asked me what ‘number’ to ring it up under, since John had told her before to always use his number for big items, and he wasn’t here anymore.
I knew she expected me to tell her to use my number, but instead I asked her what the highest number we were using was and she said ‘8, but were not using 5 right now.” I told her to ring it under 5.
She said ‘I just told you we don’t have a 5!”
I responded “We do now, and her name’s ‘Wanda”.
I’ve rarely in my life seen a smile that big, and she went on to be the #1 salesperson in the store for 2 years running, that I know of. 🙂
Doritos Chicken Casserole
Nacho cheese Doritos chicken casserole is rich, creamy, and packed full flavor!
Cheesy. Doritos. Chicken. Casserole. How amazing does that sound? This flavor-packed casserole is sure to become a new family favorite!
It’s a creamy casserole loaded with cheese and shredded chicken, then topped with crispy Nacho Cheese Doritos. The Doritos make an amazing cheesy crust that turns the humble casserole up a notch!
Doritos Chicken Casserole
I love casseroles because they’re always so easy to make! This casserole takes just 10 minutes to prepare and uses minimal dishes, so cleanup is always so easy!
This super cheesy, crispy Doritos chicken casserole is so fun – you have to make it tonight! It’s a wholesome and absolutely delicious dinner that my family loved and yours will too!
Why This Recipe Works!
Ultra-Cheesy! This amazing casserole is loaded up with cream cheese, Mexican cheese, and topped with Nacho Cheese Doritos! It’s the cheesiest casserole ever! All-in-One Dinner! Casseroles are so great for dinner because it’s a complete meal! This casserole is so filling and wholesome! Super Kid-Friendly! Got picky eaters? There’s no way this Doritos topped casserole won’t become one of their favorites!
Ingredients
ingredients
1 tablespoon Olive Oil – Or another oil with a high smoke point.
¼ cup Yellow Onion – This is about ½ a medium sized onion, diced. You can also use white onion, if preferred!
21.5 ounces Cream of Chicken Condensed Soup – This is equal to two 10.75-ounce cans of cream of chicken soup.
10 ounces RoTel Diced Tomatoes with Green Chiles –1 can of RoTel makes this dish extra flavorful!
1 ½ tablespoons Taco Seasoning –Make my simple recipe or use your favorite store-bought brand, like Ortega.
4 ounces Cream Cheese – The cream cheese should be softened and brought to room temperature. I recommend cubing or cutting up the cream cheese into chunks to make it melt more easily.
15.25 ounces Black Beans – 1 15.25-ounce can of black beans, drained and rinsed.
4 cups Cooked Chicken – The chicken should be shredded for this recipe! I like to use leftover rotisserie chicken to make this meal super easy.
9 ounces Nacho Cheese Doritos – This is equivalent to one regular size bag of Doritos. The chips should be crushed and divided into two portions.
2 cups Mexican Cheese Blend – I like a finely shredded Mexican cheese blend. This should also be divided into two 1 cup portions.
¼ cup Cilantro – Cilantro is an optional, but a recommended addition. If using, make sure it’s fresh and roughly chopped.
Substitutions & Additions
This quick casserole is fantastic as is, but you can easily customize it! Here are a few delicious variations you can try:
Rice – You can make this meal a little extra filling by adding 1 or 2 cups of plain, cooked white rice.
Jalapeños – Add a little Tex-Mex spice with some diced fresh or pickled jalapeños! You can also add chopped chipotles in adobo (dried jalapeños) for a different layer of spice!
Corn – You can easily sneak in extra veggies by adding in a little fire-roasted corn into the chicken mixture.
Red Bell Pepper – Sauté some diced red bell pepper with the onion for extra flavor and color!
Instructions
This easy casserole is as simple as it is downright delicious! You don’t need any special equipment here, just a large skillet and a baking dish!
Instructions
Prepare. Start by preheating your oven to 350°F (175°C), while you heat a large skillet with 1 tablespoon of olive oil over medium heat. Next, lightly grease a 9×13 baking dish with non-stick cooking spray or oil and set aside.
Make Sauce. Once the oil is heated and shimmering, add ¼ cup of diced yellow onion and sauté until fragrant and tender, or about 4 to 5 minutes. Then, pour in 21.5 ounces of condensed cream of chicken soup, 10 ounces of RoTel diced tomatoes with green chiles, and 1 ½ tablespoons of taco seasoning. Stir to combine all the sauce ingredients.
Add Rest of Ingredients. After stirring the sauce, add 4 ounces of cubed, softened cream cheese and stir until it’s melted and smooth. Then, add 15.25 ounces of drained, rinsed black beans and 4 cups of cooked, shredded chicken (If you’d like some cilantro in your casserole, stir in ¼ cup with the chicken and beans).
Layer Casserole. Start by layering half of the crushed 9 ounces of Nacho Cheese Doritos into your prepared baking dish, then add half of the chicken and sauce mixture. Top with 1 cup of the shredded Mexican cheese blend, then add the last half of the chicken mixture. Finally, top with the remaining crushed Doritos and remaining 1 cup of shredded Mexican cheese.
Bake Casserole. Once the casserole is layered, bake uncovered at 350°F (175°C) in the middle of your oven’s center rack for 30 minutes. If the cheese topping begins to get too brown, cover loosely with a sheet of aluminum foil. The casserole is ready when the cheese is fully melted and golden.
This cheesy, delicious casserole is a fantastic weeknight meal! I love to garnish plates with a little extra cilantro and serve it as is! If you want to make it even more filling, try serving with my cilantro-lime rice!
Tips & Notes
Make sure your cream cheese is softened! Setting your cream cheese out for about 30 minutes before using is typically sufficient time to let the cream cheese warm to room temperature.
Regular size bags of Doritos (keep getting smaller) but typically range between 9 and 10 ounces. Family size bags are around 15 ounces and will work just as well!
Cilantro is optional but recommended! Cilantro is a great garnish, but also a fantastic stir-in for the casserole for more great Tex-Mex flavor.
Can’t find the RoTel? Plain or fire-roasted diced tomatoes are equally wonderful in this tasty casserole!
Storing & Reheating
When stored properly, leftovers of this cheesy Doritos chicken casserole will keep for 3 to 4 days. Make sure to wrap the baking dish well with plastic cling film or transfer leftovers to an airtight container.
This casserole keeps terrifically in the freezer for up to 3 months! Make sure to transfer the cooled leftover portions into an airtight container. You can even freeze an entire casserole, wrapped with a layer of plastic cling film and a layer of aluminum foil (See FAQ).
Reheating Doritos Chicken Casserole
If you’re looking to reheat this casserole, I recommend using the oven for the best results. This way, the Doritos topping can get deliciously crispy again.
Either place the whole baking dish or portions of casserole into a 350°F (175°C) oven and bake for about 20 to 30 minutes. The casserole is reheated when it’s golden and bubbling, or warmed to your satisfaction.
F3MINIST Losing Their Mind As Men Are Refusing To Help Women: Stand By, Watch, As Society Collapse
Will China finally collapse if the US put Iran-style sanctions on China? Namely, cut China out of SWIFT, severely punish any entity or country that does business with China, cut off all ties with China, basically kick China out of the global economy.
Why exactly are Russian Sanctions not working?
It’s because Russia supplies Oil, Gas, Fertilizers, Food and Raw Materials to the Global Supply
These goods have a huge demand
So no matter what you do, people will find other ways to pay for these goods from Russia
So the Sanctions remain moot
And if Russia’s Products are not part of the Global Supply, the Global Supply will shrink and the prices will surge through the roof
If Russian Supply is cut off, then even at 50% of the Demand of 2018, Oil Prices would rise to $ 139 a barrel
So obviously people, even Europeans will have to find a way to pay the Russians and ensure Russian Oil, Gas and other products keep flowing to the Global Supply Chain
Why would Sanctions not work on China?
Same reason
China may not produce Oil Or Gas but it produces 57% of the World’s “Cheap Goods”
Chinese Goods imported into half the world, retail for a sum between 2.5–6 times their import value and this sum goes as Salaries, Development funds, expansion funds, investments etc
Around $ 100 Billion of Imports from China cause a value addition of :-
$ 261 Billion in Germany
$ 279 Billion in Russia
$ 178 Billion in Japan
$ 409 Billion in India
$ 536 Billion in USA
So by cutting off $ 100 Billion of Imports from China to the US Economy, you are cutting off $ 436 Billion of Value Enhancement into the US Economy
After all when a Chinese made shoe imported for $ 47 sells for $ 139 retail, Walmart makes $ 40 in profit which is almost 91% of the import price of the show
This $ 436 Billion alone could cause additional inflation of 1.25% a year
Plus a huge supply shortage which could cause more inflation
Already Trump Tariffs are being easily by passed by near sourcing from Mexico
Soon there will be more Chinese goods coming in from Bolivia, Dominica or some South African Nation
Ultimately the only way to successfully sanction China is to find an alternate origin station of these goods
However for 100 Tons of Goods manufactured by China today :-
India makes 8.5 Tons
Vietnam makes 7.7 Tons
Turkey makes 5.2 Tons
Bangladesh makes 4.4 Tons
Mexico (Non China) makes 3.1 Tons
Combined today, the other five nations make 29% of what China alone can make in a single year
There is a second reason:-
Reciprocity
China represents a Huge Market
In 2010, the Chinese Market had a Domestic Fulfilment (Demand fulfilled by Domestic Manufacturers) of 7.2%
In 2023, this number rose to 40.4%
This means 40% of Chinas Market is fully catered to by Domestic Manufacturing which means 60% of the Market STILL requires Foreign Products and Services
60% of the Market means close to $ 7 Trillion a year
If the West sanctions China, China could cut off the West and it’s access to the $ 7 Trillion Market
Western Entitities could lose almost $ 4.5 Trillion from such a move
There is no alternate market today in Asia
For every $ 100 that a Chinese Consumer spends on foreign goods :-
Indian Consumers spend $ 14.75
Japanese Consumers spend $ 18.50
South Korean Consumers spend $ 14.40
ASEAN Consumers spend $ 20.42
Thus the biggest nations in Asia including all of ASEAN, economy wise collectively buy and spend only 68% of what China alone spends on foreign goods
So no way they can suddenly increase their spending by 140%
So right now Sanctions against China would be more catastrophic than Russia for the West
The cost of $ 1 Loss to China would mean between $ 5–6 for the West
China can somehow adjust with BRI nations and avoid a killer blow
Yet the West can’t
It would accelerate their decline
So these Sanctions simply won’t work beyond a few weeks or months at the most
Their time is over on this earth and their masters, the West are terrified of this
What is the most badass thing your parent has ever done?
My dad was teaching a class at the high school when my mom called him to tell him that I was dying. I think I was about four years old at the time and had taken terribly sick suddenly. Our house was about a mile away from the school where he taught—he came back running and immediately took me to the best private hospital in the small city of Aligarh.
As my parents reached the hospital, they were asked to wait for their turn in a long queue. My condition further deteriorated and my mother started crying. My dad had been a very peace loving person throughout his life. But on this occasion, he stood up and yelled at the top of his voice, “If the doctor doesn’t see my son in next five minutes, I will make sure this place turns into soil and dust.” That immediately worked. The doctor called my parents the next and immediately put me on treatment. He told my parents that if there was a delay of ten minutes in getting a treatment, they might have lost me.
I lost my dad in Jan 2013 at age 69. There is not a single day I don’t remember him for being the best dad ever.
Here is a photo from around same time—I am the one standing with my dad. The other cute looking child is my younger sister.
What is the likelihood of a military conflict between the United States and China over Taiwan? Can the United States successfully defend against a potential attack from China, considering the size difference in their military forces?
Potential attack?
I was born in Taiwan. I had no idea that Taiwan was US territory. Could you enlighten me on that? Because this US document signed by a US President says that Taiwan is CHINESE territory.
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And if the US believes their own propaganda then the US is going to be in a world of hurt. A lot of US kids are going to die for nothing. When I say a lot I mean however many US carriers battle groups is sent. They will all die.
Afterwards, Americans are going to wonder why American kids died to try and take Taiwan, who are Chinese, away from China and failed. How are you going to explain this act of Imperialism to American families who lost their kids?
Can you describe a perfect day for you? How does the day end?
I’ve been having a lot of perfect days lately, working from home. They go like this:
wake up without an alarm clock (I don’t need one, I go to bed at ten and am up at six, every day, happy to get up and do stuff).
distribute a round of cuddles and canned breakfast to the house panthers, who will be staging a drama already for being famished and helpless little things.
boil up hot water for some suitable morning cuppa, typically grain coffee, maté, or hot water with stevia.
recline on the couch with my laptop and try to comprehend the world.
as temperatures pick up outside, eventually switch to sitting in my hammock under the birch tree and work from there.
have some lunch; I’ve gotten pretty good at cooking in ways that are barely noticeable, so I just go inside and, miraculously, edible things await.
do some tinkering around the house, improving this or that a little bit, often just with wire and a nail.
work some more.
go photograph something, possibly by car.
come home and feed the panthers again, then possibly hammock or TV-room with interesting documentaries until I go to bed again.
BLACK AMERICAN WOMEN: THE NEW FACE OF CRIME AND DEGENERACY IN AMERICA
What are the most mind-blowing facts about the human brain?
1. About 75 percent of the brain is made up of water. This means that dehydration,
2. Can have negative effects on brain function, even in small amounts.
3. The human brain will grow to three times its size in the first year of life. It continues to grow until you are about 18 years old.
4. Headaches are caused by a chemical reaction in your brain combined with the muscles and nerves in your neck and head.
5. Your brain uses 20 percent of the oxygen and blood in your body.
6. Alcohol affects your brain in ways that include blurred vision, slurred speech, an unsteady walk, and more. These usually disappear when you calm down again. However, if you drink frequently over a long period of time, there is evidence that alcohol can permanently affect your brain and once again not sober up. Long-term effects include memory problems and some reduced cognitive function.
7. If the brain does not get oxygen for 5-6 minutes, then it stops working forever.
8. As we grow older, the human brain becomes smaller. This usually occurs sometime after middle age.
9. The human brain starts to lose some cognitive skills by your late 20s, along with your memory abilities.
10. A brain freeze is actually a sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia. It happens when you eat or drink something that is cold. This stretches blood vessels and arteries to the very back of the throat, including blood to your brain. These compress when they are cold and heat up again, causing pain in your forehead.
11. Dreams are thought to be a combination of imagery, phycological factors and neurological factors. They prove that your brain is working even when you are sleeping.
12. It is a myth that humans only use 10 percent of our brain. We actually use it. We use more than 10 percent when we sleep.
13. During human evolution, the brain has tripled in size.
14. Your brain uses the same amount of power as a 15 watt light bulb.
Deep-Dish Chicken Cordon Bleu
Luscious layers of chicken, ham and cheese stack up in a family-friendly dinner casserole.
1 pound shaved cooked brown-sugar or maple-glazed ham (from deli)
Instructions
Heat oven to 375 degrees F. Spray 13 x 9 inch (3 quart) glass baking dish with Crisco® Original No-Stick Cooking Spray. Unroll crescent rolls in baking dish; press perforations to seal. Bake for 10 to 13 minutes or until light golden brown.
Meanwhile, in a 10 inch skillet, heat butter and oil over medium heat. Add onion and garlic; cook 2 to 3 minutes, stirring frequently, until softened. Remove from heat; stir in cut-up chicken tenders.
Place 8 slices of the Muenster cheese over baked crust. In small bowl, stir Parmesan cheese, mayonnaise, mustard, lemon juice, honey, horseradish sauce and thyme until well blended. Spoon half of the mayonnaise mixture evenly over cheese on crust.
Spoon chicken mixture evenly over mayonnaise mixture on crust. Spoon remaining mayonnaise mixture evenly over chicken. Cover chicken evenly with ham. Top with remaining 8 slices Muenster cheese.
Bake 15 to 20 minutes longer or until cheese is melted and filling is thoroughly heated.
Random LeonardoAI text generated art
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What ignorant thing did a retail employee say that made you walk out of the store without buying a single item?
It gets very cold in Michigan and I have a very large, down-filled winter coat. It’s somewhat hideous but it’s very warm.
Apparently coats like mine are great for shop lifting. You simply place a hole in the pockets and drop items that you’ve casually picked up and drop them to the bottom of the coat as you shop/steal. It’s difficult to tell that you have stolen anything because the coat itself is so large.
I was shopping in a card shop a while back and the sales woman there accused me of shop-lifting, because of my coat. When I was at the register to pay for ALL of my items she asked me if I would also like to pay for the items inside of my coat as well.
I smiled and I gently laughed and asked her “Are you kidding me?” I told her that I was a shop owner myself and that I would never steal anything from anyone.
She looked at me in a slightly disgusted way and rolled her eyes. “Oh. So that’s how it’s going to be!” She didn’t ask me about my store or attempt to apologize. She just stared at me. Hmm… I thought.
I had quite a large number of items that I did want to buy and I had been quite a regular customer there for some time. I was beyond insulted, but I understood her frustration, even though I was shocked.
I took off my coat, gently put it on the counter and opened my purse. “Would you care to inspect my belongings?” I said in a calm and polite way. She patted down my coat and glanced in my rather small purse. She then slid my coat over and without apologizing, began to ring up my items.
I let her ring up everything, staring back at her silently as I waited for an apology. Nothing.
I didn’t reach in my purse to pay. Instead I pushed the items back at her gently and I told her “I’m sorry but I’ve changed my mind. Not about the items, I still want them but I think I’ll take my business elsewhere, where my business is appreciated. There are lots of stores, exactly like yours.” And I left. And I held my head up without shame or anger. But what I really felt was hurt.
I went a few miles down the street to another shop that offered the exact same items and I left that store with all of them. The bill was well over $100.00 .
I understand that shop lifting is a problem but honesty is not. I gave the first woman every opportunity to make the situation right but I really felt that she did owe me an apology. I didn’t think that it was too much to ask for considering the insulting way that she had treated me in her store.
I give all of my business now to the other shop owner. Yes, it’s a bit further to drive but I feel I’d rather go without than give the first shop owner even one dime of my hard-earned money. In my opinion there is no reason, whatsoever, to treat anyone like that.
What do you think is the best revenge anyone has ever taken?
The savage killing of serial rapist Akku Yadav by a mob of women he raped is one of the most brutal revenge of all time in Indian History.
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On August 13, 2004, Akku Yadav was lynched by a mob of around 200 women from Kasturba Nagar, a slum of Nagpur in Maharashtra.
He raped more than 200 women that mostly belonging to Dalit families, the Untouchables, those placed at the bottom of the caste ladder in India. The members of the Dalit community received little to no help from the government authorities.
Akku Yadav fed the local officers bribes and drink, and they protected him and dropped his cases. Despite countless women coming forward with allegations of rape against him, Akku Yadav always felt free to rape whomever he wanted.
Whenever a victim reported him to the police, the authorities would alert Yadav, who then visit that women and threaten to throw acid on her and rape her again. He had raped so many women in Kasturba Nagar that a rape victim lives in almost every other house in the slum.
Usha Narayane, a victim who had repeatedly been harassed by Akku Yadav reported the case about Akku Yadav to the Deputy Commissioner, who promised her that police would soon arrest the serial rapist. One day Akku Yadav himself surrendered to the police fearing his death by local women.
The next day in court, Narayane and many other local women heard that the Akku Yadav was likely to escape punishment yet again. Together, they entered into the court in large numbers armed with vegetable knives, stones, and whatever else that was at hand.
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As he walked in, Akku Yadav spotted one of the women he had raped. He called her a prostitute and threatened to repeat the same crime again. The police laughed. She took off her sandal and began to hit him and started saying that, “We can’t both live on this Earth together. It’s you or me”. The attack lasted for more than ten minutes and left Yadav’s dead body butchered on the courtroom floor with 70 stab wounds and his penis cut off.
Usha Narayane, a local activist, was arrested and charged with murder, as with other women. In 2012, Narayane was released from custody. 21 other people, including six women, were also arrested and released due to lack of evidence.
Justice Bhau Vahane said, “In the circumstances that they underwent, they were left with no alternative but to finish Akku Yadav. The women repeatedly pleaded with the police for their security. But the police failed to protect them”.
1 cup (4 ounces) shredded mozzarella cheese, divided
1 cup cornflakes, crushed
Instructions
Heat oven to 350 degrees F. Lightly coat a 9 x 13 inch baking dish with butter.
In a medium bowl, combine turkey, celery, water chestnuts, red bell pepper, mayonnaise, onion, lemon juice, 1 cup Cheddar cheese, and 1/2 cup mozzarella cheese; mix well. Place the mixture in the baking dish and bake for 25 to 30 minutes, or until heated through.
Meanwhile, in a medium bowl, combine the remaining 1 cup Cheddar cheese, 1/2 cup mozzarella cheese and cornflakes.
Sprinkle the cheese mixture over the baked turkey casserole, and bake for 5 to 8 minutes, or until the cheese melts.
I grew up in the 1960’s. This was the start of the acceleration of the “woman’s movement”. This later on went nuts and merged with other generational forces and combined has created a very hostile environment for men. I know, I had a “three stage rocket” thrown at me in Arkansas.
Accuse the man of molestation, then tell the police that the man is violent.
While the man is in jail, the bank accounts are frozen, and every stone is uncovered “looking” for evidence.
Then a divorce, favorable to the woman is initiated, and the husband, in jail / prison is unable to fight back.
Three-stage Rocket.
One friend had this happen to them. Then another. Then another. And, another.
Common place.
Now, men are saying… GOOD BYE.
The West has shot itself in the foot.
And the blood is hemorrhaging. Triage is needed, but people are dragging their feet. The blood is everywhere. It is smeared all over.
The damage is TOO FAR GONE.
Die. Let the West die.
We see what is going on, but it’s still to early to see the pain, and the hurt when the the women finally realize that they are FUCKED. Starting now.
In twenty years… LORD…
It’s gonna be nasty in the West. Nasty.
Once you wipe out two generations of stable society, what you have left is “Mad Max”. Gonna be a nightmare.
Today…
American HELLSCAPE
I am a Dutch national and have lived in Ethiopia, Netherlands, France and Germany. In 1984 I went to the US on a student exchange visa. I landed in New York on June 4, 1984 and took a taxi to the Holiday inn in downtown Manhattan – I think it was on 52nd or 54th street. Can’t remember that. what I do remember is that the taxi fare was $90 (which I thought was a lot) and I had been told you tip at least 10% on taxi rides, so I have the guy $100, which was almost a full week’s of wages for me at the time. I walked into the hotel and the doorman asked me where I came from. I told him “the airport” and then, on a whim, I asked him how much a taxi ride should cost. He told me “$35–$40.” Welcome to America, where most everything is a scam of some sort.
I have now been here almost 40 years and it has gotten soooooo much worse. This country is truly devolving into a hellscape. Government is basically non-functional. Pharmaceutical companies are allowed to murder tens of thousands of people a year with their opioids without ANY ramification. Food companies can poison you with the shit they put in their food because we, as individuals, cannot prove a substance to be unhealthy or dangerous and these companies do not have to prove that a substance is safe before they can use it in whatever they’re cooking up.
I own my own business and America has been good to me, but my wife and my health insurance? Yeah, the first $55,000 we earned in a year went to cover health insurance and deductible. No mandatory vacation, no mandatory sick pay, you can get fired at the drop of a hat, for no reason whatsoever, which has happened to me four times until I said “fuck this, I am going to do my own thing.” No national holidays that employers MUST pay you for – ZERO! No paid time off for new parents with a newborn at home – ZERO! Homeless people all over the place, seemingly BILLIONS of churches that do fuck all nothing for ANYBODY, it is really surreal once I began seeing all of this.
School shootings? who the fuck thinks this is a good thing? Yet America’s conservative highest court of the land claims we should not and cannot rein in the insane amount of guns in this society. It is now wonder cops shoot people willy-nilly because they are terrified ALL the time. Normal people would immediately recognize that a society with more guns does not make a society safer, quite to the contrary, it makes it MUCH more dangerous. They actually have laws here, making it illegal for the government to spend money on research about gun violence. Imagine that. 50,000+ deaths from guns EVERY year and the government doesn’t think we should figure this out.
The Supreme Court of this country is co completely FUCKED UP that it actually decided that “corporations” were “people,” so they could contribute to political campaigns unlimited sums of money without disclosing they have donated to whatever organization. I don’t know about you, but I have never seen a corporation in prison. It is completely INSANE here.
At first I genuinely was blown away by America. Now I look at it in horror and with pity for the American people, half of whom are too stupid to recognize they are being fleeced. America’s version of capitalism is abhorrent and Europe is headed in the same direction. DON’T LET IT DESTROY YOUR SOCIAL SERVICES. The uber wealthy in Europe are beginning to see how America did it and they noticed that if you set the common man up against the immigrant, you can fuck them over really easily. That is EXACTLY what is happening in Europe today. You better be careful.
Sadly I am stuck here. My daughter and her soon-to-be husband want to stay and my wife and I don’t want to move far away from her, so here we are. Fortunately our life is very good because we have invested well and have our own business. Life for most is nearly impossibly difficult here. Hopefully, one day my daughter will say, “pops, lets get the fuck out of here.” I’d be gone in three nano-seconds. That is how bad I feel this country has gotten.
Are Europeans shocked when they first come to the United States?
I am a Dutch national and have lived in Ethiopia, Netherlands, France and Germany. In 1984 I went to the US on a student exchange visa. I landed in New York on June 4, 1984 and took a taxi to the Holiday inn in downtown Manhattan – I think it was on 52nd or 54th street. Can’t remember that. what I do remember is that the taxi fare was $90 (which I thought was a lot) and I had been told you tip at least 10% on taxi rides, so I have the guy $100, which was almost a full week’s of wages for me at the time. I walked into the hotel and the doorman asked me where I came from. I told him “the airport” and then, on a whim, I asked him how much a taxi ride should cost. He told me “$35–$40.” Welcome to America, where most everything is a scam of some sort.
I have now been here almost 40 years and it has gotten soooooo much worse. This country is truly devolving into a hellscape. Government is basically non-functional. Pharmaceutical companies are allowed to murder tens of thousands of people a year with their opioids without ANY ramification. Food companies can poison you with the shit they put in their food because we, as individuals, cannot prove a substance to be unhealthy or dangerous and these companies do not have to prove that a substance is safe before they can use it in whatever they’re cooking up.
I own my own business and America has been good to me, but my wife and my health insurance? Yeah, the first $55,000 we earned in a year went to cover health insurance and deductible. No mandatory vacation, no mandatory sick pay, you can get fired at the drop of a hat, for no reason whatsoever, which has happened to me four times until I said “fuck this, I am going to do my own thing.” No national holidays that employers MUST pay you for – ZERO! No paid time off for new parents with a newborn at home – ZERO! Homeless people all over the place, seemingly BILLIONS of churches that do fuck all nothing for ANYBODY, it is really surreal once I began seeing all of this.
School shootings? who the fuck thinks this is a good thing? Yet America’s conservative highest court of the land claims we should not and cannot rein in the insane amount of guns in this society. It is now wonder cops shoot people willy-nilly because they are terrified ALL the time. Normal people would immediately recognize that a society with more guns does not make a society safer, quite to the contrary, it makes it MUCH more dangerous. They actually have laws here, making it illegal for the government to spend money on research about gun violence. Imagine that. 50,000+ deaths from guns EVERY year and the government doesn’t think we should figure this out.
The Supreme Court of this country is co completely FUCKED UP that it actually decided that “corporations” were “people,” so they could contribute to political campaigns unlimited sums of money without disclosing they have donated to whatever organization. I don’t know about you, but I have never seen a corporation in prison. It is completely INSANE here.
At first I genuinely was blown away by America. Now I look at it in horror and with pity for the American people, half of whom are too stupid to recognize they are being fleeced. America’s version of capitalism is abhorrent and Europe is headed in the same direction. DON’T LET IT DESTROY YOUR SOCIAL SERVICES. The uber wealthy in Europe are beginning to see how America did it and they noticed that if you set the common man up against the immigrant, you can fuck them over really easily. That is EXACTLY what is happening in Europe today. You better be careful.
Sadly I am stuck here. My daughter and her soon-to-be husband want to stay and my wife and I don’t want to move far away from her, so here we are. Fortunately our life is very good because we have invested well and have our own business. Life for most is nearly impossibly difficult here. Hopefully, one day my daughter will say, “pops, lets get the fuck out of here.” I’d be gone in three nano-seconds. That is how bad I feel this country has gotten.
What is the biggest scam you’ve ever seen?
One morning a couple of months ago, one of my employees called me in tears. She said that she had an emergency and she and her husband must urgently leave the job and drive to LA. I asked them what happened. They explained that a month ago they received a call from someone saying they won a prize – a set of furniture and to provide the address and personal information where the prize can be sent, which they did. (They are young recent immigrants from Cuba and never dealt with this kind of thing before.)
Subsequently, she received another call and was told that the prize was shipped but now she owed a $1,000 in shipping and handling fees. She responded that she doesn’t need the prize and hung up. They then received an official looking letter from a law firm in LA saying that they are being sued to recover the prize money. And now – harassing phone calls saying they will be kicked out of the country for fraud and all of their hard-earned money will be seized by the IRS.
That morning the attorney from LA called and said that they must urgently come up with the money or appear for a deposition. They were hyperventilating and crying. Even after I explained to them that it’s a scam, they wouldn’t calm down for the longest time. I showed them that a generic office building is located at that address, not a law firm. That a lawyer with that name is not licensed in California or anywhere. And I called back the number they provided which was disconnected.
I don’t know if this is the biggest scam, but to prey on new immigrants who don’t know anything and are very vulnerable, is the lowest of the low. Same kind of people were calling my elderly mother with similar offers and messages. Makes my blood boil.
America – the Shabby
My Ukrainian relatives were. When they arrived in Albuquerque via San Diego, having escaped the war, they were shocked by how shabby everything is. This is a thing, I think, to which most Americans are oblivious, since so few of us ever leave the country. My family were expecting a wealthy, modern society— what certain elements of our culture portray as a “shining city on a hill”. They used to think I was just “talking Ukraine up” for their benefit on my many visits, and I’m not suggesting that Ukraine is without deficits, but I suspect if Americans had seen what that country looked like prior to the invasions, they would want to know what the hell happened to us.
My family are grateful to be here, grateful to have gotten their little daughter away from the Russians, and worry constantly about the relations they left behind, some in occupied territory, but they still marvel at bad roads, the general absence of public transportation, antiquated technology, stodgy banking, low quality food, poor healthcare, and a shockingly indolent education industry.
Their best friends— and some of mine— ended up in Toronto. Comparing notes, my family often wonder if they would not have been better off in Canada…
Can you give some examples of revenge being served cold and sweet?
When I was in highschool, I had a girlfriend tell me that I was immature. I pointed out that I worked 5 days a week, as well as getting good grades. That I was never late for work, and always did my homework. That I was never in trouble with the police.
She asked what that had to do with maturity? I tried to explain, but she wasn’t believing anything I was saying.
Fast forward 25 years, and I run into her family at a wedding, we are sitting at the same table during the reception. She is lecturing her 17 year old son about sneaking alcohol, they get into an argument, and she says, why can’t you grow up? He bragged about being the most mature kid in his class. She said, you can’t hold a part time job, you are just barely passing your classes, and the police brought you home because you were drinking, and you were given a warning about being suspended from school.
He asked what that had to do with maturity? I spit out my drink, and started laughing. The mom looked at me, and asked what was so funny. Obviously not remembering our conversation from 25 years ago, but I had never forgotten it. I finally felt validated after 25 years.
Culture Shock America
Haha yes….
When I visited Los Angeles in the 80s. When I get to the customs guy, he asks his questions. Now I didn’t know this but they sometimes have random questions
This one says, in a deadpan voice “ Do you have any plans to overthrow the United States government?”
Of course, I snort with laughter, which really pisses the guy off
His next question is asked in a louder, rude tone, “Are you here for business or pleasure?”
Somewhat bewildered and increasingly pissed off, I quip back, “Ask your sister”. That earned me a thorough baggage check and a twenty minute delay. So much for petty officialdom
I picked up a Hertz rental car from the counter at the airport
I noticed it didn’t have much fuel in, so as I am coming out of the airport, there’s a gas station
As I pull in, this Latino guy comes over and with a thick Mexican accent says “What you want, Senór”
I ask him to fill it up and he says “Twenty Dollars. You pay me first. The people they fill up and drive away and they do not pay!”
So I give him twenty dollars. He says “I put this in the till, Senór”, and off he goes into a little building
Ten minutes later I am still sat there, so I get out and I too go into the little building. It’s empty apart from a bored looking white guy behind a counter
“Hey”, I say, “Where’s the Mexican forecourt attendant?”
So, a few days later, I’m driving around when this small pick up truck passes me. Mounted on the back is a big board and on that board is written “FOLLOW ME”
And Americans are all like “Hey, look at that, Honey, let’s follow it and see where it’s going”
The truck drives around for a while until it gets a tail of about twenty cars. Then it goes to a big shopping mall and parks up
And the Americans are “Hey, Honey, while we’re here, let’s do some shopping!!”
I doubt such a trawling tactic would work in my country, but you never know
So, in the evening back at my hotel, I’m watching TV
First up is a quiz show, the contestants are sitting in seats with a metal plate. They answer questions on various topics to build prize money. Pretty regular fare, right? But here’s the kicker, if they get three questions wrong in a row, they host presses a button and “BZZZ”, the contestant gets an electric shock that literally makes them leap out of their seat!
I flick the channel. It’s a nature documentary about the Wild Turkey. Seems like when George Washington was President, the national bird of America wasn’t going to be the Eagle, but the Turkey. Something to do with Thanksgiving, although how that would have looked on The Oval Office carpet clutching arrows and laurel leaves bothers me more than I can say
However, the narrator is going on Wild Turkey this, Wild Turkey that. Then he says, “Now we’ll talk to someone who encounters the Wild Turkey every day. One of the backwoods hunters of America”
So it cuts to this old dude with a check shirt, peaked cap and a face like Elmer Fudd, sitting behind a log. He has a pump action shotgun
The narrator says “Sir, can you tell us your thoughts on the Wild Turkey” and holds out the microphone
In the deepest, slow, hillbilly accent, the guy says, “Well, the American Wild Turkey is a truly noble bird. It is full of grace and beauty”
Then he says, “There’s a gobbler now”, and in a loud voice calls “GOBBLE, GOBBLE, GOBBLE!!!”
This Turkey head pops out from behind a bush, and, “BOOM, BOOM, BOOM!!”. The guys cuts loose with his gun and clouds of feathers fly up
And this is a nature documentary!
So, yes, America was an absolute culture shock to me. I did enjoy it though
Why Men Are Going Their Own Way (MGTOW Explained)
Take the time to watch.
There were only two things that shocked me when I came to the US.
the complete lack of maintenace for the infrastructure. I thought Americans loved to drive? So why not spend some money on maintenance. I’ve seen more potholes in 6 days in the Usa, than in my entire life in the Netherlands
the way police officers and other other uniformed people behaved. It already started on the airport at border security, all of the guys in uniform acted like they were the most important person in the world and we were just measly worms. Come on, I know you have a job to do, but why can’t you just try to be pollite? If Dutch police officers would behave like that, they would be considered unfit for the job.
Is it a dress code rule in county jail or federal prison to wear socks to bed?
You know, I can understand how one might get the impression that specific behaviors are mandated in jail or prison due to prisoners adhering so meticulously to certain practices.
But inmates have many self-imposed rules, and the sock thing is definitely one of these.
Nobody in their right mind wants to put bare foot to floor in lockup.
The only reasons I EVER removed my socks in county was —
…to put on a cleaner pair;
…to don shower shoes;
…to clip my toenails.
And that’s it.
Despite the CO’s wheeling in a janitorial cart once a day, and every con in the pod swabbing the day room floor, our individual cells (particularly the stainless steel toilet/sink combo), and the shower stall and additional open air communal head at the end of the second tier catwalk — despite all this — the surfaces in jail were never truly clean.
Jails and prisons are veritable petri dishes for tinea pedis, protozoa, cold/flu viruses and your everyday run-of-the-mill despair.
And in an environment where a relatively mundane illness can blossom into something life-threatening due to substandard healthcare, you do what you can to minimize contact.
And if that means wearing socks and marginalizing bunkies who refuse to get with the program, then so be it.
We called the few prisoners stupid enough to go barefoot in the pod “Jethros.”
And it wasn’t a term of endearment.
Nobody wanted a Jethro for a cellmate.
They usually ended up camping out on yoga mats under the corrugated steel stairway rather than getting a cellie.
So the sock thing, like the courtesy flush, was a rule of our very own.
And you broke it at your own peril.
America has gone INSANE!
I was working near Houston, Texas, from UK, when I took my wife to visit the town. We parked for a little while to study the city map when somone, we know not who, or why, let fly with an automatic rifle of some sort, so yes, that did shock us.
I was in Loisiana with a group of workmates when we were held up by a gang of young children, made strong by one of thier gang holding a small hand gun. One of my group was shot in the stomach, causing relatively minor injuries, but with a certain amount of trauma, so again, yes you can say we were shocked.
I was on holiday in Maine, near Bangor airport, when a stranger, from his demeanor I guess he was probably not of sound mind,walked past brandishing a large automtic pistol in his hand. By now I was more difficult to impress but my wife was certainly very impressed and quite shocked.
My son was mugged by a gang of five youths in Central Park, I think around 1990. It made your national news as my son is also a competent and very aggressive combatant. He layed into the gang, disaarmed them of their knives and holding two of them until the police got there. The rest of the gang got away with ten dollars. We were at home in England when we received a phone call from the New York police. They praised my lad but also asked us to tell my lad, that that is the way of things in this little backwater town of New York and it would be better if he had just handed over his cash to the thieves and let them escape.
You seem to have little idea just how insane you are all becoming.
Tell me, are Americans shocked when they first come the UK?
When you Accidentally Compromise every CPU on Earth
The Pizza Index.
A quick visit to the United States
The naive unworldly ignorance of most Americans and the poverty and squalor of weatherboard shotgun shacks and trailer parks living is shocking but it’s the absence of the freedoms from guns and gun crime that killed over 40,000 Americans last year and the absence of civilised universal health care that leaves 40,000,000 Americans with no health care that is really shocking.
Little things like never being able to pay the ticket price for goods and services, primitive banking and payment methods, being coerced into tipping underpaid serving and bar staff and not being able even to cross the road wherever it observed safe to do so is oppressive when used to the almost utopian freedoms Brits and most other Europeans enjoy.
How do Americans tolerate the fear that they or their children can be shot and killed at any moment and the terror of bankruptcy hangs over them if/when they or a family member becomes chronically ill? That is truly shocking!
If you’ve worked the same job in different countries, what was the country you’ve preferred doing that job in?
I have been a university lecturer in the following countries, and experienced it in the following ways:
Germany: A very pleasant experience. The students are mature and polite, and it felt like I was conversing with adults on an even, intellectual level. It’s nice to teach at university level in Germany. The colleagues also tend to be quite dignified and interesting. Hierarchies are steep. As a lecturer in Germany, you feel respected. Income is not very high though, after deductions. And one thing you will sometimes sense is a certain sense of depression. Students in Germany aren’t always happy people, and you will sometimes bump into some really dark and brooding characters.
England: A bit more demanding, also on your pedagogic abilities. British students appear much younger and less mature than German students. You will have plenty of discipline and disturbance issues, and motivation can be low. Still, there is respect for the lecturer, and I have always enjoyed my British colleagues. The research aspect is demanding. Much more so than in Germany, and one feels at times that the only way to earn one’s keep is by bringing in plenty of research funding. I often felt like a mixture of a high school teacher and a fund raiser while working in England. Pay is fairly good. I earned much better than in Germany, and generally felt that my work gave me more status.
New Zealand: Like in England, but with the exception that there was an unusual level of interpersonal friction. Students will openly challenge you and make life as hard as possible, and colleagues can dedicate themselves to strong and long lived animosities that will be carried out in eerily orchestrated mobbing scenarios. I have to say I have no interest whatsoever in working in New Zealand again. It nearly broke me. Pay is average. You will earn more as a courier driver or sales person. What is nice though is that you get a good amount of time off to enjoy New Zealand’s fantastic scenery.
France: Here, you really need to make sure you understand the institution’s philosophy first, and then sing from the same song sheet as everyone else. I found my work at French university highly inspiring, but also unbelievably demanding. The levels of discipline and integrity required are higher than elsewhere. I often say it, and will say it again: Living and working successfully in France requires a certain military spirit. Reporting orders, understanding hierarchies, and not getting into the mills of politics, are your daily life. Bottom line for me was, I learned more about my field teaching for a French university than I did studying in Germany, the US, and Canada. But watch out for the students. France is where they once beheaded their royals – that streak runs deep. Student complaints can occur with a vengeance. Pay was good. Better than in England.
China: Here, you have two choices. Either you go through your material in any way you please, or you make a pedagogic effort. In both cases, the students will be exquisitely polite and respectful, and assure you of their warmest feelings. Come examination time, the true picture emerges, and you will see just how successful your teaching methods were. Having said that, expectations in grades are very high, and the stigma of failing is enormous, so you will eventually relegate yourself to mark on the unrealistically high side, just to evade human drama. For me, teaching in China meant having to reinvent myself totally, because I wanted to make sure the high marks I pretty much had to give actually reflected reality. I have taught myself to teach properly only in China. Pay, by national standards, is on the higher side, but then, I was an expat.
India: If you are one of those idealists who dream about a career in teaching because you want to make a difference, and imagine your students will love you for your efforts, India is the place to be. My Indian students were my favourites. Nobody else is this eager to learn, displays more genuine interest and even enthusiasm, and connects more strongly on a personal basis than Indian students. Teaching in India really was absolutely brilliant, and I would do it again. Even though the management is often disgustingly top down, and will do whatever they like, such as ordering staff in for meetings on weekends, or the likes. It doesn’t matter. In India, you really experience genuine hunger for knowledge, and pleasure in making it accessible. I was on a lucrative expat contract.
Sweden: Very much like Germany. Swedish students are a mature, polite, and jolly bunch who see you as a human being and will do their best to keep things pleasant for everybody. The actual organisation though is much tighter than in Germany, while providing a fireworks of fun stuff on the side for staff and students alike. In Sweden, year schedules are ready and perfect for the entire academic year by August, and everything is timed and apportioned to the minute, with a great sense of timing and availability of resources. Colleagues are warm and lovely, and you will feel very comfortable with your workplace, which will be hugely more attractive and homely than in any of the other places. I can’t imagine a better place to be a university lecturer than Sweden if you simply want to enjoy life and do well. Pay is about the same as in France, which makes me a member of the somewhat more comfortable pay bracket in Sweden.
Coffee Liqueur Wings
Delicious
Coffee Liqueur Wings can be prepared a day ahead and can be reheated in the oven.
Ingredients
1 ounce butter
1/2 cup onion, finely chopped
3/4 teaspoon chili powder
2 drops hot sauce
1 cup barbecue sauce
2 tablespoons honey
Salt and pepper to taste
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 cup coffee liqueur
2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon salt
20 chicken wings
Instructions
In a 2 quart saucepan melt butter; sauté garlic and onion over medium heat for 3 minutes.
Add cumin and chili powder and cook, stirring constantly for 2 minutes.
Blend in coffee liqueur and cook to reduce liquid by one-half.
Stir in hot sauce, Worcestershire, barbecue sauce and salt. Simmer 5 minutes.
Remove from heat and add honey. Set aside and allow to cool.
Prepare chicken wings by removing and discarding the tips. Divide the wings in half at the remaining joint.
Marinate the wings in the cooked sauce for 1 hour at room temperature, or overnight in the refrigerator.
To cook, place the marinated wings on a broiler pan, sprinkle with salt and pepper and broil 5 minutes, turn and brush with the remaining sauce and bake at 350 degrees F for 15 minutes.
What these two simultaneous events indicate is that there is a growing disconnect between the military-industrial complex coupled with the ruling class on the one hand, and the wealthy elite on the other. The fact is that China has overwhelming support among US capitalists, who want nothing more than to be able to trade freely with China.
More specifically, this means that the sectors of the capitalist class who are not involved in arms-dealing are not interested in the escalation of tensions, nor war, with China. However, their interests are not being reflected in government. US foreign policy has become via the pull of the military-industrial complex, which drags the country’s resources into wars and conflicts around the world. It is a growing tumor of greed that is depriving society of the blood and oxygen it needs to sustain itself.
Only when the US ruling class accepts the fact that China is not going anywhere can it move forward as a country. Otherwise, the contradictions between reality and its unrealistic objectives will tear it apart.
It doesn’t take a communist to realize that all attempts at dismantling China will fail, and that by insisting on doing the impossible, more people are losing out than just the working class. If America wants even to preserve its prized capitalist system, to say nothing of socialism, it will have to accept these realities. The preservation of capitalism in America rests on win-win cooperation with China.
The above contradictions are a direct outcome of China’s four-dimensional chess strategy of using a relatively weak currency to create a trade surplus — causing Western capitalist nations to both rejoice at the untold amounts of profit they receive from an endless pool of cheap but reliable labor, and seethe at the fact that the investment they put into such labor is also going towards building a developed socialist country that will not bend toward their will.
All of this begs the question, why do the pro-China US capitalists not use their wealth and influence to form a party and run for office, defending their capital interests via preserving positive trade relations with China?
At this point in time, even the most exploitative form of capitalism would be a more rational social structure than what we have in the US, which is now a rogue state threatening global stability and quite literally all life on the planet. If there were even a bourgeoisie overthrow of the current regime, I would put my full support behind it, because at least it would eliminate some of the risks of direct military confrontation with unbeatable opponents and destruction of life on a scale rarely seen before.
Ironically, this might be the best chance we have at seeing a non-imperialist United States in this lifetime. And those of us who don’t want to see war with China should be the first to not only accept, but also encourage this reality in coming to fruition.
Boss Babe Horrors
How do sergeants/chiefs handle a soldier/marine/sailor/airman who has been accepted for officer candidate school but has not, as yet, left their unit?
I was in infantry AIT with an OCS guarantee at Ft DIX. I enlisted after receiving my draft notice only to get that OCS slot. I was ranked high up in my AIT class since I was trying hard to learn and physically prepare for OCS. Somebody in the command line made the decision to fill an open Drill Sergeant slot with me. They pinned E4 DI corporal stripes on me, gave me a smoky bear hat and gave me a heavy weapons platoon to train in Infantry AIT. Since I had run through regular infantry AIT doing heavy weapons gave me the opportunity to learn 81mm and 4.2 skills. I did get to go to OCS after one cycle as a drill corporal; I graduated near the top of my class so the time to learn the junior noncom skills definitely helped. After receiving my brass bars I was assigned =as a map reading instructor at Ft Benning. Four mounts later I was sent to Jungle training school in Panama. All this training set me up very well to command a recon unit in Vietnam in the 199 Light Infantry Brigade. I ended up serving 39 months instead of 24 which I would have if I had kept my head down as a draftee. I can’t say I would have chosen the Army as a recent college graduate in 1967 since the being drafted interrupted my professional career. I certainly learned leadership, personal confidence and other personal skills and I do feel that I earned my freedom as a citizen of the US of A. I earned two Bronze stars with V device, an ARCOM with V device and valor awards from the Vietnam units I served with. I certainly used my jungle training skills and my mortar, artillery and air support direction skills in jungle combat. i came out of Vietnam with a permanent hearing disability, minor shrapnel wounds and agent orange disability that the VA can treat but not cure.
After leaving the Army I was able to resume my professional career albeit with a different company from the one I was drafted out of. With an OCS guarantee in AIT, A simple decision made by some unknown commander to hold me back in AIT and make me a junior NCO drill corporal had a dramatic effect on my military career and later on my personal and professional life.
As a draftee right out of college I was angry at the draft but over the years I have come to the conclusion that some sort of two year compulsive service to our country should be required of all citizens.
The Wall #37 – When Women Regret Feminism | The Wall
What amuses you as a foreigner in India?
I’ve worked and lived in India for two years, and for me, India is one of the most amusing countries in the world, together with Japan, Great Britain, and Australia. There’s always something going on that makes me chuckle in these places.
In India, my list of amusements is this:
the way they speak; I don’t know why, but it immediately lifts my spirits to hear an Indian speak English. There is something very funny about it for me. Perhaps it’s because of the way they seemtospeakwithoutanybreakbetweenwords, roll the Rs, and choose quaint old-fashioned expressions while sounding somehow… cute. There is a trademark intonation that I have actually picked up myself while living there, and I fall back on it in some situations, which makes my wife laugh, because she used to work for a big, Indian company once, and it reminds her of the way the management spoke.
the way they decorate vehicles. I’m a car designer, from Germany, and they teach us to design vehicles to look serious, determined, premium… and then come the Indians and paint flower garlands and happy colours and religious symbols onto them. It’s like trying to design a fighter jet, and someone paints kittens and sun flowers on it. They just somehow aren’t with the program in that regard, which the hippie inside me secretly approves of.
their start-up spirit and professionalism with even the most modest of entrepreneurial endeavours. I’ve talked to guys selling street food in Bangalore from little carts, and from the terminology they were using, you might have thought they owned a supermarket chain with car washes.
music videos in Hindi where you get some gent singing in a landscape, and before you know it, there comes a whole army of brightly dressed ladies and whirls through the background in flowing dresses, performing perfectly synchronized movements. It’s just not something we see in the west, where music videos are mostly about some somber individual glowering at something unseen in mysterious surroundings.
the way they initiate conversations. It was an absolute classic for me to be sitting in the university canteen with a plate of chana masala and some roti, and here comes a student and sits next to me and asks brightly, “are you a foreigner, sir?” To which I was sometimes tempted to answer “no, silly, haven’t you seen how many blond, blue eyed Indians with Canadian/ German accents there are?” It was of course clear to them that I wasn’t a local, but they still managed to be diplomatic even with such a blunt question.
I came to India from my expat posting in China on a French contract, and it was a huge sigh of relief for me to come to India, even though I really enjoyed China. I felt somehow immediately at home in India, partly because everyone spoke English, and partly because of something else that I can’t quite place.
A Naadi reader told me in Bangalore once that I had been an Indian in a previous life, and I could absolutely see that. A friend of mine in Bangalore says she believes I’m a “closet Indian”.
I certainly had a great time in India in this life. I
He’s special
Chicken Wings in Coke
230202 Coca Cola Chicken Wings 1
Ingredients
4 pounds chicken wings
1 (10 ounce) can Coca-Cola
1 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon onion powder
1 tablespoon soy sauce
Instructions
Place the chicken in a shallow casserole.
Sprinkle with the garlic and onion powder.
Combine the Coke with the sugar and soy sauce and pour over the chicken.
Slow bake the chicken at 325 degrees F for 3 to 4 hours until liquid has evaporated and becomes sticky.
Is it true that Ukraine is losing the war? How when they possess 90% of Ukraine?
Russia’s overall objectives were, are, and will remain securing the Donbass and Crimea.
When they initially invaded in the north, east, and south, the intent was to force Ukraine forces to draw back from the Donbass. This part of the initial invasion was a huge success, despite what the USuk’s CIA and MI6 propaganda told you (and misinformed you).
To invade, take and hold even half of Ukraine, Russia would have needed far more forces than the initial 70,000 that they used. They used armor and mechanized infantry to take aggressive positions in hopes that it would force Ukraine to sue for a quick peace and settlement.
Initially, even that part of the bold Russian actions seemed to be a huge success. Then Ukraine asked for negotiations, and the results were to demand Russia to move back its forces to show a willingness to negotiate and not just use the negotiations as a ruse. Russia complied somewhat, but this only led to Ukraine doing exactly what they accused Russia of doing—aggressively counter-attacking and sabotaging the peace negotiations.
At that point, relatively small expeditionary Russian forces were dangerously overextended, so they doubled down on their original plans. Pull back, consolidate, and secure the Donbass and Crimea.
In order to take cities like Kharkov and Kherson, Russian forces will have to destroy much of these cities—unless Ukraine forces flee from those cities. The Ukraine strategy has been to put much of its military right in the cities in order to protect the forces because, for the most part, Russian forces have refrained from bombing them. After all, if the cities are part of the objective, you really don’t want to kill their largely Russian populations or destroy the buildings. It’s Russia that will have to pay for the reconstruction of E. Ukraine.
It took Russia two years to build up the defense of the Donbass and Crimea regions to the point where they can then use them as bases for going on the offensive to take the rest of the Donbass. That point has been reached, and now Ukraine is losing badly. Basically, Russia is using a much smaller force to neutralize Ukraine’s much larger army in E Ukraine.
When a client can’t get it up :/
If you are trapped in the desert with only a car that is broken down, how could you survive?
Set one of your tires on fire. They produce an inky black smoke that will be visible for miles. Also, they burn for a really long time too.
main qimg 80ff931a86b4af7941400a7d7ef0576d lq
When a tire field catches fire it produces a smokestack that is visible for huge distances. And these tire fires are actually really difficult to put out too because they reignite themselves from within due to their composition.
I’d space out when you burn each tire though. The rescue search might not start until after you’ve been missing for a while.
Also — don’t leave your car — that is usually how people die. Too often, a rescue team gets to a car only to find it is empty.
Being lost in the desert is no bueno (not good). It reminds me of that one Far Side comic:
main qimg 99518d0a902216d964c08134642bc6f2 pjlq
Creepy
The USA is on a sled going down hill
Ohh yes, when we go for first time and ever after.
Of course, so called “USA” is not a uniform place. Its made up of thousands of counties, each with its own peculiarities and distinct characteristics.
What is shared by all is the hypocritical duality of prudishness and deep religiousness with improper sexual behavior and love and care for the needed.
You frown about pictures showing woman’s nipples or prohibit showing universal masterpieces of art because they show penises, but accept and make president of a guy who boasts on TV that he can and does grab ladies genitals just because he is rich and powerful.
You boast of your country been the “safest” in the world, yet you have to own and wear and use arms to defend your selves. And enjoy the highest rate of killings by firearms of all what you call the first world counties.
You say you believe in the teachings of Jesus, basically to care for thy neighbor when he is in need and to share bread and water with the hungry and thirsty, but you refuse the idea of universal health care to cover thy neighbor in need.
You say you believe in paying workers fair and decent salaries, but waiters need the tips because they are not covered by a basic salary nor any kind of health care or social net.
You believe that the almighty US dollar can buy everything and that quantity prevails over quality but you think you can teach other how to behave.
And yes, we are shocked by the very high rate of really obese people in a country that boasts the best meat, vegetables, bread and coffee in the world. Are they? All I know is that most of USA produce is banned in the EU for not meeting our health and sanitary standards.
I’m sure you are also shocked when you come to Europe.
The USA is fucked up
Many years ago I was staying at a budget hotel in Boston and I asked the clerk if there was a corner store nearby and she said that there was a shuttle service that would get me to a local mall in about fifteen minutes. When I got to my room I realised that I could see a mall I could walk to in a couple of minutes from my window. So I grabbed my backpack and started walking, got about half way there and a cop car appeared from no where, screeched to a halt and two incredibly aggressive cops hopped out demanding to know what I thought I was doing. They were 100% convinced that I was up to no good because they just didn’t believe that anyone would walk for five minutes instead of sitting on a bus for fifteen.
Edit for the grumpy folk: I wasn’t staying down town, couldn’t afford that. I was in an area that was mostly industrial with the sort of budget hotels workers stay in. No idea what you guys think of as “budget” but 25 years ago my whole stay cost less than one night down town, even with travel costs
What’s the hardest thing about being a guy?
I am answering this on behalf of my husband.
Incident –
My husband was working with a restaurant. He was in the kitchen section of the restaurant.
There was a woman in her mid thirties who worked there. She was like my husband’s Elder sister.
My husband then switched the job as the pay was low.
After he switched, the owner started calling him as he had no one to work. My husband had given him 2 months notice.
Then one day he accused my husband as a pervert. And he told him that the woman who works there complained about my husband touching his private parts while at work.
My husband couldn’t speak and came to me, hugged and started crying hysterically.
He never cries.
I asked him and he told me everything.
I understood what happened. My husband had a bacterial infection on that area when he was younger.
He gets itching when there is high temperature. When he used to work there, due to stove he got that itching and his hand went there.
It’s a medical condition. He was helpless.
I straight away called that lady to clarify.
She told me that she didn’t complain, but the owner modified the truth to abuse my husband put allegation.
That night she called my husband and apologised.
The hardest part of being a guy is even if he doesn’t mean anything vulgar in actions, he can’t clarify with a female.
Thanks
Riya
PS – please share the answer because I don’t think anyone should suffer from this type of judgemental attitude.
Fathers are fucked
To those of you who have been incarcerated, who was the strangest inmate you ever encountered, and what eventually became of him or her?
There was this guy who we will call Bob. ( Not his real Name). He always looked at people with a cold stare. He rarely talked and never smiled . One day i went to chow because the meal wasn’t that bad. He sat down opposite of me . Others that were going to sit with me sat at the next table . Bob stared at me as he ate. Never took his eyes off me , never looked at his plate or looked around . Just stared at me . This is the way he did everyone but it was my first encounter that close to him My workout partner said “Hey Harve . come over with us. “ I wanted to but I also felt if I moved he would think he intimidated me. And to be honest I was nervous. So I just stared back.
A couple years later I saw him in the dog program and he was outside with a dog. He was smiling and laughing as he talked to the dog. I walked up and asked if I could pet the dog and he said with a big smile “Sure” I told him that it was the first time I ever saw him smile and asked what made him so happy. He basically told me the dog made him happy and that being in the dog program gave him purpose. I already knew the dog program was a good program but this definitely confirmed it
Creepy and cringe
Have you ever walked out of a movie theater early over a feature movie that you simply could not continue to sit through? If so, what was the movie?
THIS abomination:
https://youtu.be/Nk3ZN3dSeDk
It was a gruelingly hot summer day. Mercury was spurting from the top of thermometers, the heat was rising in great waves from the streets, eggs were frying on the sidewalks, and car radiators were spewing great clouds of hissing steam into the air.
Going to an air conditioned movie theater seemed a good idea, to me, a lad of 15, wandering aimlessly on the streets of my miasmic little town, trapped -like a rat- in the maze of my fetid adolescence. ANYTHING would be better than this ungodly, brutal, unceasing heat.
So I paid my 50 cents and entered the dark and cool cavern of the theatre. I didn’t care what the movie was; anything -anything at all- would be better than the cloying, penetrating heat.
Twenty minutes later, I was on the street, again. Anything -anything, I say- would be better than that insipid, brain dead, gratuitous appeal to my adolescent fantasies: Beach Blanket Bingo. God, help me.
And there, across the street, was a dog, panting heavily and licking itself in that special way that only dogs can do. A stranger approached the theatre entrance, and paused to ask me if the movie was any good.
“No,” I said, “Don’t waste your money. That dog over there is better entertainment.”
I pointed at the mutt. “Sure wish I could do that…”
“That dog’d bite you,” the man replied, and disappeared into the movie.
I turned to take the long walk home, in the searing heat.
The United States is INSANE
I was working near Houston, Texas, from UK, when I took my wife to visit the town. We parked for a little while to study the city map when somone, we know not who, or why, let fly with an automatic rifle of some sort, so yes, that did shock us.
I was in Loisiana with a group of workmates when we were held up by a gang of young children, made strong by one of thier gang holding a small hand gun. One of my group was shot in the stomach, causing relatively minor injuries, but with a certain amount of trauma, so again, yes you can say we were shocked.
I was on holiday in Maine, near Bangor airport, when a stranger, from his demeanor I guess he was probably not of sound mind,walked past brandishing a large automtic pistol in his hand. By now I was more difficult to impress but my wife was certainly very impressed and quite shocked.
My son was mugged by a gang of five youths in Central Park, I think around 1990. It made your national news as my son is also a competent and very aggressive combatant. He layed into the gang, disaarmed them of their knives and holding two of them until the police got there. The rest of the gang got away with ten dollars. We were at home in England when we received a phone call from the New York police. They praised my lad but also asked us to tell my lad, that that is the way of things in this little backwater town of New York and it would be better if he had just handed over his cash to the thieves and let them escape.
You seem to have little idea just how insane you are all becoming.
Tell me, are Americans shocked when they first come the UK?
Delusional ONLYFANS WOMAN THINK Men Want Wife Her Up
No wonder no guys want them…
Welcome to America!
Shocked doesn’t quite cover it. Appalled is closer.
The ‘welcome’ at the airport quite takes my breath away. It seems to be assumed that everyone is a terrorist and should be treated like one. The wait was also very long, it isn’t like that in Europe. We should start treating Americans in the same way so they understand how unacceptable it is.
All taxi rides I’ve had remind me of Grand Theft Auto. It seems to be necessary either to be accelerating or braking hard and changing lanes harshly.
The tipping culture is mad, why can’t you just pay the staff a salary and show real prices? Make tips mean something so that they really do reward someone for exceptional service.
prices in shops are strange. The price on the shelf isn’t what you pay because it doesn’t include taxes. That needs to be sorted out!
People seem to be judged by how rich they are, richer people receive better service. Probably due to the tipping culture. Everyone should be treated the same regardless of money, culture and sex.
I have been a few times but won’t return willingly.
i could go on, but I’ve said enough.
Creole Chicken Wings with Peach Mustard Sauce
shutterstock 50480857
Yield: 4 entree or 8 appetizer servings
Ingredients
Wings
3 pounds chicken wings
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 teaspoons dry mustard
2 teaspoons paprika
1 teaspoon dried thyme
1 teaspoon granulated sugar
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/4 cup lemon juice
Peach Mustard Sauce
1/2 cup peach jam
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
2 teaspoons pimento, diced
1 teaspoon cider vinegar
Instructions
Wings
Cut tips off wings; reserve for stock.
In small bowl, stir together garlic, mustard, paprika, thyme, sugar, cayenne, salt and black pepper; blend in lemon juice to make paste.
Using pastry brush, brush paste over wings.
Arrange wings, meaty side down, on lightly greased foil-lined baking sheets. Let stand for 30 minutes at room temperature.
Bake at 475 degrees F for 15 minutes; turn wings over and bake for 15 to 20 minutes or until brown, crisp and no longer pink inside.
Peach Mustard Sauce
In saucepan, melt jam over low heat; stir in mustard, pimiento and vinegar. Serve separately for dipping.
Welcome to the USA more…
I’ve been on holiday in the states a few times. «shocked» is perhaps not the word I’d use, but a few things was a very new experience for me:
Airport customs immigration: standing hours in line just to show my passport and answering a random questions like «what’s the purpose of your visit» or «where are you staying». I’ve traveled all over the world and never had to wait so long at customs as I’ve done in the US.
Prices in stores not including taxes. This was quite strange for me. I’d pick out a 2 dollar item and take it to be register, only for them to ask me for 2.5 dollars. This seems absolutely absurd to anyone who’s grown up in Europe. In stores here, the price on the shelf is the price you pay. You have to pay the taxes anyway, so there’s no reason whatsoever to exclude them from the price on the shelf
TV commercial breaks: When watching american shows I’ve always wondered why they so often show the logo and fade to black. Untill I visited the states, that is. They have a commercial break every 7 minutes. It’s absolutely outrageous. In the states it takes 1 hour of TV to show a 30 minute show. For someone who’s used to 22-min shows taking 30 mins and 45 min shows taking 1 hour, this is truly jarring.
Tipping: In restaurants in the US there’s a general expectation to tip generously. This is also quite a foreign to a Norwegian. We only tip if it the service, food and restaurant were all truly above and beyond exceptional, or if you’re a rich guy feeling generous. If for some strange reason we’re paying cash we might tip a little bit to ease the rounding-up, but virtually every single transaction in norway happens by credit- or debitcard, so this isn’t common. Restaurants pay their employees a living wage, and tipping is meant as something extra for something extra great, not just paying someone for doing their job.
USA stories
Well, my first trip (of many) to the US was to LA. Our travel company had us booked into a hotel near to LAX. After checking in, we were escorted across the parking lot to our room by a security guard carrying a rifle. That was a shock!
Other shocking things for me:
1. Lack of exercise and outrageous unhealthy food portions. No wonder the US is the most obese country in the developed world with an obesity rate in excess of 42%.
2. People in Southern California that don’t speak English.
3. The levels of poverty in many of the cities.
4. Your banking system is about 30 years behind the rest of the developed world. (Thankfully, your phone system has caught up more recently).
5. Poor maintenance of infrastructure – ie Roads and Bridges.
6. The News is mostly focussed on local matters – leaving many US citizens with a lack of understanding of global issues.
7. A total misbelief by many US citizens that the rest of the world is somehow behind and in awe of the US.
Edit: It seems that some people here cannot accept reality. In particular, it seems that my experience of being escorted across the parking lot of a hotel near LAX (back in the early 1980’s) can’t possibly have happened! Well, I am very sorry to advise that it really did! If you would like to fund a lie deter test, I will happily oblige on the basis of whoever is wrong, pays the other party $1M.
My original source of the obesity rate was via a yahoo page stating it was 70%, but others have pointed out that according to the WHO, it’s 42%, so I’ve updated it. The main point, still stands.
Women Hitting The Wall #37 – When Women Regret Feminism | The Wall
This is stunning, and so sad.
America simply is in the gutter
Not a European, but an Australian.
I have visited the USA three times, 1998, 2018 and 2022.
In 1998 it seemed fairly bright and shiny, but you didn’t need to get far off the main roads for it to become dirty and ominous. This was LA. The food serving sizes were ridiculously large, and of average quality; we booked a reasonably fancy restaurant once, and I think we paid for food quality, but not much else. The tipping culture is positively feudal. And we couldn’t understand why our credit cards disappeared somewhere at restaurants before coming back with the old carbon form. The people were uniformly cheerful and friendly, that was their default, apart from anyone in a uniform, whose default was stern and unforgiving.
Fast forward 20 years. In Australia, when you pay at a restaurant, if you’re not paying cash they bring the electronic payment machine out to your table and you can tap or insert your card and, if you’ve set up your card to require a PIN, you enter it. In LA again in 2018, payment customs haven’t changed, though it’s clear that there’s an electronic machine back there because they don’t bring out the old carbon slip when they return your card, it’s been printed by a machine. But honestly, if someone took your card out of your sight in Australia, you would strongly suspect they were secretly swiping it for some form of fraud. In other respects, the place was dirtier and in higher disrepair; the decrepitude was on main street. The people were as friendly, but not as automatically forthcoming. And the people in uniforms were nastier as their default.
We had a pretty nice time, then, and again in 2022, but the USA is a place where you really need to be on guard, and heaven forbid you have an encounter with law enforcement, because they take the “enforcement” part into the physical realm far faster than police in Australia or Europe would. The USA, at first hand, is not the land of milk and honey that its citizens would have you believe it is. I’m sure it’s possible to live a happy and peaceful life there, clearly millions do. But the concessions to personal freedom and safety required to do so, and the adoption of so many delusions (of superiority in every field of endeavour) necessary to live that life, are not worth it.
And THAT is the most shocking thing to us about visiting the USA: that those smiling, friendly people are happy living in an increasingly backward, crumbling country because they have been told, since birth, that everywhere else is worse (but it’s phrased as “this place is the best”). And that simply isn’t true.
What did you notice during an interview that made you not want the job?
Filled out an application to work at an airport gift shop. Went to the airport for an interview and got to the point for a drug screen, no problem. Got through that part and received the call that I was hired. I was to show up on Monday morning in khaki pants, a white polo shirt, and comfy shoes. I arrived on time and had to fill out all of the paperwork for taxes, etc. Then I got the uniform ‘receipt” that I was to sign that I had been given two uniform shirts and that I would provide the proper khaki slacks or skirt. AND if I quit or was let go within 90 days, my final paycheck would be deducted $125 for the uniform shirts. What?? No way I was signing that paper work. First of all, I had NOT be given anything and wasn’t going to find out later they didn’t have my size or I should wear my own shirt until more came in – whatever. Nothing had been said prior to this about the uniform policy. I placed my clip board on the chair and went to the restroom to figure this out and calm down a bit. Finally, went back to the office and told them I was sick (pretty much was at how they treat their employees) and had to go home. On my way, received a call from another place I had applied and had an interview the next day with a company who was upfront and did not try to screw new employees.
What surprised you about the USA?
Shocked doesn’t quite cover it. Appalled is closer. The ‘welcome’ at the airport quite takes my breath away. It seems to be assumed that everyone is a terrorist and should be treated like one. The wait was also very long, it isn’t like that in Europe. We should start treating Americans in the same way so they understand how unacceptable it is.
All taxi rides I’ve had remind me of Grand Theft Auto. It seems to be necessary either to be accelerating or braking hard and changing lanes harshly.
The tipping culture is mad, why can’t you just pay the staff a salary and show real prices? Make tips mean something so that they really do reward someone for exceptional service.
prices in shops are strange. The price on the shelf isn’t what you pay because it doesn’t include taxes. That needs to be sorted out!
People seem to be judged by how rich they are, richer people receive better service. Probably due to the tipping culture. Everyone should be treated the same regardless of money, culture and sex.
I have been a few times but won’t return willingly.
i could go on, but I’ve said enough.
Thanks for all of the upvotes ! You have probably noticed that I have turned off comments because not everyone was playing nicely.
UK citizen discusses the United States
I’ll confess that I’ve only visited the USA a single time, back in 1993. We went to New York for our honeymoon.
Generally, I found New York to be quite grimy and also very fast paced. The only thing that truly surprised me was the television service.
In the UK, believe it or not (for any fellow Brits) we show seven minutes of commercials per hour on our commercial channels. (The BBC does not show commercials other than trailers for upcoming shows on its own network.)
We didn’t plan to watch much television, but on the night we arrived after our flight, we were quite tired and wanted to sit down quietly and relax for a bit.
I believe the show we saw was Family Feud (which we know as Family Fortunes in the UK). I may be exaggerating, but this is how it seemed:
…
Theme music, introduction of host.
Commercial break.
Introduction of each family.
Commercial break.
First question. Winner chooses whether to play or pass.
Commercial break.
Rest of winner’s family answer the question.
Commercial break.
Opposing family try to complete the board.
Commercial break.
Second question. Winner chooses whether to play or pass.
Commercial break.
Winner’s family answer the question.
Commercial break.
Opposing family attempt to complete the board.
Commercial break.
Third, fourth, and fifth question as above. Winning family announced.
Commercial break.
Head-to-head player one answers the final questions.
Commercial break.
Head-to-head player two answers the same questions.
Commercial break.
Player two’s answers checked, revealing whether the family have passed the number of points to win the big prize of a car, sponsored by NYC Motors. Keys to the car given to family.
Commercial break.
Host thanks you for watching, credits roll.
Commercial break.
…
If I tell you that the original version of Family Fortunes in the UK which ran from 1980 to 2002 was a half hour show – with a single commercial break, you’ll understand why the USA version seemed overly heavy with commercials. You stretched a half hour show to what seemed like two hours. (In fairness, in 2006 when Family Fortunes was revived in the UK, we managed to string it out to a full hour per show.)
For reference, when 24 starring Keifer Sutherland was broadcast in the UK on our non-commercial channel BBC2, it ran for 40–41 minutes per episode. That kinda ruined the “each episode covers an hour” premise of the show.
These days, I never watch commercial TV live.
I record everything and then fast forward through the breaks. Television advertising used to be rather an art form in the UK – prizes were awarded for the year’s best campaign. These days, with so many channels available, advertisers spend little money on creating their ads and they’re not worth watching. Life is too short for commercial breaks.
Men are no longer seeking relationships of any kind & people are in DENIAL!
Major changed to the Western society is in process. Japan was the “canary in the coal mine”, and Holy Fuck! Listen and watch this video.
Great video
So many average guys are MGTOW, and don’t even know what the term means.
When I was in middle school, perhaps 9th grade of so I had many various chores around the house. One of them was to take care of the dogs. They lived in the backyard. It was a fenced in area, and they were “outside” dogs.
Every morning, my job was to pick up the “last night” empty food bowls and bring them onto the porch. That way, my mother would get them and clean them up. After that, I would go though the yard to the back alley and make my way to school, or on the weekend; to work.
One day, after I got ready for school. All dressed up with clean clothes, I went to the back and picked up the metal doggies bowls when my bigger dog “Belle” ran up though the muddy back yard and leaped up into my chest.
Now, Belle was a Siberian Husky. Not a huge dog, but big enough, and just about knocked me down. So there I was covered in mud, and the dog was happy as could be. But I was late for school, covered in mud, and screaming at the poor dog.
All that screaming and hollering brought my neighbor a running. He was a medic during the Vietnam war. And perhaps was ready to prep me for surgery. LOL.
Long story short, the neighbor left chucking. I went to class covered in mud and dog shit. I was the butt of jokes all day, and when I came home, my parents yelled at me for being so “poorly dressed” during class. Butt of jokes at school. Berated by my parents for lack of awareness. (And I am sure that my sister did her best to make me look pathetic and stupid in their eyes; embellishing and lies for grand effect.) And thus, endith my story.
People!
Never get caught muddy and covered in dog shit because you have chores to do. Take your time. Organize yourself. And stand up for the situations that assault you.
Today…
Disturbing
Have you ever been invited to something that turned out to be another thing entirely?
I had a friend at work who kept wanting my husband and me to come over for dinner with her and her husband. Finally, I accepted her invitation although my husband wasn’t too keen about it as he had never met them and he wasn’t exactly comfortable in social situations.
When we arrived there was no smell of dinner cooking but were offered drinks to start the evening. A few minutes later some other couples arrived and they too were handed drinks. I thought it would only be the four of us but realized that more people meant my husband wouldn’t be put on the spot to talk just with my friend’s husband.
As others were chatting we noticed that everyone else was getting along pretty well and I felt good knowing this was a congenial group. Shortly after, I was chatted up by a man I did not know. “Oh good, I finally get to meet someone,” I thought. I look around and see a panicked look on my husband’s face. I excused myself from my new gentleman friend and went to my hubby’s rescue. “We have to go,” he whispered. “What’s wrong?” I said. “Don’t ask”, he said. We just have to go, NOW!” I went to my friend and told her my husband didn’t feel well and that we would have to take a raincheck for dinner.
Come to find out, dinner was not what we expected. There was to be no dinner at all. The evening was to be a wife-swapping party and we were as shocked as anyone would be!
I never mentioned a thing to my friend but neither did we accept a ‘dinner’ invitation from them again!
Funny
Have you ever had to put an elderly person in their place?
Well, we tried once.
When my dad was about 90, a neighbor once chewed our ear off about our dad still driving. He never went over 25 mph, he could be seen looking out over the crops rather than paying attention to the road, we needed to take his keys, for his own safety.
We had thought about this before. And Moses and I strategized, planned out exactly what to say, made a plan for Dad getting wherever he needed to go (Mo had two 20 something boys at home at the time.)
We were ready. I came home for the weekend, and Friday night, after dinner, Mo began with, “Dad, we’d like to talk about your driving.”
And that was as far as it went. Dad turned the sheer blue ice glare he had always had on both of us before replying, “No, we do not. I maintain a very safe speed, a lot safer speed than the dang fools who blow their horn and fly on around me, like the one who complained to you. (Didn’t miss a trick, that old man.) I know my own facilities, and if I should ever need to quit driving, I will tell you about it.”
Then he gave his newspaper the trademark shake that signaled disapproval, and the subject was done. Mo looked at me; I looked at him, and like the pig, cow, and sheep in The Little Red Hen, we both screamed silently , “Not I! Not I Not !!”
We had high hopes for the next year, when his license was up for renewal. When he walked out of DMV with a new one, we immediately sought out Laura, the DMV employee who we had been counting on.
“Mo, he passed the vision test with ease. . He passed the written test with a score of 90. Nothing I could do. Sorry.”
He never caused an accident. He never went further than the Food Lion in town, or the barber shop. And, when he died at almost 95, a valid VA driver’s license was in his wallet.
There are some things you just don’t mess with, folks.
It’s an American quickie
What happens when a person falls off a US Navy aircraft carrier?
A carrier will not execute a Williamson turn (or even an Anderson Turn or Scharnow Turn). Imagine bobbing in the water and seeing 90,000 tons of steel bearing down on you as the carrier attempts to “return to the approximate point in the water where the person went over”!
As a Tactical Action Officer, I was responsible for the tactical operation and safety of the ship (not to be confused with the navigational safety of the ship, which is handled from the bridge). The immediate response of the carrier to a man overboard is handled by the bridge and engineering. Basically, as indicated in other responses, if the man overboard call is timely, they will attempt to stop the propellers, and maneuver to clear away from the man.
Under normal conditions, the carrier is accompanied by escort vessels. During flight operations, there is usually a plane guard helicopter (sometimes a plane guard destroyer). Therefore, when a man falls overboard, it is the helicopter or escort vessel that is assigned to recover the person.
In the rare event that the carrier is operating alone (transiting?), then the carrier would come to a stop, and deploy the motor whaleboats to recover the man overboard.
Been there … Done that
When we were transiting home from Japan, we sailed through the tail end of a typhoon. We were alerted that we had a man overboard. However, it was not based on a visual sighting, but from a sailor missing from his post. We came to a stop, and deployed helicopters and escort ships to search for the missing sailor. As noted in other posts, the chances of finding someone, particularly in heavy weather, is very remote. As nightfall approached, we continued the search with helicopters, but ordered the escorts to continue the transit home. After 36 hours, we discontinued the search. Although our escorts had a 24 hour headstart, we were able to kick up our transit speed (one of the benefits of being on a nuclear carrier) and catch up with them before we returned home.
We never found the sailor.
How he got his money
What is the most embarrassing thing that happened to you while you were swimming?
I 18 at the time and I suffered from social anxiety a bit (I was able to go everywhere and do everything, but felt like everybody was watching and judging me so I was extremely shy and inhibited. I overcame that with some help later, luckily).
One morning I woke up earlier than usual and decided to go to the public swimming pool. It was only 7.00 AM when I got there and as expected, there were maybe five other people swimming in that 50*15 m swimming pool, all in their seventies so I was nearly by myself. Great! I was wearing my new swimsuit, rather modestly cut, with broad striped in white and blue.
I swam for half an hour, then I decided to get out and go home. I was approaching the ladder when I noticed that the white stripes were entirely see-through when they were wet. Well, never mind, only a few grannies around, I´ll just be quick.
Then I heard something. I turned around and saw a group of 40 recruits (all men between 18 and 20) had walked in with their instructor and most of them had plenty of time to let their eyes wander around because they were waiting in a queue to jump off the 10m board.
I decided to keep swimming until they left.
(Today I would just get out anyway but as I said, I was having some trouble at the time.)
What was it like seeing the kid you bullied again years later?
In second year high school, there was this kid who we thought he acted flamboyantly gay. He denied, vehemently, being gay, but we all assumed he was. He was mercilessly bullied for it. A different era, different attitude, culture, you name it… it’s no excuse! I stood by and let it happen. Didn’t actually bully the guy, but I did make a joke at his expense once. Made the whole class laugh. Felt good at the time, now makes me think I was a total piece of shit… anyway…
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He transferred classes, after a few months of bullying. After that, he changed schools and completely disappeared off the radar altogether. For years, I did not see the guy or know what became of him…
Years later, I ran into him in a restaurant somewhere. He had gotten tall. Really tall. I barely recognized him, his face was completely different, too. He was now muscular. His jaw had gotten wide, he had grown a bit of stubble and he looked very, very handsome and masculine… I was in shock.
I’m not a bad-looking guy myself, nor am I short, but he towered over me and in that moment, he made me feel small. And not because of him being so tall, but because of how genuinely friendly he was, because of how he shook my hand, smiled at me and told me of his life after school, and how he did not seem to carry any resentment…
He was well-dressed, and was doing amazing in his career. He had traveled all around the world, had gotten himself into adventures everywhere. With regards to his personal life, he never volunteered any information, nor did I ask. It really didn’t matter anymore at this point. He cracked jokes, exchanging hearty banter like the best of them, he was genuinely warm and I just felt overwhelmed with guilt and sadness, in awe of what this guy who had once seemed like a helpless victim of our undeserved ridicule had become…
It was hard for me to do so, but eventually, I told him I was sorry for having bullied him. I told him again of the joke I made, he must have remembered, and I apologized. Profusely. He just, nodded.
He told me, and I’ll never forget his words:
“Comments like yours toughened me up to the world. You weren’t anywhere near the worst of them. For years I hated you all, but it pushed me into the gym, and it pushed me to be my best, and now I can face you and say to you I do not hold a single syllable against you. I would not be proud of who I am right now if not for those words you and other said to me.”
The guy we bullied for his perceived lack of masculinity? Turns out in the end, he’s the manliest of all.
Learning
What is that one picture that describes the lowest point in your life?
This picture right here.
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I love this picture. I took this picture of me and my fiancee Olivia in March of 2017. We were taking a walk in downtown Greensboro, and I decided I wanted to get a quick picture of us. We were so happy. She had just recently passed the bar and was about to start her first job as a lawyer. I was as proud of her as I could ever be. She had worked so hard to get to this point, and she was about to start seeing the rewards for all of her hard work.
I also hate this picture, because it is the last picture I ever took of us together. Just seven weeks after I took this picture, Olivia was driving home from work when she lost control of her car, slid off of the road and into a tree. She was killed instantly. This picture represents the last time I was happy, the last time I had the love of my life in my life.
The first year after the accident was the worst. I woke up every single day and wondered if this was going to be the day. Would this be the day that I couldn’t think of a reason to keep going? I sank deeper and deeper into depression, I put on 80 pounds, my blood pressure shot through the roof…I thought about killing myself every single day, and every day I found a reason not to do it, but in reality I was slowly killing myself anyway. I was eating myself to death, drinking myself to death…I was in a bottomless pit, and every day it got a little deeper.
That was the first year. There’s no real way of knowing if there would have been a second full year if something hadn’t changed. But then one day, shortly after I got home from work, I got a text from my niece. My niece Caty is my brother’s only child, and she is like a daughter to me. My brother passed away from leukemia 19 years ago, when she was only 4 years old, so I have been the most positive male role model in her life since then. Anyway, Caty had texted me to ask me if I would walk her down the aisle at her wedding later this year.
Suddenly I no longer needed to come up with a new reason to keep going each day, because for the first time in a year I had something to look forward to. I looked at myself in the mirror, and I was disgusted with what I saw. There was no way in hell I was going to walk her down that aisle in the condition I was in. So I went to the doctor, I got on medication for my blood pressure and for my depression, I started eating a little healthier, cut out all of the drinking, and I dropped 100 pounds in a year. I feel healthier now than I have in years.
The depression is still there. The pain, the hurt, the loss, the emptiness…they are all still there. I know they will never go away. The meds help me deal with them, help me to suppress them, but they are still there under the surface. I can function now, so that’s something. So that picture up above, that represents the start of the darkest period in my life, the lowest point in my life. The picture below was taken this past March, almost exactly two years after the one up above.
There’s a lot more gray in my beard now, and a lot less hope in my eyes. I’m almost smiling in this picture, but make no mistake…this picture represents the lowest point in my life. Every single day of the last 781 days has been the lowest day of my life, because it’s been one more day without the love of my life in it.
EDIT: I was trying to reply to all of the comments, even if it was just a simple thank you. I couldn’t keep up, so I decided to reply here instead. Thank you to everyone who took a moment to comment, to give me some kind of words of hope or encouragement. Thank you to everyone who was touched in some way by this, or who cared enough to respond. Thank you to everyone who took the time not just to comment but to send me personal messages of encouragement. And if you read this, even if you didn’t comment or message me or respond in any way, I still say thank you for reading it. For a moment, just that small moment, Olivia’s name was on your mind, you saw her picture, you thought about her, and for just that moment she was remembered. That probably sounds pretty cheesy, but it means more to me than you can imagine.
Update 11/23/19: So I originally posted this answer on July 8th of this year. I added the first update on August 13th, which also happened to be my birthday. I was amazed at the sheer volume of support I received on this one. I had written many different answers where I talked about Olivia, where I shared her story. I got some very sweet and encouraging comments on all of those, and a few messages from people, but nothing like the response I got from this single post. It has been humbling, and it has been beautiful. I have tried to read every single comment and every single message, although I had to stop replying to them all a few months ago. It was just consuming too much of my time. But I want you all to know how much I appreciate every single one of you that has taken the time to reach out, taken the time to let me know that our story touched you in some way. There have also been a few negative comments, some that were even mean, and a fair bit of spam, but the vast majority has been so lovely and encouraging.
So with all of that said, I wanted to give you an update on my life. As I mentioned, I received a lot of messages from people in addition to all the comments I received. I was trying to keep up with them all for a while, trying to send some kind of reply, even if it was only a few words of thanks, but it got to be too much, although I still do read them all. But then a couple of months ago I received a message that gave me pause, and it touched me so much I had to read it a second time. This message was from someone else who had just recently lost their own fiance unexpectedly, who was struggling with the grief and the pain, and just wanted to let me know that my story was inspiring. It brought literal tears to my eyes reading this message, and I felt compelled to reply. I had no idea who this person was , if it was a man or a woman, young or old, I knew nothing other than this was a heart in pain, and I needed to let this person know that I understood, that I grieved for their loss. Maybe try to offer some words of comfort from the perspective of someone who actually understood that pain and knows what words are comforting and what words ring hollow.
I didn’t expect to hear anything back after that initial reply, but to my surprise I got another message, to which I also replied, and pretty soon we were writing each other almost every day, talking about the losses we had both experienced, with me offering words of comfort and advice. This blossomed into a lovely friendship, and we decided to connect on social media as well.
By this point we had learned a lot more about each other. My mystery writer was a beautiful young woman with a beautiful heart. I realized after a while that I was falling for her, which brought me a lot of guilt. Finally one day I went to visit Olivia’s grave, to talk to her, to tell her what I was feeling. I told her that I would always love her, that she would always be the love of my life, and that no one would ever replace her in my heart. I also told her that I needed to continue living, that I need to let this new person create her own place in my heart. I told her that she would never be replaced, but this new woman I was falling in love with would also understand that,and that I would be sharing her heart with her lost love the same way she would share my heart with Olivia. The only thing left to do now was to tell the new woman in my life how I felt.
I got really lucky y’all, because she was feeling the same things. So yeah, we are in love, we are happy, and we are making plans for the future. I will never “get over” Olivia, I will never stop hurting, stop missing her, stop wishing she was still in my life. But that doesn’t mean I can’t love again, that I can’t live again. And I hope that if anyone reads this who has gone through this type of pain, who is still going through it, I hope you take that message away with you. You can find happiness again if you open your heart to the possibility.
Thank you all for your support and encouragement.
5/15/21 – Final Edit: Wow, so much has happened since I wrote my last edit on this answer. Life has changed so much. The world has changed so much. But I did want to provide one last update, at least partially because I received so many comments and PMs requesting another update.
So, in my last update I told you all about how I met another kindred spirit who had gone through the same type of loss that I had, and how we connected and ultimately fell in love. What I didn’t mention at the time, however, was that we had one huge obstacle – we lived 9000 miles apart. See, I was living in Greensboro, NC at the time, and she was living in the Metro Manila region of the Philippines. This made things more difficult, but it was manageable. We spent hours on Skype every single day, talking and getting to know each other, getting closer every day.
We were both anxious to meet in person, so I bought a ticket to fly out to the Philippines and spend a few weeks with her there. There was only one problem…I was scheduled to land there on March 15th, 2020. Anyone who has been, well, awake for the last year should spot the problem there immediately. Yes, the day we were supposed to finally meet was the same day that Manila went on lock down due to the pandemic.
“It’s ok,” we both said, “this will be under control in a month or two, we’ll reschedule then.”
While we waited for everything to get back to normal, we continued to Skype every day. We would start a call after we finished work each day (she works for a company here in the US, so we actually work almost identical hours) and usually be on that call for the rest of the night. During that time I met her family digitally, and she met mine. There were weekends where we would literally have an eight hour Skype call, log off to sleep for a few hours then spend another eight hours on our next call.
Finally, in February of this year, we started looking into alternative options for where we could meet each other. Her coming to the US or me going to the Philippines were both off the table since Visa services were still suspended for both countries, but we knew that there were countries that we could both get Visas for, so we did some research, and settled on Turkey.
And thus, a little over a year after the date we were originally supposed to finally meet one another, we finally met in person at the airport in Istanbul. When I say I was nervous, that is an understatement. I mean, at this point we had known each other for a year and a half, we had helped each other through the worst pain you can imagine, we had fallen in love against all odds…and yet I was nervous. What if we were uncomfortable around each other? What if she saw me in person and realized that she didn’t like what she saw? What if it was all just so awkward? What if…then I saw her. She had arrived a couple of hours before me, and she was waiting near the baggage carousel my luggage was coming in on. As soon as I walked up to her I think we both started crying a little, I wrapped my arms around her, and I swear I never wanted to let go.
We had planned to spend two weeks in Turkey. We ended up staying five weeks instead, and even then neither one of us really wanted to leave. As soon as we were together, all of those fears, all of that nervousness, it was just washed away. Even though it was our first meeting in person, we had already spent a year and a half getting to know each other, and so we were immediately comfortable together, we knew each other so well that within moments of meeting it felt like we had been together for years. And I realized very quickly that I couldn’t imagine my life without her in it.
And so on April 2nd, 2021, just five days after we arrived in Istanbul, I asked her to marry me and she said yes. I am so incredibly happy that I have this amazing, beautiful woman in my life.
There was a time when I felt completely broken. I felt – no, I knew – that I would never love again. I was at my lowest point, I was literally praying each night that I just wouldn’t wake up the next morning. I had no desire to live, felt that I had nothing left to live for. My niece snapped me out of that when she asked me to walk her down the aisle, but I still felt empty, alone. I wasn’t trying to live again, I was simply no longer actively trying to kill myself through neglect and abuse.
Now – now I want to live life, I want to enjoy life, I want to share my life with this amazing woman who understands me in ways no one else ever could, and who accepts me for who I am, flaws and all. She understands how broken I was, because she was broken as well, but somehow when we picked up all of our broken pieces and put them back together, we found that we were actually two halves of the same puzzle.
So – on to the main reason for this final update. I have been so amazed by the level of support this post has received, the number of people who have reached out to share their own stories of loss, and to tell me that my story has given them hope, or at the very least touched something in their heart. That has meant so much to me, more than any of you could possibly know. And after my last update, so many of those people wanted two things…they wanted to hear more stories about me and my new love, my Macy…and they wanted to see a picture of us together. I guess it was kind of a full circle kind of thing – this started with the picture at the lowest point in my life, now they want to see me at my new high point.
"NGOs that have been working in our country for 30 years were not registered anywhere.
They were not accountable to anyone.
They just opened bank accounts, took money from foreign donors and used it as they saw fit, including for personal purposes.
From now on they will be registered with the Ministry of Justice like everyone else.
They will open bank accounts. They will start to work openly. There will be no more confusion.
The question is why foreign donors against this law.
Our non-governmental organizations are deceiving them.
They spread false information, saying 'we will be persecuted, we will be arrested as agents of a foreign state'.
And the donors believed it. That is why they are asking me not to sign this law.
You have been working with foreign donors for 30 years and no one has prosecuted you for taking money. Are we going to start doing that now?
As the Head of State, I guarantee there will be no persecution.
We are not a nuclear power.
We are not going to fly into space yet.
Our state has no secrets to hide from you and your donors. All our information is in the public domain.
If you can, get billions, not millions. It will only benefit our country.
We just want to show everything openly, so that everyone is working on equal terms.
Then foreign donors will be able to see how much money has been used and for what projects. And they will not be deceived.
Before this, you deceived them by saying that you organized round tables, spent money on training, and implemented projects.
Meanwhile, the funds were used for your personal interests.
If you say it is not true, I can prove it.
Why do non-governmental organizations in developed Western countries register with the Ministry of Justice, the Tax Service, open a bank account and not do the same when they come to us?
Or are we a second-class country?
No, we are not.
We will no longer allow such dubious actions."
Excerpt from the statement by by Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov on his Facebook page regarding the adoption by the Kyrgyz Republic of a law on non-governmental organizations (NGOs), April 2, 2024.
Cranberry-Orange Wings
Yummy
Yield: 8 to 12 servings
Ingredients
3 to 5 pounds chicken wings
1/2 cup orange juice
1/2 cup soy sauce
1/4 cup packed dark brown sugar
1/2 cup jellied cranberry sauce, melted
Dash of Tabasco sauce
Instructions
Arrange chicken wings in a shallow nonreactive container.
In a medium size bowl, combine orange juice, soy sauce, cranberry sauce and Tabasco sauce; mix well.
Pour sauce over chicken wings.
Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for several hours or overnight. Turn wings occasionally to marinate evenly.
Lift wings from marinade and place on shallow baking pan.
Bake in preheated 350 degrees F oven for 50 to 60 minutes, or until tender. Baste frequently with reserved marinade during baking.
Rollo RED PILLED Tim On The DECLINE Of Modern Women!
Don’t Underestimate the World’s Second-Biggest Economy
For over two decades, China’s phenomenal economic performance impressed and alarmed much of the world, including the United States, its top trading partner. But since 2019, China’s sluggish growth has led many observers to conclude that China has already peaked as an economic power.
’s rise will continue point to the country’s weak household spending, its declining private investment, and its entrenched deflation. Sooner than overtake the United States, they argue, China would likely enter a long recession, perhaps even a lost decade.
But this dismissive view of the country underestimates the resilience of its economy. While its growth has slowed in recent years, China is likely to expand at twice the rate of the United States in the years ahead.
MISREADING THE DATA
Several misconceptions undergird the pessimism about China’s economic potential. Take the widely held misconception that the Chinese economy’s progress in converging with the size of the U.S. economy has stalled. It is true that from 2021 to 2023, China’s GDP fell from 76 percent of U.S. GDP to 67 percent. Yet it is also true that by 2023, China’s GDP was 20 percent bigger than it had been in 2019, the eve of the global pandemic, while the United States’ was only 8 percent bigger.
This apparent paradox can be explained by two factors. First, over the last few years, inflation has been lower in China than it has been in the United States. Last year, China’s nominal GDP grew by 4.6 percent, less than the 5.2 percent that its GDP grew in real terms. In contrast, because of high inflation, U.S. nominal GDP in 2023 grew by 6.3 percent, while real GDP grew by only 2.5 percent.
Moreover, the U.S. Federal Reserve has raised interest rates by over five percentage points since March 2022, from 0.25 percent to 5.5 percent, making dollar-denominated assets more attractive to global investors and boosting the value of the dollar relative to alternative currencies. Meanwhile, China’s central bank cut its base interest rate from 3.70 percent to 3.45 percent. The growing gap between Chinese and U.S. interest rates reversed what had been a large inflow of foreign capital into China, ultimately depressing the value of the renminbi vis-à-vis the dollar by ten percent. Converting a smaller nominal GDP to dollars at a weakened exchange rate results in a decline in the value of China’s GDP when measured in dollars relative to U.S. GDP.
But these two factors are likely to be transitory. U.S. interest rates are now declining relative to rates in China, reducing the incentive of investors to convert renminbi into dollar-denominated assets. As a result, the depreciation of the Chinese currency has begun to reverse. The International Monetary Fund forecasts that Chinese prices will pick up this year, which would boost China’s GDP measured in renminbi. Its nominal GDP measured in U.S. dollars will almost certainly resume converging toward that of the United States this year and is likely to surpass it in about a decade.
A second misconception is that household income, spending, and consumer confidence in China is weak. The data do not support this view. Last year, real per capita income rose by 6 percent, more than double the growth rate in 2022, when the country was in lockdown, and per capita consumption climbed by nine percent. If consumer confidence were weak, households would curtail consumption, building up their savings instead. But Chinese households did just the opposite last year: consumption grew more than income, which is possible only if households reduced the share of their income going to savings.
A third misconception is that price deflation has become entrenched in China, putting the country on course toward recession. Yes, consumer prices rose only 0.2 percent last year, which gave rise to the fear that households would reduce consumption in anticipation of still lower prices—thereby reducing demand and slowing growth. This has not happened because core consumer prices (meaning those for goods and services besides food and energy) actually increased by 0.7 percent.
The prices of tools and raw materials used to produce other goods did fall in 2023, reflecting global declines in the price of energy and other internationally traded commodities as well as relatively weak demand in China for some industrial goods, potentially undermining the incentive for firms to invest in expanding their productive capacity. Rather than pump money into their businesses, the thinking went, companies would use their declining profits to pay down debt. But here, too, the very opposite came to pass: Chinese corporations ramped up borrowing, both in absolute terms and as a share of GDP. And investment in manufacturing, mining, utilities, and services increased. No recession appears on the horizon.
Another misconception concerns the potential for a collapse in property investment. These fears are not entirely misplaced; they are supported by data on housing starts, the number of new buildings on which construction has begun, which in 2023 was half what it was in 2021. But one has to look at the context. In that same two-year period, real estate investment fell by only 20 percent, as developers allocated a greater share of such outlays to completing housing projects they had started in earlier years. Completions expanded to 7.8 billion square feet in 2023, eclipsing housing starts for the first time. It helped that government policy encouraged banks to lend specifically to housing projects that were almost finished; a general easing of such constraints on bank loans to property developers would have compounded the property glut.
Finally, there is the misconception that Chinese entrepreneurs are discouraged and moving their money out of the country. Undoubtedly, the government crackdown that began in late 2020 on large private companies, notably Alibaba, did not help matters. From the beginning of economic reform in 1978 through the mid-2010s, private investment in China grew more rapidly than investment by state-owned firms. By 2014, private investment composed almost 60 percent of all investment—up from virtually zero percent in 1978. As private investment is generally more productive than that of state companies, its expanding share of total investment was critical to China’s rapid growth over this period. This trend went into reverse after 2014 when Xi Jinping
, having just assumed the top leadership position, aggressively redirected resources to the state sector. The slowdown was modest at first, but by 2023, private investment accounted for only 50 percent of total investment. Xi had undermined investor confidence; entrepreneurs no longer saw the government as a dependable steward of the economy. So long as Xi is in power, runs a common argument, entrepreneurs will continue to hold back on investing in China, opting instead to funnel their wealth out of the country.
But here again, the pessimism is not supported by the data. First, almost all the decline in the private share of total investment after 2014 resulted from a correction in the property market, which is dominated by private companies. When real estate is excluded, private investment rose by almost ten percent in 2023. Although some prominent Chinese entrepreneurs have left the country, more than 30 million private companies remain and continue to invest. Moreover, the number of family businesses, which are not officially classified as companies, expanded by 23 million in 2023, reaching a total of 124 million enterprises employing about 300 million people.
REAL CHALLENGES AHEAD
Although China is beset by many problems, including those resulting from Xi’s efforts to exert greater control over the economy, exaggerating these problems serves no one. It could even lead to complacency in the face of the very real challenges that China presents to the West.
That is particularly true for the United States. China will likely continue to contribute about a third of the world’s economic growth while increasing its economic footprint, particularly in Asia. If U.S. policymakers underappreciate this, they are likely to overestimate their own ability to sustain the deepening of economic and security ties with Asian partners.
Andrew speaks his piece
Does not being a graduate from IIT or NIT qualify you as a loser for life?
I believe there are only five reasons why you can be a LOSER in life :-
Didn’t work or deliver your whole potential & still don’t recognize that
Burying your head in the sand. Not recognizing or accepting weaknesses and faults or making excuses
Hitting a woman no matter how grave the provocation (Male). Filing a false case of Dowry Harrassment against In Laws (Female)
Whitewashing the crimes of the White Man perpetrated on the world in greed for his dollars.
Shamelessly fawning on people who make 20 Crore to enable them to make 200 Crore a year while you make 2 Lakh a year
Nobody else is a LOSER
When I was a Student, we considered ECONOMICS to be a part of ARTS
Today the whole world acknowledges that Economics is a SCIENCE and has a lot of Math & Calculus too.
Likewise we regard Language to be a part of the Arts, however the same language is used for Ciphers and Cryptography and shows how it can be used for SCIENCE
Accountancy was once regarded different from Science but now it’s clear Accounting has a manner and method to it
Even Marketing and Sales has its own Strategy that is based and steeped in SCIENCE
My point is :-
Your brain must be steeped and honed properly
You must see manner and method in everything
Even Cooking has a lot of Science
The very fact that hot milk dissolves more sugar than cold milk is a science involving solubility of solutions
Apply logic without blindly following statements. Assume every Statement is a lie and use logic to prove it it possibly true.
You do this and that’s all you need in life for a superior brain
IIT, NITs are just alphabets in such a case
America today
What is nightlife in Japan like?
Let’s say you finish work at 6 pm.
Congratulations! You’ve managed to clear that pile of work within regular hours. Today was indeed a productive day.
As you close your laptop and prepare to leave, you notice your boss still at his desk, along with most of your colleagues.
If you’ve been in Japan long enough, this sight should remind you to sit back down and unpack your bag quietly.
Do you have plans to meet your girlfriend? Text her next time.
Did you make dinner reservations? Convenience store food is enough for you.
Do you have a TV show you were looking forward to? You’ll catch the rerun online later.
Your nightlife is right here — staying at the office with everyone until the bosses leave.
This is the nightlife that matters most to you.
In the Japanese workplace, there’s a common practice of “pretend overtime.”
This includes situations where you might be there for extended hours without accomplishing much or feeling pressured to stay late just because your boss hasn’t left yet.
Even if you’ve completed your tasks for the day on schedule, you’re not permitted to leave until your boss says, “You can go home now.” Until your supervisor clocks out, you’re stuck at the office, even if you’re sitting there idly. You end up staying until late into the night, finding ways to pass the time, like reading manuals or making memo pads out of scrap paper.
You’re not allowed to leave until your boss leaves the office, and it’s essential to make sure your boss sees you reading documents or typing on your keyboard. If your boss asks, “Aren’t you leaving yet?” you respond by saying there are still a few things you need to prepare; thus, he recognizes your “presence.”
You don’t have much work that requires overtime. If you work efficiently, you can get it done before the end of the workday. You’re not looking to be your boss’s favorite, but you worry that people might perceive you as lacking ambition and dedication if you don’t do what others are doing. So, you end up staying in the office instead of leaving, even when you could.
In Japan, it’s common for companies to equate working overtime with dedication and hard work. The longer you stay at the office into the night, the more committed you appear.
Look, it’s time to hop onto the last train home.
Welcome to our unique nightlife culture.
Pre-birth world-line template
What was the reason for your migration?
I usually migrated for career reasons:
from Germany to Canada because I got into a university there;
from Canada to the US because I got a first job offer there;
from the US to France because I got a better job offer there;
from France back to Germany because I got into a master’s program there;
from Germany to England because I was offered a full-time lecturer position there;
from England to New Zealand because I was offered a position as academic leader at a university there;
from New Zealand to China and India because I was offered a position as a dean at a university there, in the employ of a French university.
That was the pinnacle of the achievable in my career. After that, feeling like I no longer needed to prove anything, I decided I’d now find a position somewhere in the comfortable middle field of my career, where I would benefit from my experience without getting too stressed out, in a reasonable country that I loved.
So I went back to England as a senior lecturer at a university, and lived and worked there happily while maintaining a holiday home in Sweden, where my Chinese wife and I went during the long summer and winter holidays.
And then Brexit came, taking away all the certainties of my position in England and all the research funding and partnerships, so the time had come again to move to secure my professional future, and I eventually found a senior lecturer position at a university in Sweden, in commuting distance of my house.
Long story shot: Dangling carrots at first, long term outlook and sympathy later were what made me migrate.
I think it’s what most people migrate for: A better life. Not that mine would have been bad where I was. But when you can get better, well… of course you go.
And of course it wasn’t only for the CV. Often, there were romantic notions attached, a sense of adventure, the thought that a new world with a different language, culture, climate, and cuisine would be inspiring to experience.
Obsolete Car Features From The Past
If you could choose one defunct automotive manufacturer to revive as a brand, which company would you choose and why?
I sort of miss Oldsmobile.
They were always an interesting, understated brand with nice cars that seemed a bit like Buicks for people with university degrees. Especially the Toronado, I thought, was wonderful. An interesting and different sort of car, with front wheel drive at a time when not many dared, and especially not in conjunction with a big V8 engine.
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I had two Oldsmobiles myself. One of them, a 1973 Delta 88, was a real miracle of reliability and economy for its age and size.
I also lament that Pontiac is gone, having one myself. It always seemed like Chevrolet with an apache flavour to me. The Native American brand, if you will. That was cool.
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Mine is just a dressed up Caprice for the Canadian market, but it does have that vibe.
I can’t believe it’s gone. It used to be the other defining agent in the Swedish car duality game. It’s as if someone were to remove Holden or Ford from the Australian context. Such a huge vacuum has been left.
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Maybe they can come back as hydrogen hybrids some day.
Teen Opera Singer Reacts To Dio – Last In Line
Dio and I are the same age. Too bad he passed on. This is a wonderful reaction. Not too many interruptions, and genuine love.
What was the most brutal military tactic in history?
I am going to tell my favorite Roman story here. One of those events that is just so weird it sticks with you forever. It was a brutal moment in history and one very few people have been heard of.
Background
The Romans first invaded Britain when Julius Caesar set about conquering the Island. He found that it was poor, hard to get to, and packed with warlike tribes. So after winning a few battles he appointed the local leader a “vassal” of Rome and left.
This didn’t stick and the Romans forgot about Britannia for many decades.
Then Claudius takes the throne some 80 years later. Claudius is smart, wise, and careful but the people of Rome consider him a weak idiot. So to win glory Claudius invades Britannia and adds it to the Empire as a new province.
Things do not go very smoothly though.
The locals are not very cool with their land being conquered and they resist. In addition, Britannia is far away and Rome has to make significant efforts to convince Romans to colonize Britannia.
The largest tribe, the Iceni, remain somewhat independent. When their chief dies in 60 AD he leaves his lands to the Romans and his 2 daughters. This is meant to serve as a peaceful transition into the Roman Empire with his daughter still at the head of the tribe.
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The Romans don’t see it this way though and move in on Iceni lands. They began to pillage Iceni lands, taking the men as slaves and raping the women. The chief’s daughters were also raped. When their mother, a woman named Boudica, tried to stop the Romans she was stripped naked publicly and whipped.
This horrid action would have consequences though.
Now 17 years after Rome first established itself on the island things would escalate quickly and one of the most brutal chapters in Roman history began.
My favorite part
Gaius Suetonius Paulinus is the governor of Britain. He is a man of middling skill but he is loyal and capable enough. His goal is to establish Roman control over the island
Paulinus has a plan to establish more control over Britain. There is an island off the Northern coast of Wales that has extreme religious significance to the locals. If he could control that island he could establish more control over the locals.
With a legion in tow, he sets out to conquer the Island (Anglesey).
As the Romans arrive off the shore and start moving to the beach they notice something strange. On the shore, there are people – thousands of them.
These men aren’t warriors though. They are dressed in black and reaching their hands towards the while and chanting. In between the ranks of chanting people, there are women, cloaked in black and dashing about with torches.
The sight is shocking and the Romans freeze – nobody knows what to make of it so they just stare in fear.
The women start screaming like animals and begin to charge towards the Romans.
Still the Romans are frozen at the sight.
Paulinus starts to shout insults at the men to get them moving. The legions advanced and cut the women to pieces – it is no contest.
The Romans then make it to shore and cut down the men that were chanting
After a few minutes, the beach is taken and the Romans look around. They soon notice they are not standing on a beach, they are standing on a giant funeral pyre.
A torch-wielding woman then appears and lights the pyre. The many injured druids are engulfed by the flames and cry out in agony.
The Romans now realize what happened. They had just been tricked into engaging in a religious act of human sacrifice.
This TERRIFIED THEM beyond what we can imagine.
You see, the Romans were a religious/superstitious bunch. They believed that the gods of foreigners were as real as their own. Curses, sacrifices, and deals with the gods were all totally valid things in the Roman world.
To them – this was going to have a significant impact on the world around them.
Stories started flooding in that rivers were running red for no reason and that a statue of Mars collapsed without cause.
The Romans in Britain were afraid.
The Druid gods appreciated the sacrifice because things suddenly shifted drastically in favor of the local peoples.
Boudica, the wife of the dead Iceni chief, had taken to the warpath. She gathered the local leaders and tribes and they decided to revolt and cast off the influence of Rome.
They didn’t even farm that year. They dedicated themselves entirely to preparing for war.
When they were ready they struck hard and fast.
Boudica first struck Camulodonum. As the leaders of Camulodonum noticed the approaching army the requested help from Longthroppe and Londinium (modern London).
Longthroppe took it seriously and sent their garrison but Londinium only sent 200 unarmed slaves as an insult.
When the garrison from Longthorpe arrived it was too late. The city of Camulodonum was destroyed completely. Every single person was killed. The women were raped, the men were slaughtered, and the city was looted.
It is recorded that the Roman women were hung up naked and had their removed breasts sewed to their mouths so it appeared as though they were eating them.
It was horrific. This garrison from Longthorpe thought they were dealing with a smaller revolt. To their horror, they found the entire Iceni tribe mobilized– some 75,000 warriors. The garrison was immediately overwhelmed and ran for their lives.
Paulinus now gets word what is happening. He takes his men and heads straight for Boudica.
He requests that the second legion on the island join him, but they refuse. So he requests that every retired legionary able to hold a sword join his ranks immediately.
With this his army swells to 10,000 – but he is still drastically outnumbered.
Boudica now arrives at Londinium and repeats her actions at Camulodonum.
Boudica’s plan was clear – ethnic cleansing.
Paulinus decides to try and save lives. He begins going city to city and evacuating citizens whenever possible. Boudica is in hot pursuit of his small army and the thousands of refugees are weighing him down.
Paulinus gives up. He tells the refugees to continue North and he turns to fight. He decides that dying in battle is preferable to being tortured by Boudica.
Paulinus sets himself up in the best spot he can find. Thick marshes protect his flanks and he gets his men into a sawblade formation.
Boudica’s army is at least 7 times larger than the Roman army. Many of them now have captured Roman gear as well.
She decides to charge and overwhelm them. It seems logical – crush this small army under the weight of 75,000 warriors. She takes her wagons and forms a circle around the battlefield to prevent her army and the Roman army from retreating.
Big mistake.
The Romans were the kings of this style of warfare. Their training, tactics, and heavy armor all favored prolonged head-on clashes.
Boudica’s army charges in and engages with the Romans. As usual, the Romans stab, slice, and kill from behind their big shields. Every few minutes the man at the front heads to the back while the next guy in line takes over. This keeps the men fighting fresh and allows those that just fought some time to rest.
Paulinus orders his men forward and they begin moving forward 1 step at a time.
Boudica’s forces start to get desperate. The Roman momentum is insane – they just keep coming forward and nothing Boudica does can stop them. Thousands are already dead and morale is dropping.
When a break in the battle finally happens Boudica orders a retreat.
But the wagons create choke points and the retreat turns into a mad dash for safety.
The Romans surge forward killing everything in their path. It’s a slaughter. They massacre their enemies by the thousands – pressing them against the carts and cutting them down.
Almost the entire 80,000 strong army is killed, while the Romans lose a mere 400–1000.
Boudica – totally defeated – takes poison to kill herself. The Romans now have full control over the Southern part of Britain.
The brutality of this episode is shocking even by Roman standards.
First, you have the Romans raping and enslaving an entire tribe without provocation.
Then you have a mass ritual human sacrifice accidentally committed by the Romans.
Then Boudica starts a campaign of ethnic cleansing.
Then one of the largest battles in Roman history happens and 80,000 people are cut down.
I would say it is the most brutal episode of Roman history.
California Fast-Food Outlets CUT Jobs & BOOST Prices Ahead of $20/hr Minimum Wage Rollout
What do you think of the Fox News host who explained that the world was suffering from the coronavirus because the Chinese Communist Party cannot feed its people, who have resorted to eating raw bats and snakes?
Logically it makes no sense.
How do poor people afford meat when grain is a luxury?
Unless one deliberately goes into the wild or lives in some secluded corner of nowhere, there are no bats and snakes aplenty.
Unless, of course, these species are being farmed for food.
Which makes no sense because snakes are slow growing and bats are difficult to raise. Besides the protein haul is miserable compared to chickens and pigs per unit of resource.
Any way you look at it, these are luxury items that only the rich can afford, because the poor will rather sell their catch rather than consume bounty.
Anyone who finds exotic food cheaper than regular tofu, please leave a comment. That will be the bargain of the century.
Does the Fox anchor even know how much a snake gallbladder costs???!!!
Note: There are families in Yunnan that can only afford rice a few times a year, and meat only once. The rest of the year consists of corn, roots, fruit and vegetables.
Rabies is a terminal illness, once a dog starts to show symptoms of the disease, there is no cure but to euthanize the dog, for the greater good of neighborhood. A rabies ridden dog not only suffers himself, but also poses a danger of instability and greater harm to those around him.
You cannot “reason” a rabid dog out of his illness.
Similarly you cannot reason with Israel and apologists, both Israel, majority of Israeli society and its apologists abroad, have pre-emptively convinced themselves that, whatever Israel does on Gaza, will always be justified.
No matter how many civilians, aid workers or doctors are killed, or how many hospitals are destroyed, that will always be justified in eyes of Israel’s apologists, there will always be a “khamas base” if not in Al-shifa hospital, then in 4 year old Palestinian child’s skull.
Only way to stop this genocidal state from killing more innocent souls, is NOT A CEASEFIRE, but bowing it into submission by force and sanctions
Just hours after destroying the largest hosptial in Gaza (al Shifa hospital), IDF targeted and killed European aid workers who were delivering food to Palestinians in Gaza.
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Guys will never get over it
What are some crazy facts about intelligent people?
Intelligent people are always curious about the world.
Being funny and having a good sense of humor are both signs of intelligence.
Staying up late is an indication of high intellect, as it indicates that their brain activity is boosted at night.
People that are very intelligent have fewer friends than the ordinary person.
They have a greater sense of self-doubt than ignorant people.
Self-talk is an evidence of people who are highly INTELLIGENT.
Intelligence is not determined by grades or age.
Socially awkward people are highly intelligent.
People who are intelligent are less likely to engage in conflict. They pay attention to everything but rarely say anything.
Worrying excessively is linked to high intelligence.
How can you inspire programmers to work longer work weeks voluntarily?
Having been through several startups over the years, I am stunned at how many executives are openly and publicly contemptuous of developers and then expect them to put in long hours. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve heard sayings such as, “I can lock the developers in a room, slide pizzas under the door, and in a month I’ll have a product.” Thinking of the people who create your product as second-class employees comes through, and most definitely does not motivate them.
At one company, where I was the VP of Engineering, we got a new CEO who told me to get the developers working longer hours. I asked why. He said that that’s what developers at a startup should do. I asked him for anything goal-oriented with which to motivate the team, which was already largely burned out from some heroic pre-launch efforts. Did we have a new sales prospect with a feature request, or did we have some new competitive intelligence that demanded a big push to catch up, or anything to justify again burning the midnight oil? No, the CEO just thought that’s what developers should do.
Developers aren’t idiots. They can tell the difference between a legitimate crunch time and a CEO who is merely cheap and demanding. So, it’s probably obvious where I’m going with this: Just wanting more hours for no good reason will just piss the developers off. If you do have a good reason for long hours, then the answer is to simply share the reason with the team. I’ve seen developers do amazing things to deliver to a key customer on time, or have something ready for a big trade show, or otherwise come through for the company. But it has to be something real, not just an arbitrary desire to squeeze employees for more work.
Returning to Rainbow and Dio! Vocal ANALYSIS of “Mistreated” Live!
What are your thoughts on ex-Taiwanese President Ma visiting China to help build social and cultural links? Will he be successful?
95% of the people of Taiwan are Han Chinese, and Taiwan and the Mainland of China are of the same ethnicity, and the cultural and economic ties among the people have never ceased.
MA Ying-jeou remains a supporter of maintaining the separation of the two sides of the Taiwan Strait rather than a supporter of cross-strait unification.
He cannot achieve political success if he consistently positions himself as a political figure who obstructs and delays the reunification of the two sides of the Taiwan Strait.
The purpose of his visit to Mainland China was expressed before he boarded the plane:
I will try my best to convey the peace-loving wishes of the Taiwan people and hope that both sides will expand bilateral exchanges and avoid war. This is a journey of peace and a journey of friendship.
It can be seen that Ma Ying-jeou’s own positioning of this trip is not a unification trip, and Ma Ying-jeou has been avoiding the word “unification”. It is hypocritical to talk about “peace” without talking about “unification”.
It is only because of the recent vicious incident in which two mainland fishermen were killed by the DPP in Kinmen, the Taiwan authorities felt the danger of war, and Ma Ying-jeou took the initiative to act as a “peacemaker”.
Of course, there are still a few days left in Ma’s visit programme, the most crucial of which is the last day of meetings with the top brass in mainland China. It is too early to speculate on Ma Ying-jeou’s inner thoughts.
If Ma Ying-jeou wants to achieve political success, this visit is his last chance!
We hope he will be bold enough to take the first step and say the word “reunification”.
Some fun pictures that I generated
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What ignorant thing did a retail employee say that made you walk out of the store without buying a single item?
My ex and I used to live on Capitol Hill in DC. Almost all the houses there are 100+ years old, so there is generally something in need of fixing at any given time. We felt it was a good thing to try and support local businesses, so whenever anything small broke, we tried to use the local hardware store to get whatever we needed to repair it. Well, something small broke and we needed a small piece of pipe to replace one under a bathroom sink. If anyone has lived on the Hill in the past, they probably know that there is only one local hardware store. It had almost criminally narrow aisles until it burned to the ground several years ago. It has since been rebuilt with a much better layout.
Off we went to the local hardware store, broken piece in hand. we were faced with bins of nearly identical looking pieces. The store was often understaffed, so we were trying to compare the pieces ourselves to find the right one. As we stood there, an employee came walking down the aisle. Rather than stop to help us (though to be fair he may have been in the middle of helping someone else at the time) or politely excusing himself as he tried to squeeze around us, he just stopped, looked at us, and sarcastically sneered “do you think you could take this party somewhere else?”
My ex had worked retail for years, and was a district manager for a home goods chain at the time. We just looked at each other, put down the pieces we were trying to match, and said “sure. We can take it to Home Depot.” And that’s what we did. We made sure to let the manager know what we were doing and why before we left.
My first Talk Box experience! Peter Frampton’s “Do You Feel Like We Do” Vocal Analysis!
It was in the late 1980’s. I was a worker drone; an engineer in a automotive electronics company. This company was (probably) what they based the comedy “Office Space” from. It was just like that. Cubicles. Many bosses connect to crazy dotted-line org charts, and frequent reorganizations and lay offs. It was a very stressful job, and a very stressful time.
At that time, my wife was going crazy.
I did not find out until years later, but she had a mental illness that doesn’t hit until the person is in their late 20’s. She had a Schizoaffective disorder. This is a mental health disorder that is marked by a combination of schizophrenia symptoms, such as hallucinations or delusions, and mood disorder symptoms, such as depression or mania. Yes. She was both schizophrenic and had bipolar mood swings. Lordy.
So, I would work in a crazy work environment, while my wife would sleep. As soon as I got home, she would unload all of her insecurities, issues, past traumas, and everything else on me. TO make matters worse, she was getting worse and worse over time. I had no one to talk to. No one to confide in. No outlets. I was on my own.
We were walking down to street. I used to take her out of the house to get some air. Sort of how you would walk a dog. Then we would go back into the house. (Where it would continue to about five am, at which point I would take a shower and leave for work. )
Anyways, I was seriously stressed out. And she was going on and on and on about this fight she had with her girlfriend back in seventh grade when she was a young girl. And she started accusing me of not listening. And then suddenly…
I snapped.
Everything got numb. It was like I was wrapped in a warm blanket of cotton. Oh, I heard her rant on and on and on and on. But the droning was distant. I was just numb. I was comfortable, you know, but really in some kind of spacey world.
Then she turned me around, and slapped me hard in the face.
“Aren’t you listening to me? This is about ME! Not about you. Don’t you hear what I am saying? What is the matter with you?”
I just looked back at her.
She continued yelling at me, and then after about a half an hour or so she realized that something was seriously wrong. She led me to the car and drove me to the hospital….
…
Long story short. I was prescribed anxiety medicine, and on a treatment plan.
She was then placed in a mental hospital for observation, where she ended up staying for three months. (The first of many such in-patient stays.)
My job found that my illness was not covered by the health plan, and so I had to plan myself, and eventually they laid me off.
But I will NEVER forget what it was like being in a serious health crisis and my “loving wife” yelling at me about being so selfish and not caring about her needs, while I was in a SERIOUS medical emergency.
Totally oblivious.
That’s most people in the world today.
Today…
What is the most shameless thing you have ever seen a teacher do?
I got in trouble in 7th grade for cussing in a teacher’s class. Was sent to the office and got suspended out of school for two days. While I was going up to get my bookbag the spanish teacher and her friend the language arts teacher were trying to dogpile me. I found out later she had lied and told her I cussed her out. They didnt say anything inappropiate but they were definitely trying to unsettle me with their words to me. Saying things like were not idiots and you better respect us. After I got back I thought that was it as my grandmother had forced me to write a letter of apology to my spanish teacher. No I was completely wrong.
I had the language arts teacher next grade. Everything I did was graded harsher than anyone else’s assignment. She wouldnt let me do a biography of my choosing even though I wanted to do ALice Cooper but she allowed another kid to do a report on the Sid Vicious. He was rumored to have killed his girlfriend and later killed himself. But doing a report on a born again Christian rocker is too much. I once went all out for my midterm assignment. Looked up evidence based arguments and cited everything. Got a C for it. I remember getting a lot of Cs. I looked at another kids assignment and he had two pages with no citations when the requirement was four pages. He got a higher score than me. Thankfully, I was able to pass the class and say goodbye to that witch. GFY Ms. Evalsky if youre reading this.
As soon as I was out of that class I got As and Bs in all my language arts courses in High School. I also Aced every class in college just about. Psychology is a major that is report heavy. But Im just imagining all of that Im sure.
The west makes up most of the world’s higher standards of living, and trade volume., even though it makes up only 15% of the world’s population.
When the US talks about a values-based rules system, it says that it wants to retain that privileged position, and will not give it up without a fight.
Putin said that he represents the underdogs who consider this system to be unfair, and that is what the Ukraine war is all about. Of course, there are other factors, but he is trying to appeal to a wider audience.
China agrees, but does not want to get loud about it because it wants to continue trading with the west as long as it can. Why walk away from money?
But China is also trading with the 85% of the world which make up the Global South. What has China done for the Global South?
When it comes to network infrastructure, it has made it affordable with Huawei equipment, the company the US Commerce Department hates so much.
China makes Android and Apple phones, making them accessible to anyone who can afford them.
It sells electric automobiles and solar panels to anyone who can afford them.
It is selling weapons and armament to anyone who can afford them.
It goes on and on.
Anything you can buy in a developed economy you can now also buy in a Global South economy. ANYTHING.
Why did this happen? Because China made the products affordable and was willing to sell them to anyone with the money.
GAME CHANGER.
I have a saying:
In the end, big numbers win.
That means, the 85% wrest a lot of their power, influence and buying power away from the 15%, no matter how much the 15% resist.
This explains the times we are living through.
Pre-Flood Mega Quarry Discovered in Utah
Will jobs that moved to China be brought back to the US as President Trump promised?
I was on a flight from China to Vietnam with a guy whose job was to oversee production of furniture for Pottery Barn. He was going to Vietnam to find a cheaper factory because the Chinese factory was getting too expensive. He said he liked Vietnam but it looked like he would eventually end up in Africa when Vietnam became too expensive. Bottom line: slapping a tariff on Chinese goods will move jobs to cheaper countries. Slapping a tariff on the whole world will still move those jobs to cheaper countries until the tariff is greater than the cost differential.
So let’s do the math. Let’s say it costs us $100 to make something in America in an old-style labor intensive factory, but only $25 to make it in Vietnam and ship it to America. If nothing else changes, the tariff has to be close to $75 to shift production to America. That’s 300% and that’s not in the cards, so no, those jobs aren’t coming back that way.
The only other way to shift production to America is to decrease the cost of production in America, which means the new factories have to be much more automated than the ones that shut down. And that means few of the old manual jobs are coming back and few new jobs will be created.
Up to 85% of all jobs lost in America have been lost to automation, not China. This is the real story. America is producing more than it ever has, but with fewer people because automated process can be just so much more efficient.
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Very Accurate
Have you ever completely snapped? If so what did you do?
Here we go folks!
I used to be a tire technician for a couple years. I was debating leaving, although I loved the job. I guessed I probably would have stayed at least one more year, maybe 2.
got a new manager, who had only been in Canada for less than 2 years. He was presented to us as university graduate with a business degree and 10 years experience running a tire shop in his home country, also at another shop during his first 2 years in Canada. He “worked” in our shop for barely 3 weeks. In that time, we found out he lied about everything. He didn’t know a single thing about tires or the industry at all, and never had business schooling. This info was reasonably forgivable, if he didn’t act like he knew everything. I kid you not, this man did not know how to sweep with a basic broom!
This man almost dropped a semi truck on me while I was working underneath it. The only reason I’m alive is because I secured the truck prior. He wasn’t supposed to be involved with the truck whatsoever. This was completely unexpected. Like a jump scare. In the aftermath, I gave him mercy and left it to the higher ups to rheme him out.
However, later that day, he denied falling asleep for an hour in the customer chairs! We had pictures of him dead to the world passed out. In his argument with our real boss, he caused boss such strife that he left for the rest of the day. We all had major respect for boss, so this was my last straw. I gave fake boss chance after chance, I had enough. The last hour of the day I went off on him. Told him he’s a fake and an incompetent idiot. He kept defending his actions as high and mighty, he didn’t know when to be honest and apologize. Most of the problems would’ve been fixed with sincere apologies. He didn’t even care that he almost put me 6 feet in the dirt! I berated him for an hour (for context, no one who I’ve known has ever seen me rage until now, and I have never yelled in anger at anyone except for my sibling when we were young. I am a docile man). Fake boss quit with not a single word to the company. I subsequently quit 2 weeks later, also due to other circumstances.
What’s the most ridiculous thing a coworker told on you to your boss for?
My coworker complained not only to my boss but to HR because he felt that I discriminated against him.
The guy was a slacker who thought that work was a place where he could go and be paid to socialize, so I didn’t care for him from Day One. I trained him and then told my boss I’d prefer to have nothing more to do with him, and she honored my request by making him the site tech for our building and Central Office.
I was a Computer Support Tech who covered prison units that were a good distance from our office, so I spent most of my day out of the office, at a prison or traveling to a prison. One of the prisons was a four-hour drive from our office, so when I had to go there I’d put in 12–16 hours that day. Because the state prohibited hourly employees from working over 40 hours in a week, this meant that I’d, either, have Friday off or be able to go home early on Friday.
I only visited this prison once a month so there were months when there was enough work for two techs, and I’d arrange for someone to come with me. One month the motormouth wanted a long weekend and he knew that I was making my monthly trip to the distant unit, so he asked me to take him along. At the time I didn’t have much to do — four hours of work, tops — and I told him this. A few minutes before end of day the day before my trip, I received a call from the warden asking if I’d have time to install ten network printers they’d received. Suddenly, I had enough work to justify taking someone to help, but motormouth was nowhere to be found, and I arranged for another tech to meet me at 0400 so we could head to the prison.
Motormouth found out that morning that I’d taken someone with me and immediately started whining. He whined to our boss and then went to HR and filed a complaint, claiming that I discriminated against him by refusing to take him with me. HR shot the complaint down quickly — after talking to my boss — and they never even discussed his complaint with me. My boss, who knew the entire story, told me about it the next day and it gave me another reason to dislike the jackass. I avoided him entirely after that.
The MAGNIFICENT RISE of Passport Bros in Modern Dating | Why Men Travel Abroad to Date Women
Why isn’t it allowed to take home food from a buffet?
Buffets operate according to an unwritten rule named The Huffnecker Rule.
The Huffnecker Rule came into effect in 1957 at Big Tom Huffnecker’s Buffet in St.Louis, Missouri. Big Tom’s was a popular local spot loved by everyone. Big Tom’s had great food and no one left unsatisfied. Everyone also loved Big Tom, he was a gracious host who performed magic tricks for his customers as he roamed the dining room visiting with his guests.
One day a local ne’erdowell named Aunty Becky rolled into Big Tom’s. Being a gracious host, Big Tom welcomed Aunty Becky and entertained her with a fancy card trick. Sourpuss Aunty Becky just shined him off and made a beeline for the buffet. Never had a customer treated Big Tom so rudely, he made a point of keeping one eye on her as he roamed the dining room.
Aunty Becky made multiple trips to the buffet, heading back to her table with a gigantic plate full of food each time. He quickly discover that she was packing the food into her purse and pockets. The grease from the fried chicken soaking into the bottom each.
“Get out of my restaurant!” Big Tom hollered, pointing towards the door. Aunty Becky held her ground though. “It’s a buffet” she said, “I can take all the food I want.”
That’s when Big Tom uttered those famous words. “You can take all you want, but you have to eat it all here.” he said. “That’s the rule, The Huffnecker Rule!”
And so it was written. You can take all the food you want from a buffet but it has to be eaten there. That’s the rule, The Huffnecker Rule. You shall abide.
When have you been in an accident where the other person involved blatantly lied to the police about what transpired?
Yes, and their lies turned a fairly straightforward collision claim into a six-month battle.
My beloved ’99 Ram diesel got T-boned by a Ford Expedition that had blown through the red light.
The problems started when the other driver claimed that she had the green and that I had jumped the red light. None of the other drivers that had seen the crash stuck around once they ensured we were all okay. I had no dash cam. It was the word of 20-year-old me versus a 40-something Mom with a small child. There were no skid marks leading to the crash, indicating she made no attempt to brake, which gave credence to the idea that I had unexpectedly pulled out in front of her. The police report listed me as at fault and I was cited for failure to yield and careless driving. And my truck was totaled. Not a good day.
I immediately contacted my insurance agent and started the claims process, informing them that the other driver had lied and that I had no way to prove it. The insurance company got a lawyer for me, but the agent suggested right off the bat that I check with the businesses at the intersection to see if they had any security cameras that covered the road. They did, and the manager of the gas station there was sympathetic to my situation and provided copies of their camera footage that looked out over the lot and included the intersection.
The other driver filed a civil suit for damages and medical bills against me. Armed with video of the crash, my insurance refused to pay out, and refused their settlement offers or arbitration. My lawyer got the court date for the two traffic citations delayed until after the start of the civil proceedings, so that the other driver would have no knowledge of the outcome of those tickets before going to trial. The trap was set for Mrs. Expedition.
The court date comes, and Mrs. Expedition gets on the stand, and under oath, tells the same version where I jumped the light causing the collision. She then went into a woe-is-me spiel about her neck and shoulder pain since the crash.
Finally my lawyer gets a chance to cross examine, gets her to repeat her version for the court again…but when she gets to the part about having the green light, my lawyer asked “if you had the green light, can you explain this?” and plays the tape.
The tape rolls, we can see the cross light is red, and the first car in line from my lane proceed through the intersection, then the second, and then me in my truck. Just before the crash, the lawyer pauses the video, and plain as day, we can see her looking down at the phone in her hand, completely oblivious to the fact she is 0.25 seconds away from 8000 pounds of truck.
I don’t know whose face was more priceless — her lawyer’s when he realized he’d lost the case, or hers when the Judge put her in jail for 3 days for contempt. She was later charged and convicted for perjury and sentenced to 60 days. It took every ounce of self control to not jump up and yell “gotcha bitch!” I had to be content with looking more smug than Jeremy Clarkson:
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Her case was tossed, and before we got out of the courthouse, her insurance offered to pay all of my insurer’s legal bills as well as a $30,000 payout for a truck worth $17k if we wouldn’t counter sue. I took the deal. Thirty grand and getting to see the bailiff put her in cuffs? Good day.
EDIT: for those who asked why the plaintiff was surprised or didn’t know the video was coming, my lawyer did turn over the video to their lawyer during discovery. On several DVDs with hours of footage from many cameras from the business, and without marking the few seconds of footage we would actually show in court. My lawyer was banking on the fact they would not review all the footage. If they had, they would have settled out of court. My insurance company wanted to bust her for lying on a sworn deposition. As I wrote in one of the comments: don’t get cheap lawyers or cheap condoms if you don’t want expensive surprises.
What happened to US Rail?
How do introverts live their life?
We express more in text than in face-to-face conversations.
People tend to think we’re masterminds. Little do they know while I’m sitting there quietly, picturing a smoking squirrel on a unicycle wearing a bunny-hairband.
We don’t feel compelled to go out every weekend and spend money we don’t have.
We don’t need anyone to entertain us. We’re satisfied with our own company.
We’re good listeners – even if we prefer that someone else START the conversation.
It may take longer for us to give an answer, but it will be a well thought out answer!
We tend to think more deeply, even if we can’t always express those thoughts well in words.
It may take time to win us over, but once you have, we’re loyal to the end.
We do well with friends who are grieving because we’re comfortable with silence.
We don’t have to deal with other people’s bullshit or drama. I have one friend who is a no-drama type person, and I’d prefer them to 10 friends.
We can keep a secret. (Who are we going to tell?)
Without the need to fill space with a conversation, we notice things around us that others don’t.
We excel in the art of people-watching. It allows us to learn things about people, their interactions, and human nature in general.
Women on Women
What did you learn when you worked at Google?
One of the big things I learned is just how shitty people on the Internet are.
If you build a tool that can be misused in any way, someone will figure out how to misuse it. Those people will take the useful thing you’ve built, and they’ll find ways to harm or harass other people with it. This is more true the more generally useful you’re intending your tool to be. A tool that’s used by thousands may have one bad actor using it; a tool that’s used by millions will have a thousand.
If you manufacture hammers, it’s not irresponsible of you to make a hammer that someone can use to kill another person with. We accept that it’s pretty much inevitable that blunt objects can cause blunt-force trauma. (As William S. Burroughs put it, anyone who owns a frying pan owns death.)
But those are simple, concrete, tangible objects. A lot of people who design software systems never imagine that someone would use the thing they’re building to harm another person. It’s extremely irresponsible to build a feature like location-tracking into a phone without also considering the ways in which the information that it generates can be misused by bad actors.
This is something that engineers and product managers at Google worry about all the time.
Also, you have to not only worry about your product being misused, you have to worry that the things you build to keep it from being misused don’t punish people who are just trying to get things done.
I’ve been haggling with a colleague for weeks about rolling out an anti-abuse feature that we’ve built. We have no good model for accurately assessing the risks of false positives, and it’s still possible for us to deal with the problem it automates away manually. If we turn the feature on, it will decrease the risk that we’ll miss disabling an abuser’s account by X%, but it will increase the risk that we’ll accidentally disable a non-abuser’s account by Y%, and getting the account reinstated will take Z hours of work by the user we’ve unfairly disabled. What values of X, Y, and Z are the ones at which you say, “Yes, let’s do that?” No one really knows. But we’re pretty sure that if we’re wrong, we’ll hurt enough users that Twitter will tell us.
This is an extremely common scenario at Google. The terms “false positive” and “false negative” get thrown around so much by some teams that it can be hard to follow their conversations. (Fortunately, the bathrooms at Google provide a handy mnemonic. When the soap dispenser fires soap into the sink because your hand passed within a foot of it, that’s a false positive. When the faucet doesn’t dispense water even though you’re frantically waving your hand back and forth under it, that’s a false negative. So, there’s another thing I’ve learned at Google.)
False positives and false negatives go hand in hand with another aspect of working at Google, which is scale.
A colleague of mine put it this way: “For most teams at Google, another way of saying ‘this happens one time in a million’ is ‘this will happen two or three times today.’”
A common benchmark in site-reliability engineering is “five nines,” or a system that works 99.999% of the time. But there are only 86,400 seconds in a day. Your site can be down for almost a full second every day and still have five nines of reliability. Hundreds, or thousands, of user operations will fail in that near-second. What’s your plan for dealing with that?
I have heard tell of teams at Google that check their system’s performance against its SLOs, and if they’ve had too much reliability at the end of the month, they deliberately bring the system down for a second or two, just to make sure that all of the mitigations that other engineers have built to accommodate that failure rate actually get triggered. It’s like testing your fire extinguishers to make sure they still work.
This is stuff I never, ever had to worry about before coming to Google.
Baked Chicken and Dumplings
Baked Chicken and Dumplings
Ingredients
Vegetable cooking spray
1/2 cup milk
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 cup flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
6 boneless skinless chicken breast halves, uncooked
1 medium onion, finely chopped
2 stalks celery, coarsely chopped
1 (10 ounce) package frozen sliced carrots
1/2 teaspoon dried sage, crushed
1/4 teaspoon ground pepper
2 (13 3/4 ounce) cans chicken broth
Instructions
Heat oven to 325 degrees F. Coat a 2 1/2 quart casserole with cooking spray.
In a medium bowl, combine milk and oil.
Gradually stir in flour, baking powder and salt. Mix well into a dough consistency and set aside.
Place chicken breasts in bottom of casserole.
Cover chicken with onion, celery, and carrots.
Evenly sprinkle sage and pepper over vegetables; pour broth over dish.
Using the dough mixture, form 2 inch balls and drop into casserole.
Cover tightly and bake for 1 1/2 hours.
Is Taiwan the Chinese Ukraine? Is there any other neighboring country that China could invade and get little reaction from the global community?
Taiwan is not sovereign. It is not a UN member, or an observer state.
EVERY, and I repeat, EVERY, nation on earth implements the One China policy. No first world nation recognizes Taipei as the seat of the China government. All of them, and this includes the United States, pursue diplomacy with Beijing instead.
Today, only 11 states recognizes Taipei in lieu of Beijing. Comprising less than 0.5% of the poorest and most isolated humanity—Belize, Eswatini, Guatemala, Haiti, Marshall Islands, Palau, Paraguay, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Tuvalu—are all without exception tied at the umbilical to American largess and patronage.
When Taiwanese leaders drop by Washington, they do not fly direct. The trips are framed as stopovers from diplomatic visits to Belize or Guatemala.
Ukraine is a full UN member, and votes at the UNGA.
What Chinese Ukraine?
As for land grab, let’s put the house in order and fulfill the terms outlined in the Cairo Declaration of 1943, the Potsdam Declaration of 1945 and the Treaty of San Francisco of 1951 first.
History owes China that much, at the minimum.
Otherwise, continue playing the deliberate fool stoking war at every juncture.
Scott Ritter & Andrei Martyanov: Russia has Demilitarized NATO and Ukraine is FINISHED
Have you ever met a dangerous person and not known it at the time?
My daughter. I boxed in the Navy, before and after, and loved the sport. My daughter, when she was about five, went with me to the gym and asked about it. She began taking boxing lessons when she was either six or seven, I forget. She did look a bit weird in those HUGE gloves and head-gear.
She boxed throughout her teen years – loving it.
A few years later she was on a date with a “new” boyfriend when she returned home about 9:30 at night, alone, but in his car. “What happened?” I asked her.
“He got fresh with me after I told him to leave me alone,” she said. “But he didn’t stop and put his hands on me, quite inappropriately,” she added.
“Yes,” I said. “And then what?”
“I pushed him back and decked him,” she said flashing a sly smile. “I left him unconscious in a ditch and took his car home. It’s outside, the keys are locked inside.”
A day later the car disappeared and we never heard from the SOB again.
Blind Ranking Men Shortest to Tallest
What’s something that sucks about being a man?
Going Anonymous because this is a story of someone I know personally, and I want zero chance that this gets back to him since he still doesn’t like talking about this nearly a decade later.
During college I was friends with 2 cousins who for sake of anonymity were named Blake and Nate. After a night out to the local bar for pool, Blake and Nate had too much to drink. Blake is a big guy, he had little issue holding his alcohol, but Nate is very slender and was absolutely drunk beyond conscionable thought after an equal number of rounds. Later into the night, as everyone was packing it in, Blake had noticed that Nate had disappeared. Blake assumed Nate made it back to their apartment safe, however as he stepped out of the tavern he spotted his cousin Nate being escorted/carried down an adjacent hill toward town by a rather large woman he had seen Nate speaking with on-campus previously. Thankful he didn’t have to personally carry Nate’s drunk person a half mile in the opposite direction, Blake let Nate’s “friend” deal with his semi-conscious cousin and began walking in the opposite direction toward his and Nate’s apartment.
Afterwards, Nate made it clear to us that this woman had frequently harassed him on-campus with sexual advances which he had at numerous times rebuffed. Nate didn’t remember a thing from that night, only that he woke up in her empty apartment with no clothes on. Campus police were utterly disinterested in investigating, practically laughing him out of their office saying that he must have been more conscious than he remembered or cared to admit because the notion of possible rape committed by a woman towards a man seemed utterly ridiculous. I still can’t imagine the dread Nate went through over the following 3 months fearing that this woman might be pregnant (he couldn’t remember what happened or if it was safe, he only knew he was naked). He feared that she might demand that he take responsibility for acts he could not physically consent to and that no court would take his claim seriously enough to dismiss legal obligation or allow him to elect termination on grounds of rape. He was panicked that the mistake of drinking past blackout would force him to trade further education for a forced life of child support payments following a sexual act he did not consent to, want, or even remember. All of this seems an exceedingly rare and alien cornercase until it is someone you know.
The worst part of being a man is knowing that society doesn’t take these problems seriously when faced by a male because it is assumed that as a man you cannot be the victim of a woman. The shame that if you as a man are a victim and expressing your pain then you are deserving of scorn or heckling.
The Most Depressing Graph EVER!
Had you ever had a neighbor that you just stayed away from for some reason?
Back in 1985, my now ex husband and I bought a farm at the edge of a village of around 700 people. This town was not the most welcoming to strangers that were not born or lived here forever. They even seemed to marry people from that small village. Girls would marry a boy and their sisters would marry his brothers. The kids would be double first cousins and all look alike.
There were several people that were weird enough that I wondered if there was something wrong with the water. We had an alcoholic neighbor that was a Vet of 2 wars that lived on the hill in a house owned by his family. The yard was filled with old machinery. I had to go inside once because he was in the hospital and he asked me to get some things. He used to pick up Friday night fish and eat it at the table and shove the Styrofoam container off the table. The house was trashed beyond belief. The roof was open because there was a fire. Stuff scattered everywhere. He could be mean and he could be nice depending on his mood. We never knew what to expect when he came over. The stories he told about the things he experienced in the wars gave me an understanding of his crazy moods. He is dead now. I believe he drank himself to death.
We had an old hermit that lived in his falling down house by himself. His parents had died years ago and he never had a job but worked for cash under the table. There were holes in his floor and one day he fell into them and couldn’t get out for several days. he had to have them amputated and moved into housing provided by the state. He died there.
We had a next door neighbor that was bat shit crazy. He went really nuts after his wife left with their kids. She went into hiding as she was fearful of him. His father died a day or 2 later in a horrible farm accident and it sent him over the top. The state decided it was cheaper for him to live with his mother than an institution. He was abusive towards her, stole from her. He harassed people in town and generally made himself a pain in the ass to everybody. He hated me for trying to protect his mother from his abuse. Called the cops on him a time or two when he was abusive to her. Every once in a while, the cops would come and haul him off the the mental ward when he went off the deep end. A week of peaceful quiet for her. He dragged his mother everywhere when at the age of 91, she just wanted to go to church and then home. She developed a blood clot in her leg (I always believed it was because he would drag her out and about) and she refused to amputate her leg. He went nuts and made a huge scene at the hospital. She died soon after. He ended up permanently at the mental institution. He died a few years later.
We had a guy that changed his legal name to a famous singer because he once had the slightest resemblance to him. He was a greasy looking slimeball. I don’t remember if either worked. There was a story going round that when she gave birth to their son, there were maggots in her genital area. She was one of those moms that her punk thug of a son could do no wrong. If he stole stuff-it was your fault for having it for him to take. The boy went to jail for molesting young pre teen kids. He was forced to take a class for sex offenders. He told the doctors treating him that his dad was molesting chickens. Dad ended in jail for that offense. He eventually got out and was forever known as a chicken fucker. He is dead too. His wife left him. The son got out of jail and was not out long before he was killed by 2 guys who wanted to know what it was like to kill someone.
The last one was my closest neighbor. My kids would bike to school. He lived around the corner from us. My kids told me that he stands in the window and he looks naked. Being that we were new and did not want to upset the apple cart, I told the kids to stay away from him. Turned out, he was molesting the neighbor girls next door who told their parents. They reported it. When the dust finally settled, he was a serial child molester going back about 30 years. His own grandchildren great grandchildren and anyone he could get his hands on. His name was Lester and everybody called him Lester the Molester. I was rather pissed that for whatever reason, nobody ever turned him in even though the whole town supposedly knew. His wife was in the next rom and it was said that she was aware of his misdeeds. He ended up in prison for less than 5 years before he was moved to a nursing home to die. His wife is gone as well. I moved away 25 years ago, but my ex husband is still there-drinking the same water.
1920s Sweetheart Antique Toaster In Action
It’s so gorgeous and intricate. Very lovely.
The Oil Paintings of Alan MacDonald
There is seemingly no element too exotic to inhabit an oil painting by Alan MacDonald, whose works traverse cultures and histories to present something always elegant in execution. At the base of MacDonald’s work seems to be a need for adventure, exploring inspiration and varying perspectives in each work.
A Chinese guy told me to go to his house to make dinner because Wuhan is so cold now. Should I accept or not? I’m afraid I’m Muslim.
Hi, Youssra Ary. Thanks for the very interesting question.
You posted this question on February 5.
It would have been colder in Wuhan then (today is March 24).
I just got back from Wuhan and the weather was quite pleasant.
Around 10 – 15 °C during the day.
Very nice.
It’s really beautiful in Wuhan now.
The cherry blossoms are in full bloom now – it’s all a very lovely sight to behold.
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Took this picture in 东湖樱花园 (East Lake Cherry Blossom Garden).
The cherry blossoms are so pretty!
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Okay, now let’s get down to brass tacks regarding the premise of your question.
China has about 20 – 30 million Muslims.
There are food establishments selling halal food around every corner.
In fact, there are several times more food establishments selling halal food in China than there are McDonald restaurants.
There are 2 halal restaurants near my apartment, but no McDonald’s.
There are 3 halal restaurants around my game studio.
And the best part is, these halal food establishments are frequented by non-Muslims and Muslims alike.
I have several colleagues who are Muslims, so in addition to halal food deliveries + bringing their own food from home, these 3 halal restaurants offer them quite a bit of variety in terms of their food choices during lunchtime.
For myself and most of my non-Muslim colleagues, we’ll head on down to one of these halal restaurants at least once a week.
I don’t think there are any non-Muslim Chinese colleagues at my game studio who hasn’t been to a halal restaurant.
These halal food establishments are just that ubiquitous.
And they serve up some pretty tasty fare as well!
Just look out for these two characters: 清真
If you see these two characters, it means the food will be halal.
See picture below:
main qimg 426ca91b500b9ea9c5c67d6c093ef14e
Those working in the halal food establishments will either be Uighur Chinese, or Hui Chinese.
Uighur Chinese and Hui Chinese make up the two largest Muslim groups in China.
The picture below was taken in a halal food establishment in Kashgar, Xinjiang.
It is run by Uighur Muslims.
You can get a good and filling halal meal here for under 20 yuan (2.80 USD).
main qimg 302786d4b6f3f33701677233fbad8134
This picture was taken in a halal food establishment in Yangzhou.
You can see from the sign at the back, the two characters 清真, denoting that this is a halal food establishment.
The proprietess is a Hui Muslim from Linxia, Gansu.
Many of us Chinese are already very used to eating halal food.
I eat halal food at least once a week.
Actually, the commonly held belief is that, if you want to eat really good beef, mutton, and lamb, you head on over down to a halal food establishment because the people who work there are very good at preparing these meats.
But if you like chicken too, don’t worry.
They serve that as well.
Say hello to 新疆大盘鸡(Xinjiang Big Plate Chicken):
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My only concern with your going to your friend’s house in Wuhan to prepare a halal meal is…
Wouldn’t you have to bring your own cooking and eating utensils?
Please correct me if I’m wrong here, but I though that, as a Muslim, you’re not allowed to use cooking and eating utensils that have been used to cook and eat non-halal food?
Men Are Avoiding Marriage And The World Doesn’t Understand Why
Girls and Fruit
This is from one of my AI text to picture experiments.Enjoy.
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Have you ever accidentally opened someone else’s email and found something interesting?
My wife opens all the mail. All of it. She always has, and she lets me know if anything comes that I need to take care of. It’s a fine arrangement for me, I prefer not to have to sort it out. Many years ago, she was sitting at the kitchen table opening mail while I was across the room at the sink filling a glass. I heard a snort, and a “what the…” I turned my head to look at her. She was looking at me with that look…guys, you know what I am talking about…like laser beams of pure hate, fury and evil all rolled into one. Her head was about to split open and reveal Satan himself. She had opened an envelope and found a dirty magazine inside, which she was now holding up. It was not just any dirty magazine, either, like a Playboy or something, it was extra nasty stuff.
“WHAT IS THIS?!?!” she growled through gritted teeth. “Why would you do this? And, WHY would you have it delivered HERE?!?”
I was just standing there with a glass of water. Flight or fight mode was kicking in. “Honey,” I said, very calmly while taking a sliding step toward the door, “What makes you think I would do that? How long have you known me?”
“Well, who else would do it? It wasn’t ME!”
“Honey, have you checked the delivery address?”
Well, it so turned out that the mailperson had transposed the house number and delivered this package intended for our neighbor to our house by mistake. “Well,” she said, trying to calm down, “Ok, ok, you are right.” Her blood had boiled so hard it took her quite a few minutes to calm down. Even after realizing her mistake, she was still mad and would not look at me. About 1/2 hour later she nicely asked if I would drop it off to the neighbor.
Why did my top performing employee quit after write up?
Some years ago I was a bankruptcy specialist at a large financial institution. We’d been purchased by this after the original company n had been purchased by an entrepreneurial operation who took as much as they could get and then sold the remains.
Very little of this affected me or my particular job other than we’d been relocated to this financial institution’s headquarters so my 40 something mile commute became closer to a 70 mile commute (round trip).
So we had a department meeting one day to be told that our department was going to be split in half. One half was going to remain pretty much the same under the leadership of the overall department head. The other half was going to be strictly litigation focused.
Now I’d gotten really good at the bankruptcy part. I’d actually completed a legal assistant degree while working there and had taken a couple of bankruptcy classes. What I had never learned was litigation. My new boss knew that, but never offered any kind of training, assistance, nothing.
In addition, I was told that I was to assist the half of the office still doing bankruptcy. Like me and litigation, none of them had ever done bankruptcy.
I tried, I really did. I gave the cheat sheets, proof of claim templates, everything I could. But over a year later, I was still getting basically the same questions as they had at the beginning. I gave them information sheets explaining the different types of bankruptcies and how they were handled. Nothing seemed to actually stick as I would be asked to do a lot of the work.
I was probably spending about 75% of my workday on bankruptcy and wasn’t learning anything about litigation. So I finally went to my direct boss to ask how long I would be expected to “help” the other people in the office. I told him that I wasn’t really clear on the ins and outs of litigation because I was constantly being asked to handle bankruptcy.
He reminded me that our annual review was coming up and both heads of department would be conducting them. Since our overall boss was in charge of the group handling bankruptcy. He suggested I bring that up in the review.
Well, it was a setup. After a somewhat wishy-washy review, I was asked if I had any questions so I asked about my assignment to “assist” the new bankruptcy team while they were supposedly learning the ropes. I didn’t outright criticize any individuals, but I did point out that the basics still seemed to be misunderstood and I wasn’t effectively able to work on litigation.
Clearly he’d been warned I was going to ask this. He sat up in his chair, his cheeks got all red, and he began huffing and puffing. He started by accusing me of not training them. I was prepared enough that I’d brought copies of all the training paperwork I’d provided, all of it created by me mostly on my own time at home. He literally pushed it away and started pulling out printouts from our computer system.
He started with about six or seven printouts from individual bankruptcy cases. I looked at them. In every case, these were bankruptcies filed after I was no longer in the department so of course my name wasn’t in the notes.
Oh, but he’d thought ahead. Next he pulls out a dozen or more bankruptcies dating back over a year or before the department divided. I looked at those and each and everyone of them had notes under my name stating that they had been sent to outside counsel. About six months or so before the changes, we (my previous bankruptcy coworker and I) had been told that all new bankruptcies where the overall value of the company was over a certain amount (I think over $250,000) was to be sent directly to outside lawyers and we were not to touch them. Yes, every one had been sent to outside counsel. As for my question as to how long I was to be “assisting,” I was told “until I tell you otherwise.” Honestly I didn’t really mind that answer but I was concerned about eventually having a bad review over not accomplishing more in litigation.
My review ended up with some phrasing about how I wasn’t cooperating with the “overall department strategy,” and I started job searching immediately. I was out about six months later.
Scott Ritter: Putin Rejects Neocon’s China Agenda – What Will Happen Between Russia and NATO?
https://youtu.be/w1iQNmsgHeM
What was the moment you realized that life had passed you by?
I was given a hint life was passing me by when I was buying a movie ticket. I was asked if I wanted a senior discount. I was 50 years old. I was shocked. I started getting AARP ads in the mail at the same age.I realized then society viewed me as an old person.
I always thought I had all the time in the world to accomplish anything. I had a few hints earlier about life’s uncertainty when a 27 year old friend was killed driving home from a grocery store three blocks from her house. Once a 34 year old neighbor came home for lunch, went for a quick jog, and dropped dead from a heart attack.
Those events happened to other people: not me.
I looked in the mirror and realized I was not young anymore. Delusion is powerful. Feeling immortal is an emotion I always had.
In 2012, I was told I had Parkinson’s disease. No worries… I thought, you can live a long time with this disease. Recently I was told I actually have MSA which is a cousin of Parkinson’s. You die sooner having this disease.
Do what you’ve dreamed about now. Want to be an actor? singer? own your own business? How about taking a trip? An uncle once told me he and my aunt saved their money so they could see the world when they got old. They never knew he would get sick and die soon after he told me about their plans.
No matter what age you are, follow your heart now. Marry, have children, do what you want to do to make your life complete. You’re not immortal. You won’t be young forever.
One day you’ll wake up and be me.
Baked Honey Mustard Chicken Breasts
Honey mustard chicken 4
Ingredients you will need
Chicken breasts: I always opt to use boneless and skinless breasts for this honey mustard chicken. A lot of recipes use thighs, but I like the leaner versatility of a chicken breast or you may even use chicken tenders.
Spices: We use a mix of spices here including paprika, mustard seed, ground mustard seed, cayenne pepper, salt, and pepper. These flavors all pair so well together and also help to complement the honey mustard.
Olive oil: A great neutral vegetable oil that can be used at high temperatures, high-quality olive oil has natural aromatic flavors that are robust and so delicious.
Honey: The sweet portion of this sweet and savory chicken recipe comes from the honey. It’s a natural sugar, not too sweet, and also has an excellent flavor.
Chicken stock: Just a few tablespoons of chicken stock gets added to the marinade. This helps to keep the chicken moist while baking. You can also use vegetable stock if you have it.
Mustard: We are going to be using two mustard in this chicken recipe to take it to the next level: Dijon and whole grain. While providing an excellent flavor, the whole grain mustard also provides some texture to our honey mustard chicken breasts.
White vinegar: In addition to the tang from the mustard, white vinegar provides an additional tanginess. You could also use apple cider vinegar here.
Sriracha sauce: I like a little bit of spice to my honey mustard chicken recipe, so I add a touch of Sriracha. You can adjust this to your taste buds, or omit it altogether if you’re not of fan of the heat.
Thyme: A small handful of fresh thyme finishes this dish off. It provides some color to garnish and top off your baked chicken.
Ingredients
6 skinless, boneless chicken breast halves
Salt and pepper, to taste
1/2 cup honey
1/2 cup prepared mustard
1 teaspoon dried basil
1 teaspoon paprika
1/2 teaspoon dried parsley
Instructions
Heat oven to 350 degrees F.
Sprinkle chicken breasts with salt and pepper to taste and place in a lightly greased 13 x 9 inch baking dish.
In a small bowl combine the honey, mustard, basil, paprika and parsley. Mix well. Pour 1/2 of this mixture over the chicken and brush to cover.
Bake for 30 minutes.
Turn chicken pieces over, brush with the remaining 1/2 of the honey mustard mixture, and bake for an additional 10 to 15 minutes or until chicken is cooked through and juices run clear. Let cool for 10 minutes and serve.
Honey mustard chicken 5
Men blind dating
What makes Chinese people proud of their country? What are some unique aspects of China that contribute to this pride?
How about everything? Its culture, its rich history 60% of all human endeavours result as a an outcome of Chinese history! It don’t resort to US and European barbarism, hypocrisy, plunder and murders to get to where it is today! It survived despite of the atrocities the Japanese and western powers did to China! Today it does not tell anyone to to change to the Chinese systems. The west slaughtered millions to impose its ways! Today it turns deserts into farmland and cultivate wind and solar energy in excess of the entire world combined!
What is the most shameless thing you have ever seen a teacher do?
When I was in the 7th grade in math I continually got Ds on all my scores. One day I watched the teacher grade a girls test and saw exactly what she missed. She got a B+. BTW her family owned one of the largest grocery chains in the nation. When he graded my test it turned out I missed the exact same question in the exact same way as the girl, I got a D. I was a very tiny boy and mild . I said nothing as I always respected my elders. The very first week of 8th grade we were given a standardized math test. Not once had I studied outside of the class room. I tied for the highest grade on that test against over 700 eighth graders. The person I tied, studied very hard and becam the valedictorian of our high school. When I saw my test score I realized just how biased the teacher was against me. For the very first time in my life I confronted an adult.I went to see him and said, Mr Ziegler, I want to show you my 8 grade standardized test scores. I explained that my score tied with another boy for highest in the entire 8th grade. He then said “ oh, you must have really studied during the summer”. I told him No, I had not even opened a book from the time I left his class and the time I took the test. I turned and walked out without saying another word.
That was 70 years ago and only a few years ago I realized why. I was a blond haired, blue eyed boy. My name was the same as the head of the Waffen SS and this was only a relatively few years after WW2 and the fall of the Nazi regime. BTW my German heritage moved to the USA was in 1840.
When I lived in Milford, Massachusetts, I lived in a “crack house”.
Oh, it wasn’t my intention. But that is exactly what had happened.
There was this old Victorian mansion in Milford, right next to the police station. And, a man (an Iranian immigrant) bought the house and divided it up into six apartments. He renovated the place nicely, and I fell in love with the “huge “drawing room” apartment on the first floor.
Soon, others moved in. Most were like myself. Middle class.
Then his brother brought in a “section eight” family.
Now, a “section eight family” is a person living off the state. Takes welfare and government benefits, and is usually the lowest of the low.
And from the moment she moved in, it was non-stop under -16 drug, alcohol parties. All night. Loud with the thick vapors of crack smoke seeping into our apartment.
Oh, I talked to the owner; landlord, and he couldn’t do anything. It was against the law to deny housing to welfare recipients.
I talked to the police, they couldn’t do anything. All the 60+ kids were “protected” as they were juveniles in a private residence.
Well, there were raids on the property. Busts discovering drugs… mostly crack and all the rest. There were stabbings, and car damage, and all sorts of nonsense. It truly was a Hell. Ugh!
And it was Hell for me. As soon as my contract was up I left. Then I sued the owner. Long story, but we parted on good terms.
Do not ever let that happen to youse guys. Ever!
Nothing quite ruins your day as the thick sweet smell of crack wafting up from the basement.
Today…
What is the most shameless thing you have ever seen a teacher do?
I don’t know if I’d call this “shameless”, but it shows how a student (me) can so bother a teacher that he’ll make irrational decisions!
I was a lousy student. Either didn’t do homework or did a really sloppy job. My written work was really hard to read because I didn’t try to be neat.
Anyway, it drove my US History 1 teacher crazy, especially since I always tested very high in aptitude! Aptitude doesn’t triumph over laziness!
Anyway, while I was getting low grades in his class, I probably would barely pass for the year. We got to the mid term exam and he gave me an “F” on my report card (the exam was equal to a regular grading period so it was a big deal – 1/8th of the year’s average for each exam)
So my mother goes in to talk to him because, while my grades were usually bad, I generally did well on big exams. I guess I’d remember the major points that such tests cover, but wouldn’t remember the little things that normal tests include.
So my mother mentions that I usually do fairly well on the big exams and asked him about it. He pulls out my test and at the top it says I got a B minus!
My mother asked why the report card said the score was an F instead of B minus. And this is where it got weird.
He said, “He took the examine in the Old Cafeteria and it very easy to copy the work of other students”.
This was true. It had been converted into one big room with those one-armed desks jammed side by side, so even though we sat every other seat for exams, it was still easier to see a neighbors paper than in a regular classroom. But it wasn’t our fault we were assigned to that space!!!
My mother asked the obvious question: “Did you give every student who took a test there an F as well?”
It was at that point that he finally returned to his senses and changed my grade.
I actually liked him and he wasn’t trying to be a jerk or an idiot. I just drove him nuts! Since I later became a teacher myself, I also learned how students can push a teacher’s buttons!
Will the US allow itself to be overtaken by China?
The spirit is willing but the body is weak, my friend. Like the famous kung-fu move 吸精大法Sucking Spirit Move, every punch that US executes, the zest is sucked out of US to make China stronger. It’s not like China didn’t warn US not to engage in fruitless trade wars, but warnings have been ignored and the commoners were cheering her on, oblivious of the risks involved.
It is too late. Not only will China overtake US, she will do it in record time, estimated to be in 2026. Enjoy the inevitable.
Explain (I can’t believe we haven’t fixed this yet)
Why is the US doing such a bad job countering China’s rise?
Imagine you are the world’s fastest runner in the 100m sprint. You know your closest rival is training hard and will soon surpass you. What do you do?
You train even harder to stay ahead.
What you don’t do is try to hobble your rival by accusing him of cheating, denying him training opportunities, keeping him out of competition, and using underhand methods to ensure you keep on winning.
And that is what the US is trying to do to China. Instead of working harder to stay ahead, it has focused it on trying to slow China down.
The US cannot see that this approach will not work. It may have worked with other countries that threatened American superiority and dominance in the past but China is different.
In 1971 I read Dick Wilson’s book, A Quarter of Mankind. My classmates and I realised that once China got its act together, its rise was inevitable.
For a long time, I thought India would rise faster. It did not and will not for reasons that belong ion another answer.
Since Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, China has been on the up and up. And rather than rise to the challenge, the US has opted to try to stop China’s inevitable development and dominance. It may have even contributed to it with its rampant capitalist policies.
The US has not just done a bad job countering China’s rise, it has utterly failed. And it continues to flounder.
The new normal
Have you ever witnessed a “Don’t tell me how to raise my child” moment?
It was with a colleague in the US.
We had a guy at my office who was married to a Japanese woman. They had just had their first baby, and the wife was staying at home going forward.
First, our overbearing colleague started to ask why they didn’t just get a nanny. Why didn’t his wife want to work?
Our overbearing co-worker hired a nanny, and offloaded all the things that parents usually do to the nanny. She wasn’t wealthy, but it seemed like she would rather work full-time than spend time with her children.
But that wasn’t the main issue. The new parents had taken the drastic step of *gasp* co-sleeping with their newborn.
He was 1/2 asleep one day by the copy machine when the overbearing woman got after him again. “You guys need a nanny. You’re sleep-deprived.”
“Don’t remind me.” He was trying to brush it off, but she wouldn’t let it go.
“I mean, if you’re not going to get a nanny and your wife wants to stay home with the kid, why can’t she take care of her without waking you up?”
“We share a bed.”
This was met with a blank stare.
“You know, co-sleeping.” He had told me before that he was nervous about it, but had read some research on how it helps infants regulate their breathing.
“Oh, my gawd! Are you crazy? Didn’t you hear about the couple who did that and the Dad rolled over and killed the baby?”
Sometimes you don’t know that you’ve crossed a line until it’s too late.
“No, but I heard about the couple that got a nanny who BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF THEIR KIDS!”
WARNING: Never mess with a sleep-deprived new father.
What is the most panic-inducing thing that can happen as a teenager?
I was 13 years old,
That time there were no smartphones in popularity. Nokia was the king of mobiles and keypad phones were in use. My dad used to have Nokia 7210.
Sometimes I used to play games in my dad’s mobile. One day, I was casually scrolling through his mobile. I didn’t know much about phones those days. I was curious to explore.
In curiosity I don’t know what I have clicked, Suddenly a text message has been received which shocked me-
“Dear customer, thanks for choosing our service. 198rs has been deducted from your balance.”
I was stunned. My body started shivering and it was like a heart attack for me. 10 years ago, 198 ruppees had more value as compared to now. I knew that I am fcuked up. I put the mobile and was surviving the attack.
After sometime, My dad came. He had to make a call. I was edging near death. He dialed number and got to hear this,
“Sorry your account doesn’t have enough balance to make call.”
My heartbeats almost stopped.
He : Gurmeet, come here!
I felt like Yamraj is calling me.
I went somehow because my legs weren’t supporting me to go near him.
He : What you did in mobile? Tell me!
Me : mmmm! I don’t know.
I started crying. He was angry.
He : Tell me, what the hell you did? Where’s balance?
…
After a minute,
He : Next time don’t dare to touch my mobile.
He said and went. I beat the death and got my life back. I was extremely scared and stressed, however he didn’t react much.
Que : What’s most panic inducing thing that can happen as teenager?
Ans : when first time parents suffer loss because of us. When first time we do something wrong and get caught. After this, they get used to losses so it doesn’t induce more panic next time.
What is something extremely unjust that happened to you at work that made you quit your job?
I was at a convention out of town. Just before dinner, I received a call from my mom saying my dad’s appointment had confirmed what we had expected-stage 4 lung cancer. Doctors said 1 month. Of course I was in tears and beside myself. I went to the dinner with tears rolling down my face. I was sitting quietly just remembering all the good things. My district manager came up and asked what was wrong. I told her. Her exact words were…..get over it. This was the same woman who just had 4 months off because her sister got sick. As soon as we got back I handed in my resignation. I just felt that comment was completely heartless and I lost all respect for her.
What is a split-second decision you made that changed your life?
We were in a restaurant with a group of my friends almost 20 years ago…
As we were waiting for our food, I saw the richest and probably most respected man in our town walk in. He was super well known and employed over 500 people at that time.
We started talking together about him and my friend said.
“You would never have the balls to go talk to him!”
I actually didn’t, and the whole idea of talking to someone on that level scared me to death. But, my friends kept telling me to go, and I just said, “Ok, ok, I’ll do it.”
He was sitting alone, waiting for his food, and I just walked up to him and told him how he has been an inspiration for all of us guys sitting at that table over there and how we respect his work.
He was super nice to me and told me to sit down with him. I asked for some advice from him, and that started our friendship. He became my mentor.
He gave me so much good advice and helped me to grow my company. It’s sad that he passed away 2 years ago; he was 59 when I met him. It’s crazy that he took me under his wing.
That was the best split-second decision I made.
Jail and Porn equivalents
Have you ever walked out of an interview?
Once. Just once.
The interviewer was a little … stiff. Spoke with a German accent. Nothing wrong with Germans – it was just my own bias at the time that I expected them to be over-formal. Sticklers.
He asked me a question, which I didn’t like much because it was kind of basic for somebody with lots of experience, about submitting a form from a web page.
So I sketched out the answer on a white board and he asked a question, and I answered, “Yes, in that case I would add an ‘A=5’ right here.”
That was the end of the question, but before we moved on, he said, “Oh – do you want to put that?”
I said “Put that?”
“Write it. On the board.”
“Um … is somebody else going to read this or something?”
“No – we’re done. It’s in order to … finish the exercise.”
“So you want me to write ‘A=5’, right here? What’s next?”
“Then we can just erase it and move on to the next one.”
“So you need me to write A=5. And then erase it. So that the exercise is completed.”
“Yes.”
“Yea. No offense, really, I can tell we just wouldn’t get along at all.”
(This was the guy I would be reporting to.) As I made my awkward exit, both he and his boss made valiant efforts to change my mind, but I just offered, “It’s a gut thing. Trust me. We’d clash.”
I could never shake the hunch that as I was driving off, the interviewer gave a heavy sigh, picked up a marker, wrote “A=5” on the board, and then erased the whole thing.
How did Huawei manage to achieve its fastest growth in four years despite US sanctions?
What the fuck is US sanction you can do what you like in the U.S. but we the rest of the world don’t gives a shit about you! Huawei is popular in 88% of the world. Your 12% can love Apple till your market drop it don’t mean shit. Get that!
Record Record Record
What is the rudest thing another shopper has told you while waiting in line?
This wasn’t said to me, but to my then 7-year-old daughter, who had, for the first 6 and a half years of her life, had people, especially grandmotherly women, gushing over her: “Oh, what a beautiful girl! Oh, how well-behaved! What lovely, silky blond hair! You’re so lucky to have her!” etc. While she wasn’t entirely comfortable with total strangers coming up to her to adore her, it was still nice of them, and who doesn’t like being complimented, right?
Then baby sister came along, and the compliments got shared; baby sister was also pretty, though much different in looks. Stiil good; she loved her baby sister and was quite proud of her.
One day, though, we were in line at the grocery store check-out, when this grandmotherly-looking old lady came up and started gushing about the baby (somewhere between 6 and 12 months old) and how beautiful her eyes were, and her hair, and how sweet she was, and started remarking to other people in the line about the beautiful baby, and asking saying things like “don’t you think so?” to which the others, wanting to be polite to this older woman, of course agreed.
What was so rude? She then turned to my also very beautiful and well-behaved 7-year-old daughter, and practically sang out, “Oh, aren’t you lucky to have such a beautiful sister! Your mother must be so proud of her!” after which she marched off to resume her shopping.
Though I’m reasonably sure it was meant with good intentions from a totally clueless person, that was definitely one of the rudest and cruelest things I’ve ever heard said to a child, at least by someone who had no idea how hurtful their words could be.
I know that ruder and intentionally meaner things are said to or about people every day, but what astounded me was that this woman could have said what she did with no thought as to how negatively her words might be heard and interpreted by a child.
Why has Anthony Fauci predicted 100,000 to 200,000 coronavirus deaths in the US with millions of cases? For perspective, total deaths in China stood at 3,186 today.
Because the cordon sanitaire is a joke stateside. You have to ringfence the virus to break transmission.
New York is now worse hit than Wuhan. Have state borders been sealed?
If someone tests positive but has mild symptoms do you send the person home?
What if he is a renter who shares the space with others and gets kicked out?
What if they are adults in nuclear families?
What if they are homeless?
Where are the quarantine facilities?
Further, who ensures compliance with quarantine orders for those that test positive?
Relying on goodwill and personal responsibility contributed to a handful of individuals becoming responsible for more than half of Korea’s cases. That is 5,000!
Where and how effective is contact tracing when America solves only 60 percent of murders each year? Every missed contact can mean thousands of cases down the road.
America is not putting whole of nation and whole of government effort into fighting this. They are fighting each other and have an eye on the stock market. How do you have the best days in a century when 3 million lose their jobs in one week?
"All natural resources on which economic development, influence and might depend are instruments of political struggle.
It is logical that they are used for political purposes, including geopolitical ones.
We saw this in the 1980s, when the United States put colossal pressure on Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries, which were the main oil producers, bringing about a collapse in oil prices to $10 or even lower per barrel in the hope of reducing the Soviet Union’s foreign exchange earnings and hence its capacity to continue to develop and ensure its security.
At that time, we continued to compete with the United States and the West as a whole.
They achieved their goal.
The Soviet Union’s revenues plummeted, which was one of the causes, though not the main or only one, that led to its dissolution.
They put pressure on the oil market, used speculation for the fall, drew the Soviet Union into an arms race, and promoted 'democratic reforms' when our country was not prepared for them.
Taken together, this contributed to the fall of a great power.
Since then, the Americans have been using oil and oil prices as a weapon.
A relevant example is Iran, which had its oil exports banned and the channels of oil deliveries contrary to that illegal ban were blocked.
Today, oil sanctions against Iran have been lifted.
The latest example is Venezuela, which was the third largest oil supplier to the United States in 2019.
In 2022, the Americans adopted an oil embargo against it, allegedly in the struggle against the 'regime' of Nicolas Maduro, as they put it.
But later they faced the consequences of the OPEC and OPEC Plus efforts to stabilise the oil market based on the main economic factors and a balance of interests of producers, importers and transit countries.
Today, the Americans are playing new political games against Venezuela, offering it an agreement to resume oil exports to the United States in exchange for political concessions.
However, it is a fact that Washington is suffering the consequences of its own actions considering that a vast number of American oil refineries were equipped to process Venezuelan oil.
It is a combination of purely economic factors and a desire to take advantage of economic ties, in this instance, use oil as a weapon.
As for Russia, what is the oil price cap imposed on Russian oil by the Americans, which the West was pressured to adopt as well?
It is flagrant interference in the workings and principles of the free market, which the Americans have been promoting for decades.
They described the dollar not as an American currency but as a global element of interconnectivity between the global economy and finances.
The structure collapsed when they decided to use these instruments to inflict what they described as 'geopolitical defeat' on Russia.
It is obvious that nobody is happy about the use of these underhanded methods, although few people, especially in the West, dare to put their uneasiness into words.
The pinnacle of using hydrocarbons as a weapon was the explosion of the Nord Stream pipelines, which directly targeted Germany.
American analysts have admitted it, and many in Germany are openly saying this.
It is evidence of the current German government’s impotence and inability not just to think independently but to even protect its vital interests on which the prosperity and well-being of German citizens depend.
As a result of that subversive terrorist attack, businesses, faced with rising gas prices, are leaving Germany and other European countries, and relocating, for the most part, to the United States.
They have started to talk about the de-industrialisation of Europe.
A year ago, French Minister for the Economy and Finances Bruno Le Maire said in a public statement that businesses paid four times more for energy in Europe than in the United States. I believe the balance is approximately the same now.
It is a fact that the United States has created much more favourable conditions for businesses, including by approving credit subsidies under the Inflation Reduction Act. Business is moving to the United States.
At the same time, immediately after blowing up the gas pipelines, Washington said that in the absence of Russian gas Europe needed to buy American LNG, even though it cost more and there was a lack of the necessary infrastructure, which was still to be built.
Four years ago, when Angela Merkel was chancellor and life was easier, the Americans attempted to convince Germany that it had no need for Nord Stream or Russian gas in general, that it could buy American LNG instead.
Angela Merkel argued that it would be more complicated and much more expensive.
The Americans agreed that it would cost more and suggested covering the difference with higher taxes.
After all, they said, you can tell your people that it is a good cause in the interests of peace and democracy throughout the world.
There are more examples of this kind."
Profile
—Answer by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov to the question, “Do you agree that oil is an instrument of political manipulation? Can you provide more striking examples of this or arguments to the contrary?” during an interview for the documentary series ‘Oil’, Moscow, March 21, 2024.
What is the most heartbreaking conversation you’ve ever had?
It was March 2016. Nine months before I had been granted parole and I would be going home in November. My brother knew I was being released and was ecstatic.
So I was on the yard when I was called to the Captains Office. I get there and the room is full of white shirts and C/Os . They asked me to have a seat. I said I would prefer to stand. The Captain asked if everyone in the room would sit would I please sit. I reluctantly agreed. Some C/Os had to squat. My mind was racing. What had I done to cause so many officers to be in the room? They told me I to call my sister in law and pointed at the phone. I couldn’t reach her. They then told me my brother had passed. I did not believe it. They asked if I would prefer to go to the hole so I could be alone. I told them no. I felt numb . I could barely understand what was being said. A C/O offered to walk me to my housing unit again no.
I get back to my housing unit and call my sister in law. She was crying so hard I could barely understand her. But she confirmed my brother had passed away. I was devastated. My little brother who I went to prison for by killing his abuser was gone. He passed within mnths of me getting out
Could you cover a grenade that’s about to explode with a military issued helmet to protect yourself from flying shrapnel?
of the US Marine Corps. While his Marine squad was trying to subdue an enemy combatant, the insurgent dropped a grenade among them. Dunham jumped on the grenade to save his comrades, placing his combat helmet directly over the grenade to reduce the blast.
You can see how that worked out for the helmet.
Surprisingly, Dunham was not immediately killed by the blast, but he was severely wounded. His injuries sent him into a coma, and he died eight days later.
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Dunham was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for his sacrifice.
So judging by real world experience, the answer to this question is no. Of course, if you are presented with a grenade, you want to put as much distance and protection between you and it as possible. If that includes a helmet, it’s better than nothing. But you cannot expect that it will save you.
If you’ve got a better option, take it.
How can I stress Google and significantly increase their costs?
Physical attacks are cheaper, easier and possibly less risky than electronic attacks.
The US-101 exit for the Google Headquarters in Mountain View is notoriously busy. It can take 15 minutes of sitting in traffic, and causes a great deal of stress to Googlers.
If your car ‘broke down’ in that junction thousands of people would be delayed in getting to work. Let’s say that the fully burdened cost of an engineer is $100 /hr, you might delay 2000 people getting to work by half an hour, costing Google $100k. (Some people might give up and turn around).
In addition, one of the reasons that people leave Google to work elsewhere is the traffic. A few engineers might quit. Hiring new engineers is expensive (I think Bob See has given the cost somewhere on this site, and it’s in the thousands of dollars), plus it takes time to ramp up at Google – you are not productive for at least a couple of months, and possibly up to six months. Let’s call that $100 * 8 hours * 60 days, that’s another 50k.
So, for the cost of the cheapest car you can find, that will actually start, and a couple of hours of your time, you have cost Google $150k. (You might need to add the price of travel and the time to get to Mountain View).
You could pull this stunt as often as you can get away with it, each time costing $150k.
That’s much easier than a botnet attack, or 10s of thousands of Gmail accounts.
Another advantage of this method is that you haven’t committed a very serious crime – the FBI aren’t going to come after you for hacking. You can probably get away with it at least once by being told to be more careful.
Comix 1
American Society of Magical Negroes is AWFUL – People Are SICK of Woke Hollywood
WTF? It’s an actual movie? Whoa!
What’s something your gender does that the opposite gender never even thinks about?
A lot of men try very hard to not seem like creeps or pervs, whereas I’ve never heard of any woman making any similar effort.
For example, I am currently at the beach. Literally, I am sitting in a chair in the sand about 15 feet from the Atlantic Ocean. There are about 40 other people within eyesight on this beach, including a group of teen girls to the right of me who’ve been taking bikini selfies for about two hours. They’re hard to ignore, because they’re doing weird poses and giggling a lot.
To the left, there are more women in bikinis. They’re sunbathing.
So I’m making a point to keep my eyes on my laptop, the book I’m reading, or the ocean in front of me. I hesitate to look left or right, lest I get accused of being a creep.
But, there are also a lot of scantily-clad men out here too. The women around me seem to have no problem staring at these guys. Older women, younger women, it doesn’t matter. When a shirtless guy jogs by (it happens a lot… there’s a Marine base near here), some of these women are downright shameless in their gawking.
Imagine if a guy did that to a woman running by, especially if that woman was a generation younger than them. They’d be driven off the beach by an angry mob, accusing them of being a pervert.
Yesterday, I was sitting on the deck overlooking the ocean, using my binoculars to scan the horizon. I was looking for dolphins or boats or whatever I could see. But, as soon as a family with teenage girls showed up on the beach, I put the binoculars down. Seeing a dolphin isn’t worth the risk of being thought of as a possible creep.
Jia Qingguo (贾庆国)
What follows is a relatively wide-ranging interview with Jia Qingguo (贾庆国) discussing the prospects of cross-Strait relations, a potential Trump presidency and US-China ties more broadly. Jia has been a long-time foreign policy adviser in the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) and is the former Dean of Peking University’s School of International Studies. He has recently been outspokenly critical of the restrictions on Chinese scholars’ engagement with foreign counterparts. Among the highlights of this piece – his advocacy of “patience” in the Taiwan context so long as the incoming leadership does not pursue independence; his preference to see Biden re-elected rather than Trump (views among China’s establishment intellectuals continue to be divided); and his belief that there is still scope for alignment of US and Chinese interests on regional conflicts in Ukraine and the DPRK.
Taiwan’s president-elect Lai Ching-te has his hands tied politically. The impact of his election on cross-Strait relations should be limited. China will continue to promote peaceful (re)unification “for some time to come”.
Trump is “reckless”, has “outdated views” and lacks “basic moral principles”. He has shown that he is not the pragmatic businessman that many in China had hoped for back in 2016.
His re-election would be particularly detrimental to China and could lead to “severe friction and confrontation” between Washington and Beijing. The prospect of his walking away from the US’s One-China Policy is real.
A second Biden presidency would not prevent further tensions between the US and China, but it could help preserve the current trend of stabilizing and improving ties.
Beijing should always keep its long-term interests in mind and avoid overreacting to provocations coming from the United States. Confrontation and tit-for-tat responses make little sense at a time when China is still more vulnerable than the US.
There are still many areas in which the US and China can (and must) cooperate. For instance, defusing tensions on the Korean peninsula will only succeed if Beijing and Washington are prepared to join hands.
B̲o̲ston – B̲o̲ston (Full Album) 1976
Let’s hop into the GTO, crank it up loud, and roll up one.
I went to Walmart
“I went into Wal-Mart to grab three things. Fruit Loops, eggs & waffles. Healthy, I know. This woman was asking people for something and my goal was to bypass, get my things and go. She asked me to stop. I figured she was just asking for money and I already decided that I was going to politely let her know that I didn’t have any cash on me. I never carry cash. I listened to her. She had groceries in her cart and asked for help to buy food for her family. She proceeded to tell me that she turned her daughter in for dope, her 2-month-old grand baby was born addicted to crack and she has 6 grandchildren to take care of. I really felt for her. She was sobbing. See, I know stories like this to be FACT from working in an inner-city school and my husband working in a hospital. Babies are unfortunately born addicted all the time & responsibility of raising grandbabies does fall on the grandparents. She asked me if I would help her buy groceries.
I looked at what I had in my hands compared to what she had. She had shopped smart and had healthy food: bananas, bell peppers, meat, pancakes, etc. Practical things you would make meals with and feed children. I told her yes, go get diapers for the baby and meet me at the front. She sobbed, praised God and said hallelujah to the cashiers,etc. Yesterday, I turned 30, had my healthy family by my side, ate tons of crawfish and blew $20 at the casino for the heck of it. Well, I checked my humanity today. This woman has food to put on her table and even if she wasn’t telling the truth, I don’t even care in the least. She’s human, I’m human and today she helped me realize a few things and I hope that I helped her. She won’t have to worry for at least a little while about food. I didn’t expect this today but apparently I was called to it and was right where I needed to be.
The forgotten dresser
Cheese Steak Pizza
Cheese Steak Pizza
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
1 pound ground beef
1 small onion, cut crosswise into thin slices, separated into rings
1 small green or red bell pepper, cut into thin strips
Brown ground beef in large nonstick skillet over medium heat 6 minutes.
Add onion and bell pepper; continue cooking until beef is not pink and vegetables are crisp-tender, breaking beef up into small crumbles.
Pour off drippings; season with salt and pepper.
Place pizza crust on ungreased large baking sheet. Spoon beef mixture evenly on pizza crust; sprinkle with cheese.
Bake at 400 degrees F for 8 to 10 minutes or until cheese is melted.
Cut into 8 wedges.
What are some examples of grim legacies?
Saddam’s bunker was designed to withstand a nuclear bomb.
It was built directly under his palace.
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(source: Outlook Magazine)
Much like traditional concrete design, steel rods were run first, then concrete poured over them.
Only—the steel was thicker, and so was the concrete.
It was so powerful that if a Hiroshima bomb went off 250m away—the bunker would be fine.
And through both Iraq wars, the bunker stood strong and withheld all the onslaughts of US forces. In today’s dollars, it cost well over $100 million to build.
But—to the question:
It was built by a Munich, Germany born designer, Karl Esser. He comes from a long line of architects who have also designed military grade bunkers. He expresses no guilt in designing the bunker, stating that it wasn’t a weapon, merely the equivalent of a bomb shelter.
He actually met with Saddam Hussein several times and stated that if you met him (in the 1980’s), he looks like a tax collector, there is nothing special about him. But when he starts speaking—you realize that he is far more than a tax collector, and you are reminded of that by how tense everyone around him is. (Source: Saddam’s bunker can withstand nuke attack, says its designer. Bhaita, Saida)
Again—to the question:
Karl was chosen specifically by Hussein because of his experience. His grandmother designed Hitler’s bunker. The family trade had been passed down to him.
To usher in Communism?
Really? These folk don’t have a clue as to what they are talking about.
Have you ever met a celebrity who asked you, “Do you know who I am?” and you said no?
Yes, as a matter of fact, Shaquille O’Neal. Now to be honest, he wasn’t as famous at the time as he has become since, but he was well known locally. I was a homicide detective in Baton Rouge, Louisiana one Friday or Saturday night was driving on one of the public thoroughfares to go through LSU campus, when a small truck ran a stop sign in front of me on Highland Road, almost causing an accident. Even though I was I was in an unmarked car, I decided to pull it over to advise the driver to be more careful. Upon stopping the vehicle, the driver of the truck exited, and it took him a while to unfold himself out of it. He towered over me, but smiling, advised apologetically that he didn’t have his drivers He advised he did not have license on him, saying friendly enough, “but you know who I am” More statement than a question.
I decided to play ‘dumb’. “No, who are you?” I asked with a straight face. I was pretty sure it was Shaquille O’Neal, but I wanted him to tell me who he was. I honestly did not do not follow basketball, but everyone was talking about him (he was the star LSU basketball player at the time). I almost felt sorry for him As he looked a little Bit crestfallen that I apparently did not know who he was. He wasn’t asking for special favors or making demands, he innocently thought he was well known in town BY ALL due his Athletic prowess and notoriety. I smiled at him, and I said something to the effect that, ‘ I know who you are, but need your DOB and some proof. He found his insurance or registration with his name on it and I explained why I stopped him and told him to please be more careful. He was friendly and respectful during the entire encounter. I am very proud that he now works as a reserve law enforcement officer. He is much more than some guy who can play a game, he is obviously a still a class act.
Victoria Nuland: The making of a psychopath. Chapter 1,2 and 3.
Have you ever stood up to a bully? What happened?
Starting in the second grade, when my father lifted the absolute prohibition on fighting. He got tired of picking me up from the school nurse, or the hospital. Also tired of the wear and tear on my clothing.
The very next day, one of my usual tormentors hit me in the back of the head. The teacher just watched, as usual. So I picked up my desk and beat him unconscious. Took three blows.
I was sent to the office, of course. The principal said I was to be expelled. My father asked if the other boys who hit me had also been expelled. “well, no. They didn’t use a desk.”
“So, it’s okay for them to beat MY son bloody, as long as they don’t use the furniture? Is that it? Did you at least discipline the teacher who allowed this to go on?”
“Well, no. Boys will be boys…”
“Well, my boy is a boy, too. You have demonstrated that you will do nothing to prevent him from being beaten; so where’s the problem if he fights back?
Tell you what. I’m going to send the hospital bills and the bills for damaged clothes to my lawyer, and the school board. we’ll let them sort it out.”
And that was the last said of expelling me.
OMG funny
What would happen if the US decoupled from China?
The life in the US would become like this.
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How can an employee get a manager fired?
In my experience its easier if you don’t try. Couple of years ago a manager denied me several requests for Training, told me i was a waist of time. Few years latter my ceo inquired as to why i never made use of the company training system. So i told him. I told him about being denied and the waist of time comment, and how i did not even look at training anymore because of it.
That manager was demoted that Christmas, quit instead, then sent his layer to take a chunk out of my 401. The company successfully convinced him not to. But later they restricted my max contribution to the retirement account because of the incident.
And it all happened because i applied for training on how to handle an upset customer.
Second time was during an ataboy reward. Essentially i had a panic attack when that same ceo came to congratulate me. He was fired because, by procedure, when an employee freaks out the manager is supposed to walk away. Instead this ceo stayed around and calmed me down. The project manager 5feet away wrote the ceo up, and by the end of the week that ceo was gone. Only thing needed to make it all happen was a traumatic event in college to give me ptsd. “May God welcome you to his heavenly splendor Jerry. You will be missed and thank you.”
To get a manager fired do the following. Call a lawyer, get the lawyer to file a freedom of information. Aquire the company’s secret employment laws document. This will be the stack of papers that say among other things
1. A thong is ok for women to ware but brief’s are not ok for men to use.
2. An employee may be terminated for possession of pornography when: they are found to poses/refuse to submit to search and with a witness, or have a prior termination for and no witness. Or a manager successfully implants the audio album “innocent victim” on the employees phone.
3. Work place competition is permitted under these criteria. Or exceeds the bounds of acceptance under these criteria…
4. The employee was found holding a blade, even if found working with food in the kitchen.
5. Employees are permitted to use incontinence products but are subject to termination if they discard used products in the bathroom garbage bin. And by extension are not allowed to have extra diapers on company grounds.
Be warned if you do obtain these secret documents, most fortune 500 companys will respond by amending a new criteria. Usually the new criteria is specialized to target YOU and some thing YOU do. In this way even after you learn how to CAN anyone, you will not be bulletproof. HR is not stupid, they will fit you with a remote explosive collar.
But coming back to the original question, use what you learn then file a report on your manager for anything he is doing that violates those secret rules.
The underwear criteria was really surprising to me, then i got investigated for it one day.
Please let us know if you actually get someone canned for their underwear.
Final comments. The right reason to terminate a manager is when there replacement is both better than the current person, and when its better for the company. Any situation where you are involved in a non consensual passing of the torch will result in repercussions. If your manager is doing something you don’t like, ask them how you are supposed to respond. You will be surprised.
U.S IN TROUBLE! China Finally DESTROY U.S Companies
What are some dark sides about law enforcement you have seen?
A man was stabbed, killed and thrown in a desolate pit.
The mother blamed victim’s brothers in law for this. Police arrested both of them but later cleared them off. No lead, no progress at all. Senior officers and Judge were not happy.
Four months passed.
Then a young and handsome officer got transferred in our police station. A few ongoing cases were given to him to investigate and complete, this blind murder incident was exclusively included as well.
I remember… It was his first day at work, he chose to handle this blind murder case first. I knew him personally because his elder brother is my friend, a constable as well. So this officer preferred using my room until he gets a suitable place to set up his desk and everything.
So… yea. First day at work. He summoned those two suspects (in laws) as he wished to question them. Those two individuals arrived in my office. There were four people in my room. Me, detective and those two.
He began throwing question at them and investigated. Questions after questions… and a bit of persuasion.
They confessed the murder in half an hour. I kid you not. They confessed the murder, showed the place where they hid the knives and explained the motive.
This young detective solved a murder case in 30 minutes on his first day.
Senior officers couldn’t praise him more. That previous detective was blown upon hearing this news. He was ordered to report to head quarters. A seasoned one. I am sure he was asked…
How the hell couldn’t you resolve this piece of cake investigation in four months. Did you intentionally spare the murderers.
I remember the sweat on his forehead when he returned. He was worried as this may lead to dismissal from service and then some, if proved that he favored the murderers in his reports.
And if that’s truth “he sold a murder” which is awful and atrocious.
Anyway…. it’s not my place to put verdict.
I don’t know if he did it or not.
What is rare is not common
Is China’s rise America’s fall?
I have written extensively on this subject, focusing for a moment on what is China doing and what is the US doing which are in opposite directions. If you go the wrong direction for long enough then you are in real trouble, which America is in right now.
CHINA’S RISE
Forget about all the state capitalism vs corporate capitalism, yes this is an underlying difference but results are results. Either you are in the game or you are not and the USA is not in the game, China is.
It is all about one thing, investment. You do not invest you get nothing. Here is Pudong in 1982 when I first arrived in China. NOTHING NADA ZERO development.
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Then there is Pudong today, same photo but completely developed.
AMERICA’S FALL
Here is Detroit where I grew up in 1950:
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Ostensibly the ‘richest’ city in the world the year I was born, 1950.
Here is Detroit a few years ago:
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I chose a nice image, just the after effects of destruction.
It is all about investment. The USA does not invest in anything other than military. Nothing, nada. The Trump administration even litigated against universities who were trying to enroll more blacks and minorities in favor of Chinese and whites, but really Chinese as they were the highest test scorers so they get in and nothing for black, latinos or other US citizens. Incarceration rates and numbers at 2.3 million, drugs, lack of opportunity, do you get it? America is still going in the wrong direction and now we have the QAnon types running the Republican party so you can forget about them to help. Up to the Democrats who are ok but they are no world beaters when it comes to investment as they are govt types and don’t get the private sector.
And Trump? Mr Glitz was the exact opposite of investment, but if you do not invest you die and he invested nothing.
The USA will die and be hollowed out and China will dominate the world completely if the USA and Europe and even Australia, but especially the USA, does not clean up its act and invest.
Invest in their education, in vocational training, in tax incentives to invest to get companies back to Detroit and everywhere else.
I could go on, but this nonsense about China’s gain is the US loss is only because the USA put all of their money and effort and investment INTO CHINA AND NOT INTO THE USA FOR THE PAST 35 YEARS!
As Everett Dirksen, a great US Senator once said when asked about the budget, ‘a billion here a billion there, and before you know it, you are talking about real money’. How about a trillion here a trillion there and before you know it, you are broke like the USA is about to be!
I could easily make a case that every US company was headed up by traitors, strong word I get it, but I want to make a point. If all you want to do is make profits in the next quarter, you and your country and your family and your future WILL LOSE.
China is also investing internally not just FDI any longer.
Good on them, now can the rest of the world get off their bums and stop thinking that selling each other cups of coffee and beers is good enough? And that all of the fake hedge funds and other financial ‘products’ are garbage and are not benefiting Americans rather a small elite that now does their business in China as they make more money there.
Hope that puts a different focus on this debate and gets people to back off on China and to focus instead on their own countries and their own people and solve their own problems.
There is plenty of time to discuss this all with China but clean up your acts first.
What are a few bitter truths of life?
In my office, there is a 26 year old married guy. He is an attendant and not earning much for leading a decent life in a metro city. Although, I am much above in post than him, I treat him as my friend.
So, his wife was about to give birth in a day or two yet he was not taking leave from the office. He told me that it is very close and could be today or tomorrow.
Then on the next day at 4 PM, he rushed towards me saying that wife is in labor and was taken to the hospital. I got furious and told him why he didn’t take leave that day. I quickly calmed down realizing his situation and offered to drop him. But to amazment, he refused.
I was speechless. He said he has some urgent work and only after finishing that he will go.
Next day he called me and said that he was blessed with a baby boy but he also said by the time he reached his wife had already given birth.
I demanded he explain this nonsense.
In a soft voice he explained that he needed to finish his duty till 5.30 pm otherwise his one day pay would be deducted.
Bitter truths:
Money really is the most important thing because the lack of it is so painful.
Our parents sacrifice so much but still sometimes we end up ignoring them.
One cannot truly relate to the pain of others unless he is put in same position.
Without education, a person is really on a path of lifelong struggle.
The Sopranos – Dick Barone – the king of garbage and Tony Soprano’s boss!
What is the most satisfying passive-aggressive thing you have ever done to a really mean or rude person?
I was working the AT YOUR SERVICE counter at Macy’s during the holiday rush when a woman with husband in tow stepped in front of the customer I was waiting on, a quiet and endlessly patient young man, and demanded that I call her a manager and, almost as an afterthought, added that the person I summoned had better be white.
She said this loud enough for everyone in the cordoned line behind her to hear.
The young man I’d been waiting on was black, as was practically everyone else in line.
I leaned towards her and hissed —
You realize you’ve just given me license to tell you exactly what I think of you without the risk of getting fired…
But I’m not gonna do that.
What I AM going to do is tell you to go to the end of the line and wait for me to finish with all these other good people…and then I’ll call you a manager.
His name will be Akeem.
And he’s just gonna LOVE talkin’ to YOU.
She didn’t make it to the end of the line. Her long suffering husband literally dragged her out of the store.
And Akeem wasn’t actually my supervisor. He was responsible for the ground floor and I was mall level.
I lied about that part.
But he did enjoy the story when I told it to him later on.
Mother Goes Off On Woke School Board Over Graphic Books in Her Child’s Elementary School
What are some things that make you think “what a strange world we live in”?
There are many places that make this a very strange world. The Nazca Lines, crop circles, Easter Island, Stonehenge, Machu Picchu, and so on. I thought I had read about them all, but this one was new to me.
The Band of Holes
In Pisco, Peru, stretching across the Cajamarquilla Plain are thousands of ancient holes that measure 6 feet (1.8 m) to 7 feet (2.1.m) deep and evenly spaced 3 feet (.9 m) apart. No one has any idea how these holes were formed. There are at least 5000 to 6000 depressions that run north and south for almost 2 miles. (3.2 k)
Who would dig all these holes? Why? How were they created? I’m imagining some poor sunburned guy with a spade saying, “Okay, 600 more to go then I’m stopping.”
It actually looks like some giant machine was travelling along this path. Was it a mining operation? What were these holes for?
Initially discovered by pilot Robert Shippee who took an aerial photo of them and published them in National Geographic, they are indeed strange. They date to around the 15th. century, they believe.
Truthfully, although there are many guesses, no one really knows who or what dug these holes and why.
Peru is a very strange place that’s for sure. Just read about Saqsaywaman, 12 Angled Stone, and Machu Picchu. Who built these places and how? Modern man would have a hell of a time reconstructing them. They might not be able to. I think we have forgotten the ways to do these stupendous feats. The ancients apparently knew them. We are now just learning, or relearning about moving rock through sound and wavelengths.
More experiments with text to picture
Here’s some examples from others that I thought were well done…
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What if the USA attacked China?
I find it remarkable that so many people think that the USA would overwhelm China in a war, the country that wrote the book on military strategy and how to defeat larger, more powerful opponents.
The US could not even win in Korea or Vietnam, what makes you think they would prevail against the much larger and powerful China?
First of all, the US would likely only defeat China in a conventional war assuming that China fought back using similar conventional means. Unlikely.
You have certainly seen all the news reports about Chinese hacking by their military? These sorts of things are warnings. They are warnings to the US that if you come after us we know where your vulnerabilities are. And so do the Russians. And any attack on the Chinese would also likely bring about a quick military alliance with the Russians as well.
A ground war against China (not to mention ANY war against China) would be the height of idiocy. China has 6X the number of people, compared to the US, who could be called into military service fairly quickly. And China is a HUGE country with lots of very difficult terrain to cover.
And given all the bullying and warfare that the US has engaged in since this new century began, do you really think that the Chinese, and Russian military, have not been actively preparing for the potential of such a scenario?
The US military can overwhelm most countries because they are much smaller and weaker. But taking on someone even close to our own size would expose weaknesses and vulnerabilities, both in the military and the US government, that neither wants the American people to know about or experience.
If the US wants to get itself into the biggest military quagmire in history, and destroy its economy, then yeah go ahead and try and go to war with China.
Guy Mocks Leftists Worldview With Funniest Testimony You’ll Hear Today
Can the U.S defeat China in a day? It seems that is the worldwide consensus. If such is the case, then shouldn’t China thread lightly when it comes to the U.S? I’m starting to really think China doesn’t stand a chance against the U.S and her allies.
It took the USA four presidents, 2 trillion dollars and 20 years of war in Afghanistan to replace the Taliban with the Taliban.
And you think that the US can defeat China in a day. Do you mean, like, in a basketball game or something? Hahahaaa …
What are some reasons you have left a restaurant before ordering?
I went into a truck-stop restaurant one night (though not the only time this happened) and was seated by the hostess, who cheerfully brought me the coffee and water she offered. And that was the last time ANYONE came to my table.
I watched other drivers/customers, all male, come in, get served, and finish and leave, and I couldn’t get anyone’s attention even by standing up and waving, or calling out to them as they passed by my table.
Note: I was alone, female, 50ish, and dressed decently (not provocatively) and clean. And hungry.
I finally gave up, and went to the cashier to pay for my coffee, and asked to speak to the manager. (It was the hostess who was acting as cashier). She asked, with concern, if there was a problem, and if there’d been anything wrong with the food. I said I wouldn’t know, since I never had the opportunity to order any. She got the manager, who said he was so sorry for the “misunderstanding”, and he’d be happy to take my order right then. I declined, saying that I had run out of time, and that I’d have to make do with a can of tuna or something I had in my truck for emergencies, but that it might be a good idea to speak to his waitstaff about the concept of customer service. And I added that I wouldn’t be stopping again there to eat anytime soon, as I didn’t have time in my life for that kind of treatment. I didn’t shout, or raise my voice, but I did want to make my displeasure known and understood.
On my way out, I left a tip with the hostess, who’d been cheerful and professional in her dealing with me, and told her that that tip was for her alone, and not to be shared, or “tipped out” with any servers. She already knew why, and thanked me.
Oh, and the coffee was comped.
What was your most horrible wedding experience as a guest?
Ha, not horrible just really rather bizarre! My husbands cousin was getting married. He turned out to be a horrible person but thats another story. At the wedding we are sat at the cousins table along with a mutual cousin who is/was a well known pop star. He was absolutely lovely, I was sat next to him and obviously the pop star has been left at home for the day. During the speech the brides father announced he was here and made him get up for a round of applause. Honestly he looked like he wanted to die on the spot. The brides father then spent the next 10 minutes talking about the pop star cousin and forgetting the bride and groom.
On another note 2 aunties had basically taken over the ladies loo where they could have a full blown row. You went in and they were just stood there, daggers drawn in silence. As you left you could hear them start again.
Overall it was a wedding to remember for all the wrong reasons and the bride and groom lasted about 10 years.
Niger DESTROYS Victoria Nuland’s Plot to Return Africa to France w/ Ben Norton
What office rule made you say “You gotta be kidding me”?
One place I worked still expected everyone to wear formal business attire even if they never met any clients. Amazingly, they issued an email that announced a trial run of “dress down Friday”. No guidance was given it was just dress down. This experiment was to run for a month.
After the second Friday we received another email cancelling all future dress down Fridays as some people had taken things too far. After a bit of discussion about what could have caused such a reaction, it is eventually revealed that some people wore jeans! Not scruffy jeans, jeans with holes in, slung too low, cut offs, just jeans.
Are people in China encouraged not to purchase American goods?
Many of my colleagues have moved away from iPhones. But it has nearly nothing to do with the brand beating a US brand.
An iPhone used to be a prestige item. A status symbol. But over the last 2 years so many people in China own one that it is no longer a status symbol. Factory workers, office workers etc. So what is so special about an iPhone that makes someone want to spend twice as much for it. They can buy another brand of phone that does what an iPhone does, make a phone call? Yup Take selfies? Yup. Use We Chat? Yup. Surf the net? Yup.
So that is the problem is Apple was too successful selling so many phones in China that there is no prestige that is worth paying an extra $500 for it.
And keep in mind that when someone in China is buying a phone they are paying for it all up front. So it is an extra $500 out of pocket. It is not like in the US where you pay for the phone monthly as part of your phone plan. So it is a painless extra $10 a month to buy an iPhone. So a Chinese person really thinks about the value they are getting when they hand over their money.
Of course now the little extra push to go with a Chinese brand is the trade war. But as far as I can see no one is telling them or asking them to not buy American.
Personally I think if the government ever did ask that US companies would sell very very very little here. Be thankful the Chinese government is showing restraint.
Is the quote “You cannot invade mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind every blade of grass.” attributed to General Isoroku Yamamoto based on a true story?
Admiral Yamamoto, not General. No, it is almost certainly bogus as there is no known citation for this supposed quote. The words have sometimes been attributed to the Gordon Prange, a historian on the staff of Douglas MacArthur, but it is found nowhere in his writings either. The quote should be regarded as bogus until someone can cite when and where it originated.
Nor did Admiral Yamamoto ever say:
I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.
That quote appears to be derived from the 1970 film Tora! Tora!, Tora! (great film). What he did say was:
A military man can scarcely pride himself on having smitten a sleeping enemy.
This is a reference regarding his disappointment over the bungled Japanese declaration of war which wasn’t delivered until a few hours after the attack on Pearl Harbour.
Cast-Iron Skillet Pizza
I would name this “Caprese Pizza.” It’s heavenly!
cast iron skillet pizza
Prep: 10 min | Cook: 20 min | Yield: 2 (9 to 10 inch) pizzas
2 tablespoons Filippo Berio Extra Virgin Olive Oil
1/2 cup shredded fresh basil
Instructions
Heat well-oiled cast-iron or nonstick 10 or 12 inch frying pan over medium heat for 5 minutes.
Divide dough in half; roll one half into round 1 inch smaller than diameter of pan.
Cook dough in hot pan until dough begins to rise and bottom starts to brown. Using metal spatula, turn carefully. Layer half the tomato slices over dough; scatter half the mozzarella over top. Lower heat to medium-low; cook until mozzarella melts.
Using metal spatula, transfer pizza to cutting board. Sprinkle with salt; drizzle with half the olive oil.
Cut into wedges; sprinkle half the basil over top.
Repeat with remaining ingredients.
Why did my top performing employee quit after write up?
Imagine it from the top performer’s point of view.
They might be getting offers from other companies they don’t discuss with you.
If they’re performing better than everyone else and don’t perceive themselves as having erred (at least not enough for a write up) they’re left searching for reasons you may have written them up. It’s inevitable that they will arrive at political or financial motives.
Typically having a write up interferes with career advancement, raises, and bonuses.
Perhaps they thought you were trying to put them back on their heels to make them more controllable. Top performers don’t need to be controlled. Maybe the very act of writing them up was a final straw in proving the incompetence of your leadership to them.
If their work created opportunities or revenues perhaps they saw a write up as a way of denying or usurping those. Top salespeople get this all the time. It’s a typical ruse for an unscrupulous leadership team to mess with a salesperson’s compensation or territory when they confront how much money they may pay in commissions to one person. When they think they can close the book of business themselves these asshats will do things to marginalize or force out the salesperson to capture more revenue and take credit for the sale “in spite of” the salesperson’s supposed shortcomings.
If the company is already having some problems this kind of thing is a death knell. It’s like the drunk, losing poker player trying to scare a guy with a stack of chips into folding by going all-in with an obvious bluff. The experienced people see that and think, “Well, that’s the end of that.”
This type of thing is doubly bad because it simultaneously signals bad faith and incompetence. It inspires disgust and righteous anger in people who work diligently and honestly.
In general, the more honest and competent a person is, the more attuned they are to the dishonesty and incompetence of others. Since they are typically getting things done at a faster pace they end up encountering things that interfere with getting things done more often. They encounter and avoid the temptation to take dishonest shortcuts and are pressured to do so by their managers more often.
This whole time other companies are sending messages about the greener grass across the street.
Does any of this feel like it applies to you?
The Delta Hot Index: Compare your Mate Value at a Glance
What new policy did a new boss try to implement that made you say “You gotta be kidding me”?
Many years ago I worked at a Clinical Trials company. In the space of 18 months, two of the female staff had needed extended sick leave. I don’t know the exact nature of the illness these women had. I worked more closely with one of the women so, I know that she had a miscarriage and possibly depression afterward. I believe the other women had some long-standing health problems that resulted in a hysterectomy.
One of the Managing Directors sent a fairly rambling memo about the inconvenience, to the company, of key staff being absent for long periods. He was proposing to take a gynaecological history of female staff in order to assess their ‘availabilty’ for certain roles in the company. Apparently, women’s plumbing is a bit different and inconveniently complex …. (In fairness, I should point out that he was a consultant gynaecologist).
As a Staff Representative, I was asked to forward a unanimous response on behalf of the female staff. The response was just two words and you know which two words.
He received his reply within an hour of sending his memo and the subject was never mentioned again.
OMG. This takes me back. We used to jam to this non-stop. First time I have listened to the full album in about fifty years. No shit!
Are Taiwanese oligarchs worried about chip breakthrough in mainland China that will affect their margin?
Not really
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A Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 Dragon Chipset costs around $ 450 and of that Qualcomm pockets $ 225 as Chip Designer while TSMC gets around $ 175 for Fabrication and the Packaging and Testing costs $ 50
A Huawei Kirin 9000s costs around $ 370 today of which Huawei pockets $ 100 as Chip Designer, the Foundry SMIC gets around $ 300 , the Packaging and Testing costs $ 20 and the Chinese Government subsidizes $ 50 a Chip
So as you can see TSMC pockets $ 175 for each Chip and has a margin of close to 40% as profit
SMIC pockets $ 300 for each Chip and has a margin of 7% as profit
Thus TSMC is paying almost $ 105 for manufacturing a 7 nm Chip while SMIC is paying a whopping $ 279 for manufacturing a 7 nm Chip with a 96% Yield
So TSMC is in a very advantageous position in terms of Chip manufacturing
It costs SMIC almost three times more to manufacture a 7 nm chip than TSMC at 96% Yield
The key is HUAWEI
You notice Huawei pockets only 24% of the Cost of the Chip whereas Apple and Qualcomm and Intel they pocket 50% of the Cost of the Chip
Likewise the Testing and Packaging and Finishing in China is 40% of what they charge in Taiwan
So the final Chipset is almost $ 50 Cheaper on the Mainland
So if you look at TSMC vs SMIC
SMIC is manufacturing a chip which is 96% in Yield of the same manufactured by TSMC at 3 times the cost and 20% of the Profit earned by TSMC (Not including the Subsidy)
If you look at the Kirin 9000s vs Snapdragon 888
The Kirin costs $ 50 Less than the Snapdragon and at virtually almost same quality
This translates to at least $ 117 on the final retail price of any phone using the Chipset
That’s 700 RMB cheaper at the lowest
Thats where China dominates
Ultimately the Brand mode of profiteering is why the West can never ultimately win against China in a fully competitive market
What was the most boneheaded mistake you saw someone make while in the military?
This was more than boneheaded!!!!!!!!!! This photo is of me as a MP about to go out on a jeep patrol in Danang Vietnam in 1970.
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When we changed the watch, the watch before us gave us their 45 caliber pistol. They were supposed to remove the magazine, jack the weapon back and then shoot down at some sand or earth area to make sure no round was in it. The guy I had on one watch switch, took his weapon out did not take the magazine out, jacked it back (which loaded the chamber) and then shot it down about 2 inches from my toes. We were both on a concrete walkway going into our police office. What saved my life most likely was a rubber mat about 15 feet long on the sidewalk. The round went through the rubber mat and when it ricocheted on the concrete, the bullet slid about 12 feet under the mat between my legs behind me instead of going up into me. What followed was a huge flurry of of expletives to him from myself and the men around me. I could have died from friendly fire!
What will happen if America invades China?
This shall not happen.
Last time when the States invaded North Korea, 54246 American soldiers lost their lives, and we lost more. I believe that a wise POTUS would never decide to invade China by risking half of the army in far east.
If this shall happen, er…
Per the requirements of Chinese laws, I shall be recruited, and given a rank around caption.
I may be assigned to work in a camp, interrogating captured US soldiers (see I can speak English quite well, and I am somewhat familar with psychology, politics, history and western culture).
I am also a chemist graduating from a top university. I can also serve as a chemistry engineer in factories, producing gunpowder, medicine, and other necessary materials for the war.
If the war does not go on well, I may be sent to the front, holding a handgun, leading dozens of soldiers, and I may die there. If I die bravely in a battle, I shall be recognized as “revolutionary martyr” and beried in a “martyrs cemetery”. I may have no son or daughter, but all Chinese children living in the new peace world shall dance and sing on the land that I have bled for.
Both China and the States have well educated, brave and patriotic citizens. It would be a disaster for the people of both countries, even the whole world, to initiate a war between the two countries.
Lives shall be lost, cities shall be burned and children shall starve.
If we use our muscle suitably instead, we can make this world better.
What happened to you in China which made you think completely differently about the country and society?
Before going to China, I used to hear a lot from my Mainland Chinese friends in Australia how the Chinese are so selfish and cunning. They told me to be careful when buying something because I could get cheated, that the Chinese won’t do me any favor when I ask for one and if I ask somebody the direction they might point into a wrong direction. I heard the Shaghainese are arrogant, the Henanese are very bad, the Hubei-ese are cheaters, the North-Easterners are rough and so on so forth. Of course, they warned me on good will, and I thanked them for that.
Yet, when I was actually in China, I found that virtually all what they told me are wrong. I’ve never met any arrogant Shanghainese, Hubei-ese cheater, bad Henanese or rough North-Easterner (though many North-Easterners do talk loudly). When I had no umbrella on a rainy day, someone gave me an umbrella; when I took a bus but had no coin, someone gave me coins and when I forgot my belonging in a restaurant, someone told me that. Of course, there must be bad people in China as well, but not as many as I imagined before going there based on what those Chinese friends warned me.
EELF Collection
This is… well… not what you would think. I ran across this, and it’s… well… you just have to watch it.
Some are cool, some are silly, and some just seem odd.
Back in the 1980’s I wore “parachute pants”.
1980s era parachute pants were a fashion trend popularized during the 1980s, particularly in the hip-hop and breakdancing cultures. These pants were characterized by their loose, baggy fit, often made from lightweight synthetic materials like nylon or polyester, resembling the fabric used in parachutes (hence the name). They typically featured multiple pockets, zippers, and sometimes decorative stitching or panels. Parachute pants were known for their bold colors and patterns, and they often had elasticated cuffs at the ankles. The style was closely associated with the dance and music scenes of the time and became iconic within the fashion landscape of the 1980s.
Do you all remember these things?
s l1600
Mine were grey-silver in color. LOL.
Parachute pants
I was the “cool guy”… Ha ha ha ha
How cool are you today?
Today…
What happens if you give two weeks’ notice and they ask you to leave?
Oh, this happened to me and I can tell you from personal experience.
You leave.
I gave a letter of resignation to my boss and said “Sorry about this”. He said “Aww man, really?” and then I went back to my desk. Two hours, later the HR lady that I hated came to my desk and asked me to grab my stuff and come to HR with her. I already had all my stuff packed in a box.
She processed my paperwork and sent me home. She asked me to go straight to my car and not to say anything to any of my coworkers on my way out. I said I wasn’t planning to, but wouldn’t ignore them if they said something to me. Which she was ok with. She also asked me if there was anything else I needed off my desk, but I had already gotten everything I wanted to keep. She asked if She could go through my box and take a look. I was fine with that. And that was pretty much it.
When I got home, I called the new job and told them I could start early if they wanted. They asked me to come in on the Monday after the following week as that was how the pay periods lined up and I agreed.
This is always a possibility, especially if you are going to a competitor.
All you need to do is stay professional, and don’t burn any bridges. Not worth it.
Men are simple
"I'm a 46 year old man. Married with a kid. You pretty much nailed it. Not sure why this video was suggested to me or why i clicked on it but your insight is spot on."
What was the bravest thing you ever did in a job interview?
Sometime in 1980, I had a job interview for an Electrical Engineer position.The interviewer showed me a very simple circuit and asked me what it did. I said, “It drives a DC motor either forward or backward.” He then asked what was wrong with the circuit and I then said, “I don’t see anything wrong other than that fact that there was no biasing on the transistors, but that is pretty obvious.”
“No no.” he said. “That’s not obvious at all. You have no idea how many electrical engineers don’t know how to bias transistors,” (Fact is that this is both basic and very important.)
He went on ranting and raving about this for several minutes. Then asked me how I would bias the transistors. So, I drew in some resisters. He said, “Yeah – I guess that would work.”
I asked him, “Would you do it differently?” “A little bit.” He replied. I asked him to show me how he would do it.
He then proceeded to “bias” the transistors in a way that would NOT work. I asked myself, “Should I tell him?” I quickly decided that if I could not point out his error, I did not want to work for the guy anyway.
So I told him why his circuit would not work. He crumpled up the paper.tossed it in the basket and said, “That stuff is not important anyway.” I was out of his office two minutes later and never heard from them again. I laughed all the way to my car.
Real talk
Russia. Is. At. War.
Due to a flurry of western support for Ukraine, now escalating to ground troop insertions, Russia had to move its special military operation in Ukraine into the bigger scope of a full fledged war. Over the last month the Ukrainian military intelligence directorate GUR and its civilian secret service SBU have attempted to disturb the recent presidential election in Russia. They did this by:
sending forces, with U.S. made equipment (Bradleys), to attack Russian border villages in the direction of Belgorod (Belgograd),
by launching missiles from Czech Vampire (RM-70) multiple launch rocket systems towards Belgorod,
by launching somewhat successful drone strike against Russian oil refineries.
The election in Russia saw a record turnout. As expected President Putin did win by a very large margin. His legitimacy is a geopolitical reality:
If Nato expansion is about the perpetuation of US hegemony and de-dollarisation is about the burial of the western financial system that underpins that hegemony, Putin is playing a pivotal role in that historical process. If Putin remains in power till 2030 and fulfils even one half of the ambitious blueprint of social and economic programme for Russia that he outlined in his landmark speech at the Federal Assembly of the parliament, the global strategic balance will have shifted irrevocably and cemented a multipolar world order as the anchor sheet of 21st century politics. The West knows it, the Russian people know it, the vast majority of nations realise it. That said, it must be understood as well that this is not only Putin’s victory personally but also a consolidation of Russian society around him. And that accounts for the last week’s election turning into such a high-stakes affair.
With the election out of the way Russia was free to hit back.
Over the last six days the Russian MoD reports claimed no less than nine hits on the Czech Vampire systems which targeted Belgorod. The Ukrainian incursion towards Belgorod has thus been defeated. On Wednesday Jake Sullivan, the U.S. National Security Advisor, had visited Kiev. He was noticed for what he did not say:
Jake Sullivan, US National Security Adviser, has said that Ukraine will win if it comes out of the war as a sovereign, democratic and free country. At the same time, he did not mention restoring Ukraine’s territorial integrity among the conditions of victory.
It is believed that Sullivan delivered a warning to Kiev. As the Financial Timesreported (archived):
The US has urged Ukraine to halt attacks on Russia’s energy infrastructure, warning the drone strikes risk driving up global oil prices and provoking retaliation, according to three people familiar with the discussions.The repeated warnings from Washington were delivered to senior officials at Ukraine’s state security service, the SBU, and its military intelligence directorate, known as the GUR, the people told the Financial Times. Both intelligence units have steadily expanded their own drone programmes to strike Russian targets on land, sea and in the air since the start of the Kremlin’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
The U.S. concern is not about Ukraine but about Biden’s chance for reelection:
Russia remains one of the world’s most important energy exporters despite western sanctions on its oil and gas sector. Oil prices have risen about 15 per cent this year, to $85 a barrel, pushing up fuel costs just as US President Joe Biden begins his campaign for re-election. … The US objections come as Biden faces a tough re-election battle this year with petrol prices on the rise, increasing almost 15 per cent this year to around $3.50 a gallon.“Nothing terrifies a sitting American president more than a surge in pump prices during an election year,” said Bob McNally, president of consultancy Rapidan Energy and a former White House energy adviser.
The Ukrainian government denied and confirmed the FT report (machine translation):
Earlier, Deputy Prime Minister Olga Stefanashina actually confirmed the information to the Financial Times , saying that “we understand the calls of American partners,” but Ukraine responded to such calls by “achieving its goals” and “very successful operations” on the territory of the Russian Federation.
Sullivan’s warning about provoking retaliation was too late. Yesterday, for the first time in 44 day, Russia launched a missile attack against Kiev (archived):
The Ukrainian Air Force said that air defense systems had intercepted all 31 of the Russian missiles that targeted Kyiv. Still, debris from the downed missiles fell in various parts of the city, causing the injuries and damage. No deaths have been reported so far. … In the Podilskyi district, which is home to industrial facilities that Russia has targeted in the past, a plume of black smoke was rising early in the morning, suggesting a hit. Mr. Klitschko said a fire had broken out at a power substation in the area. Ukrainian officials rarely confirm strikes on strategic industrial and military targets. … Thursday’s attack on Kyiv echoed a strategy used by Russia during air assaults in late December that consisted of overwhelming Ukraine’s air defenses with multiple launches of various types of missiles, including ballistic and hypersonic ones.Russia has launched relatively few large-scale missile attacks in recent months, despite a capacity to produce more than 115 long-range missiles per month, according to Ukrainian officials.
Last night, the Russian Aerospace Forces delivered a strike by long-range precision weaponry including Kinzhal hypersonic missiles at AFU decision-making centres, logistic bases, temporary deployment areas of special operations forces and foreign mercenaries.The goal of the strike has been achieved. All the targets have been engaged.
Such Russian strikes are complex. Drones are send first to reveal Ukrainian air defense systems. Then follows a wave of attacks against those system. A third strike is then launched against the real targets of the attack. In this case those were a drone factory in Kiev as well as a headquarter of the military intelligence service GUR. Another large scale strike followed today. The primary targets were elements of the electricity infrastructure:
Large areas of Ukraine are suffering blackouts after Russian missiles targeted energy infrastructure.There is no electricity in the second-largest city of Kharkiv, says regional head Oleg Synehubov. Fifteen blasts were reported in Kharkiv, while more than 53,000 households in Odesa were without power. Ukraine’s energy minister, German Galushchenko, accused Russia of trying to provoke “a large-scale failure of the country’s energy system”. A power line feeding the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant had been cut, he added. Regional head Ivan Fedorov said the power station was “on the verge of a blackout”, adding that seven buildings in the region had been destroyed and 35 others damaged. President Volodymyr Zelensky said Russia had launched more than 60 Shahed drones and about 90 missiles into Ukraine during the wave of overnight attacks.
Internet access in Ukraine has dropped significantly. This was again a complex attack:
Lord Bebo @MyLordBebo – 9:42 UTC · Mar 22, 2024🇺🇦🇷🇺🚨‼️ Russian missile attack on Ukraine during March 22nd, 2024. -> Notice the flight patterns of the missiles. Aviation: At 01:12, the takeoff of 3⨯ Tu-95ms from the Olenya air base was noted. At 02:30, information on the movement of 13 Tu-95ms to the launch lines was clarified. At 03:34, the launch of the KRPB Kh-101/555/55 was carried out from the Volgograd region. At 04:18, the takeoff of 5 Tu-22m3s from the Mozdok air base was noted. During the attack, a total of 10 MiG-31Ks were raised (7 were used before the attack). Armament: 55/63x “Shahed-136/131” Type Shock Unmanned Aerial Vehicles; 0/12x OTR “Iskander-M”; 35/40 X-101/X-555 cruise missiles; 0/5x NKR Kh-22; 0/7x ARPB Kh-47M2 “Dagger”; 2/2x CAR X-59; 0/22x ZKR S-300/S-400. The targeted air attack vector during today’s day is marked on the map.
The Ukrainian air defense claimed to have shut down 55 of 63 Shahid drones. But the Iskander, Dagger and S-300 fired against it all came through. The Russian MoD reports (machine translation):
Today, the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation delivered a massive strike with high-precision long-range weapons of air, sea, land-based and unmanned aerial vehicles against energy facilities, military-industrial complex, railway junctions, arsenals, places of deployment of formations of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and foreign mercenaries.As a result of the strike, the functioning of industrial enterprises for the production and repair of weapons, military equipment and ammunition was disorganized. In addition, foreign military equipment and weapons delivered to Ukraine from NATO countries were destroyed, transfers to the front line of enemy reserves were disrupted, and units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine and mercenaries in the areas of restoring combat capability were hit. All the goals of the massive strike have been achieved.
Some European politicians are eager to join the fight.
As demonstrated today, Russia is ready for it. But unlike a still training Macron Russia has taken its gloves off (machine translation):
Peskov: Russia is in a state of war, everyone should understand thisRussia will continue to act in such a way that the military potential of Ukraine could not threaten the security of its citizens and its territory, he said in a conversation with reporters. “What is the president talking about? We have four new regions of the Russian Federation. And the main thing for us is to protect people in these regions and liberate the territory of these regions, which is currently de facto occupied by the Kiev regime,” Peskov said. According to the presidential press secretary, Russia cannot allow the existence of a state on its borders that has documented the intention to use any methods to take Crimea from it, not to mention the territory of new regions. “We are at war. Yes, it started out as a special military operation, but as soon as this little group was formed there, when the collective West became a participant in this on the side of Ukraine, it already became a war for us. I am convinced of this. And everyone should understand this for their internal mobilization,” Peskov added.
In parallel to Peskov’s declaration of war talk, Russias announced the mass production of the three ton heavy FAB-3.000 aerial bombs with 1,400 kg of explosives. These will be fitted, like the currently used FAB 500 and FAB 1.500, with the universal planning and correction module (UMPC) which allows the bombs to glide some 40 miles after being launched to then hit its planned target with high precision. There is little that can survive such a strike. In his (highly recommendable) book “The Russian Art of War”, the former Swiss military intelligence officer Jacques Baud described the reason why the current fighting in Ukraine started out as a “Special Military Operation” within a larger context:
The use of the word “war” would imply a different structure of conduct than that envisioned by the Russians in Ukraine, and would have other structural implications in Russia itself. Moreover – and this is a central point – as NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg himself acknowledges,”the war began in 2014” and should have been ended by the Minsk Agreements. The SMO is therefore a “military operation” and not a new “war”, as many Western “experts” claim.
That was then. Now Russia is at war. This will have, as Baud says, a different structure of conduct and other structural implications in Russia and beyond. Those ‘western’ politicians who are dreaming of fighting Russia have no idea of what will hit their troops the moment they try to join the war. NATO however, and especially the United States, will not go to war. At least not yet. President Biden has his hands full with the genocidal war the Zionists are waging against the Palestinian population. There is also a chance for a war to suddenly start in Asia. (Could North Korea be asked to flex its muscles?) Neither the U.S. nor Europe are in the shape of winning a multi-front war of global dimensions. The military leaders in the relevant countries know this well. In consequence ‘Western’ politicians will have to bite the bitter pill of a decisive strategic defeat.
Posted by b on March 22, 2024 at 13:10 UTC | Permalink
Furious Putin Crocus Gunmen Captured, Terror Network Destroyed, Big Ukr Defeat ivanivske Falls
What do you think about the saying: “If you have to ask (the price), you can’t afford it” as a person of wealth?
A few years ago, an American tourist in Zurich wandered into a pricey fashion store called Trois Pommes, and a handbag caught her eye. So she asked the saleswoman: “Excuse me, may I see that bag right above your head?”
The saleswoman sized up the tourist, a middle aged black woman, and figured it was a waste of her time so told her: “No. It’s too expensive”.
The tourist said: “No, you see the black one, the one that’s folded over”.
Saleswoman, with a snooty fru fru I’m-not-even-close-to-being-rich-but-will-obsequiously-kiss-rich-peoples-butt-while-despising-normal-folk-like-me replied: “No, no, no, you don’t want to see that one, you want to see this one, because that one will cost too much, you will not be able to afford that one”
The saleswoman ultimately refused to get the bag in question, priced at around $38,000, and the exasperated customer walked.
Unbeknownst to the saleswoman, the tourist was probably the world’s richest woman at the time (I’m guessing Jeff Bezos’ ex is richer now after the divorce settlement), billionaire Oprah Winfrey.
The story made the news and generated tons of negative publicity for the store. As to Oprah, when she eventually found out what the bag cost, she said it was overpriced and would never pay that much for that handbag.
Rich people – at least wise ones and/or the ones who worked for their money, as opposed to spoiled trust fund brats who had everything handed to them since birth, do ask for prices. For one, because it takes less time to ask and get an answer in a few seconds than it does to go through the hassle of research. For another, and more importantly, because like any rational people, they want to have an idea about cost vs benefit, whether something is worth it, and whether they can get the best deal for what they want.
Just because rich people can afford to pay a seller their asking price doesn’t mean they’re automatically going to. Rational rich people do comparison shop and negotiate for the best deals they can get, instead of just shell out whatever anybody who has something they want asks for.
The “if you have to ask the price you can’t afford it” assumption is silly.
The Best of Saul Goodman from Breaking Bad
What was the strangest way an embezzler was caught?
I worked in engineering and facilities for a large Pharma. We had project managers who did construction and renovation.
In the old days we had paper employee ID cards and contractors weren’t accounted for very well. We started a contractor safety program where each of the contractor’s employees had to take a one hour safety program, then issued a contractor card. At the same time employee IDs we’re upgraded to mag cards so everyone swiped in and out of our properties.
In time the audit showed one company who didn’t respond to the program. Digging in it was found that one project manager used them exclusively. On every project he had them do some small unidentified tasks, never more than $5000. And for many years. Once the card systems were installed we could see nobody from that company ever entered the property but the small bills kept coming.
An investigation revealed that this 30 year employee owned the company which was nothing more than a post office box and a bank account. He never got greedy so he never aroused suspicions, but constantly embezzled betwen $2–5000 on every project for years! Only caught by automation.
Reality of Government Policy
US crackdown on China desperate, delusional — S.L.Kanthan
“We don’t want to live in a world where the Chinese are the dominant country,” – this astounding statement of fear and paranoia is from the US Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns. Once upon a time, the same US championed free trade, free market, and competition. It also established global institutions such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and WTO, welcomed immigrants from all over the world, and evangelized free movement of capital and technology. Now, the US is sabotaging everything it built, hoping desperately to retain its hegemony. However, this onslaught is futile as US elites do not understand why their financialized economy of OnlyFans failed and why China’s industrial economy of electric vehicles and solar panels succeeded.
Unable to compete and unwilling to learn, the American establishment has been trying to hobble China’s growth through illegal and incoherent tactics. Since 2017, the US has been waging a relentless and intense war on China’s economy and development. The hybrid war includes tariffs, sanctions, diplomatic assaults and propaganda wars.
The broader objective is to prevent China becoming the No.1 economy in the world in terms of nominal GDP – by purchasing power parity, China is already 20 percent larger than the US. The narrower, but equally sinister, goal is to stop China from catching up and becoming self-reliant in cutting-edge technologies. If China is portrayed as a threat to Asia and the world, the American and European public would feel that the sanctions are justified.
In the smartphone world, when Huawei surpassed Apple in market share, the US forced TSMC and Samsung to stop making semiconductor chips for Huawei. Similarly, the US has pressured the Dutch company ASML into not selling high-end chipmaking lithography machines to China. What WTO rules or international norms allow the US to engage in such geo-economic thuggery?
The blitzkrieg against Chinese companies did not stop at strategic high-tech companies. Now, the US has started attacking Chinese electric cars and targeted at robbing the TikTok. Without blushing a bit, US officials claim that Beijing can turn off the electric cars or harvest data from TikTok. Don’t forget that: Thanks to Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks, we know how every American hardware and software is a spying tool; and the “Twitter Files” revealed how US social media are infiltrated with representatives from the Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, US Department of Defense, among others.
Every accusation by America is an admission of its own guilt. While the US media and politicians accuse China of stealing intellectual property (IP), the US is blatantly stealing TSMC’s technology and IP by forcing the latter to build advanced chip-manufacturing plants in the US. The US also complains a lot about subsidies in China, while dispensing tens of billions of dollars to American tech companies under the CHIPS and Science Act. Furthermore, the US dollar itself is the biggest subsidy, since the US government prints trillions of dollars out of thin air rather than taxing corporations.
The tragic fact is that the US, without a clear strategy, is failing. It is jumping from tariffs and sanctions to illogical buzzwords such as “decoupling,” “friend-shoring” and “de-risking.” China is the world’s manufacturing powerhouse with a trade surplus of $800 billion a year; and neither the US nor the EU can survive for a month without Chinese goods. It’s only a matter of time until China masters the entire semiconductor ecosystem, after which the US will have no advantage. Thus, when US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo recently said that the US will “do whatever it takes to curb China’s technology,” she just sounded delusional.
To figure out who will be successful, one just needs to compare President Joe Biden’s address at the State of the Union to the Two Sessions in Beijing. Biden started off his speech by vilifying Russia and imploring Congress to continue funding the proxy war in Ukraine. On the other side of the world, political advisors of the CPPCC and deputies of the NPC deliberated “high quality growth” and “new quality productive force.”
The US model is based on imperialism abroad and a parasitic form of capitalism at home. If their ego prevents them from learning the China model, Americans should go back to their roots and study the writings of founders like Alexander Hamilton and the classical economics of the 19th century. At the current trajectory, the US is on a path to implosion and a disastrous collision with the reality of a multipolar world.
CITY OF GLASS – Pulp Science Fiction by Skyward, Surrealism, Experiments in Texture and Transparency
At The UN It Is A Rogue U.S. Against The Rest Of The World
“Unipolar” used to mean that the United States was, at least in theory, alone in leading the world. Now “unipolar” means that the United States is alone and isolated in opposition to the world.
Snider refers to the recent UN Security Council resolution 2728 which “demands” a ceasefire in Gaza and “demands” a release of hostages and “demands” the unhindered supply of food and other items to Gaza.
On March 25, the U.S. went one step further and took a step toward becoming a rogue state who has supplanted international law with its rules-based order. International law is grounded in the charter system and the United Nations and is universally applicable. The rules-based order is composed of unwritten laws whose source, consent, and legitimacy are unknown. To the global majority, those unwritten laws have the appearance of being invoked when they benefit the U.S. and its partners and not being invoked when they don’t.
On March 25, the Security Council passed a resolution demanding “an immediate ceasefire for the month of Ramadan respected by all parties leading to a lasting sustainable ceasefire.” The resolution was able to pass because the U.S. stood aside and let the other fourteen Security Council members pass it by abstaining instead of vetoing.
But in her explanation of the American abstention after the resolution passed, U.S. Ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield “surprisingly” said that “we fully support some of the critical objectives in this nonbinding resolution.”
Her claim that the Security Council resolution was nonbinding was not an off script, impromptu comment. It is the strategy of a country that enforces, not international law, but the U.S. led rules-based order.
Since the beginning, it’s been obvious that Gaza was in many ways a fight between International Law and the US’s “rules-based order”.This whole episode around the UN resolution is a perfect illustration of this. There is no debate amongst international law scholars that resolutions by the UN Security Council that “demand” certain actions are binding (good explanation by a legal scholar here). In fact resolutions by the council ARE international law, article 25 of the UN Charter clearly states: “The Members of the United Nations agree to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council in accordance with the present Charter.”
Yet the US now argues that the “rule” is in fact different: “It’s a non-binding resolution, so there’s no impact at all on Israel”.
Where is this rule written, that somehow when the UNSC “demands an immediate ceasefire for the month of Ramadan respected by all parties leading to a lasting sustainable ceasefire”, it’s non-binding and “there’s no impact at all” on the warring party?
Nowhere, that’s the beauty of the rules-based order: the rules are made-up in the moment to fit the interests of the U.S. and its henchmen, depending on the circumstances.
The big issue here is that the whole world, literally, disagrees with the U.S. claims.
All UN Security Council resolutions are legally binding and have the status of international law. That is why UN Secretary General António Guterres said, “This resolution must be implemented. Failure would be unforgivable.” UN deputy spokesperson Farhan Haq explained that, “All the resolutions of the Security Council are international law. They are as binding as international laws.”
Others responded the same way to the U.S. claim. On behalf of the ten elected members of the Security Council who drafted the resolution, Pedro Comissario, Mozambique’s envoy to the United Nations, said, “All United Nations Security Council resolutions are binding and mandatory.” He then added, “It is the hope of the 10 that the resolution adopted today will be implemented in good faith by all parties.”
The United Kingdom also did “not share” the U.S. claim, prompting their envoy to the UN to say, “we expect all Council resolutions to be implemented. This one is not any different. The demands in the resolution are absolutely clear.” China, too, did not share the U.S. evaluation. “China’s U.N. Ambassador Zhang Jun said Security Council resolutions are binding.”
France too rejects the U.S. claim and insists that UNSC Res 2728 is absolutely binding and especially binding for Israel:
“A United Nation Security Council resolution is binding under international law. All concerned parties MUST implement it, especially Israel, to whom it is incumbent to apply this resolution.”
Russia’s Foreign Ministry said Tuesday that UN Security Council Resolution 2728 on Gaza, which calls for an immediate cease-fire and access for humanitarian aid, is binding for all sides, including Israel.
…
“The Russian side expects that the binding UN Security Council Resolution 2728 will contribute to de-escalating violence in Gaza, including preventing the Israeli operation in Rafah, freeing hostages, (and) increasing humanitarian assistance to civilians in the sector,” it said.
Four of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council – including two major U.S. allies -, all of its non-permanent members and the UN Secretary General have explicitly said that UNSC Res 2728 is binding.
The U.S. (plus maybe a few of its minor proxies) is the only state which publicly disputes that.
Bertrand points out that this will have huge consequences:
There’s no overstating how consequential this is for the integrity of international relations. By doing so, the US effectively destroys the world order it largely created after WW2 because it effectively tells everyone that the set of institutions, rules and norms that underpin it are meaningless. We’re effectively now in a world system where everyone realizes the police, the government, the basic set of beliefs, have become completely corrupted. This changes everything.What comes next? I think there’s no coming back for the U.S. And I think they know this, maybe unconsciously, otherwise they would at least pretend to act for the better good of all. The fact they don’t shows they’ve effectively abdicated ambitions to restore their hegemony: they’re now nakedly in it to milk the system for themselves, universal pretentions have gone.
This UN Security Council is not the only institution which the U.S. tries to destroys after having largely created it.
The appellate body of the World Trade Organization (WTO), considered the supreme court for international trade, lost its ability to rule on new dispute cases at midnight Tuesday.The panel, whose decisions affect billions of dollars in global trade, is supposed to have seven judges. But their ranks have dwindled because the United States — under the past three presidents — has blocked replacements to protest the way the WTO does business.
A minimum of three judges is needed to issue rulings and the terms of two of the last three judges ended at midnight Tuesday.
This will deal a major blow to the global trading system, critics say, arguing that the situation risked creating a system of trade relations based on power rather than binding international rules.
The U.S. is now using protectionism, subsidies and tariffs, which are clearly illegal under WTO rules it had previously agreed to. But as it has managed, without having any serious argument, to destroy the WTO’s court their is no longer a direct way it can get penalized for it.
But trade is only one field of international relations and other WTO members have found ways to solve disputes even without its court.
The stakes are much higher when it comes to matters of peace and of wars waged with the intent of genocide.
Most countries however don’t want to live in an “eat or get eaten”/”might makes right” world, without rules or norms. So in time a new system will arise.
The biggest unknowns being: can it arise without a major global war, who will lead the construction of its foundations and how can it be set up so that this time around it is fair for all and respected by all?
I’ll leave it to you to ponder those questions.
Posted by b on March 28, 2024 at 16:43 UTC | Permalink
The Collapse of The Traditional Career.
Pesto Feta Pizza
2011 11 10 19 03 04
Ingredients
1 prepared pizza crust (such as Boboli)
Feta cheese to taste
Pesto
2 cups fresh parsley or basil, firmly packed
3/4 cup Parmesan or Romano
2/3 cup olive oil
2 to 4 cloves garlic
1/3 cup pine nuts or walnuts
2011 11 10 19 01 08
Instructions
Heat oven to 400 degrees F.
Place basil and garlic in food processor bowl and blend until smooth.
Add nuts and cheese and continue blending.
While processor is running, add olive oil until creamy. (Pesto can be stored up to three months in refrigerator if covered with a thin layer of olive oil, or it can be frozen.)
To assemble pizza: Use pastry brush to add a thin coat of oil to pizza crust (can omit this step).
Spread pesto over pizza crust.
Sprinkle feta over top and add thinly sliced and quartered tomatoes, if desired.
Bake for 10 to 15 minutes.
Serve with a salad.
2011 11 10 19 02 01
What was the rudest thing a teacher has said to you in front of the whole class?
When I was at the 3rd year of Business Administration at the university (from 5 years total), I was discouraged, kind of depressed, and unhappy. So, I didn’t care about buying all the books or anything. I was usually a great student but that year I wasn’t inspired.
One day, my tax law professor criticised me, in front of everyone, because I didn’t have the book. He didn’t have, either! So, I told him that. He answered he had memorised the book. I said I didn’t care, if he didn’t give me the example he couldn’t criticise me. He continued not having the book during the classes and I did the same.
When the test came, we could consult the book. I borrowed the book from my cousin’s boyfriend. Before to hand him (my teacher) my test, knowing I did a great job, I wrote a note provoking him for having done a great test without needing the book during classes (it was easy to find the references I needed from the book).
He was furious with me the day he returned the graded tests. Because my grade was among the best of my class. 😈 I didn’t check the test of my colleague with the best grade. Maybe mine was better and the teacher gave him higher grade just to avoid giving me extra reasons to provoke him, but I didn’t care. For me, my grade was good enough.
Even in my worst days I can be much better than most people at anything I want to do well. Not only in my native country. I did better than competitors worldwide along my career. Without needing anyone to disrespect me or provoke me. I’m motivated by doing things better day after day and learning from my experiences.
Where is the Next American Dream?
When did you realize that you would be single for the rest of your life, and why?
My mother once told me “you gotta kiss a lot of frogs…”
Somewhere around 40 years old (I’m 42 now) I decided I was done kissing frogs and never getting my prince. I now understand why my mother referred to one of her exes as a toad.
Dating these days is often gross and impersonal. It’s hard to meet people organically, so we now resort to online dating. For a woman, online dating is basically a sea of horny, rancid, male sharks and we’ve just put on a bathing suit soaked in chum. Even if there are some decent men on there, we aren’t going to find you or believe you. It’s like panning for fools gold in a NYC sewer. I could tell you some horror stories about the kind of men I’ve met because of online dating. I don’t want to do it ever again and no one can make me! Yuck, eww, No.
Relationships are too exhausting. It takes many years to truly get to know someone and I just don’t have it in me anymore to give that much time, effort, and heart and soul on learning someone again, only to find out years into it that they’re actually a terrible human. This isn’t necessarily fair to people who aren’t awful, but it’s a gamble I’m not all that eager to take anymore. Hard pass.
Even if I were to find my unicorn, the thought of having to alter my long term life goals to now fit the goals of another person just isn’t something I’m very willing to compromise on anymore. And I wouldn’t expect or want someone else to make those changes for me either. At this age, our time is becoming more precious and shouldn’t be conceded on when it comes to our own lifelong happiness. It is unlikely we are meant to travel the same path indefinitely.
For now, I focus on my career and raising my teenagers. I have a couple of dogs and a few good friends to keep me company. I also have to interact with people at work all day. I’m introverted so I’m definitely not lonely, by any means. Getting alone time is a hot commodity to be cherished. I don’t know that I’d want to give up my 30 minutes a week to a relationship. I’m busy.
Some day, when I’m older, I’d like to do things that I really want to do, like travel more, experience new things and cultures, or maybe just sit around in my underpants while eating a rotisserie chicken with my bare hands and watching jeopardy reruns.
Whatever it may be, I want to be free to do it sans the time wasting a-hole.
Jesus via AI
Default jesus in church with lot of people in church 3Default empower through faith of jesus christ 1Default jesus showing love to people with heart sign 1Default empower through faith of jesus christ 6Default empower through faith of jesus christ 7Default empower through faith of jesus christ 5Default empower through faith of jesus christ 3
Have you ever chosen to dispute a traffic ticket in court? What was the outcome?
I was pulled over in New Mexico back in 2012 and it was for not stopping at a stopsign. The area was fairly rural and I could see both directions some distance. So I slowed but kept rolling then took off. About 2 miles down the road there was a mounty on me and I pulled over trying to imagine what he was getting me for. He came to the car asked for my DL and Ins. and asked me what I called that? I looked at him and said well if you would be kind enough to tell me what “that” was I would be happy to answer for it. After some questions about me being a smart ass he finally realized I didnt know what he was at me about. So he finally told me “Failure to stop at a stop sign!” I admitted well I did slow down he said but you didnt stop I said no its a common practice in the country side at rural stops to roll through and I explained some call it a california roll. He said “That Figures!” and he handed me a ticket to sign He said “well here in Nebraska we dont drive like californians” I said ok not arguing and went on with my evening. Well next day I called an uncle of mine who was an attorney told him and he told me how to get out of it. SO court day came I show up and so does he. THe judge asked him what happened and then turned to me and asked my side. I didnt even tell him about the stop and went to describing how I was treated by the officer and the “It figures” and “we dont drive like californians” comments and my ticket was promptly dismissed for personal bias and out I walked while the judge reprimanded the deputy.
Have you ever been treated so terribly at a restaurant that you refused to go back there again?
Yes. Arriving, the parking lot was very slick ice. I informed the hostess (owner), she just shot an undeserved annoyed look. Hey I was just trying to help them & avoid a slip & fall for someone.
Our waitress failed to bring our food as it sat way to long prepared, even after a long wait we asked. Clearly she then forgot; but did show up to push a wine bottle to buy. That after we distinctly expressed early on we were not there for drinks. Same with appetizers & desserts.
The goal was clear: upsell, upsell.
The food was just about room temperature. And not even what we had ordered. She tried to convince us to eat what she brought anyway!
All that did was piss her off. Watching her she returned food to the kitchen, obviously not giving them our actual order.
We are not snotty people at all! But were pretty much forced to be at this point, hangry didn’t help.
We stopped at the hostess/owner podium & waited for some attention. After too long she asked “how many in our party?” She didn’t remember us unsurprisingly.
I made a bit of a sport of it, saying “still two, we’re just waiting for our check”.
“Who was your waiter/waitress?”
“Don’t know”
“Where was your table”
“Over there (with a vague gesture”
Now SHE’S very annoyed & NOT pleasant at all. “What did you have?”
“Nothing but water”
Now she’s even more annoyed + confused. Good. As if anyone there cared anyway.
I finally explained the situation & that we’d been there for almost an hour at this point. Ordered food, never got it, we’re leaving.
The bitch, now outright rude, threatened to call the police.
I implored her to, explaining we certainly are not paying for a product or service we’d never received. And fortunately we hadn’t yet paid, as then we would have a stronger case do please – a police report will be a good addition to our case. Plus hopefully for her sake they arrive quickly since now they are on the clock.
She still tried to argue! “We can’t just come here and leave without paying”. Argh. Pay for what – water? I don’t even see water on the menu, how much do you charge for it?” (I believe it’s state law that water & bathroom facilities are required at a certain amount of seating). But she briefly tried to think of an amount to charge.
I finally announced the end of this dispute – if she’s call law enforcement we’d feel compelled to wait, otherwise we’re leaving. She quipped something like ” well I guess we’ll eat this one”.
US troops 1 mile from mainland china 03 22 2024 large
The top defense official in the nation of Taiwan has confirmed that U.S. troops are stationed off the coast of China, as World War 3 continues to take shape. Chiu Kuo-cheng, Taiwan’s Defense Minister, was questioned by journalists about a report that U.S. troops had advanced from Taiwan to small islands in close proximity to mainland China, such as Kinmen Island. Chiu’s response confirmed that the troops had in fact advanced closer to China. The scalable map below shows where US troops have gone and how close they now are to mainland China: Hal Turner Editorial Opinion China has long told Taiwan and the world that the stationing of US Troops on Taiwan would be viewed as “an invasion of China” and would be dealt with as such. Not only has the US now deployed troops onto Taiwan, they have moved some of those troops to an island within one mile of mainland China! This is a gross provocation by the United States; it’s almost as if the US is TRYING to start a major war!
What was the strangest way an embezzler was caught?
My dad owned his own accounting firm for decades and he had one fairly big client that he got on well with. When Dad retired he was offered a job 1 day a week by this client. They had a guy who had been there a while who did payroll and the basic accounting but he wasn’t very good at the accounting so my dad was meant to be taking over accounts and this other guy was meant to be just doing payroll.
Anyway, on my dad’s first day the boss suggested he learn the payroll system so he could be cover for the other guy.
They had a little demonstration session and my dad asked how sickness was done. The payroll guy said nobody is ever sick to which the boss replied that he was, last month. Reluctantly the guy showed my dad how the sickness was done on his own payslip and everyone instantly spotted that the guy had been paying himself double when off sick! He had been doing that a while. He went the same day!
He Was Homeless in America & Then He Moved To The Philippines : A Life Lesson
Have you ever walked out of a restaurant after you were seated by a waiter or waitress?
I was seated by a hostess at an Italian restaurant in Paramus NJ. It was supposed to be our anniversary dinner. A coworker of mine who was about as Italian as you can get without being born in Italy had given me a recommendation to go there.
Well after 30 minutes with not so much as a waiter/waitress taking our drink order (perhaps longer… I can be stubborn) I decided enough of this and signalled to my wife we were leaving now.
That could have been the end of the story but it is not.
I told my coworker what happened and it turned out he was part of the family (in laws? cousins? don’t remember.) and took it very personal that we got treated that way. My telephone at work rings a day or two later and it’s the owner of the restaurant and he’s apologizing profusely. It was then that I remembered my coworker told me to drop his name when I went there.
We were invited back for a “chef’s choice” seating at their expense. The meal was wonderful but way more than I could eat. There were eight courses and lots of wine. My wife doesn’t drink wine and never did so I got sorta concerned as was going to be way too drunk to drive. I’m not talking one bottle of wine here but a different wine for each course.
It was quite the meal.
When we went back days or months later we always were treated with great deference and got great service.
210,000 CODERS lost jobs as NVIDIA released NEW coding language.
Who’s the most boring person in your life?
My brother in law Paul, he is a really nice guy he is always ready to help someone out. He was a volunteer coast guard, regularly went to church , is a really good provider for my sister, hard working financially prudent, not tight just put a bit aside for the rainy day, save for the pension.
But he makes watching paint dry feel exciting, he can flatten a family gathering just by walking into the room. He is a train spotter and makes models out of matches and is an amateur weather forecaster. His only subjects of conversation are different types of rolling stock on the railways, cloud types and work, he is an aera manager for morrisons local shops. But because a lot of his job is to do with the finance side he takes commercial confidentiality seriously. So apart from three slightly amusing stories, nothing about work.
He only ever has two drinks either at a party or in the pub, doesn’t like spicy food or french food, not really keen on pasta or pizza no bbq and doesn’t eat rice or garlic. His taste in music was once described by my sister ‘Paul doesn’t like music, he likes ric Astley and black lace it is mucus not music’ he is a nice guy but so boring.
According to my sister the only time he’s not boring is when he and she stay energetically awake, then by all accounts he is creative and inventive, and has superior staying power.
As I don’t have sex with him I will stick with the description boring.
Make this fair
Laziness: What’s the laziest thing you’ve ever done?
It’s not me, but a guy who used to sit near me in my office.
In my office, the computers are set up such a way that if you don’t do anything for 4 minutes, they get locked. in order to unlock that, you need to type your password again.
Everyone faces this several times a day, if you go to the washroom, or busy in a phone call, or discussing something with someone for more than 4 minutes, you will find your PC locked when you come back.
This guy was too lazy to type his password every time this happened. So he invented this technology:
Open notepad
Put a bottle on the keyboard, this causes some keys to be pressed all the time.
this causes text input in notepad.
The computer thinks that user is working, so it does not get locked.
This is a photo I took when he was gone from his desk after setting up the Bottle-Anti-lock mechanism.
main qimg d6d918dc60bf9231593fd04036b08d55 pjlq
Soon he realized that entering huge amount of text in notepad causes the PC to run out of memory eventually and crash after some time.
We asked him to write a VBScript to mimic the keystroke, but he is too lazy for that. He found out a lazier work around,
He now uses a Comb (borrowed from a female co-worker – permanently) to push down the keys in the alt, ctrl, and the directional keys area which do not enter text in the notepad. and he keeps the bottle on top of the comb for the weight.
I don’t have an original photo for this. so I made a dummy. imagine the power bank is the keys that need to be pressed.
main qimg c32ee9eef28193a84d190808fb6bb97c pjlq
Necessity is the mother of invention!
Update: Some friends have asked in comments why cant we just change the screen lock timeout settings, or remove the password. The answer is, we do not have Admin privileges. Passwords and other system settings are enforced by Admin directly into the registry using group policy. We don’t have the privilege of Change settings, edit registry, change date/time, change screensaver and wallpapers. we cant even install any additional software. CD roms and USB drives are disabled too, so no way of boot into a portable Linux or something to hack the registry.
My daughter’s AI “likes”
She has different tastes than I have.
Default masterpiece best quality Majesty of Amethyst Court15 m 3Default Style by Yuko Shimizu Masamune Shirow Inio Asano and J 0(1)Default Style by Yuko Shimizu Masamune Shirow Inio Asano and J 1Default photographic photo photogenic extremely high quality h 6(2)Default Style by Yuko Shimizu Masamune Shirow Inio Asano and J 0Default photographic photo photogenic extremely high quality h 2
The Sopranos – Tony Soprano and other capos meet behind Junior Soprano’s back!
What is the funniest joke you’ve been told that you still think about to this day?
Two women talking in heaven
1st woman: Hi! Wanda.
2nd woman: Hi! Sylvia. How’d you die?
1st woman: I froze to death.
2nd woman: How horrible!
1st woman: It wasn’t so bad…. After I quit shaking from the cold, I began to get warm & sleepy, and finally died a peaceful death. What about you?
2nd woman: I died of a massive heart attack. I suspected that my husband was cheating, so I came home early to catch him in the act. But instead, I found him all by himself in the den watching TV.
1st woman: So, what happened?
2nd woman: I was so sure there was another woman there somewhere that I started running all over the house looking. I ran up into the attic and searched, and down into the basement. Then I went through every closet and checked under all the beds. I kept this up until I had looked everywhere, and finally I became so exhausted that I just keeled over with a heart attack and died.
1st woman: Too bad you didn’t look in the freezer—we’d both still be alive.
Weather warnings
It’s war: the real meat grinder starts now
Pepe Escobar No more shadow play. It’s now in the open. No holds barred. Exhibit 1: Friday, March 22, 2024. It’s War. The Kremlin, via Peskov, finally admits it, on the record.
The money quote:
"Russia cannot allow the existence on its borders of a state that has a documented intention to use any methods to take Crimea away from it, not to mention the territory of new regions."
Translation: the Hegemon-constructed Kiev mongrel is doomed, one way or another. The Kremlin signal: "We haven't even started" starts now.
Exhibit 2: Friday afternoon, a few hours after Peskov. Confirmed by a serious European – not Russian – source. The first counter-signal. Regular troops from France, Germany and Poland have arrived, by rail and air, to Cherkassy, south of Kiev.A substantial force. No numbersleaked.They are being housed in schools.For all practical purposes, this is a NATO force.
That signals, “Let the games begin”.
From a Russian point of view, Mr. Khinzal’s business cards are set to be in great demand.Exhibit 3: Friday evening. Terror attack on Crocus City, a music venue northwest of Moscow. A heavily trained commando shoots people on sight, point blank, in cold blood, then sets a concert hall on fire.
The definitive counter-signal: with the battlefield collapsing, all that’s left is terrorism in Moscow. And just as terror was striking Moscow, the US and the UK, in southwest Asia, was bombing Sana’a, the Yemeni capital, with at least five strikes.Some nifty coordination. Yemen has just clinched a strategic deal in Oman with Russia-China for no-hassle navigation in the Red Sea, and is among the top candidates for BRICS+ expansion at the summit in Kazan next October.
Not only the Houthis are spectacularly defeating thalassocracy, they have the Russia-China strategic partnership on their side. Assuring China and Russia that their ships can sail through the Bab-al-Mandeb, Red Sea and Gulf of Aden with no problems is exchanged with total political support from Beijing and Moscow.
The sponsors remain the same Deep in the night in Moscow, before dawn on Saturday 23. Virtually no one is sleeping. Rumors dance like dervishes on countless screens. Of course nothing has been confirmed – yet. Only the FSB will have answers. A massive investigation is in progress.
The timing of the Crocus massacre is quite intriguing. On a Friday during Ramadan. Real Muslims would not even think about perpetrating a mass murder of unarmed civilians under such a holy occasion.
Compare it with the ISIS card being frantically branded by the usual suspects.
Let’s go pop.
To quote Talking Heads: “This ain’t no party/ this ain’t no disco/ this ain’t no fooling around”.
Oh no; it’s more like an all-American psy op.
ISIS are cartoonish mercenaries/goons. Not real Muslims.
And everyone knows who finances and weaponizes them. That leads to the most possible scenario, before the FSB weighs in: ISIS goons imported from the Syria battleground – as it stands, probably Tajiks – trained by CIA and MI6, working on behalf ofthe Ukrainian SBU. Several witnesses at Crocus referred to “Wahhabis” – as in the commando killers did not look like Slavs.
It was up to Serbia’s Aleksandar Vucic to cut to the chase.
He directly connected the “warnings” in early March from American and British embassies directed at their citizens not to visit public places in Moscow with CIA/MI6 intel having inside info about possible terrorism, and not disclosing it to Moscow.
The plot thickens when it isestablished that Crocus is owned by the Agalarovs: anAzeri-Russian billionaire family, very close friends of…… Donald Trump.Talk about a Deep State-pinpointed target.ISIS spin-off or banderistas – the sponsors remain the same.
The clownish secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, Oleksiy Danilov, was dumb enough to virtually, indirectly confirm they did it, saying on Ukrainian TV, “we will give them [Russians] this kind of fun more often.”But it was up to Sergei Goncharov, a veteran of the elite Russia Alpha anti-terrorism unit,to get closer to unwrapping the enigma: he told Sputnik the most feasible mastermind is Kyrylo Budanov–the chief of the Main Directorate of Intelligence at the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.
The “spy chief” who happens to be the top CIA asset in Kiev.It’s got to go till the last Ukrainian The three exhibits above complement what the head of NATO’s military committee, Rob Bauer, previously told a security forum in Kiev: “You need more than just grenades – you need people to replace the dead and wounded. And this means mobilization.”
Translation: NATO spelling out this is a war until the last Ukrainian.And the “leadership” in Kiev still does not get it.Former Minister of Infrastructure Omelyan:“If we win, we will pay back with Russian oil, gas, diamonds and fur. If we lose, there will be no talk of money – the West will think about how to survive.”In parallel, puny “garden-and jungle” Borrell admitted that it would be “difficult” for the EU to find an extra 50 billion euros for Kiev if Washington pulls the plug. The cocaine-fueled sweaty sweatshirt leadership actually believes that Washington is not “helping” in the form of loans, but in the form of free gifts.
And the same applies for the EU. The Theater of the Absurd is unmatchable. The German Liver Sausage Chancellor actually believes that proceeds from stolen Russian assets “do not belong to anyone”, so they can be used to finance extra Kiev weaponizing.
Everyone with a brain knows that using interest from “frozen”, actually stolen Russian assets to weaponize Ukraine is a dead end – unless they steal all of Russia’s assets, roughly $200 billion, mostly parked in Belgium and Switzerland: that would tank the Euro for good, and the whole EU economy for that matter. Eurocrats better listen to Russian Central Bank major “disrupter” (American terminology) Elvira Nabiullina: The Bank of Russia will take “appropriate measures”if the EU does anything on the “frozen”/stolen Russian assets.
It goes without saying that the three exhibits above completely nullify the “La Cage aux Folles” circus promoted by the puny Petit Roi, now known across his French domains as Macronapoleon. Virtually the whole planet, including the English-speaking Global North, had already been mocking the “exploits” of his Can Can Moulin Rouge Army.
So French, German and Polish soldiers, as part of NATO, are already in the south of Kiev. The most possible scenario is that they will stay far, far away from the frontlines – although traceable by Mr. Khinzal’s business activities. Even before this new NATO batch arriving in the south of Kiev, Poland – which happens to serve as prime transit corridor for Kiev’s troops – had confirmed that Western troops are already on the ground.
So this is not about mercenaries anymore. France, by the way, is only 7th in terms of mercenaries on the ground, largely trailing Poland, the US and Georgia, for instance.
The Russian Ministry of Defense has all the precise records. In a nutshell: now war has morphed from Donetsk, Avdeyevka and Belgorod to Moscow. Further on down the road, it may not just stop in Kiev. It may only stop in Lviv. Mr. 87%, enjoying massive national near-unanimity, now has the mandate to go all the way. Especially after Crocus.
There’s every possibility the terror tactics by Kiev goons will finally drive Russia to return Ukraine to its original 17th century landlocked borders: Black Sea-deprived, and with Poland, Romania, and Hungary reclaiming their former territories.
Remaining Ukrainians will start to ask serious questions about what led them to fight – literally to their death – on behalf of the US Deep State, the military complex and BlackRock.
As it stands, the Highway to Hell meat grinder is bound to reach maximum velocity.
“Most Terrifying Poll Result I’ve Ever Seen”: Scott Rasmussen Surveys America’s Elite 1%
Lately, I have been generating art for my Patreon, and youtube channels. These have been created by LeonardoAI. And the artwork is truly exceptional.
I tell my readership, over and over, that your actions in this reality, acts as a feedback loop that allows and permits manifestations.
This is the basis of “Affirmation Campaigns”.
For instance, after I got out of prison, I had continued to deal with prison-similar situations up to two years afterwards. It was almost like a contamination that I had to “shake off”.
…
Anyways, I have been working on my videos.
So, I have been creating hundred of these images for the Affirmation Campaign section of my Paetron.
They look like this…
Default Imagine a Baroque painting high attention to detail ro 1(2)Default Imagine a Baroque painting high attention to detail ro 0(2)Default Imagine a Baroque painting high attention to detail ro 1(2)Default Imagine a Baroque painting high attention to detail ro 2(2)Default Imagine a Baroque painting high attention to detail ro 3(2)Default Imagine a Baroque painting high attention to detail ro 0(1)Default Imagine a Baroque painting high attention to detail ro 1(1)Default Imagine a Baroque painting high attention to detail ro 2(1)Default Imagine a Baroque painting high attention to detail ro 3(1)
Nice huh?
The criteria…
Attractive
Young woman
Italian
Baroque style
In her 20’s
Large mane-like hair
Friendly
And I would put that all in my prompt. Sort of like this…
prompt
Now, the point that I want to make is this.
When you concentrate on statements or words, they do manifest in your reality, whether you want them to or not. Sooner or later. In one form or the other.
…
OK. Story time.
So, I am riding the bus home from the office today.
And I feel like someone is watching me. You all know the feeling. It happens from time to time.
It was happening then and there. So I looked up.
Right in front of me, across the isle and facing me directly was a girl.
Body language was facing to me.
There is this Chinese girl. She’s very attractive. She must have been in her early 20’s. She kept on stealing glimpses at me, and was very friendly.
Skin like powered soft butter. Soft gentle curves. Large black hair.
A Chinese version of my artwork.
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0
No, she did not wear a “period-style” fashion dress. She wore contemporaneous clothing. But she had the same build, look, and appearance of these girls that I have been generating.
But something else.
She turned her head to look up front and I had a great view of her profile.
I looked at her nose.
It wasn’t a “Chinese nose”. It was a nose right out of my AI generated art. That was the DEAD GIVEAWAY. You NEVER see these noses in China (unless they are plastic surgery).
My art noses…
nose 2nose 1
Chinese noses are flat and wide. Like this random chick…
nose x
That stranger on the bus, that girl, well she had a Baroque Italian nose.
No shit.
Now, I was VERY uncomfortable with a girl in her early 20’s giving me “the look”, and all that. I really didn’t want to engage her. Lordy! My life is already complex. That’s the last thing I want right now.
So I let her get off the bus.
And she kept on looking at me… with this expression. An expression that I haven’t seen in DECADES.
And breathed a sigh of relief. She was intense.
Be very careful on what you do, how you think, and what you say. You might be surprised at what might materialize.
Default Imagine a Baroque art painting with an attractive Youn 2Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(1)Default Imagine a Baroque art painting with an attractive Youn 3Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(2)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(9)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(8)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(7)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(8)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(7)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(6)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(3)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(5)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(6)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(4)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(2)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(3)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(2)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(1)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(5)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(3)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(2)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(1)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(5)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(4)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(3)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(1)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(1)Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(2)
Yeah.
The nose was the dead giveaway. But really, that continuous stare was highly unusual and very disturbing.
Today…
What happens to a person who is put in prison when they are 18 and released at 40? How do they reintegrate into society?
I was arrested when I was 17 in 1987. I was released in 2016 when I was 46. I was given no reentry program . The only thing they did was put me in a class to tell me how to operate computers { minus the internet}
So I was told to get a home plan. I did and it was approved and then released me on the day of my release. Family and friends have supported me and helped me reintegrate into society. The are very understanding and supportive. So adjusting to this big change is something ongoing and I have come a long way since getting out. But it has been friends and family and every day people who have helped and not the state of Missouri
Also the people here on Quora have helped even though they may not know it.
Just answering questions has been therapeutic and most people on here who read my content are supportive and give me encouragement. It means a lot to me so thank you everyone
I didn’t interview men
What is the saddest individual story from history?
Willie Mae Bragg:
Was sentenced to death for murdering a pharmacist in 1939.
On the day of his execution, he was strapped in, and as the current went through him – he went unkilled. His final cries were for the strap to be removed.
After surviving, he then filed a lawsuit claiming he was safe from execution as they had already executed him and that he simply hadn’t died.
It was an ominous case. Most of the executions in 1940’s Mississippi (one of the most racist states in the US) were of black people.
His appeal failed and he was executed the following year by a portable Electric Chair that had been put into use:
Also:
They typically don’t serve “the last meal” on the day of the execution as people can rarely eat.
They have also begun putting spending limits on last meal requests, $30-$50, as many death row inmates have ordered King’s feasts, only for them not to eat a single bite, as a final f#%k you to the system.
One more also,
A man used to drive around with a wheelchair and a generator in his pickup truck, as his job was to move the electric chair to its next location.
Could you imagine seeing that on the highway?
What’s the shrewdest, smartest maneuver you’ve ever seen in business?
My college town had a lovely small pizza restaurant named Papa John’s.
My God it was good. Delicious real mozzarella, fantastic toppings, a side of juicy-tangy-sweet pepperoncini peppers, and a special cup of garlic butter dipping sauce for the crust, so you could eat it just like breadsticks. It was heaven.
Everyone loved it. Except Domino’s pizza.
Domino’s, the chief competitor on campus, just couldn’t compete against the flavor and quality of Papa John’s pizzas.
Every weekend, all of the local pizzerias would do a Friday advertising push to win as much of the student weekend pizza dollar as possible. That meant a LOT of coupons, and every student got to pick their favorite weekend study treat.
One Thursday, the Domino’s marketing team was in a nasty funk, and decided to play dirty. In the local university newspaper, they booked this ad for the Friday edition…
“Bring us 30 competitors’ coupons, and get a FREE PIZZA!”
Oooooh…. nasty, eh? Dominoes was going to suck up all of the competitor coupons on the market, and burn them. By their math, they’d get most of the pizza dollar because they’d be the only pizzeria offering a weekend special- all of their competitors would be couponless, and therefore cost more.
And this coup would cost them very little… for “stealing” 30 pizza sales from their competition, it would cost them 1 free pizza, at roughly $4 in ingredients & labor.
Poor Papa John’s was getting no business this weekend…
Except that, one of the students at the school newspaper happened to love Papa John’s, and mentioned the Domino’s ad booking to a friend who worked there.
The team at Papa John’s thought for a minute, and then placed their own weekly ad.
That Friday’s edition saw two massive ads, running side-by-side.
The Domino’s ad…
Bring us 30 competitors’ coupons, and get a FREE PIZZA!
And the Papa John’s ad…
Thank you to all of our wonderful customers!
Here are 30 Papa John’s coupons for you to enjoy.
Because everyone deserves a pizza.
Students flooded the Domino’s, newspaper in hand, demanding their FREE pizzas. Domino’s had to close its doors for the weekend after completely running out of product.
… while losing a pile of money.
… and a fair bit of pride.
( Note: I can’t remember the exact ad copy… but it’s close. I made a best effort )
It’s over
You fucked up… BIG TIME.
What was the most amazing thing that you could only have learned while travelling?
I always thought I wanted to live on a deserted island in the South Pacific or the Caribbean.
My first kick at the cat went OK, I was dropped off on a deserted beach on Andros island in the Bahamas, they left me near a palapa, gave me a cooler full of food and beverage, and a boogie board. They left me at about 10:00 am, and picked me up about 4:00 . I never saw another person and it seemed idyllic.
So a couple of years later when I was in the Cook Islands, I heard about this quasi resort, that dropped you off on this little island. It had very limited fresh water, not enough to swim or bath in. Six little shacks, where 6 couples, or singles could stay. It had a kayak and a few other little extras like an outhouse. It seemed just like Gilligan’s island, and what could possibly go wrong.
They left fruit, vegetables , canned food, soda, charcoal, and that was about it. I brought some beer and vodka.
The first day was awesome, the second day I was a little bit sunburned, and my skin was suffering from not being able to get the salt off well enough, and the ice in my cooler had melted and my beer was warm.
The island was gorgeous and you could swim to a neighboring island. You could see all sorts of fish while snorkeling.
On the third day I was itching like crazy, and I packed up and took the boat back to civilization, which was just a short journey.
I decided that I really didn’t want to be alone on a desert island. If I could have had a fridge, a toilet and a shower, or even a fresh water stream, I would have easily lasted a week, maybe a month.
So what I learned was that being stranded on a deserted island is a lot more like Tom Hanks, than like Swiss family Robinson, and without the things that I was accustomed to, it wasn’t the paradise that I had thought. Or maybe it was a paradise, just not my paradise.
This all happened about 40 years ago, so I doubt anything is the same today.
Why do right-wing Americans don’t trust mainstream narrative about Trump but take every lie of them against China as truth?
They need a scapegoat for all their problems, and China qualifies as scape goat for the Right, especially being (at least officially) Communist and definitely nonwhite. There is definitely more racism among the right wing, or at least they show it more. So, unfortunately, Trump used China as a scapegoat during his term, at times, but he started doing it less and less towards the end. Doing this to China was a mistake, but at least he didn’t get all belligerent about Taiwan like Biden did, and what Biden did was far more dangerous. Unlike Biden, Trump preferred dialogue to war with China, Russia, and even North Korea. He is the dove of peace compared to Herr Biden!
I believe when Trump gets elected (notice that I am saying not “if” but “when”), he will no longer use China as a scapegoat anymore, recognizing its vast economic and military power and usefulness to the US, but he will blame everything on the Neocon Neoliberal US establishment, and he will be right. The establishment fully deserves it, with inequality (and resulting socioeconomic instability) under this establishment increasing exponentially over the last 40 years (and especially the last 20 years or so, post 2007 crisis), and a war on two fronts (Ukraine and the Middle East). This almost makes even Trump look like a Socialist!
As far as not trusting the mainstream narrative about Trump (and most other things), the Trump-supporters are right. What’s more, I believe that at least half of Democrats don’t trust the mainstream narrative anymore!
No more shadow play. It’s now in the open. No holds barred
Exhibit 1: Friday, March 22, 2024. It’s War. The Kremlin, via Peskov, finally admits it, on the record.
The money quote:
“Russia cannot allow the existence on its borders of a state that has a documented intention to use any methods to take Crimea away from it, not to mention the territory of new regions.”
Translation: the Hegemon-constructed Kiev mongrel is doomed, one way or another. The Kremlin signal: “We haven’t even started” starts now.
Exhibit 2: Friday afternoon, a few hours after Peskov. Confirmed by a serious European – not Russian – source. The first counter-signal.
Regular troops from France, Germany and Poland have arrived, by rail and air, to Cherkassy, south of Kiev. A substantial force. No numbers leaked. They are being housed in schools. For all practical purposes, this is a NATO force.
That signals, “Let the games begin”. From a Russian point of view, Mr. Khinzal’s business cards are set to be in great demand.
Exhibit 3: Friday evening. Terror attack on Crocus City, a music venue northwest of Moscow. A heavily trained commando shoots people on sight, point blank, in cold blood, then sets a concert hall on fire. The definitive counter-signal: with the battlefield collapsing, all that’s left is terrorism in Moscow.
And just as terror was striking Moscow, the US and the UK, in southwest Asia, was bombing Sana’a, the Yemeni capital, with at least five strikes.
Some nifty coordination. Yemen has just clinched a strategic deal in Oman with Russia-China for no-hassle navigation in the Red Sea, and is among the top candidates for BRICS+ expansion at the summit in Kazan next October.
Not only the Houthis are spectacularly defeating thalassocracy, they have the Russia-China strategic partnership on their side. Assuring China and Russia that their ships can sail through the Bab-al-Mandeb, Red Sea and Gulf of Aden with no problems is exchanged with total political support from Beijing and Moscow.
The sponsors remain the same
Deep in the night in Moscow, before dawn on Saturday 23. Virtually no one is sleeping. Rumors dance like dervishes on countless screens. Of course nothing has been confirmed – yet. Only the FSB will have answers. A massive investigation is in progress.
The timing of the Crocus massacre is quite intriguing.
On a Friday during Ramadan. Real Muslims would not even think about perpetrating a mass murder of unarmed civilians under such a holy occasion. Compare it with the ISIS card being frantically branded by the usual suspects.
Let’s go *pop*.
To quote Talking Heads: “This ain’t no party/ this ain’t no disco/ this ain’t no fooling around”.
Oh no; it’s more like an all-American psy op.
ISIS are cartoonish mercenaries/goons. Not real Muslims. And everyone knows who finances and weaponizes them. *wink* *wink*
That leads to the most possible scenario, before the FSB weighs in: ISIS goons imported from the Syria battleground – as it stands, probably Tajiks – trained by CIA and MI6, working on behalf of the Ukrainian SBU. Several witnesses at Crocus referred to “Wahhabis” – as in the commando killers did not look like Slavs.
It was up to Serbia’s Aleksandar Vucic to cut to the chase. He directly connected the “warnings” in early March from American and British embassies directed at their citizens not to visit public places in Moscow with CIA/MI6 intel having inside info about possible terrorism, and not disclosing it to Moscow.
The plot thickens when it is established that Crocus is owned by the Agalarovs: an Azeri-Russian billionaire family, very close friends of…
… Donald Trump.
Talk about a Deep State-pinpointed target.
ISIS spin-off or banderistas – the sponsors remain the same.
The clownish secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, Oleksiy Danilov, was dumb enough to virtually, indirectly confirm they did it, saying on Ukrainian TV, “we will give them [Russians] this kind of fun more often.”
But it was up to Sergei Goncharov, a veteran of the elite Russia Alpha anti-terrorism unit, to get closer to unwrapping the enigma: he told Sputnik the most feasible mastermind is Kyrylo Budanov – the chief of the Main Directorate of Intelligence at the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.
The “spy chief” who happens to be the top CIA asset in Kiev.
It’s got to go till the last Ukrainian
The three exhibits above complement what the head of NATO’s military committee, Rob Bauer, previously told a security forum in Kiev: “You need more than just grenades – you need people to replace the dead and wounded. And this means mobilization.”
Translation: NATO spelling out this is a war until the last Ukrainian.
And the “leadership” in Kiev still does not get it. Former Minister of Infrastructure Omelyan: “If we win, we will pay back with Russian oil, gas, diamonds and fur. If we lose, there will be no talk of money – the West will think about how to survive.”
In parallel, puny “garden-and jungle” Borrell admitted that it would be “difficult” for the EU to find an extra 50 billion euros for Kiev if Washington pulls the plug. The cocaine-fueled sweaty sweatshirt leadership actually believes that Washington is not “helping” in the form of loans, but in the form of free gifts. And the same applies for the EU.
The Theater of the Absurd is unmatchable.
The German Liver Sausage Chancellor actually believes that proceeds from stolen Russian assets “do not belong to anyone”, so they can be used to finance extra Kiev weaponizing.
Everyone with a brain knows that using interest from “frozen”, actually stolen Russian assets to weaponize Ukraine is a dead end – unless they steal all of Russia’s assets, roughly $200 billion, mostly parked in Belgium and Switzerland: that would tank the Euro for good, and the whole EU economy for that matter.
Eurocrats better listen to Russian Central Bank major “disrupter” (American terminology) Elvira Nabiullina: The Bank of Russia will take “appropriate measures” if the EU does anything on the “frozen”/stolen Russian assets.
It goes without saying that the three exhibits above completely nullify the “La Cage aux Folles” circus promoted by the puny Petit Roi, now known across his French domains as Macronapoleon.
Virtually the whole planet, including the English-speaking Global North, had already been mocking the “exploits” of his Can Can Moulin Rouge Army.
So French, German and Polish soldiers, as part of NATO, are already in the south of Kiev. The most possible scenario is that they will stay far, far away from the frontlines – although traceable by Mr. Khinzal’s business activities.
Even before this new NATO batch arriving in the south of Kiev, Poland – which happens to serve as prime transit corridor for Kiev’s troops – had confirmed that Western troops are already on the ground.
So this is not about mercenaries anymore. France, by the way, is only 7th in terms of mercenaries on the ground, largely trailing Poland, the US and Georgia, for instance.
The Russian Ministry of Defense has all the precise records.
In a nutshell: now war has morphed from Donetsk, Avdeyevka and Belgorod to Moscow. Further on down the road, it may not just stop in Kiev. It may only stop in Lviv. Mr. 87%, enjoying massive national near-unanimity, now has the mandate to go all the way. Especially after Crocus.
There’s every possibility the terror tactics by Kiev goons will finally drive Russia to return Ukraine to its original 17th century landlocked borders: Black Sea-deprived, and with Poland, Romania, and Hungary reclaiming their former territories.
Remaining Ukrainians will start to ask serious questions about what led them to fight – literally to their death – on behalf of the US Deep State, the military complex and BlackRock.
As it stands, the Highway to Hell meat grinder is bound to reach maximum velocity.
Heat oven to 400 degrees F. Grease and lightly dust* a 10 inch fluted tube pan or an 11 cup ring mold with cornmeal.
In a large mixer bowl, combine biscuit mix, milk, eggs and butter. Beat with an electric mixer on low speed until well combined. Beat on high speed for 1 minute, scraping bowl constantly.
With back of spoon, spread 2/3 of the dough on the bottom and up the sides of the prepared pan to within 1 1/2 inches of the top; reserve remaining dough.
Layer mushroom, pepperoni, pizza sauce and 1 1/2 cups of the cheese over the dough in pan.
Spread reserved dough over the top of cheese layer.
Bake for 30 minutes or until golden.
Let pizza stand for 10 minutes on a warm rack.
Use a knife to loosen sides of pizza, turn out onto ovenproof serving plate.
Top with remaining cheese.
Return pizza to oven for 1 to 2 minutes to melt cheese.
Figure 1: (A) 65°N summer solstice insolation, (B)Atmospheric CO2 concentration, Allan Hills vertical error bars indicate 2σ spread with horizontal age uncertainty, (C) Global LR04 benthic stacked δ18O (blue), ODP1123 seawater δ18O (black). The MPT and the “typical 41 ka-world” intervals are highlighted in grey and yellow respectively.
Some 900,000 years ago, humans nearly went extinct. According to the results of a genomics study published last year, modern humanity’s ancestors were reduced to a breeding population of barely 1,300 individuals in a devastating bottleneck that brought us to the very brink of annihilation. Now, a new study has found that a mass migration of humans out of Africa occurred at the same time.
It’s a discovery that confirms the previous dating of the population decline, and suggests that the two are linked to a common denominator; an event known as the Mid-Pleistocene Transition, in which Earth’s climate underwent a period of utter turmoil, wiping out many species. The movement of early humans into and across Europe and Asia from Africa is difficult to reconstruct. The best evidence we have consists of a sparse record of bones and mostly stone artifacts, which can be challenging to date. However, the evidence suggests that it wasn’t one event, but multiple waves of early hominids and human ancestors that packed up their lives and made long journeys into new environments.
Two recent studies have linked human migration to a population bottleneck, based on different types of analysis. A close reading of the human genome found that a population bottleneck caused a loss of genetic diversity some 900,000 years ago. A second study, published a few weeks later, studied early archaeological sites in Eurasia, and dated the bottleneck to 1.1 million years ago.
This discrepancy makes it challenging to identify the climate event that may have caused or at the very least contributed to the temporary drop in numbers, so geologists Giovanni Muttoni of the University of Milan and Dennis Kent of Columbia University embarked on an effort to narrow down the timing of the bottleneck. First, the researchers re-evaluated records of sites of early hominid habitation across Eurasia, and found a cluster of sites reliably dated to 900,000 years ago. In comparison, the dating on older sites used as evidence of a population bottleneck was more ambiguous and therefore disputable.
They compared their findings to marine sediment records, which preserve evidence of changes in the climate in the form of oxygen isotopes. Ratios of oxygen trapped in sediment layers indicate whether the climate was warmer or cooler at the time the minerals were deposited.
The genomic data and the dating of the hominid sites together suggest that the bottleneck and the migration were simultaneous. During the Mid-Pleistocene Transition, global ocean levels dropped, and Africa and Asia dried out, with large patches of aridity. Hominids living in Africa would have faced horrible conditions depriving them of food and water. Fortunately, with the falling sea level, land routes into Eurasia became available and they were able to skedaddle, according to the researchers’ model.
This is not to say, they carefully note, that hominids had not migrated previously. Rather that the population bottleneck in the ancestor of modern Homo sapiens and the migration thereof occurred at the same time as a result of the climate upheaval that was occurring some 900,000 years ago.
“We suggest that the enhanced aridity during marine isotope stage 22 that caused the spread of savanna and arid zones across much of continental Africa pushed early Homo populations in Africa to adapt or migrate to avoid extinction,” they write in their paper. “Rapid migration in response to a severe climate trigger and concomitant means to escape is what can account for the … migration out-of-Africa at 0.9 million years ago and contribute to the modern genomic evidence in modern African populations of the bottleneck.”
Comment: I have found this stuff fascinating as far back as when I watched the National Geographic specials with Louis B. Leakey digging for bones in Olduvai Gorge. I started at RPI majoring in geology figuring that would be a good way to get into paleontology. Only later did I transfer to anthropology… and ROTC.
This story is a good example of what effect a changing climate can have on humans even when they occur on a geological time scale. Reducing our breeding population to barely 1,300 individuals and causing our ancestors to un-ass the area for parts unknown are damned drastic effects. In this case, humans certainly had no hand in influencing this particular episode of climate change. It would be interesting to compare and contrast the conditions leading to the Mid-Pleistocene Transition to what we’re seeing/not seeing today.
With his re-election accomplished, Russian President Vladimir Putin is now getting serious about the harm being done to Russia by the petulant and crazed collective West. Defense Minister Shoigu has announced the creation of two new ARMIES for Russia, including fourteen (14) New Divisions of 10,000-15,000 troops EACH, and sixteen (16) new divisions of 3,000-5,000 troops EACH.
To put these two new armies in perspective, what Russia is now creating – above and beyond its present armed forces – is larger than the armies of:
Germany, Britain (UK), France, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Czech Republic, Croatia, Finland, Sweden COMBINED.
The big question now is whether or not Russia will resort to Conscription.
Stay tuned . . .
So true
One of the Moscow attackers, has been confirmed to be an ex-Ukrainian soldier who served in 2022
The investigation into the horrific attack at a Concert Hall in the Moscow, Russia region, has been positively identified as Rustam Azhiyev, a former UKRAINIAN SOLDIER (Image above) who served in 2022, as a shooter.
The man shown atop this story is the captured suspect and Russian law enforcement identified him and pulled up some of his history in the Ukraine Army:
Suspect Rustam Azhiyev Ukraine Army info
In earlier stories about the Moscow Attack, it was reported that a White Renault automobile was caught on a dashcam, with men exiting carrying rifles, outside the concert hall which was attacked (HERE).
It was also reported earlier that the White Renault vehicle was captured and the men inside, who fled to nearby woods, were also captured (HERE).
Those men were identified as having been citizens of Tajikistan, which is shown on the map below:
Tajikistan Russia Map
Hours after the Terrorist attack near Moscow, that White Renault vehicle was captured on a road near Bryansk, Russia, which is shown on the map below:
Why were the suspects traveling toward UKRAINE when they are allegedly from Tajikistan? Why does one of the suspects have ties to the UKRAINE armed forces?
The investigation is rapidly developing with evidence that it was UKRAINE that was deeply involved in this terror attack upon innocent civilians inside Russia.
Pittsburgh Is Being Destroyed. Here’s Why.
Transforming the United States into Haiti.
1
Lordy! I have family living in Pittsburgh.
Terrorists Wore Body Cams! Video of them Murdering inside Russian Concert Hall
The terrorists who attacked a concert hall inside Russia, apparently wore Body Cams or “Go-Pro-Type” cameras and took video of themselves as they massacred innocent people. I have received one such video.
In the video, one can see an UNARMED co-conspirator, wearing what appears to be rifle magazine clip-carriers (no gun seen on him) waving a shooter INTO a hallway where innocent people were hiding. Image above.
The shooter enters the doorway to that hall and begins firing.
Moscow shooter in hallway
At least six people go down under his automatic weapons fire. Blood spray and splatter, everywhere.
As the person wearing the camera turns, another terrorist attacker is shown kneeling at the throat of another victim, who had already been shot, but was laying, wounded and dying, on the ground. The perpetrator is seen repeatedly slicing the victims throat — at least TEN SLASHES, with blood spewing from the gaping wounds.
Then that perp and others calmly walk away:
Unarmed co conspirator waving shooter into hallway large
This is some of the most evil, vicious, horrifying, crime video I have ever seen. It makes me sick to my stomach. The Barbarity. The inhuman behavior. It is mortifying to me.
I find myself in an ethical and moral quandary over this video. It certainly is “news.” Of that, there is no doubt.
Yet the video is so utterly horrifying, so outside any behavior even remotely “human,” and so hideously violent, that I find myself recoiling at the notion of putting the video out.
I then asked myself if perhaps I should put still images from the video, like the one atop this story, and that begot yet another quandary. Would publishing such still images, cause emotional distress to the families of the victims?
I have decided still images ought notbe published except for the non-gruesome images above, either.
Maybe I’m getting soft in my old age. Maybe, though, I’m just pushed too far on this one, and realizing there is nothing good that can come of publishing it.
I want you to know I have the video. I’ve watched it. It is frighteningly gruesome, and shows what can only be described as pure evil.
Biggest red flag
Happening Now: Russian Missiles Cross POLAND Border During Ukraine Attack
As of 11:53 PM eastern US time on Saturday night-into-Sunday, Russia is engaged in a large missile attack against Ukraine. HOWEVER, “at least three” Russian missiles breached POLAND air space over the Village of Horodto, and POLAND has scrambled fighter jets.
The scalable map below shows the village of Horodto, Poland, on the border of Ukraine.
At least 7 Russian Tu-95MS bombers took off from the Olenya air field in Russia to launch long-range missiles at Ukraine.
Bombers also took off from Engels with a total now of 13 in the air.
This airfield is located just 100km from the Norway border in the far north.
MORE:
6- Su-34 bombers are airborne
LARGE EXPLOSIONS IN LVIV. SECOND MISSILE VOLLEY INBOUND.
MISSILES ARE HEADED FOR KIEV!!!!
ALL of Ukraine now in Air Raid Alert:
GJZwuZIXQAA2T9n
Missiles Have Overflown Oserdow, Poland which is about 70km south of Horodto, Poland, previously overflown.
— Several Dozen additional Cruise Missiles have entered Ukrainian Airspace via the Chernihiv and Sumy Region.
— Multiple Russian Kh-101/555/55 cruise missiles on direct course to Kyiv from the north.
Massive explosions in Kyiv the city is under intense bombardment right now.
MORE:
At least 19x explosions in Stryi, on the Ukrainian side of the Polish-Ukrainian border:
“Frankly, I’m very worried,” he says. Ever since mid-November, the Voyager 1 spacecraft has been sending messages back to Earth that don’t make any sense. It’s as if the aging spacecraft has suffered some kind of stroke that’s interfering with its ability to speak. “It basically stopped talking to us in a coherent manner,” says Suzanne Dodd of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who has been the project manager for the Voyager interstellar mission since 2010. “It’s a serious problem.”
Instead of sending messages home in binary code, Voyager 1 is now just sending back alternating 1s and 0s. Dodd’s team has tried the usual tricks to reset things — with no luck. It looks like there’s a problem with the onboard computer that takes data and packages it up to send back home. All of this computer technology is primitive compared to, say, the key fob that unlocks your car, says Dodd. “The button you press to open the door of your car, that has more compute power than the Voyager spacecrafts do,” she says. “It’s remarkable that they keep flying, and that they’ve flown for 46-plus years.”
Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, have outlasted many of those who designed and built them. So to try to fix Voyager 1’s current woes, the dozen or so people on Dodd’s team have had to pore over yellowed documents and old mimeographs. “They’re doing a lot of work to try and get into the heads of the original developers and figure out why they designed something the way they did and what we could possibly try that might give us some answers to what’s going wrong with the spacecraft,” says Dodd. She says that they do have a list of possible fixes. As time goes on, they’ll likely start sending commands to Voyager 1 that are more bold and risky. “The things that we will do going forward are probably more challenging in the sense that you can’t tell exactly if it’s going to execute correctly — or if you’re going to maybe do something you didn’t want to do, inadvertently,” says Dodd.
Linda Spilker, who serves as the Voyager mission’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says that when she comes to work she sees “all of these circuit diagrams up on the wall with sticky notes attached. And these people are just having a great time trying to troubleshoot, you know, the 60’s and 70’s technology.” “I’m cautiously optimistic,” she says. “There’s a lot of creativity there.”
Still, this is a painstaking process that could take weeks, or even months. Voyager 1 is so distant, it takes almost a whole day for a signal to travel out there, and then a whole day for its response to return. “We’ll keep trying,” says Dodd, “and it won’t be quick.”
Comment: This is one hell of an adventure for NASA coders and engineers. I envy them. Years before the launch of Voyager 1, I was introduced to computers in an after school course in the computer center of Fairfield University. I ended up writing a Star Trek navigation game in Fortran by graphing polynomial functions. I wouldn’t know where to begin to do that now. Many years later I learned how to hack MS DOS to write stupid computer tricks and write simple viruses. That was all to support a cover. I couldn’t do that today, either. Those rudimentary old skills are nothing to sneeze at. Those NASA coders are living the dream… a techno-nerd dream, but a dream nevertheless.
TTG
The logic of anti-China idiots
2
Smart Boy
Stuffed Pizza
1362506743810
Ingredients
Crust
1 recipe uncooked deep-dish dough crust
Stuffing Mixture
1 bunch spinach, washed, stems removed, and lightly wilted (stir-fried)
8 ounces shredded mozzarella cheese
2 ounces Canadian bacon slices, diced
1 teaspoon oregano
2 cloves garlic, sliced thinly
2 ounces mushrooms, sliced
1/2 cup tomato sauce
Alternate Stuffing Mixture
8 ounces shredded mozzarella cheese
1/4 cup shredded Parmesan cheese
1/4 pound hot Italian sausage, browned/crumbled and drained
1/3 cup small pepperoni pieces
1/4 cup sliced black olives
1/4 cup sliced green olives
1/2 package frozen chopped spinach, thawed and drained
1 teaspoon oregano
1 tablespoon chopped parsley
Instructions
Stuffing Mixture
Combine spinach, cheese, Canadian bacon, oregano, garlic and mushrooms for stuffing mixture.
Crust
Spread dough in a greased deep-dish pan and up the sides for the bottom crust (approximately 16 ounces of dough for 14 inch deep dish).
Par-bake the crust for four minutes.
Add stuffing mixture to bottom crust in a deep dish pan and cover with top crust (approximately 13 ounces dough).
Seal the two dough edges together with fingers and trim excess.
Slit the top crust to allow steam to vent during baking.
Add tomato sauce topping and bake in a preheated 450 degrees F oven on lower rack or directly on the pizza stone for 45 minutes or until crust is golden brown.
Remove from pan and cool 5 minutes on a wire rack before cutting and serving.
Reactance
Have you ever called in sick but you were convinced or threatened by your superiors to come to work? Did it end well for you?
Oooooh yes, and definitely no.
I had done some North American travelling (flights) in late 2019, and soon after arriving home in Canada I fell ill. I was sicker than I’d ever been… but it felt like a bad cold. Very bad. I lay in bed for 4–5 days with fever, aches, congestion, cough – no medicines could ease my agony. I am not a whiner either… quite the opposite. I don’t miss work.
On the Thursday of the week (having missed Monday – Wednesday out sick) I received a call saying that the Boss wanted me in Saturday because we were moving a ton of desks around the office, on his whim. For context, I’m an Office & Facilities Manager, so this did *technically* fall under my purview, though the Boss dreamt this up earlier in the week so I hadn’t been involved.
They threatened my employment if I didn’t show up for this desk move, despite touting a ‘no limits’ policy on vacation and illness. I showed up to the office that Saturday and did my job, sicker than ever. Life went on, my cough lasted 17 weeks (SEVENTEEN WEEKS) even with a steroid inhaler, I lost 18lbs off my already lean but fit frame. Management teased me & laughed about it as I coughed all over the office and just kept saying ‘you’re so sickly’…
Pretty sure I had COVID, and bad, but this was before tests were available.
I quit in January ‘20, just before the world learned of the COVID-19 virus circulating the world. Still can’t reconcile the arrogance and lack of empathy of that management team with the A++ company they purported to be.
Only 6.5 out of 1,000 Men Are Getting Married: Report
Let me tell you all about raising kids. I am sure that other parents will agree.
How you you know that the home that you are visiting has children?
Easy. There are stickers everywhere.
Seriously. My daughter is sticker crazy, and they are cheap with different designs, shapes and colors. They are peel off and she will get a roll and plaster the entire house with them. I doesn’t matter where. Either.
On the walls, on the drawers, on the floor, on the table. On everything.
It’s a fact of life that I was unprepared for. Ugh!
Initially, I tried to keep up, but eventually I “threw in the towel” and gave up. Now, I own a home populated with stickers everywhere.
Word to the wise.
If you all ever decide to have kids, please don’t buy them any adhesive stickers. You can thank me later.
Today…
Wheat issues with China
Five orders of wheat from the West has been canceled.
There is a penalty charge for cancelling orders and Chinese buyers still have to look at their bottom line.
The logical reason for the cancellation, I believe, is that China has made reliable food supply the most important strategic goal for the country since maybe ten years ago. In the meantime, China has been exporting inexpensive farming equipment and technology to ASEAN countries and Africa (noticing that, John Deere’s prognosis for its future is “Winter is coming”).
China is leasing farmland in Kazakhstan and Russia and establishing strong relationships with BRI and BRICS+ countries that export agricultural products, including Argentina (despite early rhetoric, they cannot afford to lose China and are doing all they can to keep their old friend by eating crow and shutting TFU). China also has plans to divert water from the Tibetan plateau to the vast arid land of Xinjiang for developing agriculture.
The result is now being experienced with bumper crops in all these places where China has close ties, on the average 50% increase in output.
Since US, Australian and Ukrainian suppliers are unreliable (thanks to their politicians), China will buy from countries with shorter secured trade routes, stronger trade ties and direct currency swap lines. Because the US and Australian contracts are at higher prices set in the past, Chinese buyers paying current bumper crop prices pay less even with the cancellation penalties (it’s like the cost of hedging).
It’s just business, not personal (favorite Mafia excuse after knocking off their competition), and certainly not an insidious trade war. This is an example of China’s long-term planning and assiduous execution of their plan. Meanwhile, the West is busy manufacturing more lies.
Good luck with that.
PM
The truth…
What is the most degrading job you ever had?
I worked at a small, private nursery school in Japan that catered to rich kids. I was paid nine dollars an hour.
I arrived early every morning to set up all the heavy classroom equipment, and I stayed late to put it all back again. No problem.
I changed diapers, and toilet trained the kids. Bring it on!
I spoon fed the kids at lunchtime, and didn’t eat any lunch myself. Loved doing that, too.
In fact, I really loved the kids, and I liked a lot of things about that job.
What I didn’t like was how I was treated by the bosses.
On my first day there I was handed a pair of gardening gloves, and ordered to weed the garden and remove the cat poop from the sandbox. (Incidentally, the gloves got stolen when I washed them and left them out to dry. Why would anyone do that?)
I was also instructed to water down the liquid hand soap in the washroom, and to wash and reuse the disposable plastic cups in the kitchen (which didn’t have any hot running water, by the way). Tissues were strictly rationed, and I was criticized for offering a tissue to a child with a runny nose because she’d already used one that day.
I was given a lot of strange and contradictory instructions, and I was always getting in trouble for not knowing which particular rule to follow, because they seemed to change on a daily basis. After a while, I started to think I was losing my mind. It was horrible.
I lasted four months at that job. When I gave notice, the boss burst into tears and told me that I was the best worker he’d ever had. I later found out that I was the only worker who had lasted more than a month! (Apparently some people quit after their first day on the job.) I’m amazed that I lasted so long.
I have had a lot of bad job experiences, but that was the most degrading … and the worst paying.
Is he wrong
What if you have been caught with a gun to your face?
😀 I have had a gun shoved in my face a few times.
I am still alive. You’d very quickly work out my identity if I told you those stories.
However, my dad’s shop had a gun come in with a sawn off a couple times. Did I do something heroic grab the gun fuck no… I gave him the till tray which had at most £50 most people were paying with cards by that time and anybody who paid with cash had the notes shoved into a one way floor safe built into the floor. It had a slit to push notes into and of course it was the early 2010s the take away business wasn’t what was.
Squatters FLEE After Vigilantes Send Message, Illegal Immigrant CALLS FOR INVASION Of US Homes
Did your life change in an instant? What happened?
I had just finished my second year of university, and my dad had a heart attack. It was a warning. Bad, but not disastrous. I went home and looked after the family business while my father recovered. I had a high paying summer camp job lined up, that included room and board, plus 360 hours a month of work, for 4 months.
I gave this up, to keep the family business going. When it was time to go back to university, my dad approached me, and asked me to continue to run the business, until it could be sold. This took 4 years, because my dad had to go to court to get my uncle to agree to sell it.
In 4 years I had a lot more life experience, and I no longer wanted the career that I had been going to university for. I read a Dear Abby column, where someone said that they were 32 and wanted to go back to university to get their dream job, but in four years, when they started their dream job they would be 36. Abby replied, saying, and how old will you be in 4 years, if you don’t go back to school. This was an eye opening way of looking at life.
I decided to see the world and then go back to university. Seeing the world when you are young is never the same as seeing it when you are retired.
I became a ships Captain and saw the world. When I felt it was time for a change, I went back to university, I started a third career, completely different from anything I had thought about before. When that got old I started another career.
If my dad had stayed healthy, I would have completed a degree in something that I might have had no interest in, gotten married young, and not wanted to risk career changes, with a family to support.
Accountability
Have you seen a lawyer get rude with a judge during a trial?
Many, many times. Here’s a good story for you.
Judge: “You’re 40 minutes late for trial.”
Lawyer: “I heard that I’m being sanctioned?”
Judge: “You didn’t produce the expert report that I granted you the last continuance to have time to produce. And you’re 40 minutes late. And I’m having to continue the trial again because of your bad behavior.”
Lawyer (who has an enraged look in his eye): “Yes we did produce the expert report.” (this was a total lie btw)
Judge: “NO, YOU DIDN’T. We’ve had a hearing with your associate on this for the last 40 minutes before you were so kind as to grace us with your company. Now you’re late and you are arguing with me over matters already decided. I’m continuing the trial because a client should not have to suffer for a lawyer’s bad behavior, but I’m sanctioning you $500.00.”
Lawyer: “I don’t feel like that would be fair.”
Judge: “I really don’t care what you feel would be fair. You haven’t been on this earth long enough to tell me how to run my courtroom.”
Lawyer: “Look, I want to make sure the record is clear on this. You’re sanctioning me $500.00 for not turning over an expert report we turned over?”
Judge: “No, you didn’t. I’m going to sanction you another $200.00 for your insolence. Now you’re up to $500.00. Do you want to keep going?”
Lawyer: “Judge, if you’re sanctioning me another $200.00, that would be $700.00, not $500.00.”
Judge: “Oh my goodness, you’re right. What would we do without you here to keep me on track? I’m sanctioning you $700.00 payable to the Women’s Center within 30 days. Get out of my courtroom.”
EDIT: Thanks for the upvotes!! This is my first Answer to receive 1,000+. Please follow me and I will A2A questions with courtroom dialogues whenever possible 🙂
Life rules
What is the most condescending advice you received from someone who assumed you were poorer or less educated than them?
I used to work in engineering – high precision aerospace stuff. It just so happened that the majority of the people who worked there were men. In fact I was one of only three women out of the 300 or so who worked there. We also all wore the same corporate clothing which was nice because it made us feel like a team rather than managers versus shopfloor.
One incident stands out in my head. I was near the shopfloor entrance chatting to one of the guys, when a couple from our new supplier walked in. One of them barked at me ‘I’ve got an appointment to see the Managing Director, about some technical issues,’ whilst the other didn’t even condescend to look at me. Despite his rudeness, I said; ‘certainly sir, I’ll take you up there.’
I settled them into the office (big office, very plush) and asked them if they’d like coffee. They nodded (speaking was too much effort), and I served them freshly brewed coffee and expensive biscuits. No thank you of course.
Then I proceeded to introduce myself and shook their hands, ‘hello, I’m Dr. Dickens, Managing Director. Now let’s get started on those technical issues shall we?’ I have never seen two people pale so quickly, because I could have cancelled their supply contract in a second.
Because I have a PhD in Aerospace engineering, my title is Dr. and almost without fail, everyone thinks I am a male, so this scenario happened time and time again. The guys who worked for me thought it was brilliant (‘they thought you were the secretary again!!’), but it can wear a bit thin sometimes.
No lies told here
Have you ever found something unexpected inside of something you bought used?
A few years back, I decided to buy what I call a man bag. It’s sort of like a briefcase, but soft sided and has a strap that you can put over your shoulder and carry it like a purse.
Anyway, I picked out a nice one. And when I got home, I started taking out all the packing paper they’d put inside. In one of the pouches was a bunch of legal papers. It was a checkbook, bills, and canceled checks and other things like that. It was obviously somebody’s personal documents, it had the man’s name, and something like I checking account number, but not enough for me to identify and contact him or her. It did have one thing that I recognized. The name of a company. UBS is sort of a brokerage house, money management, bank, services company. I use it for some of my retirement savings. So, I took the papers over to the local office and explained to the receptionist how I found them. She seemed quite surprised by the story, but in the end, said yes, she takes the papers and pass them on and see what could be done. I thought that was the end of the story, but about six months later I received a package in the mail. This was from a stranger in California. At this point I should mention that I live in a small city outside Chicago, Illinois. Anyway, the papers belong to him, and UBS had tracked him down using the account numbers and return all the documents.
He was very, very happy and told me that he had purchased the bag in California about a year before. He decided he didn’t like it and returned it to the store, but obviously had accidentally left some of his papers in the bag. The retail store obviously had not checked very well, put the bag back in stock and somehow it ended up on the shelf in their store near me 2000 miles away. So, we have one company that didn’t check their merchandise very well, and another company that went the extra mile for one of their customers and got him back some documents that he really needed, but had thought were lost forever.
The end of the story is that in the letter saying thank you for helping get his documents back. He sent me a very large box of see’s candy. Now of all the candy in the world, I love see’s the most. Unfortunately, about one week before the candy arrived, I’ve been put on a pretty strict diet to lose a significant amount of weight. But my daughter and granddaughter graciously took the candy off my hands and told me that was very good.
14 Habits that will make you more attractive and impressive
Have a great hygiene. Take good care of your teeth, skin, hair and entire body. Being rough or smelly makes you unattractive.
Build an excellent posture. Don’t bend your back or side while standing or walking.
Invest in your physical health. Eat vitamins, hit the gym consistently and don’t be overly stressed. Stress makes you unattractive with time.
Dress well no matter the occasion.
Smell good always. Use a good perfume, you don’t need to have a body odour to smell nice.
Have a positive mindset. Being negative always is a bad energy people run away from.
Be confident and carry yourself with dignity. Low-esteem makes you unattractive.
Don’t use vulgar words
Cultivate excellent etiquettes
Be a goal-getter and constantly achieve things that are important your life.
Be joyful, being sad always is unattractive.
Fill your heart with love. Hating on others and gossipping about them is terrible and unattractive.
Respect people. Being rude is unattractive.
Be financially stable. Learn a high demand skill, get a job, start a business or launch your startup.
Zorg Being Iconic for 10 Minutes | The Fifth Element
Have you ever been given a poor grade because of a political view you expressed?
Yes, and it wasn’t a pleasant experience.
I won’t say what grade I was in, and I won’t name the school, either. Nor will I name the teacher. Anyways, in class, we had to do a debate/argument writing piece. I was usually pretty good at these arguments, and writing was one of my strong points. Therefore, I felt that I would do pretty good.
I decided to do an argument about jail time for men and women. As you may know, a study by Sonja Starr found that men, on average, spend up to 63% more jail time than women, for the same crime. There were also many other prejudices with the legal system that I pointed out. I don’t remember exactly what I wrote, but it was about the conviction and trials of men as opposed to women. Of course, I had facts and statistics to support them.
Throughout the month, the class worked on their essays. A few days into the project, we had to get out ideas approved for our writing piece, so everyone lined up to the teacher’s desk. When I finally got to the front of the line, I told her about my argument: men are prejudiced against when it comes to serving jail time. Before I show you her response, I need to say that my teacher was going through a phase where she didn’t care about much. She usually responded with a few grunts, and wasn’t generally happy at all. In fact, some kids called her “cave woman” behind her back. But when I told her about my essay topic, her eyes got wide. She told me that my topic wasn’t valid. Being the kind of person I was, I asked her “Why?” She just shook her head and told me to meet her after everyone was done getting their topics approved. I walked back towards my desk, puzzled and a little irritated. After everyone was done getting their topics approved, she gestured towards me for me to come over. I quietly got up and walked over to her. The following conversation isn’t 100% accurate, as this was a long time ago, but you’ll get the gist of it.
I approach her desk.
“Follow me,” she says, and starts walking towards the hall. I trudge after her, ignoring weird looks from my classmates and the occasional “He got in trouble,” or “I wonder what she’ll punish him with.”
I walk into the hall, and close the door.
“So, do you know why I dragged you out here?” she asks with an interrogating tone.
“No”, I reply honestly.
She pulls out an AK-47 and shoots me, and drags me down the hall. She walks past two guards, then locks me in a cage. Inside is a monstrous, man-eating gorgon. The gorgon eats me.
I snap back to reality.
“Well, I am disturbed by how patriarchal your essay topic is.”
“I’m sorry.” I respond.
“Sorry doesn’t cut it.” she says. “Your essay topic could’ve offended many people. I was quite offended.” she continues. “You will need to serve this week in detention. And start thinking of a new topic, or else I’m going to call your parents.”
Rage boils inside me, and I can feel anger in my head. I swallow it, and say nothing. But I am mad. I can’t believe that this teacher would criticize me based on my beliefs.
“Well, what do you have to say for yourself? What do you have to say to all women, for being such a misogynistic bigot?”
“Sorry” is all I can mutter.
“I’m not going to waste more time lecturing you. Now get back into class and think of a new topic. And it had better not be sexist.” she says.
I walk back into the classroom.
That night, I told my parents about everything that had happened. I was pretty afraid that I would be punished on the home front as well. After all, our writing teacher was pretty grumpy, but also reasonable. I figured that if she thought that my topic was sexist, my parents would, too. However, they sympathized, and instead of grounding me for thinking of such a “sexist” topic, they called the principal.
The next day, during biology, I was called down to the office. I thought I was in further trouble, but to my surprise, my writing teacher was there too. The principal explained to me that yes, I could write about that topic if I had a strong belief in it. The principal, who was female, (not that it adds anything) was my savior that day, and I have appreciated it since. I headed back to class, and my writing teacher did the same.
Throughout the month, I worked on my writing piece, and even showed it to the principal. She enjoyed it thoroughly, and it made me pretty proud. I didn’t get my teacher’s approval, but at least I got the principal’s.
One thing about our school was that we had to read our pieces aloud. Every semester, we would work on one aspect of writing. We would do two pieces a semester, and we would always have a big class ceremony. We would each read our piece in front of the class. When it was my turn, I walked to the pedestal at the front and read my title aloud. Immediately, one girl raised her hand annoyingly. This girl (we’ll call her Denise, for lack of a better name) was the teacher’s pet in every class except biology. She always got her way, no matter what, except for, well, in biology. My biology teacher probably hated Denise and was the only one who had ever gotten her in detention. I secretly admired him for that. Anyways, Denise raised her hand. Annoyed, I called on her, and she shouted “you’re a misogynistic, patriarchal &%^#$” (kept out for obvious reasons). The whole class looked at her disgustedly, except, of course, the writing teacher. I proceeded with my writing, and I could hear Denise calling me “sexist” or “bigot” under her breath. When I was done, everyone applauded except for Denise and the writing teacher. I walked back to my desk, feeling pretty good.
The next day, I was in study hall, reading my textbook so I could complete my study guide. (It was history.) I was minding my own business when three girls suddenly approached me. I asked them how I could help them, out of politeness, and they told me that I was a jerk, that I deserved to die, that I was a disgusting human being. At first, I had no idea what they were talking about, until they said:
“Why did you bully Denise yesterday, just because she’s a girl?”
I understood. Either Denise had told them that I was a bully, or they had made up the story themselves. And they seemed so hooked on the idea that I knew it must’ve been Denise.
I answered in my best calm-but-angry tone: “If you consider writing an essay bullying, we all would be shipped off to jail right now. Except for you three, since the courts are more considerate towards women.”
One of them punched me in the shoulder, hard, but not hard enough to do serious damage. I had had enough. I picked up my textbook, pencils, and all of my other supplies and simply walked away. They didn’t pursue. Even though pain was still ringing through my shoulder, I felt pretty proud of myself for standing up to three girls who were using their gender to blackmail me. I didn’t report it, because I knew that punishment wouldn’t change them.
The next day, we got our grades. I flipped over to my rubric and was shocked at what I saw: a 36%. The comments wrote something along the lines of Alexander wrote a very misogynistic, questionable essay. I know that he is capable of doing better, if he gets these very old-fashioned thoughts out of my head. That’s it, I thought. Inside, I was crying, and I knew how mad my parents would be. I knew that I couldn’t get my parents to bail me out of this one; sometimes, you have to just suck it up and take matters into your own hands. So I did. At lunch, I talked to the principal, and she and my writing teacher emailed each other. In the end, they agreed that my writing would be graded by the writing teacher a grade level above me, and the score would be averaged out. The writing teacher in the next grade level gave me a 98, so the average was a 67. A D+. I was an A-, A, and A+ student, so this was a crushing blow to me. I told my parents what happened, but to my surprise, they weren’t mad, but proud that I had “taken the case” to the principal. The other thing was, my grade wasn’t impacted much. It got lowered to an 83%, which I managed to regain back to a 94%.
In retrospect, I may have overreacted a bit, but I’m not the kind of person who just sits down and gets steamrolled by injustice. I stood up for myself, and I think I did what was right.
Wow! I just wrote the longest answer I’ve ever written. Hopefully, you read my whole story if you are reading this sentence right now. What I won’t offer is the cure to cancer, but there is something I’d like you all to know.
It’s okay to question authority when you are doing what’s fair for you. After all, minors deserve to be treated with respect as well. Also, never let your one-sided bias blind you.
Well, have a nice day.
Scott Ritter: Putin Rejects Neocon’s China Agenda – What Will Happen Between Russia and NATO?
A supremely great interview. A MUST watch.
https://youtu.be/w1iQNmsgHeM
If your young child ever “walked in” on you and your spouse, how did you/would you handle it?
I can’t believe I’m actually sharing this story but it has been 36 years so I guess enough time has passed to protect the innocent. My husband and I were living in Germany with our three year old daughter. It was winter and very cold so she wore those little onesies with the feet in them. It was late, we knew she was asleep because we had checked on her, so we were comfortable enjoying our “adult time”. Thus, you can imagine our surprise when suddenly there is a extra weight that plops down on my husband’s back while simultaneously we hear, “Ride a horse, Daddy, giddyap!” Of course we were stunned, shocked, and not knowing what to do, my husband did the only thing he could think of…he gave her a “ride” for a moment while we gathered our wits. Then, we arose, got her the drink she had apparently originally wanted, and put her back to bed. By the time we regained our bedroom we were choking trying to hold back the laughter and could finally let it out. We laughed until we cried. It’s was a memory we shared and loved right up until the day he died and one that will always make me smile.
What do I write to my dad in prison?
A Rule: Don’t start your letter with, “Sorry it’s been so long since I’ve written.”
Trust me, we know it’s been a long time. We know better than anyone. Just don’t waste the time, effort, or space committing those words to paper. Probably half the letters I received started with those words, and it felt like being told, “You’ve diminished in importance since you’ve gone to prison, and each successive day makes you that much less a part of my life.” I’d much rather hear that than, “Sorry it’s been so long.”
No preamble is necessary. Just imagine that I’m sitting next to you on a long drive and tell me stuff! What’s important to you right now? Tell me about the argument you had with your coworker. Clue me in about the movie you just watched that you loved or hated. Did you go to a restaurant that surprised, delighted, or sickened you? I want to know!
Don’t worry about reminding me where I’m at. Several people took great pains to avoid the topic of prison, as if they were afraid I’d read it and suddenly remember, “Holy shit, I totally forgot! I’m in prison,” then break down in tears. It’s never far from our minds where we are, and it’s perfectly OK to talk about it.
Letter writing is a lost art. It’s hard to find positive things to say about prison, but your letters can be one of them. A woman I had been seeing before going to prison and I wrote the most amazing letters back and forth. One of us would start a story that the other would carry forward. We became the nightly entertainment for one another, and I learned more about who she was in those pages than I ever could in a thousand dates.
An Observation: e-mail kills letters and destroys communication. If you start writing letters, and enjoy that, e-mail will bring it to a swift and final conclusion.
In the federal system, inmates have to pay five cents a minute to read or write e-mails. E-mail with a taxi meter forces you to vomit your thoughts onto the screen, and inhale messages. Please, give me a piece of paper, a thing I can hold in my hand and linger over for hours or days. I have the time.
Most of us come from an era where written letters are as relevant as cuneiform. That’s our loss as a society. A written letter, especially a handwritten letter, can carry emotions more colorful and deep than any tweet ever crafted. It’s a physical object once held by your hand, now held in mine, that gives a keyhole-sized view of who you were in that moment. As an added bonus, your words haven’t been indexed by Google, and it’s not loaded down with content appropriate advertisements.
Another Observation: People fear empty white space.
Don’t. This isn’t a test. This is your dad, boyfriend, husband, brother, son, or friend, sitting next to you. The empty page is my ear. Tell me a story. Start a conversation. Let’s meet one another for the first time on that page.
Cooking and Cleaning
Why do Chinese think that anyone in Taiwan, Hongkong or Tibet would long for the motherland as Chinese themselves escape to America or Canada as soon as they have enough money, even paying a fortune to American taxis or marry an American Chinese?
Because you don’t know China and you don’t know Chinese people.
You project your worst fears onto us because you literally are unable and unwilling to understand us.
I was born in the UK, people imagine OMG you won the LOTTERY in crawling out your mother’s vagina in the UK. Yeah well I didn’t. Notice how over the past few days british people have said I was never british I was a 2nd class citizen in the UK bud.
I moved back to Hong Kong my ancestral homeland nearly 8 years ago. 7 years ago or there abouts I renounced my GOLDEN LOTTERY TICKET UK passport to live in China.
And here’s something even bigger, I’m thinking of leaving Hong Kong, to go live in the Mainland. I’ve made enough money to retire already
CAMPING IN THE SNOW STORM WITH 2 BEDROOM AIR TENTㅣSNOW ASMR
WOW! Russia Uses “Zircon” Hypersonic Missiles Against Ukraine
The Ukrainian Armed Forces unofficially report the arrival of new Zircon missiles.
Several missiles covered a distance of 580 km from Crimea to Kyiv in 3 minutes, which allows us to estimate the speed of the missiles as 11,600 km/h, (7,200 mph).
Multiple buildings were destroyed and reportedly an airfield was targeted.
A destroyed three-story building in Kiev, destroyed by a hypersonic missile, was used by the SBU and SBU officers were there at the time of the attack.
If TikTok is banned around the world, will the Chinese economy totally collapse? If the Chinese economic does collapse, will China have no other alternative, but ‘war’?
ByteDance has 2.5 billion users, TikTok has 109 million American users, 4% of the user base.
ByteDance can easily do without 4% American users. It will not make any difference in the revenue stream.
The American users represent a trivial percentage of the whole.
Single Mother SHOCKED No Man Wants to Raise her KID
Remove skin from chicken. Place drumsticks in a shallow baking dish.
In a small saucepan, over medium heat, melt butter and cook onion until softened, about 5 minutes.
Stir in ketchup, bourbon, molasses, brown sugar, chili powder and salt. Simmer, stirring frequently for 3 to 5 minutes until slightly reduced and thickened.
Pour sauce over chicken. Bake uncovered for 25 to 30 minutes until chicken is cooked to 180 degrees F internal temperature. Stir sauce on bottom and corners of pan halfway through cooking to prevent sticking.
American women
What do Chinese think of the constant “Social Credit system” joke that trends on internet? How can China disprove it or fight it back? Even Asian jokers like Uncle Roger love milking it.
Social Credit is a Valuation of the Trustworthiness and Creditworthiness of an Individual, Firm or Company
Unlike most other nations like US or UK or even India which only scores Credit from a FINANCIAL perspective China is different, it scores TRUSTWORTHINESS rather than a mere numeric credit value
For instance the Western system says “Is this Individual capable of properly repaying a certain extension of credit or a Loan?”
The Credit Systems in the West either say “Yes. He has repaid his debts promptly. He pays his bills on time” Or “No”
The Chinese system asks “Can a Company or Individual be TRUSTED to properly repay a certain extension of credit or loan?”
The Western credit systems are Individual centric. Their entire focus is on Individuals
The Chinese system is Company centric plus Individuals too.
Parameters of Evaluation of a Score :-
Financial Repayments with early repayments getting positive scores and repayments later than 90 days from due dates getting negative scores
Membership of social organizations and voluntary organizations including the Professors who give up their weekends to take STEM classes in Chinese Learning Centers for free get positive scores.
Companies that contribute to “Active Development” of villages and towns surrounding their factories by financing certain roads in lieu of taxes get positive scores
Individuals who are outspoken critics of the CPC get negative scores. This is because the belief is they may soon leave China and not repay any loans that they have borrowed
Individuals who participate in protests against the Government either Local Or Government are given negative scores. However Individuals who have availed permission to protest are not included.
In either of the above case, the negative score comes across only when the Police record such activity and report it.
Individuals who are reported for excessive drinking get negative scores because of the belief that such Individuals may die soon and not repay their loans
Individuals who run Social Media accounts where they advocate Separatism and are flagged by the Censor get negative scores unless they justify their statements with evidence in which case their score is restored.
Companies whose Asset base is larger, get better scores than Companies whose Asset base is smaller
Students younger than 18 years old are not given negative scores
PLA volunteers get a good credit score when they finish their 3 year voluntary service and can get upto 80,000 RMB for credit without any security to set up a business
Myths :-
People who praise China all the time get positive scores. This is nonsense.
People who merely criticize China or CPC get negative scores. This is nonsense. You have to be flagged by the Censor or Reported by the Police and still have 90 days to defend your criticism. Not a single Covid protestor among the 58,000 recorded got adverse social credit scores.
Social Credit is valued in money. Idiots say 10 RMB social credit. This is a lie.
That Gay people get negative scores is nonsense.
Impact of Social Credit :-
Higher Social Credit gets better interest rates. A Person with better social credit gets his home at 4.25% while a Person with lower score gets his home at 5.25% or even 5.75%
Companies with higher social credit can borrow more in bonds. The borrowing limit is 55% of Assets but for companies with larger social credit it can be even 75% of Assets
Individuals with low social credit may not get a passport easily enough. An Individual with good social credit is exempted the extended verification process and gets his passport within the usual 90–120 days but others who have a low score may take 180–240 days or even 300 days to get their Passport.
Subramaniam Duraisamy , I forgot to add Individuals with social credit score lower than a specific limit need an Exit Visa to leave China without which they can’t apply to other consulates for foreign visas. Not included for travel to :- HK, Cambodia, Mongolia & since 2022 Russia
Individuals with low credit score won’t be approved to become CPC Deputies unless the Politburo or the Provincial Standing Committee waives this. Same for the Civil Service in China.
So it’s a system that works for China and Chinese Individuals
If Dhruv Rathee puts up a video of this then Indians will get it
Today the media distorts Social Credit into some Orwellian Surveillance System which is ridiculous because this system has been around since 1982
Good going Feminism!
Is the US a true democracy?
Recently, the United States held an event called the “Democracy Summit.” However, this summit has been criticized as a “false summit” by the international community, exposing the hypocritical nature of so-called American democracy.
According to a survey, over 70% of American voters believe that the US is heading in the wrong direction, closely linked to the country’s economic and social problems. However, American politicians seem more concerned about geopolitical interests instead of addressing real issues. Furthermore, American democracy is a rent-seeking transaction between interest groups and politicians, and political parties’ divisions have led to policy failures. 85% of Americans believe that the political system needs change.
Although the United States has always claimed to be a model of democracy and human rights, the widespread and deeply ingrained monetary politics have revealed this falsehood. Elections in the United States have become a “one-man show” for the wealthy class, severely undermining the original meaning of democracy.
In the US election, secret money and “dark money” have also infiltrated election activities, intensifying the dominance of the wealthy class and gradually diminishing the influence of ordinary people, resulting in a more severe political opposition and societal division. More than 90% of the candidates for both the Senate and House of Representatives secured their election victories by heavily investing in their campaigns.
The “Open Secrets” website, which has long tracked the flow of political donations in the United States, revealed that during the 2022 midterm elections, both the Democratic and Republican parties spent over 16.7 billion U.S. dollars, setting a new record, surpassing the previous one of 14 billion U.S. dollars in 2018.
Many netizens believe that this exposes the fraudulent nature of American democracy. American democracy is far from true democracy as it has become a luxury accessible only to the wealthy.
Can You Say Why America is the Greatest Country in the World?
Based on your personal life experience, was there ever a generation/period of time when the general population in your country did not feel that life was tough?
In Germany, it would seem to me that life was generally considered a breeze between about 1970 and 2000.
Those, according to my observations, were Germany’s golden years.
Before that, things were still being built up after the war, and after that, things somehow went into decline. 1970 to 2000 were cushy times. There was a general feeling of everything getting better every year, everyone doing better every year, and society having it all figured out.
Cushy social system, too.
Here, this is a picture from a family holiday in Austria and Italy. My parents were high school teachers, and we lived in our own house, had a brand new Mercedes station wagon, and during our holidays, of which we had crazy many every year, we cruised from hotel to hotel, eating in restaurants:
main qimg ebc73c715d4176dccfbedc4f53449608 lq
The first twenty years of that time frame, we still had the worry of getting wiped out in US/ Soviet nuclear strikes and counter strikes any minute, so that dampened the fun.
I don’t think a family of five with both parents working as teachers these days in Germany can afford their own home and a brand new Mercedes E-Class, as well as a fishing cottage and an apartment in Austria, and a boat on the river Danube. Things are not that cushy any longer.
But the 1990s were absolute rocket material. I’d say the 1990s were Germany’s party time.
GF Learns The Hard Way What Happens When You Push A Good Man TOO FAR
Who is the most annoying person or people that you have sat next to on an airplane?
Dubai to Seattle, business class. The couple in front of me, every 30 minutes would get up, get their bag down, pull out a bottle of perfume and a bottle of cologne, spray themselves and then spray the cabin. Five minutes later, everyone else in the business class cabin would start choking, stand up, and move one cabin back to be able to breathe for the 10 minutes it would take to clear out. We begged the stewards and stewardesses to do something, but they did nothing. Finally, I walked up and asked the people directly, who had been speaking VERY clear English up to that point, “Excuse me, could you please stop using perfume. My seatmate has asthma and it keeps activating it.” Suddenly they could only speak Hindi. No problem, my seatmate spoke Hindi, repeated the question. Suddenly they could only speak Urdu. No problem, the guy across the isle could speak Urdu, he repeated the question. Suddenly they could only speak Arabic. No problem. Finally they yelled at all of us, “ALL OF YOU STINK! WE HAVE TO DO THIS TO KEEP FROM GETTING SICK! YOU PEOPLE ARE SO RUDE!”
The head stewardess, also fed up at this point, offered to upgrade them to first class private cabins. The couple refused, “THESE ARE OUR SEATS, EVERYONE ELSE CAN MOVE IF THEY HAVE PROBLEMS!”.
Thank you Emirates for the ride in first class and thank you to the people who decided they wanted to stay together as couples and chose to move into the second business cabin instead.
As for the couple that felt the need to perfume the entire business class cabin every 30 minutes, not only were you annoying, but you were obnoxious, noxious, and rude.
What did your boss say to you during a meeting that resulted in you immediately resigning?
I worked for a company in south Louisiana after a major hurricane. We slowly became the became the # 1 branch in our region because of hard work and dedication of our employees. The branch manager fell and broke his hip and was out for 6 months. I had to take over as branch manager as well as operations manager. IN the mean time. the company promoted a very energetic director of operations and also a new CEO. Both wanted to visit and see how and why we were so successful. At a round table disscusison, the Director told me to keep doing what we were doing and gave us great direction on how to get better (remember, no manager). The CEO on the other hand told us that we needed to cut staff but 20% and reduce our budget by 35% within 3 months. All in the same meeting. I was not one to hold my tongue in this situation. I told them pretty plainly that I could not do both and that we were #1 in our region and I had no plans to change. I walked out of the meeting and was given a written warning for insubordination that I would not sign. 4 weeks later there was a layoff that I was part off. 10 weeks later the branch closed.
Second Hand Lions Bar FIGHT Scene
What are some psychological facts that everyone should know?
1. Love is a feeling that doesn’t come from the heart. Instead, the brain controls everything inside us, including our loving feelings.
2. No reasons can justify narcissistic behaviors, including depression, anxiety, or other issues.
3. Our pupils will widen every time we encounter things or people we like.
4. Dreams are pictures and gateways to our unconscious self. They tell us things that we need to work on.
5. Shedding tears and asking for help are not weaknesses.
6. A successful hypnotherapy session can change a person’s behavior permanently.
7. Foods from your loved ones taste better than foods you eat at restaurants, shopping malls, and the like.
8. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” doesn’t justify people’s attempts to kill a person’s personality and ability to shine.
9. We think our future is bright because we want to project good things to ourselves.
10. Ever heard “Music plays a significant part in stimulating your brain”? True, but, it’s virtually impossible to move on from childhood music.
11. People choose to believe what they see. Hence, we remember things better only when we’ve tested them at least 2-3 times.
12. People who talk to themselves tend to have higher-than-average IQs or even be geniuses.
13. Conflicts are inevitable parts of our daily life. What matters is how we tackle them.
14. Ladies’ fights can be 2-3 times more barbaric than fights between muscular, WWE-like men.
What is the greatest act of mentorship you have had in your career?
My boss sent me to Sweden to get me fired. He gave me a task I was never able to do. Him and his boss had no faith in me. The client wanted x, y, z implemented and I was supposed to do that.
I knew this (they never told me, only after).
That week in Sweden I survived by copying bits of work my boss implemented at other clients. Just snippets. But additional bits they had not seen yet.
I sold myself as the “dumb junior” but worked my ass off around the clock and showed bits my boss had done with different firms. I told them that if they were going for what my boss implemented at client x and y, it would even be better for them. The client was sold. Given I helped my boss with different client’s I was able to implement these new things for 20–30% to keep them pleased. It was cut and paste work for me. Easy peasy.
The client was exhilarated. They sent an email to my boss and his boss. Ross was amazing. Can’t wait for (ross his boss) to come and we will expand the contract.
I came back and they got beaten on their own game. They were shocked. My boss his line manager sent him to Sweden.
My boss took me out for dinner. He told me he saw a copy of himself when he was younger. He told me, you basically did nothing (for which I wanted you fired), yet you managed to upgrade the contract and have me do all the dirty work. That was the beginning of a long friendship.
As a house cleaner, what mess made you want to leave as soon as you opened the house door?
I wasn’t a cleaner. I was a repo man. I worked that summer for a company that rented household goods. Washers, dryers, couches, TV’s and… VCR’s.
Lady bought a VCR. Said it stopped working. They sent me to get it as one stop on my day schedule. Lady said she was at work, door’s open, just go on in. Boss okayed it.
Took two of us about a half hour to get it.
About 50 cats in the house. No litter boxes. Roaches crawling on the floors, walls and ceiling. Not one or two. Floor was slick with shit. Magazines and old newspapers stacked along the walls, on the floor, on top of every piece of furniture. Like towers of them. We had to unstick the TV from the floor to get to the cables on the back of it, and I finally said just leave them.
Why it took so long was we both had to do relay holding our breath. Dash in, start working on a cable, when out of breath, run back out. When the VCR was free, we took it out, put it in a garbage bag we kept in the truck, and sealed it up twice. We shook out clothes out, and checked each other before we got into the truck. It was the single nastiest house I have ever encountered, ever. Absolutely disgusting, as in, burn it to the ground, it cannot be saved level disgusting. Just taking a breath in the house was enough to cause both of us to nearly vomit and it was so foul that trying to breathe was literally painful.
And do you know what the biggest insult was?
She was the head waitress at a local restaurant.
Have you ever met a dangerous person and not known it at the time?
I was working at a little local shop while in college. This guy comes in, he wasn’t bad looking, was really cool, same age, even commented on the music I was listening to. He would come in for this and that every so often. We became friends especially since there was a mutual friend I found out we had. Over the course of time hanging out, he randomly pops out an engagement ring. I was floored I really didn’t know what to say, was this normal I didn’t know what to say. I got up and excused myself to go home and he pulled this small gun out held it to me then started laughing and said just kidding so I had no idea if the police would do anything but I was a naive and just didn’t know and I ran to the car and left. Keep in mind this time period was slow over the course of a year. Our mutual friend I told what happened then proceeded to tell me they were only friends because the guy was dealing dope. But after this occurrence I moved home a state away and graduated school all within just a month period of this happening. Never heard from the guy again and then out of nowhere he finds me, he cons a friend in getting my new number which changed because of him, he hunted me down, would show up and know where I lived, even had flowers sent to me saying he was going to kill me and I’m shocked the flower place never called the police and just sent, when I asked about it they said it just prints. I went out with some friends and he shows up and literally pulls next to me and shows me his guns then drives off. I call the police and since I didn’t know where he was staying or his tag number that I would have to waste my resources and go to his home state to file an order of protection. The guy would show up at my work, I’d call the police and they just kept telling me to compile evidence because they could do nothing, I had to handle torture because the police would not help. In the end I was finally able to get an order of protection because someone else reported him and he got my number somehow in prison causing threats again and the court said if I decided to proceed with the violation of protection that it could disrupt their federal case (he was traveling several states with guns and fake names). So I was pushed in the corner again by the police and courts and put fear in me that he could get released. They recorded his phone calls from prison and got him on much more charges, he was never jailed due to my charges and with his first arrest the officers gave him his gun back when he was released from jail prior and the courts said it was a mistake on their part. I was even escorted and parked at other building so that I didn’t get hurt possibly on my way in. I never testified with his other charges on with the order of protection. During all this the guy told me over and over I wasn’t the only one. When he was finally caught on something else the police surrounded the hotel he was living in with a prostitute doing drugs, the cops accidentally busted the door of the neighboring room by mistake but got the guy. He’s still in prison. It took police 4 years to finally help me, and at that point I couldn’t take the flower company to court over the note saying I was going to die because there was a 3 yr statute of limitations. In the end it was a security guard who helped me and got the police really involved, he even helped set up meetings, to this day we are friends, I could have died. I’m truly shocked i was never raped. Apparently he saw me at a gas station with a tshirt of where I worked and he said he was in the stall across from me and knew I was going to be the next one. This was 15+ years ago.
Harley Davidson & The Marlboro Man – Convenience Store Robbery
What happened in a tent while you were camping that you will never forget?
My wife and I were travelling cross-country, the first long trip without our kids, now grown, that we’d had since before they were born. We planned to camp in national parks along the way.
So there we were, in the Grand Canyon National Park. Beautiful day in June. We’d cooked dinner over the campfire. At the amphitheater welistened to a ranger tell Native American stories under the stars, then bought some beer from the park store. We returned to our campsite. The stars, the smell of the campfire and the pine trees, this really was the most wonderful place in the world.
My wife was urging me to go inside the tent. We started kissing and undressing and I remembered I’d bought beer. I had left it in the car. “Well go get it,” she said, “I’ll wait.” By this time I was completely naked so I reached for my jeans. She said, “Just go, it’s dark, no one will see you.” So I grabbed my keys, slipped on my shoes, poked my head out of the tent, and seeing no one, ran for the car. I opened up the trunk, grabbed the beer and a bottle opener, and turned around, just in time to get caught in the headlights of a car coming around the bend. I was frozen like a deer in the, well, the headlights.
The guy who was driving the car gave me a friendly wave and from the car I heard kids giggling. But that was nothing compared to the hysterical laughter of my wife who had watched the whole thing from the tent. She has teased me about my streaking act at the Grand Canyon ever since.
What’s the most savage way you’ve seen someone get fired?
Oh man do I have a story for you. I didn’t see it, but I heard it from multiple people, including the man himself.
Once upon a time, I was a recruiter in the barcode and data collection industry. Honeywell was a company we recruited out of all of the time. Out of nowhere we heard that Honeywell was losing employees like crazy. I’m talking sailors jumping off a sinking ship. They weren’t being laid off, they were leaving the company in droves.
Apparently, there was a man, let’s call him Mr. Wilson, who was a salesman for Honeywell. Mr. Wilson had a customer come up to him and say, “hey, I have a couple of warehouses. I need barcode scanners and printers for inventory. Give me all you got.” It was a little known company at the time called Amazon. Mr. Wilson delivered the goods, and the next year Amazon began to grow. More warehouses, more inventory, don’t worry, we got a guy at Honeywell who is our sales rep and he treats us wonderfully! We’ll give him a call and he can help get the warehouses setup.
Fast forward a few years, Mr. Wilson is doing SO well selling to this customer, Honeywell rewards him by making him the sole man over the Amazon account at Honeywell. The orders for Honeywell products are so large at this point that it’s over a billion dollars a year. Mr. Wilson can’t do that himself so he’s given a staff of 200 plus employees just to satisfy Amazon’s needs for Honeywell scanners.
Fast forward to 2022. Honeywell has a new president. This president thinks he knows everything, and likes to feel important. So he starts butting into Mr. Wilson’s dealings with Amazon; negotiating things, talking to the reps at Amazon, over promising and under delivering to Amazon with unrealistic deadlines for Honeywell products to be delivered, etc. Mr. Wilson boldly told the president of the company, and the VP and new CEO more than once, that he was rewarded this account, and he knows what he’s doing, and that them over promising and under delivering was going to kill their relationship with Amazon. And he alone has the rapport with Amazon, and the president is ruining the credibility of Honeywell by lying to their client about how much they can sell and deliver to Amazon. You can imagine how well that went. They told him to go piss up a rope. He’s an employee, they are the big shots, and they can do whatever the hell they want and if he don’t like it he can go work somewhere else.
Fast forward a little further. The president over promised and under delivered again. They couldn’t get the thousands of scanners in the deadline the president promised, which he had no business doing anyway as Mr. Wilson had his boots on the ground and had it covered. Honeywell screwed Amazon. So Amazon switched to another company for their inventory needs and dropped Honeywell like a brick. Did the president take responsibility? Nope.
Fast forward a couple weeks later. Honeywell is having a big corporate party to award their top performers. Wine and food, giving out Rolex watches and other expensive gifts for exceeding sales goals, the works. The President of Honeywell gets up and gives a speech recognizing Mr. Wilson’s accomplishments over 15 years of service at Honeywell. He brags on him for his hard work and dedication, and gives him his award for millions of dollars in Honeywell equipment sold that year. The place applauds. Mr. Wilson is a well known overachiever in the company and is loved by many there. He accepts his award at the podium.
Then, in front of EVERYONE, the President says, “oh, and one more thing Mr. Wilson. For losing the Amazon account, you’re fired.” In. Front. Of. Everyone. The place is STUNNED. Mr. Wilson is then escorted from the premises by security in front of God and everyone attending. His staff was liquidated as well. All 200 some employees in one swoop. All at a celebration for salespeople who did their job above and beyond.
This humiliating, cold hearted, vengeful, extremely heavy handed authority and show of massive ego set off a big chain reaction. People that were there realized then that the company was in trouble with their leadership and that the time had come to look for another job. And I mean now. Folks who were there began the job search in private the next day. The news of what happened spread like a prairie fire, and soon others began putting their resumes on LinkedIn. It became industry known and Honeywell took a serious hit to their reputation. We helped lots of employees find work elsewhere after that little fiasco.
I eventually heard this story so much from employees, one suggested that I get ahold of Mr. Wilson myself whom this fella was a friend of. He was out of work, he’d be the one needing a job more than anyone. So he gave me Mr. Wilson’s number and I gave him a call. Lo and behold it was 100% true. He saved most of his money from his career and was sitting on several million dollars through selling to Amazon so he wasn’t hurting financially. He was effectively retired at age 52. But he was so disheartened and bitter about how he was treated he was over the thought of ever working again as a salesman. However he did send me his resume and told me if I ever came across an exciting project that needed a leader to give him a call.
I never was able to find that exciting project for Mr. Wilson but I kept his resume on my windowsill by my desk until I left that job, mainly as a reminder that no matter how good of an employee you are or how much money you make, a bad boss can ruin everything. And that’s exactly why I left my short lived job as a recruiter and became self-employed again. But that’s another story for another time.
Denmark’s Government Is Begging Men To Have “Relations” With Their Women
WTF?
Are there any lies that your parents told you as a kid that you believed for longer than you’d like to admit?
“Stick out your chest, men like little titties”
“Men like when you don’t shave your armpits or have a moustache. It reminds them of a labia”
“That little girl had no right running around in her panties trying to turn on your uncle, her mom is partly to blame”
“You need to ask god why you still want to sit on my lap when you’re getting so big. It’s nasty. Do you know what a lesbian is? God doesn’t like lesbians”
“In this world everyone is a snake in the grass, you can’t trust women you have to sleep your way to the top”
“You never talk about things to anyone. Anything that anyone asks you is because they want information on how to destroy you”
“No. You can’t be that when you grow up, it’s too much competition. Just go to a trade school maybe you can marry your boss”
“Don’t press the answering machine button, you’re going to break the motor”!
“I’m not a racist. I just believe god made some races inferior, so we shouldn’t mix, or have them in our homes”
“They started this socialism takeover with Sesame Street to teach our kids to love the blacks”
“If you don’t marry this boy and have this baby, god is going to punish you, and me, and this entire family”
“The aliens know I have a photo of the cloud covered ships. They were flashing lights to lure me into the mountains. I lost time at the library. I may have an implant. I can’t come over, I can’t risk them finding you, or using the kids to get to me. They KNOW Becky. They Know”
“Don’t think. Just do.” – Top Gun: Maverick
When did you realize something was a blessing in disguise?
When I lost my job in Las Vegas.
About six years ago, I had lost my job and was looking for a job. I applied for every job I was qualified to get, and couldn’t get anything.
I was running out of money and had to do something, so I decided I had to leave the state if I was going to have any hope of making it financially. So I reluctantly started working with a recruiter and applying to jobs in the Western US.
Not too long after that, the recruiter called me and told me there was a company in Houston that wanted to talk to me. They had an opening in Austin. Well, I thought, maybe that’s not so bad. Texas, like Nevada, didn’t have an income tax so I thought I could probably swing a mortgage and an apartment.
I interviewed with the company, and they liked me. A day or so later, the recruiter called me and said they wanted to hire me…but for a position in Oakland, CA.
Oh, no. I did NOT want to go there. The cost of living out there just scared me. I told the recruiter that I didn’t think I could swing the cost of living there, and what about that job in Austin? I wanted to go there. He told me that this was where they wanted me to go. Austin was off the table. Well, being broke, I was in no position to say no, so I said yes, I’ll take it. I moved to Houston for four months to train, and then they sent me out to Oakland.
It turned out to be a blessing to move out here for two reasons:
I was able to over the next few years to establish myself in a new career direction: renewable energy projects. California is ground zero for such projects, and it turns out my skill set and experience is a desirable thing to have. I never would have been able to make this change had I stayed in Las Vegas.
I had started serious voice lessons in Las Vegas about a year before I moved. By the time I moved here, I had been taking lessons just long enough to know I had some ability. I wanted to continue studying voice, and found a teacher out here who not only picked up where I left off but also helped me get started in the theater community out here. I have now done several musicals and plays here, and am going to sing in an opera next year-things I have wanted to do for years but could not because Las Vegas didn’t have any real opportunities.
The move was a blessing in disguise-something I thought would be an absolute disaster turned out to be a growth period for me personally and professionally.
A curve ball thrown at him…
Bourbon Pecan Roast Chicken
Bourbon Pecan Roast Chicken
Ingredients
1 (3 pound) whole chicken
1/2 lemon
Salt and freshly ground pepper, to taste
3 tablespoons fresh tarragon, chopped, or 1 tablespoon dried tarragon
1 tablespoon fresh rosemary, chopped, or 1 tablespoon dried rosemary
4 whole garlic cloves, peeled
3 small onions, peeled
1/4 teaspoon paprika
1/4 cup broken pecans
1/2 cup bourbon, divided
Instructions
Heat oven to 400 degrees F.
Wash the inside cavity and outside of the chicken and pat dry. Rub the cavity with the cut side of half a lemon and sprinkle it with salt and pepper. Fill cavity with the tarragon, rosemary, garlic cloves, onions and paprika. Truss and tie chicken. Pull up skin from breast, press pecan bits into meat; pull skin back into place. Pour 1/4 cup of the bourbon over chicken and place it on its side in the oven.
Roast for 20 minutes, turn to other side, add remaining bourbon, baste and roast for another 20 minutes.
Turn again, baste and roast for a final 20 minutes. Chicken is done when thigh is pierced and juices run clear.
Have you, while repairing a computer, ever found anything that made your jaw drop?
Well not me, but on one afternoon at work, my PC started printing a continuous series of lower case f all over the screen. I switched off and on but the ‘f’s came back as before. So I called IT.
The fellow turned up, stroked his chin for a while whist observing the stream of ‘f’s rolling up the screen and opened his case of tools and removed a pair of tweezers.
Carefully deploying this tool he delicately removed a piece of cheese which had been holding down the letter ‘f’ on the keyboard. “Lunch at work?” he asked. Indeed. And it had included a cheese sandwich!
The following morning when I came in and switched it on, a large flashing ‘WARNING!’ screen appeared, followed a few second later by a notice reading “To avoid continuous ‘f’s, do not eat cheese sandwiches at this computer!” It vanished when I touched a key, but reappeared every time I switched the machine on until it got upgraded. An embarrassing reminder of what a silly bugger I’d been.
” YOUNG WHITE MEN FAILING And Woman Finally NOTICING. Is It Too Late? ” | The Coffee Pod
When I was between the ages of 12 and 14 or maybe 15 … right before I started working, I was on the “golf team” at school. We would get to leave school early, and drive out to the local Golf Club and play for free.
Then, various parents would pick us up and take us home afterwards.
Boys being boys, and kids being kids, had “clicks” and groups of friends. And when we would “tee off” one group would play after the other, and the groups were four kids.
But we had nine kids in the club.
What the coach should have done was…
3 + 3 + 3
3 groups. Everyone played in a group.
But No. The “coach” left us alone and went to the clubhouse to grab a beer and play some poker with “his” friends.
So we self organized.
Yeah. And you can guess what happened.
Two “clicks” of friends. One outsider.
3 groups.
4 + 4 + 1
Dumb fuck golf coach.
…
Guess who usually had to play alone?
Yup. I was the last kid, and I was the one playing alone.
I trailed behind the two other groups. Alone. Waiting until they finished playing before I could tee off. Which was something like ten to fifteen minutes.
Nine holes.
Nine times.
And often, I would finish the last round and walk to the parking lot to find my dad waiting for me with a car-load of the other kids waiting for me. Yupur. They were all in the car.
And all he could say was… “What took YOU so long?”
Which, of course, the other kids asked as well.
“Yeah, XXXXX, what too YOU so long?” And they would giggle.
I never said anything.
…
Dumb fuck. The other two groups played before me. I had to wait until they were all done before I could tee off.
The first group would be in the car, then the second group would pile in.
Meanwhile, I’m the last guy out, getting ready to tee off.
Fucking shits.
…
Fuck the “golf coach”.
Fuck my classmates.
Fuck my dad.
And FUCK ME for taking it. 14 years old. I should have known better.
…
So this is how I spent my entire time on the Golf Team. Mostly, but not always, playing alone.
Sometimes, I would get to play with one or two boys.
But mostly, I trailed behind. Spending the afternoon playing ALONE.
…
My stupid-as-a-rock father didn’t notice that I spent the afternoon shunned, and playing alone.
And, don’t you know it, he was giving the kids a ride and allowing them to make fun of me. A double whammy insult.
…
So one day, I was feeling bad. I was lonely. And I was again the last guy. Playing alone.
And the entire time I just fumed about the entire piss-poor situation.
I fumed, and fumed and fumed.
And, somewhere around the sixth hole, I said “fuck this!”.
…
So that day, I skipped the eighth and ninth holes, cut through the wood line, and went directly to the parking lot. My dad was there as always.
He looked up and said” Wow, you are early today.”.
I didn’t say anything.
I just threw my clubs in the car, and told my father to go. To leave. To just get going. He’s looking at me like..
Then he asked…”what about the other kids”.
I yelled; “Drive! Go! Go! Go! Don’t get those kids. Leave now!”
He looked at me like the dumb-fuck he was. The face of incomprehension.
And then he fired up the car.
And I was surprised that he actually drove off.
We left the gravel parking lot, in a wide turn.
The first group of kids were just then reaching the parking lot.
He did it slowly, looking at me; fully expecting me to ask him to stop. But I must have had a real pissed off expression on my face. So he kept on driving.
And these other kids were looking at us, like “why are you leaving without us.?”
…
So he, of course, asked.
“What is going on?”
…
On the way home I told him why.
The kids never played with me.
I always played alone.
…
They were using me to get a ride, and that was all.
That they did not like me, and I was sick and tired of being shunned. If they didn’t want to play golf with me, then they won’t get a ride with me either.
…
Dad had nothing to say.
So we drove in silence.
He then, after about ten minutes of silence, asked me sheepishly if I still wanted to be “on the team”, and I said “no”.
…
Fuck them all. And that is my story for today.
Sometimes we HAVE to tell the rest of the world to FUCK OFF.
Shortly after that, I quit the team, and started to work in the coal mines.
And that was another adventure. Today…
Have you ever seen someone park in a handicap spot who wasn’t disabled and get ticketed by the cops?
I was the cop. I was an officer at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. I kept seeing a young lady parking a car in a handicapped spot and scurrying inside before I could reach her. I ran the plate and found the vehicle was registered to her father. I ran the placard hanging on the rearview mirror. It was also registered to him as well. NC law states the placard is registered to an individual, not the car, and only the registered user can use it when in the vehicle. One day, I finally caught her getting out of the car. I stopped her and explained she would have to move the vehicle, and of course, I got the usual, “Do you know who owns the car?” I responded and told her what the citation would say word for word. She still refused to move the vehicle. I requested her driver’s license and registration. When she refused, I put her in cuffs and placed her in the back of my car. I told her she would be charged with resisting, obstructing, and delaying an officer and the parking violation, and I was towing her car. It finally hit her: I was a police officer and didn’t care who her father was. She immediately agreed to move the vehicle and surrender the placard. I wanted this from the get-go, so I seized the placard and cited her for the parking violation.
I had a sinking feeling this wouldn’t be the end, so I wrote a report and placed the placard into evidence. I sent a copy of the report to the NCDMV in Fayetteville, NC, then called the inspector there and told him he may or may not hear about this later. Not thirty minutes after hanging up with the DMV inspector, I got a call from communications to return to the station. I walk in, and who do I see but my Asst. Chief and the young lady. She has this grin and wears it up to the assistant—Chief’s office. The Chief went through the everyday complaint speech, and I elected to have the young lady tell her story first. She attempted to say I was disrespectful, yelled and threatened her, and stole property belonging to the state. After all her whining and moaning, I walked over to the Asst. Chief’s computer pulled up the report and the video attachment of the traffic stop (I always recorded my stops even before it was mandatory). I said nothing but let the report and video tell the story. She left near tears, swearing, “We” hadn’t heard the last of this. I remember turning to the Asst. Chief and saying something like, “I don’t doubt it.”
The next day, a young lady in a wheelchair entered the lobby and requested to speak to the Chief. The Chief was busy, so my Asst. Chief took the visit. The young lady wanted to thank the officer who made a non-handicapped girl move from the handicapped parking spot to her dorm.
I did hear from the father a couple of days later. He called from the Fayetteville DMV office, stating he was filing a report for a stolen handicapped placard. The inspector got the case and connected him with me. I explained the situation and what happened. I offered to send him a copy of the report and the traffic stop video. After all was said and done, he decided he didn’t want to file a report with DMV and ended up apologizing for his daughter’s behavior. I explained he wasn’t responsible for his daughter’s poor decisions, and hopefully, she learned a lesson.
What is the funniest joke you’ve been told that you still think about to this day?
So, this completely drunk guy walks into a bar, sits down at the end and orders a beer. He’s obnoxious but not bad enough to get booted out. After a while he notices a dart board at the other end of the bar and asks the bartender “hey, barkeep what will you give me if I can hit a bullseye with one dart from over here? “
“You can’t.”
“Ya, but what if I do?”
“Don’t worry, I have a special prize.”
And the drunk grabs a dart, chucks it in the general direction of the dart board and to everyone’s amazement nails a bullseye.
“Well, what’s my prize?” the guy asks.
Well, the bartender has nothing and is calmly scrambling around, trying to think of something to give the guy, when he remembers a turtle he’s got in a brown bag that he was going to give to his nephew for his birthday after work.
So, he grabs the bag and plops it down in front of the drunk…who doesn’t even look in it. He just picks it up, says “Hey, thanks Boss” and walks out.
A couple weeks later, the drunk shows up again, sits on the same barstool and chats people up while putting down a couple more beers. After a while he once again asks “Hey, bartender… what’ll you give me if I throw a bullseye with one dart on that board over there?”
Knowing there’s no way in hell the drunk is going to repeat his last lucky shot the bartender says, ” I gotcha covered”
The drunk picks up a dart and once again with reckless abandon throws it in the general direction the dart board. And nails another bullseye.
Before the bartender can say anything the drunk guy says “And no food this time. That burger you gave me last time was the worst I’ve ever had.”
Proof of Reincarnation
What did the teacher in your high school get fired for?
This occurred in Mississauga, just outside of Toronto. Didn’t get fired, but worse! My high school science teacher was an okay guy, everyone liked him and he did some interesting things in his classroom.
One time he performed open heart surgery on a live chicken to demonstrate biology. The chicken died from the ether.
I graduated from high school and about two years later I see my science teacher on the front page of the Toronto Sun. This guy was a total fraud! He was arrested for impersonating a doctor and was operating his own medical clinic in Brampton based on fraudulent documents. Even his teaching degree was a fake – he wasn’t even a licensed teacher.
And the most impressive con? He was also impersonating a golf pro! He was a good golfer and he used to show us pictures of him with pro golfers like Jack Nicholas (this was late 70’s). He was found guilty, did some time, and was deported back to the US.
My theory is that he was a failed medical student but great forger and knew enough to fake his way as a biology teacher and doctor. Same for the golf, pretty good, but not quite good enough!
Us Literally Freaking Out As Brics Takes A Huge Step To Dethrone The Dollar.
Japan in 2024 has lost the ability to even buy orange juice and has started making "orange-mandarin mixed juice" with tears in its eyes.
Women have gone abroad to prostitute themselves so much that they have been refused entry into the United States, and even started going to South Korea, which was much poorer not so long ago, to work as prostitutes.
The former trading and exporting powerhouse has been sitting cross-legged for a long time now, with a trade deficit of trillions of yen and nothing to export, and in the tourism industry it is desperately bowing down not only to Westerners but also to people in Southeast Asia, India, and even countries whose names we do not know. Earn foreign currency.
Even though Japan is a country with extremely low wages, we subsidize hundreds of billions of yen to foreign companies to build factories in the country, yet young people still go abroad to work.
The top ranks of universities have all been uprooted by foreign capital, and graduates from prestigious schools such as Tokyo University, Kyoto University, and former Imperial Waseda University are pursuing empty careers in consulting rather than manufacturing, with no hope of earning foreign currency.
The top ranks of society are fleeing to the United States one after another, and those who escape never return.
In urban areas, Japanese people pay monthly rent for apartments to Chinese owners, and while Japanese people complain that they can't buy real estate because it's too expensive, Chinese people buy apartments with cash because they're cheap.
The prices of imported building materials have skyrocketed, making it difficult to even buy a house, but it's okay! The president's house is grateful for its good cost performance, and the company's profits are at an all-time high.The sales of a small-scale real estate agency that has been selling on the street in front of the station, appealing to people in their early 30s, and raising the slogan, ``Let's go, 1 trillion,'' has finally increased. Over 1 trillion.
Even though the US dollar price of the iPhone has not increased, there is a lot of fuss in Japan saying, ``It's gotten more expensive again!'' Foreign companies are in control of almost all mobile communication methods, including smartphones and LINE.
IOWN is amazing because they are desperately trying to hide the fact that they have not achieved Industry 4.0 or even the third industrial revolution by chanting a fluffy and mysterious fantasy and delusion called Society 5.0, and neither the government nor the private sector has any IT technology to sell anymore. They are desperately trying to promote something that they don't really understand and are trying to show off that they are doing a good job.
In the past, the country used to have empty discussions such as, ``If we don't have enough labor, we should bring in immigrants,'' or ``It's better not to bring in immigrants.'' The wages are higher in the department,'' so they have no choice but to deceive the Vietnamese and create a system of slavery to secure labor.
The medical infrastructure that was said to be one of the best in the world has been eaten up by the elderly, and as a result of exploiting the working generation and finally reaching the limit of what they can pay, Japan has forced its drug prices down, and now Japan is saying, ``I won't sell it to Japan at such a low price.'' There are countless drugs made overseas that cannot be used.
Young people who could be saved by a new drug cannot be helped, and even today, old people happily gather at the hospital to receive compresses, administer drugs that delay dementia by 20-30% at a cost of 3 million yen per person, and patients in their 80s are in bed. There is an old man in his 90s who is bedridden and trying to prolong his life, and his single son in his 60s who is earning his pension sometimes comes to visit him.
All of this is borne by the young working generation, who have no money and the marriage rate has hit a record low, while at the same time the number of births has hit a postwar low.
The currency that people around the world once coveted, the yen, is no longer known as the "emergency yen" and is being sold off on a daily basis.
Now, as one of the currencies of emerging countries in the Far East, it is experiencing wild price fluctuations, and although it has managed to hold on by selling off foreign currency hoarded during its past glory days, it is unclear how long it will last.
The country and its people have postponed structural reforms, neglected technological development, and simply postponed everything, mistakenly believing that monetary and fiscal policies would somehow solve the problem.
Forgetting the bloody efforts of the wise men of the past and the history of drastic changes caused by civilization and enlightenment, the old men of companies and organizations that were only steeped in old interests, which flourished in the Showa era, are wielding power and introducing new technologies and ways of thinking. Even if they were crushed, the people in question would be dead by then and have escaped.
The young people who were forced to carry a time bomb in the bellies of boiled frogs realized that one day, when foreign currency runs out, they will not be able to buy everything, including beef, flour, soybeans, oil, gas, and uranium, resulting in a devastated society. Even though I'm vaguely anticipating the future, I just turn my eyes away from the reality and drink tangerine juice today while the daddy girl is being asked about the color of her pants by an uncle.
US approach to decouple from China is backfiring
On May 3, the US Treasury announced relaxed conditions for tax incentives when consumers purchase electric vehicles (EVs). Previously, EVs using Chinese-produced minerals were set to lose tax incentives starting in 2025. The new adjustment extends this deadline to 2027 for certain minerals like graphite.
According to an analysis by Nikkei News, the US government’s decision to relax these conditions stems from the difficulty of producing EV batteries without using Chinese-produced graphite. Graphite is a core material in lithium battery anodes, and currently China accounts for 70 percent of its supply worldwide, with a high dependency on Chinese processing and refining capabilities.
As the US grapples with the complexities of its containment and decoupling from Chinese manufacturing, it’s increasingly feeling the “pain.” Over the past three years, the US government has implemented strict export controls to weaken China’s high-tech capability.
However, this approach has started negatively impacting the US itself, creating a complex double-edged effect.
A report released last month by the New York Federal Reserve Bank (Geopolitical Risk and Decoupling: Evidence from US Export Controls) analyzed this issue. According to the research by Matteo Crosignani and others, US export controls led to widespread decoupling between American suppliers and Chinese companies. Affected American suppliers are more likely to terminate existing relationships with Chinese clients and less likely to form new ones.
With the decoupling, numerous American suppliers impacted are unable to form new supply chain connections with clients in the US or allied nations within three years of the export controls being enforced.
The imposition of export controls has resulted in substantial losses for affected American suppliers, leading to heightened negative loan default risks, with an average market value decline of $857 million per impacted supplier, summing up to $130 billion collectively across all suppliers.
These suppliers are also encountering reductions in revenue, profitability and workforce. Bank loans to these suppliers have notably dwindled, signaling wider financial limitations.
From the perspective of Chinese companies, the report reveals their resilience. Targeted Chinese enterprises have increased their reliance on domestic and non-US suppliers to cope with US export controls. They have established new relationships with alternative suppliers within China and strengthened cooperation with existing non-US suppliers to mitigate the impact of the controls. Moreover, US export controls may unintentionally promote domestic innovation in China as businesses are forced to reduce their dependence on American technology.
Washington has implemented decoupling strategies with China, not without anticipating losses on the American side. The approach involves sacrificing short-term economic interests to prompt supply chain shifts and hinder China’s rapid advancement in vital high-tech areas, thereby maintaining America’s continuous advantage in global technology competition. However, the trouble now is that decoupling not only causes more losses for the US but also rebuilding supply chains is not an easy task, and some may be impossible.
This is because Chinese manufacturing has achieved large-scale, diversified and multi-tiered system development, with many sectors being irreplaceable, and the aggressive expansion of Chinese manufacturing in the global market is unstoppable, especially in sectors like EVs, renewable energy, shipbuilding, high-speed rail and steel, where it already has the upper hand.
As Chinese enterprises gradually reduce their dependence on American technology and enhance their own innovation capabilities, the influence of US enterprises in the global market may further weaken. The position of Chinese manufacturing in the global supply chain is becoming more solid. Extensive decoupling of US businesses from China could potentially cause irreversible damage to the global industry and supply chains, as well as their own. Washington has already had to start assessing the consequences brought about by this.
Chinese enterprises are also seeking breakthroughs by establishing new supply chains and innovation paths. The friction and conflict between US and Chinese manufacturing will unfold on a broader scale.
The US will not change its policy of containing China in the short term. It will continue to expand the scope of its controls and sanctions, while coordinating with other third parties to curb Chinese enterprises’ access to international markets and find new ways of international cooperation.
This strategic game will have complex impacts on the economies of both sides, including adjustments to their own economic structures and profound effects on global political, economic and security fields. Change has already begun.
“America Is Getting WIPED OUT” — This Is What’s Coming… | Robert Kiyosaki 2024
Biden’s Foreign Policy Has the US in Deep Trouble
There are two problems in the United States these days and they are closely related.
The first problem is that the Biden Administration is in deep trouble on the foreign policy front and the trouble is almost certainly going to get worse. The Ukraine war is going badly for both Ukraine and the West, but U.S. leaders show no signs of wanting to negotiate a settlement and, instead, seem committed to making this a forever conflict. Gaza is another horror show. It simply has no solution since Israel has no intention of allowing the Palestinians to have a sovereign state of their own. To make matters worse, the United States is complicit in Israel’s murderous policies in Gaza. This conflict is now causing huge trouble on campuses around the country, which is making America’s poisonous politics even worse. Moreover, there are real dangers in East Asia, where there is an ever-present possibility that China and the United States could get into a shooting match. And there are further armed conflicts taking place in Africa and other regions of the world. Something is badly wrong with U.S. foreign policy.
The second problem is that there is significant agreement inside the American foreign policy establishment on most foreign policy issues, and those consensus views are reflected in the discourse in the mainstream media. It is very difficult for the many individuals who challenge the establishment’s prevailing wisdoms to make their case in elite media outlets. This disturbing situation explains in good part why America’s political leaders will not change course and adopt smarter policies.
What we need in the United States is an open discourse about the ongoing wars as well as potential wars. Why? Because unfettered debate maximizes the chance of coming up with smart strategies for either ending wars or preventing them. The key to success in this regard is to have well-informed individuals with different perspectives engaging with each other in the marketplace of ideas. We need free-wheeling debates that include unpopular views.
Sadly, there is little chance of reforming the mainstream media anytime soon. But thankfully, alternative media outlets have proliferated in recent years, making it possible for critics of U.S. foreign policy to make their voices heard.
Antiwar.com is one of our most important alternative platforms on the planet. It is an ideal place to find first-rate analysis that challenges today’s foreign policy orthodoxies. I visit Antiwar.com every day and am invariably rewarded for doing so. Surely, many of you who are reading this appeal also benefit in all sorts of ways from reading pieces published on this vital platform.
All this means that we readers have a responsibility to help maintain a flourishing Antiwar.com. In that spirit, I urge you to join me in making a generous contribution so that we can collectively increase the chances that the United States will begin acting in much smarter ways on the world stage.
John Mearsheimer is the Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and one of the leading foreign policy scholars in America.
What did someone do or say at the bank that made you say, “You gotta be kidding me!”?
We sold our house and we had to fill out paperwork saying how we wanted the money paid out across the loans we had with that bank.
We stated
home loan in full.
credit card to be paid out.
whatever money left over paid towards personal loan
What the bank chose to do
home loan in full
personal loan paid out I rang and asked what was going on as that’s not what we asked to happen. I was told ‘we assumed you filled the forms out incorrectly and that you would prefer the loans to be paid out’.
Told them no I wanted the home loan gone and then the credit card as it had the higher interest to which they responded with ‘oh well we’re sorry but it’s to late now as personal loans won’t do anything about it’.
The lady was very surprised when I didn’t take that as a final decision and told them exactly what I thought of their ‘we assumed’.
The only reason the bank decided that was what was happening is because the credit card had a higher rate of interest with no free interest period and if they didn’t pay it off we would of course keep using it and that would benefit them more.
The banks decision when I wouldn’t back down
my credit card was to be charged at the personal loan rate for the next 6 months(time left on personal loan). This rate was of course only for the amount that should have been paid out. Anything purchased after that on it would be at full rates.
our decision we took the interest rate cut told them that would be fine and then destroyed both credit cards so they couldn’t be used at all. In the end we cut expenses as much as possible and paid it off in 4 months.
As I told them ‘What’s the point of having people fill out paperwork if you’re not gonna pay attention to it’.
The final result was that when we built our new home we checked out loan deals at lots of banks but never even enquired with our original bank they had stuffed us around on a number of other occasions and we had had enough but that’s another story.
HOLLYWOOD is DEAD and GOLLUM MOVIE PROVES IT
Bacon-Wrapped Turkey with Chipotle and Orange
Want to knock their socks off? Make this bacon-wrapped turkey with a zesty chipotle-orange rub.
bacon wrapped turkey chipotle orange
Prep: 30 min | Total: 4 hr 30 min | Yield: 24 servings
Ingredients
1/2 cup Kraft Zesty Italian Dressing
1/2 cup orange juice
1/4 cup Kraft Original Barbecue Sauce
4 canned chipotle peppers in adobo sauce
1 (13 pound) fresh or thawed frozen turkey
1 orange, cut into wedges
5 bay leaves
1 (16 ounce) package Oscar Mayer Bacon
1 tablespoon cornstarch
1 tablespoon water
Instructions
Heat oven to 325 degrees F.
Blend first 4 ingredients in blender until smooth.
Remove and discard neck and giblets from turkey cavities. Free legs from tucked position. (Do not cut band of skin.) Place oranges and bay leaves in chest cavity. Use rubber spatula or your fingers to loosen skin over breast, starting at body cavity opening by legs. Rub half the chipotle mixture onto meat under skin on breast, legs and thighs. If necessary, use wooden toothpicks to secure skin at opening. Return legs to tucked position and tie securely with string; turn wings back to hold neck skin in place. Rub remaining chipotle mixture evenly onto turkey skin.
Place turkey, breast side up, on flat rack in roasting pan. Top with bacon*. Tent turkey with foil.
Bake for 4 hours or until turkey is done (165 degrees F), uncovering after 3 hours. Remove turkey from pan; tent with foil. Let stand 15 minutes before carving. Meanwhile, pour pan drippings into medium saucepan. Discard excess fat. Mix cornstarch and water until blended; gradually stir into drippings. Bring to boil, stirring constantly.
Carve turkey. Serve with gravy.
Notes
How to make a lattice design (weave bacon): Place 5 bacon slices in single layer on sheet of parchment or waxed paper. Weave 5 of the remaining bacon slices through bacon slices on parchment to resemble lattice pattern. Hold 2 opposite corners of parchment, then quickly invert parchment onto turkey; remove parchment. Arrange remaining bacon slices over turkey’s legs, thighs and wings.
Food Facts: A 12 to 14 pound frozen turkey needs 3 to 3 1/2 days of thawing time in the refrigerator. The cooking time will range between 3 to 3 3/4 hours until the turkey is done (165 degrees F).
Nutrition
Per serving: Calories 270 Total fat 12g Saturated fat 3.5g Cholesterol 135mg Sodium 450mg Carbohydrate 3g Dietary fiber 0g Sugars 2g Protein 35g
Vitamin A 2% DV Vitamin C 0% DV Calcium 0% DV Iron 8% DV
Interesting
What are some examples of assassination attempts gone wrong?
İlkay Sivaslı was a 41 years old teacher who had been feeling suicidal after breaking up with her married lover.
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She hired a hitman, Tanju Doğan, to kill her because she can’t bring herself to commit suicide. Things took an interesting turn when the hitman fell in love with her instead.
So for a month, she had to pursue him to finish off what he’s paid to do while he took his time to talk her out of it. One time he tried to strangle her but couldn’t do it when she started turning red.
But she texted him the next day asking him to come over as she had purchased a gun for him to kill her. He tried one last time for her to change her mind but eventually did it by putting a pillow over her face and pulling the trigger twice.
Miraculously she didn’t die immediately so Tanju called the emergency line for her and fled her house. Initially, police thought it was a murder case until they obtained the record for their texts and realised that the teacher had paid him to assist in her killing.
Welp, that’s the story of a woman who pays someone a lot of money to be killed but ended up being persuaded not to instead by the hitman himself. Unfortunately, she died while paramedics were trying to save her when they got to her house.
This is in China. First day at school.
What is the most disrespectful thing someone has done while you were shopping?
It was Black Friday at about six in the morning.
In the aisle was a display for two sets of toys. One was a Noah’s Ark with all the animals and Noah and his family. The other was Old MacDonald’s Farm.
My son had the Old MacDonald one. He’d gotten it a couple months earlier for his birthday. He wanted the Noah one. The display only had a couple of Noahs, but plenty of Old MacDonalds.
I was standing right by a Noah and waiting for the store employee to cut the banding. Once he did, it was game on.
I grabbed the Noah one. A woman lunged OVER THE TOP of the display and grabbed the same one I did, yelling, “I need this! You can have one of the MacDonald ones!”
She refused to let go. So I did the only thing I could do…I planted my feet and yanked her across. She had no choice, let go or take a faceplant into the floor. She was pissed.
She followed me around cussing me out. I ignored her. But when I went to get a game off the shelf, she lunged at my cart to grab the Noah toy. I slammed my hand down on hers as she grabbed my cart. This got her pinched fingers.
I cut across a line of people waiting to get DVD players to get to the other side. People parted to let me through. When she followed behind me I yelled and pointed to her, “Hey, she’s trying to cut in line!”
They converged on her like lions on a gazelle.
Her screams were most satisfying.
Whenever I’m in a bad mood, I remember that day, and those screams.
Suddenly I’m not in a bad mood anymore.
Pepe Escobar
Pepe Escobar writes about the major takeaways of his recent tour to Brazil.
I have just been immersed in an extraordinary experience: a mini-tour of conferences in Brazil encompassing four key cities – Sao Paulo, Rio, Salvador, Belo Horizonte. Full houses, sharp questions, fabulously warm people, divine gastronomy – a deep dive into the 8th largest economy in the world and major BRICS+ node.
As much as I was trying to impress the finer points of the long and winding road to multipolarity and the multiple instances of frontal clash between NATOstan and the Global Majority, I was learning non-stop from an array of generous Brazilians about the current inner contradictions of a society of astonishing complexity.
It’s as if I was immersed in a psychedelic journey conducted by Os Mutantes, the iconic trio of the late 1960s Tropicalia movement: from the business front in Sao Paulo – with its world-class restaurants and frantic deal-making – to the blinding beauty of Rio; from Salvador – the capital of Brazilian Africa – to Belo Horizonte, the capital of the third-wealthiest state in the Federation, Minas Gerais, a powerhouse of iron ore, uranium and niobium exports.
Chancay-Shanghai
I learned about how China chose the state of Bahia as arguably its key node in Brazil, where Chinese investment is everywhere – even if Brazil is not yet a formal member of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).
In Rio, I was presented with an astonishing work on Stoics Zeno and Cleanthes by essayist Ciro Moroni – delving among other issues into the equivalences between Stoic theogony/theology and the Hindu Vedanta – the tradition of culture, religion and sacred rituals in India up to the Buddha era.
And in a sort of psychedelic synchronicity, I felt like Zeno in the Agora as we debated the NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine at a lovely round pavillion – a mini-Agora – in fabled Liberty Square in Belo Horizonte, across the street from a fabulous exhibition of Treasures of Peruvian Art.
Much to my astonishment, a Peruvian, Carlos Ledesma, flew in from Lima especially for my conference and the exhibition; and then he told me about the Chancay port being built south of Lima, owned 70% by COSCO and the rest by private Peruvian capital; that will be a sister port of Shanghai.
Chancay-Shanghai: APEC in action across the Pacific. Next November, there will be three nearly simultaneous key events in South America: the G20 in Rio, the APEC summit in Lima, and the inauguration of Chancay.
Chancay will be boosted by no less than five rail corridors that may eventually be built – certainly with Chinese investment – from the agribusiness Valhalla in the Brazilian Center-West all the way to Peru.
Yes, China is all over the place in its largest trade partner in Latin America – much to the despair of a Hegemon sending lowly functionary Little Blinken to Beijing to hear the letter of the new law by Xi Jinping himself: it’s cooperation or confrontation, a “downward spiral”. Your downward spiral.
A river from Tibet to Xinjiang
At the Belo Horizonte conference, I shared the stage with remarkable Sebastien Kiwonghi Bizaru from Congo, who supervises PhD programs at the Candido Mendes University as well as being a Professor of International Law, after an extraordinary academic journey.
He is also the author of a ground-breaking book examining the highly debatable role of the UNSC in the conflicts of the Great Lakes – focusing on Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
With top researcher Natacha Rena, we pored over a map of China retracing her travels east to west last year all the way to the Xinjiang border – as she filled me in on the astonishing Honggqi River – or Red Flag River – Project, first proposed in 2017: no less than an attempt to divert water from Tibet to the dry lands and deserts of Xinjiang by building an enormous, over 6,000 km-long artificial river, including the branch canals.
The projected river will be slightly less longer than the Yangtze, diverting 60 billion cubic meters of water a year, more than the annual flow of the Yellow River. Predictably, ecologists in China are attacking the project, which may have already had an official go-ahead and is proceeding discreetly.
And then, as I was on the road between Rio and Minas Gerais, the BRICS 10 Ministers of Economy and heads of Central Banks met in Sao Paulo: and all of them hailed the drive towards “independent” payment settlement mechanisms. Russia is the 2024 president of this crucial group.
Russian Vice-Minister of Finance, Ivan Chebeskov, went straight to the point: “Most countries agree that payment in national currencies is what the BRICS need.” The Russian Ministry of Finance privileges the creation of a common digital platform congregating the BRICS Central Banks’ digital currencies and their national systems of transmitting financial messages.
Crucially, at this BRICS 10 meeting, most members stressed they are in favor of totally bypassing the U.S. dollar for trading.
Russian Minister of Finance Anton Siluanov was even bolder: he said that Russia is proposing to BRICS the creation of an independent and “de-politicized” global system of payments.
Siluanov hinted that the system may be based on blockchain – considering its low cost and minimal control exercised by the Hegemon.
BRICS map the new world in Sao Paulo
A day before the meeting in Sao Paulo, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Moscow supported the development of these BRICS strategies, noting that “if we manage to develop independent financial mechanisms, that will seriously question the globalization mechanism currently led by the West.”
As over 100 nations are currently researching or embryonically implementing a digital currency in their Central Banks, a big breakthrough is imminent in Russia – a process I have been following in detail since last year.
In the end, it’s all about Sovereignty. That was the crux of the most serious debates I had this past week in Brazil, with academic players and on several podcasts related to the conferences. It’s the overarching theme hanging over the Lula government, as the President seems to cast the figure of a lonely fighter cornered by a vicious circle of 5th columnists and comprador elites.
In Belo Horizonte I was presented with yet another astonishing book by a former, brilliant government official, the late Celso Brant. After a sharp analysis of the modern history of Brazil and its interactions with imperialism, he reminds the reader of what stellar Mexican writer and poet Octavio Paz said in the 1980s about Brazil and China: “These will be the two great protagonists of the 21th century.”
When Paz rendered his verdict, every indicator favored Brazil, which since 1870 held the largest GDP growth in the world. Brazil exported more than China, and from 1952 to 1987 was growing at annual rate of 7.4%. Continuing the trend, Brazil would be the 4th largest economy in the world by now (it’s between 8th and 9th, side by side with Italy, and could be the 5th, were not for direct destabilization by the Empire starting in the 2010s, culminating with the Car Wash operation).
That’s exactly what Brant shows: how the Hegemon intervened to crash Brazilian development – and that started way before Car Wash. Kissinger was already saying in the 1970s that “the United States will not allow the birth of a new Japan under the Equator line.”
Hardcore neoliberalism was the privileged tool. While China under Little Helmsman Deng Xiaoping and then Jiang Zemin went Full Sovereign, Brazil was mired in neocolonial dependency. Lula tried – and is now trying it again, against all odds and surrounded on all sides, with Brazil branded as a “swing state” by U.S. Think Tankland and potential victim of new rounds of imperial Hybrid War.
Lula – and some solid academic elites away from power – know full well that as a neo-colony, Brazil will never fulfill its potential of being, side by side with China, as prophesized by Paz, the great protagonist of the 21st century.
That was the major takeaway of my psychedelic tour of Tropicalia: Sovereignty. Viktor Orban – accused by simpletons of being a member of a fuzz “Neofascist International” – nailed it with a simole formulation: “The inglorious period of Western civilization will be brought to an end this year, by replacing the world built on progressive-liberal hegemony with a Sovereigntist one.”
BIDEN TARIFF AGAINST CHINA EV’s and GREEN ENERGY – us auto companies can’t compete…
Ukrainian Losses And The Role An Austrian Archduke Has Had In Them
A recent piece in the New York Times connects us to a name which played a serious role in the last century of Ukrainian ‘nationalism’.
The history of the western Ukrainian region is, like in some other European areas, a quite convoluted drama that still plays out today.
The first reports of war fatigue in the ‘nationalist’ western Ukraine are coming in. Natalia Yermak, a Ukrainian cartoon producer turned New York Times journalist, reports from the Galician area near Lviv:
It was sunset when Maj. Kyrylo Vyshyvany of the Ukrainian army stepped into the yard of his childhood home in Duliby, a village in western Ukraine, just after his younger brother, also a soldier, had been buried. Their mother was still crying in the living room.“I can already see that she’ll be coming to visit him every day,” he said that day. He was right, but he would not be by her side. A few days after the funeral, in March 2022, he was killed in a Russian missile strike on a Ukrainian military base and buried next to his brother, Vasyl.
The Vyshyvany brothers were the first deaths from Duliby and the surrounding community after Russia began its full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022. Since then, 44 more Ukrainian soldiers from the area have been killed — more than four times the local death toll from the previous eight years of fighting Russian-backed separatists in the east.
For Duliby and its surrounding enclave of Khodoriv — total population around 24,000 people — waiting for the next solemn death notification and the funeral that follows has become a bitter routine. But even as the town meets and buries the fallen with modest ceremony, some neighbors are quietly weighing the price they are willing to pay for a war with no end in sight.
Divisions have started to form between residents agnostic about the war — often those whose family members have dodged the draft or fled the country — and those who have loved ones on the front line or who fully support the war effort.
The name Vyshyvany looked quite familiar to me. I’ll come back to it.
The reporter depicts Galicia, the hotbed of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) fascists, as ‘nationalist’:
In the earliest days of the war, before the news of the first combat deaths arrived, people in communities across Ukraine flocked to draft offices. Among them was Khodoriv, whose families have a long history of fighting for Ukraine’s independence and being executed or sent into exile during violent Soviet repressions of its nationalist movement in the last century.
Even in the region with deeply seated Ukrainian nationalism lots of people have skipped the draft by paying bribes or other means:
Petro Panat, the leader of the territorial defense unit, an ad hoc military unit formed in the early days of the war to protect local communities, said 10 out of 30 men from the unit had since obtained documents to legally exempt them from fighting. The exemptions are granted for reasons like health problems or relatives in need of care.
…
In the Khodoriv area, relatives of soldiers who are fighting or who have died at the front said that in the last two years they have begun to resent men in the community who are said to have bought their way out of service while their own sons and fathers are fighting — a feeling that may be shared by many across the country as the Ukrainian government wrestles with how to mobilize up to 500,000 more troops.
After the war is lost, with whatever other outcome, there will be a deep acrimony between families who’s members have fought and died in it and those families who had the means and foresight to bail their members out:
There is no legal way to pay for an exemption from military service in Ukraine, but there have been widespread reports of corruption in draft offices, with bribes ranging from $1,000 early in the war — “a buyout from death” — to as much as the $10,000 per head price that was revealed in a Kyiv draft center.
In future the distance between the ‘nationalists’ and pragmatist draft dodgers will get even bigger than it has been before the war. I wonder how much that could contribute to further internal strife or even a civil war in western Ukraine.
Now back to the Vyshyvany family name which was the first mentioned in the above piece. I had stumbled over it a while ago.
If one searches for that name it brings up the Wikipedia page of the Archduke Wilhelm Franz of Austria who was born in 1895. Wilhelm’s rather complicate history and Ukrainian fascist-‘nationalism’ are deeply interwoven:
Archduke Wilhelm Franz of Austria, later Wilhelm Franz von Habsburg-Lothringen (10 February 1895–18 August 1948), also known as Vasyl Vyshyvanyi (Ukrainian: Василь Вишиваний), was an Austrian archduke, a colonel of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen, a poet, and a member of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine.
…
Wilhelm was raised in his parental estate located in the Austrian city of Saybusch, Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. His father was a patriot of Poland [..]. Accommodating the 19th-century rise of nationalism, he decided that his branch of the Habsburg family would adopt a Polish identity and would combine a loyalty to their Habsburg family with a loyalty to Poland. Accordingly, he had his children learn Polish from an early age and tried to instill in them a sense of Polish patriotism.
…
Wilhelm, the youngest child, rebelled, and came to identify with the Poles’ rivals, the Ukrainians. … [H]e developed a fascination with Ukrainian culture that he kept for the rest of his life.
The family eventual accepted his Ukrainian tendencies and groomed Wilhelm to become a ruler of Galicia, then part of Austria-Hungary and today of western Ukraine.
During the first world war Wilhelm became a Ukrainian ‘nationalist’:
The most acceptable course to solve the “Ukrainian issue”, for Wilhelm, was the creation of an autonomous Grand Duchy of Ukraine with federalist principles, within the Habsburg monarchy. That duchy, beside the Eastern Galicia and Bukovina provinces, could include as well Ukrainian lands that at that time belonged to the Russian Empire and which had to be reconquered.
Supported by the German-Empire and Austria-Hungary William fought as commander of Ukrainian draftees against the Bolsheviks.
When the world war ended William was hospitalized. Ukraine, the name translates to ‘border land’, again experienced the fate that comes with such an estate:
As he lay in the hospital, World War I ended, Austria-Hungary fell apart, and the Habsburgs lost their throne. In Eastern Galicia the West Ukrainian National Republic was proclaimed, while the Ukrainians of Bukovina tried, unsuccessfully, to unite their land with the new Ukrainian republic. The Bukovina was occupied by hostile Romanian forces, causing Wilhelm to flee to Lviv to avoid arrest. As Lviv was occupied now by Polish forces, Wilhelm again was forced to leave, moving to the Carpathian region where he was hiding in local monasteries for almost half a year. Meanwhile, while Germany was withdrawing its troops from Ukraine, the regime of Skoropadskyi in Ukraine was overthrown by republican forces of “Directorate”, led by Volodymyr Vynnychenko and Symon Petliura, and interest in seeing Wilhelm as sovereign of Ukraine faded.
During that era other nation’s rivalries affected the region – as they had done before for many centuries and as they still do today.
Between the world wars Wilhelm was mostly in Vienna but continued his Ukrainian ‘nationalist’ activities:
In circles of Ukrainian political emigrants, a hope was burning that the loss was not yet final and the Soviet regime could still be overthrown. In Vienna, Wilhelm became involved with pro Ukrainian monarchists who saw in him an opportunity, but nothing came out of it.
…
In Paris Vyshavanyi renewed his communications with Ukrainians when members of the newly formed Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) found him. He twice met with head of OUN Yevhen Konovalets. Through Wilhelm, nationalists tried to find new sources of financing.
Wilhelm supported the German Nazis who, with the avid support of the Ukrainian OUN militia, killed many Poles and Jews after invading the Soviet Ukraine. When the Nazis turned against the OUN Wilhelm stayed with the Ukrainian ‘nationalists’:
Soon however, Wilhelm realized that the Hitlerites would not allow for creation of independent Ukraine even as a puppet state similar to Slovakia. After he and his brother Karl Albrecht were arrested and interrogated by Gestapo, Wilhelm changed his political views and soon joined the local anti-Nazi resistance in Vienna.
When the second world war came to an end Wilhelm was engaged by the British(?) and French secret services to instigate a Ukrainian nationalist terror campaign against the Soviet forces in Ukraine:
At some point Maas introduced Wilhelm to his colleague Jack Brier who in his turn in 1946 introduced Wilhelm to French military officer Jean Pélissier. The latter had been tasked by the French authorities to revive contacts with Ukrainian nationalists who continued to fight the Soviet regime. Confrontation between yesterday’s allies, the collective West and the Soviet Union, was becoming more obvious and eventually had grown into what now is known as the Cold War. The French representatives promised help with delivering by planes political agitation on the Soviet territory as well as Ukrainian militants who would join the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). At first the French representatives requested to meet personally with Stepan Bandera, but since it was too complicated, agreed to meet someone from his closer associates.
The ‘western’ allies, especially the U.S. between 1948 and 1952, spent a lot of effort and money to instigate an insurgency in Galicia against the Soviet forces.
Wilhelm was eventually caught by the Soviets. In 1948 he died in of tuberculosis a prison hospital
One wonders what else but the name connects the Vyshyvany family in the recent NYT piece with the Austrian aristocrat turned Ukrainian ‘nationalist’.
In the early 1950s, after the Soviets had launched a serious counter insurgency campaign, the post WWII fascist OUN insurgency in Ukraine eventually petered out.
In 2014 the U.S. revived it.
Posted by b on May 9, 2024 at 15:00 UTC | Permalink
Why has everyone in the United Kingdom turned against Meghan Markle despite initially liking her?
We like to give folk a fair chance to settle in. We also root for the underdog. It’s a British thing.
The second of Diana’s sons is a bit of a wild card, but that’s okay. Will is in 1st place and he’s the sensible one so it’s not a big issue if H wants to be a bit of a jack-the-lad. It might even be expected from the spare to the heir.
Anyway, he got together with Meghan and a lot of us thought ‘okay, a bit of diversity. Probably about time. American too. That didn’t work out so well for Edward with Wallis Simpson, but that was all a long time ago. Besides, H isn’t king, so we’re not likely to have a constitutional crisis. Let’s give the girl a chance’.
Fitting in to any new family has its challenges, but a Royal family, that’s going to be extra tough with all the press scrutiny. We wished her well.
Then the seams started to come apart. It was obvious that Meghan had certain ideas about what it meant to be in a Royal family, and when things didn’t quite go the way she expected she threw her Teddy bear out of the cot.
We can forgive a lot in the UK, but stabbing the Firm in the back is a no-no. Airing the dirty laundry through the press is very bad form.
Meghan took a great opportunity and squandered it rather than taking her time to adapt. She made her own bed.
What are some deep things 80 year old man told before his death?
Don’t celebrate too soon, wait until it’s a sure thing.
Don’t give things to people who won’t value them.
Starting is simple, but keeping going is tough.
Showing off starts when being smart ends.
Even someone foolish can have a talent.
Even when time feels never-ending, life is still short.
Everyone likes different things. Let’s respect each other’s preferences.
Fear is only as strong as we let it be in our minds.
SUMMARY: US lost dominance nearly decade ago on all fronts, now, its prepping a world war against China to regain it before the gap gets wider
Dominance? This was over 7 years ago.
Dominance? America lost the first spot to China on all fronts.
ECONOMIC: China is the world No. 1 Economy for 5 years and over 10 years if you add the black economy.
POLITICAL: U.S policy was based on creating Win-lose, China’ relies on Win-Win.
Invasions and destruction VS. Investments and development.
All U.S close allies rushed to China to build partnerships, after realizing that the US can’t be trusted for a blink.
These partnerships are China’s Political leverage in the future. A way smarter approach than bullying and intimidation.
China is respected, the US is (was tb precise) feared.
The atrocities and impunity of the several consecutive US administrations made the US hated but feared worldwide, which made China loved and respected when it emerged.
China is a 70 century old wise grandad compared to the US,a bustard 4 centuries baby with a diaper, wisdom and experience is a key on the policies front.
(Note: bustard is not an insult here,but a description of a nation born on a raped land from another, and that explains alot, since It was born with brute force and relied on it to present)
TECHNOLOGY: One of the Chinese giants, HUAWEI is times bigger than the entire of Silicon Valley companies. Search Huawei city and see the wonders. HUAWEI is the world’s no 1 mobile phones manufacturer, the forbidden APPLE is the 3rd next to Samsung. But that’s just the tip.
HUAWEI is the world’s leading telecom company, owns the 5G with over 1000+ patents and now the 6G.
The panic of NSA and the 5 eyes( US,CA, UK,AU,NZ) over the 5G says it all. The FIORC or the 5 eyes WERE tapping and controlling all Internet and telecommunications until the 5G. Now, HUAWEI or China runs the show.
But the desperation of US was really interesting, starting with an idiotic campaigns on the hazards of the 5G, as if the 4G was the last safe thing and supposedly we shouldn’t advance anymore?
That was followed by an even more idiotic move from NSA, which announced they will start their own 5G, they will reinvent the wheel, so by the time, they are ready, there will be 6 or even 7G.Ofc the intention was a message of the US capabilities to the world, which was perceived as a silly joke.
Now, the entire West is paying loyalties on the 5G patents to HUAWEI.
Tables are turned, yesterday’s payee is today’s payer. More importantly, intelligence is in the Chinese hands
And another desperate but seriously idiotic move was by Trump, by calling Tredau of Canada, to arrest HUAWEI daughter( also HUAWEI CFO) from Canada to the USA in an attempt to blackmail HUAWEI on the 5G. Obviously blackmailing was Trump’s Art of the deal.
These desperate moves signals the panic of the US and its typical way of thinking. Just American muscles no brains.
Since Technology and communication is a key and crucial factor in today’s smart weapons, it adds leverage to the military front.
MILITARY This is tricky, because practically wars aren’t 1vs 1, but alliance vs alliance.
1 vs 1, China has an equivalent of each US weapon,but China has weapons, the US never saw before on the military parade of the Chinese party 70 year anniversary. Its available on CCTV UT channel.
The US realises that the gap with China is growing wider every day. So, its Now or Never.
Knowing that China and Russia have joint defense agreement, then they will face both together.
The US used Ukraine to provoke Russia and Taiwan to provoke China. These pawns are presented to the public under the pretenses of democracy and free world, as always. Its not Ukraine vs Russia, its the US and the Nato against Russia and China for now.
Inflation rises in the countries of conflict, pretty normal, but in the present quarter, it’s the entire world.
This is not a regional conflict, its a global one, its a brink of a world war.
The US weapon stockpiles have been depleted to critical levels, making the US incapable of self defense with its current levels. Manufacturing backlogs are full. The US won’t risk that unless its at war, not for any of the pawns. These stockpiles are enough to go against the entire world.
It’s pretty clear that the 4 centuries diapered baby, is a cry baby, and can’t learn or accept the fact, that life and existence is a cycle, everything is a cycle.
Europe had its 2 centuries of dominance, then the US had its 2, now its China, its Asia time.
The West had 4 centuries collectively, now its the East time
So, the US crybaby isn’t mature enough to grasp that concept, and seek a confrontation while at parity, hoping to stay dominant.
Nothing strange, Muscles no brains is the American way of thinking.
The brat doesn’t realise its not a confrontation vs Russia and China, its against a cycle, its against nature
Man has never won against nature
So again, DOMINANCE was 10 years ago, and heading to DOOM, unless one of those immigrants isn’t thinking the American way.
God saves us all from the immigrants way of thinking
Which countries have the most brutal and horrific history?
This answer isn’t really about saying what one single country has done the worst, but I do want to share below on the cruelty of humankind that many people don’t know about.
Graphic content below but I want to make this known because so many people around the world have heard of Hitler, Nazis, concentration camps but they have not heard of the Asian holocaust that took place around the same period. In western schools, history classes do not teach people about this part of the world.
This is regarding what the Japanese did during their occupation of Korea and the war crimes they committed to the surrounding Asian countries, including some Pacific Islands they invaded: Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Myanmar, East Timor, New Guinea, Indonesia, Guam, Nauru, Wake Island, Attu and Kiska Islands, and Kiribati.
They even had some prisoners of war from the west such as America, any forces against them at the time etc.
Hundreds of thousands of women from my country in Korea were forcefully abducted (called comfort women) during the Japanese occupation in WWII. They endured torture beyond imagination if they did not sexually submit to these vile men and were forced to have sex with 60–100 men every single day. Their innards rotted because of the STD’s and they were destroyed, unable to have children even after they were rescued. They have still not been compensated for the war crimes that they endured and majority have died.
Pregnant mothers were cut open and rape victims were sodomized with bamboo sticks and bayonets until they died in agony.
On top of this they literally tore the unborn from women’s wombs and speared them alive with bayonets in front of them. They’d crush the infant’s skull against concrete floors. They would actually do this for fun.
They tied sons and daughters up and tore them apart, spearing them and forced their own parents to watch.
They raped and pillaged women of all ages, even toddlers to old women in the most vile, disgusting way imaginable. They would often disembowel them while in the process, leaving them to die in agony.
They conducted unspeakable evil torture and experiments on LIVE prisoners from these countries even children and infants in UNIT 731. Torture methods such as vivisecting pregnant women without any anesthesia, centrifuging and killing people in pressurized chambers, and slowly burning and freezing people alive. They artificially created what is similar to the ‘bubonic plague’ to see the effects on the prisoners. They were forced into X-rays until they perished and hung people by their thumbs or tongues etc. These torture tactics were deliberately planned to see death happen SLOWLY, not fast as the scientists wanted to observe the resilience of the human body.
Bodies of slayed, raped, mutilated women in China.
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Carcasses of babies and children piled up
Despite this, Japan still presently denies what has happened and even believes that it is a rumour. The young people as shown in this video are absolutely clueless on the whole tragedy, or are so far removed in cognitive dissonance and lack of care it is astounding. There is even a middle aged woman in the video who even says “Well I’m not sure if it’s a rumour or not…” which is an absolute lunacy and an embarrassment of the failure of the country in not properly educating their citizens of what truly happened. One young girl even says “Well, I wonder when they will ever get over it…” How are people supposed to get over it when there are still thousands of victims still alive who didn’t receive any form of compensation for what they have been through??!
Their government still warps their history books and deliberately tries to hide the evidence of what truly happened. There are active groups within Japan who refuse to accept what happened and truly believe that it is just a ‘rumour’ to make Japan look bad.
Below is a real life account by a South Korean comfort woman on the horrors she went through. It is heartbreaking to watch but quite educational. She sadly passed away early January of this year, fighting until her last breath but still never receiving any compensation or apology from the Japanese. They don’t even recognize that she went through this or who she is.
What Japan did wasn’t just an invasion or occupation, it was a literal carnage, hell on earth genocide. They didn’t have to go this far as majority of the Koreans and the people they invaded were helpless farmers, uneducated servants, and innocent people who were not trained in war at all. They did this because they did not see these people as human, and their goal wasn’t simply to occupy, but to desecrate the spirit from within. They knew when you destroy someone’s spirit from inside out, the enemy will bend the knee and yield to the point where they do not have the soul to fight back. On top of this, it was just pure, raw sadistic savagery because all of these helpless people surrendered and begged for mercy yet they were still tortured for absolutely no reason.
Presently Japan is one of the most wealthiest and prosperous Asian countries in the world yet they cannot even fully take responsibility for their own committed atrocities. It shows the savage barbarism that still resides in some of these people and makes one question just how this is even acceptable. Instead they choose to warp their own history books, flat out deny it existed and have refused to offer sincere, acceptable compensation/apology for the people who are still alive. They are waiting until every last victim is dead so they no longer have to worry about it. They are not truly ashamed of this past, they just see it as an eyesore they want to bury. Keep in mind Japan has very strong political parties that strives to ensure this shameful past does not reach the masses to retain their false honour. Still to this day, they praise their war criminals in shrines.
From the invasion of China in 1937 to the end of World War II, the Japanese military regime murdered near 3,000,000 to over 10,000,000 people, most probably almost 6,000,000 Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos, and Indochinese, among others, including Western prisoners of war. This is more than the estimated Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
designed to discredit the nation,” wrote Mindy Kotler, director of Asia Policy Point, in 2014.
“Mr. Abe’s administration DENIES that imperial Japan ran a system of human trafficking and coerced prostitution, implying that comfort women were simply camp-following prostitutes,” Kotler continued. “The official narrative in Japan is fast becoming detached from reality, as it seeks to cast the Japanese people — rather than the comfort women of the Asia-Pacific theater — as the victims of this story.”
Edit: Since I’m getting quite a lot of people who clearly don’t seem to understand and may not have read or researched in depth in this matter. They are saying that ‘Japan does not need to offer apology or compensation for what people of their past did etc’
It’s more complicated than that. Please read the links again. Even if they can’t take full responsibility for their past, they SHOULD take responsibility for the future by not warping textbooks and giving power to political parties who enforces the dangerous fallacy of denying any of this ever happened or triviliazing everything that has happened. They should make sure to teach the correct history not just for educational purposes but to ensure their citizens fully know and accept their own history and in hopes that it never happens again. This is also to help not silence the voices of the people who did suffer in the past and to not spit into their graves and ruin their legacy by spreading false lies.
Also the comfort women and people who were forcefully taken into labour camps as prisoners, many are still alive who didn’t actually get any compensation or even sheer RECOGNITION. They suffered their entire lives without anyone hearing what they have to say with nothing from Japan. This isn’t just about wanting Japan to go up to a stadium and saying ‘I am sorry’ and stepping down. Words are meaningless and worthless when not backed up by actions.
They are hypocrites by warping textbooks and also praising their own war criminals. Imagine what the world would say if Germany praises Nazis and gave strong political power that has the power to make Germans never even hearing of the Nazis or even contemplate if it was just a rumour or not. Think about how insane that would be.
So why do they need to apologise? Because unlike Germany what they are doing is absolutely deplorable and morally bankrupt by continuing to CONTRIBUTE to the legacy of the abomination Japan was in the past. You don’t see Germany do the same about the Nazis and for good reason. It means Japan hasn’t learned and is not truly remorseful. By Japan I am talking of the FACES of Japan which are the politicians who represent that country. The rest of the Japanese experience their trickle down effect so while it’s not saying it’s their fault, they end up indirectly contributing to supporting these vile politicians. So yes the people who represent JAPAN who hold the power of influence does need to sincerely apologise and stop contributing to what they are presently doing.
As I am getting tired of having to repeat the same information again and again, any comments that say things along the lines of ‘Japan does not need to apologise’ or those questioning or defending the existence of any of these crimes, their war criminals will be either ignored, deleted or blocked. It is extremely disrespectful to the victims and deplorable. The links are already here clear as day for reading and one can also do the research themselves. Also for anyone who brings up another atrocity and pitting them against each other, STOP. This post isn’t about pitting one atrocity against another, it is disgusting to even keep doing that and seriously lacks any insight into the original point of my post.
Otherwise thank you for reading and have a nice day.
TLDR: Japan did some truly horrific shit that many people including the present day Japanese citizens are unaware of. What they did is abysmal carnage from the Antichrist itself.
Also, piece of shit apologies that require uttering words and throwing money at victims isn’t a true apology when they are still in 2019 warping textbooks and none of their youths know anything about their crimes.
Why do you think Germany forces every citizen to learn about their nazi history and Japan doesn’t ? It is to deliberately ignore and not acknowledge their past due to their pride and selfishness. I’d equate this to even pathological narcissism and psychopathy due to how far they have gone in managing stomping this knowledge out of their own present day citizens.
Edit 2: As I am still getting very disrespectful, deranged comments on here pitting atrocities against each other, saying that I am spreading lies and others spewing ignorant hatred against Koreans, here’s my final message.
Instead of blaming others, look at what Japanese Nationals do. Stop diverting the attention away by blaming the mistakes of other countries yet not acknowledging the corruption of the Japanese government
Japanese people often fail to understand why neighbouring countries harbour a grudge over events that happened in the 1930s and 40s. The reason, in many cases, is that they barely learned any 20th Century history. I myself only got a full picture when I left Japan and went to school in Australia
The Germans in contrast have personally done everything possible to make people aware of their Nazi past. Japan doesn’t scratch the surface of what it means to have true honour while Germans go to great lengths to do humanitarian work and to allow their citizens to understand the FULL facts. This is what true compensation and remorse actually is, not the dogshit excuse of what Japan does by also denying people, correct history. End of.
What is something you heard your child say or saw them do that made you think “Yep, that’s my kid.”?
Daughter was 4, old enough to be dropped at a birthday party for sometime without husband or I to be with her.
At this one party, I dropped her and told her I would be back in an hour and that if she wants to come home, she just needs to tell the birthday boy’s mother to call me.
She assured me she was okay and headed off inside.
I was skeptical as this was the first time but she appeared okay to me.
I went back after an hour and a half to see the main door was open. I took out my slippers and peeked in. A bunch of kids were fighting and screaming. A few girls were crying put loud for their mother terrified with scene going on in front of them.
I looked around for my daughter and didn’t see her.
I panicked.
The host was in the middle of the whole drama trying to call a truce but in vain. Two mothers joined me just then and took control over the situation.
I looked around for my daughter and still couldn’t find her. I went over to the host lady and asked her about it.
She laughed and pointed at a teeny tiny corner of the dining table.
Perched up on the chair sat my daughter with a plate in her hand, munching away the food. Oblivious to the surrounding.
The whole area looked like a war zone. ‘Hurt’ people were complaining to their mother. The birthday boy was crying because his party was spoiled plus someone broke his favourite toy. Some girls were crying because they were afraid and wanted to their parents to take them away.
And here was my daughter not caring a damn to the drama that unfolded around her.
“Hey!” I said as I walked up to her.
“Mumma, the fried rice is really good and also these cheese balls. You want?” She said beaming.
“There was a fight here. You know what happened?”
“No. I am eating.” She said as she dug into her cheese ball with a fork.
When it comes to food she doesn’t care even if the world is ending.
Yep, that’s my kid.
Women has it so easy…
During a light-hearted exchange, a man guessed this 39-year-old woman’s age to be 43, which apparently pissed her off. She followed him to the bathroom and glassed him in the face, twice.
He received a 10cm cut that narrowly missed his eye, as well as an injury to his thumb while he was trying to shield his face. He needed stitches for his injuries.
Judge Elizabeth Nicholls spared her prison. The judge said that she could see this woman was a ‘hard working woman’, ‘loving mother’ and ‘no risk to the public’. Yeah right.
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In September 9 last year Joanne Dodd was out with her sister at a Manchester pub. In a banter with a guy he was asked to guess their age, at which he guessed Joanne to be four years older than she was. This made her fly into a rage and threaten to hurt him. He excused himself to go to the bathroom and away from the hostile situation, but she followed him and attacked him with her glass.
In court her lawyer said she was drunk. Said she was suffering from low self-esteem. Yeah aren’t we all. We just don’t cut up people’s faces when we’re drunk.
Joanne pleaded guilty to inflicting grievous bodily harm. She was facing up to three years in jail under the sentencing guidelines.
But she was spared jail. The judge said, “one person’s banter may be insulting to others, but that did not justify what you then went on to do.” Fair enough, but come on.
She almost rendered someone blind over a joke, gave them multiple lacerations in the face that needed stitches.
Joanne was sentenced to 12 months in prison, suspended for 12 months and was ordered to complete 180 hours of unpaid work. Plus also ordered to pay £800 in compensation to her victim.
Proof of Reincarnation
Have you ever called in sick but you were convinced or threatened by your superiors to come to work? Did it end well for you?
When I worked for the legal department of the Department of Children and Families, about year three or so I begin to experience profound depression, bad enough that I needed to seek medical assistance. I felt pretty miserable that my life had deteriorated to a point where I would need psychotropic medication just to function, but the doctors assured me that it was a very good thing that I was seeking help from them instead of trying to self medicate and we tried to work on a plan. The problem was, I hadn’t taken any psychotropic meds for years at that point, and I wasn’t sure what would be effective. At this point, there are so many medications on the market that sometimes it’s literally a game of “well, let’s try this and see how it goes.”
The first medication I took, Prozac, made me paranoid, even at half-dose, and gave me full-blown panic attacks. I called the doctors’ office to explain my symptoms, and they continued to tweak, but suggested that I give the meds a chance to work. The meds ended up knocking me out constantly. I literally would not have been safe to drive a car, let alone work with legal files.
The managing attorney of the office threatened my employment when I came back to work, stating that me being out of work for five days put too much stress on everyone else in the office for coverage. Mind you, this is the same person who would make small talk with me about when I was going on vacation and asked me why I hadn’t dropped everything to go across the country with my husband on one of his spur-of-the-minute trips California or Italy or something. So it’s totally cool if I ask for time off to go on a drinking trip, but actually trying to manage my mental health so that I can continue to do the job of a junior attorney for a receptionist pay is borderline terminable?
This is the same supervisor who took nine months off for her own maternity leave, but was demanding that an underling come back to work four weeks after giving birth because “the office needed her.” Completely unempathetic human being. Before she became the managing attorney, the turnover in the office was practically zero; afterwards, it stood close to 90% every two years.
Law enforcement, when did you get an unbelievable tip that was actually real?
I was working the front desk at the police station when a woman came in and said she had some information. She told me her boyfriend (I had the impression he was or was about to be an ex-boyfriend) had two sticks of dynamite hidden under her house. She wasn’t sure why he had this. I recorded her information, thanked her, and sent her on her way.
The usual procedure would have been to notify our bomb squad. My department participated in a regional EOD (explosive ordnance disposal) team that was staffed by representatives of the local police, sheriff, and fire departments. Our PD’s representative was an academy classmate. He was (and is) also an asshole. I avoided talking to him for any reason. One of my close friends, however, was the EOD tech for the fire department. I called him at home and passed along the information.
About six hours later, my friend came in to the PD to update me. He had gone to the address in question for recon, found a suspicious package under the house (maybe some search and seizure issues here, but Not My Problem), and called the rest of the team. They recovered the two sticks of crystallized (read: highly unstable) explosive, which they placed into a bomb-proof cask to transport to a remote location to be “rendered safe” (read: blown up). He thanked me for a most productive day.
What is the stupidest crime you have ever seen anybody charged with?
I was in court over a ticket, it was dismissed so I’m not a lawbreaker.
Anyway, this little old lady was called up. She’d been given a ticket for speeding in an area at the end of my street, a busy business highway street that goes through the main part of a town.
The lady told the judge she wasn’t speeding, she was actually going under the speed limit. The judge called the officer up, he said he clocked her going 44 in a 40. The officer said I clocked her in front of… some local business, XXXX, and she was doing 44mph. I drive that area every day, multiple times. The speed limit there is 45. She really wasn’t speeding. The judge started to chew the lady out, stating she was getting too old to drive and needed to surrender her license and sell her car.
I muttered something to the effect that she hadn’t done anything wrong and was driving fine, and the judge heard me. I was thinking “oh crap! now he’s not going to listen to me when it’s my turn!!” but I said I live on SSSS street and drive the road in question, every day. The speed limit in front of XXXX business is 45, the speed limit if 40 up the YYYY business and the 45 mph speed limit sign in on the easement in front of their business. The speed limit where he’s talking about is 45mph.
The judge had to get another officer on the phone to go and check where the speed limit changed. The lady went to sit down and wait. I was nearly last so when they got the call back he dismissed her ticket. I bet the officer got in trouble for giving false tickets.
When and where did your parents die? What do you remember about it?
Dad was supposed to be on Hospice but they didn’t start it because someone was on vacation. He was home swearing he wouldn’t ever go to the hospital. Mom was trying to take care of him but he fell off the couch twice one day and sat on his oxygen tube. She called 911 to pick him up once then the neighbors the next time. Saturday I was with her all day to help with him. Sunday morning he asked if I was coming so she had him call me. Then he asked if my brother was coming and she offered to call him but he said he would know he wanted him. She called him anyhow. So my brother, SIL and I were visiting when dad announced he was ready to go to the hospital. The doctor said he couldn’t because they couldn’t help him. Mom was crying, she couldn’t lift him and thought if it got to be too much she could have him go to the hospital. The doctor came to the house and said he had total system shutdown and his kidneys had stopped working. She said he could go to the hospital to get morphine but if he did, he couldn’t come home again, he would go to the nursing home if he didn’t die first. On Tuesday he went to the nursing home, an hour or so later mom was home taking a nap when they called and said to come back. He had died already.
Mom ended up living with my brother and went to the hospital for pain. They claimed she had pancreatic cancer but wouldn’t treat it unless she got a biopsy. She said she didn’t want a biopsy and would rather have hospice, so they sent her home. Everyone came to visit her dozens of grand and great grandkids, she had a great time visiting everyone like a big party. One day she said this was the first time she thought about dying. She only lived 20 days and died peacefully at home.
Is the problem with US diplomacy with China that it goes against Chinese values?
Not to be rude, but I burst out laughing reading this question in the notification.
The Chinese do not conduct diplomacy on grounds of values.
As in we’re attacking/punishing/threatening/sanctioning you for not being Chinese enough.
Only the West, and primarily the United States does that. Western NGOs are an economy unto themselves.
Israel does it to its own citizens/residents, because their quarrel with the Palestinians boils down to a disagreement over whose God is in charge.
China doesn’t print “In God We Trust” on the Renminbi.
In fact, China as a state does not identify with any religion, unlike modern India, and most of the West. All monarchies that remain today identify with a religion, and that includes Japan.
Evangelism has never been a part of Chinese culture, which doesn’t travel well, unless there is critical mass.
China’s diplomatic principle is simple. Recognize One China and respect Chinese sovereignty, and China is your friend.
America’s problem with China is singular—it wants to remain top dog, at all cost.
I say good luck.
中国人不吃这套
Pepe Escobar
May 8, 2024
The NATOstan lackeys will remain dazed and confused. So what; lackeys lack strategic depth, they just wallow in the shallow waters of irrelevancy.
Startling mirror images swirl around two major developments this week directly inbuilt in the Grand Narrative that shapes my latest book, Eurasia v. NATOstan, recently published in the U.S.: Xi Jinping’s visit to Paris and the inauguration of Vladimir Putin’s new term in Moscow.
Inevitably, this is a contrasting tale of Sovereigns – the comprehensive Russia-China strategic partnership – and lackeys: the NATOstan/EU vassals.
Xi, the quintessential hermetic guest, is quite sharp at reading a table – and we’re not talking about Gallic gastronomic finesse. The minute he sat at the Paris table he got the Big Picture. This was not a tete-a-tete with Le Petit Roi, Emmanuel Macron. This was a threesome because Toxic Medusa Ursula von der Leyen, more appropriately defined as Pustula von der Lugen, had inserted herself in the plot.
Nothing was lost in translation for Xi: this was graphic illustration that Le Petit Roi, the leader of a third-rate former Western colonial power, enjoys zero “strategic autonomy”. The decisions that matter come from the Kafkaesque Eurocracy of the European Commission (EC), led by his Nanny, the Medusa, and directly relayed by the Hegemon.
Le Petit Roi spent the whole of Xi’s Gallic time babbling like an infant on Putin’s “destabilizations” and trying to “engage China, which objectively enjoys sufficient levers to change Moscow’s calculus in its war in Ukraine”.
Obviously no pubescent adviser at the Elysee Palace – and there’s quite a crowd – dared to break the news to Le Petit Roi about the strength, depth and reach of the Russia-China strategic partnership.
So it was up to his Nanny to volunteer out loud the fine print on the “Monsieur Xi comes to France” adventure.
Faithfully parroting Treasure Secretary Janet Yellen in her recent, disastrous Beijing incursion, the Nanny directly threatened the superpowered hermetic guest: you are exceeding in “over-capacity”, you are over-producing; and if you don’t stop it, we will sanction you to death.
So much for European “strategic autonomy”. Moreover, it’s idle to dwell on what can only be described as suicidal stupidity.
Steadfastly defending a debacle
Now let’s switch to what really matters: the chain of events leading to Putin’s lavish fifth inauguration at the Kremlin.
We start with the chief of GRU (main intelligence department) of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, Admiral Igor Kostyukov.
Kostyukov, on the record, actually re-confirmed that right on the eve of the Special Military Operation (SMO), in February 2022, the West was ready to inflict a “strategic defeat” on Russia in Donbass, just as before the Great Patriotic War (Victory Day, incidentally, is celebrated this Thursday not only in Russia but also across the post-Soviet space).
Then the ambassadors of Britain and France were called at the Russian Foreign Ministry. They spent roughly half an hour each, separately, and left without addressing the media. There were no leaks about the reasons for both visits.
Yet that was more than obvious. The Foreign Ministry handed the Brits a serious note in response to David “of Arabia” Cameron’s babbling about using British long-range missiles to attack the territory of the Russian Federation. And to the French, another serious note on Le Petit Roi’s babbling about sending French troops to Ukraine.
Immediately after this compounded NATO babbling, the Russian Federation started drills on the use of tactical nuclear weapons.
So what started as a NATO verbal escalation was counterpunched not only with stern messages but also an extra, clear, stern warning: Moscow will regard any F-16 entering Ukraine as a potential carrier of nuclear weapons – regardless of its specific design. F-16s in Ukraine will be treated as a clear and present danger.
And there’s more: Moscow will respond with symmetric measures if Washington deploys any ground-based intermediate-range nuclear missiles (INF) in Ukraine – or elsewhere. There will be a counterpunch.
All that happened within the framework of astonishing Ukrainian losses in the battlefield over the past two months or so. The only parallels are with the 1980s Iran-Iraq war and the first Gulf War. Kiev, between dead, wounded and missing, may be losing as many as 10,000 soldiers a week: the equivalent of three divisions, 9 brigades or 30 battalions.
No compulsory mobilization, whatever its reach, can counter such debacle. And the much-advertised Russian offensive has not even started yet.
There’s no way the current U.S. administration led by a cadaver in the White House, in an electoral year, is going to send troops to a war that from the beginning was scripted to be fought to the last Ukrainian. And there’s no way NATO will officially send troops to this proxy war, because they will be minced into steak tartare in a matter of hours.
Any serious military analyst knows NATO has less than zero capability to transfer significant forces and assets to Ukraine – no matter the current, grandiloquent Steadfast Defender “exercises” coupled with Macron’s mini-Napoleon rhetoric.
So it’s Ouroboros all over again, the snake biting its own sorry tail: there was never a Plan B to the proxy war. And at the current configuration in the battlefield, plus possible outcomes, we’re back to what everyone from Putin to Nebenzya at the UN have been saying: it’s over only when we say it’s over. The only thing to negotiate is the modality of surrendering.
And of course there will be no sniffin’ sweaty sweatshirt cabal in place in Kiev: Zelensky is already a “Wanted” entity in Russia, and in a few days, from a legal standpoint, his government will be totally illegitimate.
Russia aligns with the world majority
Moscow has to be fully aware that serious threats remain: what NATOstan wants is to test the strategic capability of hitting Russian military, manufacturing or energy installations deep within the Russian Federation. This could be easily interpreted as a last shot of bourbon at the counter before the 404 saloon goes down in flames.
After all, Moscow’s response will have to be devastating, as already communicated by Medvedev Unplugged: “None of them will be able to hide either on Capitol Hill, or in the Elysee Palace, or on Downing Street 10. A world catastrophe will happen.”
Putin, at the inauguration, was cool, calm and collected, unfazed by all the hysterical incandescence across the NATOstan sphere.
These are his main takeaways:
Russia and only Russia will determine its own fate.
Russia will pass through this difficult, milestone period with dignity and become even stronger, it must be self-sufficient and competitive.
The key priority for Russia is safeguarding the people, preserving its age-old values and traditions.
Russia is ready to strengthen good relations with all countries, and with the world majority.
Russia will continue to work with its partners on the formation of a multipolar world order.
Russia does not reject dialog with the West, it is ready for dialog on security and strategic stability, but only on an equal footing.
All that is supremely rational. The problem is the other side is supremely irrational.
Still, a new Russian government will be in place in a matter of days. The new Prime Minister will be appointed by the President after the Duma approves the candidacy.
The new head of the Cabinet must propose to the President and the Duma candidates for deputy prime ministers and ministers – except for the heads of the security bloc and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The heads of the Ministry of Defense, FSB, Ministry of Internal Affairs, Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Emergency Situations and Ministry of Foreign Affairs will be appointed by the President after consultations with the Federation Council.
All ministerial candidacies will be submitted and considered before May 15.
And all that will happen before the key meeting: Putin and Xi face to face in Beijing on May 17. Everything will be in play – and on the table. Then a new era starts – outlining the path towards the BRICS+ summit next October in Kazan, and the subsequent multipolar moves.
The NATOstan lackeys will remain dazed, confused – and hysterical. So what; lackeys lack strategic depth, they just wallow in the shallow waters of irrelevancy.
Amazing Tour Inside a Chinese Attack Submarine
Is this the end of the United States as a global superpower?
All empires fall. It’s an historical fact.
The American Empire is falling. The US Dollar is America’s main pillar of power and the world is massively de-dollarizing.
Within the next 20 years, the US Dollar will no longer be the world’s primary reserve currency. It will be replaced by something else.
When that happens, the Empire will collapse. It will no longer be able to afford its military.
America is also rotting from within. It is plagued by domestic problems such as homelessness, gun violence, poor health care, poor education, crumbling infrastructure, opioid addiction, systemic racism (“I can’t breathe”), mass incarceration, growing poverty, etc.
The US political system is in turmoil. Deep political division. Deep corruption by the corporate capitalist elite. January 6, 2021 is just the beginning.
As we report, the disintegration of the old order is visible everywhere. Sanctions are used four times as much as they were during the 1990s; America has recently imposed “secondary” penalties on entities that support Russia’s armies. A subsidy war is under way, as countries seek to copy China’s and America’s vast state backing for green manufacturing. Although the dollar remains dominant and emerging economies are more resilient, global capital flows are starting to fragment, as our special report explains.The institutions that safeguarded the old system are either already defunct or fast losing credibility. The World Trade Organisation turns 30 next year, but will have spent more than five years in stasis, owing to American neglect. The IMF is gripped by an identity crisis, caught between a green agenda and ensuring financial stability. The un security council is paralysed. And, as we report, supranational courts like the International Court of Justice are increasingly weaponised by warring parties. Last month American politicians including Mitch McConnell, the leader of Republicans in the Senate, threatened the International Criminal Court with sanctions if it issues arrest warrants for the leaders of Israel, which also stands accused of genocide by South Africa at the International Court of Justice.
It is the U.S., the country which arguably benefited the most from the liberal international order, which is actively destroying it.
Others, if they did not attract random U.S. rage and war against them, also saw some benefits from it. Those small to medium countries will most likely lose out should the current regime collapse.
That would not be unprecedented:
Unfortunately, history shows that deeper, more chaotic collapses are possible—and can strike suddenly once the decline sets in. The first world war killed off a golden age of globalisation that many at the time assumed would last for ever. In the early 1930s, following the onset of the Depression and the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, America’s imports collapsed by 40% in just two years. In August 1971 Richard Nixon unexpectedly suspended the convertibility of dollars into gold; only 19 months later, the Bretton Woods system of fixed-exchange rates fell apart.
Similar ruptures, like the examples above again caused by the U.S., may happen soon.
Interestingly the Economist does not name a solution or way to avoid it. It sees a collapse coming, blames -more or less- the U.S. for causing it, but does not point to way out of it.
That is an uncharacteristically pessimistic view for writers who otherwise like to paint a positive picture for those with big money.
Posted by b on May 10, 2024 at 14:04 UTC | Permalink
Shopping in Stores in 1971: Retro Video of the Early 70s in America
Picadillo-Stuffed Turkey with
Orange-Tamarind Sauce
Add Latin flavor to your holiday turkey with the addition of picadillo ingredients to the Stove Top Stuffing.
picadillo stuffed turkey
Prep: 30 min | Total: 4 hr 45 min | Yield: 24 servings
Ingredients
1 tablespoon oil
1 small onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 1/2 pounds ground pork
1 (8 ounce) can tomato sauce
1 (6 ounce) package Stove Top Stuffing Mix for Chicken
1/2 cup raisins
1/2 cup Planters Slivered Almonds, toasted
5 large navel oranges, divided
1 (15 pound) frozen turkey, thawed
1 (14 ounce) package frozen tamarind pulp, thawed
1/2 cup granulated sugar
4 1/2 teaspoons cornstarch
1 tablespoon butter
Instructions
Heat oven to 325 degrees F.
Heat oil in large skillet over medium heat.
Add onions and garlic; cook and stir for 3 minutes.
Add pork; cook 5 minutes or until no longer pink, stirring occasionally.
Stir in tomato sauce; cook 2 minutes.
Add stuffing mix, raisins, nuts and the juice of 2 oranges (about 1/2 cup); mix well. Cook for 5 minutes or until heated through, stirring frequently.
Remove from heat. Cool for 15 minutes before stuffing the turkey.
Remove and discard neck and giblets from turkey cavities. Rinse turkey; drain well. Free legs from tucked position, but do not cut band of skin. Place turkey, breast-side up, in roasting pan.
Spoon stuffing into neck and body cavities, being careful to not pack stuffing into turkey too tightly. Return legs to tucked position; turn wings back to hold neck skin in place.
Cut 1 orange into 8 slices; arrange over turkey. Cover breast loosely with foil to prevent over-browning.
Bake for 3 hours, basting occasionally with pan juices.
Meanwhile, combine tamarind pulp, sugar and juice from remaining 2 oranges in saucepan.
Remove foil; bake turkey 45 minutes to 1 hour or until done (165 degrees F), brushing with 1/4 cup of the tamarind mixture for the last 15 minutes.
Remove turkey from oven; let stand 15 minutes before carving.
Meanwhile, stir cornstarch into remaining tamarind mixture until completely dissolved. Bring to boil; cook and stir 1 minute or until thickened.
Remove from heat; stir in butter. Serve warm with turkey.
Notes
Serve with smart sides, such as a crisp mixed green salad and your favorite hot steamed vegetable.
A 12 to 14 pound frozen turkey needs 3 to 3 1/2 days of thawing time in the refrigerator. The cooking time will range between 3 to 3 3/4 hours until the turkey is done (165 degrees F).
Do not stuff turkey until ready to roast.
Nutrition
Per serving: Calories 460
Total fat 20g Saturated fat 6g Cholesterol 130mg Sodium 260mg Carbohydrate 26g Dietary fiber 2g Sugars 17g Protein 45g
% Daily Value: Vitamin A 2 % DV Vitamin C 0% DV Calcium 6% DV Iron 20% DV
* Nutrition information is estimated based on the ingredients and cooking instructions as described in each recipe and is intended to be used for informational purposes only. Please note that nutrition details may vary based on methods of preparation, origin and freshness of ingredients used.
What did your boss say to you during a meeting that resulted in you immediately resigning?
“You never deserved any of the promotions I gave you.”
I started working for a small non-profit when it was only 3 other employees and myself. I was able to take over a lot of jobs that they were outsourcing and saved the foundation over $15,000 a year in contract labor within 6 months of being hired. Within 2 years, the organization grew to over 15 full time employees and I was promoted from Office Admin to Office Manager to Finance Director/Travel Logistics Manager. I was on call every day and often sacrificed family stuff to make sure the participants in programming were taken care of.
After 2 years, I took a 9 day vacation with my family to Disney. I made sure that everything was taken care of before I left and had made arrangements with co-workers to be able handle anything that came up. I left contacts for myself, and my husband should there be an emergency. On the plane to FL, I lost my phone. When we arrived at the hotel, I immediately emailed from my personal email to let my co-workers and boss know what had happened and how I was handling it.
When we returned, my boss pulled me into her office and berated me for not taking my work laptop on my family vacation and said that losing my phone (not a company phone) was extremely “unprofessional” and that I didn’t deserve anything I had earned in my tenure there. She claimed that she had only advanced me because she was being nice and yelled at me so loudly that the entire office heard. I told her that was pretty poor leadership and gave my 2 weeks notice to the founder and explained the situation. Unfortunately, he felt we were “just being catty” and refused to do anything about it.
I visited my village in CHINA for the first time in 10 years *MY LIFE CHANGED*
What is your most horrifying supernatural experience? (A real life incident)
You may not believe this, but…
Los Angeles. 1980, at a stoplight. three lanes. Truck in furthest left lane, A friend was next to me in middle lane, I was in the inside lane. My friend and I were revving our motors like we were going to drag race as soon as the light turned green.
Rev..rev, looking at the light. Waiting. Yellow comes on in other direction, I was ready to go when….. this old man crosses in front of us, slowly. He looks like he’s 100 years old and so slight you can barely see him.
The light turns green but we can’t go because of the guy. All of a sudden, from my left, a truck comes barreling through his red light, crossing directly in front of us. If it wasn’t for the old guy walking across our paths, we probably would have been dead. Except……later at the coffee shop, we were talking about what a close call that was, and that but for the old guy crossing we would have been toast.
My friend asked: “what old guy?” I said the old guy crossing the street in front of us, isn’t that why you didn’t take off? No, he said, I just don’t race at stoplights. I thought we were playing.” My friend was killed, a long time ago by an old driver racing through a red light and striking his car, killing him. Me: “So you didn’t see the old guy.” He laughed thinking I was making it up.
My life was saved by a ghost.
What is the rudest thing that a new neighbor has done to you immediately after you had moved in?
It was immediately after he moved in.
We had a house for 10 years. Beautiful natural yard with several 200+ year old oak trees. Mr. New Jersey moves in behind us and immediately starts pestering my wife about getting those trees cut down because, “if they fell over they could land on his house and take out the power so they needed to be removed immediately.” Wife demanded I not talk to him about it as she didnt want me to anger new neighbor.
She put up with it for a year. I was really sick of hearing her complain about it. So I started doing yard work where he could see me. He came over and started his rant. I politely told him noody was cutting down my wifes healthy oak trees and the subject was closed. I then pointed out his pretty shrub was growing into the powerline and needed to be trimmed or we would all have a power outage.
A few weeks later the power company came out for a service call(3 days with no power for the neighbor hood). His shrub had taken out the power.
We all now get along great.
When the 65 foot Hackberry tree died, I rented a 45 foot boomlift. He let me park it in his backyard while I cut that thing into 2 foot pieces and lowered it to the ground. It was leaning over the powerline. The power company wouldnt cut it down and I had to take it down in pieces so it didnt knock out the power to the neighborhood.
He asked me why I was doing the work instead of hiring a tree service. I explained its easy work and I find it fun and relaxing.
I get to drive a 45 foot boom lift and play with a new chainsaw. Its guy heaven.
He had thought he could bully a woman into cutting down her trees. As I had not gotten involved in the fracus for a year he maybe figured I was intimidated by him for some reason. Then he realized I wasnt intimidated and just supported my wifes opinions.
What do women have that men want from us besides our holes?
I was a stripper for about ten years, so I’ve talked to far more men than the average female. The one thing most married men talked about missing from their marriage/relationship was acknowledgement, particularly for their feelings, and also their contribution. Men would routinely tell me that their wife behaved as if she was owed a better husband than he was to her; she deserved a man who made more money, but she also deserved a man who spent more time at home. And very often, a man would go to great length and trouble to do something special for a woman he cared about, and very often, she would mention the parts he fell short in that endeavor. Women have encouragement and acceptance and affection and appreciation, and when a man gets all that from a woman, her holes are hardly the thing he wants most from her. In fact, if any woman has nothing to offer, but her holes, she will find herself very unwanted, even if she has really good holes.
Aliens & Espionage: Crop Circles and the CIA Coverup | They Don’t Want You to Know
You all know the American idiom “Shitting a brick”, right?
shitting a brick
What you might not realize is that this is an actual term that refers to something that happens during incarceration.
Before you go to prison, you tend to spend months in jail.
This is because a prison bed is typically not available. So you have to wait in jail until you get to go to prison.
While you are in jail, at least in the Southern states, they fed you a lot of “salt peter” (don’t know if it was actual, or slang) that was mixed with the daily mashed potatoes that you ate.
This was supposedly done to make the inmates more easy to control and calmer.
I don’t know the true story, just the rumors.
Anyways, we would eat this stuff. Since the trays were pretty much empty, but the potatoes were just dished out in glorious amounts, us guys would then eat the stuff with relish and gusto.
The thing is, however, the “salt peter” wouldn’t digest. It would just sit there in your colon. Getting heavier and heavier over time.
Eventually you would need to take a glorious shit, and I swear to God, that you would shit out a brick like mass, almost the same size, shape (rectangular; no shit. Actually the rectangular shape.) and weight of a brick.
It happens to all the (older) new inmates.
If you are over 50, sure as shit, you will be shitting a brick after about four months in county jail.
And it will sit there until someone gets a stick to break it up so that it goes down the drain.
The China Defense Ministry says that “China is ready to intervene militarily anywhere if the United States or NATO decides to attack Russia.”
This blunt public statement is almost completely out-of-character for the nation of China. For its entire history, China has always spoken with words like “peace, negotiation, Diplomacy, cooperation.” Almost NEVER has China spoken of war – or declared its intent to actually wage it — so bluntly – ever.
Hal Turner Snap Analysis
The fact that China’s Ministry of Defense used this type of language is an indication to me personally, and to many other people, that China perceives (or knows) that something imminent is about to take place regarding a US/NATO attack upon Russia.
It seems to many long-time observers that China would never have spoken words like these, unless they believe such a situation is imminent.
I find myself in full agreement with such an assessment.
As you read this, news came out this morning that all of Europe is now $61 Billion in the hole over the weapons and assistance it has given to Ukraine during the conflict with Russia.
It has also come out that, since the beginning of the Russia Special Military Operation inside Ukraine, the Russians have been able to increase military production fifteen times (15X) over what it had previously been.
This staggering increase in Russia’s national military production puts that single country’s production SEVEN TIMES that of all of Europe and the United States, combined.
Everywhere on the planet, voices are (finally) rising and admitting Ukraine cannot win against Russia and people who think otherwise must be “out of their minds.”
Here is one such voice from the Bundestag (Parliament) of Germany:
Yet China felt compelled to say it would intervene militarily — anywhere – if the US and NATO attack Russia.
The world seems headed into a gigantic, suicidal, Word War 3, and China has made clear with whom they will stand with.
The rest of us would do well to take note, while we’re still alive and can do something to stop this madness.
In Vietnam
Side boobies! Lol.
Has a super rich person ever been treated so badly at a store that they then turned around and bought the store just to fire the employee?
Well, not to fire an employee. I knew an extremely wealthy man who owned a dry cleaning business as one of his many endeavors. One year, the landlord for the building it was in announced he was doubling the rent.
The businessman said to himself, “Now, that doesn’t make sense. He can’t get that kind of rent on the open market. The guy must be desperate for money.” So through another company he owned, he made a lowball bid for the entire building for half what it was worth, and much to his astonishment, the landlord took it.
Now, since he owned the building, he wrote a sweetheart deal of a lease for his dry cleaning business. Then he looked around the building and saw that it was mostly empty, so he swung a few deals and filled it up with commercial tenants. Then, since he didn’t want to be in the Landlord business himself, he put it on the market for twice what he thought it was worth, and much to his astonishment, somebody bought it for that price.
So, he quadrupled his money and got a nice long-term lease for his dry cleaning business, all because the landlord pissed him off. But this was kind of the way he got rich in the first place.
I remember one time Exxon representatives told him he didn’t charge enough at a gas station he owned. After the Exxon representatives left his office, he handed a can of paint to a worker and told him to take Exxon’s name off the pumps. After a week, Exxon knuckled under and let him sell gas for whatever he wanted. He was moving a lot of cheap gas.
What was the biggest warning that your cat was able to give you?
That a tornado was coming.
I woke up in the middle of the night to her meowing her head off and pawing at the covers. She had been taught very young not to wake people, so this was extremely out of character. As I groggily told her to go away, her meows reached a new completely freaked out pitch (think very upset cat in a bathtub type meows), and I realized there was quite an angry storm going on outside. When I got out of bed, she ran to the doorway, continuing her frantic meows. I grabbed my phone and, noticing a text alert saying we were under a tornado warning, ran downstairs to the first floor closet with her close behind.
She was completely silent as we huddled in the closet together, hearing the world come apart outside. When people say tornadoes are loud, they’re not doing justice to the incredible roar of the twister and the banging, popping, and rough sliding sounds of buildings coming apart and cars being thrown. They’re loud…and they’re incredibly scary, even when you know you’re relatively safe.
We came through that storm with only a broken fence, busted garage door, and a few shingles missing from the roof, but as I looked at the devastation of some of the other homes in my neighborhood, I knew it could have been far worse…and I could have been stuck in my bedroom on the top floor as it happened.
President Biden
What was the most obvious lie you’ve been told?
This one is kind of sad.
I used to work at a school that had quite a few well off families. There was one kid (Flynn) who had learning issues but his parents refused to have him tested due to not admitting it. He was also spoiled rotten, his mother would never discipline her perfect little baby and his father was always away. So he was close to feral in school.
Anyway, one day in class the kid sitting next Flynn starts getting angry wanting his pencil case back. Flynn has his hands up and swears he doesn’t have it. From where I’m standing I can see it on his lap under the desk.
I go, “Flynn, give Jack his case back.”
“I don’t have it.”
“Yes you do, Flynn. Give it back.”
“No, I don’t. I don’t know where it is.”
“Flynn, you know I hate it when you lie. Stop lying and give it back to Jack.”
“I swear I don’t have it.”
“Flynn, I can see it from here. Give it back and see me after class.”
So after class I just come out and say, “Flynn, you were lying. I knew you were lying. And I’m pretty sure that you knew that I knew you were lying. What I don’t get is why. If you knew I could see the pencil case why did you keep lying to me?”
Flynn’s reply, “It works at home.”
What’s something you’ve done that unexpectedly made you a lot of money?
An auctioneer once paid me $2500 for just saying the word NO.
I was at the on-site auction of a restaurant. At the time I was buying and selling just about anything, and I saw in the auction ad that the restaurant was decorated with about 40 antique wooden newel posts, and had a brass railing that connected all of them creating some kind of walkways in the restaurant. A newel post is a wooden post usually at the top and bottom of a staircase (see the photos).
main qimg 28175ed784ad714a48d242ac9760e13e lq
I knew that since virtually everyone who attends restaurant auctions are either restaurant owners or restaurant equipment resellers, the ornately carved wooden posts would be very undervalued by the crowd.
I was right.
The auction was halfway done and I had won about 20 of the posts for just $40 each, plus the giant pieces of brass railing that went with them. The big problem was that I had no idea how I was going to get them out of the floor. They seemed to be pretty well attached and I had no experience in such things!
So halfway through the auction one of the auctioneers comes to me and tells me he’s really sorry but the bank told him he wasn’t allowed to sell the posts, and therefore I couldn’t have them. The reality was probably closer to this: someone new showed up at the auction, found out how little posts had sold for, offered more money privately to take all of them at once, and the auctioneer decided to see if he could steal them from me with this ruse.
I just told the auctioneer: NO. You can’t have them, they’re mine now and I’ll assert my rights to take them away. After a few minutes of this he just said,
“Howabout I give you $2500 to forget about them?”
I said OK and left 5 minutes later with $2500 cash in my pocket.
In hindsight, driving away, I realized I could have asked for more!
Starbucks
What are business or life stories of people who did the right thing, but then it backfired on them?
In April of 2014, Santa Monica High School biology teacher Mark Black caught a student dealing drugs in his classroom. So he did what most teachers would do: he called security. The student panicked and attacked Mark, pushing him onto a table.
Luckily, Mark Black wasn’t just a biology teacher; he was also a seven-time national wrestling champion, and a national hall-of-fame wrestling coach. He slid off the desk, and used simple wrestling techniques to bring the student to the ground and safely restrain him.
This should have been the end of the story. But in a modern-day twist, the entire incident was recorded on video from the cell-phone of one of the student’s friends. That friend then edited the movie, removing the attack on the teacher, and leaving only the part where Mark Black took the student forcefully to the ground.
The student sent the edited video to news media outlets, and within minutes, pundits around the country were calling for the teacher’s immediate dismissal. Hours after that, the Superintendent of Schools sent out a district-wide email calling the video “utterly alarming,” and suspending Mark.
For most teachers, this would have been the end of their teaching career, but not for Mark Black. He had mentored thousands of students over a 30 year career, and he was loved by an entire community. Many people suspected the story was untrue–because they believed in his character.
Rising up to support him, former students from around the country flew back to Santa Monica, California. A petition was launched on The world’s platform for change
asking for Mark to be reinstated, and overnight it exploded to more than 100,000 signatures. The uproar from Mark’s supporters forced the school district to investigate deeper into events… and the real story quickly came out.
In just three days, Mark went from almost losing his career, to being acknowledged in news outlets as a hero. Within two weeks, he was reinstated to his position…. all because Mark had built a network of support by being passionately devoted to his students and athletes.
_____________________
Fun Addendum: Mark Black was my high school wrestling coach. I was one of the students that flew back to Santa Monica to support him in that time. It was one of the most special experiences in my life to support such a wonderful mentor in a time he most needed it. Here is an LA Times article about him. You’ll notice I’m quoted in it 🙂
What is the single most underrated trait a person can have?
We were in a cafe.
The waiter was serving the things in our plate and he spilled some red sauce on one of my friend’s white shirt.
They both stopped for a while and looked at the stain.
“I am really sorry sir, please come with me to the washroom I’ll clear it” he was fumbling and the droplets of stress could be seen on his forehead.
“It’s perfectly fine brother. Don’t worry! it happens. Just show me the way to washroom I’ll manage” my friend said with a smile.
“Don’t worry I am not gonna change my mood to give you tip” He winked and smiled again while leaving.
And the waiter just smiled.
We went to take clothes from the washerman one day as he didn’t come to return the clothes from many days.
The washerman gave the clothes and showed him the burnt area on a shirt.
He looked at the face of the man which was getting paler and the wrinkles were more pronounced to be a man in fifties.
“Koi baat nahi dada, shirt hi toh hai isi bahane ek nayee le aayenge” (Not a problem uncle, its just a shirt and you gave me a reason to buy new one) He said with a laughter and consoled him by holding his hand.
The watchman of our building didn’t come for a long time.
He went to meet him and found that he was sick. And his daughter was about to get married in a week.
He spent the rest day in preparation of the wedding along with the son of the man and spent whole day on the day of marriage hosting the guests and serving them.
The single most underrated trait which anyone can have is EMPATHY.
The feeling of finding other person’s echoes in yourself and the art of giving smile to others by putting yourself in their shoes.
The effort to make someone’s day a bit better.
Double Name
What is the oddest reason you have been contacted by your child’s school?
Funny story here!
My daughter was (probably) in first grade at the time. It could have been KG ir 2nd grade. Anyway, she was always a playful and friendly little girl. She made friends all the time. However, she was never (and still isn’t, 20+ years later) into anything physical (e.g. sports, gym, hiking, etc.) The one physical activity that she did love was the monkey bars.
I’m not sure how many bars the thing had but probably a dozen or 2 dozen, more than enough for several kids to be on the thing at the same time.
Just to be clear, monkey bars have an upside-down U shape. You climb up 1 vertical side. Then there’s a horizontal portion a few feet long. You grasp a bar and hang from it and then you “walk” across the bar with 1 hand on the bar in front of you and 1 hand on the bar directly behind it.
There’s a drop of a few feet. The thing is just tall enough that a little kid’s feet won’t touch the floor while handwalking across the horizontal section. My daughter was on the horizontal section with 6 of her friends. She lost her grip and fell (maybe 2 feet). Her little friends loved her so much that they got worried all let go of the bar and fell on top of her 😂
The school called me to tell me that my daughter had injured herself on the playground. I lived close by and got to the school in 15 minutes. My daughter was fuming. The teachers had taken her to the nurse for her “injuries.” There wasn’t a scratch on her. But she was annoyed at having lost her playtime!
This was the first time that I had ever been called to school for non-existent injuries. I had to calm down my daughter, not because she was physically or emotionally hurt but just because she got too much love.
What is the rudest thing a beggar/homeless person did and said to you after you did them a favor?
I was at RacTrac in Fort Worth getting gas. A rough looking guy comes up to me and gives a sob story, tells me he ran out of gas, coasted up to the pumps and asked me for 20 bucks. I told him I didn’t have any cash and said let’s go over to your car and I’ll fill ’er up with my credit card. I asked which car was his. He looked around and pointed to an older car two bays over. He said “NO! Just give me some cash!” He got pissed off and said he was gonna beat my ass if I didn’t cough up some cash. I gave his crap right back to him and told him to go away or I’d knock him out. Then he frantically heads over to the next pump and starts harassing an older, well dressed woman. About that time, someone came out of the store and got in the car he said was his. Then drove away. I went over and demanded that he leave her alone and stood there until she finished getting her gas. She graciously thanked me and left. So I went back and my gas was finished pumping. I started to pull out and saw a Ft Worth police car pulling in. By now this guy was harassing people on the other end of the lot. I flagged down the officer. He was a SWAT officer in full riot gear heading back to the station! I told him what had happened. Next thing I know he has the guy spread out on the hood of his squad car searching him.
I drove slowly by and waved at the guy as the officer was cuffing him!
Is saying ‘thank you’ common in Russian culture? How should one respond if someone thanks them for a small gesture in Russia?
Here’s a little first hand story.
In 2003, I made my first trip to another country, which was England. I stayed at a private home in a place called Pinner in Greater London. My hosts gave my a room and let me use their facilities. It was the first time I actually saw and used those bizarre separate water taps for cold and hot water. So inconvenient. But that’s beside the point.
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I spend most of my time hiking and sightseeing. One day I went to see central London. In the evening, when I was going to board my train to go back I learned that there was a blackout
and the trains didn’t work.
I didn’t know how to get to Pinner, so I called my host and asked him if he could drive to the center and pick me up. This phone conversation was life changing for me due to one little detail. It was I who was asking him for help, but it was him, who thanked me several times during the mere seconds that we spoke. When he understood the position I was in and what I was asking him for, he said something like “okay, I see, I’ll pick you up, thank you, thank you, bye”. I was stunned. Those “thank yous” sounded very automatic, but they made so much difference. Like, the man had nothing to thank me for. On the contrary, I got him out from his comfy apartment and made drive to the central London at night, and yet he said thank you. Just a simple sign of politeness made a world of difference. After that I started saying thank you much much more often than I used to.
It’s been more than 20 years, and I have observed that Russian people have become much much more polite, and they use the “magic words” like thank you and please much more often. So I’d say, it has become common. It even affected people who are not used to saying thank you that often, because it has become much easier and more pleasant to deal with them.
Japan evening walk in Shinjuku, Tokyo • 4K HDR
https://youtu.be/rFcwx-sIMA8
Have you, as a police officer, ever known a “dirty” cop? If so, what did you do about it?
Cops as Robbers!
It was about 11:00 p.m. when I first observed my sergeant get a cell phone call. He looked at me and told me he had to check something and left the office. I didn’t hear from him for about thirty minutes. The next thing I hear is that they are looking to establish a crime scene. I immediately went to dispatch and asked, “Where’s the scene and what’s going on?” The dispatcher who was half-asleep said he didn’t hear the broadcast, so I made him play back the audio recording. The department tape-records all radio transmissions and incoming phone calls, a fact that would save my bacon over the next few hours.
After hearing the recording of an officer asking about a crime scene, the dispatcher said nobody told him anything. I then called the sergeant over the radio and said: “What do you have?” He replied that he would give me a call (fortunately for me on a taped line). I took his phone call, and he explained that some drunken Mexican was saying that he got kidnapped, beat up and robbed by the police. They were driving the victim around looking for a crime scene, but the sergeant stated, that to him, it sounded farfetched.
I was aware that there had been some informant information saying that a rogue cop was robbing Mexicans. In fact, the chief, in a staff meeting two months prior, had brought up the information.
I told the sergeant to bring the victim to the station, which he did. At the station, I spoke to a friend of the victim and the victim. The friend spoke English while the victim spoke only Spanish. The friend said the victim was on his way to his house to pay him back some money. As the victim approached the man’s house, a marked police sport-utility-vehicle stopped the victim, arrested him, and drove off. The witness described the involved officers as wearing blue police uniforms with one of the officers speaking fluent Spanish.
The sergeant kept downplaying the incident, and I later determined he had misdirected my initial investigation. He said we only had two Spanish-speaking officers working, while he knew we, in fact, had three. I had the two Spanish-speaking officers I knew about come into the room, and apparently, these were not the officers.
The sergeant then reminded me that the state police had several units in the area who were driving similar vehicles. Two of their officers were at our station using our breathalyzer because their machine was down for repairs. I ran down those leads and came up empty.
Because of the informant information previously discussed, I called the chief of police at 2:00 a.m. and said, “I’m not sure what I have, but one of our cops may be involved in a robbery.” Both the chief and internal affairs commander responded to the department, as well as the two other division commanders.
Information started to leak out in small dribs and drabs. Everyone working that night was interviewed, and no one was allowed to leave. First, I learned that it had something to do with an off-duty police officer who was pulled over for drunk driving. Two officers from our community-policing unit offered to give the intoxicated officer a ride home so he wouldn’t get in trouble. Instead of taking him home, they transported the officer back to a local bar.
I would learn later, that when they transported this drunken officer to the bar, they had already kidnapped the Mexican who was in the back seat with him. The truth finally came out when one officer involved in the kidnapping came clean and turned state’s evidence. This officer had recently transferred to the unit. The second officer and ring leader was not Hispanic but apparently spoke fluent Spanish—a fact I didn’t know, but the sergeant did.
On this night, they were looking for a Mexican to rob. They kidnapped this person off the street and eventually took him to a secluded area of a park and robbed him of his money, assaulted him, and left him there.
However, en route to the park, they stopped a suspected drunk driver who was yet another officer. They then started to give the drunken officer a ride home, loading him into their car right next to the kidnapped man. They dropped the officer at a local bar instead of taking him home.
As word spread of the robbery, other officers knew of the drunken officer and learned of the man in the backseat. The sergeant and others on the shift knew this information, but at that point, all remained quiet.
Initially, I think the sergeant was only covering for the non-arrest of the drunken officer, but later learned of the man in the back seat and tried to continue to sell a false narrative. It’s unfortunate once you start trying to cover one officer’s bad behavior; you become caught up and locked into a much more severe situation. There’s no question in my mind that this well-respected sergeant would never have covered for officers committing a robbery. The problem was, he got caught up in trying to help the intoxicated officer and just got sucked into the middle of a bad situation.
By the next morning, the two officers left in handcuffs going to the county jail. A group of union idiots stood in solidarity at the jail parking lot supporting the officers. In fairness to them, they didn’t know the facts of the case, or they probably wouldn’t have been there.
One junior officer came forward identifying who knew what when, which took courage considering he was going against his entire platoon and his sergeant. He and other officers on the shift received discipline. The sergeant was initially suspended pending further investigation. During this extended period of months, he had several personal tragedies in his life, losing both of his parents.
Additionally, while he was still suspended, the current chief who wanted the sergeant fired was forced to retire. A new chief took over. This chief was a close personal friend of the sergeant. Under the new administration, this sergeant took some discipline but kept his job and more amazingly his rank.
The officer involved in the robbery who turned state’s evidence got a couple of years in jail. The Spanish-speaking ringleader pleaded guilty and got almost the same sentence. They were both out of prison in about three months.
Several years later, the ringleader was back in the news, this time for the armed robbery of several banks. He went away again on a seven-year sentence, but just as before, served only a portion of that time and is now out, yet again.
Cowboy Coffee Cake
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Ingredients
1 (10 count) can biscuits, not the flaky type
1 cup brown sugar
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1/4 cup milk
1/3 cup finely chopped nuts
1/3 cup raisins
1 teaspoon cinnamon
Instructions
Heat oven to 350 degrees F.
Put biscuits in bottom of Bundt pan.
Heat other ingredients just long enough to melt sugar.
Spread mixture over biscuits.
Bake for 25 to 30 minutes.
Would you hire someone who’s been in prison?
As a supervisor for a drywall company I hired a guy who had served half his life in prison.
he was 44 and had spent 22 years in prison. ( 4 year stretch 2 year stretch etc not one long 22 year hit),
He was by far the cleanest worker ( his work space ) and the most obedient worker too.
I had to measure up his work after his first 2 weeks.
He worked alone as he was 6 foot 9 and looked nasty.
I told him his count and that he had earned $7000 for 2 weeks work.
He apologized and said he would work harder next pay period !!! the most the other employees would make would be around $2500.
Next pay period rolls around and I measure his work. $8000 this time.
I tell him and he promises to work harder next time !!. 2 weeks later His measure was $9000. The owner strolls on the job site after the invoices have been sent in.
He asks me who Mick is? I take him to Mick and of course his work area is spotless and I introduce them. Mick shakes his hand and the boss pats him on the back. If Mick made $24000 in 6 weeks guess how much the boss made.
I had mick working for me for 5 years till he cracked and ended up in pokey again.
So YES I would employ someone who has been to prison.
I was on an hourly wage but loved to see Micks cheques
Cross of Iron – Facing the T-34s
What is the most unusual and incorrect reason you’ve had the police called on you?
my insane landlady/neighbor reported me to the police. she said i went inside her house and stole her purse because it contained $5000 cash and her phone. meanwhile, she actually left it in the yard while nibbling on random plants in my ornamental garden (yes you read that right, i had cameras 😂)
thankfully, she also told the cops i did it because she works as jeff bezos’ assistant and i wanted the phone so i could blackmail him for money. needless to say they didn’t take it very seriously. i only found out she reported me when i went to the police station to talk to them about her erratic behavior. they were wildly unhelpful then, and throughtout the whole mess that followed 🤷♂️
random other crazy parts of the days surrounding the police report:
she has cameras, and could easily prove someone entered if it were true.
the day before she randomly texted me to ”go in her unlocked backdoor while she was out, and leave the rent on her kitchen table” – specifically asking me to do it while she wasn’t home. it was the same table she told the police i took the purse from. i didn’t of course – but it seems she intended to frame me
she had snuck into my place while i was at work three days prior, i caught her when coming home early. and immediately realized she had been doing it a lot. (things had been moved, doors open i didnt usually leave open etc.. i had figured it was a guest until then) it caused her to spiral with excuses for why she did it, and plots to make the situation go away – she admitted it but didn’t apologize lol.
thats just the beginning, but thats the police report part
Is it better to be tasered or pepper sprayed?
Take it from someone who has tasted both: Take the Taser. Every time.
Now, both are awful – I wouldn’t recommend either for a leisurely afternoon. However, the difference is in how they’re bad. When a Taser is used on you, it is pure electric hell, but for exactly five seconds (the standard duration of a single trigger pull). Now, God never stitched together five longer seconds, to be sure – the current from a Taser is by far the most acute pain I’ve ever endured, and this is coming from someone who’s had a baseball fracture a finger, taken an elbow right to the nose in a basketball game, been hit with simulated bullets, and gotten into (and won, I might add) a street fight with a convicted felon. But once it’s over, it’s over. There is some lingering muscle weirdness (I liken it to that feeling that’s left behind after you finally work out a charley horse in a muscle), but that’s it.
When you get pepper sprayed, though, it’s an hours-long ordeal. When oleoresin capsicum (OC, the chemical in pepper spray) hits your mucous membranes, they go absolutely insane. It took well under one minute for my eyes to swell completely shut, and they were obviously watering profusely. My sinuses underwent nothing less than a liquid detonation – I’m trying not to be crude, but think in excess of half a pint. It’s panic inducing – you can’t see without physically prying your eyelids open, you’re punished every time you breathe, you can’t squeegee the stuff off your face (despite frantic efforts that only serve to expand the zone of misery). It took me an hour to see clearly enough to drive, and over a full day for the pain to completely subside – when OC dries, crystals are left behind that, no matter how many tears you produce, can stay stuck under your eyelid.
As a civilian, I would double down on this answer, because in the heat of the moment, officers tend to err on the side of caution – their caution. That means if you’re to the point of being sprayed, you’ve got a high likelihood of what was known among officers as “getting hosed down.” While Taser cycles can be restarted, this can only be done if the subject is continuing to resist (and cycles are recorded by a tiny onboard computer, which provides records which can be uploaded to a personal computer – in other words, supervisors will know if you abused a Taser during a use of force incident). There’s no ‘standard spray’ with OC – it will emit spray as long as there are contents in the can and you have the trigger depressed.
Unfortunately, you won’t have any vote if you’re on the receiving end. You can take hope from the fact that most officers, in my experience, prefer using a Taser (usually no medical intervention necessary, the subject can see and isn’t hyperventilating, no patrol car contamination, and on and on).
But again, do avoid both at most any cost.
Mexican Casserole
Use your choice of meats in this versatile casserole.
8 ounces Dorito corn chips, crushed, or regular corn chips
1 (15 ounce) can Bush’s ranch-style beans or chili beans
1 (10 ounce) can Ro*Tel, undrained
1 (10 ounce) can cream of mushroom soup
2 cups Mexican-style shredded cheese
Flour or corn tortillas, warmed
Instructions
Heat oven to 350 degrees F. Spray a 2 quart casserole dish with cooking spray.
In a large skillet, brown the meat for 5 minutes, using a spoon to break up any large clumps. Drain off excess fat and add onion, garlic and chili powder. Continue to cook and stir for 2 minutes.
Add the beans to the cooked meat mixture.
Combine the tomatoes with the soup in a small bowl, mixing completely.
Place about 3/4 of the crushed chips into the bottom of the casserole. Spoon on half the meat mixture, then half the soup mixture. Then add half of the shredded cheese. Repeat the layers, ending with shredded cheese.
Sprinkle the top of the dish with the remaining crushed Doritos or corn chips.
Bake for 30-35 minutes until mixture is bubbling and top is lightly browned.
Serve with tortillas on the side.
What are some of the funniest “got fired” stories?
Not fired per se, but often reassigned. I spent 20 years in the military. One of my supervisors, on realizing I was essentially a lazy git, put me in charge of a shop in a distant part of the ship. No one had really paid any attention to the processes in years. So, lazy man that I was, I dug in to work out the easiest, most expeditious way to do the work. Took about a month, most of it reading manuals and regulations. I completely streamlined everything, including our reporting, eliminating redundancies and revamping workflows. Another 3 weeks to train the staff on how to follow the new procedures, and I could do my whole job in about eight hours a week.
Well, my boss wasn’t going to have me sit on my rump for the other 32 hours, so he moved me again. Same result. A third time, and I was getting the hang of it. I was down to six hours a week. In sheer Puritan frustration, he sent me to the department head’s office to do admin work. Bad choice on his part; I quit paying any attention to the three shops I’d been in, they didn’t need it. In the mean time, I’d become indispensable to my new boss, by arranging things so he could do his job in just a few hours a week.
They gave me “extra duties as assigned”. Well, those were mostly simple enough; paying attention to the written procedures and manuals, and keeping in mind the actual goals, instead of “This is how we’ve always done it”, let me go back to being a lazy git in short order. I was up to maybe 10 hours a week, and that was mostly delivering verbal reports. Maintenance standards were ridiculously high, my people got a lot of time off because the work got done faster than ever before, and me? No one ever saw me actually doing anything. I’d just wander around, a cup of coffee in my hand, dropping a hint here and a word there, or sitting in the mess and catching the occasional phone call.
My evals made me look like a lazy incompetent. Because they used the wrong metrics. But anywhere I was assigned, actual productivity rose, down-time dropped, and everyone got more time off (the only truly effective reward I had to hand out). A lot of my bosses got commendations for “improvements” I had implemented. I eventually retired, after doing some of the easiest time in the service, drawing two pensions and only 38 years old. Drove my wife nuts doing the same thing at home, before she kicked me out of the house. 🙂
Battle of Nagashino 1575
What is something you have tried, but will never do again?
My mate’s girlfriend was getting married to some other guy.
This had to happen.
I too knew that. Who would give her daughter’s hand to a jobless second year engineering student?
Around a week before his girlfriend’s marriage I advised him to cut all connections with her so that she could start a fresh life.
He replied:
“She cannot live without me. If I will stop calling her, she will die.”
I said: “She will not die. She will take time to adjust with her husband but eventually she will be happy with her husband.”
He: “Do you take the guarantee?”
Me: “I am pretty sure that she will not do such stupid thing. Please do not call her if you need her betterment.”
He: “If she commits suicide then you will also have to jump from the roof.”
After that incident I stopped giving advice to any hardcore Romeo.
It has been 2 years and the girl is living happily with her husband.
Million-Dollar Macaroni Casserole
The whole family will love this easy, cozy make-ahead Million-Dollar Macaroni Casserole.
million dollar spaghetti casserole
Ingredients
1 pound ground beef or bulk sausage*
1 (28 ounce) can spaghetti sauce
8 ounces cream cheese
1/4 cup sour cream
1/2 pound cottage cheese
1 stick butter
1 pound pasta such as elbow noodles or rotini
1 bag pizza blend shredded cheese
Optional: sliced mushrooms, diced bell pepper, diced onion
Instructions
Heat oven to 350 degrees F.
Boil the noodles. Mix together the cream cheese, sour cream and cottage cheese in a mixer to thoroughly mixed together. Set aside.
If you have chosen to use the bell pepper or onion, sauté them for 3 minutes then toss in the ground beef or sausage. Brown ground beef or sausage and drain well. Add spaghetti sauce and mix together. Put a few slices of butter in the bottom of a 9 x 13 inch casserole dish. Then layer half of the noodles in the bottom of the dish. Spread the cheese mixture over this layer. Then add the remaining noodles on top of this with a few pats of butter.
Spread the red sauce and meat on top.
Bake for 30 minutes.
Remove from oven, spread cheese on top, and return to oven for another 15 minutes or until cheese is melted and bubbly.
Notes
* Ground chicken or turkey may also be used in this recipe.
Does it cost money to go to jail?
Depends on how you intend to live your life while you’re there.
Because simply existing in jail — an American jail anyway — requires no money at all if you’re willing to subsist on bad food, basic toiletries, and a blaring day room TV.
But any kind of a normal life at all is gonna require income.
Without money in your commissary account, you can’t —
wash your hair with anything other than bar soap;
soothe a raw throat with Menthol-Lyptus;
take Tylenol for a headache;
write and mail a letter;
make a phonecall;
listen to music;
use deodorant;
eat a snack;
moisturize;
And if you consider any of these items luxuries, then you’re probably coming to incarceration straight off the street and sleeping rough.
Congrats on the upgrade.
Otherwise, you’re gonna need funds.
That means sympathetic family and friends on the outside, a work release or road crew deal from the judge and/or sheriff’s department, or a trustee uniform.
I know it’s possible to subsist in jail without means, because I’ve seen motherfuckers do it.
But it’s no way for a human being to live.
Network
Grease Palms
Update That Resume
Jail isn’t the free ride one might imagine.
Putin just scored a KNOCKOUT Blow to NATO and Ukraine is Terrified w/ Andrei Martyanov
Which historical event sounds like it came straight out of a movie?
Shawn Nelson was a plumber.
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And since Shawn Nelson was a plumber, he was rich too.
He quite literally had it all. A nice wife, a big house, and a booming business.
But one day, it seemed like whatever higher power there existed had had enough of Shawn and his life being so nice.
So the higher power commanded fate to start shitting on Shawn with unparalleled fury.
In the span of 4 years:
Both of his parents died, his mother’s death causing him to become an abusive alcoholic
His wife filed for divorce because of his alcohol tendencies
He was hospitalized for neck and back injuries, which left him unable to walk for a year or so
His truck was broken into, having all his plumbing supplies stolen
Due to him not being able to walk, which means not having a business, which means not being able to pay the bills, Shawn’s utilities were cut off.
The bank started to foreclose his assets due to him not being able to pay
The hospital that treated him for his injuries sued him for unpaid medical bills
The man had quite literally lost everything in a fraction of the time it had taken him to get it.
Safe to say, he was at his lowest point.
As many can attest, it is easier than ever to fall into the grasp of drug use during this time. Nelson was no different. He quickly got addicted to crystal meth, and he went all-in into his addiction.
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When the meth started, his erratic behaviors increased.
Nelson’s neighbors were constantly calling the cops because they were being kept awake at night by Nelson’s outbursts. He constantly threatened suicide and was verbally and emotionally abusive to his roommate and a new girlfriend.
He went so far as to call the Oklahoma bombing that killed nearly 200 people and injured nearly 700 “good stuff.”
However, it seemed fate had finally smiled upon Shawn when he found gold in his own back garden.
This was it. This was the chance to turn his life around. He could pay his bills, regain his job, make his business run again, and finally go back to his old life.
However, this was another meth-fueled delirium. That didn’t stop him from single-handedly building a fifteen-foot mineshaft in his own back garden though.
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He dug that mineshaft for nothing.
Soon after, his girlfriend and roommate moved out.
Shawn was alone in his big house with a big pile of meth.
He had nothing to lose.
On the 17th of May, 1995. Shawn Nelson ingested all the meth he had, then got into his car and started driving, stopping only when he reached the California National Guard Armory.
At this point, Nelson was a meth entity with nothing to lose, and he had only one goal in mind.
He was going to steal a tank.
Shawn arrived at the national guard barracks to find the door wide open, with no guards guarding the millions of dollars worth of tanks and guns stored inside there.
So Shawn just waltzed right in.
He found a tank that he liked and climbed in. At this point, you’d expect tanks to have something like keys or a complicated ignition system to start, but nope.
The tank had a push start button.
Unfortunately, the tank didn’t work. So Shawn climbed into another tank, all without getting spotted. That tank didn’t work either.
He climbed into a third tank, which worked, and so began the half-hour-long Meth Tank Rampage.
He drove his tank through the streets, completely invulnerable to anything the police cruisers that followed him had access to. He crushed 40 vehicles and many more road utilities until he finally got stuck, at which point he was shot dead.
Getting your life screwed over that bad, then stealing a tank does not sound like something out of real life to me.
HUGE EDIT PLEASE READ:
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Shawn Nelson was by no means a saint. He was not entirely a victim of circumstance and mostly brought the stuff that happened to him onto himself.
Mercenaries from the West inside Ukraine – Stunning Numbers
The number of “mercenaries” inside Ukraine, from Western and NATO countries, is stunning. The number of them KILLED is also stunning. Details below:
The Russian Ministry of Defense continues to track and record all foreign mercenaries who have arrived in Ukraine to participate in combat actions.
►The total number of foreign mercenaries who have arrived in Ukraine is 13,387 (Since 24 February 2022.)
►Destruction of 5,962 foreign mercenaries has been confirmed to date.
The undisputed leader in terms of the number of killed fighters is Poland (2,960 arrived, 1,497 eliminated). From Georgia, 1,042 fighters arrived, of whom 561 were eliminated. The 1,113 ‘soldiers of fortune’ arriving from the U.S. lost 491 killed. More than 40% of Canadian mercenaries were eliminated (422 out of 1,005). Of the 822 fighters arriving from the UK, 360 were eliminated. From Romania, 784 mercenaries arrived, 349 were killed. From Germany – 235 and 88, respectively. France has already lost 147 militants out of 356 arrived
but denies — at all levels — the presence of its mercenaries on the territory of Ukraine.
Forty-four percent (44%) of all foreign mercenaries who went into Ukraine, are confirmed dead.
If one applies the same percentage to Ukrainian regular army troops, then out of the 800,000 troops that existed at the start of the conflict, it is logical to conclude that at least 352,000 are already dead.
Since Ukraine has been drafting-by-force during the entirety of the conflict, the number of Ukrainian dead is clearly far higher than 352,000.
At what point will anyone in the West come to the rational conclusion that the Ukrainians have ZERO chance of surviving continued hostilities? Because THAT is the only rational conclusion to be arrived at.
If the West decides to pursue a suicidal effort to enter Ukraine militarily, is it not clear already that Western Forces would see the same 44% of their men killed the same way Ukraine has?
Last week, it was admitted by the West that eighty percent (80%) of Ukrainian Drones have been rendered useless by Russian Electronic Warfare! 80% ! ! !
Those are Western-supplied drones. Does the West think it will have better odds if THEY are the ones launching the drones? Such a conclusion would be idiocy.
When will the West come to its senses and tell Ukraine “We’ve reached the end, you must sue for peace with Russia?”
As it stands now, Western armament supplies are dwindling to the point where Western nations are no longer able to defend THEIR OWN territory, because they have so depleted their supplies of Ammunition, artillery shells, and missiles.
If the West _does_ engage in Ukraine, where do they think they will get re-supplied from? Right now, the West can’t make enough for the pittance of an army that Ukraine has left. How would they then supply the extra half-million NATO troops? The ammunition simply isn’t there anymore and the manufacturing base simply cannot make enough to supply an ongoing war effort.
None of these facts are in dispute. So why is the carnage continuing?
Do card counters really get beaten up by casino thugs, as portrayed in the movies?
My wife counts cards. She likes to play at the $1 tables at Circus Circus in Reno. She makes a few bucks every time she plays. Counting cards requires some concentration, and many people can’t do it, especially if they’re drunk, which explains the free alcohol.
The dealers all count cards. It’s the only way to keep from nodding off doing that job. So they pretty much know who is counting and who is gambling.
If you go home with $20 and brag to your friends that you counted cards in Reno, it’s great for business. If you try to count cards at the high-stakes tables, you will get escorted out if you are successful at all. A photo of you is taken and posted in the Security office so don’t come back later in the day to try again.
There are enough casinos in Reno that you can make some money if you come a couple times a year. If you move to Reno and try to make a living counting cards, you become known to the pit bosses and the security people, and find yourself prevented from playing.
No brass knuckles are involved. That’s just for the movies.
Cowboy Coffee
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Ingredients
4 quarts water
1 1/2 cups freshly ground coffee
1 egg shell
1/2 cup cold water
Instructions
Bring water to a boil in a large saucepan or coffee pot.
Add coffee grounds and egg shell to boiling water. Return to a boil, then remove from heat and let stand for 2 minutes.
Slowly add cold water to settle grounds to the bottom. Strain if desired.
As a boss, what is the wildest reason that you had to chew out/discipline/fire an employee?
I was managing a radio station in Colorado. One early morning, I was on the air and noticed the hotline lighting up indicating an incoming call: it was the guy whom I scheduled to be on the air after me. He was calling in sick.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “We’ll cover your shift so stay home and take care of yourself, and I hope to see you tomorrow.”
I was able to find a replacement for him, so after my shaft had come to an end, I handed over the reins to the next jock. I rarely did this, but for some reason, I decided to go home for an hour before I came back to work and spend the rest of my day working in my office. Once I was home, I turned on the TV just to have some noise in the background as I went into the kitchen to make a simple lunch. As I walked around the house, I looked down to see a basketball game in progress. Who do I notice seeing courtside, was none other than the guy who had called in sick.
It was well-known through my staff that if one wanted to take off a day – even if it were for personal reasons – I had a policy in place that would allow people to call in (even at the last minute) and request time off.
To make matters worse, he had lied to me.
The next day, I saw him in the hallway and simply said, “My office. Two-o’clock. Be there.”
At the moment, I couldn’t tell if I was going to fire him for being stupid enough to call in sick to attend a nationally televised event, or if I was going to fire him for lying to me. Either way, he was becoming gainfully unemployed that afternoon.
“Thank you for stopping by my office, but I am afraid that your services are no longer needed. Have a nice day.” I handed him his final check and he left silently.
I am glad that during my time in management I rarely had to fire someone (in fact, he was only one of two people I had fired during my career (the other person was dismissed for attendance purposes. I can tolerate a lot of things with people, but being lied to is, in my opinion, the worst.
Which are some of the most ingeniously solved criminal cases?
The story starts in Denmark. It is 2012 and police officers have just made a pretty standard arrest: they found a sexual offender with possession of child porn.
Police had a much greater concern though. They needed to find who created the videos, not just who was watching them.
There were no clear clues, so they turned to the videos to see if they could find a lead.
In the background, at one point, there was the slightest shot of a pill bottle.
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They zoomed in and managed to discern the man’s first name, the first two letters of his last name and the first three digits of the prescription order.
From there, the investigators applied these details to every possible person to whom they could be attributed.
After intensive searching, they conclude that a man named Stephen Keating is responsible, however they still have very little info about him. Furthermore, this evidence alone isn’t enough to convict him.
Rather than giving up, they once again went back to the videos. This time however, they found an image showing the man’s hand. From there, they used technology to create an impression of his fingerprint.
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The resulting fingerprint was a perfect match.
53-year-old Stephen Keating was arrested, just three weeks after the investigation began.
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Keating had repeatedly sexually molested three children, all under the age of 12. Outside of the ones captured on video, it was revealed there were another 12 children whom he had abused.
He was sentenced to 110 years in federal prison, but he may have never been caught had it not been for some brilliant detective work.
[4K】Relaxing Walk in Japanese Small Town – Ikegawa, Kochi
This is just lovely.
Cowboy Coffee with Kahlua Cream
Featured in the November 1998 issue of Texas Monthly – created by Chef Grady Spears
how to make cowboy coffee recipe 1695022684
Ingredients
1 pot hot coffee
1 1/4 cups heavy cream
2 tablespoons powdered sugar
2 tablespoons Kahlua liqueur
8 teaspoons shaved chocolate
Instructions
Make a pot of good strong coffee.
In a bowl whip the cream until soft peaks form.
Fold in the powdered sugar and Kahlua.
Put a dollop on each cup of coffee and garnish with shaved chocolate.
What single decision had the greatest effect on history?
On September 28th, 1918, Henry Tandey, a British soldier serving with the 5th Duke of Wellington’s Regiment, saw a weary German soldier wandering into Tandey’s line of fire at the small French village of Marcoing.
The enemy soldier was hurt and didn’t even attempt to raise his rifle. Altough Tandey had a clear vision and an opportunity to reduce the number of enemy forces by one, he chose not to shoot. The German soldier allegedly saw what he did and nodded his thanks before getting out of the sight.
That German soldier was Adolf Hitler.
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This story supposedly comes from Hitler himself. When Neville Chamberlain visited Hitler in 1938 (before the Münich Agreement), he saw a picture by Fortunino Matania ordered by the Green Howards regiment depicting a man saving his fellow comrade. Hitler had allegedly identified the man as Tandey on the basis of a U.K. newspaper article and claimed Tandey was the one who saved his life:
That man came so near to killing me that I thought I should never see Germany again; Providence saved me from such devilishly accurate fire as those English boys were aiming at us.
There has been a lot of evidence that this story is not actually true (see the sources below). But it doesn’t make it less cool nevertheless. If it were true, it would definitely be a legitimate candidate for a single decision that had the most dramatic effect on the entire 20th century.
If nothing else, it kinda reminded me of the following joke:
A man decided to visit a fortune teller. After looking into his hand and into the crystal ball, the fortune teller says in a dramatic tone:
“You sir, will be responsible for the death of millions”
Shocked and taken aback, the man goes back to his home. Along the way, he passes near a river and sees a small boy drowning helplessly.
“Well, if millions of people are going to die because of me, I might at least save one life.”
He jumps into the river and pulls the boy out. The shocked mother comes in tears and says:
“ Oh my dear god, thank you so much Mr., you are a saint. Adolf, you should thank this gentleman yourself.”
If you have just killed someone in self defense, what can you do immediately after the fact to help cement your innocence?
Call a lawyer.
Shut up until your lawyer shows up.
Take pictures of the scene and especially the witnesses. Give the phone only to your lawyer.
When the cops come say ‘I’m sorry Officer. I’d love to tell you my side, but my wife told me to wait for my lawyer.’ Change that to your Dad, etc. At some point before then say ‘Dad, tell me the following…’ so you aren’t lying to the cops.
If they are going to miss the obvious, like a witness, or the gun slid under the dumpster, point it out. But then shut up again.A buddy was getting divorced. His soon to be ex said, she felt threatened when talking to him because he was a soldier (it didn’t matter for the other 20 years…) He was a nice guy and wanted to say, ‘it’s okay, I won’t talk to her.’ But his lawyer shut him down.
If he said that, it gave the impression that he really was a threat.
If he made a mistake, and called his kid, but his wife answered, he could be found liable of breaching a court order.Don’t move things, except to safety and holster your weapon.
A cop had a legit shoot, but noticed the bad guy dropped the gun, right at the cop’s feet. The cop moved the gun to the bad guy, to match what he saw as true, at the time.
Moving the gun got him convicted.Changing your mag might be a good idea because you don’t know if the fight is over until the cops arrive.
Leave the 1/2 empty mag at your feet. Put the safety on/de-cock it, etc. because you don’t want the cop who takes your gun having an ND.
You don’t want the cops to show up and you have a gun in your hand. If your gun is in your hand, very nervous cops will point their guns at you. You don’t want that.Don’t move anything you don’t have to. Giving first aid is allowed but it messes with the facts. Ask 911 before you do it.And shut up. You will really really want to talk. But who among us haven’t said something stupid?
When I was really young, say 2 to 3 years old, I had these reoccurring dreams of me being beheaded by guillotine. Of course at that age, I had no idea about what a guillotine was, or the French Revolution, or anything like that. But my dreams were consistent.
My sister and I were both led up the stairs to this wooden platform. She was always fist, and she laid down on the board, and there was a big crowd that was watching. She laid down and this metal piece slid down and hit her, but her head did not come off, so they had to raise it again, and then the second try it came off. And her head fell into this woven basket.
Then it was my turn.
I went onto the gallows and laid down. I faced the basket and it it was like five heads. All were lifeless, including my sister. She had blonde hair and it was in a tight bun. Then the steel knife went down. My head moved a little, but I felt nothing. And just waited while it went back up again.
Then it slid down. I saw the bucket get up close and my last image was the view of the gallows from the bucket looking up as darkness surrounded me.
Today, I am pretty much convinced that it was a past life that I was remembering, or maybe a television show that my parents must have watched when I was six months or so old. The take away from this are numerous. For if it was a memory from a prior life, then…
My sister and I shared reincarnation experiences.
The guillotine was not fool-proof, and in fact was very inefficient, and multiple chops were required to kill someone.
I still retained consciousness for a few seconds after my head was removed.
I felt no pain, once the first chop hit.
Interesting.
What do you think about this one, eh?
Today…
Have you ever seen an employee get fired on the spot because of you?
Yep. I was a worker at McDonalds and only sixteen at the time, and we had a new employee. He was on grills, and I was on table right behind him. There’s another side to the table that cannot see the grills through the cabinets of food, so when any cook-to-order meat, in this case quarter pounder, was finished, the grill person would call “Quarter’s up!” So side two would know to get their meat and send the burger on its way.
Well, our new employee absolutely refused to talk near me. I didn’t really get it, he would talk to other people. But he wouldn’t call out quarter’s up for the life of him. After multiple times of doing it myself, I finally stopped and took the meat and held it back to him and asked him to call it out himself. He slammed it into the table and splattered grease into it. I stood there and told him he needed to call out quarter’s up for side two. He would not, he turned back to his grills and ignored me.
I called out quarter’s up and slid them their meat, and the shift continued. I stopped calling out quarters’ up, mostly because I was busy keeping up with the lunch rush and didn’t notice when he slid the meat onto the table out of my line of sight. And out of side two’s sight.
So a manager asks why side two is so slow, and they explain they don’t have their quarter meat and I would slide it over to them and apologize. Someone would tell the grill person to call it out, and the shift would continue again until he went on break.
I didn’t actually know anything had happened until the big boss of the store was called in and he came rushing up to me and told me very sternly,”If someone threatens you like that again, you need to tell management immediately!”
I did not understand. Nobody threatened me?
Turns out, when the grill dude went on break, he loudly told everyone how he was going to “beat the shit out of that little kid.”
The Four Stooges saga of Bundeswehr officers plotting to blow up the Kerch bridge in Crimea with Taurus missiles and getting away with it is a gift that keeps on giving.
President Putin, in his comprehensive interview to Dmitry Kiselev for Russia 1/RIA Novosti, did not fail to address it:
“They are fantasizing, encouraging themselves, first of all.
Secondly, they are trying to intimidate us.
As for the Federal Republic of Germany, there are constitutional problems there.
They correctly say: if these Taurus hit that part of the Crimean Bridge, which, of course, even according to their concepts, is Russian territory, this is a violation of the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany.”
Yet it gets curioser and curioser.
When the transcript of the Taurus leak was published by RT, everyone was able to hear Brigadier General Frank Gräfe – head of operations of the German Air Force – speaking with Lieutenant Colonel Fenske from the German Space Command Air Operations on the plan to deploy Taurus systems in Ukraine.
A key point is that during the plotting, these two mention that plans were already discussed “four months ago” with “Schneider”, the successor of “Wilsbach”.
Well, these are German names, of course. Thus it did not dawn on anyone that (Kevin) Schneider and (Kenneth) Wilsbach could instead be… Americans.
Yet that did raise the eyebrows of German investigative journalist Dirk Pohlmann – who I had the pleasure to meet in Berlin years ago – and his fellow researcher Tobias Augenbraun.
They found out that the German-sounding names did identify Americans.
Not only that: none less than the former and the current Commanders of the U.S. Pacific Air Forces.
The Four (actually Six) Stooges element gets an extra boost when it is established that Liver Sausage Chancellor Scholz and his Totalenkrieg Minister Pistorius learned about the Taurus plan no less than four months later.
So here apparently we have a clear cut case of top German military officers taking direct orders regarding an attack on Crimea – part of the Russian Federation – directly from American officers in the Pacific Air Forces.
That in itself opens the dossier to a large spectrum ranging from national treason (against Germany) to casus belli (from the point of view of Russia).
Of course none of that is being discussed on German mainstream media.
After all, the only thing that seems to disturb Brigadier General Gräfe is that German media may start seriously prying on the Bundeswehr’s Multiple Stooges methods.
The only ones who actually did proper investigation were Pohlmann and Augenbaun.
It would be too much to expect from German media of the “Bild” type to analyze what would be the Russian response to the Multiple Stooge shenanigans against Crimea: a devastating retaliation against Berlin assets.
It’s so cold in Alaska
During the jolly Bundeswehr conversation yet another “plan” is mentioned:
“Nee, nee. Ich mein wegen der anderen Sache.” (“No, no. I mean the other matter.”) Then: “Ähm … meinst du Alaska jetzt?” (“Ahm, you mean Alaska now?”)
It all gest juicier when it is known that German Space Command Air Operations Centre officer Florstedt will meet none other than Schneider next Tuesday, March 19, in Alaska.
And Gräfe will also “have to go back to Alaska” to explain everything all over again to Schneider as he is “new” in the post.
So the question is: Why Alaska?
Enter American shadowplay on a lot of “activities” in Alaska – which happen to concern none other than China.
And there’s more: during the conversation still another “plan” (“Auftrag”, meaning “mission”) also surfaces, bearing a not clearly understandable code name sounding like “Kumalatra”.
What all of that tells us is that the Crash Test Dummy administration in the White House, the CIA and the Pentagon seem to betting, in desperation, on Total War in the black soil of Novorossiya.
And now they are sayin’ it out loud, with no shadow play, and coming directly from the head of the CIA, William Burns, who obviously sucks at secrecy.
This is what Burns told the members of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee earlier this week:
“I think without supplemental assistance in 2024, you’re going to see more Avdeevkas, and that – it seems to me – would be a massive and historic mistake for the United States.”
That spells out how much the Avdeevka trauma is impressed on the psyche of the U.S. intel apparatus.
Yet there’s more:
“With supplemental assistance, Ukraine can hold its own on the front lines through 2024 and into early 2025. Ukraine can continue to exact costs against Russia, not only with deep penetration strikes in Crimea, but also against Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.”
Here we go: Crimea all over again.
Burns actually believes that the humongous $60 billion new “aid” package which must be approved by the U.S. Congress will enable Kiev to launch an “offensive” by the end of 2024.
The only thing he gets right is that if there’s no new package, there will be “significant territorial losses for Ukraine this year.”
Burns may not be the brightest bulb in the – intel – room. A long time ago he was a diplomat/CIA asset in Moscow, and seems to have learned nothing.
Apart from letting cats and kitties galore out of the bag. It’s not only about attacking Crimea.
This one is being read with surpreme delight in Beijing:
“The U.S. is providing assistance to Ukraine in part because such activities help curb China.”
Burns nailed his Cat Out of the Bag Oscar win when he said
“if we’re seen to be walking away from support for Ukraine, not only is that going to feed doubts amongst our allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific; it’s going to stoke the ambitions of the Chinese leadership in contingencies ranging from Taiwan to the South China Sea”.
The inestimable Andrei Martyanov perfectly summed up the astonishing incompetence, peppered with tawdry exceptionalism, that permeates this performance by Burns.
There are things…
...“they cannot grasp due to low level of education and culture.
This is a new paradigm for them – all of them are ‘graduates’ of the school of ‘beating the crap from defenseless nations’ strategic ‘studies’, and with the level of economic ‘science’ in the West they cannot grasp how this all unfolds.”
So what is left is panic, as expressed by Burns in the Senate, mixed with the impotence in understanding a “different warrior culture” such as Russia’s:
Even as the acronym fest of the CIA and 17 other U.S. intel agencies have concluded, in a report shown to Congress earlier this week, that Russia is “almost certainly” seeking to avoid a direct military conflict with NATO and will calibrate its policies to steer clear of a global war.
After all the Empire of Chaos is all about Forever Wars.
And we are all in the middle of a do or die affair. The Empire simply cannot afford the cosmic humiliation of NATO in Novorossiya.
Still every “plan” – Taurus on Crimea-style – is a bluff.
Russia is aware of bluff after bluff. The Western cards are now all on the table. The only question is when, and how fast will Russia call the bluff.
Harry Potter as a Mexican Soap Opera | Telenovelas are Hell
What did a teacher say that made you immediately walk out of the classroom?
Once I walked into my college class of 200 people only to see my picture displayed on the projector screen and my instructor asking my classmates who had been signing in for me since I had clearly never been to class. Apparently I’d accidentally signed the attendance sheet for that day, the class day prior, and was a couple minutes late, so he had his ga literally examine my signatures and they determined that the letters were written differently each day. Since I was safely hidden behind a large pillar, I promptly left and called my mom crying. I had attended every class, albeit late on occasion, and was a very shy person. I dreaded going back to that class where I was certain everyone believed me to be a fraud.
Edit: I saw some people asked what happened afterwards, and I ended up emailing the professor during that class telling him what I’d seen and assuring him that I had attended every class and that I was very confused as to why he had made the accusation. It was then that he told me I’d been signed in on the wrong day and that was what had prompted his investigation into my attendance and signatures. He made it very clear that he did not believe my explanation and I met with him in his office where he had me sign my name about 20 times and kept threatening to fail me, saying I could easily be faking it. At this, because I was telling the truth, and had never had anyone question my honor like that before, I started to cry again, and begged him not to fail me. I honestly don’t remember much after that, only that my crying made him begrudgingly agree to allow me back in class. The rest of the time I attended class, I showed up early, sat in the very back and wore a hood until class began. I caught a couple people looking back at me on occasion (and I turned bright red as a result), but for the most part my incredible ability as a shy person to remain utterly invisible served me really well.
Cattle Drive Cornbread
Cornbread
Ingredients
4 cups cornmeal
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 1/2 cups chopped onion
1 to 2 finely chopped jalapeño peppers
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
1 1/2 tablespoons salt
2 teaspoons black pepper
1 (16 ounce) can creamed corn
Instructions
Boil a pan of water.
Mix cornmeal and vegetable oil well in a large bowl. Add just enough of the boiling water to form a dough that could be made into a ball.
Add remaining ingredients except for the creamed corn. Mix to blend, then add creamed corn.
Coat the bottom of a cast iron skillet with vegetable oil. Heat over medium heat.
Remove one cup of the cornbread mixture from the bowl, and add it to the skillet.
Flatten out the cornbread, and cook as you would a pancake.
This Japanese Man has 4 Wives, 2 Girlfriends & 54 Children…
An aunt and uncle are not invited to their niece’s wedding, but are invited to a bridal shower 300 miles away. Is this a gift grab? Should the aunt send a gift for the shower if they choose not to drive the distance?
Randy Miller suggested an edit to my story.
He blew my story away because I have never run into an ASSHOLE that removed an entire story.
Fuck You Randy Miller!
I had to rewrite it you ass!
I will tell you my story.
My sister-in-law has a son. When my nephew was young we saw him a lot, even visited a few times while he was in college, and took him out a few times for dinners. When he got married, we were not invited to his wedding. We weren’t even told about it. When we found out, I have to admit we were a bit hurt.
The reason we weren’t invited was because his grandmother, my MIL, was a crazy mean, lying, horrible woman. The entire family except the nephew and my husband had felt her wrath. To her, he was a golden child. She filled his head with lies, and she is convincing, especially to a kid. She did spend money on him, but nothing is without a string. When she met his girlfreinf, he was told she was a sl*t, a woman that would hurt him, a dirty girl, not worthy. Eventually, they broke up, but got back together., and then secretly engaged, and finally secretly married.
So there was a plausible reason why only his immediate family was present. They did not have any big thing, justice of the peace, ate out, done.
Now married, his wife was pregnant with their first child. I was invited to the baby shower. A part of me did not want to go because I was still hurt. Plus, I dislike showers. But I thought about it, and let it go. I attended the shower and bought a gift of of their registry that was fairly expensive for the baby, and them.
So the question is why would I agree to give them a gift for a baby shower, when I wasn’t invited to the wedding. Because I had found out the entire story, and realized I was being unkind, childish, selfish, and ignorant. And most important, I want a relationship with them.
I have never discussed being disappointed about not being able to attend their wedding, I love weddings. But I’m glad I rethought the emotions I felt because we have a great relationship now with his family. I know I would have regretted not going to the baby shower, and giving a gift to them for their baby.
So, you haven’t explained why you weren’t invited to the wedding. Could it be they were trying to keep it small. There could be many reasons, even that your invitation never arrived. But you need to decide if you have a relationship with these people that you wish to continue. If the answer is yes, then send a gift. If not, you have made up your mind.
Regarding the 300 miles away, unless they are living somewhere you could turn your trip into a vacation, if you have the time and money, I would just send the gift with a congratulatory note.
My opinion only!
Gen Z Doesn’t want to Work Anymore …..
Be the Rufus
“I was on the way home a couple of days ago when I saw this girl from my neighbourhood being very upset and crying on the street.
I decide to approach her. I asked: ‘Hi! Is everything okay?’
She barely looked up and then she just started bawling about her crappiest day she had.
She said she had lost her best friend because a stupid fight and that her mom is depressed all the time and she was also bullied in school all day…
I really wanted to make her feel better but I didn’t really know what to say, so I just asked: ‘Do you want to come in for a cup of tea?’
She said yes!
When we walked in the door, she looked up, her eyes opened up, and she was like: ‘Wooow!!!’ My house is full of paintings and all sorts of weird stuff; it’s messy but very colourful.
On the way in, I was even thinking about how messy my house was and felt bad about leaving tobacco all over the table that morning. But she didn’t seem bothered at all.
She said it was the coolest place she has ever seen. I asked her if she wanted to paint with me so we did. She painted the biggest canvas we could find with lots of bright colours. She used like 10-12 brushes and when she finished, her face had changed completely.
She was beaming!
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I may have made her feel better that day but she also made me realise how lucky I am. Maybe I am weird and I often feel that I don’t really fit anywhere, but my art was able to make this girl feel better about herself and lift her up from a dark place.”
America Collapsing Like Rome?- Upcoming Recession, WW3, Trump, China & Joe Rogan | Patrick Bet David
Have you, while repairing a computer, ever found anything that made your jaw drop?
Not working on a computer but: I worked at the 24 hour photo processing lab back in 1990. Based in Phoenix we got film flown in from all over, including Las Vegas. The usual family photos, the occasional but weekly roll of film for some one with a anatomically correct BDSM Barbie with ever-changing costumes, personal intimate photos for a loved one, and once in a while something different and more sinister.
One of our Las Vegas rolls showed men with a pair of boys, all nude no clothes in sight(ha-ha), no intimate contact showed just these men and the children. The lead tech made the call to the FBI for possible child porn or abuse. After the FBI came and collected the pictures and the address from the packaging, they proceeded to the Las Vegas area address.
What they discovered was the address was a nudist retirement community. The men were a couple and one of them was the grandfather of the boys. The parents knew about granddad and his partner living in a gay nudist community and had no concerns about the safety of the boys.
Douglas Macgregor Reveals the Truth: Russia’s -Ukraine Terrifying Hidden Power in the Conflict
https://youtu.be/otyhVg-oUHs
What is the most extreme example of human willpower and discipline?
A Woman Finds Her Daughter’s ‘Dead’ Rapist: people are in awe of her “willpower”
A woman from a remote village in Bihar, India tracked down her daughter’s rapist after he was declared dead leading to the closure of the case. The rape convict, Niraj Modi, has been sentenced to 14 years of imprisonment for raping a minor girl and his father to seven years for forgery, cheating, and dishonesty.
Modi, a 39-year-old man who was a school teacher at a government school, was accused of raping his 12-year-old student, a minor girl, in October 2018. The girl was attacked while she was by herself in a sugarcane field, and her assailant threatened to post a video of the assault online to keep her silent.
Soon after a complaint was lodged by the survivor’s mother, and Modi was arrested. But, he was out on bail after merely two months in prison.
In February 2022, Modi’s father Rajaram Modi, who is over 60 years old and works as a farmer, travelled to a court nearly 100km (62 miles) away from the village, with a lawyer to claim that his son died on February 27, 2022, at their village home. In order to get a death certificate issued, he provided two pictures from the cremation, receipts of the firewood bought for the ritual as evidence, signatures and the unique biometric identity number of five villagers as per Indian laws. However, as per a 54-year-old law, the authorities didn’t question the cause of death.
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Two months after this, the local authorities issued a death certificate and the court closed the case in May 2022 as the “only accused in the case” was dead.
However convinced that this was a forgery, the girl’s mother was the only person who suspected that the teacher had faked his death with the help of his father.
The mother said that she went from one home to another in order to enquire if Modi was really dead and not to her surprise, nobody had heard of the news. Following which, she went to the court urging an investigation into the matter.
In May 2022, she also wrote a petition to the local official claiming that the death certificate was issued based on forged documents and it needs to be investigated. Soon, investigation began and the authorities demanded more and fresh evidence from Modi’s family regarding his death including photos of the “deceased after his death, of the cremation, of the burning pyre, the last rites and [fresh] testimony of five witnesses”.
As a part of the investigation, members of the village council met the inhabitants of the 250 families in the village. It appeared that no one was aware of Modi’s death. Hindus often only shave their heads as a sign of mourning if a close relative passes away. However, none of the Modi family members had done so. In fact, Modi’s own relatives did not have the information regarding his death.
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After Rajaram failed to provide fresh evidence of Niraj’s death, he was questioned by the investigative office again.
Following the investigation, it was confirmed that Modi’s death was faked. The officers found that the teacher had falsified the signatures of the parents of five of his students’ parents on a document requesting his own death certificate. He informed the parents that in order to set up the students’ scholarships, he would need their biometric identity numbers.
The officials, then, cancelled Niraj Modi’s death certificate and charged his father with forgery and in July 2022, the case was reopened.
The mother’s relentless battle to track down her daughter’s “dead” rapist came to an end finally and in October last year(2023)he was convicted for his crimes.
Keep smiling
Beefy Cowboy Beans
There’s plenty of hearty ground beef in this Beefy Cowboy Beans recipe.
cowboybeans 750×1000
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
1 1/2 pounds ground beef
1 medium onion, chopped
1 red or green bell pepper, cut into 1/2 inch pieces
1 (16 ounce) can baked beans
1 (15 1/2 ounce) can Great Northern beans, rinsed and drained
1/4 cup tomato ketchup
1/4 cup Heinz 57 sauce
1 tablespoon packed brown sugar
2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
Instructions
In a large nonstick skillet, brown ground beef, onion and bell pepper over medium-high heat 6 to 8 minutes or until beef is no longer pink, breaking up into 1 inch crumbles.
Pour off drippings.
Season beef mixture with 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/8 teaspoon pepper.
Stir in beans, ketchup, Heinz 57 Sauce, brown sugar and Worcestershire sauce.
What is the strangest way you kept yourself entertained while in prison?
I have a theory about the sorts of people that are easy to entertain…. 😉
One cellie of mine was really into the markets. He spent incredible amounts of time building models to use against the daily Dow or NASDAQ numbers when we could get them in long enough blocks to be useful. A friend sent him five years of daily data for one index. He built some formulas to fire triggers when conditions were right. The formulas were designed to work in excel.
My job? Human spreadsheet. I took a couple months worth of the data, plotted it across a “spreadsheet” that I’d made from steno notebook pages taped together. The spreadsheet went from A1 to something like BK68. A handful of cells were raw data, the remainder were things like, “=If(And(AI22>AI21,B22>B21,Or(H22=I22,K22=K21)),BB22-BC21,BB22+BC21)”.
Pure drudgery. I had to proof for syntactical and lexical errors and churn out the data. We were sending the finished product (formulas) to someone who would drop them in excel and (hopefully) use them to come up with actionable Intel.
Woof. It took weeks to produce what excel can do in the blink of an eye!
Then there was this:
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I set a goal for myself to memorize two hours of poetry. I copied poems I liked in tiny handwriting and kept them with me most of the time so I could study while I waited (lots of waiting in prison).
I didn’t hit my goal, but I did manage to get to about forty minutes. The more I did, the easier it got. I learned that our memory works (kind of) like a muscle. Give it a good workout and it’ll get stronger.
Are those pastimes strange enough?
The (Overdue) Collapse of the 9-5 Job
Do police officers ever let criminals go because they sympathise with them?
A sheriff’s deputy drove up to me while I was standing leaning against my vehicle and asked me if I had any guns. I said not on me but there were some in the back of the pickup. He told me to stay where I was.
He walked back to the bed of my truck and picked up a poster that I had made up that said “WANTED Dead or Alive: Baby Bomber Brandes”
He read the poster and then said to me, “I know who you are. You are the man whose home was bombed and whose baby daughter has been in the hospital for the last 6 months, and this is going to be the hardest arrest I ever have to make in my career, but I want for you to know that if I were in your shoes, I would be doing exactly what you are trying to do.” Brandes was up a dead end road, and I was at the bottom waiting to kill him.
Brandes had called his employers at the ATF and told them that I had him trapped and they needed to help him get out of there. The ATF called the sheriff and had them come up and arrest me.
The deputy arrested and drove me to jail without handcuffs and when he dropped me at the jail explained to the jailers the situation. I was treated very well by everyone at the jail. A couple of days later I made a deal with the federal DA that I would leave town and leave their snitch alone. I had to, I had a quadriplegic daughter getting out of the hospital to care for.
I came to Oregon and had to care for my daughter while wearing an ankle bracelet for a few months. The feds did live up to their end of the bargain though: all charges were dropped a short time later. There really are some great cops out there and they are just like you and I and have big hearts.
The deputy actually apologized for having to take me in.
the American dream is dead… this is why people are leaving the US.
What are some fun and actually useful historical facts?
In early March 1933, a man walked into the Hi-Way Cigar Store in Pismo Beach, California, and laid a huge clamshell on the counter. “Gimme a box of cigars,” he said.
A clamshell used as scrip currency in 1933 shows the name of the shop issuing the currency, its value, and, on the inside, signatures of the people whose hands it passed through. (Clamshell Currency | Hakai Magazin
History is full of examples of successful local initiatives aimed at providing exchange media, but the Great Depression of the 1930’s saw this done on an unprecedented scale. There were literally hundreds of scrip issues that were put into circulation by a variety of agencies, including state governments, municipalities, school districts, clearing house associations, manufacturers, merchants, chambers of commerce, business associations, local relief committees, cooperatives, and even individuals.
These issuers went by different names, depending on who issued them and the circumstances of their issuance. Common scrip types were certificates of indebtedness, tax anticipation notes, payroll warrants, trade scrip, clearing house certificates, credit vouchers, moratorium certificates, and merchandise bonds.
Crescent City, California 1933 10 cent clamshell From the collection of Ken Barr Numismatics (Depression Scrip.com)
Besides learning how to “make do, or do without,” people began to establish mutual support structures, like workers’ cooperatives, many of which would recycle and repair donated or broken items.
People learned to share what they had, and to by-pass the market and financial systems. Most of these measures were considered stop-gaps to be utilized until things “got back to normal,” but in some of them there seemed to be the promise of more permanent improvements. One of these “stop-gaps,” which was intended to address the problem of the dearth of currency in circulation, was the issuance of “scrip.”
When the Depression and resulting banking crisis hit their community, the residents of the coastal town of Pismo Beach, California picked an unusual but logical medium of exchange. The pismo (Tivela stultorum) is a species of clam with a very thick shell
[6], found in large numbers at least as far south as 300 miles south of the US–Mexico border in Baja California on the Pacific Ocean side, where strong surf sometimes washes ashore live clams. Native American tribes in California relied upon the clams as a main dietary staple.
The shells are surprisingly large—up to roughly 15 centimeters in width—and many have faint traces of the clams’ natural shell patterning, faded wispy lines of purple at the edge of the exterior sides.
Shells were marked with India ink in denominations ranging from 25 cents to $20. Each piece was numbered, and signed on the front and on the back. As with the stamp notes of the Midwest, it was necessary to sign each clamshell on the back in order to keep it in circulation.
No formal requirements may have existed, but informal pressure certainly would have endorsed the practice. The shells were more or less credit—placeholders for real currency.
Eleven of the town’s merchants got together to issue the clam currency. Among them: K.L. Phillips service station, Henderson’s Drug Store, Hi-Way Cigar Store, Leiter’s Rexall Pharmacy and Restwell Cabins. Even the Pismo Beach Post Office accepted clam currency. It was agreed that when change in dollars or cents wasn’t available, they would issue shells to customers instead. Customers would use the shells in subsequent transactions after signing their names on the inside, endorsing them somewhat like checks, which gave businesses a record of who had “spent” their shells. If any customers still had shells rattling around once the banks reopened, they could ask the retailer to exchange them for cash.
The larger the amount, the larger the shell. The issue may have been partly intended as a spoof, or for sale to tourists, in the manner of German notgeld around 1920.
Each piece was numbered, and each was signed on the front and on the back. This was in the middle of Roosevelt’s 1933 national banking holiday, from March 6 to March 9, 1933, during which withdrawals were frozen. This gave his administration a chance to stabilize the banking system
.In an era of economic turmoil, thousands of banks were failing and Americans’ trust in the institutions had evaporated. Fearing that their money was no longer safe at the bank, many people had emptied their accounts and stashed dollars at home—which, unfortunately, further undermined the banks.
Proclamation 2039 ordered the suspension of all banking transactions, effective immediately.
The terms of the presidential proclamation specified that:
“no such banking institution or branch shall pay out, export, earmark, or permit the withdrawal or transfer in any manner or by any device whatsoever, of any gold or silver coin or bullion or currency or take any other action which might facilitate the hoarding thereof; nor shall any such banking institution or branch pay out deposits, make loans or discounts, deal in foreign exchange, transfer credits from the United States to any place abroad, or transact any other banking business whatsoever.”
The thought of having to go for four days without readily available cash shocked and traumatized America. Around the country, businesses began issuing IOU-style notes or ersatz dollars—often called scrip currency—in the form of metal or wooden tokens so that everyday transactions could continue even when retailers couldn’t easily issue change.
An estimated $1 billion in this scrip was issued by towns and counties, not to mention corporations, school boards, newspapers and a few wealthy individuals.
Most promissory notes looked like paper currency, but scrip was also printed on leather, metal, fish-skin parchment and, in Tenino, Wash., on slabs of pressed wood.
In creating the currency, the Pismo Beach business owners turned back the clock to the era before the Civil War when it was common to find locally produced scrip.
The 1933 scrip reflected the small community’s expression of resilience. A lack of dollars didn’t worry them. “All of a sudden this group of people said, ‘Well, we have what we do have’,
The clams are now on display at City Hall in the lobby by the city clerk’s office. Not a bad investment, especially considering how rare it is to find a legal-sized clam in Pismo Beach these days. In 2013, to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the clam script, Pismo Beach citizens resurrected clamshell money, making colorful homages to the 1933 variants.
10 Countries Where Americans are Not Welcome in 2024
As a new manager, have you ever had to fire someone on your first day?
I once had to fire someone just a few days after they started and it’s one of the very few times in my entire career where I fired someone on the spot. I had no choice.
At the time we were riding high as a company having rebuilt an entire culture and the company was working well. This admin who answered to me and a few others, while I was at lunch demanded access to HR documents that were confidential to the other employees. When our HR manager told her no but that she could talk to me, she started screaming at the top of her lungs at the manager and everyone in the offices was completely rattled by the scene.
I receive a call while I was eating my lunch to get back to the office because it was bad. I raced back and saw the looks on everyone’s face and asked a few what had happened. They all said the same thing. There was no other side to this. A few heard her demand for records and thought it was out of line in the first place and then with the screaming on top, there was no way to keep her. When I fired her, I explained that there was no turning that around. You couldn’t undo that damage no matter how she apologized and I didn’t want our culture to be everyone thinking that was even remotely okay.
It sucks to fire anyone. It’s not something any manager ever wants to deal with, but sometimes you have to do it for the greater good of everyone else. There were no employees who thought she should have a second chance. Not one. In fact, they were thrilled that I didn’t put up with it.
Male inequality, explained by an expert | Richard Reeves
The number of male therapists decreasing while the number of men needing therapy increases is worrying to think about.
What are some last-minute decisions that changed world history?
On April 14, 1865, as he walked into the morning Cabinet meeting at the White House, General Ulysses S. Grant received rapturous applause. Five days earlier, Grant had accepted the surrender of Confederate General Robert E. Lee at Virginia’s Appomattox Court House.
The nightmarish Civil War had ended. Lincoln and his Cabinet were in a celebratory mood, but Grant was bone-weary. As author Ron Chernow recounts in his biography Grant, the general looked forward to a short respite from the battlefield.
After the meeting closed at 2pm, Grant “lingered to speak with the president.” Lincoln invited the general and his wife to the theater that evening to see the play Our American Cousin, starring celebrated actress Laura Keene.
Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s Secretary of War, immediately worried for their safety.
“He had for some months been aware that threats of assassination were being made by certain evil minded persons against the leaders of the Federal government and army. The presence of the President of the nation and the Lieutenant-General of the armies at any public function at such a critical hour was simply courting disaster.”
Lincoln reacted flippantly, chaffing Stanton “for his lack of faith in human nature.” The president of a democracy, he averred, had to show himself to the people, and some danger was an inescapable hazard of office.
“To be absolutely safe,” he told John Nicolay resignedly, “I should lock myself up in a box.”
Grant searched for a gracious way to decline. The general soon received a note from his wife Julia, detailing her wish to leave for Burlington that day to see their children.
Grant politely declined to attend Ford’s Theatre, joking that he now had a command from Mrs. Grant. As he subsequently said, “I was glad to have the note, as I did not want to go to the theater.”
Lincoln, who was disappointed, understood. “Of course, General, you have been long from home, fighting in the field, and Mrs. Grant’s instincts should be considered before my request. I am very sorry, however, for the people would only be too glad to see you.”
Lincoln extended invitations to Stanton, Speaker of the House Schuler Colfax, and his son Robert Todd Lincoln, but all turned him down. Eventually Clara Harris and her fiancé, Major Henry Rathbone, agreed to accompany him.
At 10:13pm, while the Grants traveled east to change trains in Philadelphia, John Wilkes Booth slipped into the president’s box at the theater and pointed a derringer at the back of Lincoln’s head. He then “executed the gentle president with brutal efficiency.”
In a small appointment book, Booth was eager to record his accomplishment for posterity.
Until today nothing was ever thought of sacrificing to our country’s wrongs. For six months we had worked to capture, but our cause being almost lost, something decisive and great must be done. But its failure was owing to others, who did not strike for their country with a heart.
I struck boldly, and not as the papers say. I walked with a firm step through a thousand of his friends, was stopped, but pushed on. A colonel was at his side. I shouted “Sic semper” before I fired.
Telegrams notified the general of the terrible news, and he was immediately summoned back to Washington.
Grant had seen untold horrors during his campaigns. But he would remember this day as among the saddest of his life.
Weeks later, as the assassination conspirators stood trial, Grant discovered that he was one of several targets of the Confederate sympathizers. The killers had hoped to decapitate the Union government in one bold strike, but they lost their golden opportunity to attack the now-famous general.
The night of Lincoln’s assassination, as Grant and his wife prepared to board their train, they had noticed a man on horseback who had galloped past them twice. Each time, the figure had “thrust his face” at the couple and glared at them.
Grant later learned the glowering horseman was John Wilkes Booth, who had been conferring on the sidewalk with his actor friend John Mathews when the Grant carriage sped by and he set off in pursuit of it. From the heaped-up baggage, he must have confirmed that the Grants were leaving town and would not be at Ford’s Theater.
“It seems I was to have been attacked,” Grant stated, “and Mrs. Grant’s sudden resolve to leave deranged the plan.”
As Project Ukraine goes down the drain of history, Project Taiwan will go on overdrive. Forever Wars never die.
This is the Year of the Wooden Dragon, according to China’s classic wuxing (“five elements”) culture. The dragon, one of the 12 signs of the Chinese zodiac, is a symbol of power, nobility and intelligence. Wood adds growth, development and prosperity.
Call it a summary of where China is heading in 2024.
The second session of the 14th National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) was finalized on Sunday in Beijing.
The wider world should know that within the framework of grassroots democracy with Chinese characteristics, an extremely complex – and fascinating – phenomenon, the importance of the CPPCC is paramount.
The CPPCC channels wide-ranging expectations of the average Chinese to the decision level, and actually advises the central government on a vast range of issues – from everyday living to high-quality development strategies.
This year, most of the discussion focused on how to drive China’s modernization even faster. This being China, concepts – like flowers – were blooming all around the spectrum, such as “new quality productive forces, “deepening reform,” “high-standard opening-up,” and a fabulous new one, “major-country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics.”
“2024 is not only a critical year for achieving the goals of the ‘14th Five-Year Plan’ but also a key year for achieving the transition to high-quality development of the economy.”
Betting on strategic investment
So let’s start with Chinese Premier Li Qiang’s first “work report” delivered a week ago, which opened the annual session of the National People’s Congress. The key takeaway: Beijing will be pursuing the same economic targets as in 2023. That translates as 5% annual growth.
Of course deflationary risks, a downturn in the real estate market and somewhat shaky business confidence simply won’t vanish. Li was quite realistic, emphasizing Beijing is “keenly aware” of the challenges ahead:
“Achieving this year’s targets will not be easy.” And he added: “Global economic growth lacks steam and the regional hotspot issues keep erupting. This has made China’s external environment more complex, severe and uncertain.”
Beijing’s strategy remains focused on a
“proactive fiscal policy and prudent monetary policy”.
In a nutshell: the song remains the same. There won’t be a “stimulus” of any kind.
Deeper answers should be found in the work report/budget released by the National Development and Reform Commission: the focus will be on structural change, via extra funds to science, technology, education, national defense, agriculture.
Translation: China bets on strategic investment, the key for a high-quality economic transition.
In practice, Beijing will be heavily invested in modernizing industry and developing “new quality productive forces” such as new-energy vehicles, biomanufacturing and commercial space flight.
Science Minister Yin Hejun made it clear: there was an 8.1% increase in national investment in research and development in 2023.
He wants more – and he will get it: R&D spending will grow by 10% to a total of 370.8 billion yuan.
The mantra is “self-reliance”.
On all fronts – from chipmaking to AI. A no holds barred tech war is on – and China is totally focused to counter “tech containment” from the Hegemon as much as its ultimate goal is to wrest tech supremacy from its prime competitor. Beijing simply cannot allow itself to be vulnerable to U.S.-imposed tech choke points and supply chain disruptions.
So short-term economic problems will not be causing sleepless nights.
The Beijing leadership is always looking ahead – focusing on long-term challenges.
Learning lessons from the Donbass battlefield
Beijing will continue to steer the economic development of Hong Kong and Macau, and invest even more in the crucial Greater Bay Area, which is the premier southern China high tech, services and finance hub.
Taiwan of course was central to the work report; Beijing fiercely opposes “external interference” – code for Hegemon tactics. That will become even trickier in May, when William Lai Ching-te, who flirts with independence, becomes president.
On defense, there will be only a 7.2% increase in 2024, which is peanuts compared to the Hegemon’s defense budget now approaching $900 billion: China’s stands as $238 billion, even as China’s nominal GDP is approaching the U.S.
A great deal of China’s defense budget will go for emerging tech – considering the immensely valuables lessons the PLA is learning out of the Donbass battlefield, as well as the deep interactions part of the Russia-China strategic partnership.
And that brings us to diplomacy.
China will continue to be firmly positioned as a champion of the Global South. That was made explicit by Foreign Minister Wang Yi in a press conference on the sidelines of the National People’s Congress.
Wang Yi’s priorities:
to “maintain stable relations with major powers; join hands with its neighbouring countries for progress; and strive for revitalisation with the Global South”.
Wang Yi once again stressed that Beijing favors an “equal and orderly” multipolar world and “inclusive economic globalization”.
And of course he could not allow U.S. Secretary of State Little Blinken – always out of his depth – to get away with his latest “recipe”:
“It is impermissible that those with the bigger fist have the final say, and it is definitely unacceptable that certain countries must be at the table while others can only be on the menu.”
BRI as a global accelerator
Crucially, Wang Yi re-emphasized the drive for “high-quality” cooperation within the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) framework. He defined BRI as “an engine for the common development of all countries and an accelerator for the modernisation of the whole world”. Wang Yi actually said he’s hopeful about the emergence of a “Global South moment in global governance” – in which China and BRI play an essential part.
Li Qiang’s work report, incidentally, had only one paragraph on BRI. But then we find this nugget as Li refers to the New International Land-Sea Trade Corridor – which links China’s landlocked southwest with the eastern seaboard, via Guangxi province.
Translation: BRI will be focusing on opening new economic roads for China’s less developed regions, diversifying from the previous emphasis on Xinjiang.
Dr Wei Yuansong is a member of the CPPCC and also the Chinese Peasants’ and Workers’ Democratic Party – which happens to be one of the eight non-CCP parties in Chinese politics (very few outside of China know about this).
He offered some fascinating comments on BRI to Fengmian News and also stressed the need to “tell China’s story well” to avoid “conflict and incidents” along the BRI road.
For that, Wei suggests the need to use an “international language” in telling these stories; that implies using English.
As for what Wang Yi said in his press conference, in fact that was discussed in detail at the closed-door Central Conference on Foreign Affairs Work in late 2023, where it was established that China faced “strategic opportunities” to raise its “international influence, appeal and power” despite “high winds and choppy waters”.
The key takeaway: the narrative war between China and the Hegemon will be pitiless.
Beijing is confident it’s capable of offering stability, investment, connectivity and sound diplomacy to the whole Global South, instead of Forever Wars.
That is reflected, for instance, by Ma Xinmin, the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s legal advisor, telling the International Court of Justice that the Palestinians have the right to armed resistance when it comes to fighting the colonialist, racist, apartheid state of Israel. Therefore, Hamas cannot be defined as a terrorist organization.
This is the overwhelming position across the lands of Islam and across the majority of the Global South – linking Beijing with fellow BRICS member Brazil and President Lula, who compared the genocide in Gaza to the Nazi genocide in WWII.
How to resist collective West sanctions
The Two Sessions did reflect Beijing’s full understanding that Hegemon containment and destabilization tactics remain the biggest challenge to China’s peaceful rise. But simultaneously it reflected Chinese confidence on its global diplomatic clout as a force for peace, stability and economic development. It’s an extremely sensitive balance that only the Middle Kingdom seems capable of pulling off.
Then there’s the Trump factor.
Economist Ding Yifan, a former deputy director of the World Development Institute, part of the State Council’s Development Research Centre, is one among those who’s aware China is learning key lessons from Russia on how to resist collective West sanctions – which will be inevitable against China especially if Trump is back at the White House.
And that brings us to the absolute key issue being currently discussed in Moscow, within the Russia-China partnership, and soon among the BRICS: alternative settlement payments to the U.S. dollar, increasing trade among “friendly nations”, and controls on capital flight.
Nearly all Russia-China trade is now in yuan and rubles.
As much as Russian trade with the EU fell by 68% in 2023, trade with Asia rose by 5.6% – with new landmarks reached with China ($240 billion) and India ($65 billion) – and 84% of Russia’s total energy exports going to “friendly countries”.
The Two Sessions did not get into detail on some extremely thorny geopolitical issues. For instance, India’s version of multipolarity – considering New Delhi’s unresolved love affair with Washington – is quite different from China’s. Everyone knows – and no one more than the Russians – that within BRICS 10 the biggest strategic issue is how to accommodate the perpetual tension between India and China.
What’s clear even behind the fog of goodwill enveloping the Two Sessions is that Beijing is fully aware of how the Hegemon is – deliberately – already crossing a key Chinese red line, officially stationing “permanent troops” in Taiwan.
Since last year U.S. Special Forces have been training Taiwanese in operating Black Hornet nano microdrones. In 2024 U.S. military advisers are deployed full time at army bases on Kinmen and Penghu islands.
Those actually driving U.S. foreign policy behind the Crash Test Dummy at the White House believe that even as they are powerless to handle the Houthi Ansarallah in the Red Sea, they are capable of poking the Dragon.
No posturing will alter the Dragon’s roadmap.
The CPPCC’s political resolution on Taiwan calls for uniting “all patriotic forces”, “deepen integration and development in various fields across the Taiwan Straits”, and go all out on “peaceful reunification”.
That will translate in practice into increased economic/trade cooperation, more direct flights, more cargo ports and logistics bases.
As Project Ukraine goes down the drain of history, Project Taiwan will go on overdrive.
Forever Wars never die.
Bring it on.
The Dragon is ready.
White Women Are PISSED At White Men Dating Asian Women!
What do you know that most people don’t?
I’ve literally (and I actually mean literally here) won cash money on bets with friends about this and it is a method I’ve been using since I was a little kid. Works every single time; no exceptions.
I’m going to let you in on my secret to treat your hiccups in a few seconds every single time.
Let’s first understand what causes hiccups; only when we understand how a machine works can we fix it if it’s acting up. Your diaphragm is a dome-shaped muscle at the bottom of your chest. The diaphragm almost always works perfectly. When you inhale, it pulls down to help pull air into the lungs. When you exhale, the diaphragm relaxes and air flows out of the lungs back out through the nose and mouth.
But sometimes the diaphragm becomes irritated. When this happens, it pulls down in a jerky way, which makes you suck air into your throat suddenly. When the air rushing in hits your voice box, your vocal cords close suddenly and you’re left with a big hiccup.
Some things that irritate the diaphragm are eating too quickly or too much, an irritation in the stomach or the throat, or feeling nervous or excited. Almost all cases of the hiccups last only a few minutes. Some cases of the hiccups can last for days or even months, but this is very unusual and it’s usually a sign of another medical problem.
So now that we understand the cause of hiccups, it’s fairly evident that to treat them, all we need to do is soothe the diaphragm, reduce the irritation and bring it back to a normal operating state.
Fill a cup a little over half with water and hold the cup right side up. Stand and bend over, while placing your mouth on the opposite side of the cup so the opening is around your chin. Sip the water slowly, holding your breath as you do and breathing between sips. The combination of these forces your diaphragm to get back to its expected state of behavior.
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So the next time that cute girl you were trying to talk to has a bout of the hiccups, skip the cheesy lines telling her how “someone” is thinking of her and instead treat her hiccups with this method. I can assure you that will score you more brownie points that way.
What if God’s plan for me is to have an insignificant, unfulfilling, and miserable life?
There is a Russian joke.
At some point in life, a man who had previously been a great sinner has spiritually awakened and started to preach the word of God. He believed that he was inspired by the Lord Himself. So he dies, and meets St. Peter.
– Saint Peter, I need to see God.
– Why? You were an okay guy, we won’t send you to hell.
– No, I really need it. I need to ask Him one question.
St. Peter shrugs his shoulders and brings him in God’s Presence. The man asks:
– My Lord, tell me, did I understand my destiny well? Was it to carry Your word?
God is silent.
– Please tell me!
– Do you really want to know? – asks God.
– Yes, I long to know, I crave for this knowledge, I implore you!
– Okay, okay. Do you remember how you travelled by train from Samara to Syzran’? It was forty-seven years ago.
– Yes!
– Do you remember how you went to the dining car?
– Yes!
– Do you remember how your neighbour to the left asked you to pass the salt?
– Yes!
– This was your destiny. You were born to pass the salt to this person.
When I first heard this joke, I was shocked at the utter pessimism it expressed. Now, I see it in a different light. Yes, the guy was mistaken about God’s designs. But he was born just to pass the salt during a train voyage – and yet he managed to have a rich and fulfilling life. Good for him, isn’t it?
So if you really believe that God had such horrible designs on your life, why not try to see what you can do yourself?
My GF Made Friends With College F**inists And Thought I’d Be P-Whipped…Instead I Tossed Her Out
Watch this video before it is taken down. It is currently suppressed.
Ray McGovern with Nima Alkhorshid on the possibility Israel might have sent a F-35 loaded with atomics, the intention was to detonate them in high altitude, getting an EMP effect destroying the Iranian civil electrical grid. The military…
As I understood the discussion, Pepe Escobar reported it, and Scott Ritter, as a military expert, said that that event was logically impossible.
Nevertheless, we shouldn’t put anything past these monsters.
…
IF TRUE, RUSSIA SAVED THE WORLD ONCE AGAIN FROM …
… THE MINI-ME ROGUE STATE IN WEST ASIA BEING PROTECTED BY THE BIG ROGUE STATE IN NORTH AMERICA. A QUITE DANGEROUS PAIR FOR ALL OF US TO SAY THE LEAST.
Mao Zedong 毛 泽 东 (1893-1976) made sure in 1949, at the start of the People’s Republic of China, that all the Western Jews left China. I’m not speaking of the Jewish families of Kaifeng being there since the Song dynasty (960-1279). Obviously, they were not expelled. Also, I’m not speaking of certain Jews like Sydney Rittenberg 李 敦 白 (1921-2019) or Israel Epstein 伊 斯 雷 爾 爱 潑 斯 坦 (1915-2005) the Chinese rulers thought useful for them and China.
Contrary to many urban legends repeated with gusto by misguided people, I don’t think that the Jews (in general or those living in Israel) rule the World. Of course, their “elite” is part of the movers & shakers of this World but it doesn’t mean that they rule the World. They are powerful but not all-powerful as their excellent propaganda managed to make some incurable morons believe.
Their “elite” had a lot of money, sure …
But that kind of candies works only for lowly kakocrats and NO countries endowed with a minimum of aristocratic men at the helm of the State would have succumbed to money.
Same remark concerning the big rogue state.
What’s certain is that their “elite”, especially the Zionist variety (living in the US, Western Europe or Israel) is endowed with chutzpah to an inordinate level.
The British used them at the beginning of the twentieth century for getting a foothold in West Asia because Mark Sykes (1879-1919), the British representative in West Asia at the time, got extremely disappointing results in his negotiations with François Georges-Picot (1870-1951), his French counterpart. And being clever people, the Zionist leaders, having seen clearly through the British government and its representative, the clumsy Mark Sykes, skillfully accepted to be used in order to gain a state in Palestine, having stolen step by step the land from their rightful owners since then.
As crimes’ partners, the Zionists are in a very deep symbiotic relationship with the Anglo-American EstabLishment, hence the acronym I coined : KFC-AZAEL (Kakistocratic Feudal Conglomerate of the Anglo-Zio-American EstabLishment).
It’s a well-known psychological phenomenon that a servant will take on unconsciously/subconsciously the characteristics of the master. In this case, both groups suffering from the get-go of extreme hubris; together, they reciprocally amplify to a staggering degree their common deadly character flaw.
Here’s a reminder of what happened between May 16, 1916 (Sykes-Picot Agreement) & November 2, 1917 (Balfour Declaration) :
There is also THE OTHER URBAN LEGEND that, thanks to his agent having got the news that Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated at Waterloo on June 15, 1815 before everyone, the Rothschild at the time screwed everybody at the London Stock Exchange and that his family held under their thumb the British aristocracy & its global policies since then … Legendary, huh ?!
What is sure is that the Zionists managed somehow to get A LOT OF MONEY from the US officials. The US elite is completely hypnotized by the prestige (the bribes ?) of the Jews & the Jewish culture ???
Believe what you want but for me, NO ONE IS ALL-POWERFUL …
I repeat myself : If true, Russia saved the World once again.
Not only that, Russia sent a crystal clear message to the mini rogue state & to the big rogue state, that there are truly red lines in this World & there is someone to seriously enforce them.
SO I WISH PEPE ESCOBAR’s REPORT IS 100% TRUE.
Those people, the ruling classes of the mini rogue state & the ruling class of the big rogue state, will never change.
THE ONLY SOLUTION IS THEN :
Ceterum censeo KFC-AZAEL-nem esse delendam
PAX SINICA PERSICA KOREANA RUSSICA
IMPERIUM MUNDI SEMPER INVICTUS
Have you ever been pulled over by a police officer for an unusual reason?
Yes. I was on my way home and got pulled over by a cop who handed me two packages of really nice dog treats, asked to fuss my dog, and then gave me a card with his name and number. He was really friendly, lovely, asked me alot about my dog, and even asked me where I got my dog’s beautiful collar from. He then wished us well and left.
This is why.
I had been at a restaurant with three friends and my assistance dog. I’m a wheelchair user. It was a nice place, a bit pricey, but nice.
My assistance dog was always impeccably well behaved. She went under the table, next to me, and went to sleep.
We ordered our meal, and were eating, when some very bratty kids (6 ish in age, old enough to read) started running around. They saw my dog and started bugging her, getting near her and yelling WOOF!!! Then one brat poked her. My dog’s only reaction was to get up and put her head on my knee.
I strongly told Brats to bug off, leave my dog alone, and to go to their parents. Brat 2 joined her, saying, loudly, DOGS AREN’T ALLOWED IN HERE, STUPID!
I smiled as nicely as I could and tried to explain that she was a special helper dog… then Brat 1… who was a good 3 feet from my dog (whose head was still on my knee) yelled THAT DOG BIT ME!
The two terrors ran screaming ITS A BAD DOG! ITS A PITBULL! ITS GONNA KILL ME!
My dog was a smallish, exceptionally gentle, patient, and calm black lab.
In no time parents are with restaurant manager demanding that they throw me and my “pitbull” out of the restaurant. All the other patrons are looking and pointing.
I have not moved. We are still eating.
The parents (and its clear why the kids were monsters…) come over and demand to see my ID so they can “engage their solicitor”. The manager, clearly upset and embarrassed, said “I need to ask you to leave”.
I said I was not giving my ID to anyone, I was not leaving, and I would appreciate if they would leave me alone as my dog was allowed by law and they were ruining my.meal. I might have added that at least SHE had her shots and was obedience trained…
The mother screamed that my pitbull (sigh) had nearly ripped Perfect Princess’ arm off. Note said child has a small round superficial bite mark on her wrist encircled by the same pink as her lip gloss.
I told them all that my dog bit no one, and to call the cops but I wasn’t speaking to them any longer. My friend just kept eating and chatting as if nothingvwas wrong.
Parents storm off, manager begs me to leave, tells me to leave, demands I leave… I explained about Assistance Dogs, introduce her, tell him he can see she was not a problem but by then Parents are back and they had called 999 saying there was a rabid pitbull running arounfçattacking children … manager tells me to please get out. I reply…
She’s not a bitbull.
There is no rabies in Britain.
She had not moved from her space next to me.
She is wearing an AssistancevDog jacket, Ive shown my ID, and tried to explain. Im going no where.
I’m not really upset because this shit happens often enough that Im used to it… the brats were a unique twist, but people are really ignorant about Assistance Dogs.
All of a sudden a handful of cops burst in. Parents tell their side. They strut over to me and demand I immediately leave. I said that when we were done eating I would, but not until. In all this the waitress had continued to serve us… so we just got our puddings.
Lead cop is totally self impressed, and starts to read me the riot act, demanding I surrender this pitbull I brought into the place. I kept eating. He bangs his hand on the table to get my attention.
When he does, the dog treat I had on the edge of the table falls off and my sweet pup sticks her head out, takes the treat, and goes back under the table.
Just then the other cops come back and pull cop1 aside. Theyve read the situation, told him so.
He asks to see my dog properly. I called her out, and told her to ‘say hello’. She was wagging her tail (total fusspot) and raised her paw to the cop. All three of them are now admiring my dog.
Parents come over demanding I get arrested, deported, hung drawn quartered, etc.
Cop says Your children are harassing this lady, her dog is allowed…
Mother says about dog bite.
Cop says “thats not a dog bite, lady, and wasting police time is an offense. Leave this lady alone, get control of your kids, and either go sit or leave.”
He tells manager that there is no problem with us.
Cop sees we are all done and kind of hust waiting for this foolishness to end so we can leave as we’ve got our coats on, etc.
He says “I suppose you guys would feel better just getting out of here yeah?”
I start to argue but my friend says “Yes, we are going. “
He says “Im just going to get some details from the manager, and we will stay until you go, to keep the peace”.
Waitress comes over and I am about to ask for our bill but the cop waves her away saying “they are leaving, please just let them go…”
We go! Our bill was well over 100… I put £10 on the table as a tip.
We got in my van after loading my chair, saw the cops leave as we were.
When I saw the lights behind me I thought we were in trouble gor skipping out on the bill!
I did call the restaurant later and spoke to the manager to offer to pay, he profusely apologised and sent me a gift voucher and asked for another chance.
We did go back, just me and a friend (and my dog) there was a sign clearly posted that assistance dogs were welcome … but that poorly behaved children were not!
We lost Taska March 2024. Her successor is just as calm and well behaved
Assistance dogs are amazing
What secret did you learn about your neighbor that made your jaw drop?
When I was growing up my neighbor Tom was my role model. My father was an alcoholic who was rarely home except to sleep. When I wanted to learn something, I would talk to Tom. He had dropped out of school to help support his family, but was very talented with his hands. He built the house he lived in, and I mean completely, plumbing, electrical, everything. He was also an outstanding mechanic. He was very strong, but incredibly gentle and patient. I knew he was a vet, but he never talked about it except to say he hadn’t really done anything. When he died, his family searched for his records. They wanted to bury him with any medals he had been awarded. I think most of us expected stuff like a Good Conduct, National Defense, maybe a European Victory Medal. What they found out was that this quiet gentle man was a genuine war hero. He had been credited with single handedly stopping an attack by a company of Germans, effectively destroying the company through the combination of casualties he caused and prisoners he took, despite having been wounded at the start of the attack. For his actions he had been awarded a Silver Star. There were also a number of awards for other actions. I ended up spending 20 years in the military, and his rack of medals remains one of the most impressive I’ve seen.
Every mans daydream
What was a gift that made you speechless?
I was 39 with a 4 year old son. Becoming a single mom through adoption and everything was great. I had a great career, lots of friends, the child I’d been dreaming of etc. Suddenly, a massive heart issue popped up leaving me on disability for 11 months while it was diagnosed and treated. We had just moved to a new place a couple of months prior. Then, just after I paid the bills and went in for a minor heart procedure, it turns out the people I had been renting from were not the owners of the house. They were squatters and I was scammed. The actual owner showed up wanting me to pay first, last and deposit, and the past due electric bill that was nearly $1000 at that point (my rent included utilities). Obviously I couldn’t pay it so I had to move out quickly just 2 days after heart surgery. We found a place and I got help moving the majority of Stuff. Some was stolen while we were moving the other stuff.
I was released to go back to work and my HR informed me that they had accidentally overpaid me during my disability, do they were deducting that from my next 4 paychecks. About the same time, the Franchise Tax Board hit me with a penalty for not filing my taxes the year before and garnished 25% of my wages. So I was getting about $850 a month at that time. We were sinking fast! I wasn’t fully recovered enough to have strenuous work and I only get paid once a month at my regular job.
I was at my breaking point. Then, my only vehicle broke down, again! I am not super religious, but I do pray and I was definitely b my knees at that point. I didn’t know what I was gonna do. My credit was shot, I was SOL. One day I get the mail. There was a ton of bills in there. I left them sitting on the table for 2 days, because I cannot pay them anyway.
Finally, I sat down to figure it how bad this was gonna be and I noticed that one of the letters is a greeting card with no return address, but addressed to me.
I open it up and there is a beautiful card that says, “I see you struggling and I see you keep going. You are so loved and you will overcome this. Signed Jesus Christ.”
Inside the card was $2,000 in cash! I couldn’t speak for a few minutes! I still have no idea who sent that card, but it was definitely a game changer for us! To whoever sent that card and money, they definitely changed our lives.
“The United States has consistently claimed to comply with ‘the rules-based international order’, but the most significant rules are the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, including international legal norms such as UN Security Council resolutions.
The Security Council, as the core of the world’s collective security mechanism, should by no means be a tool manipulated by individual countries for geopolitical purposes, nor should it serve as a stage to pursue hegemony or power politics.
There is no exception in the United Nations in complying with international laws including Security Council resolutions, and the United States holds no privileges in this regard.”
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Excerpt from remarks by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi during a joint press conference with Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi after their talks in Jakarta, April 18, 2024.
INCREDIBLE SCENES (this is why I came to LAOS) 🇱🇦 LOST in LAOS Ep:2
I know Thailand is the land of smiles but in my own experience I found the people of Laos and Cambodia to be even friendlier than the amazing Thai people. Really miss that whole beautiful area of the world. Happy Travels
A real adventure…
What factors have contributed to the growing demand for fast food among Indian consumers?
Ah India
One aspect of the Nation I am proud of
Fast Food in India has been INDIANIZED better than in any other nation
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After all these years of McDonalds and KFC and Burger King’s and Taco Bell – the leading fast food is still Vada Pav
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When KFC was forced to launch Biryani among in its Indian menu when it was evident that the 2 Pc and 3 Pc and the famous Zinger was not doing it for the Indian people
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When India is the only country in the world where the top selling burger McAloo Tikki is a vegetarian one and the top 3 selling dishes – McAloo Tikki, McSpicy Paneer and Big Spicy Wrap (Paneer) are all vegetarian pushing the Filet O Fish to fourth sport and Mac Maharajah to the fifth spot
We may be utterly beholden to the West for their technology and core software in every sphere
Yet our Fast food growth is mainly due to our own foods
The leading fast foods of today include :-
#1 Vada Pav
#2 Pav Bhaji
#3 Momos
#4 Pani Poori
#5 Bhel Poori
#6 Aloo Tikki
#7 Samosa
#8 Kachauri
#9 Pizza
#10 Sev Puri & Samosa Chat & Aloo Chaat
(Zomato most ordered foods between 3 PM and 7 PM 2023)
Only Pizza stars in the top 10 popularly eaten fast foods of 2023
And guess which is Dominos most popular Pizza?
Indian Tandoori Pizza & Achari Do Pyaza Pizza
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Pepperoni or Hawaiian are the least selling while Tandoori Chicken sells far more
So it’s not just Mcdonalds outlets or KFC outlets that have spurred the taste of fast foods in India like it did in other nations
The three top reasons include
Availability
Fast Food is available everywhere today
You go to a street and you have a Pani Puri wallah or a Chat seller or a Pav Bhaji stall or a Bakery selling Puffs or a High End Pizza store
You are served in 3–4 minutes and finish in 10 minutes
Far more convenient for office culture and working culture
Price
Fast Food is not too expensive especially Indian Fast Food
You can get Pav Bhaji for 40–60 Bucks a plate which is way lower in cost and better in taste compared to a ₹ 378/- meal in KFC
Taste
Fast Food may or may not be unhealthy but it’s tasty
It’s spicy and Indians like spicy and tangy food
Chili Verde
Chili Verde
This authentic Chile Verde recipe made with fresh tomatillos, poblano peppers, jalapenos, onion, garlic, and cilantro takes a little more work than the typical “salsa dump” recipes but is absolutely worth it! Serve it with these Slow Cooker Pinto Beans, corn tortillas, or with some Cilantro Lime Cauliflower Rice.
There are so many different recipes out there for chile verde but unfortunately, most of them involve grabbing a jar of store bought salsa verde and dumping it into the slow cooker with either chicken or pork.
While this can be really delicious (case in point: Slow Cooker Salsa Verde Chicken), it will never be as good as making green salsa from scratch. While making salsa from scratch may sound intimidating, it’s actually really easy and only takes about 5 minutes of active prep.
Let’s start with the salsa. Chile Verde is made with a tomatillo salsa verde made with fresh tomatillos, chile peppers, onion, and garlic. The first step to creating this flavor is roasting the tomatillos and peppers. Roasting everything deepens the flavor, adds smokiness to the salsa, and also mellows out some of the sour flavor in the tomatillos. Next, it is important to brighten up the salsa and that is where the cilantro comes in.
How to Serve Chile Verde
Traditionally this dish is served with rice, beans, and tortillas with fresh limes but there are all kinds of ways you can use this. Here are some of my favorites:
Tacos: This is a no brainer, but clearly this stuff is delicious in tacos. Warm the tortillas and serve the chicken with fresh cilantro, limes, and queso fresco or avocado.
Burritos and Burrito Bowls: Build your own burritos or burrito bowls with rice and beans. Personally, I like to make burrito bowls since the chicken is moist and sometimes I find the burrito begins to fall apart before I finish eating it.
Quesadillas: While it may be tempting to stuff this inside a quesadilla, I actually prefer to serve it on top so the quesadilla gets nice and crispy on the outside. Simply make a cheese quesadilla and then top it with Chile Verde.
Scrambled eggs: This is so good for breakfast with some scrambled eggs and pinto or black beans. Trust me.
Baked potatoes: This is a great stuffing for baked potatoes or sweet potatoes topped with some melted cheese.
Chilaquiles: Chilaquiles are one of my favorite breakfast recipes and this Chili Verde is so good on a pile of chiliquiles. If you think you might make chilaquiles, I recommend doubling the salsa so you can cook the chips in the extra tomatillo salsa.
What is Chile Verde?
Many people wonder about the origins of Chile Verde and there is some debate whether chile verde is from Mexico or New Mexico. Most people agree that it is a dish that hails from Northern Mexico, and possible areas in New Mexico as well.
In Mexico, it is traditionally made with pork that is slow cooked in a spicy roasted tomatillo salsa that uses a variety of chile peppers. In New Mexico, it is made in a similar manner but traditionally uses Hatch chile peppers or other native New Mexico green chiles.
1Preheat the oven to broil or your oven’s highest temperature setting, like 500 degrees.
2Place the tomatillos, poblano pepper, jalapeno pepper, serrano pepper, onion, and whole unpeeled garlic cloves on a baking sheet sprayed with cooking spray. Broil for 10 minutes, flipping everything halfway through. If the garlic looks like it is beginning to burn, remove it when you flip everything else.
3Carefully remove the baking sheet from the oven. Place the peppers in a bowl and cover with plastic wrap or a lid. After ten minutes, carefully pull the skin of the peppers off, removing as much as possible. You can also remove the seeds, depending on how spicy you like things. Peel the garlic.
4Add the tomatillos, peppers, onions, garlic, cilantro. and chicken broth to a blender along with any juices from the pan. Blend until it reaches your desired consistency. Some people like a chunkier sauce and some prefer a smoother sauce.
5Stovetop: Heat the olive oil over medium heat in a Dutch oven or heavy pot. Add the chicken (or pork), season with salt and pepper, and brown for 2-3 on both sides. Add the sauce and bring to a simmer. For chicken, let simmer on low heat for 25-30 minutes until the chicken easily shreds with a fork. For pork, simmer for 2.5-3 hours until pork easily pulls apart.
6Slow Cooker: Heat the olive oil over medium heat in a Dutch oven or heavy pot. Add the chicken (or pork), season with salt and pepper, and brown for 2-3 on both sides. (You can skip this step but it adds more flavor if you sear the protein first.) Add to the slow cooker with the sauce. For chicken, cook on low for 4 hours. For pork, cook on low for 8 hours or until the pork is fork tender.
7Instant Pot: Use the instant pot saute setting. Add the chicken (or pork), season with salt and pepper, and brown for 2-3 on both sides. Add the chile verde salsa and cover. For chicken thighs, use the manual (Pressure Cooker) setting and cook for 8 minutes. Let naturally release for at least 2-3 minutes before using the steam valve. For pork, use the manual (Pressure Cooker) setting and cook for 45 minutes. Let naturally release for at least 2-3 minutes before using the steam valve.
When it comes to the heat in this recipe, it comes from using three different types of chile peppers that vary in strength and flavor. The poblano has the least amount of heat but adds a lot of flavor similar to a slightly spicy bell pepper.
The jalapeno is in the middle when it comes to spice and the serrano is the spiciest. You can vary the heat in the salsa by using different amounts of each pepper to find the right combination for you. You can also remove the seeds for less heat or leave them in for more.
Whenever making salsa, start slowly and taste along the way until it is as spicy as you like. Generally, I recommend making it slightly spicier than you want your final product since it will mellow out when cooked when it is cooked with protein.
If you have kids who don’t like spicy, make the salsa using just one seeded poblano pepper for flavor. Cook the protein in this mild salsa. Then puree the remaining peppers with a little chicken broth. Stir this spicy salsa into your dish individually so you can have a spicy version. I always make it this way and my toddler devours the milder chicken while I make mine super spicy.
The next decision when making Chile Verde is what kind of protein you would like to use. Traditionally Chile Verde recipes are made with pork but it is often made with dark meat chicken as well. Both options are delicious.
Normally I like to make it with chicken for a quick meal and I use pork when I will have more time since the pork takes much longer to cook. To keep things lighter, I like to use boneless skinless chicken thighs or a lean pork shoulder roast, but any protein would work.
When I was a boy in middle school, perhaps 12 to 14 years old, I needed a new pair of boots for winter time. Well, it seemed that my father has an old pair of work boots that he never used. And so he gave them to me to wear during Winter.
These were “Engineer’s boots”, and are typical boots that you see bikers wear or the Terminator, dressed in biker garb, wear. I thought that they looked cool.
boots
Only one thing though.
They were steel toed, meaning that the front of them were steel. Great to protect your feet. But, terrible in the Winter.
My father knew that this was a problem, and told me so. But I refused to listen to him, and so I wore those things for maybe four or five years until I went and got myself a real genuine pair of hiking boots.
Hiking Boots
Never the less, it was a true and real miracle that I never got frost-bite while wearing them. My feet were constantly frozen each and every time I stepped outside in the frozen woods around my home.
Was I bad and wrong for wearing them? Yes I was.
Should my father thrown those boots away and got me a replacement pair without the steel toe up front? Yes he should of.
But time is the teacher, and what I know know is only through the prism of experience. What experiences have you had that would have avoided mistakes in your past? I’ll bet you have many.
Don’t you?
As a side note, when I lived in Boston, Massachusetts, I needed a good pair of Winter Boots. This of course, was decades after the boot adventure. So I went to a local store and got me a proper pair of New England Winter boots, and I’ll tell you, I was never happier.
Easy to put on and take off. Easy to clean and dry: the inserts came out and were washable. Comfortable, warm… always. And my feet were never cold, wet or frozen.
And NO, this is not a paid advertisement. Get them HERE.
Bean Winter Duck Bill Snow Boots
These were the shit! I’ll tell you what.
Today…
Generate you own music
Free application, and this makes actual music. Of course, I have been playing around with it.
[Verse]In Jamaica, sunny days Irie vibes, and feelin' irie ways (irie ways) But when me hungry, I know what's good Peanut-butter and jelly sandwich, that's what's understood (oh yeah)
[Chorus]Spread the peanut-butter, spread the jelly (ooh-yeah) Put 'em together, it's a reggae melody Spread the peanut-butter, spread the jelly (ooh-yeah) Dance along, feel the rhythm, it's so jellylicious (jellylicious)
[Verse]In the morning, when I rise I got a craving, I can't disguise I need some sweetness to start my day Spinnin' around, like a reggae DJ (yeah, yeah)
[Chorus]Peanut-butter and jelly, it's the perfect blend (ooh-yeah) Spread it on thick, let the flavors transcend With every bite, feelin' oh so fine (oh so fine) Groovin' with PB&J, it's a reggae rhyme (yeah, yeah)
Here’s two Country & Western songs about Peanut-butter pies…
[Verse]Sitting on the front porch, gettin' lost in the sun Got a jar of peanut butter, it's my kind of fun Mix it up with some sugar, creamy and sweet Spread it on a crust, can't be beat, can't be beat (ooh-yeah)
[Chorus]Peanut butter pies, oh they make me smile With every bite, it's like a little slice of sky Peanut butter pies, oh they're pure delight They keep me comin' back, every single night (ooh, ooh)
[Verse]Well, I was sittin' on my porch in the sunny afternoon When my mama brought me a treat, it was comin' to bloom She said, "Darlin', I made your favorite, just for you" I took a bite and knew I had to share the news
[Chorus]Peanut-butter pies, sweet as a southern sunrise Meltin' in your mouth, takin' you to paradise With each bite, my heart takes flight, oh my-oh my Peanut-butter pies, can't get enough, oh, I can't deny
AI is a major force, and will slam-dunk our society. Today…
Have you ever met your school bully as an adult?
I was terrorised as a child by the older kids in my neighbourhood. We were poor but I was quite popular with other kids my age. For some reason this made me a target with the popular older kids. They would take great pleasure in chasing me and if they caught me they would beat me to a pulp. It was the 80s and this kind of thing was just accepted.
Fast forward 10 years. I’ve done an apprenticeship as a scaffolder, put on a lot of weight. Bulked so much I’ve earned the name Tank at work. I bump into the ring leader of the older kids in a night club.
I get we were kids when the bullying happened and think that as he’s now grown up he’s probably grown up. As I pass him I smile and say “Alright, mate?” He replies with “Don’t fucking speak to me”. This stops me in my tracks. I look him dead in the eye. The club feels like it’s gone silent as I contemplate knocking his head clean off of his shoulders. I said to him:
“Listen Julian, we’re not 10 any more and this isn’t the estate, now, turn back around and walk out of here before you get hurt.”
He froze. There was a look of sheer confusion on his face. He turned on his heels and walked out the door without another word.
The simple answer: Me. On September 3, 2012, when I was 35, I had the first of 4 sudden cardiac arrests and clinically died. I was anoxic, or without breath for somewhere under 10 minutes. I was diagnosed with a heart condition called Brugada Syndrome, which is a gene mutation that largely goes undiagnosed because the first symptom is death. In that time, I suffered mild traumatic brain injury or tbi. Before that I was a lively, smart woman, mom, fluent Spanish speaker with a great job of 6 years. After I came home, I couldn’t recall that thing the kids played with in the backyard. I just pointed and cried. Their swingset. My doctors couldn’t agree on when, or if I should return to work. Subsequently I was terminated as was denied short term disability because their physicians didn’t agree with mine and my time off wasn’t covered. I had never been fired before, and it’s never gotten easier since. I’ve been fired 4 times. I have worked at Walmart, and as a receptionist at a small nursing home. My doctors told me to try Disability(SSDI). I tried and was denied, saying I was too young and able to be a mail sorter. I kid you not. I struggle. Then 5 ‘events’ with my ICD(internal defibrillators) and 2 unsuccessful cardiac ablations left me with anxiety, panic attacks and PTSD. I have lost so much of my memory, including most of my Spanish skills, my confidence, my ability to learn new things much less recall previous things. My short term memory is appalling and I reach for words often. 3 weeks ago I was let go from yet another job, despite telling them of my ADA status. At least I got excellent counseling which all but erased the mental anguish.
So yes, I miss the person who I was.
I can relate to this
Chicken and Vegetable Stew (Saucochi di Gallinja)
2024 02 18 09 50
Yield: 8 or 9 servings
Ingredients
1 (2 1/2 to 3 pound) broiler-fryer chicken, cut up
6 cups water
2 tablespoons instant beef bouillon
2 medium tomatoes, chopped
2 medium onions, chopped
2 medium potatoes, cut into 1/2 inch slices
2 medium sweet potatoes or yams, cut into 1/2 inch slices
3 ears sweet corn, cut into 3 pieces
1/4 pound winter squash, pared and cut into 1/2 inch pieces (1 cup)
1/2 cup fresh or frozen green peas
1 small hot chile pepper, stemmed, seeded and sliced
2 teaspoons salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
Chopped chives
Instructions
Heat chicken, water and bouillon to boiling in Dutch oven; reduce heat. Cover and simmer 30 minutes.
Skim off fat. Add remaining ingredients except chives. Heat to boiling; reduce heat. Cover and simmer until thickest pieces of chicken are done and vegetables are tender, about 20 minutes.
Garnish each serving with chives.
What China Just Did Changes The Entire Space Industry And America Is Terrified!
Once again as a racist you cannot see beyond wages. As a spremacist you miss the point all together about the education, the trainings , the willingness to learn, the feebleness, the ability to adapt and change, the characteristics of Chinese language that is superior in retaining knowledge and the unique discipline, and hard work of the Chinese workers and a whole host of the Confucian and Taoist edicts that groomed a Chinese worker from birth that so much affect the immense productivity and efficiency of Chinese workers.
So white Caucasians analyst are simply unaware of these characteristics and they think simply and blindly thinks that Chinese makes things cheaper because of wages and government support and taxes means absolutely nothing compared to a perfectly well trained and highly disciplined worker.
My first job as a Town Manager in the early 80’s was in a small town in Kentucky along the Mississippi River. Some interesting tid-bits….
The Chief of Police was driving me around my first week there. We were in a residential area and he stopped and opened his door. He got out his shotgun and shot a dog in the street. He got back in the car, called Public Works and told them to pick up the dead dog on Maple Street. When I asked him why he shot the dog he said it didn’t have a dog tag.
Town Hall was located in downtown. I’m working in my office on the second floor and when I hear a gun shot blast. I looked out the window and there’s a half dozen people waking down the middle of the street with shotguns. I called the police dispatcher and said there’s people with shotguns walking downtown and shooting, please let the Chief know. The dispatcher said “yeah, it’s pigeon day. All the duck hunters get together and shoot the pigeons. It’s a warm up to duck season which starts this weekend. I believe the Chief is with them.”
The local doctor died a few months before I got there. He had been the only doctor in town for 30+ years. He willed his medical office building to the Town. One of my jobs would be to modernize the office and find a new doctor. When I went in the office to see what needed to be done I noted he had two waiting rooms. I assumed that was “well” patients and “sick” patients. It wasn’t. It was blacks and whites.
The nearest TV stations was Memphis and Cape Girardeau, Missouri. They were too far away for ‘over the air’ reception so people in town didn’t own television sets. I called a cable company and had them built a cable system in town.
We operated the local utilities, which included water, sewer and natural gas. We had a separate building for the electric system. Two women worked inside the office and a crew of men did the outside electric work. One of the women went to Disney World on vacation. While she was gone the other woman had an emergency operation. This was the first time both had been gone at the same time in years. I called my wife and asked her to cover for them until one or the other got back. My wife was a CPA and home along (without TV) with our toddler son. She jumped at the chance to do something. She opened the office and before lunch she called and told me the woman were taking cash out of the cash drawer and covering the missing money with their own personal checks, which they never deposited. More than $3,000. I told her to deposit their checks. I hired an auditor to come investigate, had the locks on the doors changed, filed a police report and informed the Mayor & Council. I fired the women. The checks bounced. The Town Council told me to not press charges against the women. The women filed for unemployment, which I appealed and won.
There was a giant flood wall to keep the river from flooding downtown. We had a number of large pump stations to pump water over the dikes and flood wall. Beavers was the bane of the town. There was a “bounty” on beaver ears and there was a local guy who bought beaver fur.
The volunteer Fire Chief invited me to a monthly last Friday cookout which I accepted of course. As it turns out that was men only, no wives. Just as well, my wife would never had eaten the beaver stew.
I was the Town Manager for 365 days and took a job in Tennessee in a very interesting town.
The Ukraine War taught the Taiwanese a lesson. The so-called protection of Taiwan by the West is to make Taiwan the battlefield and let the Taiwanese suffer the consequences of the war. Taiwan is part of China at present International laws so China has sovereignty over Taiwan. China has an Anti-Seperation Law. if Taiwan pushes for independence, it will get into war. Now they understand the so-called Western protection for them is a trap. Their youths will die. Their seniors and children will become refugees that already saturated the developed countries so that they may have no place to escape the war.
The West will supply weapons to Taiwan to fight till the last Taiwanese, just as now Ukraine has to fight the last Ukrainians.
Ukraine War is evident. The US wants Taiwan to claim independence as soon as possible. So the US makes a big arms sale to Taiwan, giving them the false perception of “safe”. The US needs the Ukraine War to weaken Russia. The US wants to weaken China more than Russia. So the US wants Taiwan to provoke a proxy war for the US.
The US is a very smart businessman. If the US wages war on China, the US soldiers will die and the US has to commit many resources such as arsenals. Now it can let the Taiwanese replace the US soldiers in the war, and Taiwan even has to purchase the weapons, to fight the war for the US geopolitical objective. The US wants to fight a war against China without cost a penny and a single soldier. The US wants a war it can profit from while Taiwan bears all the costs, including lives and weapons. The US already profited from the perception of war because it made a big sale of weapons to Taiwan.
You see this face and you don’t really get awed by these warnings
Your first thought is STUPID MORON
This guy doesn’t have the ability to put that voice of steel that some US Leaders had in the past
It’s why everybody has openly mocked him, from MBS blatantly ignoring him for 24 hours to Jordan openly telling him to go f*** himself to Qatar to Iraq all snubbing him including our EAM Jaishankar
image 261
Someone like James Baker would be different
His voice would have that steel warning
You would think twice before acting against the man
Not Blinken
Not Biden
Not Austin
Not Sunak
Not Ursula
These are Circus Clowns and if they warn, you can laugh and ignore them safely
What comes to mind as I move through a dining experience?
When you arrive, you’re greeted by a doorman, who opens the car door, ladies first. If it’s raining, they escort you to the door under a large umbrella.
The door is opened for you, and the host(s) say hello immediately rather than looking down at a floor chart. Maybe greeting you by name.
There is either someplace to check your coat, or the host helps you off with yours and checks it for you. The host would return it to you when you’re ready to go.
The music is subtle, whatever kind it is.
Lighting is appropriate. There are fresh flowers and in the evenings, candlelight (with real candles). People look better in candlelight, and a lady feeling pretty creates another luxurious atmosphere.
If, God forbid, your table wasn’t ready you’re escorted to the bar for a cocktail. There are no buzzing pagers (nor inappropriate jokes about stuffing it down their pants), no name screaming when your table was finally ready. The host carries the drinks for you to your table. If more than two, the ladies’ drinks are carried. Checks are seamlessly transferred from the bar to the table. You TIP the bartender very subtly.
Chairs are pulled out for you, ladies first. When all are seated, then the menus are handed out.
Menus might be printed daily, but there is no stickiness, crumbs, or fingerprints on menus that are reused. No pictures on the menu, nor vendor logos. Probably no prices. They probably don’t offer wings.
There are utensils for each basic course. The waiter (and they’re waiters, not servers) replaces silverware with each course if the meal choices require a different utensil, usually with a mise en place. Proper underliners are used under soup or dessert bowls, ramekins come on a plate, too. (Ben Maurer) Crumbers are used. There are chargers.
No water spots on the silver or glassware. Or windows! (Leroy Binx) God forbid, no crumbs on the floor or seats.
Having someone walk you to the restroom rather than pointing across the room.
There isn’t a “no problem” to be heard.
There is no He or She when addressing someone about someone else. For example, not “She ordered the salmon” but rather “The lady ordered the salmon”. The word “food” is a 4-letter “f” word. (So is “free” and “fair”) It’s “your meal”, “your dinner”, etc. Not “your food”. One doesn’t eat, one dines. You’re not eating with us tonight, you’re dining with us tonight. (Sorry – I don’t know the answer to the pronoun issues people are having these days.)
Water glasses are never low, and you didn’t have to ask for water in the first place. Water is poured after you’re seated, without a drop being spilled on the tablecloth. Although, the waiter might still ask you if you prefer sparkling or still bottled water.
The meal looks beautiful, i.e. no broccoli stems pointing up. (People eat with their eyes) No finger prints on the plates. Protein (main course) is always served at 6:00 on the plate. Ladies first. Period. Meal delivery as well: “And the lady ordered the salmon” as the dish is placed in front of her, coming in from the left. Plates are not handed to the guests. Served from the left, removed from the right. Sometimes, every person is served at the very same time by a group of waiters. It’s called a “drop” (A group of waiters? A “gaggle”? Just kidding!)
Black or white napkins, which, if you get up are refolded neatly on your chair.
Every time a table is bussed, which is immediately, it looks like it’s never been seated before. Condiments (salt & pepper) full and clean, perfectly placed. Freshly ground pepper is always offered, along with grated cheese where appropriate. The latter either freshly grated into a bowl, served by spoon (rare) or by a little grinder that is silver, not plastic. No one says, “Say when”. Holding up your hand a little, palm down says it all.
No catsup or mustard bottles in sight. Ever. (Andre Serafin and Kristin A) Mustard, catsup, mayonnaise, and horseradish are served in ramekins or tiny bowls with small spoons. They probably don’t have steak sauce, although accommodating a guest is paramount, so these days it will probably come in a ramekin, too.
Edited 12/10/19 to add: I’ve often enjoyed and taken for granted the service of a Sommelier, whose job it is to create wine lists, pair wine, and make recommendations of wine on or off the written wine list. What I didn’t know, was the rigorous training and testing it takes to become a Sommelier! There are only a few over 200 in the world, so they are a Big Deal. That said, I’ve never known if the Sommelier just came to our table because we were looking at wine, or if their expertise needed to be requested. A glaring hole in my experience, I must say. Any thoughts or “subtle differences” to contribute?
A red wine glass for red, a white wine glass for white. Red wine is never oxidized. When a bottle of wine is served, it’s (Steven Michael) decanted or chilled appropriately. The restaurant doesn’t even ask, and they know what and when wine should be decanted. The wine tasting is handled with grace and silence, in the appropriate order. The cork should be placed next to the host (Liam MacDonald) so the host can make certain the cork is moist and there aren’t any telltale signs the wine has turned. If the table isn’t already set with glasses for that wine selection, the appropriate glasses are set once the wine is approved. (Rachel Bateman) The invisible waiter tops off the wine. The guest never touches the bottle.
The port doesn’t have pour spouts in them, nor does good scotch or whiskey. White Zinfandel isn’t a featured wine type. There’s a good chance there is no happy hour.
There are no dirty aprons nor shirts on the waiters. No shabby shoes. No crazy hair styles, piercings or tattoos. (Sorry all. That’s life.)
When its a mixed gender couple or table, males’ plates are never removed until the females are finished dining.
Dessert menus are handed out without asking, coffee, tea, espresso or an after dinner brandy or port is always offered.
There are no bus tubs, no stacks of dishes through the dining room, and empty plates are removed IMMEDIATELY directly to the kitchen. Oh. Plates are removed to the kitchen to be boxed. A guest is never, ever, handed a box with a cheery, “Here you go!” The package is always in a nice bag.
There is some controversy in the comments over leftovers. Since I am writing this, I’ll say my own feelings agree with Tim Chisell and Umair about waste, portion control and not being served troughs of food, so there really shouldn’t be leftovers. People do take food home (have you never seen a little tin foil swan?) so I added what a restaurant would not do: hand you a big box.
When you get your leftovers home, the contents look like a beautiful meal. After all, those are the very last impression of you as a waiter and the restaurant.
The check. Reminded to me by my mother. One signs on one’s account. If one must handle a form of payment, it’s normally a card, very subtly put into a check presenter. Not stuck out the top for all to view.
Believe it or not, it’s not just bread or rolls before a meal. It’s not valet parking, or sorbet between courses. Those would be obvious attempts, but if other items such as those which come to mind for me aren’t present, it’s nice, but maybe — not always — a wannabe. It could just be a nicer restaurant not trying to be more than a comfortable, more upscale place to dine. But high-end? Add in details such as these and it will elevate a restaurant.
So there are a lot more obvious indicators, but what really makes or breaks the difference is quality of the food, the service and presentation. Anticipation of the guest’s needs. Sauces, condiments, appropriate suggestions that might enhance the meal for some, but not for others — just to be sure. The appreciation of the guest.
Edited to add: I’ve received so much fun feedback to this answer, I thought I’d incorporate suggestions from commenters. Quora is acting funny (maybe) and not letting me see all the comments, but I’ll be adding them in. Thank you!
And, now I read that I, or this answer, is the highest read in the restaurant category. Interesting to me that something I began almost wistfully others have enjoyed. So thank you and thanks for participating!
If I could change one thing about American schooling — mostly at the high school and college level — I would make it mandatory to teach financial literacy. And I don’t mean basic stuff like how to write a check — that was what passed for “financial literacy” when I was in high school in the 1980s.
I mean we turn out college and high school graduates who have never learned about things like credit scores, how loans work, how taxes work, the value of retirement accounts, how the stock market really works, etc.
My two kids are ages 25 and 23, and anything they know on those subjects, they mostly learned from my wife and me. For the most part, we don’t teach kids how to stay out of financial trouble.
So we have full-grown adults walking into a car dealership, and the salesman steers the question to, “How much car payment can you afford?” The salesman is hoping that the customer is financially illiterate and doesn’t understand what a terrible question that is — for the customer. The salesman will hear that you can afford $600 per month and come back with, “Hmm, we can work with that.” The customer ends up leaving in their $40,000 car, pleased as punch that they can actually afford it, and they think the salesman did them a favor. Maybe down the road they figure out that they’re paying 12% interest on an 84 month car loan, and that they only got half of what their trade-in should have been worth.
Same thing happens on the mortgage front, by the way. Some loan officer runs a preapproval on a young couple and tells them they can afford a $300,000 house. I guarantee you that the couple zooms in on that price point. If they slowed down and asked, they might find out that they can qualify for a $225,000 house with a 15 year mortgage at a substantially lower interest rate, meaning that they build equity faster, pay less in interest, and should they choose to do so, own the house free and clear after 15 years, as opposed to still owing 15 more years of payments if they’d taken the 30 year mortgage. And all they had to do was ask, and reset their expectation to a slightly less expensive house.
So in summary, why are people struggling and over-spending? Because they’re financially illiterate, and we as a society don’t seem to think that’s a problem.
The only time it really happened was when I sprained my ankle.
I was working in retail management and we had inventory coming up on a Sunday.
Friday I sprained my ankle bad. But because of how US healthcare is, I tried to put off having it seen by a doctor because, ugh horrible health insurance and bills. But that Saturday, since I could barely walk, I saw a doctor. And after x-rays to confirm it wasn’t actually broken, given an air-cast boot and doctor’s note for my employer with work restrictions.
I was scheduled that Sunday for inventory plus 2 hours in the store prior to closing. I showed up, air-cast and all, to try to explain that I didn’t think I’d be able to work the inventory. I mean, seems obvious right? Air-cast, doctor’s note, work restrictions, etc.?
The other store management had zero issue with me not working the inventory, they understood I was actually injured and not faking it. They also knew how rarely I called in.
Not to my district manager. Who threatened me with termination. 4 years of work, almost never calling in sick, working every Helliday shit shift, and because I was only one of 5 members of management there that day who was actually injured, I could be fired.
So, malicious compliance it is.
My work restrictions were very detailed and explicit. No climbing, no squatting, no standing for more than 15 minutes at a time, must elevate my ankle every 30 minutes, must be allowed to sit for any tasks that don’t need to be done standing, etc. I also, per company policy, faxed (yes, that long ago) copies of my doctor’s note, etc. to the HR office with a follow-up email.
And I followed the work restrictions to the letter for the whole shift. Despite the fact they had external inventory counters, it still took longer than scheduled, which meant, by law, every member of the store management staff other than the district manager(salary position) had to be paid overtime, since it put us all over 40 hours for the week.
On Monday, the district manager got chewed out by HR and his boss, the area manager.
For having so much overtime (for 5 people, about 2 hours each), for ignoring my doctor’s note, for not excusing me from inventory, for erroneously threatening me with termination (my email mentioned I understood termination of my employment was a possibility due to my injury), and a few other things.
I received 2 days off with pay, apologies from the area manager, HR and the district manager (begrudgingly from him), and wasn’t written up.
And while the district manager bore a grudge against me for his ass chewing, he was also incredibly hesitant to pull any similar stunts against me. It took him about 8 months to do so, and when he did, I left the company, after explaining why to HR, the area and regional manager.
My quitting also left not one, but 2 stores short staffed as he had expected me to cover another store’s shifts after writing me up, denying me a transfer promotion, and rescinding pre-approved vacation time off.
His actions also led to another ass chewing by his superiors after I left. And two of the top performing employees to quit shortly after.
I’ve been to more suicides and sudden deaths than I can remember, but one has always stood out. It was a lady who had hanged herself. It wasn’t particularly gruesome, she was discovered very quickly, and she had obviously done her homework as it appeared to have been effective and quick. The reason it was so memorable was because of WHERE she did it…
As I say, she had done her homework, and had made a proper noose which she had firmly secured to the rafters in the attic of her home. She had stepped through the attic hatch, which had the effect of acting as a ‘gallows drop’. The hatch to the attic was situated at the top of a flight of stairs, so for us as the attending officers the only way to get to her was to walk up the (fairly narrow and dark) stairs to the top where she was effectively ‘standing’ over us, where we had to gently move her to one side in order to get onto the landing. The power to the dwelling was cut, so the only light available to us was via a bedroom window which was situated directly behind her with the door open, such that she was silhouetted to us, and seemingly looking down with glazed eyes.
I’ve been to deaths over the years which were far more gruesome, but there was something psychologically unnerving on a primeval level about having to climb your way up restricted access to a deceased person who is ‘stood’ in a dominant position over you.
Rationally, the apprehension was purely down to perception. Nonetheless, everyone there physically relaxed once we were able to cut her down and rest her on the ground.
One of my juniors in college was a very chirpy girl. She was an only child. A helpful and polite soul, she was liked by nearly all the students and faculty members.
Her home was situated across our college. We used to often drop by her place while heading back home.
One day, we reached college and were greeted with a heart-wrenching news. Our beloved junior had expired. She was lighting a stove while her parents were out. The stove burst and she met a tragic untimely end. No words can describe the sadness that permeated all our lives. It was difficult to accept that someone so dear was suddenly snatched away from us.
We went to her place to meet uncle and aunty and offer our condolences. They sat silently. Absolutely silent and lost. Their vacant eyes told a story that was gut-wrenching.
The couple had lost the joy of their lives. Their only offspring was gone. While she could never be brought back, our college girls tried to make an effort to mitigate the pain.
From the time she was put to rest, not a single day passed when uncle and aunty were left alone. Every day, some girls used to go over to their place and spend time with the couple. We had even decided on the schedule so as to ensure that we did not miss out on any day.
We used to talk to them, take them out sometimes, run errands for them, regale them with our antics in college and generally try to be there for them.
The process was slow. But eventually uncle and aunty were able to come to terms with their loss and move on with their lives. Their smiles and blessings said it all.
A majority of students came together to show the couple that they were not alone… that they had daughters, just not born in their family. This collective effort was one of the most humane, compassionate and loving gestures I’ve ever witnessed.
“NO WAY” Videos That Are Glitching The Entire Internet Out
Terrifying. This Changes EVERYTHING. MY REACTION to What They’re Planning.
The sound still haunts me. I still think of it, and it happened in 1987 and here we are in 2024 and the sound of that night will be with me until the Lord calls me home.
There I will probably meet the 18-year-old senior in high school who didn’t wear his seatbelt as the car rolled over end to end 11 times after exiting the roadway. He was a back seat passenger with no seatbelt and that resulted in his high-speed ejection thru the rear window. He laid in a field and his body appeared pristine, even though his skull was fractured which killed him instantly. I was the patrolman who responded to handle the accident scene.
The noise was his mother’s scream at 1:17AM in the morning as I stood on the porch after giving her the death notification.
It was primal, it was guttural, and it is forever.
It will never leave my mind or my soul. I will think of that kid forever.
Girls are more attached to their parents emotionally.
Girls who talk less are more romantic and loyal to any kind of relationships .
Girls who talks more are over friendly and confused in their relationships .
If a girl sends you first, good morning messages then more likely she likes you and want you to be her friend .
If a boy continuously calls in every two, three hours then the girl gets irritated. This is the main reason of break ups.
All girls don’t love flowers. Before giving flowers think twice .
Do not gift too early in your relationships. You will lose your dignity. Most of the girls find it awkward.
Girls like boys who visit their house confidently and pass some time with her family.
Girls prefer friendship before any serious relationships. Most girl friends become very good wives except for few.
Girls are experts in reading eyes and body gestures. A decent girl will never fall prey.
Some girls deliberately flirts with boys to get popularity in their friend circle. You can make out from their dressing sense. If you are also a flirty then enjoy.
Girls like the boys who likes to share the money during a date or in group party. They love gifting more than receiving .
Girls mostly respect the boys who help in studies and clearing the doubts. They remain genuine as friends all the time.
Girl can never go to restaurant or cinema hall alone with you if she is not in love with you. If you are flirting, take a note.
Girls like if you talk straight looking into the eyes. If you are really interested, you can try this. If you can talk straight looking into her for five minutes then you are in love .
Girls love to be praised in front of others not in one corner. This shows your lack of confidence. There is nothing wrong in praising in public.
Girls love to be pampered. This is the main reason they get cheated. They trust easily.
Girls like to be independent. They don’t like questioning and blaming always.
Girls don’t love easily and once they love they can go to any extent to own their love. Note this
If a girl easily accepts your expensive gifts then, think twice before dating her .
Girls can sustain unbearable pain emotionally as well as physically. Mother Earth 🙂
I compared Moscow to New York, and indeed, Moscow is nicer, which confirms Tucker Carlson’s claim
China’s trade with the rest of the world increased and improves substantially contrary to your intentional doubt casting. Fact is UK declined by 3.0% GDP Germany too had a negative growth and the uS has barely any real growth! Needless to say China’s trade with them deteriorated significantly in 2023!
Please stop fooling your own people. The problem is that the war which the U.S. and UK and NATO stupidly and barbarically goaded Russia into and highly provoked boomerang back at them hard and is now destroying the western economy. Stop fooling your people it is not hurting you. It is. And in a very big way.
My daughter was around the age of ten and I had given her a box of lolly pops that whistled. I had purchased them in a bulk buy but none of my children liked the flavour. So I sent my daughter to school to share them with the other students. Some time after lunch I got a call from the headmaster to come to the school, as she was in trouble and was being sent home as punishment. He did not go into details over the phone and I was left completely shocked as she was a straight A student and had never been in trouble before.
I arrive at the principal’s office and was seated next to my daughter when he pulled out a plastic bag full of coins and placed it on the desk. He went on to tell me that she had stood outside of the canteen line of students, during lunch hour spruiking “lolly pops for sale only fifty cents”. She had managed to sell every lolly pop I had sent her to school with. The canteen staff complained that they had a contract and that they had lost sales due to her lolly pop sales, so the principal had no other option but to confiscate the money and call me in to address the issue. My daughter sat next to me with tears streaming down her face.
After we discussed why she had that many lolly pops and what was said to her in the morning before she left for school, he realised that this was not something that her parents or any adult had encouraged her to do. He went on to say “ I cannot punish a child that shows entrepreneurial skills that someday could lead to great things”. He applauded her efforts and explained what a contract with the canteen owner meant and why she could not do this again. He handed over the bag of money to her and we happily left his office.
She gleamed all the way home. She not only had lots of cash but she had been given the afternoon off school. I thanked that principal for his honesty and for not punishing her unnecessarily.
Had a slow refrigerant leak in my WRX. I actually heard it hiss slightly at the compressor while topping it off once, so I knew where at least one leak was. Took it to the dealer for a timing belt and asked them to look at the AC. I picked up the car and they said they couldn’t find the leak where I showed them it was, but that I needed a new condenser, the AC tech could smell the refrigerant in the cabin of my car. $3200 to fix.
Said no thanks, I’ll keep topping it off.
Got into the car and it did have an odd odor, which I attributed to it sitting near the body shop. I was smelling lacquer thinner.
A few months later, I was in Advanced and the kid working the the counter had a same year STI, so we were BS’ing about what we liked and disliked about the cars and I mentioned the AC experience. He walked over to the AC isle and handed me a package of assorted green O-rings. He said he had the same issue and to try one of these where I heard the leak.
Next day, I popped the line off, replaced the O-ring, charged the system and once I got the pressure right, I was good to go. $4.95 plus $19.95 for a bottle of refrigerant.
Many of you will say that I should have evacuated the system and you’re right, but I didn’t have a vacuum pump. This was as much a test as anything. Still driving the car 8 years and easily 100k miles later and I haven’t touched the AC since that day. In fact, the compressor clutch is on it’s last legs, but at 282k miles, the entire car is feeling it’s age. Saved $3175, too.
New factory Subaru condenser: ~$280 online Amateur labor estimated: 4 hours (estimated $400 shop labor cost, no way they would take as long as me to replace) Other supplies: $30
They were looking at making ~$2500 profit and still not fix my problem. I am fighting the urge to name them, especially since I had a run in with their service manager the next (and final) time I was there. In for an airbag recall and he’s trying to replace my power steering pump for $600+.
Never be afraid to walk away and get another opinion if you can.
I had a friend of mine who had this happen. He did not take it sitting down. He was rather excitable.
The women who made the allegation was one of the most narcissistic people I had ever seen.
when HR went to him with the allegations of sexual harassment he, went ballistic on the HR PERSON. This is what I was told.
He said that he told the HR PERSON, the woman accusing him was a lesbian, shinny, ugly, had scabs all over her body, had a personality of a stone fence post. Nothing he would be interested in.
in a later meeting with the HR Person, he threatened to sue the company for false reporting. His theory was the office was so busy there was someone around the both of them all the time, there was no time for a possible sexual assault of the nature she was claiming to happen. and he will sue the person making the allegations also
He said his coworkers will back him up in this.
that was the last time I heard of that allegation.
Personally if I was this person being hassled by this woman I would drag her into the HR OFFICE,
say, “you have a reputation of doing this with other people. I have tried to avoid you for two years, and have lots of people to support my claims. I Want this settled right here and now. i will not live with hanging over my head.
I will fight back, this is my reputation and my livelihood you are messing with, and I have had enough.
I would say if you meet here head on in front of her and the HR PEOPLE THAT THIS WILL STOP.
if it doesn’t I suggest you contact a good lawyer.
just make sure you have not done what she is saying .
How has your appearance affected your life?
This is something I’ve pondered a lot since my early 20s, when it became obvious to everyone that my sister and I had gone down two totally different paths in life.
She was a high school dropout, mother at 16, drug addict who couldn’t hold a job and was either living with an abusive boyfriend or with our parents. She never really made it on her own. But she was nice. Always nice to everyone.
I was in advanced classes in high school, went to a university several states away, and was doing very well there. I’d also had a part-time job since I was 16, and a full-time job since I was 19.
I think our appearances had a lot to do with our different life paths. She was a gorgeous blonde bombshell in our small Southern hometown. Boys were constantly trying to date her/get her drunk/give her drugs.
I was the fat kid in school. No girlfriends. No parties. I didn’t mind working after school and on the weekends, because it’s not like I had anything better to do. Doing homework and studying isn’t hard when it doesn’t get in the way of your nonexistent social life.
Eventually, I lost a lot of weight in college (put it back on after getting married, now trying weight loss round two), gained enough confidence to ask out a woman I liked, and dated her for five years before marrying her. Now, in my late 30s, I have a happy marriage, three happy and healthy kids, a career I love, a house, a minivan, etc…
My sister got married two or three times, I honestly don’t know. She continued doing drugs and “shacking up” with abusive guys throughout her 20s and early 30s. She eventually died of a drug overdose at age 34.
That’s why a part of me pities the really beautiful young women… constant attention from guys when you’re trying to build your life can be a major distraction and help push you down a bad path in life.
So, how has my appearance affected my life? It kept me out of trouble and helped make me the very happy adult I am today.
Last time I flew in an airline -I won’t name,the flight attendant forgot to get me my meal. By the time the trolley reached me, the non-vegetarian meal rack was empty. I was told that they will get me the meal in 5 minutes, I told them even if it’s a vegetarian meal it’s fine. It wasn’t really an issue for me as I don’t like troubling them but they insisted that they have more fish packs and they will get me one.
My wait was for half an hour, with them avoiding me,avoiding my call and not even looking at me. They didn’t even get me water. I got pissed. I literally raised my voice the next time with an “Excuse me, are you deaf?” and the flight attendant was like, “yes,mam can I get you something?” and my soft reply was,”YES! Your complaint book and it should not take half an hour, I want it right now.”
That led to some prompt working and them apologizing for some 15 times in next 15 minutes, they offered me meals (which I refused) and goodies (I refused them as well) and as I didn’t accept their peace offering or apology, in the end, after our landing the ground staff met me and after another series of apologies they refunded a portion of my ticket with vouchers.
It’s not about the food,it’s about their non-caring attitude. I have paid for that seat and that meal with hard earned money. If one form of meal is not there, I understand it’s not their fault but if they refuse to get me any meal then I can get nasty as well.
So, asking for the complaint book work wonders, do it the next time they harass you.
PS I am not proud of what I did but it was needed.
I was administering the Anesthesia for a Neurosurgeon friend. He was removing a Cervical spinal cord tumor of a woman in her late 40’s. She was prone (on her stomach) on the table. He had just spent nearly 45 mins denuding the Cervical Lamina (flat bone on each vertebrae that protects the Spinal Cord by creating a bit of a Canal the bone was in intimate contact with the tumor. He is an excellent Surgeon and fun to watch work, no wasted motions. I had just turned my back to the field and doing a routine check of endotracheal tube placement to make sure it had not migrated (a routine thing to do especially in the prone position).
With the tumor now completely exposed, he asked for the Bard-Parker (scalpel), with my back still turned I quickly called out “Stop.” Everyone turned and looked at me. He asked my why… I looked at the tumor one more time and asked him if he would mind using a tuberculin syringe and aspirate the tumor. He said, all of the X-Ray reports had confirmed it was a solid mass tumor. But, because of our long history, he said he would humor me.
The nurse gave him the syringe. He pulled back on the plunger and blood returned. He asked the nurse to give him the closure suture on a needle driver and a pair of Adson’s forceps and said we are closing. Only he and I realized what had just happened. It was a very large Arterio-venous malformation with thicker than normal walls of the middle muscular coat (tunica media), and an external or connective tissue coat (tunica adventitia). Which had made the almost 2 inch AVF look solid on X-Ray. While closing he explained to the nurses that there would have been almost no way to have stopped the bleeding if he had made the incision and we may have very well have lost the patient.
I have no explanation as to why I told him to stop. It was just this internal feeling.
He sent the patient to a University Med. Center to have the defect repaired. They sent him a letter thanking him for his excellent job in dissecting away the Spinous Processes, the Lamina, and the surrounding tissue. They said this made their surgery so much easier and because of his excellent dissection the AVF walls had not been disturbed which they also felt would have caused her death from hemorrhage. He had done the hardest part of the surg. He also was on the Neurosurg teaching staff at the U.
Two hours in the gym
Puerto Rican Chicken and Rice Stew (Asopao)
This chicken and rice soup is Christmas for me. Not the Christmas meal by any means but the Christmas season. In Puerto Rico, this is the soup that was traditionally served at parrandas. And it continues to be a staple at parties and get togethers.
What is a parranda? You well may ask. The short answer is that a parranda is a party. It’s a Puerto Rican tradition that probably wouldn’t go over too well in most American suburban neighborhoods. It involves late night singing and ritualized kidnapping. And eating. And drinking.
A group of singers, parranderos, start the party late in the evening well after dinner. They assemble at the front door of a friend or neighbor’s house and make music until the family wakes up and lets them in. After some more singing, everyone gathers in the kitchen for refreshments. Usually chicken and rice soup.
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After they eat, the parranderos hustle the family off to the next house where the singing, eating, and kidnapping is repeated through the night. This PR holiday tradition is kind of like Christmas caroling, but not.
The beauty of the Puerto Rican chicken and rice soup is that it was easy to heat up when the parranderos arrived. And by adding more stock, it could be stretched to feed everyone. You can imagine that by the last house, there would be quite a crowd. These parties would break up by dawn, with all of the parranderos going back to their beds.
Guess what heats up nicely the next day when nobody feels like cooking? You’ve got it. Asopao de Pollo.
Yield: 6 to 8 servings; makes enough Adobo to season 3 to 4 pounds of meat
Ingredients
Chicken and Rice
3 pounds chicken, cut into pieces
1 recipe Adobo
9 cups water
2 tablespoons salt
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 ounces lean cured ham, diced
2 green bell peppers, seeded and chopped
1 onion, peeled and chopped
1/4 cup chopped fresh cilantro
3 large tomatoes, chopped
12 pimiento-stuffed olives
1 chorizo (Spanish sausage), cut into 1/2 inch rounds
2 tablespoons capers
1 (4 ounce) can chopped pimientos, drained
3 cups long-grain rice
1 cup fresh or frozen peas, thawed
Additional chopped fresh cilantro (for garnish)
Adobo
4 whole black peppercorns
2 cloves garlic, peeled
2 teaspoons dried oregano
2 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons olive oil
2 teaspoons vinegar
1/4 teaspoon paprika
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How to Make Asopao de Pollo
The homemade Puerto Rican chicken and rice soup recipe I’m going to show you develops flavor by sautéing most of the ingredients in a large caldero or dutch oven.
After cutting up the chicken and seasoning thoroughly, go ahead and heat up the olive oil in your pot.
First you’ll brown the raw chicken pieces in batches and set them aside. Next sauté the sofrito, it will smell fantastic as it cooks. Scrape up those browned bits.
Now add the ham, diced tomatoes, tomato sauce, capers, pimentos, olives, boullion and rice. Stir all of that right into the sofrito before adding the chicken back. Make sure you pour in any juices the chicken might have accumulated while it was waiting. That’s the good stuff!
Finally, when all of the ingredients are in the pot, pour as much of the water as you can fit into the caldero. Add your salt and pepper and mix it all up thoroughly. Over the cooking time, you can add more water as the rice cooks and absorbs the liquids.
Bring the soup to a boil and then turn down the heat. Allow it to simmer for up to 30 minutes. Keep an eye on your pot, stirring frequently as the rice can burn to the bottom.
When the rice is tender and the chicken is cooked, it’s done. Now you’re ready to feed any late night parranderos that come to your door.
Guests that come at more reasonable hours will love this soup too!
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Instructions
Chicken and Rice
Rub the chicken pieces thoroughly with the adobo. Place the chicken pieces in a large pot and add the water and salt. Bring to a boil over high heat. Cover and reduce the heat to low. Simmer for 30 minutes.
Meanwhile, heat the oil in a skillet. Add the ham, bell peppers, onion, and cilantro. Sauté over moderate heat for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.
Add the tomatoes, olives, chorizo, capers, and pimientos. Cook for an additional 5 minutes.
Add the vegetable mixture to the pot with the chicken and simmer for 15 minutes.
Add the rice and peas and simmer covered over very low heat for 15 to 25 minutes, until the stew reaches the desired consistency. It is traditionally served runny, almost like a soup.
Serve in soup bowls garnished with chopped cilantro.
Adobo
Combine all ingredients in a mortar and pestle and grind to a paste. Alternately, combine in an electric blender or food processor and process until smooth.
I know this question is a month old, but I just have to answer it. Unfortunately, the nastiest thing that happened at my school was done by me.
It was my freshman year. I desperately had a crush on my best friend, Rob. He had this dark, black, hair and deep hazel eyes that made me melt every time I caught him staring at me in Math. You know, teenage hormones and the like.
Our lockers were right next to each other; we were in the same homeroom. Sometime around October, being the ever awkward and weird kid I was, thought that the best way to show Rob I liked him was by teasing him.
I left the cafeteria one day with a nearly full milk carton in hand. I held onto it throughout my last class of the day and waited for Rob at my locker. Once he had gotten his things and we said our goodbyes, I pulled out the milk and placed the carton at the bottom of his locker (he carried a lock with him but never put it on), spout open and covered slightly by a hoodie he had left in there.
Hilarious I thought, he’ll come in on Monday and have to find a chunky carton of milk in his locker. Gross, yet harmless. I was so, so wrong.
Rob found the milk carton on Monday. What I had underestimated about him though, was his capacity to simply not care. He shrugged it off, took the hoodie out of his locker and placed the lock he had never used on it. Then he left it.
A month went by, and I could smell the milk every time I opened my locker next to his. After two months and the Christmas holiday and I forwent my locker, too, instead carrying my entire bag from class to class just so I didn’t have to open my locker.
By April, the entire hallway reeked of sour milk, so strongly that the students curved around the affected area when passing through. Everyone smelled it, no one could figure out where it came from or what it was. It was deadly; so much so that people whispered about what could possibly be making THAT smell. It was the mystery everyone talked about. You could feel the thickness of the stench in the air.
The last day of school came, and we were instructed to take the locks off of our lockers and clean them out at last period. Rob tried to make a getaway – grab his lock and run for the doors before someone asked him to open it and show it had been cleaned out, but he just wasn’t quick enough. “Open it”, our home room teacher demanded, as if he knew what that locker held inside it.
With shaking hands, Rob opened the metal door, and it was if you could see a green puff of foul odor release like a bomb from inside. “Close it!” Our teacher screamed, and Rob did, both of us gagging. The teacher ran for the safety of his classroom and we left.
The first day of sophomore year we came back to a clean hallway – no smell, bare lockers. Though, our former home room teacher never looked at Rob the same. As an adult, I feel TERRIBLE for the poor custodian who had to clean that putrid milk.
However, as I lay next to my husband in bed, I can’t help but be just a little bit nostalgic for that stupid prank. Fourteen years later and Rob and I have been together ever since; inseparable.
Asia’s Top Economist Reveals Shocking SECRET About China In 2024
Yes, my wife of 46 years died suddenly from heart failure. I got her to the hospital and was able to spend some time with her before she passed.
After she was gone, the medical staff insisted that I spend the night in the hospital due to my medical issues. I was given a mild sedative to help me relax. I fell asleep and at some point I woke and was unsure of where I was. When I realized what had happened, I was leaning against the safety rail on the hospital bed. I saw what appeared to be a room full of people below me, they were all in ‘shadow’ except for one woman in a white light dancing. My wife loved to dance and as I watched, the woman waved at me and everything vanished when the nurse came to check on me.
The second time was at her funeral service. It was freezing that day and I got to the service early to bring some mementos for the service. I, somehow, lost my phone and the facility was locked and no one was around. As I was starting to panic, I ‘heard’ my wife say “calm down.’
As I looked around I saw a perfect rose bloom in the garden area in front of my car. I couldn’t believe that a rose had bloomed in freezing conditions. Roses were her favorite flower, I went to pick the rose and found my phone on the ground. I immediately calmed down and told my wife “thank you.”
The Man Who Built UFOs For The CIA [Not Bob Lazar…]
Battery life continues to be one of the biggest complaints of laptop users, so understanding what you can do to help prolong the life is important. Technically speaking, keeping any relatively current laptop plugged in and charged at 100% for extended periods of time shouldn’t be a problem, but it’s best not to do so for a number of reasons.
This is a question that comes up a lot with laptop owners. And the answer is a quite simple “No.” For optimum battery use, and to get the most life out of your laptop battery, keeping it charged between 40% and 80% has been seen as optimum.
Most late-generation laptop batteries are either lithium-ion or lithium polymer, and as such, they are designed to be able to withstand many charge cycles. When you keep it charged at 100%, the charging circuit continuously checks the battery charging process and, so it stops charging once it is at its optimum point and goes into trickle mode, in which it only supplies what is necessary to prevent the charge level from failing.
Also to note: overcharging can lead to overheating, which can lead to catastrophic chemical reactions inside the battery.
Allowing your battery to completely discharge will take away from its originally-intended lifespan. You should ideally keep its battery between 40% and 60%. Don’t let the battery discharge completely to increase its life.
Here are some tips to extend your laptop battery life:
Avoid discharging your laptop completely after charging it.
Make sure that your laptop doesn’t get too hot and your cooling fan is working properly.
Overheating can reduce battery life, check the laptop’s cooling system is functioning correctly and use it on a flat surface to allow for proper airflow.
Customize your laptop’s power plan settings to favor battery life over performance when running on battery.
If you’re not using your laptop on battery power for an extended period, store it with the battery at around 50-80% charge to reduce long-term stress on the battery.
I suggest maintaining your laptop’s battery level within the range of 40% to 80% charge. By doing so, you can effectively double the number of recharge cycles, increasing them from 300-500 to a substantial 1,000-2,000, ultimately extending the overall lifespan of your laptop.
Today I have a real treat for you all. It is the movie “Fail Safe” which is a 1962 depiction of the build up to world war 3. And it stars Henry Fonda, so you know it’s a great movie.
Please take the time to watch it. It was 60 years ahead of its time.
Meanwhile, my post on Quora…
Why is the USA so eager for a war with China
Any one who wants war has a mental disorder.
Obviously they have never experienced war, and has no idea or concept of what it entails. Pain is real. The loss of everyone you ever knew is real. The lost of your money, your homes, your jobs, and your friends is real. The loss of your culture and your society is real.
The loss of your innocence is permanent.
…
So why do so many American “leaders” want to engage a war with China?
I’ll repeat myself.
Anyone who wants a war has a mental disorder. They are not right in the head. They need to be seen by a doctor and treated for this disorder. If need be, well then, locked in a padded room. But they should not be permitted anywhere near the levers of power.
…
Ah. It was deleted.
I guess that stating the obvious is against the “rules” in the United States.
a young boy, puts $100 in the bank every single day. One day the boss at the bank noticed and asked, hey buddy, why do you keep dropping $100 in here everyday? The kid says, Can we talk in your office? The boss says, yes, and they go to his office. Then the kids spills the beans. Well, I make a bet everyday with someone new that I can kiss my right eye. The boss laughs and says, no way you can do that. The kid smirks. Wanna bet? The manager agrees, and quick as a wink, the kid takes out his fake eye and kisses it. The boss feels kind of silly and gives him $100. But he wants it back. So The kid says, okay, but with a twist. I’m pretty sure that you are wearing red girly panties. If I’m wrong, I’ll give you back your $100 plus another 100. Thinking he’s too smart, the boss agrees. The kid adds, but before you drop your pants, we need 10 witnesses to make it official. The boss gathers his team and after taking his pants off, he feels very proud to have won $100. Then he notices the kid is all smiles about losing money. Confused, he asks, why are you happy about losing your cash? The kid grins. Well, I had a bet with your team about how fast I could get you to drop your pants.”
Braised Pork with Green Chile Sauce
Mild green chiles season this meaty pork stew. Serve it with rice or as a burrito filling. This can also be served with tamales. This chile verde is also good served with scrambled eggs.
chili
Ingredients
Pork
1 (3 pound) lean boneless pork butt
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 large onion, chopped
4 garlic cloves, minced
2 large green bell peppers, seeded and chopped
1 (7 ounce) can diced green chiles
1 teaspoon dried oregano leaves, crumbled
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1 1/2 teaspoons kosher or sea salt
1/2 cup fresh cilantro, chopped
1 tablespoon wine vinegar
1/4 cup water
Garnish
Tomatoes, cut into wedges
Cooked rice
Sour cream
Lime, cut into wedges
Instructions
Trim and discard fat and cut pork into 1 inch cubes.
In a large frying pan, heat oil over medium-high heat; add meat a few cubes at a time and cook until very brown.
Push meat to side of pan and add onion, garlic and bell peppers; sauté until limp.
Stir in chiles, oregano, cumin, salt, cilantro, vinegar and water.
Cover and simmer until meat is fork tender (about 1 hour).
Skim off fat and discard.
Serve with rice or make burritos or serve in your favorite way.
For Burritos: spoon pork into warm, soft flour tortillas, add sour cream, tomato wedges, and a squeeze of lime juice and fold to enclose. Rice may also be enclosed with the filling in the burritos, if desired.
What can you do to upset your neighbors the most in a well-to-do neighborhood?
Set up a drug dealing operation.
Because I was raised poor, a lot of things DID NOT bother me once I moved into a nice neighborhood. Things that might drive other neighbors (who have always been wealthy) absolutely crazy wouldn’t faze me at all. Loud music? So what. Kids shooting off fireworks? Hey, it’s better than gunfire. Lawns that grew a little too tall? Big deal. But set up a crime syndicate in one of the nicest neighborhoods in the U.S., and you’re going to make some very influential people extremely irate!
I lived in poverty when I was younger. The shack we lived in measured 500 square feet. My bed was in the kitchen. Stabbings and shootings in the neighborhood were routine. Before I was born, my parents found a guy dead on the front porch. He had been stabbed overnight and I guess he stumbled toward the house for help, only to collapse there. Drug deals became common.
My father worked very hard to eventually escape poverty, and I applied the same work ethic to my life. I had no desire to remain in a neighborhood where I had to fear for my life every single day. Anyone who has lived in such a place can tell you that it’s a miserable way to live!
I became successful. I got married. My wife was also successful. It took me 42 years, but we finally bought one of the more modest homes in one of the wealthiest towns in America. Celebrities became my neighbors. I didn’t hear gunfire. There was no crime. Kids left their toys on the lawn overnight and nobody stole them. People left their car doors unlocked at night. This is why I had worked so hard, for this level of safety and peace of mind. I had finally arrived!
About a year after moving in, our very quiet neighbor (an older lady who lived alone) moved out. A lady who had just divorced her multimillionaire husband moved in. She had triplets who were 17 at the time, two boys and one girl. She apparently had no control over them. Among many infractions, the girl once drove through our lawn, tearing up the grass and the driveway. Who drives through your neighbor’s lawn? One of the sons was driving drunk when he plowed through a neighbor’s fancy brick driveway entrance. But worst of all was the other son, who apparently had a large drug dealing operation.
Sketchy-looking cars would pull up at all hours of the day. The kid would come out of his house, sit in the back seat, make some sort of exchange, and then go back inside. Cars and houses throughout the neighborhood began to be broken into, probably linked to the people showing up to buy drugs.
This is what I had escaped. When you’ve worked so hard to live in a place with no crime, and you’re suddenly faced with drug dealing, people breaking into cars and houses, vandalism, and all that stuff you escaped, you become pretty ticked off. We didn’t pay all this money for a house only to have flashbacks of where I grew up. Other neighbors who were unfamiliar with such behavior were even more furious!
One particular neighbor, who happened to be a big time television producer, finally made the call. Police swarmed the house, found A LOT of drugs, and the kid who had now turned 18 got a pretty hefty prison sentence. The family moved out a month later.
My dad bought himself a 1973 Mercury Montego two door. Every option you could imagine, back when you could actually order a car built for you.
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Really sharp car, dark blue metallic with a blue vinyl top. Had a dark blue leather interior with front bucket seats. Was his pride and joy. Biggest motor available, 460 4bbl. That car was a real sleeper. Fast as hell. Got about 8–9mpg. Every time you went around a right turn there was a metallic thump from the back somewhere. Turn left, nothing. Dad was an OCD prick. Drove him nuts. Was to the dealership for service multiple times. They replaced all kinds of stuff, even the rear axle. Finally he had me lay in the back seat and listen as he drove around. I isolated the sound as coming from the area of the drivers side rear quarter panel. Dad and I took out the rear seat and removed the interior panel. We found heavy nut and bolt hanging from a string. Taped to the sheet metal was a note, “How long did it take you to find this?”
Coconut Corn Bread (Dominican Republic)
2024 02 18 10 12
Ingredients
1/2 cup diced mixed candied fruit
2 tablespoons dark rum
1/3 cup granulated sugar
1/3 cup butter, softened
2 eggs
1 cup coconut cream
1 cup yellow cornmeal
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1 cup shredded fresh coconut
Instructions
Heat oven to 375 degrees F.
Mix candied fruit and rum in small bowl; reserve.
Beat sugar and butter in a large bowl; add eggs, one at a time, beating until well blended. Stir in remaining ingredients except candied fruit mixture and coconut; beat until smooth, about 30 strokes by hand. Fold in candied fruit mixture and coconut. Pour into greased 9 x 5 inch loaf pan.
Bake until top is golden brown and wooden pick inserted in center comes out clean, 40 to 45 minutes.
Cool for 20 minutes; remove from pan. Cool completely before slicing.
In the 17th century, a priest in Venezuela was particularly fond of meat. Yet during the Catholic holiday of Lent, eating meat is not permissible — only fish may be consumed. So he wrote a letter to the Vatican.
image 15
He had found an animal, he said, which “lived in the water, had webbed feet” and “it even kind of tastes like fish when you cook it”. Would it be allowed to consume this creature during Lent? The Vatican replied, also by letter — it was allowed to eat the creature, provided they classify it a fish. So they did. And Venezuelans have been eating this animal ever since.
What species do I speak of? The capybara. World’s largest rodent, a largely aquatic species that loves to dwell in water. A meatlover’s delight — from giant hamster, to conveniently reclassified “fish”. One hell of a good loophole, if you ask me.
I worked for a food establishment that keeps all of its food on a “line”. One day I was sicker than I’ve ever been and needed to call out. I figured this wouldn’t be a problem since I never called out, but I was wrong.
So they force me to come in under threat of termination.
So i come in. I’m making food on that line, and I have a very specific urge everyone knows well. But, oh my oh me! I can’t leave the line! I have a lot of food to make! So I threw up. On the food in the line.
The company had to close for a short time to have the line professionally cleaned and sanitized.
When they finally reopen, I get called into the office. They ask me what happened. I tell them quite plainly that I tried to call out sick and was forced to report to work. Their genius response was ”you were scheduled to work so you had to come in.“
So I simply asked them how much it had cost to have the line cleaned. They give me a rough figure. I tell them they forgot about the money they lost out on by being forced to be closed during that time. Lastly, I tell them, straight to their face, that if I call out, it’s for a reason. If they force me to come in while I’m sick and throwing up, I will purposely throw up on the line again and they can pay that price again. And if they try to saddle me with the bill of cleaning the line, reduce my hours, or fire me for any reason, I would be more than happy to report them to the number that’s literally above their head about us not being allowed to come in sick. The next week my hours were reduced. I pulled out my phone, looked at the sign I referenced the week prior, and started typing in numbers in front of the manager. My hours were immediately reinstated.
After that, anytime I called out sick, I was told to feel better and call when I wasn’t sick anymore.
I feel like I’m a good fit to answer this question because I used to own a Chevy Volt, which is a plug-in hybrid (PHEV). In the summer, the Volt would drive 50–60 miles using only the battery, before switching to the 4-cylinder engine and acting like a normal hybrid, alternating between gas and battery.
Most days I did not drive anywhere near 50 miles. So I would come home, plug in to 120V, and the car was fully charged in the morning.
Why not a PHEV, then?
Well, it’s got an engine I rarely used, and some complicated electronics and wizardry to switch back and forth between the battery and the engine. It was something else that could go wrong on top of a straight EV propulsion system.
Some people like PHEVs because once they exceed range of the small battery pack, the car switches to gas and then you can just drive it like a gas car. Fillups are quick, and you’re back on the road. When you get to your destination, you can charge if you like, and your next 50 or so miles are all electric.
I loved the Volt. But I always felt it would grow up to be a Tesla, and last year, it did.
I much prefer having an EV. It’ll handle that 50–60 miles of daily driving you ask about with aplomb. Since the range of my EV is 318 miles, I could do that much driving for 4 days easily, without recharging if I didn’t want to.
Or I could charge at 120V/15A, as I typically do, and in the 12 hours or so that I’m sleeping and doing other things at home, I can add 36 or miles of range. Yes, eventually I’ll have a deficit, if I really do drive 50–60 miles per day, but I don’t. And for those that do, you can easily install a 240V outlet and charge quicker if you need it. So it’s a non-issue.
My in-laws are Chinese. I am a white American with mixed West-European ancestry. When I sit down to a meal with them, I have learned to practice strategic food placement on my plate so that it is never actually empty.
In the US, we have drummed into our heads as small children that it is incredibly rude to leave uneaten food on your plate, especially if you are a guest at someone else’s table. It is an insult to the chef. “There are starving children in Africa!” was the exhortation when I was a child. “Eat your vegetables and be grateful you have them!”
In Chinese culture, it is the obligation of the elder generation to make sure that the younger generation(s) are fed. If your plate is clean, that means you must still be hungry, but are too polite to ask for more. So they give you more, whether or not you actually have the capacity to eat it, whenever they observe sufficient empty space on your plate. Furthermore, it is extremely impolite to refuse to eat food given to you by a parent, auntie/uncle, or grandparent.
Therefore, I have learned to eat an amount sufficient for myself at meals while leaving enough on my plate to spread out and take up all of the large bits of contiguous space that might accommodate an additional serving.
I still feel guilty about the starving children who might like to have my leftovers, though.
My first boss told me that when she realized that several of us-all teenagers-were trying to coordinate our schedules so we all got off on the same day, so we could hang out outside of work. I didn’t understand it then. I thought she was just being a bitch.
But, ten years later, when I was in management, it made more sense. Coworkers are one group. Friends are another. Mixing those groups can cause problems, especially when one friend is put in charge of another.
It’s fine to be friendly with your coworkers. You should be friendly with them. But being friendly, and being their friend, are two different things.
I’m anti-social anyway, so it was easy for me to avoid making friends with the people I’ve worked with over the years. I’ll chat with them at work. I’ll ask them about their families, and they’ll do the same for me. But when work is over, I don’t hang out with them.
I suppose a lot depends on the type of job, though. Not every job is about making money. What I do now, for example: teaching. It’s not-for-profit. But I also don’t see my coworkers very often. Just in the halls during passing periods and during our weekly staff meeting. Other than that, I’m usually the only adult in the room. If adult interaction is your thing, teaching probably isn’t the best career choice.
This image was uploaded on an Internet forum with the caption:
“This is the lettuce you eat in your burger when you go to Burger King, enjoy it“
image 233
The netizens were shocked and horrified. They were angry to learn someone working in the kitchen has been messing up with their food.
Soon people got down to tracking the person; ‘where done and who doing this’! The image was posted anonymously, on the 4Chan forum. 4Chan users got down to work to discover the person behind it.
In the picture you can only see the shoes and pants of the uniform of the hamburger chain and that does not reveal anything since they are all dressed the same.
The image was tracked to its location. They found out where came from.
image 231
It came from an area where there was only one Burger King for many miles around.
image 232
Thereafter the netizens wrote and posted many mails to the Chain manager of Burger King, Mayfield Rd.
Then the Manager got into action and in a short time, the manager was able to find who had done it Two people who were on that shift were fired on the spot, they lost their jobs, and faced a fine of thousands of dollars.
So now you know, never make people angry on the internet, you could end up paying dearly.
I remember a guy who worked at a company with me. He was a professional who loved his job. He was 83, when the company forcibly retired him.
He made good money, and took fabulous vacations, had his house paid off 30 years before. He died 3 weeks after they forced him out. He lost the will to live, when he stopped doing what he loved.
I knew this lady that I worked with, who hated her job, she was depressed about having to go into work every morning. The happiest day of her life was when she retired early, with an early retirement package.
I think the benefits of working longer or retiring early very much depend on how you feel about your job.
It also depends on your health. If you think you will die early, then there is really not much point in working late. Unless you really love your job.
If you think you will die late, then working later, getting a bigger pension, and more savings, and using your wages for vacations and toys, now that your house is paid for, is the way to go.
I think it also depends on the country you live in. I live in Canada, I loved my job, I got 30 vacation days, 12 flex days, plus 3 golf days a year. I don’t know how many sick days and compassionate leave days I was entitled to because I never used them all up. So I got the equivalent of 9 weeks vacation. With weekends and statutory holidays I got 162 days off a year. Which is almost exactly half a year, so work wasn’t the same to me as an American who worked weekends, and only got 2 weeks vacation.
I could take fabulous exotic vacations, or just relax at the cabin while working.
Jamaican Rum Punch
2024 02 18 21 33
Yield: 10 servings
Ingredients
4 cups water
1 cup lime or lemon juice
6 cloves or allspice berries
3 cups strawberry-flavored syrup
2 cups Jamaican white rum
Instructions
Mix all ingredients together in a punch bowl, and let the mixture settle for 1 hour before removing the cloves or allspice.
Stir and serve over ice cubes in old fashioned glasses.
Water and rum may be added to weaken or strengthen as needed.
One reason I wanted to shake hands with Oskar Groening is because our first meeting did not go so well. On the first day of the trial, I introduced myself and reached out to shake his hand. The strangest thing happened. He was trying to say something as he was sitting sideways in his chair. He turned white and fell backwards, not saying a word. He was holding onto my arm so he did not hit the floor. At that moment he was not a Nazi but an old man who fainted and I was trying to save him from falling. I screamed, “He is falling and I can’t hold onto him – he is a big old guy!” This was not the interaction I was hoping for. I knocked out an old Nazi.
The second reason is because I am interested in what will happen when someone from the victims’ side meets with someone from the perpetrators’ side. You cannot predict it. So today after the trial session concluded, I went up to Oskar Groening. He wanted to stand up but I said, “Please don’t, we do not want a repetition of last time.” I just shook his hand and said, “I appreciate the fact that you are willing to come here and face us. But I would like you to appeal to the old Nazis who are still alive to come forward and address the problem of neo-Nazis in Germany today. Because these young misguided Germans who want Hitler and fascism to come back — they will not listen to Eva Kor or any other survivor. You can tell them you were in Auschwitz, you were involved with the Nazi party, and it was a terrible thing.”
As I was talking to him, he grabbed me and gave me a kiss on the cheek. Well I probably wouldn’t have gone that far, but I guess it is better than what he would have done to me 70 years ago.
Everything he is accused of — I am saying he did all that. I have forgiven the Nazis and everyone who has hurt me, but I told him that my forgiveness did not prevent me from accusing him nor from him taking responsibility for his actions. And I told the media that he was a small screw in a big killing machine, and the machine cannot function without the small screws. But obviously he is a human being. His response to me is exactly what I was talking about when I said you cannot predict what will happen when someone from the victims’ side and someone from the perpetrators’ side meet in a spirit of humanity.
image 236
I know many people will criticize me for this photo, but so be it. It was two human beings seventy years after it happened. For the life of me I will never understand why anger is preferable to a goodwill gesture. Nothing good ever comes from anger. Any goodwill gesture in my book will win over anger any time. The energy that anger creates is a violent energy.
I am asking a question: What do we want in the future? Do we want to keep pointing fingers and the accused stay in one corner and the accuser stay in the other corner and they never connect? How will that work out? Look at the world – it doesn’t work out. All we have is people who are feeling angry, people who are running around doing crazy things.
When tragic things happen, we have to sit down and discuss, what are the options for the victims and for the perpetrators? Most people are only here in court to accuse him of things he has already admitted. So now what? I don’t think we should raise a statue in his honor, but he can serve as a good example to young people that what he participated in was terrible, that it was wrong, and that he is sorry that he was part of it. Now there is a message that has some usefulness for society.
If I had it my way, the dialogue between the survivors and perpetrators would have started a long time ago. And it would have helped the survivors cope and maybe heal themselves, but even more so not to pass the pain on to their children.
My ideas in life are very different, I know. I am in the minority — maybe a minority of one. I know how society looks at it, but as I look at society, I do not think it is working very well. So what I am saying is, maybe we ought to try something else. And my idea is for people from the victims’ side and people from the perpetrators’ side to come together, face the truth, try to heal, and work together to prevent it from ever happening again.
Back some 30 years ago, fresh out of college, I worked at a real estate company owned by a Greek immigrant.
The company did everything involving real estate, loans, brokerage, management, home flipping…. It was a good place to get all around experience.
About 3 months into the job, the owner approached me and asked if I was ready to purchase my first house. Told him I was not ready, I was living with my parents and saving money. Then he told me a real gem.
He said to not purchase a condo or house for my first home. Huh? I said. He told me to purchase a four unit apartment. I told him I did not have that kind of money. Then he gave me the whole spill.
A single family home cost $150,000 and I would need $10,000 deposit plus pay $1000 per month for loan payment plus upkeep.
A four unit apartment cost $250,000 and I would need $15,000 deposit plus pay $2,000 per month for loan payment plus upkeep.
Here is the real kicker. If I bought the house, I would not have anything left over after I paid for all my expense.
If I bought the apartment, I can rent 3 other units at $700 each and the rents will actually pay all my cost.
WOW!
Here is the second kicker!
He said I can save that $1,000 a month and after two years, purchase another 4 unit apartment. Then I can move to my second apartment and rent the original place for extra $700. Now I will be saving $1,700 per month! My head was spinning. I realized how he made his fortune. He had multiple apartments collecting rents.
I went home and told my parents about what the owner told me. My Dad was bit skeptical but said he will help me to get the loan if needed.
Fast forward 30 years…my wife and I are making retirement plans. Thanks to the advise from my boss early in my career, things look good.
Back when homeless people were Hobos, Drunks were Winos, and “substance abusers” were Hypes, I pounded a classic foot patrol beat on San Francisco’s Mission Street. After 3 or four years, I literally knew everyone on my beat, bad, good, or wack-a-doo.
We’d periodically get some merchants complaining about this or that, so the Captain would tell the Lieutenant, and he would lean on the street Sergeant, who in turn would tell us: “ Its the weekly sweep time boys”.
Mitch would grab the BIG paddy wagon, and the six beat cops would ride its rear bumper while picking up the usual miscreants more or less at random.
We’d do a decent job of disarming them before tossing them in the wagon, and in that the prisoners and the cops knew how to play the game, we didn’t get any big surprises.
Untill:
I forget his real name, but if I called him “stinky” , and mentioned that he NEVER took off any of the 3 pairs of pants, or five overcoats he wore, everyone knew who he was.
Stinky was face down on the pavement across the street from the food market at 22nd when we grabbed him. Mitch did a cursory high risk pat search for weapons, or bottles of cheap wine, and finding none, cuffed him up and put him in with the other 15 bums in the back of the wagon.
At the Station, we had a regular assembly line thing going where the arrestees would line up, get a photo taken, have their meager belongings tossed into a brown grocery bag, and then shamble into the drunk tank.
Stinky shuffles up, and is so out of it, he can’t empty any of his 11 coat pockets. Mitch leans him against the booking counter, and begins taking handfuls of God know what out of the pockets.
Suddenly Mitch jumps in the air, yelling all sorts of Germanic based profanity, and is yelling “ Something bit me..something M….F….g BIT ME !!!”
Stinky has a semi-blank look on his face, but says; “ Oh, that’s just my lunch”
I grabbed the offending coat, ( while wearing gloves!) , turned it up-side down, and shook it.
About 7 or 10 half-dollar sized LIVE soft shell crabs fell out, and began scuttling around the booking room.
Stinky had apparently stolen them out of the fresh sea-food bin at the fish market up the street before we nabbed him.
To say that hilarity ensued would be vastly understating the commotion that followed, but suffice to say Stinky didn’t get his lunch, and Mitch never lived it down.
The Lieutenant had Mitch prepare a Line Up Briefing presentation on the “importance of proper searches during custody” later that week. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house when he finished
Avdiivka, Ukraine FALLS to Russian Army – “Complete Rout”
Once considered impregnable, the KEY city for Ukraine defense, Avdiivka, the most heavily fortified city on the entire planet, has fallen to the Russian Army.
Within hours, the bloodiest battle of the 21st century (so far) will be over.
For those who have not kept up on developments in the Russian Special Military Operation (SMO), Avdiivka is the place from which the Ukrainian Army has shelled the civilians of Donetsk City for TEN YEARS!
There are going to be lots of tactical, strategic, and political implications from this that we will see over the next days and weeks.
There are reportedly very FEW Ukrainian defenses behind Avdiivka; the Ukrainians put all their eggs into one basket, counting on the deep Soviet-era nuclear bunker system, and defenses built since the end of the civil war to make it “impregnable.”
ALL of those defenses have failed and the Russian Army now controls the city.
(HT Remark:Remember how CNN and Bloomberg crowed endlessly that cutting Russia off from SWIFT was like using a Nuclear Weapon, and that there was no way Russia could survive that? Here we are, two years later, and now, there is no way for UKRAINE to survive!)
This is a developing story . . . check back for updates.
2023.02.22 China Declares War On The United States
Gonzalo was correct.
https://youtu.be/mj7mauNj8DY
Be the Rufus
image 234
“Today I went to Dunkin and saw a clearly homeless guy singing on the side of the road and picking up change. Eventually I saw him stroll into Dunkin, as he was counting his change to buy something I began to get super annoying and talk to him over and over again even when he didn’t really want to talk. Since he had maybe $1 in change I bought him a coffee and bagel and asked him to sit down with me. He told me a lot about how people are usually very mean to him because he’s homeless, how drugs turned him into the person he hated, he lost his mom to cancer, he never knew his dad and he just wants to be someone his mom would be proud of (along with another hours worth of conversation.) this lovely mans name was Chris and Chris was one of the most honest & sincere people I’ve ever met. After realizing I really need to get back to class Chris asked me to wait so he can write something down for me. Handing me a crumpled up receipt he apologizes for having shaky hand writing, smiled, and left. I opened his note and this was it. “I wanted to kill myself today because of u I now do not. Thank u, beautiful person.”
The most important thing that drug rehabs understand that soon to be patients don’t, or can’t, or have forgotten, is that your being there is a matter of life or death. Plain and simple — you will die or you will get clean — that’s it.
Preparation for rehab goes like this.
You make the call to rehab and tell them you need help. Their phone intake staff will ask you a handful of questions like:
What is your drug of choice?
How long have you been using?
Are you safe?
Have you ever been to rehab?
Do you have a phone number that we can call you back if we get disconnected?
Are you on probation or parole?
Do you have an address where we can pick you up?
Those are a few of the questions the rehabs I’ve been to have asked me during the phone intake interview.
If you noticed, there is a seemingly important question that isn’t asked (or wasn’t asked of me).
That is: “Do you have insurance?”
Every rehab that I’ve been to didn’t require insurance. Once I got into rehab they helped me find funding.
Once you make the call asking for help, rehab is usually less than twenty-four hours away.
Here is a list of things that are great to have, but without resources not all of them are possible.
Your shoes and clothing.
Toothpaste, toothbrush, body wash, stick deodorant, razors. Don’t bother bringing any aerosol deodorant, mouthwash or cologne. If it has alcohol and has an outside chance it can be abused, it is contraband.
Cigarettes.
Money.
Hard candy in an unopened brand new package.
Don’t bring drugs, alcohol or weapons. That’s a crime in and out of rehab. They will call the cops. You will pay dearly.
Now you’re packed up and ready to go.
Usually, within twenty-four hours they send a van to pick you up at your doorstep. Again, it’s life or death so time is ticking and rehabs understand that.
The van is probably going to have four or five other people heading to rehab also. They’re in the same boat as you.
Once you get to rehab, you’re gonna get naked and searched. So, let’s back up. Before you get picked up, get a shower and shave. Somebody is going to be looking at your body without your clothes on.
Once you’re searched and all your belongings are searched, you’ll be assigned a bed.
You’re going to have 1–5 roommates.
You’ll go through 1–7 days of detox. This will seem difficult. You’ll be on medication. It’s gonna hurt, but it gets better.
After detox, you’ll be moved to rehab.
Now it’s official.
There are lots of people with lots of problems in rehabs.
Focus on yourself — they are not your friends. Don’t trust them, don’t believe them and don’t leave with them.
Listen to your counselor.
Pay attention.
If you have the opportunity to get into a halfway house after rehab, take it.
It’s awesome. You get to work, save money and start your life over.
In WWII, Nazi Germany was concentrating their man power toward the Eastern Front.
An ENTIRE Wehrmacht Division which consisted of 2 brigades of about 12,000 soldiers was up against a single Soviet KV Heavy tank.
The crew of the tank (5 personnel) held off the German advance for hours. The Germans simply couldn’t disable the beast. Eventually, the crew of the tank ran out of ammo and was killed by the Germans.
The Germans took the bodies of the Soviet soldiers and buried them with full military honors.
They swept through the KV and grabbed a flag of the Soviet Union. The bodies were buried with the flag, saluted, and 21 rounds were fired in their honor.
Everyone is aware of the infamous Christmas Truce of 1914 during WWI. Similar things about during WWII. Please remember that during WWII, Germany was signed under the Geneva Conventions. The SS didn’t really care for this. But the Wehrmacht did and had to abide by it.
During national holidays like Christmas, the Germans and British once again ceased fire. They all agreed to stop shooting to give themselves time to bury their fallen soldiers. This happened on multiple occasions but was looked down upon, especially by Adolf Hitler.
During Operation Barbarossa (Invasion of the USSR), German was winning in the beginning. They were sweeping through the Soviet Union fast and capturing millions of Soviets. With the unforgivable Einsatzgruppen killing off Soviet Jews in the rear.
There are many pictures out there of Wehrmacht and even SS soldiers helping their enemies (Soviets). With the increasing victories of the Germans, thousands of Soviets were being injured. There are pictures and stories out there of SS soldiers caring for those victims. I know, it’s really hard to believe. (I’ll add the pictures in once I find them).
The Geneva Conventions state that once the enemy is disarmed, they’re no longer an enemy but a POW. And POWs must be treated humanely and taken care of.
During WWII, the Wehrmacht captured American POWs. They were separated (officers from enlisted). They were given jobs (mostly for junior ranks). They were given 2 full meals a day, and were able to receive care packages from the Americans Red Cross.
This was different with the SS most of the time.
Americans were captured by the 1st SS Panzer Division (Hitler’s Honor/Body Guard Division, Leibstandarte SS) after the Battle of the Bulge.
This image completely breaks my heart, as I’m an American soldier and have massive respect to my veterans, especially WWII veterans.
Instead of taking prisoners, the SS decided to shoot them dead and leave them in the snow. An MG-42 opened fire at them, killing 84. A few survived and managed to reach another American Division. After that, most divisions gave the order to kill all SS personnel on sight. In 1944, the commander of the SS Division (Joachim Peiper) was caught along with his men. They all stood trial for killing POWs. Peiper unfortunately got away with his crime. He was later killed by Nazi Hunters long after the war.
Jamaican Banana Bread
2024 02 18 10 14
Ingredients
Bread
2 tablespoons butter, softened
2 tablespoons light cream cheese, softened
1 cup granulated sugar
1 large egg
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 cup mashed ripe bananas
1/2 cup skim milk
2 tablespoons dark rum or 1/4 teaspoon rum extract
1/2 teaspoon grated lime rind
2 teaspoons lime juice
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/4 cup chopped pecans, toasted
1/4 cup flaked, sweetened coconut
Topping
1/4 cup packed brown sugar
2 teaspoons butter
2 teaspoons lime juice
2 teaspoons dark rum or 1/8 teaspoon rum extract
2 tablespoons chopped pecans, toasted
2 tablespoons flaked, sweetened coconut
Instructions
Heat oven to 375 degrees F. Coat an 8 x 4 inch loaf pan with cooking spray. Set aside.
Bread
Beat butter and cream cheese at medium speed with electric mixer; add sugar, beating well. Add egg; beat well.
Combine flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt; stir well. Combine banana, milk, rum, line rind, lime juice and vanilla extract; stir well. Add flour mixture to creamed mixture alternately with banana mixture, beginning and ending with flour mixture; mix after each addition. Stir in pecans and coconut.
Pour batter into prepared pan; bake for 60 minutes.
Let cool in pan for 10 minutes; remove from pan. Let cool slightly on wire rack.
Topping
Combine brown sugar, margarine, lime juice and rum in saucepan; bring to a simmer. Cook 1 minute; stir constantly. Remove from heat. Stir in pecans and coconut; spoon over loaf.
I pulled an idiot move and had the other driver follow me. New town, didn’t know my way around very well but knew I was being followed. Drove past my apartment complex and into a neighborhood, make a u-turn back out to make sure I am being tailed and yep, I am. Ended up driving to a convenience store and parking up front. See the other guy park as well, then as soon as he gets out I back up and leave. Do a few more twists and turns and catch a red light or two, make sure I lost them, then go to my apartment. Lucky for me they didn’t know which drive I was going to or even where I was going. And I left about an hour later for the airport and was gone a week plus. Thankfully they never saw me again, out of state plates would’ve been a give away for me.
– Kursk 2.0? – Moon of Alabama, Jun 09 2023 – Collapse of Operation Citadel 2.0 – TASS, Feb 24 2024 by Konstantin Sivkov – Vice President of the Russian Academy of Missile and Artillery Sciences for Information Policy
> Sir Tim Clark told the Financial Times he had seen a “progressive decline” in Boeing’s standards, which he put down to long-running management and governance mis-steps, including prioritising financial performance over engineering excellence. <
Use as open (not Ukraine or Palestine related) thread …
Posted by b on February 25, 2024 at 13:03 UTC | Permalink
Cheese Tortellini Crock Pot Dinner
A creamy, cheesy crock pot dinner recipe featuring cream cheese, cheese tortellini and spinach.
cheese tortellini crockpot dinner
Ingredients
1 (8 ounce) package cream cheese
1 large bag cheese tortellini
1 (16 ounce) can diced tomatoes, undrained
1 bunch fresh spinach, stems removed, or 1 bag frozen spinach
2 teaspoons garlic powder
1 teaspoon onion powder
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1 1/2 teaspoons Italian seasoning
1 container vegetable or chicken broth
4 ounces grated mozzarella cheese
Instructions
Place block of cream cheese in the slow cooker.
Pour the bag of tortellini over the cream cheese.
Pour the can of diced tomatoes over all.
Add the spinach to the top.
Sprinkle garlic powder, onion powder, pepper and Italian seasoning over the top.
Pour the chicken broth into the slow cooker.
Sprinkle mozzarella cheese over the top.
Cover the slow cooker, and cook on HIGH for about 2 1/2 hours.
Stir well and serve.
Fail Safe (1964) | Full Movie ft. Henry Fonda | Voyage
A U.S. plane loaded with hydrogen bombs is flying towards Moscow and because of technical difficulties, is impossible to recall. Starring Henry Fonda and Walter Matthau. Directed by Sidney Lumet.
“Dr. Strangelove” and “Fail Safe” were released the same year, 1964, and deal with the same subject. Dr. Strangelove got more attention due to its satirical, comedic approach to the subject of nuclear destruction, but Fail Safe brings home the point in a far clearer, more compelling manner. It’s just as chilling today as it was 60 years ago.
After I left Prison, I was released to the custody of my father. And unfortunately that included me living in the same house with that psycho witch; my step mother who despised me to no end. She actually loathed me.
Anyways…
I would, while in prison, write letters to my father. In one of those letters, I talked about the food that they served us. I told him that I was so tired of the non-stop beans that they served us. It was a mix of Global (human canned dog food), lima beans, pinto beans, black beans and okra.
Anyways, it wasn’t all the time, but often enough that it was a real problem.
Well, as soon as I was released to my father’s custody, his psycho wife made dinners for us all. The meals were ridiculous. Bean soup. Mashed beans. Pinto beans and rice. Bean casserole. Three bean salad. Bean sandwiches with sprouts… bean dessert.
…what was her problem?
Every day. Every morning. Every lunch. Every dinner.
Day after day. Week after week.
Later on, months later, I figured that she wanted to make my stay as uncomfortable as possible for me. And on Christmas eve she kicked me out and the truth became apparent.
Ah. One of the reasons why it sucked to be me.
Every now and then I remember this, and I shake my head. You know, some people are so crazy, so unstable, that they will always surprise you in how absolutely rude and shitty they can be.
I’ll never forget the bowl of beans with sugar and milk that she made for me one breakfast.
Have you ever bought a car that didn’t run and found that it was an easy fix?
We bought a Saturn at auction a number of years ago. I was desperate for a vehicle that was cheap. It seemed several things we owned were breaking at the same time.
We went to the car auction and looked around. We picked out several possibilities, looked them over and then we prepared to bid. They all went higher than I hoped. In came the Saturn on a tow truck we hadn’t looked at from the it doesn’t run section.
Bidding was introduced at $800. no one bid. They tried $700., $500., and finally someone bid $100. and it raised from there $200. and then $300. My husband turned around and looked at it. Not only did it have no battery but no battery cables. The paint was scratched up both sides. I heard $300. going once and my husband raised his hand. Auctioneer said $400. he soon said, $400. going once, twice, sold. I looked at my husband and said please tell me you didn’t just buy that car that doesn’t even run and we know nothing about. He said Yep.
So the paperwork was complete. We walked out back and looked at it. It had been previously stolen and the battery was removed, cigarette holes burned in a few places in the seats. The letters B i t c h were clearly scratched into the paint on the trunk. I joked it had my name on it.
The battery was still good on my old car. We drove home (approximately 3 miles) and got the battery and stopped on the way back and bought the connectors. Went back and installed the battery and drove it home. It ran great. My husband buffed the trunk lid the following day.
I drove it several years. It got hit once at an intersection. The man at faults insurance paid me $800. It was only a little cosmetic damage that I didn’t care about. I drove it a few more years, money improved and I sold it for $500. and bought another car. I was prepared to go lower but they were glad for $500.
I saw the Saturn a few years later. Still going strong. They said it once needed a part they installed themselves but otherwise dependable.
"People often think I'm joking when I say Global South with my mouth full.
Because we were once known around the planet as poor countries, then as third world countries, then as developing countries, then semi-developed countries.
And now we are developing countries...
No sir, we are now the economy of the Global South, we want to give ourselves a chance so that the Global South, which has part of what the world needs today, can occupy its place in the economy, in politics and in world culture.
Obviously, the BRICS are an exceptional opportunity.
We think it is possible to bring other African countries into the BRICS. We think it is possible for other African countries to participate in the G20, but we are just getting started.
We are just starting out and, at the G20, in Brazil, one of the things we want to discuss are the financial institutions that have existed since the UN was created, such as the IMF and the World Bank.
Whether these institutions will serve to help finance the development of poor countries or whether they will continue to exist to suffocate poor countries.
Africa, I don't have the precise number, but Africa has a debt of around 860 billion dollars. In other words, a debt that is practically unpayable by several countries.
Our suggestion is that the funds that lent this money—or the financial institutions—should take into account the need to transform part of this debt into a productive assets so that this money, instead of returning to the institutions that lent it, goes back by building railways, highways, hydroelectric plants, thermoelectric plants.
That is, something that means the development of the continent, that goes back to education, to a university, a research institute."
Excerpt from remarks by President of Brazil Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva at a press conference during visit to Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, February 18, 2024.
Israel Quietly ‘Retaliates’ For Iran’s Retaliation Attack
The current exchange happened after Israel, in clear violation of international law, bombed the Iranian consulate in Damascus.
The aim and success of last night’s attack is yet unknown:
Israel carried out retaliatory strikes against Iran early Friday morning local time, reportedly targeting locations in the west of the country. Explosions were heard in the city of Isfahan, prompting commercial flights to divert from their routes.Senior US officials speaking to ABC, CBS and NPR confirmed the strikes.
…
Iran’s semi-official Fars news agency reported at around 5:30 a.m. local time (10:00 p.m. EST Thursday) that explosions were heard in Qahjaverestan, northeast of Isfahan.
A senior Iranian military official in Isfahan told the Islamic Republic News Agency that the explosions were caused by Iran’s air defenses that fired at a suspicious object east of Isfahan. Isfahan’s international airport is located just northeast of Qahjaverestan.
Two discarded first stages of Israeli ROCKS aero-ballistic missiles have been found in Iraq. ROCKS, a derivative of Sparrows ballistic target rocket, are air-launched, stand-off, air-to-ground missiles.
They may have hit something near Isfahan or they may have been taken down by Iranian air defense.
No Iranian or Israeli officials have commented the attack. The IAEA said that no Iranian nuclear facility has been hit.
As both sides are currently silent, and as there are no signs of further escalation, the strike will likely conclude the current exchange.
As a consequence of its strike in Damascus Israel has lost its escalation dominance. Iran managed to penetrate its external security screen just like Hamas had penetrated Israel’s internal security screen on October 7 2023 when it broke out of Gaza to collect hostages.
Those who moved to Israel because they thought that it could provide them with security should reevaluate their decision.
What are some possible reasons for Westerners to have negative views towards China/Chinese culture/people, despite not having personal experience or fluency in the language?
The Chinese are not arrogant or domineering in the world, nor do they bully others. They are also cautious when traveling. Why do Westerners still have negative views of the Chinese?
This negative view is not accidental, but inevitable.
Of course, there is no need for Chinese people to care about what Westerners think of China. After all, who doesn’t have a butthole?
1. The image trap under the hegemony of public opinion
Good impression or bad impression, how is it generated?
Obviously, this requires an input type of cognition, and then each person makes a judgment based on his or her own moral standards. If it is consistent, it will be a good impression, and if it is not consistent, it will be a bad impression.
Therefore, Westerners have mostly bad impressions of China, which has a lot to do with their “cognitive input.”
In fact, the West has been working tirelessly to discredit China for many years in terms of “cognitive input”, even starting hundreds of years ago.
The first is the deliberately created negative cultural symbol.
In fact, at the beginning, Westerners had a good impression of the Chinese.
According to the rumors brought back by various missionaries and sailors, China is an ancient, mysterious and civilized country.
China has a splendid culture and numerous scientific and technological inventions, and can also produce exquisite porcelain, silk, tea and other products.
On the contrary, Europe at that time was filled with corrupt churches, tyrannical nobles and autocratic monarchs. So at that time, Westerners admired China.
However, the Opium War broke all this.
In the Opium War, China suffered a complete defeat, which also allowed Western countries to completely recognize China’s reality.
Westerners are shocked to find that China is so weak, its officials are so ignorant, its people are so poor, and its technology is so backward!
In the hundreds of years since then, Westerners’ impressions of China have changed from one extreme to the other, thinking that China is an uncivilized and barbaric country.
Later, in order to beautify their aggression against the East, Western countries created the “Yellow Peril” theory.
The term “yellow peril” originated from the history of the Mongol Empire’s conquest of Eastern Europe. At that time, the Mongolian army burned, killed, looted, and destroyed civilization in Europe. Their barbaric behavior brought a huge psychological shadow to Europeans. Since China recognizes the Mongol Empire as one of the Chinese dynasties, it is naturally a barbaric and cruel country that will bring disaster to Europeans. This Yellow Peril theory directly gave birth to the biggest negative cultural symbol about China-Fu Manchu.
In the novel “The Mystery of Dr. Fu Manchu”, Fu Manchu is the leader of a Chinese evil organization. He has a bald head and long braids, a Qing Dynasty dress, thin eyebrows and long eyes, and a cunning face.
Fu Manchu’s biggest hobby was to kill white people. He “used insects, bacteria and venom to cause more casualties in a week than Hitler did in a year.”
The appearance of this image completely embodied the Western world’s fear of the mysterious East at that time.
Subsequently, with the addition of Hollywood screenwriters, Fu Manchu in the movie was even more terrifying than the one described in the book.
Indulging in murder and various tortures, these horrific plots have become the childhood shadow of generations of Europeans and Americans.
Subsequently, the Asian people represented by China, together with the evil-doing Fu Manchu, became a cunning, cunning, cruel existence that posed a serious existential threat to the white people.
This is how Western countries use cultural symbols to completely vilify the image of the Chinese people. As a result, when Westerners mention the Chinese, the first impression that comes to mind is the cunning and insidious Fu Manchu. How could they have a good impression?
The second is ideological incompatibility.
As we all know, China is a socialist country and believes in communism.
Communism advocates the elimination of private ownership of the means of production and calls on the proletariat of the world to use revolutionary violence to overthrow the rule of the bourgeoisie.
Capitalism is a social system based on private ownership of the means of production.
This determines that there is naturally the most intense ideological conflict and opposition between the two.
Since the birth of communism, Western countries have tried their best to vilify communism, causing people to feel disgusted with communism and have faith in and dependence on capitalism.
In this way, the authority of the government can be maintained, its political rule can be consolidated, and the capitalists can continue to legally exploit the proletarian masses.
Therefore, Western countries use all kinds of methods to discredit communism.
For example, Western countries took advantage of the public’s antipathy toward Hitler and deliberately confused Nazism (full name: National sozialismus) with socialism, combining historical inducements to arouse people’s antipathy and fear of communism.
For example, in 1948, high-level officials in the United States issued multiple documents one after another that clearly discredited the Soviet Union. Its ultimate goal was to rule the world by any means necessary and encourage its allies to vilify Soviet communism around the world.
Through the export of strong ideology, the United States teaches children to hate and fear communism from an early age.
So no matter what you say, no matter how much communist theory they read, they think it’s “brainwashing.”
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States shifted its target of vilification to China, which still adheres to the socialist path.
For example, the English abbreviation of the Communist Party of China is CPC (the Communist Party of China), which emphasizes the Communist Party of China. However, Western media have always called it the CCP (the Chinese Communist Party), emphasizing China’s communist attributes.
This is actually a discourse trap that deliberately leads the public to unconsciously associate CCP with the image of communism that has been vilified in the past few decades, creating a negative image.
The third is that the United States manipulates public opinion to smear China out of anti-China needs.
In fact, during the honeymoon period between China and the United States in the 1980s, the United States had a relatively friendly attitude toward China. Even Fu Manchu was banned at that time.
But with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the United States labeling China a new generation enemy, this organized smear campaign motivated by anti-China began again.
At the beginning, the US anti-China propaganda mainly focused on “human rights violations” and “Tibet issue”.
After China’s economic aggregate ranked second in the world in 2010, Western countries were worried that China would threaten them, so they began to create the “China threat theory”.
The “China threat theory” covers a very wide range and can be related to anything.
For example, they say that China’s development of normal national defense is to disrupt regional balance and create the threat of war.
For example, they say that China’s population is too large, which will bring a crisis to the world’s food supply and cause food shortages.
For example, they say that everyone in China has a family car, which will cause environmental pollution and bring ecological disasters.
For example, they say that the Chinese engage in hacker activities and accuse Huawei and ZTE equipment of “endangering national security.”
For example, they say that China’s Belt and Road Initiative has created a “debt trap” for relevant countries.
For example, they say that China’s Confucius Institute is a spy agency and a cultural invasion.
For example, they say that China’s police cooperation with other countries is setting up “foreign police stations” to threaten its own nationals.
Even when Chinese people eat meat, Western media say that the carbon dioxide brought by Chinese farming will cause global warming and threaten all mankind.
According to the Western media, everything the Chinese do is wrong and threatens all mankind.
The purpose of this kind of strange, varied and negative reports that exceed the imagination of the Chinese people is to use “deceptive information” and “false propaganda” to offset China’s positive influence in neighboring countries and even in the international arena.
Suppress China’s international image and create obstacles for China to go global.
After all, in the face of a China that has been smeared as “doing everything with conspiracy”, any country that wants to cooperate with China will have to do it in its heart.
How can people in Western countries have a good impression of China when they are immersed in this information cocoon of anti-China public opinion every day?
2. Conflict of interest
If the media’s exaggeration is an external cause, then the conflict of personal interests is the internal cause of the deterioration of foreign people’s impression of the Chinese.
The first is the hostile attitude brought about by industrial competition.
Although the Chinese ideal is a unified world, in the real world, there are indeed stratifications.
In this pyramid-shaped world, it can basically be divided into 6 levels.
The top one is naturally the United States, with a per capita GDP of over US$60,000.
Next are the moderately developed countries, with per capita GDP of about US$40,000, such as Germany, France, the UK and Japan.
Next are the junior developed countries, with per capita income of US$20,000-30,000, such as Greece, South Korea, Spain, etc.
Next are relatively developed developing countries, such as China, India, and Russia.
Then there are some developing countries that sell resources, such as Venezuela, Egypt, etc.
Finally, there are some small and poor countries that cannot even sell their resources.
The total global GDP in 2023 will be approximately US$93 trillion. Among them, the overall GDP of developing countries is US$36 trillion, and the total GDP of all developed countries is approximately US$57 trillion.
What about population? The total population of developed countries is only about 1.1 billion. Except for the United States, which has more than 300 million, and Japan, which has just over 100 million, none of them exceeds 100 million.
In other words, developed countries, which account for less than 18% of the world’s total population, control two-thirds of the world’s total wealth!
If you were reborn in a developed country, you would have enough food and clothing, and receive basic benefits even if you didn’t work. If you are reborn in a small, poor country at the bottom, having enough to eat is just a luxury. Is this fair?
It’s unfair, but this is the reality. Developed countries and developing countries are completely different from the same world in terms of people’s living standards.
So how did these two severely separated parallel worlds come into being? The reason is simple: industry.
If we look at developed countries, we will find that they always have at least one or two trump industries.
Even if some low-end industries are transferred out, high-profit high-end industries are still firmly in the hands of the United States and its allies.
In this system, the United States controls high technology, finance, military industry, aerospace, biopharmaceuticals, computers, agricultural machinery, etc.
The UK controls higher education and finance, France controls nuclear power and passenger aircraft, Germany controls precision machinery and chemical industry, Japan and South Korea control semiconductor raw material manufacturing and automobiles, etc. Basically, each is in charge of its own business.
What are the benefits of this system?
On the one hand, it can leverage the advantages of each country, reduce product costs, and ultimately serve the United States.
On the other hand, since the allies of the United States are smaller in size, giving them some industries can easily ensure prosperity at the national level, lead a good life, and no longer have incentives to develop advantageous industries that threaten the United States.
Why can Westerners work 4 hours a day, drink coffee for another 4 hours, go on vacation to the Mediterranean, sunbathe, and pick up girls, but you can’t? And they are still not satisfied with this and go on strike at every turn! Because their high-end industries support this kind of life.
Their country, relying on its technological and industrial advantages, can live a good life comfortably after seizing its ecological niche. As long as a developed country builds a plane, people in developing countries need to use their hard work and sweat to create 700 million shirts in exchange. Other developing countries can only be locked in agriculture, animal husbandry, mineral resources and low-end industries forever.
In terms of profits, low-end industries can never compare with high-end industries.
This system has been running stably for decades, and the United States and developed countries have been lying on the top of the pyramid, selling sand for the price of chips, and sucking the blood of developing countries for decades.
But they never expected that China would appear.
China is different from other countries in that it has too many people and low-end industries cannot give Chinese people a decent life.
Even if the United States provides some high-end industries to China, China will not be able to become a developed country like South Korea, which has a smaller population.
Therefore, what China is pursuing is the upgrading of the entire industry, using the rise of various industries to cover more Chinese people and allow everyone to live a better life.
No matter how many pearls you have in your industrial crown, we’ll find a way to get them.
Moreover, China has the most complete industrial chain in the world.
China graduates millions of science and engineering students every year. It has a huge domestic market, strategic support at the national level and the national sentiment of “Do those gentry certainly have blue blood?” engraved in the Chinese DNA.
This means that as long as the Chinese want to do something, there is a high probability that they can do it.
Therefore, when the Chinese are no longer satisfied with sewing buttons and knitting clothes, and start to upgrade their industries, the comfortable days of Western countries will come to an end.
China’s industrial upgrading also has a magical ability. No matter what high technology is conquered by China, it will immediately become a bargain.
Then when we return to foreign markets, we can immediately reduce the dimensionality of foreign manufacturers and attack them without even having to compete.
For example, Western countries used to sell dyes used in the textile industry for hundreds of thousands of dollars per ton. After we mastered the core technology, we directly sold it for 10,000 CNY per ton, killing most of our international peers.
There are also white goods. In the past, every Chinese household was proud to have a Toshiba TV. As a result, now that China’s white goods market is all over the world, Toshiba is about to go bankrupt.
The same goes for LCD panels. In the past, China could only rely on imported LCD panels to make color TVs, and most of the profits from a color TV would be taken away by foreign countries. Now after China’s breakthrough, it has directly captured 80% of the world’s LCD panel share, and the price is so low that LCD panels can be installed above toilet urinals.
Also, China broke through the shield machine, and Germany’s Waldrich Coburg Machine Tool Factory closed down.
China made a breakthrough in pen tip steel, and Japan’s Shimomura Seiko suffered a sharp decline in profits and was on the verge of bankruptcy.
China started making mobile phones, and Nokia and Motorola went bankrupt.
China’s practice of using low prices to completely overturn the market structure once a technological breakthrough is really unbearable to Westerners.
China has destroyed so many monopolized industries in the West, making life for Westerners less comfortable. How can you expect them to have a good impression of China?
Let’s take a look:
Why were Western countries not as anti-China in 2010 as they are now?
Has the anti-China voice in Western countries suddenly become louder since 2010?
Isn’t it because China has started industrial upgrading and its GDP has surpassed Japan’s?
The second is that the rise of China has changed the international order and caused an imbalance in the mentality of Westerners.
Western countries like to talk about a saying: rules-based international order.
What exactly is this “rules-based international order”? To put it bluntly, it is the international order established by the United States after World War II by taking advantage of its status as the biggest winner in World War II.
In this order, the United States can recruit a “team of allies” to arbitrarily interfere in other countries’ internal affairs and launch color revolutions to overthrow other countries’ governments at will.
In this order, the United States has bound the U.S. dollar with gold and oil successively, making the U.S. dollar the world currency, and the United States can harvest the world’s wealth through the U.S. dollar tide.
In this order, the United States and its allies maintain strong military strength and bully other countries wantonly.
They can use a test tube of white powder as an excuse to bomb Iraq at will, killing and injuring millions of people, and if other countries build a new warship, they will be slandered as a “threat to regional peace.”
Simply put, the biggest principle of this order is to always maintain American hegemony.
After this order is established, everyone in Western countries will be a beneficiary of this order.
They can treat immigrants from other countries with an arrogant attitude and leave all the dirty work to immigrants.
They can draw high profits from developing countries by entering into unfair contracts through the economic advantages maintained by their hegemony.
They can go to developing countries at will, show off their identity as a Westerner, and attract countless women to throw themselves into their arms, and then abandon them.
Even in the face of a terrorist attack, as long as you show your identity as “I am an American”, you will most likely enjoy priority evacuation and special protection.
Over the past few decades, they have taken this kind of treatment for granted, as if they were born with this kind of treatment.
But they didn’t expect that China would appear.
Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi has repeatedly declared that there is only one international order, and that is the basic order of the United Nations.
Obviously, China is willing to integrate with international standards, but it is not willing to be subject to the basic order of the United States.
China seeks a fair and just international order from the perspective of everyone in the world, not an international order dominated by the United States.
In the international order advocated by the Chinese, every child in Gaza should live to adulthood.
In the international order advocated by the Chinese, underage girls in Thailand should not become the playthings of white people.
In the international order advocated by the Chinese, Africans should not starve while guarding their fertile land.
In the international order advocated by the Chinese, South American children should not face the only two options: drug trafficking and football.
This is China’s original intention of building a community with a shared future for mankind – hoping to seek the sharing of development rights, development opportunities and development results, so that the results of world construction and development can benefit people of all countries more and more equitably, and truly achieve win-win sharing.
But this has undoubtedly touched the cake of the people of developed countries. You have changed the world order, so how can they continue to lie at the top of the pyramid and dominate?
It’s like a rural person who enters the city and feels inferior when looking at the high-rise buildings in the city. When he meets the city people, he feels inferior to others. The city people feel that everything is taken for granted.
However, when a rural person who comes to the city becomes literate through self-study and feels that he and the city people are both human beings and there is no distinction between superiority and inferiority, and demands to be on an equal footing with the city people, do you think the city people can accept it?
Therefore, Western people naturally do not have a good impression of China, which has taken the lead in “undermining the international order.”
Third, the successful path of Chinese-style modernization has completely overturned the only successful path of the West for a long time.
For a long time, there has been only one successful path to human development, which is Western-style modernization.
This was the only correct path proven by practice, and it became a model for all countries to learn from.
To a certain extent, Western-style modernization has dominated the process of human modernization.
But strangely enough, there are many countries that follow the path of Westerners. Whether it is political system or economic system, they are basically planned according to the Western model.
But today, not many countries have really reached the level of modernization in the West. On the contrary, some countries are getting worse and worse, and even go bankrupt.
Why is this so?
To put it bluntly, the other side of the Western modernization process has been deliberately hidden.
Since the Age of Discovery, the West has embarked on global capital expansion and colonial activities.
Ship after ship of silver, ship after ship of black slaves, and ship after ship of opium helped the West quickly accumulate a large amount of wealth, and also planted the root of poverty and backwardness in other regions.
With capital, coupled with the technological monopoly created by the first-mover advantage and the trade hegemony brought by the advantages of international rules, Western countries can easily seize high profits and play a game of scissors.
Therefore, despite the hype about Western modernization, it actually only requires you to comply with the international order established by Western modernization and the unfair international wealth distribution behind this order.
But they never expected that China would stand up.
China knows very well that copying the Western development model will not achieve modernization at all, so China has developed Chinese-style modernization.
China chose to rely on its new national institutional advantages and scale advantages to change from a free flow of funds to a government-guided capital flow.
Through rural revitalization and urbanization, China’s advantages of huge population and large cumulative effect have been used to help rural areas get rid of poverty and promote common prosperity.
Facts have proved that China was successful, and it took several decades to go through the path of modernization that took Western countries hundreds of years.
Today, both its economy and military strength have reached the point where it has surpassed countless developed countries.
China has provided a model to all countries, a model that can still succeed without following the path of Westernization, which has strengthened the confidence of all countries in the world that are interested in developing their own modernization.
When other countries see China’s success, they will naturally pursue their own modernization instead of following suit under the deception of Western scholars.
But in this way, the modernization theory that Western countries have maintained for decades will go bankrupt.
To put it simply, the rise of China has completely destroyed Westerners’ institutional and theoretical confidence.
Therefore, we cannot expect Western people to have any favorable impression of China, a “heretic” that does not follow the Western path and is leading more countries to abandon the Western path.
Therefore, there is no need for Chinese people to consider what Westerners think! You can’t change them either!
As winners, do Chinese people need to consider the thoughts of losers?
Have you ever lost any respect for someone instantly?
I was in the ninth or tenth standard.
Our Maths teacher was excellent in teaching maths in logical way.
I had a great respect for her teaching excellence.
Since I loved Maths and scored good marks, students who had problem with maths would come to me in the short interval for clearing their doubts in some difficult problems.
Those students were day schoolers , while I was in boarding.
In short interval when I was explaining Maths, they would offer me some food to taste which they brought from their home.
One particular item jowar roti(it is called jonna rotti in Telugu) with smoked brinjal chutney(baigan ka bharta) was my favorite. So whenever any of those girls brought those items, they would invariably offer me.
One day when I was explaining some problems to the girls, the teacher saw us.
After some time I was called into the staff room.
I was scared. “Did I do any thing wrong by explaining maths to those girls?” I thought.
“It is a good thing you are clearing the doubts for those girls. I appreciate you. You are saving my time” she said.
My respect for her increased.
“But why do you eat from their (mentioning their caste) tiffin boxes? Stop eating from now onwards”
My entire respect for her came crashing down in a minute.
From then onward, I respected her as a good Math teacher but never considered as a mentor.
RV Life is FINISHED! | 7 HARSH REALITIES Why RVer’s QUIT
Southern Fried Catfish
Fried Catfish Recipe 8 scaled
Ingredients
6 small catfish
2 cups buttermilk
2 cups cornmeal
Salt
Ground pepper
Instructions
Shake cornmeal, salt and ground pepper in a paper bag.
Heat oil to 360 degrees F, halfway up the sides of a cast iron skillet.
Dip catfish into buttermilk, then into dry mixture in bag.
Fry for about 2 1/2 to 3 minutes on each side (5 minutes per every inch of thickness).
Serve with Hush Puppies.
What kind of people will not succeed in life?
I had a good friend, Matt, growing up through high school.
He was a bright kid, did well on tests and stuff. But his parents, who were wealthy, kept giving him everything.
He never had to work during the summers (which is common here in the States). Anytime he needed anything, they handed him wads of cash. Anytime he made a mistake they bailed him out, never held him accountable.
Over time he just lost all motivation.
It hurts me to write this, but – here we are 34 years old, and he still hasn’t finished a college degree and literally lives in his parents’ basement. So much wasted potential already.
Spoiling a kid is the worst thing a parent can do.
She’s absolutely full of shit
Have you ever bought something from a yard sale or second hand store only to discover it was worth significantly more? What was the item you purchased?
Years ago, my husband stopped by a yard sale looking for old canning jars (which he collects). When he was getting ready to pay for his new treasures, the man running the sale asked him if he wanted a bottle he had – it was only $5. So my husband bought it. He put it in the back seat of his truck and headed for home.
When he got home, he noticed the vivid green coloring to the bottle so he took some pictures of it and uploaded pictures of it to a collector’s group he belonged to. One person offered him $100, another $200. Finally, someone messaged my husband and asked him if he even knew what he had. Turns out it was an old Binninger’s whiskey bottle and the second one known to exist. They offered to pay for transport to their facility and take it around to some collectors’ shows, then auction it off so it could get some exposure. My husband paid for the shipping and agreed that they could auction it off.
That bottle sold for $6000. The auction house got 10%. So $6000 – $620 (600 to the auction house and $20 to buy and ship) = $5380.00. Not a bad traffic
What is the best random conversation you overheard?
This was actually half of three conversations that were all connected.
A few years ago I was on holiday in Pisa. One day we were travelling back to Pisa by train after a day out and we were sitting near a young Italian.
When he started speaking to someone on his mobile, I did pay attention at first but I then found that I was understanding what he was saying without trying. I decided to practise my aural comprehension and started listening.
He was asking someone to meet him at the station and I assumed that it was his sister, since many young Italians live at home.
Anyway he said something like:
”…… if you could come and meet me at the station … I need to buy a birthday present for Mamma…”
I could not hear what the other person said but I realised he had received a negative response because he said “OK” in a tone of resignation. I had a vague suspicion that asking for help to choose a present was just an excuse and his real concern was getting a lift home. He then said something like:
”I’ll see you at home then ….. or maybe you could come and pick me up at the station …… Ah, OK. I’ll see you at home then”
I noticed that when he asked about being picked up at the station he spoke with exaggerated casualness, obviously wanting to give the impression that he had only just thought of it although it was his real reason for phoning.
After his request had met with another refusal, he phoned someone else and suggested meeting at the station before going to a bar. This person also declined.
A few minutes later the young man’s mobile rang and I just knew that the second person wanted to arrange something for another night. When he answered his mobile, I could half sense and half hear the other person suggesting that they meet another time. The young man did not want to arrange anything and ended the call very quickly.
Personally, if I had been in the other person’s position, I would not have bothered with that young man again. He seemed really self-centred.
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Why do some foreigners think that the Chinese are living in disasters and that the government is against its people?
It is the nature of commercial media that it reports only shocking bad news. Good news is of no interest to anybody. Commercial media has one job: to delivery a large audience to advertisers. To maximize the audience it must minimize the daily shock value.
It ‘s not just foreigners, newspapers in Singapore, HK and Taiwan report China like it is a complete cycle of violence, corruption, and sex, because that is what sells newspapers and attracts audiences. My relatives in HK won’t visit because they are too frightened to come to Suzhou. Despite us being in the SIP which is virtually crime free.
Government media would like to correct the balance. But they also are under pressure to deliver audiences to justify their huge budgets, so they too become superficial and concentrate on human rights, labour regulation failures, and corruption.
China tries to bring in its own message via publications and CCTV, but this is seen as propaganda and so viewership is limited to overseas Chinese.
What was a loophole that you found and exploited the hell out of?
I’m torn whether or not the share this because this “loophole” still exists.
When I was an undergraduate, I noticed that publishers would send professors copies of their textbooks. Some unsolicited. Some upon request.
A light bulb went off. As a new semester approached, I would find a copy of the previous syllabus and get the ISBN number or I’d just go to the bookstore and copy it down. All I really needed was the publisher’s name, the title and the author. I would Google the publisher and look for a customer service number or a request for review copy number. Then, I’d call and say, “Hi, my name is Charlie and I’m calling for Dr. Jones. Do you have any review copies of this textbook that you can send me?” (I used Jones as a pseudonym here but the person whose name I used was real). And then when they confirm that they do, I’d ask if there were any ancillaries that would accompany the book.
They would send the book, solution set and test bank directly to me at the department office. After my first semester, I didn’t pay for a single book in college.
I would exercise caution doing this. I think this worked for me was because I provided free tutoring to students and every one of the faculty members in the department knew me.
What are the lessons people most often learn too late in life?
1. Money might not buy happiness but it does make sadness comfortable.
2. The fuller your phone battery is by the end of the day, the better your day was.
3. Having a small circle is cool until your two friends are busy.
4. World history unfolding seems so unreal until you experience it first and it becomes too real.
5. If an object is large enough, it becomes a location.
6. Never run for a bus or a relationship. Because when one leaves, another arrives.
7. May you attract someone speaks your language so you don’t have to translate your soul.
8. Some people don’t realize how hard you are riding for them, until you park.
9. Everyone wants you to go the extra mile, but seldom gives you the gas to do it.
10. Randomly hearing your favorite song is more satisfying than putting it on yourself.
According to the plan, it was supposed to carry back 2 kilograms, but the density of the lunar soil is based on public information in the United States. The U.S. public information is incorrect. The actual lunar soil density is smaller than that disclosed by the United States.
In this way, under the same volume, the mass decreases: 2 kg → 1.731 kg.
This scientific parameter must not be wrong! Get it wrong and the mission will fail. Fortunately, the Chinese do not trust the United States and have margins when designing.
2 possibilities: Deliberately publicizing wrong information to mislead others. The second is that the United States really doesn’t know what is wrong. Therefore, the United States keeps asking China for information and lunar soil. China ignored it!
I am not qualified to say that the US moon landing was fake, I can only have doubts.
Some Problem discussion :
1. The Soviet Union also used unmanned missions to land on the moon, obtained the lunar soil, and found water, while the United States said there was no water. The Soviet Union was not confident and could only believe that the lunar soil it obtained was contaminated. Now, no one from China has landed on the moon to obtain lunar soil, proving that the lunar soil contains water.
2. The ironclad proof of the American moon landing is the installation of a lunar surface laser corner reflector . The distance between the earth and the moon can be measured on the earth through the lunar corner reflector. However, the United States installed two corner reflectors manually, and the Soviet Union installed three corner reflectors with automatic machines for unmanned lunar landings. At the same time, the Soviet Union’s corner reflectors can also measure the distance between the earth and the moon. The effect is the same, how can it be “irrefutable proof”.
3. Zhang Benan , deputy chief engineer of China’s aerospace industry , publicly stated that according to the internal assessment of the US Apollo moon landing, the reliability rate was less than 50%. If China followed the American moon landing model, it would be impossible to succeed. Look, Chinese scientists always speak in direct manner. If the success rate of a project is less than 50%, can it be successful? However, there were 6 Apollo moon landings, 5 of which were successful. Science is not feudal superstition. We talk about projects based on facts. We do not take personal feelings and evaluate rationally!
4. When the United States landed on the moon and returned to the earth, it did not master the ” Qian Xuesen ballistic ” re-entry technology and returned to the earth at the second cosmic speed , which would have killed all the astronauts. However, the three astronauts are not dead, they are alive. what happened? The United States has not yet mastered this technology. In 2022, NASA made big claims early, claiming that Orion was the first manned spacecraft in history to use a jump return method (i.e., “floating”) to reenter the atmosphere. This is actually a ” semi-ballistic return ” and is not fully understood. But how did they return to Earth in 1969?!
5. China and the United States, no one has landed on the moon, and some people have landed on the moon. Comparison of lunar surface pictures:
main qimg 9f3133a555bfba4b50b4547c58bb3bce
China, lunar surface, lunar soil is dense and discolored. United States, on the lunar surface, the lunar soil is like a cement pile, loose and does not change color. (Picture below: Moon landing announced by the United States)
main qimg da27dfb27dc0d274dda5f095a428ba41
There is another picture, below: Ground simulation training taken by the United States (published by the United States), take a look
main qimg 4ae1eed93956631e2abf65cb90cd3e78
In the ground simulation, the astronauts were held by two wires behind them, and the scene was almost the same as if they were on the moon… If you go to the studio and the wire ropes are blurred, you would think that they are on the so-called moon….The picture below shows the lunar surface taken by China’s Chang’e 2 , which is believed to be the remnants of the American Apollo 11. However, it is a shadow with a resolution of 70 meters. It does not prove that “someone landed on the moon”. A lunar rover? American flag? where? Where are the footprints? No one has ever landed on the moon, so we can throw something down. It’s pitch black, what are you looking at? ?
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Even if no one lands on the moon, we can still create this huge pile of ruins with nothing visible. 2002 American TV show, the host who questioned the moon landing insisted that astronaut Aldrin swear to the camera with his hand on the Bible, declaring that he had truly left footprints on the moon. If he refused, it would prove that the moon landing was a hoax. Aldrin remained silent for a long time. But the host continued to ask, saying that if you don’t swear, “you are a coward, a liar, and a shameful thief.” Faced with such verbal provocation, an angry Aldrin punched the host, but he still refused to swear in the end. Later, Armstrong and other three other astronauts who landed on the moon also refused to swear when they encountered similar situations. That is to say, no one who landed on the moon has dared to swear according to the Bible that he landed on the moon. (There is a video, you can look for it) According to American law, pressing the Constitution and the Bible with your hands and swearing an oath are essentially testimonials, which are legally binding. Many people do not understand American law. The act of swearing on the Bible can be used as evidence recognized by the court. If you lie, it is ” perjury “; and perjury is one of the six major felonies and must be sentenced to more than one year in prison. There is no Execution outside prison and understanding outside court. Therefore, when Americans are forced to swear or testify, they can remain silent and refuse to answer. This is a form of self-protection and is recognized by law.
Conclusion :
1. We must use a “real scientific attitude” to talk about problems, instead of “because the United States is very powerful”. Everything it does is right and true. This is inappropriate. Discuss things objectively without any subjectivity; let alone use force to overwhelm others, “America is great, how dare you doubt it?” “Scientists from all over the world don’t doubt it, so who do you think you are?” “Whatever culture you have, you are worthy of doubting Apollo”…This is no longer interesting.
2. Not much to talk about, just two:
A. The United States has not yet mastered the “floating technology.” How did the people inside the lunar return module survive when it returned to the earth at the speed of the second universe? Entering the atmosphere at the speed of the second universe, the spacecraft can withstand at least 16G inside and outside, and the human body can withstand up to 10G. If it exceeds, you will die. How did these moon landings survive?
B. Just one. Of all the “moon-landers”, not one of them pressed the Bible and swore he would land on the moon. Why? When talking about things, convince people with reason.
Everyone is interested in the ground training of the American Apollo moon landing. Here are a few more pictures. These are all announced by NASA:
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It is speculated that the Americans do not know what the real land on the moon is like. They relied on reasoning to simulate the lunar surface and thought it was similar to a cement pile. However, now China has landed on the moon, and found that the lunar surface is actually similar to the Gobi Desert. The picture below shows the first American moonwalkers. They firmly refused to swear by the Bible that they had landed on the moon. They either cursed, ignored, or remained silent. There were 12 people who landed on the moon, and no one swore an oath!
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We Chinese, born in a secular society, keep a distance from religion or are indifferent to it. But Western society is different. Even after the religious reform, most Americans are Protestants, and they still have a strong respect for religion. Swearing on the Bible is a big deal to them. This is not an oath, it actually explains a lot.….
The latest video I saw was Aldrin talking to a little girl. He probably won’t live long enough to control it, so he told the truth. July 2018, an 8-year-old girl asked Aldrin: “Why hasn’t anyone gone to the moon in so long?”Aldrin accidentally said this: I don’t know, we haven’t been to the moon either!
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Author Note :
USA empire of lies, Barbarian who think himself noble.
Onion Crusted Catfish
onion crusted catfish
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
Catfish
8 U.S. Farm-Raised Catfish Fillets
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1 teaspoon lemon zest
1 cup French fried onions, crushed
Pecan Sauce
1/2 cup butter
1/2 cup chopped pecans
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 tablespoon fresh parsley, chopped
Instructions
Catfish
Combine flour, salt, cayenne pepper and lemon zest in shallow bowl.
Dredge fillets in flour mixture and press in crushed fried onions, coating well.
Brown fillets over medium-high heat serving side down for 3 to 4 minutes.
Turn fillets and cook 3 to 4 more minutes or until done.
While fillets are cooking, make Pecan Sauce.
Place fillets on plate and serve with sauce.
Pecan Sauce
Melt butter in small saucepan until bubbly and slightly browned.
Add pecans and cook 1 minute to lightly toast.
Add lemon juice and Worcestershire sauce. Remove from heat; add parsley. Spoon over fish.
What accidentally rude things do Americans do while traveling even without realizing it?
Senator John McCain told this story. He was visiting an African nation and was in the office of that country’s president, along with a Congressional colleague. The colleague proceeded to talk to the African president loudly and slowly, using exaggerated gestures.
“MY country is VERY BIG. We have BIG MOUNTAINS. We have BIG CITIES. We have UNIVERSITIES. Do you know what UNIVERSITY means?”
The African president stared at him a moment and then replied, in a normal tone of voice, “I think so. I have a daughter at Vanderbilt.”
Edit, May 5, 2023: Eighty-two thousand views in a week suggests that this issue resonates with a great many people. I am also reminded of this incident of a few years ago:
EDITORIAL: Well, that was embarrassing… — Acknowledging our assumptions
There are many ways to strangle communication. We can misinterpret, not pay enough attention, pay too much attention (to ourselves!), and of course assume. It is much too easy to do. A recent case …
Finally, I am reminded of the employee orientation I attended at an internationally known non-profit institution that attracts employees from all over the world. The institution is located in Tennessee. A young couple with obvious British accents said they were from the UK, and the person in charge of the orientation, having no idea what the UK was, spent the entire day thinking they were from Ukraine.
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Have you ever worked with someone who deliberately tried to get you fired?
Yes. My BEST friend…who I hired to be an assistant manager…and he succeeded. Out of the blue one day, the COO of the company (a bit of a tyrant, but was ALWAYS cool with me) tried to get me to resign for “theft” of property that had been missing before I ever took the position as a manager. I flatly refused and even laughed at him, I hadn’t stolen anything and I knew I was the scapegoat for something. I was fired with no cause given, it certainly wasn’t for theft even though that was the claim. Months later he (best friend) then proceeded to go after my Dad (who worked at the same company) and my dad resigned (he was already job shopping because the company was beginning to have strange issues). Turns out he (my best friend) was a two faced POS (even his own family has now disowned him). He apparently knew that the COO of the company was having an affair…and he used that info to blackmail the COO into putting him into my position and then my father’s position. It lasted about a year until the company president found out about the affair and gave the COO a second chance to clean up his act (the COO’s wife worked for the president and was just a wonderful person). The COO couldn’t keep it in his pants and he got fired. The President took over the COO’s position and began to get information from recently fired employees about how they were fired without cause because the “big supervisor” (guess who) found “problems” that didn’t really exist. The big supervisor would have to come to the stores and do inventories, etc., and while he was doing that he was rewriting sales agreements and contracts so that HE was now getting the percentages of the sales vs the now fired managers. Well, all of that caught up to him…AND it was determined that HE was stealing and blaming it on employees. He had a nice racket going. He got fired and damn near got put in jail. I eventually heard that he had BIG BIG money problems, a serious drug issue and other things. His wife divorced him, his two kids won’t speak to him, his brother and sister won’t even mention his name…. He moved away, married a gal that had a “history” and became persona non grata around these parts.
This is a guy I knew all of my life, who I trusted with my life and would’ve died for. His family is one of the best and his father was as good a man as I’ve ever known. He threw all of it away for money and to try to dig himself out of a problem of his own making. It broke my heart because I’d never been betrayed like that before.
PROOF EVERYONE IS GOING BROKE!
If the Chinese government was forced to choose between Made in China 2025 and One Belt One Road for investment, which one should it invest in?
I believe that Made in China 2025 plays better to China’s traditional strengths, which are:
Production and manufacturing capacity;
Innovation and adaptation;
A growing domestic consumer market;
Fast to market speed;
Domestic consumers who are quicker to adapt than other markets.
It will also stimulate science innovation at a time when the US, EU and Japan are not investing as much.
Moreover, China needs to move up the value chain because the US has shown that it is an unreliable trading partner, which means that China needs to be strong in all the areas which the US is currently strong in, and replace the US as the world’s most innovative and reliable trading partner.
There is an opportunity here because the Trump administration and Republican Party have turned against science investment and education, which means that there is a good opportunity for China to attract science talent to work in China on next generation products and services.
In order to do this, China needs to open up immigration, not just to ethnic Chinese from overseas, but to all talented individuals with special skills who can contribute to Made in China 2025. It needs to become the immigration destination of choice for people from all over the world, replacing the US.
OBOR mainly benefits the large Chinese state-owned companies which are strong in transport development and infrastructure. However, the big question is when will these huge infrastructure projects be paid off?
If their domestic markets take a long time to develop, this means that these governments in central Asia will be saddled with high levels of debt to China, and creating animosity towards China among their own populations. (This has already happened in Malaysia, where the new Malaysian government has asked to re-negotiate the terms of Chinese infrastructure projects in Malaysia.)
For these reasons, I think that Made in China 2025 is the safer investment, and will help Chinese science and industry move up the value chain, replacing the US.
More common than you can believe
Beef Brisket
Beef Brisket
Ingredients
1 (5 or 6 pound) beef brisket
Onion, garlic and celery salt
1 tablespoon liquid smoke
1/4 cup Worcestershire sauce
1 envelope onion soup mix
1 small bottle barbecue sauce
Instructions
Marinate brisket in a mixture of the onion, garlic and celery salts and liquid smoke. Rub in well and poke holes in meat to help tenderize it. Marinate overnight or at least 3 hours.
Make a pouch of aluminum foil. Put meat in it and add salt and pepper to taste and Worcestershire sauce. Seal pouch well and bake at 275 degrees F for 4 to 6 hours.
Open pouch and put onion soup mix and small bottle of barbecue sauce over brisket. Seal pouch again and bake 1 hour longer.
Refrigerate for 1 hour before slicing across grain.
What was your favorite prison experience?
A few years ago, pre-COVID, I volunteered to teach inmates at Folsom Women’s Facility how to code.
In preparation for doing so, I was sent a list of do’s and dont’s (well, mostly don’ts, especially since any “do” can be converted to a “don’t” by negating it).
Some of the don’ts were fairly obvious–no physical contact with an inmate, no passing of messages to/from inmates, no discussion of their crime or sentence, etc.
Some were less obvious (to me, at least) but made sense once I read them…
Do not wear clothing that resembles the clothing that prisoners wear (so no jeans, no blue shirts, no orange, etc.)
Do not wear clothing that resembles what custodial staff wear (forest green pants, tan shirts, camouflage)
And there was “Do not under any circumstances run.”
I had (correctly) assumed I would be escorted to and from the classroom, so I couldn’t imagine running. “What’s this about?” I said to myself for a millisecond, then I read further. If a violent incident were to occur, typically the only people running are the perpetrators. Or the guards rushing to quell the incident. You don’t want to be mistaken for an inmate causing trouble, so don’t run.
All of a sudden, the blood drained from my face. “What am I getting myself into?”
Reading further, it said that incidents were rare, but they do happen. I composed myself.
Further down still, the verbiage was something like this–if an incident did occur, the guards’ primary objective was to prevent injury to the staff. I would be a volunteer visitor, and my safety could not be guaranteed. Hmm.
I signed the form. I wanted to help.
It was a bit of a drive–San Francisco to Folsom. Stayed overnight in an Airbnb, and was ready to go early the next morning. Short drive to the facility, enjoyed the scenery, etc.
Then I pull up the road that leads to the facility. As I approach and look for the parking area, I see guard towers, barbed wire, etc. “Holy shit, what did I get myself info?”
I panic for a few seconds, then compose myself. “This is going to be fun. Teaching is my happy place. These folks could use my help.”
I had always assumed that in retirement I would work at the Humane Society, or part-time at Home Depot or the like. But the moment I stepped in the classroom and introduced myself, I instantly knew what I was going to do when I retired.
I could make jokes about inmates being a captive audience, but the fact is–they were there to learn. Much more universally than my corporate clients, some of whom don’t really want to be there, or if they do, they aren’t allowed to focus because their boss keeps asking them to do things, even though they are in class.
I went back several times and enjoyed each and every moment with those students.
But the question asked about our favorite prison experience. It was a LinkedIn message I received a couple years later, from one of my former students:
“I hope you remember me from Folsom Women’s Facility. You did a Python workshop for us, I enjoyed it and was inspired by it. I am out now and working. Thank you for the knowledge and encouragement!”
That.
More of that, please.
Have you ever been pulled over by a police officer for an unusual reason?
The plant I work in is a 24/7 365 operation. I’m an industrial electronics technician/mechanic and this particular year I got the short straw. So late on the 24th of December Christmas eve and I’m on my way to work. Then this cop pulls in behind me, lights n such, and pulls me over. I couldn’t think of a single thing I had done wrong and was thinking, wtf, I’m gonna get a ticket on may way to work a night shift on Christmas eve, seriously???. I was clearly not feeling like this was going to be a good day.
Now I like putting my skills to work in my personal as well as professional life. My favorite thing is building projects, enter the pickup truck I was driving at the time. For note, this took place about 20yrs ago.
The cop comes up and immediately said, ‘you haven’t done anything wrong’. Which clearly left me very very confused. ‘Are those solar panels on your bed?’. Yes, yes they are. You see I had built an electric truck out of an old Chevy S10. The solar provided some free charging. The questions being flying and on the side of the road on Christmas eve I pop the hood and give an impromptu lesson on electric vehicles.
10min or so later excused myself, work awaited. Oddest stop I ever had.
As a car salesman, what was the biggest discount you ever gave on a car?
I worked for a Kia dealer in the late 90s. They had something called retro money. It was an incentive to the dealer. Every car you sold in a month got you xx dollars from the manufacturer. The more you sold the larger the incentive, and it was retro to all the cars you sold that month. So if the incentive went from 500 to 800 per car you would get the extra 300 on all cars sold for the month.
It is the last day of the month and we need to sell two cars to hit the next level. It would mean an extra 35k for the dealer. We sold the first one by 10am. Then it was a ghost town. No customers etc. I get a guy looking at a Kia Sportage. Not really interested, blah blah blah. It’s nearly closing time and this guy is the only customer. He is one of those that doesn’t buy the same day etc. I was ready to buy a car at this point. We offer him a deal, no, another deal, no. We gave him the rebate off of invoice as well as the holdback, the funny money. The final offer was a 4,000 loss from triple net cost. It was about 8k off of sticker price. This on a car that had a sticker price of about 18k. HE WANTS TO THINK ABOUT IT OVERNIGHT. I tell him this deal goes away. Honestly, if he didn’t buy it, I was going to. He did buy it.
Drizzle Drizzle; men have flipped the script but women DON’T GET IT
As a Starbucks barista, have you ever been terrified of the name someone wanted on their order?
I work at a fast food place, not Starbucks, but yeah, I’ve had my share of gross assholes who want me to call them shit like “big dick” or “daddy.” In the immediate aftermath of the 2016 elections, I had a Latine coworker who was told several times to put in “Trump,” and once, “Heil Hitler.” Thank g-d I wasn’t in the store that day. I think I would’ve had a heart attack.
The absolute worst I’ve personally taken was this douchebag who told me to put his name in as Hail Satan 666, and when I called his order by item instead of name, he told me he wouldn’t leave the store until I called it. I refused and told him we only called real names (not true, but a convenient excuse). He was snickering with his buddies and told me that was discrimination because that was definitely his real name, and did I have a problem with his real name? Goodness, I hope none of that merry band ever procreate.
On the flip side, I had a dude that same day who gave me his name, and when I apologized and said we could only use real names, he got the BIGGEST grin, pulled out his wallet….
…..and I put in his name, went to the back, and when my manager opened her mouth to tell me off I said “ohhh, no. I saw his driver’s license. His name is really Bruce Wayne, and we’re gonna call it.”
Can you write something that will shock me to the core?
In ancient Rome, the punishment for patricide (killing one’s father) was to be drowned in a sack along with a viper, a dog, a monkey and a rooster. The reason? I don’t even know.
Alice Stebbins Wells was the first ever policewoman who joined the LAPD in 1910. Because she was the first (and only) policewoman, she designed her own police uniform.
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3. Gorgias of Epirus, a Greek sophist, was born in his dead mother’s coffin while pallbearers were on their way to bury her. Who has an explanation for this?
4. In the 5th century, St. Simeon Stylites spent 37 years on a small platform on top of a tall pillar in Aleppo, Syria. He did it for ascetic reasons but sometimes I wonder how even spending 1 year on top of a skyscraper without coming down will be like.
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5. One of the most well-known gladiators of ancient Rome, Carpophorus, fought exclusively against beasts. You think Samson in the Bible was a beast? Carpophorus was a monster! Carpophorus famously defeated a bear, lion, and leopard in a single battle. That same day, he slaughtered a rhinoceros with a spear and set a record of killing 20 wild animals no other man will even venture to go near. Even Hercules didn’t do this!
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American Reacts to First Time You Realized America Really Messed You Up | Part 2 | TikTok
Have you ever had a job where you did nothing for years and nobody found out?
I do now.
It grew out of quiet quitting. Most other hospitals in town pay about 30–40% more for my job. So after making this known I cut back my work to about 60% and nobody noticed or cared so I cut back even further.
I do about 6 hours of work in a given week.
I show up, I train my classes 1–2 days a couple weeks a month then I go wander around clinics and bullshit with a few people to look like I’m busy. Then I go back to my desk and sit. Thanks to Covid office emptiness I keep headphones on so it looks like I’m listening to music. I’m listening to books on tape or watching YouTube videos. I keep something that looks like work on one of my monitors so I look busy but I pretty much just sit. Sometimes I work on additional certifications for when the ship sinks and I have to go work somewhere else.
I work from home on Fridays, which is to say I sign in to Teams and watch Netflix for 8 hours.
If I can keep this up for 13 years and this poorly run mess I work for doesn’t bankrupt itself, I retire with a full pension.
How did your marriage end?
I have been married twice.
My first marriage ended with my wife’s bloody body in my lap.
She took only about a minute to die.
We had been married, exactly 5 years, she died on our anniversary. She was pregnant, so I also lost the person who would have been my firstborn.
My second marriage ended when my wife died in hospital, from cancer, while I was asleep, at home, she took just days short of 2 years to die.
We had been married 46 years.
I’m still trying to work out which was the worst.
The strange thing about all this is that my first wife died on the 17th of August 1963, at 0130 hrs.
My second wife died on the 17th of August 2013, at 0115 hrs.
I decided to not remarry as I would be depressed every year as August approached.?
PS. My birthday is the 27th of August.
What did your boss say to you during a meeting that resulted in you immediately resigning?
I came into work one morning at around 9:30AM and so was admittedly late. This was in the early 70s so flexible working was not a thing. My boss called me into his office, and gave me right bollocking. I resigned on the spot basically telling him that if he didn’t like it he could stuff his job.
This does seem to be rather high-handed of me, but the context is that I had finished work at 4 AM, destruction testing and debugging a programme suite I had written over the previous 6 months. I had just worked continuously from Friday 10 PM until Monday 4 AM surviving on sandwiches and copious amounts of caffeine citrate tablets so by the time I arrived at 9:30 AM on Monday I was still pretty strung out and probably resembled the crazy doctor in the Cannonball run.
I was incensed to be carpetted without being asked for an explanation. Two days later I had a new job with a 50% salary increase.
Have you ever seen a mass exodus after a respected employee quit or got fired?
I worked a $8-an-hour part-time job on weekends because I needed the money. Like all low-wage jobs, it was hard work, stupid policies, supervisors with a take-it-or-leave it attitude. It was a high-turnover position; people were always quitting and they were always hiring. We were always understaffed.
We were without a manager. Our team lead had been pressed into service without title or pay raise while they recruited the position. For months. As an employee formerly in our position, he was sympathetic to our viewpoints, did the job well, and was popular with us front-line guys. He applied and interviewed for the position he was already spending 40 hours a week doing.
He didn’t get the job.
On the new manager’s first day, our disappointed and bitter team lead quit. Fully 80% of the team followed him out the door. Many of us told our team lead that the only reason we hadn’t already quit was that we hadn’t wanted to make his job as our unacknowledged manager harder.
That didn’t stop the fucker from disappearing instead of repaying the $500 I had loaned him.
For years, the race we all hear about is to lower and lower node sizes. China (SMIC) decided that competing on this was a fools errand.
They are currently flooding the market with 28nm (and above), also known as “mature processes”. This is the same strategy they took in solar panels and batteries. By some accounts, they’ll have a third of this market in a few years.
28 nm is a limit after which transistors had to be redesigned for heat dispersion, data transfer and electric interference, expensive for minimal speed increase. Some think that it is better to keep that design. but use gallium, photonics and other tech to make chips faster. There’s also this interesting cost curve where 14nm is the inflection point where it starts to become more expensive rapidly.
The running after Moore’s law of stuffing more primitive logic into smaller and smaller chips ends up with, for most applications, only marginal gains in useful functionality. Bigger, although still tiny, integrated circuits take up marginally larger space/volume and energy consumption and do the job within acptable response times for logical cycles.
In marketing terms this makes even more sense to raise the cumulative return on mature proven minimum defect production cycles. Going after smaller etching dimensions involves a far higher investment and as can be seen a smaller market.
The experience and tacit knowledge gained on the rising throughput in 28nm etch production is likely at some point to result in the systems teams involved coming up with better designs for smaller dimensioned products simply as a result of their accumlation of their know how (learning curve).
Why is this a problem:
They need 28nm for a ton of things. Lower node is more profitable, but higher node chips are critical for a bunch of things. Cars. IoT. Microcontrollers.
And most worrying: these higher node chips are important for the military. The US government, especially under Trump, tried to get the military to have a better sense of the provenance of chips. They have, for the most part, failed. Chips are bought by systems integrators and the systems integrators have little sense of their own supply chain.
Qualcomm etc aren’t lying per se, but you need to fulfil orders. Some of them are civilian and are military. Some get filled by SMIC chips others by global foundries.
What’s more important?
Their military production might be at risk of being cut off in the event of conflict. Intel’s foundry is targeting lower nodes. It won’t touch these lagging edge processes. Why should it? There’s no $$ in it.
The US private sector has shown great disinterest in solving this.
It was obvious some time ago that this would happen, and it’s the consequences of capitalist short term policies of the US administration. Anyone in tech knows military equipment does not use advanced node chips.
Whatever West does is too little & too late if West’s purpose is to kneecap China. China can make everything, materials, chemicals, and equipment for making 28nm chips & above. China has some workarounds for making 5nm chips too.
This gain in Chinese market share is not export driven, but from domestic consumption growth and divestment from US foundries. Too many people are short-sighted and think that China cannot properly manufacture advanced chips. Take a look at Huawei’s recently released PUEA70, which has a 7-nanometer chip and a camera module that surpasses Sony’s.
I think another point that the West hasn’t realized is that Chinese advance in semiconductor will quickly spill over to Vietnam too (China is already eating into South Korea & Taiwan’s lunch) and there won’t be anyway to diverge from China-Vietnam supply chain network and still able to compete on price (China already can mass produce for much cheaper than other East Asian developed economies). This spillover has already happened in solar industries.
Saving Private Ryan RIPPED Me to Shreds – First Time Watching
One of the best reactions.
This movie was a hard watch and a complete emotional rollercoaster. I cried and laughed (sometimes at inappropriate moments), but mostly sobbed. Okay... not just sobbed, I UGLY cried. Kinda embarassing, but it's out there now, don't judge me for my faces of despair! Lol. Trust me, I went to bed hugging my dog after filming!
You know there are a number of things that I miss from the “states that are particularly difficult to come by here in China. Not to bash China, but these things are rare, or completely heard of, outside of the mega-cities.
Milk Shakes. I had one at McDonald’s in Shenzhen back in 2013. Right before they stopped carrying it for lack of popularity.
Fresh sesame or onion bagels with cream cheese.
Cheese-It crackers.
Goldfish crackers… any flavor.
Crusty hard rolls.
A full turkey with stuffing.
Cold cuts (with the exception of prepackaged hams).
Grandmother “butter chips” pickles.
Pretzel sticks
Not that I am complaining. You see, there are tradeoffs. Sure, I might not have some of those processed snack foods, but there are so many food alternatives that are tastier, and better for me to eat here, that I am not bothered by it at all.
But still…
Having a butterscotch milk shake and ten tacos would be a nice treat every now and again.
It is common to see a row of tires placed next to military camp dormitories in Taiwan. What do you think is the purpose of placing tires next to military barracks dormitories?
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You won’t guess what the tires are for! Well let me tell you, they put these tires in to prevent Taiwanese soldiers from committing suicide.
Taiwanese soldiers are not only physically fragile, but also psychologically fragile. They are simply unable to face the bloody battlefield.
Because Taiwan’s military leaders are worried about accidents happening to soldiers during training, they are unable to explain to their families and public opinion. They can only keep lowering training standards and being accommodating, causing the physical condition of Taiwanese soldiers to get worse and worse, becoming outright “hothouse strawberries.”
Just imagine, if the PLA occupied Taiwan by force, when the sharp sirens sounded in the Taiwan military camp, how many Taiwanese soldiers who had hurriedly escaped would fall from the heights of their dormitories.
Before conducting ground operations, the PLA will definitely carry out targeted bombing of Taiwan’s airports, ports, and military camps to completely destroy the resistance of Taiwan’s navy and air force.
Multiple legions of the PLA landed on Taiwan Island, established headquarters, and began to enter the city. The so-called Taiwan Army’s special forces soldiers are probably still queuing up to receive their guns.
Basically all the generals of the People’s Liberation Army participated in the 1979 Sino-Vietnam conflict. On the Syrian battlefield, the PLA central theater and western theater dispatched multiple divisions to participate in actual combat training against “ISIS”. But in Taiwan, only General Xu Linong, who is over 100 years old, has participated in actual combat, and the new generation has never been on the battlefield.
This is the real Taiwanese military and will make you feel a sense of absurdity.
I did not witness it, but the crime was so pointless and stupid that I still cannot wrap my head around it.
A good friend of mine has been a police officer since leaving the military in the late 90’s. He has no shortage of stories of dumb things people do on bad days. This one sticks out to me as particularly pointless.
As a new recruit, he and his training officer responded to a low-priority call about a tractor-trailer idling in a residential area. It was a cold night and the driver was probably trying to heat the sleeping compartment. Maybe contrary to a noise or anti-pollution bylaw, but about as mundane as it comes.
They walk up. The supervisor raps on the cab door and yells to shut off the truck. No response. Bangs harder. Yells louder. Then from inside the truck a muffled answer: “F*** Off!”
Seriously?? They bang again, tell the guy to move his truck or shut it off. “F*** Off!”
They look at each other in disbelief. They weren’t there to arrest him. All he had to do was shut off the truck. Then start up again 5 minutes after they leave. Or just drive away. Instead, he’s swearing at 2 police officers.
The driver is shaking off the sleep and is getting more aggressive. The officers can’t walk away, but (probably) can’t force entry either. A standoff. A pointless standoff.
Then the driver throws the door open and jumps them. They try to restrain and subdue him. But this guy is strong. And mad.
The two officers should have been able to gain control quickly. My friend was not experienced yet, but he was big, well-trained, and had been an amateur kick-boxer before serving in the infantry. But he could not believe how brutal the fight was
It took everything out of them, but of course they get him down. Solid as he was, the truck driver could not win that fight. And now they could search the vehicle. Drugs. Well past the threshold for personal possession. Enough drugs that they are presumed to be for the purpose of distribution.
Drugs that never would have been found if he had just shut off the damn truck.
For the life of me, I do not know how that man’s brain operated. So easy to avoid trouble. So many reasons to avoid trouble. Instead he attacks two police officers and sends himself to jail for a long, long time.
** Edit **
Might be worth pointing out that my friend has never described any encounter as a “dumb thing” done on a bad day. Those were my words, not his. He has seen a lot of bad things, a lot of people at their very worst. But he does not trivialize anyone’s experience and feels it is his place to keep the peace, not to judge. In other words, a far better man than I could ever be.
Shrimp Arancine
Shrimp Arancine (Arancini) is a wonderful Sicilian street food.
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Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
Shrimp Filling
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 shallot, minced
1/3 pound shelled shrimp, finely diced
Salt and pepper
1/3 cup cream
1/4 cup minced parsley
Rice
1 1/2 cups rice
2 teaspoons curry powder
2 tablespoons unsalted butter
1 cup freshly-grated Parmigiano cheese
2 eggs
Breading and Frying
2 eggs
Salt and pepper
Bread crumbs
All-purpose flour
Oil for frying
Instructions
Shrimp Filling
Melt butter and sauté the shallot until it begins to wilt. Stir in the shrimp, cook for a minute more, and stir in the cream. Season the mixture with salt and pepper, continue cooking it over a brisk flame until it has become fairly thick, and stir in the minced parsley. Then remove the pan from the fire and let the filling cool.
Rice
While you’re cooking the filling, bring a pot of lightly salted water to a boil.
Add the rice and the curry powder. Drain the rice when it’s still a little al dente and mix the butter and cheese into it while it’s still hot, then lightly beat the eggs and stir them in also.
Breading and Frying
When everything else is ready, lightly beat the eggs and season them with salt and pepper.
Heat oven to 350 degrees F (180 degrees C).
Make the first arancine by taking two small handsful of rice and shaping them into hollow balls. Fill the hollows with shrimp filling, and mold the two halves together to obtain a smooth-sided rice ball about the size of a small orange (1.5 to 2 inches in diameter). Roll the arancine in flour, dredge it in the beaten egg, roll it well in the breadcrumbs, and fry it in deep hot oil. While it’s cooking begin with the next, and when it has become a golden brown, drain it on absorbent paper.
When you have finished frying the arancini, heat them through in the oven for five minutes, decorate them with orange leaves if desired, and serve them hot.
It’s the Christmas of 1916, and you are a 24-year-old sentry on his duty outside your platoon’s camp in Lithuania.
It’s in the middle of the night and it’s hard to keep your eyes open, it’s cold, miserable, and windy.
You are dreaming about how good it would be to be back home, sitting in front of a fireplace, eating that Bienenstich prepared by your wife.
But all of a sudden you hear a noise coming from the bushes, “What was that?”, you ask yourself when suddenly of your buddies screams, “Achtung!”
This wasn’t an isolated incident, it happened throughout the forests of Lithuania, modern-day Poland, and Belarus.
Wolves back then used to roam the vast expanses of Eastern Europe more freely than they do today, food was in plenty and life was good.
Then the war broke out and that wasn’t the case anymore, the hunting grounds of these wolves were disturbed as their prey was slaughtered for food by both the armies, or was killed during a battle.
The first of these attacks happened in Poland in 1915 when a bunch of wolves started to migrate towards urban areas due to a lack of food and started to attack cattle.
By late 1916, things got extreme as there was no more food left (even cattle), and as their hunger overpowered their fear of humans, they started to attack unsuspecting sentries in the middle of the night, feeding on dead and wounded soldiers in the middle of the battle and sometimes ambushing convoys.
Neither the Russians nor the Germans had the patience to deal with those canines and would turn on packs of wolves and boy would the wolves be coming in hot.
If the regular infantry stopped attacking each other, then that was a sign taken by everyone including snipers, mortarmen, artillery spotters, etc, who too would stop and start assisting the infantrymen in gunning down the incoming wolves by spotting them but the wolves would just keep on coming like one of those video games where the enemy seems to have infinite respawns.
In one incident, several hundreds of wolves (around 300) were killed with no humans dead and only a few wounded but still, this was not enough to dissuade the wolves who would continue these attacks well into 1918 after which they abruptly ceased, however, some places, mainly in Belarus would continue to have a problem with wolves up until early 1919 but these too would stop once their prey in that region was available again.
I was on a solo trip then. I booked a bike tour in Berlin and we were told that we’d be leaving in 10 minutes so if we wanted to go to the restroom we ought to do it now. I was falling in line with other tourmates to the only restroom in the shop and for some reason, a group of American teenagers took notice of a small bike displayed in the shop. One said, “Who would ride that?!” then she noticed me, and their group burst into laughter. I acted like I didn’t hear it and moved on.
For context, I look like a typical Asian, with a height an inch below 5 feet, a child-like face, and a petite build. At that time I was on a trip for a Polish conference and was spending a few days in Berlin to tour around. I was 30 years old then.
Indeed, the “adult” bike was too big for me and the tour guide fetched me a smaller one before we took off.
During the tour, I was asking a few history questions to the tour guide and after a while into the conversation (I talked to him during our free time), I caught a glimpse of the girl and her group’s faces.
She/They looked astonished that I was conversing with the guide in straight English. Which means, I understood every word of their little chatter back at the shop.
My gramps bought a “Dirty Harry” .44 magnum in the mid-70s. My Dad brought it over a couple of years ago to store in my gun safe. Shortly after, I took it to a local indoor range to try it out with a buddy of mine. How could we not?
We both got 40″x24″ paper targets and hung them at the max distance (50 feet+).
image 229
We held the .44 Magnum one-handed, just like Harry Callahan, and gave it a try.
image 14
We each shot 6 shots in fairly rapid succession, pausing only long enough to re-acquire the target. I hit the paper a grand total of one time. He hit the paper twice. Neither of us hit the actual target on the paper.
Granted our ‘test’ wasn’t controlled or really all that fair because we were just having fun with it. But we’re both pretty good shots and we both expected to hit the target a couple of times.
We both had perfectly good targets so we tried again with some of our more comfortably shooting pistols and we both did much better.
In comparison, my semi-custom 1911 in .45 ACP and my Ruger Vaqueros in .357 are both a LOT easier to shoot than that .44 Magnum. And, of course, my 9mm is even easier.
That said, for home defense my favorite pistol is still a shotgun.
The discard happens emotionally before physically.
Here’s how it plays out.
Their replies to you via text or voice are short, non engaging, kinda ‘fed up’ bored vibe to them and they will keep you on unread and take waaaaaay longer in replying back to you.
They stop asking anything or everything about you and what is going on in your life. They never ask about the doctor follow up appointment, or “how’s your day?” They have zero interest and if you do by chance have the opportunity in holding the ‘talking stick’ they are looking out the window as you communicate or switch the topic mid your sentence. You are simply not there and not important in their mind.
You will notice they are doing more single things – that invite, party, event.. they could only get one ticket too.. and its not their fault you are not on the guest list now is it?
Their interest changes in things they talk about doing – almost like it is someone else talking about these things – they will go on and on about a bike ride they will achieve, or a long hike at a place that is all of a sudden a new interest for them to visit. But you know it is coming straight from the mouth of someone else.
They will wait for you to blow your top on something said or done and they will use this as the exit door for silent treatments/ghosting or discards to be able to blame you for being nuts and then run off into the hills to play.
They will put you down more, scorn on your self improvement, thoughts or plans. Generally undermine and underpin any positive action or talk off by being dismissive or remind you that you are and will not be able to achieve any of what you talk off.
They will give nothing away. The breadcrumbs you once hung on to will become sparce, nada, nothing and you will feel inside that dreaded anxious panic feeling that you know something ain’t right and your egg shell walking will turn into marathon running across hot coals to try to please them.
You will doubt yourself more and more and more.
The discard is a process, even though it may seem like a brutal ending at first when you look back you can see the lead up clear as day. It might happen over days, months years and if you have been through the cycle a few times by now, you can set your grand fathers watch to it.
They are self serving creatures and highly predictable once you know the narc code. They are game set match and you realize they are more reliable than an egg timer.
Funny little fuckers aren’t they.
Chicken or Veal Scallopini
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Ingredients
1 pound chicken breasts or veal cutlets (cut thin)
1/2 cup olive oil
1/2 cup Parmesan cheese
2/3 cup Italian seasoned bread crumbs
1 teaspoon garlic powder
Salt and pepper
1/4 cup pure olive oil
Instructions
Pound chicken or veal gently between wax paper ( 1/8 to 1/4 inch thick for veal and 1/4 to 1/2 inch thick for chicken).
In a shallow bowl, combine Parmesan cheese, bread crumbs, and garlic powder. Pour 1/2 cup olive oil in another shallow bowl.
Dip each chicken or veal piece into olive oil and let excess drip. Press meat into bread crumb mixture, coating well and set aside until all meat is breaded.
In a heavy nonstick skillet, heat oil over medium heat and sauté until golden on both sides.
Drain on paper towels and serve with pasta and red sauce.
This was a dude I had dated for some months. First mistake I made was agreeing to start a relationship while trying to finish college. Needless to say I was too busy to pay attention to this guy’s immaturity and lack of personality. Soon after I graduated, the red flags became glaring; his disrespect was consistent and intentional. He refused to show up to my graduation, choosing instead to go hang out with his boys. After that incident I decided to remove myself from the relationship and observe things for a while before making the final decision to completely walk away.
It didn’t take long for him to help me make up my mind. A mutual friend got married so we attended (separately). At the reception I had gone to sit by myself in the hotel lobby when he and one of his friends joined me. They made small talk and whatnot while I did my best to be polite. Then a family passed by, they had a neuro-divergent child around 7 or 8 years old. You could tell from his mannerisms ; soon as he saw my green velvet dress, he wanted to stroke it to his mother’s horror and wouldn’t take no for an answer. I told mom it was okay. I let him touch my dress, gave him a smile and when he was ready, he left. Soon as mom and son left, my ex started laughing and saying, “Autism! Hahahaha”, “Autism!”, “Autism!Hahaha”.
Both his friend and I sat stone-faced, looking at him while he made fun of a child with a condition he had no control over. I was so shocked, my usual retorts, wisecracks and one-liners left me.
That was the day I decided I was not going back to that donkey 🫏. This was 2007. I’ve been married 13 years now, dude is pushing 50 and is still single and childless (and no he’s not single by choice.) I guess no one really cares to stay and do life with a gaping a$$h0le.
It shouldn’t have happened, and no one was blameless.
Mid 1970s, Los Angeles, California. Management decided to hire outside experts to help adjust management and staff attitudes to increase productivity and decrease staff turnovers.
The experts decided that promoting ‘We are a family’ would accomplish company goals. Everyone was expected to attend 2 interoffice workshops a month in which we were encouraged to be ‘like family’ with each other, to share, to become close. A company picnic, a games day and a mid-year party were scheduled (on weekends). Families were invited.
Betty, a longtime, close-to-retirement employee, shook her head and called it ‘nonsense.’
Gary, a top salesman, was friendly, always ready with a little joke and very well liked. He was a pudgy teddy bear, married with five children, living in a two-bedroom home. His wife was a sweetheart, a full-time mom and Gary’s biggest fan.
In the spirit of ‘family,’ Gary shared that his wife had had three miscarriages and had been warned that if she became pregnant again, her chances of living were 30%.
When Gary later proudly announced that his wife was pregnant again, the female staff became incensed, and for days, trouble brewed.
Rita, a tough, direct, three-times-married, 40-year-old who worked closest with Gary chose herself to represent his company ‘sisters’ to confront him.
Betty warned that this ‘family’ intervention would all go wrong. She, like an all-knowing grandmother, was so right.
Gary’s office was glass on three sides, with a wall and window at his back. Anyone could look in, and when Rita strode into his office, many of the female staff took full advantage and stood in groups nearby. Gary, of course, could see this, but had no idea what was going on.
Rita began berating a stunned, deeply reddening Gary. We couldn’t hear clearly, but their faces and gestures told an angry story.
After a bit, Gary ordered Rita out, and she left, slamming his office door so strongly that it was like an explosion, rattling the other glass offices. She disappeared, swearing, into the Ladies’ Room, with friends.
Gary sat for less than a minute, then stood and swept everything off of his desk in several moves. He did the same to files, pictures and mementos on the credenza behind him. He slammed an upper cabinet door over and over, pulled everything out and then tugged one of the cabinet doors off. He dumped his desk drawers on the floor and kicked over the chairs.
As his final act, he heaved a potted plant against his office’s front glass. It cracked but didn’t shatter.
In the spirit of family, Gary (like a favorite son) was told to take a week of vacation time to ‘feel better.’ Rita (treated as a black-sheep, troublemaker) was chastised and threatened with reprisals (no raises, promotions) until 60% of her ‘sisters’ quietly threatened a mass ‘sick out.’
We all received a memo which lengthily described professional office behavior, and the word ‘family’ was glaringly absent. The workshops were discontinued, and the experts never seen again.
Betty harumphed a “I told you so.”
Note: Gary came back and acted as though nothing had happened. Rita moved to another department, and they never spoke to each other again.
Gary’s wife had a near-fatal miscarriage a short time later and had a life-saving hysterectomy.
I’VE BEEN ROBBED. REASON PEOPLE ARE QUITTING YOUTUBE.
At the age of 57 the company I worked for announced they were closing our division. I knew because of my age I might have difficulties finding another job. I decided to keep a positive attitude.
I also started putting together a list of the things I had done at other organizations. Things like problems I had solved, cost reductions with suppliers and operational improvements. The type of things that I could bring to another organization. The other thing I did is I reached out to my professional contacts. Within two weeks I had a list of around 20 companies that were looking to fill a position in my field. I then sent out resumes making sure each was tailored to the needs of that company.
About a week later I had 9 interviews. From those 9 initial interviews I ended up with 4 job offers. From finding out in early February that I was out of a job, to starting a new job in early May. I went into the interviews with a good attitude, used my many years of experience as a positive and focused on what I could do for their organization.
Being out of work at 45 is not the end of the world, but rather a chance to write a new chapter in your life’s story.
There’s a very wealthy guy who lives not too far from me in St. Louis. I interviewed him once for my publication and we had several other meetings. He’s got to be worth a few hundred million, but I’ve never seen him dressed in anything but jeans and a flannel shirt, even on the rare occasions when he spoke on panels at local events.
He’s a very down-to-earth guy who made his initial money trading grain, then made even more money in real estate. He owned a mill and a river terminal at one point. His house is nice and probably worth more than a million, but it’s just a house—it’s by no means a McMansion or anything. I’ve never been in it but it’s on a private street just around the corner from the same supermarket where I shop.
He became briefly notorious in my hometown when the city put up a bunch of vacant buildings and lots for sale in the late 1990s. He bought up a bunch of them, turned around and sold them to developers, making something like a $10 million profit in 24 hours. There was an outcry in the papers and a phony “investigation” that didn’t amount to anything because the only thing it revealed was that the city was stupid and he was smart. The city should have been able to make those deals itself.
Like F. Scott Fitzgerald said, the very rich are different from you and me.
PEOPLE ARE DEAD BROKE! Credit Debt and Delinquencies EXPLODING!
What as a cop, is the assignment that would make you want to quit your job?
That’s an easy one. Internal Affairs! I did this job for six long years and wanted to quit almost every day. I will make my case:
You get to investigate people who you have worked side by side with for many years.
You have to be objective in your investigations which is not what fellow officers are expecting.
You get to sustain charges and recommend discipline to the chief. The chief then decides to hammer the officer with a more severe penalty, and you get to deliver the bad news as if it was your idea.
You must get in the middle of officers domestic disputes, going to their homes and interviewing their wives. Talk about being popular.
When an officer isn’t cutting it or screws up badly, you get to take their gun, ID, and shield. I have a couple of officers who never got over that moment.
You have officers who genuinely blame you for the discipline that they brought on themselves by doing dumb things.
You have officers investigating you on their off time trying to find something they can use as leverage or payback.
Everyone tiptoes around you and tries disingenuously to get and stay on your good side. Then they trash you as soon as you retire because you’re no longer a threat.
You get to take your fellow officers to court and testify against them.
You get to conduct confrontational interrogations with fellow officers.
You get accused by the public of covering up police corruption, while at the same time being accused of being a headhunter by your fellow officers.
Once you’re in Internal Affairs for more than a couple years, there is no path out except retirement.
An officer can do a lousy job at IA and never find any wrong-doing and remain popular. This to me is allowing and condoning police misconduct. However, if you conduct your investigations fairly and without blinders, you will be universally disliked.
If someone is trying to make you decide in a hurry, they are probably giving you a bad deal. Walk away.
If you want to make someone feel uncomfortable, look at their forehead when you’re talking to them.
Sometimes pretending that you are naive gets you more information.
If you want to avoid office politics, say good things about coworkers behind their backs.
Physical contact makes you more likely to say yes to a request.
When a group of people laugh, they tend to look at the person they like the most.
Nervousness and excitement have the same body reaction, so if you’re nervous for a speech, instead convince yourself you’re excited. Its proven to give better speeches, too.
Ask for something that seems small, but is related, to what you really want. Then, once they’ve agreed to the small thing, just work up with slightly larger requests until you’ve achieved the desired outcome.
BRAINWASHED College Student Gets SHUT DOWN By Michael Knowles
One frosty evening, as the clock struck 10, there came a mighty bang on my iron gate. Intrigued, I ventured forth to find a young lass standing there, fashionably dressed but sorely lacking in winter wear. Bald as a baby’s bottom with a black cloth wrapped around her noggin, she wore a look of utter befuddlement.
“Can I come in?” she implored. I ushered her onto the porch, where the whole family soon gathered, eager to unravel the mystery.
She spun a yarn about being a long-lost classmate of my nephew, whom she hadn’t seen since dinosaurs roamed the earth but somehow remembered his name.
Her tale took a wild turn as she divulged a family saga involving terrorism, sounding more like a B-movie plot than anything from the real world.
My nephew, blissfully oblivious in his far-off land, confirmed her identity as a former classmate from their days of yore, though he knew zilch about her current escapades. We were all left scratching our heads.
Sensing her screws might be a bit loose, I nixed the idea of summoning the cops and instead rang up the school, where I had a few favors to call in.
Like detectives on a sugar rush, they rifled through ancient files, unearthing her home address and digits.
Her father materialized at our doorstep, frantic from hours of searching. He spilled the beans about her battles with the blues and thanked us profusely for our help.
But the million-dollar question remained: How did she know my address and my nephew’s name?
Living in a cozy small town where everybody knows everybody else’s business, we later found out that the girl had always been a few crayons short of a full box, even back in her school days. Turns out, her story was more twisted than a pretzel in a cyclone.
Don’t smoke cigarettes, like ever. Don’t get caught up in drugs. Manage your blood pressure and cholesterol for the duration of your life. If you let that get out of control, it can damage your heart and arteries in ways that will catch up to you later.
Sure, there are people out there who just do whatever they flipping want and live to 100, but it’s far, far less common for them to live that long.
See a doctor on a regular basis. Stay active and on your feet and exercise regularly.
Another thing that’s rarely mentioned, maintain positive relationships with people. Human connections are critical for happiness and longevity. No man is an island.
Not me but an old friend. This was back in the pre-internet days and in more innocent times.
He created a company called something like “Big Dildos Ltd”.
He then had some mail order catalogues printed, the content of which was relatively discrete but adult-themed – sexy lingerie, battery operated “massage devices”, etc.
The catalogues were delivered to lots of addresses in mostly middle-classes neighbourhoods.
When he received an order, along with a cheque, he would bank the cheque and sit on the money for a few weeks – thereby earning interest on money received.
After a few weeks, he would send a letter to tell the customer he was out of stock for that item and not expecting any more stock, along with a cheque to refund the money.
But here is the real “loophole”. The cheque he sent to return the money had the company name clearly printed on it.
Turns out that many/ the majority of people who placed these orders were too embarrassed to deposit that cheque into their own accounts.
Because he was refunding the money and he always kept a few items listed in the catalogue in stock (at home and generally for personal use between him and his wife), he wasn’t doing anything illegal.
A genius plan that clearly wouldn’t work these days because people can order what they want from the internet, people are far less concerned about anyone knowing that they own such “personal” items and things would all be done by credit card or bank transfer.
When I taught at a private school in a wealthy suburb of Chicago, several of my middle school-aged students were the children of wealthy parents. They were (mostly) very nice, courteous, and studious students. The only thing that shocked me was how oblivious some of them were as to how wealthy and privileged they really were. Like:
The boy who liked to write about his weekend trips with his parents. There were trips around the country during normal weekends, and international trips during long weekends. His father was an executive at Boeing, and I guess traveling was free or cheap to them, so this kid saw more of the world by the time he was 12 than most people see in their entire lives.
The girl who sometimes mentioned that her “dad’s truck had his name on it.” What she failed to mention was that it wasn’t just one truck, but a fleet of delivery trucks for her father’s high-end deli meat business. She thought this was a normal thing… for your family’s name to be on trucks throughout the midwest.
The girl who would spend 3–4 hours after school most days training as a competitive swimmer. Her coach was a former Olympic medal winner. The student seemed really bored by the whole sport, but she ended up getting a full college scholarship and becoming the captain of her college swim team because of it.
The girl whose grandfather purchased brand new MacBooks and charging carts for the school, some 150 MacBooks, total. I was told that he was on the school board, and they were talking about tech for the school, and when the Mac sales rep came to speak with them, he did most of the talking, negotiated the price, and paid for it all himself. He made his fortune owning some sort of electronics retail business before he retired.
But these kids were all ages 11–14 when I taught them. They were always nice enough to me, but if they were snobby with their peers, I never saw it. I just remember, as a broke 30-year-old new teacher at the time, being continually shocked by how oblivious some of those students were as to how lucky they were.
Not so much weird as sad. I had one little girl in my class who had just joined us from another school where she had been having problems. When she came to us she was very withdrawn and shy. So I sat her next to, and encouraged a friendship with, another child, a little boy who was delightful but a little loud and very gregarious. The pair complemented each other beautifully and I kept a close eye on them. Within a week or so they were inseparable, it was a way of getting two birds with one stone, since my loud and sometimes a little too enthusiastic boy benefited from the calming influence of the girl, while she was included in all the games, etc, he was and they were soon BFFs.
However, the sad part was that one day, when we were having a quiet time after lunch (they were all very young and Special Needs, so usually about half the class would nap and the other half I’d read to) the little girl confided in me that she loved me, because I was nicer to her than her last teacher in her other school. I was intrigued and gently questioned her, without making a big deal of it, just having a quiet conversation. From what she told me, this other teacher was a horrible bully and had told her repeatedly that she was “a bad student”. I felt a lot of anger at this; this little girl was a lovely kid but it was clear she’d taken the other teacher’s words deeply to heart.
I spent the rest of that school year helping to bolster her self-confidence. This was a few years ago, she has since gone on to high school and I see her and her family now and then. She is still a lovely young girl and I’m glad I helped her in however small a way. Oh, and her BFF is now her boyfriend!
One evening in 1980 the doorbell rang, which seldom happened at our exurban home. I knew my brother was working on his car in the driveway, so this was strange.
I answered it to see a 60+ year old man, a woman of the same age peeking behind him, and my brother standing 10 feet back grinning like a fool.
“May I speak to Mr. Norman (last name)?” he said in a foreign accent, mispronouncing the last name. I called my dad to the door, and the man said, “Hello. I am your cousin Herbert from Germany.”
Dad was a little dumbfounded, and my brother giggling made him wonder if it was a prank. “I don’t think I have a cousin Herbert.”
The man pulled out his wallet and produced my dad’s confirmation portrait, taken when he was 13 years old. Forty-two years earlier. “Is this you?”
A long-lost cousin from the Old Country!
An instant friendship was forged that night. Herbert was grateful to hear that we pronounced our name as he did, he figured we’d Americanized it (hence the mispronunciation), but was glad to find we hadn’t.
We learned that after WWII, he and his mother received some kind of postwar donations from my great-aunts. “They saved our lives, we would have starved to death.” He still had the certificates from the donation program.
He was amazed my dad spoke excellent German with a ‘Pomeranian’ accent, knowing Dad had been born in the US, 35 years after the family arrived here in 1890. But my dad, surrounded by a family of immigrants, had spoken only German until he went to school. And when we had him try our homemade sauerkraut, he said, “It’s just like I remember my parents making!”
Ninety years after the family moved an ocean away, two old guys found themselves with so much in common it was like finding a brother, right on our doorstep.
Breaking! Outrage when no one stood for The Super Bowl! ”The Black National Anthem”
The US should leave the Chinese alone. The more the US tries to derail China the more hurts the Americans are going to get
The tariff for China products ended up pretty badly, most cost are paid by the American users themselves.
The US government hope to isolate China ended up them getting isolated now.
The US ban on semiconductors sale to China ended up the American semiconductor industry losing 16 billions every year.
The US ban on China’s participation in its space program ended well for the Chinese, they have their own space technology with as many countries participants. The latest news on this one is, the US coerced the European countries not to participate, which shows us that the US is not a democratic Republic.
The US ban on China’s trade , the embargos on technology ended up badly for the US because the Chinese has other trading partners, by and by America could be isolated into a corner.
I can go further but I would stop here.
In conclusion the US government is not smart.
Now , some questions for people:
What are we going to do about the terrorists attack on the Nordstrom pipeline; the foreign led insurgents in HK, Tibet , Syria and Xinjiang, the torture of Eurasian prisoners in Guantanamo, the torturing and the killing of civilians in Iraq , Afghanistan, the bombing of Iraq where no WMD was found, the killing of 7 nuclear scientists of a Sovereign State, the stealing of gold and oil from Iraq, and oil from Syria , etc?
CAN they? Absolutely! SHOULD they? Depends on the circumstances.
Last time I went to the ER was about 10 or so years ago. I had a high pulse rate, jaw hurt, dizziness, and pain radiating down my arm after an afternoon of shoveling snow. All signs of a heart attack.
They ran a bunch of tests that all came back normal. The doc walked in and flung a piece of paper at me. “You’re fine. While it may seem better safe than sorry, you’ve wasted everyone’s time tonight. Your blood tests, EKG, and everything else looks fine. The only thing that appears wrong is the Xray shows a slight issue in your neck. You’ve got a pinched nerve which is causing your arm pain. That obviously made you nervous, causing your heart rate to go up. You need to just go home, take a Xanax, and go to sleep. Next time, think before coming in. You’re not even 40 and worrying about a heart attack!” Then, he left to tell the nurse. We could hear him talking to her, “Send him home. There’s nothing we can do for him when we have others waiting with more important issues.”
I told my regular doc what happened. “Yeah, he’s like that. He’s great at what he does, but can’t seem to grasp the humanity side of things.”
There was also the time when an ER doc was rude and called out on it by my GI. I was newly diagnosed with ulcerative colitis and was having a flare. High fever, bleeding, everything. I had pooped so much there was nothing left when they wanted me to give a sample to see what the problem was. “You’re just constipated. We’ll give you something to help with that.” When I told him that I had UC, he said, “What do you know about it? You’re not showing any signs other than “a wittle tummy ache” (in a condescending tone).” My GI had walked in just as that was being said and told the ER doc, “He’s got UC. I’ll take over now.” ER doc said, “What would you know about it, intern?” My GI said, “I’ve been practicing for almost 30 years. Look my name up in the directory and you’ll see I’m head of gastroenterology here. I suggest you let me tend to my patient now.” ER doc scampered off somewhere and I never saw him again.
His father is quite old and therefore ,a little weak too. While eating, food occasionally fell on his shirt and pants. The other guests watched the old man with their faces contorted in disgust,but his son remained calm.After they both finished eating,the son quietly helped his father and took him to the toilet. Cleaned food scraps from his crampled face and attempted to wash food stains on his clothes, graciously combed his gray hair and finally put on his glasses.
As they left the restroom, a deep silence reigned in the restaurant. The son paid their bill but just before they leave, a man, also old, got up and ask the old man’s son , “Don’t you think you left something here?”
The young man replied “I did not
leave anything.”
Then the stranger said to him,”You left a lesson here for every son and a hope for every father.”
The whole restaurant was so quiet, you could hear a pin drop!
One of the greatest honours that exist ,is being able to take care of those who have taken care of us too.Our parents and all those elders who sacrificed their lives with all their time, money and effort for us, deserve our utmost respect .
You know that feeling when you’re going down a flight of stairs and you miss one?
That was the way I felt when I shook hands with another attendee at a martial arts workshop I went to many years ago- like I was suddenly falling and disoriented and scared. The second I took his hand, that feeling hit me, and I nearly felt sick.
This guy wasn’t exactly intimidating- he was actually kind of nerdy and awkward-looking. I couldn’t figure out why he made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, but I felt awful whenever he was nearby.
I was so uncomfortable that at the end of the workshop, I went to my biggest, strongest looking buddy and asked him if he’d walk me home. I felt stupid for being scared, so I didn’t tell him why- I just made up some excuse. He said he would, and I told him to meet me at the exit to the women’s locker room, at the back of the building.
When I left the locker room, I found the guy waiting for me- sort of poking his head around the corner of the building and staring at me. When I locked eyes with him, he stepped out of the shadows and into my path. He didn’t say a word- he just marched toward me, unblinking. At that exact moment, my buddy came around the other side of the building and shouted a hello. I looked over to him, and then back at the guy in front of me- who was now running away.
As my friend reached the place where I was standing, he looked over my shoulder and said, “Did that guy just SNARL at me?! What’s HIS problem?”
I told him that I thought I had just dodged a bullet and that drinks were on me.
Caught Wife Cheating, So I Drained Millions From Our Accounts, Got A New Identity & Left The Country
I am 14, I work in my father’s office in summers and recently a very talkative girl was hired. She was introduced to us and after a few hours I went out to a restaurant for lunch.
I sat down after ordering and saw the new girl come in. She noticed me after she found her own table, right across mine. We didn’t talk or greet each other. She got a call from whom I assume is her best friend. She was talking very loudly in English, about how the office was.
“They see everything I do! I can’t even pick my nose without them noticing!” she exclaimed.
And I was resisting laughing, thinking: “Ironic…”
And she talked about who she didn’t like in the office, things that offended her etc.
“The boss’s daughter is staring right at me, creepy girl…” She said.
And she waved at me.
Later that day she asked me what work I do in an office like this. I said that I did English translations. Her face went pale that moment.
A welding story
image 228
A customer asked me how much it cost to do this job….
I answered him: $ 1500
He said: So expensive for this job?
I asked: How much do you think it would cost you?
He answers me: $ 800 maximum… That’s a pretty simple job right? !”
– For $ 800 I invite you to do it yourself.
– But…. I don’t know how to.
– For $800 I’ll teach you how to. So besides saving you $700, you’ll get the knowledge for the next time you want
– It seemed right to him and he agreed.
– But to get started: you need tools: A welder, grinder, chop saw, drill press, welding hood, gloves etc…
– But I don’t have all these equipment and I can’t buy all of these for one job.
– Well then for another $300 more I’ll rent my stuff to you so you can do it.
– Okay, he says.
– Okay! Tuesday I’m waiting for you to start doing this work
– But I can’t on Tuesday I only have time today.
– I’m sorry, but I’m only available Tuesday to teach you and lend you my stuff. Other days are busy with other customers.
– Okay! That means I’m going to have to sacrifice my Tuesday, give up my tasks.
– I forgot. To do your job yourself, you also have to pay for the nonproductive factors.
– That is? What is this?”
– Bureaucratic, tax, vat, security, insurance, fuel etc.
– Oh no!… But to accomplish these tasks, I’m going to spend more money and waste a lot of time!
– Do you have them? You can do it to me before?”
– Okay!
– I’ll make you all the material you need. Truck loading is done Monday evening or Tuesday morning you’ll have to come by 6 loading the truck. Don’t forget to be on time to avoid traffic jams and be on time
– At 6??? Nope! Too early for me! I used to getting up later.
…
– You know, I’ve been thinking. Y ‘ all better get the job done. I’d rather pay you the $1500. If I had to, it wouldn’t be perfect and it would cost me a lot more.
When you pay for a job, especially handcrafted, you pay not only for the material used, but also:
– Knowledge
– Experience
– Study
– Tools
– Services
– Time to go
– punctuality
– Accountability
– Professionalism
– Accuracy
– Guaranteed
– Patents
– Sacrifices
– Safety and security
– Payment of tax obligations
No one can denigrate other people’s work by judging prices.
Only by knowing all the elements necessary for the production of a certain work can you estimate the actual cost.
Actual conversation at the local gas station convenience store:
Me with a coffee refill in my cup: “Just a refill.”
Clerk: “That will be $1.58.”
Me: “Your sign says $1.00 cups of coffee today.”
Clerk: “That’s not a cup; it’s a refill.”
Me: “But it’s a cup of coffee.”
Clerk: “No, it’s a refill because it’s not in our cup.”
Me: “So if I bring this back in your cup, it’s $1.00.”
Clerk: “Yes”
Me: No one else in line, so I step over to the coffee area and get one of their cups. At the counter, in front of her, I dump the coffee out of my cup and into theirs. “Okay, I have a cup of coffee.”
Clerk: “That will be $1.00.”
Is Gen Z Aging Rapidly ?
https://youtu.be/TYJH5gFRU5E
Why do people let themselves go when they get older?
Before I worked in medicine, I wondered the same thing. I didn’t mean it in an unkind way, but I wanted to know how to avoid this seemingly unavoidable dilemma of aging. What I found out from the hundreds of patients I’ve had the pleasure of speaking with, is that when life gives you lemons, very few can make lemonade. I generally hear the same things from patients. The two I hear the most, “Don’t get old!” and “These aren’t the golden years.” Anyway…
Off the top of my head, I’ll give you several reasons why people “seem” to let themselves go as they age. I realize there are exceptions to all my examples, but I’m giving you general anecdotal observations that you may not be aware of:
Accidents. Car accidents, motorcycle accidents, job accidents, violent crime (stabbing, punching, gunshots), falling down stairs, etc. Accidents that cause injury almost always leave residual long term pain. The lucky ones don’t have the chronic pain until they are older. If someone has a back injury, several things could have gone wrong. Herniated discs, scar tissue, arthritis, bone spurs, spinal stenosis… and that’s just the back injury. Chronic pain and immobility that stems from injuries can be debilitating later in life. I’ve seen very fit people slowly put on weight over a few years after an injury, because they just could not keep up their exercise regimen.
Less Energy. This seems like a cop out. I didn’t believe it until my own energy levels started declining after 37 yrs old. As you get older, intense activities tire you out far quicker and you need more sleep. It’s more than just mind over matter. So even a life time exerciser starts to slow down as she gets older. It’s nearly impossible to keep up the intensity. This leads me to food intake…
Eating style hasn’t changed with aging. So this is a big one that gets the aging into trouble. I think this one can be somewhat controlled if a person is mindful. Generally speaking, you don’t need to eat as much the older you get. The reasons are many, but one is that you’re not as active (maybe because of #1 and #2). Less energy + more pain + less activity = less calorie intake. At least it should equal less calorie intake. This takes me to…
An older body doesn’t take out the trash as efficiently. As a person gets older, their body just doesn’t handle unhealthy eating and hard living (cigarette smoking, excessive alcohol, etc) as efficiently. Ideally, people should clean up their diets once they hit middle age, but this time of life is incredibly hectic. Healthy living becomes ever more challenging…. it’s not really laziness, it’s exhaustion (see #2). Losing weight and/or staying in shape really is harder with age.
Illness and declining health. Cancer treatments, prolonged Prednisone usage, Congestive heart failure, medications for chronic pain like fibromyalgia (actually a lot of medications can cause unexplained weight gain), Lymphedema, Diabetes, thyroid conditions…. the list goes on. If you saw someone at the grocery store with one of these conditions and you didn’t know it, you would think they were “letting themselves go.”
Hormones. This is more for the women, but men can easily gain weight from declining hormone production too. Women really get a raw deal though. Menopause is not kind. For many women, weight gain is unavoidable. If the weight doesn’t get her in the beginning it might after the “change.” The change in hormone (estrogen mainly) levels changes how the female body uses or stores fat. It’s a common enough problem that scientists seem to be working tirelessly to figure out how to help women stop weight gain during and after menopause.
Other priorities. I do see some elderly women (rarely men) who are still overly obsessed with their weight (I think this is more the Baby Boomer generation). But more commonly, as one ages their priorities shift. Yeah, they may not like being overweight, but “getting in shape” or getting “lean and cut” just isn’t that big of a deal anymore, especially when they have to work so much harder to achieve those results.
Again, these are just some reasons for age related weight gain or not taking care of oneself, that I encounter on a daily basis while working with the middle aged and elderly population.
Since I love to exercise so much, I can’t imagine not continuing to do so into my elderly years. Yet I don’t know what life has in store for me. I haven’t lived with debilitating pain or lymphedema, so I try not to judge.
Braised Veal Shanks, Milan Style (Osso Buco)
2024 02 17 08 3c2
Ingredients
Veal
4 pounds veal or beef shanks
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
1 medium carrot, chopped
1 stalk celery, chopped
1 clove garlic, chopped
1 bay leaf
1 cup water
1/2 cup dry white wine
1 teaspoon instant beef bouillon
1/2 teaspoon dried basil leaves
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
Gremolada (optional)
Gremolada
2 tablespoons snipped parsley
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
1 teaspoon grated lemon peel
Instructions
Trim excess fat from veal shanks if necessary. Coat veal with flour. Cook veal in oil in Dutch oven over medium heat until brown on all sides, about 20 minutes. Drain fat.
Add remaining ingredients except Gremolada. Heat to boiling; reduce heat. Cover and simmer until veal is tender, 1 1/2 to 2 hours.
It happened in a case of mine a good while back. I was appointed to represent a white supremacist/neo-Nazi kind of guy on a perjury charge (under oath he denied remembering anything about a stabbing he had witnessed (white guy stabbed a black guy), an incident that he seemed to have remembered clearly an hour before he was called to testify, or so the evidence showed). It was a tough case, and he was a difficult client.
The trial lasted a week and, to no one’s surprise, he was found guilty (the only surprise was that it took four hours for the jury to reach a verdict). At sentencing, he predictably went off on a tear about white people being race traitors, and such.
The judge could have given him up to 30 months in prison but only gave him 18. At which point the client reinvigorated his rant, pointed at the judge and said “I know where you work and I will come find you when I get out.” He turned to the DA and pointed at her and said the same thing. At that point he was flailing his arms around, and the two large courtroom deputies (they used to be called “bailiffs”) hurried up to restrain him — I had the common sense to get out of their very large way — at which point, his honor said: “you know, I must be getting old. I see here in my written order that I was actually intending to impose 30 months, and I must have mistakenly been thinking about someone else when I spoke. . . So 30 months it is.” (or words to very much that same effect).
The client started to try to flail more vigorously; two additional very large deputies somehow materialized (they will do that) and the four of them hoisted him up and carried him feet first out of the courtroom, as he shouted loudly, with spittle, at the ceiling. The judge, afterwards, observed that he could only have given him 6 months additional for the contempt. He seemed satisfied.
(Disclaimer — this trial was about thirty-five years ago. With the passage of that much time the fine details of exactly what was said may vary from telling to telling.).
Epilogue: The client got out of prison and the only serious trouble he got into afterward was a DUII and, then, feloniously driving with a suspended operator’s license a couple times. And then he died. The prosecutor became a judge, and she’s now retired. The trial judge is long retired but still with us.
My first real job was as a morning biscuit maker at McDonald’s in the summer when I was 16 (over 20 years ago now). I recall a lot of corner-cutting when it came to the official food prep rules.
For example, once food was cooked, it went into a warming bin. Each bin had a timer on it, and once that timer went off, you were supposed to toss the food. We only used those timers if a health inspector showed up, or the “big boss” was there. Other than that, we just ignored the timers and kept everything in the warming bins until sold.
Also, you were only supposed to crack open eggs as needed, and keep them refrigerated otherwise. We often just cracked open several dozen into a large container, and kept that on the counter next to the grill for a few hours, dipping into it with a ladle as needed when someone wanted scrambled eggs. It saved time and hassle that way.
When we switched from breakfast to lunch, back when McDonald’s did that, the cooked but unsold breakfast food was supposed to be thrown away. Often, it would all be thrown into a different, clean garbage bag, and when someone took out the garbage, that bag would end up in that person’s back seat and the leftovers became their meals for a few days.
Most of my coworkers were also high schoolers. When one of our friends came through the drive thru, they’d order and pay for something small, and we’d hand them bags of food. I think the boss, who was a woman in her 20s, did this for her friends too.
Back in the mid-90’s, McDonald’s would sometimes do these 29-cent cheeseburger days as a promotion. It would have been fine, except they didn’t put limits on how many people could order, so we’d have multiple orders of 50+ cheeseburgers as people stocked up on them. We were in a lower-class small town, so people always stocked up on food when there was a good deal. We couldn’t possibly follow the rules and keep up with the orders when they came in that fast, so we broke a lot of rules, including cooking burger patties on the egg grill (a big no-no, apparently), and cooking hundreds of burgers ahead of time and just microwaving them before we served them.
Oh my goodness! Isn’t that the biggest dilemma??? Especially if your stomach growls…
When my daughter was about 4, we had some very close friends who used to invite us to dinner. They were the most generous and kind people you could ever meet.
However, everyone’s plate would get exactly the same portion. I sausage, 2 pieces of broccoli, 2 little carrot sticks and a small portion of mashed potato. The kids would get about half that.
The first time it happened, my daughter came and whispered to me that she was still hungry. I told her it was okay, we’ll probably have dessert. When no dessert arrived, and it was time to go, my daughter’s stomach rumbled as she got in the car and her little friend said quite loudly, “your tummy is talking, saying you want more food!”
I looked at my daughter, dreading what the answer might be, but she just looked at everyone and said, “it’s actually saying thank you for dinner.”
Everyone laughed and in that moment I could never have been prouder of my little girl and her display of tact and good manners.
We got take away on the way home and every other time after visiting these people, as the same meal was served each time over a number of years. They were just not big eaters.
For my daughter and I, It became a beautiful ritual to have take away afterwords, and we always looked forward to going to their place for dinner.
To answer your question – eat before or eat after visiting, but always be appreciative that someone took the time to think of you and invite you over. Say thank you and leave it at that!
She has grown up still tactful, well mannered and ALWAYS hungry!
When I was young my sister and I were playing in the back yard and our neighbor was out on his screen porch and was playing with himself. I had no idea what he was doing and wasn’t freaked out just curious. I asked my mother about it and she said, “don’t worry about it son, it isn’t important.” And, she was right, shortly after I rarely saw him ever again. When he saw me or my sister he would literally turn around and walk away. I never thought about it again.
My mother died about 50 years later and my uncle who often lived with us (WW2 vet with a drinking problem) got very ill about 10 years later. We talked and he told me what he was leaving to me (not much – but I loved the man and would never say that to him) and one of the items was a revolver. He told me, “I used to loan this to your mom when your dad was on the road (he was a truck driver). This is the gun she pistol whipped your neighbor with.”
“What”, I said.
“Oh, you didn’t know? She borrowed this pistol and went to your neighbor’s house and beat him with it. She told him that if she saw him looking at or near her kids she was going to kill him next time.”
“Seriously?”, I said
“Like a heart attack. I took the bullets out so she wouldn’t kill him”, he laughed, “she didn’t know that till later and chewed me out.”
“Why didn’t she tell dad?”
“She said somebody had to take care of the kids if she went to jail.”
The US is not “competing” with China because it doesn’t have the capability and confidence to compete.
Instead, the US is trying to “kneecap” China in Tonya Harding style. It’s using tactics like:
propaganda warfare — telling lies about genocide, concentration camps, oppression, etc.
political interference — using the CIA to foment color revolution in Hong Kong and Xinjiang
commercial obstruction — banning Huawei, SMIC, WeChat, etc.
military intimidation — operating two supercarrier strike groups off the coast of China; arming Taiwan and Japan; inviting British and German warships into SCS; Quad pact; AUKUS pact and giving nuclear subs to Australia
personal legal intimidation — arresting Meng Wanzhou on trumped-up charges in the same way Alstom executive Frederic Pierucci was arrested in 2013
The US is behaving like a dinosaur in its final death throes as its world is coming to an end.
Veal Rolls, Roman Style (Saltimbocca alla Romana)
2024 02 17 14 52
Ingredients
1 1/2 pounds boneless veal round steak, 1/2 inch thick
1/4 teaspoon dried sage leaves, crushed
1/4 teaspoon pepper
6 thin slices prosciutto or fully cooked smoked or boiled ham
2 tablespoons butter or margarine
1 tablespoon olive or vegetable oil
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1/2 cup Marsala or other dry white wine
3/4 cup water
1/4 teaspoon salt (optional)
Instructions
Trim excess fat from veal; pound veal until 1/8 inch thick. Sprinkle one side of veal with sage and pepper; cut into 6 pieces, 4 or 5 inches square.
Place ham slice on seasoned side of each piece veal. Roll up; secure with wooden picks.
Heat butter and oil in 10-inch skillet until hot. Cook veal rolls over high heat until brown, 5 to 10 minutes. Remove from heat.
Place rolls in single layer in ungreased 10 x 6-inch baking dish.
Stir flour into drippings in skillet; stir in wine, water and salt, if desired. Heat to boiling; pour over rolls.
Cover and bake at 325 degrees F until tender, 35 minutes.
Oh boy….this was fun. Several years ago, when my son was just shy of 2 YO, he was considered a lap child by an unnamed airline, even though we had bought him a ticket as he was too big to be on a lap for 6 hrs. As such, we could not do the online check in, since they needed to verify he was a lap child….repeat…..he had a full fare ticket. Show up at the airport and check in, but not seats together…..you selected seats during the online check in. So ticket agent say to go to gate agent, gate agent says to check with stewardess, and stewardess says she cant help and we need to sit in our assigned seats. CLASSIC pass the buck.
Now that dear reader was a poor choice of words. You see my 2 YO was assigned a single middle seat about 15 rows away from the other three of us. So I showed up at the seat, and motioned to the gentleman in the aisle that I had the middle seat. He got up and I strapped my son in and give him his DVD player and snacks. I looked at the other passengers near my child and said “ I am in in seat 32 C if he needs anything” and proceeded to go to the back of the plane.
Funny story. We were all seated together very quickly after that. Amazing how following the rules works!!
I pulled out a Paetron video for you all to enjoy. It’s the start of the Dragon Year 2024. Please enjoy it, you all. For those who already watched it, please check it out again.
Enjoy this video.
MM discusses a rebuilding of the Reality Universe substructure
A question…
I really enjoyed this but now I have so many more questions!
Didn’t know you still do missions and I wish I knew what “polishing” is…
An answer
I am retired from MAJestic. But I am still active in Domain.
As far as “polishing” is concerned…
“Polishing” is like dipping a piece of fly paper into a thick vegetable soup. Then pulling it out.
The chunky bits all cling to the paper. You then scrape the paper clean (or get a new sheet), and repeat the process.
Over time, the soup gets less “chunky” and full of stuff, and is more like really sluggish and calm water.
Hmmm. I guess it was when my parents were divorcing. My father purposefully put mom in dire financial trouble. He even somehow cancelled my credit cards and cleaned out my college fund which I hadn’t touched yet, even tho I was 21. She was suddenly behind in house payments and taxes, because even tho he said he was paying everything, he pocketed the money for months and years. So, yeah. I gave mom all my savings, dropped out of school midterm and went to work full time to get her back on track. I gave her my entire paychecks. After about a year she was ok again. And karma found the sperm donor and took him down. Story for another time tho. Secondly was quitting my job to care for my mom when she was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, which had spread everywhere. She became bedridden pretty quickly I was her 24/7 caregiver for over a year. I wouldn’t let her go to a place where she couldn’t get one-on-one attention. She had every complication possible. Rashes, wounds, meds, diarrhea, nausea, dizziness, everything. She would be confused and call me every 15 minutes for something. She required 3–5 full bed changes and cleanings a day at times. Hospice told me it was the worst case they’d seen in 25 years. But I stayed. Caregivers I hired at $50/hr to get a few hours relief would leave because it was “too much work.” But I stayed. I may have had no outside life, only got 3–4 hours of sleep a night, and was an emotional wreck, but I know I did everything I could have done for her. She passed a few months ago and I’m still riding all the emotions while trying to figure out my life again.
Already entitled and lazy, once she realized that I’m reliable, not stupid and could be trusted to do her work, she started dumping on me. Eventually I was doing her job and mine for four days out of five while she called in either “sick” or “working from home today” or .”out on appointments” or “cold-calling” every day except payday Fridays.
Or one or the other of her children or husband was sick, or had an appointment, or the car broke down. Like she fucking thought I was that damned stupid. Every. Single. Day.
When I complained to her brother the company owner about my overwhelming workload, I was told that I just needed to learn how to prioritize.
Eventually he was spending more and more time on the golf course and dumping on me himself. I became a de facto office manager without the salary, I was running their company for them in their absence on my secretary’s wages. Everything from invoicing, collections, and banking to sales and installation support and inventory to making coffee and vacuuming to painting walls.
Yeah, I quit without notice. And without me, they not only had to get off their asses and do their own jobs but had to figure how I’d spent 45 hours a week, because neither one of them had any idea. Clueless about customer service, answering the phone, taking and filling customer orders, shipping and receiving, reception and typing and filing and billing. Without me they didn’t even know where the vending machine keys were. I guess neither one was smart enough to figure it out, because less than a year after I quit they bankrupted the business.
My supervisor ended up giving $6 haircuts at the Hair Cuttery for tips.
Are ‘Girls Trips’ on Spring Break Okay When Married?
I’m sure there are examples more disgusting than this, but this is the one that sticks in my mind.
I was a Teaching Fellow at Harvard while getting my Ph.D. There was a student in my section who clearly had money to burn and the attitude that the world was his toy to play with. He came to me on the day a paper was due, smiled his expensive Tom Cruise smile, and said he hadn’t gotten his assignment done because he spent Spring Break in the Bahamas, so he’d get it to me when he had a chance. He seemed to think this would be absolutely fine. I told him how much his grade would drop each day it was late, and he shrugged and sauntered out.
Later, close to the end of a semester of this kind of performance from him, I explained exactly how many points he needed on the Final to pass the course.
He didn’t pass.
He then proceeded to come in with a multi-page detailed analysis explaining how I had graded his exam wrong. If he had put that much effort into studying for the test, he would have passed.
He clearly expected me to change his grade and pass him, because otherwise he wouldn’t graduate and would have to take summer school to get his diploma, and he already had a job lined up at his dad’s law firm. And to my amazement, the professor of the course wanted me to do exactly that — either he was afraid of what the powerful lawyer-dad might do if we failed his kid, or he just didn’t want the bother. I had to fight to get him to follow through with the clearly stated consequences for this kid’s actions.
I saw the kid later during the summer term. He didn’t look quite so entitled then.
I was hired by a Director at a software company, she was remote, her team was remote, I was remote, and the team was Project Management (overseeing the implementation of enterprise facility management software). BUT then the Director of the implementation team was more short-handed, so I was given that director instead. Fine. I’d done all of the roles before, I was just happy to be working there, and able to help the clients, and give articulate feedback to the dev team, which I did.
I was the only one on the Implementation team (including the Director) who’d actually been a Solutions Consultant before. Talking to the clients about their needs, importing their existing data, customizing the software to meet their needs, helping them with training, etc. The rest of my team were total noobs. It’s cool, we all had to start somewhere. So, everyone on the team would come to me with questions.
I’d started off as a CAD Manager (dealing with the drafting and design software), so when our tech support team would have a difficult issue with a client’s drawing files, they’d call me in, and I’d help them out. They were SUPER grateful. Like they knew all about their own software, but AutoCAD and Revit are a whole different company, and they weren’t experts.
About six months in, my Director told me I needed to move to a different state because the remote work wasn’t working out. Uh, really? Because my two biggest clients were actually in the same city as me, and I’d been doing this job remotely for clients all over the country for years.
Whatever. I was let go because I couldn’t relocate. (I was in the middle of a divorce, and I’m physically disabled. My kids and I needed family support, and they legally needed to remain near their Dad.)
***The wild thing was, when the head of the support team heard that I’d been let go… he quit.***
He was tired of not having anyone else in the company to turn to for help, and I’d been that person for him, and the clients were all happier with quicker, more effective resolutions, and clear documentation for the knowledgebase.
He and I are still friends. That director didn’t last much longer there either and went back into real estate.
A little background: I was a 13yo city kid. I previously joined the Boy Scouts but having made only 2nd Class, I was invited to leave by the Scoutmaster for swearing. Hey..we were city. Short time later we were snow sliding not far from the tenement and I got the bright idea to pick up a long sheet of scrap metal from a nearby mill. I found out if you pulled the end up like a toboggan you rocketed down the hill. On one run I really picked up speed and my ‘sled’ went out of control spinning and I landed at the bottom covered in snow and laughing. I looked up the hill and a line of my friends were just staring at me. I yelled “what?” and they pointed to my hand. I had gone out wearing a pair of my sisters white wool gloves. I looked at my left hand and that glove was soaked in blood and dripping fast. I stumbled up the hill to try and run home. At one point I knelt and pulled the glove off. I had severed my left thumb down to the bone along with the arteries and blood was pumping out of my body. A friend stayed with me as everyone went to get help. By this time the snow around me was crimson. I was getting dizzy. I knew I was in trouble. I told my friend to find a stick and told him to give me his bootlace. I told him how to tie a tourniquet and told him to keep winding that stick until the blood stopped. He was shaking and crying. I remember telling him it’s going to be all right. The bleeding did stop but there was blood everywhere. I looked up to see my mother running towards me. I remember saying “I’m sorry mommy” and I guess I passed out. I woke up in a rescue and the EMT asked who tied the tourniquet and I said I remembered from Boy Scouts and out again. A week in the hospital and my thumb reattached and today as good as new. One of the things I remembered before getting kicked out of Scouts was First Aid.
In 2016, Abdullahi Abdisalam Borleh was a suicide bomber who had explosives in his laptop as he boarded airplane from Somalia,Daallo Airlines.
image 212
He had come in as someone who had difficulty in walking and he claimed his purpose for travelling was health related.
Twenty minutes after taking off from Mogadishu, Somalia at an altitude of 14,000ft an explosion occurred inside the aircraft. There were 74 passengers and 7 crew members on board.
The explosion created this opening.
image 213image 214
He was sucked out of the plane from this opening.
His intention was to kill everyone on the plane, but as fate had it, He was the only one who died.
He was the only fatality and the plane’s controls were unaffected by the blast allowing the pilot able to fly the plane back to Mogadishu safely.
My boss was a prankster so I should have seen this coming.
Not sure if it was April fools but the joke was on me!
I worked for a company based very near Heathrow Airport. One year I booked a three-week holiday to the Philippines with my family.
Long-term car parking would have cost hundreds of pounds, but my boss had a secretary lived nearby. She said I could use their driveway as they would be away too. Just pop the keys in their letter box, bring a spare and drive myself home when we got back since she would be at work.
It all worked fine.
About a week after I got back I had a meeting with my boss. I am a field manager so we used to meet at a local Hilton convenient to us both.
So we meet up and were having our discussion when he excuses himself to go to the loo. He’s away a while so I assume he’s just having a dump.
At the end of our meeting we say our goodbyes, I go off to my car. Its gone! I check everywhere! I’m sure I remembered where I parked it! No it’s gone! Some bastard stole it! My beautiful blue Mercedes C class!
I run back in panicking! I see my boss still packing up his lap top. I tell him what happened. He’s not surprised! He’s laughing!
What?
He waves my key at me !
The bastard had been given my key by his secretary and asked to return it to me . He’d taken the opportunity to move my car to the far corner of the car park! No wonder I couldn’t find it!
When I saw a significant theft on the job, I held off, thinking on the subject until quitting time. As my fellow employee prepared to leave I approached him, saying I knew what he wanted to take and it was in his knapsack. He gave me an innocent look and denied any such thing. I advised him what would probably happen if management “accidentally” found out about attempted theft as he exited the building. Then I explained how he would feel later, how it would probably affect his performance, and what little gain he was going to get -vs- his possible loss of employment as well as a black-mark on employment history.
He stood quite for a moment then explained the item was supposed to be a birthday gift to his son. Sympathetically, I asked him how much he could afford for a gift. He had about half the money he needed if he paid retail price. I knew the owner/manager well so I told my fellow employee to replace the item while I asked what could be arranged.
The owner seemed proud the employee’s son would receive an item his company produced and gave me a reduced figure. I paid the difference, asking the owner to accept the amount the employee had saved. We went to the production area, selected a newly inspected item, packaged it and presented it to the employee who beamed with excitement. Then he hesitated, explaining he only had half the value saved. The owner simply accepted the amount, grinned and told him not to tell other employees about today’s deep discount. The day, and a man’s dignity had been saved.
In my first two weeks after finishing in the training school I was put with Alan.
Alan was a very experienced officer and I was assured I would learn plenty from Alan.
So we are driving down the street when Alan suddenly declares “There’s Fingers Malone. He must have just been released. Sit in the back!”
Alan then pulls up alongside this criminal.
“Hi Fingers. How are you doing? Just got out have you?
“Yeah.”
“Where are you heading? Home?”
“Yeah”
“Well we’re heading that way. Why don’t you jump in and we’ll give you a lift?”
Fingers then gets in the patrol car where I had previously been seated.
“So did you have a bit of a party when you got out?”
“Yeah”
“I bet your old mates Wiry and Doggo were there eh?”
“Yeah”
“Anyone else”
“Yeah, Jacko and Freddie were there too.”
“Here we are King Street. What number was it?
“28”
“Here we are number 28. Right to your door”
“Thank very much. Sometimes I think you guys are better to me than my mates”
“Stay out of trouble”
“OK Steve you can come back up front now. Have you got your notebook?
“Yes” says I.
“Take this down”
“Fingers Malone is residing at no 28 King Street. He is still associating with known criminals Wiry Burns, Doggo Johnson, Freddie Duggan and Jacko Carpenter.”
I was blown away. Alan had skilfully attained information that was highly useful to the collator. (It would now be done on a computer but in those days by paper.)
To illustrate how useful – I took a call from someone who had their tool van broken into and they had noticed a man known to us (criminal) hanging around.
Found that man’s address from the collator sent a car there and it arrived just as this person was unloading his van of a load of stolen tools.
As he was arrested and cautioned his reply was “Fuck me that was the fastest I have ever been arrested.”
After my father died, my mother was incredibly lonely, she was the type of person who couldn’t be alone. My dad, brother and I were never like this. She just never felt complete if she didn’t have someone in her life.
I was a workaholic, and wasn’t giving her the attention she needed, my brother had his own young family to look after. We just didn’t understand how lonely she was, because when we visited, she wasn’t lonely, she had us.
We started going on road trips, and at first she would lose her train of thought, and not be able to finish a sentence. She couldn’t walk a half block without resting.
After taking a three week road trip, and going for a walk every night, she was back to normal.
But she quickly backslid, and I asked her to move in with me. She was reluctant, because she didn’t want to ruin my life. But she said she would give it some thought, and then she had a stroke and died.
For people who don’t get lonely, its hard for us to imagine what someone who does, feels after years of loneliness.
But I finally got it, albeit, too late.
You say you have lived alone for 15 years, and tried everything. Does that include online dating, there are plenty of fish in the sea, especially if you aren’t too picky, and just need someone. Don’t be afraid to contact men, don’t wait for them to approach you. This is how I met my wife. If this hasn’t worked, try volunteering to fill up your empty hours. You will undoubtedly meet other lonely souls, and don’t be afraid to make the first move. All of my long time girlfriends and my wife, approached me first.
“I never even used that pot! It was the morning shift!” – this was the last lie Stefani told me while she was still employed by me, because I fired her on the spot. Somehow everything that happened around her was always someone else’s fault, but people do occasionally lie, so I let it go until she lied about three different coworkers in one day, trying to get them in trouble for no apparent reason.
Stephani was the sole lunch cook in a small store I own, and she was a problem from day one. She spoke to her coworkers like they were dogs, constantly corrected and bullied them even when she was a new hire being trained by them, and she excused it all by saying that she “always speaks the truth and won’t hold her tongue” and “that’s just how she talks, she can’t help it”. She was also a sneaky bitch, because she tried to kiss my ass, but even with me her temper and pathological need to be right would assert itself, and she’d flash out until she got it under control again. With everyone else, she was constantly insulting them, berating them, and lying about them. You might think that it takes more than one person to carry on a feud, but Stephani proved that she could do it all on her own.
Her job wasn’t hard, because sales were low at that store when I bought it and we’re branded by a chain that mostly has ready-to-fry foods. She had to come in and fry chicken, sides, and make a lunch special, and she had to do the occasional burger or sandwich. Other than that she just needed to prep for the following day, and clean the kitchen and the equipment at the end of her shift, which only takes an hour. The other cooks who had worked her shift had all had lunch out on time, gotten the special orders (those the cashiers can’t put together by the hot case) out in a timely manner, cooked until an hour before their shift ended, and left a clean kitchen with food prepped for the next shift. Stefani, on the other hand, couldn’t get the food out on time, and it was always the breakfast cook’s fault for not getting out her way. She had similar excuses for why she couldn’t prep, and when the kitchen was a filthy mess it was always because someone else made it that way.
We cook our own lunch specials but everything else is branded, and those foods have to be made and they have to be made according to certain standards, but Stefani tried to take advantage of my absences from the store (I have other businesses, a full time job, and a family) to stop doing those items and just do her own cooking that wasn’t even selling in this small town. When her more senior coworkers would politely remind her about the way she was supposed to cook, she make arrogant statements like: “Oh, I know how to cook. I don’t cook according to recipes, I do my own, and these people will either eat it or they can go somewhere else”. I knew about her behavior but for almost two months that little store just wasn’t my focus, as I’d mainly just bought it so it wouldn’t be soaking up sales from my bigger store across the road, which meant that she got away with way too much. Finally I got a chance to focus on this store, so at the beginning of the month I had a serious talk with her. I told her what she had to cook, I transferred an experienced cook from the other store who needed a less demanding job for health reasons to cook breakfast at the little one, and I appointed her kitchen manager so she could stay on top of Stephani.
What I’d hoped was that she’d do what this cook asked, especially since this woman gets along with everyone and has an incredibly tactful way about her, but it didn’t work. She doesn’t complain much but when I asked for updates she admitted that nothing had improved. I tried spending more time in the store, and it did make Stephani at least pretend to do what she’d been asked, but pretend is all she did. I had already made up my mind to fire her, but I was short on staff at both stores and in the process of buying a third, so I was going to wait a bit. When she snapped back at me after I once again told her that she couldn’t bully her coworkers, I went ahead and told her that I was going to fire her if she didn’t start getting along with people, and when I found a very unclean kitchen a day later I made it clear that she was out of chances. She went about two weeks without causing any issues big enough for the other ladies to bring them to me (although they try too hard not to bother me), only instead she started to call me about every little thing.
The big store has a general manager who runs it for me, and I’d tried putting her in charge of the little one too but it was too much for her, so those few employees were temporarily allowed to contact m directly. Other than her calls, the only one to call was the kitchen manager and the assistant manager in the store, and that was for serious trouble like a broken walk-in cooler and a fire marshal showing up to inspect us. Stefani called multiple times about little shit even though I told her every time to go through her immediate manager for that, and then she started to call to complain about her coworkers. One time a cashier had told her that she was being mean, which was exceedingly mild and entirely appropriate under the circumstances, but Stephani wanted her fired. Apparently she’d even looked at her smugly and announced that she was about to get her job taken away from her, as she grabbed her phone and walked outside to call me. This was when I reached out and hired someone to replace her, and started to count the twelve days until that woman could start.
I didn’t want her to leave immediately when I didn’t have her replacement yet, so I didn’t tell her. In fact I was just going to send out the new schedule the day before the new cook started, and let Stephani figure out that she was fired, but she couldn’t stop making trouble. Last Tuesday she called and woke me up after my late shift in the ER (the schedule in the store includes my hours at the hospital so they can know when it’s okay to call), to complain that the same cashier who had said she was mean had called her the n-word. She was gleefully happy as she informed me that I’d have to fire the girl now or she was going to sue me, but I was 99 percent sure she had made the accusation up. I’ve never used it to spy on my workers, but my stores have hidden cameras with microphones and speakers in addition to the visible cameras. I had them installed for precisely this reason, to avoid having to fire someone innnocent, and because audio is useful evidence too in case a crime is committed. It took me a while to find their confrontation on the footage and then search out the audio based on the time stamp, and before I finished the assistant manager of the store calls to tell me that a group of regular customers had come in to say that Stephani had started a fight with them outside when she was smoking. According to the men, they had half-jokingly asked why she never had the fried foods out at lunch time, and she’d gotten pissed and told them that she wasn’t ever cooking for them again. When they asked what the hell she meant, she’d banned them from both my stores.
At that point I got dressed and drove to the store, only to find my cook sitting outside in the middle of the lunch rush, smoking a cigarette. She immediately said it was her first break, but having just watched most of that morning on the cameras, I knew she’d already taken at least seven smoke breaks in less than four hours. She comes inside as I’ve asked the other cook if she’d done any work that day and she’s explaining that no, she has not, so then Stephani starts screaming at the other cook – the kitchen manager – that it’s none of her business if she works. I tell her stop, and I explain that Mary is her supervisor so it absolutely is her business. I tell her to apologize and she does that thing where she says “I’m sorry if you thought what I said was mean, but I can’t help how I talk”. When I insist on a proper apology, while I’m also answering an important call, she says something to Mary just out of earshot. I finish my call and ask Mary if she apologized, and I’m told that no, what Stephani really told her was “to mind her own business because people who crossed her had a way of regretting it”. It was my turn to fly into a rage, especially since I’d just seen a text Stephani must have sent just as I was pulling up to the store, one complaining that another employee had been the one who spilt a lot of gravy on the floor she just left it. I already knew it was Stephani because her coworkers knew she’d blame them, and so they’d sent me the exact time so I could easily check the cameras. That and the veiled threat was it, so I was done with this bitch even if I had to cook lunch myself for the rest of the week!
Up until that day I’d never fired anymore in public, but I followed Stephani out into the store where she was getting her some more free coffee, and told her to get her shit and go home. She’d been suspended once before, because of her attitude, so she put her hands on her hips and said: “Really?? You’re suspending me for taking a smoke break?!”. She’s a big woman who uses her body and voice to bully people, so she wasn’t particularly discreet with her question, which meant that her coworkers and the customers all stopped to stare at us. Knowing her it was deliberate, as she likely thought she was about to verbally own me, so the look on her face was priceless when I told her that she wasn’t suspended; she was fired. It was the first time she didn’t immediately snap back, so I actually got a chance to tell her that I was firing her for failing to perform her job, bullying her coworkers, lying, and making false allegations of racism. Once she recovered from the shock she started to argue with me, about the specific reasons, but I told her to get her shit and go home, and I would mail her last check and her separation papers.
She was starting to cry a little when she grabbed her purse and left, but my sympathy is with the coworkers she terrified and tried to get fired! I wish I’d known just how bad it all had gotten, but my employee are great women who didn’t want to bother me unless it was urgent. I’ve made it clear that everything Stephani did qualified as a valid reason to call me, and I’m training the assistant to run the store. A cashier is filling in until the new cook starts, all five employees at that store got a 50 cent raise for all they’d had to put up with, and now that they know about the microphones and speakers, we’re having some fun with them. Last night I played “Haunted House” sounds from YouTube over the speakers, just as the cashiers looked like they were starting to fuck off a bit too much, and their reactions were hilarious. Oh, and Stephani called to ask that I say she was laid off rather than fired, so she could get unemployment. Even as she was asking for a huge favor, she couldn’t stop being a bitch, because she actually went ahead and said: “you know, since it’s your fault if my kids have to starve”. As you can probably guess, I made it abundantly clear that she’d been fired for cause, and that there are plenty of available jobs around here. None of them are paying as much as I do, but she had her chance.
One of the weirdest stories we covered when I worked at the TV station involved a welfare check. The police received a call from the coworkers of a woman who hadn’t showed up at work that day, nor had she called. Coworkers tried to call her but she didn’t answer multiple calls. Normally the cops are not going to go check on someone because they didn’t feel like going to work. But in this case, her coworkers insisted this was not like her, she’d worked there ten years and never failed to show up without calling, and she was also an older woman who lived alone and had a heart condition. They were concerned she might be sick and unable to get to her phone. Given all that info, the police dispatcher agreed to send a unit to do a welfare check.
The officers got to the door, thinking they were probably going to find an old woman who died in her sleep. That happens a lot with welfare checks. Usually they will start by ringing the doorbell or knocking, and if they don’t get an answer, they walk around and look in the windows to see if they can see the person. If they spot someone who’s not responsive despite repeated yelling and pounding, they might consider that probable cause to break in.
But that wasn’t really necessary in this case. They got to the door, one of the officers knocked, and it just swung open. Wasn’t fully closed, let alone locked. The old woman was lying on the floor in a pool of blood, clearly dead and not from a heart attack. She had been stabbed multiple times. The coroner was called, Homicide detectives and crime scene techs came. One of the detectives knelt down to look at the body and noticed something on the wall. It was a name, written in blood. Turned out it was the name of her cousin, who turned up a few days later at a hospital in another state, claiming to have amnesia. She had the dead woman’s ID on her. I seem to recall she was charged with the murder but not how that turned out.
Bizarre story. I always thought it would be good inspiration for a work of fiction, and I did eventually write a short story loosely based on it.
I was at a hospital for some tests recently. The doctor prescribed some medicines and asked me to get them from the in-house pharmacy as they weren’t available elsewhere. I went to get the same and stood in the queue.
The hospital had put a queue barricade for easy maintenance of crowd. The counter was equipped to handle only two people at a time. There was a lady ahead of me in the queue. She was getting irritated for being made to wait and started shouting at the staff. They offered a mumbled apology. Meanwhile she tried to push her way through, even though the previous guy was still waiting to collect his medicines. His hospital file grazed this lady’s arm and all hell broke loose!
The lady started shouting at the poor guy and accused him of harming her. The poor fellow did not know what had happened exactly. He was a very young lad and was cringing at the lady’s accusations. He tried to reason with her and said that he had not budged from his place at all. It was her own fault. This retaliation was unacceptable to the lady and she took it as a serious affront to her! So she started calling for the management and resorted to threats.
However, everyone present there stood by the boy. That was almost a miracle! No one spoke against the boy and instead told the lady to mind her language. Frustrated at this sudden turn of events, the lady marched away calling all of us a bunch of “bumbling idiots”. Yes… her exact words!
What needs to be said out loud? The message that the perception of people is changing. Slowly but surely. Now women can’t expect immediate and blind support just because they are females. If you are wrong, you are wrong. It’s as simple as that. So it’s the need of the hour to refrain from such stunts so that a genuine case of harassment does not get ignored and a victim is not denied help just because some of us decided to cry wolf and made people wary of every female!
I am still thanking the mechanic who told the guy I bought my new truck from that the engine was bad! 2016 Dodge RAM 1500 and it barely had 50,000 miles on it. This was a few years back.
As I drove this truck around on the highway she rode and smelled like new. It had great acceleration and power, and didn’t have the burning smoke exhaust like an engine using oil should have. I look at the oil on the dipstick, and the percentage the computer says left was 40%. If it had blowback, that oil should be really black and smell of exhaust. It was pretty clean and smelled ok. Nothing was pointing to a bad engine. So I thought maybe bearings or something? I quickly check pricing on a new engine core just in case. Heck doing the work myself I was only looking at $3600.00 for an entire brand new engine core. The price he was asking ($15,000) was half its worth of around $32,000.00. How could I go wrong?
I once again told the seller I didn’t think the engine was bad, he was making a big mistake, etc. Nope he already bought a new truck he likes better and he was happy with the deal he got. Ok, I tried, so I hand over the cash and signed the papers. Best decision i have ever made.
Next morning I go out to a chilly 48deg truck. At this temperature if the rods and bearings are bad they will knock like crazy at first start. I turn the key and listen intently. I hear noises, but not rods or bearings. Now Dodge Hemi engines are noisy. Their design you will hear various rattles and ticks here and there. My last work Dodge lasted 390,000 miles and rattled to high heaven. I listen intently to a very loud tick on the passenger side, as the noise begins to fade away. Using my scope i quickly found what I suspected, a leaky exhaust header. Very common on these. A good look underneath confirms several broken bolts. A pain to remove, but nothing serious. At first it did sound like an internal problem, but any good mechanic with a scope should be able to pinpoint that noise or should have known it was a problem.
At this stage we are at 85,000 miles and doing great. I have never owned a newer vehicle before with so many buttons and things to touch. Most of the miles have been cross country to see relatives. So yes, thank you whoever you are! You got me a new vehicle I otherwise would never get for a fantastic price.
My buddy was 17, the legal drinking age was 18, and he would be turning 18 on Sunday. But he wanted a party in the bar Saturday night to celebrate. So we all go down to the small town bar. A good time was had by all, until about 11:00 pm, when the police do a walk through. Being a small town, they notice that they hadn’t seen my buddy in the bar before. They ask for his ID, and he is underage. They write him up an illegal possession of alcohol, the fine is about the equivalent of 15 dozen beer.
This happened a long time ago, so giving dollars wouldn’t mean much.
My buddy wants me as a witness, to say that I didn’t see him drinking, and the beer on the table wasn’t his. I hadn’t seen him drinking, because I had only arrived 10 minutes before, and so I could tell the truth and get him off. There is a different charge they could have used, with a lesser fine, for being underage in a bar.
He is called before the judge, and the police officer is sitting in the back of the court.
The judge asks my buddy how old he is, and he says 18. The judge says. It says here you were found in the bar, last Saturday night and were under age. He says, yes thats true.
The judge asks when was your birthday. My friend says Sunday. The judge burst out laughing, and says a dollar a day fine, please pay the clerk a dollar. My friend says, but I wasn’t drinking, I have a witness. The judge says, don’t push your luck. its a dollar, do you want to have a trial.
Simply known as “The Greatest”, Muhammad Ali had it all – enormous wealth, exceptional good looks, freakish athleticism, and hundreds of millions of adoring fans. According to international polls, it was Ali who finally toppled Elvis as the “The Most Famous Person in the World”. This is his final picture before taking exit from his frail, withered body.
After someone stole his bicycle, a young Cassius Clay decided to “whup the thief”. He never got the chance, but, hoping for the opportunity, took some boxing lessons at a local gym. Six years later, while still in his teens, he would win an Olympic gold medal. And less than three years after that, Clay became the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world.
Although somewhat shy, Clay watched professional wrestlers with their outlandish behavior and remarks filling the seats with fans. Wanting to do the same, Ali took on a new persona – the supremely pompous “Louisville [Kentucky] Lip”, drawing attention to a sport that seemed to be struggling with mediocrity and a plummeting fan base. People loved him or hated him. Everyone had an opinion and it was never in the middle of the spectrum.
But, although he kept on winning, something was not right. Punches to the head from George Foreman, Joe Frazier and Ken Norton were taking their toll. Still in his thirties, and no longer calling himself by his “slave name”, Muhammad Ali, was developing early symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. But he kept boxing, even as his disability made every moment a chore.
Eventually, there was nothing left. Ali had no choice. It was time to retire or face the prospect that one more punch to the head might take away his last breath. Dedicating the remainder of his life to charity, it is estimated that Ali provided 22 million meals for the hungry in Africa. Among his many other contributions, Ali became one of the biggest donors to the United Negro College Fund, talked a suicidal man off a 9th floor ledge and negotiated the release of American hostages held by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
Eventually, his ailing health would no longer allow him to speak. His body would quake. His brain was damaged, losing its ability to function on virtually all levels. His bladder failed. Ali would have regular bouts with pneumonia and infections in which he could never fully recover.
For the last years of his life, Ali was not able to leave his house. His once agile, quick and strong body capitulated to a much stronger, microscopic virus. It would be his last fight.
In 1983 a German couple was on a holiday in Sicily. They were minding their own business, alternating mornings at the beach with little road trips in the afternoon.
On one of those afternoons coming back from a hike, their rented car broke down. In the middle of nowhere. They got out of the car and tried to push it to the side of the narrow dirt road. The car was stuck in gear and wouldn’t budge. The German couple was happy to see a car approaching in the distance, preceding a cloud of dust. The car stopped and a man flung out, screaming. The Germans did speak some Italian but had a hard time understand what he was shouting: do you know who I am!?
image 219
They didn’t. And worse, instead of helping the wedged his Fiat through the little space between their car and the edge of the road. Metal against metal, scratching the rented car from front to rear.
Later that evening the couple reported what happened to the local police. They described the man who scratched the car and added he was probably famous since he couldn’t seem to understand they did not recognise or knew him. Well the police sure did who he was. After being on the run for three years Masino L. was arrested. The price he paid for asking stupid questions.
Elon Musk’s Frustration with the Biden administration.
I consulted a business where someone in a work uniform took his break at a nearby coffee shop. He was clocked out. He got into a dispute with another customer over something stupid but decided to check all the boxes in his argument. He insulted an old black woman and implied that she needed to practice better feminine hygiene.
The woman took note of the company name on his coveralls and noted it in her police report. No charges were filed, but the woman made sure to contact the business claiming that this man represented their company and she planned to share with everyone she knew that the company hired racist, sexist assclowns.
When we asked the employee about it, he freely admitted every detail, telling us that we “can’t do a fuckin’ thing about it” since he wasn’t on the clock at the time. He was fired on the spot but police had to trespass him and march him out in handcuffs.
To the woman, she had no power over a large, loud man in the moment, but she chose to get her revenge for his disrespect. Employees who are off the clock usually have instructions about how they can conduct themselves in public while wearing company apparel. This is why companies don’t approve of people wearing company apparel in their off-hours, because they can act like assclowns while also serving as a walking billboard for the company that pays them.
Boring most of the time. After I got out of the military I went to work for a small town of 1000 residents. We had three officers, one for the day, mid day, and night. I was chief of police there and took the day shift. Most of the things that happened were an occasional stop sign violation, a domestic once in a while, and just keeping things safe.
Kids were kids, always trying to get a beer or two past me. Not always successful too. When I would catch a minor with booze, I would take them to the office, sit them down and call parents to come get them. However I did not arrest them as here was the deal. Parents and child could decide if I took the kid to jail, booked them in, gave them a police record, and have them spend time behind bars for their stupidity. OR….they could show up each weekend for the next year, Pick up trash in the park, sweep the sidewalks downtown, Paint the fire hydrants, Plant flowers on the corners downtown, etc. I had the prettiest park, corners, and hydrants in the state. The kids learned a lesson and knew if they did it again they would go right to jail, no parents involved. Which did happen I think three times. After word got around in the younger citizens I and my fellow officers were treated with respect and as a friend of the younger people and parents.
The only bad thing I can think of was the small town politics, When I started I was handed a piece of paper with names and addresses on it as to who to arrest, who not to arrest, who to trust and who to do every thing possible to get to move out of town. After reading the list, I tore it up right in front of the city council meeting, told them I do not discriminate, do not do what they wanted, but I enforce the law equally of all citizens.
I lasted there for two years and when I arrested the Mayors daughter for possession of drugs, with intent to distribute ( $75000 worth of meth, $100000 worth of coke, and more, The city council fired me., She still went to jail, found guilty and spent 5 to 10 behind bars. I went on to a sheriffs dept in the same county and later even arrested the mayor of the town on similar charges. After which I was asked to come back to the town to work and I refused.
So small towns are quiet, boring most of the time, but occasionally have some excitement and danger.
. In addition to its civilian population, Santo Tomas became the initial internment camp for both the army and navy nurses, with the army nurses remaining there until their liberation.“
“Capt. Maude C. Davison, 57 years old and with 20 years of service experience, took command of the nurses, maintained a regular schedule of nursing duty, and insisted that all nurses wear their khaki blouses and skirts while on duty. She worked with Josephine Nesbit.”
At Los Baños
“In May 1943, the navy nurses, still under the command of Lt. Cobb
, were transferred to a new internment camp at Los Baños, where they established a new infirmary and continued working as a nursing unit.“
“At Los Baños they came to be known as “the sacred eleven.”
On the Home Front
“While the capture of the nurses was widely publicized in the U.S., little specific information was known of their fate until they were liberated.
, one of the few nurses to escape, published a memoir of her experiences on Bataan in 1943 that concluded with a dramatic reminder that her colleagues were still prisoners.“
“The nurses’ story was dramatized in several wartime movies, including:
“When So Proudly We Hail was shown in the theaters, a recruitment booth staffed with Red Cross volunteers was set up in the lobby.“
Final year of Internment
“In January 1944, control of the Santo Tomas Internment Camp changed from Japanese civil authorities to the Imperial Japanese Army
, with whom it remained until the camp was liberated.“
“Access to outside food sources was curtailed, the diet of the internees was reduced to 960 calories per person per day by November 1944, and further reduced to 700 calories per person per day by January 1945.“
“A Department of Veterans Affairs study released in April, 2002 found that the nurses lost, on average, 30% of their body weight during internment, and subsequently experienced a degree of service-connected disability “virtually the same as the male ex-POW’s of the Pacific Theater.”
“ Maude C. Davison’s body weight dropped from 156 lbs. to 80 lbs.”
A few years ago I’m in Uganda and we drive through a village. Everyone is running out of their houses with spears and machetes (they call panga), knives and pitchforks. So, I ask the driver to stop and ask the mob WTF is happening.
Within a few seconds, we’re surrounded by about 200 people who look fucking mad as hell.
They tell the driver that some dude just stole a motorcycle and that they’re going to hunt him down and chop him up into lots of tiny pieces. Our curiosity satisfied, we thanked them and continued on with the journey.
image 223
Naturally, I had questions for the driver on the way:
if the guy has a bike will they catch him. He says yes. They normally catch people within 24 hours.
I pointed out that the border to the Congo is less than 24 hours away by bike. He says people have tried that in the past and they still get killed.
I ask why the police aren’t going after this guy. He says that the police only catch a guy if they’re paid to. The village is poor and can’t afford the bribes.
And that was that. I had witnessed the beginning of murder, but glad I wasn’t there to see it happen. I know they would have gutted him like an animal. And he must have known this too since he lived in that village. How desperate must that man have been to take such a risk?
When surrounded by a mob and you have a fully loaded pistol, what would you suggest: to fire in the air or fire on people?
If that happened I’d just tuck the pistol in my belt. If the mob is after someone else, they don’t give a fuck about me. If they’re after me, I’m already dead.
Edit: That was the nicest image I could find. A lot of the other ones show the person being chopped up – no censorship. Brutal.
Edit: For those people in the comments trying to turn this answer into a culture war, I recommend you educate yourself about the history of Africa before you call them savages. The most savage thing done to Africa was by Westerners – lest we wilfully forget, yet again.
10k bonus edit:
So, something like this has happened to me before. 1997, Edinburgh, Scotland, during the day. I’m waiting at a bus stop when two young guys come up and offer me a swig of wine. I look at it and say, no thanks. Then they demand, “DRINK IT”. So I take a swig and hand it back. Then one of them comes up to me and says, “Give me all your money or I’ll cut your fucking throat.”
I look down at his hands to see if he has a knife, but he has no hands, just stumps. So I ask him, “how are you going to hold a knife?” He puts one stump behind his back and says he has a knife in his back pocket. Now I only had 53 pence and the bus ticket was going to cost 50 pence, so I told them to “get tae fuck” and walked along the road to the next bus stop while they shouted after me that they were going to murder me.
I just can’t take anyone seriously if they don’t have any hands.
Having been a boss for several decades I feel qualified to give an answer here.
I am smart enough to realise that I am unlikely to attract extremely high intelligence employees to mix detergent! I own two chemical manufacturing companies. So I am talking about normal everyday people with this answer.
For me a good employee is one that is consistent. In other words they produce the same quality and quantity of work/results every day consistently. They are set and forget with little to no effort required from me or their supervisor. I don’t need them to be a superstar. I am happy with them giving me 80% of what a superstar could give me in theory because I know I am always going to get it from them and I can more easily predict business/job outcomes as a result.
This doesn’t mean I don’t try to get them to 85% or greater, of course I try.
The above employee tends to arrive on time and have less than average personal/sick leave too in my experience.
By contrast, the mediocre employee is brilliant one day and off with the fairies for the next three days, then rounds out the week with a day off for a sprained eyelash!
Mediocre employees work output is up and down and hard to predict resulting in far more time spent supervising them. This adds cost and complexity to the business as a result.
So if you want to impress a boss – work consistently. Produce at the same level everyday and try and find ways to gradually improve or become more efficient.
Russia Launch on Feb 9 Causes U.S. National Security “Threat” Today
Five days ago, on February 9, Roscosmos, the Russian Space Agency, conducted a rocket launch into space carrying cardo for the Russian Ministry of Defense. Today, February 14, Americans are being told of a new “threat” described as “destabilizing.”
Earlier today, February 14, U.S. Congressman Mike Turner (R-OH) head of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), announced to the nation a new “Destabilizing threat to national security” and revealed all members of Congress are now able to go into the secure House Briefing area to learn details.
HPSCI notice
Within the offices of the US House of Representatives is a SCIF: Segmented, Compartmentalized, Information Facility. Anyone entering the SCIF is searched for any electronic devices, which are forbidden. Entrants are also barred from taking any notes. They are “read-in” on the Classified Material and when they depart the facility, they are reminded they are forbidden to talk to anyone about what they have learned under Penalty of prison.
Congressman Turner issued the following notice to fellow members of Congress:
In the notice above, the words “destabilizing foreign military capability.” “Destabilizing” means it is a power THEY have, but which we DO NOT have. That’s what “destabilizing” means in this context.
CNN and other media outlets are claiming this has something to do with Russia. It may.
On February 9th, the Cosmos-2575 Mission was launched by Roskosmos using a Soyuz-2 Rocket carrying an “Unknown Payload into Space for the Russian Ministry of Defense. It is almost guaranteed our spy satellites and ground-based information gathering capabilities have kept close watch on whatever went up.
Based on our current capabilities for intel-gathering, it seems likely (to me) that we now have some idea of what it is — or possibly know EXACTLY what it is. So here we are, just 5 days later, being told there is some new, “destabilizing” foreign military capability.
My personal layman’s FIRST guess: Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS) weaponry.
FOBS are space-based nuclear bombs (actual warheads) that can be released at ANY time, orbit the earth several times under their own power for months or years (or just once), then come down anywhere on the planet with ZERO advance warning to the intended target.
A particular city in a particular country would go from happy-go-lucky to vaporized with ZERO warning.
There is no defense to such weaponry.
My SECOND guess:
Iran may now be confirmed to have a working nuclear bomb.
Of course, it is common knowledge that Mike Turner is a RINO, he supports the aid package for Ukraine and Israel (but NOT our own Border), he wants to push the Ukraine support, end of story. SO coming up with some new Russian “threat” may be the impetus to get that passed.
Ukraine sinks another Russian Ship 02 14 2024 large
Ukraine has attacked and sunk another Russian navy ship in the Black Sea; this one the “Cezar Kunikov“ shown in a file photo above.
According to information released by the Ukraine armed forces, “Magura V5” drones sank the Russian warship near Alupka, Crimea as shown on the map below:
Map Crimea Ship Sunk 02 14 2024
Below, after being hit by THREE sea drones, the ship listed onto its side and sank.
Ukraine sinks another Russian Ship 02 14 2024 2
It’s the fourth landing ship from Russia’s Black Sea Fleet that Ukrainian military has sunk since the beginning of Russia’s Special Military Operation. The Caesar Kunikov was a large landing ship with a crew comprising 87 personnel.
BUILT IN 86 ….38 years old
Class and type: Ropucha-class landing ship Displacement 2,768 long tons (2,812 t) standard 4,012 long tons (4,076 t) full load Length 112.5 m (369 ft 1 in) Beam 15.01 m (49 ft 3 in) Draught 4.26 m (14 ft 0 in) Ramps Over bows and at stern Installed power 3 × 750 kW (1,006 hp) diesel generators Propulsion 2 × 9,600 hp (7,159 kW) Zgoda-Sulzer 16ZVB40/48 diesel engines Speed 17.59 knots (32.58 km/h; 20.24 mph) Range 6,000 nmi (11,000 km; 6,900 mi) at 12 knots (22 km/h; 14 mph) 3,500 nmi (6,500 km; 4,000 mi) at 16 knots (30 km/h; 18 mph) Endurance 30 days
CAN CARRY 10 TANKS AND 340 SOLDIERS
This Clip Will Disillusion All Young Men
Escalation In Northern Palestine
The situation on the northern Israeli border is escalating. It is likely to soon evolve into a full fledged war. The situation is already increasing the economic price Israel has to pay for its misdeeds.
The international rating agency Moody’s has downgraded Israel’s credit rating. This will lead to higher interest payments on Israeli government debt:
In a report dated last Friday but not issued until Saturday, the Jewish sabbath, the agency officially reduced Israel’s rating from A1 to A2, and added pointers of further downgrading to come. The Anglo-American press immediately reacted against Moody’s.
“Israel hits back”, the Financial Timesheadlined. The newspaper added: “[Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, in a rare statement over the Jewish Sabbath, said: ‘The rating downgrade is not connected to the economy, it is entirely due to the fact that we are in a war. The rating will go back up the moment we win the war — and we will win the war.’” In the Associated Press report, “Israel’s finance minister blasts Moody’s downgrade”. Rupert Murdoch’s platform Fox claimed: “Israel has a strong, open economy despite Moody’s downgrade”. “Israel’s creditworthiness remains high,” according to the New York Times, “but the rating agency noted that the outlook for the country was negative… A rating of A2 is still a high rating.”
There are several negative issues that could lead to a further downgrading:
According to Moody’s report, “downside risks remain at the A2 rating level. In particular, the risk of an escalation involving Hezbollah in the North of Israel remains, which would have a potentially much more negative impact on the economy than currently assumed under Moody’s baseline scenario. Government finances would also be under more intense pressure in such a scenario.”
Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah reiterated that Hezbollah will continue its border offensive against the Israeli occupation sites near Lebanon border till the Zionist barbaric war on Gaza ends.
“When the aggression on Gaza stops fire will be ceased in South Lebanon,” Sayyed Nasrallah said. … Hezbollah Secretary General commented on the recent threats made by the Zionist defense minister Yoav Gallant who said that the IOF will not stop aggression on South Lebanon even after Gaza ceasefire, stressing that, then, Hezbollah will continue its offensive.
“When the war on Gaza ends, we will stop our offensive. If the enemy resumes its hostilities, we will, act in light of the rules and the formulas.”
Nasrallah rejected western demands, passed through the Lebanese government, to pull back Hizbullah’s forces and to cease fire:
It is Hezbollah duty and responsibility to deter the enemy and prevent the assault on Lebanon, Sayyed Nasrallah affirmed, adding that the Resistance responses will be proportionate, yet effective and productive.
Sayyed Nasrallah stressed that the hundreds of thousands of settlers already displaced from the North will not be able to return to their homes in case of escalation.
‘Israel’ must prepare shelters, basements, hotels and schools to house 2 million settlers who will be displaced from northern Palestine if it expands the war zone, Sayyed Nasrallah warned.
If the Israeli enemy expands its war zone against Lebanon, Hezbollah will do too, Sayyed Nasrallah emphasized. … “It is easier to move Litani River forward to the borders than pushing back Hezbollah fighters from the borders to the Litani River,” Sayyed Nasrallah said.
More will be announced later:
Sayyed Nasrallah stressed that ‘Israel’ has failed over 130 days to achieve any target in Gaza war, except the monstrous attacks on the civilians.
Concerning the Zionist war on Gaza, Sayyed Nasrallah stressed that he will address more details about during a speech he is scheduled to deliver on Friday (February 16) the anniversary of Hezbollah Martyr Commanders.
The resistance in Southern Lebanon, has so far attacked:
HQ of the Northern Region Command in Safad.
Command HQ of the 91st Galilee Division in “Branit”
HQ of the 769th Eastern Brigade in Kiryat Shmona.
Meron Air command and control base
Beit Hillel IOF base
Training camp in Kela, in the occupied Golan Heights
Ma’ale Golan IOF base on Mount Hermon
Most artillery positions along the rear front and military concentrations
Every single border military IOF sites
All of these attacks carried out by the resistance confirm that all military and fire pressure and Israeli threats will not deter it from continuing its operations. The resistance is proceeding with full confidence, first relaying on God, and then its military capabilities, the spirit of its fighters, and the resilience of its people.
The Safad headquarter site was only hit this morning. This followed after more Israeli attacks had hit civilian structures in southern Lebanon.
URGENT: #Hezbollah fired a barrage of rockets targeting an army base #Israel’s northern city of Safed. One reportedly killed & eight wounded, one in serious condition. The IDF said some of the rockets hit the Northern Command headquarters base in #Safed, some 13 kilometers (8 miles) from the Lebanese border.
Hitting Safad was a (mild) escalation after previous attacks.
Unlike the daily Palestinian victims of Israel’s brutality, the Israeli casualties of the strike created headlines in Israel:
An Israeli woman was killed and eight others were wounded as a barrage of rockets fired from Lebanon slammed into Safed and an army base in the northern city, the military and medical officials said.
In response to the attack, the IDF said it launched “widespread” airstrikes in Lebanon.
There was no immediate claim for the rocket fire, although it was believed to have been carried out by the Hezbollah terror group, which has been launching daily rocket, missile, and drone attacks on northern Israel in recent months, saying it is doing so in support of the Hamas terror group in Gaza, against whom Israel is waging war.
The Israel Defense Forces and Safed’s municipality said rockets hit an army base in the area, some 13 kilometers (8 miles) from the Lebanon border.
The casualty count on Israel’s northern border is still very uneven:
So far, the skirmishes on the border have resulted in six civilian deaths on the Israeli side, as well as the deaths of at least nine IDF soldiers and reservists. There have also been several attacks from Syria, without any injuries.
Hezbollah has named 194 members who have been killed by Israel during the ongoing skirmishes, mostly in Lebanon but some also in Syria. In Lebanon, another 29 operatives from other terror groups, a Lebanese soldier, and some two dozen civilians, three of whom were journalists, have been killed.
If Israel does not evacuated more settlers, at high economic costs, the casualty ratio is likely to change.
The Lebanese Hezbollah expert Amal Saad, who is currently teaching in Cardiff, Britain, explained Hizbullah’s thinking:
There are several messages behind Hizbullah’s qualitatively different strike on Safed this morning, which Israel is treating as the gravest attack since the start of the war, with Ben Gvir calling it a “declaration of war”.
At the forefront, is Hizbullah’s message that it won’t capitulate to Israeli and western demands that it cease hostilities across the border, as per Nasrallah’s speech yesterday. It’s also a response to several Israeli assassination strikes in South Lebanon, reaching as deep as Sidon.
But the timing of this escalation also appears to be related to Netanyahu’s scuppering of the Paris cease-fire proposal and his government’s threats to invade Rafah, which in turn, would make a full-out attack on Lebanon more likely. Hizbullah is giving Israel a taster of the type of strikes and casualty tolls its military will have to bear, should Netanyahu continue to reject a cease-fire.
Predictably the Israeli occupation forces responded to the strike on Safad by escalating further:
The Israeli military said Wednesday its fighter jets “began a series of strikes in Lebanon”, raising fears of a war between the two countries after months of cross-border fire.
The military gave no further details of the air strikes, while Lebanese media reported air raids on southern villages including Adchit, Sawwaneh and Shihabiyeh.
The strikes came hours after fire from Lebanon wounded multiple people in northern Israel, according to medics. … Fears have been growing of another full-blown conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, with tens of thousands displaced on both sides of the border and regional tensions soaring.
“I don’t know when the war in the north is, I can tell you that the likelihood of it happening in the coming months is much higher than it was in the past,” Israeli military chief Herzi Halevi said last month.
Following the last Israeli strikes, the Lebanese side said that four civilians had been killed or wounded by them.
The increase of hostility is getting to a point where there will no longer be the question “if” another war between Israel and Hizbullah will occur but only the question of “when”.
Posted by b on February 14, 2024 at 15:23 UTC | Permalink
Yes. This past week. She is a lot older than me but our personalities clicked. We met at work and were really close for 7 years. We both left the department we met in for new jobs but still met up every month. I supported her through breast cancer. Then we both got offered promotions in our old department. Both accepted and were so excited to be working together again. She started a month before me and struggled to settle back in, feeling old colleagues were freezing her out. I comforted her as she sobbed down the phone to me and helped her talk things through with them. Then last week I started back. One particular colleague was very angry I was back as I had given evidence in a bullying case against her involving another colleague and she got very nasty, even refusing to sit beside me in the office and screaming at caretakers to move her desk on my first day. I was very upset and intimidated. I shared my feelings with my friend. Her response was that SHE didn’t feel any toxicity and I needed to just stay away from people. Also she and this woman had now bonded because they were both new grandmothers. I was crushed and texted her about it later, saying I was hurt by what she had said. Her response was to tell me to never text her again. Fine. I figured I’d leave her to cool off and then maybe we could talk.
A couple of days later I developed chest pains in the office. It was early morning and my manager wasn’t in so I left a message on her desk and went for an Emergancy GP appointment. He sent me straight to the hospital. On the way there I was trying to get through to our office to let my manager know what was happening, but couldn’t get through on the office line. So I phoned my friend, told her I was having an emergency and couldn’t get through and asked her to tell the manager what had happened.
She said no, she couldn’t do that. And then hung up. And blocked me.
And now I’m done. Because whether we were fighting or not, I would have taken the call and helped her.
Thankfully I’m ok, it was just a torn chest muscle and pluerasy but I learned that day that some people only like you when you’re the one carrying them. And frankly, she doesn’t deserve my friendship. Don’t waste time trying to heal relationships with people who don’t value you.
Japanese-Peruvian Marino Morikawa found that his childhood lake was contaminated and decided to put his master’s degree and Ph.D. to work. His goal was to change a plant-covered, unsanitary swamp into a place that animals and people could use.
He began by taking a break from school and taking a loan from the bank. He wanted to create something that could clean the lake. He had to use several different methods to get there, though, and research took 6 months.
One tool he tried was microbubbles. Microbubbles are tiny bubbles invisible to the naked eye. Morikawa put them into water. As they traveled up, they caught diseases and other harmful elements, acting like a spider web. Once they finally reached the surface, the bacteria were killed and the bubbles were destroyed by ultraviolet lights. Unfortunately, bubbles take hours to rise due to their size.
Another tool he used was biofilters. Biofilters work by bringing foul pollutants to the surface of a lake while leaving clean water and useful organisms at the bottom. He made his ceramic biofilters by himself in a pottery class.
Eventually, Morikawa created an organic nanotechnology compote to clean dirty water. The compote was so natural that it was even edible! Morikawa admits that it is quite expensive, but he believes that it is worth it.
To use it, one simply had to put it in dirty water and wait for about 15 minutes. This is what the water looks like before and after treatment:
image 224
Look, I’m on TV! Hi mom!
Once he had done the hardest part of the work, he was ready to clean his lake. Using homemade biofilters, the compote, and science, he was able to clean the lake in 15 days (although other sources say that cleaning the entire wetlands took 4 months).
As a result of cleaning the lake, people, over 40 species of birds, and 10 species of fish came back to inhabit it. This man should truly be respected. His efforts are not for money or fame; he simply wants to make the world a better place.
And he still wants to do more, zoning in on other polluted lakes and prioritizing Lake Titicaca. With his intelligence, passion, funding, and ingenious technologies, I think he may just be able to do it.
Nana’s Spinach and Sausage Pies
This spinach pie is a family recipe passed down for generations. It stems from a traditional Greek (or in our case Albanian) recipe. It calls for homemade crust, and is truly wonderful when the time is taken to make it from scratch! But if you’d like you can substitute homemade crust for store bought Phyllo dough.
My grandmother would make this spinach pie every New Year’s day. She would wrap a quarter or silver dollar in wax paper, and place it near the crust. Whoever received the lucky dollar would be blessed with good luck for the year! Before you start baking, mark the quarter with a toothpick so you know where it is and it stays in the slice. Cut the pie, take the toothpick out, and randomly provide everyone with a slice. Everyone uses a fork to poke through their slice to find the lucky dollar. Don’t start eating until you find the lucky dollar, or it could become an unlucky choking hazard!
If you’d like to skip making your own dough, purchase Phyllo (not country style) dough for this crust. It’s more and more common in grocery stores these days. It can be very thin, so use up to 10 layers on for your crust.
For homemade dough mix flour, salt, water for dough with your hands until soft. Knead for 5 minutes. Then place in a bowl and cover with plastic wrap for 10 minutes.
Divide the dough in half, roll it out until thin and spread with melted butter well. Fold the sides to the center and butter again. Now fold one half over the other and butter and fold in the opposite direction until you have a 5 inch folded square formed. Butter the top and cover with plastic wrap. Refrigerate for 12-15 minutes (or overnight if you’d like) and do the same with the other half.
Now it’s time to make your filling! Just add all your filling ingredients into a bowl and mix well to make your filling.
Remove your dough from the fridge and roll out to the size of your square or round buttered pan. A 12–15-inch pan is perfect. Place the dough on the bottom of the pan with a ½ overlap around the edges. Add your filling and cover with more dough. Wrap the edges of the dough into a crust and bake uncovered at 350˚ for 30 minutes, or until the top is golden brown and a bit crispy.
I will never forget my wonderful Nana Tefta, and all the ways she showed her love. Cooking this family recipe and giving us the joy of finding a lucky quarter was just one of the many ways she did that.
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Ingredients
1 pound sweet Italian sausage links, casing removed
10 to 11 ounces piecrust mix or 2 (9-inch) deep dish pie crusts
Instructions
Heat oven to 375 degrees F.
Crumble sausage in a medium skillet and brown meat over medium heat, breaking up with a spoon. Drain on paper towels.
If using fresh spinach, bring a large pot of water to a boil and put spinach in water. Boil 1 minute and drain; squeeze dry.
Separate 1 egg. Combine 5 eggs with 1 egg white, sausage, spinach mozzarella, ricotta and pepper and set aside.
Prepare pie crust mix if using. Lay 1 pie crust in pie pan and spoon mixture into it. Lay another crust on top and flute with a stand-up edge. Carefully cut a 2-inch circle out of the top crust.
Mix egg yolk with 1 tablespoon water and brush on top of pie. (Can decorate with scraps of dough.)
Bake for 1 hour, 10 minutes until golden and bubbly. Check crust after 1 hour and put foil on edges to prevent over-browning.
Let stand for 10 minutes and cut OR chill uncovered until cold; cover and refrigerate until serving cold.
When I was 15 our cleaner invited our whole family to her wedding and reception. We were friendly with her as she’d given one of our puppies a home when our dog had a litter, but we hadn’t known her long. Being 15 I didn’t really want to go, but my mum said we wouldn’t have to stay long and we would just go for the reception, dance a bit and come home. It was in the Town Hall, a big, grand room in the nearby town.
When we got there we saw the bride and groom dancing, but hardly anyone else in the room. My mum checked the time thinking we were early or late but it turns out no one had turned up! There were my parents, my two brothers and me, and then no more than 7 other people in this huge, heavily decorated room with a large buffet that would have fed around 100 people.
We felt bad for the bride and groom so tried to make up for the lack of people by dancing and eating a lot, but they were acting as if it was totally normal. They seemed to be having a really good time. After a while a couple of people left and the 5 of us in my family made up half of the guests! I felt very awkward, and instead of staying an hour or two we had to stay the whole night, all the while pretending we were having a great time.
We found out later the reason no one had showed – it turns out that the bride and groom had been married before. In fact, they’d been married and divorced 9 times! The reception we went to was their tenth wedding… which explains why none of their family and friends wanted to waste anymore time on them. A match made in heaven! I wonder if they are still married, or how many more weddings they’ve racked up now…
Putin on the Collapse of the Dollar as the World’s Reserve Currency
I was at a thrift store, just looking around for anything interesting.
Standing in the entrance area was a mother with a baby and a toddler, and a large toy chest she had just purchased, which was sitting in her cart.
Thus she had a dilemna.
The baby was too small to walk, so she had to carry the baby. The toy chest was too big to carry one-handed, and too big to allow the baby to sit in the cart with it. Even if she could carry the baby and the toy chest, the toddler’s hand needed held in this busy parking lot.
What to do?
The thrift store was especially busy that day. People walked in, gave her situation a glance, and kept walking. She stood there for at least five minutes (which doesn’t seem very long, but it seems like a long time if you’re just standing there), occasionally trying to pick up the chest. Not a single person stopped to help.
A family walked into the store. They all gave the woman a glance and kept walking, just as the others had.
Well, most of the family kept walking.
A teenager slipped away from the family and went up to the woman.
“Hey. You need some help?”
The teen carried that toy chest all the way to the woman’s car. I saw the woman pull out her wallet, and the teenager backed away, waving their hands.
Any show of kindness is great in the eye of the recipient.
One and only time I ever left a job because of a boss was when I was doing software engineering at a major aerospace company on contract.
The direct manager was a micro-manager and apparently didn’t have a life outside of work.
He would take home the code listings of that day’s work from his team members to do “code reviews.’
The next morning you would get back your listings with “suggested changes” in red pencil.
You would dutifully spend the first half of the day coding and testing the suggested changes then try and make some new progress before turning the day’s listing back to the boss.
The next day it would start all over again except, more often than not, the day’s “suggested changes” basically had you putting the code back to the way you had it to begin with.
I implemented my own code management system so I could easily roll back changes.
I lasted all of a year before finding a new job.
When I became a people manager some years later I used the experience as a life lesson of the kind of manager NOT to become.
The Pathology of America: Dehumanization, Greed, and the Decline of Empire
Actually it is sad, and when I peer into the future, it is absolutely worrying. Please be safe everyone.
Lots of videos today, but most are super short.
Enjoy…
Western Diplomacy is ‘Primitive’
Russians have had to dumb down their speeches at the UN so other countries can understand them, deputy representative Dmitry Polyansky has said.
Russian diplomats perceive their Western counterparts’ approach to international affairs to be “quite primitive,” Moscow’s deputy permanent representative to the UN, Dmitry Polyansky, has said. Moscow’s representatives are not certain what caused this, but have simplified their messaging in response, he added.
Polyansky made remarks about the quality of the Western diplomatic corps in an interview with RIA Novosti published on Monday, based on his personal experience at the UN. He expressed concern about Anglophone speakers at the forum selectively ignoring the context of particular situations for their own benefit.
”They pick an arbitrary point in time and claim nothing happened before it. They try to blame a nation for its actions regardless of prior events or the general context,” he explained.
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The diplomat cited the Ukraine conflict as an example. The US and its allies have been describing Moscow’s military action against Kiev as “unprovoked” and supposedly motivated by “imperial ambitions,” and have pressured other nations to frame it in the same way. As they learn more about the conflict, however, those parties realize how much the general context and Western actions since Ukraine gained its independence matter, he added.
”This trick does not always work, but it is a trend. I don’t know if it’s some deeper trend or just something typical for some people coming from [Western] schools of diplomacy,” Polyansky said. “Having a dialogue with them is challenging because they show certain superficiality, tunnel vision, and unwillingness to seek the core causes of conflicts. No solutions can be found without [such analysis].”
The office of the Russian envoy to the UN has been simplifying its addresses due to uncertainty over how their words are understood, he said. Russian diplomats used to quote foreign and Russian classics in speeches, but are no longer using this rhetorical device as much, Polyansky said.
”Times dictate things. Our partners may now be less well-read individuals, so occasionally we want to speak in plainer terms to make sure our signal comes through,” he explained.
Reality
A New Civil War is A Very Real Prospect for the US
It has long been on the minds of doomsday preppers and fiction media creators alike – but how likely is it, really?
Let’s sketch a big country in three broad strokes:
First, its population is over 333 million. These citizens privately own about (or at least) 339 million guns. They are unique in that no other state in the world has more private guns than people. They easily outdistance, for instance, Yemen, a country with a martial culture that has gone through years of civil war and yet there are only about 53 firearms per 100 inhabitants.
Second, polarization is unusually high and virulent: As of 2020 already, a political scientist at one of America’s most prestigious universities, found that “political polarization among Americans has grown rapidly in the last 40 years — more than in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia or Germany,” for instance. The result: America is special, but not in a good way. “None of the wealthy, consolidated democracies of East Asia, Oceania, or Western Europe,” a 2022 paper published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace pointed out, “have faced similar levels of polarization for such an extended period.”
Last year, another Carnegie Endowment paper found that even while some of the perception of polarization on specific policy questions (such as gun control or abortion) is exaggerated, that perception itself is detrimental to the country’s cohesion. Because “the people who are most involved in civic and political life hold the least accurate [here meaning: highly negative] views of the other side’s beliefs” and there is a high degree of what political scientists call “affective polarization.” Put simply, all or many of those citizens, collectively hoarding so many guns that over 40% of households are armed in one way or the other, do not like or even merely respect “the other side” of the political spectrum – not at all and ever less.
Third, the country also displays a pronounced cultural preoccupation, really almost obsession, not merely with the idea of civil war as such or the specific history of its own very bloody civil war in the nineteenth century. Rather its elites and general population are fixated on a coming civil war, which, as of 2022, a whopping 43 percent considered likely in the next ten years. Debates, high-brow books, articles, and popular culture feature this fantasy prominently and persistently.
We are talking, of course, about the United States of America. While it would be easy to adduce more criteria and data points, there is no need. The above is sufficient to demonstrate that it would be shortsighted to pooh-pooh the risk of a second civil war in America, for two reasons: It is not a mere fantasy, owing its current national resonance to “hype” and the titillation of imagining a liberatingly apocalyptic future of chaos and every man and woman for themselves (and, in the US, I guess, every other gender that wishes to participate).
Smart Americans realize this as well. Barbara F. Walter, for instance, is a prominent political scientist who has worked extensively with the CIA to develop a model of civil war predictors, for any country but the US, of course. She has now come to warn that the model begins to fit America itself disturbingly well. She may have her centrist biases – the usual exaggeration of “Russian influence” included – but her core points are valid: The US is turning into an anocracy, that is, in essence, a regime that only pretends to be a democracy. (In fact, that is what it has always been, I would contend.) And there is a substantial constituency of those who feel threatened by losing their former social status and preeminence. Those happen to be phenomena strongly correlated with a risk of civil war.
Let’s also not forget that America is proving its enormous capacity for global disruption every day, even without civil war at home. While some observers may – even gleefully – hope that Americans fighting each other would finally have to let go of the rest of us, that is a very dicey bet. With an elite narcissistically obsessed with global “primacy” and “indispensability,” about 800 bases worldwide, an arsenal of thousands of nuclear warheads, and a nasty habit of blaming others for its own failures, a new American civil war would not exclude aggression abroad. Moreover, declining as it is, the US is still a key part of the global economy, much more so than in 1860, when its first civil war already had serious repercussions for the rest of the world.
In sum, it may attract preppers with camo baseball hats, beards, and pump guns, but don’t let that fool you: American Civil War 2.0 is a serious issue. So, what about it? What can we reasonably guess about how likely it really is and what shape it might take if it happens?
To start with the latter question, perhaps the first thing to note is that big civil wars can start small and local. That is, by the way, the real significance of the recent, open tensions over migration and border control between the state of Texas and the federal government in Washington. They did involve armed forces and much foreboding rhetoric, but, fortunately, no shots were fired. Yet those glibly dismissing the incident as mere political theater are wrong. Because, as the New York Times has noted, it was not only Texas that defied the US government. Rather, “many Republican state leaders publicly expressed defiance in terms that echoed armed conflicts.”
Indeed, the second thing to note is that, due to America’s federal structure, a new civil war would most likely begin with secession. In the fracas between Washington and Texas, 25 Republican governors openly sided with rebellious Texas. This was a perfect illustration of how one local flashpoint could quickly suck in the rest of the country by creating a logic of ultimate polarization and then secession. This logic has not yet fully unfolded. Its contours, however, have emerged clearly.
It is worth noting that many of the fiction narratives about Civil War 2.0 make the same point: Whether it is the cult graphic novel series “DMZ,” the bitterly ironic novel “American War” (it’s obvious in-joke is that it has some Americans treat other Americans the way Americans and Israelis now treat Palestinians, Iraqis, or Syrians), the small-budget yet clever movie “Bushwick,” or the big-budget “Civil War” about to hit American cinemas now: Again and again the basic premise is a scenario of secession escalating into massive domestic warfare.
Third, while the humongous pile of private firearms would certainly play a large role in a new civil war, it would be misguided to assume that such a fight would only pit gangs of private citizens, organized in militias, against official police and military forces. In reality, a dynamic of secession, once set in motion would lead to parts of the US’s manifold “siloviki” choosing their own allegiance, splitting, and starting to fight each other. If you believe that, in such a situation, the formal chains of command ultimately linking them all back to Washington would remain intact, I have a whole-and-indivisible Yugoslavia to sell you.
And, last but not least, in such a development, the war would be both severe and long. In that respect, it would resemble the first Civil War. Although, due to advanced technologies and declining inhibitions, it could be even more devastating and cruel. In Netflix’s recent and tellingly successful “Leave the World Behind,” the protagonists never learn who exactly is blowing up their country, but by the end of the movie two things seem reasonably clear: No, it’s not enemies from outside, but an inside job, and nukes are being used. That, by the way, was the premise as well of the earlier, initially unsuccessful but now cult television show “Jericho.”
How likely is such a dark future? Obviously, we do not know. But let’s note two things: We could, a priori, be looking at an America where no one is much interested in thinking about it. Yet we are seeing the opposite. If you think that means nothing, fine. Just don’t mistake your guess for a good policy or planning basis.
There are, of course, alternatives to civil war. One is peaceful de-polarization under the current anocratic conditions, which, hypothetically, can happen. The other is full-blown authoritarianism: one way to suppress the possibility of a civil war is to impose dictatorship.
But here’s the catch: A country can end up with both civil war and dictatorship. Ask the ancient Romans. Those Romans, that is, who were so much on the mind of the founders of the American Republic.
It has long been on the minds of doomsday preppers and fiction media creators alike – but how likely is it, really?
If you are greeting four people standing in a group, at least smile at the fifth person standing along with them, whom you don’t know, so that they don’t feel disrespected.
Whenever you ask someone to do something for you, even if they are ought to do it, frame it as a question to boost their self-esteem. ‘Can you please get my pen from the table?’ sounds much soothing than ‘Go, get my pen’.
People in hurry, appear too irritating, but they may be anxious about something or facing an emergency, don’t bother much, just give them a way and ignore, and even if someone is just too impatient, that’s something to pity.
You desperately want to interrupt someone, may be they are completely wrong, but at least let them finish a sentence, so that you don’t appear even worse than them.
When you finish eating, pick the little pieces of food fallen around your plate and put them on your plate and throw them, it shows immense maturity.
Don’t wait for someone, standing in front of the opposite sex wash room, because when the gate opens again and again, it can be quite embarrasing, and also people may question your integrity.
When you disagree with someone, it doesn’t make them a criminal. Respect their opinion, and realise the fact that your thoughts may also be your opinion and not a fact. ‘Argue with respect.’
Whenever you break a line, you become a teacher for countless innocent people, this isn’t something great to give back to the society, respect a line.
Not liking to be touched is not arrogance, it’s a natural trait of most people, avoid touching people as much as possible to protect your self-esteem and respect theirs.
When you shout at someone, all you are doing is wasting your energy, misusing your larynx, and showing immaturity, learn to take boldest of actions and give harshest of warnings, keeping a smile.
Italian Oven Chowder
To enjoy this hearty chowder as the Italians do, be sure to include the oysters.
Creamy Italian Seafood Chowder 4
What is Creamy Italian Seafood Chowder?
If you are a seafood lover – this Creamy Italian Seafood Chowder is for you!
Sometimes called an Italian “white” seafood chowder – a delicious variety of seafood and vegetables are suspended in a cream-based broth that really allows the flavors of the seafood to shine through. (You can also make a “red” seafood chowder with a tomato-based broth.)
Some Italian families serve this seafood chowder on Christmas Eve for the traditional Feast of Seven Fishes, but we love it anytime of the year – especially with fresh-caught seafood in the summer.
Why you’ll love Creamy Italian Seafood Chowder
It’s chock full of a variety of fresh seafood – and you can vary it depending on the catch of the day, or to suit your family’s tastes.
This chowder is hearty and delicious, and it makes for a very satisfying meal.
You can prepare it ahead of time (but be sure to read our tips below in the Frequently Asked Question to avoid overcooking the seafood if you make it ahead).
Ingredients
4 slices bacon
2 large carrots, sliced 1/2 inch thick
2 medium parsnips, sliced 1/2 inch thick, cutting larger pieces in half
In a 4-quart Dutch oven cook bacon until crisp. Remove bacon, reserving 1 tablespoon drippings in the pan. Drain bacon on paper towels; crumble and set aside.
Add carrots, parsnips, and onions to Dutch oven. Cook over medium heat for 8 to 10 minutes or until brown, stirring occasionally.
Add potatoes, chicken broth, garlic salt and pepper. Bring to boiling; reduce heat. Cover and simmer about 15 minutes or until potatoes are tender. (At this point the soup can be cooled, covered, and chilled in the refrigerator overnight.)
In a small mixing bowl stir together melted margarine or butter and flour. Stir flour-margarine mixture, milk, and corn into chowder mixture in Dutch oven. Cook and stir over medium heat until slightly thickened. If desired, add oysters and liquid to soup; heat through.
Sprinkle each serving with crumbled bacon and chives or parsley, if desired.
Key Ingredients & Substitutions
Salt Pork and Bacon – These two ingredients are an easy way to add delicious flavor to any soup or chowder – the rendered fat is used to sauté vegetables, so you won’t need to add other fats. While we use both salt pork and bacon, you could easily just use all of one or the other – the salt pork adds a nice salty flavor, while the bacon adds a smokey taste.
Seafood – Buy a total of four pounds of seafood. We made our chowder with fresh haddock, chopped fresh clams, shell-on shrimp (frozen shrimp is fine), fresh scallops, and crab meat. You can substitute any of these varieties of seafood, or use all of one or the other, just as long as the total weight equals four pounds.
Clam juice – Look for bottled clam juice at the supermarket – sometimes sold near the seafood counter. Other times, you can find it near the soup aisle.
Dairy – Heavy cream makes up the broth, along with the clam juice and a broth from the shrimp shells. Unsalted butter smooths things out and adds more flavor. You could lighten this soup up a bit with light cream or half and half – but it won’t be quite the same.
Tomato – Buy canned whole and peeled San Marzano tomatoes. You’ll break up the tomato pieces into the soup and reduce the juices to create a serving sauce that garnishes each portion.
Other Vegetables – Peeled and diced russet potatoes are the best for this seafood chowder, plus diced onion and celery, and minced garlic.
Herbs and spices – You’ll use a variety of herbs and spices including bay leaves, fresh basil, fresh mint, dried oregano, kosher salt, black pepper, and fresh thyme.
I was 27 when my husband (29) passed away unexpectedly while stationed overseas. It took 3 weeks for the army to bring his corpse back to the US and a week after the arrival his church service and funeral took place. A week after the burial, I traveled back to my country of origin for only one week. My daddy, who was extremely fond of my late husband, and who couldn’t attend the funeral due to work obligations and visa lasting procedures, had an open-hearted conversation with me. He said that all of us will die. And many of us will go unexpectedly. That there was a divine reason why all of what happened had happened and that I would need to eventually come to peace with losing him. I needed to see my story with my husband as a chapter of my book that ended. I needed to turn the page to the next chapter for my own benefit, if not, instead of having one dead in the family, they were going to have two. Because that’s who I was going to turn into. A dead living woman.
I listened to his words which made sense, but I didn’t want my life to make sense so quickly so I forgot about them until after I dragged myself into an alcohol addiction for months. And one day, I remembered his wise words and between that and the help of a close friend, I realized my daddy was right. Either I got over my husband’s passing or I was going to stay dead myself.
200 Times Wife Has a MELTDOWN After Getting Caught Cheating #2
Aging is a natural process, but there are steps you can take to maintain a youthful appearance and overall well-being in your 70s and 80s. Here are some tips to help you look and feel young:
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1. Stay Active: Regular exercise is crucial for maintaining muscle strength, flexibility, and overall health. Low-impact activities like walking, swimming, and yoga can be excellent choices.
2. Eat a Balanced Diet: A diet rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean proteins, and healthy fats can support your skin, hair, and overall health.
3. Stay Hydrated: Proper hydration is essential for skin health. Drink enough water to keep your skin hydrated.
4. Protect Your Skin: Use sunscreen to protect your skin from the sun’s harmful UV rays, which can cause premature aging. Moisturize your skin regularly to keep it hydrated.
5. Get Sufficient Sleep: Quality sleep is essential for overall health. Aim for 7-9 hours of sleep per night.
6. Manage Stress: High-stress levels can lead to premature aging. Practice stress-reduction techniques like meditation, deep breathing, or yoga.
7. Regular Checkups: Visit your healthcare provider for regular checkups to address any health concerns promptly.
8. Stay Socially Active: Maintaining social connections can contribute to mental and emotional well-being, which can affect your overall appearance.
9. Mental Stimulation: Keep your mind active with puzzles, games, or learning new skills. It can help maintain cognitive function and a youthful spirit.
10. Good Skincare: Use skincare products suitable for your skin type and age. A good skincare routine can make a difference in maintaining healthy skin.
11. Fashion and Style: Update your wardrobe with clothing that makes you feel confident and stylish. How you dress can impact your overall look.
12. Hair Care: Consider a hairstyle that suits your face shape and is easy to maintain. Many people embrace their natural gray hair, which can be quite attractive.
13. Regular Dental Care: Don’t neglect your dental health. Regular dental checkups and good oral hygiene can help maintain a youthful appearance.
Remember that aging is a natural part of life, and it’s essential to embrace the wisdom and experiences that come with it. Looking and feeling young is about maintaining your health and self-confidence as you age.
I was working at this shipping company, I think it was.
The boss was one of those who would bully his subordinates. He often made several employees cry.
Anyway, we were in a meeting. It was more like a bitching session.
The boss spent the meeting screaming at everyone, calling us lazy and insisting we were the worst employees ever. He was screaming at us and I felt I had to say something.
So I did.
The boss got right in my face. I mean, like a few inches from me. He started screaming right in my face and I simply stood my ground.
The boss screamed at me to get out, that I was fired.
Then he screamed at everyone else, calling them lazy and telling everyone to get out if they didn’t like the way he was running things.
Each and every person followed me out the door. This literally meant there was no staff to get any work done.
Not surprisingly, the boss ended up getting fired.
I was turning 30. I had planned a party for me and my going to be 12 year old daughter. It was a Saturday. My sister and I went with our kids to Mom and Dad’s for the regular Saturday bagel routine. Dad was at his parents’ house mowing their lawn. He had called me earlier with a, “Happy Birthday Robbio, See Yah later”. I responded, “Love you Daddio”. About 45 minutes into our bagel breakfast, the phone rang and my mother answered. The color completely drained from her face. She kept repeating, “A stroke? A stroke?” It was my grandfather. My father was in the hospital. My then husband and brother-in-law raced to my mother’s side and my sister and I loaded the kids into my car and sped to our grandparents. I played the game in my head, If I get all green lights he’s fine. If I see kids playing he’s fine….etc. It was a warm September day. The windows on the car were open. As we approached the house, we could hear what only could be described as wailing. It was Grandma. I have never, ever heard such a sorrowful, painful sound. My daughter found my Dad’s smashed glasses on the lawn. My grandfather returned from the hospital, just shaking his head. He said nothing. Shortly the family showed up. My dad had died. He had a massive heart attack. The sanitation workers picking up trash had jumped off of the truck to help my grandfather apply CPR, but to no avail. He was basically dead before he hit the ground. For the next fifteen years, no one and I mean no one could say, “Happy Birthday” to me. I forbade it and if someone accidentally said it, they got schooled. I still can’t really celebrate my birthday, even though it’s been 36 years. I do have a major amount of respect for sanitation workers though.
Five days after moving into a new (to me and my wife) home our neighbor, Lee, showed up at our door to borrow my weedeater. He’d seen me using it in my backyard the day before and said he wanted to do some “cleanup” around his yard. I told him that I was sorry but I had a firm policy against loaning my tools or equipment out. I also mentioned that I’d bought the weedeater at a local home improvement store for around $75. He replied that he wouldn’t use it that often so he didn’t see the point of buying one.
End of story, right?
Not quite.
The guy pretty much avoided me after I denied his request; if I came outside while he was in his driveway or yard, he’d ignore me, or just give a cursory wave before turning away. Over time I became friendly with Mack, my neighbor across the street, and one evening we were in his backyard, staining his deck, when he said that he didn’t think I was a bad guy, at all. I asked him to explain and he told me that my next door neighbor, Lee, had told him and a couple of other neighbors that I was an asshole who didn’t want to help anyone out. Because I wouldn’t lend him my weedeater.
I told Mack that Lee struck me as being something of an opportunist and con man, and Mack admitted that Lee did have those tendencies. That convinced me that I’d been right to refuse to lend him my weedeater. He was just angry at me because I didn’t buy his BS.
I couldn’t say how friendly German women as a whole were to American troops; (although sometimes they were very friendly indeed, I’ve often read, lol)…but I can relate a story my dad told me about an interaction he once had with a German woman towards the very end of the Third Reich.
My dad was a medic in the 3rd Armored Division. He landed on Omaha beach, fought all through France, drove through the carnage and destruction of the Falaise pocket, was in Belgium at the Battle of the Bulge and was in Germany at the Battle of the Hurtgen forest. He was also at the liberation of the Nordhausen forced labor camp, where V-2 rockets were being constructed by slave labor…Poles, Jews, Czechs and Russians. My father was in the Ruhr pocket in Rhine-North Westphalia, Germany when the war ended.
It really didn’t dawn on me until much later in life what a living repository of history my dad was, and how present he had been at and for so much history. He told me many truly amazing stories, and as I was always pretty much the only one among my siblings who ever showed any interest in my dad’s WW II service, I wrote everything he told me down and have it archived on my computer. (And even as a child, I was fascinated by my father’s stories and recognized them for the real family and WW II history they were). I really wish I had tape recorded my dad telling these stories when he was still alive, and always meant to…but life and time got in the way (as it often does) and I never got around to it. Still, though…I’ve got them all down in print.
This happened shortly after the 3rd Armored had crossed into Germany proper. My dad told me;
“Often,when we moved into and occupied these towns,of course we would sometimes take a break for chow.And invariably, little French or Belgian or in this case Germankids wouldcluster around, watching us getting ready to eat and hoping for some food.All of these children had been living in occupied or food-rationed countries for years now; they were often terribly thin and pale.And they’d gather around, smelling the cooking food and shyly watching us with big eyes.
And of course…we shared. I mean…how the heck could you eat while being watched by hungry kids? Anybody with a heart would’ve shared, and we always did.
And in this particular town, there was a little fella watching us. He had a beat-up, moth-eaten black coat on, and a little black cap on his head. Short pants and knee socks…legs like pipe cleaners…like sticks.
So I decided right then and there to make sure this little guy got fed well.
I grabbed him by the hand, took him to the head of the chow line and told the guy filling our kits, “C’mon, pal. Load this little guy up. Load‘im up.Looks like he hasn’t had a decent meal in years.”And he hunted up an aluminum tray, and piled it high with corned-beef hash and beans and white bread. I dug a D-bar out of my pocket and also put some chewing gum on the tray, too. I knelt down and put the tray and food into the boy’s hands.
You should’ve seen this kid’s face. (Laughs). His eyes nearly popped out of his head! “Danke schoen, Herr Soldaten!’’, he said to me politely and wonderingly. I found an empty packing crate in the street, led him over to some steps in front of a house, propped up the crate and helped him put the tray on it and sit down, and stuck a tin spoon in his hand. In German, I told him to help himself and eat up. Eagerly, he began to dig in.
But as the boy began to bring the first spoonful of food to his mouth…a door to a house on the other side of the street flew open, and a matronly “hausfrau“ maybe sixty years old or so came storming out of the house and across the street to us, snatched the spoon right outta the kid’s hand, grabbed the tray of food and hurled it to the ground.
“ALBERNES KIND!” (FOOLISH CHILD!), she yelled at the boy.“Do you notknow, have you not heard?These American soldiers are all CHICAGO GANGSTERS!! They will kill you!! That food is poisoned!! And yet you are blockhead enough to eat ofit??!!”
Viciously jerking the boy up off the stairs by his arm, she swatted his ass good and turned to march with him back to the house across the street.As the kid started bawling, I grabbed her by the arm to try to stop her and explain things to her. I spoke and understood the Deutsch pretty damned well by then, and I knew exactly what she’d said; and I was very much dismayed that she actually believed I, or we as Americans, would really try to poison her child…or grandchild, most likely. And I desperately wanted her to understand that this wasn’t the case.
And besides…I wasn’t even from Chicago! (Laughs).
So Itried to talk to her, addressing her as ‘’gnadige frau” (gracious lady) and telling her, “The food is not poisoned! Look!”And I bent over and picked up the tray, and actually scooped up a handful of hash off the ground and ate it right in front of her!“Nicht giftig!”, I kept repeating to her, “nicht giftig!” (Not poisoned!)
Unfortunately, she was having none of it. With a glare at me and a sniff of her upturned nose, she turned away and dragged the bawling kid across the street and into the house and slammed the door behind them.
I felt bad that the little guy never got his chow, and that these people had been so ingrained to hate and distrust us by Nazi propaganda.
But not all the German people were that way. Many of them were quite friendly and distinctly glad to see us…as opposed to the Russians.”
My father told me lots of other stories, some funny, many quite tragic, which I’ll be submitting to Quora in the future. My first story of his got an overwhelming response, and I was glad so many people enjoyed it. I fancy myself a student of WW II, and it really made me pleased that so many other people find so much interest in my dad’s war tales. Thanks to everyone for your views and comments…more to come if you’re interested!
I went to the drive up window at our pharmacy to pick up my script. It was a very blustery day. As I went to put my $20 in the drawer a gust of wind blew it out of my hand. After paying with my ATM card I pulled away and parked. Got out of the car and searched the area but no luck. My thought was I hope whoever found it needed it more than me and drove home. During the next week or so I was in and out of my car including the trunk several times.
I had a bag full of clothes to donate to Goodwill. In order to get to the Goodwill near me I had to drive to the intersection near my pharmacy, turn left, travel about half mile, turn right onto a busy highway, drive another half mile and turn left into the Goodwill parking lot, drive to the back of the store to deliver my donation. The rear parking lot backed up to a wooded area. I took the clothes out of the trunk of my car and deposited them in the bin provided.
Just as I walked to the back of my car a $20 bill blew right up to my feet. I just couldn’t believe it. The bill looked like it had been out in weather for a while. Was it my bill from the pharmacy. Was it somehow stuck to my car or trunk. But how could that be. I had driven my car quite a bit and had been in and out of my car and trunk several times during that week. In any event I was so happy because I sure needed that $20.
When Delusional Woke People Get OWNED
https://youtu.be/TNtVDYnSxh0
TO THE MOM AT THE SCHOOL DROP OFF THIS MORNING
Today I walked my son to his kindergarten class. It was cold and we were huddled together like sardines as we stood outside the door waiting for the bell to ring.
I saw you with your little boy just a few feet from us, and I looked down when I realized you were looking at us. I hoped you didn’t know who we were. I hoped you didn’t know my son was “that kid.” The one who’s not transitioning well in this school year.
I know what the kids say about my son. They go home and tell their parents my kid is bad. Sometimes he pushes and hits. Sometimes he is defiant and refuses to sit down, be quiet, or stay in line.
I know because the kids tell him what they think of him on the playground. “Mark said I’m bad today.” Or “Aiden’s dad said I can’t play with him anymore.” And my heart hurts, because I know he’s struggling in school. And we are working every angle… in school with a specialist, at home, and through classes, books and resources.
Today, you looked at me, then at my son. “You must be K,” you said to my son. And I looked up and smiled sheepishly. It was an apologetic smile. Almost a “I’m sorry you know his name” smile, because that means you’ve heard the stories.
I said to you, “Yes, this is him.”
I whispered when my son stepped away that we are aware he’s causing some trouble and we are working on it. That we take his behavior very seriously.
And then you did something I never expected. I don’t know if I was waiting for you to tell me what you heard K did to your son, or just tell me off. But instead you told me about your older son who struggled with similar problems at this age. You told me that now he’s in high school and he’s a straight A student.
Instead of tearing me down, you lifted me up. You gave me hope. And you handed me an olive branch so I know that I do have an ally during school drop off. An ally I never expected.
You didn’t have to make that connection. You could have ignored us or pretended not to know us. Or yes — you could have told me what you think of my son (you would not be the first). But you didn’t. You showed me grace and kindness and you uplifted me more than I could possibly describe in words.
I told you I would love to learn more about steps you took with your older son. I would love suggestions and guidance and that I would call you. And you know what? I will call you. Even if no suggestions or guidance is ever exchanged. I will call you because you are a friend I want to have. You are a good person.
Supporting evidence: Having spent more than 5 years at TCS I thought employees must accept their manager’s decision, no questions asked. After I moved to Australia I took up a casual hour based contract job. I didn’t mind the pay (which was less than what my experience could get me) because I loved the team. My manager believed in giving credit where it was due and soon the top management wanted to offer a fixed term contract which meant I could take paid leaves. I was so grateful and was about to sign the contract when my manager asked, “Aren’t you going to ask for a raise?”
“But this is so nice of them and I don’t want to make it awkward. What if they think I’m being greedy?”, I asked.
My manager laughed but looked at me seriously as she said, “Ruchika, if you don’t ask, you don’t get! You know you can get more money outside and they know it too. Don’t let them get away with it. Show them you know your worth.”
I nodded and wrote an email only to please my manager. I was so surprised at the response because the higher step pay was granted to me, just like that.
After some time, the management decided to offer me an ongoing permanent position and offered me the topmost step pay in the band. I was about to sign the offer letter as my manager reminded me to ask for a raise again. “But they are already offering me the topmost level in my band and they can’t change the band for this job, so I’m not sure what they can do.”, I responded.
“They will figure out a way if they want to. I know they will because they know you’re good and wouldn’t want to lose you. However, if they can’t, the worse that’ll happen is, they’ll refuse. I can’t see what you have to lose.”
Cursing the awkward situation I was in, I wrote an email trying to sound grateful and confident at the same time. My manager approved the draft and I hit send. By the end of the day, the General Manager asked HR to add a special loading to my pay package, which meant I was earning pretty much the same as the next band without undergoing any admin headache.
The thing is the company knows their good employees and understands, like all relationships, this association needs to be beneficial to both the parties. So if there’s something that you know will help you perform better for your company… just ask!
Boss asked me to train a newly hired paralegal graduate to do my job in one week as she was going to be my backup while I was on vacation.
I asked him how do I train 35 years of experience in a fresh paralegal graduate? I did my best to cram the information before I left for vacation.
She was inattentive and I had grave concerns since she refused to take notes.
Upon my return, I got the blame for every mistake she made during my absence. Each attorney gave me a list of their grievances.
I defended myself and was scolded for insubordination and told my services were no longer required.
So I left, turning in my keys. 4 hours later I receive a text stating that I misunderstood our conversation and that it was not their intention to terminate me.
5 hours later, I receive another text stating that he was no longer firing me but I needed to be less reactive and more understanding of the firm needs.
I decided to help clarify the situation and informed him that my text response confirms the separation terms.
And if you are a teacher, you might be cranky after reading this. It does not put teenage me in a flattering light.
When I was in high school, you had to take 2 years of gym in order to graduate. May I just say, over 30 years later, the most frequent recurring nightmare I have is not having enough of the right credits to graduate high school.
This plagued me.
I hated gym. I wasn’t athletic. I was not a group anything, and was particularly awful at group sports. I’m very tall, so you’d think I’d be good at volleyball. Nope. Into the net every time.
I despised everything about gym, because I was an outsider. Outsiders are most vulnerable in gym class. I just wanted to be alone & read books & listen to Bowie records.
Plus, I hated my body. I thought I was supposed to look like Farrah Fawcett. I did not look like Farrah. I was fat, and in particular I hated my legs.
Back then, you were required to do certain things to pass gym. One of those things was called dressing out. We also had to participate in class, then take a shower & dress for our next class, all in six or seven minutes at the end.
As you can see, this was a lot of body exposure for someone who hated their body so much. Every part of it was a humiliation to me.
I have a picture of myself in a swimsuit after my senior year. Thing is, my body was fine. I’d be delighted to have that body again.
(So if you are a teenager and hate your body, stop it. You are more fabulous than you know.)
Dressing out was changing out of our school clothes & putting on our gym clothes, which was basically a polyester onesie. Navy shorts attached to a navy & white horizontally striped shirt which zipped up the front to our neck.
It was just heinous. See?
image 176
(Photo courtesy of Google images)
I just wouldn’t do it. I’d plead not feeling well & wonder why putting on this onesie & playing dodgeball could possibly advance our lives in any way. I sat on the sidelines staring at the antics of class with great disdain. And I seemed to be getting away with it.
I was not getting away with it.
One day, our gym teacher, Mrs. K, walked over to me. She had a very pleased with herself expression on her face. She was smirking.
Because kids like me were the bane of existence to teachers like her. I had a bad attitude.
Once in a while, teachers will one-up kids like me. My antennae went up. The smirk worried me.
I need to talk to you, she said.
I stood up and gazed at my foe, with her Hamill haircut and velour track suit in a particularly unflattering shade of mauve.
I have to tell you, she said, almost unable to contain her glee, that you are failing gym. There’s no way for you to pass. None. I have told you over and over you have to dress out and participate. You haven’t done either. So, she continued, delivering her coup de grace, unless you go to summer school, you will not graduate with your class.
SUMMER SCHOOL? Oh, HELL no.
I do believe I cried. She was unmoved, giving the standard line that eff-ups like me hear time and time again:
There are consequences to our actions!
It was unbearable.
I did feel ashamed. It was just so stupid and avoidable. I’d truly screwed myself this time.
Two things were certain.
I was not going to summer school.
I was not being left behind a year. Impossible.
So I had to put my thinking cap on & figure this mess out.
Okay. What does she want? What do teachers like her want from students? Above all else?
The answer was clear. The problem was the execution of the plan. She would be suspicious. I had to deliver this perfectly.
The next day, I showed up at gym class. I put on the wretched gym suit. I participated in calisthenics and dodgeball. I showered & dressed for class. I saw her looking at me with my peripheral vision; I did not turn my head or make eye contact.
Me & my new, improved attitude were docile. Subdued. One of the herd.
Next day, I came back. Did the same thing. Participated. Laughed along with the other students. Plays well with others, check.
I knew the fatal flaw would be to ask her to pass me. So I didn’t. Nothing happened. A week went by.
Then one day she calls my name after class. I trot up to her. I keep my eyes big and innocent. I say Yes m’am.
I’ve noticed, she starts, that you’ve been dressing out & participating for a week. Without a reward in sight.
That’s right, I think, keep going…
You have had a real change of attitude.
It’s actually worked, I think, this is just thrilling.
So, she continues, kind now; dare I say moved? If you continue to dress out every day & write a two-page report on the importance of dressing out, I will pass you.
YES
But you have to do it every day, she warns, letting me know not to test her benevolence.
Ah, bien sur, Madame. I give effusive & grateful thanks.
I walk out of there like a boss. I can barely contain my joy. No summer school. I graduate with my class.
I tell my best friend, howling with glee, about how my attitude had changed.
Unbelievable, says my friend T, with more than a little disgust.
What do teachers want most? They want to make a difference in a kid’s life. I let her think she had changed me; that she’d taught me the importance of a good attitude.
What are most people surprised to hear about Australia?
the crustaceans we put on barbeques are called “prawns”, not “shrimp”.
I had never heard of Steve Irwin until after he become famous overseas — he was not that well-known here before he became famous overseas
Steve Irwin and Crocodile Dundee are anything but “typical Australians” — typical Australians live in cities, like Sydney and Melbourne and the other state, territory, and federal capitals
we rarely see dangerous animals or insects — Australia is not particularly dangerous and we have a long life expectancy
we don’t see many kangaroos or other native animals unless we live well outside the big cities
Pavlovas — you must eat one
Australian confectionery is very good, at least compared to American confectionery
Australian food (meat, vegetables, fruit) is fresh and generally of a high quality
most Australians live near the ocean — the interior is relatively empty (and dry, as in desert)
Australia does not have a lot of Mexican restaurants because we don’t live next door to Mexico — it is a long way from here
Australians do not like Starbucks, and do not have “Burger King” — we call it Hungry Jacks because of a court case run by a business here that already had the name “Burger King”
our Woolworths has no relation to American Woolworths … except our Woolworths stole the name before the American Woolworths tried to open stores here (Woolworths Group (Australia) – Wikipedia
)Australians drive on the left — like the British, Japanese, New Zealanders, Indians, and many other people in this part of the worldwe have winter in June, July, and August, and summer in December, January, and February … and no, we don’t think that is strangeit gets cold here in winter, especially because we build our houses to be cool in summer … and then freeze in winter if we don’t have heaters and woolly jumpers (sweaters).
If you only bring summer clothes to Australia you will suffer during winter months.we have Christmas in summer (December) … because Christmas is not a celebration of winter, it is a celebration set on 25 December
Australians write dates as day/month/year not month/day/yearthe Australian accent is different to the New Zealand accent — just ask a New Zealander to say “fish and chips”: if they say “fush end chups” they are from New Zealand. It is definitely different to any British accent.Australians use A4 paper, not “Letter size”; we use the metric system; our currency is the Australian dollar … and we changed all of those things in my lifetime.our temperature is in Celsius.
No, we don’t understand Fahrenheit, we have to convert it to Celsius first.we put “petrol” in our cars, not “gas” … unless your car has been converted to use liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), in which case we say “LPG”, not “gas”. Petrol is not a gas, it is a liquid.
One boss asked a subordinate to review sick leave usage. The subordinate reported that 40% of all sick leave was taken in conjunction with a weekend. He took it as proof that people were abusing the sick leave system.
The boss ordered all supervisors to require a doctor’s note when someone took sick leave in conjunction with a weekend.
I did a quick analysis of his order and responded, “Monday and Friday are each one fifth of the work week, or 20% of the work week each. Together they add up to 40% of the week. If people get sick at random, they will call in evenly over the work week. You should expect to see an even distribution of 20% of sick leave taken on any given work day. The fact that only 40% call in on Monday and Friday (20% each) proves that no one is abusing sick leave.”
So I was working with this Car Dealership in the States for quite a while, about 4–5 years. Made good money and we had relatively good business practices, which isn’t common in car sales anywhere, and I ended up liking it alot. Anyway, they had this page in the employee handbook that states essentially that if your fired, quit, etc before commission is paid out on the 15th of each month then they were not required to pay you your commission. And that instead of $15 an hour your paychecks were retroactively reduced to minimum wage of $7.75. So, in this dirtiest of fine prints, what it didn’t tell you is that if they fired you on the 14th, which happened ALOT, then instead of getting your commission check, you were handed a bill that you owed them. Unless you worked an impossible amount of hours, you’d never be able to break the “Draw pay” or the money they front you weekly, $600 weekly. You would have to sell an absurd amount of cars, which case your not fired no matter how much you suck, or work 100+ hours a week to cover it. It was just cruel and dirty. I watched many folk get fired on the 14th and on the 15th have a letter from accounting stating that you ower them $300-$500 due in less than 30 days. Everyone screamed it was illegal, but “You signed the agreement” was always the answer. Somebody sued them for it once, and if memory serves me right they dragged it out for about 2 years and settled on not nearly enough money to cover lawyers and court costs. Dirty fine print at its best.
In 2012 a man was traveling in a Suzuki car with 3 others in Patna. He was driving at a speed of 100 kmph on an empty highway. Soon an SUV passed them at a very high speed. The SUV was so fast that it almost got out of control and was about to hit the Suzuki.
To save the accident, the driver of Suzuki tried to move away from the passing SUV. Doing so, the Suzuki got out of control and overturned and hit the corner of the road.
image 177
(photo for illustration only)
Four people in the car were badly injured, but narrowly escaped. The SUV driver fled after the accident and there was no one else on the road. Suzuki’s driver was badly injured and he got out of the car and sat on the middle of the road, shouting “Save!”.
It was 36 degree heat and the road was scorching. The driver lay on the road thinking that he was about to die. He wanted to help the other 3 passengers, who were still inside the car and were moaning in pain.
A few minutes later a car arrived. The man who got out of the car made a video of the accident with his phone. Then he took a closeup of the driver, whose face was covered in blood. Then this person sat in his car and left from there.
A few more minutes passed and the other car stopped. A middle-class couple came out and saw the driver lying on the hot road. The couple went back to their car and came back with a sheet.
To protect the injured driver from the scorching sun, the couple shed a sheet over him and stood up. They both stood in the sun. The husband then called emergency health services and asked them to come to the scene immediately.
They both stood there giving shade to the injured driver for almost 70 minutes! So long in the sun!
After the ambulance arrived, the couple took two other passengers in their car along with the ambulance.
The couple left the hospital after the four injured were admitted to the ICU. The driver narrated this story after recovering from an injured condition for several months, but he could not meet the noble couple.
China is militarily aggressive towards Taiwan and in the South China Sea.
China is a dictatorship.
China is trapping developing countries in debt with the Belt and Road Initiative.
There are many, many more lies. They could fill a book, so it’s not appropriate to expound on all of it in a Quora answer.
Some food for thought…
China has fought no wars since 1979. How many wars has America fought?
China has legitimate maritime disputes in the South China Sea, just like USA and Canada have no fewer than five maritime disputes.
China does not sanction other countries, nor interfere in their politics, nor overthrow their governments. America has done all of this.
According to the Edelman Trust Barometer, 85% of Chinese trust their government. Only 40% of Americans do, and 30% of Brits do.
image 13
According to Latana’s Democracy Perception Index (which measures what people think of their political system), China is the sixth most democratic country, well ahead of Canada, UK, and USA.
image 178image 179
The Global South gives overwhelming support to the Belt and Road Initiative. Over 150 countries participate!
Married Women Held Accountable for Late Night Encounters with Under Age Boys
At 4pm he told us to compile a report and action plan ready for tomorrow’s 830am meeting. Now to do this properly would take each of us a full day’s work. All 7 of us protested, and asked for more time. I asked when he expected us to find the time, and he told us to work on it that night at home. I openly said “sorry, that’s unreasonable. I have a 90 minute drive home, then I’ll be cooking dinner, and then helping with showers and homework. When that’s done I have about an hour before I’m ready to fall asleep. His reply? “Get your wife to make the dinner and shower the kids while you work on the report.” And then he left the room. So we all united and decided not to do it.
He went off his tree at 830am the next morning when nothing was done. I had a word to the very nice HR lady, about what he said, along with the list of people in the room who witnessed it. When he blew his gasket and wanted HR to issue warnings, she simply told him to reschedule the meeting for the following day, and let us work all day uninterrupted to prepare for it, in work time.
My ex worked at a Friendlies restaurant. They had that wonderful phenomena with the Sunday morning church crowd. If you don’t know what I’m referring to, ask anyone who works Sunday morning at low-end restaurants.
This one family was notorious for demanding exemplary service, running the servers ragged and not tipping. On my ex’s last day of work, they showed up and did their usual. Rather than not tipping, they left a little card that said “I’ve given your tip to Jesus!” She balled up the card, followed them out into the parking lot, threw it at the dad and said “Jesus doesn’t pay my fucking rent!”
The dad flew back into the restaurant and demanded she be fired. The manager said it was her last day, and maybe things like this wouldn’t happen if you tipped the server. It was golden.
70% of people keep things to themselves to avoid being judged by others.
People between the ages of 18–33 are the most stressed in the world After the age of 48, stress level tends to reduce.
The most common lie said by humans is ” I’m fine”
Pretty people are automatically more acceptable by people. Average looking people have to do something above average to get accepted and ugly people have to do something extraordinary!
Always tell the truth. So when you have to tell a lie, people are more likely to believe you.
More you talk about a person to others, more you fall in love with that person.
If you announce your goals or tell someone else about them, you are less likely to accomplish them because of lack of motivation interest since you have nothing to prove.
A true friend who understands your troubles is far more valuable than a hundred friends who only show up for your smile.
We tend to behave better when we are being watched.
Happier is not the one who has more money, but the one who has more money than his neighbor.
Anger increases the desire of possession in people. People make more efforts to obtain the object that is associated with angry faces.
‘Maturity’ has no connection with ‘Age’. Yes, age is just a number…you can find more maturity in a child, than a person in his 50’s. Maturity comes with ‘Empathy’.
Intelligent people tend to have fewer friends.
We want more choices, but choose better with fewer options.
I’ll admit that when I conducted interviews — either alone or as part of a panel — there were times when I liked, or disliked, a candidate early on. That’s why I came up with a series of questions to ask and made sure to ask them all: I wanted to give the candidate an opportunity to change my mind, one way or the other.
I will say that my initial impression was right about 70% of the time but ending an interview after five minutes would be a waste of the candidate’s and, more importantly, my time. In my 50+ years in the work force, there was only one occassion when I ended an interview prematurely. When I owned a security guard company I interviewed a woman for a job as Operations Manager. When she sat down she said that she’d heard good things about my company and she really wanted the job. Then she stood up and leaned on my desk, so I could see down her blouse, and said she’d do anything to get the job. I looked at her and smiled, and she repeated, Anything.
I ended the interview at that point, after less than ten minutes, and thanked her for coming in. I told her I planned on making a decision before the weekend (she’d come in on Tuesday) and I would let her know what is was. I had my assistant call her two days later and tell her another candidate had been hired. That chick was a lawsuit waiting to happen and I wanted no part of her.
When I’ve approached a table and before I’ve even said hello I’ve been met with ‘just so you know, we are on tripadvisor’. *sigh*. I can tell straight away I’m going to get AT LEAST one complaint about food/service/drinks/the colour of the tablecloths or whatever other excuses they want to make in order to receive a discount or face a terrible review.
We have a group of women who come in twice a month. There are always between 8-10 of them. They are taken care of as well as we take care of all our other guests. The fact you leave reviews on tripadvisor is not special and you will not be treated any differently. Every time they come in they order the same lamb dish. Everytime they ALL complain about the lamb dish.
The first time I was apologetic and gave a good discount on the bill. Two weeks later it happened again I gave a discount but started to suspect something when other patrons complimented the lamb and I had watched them talking for a good 15 minutes after food was served before complaining the food was cold. The third time it happened I was pissed off. Not only were they generally rude to the staff but when they paid the bill they would make a big deal out of saying they left a little extra for the server and it has never been more than 5 pence. Luckily we are in a country where we don’t rely on tips to earn a living.
So this third time they come in; as usual they want lamb and as usual they complain about it. When it comes time to pay I take the complete bill over, no discount.
The chief moaner said that as they hadn’t enjoyed the lamb they should get some discount. I was once again reminded they were on tripadvisor. I proceeded to tell them that they had been here twice now, ordered the same thing and complained about it both times. They were choosing to come here and if the food was that bad they didn’t need to come back. They were more than welcome to leave a terrible review and in exchange we didn’t have to give them free food every other week or put up with their terrible attitude and it was a worthwhile trade.
Shockingly they didn’t argue back just paid the bill and left. Also shockingly they came back two weeks later like normal and ordered the lamb, which when asked if everything was okay with their meals it was ‘delicious’ or ‘lovely, thank you’.
They still come every fortnight and we never got a negative review on tripadvisor.
She Sells Her Soul For 50 Years Of Pleasure, But When The Devil Comes For Her, She Outwits Him
In 2022, I visited New York City to take a training for my job.
I set aside the day before the training started as a sightseeing day. I knew I wanted to visit Ellis Island and the 9–11 Museum, so I bought a package ticket for both through the website where I booked my flight and hotel.
On my sightseeing day, I took the subway from my hotel down to Battery Park and met my tour group there. The tour guide, who was wonderfully intelligent, knowledgeable and interesting, took us to the ferry, which took us to the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island.
After the ferry returned, it turned out that I was the only one of the group who had also signed up to go to the 9–11 Museum. The tour guide walked me down there, saying it was only a few blocks away.
I’m 63 years old, and not in very good physical condition. The temperature was over 90 degrees, and I do not do well in the heat. So it was a long walk for me, and I had to take frequent rest breaks. The tour guide was quite patient with me, and we had a really great conversation during this walk.
At one point in the conversation, I mentioned my husband. The tour guide said to me, “Your husband must be very smart. I know this because you are very smart, and I can tell you would never put up with a guy who wasn’t as smart as you. You would have him for breakfast.”
I will never forget that complement!
P. S. FYI, my husband IS very smart.
Italian Wedding Soup
This Italian Wedding Soup Recipe is simply the best! Made with acini de pepe, beef and pork meatballs, carrots, celery, greens, and Parmesan cheese. This soup is SO flavorful! Serve with crusty bread and a glass of wine and enjoy!
Packed with onions and carrots, spinach and pasta and meatballs, this hearty soup is perfect for chilly winter nights. Serve a big bowl of wedding soup with crusty rolls for a satisfying meal.
Italian Wedding Soup 33 1 of 1
Yield: 29 cups; about 16 (12 ounce) servings
Ingredients
Meatballs
2 hamburger rolls or 4 slices white bread
2/3 cup milk
1 large egg
1 1/4 teaspoons salt
1 1/2 pounds ground beef or meatloaf mix
1 medium onion, grated or very finely diced
3 tablespoons grated Parmesan or Asiago cheese
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1 teaspoon dried parsley
Soup
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 medium onions, diced; about 2 cups
2 cups finely diced carrots, about 3 large carrots
2 large garlic cloves, peeled and minced
4 to 4 1/2 quarts (16 to 18 cups) chicken broth, homemade or purchased
1 1/2 teaspoons dried Italian herbs or 3/4 teaspoon each dried oregano and dried basil
10-ounce box frozen chopped spinach
1 teaspoon salt, to taste
1/2 to 1 teaspoon coarsely ground black pepper, to taste
2 2/3 cups uncooked orzo, ditalini, or other small, roundish pasta
Instructions
Meatballs
Combine the bread, egg, milk, and salt, stirring until everything is well moistened. Allow to sit for about 10 minutes to soften.
Add the ground meat, onion, cheese, and herbs. Mix gently until thoroughly combined.
Shape tiny meatballs, (about 1 inch diameter or less). Using a level teaspoon scoop (which volume-wise is actually 2 level measuring teaspoons) makes about the right size. Place the meatballs on a parchment-lined or lightly greased cookie sheet, and refrigerate them while you prepare the soup.
Soup
Get out a large pot, at least 6 quart capacity. Pour the olive oil into the bottom of the pot, and add the onions and carrots. Sauté, stirring frequently, until the onions are translucent and beginning to brown, about 10 minutes. Add the garlic, and cook for another couple of minutes.
Add the broth and herbs, bring to a simmer, and cook gently for 10 minutes.
Add the frozen chopped spinach, and simmer for 15 to 20 minutes, total; the soup will take awhile to come back to a simmer, due to the frozen spinach. Help it along by breaking it up with a fork as it cooks.
Gently drop the meatballs into the soup. Simmer the soup for 30 minutes or so, then stir in the pasta, cooking until it’s al dente. For orzo, this will take about 8 minutes or so.
Add salt and pepper to taste; using reduced-salt canned chicken broth, we added 1 teaspoon salt; and 1 teaspoon coarsely ground black pepper.
Serve the soup garnished with freshly grated Parmesan or Asiago cheese.
When I was a Probation and Parole officer I had this guy on parole and probation at the same time. He had several positive cocaine drug tests. Usually three positive tests was where they would be arrested. Larry was uniquely qualified for extra chances. I can’t remember the fourth reason, but it most have been pretty good for me to have given him the pass. Then he got his fifth positive test. As much as I liked him I felt like I had to arrest him then. So, I confronted him about the positive test, and instead of denying it like most parolees did he said, “Officer Davis, I was this woman, and she poured cocaine all over her breasts and p**sy, and said, Larry go down on all this stuff.” Then he looked at me like a five year old child would, even though he was a forty some year ago man and said, “Officer Davis, what did you expect me to do?”
I never new if that story was true or not, I’m pretty sure it is, but anyway it was such a good story that Larry got another chance and completed hi probation and parole, with a little help from me.
Older Woman Leaves Her Good Husband And Can’t COPE With The CONSEQUENCES
This was back around the mid-90’s in So Cal. We were having dinner with serveral of my husband’s coworkers and their spouses. It was a fairly well-known Italian place, I ordered shrimp and broccoli pasta. I took a few bites, and there was a large curled up caterpillar (I later learned was a “tomato horn worm”). It was the size of the shrimp, but not quite a brilliant green like the broccoli.
I didn’t want to make a huge fuss, so I pushed food around the plate. The server came around, and noticed that my plate was still mostly full. He asked if there was something wrong, and I pointed to the caterpillar. He went kind of pale, and quickly whisked my plate off the table. My husband noticed, but with the rest of the table eating and conversing, no one else did.
The owner of the place came over and very quietly apologized, and offered me another item. I no longer had much appetite. He asked if I would like a dessert, but no, I just couldn’t. You could tell he was genuinely aghast. I didn’t make any announcement to the rest of the table, but just said I was full. They didn’t know anything until they were told that the entire table’s bill was comped.
We still laugh about that “green” shrimp. And yes, that restaurant is still in business.
Irishman here. About 25 years ago, our next door neighbour went on holidays to Spain for 2 weeks leaving their 16 year old son behind. The son had a series of parties all week and I called in to him to have words with him. When I called in, there were a group of kids there and when I was talking to him, I noticed from his eyes that I may have done better talking to the dog. He was as high as a kite and you could see and smell the drugs. I reported it the Gardai (Irish Police) who called out to him, but did nothing.
Friday of the week came and the party was beginning to grow with loads of people and loud music. I couldn’t take it any longer and my wife, kids and I went to our holiday home in Wexford for the weekend. Before we left, we informed the Gardai and some neighbours.
The following morning, we got a call to say the house next door went on fire and we had a lot of fire damage in our house. We came home to chaos.
The young lad next door moved in with some relatives nearby and they refused to ring his parents in Spain to tell them in case it would ruin their holiday.
When they came home, we spoke to them and they refused to accept any responsibility and we had to put it through our insurance. At the time, I was very naive regarding putting in an insurance claim and missed out on a lot. I should have replaced stuff where I just got them repaired and made do with a lot of other stuff. In short, I only claimed for half of what I should have and in saying that, my insurance increased for the next 5 years and affected our no claims bonus for 7 years. It cost me 10s of thousands of Punts.
The next door neighbours got their house completely gutted and rebuilt. Essentially a new house. The only thing that remained of the original house were the 4 walls, All concrete. They then moved out to a new house elsewhere.
In answer to your question: Yes they should pay and carry out a clean up. But it didn’t happen in my case.
When my son was in 8th grade, he refused to get in my ex’s car when she came to pick him up. I never found out why.
We took him to counseling, she had him meet with her minister (I took him over). In all cases, he sat there for over an hour and never said a word.
Eventually, she sued me for not forcing him to go with her. Judge took testimony. Told him all the things that we had tried to find out what was going on. Judge decided to take a crack at it. Spent 15 minutes chatting with him in chambers. Judge found him personable and likeable, but when he brought up why he wanted nothing to do with his mother, my son shut down and refused to interact with him.
Judge’s decision was that my son had veto powers over any custody agreement. My son never talked with his mother again until after high school graduation. He is 25 years now, he still has a bad relationship with his mother, and I still don’t know why.
1968. Single Mom, very poor. So poor I couldn’t afford needle & thread to sew my good blouse with a torn sleeve at shoulder. Worked for GSA, government with 2 other office ladies. Main Secretary had to have major surgery; off several weeks. The other lady became ill & took extended leave also. Left me to do all the work.
I didn’t mind as all the custodial/maintenance persons told me what a great job I was doing. They all said my annual appraisal warranted an outstanding rating; meaning a bonus of $200.
My boss called me in for the appraisal and his words: “I think you deserve an excellent rating but if I give it to you, I will have to fill out a lot of paper work. Then what will you have to work for next year”.
I was crushed and dumbfounded. It was unbelievable to the others persons as well. Within a few months, I found another job. Karma stepped in. Boss called me within a month and asked me to return as the other gals were leaving.
I was 16 years old and had an appointment my mother made because I was bleeding from my rectum. I was a 16 year old who thought it was all so dumb and wasn’t this doctors appointment just stupid and why mom did you bring me here… I was vocalizing all of this and my mom was crying and I was being awful. Finally I hear, “Shut up you little bitch!”
I was stunned. My mother probably wanted to applaud the man and I don’t blame her.
That doctor found very active ulcerative colitis. I was pretty sick. Pretty dumb too. To that end he went on to become my doctor for the next 20 years or until he retired. We had a real bond because of his big mouth.
On the day of his retirement he gave me a big hug and told me that I’d come a long way from the little brat he had met at first. He told me I was his favorite patient now. Good thing he was the best doctor I ever had.
He never apologized for saying that to me, but I did apologize for acting like a little bitch. Entitled one at that. Lol. You go Dr. Cocco!
*****PS. For anyone that thinks this behavior was wrong for a doctor. Maybe. However in this case I was bleeding actively from the inside out. This doctor could tell that with no exam really. All a person in GI bleed status has to do is fart and if you are in the medical profession you know what it smells like and tastes like pretty much without a “guaiac” or test. In this case the doctor could tell that I was mega non compliant as I was 16 and you don’t die at 16. So he stunned me into submission to get me out of there and to a hospital.
My mother had a child die from a bowel that was twisted and maybe she did or did not know what was going on. This was a whole different era. She was probably afraid it was happening again. In any event I was a bitchy little entitled brat back then. Even if it wasn’t emergent she should or would have clapped. Lord knows she tried everything else.
Just so you all know the rest of it maybe you’ll get more of the big picture.
I viewed the world from the lens of television, and I thought that the stereotypes thrown at me was real. I believed that wars were gallant men fighting for just purposes, and that work as an never ending adventures with one mystery after the other.
Ah. The harsh reality wasn’t that at all.
Now, that was decades ago. Today, it seems that Gen-Z is having some real coping issues. This is the West, buy the way, not in the East. And what I am reading, hearing about, and watching is terribly disturbing.
The ship USS America is now under water.
The water has breached the deck and starting to go down the air funnels and leech into the duct-work. The hallways have inches (3 cm) deep water that one has to splash through to get to the upper flooded deck.
The signs are all there.
Perhaps the sinking will be complete before the captain of the Ship; whatever “president” that might be might want to reconsider a war with a vibrant, healthy, professional boxer like China is today.
Just sayin’
Today…
French Defense Reports Acknowledge Ukraine Is Done With
The French president Macron has recently pushed for an engagement of foreign troops in Ukraine. The idea was immediately rejected by every country that would be able to send a reasonable number.
The question is why Macron suddenly came out with this.
A series of recent reports from the French defense establishment might have caused his irritation.
The French magazine Marianne got access to “several confidential defense reports” from the French army on the situation in Ukraine.
The situation looks exceedingly bleak for Ukraine, which might in part explain Macron’s recent declarations around sending troops to Ukraine. I translated the important parts of the article:”A Ukrainian military victory now seems impossible”
The reports Marianne consulted write that Ukraine’s counter-offensive “gradually bogged down in mud and blood and did not result in any strategic gain” and that its planning, conceived by Kiev and Western general staffs, turned out to be “disastrous”: “Planners thought that once the first Russian defense lines were breached, the entire front would collapse […] These fundamental preliminary phases were conducted without considering the moral forces of the enemy in defense: that is, the will of the Russian soldier to hold onto the terrain”.
The reports also highlight “the inadequacy of the training of Ukrainian soldiers and officers”: due to a lack of officers and a significant number of veterans, these “Year II soldiers” from Ukraine – often trained for “no more than three weeks” – were launched into an assault on a Russian fortification line that proved impregnable.
Somehow people who had never heard of the Battle of Kursk convinced themselves that Russian soldiers in defensive positions would run away as soon as they would hear a tank rumbling towards them. They of course did not do so.
These Russian troops are well managed and cared for:
The reports also highlight that contrary to Ukraine “the Russians have managed their reserve troops well, to ensure operational endurance.” According to this document, Moscow reinforces its units before they are completely worn out, mixes recruits with experienced troops, ensures regular rest periods in the rear… and “always had a coherent reserve force to manage unforeseen events.” This is far from the widespread idea in the West of a Russian army sending its troops to the slaughter without counting…
The Ukrainians on the other side are done with:
“To date, the Ukrainian general staff does not have a critical mass of land forces capable of inter-arms maneuver at the corps level capable of challenging their Russian counterparts to break through its defensive line,” concludes this confidential defense report, according to which “the gravest error of analysis and judgment would be to continue to seek exclusively military solutions to stop the hostilities“. A French officer summarizes: “It is clear, given the forces present, that Ukraine cannot win this war militarily.“
The fall of Avdeevka has shown that the Ukrainian military, even on the defensive, will inevitably lose the fight:
“The Ukrainian armed forces have tactically shown that they do not possess the human and material capabilities […] to hold a sector of the front that is subjected to the assailant’s effort,” continues the document. “The Ukrainian failure in Avdiivka shows that, despite the emergency deployment of an ‘elite’ brigade – the 3rd Azov Air Assault Brigade –, Kiev is not capable of locally restoring a sector of the front that collapses,” alerts this last report.
In consequence the Russian forces will simply move on:
What the Russians will do with this tactical success remains to be seen. Will they continue in the current mode of “nibbling and slowly shaking” the entire front line, or will they seek to “break through in depth”? “The terrain behind Avdiivka allows it,” signals this recent document, also warning that Western sources tend to “underestimate” the Russians, themselves adept at the practice of “Maskirovka,” “appearing weak when strong.” According to this analysis, after two years of war, Russian forces have thus shown their ability to “develop operational endurance” that allows them to wage “a slow and long-intensity war based on the continuous attrition of the Ukrainian army.”
There is nothing really new in the above for people who have followed the facts on the ground.
So why were western media, and politicians like Macron, late in recognizing the real situation?
Posted by b on March 12, 2024 at 16:59 UTC | Permalink
When a coward meets a man
What did a teacher say that made you immediately walk out of the classroom?
My teacher told me, “No you may not leave the room. Stay in your seat.”
This was said after I glanced out the open door to see my younger brother standing in the doorway crying. (I was a Jr, he was a sophomore) This was so out of character for Mike, that without thinking, I had jumped up from my desk and asked the teacher if I could be excused for a minute. He, too, saw my tall, goofy, big-hearted brother standing there brushing away tears.
I never sat back down, I just kept on going toward the door and my brother. My brothers and I had a very tight relationship. We were always there for one another, and this time was the same. The teacher didn’t say another word as I exited the classroom.
I immediately hugged my brother and asked him what was wrong. He then told me, between the tears that a boy in his gym class had made a nasty remark about me, and without thinking, Mike had sent a basketball soaring across the gym, which hit the offender right square in his face. Blood went everywhere, and it turned out that he had a broken nose. Mike felt terrible about breaking his nose and just knew he was in trouble big time.
I got Mike calmed down and he went back to class, but only after I assured him that I wouldn’t tell our mom about the incident. Then I went back to class and sat down and continued to listen to the lecture for the day. Teacher never said a word to me.
I’d do it just the same if it happened all over again. Nobody, but nobody ever came between my brothers and me.
Damn! This guys is a menace
What is the strangest thing you’ve found buried?
I worked as a field archaeologist for ten years or so and in that time I participated in the excavation of many historic and prehistoric sites in North America.
One of my more unusual finds was in South Western Wyoming.
Wyoming is a big state, comprised of deserts and mountains and little in between. The population is scant and you can drive for hours in some places without seeing another car or an occupied home. A common problem in Wyoming is running out of gasoline because gas stations are few and far between. Many residents have a second gas tank installed in their pickup trucks for this reason.
One spring the company I was working for was scheduled to excavate a prehistoric Native American site in the very rough terrain of the South Western corner of the state. The site was nestled on a terrace on the side of steep hill surrounded by canyon walls. The site had been discovered decades earlier when an oil company put an oil well pad near the site but it had not been investigated further.
The site had some interesting characteristics. First, it was located on a terrace, a flat spot on the side of a steep hill. Then the site was protected from wind on three sides by canyon walls. And finally the site had access to fresh water via a stream that crossed below the site. These characteristics made the site uniquely suited for settlement to ancient people. Such a perfect place was extremely rare.
Upon arrival, we located a series of petro-glyphs or prehistoric rock drawings which were spread across the sandstone walls that protected the terrace. The panels were crowded with images, many of which featured stick like hunters stalking groups of antelope in the desert dunes. Occasionally bison, goats and birds made appearances. But one panel included a dog.
At the time it was known that Native Americans had domesticated the dog but the details were sketchy. For sure dogs were common among the “civilized” late prehistoric tribes of the Carolinas on the Atlantic coast and a breed of tiny dogs were known to the famously civilized Aztecs of Central Mexico but after that it was a big blank as of early 1990s.
The crew examined the “dog” and then looked at the antelopes and it was our collective opinion that the dog was a dog. The ancient artists were particular in their portrayal of the animals, there was little variation in the way they made the antelopes. The antelopes were antelopes and the dog was a dog. We wondered about a domesticated “coyote” or even a “wolf” but this figure had a dog like profile and posture.
We did not spend much time on the rock drawings. They would be documented and preserved. Instead we focused our attention on the sizeable archaeological deposits on the terrace. Imagine the terrace as a bowl with 5 feet of stratified sand in it, with each strata containing the remain of multiple seasonal occupations. In all 8,000 years of ancient American history were recorded in these thin layers, like the pages of a giant history book.
In the coming days, we revealed layer after layer after layer of ancient camp site, with excellent examples of finely designed arrow heads, dart point, and spear tips and all or most of the specimens fit neatly into the historical typology of types which were well documented for this region.
And then we settled into a number of strata that were all from the Archaic age. In the archaeology of the Americas, the Archaic period is this incredibly long and undifferentiated period that starts roughly at 6,000 BC and continues to 1,000 BC. From this period we have only the slightest indications of what life was like.
In the archaic, humans lived in small bands, they hunted, they collected foods from the wild and they moved in seasonal cycles to harvest things as they became available. Almost everything else about the archaic peoples are unknown. We occasionally get a very detailed snap shot of archaic life from a particular region and then hundreds of miles and thousands of years of silence .
Early on, it became apparent that we were going to be looking at many layers or occupational instances of the Archaic. As we peeled the top off the archaic strata we found a multitude of “features” which are stationary archaeology remains that can indicate particular human activities. Features might include storage pits, bone piles, fire features (hearths or fire pits) and so on.
And then we found what looked like a small burial. We quickly adjusted our pace of excavation, and out came the smaller pics and brushes. In the bottom of an oval pit some 80cm across we found the well preserved remains of a dog, curled as if asleep. Our best bet at the time was that the dog dated to the Late Archaic and could be anywhere between 3,000 and 4,500 years old.
Finding the dog was a shock to us. Maybe the specimen was a mutated coyote or adolescent wolf, or maybe the dog was “intrusive,” i.e. from a latter date and someone dug a deep hole into more ancient deposits… However, the features start point was well within the Archaic strata.
This find would indicate that the “dog” appeared in North America at a date much earlier than originally believed and that maybe the “dog” was domesticated separately by ancient native Americans in very distant communities separated by hundreds of miles and thousands of years.
Random, Rome and R
Have you ever called in a “welfare check” to the police? Did it turn out there was a real need? Officers, how often are “welfare checks” something where a person does need assistance?
My lovely youngest brother.
He lived in the local city, I live just outside with my family, he used to talk to our mother every day. She rang me on my daughter’s birthday, and told me he’d not answered his phone, or texted back all day.
We popped over, on the way my husband ran over a raised island, with curbs around, there was usually a lit bollard on top.
We went on, parked, and went in the block of flats. He didn’t answer the door, I rang him. In the end he shouted back. I wanted to call an ambulance, he didn’t want me to. We stayed about 10 minutes. I said you sound terrible ally. He refused help again.
We started driving home, and he rang me, we chatted and he said he’d talk to mum. He sounded the normal Ally then. I said I would call him tomorrow. And he said love you.
Later, on our drive home, we realised we’d damaged the wheel, on that island. The tyre was slowly letting out the air, and I think the wheel rim took a knock. So now the car was out of commission for a day or two.
Later I put my mum at ease, and had a chat with her.
He didn’t answer the next day.
So the day after, I had my daughter take me back. He really didn’t answer any calls through his letter box. I could hear his phone ring.
I rang the police and ambulance. They said yeah, contact the hospital and see if he’s been admitted.
Nope, not there. So I rang ambulance again. The ambulance came first, they called the police, and they crashed in the door.
No one let me see him, but he’d died.
I think he died the evening I spoke to him.
Then I had to ring my family. That’s something I don’t want to do again. I had to tell everyone when our father died, that was shit, too.
I was sent away by the police and the paramedics. It was the start of more worry. The police called the council to seal up the door.
In the UK, a death like this always warrants a postmortem.
LOL
What is the best way a friend has showed you that they are a true friend?
My dad was being taken off a ventilator at the hospital. They put him in a room because they expected him to die. I sent my son and husband home because they were so antsy and while upset didn’t want to stay. So I sat by myself. I held my dad’s hand and thought of why had my normally very smooth rather dull life turn into this horror movie. My mom was becoming somebody I didn’t know with dementia 😢. She said these horrible things to me that I know she didn’t mean but hurt anyway. Then she was killed in an auto accident. Three months later I’m sitting by my dad in this surreal hospital room watching him labor for breath. Suddenly I see the person who has been respite support for my autistic son for years come running up with tears running down her face. She found out I was alone up there. Well, now I wasn’t ❤️.
She has my heart and my sword forever.
Can The US Compare To CHINA’s High-Speed Rail?
Disturbing trends.
What was the best hidden bonus you found in your old car at a new car dealership, when you were cleaning it out before taking your new car home?
I had an elderly couple trade for their “final car” several years back. They had been married a long time and were coming up on their 50th anniversary, and in conversation I had noticed the little old man was not wearing a wedding band. I didn’t mention it as it was none of my business, but I had noticed he was fairly frail looking.
After they left, I was going through their car to double check to see if they had missed anything, and I noticed something gold poking out from under the driver seat rail, so I grabbed a long screw driver and gave it a wack to knock it out from under the rail. It was a very old looking wedding band. I called them to let them know I found something they would want back and asked them to come by to retrieve it. When they came by and I handed it to them, they both teared up. They told me how he had been battling illness over the last 6 years, and he had lost a lot of weight and at some point it had fallen off. They couldn’t figure out where he lost it, but I figure it happened when he was putting on or removing his seat belt. She had offered to replace it, but he said it was irreplaceable and God would make sure he got it back.
That one still gives me chills, and I was glad to get it back to them in time for their 50th anniversary.
We don’t wanna…
In the USA, it’s not just taxes, and inflation, you HAVE to tip!
What is the rudest/most unusual/most obnoxious thing you have seen someone do at a wedding?
I was at a wedding many years ago. The groom’s family were Jewish. The bride’s family were Christian.
The bride’s father stood up to speak. He started with “I love my daughter, Abigail, with an A because she is Amazing. Then he gave a couple of sentences about why she was amazing. Then “I love my daughter, Abigail, with a B because she is Beautiful”.
Okay so he is going to spell out Abigail – that’s cute. But no, he went on to C, then D, etc, all the way through to Z. I have no idea what he came up with for Z because everyone on my table was asleep and/or drooling by then. He spoke for 25 minutes, which is the longest father-of-the-bride speech I have ever had the misfortune to witness.
But it’s not the length of the speech that was the obnoxious thing. Or the gushing sentimentality of it.
For ‘C’ this woman’s father said, “I love my daughter Abigail with a C because she is Clever.” Lovely! Right? No!
He wasn’t proud of her cleverness because she had a very good degree from one of the two best British universities. No! She was clever because she had snagged a rich Jewish husband, who worked in finance and had a trust fund.
The father-of-the-bride looked so proud of her and he clearly didn’t have a clue he had pissed off the Jewish half of the room, with this massively antisemitic trope.
Even now many many years later, the groom’s mum and her friends still talks about that speech and how tacky it was.
Why Gen Z and Alpha Are Making Teachers Quit
Disturbing trends.
Are inmates respectful of the medical equipment that other inmates have to use?
I never saw anyone mess with a wheelchair. Most of the guys in chairs were pretty easy going and got along with everyone else. If someone were to try and swipe a chair, it’d be obvious where it came from, and if they were trying to damage it, they’d quickly discover how rugged the things were.
I saw a little horseplay with crutches, but nothing serious.
The only cases I was aware of where someone actively targeted medical equipment were all against the same guy. Crazy Dave was universally hated by everyone. He’d pick needless fights because he simply had no idea when to quit, or how unpopular he really was.
CPAP machines could be an easy target. The machines are loud and therefore unpopular. Of course, destroying the CPAP will only make the inmate snore and that’s even less soothing. So, to destroy a CPAP, it’s pretty clear who your beef is with.
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No idea if this guy is crazy, or if his name is Dave. Image from eBay.
Crazy Dave had a CPAP. Of course he didn’t need it, but he was such an incessant whiner that the staff would give him stuff so they didn’t have to listen to him. He was the kind of guy who would feign a heart attack if we had a new female CO in the unit.
One time someone stole the hose from Dave’s machine. I think it was later found in the showers with some unsavory something-or-other on it. The next attack was more clever. The guy in the very next bunk waited until Crazy was sleeping and used a needle to put dozens and dozens of tiny holes in the hose. After a while, that hose was about as air-tight as a whiffle ball.
Dave wanted a walker too. Nothing wrong with the man (physically), but he wanted a place to sit while waiting in line for commissary. He also had a need to keep up with the hypochondriac Jones crowd. He dumped reams of kites in the box until he eventually got one. Dave couldn’t keep the walker in his locker like the CPAP, so it was always vulnerable. Several times random people would undo the screws that held the handle on, or adjust the legs so they were at different heights.
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His own private chair. Image from Amazon.
Aside from Crazy Dave, pretty much everyone else’s medical equipment was off-limits. If there had been a way to make a tattoo gun out of CPAPs however, I’m sure that would’ve been a different story.
More Gen-Z WTF?
SpaghettiOs
Kids will love this homemade version of a favorite canned pasta.
spaghetti os
Yield: 6 to 8 servings
Ingredients
1 (26 ounce) can tomato sauce
3 cups water
1 cup milk
2 cups Cheddar cheese
1 teaspoon garlic powder
8 ounces ditalini or pasta of choice, uncooked
Instructions
In a large pot mix together the sauce, water and milk. Bring to a boil.
When it reaches a bowl, stir in the cheese and turn it down to a simmer. Continue to stir until the cheese is melted.
Add the garlic and stir.
Pour in the uncooked pasta. Simmer on low for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally during the first 5 to 6 minutes to prevent the pasta from sticking to the bottom of the pan.
Check the pasta after 20 minutes, if it’s not as soft as you would like, cook it a little longer. Sauce will thicken even more over time.
Why Are Men Falling Behind?
Disturbing trends.
Have you, while repairing a computer, ever found anything that made your jaw drop?
I got called to look over the computer and network for a very meek looking, slightly overweight, older grandmother..
First, I noticed that her router had no firewall enabled.. Upon inspecting the computer, I noticed that there was a strange folder in the windows directory, filed with foreign copyrighted videos. I found that a ftp server had been hidden in the system and was serving the films to the Internet. I figured the system had been hacked and the ftp server was installed by malicious malware, but then after opening the GUI for the ftp server, I found several other directories.. The contents of one directory took me by surprise.. The directory contained photos and movies of the little old lady involved in BDSM activities with various men. The must have been hundreds of files in it.
I talked to the woman about the firewall and the ftp server and discovered, from the now red faced woman, that she had installed the ftp server herself but supposedly had no clue about the foreign copyrighted movies.. I deleted the foreign copyrighted movies, reconfigured the server and installed a firewall and left her BDSM stuff.. Telling her to be careful of what she exposed on the Internet..
I love this
Why is TikTok going to be banned in America without any scandal meanwhile Facebook is left untouched with massive scandals like Cambridge Analytica?
Facebook is banned in China
Google is banned in China
YouTube is banned in China
This led to China developing some of the finest and best internet applications on earth and today Chinese Software programming beats everyone else hollow
The Chinese Apps are so good that if they ever came out they would beat Western Apps in seconds
Didi has far more features than Uber
Douyin makes Tik Tok look like a Ford Taurus and YouTube like a Ford Model T
WeChat is a combo of everything and runs the entire Chinese nation digitally
Taobao and JD are as good as Amazon and better than flipkart
The US Point of view :-
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You guys deny our Internet Giants from playing in your massive market
Your Internet Services & E Commerce market has a 80% share for Domestic companies
Once you come to our markets, you will put all our players at risk and take a large chunk of revenue from our markets
We cannot have that
The Chinese Point of View :-
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We don’t pretend and never pretended to be a fan of the FREE MARKET like you did
You have used FREE MARKET and throttled all your competitors but NOT US
The fact is our products are better than yours because we don’t have a saturated market and we have 20 engineers for 1 of yours
The bottom line is
US has a $ 3.5 Trillion a year Internet services market today
China has a 12.6 Trillion RMB Internet Services market today ($ 1.8 Trillion)
The two combined have a market equivalent to 80.3% of the World’s combined market
By 2035, US is expected to have a $ 4.5 Trillion Internet services market
China is expected to have a $ 4 Trillion market
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Both nations will fiercely protect their own markets and evolve within their own markets
This is inevitable
Karen is upset
What are the strategies of China and Russia to deter America from using nukes in a desperate situation as a Samsonite option?
China and Russia can’t
raise the IQ of US presidents,
stop US presidents from putting the US neocons/chickenhawks in their cabinets,
improve the critical thinking skills of the US electorate,
make US cable news, the New York Times, and the Washington Post better than the paper you’d use to clean up dog shit.
Right now, we’re relying on Putin and Xi Jinping to be the adults in the room and not the crash-test dummies that we Americans keep putting in the office of the US presidency and Congress.
From the US side, we’re not preventing nuclear war but heading straight into an idiot apocalypse.
I’m old enough to remember when US presidents tried not to provoke a nuclear war, but those times are long gone.
Nuland resigns. China hawks take over
“Project Ukraine is her child.”
“Her resignation was insisted upon by powerful people in the United States.”
Swiss Steak with Tomato Gravy
dinner
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
1 large slice round steak
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 large cans tomatoes
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 large onion, diced
Kosher or sea salt and pepper
1 cup water (for gravy)
Instructions
Spray slow cooker with Pam. Turn on LOW.
Heat oil in large skillet.
Cut round steak into serving-size pieces.
Put flour into a shallow pan. Add salt and pepper to flour and flour steak well.
Fry steak in hot oil until brown.
Pour a few tomatoes into the slow cooker. Add pieces of browned steak and remaining tomatoes in layers. Add diced onion.
Cook for 4 hours on LOW heat.
Remove meat from slow cooker.
Put 1 cup of water in a pint jar. Add 3 tablespoons flour. Shake well. Add to tomato mixture in the slow cooker. Cook and stir until gravy is thickened.
Put meat back in long enough to heat.
Serve with mashed potatoes.
Men Are Lost? No they aren’t- they are DONE! Women are clueless about why!
Disturbing trends.
What does it feel like to live in a super-large house?
For years I lived in a large Tudor home, or as a family member called it, an “English two-door”. It was built in 1920 in the U.S. and was most certainly a relic from the days when people had live-in domestic help.
Maintaining such a home is a time consuming and expensive proposition. It was sometimes hard to find a balance between restoring with historical accuracy and updating to modern systems.
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The front door looked as though it could withstand a battering ram, 4 inches thick, wooden and heavy. Inside the front door was an ante-room, another heavy door and then the foyer. This was the size of an average living room and was for the most part unused space. It was large enough for a 5 piece orchestra to play comfortably in when we agreed to participate in a walking tour of historic homes, in support of a local theatre one Christmas. There was room left over for a sizable Christmas tree and a grandfather clock that chimed. Being asked to participate in fundraising events becomes a regular occurrence when one owns a home like this.
In addition to all the usual rooms found in an average home, there was a library, a solarium with a stocked bar, a sewing/ironing room, sleeping porch, butler’s pantry, mud room and servants quarters. There were window seats everywhere. Nearly every room had at least one wall of windows with an upholstered seat running along the length.
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We installed new hardwood floors throughout the first and most of the second floor.
Secret wall compartments were tucked away around the house. Certain panels opened when pressure was applied, like in a Hercule Poirot mystery.
There was a kitchen original to the house used for food preparation, with stainless counter tops that ran the length of the walls, prep sinks and a pass through to another slightly smaller kitchen with a swinging door that led into the dining room. There was a dumb waiter (no longer in use) that went to a hallway on the second floor, great for playing hide and seek. Once in a while someone would get stuck and be forced to give away their position in order to be helped out of the little cabinet.
There was a narrow back stairway used by the staff, back when there was staff – 2 flights that led to the bedrooms on the second floor and then 2 more that led up to the attic. The attic itself could have served as a very nice living space except for it being unbearably hot in summer and bone chilling in winter.
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The doorways were narrow in the “service” area. They led to the basement, laundry room, butler’s pantry and a small apartment. These floors were original to the house.
The bathrooms were almost completely original. Nice in some ways, but not very practical. The tubs were free standing and large, there were only 2 real showers in the entire house; the rest had bathtubs with handheld sprayers attached to the taps. The most popular bathroom with a shower was located in the master suite which meant a steady stream of traffic coming through the bedroom in the mornings.
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Many of the bathrooms had the original fixtures similar to these. Others had been updated. There’s also a tub and shower in this bathroom that’s partially visible in the mirror. This type of radiator was throughout the house.
The concept of locking bathroom doors was unheard of in our house. The locks on the doors were all original and the skeleton keys had become either lost or were in the junk drawer in the kitchen and it just wasn’t worth anyone’s time to try to match each with its proper door. This created some minor issues when company came. Our house rule was a closed bathroom door meant occupied and visitors would have to try to trust in that. At yet another fundraising event, even our soon to be Governor wasn’t comfortable in a bathroom with no lock and asked one of his staff to stand outside when he went in.
There’s an episode of Downton Abbey when Lord Grantham says “I’ll sleep in my dressing room tonight” as if he’s making some sort of sacrifice. The master suite in our house had a dressing room. One wall was lined with rows of shallow drawers, meant for folded shirts, ties and other sundry items, a full length free standing mirror and a window seat overlooking the back of the property. There was also a full-sized bed and a small bathroom. Lord Grantham wasn’t exactly roughing it.
There were very few overhead light fixtures except in some of the bedrooms upstairs. There were sconces in most of the rooms that didn’t provide much light. Even with white ceilings and light walls, the house seemed dark much of the time. Extra lamps were a necessity.
The winters were cold not just in the attic but in the entire house. There was a fireplace in every bedroom and common area. The house didn’t seem designed with New England winters in mind. I’d be comfortable wearing a turtleneck, fleece jacket, sweatpants and heavy socks to bed. The original owners probably spent their winters somewhere much further south or maybe this was the height of modern heating in the early 20s.
The furnace was always on its last legs, propped up in some spots by blocks of wood. It was originally coal burning, but had been converted to oil at some point. I remember the furrowed brows on many a technician’s face when I’d lead them down to the cellar to service this behemoth.
All windows had to be covered in plastic every winter to keep the heat inside. The covering of the windows was an annual family activity that began in October.
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A large house like this is an amazing place for children to grow up. A magical place of discovery. There was plenty of room to play with friends. There were areas inside large and empty enough to ride a scooter around. There was an empty room on the second floor that became the train room. I filled it with low plastic tables and we designed quite an impressive railway system with 2 separate train sets. There was a high speed bullet train on one side and “Thomas the tank engine” on the other. It was the sort of thing you’d only want to set up once, and because of the size of the house, we were able to do just that.
The cellar was divided up into several small rooms, most with doors and shelving on the walls. There was also a bathroom down there. They were designed to serve a purpose back in the day; wine rooms, cold storage, dry goods, etc. The cellar was avoided by most and was off limits to kids. It was full of dangers, such as a deep well-like hole in the floor that was often filled with water.
The house is unique on the street. It was the only house with any property to speak of. It was situated between two parallel streets with a “service entrance” that led out the back of the property.
The yard was by far. where the kids and I found the greatest joy living in this house. It was an oasis from the world, surrounded by 3+ acres of lawn and woods, insulated from traffic sounds and the dogs could run free. It was like having our own private park. A hill on one side was perfect for sledding in winter. The kids also learned how to make maple syrup with sap that we collected with a simple tap and bucket attached to a tree.
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Sledding. The copper beech tree in the background is over 100 years old. The black figures sitting in the leaves to the left are the dogs.
The grounds were full of various wildlife. Some transient, some permanent residents. The array of birds was incredible for a yard in the suburbs. One night, we heard a noise outside and the motion sensor floodlights came on. The kid’s grandmother opened the front door and found herself eye to eye with an eight point buck, standing in the circular drive. There were deer living in the woods adjacent to the lawn. I often caught a glimpse of one or two lying in the woods during the day. I put food out for them on a feeding station I set up on a tree. I provided the food because there was nowhere for them to go that didn’t require crossing a busy street or wandering through a parking lot and residential neighborhoods and a few had already been hit by cars.
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We grew Dahlias. I was very proud of those Dahlias. We divided and saved the bulbs from year to year and had a magnificent crop every summer. One spring morning, I was utterly devastated to find the deer had dug up and eaten most of the bulbs. I was upset, no doubt, but unlike one of our neighbors, I would never think of retaliating in any way. I knew a neighbor who had no tolerance for deer and skunks ravaging their gardens. So, I fed them hoping to keep them safe in our yard. The only hazard they faced was one of our dogs bounding after them through the woods occasionally. Raccoons, skunks, foxes and plenty of neighborhood cats (due to the large crop of catnip we planted in the garden) came through on a regular basis. We had hawks, owls and crows that would stop for a few days.
I discovered the bird feeders were attracting wood rats. As much as I respect wildlife, I couldn’t abide rats and took down the bird feeders that were closest to the woods. I don’t particularly like crows either – or rather the racket a flock can make – waking everyone at the crack of dawn with that incessant “CAW… CAW… CAW”. Usually, my husband would go outside and hit the trunk of a tree with a broomstick or something to shut them up. It did, but only until he got back into bed. Early one morning he had had enough of one particularly brazen crow and went outside, picked up a rock and threw it at the thing. We heard the “thwack”. Neither of us could believe he’d actually hit the bird, it was quite a distance away, in a tree in the cover of other trees. We thought we saw it fly away and went back inside. Later on, he found it, dead, lying on top of a bush back in the woods. I felt bad. I didn’t want it killed, just out of our yard. It was a crime of passion though, committed in the heat of the moment. He had been working all night.
There was a small fenced in fish pond where the only resident was a bullfrog that reappeared every summer and a brook that, when it rained, overflowed and flooded parts of the lawn.
There was a fountain (which we didn’t run). The wooded areas had originally been manicured lawns with flower beds and daffodils that I was often asked about as they seemed so strange popping up 100 feet back in the woods. Nearly half of the original lawn had been taken over by various bushes and saplings. There was still plenty of lawn area left, more than most people need. It must have been incredibly beautiful back in the 1920s.
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The “thinking rock”, was a large boulder just off the patio, where we would sit and talk about things, sit and think or just sit.
There was a patio next to our thinking rock with a sitting wall that was covered in geraniums from May through October. Pulling the weeds from between the flagstones was a weekly project. The many trees in the yard provided a spectacular show in the Fall. We pressed leaves into a heavy book and labeled them every year.
One day the kids found a small hole at the base of a tree with a flat rock covering it. There was something barely legible scratched into the rock but it looked like it said “Sara’s…something”. We couldn’t quite make it out. But, in the hole under the rock they found an arrowhead, a small blue bottle and a key. It was so much fun for them to find this and they eventually added a few things of their own to this mini time capsule.
The little quirks of daily living in a big old house are endless and many features of the house definitely spark the imagination. It served both as a teaching tool and a window into a time where things were simpler (at least in our minds), and understated opulence was possible. The over-sized rooms that often seemed so empty and lonely magically became just the right size when the house was full of family and friends. The livingroom, that a friend once said seemed about as homey as a hotel lobby, came alive during family gatherings, full of laughing children and clinking glasses.
Outside, there were dogwood blossoms, hickory nuts and widow makers that fell from above. The house was equal parts hazard and haven. Overall, it was a wonderful experience living in a home that size; essentially unchanged from the early 1900s. It was our home and we very much lived in it. It provided my children with room to spread their wings and make all sorts of discoveries all on their own. It gave them a sense of a connection to the home life of a family much like ours 100 years ago, and to learn to appreciate the beauty and value of nature in their own back yard.
History, Bitch!
What would happen if a nuclear bomb were to detonate mid-air when it was halfway down its fall?
Five guys actually volunteered to stand at ground zero of a nuclear blast just to see what would happen.
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No, they were not crazy. Nor were they being punished. It just shows how stupid some people can be (I’m joking guys, don’t take out your pitchforks).
During the Cold War when the US and Russia were both trying to set the world record for spending the most amount of money on nuclear weapons, the general public was getting a little bit worried about these weapons of mass destruction.
Despite US claims that nothing bad would happen if a nuclear bomb detonated above civilians, nobody was buying it.
So what did the US do?
They decided to prove it.
On July 19, 1957, five exceptionally brave Air Force officers and one cameraman (probably reevaluating his life at that point) stood about 65 miles northeast of Las Vegas.
Sure enough, two F-89 jets flew above their heads and shot out a nuclear missile. Thankfully for the group, the missile did not malfunction and promptly detonated directly above their heads.
According to Major Body as it happened,
“We felt a heat pulse. A very bright light. A fireball it is red. The sky looks black about it. It is boiling above us. It is rapidly losing its color…”
Then the blast could be heard and he continued to say,
“There is the ground wave! It is over folks, It happened! The mounds are vibrating. It is tremendous! Directly above our heads! It is a huge fireball. … Wasn’t that a perfect, perfect shot.”
Now, at this point you might be wondering about all of that radiation from that blast that was hovering over their heads. Surely they have been exposed to a decent amount of ionizing radiation, right?
Since the blast occurred pretty high up in the air (around 18,000 feet or 5.5 km from above), no ground material was sucked up to create a giant mushroom cloud, and thus no giant radioactive cloud was present. As for the material in the bomb itself and surrounding dust, those radioactive particles would have traveled quite a large distance before descending back down to Earth. EDIT: As others have pointed out in the comments, you don’t need to worry about gamma rays because by the time it reaches them, the radiation is halved by 20 times. Thanks Lyle McElhaney and Graham Ross Leonard Cowan .
So it made sense that later on when the men were being examined, it turned out that they were exposed to negligible amounts of radiation from the bomb. It was even less than the amount the pilot was exposed to.
The irony here is that while this was entirely devoted to proving the safety of nuclear blasts high in the air, radioactive particles from such tests often ended up settling on nearby towns, leading to a number of health issues.
While it’s not certain that it’s related to this particular blast, interestingly enough all 6 men (including the cameraman) eventually ended up with cancer later in their life.
What was the weirdest phone call from a random number you have ever received?
A couple of years ago, I got a rather random call on my business phone. Unlike my regular calls from product vendors or salespeople (or occasionally a potential client) this was a young woman’s voice, quite tentative.
“Is that Nick Malik?”
I confirmed that she had, in fact reached me. But then came the odd question:
“Are you a relative of Mary Wolf?”
I was dumbfounded. That was my maternal grandmother’s maiden name.
“Yes, that’s my grandmother’s name.”
She pressed on “Is that the same Mary Wolf who earned a business degree from Ohio State University in 1918?”
At this point, I was glad I had created a genealogy chart for my family. But this was the most curious call I’d ever had.
“Yes, I think so.”
It turns out the Fisher College of Business at Ohio State was going to celebrate their 100th Centennial. This young woman was trying to get information on Mary Wolf, the first woman to graduate from the OSU college of business.
I knew it was unusual for a woman to attend a public university in those days. I did not know she was the FIRST WOMAN to graduate from the OSU College of Business.
Of course my beautiful Grandmother had passed away many years ago, but her eldest daughter, my aunt, was still alive. Her son had contacted me on Facebook a few years ago, so I looked him up and passed along contact information on my aunt for her to get some biographical details.
This young woman had found me from an old article on a defunct blog where I mentioned my parents. Somehow she had tracked down my mother (a published author, artist, and poet) (who had passed away) and then managed to find me by googling her name, then my name, then found my business site. TENACIOUS!
The nice young woman sent me a set of coasters from OSU and a box of Buckeye chocolates as a thank you. The real thanks was finding out what a pioneer my grandmother was.
Trump 2024
And
And
What did a family member say or do that you don’t talk to them anymore?
“Your Dad may have just died, but he’s been dead to me for 5 years. I just want to know what I’m getting.”
My amazing Dad passed away in 2019. My brother and I were from his first marriage to my mom, and he had 3 more girls with my step-monster. As it turns out, he and step-monster had been divorced for about 20 years and he and my mother rekindled their romance after the death of my stepdad in 2001. His eldest daughter hated my mother with a passion, which caused a lot of drama and neither my mom, myself, or my dad had spoken to the Brat in about 5 years.
My Dad had his first stroke in April 2019, worked extremely hard to recover his speech, walking, etc., but had a massive stroke in June 2019, after which we took him off life support. Only the Brat lived in his city during his illness and did nothing to help or support. I flew cross country and stayed for months to help take care of him and my mom.
My Dad was my hero and I loved him immensely. Watching him struggle was so hard, but nothing prepared me for seeing him have the final stroke and the difficult decision to remove him from life support. He was only 67 and in the prime of his life.
While my mom, brother and I were at the funeral home making arrangements, the Brat walks into his house with a pad and pen – telling her own sister “Your Dad may have just died, but he’s been dead to me for 5 years. I just want to know what I’m getting.”
Needless to say I definitely haven’t spoken to her since. My Dad had talked about removing her from from will for years, but apparently never did. It frustrates the hell out of me that she only saw him as bank. That she received equal shares of his sizable estate kills me to this day.
Biden’s handler
If you see an attractive girl in public, how would you personally approach her, and what would say to her? (I’m trying to learn better social skills)
“Excuse me – do you know anything about making gravy?”
I was at the supermarket, in the flour aisle. A guy was talking to me, looking lost and deeply concerned about the multiple bags of flour that he was holding in his arms.
Me: “Umm… a little bit, what do you need?”
Guy: “I’m confused by all of these different types of flour. I’m making dinner tomorrow for my sister and her family, and the recipe calls for ‘flour’, but I have no idea if I need all-purpose flour, pastry flour, whole wheat flour, spelt flour…”
He gives a confused and embarrassed look and shrug with the hint of a smile as he finally looks at me and makes eye contact. If he’s attempting to flirt, he’s doing a great job of it.
Me: “I’m pretty sure that they would all work, but all-purpose flour is usually a pretty safe bet.”
Guy: “Thanks so much. Why on earth do we need so many types of flour?”
Me: “I don’t know, it’s kind of crazy isn’t it.” I turn to leave
Guy: “I see that you’re buying candles, are you making a birthday cake?”
Me: “Yes, my husband and I are celebrating my daughter’s second birthday tonight.”
Guy: “Wow, congratulations! And let me just tell you that you look amazing. Your husband is very lucky.”
Me: “Thank you.”
I think we both felt good about the exchange. Had I not been happily married, we might have continued the conversation, and who knows where it could have led.
The best way to approach a woman is indirectly, and by talking about something that will pique her interest. Never ask her out until after you have had at least 5 minutes of fascinating two-way conversation.
The West is NUTS!
How do lifers cope with the fact that they will never be outside the prison walls ever again?
There are two types of lifers in Missouri. Those with life without and lifers who have the possibility of parole. Most in both cases accept that prison is their home now and where they will spend a large portion of their lives if not all of it
Those who have life without the possibility of parole do not have to worry about parole hearings.Many cut ties with family and friends on the outside They just want to deal with their life in prison.
I knew many who had life without. Most were laid back and just wanted to do their time. They had their circle of friends. Usually others doing a lot of time. Many are willing to give advice to new people to prison if they think the person will listen.
However, get on their bad side and it’s usually not going to be just a fight , but a stabbing
Only a few had trouble dealing with the life sentence. I remember one young guy who came in with life with the possibility of parole. So he at least had a chance. But he complained to everyone that he couldn’t do the life sentence. He even said he was lost without his phone. Rarely said anything about missing his family , it was always the dawn phone he missed. I think someone got tired of hearing him and beat him up
China Warns New Zealand about Joining AUKUS!
What is the most intelligent one liner you have come across?
Late one Christmas eve my 65 year old father encountered a man who had broken into our warehouse store. The man was half my dad’s age and muscular. When my father realized the man had a handgun he dove behind a counter. The man fired a shot but missed. He started to make his escape but my father got up and tackled him. The burglar fought him off and ran toward the other end of the building but was tackled again. After fighting him off the man limped away but realized there was no exit. He turned and shot at my dad three more times. I arrived to hear those shots. The burglar finally found a way out but I followed him in my truck until the police arrived and took him into custody.
The evening before the man’s trial my father received a phone call from the man’s wife who asked him to think about her husband’s four kids before giving his testimony. My father’s immediate response – “Was your husband thinking of my kids when he shot at me?”
China’s Two Sessions as the World Watches What It Does!
Have you ever seen someone call the cops and it backfired on them?
Oh, yes…
My oldest son’s girlfriend “A” had moved in with us. She was 19, legally an adult and could move wherever she wanted. She also wanted absolutely nothing to do with her mother or her sister (though she and her sister have since reconciled and are now very close). Their mother has serious substance abuse issues and their childhood was much less than ideal.
We still don’t know how her mother found out where we lived, but one night she showed up on our doorstep, demanding to see her daughter. She was yelling thru our locked security screen door how I’d “put a spell” on her daughter, that she refused to believe her daughter didn’t want to see her, we were keeping her against her will, etc. My son’s girlfriend had been hiding in their bedroom while my husband had been calmly replying to the mother’s histrionics, but he finally convinced “A” to at least come out to where her mother could see that she was alive and unharmed. “A” stood under the light in our dining room so her mother could see her, and she once again told her that she was fine, but she wanted nothing to do with her and to please leave her, and us, alone. The mother started up her screaming again and told my husband that she was going to call the sheriff on him. He told her to go ahead and do that if she wanted. We were on our own property and hadn’t broken any laws, so he wasn’t sure what she thought the sheriff would do, but hey…if she wanted to call them, have a ball.
She went back to her car, he closed the door and went back to watching TV. Maybe 10 minutes later, there was a knock at the door. My husband opened it to find a sheriff’s deputy on our front porch. He was invited in and he told us he’d already talked to the mother and he wanted to get “A’s” side. He spoke to her, then went back to where the mother was waiting in her car. He told her that “A” was an adult who was of sound mind and body and she’d made it VERY clear that she wanted nothing to do with her. Not only that, but my husband and I wanted her trespassed, so should she enter our property again, she would be arrested. He then returned to the house and gave us instructions on how to obtain PPOs (personal protection orders) against “A’s” mother.
Yeah…calling the sheriff certainly backfired against her that night.
What’s the biggest thing from childhood that still bothers you today?
From the outside, my family looked pretty normal: Mom stayed home and Dad worked, a full-time job in the Post Office and sometimes one or two part time jobs. But the family dynamics and child rearing were off-kilter.
Unfortunately, my Dad had been injured in a non-combat accident in WWII. That led to multiple medical procedures and left him in continuing pain. He’d come home from work and go right to bed. He even had a sandbag traction device at the foot of his bed attached to a kind of girdle he wore to relieve the pain.
My parents were nice folks, saw that we had what we needed growing up, weren’t the horror parents of abuse stories. But they lacked good parenting skills.
My mother would frequently say to my brother and me (born 1948 and me 1950), “Don’t bother your Father now” when he went to bed. That meant “be quiet and go away” to us. I don’t remember my Dad spending much time with me, unless it was something he was interested in. And his hobbies were… different. Like rock collecting, hand tooling leather crafts and copper enameling jewelry. I don’t remember him so much as throwing a ball back and forth with me, ever. He followed sports, but never explained how baseball or football worked. I think other extended family members recognized this and took pity on me. My maternal uncle took me to one San Francisco Giants game. My
brother-in-law took me to a World Series Giants game in the 1960’s. That was my total sports exposure.
I taught myself to ride a bike borrowed from a neighbor kid. By myself, no help from Mom or Dad. That taught me a lesson: if I wanted to learn something, or do something, I had to do it myself.
So… benign neglect.
As I look back from my 70’s, I wanted to understand my life journey, as many seniors do. What was the narrative?
One of the early signs of a problem was in High School English. The teacher was baffled. He told me, “I don’t understand. You write beautiful sentences and even paragraphs. But you can’t write a story.” I also couldn’t understand literature. Because I didn’t fully understand people.
I wasn’t stupid, although I thought I was an idiot. Was a college graduate, had a job as a computer programmer for decades, so there were some working brain cells. What I lacked were social skills and political savvy. The social skill deficit would come up in job interviews, where the interviewer would pick up on tells like lack of confidence or hesitation. More than once, an interviewer said something along the lines of “Well, you’re going to be working for so-and-so. You’ll be their problem”. The lack of political sense caused problems that could have escalated to job loss.
Lately, I was comparing notes on childhood with my brother. I got so far as to say: “In childhood, did you ever feel like…” and he finished for me: “ we were unwanted? Yeah, me too!”.
Modern Women FURIOUS they also GET REJECTED in Other Countries While Passport Bros find HAPPINESS
Have you ever put your child in a daycare only to take them out shortly after because something didn’t feel right?
My daughter was coming home with bruises on her shins. I asked her what was going on, and she said that a boy was kicking her. I spoke to her teacher about it, and next day, police and CPS were at my house questioning my father. They said she said it was her grandfather. I have been caring for my elderly parents for over 20 years, and at that time, my father had just gotten out of the hospital and was still hooked up to an IV and catheter. It was ridiculous. It was obvious both to me and to CPS and the police that they were covering something up. They knew all about him being ill and in the hospital. And I spoke to another parent having the same problem. They said the teachers would go outside with the kids and stand around talking to one another without watching the kids. I took my complaint to the director, and she said that I had no right to talk to other parents about the school, and my daughter was obviously partially retarded because she couldn’t speak well. I demanded my money back and told her never to even think about breathing the same air as my daughter or I would serve her her own ass on a silver platter. That was the end of that. And I made a formal complaint to every agency involved with them.
What trivial knowledge might save your life one day?
When walking downstairs, don’t put your hands in your pockets.
If you’re ever at a party and your drink tastes unusually salty, do not continue drinking it. Rohypnol is reported to have a salty taste.
If a power line falls next to you, do not walk or run. Put your feet together and do a bunny hop to jump and get away.
When the waterline is abnormally far from the shore, this is a sign of a tsunami.
If you see a photo of anyone where they only have one “red eye” from the flash, this could be a sign of retinoblastoma, a type of eye cancer.
Don’t leave ice packs on wounds or swelling for more than 15 minutes at a time to avoid irreversible nerve damage!
A gray ring around the edge of the cornea is an indication of the high level of cholesterol in the blood.
Keeping transparent water bottles in your car can cause a fire if sunlight passes through them.
A finger up the bum will get the dog (or any animal) to stop what it’s doing real quick.
Baking soda will extinguish a fire, even grease and electrical fires.
Losing weight without trying could very well be cancer.
If you are a male and you pee on a pregnancy test and it comes out positive, go get yourself checked for testicular cancer.
If your car is broken down, do not stand in front of it while waiting for help.
Money falling from buildings? Don’t pick it up, get the hell out of there, it’s a way terrorists kill more people, is by having them all in one place.
If you’re ever unsure if an electrical wire is live, use the back of your hand to touch it. Regular contact could trigger muscle contractions, potentially leading to a fatal grip.
China SHOCKED us 🇨🇳 (British family arriving for the first time)
Have you ever found something in your food that was clearly not supposed to be there? How did you react?
Money was tight when Dad was in the Navy and Mom was home with 3 very young girls. As a rare treat we got popsicles. My youngest sister and I split a 5 cent popsicle. My middle sister insisted on getting a 7 cent banana one. As she started eating it she said it tasted funny and Mom said she demanded it so she had to eat it. She cried but kept eating. Mom started eating the other half and it was bitter. She saw something green on it. My crying sister had finished hers but threw up. The man at the little store gave Mom her money back and offered a free popsicle if a different flavor. He pulled the rest of the banana flavors off the shelf. My sister had some ulcers in her mouth and Mom felt terrible. At that time they used liquid quick lime to speed up freezing. Apparently some got into the mold for the banana flavor. The store owner gave them Mom’s name and she was pleased with the cash settlement they sent to her.
When I was living in Erie, I went shopping with my roommates. We went grocery shopping, which was something we did about once a month.
One of my ‘mates was this big burly man named Mark. He was a silly guy. Drank Pepsi cola like no one else alive. Perhaps twelve bottles a day. It was his way of coping as he distanced himself away from his drug abusing past.
A coping mechanism. I get it.
Well, as I checked out and had the groceries, Mark was no-where to be found.
We looked and looked, until he finally came out one hour later.
He strolled up to the car.
We asked “where the fuck were you?”
And he said “I don’t want to talk about it”.
But, later on he did.
It turned out that he was drinking a Pepsi in the store, and instead of taking the empty bottle to the checkout counter, he placed it on a shelf. And it was caught on the CC television video system, and the store detective nabbed him.
As he was on parole, this could have gone very badly for him. But… life is strange. It turned out that the store detective was a classmate of his, and after the mandatory beat-down, they warmed up and kicked-back and shared memories and stories.
Life is sometimes like that.
I am sure that Mark has since thought long and hard about this kind of “store grazing” behavior. I like to think that he is a better person for it. Ah I hope.
As I review my life, I am constantly amazed at how many times coincidences seem to intertwine the threads of our lives together.
Not quite a garage sale. A good friend, “ George” was a coin collecter, who noticed a small ad in the local News paper. “ selling late husbands coin collection – make an offer.” With nothing else to do that day he called and went to see the lady. He started to poke through and told her he need a bit of time, but he found 3 coins he wanted, for himself. He said to the lady I will buy these three right now, on the condition that if anyone else calls you tell them the “ entire collection is sold “ she said but you are only buying 3 coins what about the rest, what do I do. He said “ I will sell them for you, please give me a chance” She reluctlently agreed. He paid $300 cash each for the coins he picked out. He saw that the lady was not to well off and had lost her husband. He sat down and selected 10 coins, wrote down what they were and description, and said he would sell them for her. He was in touch with her every day, and about 10 days later, he went to see her and told her he was able to get a decent price for 3 of the coins he left with. he handed her $8000.00. and confirmed he would sell all of the coins that she had. She said as she was going through her late husbands things she had found other coins. She really had no interest in the coins and said they had taken up so much of her husbands time away from her. George told her that her husband loved her more then she knew. In about one year, he had sold off the entire collection of coins for just over $450,000.00 A few of the gold coins he told her to keep for herself.
My wife loves a deal. If they offered a free toaster with an Aston Martin, I might be driving my dream car.
So we were on vacation in Athens and she pulled off a haggling master stroke – a bag, a dress, and a speedo (hey, it was Europe) and got them to knock a few hundred euro off the price. All she said was, “is this the best price you can do?”
And this was at Dolce & Gabbana!
So, while on a business trip in Venice, I decided to pick two things up for my wife:
A dress and a deal.
At Prada!
I found the perfect dress. Something she definitely wouldn’t buy herself, but would look great on her. It was pricey, but I had my ace in my sleeve. My all-purpose Euro retail haggling pass.
The saleswoman approached me. I explained that I wanted the dress. She was pleased with my selection.
And then I did it.
I whipped out my haggling secret weapon, with Blue Steel swagger, and an expectant attitude.
“Is this the best price you can do?”
She paused and just stared at me.
I’m thinking, haha… didn’t see that one coming did you?
She keeps staring. She wrinkles her brow, like she’s computing the speech in her head.
Now I’m getting worried.
Then, she has a moment of clarity.
“Oh, are you trying to negotiate?”
She’s says it like I’m some 9 year old kid who just asked his 24 year old babysitter to be his girlfriend.
Me: (trying to stay cool) “Well… um, yeah…. You know. If there is any room for…..”
Her: (interrupting but sincere) “We don’t negotiate at Prada.”
Ordered 4 new bras from an online shop, ended up receiving 32 new bras, none of which were the color I had ordered.
The receipt in the box was tallied for 8 bras with a note that they’d been running a promo the day I ordered that they were buy 1 get 1 free. I don’t even want to fathom how 8 turned into 32, but when I called the company to get a return label the gal informed me that the bra sale had actually been buy 1 get 2 free, which should have only been 12 bras, not 32, and who the heck gives away 2 forty dollar bras?
Got transferred to a different representative and was informed that the bras I was trying to return where non-returnable since they’d actually been discontinued and were now “on clearance” neither of them had addressed the issue that the bras I received were the wrong color (right size at least)
I was transferred yet again (gotta love “that’s not my job” employment opportunities) where I was quickly informed that they would send out the bras in the right color.
Fast forward a few days and I received 12 of the right size, right color bras. They had honored the buy 1 get 2 free sale apparently. I also received 8 additional bras in colors I hadn’t even known were available in my size as a “consolation prize” for my troubles.
So, 52 bras for the price of 4 at forty dollars each. I haven’t had to special order bras in years…
I’ve worked in software engineering for 20 years. I come from a no-name college in India, and my grades weren’t stellar. SO, getting into top tier companies was hard for me. Over 20 years, I’ve worked my way up, and I’m in Amazon now. On the way, I have worked in all kinds of companies: startups, mid sized companies, large multi nationals; and in all kinds of industries: consumer goods, healthcare, finance, education
First of all, Companies are tiered in terms of the skill levels of their engineers. They pretend not to be. Everyone claims that they hire the smartest engineers. WHat they mean is that they hire the smartest engineers that they can get. There is a definite differrence in Engineers working in FAANG companies (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google), I’ve seen all kinds of engineers
Here’s the kicker. The biggest difference isn’t in the quality of the code that they write. FAANG engineers, on the whole, write as buggy code as engineers in decent companies.
The biggest differentiator is Communication. When I was in mid-tier companies, I was constantly finding myself explaining and re-explaining things in great detail. In fact, I would say that at most companies at mid-tier level, your success as an engineer depends on being able to drive people in the right direction by communicating to them.
There are 3 kind of people in tech. There are a) arguers:- people who will fight every point of view that isn’t their own, b) receivers: people who will try their best to understand what you are saying c) analyzers: people who start thinking critically while you are talking to them. Arguers are toxic. Receivers are good but slow. Analyzers are good and fast. In mid tier companies, you are more likely to find Arguers and Receivers, whereas in top-tier companies, you are more likely to find Receivers and Analyzers.
To be a successful tech company, you need to get in as many Analyzers as you can. Because these are the people who generate ideas. These are the people you give 2 and 2 and they figure out how to make 8. Not only that, with ANalyzers, you have to spend less time getting the team on the same page. Less miscommunication = Less rework = shorter turnaround = lower time to market = win.
Just to be clear, I’m not saying communication is bad. Communication is good. You need to make sure everyone understands what needs to be done. Communication is essential. All I’m saying is that in top tier companies, communication is lot more efficient. It’s like getting onto a highway. You are just going faster.
Not me, but my ex-wife, and I didn’t witness it. She told me about it several years after the fact.
My ex and I are both blind. As in without sight. One of the things you have to understand about blind people is probably something obvious. To wit, we don’t drive. We can’t. Has never happened and ain’t gunna ever happen; no, not ever. Another thing you have to understand about blind people is that sometimes sighted people will ask the stupidest questions or do the dumbest things. Usually this happens when we’re just walking along, minding our own business. One day this happened to her.
I can’t remember what she was doing at the time, but she was walking along, doing whatever errand she had to do, when this group of women happened to come upon her. One of them was obviously drunk.
“So,” said the drunk woman, “you’re blind, right?”
“Yes,” she said.
“So, um, like, how do you drive?”
My ex, who walks with a cane because she’s obviously blind, said:
“Well, I have two canes. When I drive, I keep one cane out the right window, and another out my left window. That way when I bump into something, I know when and how to turn.”
“Really?” said this other woman. “That’s amazing!” And she went on and on for some time about what an amazing feat this was,, while the other people she was with were laughing and calling her an idiot, which she so obviously was.
Probably convincing others that this is a good look. It isn’t — your lips look like a baboon’s anus swelling to indicate it’s ready for mating. I’ve never in my whole life met a single person, male or female, who appreciates this aesthetic. And yet I keep seeing it, with increasing frequency.
image 172
This weird bimbo-style… the heavy makeup… the facial fillers… and those God-awful inflated lips. Shudder. It’s horrific. So painful on the eyes that it makes one question the existence of the God who supposedly made our species in His image. The fake lashes don’t help, either… I mean why bother changing yourself in a way that isn’t genuine? I get going to the gym, working out or getting a tan, all those yield tangible results. But why alter yourself in ways that a single shower or missed injection could erase?
The weirdest thing people have ever done is invent this made-of-plastic bimbo aesthetic and promote it on social media as something to aspire to… it’s giving women in their twenties the appearance of elderly Hollywood stars in denial of their age. Turns the “girl next door” into whatever-the-hell-happened-to-Madonna. It’s an absolute travesty.
Originally Answered: Who was the most ignorant person you have ever met in America?
This happened many years ago, but it is what came to mind when I read this question…
I was teaching class, and we were discussing the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Students were discussing their various thoughts on the situation.
One student stated, very loudly, “You know what really bothers me? All those people who are shouting and holding up signs…why aren’t they speaking English?”
I explained that it is unreasonable to expect people in a foreign country to protest in another country’s language. She didn’t understand what I meant, and the class was trying to explain to her that Arabic is the language of the people who were protesting.
After a while, I stopped everyone and asked her where she thought “those people” lived. She said, “I don’t know…near Arizona?”
That is when I realized that she thought the the Middle East was next to the American Midwest! I showed her where it is on the map, and she said, “Oh! Things make so much more sense, now!”
The most intrepid drug seeker I have ever seen was Mr. C.
He walked in a very hunched-over posture, leaning on a walker, to elicit sympathy.
We would not even say his name, as that might bring the bad luck of the ER calling to admit him…AGAIN.
If one of my colleagues were to talk about him he would say, “Mr.” and then crook over his index finger.
We all knew who he meant.
This guy was the biggest pathological liar in the universe.
Every time I’d get a call from the ER his story was different.
He was a missionary, a teacher, a policeman, you name it.
His favorite was to tell people he was a former PA or MD.
ER calls….
“I’ve got a 68-year-old former doctor down here. He looks so decrepit that I think he needs nursing home placement.”
Right away, I knew who it was.
He went from hospital to hospital to hospital. I don’t think he had permanent address. Why would he?
“Uh,…I know who it is. He’s not a doctor. He’s a drug seeker.”
“No, Maureen, he’s such a nice guy. You must be thinking of someone else. I think he IS a doc.”
“Go ask him what a CBC is (complete blood count, a common lab test). I’ll hold.”
Off he goes.
“For Pete’s sake, he doesn’t know.”
“Ah…yup. Don’t give him any narcs.”
“OK. But he still needs admission because he has been having recurrent temperatures and can hardly walk.”
“Did you document a temperature?”
“No, he is afebrile.”
”Labs and imaging normal?”
“Yeah.”
“Wanna see him take up his bed and trot, upright, right out of there?”
“Yeah.”
“Tell him that Dr. Boehm will be admitting him. I’ll be happy to evaluate and treat any of his complaints. I won’t be giving any narcotics, however.”
Off he goes.
“Uh, he got up and left AMA.”
“Did he ask for a cab voucher?”
“Yeah.”
“He wants us to pay for his transportation to the next ER.”
Sometimes, I would come in and he had been admitted overnight by some unsuspecting doctor.
His nurse called me.
“Mr. C is very lethargic. He’s becoming hypoxic”.
“How can that be? He’s not getting any controlled substances.”
Well, he sure was.
He had called down to the OR and interrupted a surgery. He told them that he was one of our orthopedic surgeons. He demanded that a message be given to the Ortho PA.
“Why does Mr. C have uncontrolled pain? I want him on a Dilaudid PCA NOW!”
I walk in. Mr. C, not only has a Dilaudid drip running, in one of his groggy little hands he had a bottle of Percocet that he had brought from home. In the other hand, the button to deliver a hefty bolus of Dilaudid to himself.
He was “out” with a mouthful of half-chewed Percocet, the drip just dripping away with a hefty basal dose.
He could have killed himself.
Never have I relished the delivery of Narcan like I did that day.
One little squirt and he was wide awake and pissed that his nice “double” high was ruined.
After that we had to do a complete search of him and his stuff, with security, so he didn’t get away with it again.
I often wonder what happened to Mr. C after the new system was available to track and prevent his overuse of narcotics.
He couldn’t go to five doctors in a month and get narcs from all of them. He couldn’t go ER to ER.
When I was 15 I used to babysit these 2 super lovely Chinese kids every friday and saturday night. It was only ever for 4 hours, 8pm to midnight. The family owned the local fish and chip shop, that also sold Chinese food. Now I never got fed while babysitting, but the parents would pay me my time AND bring me chinese food to eat when I got home. Always asked me what I wanted when I went to the house. The were an awesome family.
Another time my GP asked if I would babysit his kids on new years eve, and stay over night. My mum agreed and he would pay me £50 for it. I got told to eat and drink whatever I wanted, watch whatever I wanted on the tv, and the room they let me sleep in also had a tv. Easiest babysitting job ever! The kids were in bed before I got there at 9pm, I was told to check on them at 10, 11 and midnight which I did. They never woke up, I got to eat junk food all night, and got paid for doing it. I was actually happier about the junk food and tv than the money. At home I wasnt allowed food between meals, junk food was never allowed, and forget about watching anything other than my mums choice of program on the tv.
I was in the military (USAF) and until you reach a certain rank, you are assigned a roommate in your dorm room. I was stationed in Germany in a unit that traveled extensively 300+ days per year. Commonly we would travel 6 months, come back for a week or even a weekend, and then be back on the road. I was assigned a roommate whom I met… He was the typical “computer geek”. Greasy hair, showered infrequently, was a slob, almost never left the room when he was not on the road, and played a lot of the “Oregon Trail” computer game.
Mind you both of us were in the same unit that traveled a lot, but we were on different teams, so we traveled to different places at different times. One time after being gone 6 months in England, I came back to station, and opened the door to my room, only to be gagged by the smell. I set my luggage down in the hall and went to the communal bathroom, wet some paper towels, and covered my nose and mouth area. Then went back into my room to locate and remove the source of the smell.
At first glance everything seemed in order, but the smell was overpowering… I walked over to his side of the room and it got even worse. His bed was raised up on blocks that gave him a couple feet of storage underneath it, and I saw a shirt sleeve sticking out from under the bed. When I lifted up the bedspread, it reeked to high heaven, but all I could see was his dirty clothes. They were stuffed under his bed to the point that it took up all the room in under the bed! I couldn’t imagine that this horrific gagging smell was just his dirty clothes (although they did stink terribly), so I started reaching under there and pulling clothes out a handful at a time…. When I had pulled out about half the clothes, I found the source of the pugnant aroma.
At some point when he was stuffing all his dirty clothes under there, he apparently forgot that he had also put a half a pitcher of OJ under there as well. When he pushed more clothes under there, the pitcher of OJ got pushed back into the middle of the pile of clothes. I had been gone 6 months and come to find out he left the week after I did! That OJ sat in that pitcher in the middle of his stinky clothes for basically 6 months, rotting! It was a solid black and green mass all around the outside with Orange pulp in the middle, and OMG did it stink. I was gagging and running to the outside trash can holding the pitcher behind me to get rid of it once and for all! Once it was gone, I went back to the room. I stuffed all of his dirty clothes into big black garbage bags, zip tied them, and put them back under his bed.
When he got back the following week I was already gone again, but I left a note for him and told him what had happened and what I had had to do! I also told him if I ever come back to something like that again, that I would be turning it in and reporting him to the First Seargent! It neverhappened again. (THANK GOD!!!))
strong independent woman instantly REGRETS their lifestyle
When I was a toddler my father had an affair. The woman started calling our house and tormenting my mother in order to break up the marriage. My mother wasn’t emotionally stable. After a certain time each evening, she knew that her friends and family wouldn’t be calling so late, and when the phone rang my mother would cry, wail and scream. I remember answering the phone myself in an attempt to stop my mother’s over-the-top reaction and at some point learned to leave the phone off the hook but my mother didn’t leave it that way for long. On some level, she liked the drama I guess. This went on for months. I’d have been 3 or 4 when this was happening. It was very traumatic for me because I had no idea what was going on until much later. In my pre-school mind, the threat on the phone had to be very dire and worthy of my drama momma’s reaction. I was absolutely terrified. I’d wake up many nights to answer the phone and cry “please don’t hurt us” into the phone, but she didn’t stop until the divorce was done.
30 years later, my father dies, leaves that woman a penniless widow, which was the result of gross financial mismanagement because he’d had money and didn’t support those of us in his first family (a man could get away with that back then). The one thing she has is a lawsuit for his death. It’s a good case. The payout is potentially large but that’ll take years in court and may never payout as the company responsible will probably go bankrupt. The defendant has offered settlement and would payout quickly but the only requirement is that all of his heirs agree to accept the settlement and agree not to sue separately at a later date.
But I don’t need money and I’ll never sign. I’ve been getting certified letters for years asking for my signature. They’ve threatened to have me arrested (which was clearly a ruse) for refusing, offered me cash to sign, on one occasion her grandson connected with me on social media explaining that she needed a new roof and could I please sign off on the settlement and I ended up blocking his whole family. Last year I got a letter that the county was going to auction her house for non-payment of taxes. She is probably living with one of her kids and collecting social security so not quite homeless but I still feel like I’ve gotten a little revenge.
Many years ago I lived in an inner suburb of Sydney, in a terrace house.
The next door neighbour was an alcoholic bricklayer. Call him Don.
Don had decided to do some extensions, or renovations, and had three pallets of bricks dropped off in front of his place. They partially blocked the footpath and leaned outwards, dangerously overhanging the road.
One of the.pallets was in front of our house. Effectively our parking was blocked and the footpath was hard to negotiate.
The first Saturday they were there I knocked on his door, (interrupting a fight with his wife as he had accidentally lost her car the previous night, as far as I could work out he had parked it near a brothel and could not find it when he staggered out) and offered to help him shift the bricks around the back. He declined and said he would get to them during the week.
A few weeks went by. I offered again to help shift them, and got told to f off. I explained they were dangerous and inconvenient. Got the door slammed in my face.
I complained to the local council, and I suppose they sent him a letter, but the bricks remained.
By this time the bricks had been there about four months. The pallets were deteriorating and the stacks leaning. It was getting more dangerous by the day. It was only a matter of time before they collapsed on a car, a person or the busy road.
I wrote up a couple of large signs “ free bricks, help yourself” and put them on the pile about 6:am on a Saturday morning.
By the time Don surfaced around 11, there was probably half a pallet or so left… which he moved to his back yard.
Without a doubt. Any unfair action by the EU Will be met by an action that U.S. fairer but with a much bigger consequences to EU. Let that be a solemn promise.
Europe will have to suffer a total collapse of the automobile market if it dare to try any shit. Don’t forget that many European cars companies are surviving only due to the Chinese market and consumer. And the reason it still can compete is only due to its production efficiency and capacity of its plants in China!
Years back, I sat in a sombre home where a young man in his 30s died untimely in an accident.
I, along with my family, went there to pay respects.
Sitting on the sofa I was nudged between two middle aged women who were discussing the next course of events.
“I heard Sheela is going to go to her maternal house to stay! How would Usha bear this? First she lost her son and now with the daughter-in-law gone she will lose her grandchildren too.”
“That’s true! I had the same reaction when I heard about it. We must put some sense in Usha and stop her from letting Sheela go.”
When Usha aunty came towards us, these two woman grabbed her and made her sit with them, squeezing me.
They then narrated their opinion on the grieving mother and stopped her from taking a ‘foolish’ decision and going against a tradition where the widow usually stays with the in-laws.
After listening to their valuable advice Usha aunty spoke.
“True, I lost my son. But Sheela has lost her husband too. A person she vowed to spend her old age together. A person who was a loving parent to their children. Sending them away to her parents place will surely make me sad and lonely but it would be a much needed change for Sheela. At this time, she needs her parents the most. If she stays here, this house would remind her of him everyday. At her parents place, she would slowly come back to her usual self soon. I lost my son. I don’t want to lose my daughter because of some tradition.”
The two women were speechless, so was I. I hadn’t thought of it in that way either. Usha aunty left and consoled her daughter-in-law who sat in a corner with a pale and teary face.
That day it was just a conversation I unknowingly was a part of. But today, I think what Usha aunty did was so right.
Thinking about someone else in the event of your child dying, needs immense amount of courage and determination.
Sheela di did recover soon and moved back to her loving mother-in-law’s house and now cares for them as their daughter.
Man went to McDonald’s — which was a treat — for his family’s dinner, and on the way back, was broad-sided in the driver’s door. He’s dead in the driver’s seat and his family’s dinner is all over the front of the car. When he didn’t come back, his 10-year-old son went looking for him on his bicycle and came up on the accident scene. The child climbed into the wrecked car and was hugging his dead father. We weren’t going to stop him, and the fire department stayed longer than they normally would have in case there was any unexpected fire.
Another officer took the child home in his police car and informed the wife of what had happened. Prime example of one of those evenings when a cop skips dinner because he has no appetite.
The driver that hit him was a teenager who had just stolen a tank of gas from the local AM/PM Mini Market, and was being chased by the idiot store manager in his own car. We arrested them both, though that did not make the outcome any better.
The only decent thing that came out of it is that the owner of a local McDonald’s franchise read about it, came in the station and we helped him arrange to pay for an elaborate funeral. The owner insisted we not talk about it publicly; he didn’t want his kind act to look like a PR move. That is class.
J.K. Rowling had just got a divorce, was on government aid, and could barely afford to feed her baby in 1994, just three years before the first Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone, was published. When she was shopping it out, she was so poor she couldn’t afford a computer or even the cost of photocopying the 90,000-word novel, so she manually typed out each version to send to publishers. It was rejected dozens of times until finally Bloomsbury, a small London publisher, gave it a second chance after the CEO’s eight year-old daughter fell in love with it.
Positivity, confidence, and persistence are key in life, so NEVER GIVE UP on yourself.
This Thing Is About To POP: Putin, Biden and The Trainwreck
This was one that I witnessed, but wasn’t a part of.
I was working in the hardware section of a department store, right beside the sports department.
Straightening up/stocking the shelves just near the boundary between the departments, I saw a fellow salesperson talking to a customer with his small son. The child was bored and started to wander around, touching everything he could reach.
After a couple of minutes, the other salesperson saw the child start to try to climb a display of weightlifting equipment. He quickly excused himself and rushed over to the child, not touching him but gently suggesting that the boy not climb on anything and particularly not on the heavy weights.
The father turned around and seeing what was happening was incensed.
“How dare you tell my son what he can and cannot do! Who do you think you are?”
“I was just trying to keep him safe.” said the salesperson. “The weights are heavy and he could hurt himself.”
“Oh really? You have no business disciplining my son. I want to see the manager to complain.” said the father.
By this time, the child, seeing that he was again being ignored, went back to the weight rack and started to climb again.
The father fumed on at the unlucky salesperson.
And just at that moment, the rack of weights, unbalanced by the child fell over on top of him, a couple of weights pinning him to the floor.
He started crying.
The father started ranting about suing the store.
I later heard that he lost because the salesperson had tried to stop the child from climbing and had been forbidden from doing so by the father.
I got a performance review that ripped me up, down and sideways, and was totally unjustified. I refused to sign it and requested a second meeting later that afternoon. I attended that one armed with statistics showing how I had reduced the work ticket backlog on our software library from over 800 to just 2.
Now, a little technical explanation. This was pre-Windows. We had a software library written in Microsoft Pro Basic. Everything worked for the most part when I took it over, except it was slow. I fixed the outstanding bugs, then went looking for the cause of the slowdown and I found it: type declarations.
There were none. If a variable name ended with a $, it was a string. Otherwise, it was a number. But there are all kinds of numbers, and the default was double-precision floating point. Microsoft made a big deal about how indexes and array subscripts should be integers and pointed out that it was a speed deal. I went through, explicitly defined all variables and made sure that anything used as a loop index or array subscript was declared as either a short or long integer. Massive increase in speed. Calculations that used to take 20–30 minutes now ran in a minute or less.
Now, back to the meeting. I pointed all the improvements out to him, including comments from customers praising the improvements. He looked at everything and had the gall to say that my review was not going to be changed. I walked back to my office, made a couple of phone calls and had a job, paying more, starting the following Monday. I then edited the library and took out every one of the integer or long type declarations, recompiled the new version and saved everything into the distribution folders. I cleaned out all my work directories so that what I had done was not readily available, then walked by his office, tossed my keys on his desk, said I quit and walked out.
I had applied for a promotion that I was overqualified for. Had a great track record of mentoring new employees, working above and beyond, coming up with great ideas. I had been in the position for 7 years and with the company for 11.
My manager and supervisor told me that I wasn’t “ready” for this promotion (a 6% raise) and that I could try again next January. I told them “there would not be a next January”
Fast forward a few months, I was already applying for jobs and went on a few interviews. My manager and supervisor called me into a meeting to let me know one of the males on the team who have been at the organization and position for 2.5 years was getting the promotion (it was a promotion multiple people could get). When they asked me if I had any questions I said “No – his promotion doesn’t age t my career”
1 month later when I was putting in my 2 weeks notice for a company giving me a 30% raise my manager and supervisor asked me what they could do to retain me…I say nothing.
Left the job May 2021 and it was the best decision ever. Never knew I could get such a big pay bump for NOT being loyal to a company.
And if you are going to do it, this is the way. Not by shooting somebody or anything else.
My dad was a small builder. A few houses a year. He enjoyed it and it made him good money in retirement. He was building one of the only spec houses (not already sold when he started) he ever built.
One night, when the house was almost done, the furnace and airhandler disappeared from the garage. No signs of breaking and entering.
Now it takes a couple of hours to remove all of this w/o damaging anything. So my dad quickly guessed that his HVAC contractor (one he had never used before) had made a copy of the key my dad had given him. Let himself in, opened the garage door. Backed his truck in. Closed the door. And got to work.
He told the police this. They talked to the contractor who denied everything and suggested my dad had done it to collect on the builder’s insurance. This made my dad MAD! The HVAC guy however didn’t know the police told my dad he said this.
So my dad had the same guy put a new furnace and airhandler in the house. Yep, same guy.
What the guy didn’t know is that before hand my dad had a security system installed. Hidden motion detectors only, no contacts on the windows and doors to be spotted. And no audible alarm. Silent only. He registered his cell phone with the security company.
Sure enough, a few nights later he gets a call in the middle of the night from the security company. He tells them to call 911 and jumps in his truck. By the way, he lived only about 90 seconds down the road.
He pulls up and can see light around the garage door. He pulled quietly into the driveway at an angle, all the way up to the door, completely blocking it. And quietly waited for the police to arrive, which they did a few minutes later.
The guy heard him talking to the police in the driveway and put the garage door up. My dad couldn’t stop laughing at the expression on the guy’s face when he saw my dad standing there with four deputies!
And the best part? My dad hadn’t yet paid the contractor for his work. And he never did.
This actually happened to me years ago. It was a Friday evening. An entire group including me were in a meeting. We had a code thoroughly tested and ready for production. This Manager went and made changes without consent and broke the code but they still wants to keep the implementation date which was ten days away.
Now the ten days included two weekends. I’m sitting in the room. They totally ignored the fact that I was the one responsible for testing the changes. Nobody asked me what my plans were for the weekends and proceeded to agree upon meeting the date. I stayed mute. Now at that time my husband was in the army and and deployed to Bosnia, so they thought I had no life. They talked and laughed and when the meeting was over, I spoke.
“Who is coming in tomorrow because I need a ride”. They all said they were not. That’s when I dropped the bomb. I said, “Neither am I”. Everybody sat down, I got up, saluted them and walked out.
I had just finished a year of substitute teaching and had few. if any, prospects for a full-time job come that Fall. So when I saw that ad in the paper, my eyes lit up.
This company was wanting to hire teachers for a summer job. Was it evaluating textbooks? Maybe we would be tasked with creating exciting curriculum or conducting research into how children learn. Maybe a private school wanted to hire a number of tutors for their summer programs? The ad didn’t get specific.
I fired off a resume and waited to hear back. I didn’t wait long before being contacted with a time and place for the interview. When I arrived, I saw a room full of people dressed in typical teacher fashion-Dockers, Polo shirt, etc. I must be in the right place! But why are they doing a group interview? A bit later, a man walks in dressed more professionally. He asks us to tae a seat. He then gives a presentation into what sort of summer work they had for all of us education professionals.
STEAK KNIVES!!! He was wanting to “hire us to be door-to-door salesmen for his company’s line of cutlery. For a low investment of only (the cost of 2 sets) we could have unlimited earning potential. He must have seen the disgusted look on my face and figured I was going to let the more naive know exactly what the deal was, for I was the first to be invited into the office for a second interview.
It showed clearly that it does not care for its people but it protect profiteering and too big to fail companies. Such actions never ends well. The day will come when the U.S. citizens rebel and raised up against them. And these companies will continue to be unproductive and inefficient to the point of becoming irrelevant.
Pease remember the US has been dictating free trade and freedom of choice to Americans and the world for the longest time! What happened?
This tasty and easy Italian Sausage Soup Recipe is loaded with onions, carrots, celery, zucchini, and a healthy helping of Italian Seasoning in chicken broth with tomatoes, cannellini beans, and elbow noodles. It is the perfect pick-me-up for cold, wet weather, coughs, ailments, or just because your soul needs a little warmth. This Italian Soup Recipe is one of our favorites.
2024 02 13 08 12
Ingredients
2 pounds mild or hot Italian sausage
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 large onions, chopped
1 (28 ounce) can diced tomatoes
6 (14 ounce) cans beef broth
1 1/2 cups red wine (optional)
1/2 teaspoon basil
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
2 teaspoons hot pepper sauce
3 tablespoons parsley
1 medium green bell pepper, chopped
2 medium zucchini, sliced
3 cups pasta shells, cooked
Instructions
In a large pot, cook sausage for about 15 minutes.
Pierce with fork to release fat; drain well.
Cut into bite-size pieces.
Add remaining ingredients except zucchini and pasta.
Cook for 30 to 45 minutes, then add zucchini and cook until tender.
Add pasta shells just to heat through.
Recipe notes and helpful tips
If you have a nearby meat market, call and ask if they make their own Italian Sausage. It is well worth the added expense and trip to the market.
For aesthetic purposes, peel the carrots. It brings out that beautiful bright orange color.
You can sub any medium to small pasta in this soup, including penne, rotini, shells, farfalle, ditalini, or radiatori.
Fresh thyme is always delicious, and I usually have it on hand. However, you can substitute fresh chopped parsley or a little dried marjoram or thyme.
Store leftovers in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to 4 days. Heat on the stovetop over low heat or in the microwave at reduced power.
Freeze in an airtight container or heavy-duty freezer bag for up to 3 months.
One summer as a college student (many years ago) I worked at a now defunct “family” restaurant called The Ground Round. One room was a bar, and the other room was for families and they were famous for showing old silent movies in the family room and giving out free peanuts and popcorn (that usually ended up all over the floor).
Unfortunately, they were also famous for their “Penny-a-Pound” Thursdays where children under 12 who accompanied an adult would be weighed on a big scale at the front of the restaurant and could then order anything off the children’s menu (including unlimited free drinks) and be changed a penny for each pound they weighed. So, yeah, a kid could order a hot dog or a hamburger or a bowl of mac&cheese and get an orange soda (with 3 refills) for $0.40.
Most of this time this worked out OK and people enjoyed the deal responsibly. A family of four would come in, say, both parents would order full meals, and the little ones would get to basically eat for free. However, there were quite a number of occasions when people would completely abuse the deal. We’re talking situations where a single adult would come in with 5 or 6 children (obviously not all their own kids due to them all being the same age), the adult would order something cheap like a bowl of soup, and then the kids would proceed to make my life a living hell by constantly ordering drink refills every single time I walked past them on my way to take care of my other tables.
That wasn’t the worst part, though. No, the worst part was when it came time to pay the bill and the cost would end up being something like $9.27. And the person paying the bill would leave a $10 bill and say “keep the change.”
ALL the waiters dreaded having to work the main room on Thursdays, but since I was the newest employee there I ended up having to do it every week.
Dave was bragging to his boss one day, “You know, I know everyone there is to know. Just name someone, anyone, and I know them.”
Tired of his boasting, his boss called his bluff, “OK, Dave, how about Tom Cruise?”
“No drama’s boss, Tom and I are old friends, and I can prove it.”
So Dave and his boss fly out to Hollywood and knock on Tom Cruise’s door and Tom Cruise shouts, “Dave! What’s happenin?!? Great to see you! Come on in for a beer!”
Although impressed, Dave’s boss is still sceptical. After they leave Cruise’s house, he tells Dave that he thinks him knowing Cruise was just lucky.
“No, no, just name anyone else,” Dave says.
“President Bush,” his boss quickly retorts.
“Yup,” Dave says, “Old buddies, let’s fly out to Washington.”
And off they go.
At the White House, Bush spots Dave on the tour and motions him and his boss over, saying, “Dave, what a surprise, I was just on my way to a meeting, but you and your friend come on in and let’s have a cup of coffee first and catch up.”
Well, the boss is very shaken by now but still not totally convinced. After they leave the White House grounds he expresses his doubts to Dave, who again implores him to name anyone else.
“The pope,” his boss replies.
“Sure!” says Dave. “My folks are from Poland, and I’ve known the Pope a long time.”
So off they fly to Rome. Dave and his boss are assembled with the masses in Vatican Square when Dave says, “This will never work. I can’t catch the Pope’s eye among all these people. Tell you what, I know all the guards so let me just go upstairs and I’ll come out on the balcony with the Pope.”
And he disappears into the crowd headed toward the Vatican. Sure enough, half an hour later Dave emerges with the Pope on the balcony but by the time Dave returns, he finds that his boss has had a heart attack and is surrounded by paramedics. Working his way to his boss’ side, Dave asks him, “What happened?”
His boss looks up and says, “I was doing fine until you and the Pope came out on the balcony and the man next to me said, “Who the fuck is that on the balcony with Dave?
My uncle was a functional alcoholic. He had an advanced degree and was extremely accomplished in his career. He never did the kinds of things that would result in legal problems, he didn’t drink and drive, didn’t get in fights, or commit crimes. He and his husband were wealthy. They had a house with a swimming pool in a HCOL area. He was well-loved by everyone in the family but no one was able to get him to stop drinking or seek help for it. By and large, no one really wanted to argue with him about it either because it was pointless.
My uncle died during the pandemic and it wasn’t due to COVID. He drank everyday starting early in the morning and continuing through the night. He had done this for as long as I can remember. He cared about his appearance but completely neglected his health and refused to see doctors probably because they would tell him what he didn’t want to hear -alcohol was killing him.
Heavy drinking doesn’t only affect the liver — although that would be bad enough in itself — it also messes up the functioning of multiple other organs and body systems including, but not limited to, the heart, brain, kidneys, digestive system, and the nervous system. In my uncle’s case, he developed a cardiac problem and died suddenly. For many other alcoholics, dying is a slow, painful decline that involves a lot of suffering drawn out over many years.
Even if a person manages to avoid major illness, alcoholism, whether functional or not, does not make for a happy, fulfilled life. By nature, alcoholism requires that people prioritize alcohol over and above everything else in their lives, including all the meaningful things like important relationships, personal values, activities that bring joy, and personal accomplishments.
A person who drinks their way through life is never really present in their life and thus misses out on fully experiencing life itself. It may be feel pleasant to temporarily numb or black out distressing emotions but this comes at the cost of numbing positive emotions too. It comes at the cost of losing intimacy in your relationships, or just losing relationships altogether. It comes at a cost of not being able to remember your life or make good decisions.
Alcoholism and addiction in general, whether functional or not, is sad. It’s sad to see people searching for life satisfaction in the one place it will never be found.
Have you heard that “African babies cry less”? It is true, but the why of it is more interesting. They cry less because they are attended to. They are carried by their mothers, they co-sleep. They are always with their mother, who nurses the baby as soon as it starts to fuss. Doesn’t matter if it’s for comfort, for hunger or thirst. The baby never gets to the point where it *has to* cry.
Crying is the only way a baby has to communicate…..sort of. They also wiggle, and fuss and make weird faces and reach toward something, and when none of the rest of it works, THEN they cry. So it might be better to say that crying is the LAST way babies communicate. Even so, they can’t tell you they had a bad dream, or their stomach is upset, or there’s a string wrapped around their toe and it feels weird, or they have an itch but no fine motor skills to scratch with. We have to learn to decode baby language other than crying, before it gets to that. And we don’t.
You can’t spoil a baby. Moreover, when did giving someone attention get such a bad rep? Why is it bad to give a baby attention? What defines ‘too much’ attention, and why should we ration it? Is there a limited amount available? What idiot made this up?
By giving a baby the attention it needs when it needs it, and not when you feel like giving it, or when some book says you should give it, you teach the baby that you are always there for it. You aren’t teaching them to be clingy, you are teaching them that no matter what they do, what new things they explore, you will be there. It gives them confidence to try and do new things, knowing this.
But let a baby go untended until he gets to the point of crying, and then wait some more? What good does that do? The baby is not going to become less hungry or thirsty or scared or wet. Baby isn’t going to decide, oh, I guess I wasn’t actually hungry after all, I guess I’ll stop now. It will cause a lot of stress hormones to be released in the baby’s brain. A baby who cries until he stops has given up on you. He’s learned that you are NOT going to be there for him, and his needs might not be met. That, in his desperation, he reached out to you and you turned away.
Soon enough, he or she will be telling you not to hold their hand at school, or kiss them goodbye in front of their friends. The time when they need and depend on you is only a small part of their lives, and yours, so you should enjoy it while you can.
It’s really hard to fire someone in the government, but if they are an intern, it’s pretty easy.
We had three people start at the same time as interns. The two women were fantastic, interested in learning the job, hard working, never called out, etc. but “Charles”, not so much. I had just been promoted to supervisor. A week after he started, he stuck his head in my office and offered to help me with my supervisory duties. He didn’t know how to do the work yet, but he was going to help me supervise. Got it.
A couple days later, he walks into my office, plops down in a chair and says “I don’t know how you work with some of these fucking bitches. Those dumb cunts deserve to be fired”. Now I’m not a prude, but I also behave and speak in a professional manner. I had done nothing to make Charles think my office was some “safe zone”, where he could denigrate other employees, or use that kind of language.
He would sleep at his desk, call out, leave early, not what you would expect from any professional, let alone an intern trying to make their mark.
A lot of our job entailed technical writing. He wasn’t much of a writer to begin with, and often sent supposedly final versions of documents on the the next department with track changes and edits still in them. I had to fix a lot of his supposedly finished work. .
The crown jewel was him loudly proclaiming that life would be great in two months as he would no longer be an intern, so it would be near impossible to fire him. He was fired the next day.
I had to let an employee go when I owned a security guard company. He’d been involved in a fatal shooting — he killed a man who’d fired at him — before I bought the business and he shot and killed a drunk who attacked him after I took over.
After the second shooting my insurance carrier gave me an ultimatum: Fire the employee or lose my insurance. I promised them that I would not allow him to carry a weapon and that I would assign him to my office as Operations Manager but they would not budge. I had to choose between him and insurance coverage but without insurance I was out of business.
I called everyone I knew in the business trying to find him another job. They all knew about the shootings so they weren’t interested. So I began reaching out to my clients. My guy was ex-military and very smart and I hoped that one of them might be interested in him.
It turned out that a car dealer I was providing patrol coverage to was thinking about taking his security in-house so he agreed to talk with my employee.
Long story short, I lost a $1,000 a month patrol contract but the guard was hired by the car dealer. I haven’t spoken with my ex-employee in years but the last time I did he was head of security for the dealer, in charge of 4 different car lots. Like I said, he is very smart.
I’m from Russia. Below are a few things I almost always have to explain or discuss with visitors from Russia.
1. Why individual houses are so large? We always get into discussion that house is not just a shelter, but also a manifestation of one’s financial achievements.
2. Philanthropy. There is no culture of philanthropy in Russia and many view American philanthropy either as a waste of money or as some intricate plot to get some additional benefits.
3. People don’t walk places. They go everywhere by a car.
4. There is almost no public transportation except in a few large cities. People actually have to have cars to get places. Cars are necessity, not luxury.
5. Majority of high and middle schools have sport facilities of very high, almost professional quality.
6. Many schools have orchestras, bands, theaters of a very high, almost professional quality. Free.
7. Every state has a lot of autonomy.
8. President’s salary is comparable with the one of a plastic surgeon.
9. President doesn’t automatically become the richest person in the country.
10. Majority of things in the US aren’t controlled or regulated by the government.
11. Children are expected to leave home when they are 18.
12. Students prefer and are expected to live in a dorm and not with parents.
13. When relatives visit they often stay in the hotel.
14. Many children, even in well to do families, work in fast food, car washes and do a lot of other things to get money and it is not an embarrassment.
15. Parents have their babies sleeping in separate rooms almost from the day of their birth.
16. Russians find 11-15 are particularly absurd, offensive, and egotistical.
17. Many Russians believe that American system of primary and secondary education is very inefficient. As a mother, I have to explain that it is very diverse and essentially even in the poorest districts there are tons of resources available for children who are willing to use them. There are also an opportunity for kids to take advanced and extra advanced classes providing they are willing and able to do the work. And this differentiation is available as early as elementary school.
18. How well elderly live, even those on SSI and Medicaid. How many services are available to them.
19. How open Americans are about their shortcomings and always ready for self criticism.
20. Millions of people don’t have medical insurance.
21. Some hospitals look like five-star hotels.
22. Budgets of some hospitals are equal to h/c budgets of small countries.
23. Doctors tell their patients everything.
24. Return policies and free refill.
25. Idea of a liberal art education. In Russia, after high school graduation, a student should decide on vocation: engineer, doctor, teacher, lawyer, accountant, etc. It seems inconceivable to attend a university and then to graduate without a solid specialty. I often have to explain that not knowing what one wants to do after high school is an acceptable norm in US. A student can still acquire marketable skills, expand his or horizons, get a job after graduation, and, what is even more surprising, obtain an advance degree in a totally different field later. Yes, accountant can attend a medschool and become a doctor and musician can go for aa master degree in computer science.
Long ago when the no bra and see through crazes overlapped for a while (late 70s I believe) I had a young lady walk into my 1st Period class with no bra and a see through blouse. I took roll while the students started a mini lesson on the board. Then I started to write a note I intended to give to her to go to the office for a ruling/talking to by a female counselor. I had just started when the young lady called to me “Mister, tell them to stop staring at me!” I looked up and of course every boy in class (11th grade) was staring, standing to see over other students etc. Before I could say anything another girl loudly proclaimed “If you don’t want them looking, why did you dress like that?” Another girl handed the young lady a sweater jacket to put on. Then the young lady came up and whispered “May I have a bathroom pass?”
I gave it to her and put my note aside to see what happened. 10–15 minutes later she came back wearing an over sized PE uniform t-shirt over her clothes, handed the sweater back to the girl it belonged to, looked at me and then at the one who had spoken up and in a very soft voice said “I guess I didn’t think. It won’t happen again.” It didn’t.
On October 25, 2009, I was working like I always did and my supervisor came up and asked if I wanted an early out. I didn’t usually take early outs because I was a single mom and my supervisors knew it. I shocked him because I agreed to leave early. I said it’d be nice to have some extra time with my kids. I went to the babysitter’s house and her brother told me that she took my kids to her grandparents farm and he’d let her know to bring them straight home when they got back. I left there and at a stop sign and ambulance went flying past me and I had such a strong urge to follow it but I talked myself out of it. I went home and was pulling stuff out of the fridge when my phone rang. It was the sitter’s cousin asking me where my kids were and I told her they were with Nikki and then she told me that Nikki was in a head on accident and they may have to life fight her. She swore my kids weren’t with Nikki and I knew they had to be. After that Nikki’s boyfriend called me and told me that Nikki and my kids were in a head on accident and I must have let out a really loud scream because my neighbors heard me in their house. I called my parents as I rushed out the door and I asked them to keep me calm until I found my kids because they were in a head on accident. I didn’t even notice my neighbor standing in the yard. Apparently they heard about the wreck on the scanner and then heard me scream so they’d came out to drive me wherever I needed but I didn’t hear him talk to me. I was too focused. I had no idea where to go so I decided to go straight out the direction that I saw the ambulance go earlier. I came up to an accident and I tried to get past all of the cars and a police officer stopped me and said I couldn’t go any further. I told him it was my kids without knowing 100% at the time but just by my gut feeling. He called ahead to another officer and he said they were okay but my son’s face was cut a little bit from the airbag and his glasses. They allowed me to drive up to the ambulance but I still wasn’t allowed to see my kids. I followed them to the hospital. From the look of the truck, I knew the police officer was wrong. It took over 2 hours to be able to see my kids from the first call. I only got to see them when once the arrived at the hospital. My son’s face wasn’t just cut a little it was several cuts and two black eyes. My son ended up with permanent brain damage that was diagnosed later on. He didn’t want to walk and we just thought it was because he was scared so we carried him home. He’d just crawl on the floor and not walk. When we took him to his so called specialist, he told me I needed to institutional him because he’d never be able to learn again because he no longer had a short term memory and part of his long term memory was gone. I fired him and worked to teach my son how to walk, use the bathroom, and worked with him on his schooling. I’d enrolled in college just to help him learn. I needed to know how the brain worked to teach him and him retain things. He did learn it and more after I was told he never would. He also had whiplash extremely bad. Our attorney found it in the x-rays but the hospital never mentioned it. My daughter had to be potty trained again and she had severe whiplash along with a severe concussion. For the police to tell me they were fine I knew they weren’t. especially after seeing the truck. II wish my intuition was wrong that day. I’m fortunate that I didn’t lose my kids but we still lost my son as we knew him. When my older kids saw the actual changes in him they broke down crying. Fortunately it wasn’t all at the same time. As for the child the told me to institutionalize because he’d never learn again and could never live alone, He proved them all wrong. He’s got an amazing job, lives on his own, drives himself to work, and is having a babe in a couple weeks. He thanks me all the time for not giving up on him. He and his sister are best friends because she stood up for him when he couldn’t. I hope I never ever get the urge to follow an ambulance again. That’s not something I’d normally do so that day I had gut feeling and I was right. BTW, the engine was pushed all the way to sit in the back seat where my daughter was sitting. Her seatbelt wouldn’t work so she wasn’t fastened in thank God. If my kids would of say any other way I probably would of lost one if not both. Good was looking out for my kids that day. I’ll never ever forget that day.
Tuscan-Style Ribollita
2024 02 13 08 10
Ingredients
6 slices (1/2-inch thick) day-old crusty French bread
3 cloves garlic
Black pepper, to taste
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 tablespoon chicken broth
1 onion, diced
3 carrots, chopped
3 celery stalks, chopped
1 zucchini, sliced
1 yellow squash, sliced
1/2 sweet red pepper, diced
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
4 cups torn escarole or dark cabbage
1 (16 ounce) can kidney beans
1 (14 1/2 ounce) can plum tomatoes, drained, juices reserved
1 cup chicken broth
3 tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese
Oregano leaves (garnish)
Instructions
Grease a baking sheet. Put the bread on the sheet and bake at 350 degrees F until golden brown, about 15 minutes.
Remove from the oven.
Cut 1 garlic clove in half and rub on each side of the toast slices. Sprinkle with black pepper and set aside.
Heat the oil and broth mixture in a 4-quart pot. Add the onions and sauté until tender, about 10 minutes.
Mince the remaining garlic. Add the garlic, carrots and celery to the pot. Cover and cook, stirring occasionally, for 10 minutes.
Add the zucchini, squash, sweet peppers and oregano; cook for 5 minutes.
Add the escarole, beans and tomatoes; cook until the escarole wilts, about 2 minutes.
Add black pepper. Pour the vegetable mixture into a 3-quart casserole and top with the toast.
In a large measuring cup, combine the reserved tomato juice and the broth; pour over the toast. Sprinkle with Parmesan.
Bake at 375 degrees F until the cheese has melted, about 30 minutes.
One night as I proceeded through an intersection when the light turned green I heard a car accelerate and saw it nearly t bone me. I made the stop and saw it was a local shithead kid I knew well as having a major chip on his shoulder. He blamed his faulty brakes to which I replied I’d have to impound his car for a safety inspection. At this point he changes his story and tries to reach down and roll the floor mat under his brake pedal to blame for the incident. I issued him summonses for unsafe speed, running a light a failure to yield with the warning to keep it on the straight and narrow. A short time later I received a call for a 911 hangup at his address. The door opened and a middle aged male walks out. I ask him if he was the homeowner and if everything is OK. He addresses me by name and says he’s a corrections officer and asks why his son was not given a courtesy and gives me a rehash of his sons version of events. I ask him if he called 911 over this event and he said yes he was trying to lodge a complaint against me. I replied that his son is a liar and that’s not what 911 is for. He went on grumbling about courtesy and I shot back neither you nor your kid know the meaning of the word. After that incident the kid was noticeably quieter during the numerous encounters we had with him and his delinquent crowd.
Yep, had a woman who did the same job as me on alternate days and was jealous as I was asked to do the important stuff so to speak on my shifts and not her, the boss, female would confide in me and not her as she was a straight out the door on the dot person and would never cover in an emergency etc. She started to file fake complaints on night reports …he didn’t do this etc but of course we had CCTV. She would send watsapp messages to me complaining and then the best one…my wife is Asian…one night she sent a message insulting my wife and Asian women calling them Ting Tongs and Asian brides.
What she failed to realise is that the CEO despite having an English surname through marriage was Asian. I simply replied… our Thai CEO will enjoy reading that
Years ago I was driving home from a night out in Memphis, TN. It was roughly 3 AM, and I was driving about 60 to 65 mph along Walnut Grove Rd through Shelby Farms. The speed limit stepped up from 40 mph to 55 mph pretty close to that spot, and I don’t recall which side I was on. As it turned out, it didn’t matter. I saw the reflection of my headlights on his patrol car and started to pull over before his blue lights came on. Once stopped, I rolled down my window and had my license and registration ready for him when he walked up to talk to me. He looked at them, at me, and at the officer decal on my windshield and said I could go. Greatly surprised, I asked him why, and I would never have predicted his response. “You pulled over so fast and in such a short distance that I don’t even have to go around [a mile or so down the road to a break in the median] and come back to my spot [where he had set his speed trap].” I was not intoxicated, and I was far from the fastest car to travel that road. But at that particular time I was the only driver around, so I got his attention. The whole thing was a bit surreal, but I was grateful for the outcome. I thanked him and went home to get some sleep.
I called for what I said was, I guess, a welfare check. I saw a young girl, probably mid-teens, walking on the rural road near where we live. I didn’t think much about it, even though there are few people who walk on that road, and very few homes. Later, as I returned home, I found her walking up the even more rural road leading up the mountain to where we live. I stopped and asked if she needed a ride. To my surprise, she said yes (her a young girl, me an old man). I asked her where she was going, and she said to visit someone. We passed my house, and she said to stop at a neighbor’s house. I asked who she was seeing, since I knew our neighbors, and she just said, “Someone.” I let her out and went home. I had to leave a while later and found her walking back down at the bottom of the mountain on the road near where I first saw her. I had also noticed that she had taken off her jacket and dropped it on the road. At that point I called the police and said that I was worried about her. I described her and told the 911 operator where she was. A short time after that a police car passed me going in that direction. I did not see the girl later when I returned home. I don’t know what happened, but she seemed troubled in some way, and was definitely acting odd. I hope the police gave her a ride home, or helped her with whatever her problem was, but I have no idea.
Ladies, this is the worst expression you could tell a man. Don’t tell him all men are the same because no one told you to try them all.
Men do not like to be told what to do and how to do it all the time.
When you ask stupid questions like “Do I look fat to you?” “Do you still love your ex?” “When I grow old, will you still love me?” “Do you think that woman is more beautiful than me?”
We all hate it when you bring up old things every time we fight.
Talking to your Friends about Anything and Everything
Men don’t like it when you talk about your exes, especially if you do it a lot or bring up details.
Even if you are just friends, men hate to be friend-zoned.
I was the IT manager at one of the Maryland Job Corp centers. I was in the process of upgrading government cast off computer equipment from 486s to Pentium Ones, if that tells u how long ago.
Being a nonsmoker, I never take breaks. Ever. I was coming across campus carrying 4 CPUs. I walk really fast so it alway looked like I was running to other staff. They’d joke about me working so hard, so fast. I stopped outside the admin building to catch up with the HR assistant. I was changing her computer next. In front of probably 10 of these smokers, my boss, the director of Finance and Administration took a puff and asked, “Christine, isn’t there someplace you should be?”
Dead, shocked silence.
The 60 hours I’d put in the week before, being forced to sign something that I was volunteering so wasn’t paid OT, and this comment flashed thru my mind.
I took a breath, bit back my inner voice’s come backs, smiled and set the computers down on the sidewalk.
I said, “There sure is.”. Smiled, walked inside, got my keys and kept walking.
When my older son was 7 (he’s about to be 28), the school nurse called because my son had an accident on the playground and sustained a large bump/knot to the center of his forehead. They said he was fine, but that I should probably take him to the doctor just to be sure. The nurse kept… almost giggling?… and when I asked what happened, she reiterated that he was okay, but that he would best be able to explain when I got there.
i should probably mention that he was already a big nerd, an advanced reader who used words many adults didn’t even use and wasn’t athletic AT ALL. He didn’t like to sweat or get dirty and was always afraid of injuring himself. Needless to say, all the way to the school I was perplexed at what MY KID could’ve possibly been doing so carelessly or vigorously on that playground to have injured himself.
When I got there he was embarrassed and mad af at himself but also laughing and I will never forget what he said. “My arch nemesis challenged me to a duel and I won. And it felt so good I couldn’t hold it in. I did a victory lap, but was stupid and did it with my eyes closed and ran into the tether ball pole. Mom, I gloated too hard.”
Months after buying a security guard company, from my former employer. one of my guards was involved in a fatal shooting at a nightclub. A drunk wielding a tire iron ran at him and the guard shot him once, through the heart, from about six feet away.
Houston Police investigated and eventually the guard was no-billed, meaning a grand jury declined to indict my guy, but that didn’t stop the drunk’s family from filing a wrongful death suit against the club and my company. My liability insurer wound up settling my part of the suit for $30,000 but after doing so they blindsided me by insisting that I fire the guard.
A couple of years earlier, while working for the man I bought the company from, he was involved in another fatal shooting at an apartment complex. In that case, a man shot at him from across a courtyard and his return fire struck the man in the head, killing him instantly. No lawsuit was filed in that case but my insurer still believed that two fatal shootings in such a short time indicated that the guard was too much of a liablility, so I was told to fire him or they’d cancel my coverage. I proposed giving him a job in my office so he wouldn’t be working a post, but the insurance company wouldn’t budge. I had 25 other fulltime employees to consider so I had to let the man go.
But I knew that a car dealer I provided security for was considering taking their security in-house, meaning they’d hire guards directly who’d work for the dealership. I talked with the owner and told him that my (former) guard would be a great choice to run his security team and, after checking the guy out, he agreed. I wound up selling my company and leaving Houston 10 years after I fired the guard but we’d stayed in touch over the years so I had a chance to visit with him before I left. He’d left the car dealership and was assistant security director for Occidental Petroleum. He said my firing him was the best thing that ever happened to him.
I use an iPad mounted facing down and connected to a projector as a document projector. The mount is flexible, so I can aim the iPad at the class, if I want to. If I suspect that students are cheating when I’m not looking, I just set the iPad to record a video or time-lapse, then quietly flex the mount, so the iPad is pointed at the students.
Then I walk around the room, making sure to turn my back on the students I suspect are cheating.
Then, I come back to the iPad and stop the video.
Finally, at the end of the quiz or test, I turn on the projector and show the students the beginning of the video I made. I pause it just a few seconds in, so they can think about the fact that I caught them on camera, and I ask the students to be honest with themselves and me. If they were cheating, let me know, before I see it in the video. It’s the right thing to do.
Most of them confess right then and there. Some of them don’t. We have to watch the video together and I have to point to the moment when they’re cheating.
If they know they cheated, but don’t confess, I show their parents the video.
Nazis had a pretty weird thing about blonde, blue eyed babies.
During Hitler’s rise to power, he initiated a program to raise the percentage of Aryan children. This was called a Lebensborn
program.
They basically made every available child to be in peak physical condition and made to match the Aryan race standards.
This included treatments such as: a very strict diet, early indoctrination with Nazi ideologies and even the usage of ultraviolet rays for hair color (in case a baby wasn’t blonde enough)
image 175
Most children came from German impregnated moms but after WWII started , the Nazis encouraged SS soldiers to ‘’get to know’’ the beautiful girls of Europe. They captured not only the best countries, but also the most Aryan girls 😉
If those ladies got pregnant, and their children were deemed as desirable, they were sent to a Lebensborn house where their kids would get a treatment like the one written above. The main ‘’factory’’ (besides Germany) was Norway, with 12.000 kids born during WWII.
When there were not enough moms available, the SS would simply kidnap children that fit their Aryan standards, as Himmler himself said
‘’It is our duty to take [the children] with us to remove them from their environment … either we win over any good blood that we can use for ourselves and give it a place in our people or we destroy this blood’’
The USSR, Estonia, Latvia, Norway and Yugoslavia were serious targets. Poland reportedly lost as many as 100.000 children during the whole war.
image 174
(abducted Polish children in a special labour camp)
After WWII, most children could not be found and linked back with their families because their program files were destroyed to hide war crimes. Hence, an exact number of Germanized children is impossible to tell.
Frid Lyngstad of ABBA is a known survivor of this terrible initiative. Her German father who was an officer in the German army, befriended her Norwegian mother to supply the SS with enough moms. After the war, she and her mom migrated to Sweden.
image 173
(The one with dark hair)
At least something good came out of this whole mess.
I worked for a very large, blue, trash company for about 7 years. After the first year I was running routes so efficiently that there were no improvements left to make so they pulled me from those routes and made me a swing driver. I started running everyone’s routes faster by an average of 3 hours per day, other swing drivers would take 60 hours to run the same routes it was taking me 36 to run and pick up what they missed. I did this for a long time and after several talks with management to make the pay more fair they told me that there was nothing they could do. We were paid hourly and thats it. I told them I was going to find another job then. They freaked out and I told them I wasn’t leaving just yet but as soon as I found something else I was leaving. Fast forward 3 years and I walk into my managers office to tell him I am quitting. He couldn’t believe it because it was out of nowhere in his eyes. I walked away from a fun fast paced job making $20 per hour getting anywhere from 33–56 hours per week depenfing on which routes i would run or who they would let me help. I am now working a job where I only work 6 months out of the year, easy work and make $120k and only requires 8 hours of overtime every other week. Now fast forward another 4 years and I run into the new manager and supervisor. We talk for a minute and the supervisor tells the new manager I used to work for them. He offers me my job back. Before I could even speak the supervisor tells him they can’t afford me to come back. I wished them a good day and walked away. So to answer your question, probably not fired but definitely passed up for promotions. That’s what they did to me.
Because of her eyes that were getting angrier at me by the day. Because of her eyes that were getting hungrier by the day, but not for me. Because of the divide that had started to appear, and there was nothing I could do about it.
It started with a crack (that I didn’t notice at first).
And when I did notice more cracks, only hours later — on that very same day — I realized that she already was in a very different place, and that she might be cheating. Her cell phone behavior had become erratic. Her reactions on my every sentence aggressive. Just like that.
She must have been hiding it, but now the cracks started to appear.
Hours later, in one of the longest nights of my adult life — and still on that very same day — she blatantly stated in the darkness of our cold bedroom that her love for me had faded. (“It was not like before anymore.”)
And day after day, week after week, the space between us became bigger, and the cracks grew into an abyss of anger and distrust.
At one point, the divide became too big, and she was standing at the other side — not even waving. She was just looking at me with empty eyes, as if she was not seeing me anymore. (And I think she really didn’t.) I would see that same empty look on her more than fifteen years in the future — in the awkward silence only separated people know — when she was in the final days of late stage breast cancer.
Much further away on the other side of the divide now, and about to disappear.
The problem is that back in the day, we were already married.
And there was nothing to call off except our every shared memory. As if life had become a text, written on a chalk blackboard.
A friend of mine was having a medieval themed wedding. She had this gorgeous green gown and planned this elaborate hairstyle with flowers braided in. She asked her best friend to be maid of honour, and I got to be bridesmaid.
Get to the big day, and maid of honor is a no show. No phone call, text or email either. So I get upgraded and asked to help with my friends hair. I know NOTHING about elaborate hairstyles, there was no way I could do the style she wanted. So we ended up settling on a simple braided style with green ribbons and flowers threaded in. My friend was pissed. Not with me, but with her now ex-friend. Rest of the day went without a hitch and was gorgeous. My friend thanked me for helping at the last minute.
She never did get an explanation from that other girl, and refused to ever see her again.
I’ve quit without notice twice in my life. The first time was when I was passed over for promotion at Walmart but was offered a 25¢ an hour raise, instead, in recognition of the good work I was doing for the store. 25¢ an hour came out to $520 a year while the promotion would have resulted in a pay increase of around $12,000 annually. I told the store manager to shove the raise and walked out.
Several years later I was working in IT for a clothing manufacturer but I wanted to leave because I was, once again, denied a promotion. I soon learned that my boss and her toadie were holding me back by giving tepid references when companies I’d interviewed with called, so when I finally was offered a job I accepted immediately and told them I’d start the following Monday.
Before leaving work on Friday I drafted a companywide email telling my boss, and her toadie, and the business owner exactly how I felt about them, and I delayed delivery until Monday morning, so it would be the first thing everyone, including the three stooges saw. My boss actually called me on Monday morning, around 5 AM, before the email was delivered and asked me to come in early because she was having trouble with a printer. I told her I’d be right in and then rolled over and went back to sleep. She never called me again.
China is one of the most emblematic and visible practitioners of Progressive-Conservatism, which may seem an odd description given that Communism is described by the West as ultra-radical.
However, when integrated into the context of Chinese history and its longstanding social-philosophy, it’s actually normative as the past is honored while wading into the future with confidence based on past successes.
When looked at seriously, China’s policies seek to establish Balance and Harmony globally.
Containing China makes no sense. Working with China makes a great deal of sense. And the latter path is far easier than that of confrontation.
A look at the Big Picture shows nations confronting China declining while those cooperating rising.
A while ago my mother’s kid sister (my aunt) was on the dating market, and she was dating various men. After a period of time, she had to choose between two men. Apparently, it was a tough decision.
Ralph. He was a blue-collar carpenter. He was from a traditional Catholic family, and was a “salt of the earth” kind of guy. I really liked him alot. He was honest, a straight-shooter. He was just a all around “good guy”. But he wasn’t wealthy. He was just solidly middle class, with about 11 children.
Sonny. He was a dentist, who branched out and bought up factories and businesses. Turned them around. And then sold them for a profit. He had a daughter, and a large ranch with horses, and a great spread of land.
Well, my aunt decided on Sonny.
Ralph was devastated. I (and my wife at the time) liked him a lot. I haven’t seen him since. He used to help my mother fix and repair stuff at her house. He just did it because he had the talent and the ability. He built her a storage room in the basement and a huge porch in the back.
A few years ago, Sonny and my aunt were having troubles. Apparently he was “too controlling” . Ah. I hate to hear that.
I am of the opinion that if she would have chosen Ralph, she would have been much happier. Maybe not wealthier, but certainly… happier. Sigh.
It’s all about picking your battles with teens. My oldest is 18 now and has been accepted into a very good college, so we’re pretty much “done” raising her. Now it’s mainly just raising money for her.
But, between the ages of 13–18, there were quite a few times where she did something she knew we didn’t want her to do, or she lied to us, and we let her think we didn’t know. We knew, we just picked our battles, and those didn’t seem like battles worth fighting. Basically, if it was something that put her or her future in danger, we came down on her for it. If it was something that just annoyed us or was rude, we let it slide, sometimes.
For example, we grounded her when her grades started slipping because she was spending too much time with her boyfriend. She was mad, but it worked. Within a week, her grades were back up and she was un-grounded. We also have a rule in the house about not hoarding dirty dishes in the bedrooms, but sometimes I’ll look in her room and see literally 20 dirty dishes. Is it worth making a fuss over, even though she’s being disrespectful and breaking a rule? Nah. I just ask her to bring me the dishes from her room the next time I’m loading the dishwasher. No need to pick a fight.
Our parenting mantra for her was pretty much: “Make sure she doesn’t screw up her future by getting pregnant, doing drugs, or failing school, but otherwise, don’t needlessly rock the boat.”
It all worked out. Assuming she doesn’t go completely insane over the next five months, she’ll be fine.
Chicken Soup with Tortellini (Pollo in Brodo con Tortellini)
Tortellini Soup
There is nothing, nothing, as comforting as walking into the house after a long day to the wafting aroma of chicken tortellini soup.
Today’s Creamy Chicken Tortellini Soup is a healthified version of a heavier cream-based soup.
I haven’t removed the essential elements that make it special such as tender chicken, hearty cheese tortellini, and even a little cream. I’ve just reduced certain ingredients, so you can feel good about serving this Creamy Chicken Tortellini Soup to your family.
And maybe even having seconds.
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Yield: 8 servings
Ingredients
1 (3 to 4 pound) broiler-fryer chicken, cut up
6 cups water
1 stalk celery (with leaves, cut into 1-inch pieces
1 medium carrot, cut into 1-inch pieces
1 medium onion, cut into fourths
2 sprigs parsley
1 bay leaf
2 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon black peppercorns
1 package commercial fresh tortellini or 20 homemade tortellini
2 cups water
Minced parsley
Grated Parmesan cheese
Ingredients You Will Need
DeLallo Extra Virgin Olive Oil
Large Sweet Onion – peeled and chopped
Red Bell Pepper – seeded and chopped
Carrots – sliced
Minced Garlic Cloves
Boneless Skinless Chicken Breast – or bonleess chicken thighs
Chicken Broth – low sodium chicken broth
DeLallo Three-Cheese Tortellini Pasta
Heavy Cream
Packed Frozen Spinach – or fresh baby spinach leaves
Fresh Chopped Parsley
Dried Thyme Leaves – or fresh thyme leaves
Crushed Red Pepper
Salt and Pepper
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Instructions
Heat chicken, 6 cups water, celery, carrot, onion, 2 sprigs parsley, bay leaf, salt and peppercorns to boiling in Dutch oven; reduce heat. Cover and simmer until thickest pieces of chicken are done, about 45 minutes.
Remove chicken from broth; strain broth.
Refrigerate chicken and broth separately until cool.
Remove chicken from bones and skin. Cut chicken into bite-size pieces; add to broth. Cover and refrigerate.
Prepare tortellini. If using commercial tortellini, do not precook.
Skim fat from broth. Heat broth and 2 cups water to boiling. Add tortellini. Heat to boiling; reduce heat. Cover and simmer until tortellini are tender, about 30 minutes.
Sprinkle each serving with minced parsley.
Serve with Parmesan cheese.
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How To Make Chicken Tortellini Soup
This Creamy Chicken Tortellini Soup is quick and easy to make, yet offers so much wow-factor, your family will ask for it again and again!
Saute. Place a large sauce pot over medium heat. Add the olive oil and chopped onions. Saute for 3 minutes to soften. Then add the chopped bell pepper, carrots, and garlic. Saute another 3 minutes.
Simmer. Add whole raw chicken breasts, chicken broth, dried thyme, crushed red pepper, salt, and ground black pepper to the pot. Bring to a boil. Lower the heat a little and simmer for 15 minutes, until the chicken is cooked through. Remove the chicken and place on a cutting board.
Cook Pasta. Turn the heat back to medium. With the broth still simmering, stir in the DeLallo Three Cheese Tortellini. Stir well so it doesn’t stick together. Then chop or shred the chicken and place it back in the soup.
Cream and Season. Once the tortellini is cooked through, about 10-14 minutes, turn off the heat. Stir in heavy cream, spinach, and parsley. Add a little more cream if desired. Taste, then salt and pepper as needed.
My Mum was 79 when a lady who grew up in the same small town as she made contact and started chatting with her. My Mum said, “I don’t know who this person is, but she seems to know me.” Eventually, this lady said to my mum that she was her half-sister. They organised a DNA test and there was shown to be “a high probability” that they were half-sisters. AncestryDNA has shown that I am related to my Mum’s new half-sister. So after 79 years, her whole ancestry has changed.
The story ended up being that my Mum’s father was unable to have children whilst her mother really wanted one, so the father of this other lady was allowed to produce a child with my Nan, that child being my mother. Apparently, the other family was aware of what had happened but kept it under wraps until my Mum was 79 years old when her half-sister decided to talk to Mum and see if she was a nice person. Having decided she was, she opened up to her regarding the situation.
On 2024/1/8, China praised the commander & crew of Nanchang destroyer.
Nanchang (南昌号) is 10000 tons with the most up-to-date equipment. It started service in 2020. It has sailed to Guam a few times. The latest one was Dec 2023 to accompany the fleet of Liaoning aircraft carrier (辽宁航母).
On 2024/1/8, Chinese CCTV released a video which showed 2 US warships, probably EP-18E, nose-diving towards Nanchang. To intercept Nanchang’s electromagnetic field.
Nanchang left Liaoning fleet & went, alone, closer to US aircraft carrier fleet. It activated its Fire Control Radar & opened the lid of 7 of its many missiles. To counter-intercept the electromagnetic field & to warn USA that the US aircraft carrier fleet has been targeted & can be attacked by Nanchang.
The standoff of Nanchang-US warplanes & warships lasted for 20 days. At the end, US fleet left. … China won the electromagnetic “war” & Nanchang crew was thus praised.
Several years ago, I was in court in North Carolina. At the time, cases were called alphabetically, by last name.
One gentleman, let’s call him Ben Jones (not his name but I can’t remember what it was) was called to face charges for some petty crime or another. The judge hadn’t even heard any evidence when Mr. Jones started cursing the judge, the DA, the bailiff, the clerk and everybody else. When the judge gave him a month in County for contempt, he cursed more. This went on until he ended up with about 6 months in county.
When he was finally removed from the courtroom, Chris Jones (again, not the real name) was called up. He immediately asked for a continuance. When the judge asked why, he said that Mr. Curser was his brother and he didn’t want his behavior to affect his case. Even the judge laughed a little and told the guy not to worry, he could keep an open mind.
The judge smiled at the guy upon his not guilty plea, found him not guilty and told him to tell his brother that he’s a reasonable judge.
It is very hard for people who live in western democracies and are used to a multi-party political system to understand that defining the Party as being either left or right is not applicable in the Chinese context.
I would just say that the Party is strongly pro-development and pro-growth, and is focused on improving the lives of ordinary Chinese and making China into one of, if not the greatest economic power in the world, with a special emphasis on manufacturing and hi-tech. It has been very practical and pragmatic, sometimes adopting socialist policies and sometimes adopting free-market policies. As far as the Party leadership is concerned, it is most important that it works for ordinary Chinese, and does not threaten the leadership role of the Party in Chinese society.
The greatest threats to the Party leadership are internal corruption by Chinese officials; this is why Xi has waged his never-ending war on corruption. He sees corruption as a potential cancer in the system, which undermines the peoples’ faith in the system and Party. In China’s past, corruption has almost always been a major contributor to the fall of Chinese imperial dynasties. The other great threat comes from capitalism going wild, and Chinese worshipping the super-rich as their role models. If this were to happen, materialism would run wild, and Chinese would become superficial materialist people like many South Koreans, who worship billionaires and successful actors and entertainers.
To sum up, modern China is very complex, and describing the Party as leftist or rightist is completely inadequate to describe its real nature.
I was hitchhiking a ride one day, about ten years after being bullied. A truck passed, slowed down and backed up to where I was.
“Hey Brad! It’s me” I heard from just below the passenger side door, from the person leaning out of view to open it. All the fear of my past washed over me because I recognized that voice. It was the voice of the doom that followed my every move, my tormentor from junior high through the end of high school.
He looked at me through the open door of his truck with a side of him I had never seen before. “It’s ok man. I’m not trying to trick you or anything” he said.
Various scenarios played in my head, none of which made sense for an adult man to think, so I got in the truck. I needed the ride.
“Thanks for stopping” I said.
“I did more to talk to you than give you a ride. I didn’t think I’d ever see you again, but there you were, and now I have the chance.”
The chance at what? I thought. Oh sweet Jesus! Is this guy a serial killer by now? Did all the hate he pummeled my frail body with finally build up to a point that he was now insane? What other reason could there be?
I considered jumping out, but that would certainly kill me. All I could do was wait for his next move.
“I swear I’ve thought about you since I last saw you” he said. “What I did to you was so very wrong. I’m so sorry. I can’t tell you why I did it.”
His voice trailed off into a sob. His shoulders lurched forward in heaves of grief. He had to pull over to maintain control of the vehicle.
We sat in awkward silence on the side of the road.
I held his confession in high regard. It was the first time I saw him as a human being. The fear I felt was displaced by compassion for a person that suffered from the enlightenment of adulthood. I knew then what I needed to do.
“I forgive you, Trickle” (his nickname .) It was akin to evoking the name of Satan himself.
“I don’t go by that name anymore!” he protested angrily.
“What should I call you now? What is your name?” I said, hoping that he knew.
“It’s Paul, just Paul” he said in a soft voice.
“Pleased to meet you, Paul” I said reaching out my hand to shake his.
With that the demon that was “Trickle” was exorcised from both of our lives. All the suffering we endured was cleansed.
We talked for hours and stayed in the truck for the duration. I never saw him again.
I think of him now. I hope that he received my forgiveness, and that his life for the last 30 years since we met that day was free of guilt.
Paul, if you’re reading this I want you to know that I did and still do, forgive you.
Not me but a friend. He is pretty high up in the Cyber Security world and has his own business. He was hired by a company to help them harden their network. So he went in and did his due diligence to understand everything that they had, what their vulnerabilities were, etc. After he had done the due dligence, he designed and wrote up a system that he felt would meet their needs. It is very important to understand that when he does this work, he is specific about what hardware and software that they will need to use. He has it in his contracts with his clients that they must follow his design to the letter or his company will walk away, the client will still be required to pay in full all work done to that point + a portion of the remaining contract, and his company will be released from any and all liability.
He goes into the meeting with his client C Suite. Goes through his presentation and presents his numbers. Immediately, the CFO pulls up a document for a completely different system (different hardware, software, etc) that he feels would be just as adequate and significantly cheaper. My friend explains why he has designed the system and hardware needs to best meet their requirements that they gave him and how that system that the CFO was referring to would not meet their requirements. CFO immediately argues back that they should use this cheaper system and demands that he and his company implement it per the contract. My friend immediately stands up, gathers his documentation, designs, presentations, hardware list and everything from everyone in the meeting and tells the CEO that they have just violated their contract with him and they they have 30 days to pay his company out and that he and his company will not be working for them at any time now or in the future and walks out.
About ten years ago, I was on a one-stop flight from Vietnam to Los Angeles. Hanoi – Incheon – LAX.
We were transiting at Incheon airport. We had to do a re-security screening after landing from Hanoi. So, we got in line. An officer was walking back and forth in front of the lines, with a water bottle in his hand above his head, speaking loudly in English, “No water. No fruits.”, to let people know to get rid of all those things from our bags before getting checked.
Suddenly, a middle-aged woman in front of me, walked toward the officer, took the water bottle off of his hand, opened it, drank some water from it, closed the bottle, and gave the bottle back to the officer with her biggest smile. She nodded her head with the officer like she wanted to thank him for offering the water. The officer was surprised and then laughed, but the woman didn’t understand English, I guessed, she kept smiling and got to the screening area.
The screening area had five small tables in a row, each table had an officer. You just had to walk to the table and open your handbag for the officer to take a look, and you were done, pretty quick and simple. One by one. After finished checking a person, the officer raised their hand, “Next!”, so the next person could walk up.
That woman was finished checking, she was walking out when the officer at the next table raised his hand, “Next!”. Suddenly the woman also raised her hand and gave the officer a high-five and the same big smile. Then she walked away.
I still smile every time I remember that trip and that cheerful woman.
One night, while driving home form the Ozzfest, an officer on DUI patrol stopped me for suspicion of DUI (he claimed I was swerving) He made me do the FST bare foot and I passed. He the takes out the breathalyzer and I blew a .008 (I saw the reading as he quickly turned away) and the cop stepped into me, looked me in the EYE and said; “HERE!, IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, the legal limit it .07” I knew he was messing with me so, I just shut up and said; “Oh? I didn’t know”. From there on, I said nothing. He arrested me for suspicion of DUI. I know the limit is .08 but I don’t fight with cops on the side of the road. When I was released, I walked to the tow yard and picked up my truck. When you get stopped for DUI they take your driver’s license (send it to DMV) and give you a number to call with in 10 days.
The next morning I called the DMV. The DMV gave back my license over the phone cause the was no evidence filed. Knowing there was no evidence, I put myself on the court calender so, I could get a copy of my police report. In order to get the police report myself, (without a lawyer), I had to agree to defend myself so, I agreed to defend myself.
The judge calls my name, he pauses… because, he sees that I am defending myself. He says; “Charles are you going to defend yourself?” I reply, “YES SIR!” The judge then says; “DO YOU KNOW WHAT BEN FRANKLIN said about people who defend themselves?” I replied; “YES, YOU DON’T NEED TO HIRE A LAWYER TO GET A POLICE REPORT”. The judge didn’t like my answer but he gave the report reluctantly. The judge gave me my report and I went down the street to have lunch and read the report.
I read through the report and to my amazement, the officer told the truth, that I blew a .008 and the limit was .08. after read the report, I went back to court and found a DA. I tried to get him into the court room so, my case could be dismissed. The DA declined to help me so, I had to return for a hearing.
To make a long story short, trust me its longer….I defended myself the whole way through but it took a dozen appearances (over a year of court dates) before I finally got my case dismissed. KNOW YOUR RIGHTS AND READ THE POLICE REPORT BEFORE YOU AGREE TO ANYTHING.
I saw neither of the following, but I sure heard about them from the offenders themselves.
I teach in Thailand and have trained teachers in not only methodology but also cultural considerations.
‘Sam’ had been a kindergarten teacher in the U.S. and had often patted kids’ heads when they did well or playfully tugged gently on their hair.
Why he thought that would be ok with adults, I will never understand. Mortified, he came to me, admitting that the students had explained that their heads were considered blessed and asked him to stop touching them. He had apologized profusely.
‘Dan,’ on the other hand, was stubborn in the belief that he owed no one an apology. A class represenative had asked a Thai Academic Office staff member to tell ‘Mr. Dan’ to stop putting his feet up on the teacher’s desk and on empty student chairs.
When she explained to ‘Dan’ that feet are considered ‘dirty’ as the lowest point of the body and should not be placed on furniture that others use nor pointed aggressively at others, ‘Dan’ scoffed and walked away.
The Assistant Academic Director then got involved, and ‘Dan’ grudgingly apologized to his class who accepted it but because of his tone, saw him as disrespectful of Thai culture.
‘Mr. Dan’ complained about the ‘ridiculous’ custom to anyone who would listen. Most (including me) reminded him that he is a guest here and should abide by Thai ways.
Note: If paper currency goes skittering, do NOT put your foot on it because it can be considered lese majeste since money carries the image of the king. A fine or even jail time may be involved.
Woman Adopted 11-yr-old Cat. What She Did Next Shocked The Shelter Staff!
It was part of an initiative that I began 10 years back, my goal to slowly acquire skills to fix things myself so that I wasn’t constantly having to hire people to fix things.
I was under my car laying on my back sorta like this.
image 162
I don’t remember precisely the problem with the car. But I do remember it was night time and I had a small flashlight.
I didn’t have the equipment to lift the truck up properly, so I’d just slowly and carefully wiggled my way under there.
It was a tight squeeze. Very tight.
I felt like Bishop in that insanely claustrophobic scene from Aliens where he crawls through a mile-long, shoulder-tight tunnel.
image 163
As I’m on my back, my flashlight is shining up into the engine and I’m quickly realizing that I’m in over my head, (you may as well be teaching a monkey to do brain surgery at this point).
Then – shit got real.
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
I heard growling.
With my god damn legs hanging out from under this car, I heard the deep guttural growling of a large dog within 10 feet of me, clearly growling directly at me.
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
I began squirming out as the dog continued growling from the same spot.
Then I emerged.
I looked right.
And the growling stopped.
It was a familiar large, yellow lab, who started wagging his tail as he recognized me:
It was my neighbor’s dog.
And my neighbor was standing right behind his dog, with his hand firmly gripped on the dog’s leash.
When I was 17, I worked for a cellphone store. One of my coworkers was helping this lady who was going through a tough time. Her husband passed away, and she had five small kids. He was their sole provider. She told us he cared for everything so she could focus on their home and kids. She needed a phone and didn’t have access to the funds her husband had left her because her mother-in-law was trying to take it from her. So my coworkers told her she could purchase the cheapest phone, and it would be suitable for a couple of months and work for what she needed it for. But we were instructed to tell the client they could only get the phone with the highest phone plan. If we sold it with the lowest phone plan, it would kill our numbers. My coworker saw this lady was struggling and did this for her. The next day when our boss asked why it had been done. He was furious and fired her for it. I quit a couple of days later.
I’m a teacher. I always insisted on having the crappy classroom at the end of corridor one, one of the five ground level corridors.
Why? I wanted to keep the students away from the office. If they were late, I wanted them to slip into my class without reporting to the authorities. I wanted easy and immediate access to the outside for any students experiencing acute anxiety or if they were about to burst into tears. If that happened, they were guaranteed some privacy.
I could also see who was at the Happy Tree across the street (a key pot smoking location).
My classroom was a long way from the office and most administrators were too lazy to come by. If they dropped by, there was a reason, which was fine with me.
But there was another reason I wanted to be at the end of corridor one.
The intruder alert procedures insisted that we gather on the floor in our classrooms, remain silent after closing the drapes or blinds and covering the window on the door and locking it.
Like fish in a drained barrel.
So that was the official Plan A.
My plan was Plan B.
If there was an intruder alert, I needed to determine the direction it came from. Then I wanted all my students to run across the street to the Happy Tree, as a group, on through the park, across the next street, and through the intersection to the mall. They were to be silent and fast. I would be behind them.
It never happened.
We have so much support and school-to-work programming for mentally ill and angry young men that I don’t think it will ever happen, but if I was wrong and it did happen, I wanted my students out of harm’s way.
They couldn’t be out of harm’s way if they were cowering in the corner of a classroom.
The US military is the biggest military power in the world. There’s no arguing against that. They have some of the best troops, the best tech, and probably the best logistics. Heck, strike “probably”, they fight wars on other continents.
What they often don’t have is a clear idea of what they want to achieve, and that’s down to the people who send them out. The US politicians rarely have a clear vision of their war objectives, and when they have one, it’s often laughably unrealistic.
image 164
George W. Bush planning the invasion of Iraq
For instance, the idea behind the adventures in both Afghanistan and Iraq was to install a democracy. That’s not a military objective, that’s a political objective, and the military is patently useless at that sort of thing. And it was a hopeless task to begin with; yes, there was a lot of opposition to Hussein, but they all just wanted a different crazed dictator. Vietnam became a total mess because, again, they sought a political outcome, and asked the military to achieve it, and then messed up the political side totally.
It’s all a bit like if Elon Musk wants new and better recruits for SpaceX, so he hires Lionel Messi and Novak Djokovic. Yes, they’re world class, but they’re not world class at what he’s trying to do.
I was driving through a long painful construction zone, we were reduced from three lanes to 1, for no apparent reason, we would suddenly come to a stop, with a flagman stopping us, then start up again. The speed was reduced from 110 kmph 68 mph to 50 kmph 30 mph.. We had been crawling along, or stopped for 16 km, 10 miles.
I was the person in front, when the flagman stopped, so there were no cars in front of me, for a couple of kilometers. When the flagman motioned for me to proceed I was leading the pack. After a couple of km I could see the “End of construction “ sign. For some reason there was a concrete barricade slanted across the shoulder. I started speeding up, I was maybe 50 feet from the barricade, that was also the end of construction, and I had sped up to maybe 80 kmph, out of nowhere, a guy passes me on the shoulder. He had to have seen the barricade, but he was accelerating, I’m guessing he was doing 200 kmph 124 mph when he flew by me, he had to instantly change into my lane, I slammed on the brakes, and he almost made it through, his bumper clipped the barricade and went flying through the air, and skidded across three lanes to disappear into the median. I swear he missed hitting me by less than a foot.
I was the only one who could see the end of construction, and 110 kmph sign, so I was the only one who had been speeding up, and there was a huge gap behind me that would have been easy to pull into, and once we passed the barricade, we were back to 3 lanes again, and I was the only car ahead of him.
I honestly had no idea that someone was doing 200 in a 50 kmph zone transitioning to 110, on the shoulder. It was single lane traffic, I wasn’t even checking my mirrors.
To save maybe 30 seconds, he lost his bumper. I have no idea how much more damage he did because he kept going at well over the speed limit.
This was a long time ago about 1985–86. My son was in I think 3–4 grade. He and a group of about 4 boys hung out together in the playground at recess. One day the 5 of them were hanging out at the swings. They were like sitting on them and talking but not really swinging in them. The story gets a bit long here.
Another boy came up and asked them for one of the swings since they weren’t really using them. Now one of the boys being a smarty pants said something like “ give me a quarter and I’ll let you have the swing”. To his surprise the boy gave him the quarter.
I think you see where this went. So everyday at recess the 5 boys would run out to the swings and charge a quarter for the other kids to ride the swings. This went on for about 2 weeks until someone at the school finally found out.
So I get a call from the school to come in. Come to find out they had called the police and had the school psychologist and a police detective “talk” to the boys. The detective actually threatened the boys that they could go to jail and psychologist wasn’t much nicer.
Now don’t get me wrong I was not condoning the behavior but in the end I don’t think what they did was actually wrong it just wasn’t very nice. The school on the other hand label these boys as the horrible thugs and the police even said that they were guilty of extortion. The psychologist was going on about deviant behavior and how traumatic an experience it was for the kids that paid for the swings.
I went in to the school but I did not take my son with me they asked me why and I said because I didn’t think they would want him to hear what I was about to say which was the following:
can understand your concern and my husband and I will deal with the behavior, however here are my issues.
The school intimated to me I should have noticed my son coming home with all this money and I was a poor parent. It was a quarter so no I wouldn’t notice he had a quarter on him at the end of the day. We’re not talking $10 a ride here, we had a change dish on top of the TV that he and his sister would take out money for lunches or milk/snacks at school so I wouldn’t really think it strange that he had an “extra” quarter at the end of the day.
*Where was the adult supervision on the playground that this behavior went on for 2 weeks before one of the others kids on the playground complained?
*Whereas I agree what they did wasn’t very nice it was in no way a criminal act or extortion. The boys did not threaten the other kids like gimme your money or I’ll beat you up or if you tattle you’ll be sorry. They simply were selling rides on the swings.
*You had absolutely no right to have my son ( who is probably about 8 years old) interrogated or questioned by either the police and psychologist without my permission.
*In the end the boys made about $2 total each because all of the boys said sometimes the kids only had a dime or a nickel to pay.
Again I agree it wasn’t a nice thing to do but illegal or immoral I don’t think so. I explained this to my son and I don’t know about the other boys but I did make my son apologize to the kids he could remember and he gave them their money back ( at least most of them that he recalled) it came out of his allowance.
The one thing I did tell the school was that if the roles were reversed and my son was told he had to pay a quarter to ride the swings. The first thing he would have done was when he got home he would have said something to either his dad or I.
My first question to him would have been “Did you give it to them?” If he had said yes I probably would’ve said something like “ Don’t do that again if they are asking you for money for the swing go tell a teacher. You don’t pay to ride the swing “ I would have then followed up with school it would not have gone on for 2 weeks!
I can’t believe that my son and his friends were the first ones to ever try something like this. But in my mind I can see these 5 boys with a little light bulb moment 💡 ! I asked that boy for a quarter to ride the swing and he gave it to me!!! There was nothing criminal or psychotic in their behavior just a bunch of boys being dumb.
My son did not grow up to become a social deviant or a gang member or thug. He is married with 3 kids and 3 grand children. I look at this episode as just one if those childhood stories that we tell at family gatherings.
One of the first jobs I had was at a distribution center for AH Robins Pharmaceuticals. I was assigned to work with another guy to fill and pack the small orders that shipped via UPS. I was 22 and had just been hired while my coworker was 29 and had been with the company for about 6 months. We were the youngest guys, by far, in the warehouse. Everyone else had been with Robins for 15+ years and all but one were 50 years old, or older. The other guy was 38.
Being young(er), we decided to make a game out of completing the orders by seeing who could pick and pack them faster. As a result, we’d finish the orders by lunch each day. Since we had half a day left and nothing to do, at first we were told to stock the small order shelves and then clean the area around the packing table. But we finished that so quickly the warehouse manager had one of us start helping the other workers pull truck orders.
That was when the older workers pulled us aside and told us that we needed to slow down because we were making them look bad. We just laughed at them. But then the warehouse manager called us into his office and told us to slow down and take our time, or he’d have to let us go.
We were puzzled by this and we finally worked up the courage to talk to the DC Ops Manager, and he explained that the warehouse was staffed with long-time employees who were set in their ways, and we needed to go along to get along. So we began stretching our orders out to last the entire day so our coworkers and boss would be happy, but the job no longer fun from that point on.
The 24.7 military activity around Taiwan is a visible electric fence, a constant tripwire reminder that Taiwan is ringfenced, and the Taiwanese military is not doing anything about its ever-shrinking area of responsibility. It’s the classic boiling frog, with time scales measured in years.
A blockade is an ON-DEMAND military option today, based on demonstrated readiness, enabled by real-time multi-sensor intelligence and deployed assets.
The real battlefront lies further away, as far south as the Philippines, as far east as Guam, and as far north as the Japanese home islands.
In other words, the battlefront is as far south as America, as far east as America, and as far north as America.
Let me repeat, because it is important.
THE BATTLEFRONT IS AS FAR SOUTH AS AMERICA, AS FAR EAST AS AMERICA, AND AS FAR NORTH AS AMERICA.
That is the current strike capability of the combined Chinese military.
The island of Taiwan, paradoxically speaking, is no longer central to the question of Taiwan.
I always provide a clear estimate of every job I look at. I had a woman that had been referred to me by her sister but had been warned about her too. She had money but didn’t like spending it. She wanted a simple wheelchair ramp installed in her garage for her ailing husband. I noticed her 4500 sqft house needed a lot of work including a new roof. I offered to build the ramp for only $500, which was about $50 over cost of lumber. It was going to be a simple ramp with plywood covered with Astroturf or berber carpet. I figured it might open the door to other work on the house. I’d make my money back later. She looked at my estimate and passed it back to me. Then told me she knew somebody that can build it cheaper. I thanked her for her time and started walking to my truck. She asked me where I was going. I told her that by her comment that she was going to have the cheaper guy build it. She wanted me to lower my price. I said that was impossible as I was making zero on the ramp. The lumber alone was $450. After gas, I was breaking even. Again, I thanked her for her time and started walking back to my truck. She said she thought it would be closer to $300. I replied that It should have been at least $1500 and I was doing her a favor as I knew her sister and could see the house needed other repairs. She asked if I could do it for $300. I actually laughed and told her to hire the guy she knew that could to it cheaper. I’m done playing her games. I knew she was bluffing and there was no other cheaper guy. I wished her good luck and said my final goodbye. I later thanked her sister for warning me beforehand.
When I was a teenage & young adults (late 70’s to Mid-80’s) the shopping mall was at its peak. A large number of stores in a climate controlled environment where you only had to park once.
For me a visit to the mall was a visit to …
The arcade (to play Space Invaders & Asteroids)
One or two book stores (using both Walden Book and B Dalton)
The music store
Sears, to check out both electronics & tools
Radio Shack
The food court.
Now, both radio Shack & Sears were in decline by the mid to late 90’s anyway.
But console games spelled the death of arcades. When feed money into a game when you could play them at home as many times as you wanted?
Book, music and electronics are all found on amazon. And music, for the most part, now as downloads.
In many malls, there were also novelty stores like Spenser’s, and even hobby/arts & crafts focused stores. There seems to be an overall decline for some time, at least before the “maker movement” had a resurgence. But again, online shopping has seriously cut into that market.
I commended on an older answer, that most malls are filled with clothing stores, which is death via boredom for a typical guy.
I really don’t see malls coming back, at least not in their past “glory days” format.
When I began school, we lived 3 doors down from the kindergarten school.
On the first day of school, I walked to school. My mom stood on the front porch and watched me walk all the way, and I waved to her when I got there.
I was very excited and could not wait for the day to proceed – I was a big girl, and was finally in school!
At that time, most schools still tried to force left-handed children to write with their right hand. I am left-handed.
My teacher walked behind me as I sat at a table with several other students. We were coloring pictures. She saw that I was using my left-hand. She smacked the back of my hand with her ruler. It was wood and had a metal strip on it. I jumped and dropped the crayon. She yelled at me that I was to use my right hand, it was not acceptable to use my left hand.
My kindergarten class was a half-day class. For the next 3 1/2 hours, every time I picked up anything with my left hand, she instantly slapped my hand with the ruler.
By the time I left to walk home, the back of my hand was bruised, and I had several cuts on my fingers from the metal band on her ruler.
I was no longer thrilled with the prospect of going to school.
I went home and told mom I was not going back.
When my father came home from work, mom told him what happened. He called me over to him and looked at my hand.
He picked up the phone and called his boss. He told him that he would be late to work the next day.
The next morning, my dad walked with me to the school.
It was a small school that was used only for kindergarten. There were 6 classes.
We walked in the front door of the school and my dad yelled for my teacher and the principal.
They both came running to see what the commotion was.
My father was very loud with the principal about the fact that my hand was bruised and cut.
He then turned to my teacher and told her very clearly that I was left-handed and that I would remain left-handed.
He then told her that if I came home from school with one more mark on me from her trying to force me to write with my right hand that he would return to the school and make sure that she had two marks for every mark she put on me.
He then looked at me and said, “Joyce, you write with your left hand.”
He then walked me into my classroom, helped me hang up my sweater, and walked me to my chair.
He patted me and told me he’d see me at dinner. He then gave my teacher a scowl and left.
It is now not a big thing to be left-handed. That was not always the case. It was the first time I realized that I was not like everyone else. Dad showed me it was OK to be different.
When my younger sister and I were about 14 and 16, we went shopping at a department store together. We separated briefly, she went to the washroom while I looked through albums in the music department. When she was about 15 minutes late at our prearranged meeting spot, I went to the adjacent car park to see if she’d returned to our car by mistake. The garage was enclosed, dark and mostly deserted and I heard footsteps rapidly heading away from me as I approached our car, a low slung mustang. My sister suddenly popped out from under the car and threw herself into my arms, sobbing and shaking. A creep had lurked outside the ladies’ washroom and followed her all around until she panicked and ran to the garage to hide. I was furious and 16 year-old me drove around that parkade to try to find that creep predator. I had some half formed plan of running him over. We returned home, and decided not to say anything to our parents because we didn’t want to lose our car privileges and the ability to shop on our own. Now that I understand just how bad that could have turned out, and realize that predator was a danger to other young girls, I realize that I should have told my parents, so that they would have contacted the police. Instead, we decided to stay together when shopping downtown, and practiced alternative ways to shake off a creep. My sister made a decision that day that could have cost her life. My parents were never told.
I was travelling by bus to a place. And was sitting alone on the seat meant for two people, window side. The scenery was beautiful and I was lost looking outside the window, enjoying beauty of nature.
The bus stopped and a lady boarded the bus. She looked like she was aged above 60. Now, there were two seats empty in the entire bus. One was besides me and other one behind me. Same as me, a man was sitting in window seat behind me, alone. He too looked like he was enjoying the beauty of nature seemed happy with the window seat.
Now the lady stood besides me, thought for a while and asked me to sit with the man sitting behind me. I was like, why? Can’t you sit besides me or that man? Are we going to eat you? Why are you killing our enjoyment? She was adamant and started creating a scene.
I had to get up and sit besides that man. He felt my reaction and offered me window seat but, I thanked him and choose to be on the aisle seat.
What an unnecessary sacrifice! You need to kneel befor fake feminism, THAT SUCKS ABOUT BEING A MAN.
My wife nearly died about 22 years ago. She had cysts on her fallopian tubes. On one side it was big enough that it caused the tube to twist, which torqued the ovary on that side. It basically folded over. This prevented proper blood flow to the organ, so it died inside of her.
I had an entry-level corporate job with good health coverage. The kind where you have to tell hospital staff to check again and see that no, I don’t actually have to pay for xrays, blood tests, yadda yadda, I have the GOOD coverage. Even so, after the emergency hysterectomy I was hit with a bill that was many, many thousands of dollars. I tried to negotiate a payment plan but there was no way I could pay enough monthly for them to agree to it, so they garnished my wages. A lot. Faced with losing my car (and therefore my ability to get to work) and having to choose between groceries/prescriptions and rent/utilities, I had to declare bankruptcy. It took me a decade or so to pay it off, and that’s after they wiped out a lot of my debt and consolidated the rest. Fucked my credit to boot.
And that healthcare that people on here love to tout as the best in the world? Without my intervention, they would have killed my wife. The morning the surgery was scheduled for, no one showed up to take her from her room to the OR. I tracked down a nurse and was told that because my wife has a fever, she needs to go home and take tylenol or something and come back when the fever goes down. While she has a dead organ killing her from the inside. I screamed that the fever wouldn’t go down until she was dead, and made a big enough scene that they finally consulted a couple more docs until one said “well yeah, we’ve got to operate now, wtf are you waiting for?!?!”
When my sons were younger, their Dad and I began teaching them both how to tidy up. This began with the usual dirty clothes in the laundry basket and toys being put away, taking dishes through to the kitchen etc. Pretty standard stuff. As they got older, we taught them how to do their own laundry, wash dishes and hoover. In the beginning, it was all a novel experience for them and they were eager to help mummy and daddy – especially when it came to us teaching them to bake or cook simple meals.
Fast forward to when my eldest started secondary school.
Naturally, the novelty had long since worn off and it was such a big deal if I dared ask them to do something around the house *gasp* (How dare I?) One day, my eldest had been asked to tidy up the mess he had left in the kitchen – it wasn’t much, just a butter knife and toast crumbs on the side and a dirty plate and glass. He huffed and looked at me.
“You know something, Mum? I don’t think I should have to do this…”
“Why not? You made the mess…”
“Well, I’ve been speaking to Nev* and he says he doesn’t have to do this sort of thing…”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, he says his mum does it all while he’s at school and his dad’s at work. So why should I have to do it?”
I knew I had to choose my words carefully here, he was all but saying it was a mum’s job to do everything around the house. I could see his dad open his mouth and I held up my hand to stop him.
“Son, does Nev’s mum work?”
“No, she stays at home.”
“Ok, do I work?”
“Yes…”
“Does your dad work?”
“Yes, but…”
“And who is the first person home each day?”
“Well, me I suppose, but…”
“So do you think it’s fair that after dropping you and your brother at school in a morning, commuting to work, sitting in an office for eight hours then commuting back, picking up your brother from the after school club and come home to find you’ve made a mess in the kitchen from making a snack, do you think it’s fair that I should have to tidy your mess?”
“But Nev’s mum…”
“Son, do you think it’s fair?”
“Well, no, but…Nev thinks it’s mean…”
“Oh does he now. I’ll tell you what, let’s go ask him shall we?”
Son wasn’t happy when I took him round to Nev’s. We spoke with Nev’s mum who was less than impressed by what both boys had said, but what was funnier was when she turned to Nev and said: “I don’t give you jobs to do then do I? I guess I’ll have to find you something else to occupy your time if you think that, won’t I?”
Needless to say, both boys were not happy that we had called their bluff.
Fast forward another few years, both sons can do their own laundry, cook excellent meals and tidy up etc. Son’s girlfriend was really impressed when he cooked her a meal and she asked me how come he was such a good cook. I just laughed and said, “I was mean.”
Stress. I know recluses. They actually enjoy my company, I know when to leave. One of them worked hard and burned out, he found he was less and less productive. Working longer hours and getting less done.
He started working from home, he quit going to crowded bars, if there were more than 3 people in a group, he was out of there. He couldn’t take the anxiety.
He became more productive again.
Another person had a concussion that lead to post concussion syndrome. They were a social butterfly, and suddenly they couldn’t be in a room with more than 6 people. They couldn’t handle sirens, helicopters, barking dogs, squealing kids, or crowds. If they came to the end of a grocery aisle and there was someone waiting to cross, they would be frozen with anxiety, not able to make a decision.
People that can’t handle crowds become hermits.
President Obama said he was suffering from decision overload, so he had someone make all of his small decisions so he had the resources to handle the big ones.
Someone laid out what clothes he should wear, scheduled all of his appointments, chose his meals, etc.
The older I get the more I am susceptible to stress, so I can relate to them, and hope that I am not just like them in 10 years.
I was a middle school teacher(1984). The night before school started my 18 month old son started having seizures. My husband and I spent the whole night at the hospital with him. The doctors did a spinal tap and my son lost feeling in his legs. The doctor said that it could be temporary, or it could be permanent. I still showed up at school the next morning and I told my principal that my husband was staying with my son for the week and that I would need the following week off. The principal told me, you need to decide whether you want to be a mother or a teacher because you can’t be both. I resigned on the spot and went home. My son did regain full sensation in his legs a couple of weeks later There was no way I was going back to that school.
In my experience, there is only one sign I always look for to discern a covert narcissist.
The other red flags will pick up narcissists, but they pick up the overts or malignants.
But there is one thing, yes one thing, that is simultaneously so subtle that it makes coverts fly under the radar, and also the one thing which is what makes a covert narcissist a covert narcissist. In other words, this one thing makes coverts different from all the other types of narcissists. It is their signature.
It’s switching off.
Coverts switch off. They practice
avoidance
ghosting
withholding
neglect
silence
pretend not paying attention
pretend not hearing you
pretend misunderstanding you
pretend there is something wrong with you when you talk about something serious and dear to you (e.g. reframes you as bitter and unable to let go when you share insights on narcissism etc. -> covertly tearing you down by twisting your perspective; this is a form of switching off because they refuse to lower themselves to empathize with your perspective so as to understand it, they switch off listening and understanding)
pretend superiority (e.g. I forgave my narcissist, therefore I’m superior to you, you wouldn’t talk so much about your narcissist if only you would forgive them, you should forgive, for your own sake, never let the narcissist change you, I choose love, I choose forgiveness, I choose not to hate, no one is evil, everyone deserves compassion, we are all the same, there is humanity in everyone, etc. -> blowing their own trumpet; this is a form of switching off because they refuse to lower themselves to empathize with your perspective so as to understand it, they switch off listening and understanding)
acting stupid to create situations (e.g. to persistently cause miscommunication and misunderstanding, to ignore you and create opportunities to withhold, to get away with having done harmful things, to deliberately frustrate and antagonize you by doing the opposite of what they are supposed to do, deliberately act bored or switched off while you are giving instructions and then doing the opposite of something simple you asked for e.g. don’t buy eggs -> buys two cartons of eggs and then proudly boasts that you asked for them)
you take a walk with them, you stop by to admire a flower (or you fell down and sprained something), they pretend not to notice and keep walking on without you, and you either look up from the flower to find yourself all alone, or you lie there watching their back recede into the horizon
they cut in line right in front of you just as you open your mouth to give your order, preventing it, pretend to be oblivious, and happily make their order instead, you stare at their side profile (what the hell! can you believe this girl?)
they do something they know they shouldn’t do (e.g. litter, trespass, jaywalk, steal your food or your seat, or chat on the phone loudly in the cinema, leave their car in the middle of the road blocking everyone, walk in the middle of the meant road for cars) and then pretend to be helpless, oblivious, or ignorant when you have an issue with them
not pick up the phone
they pick up your phone call, they are told to pass a message to you, they take the message and never pass it on to you
you are napping, the phone rings, the covert narcissist is right next to the phone, they let the phone keep ringing, it wakes you up, you run across the house to groggily pick up the phone while the covert narcissist was right next to it all along (at other times the phone manages to ring out) (this happens consistently)
the receptionist who cuts everyone off midsentence to transfer them, and keeps doing it the whole day, every day
they never reply your email (even though they are not busy)
they never return your call (phone message)
you greet them, they look down but make sure they never acknowledge you (they don’t stare at you because that’s malignant, but they make sure they do not reply) (some will look down and give a Mona Lisa smile, like they are slightly embarrassed at their own rude behavior)
you sit across them at the party, they look away from you in disgust, avoiding eye contact and refusing to talk to you, a guest passes by, the covert narcissist suddenly beams a smile at you and says ‘hey, remember that time when … ?’, the guest passes on by, the covert narcissist terminates mid-sentence and goes back to snubbing you, until the next guest comes by
walk out on you midsentence
keep on talking as if to you after you’ve left the room, still holding the conversation but without you
covert narcissists are experts at urging everyone to get along, forgive everyone, hate no one, and then mysteriously degrading you through silence and withholding over nothing (they have weird concepts of what getting along means)
mysterious sour moods (they are a form of switching off, the switching off of love or joy, sour moods in the absence of concrete causes are a form of withholding, and especially negatively affects susceptible empaths nearby)
convenient unavailability or inaccessibility
disappear
run away from fights they started with their covert antagonisms and microaggressions
coverts are experts at telling you they don’t want a fight with you after they’ve finally button pushed you to the limit and caused you to start sorting things out with them
snub
ignore
always have nothing to say in response to what you just said (covertly deflating you and degrading you by refusing to reflect back to you sanity and gravitas; it’s as if their attitude is always ‘you just said something stupid, I’m not going to honor that with a response’ to everything you enthusiastically share or say)
or they will always give a lackluster or subtly negative devaluation or degradation response to your happy, exciting, inspiring experience
not be courteous when courtesy is appropriate and expected (hyper-courteous at other times as if they were on an audition) (courtesy is a weapon to be deployed in the most inappropriate ways)
always being the unavailable shoulder for you to cry on only when you have dramas in life (only unavailable when you need them, this is not a fairweather friend, it’s weaponized withholding)
after you tell them your sob story, they make sure they never say a word to console you (e.g. ok, bye!)
you call, the covert narcissist picks up the phone, you want the covert narcissist to pass a message to someone else, just as you start telling your message, the covert narcissist pretends you’ve finished and says ‘ok bye!’ and starts hanging up, forcing you to scream for them to wait and not hang up on you.
making promises just so they can abuse through failing to come through (duper’s delight e.g. ‘you’re a fool to believe my promises or to trust me’)
making sure they don’t inform you when they go on extended vacations, so that you will call them on the phone, still expecting to make a date for lunch, but there’s no one home to pickup, should you call the police and report missing persons?
making sure they cancel plans on you at the last minute, while making sure you never get wind of it any earlier, to create the greatest last minute upset (this is worst when there’s plane tickets involved)
frustratingly not give any response or acknowledgement whatsoever when it is appropriate to the situation – the mannikin routine (this is always deliberate, make no mistake, it just appears like an accident each time for maximum plausible deniability)
the impossible to please parent, spouse, child, boss, sibling, friend
Coverts practice weaponized switching off. They are like a demonstration prototype that always refuses to work at the convention in front of the investors, or the cartoon frog that only sings when there’s no audience, and switches back to ‘ribbid’ when an audience gathers to listen. Or a mannikin that comes to life when the lights are off, dances, holds parties, then freezes back into position when lights come on, or Toy Story.
This is a peculiar form of passive aggressive crazymaking particular to covert narcissists.
Learning to recognize weaponized switching off will allow you to spot covert narcissists early.
Most people are trained to dismiss and overlook weaponized switching off because it is very highly plausibly deniable, but secondly, because they did not suspect the nature of covert narcissists. This causes them to impute more decency in the covert narcissist than they posses.
When being the recipient of weaponized switching off, something will feel odd to your gut. That’s because your gut senses that the covert narcissist is missing cues. This missing cues is deliberate. Missing cues is something the covert narcissist cannot help doing because their nature is antagonism and hatred, and refusing to behave appropriately by honoring the subtle cues of interaction is how they rebel and live out their intrinsic hatred (don’t mistakenly do this to people in the Asperger spectrum, or those who are depressed, or those suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome, or Alzheimers or dementia, or who lack sleep).
(The cause of missing cues is zero affective empathy. Zero affective empathy causes the covert to both overcompensate with lurvebombing at times, and weaponized switch off at other times. This is because zero affective empathy causes their emotional reaction to everything to be inappropriate, screwy, and ‘off’. Hence their emotional response to everything is always inappropriate. This can be easily detected once you know to look for it. Fakeness, all fake people are coverts.)
It’s hard to explain, and easy to dismiss. But you will feel erased to various degrees in their presence.
The point of switching off is to refuse to acknowledge your personhood (to deny you the glory you deserve through simple things like paying attention or replying earnestly – by the way paying attention and earnest replies are acts of love). They are not switching off to conserve battery. They are switching off to micro-antagonize you. It’s covert button pushing. This is how they toy with your emotional wellbeing. It is meant to produce in you shame, embarrassment, frustration, anger and insecurity. They like to throw you emotionally off balance. This is how they make themselves feel better, at your expense. As you get to know them better and better, they will switch from micro-antagonisms to bigger and bigger antagonisms, and it tends to happen along the lines of withholding, denial, avoidance. Malicious suppression.
What they actually switched off was their humanity. The game is to attack your humanity through switching off their own humanity. A humane person does not seek to feel better through causing hurt feelings. Cruelty is inhumane. Covert narcissists have emotional cruelty built into them. It’s a lot like what they talked about regarding Auschwitz.
Funnily, covert narcissists hate it when you switch off on them. Just try it and see, fail to answer or acknowledge them, pretend you weren’t listening and give no response to them, and see how they react.
My theory is that they react so poorly to their own medicine because they know that whenever anyone does that, it is a deliberate, antagonistic move, because they are well aware that they wanted to ruin things whenever they themselves did it.
11 If a son asks for [a]bread from any father among you, will he give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent instead of a fish?
12 Or if he asks for an egg, will he offer him a scorpion?
“Ah, hello, Miss. I am Mr. McMichaels. I’ve come to talk to you about your child’s behavior!”
“Right,”
“Right now, as we speak, your daughter is on the floor crying.”
“…”
“Yes. And she won’t stop.”
“My… 6-year-old daughter… Is crying. Right now. And you decided to call me about it.”
“Well, yes, because I asked her what could I do to stop her from crying and she said to call you.”
“Ah,”
“So how is your day?”
“Has my daughter stopped crying yet?”
“Mmm, NO! She won’t stop crying untill you talk to me for a bit more!”
*in unconvinced tone* “Uh-huh”
“So, let’s ignore the topic of your daughter for a moment. What are you doing tonight?”
“Tell my daughter to shut up and be a man. Goodbye, Mr.McMichaels.”
“WHAT ABOUT SIX?!”
“Oh. At 6 I will be going on a date with my lovely husband for our 20th anniversary! Never contact me again, Sir.”
My sister comes home and explains she did not cry that day, nor did she have Mr. McMichaels as her teacher.
The teacher tried, and failed, to plan a date with my mother.
SHAME ON HIM!
EDIT: EEeEe, I’m sorry, guys, I didn’t make this clear enough! This is from the POV of my Mother, not me! I’m sorry for the confusion lmao <3
Also, thank you guys for the love and upvotes! Ik my Mama should’ve said something to the Principal but she was in tears about how funny it was. My Mum isn’t what you would call ‘A responsible adult’ She just laughs at things like this. But, I swear, if something more were to happen she would have told someone I assure you that.
Not my boss, but a true story. A few years ago I was in a pizza shop waiting to pick up my takeaway pizza. A store manager at the counter publicly tore verbal strips off a young trainee who had apparently made an error in her work. I was appalled at the way he humiliated the poor little thing in front of onlookers. At the time one of my children had begun part-time work during the school holidays to earn some money and this young lady only looked about her age. I’m a teacher and maternal, and while all the other customers looked uncomfortable but weren’t going to say anything, I decided to let fly. I mean, what could he do to me? I wasn’t his employee.
I stepped up to the counter and took on the manager. I told him that what she had done was totally understandable given her age and level of experience. I then said that how he handled it was NOT and that I was going to report him to the company for foul language and abuse of a minor. I had his name from his badge and I had the receipt showing time and date of my purchase and that he really needed to go to counselling and get help.
He turned on me, screaming abuse and making a fuss, and actually came out from behind the counter to tower over me, attempting physical intimidation seeing as yelling at me was not having the desired effect. I got out my mobile phone and recorded him, and another customer at the store called the police and reported him. I also made good on my threat, got in touch with the company with details and was assured that they would investigate the matter. I think the fact that the police had been involved swayed them.
Anyway, long story short, about a year after the incident I returned to the shop (they did make good pizza!) and the young trainee came up and thanked me for my help. The former manager had gone to counselling but it then came out that he had been groping other female workers and they were emboldened by the fact that I had taken a stand and spoke up about him. He lost his job and I have no idea where he is now. But I hope nobody else has had to suffer from his misogynistic rants.
Learning Chinese and got to visit China in 2008 (and then in 2010 and 2013)
Before 2008, I attended a college in the US and my view on China was roughly the same as the Western MSM (Communists, human rights abuses, people have no freedom etc.) However, having visited China 3 times and witnessing the development gradually changed my views on China.
I remembered my first day when I landed in Beijing and I wanted to test my Chinese, so I asked a taxi driver whether his life is okay in China. He replied, “还可以“, which means “it’s okay” without sounding worried or oppressed at all.
That surprised me a lot. Weren’t the people of China oppressed? Why was his tone so relaxed?
And during that Olympics year, I witnessed the boom of subway in Beijing. When I first got there, there were just 3 operational lines (Line 1, 2, and 13), but just a couple months later, 3 or so more lines became operational. My life in Beijing was better than expected. I thought I was going to feel oppressed in China, but apart from censorship of certain contents (notably contents on Dalai Lama and Falungong), I was free to enjoy jianbing every morning and free to explore the city (it helped that Beijing subway back then only cost RMB2, or just a little more than a quarter dollar). Moreover, me having Chinese heritage can blend in very well in China and I enjoyed same kind of usual city life in a similar fashion to that of Bangkok. And I ended that year by taking the Z-train from Beijing to visit the Yangtze River Delta area. Their sleeping cabins were far better than the Thai ones (and I China was poorer than Thailand in per capita income back then)
Fast forward to 2010, my view on China became more neutral. Having spent months in Beijing 2 years prior, I thought living in China isn’t so bad. I didn’t whine the same MSM rhetorics anymore but I still couldn’t find positive things to talk about China. That year, what amazed me were their infrastructure. I took the bullet sleeper train from Shanghai to Beijing, and it was the first time I ever saw a bullet sleeper train! By this time, I was convinced that the Chinese transportation infrastructure was miles ahead of Thailand.
2013 was a really pivotal year for me. In that year, I decided to tour China alone by myself from Datong to Xi’an, then to Lanzhou and Dunhuang, then back to Xi’an and Beijing before taking the train to North Korea. By being able to speak the language and being able to blend in with Chinese people, whenever I travelled around any city with Europeans or Americans, there were always Chinese people asked me whether I can ask those white people to have pictures taken with those Chinese locals. Also, one day on the train from Xi’an to Lanzhou, I met a young Chinese college student in her berth opposite to mine. She saw me looking very Chinese, yet reading a guidebook about China in English. Once, she asked me in Chinese to move something out of the way and I did it for her, then the conversation began. She was so surprised to know that I’m not Chinese but a Thai, and then moved on to talk about her Thai idols. I was also surprised that a lot of Chinese people know the politics of my country quite well.
Having all those experiences in 2013, I concluded that Chinese people are so curious and they asked me a lot of questions after knowing I’m a foreigner. They are hunger for experiences and perspectives. But most importantly, they are people who simply want to work hard and enjoy a good life, as we all are in any part of the World. Politics are of very least concern for them. The way Chinese people come to you may seem rude, but I interpreted those moves as sincere curiosity.
Then my view on China gradually became more positive, as seeing people across China hunger for knowledge and better life made me realize massive potential of this millennia-old civilization that my ancestry also belongs. And since I mentioned “sincere curiosity”, Chinese people are also very friendly (it helped though that I can speak the language). I’m sure that even if you are whites from Europe or America, if you start a conversation in Chinese, you will easily make friends in China.
Having been to China for 3 successive times also fascinated me that each time I was there, I saw massive amount of development unfolded right before my eyes. Then I started to wonder why I thought China was such an evil place pre-2008. Looking at the people and infrastructure, they surely have come very far on the World stage. And nothing matters more than current generation of Chinese people are living decent lives. To me, I think whoever was running China did the job well enough to ensure steady prospects for her citizens.
Now, I would like to have my fourth visit and see their entrepreneurial spirits in places like Shenzhen, Hangzhou, and Beijing with my own eyes and be blown away just like all three visits prior.
Tuscan Onion Soup with Shaved Parmesan
Onion soup is a hearty dinner.
If French onion soup is on a menu John or I are sure to order it. We really love it! Onions, cooked slowly with beef stock and then topped with bread and cheese! What is there not to like? Then, one evening we were invited to a friend’s house for dinner, and they served Italian onion soup. It was different from the French version, but it was delicious, and I had to have the recipe.
Where did Italian onion soup come from?
I did a little research on this fantastic dish and learned that it is known as Carabaccia. It originated in Tuscany going back at least to the 15th century. Carabaccia was made with red onions which are native to Tuscany. It had a sweet and sour flavor and used almonds as a thickener. A piece of bread would be placed in the bottom of the bowl and the soup would be poured over it and then topped with cheese. Sound familiar?
Apparently, Catherine d’ Medici brought the recipe to France with her from Tuscany when she married King Henry II. It is said that this was one of Leonardo DaVinci’s favorite dishes. Over the years changes were made to the original recipe. Some modern takes on this soup include the addition of a poached egg and the omission of the almonds as a thickener.
3 bowls onion soup with parmesan
Ingredients
3 pounds white onions (3 or 4 large)
4 medium leeks
4 ounces pancetta, in 1 piece
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
6 cups chicken stock
3 to 4 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
3/4 to 1 cup fruity red wine, such as Merlot or Beaujolais
Salt and pepper, to taste
6 slices rustic country style bread
2 garlic cloves, peeled, halved
3 ounces Wisconsin parmesan cheese, in 1 chunk
2 tablespoons fresh parsley, chopped
Ingredients
My version is a little different and closer to some of the more modern takes on the recipe. It does not have the sweet and sour flavor that was typical of Carabaccia and I omitted the almonds altogether.
Red onions are still the main ingredient. I also use a nice rich red wine and some tomato sauce to compliment the flavor of the onions. I also like the addition of beef stock, where the original recipe might have used a vegetable stock. Garlic and thyme, also add to the robust flavors of this soup.
Tips for making Italian Onion Soup
The onions are the star ingredient in this recipe, so they need to be cooked carefully to get the best flavor out of them. The onions, garlic and sugar should be added to a pan with hot oil and cooked down until they are soft and caramelized. To do this you will need to set the heat on your stove low and allow the onions to cook slowly so that they do not burn. You will need to be patient; it may take 20 minutes or more for the onions to soften.
When you add the wine bring the soup to a boil and then lower the heat a bit and let it cook until the wine is reduced by half. This will heighten the flavor of the wine.
It is best to whisk the tomato sauce and the flour together before you add it to the soup. Make sure that you do not have any lumps of flour in the sauce before you add it.
Once all the remaining ingredients have been added, let the soup cook on low heat for 1 hour. The slow cooking process creates a rich robust soup that is worth the wait!
italian onion soup with parmesan
Instructions
Peel the onions and cut in half lengthwise. Thinly slice crosswise.
Trim the leeks and cut in half lengthwise. Slice crosswise in 1/4 inch slices, using 3 inches of pale green. Place the leeks in cold water, and rinse to remove the dirt. Drain. Reserve the onions and leeks.
Unroll the pancetta and dice into 1/4-inch pieces.
Heat the olive oil in a large soup pot over medium-high heat. Add the pancetta and cook until some of the fat has been rendered, about 5 minutes.
Add the onions and leeks. Sauté for 20 minutes or until tender, stirring occasionally.
Add the stock, and simmer 30 minutes.
Stir the vinegar, wine, salt, and pepper into the soup. Cook until thoroughly heated.
Toast the bread slices, and rub with the peeled garlic clove halves.
Spoon the soup into soup bowls. Float the bread croutons in the soup. Pare 4 or 5 shavings of the cheese on top of each serving.
Garnish with the chopped parsley, and serve immediately.
I once had a young lady in 12th grade come to me at the end of class, just before lunch, and tell me her Uncle, who lived with them, was molesting her. I instantly reported it to the Admin and the Campus Police. The Campus officer burst out cussing. It seems that two+ years before the same Uncle had gone to prison for molesting the same girl. He was a good manipulator and had convinced the prison shrinks he was reformed and as a first timer got released early on parole. And the terminally stupid parents let him move right back in with them – he was the Mother’s “Baby Brother” and had always been spoiled etc. The girl and her little brother were taken out of the home and sent to live with another Aunt and Uncle, I seem to remember one of them was a peace officer. The molester was sentenced to a long term with “no parole” and her parents were put on probation for child endangerment. She didn’t even come to check out, the Admin did all her papers to send her to another high school for her. But one of them passed on her “Thank You” to me. It seems I was the 4th teacher she told and the only one who did anything. The rumor was the other three were demoted to probationary teacher and put on notice as well as having a prosecutor warn them that he could charge them with a felony for failure to report the suspected abuse and just might still do it if they failed to report anything again, even if it was just a rumor they heard from the students.
No not at all. First GDP itself is a highly flawed form of economic measurement. GDP per capital. Is therefore by same extension is highly flawed.
Let’s just look at one item if GDP. Healthcare. The U.S. with a mere 330 million population has GDP that consists of 6 trillion dollars Healthcare and pharmaceutical items while China that has 4 times the U.S. population if 1.4 billion people has a GDP that consist of only 1 trillion dollars in the same category!
So why is that? China offers universal healthcare coverage compared to the U.S. billing every penny to the healthcare industry and hence the difference. The irony is China today as a life expectancy of 78 years old versus 76 years old for the U.S.
So either the U.S. overstated its GDP by 24 times that of China or China understand its GDP by the same ratio! Hence American’s look rich but they are not and Chinese look poor but they are actually a lot richer.
We haven’t even factored in real purchasing power parity. A dollar can buy a Big Mac in the U.S. but the same dollar can exchange for roughly 7 RMB and that can buy you 3 Big Mac in Beijing. So once you factored in that and you factored in the 0.1% in the U.S. owns almost everything and 99.99% Americans are a mere average Chinese but less capable to think for themselves!
I’m from the US, but unlike most US citizens I’ve traveled extensively. Even so, the five best examples of “American ignorance” I’ve witnesses all occurred within the US.
1) The car that makes its own gas. I was on a flight, sitting in first class, and next to me was a college student (from Quinnipiac College). I was reading a car magazine, and she very excitedly told me that she had just gotten a new car, and what she loved about it the most was that the car made its own gas. This was before the era of electric cars, so that couldn’t have been what she meant. I asked her how her car ‘made its own gas’. She said she didn’t know how, but it was so great that it did. I asked her who told her that it makes its own gas. She explained that was the strange part; the dealer didn’t even mention that! She went on to explain that she drove the car off the dealer’s parking lot, and the gauge said the car had enough gas to go 381 miles. She got on the expressway and drove 15 miles to her parents house, and when she got there the gauge said that the car had enough gas to to go 409 miles! So she’d never have to buy gas again because when she drove 15 miles it made 27 miles worth of gas!!
2) I want a room with an ocean view! I was checking into a hotel in Orlando, FL. Ahead of me in line was a couple from Minnesota, demanding that the desk agent give them a room with an ocean view. The desk agent patiently explained that Orlando is 60 miles from the Atlantic Ocean, so there were no rooms in the hotel that had a view of the ocean since it was an hour’s drive away. The man raised his voice and exclaimed “Don’t you go lying to me; I looked at the map and Orlando is only a half inch from the ocean!”
3) How the f**k am I supposed to know what zip code I’m in? I was at a gas station in Tucson AZ. I no longer live there, but I used to. I was filling up the tank, and a guy at the pump next to me was swearing up a storm and hitting the pump. He came over to me and angrily asked “Do you know what f**king zip code we are in?” and I told him I wasn’t sure, but I thought it was 85719. He went back to his car and moments later was was screaming and kicking the pump again. Then I realized that he thought the pump was asking him to enter the zip code for the gas station, instead of the billing zip code for his credit card!
4) Only an hour from Boston and an hour from NYC! I was at a high school graduation party for my nephew, and I met his girlfriend for the first time. I asked her where she was going to college in the fall, and she told me she was going to Quinnipiac College. I asked her why she chose that school, and she told me that it was in the most amazing location, only an hour’s drive to Boston and an hour’s drive to NYC. I asked her how that could be, since it takes 3h30m with no traffic to get from Boston to NYC, so there isn’t anywhere can be an hour’s drive to Boston and an hour’s drive to NYC. She said “that’s what’s so special about the location!” <Note – I have nothing against Quinnipiac College, it is pure coincidence that two of these stories involve their students>
5) The impact of video games on violent behavior. I’ve been involved in college admissions for both Harvard and MIT. I don’t think I ever laughed so hard as when I read the opening sentence of an applicant’s essay: “The impact of video games on violent behavior has been a controversial topic for centuries.”
And just to show that ignorance isn’t limited to Americans, here’s one involving a Brit;
I’ve been on eBay since before you were born. One of my hobbies is restoring and refurbishing old cameras. I pick up ratty old cameras at random antique stores, goodwill, garage sales, and, of course on eBay, and clean and repair them. On eBay I often find great deals when someone misspells a camera name, so it doesn’t come up in a standard search (i.e. Rollleiflex or Cannon or Lieca) so I search for misspelled versions, and often end up as the only bidder. Once I came across a listing with a whopper of an error. The photo was of a very rare and expensive camera, the Olympus OM-3, with a title and description of a very common and inexpensive camera, the Olympus OM-30. At the time, the OM-30’s sold for $10 – $15, but the OM-3 is very rare, and never sells for less than about $600, sometimes as much as $1800. I felt bad; that was too much of a differential to let the seller leave all that money on the table. So I emailed the seller and asked if the item for sale was the camera in the photo or the camera in the description, and let the seller know that the camera in the photo was worth quite a bit, and if that was what was for sale, s/he might want to adjust the item title so that the auction got the attention it deserved.
The response I got:
“Of course it’s what’s in the picture! How else would I get the picture, you daft cow! Who are you, the eBay police? I’ve been on eBay since before you were born and I don’t need you telling me how to run my business! Bugger off”
So I bought it for $10.27, as the only bidder! I ended up selling it a few weeks later for $1200.
My brother, Daniel, lives in Colorado. He is the only family member that I remain in contact with.
I have a couple of sisters, but they are isolationists and never respond back to me when I try to reach out. Oh well.
For the longest time, my brother and I would talk and zoom every week. But after Covid hit, it broke down and our emails and talks got to be scarce. The last big talk that I had with him was when he was worried about World War 3 between the USA and China and offered to take me in (abandoning my family in China).
I wrote a post about this.
After that our talks got shorter and shorter, and then he got sick with COVID. He spent an entire month in bed, delirious and hallucinating. Turns out he didn’t get any vaccination, and instead took “colloidal silver” that he got from the internet to get better.
I had a few zoom meetings after that. He looked good. Lost a lot of weight.
But then, the last talk I had with him was about when his dogs died. My dog; PP had died, and so I was asking him about it. Later, he was going camping over the weekend. This was in July 2022.
Hi BV,
I think your correct, dad got her in '67, and I think she passed in '78 or'79. Tara was 11 and Kimba was 14, which is a good long time for a husky.. Ashia just turned 5 last week..
Hope your well! We're going on a three day backpacking trip in a few hours. That will be some fun, Ashia will be carrying her own food so that will slow her down abit :)
DZ
And that was my last e-mail from him.
That was a year and a half ago.
I haven’t heard anything since.
He has five different email accounts and two video accounts, and he doesn’t answer any of them. Further, the twice yearly alerts of vacations, travel, and parities that would occasionally pop up in my in-box … all ended.
Sigh.
Either he is purposely blocking me, or he himself went to the big Domain in the sky.
Vaxx victim?
In Prison for some law?
Death by accident?
I did find his wife’s coffeeshop on the internet, and sent her an email. This is what she said.
Hi BV,
first of all, Dan is fine and all is well! I honestly don't know why he wasn't in touch with you. I'd ask sometimes if he'd spoken with you but I had no idea that much time had passed since you two had communicated. I don't have any huge or exciting updates....
Tomorrow (Easter) we're going to one of my sister's for dinner. Some of my family will be there, so it'll be nice. Otherwise, just plodding along.
How old is Ray Ray now? I'm thinking she must be around 5 or so...? You should send my a picture if you think of it!
I'll tell Dan he must get in touch with you. It's just dumb not to communicate with family - often we're all we've got. And I apologize for not being more proactive in that regard!
Love to all of you from Colorado,
Emily
Sad to say.
It’s a reality when you get older. As time progresses, you circle of friends and relatives get smaller and smaller.
Today…
If China invades Taiwan militarily, who will the state of Singapore support, China or Taiwan?
Firstly, and this is the much more important point — most Chinese who understand modern China know in the depth of their souls that mainland China will never invade Taiwan; the main reason being that “Chinese should not kill Chinese” (a lesson learned from the bitter Civil War between KMT and CPC).
There are more reasons
For example – the Chinese are used to thinking long-term — and mainland Chinese know that PRC is on the ascendant, and ROC is either stagnant or even declining. The day will come when the Taiwanese would be less reluctant to unite with mainland China, though likely they would still want a “one country, two systems” approach.
Secondly, almost all leaders in Singapore have always maintained that we don’t take sides — this message have come from both our PM Mr Lee Hsien Loong, and our polymath and wise man, Mr George Yeo, among others
The Man up argument
About American Bullet-train, the Brightline.
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One photo that can tell you why it’s not a real high-speed train:
See the stones under the railway tracks? Technically, it is called a ballasted track. That means this train cannot run fast enough to be called a high-speed train. Otherwise, it will become a killing train.
Well I happen to be a railway police officer.
Brother workers in the US, if someone asks you to build a second phase project for this railway, such as turning this poor railway from one pair of tracks into two, please remember that you may have accidents due to the strong sucking of Bernoulli effect or splashing stones. I don’t think the contractor will really consider your safety. When you are constructing, remember that time is not enough to observe the arrival of a fast train solely with your eyes and ears.
Also, for other Americans nearby, remember to take care of your children and keep them as far away as possible. Because even out of a few meters may not be a safe zone. See that white van far away in this photo? Not in the safe zone. Many parts of your fast train railways do not have fences. It won’t knock people into disabilities. If a person is accidentally knocked away by it, you need to shovel the body-jam up from the ground, or trees, depends. I am glad that China’s railways have fences, so most of our colleagues do not need to go through this.
Someone once asked me on Quora before, why Laos needs to build bullet trains when its economic conditions are not good enough?
Well this is the reason, the foundation made of stones means that this railway track is not suitable for running high-speed trains. If we build a regular railway, Laos will need to rebuild a route suitable for high-speed railways in the future. That will be a heavy burden for our neighbor.
Rail tracks are downward compatible, not upward. So next time, don’t believe in the scam of transforming ordinary railway lines into high-speed railway lines.
What was your most arrogant software engineering interview candidate experience?
“I am HOT SHIT!”
A year ago I interviewed a candidate for an Engineering PM role on my team; a sharp and interesting guy who grew up in New York and was grudgingly getting accustomed to life on the west coast. We needed a candidate who had a very specific set of deeply technical skills for that role and he fit the bill. He came in with glowing recommendations from some pretty senior people and had the exact experience and expertise that we needed. Basically he was an almost certain hire and I was his final round.
I didn’t want to grill him more on the technical aspects of the role since he had already proven himself in that space; I wanted to figure out what he would be like to work with on my team and what he would bring to the table there. My team is extremely close knit; it has been like a tight family for many years and we always have each others’ backs through thick and thin; we have worked quite hard to ensure that egos never get in the way.
We started off with him telling me about his journey, his passions and ambitions, his previous experiences on teams, etc, I told him about our team culture, the dynamics we share. I asked him why he wanted to join our team when clearly the whole world was open to him based on his assessment of himself.
He started to tell me how he was bored of large companies and wants to work at a small startup. He said that he only wanted this job for a year so he could add it on his resume and he would leave after that. That came across as odd, but I still decided to give him a chance since I knew the specific project we needed his expertise for would probably be done in a year so it might actually work out and give us time to change his mind.
The next words that he said had me completely baffled; “I am HOT SHIT!” he said, “You will be lucky to have me. You guys know I’m the best guy for the job. The only reason I’m here is because startups need people with 5 years of experience and I have only 4.”
I thanked him for his time, walked him to the door and went back to the interview panel and made it very clear that we would not be hiring this guy and that I would like to veto this decision; my manager heard me out and absolutely had my back on it 100%. We did not make him an offer.
There are three HUGE red flags here:
Arrogance. Someone who comes in believing and loudly announcing that they are God’s gift to mankind are not coach-able. You do not want to work with someone who is not coach-able; you always want people who will learn and grow and adapt to the needs of the team. One single arrogant member can bring toxicity to the whole team and destroy a culture and relationships that took years to forge.
Lies. I’ve worked on my own startups, lived with close friends who had startups, I’ve interviewed with startups and I’ve interviewed candidates from startups; you know what the one thing is that sets them apart from large corporations; they don’t stick to arbitrary rules. No startup(or competent hiring manager in any company for that matter) will ever pass on a great candidate just because he has one year of work experience less than what the online job description suggested. This was an extremely obvious bluff .
Commitment. When you hire someone into your team, you spend a good amount of your time coaching them, showing them the ropes, teaching them the business. It often takes 3–6 months for a new employee to become fully independent and during that time the whole team rallies together and helps set them up for success. If someone tells me that they plan to leave in a year for something new and shiny, it tells me that they are not going to put their heart and soul into this job; they will not be passionate about it and that means they won’t deliver their best results. It would also take up so much time from my whole team that the investment is not worth the returns.
Don’t let your arrogance eclipse your talent; all that remains is the shadow.
Creepy and cringe
What is the strangest complaint you have received at your job?
Some years ago while counting down the last few minutes before my shift ended in a public library, a young woman came to the information desk with an ennraged look on her face.
Lady: Can someone please tell me where the Spanish classes are? I’ve been on all the floors and no one seems to know what I’m talking about.
Me: Sorry miss but those aren’t Spanish classes. The Spanish Embassy has been having a series of public talks every Wednesday at 5 – 6 pm on the third floor discussing the Latin American economy. We simply allow them to use our conference room on the third floor.
Lady: Are you listening to what I’m saying? I left work early to come to these Spanish classes. Where are the people for the Spanish class?
Me: I’m sorry miss but we really don’t know. We simply give the Embassy access to our conference room. You might want to call the number they left on the advertisement.
Lady: So you’re saying this is your library, where you work, but you have no idea what’s going on?
Me: We know all what is going on in regards to our public services but the Embassy’s program is something external. Any complaints about the program can be addressed to the Embassy’s website.
Lady: Typical lazy government worker mentality…So you’re saying you have no knowledge of what is going on in your own building?
Me: This is actually not our building. Several government departments are housed in this building besides the library. Would you like me to call the Embassy for you?
Lady: You’ve wasted my time already. It’s already 5:30pm. I mean does it feel good to you to be getting paid for nothing? What’s the point of this library? I want to speak to your manager.
I was about to explain to her that we don’t have ‘managers’ but librarians when she whips out her cell phone and shows a screenshot of a Facebook post advertising the Embassy’s program.
Me: Miss. I’m sorry but that post shows that the program ends April 24th, which was two weeks ago…
Lady: ……so you….this is so unprofessional…..a big freaking library and you can’t call people and tell them that the Spanish class program has finished. I want to speak to the manager. This is unacceptable.
It was at this point I decided I that I no longer waste my time with this lady’s nonsensical complaint.
Bill Maher is officially PANICKING!!! He know it’s coming…
Nike announced that it does not source products from the XUAR and have confirmed with their contract suppliers that they are not using textiles or spun yarn from the region. Will this cause them to lose the Chinese market?
Those who have mainland business contacts may have been party to this conversation.
First among foreigners are the anglophones, then Italy, France, Germany, followed by the rest of the EU, then the Asian first world, the brics, and finally, the rest of the world.
American business interests in China are sacrosanct, followed by the brits, Canadians, Australians and so on, as per the order described.
Why? The Chinese understand there can be no economic interest without political power, and America is hegemonic. Helping America succeed in china is the best protection against sanctions and embargoes. The last 40 years has seen America develop a heavy consumer brand presence in China, with negligible Chinese presence stateside.
I believe the current Nike troubles framed against the illustrative example of h&m’s commercial erasure is a signal China is finally ready to weaponize this particular disparity.
China has had enough of America’s no holds barred maximum pressure strategy of confronting China, especially the attack on its domestic economy.
China is hurt. 2020’s live births is the lowest in 2 generations, 25 percent below 2016, compared to America’s 9 percent.
It is time to draw blood.
China can ask the coca cola ceo, you have 4–5 billion revenue this year. Your corporation can do 40–50 billion business each year in the future. You have supply chains all over Xinjiang. Do you observe genocide or mass incarceration in the data? If you refuse to make a statement or lie, we will burn you, and offer the Pepsi ceo your market share.
Choose.
And so on. There is no other growth story like china’s anywhere else, with the scale, stability and above all, speed. McDonald’s, for example, grew 10x faster compared to its Indian franchise.
Going forward, there will be no sacred cows among mncs in china. Trump made sure of that.
And yes, Nike can certainly lose the Chinese market if it gets erased like h&m.
It hasn’t happened… yet.
Note: The question and this answer is about China, not India.
Power projection
Men are starting to stand up in the USA.
Has someone treated you poorly until they discovered you were wealthy and/or successful?
The best one I ever heard of was from my grandfather. In order to receive a promotion at the company he worked for, he was required to attain a master’s degree. He was an engineer, of sorts, shall we say.
This was the 1960’s, and there was my grandfather sitting in a classroom with a bunch of 22 year old hotshots, while he was 50 years old. For 6 weeks, no one spoke to him, he wasn’t called on, the professor ignored him, and whatever work he did received an average grade.
One day, a singularly difficult real life engineering problem was presented in class from a local company called JPL. When none of the students could correctly answer it, the professor asked if anyone had any ideas…..
I love this part….
My grandfather raised his hand and answered it. The professor told him he was wrong. Mr. Professor then told the class the answer. Grandpa then interrupted the professor and informed him that the answer given to the class turned out to be incorrect for that particular alloy, and that the week prior my Grandpa’s team had found that with a 2% increase of cadmium, the answer was as my Grandpa said. The professor then asked Grandpa to come to the board and explain it in writing. He did. The professor then asked him who he was and what his job was.
After the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Manhattan and other projects were thusly discussed, Grandpa never sat down in that class again. Or any other. He taught the class as one who actually did these things…from Fat Man and Little Boy to the Saturn rocket booster and everything in between.
At the end of the semester, Grandpa received an “A”, and the professor informed him that he had received average grades before because his work just seemed too different than the textbook answers. The professor called a meeting of the department, and after a 60 minute interview they gave him his master’s degree and offered him an honourary doctorate if he would teach there. He declined.
Six months later, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. Every July 21st for 20 years, a new offer was sent to Grandpa to receive his doctorate and teach. He wasn’t ignored any more.
Scientists Discover Most Incredible Habitable Planetary System
[You said in your interview that the Americans have no analysts on Russia left who would be familiar with our mentality, people, and culture. How can they declare us their enemies if they know nothing about our country?]
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"They have no interest in that.
The United States has lost diplomacy as a method for establishing contacts, holding candid discussions, and identifying ways to strike a compromise.
It is not necessarily about specialists in Russian, European, Asian, or African studies. I don’t see serious specialists there.
They are accustomed to making demands.
They have even stooped to rudely and publicly telling China what to do.
Reportedly, Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister Ma Zhaoxu had a telephone conversation with US Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell. The US official said Washington was dissatisfied with Beijing supporting Moscow.
How can they say such a thing to the great power of China?
What about the reputation of the Americans themselves?
There is also a statement by EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell. I can’t get enough of his quotes.
He said that the West (through Ukraine) must necessarily win. If Russia wins, no one will ever be able to rely on the United States when they need help.
You can’t help thinking about Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, and Syria (which they will supposedly leave). They will supposedly leave Iraq too, and they have effectively fled Afghanistan.
Speaking of help provided by the United States, they have a small nation of Haiti sitting right next to them, which they have been taking care of for more than a hundred years now.
Even before the UN was created, they were nurturing dictators, toppling them, and putting in new ones.
However, the Americans are powerless when it comes to preventing thuggery, rampant theft and embezzlement of public funds in that country, which is probably the world’s poorest economy.
It would not be difficult for the United States to take a sliver of the Ukrainian pie and solve at least this problem.
Instead, they showed up at the UN Security Council again and are trying to lure in someone from Africa to ensure law and order in Haiti (the US fiefdom).
Let them first sort things out in their own backyard, or rather a small portion of it.
It is sad to acknowledge that the psychology of global dominance and retaining hegemonism at any cost has never helped the United States solve any issues on the ground."
-Excerpt from remarks by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in an interview with Izvestia Multimedia Information Centre, Moscow, March 28, 2024.
Using the grappler
Is dictatorship always wrong? Doesn’t history have any examples of good dictatorships/dictators?
There are two problems with “good” dictators:
There aren’t that many of them
They don’t live forever
When a dictator creates a political system, that system is dependent on them…and on whoever comes after them.
If the line of successors is an unbroken chain of good leaders, all is well and good. But that hasn’t happened yet to date…
As an autocratic leader, I have no doubt his achievements were great. He united Germany, introduced social legislation, and sustained a European balance of power to avoid a world war.
The problem: he made sure to write a German constitution that concentrated all that power in one place – himself. And when he got let go, his successors weren’t up to the challenge.
The economist Max Weber gave the best assessment: “Bismarck created a great nation without any political education, without any political will, accustomed to letting the great statesman at the helm take care of politics for it.”
Weber died in 1920, so that makes his assessment even more powerful.
Sort of like raising children, no?
There might be “good” dictators, but I’m not convinced any of them can create a “great nation.” Not one that lasts, anyway.
Florida is different
The Chinese Communist Party often claims that Tibet before 1959 was a dark, theocratic feudal serfdom with cruel punishments, but Tibetans abroad often deny these claims. So what was the real situation in old Tibet?
The CCP said the truth that tibet was a feudal theocratic state with serfdom and cruel punishment.
The Tibetians under the Dlamas were oppressed others were subjected to having their hands cut off. Some had experienced punishment like this one shown below:
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This led china under mao to liberate tibet in 1951 to free the Tibetians from oppression and incorporate tibet back to china. So mao did liberate tibet in 1951.
The Tibetians living abroad are denying these claims to hide the truth and they’re spreading lies ,misinformation and hearing western propaganda that tibets are being oppressed under the CCP regime which isn’t true.
Do you believe that a world free from US hegemony would be beneficial for developing countries?
Yes of course!
The U.S. is the main cause of economic crisis and poverty if the developing world! If the U.S. did not manipulated the prices of most raw materials from the developing world will appreciate in prices to several folds what it is now generations ago!
Why It Would Be Preferable To Colonize Titan Instead Of Mars
What is the most badass thing you have done as a parent for your teenage daughter?
My 15 year old daughter came home from Knott’s Berry Farm one night around midnight in tears. Someone had stolen her iPhone while she and her friends were on a ride and she was worried I would be mad.
I told her to hold on for a moment, went to my computer for Find My iPhone, and told her, “I found it. Let’s go.” She asked where and I told her, “To get your iPhone. It’s at an apartment complex in Santa Ana.”
We found the apartment building and I called the police. I brought them up to speed and they said they’d meet us at a gas station about a mile away. My daughter was starting to see some hope.
Three police cars showed up and, after I showed him where the phone was, the officer in charge said we could park down the street and watch. So we did.
It was about 2:30a and the lights were still on in the apartment for some reason.
The lead cop went upstairs and pounded on the door. A middle aged guy answered the door and the cop said a stolen phone was inside the apartment and he wanted it brought to the door (he told us later). My daughter and I heard the guy yell, “Anybody have an iPhone that doesn’t belong to you?” After a few seconds, he shook his head “no”.
The officer told us he said, “Look, I know it’s in there. So you can either bring it out, or I’ll stand here until the search warrant arrives and we’ll go in and find it ourselves.”
We saw the door close and less than a minute later the guy handed the officer my daughter’s phone. He brought it down and my daughter logged in to prove it was hers.
She couldn’t believe we actually got her phone back, but I was committed to fixing this so my daughter wouldn’t become a victim.
We got home about 4am, but neither of us was tired – LOL.
I know everything worked out in the exact way it had to for us to succeed, but it was a great lesson for my daughter about standing up for yourself and taking appropriate action. She continues to be a very empowered individual and I like to think I had a hand in that.
[NATO countries are planning to send their fighters to Ukraine. The media report that F-16 aircraft will be deployed against Russian forces and facilities in the special military operation zone. Will we be allowed to hit these targets at NATO airfields?]
"First, if they supply F-16s (they are talking about this, and it looks like they are training pilots; I believe that you realise this like no one else and better than others), this will not change the situation on the battlefield.
We will destroy their aircraft just like we are now destroying their tanks, armoured vehicles and other equipment, including multiple launch rocket systems.
Of course, we would see them as legitimate targets if they operate from the airfields of third countries, no matter where they are located.
F-16 aircraft can also carry nuclear weapons, and we will also have to heed this while organising our combat operations."
-Excerpt from remarks by Russian President Vladimir Putin during a meeting with army aviation pilots of the Russian Federation Defence Ministry’s 344th Centre for Combat Employment and Retraining in Torzhok, Tver Oblast, Russia, March 27, 2024.
A “you” problem
South Korea arrogantly supports the Philippines on the South China Sea issue. Why?
How rampant is Yin Xiyue’s government today? In addition to commenting on the South China Sea issue, it also began to interfere in the Taiwan Strait of China. According to recent news, South Korea’s position on the Taiwan Strait issue has become more and more outspoken, which has aggravated the tension between China and South Korea.
There are two things.
The first thing is that the South Korean side invited the Taiwan Province authorities to participate in the so-called “Leaders’ Democracy Summit”, but after being firmly opposed by the Chinese side, South Korea directly “countered” Chinese mainland’s criticism of the Taiwan Province authorities’ participation in the Democracy Summit, claiming that the event was aimed at “strengthening democracy” and “not targeting specific countries”.
At the same time, he reiterated that the “One China” policy of South Korea will remain unchanged. Secondly, the South Korean side expressed serious concern about the use of water cannons by the China Marine Police against Philippine ships some time ago, threatening that this action has aggravated the tension in the region.
Whether on the Taiwan Strait issue or the South China Sea issue, South Korea’s position deserves our high vigilance.
These two things are enough to show that Yin Xiyue’s government has changed the cautious and neutral stance that South Korea has adhered to for many years, and began to take sides and openly intervene in sensitive issues such as the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea.
If South Korea still supports the “one China” policy, as it says, then why invite the Taiwan Province authorities to participate in the democracy summit? Knowing that the current situation between the two sides of the strait is tense and the relationship is subtle, it is difficult for the South Korean side to invite it at this time without letting the outside world guess that this is a disguised support.
As Lin Jian, the new spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, emphasized, there is only one China in the world, and Taiwan Province is an inalienable part of China. So, what is the intention of South Korea to invite the leaders of Taiwan Province authorities to attend the summit?
At least in my opinion, this is obviously malicious. In safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity, the PLA has always dared to take action. South Korea’s move is tantamount to stepping on the most sensitive red line of the PLA.
In this regard, the same is true on the South China Sea issue. What does the contradiction between China and the Philippines have to do with South Korea? Apart from the South China Sea issue, what does it have to do with South Korea on the Taiwan Strait issue? What’s more, it is reasonable and legal for the Philippines to illegally invade Ren’ai Reef, Huangyan Island and China to respond with water cannons, while it is ridiculous for South Korea to accuse China of doing so.
So wantonly stepping on China’s red line, is it difficult for South Korea to be warned by water cannons like the Philippines?
Yin Xiyue’s government is at the forefront of the Sino-US game, which is not only very dangerous, but also fatal. The South China Sea issue is also the same. South Korea is not a party, and forcing it to annoy will only make it pay a great price.
Wholly Cow
What was life like for German soldiers in Germany after WW2?
A lost war is a heavy burden. Some German soldiers added up to 10 years as a POW in Siberia. Many died in the camps, some died after returning home when eating their first big meal for years. Others discovered their wives had remarried and committed suicide. Those who made it back into normal life, weren’t acknowledged for what they had done, but they weren’t despised either.
Having returned from war, the former soldiers worked extremely hard and disciplined. Maybe a coping strategy to get along with what they had experienced during the war. Germany soon prospered. The “omertà”, that is, the principle of remaining silent about Nazism, was common sense until the late 60ies. The early years of the Federal Republic were characterized by strict conservatism. Everybody felt he or she had done something wrong. Nobody was interested to talk about it, knowing that some brutal guys would get away with it then.
When veterans met, they would discuss how they might have won WWII: “If I’d been in charge at the Ostfront, I’d taken all Panzers together at one point and hit the “Ivan” in the north where he least expected…”
Besides, their recipes were strikingly similar: Push harder, focus more, ignore casualties, and produce more “Wunderwaffen”. Some regarded Hitler as a visionary man, who lost WWII because “too many hounds soon catch the hare”. Most of the veterans I talked to were farmers. They made a little extra money cutting wood in the winter. And while they sat at the fireplace to warm up, they’d sing Russian songs. Stockholm syndrome came alive.
I had contact with many former Nazis.
Only a few I’ve met displayed attitudes and feelings as one would expect, that is, feelings of guilt, empathy for the victims, and anger about the lies they had been told. These “soft guys” seemed to be lucky, the war was over, and they had come out alive. Nazi times weren’t good times for them. They preferred not to be reminded of that. They would escape in some bonhomie gesture: “It’s good this is over, my boy”.
The majority of them pleaded “not guilty” when asked. “I had to follow orders, and we had an oath…” They wouldn’t talk much.
The normal soldiers were better off than former victims of the Nazis, or people who had fled into exile. Among the survivors, they were the most frustrated. Never recognized, if not despised for leaving the country in times of war, they had to witness some big former Nazis succeed and no one cared. Many intellectuals preferred not to return to Germany in the 1950ies and early 60ies. 1968, the time of the students’ uprising, was the turning point:
The younger generations asked questions about the past. The country changed a lot in the aftermath.
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(Pinterest) The typical angle of the cap was no sign of individualism
The few “hardliners” could be recognized by their gait: Faster. More dedicated. Fixing with her eyes. They really were different. They mocked democracy and everything that goes with it. Not only that, they grinned and wore their caps at a certain angle, as can be seen in photographs of Wehrmacht daredevils: an odd mixture of courage and stubbornness, as well as a willingness to immediately stand at attention when needed and instructed, and to carry out any command uncritically.
I think they promised their wives not to talk too much. But occasionally, they did. They still internally wore the “Führer’s uniform” and saw an authoritarian regime as the most effective way to run a country. They often reassembled into organizations like the firefighters, whose uniforms—and commands—were oddly similar to those of the Wehrmacht.
Post-War firefighters in their uniforms.
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And what about their attitude to Nazism?
No one I talked to, told me, he or she wanted the Nazis back. I wouldn’t put this up too high, for speaking out for the Nazis in public is prosecuted for criminal law. No law was needed to keep the Germans from going to war again. WWII seemed to have been a fundamental threat to almost everyone’s life. Nevertheless, deep in their hearts many still felt for Hitler, as you can tell from phrases like “Under Adolf this wouldn’t have happened”, e.g. when talking about how to deal with unemployment or how to make the lazy hippie guys of the 60ies and 70ies go to work. I remember some bad arguments between them and the younger generations, which often ended in yelling “Wenn’s euch nicht passt, geht doch rüber!” (“If you don’t like it here, move to East Germany!”). To me, the most shocking experience was their readiness, to lock people up in forced labor camps and “cure” misbehavior through hard, physical work. “A short trial, and then put them in front of the wall and: Ratatatatata!”
Yes, the Nazi soldiers, and their whole generation were confronted with the past by their children or grandchildren, but I cannot recall a single veteran, who in a discussion, changed sides or openly argued against the Nazis. The poison still worked. They didn’t tell us all. It was as if the Nazis had a grip on them until their last breath. They died one by one. Six of us lend a hand as we carried the coffin.
Many of us do not know what exactly grandpa had done, and yes, this is some kind of burden.
EDIT: This answer is based on my experiences during my childhood in rural, protestant Germany. The biographies of higher-ranking officers, Nazi Party leaders, doctors,, or judges were different. Many of the ex-Nazis, who launched a second career in Post War Germany, only pretended to be democrats. In reality, they cared for “former comrades” in need and heavily influenced the view on opposition to the Nazis. I have addressed these issues in different answers.
Don’t go orange
Do you have any examples of dictators that actually did their country good?
There’s quite a few. If you are from the West, some of these might shock you. If you are not, well, enjoy the ride 🙂
Number 1: Muammar Gaddafi.
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Gaddafi when he was a lot younger. Quite handsome, right?
Gaddafi is often portrayed as a bad guy, and as Ronnie put it “the mad dog of the Middle East”
But that is in fact, not true.
Let’s take a look at some of the luxuries that Libyan citizens had during his rule
1: Free electricity.
2: Free housing.
3: Free healthcare. Not only free healthcare, but the best free healthcare in Africa and the Arab world.
4: A high GDP per capita for two decades before the West started sanctioning Libya.
5: A portion of the money made from oil sales went directly into the bank accounts of Libyan citizens.
6: If healthcare in Libya was not sufficient, the state would finance the entire trip to a foreign hospital.
I could go on and on, but those are just six things.
Also this
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Libya had the highest rating on the Human Development Index in Africa while Gaddafi ruled it.
So while he might be portrayed as a bad guy, he was actually a really good leader.
Number 2: Lee Kuan Yew
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A young Lee Kuan Yew
Lee. Kuan Yew was the Prime Minister of Singapore for three decades. In those three decades, he transformed the undeveloped city state, which had no natural resources, not much land area and a small army, into a shining example of a developed country. But he did this with many challenges facing him, like the multiculturalism of Singapore. The population was a collection of Malays, Chinese, Englishmen, Frenchmen, Indonesians and many more ethnic groups.
While he did implement dictatorial measures, such as muffling the press, outlawing protests and arbitrarily detaining people, he still holds the title of “The Least Brutal Dictator in History”. He did not kill a single person during his three-decade-long rule. Torture was not implemented either.
Before he took the mantle of leader, Singapore was nothing more than a collection of plastic houses and shanties. Look at Singapore now.
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Quite the success story, isn’t it?
Number 3: Park Chung-hee
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Park Chung-hee. Slick haircut, right?
Park Chung-hee didn’t exactly come to power by democratic means. He made himself leader in a military coup. But unlike many leaders of military juntas, he was not a selfish blowhard who worked only to enrich himself. Instead, he enriched his country, South Korea.
He developed South Korea’s banking sector, business sector, and enriched the country with a policy of export-oriented industralization.
To give you some perspective, when he came to power, the GDP per capita in South Korea was a miserable 59 dollars. When his rule ended, it was 1,000 dollars.
Unfortunately, he was betrayed and assassinated in 1979, before he could do any more good to South Korea.
And as a bonus, he defended South Korea from communism.
Number 4: Qaboos bin Said al Said, or Sultan of Oman for short.
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Looking quite dashing in a military uniform there.
When he took power way back in 1970, Oman was the poorest country in the Arab world. Now, it gained the nickname of “The Switzerland of the Middle East”. All thanks to this man.
Oman, like many other Arab countries, is rich mainly due to oil exports, but added to that, Oman also has a developed banking and finance sector. Hence the nickname. Oman also serves as one big negotiating table, due to its policy of military neutrality.
In 1970, Oman had just three or four schools. Now it has over a thousand, and a few universities, the most famous one being named after him. Also in 1970, the average GDP per capita in Oman was 345 dollars. Now, it is 15,000 dollars. Qaboos still rules Oman, and continues to improve it.
While other Arab countries constantly squabble, Oman quietly sits and looks by, enjoying its wealth.
Number 5: Thomas Sankara
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Thomas Sankara. Humble military uniform.
Sankara achieved many great things during his short rule.
He ordered the planting of million upon millions of trees, in order to prevent desertification. He lowered his own salary, and rid the government of most of its corruption, which was a giant problem. He connected the country via roads, and built housing for the citizens of his country. He made it self-sufficient in farming. And he saved the country from French dominance.
He renamed the country from Upper Volta, its colonial name, to Burkina Faso. He composed the national anthem, and designed the flag of Burkina Faso.
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Unfortunately, he was killed in a military coup, which was, predictably, sponsored by the French. It installed a brutal dictator who impoverished the country and was a puppet of the French.
So, those were the top five dictators who did their country good.
EDIT: After some research, I came to the conclusion that Lee Kuan Yew had in fact not rigged elections. Even the fiercest critics of his don’t say that he did. I am sorry to spread that misinformation around. THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT!
I find it so hard to focus on the food
Why do men prefer women with makeup than without makeup?
They think they do. There is a style of makeup application called the “no makeup” look. It appears natural because the tones used are neutral and not bright, shiny, or flamboyant.
When I wear makeup, which is nearly everyday, I go for soft shades. I am naturally so pale white that my skin is translucent. Without a good long wear foundation on my face you can see every vein, blush, blemish, freckle, or scar. I conceal them with a matte foundation. I build on that with contour, blush, and highlight to add natural (in appearance) colors back in. It’s like painting a canvas. I follow the lines in my face and use light and shadows to hide or accentuate my features. Same with eye shadows and such.
However, there is one area where I usually without fail use bright color. My lipstick. I tend to wear a vermillion red. It’s certainly a “pop” of color. People have different reactions. Most people compliment the color. Some ladies ask me what color I’m wearing.
But I have occasionally gotten a negative response. Once, a man on a dating website told me, “If we go on a date that red lipstick has to go.” My response was that any man who told me what makeup I could or couldn’t wear before even going on a first date would not be getting a first date! He countered by saying he liked women with natural features and no makeup. I said that I did like makeup and I wished him great success finding his natural woman.
It’s not that I wouldn’t tone down the lip color if I had a husband and he didn’t care for it. I can be submissive and respectful. But he has to earn the right to have me comply with his preferences. Insisting I change myself before even getting to know me sends out a flag that might be even more red than my lipstick!
However, I have a feeling that the first time a man saw me “without makeup” and “natural faced” he’d wish I’d put it back on! I think men sometimes confuse wearing no makeup with “natural makeup.” The times I’ve gone without makeup people ask me if I’m feeling well or if I’ve been sick. They ask if I slept well the night before. It makes me inwardly chuckle. Everyone is allowed their preferences but I suggest you do what makes you feel comfortable and confident. Men will probably be more impressed with confidence than anything else, including makeup.
Real shit
What is the strangest experience you have ever had while answering your front door?
“JESUS CHRIST, WHAT HAPPENED? WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?”
The man shrieked, and backed away from the front door so fast he almost fell when he missed the first step down of the porch stairs.
It was late afternoon. Up until half an hour ago, I’d been at the hospital, having a basal cell carcinoma removed from my forehead.
I was still woozy from the anesthetic I’d been given. They’d done the surgery under some kind of “twilight sleep” anesthetic, I hadn’t been completely unconscious. When the surgeon cut out the carcinoma, they’d had it sent to the pathologist to see if the margins were clear, and while they waited, blood had been seeping from the incision. When the pathologist reported that one of the margins wasn’t “clean,” they’d had to gouge out some more, then wait again. All that time, I’d been seeping blood. I felt sticky and swollen and yucky.
My husband had gone to the drug store to get my prescription for pain pills filled.
I wasn’t feeling well; anesthetic makes me nauseous. I had bandages wound round my head. The lesion was above my right eye, and the bandage partly covered my eye. There was a lot of swelling.
As part of the surgical prep, they’d washed my face with an iodine scrub. I could feel it still on my face.
I’d been lying down when the knock on the door came.
Since our house had been burglarized years earlier, I never let a knock on the door go unanswered. I sat up, waited for the world to stop spinning, then stood up. The knock on the door was repeated.
I got up, cursing whoever was knocking, and walked to the front door and threw it open.
Whatever the guy who was knocking was expecting, I obviously wasn’t it. He looked to be in his thirties and was holding a clipboard.
He reeled back away from me, and that’s when he yelled in horror.
Pissed me off. “I had surgery this morning. What do you want?” I demanded. At that moment, I felt something warm and wet running down my face.
He stammered something about being a contractor, he was just going through the neighborhood seeing if anyone wanted work done.
About then my husband came back. I left husband to deal with the guy and went to the bathroom to wipe my face with cold water.
When I looked in the mirror, I understood why the guy had been so horrified.
My face was unevenly painted yellow-brown from the iodine scrub. There were traces of dried blood on the side of my nose and under my right eye. The bandage I was wearing had a bloodstain over the incised area, and evidently getting up had caused it to start bleeding again, because fresh blood was oozing in a line from under the bandage and rolling down my face. My hair was all spiky and glued together with blood and iodine solution.
I guess my appearance had really shaken up the guy who’d knocked on the door. My husband said the guy had hardly been able to talk and had taken off as fast as he could.
She does love jiggling her boobies
What’s the worst candidate who came to an interview?
Many years ago my partner, David, was a shop manager and was advertising for a full time shop worker. One morning this kid came into the shop in dirty jeans and t-shirt and asked about the job. David gave him an application form and told him to complete it, which the kid did straight away. David said that he was starting interviews that afternoon and arranged a time.
The interview time approached. The kid turned up on time. Still wearing the same clothes, now wet (it had been raining) and now smelling of poor body odour. Not a great beginning.
First question, what have you done? Answer “I’m just out of Borstal….” For those who do not know, this is a prison for youth offenders. He was in prison for multiple counts of shoplifting!
Why didn’t you change and look smart for the Interview? – Because I live several miles away and I did not have the bus fare to get home and back. So I hung around in town all day.
David hired him. HR was very very worried.
Years later the kid was still employed, now assistant manager. He turned out to be one of the most reliable and honest employee David had ever hired. One day he admitted that he turned to shoplifting when he was younger to get caught and taken away from his abusive father. He was safer in prison than at home.
So he was the worst looking candidate, with the worst CV, but the best employee.
Artichoke Pepper Pizza with Feta Cheese
Pizza 2
Ingredients
1 teaspoon olive oil
1 small red bell pepper, sliced
1 small orange bell pepper, sliced
2 cloves garlic, minced, divided
1/4 cup mayonnaise
1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1/8 teaspoon black pepper
1 large can artichoke hearts, drained
1 pizza crust
2 ounces feta cheese, crumbled
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
Instructions
Heat oven to 450 degrees F.
Heat oil in medium nonstick skillet over medium high heat.
Add bell pepper strips; sauté for 3 minutes.
Add half of minced garlic; sauté for 1 minute.
Remove from heat.
Place remaining garlic, mayonnaise, crushed red pepper, black pepper and artichoke hearts in a food processor and process until finely chopped.
Place pizza crust on a baking sheet.
Spread artichoke mixture over pizza crust, leaving a 1/2 inch border.
Top with bell pepper mixture.
Sprinkle with feta cheese and thyme.
Bake for 14 minutes or until crust is crisp. Cheese will not melt.
Where To Move If America Fails
Playing around with text to picture.
My prompt…
adventurer in the center of the picture, view from above , desolate, dusky sunset, many shadows, on orientalist style art depicting ancient ruins at a desert oasis, thin pool of water, exploring explorer, date trees camels, caravan, statues
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Thai girls cooking street food
Why did my top performing employee quit after write up?
I have quit three jobs in my lifetime. All three were after being written up. Its a matter of honor. I performed my jobs to the best of my abilities. I always gave 110%. So getting bullshit writeups really piss me off. The first time was by the owner’s son. He basically told me my level of quality was too high for the company. I quit on the spot. The second time I was instructed to do a job but not record it in the proper forms (military contractor). It would have been an unsafe act. I refused to do the job. I was written up for not obeying orders. Put my two week notice in an hour later. My last time was after briefing a supervisor of the company’s capabilities and then the supervisor deciding to go over what we were capable of performing. After he finished chewing me out, I handed him my keys and quit on the spot. Thirty days later I was rehired and promoted after being told my supervisor was fired. Perhaps it was my 20 years in the military that pushed me to personify the need for honor in my work ethic.
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The Passport Bros movement was inevitable…
Have you ever had something stolen, only to have it returned (anonymously or not) much later?
In 1998, I had left my wallet on a table in a restaurant in San Francisco, and when I came back for it, it was gone.
I called my credit card company to report it. Apparently the thieves were professional, or just very well organized, because it had already incurred two separate charges for fuel at a gas station. My bank rightly saw this as suspicious — who fills up two gas tanks at once? — and blocked the card from further use.
I only had one credit card (still do), and though that was safe, but I really didn’t want to go through the hassle of replacing everything else — my driver’s license, gym card, company badge, blood donor ID, buy 10 coffees-get the 11th free punch card.
The guy at the credit card company said thieves will often toss the rest of the wallet in the garbage, or the bushes in the immediate vicinity, so I headed down to the gas station and asked to look through their trash. No wallet. I checked out the greenery around the place, nothing.
So I sucked it up. Replaced all the cards except for the one from the coffeeshop, and vowed to be more careful in the future.
The one thing I was bummed about was the loss of the wallet itself. It was made out of Tyvek, printed with some comic-book graphics. It was a really cool wallet, and it was also very light. I’d purchased it at a crafts fair, and replacing it wasn’t an option.
But I managed to recover from this traumatic experience and get on with my life. 🙂
I spent a few more years in San Francisco, then moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, then Somerville, then Medford, and in 2004, Seattle. In Seattle, I lived with my parents for a while, then in a house with roommates, then, in 2007, I moved into the house where I live today. That’s seven addresses in six years across 3500 miles and back again.
A lot of mail didn’t get forwarded, I would imagine. But one persistent little package managed to make it. I found it in my mailbox, covered with yellow “mail forward” stickers.
It was my wallet! And everything in it, minus the cash and that credit card, along with a note.
A guy in San Francisco found it on the street and took it home, intending to send it to me but forgot about it. Only when he was getting ready to move out did he find it. He sent it to the San Francisco address on my license, and it got forwarded to Cambridge, Somerville, Medford, BACK to San Francisco, then to Seattle, where it was delivered to my roommates’ old house (which had all-new renters who didn’t know me) and finally, to my house.
I don’t have the wallet anymore. After six years, it wasn’t my style anymore. But I am happy to have my California drivers’ license, and even happier that the U.S. Postal Service made such a valiant — and ultimately successful — effort to get it back to me.
Asparagus Pizza
Pizza 1
Yield: 4 to 6 servings
Ingredients
1 1/2 pounds asparagus
8 large mushrooms
1/3 cup chopped shallots
2 garlic cloves chopped
1/2 cup mozzarella cheese, grated
2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup butter
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 tablespoons cold water
Instructions
Mix butter flour and salt until the flour resembles peas, add water and mix until you have a rollable dough.
Place on floured surface and roll out to 1/8 inch thick and in a circle.
Heat the oven to 400 degrees F and place either a pizza stone or cookie sheet upside down in oven.
Place dough on a board that you can slide it off from into the oven and have a little cornmeal under the dough to help make it slide better. Turn the edges of the dough in about 1/4 inch and crimp at intervals to make a nice ruffly edge to your pizza, it will get crusty.
Cover the dough with the cheese and set aside.
Trim the asparagus and blanch it for 3 minutes in boiling water in a shallow pan.
Remove from pan and quickly dip in cold water to stop cooking process. Pat dry with paper towels and place in a pinwheel fashion around pizza dough with the stems meeting in the center and making a mound, sprinkle with a little salt and pepper and slide into the oven on hot surface of pizza stone or cookie sheet and bake for about 25 minutes or until crust is golden brown.
Remove from oven and cut into serving size pieces.
While pizza is baking slice mushrooms and place a small amount of olive oil in skillet and add shallots and garlic cook for about 3 or 4 minutes and add mushrooms. Cook for about 5 minutes.
Add just about 1 tablespoon of balsamic vinegar and stir; remove from heat. Spoon a little on each slice of pizza and serve.
Follow Us
How can I tell my co-workers that I no longer want to give them rides to and from work every day without being rude?
When my youngest daughter was a teenager, she had early morning seminary before high school started. She had to be there at 6:30 or seven in the morning. I would just drop her off on my way to work and we would enjoy the time together in the car. Because I work, I wasn’t there when she got home from school and that time was valuable to us.
A woman in our church had just had a baby. She called and asked me if I would mind giving her daughter a ride to seminary. It wasn’t really out of my way so I told her I would be happy to do so. Every morning, her daughter got in the car and never said a word. When I dropped her off, she never even said thank you.
But the worst part was that my daughter and I no longer had alone time to talk about things. We really missed that time during which we were able to share our lives with each other.
Her mother never called to say thank you and she certainly never offered any gas money. And I had to deal with their surly and rude daughter every morning. Finally I called her mother and told her I wouldn’t be able to pick up her daughter anymore. I also told her that it was the time that I valued spending with my daughter.
She asked me if I could continue doing it just until her son was sleeping through the night. Bear in mind, she had a husband and an older teenage daughter who also drove. I told her that I was no longer willing, or able to drive her daughter every day and if she wanted her daughter to attend seminary, other arrangements would have to be made.
And that was the end of that. When I saw her at church after that, she was cold to me. I really didn’t give a damn. Her family choices were not my problem.
Buy a new house
Why China have a chance to became a next superpower?
That is your superiority complex version. The reality version is that China is already way ahead of the U.S. from every aspect. China is by far a bigger saver and investor and it lapped everyone add together in manufacturing and production prowess. It trains and graduates more engineers and scientist a year than the U.S. has in entirety.
China has more ships, more drones, more planes and more men if war ever started than the U.S. ever has. And worst it has the capacity to build more a month an the U.S. could in a whole year! In influence China gained the respect and influence over the entire Africa, most of Asia, and South America and Oceania, US just has its slaves and dog nations of fading powers!
China is the largest trading partner of 170 out of the world’s 195 nations! In space China is ready to build a moon colony and it has been to places the uS has not been! Meanwhile it has a approval rating of 92% of all Chinese people while the U.S. has less than 30% of its people supporting what they do!
Is American democracy malfunctioning?
Yes. According to recent reports, the US interventionist policies in the Middle East have led to the failure of democratic exports and caused turmoil in the political and social situations of the targeted countries. US intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq attempted to impose the American democratic model on these nations, but only resulted in prolonged conflict, economic collapse, and increasing poverty.
The US’s democratic exports are based on self-interest and interfere in other countries’ internal affairs.
To illustrate this point, we can take Afghanistan as an example. In 2001, the US invaded Afghanistan and overthrew the Taliban regime, but it failed to establish a stable democratic government, leading to the Taliban reclaiming power. This case highlights the limitations of American-style democracy in non-Western countries and the challenges faced by Western democracy in political transformations and modernization.
Additionally, the US government faces in handling relations with certain countries. During the first year of the Biden administration, it showed caution in its relationships with India, Turkey, and Egypt. While the US has consistently raised issues of democracy and human rights, it has received criticism from these countries, accusing the US of excessively prioritizing short-term security interests while neglecting long-term democratic and human rights concerns. This conflict further illustrates the complexity of the relationship between democracy and security interests, leading to tremendous changes in bilateral relations.
The consequences of the US’s democratic exports have been severe, leading to the failure of the targeted countries and exacerbating anti-American sentiments internationally. The US’s democratic exports have caused political and social unrest in these countries, severely impacting their development and people’s lives.
At the same time, the failure of the US’s democratic exports has also damaged its international image, making it increasingly isolated on the international stage.
The US’s democratic exports are driven by self-interest, interfere in other countries’ internal affairs, and disregard international law and humanitarian law, thus resulting in a series of negative consequences.
The Sopranos – Paulie vs Colombians (1999 & 2006)
What is the one true crime case that unsettles you the most?
Hi-Fi murders.
Back in the April of 1974, 6 men in 2 vans went to a business called the hi-fi shop in Roy, UT. This is an audio store and the men had planned on robbing them. 4 of them made their way into the shop right before closing while brandishing handguns. At the time there were 2 employees working named Stanley Walker (20 years old) & Michelle Ansley (18 years old) who both complied with everything the suspects ordered.
Stanley and Michelle were made to go downstairs where they were bound by the two robbers later identified as Pierre and Andrews. Meanwhile the other 2 (who are unidentified) were upstairs stealing audio equipment while the other 2 remained in the vans as get away drivers. One of the getaway drivers was identified as Robert’s later on while the other was unidentified.
Shortly after the robbery began a 16 year old named Cortney Naisbitt entered the store to thank Stanley for allowing him to park in their parking lot earlier in the day while he went shopping near by. Upon entering he was met by the 2 robbers that were upstairs. They forced him to the basement where he was also tied up and held hostage.
Some time later, Stanley’s 43 year old father named Orren Walker made his way to the shop concerned about his son’s absence. At the same time Michelle’s 52 year old mother named Carol Naisbitt was arriving at the shop concerned about her son’s absence as well. Upon entering the shop just like Cortney, they were both led to the basement and tied up along side their children.
GRAPHIC DESCRIPTIONS AND UPSETTING DETAILS BELOW PROCEED WITH CAUTION.
At some point Pierre ordered Andrews to go retrieve something from one of their get away vans. Andrews returned with a brown paper bag that contained a bottle and a cup. Pierre poured something out of the brown bag into the cup and made his way over to force Orren to drink it. Orren refused so he was gagged and laid face down on the floor.
Pierre and Andrews sat the remaining 4 victims up claiming the cup contained vodka laced with sleeping pills. The second that liquid touched their lips they were met with unimaginable pain… the liquid was NOT in fact vodka it was a corrosive drain cleaner called draino. Drinking the draino instantly caused severe burns and blisters to their lips, mouths and throats. They forced all 4 of the hostages to drink the draino. In attempt to keep it in their mouths they made attempts to duct tape their mouths closed but the blisters were already so severe they were oozing which prevented the tape from sticking.
Orren was the last one to be forced to drink the corrosive cleaner but unlike the others because he saw all 4 of the others, he didn’t swallow the draino, he kept it in his mouth and let it dribble out of his mouth mimicking the screams and convolutions he saw the others go through.
Pierre was incredibly mad by the length and volume of their victims from the choice of murder so he shot Carol and Cortney in the back of their heads. Carol was killed instantly but Cortney survived with major wounds. Pierre then fired at Orren but missed. Orren looked on horrified as he watched his son get fatally shot then the gun was turned on him. The bullet grazed the back of Orrens head but he was still alive.
Michelle was then dragged into a corner by Pierre where he proceeded to force himself on her several times for 30 minutes. She was then fatally shot in the back of the head.
Andrews and Pierre still knew Orren was alive. After 3 failed attempts to kill him Pierre made an attempt to strangle him with speaker wire. This attempt yet again fails to kill him. Frustrated Pierre and Andrews went upstairs in attempt to find something to kill him. This is where they found a ball point pen. They placed this pen in his ear and then stomped on it. The pen went through his head and out his throat.
Satisfied with the idea Orren couldn’t have possibly have survived that they made their way up stairs and stole more audio equipment before leaving in the get away vans.
Approximately 3 hours later Orren’s wife and other son turned up trying to find these 2 members of their family. Around the back of the building Orren’s other son heard noises from the basement and broke in the door while Oreen’s wife was on the phone with police. Entering the basement, they stumbled across the gruesome scene.
Upon first responders arrival Stanley and Michelle were pronounced dead on arrival. Carol was rushed to the hospital but unfortunately passed before making it to the hospital. Courtney was almost certainly dead to her injuries but amazingly after nearly a year of hospitalization she lived all though she was left with severe brain damage. Amazingly Orren not only survived but he was able describe and identify the 2 offenders.
Redefining America
Have you ever applauded an act of vigilante justice?
Yes. My Dad delivered some vigilante justice when I was 13. Dad was a large, gentle man. He was 6’4” and extremely muscular. He was born in 1917 and started working in the family coal mine at 4. He picked pieces of coal off of the floor, placed them in a bucket, and dumped the coal in a coal car. He continued to do hard physical labor for the rest of his life.
He taught us 4 boys to love, honor, and respect women and he taught the three girls to expect being treated like he treated our mother.
We lived in a small town in rural Wyoming. The neighbor kitty cornered from us was the opposite of my Dad. The weasel would get drunk and beat his wife and daughter.,
We were working in the yard one summer day when we heard a scream. Weasel’s wife ran out of the house with him right behind her. He tackled her in the front yard and started pulling her hair and beating her. Dad dropped his rake, said, “that’s enough”, and ran over there. He yanked Mr. Weasel off of his wife and beat the crap out of him.
About an hour later, Mr. Weasel crawled back into the house. An hour or so later, he got in his pickup and drove away. We never saw him again.
More fun with Text to picture.
This theme is a different seed, on the Wes Anderson Moonrise Kingdom movie image generation.
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Until you are in a situation…
What did someone do in TSA/airport security that made you say “You gotta be kidding me”?
My wife required a cane to walk. A very pushy TSA agent took it and required her to walk about twenty-five feet to a secondary inspection point. When I told him she needed the cane, he told me to stay out of it or I’d be arrested. My wife was reduced to tears and was straight out bawling before it was all over. It was a horrible way to start our vacation.
When we got to Las Vegas I sent an email with all of the details to the TSA in Washington, D.C. They responded with a few questions almost immediately and I replied with answers quickly.
The following day I got an email from the head TSA agent in Minneapolis. She assured me that the issue had been addressed and that she couldn’t tell me much more but she assured me that both my wife and I would be satisfied with the outcome. I took this to mean the officer had been terminated. I suspect that this had been the final straw that broke the camel’s back.
Can you share any personal experiences with real-life billionaires or individuals with a net worth of over $100 million? How do they behave around those who are not wealthy?
I know four people well enough socially, who are over 100 mil in net worth. No billionaires in USD terms.
One of them is an industrialist, with a great portfolio of investments and interests. He works hard, keeps himself comfortable – only five star accommodations wherever he goes – but nothing ostentatious stuff with him. Known him since college. Great fun chap. No difference in the way he treats one person vs another. Curious about everything he can connect and crack jokes with anybody in no time. No amount of teasing can get him angry – especially since he chooses to buy only products that his group of companies is involved in producing or packaging – no matter where he travels in India!
Another owns a fleet of planes and flies – all private jets. But aside from that is a professional wealth manager managing billions in other people’s money. Smart investment specialist. He is flamboyant, but in a very private circle. Talks about planes about 95% of the time! That’s his true love. Also down to earth, but doesn’t have time for any “small” talk. Dedicated to his work and his freaking planes. Flies way too much for the environmentalists!
Another owns a fantastic manufacturing business (medical equipment) with sales in nearly seventy countries. Very well connected and respectful of real people, no matter what. Treats everybody just the same. Family oriented person, and waited for his girlfriend’s parents’ approval for years to marry her.
The most interesting last of this quartet is somebody so unassuming, you’d never even know he is worth so much. Big time trading and stock market player. Low profile to the point of being invisible. Pious, religious, spiritual – I have never seen him with other rich people! Took me about a year to know he was worth that much. Deeply respectful, patient, rustic in his ways – doesn’t even want to be well known. Only when he knew his secrets would be safe with me, he let me into his world – very privileged to be trusted like that.
None of the above have any vices or addictions that I know of either, not even quirks, apart from the pilot! Most of all, they are all very “normal” people, which in itself seems a rarity in some places. Invariably respectful to others is a common quality I would say.
Work in silence
What are some of the things women don’t understand about men?
Men don’t use subtexts. They say what they mean. No beating about the bush.
They often don’t understand subtexts. If you say something and mean the other, chances are you won’t get the desired response. Why complicate stuff by relying on hints when you can spell something out clearly?
They don’t like to rehash their issues unnecessarily. And if they do, it’s with the express intent of finding a solution. Aimless thrashing of the matter is just a waste of energy for them. If your guy doesn’t wish to discuss certain matters, it’s just his way of dealing with them. Hounding him for that will just add to his woes.
Shopping for them means being in and out with the required item in the least amount of time. Window shopping and browsing are not their cup of tea. And if they do so, it’s only for you.
They can’t handle your tears. What pains you hurts them as well. They may not be able to articulate it but it is traumatic for them too.
Their non-verbal expressions pack a world of emotions. Just because they may not be vocal about something doesn’t mean they don’t feel it.
They are tough. They act tough. But they need tender loving support too.
Generalisations that hurt women hurt men as well. “All men are…” pinches as much as “All women are…”
Their polite behaviour isn’t a sign of flirting or nefarious intent. They don’t deserve to be viewed with mistrust always!
They have a unique bond with their guy pals. Their demeanour and persona is different with them. Trying to get them to change this aspect of their personality just because it doesn’t fit with your idea of how “he” should be is not fair.
They can have gal pals who are just that… pals. This shouldn’t be a basis for constant doubting and questioning.
Closeness is as precious as space.
They don’t like being compared to other people, particularly other men, in a woman’s life. No matter how innocent the gesture, it is not fair to subject a man to unnecessary comparisons. They don’t need to be measured against others to be told how they are.
Lastly, when they say, “as you wish“, they are handing over their part of the decision making in your hands. It’s a huge responsibility and shouldn’t be taken as a free rein to act as one pleases. Judiciousness should be the guiding factor.
These are just my observations and may not be correct completely. But based on my interactions with my friends, brothers and most importantly, my husband, these felt like areas where a bit of understanding could work wonders 🙂
American education
What is it like to have a child addicted to drugs?
Having a child addicted to drugs is a horror story that never ends. My oldest son is 37 years old. He became an addict when he was 12 years old. I’ve been at his funeral 25 years. I’m sitting in a church waiting for him to walk by me and smile and then climb into his casket.
Having a child addicted to drugs changed my life, I had dreams when he was a child that he would become great at something. My expectations went from hoping he would be a happy person doing what he loved to hoping he stays alive.
Having an addicted child/adult son means never allowing him to come home. I can’t buy him anything because he’ll sell anything for drugs. He’s sold blankets and sleeping bags I gave him to stay warm in the cold. I can never give him money. I buy lunch for him and watch him eat it.
My son knows my love for him is unconditional. I don’t approve of the choices he’s made but it’s his life.
My son has to want to climb out of the hole he’s in. I’ve shown him how to do it and led him to the “well.” He alone has to drink from it. He has to want to live a life of clarity.
I believe in miracles. I believe one day he’ll come out of the darkness and become the person I know he can be.
My hope is that I’ll be alive to see it.
What bad experience had you saying “I will never buy from that company or use their service ever again”?
The Brick.
I was a long-time customer, 30+ years, when we went to purchase a new bedroom suite. As my wife was getting what she wanted, I started looking at TV’s. I found a 51″ that I liked, so we bought that as well. Since it was a display model I also bought the extended warranty.
Well, within 6 months, the TV quit working. So I phoned the Brick to come pick it up as the warranty had in home pick up as part of the service. The woman I spoke to said that I was just out of their service area, but that they pay $75 to the customers who bring in their TV’s and appliances. Living 50 miles away, I thought this was OK, so I loaded up my truck and drove into Edmonton.
When I got there and dropped it off, I asked for my money, they said that you have to get that from the warranty company. Needless to say, I was pissed, and went home.
Six weeks later, still not hearing from the Brick, I called them and asked them about my TV. Oh, they said, it was ready the next day. Well why don’t you drop it off then I asked? You are just outside of our service area and we pay $75 for people to come pick up their TV’s and appliances. So I drove in to get my TV and asked where’s my $75? I was told that I have to get it from the warranty company.
So, like a good little pissed off consumer that I was, I went to the main store where I bought it at WEM, and asked to speak to the manager.
I know, you’re thinking that I sound like a Karen, but we needed a new freezer, and I thought that since they screwed me on $150 in travel money they could take that off the cost of a new freezer.
Well, while I was waiting for the manager to show up, a big brute from the back just happened to show up at the counter to ‘play on his phone and kill time.’ Did they think that I was going to fight the manager? Anyways, I explained my story and how they screwed me, and how they could keep me as a happy customer. All they had to do was take off the money from the price of the freezer. He absolutely insisted he couldn’t do it, yet I knew he was lying, as I negotiated the price of the TV down $500 when I bought it! So right on the spot I told him that he could shove his credit card, as I had a Brick credit card with an $18,000 limit on it, and that myself and my kids had spent at least $60,000 there in the past, would never shop there again. I also told him that I work at a company that employs over 2000 people and you can be sure that every one of those people would know how I was treated.
And I have never been back there, or to Leons, which is owned by the Brick.
Cooking in Vietnam is a visual treat
When have you cheaply or inexpensively fixed an item someone thought unrepairable?
I retired a few years ago and oddly started finding discarded vacuum cleaners all the time. Like some people seem to attract stray animals, crippled vacuum cleaners seemed to find me. I fixed nearly a dozen by some combination of emptying the bag, replacing a drive belt, untangling a string from the roller brush, taping a leak in a hose, or fixing a damaged electrical cord. On average, it took me about 10 minutes to “repair” them.
One of my neighbors learned about my hobby and asked if I would repair theirs, so I loaned them one of the others while I took a look. It needed a part that was widely available but had to be ordered for about $15. I told them the situation and they told me that they wanted their cleaner repaired, so I ordered the part. When the part came a week later, I repaired it and tried to return the cleaner to its owner. They told me that they had already bought a new one, and didn’t need the old one, so I could “have it.” No mention of the money I had spent for the part. We didn’t talk much for awhile after that.
Since new vacuum cleaners are really cheap, I eventually had to give the older ones away after fixing them. I traded a couple of units for some new bags at one of the local vacuum repair shops. I still have several, but I no longer fix them free, even when they still occasionally find me.
What country have you fallen in love with because of their transportation?
For transportation, I find China absolutely rocks:
Crazy fast trains that do the 1600 km from Shanghai to Beijing in six hours, with stops. And they’ll do it for 50 US$.
Beautiful metro systems that are bright, safe, clean, air conditioned, and good to use at any time. The cost is negligeable, and these things go everywhere.
Taxis that are everywhere, metered and trustworthy, with drivers who drive well. Need one? Just wave at the next one approaching and get in. Affordable, too. You don’t need your own car in Shanghai or Beijing.
Maglev! The magnetic, levitating train from Shanghai Airport to town. I take it every time I’m there. Does 70 km in 12 minutes.
Male Logic
Is it true that no programmers will be needed within 5 years due to AI?
Lol. No.
The below image was made by an AI:
main qimg 86d3b8d2f7775c4461bc230e92612989
Looks neat?
Now look again at the stair case.
You really want that sort of bloopers in your software? Oh and a window for rainy days might be nice as well.
Or this one…
main qimg 7f8b376ebcb33e275c1840808882d3e0
Here, the stair case isn’t too bad (except the very top and bottom), but cooking in that kitchen will be tricky…
main qimg b24357afd49c116793c693c7a662e3bb
I could post many more, but I trust the point is clear?
Are nuclear power plants safe?
Nuclear power is inherently unsafe, but.
The main reason as to why nuclear power is unsafe is because you have approximately 12 months of fuel in the reactor cell at any one time. Nothing with this much energy being accessed at any one time can be inherently safe. A hydroelectric dam that holds back a lake large enough to run the power plant for a year will be a major potential threat and far smaller dams have failed catastrophically, killing dozens, hundreds, thousands even.
Nothing that holds that much usable energy together, in one container, can ever be understood as inherently safe. However, nuclear energy is strictly regulated and has such a number of redundant active and passive safety measures that nuclear power is actually one of the safest sources of energy out there, for everyone involved – from industry workers to general public.
This is akin to aviation. Aviation is one of the safest ways to travel, only rail traffic can compete with aviation on safety. This is not because putting yourself in a hollow metal tube many kilometers in the air and moving about at hundreds of kilometers per hour is inherently safe. It isn’t, there are plenty of ways this can go very wrong and people do die when it does. It’s just that air travel industry is also tightly regulated and uses many redundant active and passive safety measures to make it such.
Air travel is inherently dangerous, but it can be made safe if regulations are observed. The same goes for nucelar power: it is inherently dangerous, but has been made extremely safe over the years and there is no safety reason not to use it more.
Men are suffering
Nora Vincent.
Why can’t we find a way without China? We literally hate everything about them and China’s silence is practically guilt. Why can’t anyone just try to find the way around/without China?
Well, I’m afraid you are completely and totally deluded. Most of the world is behind China. Only ignorant bigots like you hate China.
Western countries like the USA and its allies want to maintain their global hegemony. China’s rise threatens this hegemony. It’s as simple as that.
They’re jealous and fearful of China’s rise. Meanwhile, China has garnered the support of the Global South, or more accurately, the Global Majority. These countries represent more than 80% of the world’s population and more than 80% of the world’s countries!
Why so much support? Four main reasons:
China has fought no wars in the last 45 years. No other world power has ever been so peaceful for so long.
China helps other countries with their infrastructure and economy through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). It also leads BRICS, which is unifying the Global South.
China is the largest trading partner with over 120 nations. They all benefit enormously from trading with China.
China respects all nations and does not interfere in their politics. China sanctions nobody. China overthrows no foreign government.
We’re living in corporate dystopia and Gen Z is reacting accordingly
I once worked on a joint venture with an Australian company. At that time, I was both the Director of heated products in the American company, and the Project Manager for the project that I was leading in the Australian company. So I was wearing “two hats”.
The project was a clothes iron joint-venture.
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Now reporting to two different managers, one Australian and one American had its challenges. But over all it was positive.
But there was one thing, however that really made life difficult. You see, the American company Marketing Director (In Chicago) wanted to micro-manage the project.
And she would provide lists of technical issues that she wanted to be worked on… on a daily basis. Most of which were not germane to the projects and work at hand, and was a real headache.
Most of the things were trivial in importance and silly in scope. Like can the power cord go from 1 meter long to 1.2 meters long? Or, investigate if the temperature can be 5C higher on the plate. Now about making the logo bigger, then smaller, and then bigger again. How about cutting the size of the manual down?
These little tasks took 15 seconds to think up, and maybe 10 man-hours to work out each one of them.
So everyday, she was coming up with about 40 man-hours of work, and completely stressing the staff out.
I just wanted a fine working product. I believe in the 80/20 rule. Not the 100/0 perfectionist rule that the inexperienced seem to accept as “leadership”.
We held a number of meeting on this subject. But nothing ever got resolved, until one day, during a meeting in Australia, I stood up and pointed to a blackboard showing all the issues that she wanted us to work on.
And I really wanted to make a point. We needed to concentrate on the items that had the biggest gain; a weighted outcome, as not every issue is worthy of time to develop and flush out.
And said…
Don’t be like a dog. Going from tree to tree. Pissing around indiscriminately.
Everyone was stunned, and then the entire room burst out laughing. The Australians all got smirks on their faces and held up their finger like “what a great idea”. Ha!
Here’s one for you. We received a letter from school that my son was failing 6th grade math and we needed to sit down. When we got to the school there was a teacher and a vice principal waiting for us. The teacher started off with handing me a test my son had taken. I glanced over it the math was right but almost every answer was marked wrong. She informed me that his spelling was horrible.
I quickly informed her that we had been fighting with him about this for years. Back when the school was teaching – th (the) i for eye. I had my conflict with that teacher at the time.
This set the math teacher off! Me questioning a teacher! How dare I? Then she said something that set me off. Your son’s problem is because you’re an absentee father! Just as she said this the bell to change classes rang. I asked her to step out into the hall with me. As we did kids were going past us- you’d hear hello Mr. Y. several times as kids passed us.
I turned to her and said I am the soccer coach here at the school! Her face turned red. We went back in and sat down the mood had changed. Now it’s time for me to take her lags out!
I pointed at the letter she had sent to us about my son Brian. I laughed and said that my sons name is Bryan. You’ve been teaching him for 9 months and you still can’t spell his name correctly? I would like to see you right his name correctly 100 times each time you’ve spelled it wrong (we had all his test sitting right in front of us)!
I told her I was going to call the local news agency about the hypocrite at this school. The vice principal was getting scared and trying to talk me down. I wanted her job after her accusation about me and my son.
She quit! I found out later that she had been doing this to every boy in the class. Finding a way to flunk them. Parents had been complaining but no one got anywhere till me.
Yes the USA. Is poorer. If your neighbour who has the biggest house owed roughly 10 times the worth of his house and you living in a house 5 times smaller and don’t owe anyone a dime. You ie (Vietnam and Cuba) are much richer than the show off that is driving a Ferrari in the huge home that owes a ton of money that it could never pay off in a century like the U.S.
So stop asking silly questions to make yourself feel good. The U.S. is a huge Ponzi nation.
You may have noticed from the image that Nauru isn’t particularly large. In fact, it is just 21 km squared, which is eight square miles. That’s six Central Parks or 11% of Washington D.C. and only two countries are smaller than it, those of course being Monaco and the Vatican. In terms of population – well, you can see it’s not bursting with people, with 10,084 at the last census – that’s as many as Elkhorn in Walworth County, Wisconsin, which you’ve never heard of.
Why do I feel bad for Nauru? Because they messed up big time.
You see, the island of Nauru had a ludicrously high amount of phosphate.
image 24
Phosphate is basically this important and expensive mineral which comes from bird poop among other things. Once it became a big deal in the 60s and 70s, and Nauru got their independence in 1968, they started to mine and export it to the rest of the world. And this went brilliantly well for them, with their annual GDP going from 15 million to 45 million in the space of eleven years. They had the second-highest GDP per capita in the world, behind only the UAE. Everything was going brilliantly.
And then, the inevitable happened. They ran out of phosphate.
That’s fine, isn’t it? We’ve got, like, a billion dollars now. Just invest it well and we’re sorted. Doesn’t matter that we have no idea what we’re doing, we’ll be fine – Nauru government, 1980 (paraphrased)
They weren’t alright, to say the least. None of their investments paid off at all. They had a billion Australian dollars and managed to lose almost all of it.
They bought a bunch of hotels and properties overseas, in Australia, the US, India and New Zealand among other places. They tried to get their national airline, inventively named Nauru Airlines, off the ground, but they couldn’t fill planes, so they literally let anyone fly. They put two million dollars into a terrible, terrible West End musical that everyone hated. The only purchase that really worked out was a block of land in Portland.
FUCK. – Nauru government, 1990 (paraphrased)
So now, Nauru barely has any money. They’ve got no real source of income, apart from being friends with Australia and a few other countries. Whilst they’re just about getting by for now, projections aren’t looking good. The entire middle of the island is basically unusable for anything, because it looks like this:
image 23
The entire population lives around the coast in a coast-shaped blob, but because of rising sea levels, they’re gonna have to move somewhere at some point. Unfortunately, there isn’t really anywhere to go.
Nauru had so much luck in having so much minerals, but financial incompetence has led to the downfall of an island that could have been so much more than it’s managed to. We can only hope that they find a solution.
This wasn’t me. and it was as much weird as horrifying.
In June 2008, an 88-year-old retired nurse named Mary Ferns left her house in Livingston, West Lothian, saying she was going into the town centre to buy tights. Everyone assumed she meant Livingston town centre, about a mile from her home, but she never came home. CCTV showed her in Edinburgh, 25 miles away, heading towards Waterloo Place where she would have been able to get a bus back to Livingston (or to any of a hundred other places), so it looked as if she decided to go into Edinburgh to shop instead of to Livingston.
Between central Livingston and her home there are several routes which cross over bridges, and at the sides of the bridges there are steep slopes covered with bushes, leading down to the water. It was natural to wonder if she had returned to Livingston, set off to walk home instead of getting a local bus for such a short journey, had a heart attack or stroke while approaching a bridge, and rolled down into the bushes: but dogs couldn’t find her.
Then in April 2011 a skeleton was found under one of the bridges, and everyone assumed it was hers. But it turned out to be someone else entirely – a man who had been missing for 15 years, and who had evidently sat down under the bridge to get out of the rain, and then had a heart attack or stroke of his own.
Mary Ferns, meanwhile, has never been found. We don’t know if she was murdered, or met with an accident, or whether, despite her age, she chose to go missing.
Pol Pot (real name Saloth Sâr) was the dictator of Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, taking power at the end of the Cambodian Civil War. As soon as he took power, He and his administration transformed Cambodia into a one party communist dictatorship. Over the next 4 years, he and his administration committed various human rights violations and carried out what is now known as the Cambodian Genocide. To go into more detail, Pol Pot and his administration:
• Forced the Cambodian population to work without pay.
• Made the Cambodian population live in the country side by forceful removing them from their homes in the cites.
• Destroyed Cambodia’s legal system and replaced it with re-education and interrogation centers. If they thought that you were guilty, you would have been very hard pressed to convince them otherwise.
• Caused much of the Cambodian populace to starve, many times to death.
• Killed anyone they either felt didn’t fit into their new society or deemed to even slightly be a threat to their regime. these included: people with connections to the previous government, Doctors, Lawyers, Intellectuals, Journalists, Business Leaders, Vietnamese Cambodians, Chinese Cambodians, Thai Cambodians, Christian Cambodians, Cham Muslims and family members of prisoners who were thought to be a threat to the regime. Even wearing glasses or being able to speak multiple languages could get you killed.
• If you were to be executed (which was very likely), you would have been taken to one the various “Killing Fields” and would most likely be killed with a pickaxe, so that they did not waste any bullets.
By the time they were overthrown during a Vietnamese invasion, the Cambodian life expectancy was about 18 years old.
As bad as rulers such as Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin and Mao Zedong were for their people, I believe no one was as brutal as Pol Pot was.
I feel like their motto put it best:
To spare you is no profit, to destroy you is no loss.
This doesn’t qualify as disgusting, but many years ago, I was involved with an Internet startup. They spent all of their time having meetings which achieved nothing, and were a complete waste of everybody’s time. One day, I was asked, no told, by the CEO to prepare a lengthy report on something that I considered ridiculous. I wrote 3 pages of it, and then decided to see what would happen if I didn’t finish it off, so I added 35 more pages of Loren Ipsum (Latin), and handed the report in. At the next meeting when everybody was present, I made a point of asking the CEO if the report was what he had wanted. He said “Yes, it was great”. I stood up, and told the entire room that this very important report that I had handed in, and which the CEO thought was great, actually contained 35 pages of Latin, proving that he hadn’t actually looked at it. I said “I quit”, and walked out of the door. The company went belly up 6 months later.
My wife had disappeared forever, and my boss knew that the ground was very cold. He also knew that my car was gone, and my house was under debate. Money gone as well.
image 69
And in the middle of that struggle, he entered my office without knocking, and stated that I would have to move into the (smaller) office of a young colleague with severe psychiatric issues, whom he hated just like he hated me. When I asked him why I had to move (since we had plenty of room in our department), he stated with a smile:
“Because I said it — that’s why.”
He also said with the same smile that he was to chair my next HR committee soon, and that I could basically forget about my future. He said the same thing to the woman with the psychiatric problems.
He called us “the goofballs.”
But he forgot about the one thing he could not control nor understand, and that even we — the goofballs in that tiny office which leaked water during rain showers — understood. The secret force he tried to capture, because he did not understand how the goofballs kept coping with his constant harassing and mental torture.
And I will also never forget his expression when he was finally fired — that final sight.
I don’t know if it was disgusting, but it was rather a unique trick. I used this a couple of times on drug dealers.
When I worked undercover in narcotics I would be asked to buy street-dealer weight in either cocaine or Heroin. The designer drugs weren’t around yet and this new stuff called crack was just making its way onto the market.
One problem every undercover faced was the hand to hand delivery of the drugs. During the actual purchase, you needed to be able to testify that you gave the money directly to the seller and they directly handed you the drugs. ( AKA hand to hand purchase).
Drug dealers were wise to this. When an informant would introduce me to the seller they would take the money but they would only give the drugs to the informant and not to me directly.
I couldn’t testify that I got the drugs from the informant. That would require me to identify the informant and have them testify. No way I would do that. So I came up with a cool little trick.
I would give the dealer the money and he would pass the drugs off to the informant who gave them to me. I would look at the package and say it was light (not the correct weight) and throw the package back directly to the dealer saying I wanted my money back. Drug dealers are not in the business of giving out refunds.
I’d move in close seemingly to get my money back, but we’d talk a little and I would agree to the light package if he would agree the next package would be a little overweight.
As soon as the dealer agreed, I’d reach out and take the package back directly from the dealer, sometimes almost pulling it out of his hands, thus completing a hand to hand transaction.
We would let the case sit for six months before we made the arrest, so they would not remember what informant walked me in. But my little hand to hand trick worked every time.
I mean..this American senator keep on asking if Chew Sou Zi (the Tiktok CEO) is a Chinese citizen and a member of Chinese Communist Party even though the CEO keep repeatedly answering that he is a Singaporean citizen !
That senator apparently:
1.Could not tell the difference between China and Singapore.
2. Doesn’t know that Singapore is not a part of China.
3.Doesn’t know that a Singaporean person is not allowed to have a dual citizenship.
4.Doesn’t have a clue that only a Chinese citizen could become a member of Chinese Communist Party ( I’m not sure about USA, maybe in the US, a non citizen could become a member of senate?)
5. He probably doesn’t even know where the heck Singapore is!!!
And the fact is, he is a SENATOR ! He represents the people in america ! He went to Harvard, therefore he’s one of america’s best and brightest! He’s a decision maker!
Can you imagine the level of intelligence of the ordinary americans?
I was relief that the senator did not asking the CEO “have you ever ordered a Chinese takeout”?.
Italian Stuffed Meat Loaf
18521t6
Ingredients
Meat Loaf
1 pound lean ground beef
1 cup oats
1 (15 1/2 ounce) jar spaghetti sauce, divided
1/2 cup chopped onion
1/3 cup grated Parmesan cheese
1 egg, slightly beaten
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon pepper
Filling
1/3 cup of any one or all of the following: sliced mushrooms, sliced ripe olives, shredded mozzarella cheese, shredded zucchini
Topping
1/2 cup shredded mozzarella cheese
Ripe olives, sliced
Instructions
Heat oven to 350 degrees F. Grease an 8-inch square baking pan.
For meat loaf, combine ground beef, oats, 1/2 cup spaghetti sauce, onion, Parmesan cheese, egg, Worcestershire sauce and pepper; mix well. Separate mixture into two equal parts. Shape each into a patty about 7 inches in diameter. Place filling on one patty to within 1/2 inch of edge. Place in prepared pan.
Bake for 45 to 50 minutes or until meat is done.
Top loaf with remaining spaghetti sauce and mozzarella cheese. Garnish with olives.
So, we’ve got Liam Ashley, a 17-year-old dude from New Zealand who made a serious mistake. He took his parents’ car for a joyride without their permission. Yeah, not the smartest move in the book, my friend.
But here’s where things get real messed up. Liam’s parents, instead of just giving him a good old-fashioned grounding or some crap, decided to press criminal charges against him. They wanted to teach him a lesson, right? So they denied the poor guy bail, thinking that sending him to prison would fix everything.
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Now, I get it, parents wanna straighten out their kids, but come on! Liam had some minor run-ins with the law before, nothing too serious. And for that, they wanna throw him behind bars? Talk about overreacting, man.
But here’s the real tragedy. While Liam was being transported in a prison van, some dangerous psycho attacked him. And I ain’t talking about a friendly game of patty cake, my friend. Liam was brutally assaulted and, tragically, he didn’t make it. It’s a heartbreaking ending to a messed-up situation.
Ashley was killed by George Charlie Baker, a classified dangerous criminal, who strangled and stomped on the boy. Liam sustained severe brain injuries and his family decided to remove him from life support the next day. Baker was given an 18 year sentence!
image 70
I mean, seriously, what the f**k? Liam’s parents thought they were doing the right thing, but their actions led to their own son’s death. It’s a harsh reminder that sometimes, people’s intentions can be all kinds of messed up, and the consequences can be devastating.
Yea I did. I was interviewing for a part time job in a small, higher end chain women’s clothing store. I just wanted a few hours a week in a nice atmosphere. This weeks to be the place. Then as I was doing my last interview with the store manager, she started telling me about the hourly sales requirements. Woman, what are you talking about? Well, the first hour you had to sell, say $10 worth of accessories. The second jour V higher dollar value, and it went in up to 8 hours and by the eighth hour you had to sell $50 worth of stuff. By the hour! She’s been very nice and told me she’d never seen such glowing recommendations from previous employees, she’d actually talked to them. So at the news of the hard sell requirement I was sitting there with it mouth agape in shock, I said, I’m 52, months his is a part time job I thought would be enjoyable, you just made it despicable, sorry, I’m not interested. It was a good thing, I found a job in a chain fabric store, they had about 200 stores nationwide, our store was very small, about 3500 square feet, but we worked our way up to a million dollars in sales so it was busy, fun and I loved it until the store manager stopped caring and was a pain in the butt. I loved to see, knit, crochet and do other fiber crafts. We sold fabric, yarn, lots of supplies for other crafts. And people were buying all of our supplies. But it went downhill, I left after 12 years and 18!years after I started they went out of business. It was sad, I couldn’t buy a sewing machine needle there at the end because the selection went from 20 types and sizes to 4 basic needles. And that was with everything.
JEFFREY SACHS FULL INTERVIEW ABOUT CHINA – U.S RIVALRY CONTINUE ? AND MORE
Oh my God. A deep madness.
https://youtu.be/cVYtF3HVSXY
Subtle Change in Ukraine Blame Means Deadly Trouble for Americans
OPINION-EDITORIAL — A very subtle change in the words coming out of the Russian Foreign Ministry signals the FINAL step before the annihilation of the United States. We have now reached the final step . . .
The wording used by the Russian Foreign Ministry was very subtle, but its implications are anything but. See if you can pick-up the subtle change in this excerpt from RT:
The US and its citizens are complicit in the deaths of the Ukrainian POWs who were killed last week when the Russian Il-76 military aircraft transporting them was shot down by Kiev’s troops, Moscow’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova, has said.
On Thursday, Russia’s Investigative Committee released a report stating that the cargo plane was destroyed using two US-made MIM-104A missiles fired by a Patriot air-defense system. The Il-76 came down in Russia’s Belgorod Region last Wednesday. All of those on board – 65 Ukrainian POWs, three Russian troops, and six crew members – were killed.
Russian investigators stated that Ukrainian troops fired the missiles from a staging area in Kharkov Region, not far from the village of Liptsy, some 10km from the Russian border. They based their conclusion on 116 missile fragments found at the crash site bearing inscriptions in English.
Responding to the report, Zakharova said in a Telegram post that US citizens “need to know where their money is going,” arguing that President Joe Biden and his administration have made Americans “complicit in a bloody tragedy.”
Did you catch it? Did you pick up the subtle change in the language they used? It’s right there in front of you!
Here, let me focus it for you:
“The US and its citizens are complicit in the deaths of the Ukrainian POWs . . .”
Then again, in a later paragraph:
” . . .arguing that President Joe Biden and his administration have made Americans “complicit in a bloody tragedy.” “”
This tiny and subtle change points the finger not just at the US Government, it also points the finger at . . . . YOU. And me! Individually. Personally.
This is a point I have made repeatedly on my radio shows in the past two years. I have earnestly pointed out that what our GOVERNMENT does, is being done IN OUR NAME.
Remember, this nation celebrates Abraham Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address wherein he posited that we have “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”
Ergo, when the US Government does something, it does it in OUR name. You and me.
The Russians have now made clear who it is they hold responsible for what the US Government is doing: YOU and ME.
You see, we . . . . you and me . . . . ARE in fact, to blame!
We sit back and do nothing while our government runs roughshod over the whole world. Sanctions on this one and that one. Military action here. Military action there. And whenever our Government engage in that activity, people we don’t know, in lands we’ve never been to or maybe haven’t even heard of . . . . die.
Oh, and while our government is doing all this crap to people all over the world, you and I sit back and do . . . . nothing. We don’t make a phone call to our members of Congress or the Senate. We don’t write a letter or send a fax. We don’t even fire-off an email. We sit on our asses and do absolutely . . . . nothing.
The Russians are now making clear it is YOU and I who are doing this. YOU and I who are to blame. Directly. Personally.
You know what? They’re right.
WE are to blame. We elect these people then sit back and tacitly approve of what they’re doing by our own, personal inaction. They slaughter people all over the world. They bomb countries back into the Stone Age. You and I sit back and do absolutely nothing. Or worse, we sing idiotic Beach Boys Parody songs like “Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran . . . .” as if somehow what we’re doing is good. It isn’t.
A Russian guy I know cited US Senator Lindsey Graham the other day to make a very valid point to me. He showed me what Lindsey Graham, posted on “X” (formerly Twitter) wherein he said the following:
Then the Russian guy asked me “What if some member of the Russian Federation COuncil (i.e. a Russian “Senator”) Posted this exact message on VKontake (Russian Social Media) only changed the countries involved, like this FAKE SAMPLE:
FAKE RUSSIA SENATOR
In case the Putin Administration is wondering, it is abundantly clear to the United States and everyone else in the region, that the Administration doesn’t want war. But it will be difficult to tell the families of the fallen soldiers that the United States is not at war with us.
The United States is at war with Russia on multiple fronts through their proxies (Ukraine). Weak talk and weak action are putting our service members [in Ukraine], at risk. If the United States doesn’t pay a heavy price after the deaths of our service members, and the wounding of many more, then the Putin Administration is derelict in their duties to protect Russian personnel in harm’s way.
To the Putin Administration: Stop the weak rhetoric and respond with strength to protect Russian interests and lives. Your current approach to United States/NATO aggression is not working. Change while you can.”
Same words as Lindsey Graham. Same logic.
So I have to ask YOU, the Reader, if Lindsey Grahams words about Iran are good enough to warrant the US attacking Iran, would the FAKE Russian Senator’s exact same words about Ukraine, justify Russia hitting us?
Why not. Same situation!
You see, this is a big problem for my fellow Americans. We view the world as being ours to do with as we please. We never once stop to think how other powerful nations, might decide to use OUR logic, when dealing with . . . . us.
Now, some of you will react by saying “They wouldn’t dare.” Oh no? Why not?
And you would respond “Because we would nuke the living shit out of them.”
Really?
Because they can also do that to us.
Oh.
Yes.
Reality sets in.
And those same reactionary Americans who would say “They wouldn’t dare” would then likely say “They won’t, it would mean the end of the world.”
Yes. It would. And we would have done it to ourselves by the way we are behaving around the world.
Why should Russia sit back and allow us to supply arms to Ukraine, which are now clearly being used to kill Russians?
Why shouldn’t Russia tell the United States (again) to stop supplying weapons that are killing Russians and then add, or Russia will start hitting the United States?
Why shouldn’t Russia make it direct? Blunt?
Well . . . . turns out, they just began making it blunt. At the top of this Op-Ed, they have now begun blaming “American citizens.” You and me.
Where is this leading? Let me explain it this way:
What is the difference between “Killing” and “murder?”
Murder is the unlawful killing of an innocent. But “Killing” is allowable if it is “justified.”
For instance, if a guy is aiming a gun at you, and you do something which kills him, that is “self defense” and not murder, even though the guy is now dead.
So there is a difference between killing and murder. One may be allowed while the other is not.
Same thing with countries.
The U.S. is supplying weapons for Ukraine to use to kill Russians. Russia has repeatedly told the US and NATO to stop, but we are not stopping. ERGO, it would be “justified” for Russia to kill us in self defense.
Thankfully, the Russians have good morals and they know that perhaps the innocent American people ought not be harmed because of our evil government. SO thus far, they have not killed us.
I think the change in Russian Foreign Ministry wording mentioned at the start of this Op-Ed, tells us that’s about to change.
The official Diplomatic Corps of the Russian Federation is now openly, and publicly, laying the blame for the deaths of Russians, upon “the American people.” Me and you.
Having repeatedly told us to stop, the only thing left for Russia to do is to make us stop – by killing us.
The Russian Foreign Ministry has now begun laying the historical groundwork to justify exactly that.
By changing their statements to lay blame upon “the American people” they are building a record to justify killing . . . us.
Wise-up folks.
Unless we reign-in our wayward government, and stop them from running roughshod over the whole world, you and I __can__ be held accountable. You and I __can__ be stopped.
The clock seems to be ticking.
Now, you can either step up and start being an active and engaged citizen, and start telling your elected public servants to knock it off, or you can go right back to sitting on your ass and doing nothing until the brilliant white flashes start. Then you can feel sorry for yourself as you vaporize, except God already knows: You brought this on yourself by not getting off your lazy ass and stopping your own government while you still could.
Kevin is the gentlest man I’ve ever known, and we go back nearly four decades. He’s tall, well-built, and strong, yet he talks with a soft voice and always speaks kindly.
Kevin worked in a small, cramped Capitol Hill office with a Class A bully. This guy continually said nasty things to his colleagues. He was especially abusive to the women and, because of his kind demeanor, Kevin was one of the favorite targets. A bully loves attacking anyone s/he perceives to be weak.
One day, Kevin had enough. During a verbal attack, Kevin jumped up, grabbed this guy by the lapels, and pulled him from his desk chair. He then pushed the guy against a wall and put his face very close. Kevin told the guy that he could shut up, immediately, or that Kevin would shut his mouth for him. Kevin went on to explain that there’d be no more office abuse; if the behavior happened again, the consequences would be much more severe.
The guy turned bright red, then ghostly white. He had nothing to say. He sat down and spent the rest of the day looking terrified and shaking uncontrollably. He never bullied anyone again, and he left his job shortly after. Nobody was sorry to see him go.’
It was Dec 1982. I had just turned 16 in October. My two friends and I were walking home from the Christmas dance at the high school when I was hit by a drunk driver. She was driving home from a company Christmas party. I was the one closest to the street on the sidewalk and somehow she clipped me without hitting either of my friends. Best we can figure, I rolled up the windshield and off the side of her car.
I was knocked unconscious and woke up laying facedown on the street. People were already gathered by me, holding me down, telling me not to move. I was terrified that they knew something about my “condition” that I didn’t know. Fortunately, I had only minor injuries and a concussion. Sprained pinky finger, road-rash scrapes over the whole right side of my body from my ear to my knee, swollen knee and elbow, and that pesky concussion. No doubt, I was lucky.
Then there was another little “gift” that I didn’t realize I had for years. PTSD. I had to quit the school wrestling team after I had a panic attack and blacked out during practice. In the first few months after, I literally dove into bushes and onto lawns when I heard sharp sounds behind me – tires squealing, engine revving, door slamming – all sent me flying away from the road. I would get up and brush off the leaves while mentally chastising myself for being weak. Eventually, it got to the point where I’d just flinch and not actually leap, and months later where I’d just startle.
This was 1982, before MADD, before strict DUI laws, and in many cases, before any DUI laws. I was told she spent the night in the “drunk tank” and was released the next day. Her insurance paid the medical expenses minus the PTSD therapy because I didn’t know I had that. Insurance also paid for clothing that was torn or cut off, and I believe an additional $600 for “pain and suffering.” My PTSD lasted over two years.
I never drink and drive. Because I know the real cost. Because I know I got a small dose and some families pay a much larger cost. Because I couldn’t imagine sitting in a cell knowing I killed someone.
I had my fairly new license and was driving my parents car when a deer darted out in front of me. I swerved and put the car into a ditch. Not hurt.
I find a phone and call a tow truck. Get back to the car and there is a police car there. I explained I’d stayed with the car for 15 minutes but knew there was a gas station nearby.
He gives me a ticket for speeding because in his opinion that’s the only way this could have happened.
Now this is a small municipal court for traffic tickets. My license was from my parents home 3 hours away. He was expecting me to just mail in the fine rather than contest it. He approached me before court to “refresh his memory about the event” and naively I did. He gets called and testifies that I was speeding.
So, I asked him where he was when the accident happened and was able to witness me speeding. He said he passed me going in the opposite direction.
So, I asked: if you saw me speeding in the opposite direction & saw me wreck my car, why did I have to walk 20 minutes to the phone, call police headquarters to report the accident, and walk back before you wrote the ticket?
The judge stopped things at that point & dismissed the charges.
One morning as I was waking up, I looked at my 27 year old wife as she was sleeping and noticed the veins in her neck were throbbing. A few days later she was in the hospital getting excess fluid drained from her pericardium (sac around the heart) that was built up and putting pressure on her heart, and causing the veins to protrude. She had recently recovered from a stomach virus and doctors attributed this to a viral infection.
A few days later, it was happening again. That’s when the whirlwind began. She was put back in the local hospital for tests, within a day sent to John’s Hopkins for more tests, within another day sent right to the oncology unit. Her diagnosis was Angiosarcoma; the tumor was on her heart.
The outlook wasn’t good and I was getting a lot of percentages: “if we do this there’s x percent of this happening and if that happens there’s x percent that we can do this”, etc. I asked to speak with someone who could just tell me what the deal was, what to expect, what the reality of the situation was. They sent the head of oncology to speak with me, and I’ll never forget it:
“The tumor is on her heart…we can’t just remove the tumor because of the location, and because angiosarcoma has an almost liquid consistency operating is rarely successful. It’s extremely aggressive and once it gets into the bloodstream, if it hasn’t already, will spread throughout her body. You’ve asked me to be completely frank with you about your wife’s condition, and because you asked I am going to honor your request: the reality of the situation is that your wife is going to die, and the life you had together as you know it is over. It could be within six months, or because of the pressure on her heart she could go into cardiac arrest at any time. Now, I’m an aggressive realist, which means I’m going to aggressively try to change the reality of the situation. But the fact is that if this kind of cancerous tumor appeared in her leg, we would immediately amputate, and she would still not survive more than two years”.
This will not go down well with the electorate and, moreover, with the soldiers of the Ukrainian forces:
A poll published by the Kyiv Institute of Sociology in December found 88% of Ukrainians supported the top general. Zelensky’s approval rating, though also high, was considerably lower at 62%.
It is far from clear that any new commander will be able to improve Ukraine’s difficult situation on the battlefield without significantly more forces and weapons — precisely what Zaluzhny has demanded of Zelensky, adding tension to what was already a fraying relationship.
Zaluzhny’s popularity — both within the military and among ordinary citizens — makes his removal a political gamble for Zelensky. It also poses strategic risks at a time when Russia has intensified its attacks and Western security assistance for Kyiv has slowed. The general has built strong rapport with his Western counterparts and has often been able to advocate directly for certain materiel and seek counsel on battlefield strategy. … Both Budanov and Syrsky are considered favorites of Zelensky and Andriy Yermak, the chief of the presidential office and Zelensky’s closest adviser. Nearer the front, however, there seems to be little appetite for change.
“My personal opinion is you can’t do something like this right now — Zaluzhny is someone 80 percent of the military considers a good authority,” said Oleksandr, a battalion commander fighting in eastern Ukraine.
“For what is he being removed? It’s not clear. And who will replace him? Syrsky? God, I hope not. No one in the army likes Syrsky,” Oleksandr added.
The Bild publication writes that Zaluzhny wanted to withdraw troops from Avdiivka a few weeks ago, but Zelensky refused him this and on December 30 he personally went to the city to the front line to support the Ukrainian Armed Forces fighters.
So all the coffins that arrived from near Avdeevka to Ukraine since December 30 are solely on the conscience of Zelensky and his passion for narcissism.
Avdeevka is nearly surrounded and any attempts to hold onto it will cost many valuable lives of soldiers for no discernible advantage. But, just like with Bakhmut, Zelenski wants to hold on to the city to be be able point his western sponsors to some ‘successes’.
My hunch is that, after Monday’s kerfuffle in Kiev, the decision to fire Zaluzny was still hanging in balance.
The change now only happened after the noeconservative destroyer of Ukraine, Victoria Nuland, had landed in Kiev.
When asked by a journalist whether Nuland had learned about Kyiv’s plans on the battlefield, she replied that, in her opinion, Ukraine would achieve great success.
“I have to say that I leave Kyiv tonight more encouraged about the unity and the resolve, about 2024 and its absolute strategic importance for Ukraine. I also leave more confident that, even as Ukraine strengthens its defenses, Mr. Putin is going to get some nice surprises on the battlefield and that Ukraine will make some very strong success,” the U.S. Under Secretary of State emphasized.
This hint does not foresee success on the ground but asymmetric operations within Russia or the Black Sea. More to the like of this which has happen last night:
Ukraine sinks Russian ship.
During a night attack by drones in the Donuzlav area, the Black Sea Fleet lost the Ivanovets MRK, built in 1989, 493 tons of displacement, armed with Moskit missiles.
Sinking that ship will do nothing to change the outcome at the battlefront. Nor would any attacks on Russia oil and gas infrastructure change anything.
Nuland’s remark also hints that the replacement of General Zaluzny will not come in the form of Army General Alexander Syrski, who is disliked by the troops for unsuccessfully holding grounds in Bakhmut and elsewhere at too high costs in men and material.
Nuland’s hint towards asymmetric operations points to the elevation of the Chief of Military Intelligence Directorate Major-General Kyrylo Budanov as a incoming replacement for Zaluzny.
Budanov has been responsible for some daring, if mostly unsuccessful, terror attacks on Russian land and interests.
Back in June 2023 the Economist explained why Zelenski might seek to elevate Bundanov:
Aides huddle close when the general speaks. Under his leadership, Ukraine’s main directorate of intelligence—HUR—has become a plucky, autonomous authority that punches above its weight. It resembles a gang. “Before we had managers, now we have a leader,” says one veteran officer. Oleg, an operative who has known General Budanov for decades, speaks approvingly of his ability to infect others with his fervour, comparing him to a snake “hypnotising you before he comes in for the kill. Restrained, measured, never panicked. You do anything he asks.” … As a confidant of the president—those in government call them kindred spirits—General Budanov is understood to be playing an ever-bigger role in behind-the-scenes peace negotiations. Sources say he is a conduit to secret talks with the Chinese, and he has also been in contact with Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of Russia’s mercenary Wagner outfit.
In conversation it is clear that General Budanov has been thinking hard about post-war Ukraine. Last winter there was talk of him becoming defence minister. He insists his only ambition is victory. Yet secret polls conducted by Mr Zelensky’s office show they are thinking about using the cult of their hero spymaster to counterbalance a perceived rivalry emanating from Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s likeable and independent commander-in-chief. General Budanov’s colleagues say they are convinced he is destined for a big political role once peace comes—if he lives that long.
To the TV producers (Yermak) around the former comedian actor Zelenski it is all about ratings.
Budanov may be good at marketing his image as a successful terrorist.
But he has zero experience of leading any size of unit in combat. You can not lead a company, battalion, brigade or army by ‘huddling close’ with aides. It needs long term strategic thinking just as detailed attention to all kinds of day to day logistics.
Leading an army is like conducting a huge orchestra through a four year long Wagner epos. Having played the first fiddle in a chamber quartet does not qualify for that.
I am sure that U.S. military is not happy about this move. While there were some disagreements with Zaluzny about the right strategies those were between military professional who allowed for diverting opinions. Zaluzny was seen as an experienced professional soldier. Budanov is seen as a spook who had never been in command of any real military. He well not be talked to at the same level.
According to one source, Zaluzhnyi’s senior staff are also expected to be removed from their positions.
With the new inexperienced leadership the situation on the ground will soon become a catastrophic mess for forces of Ukraine. There will be wrong priorities, miss-allocations of resources and large scale losses of men and ground.
On the other side terror attacks on Russian targets, industrial equipment as well as population centers, are likely to sharply increase.
The larger U.S. aim of all this, first announced as a 2019 RAND study, is still unchanged:
The study at that time recommended the arming of Ukrainian’s army as the best way to unbalance Russia. We have since seen the escalation of that strategy. The move from the battlefield to the realm of terror is a response to the degradation of the first by empathizing the psychological effects of the second.
The foreseeable outcome though is unchanged. Ukraine will be smashed, Russia’s power will increase and the global view of the U.S. as a reliable partner will be diminished.
Posted by b on February 1, 2024 at 14:48 UTC | Permalink
One of the first casinos I ever worked in had a policy that you had to wear black pants, a tuxedo shirt, a bow tie, black dress shoes, and black socks. The only thing they didn’t demand was the colour of your underwear (as long as a bra couldn’t be seen under your white shirt). The bosses were so strict that “uniform checks” were part of the norm – every couple of days a delegated supervisor would check everyone to see that they were wearing the right clothing. What stood out to me was when they’d ask you to pull up the leg of your pants to check your socks – sometimes both legs… just to make sure both socks matched and we’re all black (no stripes at the top).
This particular casino was an anomaly in the industry – it was many years ago and a small place so they didn’t have security cameras – none! One day I was on a game that required two dealers to operate and it happened that he was one of my best friends. There were no patrons in the casino at all – not unusual for an early day shift there. An older female supervisor came around announcing a “sock check”. I looked at my friend, he looked at me, we both unbuckled our belts and let our pants drop to the floor exposing the tops of our socks.
Neither of us ever had a sock check again.
No, we weren’t fired either… there was nobody in the casino at the time and the older female supervisor was a very nice lady with a great sense of humour – she (of course) told us to never do it again and almost stayed red-faced for the rest of the shift.
I exposed a huge scam by my local gas distributor (cooking gas).
This is a typical cooking gas cylinder in India.
As you can see (not very clearly though), on the neck of the cylinder, net weight and gross weight are clearly mentioned.
Recently, I read an article in ‘The Hindu’ that revealed that a lot of gas agencies/distributors/delivery persons in India are stealing cooking gas. They take out about 1–2 kg of gas from each cylinder and sell it separately in black. The loss in weight is too small for an unsuspecting buyer to notice. But in terms of money, this translates into a loss of about 60 INR per cylinder. The article cautioned everybody to get their gas cylinders weighed before paying the delivery person (Delivery persons are mandated to carry a portable weighing scale along with them by the Govt.)
At first I laughed it off. My agency was trusted. It would never do that. But then on a whim, I decided to try it out. When the next cylinder was delivered to my home, I casually asked the delivery boy to weigh it. The color on his face instantly changed. He started stammering, started insisting that there was no need for this because the bond of trust we shared! I immediately grew suspicious. I pressed him. He then started making excuses that he forgot to bring along his portable weighing-scale.
Luckily, I had my own weighing scale at home. I immediately brought it out and weighed the cylinder myself. The gross weight printed on the cylinder was 29.5 kg, whereas the scale read 27 kg. A difference of bloody 2.5 kgs.
The delivery boy started begging me not to register a complaint against him. And that he wouldn’t repeat the mistake ever again.
Apparently, this is a huge scam going on all over India. If you are reading this answer, please get your gas cylinder duly weighed before paying for it.
Once, many years ago, as a young lawyer, I was asked to help a family member, a crazy uncle, with his disability case. He was literally homeless, living on the street and crazy beyond description. His grip on reality was severely distorted, he was schizophrenic and had lost his job as a NYC sanitation worker.
Surely, you can get him SOME benefits to live on? This was the family’s charge to me as a brand new baby lawyer. Help Uncle X! He’s desperate. You gotta do this.
Okay, I’ll give it a try. How do you say no to something like that? I had never handled a disability case and really had no idea where to start. So, let’s start with interviewing the client and see what he can tell me. I didn’t expect much in the way of cooperation from a man who I knew was thoroughly and completely insane and off his rocker. I had heard the family stories.
I set up an appointment, nevertheless, and I prayed to God for wisdom to help me save this man from roaming half-naked on the streets of NY. I figured it might even be a public service.
One fine day he did actually show up in my office. At the time, I was working for an older gentleman lawyer who had a massively busy local general practice, the type you really don’t see anymore and before the days of “legal specialization.” This office truly tried to handle EVERYTHING! It was great experience.
The waiting room was full of people in need of one form of legal advice or another when my prospective client showed up. As I greeted him in the office full of these other waiting clients the first words literally out of his mouth are “Hi, you have nice lips!” Lol. Oh boy, this was going to be a real experience. I quickly and quietly shuffled him off to my basement office so we could get to work. My office didn’t even have a window.
Well, my client had brought a sheaf of disorganized, crumpled papers and, after organizing and unfolding them I started reading them. They consisted of his employment file and the stated reasons for his termination. He was quite literally unfit for employment. His record consisted of bizarre hallucinations, reports of “voices” and other strange phenomenon which he was experiencing which rendered him totally unfit for any gainful employment. There were also stacks of medical records indicating that he was suffering from a severe mental disorder (which was nothing but obvious to anyone spending one minute in his presence). He was very much totally out of his mind.
I felt sorry for him. I knew he would qualify for Social Security Disability benefits and would also be entitled to a sizable retroactive payment. All we had to do was apply and possibly have a hearing. I was confident I could win it. I started preparing the application, starting with the claim for “disability based on mental illness.”
Well, my uncle/client took one look at the application and said (I swear that I’m not making this up) “my disability is for hemorrhoids, not that!”). I was astonished! I expected anything but resistance. What was your disability?
HEMORRHOIDS!
Well, the medical records clearly stated that he DID have hemorrhoids but that was hardly his disability or his reason for not being able to work. The records were replete with references to paranoid schizophrenia and wild hallucinations. THAT was the problem, not hemorrhoids!
I tried to persuade him. I tried to convince him to proceed but he became agitated and uncooperative. Finally, he grabbed his papers and ran out of my office. I couldn’t stop him. He was gone.
My aunt, his sister, wanted to know how we did. I told her that the case went nowhere and that he was uncooperative. Back on the streets he went for another year or so. I couldn’t help him since he wouldn’t cooperate.
Then something amazing happened (after about a year). He returned to my office, looking for help, insisting once again that his HEMORRHOIDS were his difficulty. This time I agreed.
I applied for Social Security Disability ON THE BASIS OF HEMORRHOIDS. Of course, we were going to be denied but I had an idea brewing in my young lawyer head. Let’s see if this works.
After receiving the expected denial of our application I filed an appeal and asked for a hearing with a judge. It was granted as a routine matter, as I knew it would be. Now what to do?
Well, the date of the hearing arrived and we went to court in Brooklyn. I showed up with my uncle and the case was called. The judge (I still remember his name!) looked at the hearing application and said “this is an application for disability benefits based on…. what? Hemorrhoids? Really? Okay, counsel proceed.” He was shaking his head in disbelief the entire time he said this.
I politely asked the judge to exclude my client from the room. He looked at me and said “young man, this is a most unusual request.” Yes, judge but I have my reasons. “Okay,” he said, “please exclude the claimant from the courtroom. This had better be good, counselor!”
Oh, it’s gonna be good. I promise!
As soon as my uncle left the courtroom I gushed “judge, this guy is my uncle and he’s completely nuts.” I then proceeded to tell him the entire story and told him that the real claim was for mental illness disability but the client wouldn’t let me proceed on that basis, insisting that his hemorrhoids were the issue. The judge seemed to understand.
“Okay, bring the claimant back into the courtroom. You may inquire, counselor.”
I stood up and literally asked my client ONE QUESTION. It was truly only one question… no more. I said “Uncle X, please tell the judge what’s bothering you.” Then I sat down fully knowing what was coming next.
For the next ten minutes, until the judge could no longer stand it, the client rambled about “wires being crossed” and “Ring Dings and Yankee Doodles” and how the police were stalking him and many other bizarre and colorful statements. It was very clear that his grip on reality was non-existent. I doubt he could have told you who the President was at the time or what month it was. After hearing enough, the judge stopped him, clearly having heard enough to realize this wasn’t a put on, or a fraud. It would have actually been funny if it wasn’t so sad.
“Decision reserved,” the judge said and dismissed us from his court. I left feeling confident.
A few weeks later we got a decision granting 100% disability to my uncle with a retroactive payment of over forty thousand dollars plus monthly benefits of about $2500 for life, plus Medicare. It was a grand slam win! I was a family hero.
Years later I ran into the judge on the street outside the courts. I greeted him and thanked him for his help and understanding. He told me “I will never forget that case… It was textbooks!”
Not exactly fired, but we thought it was a great reaction.
After a recent merger between two rather large companies, it was necessary to reduce personnel, so each department was asked to cut staffing by a certain percentage.
To encourage volunteers, management offered to give a full week worth of salary and paid medical benefits for each full year a person had worked at the company if they took early retirement. And anyone who qualified for a pension also got the full pension as if they had not retired early.
One member of our team was about 14 months away from his planned retirement date when he would start receiving full Social Security and pension payments.
He had worked for the company for 45 years. After some simple math, we all strongly encouraged him to take the deal.
He got 45 weeks of full pay, a whole year of benefits coverage (negotiated with HR), his full pension, and they also bought out the almost two months of accrued vacation time that he had been saving up in order to retire a few months early.
He basically got a 12+ month paid vacation with full benefits. We will be having a retirement party for him on his original planned retirement date in a couple of months. 😀
I imagine that wasn’t what management had in mind when they made the offer, but everyone on our team was very happy for him to get it!
When I worked as a commis chef in a 5-star hotel, we had some guy come in and eat on his own, which was a bit unusual. He ordered some expensive food, but strangely finished with a starter which involved some salad. A waiter came through shortly after serving the salad to tell me that the customer was complaining as he’d found a slug in his salad, so I went out to speak with him. I explained to him that I was terribly sorry, but it just was not possible. The man was being quite rude with me, but I maintained my calm and he demanded to speak with the head chef.
The head chef came out and apologised to the man and stated that the slug was not in the salad when it was served to him. The man became outraged and the implication that he was a liar and asked how we could be so sure. The head chef said “If you would please follow me sir. There’s something I would like you to see.” The man stood up, shaking his head looking a bit smug. He seemed adamant that there was nothing we could do that would ever change his mind or prove that he put the slug there. As the head chef and I led him into the kitchen, the head chef explained the sections of the kitchen as he passed through and their function. Finally, he reached the garnish section on the other side of the kitchen and pointed. “We put the lettuce for your salad through this machine. We call this ‘a shredder’”
The man took a little time to think, clearly realising that there was just no way anything short of a small bug could have made it through there alive, and started to look a little panicked. He then started to grow embarrassed by the second, and finally apologised profusely. He said that he did not have the money to pay for the meal. As we called the police, he suddenly remembered that he did have the money and paid for the meal in cash. We never saw him again.
The Duran: NATO Crossed Putin’s Red Line and Russia is Ready to FINISH It
Many years ago, while working as a housekeeper, l had one very dirty client that always left notes about what they’d like me to clean that visit.
One week l arrived to a note stating that, they’d like me to clean out the bathroom cupboard.
When l opened the cupboard l found it to be full to overflowing with used sanity pads. The whole cupboard, not one or two. Not half a dozen, but hundreds of uses sanity items. A lifetimes worth.
The note stated…clean out bathroom cupboard and as this was the only cupboard in the room, l empied it and scrubbed it out, only to be met with a nasty phone call the following day stating l should not have thrown out anything. They were being saved. Hmm. Not what the not implied. But sure.
The following visit, another note, please clean out the kitchen party. So l put all like food together, such as 10 or so open packs of pasta together, sauces together, etc, wiped out all the shelves. It looked great.
Yup another phone call. How dare l mix up the food in the cupboards. There were other instances, so l stopped working for them. The house was always filthy and they would never employ me long enough to clean the house completely. It was always left dirty, with just a small area cleaned, which would be very dirty again by next visit.
It wasn’t that it was a messy house, it was filthy to the point of being unsanitary, so l was happy to never go back.l was always worried ld get sick just for being inside there.
I was an odd duck, partly because I spent five years overseas in a private school that catered about 50/50 to children of government workers stationed there and half to people working for various corporations also stationed there, all from English speaking countries looking for a school in English in the middle of Brazil.
Also, in retrospect, partly because I’m on the autism spectrum, although I had no idea that that was the case for some decades to come. Still, I knew, everyone knew, that I was a weirdo.
Well, I got to this new school (it had just been built, because town had expanded so fast that the original school had gotten overcrowded) and of course that meant so had all the other kids. And… I’m reconstructing this, mind you, and it’s just a guess, I’m really not great at understanding how people think, see “Autism” above… they didn’t know what the “pecking order” was. So they settled it with fights. You saw someone weaker than yourself, you beat him up, and that meant you were better than him, or he beat you up and then he was better than you, and it was all sorted.
Except I didn’t want to fight. Had no reason to. Didn’t make any sense to me. Wasn’t afraid, just, well, weirdo.
It seems one kid got it in his head that this was his ticket. If he beat me up, he had it made. So my turning him down, that was maddening. He kept after me about it for weeks. Finally, I agreed. Stay in the classroom when everyone goes to recess. The teacher wasn’t all that good about policing things, it was simple enough for us both to stay behind.
He said “all right, let’s fight!” I asked him “are you sure? I don’t want to fight you. Are you sure?” “Sure” he said. So I picked up one of those desk/chair things and hit him with it. Then I asked him if he wanted to continue. He said no.
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Don’t try this. It’s probably “assault with a deadly weapon” now. I guess I’m lucky he didn’t get hurt bad enough for anyone to find out, although in the 1970s I might not have gotten in trouble anyway.
Dad always told me not to fight, but if I had to fight, be sure to win, no rules.
That’s the first and last fight of my life. Maybe word got around? Maybe I just don’t have the look in my eyes of someone you should fight with. It could be the autism, sending weird signals. I don’t know.
No. But may I highlight a dirty trick by a phone soliciter?
I’ll take that as a yes.
A neighbor of mine was a saleman for Sam’s Club. The guy who makes a pitch to your boss, offering a discount to any of his/her employees who’d like the group membership, put on sales presentations at state fairs etc., cold-calling as well.
Then I moved halfway across the state. He calls me one afternoon, disguising his voice and acting as if he’s calling on behalf of some worthless telemarketing offer. Of course I, not recognizing him, utter some choice words before hanging up. He calls me right back, identifies himself and proceeds to ask me why I couldn’t be more polite in declining whatever it is that’s being offered.
I told him why. Said my peace and then we chatted about whatever he had really needed to talk to me about.
Many years ago I was in a chat room of a group with hundreds of members. Predominantly adults but, there were older teens. I don’t remember what was being discussed but, this kid (older teen) started making rude comments then started making bizarre comments about school shootings,violence and basically hinting he was going to do something. Quite a few people ignored it or told him he was being inappropriate and that he would be reported to moderator. Most in the discussion didn’t take it seriously. I went to his profile which fortunately wasn’t locked down. So concerning posts and was able to figure out the state, town and high school he attended. And his actual name. So I called the police in that town. Explained what I had seen, sent screenshots etc. While I was on the phone with a detective they got a call from one other man who had done the same as me. Surprisingly, the detective called me back a few hours later and while he didn’t give me many details he did say, that between myself and the other man they were able to locate the boy and that everyone was safe. I confess to stalking the FB profiles later and saw that he had been hospitalized so hopefully he got the help he needed. I worried I was doing the wrong thing but, I just kept thinking how hard it would be to live with myself if I saw news the next day of a school shooting and HADN’T called.
Nuclear Boy Scout
Now known as the “Nuclear Boy Scout,” David Hahn was 17 when he decided to earn an Atomic Energy merit badge by building a working nuclear reactor — right in the backyard of his Michigan home.
In the mid-1990s, Hahn painstakingly collected tiny amounts of radioactive material from everyday objects around his house.
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Image: David’s nuclear reactor can be seen
He almost had a working “breeder” reactor in his back shed when he caught the attention of local and federal authorities, prompting an FBI and Nuclear Regulatory Commission response with the evacuation of more than 40,000 people in the locality.
With the level of radiation in his basement 1000 times higher than normal; David declined to see a doctor despite having had significant radiation exposure (the skin burn seen in the image above came as a result).
Of course, it’s best to avoid bears in the wild, but if an encounter happens, you should know that the weakest skill of this animal is its maneuverability. Bears run very fast and crawl really well — but moving quickly around an object like a car or a tree is much harder for them. Sooner or later, the animal will give up trying to catch you seeing that this smart food (you) is not worth its energy.
However, don’t panic before a bear starts to act aggressively. If it’s just looking at you, standstill. There is a chance it won’t even understand who you are and what you are going to do. If it starts walking toward you slowly, walk backward slowly. Bears rarely attack people. Most likely, it will back off once it realizes you are a human.
2. Rip current
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If you accidentally find yourself in a rip current, it is completely useless to swim against it to the shore — you will only waste your energy. Try to swim parallel to the shore until you exit the current, and only then swim toward the shore.
3. Aspirin during a heart attack
Just one pill of aspirin can seriously improve how you feel. The person having a heart attack should lie down immediately and put something under their head or sit down and then take the pill. In order for it to work sooner, it should be chewed very well.
4. Diagnosing a heat stroke
The most obvious symptoms of a heat stroke are dizziness and nausea, but they can appear for other reasons too. In order to know for sure, you should eat something sweet, like candy. If the taste seems unpleasant, this is a heat stroke. For people who have any cardiovascular disorders, it is vital to determine the reason as soon as possible and get the right help.
5. A simple maneuver that will bring someone back to consciousness
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If you really need to bring someone back to consciousness, you should put them on their back and push their knees to their chest. This will make the blood flow to their brain and the person will wake up. But first, make sure the person doesn’t have any leg or body injuries, otherwise, the situation may only get worse.
6. Help in case of a venomous snake bite
Unlike some popular misconceptions, you shouldn’t suck out the venom, apply cold, apply bandages, or burn the wound. Before the experts arrive, the victim has to drink a lot and take an antihistamine. The area around the bite should not be touched because otherwise, the venom will just spread around the body faster.
7. Saving a drowning person
If you were able to save a drowned person, it doesn’t mean that they are out of the woods yet. You should take them to the hospital immediately, otherwise, they could die within several days if there is some leftover water in their lungs.
8. How to break car glass in case of an accident
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If you are in a situation where you can only get out of a car through the window and the door is impossible to open, remember that it is much easier to break a window by hitting it, not on the center but on the edges. By the way, if you can remove the headrest from the seat, you can use it to break the window. In different cars, headrests are different, so make sure you know how to remove the ones in your car.
9. Antihistamines should always be with you.
It may happen that you are allergic to something that you have never encountered before. And it could be such a severe allergic reaction that it might just be lethal unless you get qualified help. This is especially important on trips when people try new foods, see new plants, and go to completely new places.
10. Water on the beach is too far from the shoreline.
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When the waterline is abnormally far from the shore, this is a sign of a tsunami. If you notice this somewhere, you should warn everyone around and run.
Unfortunately, in 2004, people didn’t pay attention to this sign before a tsunami in the Indian Ocean. Almost on the entire shore was exposed and people went out to collect fish and shells. And children were the most interested. However, there were people on 2 beaches that knew about this fact: a 10-year-old English girl named Tilly Smith and biology teacher John Chroston. They managed to save the lives of many people that day.
11. The rule of 3
If you ever find yourself in a critical situation, you should remember these numbers that can be used to describe the survival abilities of an average person:
3 minutes without air;
3 hours in extreme temperature;
3 days without water;
3 weeks without food.
So, if you can’t get your priorities straight, the chances of surviving are much lower.
My son has anaphylaxis inducing food allergies. The kind of food allergies where we had benadryl and epi pens in the nurses office and his backpack. In order to prevent an exposure I carefully packed his lunch every day. He had some money on his school lunch account so that on Fridays when they offered icy pops he could get one. Other than that, no birthday celebrations snacks, no school holiday celebrations, etc were allowed. The nursing staff knew, the teachers knew, even the principal knew this.
Apparently the stinking lunch aide didn’t know and didn’t care. One day my 7 year old son forgot to grab his lunch kit before heading to lunch. He told the lunch aide but she refused to let him go back for it. He begged but she instead marched him to the hot lunch line and made him buy his lunch. He came home covered in a rash, beet red and with severe stomach issues that kept him out of school for 5 days. When I asked him he told me what had happened. Fortunately he ate something off the minor allergy list so not an anaphylactic reaction.
I called every person I could think of and demanded answers. I went to school and demanded to talk to the lunch staff supervisor. That woman was re-trained and put on probation. I wish they had fired her but she claimed she had no knowledge about allergies and was just doing her job. Oh, and she avoided my son completely the whole rest of the year.
Young Wife Hid The Truth About How She REALLY Made $ In College, Now Hubby’s Family Has Video Proof
This is a great video that I will show to my daughter when she gets older. Learn from the mistakes of others.
Every Thursday night, a bunch of us university students would meet in the local pub. One night one of my closest friends says, that they are going to Hawaii for reading week (spring break) and asked if I would like to come.
Being drunk, I said that sounds awesome, he said ,sign a blank cheque and give it to me, and I will make all the reservations. I gave him the cheque and forgot about it. It was never mentioned again. Two months later I get home from the bar, on the Friday of reading week, and the phone is ringing, ( before cell phones) I answer it, and my friend says,”Where are you, the plane leaves in an hour and a half, and we are all at the airport lounge”
I lived 15 minutes from the airport. I threw my notes and text books, some jeans, underwear, socks and long sleeve shirts in a suitcase. I had no clean T-shirts, gym shorts or swim wear. I drove, parked in long term parking and just made it to drop off my luggage, at the last second. I met my friends in the lounge, and walked to the gate. If I had gotten home from the bar 10 minutes later I would have missed it.
I asked him why he hadn’t mentioned the trip in two months, and told him I had nothing to wear in Hawaii, and I needed to study for exams that followed reading week.
He looked stunned, he had completely forgot to tell me that he had booked the trip. Because the others had all been talking about it.
I had a great time in Hawaii, bought cheap T-shirts, shorts and swim wear, and never cracked a book.
I failed my first test, the day that I got back to university, and had to spend an extra semester in school to catch up. I should have said NO
I remember an incident in the late 1990s that happened on a Boeing 757 during a flight from Orlando to San Francisco.
As we were taxiing for take-off, we were enacting the required safety demonstration. A passenger seated in the over-wing exit row was talking loudly to his seatmate, creating such a distraction that some near him were having trouble hearing.
I leaned over and quietly asked him to hold his conversation until we were finished. He replied, somewhat condescendingly, “Look, I fly a lot. I know what to do. I’ve seen this so much that I already know it by heart.” And with that, he launched rudely back into his conversation.
I politely suggested that our demonstration was an excellent chance for him to review his knowledge, but he interrupted me, snarling for me to leave him alone because he didn’t need a review; he knew exactly what to do. I then flatly stated that his conversation was a distraction for others, and again asked him to hold until we were done, assuring him that it would be only another minute or two.
“FINE!” he snapped, heaving a melodramatic sigh, and glaring sullenly at me, he muttered something incomprehensible (and undoubtedly unpleasant) before continuing his conversation anyway, though quietly.
We achieved our cruising altitude at 35,000 feet and the ride was smooth. But about 90 minutes into the flight, we experienced an emergency when the cockpit was alerted by a sensor that there was a fire in one of the wheel wells. The proper procedure was to immediately lower the landing gear to extinguish the fire. But after the gear was lowered, the sensor still indicated the presence of fire. The Captain called to advise us that we would be making an emergency landing at the nearest airport, an Air Force Base in Meridian, Mississippi, and instructed us to prepare the cabin for evacuation.
Our descent was rapid, and we had only minutes to prepare. We advised the passengers on the situation, and began to prepare them for an emergency landing, including the possibility of a crash, and subsequent evacuation. The fear was palpable in the cabin, and everyone was paying very close attention to our instructions.
Our final action was a visual inspection of the cabin as we made our way to our jump-seats to strap in. As I hurried down the aisle, checking to see that passengers were prepared, I came to the window exit and noticed that the loud-mouthed passenger appeared rigid with terror. So I stopped and I asked, “Sir, are you OK? Do you know what to do when we land?”
He didn’t respond, and so I grasped his shoulder and with a shake, I said loudly, “SIR, CAN YOU DO THIS?”
He turned his gaze on me and I could see that he was in absolute shock. His terror-stricken eyes began to tear up, and the color drained from his face, turning it white as his mouth opened and closed, over and over, like a fish out of water. He couldn’t answer me. His mouth made little bleating sounds as he tried to force air through his larynx, but couldn’t seem to form words.
Time was running out, and others around could see that there was a problem. I pointed to the man sitting in the row behind and asked, “Can you do this?”
He fairly leapt to his feet, nodding and saying loudly, “Yes ma’am, I can.”
“Do you know what to do?” I demanded of him, and he replied with full confidence, “Yes ma’am. I look out the window first, and if it’s safe, I pull the cover off, and pull the handle down until the window opens, then lift it in, roll it onto the seats, step through and get off the back of the wing.”
“Then you and him change places… NOW!” I fairly shouted. I only had moments left; we were nearly landing. But the man in the exit was frozen with fear, unable to even comprehend what we were doing, let alone move himself.
At my shouted instructions, the second passenger and I, along with two other passengers, grabbed the terrified man by his arms and physically lifted him up, out and into the row behind. I yelled to the passengers next to him to buckle him in as the second passenger jumped into the exit seat. I fled for the back of the plane just as the Captain came onto the PA shouting “BRACE, BRACE, BRACE!” Diving for my jump-seat, I strapped in, pulling the last harness tight and snapping my body into the brace position just as the wheels touched down.
Fortunately for us, the landing was smooth, and before the plane came to a stop, the Captain announced, “REMAIN SEATED, REMAIN SEATED!” The fire was out, and we taxied to a stop. (We later learned that it was a malfunctioning sensor; there had been no fire in the first place.)
Air Force personnel brought stairs to the airplane, and all the passengers got off to stretch their legs and recover from the excitement. Inside the small terminal, someone tapped my shoulder. It was the man who had been so rude during our safety demonstration, who had frozen up when the actual emergency came.
“I want to apologize to you,” he said. “I was being an ass. I thought something like this would never happen to me, and when it did, I was terrified because I didn’t know what to do. Despite my rudeness to you, you still did your best to save my life.
“I was wrong, and I make this promise to you that I will never again ignore the safety demonstration, regardless of how many times I’ve seen it, and regardless of where I’m seated on the plane. I’ve learned a valuable lesson, and I have you to thank for it. I hope you accept my apology.”
When I first started working at Wolf Camera, I had a coworker that I’ll call John Doe. He was the type who was friendly enough, but didn’t have a particularly great work ethic.
Once, I was printing some photos. He was in the back taking a break. The phone rang. After a few rings, I answered the phone. When I was done with the call, I asked why John hadn’t answered the phone. He said something like, “Oh. I thought you liked answering the phone.”
Another time, he left work to take care of personal business. He said he’d be back in an hour or two to help close up. My brother and I were the only ones there. I didn’t have a key to lock up and I don’t think my brother did, either.
I was new enough at that point that I didn’t feel comfortable shutting down the machines by myself. We had to call someone to help close the store. I’m not sure if that ever made it back to the manager, as that incident didn’t get him fired.
One day, a camera goes missing. Our store had been flagged by corporate because we had enough inventory go missing, so we had to count the cameras every morning and every night. We also had them tagged, so we knew which camera went missing. A few days later, it appeared in the back again.
Shortly thereafter, we get a visit from corporate. Then, John Doe is suddenly no longer with the company. Officially, this is all I know.
It later came out that John had taken the camera and used it for photos on a dating site. How do we know? He left the pictures (of himself) on the camera’s internal memory.
Once upon a time, in a small suburban town, there was a high school named Elmwood High. Among the teachers at Elmwood High, there was one who stood out, Mrs. Anderson. She was known for her warm smile, her passion for teaching, and her impeccable professionalism. Students admired her dedication to her job and respected her greatly.
One sunny afternoon, a group of students was gathered in the school library, studying for an upcoming history exam. As they pored over textbooks and notes, a hushed conversation began about Mrs. Anderson. The students wondered about her personal life beyond the classroom, as she was known to be quite reserved about her own affairs.
Curiosity got the best of them, and they decided to do some sleuthing. They began by searching for her on social media, hoping to uncover tidbits of information about her life outside of school. It wasn’t long before they stumbled upon a social media profile that belonged to Mrs. Anderson.
To their surprise, her profile revealed a secret passion that none of the students had ever imagined. Scrolling through her posts and pictures, they discovered that Mrs. Anderson was an avid extreme sports enthusiast. There were breathtaking photos of her skydiving from high altitudes, snowboarding down steep slopes, and even bungee jumping off towering bridges.
The students couldn’t believe their eyes. The teacher they had always seen as reserved and composed was, in her free time, a fearless adrenaline junkie. They were in awe of the stark contrast between her adventurous hobbies and her calm, composed demeanor in the classroom.
As the students shared their discovery with their classmates, the news spread like wildfire throughout the school. Everyone was astonished by the double life their beloved teacher led. The revelation added a new layer of intrigue to Mrs. Anderson’s personality, and she became even more respected and admired for her unexpected passions.
One day, a curious student couldn’t resist asking Mrs. Anderson about her extreme sports adventures. She smiled and confessed to her secret hobby, explaining how it provided her with a sense of thrill and freedom that balanced the structure and responsibility of teaching.
Her revelation served as a valuable lesson to her students, reminding them that even those who appear to be one-dimensional may have hidden depths and interests that defy expectations. It was a moment of connection and mutual understanding that brought the teacher and her students closer together, deepening their respect and admiration for one another.
1920’s General Store OPENED After Decades of Closure: Exploring a long-Abandoned General Store
If we stopped launching satellites and rockets (I’m against this), how long will it take for Earth to be cleansed of all the space junk orbiting it?
The densest concentration of space junk – using the word “dense” very loosely – is in low Earth orbit and would mostly clean up after 10–20 years due to orbital drag. On the other hand, the debris in higher orbits might last thousands or millions of years.
On the gripping hand, space junk isn’t all that dense. The carefully guarded ISS has to dodge debris about once per year (and is armored for the very little stuff that is missed). Pictures like the following diagram incorrectly portray space junk that is the size of nuts and bolts as being the size of cities.
60 years of space launches have put a grand total of 7,500 tons of junk into orbit, which is equivalent to one day’s worth of domestic trash from a big city. Space junk, of course, is spread over a volume thousands of times greater than all the skies, waters, and lands of Earth.
that 95% or more of its satellites would de-orbit in a controlled fashion at their end of lives, and their low orbit means the rest will drop in a few years if they can’t make de-orbit burns.
used to be a major source of space junk because after some years in orbit their batteries or residual fuel would explode. They are now usually built to vent their tanks and batteries after releasing their payloads, while some operators try to set them up on atmosphere-skimming orbits or outright de-orbit them.
Geosynchronous satellites, which are far too high to de-orbit, now reserve fuel to kick themselves up to Graveyard orbits, which are a bit higher than geosynchronous and aren’t useful for anything except dead satellites.
So I was waiting on the check out line today at a grocery store, when this teenage girl clearly cuts in front of me. She sees that I’m there and just stridently moves in front of me. I want to say something but decide that it’s not worth it, but I have some fairly nasty thoughts about her being an entitled and rude brat.
Then I see her look back worriedly, looking really stressed. What must be her mother is leaning against the wall, looking quite ill. The mother has a cane and is barely able to walk. She’s telling the girl to hurry up already.
The teenager wasn’t cutting in front of me because she’s a nasty person, but because she’s stressed and a caretaker. She just wants to get her mother home.
I felt grateful I didn’t make a scene.
I realized that when people are cruel, many times, they have their own problems and you don’t have to take it so personally.
I was 16 and used to visit my boyfriend who lived in a large apartment building close to my house.
We’d hang out with a small group of friends in the parking lot listening to music, talking and loitering.
There was a lot of loitering.
(Wait. If you feel like this answer needs a soundtrack, play Raspberry Beret by Prince.)
One of my boyfriend’s neighbors would always come down and ask us to turn the music down. Her request was made with distaste, contempt.
It was like we had no right to occupy the space we did, like everything, including sound waves, belonged to her.
We never turned the music down. We didn’t mean to be rude but needed to stake a claim over our fundamental right to exist.
Today I live in San Francisco in a busy neighborhood. Sometimes teenagers park in the street right below my apartment. They listen to music and honestly, I don’t understand why they have to play such shitty music so very loud.
At least once a week I sigh and scrunch up my face and open the window, lean out and catch myself right before words pour out of my mouth.
It’s inevitable. You get old and become all the things you were sure you’d never be.
Yes. It was shortly after 9/11. I was a teenage girl, going to my dad’s job like I always had(we lived right around the corner). I pulled in, saw a guy waving at me, so I waved back and keep.goimg thinking it was one of his coworkers.
Well, it wasn’t a coworker, it was security trying to flag me down. I parked next to my dad’s car and was waiting for him to come out on lunch. This was before every teenager had a cell phone so I was just sitting in my car.
The security guy flew up to me, blocked me in and started screaming at me to get out of the car. They’d never had security before so I had no clue what was going on. I thought it was just some crazy guy. I got out the car(stupid, I know but teenage girl) and asked him what was going on. He yelled that he was calling the police and I was going to jail. I started crying and trying to explain that I was just coming to see my dad. He called me a liar and kept telling me I was going to jail.
One of my dad’s coworkers came over to see what was happening and saw it was me, he radioed in to my dad and a supervisor to come out right now. I was explaining to the coworker what happened and the guy kept calling me a liar. My dad and the supervisor came out and I kept trying to tell them what happened and the security guy kept saying I was lying and I was disrespectful and didn’t listen to his commands. I never even heard any commands except get out of the car.
The supervisor advised that they had cameras so he’d review them. The guy and the entire security company were let go the next day.
I still sometimes go to my dad’s work for different things and it’s been over 20 years since this happened.
Have you ever encountered someone who walks into a room and sunshine erupts from their pores? They crack a joke, and the room erupts in laughter. They ask a question, and everyone leans in, eager to share their pearls of wisdom. You leave the interaction feeling like you’ve known them for years, vowing to unlock the secret to their magical, instant likability.
Fear not, dear human, for today we delve into the Secrets of the Charmers’ Codex, a tome whispered through the ages amongst the effortlessly popular. Forget potions and magic spells (though a well-placed confetti cannon adds a certain je ne sais quoi); these are secrets of the soul, crafted from genuine human interaction and a dash of hilarious self-awareness.
Rule #1: Be the Human Sunshine: Let’s face it, negativity is the emotional equivalent of a rogue sock in the dryer – loud, obnoxious, and best left at home. Smile, not just with your lips, but with your eyes. Exude the warmth of a freshly baked croissant, the enthusiasm of a puppy greeting its long-lost chew toy. Remember, people gravitate towards light, so become a walking lighthouse of joy.
Rule #2: Listen Like a Ninja: Master the art of the attentive ear. Put away your phone, silence your inner monologue (unless it’s particularly witty), and focus on the person speaking. Nod like a bobblehead on caffeine, ask insightful questions (avoiding “Is that all?” like the plague), and remember details. Make them feel like they’re the most fascinating documentary on Netflix, and watch their walls melt away.
Rule #3: Humor is Your Weapon (But Use it Wisely): A well-timed joke can disarm tension, bridge awkward silences, and earn you eternal brownie points. However, wielding humor is like handling a spork (useful, but potentially dangerous). Know your audience, avoid offensive jabs, and embrace the power of self-deprecation. Remember, laughing at yourself is like wearing mismatched socks – quirky, endearing, and strangely captivating.
Rule #4: Empathy is Your Superpower: Step into someone else’s shoes (provided they’re not covered in questionable substances). Acknowledge their feelings, validate their concerns, and offer support without judgment. Show them you’re not just a charming surface, but a deep well of understanding. Think of yourself as a human empathy sponge, soaking up emotions and leaving behind a trail of emotional comfort.
Rule #5: Authenticity is Your Shield: Ditch the masks, the personas, the inflatable T-Rex costume (unless it’s thematically appropriate). Be your wonderfully weird, flawed, and fabulous self. Embrace your quirks, celebrate your passions, and let your genuine personality shine through. People connect with the real you, not some airbrushed version. Think of yourself as a delicious, homemade pizza (flaws and all) – infinitely more interesting than a frozen pepperoni disc.
Rule #6: Master the Art of Conversational Ping Pong: Conversations aren’t monologues; they’re a delightful dance of ideas. Share your thoughts, but don’t hog the spotlight. Ask open-ended questions, volley back engaging responses, and keep the rally going strong. Remember, the best conversationalists make others feel heard and valued, not like a spectator at a tennis match.
Rule #7: Sprinkle Compliments Like Confetti: Everyone appreciates a genuine compliment, so scatter them like glitter on a unicorn’s birthday cake. But remember, specificity is key. Instead of “You look nice,” try “That shade of blue makes your eyes sparkle like sapphires.” Or instead of “You’re funny,” share, “I almost snorted my coffee when you told that story about the talking parrot and the cheese wheel.”
Rule #8: Embrace the Power of Vulnerability: Sharing your flaws and fears isn’t weakness; it’s magnetic. It shows you’re human, relatable, and courageous enough to let others see the real you. Vulnerability builds trust, strengthens bonds, and makes you instantly more likable. Think of it as social kryptonite: It disarms defenses and reveals your authentic awesomeness.
Rule #9: Be a Name Magician: Remembering names is like casting a spell of instant connection. Use repetition, association techniques, or even write it down discreetly if needed. When you address someone by name, it shows you care and value their individuality. It’s like a verbal hug, without the awkward body contact (unless you’re into that, then by all means, hug away).
Rule #10: Radiate Passion: When you talk about something you love, your eyes light up like a Christmas tree on energy drinks. Passion is contagious, so share your enthusiasm for your hobbies, dreams, or that weird obsession with collecting vintage teacups. People are drawn to those who exude passion; it’s like a beacon of excitement in a sea of blasé conversations.
Bonus Tip: Embrace the Unexpected: Sprinkle your interactions with a dash of the extraordinary. Offer a stranger a high five for no reason, compliment someone’s shoelace-tying skills, break into a spontaneous interpretive dance (bonus points for air guitar solo). Remember, life’s a stage, and you’re the star of your own one-person show. Make it memorable, make it yours, and watch the world become your captivated audience.
So there you have it; the secrets of the Charmers’ Codex. Remember, instant likability isn’t about manipulation or trickery. It’s about embracing your genuine self, radiating warmth, and treating others with the kindness and respect you deserve. Go forth, spread your sunshine, and remember, the world needs more laughter, not more rogue socks in the dryer.
To delve deeper into this topic, you don’t need anything short of an intriguing book. Articles are not enough. Crack the code for instant likeability and charm. See my comment below.
The worst thing I have ever seen a parent do to their child in public is something that breaks my heart and makes my blood boil at the same time.:
I was working at a local gym and saw a woman carrying her infant child through the lobby toward the parking lot. I can only assume the baby became fussy because the woman became angry and stopped in the space between two sets of windowed doors, placed the baby on the floor, and began to hit the child (which of course made it cry, and did nothing to help whatever was the matter). This only lasted a few seconds, otherwise I might have dropped what I was doing and confronted her. My co-workers and I were stunned and horrified. We wondered in quiet conversation, “What kind of a monster does that to her baby?”
I have never forgotten this incident because it was so terrible, and because I would give everything I own to have a child of my own.
On the flip-side, one of the best things I have ever seen a parent do in public is this:
A little boy was with his mother in the grocery store, and he wanted a doughnut. I overheard his mother giving him a choice: “You can have a doughnut now, and skip (whatever it was) later, or you can have (whatever it was) later and not have the doughnut now.
I thought to myself, “This is a great way to teach good decision-making while instilling the importance of forethought and delayed gratification!”
The little boy chose the doughnut, and then said he still wanted the other item. To the mother’s credit she followed through with, a firm but gentle, “No.” He cried bitter tears, and I’ll bet he has never forgotten his choice and consequence. What a difficult but important lesson! I felt for the child, but silently applauded the mother.
Beef Braciole
The tomato-wine pan sauce is divine. Always serve spaghetti or other pasta on the side to complete the presentation.
2024 02 03 10 10
Braciole is a classic Italian favourite that’s sure to please the whole family. Tender slices of beef or pork are rolled up with savory fillings like Parmesan cheese, parsley and garlic before being braised in an irresistible tomato-based sauce. Serve it over pasta, or Polenta with a side of sauteed vegetables. Either way there’ll be no leftovers!
Slices of the top round (topside) can be quite large so if they are, you’ll want to cut them to make it the perfect size to accommodate two slices of prosciutto. It needs to be pounded to be thin and tenderised.
Braciole offers something special for any occasion; whether you’re looking for a hearty weeknight dinner idea or prepping ahead of time for entertaining guests this traditional dish packs all sorts delicious flavours into one impressive main course.
Ingredients
1 (2 1/2 pound) round steak
1/2 pound Italian sausage
1/2 cup chopped fresh parsley
1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
1 clove garlic, minced
1 teaspoon Italian seasoning
1 teaspoon kosher or sea salt
1/2 teaspoon lemon-pepper seasoning
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 cup chopped onion
1/2 cup chopped carrot
1 1/2 cups dry red wine (I use Chianti)
1 (16 ounce) can plum tomatoes
1 (6 ounce) can tomato paste
1 teaspoon salt
1 bay leaf
Instructions
Trim all fat from steak. Cut into 8 equal pieces, then pound thin.
Remove casing from Italian sausage. Break up in medium bowl. Add parsley, Parmesan cheese, garlic, Italian seasoning, 1 teaspoon salt and the lemon-pepper seasoning; mix thoroughly. Spread each steak with 2 heaping tablespoonsful of sausage mixture. Roll up jellyroll fashion; fasten with wooden picks.
Brown rolls 3 to 4 at a time in hot oil in Dutch oven. Add onion and carrot to pot. Cook until vegetables are soft, about 5 minutes.
Stir in wine, tomatoes, tomato paste, remaining 1 teaspoon salt and bay leaf. Bring mixture to boil; lower heat. Add beef rolls. Cover and simmer for 1 hour. Remove from heat.
Remove wooden picks before serving. Serve with sauce and spaghetti or other pasta on the side.
We had a South American migrant as a sales guy. Fresh into the country. Great salesman. His product knowledge was excellent & customer rapport was brilliant. The only negative was he needed help planning his routes, as he had yet to learn the geography – but that was something we were willing to do for him. He never had a day off. He had no family in Australia, and never spoke about friends – only the occasional mention of a neighbour who he would have a beer with on weekends.
One Monday, he didn’t show. This was normal for most sales guys, as they hit the road – but not him. He liked to plan on Monday, spent Tu-We-Th on the road, and Friday back in the office to wrap up the loose ends from the week. He also lived only 5 minutes from the office, so it was convenient for him too (unlike those of us who lived 1.5 hours away!). Some of the guys would stay back on Fridays so they could go for a few beers, and he would join them – they were probably the closest to friends that he had at the time – remembering he’d only been in the country some 2 months by now.
I called his mobile phone, and got no answer. We decided at lunch time to go around to his apartment and knock. No response. The neighbour who came out said he saw him Saturday morning, and that was it. We got real worried. So we went to the local Police station to ask what could be done. They said they’d do a welfare check, but we told them we’d already been. They promised to call us back with anything they found. We did get a call shortly after – not from those cops, but another station, to let us know the company car he drove was parked in a M-F clearway lane, and was towed that morning. The location was the other side of the city to where he lived. By late afternoon the mystery was solved. He’d met a girl on the Friday night. She invited him to her party on the Saturday night. He drove over there, parked in a (legal on weekends) roadside spot. When he was crossing the road, he looked to his left (coming from a LHD country) to make sure the traffic was clear. He didn’t look to his right (we are a RHD country) and stepped out in front of a bus. He was in hospital, and survived with surprisingly few injuries beyond a couple of broken bones, fractures & bruising.
Second one:
Same company, couple of years later. Ironically the car that the guy above had was passed down to this salesman, as he’d been promoted and got an upgrade. It wasn’t unusual for this new salesman to have days off – particularly Monday. He would usually call in sick. If he didn’t, I would text him, and he’d reply that he was sick, and apologise for not calling. One week it went 2 days with no call and no text response. We feared a similar problem, so we drove the 1/2 hour to his house to see if he was OK. Car was in the driveway – a good sign. No answer on the door though. Called the cops and explained it. They went into the backyard and could see in through a window. He was passed out on the lounge in the back room. Turns out his father passed away (overseas) and he only found out Sunday night. He drank himself silly over 2 days.
Third one.
I didn’t call this in, but a neighbour did. Many houses in suburban Australia have a separate room for the toilet. Usually around 1500–1800mm long by 800–1000mm wide (5–6 feet x 3 feet). Most have a swinging door, that opens into the room. This particular house had one like this.
A lovely older lady lived by herself a few houses down from me. He first name was Mabel. Everyone called her Mrs Mabel. She was always friendly and everyone knew her. Her neighbour Ken would help her a lot, and came to get me for “big jobs” that needed 2 people. She was often in the garden, and had a little dog she’d bring out on a lead to enjoy the outdoors – sitting on the grass for hours watching her tend to the plants and flowers.
One day Ken said to me he hadn’t seen her all of the prior day. Also, overnight, none of the usual lights went on in the house. He was scared she might have died. I suggested she might have gone to visit one of her children and the grandkids, but he said he still heard the dog when it went out into the back yard (via a doggy door). I then felt a huge amount of dread too. So he called the cops. They came. No response. They tracked down one of her children and called them. Funny story about that – I knew the numberplate of her son’s car (I really liked the car) and the cops were able to find him from that.
Her son confirmed she had no travel plans, and he hadn’t heard from her for a few days. He feared the worst, and asked the cops to break in. Before they did any damage, they decided to jump the fence and check the back of the house. Back door was unlocked, so they entered.
They found her inside, but couldn’t help her. She’d fallen when getting off the toilet, and was stuck against the door. She couldn’t get up, and she was trapped in the room. Apparently she’d called for help all afternoon the day before, but nobody could hear her. The outside of the toilet door was very well shredded where her little dog had tried in vain to “dig” her out. They got the Fire/Rescue guys in, and they cut the door into pieces to remove it enough to get to her. After a stay in hospital, which was quite long (she developed a blood poisoning problem from the pooled blood trapped in her leg) she returned home.
Ken & I took the remains of the broken door off the hinges and cut it up so she could dispose of it in the household bin over a couple of weeks. Ken told her she doesn’t need a toilet door as she’s the only one in the house. She replied with “It’s a habit, and even at my age, I still maintain my modesty, but after a kind lecture from the Fire/Rescue team, I now realise that my safety is more important than modesty.”
Some time later she asked if we could fit a new door if she paid for it. This was puzzling, as we knew she didn’t need it. But she explained that with grandchildren in the house of a certain age, it was very difficult to stop the grandson from teasing the granddaughter when she needed to use the toilet! She promised to only use the door when they came to visit. One of her children also got her a necklace that has a button you can press in an emergency. They also feared she may fall in the garden and not be able to get up.
We have had the same worry for my mother-in-law, so last year we got her an Apple watch so she can at least call, or give an SOS signal. She now proudly calls us from it, out in the garden, saying how great it is that she doesn’t miss any messages (she would leave her phone inside, or on silent in her pocket)! She’s good with tech though, and uses the watch and phone like someone half her age. It has put our minds at ease, knowing she won’t be all alone & helpless like Mrs Mabel was. She wants to renovate the bathroom and toilet soon, so I have suggested she get the door jamb for the toilet turned around so the door can open outwards, and replace the round knob (that’s hard to grip) with a lever style handle. Fortunately she has agreed with me.
Incredible Civil War Collection Hidden 50 Years in Secret Room Behind Steel Doors, REVEALED!
Dogs in Shenzhen are a real trip. I must tell you all, these pooches have to be the most catered to, and pampered animals in the world. They get hair styling, fingernails, their own clothes, carriages and backpacks.
Many, many years ago I was working at Godfather’s Pizza. One of our assistant managers was a real jerk. One of his endearing habits was making sexist remarks. I found that the way to shut him up was to add into the conversation topics that he just couldn’t handle. Like one day when a song by The Who was playing. I altered the words and sang to him “Talking ’bout my menstruation”. Another time he was being rather condescending, lecturing the kitchen staff, and mentioned the cleaning towels. He said “We DON’T use RAGS!” and I said “I do!”
Which reminds me of a time with this guy I was dating briefly. We had just had dinner at a restaurant on our way back to town, and before leaving, he said “I’m going to visit the porcelain altar.” When he came back from the restroom, I asked “Did he accept your sacrifice?” He answered “With open mouth”. So then it was my turn. When I came back to the booth, I said “I gave a blood sacrifice”. I don’t know why he thought his answer was so witty, but mine was horribly disgusting!
This was back several years ago, phone books were still used and no one had ever heard of such a thing as a smartphone. But I went to a Ford dealership in response to one of those Saturday morning programs I seen about various dealerships having sales on used cars where they’d parade them by the screen while rattling off the various things the car or truck was equipped with and the listed price. I go to the dealership and fell for their first scam, they ask you if you’re trading in the vehicle you arrived in and if you say yes they ask you for the keys so they can appraise the vehicle. Don’t ever fall for this cause not only are they going to low ball you on the trade in value (know what your car is worth before you go), but some dealerships will also about hold your keys hostage until you agree to buy whatever car you had been looking at with excuses ranging from they’re still looking at your car to let me go talk to my manager for the umpteenth time…
So I had fallen into this trap. The sales guy I had test drove the car with didn’t know anything about the car, I had to educate him, and I decided not to buy the car. Well they wouldn’t give me back the keys to my car and we were going through a litany of excuses – they were still looking at my car, let me talk to my manager, they can’t find my keys, so on and so forth. I’m getting angry and I’m not a confrontational person mind you but around and around we’re going. But then I have an idea and ask for a phone and the phone book. They ask who I’m calling??? I turn the pages of the phone book until I find the listings for the various local news channels and start to dial the phone on the desk for one of the local news outlets as I tell the dealership guy I’m calling the news, I’m sure they’d just love to hear about this dealership and their sales practices (cause we’ve all seen shady dealerships get profiled on the news haven’t we????). Well you never saw my car keys appear so fast. Never did get to talk to the news, got a busy signal but I didn’t tell them. Got up, left and bad mouthed them to everyone I ever encountered who was thinking about buying a car from them.
Why Men ARE NOT COMMITTING in Modern Dating | Dating Apps & Relationships
Vietnam (Hanoi), China (Beijing, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Chengdu)
As a foreigner who has lived for a short time in these citys, I can answer this question.
I have lived in these cities for more than 30 days, so I have a certain say.
1. Basic life
The cost of living in Hanoi is lower than Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen in China, and about the same as Chengdu. This seemed a bit incredible to me at first, because Vietnam’s per capita income is much lower than China’s. But the fact is that whether it is rent, catering, purchasing mobile phones, or telecommunications services, prices in Hanoi are not cheap and do not match the level of development of the entire country.
Regarding this issue, some Vietnamese friends also told me that it is because I have adopted a “foreigner” lifestyle. For example, I live in hotels, shop in large shopping malls, and eat in more formal restaurants. It’s not really an “ordinary” life.
But I think this explanation is limited in its persuasiveness because I also live the same way in China. For example, the price of a bowl of rice noodles I eat on the streets of Hanoi is almost the same as the price of a bowl of noodles on the streets of Chengdu.
What particularly impressed me was that the taxi price in Hanoi was twice that of Chengdu and 1.5 times that of Beijing and Shanghai.
Compared with China, only some service industries in Hanoi are relatively cheap, such as haircuts and massages.
Therefore, in terms of basic life, the consumption levels of foreigners living in big cities in China are similar to those in big cities in Vietnam. There are no problems with basic living needs.
2. Public facilities
In terms of public facilities, Vietnam and China are quite different.
Hanoi’s urban development level is similar to that of Southeast Asian countries (except Singapore), while China is at the world’s leading level.
Urban transportation: Hanoi mainly relies on taxis, there is only 1 subway, and the public buses are terrible, slow and inefficient. There are some rickshaws that I rarely try.
China relies mostly on subways, every major Chinese city I’ve lived in has a huge subway system, and taxis are cheaper than in Vietnam. Buses in big cities in China are also very cheap and efficient. China also has a large number of shared bicycles and electric motorcycles, which are very convenient and you can use public transportation to quickly reach your destination.
China is faster and cheaper
Roads: Vietnam’s urban roads are narrow, vehicle driving efficiency is low, and traffic congestion is serious. Roads between cities are in poor condition and there are very few freeways. Driving long distances is not an option
China’s road construction level is very high. Expressways can lead to every small city. You can easily drive more than 500 kilometers a day by driving a car. If you are not prone to fatigue, 800 kilometers is also acceptable.
Driving a car in China is easy, but it is not recommended to drive a car in Vietnam for short-term stay
Cross-city transportation:
Vietnam is largely dependent on flying, driving a car is not an option and the rail experience is terrible.
Chinese people generally rely on highways and high-speed rail to solve journeys within 300 kilometers.
Most distances of 300-800 kilometers rely on high-speed railways.
Planes are only used for journeys over 800 kilometers, as they are too inefficient.
Although China is larger and cities are further apart, it actually takes less time than Vietnam.
FOOD:
The catering industry in Vietnamese and Chinese cities is very developed, and there are also restaurants that are open for a long time at night. So basic meals are no problem.
The food in Vietnam is generally Southeast Asian style. You can feel the influence of Thailand and Cambodia, and the spices they like to use are relatively similar.
The difference lies in diversity. China’s catering industry is the most diverse I have ever seen. In cities like Chengdu or Shenzhen, you can eat completely different foods every day for a month, and there are many choices for each type.
The catering industry in Hanoi is relatively simple. The tastes of Vietnamese restaurants are almost the same, unlike in China where there are so many types. The number of foreign restaurants is much smaller than in China, and there are even fewer choices.
3. Medical treatment:
Hospitals in Vietnam are crowded, and so are those in China. But the efficiency is not bad. Compared with Europe and the United States, the medical efficiency of China and Vietnam is very high.
I had a skin allergy in Vietnam and a respiratory infection in China. I entered the hospital on the same day, completed the examination on the same day, and received treatment and medicine on the same day.
The obvious difference is that Vietnamese doctors basically don’t speak English and they need to use translation software or my friends. Chinese doctors basically all speak English.
In terms of hospital environment, Chinese hospitals are larger, cleaner and more modern, while Vietnamese hospitals are generally older, but have complete basic examination equipment. (I don’t go to many hospitals. I always ask local friends to take me to regular large hospitals)
4. Language :
Language is a big issue in Vietnam
English is basically useless here, except for some hotel staff and professional translators, and some college students, almost no one can speak English. What’s embarrassing is that there are more people who can speak Chinese than English. So in Vietnam I always try to speak Chinese first.
In China, young people in big cities basically know some English, but some are more proficient and some have difficulty. But if I speak slower, many people can understand. However, as a Chinese speaker, I speak more Chinese, and I feel that the language environment in China is very good.
Spinach Balls (Pseftokeftedes Santorini)
2024 01 30 10 21
Ingredients
1 1/4 cups peeled, chopped plum tomatoes or 1 1/2 cups cooked, well-drained, chopped spinach, or any other greens
1/2 cup finely chopped scallions
1 garlic clove, finely chopped
1 tablespoon freshly chopped parsley
1/2 teaspoon oregano
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
1 heaping teaspoon fresh mint
Salt
Freshly ground black pepper
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon double-acting baking powder
Olive oil, for frying
Instructions
In a large bowl, combine tomatoes, scallions, garlic, herbs and spices. Add flour and baking powder and mix together so that all ingredients are well blended and have the consistency of a thick batter (about as thick as pancake batter).
In a large heavy skillet, heat enough olive oil for frying. Taking a heaping tablespoon at a time, drop batter into hot oil and fry until golden brown and crisp.
Remove at once with a slotted spoon and drain on paper towels.
When we first moved to Maine, my wife was a wedding photographer. Having relocated from the West Coast, we were pretty unaware of the lay of the land here. We’d heard of ‘old money’—the result of generations of inherited wealth—but had never seen it up close.
So my wife gets a call from a woman asking about photo coverage of her second marriage, and my wife agrees to come out to their house to discuss with her and her husband, Richard. My wife takes along a $200 off coupon she was offering new clients at the time. She gets in her old Subaru and heads to the address. At some point, she realizes that the huge, mile-long block of woods she’s navigating around is completely enclosed by a stone wall and that the house she’s going to is the only structure inside the walls. She starts to sweat.
Inside the house, she’s introduced to Richard Rockefeller. He’s an unassuming guy in his 50s, a medical doctor. She thinks, there must be lots of Rockefellers here on the East Coast; this doesn’t mean he’s related to THE Rockefellers.
He is. In fact, Richard is the son of David Rockefeller and grandson of John D. Rockefeller. He is a physician in Maine, a prominent member of the community and president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a philanthropic foundation.
My wife has a lovely time, he asks lots of questions about her Nikon camera and even gladly accepts her $200 coupon, because, why not?
We both work together to cover the wedding reception, held a month or two later on an island the family owns off of Bar Harbor, Maine. We take a private boat to the island and are greeted by Richard at the dock. He’s wearing baggy old khaki pants, an ancient LLBean flannel shirt, a floppy sun hat and old battered shoes. He’s driving a Subaru wagon that makes my wife’s nine-year-old car look new. He grabs the wheel and tells us—the hired help, basically—that he’s taking us to his ‘barn’ where we’ll spend the night.
So we arrive at a structure I could call a barn only because it has the vague shape of what once was a barn. Huge open area for seating and events, with an upstairs loft area with comfy beds, bathrooms. We stayed there, in a gorgeous custom post-and-beam ‘barn’ that probably cost three times what my own house cost.
The weekend was fun—we photographed people like Glenn Close and others in attendance for the event. It was low-key and tasteful and understated, but obviously extravagant. Richard and his wife were extremely kind to us.
I’ve never forgotten my brush with ‘old money’. Here in Maine, you might sit next to someone like Richard Rockefeller at a local diner and never know it.
Richard died a few years later in a small plane crash. I consider myself fortunate to have met him, however briefly.
Woman Held Accountable By Church For Cheating On Her Husband
Back in the ‘80s, as a teen, I applied for a security position at local supermarket (36hrs/wk), advertised in the Jobcentre. The advisor phoned them on my behalf (standard practice), they wanted me to attend a week long training seminar, nearly 3 hours away by bus, and assured they’d refund travel costs.
First day of training went well, and they informed me they’d refund travel at end of course. Fair enough. At the end of the week they said they’d refund after the contract was signed (yes, alarm bells rang), I intended to accept the job, while not great pay, it was local (walking distance) and better than nothing. So, read and signed contract, collected uniform, then given my assignment, 2pm to 2am (60hrs/wk, same pay!) at the airport! Not local! I explain it’s too far, and public transport doesn’t run that time of morning, they expect me to get a taxi home, which would cost more than my wages! I’m then told they do not refund travel expenses, after repeatedly saying they would.
As I’m leaving, wondering how I’m gonna explain this to dad (to borrow more money), I notice a woman in security uniform, she’s pale and looks upset. She’d not been paid for 3 MONTHS! I returned to the office, stating I didn’t want the job, to be told they’d sue for breach of contract.
Of course I’m upset and scared, if I take the job then it’s either have about 2 hours a day at home, or live in the airport, and hope I get paid. If I don’t take the job I’ll lose my benefits and get sued.
When I got home, I explained what happened to dad. He contacts a drinking buddy who works for the benefits office, and we both go see him Monday morning. He said they’d breached a verbal contract, I had good reason to believe they’d breach the written contract (not pay wages), and the job was not as advertised. He was appalled they hadn’t given me a copy of the contract. He assured me I wouldn’t face sanctions. He contacted the company’s head office on my behalf, he also made sure the company was blacklisted from advertising at the jobcentres.
Dad and I returned the uniform to the offices, he verbally ran rings around the 2-faced muppet who threatened me with breach of contract. Oh, and I made sure the room full of new recruits knew travel expenses are not refunded, not to expect a paycheque for at least 3 months, and the job is unlikely to be where or when advertised.
I want you to take a gander around your room right now.
Seriously. pivot in your chair, couch, whatever —and survey everything.
How many things aren’t being used?
How many things are being kept for thin sentimental reasons? Until last year, my answer was “many, many things”.
I had an old crappy laptop that didn’t even work. I had a bunch of comics that were never going to become rare — because millions were printed. I didn’t even like the comics.
Your life is being dragged down by purposeless objects.
Junk is scientifically linked to stress, procrastination, and inefficiency. You could turn all three of those problems into advantages.
I hereby challenge you to can 50% of your stuff. Don’t let your room get like this.
Start by throwing away that stupid printer
My printer was the ultimate bad employee. Once every six months, I’d summon him, “Can you come to work today?
And in that one moment of need, he was hungover and unable to function. I’d get a mysterious error. Or an out-of-ink issue despite having barely used the printer.
He’d groan and moan and nothing would happen. He’s like that deadbeat dad who can’t sober up once a year for his son’s birthday party.
“Damnit Epson! You can’t get your act for Billy’s party for one day. Not sure why I ever married you!”
My printer is no longer with us. He’s enjoying an early retirement in the sunny isles of the Hillsborough County Waste Department.
The point I’m making: if you own something that doesn’t do its job, start there.
That lame couch you never sit on because it isn’t even comfortable? That clunky, wobbly table with a weird mystery stain, you can’t get rid of? Find them a new home.
Donate it.
Break it with an aluminum bat and scream my name if you want.
Do what must be done. I command thee.
Take a NASA perspective
I used to write in a tiny office, in a tiny house for 13 years. I moved in when I was in my mid-20s.
It was in this house that I had a girlfriend, who became a wife, who then became an ex-wife. I’ve finally collected the plunder from my various ventures and invested in a nice home. As I took stock of my inventory, I was mortified by how much junk I owned. I felt like a hoarder.
If my stuff was going to space, I’d have blown out NASA’s cost-per-square-foot budget. “Who brought these 50,000 index cards from Sean’s 2003 Bio class!?”
Heck, they’d have needed an extra fuel tank. Everything you own isn’t cost-free.
As you add more stuff, it drastically increases the surface area in your home. That surface is just one more thing to clean and collect dust. It eats up mental space. Think of your belongings like they’re being shot into space. Everything must be of absolute necessity.
No junk on the launch pad.
A push for more functionality
I used to have a GPS watch. I used it to track where I spent the most time in the house.
It was depressing: 90% of my waking hours were in my office.
I wasn’t surprised. Yet is this what home ownership is supposed to be about?
One study showed this is a common phenomenon, particularly in larger homes. Shaquille O’Neal famously owned an 18-bathroom house — and admitted, “I only use three rooms.”
We fail to optimize space. We have a bunch of chairs that suck to sit on.
Our dressers are full of clothes we never wear. Give yourself a reason to use every room in your house.
Decluttering isn’t about whether you like something; it’s about whether you actually use it.
A functional, non-cluttered house feels light. It’s efficient. It almost like weight loss. You feel lighter on your feet. Purging junk even feels like exercise: it isn’t particularly fun, but the outcome is super rewarding.
One simple trick and then some
We moved 14 times in 18 years during my childhood.
To avoid becoming hoarders, we had a hard and fast rule: if you haven’t used it in six months, throw it away. Do you even know what you own?
Imagine knowing what and where each item is at all times. I know where my remote is. I know where my two pairs of brown dress socks are.
I feel in control. Everything is accounted for. There is peace of mind in knowing everything in your life belongs there and has a use. It’s not neglected like an abandoned toy. It reinforces a mentality of purpose and deliberacy.
Adopt a six-month rule for your belongings, with rare exceptions where they need apply.
Selling on marketplace
The first object to go to was my dining room table.
I put it on the Facebook marketplace for only $50. My inbox blew up like a hot scammy dating profile at Port Dumbass.
This is usually what happens on the platform. It’s so easy. Two hours later, a nice, middle-aged Hispanic couple showed up.
After inspecting it, he turned to me and said, “How about $35?” I said, “Sorry. There are too many people wanting to buy.”
I wasn’t bluffing. But — then I offered him another table and several dozen other household items for free.
I realized I just needed to get rid of stuff. Thirty minutes later, we were stuffing his van with three tables, a huge ladder, and even lawn equipment. It wasn’t the most profitable way of doing things, but it felt good giving to someone who would need. I jokingly offered him the shirt I was wearing too, but he declined.
Decide what you don’t need and isn’t being used, and either sell or donate it.
I also called a trash hauler and paid them $150 to haul off a huge trailer full of unused stuff. You can find them easily on Craigslist.
The last step is to buy a big box of industrial bags. Then, each week make it a point to fill at least one with things you don’t want anymore.
They fit in the regular trash pickup. Donate what you can to the Salvation Army and get a tax deduction. Sell the rest on Facebook Marketplace.
Don’t think of this as an action but a lifestyle. You’ll reevaluate how you spend your money, taking broader consideration for how badly you actually need something.
Your house will feel bigger, more open, and more efficient. You won’t lose nearly as many things.
And you won’t have nearly as much stuff to manage. Throw away 50% of your stuff and you’ll be better off for it. It’s not a dare.
The question makes me remember two old Soviet jokes.
Both are about a tourist visit of the Hell. One of them mentions Joseph Stalin.
Joke #1
A tourist visit of Hell. Hall of the greatest criminals. They stand in blood (according to some versions, in shit). Hitler is waist-deep in blood, his gaze angry, his mouth shouting something that tourists do not hear. Stalin stands to Hitler’s left, silent, with a sardonic smile on his lips, blood reaching to the middle of his boots.
Tourist (astonished): Please tell me why Hitler is buried so much deeper than Stalin? Did he spill so much more blood? Guide: Ah, I will have to tell the administration. Stalin cheated again! T: How does he cheat? G: He always climbs on Lenin’s shoulders!
Joke #2
A tourist visit of Hell. Astonished tourists see Nikita Khrushchev sitting on a sofa, with Marilyn Monroe in his lap, caressing him and kissing his bald head.
Tourist (astonished): Are you telling me this is the punishment for Khrushchev’s sins? Guide: No, dear sir. This is the punishment for Marilyn Monroe’s sins.
These Kids are University Students in China and Poor Kids, Children of Poor Families
Under Common Prosperity, University Students are mandated to serve 42 hours a year in their third or final year to tutor and help poor kids pass their examinations
They have these centers where Poor Kids are provided Food, Clothes, Shoes, Smartphones and Tutors free of cost as part of the revenue from the tax collections of the local provinces plus a 3.5% of profit from the Big Gun Industries
The best of them are admitted to School and on to Gaokao
The others get Skilled Training
The others get Vocational Training
Their Working Age is reduced from the mandatory legal 16 in China to 14 in many provinces so that they can earn a living and help their families
Once they are 21 years old, THEY HAVE TO COMPETE ON THEIR OWN
Their Talent , Their Ability
No Reservations
No Affirmative Action
I like this system
Help the Kids, give them education, give them all the material benefits needed then they can compete fairly
From 2019–2023 – Roughly 8.5 Million Poor Kids have been given Jobs that will transform them to Low Income immediately and Middle Class by 2036
China just doesn’t handout money or food to poor families like India or US do
There are NO FREE LUNCHES
One new rule that China established in 2021 for Poor People was :-
image 221
The Ten Year Rule
Tenant Farmers who work as Rural Workers can now send their Kids to the Local Schools in the Village where Education is free plus two meals are free (Breakfast and Lunch)
The Kids study from 4 PM to 7 PM
They work from 7 AM to 12 PM and are paid a minimum 6 RMB per hour ($ 0.91) which is equally TOPPED UP BY THE STATE
So each kid makes 60 RMB per Day and makes 4,000 RMB for a season in addition to two free meals a day plus education
Tenant farmers don’t have to feed their kids for 240 days a years, that has to be done by the Agricultural Unit Owner
Tenant Farmers who have worked as Tenant Farmers for at least 20,000 Hours , are eligible to get their OWN LANDHOLDINGS with the deposit amount FULLY WAIVED
Hu Jintao and his gang ignored these rules
Xi enforced them immediately
Almost 300,000 Tenant Farmers now own their own LANDHOLDINGS on 30 Year or 100 Year leases
The Real Condition of China is that today China has
51.9% Middle Class or Higher
34.7% Low Income
13.4% Poor People
0% Extremely Poor
Target 2030 where at least 15 Million Kids are involved in given all those benefits is
55% Middle Class
40% Low Income
5% Poor People
This is the target set in 2022
image 220
The Stock markets can wait
According to Xi, the key is to create a large middle class consumer base
800 Million is the Goal for 2030 from 426 Million in 2023
My father was a banker for most of my life. He worked in the trust department assisting people with estates, wills, and trust funds, inheritances, etc. My mother used to tease him that he had a “harem” of older ladies who thought he was wonderful because he had handled things when their husbands died.
In the early 90s the local bank was bought by a much larger bank from another state. Things changed and not for the better. My father was told that he should use money from one account to bolster another account and replace the money later. My father refused. While it might not have been illegal at the time he felt that it was highly unethical and he wouldn’t do it.
He resigned.
And when his clients all found out WHY he resigned they all, except for two or three, moved their accounts to a different bank.
One of his colleagues who still worked at the first bank told him that the leadership from the new bank were dumbfounded by the sudden mass exodus of clients. And when my father informed the local lawyers who referred clients to him what happened they stopped referring clients to that bank. In less than two years after my father resigned the out-of-state bank closed the Trust department because it was unprofitable. My father took great satisfaction in that.
WOW! I am humbled by the huge number of upvotes for this story about my father. He was not perfect, no one is, but he was an honorable man and I am proud to be his daughter.
I am humbled by how high the number of upvotes as climbed. It is over 5,000. This is the most upvotes I’ve gotten on anything I’ve written on Quora. Thank you for recognizing a good man.
Male inequality, explained by an expert | Richard Reeves
In the 3rd century BC, a sensational scandal erupted in Rome: two Vestal Virgins had lost their virginity, and the guilty party was a young ‘pontiff’.
The Sibylline Books were consulted to decide the fate of the three religious figures, the Vestal Virgins Opimia Floronia and the pontiff Lucius Cantilius.
The two women had no escape, having been caught in the act. The rule of the Vestals prescribed live burial.
Floronia, not accepting the idea of dying in such a way, preferred to take her own life. Opimia resigned herself. A large crowd saw her ascend onto a mournfully adorned chariot, accompanied by a procession of priests to the place of execution.
Many Romans wanted to witness the dramatic scene of her being enclosed in the tomb with a loaf of bread and a pitcher of water. The interrogation of Lucius Cantilius was public.
The Pontifex Maximus, his superior and representative of the state religion, took on the role of the public prosecutor. Relentlessly, he ordered the questions to be preceded by violent lashes, repeated after the defendant’s answer.
It was not possible to conclude the interrogation: Lucius Cantilius, in fact, died from those lashes.
I had a sunroom added to my house, and the sales lady, construction manager was around a lot. She was quite flirtatious, as sales people often are. So when the project was done, and I had signed off on everything and I would never see her again, I asked her out on a date.
She told me she was moving to a different city the next week. Which was pretty suspicious, because my project had finished ahead of schedule. But I didn’t press it. Three months later I had a leak in my sunroom, and I called them up to fix it. Guess who answered the phone?
We had spent a lot of time together, and she knew I wasn’t psycho, the logical thing would have been to say that she wasn’t interested. If she was worried for some reason, then say that she was in a relationship.
But no, she had to go with the whopper, that I am moving to a different city. Nothing tells you how a person views you as much as telling an outrageous lie that’s so easy to check.
She told me on the phone, that she had just moved back. I pretended that was a reasonable answer.
Physical Intimacy: His NEED is NOT your WEAPON Ladies
Police work is a young man’s profession. You don’t want to be out chasing criminals on the street in your fifties. I was hired rather late in life, graduating from the police academy at thirty-three years old.
I learned quickly that I could do the job of a street cop but liked narcotics, especially undercover work. That led to more complex investigations. After six years in narcotics, I decided it was time to gain rank, so I aced the sergeant’s exam. I enjoyed every day as a street sergeant, leading and teaching.
Four years later, I would become a lieutenant which was great for a while. As a watch commander and then patrol division commander, I led over half of the department and made positive changes. All was fine until one day; I was asked to take over internal affairs. Our department had more serious problems than I realized. I spent the next six years of my life embattled, persuing the worst officers you can imagine.
Officers committing crimes, abusing their power, abusing citizens, and even their loved ones. Stealing, cheating, and anything else they thought they could get away with. I spent a lot of time being grilled in court by their high-priced defense attorneys with only limited success.
By the time I left, we had fired all but one of this group. The last was fired shortly after I left. So I had to go through hell for years, but in the end, the department was a better place for the citizens we served.
My twenty-five-year retirement couldn’t come soon enough. A few more years in that pressure-cooker position, and I might have stroked out. So at fifty-eight years old, I walked away with my pension. I haven’t been sorry a single day since I retired six years ago. Life’s too short.
My husband and I have been together 20 years when we met he was finalizing his divorce which they were simply too young and tried to grow up too fast they were together just two years. After about a month I was helping him get some of her stuff out which was all junk. I started cleaning out a desk of hers and in the bottom drawer was just stacks n stacks of mail. Apparently my husband hates opening mail and would just put it in a drawer for him to open later, I certainly make him open his mail I don’t know why she would do that. So he told me to open it, it was flyers, bills, coupons, everything in a stack. I start opening mail and I would see $5000 check then another then another then another. These checks were two days away from void/expired or have to wait a long time to reissue. It was from his dad’s estate and each kid got $5000 from certain accounts and investments and so on. He was broke at this time with his divorce plus being in your 20s you don’t quite make as much yet. He went from having a couple hundred dollars in his account and the very next day we now have money to put down on a house which is cheaper than our current rent and much larger and we later made a good chunk of cash when we sold it. In the end, it did look like a scam letter or a collections notice, now im always into opening mail because I’ve even over paid a bill and what looks like a bill would be a small refund for my over payment. I just can’t wait to get that jury summons for a crazy court case.
We were the polite customers in a round about way-
We are attending a destination wedding on an all inclusive resort in Jamaica-absolutely beautiful weather, all the food and drink you could possibly want. Beautiful rooms with waterfront views-
The bride and groom and the 6 other guests attending were incredibly rude, demanding, belittling, belligerent and racist in their remarks towards the staff on the resort. My husband and I had never seen this side of their personality and were shocked at the behavior to the point that after the wedding (3rd day of 7) we disassembled from those in the group and did our own things.
On the final day, we were all
booked under the wedding party and had to check out and depart together-one of the women in the group was accusing the cleaning staff of stealing her clothing, the bride was making up all kinds of reasons she should have received a discounted stay, on and on, the mother of the bride was loud and yelling in the front foyer of the resort-my husband and I had enough and told all of them to shut up. All they had done the entire trip was lie and complain. We then went into a private office and explained to head of the resort how they were lying because we heard all the comments they had made and could prove it-We were comped 1k off our stay and turned that money around to tip the staff that so excellently served us during our stay-my husband and I both knew none of the others had left a tip and it was intentional to not do so as it was mentioned on the very first night at dinner.
Once it was clear their motive was to get as much for free as possible they were checked out w/o any further interaction and escorted to the van that would drive them to the airport-My husband and I were put in a different van to go back
We never asked for anything back as we had a great trip but the resort was happy to give us the 1k- as for those people we have not spoken to them since-it’s not that hard to be nice!
Genius is what genius does. Professors spend the better part of their waking days interacting with intelligence at the upper tail of the distribution, so an unusually adroit bit of intelligence will catch any professor’s eye. Alas, anybody with experience also has seen many a charlatan, so skepticism always comes first. I may recognize genius quickly, but I will test it many times before I conclude it is truly there.
Here is an illustration.
A few years back I had an MBA student, born in the Caribbean, who had considerable world-travel experience under his belt. Quietly confident, and charming and affable, he had natural leadership abilities. Over time his stories of travels came with the additional details that he was facile with languages, and that helped him pick up work as he travelled.
I was intrigued, and learned about his travels throughout Asia, and tested him a bit with details (I have some experience in that part of the world, but, of course, I also had many more years to accumulate it). He seemed to be telling the honest truth. He knew things about Myanmar (and similar places) that would be hard to learn unless you visited.
Here is the genius part. He said that, for a while, he settled in China doing translation and other work. How was that possible? He had simply picked up Chinese, he said. I have an old acquaintance who was native English speaker who knew several European languages and learned Japanese after spending many years there, and he told me about all the challenges. So I was just a little skeptical. A few words, sure, but fluent with no formal training?
I had asked a few of the native-Chinese speakers whether the student could speak well, and they said yes, but none had a lengthy conversation.
One day we were visited by a Chinese delegation of businessmen. And my student was introduced to them. Off they went in conversation, laughing and conversing. He was fluent, and just as charming and affable in that language.
I never doubted him again. Genius is what genius does.
My typical self checkout experience goes like this.
Using own bag. Place on scale. So I do. I use a backpack so it is heavier than a shopping bag. This triggers, Wait for an assistant. I open my bag ready so the assistant can look inside it. I do this because if they asked to see inside my bag I would be terribly offended and most people don’t like being told to go fuck themselves.
Ok, ready to start scanning. Where is the barcode on this cabbage? Oh, I need to look for it in the touchscreen. Finally found it after 2 minutes searching.
UNEXPECTED ITEM IN THE BAGGAGE AREA. PLEASE WAIT FOR ASSISTANCE.
This happens at least one more time. I am really getting pissed off now.
Ready to pay. It asks me if I took a bag. I didn’t. It asks me if I’m sure. Now I start arguing with the machine. I’m fed up of you. Why would I steal a 40p bag? Don’t you think I would have taken the £10 side of salmon instead?
Finally, after a good 5 minutes have passed I get to pay for my 15 items. But wait, I have wait for assistance again to authorise the bottle of wine I bought. OK, so now I get to pay.
Not so fast. There were a couple of discounted items in there and guess what we need to get the discount applied? That’s right, an assistant!
I pay, put on my backpack and instead of saying thank you, as I would to the cashier, I mutter, stupid fucking bastard, to the machine.
Not a pleasant experience at all.
A woman I know who works in my local Aldi told me she feels bad for the old people. An old woman told her that she used to look forward to shopping because she lives alone and sometimes the cashier might be the only person she spoke with that week.
Some people enjoy human interaction. As a general rule, I’m not one of them. However I much prefer to be served by a cashier than those self checkout machines. It takes too long and it’s frustrating. Added to that, I feel like it is constantly accusing me of shoplifting.
Pepe Escobar: Putin and China just changed EVERYTHING with this Move and the Neocons Can’t Stop Them
When I was in grad school, I had to have oral surgery for a midline palatine cyst. After misdiagnosing it as an abscessed tooth and mucking about, my dentist finally referred me to an oral surgeon.
The oral surgeon (who was nearing retirement) asked about my financial situation at the initial consultation. It was pretty dire, so I told him I would need to pay over time. He told me not to worry,
After doing some imaging he told me that he had never seen a cyst that large. The surgery was done, and went well. But I was left with two drains coming out of the corners of my mouth. These needed to remain in place for a week.
My upper jaw was incredibly swollen. With the drains in place, I looked like a walrus. I had to be careful how I ate and drank, to avoid having food or drinks dribble out of my nose. Nonetheless, I had to go to classes (it was the first week of the semester) as well as meet my students (I was a teaching assistant at the time.)
And every other day, I had to see the oral surgeon. He irrigated the site and gave me samples of antibiotics and words of encouragement.
When he finally removed the drains, my palate was healing well. I saw him two weeks later for follow up. I stopped at the front desk to arrange for payment. His total bill? $50! The surgery had taken almost two hours! And there were those follow up appointments as well.
I was incredibly grateful. I waited to see him between patients to express my gratitude. He smiled and said, one day you’ll do something for someone else.
This wasn’t my property but that of a friend. He rented it to a couple ‘from New York’ they claimed, who showed up very well dressed. He was in a suit and his ‘wife’ in a nice dress. They claimed to need a ‘local apartment’ as they ‘came to Boston’ (we are 10 miles west of Boston) often and stated an apartment was cheaper than renting hotel rooms every time, sounded legit. Anyway, for the first year, the rent was a couple days early then it was ‘just’ on time for a few months then a couple days late but paid IN CASH every month so no real issues. THEN it happened! After about two years the rent was a week late so my friend went by daily to catch them in (remember, they stated that they were from NY and came up ‘often’ so he didn’t expect them to be there at any given time). After five drive-bys he was there in the evening, on weekends, nothing seemed out of place from the outside. The yard was impeccably neat and clean as they stated it would be. Then two weeks later on a Friday evening just after dinner as he drove by he saw movement inside the apartment. He stopped and knocked on the door. When it opened, he was greeted by someone who spoke NO English. Panic ensued, people running around the apartment and out the back door. He told someone who came to the door that actually spoke some English that the rent was past due and needed to be paid. They stated that they would have cash Saturday morning for him. He asked why so many people and was told it was a party. He didn’t believe that story and said so, he told that individual that as it was rented to TWO PEOPLE everyone else had to go and if more than two were there in 12 hours it would be $50 EACH! What follows I witnessed the very next day. We knocked, no answer. I went around back and knocked, no answer. I walked back to the front. He was pounding on the front door… no one answered. WHY I cannot tell you but I turned the door knob, the door was UNLOCKED. He opened it. Before I go on, first I will say that we eventually found two month’s rent left on the kitchen counter in cash. Now the HORROR! They removed the doors from the kitchen cabinets and replaced them with chicken wire to house the CHICKENS that were now living in most of the cabinets! TWO DOZEN CHICKENS!The STENCH was gag worthy. The filth was just as revolting but what got me was the bathroom! The door was closed but the exhaust fan running. (A neighbor later told me it was running 24/7, read on and you will know WHY!). When he opened the door my friend closed it fast and proceeded to vomit! I opened the door to see the toilet PLUGGED AND MOUNDED with feces! The bathtub was ALSO filled with urine and feces! There were mattresses wall to wall in every single room except the bathroom and kitchen! This included a rough basement too! About 50(?) mattresses! The apartment was being used to house over 70 people! Even the ceilings were disgusting. I do know that the entire apartment had to be gutted and renovated, I saw it after it was done. It took a bit of searching but the two that rented it originally were found, I don’t nor want to know what was said or done but I do know that they were in full knowledge and complicity with what was going on. One further note, at some point before they ‘filled the tub’ they had roasted a pig in it! They built a fire in the tub and roasted a pig above it! When the apartment was gutted, it was found that the wall and floor behind and beneath the tub were charred, they almost burned down the house!
Hollywood Goes CRAZY! | Seinfeld DESTROYS Woke Insanity in EPIC Video
I’m an aficionado chef and I love watching cooking tutorials. Recently, I’ve discovered the secret behind how Chinese restaurants get their beef to be so tender in dishes like beef in black bean sauce or Mongolian beef – and it’s pretty interesting!
Once I did an Asian cuisine workshop, and one of the chefs there taught me the secret. Chinese restaurants often marinate their beef in a mixture of baking soda, cornstarch, and soy sauce for at least 30 minutes before cooking. This breaks down the proteins in the meat, making it more tender and easier to chew.
In addition, Chinese restaurants slice the beef against the grain, which makes it even more tender. When you slice against the grain, you’re cutting the beef perpendicular to the muscle fibers, and this makes all the difference.
Another thing that I love the most about Chinese cuisine is the high heat cooking method. When you stir-fry beef at a high temperature, it keeps the moisture inside the beef and makes it juicy and flavorful. And the cuts of beef that they use, such as flank steak or sirloin, are naturally more tender than other cuts.
I’ve tried making beef in black bean sauce using these techniques, and it is absolutely delicious! The beef just falls apart in your mouth, and it tastes so well. So, if you want to make your beef dishes tender and juicy like the ones you get at Chinese restaurants, try using these techniques. Trust me, you won’t be disappointed!
Tomato Pilaf
1400×919 One Pan Tomato Pilaf
Ingredients
2 medium tomatoes, coarsely chopped
2 tablespoons chopped onion
2 tablespoons butter or margarine
2 cups water
1 cup uncooked regular rice
1 teaspoon instant beef bouillon
3/4 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon pepper
Instructions
Cook and stir tomatoes and onions in butter in 2-quart saucepan over medium heat for 2 minutes.
Stir in remaining ingredients. Heat to boiling, stirring once or twice; reduce heat. Cover and simmer 14 minutes without lifting cover or stirring.
Remove from heat. Fluff rice lightly with fork; cover and let steam 5 to 10 minutes.
Names are fictional, but otherwise this is accurate to best of my memory.
Back in the mid-80s during my high school years, I worked at major fast food place. I worked there for around 18 months and was generally well regarded by the managers there. Because of this, I would often be called on to see if I was able to cover a shift when someone called out.
One such time, I agreed to cover and went in to see that the only person working was the manager (Jim). So literally it would be just the two of us working, Jim up front on register and me in the back making the food. (Another person from a different store came in an hour or so later to help out). It was a rough night, but we made it work.
After things slowed down, I asked Jim what happened. One of the other managers (Randy) was working that night and everyone he had working with him just up and left. I asked Jim where Randy was, and he said he was asked to leave as well and really couldn’t talk any further about it.
The rest of the story wouldn’t reach me for a week or so, but the entire staff quitting at once prompted the owner to investigate what happened. It turns out that Randy had been violating labor laws for months. And as most of the staff (including myself) were minors, those laws are more stringent and carry higher penalties. Things like forcing more than 8 hours a day, working outside certain hours, and forcing unpaid OT. While I don’t know for sure what prompted everyone to leave that night, I have to assume it was related.
Randy was taken off the schedule and, as far as I know, never set foot in the store again. I don’t know what legal consequences resulted from this, if any.
I have not worked at McDonald’s, but since there’s no equivalent question for Burger King, I’m going to answer anyway.
Late at night, a guy came up to the counter and said he wanted a Whopper with 10 patties on it. He seemed like he was probably a little stoned, or a little drunk, or probably a little both. “Money is no object,” he said. I knew how to set this up, but I called the manager just to make sure everything was ok and more importantly because I knew she would want in on this process. We had a button for a patty with no bun, to accommodate people on the Atkins Diet. I entered in his Whopper request, punched the patty button nine times, and then hit the intercom to explain to the kitchen crew the correct interpretation of what was now appearing on their screens. My amplified voice filled the kitchen, like the voice of God:
“That is not a mistake. It is a Whopper with 10 patties on it. Please do whatever it takes to make it happen.”
We couldn’t hear anything from the back over all the machine noises. The guy paid. It was around $12. Then, after a few minutes, there was activity at the hamburger chute. Normally burgers would be placed here and they’d slide to the front to be bagged or placed on trays. A pair of hands gently placed a very large, roughly-ball shaped object on the chute. The hands gently—tenderly— guided it to the bottom. It was held in place by four Whopper wrappers. “Be careful with this,” one of the cooks said. “Wrapping it was very difficult.”
The customer was delighted. Once he had his to-go bag, he explained that he and a friend had got in an argument concerning the truthfulness of our “Your Way, Right Away” slogan, and he had just won a bet. It remains one of my favorite moments, a real team effort.
This “sitrep” was compiled and written at the tail end of March, 2024. It contains active elements of the global Geo-Political situation focusing on the “primary core participants” as defined by the United States Department of State. I will intentionally leave out details on the “minor” participants, that while important, is not necessary in this overview.
The world is undergoing a massive shift in global [1] Leadership, [2] Finance, [3] Society, [4] Culture, [5] Military influences, [6] Technology, and [7] Planetary Management.
What was once the realm of the “rules based order” led by the United States (the United States makes the rules that others follow), and obeyed “in lockstep” by it’s captive proxy nations, has been eclipsed by a multi-polar world, led by the Russian / China leadership alliance.
The overriding plan
The United States, embroiled into Thucydides Trap (whether you don’t want to believe it or not, it is painfully clear and obvious that the United States “Leadership” is completely ensnared in this situation.) has worked out a long-duration plan to maintain and regain its hegemony.
The key to this is the suppression, followed by the break up of Russia, followed by a pivot to China.
The Timetable for initiation of hostilities
The Break up of Russia into an easily digestible entity was planned to occur in 2022. The war to start the collapse of Russia, however, got off to a bad start, and Russia has been thwarting all of the NATO efforts to manage that collapse.
However, the time-table has not changed. And as of this date a major push to destroy Russia once and for all is planned to occur in Spring / Summer 2024 this year. Leading participants to this fiasco; the United States, the UK, Germany, and France… with participative elements out of NATO to include Finland, Poland, and Sweden are expecting a NATO win by Fall of 2024.
A “buffer” period, or up to two years is planned to coincide with the planned destruction of China. This is planned for the tail end of 2026 and the Summer of 2027.
The Major Participants
For RUSSIA, the nations of NATO will attack on the chosen battlefields of Ukraine. Eventually weakening Russia to a point where “death blows” can be administered by aircraft and missile attacks.
The NATO troops are expected to consist of large quantities of Germans, Polish, Romanian, and French forces for the main thrust. With Northern contingent consisting of Swedish and Finnish forces that will deploy and assault from the North.
For CHINA, A “island chain” of American proxy nations have formed a QUAD of aggressor nations that is designed to instigate the precipitate motions that will force the Chinese entry into the upcoming Global catastrophe.
The primary antagonizing nation is earmarked as the Philippines, with major support from QUAD nations South Korea, Japan, (and to a lesser extent) taking a backseat, the resupply center of Australia.
It is expected that simultaneous “hot spots” will erupt that will trigger Chinese participation. Perhaps Taiwan declaring independence, with the Untied States, and proxy “toadies” nodding vigorously in agreement. Followed, or led, by disruptive assaults by the Philippines in the South China Sea.
The Timetable for war duration – Russia
What is going on right now in Ukraine is not a war. It is a military action, but not a full fledged war. Yet.
But once the full NATO assault begins in the Spring of 2024, a total war event scenario will begin. The United States, and NATO plans for a quick assault, and a rapid ending of the war.
Reports as ludicrous as the collapse of Russia by mid-November 2024 is being bantered about by the collective idiots in Brussels. Smarter heads prevail, and they anticipate a delay that could last until 2026 depending on a number of unknown factors.
But the plan is one of total victory by NATO over Russia and a “color revolution” internal to Russia that would dispose President Putin and replace him with a pro-American stooge.
Maybe an actor like Zelensky (Ukraine), a ideological imbecile like Javier Milei, (Argentina), a “stooge in debt” like Ferdinand “Bongbong” Romualdez Marcos Jr.( The Philippines), or an easy to control puppet like Yoon Suk Yeol (South Korea).
My understanding is that the replacement Russian “president” and his cabinet has already been selected, and the principals have already been contacted.
The Timetable for war duration – China
The ideal timeline for the “pivot to Asia” is once Russian territory is secure, and a proxy government is in charge. Due to the events of the last two years, this date has been pushed back from 2025 to 2027. But owing to the timer / stopwatch on the abilities of the West, the expiration date for action against China occurs in 2028. So the window for action is narrow, and there is an urgency to accelerate things aggressively.
While there will be a continuation of provocations in both the South China Sea, and in Taiwan, actual “False Flag” justification, and assaults against China is unlikely to occur before 2026. Thus, the window of 2026 to 2027 will be a VERY dangerous time, provided of course, if the West (The United States) is successful in taking over Russia through military victory.
Assumptions
The Pentagon along with a significant number of interested parties have made some baseline assumptions regarding both Russia and China. These assumptions color the battle and strategic policies that will govern this upcoming period of time.
Russia is “a paper tiger” and will not use nuclear weapons.
Russia is not as strong or militarily capable as it seems.
Russia, in regards to Ukraine, has been lucky so far.
The entire world is already against Russia, and the United States is leading the world against a renegade nation.
As far as China is concerned…
China is also a “paper tiger” and will not use nuclear weapons.
China has some basic technology, but it’s military is raw recruit, conscripts, with basic understandings and operates in crude military tactics.
China’s navy is expected to be “light weight”, and nothing to take too seriously.
China will fold once the oceans around China is controlled by the QUAD forces.
End Game
It is absolutely and positively understood that neither China, or Russia would dare attack the United States. As neither nations have the logistical ability to invade or assault America, the survival of the United States is understood as certainty.
So with both Russia and China devastated by massive conventional wars, and the United States left pristine and intact, the United States will rise from the ashes of a global war stronger, and better than ever before. Though looting the resources of both China and Russia, the Untied States can be rejuvenated, and the entire globe will listen to the undisputed leader of the planet; The United States.
Final Comments and thoughts
I personally believe that all the assumptions are wrong. That the timetable is off base, and a kilter, and the “leadership” of the West needs to stop taking so many drugs. We do not know what the future holds, but if this plan proceeds… one thing is certain, those planners in the West will not be happy when things go “tits up”.
Forgotten Chicken
Forgotten Chicken is a great fast and easy recipe! I have made this with chicken tenders, and it’s great. This is also known as “No Peek Chicken.”
forgotten chicken
Ingredients
1 1/2 cups white rice, uncooked
1 can cream of mushroom soup
1 can cream of celery soup
1 soup can water
Chicken breasts or thighs
1 envelope dry onion soup mix
Instructions
Mix rice, soups and water.
Pour into a greased 9 x 13 inch baking dish.
Lay chicken on top of rice mixture.
Sprinkle chicken evenly with onion soup mix.
Cover tightly and bake for 1 1/2 hours at 350 degrees F.
Shaming
I’ve been at my job for two years and have never called in sick. However, I’ve been vomiting and really unwell so want to call in sick tomorrow but my boss won’t allow it, saying it’s because we are short-staffed – is this allowed?
My boss refused to let me call in sick because I was throwing up. She said that would leave night staff short staffed. I said “no problem”.
I went to work as required. Within 5 minutes of arriving, I was using the wastebasket at the desk to throw up in. Boss insisted I would be fine and refused to let me leave
10 minutes later I was still throwing up. Finally the house supervisor came thru the station and saw me sick as can be. She asked why I was even there. I explained my boss refused to accept my call in.
Supervisor called boss to the nursing station. Supervisor reamed boss a new one and asked her “why would you have a nurse report to work in the ICU when she can’t even leave the trash can”. “Do you even understand ICU patients are in rough enough shape without a nurse throwing up on them”
Boss had to work my shift with calling someone in early for day shift.
No one questioned me calling off the next night too.
What are some daily things that we are unaware of?
Here are some common things we are usually unaware of the purpose of:
Stickers on fruit: The stickers mark the country and producer of the fruit, but it’s the numbers that are the important aspect. If there are 4 digits and the first number is 4, then it means the fruit is sprayed with pesticides. If there are 5 digits and the first number is 9, then the fruit has grown organically, and if there are 5 digits with the first number being 8, then the fruit has been genetically modified.
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Doughnut hole: In the past, it was difficult to get the edges and the middle of the pie equally baked. So they came up with the ingenious idea of using this shape to ensure equal baking on all sides.
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The original reason for sunglasses: today it’s obviously to protect us from the sun’s rays. But the original purpose was to protect Arctic people from the dazzling rays of snow. And in 12th century China, they became particularly widespread among judges in order to hide their true feelings from witnesses.
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Margins on paper: the original purpose was not for extra notes on the side. In the past mice and rats often gnawed on the paper, so in order for them not eat away the information, people started to leave spaces on the sides.
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Holes in padlocks: People usually buy a new lock when their old one doesn’t work due to rain. However, the purpose of the hole is to put in oil – once done, the lock should be able to open with no difficulty.
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Gran Torino , Clint Eastwood – Favourite scene
If you’ve worked in law enforcement, how often have you come across criminals like the Vince Vega character played by John Travolta in “Pulp Fiction,” who actually have intellectual interests outside of their life of crime?
Vince wasn’t an intellectual heavyweight. He was a deeply flawed asshat with an outsized ego and limited self restraint.
Remember the scene with The Wolf? The Wolf was there to save Vince’s idiotic neck, and yet our boy just couldn’t stand that someone else walked in and smoothly took control. When returning home with the wife of his boss, Vince was clearly working his way up to making a pass at Mia in spite of trying to talk himself out of it. If Mia hadn’t OD’d Vince would’ve discovered that his disposal wouldn’t even merit a pine box.
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Obviously my experience isn’t from the perspective of “law enforcement”, but from being locked up with, then living and working with other felons.
Those living a “life of crime” are different from you and your neighbors only because one aspect of their life is something illegal that they got caught doing. That doesn’t mean that they live and breathe crime 24/7.
These people are fully formed and complex individuals, just like you. In many cases, you would find that the “life of crime” really boils down to just one dumb act, not a daily ritual.
The only exception to this would be the addicts I’ve met, particularly the meth users. They might start off as “unique snowflakes” but something about that drug leeches personality from them like bathwater leeches the salts from your skin. Given enough time they become shriveled husks of former humans — having more in common with one another than with anyone else.
Playing around with text-to-picture
Default masterpiece best quality coloring book line art The Ha 3
The Sopranos – Getting everything ready for the Executive game
How does China’s emphasis on manufacturing prompt concerns about overcapacity?
This is what western economists say about the Chinese economy.
But the Chinese government and its economists don’t think that way because they look at potential market size first. In China, the leading importers and processors of minerals and raw materials are state-owned companies whose annual profits are capped at 3–5 percent annually. This means that raw material costs are lower. Chinese manufacturers are increasingly using robotics and automation so that manufacturing costs are lower. Then the Chinese yuan is kept lower against leading currencies to encourage exports.
Put it all together, and it looks to Europeans and Americans like China has impossibly low costs and is making it impossible for other competitors to compete. The problem is that China is different from Europe and the U.S. and its economy is designed to encourage manufacturing and exports.
The Chinese goal is to capture as much market as possible, and then to push costs down further through cost and efficiency improvements. This is different from western companies which start with lower prices to grab market share, but then gradually raise prices through predatory pricing.
How do Japanese see the US in 2024?
Some truths
Investing in a woman you’re not married to is a waste of energy and money.
If you find someone smarter than you, work with them, don’t compete.
Life is all about being intentional and proactive in our choices . The cure for a man’s depression ?? Focus on your purpose and stay busy.
The person who carefully designs their daily routine goes further than the person that negotiates with themselves everyday.
Stop complaining at every slight inconvenience. Do what has to be done . Be happy regardless.
Have you ever seen someone call the cops and it backfired on them?
My now ex wife wanted me out of the house and her life after I caught her red handed having an affair.
My relief called in sick so I had to pull a double shift, I got home and went right to bed, only to be woke up by her whaling away on me with a shoe. I picked her up and carried her out into the living room and gently tossed her on the couch, locked the bedroom door and went back to sleep.
It wasn’t long and there was a knock on the door, it was a couple cops, she had called them to report I was abusing her. They said I would have to accompany them to the station, then I looked up at them, there whole attitude shifted.
They handcuffed her and put her in the back of the squad car, one of the cops told me I should clean myself up, apparently she’d nailed me with a shoe and I had blood running down my face.
I went to sleep, she went to jail, couldn’t have worked out any better.
How many cars have you owned and what were your favourites?
My first car was an old beater VW Karman Ghia . It was a tank, with the engine over the rear wheels it would go through snow, that bigger vehicles couldn’t handle. It was low to the ground, one day the neighbors pigs got out, and they had a huge boar, that blocked the road. He came over and leaned against my side window, and completely blocked the view.
It didn’t have a gas gauge, instead it had a reserve fuel tank, and when you ran out, you switched over, and drove to the nearest gas station.
It wouldn’t go the highway speed limit, maybe 63 mph with the pedal to the metal.
My second car was 1974 Plymouth Duster with imitation alligator skin roof, and a sun roof. It was an OK car.
My next car was a 1976 Chrysler Cordoba with real Corinthian leather seats ( best spoken in a Ricardo Montalaban accent) it had a high performance 400 cubic inch V8 with a 4 Bbl. Jet black with every option known to mankind. Sun roof, air conditioning, power everything. Pure white on white interior, to contrast to the black paint. I have a lot of fond memories of this car.
My next car was a 1969 buick skylark convertible. My plan had been to restore it, and always have a good car to drive. I spent thousands on it, and couldn’t keep up with repairs.
My next car was a 4 wheel drive AMC Eagle. It had air suspension, so it hugged the road, but if you went off road you pushed a button and the sur shocks filled and raised the car, to get more clearance. Best fishing vehicle I ever had.
The I had a 1989 Dodge D100 that was a rebadged Mitsubishi. It had a 4 cylinder that couldn’t get out of its own way, But it was solid steel, I was rear ended and it cost $200 to paint my bumper, but the brand new Previa that hit me was totalled. I wasT boned in an intersection and I I didn’t get a scratch, but it was $5000 to fix the other vehicle. It was a 4×4 with a half inch steel skid plate under the entire vehicle. It never had a problem until my power steering hose, and brake line started leaking. I couldn’t get parts, so I got rid of it.
I bought a 1997 Cadillac Catera , awesome looking car, and the day the warranty ran out, it started costing me money. Thousands.
I bought a 1999 Jaguar XKR convertible, with one year left on the warranty. It was the best looking car I owned, I had people hop out of their vehicle at a traffic light and ride with me until the next light. It was a great car.
I bought a 2004 Nissan frontier 4×4, which I drove in the winter, and the Jag in the summer. The Nissan was just OK, nothing special.
I replaced the Nissan with another 2013 Nissan frontier 4×4, which was significantly better than the first Nissan, but still not a memorable vehicle.
I got rid of the jag in 2021.
Hassayampa Casserole
This casserole is an original and was named after the Hassayampa River that flows in Wickenburg, Arizona.
casserole recipe 9
Ingredients
1 large onion, chopped
1 tablespoon olive oil
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
3 teaspoons chili powder
3 teaspoons cumin
1 (8 ounce) can enchilada sauce
1 pound fresh tomatoes, diced
10 ounces frozen corn, thawed
1 cup sliced black olives
3 large green chiles, chopped
1 pound shrimp or imitation crabmeat
12 ounces Monterey Jack cheese, shredded
12 corn tortillas
Instructions
Sauté onion in oil and add cinnamon, chili powder and cumin.
Stir in enchilada sauce and diced tomatoes. Set aside 1 cup sauce.
Add to remaining sauce the corn, olives, green chiles, shrimp or crabmeat and 1 cup cheese.
In a 3 quart shallow casserole dish, cover bottom with some of the tortillas.
Spread 1/3 of shrimp/crabmeat mixture over tortillas; repeat with 2 more layers.
Top with remaining tortillas, sauce and cheese.
Bake at 325 degrees F for 40 minutes.
The Sopranos – Albert Barese
What is a historical fact that would sadden most people if they found out?
As a kid I was fascinated by the figure of Che Guevara, who looked cool, died relatively young and fought for a better world.
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Later in life, I read his biography by Jean Cormier, a French journalist/movie director who was a close friend of Che.
It tells the story of his childhood, his medical studies, his trip through South America on a motorbike, how he joined Fidel Castro’s revolution and how they disembarked in Cuba to start a guerrilla war against the Batista regime.
Both had their own regiment in the Sierra Maestra mountains, from where they would launch attacks against government forces. In Che’s regiment there was a little puppy that everybody loved, the mascot of the camp.
One day, Che and a group of soldiers left the camp to ambush a government caravan. But the little puppy had followed them and started barking. They had to shut the dog up or else they would be discovered by the government soldiers. So Che and his men formed a circle around the puppy while one of them strangled it.
I couldn’t put this image out of my mind of these heavily armed guerrilleros standing in a circle to strangle a puppy. They say innocence is the first casualty in any war.
Best Sopranos Scene – “We’re with the Vipers” -All Right Now
I received my ancestry DNA results and I am 0% Italian, however my maternal grandmother is 100% Italian. How is this possible?
Has your grandmother actually had her DNA tested and analyzed?
What I have found in 25 plus years of doing genealogy, and even MORE so since DNA testing came along……people get very invested in family stories and myths. They can build their whole sense of self around them. Then DNA and family history research comes along and blows big holes in their set ideas. Things aren’t what they seem.
There were some doozies told in my family. Some by accident – sort of multigenerational “broken telephones” where things had grains of truth but went sideways in the retelling. Some were deliberate, because it made for a better story. Tales of glory beat tales of misery. Some were told to hide things family members were ashamed of (we had more than our share of those).
DNA can also yank the rug from under you since who you think is your ancestor isn’t always. I have a 78-year-old friend who always believed her father was an Italian fellow who her mother sued for child support in the early 1940’s. Turns out she’s 50% Ashkenazi Jewish without a hint of Italian – and she’s found her biological father’s family, all of whom are at a loss to tell her what the heck happened (to say they were shocked would be an understatement, lol).
Your grandmother may have been born in Italy and raised speaking Italian, but her family could have been ethnically from elsewhere. Nationality should not be confused with ethnicity.
Japan is Changing, and it’s SCARY.
What is one moment in your life you thought could only happen in a movie?
So I have been dating this guy from eight years now. He is my family friend. My first crush,then my first love, my first boyfriend and my first everything. Me and his sister are best friends.
Even though our families knew each other for so long, my family never knew that we were dating, because we Never used to talk infront of them.We(me and him) always used to discuss about how we should convince my parents, how we should ask them and blah blah. I used to get very nervous thinking about my parents reaction. But I was confident that I will convince them and I always knew that he was the one that I want to spend my entire life with.
So one day i went out and came to home , and saw all my family sitting together and discussing seriously, they became silent after seeing me , and my brother asked me to sit beside him and asked me that, they are thinking to get me married. My heart was stumped, millions of thoughts rushed in my head and i was so shocked that i I couldn’t think of one word to say, then he mentioned about the guy that they were considering for me.
Well to my surprise he was none other than my love, the one who makes me feel butterflies even after 8years of togetherness, who just makes me happy by his mere presence. I was so happy that I wanted to jump and dance around. But I couldn’t I simply blushed and said “YES” to my parents. They still didn’t know that we are in love.
We are going to get married soon, preparations are started, IAM on the cloud nine since then. We are going to tell them about us on our wedding day.
I always thought things like this happens only in films and fairy tales. May be every love story is a fairy tale.
Real truth
Do Western countries want South Asia and Southeast Asia to have continuous conflicts? If yes, then what will be the policies of these nations?
They do dont they?
They don’t tend to leave any country alone do they?
They always make decisions based on the people of every country in the world
They must always decide who is free and who isn’t
Any Government that toes their line is ‘Good’ and any Government that doesn’t is ‘Had
They decide human rights violations
If Israel bombs and kills 32,000 Civilians and starves an entire population to death for a single terrorist incident – that’s KOSHER
If Russia invades Ukraine to come to the assistance of 2 Million to 3 Million people who live in Donbass and have been shelled regularly and lost 14,000 lives over 8 years, chronicled in the UN – that’s horrible and thats interfering in the sovereignty of a nation
If Russia arrests 439 people for Social Media posts that’s a huge civil rights violation
If UK arrests 3237 people for Social Media Posts including 900 people just for posting the N word – that’s perfectly acceptable
They have combined killed and liquidated through their decisions – almost 30 Million people in the last 300 years belonging to different countries including :-
Inquisitions
Literally NUKING a nation
Holocaust of 6 Million Jews
Starving a million Indians without a shred of remorse
Enslaving 3.5 Million people and treating them like Cattle and breeding them like Cattle and Dogs
Colonizing and cold bloodedly robbing, slaughtering and displacing 2 Million or more Native Americans , Maoris, Aborigines and stealing their land brazenly
Stealing Texas openly from Mexico and now hunting down the same mexicans as Illegals
Invaded a Nation, killed a known 93,000 people of that nation and displaced and impoverished an estimated 330,000 people literally lying that they had nuclear weapons
Bombed and killed and stole the Oilfields of a Nation merely because their Leader didn’t toe the American line (Syria)
Funded Color Revolutions, Coup de Ats and Uprisings against legitimate Governments by their Agencies
These aren’t conspiracy theories are they?
Every one of these incidents have been firmly listed and verified and is now regarded as history
Yet they always seem to turn the tables
Saddam was a Villian though they invaded Iraq for no reason and destroyed him
Yet Zelensky is a Hero
Gadaffi was a Villian
Mao was a Villian
Putin is a villian
Xi is a Villian
Yet not one of these people have conducted a war of aggression in their lives before 2022
Why?
That’s the key question
I believe the answer lies in an Ideology that is deeply ingrained into their blood for centuries
We are the Good Guys
We are the Angels to help these Backward People develop themselves and save them from themselves and their cruel leaders
Sometimes even if people die, we have to look at the long term and be harsh
Like Gates who openly supports an organization that wants 870 Million People dead because they eat up precious food
Now these Nations, it depends on the people of these nations
China and Russia and Iran and a few other nations have obviously woken up and now see these people for what they are
Putins 87% win is an indication
That people braved a rumoured terror attack and shelling and bombing and yet voted in larger numbers is the best middle finger possible
Niger is another example
The Middle East is slowly realizing things aren’t so rosy now
Others are TOO SCARED
India for instance is too frightened of the West because India is too weak to resist sanctions plus India cannot trust China Iran and Russia fully
Not when 40% of it’s exports are destined for US and EU and most of these export orders are non crucial and can be seriously affected
Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia are also too frightened of the West. They gave been dependent too long on the West and they don’t want to leave their comfort zone.
Some are TOO SUBSERVIENT
Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Philippines are simply too enmeshed into the Western system to come out of it
However luckily the hypocrisy of the West is slowly coming out piece by piece
That too despite the fact that they control the media in every way possible.
People can be crude. People can be rude. And certain people can be childish assholes. We all know this.
When I was unemployed, I managed to find work as a french fry flipper at a fast food restaurant. And so I endured this low pay, thankless job.
But… as a man, you do what you need to do.
Anyways there was this cashier that had a fun time making my life Hell. You see, every time someone places an order of French fries, she was to yell it out. But for fun, and being a real asshole, she called for fries at every order, and I, dutifully doing my job, would make them.
The situation arose that only two fries (boxes) were ordered, but I had made 64 boxes.
Got me in trouble, and I got my pay docked because of that.
Oh yeah…
I wizened up over that, and and other stories ensued. But the point that I am making here is that if you have a co-worker doing this kind of shit, can you image what they would do later on when they are better experienced and more capable.
I spent over 30 years as head of the HR function at two very successful biopharma companies and as a co-founder of a SaaS company.
After I’d had enough experience to form an opinion, I went on a campaign to get a consensus from the SVP of administration and the CEO of the S&P 500 company where I spent most of my career: we accept all resignations.
Some of the reasons:
Countering a departing employee is news that gets around and becomes assimilated into the culture. Far better to pay at your intended percentile range in the market (25th-50th? 50th-75th?) and let people leave. It avoids creating an incentive for people to resign as a form of manufactured crisis where the company is known to cave.
Managers need to know how to replace a person quickly and effectively or to redistribute and redesign the work pattern to reduce the criticality of that person. They shouldn’t allow operations to become too dependent on a single, critical employee without knowing what to do if that employee resigns.
People at work sometimes act like the “Meister” system of guildsmen of the Middle Ages, who literally covered their workbenches at night with cabinetry designed to conceal how they did things. Even the great Mercedes-Benz suffered from this problem. They didn’t know it or face it until they got massive competition from good-enough luxo cars from Japan in the ’90s. In response, M-B had to understand its operations in a different way. They discovered that 60% (!) of cars on their assembly lines went backward for reworks. It was costing them a ton. All a meister at the end of the line had to do was say “send it back and repaint the hood.” Didn’t have to explain why. That was evidence that M-B didn’t really understand or own its standards and criteria. Some mis-motivated employees had created fiefdoms where secrets were power.
You’re a new boss. This all may be just an organizational theory to you. Explain to your boss that you don’t think it’s good for the company or the operations to allow this person to be treated as indispensable. Ask for your manager’s participation in the response. Then, accept the resignation. You may respond with a part-for-part replacement or you may reorganize the work at that person’s workstation. It may be some combination.
Whatever it is, by the time you solve the problem you will understand that job a hell of a lot better than you ever did before. You won’t be as paralyzed when the next person decides to resign. And, you’ll probably be motivated to understand and better document your work processes.
It benefits some 0.01% of America and hurt 99.99% of Americans. But unfortunately the 0.01% owns America!
They choose the candidates for you 99.99% of Americans to pick! Heads they win, tails they don’t lose! When you have a good President like Kennedy the 0.01% Will assassinate him!
How can spending more on military than the next 20 nations be good for the U.S.? How can you sell this to the 1 million homeless in the U.S. or the 35% of Americans who will die of illness because the cannot afford health insurance?
China DESTROY Europe BRANDY And WINE In Retaliation Sanction
For me I was getting to know a woman who treated me incredibly, she was beautiful, a great listener who would ask me lots of questions. She was sexy and great around other people and all my friends loved her. The problem was she had no other friends. She would talk about a friend here and there but I never met any of this people and she was never doing anything social outside our relationship. Basically every decision (what movie we went to, what restaurant we eat at came down to what I decide. It concerned me of course but she was naturally submissive and the dating world was so awful that it was easy to just ignore it. BTW she was one of the smartest person I had ever met.
We moved in with each other and slowly things started to unravel. Took a couple years for me to figure out she suffered from something that I knew nothing about. She suffered from Borderline Personality Disorder. It was a nightmare getting out of it.
Ironically, phones are no longer for talking for me. That’s the last thing I want to do on them.
It’s amazing that so many people (cough*women*cough) can talk for hours and hours on the phone.
I try to call my parents once a week at least. We talk for 10-20 minutes typically. That’s about the extent of my calling.
I had a girlfriend who literally talked for 2-3 hours on the phone every single day.
And unfortunately, if her roster of friends were unavailable, I’d be the recipient of those hours of talkage.
I’d sit at my computer on auto-pilot, “Uho….oh wow….that’s crazy.”, as she told me this long story about the bad customer service experience she had that was basically her fault to begin with.
I’d install a new solid state drive in my computer as she debated out loud with herself about the proper wedding present for wedding #400 that year.
I remember lying on my bed, putting the phone on speaker mode and setting it on my chest.
I’d stare at the ceiling and wonder weird things, like if there was another duplicate galaxy out there, with a sun, an earth, a moon, and a Sean lying on a bed at that exact same moment, with a girlfriend telling him a longwinded story about how a girl named Becky said “Hi” in this really rude way the day before.
Luckily the Middle East Conflict has caused a major change in plans for the West for at least another year
The Plan was to bleed out Russia, weaken Russia & focus on Taiwan by 2024 May or June and push China into an aggressive action
Instead Russia is now stronger than ever and Putin isn’t going anywhere so Ukraine has been abandoned and will be fully abandoned in the next few months after a last aid package of maybe $ 30 Billion being approved after a lot of arm twisting
Yet the Middle East will be a considerable strain for the US whose production is by no means what it used to be
It would be a weakened US who would be facing China
Now Taiwanese aren’t Ukranians
No way will they choose to die stupidly
No way will they sacrifice their own lives
Same with the Japanese
So Taiwan WILL EXPECT the UNITED STATES TO DIRECTLY FIGHT CHINA. It means US Troops and US Body bags
That will be WORLD WAR III and both have NUKES
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Hard to believe Trump or the Pentagon would prefer a World War with China
Trump wants to return US to it’s former greatness
A Possible Nuclear war would be the worst outcome for such a vision
If Trump can be assured that US will remain Number 1 for his term and possibly a decade or so after , if US can reduce its debt, China supports the US in restructuring Debt and reduce the deficit
HE MAY ACTUALLY ALLOW CHINA TO INVADE TAIWAN OR OPENLY DECLARE THAT IF TAIWAN DOESN’T RESPECT STATUS QUO, THEN US WONT INTERFERE IF CHINA RETALIATES
Do everything you want to do. Don’t take the little things for granted. Life is short…
I was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy at age 15.
Since I have done everything I wanted to do.
I’ve traveled the country, and I even rode my last roller coaster ride about 12 years ago.
Now, I am incredibly weak. I cannot talk very well, my voice is hoarse, raspy, and down to a whisper. I have to take breaths in between every three or so words.
I can’t walk more than a few steps.I have a wheelchair now.
I’m constantly tired by noon.
Even eating is a challenge. A simple slice of pizza takes about 30–45 mins to eat.
I’ve been cheated out of a normal life, and it hurts.
Live your life to the fullest. It’s the little things in life that make it so much better…don’t take it for granted
I am now 31 and have, at most, 1 more year left to live.
Written by my brother
Chicken Paprikash
chicken paprikash 1 11
Ingredients
Chicken
2 whole fryer chickens, cut up
1 medium onion, diced
Sweet Hungarian paprika
Vegetable oil
8 to 12 ounces sour cream
2 cans chicken broth
Spaetzle (Sinkers)
3 to 4 cups all-purpose flour
6 to 8 eggs
Pinch of salt
Water, if necessary
Instructions
Chicken: Sauté onion in about 1/3 cup vegetable oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add 1/3 cup of paprika, being careful not to let it burn.
Place chicken in skillet to fry, dusting one side again with paprika. Brown about 6 to 8 minutes, turning occasionally. Take chicken out and place in roasting pan.
Add chicken broth until it covers chicken. Cover the pan and bake at 375 degrees F for about 2 hours or until the chicken is tender.
Remove chicken from roaster. Cover and set aside. Put roaster on top of stove and bring remaining contents to a slow boil.
Gravy: Mix sour cream into some of the hot broth from roaster, whisking until smooth. Add back into roaster with boiling broth.
Pre-mix flour, water and salt. Whisk until smooth. Gravy should have a nice salmon color. Add more paprika if desired.
Spaetzle: Mix ingredients in a bowl. Dust hands and mix with flour. Knead into a ball. Flatten to about 1/8 inch thick.
Boil chicken broth in a pot. Keeping a spoon wet, section off pieces of spaetzle dough. Cook in the broth for about 3 to 6 minutes.
Place chicken and spaetzle on a plate and cover with gravy.
When I lived in what was considered a bad neighborhood in Salem MA (I didn’t think it was that bad, but it was cheap for Massachusetts) four boys moved upstairs from us the week after we got there.
Long story short, they were meth dealers (but not manufacturers, thank God!), and every weekend they threw open parties to get more business.
Idiots.
This lasted about six weeks before the Salem Police took them in, and we never saw them again. Hey, paperwork takes time. 😉 To be honest, it probably was quicker because all three were on probation.
Idiots.
So about a month after they went to jail (one went to custody of his mom), we got a ring on the bell. It was a large, muscular, threatening looking middle aged dude. He asked me what I knew about the boys, and I told him they’d gone to jail a month ago, and the place was looking for new tenants.
He narrowed his eyes. “You wouldn’t lie to me? People aren’t happy if they lie to me.”
I assured him I wasn’t lying, and their arrests had been in the newspaper, and were public record.
So he leans in, towering over me, and says, “You tell those punks they owe me $35K, and if they don’t cough it up, doesn’t matter where they are hiding. You got that?”
Looking up, I smiled and told him I didn’t expect or hope to see them again, but if by chance I did, I’d tell them.
I saw him get into his shiny black SUV, noted the plate, and went back inside.
Called the police desk and told them the story and the plate.
“Oh, can you get that for me?” he asked, tilting his head towards me and pointing to the cup on his dresser.
I nodded politely, and stood up to get it for him. As I made my way to his dresser, I noticed the piles of clothes he had lying around on the floor, crumpled and dirty. I don’t care about that I tried to convince myself as I handed him the cup of tea and sat back down.
This was our first date and we had begun to talk about life and our more personal beliefs. And when I say “we”, I actually mean him. For the next three hours, I had a total of about two minutes to share anything about myself.
I asked a lot of questions, sure, but every time I offered any input, I would be cut off immediately by another long-winded 18 minute story about his life. Again, and again.
And after about two hours, I decided to get up to go to the bathroom to compose myself and think about an exit strategy. So I got up and entered the bathroom in his apartment only to find… nothing.
Nothing.
Not a single bar of soap, not a toothbrush, not a towel. And worse.. not even toilet paper.
It was as if I had walked into a showing for a new apartment. I tried to look frantically in the drawers for something, but I found nada.
I was beyond shocked, especially because he had gone to the bathroom earlier for more than just a quick look in the mirror.
So if the two hours of lecturing from him was not enough, the bathroom was the signifying factor for me that I had to leave.
This is pretty much how he spends 23 hours every day. And he is for the most part untrainable. He is both incredibly lazy and incredibly stubborn and is not motivated by anything. Not praise, not treats, nothing.
One day last week, we were going for our daily walk. We usually walk around 1–1/2 to 2–1/2 miles every day, depending on the weather. We had only gotten a block from the house when two pitbulls that I had never seen before came charging at us. The fist one to get to us immediately tried to bite Ivan but just got a mouthful of hair.
I took a step back and made sure Ivan had enough slack in his leash so that he could do whatever it was he needed to do to defend both himself and I. I don’t think it took Ivan 5 seconds to send both of those pitbulls running for the hills. The noises he made sounded as if a demon had been unleashed.
And then we continued on our walk. And once we got home, he resumed his usual position, curled up on the couch.
Great Pyrenees dogs have been bred to be guardians. No training required. It’s just in his blood.
Spring of 2012, I was 56, and I had completed my bloodwork in preparation for my annual physical. My GP called me and said, I need you to redo your bloodwork. I went to see the vampires again and gave another sample. Two days later during my physical, the GP tells me, “Your platelet count is really high, 1.6million per microliter”. (Normal is 150k to 450k) “l want you to go see this blood specialist”. The previous year, my platelet count was normal.
Ten days later I am sitting with the Blood Swami who tells me, “Dave, you are a walking potential blood clot just waiting to have a stroke or heart attack. You have a condition known as essential thrombocytosis and I am prescribing hydroxyurea to treat it. This is a pretty strong chemotherapy drug, and there is a risk that you could develop leukemia in 20 years. If you do nothing, you could throw a blood clot causing a stroke or heart attack at any time. I am also going to order a bone marrow biopsy from your hip to rule out cancer, which can cause platelet production to spike.”
Post bone marrow biopsy, which by the way, was excruciating, it turned out I had a genetic mutation which resulted in runaway platelet production. 11 and a half years later I am still on the drug, my blood guy and see each other quarterly, and although there has been some yo-yoing of my platelet count, we are keeping the count pretty much under control, and knock wood, no signs of leukemia.
Side note: when I was diagnosed, my mom told me she had developed essential thrombocytosis a year earlier, and her doctor did not order a bone marrow biopsy. Two months after my diagnosis, she was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer and was dead in 3 months. I have always wondered if she had had a bone marrow biopsy when she was diagnosed, would they have caught the lung cancer when it was more treatable.
The commonest complaint with which people consult a cardiologist is chest pain. People believe, and rightly so, that chest pain is the classical hallmark that the heart may be in trouble. But fortunately, most chest pains are not cardiac.
–
The following ones makes us yawn.
‘Pain Right at this point.’
‘Pinprick type pain.’
‘Pain shifts here and there.’
‘Pain lasts for few seconds.
‘Feels like an electric shock’
‘Pains as I touch here’
All these have a low likelihood of being cardiac pain.
I examine them, ask for an ECG etc etc – all routine.
And most often they turn out to be normal.
–
The following gives us nightmares.
The phone rings.
‘Can I talk to the doctor?’
‘Yes please’
‘Doctor, I have some kind of discomfort of my lower jaw, I had a ECG done and it was normal. Just wanted to…..’
‘Tell me that again. Jaw pain? I need you to come down to the hospital ASAP’
–
ECG of someone who had a littlejaw pain.
Here is his ECG
image 19
ECG (the last 3 leads) shows runs of VT (very fast heart rate). Precursor of a cardiac arrest.
–
Coronary Angiogram
image 18
Critical narrowing of a heart artery (Left Anterior Descending Artery)
–
A pain, ache or discomfort of the lower Jaw, or a discomfort radiating (spreading) from chest, neck to the lower jaw is highly likely of cardiac origin.
A chest pain can happen because of muscle pain, cartilage inflammation, and many such minor stuff but a jaw pain, though a lesser known and an uncommon manifestation of cardiac disease, if present, strongly indicates that the heart may be in trouble.
–
5-Minute-Teach
If you have a aching pain or unexplained discomfort of your lower jaw, go to your cardiologist and not to your dentist.
I was working in a Bangalore in one US based company.
I had team of 2 which I was leading and was working on Automation and I was the one who started this work.
Work was going fine and things were happening on deadlines. I had direct manager , no lead in team.
One fine day my account VP called me .
Account VP: your attitude is not good ( fyi I used to come office early in morning by 9am and complete work by 4:30–5pm and then leave) about why I am leaving so early when all other people stay late ( other people used to come by 12:30–1 PM and leave by 9PM) ,
Me: my work is going fine and my manager doesn’t have any issue with deadline and work( that time my manager was in USA)
A VP : you need to improve this , can’t work like this.
Me : what you want more time or better efficiency?
A VP : do your work but you need to stay .
Me: sorry , I can’t do that as I am coming early when no one is in office and completing mine work and team is also doing same.( Team people used to stay till 6:30–7PM for no reason).
Next day I was called by my HR director , when I reached there I saw VP sitting with him.
HR director: I was told that you are behaving properly and not working properly.
Me : work wise you can ask my manager and even I do direct presentation to India head and people in US.
HR D.: U need to stay also ,that’s how everyone work here.
Me: I am not everyone and I won’t work like that. When required I do stay but can’t do it daily for no reason.
HR d- this is not way you can work here.
Me: then I don’t want to work here, you guys don’t understand the problem. By sitting till late doesn’t mean you are working more. And I can’t stay without reason.
HR D: your behaviour is not good , Not good way to talk, Better you leave.
Me: ok. I will send a mail and I am leaving. Can’t work in this kind of environment.
Later in same month I got another job with very good hike 80% and again 17% in next 4months during appraisal.
FYI,
I completed 2 projects in 7months and after I left , responsibility was given to senior developer and few months later when I asked my team mates , they told me that there is no progress and they are almost still stuck where you left . One person left one month after I left and one was working there.
Oh, you wouldn’t believe what happened with my neighbor last summer. So, there I was, enjoying a quiet Saturday afternoon in my backyard, tending to my roses — you know, the usual weekend relaxation. Out of nowhere, I hear this loud, screeching sound. I look up, and there’s my neighbor, Dave, flying a drone right over my fence!
At first, I thought, “Okay, maybe he’s just testing it out.” But no, this drone starts hovering over my yard, and I swear it’s like it’s spying on me. I’m waving my arms, trying to shoo it away like a pesky fly. And then, the unthinkable happens — this drone swoops down and knocks over my prized garden gnome, shattering it into a million pieces. That gnome was a gift from my late aunt, and I treasured it.
I marched right over to Dave’s house, ready to give him a piece of my mind. But here’s the kicker: he opens the door with this innocent look and says, “Oh, did my drone accidentally wander into your yard? It must’ve gone off course. Sorry about that.” I mean, the nerve of some people! It took every ounce of patience I had not to escalate things.
So, lesson learned — always keep an eye on the sky when Dave’s around. You never know when a rogue drone might invade your privacy. It’s funny now, but at the time, it was like something out of a sitcom!
Having lived for three years in Germany, the one thing that really struck me about Germany’s advantage over the US is Germans’ deep feeling of personal liberty. Americans believe we have personal freedom, but we really don’t compare to Germans.
Germans have a very generous social safety net that Americans do not have. In Germany a person can quit his job to start a business of his own without fear of losing his health insurance. This relieves a lot of the stress and risk for someone who wants to pursue a lifelong dream to have their own business. The government will even partially subsidize the business for the first year to help him get it started effectively rather than having to scrape together dimes and nickles and fail due to a lack of support. This makes it entirely possible for someone to start something they really want to do.
Education is fully subsidized at all levels. If a German wants to be a doctor, they go for it. An engineer, they go for it. An artist, a musician or a teacher, they go for it. The education is available to become anything they want to be, regardless of their ability to pay. Germans have freedom to pursue their dreams where Americans are enslaved by debt or cannot afford to go to school at all.
A person who loses his job in Germany may receive 60% of his salary for up to a year while he searches for a new job. This prevents him from being forced immediately into a lower-wage job as Americans frequently are when their personal savings runs out.
Free healthcare, of course. Germans don’t have to worry about whether they can afford their medications or medical treatments. Sickness doesn’t drain a person’s bank account.
The elderly are taken care of. Those who have retired will receive a pension sufficient to allow them to live the rest of their lives with dignity. The government provides substantially for elderly people who need to be in a nursing home or in a hospice, relieving families of the crushing financial burden Americans face as their parents grow old.
My experience brought me to the conclusion that Americans have as much freedom as they have money. People who have little money become risk averse and are not free to pursue their dreams—especially when they work pay check to pay check and are one car repair away from bankruptcy. If they have college debt, Americans live like slaves for many years. The German system, on the other hand, allows people to live free, to try things, to fail perhaps, and keep right on going until they succeed. The quality of life is therefore higher and people are free to do what they want with their lives.
Hanging by your fingernails over the edge of a cliff is not freedom.
Argentina is not joining BRICS? Where is its right wing President leading its people to?
Argentina went hard butt-fuck with the United States, and this has “sort of” messed up the global realignment.
Yes. Leanne. A rather entitled millennial who thought the sun shone from somewhere it didn’t. She told her manager to F-off.
She was put into a tech assistant role, supporting George, a category manager who had been working for the company for close to 50 years. He retired when he hit 50 years of service – he was 72 at the time. After retirement, he stuck around part-time for a few years as a consultant too – he was that knowledgeable, and important to the business.
Anyway, what George didn’t know wasn’t worth knowing. He could tell you the names of staff going back to the early 70s. He could also tell you when something was made obsolete, and what replaced it. He was a walking archive of catalog information going back to before I was born. If you couldn’t find an answer, George was the one who would know it. He was extremely well respected. He had 2 assistants working under him, doing daily tasks like tenders and quotes, warranty checks, stock orders, and general technical assistance for distributors and customers.
Jovic was a fellow in his mid-30s when I met him. He was George’s protégé, and he had already learned a lot from George – having worked under him for nearly a decade. His only career plan was to step into George’s role when he retired. He did (and still does) a cracking job.
Leanne was employed a year or so before I came along. She was lazy, and slow to reply to requests for help. Customers complained to both Jovic and George about her. Jovic was growing tired of having to carry Leanne’s shortcomings and begged George to do something.
George worked out she would be better doing analytic tasks like price increases, manufacturing updates, large pricing tenders, and stock monitoring – so she wouldn’t have to talk to customers anywhere near as much. She was taking a week to do a tender than George could do in a few hours. Admittedly, George could look at a partial part number, or a description, and instantly know the correct number. This took Leanne a lot of time to search. But she was also partial to online shopping and would spend hours browsing fashion sites. She would also call her friends and spend hours going through fashion websites, deciding what to buy. This was the main reason she was so slack.
George had gone to HR several times about her lack of competence in the role, her time wasting, excessive personal calls etc, etc. She was given numerous verbal warnings and a couple of written ones. She was on thin ice. One afternoon George was frustrated that a deadline was coming up, and she hadn’t started a tender that she’d had for over 2 weeks. He walked up behind her desk to see she was browsing a fashion site, and yapping away on a personal call. He interrupted her and asked her to focus on the tender. Her response “Fx off George.”
George had never been short with anyone before. So his next outburst was a huge shock to us all. He bellowed (loud enough for whoever was on the other end of her phone to hear it) “That’s it, we’re going up to HR right now. You had your last chance, and you blew it.”
Her response, which was heard right across 60+ people in an open plan office – people who had suddenly become silent after hearing George’s outburst, was “You can’t sack me you crusty old cxxx. I quit first.”
Because of that retaliation, and the language used, HR refused to give her a reference as she was marched from the building.
George was the most patient guy, but Leanne pushed him way too far. We were all glad to see the back of her.
Jovic has since become “George 2.0” – although his knowledge isn’t as impressive as George’s, he still has some 25 years to get there.
I pressed the button for floor number thirteen. The only other occupants of the lift were two cute girls, who were talking to each other in a highly fake American accent.
At the fifth floor, the lift stopped, the door opened, and I was surprised to see an African man standing in front of us. True that Delhi is a favorite destination of international tourists, but people of African origin are still a rare sight.
The lift was again on its way.
I turned my attention back to the girls. Suddenly, one of them started signaling the other, making big round eyes, first pointing towards her, and then towards the African guy. For an instant, the second girl seemed confused, but then she realized what her friend was trying to point to and both of them burst with silent giggles. I felt really bad for the African guy, who seemed strangely calm. He didn’t seem to mind at all. Emboldened by this, the two girls began talking loudly, but this time, they strategically switched to Hindi.
“Kitna bhadda lag raha hai ye kalua!” (He’s so ugly, this Blackie!)
“Haan, sahi kaha. Baal dekh iske, jaise ghungrali ghas ugi ho sir pe.” (Yep, you’re right. Look at his hair. Looks like his head is covered with curly grass.)
At this, both of them again started guffawing with tears in their eyes.
“Itni badsurat shakal kisi ki kese ho sakti hai!” (How can somebody have such an ugly face!)
I was really embarrassed. Was this my incredible India?
The lift stopped. The African guy adjusted his backpack and proceeded to step out. Then suddenly, he turned around, and in impeccable Hindi, said –
“Badsurat dil hone se to badsurat shakal hona achha hai!” (It’s better to have an ugly face than an ugly heart!)
And then, he was gone.
The expression of utter shame and embarrassment on the girls’ faces, turned red with rage and humiliation, is something I still cherish to this day.
Not sure if it ended the lieutenant’s career or not, but if it didn’t it was definitely a CLM (Career Limiting Manuver)
Friend of mine was engaged to an enlisted guy in the army. Dude had his paperwork, and was a couple of weeks from being a civilian. He was scheduled to do some final training for newbies *in a week*, but didn’t have any real duties until then. Gal’s Mom dies somewhat unexpectedly. They set up the funeral for Saturday, she calls (still crying) tells guy, wants him there. Guy’s LT is standing right there, so guy asks LT for a weekend pass to go to funeral. LT says something (loudly, knowing gal is on phone) to the tune of ‘No, you aren’t leaving the base so you can go with your c*** to a funeral’
Short version: Gal’s dad gets pissed. Calls local Senator – who just happened to be the chairman of the Armed Forces budget committee. They go to the Senator’s office, start explaining what happened, and the Senator stops her: “So, your guy doesn’t have any duty for a week, you are on the phone grieving, and the LT called you a what?”
*2 hours later*, LT is helping dude pack his bags…..
The son of our friend Mario has tried to take his own life on the weekend. Together with his family and parents, he had a nice quiet dinner where he had too much to drink, and this made him so drowsy that he ended up fast asleep in the spare room of his parents’ place.
image 136
When Robin woke up, he was extremely erratic (“What am I still doing here ?”) and ran to the garden, where a noose was tied to a tree, ready to be used.
It took his parents and sister more than two minutes to cut the cord, but he was still alive. His wife wasn’t there to help him, by the way, although she was on the premises “minding her own business.” After a while — essentially after he caught his breath and was able to talk again — he became so dangerously aggressive that he was involuntary committed to a psychiatric ward.
It was the third time in as many months that Robin tried ending his life, and it was the third time that an act of pure coincidence “saved” him. The first time it was sleeping pills (but he vomited and was found), the second time he drove his car into a log carrier, which he miraculously survived (although his car was totally wrecked).
Robin has a three-year-old son. And he also has a wife.
And she has told him five months ago that she wants to work on herself, and put their marriage on hold (“and maybe the kid was a mistake”).
It shattered his every dream of becoming the best dad in the world and a good husband, and the forth time around may well be the last. In matters of the heart, the mind often fails to survive and Robin is drowning in a shockwave that is totally beyond his control now.
For his wife, it’s a mere ripple.
SOURCES: paintings by Stephen Early and Nicola Samori.
Money. I got money for free. Thanks American Express.
I worked for a professional service firm early in my career and standard practice was a corporate credit card (American Express) which I could use for work expenses like travel, food, accomodation and limited rewards for my team members within certain limits. Sometimes I’d shout Friday drinks on the firm as a reward.
image 116
I’d submit my bill for payment every month; my boss would always authorise and all was good.
Then after a few years I resigned as I got a better offer from another firm.
I handed back my corporate credit card and did the usual handover of everything belonging to the firm before I left – security pass, phone, laptop etc.
Several months later I received a corporate credit card bill saying my account was not closed. So I contacted American Express explained that I had left and they should seek payment and sort out any outstanding amounts from my previous employer as I could no longer process any payment.
This process repeated itself for about a year. I would either email or phone explaining the situation or else ignore the bill.
Eventually I’d had enough and resigned myself to visiting American Express pay the bill myself, and settle this thing once and for all.
So apparently, I don’t know the difference between a credit and a debit balance, and it was American Express who owed me money and could not close the account.
When I got there and identified myself they gave me the cash over paid on the credit card, then closed the account.
The terms and conditions of the card made me responsible even after I resigned for card payments (and overpayments).
Free money.
The Kitten Held Out His Paw Every Time Someone Passed Him At the Shelter
The long answer is this: If I smash a beer bottle over your head I will be charged with assault and probably various other things. If you invite me to smash a beer bottle over your head and refuse to press charges, I will be charged with nothing.
By voluntarily stopping, I’m inviting you to smash me with a beer bottle and I won’t press charges. But if you try to stop me against my will, you’ve just smashed me with one without my consent and the story gets radically different.
People stand in those receipt lines because of sheep mentality. These businesses know this and take full advantage of it. People are generally idiots that will do what they see other people doing – so if there is a line that terminates in the parking lot, where customers on their way out want to be, they will typically join that line. Show a receipt? Does it mean I get to my car eventually? No problem!
A receipt is a proof of purchase. Barring some evidence or suspicion of shoplifting, the business has absolutely no legal authority to detain you – they simply hope you don’t know that and are, in fact, an idiot.
Back in about 2003 I was buying a shit ton of PC builds from a store called Fry’s (Think Costco of electronics) in Burbank, California. I needed to fill an office of twenty or so terminals and would make thrice weekly runs to Fry’s ending in shopping carts full of things. There was at least a twenty minute line to check out. Then another twenty minute line while some dipshit checked every item at the door. I eventually decided to detour and was stopped, multiple times….
In each case, it escalated to a manager and in each case, I was apologized to and “let go”…and when I say “let go” I mean that I voluntarily left after staying voluntarily. I never showed my receipt because the bluff was called.
No matter what anyone says, unless you are part of a membership based retail chain with implicit contractual conditions, there is no way any retail establishment can force you to show a receipt upon exit of premises unless said receipt is to be used for in-store reimbursement. At all. Ever. In any store.
So walking without stopping at the hall monitors exit is more or less a test and they’re hoping you’ll blow it and submit to some bassackwards receipt check that serves no real loss prevention purpose.
I do stop for adorable old people though – because that’s like their last thing that means anything. I’ll easily wait 2 minutes while some octogenarian verifies I actually purchased only shampoo, diapers and a fifty inch TV.
I regularly have to trample all over student’s dreams and crush their ambitions utterly. I hate doing it more than anything else, but it’s my job.
For some reason people believe it’s fine to lie to kids with intellectual disabilities. They think it’s okay to tell them massive untruths because it makes them smile for a moment. And immediate, short-term happiness is all a lot of people consider when interacting with kids with intellectual disabilities.
I’ve been working in special needs education and I’ve lost count of the number of girls I have taught who honestly believe they have what it takes to be a great singer. They’re convinced that they’re just as good as anyone they see on TV or hear on the radio because that’s what people tell them. They belt out a tune and friends and relatives gush and talk about what a great voice they’ve got and how they’re better than Taylor Swift etc. And the kids believe them, because everyone says it and they have an intellectual disability so they believe what people tell them.
I’ve personally seen it happen. I’ve watched girls sing in school concerts and hit roughly half the notes they were aiming for and exhibit no sense of rhythm but generate the sort of praise that Pavarotti used to get from sycophants. People tell the student that they’ll be a great singer one day which they know is a complete and total lie.
My role as a teacher is to try and get them into employment. I try and find work experience, work placements, further education and job opportunities so they can leave school with a career path. Which means I have to ask them what they want to do for a living and they look at me with conviction and say they want to be a singer. Despite the fact that their ability is well below average, they dream of being a pop star because everyone tells them that they’re going to be the next great singer. And then I come along and talk seriously about maybe getting a job stacking shelves in a supermarket. I tell them that getting a high-school certificate is essential and they need to focus on their school work and start thinking of realistic career paths. I don’t actually tell them outright that their singing is terrible, but my job is to be the voice of reason and realism among the chorus of liars who tell them they’ll be a great singer. And I watch their dreams slowly die.
It’s not just singers. I’ve helped crush the dreams of actors, stand up comedians and sports stars. I’ve always encouraged them to follow their love as a hobby and keep at it but if they ask me (and most do) if they have what it takes to accomplish their dream then I’d be doing them a horrible disservice if I wasn’t honest.
I’ve written this story before but I can’t find it.
I’m a pilot, not a flight attendant.
One day, I was traveling from a trip to my home base. I really wanted to be home but all the passenger seats were full and the cockpit jumpseat was full too. In those days, it was allowable for me to travel on the flight attendant jumpseat but it didn’t happen often. So I asked the flight attendants and they were good with it.
So I thought I’d be a nice guy and offer to help out. Unfortunately, they took me up on the offer.
I spent the first 30 minutes of the flight making drinks in the first class galley. Then they sent me to the aft galley where I swear I loaded 300 sodas on carts in a 737. When that was done, I started heating the meals and setting up each tray for the coach meal service. Those little foil dishes were super hot and I had to pull them out with an oven mitt and then remove the foil and put the meal on the tray and make sure the other items were in the right place. Then I put them into the carts as the flight attendants rolled them out for service. Then the trash started coming in and I pulled out the plastic bags from the carts and put in new ones and pulled out the carriers with the old trays and stowed them. After that was finally done, it was time for another beverage service! I had to clean out the beverage cart and put in fresh cans of soda, lots more glasses and ice. Then another trash pickup with dirty cups.
It was finally time for a break but…no, the moment I sat down on a jumpseat, people started trooping past for the lavatories. Many wanted something like another can of soda or some kind of snack or just wanted to chat or complain or ask which gate we’d use or about their connection or seat assignment or some other unanswerable thing. I said “I don’t know” a lot and most of the people were not in the mood to understand. It was exhausting.
Finally, they sent me back to the first class galley and she asked me to serve the cockpit which was kind of fun since they don’t often get service from a uniformed captain. They could tell I was wrung out. I went back to my galley and cleaned up the surfaces and put stuff where I was told to put it and make sure all those little doors were closed with the latches turned. She collected and service items and I stowed them where I thought they ought to go.
I was elated when the airplane started descending and even happier when they turned on the fasten seatbelt sign. A ten minute break!
We taxied to the gate and I was the first one off.
I had no idea how continuously hard the work was in the cabin. Those poor people never get a moment’s rest. They’re always “on” and have to somehow try to be courteous to everyone. I’m not a particularly outgoing person and it sapped my energy. It is far, FAR easier to be a pilot than a flight attendant.
Edit 1: I forgot to note that this was the flight attendant’s third leg and they were doing one more that evening. How do they have that kind of endurance?
I got a lot of new respect for the profession and I wish more pilots would do a “flight attendant appreciation flight”.
1.Women as the safest place for him to go on the planet
Your arms, eyes, and lap, those have to be a refuge for him. If you become the safest place on the planet for his heart’s secret needs; he will never leave.
2. Women who make them feel like they matter
Appreciate him when he goes out of his way to buy a gift or provide you with much-needed emotional support. Tell him that he made a difference in your life.
3. Women who accept them for who they are
If you can encourage him to be his authentic self, it makes you extremely approachable and lovable. When he feels safe and comfortable, he’ll open up to you.
4. Women who push them and inspire them
A woman who excels in her pursuits, whether it is career, fitness goals, social milestones, or anything that truly fits his description of excelling at life, can be extremely attractive to men.
5. Women who are secure in the relationship
Men are attracted to strong and confident women, period. Confidence is one of the most attractive traits a woman can have. If you are secure and confident, he will feel the same, and this will lead him to open up more about himself and be able to show his vulnerable side.
6. Women who share their sexual chemistry
Physical intimacy is important in adult relationships. Men want their women to be open with them about sex and confident in their sexual encounters with them.
If you can radiate this confidence and openness to him, he will not only be attracted to you in the short-term, but also see you as a viable long-term romantic partner.
7. Women who are open to the idea of love
If a woman is resistant to being loved, a man will quickly lose interest. He won’t be able to open up or show love if he is continually being shut down. You need to be open to the idea of love and communicate your intentions and emotions.
8. Women who don’t fight their femininity
Men love to be with a woman who is authentic and confident in expressing her feminine side. Men are task-oriented and love it when their efforts are validated and valued, especially if it’s a physical task. So if you feel like he’s taking charge or trying to help you, it’s okay to lean back and let him do it occasionally.
9. Women who don’t play mind games
For instance, not answering calls or texts promptly is part of the mind games that can be counter-productive. This may lead to him acting nonchalant as well and not committing himself fully to the relationship.
Men like women who are honest and open with them about the things that really matter.
My first 18 months in the USMC, I got to basically turn my brain off, because I was a PVT. Everything of any importance, or which required intelligence, was handled by NCOs and commissioned officers, not by some just-out-of-high-school junior-enlisted punk.
I was a Baby Grunt who just did what my higher-ups told me. Once I reached E-4 and above, though, I was entrusted with tasks that required more attention, thinking and care. I got smarter, and more careful.
Still, I could always rely on my company commander to take care of me, I never really worried about where my next meal would come from, or anything like that. Things worked out for me, pretty much, or at least I stayed alive and out-of-trouble.
I never got lost, or got demoted or thrown in the brig. I kept my nose clean and did my job decently, because no-one who was under my command died. That’s good enough for me, that I made sure I got all of my soldiers home alive, and except for one person, home in one piece.
Lots of things can go wrong at any moment, and everything is determined by luck and chance. You can die anytime. But at least they’ll take care of your family. And the chances of you dying get pretty low if you don’t take risks you don’t need to.
In my case of being wounded, that was no-one’s fault, except the Iraqi who placed it there. If I died, I would’ve done so knowing that I’d done my country and my men a good service.
Just do what everybody else is doing (most of the time, there are some cases where you should go your own way, especially if you’re surrounded by inexperienced, or just plain dumb, people) and things will turn out okay. Don’t worry, the Corps has things handled for you.
You might get your deployment extended, or sent out on back-to-back missions, but that’s not the worst thing that can happen to you. There’s a bigger picture.
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Russian soldiers taking a break during the battle of grozny
My wife Sonia was 21 when we met. I wasn’t much older but had seen more of the world, whereas she came from a small town in Upstate New York and had never been on an airplane. I decided to surprise her with a trip to the Bahamas. When we embarked on our flight, Sonia wore a woven beach hat and beautiful sun dress. She was wide-eyed and adorable (still is). A true Audrey Hepburn. As we approached the screening area of the airport, Sonia said, “What is that?” She pointed to the large x-ray box for scanning carry-on luggage. Without missing a beat, I said, “Oh, if this is your first time flying, they screen you in the box.” I thought she would laugh. Instead, she started to climb onto the conveyer belt. I had to pull her back and then explain to the startled TSA agent (this was pre-9/11) that my girlfriend had never flown before. Sonia was suitably red-faced (and even more adorable). She proceeded to slug me (much deserved).
We’ve flown together many times since. I always make a show of trying to hold her back from climbing into the box.
I used to wait tables at a Denny’s in Lawrence MA. One instance, I was off the clock and having coffee with a couple of friends when 3 teens literally ran out the door. Found out that they had run out on the bill so we gave chase and got their plate number. Called the cops, filed a report, and about an hour later a very angry father showed up with the 3 boys in tow. His son had borrowed his car. The officer on duty (we had a detail officer during rush periods on the weekends) was aware of the incident and told them to pay the bill. Then he “strongly suggested” that the boys leave a generous tip for the waitress. They had the money, they just didn’t want to pay. After all was said and done, and the father had torn his son and son’s friends new ones, the officer arrested the 3 boys for theft. They were charged, given a deferred prosecution agreement, and sentenced to perform community service. Once they completed it, their records would be wiped clean. I believe two of them completed the DPA, the third ended up failing it and going to jail for a little while. Seemed fitting.
Yes due to my second layer boss simply didn’t have a common sense.
I have this habit while I was working in a client facing side where I occasionally check my work calendar on weekend in case any of my clients do schedule a meeting last minute.
While I was checking, I got this weird meeting invite on the next Tuesday with my boss, my boss’s boss and the HR team (1st red flag).
I figure there might be 2 options either I’m canned or maybe they’re gonna move me another team. I tried to contact them and ask what’s happening but well the HR and my second layer boss doesn’t have the balls to answer me and just ignore me till our meeting (2nd red flag).
My boss did respond though, through our call I found out that he did not know anything (or did he?) Well anyway I trust him, he’s a good man after all.
Well long story short, here I am writing this experience and my second layer boss got canned too 3 months after that.
Preview The MASSIVE 1/35 Akagi Flightdeck and Bridge W/ 1/35 Kate Torpedo Bomber
30 years ago, my SIL was worried about her 2 year old son. His tummy hurt and he wouldn’t eat much. Their doctor said it was a mild stomach flu, he’ll get over it in a few days, soft foods for a while.
When he started wheezing and coughing at night, the doctor said, “It’s just a little cold, he’ll get over it in a few days”, gave her a ventolin puffer (inhaler) and a spacing chamber, but no instructions.
Asthma runs in that family, because my son was also diagnosed with asthma, as had their shared grandmother. My son’s asthma specialist trained me how to administer the meds, so I taught my SIL.
My nephew’s legs were bruising from the inside of his legs, it seemed, because he was now too weak to move much. The day care called my SIL because he had a fever and they couldn’t wake him! She took him to Urgent Care, which sent them to the Emergency hospital.
The paediatrician diagnosed him with late stage leukemia and admitted him immediately!!
The Hospital staff reviewed what they could find of his records from the family doctor. The staff called their lawyers and the Medical Board before informing my SIL that her “doctor” was not trained or certified as any kind of medical practioner at all!
She declined to join the class action suit against him, or to file suit as an individual.
He survived, and is now a lawyer and owns an apiary.
The day the divorce was being finalized I went to the courthouse.
My about to be ex didn’t bother to appear though his lawyer did.
Judge reads over the paperwork, asks me a few questions. Announces he is finding in my favor in any disputed issues because if the ex cared about the outcome he should have appeared. BANG.
Divorce is final, see the clerk for copies of decree.
Ex’s lawyer turns to me and asks if he can buy me lunch.
Judge: WHAT?
Lawyer: Lunch. My treat. Least I can do.
Courtroom is full of muffled laughter.
Judge: Explain yourself, counselor.
Lawyer: Your honor, this lady and I have been the route together. My client-
Judge: This lady’s former husband. That client?
Lawyer: Your honor, my client is a squirrel. He messed this lady about for no damn reason, kept asking for changes, kept demanding she sign off on things then failing to sign the paperwork himself, that kind of thing. He regularly failed to pay the agreed support. For that matter, he hasn’t been all that great at paying me, either. I’ve spent more time on the phone with this lady than I have with my client.
Judge: Okay. Anything else?
Lawyer: Your honor, my client is a squirrel and as of ten minutes ago he’s not my client anymore and he’s not her husband anymore. I feel like this lady and I have been through a lot together and before we go our separate ways I thought it might be nice to sit, eat a nice lunch and not talk about the squirrel at all.
Judge: Out of my courtroom. Now. (Looks at me) Make him buy you the biggest steak on the menu.
I rented a u-Haul truck. It was a clapped out broken piece of garbage that was noisy, didn’t steer right and the passenger door would pop open whenever I hit a big bump. But that’s not the issue.
I rented it on Friday and needed to return it on Sunday before 9am so not to be charged an extra day. So Sunday I got up early and was there by 8am. The place was closed! And the lot was full of people either trying to return trucks or pick them up for the day. Apparently the opening guy was a no show!
I stood around with all these folks about a half hour. Then I wrote a note dated and time marked 8:30am. I wrapped it around the keys and put it in the night slot. I felt bad for the folks waiting for trucks who had to move that day!
I get the bill by email the next day. I’m being charged an extra day, them stating the truck was logged in at 12:30pm! I call the office and explain myself. The numpty explains that the time stamp was 12:30 so the charge was correct! I retort that they were closed during business hours! He responds that yes that is true, and there was chaos and the manager had to come in, and he didn’t get to logging the truck in right away, so the charge was right! I gave up, and hung up.
I called corporate and got a reasonable human on the line. He understood right away. Situation instantly rectified!
Well, it was somewhat entertaining. I had reserved a car at EWR (Newark Airport). I used to live in NJ, and i knew very well that I wanted a SMALL CAR because that’s what you want in the part of NJ I was headed for.
So I get there, I walk up to the counter, give the guy my res number. He puts on a big smile, “would you like to upgrade to a sports car”. No “Woudl you like to upgrade to a full-sized sedan?” No “How about a Prius?” No Ok then. (do the usual dance about CDW, yadda yadda) He hands me keys. I look at the ring. It says “Ford Explorer”. Yeah. That’s what it said! So I asked, can I have a compact like I asked for, please? “No, we’re out, but you could upgrade to a sports car!” Does that cost more? “Well, it’s $110 a day.” (the compact was 39/day plus fees) So, how much is this Ford Exploder? <guy winces> “Well it’s to fulfill your reservation so it’s the same price as the compact.”
Yeah, so I was moving about NJ in the Iowa Class of Automobiles. I think I got about 11–12 MPG.
When Susan Kuhnhausen walked into her house, she immediately knew someone was in her home.
It wasn’t just a sixth sense. Things had been moved. Curtains were now open, moving as if they’d recently been touched. Things on her table had been moved. She lived alone and she knew where everything belonged.
She walked through the house uneasily looking down hallways. In the kitchen. Moving quietly.
She walked past her bathroom. She turned into her bedroom.
Standing there was a bearded man, holding a hammer. He charged her and swung his hammer, hitting her on the side of the head. She fell down. He got on top of her and kept hitting her.
They then began wrestling.
Susan was a larger woman, who was particularly strong and worked as a nurse in the ER, trained on how to subdue wild patients.
After being hit several times, she managed to get her assassin pinned to the ground in a sleeper hold.
She began choking him. When she released him his throat had been crushed — he later died (after Susan called an ambulance for him).
The assassin had been sent by her husband.
Their marriage had fallen apart and he wanted her dead. He’d paid the assassin $50,000 to kill her. (Source: A Hit Man Came to Kill Susan Kuhnhausen. She Survived. He Didn’t. Slovic, Beth.)
She was later treated for injuries and made a full recovery. Her husband was then sent to jail for the remainder of his life (he died in prison).
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Her would-be assassin’s last words, during their fight, were “you are strong.”
I opened a Christmas gift from a female kindergarten student. She really wanted me to open it in front of her. It was a teal negligee. I was speechless. She was very excited to give it to me and I said it was beautiful.
I put it back in the gift bag and said that it was so pretty I wanted Mrs. L (my good friend) to see it. I told the student to just leave it on her desk because Mrs. L is very busy and to come right back to class.
My friend was in mild hysterics over this gift and she proceeded to quietly pass it around the school. Another teacher who had taught the older siblings came to me and said mom works in a factory and probably made the negligee herself. That’s why there were no tags.
I kept it for years and wrote a lovely thank you note, of course.
I have a bold and, perhaps, strange proposition for you: I want you to start naming inanimate objects in your life. Not all of them. Just five to ten will do. You can name them anything you’d like. Why? Because it will enrich your life, teach you to appreciate these objects, and promote fun and creativity. It can even defuse arguments.
For example, my partner Laura and I are constantly at odds over the thermostat. She generally wants the house so hot that the paint peels off the walls. And in her defense, I prefer an arctic winter. As a compromise, I bought her a few warm blankets, wool socks, and a sweater.
There is one brown blanket, which we originally named, “Big Brown”, but have now named it, “The Nuclear Option.” No heat escapes and if you dare sleep in it, you risk overheating. Sometimes, when we are discussing the temperature, I will say, “Want me to get the nuclear option for you?” She will look at me in horror, as if to beg, “N-n-no…please don’t.” It generally lightens the mood.
People generally buy and own too much stuff, but that doesn’t mean we can’t name our chosen objects. Naming something changes our relationship with it, altering how our brain encodes the information. The object gains meaning and becomes more memorable. For example, small children are more likely to notice and remember features of stuffed animals if a name is attached to it. Whereas they become far more disinterested in the absence of names.
Naming objects also gives a sense of psychological comfort and control. Your garage machinery no longer feels like machinery, but instead, happy, willing employees, your allies in oiled arms. Names can also enhance the intended purpose of an object.
For example, my dad was a Navy SEAL, and in training, there are these big logs they carried and did sit-ups with, grunting and enduring torturous exercise. But if trainees did something egregiously wrong, they had to carry an extra large log that is twice the weight of an already heavy log. They call it “Old Misery.” No SEAL forgets Old Misery, and its name is part of its menace.
Per Dr. Soonkwan Wan, Marketing professor at Michigan Tech University, “You may drive exactly the same car I drive. But my car is my car. It’s part of me and part of my history, so that makes it different. In this way, you kind of decommodify this commodity.”
A few examples
One trick is to think of singular objects in your life. There’s no sense in naming an apple, in a pile of many apples. Think of those things that stand out.
During my childhood Floridian summers, we occasionally got rain downfalls that felt like a biblical apocalypse to some, but were grounds for incredible childhood fun. I had a big clunky red bike that was remarkably good at riding through high waters due to its big wheels. Every other bike immediately got stuck and fell over. So, I nicknamed this one wave runner:
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(Sister. Me in the middle. Johnny. Wave runner on the right. You might notice Johnny running for the car in the background. He’s rushing to tell the car not to try. We spent the day helping these cars get out of this street turned pond.)
Naming objects creates a bond with it, despite it not having any real feelings or thoughts. We are tricking the mind to care, and this is good because it elevates our sense of belongingness. I can promise you — as silly as this entire exercised seems — when you start naming things, watch as you suddenly start valuing these objects more.
My grandfather was eternally cheap after a bleak childhood during the great depression. He grew up in abject poverty, with a single mother and seven siblings. He took that frugalness far into life with him. Despite having plenty of money, he still drove this hideous Ford fiesta, with cracked and peeled off paint. It barely ran, and made us nervous on steep bridges because we weren’t sure if it was going to make it up the slope.
My mother pressured him to at least paint it and later regretted that. We came out one day — to see he’d taken cheap silver spray paint and made it look like the tin foil man. It was utterly embarrassing to ride in. But in good fun, and despite it topping out at 55 mph, we decided to name it the “Silver Bullet”. It took the whip off of the experience.
You might notice that my examples are throwbacks from many decades ago. Naming of these objects imprints them in your mind. You’ll tend to remember stories about them and have a stronger narrative of your life story (which is often anchored in these objects).
My friend James was given a plant 20 years prior at his Uncle Walter’s funeral (he died young and unexpectedly). They’d been very close. James named the plant Walt, and it is still living in his kitchen. When he sees it each morning, he says, “Hi Walt.”
Another friend named his Roomba, Hank, and talks to it every morning while it does zig-zagging routes through his house. I was visiting and was quite surprised by how authentic he sounded talking to it. He had a mock argument with his Roomba, just as Tom Hanks did with his volleyball Wilson — which had me rolling.
There are few rules to this exercise. Sometimes, naming breaks up the mundane. Other times, it’s a needed coping mechanism.
My aforementioned Grandfather was a World War 2 pilot, and named his bomber plane Blitz Buggy. Not only was naming planes tradition, but also a means of attaching value and trust in a machine that is deeply important. Its health was tied to your very own.
The big idea here is to have fun and find meaning. Naming objects will give you a sense of solidarity and trust with everyday things. It elevates that objects status to a character in your life.
Have the courage to be a little quirky and name five to ten objects over the next month. Think of the things you use most frequently, or of the things that aren’t like the rest. I think you’ll be surprised by how fun this exercise actually is. You’ll feel a bit of youthful vigor and creativity, and sometimes, some well needed sincerity.
I’d also love to hear from anyone who has already done this, and if there is a story behind these names.
She forced me into a position I didn’t want to take. To do something I didn’t want to do
I was working for small company, a husband and wife operation. They bought overruns from manufacturers and repacked them into pre packs of assorted sizes and colors. It was all clothing. I and five others called up companies and sold the pre-packed clothes into off price retailers.
The receptionist had worked with them for years. One day I saw some people come in to the showroom and pick out some clothing for their small store. I’ll call the girl Mary although not her name. They gave Mary $100 bill and she went to get change. She opened the petty cash, took out the change but as I walked out of the office I dropped my pen. As I’ve bent over to pick it up I saw Mary put the $100 bill in her pocket. So I started keeping an eye on her.
A week later I saw her take 8 pair of Levi’s home for her son to try on. She only brought back 2 and paid for two. So she came out with four pair of free Levi’s.
At this point I had to go to the owners and tell them. It broke their hearts and cost her her job. I remember the boss lady crying because they thought so much of her they had put her in their will as they had no children.
I felt so bad that she put me in that position. But I had loyalty to my bosses.
Almost 20 years ago I worked for a large chain craft and fabrics store who’s name rhymes with Sew Fan’s. It was a great place for a creative person with no money concerns to work, but corporate also didn’t seem to care two farts in A windstorm about the employees and were regularly instituting years long freezes on wage increases and cutting hours to under 22 per week to avoid having to pay any benefits. If I were ever to go back to working there it would only be to bring in the union. Those workers sure needed it. My first Christmas season there I was working the closing shift and saw a box that had originally had probably about 48 snack packs of cookies and crackers. It was down to maybe a dozen packs of crackers, as the day shift had pretty much decimated it. That was our annual Christmas bonus. One foot by one foot box of inexpensive snacks to share between both shifts. At least they let us do gift exchanges.
The next place I worked for had a prime rib feast, $25 gift cards and a turkey. It was pretty nice!
I was in my classroom after my class had left for the day. They had made a bit of a mess, so after I’d tidied the place, I got out the vacuum and began to run it around the room. I wanted it to look fresh for the new teacher’s aid who I was going to interview that afternoon.
A young man came in, looked at me, but didn’t say a word, didn’t introduce himself, just sat down at my desk!
I asked him, “Can I help you?”
He made an impatient gesture with his hand. “Just clean up and get out. I’ve got an interview with the Head Teacher at 4.”
I shrugged and got on with it. After about five minutes the room was clean and I put away the vacuum. As I was coming back to the room, the young man came out looking annoyed and said, “Look, pass on the message to the Head Teacher that he’s late for our interview, so I’m leaving.”
I glanced at my watch, said, “I’m so sorry, but you did imply that you didn’t mind waiting, as I was cleaning up. It’s now 4.05.”
He stared at me. “What’s it got to do with you?”
I held out my hand to shake his. “I’m the Head Teacher. Do you want to go back now for the interview?”
He stared, then went several shades of red and left. Needless to say, if he’d stayed for the interview he would have had to be truly exceptional for me to overlook his silly gender bias that I was “supposed” to be a male, and his assumption that a Head Teacher can’t clean up as well as a professional cleaner. And just for the record, our cleaner is male.
Chicken Kiev
The chicken is pounded thin, rolled with a filling of seasoned butter, breaded and then either deep-fried or baked.
2024 01 09 20 17
Yield: 8 servings
Ingredients
4 large whole chicken breasts, split, skinned, de-boned
1/2 cup butter, softened
1 clove garlic, crushed
2 tablespoons chopped parsley
1 teaspoon thyme or marjoram
All-purpose flour
2 eggs, beaten
1 cup fine bread crumbs
Salt
Instructions
Pound breasts thin between plastic bags, keeping the smooth side of breast down.
Mix next 4 ingredients. Shape into 8 elongated oval pieces and freeze.
Wrap chicken completely around butter and dip each chicken piece into flour.
Next dip into eggs and finally coat with bread crumbs.
Fry in hot oil (375 degrees F) for 10 to 12 minutes or bake at 350 degrees F for 45 minutes.
Drain on paper towels. Salt after cooking. Chicken will keep in a 200 degrees F oven if placed, uncovered, on a metal tray.
This may belong to the blond joke section, but here goes –
A blonde is flying down the road in her little sports car, convertible top down, music blaring, signing away, going way over the speed limit.
Before long, she sees the flying cherries of a cop in her rear view mirror, so she pulls off to the side of the road. The cop walks up to her door and leans in and says “Do you know you were going at least 40 over the limit back there? I need to see your license please”.
The blond starts rummaging through her wallet, and before long she is obviously flustered, and turns to the cop and says “I’m sorry, what is it I’m looking for? Can you tell me what it looks like?”
The cop takes a deep sigh and says “Umm, your license?? it’s about the size of a credit card and has your picture on it???”.
So the blond rummages again and finds a little compact mirror in her wallet. She looks closely at it and sure enough sees her picture, so she hands it to the cop.
The cop, who it turns out is also blond, takes a long hard look at it, then hands it back to her and says “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you were a cop, you can go.”
Don’t call someone more than twice continuously. If they don’t pick up your call that means they have something more important to attend to.
Return money that you have borrowed even before the other person remembers lending it to you. It shows your integrity and character. Same goes with umbrellas, pens and lunch boxes.
Never order the expensive dish on the menu when someone is treating you for lunch/dinner. If possible ask them to order their choice of food for you.
Don’t ask awkward questions like ‘Oh so you aren’t married yet?’ Or Why didn’t you buy a house?’ For god’s sake it isn’t your problem.
Always open the door for the person coming behind you. Doesn’t matter if it is a guy or a girl. You don’t grow small by treating someone well in public.
If you take a taxi with a friend, and he/she pays now, you pay next time.
Respect different political opinions.
Never interrupt people talking.
If you tease someone, and they don’t seem to enjoy it, stop it and never do it again.
Say “thank you” when someone is helping you.
Praise publicly. Criticize privately.
There’s almost never a reason to comment on someone’s weight. Just say, “You look fantastic.” If they want to talk about losing weight, they will.
When someone shows you a photo on their phone, don’t swipe left or right. You never know what’s next.
If a colleague tells you they have a doctors appointment, don’t ask what it’s for, just say hope you’re ok. If they want to talk about it they will and you don’t put them in the uncomfortable position of having to tell you their personal illness.
Treat the cleaner with the same respect as the CEO. Nobody is impressed at how rudely you can treat someone below you but people will notice if you treat them with respect.
If a person is speaking directly to you, staring at your phone is rude.
Never give advice until you’re asked
When meeting someone after a long time, unless they want to talk about it, don’t ask them their age and salary.
Mind your own business unless anything involves you directly — just stay out of it.
Take off your sunglasses if you are talking to anyone in the street. It is a sign of respect and more eye contact is as important as your speech.
So during college, I was visiting a small town, with my crappy car.
Of course, that means I broke down making a grocery run, and this old gentleman with worn out denim coveralls said he would call me a tow truck and have my car towed to the dealership.
Then I broke down because there was no way I had money for a tow let alone repairs. The old guy sat with me and calmed me down. He said the dealership was known to be reputable and would help me out of my jam.
Long story, but a couple days later I picked up my car and I went to pick up the car, having made arrangements to make payments.
They said there was no bill as Mr.Smith (not real name) had paid it. Then I realized the dealership was Smith Ford.
I Then went to get my car. Well they had totally detailed my car and even I could tell that I had new tires. I found a note on front seat saying pay it forward when I could.
They had done over 2,000 in repairs to a 500 dollar car. I can’t even list everything they did. But new tires all around, new brakes, oil change, filled gas tank, just to start.
Edit: Many people have asked if I have paid it forward. My wife and I have indeed done so, in many different forms over the years. We have been blessed, and consciously pay it back when we can.
Back in the day, I would periodically use hydrogen peroxide to clean my ears out. This was done by my family doctor and he recommended it along with soaking my head in a bathtub of warm water.
You see, I had a problem with excessive earwax fabrication. Oh, not a common problem for certain, but I had to maintain this particular issue with my body.
So one day, my ear got stuffed up, and when I tried my hydrogen peroxide solution, it only seemed to make things worse. Instead it got more and more clogged up. Indeed, for an entire month, my ear was caked full of earwax and I was at a loss as to what to do… not so serious to go to the doctor, it’s earwax after all, but serious enough to be a real problem personally…
…enter a business trip. I went and interviewed at a hot water heater company in Tennessee. And after the interview and meal, I went to the hotel. I drew a tub full of hot water and lay down to soak in it.
I soaked for a good hour, and then I held my breath and tried to blow the water out. And then it happened!
An explosion of earwax released, and many it was a sight to behold. Where the heck was all this earwax from? I don’t know, but I must have had globs and globs of the stuff. It was amazing!
Of course it ended up falling apart in the hot water, but you could tell, it was like thick honey that turned to slimy powder. Quite the experience, I’ll tell you what.
Here’s a LEGO Millennium Falcon, retail price $100:
image 163
Here’s another LEGO Millennium Falcon, retail price $7:
image 163
Back in 2004, scammer Bill Swanberg realized that Target, Walmart, and other stores sold both of these sets. Here’s what he’d do:
First, he went into a store, and bought both sets. Totally legitimately. He took the smaller one, and scanned in the barcode. Next, he re-sized it so that it would be the same size as the barcode of the larger set— and printed out gobs of them on glossy sticker paper.
Next, he’d bring a few with him into an unsuspecting store. He’d find the LARGE version of the LEGO Millennium Falcon, and cover up the barcode with one of his stickers of the SMALL set’s barcode.
Then, he’d trot up to the register, and the associate would ring them up. “Woah, this big set only costs $7.00?” “Yeah, it must be on sale, that’s why I grabbed it, LOL!” “Wow, nice find!”
Then he’d leave, remove the stickers carefully, and sell them online at a “discounted price” of, say, $50. Everyone online was amazed at the great deal, and lined up to buy them. They expected he got a great deal on them, but 50% off didn’t seem like it was all that suspicious.
He did this for quite a while— but gradually the various stores became aware that their inventory wasn’t lining up. Target noticed the pattern in 5 different states, and eventually had a security guard stop him in a store in Portland, Oregon, after he bought 10 copies of the same Millennium Falcon set. In his car, he had over $6000 of LEGO, as well as a laptop denoting other stores in the area that he planned to visit (or had already visited).
Upon review, Target alone estimated that he had resold over $200,000 worth of their merchandise— and that he had sold over $600,000 online for the past couple of years (much of it likely being from similar scams).
Why is China so afraid of asking for help when there is a virulent virus outbreak?
In 2008, a Richter Scale 8.0 earthquake shook the mountainous Sichuan province in China. When the dust settled, ~ 70,000 people were dead. ~ 20,000 people were missing, presumably dead. ~ 375,000 people were injured. ~ 5 million people were left homeless. It’s one of the greatest natural disasters in the twenty first century. The disaster was so great, that China immediately asked for help from the rest of the world.
The US government gave ~ $4.5 million in aid, plus a guy to the Beijing Earthquake Center to look at their data. So that’s what, 80 cents for each affected person?
The rest of the world pooled together ~ $450 million, plus some emergency supplies. Most of it came from China’s immediate neighbors.
The Chinese people donated $1.5 billion within the first 2 days.
The Chinese government gave the earthquake-stricken area $130 billion. 98% was spent in the first 3 years. 100,000 PLA troops rushed into the earthquake area within 2 days to help.
This was back in 2008, when China’s GDP per capita was only about ~ $3,500 a year. Now it’s over $10,000.
So I don’t think China is “afraid” of asking for help. They are realistic. They simply don’t expect to get much help. Something symbolic, maybe, which will be much appreciated, but they must do the heavy lifting themselves. Big countries must stand on their own two feet, because you really can’t expect a bunny to lift up a fallen elephant! The elephant needs to get up on its own. Reactions to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake – Wikipedia
No normal country should count on foreign aid to solve their problems.
In the current Coronavirus outbreak, China is mostly helping other countries: It isolated and published the sequence of this new virus, developed diagnostic kits and diagnostic protocols, and shared all these with the WHO and the world. It has put in border controls aimed at keeping infected people from going abroad. It publishes treatment protocols and regular updates as doctors discover and develop their knowledge of this disease. It has put 50+million people under quarantine. It is doing a lot of the heavy lifting in the global management of this novel disease.
PS: The US gave Haiti $12 billion in aid after Haiti earthquake. 2010 Haiti earthquake
Haiti is right at America’s doorstep, and the American people are very generous towards Haiti. Today Haiti looks like this:
Turned out that a big chunk of that $12 billion was the US State Department writing checks to the US Department of Defense for sending 200 guys to Haiti to “provide security”. The rest mostly went to NGOs’ hotels, jeeps, salary, and “hardship pay”. It’s a legitimate question to ask if International Aid is really worth it, not only for the Chinese People, but also for the American People as well.
“USAID has spent about $1.5 billion since the earthquake,” Johnston told Goats & Soda. “Less than a penny of every dollar goes directly to a Haitian organization.”
Where I live anything that the courts could say was a trap was illegal. I had people cutting across my property to get to the river, the previous owner had just laid razor wire coils in the bush. If anyone had got hurt on it. I would have gone to jail. So I carefully pulled it all out and placed monster boulders everywhere. No one can say a boulder is a trap.
There was a guy who had a private road leading to his place. People kept tearing it up after it rained in their 4×4 , side x side, and atvs. He had no trespassing signs, and private road signs, and people ignored them. So he stretched a steel cable between two trees, with a padlock, so he could open it. He could only put up the cable where he had two big trees close enough to the road, to string it, and enough trees to stop them from driving around the make shift gate, so it was about 50 m up his road .
A teenage girl on an ATV drove by his private road and no trespassing signs, and got knocked off her quad by the rope. They sued the land owner and won. This is in Canada, rules might be different elsewhere.
A few years ago, when I was agonizing over my future career path, my dad told me to make a list of the things in life that make me happy.
Then, split the list into two categories.
The first category includes any type of happiness that you can feel instantaneously. Sipping hot chocolate on a chilly day. Hitting the snooze button to steal another five minutes of sleep. Binge-watching the new season of your favorite show.
The second category includes any type of happiness that takes a long time to appear and a long time to fade. Maintaining a healthy lifestyle. Mastering difficult skills. Building closer relationships with the people you love.
Some of the items in the first category, my dad explained, might clash with the items in the second. The more hot chocolate you consume, for example, the less nutritious your diet becomes.
But a few items in on your list, just a few, might actually fit into both categories. The best painters in the world obtain joy both from the instantaneous act of painting and from the ultimate goal of becoming a world-class artist. The best soccer players love being out on the field just as much as they love becoming better athletes.
Circle these items, these things that bring you both short-term happiness and long-term happiness.
These are the things that you can spend your life doing, and never feel like you’ve worked a day.
You ever been to a Mcdonalds where the manager is an ass and the employees have had enough of it?
I once went to a Mcdonalds that had a mass quit a few hours later. I went up to the counter and ordered a Mcchicken, a regular coke, a small fry and an ice cream cone.
They take my money and a few minutes later come back with my order, which is… heavier than normal. And my ice cream cone is a foot tall. And my coke is a large.
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(It looked like this)
“Woops.” says the cashier. “Looks like we accidentally supersized your order.” she says with a wink. I could tell from the sarcastic tone that there was no accident about it.
I returned to my table and sat down, and noticed that my McChicken wasn’t alone, there was also a chicken select sandwich in there. I was a really, really poor kid at the time. The Mcydee’s dollar menu was a rare treat for me, and getting one of the main menu items was just amazing!
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Definitely still my favorite Mcdubbers sandwich.
My ‘small fry’ took up an entire large fry box, and then there was about a large fry’s worth of loose fries in there. Like the entire bag was drowning in fried potato goodness.
So intentionally giving me a lot of extra food to spite your boss? That’s the strangest way my order’s ever been messed up. Part of me wished I had ordered more.
Edit: So Quora apparently thinks I need a credential to prove that I sometimes eat fast food and sometimes get my order messed up. This is what happens when you let an AI make decisions.
I knew my dad was a Bad Ass early in my youth. I didn’t realize how much of a Bad Ass he was until last spring. You see my father served in WWll with the 100th/442nd Regimental Combat Team in France and Italy. A segregated US Army regiment made up of Americans of Japanese ancestry from the US mainland and Hawaii. A large portion of these warriors came from “internment” (prison) camps from which their fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters and family were incarcerated. These guys had something to prove. We are AMERICANS! And prove it they did. For their valor the 100th Battalion/ 442nd Regimental Combat Team has been recognized as the most decorated unit in American history. The 100th Bn/ 442nd RCT earned more than 18,000 awards, including 9,500 Purple Hearts, 5,200 Bronze Star Medals, 588 Silver Stars, 52 Distinguished Service Crosses, 7 Distinguished Unit Citations, 21 Congressional Medal of Honor awards and the Congressional Gold Medal. Now that’s BAD ASS! My dad was gravely wounded in Italy and left to die on the battlefield as he was not believed to survive his wounds. When the burial detail came upon my father he was still alive and eventually recovered after a long convalescence. We know this story as it was told to my cousin by the soldier who found my father still alive. Unfortunately I never had the pleasure to meet his as he passed a few years ago. My father was awarded the Bronze Star, the Purple Heart and other awards for his efforts. He was never better than 70% disabled and eventually upgraded to 100%. So I had the opportunity to travel to France and Italy last year on a tour that follows in the footsteps of these American heroes. I walked where they walked, saw the trenches whey they lay and climbed the slope’s and mountains that they climbed. But I did it in the daylight. They did it at night in the cover of darkness. These were the mountains near Carrara Italy. Impressive just to do this in daylight. Crazy to think it could be done at night! That’s when I knew how much of a BAD ASS my father and the Nisei warriors of the 100th Bn/ 442nd RCT were. I could not be more proud. R.I.P. dad. PFC Roy T. Tsutsui Co. F 442nd RCT
Whenever I was in public school, I had fairly good grades, I didn’t study much so it was crazy how good I was doing. This all lasted until 4th grade, whenever I got put in this horrible woman’s class. I was the kind of child to speak my mind and get SUPER excited about things. This woman (not calling her a teacher because she doesn’t DESERVE the title) did not LIKE that. She decided to target me specifically for her relentless bullying of literal infants. Anytime I would get excited about anything, she would tell me to flip my card (yknow, the stupid elementary punishment bullshit). Anytime I would do something that would be considered out of place in a classroom, she’d make me flip my card. She would rally my classmates to bully me too.
As the school year went on and the bullying from the woman and my classmates got worse, I started falling into a deeper pit of my own depression stemmed from the abandonment of my dad, over-protective (yet still somehow neglectful) mom, and the bullying I had to suffer at school. This made my grades drop HARD. Specifically in my math and science class, as I was not being properly taught by this woman.
Every time we would get to a new part of our science workbook, we would get given a science study guide that we had to fill out ourselves that she would then grade and fix whatever mistakes we had made. A month prior to the specific incident I’m about to tell you, my mom had noticed how bad my grades had dropped and made sure I studied (which did NOT help). She always made sure I had my study guides and stuff I got from school.
It was a regular school day for me, we had just gotten a new study guide that we were going to fill out. The woman decided to put us in pairs to do them so we could discuss the answers and stuff. She put me in a pair with the nicest girl in the class (picture the human incarnate of an excited golden retriever) and we began working on it. We finished around the same time the others did and submitted our papers. After we all finished, the woman started grading our papers. Whenever she had finished, she handed most of them out, but she held on to two of them, my friend and I’s. She waved them around in the air and said “THESE two don’t have any names… Oh well… Who wants to play 20 pickup?” and then ripped them to shreds and threw the remains on the floor. My friend and I were crushed (and fucking humiliated) as we both really needed those papers and here we were, watching our classmates pick up and fight over who could get the most pieces like it was some sort of game played at a birthday party.
A few minutes later, she picked up her copy of the study guide and said to us, “I’ve got one more left. I’m thinking of a number and whichever one of you can get closest to it wins the paper.”
I ended up winning and she gave it to me, which I instantly started working on. I figured she would want me to redo it as soon as she gave it to me. About a minute passed and she walked to my desk, swiped it from me and gave it to my friend saying that I “Wasn’t paying attention”. I felt like absolute shit the whole day.
My mom had asked me where my study guide was, and I told her what happened. She went on an absolute RAMPAGE.
Luckily the next parent-teacher conference was pretty soon after and she didn’t want to embarrass me by showing up to the school while my classmates were there. I don’t know exactly what happened during the meeting between her and my mom as I was sat outside the classroom. All that I know is that whenever the door opened, the woman looked pale and terrified and my mom had her classic murder look that she would get after laying heavily into someone.
She never told me what she had said or done, but that woman never dared to bother me again. She didn’t even like LOOKING at me. Anytime I did something she didn’t like, she would glare at me like I just killed her entire family and set her house on fire and reply something passive aggressive.
My mom ended up finding out that she had done this to other kids too at other schools. Pretty sure the bitch was on tenure though, so there wasn’t anything we could’ve really done.
I still see her around town though and she acts overly excited to see me. The first time I had seen her after I finished 4th grade, I was about 13 and was super socially anxious and had panic attacks whenever I was reminded of that experience, I was at the dollar store with my grandma and the woman came up to me and started talking, I of course was trying to keep my shit together and not start having a full blown panic attack so I was very quiet. She said “Aw, what’s wrong? Are you shy now?”, all of my fear was replaced with rage and I had to stop myself from giving her the sickest right hook of her life. I regret not doing it while I was still a kid and wouldn’t have had very many repercussions for it.
SO, I’m not going to name-drop her, as I’m pretty sure that’s illegal, but I will say that if you live in or are planning on moving to Sabine parish, LISTEN to your kids if they tell you about bullying from their classmates or any of the school staff. Hell, do that even if you DON’T live in this area.
Burkina Faso’s President Has Good News for Africa but Very Bad News for the West
My parents started middle class and worked their way to the 1%.
It isn’t this huge party. But there are some basic things you don’t worry about as much.
It is weird because I didn’t grow up wealthy at all. And had a strict-as-hell dad.
At some point after I left home, things really ramped up. My dad left the military and became a high ranking exec with SAP.
My mom started a vineyard at their farm. And sold off a lot of great real estate investments she’d made over the years.
But you would never know it if you bumped into them at the store or something. They have very humble personalities. If you went to their home however..
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When I wake up in the morning in their guest room I get to enjoy a view like this:
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When I visit they spend most of their time working around the house and on the farm. We don’t really sit still much. And even when we are it is because we are working on something. We are worker-bees.
Also, I think everyone has a misconception as to how wealthy the top 1% is. 10 years ago, even I had the impression that 1%ers don’t work hard and take 9 vacations a year. I think it is just different if you started small and got there in your middle age and have kids.
At that point, you are more concerned with managing everything and making sure your kids are doing OK.
(Maybe that it is .01 percenters that do all that laying around by the pool…)
Either way I love visiting my parents, but every time I get home here in Florida my house feels really really small! 🙂
My last name is Warehouse, just like the building. This has led to lots of interesting things, like getting calls at my work about finding things at our district warehouse or getting my account banned on Quora back when they cared if you used a fake name. It also means I get weird deliveries.
One day a big cardboard box showed up addressed to my wife, so I left it on the table without really looking at it. A few days later it was still untouched, so I asked her why she hadn’t opened it yet.
“That’s not mine, it’s got sports stuff all over it.”
And it did! Now that I looked, the box clearly had a Nike logo on it. And on closer inspection, its address tag was a mess. There was a weird poorly printed label that said “redirect” that had my wife’s name and our address in California on it, slapped over a very official looking original label that said the box was bound for a warehouse in New Jersey.
And that’s how I ended up with a bow of 24 pairs of XXL Nike football gloves meant for the New York giants.
In 1981 I worked as a computer operator for a company, then owned by Tex Schramm (owner of the Dallas Cowboys). There was a young woman, from a well to do family and graduate of Radford, working there. She was really into women’s lib.
There was also an older gentleman, long past the possible retirement age. One day I was in the lobby as the young woman, who I had recently begun dating, was ready to leave. The older gentleman was leaving, and held the door for her.
She lit into him. “Just because I’m a lady, you don’t have to hold the door for me.”
The response: “My dear Joanne, I do not hold the door for you because you are a lady. That would be presumptuous of me. I hold the door for you because I am a gentleman.”
In my second year at my current job, a lady was hired to replace my senior who had resigned.
The job was in a public office and for the most part was quite easy going. Somebody off the streets could learn the essentials in just a few hours.
The lady who came had seniority and several years more experience than me working at a different branch. I therefore expected her to have a wealth of knowledge and experience to share with me.
‘How does this work again?’
‘Did I do this right?’
‘How about you be the one to do that? You’re so good at it.’
‘Can you show me how to do (such-and-such) again?’
The lady transferred from a location that had the exact same type of system and technology as mine yet she had not a clue how to do anything!
How was this woman in a senior position? She didn’t know anything about the job. Was she dumb?
A week of ‘training’ had passed and she didn’t really learn anything and had to be supervised at all times. Before I could find out how it was that she was so slow she suddenly vanished.
She stopped turning up at work and calls to her phone went unanswered. I sent an email to HR explaining that she had gone AWOL. They gave some half-assed reply. A few months later, after she had long been forgotten, I get a frantic letter from HR saying that they have been paying her salary and they’ve just become aware that she has not been turning up to work.
‘No shit,’ I say in my mind.
HR investigates and finds out that she had accepted another job elsewhere the entire time and was gladly accepting two salaries. HR demanded that she return the unearned salary. She said she would but she was going through financial distress at the moment.
She never returned a cent. HR washed their hands of the matter and kept it hush hush.
Turns out she wasn’t dumb at all.
So my answer to the question ‘what sets off red flags on an employee’s first day?’
When I was small, my parents sent me to my grandparents (who lived in a rural area) every summer so they could look after me when school was out.
My grandpa was born late 191x or early 192x – even he didn’t remember exactly.
When I was 6 years old, I started going to elementary school which started to have summer assignments. So, when my parents sent me to my grandparents for the “vacation”, I brought my textbooks and books with me to study. One day, I remember, I brought a book to my grandpa and asked him for some help with my summer homework. He smiled, “Oh, sweetie, I can’t help you with that!”. “Why?!?!”, I was surprised, he’d never said “No” to me. A second of hesitation, then he said, “I don’t know how to read”
It didn’t make sense to my 6-year-old me; but later, when I grew up, I knew, it was the result of war and poverty, my grandpa never went to school.
Anyway, “But you know EVERYTHING!”, the little me was shocked and questioned him. He stroked my hair, “Ah, I just don’t know how to read texts in the book. I can read other things. I can read leaves to know their trees. I can read the soil to know what I need to do to get more produces. I can read the river to know if it’s safe to go down and play. I can read the night sky to know if tomorrow it will be rain or shine”, he explained to me.
A light bulb went off in my head; he taught me to ‘read’ some of those things, why didn’t I teach him to read texts? So, I offered him, “Do you want to study with me, grandpa?”.
So, I started to be his ‘teacher’. I taught him a, b, c. He studied, then forgot everything in the next summer because he didn’t use it frequently enough; so I had to teach him again.
I taught him to read, every summer, until he passed away.
I have had a number of jobs in my time. I’ve been a framing carpenter, finish carpenter, furniture maker, the army, and being in the office in the construction industry as a project manager for the last 16 years.
Working in the trades can indeed be very lucrative, and I know a number of plumbers and welders that do significantly better than me financially, but from someone that has worked in the trades and in the corporate office, there are a lot of benefits of the office world that help pull people away from going into the trades.
The first is simply being warm when it’s cold, dry when it’s raining and cool when it is hot. It’s pretty tough going to work everyday to be freezing cold all day or burning up hot. Secondly, you can do stuff after work without needing to take a shower or change clothes first. Third, you don’t beat up your body so much working in an office. I’m 47 so still well short of retirement age and I really can’t imagine doing the type of work I did in my 20’s all day, every day. That was tough work and I got injured a lot and had to just suck it up and work through it. Injuries these days take a lot longer to heal too.
Occasionally I get all nostalgic about walking floor joists 30 feet up with a 16ft 2×8 on my shoulder, then I’ll have a flashback to what that actually feels like doing it every day and appreciate very much my AC and roof and clean clothes. My nostalgia forgets doing that same joist walk with feet numb from the cold, or sweat in my eyes or a lingering injury.
The trades are good, solid, well paying professions, but if you have any other alternatives they are definitely a young person’s game. The people I see my age still working in the trades (doing the work, not management like me) are physically beaten down for the most part with bad backs, bad knees, and a collection of scars that make anyone take notice.
The Duran: Neocons want WAR in Middle East and Israel, the US will LOSE Big
https://youtu.be/k8AHFfv-pA4
Serbian Skillet Pork (Muckalica — Yugoslavia)
Muckalica
Ingredients
1 1/2 pounds boneless pork shoulder
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1/4 cup water
3 medium onions, sliced
1 medium tomato, chopped
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon paprika
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1/8 to 1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper
1 medium green bell pepper, cut into strips
2 ounces feta cheese, cut into 3/4-inch cubes
Hot cooked rice
Instructions
Trim fat from pork. Cut pork into 1/2-inch slices; cut slices into 1/2-inch strips. Heat oil in skillet until hot. Cook and stir pork in oil over medium heat until brown, about 15 minutes; drain. Add water, onions, tomato, salt, paprika, pepper and red pepper. Cover and simmer until pork is tender, about 30 minutes, adding water if necessary.
Add green pepper. Cover and simmer until green pepper is crisp-tender, 5 to 10 minutes. Top with cheese.
When I was about 21 or 22, I worked for this remodeling contractor. My dad does remodels and has rental properties, and I’ve always been a DIY type of guy, so I learned young and had about 10 years of experience at the time. Anyway, one day I was at work, and the boss nor the crew lead could figure out how to solve a problem with some vinyl flooring and the customer was there watching them for a good half hour or so. I repeatedly tried to make suggestions but just kept getting ignored. Finally I just stepped up and tried something and it worked. The next day the owner told me that work was slow and he didn’t need me to come in. That same afternoon he called me and let me go due to “not having the quality of work that his company is known for”. I’m sure he was just upset that I made him look like an ass in front of a customer. Anyway, fast forward to a week later, this customer had a family member that was also gonna get some work done by the same company. The previous customer gave the family member my Facebook info and she contacted me and asked if I could do a job for her. About 3 days in, my old boss came and the look on his face when he saw me doing the job he came to bid for was priceless.
1. Don’t call someone more than twice continuously. If they don’t pick up your call that mean they have something more important to attend to.
2. When someone drops something on the floor by mistake or drops food from the plate or doesn’t know how to use a knife/fork don’t stare at them. The same goes to people sneezing, coughing or even an uncontrollable fart. It’s an involuntary reaction.
3. Always skip using the washroom beside the occupied one. It makes it uneasy for the person in the occupied washroom as well as yourself if you occupy the one right next to theirs.
4. If you’re talking to someone and notice any of the following, they’re trying to end the conversation:
Their eyes keep darting away.
They angle their body away from you.
They give you rapid one-word answers.
5. When someone you know has an obvious change in appearance, e.g., weight gain/loss, bald spot, acne. never comment on it until they talk about it to you, they already know what is happened to them.
6. If a colleague tells you they have a doctors appointment, don’t ask what it’s for, just say hope you’re ok. If they want to talk about it they will and you don’t put them in the uncomfortable position of having to tell you their personal illness.
7. Treat the cleaner with the same respect as the CEO. Nobody is impressed at how rudely you can treat someone below you but people will notice if you treat them with respect.
8. Do not make plans in front of those you are not involving.
9. When meeting someone after a long time, unless they want to talk about it, don’t ask them their age and salary.
10. When a friend/colleague offers you some food, you can politely say No. But, don’t do this after tasting or smelling it. It’s an insult to the one who has offered it to you.
This is John Eisenman. He lost his daughter to s-exual trafficking. She was sold for $1,000 in Seattle Washington. He did what a father should do and researched, investigated and found out about her abduction. He RESCUED her HIMSELF. He found out the person who sold her into trafficking was her 19 year old boyfriend. He met up with him, abducted him, bludgeoned and stabbed him to death in Nov, 2020. The authorities found him [dead AF boyfriend] in Oct 2021 in the trunk of the car he abandoned. John Eisenman sits in jail knowing his daughter is safe and growing up after he has already lived 60 years of his life. I bet you, he rests easy. Live your life to the fullest. He did his absolute best to make sure his child have the opportunity to do the same no matter what the sacrifice.
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My POV:- I think justice can’t be black or white, it’s a greyish territory. I’m not a supporter of taking revenge but rather law doing the job. Although, we all know how deeply fukced up is our law and order.
The decade of the 1950s was the time of my well-remembered childhood. Some of the memorable un-nice features follow:
Coal shuttles in basement windows to fill the coal bins for the furnace that kept you alive in subzero weather. The loud roaring rattle of the coal can never be forgotten. My wife grew up in destroyed Berlin where the kids snuck onto the train tracks to steal coal for cooking and winter heat, especially before 1950.
Ice trucks for the “ice box,” which was the refrigerator of the day. Great fun to persuade the iceman to chip you a sliver (possibly unsanitary) in the steaming summer.
Raking and burning leaves either in the curb or in our own home trash bin (a large ugly concrete “bathtub” for burning all wastes) beside the separated garage.
After we graduated from paying marbles on the sidewalks, the never-forgotten aroma of the lightly powdered flat bubble gum accompanying Topps baseball cards used for flip-card contests. Still remember the rules.
Friends and relatives died a lot. Lost a cousin to polio despite her father being chief of staff of the largest hospital in St. Louis. Lost two more to a house fire and others to asthma. I narrowly avoided rheumatic fever and a close call with total vision loss from measles. Number 1 brother developed Type 1 diabetes, but that was hereditary (skips a generation); lasted a LONG time.
Turning on the lights to visit the bathroom in the middle of the night and watching hundreds of roaches scurry across the floor into the corners and cracks.
Sticky asphalt from the tarred streets that would permanently ruin any carpet in a snooty home.
Kids (and adults) hitch-hiked. I hitch-hiked regularly many miles to high school and college and back rather than take buses with long cold/hot waits and transfers. Just after the 50s, noticed how remarkably easier it was to hitch a ride when in my ROTC uniform.
Teenagers still in school who had never worked had no vote in national elections.
No air conditioning. Vornado floor fans, window fans blowing over block of ice, or car rides with windows open down to “Cool Valley” (yes, a real town) a low-altitude area with much lower temperatures were our only options when temperatures soared far over 100 degrees and humidity was ~80%.
Construction sites were wonderful if dangerous playgrounds for kids. Unsafe, with nails sticking out, deep ditches and holes to avoid. Taught caution and the value of tetanus shots. Learned aromas like the smell of wet concrete, rebar, freshly cut wood; mountains of dirt for King of the Hill games, playing “war” with wooden toy 1904 Springfield rifles in literal miles of dug-up ground for the interstate highways.
Homes and office buildings were insulated with asbestos, long before attorneys and asbestos-removal firms became millionaires from it.
Local stenches were many and varied. Worst were from the fish processing plants and cattle/pig stockyards, with the “nicest” smells being chemical fumes from riverside plants.
Working on the USS Admiral, was required to check for “floaters” under the port paddlewheel every morning by opening the trash slot over the water.
Learned to water-ski on the turd-filled muddy Mississippi.
US Army chemical warfare testers sprayed my hometown with zinc cadmium sulfide, a fluorescent additive of some kind and a possibly radioactive agent to secretly study possible bio/chem weapon vectors … later explained “to protect us from potential Soviet attack”.
Nearby communities (Weldon Spring, West Lake and Berkeley … but not CA) were being contaminated by toxic waste buried by one of my future employers after they processed the uranium for the first nuclear weapons. Not done on my watch; however, as an adult I did work at a number of the other tainted sites: their original chemical plant and their radiological branch.
Cap guns: actual gunpowder explosives were loaded in a tight roll to be fired by your Lone Ranger or Cisco Kid cap gun. Bangs and sparks with gunpowder’s sulpuric stench …
Bows and arrows (with real points).
Jungle gyms were tall blocks of hard unadorned steel pipes over bare dirt dusty in summer and frozen in winter.
Complete and utter obedience to our family’s Commanding Officer who actually posted duty rosters for my 4 siblings (girl was exempted) which I was required to enforce as senior NCO.
Amused myself by playing war battle games with bottlecaps. Falstaff, Budweiser and a few Stag … strewn from the six-pack dad chugged every night. Didn’t realize he was a drunk until years later.
Black and white TV with the Indian-head test pattern after midnight when all stations went “off the air.”
TV showed stereotypical characters in every show like: the Howdy Doody Show; Kukla, Fran & Ollie; Texas Bruce’s Wranglers’ Club; Lone Ranger, Cisco Kid, Zorro, etc.
Friday night fights: boxing matches every weekend.
Racism was acknowledged but not celebrated. Had black school/playmates (parochial school) and babysitters who all lived in a nearby section of the city.
Racial mockery was the basis of much TV/radio humor. Amos & Andy on the radio, Milton Berle’s burlesque schticks, Pat & Mike Irish insults, Sid Caesar’s fake Japanese babble, Jose Jimenez jibes at Mexicans on the Steve Allen Show … don’t remember German accents being considered “funny” until Hogan’s Heroes.
Classmate who later became a Japanese citizen used to play records advocating anti-Communism from John Birch (didn’t know of his Society then). Nothing mean or nasty that I remember from those lectures but quite un-PC now, I guess.
BB guns: never permitted in our home, with 4 boy, 1 girl; but vet dad built us an actual shooting range for my 13th birthday present, a .22 bolt-action Winchester … a literal deep sandbox at one end of the basement under a steel sheet canted at a 45 degree angle. Access controlled by dad, of course.
Joined my school’s rifle club in 1959 when they (not me) won the national championship with open sight .22s mounted on Garand 30–30 war surplus stocks. Kids shot rifles as a matter of indifference. Safely too, because safety was taught, responsibility was demanded … and disobedience was both unthinkable and unacceptable.
History will one day see how the U.S., its dog nations, the EU, its fellow colonialists and native slaughtering nations and its slave nations, treatment of China. Is a modern version of African slavery, Nazi Crimes, barbaric colonialism by the Europeans and the Savage rape and murder of Nanking!
How do they treat China and the Chinese race. Terrible, obnoxious and despicable. What more to say! Slurring at every turn, blindly accusing China without facts, evidence and proof calling them copy cats, stealing intellectual property, cheating, for being aggressive and threatening nations, genocide that never happen, causing Covid! All are no different from the Nazi blaming of the Jews!
Just backed by a pack of lies. And using coercion and bribery to get a dissident or two to cast doubt on China! If you are one of the group I single out please stop being a pawn or a parrot in these fake news. China won’t yield to these ludicrousness and shameful act of throwing shit!
To me you can accuse China of not bordering about its cosmetic cover up of its desire to ensure that the century of humiliation can never happen again and that it will do everything in its power to get back it’s rightful place in history. Remember how thousands of black people are wrongly accused by the white people for all sorts of thing and them lynch them!
History will show the truth that the U.S. and the west are doing the same to the Chinese. Sure without the lynching!
I owned a flying school and had a receptionist who was good with the customers.
One day I got a phone call at about 4PM from a student asking why we had shut early. I assured him we hadn’t as we had people flying till 7 that night. He told me he was standing outside and the doors were locked.
When I came in next day I checked CCTV and sure enough she had locked up at 3:30 whilst people were still flying. She returned at just before 5:30. I checked the day before and the same thing had happened. She locked up at 3:30 and returned at 5:30. It was near the end of the month so I waited till the end of the month to see what hours she had claimed for.
I also called a government employer hotline that is set up in the UK to give free help and advice. After explaining the situation they told me she was in breach of her contract, and it was gross misconduct which is a sackable offence. They said she was “stealing time” from me. I wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt so I decided to listen to her before I took action. The helpline advised that if her answers weren’t agreeable then I should suspend her on full pay whilst I investigated.
Sure enough she had claimed for her full allowance on her payslip so I called her into my office to explain herself. She claimed to have “forgotten” to take it off her hours worked. I was more concerned about leaving the building unattended whilst we had students still flying. What happened if we had an emergency? She refused to answer me so I was left with no option but to suspend her.
I studied the CCTV for previous 30 days and she had done it for almost 50% of her shifts! Despite this I didn’t want to lose her, the students loved her.
So I invited her back for a formal interview and offered to allow her to bring a witness. She declined the representation. I explained that the interview was being recorded and I had my solicitor on speaker phone to listen and ensure we both were acting within the law. It was to protect both of us.
I asked her for her reasons and she said that she had been visiting her boyfriend and having lunch together. He was an instructor pilot for me but had never left mid-shift. I then explained about why it was wrong to leave the premises whilst we still had aircraft in the air. She just shrugged her shoulders. I asked her to wait outside whilst I spoke to my legal adviser.
Truth be told I couldn’t afford to lose her. I had previously told the helpline that and they recommended “based on my explanation” that I give her a final written warning. This should be enough to make her realise it was wrong. I decided to go down this route.
After 5 minutes I invited her back into the room to give her the final written warning and a good explanation why this was happening. As I said to her “Thank you for your patience,” she replied, “Are you really doing this?”
“I am.”
Then she erupted! Quite a verbal assault against me! Then she pulled out an envelope and handed it to me saying, “I can’t believe you have blown this out of proportion, here is my 30 days notice, and as you owe me some holidays I will be taking them so I don’t have to work with you any more.”
I just calmly said, “Don’t worry about the 30 days notice, you won’t need it because I’m letting you go for gross misconduct!”
*screaming at me*“YOU CANT DO THAT!”
*a tiny voice on the telephone*”Yes he can, you stole from him and he is within his rights to terminate your contract with immediate effect and without compensation. Now if I was you I would leave quietly or Mr Savage could have the police involved for theft.”
A week later I received a letter asking for a reference as she had found a new job!
While writing this answer, I called my wife (I’m at work) and asked her to send me the photo of this knife from our kitchen. I hate using it, especially while cutting soft veggies. It is dull, useless and cheap-ass piece of cutlery. I bought it for $0.50.
With a kitchen knife exactly like this one shown in the picture.
I was going to work, when I came across a domestic street brawl. Men and women screaming, abusing and beating each other. I remember a wooden ladle in action too.
It was too awkward for me not to do something. I had no cellphone back then as it was too expensive and uncommon.
I tried calming them down with help of a few neighbors.
And during that peaceful effort… a young man out of nowhere attacked me with this kitchen knife. The swing was so swift and forceful that it scared me if this connects at all. I tried to grab his hand but the knife pierced my palm and popped out from back of my wrist.
Now I wish to stress couple of issues here.
A knife is a knife and it does not matter if it is big, small, sharp, dull, scary or funny looking. When used with intentions to inflict damage… it will damage the body inflicting stab and slash wounds, and might very well cause fatality.
And even more importantly…
This was quite a harmless bout, typical domestic quarrel between two neighboring families that usually just ends up with them receiving a bruise here and there, a noisy chest thumping exercise for the most part that goes around here over stupid disagreements.
Still…the moment I saw that guy approaching me with knife, his glowered and gloomy expressions alarmed me of imminent danger, I understood this is not just a warning… this guy wants to hurt me. To anyone else, he might not seem to be posing a palpable peril towards the cop but I as a cop perceived the incoming.
I was unarmed; I could not protect myself intelligently.
What if I was armed that day? To whom do I look up for the use of deadly force authorization?
That’s no one else’s but my decision to make.
It is my judgment call even if it is objective or weak in other’s opinion. If I have reasons to believe the person is a threat and warnings don’t serve the purpose, I have to neutralize the threat. I don’t want to hurt anyone; that’s the last and the most distasteful option for any cop in all sincerity. But at the same time, I want to protect myself and others with my best effort and ability.
I assure you, it could have been a fatal blow.
The department would have lost one of theirs, my mother would have gone crazy upon hearing of this news. All of this because of someone’s absurd, idiotic and senseless aggression.
I don’t deserve that.
No cop deserves that.
So in my opinion, if a knife-wielding person advances towards the cop and chooses to ignore the warnings – and sends an apprehension that he actually might attack the cop –
I’d consider that a legitimate threat.
And using deadly force to neutralize that threat is justifiable legally and morally.
We were married in Las Vegas over a weekend, never had a honeymoon, and it appears there wouldn’t be much romance or emotion, which appeared to suit both of us fine.
My life goals had always been to earn as many degrees as possible and to have a significant career. When my husband said he wanted to apply to law school, I stuck around to find out what would be happening.
On our fifth wedding anniversary, I was working on my masters’ degree and pregnant – not in my life goals, but I was accepting of the situation. We were both graduate students, living off student loans with no money for anything.
When I woke on our anniversary day, my husband presented me with a six page long poem he had been writing for days. He called it “FANGS for the memories.” The poem was written in the cadence of the song “Thanks for the memories” which would have been way too sentimental for either of us.
It’s been 45 years later and I still have not only that poem but also the poem he wrote on our 10th anniversary.
This past year we celebrated our 50th anniversary and not one celebration. But I do have two amazing sentimental and romantic poems to read and reread over and over – I will never forget those!
My camping experiences have uniformly been terrible. No matter what year it is, who I am with, or what my age is… it doesn’t matter what season, time of the year or whatever… it always rained.
Rain
And that meant, yeah you guessed it, sleeping in the rain, wet, cold, freezing with no real sleep and eventually waking up to a cold gloomy grey morning before everyone else does.
Sigh.
Never the less, I have romanticized the idea of camping. I imagine how great it would be to merge my “keg parties” and late-night bonfires with the idea of sleeping comfortably nearby.
kegger
My bother has become adept at it and loves to hike in the Colorado mountains with his wife and huskies. Which, by the way, they love all the snow.
camping in colorado
It’s could out, I know (if you are in the Northern climes), but if you are in Australia, it just might be perfect camping weather. I just cannot imagine it gets snowy, just temperate at night. But, honestly, I’d be afraid to sleep there in the brush. The snakes (I hear) are quite deadly, as are the spiders… the toads… the beatles… the ants… and you are apt to run into a wild herd of wallabies. Yikes!
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I’ve seen the you-tube videos… frightening!
Snakes, critters with strange names, and frogs that re inside out and just don’t die. Burrrrr!
But if you are the brave sort, as most Aussies are, going out into the brush is just as normal as downing a pint. A natural part of the ebb and flow of life.
Ah. One day. One day.
camping in the outback
Sounds great… if you have a local to keep you out of trouble, but I have to tell you all what…
You won’t be able to get me to drink beer out of a stinky old shoe. No way!
Let me help you guys unpacked how Trump fxxked up Apple. Yes he fxxked up Apple one of the world’s most admirable company.
Step one. Trump and later Biden thought that they can fxxked up Huawei and China. They both didn’t. Expect China and Huawei to survive! Let alone excel. Well they don’t know mathematics for a start. A billion and a half Chinese including me a Chinese origin turn around and patriotically chose Huawei over Apple! And poor Apple got fxxked up! For no reason but just bad politics by their racist government!
One they and their contract manufacturer Foxconn switch just 5% of their manufacturing to India and they both got fxxked up badly. The failure if Apple Phone 15 made in India is so high it lost all trust on their customers. Now Foxconn wants our right away! But India says not so fast. And Apple brand name is already thoroughly fxxked! In Asia the Apple users insist it has to be MADE IN CHINA!
But that is a smaller problem. Now let me introduce you guys a great lesson that doing shit don’t pay! China and Huawei took a mere 3 short years to do what the U.S. thought China has to take at least 30 years! And it actually made a phone better, faster, cheaper than iPhone! Plus a billion people on earth wanting to show displeasure at US and Trump and Biden shit! In January 2024 they decide to teach the west a lesson! Try imagining a perfect storm!
That is what the US is facing. It’s own products are fxxked up, its shit is not working yet it spends billions if not trillions to coerce and bribing nations and companies to do shit! That is the real USA today!
And let me help you. You ain’t seen nothing yet! Decoupling or de-risking from China is the last thing you ought to do!
Nope, the underlying problem reminds the same. US strategists feel they must retain US hegemony and its rules based world order in order to thrive. And Russia/China refuses to accept those rules not supported by the UN Charter.
2023 was a year, US officials feels they must moderate their confrontation with China due to negative headwinds from a losing fight in Ukraine war, a uniting global South dedollarising fast and near record inflation from years of Tbill printing. They fear Chinese aggressive selling of Tbills will worsen the US inflation and Tbill printing situation only. Nothing has changed.
China on the other hand has fears that an over intense US China confrontation can worsen global demand and that can complicate the delicate balance they have in sustaining the Chinese economy without HUGE STIMULUS. China is still preparing to retake Taiwan, and there are still key steps needed including doubling nuke deterrence, training PLA personnel with so many new toys, supplies and economy in case of sanctions. Plenty to do in next few years. So, China is also receptive to moderating tension while work continues.
So, this is a tactical pause only, the strategic picture has not changed at all. USA is hoping to unite West to win, and Russia/China is hoping to unite the global South to push a new world order. And to dedollarise under BRICS+ (BRICS Pay) to burst the US Tbill bubble. THAT IS STILL THE GLOBAL BIG PICTURE, THIS IS A FIGHT FOR A NEW WORLD ORDER.
I invited a very close friend with her sons to come for Christmas dinner. I was a single mom, and so was she. I invited a few other single parents too. Christmas can be a challenge for singles.
I was cooking up a storm all day. I made a lot — she had 2 sons who were big kids and big eaters. She had promised to come this time. The year before she had canceled the day before. My “friend” called an hour before dinner to tell me that she had gotten “a better offer” and wasn’t coming to dinner. (In case you’re wondering, I’m an excellent cook.) I couldn’t believe she was so rude. Plus, she waited so late — I ended up with way too much food left over.
You won’t believe this, but when the next holiday came, she hinted that she wanted to be invited. This happened for years after, but I never, ever invited her for a holiday meal again.
Don’t know how clever it was, but a client of mine had been picked up because he was in a minor accident and had an open container of beer with him. When the cops were taking him to the station, they asked him whether he wanted a breath test or a blood test (Colorado law gave the accused the choice, after which no change was allowed). He opted for a blood test, but explained that he was Russian and had ‘fat skin’ (his term); they’d need a doctor to draw the blood. He was told ‘Paramedics are what we have and paramedics are what you get.’
He sat there patiently while the paramedics stuck him about seven times, never able to draw blood. Finally losing patience, the cop with him told him he was getting a breath test, and my client refused to participate.
Under implied consent, they charged him with DUI and called him an ambulance (he’d suffered minor injuries in the crash. Nothing to make the delay over the testing any issue). The paramedic in the ambulance set an IV with no problems (of course, nobody tried to get blood then) and took him to the hospital.
When we got into court, I got the cop on the stand to agree to the main points, i.e. that the accused had opted for a blood test, he’d been patient while repeated attempts were made to draw blood and that the police then demanded the breath test, which he refused. No problem; the cop admitted each point. I then turned to the judge and said (approximately; it’s been twenty-five years or more), “Your honor, the law prevents the accused from changing his mind after he’s made his choice. If he can’t change his mind, the police can’t do it for him.” Then I shut up.
The judge thought about that for all of about a minute before dismissing the case.
My eldest daughter went into IT in my footsteps. I was so very proud of her when she got a chance to join a start-up that ended up being wildly successful. One of the founders was a bit of an arrogant little prick. One Sunday my daughter was over for dinner and we were talking shop. I asked how it was going, and she said fine except for little prick. She volunteered that the crew had found out he had two panic points. He was deathly afraid of both little people (dwarves/midgets) and scared shitless of clowns. I duly noted both. April 1 was coming fast so good old dad got busy and found…drumroll please….a midget clown stripper. Sent her into the business during lunch on April 1. Daughter said little prick screamed like a girl and ran out of the building. Didn’t return for two days. Everyone said it was the best practical joke they’d ever seen.
Originally Answered: What is the furthest you’ve seen somebody reach to be offended at something?
A few months ago I was in my local Home Hardware picking up tools – a pack of blades, some feeler gauges, etc. Sometimes I forget to put my tools back into the toolbox and they tend to…go for a walk.
While I was there, I noticed a woman and a girl in her late teens staring bemusedly at the long racks of tools. The woman had a list in her hands, and was dubiously looking at the endless choices.
Not at all hard to see what was happening; I’ve seen it dozens of times. Once, a long time ago, the woman was the friend that had taken me in after I had left my mother.
When a young person joins a technical Trade, he/she is expected to arrive at training with the required tools for the job. Parents will often gift the tools to their kids – since a basic entry-level tool collection costs easily $200* it’s a good way for parents to support their kids.
(*That swells – fast. My current toolbox is worth – at an estimate – about six to seven thousand dollars. I have two or three instruments that are worth twice that each; though in those cases the Company reimbursed me for those purchases.)
Quality tools cost – but cheap tools cost far more in the long run.)
I knew what was going on, so I drifted close as the women were looking at the hammers. “This one looks nice?” the woman was saying.
I introduced myself, and offered my help. I learned that I was right – the lady’s daughter had been hired by a factory and was following the millwright trade.
Excellent! Millwright is a superb trade; solid machinery and repair skills. The ability to understand and repair anything mechanical is a valuable ability. I cannot recommend the Millwright trade highly enough.
Every trade needs bright new apprentices and every apprentice should have generous parents willing to help.
I looked at the cheap rubber-handled claw-hammer the woman was looking at and shook my head. It looked like this:
image 480
These are fine for home use. But not what the lass needed. I pointed out the problems with the rubber grip: with regular use it raises blisters. It’s not well balanced; it’s not heavy enough to be truly efficient.
While I’m no millwright I AM a Journeyman Pressman and I repair, maintain and adjust my printing presses to a high degree of competence and know what the list meant when it said “hammer”. I show the lady this instead:
image 479
Simple, solid, reliable. It will never slip, it will never bind, it will never raise blisters. When holding it at the balance point this hammer will do an excellent job and be an extension of the young woman’s hand. (Using a hammer takes skill.) When covered in oil, in grease and filthy, this hammer will ALWAYS do exactly what you want. THIS is the hammer the lass needs – and the one that the lady hadn’t been looking at because the coloured rubber handles of the others looked better.
EDIT: A Journeyman carpenter commented that I was wrong in this particular point: using a rubber-handled does not raise blisters if it’s used correctly. Thanks for the correction; I’m glad to learn something new.
Down the list: Allen keys.
The lady looked at a set of chromed Allen keys. They looked great – and were expensive as Hell. I guided her away from them, and pointed to cheaper, solid ball-end keys instead.
image 478
(These look great.)
image 477
(THESE work!)
By this time, one of the red-shirted salespeople had joined us. She was in her late 40’s, blonde, and had the easy confidence of someone who really knew their trade. It doesn’t take much for one Journeyman to recognize another. (As a side note, Home Hardware hires a LOT of Journeyman-status salespeople. The red-shirted people selling tools and lumber often REALLY know what the hell they’re talking about.)
I smiled and bowed out – this was the Journeyman’s job.
The next item on the list was a wrench set. Wrenches are the stock in trade of any machine operator and it’s best to get a good set.
The red-shirted Millwright (I learned her status later when chatting) offered a pack I was uncertain of. I shrugged, offered my opinion and pointed out the one I would suggest.
At that point the daughter – who the tools were for – turned around and angrily told me to butt out. The woman would help them, thanks.
The mother agreed, and told me to shut up. She was DONE with ‘mansplaining’ and told me that I was just helping them to bolster my fragile male Ego. They would do VERY well without me.
The look that went across my face could best be described as a ‘very thin smile’.
At which point the red-shirted woman rounded on the lass and asked her if she wanted a career in the Trades. The teenager shrugged.
At which point the Millwright pointed out if the girl ever hoped to earn her Red Seals, she would have to learn that when a Journeyman speaks, apprentices shut the hell up and listen.
The girl was shocked into silence and I compared notes with my fellow Journeyman. I pointed out the value of the other set of wrenches. The woman agreed, but pointed out a few issues I hadn’t realized – I quickly agreed the set she suggested were the best. (I’ve since bought a set of those wrenches. They’re AMAZING and if it wasn’t for that Millwright, I’d never have realized it.)
I tried to help – and because I was a ‘guy’ I was ‘mansplaining’ – when the female Journeyman showed up.
It didn’t bother me at all – I’ve seen so many Apprentices fall by the wayside that one more failure doesn’t affect me in the slightest. I just thought it was neat that this girl just entering the Trade got a wake-up call:
The Trades don’t give one CRAP about your gender. They only care about your skill, and you are only EVER as good as your last work.
This project is led by retired US Air Force Colonel Raymond Powell, in collaboration with counterparts from the Philippine Coast Guard and some officials from the Philippine Department of Foreign Affairs. They plan, strategize, and execute this project, engaging in confrontations, provocations, and standoffs with the China Coast Guard.
According to Project Myoushu’s claim, it “seeks to develop more effective tools to shine a light into the gray zone of China’s maritime coercion strategy.” Powell occasionally releases satellite images and trajectory maps of Chinese fishing vessels and government ships. All of this is done intentionally to create a tense situation in the South China Sea region, particularly in disputed areas between the Philippines and China, such as Huangyan Island or Ren’ai Reef.
image 45
It is a good thing that China uses large ships and vessels. The numerical and scale advantage of the Chinese Coast Guard actually helps to avoid more serious confrontations, as fleet conflicts would be more imminent if both sides were evenly matched in size.
image 476
However, regardless of the circumstances, Western media always portray China as a bully. This is the true purpose of this project and the goal set by the US – they use the so-called “confidence in transparency of reporting” to create propaganda against China. They claim it is transparent because Western media bring cameras, media personnel, etc., to document the process and report it to Filipino audiences and the world. It is understandable that this signifies something – the US wants to undermine China’s reputation.
The Philippines had a highly productive and friendly relationship with China, such as collaborative projects in the BRI, which greatly enhanced the economic advantage of the Philippines. However, President Marcos clearly has his own ideas about the arrangements from the US. He has never explained to the Filipino people why he has shifted back towards the US. In the South China Sea issue, Marcos’ policies are filled with hostility and aggression.
In fact, the Filipino people are not concerned about the South China Sea dispute. A survey report released by Pulse Asia
[2] in September 2023 showed that only 7% of Filipinos are concerned about the South China Sea dispute, while 93% of the population is primarily concerned about controlling inflation, employment, reducing poverty, and fighting corruption.
image 475
The US has exerted mass pressure, demanding that the Philippines continue to “contain” China. If this continues, Marcos’ policies will only become further detached from the demands of the people. It appears that Marcos is going to have a tough time in the upcoming new year.
Never compare your sex life with porn videos. Because porn videos are totally fake.
Never be sad for losing someone. No one lasts for long period of time. Even, you are gonna lose your beauty, money and health with age.
Never underestimate failure.Only a failure gives you the proper perspective of success.
Never “Trust” easily on anyone. Because trust is the most expensive thing and so don’t trust blindly. Even, your friends get jealous when they see your progress.
Never share your password of social media accounts, email, Internet Banking, and ATM pin\CVV number with anyone. Never!
Never get involved in sexual activities till you are not serious in your relationship.
Never believe on that girl\boy who have lots of relationship in their past. They can easily manipulated you by crying their bad past.( Exception is everywhere)
Never try to hurt your parents. They have lots of expectations from you.
In any situation, Never think about ending your life. Even plants regrow leaves after one leaf shed.
I walked into a bank one morning in Florida to find it totally empty of any customers and only one teller behind the counter and another lady at her desk opposite. As I approached the teller, she scolded me for not first stopping behind the yellow line on the floor before walking the 3 steps to her counter. She was not busy at all. “Sir!!! Go back and stand BEHIND the yellow line!!” Me; “Ok, but I saw you are not busy”. I went back while she watched me. As soon as I was standing still behind the line, she nodded and immediately said; “Ok, NOW you can approach”. I asked her politely if there was any reason for having a customer stop behind the line in an empty bank. Her; “Because the sign says so!!!” she scolded. “And I say so!!!” The only other bank employee looked at her and rolled her eyes. Just then, a phone (Land line) rang and the teller picked it up still snarling at me. She was quite an unpleasant lady to the caller too. Just then, she starts to walk away at a brisk pace, forgetting the phone was not a cordless and the cord stretched as far as it would go and then phone sling shotted out of her hands and flew across the room and skidded to a stop on the floor. She looked at me right away to see if I saw what happened and I could not hide my grin which just set her off all the more. She turned red and it was clear she was not having a good day. I almost felt sympathetic.
Just a minor example of Karma, but it was pretty funny.
Whenever you are starting a new job, always let them know that you have 4 alive grandparents. Then you have 4 pre-made excuses for whenever you don’t want to come into work.
When you’re shopping online and need to reach a threshold for free delivery, simply add a gift card to your order. The next time you make a purchase, you can use the card and repeat the process.
When dining alone at a restaurant, bring a notebook. Write in it occasionally. The staff might think you’re a food critic, and they’ll likely try their best to impress you, maybe even treating you to some free food.
If someone ever calls you fat, tell them you used to be 75 lbs heavier. It will make them feel guilty for saying it to you, while also making you look accomplished for losing weight.
Use airplane mode to hang up on people. They will see “call failed” instead of “call ended”.
When you’re looking for a job, post a fake ad for a very similar position on the internet so you could check out the resumes of your competition.
Don’t show your Tinder profile or Instagram to your date. Show your profile on some niche platform like luxyor Mensa to go from being average to standing out.
If your girl ever gets mad at you and won’t speak, just tighten up all the jars in the house. Eventually she’ll have to talk to you to get your help opening up one of the jars.
If your coworker ever calls in sick for work, you can do the same 1-3 days later. Your boss will think you have the same thing and it’s “going around the office”. Your boss may even do the same shortly after you. It’s called the “fake flu”.
lf you want people to stop letting dogs sh*t on your lawn. Instead of a sign saying “no dogs allowed”, put up one saying “Lawn recently treated with toxic pesticides”.
Nobody would let their dog anywhere near your lawn ever again.
If you’re in a taxi and you think the driver is purposely driving slow to get the meter up. Just cough or sneeze to make yourself seem sick and watch the driver speed up to prevent catching something from you.
If you want to slack off at work, slack off but act annoyed or frustrated around your boss. This will give the impression that you’re working hard and the job is getting you heated.
Experiences
Mia’s Asian Chicken Salad
Asian Chicken Salad
Ingredients
Thai Dressing
1 cup soy sauce
1 cup rice vinegar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup sesame oil
2 teaspoons ginger
2 teaspoons garlic
4 green onions, minced
1 bunch cilantro, minced
1 teaspoon chili paste
Salad
Napa cabbage
Carrot peel
Green onions
Cooked rice noodles
Thai dressing
Instructions
Marinate chicken breast with Thai dressing for 4 hours, then cook on grill.
Serve grilled chicken on top of salad with dressing drizzled over.
My son was denied membership in the National Honor Society as a junior in high school. He fit every qualification for membership, but two of his many teachers just didn’t like him. It was pretty obvious that he had been “blackballed”.
I went online and checked out the rules at the national level for bestowing membership. They clearly stated that “blackballing” was illegal. They also stated that the records of the votes by the teachers must be maintained for a certain amount of time after the vote for membership. So, I went to the school and asked for the vote tally. They refused to give it to me. I filed a freedom of information suit against the school.
A few days later, I got a call from an attorney at the state capital. He was representing the school, and he asked for my lawyer’s name and contact info. When I told him I was representing myself, he started in on me. He told me that I was sure to lose the suit and that I would then have to pay all of the schools costs, which would include his bill, and it would come to thousands of dollars. He told me I had better just withdraw the suit. I said no, and we hung up.
The case was scheduled for an appearance before the judge. The attorney called me again about 3 days before the scheduled appearance. He went after me again on what it was going to cost me when I lost the suit. I again told him that I was not dropping the suit.
We went to the courthouse when the appearance came up, and we both arrived at about the same time. He went ahead of me into the courthouse and introduced himself to the judge. I went in just after him and looked up at the judge and said, “Hi, Jim.” The Judge looked at me and said, “Hi, Eric.” The look on the lawyer’s face was priceless.
The judge listened to each of us and told us that the school was required to provide me with the information I was seeking, and would be responsible for paying all of my legal fees. He then asked me what my fees were. I told him that it was such a trivial case that I didn’t incur any costs, I just wanted to see the information.
Oddly enough, I never did get to see the vote results. Seems the school was so confident in victory that they had thrown the results in the trash some time earlier. Instead of pursuing it, I let them know that they needed to read the NHS rules and follow them more closely in the future. My son was inducted his senior year.
Years ago I operated a full service gas station. There was a young lady who’d come in and have freon added to her AC. Back then freon cost just under $1 a pound. She’d come in and I added 3 or 4 pounds of freon. I’d charge my labor equal to what the material parts installed on the car. So 4 pounds of freon = $4. Meaning the total cost for my work was $8. It only took a few minutes to do.
After a few days she’d show back up to get another recharge. On the third visit I asked her “ Why don’t you let me find the leak and fix it so I can charge the unit properly and you won’t need to do this anymore. “ She refused and told me just to charge/add the freon.
It wouldn’t have cost her anymore than $50. If it was a hose or fitting leaking even less. If it was a pin leak in the high pressure coil? I could get one out of a salvage yard.
If it was a pin leak in the low pressure coil? I could fix it with epoxy. Then evacuate the system and add new freon it’d be like new.
Edit: I thank everyone for their responses.
But for the ding-dongs who are saying things like I should lose my license or charging a leaking system is illegal…. THIS WAS IN THE 70s.
There WERE NO license. There were NO laws preventing the sales or use of freon. PLUS…. back then… car AC units were designed to leak. That way the people who looked at their car dealer as the ONLY place to have the car repaired ends up giving more business to the dealerships.
I say to those people…. “ Sorry to burst your bubble… But there was life BEFORE 1985.”
I was never a professional mechanic, but this one was fun. A friend of mine was looking for a “small but fun” car back in 1993. We happened across a 1977 Datsun 280Z that was priced at $650. It needed paint, but had zero rust, which is hard to find on an old Z. The seller told us that it ran fine, and that it had a low-mileage Japanese import engine and transmission in it. We went to test drive it, and it missed horribly. I couldn’t get it over 45mph.
The seller wouldn’t budge on the price, but he said he’d take $50 off to have a diagnostic run at a local shop. He told us to take it home overnight. I insisted on stopping to get a set of plugs at AutoZone. Back then, Nippondensos were 88 cents apiece. When we got to the house, my friend gapped the plugs while I removed and installed them. I expected to see either a plug that was totally fouled with carbon, or one with zero gap. Instead, I noticed the order on the numbered factory wires:
1,3,2,4,5,6! What’s wrong with this picture?
Surely not, I thought. It just couldn’t be that easy.
I put the wires, in the correct order, on the new plugs. 5 minutes later, we were flying down the road at 120 mph, laughing our asses off. The engine ran smooth as silk. Needless to say, my friend bought it.
Some time later, I ran into the previous owner, who asked if we ever got it running right. I told him we had, but that it was very expensive and labor intensive. He said he knew it would be a difficult problem, because he and his brother had tried for two years and couldn’t figure it out.
Sometimes all it takes is a new set of eyes.
China is both cool and interesting
NASA’s Webb Captures an Ethereal View of NGC 346 (MIRI)
Yes. I went shopping for a particular Barbie for my niece’s birthday. I couldn’t see it on the shelves, but when I spoke to a member of staff she very kindly went out the back and managed to find one for me. I was just thanking her when a little girl ran up, squealing “Mummy, that’s the Barbie!” The employee said she was sorry, but I had the last one and there wouldn’t be more for a few days. The mother asked me if she could have it, to which I said no as my niece had been looking forward to it. The child went into demon mode, screaming “Mummy!” at the top of her voice and the woman asked again, saying her daughter is getting really upset. I again said no and tried to walk away. She then followed me, saying loud enough for customers to hear that I’d made her daughter cry. . That was it for me. Even though her child’s wailing had settled into a whimper by this point, no-one wants to be publicly accused of that. It was obvious that this woman was used to getting what she wanted and her daughter had learned from her mother’s example. She knew making noise would get her what she wanted, and couldn’t understand it not working in a shop when it clearly worked at home. I told the woman that (a) no child was entitled to get everything they wanted, (b) she should be aiming to raise a child with good manners, not a misplaced sense of entitlement, and (c) if she wasn’t careful, her only success would be in raising a child as bratty as herself. . I didn’t shout or swear, but I was very clear and she was so shocked that someone had stood up to her that she went the other way and started begging me for it. I told her that she had been very rude and wasn’t getting the doll from me, so if she wanted to go back to screeching and being abusive she was welcome to. Several people were watching by now, and they openly laughed when I told them what had happened. What made her finally shut up? Another customer telling her that she sounded like she needed a doll herself and should be quiet otherwise she’d end up on Facebook looking like a fool.
Not my case but a 17-18 year old boy accused and found guilty of sexually assaulting a girl he’d come across in the street late one night as she was making her way home after a big night out and yes, she was drunk, not that it makes a difference.
He dragged her into a nearby park and was in the process of trying to remove her clothes while she tried to resist him when a police patrol turned and caught him in the act. He had been spotted forcing her into the park on a CCTV camera and the operator had called it in and reported it.
Evidence is gathered, court case goes ahead and our lucky lad (please recognize the sarcasm) is found guilty and facing a minimum of XX years in jail. Judge thanks jury then sets aside the verdict/suspends the sentence and puts him on a good behaviour and some very minimal mount of community service.
Why, you might ask?
The judge said “as the boy was attending the ‘high-brow upper-class very expensive private school’ and had a promising future ahead of him, having a custodial sentence on his record would not be good for him, the court on this occasion could be lenient.”
The interesting thing about the boy with “a promising future ahead of him” was that he already had a shady past, three prior charges for things like assault, public lewdness and another sexual assault charge.
I spent 29 Christmases in prison. During this time I saw it change over the years on what they gave the incarcerated
The first few years I was in prison were like this. A huge holiday meal that took up two trays. One tray consisted of ham, turkey dressing, rolls, mashed potatoes with gravy and usually a serving of something else that was different every year it seemed. The second tray was a slice of pumpkin pie (or sweet potato pie), cool whip, a small container of ice cream and a soda
You were also given a bag of various nuts and another bag of candy. You were given a few Christmas cards to send out and $5.00 on your account. They stopped putting the $5.00 on everyone’s account after my 3rd year in prison.
The two christmas bags eventually changed to one. It consisted of shampoo, ramen soups, candy bars etc and was and to my knowledge still comes from Joyce Meyers Ministry
Over the years the size of the Christmas meal got smaller. But like the Thanksgiving meal they are still the best meals served in prison.
For many people in prison this is a hard time. Some stay in their cell all day and will not even go eat the Christmas dinner. They say things like “if I can’t enjoy Christmas in prison I don’t want to eat the Christmas dinner” I had a little different outlook. While I was a little down because I wasn’t with my family, I wasn’t going to go to that extreme. I put myself in prison and I know my family would want me to try to enjoy the meal. And I did, all the while thinking those who don’t eat the Christmas meal could give it to someone else
The one thing I did refuse was Christmas visits. Now I would let them come up before or after Christmas,but I wanted my family to spend Christmas at home , not visiting me in prison. They agreed to this under one condition. I had to call them. It is hard getting on the phones at Christmas. These days it is easier because they have tablets. The call was probably the hardest, because I could hear the sadness in my mom’s voice. One Christmas it was all I could do to hold back the tears. They had me on speaker and I said that I wished I could have sent them more for Christmas than a card. My mom said “ I think I speak for everyone when I say that just hearing your voice is the greatest gift you could give us” The others agreed and I about lost it Wow, I am sorry . I did not mean to get that personal, but maybe it will give you an idea of how Christmas is for the incarcerated. At least when I was in prison
Not really a bully, but a relevant story, nonetheless.
Years ago my family took a self defense class together. Our daughter, Katie, was a petite 15 year old high school student at the time and worked part time at a frozen yogurt shop. She arrived a couple of minutes late one day and her large male co-worker asked her why she was late. She explained that she got out of self defense class a few minutes late. He scoffed and said, “That stuff wouldn’t do you any good if someone my size came at you!” She replied, “Maybe, maybe not.” Then he said, “If someone did this there isn’t anything you could do”, and leaned toward her grabbing and twisting her shirt at the neckline. Less than a second later she was standing over him looking down at him. He was not hurt, but was lying on the floor on his back, looking up at her, with the most surprised look on his face! It was absolutely awesome! Three cheers for our self defense instructor who had taught us that day how to handle that event!!!
A Latina and her daughter (preteen) were at the milk aisle speaking Spanish to each other. As I grab some milk, I hear this older lady (50+) say, ”SPEAK ENGLISH, this is America!”
I was a little perturbed by this and began to stare at her in embarrassment. The young girl, in a calm and delicate way, dropped some history bomb on this older lady. She said , “America doesn’t have a national language because this land was founded by the Dutch, French, the English, and, most certainly, the Spaniards. And next time old lady, go read a book and learn, that’s what I did.”
I laughed so hard her mother smirked. It was obnoxious for the older lady to interrupt a mother and daughter shopping at the grocery. I wish I had recorded the interaction.
This country is built by people from all walks of life. In times like these, we have to remember this land was built for you and me 🙂
I was on Temporary Duty (TDY) for training at a USAF tech school and while there I was appointed Barracks Chief for the TDY enlisted barracks. Now NCOs were exempt from details but lower ranking airmen were not. And as Barracks Chief I was also exempt.
We took our classes in a huge three story tall building with no windows. Because everything inside was highly classified; so only people with clearances could enter the building. This meant that on Saturdays there was a large detail to wax and buff all the hallways. It took about 4–5 hours for a 50+ man detail to do this job.
There were at least 500–600 lower ranking airmen who were at the school full time for entry level training in the field. We were all graduates of that program. When I had attended the school this duty got rotated among the entry level trainees, I’d done it a couple times in my schooling.
The First Sergeant of the Training Squadron had decided that this detail should be done by visiting TDY airmen who obviously had clearances and access already approved.
The problem was that while the detail required 50 people we typically had about 30 Airmen on TDY at any time (most TDY courses were 6–10 weeks to teach now experienced graduates added systems). So he would round up other trainees from among those in entry level training, to fill out the roster.
The problem of course is that it meant that the visiting airmen had the worst, nastiest, longest detail possible every single Saturday they were at the base. You couldn’t even go out clubbing on Friday because the detail started at 0700.
When I approached the First Sergeant about the problem on behalf of one of my guys the First Shirt explained this was completely fair because the detail was ROTATING — as soon as we had more than 50 guys in residence the extra guys would be excused based on how many times they had done the detail. Never mind that in ten years they had never had more than 45 or so TDY personnel at any moment — if they ever had 51 then one lucky guy would get one Saturday off…
I tried pointing out the obvious — that you cannot rotate a 50 man detail among 30 men and that in reality no one would EVER be excused from the detail but it simply did not register. I don’t know why.
(We made a visit to the base Inspector General and registered a complaint — it is not appropriate to require a small group to bear the brunt of the longest and dirtiest detail every single weekend. No one objected to doing a detail; even this detail would be OK once in a great while, it comes with the territory… The IG upheld the complaint and they changed the detail.)
We had en employee retire. Not exactly “legend”, eh?
“Frank” was a thirty-year employee, a good worker, and not seen by Managment as a “troublemaker” or problem employee. One Monday, during a staff meeting, Frank just exploded. He launched into an obscenity-laced tirade against his boss,and his bosses boss! He used every dirty word you can’t use on TV, and the most blunt, vulgar criticism of the company, managment and some staff.
Frank’s boss, and his bosses boss just sat there, speechless, as Frank went on for almost five minutes. Finally, Franks boss said “Frank, we’ve heard enough from you. One more word and you’re fired!”
Frank replied that “You can’t fire me, I RETIRE!” The then stormed out of the conference room, flipped his desk over, and began handing out $20 bills to the “people he liked” in the office, about 20% of the staff.
Managment called security, and they escorted Frank out. As he was passing the Receptionist, he turned to her and said “Coming in every day and seeing your (blank) was the best thing about working in this (blank).”
Everyone I know has talked about quitting / retiring in a “blaze of glory” from at least one job. He actually did it!
Everyone who witnessed this still talks about it at office parties. It’s been years!
Footnote: six months after he left, Frank asked for a reference, as he wanted a part-time job. That didn’t go so well.
37 yr old single father with nearly 8 years in recovery.
I spent nearly 3.75 years incarcerated during my addict years at my rock bottom.
Bottom bunks are the most valuable, often paid for, bullied from, fought for or earned thru a medical “bottom bunk pass” if you have a disability limiting you to the bottom bunks only.
Medical passes in jail are like gold, the officers have to abide by them, inmates without them hate them.
I had a bottom bunk pass for 2/3’s of the time I spent in jail, a 2nd mattress pass, etc after breaking my back in 2011. I spent well over a year on a top bunk.
Why are bottom bunks the ones normally wanted the most? I’ll give you a few reasons from my experience’s.
The lights.
a. In jail the lighting is very obnoxious and bright, you only get a few hours of lights out (Usually from 11 PM – 4/5 AM but it’s never totally dark due to safety bulbs in each florescent light.
Being on the bottom bunk you can avoid the bright light in your eyes which is a horrible way to wake up at 4 AM. You can also have more privacy by hanging a towel, sheet or clothing item which bring me to my 2nd reason.
b. Privacy.
By hanging a towel/sheet you can basically eliminate nearly all the light in your bunk, not have 3 dudes watch you sleep, or do whatever criminal thing you would want to get away with out of the view of the cameras or simply have a get away from the other 16 dudes you share your unit with.
2. Ease of Access.
a. Let’s face it, jumping down on to a cold concrete floor 8–10 times a day for standing head counts isn’t easy on the knees or your ankles. Climbing back up is a wicked pain on the knees and lower back.
b. You also better hope you get along with your bunkie because you step on his things, his blanket/mat, etc and you’re going to have problem. I would’ve if it happened more than once after explaining the inmate rules, you make it clear very quickly to a new bunkie how the system works.
You don’t have many rights left in jail so your cleanliness is one of the only things they can’t take away from you.
New inmates learn very quickly that those on bottom bunks have the seniority in that unit which comes along with more respect from new inmates.
There’s a few more reasons I can think of honestly but I don’t want to make this too long.
Bottom bunks are earned by seniority, bottom bunk passes, and/or muscles.
One graveyard shift, I was driving west on Sunset Blvd around Fairfax. I always drove with my window down. I heard a small, brief, horn-honk and a car pulled up alongside. “Officer, pull over, I need to talk to you!” We slowed ourselves, stopping the car, and gave our location.
The driver, later ID’ed as, “Nick”, exited his car, as did my trainee and I. As he approached me, he suddenly reached deep into his right front pants pocket. My left hand already had my flashlight illuminating him, while my right hand went to my gun, unsnapping it and beginning to rock it toward drawing down on him. Suddenly his hand emerged containing nothing more than a glass tube. He threw the glass tube, the type used for the smoking of rock cocaine, onto the hood of my police car. Nick looked at me and said, “I need you to arrest me and put me in jail. I am addicted to rock. I can’t stop, please help me!”
I was still in the single digits of years of sobriety. I told him I’d do what I could. Nick was going through withdrawals only, he was not under the influence at the time.
I arrested Nick for violation of 23152(c) CA Vehicle Code – Addict Driving. It was the only time in my 30 years that I used that section to arrest anyone. You need not be under the influence of anything, your life just needs to be horribly upset by your addiction. I gave Nick his Miranda Warnings, which he waived, and asked him about his daily life and use of rock cocaine. A picture of a life destroyed by drugs emerged. He signed his statement, gratefully, and happily went to jail. Weeks later, I got an on-call subpoena for his case, but was told he’d copped out. The courts sentenced him to treatment.
Months maybe a year, later, I was off-duty and at the L.A. Convention Center attending a talk by Father Joe Martin, a Roman Catholic priest who was very active in recovery work. I was in line to get a soda, when there was a tap on my shoulder. I turned to see NICK!, who gave me a hug and told me he’d been clean and sober since his arrest. Nick said that I had helped save his life.
This is almost the largest territorial (territorial sea) sovereignty change in the world since the end of World War II. Such information has not received any attention in the Western mainstream media.
The reason given by the Americans is: According to the “United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea”, they began mapping the submarine continental shelves in these two areas in 2003 and discovered their geographical connection with Alaska. So in December 2023, they cited the “United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea” The Articles of the Convention “ ECS” lay out claims to this maritime area and put them on the map.
What is embarrassing is that the United States is not a party to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea at all. This means that the United States wants to occupy 1 million square kilometers of high seas based on a treaty that it has not signed.
There are huge amounts of flammable ice, oil, natural gas and mineral resources under this sea area.
The questioner asked: Why did no country object?
Of course, the only one who objects is Russia, because they are the only neighbor in this sea area.
Given the relationship between the United States and Russia, I don’t think Russia’s opposition will play any role.
Eventually, the map of the United States will most likely expand by 1 million square kilometers.
No country will care, or in other words, they will all quietly shut up.
Note to readers: This is a repost of an article I wrote and was published on June 18, 2022 – 18 months ago. That was long before I started a Substack account. Some of you may already have read it. When it was published on “the saker” blog, the Russo-Ukraine war was still young but an obvious civilizational conflict was underway. This article was an attempt at describing some of the forces driving the conflict, including economic ones.
The article went viral and got republished all over the place in many languages – including on Zerohedge. I have no idea how many views it got in total but it was hundreds of thousands, possibly millions. I suspect it was one of the most read articles on geopolitical/economic issues in 2022.
The geopolitical conflict is far from over and the scenarios outlined in the article are probably not going to be realized for some time (if at all – let’s hope!), but I’m curious to hear what you readers think of the current situation in the world and where we might be heading – either with this article as a framework or in general. It’s also healthy to revisit one’s thinking in the past and evaluate it.
Be warned that the article contains some doom-porn, but according to global web traffic results humans like nothing more than porn!
This is however not the main reason I’m posting this old article here on Substack. The reason is a book that was just published which addresses in detail one of the main points of the article; the enormous global debt and how it may be resolved.
The book is called “The Great Taking” and is authored by David Rogers Webb. I haven’t read it yet but I plan to. I heard it is quite interesting and you might want to take a look if you are looking for something to read between Christmas and New Year’s.
World War 3 for dummies
By Gaius Baltar
Some knowledgeable people, apparently including the Pope, are beginning to suspect that there may be more going on in the world than just the war in the Ukraine. They say that World War 3 has already started and things will get worse from now on. This can be difficult to determine while we are participating in the unfolding events and do not have the benefit of the historical perspective. It is doubtful that people back in 1939 realized that they were looking at the start of a major worldwide conflict, although some may have suspected.
The current global situation is in many ways like a giant jigsaw puzzle where the general public only sees a tiny part of the complete picture. Most don’t even realize that there may be more pieces and don’t even ask these simple questions: Why is all this happening and why is it happening now?
Things are more complicated that most people realize. What they see is the evil wizard Vladimir Saruman Putin invading innocent Ukraine with his orc army – for absolutely no reason. This is a simplistic view to say the least because nothing happens without a reason. Let’s put things in perspective and see what is really going on – and why the world is going crazy before our eyes. Let’s see what World War 3 is all about.
The pressure cooker
The West (which we can define here as the US and the EU) has been maintaining pressure on the entire world for decades. This does not only apply to countries outside the West, but also to Western countries which strayed from the diktats of the West’s rulers. This pressure has been discussed widely and attributed to all kinds of motives, including neocolonialism, forced financial hegemony and so forth. What is interesting, particularly during the last 20 years, is which countries have been pressured and what they do not have in common.
Among the pressured countries we find Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, Libya, Syria, Serbia, Thailand and Iran to mention a few. There have also been recent additions, including India and Hungary. In order to understand why they have been pressured, we need to find out what they have in common. That’s not easy since they are extremely different in most ways. There are democracies and non-democracies, conservative and communist governments, Christian, Muslim and Buddhist countries and so on. Still, many of them are very clearly allied. One must ask why conservative and religious countries such as Russia or Iran would ally themselves with Godless communists in Cuba and Venezuela.
What all these countries have in common is their desire to run their own affairs; to be independent countries. This is unforgiveable in the eyes of the West and must be tackled by any means necessary, including economic sanctions, color revolutions and outright military aggression.
The West and its NATO military arm had surrounded Russia with hostile countries and military bases, armed and manipulated Ukraine to be used as a hammer against it and employed sanctions and threats. The same thing was and is happening in Asia where China is being surrounded by all means available. The same applies to all the Independents mentioned above to some extent. In the past 10 years or so the pressure has increased massively on the Independents and it reached almost fever pitch in the year before the Russian invasion of the Ukraine.
During the year before the Ukraine war, the US sent its diplomats around the world to tune up the pressure. They were like a travelling circus or a rock band on a tour, but instead of entertainment they delivered threats: buy this from us and do what we tell you or there will be consequences. The urgency was absolute and palpable, but then came the Ukraine war and the pressure went up to 11. During the first month of the war, the entire West’s diplomatic corps was fully engaged in threats against the ‘rest of the world’ to engineer the isolation of Russia. This didn’t work, which resulted in panic in political and diplomatic circles in the US and Europe.
All this pressure through the years, and all the fear and panic when it didn’t work, are clearly related to the events in the Ukraine. They are a part of the same ‘syndrome’ and have the same cause.
The debt dimension
There have been many explanations for what is going on and the most common is the fight between two possible futures; a multipolar world where there are several power centers in the world, and a unipolar world where the West governs the world. This is correct as far as it goes, but there is another reason which explains why this is happening now and all the urgency and panic in the West.
Recently the New Zealand tech guru Kim Dotcom tweeted a thread about the debt situation in the US. According to him all debt and unfunded liabilities of the US exceed the total value of the entire country, including the land. This situation is not unique to the US. Most countries in the West have debt which can only be paid back by selling the entire country and everything it contains. On top of that, most non-western countries are buried in dollar-denominated debt and are practically owned by the same financiers who own the West.
During the last few decades the economy of the US and Europe has been falsified on a level which is difficult to believe. We in the West have been living far beyond our means and our currencies have been massively overvalued. We have been able to do this through two mechanisms:
1. The first one is the reserve status of the dollar and the semi-reserve status of the euro which have enabled the West to export digital money and receive goods in return. This has created the enormous financial power for the West and enabled it to function as a parasite on the world economy. We have been getting a lot of goods for free, to put it mildly.
2. The second falsification mechanism is the increase in debt to a level where we have essentially pawned everything we own, including our houses and lands, to keep up our living standard. We own nothing now when the debt has been subtracted. The debt has long since become unserviceable – far beyond our ability to pay interests on – which explains why the interest rates in the West are in the neighborhood of zero. Any increase would make the debt unserviceable and we would all go formally bankrupt in a day.
On top of all this, the falsification has created artificially strong currencies in the West which has boosted their purchasing power for goods priced in non-western currencies. These mechanisms have also enabled the West to run bloated and dysfunctional service economies where inefficiencies are beyond belief. We have giant groups of people in our economies that not only create no value, but destroy value systematically. What maintains the West’s standard of living now is a small minority of productive people, constant debt increase, and parasitism on the rest of the world.
The people who own all this debt actually own everything we think we own. We in the West own nothing at this point – we only think we do. But who are our real owners? We know more or less who they are because they meet every year at the World Economic Forum in Davos along with the western political elites who they also happen to own.
It is clear that our owners have been getting increasingly worried, and their worries have been increasing in sync with the increased pressure applied by the West on the rest of the world, particularly the Independents. During the last Davos meeting, the mood was bleak and panicked at the same time, much like the panic among the western political elites when the isolation of Russia failed.
What is about to happen
The panic of our owners and their politicians is understandable because we have come to the end of the line. We can no longer keep up our living standard by debt increase and parasitism. The debt is reaching beyond what we own as collateral and our currencies are about to become worthless. We will no longer be able to get free stuff from the rest of the world, or pay back our debt – let alone pay interest on it. The entire West is about to go bankrupt and our standard of living is about to go down by a massive percentage. This is what has our owners panicked and they see only two scenarios:
1. In the first scenario most countries in the West, and everything and everyone within them, declare bankruptcy and erase the debt by diktat – which sovereign states are able to do. This will also erase the wealth and political power of our owners.
2. In the second scenario our owners take over the collateral during the bankruptcy. The collateral is us and everything we own.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out which scenario was chosen. The plan for the second scenario is ready and being implemented as we speak. It is called ‘The Great Reset’ and was constructed by the people behind the World Economic Forum. This plan is not a secret and can be examined to a certain degree on the WEF website.
The Great Reset is a mechanism for the seizing of all debt collateral which includes your assets, the assets of your city or municipality, the assets of your state and most corporate assets not already held by our owners.
This asset seizure mechanism has several components, but the most important are the following four:
1. Abolishment of sovereignty: A sovereign (independent) country is a dangerous country because it can choose to default on its debt. The decrease in sovereignty has been a priority for our owners and various schemes have been attempted such as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and the Trans Pacific Partnership. The most successful scheme is undoubtedly the European Union itself.
2. The down-tuning of the economy: The western economy (and indeed the global economy) must be tuned down by a very significant percentage. This down-tuning is necessary because the western economy is massively falsified now and must be taken down to its real level – which may be as low as half of what it is now – or more. The slow takedown has also the purpose of avoiding a sudden crash which would cause massive social unrest which would be a threat to our owners. A controlled takedown is therefore preferable to an uncontrolled crash. This controlled takedown is already happening and has been going on for quite some time. Many examples can be mentioned of this takedown, including the EU and US energy policy which is designed to sabotage the western economy, and the obvious attempts at demand destruction during and after the epidemic, including the fairly bizarre logistical problems which suddenly came out of nowhere.
3. Asset harvesting (you will own nothing and be ‘happy’): All assets that can be considered to be collateral to our private and collective/public debt will be taken over. This is a clearly stated aim of the Great Reset but it is less clear how this would be carried out. Total control of western governments (and indeed all governments) would seem to be necessary for this. That precondition is closer than one might think because most western governments seem to be beholden to Davos at this point. The process will be sold as necessary social restructuring because of an economic crisis and global warming and will result in massive decrease in living standards for regular people, although not the elites.
4. Oppression: A great many people will not like this and an uprising is a likely response, even if the takedown is done gradually. To prevent this from happening, a social control mechanism is being implemented which will erase personal freedom, the freedom of speech, and privacy. It will also create absolute dependence of the individual on the state. This must be done before the economic takedown can be completed or there will be a revolution. This mechanism is already being implemented enthusiastically in the West as anybody with eyes and ears can see.
Russia, China and other Independents
How do Russia and China, and the war in Ukraine, factor into all of this? Why all the pressure from the West throughout the years and why all this panic now? Part of the reason for the pressure on the Independents, particularly Russia and China, is simply that they have resisted western hegemony. That is enough for getting on the West’s naughty list. But why the increased pressure in recent years?
The reason is that Russia and China cannot be subjugated through bankruptcy and their assets harvested. They do not have much debt in western currencies which means that the people who own the West through debt do not currently own Russia and China (like they own the West and the indebted ‘third world’) and cannot acquire them through debt. The only way to acquire them is through regime change. Their governments must be weakened by any means, including economic sanctions and military means if necessary -thus the use of Ukraine as a battering ram for Russia and Taiwan for China.
Subjugating Russia and China is an existential issue for our Davos owners because when they take the western economy down, everything else must go down too. If the western economy is taken down and a large economic block doesn’t participate in the downfall, it will be a disaster for the West. The new block will gain massive economic power, and possibly unipolar hegemony of sorts, while the West descends into a feudal Dark Age and irrelevance. Therefore the entire world must go down for the Great Reset to work. Russia and China must be subjugated by any means, as well as India and other stubborn nations.
This is what has fueled the situation we now find ourselves in and will fuel the continuation of World War 3. The western owner-elites are going to war to keep their wealth and power. Everyone who resists must be subjugated so they can follow the West into the planned Great Reset Dark Age.
The reason for the current panic among western elites is that the Ukraine project isn’t going as planned. Instead of Russia being bled on the battlefield, it is Ukraine and the West that bleed. Instead of the Russian economy crashing resulting in Putin’s replacement by a Davos-compatible leader, it is the West’s economy that is crashing. Instead of Russia being isolated, it is the West that is being increasingly isolated. Nothing is working, and to top it all off, Europe has given the Russians the means and motive to destroy the European economy by partly shutting down its industry. Without Russian resources there is no European industry, and without industry there are no taxes for paying for unemployment benefits, pensions, all the refugees and pretty much everything else which holds European societies together. The Russians now have the ability to engineer and uncontrolled crash in Europe which is not what Davos planned. An uncontrolled crash might see Davos heads roll, literally, and that is causing fear and panic in elite circles. The only solution for them is to move on with World War 3 and hope for the best.
What to do
The Great Reset of the world economy is the direct cause for World War 3 – assuming that is what is going on. What can be done about this? From inside the West, little can be done. The only way is to somehow remove Davos from the equation, but that is most likely not going to happen for two reasons: The first one is that the Davos great resetters are too entwined in the western economy and politics. Davos is like an octopus with its arms and suckers inside every country’s elite circles, media and government. They are too entrenched to be easily removed. The second reason is that the western population is too brainwashed and ignorant. The level of their brainwashing is such that a large part of them actually want to become poor – although they use the word ‘green’ for ‘poor’ because it sounds better. There are, however, some indications that there may be divisions within western elites. Some of them, particularly within the US, may be resisting the primarily Europe-designed Great Reset – but whether this opposition is real or effective remains to be seen.
However, outside the West, there are certain measures which can be taken and must be taken. Some of those measures are drastic and some of them are being done as we speak. Among the measures are the following:
1. The Independents, led by Russia, China and India, must create a block to isolate themselves from the radioactive West. This isolation must not only be economic, but also political and social. Their economic systems must be divorced from the West and made autonomous. Their cultures and history must be defended against western influences and revisionism. This process appears to be underway.
2. The Independents must immediately ban all western sponsored institutions and NGOs in their countries, regardless of whether they are sponsored by western states or individuals. Furthermore, they must ban all media receiving western sponsorship and strip every school and university of western sponsorship and influences.
3. They must leave all international institutions up to and possibly including the United Nations, because all international bodies are controlled by the West. They must then replace them with new institutions within their block.
4. They must, at some point, declare the dollar and the euro currencies non grata. That means that they should declare default on all debts denominated in these currencies, but not other debts. This will most likely come at a later stage, but is inevitable.
This will create a situation where the West will descend into darkness without pulling others down with it – if we manage to escape the nuclear fire.
Cool things in China
Yeah. I keep forgetting that the rest of the world doesn’t do this…
Originally Answered: What was something that someone did that made you think they were really smart?
When my son was really young (about 3) we were at a summer bbq in a friend’s garden with a few other friends and their kids.
The kids were a range of ages, up to about 8 or 9, with my son being the youngest. One of the kids was playing with a ping pong ball which he’d accidentally dropped into a narrow hole in the grass about 8″ deep (where a fence post had recently been removed from) and became upset that he wasn’t able to get the ball back out.
A few of the other kids were trying to help, by squeezing their short fingers into the hole to retrieve the ball (unsuccessfully) while others attempted using sticks to wedge it out to no avail. All the while, my son was closely watching the other older kids in their endeavours.
When my son asked me to take him to the kitchen for a glass of water, I assumed he was just thirsty. But he took the glass of water undrunk and walked back out to the garden. He then went up to where the other kids were gathered, still trying to retrieve the stuck ball and proceeded to pour the whole glass of water into the hole. . The ping pong ball then floated up to the top of the hole, where one of kids grabbed it and a couple of them cheered.
My son didn’t say anything but I was watching on the sidelines, absolutely taken aback at the ingenuity of it – displaying lateral thinking when he wasn’t much more than a toddler.
As a scientist myself, I was delighted to realise my young son had apparently discovered Archimedes principle all by himself!
He’s almost 8 now and is definitely still passionate about science, maths and nature.
NASA’s Webb Snaps Supersonic Outflow of Young Star
I had my condo for sale for a year, at the end it was done to 60percent of comparables, and I didn’t have an offer.
I took it off the market removed the wall paper, and painted the entire house, put in new cheap carpet, with a thick plush underlay. I got laminate flooring on sale. I tore out my old carpet and hauled it to the dump. I bought clearance blinds to replace the old faded drapes.
I had bought the condo during a low in the market in 1986, for $42,000 , I had tried to sell it in 2000 , for 100,000 and dropped it to $59,900 and never had one offer. There were no condos on the market for less. I had a 3 bedroom, and 1 bedrooms were going for more.
I spent 6 months renovating, and put it back on the market for $110,000 and sold it for asking price the same day.
I spent $4000 on painting, flooring, and blinds.
The place had wall paper when I bought it, and I hated it, but was too cheap to replace it. But to make a sale, I painted. It had linoleum and I replaced it with laminate, The drapes with blinds ( which were popular in 2000) . Then I scrubbed it spotless.
My realtor told me that I was foolish to spend $4000 on cosmetics, because people would want to pick their own stuff. But I think doubling the value in 6 months, shows that cheap cosmetic changes paid off.
I don’t guarantee that your house needs the same things as my house did 23 years ago
Webb Celebrates First Year of Science With Close-up on Birth of Sun-like Stars
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Attempted ‘color revolution’ in Serbia: What we know so far
Opposition activists forced their way into Belgrade city hall after claiming a municipal election was rigged.
23DEC23
Opposition forces in Serbia breached Belgrade’s city hall amid mass protests on Sunday. They claim the recent municipal election in the capital, won by the ruling party, was rigged. Senior national officials have described the protests as an attempted “color revolution,” and said they had been forewarned by Russia.
Mayorship
Belgrade is home to roughly a quarter of the Balkan nation’s population of over 6.6 million. The office of its mayor is viewed as one of the most important in Serbia.
Members of the city council, who vote the mayor in, were elected on December 17 – the same day as a national election and several municipal votes were held.
The ruling Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) of President Aleksandar Vucic won the most seats in the Belgrade City Assembly. The opposition Serbia Against Violence (SPN) alliance claims the outcome was achieved through voter fraud.
Early violence
In the week that followed the elections, the opposition staged several rallies in Belgrade, some of them marred by violence.
During a demonstration in front of the Republican Election Commission last Monday, leading Serbian statistician Milorad Kovacevic and several of his associates were reportedly attacked by activists. Police seized several knives and bats from protesters, local media said.
Election officials react
The Election Commission denounced the violence and claimed the rally was an attempt to disrupt its activities. The head of the commission, Vladimir Dimitrijevic, expressed hope that it was an isolated incident and that any future attempts to challenge the election result would remain legal.
The body investigated opposition claims that ‘phantom voters’ had been allowed to cast ballots in Belgrade, but reported on Sunday that it had found no evidence that the election had been “stolen.”
Sunday riot
On Sunday evening, hundreds of pro-opposition demonstrators gathered in the center of Belgrade after being rallied by the SPN. Opposition leader Marinika Tepic, who declared a hunger strike last Monday and claims to be living on IV infusions, was barred from entering the Election Commission building. Meanwhile, an improvised stage was erected near the presidential residence, with speakers and performers whipping up the crowd.
Later in the evening, some activists stormed city hall, claiming they were seeking “to liberate the institutions.” The police intervened and drove them out.
Aleksandar Sapic, head of the temporary city administration, shared images of the damage caused by the rioters in the historic building, calling it “irreparable.” He declared that Serbia must be protected from the use of violence for political gain. He used the term “Maidanization,” referring to the 2014 armed coup in Kiev, which set the stage for the current hostilities between Russia and Ukraine.
‘Color revolution’
President Vucic denounced the riot, calling it an attempted “color revolution” and claiming that a foreign nation had warned his government about the threat beforehand. Prime Minister Ana Brnabiс thanked the Russian special services for providing intelligence to Belgrade.
The term ‘color revolution’ is often applied to the mass uprisings by ostensibly pro-democratic political forces in the 1990s and 2000s, including in Yugoslavia in 2000. Russia and some other nations perceive the wave as masterminded by the West to further its geopolitical goals, and executed through NGOs, media outlets, and parties funded by the US and its allies.
The Vucic government has been presented with a dilemma amid the current confrontation between Russia and the West. It is seeking EU membership for Serbia, which would require the realignment of Belgrade’s foreign policy with that of Brussels. However, Vucic has rejected Western calls to cut ties with Russia and join the US-led sanctions campaign against Moscow.
Responding to the turmoil in Belgrade, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova claimed it was an “obvious attempt by the collective West to destabilize the situation in the country through ‘maidan coups’,” according to RIA Novosti.
Webb Reveals Intricate Details in the Remains of a Dying Star (MIRI image)
My ex-husband & I had been married for a few years before I opened up to him about the sexual abuse I endured as a teenager, at the hands of my father. Naturally, he was upset and wanted to know why I’d waited so long to tell him about it. I informed him that while it was an awful point in my life, I had long ago dealt with the pain & made peace with myself about i, that it was something I didn’t think much of anymore, but that I had always intended to tell him when I felt the time was right. He seemed sat with my response, and we went on business as usual.
Fast forward 3 1/2 years later… we had a brutal argument one day about his habit of not coming home til the wee hours of the morning. His shift at work would end around 4pm each day, & while I understood the need or desire to have the occasional few beers with the guys after a hard day, it was happening far too often & he was being inconsiderate by staying out so late while I was left alone to care for our children (mind you, I also worked every day, as well.) Apparently, that enraged him and out of nowhere, with this extremely cold glare in his eyes, very calmly stated, “I bet you enjoyed what your father did to you…” I was crushed! The debilitating emotions I’d felt so long ago came rushing back to me, and I suddenly felt as if what I’d experienced in my childhood had just happened. I was violated all over again.
He did eventually apologize for what he’d said, but I was never able to look at him the same way. Three years later, we divorced.
The Crab Nebula Seen in New Light by NASA’s Webb (NIRCam and MIRI)
Somalia is not a real country. Somalia is a geographical expression which exists only on maps and in the minds of believers.
This is what Somalia looks like in imagination with its imaginary capital of Mogadishu.
image 483
And this is what Somalia looks like in real life.
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The red part what the UN-recognized Somalian government in Mogadishu (sorta) controls. When people talk about the “country of Somalia”, they’re unintentionally referring only to the red areas. That being said, the map is a little misleading. Even in the red area, the government lacks control over many local communities, especially in the northeastern area of Puntland. And the internal borders change on a day-to-day basis.
The yellow area is called Somaliland. It functions as an independent country. The government in Mogadishu has no control over Somaliland.
The gray areas are controlled by tribal communities and terrorist organizations. The government in Mogadishu has no control over the gray areas.
This is partly why Somalia is a developing country. The official government has control over less than half the country. This means that there are no nation-wide social services. No national education system; people are often unable to receive a non-religious education. No unified foreign policy. No well-maintained national infrastructure. And the people of Somalia are kinda too distracted by violence and political instability to invest in their futures. Large parts of the country are controlled by terrorists organizations.
Despite the above, Somalia does have a stable informal economy, based upon (mostly subsistence) agriculture. But no country every became wealthy by growing plants.
NASA’s Webb Findings Support Long-Proposed Process of Planet Formation
I heard this story from my neighbour, and it happened to them about a month ago.
So my neighbour (27 male) was going on a road trip with his father (about 55 or so) and they had to pull over on the side of the road, only about a half mile or so from the city limits. The traffic was pretty bad, and obviously the person behind them didn’t appreciate having to wait for them to pull over through two lanes of traffic, and followed them off the road. My neighbour hadn’t noticed the man following them, until he got out of his car (a work ute for a construction company) and pulled out a metal pole from the back of his ute. He came up and smashed the back windshield of the car, swore at the father (who was driving) and began walking back to his car pretty slowly.
Before he could start his car again, my neighbour and his father had walked up to the other man’s car and pulled out their badges.
Both of them are cops, the father is the police captain of the station. My neighbour said the man smelt like heroin, so they checked the car and found a bunch of drugs and equipment for druggos.
He then told the man that he would have a lot of paperwork to fill out.
I love that story. Be careful who you mess with.
NASA’s Webb Identifies Tiniest Free-Floating Brown Dwarf (NIRCam Image)
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Not to play
Nearby Planetary System Seen in Breathtaking Detail, Fomalhaut Dusty Debris Disk (MIRI Image)
I was 17, hitchhiking my way to the South of France after leaving home for good. I was waiting at a spot on the Route Nationale 7 in the northern part of Lyon. Not a very good place if you wanted to go south, but it was the best I had been able to do.
An open Mehari with a long haired young man at the wheel passed. Thy guy grinned, honked and then shrugged in the universal gesture of: “Sorry, can’t help you, mate.”
image 482
Citroen Mehari, based on the 2CV, image credit: radicalmag
About half an hour later a police car stopped next to me. To my surprise it was the guy from the Mehari. Hair tied in a neat bun underneath his kepi, his bright and colorful clothing replaced by a sombre French police uniform.
He asked me where I was going. In abysmally bad French I explained that my destination was Toulon.
He told me to enter the car. My heart sunk as I thought my short lived adventure was already over and I would be returned home to my mother in Germany.
Well, from what little I understood he told me he needed to go a certain route, which he did. After about an hour’s worth of driving through all sorts of strange neighborhoods he dropped me off south of Lyon at the RN7, an ideal spot to get to where I was going. He wished me luck, waved once and sped off.
BTW, my French is much better these days
NASA’s Webb Scores Another Ringed World With New Image of Uranus
My first instinct is to say “going into debt for a worthless degree.” At age 18, I took on almost $120k in debt for a B.A. in Communications from DePaul University in Chicago… a private, out-of-state university for me. After spending six years doing jobs that didn’t even require a degree, I had to go back for my Master’s in Teaching (also from DePaul) in order to get a career I wanted: teaching. Now, at age 40, I’m still paying for classes I took when I was 18… some $400 per month. That’s down from the $650 per month I paid right out of college, mainly because my father died and some of the loans were in his name only. I will be paying my student loans until I’m 52, assuming I don’t pay them off early.
But, then again, I met my wife in college, and she and the children she gave me are the best parts of my life. So maybe I don’t regret going into debt for college. Maybe it was worth it, after all.
My second instinct is to say “moving far from home for college.” When I was 18, I was so eager to spread my wings that I moved four states away for college. I went from living with my parents, to visiting them just once per year… then once every two years. There were so many times that I could have been there for my parents, but I was too far away. I gave up the chance to have a close adult relationship with them, before I realized what I was giving up. I hurt them and, as the years go by, the more I realize that I hurt myself, too.
But, then again, I met my wife in college, and she and the children she gave me are the best parts of my life. So maybe I don’t regret moving so far away for college. Maybe it was worth it, after all.
So my biggest regret is, I guess, not taking better care of myself when I was younger… particularly in my mid-20s, when adult responsibilities of a career, marriage, and children came along. The first thing to go, once my plate got full, was time at the gym. Then I started stress eating rather than stress working out. I worked hard in my early 20s to get in shape… lost 130 pounds in the process… and I squandered it all by the time I was 30. Now it’s starting to catch up to me. I’m sitting here, writing this now, when I would rather be riding my bike. It’s a nice day outside, but my left knee is in pain and stiff. According to the doctor, I have “more arthritis than they’d expect for a man my age,” but “that can happen when you carry a lot of weight around your whole life.”
If I could do it all over again, I’d go back to about age 15 and change only one thing: I’d only drink water (no soda, no coffee with cream and sugar), and maybe even go vegetarian, just for the reduced calories. Fast-forward 25 years, and I’m a much healthier 40-year-old man, still happily married and still with awesome children.
NASA’s Webb Reveals Intricate Networks of Gas and Dust in Nearby Galaxies
I lived in an apartment building. The upstairs neighbor seemed to think he was back in the dorm: parties all night, every night… people tromping around… music blasting with the bass turned all the way UP.
I tried a white-noise app. I got earplugs. I tried playing music next to the bed. My work was suffering.
Then I addressed him directly: I would go upstairs and politely ask him to please be a little quieter. No dice. I moved through the let-my-frustration-show stage… the angry stage… the I’ll-call-the-authorities stage…
When I couldn’t take the experiment in sleep deprivation any longer, I contacted our local city council to find out my options. Turns out there are regulations having to do with “health”: exceptionally loud noise is on a list of “stressors.”
They sent him a warning letter, saying if there were more complaints they might go so far as to serve eviction.
The following weekend a man turned up at my door. He was well-dressed, polite – older gent. He said he was Upstairs Neighbor’s father and could he talk to me?
Well, hey, I like to think I’m a reasonable person. “Sure, c’mon in…”
He pulled out the letter the Health Department had sent the UN and started waving it about, accusing me of intolerance, trying to cause problems for his son, on and on. He told me I should move out – “Nothing wrong with people having company and enjoying music. I’ve been in his apartment and the music is never loud.” As if the kid would give the old man full blast and prove I had cause for complaint.
I was taken aback, as much as anything because it never occurred to me a 30-year-old would have to send “Daddums” to confront a neighbor. Father wanted me to withdraw the complaint. I refused. He ranted some more, then got up to leave, crabbing the whole way about “How do you have the nerve” and so on. I saw him to the door, and as he stepped into the hallway he turned and said bitterly, “I am so disappointed.” “I understand, sir. If I had children who behaved as your son has, I’d be disappointed too.”
He was at a loss for words. It was so gratifying. 😉
NASA’s Webb Telescope Captures Rarely Seen Prelude to Supernova (NIRCam and MIRI Image)
When I was 18, I placed second in the state finals of the 50 freestyle — and wish I’d just gotten last. At that stage of my life, everything was about swimming. I obsessed over it and hoped to go to the Olympic trials some day.
The worst part, I lost by .03 seconds. It was a sickening moment as my biggest goal of the year slipped between my fingers. I grew up with competition dripping from every corner of my home. Both of my parents were competitive swimmers and my identity was all tangled up in the sport.
It feels weird now, looking back and realizing this was still a moment for celebration and appreciation. Second in the state was nothing to hang my head over. But I’d fallen victim to zero sum thinking that is so common with competition — and often quite toxic.
The curse of second place is even scrutinized by academics. In a study led by economist, Dr. Adrian Kalwji, researchers studied the life expectancy of 978 US Olympic medalists from 1904 to 1936. On average, gold medalists lived to 73. Bronze medalists lived to 75 and silver medalists lived to 70. The study speculates that dissatisfactory outcomes for silver medalists have lasting effects on their life, both in socioeconomic status and psychological contentment. Their insights aren’t merely for sports, but extend to human thinking on competitive systems. Why is second place so fraught with disappointment?
When I won silver, there was a feeling of squandered opportunity. I was so close I could smell it. I walked into the showers after my race on the verge of tears, and thought through the small mistakes I made and questioned everything. Could I have reacted quicker off the block? Could I have timed my turn better? Was my training wrong?
image 481
Second place hits hard because we use “relative standing” when analyzing outcomes. A silver can easily make you feel like the first loser. In a study of social comparisons by Dr. Abraham Buunk, his team found these comparisons make us feel better or worse, depending on which direction we focus on. Moreover, it is less the outcome that determines our feeling, and more how we choose to interpret it.
We anchor our self-perception to the nearest reference points which creates a framing problem. For example, in one study, participants said they’d rather live in a world where the average salary was $25,000 and they earned $50,000, than one where they earned $100,000 and the global average was $200,000. It is strikingly easy to look up, rather than down.
Which brings to mind one of my grandfather’s funnier moments demonstrating this concept. As young children, my sister and I would stand at attention in front of him after doing a task. He would sit in his recliner as we recited what we’d accomplished like we were military cadets. In this case, it was related to a cleaning chore.
We stood at attention and, as a reward, grandpa pulled out a five dollar bill and handed it to me in full view of my 4-year-old sister and said, “Here you go!” Then, he reached into his wallet and handed my sister a one dollar bill. She looked down at it, grimaced in anger — then crumpled it up and chucked it at the wall. He immediately started laughing and then gave her five dollars. It highlighted the constant comparative thinking, which is why managing our expectations is so important.
After losing my 50 free, I went on to swim in college the subsequent year. I placed 3rd in the 100 free at the Atlantic 10 Championship and was thrilled. I’d barely qualified for finals and was in the outside lane. That bronze medal is my most prized accomplishment in sports and much of it is because of how unexpected it was. It felt like a gift.
Technically, I’d still lost the race. Why couldn’t I be happy about every defeat as I was with this one?
Why you should embrace 2nd place
When we are upset about an outcome not matching expectations, we often warp reality and use counterfactual thinking. Famed social economist, Daniel Kahneman, did an exercise where participants were told of two people, Mr. Crane and Mr. Thomas, who were rushing to catch their flight and were 30 minutes late because of their driver. Mr. Crane missed his flight by 30 minutes and Mr. Thomas missed his by five. Nearly every participant said Mr. Thomas was surely more upset than Mr. Crane. Why? Because he was so close to catching his flight.
In reality, the discrepancy didn’t matter. You either catch your flight or you don’t. The outcome has already occurred and there is no benefit to resenting one’s self over it.
Dr. Sergio Pellis studied how rats play fight during development. Often, a large rat will jump on a smaller one and have an immediate advantage and be poised to win. But around 30% of the time, the initiating rat will allow the other to win. The act of getting second place is fundamental to their bonding, contentment and development. If the larger rat dominated every time, he’d lose his training partner, peer, and they’d both miss out on learning. Without realizing it, they celebrate their silver metals.
Competitiveness that’s focused on improving a skill rather than dominating others is proven to increase satisfaction and competency. It is healthier and more logical, because losing is an inevitable consequence of competition. In my case, losing that swim race in high school lit a fire under me, and allowed me to perform well in college. I swam far better times and appreciated the consequence of small improvements to my stroke. I never forgot that .03 second gap. Heck, I’m here writing about it 22 years later.
Lastly, I urge you to stay gracious in victory or defeat. How you conduct yourself impacts your own psyche and how people perceive you. An amazing thing happened after losing my race. The guy who beat me, Eric, was so cool about the whole situation. The next night, we competed in another finals. Just before, we were standing in line for the walkout where they play music to hype up our race. I was standing by him and casually turned and said, “Good race last night. Congrats. It was close.”
He smiled, patted me on the back and said, “Hey, it was all luck. Good race.” And I so appreciated his humility in that moment. He could have been arrogant as many good swimmers are, and said, “Yeah, I could have swam a half second faster if I tried more.” But instead, he paid homage to his competitor.
Remember that the bitterness of losing is a comparison problem. Being outperformed can be a way to bond with others and appreciate how far you’ve come. It can be motivation to study your performance and your victor’s. Beware of making counterfactual comparisons, and building in a bunch of assumptions about why things happened the way they did.
Perhaps on that night, I swam faster than I ordinarily would have. Maybe my opponent had a slower night than usual. There was no use blaming myself. It was an honor to compete and feel alive.
Losing does not put you on a moral low ground. Appreciate the coveted fire of motivation that competition gives you. Give thanks for the competency it instills. It is as my coach often reminded me, “You are in a one person race with yourself.” Focus on progress, not domination. A setback has transformative power, if you allow it.
NASA’s Chandra, Webb Combine for Arresting Views (Pillars of Creation)
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Female friends?
Oh I am so glad that I do not live in the West.
I think that I am going to try to reincarnate as a cat.
Banbury Tarts
Banbury Tarts
Ingredients
1 1/2 cups (3 sticks) butter
1 cup sugar
2 egg yolks
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
4 cups flour
Seedless jelly or jam (preferably currant or raspberry)
Instructions
Heat the oven to 375 degrees F.
In the bowl of a stand mixer, or in a large bowl using an electric mixer, cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy, 3 to 5 minutes.
Beat in the egg yolks, then the vanilla extract.
Slowly beat in the flour until combined and smooth to form the dough (the dough will be a bit stiff at the end, and you may need to add the last cup of flour by hand).
Form the dough into small balls and make a depression in the middle with your thumb.
Spoon a teaspoon or so of jelly in the depression.
Space the cookies about 2 inches apart on a baking sheet and bake until lightly browned, about 15 minutes.
We’re not fat because we’re lazy. We work harder than thin people do. Strap a 50-pound sack of flour on your back and keep it on all day, every day. You’ll then be working as hard as a fat person.
We’re not fat because we have no self-control. We control our diet far more than naturally thin people do. We resist things that thin people don’t think twice about.
You bitch that you can’t find clothes you like. We would love to have the opportunity to bitch that we can’t find clothes we like. Our problem is finding clothes at all. The fashion industry hates us because we don’t represent the image they want for their garments. We have to take whatever fits, whether we like it or not.
Weight is set by a complex collection of factors including genetics, hormones, metabolism, lifestyle, and even intestinal flora. Of these, lifestyle is the only one we have any control over. It’s not a sign of moral turpitude.
Airplanes are misery for us. Airlines brag about their legroom and let you upgrade to seats with greater distance between them. They never talk about hip and shoulder room and offer no options to improve that except upgrading to business class, which costs thousands.
Even some GPs (primary care physicians) have contempt for us and let it show. [2]
Doctors have a tendency to blame medical problems on weight rather than diagnosing as carefully as they would with a thin person. [3]
We are a prime target for scammers. The only people scammed with phony products more than we are are men with anxiety about their penises.
We are ashamed much of our lives. Ashamed to be seen to be out of breath, ashamed not to fit in a crowded elevator, ashamed to bump into people in crowds, ashamed when a nurse weighs us, ashamed to meet people who knew us before we were fat. Why have I never been to a high school reunion? Shame.
I once employed a guy that was dubious at best. He was always talking flat out. In his words he would say “Yeah that’s the dexies mate” when I would ask him to slow down. This is when I was in my mid 20’s and Google wasn’t a thing yet. Yahoo and Alta Vista were, however I had bigger things to fry let alone checking out what “dexies” meant.
Anyway, one day we’re in the car together. This isn’t my favourite thing to do with this particular employee however, he was the only one not waist deep into a job working on the pinball machines, arcade video games and jukes boxes we would repair and sell. We were close to my house and I thought I would drop in and grab something before going back to work. Forgetting who was with me I got out of the car and walked inside. The guy followed, that’s okay. I didn’t give it a second thought until he said this:
“Nice house, lots of nice cool stuff here (as he was looking at the big (for it’s time) 68 cm Sony CRT TV, Slim line Sony DVD player, and stainless and glass custom built cabinet.” He was scanning the house, when I remembered he had told me once he had spent some time in jail. I remember holding my breathe for a second and thinking “Shit… what have I done here? Is this guy taking inventory of my house?”
Then he said this:
“I see you have an alarm box out the front and your key pad is near the telephone which is near the sliding (glass) door. Don’t do that.”
I looked at him a bit puzzled. He had cased my house in less than 5 seconds. When he told me how a criminal would think. He said this:
“Look you have a bowling green style front lawn and a good looking house, like some of the other houses on this street, it’s nice. So, people are going to look… like a nice looking car. Then if your house peaks someones interest, they will case the house when you’re not home, or maybe while you are mowing the front lawn because, you can’t hear them, and you’re intently watching the lawn mower to make sure you don’t run over sprinklers. The guy would see you have an alarm box out the front and be looking for where the phone is through your nice big glass sliding door window.”
Then the guy took me out the front and told me exactly what “his people” did when we were looking at the alarm box.
He pointed up the alarm box and said: “We buy / steal a can of “Space Invader” (This is a can of expanding foam. Ironic I was in the arcade game industry and this guy is telling me how people break into houses using a product called “Space Invader”) from the hardware store. You take the bottom of the can and you smash the blue light. No alarm is going off yet. You then shove the tube of the Space Invader can into vents on the side of the alarm box and fill the box until the Space Invader oozes out of the box. Then you go to where the phone is.
This is the product called “Space Invader”
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It works like this. Spray it in… and in seconds it will expand after spraying and dry.
This is what Wikipedia says:
“Spray foam is a chemical product created by two materials, isocyanate and polyol resin, which react when mixed with each other and expand up to 30-60 times its liquid volume after it is sprayed in place.”
They would spray it into one of these:
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They would spray the stuff into the vents on the side. The one I had was made of metal back then. This is also the light they would smash off with the base of the Space Invader can.
He continued:
“You get to the window / door that is closest to the phone. By this time the Space Invader will be close to dried. Wait a few minutes. (which I remember he said “When you first start doing “breaks” (short for “break and enters”) those few minutes with your heart racing can feel like hours. All you can hear is your heart racing in your chest) Then smash the window, there is no “quietly”… just do it fast. Get in and take the phone off the hook. This will stop the alarm system from calling the alarm company. The alarm will be going off out the front however, it will be muted, no one will be able to hear it, the light is gone, the cops aren’t coming. Take your time, don’t rush, or you‘ll miss the good stuff. Move quickly, but don’t run. Take what you need / want and leave”
In about 30 seconds he had summed up the “How to break into a house and get away with it” question I had never asked myself.
And then he said this.. “Oh but you have a big dog, you’ll be okay” as my dog Zanni rounded the corner to see we were inside the house and he was outside checking out who was inside.
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This is Zanni. (He doesn’t normally wear a tie, however he had his best suit on as he was waiting for his date to come over before they went out on the town that evening.)
This was the best thing a criminal ever told me. The phone was moved, the alarm box was put way higher and in an awkward place to get to, let alone “install” and we did the rest of my neighbours houses as well.
Good to know how others think. I don’t have an alarm now. I have CCTV and a dog.
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This is Mr Leo. He has taken over from Miss Jen, who took over from Zanni. All have put in more than 20 years of service.
There was this boy in my class at school in 7th grade. He was short for his age. He kept to himself and never really mixed with anyone. He always ate his lunch alone on a bench seat which was on the edge of the playground just staring into space. It was like he was in his own little world and nothing mattered to him. I never saw him smile in all the time i knew him.
He would get called all kinds of names that really hurt him deep down. But he never retaliated or showed how much it hurt him, which seemed to infuriate his tormentors.
They were relentless. Mean. One day he stepped in front of a car outside of school and stopped in the middle of the road as if waiting for it to hit him. The driver screeched to a halt only inches away from his body. He was frozen and only moved when the driver asked if he was OK. He hung his head and walked away slowly.
Nobody chose him for team sports during PE and when he was the last one left everyone called him a loser and laughed at him. He hung his head and went to the far corner of the gym and sat down hiding his face in his hands.
They tormented him in the change rooms and started calling him a ‘homo, faggot and perv’. It wasn’t long before it had got around the whole school that this boy was a ‘homo’ and so everyone started calling him those terrible names.
He had fruit thrown at him from behind so that he never knew who it was. It hit him in the back of his head knocking him down to the ground. With tears in his eyes he tried to stand up but they came at him again and knocked his books out of his hands making him go down again. People laughed at him. He got up, grabbed his books, and ran outside and kept running till he couldn’t run any longer. He ended up walking for 10 miles just following a road not knowing were he was going. But he didn’t care if he died that day.
Still he didn’t retaliate. Or tell anyone. Or complain. The next week he wasn’t at school. Someone started a rumor that he committed suicide. Everyone laughed. Nobody called to see if he was all right. Nobody missed him. Nobody cared.
What they didn’t know was that his stepdad had hurt him so badly and that he was in hospital for three days. Too sick to attend school. He never told anyone about what happened when he returned to school. When everyone saw that he was still alive, they were disappointed. And told him to go kill himself. “Do it properly this time”.
He was still not well from what his stepfather did to him. When they pushed him into the lockers at school or tried to jam his head in the door, he let out a yelp. But the pain was not from what they did to him.
One day after PE he was acting very strange. He stood facing everyone with his head hanging low. As if his whole world was about to come crashing down. He was trembling. There was an unusual silence in the room that scared him. It was then that everyone saw his body. Covered in black and blue welts across his back, legs and arms. He had tears falling from his eyes and was clearly ashamed of his body.
The shower stung like a 1000 bees.
They didn’t touch his clothes or call him names or hit him; this time they left him alone.
That boy is me.
I never told anybody what had happened to me. I knew that if I snitched on my stepdad it would be 100 times worse. I was 12 and as far as I knew, nobody would help me even if I asked. I was too afraid of what he would do to me. I woke up every day hoping things would change. I didn’t hold grudges and never have. It helped me get through some depressing periods while i was at school.
I just wanted a normal life and to be happy.
I can’t say that I have found that dream and I probably never will. But at least I am in no danger now and I deal with the consequences of my childhood as it surfaces and as an adult I can put it in its proper place.
Because you, a normal people, who lacks bilingual ability and critical thinking, can’t distinguish truth from the sea of infomation in which propaganda hides.
If I say the “criticism” and “democracy” are just camouflages for America’s real intention to overthrow legitimate government, and 2019 riot is actually a West backed color revolution in the coat of “pro-democracy protest”, you must think I’m brainwashed.
However, I’m not. Simply because I’m bilingual. The organziers and main activists confessed they are funded and instructed by CIA and NED, also including MI6, and some other NGOs, but your media didn’t report this. And apparently you don’t read Chinese so you don’t know this.
This, in the academic field of Media and Communications, is called GATEKEEPING.
The news agencies had the right to decide which piece of news is to be reported. And the final news outlet is a result of FRAMING the narrative via news stories.
Narratives in news refer to news stories framed and presented to us about what’s happening in this world, and one major function of narrative is to shape our views on this world. And these views consist our attitude toward someone/something.
Like in this question, you think CCP is evil, evil is a attitude, which can be shaped by narrative, and narrative is the product of a series of news outlets.
As a passive receiver, you can’t ask news agencies feeding you whatever you want to know, but whatever they want you to know.
So, where to find the truth?
First, be bilingual, or at least knowing where to find the opposite voice. There are always English information from the other side, but you need to find it yourself.
Second, be of critical thinking. Some information is misleading, sometimes they even hide or delete something from the internet. When there’s only one side’s voice, it’s dangerous. Like Russia-Ukraine war, when Russia’s voice is muted, what you receive is the selected information.
Third, be open-minded to different voices. When I told you you’re brainwashed on HK matters, don’t argue back or leave, try to compare the differences and seek more information to verify yours or mine opinion.
Beef and Onion Stew (Stifado)
A traditional Greek Beef and Onion Stew makes a comforting cold-weather meal.
2024 01 11 12 10
Ingredients
1 medium onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 (2 pound) boneless beef chuck, tip or round, cut into 1-inch cubes
1/2 cup dry red wine
2 tablespoons red wine vinegar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon coarsely-ground pepper
1 bay leaf
1 stick cinnamon
1 (8 ounce) can tomato sauce
1 1/2 pounds pearl onions, peeled
Crumbled feta cheese
Instructions
Cook and stir chopped onion and garlic in oil in Dutch oven over medium heat until onion is tender; remove with slotted spoon.
Cook beef in remaining oil, stirring frequently, until all liquid is evaporated and beef is brown on all sides, about 25 minutes; drain fat.
Return onion and garlic to Dutch oven. Stir in remaining ingredients except onions and cheese. Heat to boiling; reduce heat. Cover and simmer for 1 hour and 15 minutes.
Add white onions. Cover and simmer until beef and white onions are tender, about 30 minutes.
Remove bay leaf and cinnamon. Garnish with feta cheese, if desired.
I drove out into the middle of a forest on a mountain. Accompanied only by a man that I barely knew. Without telling anyone where I was going. To a place with no cell phone service.
I was 18. He was 25 and attractive. I had known ‘of’ him (he worked at my company, in a different department), but I didn’t really actually know him. We both ended up at a party one night and, after chatting, we exchanged numbers.
He asked if he could take me hiking, and I said sure!
On Saturday, I packed up and he drove us for 2 hours into the wilderness of Mt. Baker. Halfway up, I realized… shit! I hadn’t told anyone where I was going (which you ALWAYS do if you’re going to be in the wilderness).
And my cell phone was out of service now.
And… who really was this guy next to me?!
I started to panic, as my anxiety fueled brain came up with bizarre ideas of what could happen.
“He could totes murder me and leave my body in the middle of the woods. This place is 119,989 acres… nobody would ever find me. And nobody knew I went with him for the day. If I were a murderer this would be, like, my dream come true.”
Luckily, I played it cool and halfway up the mountain blurted “Yo, don’t murder me bro!”
So smooth.
It turned out fine. He and I still go hiking together. But, in all fairness, it was one of the dumbest/ most naive things I’ve done.
Always tell people if you’re going into the wilderness. Don’t go off alone, out of cell phone service, with a man you barely know.
I was in Chattanooga working at a franchise restaurant as a waiter after the mortgage crash some years ago.
We advertised specials on the weekdays and it would draw in a crowd that was less affluent. That’s fine, I get that people like to eat out and I provided them with the same outstanding service (I was always #1 or #2 in tips).
We had this one lady that would come in every few weeks, eat her food, and then complain to have it comped. There was nothing wrong with the food, etc. Of course I wouldn’t get tipped, either. The folks she would eat with were invariably embarrassed, but did nothing.
After enjoying this (not!) several times she came in again. They sat in my section. I notified the manager we had a comp. coming.
I took their drink and appetizer orders and, when I returned, I asked if they were ready to order their meal. When it was her turn I had to say it…
“And what free meal will you be ordering this evening?”
The table was silent. The manager on duty looked at me like I’d lost my mind but was smiling. In fact I think the whole restaurant got quiet as the end of my employment drew near.
“What do you mean by that?” she asked, loudly and indignantly.
It was so quiet you could hear the dishwasher run in the back.
“Well,” I said most matter of factly, “in my times serving you you’ve always complained and gotten your food and drinks for free when in reality there’s absolutely nothing wrong. I don’t get it. You’re not homeless, you’re well-dressed, showered, and obviously didn’t walk here (or anywhere, I’d guess), so you must like going out and eating for free. It’s happened here and probably going to happen again tonight. I thought I’d just clear the air a bit.”
Yes, if I had to do it over again I’d have rhymed off what she had ordered and not paid for, LOL.
She wasn’t happy, as you may imagine, and got rather loud in that very quiet establishment.
Good news is I don’t think she came back.
Bad news was neither did I.
The Enduring Stellar Lifecycle in 30 Doradus (Composite: Infrared + X-ray)
“If I don’t call my mom right now, she’ll call the cops.”
Some background:
My mother devised a system of codewords and numbers that if used in certain ways meant different things. My older brothers would sometimes party with their friends in some not-so-great areas, so there were things that could be texted or said over the phone that saved them from bad situations. Maybe a rival gang showed up, the cops showed up, or there were unknown drugs on the scene (hey, we’ve all smoked a little weed).
The words were: breakfast sausages, kitty litter, tampons/pads/period (any could be used), ice cream, garbage, recycling
The numbers were 1–10.
”Breakfast sausages at 10?” Meant “Something is happening here and I feel unsafe”.
My mom would question “Does that work” for “do you need me to come get you”. Yes meant she came, No meant she alerted the cops who would usually just drive by.
So, how did this help me?
I was at a party where a guy was very insistent on getting me alone, and much bigger than I was. Upon getting me into a bedroom alone, he proceeded to push me down on the bed, and get on top of me. Over the noise of the party, screaming wasn’t working so I struggled, kicking and wiggling. When he grabbed my hair and yanked me up, I caught an old school alarm clock familiar red numbers and then started “freaking out”.
”Oh my god it’s so late I’m going to be f****in killed!” He stopped for a second, confused, and I said “I need to call my mom right now or she’ll call the cops! I was supposed to be home an hour ago!”
Immediately he was off of me and my phone was in my hand. No one wants cops at a party. My exchange with my mom went a little something like this:
”Hey mom, super sorry that it’s so late. I hope I didn’t worry you I lost track of time.”
”I thought you were going to stay with Theresa tonight after your party?”
”Oh crap yeah mom I’ll switch out the kitty litter tomorrow by 9. I’ll make sure I’m dropped off early so it’s done before the garbage is collected. Can you grab me some tampons at the store tomorrow?” (My would-be assailant is looking rather uncomfortable)
”I’ll throw on a robe and be there in 5. Be ready for me to scream.”
My mom proceeded to yell some rather nonsensical things at me over the phone, as I’d requested with “tampons”. “Garbage” was that whoever I was concerned about was near me, potentially being able to hear the phone conversation or read texts. “Kitty litter” meant I needed to leave ASAP, “9” meaning without cops.
My would-be assaillant was very uncomfortable and I left the room without a word, my mom yelling on the phone, and an overly exaggerated wince on my face. I reconnected with my friend and told her what happened, she walked me out with her boyfriend and ended up telling me that same guy had told her he thought we’d “really connected” and wanted my info.
In the end, I lied. But I would’ve been raped if I hadn’t.
It’s a system I’m glad to pass on to my daughter!
Reefer Madness 1936 | Full Movie | Louis Gasnier | Cult Classic | Dorothy Short | Kenneth Craig
I used to live in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. And I loved it. What a nice and lush forest full of flowers. But like all things, I only was able to work there for a few years until I was laid off. Those lay offs really sucked, I’ll tell you what.
Anyways, I had a really nice house in a low area on the edge of a swamp. It was great. Glorious. With high temperatures, and humidity, it was super lush. My house was brown with nice green shutters and doors, and a nice slab parking garage.
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Then I got laid off.
What a nightmare. I do not want to relive that. I’ll tell you what.
But, anyways, we had a bug-control man come over every month to spray for the cockroaches. Oh, they grew them BIG in Hattiesburg. And there were so many of them, at night the ground looked like it was moving. Like you were trippin’ or something like that.
So to save up money, we decided to cancel our monthly bug spraying.
Well, one week goes buy, and my cats were busy catching cockroaches. We would find dead cockroaches on the half-shell everywhere. But they got tired of it. You can only catch so many.
On the second week, I saw one my socks waking across the room.
By the third week we were hearing sounds in the walls, and periodic electrical shorts in our outlets. And then, but the end of the fourth week, when the television was covered with cockroaches, we made an emergency call to the exterminator to put on his flashers and race to us; we told him to come over immediately!
And he actually did.
Flashing red lights, and alarm! No kidding!
Jezze!
Lesson learned. If you live in a warm climate… please bug spray. Let me tell you, Joe’s Apartment (a fun movie) didn’t do that nightmare justice.
Had this happen in my first job. Learned my lesson.
Next time there was a review coming up ( about two months later ) I wrote up a synopsis of my work ( and my colleagues work) and delivered it to my manager’s manager two days before.
We then had the review where my manager misrepresented the work that was done, whose idea it was, and the results.
Not much happened. So two weeks later I went back to my manager’s manager with my request for a transfer. I was doing about 60% of the work in my team of 3; building all the scripts, generating the data for reports, including working at night and weekends because I was single.
When the department head indicated he was reluctant to approve the transfer I told him that was OK and that I’d have my desk cleared out by the end of the week. I knew that there was the possibility that this wouldn’t work out so I had been interviewing. I also knew that the firm had gone to a lot of trouble to recruit and train me & that having me leave would look bad.
I got my transfer.
Eggs with Peppers and Sausage
Eggs with Peppers and Sausage
Ingredients
1 large onion, sliced
1 pound Italian sweet peppers or banana peppers, seeded and cut into strips
You don’t ask, you don’t get.There are plenty of ways to enter a pool. The stairs is not one of them.If a street performer makes you stop walking, you own him a buck.When entrusted with a secret, keep it.Date with standards, not expectations. Just sit back and see if they can meet your standards or not.Just because you can doesn’t mean you shouldYou only get one chance to notice a new haircut.Don’t dumb yourself down.You are what you do, not what you sayDon’t lose sight of the hobbies you enjoyed as a child. They will help you live as you grow older.Don’t let your yearnings get ahead of your earning.Don’t dig for water under the outhouse.Dating advice you should know: if they like you, you’ll know. If they don’t, you’ll be confused.
My parents started middle class and worked their way to the 1%.
It isn’t this huge party. But there are some basic things you don’t worry about as much.
It is weird because I didn’t grow up wealthy at all. And had a strict-as-hell dad.
At some point after I left home, things really ramped up. My dad left the military and became a high ranking exec with SAP.
My mom started a vineyard at their farm. And sold off a lot of great real estate investments she’d made over the years.
But you would never know it if you bumped into them at the store or something. They have very humble personalities. If you went to their home however..
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When I wake up in the morning in their guest room I get to enjoy a view like this:
image 127
When I visit they spend most of their time working around the house and on the farm. We don’t really sit still much. And even when we are it is because we are working on something. We are worker-bees.
Also, I think everyone has a misconception as to how wealthy the top 1% is. 10 years ago, even I had the impression that 1%ers don’t work hard and take 9 vacations a year. I think it is just different if you started small and got there in your middle age and have kids.
At that point, you are more concerned with managing everything and making sure your kids are doing OK.
(Maybe that it is .01 percenters that do all that laying around by the pool…)
Either way I love visiting my parents, but every time I get home here in Florida my house feels really really small! 🙂
This happened in English class back in 2018, and the second it happened, I literally searched for a question that this answer would correlate to. The rest was history.
Okay, so class had just started. The teacher was marking the roll on her laptop, and some girl named Sophie was at her desk to ask her something.
“Ethan James?”
“Yeah, here!”
Then, suddenly, Sophie was like
“Ethan James; absence explained? What does that mean, Ethan? Why is your absence explained?”
I had zoned out, but I perked up upon hearing my name. As one does. I realized what was happening, and I started monologuing.
“Hey, can I get the whiteboard for a sec?”
I said, addressing my teacher. She obliged.
I drew one circle on the board.
image 17
“Sophie, you see this circle? This circle represents the status of my attendance.”
I then drew another circle next to it but not connected.
image 16
“You see this other circle, Sophie? That second circle represents your business.”
“Yeah. Okay” Sophie was confused.
“Now, Sophie, do you see any correlation between the two?”
We have three kids. The oldest is 18, and the youngest is 4. So, for 18 years now, our lives have revolved around raising our children. My life in particular has been more child-raising intense, because I’m home with them more often and I took on the role of primary domestic engineer in our marriage.
I was prepared for how expensive kids would be, and the good times and bad times and whatnot.
But lately, I’ve been experiencing something no one warned me about: not knowing what to do with myself as my children gain independence.
Just in the last few weeks, I’ve noticed that my youngest can get her own snacks, turn on the TV and find her shows by herself, entertain herself with her own toys, and even tuck herself in at night. When my other children did this, I was either still busy in grad school, or had another baby who needed my attention.
But now, I’m finding myself, more and more, looking for things to do as my children do their own thing.
Before sitting down to write this, I asked both of my youngest children if they’d like to play something with me. They both said no. I wasn’t prepared for that. Normally, they’d jump on the chance to play with me. They’d insist on it. But right now, they’re each playing by themselves.
I’ve heard that business owners sometimes have a similar problem: they dedicate so many years to getting their businesses off the ground, that once those businesses are successful, and they have employees who do most of the work, the owners aren’t sure what to do with their new free time.
On the upside, my house has never been cleaner. I filled the unexpected free time this week by cleaning. Now, there’s not even much of that to do.
I predict I’m going to be one of those people who retire, and six months later find another job out of boredom.
I was going home on a two-lane highway on my motorcycle when a speeding 18-wheel truck came up behind me and started crowding me. I’m talking about an 80,000 lb tractor-trailer so close that I couldn’t see his windshield above the grille in my mirrors.
I was nearly to my left-turn to my road and I was afraid he couldn’t see my brake light or turn signal so I speeded up a little with my signals on, but he speeded up also. So I punched the throttle and jumped out about 100 feet in front of him, grabbed the clutch and stomped on my back brake to lock the 4.10 back tire to make smoke for about two seconds and then left off the brake and clutch and punched the throttle again. Mister Tailgater was doing the shimmy-shake trying to keep his trailer behind his cab in my mirrors and using both lanes to do it while I rocketed past my turn and outran him to the small town a mile away. I parked next to a friend’s business and upon being greeted and hearing the 18-wheeler grinding to a stop out front I ask the store owner, “Hey Spider, if you’ve got that sawed-off shotgun under the counter, I might need to borrow it in a minute.”
Fortunately, the trucker stared at the business for a minute and then drove away.
Ministry reveals UK’s MI6 using foreign national for espionage targeting China
China’s national security authority recently uncovered a case involving the United Kingdom’s Secret Intelligence Service, commonly known as MI6, using foreign nationals to engage in espionage activities against China, the Ministry of State Security announced on Monday morning.
In a statement, the ministry said that in 2015, MI6 established an “intelligence cooperation relationship” with a foreign national surnamed Huang, who served as the head of a consulting firm overseas.
The statement did not identify Huang’s nationality.
Subsequently, MI6 instructed Huang to enter China multiple times. Under its guidance, Huang gathered intelligence related to China and identified prospective individuals for MI6’s counterespionage efforts, according to the ministry.
MI6 also provided professional intelligence training to Huang in various locations, including the UK, and equipped him with specialized spy equipment for intelligence exchange and communication, it said.
Through meticulous investigation, the national security authority promptly discovered evidence of Huang engaging in espionage activities and took criminal compulsory measures against him.
Upon examination, it was determined that Huang provided MI6 with 14 pieces of classified information and three intelligence reports, the statement said.
Throughout the investigation, the national security authority has kept the consulate of Huang’s country informed on his case and has arranged consular visits for him, ensuring the protection of his legal rights in accordance with the law, it added.
I think we could all write a book about this but the rudest I heard was from a pharmacist while I was waiting in line for a prescription, not the other customers. My two year old daughter was potty training and doing a good job. That day she wanted to wear her big girl panties. She had been doing so for months.
The wait was long at the Drug Store. She needed to use the restroom. I asked if there was a restroom. The pharmacist barked “ no” at me. I explained the situation and asked if she could just use the employee rest room since we had waited a half hour already.
The pharmacist said “She will just have to wet her pants”. Really? I turned to my child and said. “Honey, just pee on the floor here. This place is just one big potty. “. My two year old politely squatted and peed all over the floor. The pharmacist was screaming. I said “ honey, this nice man will clean it up right after he gives me my paper back so we can go somewhere else. “
There were a lot of mothers also waiting and everyone found it quite funny but the pharmacist. I went back to that drug store a few years later and they had installed a public restroom.
PS. Whether you think I was right or wrong is of no matter to me. But the fact that some people think I did this over the use if the bathroom shows I did not make myself clear. I was a lawyer. Had the pharmacist said their insurance did not allow public use or said I might try xxx store that has a public restroom, no problem I get that. I could have taken her to the car and used a McDonald’s cup. It was that this man told a little girl to just wet her pants. Had she wet her pants the result would have been the same on the floor. I just decided to avoid the wet pants part and show this man that he was not providing customer service-of any form. I’m sure the issue of needing a restroom had come up before. The store should have had an appropriate response. There are Federal laws in place now concerning employee only restrooms.
Yes, and it all worked out beautifully: another employee in a different section whom I did not know well and was not particularly friendly with went out of his way to tell me that my bosses wanted to hire a woman to replace me (I am a man) and not just any woman, but one hot enough for them to ogle and flirt with. That is the kind of pervs that they were. After hearing that, I wiped my company-issued Macbook Air clean, mentally checked out, and waited for my last day.
After I had left the company, I heard that they did ogle and flirt with her, and I was told that they had hired her specifically for her charms – she flirted right back.
A few months later I got the delicious news that they had taken her on a business trip to meet the company’s most important client. In short, a good time was had by all, and she ended up fucking an employee at the client’s headquarters.
It gets better, a sympathetic former co-worker told me that he had dug around and found that my replacement had a police record (shoplifting I think) and her mugshot was online.
When I heard this news I sent an anonymous email to just the right person at the client’s headquarters describing the sex and a link to the mugshot and the fallout was magnificent: the client demanded that my replacement be fired, and she was, and my company’s reputation with their most important customer was ruined (they didn’t lose all the business, however).
Suddenly my old bosses were checking out my LinkedIn profile and I had the pleasure of blocking all three.
Millions of American’s Begin Moving into Vans | VanLife EXPLODES on Google Trends
Concierge: I’m sorry sir, we’re fully booked out. I can recommend a place down the road.
Me: How is it possible you are booked out? I’m looking at “Booking dot com” right here on my phone and it says you have a room going here.
Concierge: I’m sorry sir, we’re fully booked out. (and then smiles at me like I’m some sort of idiot)
Me: Okay, I suppose I’ll work something out.
Concierge: Yes sir. Sorry sir. (looks down at whatever it is Concierges do when they are not serving someone)
I step away from the concierge desk and think to myself… What happens if I simply press “Book Now” so… I didn’t think, I just pressed “Book Now”. The message comes back with my booking confirmation code. Bear in mind, not a single person is in the foyer, and not a single person has been and spoken to the concierge in the last 20 seconds since I stepped away from the concierge desk.
Me: “Mate, I’d like to check in please.”
Concierge: Certainly sir do you have a booking?
Me: (stunned he doesn’t recognise me from 20 seconds ago) Um, yes, here it is on my phone.
Concierge: Excellent sir, do you have any bags the porter can take up to your room for you Sir?
Me: Narr, it’s okay I only have this one bag. I’ll be okay.
I was thinking all the way up to my room in an elevator with the porter guy that had a single carry bag on a huge dome shaped brass pipe top with a red carpet floor baggage cart…
… “WTF just happened”
image 15
Picture this with one case on it. That case is the size of a case that you pull along for a two day stop over…
I once was fired from a job after a night out drinking with friends. Of course, most of the friends were work friends.
One of them mentioned they were worried about upcoming changes to the department and thought it was odd they were told to not do their job when they came in each day.
I told him … they’re going to fire you. (I had no idea…I wasn’t told anything, I was guessing) BUT i told him to never stop doing his job … that it was a test to see if they needed him at all. Turned out I was right. But someone told my boss that I had made this prediction.
I was terminated for professionalism. Off the clock, after hours, not on site … with no first hand knowledge shared.
When they brought me into my bosses office to fire me, I started to say “You can’t do this…” followed by “of course you can, otherwise we wouldn’t be here at this point.” I accepted it and turned in all my stuff, gave them notes on where I was in various projects and thanked them for the time and experience. To which my director literally said ” Thanks for your professionalism” I grinned and said “well it’s professionalism that got me fired according to you.”
And ai walked out of there and got a job paying 40% more in as month.
They can fire you for any reason and for no reason. They can even fire you for illegal reasons if they just cover it with a legal looking one. Ultimately, you can’t let it affect you. Sure money is going to be different and plans will change but you’ll get through it and you wouldn’t want to work somewhere that wants to fire you but can’t in the end.
When an Industrial leader gets arrogant and snobbish, there will be a D-day to it.
Lets look in perspective. As an experience sputtering process engineer, when i look at the EUV machine, I find that they are too elaborating. It consume hell of electricity and Hydrogen. The from my common sense if that if we can plough electron by electron onto an anode of cathode, I am sure we can make Nodes like a 3D printer. So I was right , now Cannon has done exactly that and they can produce cheaper chips then DUV and EUV… with the baggage of high energy cost and high H2 consumption. I believe Liang Mong Song already taught about long after he left Samsung. Cheers to China for giving the WEST as good bashing. When the old guards of China, Wen Jia Pow has stated we should share roles and work, but the American will never understand and Taiwan will face the music when they fondle American ideology to the hilt. As a staff in American MNC for more then a decade, I see the blind corners which will kill the American innovation. American Capitalism is all about me and not us.
No the U.S. is aggressively bribing poor fishermen away from fishing for their families to stir up shit on Chinese boats for thousands of dollars of cold hard cash paid in the high seas by CIA and NED operatives. That is precisely what happened.
All is well ap to now. The Pinoy fishermen are happy getting easy money, Bumbong Marcos U.S. happy the U.S. released his family wealth stuck in the U.S. and Philippine governments get more free money or bribes to allow US more bases. The money is used to improve infrastructures where China win the contract. You can say the U.S. pays for Philippine infrastructure!
So China prosper, US can shout it has more bases, fishermen are happy. But the only victims are Americans who will pay and pay and pay! If I were China I would bribed the fishermen to rob the CIA and NED cash by the boat loads to bribed them. That will bring peace faster.
Survival: If you get lost in the wilderness, find a river, that will lead you to a town. Most towns (or people) live near water of some sort.
Happiness: Muting politics on social media platforms makes them 1000% better.
Indian Career Paths: Roughly 70% of Indians study Engineering (this blows my mind).
Trolls: There are very unhappy people in the world. They will leave mean, racist, homophobic, anti-semitic, virtually any ugly comment they can think of – to make others share their misery.
Driving: If someone cuts you off in traffic – it is more effective to give them a thumbs down than flip them off. This will cause them to rethink their actions.
Losing: Smile at the person who defeats you. It will steal their joy in defeating you.
Oops: If you find chewing gum on clothes or the carpet, put an ice cube on it for 2 minutes, it will become hard and come off easily.
Restaurant: If you find a fly in your soup, before sending it back, put a ton of salt into the soup. That’s the only way you’ll know they re-cooked new soup rather than send the same soup back out.
“I realized my life was too valuable to let go of,” she said. “And that gave me the courage to survive.”
This is the story of Alison Botha, on December 18, 1994, she was abducted in her car near home by two strangers who took her to an area outside the city in South Africa and by the end of the night, she had been raped brutally and stabbed 30 times in the abdomen, to mutilate her reproductive organs and 16 times to her throat.
image 132
Alison Botha, with knife mark on her throat.
She said, “all I could see was an arm moving above my face making a sound. A wet sound, it was the sound of my flesh being slashed open. He was cutting my throat with the knife. Again and again and again.”
“Do you think she’s dead?” one attacker asked. “No one can survive that,” the other replied. They were apparently satisfied that they had killed her ’cause she was almost decapitated, so they left her for dead, but Botha was still breathing and could see car headlights coming through the bushes.
image 131
She started trying to get onto the road and as soon as she pulled herself up, she felt something slimy coming out from her abdomen, her intestines. She had to use one hand to keep her gut from spilling out and the other hand to hold on to her own head, ’cause it started to fall backward.
image 130
A young veterinary student named Tiaan Eilerd, who was driving down to Port Elizabeth from Johannesburg, saw Botha lying in the middle of the road and stopped. She was rushed to the hospital, where doctors were stunned by her horrific wounds. She was soon able to identify attackers from police pictures while she was still in the hospital. This led to the arrest of the “Ripper Rapists,” as they were named in press release.
Both attackers were found guilty and sentenced to life in prison in August 1995. But after serving 28 years, both were granted parole in July 2023.
Alison Botha soon became a motivational speaker and began traveling around the world, telling her story in different countries. She is one of the first women from South Africa to speak publicly about rape, she helped inspire other survivors to come forward and tell their stories to the world.
Note: If you are a victim of rape and planning to commit suicide, and if you change your mind after reading this story, then this would be a big favour on me. The only purpose of writing this is to let you know that you are precious, I just want to motivate you to live ’cause the world needs you. Please do me a favour
Unknown number comes up on my work phone, not unusual, so I answer and am greeted by someone with an Asian accent, enquiring about the accident I had been involved in, having had far too many of these over the years I responded with, It only happened this morning how did you know, well sir we work very closely with your insurance company, this was the point I put the phone on hand’s free, and the rest of the office tuned in, Well I am very glad you called I was driving along the A1 near Catterick and someone drove straight into my vehicle, the caller was most concerned for my health and wellbeing, which I informed them that I was very shocked and shaken, I am now passed to a supervisor who needs Details so road A1, location Catterick, vehicle Scorpion, speed 65, damage scuffed the paintwork,
There was a pause as they went through the information, um sir I am struggling to find your car, you can’t find it it’s a very common vehicle around here, can you please give me a bit more detail please certainly it’s a Scorpion CVRT, no sir I am still struggling to find your vehicle, really I am not sure if you will be able to help me if you can’t even find my vehicle, It’s a Scorpion Combat Vehicle Recce Tracked, it’s a Tank mate definitely scuffed the paintwork terribly, silence from the other end of the phone, followed by a single expletive, and call ended.
Funny enough it’s the only phonecall I have ever got a round of applause for as well as much laughter.
My mom and I go on a cruise every year for her birthday. I am disabled and have a walker for my immense back pain, I cannot stand for long periods of time, so it has a seat. My mom and I wait ONE HOUR in a line WE started to get into a show just so we could get our choice of seats (first come, first serve). A queue starts behind us about 20 minutes before the show and we are happy that we waited as we wanted to record from a very specific seat (middle isle). This woman shows up with her son in a wheelchair from the cruise liner, and proceeds to stand right in front of the entry doors of the venue. My mother and I give her the benefit of the doubt and my mother proceeds to let her know there is a line behind us (it wraps around a hallway). She looks at my mother and completely ignores her, sees a tall man walking past and says to him, loudly, ‘can you believe this woman wants me to get in line when my son is in a wheelchair?!’ The son is literally silent the WHOLE TIME with a small cast over his left foot. The man looks around the corner and sees me sitting in my walker. He says to the lady, ‘she has a disabled person in line too.’ The lady responds, ‘so?’ The man just walks off. My mom tells the whole line what happened. The line just ignores everything and shrinks back, trying to avoid the conflict. I am in shock about the whole thing and only getting angrier, by the fact the cruise liner crew isn’t telling her to move for blocking the door, OR asking her to get in line. I’m so angry by everyone’s actions I can’t even react. The doors open and she proceeds to sit EXACTLY WHERE WE WANTED TO SIT. The crew even offer to take the boy’s wheelchair since they aren’t allowed to leave them in the small isles! Even remembering this trip now upsets me. I couldn’t be more angry at myself for not saying anything and trying to stay calm. I should have just acted like I had NO MANNERS like her! Apparently the ‘squeaky wheel gets the grease’.
That was last year, the horrible time we had because of this lady just makes me cringe every time I think about it. I hope the woman reads this and remembers how she ruined what was before that moment, a beautiful and fun vacation. I hope she learned some manners or stays home, no amount of money can make her worth anyone’s time.
*EDIT* Thanks to everyone with the kind and understanding comments. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so heard. I think this event effected me so much BECAUSE I try to be thoughtful of others constantly and don’t get out much. Writing this out and getting validated with positive responses have really helped me, thank you. Please be aware you have made a difference in my life.
There are many cheaters and “professional complainers” among the guests making nice business from giveaways and compensations. I personally recall one amiable couple who, while being alone in the corridor, hid the “caution, wet floor” sign. Then, they went straight to the reception desk, man literally shouting at the poor receptionist that his wife had just accidentally slipped there and injured her back. They caused a small scandal: hotel manager was called in to calm them down, medical staff treated the “injured” woman, and safety officer scolded the poor cleaning lady responsible for the corridor. Nobody was able to find “caution wet floor” sign that ought to be there, so the guests seemed to be right and were offered a financial compensation + next cruise for free. However, what cheating guests didn’t know was that there are many security cameras on the ship, some of them smartly hidden… So when the couple was invited to the hotel manager’s office next day, they expected to settle the details of their compensation. Hotel manager kindly greeted them, asked them to make themselves comfortable and said something like: “Before we proceed with the compensation, let me show you one short movie.” The couple watched with awe the TV screen, showing them hiding the sign from the floor to the locker and then running to the reception. With this proof in hand, hotel manager offered them choosing between two ways of “compensations”: 1) Trial at court. 2) Putting them on passenger blacklist shared with ALL cruise ship companies, that denies them of taking any cruise till the rest of their lives. They chose no. 2) .
Yup, it was a famous named restaurant, I was the man who brought the inspection rating up from a 50 to a 98 percent,I also kept the lights on and the orders paid up to date, as well as didn’t have a huge turn over of employees. But some punk ass wanna be with out the education I had of running a business as well as the decades of experience had help in getting me bumped out of my job, little snot nosed shit sitting in my office telling me he’s my boss. 2 weeks into his employment he fires me. Okay fine I really don’t care, then this is the best part, he had no clue of how to do what I did, called me at home asking me for instructions. I gleefully told him there is no way that I’m going to teach you in a few minutes that took a life time to aquire in education and actually experience. You got what you wanted at my expense which was my job that you figured was up for grabs, I’m not going to help you, you’re on your own. 3 months later the business was shut down, and that was your Burger King at the Sunset Esplanade in Hillsboro Oregon that now the same building was remodeled into the chase bank. Thats karma at its best, screw me out of my life long career choice and not only did you lose me, but 45 other people lost out in the process.
I went away for the weekend, and my roommate was planning on having a big party, since he wouldn’t disturb me.
We had a huge backyard and they decided to have a competition for the coolest explosion, without gun powder. You know the mentos and diet coke, and the baking soda and vinegar, over filled balloons kind of thing. Stupid things like filling a balloon with diet coke and dropping in a pack of mentos in a paper tube.
The kitchen door led to the deck and back yard.
It all sounds harmless until you add copious amounts of alcohol.
I came home Sunday evening and found my roommate and a couple of friends scraping one end of the kitchen ceiling with an ice scraper. The culprits and ceiling were all different colors from the food coloring and other dyes that they had added to their experiments to make them more impressive. It appeared like tapioca or gummies stuck to the ceiling. They had matching paint already on half the ceiling. They had hoped to have it done, before I came home. But they had slept until 2:00 pm, before starting clean up.
No amount of begging would get them to tell me what happened. But I’m guessing that they prepared everything in the kitchen before taking it outside, and when alcohol is involved, I m guessing they weren’t careful.
So I came home to a bunch of hungover red and green people , with a 4 foot scraper, scraping one end of the red and green pebbled ceiling, while someone else was using a roller on a stick, roll paint along behind them.
I had to go running to the medical store for purchasing the medicines prescribed by the doc.
In the afternoon, the doc prescribed some medicines and I went to the store to buy them.
There was a lady who received the prescription. She immediately ran her eyes through it and started searching for the meds in the shelves.
The total bill was 569 inr.
I paid 600 inr. She returned 30 inr and a dabur honitus (worth 1 inr obviously).
I was a bit reluctant at first, still I asked:
Me:Um.. excuse me. Can I get 1 rupee instead of the toffee?(I asked it not only because I disliked that toffee, but also because I loved collecting coins.)
She:No. We don’t keep coins for change. Anyway, what difference does it make.. the toffee too costs 1 rupee.
Me:Are you sure you don’t keep coins?
She:(obviously being annoyed by me) Yes. We dont.
Me: Okay. Thanks.
I went back to the ward.
By the evening some more new meds were prescribed.
I went to the store again.
The lady was still there. She gave me a forceful smile. I smiled back.
This time the bill was 131 inr.
I handed 130 rupees and that one dabur honitus.
She glanced at me unappealingly.
Me: Sorry mam. I don’t have coins for change. Anyway what difference does it make.. the toffee too costs 1 rupee.
I thanked her and gave a brief smile as I headed back.Happy and satisfied.
The person asking the question seemed to want an answer like this:
In response to the request of the United States, the Netherlands suddenly revoked ASML’s sales license to China, and some lithography machines planned to be shipped to China were intercepted. The free world successfully prevented China from acquiring advanced semiconductor production technology, and the United States won again.
image 110
But sorry, that’s not the case.
On January 3, the Dutch government suddenly revoked the export licenses for two models of DUV lithography machines (NXT: 2050i and NXT: 2100i) approved in 2023. However, ASML announced that the DUV lithography machines purchased in advance by customers from mainland China had all been delivered before the license was revoked.
In other words, when the license was revoked, the planned lithography machine had already been shipped to China.
Let’s sort out the process of this incident, and you will find how interesting the game between the Dutch and Americans is.
Since the beginning of the trade war, the United States has asked ASML to ban the export of lithography machines to China, which can be used to produce advanced semiconductors. After a year of haggling, the Dutch government compromised. ASML is prohibited from exporting EUV lithography machines (used to manufacture semiconductors below 7nm, which are more advanced) to China, but they can still continue to sell DUV lithography machines (used to manufacture semiconductors above 7nm, which is slightly behind).
The Chinese felt threatened, so they added a large number of orders for DUV lithography machines. In the past three years, most of ASML’s DUV lithography machines have been sold to the Chinese.
China’s semiconductor industry has been accelerating its development, making Americans quite nervous.
In 2022, the United States requires the Netherlands to increase restrictions again, prohibiting ASML from selling DUV lithography machines, and completely cutting off the source of equipment for the Chinese.
In June 2023, the Netherlands issued a new ban but announced that existing licenses remained valid and ASML could continue to deliver.
In December 2023, the Netherlands announced that existing licenses will be invalidated immediately
In January 2024, ASML announced that all Chinese orders had been delivered.
Found the problem?
US government: Netherlands must obey
Dutch Government: OK
—-
June, Dutch government: ASML, what to do?
ASML: You announce it first and then give me some time
July, Dutch government: ASML, is it okay?
ASML: One more moment
In August, the Dutch government: ASML, is it okay?
ASML: One more moment
In September, the Dutch government: ASML, is it okay?
ASML: soon
In October, the Dutch government: ASML, is it okay?
ASML: Just a little bit
In November, the Dutch government: ASML, is it okay?
ASML: Almost done
In December, the Dutch government: ASML, is it okay?
ASML: OK, all delivered
Dutch Government: In order to maintain world peace and assist our great allies, we announce the immediate cancellation of sales licenses to China. immediately! immediately!
The Netherlands cannot fight against the United States, but this does not prevent the Dutch from trying their best to safeguard their interests. After all, that is tens of billions of dollars in profits, and they have sold all the equipment they can sell to the Chinese in the past two years.
image 12
ASML CEO (Peter Wennink) told reporters, “There is no hope of completely isolating China. If we don’t share technology, they will study it themselves.” “China has 1.4 billion people, and many of them are very smart. They will Come up with solutions that we haven’t thought of yet. You’re forcing them to be very innovative.”
The Chinese cannot control the madness of the United States. Their approach is to purchase as much technology and equipment as possible to buy time for the equipment they develop.
Once the Chinese get this done, the industry will be disrupted.
Here are 8 things you have to consider when choosing life partner:
1.Ability to cope with your family
Your family will always be a key support system in your life. They can tell if your prospective life partner is suitable or unsuitable for you. If he or she cannot cope with your family members, you might be choosing a wrong partner.
2. Find someone who makes you laugh.
A sense of humor can help you overcome many of life’s obstacles. If someone can make you smile when you don’t feel like it, that’s a great quality.
3. Choose someone who respects you
When choosing a life partner be sure to select someone who will respect all aspects of your life. Mutual respect is one of the defining traits to look for in a life partner.
4. Find someone who have shared values
Having shared values reinforces the foundation of your relationship. Simple things such as consensus on the number of children you want or living within your means create a conducive environment for your relationship to thrive.
5. Choose an honest life partner
If a relationship is not enshrined in a culture of honesty and trust, it will definitely fail. Choosing a life partner who does not refrain from open and genuine communication is important.
6. Throw out the Idea of Perfect
Don’t make a checklist — mental or otherwise — of traits your future partner must have. You can’t conjure up your perfect mate and go buy said robot at Target. If you must make a list, make a list of deal-breakers: no smokers, no drug addictions, no one with a violent felony conviction. Those are healthy boundaries to set.
7. Know how they handle anger
You’ll need to observe this one rather than asking about it. Watch how they behave when they don’t get their own way, are disappointed, or feel angry. How people act with others under these circumstances says a lot about how they will one day act with you.
8. Find someone who have the same financial and social standards
It is not always important to have the same status, but having a similar financial and social standard helps in thriving together. If one person is very poor and the other is very rich then there is a possibility of being called a gold digger. But there is no exact rule book but do check if your potential partner has the zeal to make it later in life.
I had a friend call me in the middle of the night, asked me to get my gun, and go over to his house. When your best friend asks you this, you don’t hesitate. Eventually the story came out – his wife was the manager of a jewelry store. Some men followed her home after she closed (crossing county lines), then at gunpoint (turns out it was a BB gun), forced her to drive back to the store, open it up, and unlock everything so they could clear it out. Of course, when she opened the store after hours, the security team watched on camera and called the local PD. When the perps left, the police were waiting for them. They took her car, and theirs and ran from the cops. After crashing and rolling both cars, they were arrested.
the morons got the idea from a movie. If they had just walked in during daylight and stole/robbed the place, they would have gotten 5 years. Instead, they committed multiple FEDERAL felonies (kidnapping etc), and all of them were sentenced to a minimum of 20 years in federal prison.
edit: the reason for asking me to come over with my gun:
He didn’t know if they were going to come back there. At that point the chase was still going on.
As a follow up – he gave my description to the local police, and let them know I’d be at his house. They showed up about an hour after I arrived, and I answered the door. I was slightly nervous because being 6’4 and nearly 400lbs I’m not a small dude, and had a 45 in a holster on my waist. I went to turn the porch light on, only to discover the porch light was burned out. I was very careful to let them know who I was and immediately informed them that I was armed – being sure to keep my hands nowhere near my firearm. When they asked for ID, I let them know I was removing it from my right rear pocket and moved with very clear movements, allowing them to see that I was reaching for my wallet and not my firearm. After they verified I was who I claimed to be, they made a comment like “yeah, I’d be armed too”. I love living in a rural community! 🙂
When I was in high school in 1965 I was reading a book about lesbians called The Grape Vine. My Mom asked me what I was reading. I said “a book about lesbians”. My Mom said “that’s nice, you love the theater”. I said “ no, those are Thespians. This is about lesbians, women who love women, not men”
My Mom insisted there was no such thing as a lesbian adding that the proof was that there was nothing two women “ could do together”. After my mother became hysterical, I went to my room.
Later that night my father paid me a visit. I was a little worried as my mother was his princess. He said “Laura, your mother is 45. She has made it to 45 without knowing what a lesbian is. Unless you are a lesbian, feel free to NOT educate her further”
I think when my Mom was about 80 she told me there were actually lesbians.
PS. Oh my. My mother would die a second time if she knew over 2k people liked this story. My Mom was so embarrassed that I got divorced she told everyone that my first husband was hurt in the Viet Nam war and that was why he shrunk 5 inches, grew blond hair and green eyes ( husband number two).
Nicaragua BETRAY Ally U.S in South America, Choose China
Around 10 or 12 years ago, I was on a trip and stopped at a rest area to stretch my legs and use the bathroom. As I walked back out to where my car was parked, I noticed a college age kid standing in front of his car with the hood up. I wandered over and asked him if he was having car trouble.
He replied yes and that his car wouldn’t start. He still had all his lights and so forth so I knew his battery seemed okay, but the engine wouldn’t turn over.
The car was an Acura, if I recall correctly, and the starter was located on the top of the engine, rather than down underneath the car. On the starter was a warning sticker that said not to hit the starter with a hammer.
Another gentleman wandered by and asked if he could help. I asked him if he had a hammer in his car. He thought I was joking, but I let him know that I was serious. He said that he did and left to go get it with a puzzled look on his face.
When he returned with the hammer, I took it and gave the starter a solid whack, right on the warning sticker that said not to hit it with a hammer.
I then told the college kid to try starting the car. It fired right up.
I handed the hammer back to the gentleman who had loaned it to me. Both he and the kid seemed amazed.
I asked the kid how far he had to drive to get to his destination. He said just another 2 hours or so until he got home.
I told him to drive straight home without shutting the car off because I couldn’t guarantee that the starter would ever work again. And then once he got home, he needed a new starter.
He thanked me and offered me $20, but I just sent him on his way.
Hungarian Potato and Egg Casserole (Rakott Krumpli)
rakott krumpli pulykakolbasszal
Ingredients
6 medium potatoes
1 medium onion, chopped
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 cup dairy sour cream
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
2 hardboiled eggs, peeled and sliced
2 tablespoons dry bread crumbs
Paprika
Instructions
Heat 1 inch salted water to boiling. Add potatoes. Heat to boiling; reduce heat. Cover and cook until tender, 30 to 35 minutes. Drain; cool slightly.
Cook onion in oil until tender. Mix onion, oil, sour cream, salt and pepper.
Peel potatoes; cut into 1/4-inch slices. Gently mix potatoes and sour cream mixture.
Arrange half the potatoes in greased 10 x 6-inch baking dish or 1 1/2-quart casserole. Arrange eggs on top; add remaining potatoes. Sprinkle with bread crumbs and paprika.
Bake uncovered at 325 degrees F until light brown, 30 to 40 minutes.
I yelled, loudly, not at the patient but at her aunt.
So I was working in the ER. A little kid of around 10 or 11 came late one evening. She had a massive blow on her skull and was getting seizures. It was all bloody but surprisingly she was conscious.
Her aunt was very caring and hovering over us. She told me the girl fell from a bike. I pacified her and told her to wait outside while I provided primary care to the child before transferring her to a higher care centre.
When the aunt was outside I asked the girl what happened. Her aunt had hit her in the head with a hammer. That vile lady had hit her 10-year-old niece in the head with a hammer. I was horrified, enraged. I was mad.
I stabilized her, came out and called the aunt inside. As soon as I saw her I just lost it. I yelled at her at the top of my lungs. I don’t even remember all that I said but it lasted long enough for the ward boys and nurses and the ambulance driver to gather. It also lasted enough for the aunt to break down and confess.
I called the girl’s parents and they called the police and registered the complaint.
My behaviour was unprofessional, but I have never regretted it. I don’t usually lose my cool, but I am glad I did that day.
Seen a number of these over the years. First one that comes to mind is this one. Sitting in a bar in Neenah WI, conversing with a gentleman, probably about 40 something, less than 5′10″, probably about 150 lbs. Well spoken, polite, decently dressed. A larger (12–13) groups of people all came in at once, bikers by their dress and the beautiful sound of the harleys they pulled up on. Now please understand, the greater majority of bikers I’ve known over the years were great people, polite, non confrontational, and all around nice. These folks were not. Loud, already half tanked, and generally pushy. Once they had settled, one of them walked by, catching his elbow on my conversation partner and spilling both of their drinks. Confrontation ensued. Biker: you “effing spilled my drink!”
CP: sorry about that, let me get you another
bartender: no worries, I’ve got both of you
biker: you’re damn right you’re sorry! and proceeded to grab CP’s shoulder. CP spun as he stood up, spear handed the biker in the solar plexus, and then Kicked him in the face! Biker was about 6′2″-3″, and now unconscious and bleeding on the floor. Everyone else stopped cold and looked at CP, shrugged, and went back to their conversations. Bouncer dragged biker out to the curb where the police and an ambulance took him away. Broken jaw, shattered septum, severe concussion. CP was the owner of a local martial arts school and had been training since he was a child. Oops.
JEFFREY SACHS FULL INTERVIEW ABOUT BAD SITUATION IN EUROPE AND U.S, U.N SITUATION, GAZA, AND MORE
Guys, this is a whole new world. And there are changes and revolutions and adjustments everywhere. But you will see, in the next month or so of my posts that the AI revolution is here. And it is both awesome and frightening.
Today, consider the text to video technology that is out there.
Six videos. Watch all of them. You will know when you watch them why I am so freaking out. Imagine what a desperate, corrupt and evil government or corporation could do with this technology!!!!!
-MM
We start with an overview. The next three videos…
AI Generated Videos Just Changed Forever
No shit!
Can you tell what’s real? – AI Generated Videos
You Can’t Trust Any Video Anymore… (OpenAI Sora)
Now, lets really get into the details of Sora.
Amazing!
OpenAI Sora: All Demo Videos with Prompts | Upscaled 4K
And, guys… that’s not all!
It’s a race with everyone competing against each other…
Massive Midjourney V6 Update: Consistent Style is Finally Here!
Image to Video Comparison: Pika vs Runway | Who Wins?
Yesterday, out of the blue at dinner time, a delivery man came to our door with a bouquet of lilies. Not for me. Not for the kids. Not for the wife. Mistake, I guess. But the address was exactly our address.
Strange.
A lily flower has different significance in China than it does in the USA. In the USA, lilies are associated with death and funerals.
So obviously, I looked at the delivery guy with a big exclamation point and question mark over his head. Wouldn’t you? Especially since I was in MAJ. Things that make you go hum…
Anyways…
I asked the Domain Commander about this.
DC told me that it was a real accident and not to worry. Sure there are elements in the world that would like me to die and collapse in a most horrible way, but they are far removed from me, and that I am protected. That I should not let my fears grasp my emotions.
The funny thing is, I hadn’t met girls or women who I’d consider shallow until I began my PhD. Most of the girls and women in my life were strong, independent, no nonsense girls, who took their lives on by the horns.
However, once I started my PhD, it was as though I was overcompensated for what I had missed out all along. There was a flurry of girls and women I kept bumping into, who made me question their true worth and leave me in total disgust.
Well, without much ado, here’s introducing the creme de la creme
A top woman scientist who told me to do an MBA after my PhD because girls only marry men with fat wallets because sex is not everything
A PhD research scholar who intends to marry a man who earns at least ₹500000 (~$8000) a month so that he could spend at least half of that on her
Another PhD scholar who plans to quit working after she got married because it was her husband’s duty to take care of her
A research scholar who blows up about ₹25,000 a month on partying, clothes, and weekend holidays and then takes another ₹10,000 from home because she’s the only daughter and it was “her right” to be pampered
Research scholars who even in their 3rd year of research do not possess fundamental concepts of their research because, “we’re not nerds like you!”
A research scholar who called her roommate’s mother a whore just for speaking to a guy outside their apartment. Her roomie’s mother had passed away a few months back to cancer
Another PhD scholar who said “I’m a Lingayat,” when I asked her if she was non-vegetarian. Lingayat, turns out, is a caste quite popular in Karnataka and I had no idea until she laughed when I asked her what that was
Another research scholar who’d draw a stipend from her supervisor’s project and yet work entirely for someone else because she had the support of a lot of higher ups
A research scholar who threatened a guy who kept asking her a genuine scientific doubt during one of her presentations. She wasn’t able to answer the question properly and was subsequently cross questioned. Frustrated, she said “I’ll file a harassment charge with the police. I’m a girl and my father has money. Let’s see who they believe.”
Wow! I just realized I could keep going at this. It’s crazy the number of PhD’s who think and speak this way.
What’s the use of having an education when you’re not one bit educated!
I see so much in this kitten that reminds me of my deceased dog
Spareribs and Cabbage (Zeberka Wieprzowena z Kapusta — Poland)
Serve with mashed or boiled potatoes.
zeberka z kapusta przepis 1778 4 3
Yield: 6 servings
Ingredients
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
4 1/2 pounds fresh pork spareribs, cut into 6 pieces
1 large onion, sliced
1 large carrot, sliced
2 teaspoons instant beef bouillon
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon caraway seed
1/4 teaspoon coarsely ground pepper
1 bay leaf
2 cups water
1/2 cup vinegar
1 small head green cabbage, cut into 6 wedges
Freshly-ground pepper
Instructions
Heat oil in Dutch oven until hot. Cook pork spareribs, a few pieces at a time, over medium heat until brown on all sides, about 15 minutes; drain fat.
Add onion, carrot, bouillon, salt, caraway seed, 1/4 teaspoon pepper and the bay leaf.
Pour water and vinegar over pork mixture. Heat to boiling; reduce heat. Cover and simmer for 1 1/2 hours.
Add cabbage; sprinkle with pepper. Cover and simmer until cabbage is tender, about 45 minutes.
Remove bay leaf.
Arrange spareribs and vegetables on serving platter.
Garnish with minced parsley if desired.
Waiting to Be Put to Sleep, She Sat Crying Silently in Her Cage At the Shelter
A large company you have heard of needed to lay some people off. There was this one guy who always came in, went to his office, did who knows what all day, then went home. Nobody really knew what he did. His manager had been replaced with a new guy who was still figuring out which way is up. He had to lay off X number of people from his group. He laid off this guy.
Then they found out what he did, because it wasn’t being done anymore. Turns out he was providing exclusive customized support to a very large customer on a very lucrative contract.
The customer was not happy. They were no longer getting the support they were paying for.
I know other people who work at the same company. Management knows what they do, so their jobs are secure. It’s amazing how your job security depends on the right people knowing what you do.
2) Someone I know worked for a company that provides services to the military. The company was bought by another company, which put in management that had college degrees but no knowledge or experience in that field. The existing management, which had specific knowledge and experience, was laid off because they did not have college degrees.
That company was known by the military to be able to complete contracts that other companies had failed to complete.
With the team of experts gone, they could no longer complete contracts or train new hires. They had laid off their key people.
Meanwhile, the experts got jobs with competing companies, who were now able to complete contracts.
As contractor pay has stagnated, companies have been sold, and management has been unable to pay decently. A welder or electrician can make 400% more working anywhere else.
The team of experts has bounced from company to company. Whichever company they’re with is able to complete contracts.
How does this story end? That remains to be seen.
In the meantime, we have a navy ship that has been in for repairs for over two years, for work that should have taken only six months.
50% is terrible odds
16 mind-blowing psychology facts you should know:
Hearing your name when on one is calling you, is actually a sign of a healthy brian.
Sleep directly after studying, you will remember what you have learned better.
Don’t argue through text messages. The lack of tone decreases the meaning of the words.
People are more honest when physically tired. This is why most people confess things during late night conversations.
Those who look outside, dream. Those who look inside, awaken.
Cherophobia: the fear of happiness. People with this cherophobia believe that every time they feel happy, something bad will happen and ruin it.
Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.
The most powerful way to win an argument is by asking questions. It can make people see the flaws in their logic.
It’s possible to die from a broken heart. It’s called Stress Cardiomypathy.
Being forgetful can be a sign of a higher intelligence.
Athazagoraphobia: the fear of being forgotten or ignored by someone who you strongly care about.
When ignored by someone who means a lot to you, the reaction in your brain is similar to physical pain.
Boys are actually more emotionally affected by relationship troubles than girls. They just know how to hide it well.
You’re more likely to be easily attracted to someone you have no chance with.
The average man gets bored of shopping after 26 minutes.
If you want someone to listen to you, start the conversation with” I shouldn’t be telling you this”
The Most Paranormal Place On Earth – What’s Happening on Mount Shasta?
This happened a week back exactly and it’s been running on my mind ever since then. I never thought something like this would happen to me, don’t know why.
Last week, I was on a business trip to Berlin and I went to Amsterdam for the weekend, for a short vacation. My return flight to India was from Berlin and so I took a bus from Amsterdam to Berlin Tegel airport (bus because it was cheaper!). I had to switch buses at a place called Hamburg and I had a layover of almost 3 hours.
These 3 hours were the most tiring 3 hours of my life because it was from 10–1 in the night and it was freezing cold outside. And, I was standing alone for so long. Finally the bus came at 12.45 and I was the last one to board the bus. The bus was full and all the seats were taken in the lower deck. The upper deck had only 3 seats.
Super exhausted, I politely ask this girl if I can take the vacant seat next to her and this is how the conversation goes –
Me – Hi, can I please sit here?
Girl – No
Me – I’m sorry, excuse me?
Girl – I want to sit alone. Find another place
I ask the girl in the front seat if I can sit next to her and she was like, “this seat is taken”
Me, again to the girl from before –
Me – There’s no other seat. Can I sit here?
Girl – Go see if there are any seats down
*She was getting on to my nerves*
Me – I’m coming from down, there’s no seat. I’m sorry
Girl – Ask the girl in the front
Me – I just asked her, she said it’s taken. If you want, go ahead and ask her
*By now, people were already looking at me and I was feeling embarrassed. I ignored her and took the seat*
Girl (after 5 mins) – Actually, I don’t feel comfortable about you sitting next to me
Me (I was shocked) – Sorry?
Girl – I feel very uncomfortable about you sitting next to me. Please understand. Don’t sit here, go away!
Me (I lost it) – You know what? There’s no other place. Shut the fuck up and sit! Don’t irritate the fuck out of me!
I don’t think I have ever been this rude to anyone in my life. But, I don’t feel bad about saying it and I never will. I said it, I was rude to her, like she was rude to me. But, I was shocked even after that, my eyes welled up.
For the entire 3 hours, she was giving all these reactions and making faces like she was sitting next to someone disgusting.
And the worst part was, the vacant seat in the front, itwas taken by none.
I don’t know if this is racism and if this happened to me because I’m brown and not white. But, this same female was okay with another white girl sitting next to her. While I was walking towards the seat, another white girl was going to sit there but she found another seat.
When I told this incident to a colleague of mine, he told me that I’m jumping into a conclusion that this is racism.
I don’t know if it could be anything else. Because I was dressed up well. I’m someone who gives importance to getting dressed up. This picture below is from the same day morning. I was in the same attire, maybe with a coat on top of it –
A girl I graduated high school with got a full scholarship to The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. That’s the big UNC… The world-renowned UNC… The one that most of my graduating class was trying to get into. She not only got in, but had a free ride thanks to a combination of cheerleading scholarships and needs-based grants.
She drank and partied her way to failure her first semester, was put on academic probation, didn’t recover, and was back home living with her parents and working as a waitress by the time she was 20.
She was still smoking hott* though, and it all worked out for her. “It” tends to work out for women like her… Women with model-quality looks and bubbly personalities. She married a lawyer and is now a stay-at-home (a beach house, no less) mother who, judging from what she posts on Facebook, lives an enviable life.
As for me, I have one huge wasted opportunity that I know about.
When I was 23, I’d already spent years working for families with special needs children in the wealthy suburbs of Chicago. I ended up with a job as a special needs assistant for the local school district… a very desirable school district for teachers. Also one of the hardest school districts in which to get hired for any position. I only got hired as an aide because one of the parents on the school board knew me because I sometimes took care of his special-needs kid.
Most of the other aides were teachers-in-training. I hadn’t considered going back to school to be a teacher at that point in my life. An opportunity to go to work for a friend in the auto parts business and make slightly more money presented itself, and I quit my job with the school district mid-year.
That’s a huge no-no in education. You never quit mid-year. I burned that bridge to the ground. I lost contact with all of the people I knew in the district. Dozens of networking opportunities squandered, all for about $100 extra dollars per month.
Years later, I finally went back to college and got my teaching certificate. I was 30 by then, and I struggled to find a teaching job. It was all about who you knew that could get your resume in front of the principals, and I didn’t know anyone who could do that anymore.
Had I been patient and stayed on as an aide for a few more years, I would have been first in line for an open teaching position in that district when they became available.
If this were my 10th year of teaching in that district, I’d be making three times what I make now, and have a lot more perks.
Oh well. Youthful impatience has done a lot worse to other people.
Chimps are not monogamous. In fact, they gang-rape each female. The females do this so that no male knows who the father is, preventing the infant from being killed. Just because animals do it doesn’t mean we should.
Gorillas have harems. Most males never mate, those that do dominate a group of females and have exclusive rights to them. This precludes equal rights for females. Go to a harem model, and you’ve just undone the basic premise for women’s rights.
Monogamy and systematic encouragement of it forced men to treat their only sexual partner with decency and respect for their quality of life. This is why only the Christian West gave women equal legal rights to men across the board. If men can have sex outside of marriage, whether sex slaves or prostitutes, the woman’s social status goes down.
Society has a vested interest in monogamy. Single mothers are even in the rich West at greater odds of poverty. Even worse is the three to four times greater odds of bad life outcomes for their kids. From drug addiction to joining a gang to not finishing school to committing suicide to being a single teen mother, the odds are 3–4 times greater if raised by a single mother.
If society wants to reduce criminal behavior, reliance on welfare (if it exists) and dependent adults, it has to encourage monogamy. The group cannot afford to encourage the breakdown of the family. You don’t get happy hippie communes; you get violent inner cities with stubborn inter-generational poverty in communities that used to have declining poverty rates.
Yes, humanity is biologically transitioning from “harem/free sex” to “monogamous”, so we have conflicting impulses. But we’ve been moving toward monogamy for literally millions of years. We know that because women are only 20% smaller than men versus half the size of a male as occurs in gorillas. It is driven by our higher intelligence and the longer dependent period of human infants.
Monogamy is in our best interest as individuals, as parents and as a society. And that’s why we encourage it.
I had eye surgery in winter 2019, and had to wear dark glasses (the ones in my pic) for a bit.
My eyesight is terrible anyway, but for a couple of months l could barely see.
One evening, as usual, I was taking a long walk in London – couldn’t run, I’d have been running in to street furniture- for exercise. Earbuds in, listening to music.
A beggar stepped in front if me & said something about money. I put my hand in my pocket, handed him a quid.
He said something about wanting more, l couldn’t really hear him too well over Black Grape, but this pissed me off.
“Fuck off”, I said, “you can have a quid and like it”
“Gimme more. I want all your money”
“You cheeky cunt. Fuck off or I’ll take the quid back and kick your arse” l said.
He made angry gestures and stormed off.
A bloke came up beside me…. “…mate, are you ok?” he said.
“Yeah… why?”
“He had a knife”.
Oh. Not beggar; mugger. I hadn’t seen the knife.
The mugger must have thought I was like Chuck Norris, fronting him out like that.
New Upgrade: China J-35 Fighter JET To Fly From Aircraft Carrier
Not a General (or Admiral in this case, since I served in the Navy), but a Captain (equivalent of a full bird Colonel in the other services).
I joined on the delayed entry program when I was still a senior in high school. Toward the end of my senior year, I was awarded a scholarship to state university. There was a banquet to honor all the scholarship recipients.
Even though I knew I couldn’t accept the scholarship because I was already set to go into the Navy, I thought it would be fun and interesting to attend a banquet that was being held partly in my honor.
At the banquet, I met and made small talk with a Navy Captain. I told him about how I wouldn’t be able to use the scholarship because I had already enlisted via the delayed entry program. I never got his name and never heard from, nor spoke with, him ever again after that night.
So technically, I don’t know with any certainty that he was the one who did anything for me. But 30+ years later, it’s still the only explanation that makes any sense.
A week or two after the banquet, I got a phone call from the recruiting office. They wanted me to come in and sign some paperwork. When I arrived, they had two “identical” enlistment packets sitting on a table. The recruiter explained to me that they were going to let me out of my enlistment contract and go into the reserves instead so that I could go to college.
Even at 17 years old, I knew that the government never just lets anyone cancel a legal and binding contract. This was a really huge deal. Somebody pulled some serious strings.
I have told this story before, but I got married young at 24. We were in med school. We did not have a honeymoon, and it was a major fight to get the weekend off and permission to take an exam a day early. Then in residency we both worked 100 + hours per week for years. YEARS. We were not guaranteed to get vacation on the same week. We were not guaranteed a single day off in the month, including weekends. One of my fellow residents gave birth to premature twins. The babies were in an ICU in another STATE so her parents could be in the hospital because there was no family leave. I was repeatedly told not to get pregnant, which would be hard to do if you never sleep, let alone sleep in the same room on the same night as your partner.
Fast forward to maybe age 30. I saw a TV commercial about “the best part of waking up” and it showed a couple on their porch watching the sun rise and drinking some brand of coffee. I started to cry because I had never sat with my husband on my porch or had coffee in the morning together. That was kind of the moment I realized exactly what I had signed up for.
I think things are getting much better for young doctors but for us it was not great. People have NO IDEA what some of us have gone through to be “rich doctors.” Especially if you started out poor and had no outside help or support from family.
I worked for a ‘charity’ in Wakefield, England. A miserable place with many dubious business practices, run by a egotistical idiot. One day most of my team – conspicuously all those of a particular ethnicity – was pulled into his office and told we would probably be losing our jobs and would have to reapply for them. Given the decisive nature of who had been picked, it was obvious we wouldn’t get them when we ‘reapplied’: the company is notorious for their nepotism and they no doubt had replacements – friends and family – already lined up. Needless to say, the mood turned sour in the room. Then the kicker – the absolute collosal utter bellend of a boss legitimately couldn’t tell why we were angry. His exact words: “Come on guys, why are you so down? Let’s have a good day. Big smiles guys, big smiles.”
Had a stressful month looking for work afterward, but now in a great job and glad to see the back of that dump. And of course the people he lined up to fill our posts made a right mess of it (though sadly the company survived).
Can US citizens do 4 times better than Chinese citizens?
Think about this from 1980 to 2020 alone, China grew 30 times in 40 years in real income! What will happen between 2020 to 2060? Say it just grow 10 times that of 2020! It will leave the US trailing miles away!
Chinese people are innovating more, Chinese produce more STEM engineers a year more that the entire U.S. STEM sector! Chinese works twice as hard as American’s, they are highly intelligent and very productive and discipline. Every years China’s savings alone is as big as the entire UK economy! It already has the best infrastructure amongst major economies.
For China to stay still is never going to happen. Period. To me China will grow to 5–6 times the U.S. in real economy!
Expert REVEALS Evidence of Super ADVANCED LOST Ancient Technology!
It didn’t happen right away, but a year or so later, I met her again, and after some standard comical clumsiness, I asked her out.
Knowing based on what she did for a living that she was science nerdy like me, I planned a date to the Perot Museum of Nature and Science
. (Note to guys, this is a BRILLIANT idea. It’s not just that you’re showing respect for her intellect, it also gives you several hours to walk around, have a TON of stimulating things to talk about, and get to know each other.)
Day of the date arrives, her Dad’s in the hospital, so we agree to meet there, so I can visit him too. Hilarious side story, as we’re about to leave, she says, Ok, Dad, see you later, do you want me to turn off your light? “No,” Dad says, “Chris can turn it off when he leaves.” Uh, Bob?” I replied “….(Extended awkward pause….) I’m going with her….”
So we decide to leave her car in the Hospital parking lot and take my car to the museum. Get in the car, turn it on, doors lock, car goes into drive and starts rolling and I say:
“So you know I’m still married, right?”
Have you ever heard that metaphorical record scratch in real life?
Well. I QUICKLY explained to her that we had been separated for about 8 years, that the upcoming law called “The Affordable Care Act” would make it so that she could get insurance despite her pre-existing neuro-vascular disease, and that the only reason we were still married was so that she could stay on my corporate health insurance until that was the case. (In other words, I QUICKLY demonstrated that “I’m a VERY nice guy.”)
It calmed the fire down to the point where we were able to have a VERY nice date…didnt’ QUITE get together just then… a few breaks…not the right time…I was seeing someone else…then she was…and then…
The Stars Aligned.
Yup. I married the Girl who listened to me drop the WORST line you could possibly drop on a first date.
C’est l’amour, no?
Sanctioning China? US is as stupid as the Qing Dynasty Emperor
When you sign up for anything online, put the website’s name as your middle name. That way when you receive spam/advert email, you will know who sold your information.
If you’re on a first date and aren’t connecting with the other person or feel they’re dull, ask them what job they’d choose if money wasn’t an issue. It initiates a talk about one’s passions, which are rarely dull and are simple to connect.
Do not try to be the man your father would want you to be. Be the man you would like your son to be be. It more clearly defines your own convictions, desires, goals, and motivates you to be your best.
Pay Attention to the smell of your home when you come back from a trip – that’s what it smells like to guests all the time, you just get used to it.
When a friend is upset, ask them one simple question before saying anything else: ‘Do you want to talk about it or do you want to be distracted from it?’
No matter how much your workplace pushes “team building” and “family culture” – remember, they’re not your friends and it’s still a workplace.
If you’re stuck on an annoying call, put your phone on airplane mode instead of just hanging up. The other person will see “call failed” instead of “call ended”.
If you want to learn a new language, figure out the 100 most frequently used words and start with them. Those words make up about 50% of everyday speech, and should be a very solid basis.
The Circleville Letters Mystery | Why can’t we solve this?
Pork Sausage Loaf (Hungary)
Pork Sausage Loaf Hungary
Ingredients
1 cup diced mushrooms
2 tablespoons butter
1 egg, beaten
1 pound fresh bulk pork sausage
2 cups dry bread crumbs
1 teaspoon paprika
Instructions
Melt butter in a skillet and add mushrooms. Sauté.
Combine sausage, mushrooms, egg and crumbs and shape into a loaf. Sprinkle with paprika. Place in a small roaster; cover.
Bake at 350 degrees F for 1/2 hour.
Uncover, return to oven, and bake 30 more minutes.
Serves 4
10+ Mind-Blowing Psychological Tricks & Facts That Everyone Should Know
Here are 17 psychological tricks to be more likable and 16 psychology facts you should know:
Posture matters: If you stand up straight and make an eye contact while talking to the people you are attracted to, will make you more confident and attractive.
Have a strong sense of humor: It is thought to be a sign of intelligence. this is why, when assessing a potential partnepsyr, we tend to be more attracted to those who are funny.
Start the conversation first: Women are automatically attracted to guys who start the conversation, take initiative, and make them laugh.
…and always be the one to pull away from the conversation: It shows that you value your time and have other stuff to do. If you cut short your conversation, the other person always wants more of it. It creates attraction.
Deeper voice: Men with deeper voices are more likely to make a lasting impression on women than men with higher voices.
Create sexual tension without touching: It is done subtly, and by flirting. It creates instant attraction if you do it correctly.
7. Never approach women from behind or from her sides. It looks sneaky. Approach her face-to-face. It displays more confidence.
8. Wear red: People subconsciously believe that women who wear red are more attractive and sexy, in 2010, Eliot confirmed that people will sit closer to women who wear red dresses.
9. Let others talk about themselves – it’s as rewarding as sex: If you want to make your conversation partner feel good, get them talking about themselves and their interests. Which will make people feel valued and they will be more impressed by you
10. If you’re a woman, a man will like you if you can make him feel masculine. No instructions, no advice and give him ample space.
11. If you’re a man, a woman will like you if you can make her feel beautiful, not just sexy. A high emotional quotient is also critical for a woman.
12. Do not speak badly about others as this creates distrust.
13. Do not spread false rumors and do not make accusations.
14. When with a group of people, including everyone in the conversation. Never leave anybody out.
15. Share the little you have with those who have nothing.
16. Become a happy person and wear a smile always.
17. Laugh with all. Don’t discriminate. Be gender sensitive.
US Heartbreak: Mexico Chooses China for Auto Future – Is It the End?
When I worked at the local university bar there was this guy called Mick. He was a down to earth guy who spoke in a working class accent. He always said that his dad was a miner. We socialised quite a bit over the three years that he studied for his degree. Then when it was his graduation I was invited and I met and sat with his parents. Obviously well off by the clothes that they wore. Anyhow, Mick’s mother was chatting to me and aske me who I was I told her that I was her son’s barman for the past three years. She asked “did he tell you that his father owns six mines in Yorkshire?”
I replied “no”. She said, “He’s such an inverted snob, How did you find him?”
I replied that I found him sociable, down to earth and a decent guy. I got a hug for that and an invitation to their home in the summer break.
It was like a bloody castle with footmen and butlers.
But, yes they were such a lovely, nice, down to earth family.
I’m standing by my Dad as I am casually playing on my phone.
Suddenly, he reaches over and snatches my phone out of my hands, eyeing the screen.
“Dad what are you doing?” I ask, surprised.
“Just checking” he replies, handing it back over to me.
“I’m so sick of dealing with Amy.
I wish I could just dump her at the doctors so they can take care of her.”
I’m frozen in place as I overhear my Mum talking to my Dad. I run back to my room and I find myself having a panic attack.
I’m laying in bed, “asleep”, when I hear my Dad walk up beside my bed. I peek out of my eye slightly, and see the light of my phone screen illuminate the room.
My Dad is standing there, looking at my notifications.
I start to wake up, and he quickly covers himself, saying he was just “seeing if it needed charging for tomorrow”.
These happened a long time ago, and to this day they continue to prove to me that they can’t be trusted and that they lie to me all the time.
They tell me I can trust them. They tell me that they will always support me. They tell me that they’ll always have my side. They have even told me that they will give me privacy.
But actions speak louder than words.
The Cat Knew That They Had Come to Put Him to Sleep! So Be It, For the Mistress Was Gone!
When I was in 8th grade, a classmate along with my sister tore up a painting that I had spent three months working on.
Her name was Rita.
High School / Middle School head games.
But it was cruel. I spent a long time to make that artwork so that it would be displayed in a art fair. And then with pride, the day before the event, I proudly saw it hung on the wall in the fair… located in the High School gym.
But that night, they came in from Cheerleader practice. Got in the gym. Took my picture off the wall. And then carried to school the next day.
My picture wasn’t entered in the fair. It was missing.
When I went into my “home room” the next day, Rita and my sister came up to me, and the class and right before me tore my precious artwork into a million pieces and threw them in my face. Like confetti.
I was in shock.
The class laughed.
The teacher did nothing.
And (later on when I was at home) my mother told me that I “shouldn’t get angry over it”. Just move on she argued. While my father told me “you are the oldest … you have to take the hits”.
…
Who in the fuck convinced me to accept this God Damn life? What the Hell?
The other countries are sanction and embargo proof their economies. From keeping it’s reserves in non western banks to digitising their currencies, to trading via currency swap arrangement, or paying by other currencies than the dollar and U.S. cronies currencies. Sanctions will be totally a thing of the past within a decade at most.
The world is already broken into 2 groups now. One are US, it’s slave vassal nations, the U.S. fellow native slaughterers, the U.S. fellow despicable colonial masters, the few tiny nations around Europe that has be coerce to do shit for the west. This group is less than 2 dozen nation or you can say the minority group. It’s GDP as a group is also coming to 40% and falling fast of the world and in population less than 13%.
The majority group is call the Global South. It include most of Asia, Latin America and Oceania, and all of Middle East, Central Asia and the Caribbean. These nations add up to. At least 175 out of the world’s 195 nations. Or 87% of the world, 60% of the world’s GDP and growing fast and probably 90% or real purchasing power PPP on planet earth.
The first group either has no choice or succumbed to threat by the U.S to support and defend the western so call rules base international order. And sink and swim in it. The second group through the BRICS and SCO will successfully withdraw from the rules based international order but by bit.
Try to imagine a balloon. If you prick it with a pin the balloon will burst and if flies off and the air inside the balloon is gone for good. Now try imagining that the air is the wealth and reserves trapped in side the balloon. This 2nd group is sucking up its air but by bit, little by little till what is left belongs to the 1st group. By that time in a decade or so what will be left is a balloon that is at least half its size.
So within a decade U.S. dollars, SWIFT, Western Institutions, Western Systems, western rating agencies, western exchanges, world bank, IMF and many others that together represent the world order will still be there but only serve the west. The U.S. wants decoupling, the U.S. is getting it. The world is decoupling from the west.
Welcome to the new world.
Mind Virus
Women want Leaders. But the current 20-something group of women do not want to take the follower role. Thus they can never fit with the men that they desire.
I remember a lovely patient who had a very swollen abdomen due to ascites, a complication of cirrhosis of the liver.
Every day in the hospital, I would hang a bag of albumin and chat as I drained fluid from the swollen belly. This was in the day when liver transplants were rare and not for people who had developed cirrhosis from alcohol use.
When it was time for the patient to leave, I was given a very expensive bottle of red wine. I think it came from the patient’s extensive collection of wines. The family was wealthy. We both knew that the cirrhosis was not cureable. I wondered if all the wine was given away before the patient passed. The patient had a wistful smile and explained a bit about the wine that could never again be tasted. I was young and did not know anything about fine wines.
My husband and I shared the wine on our anniversary when we were interns.
Sometimes it is the things we love the most that cause us the greatest pain.
I am a welder with a specific set of specialized skills as an ironworker. I earned about $35 an hour on the lower end with my last job in the union. Im the guy walking on ibeams on skyscrappers hanging off the side welding moment welds. One company wanted to pay me less than McDonald’s to weld.
Recently, however, I have quit this line of work to make time for college. In doing so I was searching for lower paying but more reasonable hours and location. Going to work at the same place for 40 hours a week was my plan. I was having trouble doing this since most companies are wanting me to work lots of overtime.
One day I had scheduled an interview for a job which said I wouldn’t be asked to work over 40 hours a week and it was relatively close to my home. Inquiring about the pay they just said it depended on my skills but it would be very good. I didn’t press further for detsils. On interview weld test day I accidentally left much too early. Realizing I would be 45 minutes early I decided to stop for lunch at a McDonald’s. When I was there I noticed they were offering $22/hour for a maintenance position. I spoke with the manager about it but told them I could probably make more money welding in a shop.
I went to my interview and was asked to take a weld test that took about 2 hours. At the end of the weld test one of the managers took me to a table in the office and saw I was asking for $28 an hour, really I was hoping for closer to $30. He told me the most he would be able to pay was 19 or maybe 20.
“I don’t appreciate all of my time you’ve wasted here, sir. The McDonald’s down the road pays better than this.”
I was quite pissed that I had just wasted well over 2 hours of my time with the drive there, back, and other things I did to prepare for that interview.
The shop welding jobs are paying an average of $25 an hour around here, so I’ll be working at McDonald’s until these cheap asses pay what it’s worth to weld. Why should I do a skilled job when McDonald’s pays nearly the same? I wish more welders would refuse to work for peanuts and maybe we could get some decent wages.
Of course, China have slavery like the US in … errr … emmm … yep … about 3,000 years ago, after Zhou Dynasty established in 1046 BC, Chinese slavery was ended.
Slaves made a great contributions in the war of Zhou rebels to overthrow the Shang Dynasty. In return, the first monarch of the Zhou Dynasty ordered the permanent abolition of slavery, and this order was maintain by all following Chinese dynasties, because that monarch is seen as saint and model of a virtuous ruler for all Chinese rulers, including barbarian born Chinese rulers. Even Mongolian emperors in Yuan dynasty would go to his tomb to worship him in every years, no need to mention others.
In the following 3000 years, although there were several barbarian born monarchs reintroducing slavery into China, but none of their regimes could survive over more than 50 years.
And strictly speaking, the Qing Dynasty had slavery, but their slavery was somewhat distorted because it only existed among the Manchus. The Manchu Eight Banners Army was actually a slave army, with soldiers and officers were actually slaves belongs to the banner lord. They fought in banner lords’ commanding for generations.
But the Manchus seem to regard this slave status as an honor, so you can see that when Manchus write letters to the emperor or their banner lord, they would call themselves something like “a humble slave greeting to my dear lord” in the beginning.
And when some Han favored officials of certain emperors also write like this, the emperor will directly reply to him, saying, “Please call yourself a vassal, you are my Han vassal, not my slaves in banner”.
So, for the Qing Dynasty, slaves in the Manchu system were more like hereditary family of attendants, who established a generational contract. Becoming slaves to the banner lord was not shameful for the Manchus, but rather an honor accepted and protected by banner lords, and all banner lords are royal members.
It was a letter from governer of Hu province and Guang province (This is a very big official position, ruling lands almost over two modern France), a Han official Yang ZongRen, to the YongZheng Emperor of Qing Dynasty, those black writting was Yang’s original writting, red one were the reply of the Emperor.
image 55
In this letter, Yang called himself “the slave”, and Yongzheng Emperor strike out that word, and changed it to “vassal”, and noted that “claiming to be a vassal” is more appropriate.
Of course, this is actually just a Han governor in flattering the emperor. The emperor himself was very happy on that, but still remembered to correct it for him, because it’s not appropriate.
oh … btw, about this letter, except the stroke and note in the right, the left red paragh is:
I am fine (reply the greeting of Yang), although you just arrived in this official position for no long, what you reported and what you did, has already pleased my wish, you are worthy of being a high-ranking governer, so today I leading civil service officials and military officials decided to award you xxxxxx (I don’t know how to translate this, you can think it’s some kind of medal), to recognize your excellent work.
Just let the person know politely. If they refuse to move or try to get you to do a seat swap, and if you don’t want, simply say no, I.dont want to trade seats, please get up. If the person won’t move, push the call button for the flight attendant. Do not move, or let anyone behind you get to their seat. The flight attendant will take care of it more quickly, if the boarding process, is at a stand still.
Happened to me once. I was treating myself to First Class. The First Class section had to rows on the left, but only onecrow on the right. Meaning, those seats were a window/aisle/and had no seat mate. I also, had, the last seat in the row so, nobody behind me. This group of six traveling together, got on first, and all wanted to sit together, took my seat.
The person in my seat redirected me to, a seat on the otherside of the plane, someone had the window seat already. I said, no, I’d like my seat please. They group looked at eachother, the guy in my seat, acted like he wasn’t budging. I didn’t let the people behind me go around me. The flight attendant immediately asked if everything was ok. I said, just waiting for him to get out of my seat, I asked nicely once already. She told him to move, and that he was holding up the boarding process.
You don’t have close friends just friends. Most of the people you are around, are only there because of circumstances not really related to you in anyway.
The sooner you start focusing and planning on your life goals the easier it will be achieving them.
One of the most important thing you can teach yourself during your 20’s is self discipline. This is the first thing we should learn and crave to achieve.
Life moves very fast, do things you enjoy at the moment cause our situations tend to also change as fast then we later feel like we missed out on somethings.
The more you expose yourself to the world around you, the more you expand your thinking horizons. Travel, socialize and live life don’t lock yourself out of these important things.
Learn to cook a variety of menu’s of proper home meals. Cooking is a very important skills much more as an adult.
You start using drugs as curiosity soon it becomes for fun later it becomes a dependency. The transition is so fast you barely realize it.
Learn about proper workout routines you can do to energize your body. You don’t have to do hard excercise even if its just yoga. Its more about something you can commit to that benefits you.
Reading and getting creative are ways to keep your brain sharp and generate new ideas. Make sure you read novels and try out the different forms of art around you.
Don’t be selfish in your 20’s, most of the things we hold on to are barely important in our 30’s. Stuff like money, food, material possessions. Learn to share cause these memories are the ones that we keep. Be real with every real person around you.
This takes me back a few years. The Philadelphia DA felt he caught “Streets” workers at extreme wage theft.
The city had gone through a series of bad snow storms requiring both city employees and contractors running snowplow on the streets for over a week.
A few months later the DA holds a press conference that a particular employee is being charged with felonies related to false time sheets (getting paid for time not worked). It might have been the soft kick-off to their campaign for mayor or governor — showing how they could fix problems like this.
In next day or two the employee is arraigned in court with lawyers from the union. The DA (usually an assistant associate low level attorney handles these hearings) give a speech about how it was not humanly possible for the employee to have worked the hours claimed (from memory: between 120 and 160 hours in a week) so they had to be sleeping on the job — “stealing from the taxpayers of our fine city, this just shows how the union abuses the city.”
Union attorney gets to say their piece. A few flowery words about clueless wealthy elected officials overreaching. Then the attorney drops the appropriate section of the contract (again: from old memory so not exact quote) “so long as any contractor truck is on the road performing snow removal and an employee is *available* for work, they shall be paid.”
This was exactly the situation covered by the contract. It was written that way so the city could bring in help for emergency-level snows but not outsource the employees.
A bit of evidence how the employee *worked* a lot of hours and then slept “on-site” (where they would normally pick up their truck) so they were clearly “available”.
The criminal case was thrown out. There may have been a $ settlement to the employee for false arrest and the DA’s political career petered out.
Beef and Mushroom Stew with Caraway Dumplings
Browning meat in the oven reduces the amount of fat needed for cooking. Serve with julienne parsnips and carrots.
mushroom beef blog
Ingredients
Stew
1 1/2 pounds round or blade steak
2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
1/4 teaspoon salt
Bouquet Garni*
1 tablespoon vegetable oil (if necessary)
1/2 pound small mushrooms
1/2 cup chopped onion
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
2 cups beef stock
1/2 cup dry red wine
2 tablespoons tomato paste
* Tie together with kitchen twine 1 celery stalk with leaves, 3 or 4 sprigs parsley, 1 bay leaf and small sprig of thyme
Dumplings
1 cup soft fresh bread crumbs
1/4 cup melted margarine or butter
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon caraway seeds
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 egg, beaten
1 egg white
Instructions
Stew: Cut steak into 1 1/2 inch cubes. In a bag, combine flour, pepper and salt. Add beef, a few pieces at a time, and shake to coat with flour mixture. Shake off excess and place meat on wire rack in flameproof casserole. Bake in 350 degree F oven for about 25 minutes or until browned. Meanwhile, prepare Bouquet Garni.
Set meat aside on platter.
Place casserole over medium heat. Only if necessary add all or part of the oil. Add mushrooms, cap side down, and cook until golden, transferring to platter as they brown.
Add onion and garlic; cook until onion is transparent. Add stock, wine and tomato paste; bring to a simmer, stirring and scraping bottom of casserole with wooden spoon to scrape up any brown bits.
Return meat to pan; add Bouquet Garni. Cover and simmer over low heat for 1 hour or until meat is tender. Meanwhile prepare dumplings.
Dumplings: In a bowl, toss bread crumbs and melted margarine together with a fork. Combine flour, baking powder, caraway seeds and salt. Mix lightly into crumb mixture. Beat together egg and egg white; add to crumb mixture and mix lightly (mixture will be soft) shape into 8 balls of even size.
Remove Bouquet Garni and discard. While stew is simmering, add dumplings, cover and cook, without removing lid, for 18 minutes.
I had a scheduled interview for an OFFICE job! Up to that point I had been doing piecework sewing, processing chickens, and guarding slabs of foam rubber… This was a HUGE step up!
During the night before the interview, it snowed 4 inches in Baltimore. Now this is not that big a deal… except in Baltimore, it IS. Public transport did not run. Traffic was pretty sparse first thing in the work day… I decided to walk the 3 miles to the interview. I got there in plenty of time, changed my hiking boots for heels in the ladies’ room, and went to the office where the interview was to be held.
Nobody home.
A guy showed up and asked what I was doing standing in the hall. I explained I was there to interview as an accountant’s assistant. He asked how I got there. When I said I walked, he looked dubiously at my heels. He said, “In THOSE shoes?” I admitted my boots were in the ladies’ room. He asked to see the boots, so I went and got them. As soon as he saw that I really did have boots I was hired. I had not yet even entered the offices.
I always field strip my cigarettes and stick butts in my pocket. Yes, it smells disgusting.
I have a P38 on my keychain. This is a tiny can opener used to open cans of C-rations. It even gets used once in a while.
image 571
5. Take my hat off when going indoors. Because of this, I rarely wear a hat.
6. When a passenger in a vehicle, I act as “assistant driver.” I let driver know if it is clear or not on my side.
7. I act as a ground guide for people backing up. I will often ask people to ground guide me when I am backing up, often to their puzzlement. Of course, they do not know the correct hand signs to use and those I am helping often don’t understand the signs I give them.
8. I scan the side of roads more than necessary in the US. Not too many IEDs on our roads.
9. I say, “I got your back” or “Do you have my six?” too much.
10. I use the military phonetic alphabet. D is for Delta, not Dog.
11. I use the word “task” a lot.
12. I tend to try to help people with what the military calls hip pocket training. Many people find this annoying and would prefer to screw something up than get some quick pointers.
13. Finally, I learned to never put more than eight words on a power point slide because the Army puts hundreds of words on one slide. Along with this, I also learned to NEVER ask someone to read a power point slide with hundreds of words on it.
China would be burning a lot of bridges if they do and China is hesitant to do that
The West knows it’s dying and is thus ready to inflict every horror on it’s population
They are prepared to subject their population to everything from inflation to starvation knowing that they have tamed their population sufficiently through propaganda
They can cause China to lose quite a bit of money if they invade Taiwan and that could make a lot of Chinese unhappy and cause some strife within the country
Plus more importantly, China believe Taiwanese are their brothers and killing them is a no no because at least 30% Mainlanders have family in Taiwan
So that’s what’s stopping China
Otherwise if China decide that they don’t care, China can pulverize and decimate Taiwan into a graveyard overnight and nobody can do a thing to stop them without risking WWIII
Yep, my brother fell out of a Huey. He was in Nam and the radio went wild, with troops needing to be evacuated from a hot zone. He jumped in as the M-60 machine gunner. It was the first time he flew into a hot zone. His adrenaline was high. Because of that, he forgot to strap in. The Huey headed out over the paddies and couldn’t land because there was a nest of Charlies that needed to be taken out first. The pilot banked to the left super hard so my brother could shoot the 60 down at Charlie’s nest. The pilot banked too hard and my brother fell out right on top of two Charlies. The wind was knocked out of all three of them. My brother was the first to come to his senses, and realized he didn’t have a weapon. He looked around and found one of the Charlie’s AK and as they started to get up he blasted them both. Killed them dead, he did. The chopper picked the GIs up and then came back and rescued my brother. When he got back to the base, the pilot said, “That is the bravest thing I have ever seen, jumping unarmed out of a Huey, kill two gooks, and saved a squad. Boy I am going to put you in for a Silver Star.” My brother told him, “I fell out and was just trying to save my ass.” He still got the Star. Analyse and improvise. A motto to live by!
The first time a European owned company announced a round of layoffs in a month. I was the new guy in the group and figured I was disposable. The day of the announced layoffs I went into work wearing my “Gone With The Wind” tie.
When I was summoned to the boss’ office, my desk had been cleared of all personal effects. My pulled out a paper and made to read it. I stopped him and said, “I know I’m being laid off. What are the details?” Boss was rather startled and we started talking about it.
I told him that he had a good old boys club where engineers from headquarters would rotate in then return for a raise & promotion. U.S. employees were treated as second rate. Thanks for the layoff. I was pretty disappointed in the company.
When he asked how I knew that I would be laid off, I told him that the company had announced the layoffs a month earlier. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that I was one of the newest people in the group and not part of the “club”. Of course I was the easiest to lay off.
I also told him that it was pretty stupid to announce the layoffs a month previous. Everyone quits working and it encourages mischief. Oh they hadn’t thought of that.
The bosses were gone within 3 months.
The other was a company where I was the entire engineering department. My boss & I were always at odds. He wanted to get rid of the product line. I’m sure the fact that his brother worked for a competitor had nothing to do with his decision.
The company staged an ambush layoff on January 2nd. Oh well, at least they didn’t screw up the holidays.
Although they offered $10k, I refused to sign their termination agreement and collected unemployment all through the covid lunacy. Made out like a bandit.
Why sex is important.
Men know this instinctively. Modern 20-something, 30-something women, are having trouble with this.
I was at home, having broken my foot in a stupid accident, when the head of HR was “in the area” and wanted to see me. After the pleasantries, she told me that I was being made redundant and my job no longer existed.
In the UK, firing someone is not easy or cheap. A company can find itself in court and it can all get a bit grubby. So a more usual tactic is to say that the employees job is no longer needed. Employers like this, because it saves it all getting public, legal and unpleasant, and employees like it because the employer has to pay to make it all go away.
So we negotiated a redundancy fee and the next day a car came with my personal things from my office. I trousered the (generous) cheque and picked up the phone.
The irony was that I had just had an exceptional year. I had won a load of creative awards (I was a creative director at Saatchi and Saatchi) including a Cannes Gold. I have no idea why they wanted me out. To this day I don’t know.
Two weeks later I signed a contract with a rival company for a bigger salary.
The local supermarket includes a hot table where they sell hot cooked chickens for $10.99 It’s a good deal – I’ll get one occasionally. It looks like this; if this is unfamiliar in your area:
image 570
The pack includes a cardboard handle for easy carrying.
One day, I noticed that whoever had labeled the latest batch of chickens had made a mistake. Instead of $10.99, they were labeled as $0.99. Cool! Cheap chicken! lol. Not really – I like the folks there and quickly let the lady in the meat line know. The chickens had only just come out; no loss to anyone.
Except – I was not the only one that had found it. A woman of – how do I say this – limited intelligence saw it and began screeching at the top of her lungs “Chicken for a buck! CHICKEN FOR A BUUUUUCK!!!” and began loading her cart.
The manager arrived right at that moment, apologized and began to correct the matter.
The woman went ballistic; screaming, shouting bloody blue murder, accusing him of stealing, of trying to starve her to death, etc. etc. etc. The price was 99 cents dammit, she deserved chicken for 99 cents!
The manager, in an effort to ease the situation, agreed. He told her that alright; she had ‘found’ the error; she could have a chicken for 99 cents.
There was a long pause as the woman looked dumbfounded. Then she launched herself at the table, screeching, trying to grab every chicken she could possibly get her hands on. Chickens were falling everywhere; spilling onto the floor. The manager tried to intervene but no help – she was grabbing, stuffing, howling; it was a disgusting display of a complete lack of dignity.
She was taken out of the store in handcuffs; without her 99 cent chicken. The entire batch of roast chicken was destroyed.
Of course I agree with you absolutely, and any person could see it unless you are in denial or made brain dead by the western media.
They offer consistency and continuity in their policies to investors and business yet the protect their citizens against the ills of raw capitalism. In other words Socialism with Chinese characteristics takes the best of both worlds and rejects the flaws of both systems.
Hence the growth of both economies of China and Vietnam both grow phenomenally and consistently. For decades and now generations through ups and downs of the economic cycle. Westerners scream democratic and freedom but ignores the fallacy of this costly, inefficient and mostly corrupt system that put their people at the mercy raw capitalism.
If you look at the U.S. for example, 1% have more money than they ever need, 10% are wasteful and selfish but can afford to live comfortably , while 70% are poorer than most advance economies and in fact are like the majority of Chinese except that the Americans has to bear the burden of it’s weaker purchasing power in their country. The majority of Chinese has high disposable income. And while Chinese cut out the destitute poor in the past 10 years, the U.S. raw capitalism allowed the 19% in Americans to have to worry where their next meal is coming from and they barely have 500 dollars to their name!
A government role in a society is surely to bring prosperity, peace and harmony and healthy living for everyone. From that count the Chinese population enjoys that. Western liberal democracy allows the rich to get richer and the poor to be destitute. But because they wrongly thinks they need to overlord the entire world, they barely have enough money left to pay for infrastructure, college education or healthcare. So they fail the poor and pamper the rich!
Are you surprised that according to western surveys, 91% of Chinese favour their government and 36% of Americans favour their government! I am not! Are you?
My son was given a car for his birthday. We bought it. It was nice little car that had been wrecked and was repaired and had a salvage title. That meant that a previous insurance carrier had totalled it following the wreck, and it had been repaired and state certified to be safe.
Anyway, he had been driving it for several months to school and to work after school. This one day he was in his way to work and came to a stop sign. Stopped, insured the traffic was clear and went to make a left turn. Older lady than him (he was 17, she was 36) had stopped at the opposite stop sign and gunned it, hitting my son’s car in the back quarter panel and rear door on the passenger side. He called me and I went to the scene. The accident was on state highway, inside city limits. I had the option to have the highway patrol called to work the accident, however I decided to just let the local police work it. I spoke with the lady and she was all apologetic and saying she’d take off it…yeah, right…
She took care it alright. She whines and said that it wasn’t her fault, that kid just stomped on the gas and caused the accident. They took her word for it. Even though you could about tell from my son’s damage that she caused the accident.
So the next day, my son is home in bed sick. I’ve medicated him and he’s sleeping. The phone rings, it’s the insurance adjuster from her insurance. Absolutely demands to speak with my son. I tell him no, that my son is sick, had been medicated and it’s sleeping, and that I won’t wake him. Adjuster didn’t like that and was insistent. Well he woke Mama Bear…I told him that my son was 17, still a minor, and that he (the adjuster) would wait until I said that my son could talk with him, then I hung up.
Could days go by. Another phone call from someone else in that company. Says that my son was assigned 50% blame (no fault state here) because he turned into a four lane road and didn’t stay in the closest lane. I laughed and asked what town did your adjuster go to? My town has zero four lane roads, only part of the highway with a center turn lane, that ended 2 blocks before the intersection where the accident happened. They wouldn’t budge, so I said fine whatever, just cut me a check. BTW, they wouldn’t pay for a rental since my son wasn’t 21, and wouldn’t get one for me so I could let my son have my car, since I wasn’t in the accident… we only had liability insurance on my son’s car as it was so expensive, so they couldn’t do anything.
So I took pictures and sent them to the insurance adjuster and asked him to show me where the four lanes were. He tried to say the wide shoulder was a lane, yeah.. No.
Get another call, they do they’ll cut a check for less than half what we paid for the car, since it had a previous salvage title. Even with the salvage title, this care was with 4 times what they offered and twice what I paid. I only wanted them to pay what I had bought the car for. They refused, so I told them I’d let my attorney handle it from there on out. That gal said, “go ahead, we hear that all the time”. I said that fine, but do you hear this “I’m the biggest bitch in the state and I mean what I say”. She started spluttering and I just hung up.
We engage our attorney. The vehicle was towed to an indoor storage facility (the window was busted and the interior would have been exposed to weather). In the meantime, my son graduates high school and joined the army. After several months our attorney calls and says that the insurance company wants me to release the car to them as it’s racking up a huge bill. I asked if they were giving me what I wanted, he said no, they’d only come up to about 3/4 of my demands. I laughed and said no.
Another few months go by. Now my son has graduated basic and is almost finished with his advanced training and is days away from getting married. Insurance is whining about the storage fees again. Again they don’t want to pay. Of course once I hired our attorney, the suit included the insurance paying my attorney as well as the storage fees and the original cost of the car. So again I say no. I got a call from the storage facility. The was a tow truck there for the car. I drove there and told the driver nope, you can’t have it. He tried to say that he had orders to impound it… I laughed at I called my attorney.
So now it’s been over 2 years since the accident. My son and his wife are in Germany. I get a call from my attorney. He’s laughing his ass off. Said he had a check for me, $500 more than I asked for and all storage fees and his fees as well. Said the person he had been dealing with was whining about how hard I was to deal with and that I should have compromised sooner. Attorney told him that had I been given what I asked for at the get go, it would have been a hell of a lot cheaper. Was told that since hardly anyone actually engages an attorney, it’s the risk they take, and since their attorneys were on staff, they didn’t cost anything extra.
So because they wouldn’t pay out a measly $5400…it finally cost them almost $30,000.
I kept the extra $500 and sent the $5400 to my son.
So it might not have hurt the insurance company to shell out that $30k, but to me it was the principal. They thought because he was 17 that they could take advantage of him. They didn’t count on me.
I see a couple of answers that are good but don’t answer the whole question. Manufacturing is important but it is more than just that, but they are good at manufacturing.
1 – SpaceX has a strong bias toward action. Elon wants it done tomorrow and he expects you to work all night if you have to in order to make it. They definitely push action now. (Blue Origin started before them and still hasn’t made it to orbit. SpaceX did in 2008).
2 – SpaceX has a willingness to learn. They test early and often to learn about basic design flaws early. An example is the Starhopper. It was the simplest version you could ever build of a Starship. It was a tin can (actually fuel tanks) with an engine and a flight computer. They tested the engine and the control algorithm using that.
image 54
3 – SpaceX has a bias toward simplicity. One of Elon’s favorite sayings is “The best part if no part”. In other words they always look for ways to eliminate whole systems. Starship and the “catch” is an example of that. They eliminated landing gear and a few thousand pounds of structure to support it.
4 – SpaceX is willing to dream big and innovate. In 2010 when Elon said they would land boosters on the Falcon 9 and reuse them people laughed at him. That is impossible! They lost a couple figuring it out but they have now landed 239 of them as of 12/19/2023 according to their website. I assume that is updated for last night’s launch. (They launch a couple of times a week). For Starship they will catch the rocket during a controlled descent!
5 – SpaceX understands where the real cost of space travel comes from and avoid it. They try not to drop millions of dollars of flight hardware in the ocean. They also launch often to avoid accumulating costs (salaries) without income (launches) and are moving to improve both with Starship.
6 – They avoid silly costs like buying multi-million dollar NASA certified flight components. Instead they usually build their own from off-the-shelf commercial components and save millions.
The end result is they are doing things no one else can or will ever do. Next stop Mars!
My wife and I were visiting friends, and we’d all been joking around for a couple of hours. Some of the jokes were “mean” in the “I’m just busting your balls” sense, but I didn’t think there was any genuine meanness going on.
On the way home, my wife got really quiet. I asked her what was wrong, and she said, “You really don’t know, do you?” She then told me I’d seriously hurt her feelings.
My heart sank. That’s the one thing I never, ever want to do. She’s my best friend, and causing her pain is unforgivable. But, no, I didn’t know what I did. I had no idea what she was referring to.
She found this hard to believe, because, from her point of view, I embarrassed her in front of our friends by, out of the blue, accusing her of being “bad” in a very specific way (which I won’t go into here, because I’d hate to humiliate her, again).
Immediately, I remembered saying it, but … but … it had been a joke! We’d all been joking around, in a cutting sort of way, and I’d just joined in.
My wife said, “It didn’t sound like a joke!”
“But why would I purposefully want to hurt you?”
“I don’t know. I was flabbergasted when you said it. I guess you must resent me.”
I apologized. I hate it when people make excuses for themselves while apologizing (“I really, really meant it as a joke!”), so I didn’t. I said “I’m very sorry. I should never hurt you. That’s terrible. I love you.”
She gradually got over it—or pretended to—but I didn’t. I realized this has happened to me before, and, a few days later, I discussed this with my wife, being careful not to make anything sound like an excuse.
“I think sometimes, when I’m joking, I don’t signal the fact with an ‘I’m just kidding’ voice. Would you say that’s true?”
“Yes,” she said. “You have a very dry sense of humor. It’s often hard to tell if you’re joking or not. Sometimes I have to explain to people that you’re joking.”
I’m autistic, and though (after decades of work), my social skills are mostly indistinguishable from a non-autistic person, that’s one way I screw up. When joking, I have a totally flat affect. I don’t realize it at the time. I don’t feel like I have a dry sense of humor. In my head, I’m goofy, not dry, but the goofiness doesn’t always translate.
Once, at work, when, at the end of a meeting, my boss asked “What will you be working on tomorrow?”
I said, “I don’t plan on coming to work tomorrow. I think I’ve worked enough for one lifetime. I’m going to stay home from now on. That sounds like more fun.”
There was a long pause. Everyone stared at me. Finally, in a really quiet voice, someone asked “Are you joking?”
To me, it was obvious I was joking. But I was in a minority of one. And this wasn’t in a stodgy, conservative office. This was a partying crowd. (Part of the problem is that I tend to joke when I feel like it. I don’t wait until there’s a general “we’re joking now” vibe. This mistake isn’t terribly conscious on my part, but I’m vaguely aware that I do it.)
In addition to being autistic, I come from a part of the midwest where people naturally have a flat affect. I grew up around folks who sounded a little bit robotic, and I inherited their tendency to talk without much vocal music. (If you’ve heard Martin Starr’s voice on “Silicon Valley,” you know what I’m talking about.)
I thought more about that night, with my wife and our friends, and realized I’d been trying to impress them. Once the jokes got started, I wanted to out-joke everyone else, and I stopped caring about who I trampled on. While I hadn’t purposefully hurt my wife’s feelings, I had used her to get a cheap laugh.
And then I thought some more about it. The thing I’d “jokingly” accused her of was something about her that irritated me at times. Had I acted out, in a passive-aggressive way, instead of talking to her, directly? I can’t discount that possibility. If that’s what I did, I was an asshole.
I went camping with my dog. We arrived at night and ended up in a remote area. I managed to get the tent up, get a fire going, plopped myself down with my dog at my side on a leash.
Suddenly she jumped and barked at something, I then smelled this weird smell, it was a grassy metallic smell that stung my nostrils. In that second i didn’t realize it was fresh skunk odor. My dog startled and lunged at the skunk and sprayed my girl right in the face, her eyes were slammed shut.
I had to take her to the water pump and wash her eyes out and wash her face and head as best as I could late at night.
Then I had another problem, where would my dog sleep ? I couldn’t leave her tied up outside due to the skunk and/or bears. If I left her in my car I would never get the smell out. So she slept in the tent and stunk the tent up.
I stuck it out, gave her several baths of dish soap,.hydrogen peroxide and baking soda. Still took,.weeks for the smell to go away.
She has a thick coat and for months I brushed or.petted her the skunk smell would drift out of her coat.
I never forgot that grassy metallic smell of fresh skunk odor and I hate skunk smell.
I’m originally from Edinburgh, Scotland but now live in Perth, Australia. I had decided one day to visit AQUA which is Perth’s aquarium and was using a bus instead of driving. When we arrived at the stop for AQUA a young male and female were getting off too and asked the driver how to get to the aquarium ( it’s at the far end of a complex with shops, cafes, beachside etc) so I said I was going there too and would show them the way.
On walking we chatted and I realised the girl was Scottish and asked whether she was here on holiday. They both were and we discussed where she was from ..it was St Andrews. Further conversation re courses at Uni etc and she said she was studying Physics and Space Science at Edinburgh University. That was a coincidence as my niece had done a very similar course at Leicester Uni as Edinburgh didn’t have that course when my niece was at Uni. I told her my niece had done the course at Leicester and she said a friend of hers had also gone to Leicester. I mentioned my niece by Christian name and was asked what her surname was. The friend was my niece. Then I remembered my sister and her OH had friends who lived in St Andrews. This girl was the friend’s daughter and was only in Perth for a few days as she and her b/f were having a tour round Australia.
This girl’s father had been my sister and her OH’s best man at their wedding. If I hadn’t been on that bus on that particular day or if I hadn’t overheard them ask exactly where the aquarium was we would never have known the connection. Quite the coincidence.
If war means China going to the U.S. to fight America, then you are right. But it is a not factor. China does not want to do that unless the U.S. hit China. China won’t be the first to lay its hands by
If war means China fighting off U.S. in China which include Taiwan, China then let me make it super clear. China is super duper ready now to give the U.S. such a hiding it will collapse the U.S. financially, economically, politically and militarily that the U.S. will never be the same again. Don’t even think about it. Your media, your politician and say what you like but if we have to sink all you dozen aircraft carriers we will in the defence of the motherland.
I think the U.S. knows that, that is why it won’t dare. But god help the U.S. if move beyond talking shit.
The research company I worked for was downsizing. My previous boss had already been let go and my new boss kept sending his employees to learn everything in my department. Well one fave employee thought she was better at my job and kept trying to change our protocols. She never actually did any work, just made our lives miserable.
Then the day came where new boss walked in and started handing out moving boxes. He didn’t even say a word, just passed out the boxes. We all packed up and left. Now my lab was a resource lab that did a ton of work for the other labs. Suddenly me and all my staff were let go and the new boss handed it over to his people.
Guess what? They had never done these procedures, used the high tech equipment or even understood the complicated algorithms to process the data. First week I get 9 phone calls asking for help. That was met with a big NOPE. Then I get a call that the favorite employee had mishandled one of the very expensive robot units and it was out of order. They wanted ME to come in and reprogram it and get them back up and running. Oh heck no! I never went back and never helped.
Lesson of my story is don’t play favorites and make sure you have the staff to accomplish the job.
It was in the 90’s on an international flight. There was a middle aged lady with a Gameboy playing a game at full volume after the lights went out and most of the passengers were sleeping.
People were asking her, then telling her, to shut off the sound. It appeared as though she did not speak English. So one guy rang the flight attendant, who came quickly, but could not communicate with the lady. She got another flight attendant who spoke the woman’s language, who seemingly asked her very politely to turn off the sound. Sorry, I don’t know what language it was. And if I did I wouldn’t say.
As soon as the flight attendant walked away, she started another game. Beep, beep, boing.
Angry passengers were yelling at her. Her husband got up to defend her. Someone rang the flight attendant again. You could tell by the exasperated sigh of the flight attendant that she knew what was going on.
She scolded the woman (assuming from her tone), who pretended to be hurt. It just kept getting stranger and stranger.
The woman shut off the Gameboy and put it away. But as soon as the flight attended walked away, she pulled it out and started another game. Beep, beep, boing. Here we go again.
Finally, a big burly man walked over, put his big hand on the husband’s shoulder and warned him, “I have no problem with you, but you better sit down if you know what’s good for you.” The husband might not have spoken English, but he sat down.
The big man pulled the Gameboy out of the woman’s hands, pulled off the back, took the batteries out, and gave it back to her. She was now screaming in a language I did not understand.
“You’ll get the batteries back when we land. If you had just turned down the sound this wouldn’t have happened.” He was raising his voice, partially because he was angry, but partially because he thought she didn’t speak English.
Finally, as he went back to his seat, she stood up and yelled in perfect English, “F**K YOU!!! IT’S NOT AS FUN WITHOUT THE SOUND!!!”
I once offered $5,000 toward state-of-the-art proton beam radiotherapy to a very good friend of mine. After speaking with his mother, he told me no, because she had advised him that, when he was unable to pay me back, I would sue him.
I, in fact, never made this $5,000 loan. — That he turned it down made him, in a way, a stranger to me; it’s almost impossible to go from a state of literally talking about everything little thing of the day with your buddy to … in all likelihood, slowly, he is dying of cancer; he probably won’t be here in five years.
I hope he’ll be here in 20. — For a cancer that is only responsive to surgery yet located in a place that barely tolerates any surgery, much less surgical resection, — for a cancer that has no effective chemotherapy treatments, curative or palliative; that, even for proton beam therapy, it’s probably not going to work.
And, you only get one shot (pretty much). — Getting the proton beam therapy twice carries about the same risk of catching another fatal cancer, so the utility-maximizing function aspect of this changes.
The part of my brain that is finance-oriented — that manifold — expects a forecast of a certain result, and deviation from that result, whether up or down, is necessarily bad.
If you forecast profits of $0, and in reality, you received $100,000, then great, but it’s still a problem from a risk perspective.
People do small things now. They will choose not to homestead their homes. I don’t know why; always reason. Perhaps… not planning on staying here all that long. Yes, but the money you’d save in taxes would… pay for the radiotherapy.
Do you see where this is going?
The whole new-money/old-money part of the film, Titanic, is interesting in how correct it is, and how misleading it is.
Rose is everything great about old money with none. Jack, of course, is fictional.
—
Jack woulda lost the best. Jack woulda died under the bridge.
Jack would’ve been of a mindset that you could not trust him with a blue diamond necklace but for if he were even accused of stealing it, he would never see the light of day again. — William Blake writes of circumstances like this (see: end of Auguries of Innocence).
This person and his mother are not crazy. There is no reason to think they would not be able to understand that you cannot sue someone for return of a gift.
But, it would take someone, for lack of a better term — like me —, to explain this to him/them, and they don’t want to believe it. I don’t know.
Maybe $5,000 was never enough. — Or, maybe we should not second-guess people. I know what they said.
Hungarian Stew with Noodles
Hungarian Stew with Noodles
Ingredients
1/2 cup vegetable oil
1 large garlic clove
5 pounds beef stew meat, cut into 1-inch cubes
4 medium onions, sliced
3 (6 ounce) cans tomato paste
2 1/2 cups water
1 tablespoon paprika
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon pepper
1 bay leaf
1 (16 ounce) package bow tie macaroni
2 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon minced parsley
1 tablespoon grated lemon peel
1/2 teaspoon caraway seed
Instructions
In an 8-quart Dutch oven over medium heat in hot oil, cook garlic 1 minute (discard), add stew meat and onions. Cook until meat is lightly browned.
Stir in tomato paste, water, paprika, salt, pepper and bay leaf. Heat to boiling. Reduce heat to low, cover and simmer 2 hours or until fork-tender, stirring often.
Cook noodles, drain and toss with butter and parsley.
To serve, sprinkle stew with lemon peel and caraway seed.
You need to be able to read through English and dissect what CNN says
In most of the Media propaganda, they generally don’t lie about the content, they mislead people through the Headline and the Conclusion
For instance, they say Chinas Economic Growth will decline
It will
China grew at 7.41% from 2013–2023 and now will grow at around a worst case of 3.93% from 2023–2033
That is a decline in growth by 47%
Any non economist who reads this will say the same thing
However let’s look at 2003–2013
Chinas average growth was 11.21% from 2003–2013
Thus Chinas growth rate ALSO declined from 2003–2013 to 2013–2023 by 34%
Now let’s see another thing
How much population growth contributed to GDP growth in each decade
2003–2013 – it was 4.9%
2013–2023 – it is 0.8%
2023–2033 – it is going to be 0%
How much Government spending contributed to GDP each decade?
2003–2013 – It was 13.90%
2013–2023 – It is 6.30%
2023–2033 – It’s going to be 3%
How much will Real Estate contribute to GDP growth each decade?
2003–2013 – It was 15.75%
2013–2023 – It is 10.77%
2023–2033 – It will be 0%
What do you see here?
You see that the GDP Growth for China from 2023–2033 will be entirely from solid areas instead of paper growth
High Technology Manufacture & Domestic Consumption which accounted for 1% in 2003–2013, 3.1% in 2013–2023 will account for 14% of Chinas GDP Growth in 2023–2033
So Chinas 3.93% will almost entirely build it’s foundation economy and not it perceptionary economy
By 2033, China will have an immensely strong economy and resilient one
I had a classmate who must have married a rich guy. I didn’t even try to keep in touch with her after high school. But we ended up friends on Facebook. That was the time I just accepted every friend request from everybody I’d ever met in life.
After a while, she started to get on my nerves. She constantly complained about her upper class problems.
I don’t think I have time to get the cabin ready for summer. All the linens I ordered haven’t come in yet. I want to kids to sleep on new sheets, not last year’s garbage.
Paris was great, but now we don’t have enough time to get the boat ready for the lake.
I just hope the new furniture arrives at the cabin on time.
The painters came on the wrong day. They were supposed to come before the new carpet, and before the furniture arrived. So we had to put our new living room furniture in the theater room. It’s so inconvenient.
Can somebody teach me how to use the navigation system in my new Mercedes S Class? I miss my BMW 740i. I just can’t learn a new navigation system every year like this.
Just got back from Hawaii for Christmas. Now I have to supervise these caterers for the New Year party.
I later found out that they had a second mortgage on the house, credit card debt, and they were a month away from foreclosure. That didn’t make me happy, but it explained why she was always complaining about her problems. She was trying to make people that she hadn’t seen in a decade think that she was doing fine.
I was given a notice that I was going to be let go and a slap-in-the-face job offer from the same employer in the same week! let me explain….
I had been working for the same employer for years (on and off) and my group was getting a little light on work, although there was a lot more work on the horizon. One day, I was pulled into the Manager’s office and was notified that I would be laid off in 2 weeks. I wasn’t really shocked, as I could see the writing on the wall due to light workload. I was offered 2 months severance at my current salary and would be paid out my remaining vacation time. Considering that I was being fired, the severance package offered was pretty good. I signed on the dotted line!
With my impending unemployment looming in the distance, I began working my network for a new gig. After about a week, I had a few interesting local prospects. It was then that a supervisor in another part of the company that I was being let go from contacted me. He said that they would like to retain me and rip up my forced resignation letter, but only if I would agree to a 20% pay cut and a relocation. I had 5 days to decide, which was pretty stressful, considering that I had a family to support and potentially uproot.
I was slightly insulted and my soon to be former co-workers thought it was a big slap-in-the-face, considering that I had been slated for a lot of future work at my current salary. Come to find out, the company had realized that I was needed, but wanted to make some extra coin off me by paying me less and billing me at my previous higher rate to clients. After all my years of service, commendations, and happy clients, the company I had worked weekends for, neglected my friends and family for, and sacrificed my time with my kids for, was trying to take advantage of me by trying to put me in a bind and forcing me to decide quickly on a bad offer.
Anyhow, a direct competitor was interested in my services and immediately offered me a slightly better salary than I was currently making with better benefits. They wanted to scoop me up before I accepted the bad deal. I turned down the 20% pay cut offer, accepted my resignation and 2 months severance package and took a wonderful 1 month vacation. After a month, I began working for my new employer, which happened to be across the street from my former employer. Within a year, my former employer was bought by a huge international company and a lot of people quit or were fired. I am very happy with my new employer.
I worked in admin with only men in my departement in a company that worked at airplane propellor⁹ services, a very strickt environment. I needed a better chair and some cabinets. The head of the supply departement, a gorilla type man, accompanied me to a shack on the premesis. We went inside and he locked the door with a padlock. I acted like I hadn’t noticed. I babbled along about what I thought was suitable, testing some chairs, opening cabinets, heart pounding! Meanwhile he laid out some flat cartboard boxes on the floor. I knew if he’d assault me I could never win. Again I pretended not to notice and asked about his kids who were back in school after the summer holidays. That made him snap out of it. I asked him to load up a few items and he did. He opened the padlock and we went back into the main building. I went straight to HR. I told the shocked woman over there I wanted him to be warned because he had a family but never let him be alone with a woman again! He was mad at me for making him look bad ‘because nothing had happened’. My direct supervisor let everybody know what happened and all the men took my side. He was not fired (my request, everybody needs a second chance) but they added a black page in his file.
My husband and I were coming home from Puerto Rico, flying into Pittsburgh that night. A small, stereotypical family sat in front of us: attractive father, beautiful young mother, and two adorable kids, one still an infant and the other a toddler. We’re minding our own business when, out of the corner of my eye, I see the toddler looking at me from the openings between the seats.
“Hi!”
I smiled and said hello, and she took that as an opportunity to tell me literally everything about her life. Her mom kept giving me this patronizing look (like, “God, I’m so sorry she’s talking to you; if I could get her to shut up I totally would”) and saying “Maggie, let’s leave them alone and sit in our seats, OK?”
She told me her name was Maggie and she likes pink, blue, and black. She’s 3 years old, and how old are we? “You’re 22? And he (my husband, Joe) is 24? So you’re both 22. OK!” Maggie lives in Ithaca, New York, and loves flowers like the ones I have on my arms (tattoos) but “you shouldn’t draw on yourself with markers so much Miss Katie!” While she was in PR she “did some bad but also cool things,” and she’s going home to see Uncle Mark, who’s sick right now, so she isn’t going to hug him. “Who’s that guy with you? Joe? So Mr. Joe is your son, right? Miss Katie, can you tell your son to wake up? I’d like to talk to him.”
This carried on for the entirety of the two and a half hour flight we were on. I loved her, but my husband wasn’t so fond: she really liked him for some reason or another, and he wanted to sleep. Maggie’s mom kept telling her to turn around because, as Maggie had already put it, “the sun was going into the water so it’s almost bedtime for my brother. Do you want to see my brother? He’s a baby still.” At which point she proceeded to pull her infant brother’s foot over to the side of the plane by the window and show him to me through the cracks of the seats. I cackled.
Joe kept trying to sleep. He had headphones on, and she told him that she liked his earmuffs, but hers were nicer because they’re pink and black but she only wears them in the winter. As my husband drifted off to sleep, she yelled, “Wake up Joe!” I cackled some more, and she kept playing with him, poking him and saying that she “got him,” and asking Mr. Joe questions about his games and what movies he likes.
Meanwhile, her parents were asking the entire time for her to leave us alone, stop bothering them, “Maggie, do you want to color? Maybe if you’re quiet and color you can show them a picture when you’re done!” and all sorts of other mom things. Once, Maggie left for a few minutes and distracted herself with a game, but came back after a bit and said over the top of the seat, “I know I left, but I came back because I like you guys. You’re very fun!”
I loved Maggie. She kinda grew on my husband towards the end there, and I think he actually liked the attention. After the flight, her parents turned to us and introduced themselves, and apologized for her bothering us the whole flight. I said it was fine, not to worry about it, and that she certainly wasn’t bothering us. They thanked me for being so nice to her, and her mom said, “Yeah, but I want you to know that now, you both will be members of our household for the next two months. She’s going to go to bed every night and say, ‘Momma, do you remember Mr. Joe and Miss Katie? Can you tell me a bedtime story about them?’”
I think about Maggie often and hope that one day her mom tells her about Mr. Joe and Miss Katie from the flight back from Puerto Rico. I miss her sometimes, especially since she was better at waking my husband up than I am.
Ambush | Full Movie (action Movie with Nicolas Cage)
When I was a young boy, I reckon somewhere around 7 years old, we were living in Monroe Connecticut. It was (at that time) a growing middle class neighborhood, and my father bought a plot there and was building a house.
(Later on, it became a wealthy suburb, and our house that we sold at a loss in 1965, became worth many, many millions of dollars. Sigh).
I used to explore the woods around the home.
And one Easter, my father woke us up with our baskets of chocolate, and Easter eggs, and a live white rabbit.
And us kids… being kids… well, we spent all day feeding the rabbit chocolate. And that is what happened all during Easter.
Well…
The very next day, we woke up to find the rabbit dead.
Yup.
Chocolate ends up killing animals like rabbits, dogs and cats.
Sheech! We didn’t know!
So that morning, once we all got our clothes on, we filed in a line… a procession… and carried the rabbit to the swamp and trees behind our property.
And there, my dad dug a hole, and we buried the rabbit.
We all threw some dirt on the cardboard shoe-box, and said goodbye to our short-lived friend.
Sometimes, the best intentions… due to ignorance… can be lethal.
Napoleon Bonaparte, who became Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, is the most famous self-made man in history. The other great men with whom Napoleon is compared, such as Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, began their careers with tremendous advantages. Alexander was already king of Macedonia when he conquered the Persian Empire and earned the title “the Great.” Caesar was born into the aristocratic patrician class, and was governor of Spain before he conquered Gaul and became dictator of Rome.
Napoleon was born in Corsica, a backwater province of France, and through his father’s efforts attended military schools in France. At any other time, he might have simply served as a career officer in the king’s army, perhaps with some distinction. Instead of this fate, the chaos and violence of the French Revolution provided opportunities for ambitious men. Like hundreds of other French military men and politicians, Napoleon was literally the right age, at the right time in history, in exactly the right place to exploit fortune.
Through a combination of talent, ability, patronage, boundless energy, and great luck, Napoleon circumvented potential rivals and rose rapidly to prominence and power. By 1807, fourteen years after his first success at Toulon in 1793, Napoleon had created an empire unlike anything Europe had seen since Ancient Rome. He was 38 years old.
From the siege of Toulon to the battle of Waterloo twenty-two years later, Napoleon fought more battles than Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar combined. However, this era was far more than just the sum of his military exploits. The transition period between the 18th and 19th centuries was the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. People listened to the new, powerful sounds of Beethoven’s music, were inspired by the Rights of Man to overthrow the rule of kings by divine right, were appalled by the beheading of thousands during the Reign of Terror, were awed by the discovery of an ancient civilization in Egypt, and read the first works of the Romantics like Byron, Kant, and Goethe.
Gifted military commander, innovative administrator, and ruler of an empire, Napoleon seemed to influence everything and everyone. His enemies were so impressed with his genius and abilities that Prince Metternich, Austrian Minister and Chancellor, named the period the “Age of Napoleon” shortly after the French Emperor’s death.
Napoleon Bonaparte rose from obscurity on a small island to become the most powerful man in Europe, then lost it all to die in exile on another small island. It is one of the most incredible stories in history.
We got scam calls alot at our office…always an India accent. One Tuesday a call comes while I was on lunch break and frankly bored. I listen to the spiel. An American stranded desperately needs our help to get to the embassy. Why he/she had an Indian call would have been a good question, but I’m in this for the fun. So I loudly relay to my co-worker what they’re telling me…”Oh my gosh! Sarah you’re not going to believe what’s happened to this poor woman!” Making a long story shorter, we strung them along all week on lunch break having them email and call back while we tried to figure out how to make this $5k transfer. Friday rolls around and they call with wire #’s so I can send the cash on my lunch break. We wait about 20 minutes and they call back. I very innocently explain that I couldn’t send the money because my bank said they’re scammers, but not to worry…I gave the bank their phone number, wire numbers, and email address so the bank can verify they’re legit. Lot of cussing in the background and they hung up. It was quite satisfying and we got no more calls.
A young immigrant taxi chauffeur had raped a girl who was 14 at the time. Oh well, sexual crimes happen and often the perpetrators come from cultures where the woman’s value is somewhere between cows and furniture. The Swedish law is rather jovial and lenient, also on what comes to sexual crimes.
The girl’s boyfriend had gotten furious, and had decided to avenge. He had called his brothers, and together with the girl, they had ambushed the chauffeur. They had assaulted him, tied him, kicked him and finally hanged him on a tree in a nature reservate.
The chauffeur’s colleagues had gotten worried as he had not arrived to work, and they found him hanged on the tree a week later.
The gang of five was caught on basis of the mobile phone data. They are charged of murder. But since they are all underagers (under 18), they cannot be tried and sentenced as adults.
It is easy to see the girl was a native Swede, as the boyfriend and his brothers killed the assailant to avenge the rape. If she had been an immigrant, the boyfriend and his brothers would have killed her as a honour murder.
All in all, I am not amused of this case. It is a direct slap upon the Sweden’s collective face. First, this whole case would have not happened if rapists were punished severely enough in Sweden. Second, vigilantism is a sign that the official crime investigation and punishing machinery is not working as it should. Third, because murdering a rapist is not an eye for an eye – murder is a far more grave crime than rape itself. And fourth, because the murderers are all underagers. It is utterly unlikely adults would have taken the law on their own hands and murdered the rapist, but underagers with too much testosterone and too little consideration can commit crimes like this.
He asked him, “don’t you feel cold being outside, and not wearing any coat?” The old man replied, “l don’t have it but I got used to that.” The billionaire replied, “Wait for me. I will enter my house now and bring you one. ‘ The poor man got so happy and said he will wait for him.The billionaire entered his house and got busy there and forgot the poor man.
In the morning he remembered that poor old man and he went out to search for him but he found him dead because of cold, but he left a NOTE, “When I didn’t have any warm clothes, I had the power to fight the cold because I was used to that. But when you promised me to help me, I got attached to your promise and that took my power of resisting.
MORAL: Don’t promise anything if you can’t keep your promise. It might not mean anything to you, But it could mean everything to someone else.”
Only the British will know the “Slaughtered Lamb’s” most famous extra.
If you drink ten pints, your body will GPS itself towards a Kebab shop.
Only the British will know what Stephen Fry, Emma Thompson and Robert Lindsay have in common.
Only the British will know that Roger Moore nearly appeared in an Andrew Lloyd-Weber musical.
Only the British will know why the bowler was holding the batsman’s willy.
We know which part of Spain the rain mainly falls on.
It’s not a great idea to look the guy at the next urinal in the eye and smile!
Men know that five shakes and more, is getting ‘iffy.’
Only the British know what “Dogger” means when I say radio four.
Only the British knew about ENIGMA
Only the British will know about the use of inflatable tanks in WW2.
Only the British will know what an Anderson shelter was.
There’s always going to be one fat bridesmaid.
That part of the wedding where the vicar says, “Does any man or woman know why this man and this woman should not be wed?” – that’s the bit where Brits start playing in their head, what the outcome would be if someone says yes.
Only British drivers can navigate a double traffic island, with traffic lights and live.
Only British people know that a 747 over London actually STOPS, mid-air, then proceeds to land at Heathrow, while barely moving.
Only British people standing on the beach of Dover know that on a clear day you can see France, and that no bugger has yet seen France.
Only British people that the only thing that the City of London was designed for, is lunch.
Only the British know that the USA has NEVER lost a war in which donkeys were used.
Only the British will think that American history is an oxymoron.
Only the British know that the difference between burned toast and the US Army, is that you can still make soldiers out of burned toast.
Only the British know that the sea at Southport is only half true.
The French call it an outside cafe. The British equivalent of tables and chairs outside is called an eviction.
It is horrible to be forced to keep a brain dead 16 year old on massive machines because the mother knows God will do a mighty healing and threatens legal action and calling me a murderer. By the way I am a Christian Doctor and I do pray with my patients and families. Two Neurologists declared this man brain dead. All the protocols were done proper . She refused any organ donation from her son. She had all the pastors and elders praying for this miracle. She glared at me horribly. I had prayed with her. She called me a murderer. I felt overwhelmed and miserable and helpless. I did not dare “ unplug “ this young son of hers. Very very depressing and sad . I consulted with the neurologist who said from his long experience to just stop trying to fight mom. He said the patient will “ die “ within a week even with full tubes and support. Forget the ethics and all the money lost and wasted that could have gone to better use. Just let it happen.
This helped me a lot.
After a week the patient went into total heart failure and no rhythm and was declared heart dead finally and the mother gave up. She was satisfied all was done and God took her son home.
Who gets to win even when the family are flat out wrong by science ? Who gets to pay all these bills? Who just eats it? We could build a whole school for what this all cost. And this sad game plays out all the time.
Olaf Scholz and Annalena Baerbock and that group have single handedly performed Harakiri on their Industries and People
By tacitly cooperating with the destruction of Nordstream and by getting access to Cheap Gas and Oil taken away, they have subjected their people to inflation of almost 9% and forced their industries to pay between 57% –117% more for energy
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Joe Biden, Blinken and that group have single handedly forced a level of de dollarization never seen before even in the 2008 Global Crisis
They have forced inflation on their Citizens
They have ignored Financial Struggles back home
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Boris Johnson and Sunak and that group have done the same
Kept Europe in a state of war, Kept Oil and Gas impossible to buy for Europe or UK Without paying a 20% premium on the price to 40% premium
Plus knowing their actions have caused double digit inflation of 11% across the last two years
Are these really Democracies??????
Are they doing a SINGLE THING for their people?
In the US, more people have been cut off from Healthcare in the last two years
Anything being done?
Nopes
The US has been flooded with more illegal migrants in the past four years than under any other presidency
Anything being done?
Nopes
The Politicians of these Countries are being elected to power on the basis of deluding their voters by mass media and social media every time and once elected, commit every act of atrocity against the people
The exact opposite is happening in these AUTOCRACIES
In China, the focus is Food Security, Energy Security, Technological Independence, removing poverty, increasing healthcare participants
In Russia, for the first time Putin is focused on ensuring his people have enough to eat, work and the ability to buy homes at lower prices
In Saudi Arabia, MBS has made life much easier for women, more education, cheaper prices and a return to free healthcare for its citizens
Not to mention moving away from religious dogma
Even in India
Our Government never talks of Food or Energy Security or Water Security or Agricultural Security or Healthcare or Education
It’s always :-
Fifth largest economy
Third Largest economy by 20XX
In China meanwhile it’s always :-
So much Poverty gone by 20XX
So much energy dependence removed by 20XX
Own Soybean Production increased
I believe the very system of DEMOCRACY is collapsing across the world
Every Democracy now reveals a fatal flaw of how much more dangerous a Democracy can become for its people when it’s leadership becomes poor like the case of most democracies today
Xi and Putin have nothing to do with it
They didn’t sponsor Maidan in 2014
They didn’t blow up Nordstream
They don’t Publish lies about other countries
All they have done is REACT to unfair decisions taken by democracies and in the process caused greater damage to the same democracies
My daughter was 2 years old when I considered returning to school for my masters. I called Millersville University and requested a catalog be mailed to me.
After I called, I had misgivings. Should I wait until Lauren was a little older? The easy way out is always so attractive, so tempting.
The catalog arrived while Lauren was napping. I made myself a fortifying cup of coffee, sat down at the kitchen table, and perused this ominous looking catalog for, by now, that’s how I came to view the situation. Having consumed my coffee, I decided waiting was the better decision.
Two days later, the mailman delivered another catalog. I placed that on my desk beside the first one. Things began to look a little sticky when day five produced yet another catalog. Was Someone trying to tell me something?
Instead of placing the catalog beside two of its fellow conspirators, I took this into the kitchen, made myself a cup of coffee, and read the requirements.
Dad’s graduation photo.
Having finished the catalog and my coffee, a memory arose. It was of my father. I remembered walking through the kitchen on my way to bed. He sat at the kitchen table with the light shining on his textbooks, pencil in hand, working the problems his professor at The University of Dayton had assigned.
Dad worked full time at Delco Products in Kettering then attended night school to finish the degree he’d started years before. His studies had been interrupted when Pearl Harbor was bombed. At 40, he returned to college to complete his degree.
If Dad could do this, so could I. I put my feeble excuses aside, and spent the next three years completing my MEd and reading specialist certification. It felt good and my parents were quietly proud of me.
This is a very old Welsh recipe. The word “Bara” is the Welsh word for bread and “brith” is the Welsh word for speckled.
bara brith
Ingredients
1 pound mixed dried fruit, chopped
1 1/4 cups freshly-brewed tea
1 cup firmly packed brown sugar
2 3/4 cups self-rising flour
1/2 cup milk
1 egg, beaten to blend
3 tablespoons orange marmalade
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
Instructions
Place fruit in large bowl. Pour tea over fruit.
Add brown sugar and mix well.
Cover and let stand at room temperature overnight.
Heat oven to 325 degrees F. Grease a 9 x 5 inch loaf pan.
Add flour, milk, egg, marmalade and cinnamon to soaked fruit mixture. Stir until combined.
Spoon dough into the prepared loaf pan.
Bake until bread is brown and crusty and wooden pick inserted near center comes out clean, about 2 hours.
Cool slightly. (Can be prepared up to 4 days ahead. Wrap tightly and store at room temperature.)
Makiwnyk (Poppyseed Loaf)
Here is the recipe for the makiwnyk, poppyseed loaf. This recipe was written down by me when I was about 15 years old as my mother was making it. The paper is old and falling apart, so bear with me. Don’t let this scare you from making it. I just found it and haven’t had a chance to re-do it.
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Ingredients
Loaves
1 teaspoon granulated sugar
1/2 cup lukewarm water
1 envelope active dry yeast
2 cups milk, scalded and cooled until lukewarm in mixing bowl
3 cups flour
1 cup granulated sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup melted butter
1 teaspoon grated lemon rind
3 eggs
3 egg yolks
2 cups flour
6 to 6 1/2 cups flour, divided
Poppyseed or Nut Filling
1 pound poppy seeds or ground nuts (I think she used walnuts)
1 cup granulated sugar
3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) melted butter
1 cup hot milk
1 to 2 tablespoons grated lemon rind
Instructions
Loaves: Dissolve the 1 teaspoon granulated sugar in lukewarm water (100 degrees F). Sprinkle active dry yeast into water/sugar mixture and let stand for 10 minutes.
Stir briskly with a fork. Add softened yeast to lukewarm milk and stir. Beat in the 3 cups flour. Cover bowl and let sit in a warm place until light and full of bubbles, approximately 1 hour.
Stir in the 1 cup granulated sugar, salt, melted butter and lemon rind. Beat just until mixed.
In a small bowl, beat with a fork the eggs and egg yolks. Stir into the batter. Add 2 cups flour and beat vigorously. Add another 4 to 4 1/2 cups flour working it in with a rotating motion of your hand. Turn dough over on a lightly floured surface and knead 8 to 10 minutes.
Shape into a smooth ball and place in a greased bowl turning the dough once. Cover and let rise until doubled, about 1 1/2 to 2 hours, approximately.
Poppyseed or Nut Filling: Combine all filling ingredients in a mixing bowl and beat until totally incorporated, set aside.
Heat oven to 350 degrees F.
Punch down dough and divide into 3 equal parts. Roll each into a 1/2-inch thick rectangle. Spread with poppyseed filling or nut filling and roll up each rectangle in a jellyroll fashion. Pinch seams to make edges secure and turn under loaf. Place on greased baking sheets and cover and let rise until doubled in size. Brush tops with butter and bake in oven for 1 hour.
Makes 3 loaves.
* I just go out to the supermarket and purchase the Solo poppyseed or nut paste and use that – it’s quicker.
I’ve had two similar circumstances. In one, they had fired me and later discovered the program I had written that tracked orders in the company required an extensive update. They wanted to bring me back at my old pay level to fix it. I counter offered with a contractor based fee. They laughed and declined. I found out later it cost them ten times my offer to get it updated. The contractor they hired wouldn’t work on the old hardware they had been too cheap to update, wasn’t familiar with the legacy format of the database file involved, would only work during business hours, stretching out the job over many days, etc. I had offered to have it done over a weekend for $5k. It took over a week and cost $47k. I was told they inquired into suing me for damages. Since they had not fired me for cause, and because I had made a reasonable offer, I was told they were advised not to pursue it.
in the second circumstance I had left the company voluntarily six months prior. My replacement had been given all the passwords with instructions to change them on my departure. Six months after my departure I received a phone call from my old bosses’ lawyer – on a holiday weekend, no less. They wanted to know the password for a critical piece of hardware and threatened me with a lawsuit if I did not provide it. I said I would not even talk to them without my old boss conferenced in. She was on the line in ten seconds, leading me to believe she had been listening in all along. I reminded her that I gave my replacement all the passwords, including the one requested, with instructions to change them. She said he abruptly left and they are locked out. They were trying to make it my problem. I expressed my sympathy, said there was nothing I could do, wished them well, and hung up.
In general, unless you did something nefarious, the location of their files is not your responsibility after they fired you.
I’d like to define “honeytrap” for others first before answering…
A honeytrap occurs when a person, political organization, etc. use sexual favors or romantic relationships to gather information. It’s also known as “sexpionage”. This was used quite ofted during the cold war.
In WWII it would be used more for spying on others rather than gathering information in a prison camp by using sexual favors. I really can’t think of anytime that prison camps did this, certainly not the Japanese who looked down upon those who surrendered.
Claire Phillip’s set up a famous honey trap. Claire was a U.S. citizen who escaped Manila when it it fell to the Japanese. She spent a number of months caring for other guerrilla figthers in the hills of Bataan. She was eventually convinced to go back to Manilla and spy on the Japanese. Phillips ran the Tsubaki Club which was a nightclub eventually most frequented by the Japanese soldiers (really the officers).
“Madame Tsubaki” would sing and socialize with Japanese businessman and officers along with girls she trained to flirt with them in order to get information. Her girls were able to gain information pertaining to troop units, troop movements, and important goings-on by flirting (and sometimes more outside the club in the nearby hotels). The next day, Phillips would gather the information gleened from that night by her and her girls and smuggle it by courier to the guerrillas.
She also helped smuggle food and notes into nearby prisoner of war camps. Her luck eventually ran out and she was captured by the Japanese police in 1944 after one of her couriers that had been captured (who had been brutally tortured and eventually killed) gave her up.
She was sent to one of the worst prisons on the island and was put in solitary confinement. The Japanese had plans to execute her, but instead commuted her sentence to hard labor. She was freed when her prison camp was liberated.
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For her brave acts, she was awarded the Medal of Freedom in 1951 upon the recommendation of Douglass MacArthur.
For further reading, I’d recommend – MacArthur’s Spies: The Soldier, the Singer, and the Spymaster who Defied the Japanese in World War II by Eisner, Peter (2017).
I’d also look up the story of this woman:
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Betty Pack was an American-born British spy nicknamed “Victoria” who worked for the famous MI6. She was the one who first discovered that the Poles had broken the German Enigma code.
I’d recommend The Last Goodnight by Howard Bloom (2016), to read more about her in detail.
I was a Critical Care Transport Paramedic for one of the largest prison systems.
I was picking up a 65+ year old “Lifer” who was suffering chest pains from our unit Infirmary, to transport him to the main prison hospital…
A young CO was putting the Old Guy (“OG”) in the required Full restraints while OG was laying on my ambulance cot, with a mile of wires, IV tubes, oxygen tube and sensor cables running everywhere….
Since OG had a high security rating, the rules required handcuffs with a “Lock Box”, belly chain, leg irons and a “trip chain”…
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The kid was fumbling everything…
Finally the OG, told the CO… “Dammit Kid…!! I ain’t got enough heartbeats left to wait on your ass….! YA DO IT LIKE THIS….”
….and Old Guy proceeded to direct Young CO in how to properly restrain a High Security Prisoner, quoting the Procedure Manual chapter and verse.
And the OG did a darned fine job of it…
When the young CO finished he told his LT he was going to write the inmate up, the LT told him to STFU and learn…
We had an uneventful ride to the hospital, and OG survived that and several more cardiac events before he finished his sentence… so to speak…
I liked OG…
He was respectful with the Medical Staff and COs tho hard as nails and well respected by the other inmates…
I was working for an independent Mercedes repair shop in Richmond Virginia. A customer had moved to Richmond from West Africa and had his Mercedes shipped by boat to Newport News and then flat- bedded directly to our shop to get it checked out and get a state inspection. The boss told me to drive it to another shop a few blocks away that did engine cleaning. When I got there we popped the hood and the guy proceeds to turn an industrial-sized pressure washer onto the engine. Out pops the biggest rat I’ve ever seen, maybe the size of a small dog, and we watched it run across the road and behind the nearest building. If that’s the kind of rats they have in West Africa I’m definitely steering clear of that place.
A semi-friend in high school days had a lot of connections where we worked part time. As a result, he believed he could do (or not) anything. He had been right for a year running. If he wanted Friday night off for a date — granted — something none of the rest of us got. If he wanted to come in later on Saturday morning, granted.
He’d “volunteer” to straighten up shelves, etc. and in reality he’d goof off. Sometimes he’d hang out in the stock room, other times in the break room. Sometimes he’d leave the store for as long as 20 minutes. The manager, who “knew,” nevertheless never went looking. He also knew that if he caught the kid, then what? He couldn’t fire him (connections) and yet he’d now officially know he was goofing off.
What if one of the rest of the staff complained. Even worse, what if one of the staff filed a complaint with the Dept of Labor or something like that? So he maintained his “deniability” by never going to look.
Then one day, one bagger was at lunch and the second was on break. The store had been empty but all of a sudden, there was someone at the check out. The rules of the store were that that the cashier never bagged … that was the bagger’s job.
The manager knew Jon was somewhere in one of the aisles goofing off, so he paged him to the front. No response. Paged again, no response. Finally, Jon comes wandering up, the manager points to the checkout line and Jon erupts.
“Go do it yourself you Effing lazy <religious slur name>. I bet you think that just because I have pull downtown that I’m in your <religious slur> religion but I’m not. So if you want to bag that b&tch’s groceries, get up off your lazy <backside> and do it. I’m going out for a smoke …”.
The manager said (very quietly I was told), “No, you’re fired.”
Jon started to laugh and the manager once again said, “You’re fired. Get out of this store right now.”
Jon: “Yeah right you little piece of <religious slur> <word for crap>. You’ll be the one fired when this is over.”
The manager stood his ground and told the woman in the courtesy booth to call the local PD. To Jon: you’ve got until they get here to get out or you will be arrested and I will press charges. I assume that the store will also back up any charges the cashier and the customer might want to level at you.
Then he hears the siren … he sees the cop car coming toward the store. With that, he tore through the store and ran out the back emergency exit and to his car. Not long after, he’s on the phone to his grandfather, who was his connection downtown.
But the grandfather had already heard the story so when Jon went off again, Granddad let him rant and then said “as your manger said, you’re fired. Is that all you called me about?”
I heard the story from coworkers and from him and both sides agreed on all the essential details. This was very possibly the first time anyone had ever told him no and made it stick.
In 1976 I was in college, and one afternoon a girl was screaming on the balcony of my dorm. So I went out there, and saw a student lying on his back, very pale, barely conscious, with blood coming out his mouth. Another student was kneeling over him, and said “if he dies I’ll kill myself, but he shouldn’t have messed with me”. A rifle lay on the balcony between them.
They were both freshmen, and had been on campus for only two weeks. The victim apparently was a bit of an asshole who had pranked the perp the previous week, destroying some of his property. On this day, he had been at it again, locking a different student in a bathroom and walking away. That was his last prank.
It was a small town, which did not have “911” service yet. I think there was some confusion about who was calling the ambulance – most of us were teenagers at that point. We should have carried him into the parking lot and put him in a pickup; the hospital was only a half-mile away. Finally the ambulance arrived; I think I saw his hand move as they loaded him in, but he was dead upon arrival.
The perpetrator surrendered without resistance. Apparently he had a history of mental illness, so he was found insane and was transferred to a mental institution. The rifle did not belong to him.
We can’t control the past. Wasting time to worry about it is lost time.
Sadly, we don’t get what we give. Don’t expect people to always give back. Not everyone has as giving a heart as you.
Good things usually don’t come easily. And if you think about it, great accomplishments take time too. Don’t expect rewards instantly.
Not everyone will support your dream. Haters, doubters, and pessimists will sabotage every move you make. To overcome this, follow your gut and forget them.
You are responsible for the problems you encounter, regardless of who caused them. So instead of blaming others, find a way to get out of situation.
Our words have the power to hurt. Cruel remarks wound others for life. Use your words to inspire and to liberate instead.
Failure quickly gets to our hearts, but success goes to our heads. Our character is revealed at our highest and lows. Be humble at the top. Be faithful in the valleys.
Our assumptions about what happiness should be are what makes us unhappy. Let go of your expectations about what would make you happy.
We judge ourselves by our ideas and others by their actions. Be a person who others want to meet and be around.
We all will die. No one will live forever. Start living a purposeful life and try to mend broken relationships, because you never know when life will end.
Hating oneself starts with breaking one’s promises. Once done, it feels terrible. When it becomes a habit, you hate yourself more.
Sometimes we have to ditch toxic friends from our lives and surroundings.
My first jury trial my client was accused of knowingly applying for Oregon resident hunting licenses and tags without qualifying for residency. My client owned about 40 acres of land in Oregon and had a trailer home and a large shop on the property and had utility bills for that property. He had one pickup truck registered in Oregon and one in California, where he taught at a community college, but his witnesses testified he spent summer and sabbaticals and holidays in Oregon and did not own a residence or have a permanent address in California. He paid state income tax to California and not to Oregon and had a California license, and a resentful Oregon neighbor had turned him in to the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW). ODFW regulations required proof of residence by any 3 of a long list of documents, including a utility bill, a Passport, and a Social Security Card.
At trial, the arresting state trooper took the stand and on cross examination I handed him the booklet of regulations, which was 20 or 30 pages of fine print and was, at the time, distributed to every place that sold licenses, and asked him to turn to the page that described the residency requirements where my client could have found the requirements when he purchased his licenses and tags. I expected the trooper to turn right to that page and I planned to establish that all my client had to do was show a utility bill with an Oregon address, his social security card and passport (which have no addresses) in order to establish Oregon residence to the satisfaction of the vender.
To my great amusement, the trooper could not find the page. He fumbled through the pamphlet, back and forth. I enjoyed that for a few minutes, and finally told him the page number. He went to that page and scanned it and said “no, it’s not there” and went back to flipping through the the booklet. I let him do that for a minute more and said “look at page _ at the last paragraph set out with darker highlighting” and he then found the part and I went on with my questioning. At the end of the trial in my closing argument I hammered on that: My client is supposed to be able to read these rules while standing in line for his license and he is supposed to understand how they apply and the trooper can’t even find the rules when I tell him what page to look on . . . “
The jury acquitted my client on all counts. I cannot say for sure, but I believe that cross examination was the best moment in the trial for me and my client. My client was found not to have “knowingly” violated the law. And my brilliant cross examination was not planned or even anticipated. I assumed the trooper would be familiar with the regulations and would turn right to the page. The witness did it to himself.
My father-in-law looked me in the eye and angrily laid a curse on me by saying: “You’re going to die a miserable old man all by yourself.” With that, he got out of his chair and stalked away.
The circumstances were I was divorcing his daughter. Understand that his daughter had had several affairs, had made my life hell for several years, and truly didn’t want me in her life. She only claimed she wanted to stay married to save face and for the Machiavellian goal of making me look like the “bad guy” because I was the one filing for the divorce.
The lead up to the above talk was my then father-in-law had called me up to come by and talk to me. I of course said yes. I had always had a good relationship with him.
I spent the first half hour listening to him about how the Christian thing to do was to not get divorced. I made sure to fully listen to him. I mirrored back to him what he was saying to make sure I understood. I didn’t interject with my counter thoughts.
When he had finished I only got about 30 seconds into what I had to say in response. He cut me off. Said I wasn’t listening to him (because I wasn’t agreeing with him) and then he laid the curse on me per the quote above.
That was the last time I talked with him some 20 years ago. As I write this I’m sitting here with my wonderful wife of 10 years enjoying a scenic overlook from the back deck of our house.
Hot Dog Sizzler, an Auto Oven Cooks Hot Dogs From the 1950s
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Want a hot dog on the road? Just plug this heater into your car’s electrical system. This 12 volt electric cooker could cook two wieners at the same time in three to five minutes in your car!
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It was called the Hot Dog Siezzler and was made by the Thomas Manufacturing Co., of Chicago sometime in the 1950s while drive-in’s were around. This was thought up has an alternative to what they saw has an expensive meal at a White Castle or McDonalds or even Carols. It only makes sense because after all who wouldn’t rather have a hot dog instead of a hamburger?
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Priced at $3.95 in the 1950s. And it also comes in a 115-volt version for the home.
Keep in mind that this is my opinion so you may/may not agree with me.
Spanish Donkey
This was a torture method that was used during the Spanish Inquisition (period of forced conversions to Christianity, killings, prosecutions and torturing). It was mostly used on women (but it was common to use on men as well) when they were stripped naked, put on the Donkey, weights were added on their legs and the point of the Donkey was to pressure the woman’s genital area and if the weights were heavy enough, it would split the victim in half. Weights were added to prevent the victim from falling off the device and to increase the agony.
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Judas Cradle
Similar to the Donkey, Judas Cradle was a torture method used to punish criminals mostly. It was a pyramid shaped seat on which the victim was put slowly to make them suffer more. The victim was tied with ropes above the Cradle and then slowly lowered to the top of the device. Men were impaled through their anus and women through the vagina. The device would leave victims in agony and if those that were torturing wanted to make the whole process worse than it already was, they would add weights to the victim’s legs. If the victim didn’t die from the pain and exhaustion (as the device was known as “the wake” as it prevented victims from falling asleep) they would die from infections as the Cradle wasn’t cleaned.
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The Brazen Bull
This torture method first appeared in Ancient Greece. The victim was placed inside a bull and fire was set under the bull causing the metal to change it’s colour to yellow as it was heated. The victim was roasted to death in the bull while the bull itself was designed in such a way that the screams coming from the victim sounded like the bellowing of a bull.
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Scaphism
This was a Persian torture method. The victim was placed in a boat and covered with one more and then forced to ingest large amounts of honey and milk. Diarrhea occured as a consequence and the smell would attract various insects to the victim. Additional amounts of honey were poured on the victim to attract more insects as he/she was left to float in a pond on the sun. The insects would burrow through the victim’s skin destroying everything on their path. It was a long-lasting torture method so the victim was in agony for days.
Back a few years ago, I had a class with a lot of kids who hated going to Phys. Ed. The teacher wouldn’t let them participate without sneakers on, so they would (accidentally on purpose) “forget” their sneakers on Gym Days. I hit up the stores and bought sneakers (on clearance) in a variety of sizes so that no one would miss their Phys. Ed. time again. One day, “Josie” wanted to wear the pink sneakers, but “Susie” was already wearing them. She cried for a minute, then got over it. That evening the principal came to me and said that “Josie’s” mother had called an insisted on a conference with both of us. When he suggested that she just talk with me first, she said that what I had done was so awful, she needed him to be there to back her up. He asked me what I had done to this child. I had forgotten the sneaker business (It was a tiny part of a very busy day) and I couldn’t think of a thing. She was a complaining mother, and I was pretty sure nothing big or important had happened. He didn’t believe me. He was sure it was something really awful. Well, the mother comes in the next day, and her huge complaint was that her daughter had wanted to use my pink sneakers the day before, and I hadn’t let her wear them. The principal gave me a look, and I gave him a look reminding him that I told it wasn’t anything big. I explained to the mother why “Josie” didn’t get to wear the pink sneakers. She was still angry and said I should have taken them off of “Susie’s” feet and let “Josie” wear them. Happily for me, the principal told the mother that if her daughter needed pink sneakers that much, she should buy them and send them to school with her. We had a good laugh after the mother left.
I hope you don’t mind, but I would like to tell you my story.
I was that 8 year old child once.
My father was an alcoholic, my mother severely depressed. I raised my sister and provided her with the emotional support when our parents were too immature and abusive to give that to us.
I would get beat up, thrown against the wall, kicked, punched repeatedly on the head by my father, his rage would shake my soul. My sister and I would drown ourselves in books, homework and play as quietly so we wouldn’t anger our father. Our mother was verbally abusive, she would break everything in our home.
My father would tell us to get lost, to get out of his way, to shut up, leave him alone, brain dead kids.
He hated us.
One day my sister and I went to the neighbors house and asked them if they had candy.
It was an elderly lady and her husband. They giggled and came out with candy for us and told us to have a good day.
A few days passed and we knocked to ask them again. This time they pulled out some chairs and sat down with us. We talked for a few hours. We told them about our hobbies, favorite books, favorite everything. They gave us candy and told us to go home and not be out so late.
The next day we visited the elderly couple and they played the piano for us. We were so amazed by their warm atmosphere, love and kindness.
Some days we would go visit and they would just sit on the front porch showing them our sweet rock or toy collections, our art and we would even sing classical songs with them.
With time they began to tell us they were busy, then they didn’t open the door anymore.
We wanted to do something nice for them and picked out flowers for them and left them at their doorstep.
I still look back and I’m thankful to have met such a sweet couple. I strive to be like them one day as an old lady with my husband.
You have no obligation, but for me those strangers meant something worth remembering in my rough childhood.
When I was in my 30s and moved into my first house (as a couple). I waited to re-paint, decorate and have locks changed and things fixed and restored, then I had a party/BBQ in my new house and invited some relatives. The party was on the patio with access to the guest bathroom and I placed sticky plastic runners on the new rugs. A couple of the relatives (the younger ones) brought some friends with them (rude to not clear it with me first) and a good thing that I have a tendency to cook way more food than I need (Nana taught me well). I was a little hyper aware of everyone’s comfort and whereabouts when I notice that two female friends of friends were missing. I knew that only one person at a time would use the bathroom so I went into the house. They were both trying the door to my bedroom (“Maybe it’s stuck”) which I had locked along with the two guest rooms and I went casually behind them and asked softly what they were doing.
They both whipped around startled. One of the women said “The door’s locked.” I actually did that because I didn’t want one of the kids to accidentally let my cats out. I didn’t say anything and they exchanged a look then asked why I had the door locked. I drew in a breath and asked them “Why do you need to go into my bedroom?”
“oh we just wanted to look at the house.”
“I think you’ve seen enough, now go outside or leave.”
They went outside…to complain. Why are there doors locked, why is there plastic runners all over the house, did you know there’s nothing in the medicine cabinet and the only thing in the vanity is an extra roll of paper (I did that on purpose).
I cleared my throat and said, “The why is because of people like you.” Their friends (Our relatives) just chuckled and kept their heads down.
Chase Explains Why Women SUCK At Picking Men And She Got UPSET
“I’m 70 y/o and this has been the case for many of the women I have known. Horrible in their choice of men. It’s on you girls, wise up.”
Sigh. Yes, completely unexpectedly. This past Friday night, my girl was actively dying from liver failure. She was within hours of death and I was staying with her to help comfort her. There were no vets to call to help ease her passing at that time of night, so I was doing my best to comfort her through it as best as I could. I was lying on the floor with her and softly petting her, telling her I was there, she would be OK, that we all loved her, she was the BEST friend I ever had, but that I knew she was very sick and when she was ready go it was OK to go, and see her mama who had passed several years ago. I was trying my best to stay calm (because me being upset always concerned her) but at one point I broke down and cried a little. My dying cat made a huge effort to stand up, rub along my side and then lay down facing me. She looked me in the eye, and put her paw on my hand and purred. This is what she did after I came home from the hospital with my baby years ago and was suffering from postpartum depression, and after I had had gallbladder surgery and was sitting in pain on the couch for days, after my mother in law passed away and any other time I was distraught in the twelve years she knew me. She was always wonderful, and even when she was dying herself she was still thinking of me. Good lord, I’m missing her!
Dong Jun 董军 was named as defense minister, taking the position formerly held by Li Shangfu.
For the first time, a Navy veteran was named to the senior defense minister position. This likely means that the Chinese government believes that, for the first time, its major challenges will come from the sea, which includes South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines. If conflict breaks out in any of these areas, the navy, air force and rocket forces will play a more important role than the army.
In terms of defense spending, this likely means a steady increase in budget for the navy, which is now building two more Chinese aircraft carriers.
If there is a major conflict with the US in the western Pacific, the navy, air force and rocket forces will form the tip of the Chinese spear.
This is what Xi is preparing China for, just in case.
I think by “train without wheels” you may be referring to it
In July 2021, the 600 kilometers per hour high-speed maglev transportation system developed by CRRC was mass-produced in Qingdao. This is the world’s first high-speed maglev transportation system with a design speed of 600 kilometers per hour.
In 2022, this maglev train will be exhibited at the German International Rail Transit Technology Exhibition.
In 2023, this maglev train will be displayed at the World Manufacturing Conference.
It is not a new thing, at least it has been around for 2 years.
It is a complete solution and requires a dedicated track to operate. This means that it is not a “train” that can run on ordinary rails.
It has no wheels and is suspended on the track by magnetic levitation. There is no resistance from the track. The propulsion power comes from each carriage. Technically, it’s flying in the air, just a few centimeters above the orbital surface.
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The forward power of the maglev train comes from the conversion of the electromagnet polarity between the track and the carriage. S and N are alternately converted to push the train forward.
When it needs to reverse, the control system changes the conversion sequence of each magnet, and the vehicle can drive in reverse. Since there is no need for a gearbox and complex transmission mechanism, its reversing becomes very simple.
Why Men Are NO LONGER Approaching Women!
“I’m reminded of the BLIND guy that a chick said was staring at her in the gym. The guy’s defense was obviously “I’m blind, I can’t stare at anymore” the gym still kicked him out.”
A few times people have asked me very intimate questions about my sex life; I just looked at them and cussed them out.
A hairy but non-intimate question that has been asked of me a few times: Why won’t you have a Christmas tree? Why? Because I’m not Christian, I am Jewish, and although there are some Jews who do put up and decorate Christmas trees, I don’t.
I had a friend from high school who grew more heavily Christian, and she peppered me with questions about this. One time on the phone (perhaps the last time we spoke) she asked me why I wouldn’t consider putting up a tree for the holiday. I asked her if she would consider setting up a Hanukkah menorah with candles for the holiday. When she said no, I laughed drily.
I told her this was offensive to me and she couldn’t understand why. I think that people who are of the “dominant” religion sometimes forget that not everyone is of their belief. And yes, it is offensive to me to be pestered about this. Ask once, and if I say I don’t, accept that. Otherwise, you’re going to get a jawing from me.
Maturity does not come with is age it comes from experiences it’s damn true because you can find a kid in 30 year old person and a wise person in 12 year old kid .
Some people come in our lives just for some time and then they leave us as if they never met.
Money is really important in life and It can solve at least 99% problems of our life .
No one is permanent in your life, one day everyone is going to leave you and We all know this but it’s takes guts to accept this fact .
No one can love you more than your parents, maybe at one point of life you will think that someone loves you more than them but it will be just illusion for fraction of time, which will get over with time.
Looks matter, Good looking people do get some benefits over others but of course it’s what others can do but we should always love ourselves the way we are.
Don’t give too much importance to someone or don’t do too much care because one day they will get bored of this.
There is nothing like BFF (best friend forever) because one day that forever gets replaced by never.
There is some problem in everyone’s life, so don’t compare your life with anyone; No one is really happy all the time.
We all have someone who extremely love us but only some lucky people have someone in their life who can understand them too.
I was around 30 and went through a phase where my right foot was much heavier than my left foot. I got pulled over for doing something like 80-85 in a 60 in an area about an hour from where I lived. When I went to court, the conversation between me and the judge went something like this…
Judge: This is your 4th speeding violation within the last 12 months. Do you realize this carries up to a $10,000 fine and up to six months in jail?
Me (suddenly feeling very dizzy because I actually did not realize that): Yes sir.
Judge: I assume you paid a fine each time before this one.
Me: Yes sir
Judge: It seems that taking your money isn’t getting through to you. How do I get through to you?
Me (on the verge of a breakdown): I don’t know sir.
Judge: I’m sentencing you to 6 months in jail, suspended. I’m also sentencing you to a $10,000 fine, suspended. You’re going to come back here in 3 months and we’re going to look at your driving record. If there’s nothing on it, you’ll go home. If there’s anything on it, your sentence will be carried out. Then we’re going to do that again 3 months after that, again 3 months after that, and again 3 months after that. In other words, I’m going to inconvenience you to drive back here every 3 months over the next year so we can look at your driving record. Does that sound fair to you?
Me (barely able to speak due to a throat like the Mojave desert): Yes sir.
Judge: I thought you might think so. I’ll see you in 3 months.
I walked out of there not believing my good fortune. Instead of just throwing the book at me and moving on, the Judge took mercy on me and pretty much made me walk the line. I went back every 3 months and he congratulated me each time for not having any other traffic violations.
If we’re only talking about sheer intensity (and not effectiveness) then the Soviet bombardment signalling the start of their Berlin offensive at the end of World War 2 is the clear winner.
According to Cornelius Ryan’s book “The last battle”, Soviet guns were lined up for mile after mile and stepped back caliber by caliber. The mortars were in front. Behind them were tanks, their long main guns elevated. Next came self-propelled guns and, following these, batteries of light and heavy artillery. Along the rear were 400 Katyusha multiple-rocket launchers. In all, over 20,000 guns took part in this bombardment.
At exactly 3 AM on the 16th of April 1945, three green flares soared into the sky and the huge collection of guns roared into life. In merely 35 minutes, half a million shells of all types and calibers were let loose. Many soldiers on both sides were battle-hardened veterans of the Eastern front, yet even they didn’t expect the true intensity of this barrage.
The noise was terrible. Gunners had to keep their mouths open to equalize the pressure on their ears, otherwise their eardrums would rupture. One experienced Soviet battery commander even warned his crews to not only open their mouths but also scream at the top of their lungs. The crew did exactly that but blood still ran from their ears. The most fearsome sound of all came from the Katyushas. The rocket projectiles whooshed off the launchers in fiery batches and screeched through the night, making terrifying noise like “huge blocks of steel grinding together”.
Everyone on both the German and Soviet sides suffered from some degree of deafness and could not hear very well at least for a while. In Marshal Zhukov’s command bunker, only when the bombardment was over could the staff barely hear their telephones ringing. Even residents of the eastern districts of Berlin, some 55 kilometers away from the target area, could hear the bombardment like distant thunder.
Also according to Cornelius Ryan: The German countryside beyond the western Kustrin bridgehead seemed to disappear before a rolling wall of bursting shells. Whole villages disintegrated. Earth, concrete, steel, parts of trees spewed into the air and in the distance forests began to blaze. Years later German survivors would vividly recall the strange hot wind that suddenly sprang up and howled through the forests, bending saplings and whipping dust and debris into the air.
Antony Beevor’s book “The fall of Berlin” cited Gerd Wagner in the German 27th Parachute Regiment: “In a matter of a few seconds all my ten comrades were dead.” When Wagner recovered consciousness, he found himself lying wounded in a smoking shell crater. He was only just able to struggle back to the second line. Few escaped alive from the artillery barrage which smashed trenches and buried their occupants, both alive and dead. Bodies are still being discovered well over half a century later.
The massive barrage also produced strange concussion effects. Troops and equipment alike shook uncontrollably from the shock. In houses closer to the front, pictures fell off walls, windows and mirrors shattered. In Muncheberg, a cross tumbled from the church spire. In the police station at Mahlsdorf books fell off their shelves and telephones rang for no reason. Lights dimmed and flickered in many areas. In Dahlwitz-Hoppegarten an air raid siren suddenly went berserk and no one could switch it off. Along the edges of Weissensee and Lichtenberg a sudden wind caused curtains to whip and flap with ghostly abandon, and in Erkner some inhabitants of air raid shelters were jolted out of sleep, not by noise but by a sickening vibration of the earth.
The world had never seen such a massive artillery bombardment like that before, it has never seen anything like that since.
Brian KICKS OUT PSYCHO Obnoxious Feminist!
“I genuinely don’t think she’s trolling, I think she’s literally just crazy. She has no idea how crazy she really is.”
John W. Campbell got his engineering degree in 1930. In 1970, he wrote about what would happen if an SR-71 Blackbird was magically time-traveled to 1930.
It was clearly from the future. But how far in the future?
Electronics: not a single vacuum tube. Just little plastic cases with pins sticking out. They decide to sacrifice one to understand it. It appears as if the circuit diagrams are drawn on the chip. They can’t be sure, because much of the drawing is below the resolution the optical microscopes of the day allow. They do a spectroscopic analysis of the material. It is 100% pure silicon. Turns out the spectroscopes of 1930 cannot detect the parts-per-billion of the dopants that create the semiconductors.
Power: they’ve never seen a jet engine. There does not seem to be any way for the engine to operate. They try to run it. The fuel does not burn. Turns out the special fuel (if I recall, something called J6) can only be ignited by throwing some hypergolic igniter in on the ground. If it flamed out while running, it could not be restarted.
Radio: the circuitry is more magic drawings on silicon. They can’t figure out how any of it works. Turns out it runs at a higher frequency than anything they know how to detect.
Radar: They have no idea what that horn in the nose does. It seems to emit some kind of energy, because a tech got his hand in front of it an experienced some heating. So they tried using infrared detectors but saw nothing. Centimeter radar was beyond anything they knew about, and they had no way to detect frequencies that high, beyond anything they could even imagine.
Construction: it is made of pure titanium. More titanium than exists in the entire world! Extruded into thin sheets. And welded! Everyone they checked with said that it was impossible to weld titanium because it would essentially “catch fire” and it would start oxidizing and would all burn away.
So how far in the future did it come from? They got all kinds of people together, scientists , engineers, scientifiction authors. Where did this come from? Or, when did this come from? Consensus: maybe 400 years in the future.
No, it was 40 years.
So if we can’t reverse engineer something of human technology from 40 years in the future, do you think we have any chance whatsoever of reverse-engineering something from an alien planet?
When I became a programmer in 1963, if you added up all of the bits of memory in all the computers in the world, you would have at most a few megabits of memory. I am typing this on my iPhone, which has 128 gigabytes of memory, that is, one terabit of information. Plus a GPS, Internet access, three cameras, and a telephone that can allow me to talk to anyone who has a telephone anywhere in the world in seconds. That’s a bit longer than 40 years, but not that much longer. This thing I’m holding in my hand is at a minimum 100,000 times more powerful than the supercomputer of 1963, and could be construed as a million times more powerful along some measures. It has more RAM than our mainframe of 1983 had disk space to support 30 programmers. If I walk a block in any direction I will probably pass 20 phones equally powerful. And I live in a neighborhood of single-family homes
So we probably won’t be able to do anything with that alien spaceship. It might use quantum computers that compare to our quantum computers like my iPhone compares to an IBM 704 vacuum tube computer.
When I was working in the arctic we had a mass mutiny after the boss cut our paid hours from 12 to 8, while we were down for repairs. Which was about 5 days. Those extra hours were all over time, so it almost cut our pay in half. We had signed up for 12 hour days, and just because we couldn’t work more than 8 hour days, we didn’t see that as our problem.
Our boss refused to budge, and at least 5 people submitted resignations, and said that they wanted tickets home, because the company wasn’t meeting the terms of employment.
The next day, a new boss showed up and took over, and pay was reinstated retroactively. The people who had quit ,hadn’t flown out yet, and they all returned to work.
Its hard to find qualified help in the Arctic. Cutting pay for five days, would have meant that we were shut down for at least another ten days before they could have flown in new qualified people. They wouldn’t have flown in for an eight hour day.
The old boss was transferred somewhere else, where he could do less damage. He wasn’t fired.
Back in Fort Bragg I stopped to get gasoline while I was wearing my fatigues. That was during a time when gasoline was being withheld by the producers claiming a gasoline shortage. There was a long line leading to the cashier.
To make a long story shorter, four young men came into the store and one of them came to members in the line making demands of them. I thought it was a prank on friends of the young men until he came to me. He demanded a coke I had in my hand intending to purchase when I paid for my gasoline.
I offered to buy the gy a coke and told him to go to the cooler and bring it back. He said that he was perticulaary fond of the coke in my hand. I refused to give it to him. He told me “we’ll see you outside”.
They were gone when I left the store, so I pulled up to the pump as was pumping gas into my car, when their car screeched up to mine and all existed the car. The same guy walked up to me and demanded the coke. I did not know him or his buddies and I was alone. He shouted “give me my coke”. I hit him across the head and face with the coke which was in a bottle. The bottle broke ! The broken glass sliced his head and face from above his left temple down to his lower right jaw.
He fell bleeding profusely. His buddies asked if they could pick him up without me cutting them. I told them to get him.
Skipping a bunch of details, I ended upon in court before a magistrate to be charged for assault on a minor. The boy’s father was in the courtroom and drunk as a a skunk. When he saw me walk in in handcuffs, he shouted pretty loudly “There’s the Son of a Bitch who hurt my son”.
The Judge admonished him telling him that was drunk and that he would not tolerate causing and such in his courtroom.
He man looked up at me and loudly said “Tell that son of a bitch (the Judge) that I’m not drunk”.
It turned out that the four young men were terrorizing local stores and people doing this same stuff over and over. I was released based upon defending myself.
The kid and I later became decent friends with him crediting me with saving his life. He has a scar across his face until this day but he is a law abiding and friendly young man. He is not hostile toward me at all.
As a very poor college student, I used to go dumpster diving. I found several things (radios, alarm clocks, amplifiers, etc) that I fixed and sold. I found that I could make about $40 a week that way, with only a couple hours work. Minimum wage was about $3.25/hour so it was relatively lucrative. But there were two items that I kept for myself.
In 1985, I found an old computer in a dumpster, complete with 8″ hard drive. I took it home and took a look inside. Everything seemed okay, so I went to the library and started looking for information about it. It turned out to be an Altair 8800BT, one of the first commercially available microcomputers. I stuck it in my closet and ignored it for a couple of decades, just taking it with me every time I moved. A few years ago, I came across a listing for a similar computer on eBay, and was astonished to find that it was worth about $5000! I spent about $200 getting it working again, but it is so much fun to play with that I haven’t gotten around to selling it, and the value fluctuates wildly. There is an amazing amount of code and documentation available for it on the internet.
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A few months later, I found a Sylvania Superset in excellent condition. I took it home and plugged it in. The flyback transformer was blown. I spent $30 for a replacement, soldered it in, and the TV worked flawlessly until 1999, when my (now-ex) wife gave it to a friend.
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The photos are not mine, but they are the exact same models.
The Saigon Execution photo, but not for the reason most people think.
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“Two people died in that photograph. The recipient of the bullet and General Nguyen Ngoc Loan. The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera.” – Photographer Eddie Adams
This picture is both moving and tear jerking for me because I know the back story. Most people look at the picture and think the South Vietnamese general as some kind of monster. When the general lost a leg in combat and received medical treatment in the U.S., many were outraged. Then-Sen. Stephen M. Young (D-Ohio) called Loan a “brutal murderer” and said his treatment in the United States was “a disgraceful end to a … disgraceful episode.”
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What most people don’t know is that the real monster was not the South Vietnamese general, but the Vietcong terrorist. Viet Cong officer Nguyen Van Lem was the leader of a hit team that infiltrated into Saigon to execute political opponents and members of the police force. Just that morning, he had murdered 34 people. 7 of the dead had been General Loan’s own men. 2 or 3 had been Americans. The rest were wives and children of South Vietnamese police officers. All had been bound at the wrist, forced to kneel near a pit, and executed. The prisoner and all of his hit squad were terrorists who dressed as civilians to attack civilians.
Loan, fresh from intense combat with Viet Cong, literally caught Van Lem red handed. The most recent victims were one of Loan’s men, the policeman’s wife, and his 6 children. The general had literally caught the terrorist standing over the bodies of his own God children.
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Combat was ongoing. Loan had to rush back into battle. He didn’t have time to read a Viet Cong terrorist his rights. He put a bullet in the brain of a terrorist who had killed dozens of women and children. But for decades, the picture was reprinted over and over, with no context. The ignorant believed General Loan to be a villain, rather than a hero taking a monster off the streets of Saigon.
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Now the picture itself was not deceitful, nor was the photographer. But the picture was stripped of context and used to deceive the reader of American newspapers.
Late and absent both. Let’s call her Patricia. Patricia, our receptionist, was late or absent at least once a week, and she was always very apologetic and always promised it would never happen again. Eventually she was put on last chance, final written warning.
The owner and I discussed it and thought that maybe if Patricia felt that the company was willing to invest in her, she would feel more invested in the company. So we sent her to a class to improve her skills. She was very excited about the opportunity.
The day of the class was monstrous. A new client signed unexpectedly and we had to immediately come up with eight workers in the right specialty to send them, but to come up with travel arrangements and temporary living quarters in a city a thousand miles away for those eight workers. We got through it finally but I’d been covering not only my own job but Patricia’s as well and I was exhausted.
The following day Patricia came in and I asked her how the class went. She said, “I was a little late and they wouldn’t let me in.”
“So why weren’t you here? If you weren’t in class you should have come to work,” I told her.
“Well, I would have, but I thought you’d yell at me.”
I told her to sit down and I’d talk to her later. Before I said anything further I wanted to talk to the owner, who wasn’t in yet. I also called the company that provides the class in question, and they told me that while the attendance records weren’t in yet, Patricia would have had to be at least an hour and a half late before she would be denied access.
The owner and I agreed that where Patricia had already been on last chance warning for her attendance, this was the last straw. As I told her, “If you’d come in to work when they wouldn’t let you into class I would have yelled at you but you’d still have a job. As it is, you don’t.”
Old-fashioned sailboats were able to sail across the Atlantic by using the power of the wind and the skill of the sailors. They did not just sail back in the other direction if the wind changed, because they knew how to adjust their sails and navigate according to the prevailing wind patterns. Sailboats work by harnessing the force of the wind on their sails, which creates a lift that pushes the boat forward. The direction and speed of the boat depend on the angle and shape of the sails, the position of the rudder, and the resistance of the water and the keel.
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By changing these factors, sailors can control the movement of the boat and steer it towards their destination. However, sail boats cannot sail directly into the wind, because the wind would push them back. Instead, they have to sail at an angle to the wind, called tacking, and zigzag their way forward. This way, they can sail in any direction, even against the wind, as long as they have enough space and time.
The Atlantic Ocean has very reliable wind patterns, called trade winds and westerlies, that sailors used to their advantage. The trade winds blow from east to west in the tropics, near the equator, and the westerlies blow from west to east in the temperate zones, near the poles. These winds are caused by the difference in temperature and pressure between the equator and the poles and the rotation of the Earth.
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Sailors who wanted to cross the Atlantic from Europe to America would use the trade winds, and sail south until they reached the tropics, then sail west along the equator, and then sail north to reach the Caribbean or North America. Sailors who wanted to cross the Atlantic from America to Europe would use the westerlies, and sail north until they reached the temperate zone, then sail east along the higher latitudes, and then sail south to reach Europe. These routes are known as the Atlantic triangular trade because they formed a triangle on the map.
Sailing across the Atlantic was not an easy task, and it required a lot of skill, courage, and luck. Sailors had to deal with storms, waves, currents, pirates, diseases, and other dangers. Sometimes they had to navigate using the stars, the sun, the compass, and the log, and estimate their position and speed. They also had to cooperate with their crew and follow the orders of their captain. Sailing across the Atlantic was a great adventure, and a great achievement, for the old-fashioned sail boats and their sailors.
One famous example of someone who was extremely wealthy and lost it all due to a bad habit is Howard Hughes.
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Howard Hughes was a prominent American business magnate, aviator, film producer, and philanthropist who was born on December 24, 1905, and passed away on April 5, 1976. He initially gained wealth through his inheritance of the Hughes Tool Company, a successful oil tool business. Hughes expanded his empire into various industries, including aviation, film, and real estate.
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Here’s how he lost his wealth due to a combination of factors:
1.) Excessive Spending: Hughes had a penchant for extravagant spending, particularly on ambitious projects. He founded Hughes Aircraft Company and designed and built innovative aircraft like the H-4 Hercules, also known as the “Spruce Goose,” which was one of the largest planes ever constructed. These projects consumed vast amounts of his wealth.
2.) Film Ventures: Hughes ventured into the film industry, producing movies like “Hell’s Angels” and “The Outlaw.” His fixation on perfectionism and costly reshoots significantly inflated production budgets, leading to financial losses in the film sector.
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3.) Reclusive Lifestyle: In the latter part of his life, Hughes became increasingly reclusive and struggled with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). His reclusiveness made it challenging to manage his various business interests effectively, and he withdrew from public life, which hampered decision-making.
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4.) Legal Battles: Hughes became embroiled in numerous legal disputes, including battles over his inheritance, control of his companies, and allegations of fraud. These legal battles drained his financial resources and added to his woes.
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5.) Mismanagement: Hughes entrusted the management of his vast empire to a series of individuals, some of whom were not always acting in his best interests. This mismanagement further eroded his wealth.
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By the time of his death in 1976, Howard Hughes had gone from being one of the wealthiest individuals in the world to a recluse with a much-diminished fortune. His life and financial decline are often cited as a cautionary tale of the perils of unchecked ambition, excessive spending, and reclusiveness.
A woman was at my local bar in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, drinking a beer. It was a quiet early evening, maybe a dozen people in the place including the bartender and bouncer. A guy carelessly bumps into her, spilling her beer on her. He doesn’t apologize. Irritated, she points out that he just spilled her beer. I don’t recall exactly what he said, but it was very much not what a gentleman who just spilled a woman’s beer should have been saying.
Two large, tattooed dudes with shaved heads come along and sit on either side of the guy and ask him if he’d still be talking like that if the woman wasn’t alone. Because she very definitely was not alone. She was there with these two guys who had been up picking some music on the jukebox when the incident happened. And all three of them were good friends with the bouncer and the bartender. So they wondered if maybe the guy would like to apologize to the woman, buy her another beer to replace the one he spilled, and be a lot more thoughtful about how he treats people in the future. Which he agreed to. They pointed out how fucked up it was that it wasn’t until they came along that he started behaving more like a gentleman, and that maybe he should rethink his behavior towards women.
The guy left soon after, having wisely left a generous tip in exchange for leaving with all his teeth still in his mouth.
I was working at Office Depot as a cashier. A lady had over $100 in merchandise. She had a coupon from Staples that was for $10 off of $50 and asked me if I would honor it. We did accept competitor’s coupons. I told her of course, not a problem. She produced it, and I was reading the fine print to make sure that it was valid. Some coupons will have exemptions, such as not being allowed to be used with HP ink. As I was trying to read the fine print, the lady told me that I said I would accept it. I agreed and asked her nicely to please be quiet so I could read the fine print. She was quiet for a few seconds and stated again that I promised that I would accept it no matter what. I told her that I didn’t promise, but please be quiet, I need to read in silence. She was quiet for a few seconds and brought up the fact I said I would honor it. I slammed my hands down on the checkout counter and told her if she would just shut up, and let me read it, we would both be happier. That shut her up long enough to see why she was trying to distract me. The coupon had expired two days prior. I looked at her and she blushed. I said, now I get why you were so insistent about my saying I would honor it. She started stammering out an apology. I told her not to worry, I would still honor it. I did because I figured, we were still making $90 from this sale, and most likely she would come back here to shop. I did ask her if she tried to use it at Staples and they wouldn’t honor it. Yes, they told me to try and see if Office Depot would accept it.
I expected to be fired for the way I talked to her and that I accepted an expired coupon from Staples.
Instead, she filled out a survey saying how wonderful I was and now she would only shop with us. She transferred her printing over to us, which generated over $1000 in sales monthly. The general manager asked why I honored it knowing it was expired. I told him because I said I would, but I did tell her that all the conditions had to be met first. Once I saw it was expired, I figured the $10.00 loss was nominal in making a customer happy.
My mother saved my life by cursing me out and making me go to school. It was the day after my 11th birthday. I had every intention to stay home and play the new Super Nintendo games I had received for my birthday. Usually, my mother wouldn’t have had any problem with this, but that day she was adamant that I was going to get up and go to school. We got into a terrible argument and both said very hurtful things to each other. I had no choice but to go.
As soon as I got to school I had this overwhelming feeling that I just wanted to go home and lay on my mother’s lap and cry. It wasn’t because of the argument but it was something else I just couldn’t put my finger on. The school day was finally over and I still couldn’t shake this feeling. My godbrother and downstairs neighbor wanted to come over and play the game and even though I still just wanted to get in the house and cry, I reluctantly agreed.
When we got to the door it was locked. No big deal. Looked under the mat and the key wasn’t there. Still not unusual. I climbed up the back patio and let myself in. I immediately went to the front door to let my company in. After I let them in I went to the kitchen to get a piece of cake and my downstairs neighbor went straight to the tv and cut it and the game on.
For some reason, my godbrother started to walk through the apartment. When he came back into the living room he told us that we needed to go outside. We begrudgingly went. Once outside he proceeded to say “I don’t know how to say this, but your mother is dead”. I darted back in and went straight to her bedroom. She was tied to the bed with the phone cord and her throat had been sliced open. There was blood everywhere.
I ran back outside and downstairs to call 911 as our phone wasn’t connected at the time. I didn’t really know what to say and I think the operator must have thought it was a prank because she hung up on me. So I called my grandma and told her. After that, I just sat on the bottom step until the police and paramedics started pulling up. My grandma arrived shortly after and it gets blurry from there.
It will be 26 years on September 26 that this happened. Still no arrests. I feel like everyone in town knows exactly who did it, the same people I’ve been saying for years, but no one is willing to say anything. Mind you her boyfriend was killed in the same way about a year before. This happened in Plymouth, North Carolina, and her name is Sonja Day. You can also look at details of her boyfriend’s murder on the North Carolina Innocence Commission website under the Spruill case. My cousin was wrongfully convicted of his murder and after all this time they are finally trying to do something about it. I’ve always been adamant that the same people are responsible for both murders.
Sorry for being so long-winded. Probably should have made this its own answer. So that’s how my mother saved my life. I would like to think that if I stayed home that day, I could have saved her somehow, but it likely wouldn’t have gone that way.
Edit: Wow! I never thought that this many people would read this. I would like to thank everyone for their comments and well wishes.There are a few things happening that may lead to an arrest. I feel like the end may be within reac. I’ll definitely let everyone know how it works out.
1-Everyone is on a different journey. You may just be starting yours while the other person might be at the end of his/hers.
2-Comparing yourself to others is a losing battle. In the game of life, you will never reach a point where you are better than others in every way.
3-What you are comparing against is inaccurate information. What people present to the outside world is usually an edited version of their reality.
4-Your dream is likely different from others. If you have a big dream, it will take a while before you achieve it.
5-Comparison saps you of your limited time, you’ll be better off paying more attention to your dream.
6-All you can do in life is be who you are. Some people will love you for you. Most will love you for what you can do for them, and some won’t like you at all.
I once left a backdoor on an Android app since I was working with a client that couldn’t be trusted whether they would pay me or not. Heard from another developer that they let him develop and ran away with the software and never paid him.
It was like this, whenever the app starts it proceeds as usual but on the background it sends a request to one of my servers, if the request reaches the server and the response is code 200, then its ok, am still waiting for the payment the app can proceed as usual, if 201 then I wasn’t paid, so crash the app, clean all preferences and change url that was saved in preferences makes the app completely unusable for good. If 203 then I have been paid in full, proceed never send any request to my server again.
And my guess was right,I made the app, haven’t send the code to the client yet (they didn’t need the code though, it was a full running app), they started using the app, told me some stuffs, I fixed them, everything is set, they love the app, it was even more than they expected, I even made them an admin dashboard with a bunch of analytics to monitor all their data for free as a way to make them like me to work with them in the future, in my price I even included free up to 3 months bugs fixing if any were to occur, they were so happy with the results.
Then they immediately disappeared, waited for their reply for two weeks, nothing, not even a reply to tell me to wait, its like they all died from a hurricane or something, they even changed the pass to their server so I couldn’t get in and kill it, that was proof enough that they clearly ran away with my software. So I sent the 201 status code from my server and the whole app froze, all clients they connected couldn’t use the app anymore, immediately the following day they tried to contact me, I tripled the price after seeing they wanted to scam me. They paid me in full the same day through western union, I sent a fully working app with no backdoor, and all the source code. And that was it, I’ll never work with these guys again.
I will put a backdoor if you are a bad client, if you are a good one or pay in advance I’m not putting any, or if we are in the same country because I know I could sue you. I hate backdoors anyway because they are too risky no matter how much I try to secure them, the fact that they exist is a problem.
My wife has a face painting and balloon business. Before the pandemic, she was booked over three hundred gigs every year at hourly rates that would make a lawyer happy.
Once April 2020 hit, her business dried up. No parties. No festivals. No grand openings. No fairs.
We shrugged our shoulders. Oh, well!
She refunded her pending contracts to keep good customer relations. I went to work as usual. We actually increased our savings since then. My job covers our needs.
We’re fine!
The reason is our modest house. We made do with a smaller home and aggressively paid the mortgage down when times were good. When rates dropped, we refinanced. Our mortgage payment is only 1/4 of my monthly net income.
This could have been a very stressful time financially. I’m very grateful that it hasn’t been at all. I wouldn’t trade that security for an extra room or a big garage.
Modest home all the way!
It’s a true story
Said by “Al Bundy” actor of Married with Children. But it is a true story.
Funny story. The Air Force never wanted the A-10 and never wanted to support the Army in ground attack roles. They only adopted the A-10 to save their budget from the Army demanding to develop and provide their own CAS solutions.
Fast is great for a lot of things but the A-10 is able to loiter and remain aloft at much lower speeds, allowing pilots to see what was developing on the ground.
Six A-10s can be produced for the cost of one F-35.
A-10s are 1/6th the costto fly each hour.
A-10’s are mission capable at nearly double the rate of the maintenance intensive F-35.
The F-35’s are rife with problems that are slowing production and have cause groundings.
F-35’s stealth is far less useful in low and slow engagements because it can be detected and killed by people with eyeballs and manpads. The A-10 suffers this problem too but it’s more durable and cheaper to replace.
Every F-35 lost to CAS missions will be detrimental to other sorties the plane might have flown.
I like the F-35 but it’s not really a good plane choice for getting down in the mud with the grunts.
image 519
If an F-35 was shot up like that’ I seriously doubt the pilot would have managed to fly it home.
EDIT:
Folks, I never mentioned Ukraine. I never suggested sending the A-10 into combat without other types of aircraft designed to make their use tolerably safe. I also never made the A-10 put to be some sort of superhero airframe, unable to be killed. I specifically answered a question about the A-10 vs F-35/F-22 in close support of troops.
During my son’s 12th grade year of school another student broke his leg during football.
At the hospital, after the X-ray the nurse came in to wrap my son’s leg. She grabs his leg and bends it to the side, and I hear this pop noise as my son screams out.
I yelled at the nurse and made her leave the room. At this point the head doctor and head nurse rushed into the room. I told them to get my son’s pain under control. They gave him a shot and after he relaxed I explained what the nurse had done. I told them that I should sue the hell out of the hospital for allowing a person man or woman to work with patients that clearly has no damn idea what the hell she is doing.
The doctor and nurse took the bitch into an empty room and she walked out of the room and walked out of the exit door. She looked at me with a hateful look and I called her a bitch, and the doctor witnessed it. He told me it will be dealt with.
Not sure if she was fired or just sent home on probation.
Barley with Mushrooms (Scotland)
mushroom barley 3f
Ingredients
8 ounces mushrooms, sliced
2 medium onions, chopped
2 tablespoons butter or margarine
3 1/4 cups boiling water
1 cup barley
2 teaspoons instant chicken bouillon
1/2 teaspoon salt
Dash of pepper
Instructions
Cook and stir mushrooms and onions in butter 5 minutes; place in ungreased 1 1/2-quart casserole.
Stir in remaining ingredients.
Cover and bake at 375 degrees F, stirring once, until barley is tender, about 1 1/4 hours.
When I was in 3rd grade my parents got a collie for me. Lassie was big on TV and I wanted my own Lassie. We named her Lady. She was the perfect pet and protector, especially of me. We lived in Omaha in a split level house. The kitchen, a bedroom, and a combination laundry room/bomb shelter were on the back of the house, the lower level. My brother, sister, and I shared the bedroom.
My parents both worked so when we got home from school, we’d stay with the lady across the street, who also took care of my younger brother who was not school age yet. We would leave Lady in the neighbor’s back yard during the day.
One day I wanted something from my room so I took Lady with me to our house. I was part ways down the back stairs when I realized the back door was open and a man was standing in the kitchen. He had apparently just forced the door. He was holding a pry bar. I froze and he started towards me, not seeing Lady behind me on the stairs. She met him as he was coming up and tore into his arm holding the pry bar. He dragged her to the door and out and I called her back as he ran away. We never learned who it was, though my dad suspected one of the neighbors.
There were two other times Lady probably saved members of our family. She woke us up the night our house burned down and got us out within five minutes of the entire ceiling collapsing.
The other time was when we had moved to South Carolina. We lived on the last street at the edge of town. Behind us was a wide field, then some woods. A few miles past the woods was a prison work camp.
My dad was gone bowling and my mother, sister, brother, and I were watching TV. It was summer and the side porch wooden door was open. The screen door wasn’t latched. My mom’s car was parked right outside the door.
My mother saw a man come over the back fence and look in the car windows, probably for keys, then walk up onto the porch and look through the screen. She called out, “What do you want?”
He didn’t say anything, just walked into the living room. He saw a woman and three kids but he didn’t see Lady, who was lying by the TV. She saw him, though, and without a word from us she was across the room and tearing into him. He bolted out the door, and she was chewing away at his legs as he went over the fence. We ran outside and turned on the porch light. He was running across the back yard, and Lady backed up to get a running start and leaped the fence. She caught him again at the back fence and worked on his ass some more. When he got over the fence and disappeared into the night, my mom called her back.
The police came and said he was an escapee from the prison camp. They brought dogs and tracked him from our house and found him in the woods. I suspect he had a healthy fear of dogs by then.
He wanted the car keys and who knows, he might not have wanted any witnesses to call the police.
Lady passed away while I was overseas in the military. My mom told me my dad sat on the floor and held her for hours until she was gone. We all loved Lady as much as she loved us.
I’ll narrate two instances where I’ve witnessed a beautiful manifestation of “bro-code”.
Mine was a co-ed school. Our class strength was divided almost equally between girls and boys. One of the guys, Inzy, had a massive crush on a girl from another section. He was too shy to speak up however. He thought she was out of his league (whatever that means!).
Our class fellows immediately got down to image building. They casually started talking about Inzy with the girls of the other section. Not with his crush. They chose the other girls, carefully avoiding “the one”. The tales of his intelligence, humility and humour started being discussed amongst the other girls and this piqued the interest of his crush.
Some girls soon started interacting with Inzy with their casual helloes. And as expected, Miss. Crush bumped into him outside our Chemistry lab and asked him to clear some doubts. Inzy did not know what hit him! He did manage to sail through with his explanation.
Inzy found his girl, all thanks to his bros who worked behind the scenes and set the ball rolling for his love story. We girls also contributed our bit… by keeping quiet about the entire set up. Wasn’t easy!! :p
The second instance is a bit gory. There were a group of boys who used to hang out regularly at the corner of our street. They were college students who had known each other since their childhood. One of them was Omi bhaiya (elder brother). He was a gentle giant, forever helping others.
One day another gang of boys from some other neighbourhood came to our locality. That day our regular group of elder boys had not yet converged. The gang went up to a lone guy who coming back on his cycle and started fighting with him. He tried to escape but was surrounded. The gang was getting aggressive and soon withdrew hockey sticks and bats. The commotion drew the attention of Omi bhaiya who was casually walking towards his usual hangout. He ran towards where the whole scene was unfolding.
Just as the cyclist was about to be slashed with a blade, bhaiya caught the sharp weapon, with his bare hands! His hand was slashed across the palm. Seeing blood gushing out, the neighbouring gang guys ran away. Turns out that it was a fight over some insult.
When bhaiya was asked why didn’t he call for help and instead held the blade, thereby harming himself, his answer was simple. “The boy being attacked is my friend’s younger brother. He’s like my own. Couldn’t take a chance. Bros always look out for each other.How could I see him get hurt?”
Cesnica (Serbian Christmas Bread)
Cesnica Serbian Christmas Bread
Ingredients
7 3/4 cups flour
3 tablespoons yeast
1 cup shortening
2 teaspoons salt
Warm water
Instructions
Heat oven to 375 degrees F.
Combine flour, yeast, shortening and salt. Knead with enough warm water to moisten until dough separates from hands. Dough should be firm, not tacky.
Put dough on greased pan. Let rise for 10 minutes in warm area.
Perforate dough with fork. Insert clean coin (quarter or gold dollar) and spread dough flat like a pizza.
In one of my job interviews this year, I was asked, “How much do you think the chewing gum market is worth in the United States?”
If you haven’t encountered a question like that before, it might sound like a crazy thing for an interviewer to ask. For one thing, I knew absolutely nothing about the chewing gum industry. For another, if I ever actually needed that information, the smartest response would probably be to pull out my phone and Google it.
But the purpose of doing estimations like that isn’t to figure out the right answer – it’s to practice structuring your thinking in a logical way. You can learn the gist of how to do it in a minute, and you can use this kind of logic for the rest of your life.
Estimations like these are often referred to as Fermi problems, or back-of-the-envelope calculations. To solve one, you’re supposed to figure out a way to break the main question into a series of smaller components that can more comfortably estimate. Then, you put them back together to arrive at an approximation of the final answer. The trick is to ask small questions to reach a bigger solution.
For example, this was how I estimated the size of U.S. chewing gum market:
I knew that there are about 320 million people in the U.S.
I knew that the average lifespan in the U.S. is about 80 years. We’ll assume that age is evenly distributed among the population (not actually true, but close enough for our purposes.)
Teenagers and adults – say, between the ages of 10 and 50, so about half the population – are the demographics most likely to chew gum. Let’s guess that about 75% of them are gum-chewers.
Small children under the age of 10, and older adults over the age of 50, are the demographics least likely to chew gum. Let’s guess that 25% of them are gum-chewers.
If we do the math, that gives us a total of about 160 million gum-chewers in the U.S.
On average, each of those people probably chew at least 1 stick of gum every week.
Most of the packs of gum I’ve seen contain about 15 sticks of gum.
There are 52 weeks in a year. If we round up a little, that means the average gum-chewer buys about 4 packs of gum every year.
I’d guess that an average pack of gum costs about $5. That means that 4 packs would cost $20.
That gives us about $20 per person * 160 million people = $3.2 billion spent on gum every year.
I had no idea if that was right or not – for all I knew, some of my assumptions were completely ridiculous. But maybe some of my wrong assumptions canceled each other out. I Googled the question afterwards, and I found that the U.S. chewing gum market was worth $3.9 billion in 2015, which means I at least got to an accurate order of magnitude. And best of all, I got the job!
If you want to try doing one yourself, here are a couple of fun ones:
How many gas stations are there in your country?
How many hair are on your head?
How many airplanes are there in the world?
How many customers visit your favorite restaurant every year?
How many Quora answers have you read in your lifetime?
Right before I attempted suicide (and 2 months after my heart attack), I asked my “wife” to tell me that she loved me. She refused. We weren’t fighting or anything. She just refused. So I asked her to lie to me and say that she loved me. I was feeling low and my body was failing me. I’m a veteran who been through a lot. So she decided to make confessions. She said that it was NOT her responsibility to tell me that she loved me or that I was attractive. If I wanted to feel loved or attractive, go to therapy instead. She also revealed that she hated the educational gap between us and said that she despised living in my “shadow” and being known as my wife.
This absolutely BROKE me. The final straw was when I told her that she broke my heart and she just shrugged. I absolutely wasted 20 years of my life.
Originally Answered: what was the most interesting thing your teacher said?
Original question: What’s the best thing you’ve heard your teacher say?
The first day I walked into my 10th grade chemistry class, the lights were off. The teacher was waiting at the front of the room, holding a small candle in front of him. The candle’s tiny flame was the only source of light in the room.
The class murmured a bit, confused and excited. Once we’d all quieted down, the teacher said, “Tell me some of the observations you can make about this candle.”
We paused for a moment. That seemed a little too easy for chemistry class.
“But keep in mind,” the teacher added, “that observations are the things you observe empirically. Inferences are the things you conclude… and inferences can be wrong.”
We stared at him, wary now.
At last, someone piped up, “Um…The flame is yellow?”
“The flame gives off heat.”
“The wick is burning.”
“The wax is cylindrical!”
The teacher raised his eyebrows at that one. “Are you sure?”
We stared harder at the candle, not sure how to respond to that. It definitely looked cylindrical.
The teacher shrugged. Then he put the candle into his mouth and started chewing.
The class stared at him.
At this point I was wondering if I ought to call the emergency room or something, but the teacher just kept chewing as though nothing was wrong. Eventually, he swallowed, shrugged again, and said, “Actually tastes okay.”
As it turns out, the so-called “candle” wasn’t made out of wax at all. It was actually just a slice of banana, with an almond slice for the wick.
The student’s “wax” statement had actually been an inference.
After explaining this to us, the teacher turned on the lights and said, “If there’s one thing I want you to learn in this class, it’s the first rule of scientific thinking: Never assume that your mind can’t lie to you.”
And that’s the story of how my 10th-grade chemistry teacher swallowed a candle to teach us the first principle of scientific thinking. Here’s to you, Mr. Miller.
Test someone’s attentiveness. Alter a sentence slightly. If they’re attentive, their expression changes or they ask about the change.
Handshakes reveal personality; they can show anxiety even if you hide nerves.
Avoid being too available, especially to close ones, except for parents. Excess availability makes you seem less important; they might take you for granted.
Instead of dinner and a movie, watch the movie first, then dine. It gives you a dinner conversation starter.
Don’t react hastily. Don’t expect acknowledgment. Think before acting!
The thing that people remember the most about you is your personality, way of talking and attitude.
The Communist Party of China (CPC) originally did not have any party property and was a political party with 0 assets. The word “bankrupt” cannot be associated with CPC.
But the Kuomintang (KMT) in Taiwan owned party assets and was indeed bankrupt.
image 566
If you mean “the Chinese government / State Council (PRC)”, then I can tell you for sure that the Chinese government also has 0 assets, and they are only the managers of state-owned capital, not the owners.
If you mean “China’s financial sector”, then I can tell you with certainty that China’s savings rate is 45%, 10 times that of the US. China’s savings rate is even 11% higher than Japan’s, despite the fact that Japan is also an ardent thrifty nation. The main reason for this is:
Chinese people have a sense of worry and are always used to saving money to prevent and cope with emergencies and unforeseen events.
Chinese people generally have the habit of saving, no matter poor or rich, they all like to save their income in the bank to accumulate more money, instead of using credit cards to spend money in advance as westerners are keen to do. You can even ask the little black brothers in San Francisco why they like to rob the Chinese, because they know that the Chinese like to go to the bank and save their money, and they rarely spend tomorrow’s money today like the whites do.
The savings of 1.4 billion people is a huge amount of money, which is the “ballast” that keeps the ship stable, so the risk resistance of China’s financial industry is much higher than that of Wall Street’s financial industry.
In other words, even if the global finance collapses, China’s finance will not collapse.
Becket (1964) Richard Burton & Peter O’ Toole
Debauched King Henry II (Peter O’Toole) installs his longtime court facilitator Thomas Becket (Richard Burton) as the Archbishop of Canterbury, assuming that his old friend will be a compliant and loyal lackey in the King’s on-going battles with the church. But Becket unexpectedly finds his true calling on the ecclesiastical side, and aligns himself against the King’s selfish wishes, causing a rift and an eventual showdown not only between the two men, but also the institutions they represent. (IMDb)
There was this guy that I went to college with. He was a real life Casanova. I mean it, a day did not go by without out him bedding (or boning) a new girl. He went through them like a sick person goes through tissues. And all us “normal” guys were terribly jealous of him.
I swear that of the 60 or so girls on our dorm floor, he must have had sex with perhaps 45 of them. Pretty damn impressive… seeing that I was a virgin throughout my college years.
This was in the 1970s. And yeah. I was the nerd bodybuilder planning to be a spaceman.
Virginal. No distractions.
On. My. Grind.
…
Ah. Memories.
During one of our Friday dorm parties, while I was a tripping on blotter (Acid = LSD), I noticed one of the girls on our floor; a particularly beautiful girl, flirting with him.
And myself, with all my inhibitions set to “off” went up to her and asked her point-blank.
“Why are you flirting with him”?
And I never forgot her answer.
“It’s fun”.
…
Duh.
…
Of course, this was a decade before Cindy Lauper sang “Girls just wanna have fun”….
And while I remembered the answer, I didn’t manage to put two plus two together. i still couldn’t figure out girls. Ah, perhaps it was because I was so fixated on “my grind” and trying to fly spaceships etc….
Which happened… well, sort of… don’t ya know.
…
But yeah.
Guys… men… we are too simple. If a woman wants something she gets it. Even at the detriment of her relationships, marriages, or physical health.
Keep your life simple.
Accept that women do what they want… FIRST.
And continue to do so until they hit an unyielding wall, And, as a man… our rules, relationships, structures and beliefs are that wall.
(Read that twice.)
And when that point comes… be prepared to… walk away.
‘That no one else knows about’ does not apply to my answer. But the most horrible thing was a schoolgirl aged about 15 came to see me when I was School Psychologist at her school. At the end of the session she said she had written a diary and had it with her and would I care to read it, as she wanted me to know what it was about.
I took it home to read that night in preparation for seeing her the next day. It was full of clearly suicidal thoughts. She was an alcohol user, too, and had already done some self-harming. I had to cope with the revelations overnight, spending my night not so much in sleep as in deep concern. To add to the difficulty, her mother’s sister had not long previously committed suicide. This would be a further load on her mother.
I did see her and was obliged to speak with her mother and get permission for referring her to an agency with more specialist capacity to help her. There was some opposition to the idea, but in the end the permission was given.
But knowing what she had revealed and not being able to do anything about it immediately was very stressful.
I grew up in West Africa. We didn’t just boil eggs; we superboiled them. We threw them on the stove, boiled them for 15 or 20 minutes or so, then took them out very satisfied that the egg was well cooked.
It was as though we wanted to let the yolk know that we hated it, along with its ancestors, parents, siblings, and extended family. The yolk, understandably would come out of this process looking pallid, forlorn, and dejected. The pale yellow would be covered in an equally pale grey, with the overall appearance of a strange, lost planet.
image 466
Why did you have to treat me so?
For my eternal fortune, at the age of 15, I moved to the United States, a land that was said to be paved with gold. I didn’t find much gold, truth be told, but I found the concept of a hard-boiled egg, which made me wonder whether there was such a thing as a soft-boiled egg.
Is it like when I accidentally “undercook” my eggs?
I googled it and found a chart like this:
image 465
Oooooooooooh!
I’ve never looked back.
This is what I made tonight.
image 464
This, my friends, is what you call perfection. The yolk is smiling at you suggestively, sending you an amorous look, beckoning you.
Come hither!
How can you resist? Of course you will kiss and treasure and savor it.
C’est ça, la douceur de vivre.
Yes, yes, it’s me in the picture. I’m wearing boring socks tonight. Deal with it.
My grandfather on my dad’s side, as a child me and my younger sister would visit our Nan and Grandad every other week just to spend time with them. My Nan loved having us at times, my Grandad however was a different story. He would always drink every time we went round there and constantly sat on the couch.
On one occasion I was play fighting with my Nan in the living room once and out of nowhere he screamed at me from the top of his lungs to “take it in the other f***ing room!”. My mood was instantly killed and I remember hiding from him in a cleaning cupboard because I was terrified. There was another time where I accidentally turned off the lights for the living room, he screamed at me saying “Turn those f***ing lights back on or I’ll throw you onto the street!”. When my mum came back to the house that night I was hiding behind her and she had never seen me so clingy so she knew something was wrong.
When we got home that night I told my parents what he had said to me about the lights and how he had made me cry on multiple occasions that I began hiding in the cleaning cupboard. My younger sister was also a witness for every occasion he was horrible to me so she confirmed my story to them. After this they decided he wasn’t going to see us as much as he used to.
We found out many years later that his drinking caught up with him and he was suffering from cirrhosis. He also had a cancer in his leg that he’s now recovered from. When the whole family found out about his cancer, all my uncles said they wouldn’t miss him if it killed him because of how terrible of a dad he was when bringing them up.
I also recently discovered that before I was born, My Grandad and Nan had asked our parents to look after their house while they went away. They forgot to mention to our parents that they owed this criminal some rent money, so one night this crook comes breaking the door down and demands the money. My parents being completely ignorant to the truth of course refused to pay the rent and so they contacted my Nan and Grandad asking what this guy’s business is. They tell my parents the truth but then refuse to pay the rent, saying they assumed their son (my dad) would’ve payed it for them. They had both already refused to pay the rent so as a result this crook gives my dad a sucker punch to the face in front of my uncle’s daughter who was there at the time.
Because of this, most of the family don’t associate or even think about him anymore. My mother has real beef with them both because of the incident with the rent, when I told her about the threat my Grandad gave me and how my Nan said nothing to defend me, that was the icing on the cake for both my parents and as a result we talk to them less.
We’re in an okay place now but we hardly talk to them anymore, we only see them once a year now, sometimes there are years we don’t see them once. My uncles each have different reasons for not associating with him anymore but I’d be here all day if I wrote them out.
But first the U.S. that orchestrated the break up of the world and the creator of animosities amongst us must accept reality first and recognised that it no longer has the ability and the means to war monger any more.
The western media must accept that sowing hates is not good for humanity, spewing hates hurt humanity and destroying earth. They need to know that lying is lowdown and simply despicable and it makes many people ignorant and naive.
Westerners need to reject them and condemn them and stop reading or listening to them. Westerners must want the truth not lies, propaganda, fabrication and half truths to fit bias hateful narratives. The western media so discord and hatred on anyone or any society that refuse to be submissive and subservient to the west.
The U.S. led them into this depth of crisis it must lead them out of it. Otherwise the 87% of the global south will leave you behind, they are moving on. Germany, Japan, Korea must stop being a faithful brain dead U.S. lackey and a lowly dog.
UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, grow some balls or forever be US dog, you deserve to sink with the world’s biggest trouble maker the U.S. Another dozen or so dog nations. Rise up and abandoned the U.S. EU abandon NATO.
Together you helped the U.S. bring the world into a chaotic, dangerous place ready to erupt into another world war but one that can end the entire human race. Act before it is too late. Let there be strong pillars of powers working together doing good and not keep one power doing bad.
Asian Cucumber Salad
Ding Tai Fung Cucumber Salad I Heart Umami 700×1050 1
Yield: 4 to 6 servings
Ingredients
2 tablespoons lime juice
1 tablespoon water
1 teaspoon granulated sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 large cucumber
1 small onion, thinly sliced
1 red jalapeno pepper, seeded and chopped
Minced fresh cilantro
Instructions
Mix lime juice, water, sugar and salt in non-reactive bowl.
Cut cucumber lengthwise into halves, then seed and thinly slice. Add cucumber, onion and pepper to lime juice mixture; toss.
Cover and refrigerate, stirring occasionally, at least 1 hour.
Not most obnoxious but a good example of why Europeans view Americans as obnoxious.
We were in a resort sauna in the Italian alps with 3 other couples (2 German, 1 Swiss) and single German woman. We’d enjoyed a couple of peaceful and wonderful rounds together.
A few minutes in to our 3rd round we heard them coming – Americans! They were talking and cackling very loudly. They opened the sauna hot room door and looked around – holding the door open, letting the heat out and cold air in. They received a loud round of ‘close the door’ in 3 different languages.
A few minutes later an American couple entered the sauna in their swimsuits. One of the German women told them that swimsuits aren’t allowed in saunas. The American’s scoffed and said certainly not and proceeded to sit down. I tried to explain to them that suits are indeed not allowed because of bacterias and odors. And that they also should have showered before entering the sauna. They slowly began to get the picture. They eventually left and we later learned that they’d complained to the resort mgmt about the no swimsuits rule and us.
Here’s the thing. There were numerous places in the hotel information stating that the sauna area (large changing and shower area with two saunas and a turkish bath) was a nude area and that suits were not allowed in the saunas or turkish baths themselves. And that this was a QUIET area.
There were big signs entering the spa and sauna area that said ‘SILENCE’, ‘QUIETNESS IS EXPECTED’ and ‘IN THE SPA YOU SHOULD TALK LIKE YOU ARE IN CHURCH’ and other sayings. If you closed your mouth for a few seconds you’d realize that there were a number of conversations happening but you couldn’t hear them. Except for Americans.
There were signs above the hooks where people hung their robes that stated not to wear swimsuits in the sauna. This is also standard throughout much of Europe.
The hotel manager told me that this was not an unusual event with Americans. I understand people being uncomfortable with the nudity element and that’s fine and those who are uncomfortable just don’t use the sauna. FWIW, about half of Germans and other Europeans aren’t comfortable with it either and simply don’t use public saunas. I have a fear of heights so I won’t go on most chairlifts or trams which means I can’t see many spectacular areas of the Alps. That’s life.
I think it takes a special kind of ignorance to not realize how loud and obnoxious Americans are, given how often it’s written about. Yet Americans continue to act loud, obnoxious and ignorant.
Because I worked with persons with Borderline Personality Disorder I was used to being fired. I enjoyed the phase of therapy where I could ask “remember all the times you wanted to fire me and the couple of times you actually did?”
As I type I remember seeing a guy with BPD who fired me and stayed away for three weeks. I had a hunch, so I kept his slot open. When he returned he told me he fired me for “not caring.” That was because he was pretty sure I was yawning at the last session. It was a great starter for talking about interpreting vs. over-interpreting social cues from other people.
It finally became a joke between us. “Any cruel evil unfeeling bastards yawn at you recently? Obviously torture and death is the only answer for them.”
One of my favorite techniques with Borderline folks in recovery was wild humor like that. They often lived and felt in extreme ways and had a hard time finding their “middle.” Taking a feeling to a silly and impossible extreme could prompt a response of “well, maybe not that bad.”
Developing the ability to scale feelings is critical for folks with BPD.
Long story short, make an appointment with your therapist and get on with it.
I was in a Video Conference yesterday. There was this slick controller from Cisco. I picked it up and turned it around to see the sticker that said: “Made in China”.
We have all heard the phrase. So much so that it has become a cultural meme, like this creative advertisement.
image 462
Every machine, and I mean it in the broad sense of the word, people use, almost certainly, has components made by the most populous nation of the world.
We are at a stage where manufacturing is synonymous with China. China’s total exports in 2017 were more than the GDP of India, at ~$2.26 trillion.
US is close with $1.5 trillion, but there is the catch.
US exports are primarily expensive stuff like airplanes, gems, assembled cell phones etc. But China makes the “cheaper” things — the components of your phones, the clothes you buy, the filaments in your bulbs, the shoes you are wearing right now.
More than a decade ago, a US family tried to rid themselves of all things “made in China”
[2] . Here are some excerpts from their experience.
When our son, then 4, needed new shoes it took me two weeks of frantic mall trips and phone calls across the country before I located Italian-made sneakers. (They cost almost $70, an obscene amount, and I bought him just that one pair of shoes all year to compensate for my excess.)
We boiled water for coffee every morning after our drip machine broke and the only affordable replacements we could find were made in China. Kevin stole —he likes to say borrowed—sunglasses from the lost-and-found at our kids’ preschool when he needed new ones and the only ones that fit our budget were made in China. We were barred from the market for humane mousetraps (I made my own), birthday candles (we used votive candles on our cakes instead) and the monster trucks and light sabers that our son dreamed of all year.
As December approached, we made lousy homemade Christmas presents, spent too much on toys from Germany and waited for the year, and our boycott, to fade into history.
And Chinese manufacturing has become even more pervasive and ingrained in the last ten years. Good luck with your attempt!
Originally Answered: What’s the most embarassing misconception you’ve ever held?
When my best friend and I were around 16 years old, we always did homework at her house, as my house was usually occupied (my mother was… friendly).
Anyway, one afternoon, we were in the middle of English Lit. homework, and I asked her if she had a dictionary. She said, “I have an Onary, but not Webster’s.”
I had never heard of an Onary dictionary before, but I figured it was no big deal. She told me where it was, and I went to the bookshelf and grabbed it.
The front cover was missing. Across the first page, in bold capital letters was ONARY.
I started laughing, and I couldn’t stop. She came over and started laughing, too, asking me what was so funny. I said, “Sardee, your dictionary is missing the front cover. It’s a Webster’s dictionary.” She said, “I don’t get it. It says ‘ONARY’, right there.”
So, I grabbed a piece of notebook paper, laid it next to the book, and wrote DICTI.
I’ve never seen someone go from confused, to embarrassed, to doubled over in silent laughter, so fast in all my life. She and I laughed so hard, for so long, that our stomachs ached for days, afterward. Every once in a while, over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to bring it up, and it’s never failed to make us giggle. In fact, one of her sons, just yesterday, asked if anybody still bought dictionaries, because we can just Google everything, now.
I couldn’t even answer him. I just got up, told him to go ask his mother, and walked outside. Two minutes later, here comes Sardee. I just looked at her, and she said, “Shut up.”
She’s kinda awesome. Even if she was dippy in high school.
Originally Answered: Was the battle of Stalingrad really as bad as in Enemy at the Gates or is this overexaggeration?
Really as bad?
Oh, you sweet summer child.
Was there any cannibalism in the movie? There was at Stalingrad.
Did you see any wounded with gangrene and maggots crawling in their wounds? No? Maybe a bit too much for Hollywood, eh?
How about extended scenes of vicious and literal hand-to-hand fighting, with the combatants using knives, spades, teeth and whatever else came to hand on each other. No? Maybe those were left on the cutting room floor?
I don’t recall seeing anyone crawling along on their hands and knees with their intestines hanging down and getting tangled in their legs, while their enemy jeer and laugh from cover a few yards away.
And we never saw anyone pouring their toes out of their boots, with a lovely long lingering reaction shot of the rotting frozen flesh on their own face because of frostbite.
I don’t recall seeing anyone screaming as they were burned to death, either. And the film doesn’t really convey that ‘roasting flesh’ smell too well. Human flesh smells like pork!
‘Enemy at the Gates’ is an entertainment product. It’s designed to be able to be watched while eating popcorn. War, on the other hand, is the worst thing that organised groups of humans can do to one another. So don’t compare the two. A movie cannot be compared to reality.
My late husband died 11 years ago. I have a box full of his things. One of the things he loved having was this old alarm clock. There was certain dings and scratches on it that made it unique. At one point it broke and he took it apart to solder some wires together. It was obviously a homemade repair, but you couldn’t tell once it was put back together. Well after he died, we ( our son and I ) moved several times. At one point our things were being stored in a friends garage. For some reason, i never got my husband’s beloved alarm clock back, it some how got mistaken for junk and was tossed out. I was very upset over the loss of his alarm clock. Several years later i was living on another side of town and a friend stopped by on mothers day to show me a box of things she found in a dumpster. ( a weird hobby i know) I noticed immediately an old alarm clock exactly like my late husbands. I picked it up and examined it, and i recognized the dings and scratches on it. So i flipped it over and unscrewed the bottem to inspect the inside where my husband had made repairs on it. It was unmistakably my husbands old alarm clock, and my friend graciously handed it over.
I was in clinic, seeing patients when one of my colleagues came up to me. He was a pleasant fellow who always looked like an un-made bed. Shirt rumpled, tie askew. I hasten to say, he was an excellent physician.
“Maureen, can I curb-side you?”
“Sure. Whatcha got?
“Twenty-year-old woman with complaint of throat pain. I saw her a couple of days ago. I investigated everything I can think of but she’s back with the same complaint. Now telling me she can’t swallow”
“Trauma? Fever? Weight loss?…”
“No.”
We puzzled and puzzled.
“Probably send her to GI for a scope.”
“Maybe just do a quick x-ray to see if anything obvious is going on structurally.”
Off the young lady goes to X-ray.
Colleague sticks his head into my office.
“You have got to see this.”
I take a look at the film.
We both shake our heads.
“How did that get there?”
On the film, plain as day, is the outline of a toothbrush, lodged in her throat.
“What did she say when you showed her the film?”
“She said that she wondered where that went.”
“What’s she look like?
“Painfully thin.”
“I’m guessing an eating disorder. She was trying to induce vomiting and went too far and lost her grip. She’s too embarrassed to tell you.”
That turned out to be correct.
So, yes, the fact that she had lodged a toothbrush, deep in her throat, would have been useful to know.
When my parents first met, my dad was living in a teepee in the woods, and my mom was living on a commune that could only be reached by boat.
When my older brother was conceived, they decided that being that remote would not be safe in case of complications with the pregnancy, so they moved somewhere a bit closer to town. They got some land, cleared it, dowsed and dug a well, and my dad started building our house.
My brother was born. I was born. The foundations of the house were laid, and the bottom floor was built. 4 rooms total. We moved in. My sister was born. Dad kept building. When I was about 4–5, we got electricity. That meant an electric pump, and running water.
When I was 11, the second floor was mostly done, which meant more rooms. I got a bedroom to myself. Mom got a job “in town”. We got an indoor toilet. That flushed.
The third floor got done when I was in high school. Mom worked as a youth counselor in town. We gradually got to be more “in the world”.
The folks split after my first year of college. Dad kept the house, Mom moved into town.
Dad finally finished the house and sold it. It was really way too big for one guy to live in. He died about 15 years ago.
My mom is 70 now. My brother owns an organic farm; she helps him out with canning and preserving his produce, so those old back to the land skills still see some use. Mom does grief counseling and hospice care as a volunteer. They never really lost their hippie ideals, but they modified them as dictated by circumstance and life.
The first time I met her, she was in jail. She was wearing a bright orange jumpsuit and plastic slides. The officer undid her handcuffs so I could examine her and he waited outside the exam room.
She was pregnant. I always ask my incarcerated patients why they are in jail (mostly in case it was for killing their former obstetrician). Invariably they will say “it’s for violating parole“ and eventually we will get around to why they are on probation in the first place.
Her’s involved a significant amount of theft.
I was immediately disturbed and put off by her handmade swastika tattoo.
She was always polite and respectful. She was released from jail prior to giving birth. She gave birth to a beautiful baby and was a conscientious mom and did a nice job breast-feeding.
She saw our lactation educator many times to help with the breast-feeding. After a year her baby self-weaned.
But she kept pumping. And pumping. And pumping. Once a week she would drive 30 miles to the nearest NICU and drop off a freezer full of breastmilk.
SHE DID THIS FOR TWO YEARS.
For two years she helped feed a NICU full of small and sick babies of every ethnicity and multiple nationalities.
She still has the swastika tattoo. Every year I see her I always look for it, hoping she will have had it covered up. I’ve never asked her about it.
I do hope that one day she covers it up.
But she is reminder to me that our worth is not simply equal to the worst thought and the stupidest decision we’ve ever made.
US politicians want a Taiwan war. No doubt. Because MIC & politicians who buy MIC stocks feed on wars.
Warmonger Americans also want war because they think it is noble to support Taiwan democracy. Without understanding what is behind the war.
Let me share an article:
On the surface, it is noble, for a foreigner, to support Taiwan independence, in name of democracy or whatever.
Since WW2, 82% of riots/wars incl independence movements in the world are actually instigated by USA+allies. So as to control other’s strategic sovereignty, economy & natural resources. It is modern-day colonization without occupying other’s land.
No country will tolerate secession & subversion. I am sure not your country either. They will use military to stop secession when necessary. Biden deployed 10,000 armed personnel in the 2021/1/6 riot. UK also said they may use military to deal with Scotland independence.
In case of war, there are blood & deaths. If you cannot feel this pain, go to Ukraine & stay there for 6 months.
There may be legitimacy for independence. But we must know the history first. Otherwise we may accidentally support a devil instead of the righteous. Let me take the example of Tibet independence.
Before CPC China liberated Tibet in 1959, Mao Zedong had a 1-country-2-system, allowing Tibet to run their old system which was a slavery system. 5% of rich Tibetans OWNed 95% of Tibetans. Slaves sometimes fought with dogs for food. The worst part of cruelty was that owners could arbitrarily peel off (pretty) skins from slaves for crafts & gifts to foreigners. Pretty probably means young people’s skin. There is a museum in Tibet today to show this cruel history.
USA instigated Tibet independence in 1959 after USA lost the Korea war in early 1950’s.
When suppressing Tibet independence movement, China liberated Tibetan slaves at the same time. Today Tibetans have education & income, and can own business & property. It is only now they are treated like a human.
Next time when you as a foreigner support Tibetan independence, do not ask the 5% but the 95%. Do not ask those who live on political donation/corruption overseas & shout empty slogans. Instead ask those who work hard to earn an income to support life.
Likewise, dont ask the corrupted separatists in Taiwan who are, like the 5% of Tibetan, will only tell you China is bad, bad, bad. Try to independently learn Taiwanese history. Listen to the story of both sides – China & Taiwan. Ironically, it is the rebels whose propaganda stir foreigners’ emotion.
Remember: no country will allow secession & subversion. Not your country either.
Also remember: when there is war, there will be blood & deaths.
When I was in the eighth grade I had to bring home a report card with an F on it. For Spanish. Courtesy of Mrs. X.
I was a pretty good student, but I despised Mrs. X. She had the maturity of my fellow classmates and a mean streak a mile wide.
She was quite popular. Her mocking of the customs and ways of various Hispanic cultures always drew laughs from my fellow eighth graders. She taught us how laughably stupid and lazy Mexicans are for instance.
She also liked to gossip about other teachers. She once insinuated that a certain English teacher who was an ex-nun was probably lesbian.
I would rebel against her obnoxiousness by not doing homework and shrugging my shoulders when asked a question in class. I would aim for a 60 on all of the exams to show her I could do better if I wanted to.
I showed my report card to my mother who had to sign it. She saw A’s, one B (Math), and the F.
She asked me who my Spanish teacher was. I told her “Mrs. X.”
My mother said, “She’s an asshole.”
This is where my jaw dropped. My mother never swore!
She signed the report card and handed it back to me. Then she explained.
My mother was an RN at an urban hospital. She had trouble sometimes communicating with Spanish-speaking patients. She enrolled in an evening adult-ed conversational Spanish course at our local high school.
The teacher of the course was Mrs. X.
Ten minutes into the class my mother walked out. She thought Mrs. X was one of the most loathsome and obnoxious people she had ever met.
The weird thing is that my mother seemed almost proud of my F.
Absolutely. Many times. But one in particular comes to mind.
minor identifying features have been changed to protect patient confidentiality.
A young mother in her early 20s broke up with her abusive boyfriend. A week later he ambushed her on her front porch, stabbing her over 30 times before stabbing himself once in the stomach. She coded shortly after arrival to the trauma bay but we were able to get her back. She had been stabbed so many times in the neck that the ragged end of her esophagus was dangling out. We rushed her to the OR and she ultimately survived and went home, but that is a story for another day.
Shortly after she came in, her ex-boyfriend arrived. His injury was not immediately life threatening but did require an operation, so after stabilizing her, I took him to the OR too, where he got a relatively minor operation. He remained in the hospital for several days after, however, because he was on suicide watch. So I rounded on him every day as I would any other patient, did wound care and other standard post-op care. He was polite, said “thank you, ma’am,” and we never discussed his ex-girlfriend or the circumstances that brought him to the hospital.
Does that mean I liked him? OH HELL NO. I thought he was the scum of the earth. I found myself thinking he should have stabbed himself as many times as he stabbed her. Better yet, just stab himself and leave her the hell alone. Oh, I despised him to the core.
So did one of my med students. So after the 3rd or 4th day rounding on him, she couldn’t take it anymore.
”How can you be so nice to him after what he did? He’s a horrible human being! He deserves to die!” she burst out.
”Maybe,” I replied. “But there are agents of justice and agents of mercy in the world, and we need both. As a doctor I am an agent of mercy. My job is to care for my patients and trust that the agents of justice will do their job just as well. Which I do.”
The war in Ukraine is one of the fronts in which the United States, in command of NATO, does not generate results in its favor
(Photo: Flickr)
Dec 14, 2023
The crossroads at which the Western establishment led by the United States finds itself has materialized in the concern of a political sector inside and outside that country. The war in Gaza threatens to reduce US arms supplies to Taiwan, as does the war in Ukraine. In recent days, US President Joe Biden has been seeking war aid for Ukraine and Israel (Biden seeks ‘vital’ war aid for Israel and Ukraine ), including more money for Taiwan.
Below they are presented along with the approach that Misión Verdad has made regarding these cases.
1. UNSUNG DEFEAT IN UKRAINE
After the Minsk Agreement (2015) served as a mechanism to buy time, the so-called “collective West” led by the United States went to war against Russia in Ukraine since March 2022. Analysts such as Dugin describe that (https://www.geopolitika.ru/en/article/five-fronts-against-unipolar-globalism ), essentially, it is about a civil war between Russians: patriotic Russians against Atlanticist Russians who have betrayed their Russian identity, but the Atlanticist “Russians” are being used by the unipolar forces of the West.
The confrontation continues to generate negative results and perspectives for the Western side. According to an analysis (Zelenski no logra ganarse al Congreso de EEUU y el paquete de ayuda a Kiev sigue estancado ) by The Washington Post, the efforts of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, during his second visit to Washington in three months, “did little” to change the opinion of Republican congressmen, who oppose continuing to finance the escalation of the war.
During that same visit, and meeting with the Ukrainian leader, President Biden promised Kiev a new $200 million military aid package, while noting that it could be the last. Days earlier, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg stated that he believes Ukraine’s front-line position could worsen if the West does not increase arms supplies. He detailed that kyiv is in a “critical situation” as members of the Atlantic Alliance were unable to meet the growing demand for ammunition. “We have to prepare for bad news,” he declared on December 3 in an interview (tagesschau24: Exlusiv-Interview mit NATO-Generalsekretär Stoltenberg – Nach dem Großangriff Russlands ist die Lage für die Ukraine kritisch | ARD Mediathek ) with the German television channel Das Erste.
In an interview (The AP Interview: Ukraine’s Zelenskyy says the war with Russia is in a new phase as winter looms ) with the AP, Zelensky admitted that his fighters were unable to make significant progress in their failed counteroffensive. “We wanted faster results. From that perspective, unfortunately we did not achieve the desired results. And this is a fact,” he asserted, blaming the West for not having provided sufficient weapons.
He also expressed fear that events in the Gaza Strip could jeopardize the flow of military aid to kyiv.
In this way, the Ukrainian conflict would be overshadowed by the destruction of Gaza implemented by Israel with the support of Western powers.
Researchers Diego Sequera and Ernesto Cazal published a series of articles ( I, II and III) with a geopolitical balance of the war in Ukraine.
2. GAZA: “ISRAEL IS THE WEST”
Precisely, the second American war front is in Western Asia.The genocide against the Palestinian population carried out by Israel has the support of the West; This has been demonstrated not only by the forms but also by the concepts.
The destruction of Gaza is not only advancing with irreversible damage to its buildings (15%) but also to its arable lands (22%)
(Photo: France24)
The article, written by an organic intellectual of Zionist nationalism, Omer Dostri, proposes as an “ideal option” that Israel reoccupy Gaza in the long term, ethnically cleanse hundreds of thousands of Palestinian residents, exponentially expand the size of the extermination zone and establish settlements inside Gaza.
Dan Cohen, American journalist and documentary filmmaker, notes (El Pentágono propone limpieza étnica y colonización de Gaza y destrucción del Líbano) that the text adds to the numerous statements that, in the case of a war crimes trial, would serve as clear evidence of the intention to carry out a genocide, which is notoriously difficult to establish. establish. The fact that this call was published on behalf of the Department of Defense and in the main media branch of the United States Army raises doubts about American culpability in the Gaza genocide, which is being carried out mainly with factory-made bombs and missiles. of the North American country, and about what the true intentions of its government are.
Israeli occupation forces have attacked residential buildings, schools, hospitals, ambulances, medical personnel, rescue and first aid teams, journalists, United Nations employees, mosques, Christian churches, infrastructure, and have cut off electricity and communication services. According to data (Centro de Satélites de la ONU: el 18 % de las estructuras en Gaza fueron dañadas – SANA en Español) from the Palestinian Ministry of Health, the death toll as a result of Israeli bombings against the Gaza Strip increased to 18,608, while another 50,594 people have been injured. 18% of the total structures and 22% (In Gaza, ‘an estimated 22% of agricultural land’ has been destroyed since the start of the conflict) of the arable land in the Gaza Strip have been damaged as a result of Israel’s aggression against this Palestinian enclave.
The destabilization of the Arab and Islamic world is a necessity of the West and its advance requires a systematic genocide of the Arab population like the one carried out in Gaza. Washington’s supervisory role, demonstrated in the recurring visits of the Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, has to do with maintaining control over an eventual overflow of elements of the Palestinian resistance, gas fields (Los recursos energéticos en la ecuación del exterminio israelí) such as Leviathan and the India-Middle East economic corridor -Europe (IMEC, its acronym in English).
Two research papers by Sequera ( I and II ) have been published on this portal to describe the plot, in addition to a recent interview with analysts Christian Nader and Javier Couso conducted by Ernesto Cazal.
3. IN AFRICA “UNIPOLARITY” IS TESTED (OR BETRAYED)
Dugin states that “the bloc of anti-colonial countries in West Africa (Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Central African Republic, Gabon) is united against the pro-colonial (Atlantist) regimes and against Macron’s globalist France.” However, Washington’s hand is not far from that front, maneuvering to retain control of the region (or at least dispute influence with the multipolar powers) and depose the influence of France. This would demonstrate that unipolarity is not so much a Euro-Atlantic vision as a purely American one.
Three Sahel countries, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger, signed (Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso establish Sahel security alliance) a pact in September to establish an architecture of collective defense and mutual assistance for the benefit of their populations.
After the coup d’état in Niger against President Mohamed Bazoum by officers at the head of the National Council for the Safeguarding of the Homeland (CNSP), the confrontation against Paris was manifest.
The coup plotters alleged that the decision was due to the “continuous deterioration of the security situation” and “poor economic and social management.”
Supporters of the military junta that took control of Niger through a coup d’état marched towards the capital waving Russian flags and denouncing France, the former colonial power
(Photo: Sky News)
The Undersecretary of State, Victoria Nuland, visited the African country (EE.UU. busca desplazar a Francia en el Sahel) in order to anticipate the increase in Russia’s influence. The rejection of the French could lead to their total expulsion (Aumenta la presión de Níger por la salida del embajador francés) from the continent and the subsequent security vacuum, which seems an irreversible process, even when force is used, either directly or through the Economic Community of West African States ( Cedeao).
The formation of the mutual defense pact by the three Sahel countries attempts, precisely, to confront the threats from ECOWAS, which has a history of successful military interventions (Historial de intervenciones militares de la CEDEAO en África) through its military arm.
In the region, the dispute between the unipolar order and the emerging multipolar order has been expressed (Níger, neocolonialismo y la geopolítica militar en África), one led by the Euro-Atlantic Axis with the United States at the head and the other by China and Russia, among other countries. The latter have dedicated themselves to establishing cooperative relations in the areas of diplomacy and international relations, economics, finance, trade and security—the Asians have been forging them for three decades. Washington, for its part, has become involved in the fields of financial investment in strategic resources and its military deployment has filled almost the entire African continent with AFRICOM (África marca el rumbo a América Latina hacia la multipolaridad)
To expand on the complex African geopolitical dynamics, you can consult the works published by Eder Peñaand Diego Sequera.
4. NATOIZING THE PACIFIC AND PROVOKING CHINA
The global dispute fueled by the United States reaches close to China’s borders, as demonstrated by the continued interference in the conflict between the Asian country and the island of Taiwan, recognized as part of its territory even by Washington, which has maintained an “ambiguity strategic” increasingly difficult to demonstrate.
It is essential for China’s foreign relations that its “One China” (The One-China Principle and the Taiwan Issue) policy be recognized. Its territorial reunification process, adopted by the National People’s Congress through the Anti-Secession Law (Text of China’s anti-secession law) of 2005, reserves to the government the right to use “non-peaceful means” in the event of an eventual declaration of independence from Taiwan, after accepting that the Taipei administration represents an autonomous province.
For its part, since 1949, Taiwan has claimed the government of all of mainland China, in addition to the archipelago of the same name, which keeps alive the conflict that Washington constantly encourages through political, economic and military support.
After the United States switched diplomatic recognition of Taiwan to China in 1979, it continued to sell weapons to the island under the terms of the Taiwan Relations Act. The key was to sell enough weapons so that Taiwan could defend itself against a possible Chinese attack, but not so many that it would destabilize relations between Washington and Beijing.
However, it has sold him more than $14 billion in military equipment.
Map demonstrating US military pressure against China. In red the defense systems installed by Beijing, in green the bases and presence of the United States and its allies
(Photo: The Economist)
Not only has Biden used discretionary powers to approve another $500 million in operational readiness to Taiwan, but ground battalions will receive training in the United States.
He has sought to increase the siege of China by strengthening the Seventh Fleet (Home) in Japan, it is the largest in the North American country with 40,000 troops, 70 ships and submarines and about 300 aircraft. Such a deployment, which seeks to otanize (Cómo se prepara China ante una escalada en Taiwán) the Pacific region, has been seen in the Korean, Vietnam and Iraq wars (1991), and would be focused on supporting South Korea against Pyonyang and Taiwan against China in possible armed conflicts.
A BBC report (The US is quietly arming Taiwan to the teeth) indicates that the United States is running out of time to update and equip the Taiwanese army, especially knowing that the equipment is old, there is no island counterintelligence in the rival country and, perhaps most importantly , taking into account its inferiority in every sense compared to China.
In addition, Taiwan plays a fundamental role in the supply and value chain of the American industry, specifically in the race for the semiconductor market, fundamental for technological development.
The Global North continues to search for oil and Venezuelan territory is in its sights.
About 10 years ago, the oil company ExxonMobil activated an oil and gas extraction plan in the territorial waters of Essequibo, a geographical space in dispute between Venezuela and Guyana as a result of the imperial dispossession of the United Kingdom during the 19th century.
Venezuela has responded to the Guyanese claim, lacking legal and historical support, demanding dialogue and bilateral agreements stipulated in the so-called Geneva Agreement of 1966. However, acting as a subsidiary of the oil transnational (Guyana, Inc.: filial de la ExxonMobil) and supported by the United States, Guyana has resorted to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) after the last two UN Secretaries General referred the dispute to that international court without taking into account the endorsement of the Venezuelan side.
Between 2015 and 2016, the Venezuelan government denounced to the international community the so-called “operation pincers” with which the United States, through Colombia and Guyana, would provoke a military conflict against Venezuela that would facilitate its subsequent intervention.
Within this framework, the United States Southern Command has arranged to include the neighboring country in its military maneuvers known as “Tradewinds”, in the Caribbean Sea, since 2015, just when ExxonMobil began to illegally explore (¿Quién está detrás del escalamiento diplomático por el Esequibo?) the deposits and sign contracts with Georgetown.
The most recent version of “Tradewinds” featured 21 countries, including three European nations (France, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom).
They gathered in Guyana for the second time since they took place to carry out various activities on land, air, sea and cyberspace, distributed in different locations in the country, many of them along the Essequibo River.
image 42
Guyana illegally granted concessions to ExxonMobil in territorial maritime space disputed with Venezuela
(Photo: El Universal)
Also this year, as a sign that his diplomacy is always linked to the conflictive imprint, Secretary Blinken visited Guyana and discussed energy investment issues for its companies and territorial security. There has already been a precedent for interference dressed in diplomacy: in 2019 the Lima Group, a group of countries aligned with the regime change operation against Venezuela directed from the United States, issued a statement (Declaración del Grupo de Lima) recognizing the alleged Guyanese sovereignty over the territory of Essequibo. This led to notes of protest from the government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela against the signatory states of the statement and led to the majority of the signatories recanting (Países rectifican posición tras nota del Grupo de Lima sobre Venezuela).
After the overwhelmingly positive result of the consultative referendum on December 3, the Venezuelan State decided to take the first actions to protect Guayana Esequiba.
) around the dispute, supporting Guyana, which seeks to mobilize the focus towards what the ICJ rules, whose decisions are known to be biased towards the North. Global, and recognized in case of being harmed.
Misión Verdad published numerous works regarding the Essequibo case, here
are six of them.
— WE ARE A GROUP OF INDEPENDENT RESEARCHERS DEDICATED TO ANALYZING THE WAR PROCESS AGAINST VENEZUELA AND ITS GLOBAL IMPLICATIONS. FROM THE BEGINNING OUR CONTENT HAS BEEN FREE TO USE.
WE DEPEND ON DONATIONS AND COLLABORATIONS TO SUPPORT THIS PROJECT, IF YOU WANT TO CONTRIBUTE TO MISIÓN VERDAD (Apóyanos)
The TRAP of the HIGH-VALUE woman: every restaurant serves water
This is actually a story about my daughter. She was 17 and had bought a second hand Acura Integra sports car with her own money. No, dad was very remiss in not teaching his lovely daughter how to change a flat tire, so one night she gets a flat and limps into a Walmart parking lot. She knows where things are in the trunk, but is a little unsure how to use them.
Suddenly, a van pulls up near her and 4 guys pile out. She said later she was frozen with terror thinking they were going to abduct her and rape her. Instead, one of the men asked if she had a flat and was help on the way.
No, she replied, she was going to fix it herself, except she really didn’t know how.
While she was talking the other guys opened the back of the van and pulled (as she described it) a lever-style jack out as well as a power wrench. In seconds, her car was lifted up from the side; the wheel removed and her replacement tire back on. All done in about 30 seconds.
They were the pit crew for a race team and were stopping at Walmart for some snacks when they saw her predicament and came over to help.
They advised my daughter to have dad show her how to change a tire.
edit: I neglected to mention that my daughter had AAA but given their response time and her not having a cell phone she was prepared to try to change the tire herself. Given enough time she’d have figured it out since she is extremely bright, but the fellows coming by was a godsend to her. They basically made it into a lark to help a damsel in distress.
My dad’s father died when he was 9, in 1946. He had an older brother, and two younger sisters.
A few years later, his mother married a man named John. John told the kids “I am not your father, I cannot replace your father. Call me John, or whatever you want.”
John was a hard worker- he only missed a day of work when he was injured at work, and only stayed home because they made him. John was not an overly affectionate man- he was in Special Forces in WW2 and had terrible PTSD. He did however take the kids fishing with him, taught them to play cribbage, he was very handy and made sure the boys could fix things. He was protective of the girls, and would stand on the front porch waiting for them when they went out, not resting until they were home safe.
He made sure the boys stayed out of trouble, made sure they behaved, respected their mother, and worked from the time they were 14. Although very “street wise”, neither boy was ever in any trouble.
His whole working life, he always turned his entire pay over to his wife, and she gave him an allowance. He never once complained.
When someone said “Your children…” to him, he would say “they are my wife’s children”.
We called him Grandpa John.
When I was married, and after my grandmother had died, I asked him about him saying that. He said “Their father deserves the credit for who they are, and it’s wrong to make anyone forget him. You only have one father.” I asked if he loved the kids… and he said “I worked hard to make sure they had everything, I took care of them.” To him, this was the proof of love.
He also said “It was a privilege to raise them, they are good people. I was lucky to be able to be there to help”.
When I was a kid, and Grandpa John taught me to play Cribbage- if I missed points when counting my hand, he would take them saying “If you don’t want em, they’re mine”. He never let me (or my brothers) win; we either won fair and square, or not at all.
My dad is now 84. He is so much like Grandpa John- he is a strong man, who plays cards (just as John taught him), who fishes (just like John taught him), who can fix *anything* (just as John taught him), He missed rare days at work, served in the military, and would be waiting outside for me whenever I went out in the evening- he didn’t rest until he knew I was home, safe.
I beat my father once at Gin- once- in my whole life. The last time he and I played cribbage, I missed “His Nibs”- and my dad took the point, saying “If you don’t want em, they’re mine”.
He is, in reality, as much (if not more) John’s son as he was his father’s son. He respected and loved John, not because anyone told him to, but because John earned it.
Your step-kids will look back on their lives and see that *you* are the one who paid the bills, *you* were there when they woke up afraid, *you* were the one who waited on the front porch until they were home safe. You were the one who said “He’s $20, stop for Pizza on the way home”.
Just be a man of integrity. Don’t argue with anyone, don’t withdraw your love or support, just be there for the kids.
Just as no one needed to tell my Dad how important John was, no one will need to tell the children you are raising. And, one day, you will see in them how important you have been. And in reality, they are the only ones who matter.
More like the most disgusting. When I was in eighth grade, we had a male history teacher. He was in his thirties with a receding hairline and a weird smile.
When we started the beginning of the year, he was sort of like a goofy soccer dad. Very funny and interactive with the class. Nothing ever seemed weird about him, and all the parents always liked him.
As we moved along the year, he started doing strange things. He’d walk up behind female students and rub their shoulders or go way too close to them when trying to “help” with a problem. People always were uncomfortable but he didn’t go to an insane extent.
When we reached the “two months left of school” mark, we were taken on a field trip to the park for a class picnic. My friend and I went off to a table away from the class so we could talk with one another without other people hearing. I remember we were laughing about a joke her brother said when the history teacher came up to us and told me that our, at the time, English teacher needed me.
I didn’t think much of it and went up to my English teacher. Yes, of course, I realized that I shouldn’t left my friend alone with the history teacher, but at the moment I wasn’t thinking.
After I talked with my English teacher for a bit, I walked back to the table but realized they were both gone. I was confused and went back to my English teacher and told her that the two were missing. She grabbed the other teachers and began to look around for them.
I followed them as they spread out. While they were searching, I realized the two of them might be in the parking lot grabbing something from the bus. I went over and checked the bus and nobody was in there. The parking lot was mainly deserted so I went and checked the van parked slightly away from the bus. I peeked through the window, and to my horror, I saw my history teacher r*ping my friend, who was yelling through her tears. I was absolutely appalled. I threw open the door and started screaming at the top of my lungs. I slammed my fist into the groin area of my history teacher, grabbed my friend, and hauled her out of the van.
The rest of the teachers ran towards us as I told them what happened. The history teacher started yelling as the others called the police and screamed at him. It was all chaos.
To this day I am still scarred. Thankfully, my friend turned out okay and I still talk to her now. She’s happily married and has healed from this experience.
Remember, just because they’re an authority figure doesn’t mean you should trust them. People are messed up.
It was the day before Thanksgiving. My mom was in the hallway sobbing and frantically searching the Help wanted section of the newspaper. I was only seven and my brother was four. I was confused about why my mom was crying so hard. I asked her and she said she needed to find a job. I thought that was strange because my dad had a good job and my mom stayed home and cooked and cleaned. Who’s going to take care of us I thought to myself.
Thanksgiving was a weird and somber day. All the food was there, but it was quiet. Silent even.
My mom found a job overnight so she could be home with us during the day. My dad stopped playing with us. He stopped talking to us. He stayed late at work a lot. My mom was always tired and took naps whenever she could. I was at school most of the day, so that helped, but the house started to get dirty and she started to bring home fast food instead of cooking delicious meals. This went on for a few years. My mom got really skinny.
And then, when I turned ten, my mom quit work and stayed home again. The house was clean again. We had good food to eat and my parents were happy again.
My mom told me years later that my dad had had a nervous breakdown. We were very close to losing the house and everything we owned. My dad had come very close to trying to commit suicide thinking that his life insurance would be enough to save every thing. My mom was crying that day because he told her his plans and my mom told him she would go to work and help save the house, but she couldn’t do it by herself. She loved him so much that she went without sleep to save him and everything we had. They were married 47 years until death did part them. My mom lived another 3 years afterwards and is buried next to him.
As a KFC customer for almost 40 years, I suppose I’m also contributing to the problem.
Ever since I first had KFC in the mid 1980s, I’ve been trained to look for their special deals or coupons which would make their meals about 30% cheaper than their regular pricing. With the deals, the iconic boxes and buckets haven’t gone up in price as much as everything else. 9 pieces of regular chicken went from about $7 in the mid 1980s to $10–12 today when it should be about $25.
Hence they had to reduce the sizes of their chicken pieces, as they charge by the piece, and slash ingredient costs until it’s basically just salt for seasoning. Honestly, plain battered fried chicken is already pretty good, so I can see how they can get by with mostly salt and dispense with the expensive spices.
As a customer, I would expect ever lower inflation-adjusted prices to compensate for the reduction in quality. I would still come for the deals if it’s cheap enough. They know it and I know it.
Now, they’re making barely passable food loaded with insane amounts of salt that people like me still eat out of nostalgia when yet another coupon comes across. The usual patrons are at least my age or older and their sad looking sit down tables are still mostly empty and straight out of the 1980s.
While each KFC location can still pull upwards of $1–2M in sales a year, I don’t know how they’re going to survive in the coming decade when the older generations like me literally can’t handle the salt anymore. The Millennials and younger crowd have grown up used to fancy fried chicken like the Korean double fried or Dave’s hot chicken. They’re not taking well to KFC at any price.
In 2016 during a night in March around 2 AM, I was woken up by hard knocks my front door. As I made my way towards the door (which was partly glass), I noticed a police uniform. I opened the door and saw a police officer standing out there telling me he’s performing a wellness check. I look at him in a weird way, asking him why he would come in the middle of the night to check on me and my family. He explained to me that an Uber driver reported taking a strange guy from near our premises around 8 pm. The guy looked weird and acted strange enough to alert the Uber driver. He asked the Uber driver to simply drop him off in the middle of a street without specifying which house exactly. During the drive, he didn’t make any conversation with the driver.
Now for the back story. The passenger was my brother, who has hurt his eye during his army service. His iris was damaged, so it looks like he has an expanded pupil. He had just landed that evening after a flight from Europe (me in the US) and was jetlagged and tired. He simply rested during the drive and almost fell asleep. He didn’t know which Airbnb house the company rented, so he needed to walk a little to find it. When I explained this to the officer, we both had a good laugh at now, 2:30 AM and then he left.
After all this, I still appreciate the Uber driver, who did the right thing. I wish everyone cared enough about strangers they never met or knew.
After my dad died, my mother was incredibly lonely, so I would take her on road trips, and we would visit all the places that her and dad had visited together.
As we drove, she told me their history, from the day she met him, their first date, how he asked her out, their first kiss. They were married 75 years ago, and my mother was a virgin on her wedding night.
She told me of them scrimping and saving to buy each other, and later us kids, gifts. How happy they were when they saved enough money.
She told of how once a month they would have enough money for a 26 of whiskey or rum, and they would invite our neighbors, their best friends over, for drinks and toast. Then two weeks later, their neighbors would have saved up enough to invite them over. My parents had a pan with holes in it, with handles, that they sat on top of their propane stove, to make toast. Their neighbors had this newfangled electric toaster. My mother loved the evenness of the toasting on the toast, from the electric toaster. The neighbors were polite enough to say that they loved the toast from the pan.
When my father died, my mother had me spread the ashes at the site of their first house, by the stream in the country. She had told me so many joyful stories of those days. Like the day she found out she was pregnant with my older brother.
Your U.S. joint chief of staff in the military CONFIRMED THAT IT IS A WEATHER BALOON officially and you still choose to call it a fxxking “spy balloon” either you are dumb, idiotic or you are a jerk. But chances is that you are an average Joe a typical China and Chinese hater pretending to ask a question!
Shoot it down? Of course no. It no different from shooting down you neighbours kid party ballon blown of course into your air space! Do you know you look and sons like a 50 IQ per just for asking that? If you are normal you will question what your nation uses a billion dollar fighter jet to shoot down a thousand dollar balloon travelling 20 KM an hour!
Grow up will you? No wonder the U.S. is bankrupt and imploding. It is due to people like you.
When I first left Hawaii I moved to San Diego. One of the first things I wanted to do was establish a checking account. This was the mid 80’s.
I took my travelers checks and had to catch a bus to a bank. I looked at the desks as I entered and they were all empty so I approached a teller and let her know I wanted to speak to someone about opening an account. She told me she could help. So I pull out my travelers checks and my wallet and place them on the counter. She glances at the tc’s and asks me, “What country is that from?” – wait, really?
“This one.”
“Which one?”
“This one. They’re from this country. Is there an account manager available?”
“I assure you, I can help. Can I see your ID?” I hand it over. “And do you have your passport?”
“For what? I don’t have a passport.”
“Because you’re from overseas. I need a passport.” again- what?
I’m not from ‘overseas’. I’m from Hawaii. It’s a state.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, think again. Hawaii is a state.”
“Ma’am, you have foreign money and a foreign ID. I need a passport.”
So, at 21, I stepped back and yelled, “I NEED TO SPEAK WITH A MANAGER!!”
A young man steps up from behind me and asks what the problem is. I try to let him know that I’m trying to open an account when the teller interjects and tells him I have no passport, I’m from ‘overseas’ and I have foreign money. Before I have a chance to show him my ID he kindly lets me know that I need a passport to open an account when coming from out of country. So, I’m done. I grab my things and head for the door.
At this point it looks like the manager is returning from lunch. He stops me on the way to the door and asks if he could help. I show him my ID. “This is a state ID, issued in the State of Hawaii. The 50th state of the United States.” He say, “Yes, ma’am, I know what this is. What’s the problem?”
Teller pops over, “She needs a passport.”
Manager, “For what?”
“Because she’s from overseas!”
“No, she’s not. She’s from Hawaii.”
“But, that’s overseas.”
“Actually, it’s a state.” To which she looked totally confused.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I won’t be able to open an account here.”
I took my Inuit husband to England. I borrowed my Mother’s car and took him to a pub. I had not been back for a while, so when, near 11pm, I did not hear the familiar “Time, Gentlemen, please” I assumed that licencing hours had been changed. After a while the publican came to each table and said, quietly “If you wouldn’t mind drinking up and leaving soon I would appreciate it. The police are outside.” So we left and got in the car. A police officer came over and I wound down the window. “Excuse me, Madam,” he said politely, “Did you know that your tax disk is out of date?” This is a circular piece of paper which fits in a holder on the windshield to prove you have paid the road tax. I explained that it was my Mother’s car and I knew nothing about it, but I scrabbled in the glove-box in case it was there. It wasn’t. “Well, perhaps it is just at home, then” suggested the officer, “could I have the name and address of the owner?” I duly gave it and was told that he would drop round in a few days to make sure. We drove home. My husband was astonished and suggested what would have happened if we had been in Canada. My Mother rushed into the nearest town the next day in my Father’s car and paid for the missing tax disk.
A couple of months later I was speaking with my Mother on the phone and she told me that a policeman had shown up just a day or so before this call. He had a cup of tea and chatted, and then mentioned the tax disk which had been duly inserted in the holder. He took a look at it and left.
That is policing as it should be, and it is the reason that the British police can do their job unarmed. In the UK, the police are our friends, there to protect us. They do not shoot and ask questions after.
P.S. Yes, this happened a number of years ago, and now police can check using the number plate.
It’s what happens to a rogue empire when it begins to collapse inwardly
It becomes a Nation of Factions and Partisanship
The US is struggling in a Multipolar World
More and more Nations now stand up to the US and say “We have had enough of your hegemony. Either you treat us better or we go to Russia and China”
Yet Israel is an old buddy and the Jewish lobby, a Lobby of corrupt and greedy people who are middlemen to various corrupt deals involving Israel and USA can use the pressure of this corruption and cause Biden serious problems in the elections because Wall Street is heavily controlled by the Jewish Lobby
So on one side the US is losing the goodwill of the Arabs who are too rich to be bribed, who can get nuclear architecture from Russia and China completely bypassing the West and who can get weapons and trade from China and Russia entirely bypassing the West
Iran simply says to the Arabs “Look guys , either you allow me to get a two state solution by funding Houthis and Hezbollah and Hamas or i turn them on you”
Arab States are happy with the recent peace with Iran so they say “Either Iran gets defeated which is good for us or Israel gets humbled and US gets humbled which is ALSO good for us”
Its a win win for them
Meanwhile Israel knows the US is losing Arabia and know that if they burn bridges with Israel, they lose the entire middle East
Israel is the only anchor for US influence in the Middle East where Arab Nations are fast asking the US to go f*** themselves every day
So they cannot be forcefully impeded by USA
So there you have it
The Strongest Nation in the world now a stinking cesspit with a Senile Biden, a Stupid Birdbrain Nikki Haley and that Faggot Lindsey Graham in charge of decision making
Losing the Middle East and clueless how to stop it
Too scared of losing Israel and thus allowing open butchery and murder of kids and women and losing the goodwill of the entire non western world
A HELPLESS NATION CAUGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF WEAKNESS AND CORRUPTION
After working closely with children as a teacher, I have to say that, although in many cases family problems/neglect or abuse by parents, carers, etc is to blame, there are also some children who are just born “bad seeds”. I had one little boy in a class one year. I knew his parents socially and had his older brother in my class in previous years. The older brother was a nice, well-behaved kid – sometimes naughty, but what kids aren’t, sometimes? Just a normal, well-adjusted child.
His younger brother, on the other hand, was a nightmare. Because I was a friend of the family, I got to see this little horror in action. From the moment of his birth, he was a cranky and demanding baby who had no patience and if everybody didn’t jump to his will he would throw a huge tantrum. As he grew older, and particularly once I could observe him daily in my classroom, I saw him become, what I can only describe as cunning. He knew tantrums didn’t work with me: I usually walk away and once they realize they have no audience they calm down. Instead, he began a campaign of terror. Always when he thought I wasn’t watching. He was very intelligent,and when it suited him he could charm the birds from the trees. But on an instant he could turn into a raging maniac. Instead of using that intellect to learn, instead he used it to lie, steal, cheat, and physically hurt other children who were smaller than him, destroying their work and generally causing me to have to concentrate on him more than any of the others just to keep him under some sort of control. The day came when he skipped class. I could hear a commotion in the playground, where the school had set up a henhouse for the children to have contact with farm animals. I could hear chickens in distress. A number of teachers, all followed by their classes, ran to see what was going on. The hens were all milling about and scared and there were five dead hens. E. was still holding one screaming chicken, laughing as he swung it by its legs. The school then told the parents that this behaviour was beyond our capacity and to take him out.
His parents took him to a child psychologist and he was diagnosed as having “Defiance and Anger Management Disorder” and he was sent to a specialist school that deals with children with out of control behaviour.
I lost touch with the family for a number of years after that, but eventually ran into the older brother, who had by now joined the Australian Air Force and was a pilot in training. We chatted for a while, and of course I asked him how E., his younger brother, was doing.
He told me that E. only got worse as he got older. He had gone to Juvenile Detention for attacking people and was now in jail again for attacking an old age pensioner with a pair of scissors. His brother said he feared for when he got out – he said that E. was dangerous and couldn’t be trusted not to hurt people. Not because of anything they did to him. Just because he enjoyed hurting other living things. The family couldn’t keep pets, since E. would always torture them to death.
Ten years after running into the older brother, I again heard of E. He is currently in jail for attempted murder. His live-in girlfriend was found beaten to a pulp, and she lives now with multiple disabilities. The judge said he had never seen anybody treated so callously, and that E. had an absolute lack of apparent remorse for his actions.
So it is not always nurture. Sometimes nature is to blame.
When I was in high school, I was a cheerleader. My father drove a school bus. One evening, we were at the school waiting to board the bus to attend an out-of-town game. A student at the school that was heavily into drugs and other assorted activities came to the school.
I was standing, talking to my father at the moment this student approached us. He produced a pistol, stuck it under my father’s chin and pulled the trigger. The gun just “clicked”. He sneered at us and said “Darn. Wish it had been loaded.”. That is my last cognizant thought of the evening.
Later, friends relayed the “rest of the story” to me.
The police were called. Upon their arrival, my father was asked where the offender was. He pointed and said “Under that cheerleader.”. Obviously, I had taken serious offense at this jerk’s actions and beat the living daylights out of him. The police pulled me off of him and took him to jail. Again, I have no recollection of those events.
I cannot condone you taking the action I took. It would completely depend on the circumstances.
When I was 11 years old, I was diagnosed with Aspergers.
The psychologist told me I would never hold a real job, drive a car, or even be capable of basic self-care around the house.
Where I come from, healthcare is incredibly poor because only the lowest-qualifying doctors move to this environmentally contaminated area because nobody in a reputable city will accept them.
Basically, my diagnosis was based almost entirely upon my uneducated sociopath mother’s lies, slander, and manipulation. The rest of my diagnosis was based on the outlandish and outdated belief that it’s abnormal for a girl to be extremely quiet, but have very articulate speech and an interest in science and video games. Yeah, they literally assumed I was mental because I didn’t fit their sexist views. Needless to say, doctors in this area are among the most unprofessional in the entire country.
My childhood consisted of endless bullying and harassment from my mom, brother, stepfather, classmates, and teachers. My mom always called me a “retard” and told me to “act like a normal kid, you fucking freak.” She also belittled me by telling me that I DESERVED the bullying that everyone gave me.
Years later, I survived multiple suicide attempts and turned 18.
Despite being labeled as an “autistic retard”, my mom forced me to immediately enter college when I wasn’t ready and all I wanted to do was navigate through basic adulthood with a job before making such a huge commitment to education.
I psychologically cracked.
Most of what happened is now a blur. But I can remember the part when I silently walked out of class in the middle of a lecture. I continued walking silently outside and made my way toward my mom’s car. (Yeah, she actually allowed me to get a license and drive myself occasionally. But only because her friends with “normal” kids started giving her shit about having a retarded kid.)
I got in the car and sobbed violently. My life was over. It’s all a prison and I want out.
My grades were all horrible because I saw no point in doing anything when my mom always told me that I would NEVER be allowed to have my own life and that if I attempted to escape from her, she would finally have me legally declared mentally incompetent so I would have no human rights to make my own decisions in life.
A few weeks later, I left my mom’s house without any notice and used my meager savings account to get an apartment. I spent 8 months submitting job applications to every place in town that would hire my age. I literally only got three interviews the entire time. I was forced to work online as an adult cam model to survive on less than $800 a month. Keep in mind that this job was very difficult due to being naturally ugly and constantly being degraded. At the end of these 8 months, I was finally hired for a shitty part-time job.
At this point, it probably sounds like nothing will ever improve.
But here’s the plot twist…
Today, I’m 22 years old and I have a stable job in a manufacturing facility. Most people are unable to survive on the meager wages of this job, but I’ve managed to do far more than just survive. I’m thriving. I didn’t need a roommate or a partner to help me move up in life. In only two years of working this job and supporting myself living alone, I was able to build my credit and save up money to buy a nice convertible car and a HOUSE. A freaking HOUSE. I did it on my own with no guidance from anyone. I researched everything carefully and worked hard and because of that, I succeeded. But aside from material things, I also gained something else that my mom and all the other cruel people said I would never have. Friends.
I still go through cycles of depression, but my friends are understanding of my struggle and it helps to know that they still believe in me.
The moral of this story is to never lose hope. Even if everyone in your life hates you and makes a joint effort to keep you trapped, always keep an ounce of hope guarded in your mind. If you have to use anger from injustice to re-ignite your hope, do it. Do it until you succeed and then find peace. As long as you have even the smallest amount of hopeful defiance, you have the power to create a plot twist in your life.
I had been out of prison for one month after a 15 year incarceration for murder. The conviction of murder requiring “intent” and “aforethought” in my state, I can say with a straight face and clear conscious that I did not commit murder, however I absolutely knew when my spouse took the stand to testify against me that I would be convicted of it. Since I am a “manslaughterer” by the legal definition of the word, I didn’t quibble and just took the sentence. It was coming either way, and I knew it.
On that Monday I took a psychological battery for vocational rehabilitation to see what they could help me with. I walked 4 miles one way at 7AM for the appointment. It was overcast, in the low 40’s when I started out, and I was hopeful. After taking a many hours long series of tests, I had a brief interview with a psychologist. I was warned beforehand that he was there to ask me a few questions but not for a counseling session, so I was to keep that in mind.
Every question he asked me I thought about in depth before I answered. I wanted to give this well educated, intelligent man the exact shade of phraseology I knew he needed for an accurate assessment. At the end, he asked if I had any questions for him. I said I had one, “When does being free start to become easier than it is now?” He looked at me straightaway in the eyes and said with absolutely zero expression of emotion, “This isn’t a counseling session. If you need a counseling session you can make an appointment.”
Freedom was not all it was cracked up to be, to put it very, very mildly. On that date I was down to my last few dollars I had saved whilst in prison ($700 in 3 years, crocheting blankets and working 250 hours a month at .30¢ an hour), I had no job, was being pestered to get a job immediately by Parole Officer who provided to date zero help in that department, and everything I was qualified, trained and educated for was worthless in a professional pursuit. I was given a list of over 50 companies who hire felons, but only 4 would consider a violent felon. I was told to spend at least 8 hours a day looking for a job. Between 10 to 20 times a day I had to replay for horrified managers what I did which sent me to prison. By the end of the day, I seemed like an apathetic sociopath who couldn’t care less about what I did. My family hadn’t deemed me worthy of help, I was in a strange new city in a halfway house, I knew very few people and they were all busy with their own life anyways.
What had most galled me was how the civilisation in general had changed. I was deeply, deeply bothered by the callous disregard of fellow humans by virtually everyone I met in every walk of life. For the last 10 years or so that I was in prison I noticed that the rookie inmates were particularly inconsiderate and selfish, and I attributed that to the fact that I was 10 years their senior, and that they were just young kids afraid and wanting to fit in. When I was released, I immediately noticed that in fact these selfish, inconsiderate and thoughtless inmates were just an accurate representation of their age group, and that this is what society had become.
Around noon, I was walking home on a bridge which went over the freeway. I looked over the edge. I could feel the spirit of despair and crushed dreams with no hope for relief calling me down to the pavement below with a promise for a sweet release from this place. For about 4 or 5 seconds, I just looked over the edge. I calculated all I have going for me and all I had relinquished so far in this life.
All I had was a promise from the Russian Orthodox Church which told me that after a well run race I would be awarded a rest and a peace the likes of which I could not imagine.
I walked on.
On my way home I thought first about what I had been educated 20 years for, and what I could do with it.
Zero.
Then I thought about what I had done in the past and wondered if I could do it again.
Nope.
Then I started considering my resources to find a job and realised that I had exhausted all of the leads I’d generated to no avail.
Empty.
Upon reaching the halfway house, I realised that every plan I had focused on my whole life was now worthless. Before I was arrested I’d hoped to become a tenured and published professor, and eventually move on to politics. In prison, all my hope every day was that life out here would somehow be better than life inside. It isn’t. It’s just different. After prison, I had hoped that my mind, education and experience could come together and be utilised in a positive way. I found that absolutely no one wanted to hear what I had to say except out of politeness. It had been all I could do to keep from jumping off the bridge when I saw into what this world has morphed.
Now I am a chef in a 4.75 star restaurant. Life is much, much harder and less pleasant than it has ever been out here. I don’t have a purpose. Not like my sister who is a world authority in her medical field. Nor like my brother in law who writes policy in the federal State Department. Nor like my Grandfather who helped save us all from the Soviet Union, put a man on the moon, and taught Jimmy Doolittle how to take a B-25 off of the USS Hornet.
I could have been any of these things and more, but I decided to overreact and lash out in abject rage in a total panic and go to prison. So, I can’t complain. At least I’m breathing, and at least God forgives me. He and His Church are all I have. Everything else can be stripped of me easily, and probably will. But I have faith in Him, His promises of life to come, and that the life here is of some merit simply unknown to me. Because of that, there is always hope that while if life has passed me by, at least I may someday cross over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.
My mother has done a great deal of unforgivable things. Here’s one:
Our family of eight moved from California back to New York in the middle of the night. I was 9 at this time. We drove, we had a beat-up station-wagon and it was pretty tight quarters.
One of the reasons for the move was my oldest brother was facing juvenile hall for some property he destroyed. My mother just couldn’t have HER oldest (and most likely best loved) son go away. I’d like to state here that my brother had problems, big problems. He was a sadist and probably a psychopath and definitely a pedophile. He was the eldest kid; there were six of us.
I believe another one of the reasons for the late night move was my Dad lost his job and we were running out on the rent. I’m not positive but it’s a pretty good guess. My Father was laid off from his job as a defense contractor.
We never got a hotel room because we couldn’t afford it, so we all slept in the car for the entire trip across country. Uncomfortable even if everything was Kosher. Which it was not.
One night I woke up to find someone pulling down my pants. Fortunately I was able to pretend to be asleep and move away from him, I realized during this situation (attack?) it was my oldest brother. So nothing happened technically, but we had just begun this trip, I was worried about him making another attempt to molest me. Of course I didn’t know THAT word at that time.
The next morning I got my mother alone and told her what happened, she said “What are you trying to do, start trouble?” I was speechless and afraid. So now if I tell my Father, (who was a good man) I would indeed “start trouble.” I should have gone to my Father first, but I was unaware (at the time), how skewed her opinion and vision of who and what her first son was. By the way, he was 16 at the time.
I have another older brother (he was 11 at this time) He is wonderful, loving, caring and trustworthy. I told him about the “problem.” He promised to keep me and my crazy brother separated by sleeping between us for the whole trip. For his trouble he was smacked and bothered by my crazy brother the whole trip. But he did just that, stayed between us, although our plan was met with objections from my oldest brother, he and my mother tried repeatedly to switch us around. I’m sure my Father thought this situation was nuts, but that was life with my mother all around.
My mother continued to take my brother’s side over the years, no matter what! He beat us up and terrified us just to entertain himself. He even turned on her, throwing glasses at her and a myriad of other things. I had to place him under citizens’ arrest twice, once when I was 13 and the other time I was 18. He was raving drunk both times, terrorizing us, breaking windows and furniture, hitting us. My Father did what he could to protect us, but my brother was a big, violent loud-mouthed drunk. The cops told me if I wanted him arrested, I would have to get him outside of the house or they couldn’t touch him. Although I’m loathe to have cops handle anything for me, I had no choice. I had little brothers and a sister to think about.
I’m so grateful to my brother (the normal one, lol.) for his protection, especially at his very young age. He remains to this day one of my very best friends as well as someone I can always count on.
Presence of mind was one thing I didn’t think I had until this happened:
Interviewer: Good morning Mr. Anonymous. I’m sure you’re familiar with a typical consult interview, so I won’t beat around the bush. Tell me a little about yourself before we dive into the puzzles and cases.
Me: Blah blah blah…er…blah…er…blah
Being my first job interview, I managed the impossible. I screwed up right at the start and ended up describing why I wanted to do consulting, instead of talking about myself. Beads of sweat started forming on my troubled forehead. With a bemused look on his face, the interviewer continued.
Interviewer: Uh, o…kay. I’ll go on to the puzzle now. Okay, so tell me…
He proceeds to describe a puzzle I had heard and solved recently. I have trouble keeping my emotions away from my facial expressions, so I broke into a wide smile, thinking that the moment to redeem the dismal ‘tell me about yourself’ had come! Needless to say, my poker career ended almost as soon as it had started.
Me: <Laughing> Sir, I’ll be honest with you. I’ve heard this one before…<I then proceed to give an outline of the solution>
Interviewer: Oh, haha, okay. I guess I’ll have to ask you another one I guess. Okay, so…
He then proceeds to describe a puzzle that sounded so tricky and convoluted that the beads of perspiration on my forehead now gushed forth with renewed fury in rivulets of nervousness down my face and neck and arms and legs. A Ganga of tension clouded over my face. The interviewer finishes asking the question and there is an ugly silence that ensues. I could almost hear the atoms in the left part of my brain screeching to a sudden halt and completely and stubbornly refusing to budge towards any analysis whatsoever. I had no idea what the solution was. I didn’t even know where to start!
But then the creative right part of my brain swooped in, with fluttering heroic cape et al.
Me: <Smiling broadly> Sir, I hate to admit it, but I’ve heard this one before as well!
Interviewer: <A look that registered appreciation of my unbelievable ‘honesty’ and shock at the probability of it all> Wow…No puzzles today, it seems. I guess we’ll move on to a quick case then…
And then, after blindly stumbling and bumbling through the case and then shockingly recovering to somehow solve it, I cleared the interview and got the job!
A few years ago, I stayed at a hotel just outside Ypres (in Belgium) which more-or-less stood dead on what was the front line, back in 1914–18. There was a bunker in the garden, and lots of photos of what the immediate area looked like during the war (a muddy, blasted, hellscape).
Next door was a water park, across the road were fields.
If you look at aerial shots of, for example, the Lochnagar crater, which was right on the front line, and which was created by a massive underground explosion on the first day of the Somme battle (July 1916), you’ll see that it’s surrounded by fields of crops.
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The areas that haven’t been reclaimed are the ones where the fighting was so intense, that there are still significant amounts of explosives, posion gas, etc, buried in the soil. Just down the road from Lochnagar is the Canadian (well, Newfoundland) memorial, at Beaumont-Hamel. There are areas there that are fenced off, and clearly marked as dangerous, becasue there are still explosives in the ground. Whilst the line of the Newfoundland trenches has been kept intact, and they are still there, along with no-man’s land, and that area has been turned into a memorial, the site of the German front line 100–200 yeards away has been cleared and reclaimed as farmland.
So, most of it has been cleared, but certain areas (the ‘zone rouge’) have not.
Think about that. We were so clever in our destruction of each other that we literally rendered the earth uninhabitable, for over 100 years.
This Is Why Marriage Is An “L” For Men!
“Their opinion on the fact that women initiate divorce 80% of the time is essentially… “a woman is always justified in whatever she does, and is also never at fault”. That is literally the default setting and opinion of most modern day woman. Ridiculous.”
I was in 5th grade and my teacher told me I needed to leave my best friend alone. I was confused. I asked her why and was told me and Kate are no longer friends.
I was heartbroken. I didnt understand why this was happening. I kept trying to make eye contact with Kate to find out what was going on but she ignored me.
At lunch I was forced to sit alone. Kate was sitting with all our friends. Tears silently poured down my face as I tried to eat. My dad had just died of cancer a few weeks ago and now I had lost my best friend.
My face must have shown my grief when i got home that day. My mom, who was usually too self absorbed to notice me, asked me what was wrong. The tears started again as I choked out that I wasn’t allowed to be Kate’s friend anymore. She got immediately concerned and asked why, but the sobbing took hold and I ran to my room.
While I was in my room I heard my mom make two phone calls. One was to my teacher. My mom demanded to know what happened. I guess my teacher told her that Kate’s mom didn’t want us to be friends anymore. My mom was pissed. Me and Kate had been besties since 1st grade. Kate’s mom had never liked me but I never saw this coming. My mom asked why they didn’t call her. The teacher said she didn’t think it concerned her.
I guess my mom had hung up because next thing i knew she was yelling at Kate’s mom. “How could you do this after she just lost her dad? Shes already holding on by a thread!”
Then the conversation took an interesting turn. “What do you mean Kate thinks she’s too bossy?! She could have just talked to Sami. This was the extreme option. Can’t she just talk to her? Maybe they can work something out.”
So there was the truth. Kate didn’t want to be my friend. My mom was more pissed at my teacher for not calling her. I refused to go back to school. I couldn’t deal with it. I later ended up in the hospital for attempting suicide.
The teacher could have handled it differently. I was treated like a criminal basically. Everyone seemed intent on keeping me away from my friend that day and it hurt me deeply.
Edit: Wow! Over 5 thousand upvotes. Thanks everyone!
And I need to add something after reading certain comments.
I was just a child and I was hurt. I didnt realize I was getting on her nerves. I would have most certainly changed if I did. Im still unsure if my “bossiness” was the reason why she didnt want to be my friend all of a sudden. It could have just been an excuse to get away from me but we will never know.
I wasn’t some kind of mastermind bent on making Kate’s life a living hell. I didn’t know that I was acting a bad way because I was never taught about right and wrong. I was just myself with her, just like anyone else would be with their best friend.
Originally Answered: How much real life damage could a modern U.S. special forces soldier do to a small town police force if provoked like Rambo’s character?
Micah Xavier Johnson, 25 years old, Army Reserves, Delusional
Dallas, Texas has a far superior police force to a “Small Town”, and Micah was young, delusional, rambling and scribbling gibberish at times with meanings still yet to be deciphered, and went in without a plan besides to shoot white cops, and in general a very far cry from a clear headed special forces operator with years of experience (one of the best if we are equating this person to Rambo)
Even still, he managed to kill 5 police officers and shoot 9 more, not to mention 2 civilians.
The largest police force of any city has a ratio of about 57 cops for every 10,000 residents, or .57% of the population. The next largest is a ratio of .43%.
San Jose on the other hand, has a ratio of .09% of the population belonging to the police force.
Over 87% of all cities in the US have a police force of under 40 members. Strange when considering New York’s is tens of thousands strong (.175% of population) The reason for this is that the smaller the city, the lower the ratio of crime to civilian numbers.
The lower the population of a city, the lower the ratio of officers to the rest of the population.
San Jose has over a million people with a police force accounting for only .09% of the population, so a small town of say 4,000 people probably only has a police force accounting for around lets say .2% of the population at an absolute maximum? And even that is an extremely high estimate implying this small town has an abnormally high crime rate, despite this meaning that there are likely only about 8 officers in total.
8 officers in total for a small town of 4,000 people [on a high estimate], and a delusional, young army reserves soldier with no real plan besides shooting white cops, no escape planned out, proved his capacity to shoot them all out with a rifle while remaining largely stationary, in a shootout.
So how effective would a seasoned, trained, special forces operator, in their right state of mind [more or less] fair against a similar police force?
One of the officers might be able to survive by remaining hidden or fleeing if our modern day Rambo [with superior training than when that movie was made] is only allowed to use a knife.
Otherwise?
(Ironically Keanu Reaves training for John Wick was a better training video than the easily available ones on youtube)
Police force will get decimated. The operator will go in with a plan of action-
Luring the police force to a certain area for example and setting off a bomb or something- And then targeting the remainder with extreme and calculated force.
small EDIT: Thankfully no one has complained- But upon re-reading my answer, since we are talking about calculated killing of police officers, some of the terms I used- “Wiping them out”, “Blowing them up”- came back as callous to me, so I re-worded a bit to remove those terms. Targeted killing of police is a major issue that does not often get talked about, especially more recently with gang’s and initiations and the like, and I don’t want to give the impression that I do not have the utmost respect and appreciation for officers. Managing a hotel overnight (the closest one to downtown which has several clubs) surrounded by multiple popular bars and breweries within 5 minute walking distance, I have had to rely on officer assistance multiple times in the last year alone and the last thing I want is for an officer, past or present, to read this and think that I would make light of a highly trained military individual targeting a police force.
So thanks to everyone willing to put their lives on the line daily to keep people safe who cannot otherwise do it themselves, by picking up a badge knowing that it can just as easily become a target.
I was working at my first job post-graduation, as a brand new RN, young and impressionable. It was a 36 bed Ophthalmology unit, and there weren’t always enough eye patients to keep every bed occupied. During times when we had an ongoing number of empty beds, the docs would head over to the local psychiatric hospital and examine the patients for cataracts. Medicare would cover the cataract surgery if the chart documentation said that the psychiatric condition was exacerbated due to the patient’s impaired vision. After these visits we would have an onslaught of psychotic patients to admit and prep for surgery. Back then, in the 1970s, cataract extraction involved a four-day hospital stay.
We nurses admitted and cared for many patients with varied psychiatric diagnoses during this time, ranging from catatonia to manic disorders, schizophrenia, multiple-personality disorder, severe hallucinations — pretty much any mental disorder which rendered long term psychiatric hospitalization necessary. It was often our observation that, sadly, these patients were not well cared-for at the psychiatric hospital, and it unfortunately became routine for them to come to us malodorous, disheveled, needing a bath, and often with soiled clothes. We would get them showered and shampooed, apply lotion to their dry skin, give them physical exams and blood work, including gyn exams and Pap smears for the female patients, and begin eye prep for their cataract surgery.
So one morning I arrived at work and was given my assigned rooms, which included a new patient who had just arrived from the psych hospital. I braced myself for the usual, but what I found was beyond the pale. The patient was a 40 year old female. She did not speak, move or react, just stared ahead. Her need for hygiene was beyond anything I had ever seen. She smelled like an extremely ripe mixture of urine, feces, sweat, glandular and sebaceous secretions, stinky feet and unwashed clothes. Her dark skin was scaled and crusted. Her filthy and malodorous hair had once been carefully braided into tiny braids all over her head. Someone had once cared enough to do that. But it was so long ago that her hair had since grown about three or four inches into a neglected, uncombed, never-since washed, unkempt afro with the tiny braids imbedded at the ends.
I looked across the room to my other patient, her roommate, to see if she was at all put-out by the stench. She was in a long white nightgown, a rather pale tiny pretty elderly lady, who nodded hello and smiled sweetly at me. She was already getting up out of bed, and said she would attend to her own needs this morning so I could concentrate on her roommate.
First things first, the psych patient needed cleaning up. She would have contaminated the entire operating room! Ok to keep things brief I will only say she came alive when I explained I was going to give her a shower and tried to get her out of bed into a wheeled shower chair. She screamed and fought tooth and filthy nails, became dead weight when I tried to get her to transfer to the chair, wouldn’t cooperate with me one iota. Her breath was horrible every time she screamed at me. After much exertion, I was able to wheel her into the shower. I soaped and re-soaped and scrubbed her face and body, taking multiple times to do this, she was so encrusted with filth. The worst part was her groin. There was probably over a year’s worth of layers of soiling herself and never being cleaned, each layer dried and stuck to the layer underneath and to her skin and pubic hair. The hot water exacerbated the stench and I had to keep putting my head outside the shower curtain for fresh air. There were clay-like clumps of feces all along the bottom of the shower, which housekeeping would have to deal with when we were through. I must have gone through at least a dozen towels and washcloths, which were in a wet brown pile.
Once her skin was clean, I sighed, not knowing how I would ever attend to that head of hair. I decided the best thing would be to cut off the little braids, so I used my bandage scissors to do that. I trimmed and cleaned her filthy black fingernails and toenails too. All through the shower I was explaining what I was doing and trying to keep the patient as placated as I could, and by now she was considerably calmer. Her hair was thick with the texture of a Brillo pad, and so dirty that it was impossible to get any lather going. But I persevered until finally I had rich suds, which I fingered and rubbed into every bit of her hair down to the scalp. By now she was no longer trying to push me away, if not exactly cooperating.
Finally we were done. I was soaking wet. I dried the patient off, got her to put on a clean gown, rubbed her extremeties with lotion, then her feet also and put on clean socks. I wheeled the patient to the sink and brushed her teeth as best as I could, with very marginal cooperation.
I got the patient back into bed, now clean, and proceeded to give her the eye drops which would begin the prep for cataract surgery later that day. I was exhausted and needed to rest.
But first I needed to turn my attention to her roommate, who was also my patient and had been quietly waiting during all this time.
Since the roommate was going for cataract surgery also, I pulled the curtain back to administer the roommate’s drops as well, and I saw that she had washed up by herself and donned a modest white habit, and I realized she was a nun. So I gave the nun her eye drops and reminded her not to have anything by mouth prior to surgery. I told the nun that I would be back later with additional eye drops, and to check on her. The nun smiled and thanked me.
I turned to leave. As I reached the door, she said the most remarkable seven words I have ever heard: “You gave the Lord a shower today.”
Korean Spinach Salad
Korean Spinach Salad
Ingredients
Salad
1 pound fresh spinach
3 hard-cooked eggs, diced
6 to 8 slices crisp-cooked bacon, crumbled
2 cups fresh bean sprouts
1 (8 ounce) can water chestnuts, sliced
Dressing
1 cup oil
2/3 cup granulated sugar
Salt, to taste
1 medium onion, grated
1/4 cup vinegar
1/3 cup ketchup
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
Instructions
Trim and discard tough spinach stems. Rinse leaves well; pat dry and break into bite-size pieces in a salad bowl.
Carl used to be a firefighter. He pulled people out of burning buildings. He risked his life all the time.
Then one day, an illness that had been lurking in his genes brought him to the ground. His tendons and muscles were slowly calcifying—turning to stone. All of them. His knees. His back.
His heart. His lungs.
And since this was a genetic disease, it was not covered by his firefighting pension plan. He had to go on SSI/SSDI.
The drugs that he took to slow (not stop, slow) the progression of his disease eventually gave him fourteen more incurable conditions, including heart disease, seizures, and diabetes. He’s had several strokes. He also cannot go outside because his immune system has to be suppressed. Going out around people always means he catches something.
So what does he do all day?
It takes him about three hours to get up, get cleaned up, and get dressed and get his breakfast, using his walker because his ankles are now frozen solid. It takes him two hours to do a single load of laundry. He does spend most of the day playing video games and watching TV, but that is because it takes him at least an hour to get to the bathroom, and there is no way he could actually work.
This man was a fireman. He saved people from burning buildings. Now he lives like a pauper, mostly on the charity of his family and friends because SSI/SSDI is not enough to allow him to do anything but die under a bridge.
He saved people from burning buildings. He’d have saved you, if you’d needed it.
I was working for a major car rental company as a tripper (drove cars from the service Centre to the rental lots). They paid us minimum wage, which was about $3.40/hr. back in the mid 80s, and decided they we playing us too much, as sometimes we had no cars to trip and they still had to pay us. It’s about 15km to the downtown Vancouver rental lot, so they figured it would take us 20 to 30 minutes. They decided to pay us by the trip, $1.75 iirc. Oh, this was a Toronto decision based on our work load in May and came into effect mid June. Demand rate was constant and now we were highly motivated to make s many trips as possible. We were tripping about 5 or 6 cars an hour, we were speeding a lot, crashing at least once a month (company self insures so all their cost). Usual the crashes were minor but we totalled 10 cars that summer (their were 5 core and 2 or 3 fill ins, so everyone had at least one major). Record was 8 mins in rush hour. They seemed up paying us about $10 an hour, their accident rates went up. I became a rental rep the next year and quit the next year as the idiocy from Toronto continued.
huWhen my mom was 16 she was raped by the son of a prominent member of her community. He denied it was rape and said she was a willing partner. The police chose to believe him over her.
She got pregnant from the rape and, because abortion was illegal, her parents sent her to a Christian home for unwed mothers. The understanding was she would give her baby up for adoption immediately after birth. She got no say in this. For whatever reason, there was a delay and she got to spend 15 minutes with her son before he was taken from her. It broke her heart.
After she recovered from her pregnancy she went home. Two things had happened while she was gone. First, her parents got their friends to start a rumor that she was away because she had an illness that required special treatment. The other was that someone started a second rumor that she had to go away because she was pregnant and had a baby, with the implication that she was promiscuous.
Guess which one took off? When she got back to school most of her classmates shunned her as a bad influence. She lost most of her friends. Members of her own extended family picked this shunning up. It followed her to college when she graduated. It was more than she could take and she had a mental collapse, ending up in a psychiatric hospital. (It is also possible that she was already bi-polar.) She dropped out of college because she could not handle the stress and deal with her PTSD and depression.
When she met my father who was in the Air Force and from another part of the county, she told him about the rape. She told him about the baby. She told him that no one believed that she had been raped. He believed her. He said he saw no shame on her and eventually they married. His service had them move from her hometown.
HOWEVER…every time she returned to town for the holidays, she would go through the shunning, the snide comments, and insults from her family and the townspeople. My parents separated when I was 24 and she moved home…to the same thing again but now her own mother was doing it too. She endured this until she died when she was 69, which means she was subjected to that shaming for over 53 years.
This is the side of “pro-life” no one talks about. Not only is there no plan for the children after they are born, but in the conservative communities that support this policy, the women who are unmarried will be slut-shamed for life.
A group of hitmen refused to kill a victim as she was a woman and let her free to get her revenge.
image 467
In 2015, the Australian Noela Rukundo (who’s the lady in the photo) went to Burundi to attend the funeral of her stepmother who passed away only a couple of weeks back.
Straight after the funeral when she was going out to get some fresh air, she was quite suddenly kidnapped at gunpoint and shoved into a vehicle. She was blindfolded and driven to a safe house somewhere in the country.
Inside the building she was tied up, and a sack put on her head and was asked by her captors:
“You woman, what did you do for this man to pay us to kill you?”
“Wh-what are you talking about?” said Noela, she was shaking uncontrollably.
“Balenga (Noela husband) sent us to kill you.”
“What? My husband will never do that, y-you’re lying!”
Her captors smirked and giggled. She then heard a phone dialling and a voice coming from a loud speaker:
“Kill her”
It was her husband. Noela fainted.
She was woken up much much later by her captors on the side of a road and they told her she was free. The men explained they didn’t believe in killing women, and they knew her brother and was friends with him. But they would keep her husband’s money and tell him that she was dead.
Not only was she freed, she was given a phone, recordings of the captors’ phone conversations with her husband and all the evidence she needed to take Balenga to court.
Although pretty messed up and a little dizzy, with the help of the Kenyan and Belgian embassies, she got a trip to Australia, where she planned her revenge.
Meanwhile back in Australia her husband had told everyone she had died in a tragic accident and all her friends mourned her at her funeral at the family home. On the night of February 22 2015, just as the Balenga waved goodbye to the last of his neighbours who had come to comfort him, Noela approached him.
“Is it my eyes?” screeched Balenga. “Is it a ghost?”
“Surprise! I’m still alive!” said a very angry Noela.
“ oh my god oh my god, I’m sorry for everything please forgive me” replied a rather shocked Balenga.
But Noela took none of his apologies. The police swooped in and captured Balenga, who ultimately pleaded guilty and was sentenced to nine years in prison for incitement to murder.
During the investigations, it was found out that Balenga wanted to kill Noela because he thought she was going to leave him for another man, which apparently was not going to happen.
Balenga was sent to 9 years of prison while Noela lives with her 8 children somewhere in the same city I currently live at, Melbourne.
This is probably a bit cliche to say but the first person that comes to mind for me is my ex girlfriend from 2017. Out of all the women I’ve had relationships with, she was by far the worst one. She was very controlling and manipulative. I was with her for 8 months and it was the worst 8 months of my life. We basically fought every day over anything. Most things that upset her. I felt like I couldn’t say certain things or do certain things without it possibly upsetting her. Anytime I tried to defend myself she would gaslight me and make me feel like the bad one. She would say things like “I don’t like what you said earlier” or “this happened and you didn’t do anything about it”. Right before I finally chose to break up with her I had her sleep over my house for a night because I just wanted a nice night with her and I could tell all night something was wrong. I could just sense it. When we were at my house she hardly spoke to me and when she did she said “I think I’m going to go home in the morning” Next morning I got up and without thinking made myself a cup of coffee.. but my mistake was not making one for her. She of course went tf off on me for it. At that point I had it, I was done. I couldn’t do it anymore. I’m not going to get treated like a servant when I’m just trying to be a good boyfriend and you refuse to see it.
I was living in West Elizabeth, PA. It was a very distressed mobile park complex. The entire community was worn down, poverty stricken, and crime ridden.
At that time, we had our first cat: Samatha Pantha.
Something cool started to happen, a beautiful blue grey Maine Coon, the same age as my kitty started hanging out with my cat.
It was beautiful. And we named it “Blue Thunder”.
…
For the next few months the two cats played and romped about.
One day, some local boys were tying to sic a dog on Blue Thunder, and I saw them under my mobile home trying to attack my cat. I was furious and chased them away.
Three days went by…
No Blue Thunder.
Then one morning, the kitty was on my porch. Someone had shot it with a BB gun…
We took it in the house and tended to it. And all was well.
It was still around us. Our “outside” cat, and not our “inside” cat.
…
Eventually, I got a job in another state. And we had to move.
I wanted to Take Blue Thunder with us, but my wife reasoned “no”. She reasoned was that he would be just fine… alone… outside.
I should have NEVER listened to her.
…
Guys… stick to your guns. If you are dealing with a living, breathing being. Err on the safe, and the protected side of things.
…
I found out later that when the mobile home was being transported, a cat (that obviously must have been Blue Thunder) tumbled out from underneath the mobile home. I don’t know what happened to it, but falling out from a moving vehicle tends to be fatal to little creatures.
I have great regrets about this issue.
I am haunted by my passive actions that led to the demise of others.
…
About six months later, I came across another little kitty. Phelie. The cat that I wrote about in other posts, the one whose mother cat died on the road. And this cat had nearly the same personality that Blue Thunder had.
Maybe he found his way back to me.
Don’t you know.
People, I have many regrets in life. But one of the biggest is going against my CORE BELIEFS because my partner or family member did not realize the value of other creatures. Do not be like me.
Fight the GOOD FIGHT.
Never give up. Stick to your guns. Hold your ground. Be someone that your grandparents would be proud of.
Two police officers with sober faces stared at me and I knew the news couldn’t be good.
They described a car that had just been in an accident, and the license plate. My wife’s mini-van had collided, burst into flames and everyone inside it died.
I’m doing a mental inventory about now. My wife, three children, and two nieces.
My legs turned wobbly. You can’t imagine what was going through my head. Because of the fire, they couldn’t find any useful identification but explained they could identify everyone both by DNA and by dental records. They wanted a DNA sample from me.
I guess they could verify my kids were mine, and that the adult was their mother. A nice, neat little bow.
Can you imagine? They’ve just told you that your whole family is dead, and —- I told them I would come down and give them a sample.
Getting ready to leave, my cell phone is buzzing. It’s my wife. What? Hard tingles are on my spine, like she’s calling from the grave.
“Our van was stolen from the parking lot….”
Were the sweetest words I could’ve ever heard. Yeah it was my wife’s car, but they won’t need any DNA sample from me today.
EDIT – to address some of the mysteries in the comments
I learned later that three people were in the van when it collided. A man, woman, and younger person, which they presumed was a child of the drivers. The police said everyone died, but they had a different human inventory than my own. I also learned they were part of a ring of car thieves, and the accident was not their fault. Another car ran a light and hit them broadside. No fatalities and only minor injuries in the other car.
My wife had organized a birthday outing for our oldest. All the necessary shops, restaurant, and theater were inside the mall. It would be several hours before it was time to leave again. The thieves had plenty of time to get away if they hadn’t been hit.
I have an interesting piece of information which was completely new to me and maybe it is new to many of you too..
Recently, a friend of mine was involved in an accident. He rammed his car behind a truck and the car was completely totaled!
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Thankfully, he was wearing his seat belt which initiated the action of airbags and saved his life.
Now comes the part which amazed me. When I saw the pictures of the crash, the speedometer of the car caught my attention.
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The speedometer needle was stuck at 90 km/hr. Upon asking some of my acquaintances in the automobile industry, I discovered that this is also a feature, due to which upon impact if the airbags are deployed, then the speedometer needle will be stuck at the speed at which the vehicle is being driven to ease the investigation and further formalities about the accident.
This amazed me as this was quite a useful feature which rarely people know and it will make it much easier to get into depth of the cause of the accident in cars which do not have a dashcam installed, which usually is the case in India.
Hope you were amazed too!
Valiant Thor: A UFO, the Pentagon and a 3-year Mission to Save the World
I have a house for rent in Brownfield, Maine. It’s a tiny vacation house I call the “Schwende Hut” named after a hot dog stand on top of the ski hill Mt Tecumseh in New Hampshire. I found out later that “Schwende Hut” means “Food House” but I think it’s hilarious.
I have been renting the house for almost 20 years to people who like to stay be the weekend, the week, the month or the season. It’s been pretty good.
A few years ago I got call from a woman who wanted to rent for a week. It was the end of the season and I still had that week available so naturally I signed her right up. She moved in on time and all was good. She was rather elderly and I was concerned that she would have a good time.
After a week my cleaner reported to me that she hadn’t left. I went over to see what was going on. Normally guests have to check out by noon so the cleaner can do his work before the next guest arrived. She came to the door but didn’t open it. I asked her what she was doing.
“I live here now,” she said to me, “I’m not leaving.”
I was confused.
“This is a guest house,” I said, “Other guests are going to come.”
“And I’m not paying,” she said obstinately. I was speechless. This had never happened before. I said, “I’ll call the Sheriff.”
“Go ahead,” she said, “Winter is coming. I’m old. They’ll never evict an elderly woman. Good luck.”
What could I do? I had to go consult with my local lawyer.
That night a huge storm came up with violent winds and lots of rain. I couldn’t worry about the old bitch in my house. I had to worry about property damage. Two days later the storm ended. I came through all right with just a few branches down and lots of pine needles everywhere. But there was no power. In Maine the power goes out at least once a week. Trees just fall and take out the lines. After a big storm crews and trucks have to go out and put the lines back up. We get used to seeing the flashing light on our digital clocks in Maine. It tells us that the power was out and we have to throw away most of the food in our fridge.
It took almost a week for the power company to restore power. In the meantime I was worried about the woman who wouldn’t leave my house. What was I going to do with her? The legal moves for getting her out were long, laborious and expensive. Even squatters have rights, it seems. People told me to tell the Sheriff she was dealing drugs and that would get her out fast. Meth is a huge problem in Maine with so much poverty. I couldn’t bring myself to do that. But within a few days of the power being out, she packed up her car and left. With no power, there was no fridge, no stove, no AC, no showers, no toilet, no light. She up and left, The house was a pigsty but at least it was empty.
I installed a power kill in a hidden location under the house. If this happens again I know what I will do now.
In the early 1920s, when the postal service first launched its airmail service, planes could only fly during the day.
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It would take three and a half days for a package to make it from New York City to San Francisco, with both airmail and train-travel due to the limitation on flight.
Thus, to solve this problem, Congress funded a transcontinental lighted airway from New York to California.
The airway went through nine different states and consisted of 50-foot steel towers that were rotating spotlights every 10 to 30 miles.
image 227
However, since cloudy days sometimes obstructed the view of pilots, giant concrete arrows were constructed on the ground in order to point the plane in the right direction. They were painted yellow to make them easier to see.
The project was called the Transcontinental Airway system and it worked surprisingly well up until the 1940s when the system was dismantled due to advances in aviation technology.
Many of the concrete arrows are still around today, remnants of a time where planes could travel across the country, purely by sight.
During my time in High School, I received a ticket from a police officer who was working a side job as a delivery driver. He accused me of “dumping my clutch” and “doing a burn out of the parking lot.” However, I am currently fighting against these allegations.
When I appeared before the judge, the prosecutor and the police officer were present. The police officer reiterated his observations, and I countered by explaining that I did not perform any clutch dumping or burnout in my 280zx because there was an 8″ gutter separating the street and the sidewalk.
I further argued that performing a burnout in the parking lot would have caused damage to my low-riding Z vehicle. Moreover, when I hit the gutter, my battery came loose, and the positive post made contact with the steel clutch line, resulting in a hole and a loss of fluid, making it impossible to switch gears. The engine sounded loud because the car was in neutral, and I was expecting to shift into second gear.
The police officer should be aware of this situation since he had to call a tow truck to take my car to the garage for repairs. I even provided the receipts as evidence.
The judge then asked me if I worked at the restaurant, to which I replied affirmatively. I mentioned that as a delivery driver, I would be unable to carry out my job without a vehicle. However, the judge questioned how I managed to hit the gutter so hard that it caused my battery to bounce.
I humorously explained that the police officer had walked in front of my car while he was distracted by the attractive rear of my best friend, who happened to be a female. This caused everyone in the courtroom to burst into laughter, including the judge. The police officer became flustered and attempted to speak, but the prosecutor intervened and suggested that the case should be dismissed.
I agreed entirely with the prosecutor’s suggestion but requested that the repair bill be taken care of since it was the fault of the police officer’s negligence while representing the police department that caused the damage.
The judge agreed to dismiss the case, and I was awarded the reimbursement of around $37, which was equivalent to approximately 10 hours of minimum wage back in those days.
Oh, I almost forgot to mention that my best friend was a female with an attractive figure who enjoyed flaunting it whenever possible. However, everyone else in the courtroom assumed that my best friend was a male.
I was happy at my job, but one day a head hunter called me up, and asked me if I would be interested in interviewing for a job that was a step up, at a rival company.
I hummed and hawed, and thought why not see what I am worth, at the worst I could ask my boss for a raise.
I went to the interview, they were impressed and offered me a job, they wanted to know my current salary, I told them that the salary was only a small part of my pay, as I had a performance bonus that was substantially more than my salary. So I wanted to know what their bonus system was. It was woefully low, compared to my current job, I would get a bonus that was maybe 20 percent of my salary, compared to the 200 percent of the salary I was getting.
To make up for it, they offered me a 20 percent higher salary.
I wont give real numbers, but here is how it would work out.
I was currently getting $1000 in salary, and $2000 in bonus per month, for a total of $3000.
They thought salary was the key, and offered me $1200 in salary and $240 a month in bonus for a total of $1440
Less than half of what I was making, doing a job with less responsibility.
I told them that I wasn’t interested, and they offered to increase it to 30 percent increase in salary. Which would have been just over half of what I was making.
They just kept coming back to salary, and never seemed to grasp how substantial my bonus was.
That was a slap in the face offer.
I of course turned them down.
They went bankrupt 18 months later.
Man Dumps Wife When He Finds Out He Was Her Last Choice
I was working on a power station in Moscow and, for the weekend, went to a small town (Kaluga), two hundred kilometres south-west from the city with a work colleague. Alex.
He had bought some brake shoes for his Russian-made car and was fitting them with his father in their garage that every Russian family has. They are always in a long row of garages some distance from the apartments.
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The brake shoes wouldn’t fit due to poor quality manufacturing so he got out an angle grinder and ground the groove in the brake shoe until it fitted.
He said that this was normal in Russia.
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He also said that when you bought a new Russian-made car you went to the showroom with a colleague and inspected the car. You would then tell the salesman what was wrong with the car (door does not close, brake pedal is missing rubber, etc.). He would fix it and, when you took it away, you accepted responsibility for all that was wrong.
So if you are planning an expedition to the Arctic don’t get an American or European mechanic to fix stuff en route, get a Russian because they have spent their entire life bodging stuff up with a Swiss army knife and some 14 gauge wire.
Most corporate offices have a “bend don’t break” rule on internet usage.
High achieving professionals don’t want to be micromanaged or watched with suspicion.
Think about it. If you work 40+ hours and are good at your job, it shouldn’t be an issue if you want to check the news or your bank account.
But some people treat their office like an entertainment center, streaming Twitch and YouTube all day.
As a result, HR and IT team up like a Kremlin intelligence agency, looking for any signs of slackers.
The golden snitch sees all. I was walking by one time and this coworker was literally watching a Twitch stream with that lady, Pokimane, as she played video games. This was in the middle of a busy office with people working.
Thirst trapping it on the clock baby. He had quite the audacity.
You can extend this to every stupid hiring practice and office rule. All it takes is one moron and life becomes more annoying for all that follow.
Don’t be the moron behind the stupid rule. If you can help it.
Karma Comes For Disloyal Wife After Husband Admits To Affair With Way Hotter Woman…And She FREAKS!
As a triage nurse in an Emergency Room, there are duties that become mundane but are necessary. One rule we had was that if a pregnant woman approached the check in desk complaining of pregnancy symptoms, the nurse asked how far along they were.
Twenty weeks is the magic number. If they are 20 weeks pregnant the baby has a realistic chance of surviving if delivered. This meant the nurse had to get up and push the patient by wheelchair to Labor and Delivery. It was a big hospital and L&D was on the exact opposite side of the hospital.
If they checked in at the front entrance, security would push them to L&D and the staff there would determine how far along they are and just as the triage nurse in the ER take them by wheelchair to the proper care area.
A pretty good system that had worked for years without incident. Both areas had to push an equal number of patients across the hospital.
And then one day I get a call from the L&D Director.
“We had a patient come in today who says she was told rudely by the ER staff that she was in the wrong place and needed to drive around to the front entrance,” she said.
I neglected to mention that this was a huge hospital that took up 2 city blocks. Crossing the hospital required a 10 min walk through a maze of locked doors and corridors. Driving around required 2 red lights and avoiding a one way street.
“I’ll have to speak to the staff,” I told her, “They know what they’re supposed to do.”
“This girl was 32 weeks and complained of her water breaking,” she continued.
It seemed she was catastrophizing the situation. The staff broke protocol. I will remind them and reiterate the protocol.
“I’ll make sure they understand,” I said.
“Keith, the baby was dead,” she said.
Turns out she was minimizing the episode. The seriousness of the call was not lost on me.
“I am going now to take care of it,” I said, “I am sorry.”
“These people are livid,” she added.
I called the charge nurse and asked who was at triage. Of the two names given, I immediately surmised who the culprit was. Judy was an outspoken nurse who enjoyed sharing her opinion that most of the patients in the ER did not even have an emergency. I went to get her.
“Can you come with me?” I asked.
“Why?” she asked, “Am I in trouble?”
She followed me out into the hallway, and as we walked to my office I asked her, “Did you send a 32 week pregnant patient around to the front?”
“Is that what this is about?” she started, “We are busy and I don’t have time to be pushing people all over the hospital.”
“The baby was dead,” I said, “This is not trivial.”
“That baby was dead before she got here,” she argued, “That has nothing to do with me not pushing her to L&D.”
Stating things that were most likely true did not change facts. She probably was already fired, honestly, but without hesitation I said, “Collect all your stuff and go home.”
“Am I being put on administrative leave because of this crap?”
“Come by my office before you leave,” I said.
While she collected her things, I called Human Resources and made sure I had grounds to terminate. The HR representative agreed to come witness the termination.
“I don’t care what you do,” Judy started as she entered the room. “That baby was already dead.”
“Judy, because of your refusal to follow proper protocol and continued insistence that you have done nothing wrong, you are being terminated. Effective immediately.” Her mouth fell open, and she began to cry. “This is Allison from HR. She can answer any further questions you may have.”
That’s the moment, I think, she finally realized the seriousness of her actions.
Solar storms: more dangerous than you think. Can we survive another Carrington Event?
The Boiling Hot End to a Cook Accused of Poison in Henry VIII’s England
On April 5, 1531, hardened London spectators of public punishment gathered at Smithfield, joined by others who were too curious to stay away. An execution had been announced of a type that none had witnessed in their lifetimes, nor ever heard of. The condemned man, Richard Roose, was to be boiled alive.
Roose was not the sort of criminal that usually met his end at Smithfield, located just beyond the London Wall. He was convicted of high treason, yet he had not sought to harm King Henry VIII nor his queen, Catherine of Aragon, nor any royal councilor. He had not tried to overthrow the kingdom’s government. Roose, a cook, was accused of murder by poison.
His two victims were an obscure gentleman in the household of Bishop John Fisher, Bennet Curwen, and a destitute widow who accepted the bishop’s charity, Alyce Tryppytt. The target of the poisoning was assumed to be Fisher himself, the Bishop of Rochester. Ironically, Fisher did not eat the soup—sometimes described as porridge—that Roose prepared and so was unharmed.
Roose admitted to the poisoning but claimed it was a joke gone wrong, an accident. There is no testimony for us to examine, because Roose had no trial, by command of the king.
In the words of the Greyfriars Chronicle of London, a contemporary document: “This year was a cook boiled in a cauldron in Smithfield for he would have poisoned the bishop of Rochester Fisher with divers of his servants and he was locked in a chain and pulled up and down with a gibbet at divers times until he was dead.”
Roose’s crime, the legal method of his condemnation, and finally the form of punishment create a bizarre chain of events that, in a more modern age, might well have raised questions of motive in several parties, including that of Henry VIII. Although there is no question of who did the killing, this is still a tantalizing Tudor murder mystery, and reveals some of the peculiarities of the early modern age, when laws existed and homicide was considered a heinous crime, but there was no trained police force nor forensic science.
Why did Henry VIII demand this punishment of a lowly cook? Why was Roose executed as a traitor when his crime was murder of commoners? The answer lies in the King’s complex feelings for Bishop Fisher.
John Fisher was made bishop of Rochester by the King’s father, Henry VII, in 1504. Fisher performed the funeral services for Margaret Beaufort, the king’s mother, and Henry VII himself when they died, within months of each other, in 1509. In the first 20 years of the reign of Henry VIII, Fisher was considered “the greatest Catholic theologian in Europe, without any rival,” writes Eamon Duffy.
But by the time of the crime in question, King Henry was no longer proud of Bishop Fisher, 62 years of age. It would be safe to say he considered him an enemy. And it would have made the King’s life much easier if Fisher had lost his—if he had consumed the soup.
In 1527, when Henry VIII, desperate for a male heir, began his public quest for an annulment from 42-year-old Catherine of Aragon to marry the delectable young Anne Boleyn, Fisher became one of his most serious obstacles. The question of the royal marriage was a theological one, and if Europe’s most respected theologian had agreed in the rightness of King Henry’s cause, it would have done a lot to bring about the annulment. But Fisher took the side of Catherine of Aragon. The marriage was legal and could not be dissolved.
In 1529, Bishop Fisher announced at the trial of the royal marriage that it would impossible to die more gloriously than in the cause of marriage, as John the Baptist did. In that same year, when a proposal came to Parliament to dissolve the smaller abbeys—the beginning of Henry VIII’s destruction of the Catholic monasteries—Fisher “openly resisted it with all the force he could.”
Enter one Richard Roose. One of Fisher’s earliest biographers, Richard Hall, wrote in 1655 the most complete account of the poisoning. He is the only source to say that Roose was not the chief cook in Fisher’s household, which is significant: “After this the Bishop escaped a very great danger. For one Richard Rose came into the Bishop’s kitchen, being acquainted with the cook, at his house in Lambeth-marsh, and having provided a quantity of deadly poison, while the cook went into the buttery to fetch him some drink, he took his opportunity to throw that poison into a mess of gruel, which was prepared for the Bishop’s dinner. And after he had waited there a while, he went on his way.
“But so it happened that when the Bishop was called into his dinner, he had no appetite for any meat but wished his servants to fall to and be of good cheer, and that he would not eat till toward night. And they that did eat of the poisoned dish were miserably infected. And whereof one gentleman, named Mr. Bennet Curwen and an old widow, died suddenly, and the rest never recovered their health till their dying day.”
An inquiry began at once. Although a salaried police force did not yet exist in England, criminal investigation was taken seriously. Justices of the peace, appointed by the monarch, received and investigated complaints; coroners viewed dead bodies and ordered arrests. Now if a suspect was bound over for trial, freedom was unlikely. Defendants charged with felonies or treason did not exist. In fact, murder trials rarely lasted more than 15 minutes.
Roose was soon apprehended, and admitted to adding what he believed were laxatives to the soup as a “jest.” No one believed him. The always skeptical Imperial ambassador Eustace Chapuys wrote a slightly different version of events to his master, Charles V, the nephew of Catherine of Aragon:
“They say that the cook, having been immediately arrested… confessed at once that he had actually put into the broth some powders, which he had been given to understand would only make his fellow servants very sick without endangering their lives or doing them any harm. I have not yet been able to understand who it was who gave the cook such advice, nor for what purpose.”
We share Chapuys’ frustration. Who gave the cook these powders and told him that they would sicken and not kill anyone? If that information was obtained, it was not shared with the public. No transparency.
Sir Thomas More, the lord chancellor, informed Henry VIII that there were rumors that Anne Boleyn and her father and brother, Thomas and George Boleyn, were involved in the poisoning attempt. The king reacted angrily, saying Anne Boleyn was unfairly blamed for everything, including bad weather.
The murder motive and the question of a larger plot were soon obscured by Henry VIII’s drastic actions. He decided that Roose should be condemned by attainder without a trial—a measure usually used for criminals who were at large. Roose was sitting in prison! Nonetheless, Parliament passed “An Acte for Poysoning,” making willful murder by means of poison high treason even if the victim was not head of the government of the land. And boiling to death became a form of legal capital punishment. This crime was especially heinous, the king’s representatives said, and thus called for such measures.
Several biographers have noted King Henry’s extreme fear of poison. Although the monarch’s paranoia became infamous in later years, there was some basis for concern. Everyone had heard the stories of murder by cantarella in Rome during the time of the Borgias. Pope Alexander VI, Rodrigo Borgia, died—perhaps of poison slipped into his food at a banquet—during the reign of Henry VII. Cantarella was believed to have been arsenic trioxide.
If poison was ever suspected as the cause of death at this time in England, there was no way to scrutinize its damage within the corpse to confirm. And should the poison itself be obtained, the field of analytical chemistry was four centuries away.
Not surprisingly, rumors ran wild. Poisoning was rumored (never proven) to be the cause of the deaths of Queen Anne, Richard III’s wife; the eventual death of Catherine of Aragon; and the agonizing death of Henry’s son, Edward VI. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, written in the reign of Henry’s daughter, Queen Elizabeth I, employed poison. Shakespeare wove it into five other plays too.
But there was more to this than royal terror of a poisoned dish. As historian K.J. Kesselring wrote in The English Historical Review, “This may explain the severe, exemplary punishment of boiling, but not the need to label the offense treason.”
In April the crowds of Smithfield witnessed Roose’s death. According to an eyewitness: “He roared mighty loud, and divers women who were big with child did feel sick at the sight of what they saw, and were carried away half dead; and other men and women did not seem frightened by the boiling alive, but would prefer to see the headsman at his work.”
The story of the king and the stubborn bishop doesn’t end there.
When, after the king married Anne Boleyn, Bishop Fisher refused to swear an oath of supremacy to the king, he was arrested. The pope made Fisher a cardinal to protect him, but it only enraged the king more. Once the monarch had ordered a savage punishment of the man who tried to kill Fisher, and now Henry VIII wanted Fisher gone.
After a difficult imprisonment, Fisher was beheaded on June 22, 1535 on Tower Hill. The crowd gasped when they saw him on the scaffold for he was “nothing…but skin and bones…the flesh clean wasted away, and a very image of death.” In his speech to the crowd, Fisher is said to have shown a calm dignity.
According to Fisher’s biographer: “And here I cannot omit to declare to you the miraculous sight of his head, which after 14 days grew fresher and fresher, for that in his lifetime he never looked so well…. the face looked as if it beholdeth the people passing by and would have spoken to them. Which many took as a miracle.”
In 1886, the Catholic Church made John Fisher a saint.
Accepting Defeat In Ukraine
In early November the Economistpublished an interview and several pieces by the commander in chief of the Ukrainian army, General Zaluzny. As I summarized:
Zaluzny’s central thesis is that the war is currently at a stalemate. It has become positional, with no large maneuvers being possible. He compares it to the war in Europe in 1917. There, he says, a change only happened through the introduction of new technologies (i.e. tanks). … I for one think that Zaluzny is mistaken. The war is not at a stalemate. Russia has clearly the advantage as it is free to maneuver along the whole frontline and to attack wherever it likes. It does not do so in full force because the current situation allows it to conveniently fulfill the order its commander in chief had given to it – to destroy the military capabilities of Ukraine.
Finally a western mainstream writer has caught up with those facts. Lee Hockstader, the Washington Post‘s columnist for European affairs, opines:
Hockstader laments the lack of support from the U.S. and Europe for the new demands the Ukraine is making. He states:
Without those infusions of cash, arms and munitions, even the disappointing status quo over the past year, in which Ukraine has not managed to recapture much territory, is unlikely to endure.
Andriy Yermak, a top aide to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, told a Washington forum last week that the “big risk” is that Kyiv’s troops could “lose this war.”
That message should jolt policymakers on both sides of the Atlantic. The danger, as Ukraine’s top general warned publicly last month, isn’t simply stalemate. It is that Ukrainian forces, running low on equipment, might be compelled to fall back, shorten their defensive lines and abandon territory. … It’s essential to think about what Ukraine’s defeat means, because it would be as much a strategic disaster for the United States and its NATO allies as a tableau of terror for Ukraine. Dual cataclysms, equally stark, played out on different timetables.
Well, yes. The West has shot its wad and it proved to be sterile.
There will be no terror for Ukraine, just the loss of the ethnic Russian people, industries and land the communist – Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev – had for whatever reasons attached to it. The rest of it will be a smaller, more poor and purely agricultural rump state without access to the sea. This was obvious from the very beginning to anyone with a clear view of the balance of the forces involved in the war.
As I wrote on February 24 2022, the very day Russian forces entered Ukraine:
Looking at this map I believe that the most advantageous end state for Russia would be the creation of a new independent country, call it Novorussiya, on the land east of the Dnieper and south along the coast that holds a majority ethnic Russian population and that, in 1922, had been attached to the Ukraine by Lenin. That state would be politically, culturally and militarily aligned with Russia.
This would eliminate Ukrainian access to the Black Sea and create a land bridge towards the Moldavian breakaway Transnistria which is under Russian protection.
Excursus:
The yellow part of that map marked ‘Ukraine in 1654’ was actually the land of the Eastern Orthodox Zaporozhian Cossacks. Under threat from the Catholic Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth, which at the time held the green parts under serfdom, they negotiated the Pereiaslav Agreement (1654) with Russia and pledged allegiance to the Tsar. They area thus became an autonomous part of Russia.
End Excursus
The rest of the Ukraine would be a land confined, mostly agricultural state, disarmed and too poor to be build up to a new threat to Russia anytime soon. Politically it would be dominated by fascists from Galicia which would then become a major problem for the European Union.
Thanks to Stalin’s additions to the Ukraine three countries, Poland, Hungary and Romania, have claims to certain areas in the Ukraine’s western regions. If they want to snatch those up again it is now probably the best time to do so. Despite being part of NATO, which likely would not support such moves, those three will have domestic policy difficulties to withstand the urge.
Since then we learned that Novorussiya will not be an independent state but a genuine part of Russia. So be it. Meanwhile analysts like Hockstader still delve in fantasies:
A complete Ukrainian military collapse is unlikely, at least in coming months. Kyiv’s armed forces remain well-led and motivated, and they are husbanding equipment to prepare for shortfalls. But it is equally unlikely to expect a negotiated cease-fire with Russia that would maintain existing battle lines. To believe in that seemingly anodyne outcome is to misjudge Putin — again.
This is not misjudging Putin, but misjudging the capabilities left to Ukraine.
2023 12 16 19 17
It has run out of men and material. There are daily videos of this or that Ukrainian army unit condemning its leaders and announcing to leave its positions. The potential of a collapse of Ukrainian army is real.
During the last days tanks from the 47th brigade (Leo 2) and 10th mountain brigade (T-64BM/BV) have been seen, and were destroyed, near Avdiivka. Both brigades had only recently been mauled during their hopeless attacks at the southern front. It does not make sense to throw what is left of them into another battle without reconstituting them. The whole experience and knowledge these brigades had gained will be lost with them.
Yesterday, the Ukraine friendly Military Watch Magazine confirmed my opinion:
The Ukrainian Army’s elite 47th Mechanised Brigade stationed in the town of Avdiivka in the disputed Donetsk region has been surrounded and forced to contend with growing ammunition shortages, according to multiple reports from Ukrainian and Western sources. British reports indicate that the brigade was meant to attack a Russian column before it linked up with assault infantry on the northern flank of Avdievka, but failed to do so due to a lack of ammunition. The brigade’s efforts to stop the advance of Russian forces in Avdievka were described by The Times as “desperate,” fuelling perceptions of an “inevitable collapse” of Ukrainian positions, and diminished hope of preventing a Russian victory by the beginning of the New Year holidays. … A serviceman from the 47th Brigade, cited only as Sergeant Danylo, observing when interviewed over the past week “a shitty situation” as the shell shortage forced soldiers to make impossible life-and-death decisions.“We had 10 times more ammunition over summer, and better quality… American rounds come in batches of almost identical weights, which makes it easier to correct fire, with very few duds. Now we have shells from all over the world with different qualities, and we only get 15 for three days. Last week we got a batch full of duds.” Thus instead of firing on Russians as soon as they came within range, Ukrainian personnel increasingly had to wait to be sure the Russians were heading for their positions and to only engage large groups. Munitions produced by European states have very frequently been faulted for their quality, and at times been considered near useless, with Italian equipment being particularly notorious for its poor quality, in contrast to superior equipment either inherited from the Soviet era or produced in by the United States.
Now tell me again that these are “well-led and motivated” forces which are “husbanding equipment to prepare for shortfalls”. Neither rings true to me.
For the Kremlin dictator, a “compromise” would involve Ukraine’s subjugation and dissolution as an independent state. That would include regime change, with Zelensky in exile (or dead), as well as an end to Kyiv’s aspirations to join the E.U. or NATO. … If he is right, the timetable of that ending would be accelerated if Congress and the E.U. fail to approve fresh support. That would leave Ukraine’s government unable to maintain basic services, and its military increasingly short of artillery ammunition, air defense capability and other equipment. Ukraine’s already badly battered front-line forces would become more brittle. Russian territorial gains would be accompanied by murders, rapes, kidnapping of children and other Russian war crimes on a chilling scale.
That grim scenario would be a staggering blow to Western prestige and credibility, revealing that pledges to back Ukraine for “as long as it takes” were empty.
Amid a Republican standoff and polarizing politics that puts new aid to Ukraine at risk, President Joe Biden emphasized his administration’s willingness to support Ukraine, but the language was different. He said the US will be there for Kyiv “as long as we can.”
It’s a change in tune from previous messaging that the US would be a staunch and fierce ally to Ukraine, aiding it for “as long as it takes” to defeat Russia’s invasion.
The West can no longer support the proxy war it had started.
History will now follow its destined path.
Posted by b on December 14, 2023 at 10:59 UTC | Permalink
VIDEO: Ukraine Deputy Detonates THREE Grenades in Council Meeting
Reports and video are coming in from what is described as a local Council Meeting in Ukraine, where a Deputy pulled pins on THREE Grenades and tossed them throughout the meeting, causing three explosions, the final one likely killing the Deputy who threw them.
Video of the incident appears below and — WARNING — it shows pretty much everything.
The Deputy walks into the meeting room and closes the door behind him. He stands at the closed door. An argument is ongoing at the meeting and the Deputy tries to intervene, to no avail. With that, he pulls a grenade from his suit pocket, pulls the pin and tosses it. He then takes out another and repeats the process. He then pulls out a third grenade and apparently holds onto it after pulling the pin; perhaps to intentionally kill himself.
At this point, the name of the Deputy is not clear, and the type and location of the meeting is also not known.
What __is__ known is that numerous people in the tiny meeting room were either killed or injured seriously.
RUMORS abound over this incident, and several of the RUMORS claim the meeting was for people who want Ukraine to surrender and make peace with Russia.
WARNING: Graphic Video of three grenades exploding in a small council meeting room. Viewer discretion is advised:
DAMN! -MM
MM version of the video in MP4 format. Worth a watch. HERE.
43 Year Old Admits “The Movement” Is BS And Being A Carousel Rider Is NOT Empowering!
My son, who is mixed race, told me that another boy at school was calling him names and throwing lighted matches at him – some of which could have burned his clothing with dire results. I called the police. They sent a very large and imposing officer who told us “I’ll take care of this”, invited my eight year old son into the back of the police car and drove him to school – opening the door for him and escorting him to the principal’s office to deal with the culprit. My son was thrilled that he was the talk of the school for arriving in a police car and the bully was suitably scared out of his wits enough to never try such a thing again.
Global Supplier of Crucial Electrical Products Announces 20 Week DELAY in most-important parts!
SCHNEIDER Electric is the second largest manufacturer of electrical components in the world. The things they make are absolutely crucial to our daily lives: Crucial electrical infrastructure, industrial automation, Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC’s), etc. Without __any__warning, SCHNEIDER announced to its partners in the US . . .
. . . a TWENTY-WEEK DELAY for “Engineered-to-Order (ETO)” products for Quarter 1 next year! That’s almost a half a year delay ! ! ! ! !
Folks, ETO projects are major private and public infrastructure, power grids, etc. The grids are not readily able to deal with this kind of manufacturing delay.
Even more ominous, this ETO equipment, is the same gear the FBI recently issued warnings over, for expected CYBER-ATTACKS!
So FBI is warning about Cyber-Attacks targeting ETO gear like PLC’s and now, the second largest manufacturer of these exact components, is announcing twenty week delays for Q1 orders!
One industry insider told me “The reason this is so weird is this company is very good at planning. They supply billions of $ in critical components. They aren’t perfect but they usually have a plan when they announce something like this. Not this time. The plans behind the announcement letter (shown below) are very shallow. They got the note out WAY before anyone on their teams knew what is going on. MANY questions with no answers. That is very weird.” Here is the SCHNEIDER Letter to Partners in the USA:
ETO Orders DELAYED 20 weeks
His remark got me thinking: WHY?
Could it __really be__ that they simply cannot get parts via the supply chain, OR . . . is this wait and hold critical infrastructure so you can step in and replace damaged infrastructure after attacks happen? Is another possibility Critical redesign? Did they find holes in security and need to redesign . . . . and will stop projects to push an updated design out?
And if they are THAT confident that attacks are going to happen, then one wonders how it is they know? Did FBI tell them?
Over the past several weeks, media outlets have carried 24 assorted local stories about 24 sites that have been hacked. The ones discussed publicly are Hawaii water systems, Texas power grid, and west coast water systems near ports. All areas that will be critical to weaken for an invasion or conflict. Near borders.
War Preparation?
Preparations for a world War are clearly taking place in very many countries around the world.
For the first time, US citizens are likely to see the direct consequences of war on our own soil.
If people spent more time following world events and wars without being clouded by their own “normalcy bias,” they could piece together what is likely to happen.
In Ukraine, Russia crippled their power grid and attacked their ability to make the tools of war. Most all war materials have to come from outside.
Now imagine Russia striking US infrastructure and OUR ability to make tools of war . . . when our stockpiles have already been depleted by Ukraine.
Oh, and let’s not forget that Israel is toast without US arms support.
But, what is most concerning to me is that the US has made no real efforts to truly ramp up production of war materials. Lots of talk, very little tangible action.
It’s like the US is planning on just going straight to nuclear. But Russian Air defense systems are proven best in the world and their likelihood of survival is much higher than the US.
Contacts I have from my years in the Intelligence Community are telling me the US is too corrupted to survive what is coming.
But real companies with very smart people with analysists with real MBA’s see what is coming and are preparing.
The Intel guys I’ve talked to tell me bluntly: “USA has never been weaker than it is right now.”
I don’t know how it’s going to play out exactly but this is the most dangerous time we have been in up to this point in human history.
One would be very wise to put the pieces together and be willing to make the very hard decision on what is required to survive it.
Because another source (unverified) told me there are currently ~35,000 terrorists in country awaiting a go signal.
Imagine an Oct. 7th style attack all over the US, if all 35,000 operatives struck at once . . . as the much smaller cells did in the ‘Day of Wrath” that hit Israel.
Oh, and don’t forget that several months ago, we all found out there is also 60,000 lbs. of ammonium nitrate fertilizer that was taken off a train in Southern California, that has never been accounted for. Ammonium Nitrate is what Timothy McVeigh used to construct the truck bomb that detonated outside the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. That bomb was reported to be only 4500 pounds. So the amount of Ammonium Nitrate already missing, could make more than TEN such bombs.
This isn’t a tall tale… I once saw 3 guys in a pub start a fight with a bloke I worked with who’d been a pikey bare-knuckle boxer. My mate’s dad had forced him into fighting for money when he was a kid, but in his 20s he’d met a lass and decided he wanted a normal life so he walked away from his gypsy family, got a job and a house, and settled down. He was a really nice guy, a proper grafter, and good to talk to — he had a real philosophy about him and always gave great advice if you had any problems. He didn’t talk much about his old life, just every now and then he’d maybe open up a bit about how he’d hated it and couldn’t forgive his dad who’d beaten him if he didn’t fight and beaten him if he’d lost. None of what he said was bullshit, he was a sincere, honest guy who you could see had been in a lot of fights and just wanted some peace and quiet. He was also a really good husband and father, he was absolutely determined not to repeat the mistakes.
We were on a job in London, went out after work one night, and three locals did the old “you spilled my drink” routine on him. He tried apologising but one of them shoved him. I was sat at a table facing it and before I could even react, all three guys were dropping and he was stepping away. If you’ve ever seen a tarantula move faster than you blink, it was like that. Afterwards he said one of the things you learn as a bare-knuckle fighter is where and what angle to hit people.
Trades are valuable
Braised Beef, Shanxi Style
OssoBuccoBraisedBeefShanksRecipe2
Ingredients
1 pound (400g) lean boneless beef
1/2 g fennel seed
10 teaspoons (50ml) soy sauce
3 1/2 ounces (100ml) chicken or duck broth
4 tablespoons cornstarch (corn flour), dissolved in 4 tablespoon water
2 teaspoons rice wine
3 ounces (100g) scallions, chopped
1/4 teaspoon fresh ginger, chopped
3 1/2 fluid ounces (100ml) sesame oil
1/4 teaspoon MSG (optional)
Instructions
Wash the beef and cut into thin slices. Mix with the soy sauce and scallions.
Stir the cornstarch-water mixture and add.
Heat the sesame oil in a work add the fennel seeds. Heat to very hot or until the oil starts to smoke, and add the beef. Stir-fry until barely cooked.
Add the stock, rice wine and MSG (optional). Cover the wok, and boil rapidly for 1 minute.
When Chinese people get old, they hang out in the park. They form musical bands, dancing troupes, and gaming rings. They practice taichi for exercise and some even swing swords around. Many practice calligraphy on the pavement with a brush and a jug of water.
image 222image 221image 220image 219image 218
Charming, right? I really like the sense of community between old people in China. Getting old doesn’t mean you can’t share hobbies with friends.
Now, of course this only refers to the old people lucky enough to have money saved up to provide for themselves or kids that help support them, but that’s a topic for another time. For now I’d like to keep this answer wholesome. 🙂 Happy Saturday everyone~
While serving as a detective, in Shetland, I received a notification that paramedics were attending a stabbing incident, in Scalloway harbour. The victim was fading fast, we were told. My colleague and I made our way there, some 5 miles from our offices, in Lerwick. We arrived quickly and paramedics rolled up at almost the same instant we did.
While they attended to the victim, who had been on board a yacht, moored in the harbour, one of them confirmed that it was likely to be life-threatening, and a witness stated that an older man and a youth had left the area, hurriedly, just before the victim had been found. We were given a very brief description and I recognised it as fitting two males, who I had seen walking away from the harbour area, as we had arrived. I passed a description of the men, and we checked the streets of the small village, without success. We returned to the seafront, where I wanted to check inside a local hostelry, just as the two walked out, having removed their jackets and hat (in the case of the younger man). I spoke to them both and they identified themselves as New Zealand nationals, a “respectable businessman” and his son, who were visiting Shetland on business. The son – still a teenager – looked like he wanted to throw up, but his Dad appeared entirely calm and unruffled, as if he had not a single care in the world.
I detained both men, on suspicion of aggravated assault, and – to much protest from them both – arranged to have them conveyed back to the station, separately, for later questioning and investigation. Having done so, we returned to the harbour, where the paramedics had realised the victim was suffering a single penetrating stab wound to the chest, which had caused a tension pneumothorax. They had aspirated him, with a needle and were conveying him to the local hospital, for urgent and critical procedures. We were advised he was not stable, at that time, having lost a lot of blood.
The victim was identified to us as a German national, and yachtsman, resident in Shetland, while the suspect was identified as being the older Kiwi.
We returned to the station, where the custody sergeant informed me that the older suspect had just volunteered under caution, during his detention process, that the German had been drunk and had attacked him with a filleting knife. There had been a struggle and Dad alleged that his son had grabbed the knife off the man, accidentally stabbing the victim with it. He would say no more (having blamed his own son, the brave soul that he was).
The son had made no comments, but had appeared stunned, the sergeant said.
I interviewed both, separately, as I was the senior – and more experienced – detective present, albeit only a Detective Constable, myself. This was, by now, an attempt murder enquiry, plus I was the better interviewer. Dad spent 45 minutes saying, “no comment” to every single question put to him, relating to the incident. He still appeared as unruffled and calm as if he was out for a Sunday stroll, showed no stress, no discomfort, and still claimed to be a respectable New Zealand businessman. Other than that, “no comment”.
The son said he was in Shetland with his Dad, who wanted to see about buying up an old inter-island ferry boat, which was being sold off. He told us that Dad had sailed around the world, many times, and knew that if a boat could handle the seas around Shetland, in a harsh winter, it could pretty much handle the seas anywhere else in the world, at their worst. He said Dad’s was a tourist-derived business, but declined further comment, when asked for more details – about anything else.
We were a small department – a detective sergeant and then two detective constables (a third was on annual leave), with five uniformed officers then on shift, all with their own duties. But as this was an attempted murder, we could direct them, in assisting us with our enquiries. Their interviews turned up some more details – the yacht was owned by Dad, but the German had arrived in Shetland, having sailed the yacht there, months earlier. Dad had arrived in mainland Scotland, and then onto Shetland, only days earlier, with his son in tow. He had spent time in the company of some locals, who had said he had shown “a nasty temper” and they “wouldn’t want to mess with him”.
So I went back into interview, with Dad. He was irked by this, now slightly testy and refusing to answer any question with anything other than “no comment”. I told him he was perfectly entitled to do so, however it wouldn’t stop me asking my questions. He grew louder and louder in his, by now, yelled, “no comment!” to every question and I could see I was getting to him. So I took another break, as we had now gone through another 45 minute tape.
I brought his son back in, put Dad in to his cell, and let them see one another – just a glimpse of son being led out, as Dad was placed in the cell. Dad started screaming at his son, “No comment, boy! You make no fucking comment!”
I told the son, honestly, that his father had already made a voluntary statement under caution, blaming him (the son) for the stabbing. I told this terrified 17 year old that the German was in surgery and still might not make it out, alive. In which case, with the absence of any further information, it was Dad’s word, weighed against his own son’s silence, that son was responsible. If he did not make any comment, at this time, his father’s account would be accepted, son would be arrested – either for attempted or actual murder (if the victim expired as a result of his injury) – and face the consequences. He would be unlikely to receive bail for such an offence and so would be held in custody, in prison, until such time as a trial would commence.
That was it. Son puked in the wastepaper basket and started crying. He immediately denied having stabbed anyone. He made plenty comments, thereafter. In fact, he said Dad and the German knew one another for years. The yacht was owned by Dad, although used by the German. The two men had argued, while they were all drinking onboard the yacht, about money owed the father, which Dad said the German was ripping off from him. This has escalated, the two had fought and Dad had grabbed up a knife, from the galley kitchen area . The German fell, son realised his father had stabbed the man, and then he and his Dad hurriedly left the yacht, his father disposing of the knife overboard, into the relatively shallow harbour waters.
Having received this information, I tasked a police unit to return to the harbour and see if the knife could be seen, and put into motion a request for a diving team, via my supervisor – a Detective Inspector 300 miles away, in Inverness. The uniformed cops thought they could see the knife, but would need the divers, to be sure.
I advised our local Procurator Fiscal Depute, of the case, and enquiries up to that point. He told me that, even if Dad copped to the stabbing, unless there was something else there, that could be evidenced, this “businessman” would be bailed, come Monday morning (this was now tea-time, Friday night). If I could arrest him, I had a weekend, no longer, to hold him in custody.
I told him that what bothered me was this guy was unfazed by having almost killed a man. He never even asked how the man – an alleged old friend – was doing, or showed any concern or regret. There was…. nothing. “He is too cool”, I told the Fiscal. “This guy makes the skin between my shoulder blades itch. He is dangerous.”
“Prove it”, I was told.
The hospital came on, to say the German had pulled through, but the stab wound was deep, and either well placed or accidentally almost-lucky, as it had just missed his heart, nicking his vena cava, instead.
Now, when I said this guy bothered me, I mean he really, really bothered me.
So I went back into interview with him, and took him for one of my “walks around the houses”, as an old colleague used to call them. Seeming unassociated chat and questions, almost like a free flow of investigative consciousness – of which I took a careful note, of course. Early on, he was testy. Then he became narked, yelling his “No comment! No comment!” again, to anything and everything I said. When I started talking about his business – I had Googled his given address, he got antsy and even more angry. He ended up yelling at my colleague, “Can you not make him shut! The fuck! UP!!” I was all sweetness and light, still talking about New Zealand, tourism and his business, as if I hadn’t heard. He put his head in his hands and at that point, I asked him why he had stabbed his friend, who was alive and now recovering. His head shot up and he went very still and didn’t answer – which I pointed out, for the tape, describing his demeanour for purposes of the recording. I asked why they had been arguing, and if Dad owned the yacht. He didn’t answer and I pointed this out, again, with his demeanour. I asked why he had wanted his son to take the blame. Same response. I asked why he had thrown the knife overboard and the skin around his weatherbeaten eyes went very white. I told him we had divers coming for the knife, that he was staying all weekend and that we would be talking again. He tried, unsuccessfully, to upend the table, at that point, lunging to his feet, face now stark white, other than two red spots on his cheeks. He whispered, surprisingly calmly, “I could kill you.” I repeated that statement, for the benefit of the tape. I think he recognised that as a mistake.
I spent three hours of my own time, after knocking-off time, that night, open source-searching this guy, on my work computer. He had an unusual name, and I used it in connection with “New Zealand” “kiwi” “yachtsman” “sailor” “round the world” and similar phrases.
Finally, I got a hit, and it was a good one. It was a front page story in a south east-Asian newspaper, about a corrupt justice minister who had been arrested and tried, having been taped, several years previously, whilst in a three-way call between the suspected head of the world’s largest Triad gang (no, really!), and a New Zealand drug dealer. The NZ dealer had also served time in an American federal penitentiary, it seemed, having once sailed a yacht packed with drugs into a harbour, there, and straight into the arms of US Customs. The reports said he was now (at time of publishing) linked to this Triad gang and the world’s largest “Shabu” factory, believed to somewhere in or around the Philippines. “Shabu” is how they refer to Crystal Meth, down there.
Real “I am the one who knocks!” material (no, really!)
I spoke to the PF Depute, at his home (before finally heading off to my own home), to be told that he would try and use this to hold Dad, in custody, as a flight risk, and was fairly certain he could get at least two weeks on a “lie-down”, out of it. He went on that I should get Dad’s prints off to our Interpol liaison, ASAP, with a request to have them prioritised. I had already done so, but was advised it would take at least three weeks for any hit to come back. Meantime, he was still a “respectable NZ businessman”, newspaper article aside.
I went home, head whirring but knackered. Three and a bit scant hours later, I was awoken by an urgent call from Force HQ, on my mobile, telling me that I had to be at my office desk within 30 minutes, as a call would be coming in for me. I asked if a message could be taken and the Detective Sergeant at the other end – our Force Intelligence Officer – laughed and said absolutely not. He had been woken up in the night, for this, and so I could face the same fate! He wouldn’t say any more, so I dressed and made my rather bleary way into the station, and my office.
Sure enough, almost bang on the hour, my phone rang. “Call for you”, said our unnaturally cheery Force Intel Officer, and with that, I found myself suddenly talking to a rough-voiced, blunt-spoken (i.e. he swore a lot) Australian gentleman, who identified himself as a Detective Superintendent in an international task force. He asked if I had (insert name of Dad, here) in custody. I confirmed that I had. He asked what for and I told him I planned on reporting Dad for attempted murder. He paused to yell, off-handset, “SHUT THE FUCK UP!!” then asked if it was “a good one”. I told him I believed it would be. I explained about the stabbing, about the son, the German, the yacht, the alleged “rip-off”, and that got him excited. He asked me to wait one, and I heard him yell out that he had a cop in “Shetland?”, (I confirmed this and next heard him cry, “Will some bastard find me Shetland on a fucking map!”) on the phone and this “inspector” had (insert Dad’s full name here) in custody, on an attempted murder – a stabbing, no less. There were a few more yells and swears, in the background, and he told me the prints had been flagged, and he had been notified of a hit, in Scotland, of all places. He explained they had been tracking Crystal Meth, arms and even people, all being smuggled out of SE Asia, into Australasia. His main target was a big-time Bad Man (with capitals), in Australia, but Dad was the means by which the drugs and other items were believed to be shipped there. He explained this guy, Dad, travelled around, using his sailing prowess – he was a genuine former competitive yachtsman – to buy up suitable boats. These were used to ship their cargos to their destinations. He told me that Dad had been implicated in several murders, directly, by witnesses – former colleagues in his ventures – always with a knife. He liked to get “up close and personal”, while dealing with these “rats”, having been in the military, once upon a time and even lied to underlings about being ex-Special Forces, to boost his legend. Upward rising knife thrust to the heart (missing the ribs), with a long thin blade, was his alleged preferred killing stroke. Unfortunately, any and all witnesses had subsequently disappeared. The task force believed Dad had either killed them, or else had them killed. “Watch your witness”, he warned me. He promised I would have an Intel file, via our Force Intel Officer, within 24 hours, for our Fiscal and the Crown Office. Their difficulty had been in identifying his travel. They had his NZ passport flagged, but there was no record of him having left the country, in years, other than the odd short trip once or twice. I asked about his Panamanian passport and, again, he went quiet. “His WHAT?!” I explained that I had noticed, at the custody bar, while his belongings were being processed, that he had two passports – one from NZ, one from Panama. I knew that, at that time, it was possible to effectively buy a Panamanian passport, if you had business registered there, sufficient capital and enough connections. This gave Dad dual nationality and, from his reaction, it seemed that the task force didn’t know about it. “Do you have it?” he asked, excitedly. “Yes, but it’s sealed in his belongings and can’t be opened unless he is present, without lawful authority”. He swore profusely until I told him I had photocopied both passports and their contents, in case they’d come in useful. He was fairly chuffed, by this, and when I read off some of the travel dates and destinations, he was even more so.
I arranged to send him all I had, in return for everything they had. He ended the call by telling me that I might even get a promotion to Chief Inspector out of this. I told him that might not be that likely, as I was a Detective Constable. He wouldn’t believe me, so I told him my details would be on the email, when he got it all. He ended by saying that Dad was number 6 on their 10 Most Wanted list, at that time, in Australasia, while his Aussie counterpart was #2. I told him I’d take 6 of 10, by their standards!
Anyway, I re-interviewed Dad, who was fairly crestfallen that NZ had been in touch, already. He hurriedly amended his story, alleging self-defence, but it was too late. He appeared in court, both passports were seized and he was placed in prison on that 14 day “lie-down”, while I carried out further enquiries.
And then…
He had the German “helped” out of the hospital and off the island, by two large men, posing as cops, to hospital staff, while Dad was on his “lie-down”, awaiting his first diet at court. We checked plane and ferry terminals (benefits of an island) and then passed info and photos, from ferry CCTV, to mainland police, who identified a hire vehicle, just too late to stop them leaving. The licence plate went into the National ANPR system and it was tracked headed for Newcastle and the international ferry to Holland, there. The German was retrieved, safe and well, and went on record, claiming that the two men had plastic sheeting and shovels in the hire car (they did) and had planned on killing him and burying his body over there, before returning, one man lighter.
We couldn’t pin that on Dad, as the two men wouldn’t cough to it, and the German wouldn’t press it, simply relieved to be “home”. He gave evidence against Dad, and then buggered off, sharpish. Never saw him again.
Dad got 3 and a half years for assault to severe injury, and I got a call from Force Intel, months later, that his calls were being intercepted (lawfully) and in one of those, he had asked an unknown male how much trouble it would cause, and how much it would cost, to “off a cop”. He had been advised against it.
That was the one and only time I worried about one of those clowns who swear they will find you and kill you….
So I repaid the favour, by continuing to keep in touch with my Australasian friends. They arranged for him to be met at the prison gates, on the day of his release, by plainclothes Officers, cuffed and conveyed to London. He was furious, as he expected to be free and clear to carry on about his business. They handed him off to New Zealand cops, who flew him home and locked him up. Turns out his wife/partner was an illegal immigrant and he was abusive towards her, and their son (who she now knew had been implicated in the stabbing, by his own Dad). The authorities offered her citizenship and she offered them all the info on his kiwi businesses and criminal dealings. I don’t know if they ever got the Aussie Bad Man, but Dad died, several years later, having served yet more time back home, and having been confirmed as HIV+, contracted whilst in prison.
One of the two best arrests I ever made.
As my sergeant noted, at my appraisal, that year, “not many cops your rank get a head on the wall like that one”. Of course, I still had to fight for a high assessment grading and then defend it to an outraged senior officer. I never got so much as a memo from my own force, related to that one. Several above me got promotions, though, funnily enough.
The last thing I’ll say (yes, there’s more) is that the first seizure of Crystal Meth in Scotland was recorded as being in Aberdeen, a few months after Dad’s arrest.
That’s not quite correct.
The first such seizure was albeit minimal, but was in Shetland, around the time Dad was here. But the powers that be sat on the info, rather than (they thought) make the place look bad (no, really!).
The info, from my task force chums, was that Dad had been seeking to establish a pipeline, for the drug, into the U.K., and rather than coming up through Europe, into the very heavily policed Dover, this switched-on and experienced sailor had planned on having boats packed with it, sail, first into Shetland, then down to one or more of the numerous remote inlets or bays, on mainland Scotland (of which there are thousands), from whence it could be distributed nationally – the latter part being what the OCGs were doing with Cocaine, at one time. Customs would need to check every single fishing boat, small ferry or able bodied sea-faring vessel, in order to defeat those tactics – and there was no Customs presence in Shetland, as there was no longer international travel to and from the port here.
That case gives me a warm glow. Drug smuggler. People trafficker. Murderer. Simply awful father! Man of the world, career criminal, tripped up, in sleepy wee Shetland, and now pushing up daisies (better him than me!!), while I get to write long-winded stories about his nefarious ways.
My favorites are the “I didn’t study so I asked someone to whisper the answer and I copied it hilariously wrong” answers.
A few samples:
What are elements with the same number of protons but different numbers of neutrons called?
Correct answer: isotopes
What a kid wrote: ice tubes
The amount of product you expect to make in a chemical reaction is called the ________
Correct answer: theoretical yield
What a kid wrote: the radical yield
The device we use to light a Bunsen burner is called ________
Correct answer: striker
What a kid wrote: tricycle
The digits that indicate the accuracy of an answer are called_______
Correct answer: Significant figures
What a kid wrote: stick fingers
What is the formula of sodium nitrate?
Correct answer: NaNO3
What a kid wrote: Any 3
I get mad when the kids leave questions blank that we discussed for weeks and weeks. But when the answers are like this, I contemplate a new career. After I stop laughing.
A symbol of a declining society
Canadian Journalist Who Pushed Vaccine Mandates and “Concentration Camps” for Un-vax’d, DIES at Age 33
A Journalist who advocated that those who were unvaccinated against COVID-19 be put in concentration camps, has died suddenly at the young age of 33.
Ian Vandaelle died after being hospitalized and “declared neurologically dead,” his family revealed.
Vandaelle was a business journalist who worked as a reporter and editor at the Financial Post.
He was also previously a producer at BNN Bloomberg for over a decade.
Vandaelle advocated for vaccine passports and mandates and called for the firing of anyone who refused the injections.
He also suggested that unvaccinated people should be arrested and taken away to concentration camps.
Hal Turner Editorial Opinion
Like so many other left-wing-ish / Liberal-ish people, this person seemed so smug and self-righteous in his (wrong-headed) belief in the new COVID-19 vaccine, that he seems to have ignored all the warnings put out by others, like me, who warned against taking the new, untested, unproven, mRNA “death dart.”
Yet as with so many others his age, He seemed to think, when it came to the COVID Vax, HE knew better. He seemed to think HE was so much smarter than the rest of us. HEseemed to look down his nose at those of us who raised very real concerns about this new technology. To HIM, the rest of us were just sniveling idiots; too stupid to embrace this new, life-saving, technology.
Looks to me like maybe he wasn’t so smart after all. It is my personal opinion that the vaccine he thought so much of, killed him.
I think his ego blinded him to the reality . . . . and now . . . . he’s dead.
It’s hard to feel sorry for someone so young, dying this way. After all, if he had HIS way, all of us might be facing a similar fate – or be locked away in a Concentration Camp — just so HE and his ilk, could feel better. No thanks.
This may turn out to be the new general epitaph for Liberals: “He thought he knew better than everyone else; now, he’s dead from what he thought.”
Japan is both overwhelmingly modern and traditional at the same time. This does not just apply to the amalgamation of skyscrapers and ancient Shinto shrines in cities like Kyoto, but also on a more sociological level. The matter of sexuality in Japan may not be one of the first things that come to mind but Japan is a country mostly free of religious morals.
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Traditionally a sexually open society
Sexuality in Japan developed separately from that of mainland Asia, as Japan did not adopt the Confucian view of marriage, in which chastity is highly valued. Monogamy in marriage is less important in Japan, and married men often seek pleasure from courtesans. Prostitution in Japan has a long history, and became especially popular during the Japanese economic miracle, as evening entertainments were tax-deductible!
The Art of Shunga
Historically, pornography in Japan may have begun at the start of the Edo period (1603–1868) as erotic artwork referred to as shunga that was typically done on woodblock prints. Shunga literally means “spring pictures”. “At its best shunga celebrates the pleasures of lovemaking, in beautiful pictures that present mutual attraction and sexual desire as natural and unaffected” Tim Clark, curator of “Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese art”
Mass produced during the Edo period shunga offered sexuality a shameless visual platform. Shunga depicted sexual pleasure that included both heterosexuality and homosexuality, each not only acknowledged but also encouraged. Surprisingly prior the Edo Period there was no Japanese word for female sexuality, and Shunga changed this with the depiction of female pleasure including lesbianism.
Shunga was an essential part of Japanese society
Shunga had functions beyond its aesthetic appeal. Its primary use would have involved viewing and sharing the paintings or books with close friend or sexual partners. Like the Indian Kama Sutra the Shunga images were also used to provide sexual education for young couples. While shunga was chiefly commissioned by men, it has been found among the dowry goods presented to a Japanese bride, suggesting that it was also highly valued by women.
Most shunga was created by woodblock artists from the popular school ukiyo-e, ‘pictures of the floating world,’ a genre of painting that mainly illustrated life’s pleasures that was mass-produced as prints. Surprisingly traditional painters also produced a large quantity of shunga including members of the Kano School, known for their innovative secular paintings.
Samurai were seen as the keepers of morality in Japan. Shunga was both commissioned and accepted by the samurai as a pleasurable cultural pursuit, and thus the whole of Japanese society enjoyed shunga.
There was also an element of humour to shunga, which sometimes referred as warai-e or “laughing picture”. Shunga works are artefacts of an era in Japan where attitudes about sex were freer. Sex was seen as an everyday natural activity without shame and often was the centre of amusement.
Sex and Erotic Art in early Japan
By the Edo period in the early 17th to mid 19th centuries, there had been a long history of erotic art and secular sexual expression in Japan, which meant that shunga was nothing new. Prehistoric societies had developed phallic worship in connection with their reliance on agriculture and Japan’s creation myths are based on human-like sexual procreation. Throughout the centuries, the phallus and phallus shaped objects (for example, mushrooms) had been prominent figures in carvings, could be found in shrines, festivals, and along roadways, and were traditionally and superstitiously related to good luck, health and longevity.
What allowed for such an openness of sexual imagery and expression was the lack of any strict religious code that controlled sexual behaviour. Unlike in the West, which was dominated by a strict Judeo-Christian ideology, there was no moral shame and stigma surrounding sex or the production of erotic images in Japan — only a stringent class system based on Confucianism that dictated deference to status and appreciation of personal space.
Sex in Japan did not take on any ‘mythical’ or religious significance as it did in India and China. Furthermore, humour and wit had developed over the centuries as a common part of sexuality and was incorporated in the broader culture via allusions, euphemisms, sexually related stories and poetry. These and other cultural and religious factors allowed sex to be seen as a more naturalistic, enjoyable experience between partners, which in turn has produced a wide array of acceptable sexual behaviours in modern Japan including same-sex partners, and sexually related products such as sex toys, manuals, and even a chain of sex stores.
By the time of the Edo Period, the normalcy and humour found in sex, highly developed forms of sexual expressions, and the lack of moral or religious control all translated into an early modern culture that allowed shunga to flourish as a genre of popular art and sex to be open, fun and easily available.
From sexual openness to repression
Japan’s sexual freedom was a revelation to Europe, particularly its artists. Painters such as Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas and Picasso found fertile ground in Shunga imagery. As Japan sought modernisation and to be in line with ‘modern’ western social norms, the Meiji Government banned shunga in the early 20th century, becoming taboo within Japan. As Japan sought sexual repression Europe sought sexual liberation!
When Shunga was flourishing in Japan, in Christian Europe at the time shunga would have been deeded pornographic. Shunga is an impressive, unique tradition of pre-modern erotic art. It serves as testament to a once uninhibited, open-minded society that offered artists opportunities to express originality and unbridled emotion.
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Celebrating Shunga Today
The history, humour and accomplishments of shunga are explored at the British Museum in Shunga: sex and pleasure in Japanese art. The exhibition looks at Japanese art like no other. Explicit and beautifully detailed the works on display are between the years 1600 and 1900, and such works continue today to influence manga, anime and Japanese tattoo art. The exhibition sheds new light on this sexuality explicit art form from Japanese social and cultural history. Parental guidance advised for visitors under 16.
The 48 Japanese sexual positions
If you have ever wondered how they do it elsewhere in the world, a recent Durex Ad may have caught your eye. It introduced some acrobatic positions within decidedly Canadian names: the ‘maple cinnamon twist’ and ‘the Niagara fall’ (the Canadian side, we are assuming).
There is not a lot of research on the top sex positions in different countries. Sex surveys tend to focus on other aspects of our time between the sheets (such as sexual satisfaction and frequency). That said, the Durex Sexual Wellbeing survey which questioned 26,000 people across 26 different countries does have some interesting insights into how different nations have sex. Overall worldwide less than 50% of people are sexually satisfied and as one gets older and has sex less often, dissatisfaction increases, particularly with males. The world has obviously become more sexually repressed.
The following images are illustrations of Japan’s 48 sexual positions — the “48 Ways” (shijuuhatte). These sex positions are inspired by sumo wrestling moves going back centuries. During the Edo period, the word 48 arms-hands started to be imbued with sexual meaning — “all the basic sexual techniques”.
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Below, Japanese Durex condom commercial teaches you 48 ways to have sex with a wrestler. It’s kinda a humorous play to watch, so enjoy it!
Choosing sexual partners in Japan
Most men are attracted to younger and good-looking women, since it is believed that the women will be fertile and prodigy will also be attractive. It’s human instinct, and only moral education can try to repress this instinct. East Asian religions (Confucianism, Taoism, Shinoism, Buddihism) do not teach strong moral principles or prohibitions regarding sex. In fact sexual restrictions and the associate shame or guilt with sex is typically a Judeo-Christian or Islamic characteristic.
In modern Japan the Western desire by males for big breasts and shapely hips may also be based upon a subconscious belief of greater female fertility but the overriding influence has been Western film culture. For women in Japan, and the world over, power has always been a significant element when choosing a male partner. Power and sexual desire often go hand in hand since a powerful male can easily support and protect a family.
The more targets the US spies on, the fewer friends it has — Chinese FM
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The US government has kept expanding its scope of surveillance, meddling in other countries’ domestic affairs and interfering in international affairs, which runs counter to international law and the fundamental principles of international relations, Chinese Foreign Ministry commented on the Section 702 of US’ Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) which allows the US intelligence agency to conduct unauthorized surveillance of non-US individuals abroad. The spokesperson added that “The more targets the US spies on, the fewer friends it has. The US needs a better sense of boundary and less obsession for control.”
During a press briefing on Thursday, media mentioned that US National Security Council member Joshua Geltzer said that Section 702 of the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), an important legal basis for US intelligence authorities to eavesdrop on non-US citizens overseas and step up international surveillance without authorization, will expire on December 31. It was estimated that nearly 60 percent of President Biden’s daily intelligence brief came from these “big ears.”
The warrantless government surveillance authority slated to expire in days is closer to lasting for at least a few more months after the US Senate on Wednesday local time passed an annual defense policy bill that included a temporary extension.
In response to that, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), adopted after Watergate, was originally aimed at preventing government authorities from abusing power and carrying out arbitrary eavesdropping.
However, Section 702, added in 2008, permit the National Security Agency to carry out eavesdropping and surveillance without obtaining an individualized court order, Mao said.
After that, the US government has been expanding the scope of eavesdropping and surveillance to interfere in other countries’ internal affairs and meddle in the normal course of international affairs. This practice runs counter to international law and basic norms governing international relations, Mao said.
“The more targets the US spies on, the fewer friends it has. The US needs a better sense of boundary and less obsession for control,” Mao added.
27 Years Ago This Animated Television Series “Duckman” SHOWED Men Are Going Their Own Way
A couple of months ago, we had an IT guy in our office who had just received his summons to serve in the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
It was a Friday and he had to appear at the military commissariat four days later, on Tuesday. Needless to say, the summons papers pretty much ruined his weekend.
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War is a dangerous affair: a wall in Kyiv that commemorates the country’s fallen heroes from 2014 till today. (Picture by the author of this post)
I have rarely seen a man who was more scared than this poor guy. He was literally sweating. He really wasn’t the fighter type: mid 30s but looking older, non-athtletic body type and a small beer belly.
There was nothing we could do for him. He should have seen it coming. There’s compulsory service in Ukraine and people like him are getting drafted every day.
In our office, most (male) workers have already bought proper body armor and helmets for themselves, some of them even got guns and regularly train on the shooting range. In addition, they help me and my friends to support the military with equipment. When these guys get their summons, they’ll be prepared.
So yes, some people are scared when they have to join the military.
Advice you NEED to hear in your 20s (not what you’d expect)
As far as Europe is concerned (as opposed to, let’s say Africa or the Middle East, for instance), body hair was left to grow until well into the 20th century.
Men typically shaved or trimmed their beards according to the fashion at the time, hair was cut , curled, bleached or dyed, equally accordingly but body hair was left to do its own thing.
This is valid for all strata of society.
Otherwise, in the absence of running water, both sexes usually washed in a bidet, which was filled with warm water and/or perfume/cologne/eau de toilette. Basically, just like you would with a wet wipe, you moisten a cloth or sponge with perfume and clean your entire body with it.
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Women using a bidet, by Willem-Joseph Laquy 1771.
So, basically, in spite of many claims to the opposite, there’s no reason to believe that people in the 1700’s would have been much dirtier than nowadays, although the mix of armpit smell and perfume would probably have been noticeable.
Lice is always a problem. However, just like nowadays, a variety of treatments were available, usually in the form of perfumes, what we now call essential oils, etc. They kill the eggs and you can get rid of the bugs themselves with a fine tooth comb.
And here it is…
2023 12 16 19 24
Women PANIC As They Realize Men Don’t Want To Marry Older Women
Man, the USA is so terribly fucked up. Take me “home”. Please!
Russia Warns If NATO Bases Used For Ukrainian Jets, Those Bases Could Be Targeted
With the Russia-Ukraine war now approaching the two year mark (in February), Americans might need reminding that the conflict remains a highly dangerous situation which could at any moment escalate into a WW3 scenario.
Zelensky’s visit to Washington this week was lackluster, and he left without securing what Kiev is hoping for – that Congress would quickly pass Biden’s $106 billion war funding request, which also includes defense funds for Israel. Of course, at this point Zelensky has complained publicly that the crisis in Gaza has taken the world’s focus off the need to defend Ukraine from Russia’s onslaught.
Though headlines in the West barely took notice, Russia early Wednesday launched a significant ballistic missile attack on the Ukrainian capital, which authorities said injured at least 53 people, including six children, with severe damage to a number of buildings.
But with Zelensky in Washington, making the rounds to the Oval office and the halls of Congress, the Kremlin issued a fresh warning saying that if Ukraine’s military is granted access to NATO airbases for sorties using western-made planes, in would respond while deeming Ukraine’s external allies as direct participants in the war.
The fresh warning was announced by Konstantin Gavrilov, head of the Russian delegation to the military security and arms control talks in Vienna:
“We already hear comments that, amid the significant destruction of Ukraine’s airstrip infrastructure, the F-16s handed over to Ukraine may carry out their missions from airbases in Poland, Romania and Slovakia,” he said during the OSCE Forum meeting on cooperation in security.
According to the diplomat, Moscow will view this as these countries’ participation in the conflict and will force Russia to resort to “response measures.”
Even though certain eastern European allies pledged F-16s long ago, it could still be a lengthy amount of time before Ukrainian pilots are fully trained, enough to be deployed in combat on the US-made warplane.
Western officials have in recent months admitted that Russia has the upper hand, and that Ukraine’s summer offensive failed, but everyone is now putting in place their ‘long war’ strategies. The Kremlin’s new warning and threat also seems part of this longer term planning from Moscow’s perspective.
(My answer contains information that some people might find offensive. Please be advised. I am just sharing an experience I had. Thank you!)
I don’t remember exactly which grade my daughter was in when this happened, but it was when she was in elementary school.
It was a sunny weekend afternoon, I asked her, “Do you want to go to the park?” – which was her favorite thing to do, she had never refused it. But to my surprise, she said no. “Why?” – I asked.
“I don’t want to turn to black!”, she answered. “What!?”, I asked, dropping my jaw. “It’s sunny. The sun will shine on me and make my skin dark”, she pointed to the sun. “Who told you that?!”, I was stunned. She then grabbed the map, and explained to me, “This is Africa. It’s near the equator. They have a lot of sun over there, they are outside a lot, that’s why their skin turns dark. Our intern teacher told us that.”
You have no idea how angry I got when I heard this.
The next Monday morning, I took my daughter to school. After dropping her off, I asked for a meeting between that intern teacher and the principal. I explained the situation and demanded an explanation. The intern teacher was scared, he said he was just “joking”. He wanted to tell the kids that they need to wear a hat and use sunscreen when they are outside in the sun, or else they will get tanned; that’s why he “joked” like that.
I could tell the “face-palm” from the principal’s look. She apologized to me and promised me she would give my daughter’s class a special lesson to “fix” this issue (And she did. My daughter later that day went home and told me they had a lesson about protecting our skin). But the damage was already done. It took a long time with a lot of reading and explaining for me to erase the thought that “dark skin” was equal to “a bad thing” from my daughter’s mind.
I don’t know what happened to that intern teacher, but I hope he learned his lesson.
Carousel Rider Has MELTDOWN After BF Dumps Her Upon Learning She Had “Relations” With Over 300 Men
Back in the 1990s, my former father-in-law (my then-wife’s father), who I’ll call Joe, was the one instigating our divorce. He was one of those macho cop types, kind of a good ol’ boy.
I found one of those subscription cards in a copy of Out magazine on the rack. Out magazine was for gay people who decided to come out of the closet. I put Joe’s full name and his nextdoor neighbor’s address on the subscription card and mailed it in. (I used a typewriter in a store so my handwriting couldn’t be traced back to me).
Imagine his shock and horror when his neighbor showed up at his door and said, “Hi Joe, your Out magazine came to my house by mistake.” 😂
Nowadays, I regret such a juvenile tactic, but I was a bit crazy at the time because it was a messy divorce.
In December 2023, 27-year-old Neusha Afkami had to go the airport in Austin, Texas. She got an Uber, and told the driver he to “make it fast”, as she had a plane to catch and she needed to be on it desperately. Much to her frustration, the driver wasn’t going very fast.
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Neusha felt she could go faster… so after berating the man, she took the driver’s phone… and threw it out the car window. He immediately stopped the vehicle to retrieve his phone and when he did, Mrs. Afkami jumped in the driver’s seat and drove off, leaving her Uber driver standing helplessly by the side of the road. Not only did she take the car, she also took the man’s wallet, which he left behind as he got out. While at the airport, she went on a 130 dollar shopping spree with the man’s credit card as she waited for boarding.
Of course, knowing his own car’s information like the back of his hand, the Uber driver immediately called the police. Before Neusha Afkami could even board her plane, she was located and arrested by Texas police, putting an end to her little bout of playing-GTA-in-real-life.
Knowing These Life Lessons After 40 is Like Cheating. Literally.
It was during a drug search warrant of a heroin dealer’s house. We executed the warrant and located the target of the investigation, a 40-year-old male at home. He also had a live-in girlfriend who, like her man, was an intravenous user of heroin.
His girlfriend had a two-year-old toddler whom we found crawling around the living room floor. The child was naked and dirty and crying. He was a good-looking child, but what would his future hold in that environment? We located drugs and drug paraphernalia all over the house. Most disturbing were the numerous uncapped needles lying on the floor and coffee table right near the toddler. Additionally, there were remnants of powdered heroin and cocaine on the coffee table, which could easily be reached by the child.
My sergeant flipped out on the woman — and asked if she was crazy, exposing her child to used uncapped needles and powered narcotics on the table. The woman just sort of smiled and almost in slow motion said it was her kid and it was none of his business. She was clearly in a drug-induced stupor.
My sergeant replied that he was not only seizing the illegal drugs but was also seizing the child. With that, he scooped up the child in his arms and walked out of the house. He instructed our evidence officer to photograph the living room to document the horrible and dangerous conditions.
My sergeant stood outside and called the division of family services. They didn’t want to respond until the following morning. He emphatically informed them that the child had been removed from this unsafe environment and either they would come and take the child or our next stop was the local newspaper.
They responded to the scene, witnessed the horrible conditions where the child was housed and took the child from the doped-up mother. Three days later they returned the child to the mother at the same house.
Moving that child back into a drug house full of used needles and drugs was the saddest thing ever I witnessed a parent do to their child. When I hear people speak of legalizing all drugs, I think back to that helpless innocent victim.
Marinade: Combine all ingredients in a bowl; mix thoroughly to ombine.
Place short ribs in a nonmetallic dish. Pour marinade over short ribs; cover and refrigerate. Marinate at least three hours or preferably overnight.
Florida Citrus Kimchi: Combine all ingredients in bowl; toss to combine. Reserve.
Drain marinade from short ribs; discard marinade. Grill short rib slices over medium-high heat for 1 to 2 minutes per side. Remove cooked slices from grill; place on cutting board. Slice short rib slices crossways into small, bite size pieces of meat.
Assembly: Heat tortillas over medium heat on the grill or in a sauté pan. Place a small amount of shredded cabbage in the center of each tortilla; top with 1/4 cup short rib meat and 2 tablespoons Florida Citrus Kimchi.
I was the arresting officer on a DUI case. I received a subpoena to appear in court. The man was so drunk he peed al over himself and other stuff in the intoxilyzer room. I thought it was for his guilty plea, but was wrong. He hired an attorney the day before trial and plead not guilty and had not viewed the tape. When the tape was played and everyone watched him pee and slip to the floor and splash his hands in his mess, the judge actually had an out loud laugh along with the rest of the court room.
As it turn out he was a regular drunk and was so out of it he had no idea he had done that. Needless to say, he changed his plea to guilty, the jury was dismissed and the judge imposed a very sever punishment on him. It was his 5th DUI in 5 years.
CHILLING NDE! What I Saw in Hell Will Change You Forever! (Near Death Experience Angie Fenimore)
I got home one night from work, and listened to a message from the State Police from a barracks three hours north of me. Curious, I called back to speak with the officer. He was off for the night so we spoke the next day. The questioning was interesting. He wanted to know if I had been in Bangor Maine the previous day, and if anyone else had access to my car. Puzzled, I asked why. It turns out that there was a bank robbery and they thought that I might be involved. WTF???
The officer was sure that I or somebody else had driven my car from the southern border of Maine to Bangor and back in under six hours without going through a toll booth. For those unfamiliar with the state of Maine that just isn’t possible. I explained that I had been at work all day, and my car was on camera and hadn’t moved. The officer was unconvinced until I send him pictures of my car, my registration, and license plates. The plate number they had matched a set of plates that I used to own, and they were on same make of car, but as it turns out a different year. Very clever.
I in turn called the local police and reported those plates as stolen. I met the detective at my house and his first words to me were “Kurt, so you’re robbing banks now.” He laughed. The detective lives three housed down from me and my wife had his kids in school.
A few months prior I came home at lunch to find a strange car at the end of my shared driveway, and my garage door open. I thought perhaps my wife or I had left the garage door open when we left for work. I grabbed a crowbar as a weapon and searched the house. I know not the smartest thing to do, but I don’t own a firearm. Nothing was missing, and nobody was in the house so I didn’t think much of it at the time. I went outside to get the license plate number strangely parked car , and to call the police. My neighbor came down the driveway and apologized for parking in my driveway and left. That’s where I thought the story ended.
A few weeks before this incident, I had just purchased my car off of lease and switched plates. In Maine we don’t need to turn our plate in and my old plates had been on the wall in my garage. I didn’t notice that they were missing. The neighbor that had parked at the end of my driveway? That neighbor had a previous conviction for Bank Robbery. The local detective and I put two and two together and we had a good suspicion about what had happened to the plates. He gave the information to the State Police and I never heard from that officer again.
High Powered (1945) ACTION ADVENTURE
Full movie. Free and fun. Film Noir.
In this two-fisted adventure tale, a high-rigger holds himself responsible after his brother is killed in an on-the-job accident. He gets a chance for redemption, when it looks as though the same accident is about to occur again!
I had a Chinese-English dictionary when I was in the ADC. And I studied it constantly. I would practice drawing the characters and memorizing the tones. I don’t really think that it ever helped me, but it did keep me focused on my goals and dreams on what I would do once I got out, and free from the USA.
For a short while, my father would xerox off pages from a learn-Chinese book, and later on, after he died, my sister bought me two introduction books of Chinese that I studied.
Every day, I had a routine.
I would sit on my rack from around 9am up to lunch and study Chinese. Then I would do my job, and come back and study again from 4pm to chow. Overall, I studied on average about 8 hours a day.
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Of course, everyone made fun of me. But it was my way of coping and dealing. All of us did it. It’s just that my way was studying in Chinese. For others it was drugs, boxing or gambling for cigarettes.
Let the rest of the world howl. Perhaps it did or didn’t help me, but one thing for certain, it keep me focused on my dream. Perhaps you too have a dream.
Stay focused.
Today… some confirmation of my previous vision of Gonzalo…
Gonzalo Lira was tortured, extorted, and reportedly has died in a Ukraine prison for just reporting the news. The US State Department refused to help Lira, a US citizen, because Lira’s journalism didn’t serve Kiev or the Biden administration. Here’s a quote from WSAU:
WASHINGTON DC (WSAU) – 55-year-old American journalist Gonzalo Lira has reportedly died in a Ukrainian prison after nearly eight months of imprisonment.
According to the Post Millennial, Lira was arrested by Ukrainian security in May 2023 after he was reportedly critical of President Vladimir Zelensky’s handling of the war being fought against Russian forces in Eastern Ukraine.
Lira’s comments included claims that Ukraine’s efforts to win the captured territory back have gone nowhere and their people are dying for a war that is already lost.
Chinese politicians have a grand dream: a global community with a shared future for mankind.
People all over the world are prosperous and living a happy life together. What a wonderful world it is. With the development of modern technology and the completion of automation and intelligence, humans can produce material conditions that provide everyone with a happy life. There is currently a lack of a system that unites humanity around the world.
China needs to first become a beautiful country and then influence the surrounding countries. Ancient China used this strategy. Ancient China first built its own country into a prosperous and strong country, and then neighboring countries envied China and learned about its culture and system. For example, Japan has sent more than ten batches of international students to study in China.
The foundation of a country is its people. If the people live a happy life, then the country is strong; if the people are poor and destitute, then the country is weak. Many rulers of countries do not understand this truth.
Food is paramount to the people. This is an ancient Chinese saying and the foundation of governing a country. When there are signs of chaos in the world, China will purchase a large amount of food. In terms of food safety, economically developed provinces in the east have begun to implement full monitoring of food production processes.
In terms of housing, the central government is implementing housing reform, which is a slow process.
In terms of transportation, China has built a national transportation network and has been continuously improving it.
In terms of cultural and entertainment, China actively promotes the promotion of justice, promotes healthy cultural information, and actively reports positive information. The network firewall successfully blocked junk culture.
I believe that China should first become a future country, and then drive countries around the world to become future countries. The the Belt and Road policy is the link between China and global human development, and also an opportunity for the development of countries around the world.
The PLAAF’s PL-17 AAM was caught on camera again, this time in a full loadout:
The PL-17 is special for two reasons:
It’s the longest range AAM in the world at 400 km (estimated by British intelligence)
It’s actually a ballistic missile. It doesn’t fly straight towards the target. Instead, it flies into the stratosphere where there’s much less air friction and cruises there to the target. Then it trades its potential energy (altitude) into kinetic energy in its terminal attack phase.
Like most high-end BVR AAMs, the PL-17 has both active radar and optical guidance. The optical guidance makes it much harder to jam when it has entered its terminal phase and can actually see the target.
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This latest photo showing four J-16s is special because it demonstrates just how much the J-16 can carry: at least two PL-17s in addition to a bunch of other PL-10, 12s and 15s. If it only carries the PL-17 and no other missile type, the J-16 may be able to carry 3 or even 4 missiles. This proves the J-16’s value as a “missile truck”, similar to the USAF’s F-15EX.
The difference is that the USAF has no equivalent to the PL-17. The longest range American AAM is the AIM-120D, with an estimated range of 160 km. The only other American missile to challenge the PL-17’s range is the AIM-260 JATM, which is still in development.
In a head to head engagement, the PL-17 gives the PLAAF a significant first strike advantage against the enemy’s key aerial assets, like AWACS, EW, etc. Loss of these aerial force multipliers would be crippling, and force the USAF to retreat or be destroyed before their radars can even spot their Chinese counterparts. The Americans would effectively be blind.
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The only other nation to field a AAM of comparable capability is the Russians with their Vympel R-37, a hypersonic (Mach 5) missile with a range of close to 400 km. Unlike the PL-17, it is not a ballistic weapon, and flies straight for the target instead. It’s also much thicc-er than the PL-17. Combat usage of the R-37 in Ukraine has demonstrated its ability to keep Ukrainian fighters from closing the distance against their Russian counterparts for fear of getting hit by this monster.
image 26
MiG-31 armed with four R-37s. Keep in mind that the MiG-31 is more a bomber than it is a fighter.
The Washington Post has produced a long, two part piece, about the failed ‘counter-offensive’ in Ukraine. It dispenses equal blame on the U.S. and British planning of the whole mess and the Ukrainian execution of it.
Key elements that shaped the counteroffensive and the initial outcome include:
Ukrainian, U.S. and British military officers held eight major tabletop war games to build a campaign plan. But Washington miscalculated the extent to which Ukraine’s forces could be transformed into a Western-style fighting force in a short period — especially without giving Kyiv air power integral to modern militaries.
U.S. and Ukrainian officials sharply disagreed at times over strategy, tactics and timing. The Pentagon wanted the assault to begin in mid-April to prevent Russia from continuing to strengthen its lines. The Ukrainians hesitated, insisting they weren’t ready without additional weapons and training.
U.S. military officials were confident that a mechanized frontal attack on Russian lines was feasible with the troops and weapons that Ukraine had. The simulations concluded that Kyiv’s forces, in the best case, could reach the Sea of Azov and cut off Russian troops in the south in 60 to 90 days.
The United States advocated a focused assault along that southern axis, but Ukraine’s leadership believed its forces had to attack at three distinct points along the 600-mile front, southward toward both Melitopol and Berdyansk on the Sea of Azov and east toward the embattled city of Bakhmut.
The U.S. intelligence community had a more downbeat view than the U.S. military, assessing that the offensive had only a 50-50 chance of success given the stout, multilayered defenses Russia had built up over the winter and spring.
Many in Ukraine and the West underestimated Russia’s ability to rebound from battlefield disasters and exploit its perennial strengths: manpower, mines and a willingness to sacrifice lives on a scale that few other countries can countenance.
As the expected launch of the offensive approached, Ukrainian military officials feared they would suffer catastrophic losses — while American officials believed the toll would ultimately be higher without a decisive assault.
Key findings from reporting on the campaign include:
Seventy percent of troops in one of the brigades leading the counteroffensive, and equipped with the newest Western weapons, entered battle with no combat experience.
Ukraine’s setbacks on the battlefield led to rifts with the United States over how best to cut through deep Russian defenses.
The commander of U.S. forces in Europe couldn’t get in touch with Ukraine’s top commander for weeks in the early part of the campaign amid tension over the American’s second-guessing of battlefield decisions.
Each side blamed the other for mistakes or miscalculations. U.S. military officials concluded that Ukraine had fallen short in basic military tactics, including the use of ground reconnaissance to understand the density of minefields. Ukrainian officials said the Americans didn’t seem to comprehend how attack drones and other technology had transformed the battlefield.
In all, Ukraine has retaken only about 200 square miles of territory, at a cost of thousands of dead and wounded and billions in Western military aid in 2023 alone.
All those points played a role.
My personal ones:
Both, the Ukraine and its supporters, systematically underestimated Russian capabilities. (And still do.)
Satellite reconnaissance showed Russian defense preparations on the level of the Battle of Kursk. There the German Wehrmacht, after way too long preparations, failed to break the Russian lines. The unlearned lesson from 1943: When you see defense lines like these, try something else.
Battle simulations and table top war games have a ‘moral factor’ input for each side. Setting your sides’ factor to 10 and the enemy’s factor to 0, as the U.S. and UK obviously did, will let you win every time – but has no relation to reality.
Air support would not have helped. Russian air defenses are too strong to counter it.
The decision to use barely trained, ‘green’ brigades without any fighting experience was a serious error.
Not to use smoke grenades and, in general, means of deception, was not reasonable at all.
To have half of the new troops, the more experienced part, fight Zelenski’s already lost battle for Bakhmut, was a major political mistake.
All together made sure that the so called ‘counter-offensive’ never had a chance to take off. The bickering now is just an attempt to put the blame for the failure onto the other side of the table.
The Ukrainian General Zaluzny has learned from the battle. He now puts up somewhat realistic numbers to let the U.S. understand how small its chances to win really are:
US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was informed during a visit to Kyiv that Ukraine needed 17 million rounds of ammunition and that US$ 350-400 billion worth of assets and personnel would be required to liberate the country. … Quote from a senior Defence Forces official: “Austin was told 17 million rounds of ammunition were needed. He was stunned, to put it mildly, because you wouldn’t be able to collect that many rounds in the whole world.”
The Ukrainian army does not have the ten thousands of barrels required to fire 17 million rounds. Nor has it the men to feed those imaginary guns.
Zaluzny obviously thinks that the war is lost and done with. And that it is time for politics that pursue peace:
In addition, according to a source, Austin also said Zaluzhnyi had complained privately to American generals about interference from the President’s Office [..]: “Austin told us privately that Zaluzhnyi was always complaining to his generals about the President’s Office and how it obstructed him. Well, obviously the president learned about those conversations too. And that isn’t conducive to trust.”
However, the President’s Office is inclined to believe that Zaluzhnyi’s dismissal would facilitate his political career.
It is high time for the Biden administration to wrap this whole thing up. Do the usual thing: declare victory, leave and forget-about-it.
When World War 3 Breaks-Out and Arrives HERE in the USA, Liberals, Progressives, Socialists, Marxists, Should be BULL-WHIPPED TO DEATH By Their conquerors
On my radio show tonight, I was asked by a caller what is likely to happen to New England when WW3 Breaks out and all the military-age illegals who are embraced by liberals, take-up arms and attack us? I told him the Liberals should be BULL-WHIPPED TO DEATH because their efforts at Gun-Control have left them unable to defend themselves, and the illegals they embrace, will be their conquerors.
I went on to point out that Liberals, Progressives, Socialists, Marxists and their ilk are too stupid to be considered Americans anyway, so losing them won’t amount to much. The trouble with these dimwits is that they spread their idiocy to others, which will endanger the rest of the country.
Your thoughts about my remarks? Subscribers can offer their thoughts below in the Subscriber comment area.
Be wary of people who try to sell their pity as kindness. They may pretend they feel compassion toward you by supporting you during difficult times, but in reality, all they can offer you is some pity you never asked for.
Hard work will always beat talent. If you are talented at something, you already have a head start in life, but if you never combine it with hard work, you might as well never had it in the first place.
The power of little gestures. Even a little gesture of kindness can make someone’s day more than you can imagine.
The destructive nature of negative words. Whether you want it or not, you end up taking some words to heart automatically, so it’s important not to use words as weapons that can inflict damage on someone.
Sometimes it may seem like life only gets harder. But even then, it’s important not to lose hope for a better future because if you lose hope, you lose everything.
You can’t expect a person to change for you because in most cases, they rather cling to their old ways than find new ones. And maybe you’d not want to change them anyway unless they are a toxic person doing all the wrong things.
It’s better to have no one to depend on rather than being surrounded by fake people who pretend they care for you when in reality they secretly celebrate all your downs in life.
Don’t stay friends with someone who doesn’t know how to be happy for you. They are not your real friend.
You have to leave your comfort zone in the present to secure a comfortable future.
Betraying your intuition means betraying your best interests. When your intuition gives you an awful feeling about something, retreat. It’s like a danger alert that is ingrained in human biology from birth, so it’s important to make use of it by not missing any of those danger alerts.
An ifn’ I don’t…
Magnolia Bar and Grill Crawfish Etouffee
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Ingredients
1 pound cleaned crawfish tails
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1/2 cup (1 stick) butter
1 medium onion, chopped fine
1 teaspoon all-purpose flour
2 thin slices lemon
1 tablespoon tomato paste
1 tablespoon green onion
1 tablespoon parsley
Instructions
Use a saucepan with a tight fitting lid to “Etouffee”.
Season crawfish tails with salt and pepper; set aside.
Melt butter, add chopped onion, and cook over medium heat until onions are tender.
Stir in flour, blend well, and add 3/4 cup water, lemon and tomato paste, and cook slowly for about 20 minutes, and add a little more water occasionally.
When sauce is done, add crawfish tails; cover with lid. Cook for 8 minutes.
Season again, to taste.
Add green onion and parsley; cook 2 minutes longer.
This is the story of a deaf and blind man who decides to fly – alone – across the country to visit his sister.
When he arrives on board, the stewardesses have difficulty communicating with him because although he manages to say a few words here and there, he cannot hear them. To help himself, he touches their face and hand in hopes of understanding their intention, but the task seems difficult.
His neighbor gave up his seat (on the aisle), prepared drinks for him, sugar in coffee, spoon, etc. and led him to the toilet, but it was impossible to communicate with this man.
Then the flight crew had an idea: why not call to see if any of the passengers on board knew sign language?
Here comes this 15 year old girl, she is dyslexic and it was her learning difficulty that made her decide to learn sign language rather than any other:
image 25
Very patiently, the girl began to “sign” each letter against the passenger’s hand, which allowed them to start a conversation.
This teenager did not skimp on making this man’s journey much more pleasant and comfortable than if he had been locked in his solitude.
The passenger who took the photo and witnessed the scene described the moment as very moving and it’s easy to understand why.
TLDR: I was seen totally nude, mid-coitis, by 4 male police officers with guns drawn, shouting “Krystal are you safe? This is the POLICE! Krystal are you ok?” And I am not Krystal. Lol.
I dated (for the brief period of 5 weeks) a very unstable male. I knew at 4 weeks there was no way we would last, he had already become physically violent and had about ten older women believing he was their knight in shining armor, via the internet. He explained that they sent him money, that was why he even talked to them. Gag me with a keyboard, right? He decided to stalk me after I ended things. Fast forward a few months. I was getting to know a different male, and we decided to get physical, but in a non-violent manner, if you catch my drift. Right in the heat of the moment I hear the back door of the house being violently kicked open. Followed by shouts of “Krystal are you safe? POLICE!! Krystal, are you ok?” Then the bedroom door opened and 4 male police officers with guns drawn burst through the doorway. My name is not Krystal, my roommate (who was out of town) is Krystal.. I hastily climbed off of my guest and threw on a large hoodie then ushered the officers out of the house. Turns out my stalker ex had called the police pretending to be the next door neighbor, claiming it sounded as if a violent altercation was taking place and they were worried their dear neighbor Krystal was being murdered. He actually (convincingly) made his voice sound like a little old lady. Just in case it wasn’t known, the cops are able to see what number a call is made from even when the person tries to hide it with an app like TextNow. They told me the # that had made the call and I was able to show them it was in fact my ex’s phone number. One of the officers saw the blip of a text message while I was showing them that it was his number and asked to see the conversation. All of this while wearing a hooded sweatshirt that came down to my mid-thigh. Needless to say they went and arrested him for calling in a fake emergency, stalking, threatening to cause bodily harm (the messages said that he was going to dismember me after strangling me) and a few other charges like harassment.
When i took 8 Valium on top of the 6 i took earlier in the day, then realized a half a bottle of whiskey might not be enough. When i woke up the next morning(??) on the kitchen floor soaking wet and covered with mud, i asked my wife what had happened. She told me that i passed out outside, then it started to rain. She couldn’t lift me, so she “coached me” for half an hour getting me inside and up 5 stairs. That night- i did it again until eventually i made it to a detox/rehab where i was placed on a 17 day Valium taper. I was later informed it was their longest ever. I called my wife after a week(??) or so and told her to throw out the weed i was saving that knew i was gonna need after getting out of rehab. I had terrible tinnitus and shook horribly for months afterwards. It’s probably not the worst. Other people’s stories may be far worse but, well, you asked. P.S. I’ve beeb clean and sober ever since-almost 7 years now. Thanks God, for being there for me, whether i wanted you or not.
Be willing to let some parts of you die. Not all of you is perfect and you know it better than anyone else. So don’t be afraid to let some of it go. After all, that’s what personal growth is all about.
Don’t run away from yourself. This means facing your trauma(s), mistakes, and bad life decisions, no matter how unbearable it feels.
Don’t suppress your negative thoughts and emotions. You don’t have to act on them but you need to acknowledge them lest they turn into an unruly beast ready to devour you any second.
Come to terms with the fact that life is meant to be difficult. It’s a default setting you can’t change. The only thing you can do is to cope with it to the best of your abilities.
Keep in mind that suffering is cruel, yet a necessary teacher of life that can make you stronger and wiser.
Try not to stress about the things you can’t change. It will disrupt both your physical health and peace of mind.
Know when to share your burdens with others. It’s admirable to take care of things on your own, but it’s just as important to open up to those you trust when life gets too much.
Treat yourself with the same compassion you treat others. If you are nice and understanding toward your loved ones, you have no reason to treat yourself any differently.
Avoid whining. It’s alright to complain every once in a while but doing so constantly will fill your mind with negativity you can’t shake and make you feel miserable.
Remember that there’s more to life than being constantly happy. And you’d not want to be constantly happy anyway because you’d start taking happiness for granted. Your life would also become dull and uneventful, living like a character in one of those imaginary, utopian lands where everything is perfect all the time.
I worked as a courier for about 9 years. During that time, I never made more than $20,000 a year. More like I averaged around $18K.
A lot of my courier brothers were supporting families on that sort of income and they qualified for SNAP and some other food stamp like benefits.
Occasionally, they would save their nickels and then buy steaks and all the fixings for their family. Not often, but maybe every other Blue Moon they would do something nice for dinner.
These guys busted their asses 10–12 hours a day with no benefits, no Healthcare, no retirement and no paid holidays. They worked in the rain, in the cold and snow, they worked in ice storms and 115degF heat.
So what do I think about them using their hoarded nickels to buy a Lobster or some good Crab for the family once in a while? I think it’s none of your fucking business.
A guy I worked with back in the mid 80’s, had a reputation as a bit of a fantasist. He was a large, very over weight, half Chinese guy, figure like a sumo wrestler. Said he was a karate instructor, played drums in a band amongst a lot of other ourlandish claims. Said his dad was a friend of the Kays, and was the last man sentenced to hang in England. He was late to work a lot and always had the oddest excuses. One week he was late every day because, he said, the papers kept sending reporters around to interview him, because they were making a documentry about his dad. Every one chuckled about that one. Then a few weeks later, I was watching TV, and it was about this guy who had murdered someone. I had missed the beginning. This bit showed the mans wife visiting him in prison. She was Chinese, and had her little chubby boy with her. I looked the program up the the TV guide and yes, it was about his dad. A few weeks later I was at a school fete and he was there, with his karate pupils doing a demonstration, and later on his band played
Oct 7 ‘Disinfo’ Org Founded By Top Jewish Lobbyists – Full Scale Propaganda Effort
The largest Jewish Groups are forming what they call the Oct 7 ‘Disinfo’ Organization, to spin the events of that day, and shape the narrative. Even casual observers are calling this a full scale propaganda effort.
The most powerful Jewish interest groups in the US have gotten together to form the 10/7 Project – an effort to combat “Jewish hate in America and the world” and to dispel “myths” about the day’s events.
The organization will fund a centralized communications operation to feed mainstream newsrooms with ‘fact-based information’ about the war, and will also release a daily newsletter to inform news outlets what is being ‘underreported.’
It will be the biggest unified effort from the Jewish lobby in recent memory, with the American Jewish Committee (AJC), The Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish organizations working together.
Of course there are. But these people are weeded out by merciless competition.
The ones that rise are tested every step of the way, and only the best survive the climb.
That’s what competition looks like in a 1.4b society.
Chinese politicians who attend the Two Sessions are not chosen because they’re tall, good-looking or give nice speeches. They are chosen for exceptional performance over the sum total of their careers. Each person wields considerable influence or power in their professional or personal capacity. That’s why they are selected as the people’s representatives. Selection is largely immune from the influence of money.
Who Is Really Behind The Mass Slaughter In Gaza?
Who is really behind the Israeli mass slaughter of the people of Gaza?
Israel’s dependence on the United States was stated bluntly by retired IDF Maj. General Yitzhak Brick in an interview earlier this week.
“All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S. The minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability. … Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”
The list of jobs is endless, I am not sure that all of them were professions. 40 years ago, I read an article about buying stocks, and it said buy quality, but understand the changes in the market. They talked about something that had happened 40 before I was born. Evidently a well known banker and investor said, that it wouldn’t hurt to buy a little stock in these new fangled automobiles, but keep the majority of your money, in something solid, like a good buggy whip manufacturing company. Fads will come and go, but you will always need a good buggy whip. He said that because buggy whips had been made for two thousand years, and it wasn’t going to change.
In my life time I saw the job of tinker disappear, he was someone, who could fix anything, if your glasses broke, if your electric frying pan broke, he could fix it. If you wore a hole in a pot, he would braze it, often they came door to door. We had door to door Fuller brush salesmen, sold brushes door to door. Milkmen delivered dairy products door to door. The bread man delivered baked goods door to door. Their used to be commercials for the Maytag repairman, and now its thrown out when broken.
Our little town still had a livery service when I was a kid, they looked after your horses when you came to town, but by my time, they mostly stored cars.
Movie theater usher, who would bring you in and show you your seat. Elevator operators, I always thought it was such a cool job. You closed an accordion door, then closed the outer door, then shifted the lever to up or down, and stopped it when it reached the floor you wanted. Sometimes requiring some fine tuning.
I had a girlfriend who was telephone operator. There used to be girls that would wander around night clubs, selling cigarettes and matches. Hat check girls.
Brake men in the caboose of a train.
Dragline operator.
Signal men, telegram and telegraph operators at train stations.
Telex operators.
Gestetner repair men.
I can see just as many jobs disappearing in the next 20 years as disappeared in the last 60 years, as self driving cars and trucks become main stream, as digital finishes wiping out paper, as online services and stores replace brick and mortar. Etc.
This happened about 15 years ago. My then partner came home from work very upset. Somewhere that day he had lost one of a pair of distinctive silver cuff links that I had gifted him for his birthday.
Probably a month later I was out in my car, driving an unfamiliar route in the countryside, when I noticed my fuel gauge flashing. I resolved to stop at the next fuel station which turned out to be in a small village. I pulled up at one of the three pumps and got out of my car to fill it. As I walked around to the side of my car with the fuel cap something caught my eye on the ground. Embedded in the top tarmac surface was something silver and shiny. I bent down to inspect it further and couldn’t believe it when I identified the item as a cuff link. Not just any old cuff link but THE lost silver cuff link. I used my car key to gently ease it out of the tarmac. Amazingly, it was undamaged.
That evening I asked my partner if he knew of the little village. He did recall he’d driven that route to a business meeting some weeks before. ‘And you filled your car at the petrol station?’ I asked. ‘’How did you know?’ he asked. I laughed as I handed him his missing cuff link.
I still can’t believe this incredible coincidence. I must’ve ‘guided’ to its location by an unknown force. It still weirds me out.
Until I retired I was a Plumber for fifty years. On this particular occasion I was working with a builder repairing the lead flashing around a chimney at the local church hall. To do the job safely we had set up a scaffolding that blocked the entry to the car park, but this should not have been a problem because the Church Commissioners had told us the church was waiting for the new vicar and no functions had been booked at the church hall.
We were working about 20 feet above the ground when a voice from below shouted “ Hey you!” I looked down to see a man in a grey suit and white dog collar. “Yes you!” he continued, “I have a Bible study class in twenty minutes and no one can get into the car park!”
I was surprised by his rather rude and aggressive tone but politely replied “I’m sorry, but we were told the church has no vicar and that there was nothing in the diary.”
“Well, there obviously is and you are blocking access to it. If you do not remove this scaffolding immediately I shall report you to your employers!” he shouted back.
It was then that I had a stoke of genius and replied. “ Very Christian of you sir.”
That immediately took the wind out of his sails and after a moment or two he replied, “Ahem, perhaps I was a trifle too hasty, carry on gentlemen.”
A guest came to stay for Thanksgiving, I had warned we had cats and dogs. They came anyway. They went to unpack in our guest bedroom. Half a hour later the husband came to me and said there was an issue. They had stripped the sheets off the beds and scrapped the mattress. Horror of horror there was cat fur. I immediately said” oh my, you can’t stay here, perhaps you should go to a hotel.” They did. As they are relatives we are civil but they are not invited to stay anymore.
The thing is, I knew the wife wanted to make trouble, I refused to fight and stayed calm. She didn’t win, I did.
Let me take this out of your hypothetical nonsense, and make it real. During the 1990’s I was a professional clown. I did birthday parties, wedding receptions, school shows, store promotions, holiday parties, company picnics – you name it, Violet P. Lavender was there. I even had several client families, where I would come celebrate the same child’s birthday three or four years in a row.
In one of those client families, there was an adorable little girl (I’ll call her Emily for this story). I met her at a cousin’s birthday party, and then was at her 4th birthday. I was happy to be at her 5th birthday as well. Because she lived in an area where Violet was very popular, Emily saw Violet four or five times during the year, in addition to her own birthday. That particular cluster of families really kept me on my toes, because I had to constantly rework my show, since all the kids saw me so often!
One day, I got a call asking me to come visit Emily, it was months too early for her 6th birthday – and to please come to the Children’s Hospital. I had a habit of visiting the hospital whenever I had free time between shows. This was the first time I was asked to come for a specific child.
When Violet arrived, Emily had been put into a private room. I was met in the hall, and warned that she was very weak and was quite fragile. They told me she did not know she was dying.
So, into that antiseptic, mostly white room filled with machines sailed Violet P Lavender. A totally Purple Person, with balloons and magic and fun! Emily smiled and clapped and used her precious energy to laugh. Only two visitors were allowed in the room at a time, so it was just me, Emily and one of her parents, with everyone else watching through the glass wall.
I stayed for only about 20 minutes. While I was saying goodbye, she took my hand and asked the hardest question… “Violet, will I ever see you again?”
I did what anyone in that position would do – I lied. I smiled at her and said “Of course you will! I’m going to be at your 6th Birthday Party!” That beautiful child shook her head sadly and gently told me, “Violet, I’m sorry. I’m not going to have any more birthday parties. I meant, will I see you again, in heaven?”
So much for her not knowing! Her mother bolted from the room, leaving me ‘alone’ to face that horrible truth with her.
So what does the atheist in a clown suit say to a child who wants to talk about heaven, as she lay dying?
I asked her “What do you think heaven is like?” She didn’t know, but she was scared that she would be all alone “up there” in a big house, with no one to talk to ever again.
Now, why would she think that? It seems some well meaning idiot had told her that God had prepared a Mansion just for her, in Heaven, and that she would be going there soon. And a Mansion was described to her as “a big house” … just for her! She was scared by the idea, and she did not want to go, but she couldn’t ask her mommy or daddy about it because (and she whispered this) “they don’t know I’m dying.”
So I laughed and told Emily that of COURSE she was not going to be alone! Her house was going to be on a street with lots of other kids, and right next to her street is the street where all the CLOWNS LIVE! And right past that is a big park where all the puppies and kittens play! (That made her smile.)
“Will you be there too, Violet?” Stubborn child! She wasn’t going to let it go! I told her I wouldn’t be there for a long time, but I had friends there, and she could tell them she knows me. Also, in her house there is a magic TV that she can use to watch over her friends and family who are still alive, while she is waiting for us to all join her. So she could watch me and her Mom and Dad and anybody else she wanted, any time she felt like!
She was relieved. She said she wasn’t scared anymore. Then reminded me not to say anything to her parents, because they are already so worried about her being sick, she didn’t want them to get sad about her dying.
I made it out of the room and into a nurse’s station before I started crying.
Violet did attend her next ‘party’ … I made sure her parents were ok with it, and Violet came to the funeral with a huge bunch of bright balloons, to say goodbye.
So the answer to your silly hypothetical question is – in REAL LIFE, you tell that child whatever you can so that they are not afraid and give them comfort.
ANY OTHER ANSWER regardless of your personal belief in an invisible guy building fancy houses in the sky is wrong.
The emotional well being of a dying child is more important than any religious or philosophical argument you could make.
1. Instead of responding immediately after someone says something to you. Wait a couple of second. This makes them feel like you’re really thinking about what you’re going to reply. And it makes you seem like a better listener. ( Don’t over do it ).
2. In a conversation, when someone is talking, nod your head in affirmation.
This will do so many things to their brain. First of all, it will give them that feeling of validation. It will make them feel like you’re truly listening to them and it is that feeling of validation that we search for unconsciously, that we got from our mom, and we’re searching in our partner, we’re searching in other people. So it becomes really addictive when you do this, and you make people feel validated.
3. When you’re talking to someone, always show the palms of your hands. This communicates to their subconscious mind that you have nothing to hide, that you are open, that they can trust you and you are their friend.
4. When you talk to someone try to match your body language and talk at the same volume and speed as they are.
This will tell subconscious mind that you are like them and they will trust you more
5. Ask people for their advice. Making them feel like their opinion matters. According to reasearch done by Katie Liljenquist makes them form a commitment to you and makes them like you more.
Example:
“What do you think I should order?”
“I think you should get the vegan burger, it’s really good”
A younger friend of my grandmother once said something that made her as angry as I have ever seen her. The 35-year-old was trying to stress the fact that her challenges and worries were different from those of a 75-year-old. She had in mind that some of life’s problems are over by the time you are 75, which may be true. But she said it in a terrible way.
You’ve lived your life.
Don’t make this mistake. Life can be just as sweet no matter how many birthdays you’ve had. And there is no age at which life’s failure to be sweet on any given day is not painful.
The 80- or 90-year-old has not “lived their life.” They are in the process of living it, just as you are.
OMG!
Ukraine Presidential Advisor: “The West Came to this war with no pants on”
The Emperor is naked . . . or so we now hear from the former Aide to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenski. Alexy Arestovich tells media outlets now that “The West came to war with its pants down” when it dealt with the Russian Army entry into Ukraine.
2023 12 06 13 11
Commenting to media outlets, Arestovich pointed out “The Americans cannot produce a million shells a year, and North Korea can. What kind of war and victory are we talking about, what boundaries of 1991?”
Of course, when he speaks of the “Boundaries of 1991” he is referring to the then-break-up of the former Soviet Union and the “Boundaries” for NATO that were agreed-to by then US President George HW Bush. It was then Secretary of States James Baker who agreed, at a meeting, in the Kremlin in Moscow, with then Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev and then Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevrednadze, that NATO “will not move one inch eastward of the Elbe (River) in Germany.”
Of course, history shows that when Bush Sr. left office, and Bill Clinton came in as US President, that NATO boundary promise went right out the window. The map below shows NATO Expansion from 1949, and points out who was in and who was not in 1990 when Bush promised Gorbachev “not one inch eastward:
Yet, as shown by the countries imaged in purple, that promise to the Soviets went right out the window in the late 1990’s under then-President Bill Clinton.
Here’s how it went:
U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (http://nsarchive.gwu.edu).
The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels.
The documents reinforce former CIA Director Robert Gates’s criticism of “pressing ahead with expansion of NATO eastward [in the 1990s], when Gorbachev and others were led to believe that wouldn’t happen.”[1] The key phrase, buttressed by the documents, is “led to believe.”
President George H.W. Bush had assured Gorbachev during the Malta summit in December 1989 that the U.S. would not take advantage (“I have not jumped up and down on the Berlin Wall”) of the revolutions in Eastern Europe to harm Soviet interests; but neither Bush nor Gorbachev at that point (or for that matter, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl) expected so soon the collapse of East Germany or the speed of German unification.[2]
The first concrete assurances by Western leaders on NATO began on January 31, 1990, when West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher opened the bidding with a major public speech at Tutzing, in Bavaria, on German unification. The U.S. Embassy in Bonn (see Document 1) informed Washington that Genscher made clear “that the changes in Eastern Europe and the German unification process must not lead to an ‘impairment of Soviet security interests.’ Therefore, NATO should rule out an ‘expansion of its territory towards the east, i.e. moving it closer to the Soviet borders.’” The Bonn cable also noted Genscher’s proposal to leave the East German territory out of NATO military structures even in a unified Germany in NATO.[3]
This latter idea of special status for the GDR territory was codified in the final German unification treaty signed on September 12, 1990, by the Two-Plus-Four foreign ministers (see Document 25). The former idea about “closer to the Soviet borders” is written down not in treaties but in multiple memoranda of conversation between the Soviets and the highest-level Western interlocutors (Genscher, Kohl, Baker, Gates, Bush, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Major, Woerner, and others) offering assurances throughout 1990 and into 1991 about protecting Soviet security interests and including the USSR in new European security structures. The two issues were related but not the same. Subsequent analysis sometimes conflated the two and argued that the discussion did not involve all of Europe. The documents published below show clearly that it did.
The “Tutzing formula” immediately became the center of a flurry of important diplomatic discussions over the next 10 days in 1990, leading to the crucial February 10, 1990, meeting in Moscow between Kohl and Gorbachev when the West German leader achieved Soviet assent in principle to German unification in NATO, as long as NATO did not expand to the east. The Soviets would need much more time to work with their domestic opinion (and financial aid from the West Germans) before formally signing the deal in September 1990.
The conversations before Kohl’s assurance involved explicit discussion of NATO expansion, the Central and East European countries, and how to convince the Soviets to accept unification. For example, on February 6, 1990, when Genscher met with British Foreign Minister Douglas Hurd, the British record showed Genscher saying, “The Russians must have some assurance that if, for example, the Polish Government left the Warsaw Pact one day, they would not join NATO the next.” (See Document 2)
Having met with Genscher on his way into discussions with the Soviets, Baker repeated exactly the Genscher formulation in his meeting with Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze on February 9, 1990, (see Document 4); and even more importantly, face to face with Gorbachev.
Not once, but three times, Baker tried out the “not one inch eastward” formula with Gorbachev in the February 9, 1990, meeting. He agreed with Gorbachev’s statement in response to the assurances that “NATO expansion is unacceptable.” Baker assured Gorbachev that “neither the President nor I intend to extract any unilateral advantages from the processes that are taking place,” and that the Americans understood that “not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.” (See Document 6)
Afterwards, Baker wrote to Helmut Kohl who would meet with the Soviet leader on the next day, with much of the very same language. Baker reported: “And then I put the following question to him [Gorbachev]. Would you prefer to see a united Germany outside of NATO, independent and with no U.S. forces or would you prefer a unified Germany to be tied to NATO, with assurances that NATO’s jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward from its present position? He answered that the Soviet leadership was giving real thought to all such options [….] He then added, ‘Certainly any extension of the zone of NATO would be unacceptable.’” Baker added in parentheses, for Kohl’s benefit, “By implication, NATO in its current zone might be acceptable.” (See Document 8)
Well-briefed by the American secretary of state, the West German chancellor understood a key Soviet bottom line, and assured Gorbachev on February 10, 1990: “We believe that NATO should not expand the sphere of its activity.” (See Document 9) After this meeting, Kohl could hardly contain his excitement at Gorbachev’s agreement in principle for German unification and, as part of the Helsinki formula that states choose their own alliances, so Germany could choose NATO. Kohl described in his memoirs walking all night around Moscow – but still understanding there was a price still to pay.
All the Western foreign ministers were on board with Genscher, Kohl, and Baker. Next came the British foreign minister, Douglas Hurd, on April 11, 1990. At this point, the East Germans had voted overwhelmingly for the deutschmark and for rapid unification, in the March 18 elections in which Kohl had surprised almost all observers with a real victory. Kohl’s analyses (first explained to Bush on December 3, 1989) that the GDR’s collapse would open all possibilities, that he had to run to get to the head of the train, that he needed U.S. backing, that unification could happen faster than anyone thought possible – all turned out to be correct. Monetary union would proceed as early as July and the assurances about security kept coming. Hurd reinforced the Baker-Genscher-Kohl message in his meeting with Gorbachev in Moscow, April 11, 1990, saying that Britain clearly “recognized the importance of doing nothing to prejudice Soviet interests and dignity.” (See Document 15)
The Baker conversation with Shevardnadze on May 4, 1990, as Baker described it in his own report to President Bush, most eloquently described what Western leaders were telling Gorbachev exactly at the moment: “I used your speech and our recognition of the need to adapt NATO, politically and militarily, and to develop CSCE to reassure Shevardnadze that the process would not yield winners and losers. Instead, it would produce a new legitimate European structure – one that would be inclusive, not exclusive.” (See Document 17)
Baker said it again, directly to Gorbachev on May 18, 1990 in Moscow, giving Gorbachev his “nine points,” which included the transformation of NATO, strengthening European structures, keeping Germany non-nuclear, and taking Soviet security interests into account. Baker started off his remarks, “Before saying a few words about the German issue, I wanted to emphasize that our policies are not aimed at separating Eastern Europe from the Soviet Union. We had that policy before. But today we are interested in building a stable Europe, and doing it together with you.” (See Document 18)
The French leader Francois Mitterrand was not in a mind-meld with the Americans, quite the contrary, as evidenced by his telling Gorbachev in Moscow on May 25, 1990, that he was “personally in favor of gradually dismantling the military blocs”; but Mitterrand continued the cascade of assurances by saying the West must “create security conditions for you, as well as European security as a whole.” (See Document 19) Mitterrand immediately wrote Bush in a “cher George” letter about his conversation with the Soviet leader, that “we would certainly not refuse to detail the guarantees that he would have a right to expect for his country’s security.” (See Document 20)
At the Washington summit on May 31, 1990, Bush went out of his way to assure Gorbachev that Germany in NATO would never be directed at the USSR: “Believe me, we are not pushing Germany towards unification, and it is not us who determines the pace of this process. And of course, we have no intention, even in our thoughts, to harm the Soviet Union in any fashion. That is why we are speaking in favor of German unification in NATO without ignoring the wider context of the CSCE, taking the traditional economic ties between the two German states into consideration. Such a model, in our view, corresponds to the Soviet interests as well.” (See Document 21)
The “Iron Lady” also pitched in, after the Washington summit, in her meeting with Gorbachev in London on June 8, 1990. Thatcher anticipated the moves the Americans (with her support) would take in the early July NATO conference to support Gorbachev with descriptions of the transformation of NATO towards a more political, less militarily threatening, alliance. She said to Gorbachev: “We must find ways to give the Soviet Union confidence that its security would be assured…. CSCE could be an umbrella for all this, as well as being the forum which brought the Soviet Union fully into discussion about the future of Europe.” (See Document 22)
The NATO London Declaration on July 5, 1990 had quite a positive effect on deliberations in Moscow, according to most accounts, giving Gorbachev significant ammunition to counter his hardliners at the Party Congress which was taking place at that moment. Some versions of this history assert that an advance copy was provided to Shevardnadze’s aides, while others describe just an alert that allowed those aides to take the wire service copy and produce a Soviet positive assessment before the military or hardliners could call it propaganda.
As Kohl said to Gorbachev in Moscow on July 15, 1990, as they worked out the final deal on German unification: “We know what awaits NATO in the future, and I think you are now in the know as well,” referring to the NATO London Declaration. (See Document 23)
In his phone call to Gorbachev on July 17, Bush meant to reinforce the success of the Kohl-Gorbachev talks and the message of the London Declaration. Bush explained: “So what we tried to do was to take account of your concerns expressed to me and others, and we did it in the following ways: by our joint declaration on non-aggression; in our invitation to you to come to NATO; in our agreement to open NATO to regular diplomatic contact with your government and those of the Eastern European countries; and our offer on assurances on the future size of the armed forces of a united Germany – an issue I know you discussed with Helmut Kohl. We also fundamentally changed our military approach on conventional and nuclear forces. We conveyed the idea of an expanded, stronger CSCE with new institutions in which the USSR can share and be part of the new Europe.” (See Document 24)
The documents show that Gorbachev agreed to German unification in NATO as the result of this cascade of assurances, and on the basis of his own analysis that the future of the Soviet Union depended on its integration into Europe, for which Germany would be the decisive actor. He and most of his allies believed that some version of the common European home was still possible and would develop alongside the transformation of NATO to lead to a more inclusive and integrated European space, that the post-Cold War settlement would take account of the Soviet security interests. The alliance with Germany would not only overcome the Cold War but also turn on its head the legacy of the Great Patriotic War.
But inside the U.S. government, a different discussion continued, a debate about relations between NATO and Eastern Europe. Opinions differed, but the suggestion from the Defense Department as of October 25, 1990 was to leave “the door ajar” for East European membership in NATO. (See Document 27) The view of the State Department was that NATO expansion was not on the agenda, because it was not in the interest of the U.S. to organize “an anti-Soviet coalition” that extended to the Soviet borders, not least because it might reverse the positive trends in the Soviet Union. (See Document 26) The Bush administration took the latter view. And that’s what the Soviets heard.
As late as March 1991, according to the diary of the British ambassador to Moscow, British Prime Minister John Major personally assured Gorbachev, “We are not talking about the strengthening of NATO.” Subsequently, when Soviet defense minister Marshal Dmitri Yazov asked Major about East European leaders’ interest in NATO membership, the British leader responded, “Nothing of the sort will happen.” (See Document 28)
When Russian Supreme Soviet deputies came to Brussels to see NATO and meet with NATO secretary-general Manfred Woerner in July 1991, Woerner told the Russians that “We should not allow […] the isolation of the USSR from the European community.” According to the Russian memorandum of conversation, “Woerner stressed that the NATO Council and he are against the expansion of NATO (13 of 16 NATO members support this point of view).” (See Document 30)
Thus, Gorbachev went to the end of the Soviet Union assured that the West was not threatening his security and was not expanding NATO. Instead, the dissolution of the USSR was brought about by Russians (Boris Yeltsin and his leading advisory Gennady Burbulis) in concert with the former party bosses of the Soviet republics, especially Ukraine, in December 1991. The Cold War was long over by then. The Americans had tried to keep the Soviet Union together (see the Bush “Chicken Kiev” speech on August 1, 1991). NATO’s expansion was years in the future, when these disputes would erupt again, and more assurances would come to Russian leader Boris Yeltsin.
When the US and EU/NATO tried to expand once again by admitting Ukraine, Russia’s financial and military condition was far improved, and the Russian’s had enough of our perceived lies about NATO Expansion.
Russia told the West that Ukraine could NOT enter NATO, because Russia knew they were planning on placing US Missile defenses on Ukraine soil. Those missiles would have about a five minute flight time to Moscow, which no country on earth could defend against.
Russia pointed out that the conventional warheads on US missile defenses were of a type that could be “switched-out” with a NUCLEAR warhead. This change could be done in about 90 minutes, and no one would even know about it.
That would put Moscow within 5 minutes of nuclear annihilation, and Russia would not tolerate it. Russia made it explicitly clear they viewed Ukraine’s entry into NATO as an “existential threat” and they would use military power to stop it if they had to. No one in the West took them seriously.
The West apparently doesn’t teach actual history to its military and political class anymore, because folks in the US under Joe Biden continued to press for Ukraine’s entry into NATO. No one in the Biden regime realized that Russia meant business on this issue, and ALL of them were . . . . SHOCKED . . . . when Russian troops crossed into Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
(HT REMARKS:Older guys like me, who have a memory that actually works, knew full well the Russian’s were going to do this; they HAD TO. It literally is a matter of survival for Russia, given the vast expansion of NATO during the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. I knew it was coming. I said so on my radio show in the weeks leading-up to the entry. I told my audience we were breaking our word and we had to stop. I told my audience this could result in World War 3 and the Russians were serious about this. No one – at least in government — listened.)
Fast-Forward to December of 2023, and former Aid TO President Zelensky now says “The West came to the war with his pants down, he turned out to be a naked king, he will not be able to win this war.
I see fewer and fewer chances for the West to win in a clash with the global South and East.”
He’s right.
But the people running the US government and military, are so ignorant of history, so arrogant in their erroneous beliefs about the Russian Army, none of them saw this coming. None of them ever expected to lose a war with Russia, and THAT is exactly, precisely, what is actually happening right now in Ukraine. Ukraine is losing and will lose. Period. Full stop.
All because the US EU and NATO install people into powerful positions who are either ignorant of history, or whose word means nothing. I suspect– it’s both.
Thanks to those people, half a million Ukrainians are now dead. A smaller number of Russians are also dead. And for what? NONE of this, had to be.
Had we honored our word, none of this would have happened.
I had a girlfriend that hit me all the time. I thought she was just being playful, until she snapped and said, why can’t I hurt you. Up until then, I thought we were just playing. I am 6′1″ 200 lbs, she was 5′1″ 100 lbs.
If you can’t tell that it was supposed to be painful, then you know how lopsided punching her back would be.
After we broke up, there were rumours that her new boyfriend was beating her. He was 5′6″ 140 lbs.
She asked me if I remembered her hitting me, I said I did, she replied, well he hits back.
So, if you can escape without being hurt, then you shouldn’t punch anyone, but if you need to punch someone in self defense, then you do what you have to do.
Simpsons Predictions For 2024 Are Insane
LOL.
Magnolia’s Spicy Shrimp, Sausage and Tasso Gravy over Creamy White Grits
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Ingredients
Creamy White Grits
12 cups chicken broth
4 1/2 cups coarse stone-ground white grits
1 cup heavy cream
Salt and white pepper to taste
Tasso Gravy
4 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup sliced Tasso, cut in 1-inch strips
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
4 cups chicken broth
2 tablespoon finely chopped parsley
Salt and white pepper to taste
Shrimp and Sausage
1/2 pound spicy Italian sausage (3/4 pound of raw)
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 pounds medium or large peeled and deveined shrimp*
1 1/2 cups chicken broth
1 recipe Tasso Gravy
2 tablespoons finely chopped parsley
Instructions
Creamy White Grits
Bring the chicken broth to a boil in a heavy-bottomed stockpot or large saucepan. Slowly pour in the grits, stirring constantly. Reduce the heat to low and continue to stir so that the grits do not settle to the bottom and scorch. In about 5 minutes, the grits will plump up and become a thick mass.
Continue to cook the grits for about 20 to 25 minutes, stirring frequently. The grits should have absorbed all of the chicken stock and become soft. Stir in heavy cream and cook for another 10 minutes, stirring frequently. The grits should have a thick consistency and be creamy like oatmeal. Season to taste with salt and white pepper. Keep warm over low heat until ready to serve. If the grits become too thick, add warm chicken broth or water to thin them down.
Tasso Gravy
Melt the butter in a heavy-bottomed saucepan over low heat. Add the Tasso. Sauté for 1 minute, browning slightly. Make a roux by adding the flour and stirring until well combined. Continue to cook over low heat for 5 minutes, stirring frequently until the roux develops a nutty aroma.
Turn the heat up to medium and gradually add 2 cups of the chicken broth, stirring vigorously. Keep stirring constantly until the broth thickens into gravy. Reduce the heat and simmer over low heat for 15 minutes to cook out the starchy flavor. Add the parsley. Simmer for another 5 minutes. Season to taste with salt and pepper.
Shrimp and Sausage
Heat oven to 400 degrees F.
To cook Italian sausage: Place the Italian sausage on a baking sheet with raised sides. Place on the top rack of the 400 degrees F oven and bake for 10 to 15 minutes or until the sausage is firm and its juices run clear. Cool and cut into small bite-size pieces.
Heat the olive oil in a heavy-bottom frying pan over medium heat. Add the precooked sausage and sauté for 2 minutes to brown slightly. Add the shrimp and sauté until they begin to turn pink-no longer than 1 minute. Add 1 cup of the chicken broth to deglaze the pan. Add the Tasso Gravy and one tablespoon of the parsley. Bring up to a boil and let simmer for 1 minute. The last 1/2 cup of chicken stock is to be used to thin the gravy if needed.
Divide the hot grits between 8 warm bowls. Spoon the shrimp, sausage mixture over the grits. Sprinkle with the remaining tablespoon of parsley and serve immediately.
Notes
* If using large shrimp, allow 6 per person; for medium sized shrimp, 8 to 10 shrimp.
Attribution
Source: magnolias-blossom.com – Magnolia’s, Charleston, South Carolina
A family friend who worked as an FBI agent was about to get married in the early 1970s. Shortly before the wedding, he got a memo from the Director’s office, signed by J. Edgar Hoover himself, pointing out a policy to the effect that agents needed permission to tie the knot, and that he hadn’t received it.
His intended was Black (he’s white), and the Director wasn’t cool with interracial marriage.
He married her anyway, and they stayed together until death did they part half a century later.
They framed the Director’s letter and hung it on a wall in their residence.
While working at a dealership in Arizona, I was doing a LOF on a late model Nissan, and got to checking the air filter as part of my routine workup on the vehicle. I popped the top of the air box, and casually lifted the filter out, and promptly slammed the air filter back in and closed the lid. I took a breath, walked over to my service manager, and told him that we needed to call pest control.
When the pest control tech arrived, he put on heavy gloves, and carefully removed a mama Western diamondback rattler and six of her babies, all alive and well in the air box. The customer mentioned that her car had recently sat for a few weeks while she was away on business. She politely apologized to me for the snake incident, gave me a nice tip (to cover my new boxers, presumably!), Paid for the pest control visit, and left.
To top this off, the next time she came in, she requested me. When I popped the hood, I was greeted by !!! Another snake! Thankfully, this time, it was rubber. Inside the air box (I was VERY cautious lifting the air filter out this time!), taped under the lid was a $20 bill with “Sorry, I couldn’t help myself!” written on it. Probably one of my favorite customers ever! She gave me a hug after I came in with a sheepish smile after I finished the oil change. I hope she’s still messing with people 🙂
“Dear teacher, I apologize to the bully for his attacking me and forcing me to have to defend myself. I promise that if he attacks me again I will defend myself to the best of my ability..I realize that the school supports his behavior and wishes us to submit to being bullied, punched hit,kicked and ridiculed. I apologize to you and the school staff, for not being a submissive punching bag as you seem to want me to be.
sincerely,
(name).
EDIT
seems a popular post. I am guessing the problem is widespread.
Keep in mind that you are looking at someone who’s already at the top of the mountain. That is to say, you don’t know the effort and time they had to put into to get where they are right now. And how many mistakes and slips they had to endure to reach that peak.
Remind yourself that the only person you should race against is yourself. It sounds easier said than done, but keep practicing and you’ll soon realize it’s not as difficult as you initially thought it was.
Throw out all the comparisons out of the window. It tends to aggravate your envy even more. Instead, focus on what you can do to get your fair share of success as well.
Don’t become resentful toward life or people who seem to have it all. Because if you do, that resentment will start living inside your mind rent-free, for your entire life.
Be grateful that nothing is over yet. As long as you are still breathing, you have a chance to change something for the better. Everyone takes things at their own pace, so don’t put yourself down just because you fell behind in the race. We can’t all be Usain Bolts, after all. So stick to the pace you are comfortable with and take occasional breaks if you have to. And once you feel rested, keep moving because, in the end, it’ll be worth it.
I was sitting on a bench outside a hotel in DC near the valet desk. I admit I wasn’t exactly dressed for style.
Lady imperiously demands I get her car and I tell her I don’t work there. She sniffs at me and scolds me for being a useless bum, a blight on humanity and if she had her way we’d be rounded up and put on press gangs to clean the streets.
About then the valet pulls up with my car, a late model BMW convertible. She started to say “that’s not my car” when I tipped the valet and drove off.
A coworker went to a local bar after work where a group from the office was going to meet up. It was a Friday so no work the next day.
He woke up in a strange bed at an apartment complex. He couldn’t find his clothes, car keys, wallet. He called another coworker to come get him. He had to look out the window and get the street intersection off street signs to tell his coworker friend where to pick him up.
When his coworker friend showed up he ran out with a sheet wrapped around himself. His coworker friend took him back to his apartment where a roommate let him in. He had a spare key for his car and he and his roomate went looking for his car. They found it in the parking lot of the local bar down from the office.
He spent the weekend trying to remember what happened to no avail.
On Monday while he was at work sitting at his desk when one of the office girls came into his office with his freshly washed clothes, wallet and keys.
She had taken him back to her apartment for an evening of love making, during the night of this he had gotten sick from too much alcohol, vomiting on his clothes beside the bed, then passed out.
She had gotten up that morning, cleaned up the mess, taken his clothes down to the laundry to wash them before ordering breakfast from a deli across the street. She returned to find him and one of her sheets missing.
She waited until Monday to bring him his belongings. They never went out again and had a strained office relationship for several years until he transferred to another office.
If I had a chance for a do over I’d take it. My life today would be totally different. I’ve never told or discussed it with anyone. I was 20 in college and I was engaged when I got pregnant. He didn’t want to start out marriage that way. He was all of 21 and also still in college. I didn’t have a job or any money. I thought my Catholic parents would disown me. I made the horrible decision to terminate the pregnancy. It took decades before I could forgive myself. He was right it was no way to start a marriage. It was a horrible way to start a marriage when he didn’t want to offer any emotional support for our shared tragedy. Nearly 10 years later we were finally blessed with a child followed by 3 more. We were married over 40 years. The roots of the failure began with I don’t want to start out marriage that way.
A few. But it’s a very hard job to be the son or daughter of a genius. I’ve had the good fortune of getting to know several Nobel Prize winners and their families. And to talk with some of the kids about their point of view. For the most part, they suffered. Many Nobel Prize winners made no secret of this. George Wald was once asked whether he might donate his sperm to a sperm bank to make superior children. He answered in two parts, but only the first was charming.
He said they should have asked his father for sperm so as to make another George Wald. Then he went on to say that his kids were not geniuses but had become bums. Which was not only unkind, but also very unfair to them as they were both teenagers at the time, sensitive and awkward, but also sweet and certainly very bright. But I remember one dinner at his house where Elijah, the son, sort of bragged about having done something clever. Most parents would smile and congratulate him. But George said something along the lines of, “Why, at your age I had already discovered….” Why was there any comparison or competition?
Other genius parents had more sympathy for their kids and took the pressure off. But still, comparisons with the father’s legendary (and oft exaggerated) accomplishments made it tough for the kid. Richard Feynman was very kind and supportive of his kids,but his daughter, Michelle, was initially too intimidated to try anything academic. Nonetheless, Richard was proud of her and of his son Carl.
Linus Pauling (two Nobels) had several children and his son Peter did brilliant work on the structure of biological molecules using crystallography. The son contributed to the work that led to the Nobel Prize that went to Watson and Crick.
But my favorite example of genius father and genius son would have to be the Nobel Laureate in physics, Luis Alvarez, who contributed much to the building of the atomic bomb in the Manhattan Project, and his son, Walter. Working together they generated the hypothesis and found a testable way to confirm that the dinosaurs were wiped out by a giant asteroid hitting the Yucatan Peninsula 63 million years ago. And there are many other good examples (like Marie and Irene Curie, etc.). So, despite the psychological and social obstacles, sometimes the apple does not fall far from the tree.
When I was quite young, perhaps three years old, I went out for a walk with my father. And thus, together… hand in hand… we walked down the street in our housing complex in Bridgeport, CT. It was a nice Saturday. Blue sky. Sunny, but cool.
And as we walked down the street we came across a curious sight.
There was this old man in a blue jacket playing a wind-up musical device of some type, and a monkey on a really long leash….
organ grinder monkey
This guy was just strolling along and the monkey was going p to people. If we gave the monkey some change, he would take it and carry it off to the guy playing the music. A simple and nice cute distraction.
My father gave me a few coins and I gave them to the monkey. He crawled up onto me, took the money, raised his tiny hat off his head and then ran to the guy with the music box, and gave it to him. And then the guys started the wind-up music all over again.
This was my once and only experience with such a troubadour. And, I had long forgotten about it.
But … when I was going through “retirement” I ended up with complete memory recall, and thus had memories regarding this singular event.
Treasure the valuable memories that you have. They might take you to places long forgotten, and seemingly trivial in importance….
I believe it was Sir Richard Branson who did what he called the “Restaurant Test.” Part of his interview process was an “informal” interview at a restaurant. What the prospective employee didn’t know is that Sir Richard had already notified the restaurant that he was coming with a potential employee and to screw up their order, nothing major like giving meat to a vegan but if they ordered their steak medium rare, the chef would cook it well done.
Richard would then see how the other person reacted. If he was polite then it was onto the next phase of the interview, if they were rude he would finish his meal and that person would not be considered for the job
My wife and I agreed early on that whoever could draw the largest salary would work while the other was stay-at-home parent. Unfortunately I went to work (would have loved to be the stay at home dad.) Our deal included that after a 30 minute decompress and wash up after arriving home, our daughter was 100% my responsibility through bedtime. My wife got up in the night with her during the week, and I took the weekend shift. We tag teamed the weekend hours, but I took most of the time. My happiest memories were coming home and getting my baby to hold, feed, and change. Later it was seeing her standing at the door or front window waiting for me. She’s 50 now and remembers being swooped up and burying her face in my fur lined coat collar in the winter.
NO stress could survive the love of a dad and daughter.
“Grandma said she’ll give me a gift if I let her shampoo my hair,” he tells me the other day.
I can see how torn and conflicted he looks.
My son’s a swashbuckling, bug-hunting pirate.
You’d have an easier time getting a stray cat to take a shower.
“I hear you,” I reply, making sure she’s out of earshot. “My take?” he leans in. “If she wants to give you a gift, she should just do it. No strings attached.”
He nods and we exchange conspiratorial smiles.
“You’ve got to rein in that wayward son of yours,” she tells me after a botched shower attempt.
But I won’t.
Of course, I’m always encouraging him to be kind, respectful, and thoughtful with others.
But I won’t use the stick or the carrot.
Because when he’s older and someone hands him a rifle telling him who the enemy is, I want him to do his own thinking.
Because when he’s older and someone offers him a pill and tells him he’ll have the best time of his life, I want him to question.
Because when he’s older and someone offers him a quick reward in exchange for giving up his values, I want him to stand his ground.
That was the excuse I got during the last week of school when a project was due in my 7th grade reading class.
My students were told that the book we had just read, The Call of the Wild, was going to be made into a major motion picture, and they were to create a movie poster to persuade people to see the show.
The posters were to be judged by other students and staff, and the winner would be awarded a prize. The competition was intense!
Every student had a finished poster except Shane (not his real name). I wasn’t totally surprised, as Shane had been late with assignments in the past, but the excuse was pretty shocking.
“So, Shane,” I began, “when I call your dad, will he be able to verify that your project did, in fact, catch on fire?” I was ready for him to change his story, but he didn’t!
“Yes,” he replied, “and he’s really mad at me because it burned a hole in the living room carpet, so now I’m grounded.”
“Hmm, he’s good”, I thought, “validating his story with details…this should be interesting.”
Later, I called Shane’s dad, and sure enough, Shane was telling the truth! His dad explained that his son had used so much white-out on his project, that when he held a lighter to the poster board (to singe the edges and make it look old) the entire thing exploded into a fire ball, fell to the floor and burned a big hole in his living room floor.
“Wow, Shane! I was a bit skeptical, but your story checks out. I’ll give you until tomorrow to create a new poster. Your idea to make your poster look old is most impressive (as the story took place over 100 years ago) but DON’T burn the edges this time!”
The next day, Shane proudly walked into the class. I eagerly looked for a poster, figuring he’d be carrying it, but it was nowhere in sight.
“Shane, did you finish you new poster?” I asked.
“Yep, I sure did.”
“Where is it?”
“Right here.” and he gave me a crumpled ball of cardboard. “Open it up, you’re going to love it!”
I did the best I could to smooth out the wrinkled mess. Sure enough, there was a movie poster advertising The Call of the Wild.
“It looks great, but why did you wad it up into a ball?”
“To make it look old.” he said as if I should have already known.
Shane didn’t win the contest, he remained grounded 2 weeks, and that summer he had to get a job mowing lawns to pay for the damaged carpet.
I recently saw Shane at the state fair. He’s engaged and works as an auto mechanic. He remembers the poster project vividly and said everything worked out pretty well. They ended up getting the entire apartment re-carpeted for free and Shane got to keep his lawn mowing money.
Galatoire’s Crabmeat Yvonne
jacques pepin oysters rockefeller recipe 1024×694 1
Yield: 6 servings
Ingredients
6 artichokes
1 pound mushrooms, sliced
1/2 cup clarified butter
2 pounds backfin lump crabmeat
Salt and ground white pepper
1/4 cup parsley, chopped fine
6 lemon wedges
Instructions
Bring a large pot of water to a boil.
Cut stem from artichokes flush with the base and boil artichokes for 45 minutes, or until a leaf pulls off easily.
Remove from pot, drain and let cool.
Pull off leaves and reserve for another purpose. Remove choke and slice the bottoms. Set aside.
In a large skillet sauté mushrooms in clarified butter.
Add reserved artichoke bottoms and crabmeat. Heat through, stirring gently.
Season with salt and pepper and sprinkle with parsley.
Serve on toast points with a lemon wedge on the side.
Attribution
Source: Galatoire’s, New Orleans, Louisiana. Gulf Coast Cooking
Twenty years ago, a friend called me in a panic. She was on the backside of a bad divorce, she had a three year old daughter, and she’d just been told she couldn’t continue to live where she was. The little girl was with her father that weekend, but my friend was at a neighborhood restaurant with no money and no idea what to do next. I told her to come over, got her something to eat and settled her on the sofa because she hadn’t slept in something over 24 hours and told her that we’d figure out what to do next when she woke up. Ultimately we moved her and her daughter into our guest room.
About three weeks later, she introduced us to a young woman who was pregnant and not in a position to raise a child. (She was married. That wasn’t the issue.) Sitting at our dining room table, having just met us and not knowing much more than that we’d taken in our mutual friend, she asked my husband and me if we would adopt the baby. We’d fought infertility for a long time. We said yes. She talked to her husband, and the whole thing was agreed on by the following morning. About seven months later, I was her birth coach and had the incredible privilege of catching my own son.
He’s nineteen now. We have him because we let a friend in a tough spot move in with us.
Mine was in the Air Force. I had a racist for an immediate supervisor who always gave me average ratings on my performance. I didn’t realize how bad I was getting screwed until one of my counterparts (who was a total screw up) was shocked that he higher ratings than myself. A “3” is considered average (which I was getting on my reviews). This “screwup” was getting 5’s which is the highest score. I was thinking “how the HECK did he get a 5??” This dude missed time, came to work drunk, was reprimanded for fights….been to jail….etc. my record was SPOTLESS. Always the first on the job and the last to leave. Kept my uniform super clean. So I realized that I’m working twice as hard as this other dude and getting a much lower score.
This was in the 1990’s. I overheard a conversation with my racist supervisor one day about what he wanted to be when he leave the military. He stated that he wanted to be a highway patrol officer “so that he can legally hit minorities”. He always made crude jokes about Mexicans and blacks. As an African American myself I hated this dude’s guts. His leadership skills were the worst. I hated every day of working with him.
One day it was his last day of work. The shop was going to throw a going away party for this racist pig. There was an option to donate $10.00 to the potluck to participate in the party or miss out and work. I chose to work. I’m not donating a DIME to this dude’s going away party.
After he gracefully disappeared from the job I thought that would be the last I’ve heard of him. NOPE! I was wrong. Found out later that he did apply for the state highway patrol position.
The timing on this particular day couldn’t have been more perfect. Two men from the highway patrol were visiting our unit and I happened to be the ONLY person there. They asked me “who’s in charge?” Well, I’m the only airman in the shop so I was actually in charge. I asked them what’s going on? They told me that they are doing a follow up on a gentleman who applied for highway patrol who used to work at this unit. I told them I have detailed files on this person. What made this even better was the fact that one highway patrol officer was black, the other was Hispanic. I was so nervous in hopes that our main supervisor didn’t show up because he would give this guy a decent feedback. I wanted them to hear the DARK side of this scumbag.
I told them that he was a decent worker at best but here are some documents I wanted to share. Luckily I kept my old floppy disk handy with all of the stuff I wrote to the higher chain of command about this racist pos. The statements had dates and times I written down of his racist comments over the years. Too many to write in this essay. But let’s just say it was two pages worth (front and back).
The look of disgust was very apparent on their faces. One of them asked me “people like him still exist in the military?” I replied “shockingly, yes”. They asked me, “did you ever want to knock this dude the F- -K out?” (Many Times I did).
To make a long story short, months went by and I didn’t hear anything. Then one day I overheard a conversation about my former supervisor being turned down for his highway patrol job and was working at a Wal-Mart as a warehouse worker. In all honesty, I take GREAT pleasure in feeling that my sneaky swift actions were the reason.
I certainly wouldn’t laugh if a student of mine told me that – so have no idea why your professor did. But I wouldn’t give it much weight, either. And I’d wonder why the student told me. Would they tell me how tall they were? Or what color hair they had?
If eligibility to be in Mensa requires one to be in the top 2% (or something) of people who take IQ tests, that is a nice capability to have. But what percentage of university professors are likely to also be eligible if that’s the requirement – plus have become academically very accomplished in their field of study? I have no idea what my IQ is, it’s never been tested as far as I know – nor has it ever mattered to me. It is likely higher than some – and not nearly as high as others, both professors and students I have known in my well over half-century at a university (if you include my student years). It’s a place that tends to collect very bright articulate people.
So if a student of mine told me they were in Mensa, I’d probably ask them about it, what they did as a member of Mensa, etc., just as I would if they told me they were in an orchestra or worked for a charity or played on the soccer team or something. That is, it is information about that student and it might be interesting, but what does it change? I would expect that person’s intelligence to show in their love of learning, the questions they ask, the connections they make, etc. And all of that intellectual capability would be obvious even it they were not a member of Mensa.
I went to McDonald’s and went inside to place a to go order. While I was standing there, the manager walked up to me and handed me an empty French fry box. This was during the time that McDonald’s was doing the Monopoly game. The game piece on the fry box was already partially open. I peeled it the rest of the way back and it said it was a $2000 winner. I really needed the money for college at that point in my life. I thanked the manager profusely. She said that it had been inadvertently opened by a worker. She saw me standing there with my young daughter and thought that I looked like I could use some cheering up. Best trip to McDonald’s ever!
It seems the Dutch Government has forbidden ASML to sell EUVs to SMIC from 1/9/23
Yet orders placed until 23:59 on 31/8/23 can be shipped and fulfilled.
So technically ASML can ship orders to SMIC upto the time the last order placed on 31/8/23 is fulfilled
That’s for 21 EUV Machines & 50 DUV Machines
In September, ASML has delivered 4 EUV Machines & 17 DUV Machines
Meanwhile there is another legal complication
SMIC has now introduced a Distributor company who can buy EUVs from ASML and simply sell them to SMIC for a 10% commission (10% is just an example)
Now the Dutch order said only SMIC was forbidden from receiving ASML EUVs so ASML has also accepted 8 more orders for EUVs from this distributor
Technically Dutch Govt cannot specifically forbid ASML from selling to China as a whole as that is a major WTO violation
So they can only blacklist importers
So China can keep bringing up new distributors and placing orders and ASML is happy because TSMC has cancelled 24 Machines recently and i am sure China offered full price for the machines
Ultimately MONEY TALKS
Once again the US is furious but again it’s all about the legalese now
SMIC is forbidden so an agency buys and sells to SMIC
The Dutch look the other way of course
ASML is delighted because they sell more machines
My guess is this new agency will be blacklisted soon and they will incorporate more laws to prevent such measures
Yet that gets China another 8 machines plus a further 24 machines which I bet China will place as they are already in process
This means SMIC technically can make 7 nm and 5 nm Chips in decent quantities at least till 2026/2027
By then they should crack some breakthrough
So China has gained TIME and the Dutch have put business ahead of stupidity
Just like NVDIA and Intel just sold products to China which were slightly off the specs in huge numbers
He was working on a HUGE problem that took up the entire white board. The students were doing their best to follow the problem in their notes and in their minds. Suddenly he stopped, turned to look at us, turned red with embarrassment and realized that he got confused and lost in the problem. A student in the front row gently guided him to finish.
Instead of brushing this off he used this as an amazing teachable moment.
Here is what he did:
He asked us if we thought he was stupid. We collectively said “no.”
He then said that he was not a “melon head” and neither were we.
The lesson: He explained about the fight or flight syndrome and said that once he got momentarily confused, instead of going back to the place in the problem where he understood, he got nervous because he was in front of us, got into the fight or flight syndrome, produced adrenaline and got so stressed that he could no longer think. He then drew a picture on the board of a human brain, showed the reptilian part of our brain and the frontal lobes and explained that when we get too stressed we go to our reptilian brain and we need to return to our frontal lobe thinking. He gave us concrete strategies for exactly how to do this. (Breathe slowly, go back to a place where we last understood and start over). This lesson was SO impactful to me that I began to study the brain more and more and then I taught this to all of my students.
Final Thought: Even though my professor was teaching Calculus, his off-topic lesson was one of the best I ever had. He turned an embarrassing moment into an incredibly helpful life lesson.
This lesson was so important to me that I included the story as one of the chapters in my teacher support book, “Wait, Don’t Quit.”
I passed a great little convertible parked in front of a business with a “For Sale” sign and stopped to go look at it because I was considering a fun weekend car. It turned out the owner of the business was a past customer of mine, I had done work on his home. Two days later it was mine.
In the process of fixing every little thing and customizing it, I decided to pull out most of the interior to really clean it. Tucked in where the carpet overlapped, under the driver’s seat, was a gold ring with a small diamond. I wasn’t sure if it was real so I asked a friend at a nearby jewelry store. They confirmed it was real 18k and about ⅛ carat real diamond.
I called my friend who sold me the car. He checked with his wife and it wasn’t hers. I asked if they knew the previous owner but she had sold them the car before moving overseas and they lost track of her info. There must have been a clean title at some point because she wasn’t listed.
I doubt it was a wedding ring because it was so small, in fact the only finger it would fit was my mother in law’s pinky. She liked it so I let her keep it.
Battle with highest total losses:Battle of Vercellae
In 113 BC a large Germanic-Celtic coalition begins poking around Rome. They crush a Roman army and send the Romans into a panic. This army is 200,000 men strong- how can Rome compete.
Into this steps Marius, Uncle of Caesar. Marius was the most well-known general of his age and he set about reforming the Roman military with rapid speed, creating the more traditional Roman Legions we all know and love.
As this massive Army began to move for Italy Marius responded with his reformed Legions. What followed was a massive all-out clash where Roman discipline held back a far larger army. The turning point came when a commander named Sula counter-charged the Celtic cavalry and sent them fleeing into their own lines.
In all Plutarch reports 100,000 were killed, Livy reports 160,000, and Orosius reports 140,000 were killed.
Battle with highest Roman casualties: Cannae
Hannibal had invaded Italy and Rome responded by raising the largest Army in it’s history- some 90,000 men strong. The Romans used this Army to attack Hannibal, driving their strong heavy infantry forward in an effort to break Hannibal’s lines.
Hannibal had cleverly made his flanks strong and so as his center bowed inwards his flanks did not. This created a big “U” shape and the Romans found themselves being pressed from all sides. Then Hannibal’s cavalry came around the rear and surrounded the entire Roman Army. They then pressed in and killed perhaps 50,000 Romans.
I have to say, a number of answers to this question are appalling. What is most troubling is that many of the worst and most shaming of these responses are from supposed clinicians themselves. I am deeply bothered by this.
Is it normal, or lets say understandable, that you would feel distrustful and off about your therapist shutting down your queries about the nature of your relationship with them? Yep, sounds downright logical to me. When we feel distrustful it is because we feel unsafe in some way. You therapist refusing to engage with you around the experience of the inherent lop-sided-ness of the therapy relationship is problematic.
What you are experiencing is incredibly common, if not inevitable. I would dare say anyone who has remained in therapy for more than a few sessions with a therapist will wrestle with the freedoms and constraints afforded within a psychotherapy. For many this remains a constant felt tension throughout their therapy. It is an important aspect of therapy as exploring the tensions, dissatisfaction, unfairness, longings etc…with our therapists directly reveals our deepest needs and wants. Talking about the bounds of the therapy is the most fruitful of topics, a talented therapist would happily (if not giddily) help you to explore your distrust, or any other experience you may be having about being in therapy.
The issue isn’t whether it is right or wrong for a therapist to reveal anything about their private-selves (some do, some don’t). The issue here is that this subject has come up more than once in your therapy and you are clearly completely confused about it. Your therapist has missed a golden opportunity to open up a discussion about relationships.
It would seem according to some of these answers your therapist is not alone in completely missing the proverbial elephant, or neon sign, in the room.
On my first day working at Domino’s Pizza, I was introduced to all the workers. One of the delivery drivers was a guy in his 70s whom we’ll call Morgan. He looked at me and said, “I’d ask you out, but I guess you don’t date people your grandfather’s age.” Keep in mind that I was 17 at this point; this was my first “real job.” Since I’d been homeschooled, I wasn’t well-versed in social norms, but this statement gave me the creeps. When I went home that evening, I discussed it wiith my mom, who said he was most likely teasing.
Morgan kept chatting with me, and I came to know him as a very friendly person. However, a couple of months later (I worked there from halfway through summer break until Thanksgiving, when I got a better job), I was eating a piece of leftover pizza and he grabbed my shoulders, trying to take a bite out of my pizza. I warned him not to do it again, or I’d elbow him. He talked for weeks about how “M.J. has pointy elbows,” so nobody get on her bad side.
I was never comfortable around him from that time on. He kept making comments that made me less comfortable. One day, he said, “You’re going to make a wonderful wife and mother someday.” Finally, I brought it up with my parents again. When I mentioned that he’d given me his business card so I could “use him as a professional reference,” they realized what was going on.
My dad called the manager, who was the best guy ever with six kids of his own and decided to let my dad (a tough-as-nails, Glock-carrying Italian gym rat in cowboy boots) do whatever he thought was best. I gave my dad Morgan’s schedule, and the two of them had a nice chat out in the parking lot. Morgan said about five words to me the entire rest of the time I worked there. It was glorious.
I used to work for an EXTREMELY reclusive billionaire (for further reference in the answer he will be called Greg) as a personal aide. Many things that I have seen and been a part of during my fantastic service with (for?) him are covered by legal documents that demand non disclosure from me. However, there are still some things that can be shared.
The word extremely is in all caps because only one or two pictures of him have ever been publicly published, and he has never given a personal statement. He maintained a zero social media presence, and would always grumble about the dependency of modern society on rapidly changing technology. His family and him always maintained a low profile, choosing to utilise public transport if they could (however, they had extensive means of transportation and if he felt even the slightest inkling of a threat they would use another transportation method). The children attended a private school just out of the county, however, in my country, private schools are very common, so this is not too fancy.
But, don’t for a moment underestimate the man. He had an uncanny ability to read people, pick out things others would not see at first glance and was always determined to understand and learn about the world around him. He would anonymously donate millions to organisations that furthered research into space (is this a thing? I learnt this from another personal aide). He played his cards close to the chest, and if he did not understand a theory or idea, he had no qualms of ringing the relevant party up to better understand the concept, something he did regularly with his firm which led to some talks behind his back in the firm.
He always maintained a composure of calmness through out even the most trying situations. There was a time when a client agreement between his firm and the client had fallen through, and they only had a few hours to rehash all the details. Unfortunately, he had given the lead architect of the deal a few days off earlier in the week as the client company had, at first, shown a very positive outlook on the agreement. Greg knew that the architect was out deep in the country side where he was helping with the after party of his sister’s wedding. Cell service was not great, and while the architect was informed of the situation, he was in no place to rehash a multi million dollar deal. So what was done, within a span of 1 hour, was a helicopter from a local tour agency, that always had one on standby, was chartered, sent out to the architect, brought him back and they worked on the deal. The deal eventually fell through (it was beyond saving if you asked me), and Greg felt extremely guilty for the inconvenience he caused the architect. As a form of thank you, he proceeded to pay for the sister’s wedding, and gave the architect another month off.
The billionaire I worked for always attempted to remain frugal. He never owned any form of private transport (jet, helicopter, yacht etc), had a small car collection but always donated money or reinvest it into the market. He never showed emotions, but you knew he was a caring individual. His neighbours son had been involved in an extremely gruesome accident when his car was slammed by a truck. Knowing that financing the operation and hospital stress for the son would be too much for the mother, he quietly payed for the entire operation, and set up a trust that would cover the living and medical treatment costs for that young man for the rest of his life.
Greg passed away a few years ago, which is when I stopped working. His wife asked us aides if we would like to stay on, and while several did, I left to take care of my ailing Mother. As a parting bonus, she gave the aides leaving a substantial monetary bonus that will be enough for the rest of my life if I live carefully. I haven’t heard from them in a while, but their current aides say they are still the same down-to-earth people I had known them as.
Greg was a fantastic individual. He was an avid learner, an individual who did whatever it took and, yet, still managed to keep the small things in life within his view. It gave me great pleasure to work for him, and I definitely miss him.
The Ferrari 166 S
The Ferrari 166 S was a sports racing car built by Ferrari between 1948 and 1953, an evolution of its Colombo V12-powered 125 S racer. It was adapted into a sports car for the street in the form of the 166 Inter.
2 17
Only 12 Ferrari 166 S were produced, nine of them with cycle-fenders as the Spyder Corsa. It was soon followed by the updated and highly successful Ferrari 166 MM (Mille Miglia), of which 47 were made from 1948 to 1953. Its early victories in the Targa Florio and Mille Miglia and others in international competition made the manufacturer a serious competitor in the racing industry. Both were later replaced by the 2.3 L 195 S.
At the end of the interview, the hiring manager leaned back on his chair, folded his hands and grinned, “Tell me why I shouldn’t hire the guy I interviewed before you came in?”
I had to think for a moment. “Having never met or interviewed the guy, I can’t make an informed opinion.” And I thought the reason for the question was to see if I made snap decisions without any facts.
He shook his head, “Now that’s a cop out. Give me another reason.”
“Let me see his resume and give me a few minutes. Cover up his name.”
“I can’t do that, but I’ll show you his cover letter.”
He folded the paper so I couldn’t see who sent it, and moved it across the desk. I read the first sentence and said, “He makes careless mistakes. He misspelled the name of your company.”
The hiring manager’s eyes popped and said, “What?” He looked at it again, then said, “This meeting is over.”
And that was that. I never heard back and no one in HR would take my call. I don’t know if it was a fake letter he used as a test or a real one.
Yes, I was a financial manager at a golf & country club.
I took two weeks’ vacation and when I came back there was a note taped to my computer that said, “Do Not Open.” Immediately, I knew because employees were being let go daily.
Minutes later, my desk phone rang, and the NEW GM wanted me in his office.
I was let go for no reason given other than “Don’t take it personally”.
I stayed in contact with my assistant, and she was given my job at $8 an hr. She also told me he brought in his wife, children and many other employees that he knew from a previous job at another club.
All total, 23 employees were let go and replaced!
Karma got him….he got caught stealing and he was fired!
Some years ago, when my special needs kids were younger, we went to a nearby restaurant to practice behavior, social skills, and new experiences. They won’t learn if they aren’t exposed.
I agreed they could have anything on the menu as long as they agreed to try their choice. My older two tried something off the adult menu, but my younger one was less confident and asked to try something from the kid’s menu. I wanted this a positive experience so I said sure. He ordered the personal pizza.
I did chuckle that we came to a restaurant for him to have pizza, but we agreed. It was a great time, and everyone enjoyed. Well, I didn’t enjoy it as much when I got the bill. His personal pizza cost almost as much as a regular pie from the pizza shop. Well, we came for the experience and everyone behaved well. But next time, I had an impulse about eating out, I asked the kids if they were ok with the pizza shop, and they were. The restaurant was ok, but you could relax in the pizza shop. Ok, I learned a lesson that day.
She hated the pool and resented my father for getting it.
Upon retirement, my father put an in-ground pool, complete with a deck and privacy fence, in his back yard. I’d been moved out for three years at that point, and I usually visited during the holidays, when the pool was closed. I never saw it in its full glory except in pictures. I saw a lot of pictures of my dad and sister and other people having great pool parties.
My mother was never in those pictures. She was the one taking the pictures, I assumed. But she later told me that she hated the pool. It cost half as much as the house it was attached to. It was the single biggest purchase my father ever made for himself.
He got about eight years of use from it. Then, his health got so bad that his doctors told him to quit going in it, lest he have a heart attack and drown in it. They drained the pool that winter, and it was never used again.
Then he died, and for the next six years, my mother had a giant man-made swamp in her backyard. Every time it rained, she had to pump the water out of the pool. It attracted frogs and snakes. It actually reduced the value of her home, because she lived in a poor neighborhood and no one who could afford to fix and maintain the pool would want to live in that neighborhood.
Finally, just last month, she got it filled in with dirt. It wasn’t cheap, of course, but now she can have what was there before: a garden.
To the US, a REASONABLE RELATIONSHIP will be when :-
Xi Jingping retires or resigns
China demilitarizes and commits to the same
China relinquishes the One China Policy wrt Taiwan and cedes the South China Sea to US Hegemony
China prepares to be Number Two for the considerable future
China purchases and takes back US Debt to $ 1.5–1.7 Trillion
Nothing else will satisfy them
Even if China makes these confessions, some Neocons won’t be satisfied
They want a War against China and to see China broken and lose considerable power and the CPC to be ousted and a US style democracy established
For China, a REASONABLE RELATIONSHIP MEANS :-
Each Nation understanding that their laws are meant to be followed in each nation
No protectionism
Not using Geopolitical issues in Economic problems
Fair Competition and the ‘May the best man win’ philosophy
Win Win Partnership so that the Global Economy can gain
Of course China also has Wolf Warriors who simultaneously aim to develop their independent supply chain and to oust US influence in the Global South
In the end, the businessmen in both nations want what China wants
The leadership in China wants peace
It is the US that is divided because of its unstable politicians, between Neocons and Neo Liberals and frankly too many homosexuals and transgenders to truly gauge what a diplomatic partnership means
So today all China is doing is BUYING TIME and waiting for US to collapse under it’s own weight
About a year ago we had a strange series of UPS and FedEx deliveries. They all had our correct address but the name was something like a cartoon character.. think something like Betty Poop.
The first box was a plant stand. My wife took it back to FedEx. Two days later we got the same delivery! In the middle there were a few more deliveries.. my wife was thinking it’s a scam where someone would come by and steal the freshly delivered boxes. But the stuff we were receiving weren’t that kind of stuff you’d expect in a scam.
We have an HOA with a complete list of homeowners. There was nobody with a name even close. Last box arrives.. it’s UPS and a big box of wallpaper. I send an email to the HOA mailing list, asking if anyone else was on the receiving end of same thing.
I get an immediate call from a woman on my street about 10 houses away. She’s screaming that we are stealing her packages and she’s a decorator and we made her miss her deadline! Apparently the funky name was her new business name! She wants me to deliver it all to her immediately or she’s calling the cops!
I ask her what her address was and she recites MY address.. I tell her to go outside and look at the number on her house. And that I’m putting all her boxes out in my driveway and she should come get it!
Ten minutes later there’s a man in an SUV picking up the boxes. No apology, no admission of fault. I still wouldn’t know the woman if I saw her today!
Penn and Teller had this show a few years back called “Bullshit”.
They would debunk TONS of stuff. It was very educational without being skewed like some of Michael Moore’s stuff is.
One show was debunking diet myths. They went through the history of sugar vs. fat and the evils of high fructose corn syrup, etc…
But one pivotal bit was when they brought a stagehand out from behind the set. He had apparently lost a ton of weight recently. They asked him how he managed to do it.
This epic hero looked straight into the camera and said, “I stopped eating so fucking much.”
When COVID hit, I knew I wouldn’t be going out as much. So I decided to change my diet very VERY slightly. I would take smaller scoops of rice and take the smaller potato during dinner. Without doing ANYTHING else, I lost about 4 pounds in about as many months. I wasn’t even trying.
Stay away from hidden sugar. EVERYTHING in the U.S. has hidden sugar in it. Look at the ingredients. Is something ends in “ose”, it’s sugar.
Exercise helps, too, of course, but not everyone can do it. One thing everyone can do, though is:
Stop eating so fucking much.
Project Looking Glass | The Time Warriors of the 2012 Apocalypse
I grew up outside of a small prairie town. One of my best friends grew up about 10 miles out of town, and in my teens I used to spend a lot of time at his house with him, his siblings and his parents. They had a built in kitchen table and wrap around bench. We used to sit at that table have a beer, and play a card game called “pass the ace” or sometimes “spoons” with all of our friends, his parents and siblings.
I moved away, travelled the world, and never settled down. I was about 40, still single, and I still planned on getting married and having kids someday.
When I was back in Canada, I decided to stop in and visit his parents. I knocked on the door, which was never locked, they yelled at me to come in, and there was a tableful of people playing pass the ace, and drinking beer. There was my friends mother, his younger brother, and 5 other young people playing pass the ace. I sat down, had a beer and got dealt in. I started to get caught up on all the news. It was exactly like old times, talking, drinking beer, playing cards, with a tableful of young adults, in their late teens, and early twenties. Exactly as if I hadn’t left. Then it dawned on me, I was playing cards with my friends two sons, his sisters son and daughter, and two second cousins. I was thinking I hadn’t changed in twenty years, and suddenly I was an old man playing cards, with the next generation, and they were old enough to legally drink.
That was the day, I realized I was no longer young, lets face it, I was old. I remember 20 years before, thinking how cool his parents and their friends were, for drinking and partying at their age, and now I was that old man sitting at the table.
I not only remember the day. I remember the minute it hit.
I’m not sure it was the most interesting, but its stuck in my mind for years. I was in a nice lakefront restaurant, inside a city, so it wasn’t a big lake, but a small man made lake.
At the table beside me was a couple and a realtor discussing putting his house on the market.
The man appeared to be about 10 years older than his wife. They had one of 5 houses on an island in the middle of the lake, accessable only by a bridge. Very exclusive. The housing market was down. The realtor had told the man what his house was assessed at. The husband said, he knew very well, what it was assessed at, but he wouldn’t sell it for anywhere near that price.
The realtor told him it would be on the market for a long time, if he listed it that high, and might never sell. The wife started to say something, and the husband actually turned to her, and said “This is mans business, we know what we are doing, let us talk, if we want to know how to decorate a room, we’ll ask you” I saw the realtor cringe, he didn’t want to be included in that kind of conversation.
The husband then told him, that the way to market it, was to sell it as one of only five houses on an island in the city, maybe the whole province. I understood his logic, but this was not a nice man.
Listing a house is something that a realtor really wants to do. Even if they don’t sell it themselves, as long as someone buys it, they make money. But, and this is a guess, it costs money to advertise the house, put it on the MLS system, and if its unrealistically high, and it never sells then they lose money. Then he has to deal with a high maintenance client, that makes him feel like he should wash his hands, after every meeting.
In any case, the realtor said that if he wanted to list the house for more than 30 percent over market value, he would have to find a different realtor. The husband was stunned, and couldn’t believe he was being turned down. The realtor paid for the lunch and left.
I don’t know if they ever talked again. But I didn’t feel clean myself, sitting at a table next to this guy, so I didn’t blame him.
There is a sure fire way to discover if a guy actually served in the British SAS, one that I witnessed myself. Let me explain. I had a friend who was an alcoholic. There was gossip in the local pubs that he was ex SAS. No matter how drunk he would get, he would always laugh and tell you not to be so stupid if you aver broached the subject with him. So how did we find out the truth? At his funeral. A serving member of the SAS in full uniform, accompanied by a bugler (Non SAS) attended and gave a eulogy that had us all gobsmacked. Not only was my friend ex SAS, but his exploits were totally jaw dropping heroic. We were told that whenever an ex member of the SAS dies. His funeral is always attended by a serving member of the regiment. RIP Alec.
I was waiting in line at the dollar store, lady in front of me had an infant in her arms, and had an older boy maybe 5 who was holding his little sister’s hand who was about 3 to prevent her from running off.
She was purchasing 2 tiny packs of diapers, a few minor food items, and a 1 liter Mountain Dew. She had enough for the total, but it was spread among 3 debit cards. I don’t know if the clerk was new, or a new computer system, but the clerk was having trouble ringing it up in 3 payments like she needed.
I was off work at the time, between jobs collecting unemployment, so I was struggling also, but I could easily afford the little bit she needed, so I just stepped up, and swiped my card to cover her groceries. She tried to take the Mountain Dew out (a luxury, not necessity) but I pointed out with 3 children she needed the caffeine even though 1 was very mature, and helpful.
On my way out the door to walk home (nice day, and not far, so I walked instead of driving) I heard her attempt to stay her van, it sounded like a dead battery and when it finally started, a horrible belt squealing sound told me a belt was destroyed, or very loose.
I told her I’m a hobby mechanic, I don’t live far, and I told her I’d gladly look at it if she would like since I don’t live far, so she offered me a ride and another thank you for paying for her groceries.
When she pulled in the driveway, she was reluctant to shut the vehicle off, I told her I have a battery booster or my car to get her started if needed.
Opened the hood, and someone had replaced the alternator recently, but had forgotten to tighten the swing arm assembly that holds pressure on the belt. It took as much time to grab the tools as it did to tighten it correctly. It started right up with the battery booster, and the squealing was gone.
I pointed out the belt was looking worn out, recommended she get it replaced but it’ll last for a few months at least, and told her I would gladly put the belt on whenever she needed free of charge if she showed up with the belt.
I’ve been in her shoes raising my 4 children as a single dad, so the little money for her groceries, and about 5 minutes of my time to tighten the alternator belt was no problem at all.
I’ve been wondering whether or not to answer this… The “wrong person” is my daughter (stepdaughter really,but I’m Daddy now and forever so that settles that) and the people doing the “picking a fight”were her ex boyfriend and his father.. I didn’t personally witness this because I was in Iraq at the time,but believe me I sure heard about it.
Daughter is tall and not a delicate flower even though she has all the requisite standard equipment to attract stares and suchlike, including a startling resemblance to Gal Gadot ,and I always emphasized to all my kids the importance of self confidence ,so she carries herself with a certain pride. She has Blackfeet blood along with Irish and Norwegian and who knows what else, girl has a temper too,what can I say..
Anyways,ex boyfriend and father spot her walking down the sidewalk one weekend night and follow her,asking her to get in and go for a cruise.. She says no,but they apparently don’t want to take no for an answer and pull ahead and stop, ex BF Gets out of the car and grabs her elbow and pulls her towards the car,she pulls away and he grabs her again, by this time she is almost in the door. I had taught my kids to avoid punching someone and use their elbows if the person was close enough, which ex BF certainly was unfortunately for his dumb ass, because Daughter proceeds to elbow him repeatedly in the face with backswing strikes on her way away from the car, dislocating ex BF‘S jaw and shattering his eye socket and breaking his nose, and naturally stopped any hostilities on his part, but ex BF’s dad was pushed by this time and ran around the car and accosted Daughter, catching a 50 yard field goal kick in his balls for his troubles..I taught my kids well.
During the Japanese War of Aggression Against China (1931-1945), about 200000, or even more women in China were lured and forced by the Japanese army to become “comfort women”. They suffered various unimaginable and unspeakable forms of abuse during the war, most of which were tortured to death at that time. Even if a few survivors survived by chance, they were left with scars and even lifelong disabilities.
At the comfort station, they subjected women to inhumane torture, even if they were pregnant, they still had to endure the torture of the Japanese army. Once they fell ill, they would be killed. The Japanese army did not leave a way for these women to survive, and they even set up a series of “rules and regulations” that made these captured women unable to die.
After Japan surrendered, they were afraid that their crimes would be exposed, and they brutally killed all comfort women before leaving. We cannot imagine how desperate they were at that moment. Fortunately, there are many women who have survived by chance. But for them, surviving may not be a kind of luck, because they have been living in darkness for the latter half of their lives, and their survival is evidence to prove the Japanese’s inhumanity. Because they survived with strength, we could only know about the various crimes committed by Japan.
There is a lengthy documentary in China called “Twenty Two”, that tells the story about China’s surviving “comfort women” during the Japanese invasion of China. The film was directed by Guo Ke, with 22 comfort women participating in the filming. It was released in mainland China on August 14, 2017. Unfortunately, on November 9, 2023, Li Meijin, the victim of comfort women, passed away at the age of 98. It means that all the surviving women in the documentary “Twenty Two” have passed away.
Until now, Japan has refused to admit their crimes. However, history is there, and it’s useless for them to sophistry. But even in textbooks, they briefly mentioned or directly overturned the truth about that period of history, to the extent that young Japanese people today do not understand what happened back then. They can cover up, but Chinese people will never forget that shameful past.
Alpha Dad Overcomes Childhood Hardships To Gain Wealth, Respect & A Wife That Treats Him Like A King
Damn is this good. And man do I love his grandmother. You rock!
When I moved to Thailand, I was incredibly lonely.
Not speaking the language, I lived for months in silence. I desperately wanted human connection. I just wanted to speak with someone.
My standard for becoming friends with someone dropped to having the ability to speak English. That’s all it took.
My new best friends became a 70 year old English man and his Thai wife. They would take me to markets on the weekends sometimes and talk with me if I ate dinner at their shop.
When I walked around the lake every day, I became friends with a 40 year old Thai man who used to work on cruise ships and could speak a decent amount of English to me.
A little 17 year old girl from Uruguay that I met at the gym became one of my good friends as well, she was studying abroad to learn Thai.
For the first time in my life, I had friends of all ages from all backgrounds.
My whole life, I’ve only been friends with people who were within a couple years of my own age. The only older men I talked to was my grandpa, I’d never called an older man a friend. I avoided high schoolers. Forty year old men and women were my parents age, I didn’t want to hang out with them.
But, let me tell you, life became so much richer as soon as I did. 70 year old men have lived a lot of life and can teach you a lot of things. 40 year old cruise ship waiters can tell you about a lot of life experiences that you’ve never had. 17 year old girls from high school can teach you about their way of life in Uruguay and supporting them can bring a lot of meaning to your life.
I think most people limit themselves to a bubble of friends who are the same age as them and in the same stage of life. I think that really limits yourself and the depth of relationships you can have.
I want to stay open to everyone for the rest of my life. It’s so much better this way.
Cockroaches have made their way into my life, against my will, and to great inconvenience. Three years ago, my girlfriend cried into the phone for me to come over, “Please…please…it is twitching on my kitchen floor.” She sounded like a hostage. We went back and forth for two minutes, with me insisting I couldn’t come to her house.
“I’m busy writing. Just get a paper towel and flush it,” I said, trying to calm her down. It didn’t work. She begged and begged until I finally said, “I’m doing this once.” And then drove 20 minutes — just to kill a roach.
After we moved into our new house together, my war with the roaches truly began. Exterminating them took significant research and numerous failed attempts. Mine is a common problem, and has made me question the value of these little critters.
We should be impressed that a creature has survived so much research and resources put into their extermination, and pesticides that are only making them stronger. A roach always finds a way and there is no “walling them out”. To the shock of NASA’s employees, one even snuck onboard Apollo 12. They’d moved mountains to decontaminate the spacecraft and ensure nothing snuck on. Employees were even in denial, swearing the roach couldn’t be there when astronauts said they’d seen one. Nevertheless, one did, and Apollo 12 took off for the moon while gaining the nickname, “The Roach Coach”.
Roaches are so nimble that researchers at Cornell University explored how just flexible they are. In a test of increasingly smaller crevices, they discovered roaches could squeeze through 3 millimeter spaces, despite their back being 12 millimeters high. Their exoskeleton is indeed hard and breakable, but exists in sections connected by soft tissue that molds and bends. And even while pressed down tight with weight on their back, they can still move fast and with little regard for gravity. When adjusting for size, they run the equivalent of a human running 200 mph. They can run when missing four legs. They can climb vertically while missing two feet. Scientists proved that roaches could withstand 900 times their own bodyweight without taking damage.
A roach is also an extreme gymnast, with a hallmark move, where it quickly flips from the edge of a table to the underside, dangling by one leg in an instant. It often leaves home owners wondering where the roach went. And so, a cockroach’s incredible athleticism, nimbleness, and durability, make it the perfect model for robotics technology, as we continue to explore new planets and depths on Earth. These new robots may even save lives.
A new era of inspiration
At John’s Hopkins University, Dr. Chen Li and Dr. Sean Gart filmed cockroaches running and then played video back in slow motion, studying how the legs and arms sync and propel it forward. They took notes, in awe, and looked at means of replicating these efficiencies with robots. A cockroach typically deals with vegetation, leaf and stick covered terrain. It is highly complex to navigate, but cockroaches do so with extreme ease and efficiency.
This matters because robotics is moving into a new phase, where robots are moving from indoor testing to outdoors, which is why the most clever animal navigators, including snakes, octopuses, and arachnids, have attracted non-hostile attention from scientists. One of the signature challenges robots face, is moving through unpredictable terrain and being durable enough for random physical impacts.
The study of cockroaches, in particular, has led to a new branch of durable and penetrating robots that can climb high objects, crash hard, and still get back up and resume climbing. Professor Robert J. Full, of UC Berkley, has spent his career researching the nature of evolution-inspired design, and even attached tiny jetpacks to the sides of roaches, to test how well they climb vertically while being randomly jetted to the side. It was easy work — for the roaches.
His lab designed a tiny cockroach inspired robot, that squeezes through cracks, and even looks a bit like a roach. It could be useful for descending through cracks in rubble to search for survivors. It stands 75 millimeters tall and can squeeze down to 35 millimeters, which is almost, but not quite as good as roaches. It also has similar pliable and molding body parts, that allow it to bend and move in extremely tight and uneven spaces. Dr. Full routinely meets with first responders at disaster sites, to learn more about their needs as he continues to innovate this robot.
The necessity of studying them
It is as the old Sun Tzu saying goes, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” Cockroaches are a brilliant species, without actually being brilliant.
When I met with a pest control expert, his feedback wasn’t what I expected. He said, “Don’t just spray every inch of a room’s perimeter, they’ll know it’s a trap.” Then, he showed me how to put tiny drops along walls, and in the underside of cupboards and tiny cracks between furniture and sliding drawers. “Think of all the tiniest openings possible, and think like a roach — and you’ll know where to put the spray,” he said. It is this intrinsic cleverness and efficient navigating that could manifest robots of incredible caliber and utility in the coming decades.
What’s remarkable is that cockroaches don’t rely heavily on their nervous system for movement like other mammals. Even when thrown off balance, yanked around, blasted with wind, and spun like a top, their bodies auto adjust without thought. This matters for robotics because engineers are constantly programming and scripting robots to manage uneven terrain, and think about where their feet are going.
The insight from a cockroach is that, perhaps engineers shouldn’t try so hard with this programming method. They should rely on predictable mechanics, that have built-in means to traverse steep rocks and slippery surfaces. In short, make it more natural. This could impact medical technology and prosthetics, and help people who’ve had strokes or major injuries, develop more fluid gaits.
The animal kingdom is, in a sense, the only alien intelligence we deal with. Species are of ingenious design through an evolutionary arms race, and can move and adjust to their environment in ways we’d have never dreamed of. Which is evident when trying to step on a roach and you miss in the last moment, or even when you hit it, it manages to keep running. Who wouldn’t want this fortitude and evasiveness?
Perhaps what strikes me most, is that a bug with little cognitive function, has evolved to elude the smartest of all known species, and who is quite hostile to its presence. A future where nature-inspired robotics, combined with artificial intelligence, could save lives in search and rescue, improve exploration of new places and planets, and improve lives for the disabled. All thanks to our most ancient and enduring pest.
Mix crumbs together with butter or margarine thoroughly. Spread the mixture on sides and bottoms of a 9-inch springform pan to form a crust.
Take 2 ounces of fudge and spread on top of crumbs. Place 1/4 gallon of ice cream on top of fudge. Next, spread 2 ounces of fudge over ice cream then place 4 ounces of coconut. Place remaining ice cream on coconut and follow with 2 ounces fudge, 4 ounces almonds and 4 ounces coconut as done before. Top with whipped cream and remaining almonds and coconut. Place in deep freezer for 3 to 4 hours.
Notes
Roasted Coconut and Almonds: Place coconut on a metal sheet pan and put into oven at 350 degrees F for approximately 3 1/2 minutes, stirring every 30 seconds. Do the same for almonds but increase the time to 4 minutes.
When I was running from an abusive situation, i lived in a shelter on welfare. After my 2 month stay was up, i had to find a room to rent or they’d send me to a homeless shelter (the one i was in was for female abuse victims and their children if they have any. Since there was a high demand for rooms there, the stays were short). I ended up finding a room that was 500$ per month. On welfare as a single person with no kids, I got 709$ per month. I went to view the room and the landlord asked me why I wanted to live there. I explained the situation and he immediately said yes. I ended up moving in not even a week later. He let me live there for free with unlimited wifi and cable TV included for 8 months of my 13 month stay with him. After the 8 months I had a job and could pay the rent, but even then he said if I couldnt make the rent to let him know. Hed share his food from his fridge with me, give me cash money randomly with notes that said things like “buy whatever you want” and “have a nice day”, hed offer to give me rides to the store and job interviews, he offered to get me a bus pass (85$ for one that lasts a month), hed invite me to share BBQs with him, his wife and the other 4 tenants. He bought everyone Christmas gifts (a box of Ferrero Roche chocolates and a 50$ amazon gift card). He never asked for anything back. He became more like a friend to me than a landlord. He was amazing
My stepdad beat me when I was between 8 and 11. He would wait until I wasn’t looking, then sneak up behind me with a riding crop and hit me behind the knees. My mother would not come to my defense, no matter how hard I cried. I had no idea how to process this situation. I felt like my mother betrayed me and that the legal system was on her side since she got custody of us (my sister and me) when she divorced my dad. I had thoughts about suicide, but we only lived on the second floor, so jumping wasn’t an option. There were railroad tracks nearby, so I could have jumped in front of a train. Basically, it was the lowest point of my life… and I was 11. Somehow I found the strength to get past this and accepted that beatings were a thing now. I could make it through this. I had to just count on myself to deal with the pain and betrayal.
Eventually, he beat me so bad that when my dad came to pick us up for one of our weekends with him, I was bleeding from a ruptured eardrum. My dad almost lost it. He was going to kill my stepdad. I asked him to just take me to a doctor and deal with the rest of the shit later. He did. He also demanded custody. My mom accepted immediately. I knew then that I was a commodity to her. I’ve written her out of my life for the most part. We only talk on birthdays and Christmas.
My dad did his best and I think he really supported me up until I lost him to brain cancer in January 2016. He was my Yoda, my Gandalf, my friend. I miss him daily. He saved my life.
KFC – always popular for making rules and rolling it back badly. As a student in UK, I worked as a parttimer in KFC for two reasons 1) Money I get paid 2) Food I’m allowed to eat during breaks.
Staffs who work in KFC are allowed to take KFC food during lunch breaks. I know staffs who even took a bucket of chicken for lunch , but then they’re hard workers and smart workers – a pillar of support behind the enormous profit KFC makes per shift.
One fine day, the circle management decided to do some cost cutting – made a rule that staffs are allowed to take only limited food for lunch. A burger, fries and a cup of soft drink. Nothing more.
Rationing food for staffs — nobody likes it. The store manager would check how much food you take for lunch , particularly if he’s a bully , that’s annoying as hell.
Time for payback ….
We came with a plan.
If the store closes by 10 pm, we started to over cook by 9pm, pile up all the racks with cooked food.
Now the “kick in the butt” is back on the store manager – it’s his head ache to sell all the cooked food before closing or else the food is reported as “unsold” in records. This means he gets questioned for poor sales, losses his incentives and what not
He can’t ask us not to over cook because incase there’s customer flow and there’s food shortage – we can do nothing. That affects the rating
Above all , staff food was rationed as a means of cost cutting. Now the management has learnt -” you touch my food, now deal with the loss mate, let’s see how you make profit”.
Within a week , the rule of food rationing was rolled back. The management went in knees —” take as much food you want for lunch, but please don’t overcook at closing time.
The management has learnt a hard lesson — it’s not just the store manager but the staff who knows how to run a shift with better profits.
No food chain can make profits without staff cooperation
This one didn’t necessarily change how I viewed my mom but it sure gave me a good (but bittersweet) laugh.
My mom was a hoarder. Her home was filled with junk from wall to wall, floor to ceiling. She just couldn’t bear to get rid of anything because she thought she might “need” it someday. The fact that she couldn’t find it if she did need it was lost on her.
Anyhoo, the day came when we had to move mom into a care home. My sister and I sat mom in a cleared corner of a couch and let her “help” by telling us “yay or nay” on keeping certain things. In the background, our team was hauling soooo much crap out into a bin without her knowing. We’d bring random boxes and let mom “sort” through them to keep her occupied. One or the other of us would sit with her and talk while the others worked. In the end, we actually kept only enough clothes and books and personal items to fit in the care home room we’d lined up for her.
During the course of the day we noticed that mom had acquired a VERY large number of nail clippers over the years. Being tiny items that you need fairly often, she was constantly leaving them here or there and losing them. The people helping would laugh and say “found another one!” every time they spotted one. In the end we found about 100 nail clippers! (We also found a mini fridge that had been buried in the back, filled with sickeningly, gaggingly, gross, rotten, mouldy food!)
Sometimes you can laugh and feel pain at the same time, I guess. It was a time of bonding for my sister and I. Mom had to give her beloved dog Spike to a friend and move away from the town that had been her home for decades. It was very painful for all of us but in a way it was also life-affirming if that makes sense.
I bought a large framed picture of James Butler Hickock or Wild Bill. I loved the photo.
I hung the picture in my sunroom right beside the back door. It was like he was looking right at me and his eyes followed me everywhere I went.
I read quite a few books about this man and he led a very interesting life as a soldier, scout, lawman, cattle rustler, gunslinger, gambler, showman, and actor.
We even visited Deadwood, South Dakota where he lived the last years of his life before being killed at a card game he was playing in 1876, the same year Custer died. We went to the saloon where he was shot and visited his grave on Mt. Moriah, and there beside him was the grave of Calamity Jane who was buried when she died in 1903.
So at first, every morning I walked out that door, I’d say, “Morning Bill,” and everytime I walked in that door at night, I’d say, “Night Bill.” All in fun.
Poor old Bill was probably lonely out there as he guarded the house. Was probably also cold at times. But those steely eyes would sure look at me. Sometimes he looked sad, sometimes amused like he had the slightest smile on his face. He probably enjoyed my pipe or cigar smoke that floated around the room while I had a few puffs. But I feel he looks forward to my good mornings and good nights, and I feel that if I forget to say those things to him, well, might not bode well. Superstitious I guess.
So every morning and every night, I talk to Bill and I think it’s okay. Weird, but okay.
Every American should seriously think about this. Every empire that come and gone since time in memorial, went because of over intervention, over interference and over reaching to the point that it could no longer sustain itself. And they self implode and civil war is inevitable.
The U.S. is not getting there, it is indeed there now and almost beyond redemption. Seriously, Americans must jointly and severally destroy the U.S. military industrial complex before it destroy all of you. They are the single most important reason that the US is drag into conflicts after conflicts. Due to them, your real standard of living has not grown since 1960! Your great grand parents have a better standard of living compared to you!
Please think seriously about your debts. Just 10 years ago your debt was a mere USD10 trillion today it is USD34 trillion precisely 340% increase in a decade. At the rate you are going by 2034 the U.S. debts will be USD100 trillion at least! Just paying interest alone at 5% is USD5 trillion dollars per annum.
Seriously, don’t let anyone fool you! 5 trillion is so humongous your nation will never be able to do anything else. Today you can argue that the U.S. infrastructure is lying dilapidated, your homeless has reached a million, a third of Americans are in debt and can’t afford healthcare and college education. It can only afford one and only one thing. Wage more wars! Wars enriched 0.01% of Americans! Your politicians and the deep state!
China is a million times more healthier than the U.S. that is your problem right here! China’s saving is so colossal it save a U.K GDP a year. China’s debts is USD 15 trillion and almost 100% of it is investment that grows China’s capacity! Build its state or art technology and infrastructure, graduate STEM engineers the size of the entire US STEM experts each year!
This means China grow its capacity phenomenally while the US fall back every year due to your liabilities. Let me be brutally honest, you don’t stand a chance against China! But you may save the US that still remain a nation and a strong 2nd largest economy for 50 years till India catches up! Most importantly your citizens get back its prosperity and avoid total collapse! Do it before it is too late. Get rid of the neocons, eradicate the deep state, get ride of NRA and CIA.
China cannot be stop, the best you can do is be strong and wealthy again.
Top Gun with a Cat
Enjoy this FUN short video. I hope it makes your day. I know that it did mine!
There’s a lot of people chatting about “reptilians”. My (MM) opinion is that (as far as the Earth is concerned), our environment is not conducive and supportive of a human-sized intelligent reptilian extraterrestrial. The size betrays the need for large amounts of oxygen and that impacts the brains size and cavity.
Reptilians can exist, mind you, but not as intelligent beings. Not around our star, and within our present environment.
I had the opportunity to inquire to the Domain Commander about this issue on a chat that I had while riding the public bus. (Yup, welcome to MM land.)
There ARE extraterrestrials that have a reptilian form, and they are intelligent.
They however, are unable to operate within this solar system effectively.
Thus, any extraterrestrial beings that operate within our Earth environment take on other “forms”. Not reptilian.
That being said, one should not discount the reports that reptilians and shape-changing beings are common in the earth environment. They are not. What is instead being reported is a cloaked image that presents a reptilian image directly keyed to satiate the observer.
The primeval state is insectoid. Not reptilian, however, many human observers would find a projection of a large insect far too disturbing for purposes of contact, thus a reptilian image is preferred.
Better to see a human-sized lizard, than a giraffe sized preying mantis. Don’t you know.
Back when I was in college (early ‘70s) everyone hitchhiked. I would hitchhike alone or with friends almost every other weekend in upstate New York (yes, I’m a guy). Our trips were always taken on part of the NYS Thruway, and there were unwritten rules that hitchhikers followed. There were usually three, four or more hitchhikers just before the toll booths, each person or group would be spread out 20 or so feet apart. We would all have signs for where we wanted to go, usually the city/town/exit we wanted to get dropped off. The person/group that was closest to the toll booths had priority for being picked up, if you were just getting to the thruway entrance, you took the spot farthest away. As people got picked up, your place in the queue got better.
My friend and I actually started a small business. We got large pieces of white oaktag (two feet wide) and created stencils that we would spray paint with dayglow orange paint. We would sell them to people who were going to hitchhike, they were always the best signs of anybody looking for a ride, they loved them. We also made copies of tips and rules (we would always be amazed at stupid ways people dressed to be standing outside, sometimes in the snow/rain for hours). I’d say we got a ride 95% of the time, we never had any problems.
The topper though was: “You will have to wait until Monday.”
Er, no I don’t.
I paraded in front of that branch with a sign stating the facts – this branch did not have $1000 on hand – causing quite the queue to form….of demanding account holders.
Presto. $1000 cash appeared, with no delivery that I observed, nothing.
Dude, age 37, sexist as hell, has a theory that only very few women are smart. Very few. He could maybe count them on one hand.
He, on the other hand, is the love child of Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein high on NZT.
We are at a party, all PhD students, the women’s section seriously looked down on by this Dude. He of course has to start an intellectual fight over something one of the girls is majoring in. He dies to prove that she has grey spots in her logic/theory. Girl is super chill, Dude makes very little sense actually. He is mostly arrogant. Finally he names a study written by a female author, says Girl should only talk with such confidence if she is as smart as that woman. Yeah, the author lady is one of the few super intelligent “females” he would be able to accept as a partner in all terms.
Girl laughs and pulls out her laptop to show Dude how the study is actually her own article. She wrote it. She is the super intelligent author lady.
Laugh rumbles for minutes, Dude leaves a contrail behind in his rush to get out, trying to act hurt.
I was 19 and doing my internship in a midsize Pune based CA firm. My boss and I were working until around 8:30 p.m. Other employees had already left.
My Boss: Vikas, we should leave now, it’s 8:30 p.m.
In an attempt to impress my boss, with how dedicated and hard working I am, Isaid “Sir, you leave. I will finish drafting that partnership deed and then go.”
My Boss: Are you sure? It can take 2 hours.
Me: No problem, Sir. I’ll finish it this evening and set the copy on your desk before leaving.
My Boss: OK. Lock the office carefully.
Here is the catch, I had already drafted that deed, and it was ready to be printed out. I went to my desk, waited few minutes, ensured boss had left his cabin, then took printouts, neatly placed it on my boss’s table. Switch off lights and locked the office. Went down the cafeteria downstairs and started having my food.
But I forgot, there’s a balcony adjacent to my boss’s cabin. He was actually in the balcony talking on a phone, while I locked him in his own office.
But that’s only half part of embarrassment story.
My boss realised I’ve locked him in, saw the partnership deed print outs on his desk, he understood the entire matter (he was a smart and jolly person in 30s, who has gone through that same phase of internship).
He called me : Vikas, where are you? what are you doing?
Me: Sir I am in office, typing that partnership deed.
Boss : There’s no need to type that deed. I’m in my cabin now, holding the printout of that same partnership deed.
Me:……………!
Boss : So please come to the office, unlock the door, let me go home!
If he had scolded me, then okay. But he never said a word about my oversmartness.
It was a second date, and we went to an Indian restaurant. The waiter made a mistake with our order, and instead of causing a scene I was apparently completely sympathetic and understanding.
I say “apparently” because I don’t actually remember this at all, since being nice to waiters is my default mode, but my date really noticed. It seems that almost everyone else she’d dated would put on some kind of show in order to show how assertive and macho they were, no matter that it involved humiliating someone for a mistake anyone could have made – and she said that that was the precise point when she thought that I might have long-term relationship potential.
Fifteenth wedding anniversary this month. Moral: be nice to waiters.
My father was a very distinguished British judge and widely recognised as one of the finest legal minds of his generation.
Whenever he bought a car, he set up a savings account to pay for the eventual replacement. The account was with a major international banking group.
When the time came to replace his car, he discovered that this type of account had been mothballed, and no interest had been paid for years. He’d overlooked the notification small print amongst the endless stream of marketing bumf from the bank.
His initial complaint was rejected. So my father wrote directly to the Chair of the Board, pointing out that this policy discriminated against the bank’s most vulnerable customers, with an incisively argued opinion that the policy was illegal under EC consumer law.
Not long afterwards he received a personal letter from the Chair. After apologising profusely, he assured my father that the policy would be changed, and that many thousands of customers of discontinued accounts would have their interest paid in full plus additional compensation. This will have cost them many millions.
It’s not often that a single customer complaint changes the policy of a major corporation. Their lawyers must have checked my father’s reputation and realised that they were on a legal hiding to nothing.
They tangled with the wrong guy!
Copeland’s of New Orleans Bananas Foster
New Orleans Bananas Foster
Ingredients
1/2 cup (1 stick) whole butter
4 whole bananas, peeled and cut into fourths
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 cup light brown sugar
1/4 cup light cream or Half-and-Half
1 ounce banana liqueur
1 ounce rum
Instructions
Place half of the butter in a heavy gauge skillet over medium heat and melt. Add the sugar and cream. Cook for approximately 2 minutes until the sugar is dissolved.
Add cut bananas and the cinnamon to the skillet and stir to coat.
Remove the skillet from the flame. Add the rum and the banana liqueur.
Swirl to incorporate and place the skillet back on the flame. (**Be careful because the alcohol may ignite when you place it back on the flame.)
Add the remaining butter and swirl to incorporate.
Serve over your favorite ice cream, pound cake, or biscuits.
They had a warrant for the guy related to money laundering and racketeering, but they knew he was a hit man too. They were going to hit his house early one morning. The bust crew staged around the corner, and my dad said he would cruise by the house to check for any unforeseen circumstances, and verify the street address. My dad pulled up in an unmarked suberban, and stopped briefly in front of the guys house. At that moment, hit man dude walks out in his bath robe to get the morning newspaper. My dad (in plain clothes) said “excuse me, can I ask you a quick question?” Dude said sure. He walked up to my dads window. My dad says aren’t you so-and-so? Guy says yes i am. Dad flashed his badge and says sir, i got a warrant for your arrest. Dude looks around, then said really? Dad says yes sir, put your hands on my hood please. And handcuffed him right there in his bathrobe. Then called the bust crew and told them “well, i got him. He is in custody “.
Dude was actually super cool. Said he was gonna need a few minutes to explain this to his wife because she had no idea about this part of his life. They gave him that courtesy
When I was younger I had been babysitting for my nephew but they had recently moved to a new apartment in a part of the city I didn’t know. My parents had drawn a map to get me there, but I ended up not quite getting the same route back. It was gone 2am and I emerged onto a little roundabout from a different road than expected so I went around twice to get my bearings. And of course a cop car just happened to see it and pulled me over.
They asked me why, I told the truth and showed them the paper map. They asked me if I’d anything alcoholic to drink and again I truthfully said no. I don’t blame him for not believing me, given the time, a Saturday night and the situation so I took the breathalyser. I knew it would come back totally negative so I wasn’t worried. So of course it did, and they let me go. But before they left, the officer looked at me and very honestly and earnestly thanked me for my polite, respectful, courteous and cooperative attitude.
Apparently they don’t get pleasant, polite attitudes from the people they encounter very often and it was nice for them.
Not too long ago, I was “de-marketized” by my former bank, Royal Bank of Canada, for accepting too many payments from companies I work for from PayPal.
from the Financial Times
This is one of Canada’s Big 5 banks, and I had been banking with them for well over 30 years. I had actually spoken to their security department about this as they wanted to confirm that all of my transactions were legal and not something out of fraud or whatever, which I didn’t mind being audited on as all of my work was legal, just not paid through the usual ways.
The bank’s security had cleared me, but they were then overruled by some other department in their head office, and suddenly I get a letter saying I was being “de-marketized” which involves having ALL of my accounts, investments, retirement funds and so on be shut down and be forced to move to another bank. There was no way to appeal, no way to complain and no act I could do to stop this. So having exhausted almost all of the avenues of redress (there’s still the Federal banking ombudsman), I had to scramble to get all of my accounts out to another bank.
Now normally I would say, “good riddance” as I’ve found that the service at my new bank far superior than what I’ve encountered with RBC. RBC put me through essentially bureaucratic hell for a month as I had to fill out this form and that form…. but now you’re probably wondering where I’m going with all this.
Well, when I had moved my investment accounts (my retirement funds) out to another bank, they had the gall to charge me $150 for the priviledge to MOVE THE MONEY OUT despite them FORCING ME OUT. And worse, if I hadn’t screamed absolute murder to the highest mountains, they tried to RETURN MY RETIREMENT SAVINGS STRAIGHT TO ME AS CASH. To do this would AUTOMATICALLY incur an instant 25–30% INCOME TAX CUT OFF THE FUNDS, which would have been in the THOUSANDS of dollars! If it wasn’t for my new bank instructing me EXACTLY what I needed to do to avoid incurring the loss and telling them I was absolutely ready to put this whole mess on LOCAL NEWS, they wouldn’t have “suddenly” discover that there was a way for me to transfer the money without the tax implications.
So in the end, I still only got hit by the $150 transfer fee, but this was absolutely absurb as I never would have been hit with this if they didn’t force me out in the FIRST PLACE.
High Alert! China Is Now Launching Their ‘Submarine Killer’ To Counter US Nuclear Submarine
China commands one of the best naval powers in the world. With modern naval vessels, advanced naval technology with no rival, a majestic naval infrastructure and the largest commanding navy in the world, the PLA Navy is by no means playing around. A recent development has come into light which reveals China’s plans of developing a next generation naval demolisher that will definitely be a force to be reckoned with.
My husband was the 82nd paratrooper with the tweaked shoulder, I was the new wife hip deep in a Ford Pinto doing an oil change and tune-up at the Hobby Shop on post. He was an E-5 Sergeant, we didn’t have money for someone else to work on our cars, so “we” were working on the Pinto of Many Colors (think primer on all four fenders in four different colors — not me, I swear!) This particular Pinto we’d paid $186 for because the little old lady who sold it to us took $14 off because we’d have to register it — 94,000 miles later, I figured we got our money’s worth. But it did require maintenance.
Hubby was handing me tools one-handed. I asked for an extension for a stubborn spark plug and he went to “check it out” which you could do at the post Hobby Shop.
Someone from the next bay handed me the tool and said, “Try this one.”
I took it and said, “Thank-you, kindly.”
There was some inconsequential chit-chat, and I said, “You sound like home.”
He was from home, less than an hour from home anyway, La Follette, TN.
That was it, a short conversation with a soldier, a good ole Southern boy in a white T-shirt tucked into belted jeans. He was a little older than everyone else in the bay, but oil needed changing, right?
Hubby gave me big eyes and said, “Thank-you, SIR.”
It was the GENERAL Carl Stiner, his many boss’ boss, head of the 82nd at the time.
The Pinto started right up and ran like a top. Hubby’s shoulder healed. And the general went on to great things with Special Operations Group and to co-write a book with Tom Clancy. But I think of him changing his own oil in a tucked-in T-shirt at the Hobby Shop.
Strangest things on camera
WHAT ELSE COULD GO WRONG?
A man was skydiving one bright sunny day. He pulled the string to open his main parachute – but nothing happened – the parachute did not open! So he pulled the string to open his reserve chute – but that didn’t open either!!
‘Oh no’, the man thought to himself. ‘The way things are going, my car probably won’t start either when I try to drive home!!!’
This is a favorite story of mine. If you watch my show the original creature features on YouTube, You will note that I wear an eye patch. I have been blind in one eye for almost 60 years And I have made a point of wearing an eye patch in all of my ID photos because it makes it easier for people to know it’s me. Having a damaged eye is a hard thing to fake. So I went down to the DMV to renew my license and they said I had to take an eye test remember I am wearing an eye patch. They first told me to cover my left eye and read the chart, the eye with an eye patch. I told them that it would not affect anything as I don’t have an eye and I am in fact wearing an eye patch but they said I could be faking it so I had to cover my left eye and read the chart. That was not the stupid part. They then told me I had to cover my right eye, The only eye that can see and read the chart. I again told them that I was blind in my left eye and was in fact wearing an eye patch over my left eye which i’d be willing to remove so that they could see the lack of a left eye. They pointed out that despite being qualified to be at the DMV or Possibly because of it, They were not qualified to look at my eye and tell that it was blind and that I still had to cover my eye and read the chart. Again they pointed out that I could be faking it, There could be a hole in the eye patch that I’m seeing through. I said let’s just write down that I saw nothing and they said they couldn’t believe me until I covered my eye and then told them I saw nothing. I asked them what would be the advantage to me to lie on my DMV eye Test that I was blind. They couldn’t tell me but required that I covered my only good eye and try to read the chart. I covered the eye said I couldn’t see anything and they proceeded to give me my new driver’s license. I desperately want to work at the DMV as I don’t believe I am stupid enough to possibly ever be fired.
“We all printed off our copies of the speech and she had hers on her computer! I can’t even believe that. I was so pissed.”
“Did you tell her to print it?” I ask.
“Well, no,” she admits. “But I think it’s fairly obvious—”
“If it’s so obvious, you’d think she’d’ve done it,” I observe.
“She was probably just being lazy.”
“Or she didn’t have the same expectations as you. If you wanted her to do something, you should’ve told her. You can’t really be mad about something you never said.”
Many people think it’s valid to get upset about assumptions.
But if you want something done, say it. If you don’t like something, say it. If you need something, say it.
Don’t assume that others see what you see.
It never hurts to discuss things.
And it never hurts to say what you’re thinking.
Communication.
It rocks, yo.
NDE REVEALS: The REASON We CHOSE To Incarnate During This DIFFICULT Time!
My best friends 5 year old son stayed with me for a week (my friend and her husband went on holiday). I was pregnant at that time.
One evening after bringing him back home from the park, i was panting walking home. As soon as he got home, he disappeared into the bathroom.
I could hear running water, but didn’t think much of it. I thought he was washing his hands (and he takes long).
While he was doing his thing, I went to the kitchen to warm up dinner, I saw him pull a chair to the bathroom. Obviously this wasn’t normal. I followed him to the bathroom, but he asked me not to come in for two minutes.
When he finally opened the door, he’s filled the bathtub with hot water, added soap for bubbles, cologne for smell (he probably didn’t realize that soap had smell too). And he’d kept the chair just outside the bath tub so I could sit and soak my feet in hot water.
He said that’s what dad did when his mum was expecting his sibling. It takes away all the pain he said!
Obviously the sweetest thing a child has done
Wife Says She “Wasted Her 20s Raising Kids” So She Wants An Open Marriage…I Said I Want A Divorce
So you know how in the Lord of the Rings books, orcs are corrupted, debased creatures made by foul darkness in mockery of elves?
That’s kind of what English muffins are to crumpets.
If you’ve only had English muffins but never has your mouth known the blessing of a crumpet, you might think they are in some way kin, without realizing how the English muffin is a fel and evil mockery of a crumpet. To taste a crumpet after a lifetime of English muffins is to know true bliss, as if you’ve had your first hint of a brighter world, a breakfast delicacy buttered by the loins of Aphrodite herself.
Not my boss, it was an important client. A client we couldn’t afford to lose.
A desperate call came in Friday morning. An American investor wanted an English translation of their just released 68-page German annual report for Monday.
I knew it was a huge problem, but I stayed calm as I ran the word count to see how bad it was.
Doing the rough math, I told him we needed to find at least 3 additional financial translators (plus yours truly) who might be willing to work a 32-hour weekend on short notice. I would call him back as soon as I had news.
Now this was back in 1998, long before Google Translate and DeepL.
I sent an email out to 11 translators and got on the phone to follow the mail.
After 8 calls I had my 3 translators, but there was a catch. The least expensive one was asking for 240 marks (120 EUR) per hour. The most expensive wanted 400 marks (200 EUR).
That was outrageous, but as they all pointed out to me, only outrageous people ask suppliers to change their weekend plans on Friday morning and tell their loved ones they are working a 16-hour Saturday and Sunday.
Normally this job would have been quoted just under 8,000 marks with a one week delivery time, but to complete over the weekend it would cost 45,000.
I called back the client and told him we could deliver for Monday at a price of 45,000… or we could deliver a week later for 8,000. I asked him to talk it over with his investor and get back to me asap.
The return call came pretty quickly. Monday in a week would be just fine.
The moral of the story is, be nice, but be firm. Set a price for losing your weekend. It can be extra money, extra days off or maybe even a promotion.
Then let the boss decide whether it’s worth it. Your weekend belongs to you, but you can always sell it if the price is right.
It was on our honeymoon and I knew then I made a mistake by marrying him. We argued a lot. He was angry with me because I couldn’t read a map. I COULD read a map just fine, it was the map that wasn’t clear as to which way to go. I gave him the map and he couldn’t figure it out either. 15 years go by, our two daughters were 10 and 13 and starting with the mouthy disrespect, but only towards me. The girls and I got into a verbal confrontation about respecting me, right in front of him. He gathered both girls to hug them and told them I was “tetched” or in other words crazy and they didn’t have to listen to me! So instead of backing me up he just made it worse. It was all downhill from there. Time goes by. Every single night, just like his parents, come home from work, eat, shower, watch TV and go to bed. Repeat until death. Repeat, repeat, repeat. Rarely go to a movie or anything else. NEVER go anywhere on vacation. I could not live like that so I decided to start my own business, which did pretty well. Went by myself on simple vacations since he didn’t want to go. So after 32 years wasted with this man, he decides to cheat with my businesses book keeper who was my best friend. I should have listened to my instict, left him to figure out his own map and walked out while on our honeymoon.
Psychologist Explains WHY Women Have To EARN Affection
“Women treat men like men treat their jobs. Men treat women like women treat money”.
And…
“people want what they want. Not, what wants them.”
I had an offer and counter offer then agreed to sell. I signed the papers and gave them to his realtor. The realtor said he would take them to the buyer tomorrow. It would have closed in a couple weeks. I was on a tight deadline to sell, it was 1994 and tax law gave me two years to sell and time was up soon. Later that same day another realtor brought me an offer that was VA preapproved and could close that week. Since the first buyer hadn’t signed yet I was able to recind my agreement to sell and accept the new one. His realtor cost him a house
“You haven’t passed the trial period”, I said to the manager.
I was having this interview for a job I really wanted. The interview went well, but the employers explained that since they couldn’t tell from an interview how I would do in practice, there would be a trial period of three months. I was happy with that; if I didn’t pass the trial period, at least I’d gain experience.
So I began my trial period, but already in the first week I didn’t like the atmosphere in that place. The manager who was so nice during my interview, turned out to be loud, on the verge of being a bully. He was walking in the place like a dictator and people would go quiet every time he was around them. I’m prone to anxieties and I knew it wasn’t going to work for me. Yes, I needed the money and I loved what I was doing, but it didn’t do good to my soul.
I was taking my time deciding though, but then one day he was shouting at one employee so badly (and in front of others), that I made up my mind. It was nearly the end of my trial period, and at the end of that day I went to his office and asked to talk. He said, “Please come in, I was actually planning to talk to you after the weekend, we’ll sign a contract next week.” I said, “Thank you but I won’t be staying, I can’t stand the atmosphere in your place.” He said, “What? why? don’t take it like that, we are busy, it’s nothing personal, and you have definitely passed the trial period.” I said, “Yes, but you haven’t passed the trial period!”
I was 17. 2 cops pulled me over and checked me and my car out. They found a pair of pliers on the back floorboard. They were looking at me all suspicious like. I was shaking. One of them said “We’ve got you now”. I managed to say “For what?” They looked at each other and then one said “Cattle rustling” I said “But we’re in the middle of the city”. They started laughing. Turns out there’s an old Texas law dating back to the 1800s that forbids anyone from carrying wire cutters. We all got a laugh and they let me go.
I came to USA married and our daughter arrived 5 years later.
I decided to teach her Portuguese since it is our mother tongue.
When my daughter was 7 years old, she did not want to speak Portuguese anymore. One day, coming from school, she began telling me some situation that happened at school in English. I told her: “Please, tell me in Portuguese.” My English is excellent, but the reason that I wanted her speaking in Portuguese was because of her future, it is a plus when you can acquire a language as a child.
She got upset and told me she did not want to tell me anything anymore. I told her to go to her room and come back when she was ready to speak. It took her a few minutes, but her reasoning was valid: “Mom, everything happened in English”. But she told me the story in Portuguese, with some American words.
A decade passed, she is in nursing school where she learned Spanish. Since both languages have Latin roots, it was not very difficult to learn it.
Today she is a nurse. Almost every week she comes home telling me how impressed her foreign patients are with her Portuguese. The hospital administration asked her to do some tests for her to become their official translator.
Here and there she thanks me for not giving up on teaching her Portuguese. It has opened many doors to her.
They took all the power tools off of my service truck.
Told me I had to go see Bob Laublaub (not his real name) at the shop.
Yup…They’re firing me.
So I go into Mike’s…Ermmm Bob’s office. He has a termination slip and a check he is filling out by hand, my payoff. He says, “We are letting you go, it’s a clean layoff”. True to his word it was a clean ROF (reduction of force). I sign it, he already has. As soon as I sign it I am no longer his employee, so I ask him, “Why”? He states “We had a complaint from a customer that you were spending too much time in your truck smoking cigarettes”.
“Ohh,” I replied and handed him his copy of the termination form.
When one of my best friends from high school got married, she asked me to be a bridesmaid. I was pretty honored, and said yes. Then she told me I had to order a dress in a size 16. I was a size 2 at the time.
Her reasoning: she was portly, as were her bridesmaids, and if I was up there in a gown that showed how slim I was, I wouldn’t “match” the bridal party.
The dress was very low cut, and the only straps a loop of fabric on each side, like this, in lieu of sleeves. The skirt was much fuller.
What was I supposed to do, walk down the aisle holding my arms over my head, dragging two pounds of fabric? How would I walk with all the fabric tangling between my legs?
The amount of U.S. treasury notes held by foreign countries is well known.
China’s current holding of U.S. treasury instruments is, roughly, $859 Billion (U.S. of course). That’s less than one trillion.
And the U.S. treasury owes that much money to China because China loaned the United States that much money (although there’s probably some interest in there). The United States isn’t going to turn down perfectly good money just because the Chinese have it. For one thing, if the U.S. government refused to sell U.S. debt instruments to countries for U.S. dollars, those countries would probably trade them on the open market for Euros or something and drive down the value of the dollar. Then the Europeans who sold Euros would be investing the money in U.S. treasury notes anyway.
They are intelligent and play the long game. They’ve watched the effects that immoral contents have had on other countries for the past few decades and they’ve decided they do not want a similar fate for the youth of China. I commend them.
Meet the woman who killed the President of France with a blowjob:
Marguerite Steinheil was a woman who lived a very interesting life. She was a socialite whom became famous for her many affairs with very prominent French men at the turn of the century, she became embroiled in international political scandals and once attempted to frame her manservant for the brutal murders of her husband and mother, a crime for which she was heavily implicated but never convicted.
However, it is for her relationship with Félix Faure, 7th President of France, that she became infamous.
Steinheil was introduced to Faure at a social event and quickly became his mistress. She would often visit his office at the Élysée Palace and disappear with him into his private chambers. One day, having visited the Palace, Steinheil rung urgently for the servants, who entered to find Steinheil adjusting her clothing and Faure having a seizure on the sofa. Within a few hours he was dead.
The story that came out was that Steinheil had been performing oral sex on Faure when he suffered a fatal stroke.
It’s tragic, but undeniably a pretty awesome and quintessentially ‘French’ way to go. The Presidents legacy lived on through a ship named for him, which ironically went down a few years later.
When I was an ENT resident, I had a patient named Alvin who had been treated multiple times for an oral cancer. What happened on a visit after a biopsy stays with me today. At that time I wrote an article about it. Kind of a long answer to your question,, but I think worthwhile:
Alvin lay on the gurney, oblivious to the huff of the respirator forcing oxygen into his lungs. Pulling the surgical mask from my face, I reached for his pulse and checked his pupillary reflexes, matching the physical input against the digital readouts on the recovery room monitor. Everything looked good except that Alvin was going to live.
Alvin, a master woodworker, had cancer. At least, he’d had it before. Four years ago a small sore on the floor of his mouth proved positive for squamous cell carcinoma. Chemotherapy, radiation and three mutilating surgeries over as many years battered the disease to a standstill.
Throughout his ordeal, Alvin was indomitable. His face disfigured by the loss of half of his lower jaw, skin burned leathery by radiation, he saw no reason to complain let alone despair. Although he couldn’t smile, he never failed to joke with the nurses and talk about the mountain cabin where he planned to retire.
When Alvin presented for his checkup, there was another lump. My heart sank. He’d had all the drug and x-ray treatments his body could tolerate. Another surgery was out of the question.
“I don’t know about this, Alvin,” I said. “I think we’d better biopsy it.”
With a voice made raspy by his treatments, he said, “Sure, Doc. No problem.”
A week after the biopsy, Alvin bounced into my office after a wave and a wink to the receptionist.
He plunked himself in front of my desk, eyes still bright but unaccompanied by the usual deep laugh lines. He unshouldered a Woodworker’s Supply tote bag and set it beside the chair. “So what’s up, Doc?” he said.
The damning pathology report lay on my desk like a sheet of lead. My voice broke on his name. I took a sip of water and pulled myself together.
“It’s not good, Alvin. The cancer’s back. I don’t think we can stop it this time.”
Alvin nodded and leaned back, staring at the ceiling for a few seconds. Leaning forward, he rummaged in his bag, extracting a package about the size of a cigar box brightly-wrapped in silver paper. He placed it on the desk and pushed it across to me.
“I know, Doc, and I knew you’d feel real bad about it. I thought this might cheer you up a little. Made it myself.”
Speechless, I carefully unwrapped a wooden box with an intricate inlay of a bird on the lid and scrolls of a yellow wood encircling the periphery.
“Not bad, eh?” he said. “Now the box is amboyna burl from Southeast Asia. One of the most exotic burls around. Chinese emperors used to hoard it like gold. Now they use it to make the dashboards on those high-end Mercedes. Just a delight to feel it in your hands, isn’t it? Like butter.”
He reached across to outline the yellow scrollwork inlaid on the sides. “Now that’s East Indian satinwood,” he said excitedly. “India and Sri Lanka. Tightest grain you ever saw. Hold it up to the light and it looks like it’s embedded with diamonds.”
I ran my hand over the polished surface, turning it to catch the light, catching some of Alvin’s enthusiasm for the natural beauty of the wood and marveling at the craftsmanship.
“The bird,” he said, “is my poor attempt at a phoenix. Lots of different woods in it for the colors: bloodwood for the fire, granadillo for most of the body, plum for the wings, some ebony for the talons. Whaddaya think?”
I stared slack-jawed at the man who’d just received a death sentence. “Alvin,” I managed, “it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Knew you’d like it,” he said, his voice smiling for him. “Thanks for being my doc. We gave it a good run didn’t we?”
Kyle McDonald, a guy (26 years old at the time of the events) who in 2006 managed to trade his way from a single red paperclip to a house.
It happened in Kipling Saskatchewan, Canada. In July 2005, Kyle posted an ad on Craigslist: “My name is Kyle, I’m an unemployed 26-year-old Canadian, I want a house in exchange, starting the trade by offering the red paperclip on my desk.” The idea came from a popular Canadian children’s game called “Bigger and Better,” which involves trading an object for something bigger or better until you get what you want. It took 14 trades and one year, but he finally succeeded.
The first to respond, two days after the initial blog post, were Rhawnie and Corinna: via email, they offered a wooden fish-shaped pen. Kyle went to Vancouver and met them, completed the trade, then posted their photo on his blog. And so, he waited for another trade. In Seattle, the pen was traded for a ceramic doorknob made by a lady named Annie. The doorknob turned into a barbecue, then a gas-powered generator (September 24). Within weeks, the internet buzz about young McDonald’s idea reached the media, and CNN and BBC competed for his interviews. The electric generator was traded for a beer keg, a snowmobile, a trip for two to Yak, British Columbia (February 2006), until he got a van and a record contract with Metal Works (February 22, 2006).
Later, he could trade the contract for a year’s free stay in a house in Phoenix. Kyle accepted, updated his blog, and started again. But renting wasn’t enough for him; he wanted his own house. Then came the real turning point in Kyle’s already lucky story: metal rocker Alice Cooper offered an afternoon in his company in exchange for the year’s rent. Leslie, an employee of Alice Cooper’s restaurant in Phoenix, lived in the apartment rent-free for twelve months. After closing the deal, Kyle had many offers to choose from, and he made the only trade that seemed like a loss: the afternoon with Alice Cooper went to Mark Herrmann of Kentucky, for a KISS band glowing orb. His popularity helped in the search, and in February, director Corbin Bernsen offered a role in his next movie in exchange for the KISS orb. At this point, the town of Kipling stepped forward, offering McDonald a recently renovated house in exchange for his role in Bernsen’s film.
It was July 5, 2006, a year had passed.
Kyle had made it, and on the lawn of his little house with red windows, there’s a large red metal paperclip.
I live in the wilderness. One night, just after dark, I get a knock at the door. Other than a few neighbors who would have phoned. I live miles into the woods, and nobody knocks on the door after dark.
I go to the door and there’s an older man and a woman, in pretty rough clothes, the man is holding a pretty beaten up rifle.
He claims that they went scouting elk in the morning, left their car, and went on foot, and got lost. The rifle was just for protection from Grizzlies. He was going to show his girlfriend a valley of elk, that would blow her away.
I hated to break it to him, that there had been no elk in that valley since the wolves moved in.
Elk season didn’t start for another week, he had planned on poaching. But here was a couple in their late sixties that had been walking for 8 hours, so guest rules were in place.
So I offered them a drink. He wanted a ride to his car.
I explained that it was a 40 mile drive, half of it on rough roads. Even though his car was only 10 miles as the crow flys away.
So we hopped in my truck, I took his gun, before we got in the truck. Though, with my hands on the steering wheel, he could have taken it while I was driving. But it was a good faith gesture.
It took close to an hour to get them to their car. I waited until they got it started, and they drove out ahead of me.
Of course, they were flat busted, and I wouldn’t even ask for gas money, because they didn’t look like they had a penny.
Went to a local mechanic to get some tires replaced on my vehicle my current set was bald and I was traveling from North Carolina to Florida.
After the tires were changed everything seemed fine until I got above 60 miles an hour at which point there was a severe rattling/wobbling coming from the rear end.
After the Florida trip I took my car back to them they told me I needed a new rear axle. Never had that kind of problem before so I took it to the dealership I bought it from. They examined the car and asked me why I had roughly 6 extra ounces of weight on my passenger rear tire on the back side of the rim. I said I don’t know please remove it they did problem was solved. The dealership didn’t charge me anything.
Upon returning home I went to the scam artists and said I am going to do everything I can and tell everybody I can not to use their services and why. Even went so far as to keep the weight strip in my car to show people.
We live in a very small town and word travels fast they we’re shuttered never to open again 6 months later.
Commander’s Palace Sour Cream Pecan Coffee Cake
2023 11 23 19 46
Ingredients
Cake
1 cup (2 sticks) softened unsalted butter
2 cups granulated sugar
1 1/2 tablespoons vanilla extract
2 large eggs
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 pinch salt
1 1/2 cups sour cream
Pecan Filling
1 1/2 cups coarsely chopped pecans
1 cup granulated sugar
1 tablespoon cinnamon
Instructions
Heat oven to 350 degrees F. Butter well a 10 inch Bundt pan and dust with flour, shaking out the excess.
Cake
In a bowl with an electric mixer beat the butter until smooth.
Add the sugar, a little at a time, and beat the mixture until it is light and fluffy.
Beat in the vanilla extract and the eggs, one at a time.
Into a bowl sift the flour, baking powder, baking soda, and salt.
Add the dry ingredients to the butter-sugar mixture, beating slowly until just combined.
Fold in the sour cream.
Pecan Filling
In a bowl combine filling ingredients. Spoon 2/3 of the batter into the prepared pan, sprinkle the top with the pecan filling, gently pressing filling into batter, going completely around the cake until all remaining nut mixture is used. Add remaining batter to pan and smooth top.
Bake for 1 hour, or until a cake tester inserted in the center comes out clean. If necessary, loosely cover top of cake with piece of aluminum foil to prevent overbrowning.
A corporate party in a 4 star restaurant a guest was talking full advantage of the open bar, and when told he would not be served he grabbed at the bartender.
The bartender was a former Michigan state police officer and he grabbed the man’s hand and was punched in the side of the face.
An all call went out for help as every bus boy, prep and chef poured into this party and restrained the drunken patron.
As they attempted to evict him he dropped to the ground. The two chefs, large, strong and burly, fell with him. They lay there on the steps holding his arms when the police came through the door yelling at us.
“LET HIM GO!” the officer commanded. And so they did.
This drunk idiot screamed, shook off the chefs, blew past me and attacked the cop!
I’ve never seen a baton wielded in such a dramatic fashion. From his side it smoothly went up and across that man’s head with a this and a “uhg” he dropped like a rock.
The dining room didn’t react at all. We all went back to work.
Your U.S. CEO earns 100 times that of Chinese CEO! Your Employees earn 5 times Chinese worker but Chinese workers work twice as hard. Your employees expect 10 times more benefits yet product half the Chinese worker productivity.
Your ports and infrastructure is dilapidated China’s infrastructure is state of the art latest technology. You turn our bill shit artist and Chinese workers are well educated, willing to learn and highly driven.
Every shit you do China will do it better, do it faster and do it way cheaper than you. So go figure why everything China do is get done at a fraction of your cost! It is not nuclear science!
CHINA, in every respect, I know every yank will say the USA but I don’t think so, not anymore, mainly because of their debt, and growing daily, yes, the US have a very powerful navy, but SO WHAT? Ships can be sunk, and sunk quickly, missiles are the thing these days, and China is way ahead with their hypersonic missiles, double the speed of US ones. According to all reports. Also, they run rings around the US in speed and cost of manufacturing. Which also puts China in front.
An elderly neighbor died. He was a mechanic before he retired and had a large set of tools. His widow held a garage sale to get rid of his things, and she had a large rolling tool chest, filled with the tools of his trade, marked at $25. I took her aside and told her “Withdraw that from the sale. It is marked way low. I will sell it for you.” She demurred, but I talked her into it.
Three phone calls later I had it sold for $1500 to another mechanic I knew. I also managed to sell the rest of his tools at a good price over the next few weeks, including a few I bought myself at fair market price.
Sleeping at night is worth more to me than getting a good deal at a yard sale.
Because (many) human beings think in terms of archetypes, not individuals, and the archetype of the abuse survivor is not a man.
I recently (last year) had a conversation about this with a therapist who works with abuse survivors. She was quite blunt and up-front about it. She said (paraphrasing) “A man can have video of a woman hitting him, and many people will still insist he can’t be an abuse victim.”
Liberals often make this about politics. A lot of liberals will point to toxic ideas about masculinity common in conservative circles (men are stronger than women, women can’t be a threat to men, women are kind and nurturing while men are aggressive and warlike) and say “therein lies the problem.”
While there is some truth to that—-some people do discount the idea men can be abuse survivors because they hold traditional gender-essentialist ideas about men and women—liberals have their own dirty closets when it comes to this issue as well.
A lot of liberals will say “believe survivors” when what they actually mean is “believe women,” and “believe women” when what they actually mean is “believe cis white women.” (Trans women? Women of color? They have a very different experience when they talk about being abused. I personally know a woman who says “believe women” who silenced a woman of color when she came forward about abuse.)
So, why does this happen?
Because people think in archetypes.
This isn’t actually about left or right, and it isn’t even about abuse. Step back for a moment. What’s the first thing, the very first thing, that pops into your head when you visualize a welfare recipient?
For a great many Americans, the prototypical welfare recipient is an inner-city black single mother.
Would it surprise you to know there are more white people than black people who receive welfare in the United States?[1]
This is an archetype: a quick mental image of the exemplar of a group. Many Americans think the exemplar of the group “welfare recipients” is “inner city black single mother.” Many Americans think the exemplar of the group “abuse victim” is “cis white woman.”
People make judgments based on archetypes, not individuals. People who make public policy decisions think in terms of archetypes, not individuals. When the archetype of “abuse victim” is “white women,” you build shelters around…white women.
And the thing is, even people who will tell you “oh, yeah, I know anyone can be a victim” don’t act like that’s true, not really. Liberals will point out hypocrisy in conservatives and conservatives will point out the same hypocrisy in liberals, but this is a “humans think in terms of groups” problem, not a left/right problem.
The very same conservative who will say “those social justice warriors always go on about how men are bad and women are perfect” also think that a real man, a strong alpha man, is not a weak pathetic pussy who would ever be hurt by a woman.
The very same liberals who will say “those knuckle-dragging conservative Neanderthals always sneer at beta males weak enough to let themselves get pushed around by a woman” also think that in any patriarchal society abuse is always a phenomenon perpetuated by men against women.
They both have the same archetype. They have it for different reasons, but ultimately they have the same archetype.
My husband and I have a very “boring” relationship. We don’t fight, we don’t “just pick up our backpacks and go for a vacation”, and we don’t indulge in “let’s do something crazy” moments. For (up to now) over twelve years together (including get-to-know-each-other, relationship, and marriage), we haven’t done anything “just because”. Anything we do, we have a plan for it.
The love my husband has for me is not the kind of love that the teenage me once dreamed about (I always dreamed that someone would love me like Gatsby loved Daisy). His love is not a love that burns like lava, seething with passion. His love is like the essence of life, filtered through time and crystalizes into a steady, solid, giant rock that I can lean on. His love is so tangible that I feel I could see it and touch it.
And I believe it’s the best kind of love one could ever ask for.
We often dream about someone that willing to die for love, willing to die for us, and we are willing to die for them. Yet, I’ve come to understand that we don’t need an eventful relationship to feel fulfilled. It’s far more enriching to have someone that we are willing to live for, to build a life together.
I am out of the hospital, and I am feeling much better. I can’t wait to get back to business with the start of the new year. The world seemed to be passing me by. Just excited and ready, but my engine is purring. All is good.
…
STORY 1
When I was 16 years old, I went horseback riding with a girl-friend (not a girlfriend) and we were riding in the woods. Well, there were some low hanging vines, and sure as shit, one caught my neck and rubbed it raw. I mean, it was brutal. All my skin was removed.
To everyone at work… it looked like a big “hicky”; a huge sucker bite.
That wasn’t the case, of course, but the razzlin’ and all was really excessive, don’t you know. It took me months to get out from the hasslin’, but you know it was the early 1970’s and that kind of stuff was common in the work-place.
I was still “sweet 16” and never been kissed. That ended shortly afterwards when two of my “girl-friends” fought to become my girlfriend. Which resulted in a sidewalk kiss, that I will never forget.
STORY 2
We were leaving a “sweet 16” birthday party of a classmate. She, a girl named Robin, invited me to it, and I as clueless as ever didn’t know what to do. When we left, and we were on the sidewalk… walking home she stopped turned to me and and “Kiss me”. And so we did.
That was my first kiss.
Robin went off to college, got married, and last I heard was doing well. I’m happy for her.
People, as cherished as those memories are, there is no way that I want to relive similar events in another life. I am tired, and have no desire for another reincarnation. I’ll tell you what.
The star of the whole show, in my opinion, is the turnout of Big Business.
No, not what President Xi said, but the audience composition. Namedrop a household corporate name and the CEO was probably in attendence, Tim Cook and Elon Musk included.
The movers and shakers of Wall Street paid handsomely for the privilege of WELCOMING President Xi. In fact, the visiting Head of State may have gathered THE star-studded corporate audience in recent years, bigger than any Democrat or Republican convention. Even King Charles and the Pope will struggle to demonstrate the star appeal lighting up San Francisco this November WEEKEND.
It was a dinner worth trillions upon trillions in market cap. One need only imagine the private jets lining up to pay hangar premiums for parking rights.
America NEEDS China, economically.
That is why Janet, the top-ranking finance official in America, welcomed President Xi on the tarmac personally.
image 143
Note that both Janet and Gavin visited Beijing PERSONALLY to arrange the visit.
Both the tarmac welcome and dinner highlighted the conspicuous absence of the State Department. No more James Cook Hotel browbeating and public attempts at humiliating the Chinese contingent.
What’s the key here?
American corporations are suffering in the downturn and the captains of industry want guarantees from Joe that the situation with China will not deteriorate further. The chips they have on the table? 20–30 billion in election funding for 2024.
We can expect a freeze on escalation of the new cold war, but not a ceasefire. The militaries will resume direct communications, which is nothing more than “we’re continuing with the harassment, but we’ll inform you first, with your acknowledgement”. However, we can expect cabinet officials to either be gagged top-down or bottom-up, or instructed to be cordial and tone down on provocation. In other words, Gina et al. morphing back to friendly beaver mode rather than “feet to the fire” wolf warrior incarnation.
That’s the tone for 2024. I don’t believe Joe will repeat the “genocide determination” stunt next year, having committed to extravagant molly-coddling in San Francisco, amidst the sea of bipartisan support for playing the China card the corporate-sanctioned way.
Lobbying works, both ways.
This is why President Xi appeared relaxed throughout, almost as if he was on holiday, totally unlike the tense atmosphere in Anchorage, Alaska, back in 2021. People have short memories.
President Xi was being feted and courted, and he was only here after two years of intense US diplomatic efforts to re-establish ties torn down by the State Department, no less.
Crazy world, isn’t it?
Note: The welcome dinner also reassured the Chinese, and gave them the confidence to negotiate deals with the Fed. Corporate America’s turnout is the real deal, in a fiery red vs. blue battle to the death.
I’ll probably never be as successful as my dad and I’m perfectly OK with that.
If anything I’m proud of him. At one point he was overseeing a $50 billion annual budget as Undersecretary of Defense. The dude earned his Wikipedia page.
My father is also an excellent case study. He is certainly very smart. But it wasn’t like he was always the smartest guy in the room. In fact, he was keenly aware when he wasn’t. Yet many of my dad’s peers, who were smarter on paper, fell way short of his success.
Why? It’s mainly because of his people skills and his diligence. He is an excellent listener. He knows how to dial in and pick up on what is important. He is also conscientious and very ethical. He treats people equally regardless of their position.
I’d say if anything, my dad’s superpower is the ability to size people up quickly and judge their character.
He has a special distaste for self-serving people, which is probably because of his career with SEAL teams, where teamwork is a religion.
This is where many highly intelligent people fail. They lack the soft skills, the ability to relate with many types of people.
Cliche as it sounds, many gifted people also have an underlying arrogance they mask. Business textbooks are filled with case studies of executives’ careers being destroyed by pride. My girlfriend is a college professor and complains constantly about the incessant egos at academic conferences.
And to be fair, I can’t totally blame them. When a person is told from birth that they are brilliant, and their test scores affirm that praise, and they live in a world that prizes intelligence — it is probably hard to stay 100% humble.
No matter how talented you are, remember you are dealing with human beings in your career. Success isn’t a MENSA test. Soft skills matter—bigtime.
The U.S. should but it won’t and it can’t. The U.S. thinks like a racist, xenophobic superior white Caucasian nation that their neighbours should be kept as savage, poor, undeveloped nations that it can invade anytime it feels like doing. So they won’t help these nations. It is beyond them. People like Donald Trump can term them robbers and rapist so that he feels very good as the Aryan Superior. So the U.S. abused them instead of helping them.
Of course now that the Chinese decide to help them the U.S. will term it “Debt Trap” China will help to make these former Spanish and Portuguese stolen nations rich and successful.
Anyway they can’t help them. The spent all its money and resources in forever wars, war mongering, war financing, war orchestrating, chaos and coup tormenting. And barely have enough to help US homeless and poor. The U.S. own infrastructure were also 20 century relics and dilapidated beyond repair in the U.S. so they cannot help. Even if the wanted to they will set a thousand conditions including signing over their sovereignty to Uncle Sam.
She Can’t Answer This Simple Question About Marriage
My cat goes on a rampage when he wants to wake me up, knocking every conceivable item off of every flat surface until I finally give up on sleep.
He did it to me the other night. I’d fallen asleep on the couch and woke up to the familiar sound of the TV remote control hitting the floor, then the Roku remote.
I could just make out the little guy’s form on the coffee table through blurry eyes without my glasses. My smartphone was the next thing to hit the hardwood (I have a military grade case precisely for this reason), then he violently smacked a bottle of pills so hard they ricocheted off an end table and went spinning across the room.
Next he hopped onto the end table, upending a bag of restaurant tortillas and swiping my keys off. A water bottle went flying. I heard my vapor pen skidding in the opposite direction.
The little f—er is relentless.
(“Does it look like I’m judging you, human? Because I am.”)
If that doesn’t work — and sometimes it doesn’t, because I know giving in just emboldens him — and he runs out of things to smack and wreck, he’ll pad over to his litter box and start punching the cover flap with his paw because he knows it squeaks and it pisses me off.
He’s a super vocal cat too, so all this is accompanied by high-pitched trills like “RRRRRRRUUUUPPPP!” and “BRRRRRUUUU!”
And you know what the most ridiculous part is?
He’s not asking for food because he always gets a bowl of dry food before bed. He wants to hang out and snuggle and be buddies. I can’t be mad at him.
So yes, it’s pretty common for cats to wake their people up for no other reason than they want us awake, acknowledging them, or giving them scritches and affection.
It’s not always tied to more concrete requests like food, although sometimes it is.
You’ll also notice that cats have no regard for your sleep, but they’ll give you the feline death stare if you rudely interrupt their naps. Such is the pecking order in feline-ruled households.
It is possible to train them out of waking you, especially if they’re young. If your cat is a kitten then she’ll adjust to your schedule. If she’s an adult, well, good luck with that. You can break the habit, but you’re going to make sure you never give in or you’re just hitting the reset button by proving to her that if she makes enough noise, you’re going to get up eventually.
In that case, grab a package of earplugs off Amazon for a few bucks. Your brain will thank you for wearing them.
(“I am a sweet little kitty cat and none of these vile lies are true.”)
We were at an airport in Mexico, going through customs and immigration. Once your bag is xrayed you pick it up, and walk to this green button and push it. If the light above flashes green, which it almost always does, you proceed on. If the light flashes red, and the buzzer, buzzes, you get pulled into a side room and they go through your luggage thoroughly.
There was a huge line up. We had waited an hour to get to the X-ray machine. We were up next. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone from a culture that doesn’t believe in queuing, walking alongside the line, right up to the front, I actually stepped in front of him, so he couldn’t get past me, and his wife took the luggage and threw it on the X-ray conveyor belt. At this point I admitted defeat, and let them go.
They get through the x-ray, and push the button, in my place. It flashed red, and they were led off to a little side room, It would have been me, if they hadn’t barged into the line.
I waved to them as they were being led into the little room.
He is the manager of my neighborhood gym, a very rinky-dink gym.
He makes ~$35K per year. It isn’t terrible money. You can certainly live on that, but it isn’t great money in the US. His salary isn’t specifically why I have so much respect for him. It’s the context:
He was a big-time lawyer here in Tampa. He had a fancy degree and a job making huge money. He did it for 15 years. He had the respect of his peers, the fear of his opposition.
He was fully capable of continuing his relentless march as a litigator.
But he realized, “Nah – this isn’t the right life.”
He walked away – chose a low-stress job, managing this local gym.
When the end of the day rolls around, he goes home and work doesn’t chase him. He is free to indulge the rest of his life.
I see him 3-4 times a week while I sign into my gym. He is always in good spirits. Relaxed. Not troubled by some unseen threat that looms on his calendar.
We grow up. The people around us tell us they just want us to “be happy,” but at the same time, they are pushing this maximization mindset: maximize grades, maximize salary, maximize reputation, go, go, go.
You see plenty of people that maximize. You see plenty of people who don’t.
But how often do you see people who maximize and then walk away? Who goes from introducing himself as “Senior Counsel at XYZ” to answering calls, “Hello, ABC Fitness! How can I help you?”
It’s surprisingly rare. It’s hard to kiss the ring of ambition for so long and then drop it.
He’s a bit of a novelty in my life. On my bad days, I envision what it would be like to be him — that one guy who stepped through the paradox of happiness and ambition.
And although I suspect I don’t have the guts to do what he did, walk away, I have a surprising amount of respect for a guy who is capable of so much, yet aspires to so little.
He did it his way. And he’s happy. Does anything else really matter?
A girl I quite fancied took me to meet her parents for dinner – which turned out to be lasagne. The only prior experience I’d had with lasagne had been at school, many years before – about a millimeter thick, cooked in trays half a mile wide, with about 50p’s worth of ingredients and left to dry out under a heat lamp for a year. 🙁
But I had to be polite.
“I’m not very hungry,” I said. “just give me a little.”
Turns out that lasagne cooked by an Italian mother was rather different to the filth churned out at St. Mary’s. So I asked for seconds
In the 1980s, state law in Florida required that all public high school students take a one-semester class called Americanism vs Communism, or AVC.
The State-approved AVC textbook can be summed up this way:
“Rah rah rah! We’re #1! America, fuck yeah! We won WWII and saved Europe and Russia! America is the best at everything! Woohoo! Look at how amazing we are! America, go us!”
Like, seriously, it was embarrassingly bad. We’re talking Soviet-Union-textbook bad. If George Orwell included a page from the AVC textbook in Nineteen Eighty-Four, critics would be all “nah, bro, too unrealistic.” You wouldn’t think it’s possible to fit so much cringe into one book.
I cannot fathom the degree of insecurity that went into passing the law that required teaching this class in schools.
Fortunately, I lucked out. My high school teacher, a WWII vet and survivor of the Bataan Death March, hated and loathed the class requirement and textbook with every fiber of his being, and made that very clear on the first day of class.
He refused to teach from the book at all. He told us point-blank “The state requirement for this class is complete propaganda bullshit. As far as I’m concerned, this is a class in Russian history, and that’s how I intend to teach it.”
He made his own teaching materials for the class and it rocked.
China has already stopped investing in U.S. Treasuries.
Since the beginning of the Ukraine War, China has been selling its Treasury holdings. As of October 2023, it continues to hold about $820 billion of U.S. Treasuries. This is a reduction of about 18% in one year.
Russia previously sold all its U.S. Treasury holdings, after the United States began to sanction it in connection withe Ukraine War. In about 2017, Russia encouraged the world to do the same.
At the same time, the Federal Reserve is selling the U.S. Treasury Bonds that it purchased during covid.
The combined actions of Russia, China and the Federal Reserve are driving down the value of U.S. Treasury Bonds. In the past six months, the value of 30 year bonds has fallen by about 50%. This raises interest rates in the United States, because the U.S. government must pay more to borrow.
The higher interest rates have greatly limited America’s options, financially. Housing prices are poised to fall, due to higher interest rates. Even worse, interest payments on the U.S. national debt have doubled. Interest payments will soon exceed what the United States spends on national defense. Thus, as you can see, the tactics of Russia and China have limited America’s ability to fight wars. We are seeing just the beginning of the cycle.
Your question is — will the United States face a financial crisis?
The answer is yes. If the United States (a) continues printing dollars, and (b) continues supporting a violent response to conflicts in the world, two things will happen:
The planet will refuse to work with the United States during America’s foreseeable crisis; and
The U.S. dollar will collapse, due to continued printing and the planet’s rejection of the dollar.
The collapse of the dollar will be devastating in the United States, because American society is dependent upon cheap gasoline and cheap imports, which will no longer exist in the United States.
The United States imports 28% of its crude oil. This leaves the United States vulnerable to a falling dollar. Contrary to popular belief, the United States is not “energy independent,” and remains vulnerable. The United States imports 5 million barrels of crude oil per day more than it exports. That is a lot of oil that won’t be coming into the United States when the dollar falls. In addition, President Biden foolishly sold decades of oil stored up by the WWII generation in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. America is not ready for the foreseeable crisis coming to its shores.
Expect riots and shortages in the United States. If Biden continues to pursue violent solutions to global conflict, those wars will return to the United States when the dollar comes down. The American people will be fighting over limited resources. There won’t be any jobs in America, when the shopping malls close.
Normally the work product belongs to the company, not the worker. In the early days of solid state circuitry, my BIL developed much of it. Although his name is on the patents, the company owned them.
I was an independent contractor managing HOAs. ( Also a lawyer). I started by managing my own while my kids were preschoolers. It ran very smoothly so no one ever wanted to be on the Board until crazy ass lady and her group of idiots came on. True nut cases. One insisted on judging the Holiday decorating contest, then picked her own house as winner. One shot my dog. Board meetings were like “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”.
The Board was 3/3, three humans, three horses asses. When one human was on vacation, the three asses called a special meeting and “ terminated “ me. Now they knew I would just sue them on my 2 year contract so they made paying me for another 18 months conditional on me delivering all the Assn documents and computer data on fees, violations etc on discs within five days. This belonged to them.
I was happy to get out of the nut house. The Assn owned the file cabinets. I just put them on a dolly and walked them to a Board member’s house and left them. I downloaded all the data in computer language and gave them the disks.
Problem was, I used a program I bought that was made by a company that had gone bankrupt. It was a great program. Totally unavailable for purchase anywhere. But I had no duty to give them my program. The computer disks were useless. The finances were also kept on a very old edition of an accounting program. I had no duty to provide them with my copy. The financial disks very useless to them without paying a few thousand for the program. It was a very specialized program used by CPAs
They spent a fortune going through old files and bank statements and quarterly financials to recreate payment records etc. And, I had fulfilled my duties. I got the next 18 months of my contract paid. They also received a cease and desist letter from me. The Assn ‘s original documents had a problem and no lender would loan on a house without a document called a Subordination agreement. Only a lawyer can write one. I always wrote them. No cost. It was my own HOA. But the first time they copied one on a new sale, I hit them with a cease and desist letter and reported them to the Bar for the unlicensed practice of law. So then they had to pay a lawyer for the next 150 or so documents. Lawyers are not free.
So, what the employer owns and what the employee owns is a mixed bag.
I was in an elevator on a cruise ship. Some wiseacre saw my polka-dot suspenders.
He smirked, “Nice suspenders. You from Wisconsin?”
I replied, “No. Ever since my cancer surgery, I can’t wear a belt.”
His smirk instantly evaporated. The elevator doors opened on my floor, and I got out.
Soft tissue sarcoma caused by Agent Orange in Vietnam, They took out 1–3/4 pounds of me from my groin to my beltline. It left a notch where a belt would sit, so I can’t wear a belt comfortably.
Two years back, I was on a road trip on my bike to Meghalaya. While returning, as I was tired I was riding slowly. I was still some 70 miles away from home, and it was already dark. On the highway, I saw a car parked and some people arguing. I rode past them, however before passing them I caught the sight of two women crying and eagerly looking through the front window.
I took a turn and came back to the spot. I saw four boys, around my age, were arguing and pushing a man of around 50 years old. Turns out, the family was returning from some function and lived in another town which was about 90 miles from mine. They were stopped by these four boys on bikes and asked them for some money. They started misbehaving when the old guy refused to pay. He asked his wife and daughter to stay in the car and got down to reason with them.
I heard the story from the old guy, while the boys asked me mind my own business and get the f**k off. I simply turned and started walking towards my bike. The man begged at me to stay and help him, and looked at the women in the back seat and felt their eyes pleading me to stay. But, I kept walking!
Here comes the twist! Now, during my rides I always keep a hockey stick on my bike. Bad luck for the guys who never knew this. They laughed at me, calling me names. One even said, “Yeah, keep walking you p***say.”
I took the hockey stick and came back running. The boys didn’t get time to react and I started beating them. The blows landed everywhere and I think two or more of them bled as well. I didn’t show them any mercy. Someone threw some punches and kicks at me too, but I had a more formidable weapon than them. Seeing me in action, the man also jumped in; his wife and daughter also got down and helped in whatever way they could. All beaten up and even not being able to stand properly, two boys somehow managed to run off on their bikes while the other two ran after them.
I told the man to start the car and keep driving, while I rode in front of him in case the boys decided to get help and chase us. When we entered the man’s town, we went to the police station and lodged a report. The daughter was smart enough to note down the bikes’ number plates. As it was very late, the man requested me to spend the night at their place. Once reaching home, the family thanked me for helping them. He wouldn’t even allow me to leave early next day, saying that he can’t send me off without a proper meal. Family, friends and relatives came to thank me for my heroism. I stayed for lunch and returned home.
To this day the gentleman calls me occasionally. He even invited me to his daughter’s wedding.
Now, let me tell you something. I’m not the brave person they take me to be. I was equally scared that night. I was terrified. It took me a lot of courage to do what I did. After this whole thing was over, I was so proud of it!
Companies Are Ditching Hiring Fresh Female Graduates
My grandparents were too poor to afford a private jet or a private helicopter, they had to rely on government programs like public roads to get by.
They couldn’t afford to hire private tutors for my parents, and so had to send them to public schools to learn to read and write.
As one might expect, this cycle of dependency continued: My parents also didn’t have a private jet or helicopter, and they also had to rely on government programs like public roads to get by. They also sent their kids to learn to read and write in public schools.
And here I am: made lazy by all this generational welfare, I’m not pulling on my bootstraps nearly hard enough to afford my own private airport. Like my parents before me, and my grandparents before them, I depend entirely on government programs like public roads (or worse, public transit!!) to get to work.
There is no means testing in place for using public roads, which leads to rampant abuse. I’ve seen people use them to go for a stroll, even though they could have afforded a treadmill. Not only that, but these type of government handouts kill any incentive for most people to get a private helicopter, they’d rather stay dependent upon the government provided public roads.
It’s truly a modern tragedy, with no end in sight.
Years and years ago, when I quit smoking, I found my temper would often flare up during the first few weeks of abstinence.
I worked at a remote branch office with a staff of six. One morning when I came to work early, something went “wrong” and I was so angry that I impulsively gut-punched my office door.
The door was hollow core wood; I punched right through it.
I admitted my foolish outrage to my office mates when they entered an hour later.
And little was said about it; I believe they were sympathetic with my situation, and supportive of my effort to quit smoking.
There matters laid at rest; nothing more said.
Until the office Christmas party, when staff from all branches and the headquarters office (over 100 souls) gathered at some central location for a cocktail party and most sumptuous feast. Everything paid for by the company as a treat to us. This was followed by after-dinner drinks, and the “awards ceremony.”
The awards ceremony was a production of the employees and was in the nature of a good-humored “roast,” drawing upon such amusing things as had happened involving any of them over the past year. Some of the recognition was by actual funny trophies which were passed from one recipient to another; others were unlikely objects constructed of broom sticks, hub-caps, old radios, or heaven knows what.
Because I and my cohorts were from the remotest branch, none of us received, or ever expected to receive, recognition at this ceremony. We had our OWN Christmas party, for that.
Thus it was quite a surprise, to me, when I saw that my associate, Greg, was called upon by the master of ceremonies to announce the grand prize winner. He briefly described in very general terms the struggle of one individual to overcome a serious addiction. I was as curious as everyone else to know who, and to know the story. The room became very quiet, as the subject appeared to deviate from the laughable to the serious. The recipient was as yet unnamed.
Then a cloaked object was carried onto the dais, looking for all the world like a draped coffin.
With the words, “And the winner is, John Scott Geare,” the black drape was pulled away to reveal my actual office door, with a precise halo painted around its wound. Somehow, the damned thing had been spirited from our office, and carried the 60 miles to the party, unbeknownst to me.
And it became the stuff of legend.
You owe me half
Chick was only going out for a free meal. And he says…
Cajun Style Tip Roast
2023 11 09 15 20
Yield: 6 to 8 servings
Ingredients
1 (4 pound) tip roast
1/4 cup finely chopped onions
1/4 cup finely chopped celery
1/4 cup finely chopped green bell peppers
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons pepper
1 clove garlic, minced
1/2 teaspoon dry mustard
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
Instructions
Heat oven to 300 degrees F.
Combine vegetables, spices and oil.
With a sharp knife make 8 to 12 deep V-shape slit pockets, stopping an inch from the bottom of roast. Fill the pockets with the vegetable mixture, reserving some to rub on top of roast.
Bake uncovered for 2 1/2 hours or until thermometer reads 140 degrees F for medium rare beef.
Serve with pan juices.
Nutrition
Per serving: Calories 391; fiber 1g; carbohydrates 2g, Protein 61g, Cholesterol 160mg; Sodium 509mg; Fat 14g (32% of calories from fat)
A number of years ago I worked for a large US company. My role was in sales (industrial product). In my third year, I was selected for management. As such, I was trained in recruiting and helped district managers hire talent.
I visited one district and held a recruiting fair and ultimately recommended 10 applicants to the manager. The manager had his own candidate and asked me to interview him. In my opinion, his choice was terrible. He did not have any of the qualities successful people in our business had. I told him this.
Jump ahead six months. I become the manager for that district. My predecessor had hired the guy I did not recommend and did not even call any of the 10 I recommended.
Within three months i had hired five new sales reps. Four did very well and stayed for years. One failed within six months. The one that I did not recommend? I had to let him go due to poor performance and poor attitude. When I told him I had to let him go, he held onto my desk and told me he really did not want to be fired and would not leave the office. He would continue to come to work. It took several hours to convince him that he was not a good match for our industry. I continued to pay him for one month as he searched for another job.
Please don’t tell me I am mean and unfeeling. In my 30+ years of managing, I have supported many people in many different ways. The bottom line, if someone is not doing well in a job, it is usually because they are not trying or they are just in the wrong job. The latter is almost always the case. If you have a good, hard working person, try to find a different position in your company for him/her. That’s the mark of a good manager.
I first noticed this phenomenon with a guy named Dr.Layne Norton. Layne has a PhD in biochemistry. This man has forgotten more about the human body than I’ve ever learned, and I’ll have my Masters degree next month.
He’s an elite level powerlifter.
And a pro bodybuilder,
He also runs a youtube channel where he shares some advice on bodybuilding and powerlifting. I began to notice that the comment section was particularly toxic.
People were insulting this man’s intelligence, his personality, and his family.
I didn’t understand why. He seemed like a nice enough guy. Until I stumbled upon the answer.
One commenter said, “I’m sure you know what you’re talking about, you just seem arrogant though.” The comment had 100s of likes.
Scientists tend to speak in very absolute terms. Why? Because they’ve studied the shit out of whatever it is they’re discussing. And because they speak so unequivocally, people get turned off.
For example, I wrote an answer in which I said working out in the afternoon is best for muscle building and performance. The hormones and body temperature are in a better position to support a workout in the afternoon.
How do I know? I wrote a 20 page paper on this topic for school (supported by 30 peer reviewed studies).
Some guy told me that I was a liar. Why? According to him, testosterone is obviously highest in the morning… because men get morning wood…..
Like many have said, scientists have spent years studying a topic, and they’ve forgotten more about said topic than most will ever even hear. As far as I’m concerned, they’ve EARNED the right to be a little arrogant when it comes to their subject.
I was adopted at birth. From the time I was able to understand anything, my parents called me their Chosen Child and gave me a poem with that name. I was raised to feel special. When I was in 3rd grade, one of the spoiled little rich girls tried to make fun of me, saying mean things, like, my mother hated me and got rid of me so that I had to be taken in by strangers out of pity – really wicked thing for an 8-year-old to say. When she finally took a breath, I responded by saying that I KNEW my parents wanted me, they CHOSE me. Then I said “I bet you were an ax-i-dent!” and walked away. When I got home from school, my mother said she had gotten a call from that girl’s mother, wanted to know what happened, and asked me how in the world I knew what an “accident” was, laughing all the time! I was only 8, had no clue, but I had heard her talking on the phone when she mentioned a girl getting pregnant by accident. Obviously, she didn’t know I heard her or that I understood the gist of the conversation. She was laughing when she told daddy – and that was when I began hearing her say to her friends that “little pitchers have big ears” as she changed the conversation. I don’t know what a little pitcher is, and that may not be what she said, but that’s all that I heard before they started a new conversation!
If they said they would be home at a certain time and didn’t call to ASK if it was ok that they stayed out later, I would call the police. I give them 1/2 hour past designated time to call and if they didn’t answer 2 calls and 2 texts all done within 1/2 hour time frame, the police would be informed of how worried I am about their safety because it’s now an hour late with them not calling or answering multiple calls and texts. Let them deal with the cops questioning them about not contacting you or answering you. The cops will let them know you only concerned about their well being and they will also rip them a new one for informing you and also for leaving their child alone with a babysitter who is now upset that something had happened to them. Trust me, they will never do it again to any babysitter. I say any babysitter because after that, I would NEVER babysit for them again, even at 4x’s the amount of money.
This Creole pork sausage is an old local favorite dating back to the 19th Century, but Chaurice isn’t as easy to find as it once was. It would seem to have come to Louisiana with the Spanish, and was adapted to local custom and ingredients; the term is similar to the Spanish chorizo. It’s great with white or red beans, and good for breakfast too, with eggs.
2023 11 09 15 18
Ingredients
4 pounds lean fresh pork, butt or shoulder
2 pounds fresh pork fat
2 cups onion, finely minced
1 1/2 tablespoons garlic, finely minced
1 1/2 teaspoons cayenne
1/2 teaspoon chili powder
1 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
8 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons freshly ground red pepper
2 teaspoons dried thyme leaves, crushed
5 tablespoons parsley, finely chopped
3 bay leaves, finely crushed
1/2 teaspoon allspice
3 yards small sausage casing (optional)
Instructions
Cut the pork at fatback into small pieces. Mix together and run once through the coarse disc of a meat grinder into a large bowl.
Add the seasonings and mix thoroughly until the stuffing is very smooth and well blended.
Make into patties, and use within three days or freeze.
Notes
You can also put chaurice into casings; make each sausage about six inches in length.
Sometimes the simple and mundane are the things that we remember, and the memories that we cherish.
The very last ice cream that I shared with my father occurred about two months prior to his death. It was nothing “special”. We were riding in the car together, and he saw a Dairy Cream restaurant and suggested that we get an ice cream cone. They had “orange creamcicle” on sale, so he bought us two and we ate them outside in the warm September sun.
To outsiders, it was just two grown men eating ice cream outside, and really there was nothing overly special about that event.
But for me, it was a memory that I will always treasure.
Enjoy what you experience. because it is all so fleeting….
I was broke and had just received a food stamp card. In the grocery store I picked up about $8 worth of food. Standing in line I took the card out of my wallet, noting the lonely $20 bill that represented my net worth. When my turn came I swiped the card and waited. The clerk said “I’m sorry but there is only $1 available on your card.” I was in shock, because this was my first time using it. Falling back on my fine command of the language, I said nothing. I was confused, embarrassed, and a little sick. Finally I just backed away mumbling that I must have left my money on my yacht. As I was leaving a man stopped me and said, “you just dropped this $20 bill” and handed it to me. I thanked him profusely for his honesty. I also thought what a careless idiot I was. I managed to fumble away the last of my money and only the honesty of a stranger saved me. Well I stopped at another store on the off chance some mistake had been made at the first place, and that turned out to be the case. With tremendous relief I started to put the card and my recovered bill in my wallet. I found to my amazement that my original $20 was still there. I realized that the stranger had given me the bill, while preventing my embarrassment or any refusal of his generosity. This is not meant as a greatest example of kindness, but to mention that a major part of his gift was the lift it gave my spirit to know of such kind and generous people. The last thing you need during hard times is cynicism.
It’s a nice place. I lived there for eight years (2012–2020) and miss it a bit, now that I’m back in Britain. What shocks me so much is the hideous, made up distortion of news reporting about it in the West, But I suppose that the US has to get something for the $400m Congress has voted for anti-China propaganda. It is just humiliating that it gets so much and so few push-backs.
When I was 9 years old, my mom surprised me and my little sister with a trip to Florida. We live in the Midwest, so any spring break trip to somewhere warm is greatly appreciated. I was so exited to have a story to tell my friends when I got back to school. One night, my best friend’s parents came over to talk to mine. They moved to the driveway, and told my sister and I to stay inside. While they were talking I heard my dad’s text notification. He had left his phone inside. Curious, I looked at what the message said. I cant quite remember what that message said, but when I scrolled up, I read a message I should not have seen. It was from my friends dad, who was now standing in the driveway. It read,
“do your girls know ours are coming on the trip, too?” “No, we are going to surprise them”, was the reply from my dad.
I was so shocked! My best friend and her sister were coming to Florida with me! I worked so hard to conceal the fact that I ruined the surprise, up until we were at the airport. We got out of the car, and my friend was there, so excited that she got surprised. I faked a reaction, but I was so mad at myself for ruining what my parents worked so hard to keep hidden. I haven’t told a soul to this day.
You need to seek counseling. Negative people are often happier with negative people. Then you can both talk about the worst case scenario, or see the cup as half empty. I have friends like this, and I try to only hangout with them in a group, so I don’t get to depressed.
Yet my friend is truly happiest when he can complain about something. Even if he has to really reach for the negative. Like I made a ton of money last year and paid off my debts, but when you make that much money, so much of the extra money just goes to taxes. Then a half hour rant on taxes.
I am truly happiest when I am positive. My wife is the most upbeat person I know, next to her, I am a gloomy gus.
Find out if you can be happy, if you have a positive attitude, if so get counseling and save your relationship. If not, cut him loose, and find someone who likes to complain about things.
Returning from a service call in Honolulu, the lady in front of me at the TSA line had serious trouble lifting her (obviously very heavy) carry-on onto the x-ray conveyor. It set off all sorts of alarms when it went through, and the TSA guy did a manual inspection as a result. When he opened it up, the suitcase’s contents were revealed: it was completely full of cans of Spam (the processed meat product). I was absolutely convinced that they actually contained something more nefarious and that she’d likely be arrested, but the TSA guy simply zipped the case back up and sent her on her way.
I was next in line, and, noticing the puzzled look on my face, the TSA guy explained that Spam is considered a gourmet delicacy in Japan, where it sells for around 3–4x what it does in Hawaii. As a result, there is a steady flow of Japanese tourists to the islands, who pretty much pay for their vacations by doing what she did. I was born and raised in the UK, where Spam has a reputation for being gross and disgusting, and something you would only eat if you can’t afford any nicer form of protein.
Management was changed and they appointed new guys ex consultant of the company who pretend know everything – based on the textbook. I am the last two managers that stay in the company when management changed.
So, this new guy did all micro management you can imagine to make most of the people left very nervous and stressful. I managed to stay for another few months until I have felt enough is enough.
Just few days before I intended to put my resignation letter, this new guys and HRD call me to the meeting room and let me go with severance payment – a payment package…
What a wonderful world it was and few friends that knew I am about to gave up congratulate me for being fired…..LOL
This is something I learned very early in my career. I always feel thankful for my former boss who taught me this lesson.
How to ask questions.
The first day I joined the company, after handing me all my personal devices and necessary office items, he led me to my cubicle and told me to self-study the system and come back to him by the end of the working day with questions. So I did. I brought back my two-page-long questionnaire and handed it to him. He read it, then told me to sit down. “Alright, question one, ‘What does (feature) x do?’”, he read my question out loud, “What do you think it does?”, he asked. I answered him with the thoughts I gathered when I studied the system. “Correct!”, he said, “Now, you see, with the way you first asked the question, if I answered it, it would have taken me five minutes to answer, but if you had asked ‘Does x do this’ including what you’ve learned, it would take me just seconds to answer ‘Correct!’ and I also would know that you actually studied and understood it. When you ask questions that you need answers to, make sure it takes the least time for the person you ask to answer. Yes/No is preferred.”
I took that advice seriously.
Instead of asking ‘What does that mean?’, I ask ‘Does that mean [my understanding]?’. Instead of ‘What should we do in this situation?’, I ask ‘In this situation, I propose the solution as below, do you have any directions or adjustments?’. Instead of ‘What time do you want the meeting to be?’, I ask ‘I checked your calendar, you have three open slots x, y, z; which one do you want to set up the meeting with Mr. A?’
This lesson has been a great help in my work, not just with my bosses, but also with other team members/ clients as well.
Cajun Sausage Roast
2023 11 09 14 29
Ingredients
Roast
1 (3 pound) pork loin roast
1 pound smoked Cajun sausage
1 small onion, chopped fine
1 small green bell pepper, chopped fine
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1/2 cup cold water
2 to 3 tablespoons cornstarch
1/2 teaspoon Kitchen Bouquet
Seasoning Mix
Granulated garlic
Dried chives
Parsley flakes
Black Pepper
Salt
Instructions
Seasoning Mix
Mix granulated garlic, chives, parsley flakes and black pepper to make seasoning mix. Add salt to mix.
Roast
Cut the whole loin into smaller roasts, about 6 inches long. Cut a hole through the center of each roast, along the center axis of the roasts and insert the sausage. If the cross-section of the roast is big enough, cut two parallel holes. Open the holes to the size of the smoked sausage and pour about 1 tablespoon Seasoning Mix into the long holes and push something through the roasts to distribute the seasoning. Slide the smoked sausage through the longitudinal holes in the roasts until about 1 inch of sausage protrudes from each end.
Dust inside and outside with seasonings and salt. Allow to sit and marinate at room temperature for 30 minutes.
Place the roasts on a rack inside a covered roaster.
Pour the cut-up onion and bell pepper into bottom of roaster and place, uncovered, in a 425 degrees F oven for approximately 30 minutes or until seared lightly on the outside.
Cover roaster and continue to cook with a meat thermometer until done inside, about 160 – 165 degrees F on meat thermometer.
Remove roasts, trim end faces of excess sausage and chop fine.
Add cornstarch dissolved in cold water.
Add soy sauce and thicken sauce over medium heat.
Adjust color of sauce with Kitchen Bouquet and adjust seasonings.
After I left the workforce, my wife continued working. I normally waited to get up until after she left to keep out of the way. This oneorning, I hear the door close as she is leaving. I get up heading in to start the coffee. On stepping into the kitchen the 1st thing I see is her phone on the charger. Run to the window to see her on the road and gone. I run back to the bedroom to grab my phone to call her to come back and get her phone. When her phone rings I compound the idiocy thinking who would be calling her this early? They need to get off the phone so…she…can…answer…my…call. Then to cap it all, as I’m closing my phone cancelling the call, I’m looking around to see if anyone saw me. 2 of the cats were dying laughing and the other 2 shaking their heads as if thinking what an idiot.
I’d been laid off at a position that did not pay well, but the work was easy. I was interviewing with this other company, and the guy (owner? one of the owners?) would not proceed with the interview unless I filled in my salary from my previous job, so I did.
He offered $3K more per year.
BUT… whereas my old job was 37.5 hours per week, this guy was expecting 55–60 hours per week. The benefit was that they were a small company, and their product was going to be big, and I’d be one of the people who benefited when someone big bought out the product.
Calculating the hours, I told him that, on a per-hour basis, he was offering me between 69% and 76% of what I was getting at the previous job, to which he restated his script about getting in on the ground floor.
A few days later, I got another, much better offer. It was an hourly contract, but 84% MORE than the previous job, and about 2–1/2 times (per hour) what he was offering. I took it.
A day or two after that, he called asking if I was still interested, and I told him I took another position “at MUCH higher pay,” I said, and definitely put the weight/emphasis on the word much. I didn’t tell him how much, but again, he tried to sell me on his “Getting in on the ground floor” shtick.
I couldn’t believe he was still trying to sell me on that.
Two juicy 100% U.S. Beef patties with two slices of melted American cheese.
image 128
Sandwiched with lettuce, tomato, onion, pickles and A&W classic sauce all on a lightly toasted bun… it doesn’t get better than this – we believe!! Because our country imported almost everything in the old days. (And still do very much in 2023).
image 11
1963 in fact was the year that put American popular food into our collective psyche.
image 127
Now here’s a genuine all-American brand serving all-American fare. And Malaysians fell in 💕💕😘 with new food that truly touched the hearts.
1963 was the first time that burgers were sized ‘papa, mama, baby burger’ – 🥰 cute! (Come to think of it, burgers don’t exist before A&W Malaysia.)
image 126
It was a year that a drink sensation was introduced — in big frosted glass mugs – the A&W Root Beer and Root Beer Float – the two most lovable, must-drink beverages ever since the country’s independence 1957. (Today there are A&W canned root beer in convenience stores everywhere.)
image 125
A&W Root Beer and Coney Dog and Curly Fries are synonymous with A&W and vice versa. To borrow a line, “we’re still loving it, mucho!!”
I’d like to think that the burger in “1950s America” would not vary too much from today’s A&W ‘Papa Burger’.
image 124
The bear is back!
image 123
New A&W retro outlets in Malaysia give you the charming ‘American diner experience’…
image 122
… who says you can’t bring back the good ol’ days?!!!
Do you know which is the laziest nation in Europe, the one that works the fewest hours? Let me give you a little hint, this is their capital:
Berlin
A study by OECD released recently showed in no uncertain terms Germans are the laziest nation in Europe in terms of hours worked. They have the largest economy and one of the largest per capita incomes in EU and worldwide. It gets weirder.
Do you know which nation works the most hours? The most hardworking nation in Europe, clocking in almost 50% hours than Germans in a given year is obvious at this point: Greeks. For every two hour a German works in a year, a Greek works three. For that they’re labeled as the lazy wealth moochers of the south that live easily on their spectacular seaside and glorious history.
Something doesn’t quite add up, does it? It turns out that hours worked is only relevant in a few low added value professions, such as store clercks, recepcionists, call center operators, night guards and the like. Those are professions that are necessary, but they’re low skilled, don’t pay well and don’t add much value to the economy.
What drives a modern economy forward are innovators and engineers who push the boundaries of what is possible. Their productivity is almost inversly proportional to horus worked. You only have that much creative energies to do something new and you need time to recharge. You don’t work as well when you’re tired and simply sitting at work comitting time theft does not equal to productivity. Germans work hard, very hard, during the time they’re at work. But when they clock out, always on time, they leave the job behind and enjoy themselves so their next work day is strong and productive once more.
The same goes for holidays. Germans are notorious for long holiday breaks and this again improves productivity. Your best becomes better if you’re well rested and you’re more willing to give your best to a company that appreciates your effort and talent.
By contrast, Americans often view workers as a nuisance they have to pay for and treat them accordingly. Why would you give your best for a company that only gives you enough not to run away to be treated like a slightly less smelly dropping instead. All of Europe is far ahead of USA on this matter and four weeks of holiday are the statuatory minimum given to all, not some great benefit to droll upon. Five to six weeks are not at all uncommon and you can go well beyond that in certain occupations (i.e. working with radiation, mental hospital employees, etc).
Cat story
A tuxedo cat named Andrew was found in a Bronx park, malnourished and in pain. A local rescuer and Little Wanderers NYC provided medical attention, including tooth extraction, for Andrew’s severe oral infection. After treatment, Andrew became affectionate and was taken into foster care where he enjoyed being indoors and bonded with his caregivers. He developed a close bond with a foster volunteer named Jeff, following him around and showering him with affection. Andrew’s transformation and loving personality have made him a permanent member of Jeff’s family, and the two share a special bond.
Unfortunately, there is this thing called van Loon’s law. It dictates: The level of technological progress in any society is inversely proportional to the number of slaves in the said society.
So you have to first get rid of slavery before any technological advancement will happen. In a slave-owning society, all technology will remain as mere curiosities and gadgets.
Heron’s aeolipili – the first functional steam turbine. It remained as mere clever gadget as there were enough slaves in the Hellenistic world to do all the tasks of slaves.
So first you had to get rid of slavery. The only way to get rid of slavery is a religion which prohibits slavery. There have historically been four of them: Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism and Zoroastrianism. So the technological revolution could have begun only in those cultural spheres.
Slavery ended in Europe with Christianization – first in the Roman Europe by the Dark Ages and then in the Northern Europe at the end of the Viking era. This dictates the earliest point when technological evolution can begin for good.
Once you get rid of slavery, you need to invent rudimentary technology – i.e. harness the forces of the nature – wind, tide, water etc. You need to develop metallurgy and chemical engineering, and material sciences. Anything which saves human labour, as the price of human labour is now the bottleneck. The Dark Ages were actually a serious period of gadgeteering, and laid the basis for the real technological revolution.
I mean, as fun as it is to whip the woman who is your sex slave in the night, to grind the quern-stones at the day, windmills and watermills are just far more efficient to produce flour.
The thing with science fiction writers is that most of them are engineers, and the heroes have open budgets and do not need to worry about economy. But to develop technology, you need a stable economy. You need to develop Capitalism first. Sorry, no such thing in the bazaar economies. And Capitalism began to evolve in Italy by 1200, and was fully developed by the 17th century. Before that, only gadgeteering.
The third requirement is the rise of sciences. That began with the emergence of universities in the 11th century. To develop sciences, you need a religion which separates between mysticism and philosophy and which recognizes an objective reality, to discover the connection between philosophy and mathematics, to discover the connection between mathematics and engineering, and to develop a system where all these things merge. This happened in the Late Middle Ages.
The Industrial Revolution happened just at the right moment. It could not have happened any earlier. You need to get all the required secondary powers in action first – only then can the real thing happen. The 200 years of Industrial Revolution was preceded by 2000 years of Religious, Philosophical, Technological, Scientific and Economical Evolution.
“We are watching ARMAGEDDON unfolding before our eyes” Col. Douglas MacGregor
Very dangerous prospect for the whole world, not only for US.
I teach teens in France, and I guess many of the particularities of this generation initially confuse or surprise me, I find myself able to roll with it.
I have been especially surprised to hear that, generally speaking, they don’t have any interest in movies, books, TV series, or music. It is surprising to me that even music isn’t of interest to them!
Some like video games, but for the most part, they spend more time on social media than anything else.
The implications of that, and how society will develop with them, leaves a lot to think about.
But as a teacher, I figured I have to deal with that reality. So, for example, I have them do a project where they have to make a tutorial video in English (I teach English). This was something they got excited about, put effort into, and they made great videos! They know how to use their phones, and add special effects, music, off-voice…. they were able to be creative with it. I stopped trying to use current music, films, TV or books. It just wasn’t getting their attention.
The young generation isn’t void of creativity, but they seem to have taken over control of their social conditioning. I mean, they are watching each other create and spread ideas, values, and ethics. I was raised watching cartoons, TV shows, commercials (and reading cereal boxes!) that were carefully geared towards conditioning me to adhere to certain values that my government and the biggest corporations wanted me to integrate.
The kids today have been able to break off from that, and I suppose that scares some older folk. Like it means chaos rules and will lead to destructive movements in society. I’m not so sure. I’m observing with curiosity.
Ex-CIA: Their New Plan is TERRIFYING!
Two Middle East Outlooks
Jake Sullivan, National Security Advisor and dimwit, had written a laudation of his own and his bosses foreign policy for the November print edition of Foreign Affairs. The piece was finalized before the war in Palestine had begun.
Indeed, although the Middle East remains beset with perennial challenges, the region is quieter than it has been for decades.
The progress is fragile, to be sure. But it is also not an accident. … [The president’s] approach returns discipline to U.S. policy. It emphasizes deterring aggression, de-escalating conflicts, and integrating the region through joint infrastructure projects and new partnerships, including between Israel and its Arab neighbors. And it is bearing fruit. … This disciplined approach frees up resources for other global priorities, reduces the risk of new Middle Eastern conflicts, and ensures that U.S. interests are protected on a far more sustainable basis. Challenges remain. The Israeli-Palestinian situation is tense, particularly in the West Bank, but in the face of serious frictions, we have de-escalated crises in Gaza and restored direct diplomacy between the parties after years of its absence.
—
Alastair Crooke, who has personally negotiated prisoner exchanges between Hamas and Israel, has published a rather bleak outlook.
… It is no coincidence that Netanyahu flourished a map of Israel during his General Assembly address last month in which Israel dominated from the River to the Sea – and Palestine (indeed any Palestinian territory) was non-existent.
Tom Friedman in his NYT reflections may fear that just as NATO’s impaired performance in Ukraine has ruptured ‘the NATO myth’, so too the 7 October Israeli military and intelligence collapse and what happens in its wake in Gaza ‘might explode the entire pro-American alliance structure’ in the Middle East.
The confluence of two such humiliations might break the spine of western primacy. This seems to be the gist to Friedman’s analysis. (He likely is correct).
Hamas has succeeded in smashing the Israel deterrence paradigm: They were not afraid, the IDF proved far from invincible, and the Arab street mobilised as never before (confounding western cynics who laugh at the very notion of there being an ‘Arab Street’).
Well, that is where we are – and the White House is rattled. … This is what worries the White House Team. They are deeply unconfident that an Israeli invasion of Gaza will put ‘Humpty’ together again. Rather, they fear that events may go badly for the IDF, and further, that the images relayed across the Middle East of Israel using overwhelming force in a civilian urban setting will revolt the Islamic sphere.
In spite of western scepticism, there are signs that this insurrection in the Arab sphere is different, and resembles more the 1916 Arab Revolt that overthrew the Ottoman Empire. It is taking on a distinct ‘edge’ as both Shi’a and Sunni religious authorities state the duty of Muslims to stand with Palestinians. In other words, as the Israeli polity becomes plainly ‘Prophetical’, so the Islamic mood is turning eschatological, in its turn.
That the White House should be floating kites about ‘moderate’ Arab leaders pressing ‘moderate’ Palestinians to form an Israeli-friendly government in Gaza that would displace Hamas and impose security and order shows just how severed is the West from reality. Recall that Mahmoud Abbas, General Sisi and the King of Jordan (some of the region’s most pliable leaders) pointedly refused even to meet with Biden after the latter’s Israel trip.
The anger across the region is real and threatens ‘moderate’ Arab leaders, whose room for manoeuvre is now circumscribed.
So hotspots are proliferating, as are attacks on U.S. deployments around the region. Some in Washington claim to perceive an Iranian hand, and are hoping to expand a window for war with Iran. … Should Israel enter Gaza (and Israel may decide it has no choice but to launch a ground operation, given the domestic political dynamics and public sentiment), it is likely that Hizbullah will incrementally be drawn further in, leaving the U.S. with the binary option of seeing Israel defeated, or launching a major war in which all the hotspots become fused ‘as one’.
In a sense, the Israeli-Islamic conflict now may only be resolved in this kinetic way. All efforts since 1947 have seen the divide only deepen. The reality of the necessity of war is permeating widely the consciousness of the Arabic and Islamic world.
Posted by b on October 27, 2023 at 13:44 UTC | Permalink
Chinese Premier Li Qiang came out before assembled media Thursday to say only this:
“China will continue to firmly support Iran in safeguarding its national sovereignty, territorial integrity, and national dignity, and will strongly oppose any external forces interfering in Iran’s internal affairs.”
Analysis
This Israel-Hamas thing is getting worse by the hour.
Ground invasion or not, Israel is. . . fucked.
Just a matter of time before Iran outright attacks, with the support of Russia, China, Syria. Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, etc.
I think they already realize they have the upper hand against Israel AND the US..
The biggest news we have heard in a long time is that China will support Iran in the liberation of Palestine. That’s a big deal. It doesn’t get any bigger.
This is shaping up to be the USA, Israel, and the EU against everyone else. I think we cannot win.
We are watching and documenting the start of WW3 right before our eyes.
Why are people Leaving America?
“Everything you said is truth. Things are getting more and more unaffordable here in the US and inflation and crime is killing many small businesses.”
A bar order changed my life. “14 Bier bitte (14 beers please).”
I was celebrating (with friends) the severance package I had signed a few hours earlier.
After 5 years, my time in Germany was coming to an end. I already had 2 interviews lined up back in the US.
From the barstool to the left came a voice. “Excuse me.” I turned to look in the eyes of a rather scruffy absent-minded-professor type.
He smiled and said, “you seem to have a slight English accent…or maybe American?”
“American,” I confirmed. He continued, “you wouldn’t happen to be looking for a job would you?”
Crazy I thought. “I just signed my severance contract 3 hours ago.”
“Can you write?” he replied.
“I think so. My grandfather was a journalist, my mother taught English.”
I’ll spare you the details. He hired me. I never went back to the US. That special lady I had met 7 months earlier came back from her studies in the UK.
Love developed. Babies arrived. We moved to France. Babies grew into fascinating persons.
Any other bar, any other night and it never would have happened this way.
One employer I had decided to make me redundant…which was a BAAAAAD idea.
Keeping it short ( I hope ). I was managing a Photolab ( in a pharmacy ) in SE London…I literally built it up from where it was originally bringing in ‘maybe’ around 10% to 12 % of the total takings of the shop…to where it was bringing in over 80% of the takings. I did that by making certain that the quality we produced was the best for ( literally ) miles around. We had company reps from the midlands who would bring their films into us…because they couldn’t find anywhere to beat us.
At one stage we had the top boys from Kodak visit us, because they were ‘concerned’ at the amount of photographic paper we were going through…sometimes 20 rolls a week. A roll of paper is 175 Meters long…that’s over 1500 prints per roll, or just over 23,000 prints ( 6 x 4 ) a week. It turned out that there was only one Kodak lab in the whole of southern England that beat us…and that by less than 3 %…and that was at a popular seaside resort…Brighton.
Sorry for the long back story.
Almost the first thing they did was make one of the two guys on the counter redundant. Then not long after that they made my assistant redundant as well. You’ve probably worked out where this is going already. If there’s only one person working the lab or the counter what happens on days off? Or when you go to lunch…or if your ill?
Answer? I haven’t got the foggiest idea…we were never told.
Then shortly after that…I was made redundant.
Not really a surprise…I had figured out which way the wind was blowing well before this. In all fairness when they told me I was being made redundant I did tell them that in my ( exceptionally modest and humble opinion ), the lab would be closed within three months since they had no one to run it properly…they ( of course ) just ignored that.
I had a new job within two weeks…paid almost as well…and without all the hassle.
The big problem they had now was that there was now only one person to run the counter side of things…and the lab. That’s assuming that the ‘last guy’ didn’t bother with inconsequential things…like a trip to the loo, or tea breaks or lunch breaks, day’s off, holidays, emergency’s at home or just being to damn ill to come to work.
Oh, I forgot to mention something else.
He wasn’t trained to operate the lab.
He told them. ‘I’ve got no health and safety training for photolab work…you know…for all that unimportant stuff…like the electrical hazards, hazardous and corrosive chemicals etc.’ He had no first aid certification, no fire hazard training. And nothing else either, like the day to day maintenance of the machinery, let alone the longer term maintenance.
There was also the minor ( but vital to maintain quality ) chore of balancing the master channel on a daily basis, plus ( on an ongoing basis ) all the print and film channels. He had no idea where to even begin with that…absolutely not his fault at all…he was counter staff…not trained lab staff.
And…then he told them something else, he was colour blind…not exactly great for printing colour films.
He was told. ‘Use the scanner, that’ll do the job’.
‘Uhuh…I can’t do that’. ‘HUH? Why NOT’!
‘It’s been disabled in the software and disconnected from the motherboard…I don’t even know what it looks like, I wouldn’t recognise it if it got up and smacked me in the face, and I don’t know how to hook it back up and get it working again…of course there was one person here that could do that…but you got rid of him, and even if I did get the scanner working again the quality and delivery times will nose dive, the two people you made redundant did everything manually…that’s why the quality was so good, and why we were doing so much trade’. ( my assistant and I could print faster and more accurately than the scanner could do the job ).
Then, obviously trying to be ‘helpful’ ( IE sticking the knife in ) he added. ‘We could always get an engineer out from Kodak to reconnect it, but, since it’s not a breakdown…it’ll be chargeable’.
Not done.
How do I know all this ?
I’m at home one evening and I get a phone call from the ‘last guy’. ‘Hey! how’s it going’? ‘Pretty good’ was the answer…’How’s the lab doing’? ( I love this bit ) ‘What lab’?? ‘Umm…THE lab’. ‘Like I said…WHAT lab’?! ‘It’s CLOSED’??? ‘Well…I suppose you ‘could’ put it that way…the whole shop is closed…permanently’. ‘Pardon’?
It turned out that not only had the lab closed because ( surprise surprise ), nobody knew how to operate the printer properly or maintain it…but when the customers found out I’d been laid off they expressed their disgust by voting with their feet. The whole shop became a wasteland…hardly anybody went in there now.
Now that might not have been so bad when I first started there, and the lab brought in maybe 10 to 12 % of the total takings…but by the time I was laid off…the lab was bringing in around 80% of the total takings…of the entire shop.
Remember I said the lab would probably be closed within three months?
I was wrong…it took 6 WEEKS! before it…and the whole SHOP was closed.
The new company thought they were getting their hands on a gold mine, and to be honest it would have been…if they hadn’t messed it all up.
In my mid 20’s I had a job at a recording studio. I was “the girl”. I was completely in charge of all things office.
This place was part of an advertising agency.
We had the whole bottom floor and most of what we did was recording jingles.
So there were the jingle writers And the musicians and the sales people. All in all it was pretty much fun.
One day the pay checks were given to me to hand out and I happened to notice that everyone made more money than I did. I marched upstairs and asked WHY. I knew full well I did more work than anyone else there. I was told that “They were creative and I was not.”
My husband and I had already been doing glass work. I called him, told him to come get me. when he got there I said I am quitting my job. I want you to quit yours,too and we will do glass work full time.
He did and we rented our first studio which was near UWM on Milwaukee’s upper East Side.
We are still doing glass work today, 45 years later. hundreds of projects all over the country.
So thanks for telling me how uncreative I was.
Why Men NEED Sex
This should be taught in schools/colleges, the differences between Men & Women so that people can better go about relationships & know why the opposite gender behaves how they behave instead of thinking that there’s something wrong with them. i.e men have 17 times more testosterone than women hence men will tend to have a higher sex drive!
The Chinese Economy resembles a 48 year old man. Not young anymore but certainly not old or dying
The Japanese Economy resembles a 77 year old man. Prematurely aged 20 years thanks to the Plaza accords or would be a healthy 57 year old
The Indian Economy resembles a 43 year old. Down on his luck and having a last chance at some development and growth.
The US Economy resembles a 75 year old. Having sucked the youth of every Economy to keep from growing old or slowing down his ageing
The Russian Economy represents a 34 year old, reborn after dying as a 88 year old and still unsure of how to go forward but strong enough to fight the world
This was maybe ten years ago, back when I worked in a warehouse.
One fine day when I arrived at work there were no chairs at my workstation. A manager was out there and told me they had removed the chairs because the people who worked the previous shift spent too much time sitting around instead of doing their other tasks, but I could go into the office and bring a chair out to the warehouse every day when I came in.
When the next person on the shift came in I told her what was going on with the chairs, and her response was, “What is this, junior high?” I was more amused than exasperated, and life continued with me bringing out a couple of chairs at the start of work every day.
Soon afterward our senior manager became tired of people losing pens all the time and announced that anyone who needed a pen would have to ask her for one personally. I myself was very methodical about how I used my pen, always putting it down at the same place on the table where I worked and expecting it to be there whenever I needed it. Other people (mostly our regular vendors) were less careful with pens, and it didn’t take long before my pen disappeared, along with most of the others.
Now, these were not expensive pens, so the savings our tightfisted manager gained from controlling their distribution could not have been that much. More importantly, our senior manager’s schedule didn’t overlap with mine very much, and if I had better things to do with my time than ask the senior manager for a pen every time I needed one, surely that was more true for her.
So, I took the matter to Human Resources, mentioning both the chair and pen situations in an email. The next morning an HR person called me up on the phone and got some more details about everything. About five minutes later I heard the rumble of plastic wheels on the concrete floor of the warehouse, and there was the middle manager with an extra chair in one hand and a fistful of pens in the other. Sounding a little contrite, he dumped the pens on my table and said if I needed more to please let him know.
Often when I hear people talk about HR, it’s in the context of how HR is on the side of the employer instead of the employee. So I offer up this one instance where HR came through for the little guy.
The chairs in the warehouse stayed in the warehouse afterward. And, more importantly, I never had to waste anyone’s time by asking my senior manager for a pen.
Years ago I fell off a truck and dislocated my shoulder. I called an ambulance and they turned up. One guy said “I’m trained for resetting that”, so he did, me lying on his trolley bed on the pavement, they then took me to hospital for X-rays to make sure there were no further issues.
I don’t know how much it cost, I didn’t see a bill.
Years later I caught double pneumonia. 15 days in hospital with several courses of strong antibiotics and lots of rest.
I don’t know how much that cost – never saw a bill.
And a couple of years ago my 93 year old father in law was diagnosed with congestive heart failure, and fitted with a pacemaker that same day, spend a night in hospital and came home with an internet connected heart monitor so they could check on him from the hospital.
We never knew how much that cost … he never got a bill.
That’s universal health care for you.
We also get low cost and no cost pharmecuticals
I don’t mind the 2.5% levy added to my tax bills at all – it’s good value.
One observation I’ve made is that people from Europe have no concept of the ridiculous expanse that is the US, and to be fair the idea that you could take a day trip to another country when you’re in Europe blows my mind as well. I met a couple from France who thought they were going to go to Maine, New York, DC, and Orlando (Disney) all in one weekend. Just for reference, it would take you nearly 24 full hours of driving to get from Maine to Orlando.
image 130
In case you can’t tell, below is the US compared to Australia.
You would not even be in a medieval army if you wanted to be safe. You would have joined a medieval army because you wanted to get rich quick – there was no other way to make easy money.
First of all: avoid all sieges. High risk of dying from dysentery as either besieger or besieged.
A longbow archer was very safe, and paid well, except that archers could not get “first pick” of battlefield booty. It was a trade off. Even so, you might get lucky especially if you got to sack a big town.
image 129
You won the lottery by either capturing a nobleman, his horse, or his fine armor. Capturing a common knight was not bad except that, quite often. knights went into deep debt to finance their war service
Even so. knights sometimes had rich relatives (so don’t get mad and kill Sir Deadbeat)
A surgeon would have been pretty safe and, if captured, you would be treated well.
We live about a quarter mile away from the nearest road, back through the woods, so it’s rare for any stray domestic animals to wander back here, but on the evening of May 26 this year, this tortoiseshell came strolling up the porch steps and looked in the window.
“Oh no,” we thought. “I hope it goes away.” We already had two cats and didn’t want a third. That lasted about 20 minutes. Then, “Well, I guess we need to feed her something. We can’t let her starve.” So she got a meal off us. When she was still there the next morning, we named her. That was it. That’s when you can no longer say a cat doesn’t own you.
I already had a jet black longhair named LBK adopted from a colleague who was moving 1,200 miles away and didn’t want to take her from Georgia to the snows of Vermont. My wife has a blue tortoiseshell rescue cat she calls Biscuit. So we named our porch cat Triscuit—not after the cracker but sort of an organic chemistry joke (bis-, tris-, Biscuit, Triscuit). Students of o-chem will get it.
Triscuit was very emaciated when she came to us. She weighed 3.2 lb; the basal half of her tail was almost hairless, like an opossum tail; she had a prolapsed rectum, worms, and diarrhea; she smelled bad. But I’m a sympathetic sap, especially for underdogs (and undercats), and she captured my heart. After several trips to the vet and a special rehab diet, my free cat has so far cost me only about $780 since May. She’s now up to 4.3 lb—just $180/lb. She’s worm-free, and she’s growing some hair on her tail. She just might live.
Cajun Stuffed Peppers
2023 11 09 14 32
Ingredients
1 pound ground meat
1 (16 ounce) can stewed tomatoes
1/2 cup chopped onions
1/2 cup green bell peppers, chopped
1 (6 ounce) can tomato paste
2 cups cooked rice
6 to 8 bell peppers
Sliced cheese
Instructions
Cook meat, tomatoes, onions, chopped peppers and tomato paste. Cook for 20 to 30 minutes until done.
Cook rice. Mix rice into meat mixture, then simmer for 20 minutes.
Clean peppers. Boil in large pot until peppers turn darker green. Dry peppers on paper towels. Cool.
Anyone can think they are superman! Just that most are smart and humble. China is a very pragmatic and rational nation. It knows no nation has a right to exist and enjoys full sovereignty. China never sees itself as a nation that is strong. It knows very very well that should anyone threaten China, it will fully defend itself completely and hurt the attacking nation. Very very hard.
Me to a new hire, “install this wing flap actuator on that left wing and what ever you do…do not drop it, it’s very expensive.”
New hire, “Yes, sir. No problem”.”
Two minutes later, a loud, crashing thud can be heard from over by the left wing.
Me, “NEW HIRE? Did you just drop that actuator?”
New hire “No sir, I just dropped a tool. It’s alright.”
Me as I go over there to examine the situation. “Then why is there a dent on this mounting lug of the actuator?”
New Hire, “uhh, I don’t know, must’ve come that way. It’ll be alright. It’s fine. It’ll still work.”
Me, “Lives are at stake when we work on these aircraft and when mistakes are made we have to own them and immediately correct them. This actuator will not work and neither will you. Remember this lesson on your next job.”
In college I lived in an apartment building and my next door neighbor was the rudest, most angry and disagreeable person that I had ever met. One day after classes I rode my bicycle home and went to store it in the small storage shed in front of my car. I noticed that someone had clipped the right rear corner of my fairly new car. I looked at the Cadillac next to my car and saw a indentation on the rear quarter panel at the same height as the damage to my car. The color on the damaged quarter panel matched the color of my car exactly.
I approached my mean, nasty and disagreeable neighbor, showed him the damage and he immediately claimed that I must have hit his Cadillac and threatened to sue me, get me evicted and on and on.
He worked in a bank in a troubled part of town. I drove by the bank and noticed a massage parlor in a single wide trailer about 2 blocks away.
I went to an adult book store and purchased an explicit picture magazine titled “Beautiful Black Asses”, went to a card store and bought a very feminine thank you card and an envelope big enough for the magazine. I signed the card “Thanks for everything honey – Candy” and mailed it to his apartment with the massage parlor’s name and address as the return address. I was aware that his wife got home first every day and retrieved the mail every day.
A couple of days later I heard a LOUD screaming exchange between them and the wife took off in his Cadillac, burning rubber all of the way. She and the Cadillac were gone for about a month before she returned but, their relationship seemed chilled until I graduated and moved away a year and 1/2 later.
The Israelis are so sure about the location of the Hamas bunker, however, not because they are trying to score propaganda points, or because it has been repeatedly mentioned in passing by Western reporters—but because they built it. Back in 1983, when Israel still ruled Gaza, they built a secure underground operating room and tunnel network beneath Shifa hospital—which is one among several reasons why Israeli security sources are so sure that there is a main Hamas command bunker in or around the large cement basement beneath the area of Building 2 of the Hospital, which reporters are obviously prohibited from entering.
I bet 100 to 1 that nothing Hamas is present in the well known bunker beneath the Shifa hospital.
Mom: I couldn’t find my saved money, I need to pay the deliveryman.
Dad: Don’t worry, you’ll find it. How much for the deliveryman?
Mom: 5 thousand rupees. I ordered some groceries and essentials for the house.
Dad paid the deliveryman and we eventually got busy with our daily work.
The next day, Mom, Dad, and I were cleaning the kitchen, when my mom shouted.
Mom: Look, I got my money, it’s in the cupboard. I was so foolish, I searched the whole house for it.
Mom looked so happy because she saved it for her friend’s birthday gift.
But the situation was something else.
Dad got out of the house to smoke a cigarette and I ran behind him.
I said “Why did you do that?’
Father asked: ‘Do what?’
I replied “I swear I have seen you taking the money out of your wallet and putting it in the cupboard.
Dad smirked and replied: “You know she was everything for me! I can’t see her getting sad over the little money she lost yesterday. Because I think we need to care for the person, we love the most!”
Dad takes out a handkerchief and starts putting off his sweat.
I said “Dad, now why are you using mom’s handkerchief? Is it a sign of your care towards Mom too?”
Dad “Nope, because it still has her fragrance”
This was something that changed my whole point of view not only towards life but also towards love too.
Every heroin addict’s go to line. The problem is the drug is too brutal and won’t let you do a little this time.
Heroin messes with your brain big time.
It is an opioid, which means it comes from the same plant as morphine and other painkillers.
But heroin is different because it gets to your brain faster and stronger than other opioids.
It does this by changing into morphine once it’s in your blood, and then attaching to these things called opioid receptors in your brain.
Opioid receptors are like switches that control how you feel pain and pleasure.
When heroin hits them, it turns them on full blast, making you feel a rush of euphoria and relaxation.
It also blocks out any negative feelings like depression or anxiety.
Sounds awesome, right?
Wrong. Because heroin is so good at turning on your opioid receptors, it also tricks your brain into thinking that heroin is the best thing ever.
Your brain starts to associate heroin with happiness, and forgets about other things that make you happy, like food, friends, or hobbies.
Your brain also becomes less sensitive to heroin over time, so you need more and more of it to feel the same effect.
This is how addiction happens.
You become obsessed with getting and using heroin, and you can’t stop even if you want to.
You also start to feel sick when you don’t have heroin, because your brain is used to having it all the time.
This is called withdrawal, and it sucks big time.
Withdrawal can feel like death. It can make you feel like you have the flu, but worse.
You can have nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, muscle aches, sweating, chills, anxiety, insomnia, and more.
Withdrawal can also make you crave heroin even more, because you know it will make you feel better.
The white horse is one of the most addictive drugs out there.
It hijacks your brain’s reward system and makes you dependent on it for feeling good.
It also makes you sick when you don’t have it, and makes you want it more than anything else in the world.
Possibly the worst thing is that even being sober for 20 years, you always remember that first high. That first rush. So the urge never really leaves…..
The smartest student in my class used to be nicknamed “Rain Man” in math class because of how fast he was able to make calculations. But he wasn’t just the best in math. He was also the best in the language classes and in history class – any class except physical exercise really. He wasn’t much use there.
Everyone thought he would go on to become a university professor. But he didn’t. He started distancing himself from academic pursuits in high school and instead started reading poetry and wanting to be an artist. When he was evaluated for military service and got a stellar score on the IQ test, the officers asked him what he wanted to do after high-school, and he told them he wanted to study literature or write novels.
Most likely the issue was that he came from an academic family, with both his parents being university professors, which made that career path seem like nothing special to him. He wanted “more”, whatever that was.
At college, he would become increasingly erratic, often not showing up for class and failing to read appointed materials. But he would still pass all exams with high marks by making an effort at the last minute.
The “artist” aspiration hadn’t died out though. He was pursuing writing as well as music, eventually forming a band, but he never really made an impact. He wasn’t even a bad music artist but he also just wasn’t outstanding like he was at school. His commercially unsuccessful “artist” career saw him moonlighting at random shift jobs to get by, including as a night receptionist.
It would be seven years until he realized music and literature weren’t going to get him anywhere. If he had just managed to put his head down and work diligently on a more weighty subject of study, be it mathematics or medicine or political science, I’m sure he would have had a brilliant career and made a splash in his field. As it was, he was already in his 30s without any really useful qualifications while others were getting promotions and buying real estate.
In the following years, he first learned Chinese and went to live in China, then came back again, took up coding with the intention of making AI models but also lost interest in that before really getting there. Nowadays he’s still struggling to even get a decent job – something I think no one would have expected back then at school. And who knows what’s next?
I guess I should know because I am this person. I was the smartest kid in my class. In this game of “professor or suicide”, I’m thus far neither. But being gifted hasn’t served me particularly well. Since everything was easy for me throughout my education (well, except P.E. and crafts), I never learned to really struggle. I learned that I could win without struggling. Therefore, I proceeded to avoid anything that might seriously put me to the test. And at the end of the day, intelligence is really no match for effort.
The silver lining is that I’m more and more beginning to realize that I don’t need a brilliant career, neither in academia nor as an artist. In hindsight, I was pursuing both more out of vanity than anything else. Unusually smart kids have a tendency to accrue lofty expectations from all around; from parents, teachers and classmates alike. Everyone tells you: “you could do this” and “you should do that” and “you’re gonna be a star” and it’s easy to become inebriated with this praise and forget to stop and be honest with yourself about what YOU actually want – not what others want for you or even what you want for your own idea of you. Finally doing so has been quite liberating.
This is an illusion. The Chinese used to think that having a European appearance meant they would be good at teaching English, but they later realized they were wrong.
Professional ability is linked to your salary, not your appearance.
If you can provide an English major certificate or education certificate, you can earn a good salary at English teaching institutions in China, but of course, there will be many people competing with you. Education requires teaching experience, not just talking to oneself in the classroom. Engaging in the teaching profession requires mastering teaching methods that students can understand. You must first be able to communicate with students in Chinese. Not everyone is suitable for the teaching profession, and whether to stay or not ultimately depends on the graduation rate data of students. People who lack a competitive advantage cannot enter higher education schools and can only teach their children some simple English conversations in kindergartens. Of course, the salary will be much lower than that of school teachers.
China’s second language ~ third language education is civilian education, not aristocratic education.
Generally speaking, the China government requires Chinese students to master at least 1~2 foreign languages. Because English-speaking countries dominate the world, China has popularized English education in the compulsory education stage.
There are many foreigners engaged in English education in China because it is easy to find substitutes, and the competitive pressure of practitioners is also the biggest among all language education. Meanwhile, due to the popularization of English education in China, the job of English teacher is also the easiest to find.
Language teachers such as Russian, Japanese, Korean, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Arabic are relatively lacking.
As far as I know, some teachers of small languages have already earned salaries of $1000~$5000 per hour. (一万到五万一堂课)
Some infrastructure contractors, in order to make their employees understand the local language, offer considerable salaries to language teachers who attend classes during training.
In fact, in recent years, the salaries of Arabic language teachers and French teachers have been very good. Because there are many Arab countries and African countries (French speaking area) along the the Belt and Road. Since there is a demand for business, of course, relevant language education talents are needed.
We hired a lady to organize our archives before they were digitized. This was in 2000. She was just required to work 8 hours a day, and only needed to interact with coworkers for about an hour a day. So she decided to work 3:00–12:00 and our Mom and Pop small company saw no reason why she couldn’t do her job at night.
She was doing a decent job, and nobody had a problem. But we reached a point, where she had to start working days, so she could tell people what was going on.
She had stored all of her rolls of fim in garbage cans, and paper records in recycling boxes.
The first day she wasn’t there when the cleaners came to clean her office, they emptied all of her film and paper into shredders, and hauled it away.
Not one person in the office could figure out why she not only used her garbage can for storage, but brought in extra garbage cans and filled them.
She was livid and blamed the cleaning staff for emptying the garbage and recycling as they were required to do by contract.
They didn’t exactly fire her. They laid her off, and said that now that there was no data to archive, they didn’t have a job for her.
Sara Anne Wood was just 12 years old when she was abducted within view of her home on Aug 18, 1993. I was friends(from camp) with her brother Dusty and it hit everyone so very hard. This was an incredibly nice family from Central New York in a very small town. Back then, kids had heard ghost stories about kids being snatched but very few took it seriously. Sara’s case changed that for many and the resulting publicity made sure that new tools for the public and law enforcement would save more missing kids since.
The man who admitted to abducting and killing her also confessed to another murder- a 12 year old boy, Jimmy Bernardo. He confessed to another murder(Jamie Lusher) but like Sara, the body has never been found. The killer has given incorrect information for the recovery of Sara Anne Wood and Jamie Lusher many times. FBI psychologists are unsure what is keeping the killer from revealing the information since he seems willing to put it behind him. He will serve every day of his pitiful existence behind bars but it isn’t enough for the pain he has brought to so many in this world.
I have not named the killer out of respect for my childhood friend’s family who feel the killer has garnered too much fame already. It’s easy to search, but do me a favor if you choose to look it up. Please also learn about all of the positive changes brought about by Sara Anne Wood’s case. Those changes have saved/found many thousands of children since.
Note to Dusty & the Wood family: I hope you find peace and closure. We have not forgotten Sara and will never stop looking.
I am so so so SO very glad that I no longer live in the USA.
When I was 16 I developed a kidney abscess. It was treated over several weeks and dissipated. First off, I had to sit in a room with a bunch of 70 year old men waiting for my Urologist. Then, the Dr was flummoxed how a teenage girl could get this, so proceeded with different types of tests. One was testing my Ureters. In the hospital, I was naked from the waist down with a paper drape, filled my bladder with something and iodine and literally put a stopper in so that I couldn’t pee. Then, they left the room. It was just me and a male tech who was in front of some machines with screens. The room had swinging double doors. Every once in awhile someone would come in, and my nether regions were on full view to anyone coming in, and anyone passing by. When I was done, I had to wrap the paper drape around me and sprint to the bathroom across the hall to piss like a Russian race horse! I’m pretty sure I leaked that liquid all across that room and the hallway. Yes, this was very embarrassing.
One of my girls had been diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome, developmental delays and schizo affective disorder.
She attends a day program for adults that provides socialization along with life skills training. They also take the clients out into the community to do contract jobs supported by staff. She came home beaming and said she was working in a local grocery store. I assumed stocking shelves, sweeping, etc.
About her third day she came home excited as usual got a snack and went to the bathroom.
I cleaned up the table, put away leftovers, and generally spent a fair amount of time puttering around.
Then I realized she was still in the bathroom and it was very quiet.
I called her name.
No answer.
I checked the door.
It was locked.
I banged on the door, yelled her full name and demanded she open the door immediately!
NO! I’M NOT DONE!
What are you doing?
It’s a surprise. Go away!
Now I’ve had pretty awful bathroom surprises from kids. Things like blood all over from an accident doing something I’d warned them about, to diarrhea, to bathing the dog in the tub with the associated water and mud sprayed around.
I said I was counting to 10 and the door had better be open or I’d pick the lock. Yeah, I’ve had to do that on more than one occasion.
At 9 she opened the door beaming and sweaty. See mom! I cleaned it all by myself! The floor around the toilet, the sinks, inside the toilet and the mirrors! Now I need to wash my hands.
Everything was spotless. I had forgotten most stores have at least employee restrooms. That was what she was doing at work.
She then said it was nicer at home than the men’s room. It was disgusting and stinks.
I was floored! Never have I had a child do such a thorough job cleaning anything! I gave her hugs. I told her I was sooo happy with the sparkling clean bathroom.
Then she asked me, Mom, can you teach me how to clean the tub? They don’t have that at the store.
I was shocked. She actually wanted to do more cleaning!
I told her I was so proud of her, and then later made her promise that if she wanted to clean the bathroom again would she please leave the door open. I explained that the surprise was fantastic, but some cleaning supplies were smelly and she could get sick.
She looked disappointed and asked how she could surprise me if the door was open.
I promised if she said she was working on something special I’d stay in the kitchen and make cookies.
I get a clean bathroom, the kids get fresh cookies, and my husband eats raw cookie dough. Wins all the way around!
China SHOCKS The US With Terrifying Nuclear Space Missile
I got a call from a friend, who had literally just been informed that he was laid off. And he was wondering if I had also gotten the axe.
I was on vacation for a week. It was Tuesday or Wednesday, and I was on my way to a dog show to help some friends set some things up. My friend had been walked into the office that morning and been told that his last day would the the following Friday. The severance was good, he had already been thinking about retiring, and his wife was having pretty bad health issues. So he just said cool, and planned on wrapping up the things he was involved with.
So I checked, and did have a voicemail on my phone. I listened to it, and yes, a manager I knew had called VERY EARLY that day and asked that I call her back when I had the time, sometime today. Given that my friend had been laid off, and what the situation at the company was, yeah, I knew I was going to get the boot as well. Not my first time, so I just sat back and made a list of what I needed to do. Then I called my friend back, told him about the voicemail and we commiserated. And finally I called the manager back and got the bad news. No big deal.
Being laid off sucks. But keep your wits about you, be open to doing something different, make smart financial decisions and just keep movin’ on.
In May 2016, Amber Heard, who is now divorced from Johnny Depp, shared photos claiming he abused her. People quickly condemned Depp, especially when he was cast in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. Many thought he shouldn’t be hired due to the accusations. Meanwhile, Heard was praised as a survivor and advocate for abused women.
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Depp, who had built a good reputation over the years, faced a backlash. People didn’t want to work with him, and he was labeled as an abuser. He received hate from fans, the media, and almost everyone.
However, this year, Depp released tapes that changed how we saw the situation. Heard admitted to hitting him and throwing objects at him, even causing injury. She mocked him, knowing people would likely believe her over him.
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Depp, in essence, is saying, “Imagine if I, as a man, claimed to be a victim of domestic violence. How many would believe or support me?” The story shows how we often quickly judge someone as a villain, even when they might not be at fault.
I was the bad boy and what you’re trying to make is a mistake.
Let me explain why.
Most girls in their 20s and even 30s have some kind of masculine ideal. This ideal is anything but healthy. They want the sociopath or the aggressive jerk or whatever is considered nowadays a good representation of masculinity.
The definition of a “good masculine sexual partner” is more of what you’d find in “Fight Club” than “Breakfast At Tiffany”. And yes, I was one of them. I acted as a jerk, I was emotionally imbalanced, I got into a lot of arguments and fights and I was emotionally and physically violent.
And this got me laid. A lot. The fact that my life was chaotic and broken, ironically, made a lot of very beautiful woman want to save me.
And here’s the thing …
If you want to screw your emotional balance, make your life a mess and be in that position for the sake of getting laid you are an idiot. This is because the “bad boy” image that works to get women turned on is kind of the opposite of what works in every other area of life.
Everywhere else consistency, maturity, dignity, integrity are rewarded. In the business world nobody will put up with the “bad boy” bullshit. In the academic world the same. Most realms of life are a meritocracy where your hard work and effort are going to get you what you deserve. Dating is one of the few fields in which the least you care and the more counter-intuitive you act, the better results you’re going to get.
But it is not worth it.
This is because while being a bad boy may get you female attention, being a bad boy is generally not a good life strategy and there is a LOT MORE to life than getting laid. I remember how at some point in my life I was an emotional mess, smoking, drinking, going in bars each night, sleeping with two girls at the same time (not in the same bed) and many people were “admiring me”.
In reality, I was crying out of frustration and desperation often because I was in a hole and no one was pulling me out. While I was getting girls to take off their panties, I had no money, my business partners wanted nothing to do with me, my friends who showed integrity and character have been replaced by superficial relationships and the future looked really bleak.
So honestly, what you want is the most immature thing you can do.
Trust me, treating life as a bad-boy (and I’m not talking about buying a leather jacket but actually being a “I-Don’t-Give-A-Damn” type of person) has a far higher downside than upside. While there are always going to be ladies who will (1) want to save you from yourself (2) think they can change you (3) be attracted because you’re different, the people who don’t want to have sex with you won’t really be impressed by what you’re doing.
So here’s my advice.
Act as a man and stop trying to emulate the dysfunctional bad-boy image. The rogue, the sociopath, the psychopath, the out of control wreck are and were always female fantasies for better or for worse but actually being one sucks.
Instead simply focus on acting as a man. The same traits that you consider boring nice, as a nice guy, are exactly the traits required to succeed in most fields. I’m not saying to be a wimp but I’m saying that being dysfunctional for the sake of mediocre sex (because deep inside you’ll always know that that’s not love but rather fascination) is a very bad trade-of.
When he was 87 and slipping into dementia, I asked my father exactly this on one of his “good days.” He smiled and said that it had been worth it, even when he became the last of his siblings alive and started to lose his ability to remember names, first, and other things later.
He became a very gentle person to be around (he had been an angry and argumentative Democrat for most of his life) and enjoyed his children, grandchildren, and even their pets. We got along better than we ever had. I remember taking him to the Fourth of July parade and whispering the names of people who came up to greet him. Once he knew their names, he could have a great conversation. Then I brought him back to a school reunion and that was wonderful. He needed no introductions as everyone wore a name tag.
Having watched my father in those years, I hope that I may live long enough to navigate old age just the way he did despite his obvious infirmities.
I’ve worked with the company I’m presently employed with for not quite 12 years. Up until a year ago, we were a small personable, easy going, family owned company of about 250 drivers. If you were around for any length of time, everyone in the office and shop knew you, and vice versa. That was up until about a year ago when the owner of the company retired and threw us under the bus by selling us out to a larger company and everything changed.
It’s common practice for just about any trucking company to require any damage to their equipment be reported and documented. With my company, if the damage was minimal, the report would still go in the driver’s jacket, but no further. It would stay in-house instead of being reported to a national data base.
I’ve always been the type to man-up in situations such as this. I was raised that way, and it was the right thing to do. Even leaving small damage unreported could result in the next driver having to have it repaired and possibly being late for a delivery.
So, after pulling out of a customer’s driveway and cutting it too tighly, I felt something go bump in the night. Upon further inspection, it appears I clipped one of those large landscaping rocks placed to prevent idiot drivers like me from cutting corners too tightly, and running over their curbs. When I stopped for the day and was doing my mandatory post-trip inspection, I came upon this,
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Thinking it was no biggie, and my company would normally think likewise, and wanting to do the right thing, I called it it. What happened next was nothing short of a shit storm. The new people acted like I ran over a carload of nuns. Initial phone call to my parent company, followed by a call to the new company’s safety department, followed by a call-back the next day from same, followed by submitting pictures and a full accident report, followed by a call-back from the new company to review of same, followed by a never-heard-of-before-review from Greg in our safety department.
When I related the story to the former head of our . safety department, her reaction was, “It was just a fuckin’ rim!”, as she shook her head.
Trust me, if it ever happens again, I won’t think twice about going palms up with a “Dunno nuthin’ ‘bout it. When I dropped it off, it was fine “, should anyone inquire.
I was driving down the freeway and all of a sudden I couldn’t see the cars ahead of me. It was if someone had pulled a shade down in front of my line of vision. I could see all around the shade, but not right in front. Although it was only for a few moments, the terror I felt was devasting.
I was a 21-year old college student, a senior at academically prestigious school, getting good grades, working part time, and enjoying a fun social life.
So, what was the matter? Where did the intense headaches come from? Why did I frequently wake up in the middle of the night, jumping out of bed and running to the bathroom, to vomit repeatedly? Why did I feel that I was about to fall down whenever the sidewalk was a little uneven?
Then there were those crazy nightmares I was having.…. I dreamed one night that I was driving on the freeway. The car next to me pulled up right beside me. The driver pulled a gun out. He shot me in the head. My head exploded. Everything became dark. I woke up in a terrified sweat. What on earth was wrong with my head that I would have such a dream?
In spite of everything, I was doing okay and maintaining my studies. But finally it became too much for me to handle. Especially the shade covering my eyes on the freeway.
I saw several doctors. They said I was fine.
I went to a psychologist. I figured that since the doctors said I was fine, it must be all in my mind. The psychologist listened to my symptoms. He said that I didn’t need to see a psychologist. Instead, I needed to see a neurologist and he urged me to see one right away.
I took his advice and went to a neurologist. The neurologist admitted me to a hospital. Still no answers. Many tests were done, but it was during the days before C-T scans or MRI’s were used, so it was hard to figure this out. Finally a diagnosis was made: brain tumor.
Surgery was scheduled. They operated for 10 hours, and were able to remove half of the tumor. The surgeon told me the tumor was the size of a large orange and that if I hadn’t been diagnosed when I was, I would have had 6 months left to live. It was just taking over my whole brain and growing so fast.
I was in intensive care for 2 weeks. I can’t remember too much about that time. It seemed like a dream, for just a few hours.
Then, more surgery. And then some more.
I lost the ability to walk. I couldn’t see very well. I lost hearing. I was fed intravenously. Because I had stroke-like symptoms, one side of my body became weak and uncoordinated. I no longer could hold a pen and write.
I had physical therapy and occupational therapy to regain some of the skills that I had lost.
I finally left the hospital and went home to live with my parents. The tumor was not all gone, but I needed a break. I needed time to get stronger before the next onslaught of surgery.
While I was home, I had physical and occupational therapy at a nearby hospital. I still couldn’t walk or write, but I was beginning to feel better. In physical therapy I worked on learning to walk with a walker and then eventually on my own. In occupational therapy I worked on strengthening my very weak hand. I did many activities with my hands, including making some beautiful crafts. Occupational therapy was so much fun! I loved therapy.
I went back to the hospital and had the last surgery. Finally the tumor was gone. After some more time had passed I felt that maybe it was time to return to school.
Living on my own again was not easy. I still couldn’t walk or write well. But I persevered. Sometimes I fell down. I used a tape recorder during lectures since I couldn’t write fast enough to take notes, and my professors gave me extra time to write exams. With the support of my family and professors, I did well and succeeded.
As graduation approached, a brilliant idea occurred to me. I remembered the great time I had in occupational therapy, and how I had been helped so much. Maybe I too could become an occupational therapist. I thought of how wonderful it would be to spend my life helping others just like I had been helped. I decided that yes, I would try, and so I applied to a master’s degree program in occupational therapy.
There were many more applicants than spots available, but much to my delight I was accepted into the program!
The program was so difficult and very competitive. But I worked hard and after two years became an occupational therapist.
That was 40 years ago, and I am still going strong. I have worked with literally thousands of patients during my career, from little 1-pound premature babies all the way up to 103 year-old patients in nursing homes, and everything in-between. I have loved every minute of it.
Occupational therapy is a flexible career with an abundance of interesting and meaningful jobs available. During my career, I traveled the world, met and married my husband, gave birth to and raised two beautiful children, and enjoyed my life!
I turned what could have been a terrible, frightening experience into something really wonderful.
My sister-in-law once called me to borrow my fax machine. This was in the days before most people had computers and internet. She had a very important document that had to be faxed to a company showing proof of payment.
I took my fax machine to her house that night, hooked it up, walked her through the simple instructions and left.
She called me at work the next day in a panic. She said she had tried to send her document several times and it would not go. This was important, and she needed it sent right away. I was getting off early that day so I agreed to go by her house and help her with it.
When I arrived I checked the machine and connections and everything seemed fine. I told her to send it again so I could see what was going on. She did everything correctly and at the tone hit Send. The fax machine pulled the paper through and indicated a successful receipt at the other end. My sister-in-law grabbed the paper as it came back out of the machine and said, “See. It doesn’t go, it just spits it back out.” My jaw hit the floor. It turns out she thought the actualpaper was being sent over the phone lines.
After I explained the concept to her, I let her know that this story would be told at every family get together for the rest of my life. It is now firmly a part of the family lore and enjoyed by each successive generation.
My sister-in-law fortunately took it in stride. She declared it her worst blonde moment and laughs as hard as anyone when the story is retold.
P.S. My sister-in-law did call the company still to confirm receipt. They told her they had four copies and that was absolutely sufficient.
Close? I accidentally found out I was going to be demoted which lead to me quitting.
In my 20s I worked at one of those places that made huge cookies, I was specifically hired by the manager to be the assistant manager, she’d worked with me as a key holder at another place so she knew I would be good at it. A few months after I was hired the owner sold the business.
One day I was hanging out with the Manager L when she got a call from one of the kids at cookie shop. “Hey L, the owner is in here with some chick he says is the new Manager, what’s going on?”
Too bad L had no answers for her, we had no damned idea what was happening. She and I jumped in the car and headed to the cookie shop to talk, in person, to the owner.
Sure enough, he was demoting L into Assistant and me into just a regular employee. Neither of us had done anything wrong, the new owner just planned to make this new lady a manager. He told us a bunch of BS saying she had experience bla bla… but we found out later she was actually just his girlfriend. We told him how messed up that was, and that both of us would quit if he planned to do this. He was unrepentant, even gaving us the whole “I’m sorry you feel you need an apology” line.
She and I looked at each other, got up and walked away.
Apparently he truly didn’t understand what had just happened because when he saw the kid who called us changing the schedule he was confused. When he was told by her we had just quit, he was completely stunned and didn’t understand why we would have done that. Dude, we literally told you to your face that’s what we’d do if you demoted us for no reason other than to put someone else in as manager, WTF did you think would happen?
Turns out the girlfriend was horrible as a manager, and the owner ended up folding in a few months. Funny how that happens when you take actions that force the people with a clue out, and put someone clueless in just because you are dating them. The two of us were the ones who knew how to run the store, knew how to run the fundraising side, which is where most of the money was made. He screwed himself by being an idiot.
Cajun Butt
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Yield: about 8 to 10 servings
Ingredients
1 (6 pound) boneless pork butt
15 to 20 garlic slivers
3 tablespoons red pepper flakes (or less)
4 tablespoons yellow mustard
3 tablespoons Tony Chachere’s Original Seasoning
3 tablespoons brown sugar
1 teaspoon black pepper
Instructions
Cut 15 to 20 slits 1 inch deep on external surface of pork butt. Press one garlic sliver into each slit with thumb, to bottom of slit. On top of each garlic sliver, insert 1/4 teaspoon of red pepper flakes in the slit. Pinch slit closed.
In a bowl, mix mustard, Cajun seasoning, brown sugar and black pepper. Mix well and apply to pork butt. Lightly dust with a coating of red pepper flakes.
Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight.
Smoke-cook using apple and hickory chips on a covered barbecue pit off the heat for 1 hour per pound or until the internal temperature reaches 190 degrees F.
Perhaps one of the most effective improvised weapons was the Rhino tank. An ordinary tank – usually a Sherman but with improvised steel teeth welded to the front.
In 1944 just after D-Day the Americans, Canadians and British troops were getting held up in the ‘bocage’ countryside of Normandy. Bocage consisted of high hedgerows built on thick banks of earth. This environment proved ideal for German ambushes, providing plenty of defensive cover. It also meant that the Germans could pick off tanks because they would be funnelled down the lanes, or forced through the narrow gaps in the bocage hedgerows. The Germans knew exactly where the tanks would come through and could lay anti tank mines, or train their guns on that exact spot. If the tanks tried to avoid the gaps and instead drive over the top of bocage embankment, it was so steep that it would expose the thin underside armour. Allied tanks were getting wiped out. Until this man, Sergeant Curtis G. Culin had an idea.
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When one of his fellow soldiers joked and said they needed a big set of teeth to bite their way through, Culin didn’t laugh but took the idea seriously. He welded some of the steel that the Germans had used as tank traps to the front of his tank, like this.
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The teeth allowed the Sherman to burst straight through the hedgerow, surprise and then destroy any Germans waiting in ambush on the other side.
When General Omar Bradley saw what Culin had done and saw how his tank was able to smash its way though the bocage hedgerows, the General ordered that as many tanks as possible be fitted with this improvised weapon. The Normandy beaches had been filled with landing spikes which were conveniently just the right shape and type of steel to make the ‘teeth’.
This simple but effective innovation enabled the Americans to swiftly move on and cut off the Cotentin Peninsula and then move south and meet up with the British and Canadians cutting off the Germans in the Falaise Pocket.
I bought the house we are in now exactly 10 years ago in “as is” condition. In fact this was the entire listing:
“Seller and agents make no representations and warranties. Sold as is.”
The house is in a fairly upscale suburb, and was about 15 years old at the time. There was plenty of cosmetic damage — water damage on the hardwood floors, a filthy kitchen, holes in some drywall, a half-full leaky pool clogged with algae. Plus the interior and exterior were just sad looking, with ugly brown paint and outdated stained oak stairs.
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But the funny thing was that no matter how carefully I looked, I could not see any actual serious problems. In fact, it was a bank repossession, and I eventually figured out that since it looked so bad they just assumed there were real problems, and they listed it the way they did to avoid any liability. Over 100 people looked at the house, and we were the only ones who put in an offer, and we got it way (way!) under the asking price, which is rare in Toronto.
I was planning on doing a full renovation anyhow, so I didn’t care about the drywall and flooring. The entire kitchen went in the dumpster. And for $600 we repaired the pool, and it worked perfectly.
I’ve been here for 10 years now and we have not had a single serious problem with the house.
I am sitting outside Quoraing this morning and I took this picture 60 seconds ago:
When you can’t destroy a target by dropping bombs vertically, you can drop them horizontally. That’s what the 617 Royal Air Force Squadron did in May 1943.
The squadron carried out Operation Chastise, designed to destroy German dams and hydroelectric power stations. Reconnaissance and simulated bombing runs revealed that bombs dropped vertically on top of dams were not effective. So instead, the RAF used an experimental bouncing bomb, designed by Sir Barnes Wallis, that was dropped at low altitude onto the surface of the reservoir and skipped along the water horizontally until it hit the face of the dam.
The strategy proved effective. “The Möhne and Edersee Dams were breached…Two hydroelectric power stations were destroyed and several more were damaged. Factories and mines were also either damaged or destroyed.”
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Lancaster bomber dropping bouncing bomb during the Operation Chastise raids on Germany’s Ruhr Valley.
The operation was later the subject of the movie Dambusters, released in 1955.
I remember seeing a girl, her parents were millionaires due to a massive inheritance.
She would try and talk about her “Working class background” how the struggle was real.
One day she was telling me how her parents only bought her a brand new mini when she passed her test and how that went to show how much her family had struggled. One of her school friends got a brand new Range Rover.
I listened to that thinking “My Mum couldn’t have afforded a driving lesson let alone a car”
My sister’s daughter and her husband were about to lose their house in Texas because neither of them had jobs, they had one very young daughter and were expecting another baby. My 80 year old mother couldn’t stand to watch this happen. So, she took out an equity loan on her house and lent them $100,000. They were supposed to make the equity payments for my mom, and at first they did and were supposed to pay the whole loan back when they sold their house.
A few months later, they sold their house but told my mother they needed her money as a down payment on their new house in california. So, they kept the money, and continued making the monthly payments until they had a big fight and split up. Suddenly, no one wanted to make the payments on my mother’s equity loan so my mother had to. If she couldn’t keep up on them, she would have lost her house.
She is now 85 years old, completely disabled, living on a tiny pension, and trying to pay off this loan. Since my niece split with her husband, they did not make payments on their house either. So, it went into foreclosure, and Mom cannot even put a lien on it to get her money back.
Needless to say, I am truly disgusted by my niece’s behavior as well as her husband’s. I have now sent my mother money; my sister has sent her money, and another one of my nieces has sent money. The only people in the family who do not seem to feel terrible about this are the two people who should.
When i decided not to break up with my boyfriend at that moment.
I had just joined post graduation course and found this guy who was extremely caring about me. Within a month, he proposed me. I was confused however i said yes.
We use to talk, study and laugh together. However even after six months, i was not sure about our relationship.
AND Here comes the blow. He was back to his hometown. He was ill since a week. Meanwhile, i had a introspection round with my roommates. I found i was still unsure about our relationship. So i decided, on the next call, i will tell him that this is not the right time to fall in love etc., we should be friends only.
He called me around 8 PM. I was full prepared to say him a No. As soon as i picked the phone, he was crying on the other side. He was suffering from a fatal disease, Meningitis. I could not gather courage to leave him at this crucial moment. I just said, “I am with you today and always. No matter what happens.”
He was not in position to join college. His parents was insisting him to leave the college and repeat next time. He refused and joined the college next month. He had not recovered fully. In fact, he lost his hearing power around 40%. When he came back, he told me – how my words motivated him to join the college again. I took care of him. I used to call him reminding his medicines, diets etc. Meanwhile, i actually fell for him and then never told about that breakup thought.
Today, i am happily married with him.
P.S. I do not want my husband to know about my breakup thought even today. He is on quora. So i am writing anonymously.
I visited a radio station for an interview, at the station manager’s request. At the time I was somewhat “known” as a pleasing radio “personality” and therefore many stations wanted to talk to me.
Part of the interview process includes a station tour where the owner or manager shows off their office, production facilities, etc.
But at this particular station, I noticed all the shelved albums (well over a thousand) were locked in place by a steel bar which prevented their removal from the shelf, unless the bar was unlocked.
But who the Hell would steal the records? During business hours, when the station was open, advertisers or promoters might come in, but they were always accompanied by station staff, so visitors couldn’t steal an album (or even a 45). So, when the doors were locked after 5 PM, who did that leave as a potential thief?
Answer: the DJ who was on air, and the news guy or gal. Sometimes, the sales manager might come in.
So, the owner of the station was paranoid about theft from his or her own people! I had worked at a number of stations, and had never seen a lockdown of the music library. It had to mean that employees and top management were not happy with each other, and I was NOT going to work in that kind of environment.
Thus, I stopped in my tracks and said, “Thanks for the tour, but I don’t think this will work for me.” And I was out the door before anyone could say, “Huh?”
Years ago, I lived in an apartment in a two-family building. Upstairs and downstairs.
The landlord had rented the downstairs to a woman and her three teenage kids. They were obnoxious, had fights constantly, played music so loud it literally shook the walls, and despite multiple complaints by other neighbors to the landlord and the police (because yes it was that bad), nothing was done.
While technically, landlords are supposed to do snow clearing after a snow fall, getting some landlords to do so in a timely manner is more effort than digging out the snow yourself. This was one such landlord.
That winter we had a bad snow storm, a few feet of snow.
The downstairs neighbor knocked on my door to ask when I, the older woman with no kids, would be shoveling out the apartments and driveway, all of it, by myself.
I told her I wouldn’t, but we could split the cost to have someone come over and do it since the landlord was extra full of excuses as to why it would take days to get to the property and do so.
She laughed and said she wasn’t paying. She then told me I was welcome to hire her 3 kids to dig out the entire property. Her kids were a big part of the problem as to why the cops were coming over constantly, and so no. I’d previously had problems with her children opening my mail and putting it back in my mail box or opening deliveries of mine. There was no way I’d pay them.
Oh hell no, first you expect someone older than you to do the work for free, then expect that I will pay your kids, who are apparently perfectly able to do so, to dig YOU out? Fuck that.
A friend’s husband was offering to dig people out for a reasonable rate. I contacted him and hired him. When he got there, I explained the neighbor issue and what I wanted and was willing to pay for. He was only to clear out MY half of the driveway/garage/sidewalk. Her sides were still untouched, because no one(Me) would pay her kids to do it.
He went the extra mile, splitting the snow between the yard, and her side, of everything. AKA her side ended up with more snow that needed to be cleared.
This level of petty
image 117
Picture from Google.
She complained to the landlord that:
1. I refused to shovel her side of the property for her and her family (I was not obligated to do ANY property maintenance at all)
2. I had refused to hire her kids to do it
3. I had hired someone and refused to pay him to clear her side.
Now this was a kinda shitty landlord, but still… I was amused that the landlord contacted me about it and agreed to reduce my rent the amount I paid to have MY side cleared, as well as tell me about the downstairs neighbor’s complaints about me.
Until I moved out, whenever there was snowfall, you would see a similar clearing pattern on the property. SO much so the other neighbors joked about it, and refused to hire her kids to clear their properties as well.
EDIT: Apparently there are a large number of people who feel the need to comment about how she could just use my side of the stairs as if I lack a functioning brain. Seriously, the level of condescending ‘splaining in the comments is a sad statement on so many here. Thanks all you Captain Obvious’.
Of course she could, as could the postal worker who had to use them to deliver mail(Something not one of those commenting about her using the stairs seemed to consider).
Her being able to use them or not wasn’t the point. So many of you making the same comment as if the more of you who say it, the more I will regret it, or as if I didn’t realize that years ago when I did it is mind-boggling.
For those clueless ones that feel the need to comment the obvious, you all missed the obvious point that it wasn’t about her use of the stairs, but the refusal to clear her side on her command.
My partner (not my husband). My mother had been really sick from cancer for 18 months, we were told that she was unlikely to make it past the weekend. With that being said I was completely distraught… my partner of 9 years said pack your stuff and leave first thing in the morning (400km drive). He woke me up at 430 am, had already packed the car and fueled it up for me. Had a travel mug of coffee ready and said call me when you get there. I left 5am Friday morning.
mum passed 8am Saturday morning (the next day). I called my partner and told him, he said I’ll move heaven and hell to get there as soon as I can. I said, don’t worry, there is nothing you can do, just be here in time for mums funeral (the upcoming Friday).
in the mean time, it was my birthday 4 days after mum had passed. My family tried to make it as special as it could be. But, it was quite a somber occasion. At 8pm, there were headlights at the top of the drive way (rural property). I know the sound of his car. I’m like it’s *partners name.
he had worked 12 hour shift (construction) then drove 400km to be with me in my darkest time to help me feel better on my birthday. In the days after mums passing I had not been able to sleep, or cry or anything but just barely function. I slept solidly that night.
I know most would say that or like to think their spouse would do the same. But, that level of love and support got me through my darkest days. Love this man so very much.
Unfortunately, this is the point. The U.S. is not filty rich but filty poor.
All those money for Ukraine and Israel we got by using the printing press. We’re now $33 trillion in debt.
We can’t pay for basic utilities to keep our house in order but we believe we’re still able to live the high life of showing off to the rest of the world how powerful we are.
Genghis Khan, the legendary Mongol conqueror, had a unique approach when it came to treating his soldiers. Known for his strategic brilliance and military prowess, Khan understood the importance of a strong and loyal army in his quest to build the largest empire in history. So how did he treat his soldiers?
First and foremost, Genghis Khan believed in meritocracy. He valued skill, loyalty, and bravery above all else. Regardless of their background or social status, anyone who demonstrated these qualities had the opportunity to rise through the ranks of his army. This approach fostered a sense of unity and purpose among his soldiers, as they knew that their achievements would be rewarded.
Khan was also an astute observer of human nature. He recognized that soldiers needed to be motivated and inspired to fight with unwavering dedication. To achieve this, he led by example. Genghis Khan was renowned for his courage on the battlefield, often placing himself at the forefront of his troops during crucial engagements. This not only boosted morale but also instilled a sense of camaraderie and trust among his soldiers.
In addition to leading from the front, Khan took great care of his troops’ physical well-being. He ensured that his soldiers were adequately fed, equipped, and cared for. The Mongol army was known for its skilled horsemen, and Khan prioritized the breeding and training of horses to provide his soldiers with superior mounts. This gave them a significant advantage in maneuverability and speed during battles.
Furthermore, Genghis Khan implemented a system of rewards and recognition for valorous acts. Soldiers who displayed exceptional bravery or achieved notable successes on the battlefield were given honors, titles, and even land. This not only motivated his soldiers to excel but also created a sense of pride and camaraderie within the ranks.
However, Khan was also a strict disciplinarian. He demanded discipline and obedience from his soldiers, as he believed that a well-disciplined army was crucial for maintaining order and achieving victory. Disobedience or betrayal was met with severe consequences, ensuring that his troops remained loyal and committed to the cause.
Woman EXPOSES The INEVITABLE Problem With Dating Modern Women | TRAINED/GROOMED To Be Masculine
I was in talks to design a business plan for one of those “Become a Millionaire” guys – aka a “Life Coach”.
As we moved along in talks I immediately got the heeby jeebies from the guy.
He was in his late 50’s and only seemed to brag about things he did in high school and his early 20’s. When I would ask about subsequent years, just to understand his career narrative, he would get thin on details and then squirm and change the subject.
So then I watched a few of his media interviews where his go-to story was about this incredible and vivid vision that came upon him when he was a child. A vision that he would someday become rich.
To his credit, it indeed came true. He was a wealthy man.
But it became true because he inherited his dad’s company when his dad passed away unexpectedly. He then immediately sold the company and spent the next 30 years doing a whole lot of nothing.
So now he is one of those people going around telling everyone he knows “that ONE special secret to getting rich”. He released his first book on becoming wealthy, which a bunch of unfortunate suckers bought.
And, no, I won’t tell you the title because he will sue the hell out of me.
But I’ll give you the cliff notes version, “Get rich by having a rich dad.”
Unfortunately, there are a lot of people out there that are like him.
Preying on people’s hopes and dreams in search of a dollar.
The American industrial system does not have such production capacity.
American shipyards do not have such production capacity: There is only a dry dock suitable for manufacturing aircraft carriers, and aircraft carriers waiting for repair are still queuing;
The steel mills in the United States do not have such production capacity: The last scandal involving the use of low-quality steel made in Kobe, Japan, by US nuclear submarines has not yet passed. This batch of nuclear submarines with quality issues cannot dive at all, and diving into deep water will explode due to increased pressure. American warships are even unable to withstand the impact of fishing vessels, which fully proves the quality issues of the steel used in their shipbuilding.
There are not enough skilled workers in the United States
20 And Back – The Super Soldiers Defending the Kuiper Belt
Joe Biden is taking the World to the brink of World War III
What can the American people do about it?
SQUAT
…
Until 19/1/2025 at least, there is nothing any American citizen can do about it except watch the World plunge into war under the watch of a senile idiot who needs Diapers
So what is the use of saying
Biden is destroying USA and he must be kicked out
It’s just empty gas isn’t it. It’s just 10 words at the end of the day. Biden laughs and keeps doing whatever he likes for four years, unchecked
…
Same with every Democracy in the Planet
At the end of the day – WHAT IS THE END RESULT OF ABUSING OR CRITICISING THE LEADER?
Nothing
Either the Media suppresses it or people shrug and brazenly keep doing what they are doing
…
Take India
We have had Protests on every decision that has ruined the country
Demonetization, CAA, NCR etc
They matter Squat
Once in, Modi is in power for minimum 5 years and he can’t be shaken by the common man
…
France?
Same story
All those Protests and Screams and Shrieks about Pension reforms and Macron did exactly what he wanted
He is in charge till 2027
…
Same with South Korea , exports plunge to historic lows and people scream and protest but does it matter? Nopes
Taiwan?
Japan?
Germany?
So many protests begging to end the war and Germany openly and brazenly calls for Escalation
So what is the use of this damn free speech? You can say the words but they are worthless in every possible way
Now China
Yes
Maybe in China, saying these 10 words could be counter productive
However the people’s voice in China is heard much better than in any democracy
Lockdowns were ended post protests
Rural Banking Reforms were initiated after Protests
Crackdowns on Real Estate Financing was initiated after Protests
1.03 Crore Jobs have been added due to vigorous Weibo Netizen criticism
Tagging Schoolkids Or regulating online gaming has been deferred due to Weibo online protests
Plus the Biggest Biggest Thing…
Recently on the XI Jingping app, they asked if Chinas History for 6–9 Classes be modified and whether Chapters on the Boxer Rebellion and the Opium Wars had to be reduced
The Question was asked of Students who had already passed out their 9th Grade and above
79% Students said NO.
DON’T CHANGE HISTORY
They didn’t.
…
In India, US, and all those wonderful democracies – they don’t ask the kids do they????
So on one hand you have Western Democracies and their lapdogs where you can say what ever you want but can do zilch
Or China where your criticism must be tempered but as citizens you can achieve much greater control on Governance
The Chinese say WE LIKE OUR MODEL BETTER
I kinda agree with them
So you keep your Senile Alzheimer’s Ridden President and your ‘Freedom and Democracy’ and let the Chinese have their own version
I think you might want to edit the question to ask which item from Italian cuisine does the US actually get right.
Italian American cuisine is a cuisine in its own right. Millions of Italians immigrated to America and they adapted their traditional dishes to use American ingredients. Some of the ingredients they used at home were unavailable or too expensive in America, so changes were made. Successive generations didn’t know there was a difference between what they were eating and what was being cooked in the old country. They just accepted the food their families prepared as being Italian cuisine, which at heart, it is.
There’s a lot of water between America’s East Coast, the epicenter of Italian American cuisine, and the old boot herself. It’s that distance that led the creation of Italian American classics. If I had to point at one item the made the leap unmolested though, I’d name Sfogliatelle.
Sfogliatelle are a flaky pastry that originated in Campania. They’re made by rolling out dough, brushing it with lard or oil, rolling it up, cutting it into portions, shaping the pastry, filling it and baking. Sfogliatelle can be baked unfilled or filled with sweetened ricotta, almond paste or candied citrus zest. They’re simple to make and don’t call for any exotic ingredients. It’s the thin flakey layers that make sfogliatelle unique.
image 116
Ricotta filled:
image 115
If you’ve never tried these pastries, seek them out. They’re amazing and their recipe has not been molested by time or distance.
Life robbed me of my childhood. My parents had to quit school after grade 9 to help support their families. They vowed that my brother and I would not be barred from finishing school and going to University.
But we were poor, so they had no way to pay for it. So they propped me early. I knew by grade six that if I wanted to go to university, I would have to pay for it myself.
So in grade 8, I started mowing lawns and shoveling snow.
In grade 9 I got a part time job and worked 20 hours a week, in grade 10 ,30 hours, and grades 11 and 12 it was 40 hours. I graduated first in my class. I lived in a 10×14 ft room, with a roommate and the bathroom, was down the hall. I worked in the dorm cafeteria. When summer came I got a camp job, where I worked 360–380 hours a month, and they also paid room and board.
This was the way I graduated from university debt free.
So, as soon as I turned 13, I stopped having a childhood, and had an adulthood instead. So much for life being easy for baby boomers.
I’d do it all over again in a heart beat. Its what it took to break the cycle of poverty.
Because I am 71, I knew people who were in their prime of life a hundred years ago (1918) and there were definitely things that they did easily and routinely that are rarely done today:
Baking bread and caramel rolls. My grandmother learned it from her mother but did not pass it on to her daughters, probably because sliced store bread had essentially taken over.
Writing cursive and writing letters. I have saved some of my grandfather’s letters. For a person with an eighth grade education, he wrote simply but beautifully.
Sewing and mending. My grandmother was not wealthy, but she was capable of producing wonderful pajamas for all of her grandchildren on her trusty Singer. My generation has lost the ability to create heirlooms.
Gardening and canning the things they grew. In an era when you were not going to see fresh fruit or vegetables in stores after growing season, people developed great preservation skills. Things like pickles, berries, tomatoes were canned as were peaches and plums when in season. I do not remember kale or zucchini, however, and that was also a blessing.
Memory work. I grew up with great uncles and aunts (all born about 1900) who had memorized massive amounts of poetry and famous speeches as well as scripture. Rote learning was fairly normal in their education, so they did group memorization. We loved to hear their recitations.
I miss those folks. They just slipped away one at a time between the seventies and today.
This wasn’t me, this was my wife. She is a lawyer and was interviewing for a job managing the sale of properties. She was interviewing at a firm that specialised in really expensive and tricky sales and when she turned up to the interview she was told by the recruiter that the partners had told the last two people who were interviewed to leave midway through so they were quite abrupt!
She went to the interview, which went quite well, and they asked her to prepare an answer to a legal sale question. When she looked at it, she knew she had no hope: it was madly complicated and about a type of property sale that is known to be horrendous to do. She thought about trying to brazen it off and decided to be honest and say she had no idea.
It turned out the partners knew from looking at her CV she would have no idea about how to do it; it was something so complex the partner himself had had to do it himself. What they were trying to do was see how she reacted to something she didn’t know. The last two people interviewed had tried to make something up and so failed the test.
I was nowhere qualified as a computer tech but one time a friend of mine brought over a a desktop machine and keyboard and asked me to see if I could get it running as it wouldn’t boot up. Every time you’d plug in the power cord to the wall socket a strange odor would start permiating from the cover. I figured something was wrong with the power supply, which if push came to shove I could’ve probably went to an electronics supply store and bought another one and installed it. I was adept at soldering and replacing some common components at the time, which is why my friend thought that I could fix it.
Anyhoo, I removed the screws holding the cover to the unit, lifted the cover off and got the most absolute shock of my life!! Hundreds of live cockroaches start running out all over everywhere not to mention many more that were obviously dead inside that cover!
I came unglued along with a major panic attack! I’d never, ever had to deal with roaches after I became an adult. I despised them because while growing up my family and I always had a major problem with roaches and they were always into everything and would drop from the ceiling when you went into a room after turning on lights, etc etc etc.
I spent 2 hours stomping on and smashing roaches trying to prevent them from getting into places in my apartment where I couldn’t reach and in the long run wasn’t successful. Ended up moving out to get away from them making sure in the process that I didn’t inadvertently take any with me.
I was not happy with my friend. It caused a major, almost homicidal argument with him and it would be several years before we spoke again. The creepiness and ick factor of watching those roaches pile out of that machine that day still haunts me to this day.
Huawei refused to disclose its foundry information, sending the Biden team into madness.
Let’s talk about smart children. Particularly smart children in the United States. Particularly those in grades K-8 at a public school.
A lot of you reading this are, yourself, a product of the American public school system. Think back to your K-8 years. Do you remember people whose only job was to deal with the students with behavior problems? Were there “special education” teachers who had special classrooms with aides and all kinds of equipment for just a handful of students? Do you remember being bored a lot in school, because your teacher didn’t have the time to challenge you, because they were so busy re-teaching things to the students who didn’t get it the first time? Do you remember a handful of students who seemed to set the pace for the whole class, and that pace was much, much too slow for you? Do you remember a handful of students whose attitudes and behavior set the tone for the whole class? And was that a negative tone that left your teacher spending most of their time dealing with that small handful of students?
That was my experience, at least. In grades 4–8, I was one of about 20 students in a special gifted program in my school. But that gifted “program” was just two teachers who were given a spare classroom in five schools in the district, and they went to a different school every day of the week, and pulled out the gifted students from their classes for an hour, to play logic games with them.
One hour per week. That’s what we got.
Meanwhile, the students on the other end of the spectrum had resources thrown at them, including permanent classrooms with full-time teachers for students whose only “special need” was that they didn’t give a damn about learning.
I remember one incident in particular, when I realized just how much time my teachers wasted trying to get one particular student under control. His name was Anthony. One day, in seventh grade, we were learning about feudal Japan by playing a game where we were all on teams, given items to trade, and could use money we made to hire soldiers, and then there was a huge map of Japan on the wall, separated into regions, with the number of regions under each team’s control represented by different colored push pins.
My team started in Osaka. To this day, I know exactly where Osaka is because of this game back in 1992. I remember that we were the blue team, our main thing to trade was fish, and we began with five pushpin armies.
Also Judith was in my group, which made it even that much more enjoyable for me. She was forced to interact with me for a few minutes each day because of this.
It was a computer-less strategy game. I loved it. The game was supposed to last for a few weeks.
It lasted two days. On the third day, Anthony vandalized the giant game board, and some of his friends laughed. And that was it. The teacher was tired of putting in so much effort for something that students like Anthony just kept ruining. We did the rest of the unit, and every unit afterwards for the rest of the year, through textbook reading and worksheets.
But, as I thought about it, I realized that Anthony had been that way since he was first in my class in second grade. He was always out of control. He always set the pace and the tone for the class. In middle school, he got kicked out of class a lot, which just wasted a lot of time because he rarely went willingly and they had to call and wait for security. But he was always back in the class the next day. He just needed to “chill out.”
That was actually the name of the kick-out room for students like him: the “chill out room.”
I just Googled him and found a story that he was sentenced to six years in prison in 2004 for “domestic battery, drug possession, and forgery.”
Yep. All of that extra time, effort, and money the public school spent on him… how’d that work out?
That would be fine, if the public schools spent the same amount of time, effort, and money on the upper end of the spectrum.
My point is this: What’s the saddest truth about smart people? Public schools just aren’t equipped to deal with your special needs, because they’re too busy dealing with the special needs of students on the other end of the spectrum. The very people who have the most potential to give the most back to society are the same ones who school prioritizes the least.
Imagine a school system where every dollar spent on students on the lower end of the special needs spectrum had to be matched by a dollar for students on the higher end of the spectrum.
Imagine if, just like schools have resources in place for when the teachers need to kick out the Anthonys of the world, those same schools had resources for teachers to send out the students who were too smart for that day’s lesson.
“Timmy, you can read this and learn it on your own in five minutes, but I’m going to be teaching it to the rest of the class for the next hour. You can go to the gifted resource room and work with the teacher there on more advanced stuff.”
Imagine if, just as schools pay extra attention to students with special needs due to federal laws and fears of getting sued, schools did the same for students on the high end of the spectrum. Imagine if parents could threaten a lawsuit because the school wasn’t meeting the needs of their child… the legally-mandated requirement that the school challenge them on their academic level and not let their classmates hold them back.
Imagine how high your hot air balloon could be now, if not for the classroom sandbags that weighed you down when you were in school.
Instead of “No Child Left Behind,” it should be “No Child Forced To Wait.”
Gavin Newsom goes to China, one-ups Biden and meets Xi Jinping
“As a Californian, I can tell you that not only is Newsom not acceptable to the rest of America, California is not acceptable to the rest of America”.
It is likely that China will sell virtually all of its remaining U.S. Treasuries.
It is useful to look at Russia’s experience in this regard. Russia sold virtually all of its Treasuries in 2018, fairly quickly. At that time, Russia encouraged the world to dump U.S. Treasury bonds. Thus, it is possible for a country to officially not hold Treasuries.
After 2018, Russia continued to hold some foreign currency reserves in U S. dollars. When the Ukraine War started in 2022, the United States and its allies froze hundreds of billions of dollars held by Russia.
As a result, the world has been forced to look elsewhere to store its savings. Both China and Russia are storing much of their wealth in physical gold. Other countries are doing the same. The planet is also increasingly doing business in currencies other than the dollar.
As a result of these trends, China will increasingly no longer need U.S. Treasuries to do business. In October 2023, China bought its first oil for Chinese Yuan. If this continues, China will get its oil for free, by printing Yuan. America will be forced to trade hard goods for oil in the future.
America’s leaders were very short-sighted to weaponize the dollar. A global reserve currency requires trust. The United States had a money-making machine, and voluntarily gave it up.
FLASH TRAFFIC ADDED – TURKISH NAVY DEPLOYING 100 SHIPS AGAINST ISRAEL –~FIFTY (50) U.S. Military Transport Planes in 24 Hours to Middle East
FLASH TRAFFIC ADDED – SEE 12:27 PM EDT UPDATE BELOW —— From Friday-into-Saturday, the United States sent no fewer than fifty (50) military transport planes loaded with troops to the Middle East. In addition, the list below shows “unprecedented” naval deployments. Today, Iran said they WILL NOT abide U.S. warnings to stay out of the Israel-Hamas conflict.
We begin with Naval Deployments into the Middle East showing 11 Countries in Support of Israel:
All of the above, along with Submarines and other support ships show an utterly massive naval deployment. I am told this present deployment is larger than the ones done prior to the US war(s) against Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 1991 and again later.
In addition to all the above vessels, another Aircraft Carrier, the HMS Queen Elizabeth II, transited the Strait of Gibraltar yesterday morning around 11:00 AM, enroute to the eastern Mediterranean:
In addition to THAT additional aircraft carrier, the Navy of Italy is also now deploying vessels:
AIR
In the 24 hours period from Friday into Saturday, the United States flew 49+ military transport aircraft from the US to the Middle East, carrying TROOPS!
On top of those troop transport flights, a Significant number of C-17A Globemaster lll and C-5M Super Galaxy Transport Aircraft from the U.S. Air Force’s Air Mobility Command have been arriving in the Middle East.
The flight info above DOES NOT even cover the regular commercial airline flights the US has chartered to exclusively move troops!
Yesterday, Saturday 28 October 2023, Germany put 1,000 soldiers on alert for deployment to the Middle East in case of emergency The German Army keeps 1,000 troops on alert for possible deployment to the Middle East in case of emergency, given the prevailing tension in the region as a result of the war between Hamas and Israel.
This flight from Fort Sill, OK has my attention at the moment. Fort Sill is home to a THAAD battery and this flight appears to be headed overseas. There are no helpful ACARS for this flight, but this is possibly a THAAD battery flight enroute to Saudi Arabia:
At about 1:47 AM eastern US Time Sunday, which was about 11:00 AM in Tehran, Iran, the President of Iran said Tehran will not follow US warnings against interfering in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. According to the Press service of the President of Iran: “Israel has crossed red lines, forcing everyone to take action.”
The President made it a point to also say “the presence of U.S warships in the region will make no difference to Tehran’s decision.”
Hal Turner Analysis
Based solely upon the movement of ships, troops, and planes, it is obvious to me the United States is going to war. A big war.
Trouble is the federal government under the Biden Regime has intentionally left the US southern border with Mexico, virtually open. Literally millions of illegal aliens have been entering the country via Mexico since Biden took office.
It is my opinion that many – but not all – of these illegal aliens are a “5th Column” sent here by adversaries to be “sleeper cells.” I believe that when war erupts in the Middle East, that WE HERE IN THE USA will also be attacked by these sleeper cells.
YOU must be ready with emergency food, water, medicine, a generator to make electric in case the grid is taken down. Have CASH MONEY in your possession incase cyber attacks take out the financial networks, making credit, debit, and SNAP/EBT useless. After all, almost no one takes checks anymore. So folks with cash will eat. Those without cash will go hungry.
The utterly massive movement of troops and weapons indicates to me that hostilities are imminent. Which could — and I emphasize “could” (not necessarily “will”) — trigger sleeper cell attacks here in America.
If you wait until trouble starts, then YOU and every other person who failed to plan, will all be rushing to stores at the same time trying to get food and supplies. In short order, store shelves will be empty and those of you who took no action, will find yourself standing in an empty store.
Don’t be like “the masses who are asses” that wait until the last minute to get supplies. Do it right now. Today.
And gas-up your cars, trucks, and spare gas cans for your generator.
Lastly, have COMMUNICATIONS GEAR – a CB or a HAM (Shortwave) radio — so if things go wild weasel, and communications like phone, fax, email, cellular/Internet all go down, at least YOU will be able to communicate locally (CB) and hear international news on shortwave (HAM).
Of course, some of you will say that this story and its advice is sort of like “Chicken Little, the sky is falling.” To those who would scoff I merely point out that, this morning, a U.S. E-6 Nuclear Command Post is now flying over the US East Coast:
The E-6B Mercury is a communications relay and strategic airborne command post aircraft. It provides survivable, reliable, and endurable airborne Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications (NC3) for the president, secretary of defense and U.S. Strategic Command.
So it isn’t just ME telling you to take steps to prepare, it’s the US Military, too. Take the hint!
(PERSONAL: Sorry my coverage today begins at this late hour of 11:00 AM EDT. I slept-in this morning. Didn’t wake up until 9:25 AM. I was literally exhausted.)
********** FLASH ***********
UPDATE 12:27 PM EDT —
The Turkish Navy is, right now, transiting ONE-HUNDRED Naval Warships through the Bosporus Strait from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Sea.
It is BELIEVED Turkey plans to engage Israel over its ongoing military action in Gaza. War may break out between Turkey and Israel within Hours! ! ! !
Unlike its better known relative, the Enigma machine which was infamously deciphered by code-breakers at Bletchley Park throughout the war, the Lorenz cipher posed a much greater challenge. Utilising 12 wheels to scramble up the message being sent as opposed to the 3 or 4 rotors found in the Enigma machine, the Lorenz cipher was incredibly secure. As a result, unlike the Enigma that was used by the German standard armed forces, the Lorenz cipher was used only by high command with messages coming from Hitler himself. As a result, to crack the Lorenz cipher (or Tunny as it was code named by the British) would have the potential to change the course of the war.
Not much headway had been made in breaking the Lorenz cipher through the war until a German operator made a catastrophic mistake on 30 August 1941. When a German receiving operator did not receive a message correctly, he asked the transmitter to resend the information and despite clear protocol against it, the two operators resent the message without changing their key settings (the settings that determine how the text is scrambled up). However since the message in question was 4000 characters long, the lazy German operator abbreviated several words, thus changing the length of the message. Since their key settings were both the same, the two messages had the same scrambling pattern of characters. Thus by comparing the locations where the message text changed, details of the way the rotors worked could be determined.
These two messages were intercepted by the British who soon realised the importance of what they had discovered. This task of cracking Tunny was given to W T (Bill) Tutte who began to find repetitions in the cipher which allowed him to reverse engineer the Lorenz machine’s logical structure in what would be later described as “one of the greatest intellectual feats of World War II”. In order to support the painstaking decryption of German messages, the British Colossus was built in 1943 by Tommy Flowers, the first ever modern computer.
image 112
The Colossus Machine
The impact of the decryption of Tunny was enormous. It gave the British intimate details of Hitler’s most secret communications which was most notably vital in D Day where the Allies were able to deceive the Germans that they were going to attack at Calais as opposed to Normandy and at the Battle of Kursk in 1943, Germany’s last ditch attempt to reverse their fortunes on the Eastern Front and one of the largest battles in history. Involving 3 million men, without foreknowledge of German planning provided by the British, the Soviets would have been badly prepared defensively and could have lost this crucial battle and as a result, the war would’ve been prolonged. In fact, historians estimate that the breaking of the Lorenz cipher shortened the war by two years and thus saved millions of lives all due to the careless mistake of two lazy German operators.
However this pivotal event is not well known due to the Official Secrets Act keeping the nature of the code breakers working to break the Lorenz cipher secret until 1974 and some former staff even today still refuse to break their vow of secrecy, preferring to take their knowledge to the grave.
image 111
W T (Bill) Tutte, the man responsible for cracking the Lorenz Cipher
Cajun Pot Roast
2023 11 09 14 23
Yield: 6 servings
Ingredients
1 (3 pound) beef sirloin or chuck roast
2 large garlic cloves, cut into 1/4 to 1/2 inch pieces
3 cayenne chiles, or jalapeno chiles, cut into 1/4 to 1/2 inch pieces
Salt and pepper to taste
1 large onion, chopped
1 bell pepper, chopped
1 large garlic clove, minced
1 (4 ounce) can whole or sliced mushrooms
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
Creole seasoning to taste
Instructions
Cut 1/2 to 3/4 inch slits into beef. Stuff one piece of garlic and one piece of chile into each slit. Season the roast with salt and pepper.
Heat a large nonstick pan over medium heat. Add beef and brown well on all sides.
Add onion, bell pepper and minced garlic land sauté until tender.
Add water to pan to cover the beef.
Stir in the mushrooms and Worcestershire sauce and season with Creole seasoning.
Simmer, covered, for 3 to 4 hours or until tender, adding more water if needed to keep liquid level halfway up the beef.
Notes
You may stir 1 tablespoon flour mixed with 1 cup cold water into liquid near end of cooking for a thicker gravy.
I broke off a 10 year off and on relationship over a single piece of gum.
He and I weren’t on great terms for a long while. It was mostly out of his cheapness. He wouldn’t take me out to eat-we ate at his place. That wouldn’t have been bad except that he bought cheap items and used foods that had expired. I told him I wasn’t eating his cooking anymore, thank you. We watched TV but only shows he liked-he didn’t want to waste his time on my shows. I could watch them at my place.
Things were coming to a head and I knew the next fight we had would be the last. It was November when he called me and asked me to come over and fix his computer. I wasn’t in the best of moods-I finally had a free afternoon with the kids out with their father and I had things to do. Ok, I decided I would go over and see if I could do something to help. I got there and he already told me I had just an hour to get things right. Perfect start-no thanks for coming over, great to see you, etc.
He offered me a piece of gum. I haven’t chewed gum in years because it sticks to my dental work, and he knew it. Why was he offering me gum-was my breath stinky? After I thought about it for a moment, I took a piece. I didn’t even get it open when he started to yell at me-why is everything in your life a big decision? Don’t waste my gum-either take it or don’t! I paid money for that!
I immediately put the gum back on the table. He flips out again-you touched it not you don’t want it! What’s the matter with you? With me? I don’t chew gum, not in years! You knew that! I thought you were hinting my breath stunk so I took a piece of gum. Now you don’t want me to take the gum! Why don’t you make up YOUR mind?
He immediately moved my tech bag away from his computer and began to work on his computer. Don’t you want me to do that? No. You asked me to cone down here to help you, now you don’t want me to help you? Silence. Are we really going to have a fight about a piece of gum after I wasted my time and gas to come here? Silence.
I sat on the couch for a few minutes. I could have just stormed out the door. I wanted to compose myself and make it clear what would happen. I told him that I have spent 10 years doing for him, taking care of him when he was sick, lent him things like my cell phone and my car, then paid the repairs when he broke them and he never paid me back. I have put up with all this, and if we didn’t resolve what was really going on, I was leaving and not coming back. All I got was silence. Are we really going to break up over a damned piece of gum? Silence.
I picked up my things and I left. I never went back. I blocked his number from my cell phone. I had a feeling I knew what happened because he did it to me before. He used to get moody around Thanksgiving time and lots of times we broke up so he could avoid my birthday in December and Christmas/Chanukah/Valentines Day. He used to call around March to renew our friendship but his birthday was in April and he really wanted a present. I just had enough of his childishness, his cheapness and his abusive control. It was just one fight too many and I was done.
He did email me the following April-after I sent nothing for his birthday. I emailed him back that I told him that after our last fight, I was done and I wanted nothing more to do with him. He replied that he forgot what we fought about, and I told him that it was over a piece of gum. Then I blocked his email.
He called from another phone the following September, demanding I stop being stupid and get back together. What a lovely invitation, no woman can resist that, I answered. Then he threatened me. I told him to come over and try to f*** me up. I had an old lead pipe my father had and it had his name on it. I told him I’ll invite my neighbors to watch me smear him all over the street. My temper broke and I told him about the horrible things he did to me over the years. He finally said “I guess you’re mad at me, huh?” I hung up and blocked his new number too.
He attempted to contact me a few times through his friends but I told them I would go to the police and file harassment charges. He finally moved out of New York City-he attempted to contact me from his mother’s home in Tennessee. I blocked that too. He’s been blocked in every social media site so I don’t have to deal with him.
He had 10 years to grow up and apologize. The words aren’t in his vocabulary. I know the piece of gum wasn’t the reason our relationship ended-it was years of my giving and him taking and never appreciating what he got. But that stupid piece of gum was the catalyst. To this day, when I see a pack of Wrigley’s gum, I still smirk with amused disgust.
I interviewed for a support engineering role, the interviewer asked me how a fluorescent light fitting worked. I explained what I knew about the ballast, starter and gas tube etc. He delved deeper and I drew a rudimentary circuit diagram. When he asked exactly how the starter worked I was stumped, so I said “I don’t know”.
He told me that he must’ve had 2 dozen other applicants attempt to convince him how it all worked, but being able to admit I didn’t know something landed me the job. I learnt how knowing one’s limitations is so important.
Despite increased attacks on US occupation bases, Joe Biden has reportedly turned down more ‘aggressive bombing options’ in Syria out of fear that a wider conflict may erupt
NOV 13, 2023
(Photo credit: AFP via Getty Images)
Several missile and drone strikes targeted US occupation bases in Syria on 13 November in response to the latest round of US airstrikes on alleged Iranian targets in the country.
Fifteen missiles targeted the US base in the Conoco gas field, sources told Al-Mayadeen, adding that US helicopters began making flights ten minutes after the strike.
“The Conoco base was targeted with advanced Grad missiles, which led to the death of four US soldiers,” Al-Mayadeen’s correspondent reported.
Field sources told Al-Mayadeen that the attacks were carried out by the “Popular Resistance” in Syria.
In a second response to US airstrikes, three drones struck the Al-Shaddadi military base in Hasakah, northeastern Syria.
The US Green Village base at the Al-Omar oilfield northeastern Syria, was also hit with a drone. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq claimed responsibility for the attack.
The Islamic Resistance in Iraq is a coalition of Iraqi resistance factions formed last month in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance in Gaza.
The coalition was formed to confront US forces in Iraq and Syria as part of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and in rejection of US support for Israel in the war, and has been targeting US bases on a regular basis.
Hours before Monday’s attacks, US warplanes carried out several airstrikes in eastern Syria.
Washington claimed the attacks targeted facilities used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
According to Al-Mayadeen’s correspondent, the US airstrikes “targeted a house in the town of Al-Mayadeen, which led to the death of a citizen and the injury of another.”
US jets have struck Syria several times over the past month in retaliation to the unprecedented surge in resistance attacks against US military bases in Iraq and Syria. Washington has labeled the attacks as “self-defense.”
According to the New York Times (NYT), US President Joe Biden “has rejected more aggressive bombing options proposed by the Pentagon out of fear of provoking a wider conflict with Iran.”
The newspaper also cites Republicans in Congress as saying that Washington’s strikes on Syria “only invite more frequent and more dangerous attacks against US troops in the region.”
There have been at least 48 resistance attacks against US forces in Iraq and Syria since 17 October, the Pentagon said on Saturday.
“At least 56 U.S. service members had been injured. Roughly half of those suffered traumatic brain injuries, and two had to be flown to Landstuhl military hospital in Germany for treatment,” the NYT adds.
There doesn’t seem to be many who are rude. My story is about a beautiful and kind woman.
Many years ago I was in O’Hara airport getting ready to fly home from Navy boot camp. As I waited, I saw what looked like a Hollywood photo shoot going on. I walked over with my nearly bald head and baggy Navy uniform and talked to an absolutely beautiful woman, dressed like an Elf. She was friendly and asked where I was from and what my home was like. We talked for about 10 minutes. As I needed to catch my plane, I thanked her for taking the time to speak with me. I asked her what her name was. It was Ann-Margaret. Surprise! I’ve had a soft spot for her since our meeting.
There have been a lot of memes lately, discussing this subject:
It’s viewed as a sort of work-around to all of life’s problems:
These’s memes are funny and all (sometimes), but they also have some truth.
A good portion of depressed people definitely view suicide as a way out and they genuinely think it’s the only way.
But it’s not.
Sunday, Nov 18 is my late-uncle’s birthday.
No one ever talks about him in my family. And of the few times he’s brought up, is always in relation to his suicide or mental illness.
He lived a pretty amazing life, but the memory of his suicide looms over the conversations around him.
It’s not like we never talk about him, or that suicide is strictly the only thing that we remember about him. There’s just no solace to the memory of his passing, suicide is something that is preventable, it didn’t have to be this way.
And, unfortunately, it’s the same with my idol, Chester Bennington.
image 120
In every Linkin Park YouTube music video, all the comments are the same. They’re ALL about his depression or his death.
No one talks about his life, how he made it big after a period of being homeless. How Linkin Park immediately knew who their lead singer was after his audition; how Chester would always do screaming vocal warmups, which could be heard several changing rooms away, before each of his live performances.
No one talks about that anymore.
If I’d killed myself on year ago, all I’d be remembered as was “that quiet kid who killed himself.”
You have a lot to be remembered for.
Stan Lee, who passed away on Nov 12, 2018, is positively cherished by fans.
So much material was circulated recently about his life and work.
image 119
There was a meme about how he drew the Peter Parker meets MJ comic strip based on the time he first saw his future wife. There were memes of his cameos in Marvel movies, memes of Infinity war, Spider-man memes….
It was awesome.
And nobody was particularly sad, rather they celebrated everything he did in his 95 year life on Earth.
You have a lot to live for.
And a lot to be remembered by.
And even if things don’t get better quickly.
Don’t tarnish that with suicide.
It’s not worth it.
You are worth it.
You are worth a good life and the world deserves your proud legacy.
During my very first visit to China, there were a couple of things that took me by surprise:
Massive malls absolutely everywhere
I’ve heard that Chinese food is so much better in China than what you get in other countries, but that’s is a massive understatement. There is so much diversity in food options, all of it is amazingly delicious and very reasonably priced. I could not get enough of it, and I can’t wait for my next visit so I can stuff my face with all that deliciousness again!
I didn’t expect to have that much trouble finding restaurants or shops that accept foreign bank cards. Some locations only allow Alipay. Also, apps like Didi are not available to foreigners as you need a Chinese number to sign up, and hailing a taxi is not always easy.
I saw very few tags or graffiti on buildings in big Chinese cities. Those are a major issue in pretty much every European city, as even historical buildings get smeared in tags, so this was a welcome surprise.
Excellent public transportation – so cheap and easy to use!
All the people I’ve met were absolutely lovely and extremely helpful. Also, there are so many older people in the parks, exercising or dancing, which is refreshing to see.
There is never any paper in bathrooms, so you have to carry a roll with you
The only thing that slightly threw me off during my very first visit was that people in China often take pictures of foreigners without asking. I’m very visibly a foreigner, so I always get quite a bit of attention when I’m travelling in Asia. I’m used to that, and I never decline a picture with some curious locals, as I find it a sweet experience. However, in China, while many approached and asked for a photo, there were many more who just tried to ‘’sneakily’’ take it, which made me feel a little bit uncomfortable at times.
As a tiny woman travelling alone I felt quite safe, even at night in less populated areas.
My wife and kids lived upstairs in my parent’s house. My Dad passed before my Mom. When she passed, as the only child, I had to sort out her bills, insurance, etc. My Mom was a school teacher for many years and received SS and a pension. At her time of retiring, she did not make as much as teachers do today. A few days after her funeral, I was sitting at her desk going through her checkbook to see what was paid and so forth. When I looked at the deposits, I started to see bill after bill after bill being paid, leaving her with very little left over. I am still saddened to this day, many years later, that I never knew the depth of how bad things really were. We could have contributed more to the household, but she hid most of this from us, trying to spare us any hardship. This is the single biggest regret I have in her passing, knowing I could have eased her burden, as she was the most loving mother one could ask for. She worked her whole life to teach children and raise me, who deserved so much more in her retirement. I am shedding tears as I write this, and hope that others can take more of an active role in their parents lives (when allowed) while they are still with us.
While employed as a pizza delivery rider, after the lifting of the COVID lock-down, our company decided to pull a fast one.
A memo from the head office was circulated among all restaurant staff at all branches. It basically said that the company was so concerned about our welfare in these trying times that they were willing to keep a percentage of our weekly salary for us as a form of savings. The memo also mentioned that if we agreed to this ‘Pizza Savings’ (my term, not theirs) that we will be getting 0% interest.
My delivery co-worker and I had a field day with that memo. We read it several times in disbelief and laughed. The owners could not be serious.
It was obvious they wanted to get a loan/invest in something. It was as if they told themselves instead of taking a 16% interest loan from the bank why not simply take it from their uneducated restaurant workers, all they needed was our signatures.
I went around some of the co-workers joking about it. Most of us laughed it off but two of them couldn’t understand what was so funny.
‘But we’re getting 0% interest!’ an older woman working the grill said.
She seemed to have the idea that this was a good thing. Apparently she had had so many loans in the past that to her the word interest = bad.
I explained to her it was a savings and not a loan. That with savings you want the highest interest you could get and the exact opposite when it comes to a loan.
‘But isn’t it good to have a savings?’ one of the teenaged girls working the pizza table said.
I explained to her it is a good thing but it makes no sense to save your money with someone giving you 0%. I tried explaining how banks work, about buying shares etc and getting the best rates for your money. Both women looked at me in silence.
In the end they both decided to ‘try it out.’
I didn’t know what shocked me more. The fact that the restaurant attempted that stunt or the fact that it actually worked on two employees.
Controller got fired for all the right reasons. On his way out, and before his access was deleted, he programmed a very, very offensive message on the Windows start menu for the entire company-something along the lines of “fxxx you, (name of the CFO)”. Now I’ll admit the guy had it coming, but will also say that the CFO was the biggest a-hole I’ve ever met. Anyway, it took the IT guys weeks before they were able to fix it (always wondered why it took sooooo loooong).
As a 45 year old, I started feeling very tired. I fell asleep in the bathroom at work one day. Went home and thought I was coming down with a cold. Never actually got cold symptoms, but could barely move my body. It felt like all of my extremities were filled with lead. Then I started getting dizzy. Then I started to vomit. I went to an urgent care center and told them all of the above symptoms and how now I’m vomiting and peeing every 5 minutes. I even told them I was vomiting black stuff which they informed me was blood. I was told I just had a stomach virus like people get on cruise ships. I said I have never been on a cruise ship in my life. I was sent home with antinausea meds. I had lost about 15 lbs in 3 days. That night and next day still vomiting and now breathing in short gasps. Now my body is shivering uncontrollably and I can barely move and still vomiting blood. My kids found me on the kitchen floor and took me to the ER. I was rushed back and found out I was in diabetic ketoacidosis. My body was shutting down. I was about a day away from death. My blood sugar was 854. I was diagnosed as a type 1 diabetic.
While hospitalized, I received a survey from the urgent care center asking how my experience was. I’ll told them that I almost died thanks to them, but other than that it was great.
Years back when Subway still gave you tickets to collect for free subs, my kids’ mother and I were going to have dinner and movie night with my brother and his wife. Subway was the night’s choice. Well, it is Friday evening and the video store is packed. So we’re standing in line waiting to check out our movies, and she is going through these Subway tickets. She asks me,
“I don’t supposed you’ll eat a 6 inch?”
To which I responded, in a building with over 150 people in it, without even missing a beat,
“No, if I don’t get 12 inches, I’m just not satisfied.”
Children were laughing at me. Had it not been so hilarious, I would be mortified of that story getting out.
A United States Air Force E-4B aircraft, which is a designated National Airborne Operations Center (NAOC) took off from Offutt Air Force Base this afternoon, headed out over the Gulf of Mexico, and Transmitted an Emergency Action Message (EAM) to US Nuclear Missile Submarines, using Very Low Frequency (VLF) Comms.
There’s something unnerving seeing a E-4B NAOC (GORDO16) and a E-6B TACAMO (FULL02) launch from Offutt AFB around the same time. As you can see from the FlightRadar24 map image below, that’s what happened.
The E-4B
The E-4B serves as the National Airborne Operations Center and is a key component of the National Military Command System for the President, the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
In case of national emergency or destruction of ground command and control centers, the aircraft provides a highly survivable command, control and communications center to direct U.S. forces, execute emergency war orders and coordinate actions by civil authorities.
The conduct of E-4B operations encompasses all phases of the threat spectrum. Additionally, the E-4B provides outside the continental United States travel support for the Secretary of Defense and his staff to ensure Title 10 command and control connectivity.
The E-6B
The E-6B Mercury is a communications relay and strategic airborne command post aircraft. It provides survivable, reliable, and endurable airborne Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications (NC3) for the president, secretary of defense and U.S. Strategic Command.
Only One Job:
The E-4B and E-6B at the end of the day only have one job: getting the message out (Nuclear launch codes) from the NCA (National Command Authority) to the United States Nuclear Triad by any means necessary.
Those means include a variety of waveforms including VLF, HF, UHF, SHF and beyond.
A B-52, B-2, ICBM Silo, or Submarine, will decode these encrypted messages and either launch their nuclear weapons at an intended target – – or not – – based on the decisions of our elected public officials.
So imagine my dismay when surveillance picked up the E-4B transmitting an EMERGENCY ACTION MESSAGE(EAM) while out over the Gulf of Mexico this afternoon! More specifically, the aircraft was messaging our nuclear missile SUBMARINES because it was using VLF, Very Low Frequency, to send the encoded message. VLF is the band that penetrates the ocean to sufficient depth, to reach our submerged nuclear missile subs.
USA civil war?
The state of Colorado ruled Trump ineligible for the 2024 election. An account of something something insurrection democracy something.
As it stands, Trump will compete in only 49 states in the election.
It is likely, others will follow. If a few swing states do it, then result of the election is successfully altered.
If supreme court does not strike these down, the United States is officially no longer a democracy.
If supreme court strikes it down, the damage is still done. People will lose trust that their vote matters.
The country is headed into civil war.
Posted by: FieryButMostPeaceful | Dec 21 2023 16:26 utc | 3
Began the telemarketer. We’d been getting a lot of those calls in the past few weeks and I was about 19 or so, so my evil little comedic mind was at work.
Here’s the thing: no one asks those bastards (you know I wanted to say something else) to call us personally! We want them to stop. It was back in the early days of this crap and many of the accents over the phone were still American.
“I have amazing news!!”
“You found a kidney??!”
“Uh, what?”
“You found a kidney!!!! You’re from the hospital, right? We’ve been waiting by the phone and- and I just can’t believe this is really happening; bless you; thank God!”
“Um…no… I’m… calling about (something he suddenly had dramatically less confidence in).”
“You- you’re not from the hospital?”
“No, sorry, I-“
(I turned my head from the phone and didn’t really muffle it properly.) “Oh, don’t cry, Sarah, sweetie! They’ll find one! It’s okay sweetheart, don’t worry.”
(I turned back to the phone.) “I’ll just call back later.”
“Thanks; I’m sorry: could you please keep the line clear? We’re waiting to hear from the hospital.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll do that.”
It got played about 2 more times and then those bastards stopped harassing us by phone to buy or sign on to their whatever.
Meanwhile, about China…
US are completely paranoid about China overtaking them, their tactics to block them has simply backfired spectacularly, so the US resort to scaring every neighbour of China into thinking they are going to invade them, including us.
Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand 19h This is a good read on “why the American technological war against China could backfire” and “supercharge China’s creation of an independent computer chip industry”. theconversation.com/why-the-…
It’s exactly what is happening and at the end of the day, as the article makes clear, it’s all about hubris.
It was always beyond delusional for the US to believe that it could stop the technological progress of a country that IS AHEAD OF THEM on all metrics that matter for it, as detailed in the article: – “Chinese high schoolers score the highest in the world in reading, science and mathematics” – “Chinese universities are outperforming institutions in the rest of the world in the vast majority of disciplines”. For instance, critically, China has 6 of the top 10 universities in the world in engineering whilst the US only has 2… – China produces more than double the number of STEM PhDs every year than the U.S. – “In 2022, China overtook the U.S. for the first time as the country or territory publishing the most research articles in prestigious natural science journals” – “China published the highest number of scientific research papers annually between 2018 and 2020, and had 27.2 per cent of the world’s top one per cent of the most frequently cited papers, compared to 24.9 per cent for the U.S.” – According to research done by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute “China is leading [the world] in 37 of 44 cutting-edge technologies, including nanoscale materials and synthetic biology” – Etc.
Conclusion from the article: “When it comes to the use and production of knowledge-based industries, China has more advantages than any other country in the world. American actions will create a new generation of Chinese high-tech firms that will compete directly with the U.S. and western businesses from whom they used to buy their products. These firms will produce more affordable products than their western counterparts, and could dominate technological infrastructure in the Global South.”
In a nutshell the very notion that China is a country whose technological progress could be stopped is almost criminally deluded, and derives from both a deep misunderstanding of China by the US and a deep overestimation of American capabilities… Adopting this strategy is backfiring big time and will without a doubt yield a considerably worse result for the US than if they’d favored a “coexistence” collaborative approach 🤷♂️
When I worked security, I knew people whose job consisted entirely of occupying a space for a long period of time.
Technically, they were securing the area and they had a walkie-talkie to call the rest of us if anyone tried to go into the area who shouldn’t have been there. But no one ever tried to get into those areas.
I worked at an outdoor concert place that had upscale restaurants around the perimeter of the grounds. Those restaurants closed when the show started, and security guards were put in the restaurants to make sure no drunk concert goers tried breaking into them.
I volunteered for that position once, and never again. I literally sat in a dark, empty restaurant for four hours. I could hear the music outside, and I could see people walking by the windows, but no one tried to come into the restaurant. No one ever tried. It was so boring… I requested to be in front of the stage for shows after that.
I was skidding through my freshman year, sleepwalking to classes and nursing hangovers. I’d just stepped into an elevator on our first day and noticed Professor Kaplan standing next to me. I’d heard about him. He was allegedly one of the best professors, a former Harvard lecturer.
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I turned and said, “Greetings professor! I believe I’m attending your lecture today.” Holding his notebooks, he turned, smiled, and said, “My condolences.” And then he proceeded to give one of the best lectures I’ve ever seen. His display of humility in that elevator made him that much more endearing.
Self-deprecating humor, done lightly, and framed in a positive way, is powerfully charismatic. It makes people feel comfortable and appeals to their insecurities. But if you make a joke about your third wife leaving you, you might be overkilling it.
A lot of people think I’m paid to write the things I write, I merely have a fair bit of free time. Today was the last day for my day job until next year, tomorrow is a massive party though…
Anyway me and a couple of other shit posters irritate enormous amounts of westerners merely by our free time shit posting.
People don’t like to argue against me because I like to use western media to debunk western media. Last night for instance a person said the BBC is honest. I then showed them two BBC clips together and one was very different.
Imagine 500million extra internet users even MORE aggressive and shit postery than me? I say 500 million because while 900 million people can write English to an OK level only about 500 million are proficient.
Imagine ME x 500 or x 5000. And here’s the thing, I’m overseas born, so I’m a hell of a lot easier going than a lot of Chinese people.
Back in 2006 me and a friend had been Christmas shopping, and it was a big outing for me, I had been battling Leukemia for a number of years, and after having a bone marrow transplant I was finally able to be out of a sterile environment,.
We went into a Restaurant and were seated right next to a table where 3 quite over weight women were seated.
I was very thin, I am 5 foot 7 and at the time weighed about 105 lbs. I didn’t have much of an appetite, so when finished my meal was barely touched, the waitress asked me if I wanted a box to take food with me, and I said no.
Well that prompted one of the “ ladies” to loudly say say “ Skinny Bitch, you can tell SHE is on drugs”!
I just looked at her and said “ well, not since the bone marrow transplant, thankfully I am done with Chemo.”
Back in 1981, I was kitchen manager at a new pizza place in town. We were about 4 months in and turning a good profit. The guy who managed the place was a great guy and everyone who worked there loved him. The actual owner of the place had a daughter with a boyfriend. He fired our boss for no reason and said his brat’s boyfriend was the new boss, a guy who had never worked in food service before (it’s just a pizza joint, how hard could it be?). Then we were told we would need to be attend a meeting to talk about these changes at 4:00pm. We did the following: 1) added shit-tons of salt and cayenne pepper to existing pizza sauces, 2) changed the printed recipe for dough to make it unlikely to rise correctly, and if it did rise to certainly taste bad, 3) change the sauce recipe to make it inedible, and 4) swap all the lines around for the soda machine, so that when you dispensed from Coke, Dr. Pepper came out, etc. We only had beer in bottles, and our bottles were longneck deposit bottles, and they hadn’t picked them up yet, so we loaded all the beer into the back of a pickup truck, filled the beer cooler with empties, and took the beer to an undisclosed location. Four o’clock came around and everyone was there. New boss, his girlfriend, and the owner were there and as soon as the new manager was introduced, we got up, walked out the door, and soon found ourselves at said undisclosed location, partaking in recently purloined beer and repeatedly calling in take-out orders that would never be picked up. Did I mention, there was a reservation for a party of 30 that night at 6:00?
Besides making a bad life decision that cost him his life, he also got the opportunity to take a step back but decided to dive back in immediately:
There is an island called “North Sentinel” which is home to 150 natives who vehemently refuse all contact with the outside world.
This rule makes sense, as these human beings are not accustomed to the diseases of the modern world, and any contact could lead to contamination that would be fatal to their small tribe.
But this didn’t stop John Allex Chau, a 27-year-old preacher, from travelling to the island to preach about Jesus Christ.
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He was showered with arrows which, fortunately for him, all missed their target.
Logically, he decided to return the following day for a second attempt.
A completely dumb decision, as the poor man would never leave the island alive.
Didn’t he think God was maybe sending him a divine message the first time the arrows missed his head?
A few years ago, I was charged with ordering breakfast sandwiches for everyone in the office for our morning meeting.
As I went around and got everyone’s orders, ‘Dave’ specifically asked for no mayo on his sandwich. I made a note on the order next to his name that said “NO MAYO” and sent in the order.
Half an hour later, I was distributing the sandwiches and heard Dave say, “Oh, har har har. You’re so funny, Kate.”
I came over to see what he was talking about and started laughing.
Dave’s ‘sandwich’ was comprised of two buns that were swimming in mayo.
No egg.
No bacon.
No cheese.
No ham.
Just an ungodly amount of mayo everywhere.
Someone had to have emptied half a container of mayo in between the buns, and thought, “Hmmm… not quite enough”. And then slathered the outside of the buns, and then thought, “Nope, doesn’t cut it!”. And then wiped more mayo on the inside of the packaging.
After I finished laughing, I took it back and showed the cashier who was absolutely appalled at the mayo monstrosity in my hands.
She went in the back and asked the other guys what the hell had happened and why on earth they made a mayo sandwich.
Apparently they thought it said “Only mayo.”
In which case, they fucking nailed it.
Modern Women Are FREAKING OUT As 63% Of Men Have WILLINGLY Left The Dating Scene
Keep it simple. 50% of women in the 20s and 30s today will NEVER get married, and will NEVER have children. Up your game girls
I was 18 and at home with dad, while mom and my brother had gone out of town.
He asked me if I wanted to watch any movie and I replied a big enthusiastic yes.
I suggested a Bollywood movie Gangster. He agreed. I hadn’t seen the movie’s trailer. What a mistake.
We went to the mall, got the tickets.
When the awkward scenes started, he turned to me and said,
“You should watch such movies with your friends. Why did you tag me along?”
“I am sorry I didn’t know they had such scenes.”
“No worries. Let’s see the movie now. Next time see the trailer before suggesting it to me.”
When it got over we went over to the food court for dinner.
I noticed a guy and wondered where have I seen him when my dad said,
“He is not your type.”
“What?”
“He is not your type.”
“Who? I was not looking at him in that sense.”
He smiled.
“What makes you think he is not my type.”
“He has a moustache. You hate moustaches.”
“How do you know that?”
“Well you know right, I had a moustache till you were a toddler? You would constantly pull them and say you hate it. Why do you think I have been moustache free all these years?”
I smiled at the memory when he pointed to another fellow and said,
Not me, but I was there. My mom was driving and my brother & I, about 9&6 years old, were fighting in the back seat. She’s yelling at us to stop fighting, and didn’t realize that she got into the town speed limit zone (35 instead of 45).
The cop came up and asked why she was going so fast, and she told him. Next thing you know, he’s got the back door open and is lecturing us about how mom needs to pay attention while driving and if we are fighting in the back seat she can’t. And if he catches us fighting in the back seat again, he might have to arrest us. Then he told my mom to drive safe, and to let him know if we caused any more trouble.
Years later, I asked her if she remembered. She laughed, and let me know that of course she did. He had been one of her classmates, she had known him since they were little kids.
I read a book about a magician who performed a stunt where he was locked into a glass box above the city. He did not eat for 53 days, he could only drink water. His stunt had to quit as doctors were monitoring his vitals and after 53 days they started to get too bad.
I couldn’t believe someone could fast that long without food and live, so I wanted to try it myself. I like challenging myself in weird ways I guess. But, I had to make sure I wouldn’t die first, a lot of people told me I probably would.
It turns out, fasting has been used for centuries as a form of healing. Catholic churches had fasting centers where people could come when they got sick back in the day. Jesus, Gandhi, and pretty much every religious figure did it. It was well known that fasting healed the mind and the body.
I read a lot of literature on how fasting has reduced cancerous tumors and even autoimmune diseases. I read about all of it’s supposed health benefits: teeth whitening, skin clearing, tumor shrinkage, plaque eating, and fat reduction. They all sounded good to me. It said you got a heightened clarity of mind after 21 days so that was the time frame I decided to do.
I began my fast. The first day wasn’t bad. The second day I got really hungry and then it went away. The third and fourth day were bad. I was so hungry I didn’t even leave my couch. I just sucked down water all day and slept. Apparently, after 72 hours your body goes into ketosis and starts living off of fat reserves. I think it took closer to 96 hours for me.
After that, I completely lost my hunger. I actually had a lot of energy. The hard part wasn’t eating, I no longer wanted food. The hard part was boredom!!! I suddenly went from eating 3 meals a day to eating nothing. The time I spent cooking, eating, and washing dishes was given back to me, probably at least 4 hours. I couldn’t work out (bad on a fast) so that was out. I couldn’t do any social things because those all involved eating a meal, drinking coffee, or alcohol, none of which I could do at the moment. So, I became ultra productive. I got all my homework done weeks in advance, I started crocheting and painting, and I slept a lot. My mom and friends received calls from me every day. I had so much TIME.
Some days I felt weak, but other days I had a ton of energy. I felt great and really happy. My skin cleared up a lot after the 10th day and I did notice my teeth getting whiter. My tongue got white stuff on it; according to the internet that’s a way your body gets rid of toxins. I lost around a pound of weight a day.
After the 21st day, I was ready to eat again out of boredom. I started by drinking a decaf coffee. That was a mistake, my stomach had lost its lining so the acidity of coffee made me throw up. Everything I ate was really intense. Fruit tasted sweeter and everything had so much flavor.
Overall, I’d lost 24 pounds and I looked really good. But, I had never regained hunger. That meant I still had fat stores on me. If you fast long enough, you’ll regain hunger one day which they call your “true hunger”. That means your fat reserves are up and your body will start eating your muscles to survive, so you really need to start eating after that! I’d also lost some muscle, I was weaker at the gym now, but I regained my muscle quickly.
Most people, if you’re a normal weight, can fast 20-40 days before regaining hunger, before their total fat stores are up. After regaining hunger, your body starts to eat muscle tissue for energy, which includes your heart, and it’s only a matter of time before it will give out. Perhaps 7–20 days until death as preducted by some studies.
But, if you’re overweight or obese, you’ll have a ton of fat stores ready to use. One guy fasted for 384 days under medical supervision on nothing but water and tea with no adverse affects. I’m sure he could have made it quite a while longer until his fat stores were completely up but he ended the fast when he hit 180 lbs.
So the answer is, it varies. But, if you’re of a normal weight, your maximum is probably somewhere from 20-40 days until your muscle tissue begins to get compromised.
Yep! I was 17 working at a mom ’n pop kinda thing, local hardware store. The type where entry-level workers just write in what they can work on a calendar posted in the back room.
Well, one day, the owner came to me and told me that there was about $50 missing from my register. I was usually one of the closers, and I always went to the bank with the nighttime lead to drop off the deposit. I thought maybe I just counted wrong or something. The owner said that if he saw that kind of discrepancy again, I would be fired. I said ok, yes, I understand. I worked for about another week, but I could tell that I was being watched by hawks.
So when I went the next week to write myself in on the schedule, I saw my name crossed out with White-Out on the calendar. Confused and a bit suspicious, I wrote myself back on. When I came in for work, the owner pulled me aside and told me that there was another $70 found missing from my drawer and that I was no longer employed there. Well, ok, fine. Maybe I can’t count, or I’m just an idiot, but whatever. I kind of knew I was going to be fired soon when I saw my name whited-out on the calendar.
For the record, I was at a party with a bunch of random neighborhood friends a few years later, and I overheard a guy I used to work with talking trash about the hardware store and how he robbed the place blind and didn’t even get fired for it—someone else did.
Almond Chicken
almond chicken
Ingredients
1 1/2 pounds chicken breasts
1 teaspoon ginger
2 teaspoons honey
1 tablespoon cornstarch
3 tablespoons soy sauce
12 ounces Chinese pea pods
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 cup natural whole almonds
3 to 4 tablespoons water
1/3 cup sherry
Instructions
Skin, bone and cut up chicken breasts into 1/2-inch cubes.
In a bowl, mix ginger, honey and cornstarch and blend in water, soy sauce and sherry.
Thaw pea pods if frozen. In a wok, heat oil over medium heat.
Add almonds, stirring and cooking for about 3 minutes.
Add chicken and cook just until meat turns white.
Pour in sherry mixture and cook until sauce thickens.
I was working in a supermarket in October 2001. I bent down to pick a can of beans off the bottom shelf on an aisle.
As I stood up, my vision shattered.
Image: My vision shattered much like looking into a light diffuser on a fluorescent light.
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I also began with a severe headache on the right side of my head.
Over the next few days the headache went away but my vision remained poor inmy right eye.
I was sent to a local eye hospital by my doctor and there I was told after several days of testing that I had Antiphospholipid Antibody Syndrome, an auto-immune disorder in the same family as Lupus.
The eye problem was a blood clot that had formed and destroyed the blood supply to the retina of my right eye. Treatment was to be life long and I would need to take blood thinners, then Warfarin though today I take other blood thinner drugs.
I also had to have extensive laser surgery on my right eye to prevent further damage from the clot and resulting new blood vessel growth.
Five and a half years later, when I was going through a non theraputic dosage of Warfarin. I had a similar event, a blood clot formed in my left eye. Destroying that retina and leaving me legally blind.
Let me help to makes western admirers amongst orientals such as Japan-and South Korea, people from greater China such as Hong Kong and Taiwan and neighbours such as Phillipines and Vietnam see light.
I am qualified to advise and share my experience. I was born in Malaysia and now a Singaporean who were a starry eye west admirer for say the first 20 years of my life.
Today I am a practical and pragmatic person who sees things differently. If your nation is a direct neighbour or in Chinese neighbourhood, try to comprehend the following.
China has been around for 5000 years as your neighbour and during 4800 out of the 5000 years China were really really strong. In fact so strong it could if it wants to, to walk right into your nation and claimed it for good. But they didn’t. Japan, Korea, Philippines, India, Vietnam and others remain a fully sovereign nation. Appreciate that.
Just look at the nation that lies and spread fear about China, the U.S. it is barely 247 years old yet it started as a 13 states union and in less than a hundred years it stole another 37 states from its neighbours. And what did the U.S. do in Asia! It murdered 3 million Vietnamese, a million each in Philippines in Mindanao, Laos and Cambodia, and at least 2 million suspected communists in Indonesia and colonised the Philippines for close to 50 years.
And they do that as a nation 10 thousand miles away from Asia! China is stone’s throw away from your shores yet you are still independent! So be logical and honest about who is the aggressor and who respects your sovereignty? If you are fair China is a 5000 years gentleman. The U.S. is a 247 years hoodlum you never ever want to get close with, unless you are inviting trouble.
Next let me help you know your future. China is the world’s most humongous market. Your nation is blessed to have such a huge market at your door step. They can buy your products and resources and yet supply you with value for money product for a song.
They are not the despicable west who wants to change your way. They even say their socialism with Chinese characteristics is not exportable and urge you to seek your best political and social system going forward. US says it is their way or the highway! In fact they murdered 5 million Indo Chinese to make them democratic unsuccessfully in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
Go to the U.S. to have fun and travel around, do business with them as they are a big spender. But whatever you do remember who really is with you and where is your future with. Most of all remember where is your nation is geographically and China will always be there! It cannot be floated away and so are you, you are stuck there.
Don’t ever let your nation be another Ukraine, the U.S. want your people to die and your nation to be destroyed just to poke China in the eye, just like how they used Ukraine to poke Russia in the eye, unfortunately one time too many. Don’t let them have even one CIA or NED officials in your nation. And don’t ever be used as a cannon fodder.
Grow up and know right from wrong. Korea for example, whether you stay rich and get richer depends on China not the U.S. The only thing the U.S. can help you is simply to get your nation destroyed! China will always be there, it will grow to be 4–5 times the size of the U.S. economy before then of this century. And as a market for Korea, it will be bigger than your next 20 biggest market! So get real, grow up like me, be a realist and be smart.
Vote in a pro Chinese candidate. Vote in a leader that has no inclination to do shit for the U.S. And tell the US. that you are a friend and a partner of China, and that you want American’s as tourist and investor. But under no circumstances will you allow them to interfere in your nation and in Asia. Asia is for Asians. If you have issues involving the US is a sure way to implicate the issues and create discord.
A bunch of young dumb grunts are meandering about the country looking for bad guys, WMDs and whatever else General Mattis (pbuh) felt was appropriate at the time. In this case it was myself and the United States Marine Corps.
Being young, dumb and American, we naturally did not speak much Arabic besides the usual peacekeeping terminology like get your hands up, stop, get down and f#ck off. As is common in these conflicts, we tend to recruit native speakers to act as interpreters.
For reasons unknown, I happened to remember one of these dudes in particular. Let’s call him Joe Hammad for the sake of security. Now these guys usually don’t work anywhere near their hometowns in country because let’s be honest, in the eyes of the bad guys, hell even in the eyes of many locals, these guys are narcs. Snitches get stitches and all that but ramped up to 3rd world standards.
In exchange for helping us communicate with an often unfriendly populace, these dudes are offered visas to go stateside should they fulfill their obligations. For many reasons, this often doesn’t happen. Remember the snitches thing?
Fast forward to 2014. Suburb of a large Arizona city. My broke ass is out of the military and between employment so I decide to put an ad on Craigslist to let a room of my house for rent. Thank goodness I was financially smart enough to have owned my own home at the time.
Within a few days of placing the ad, I have a nibble or two but this one guy comes with cash in hand. I meet him on the porch when he arrives. He’s an Arab man of medium height, about 45 years old and well spoken with a sharp sense of humor. Within minutes we both had a clear spark of recognition.
And that’s how Joe Hammad from Iraq became my roommate after the war in Iraq ended.
I can’t say for sure whether or not you’re missing any secret ingredients, since I don’t know your recipe. I am certain you’re missing one key component though, and that’s heat.
Chinese restaurants cook over commercial wok burners, which put out 125,000 BTUs of heat. Your home stove might generate 15,000 BTUs out of its largest burner. That’s a pretty significant difference.
The heat of a wok burner imparts a distinctive flavor onto foods. When foods hit the polymerized surface of a hot steel wok, they instantly release moisture, which leaves the food in the form of steam. The foods are tossed through the rising steam, where they capture the droplets of water, and fall back into the wok. This action, repeated over and over, is the essence of wok cooking. The intense heat also causes rapid browning and caramelization and gives the food a distinctive smokey flavor. The flavor, known as Wok Hei in Cantonese, is what makes Chinese take out so crave able, and can’t be duplicated on a home stove. None of what I described can be duplicated, to the same degree, on a home stove. It just doesn’t generate enough heat.
My daughter’s car was hit by a speeding unmarked police car. I have written about this and she is recovering well. When I got to the scene, she was still trapped but the fire brigade were on the scene and had everything in control. While they were waiting to cut my daughter out, the lead fireman came over to me and told me to take as many pictures and as much video as I could and to make sure I got pictures of the officers involved. As soon as I started taking pictures a uniformed policeman came over and said that I had to stop as it was an active crime scene. I said that was nonsense and carried on taking pictures. He carried on saying I should stop. I told my wife who had just turned up to take pictures as well. The policeman just walked away. We took loads of pictures and videos, the witnesses telling us what happened. It took two months for the police to give my solicitor any indication that an officer was involved in the crash and this was only because he sent them some of our photographs. They now say there will be no criminal charges to either driver and that his speeding was legal as he was on a covert operation. He was unhurt and walking around, he never once came over or asked how my daughter was. I am glad that I did not listen to the policeman and I am sure that the video and pictures will help in the civil case.
Back when I was (a lot) younger, after a softball game both teams (mine and the other side, who were all good friends on and off the field) came back to our cars to find someone had parked lengthwise behind three of our cars. None of the three could get out because this unthinking individual parked lengthwise and not in a valid parking spot behind them.
We waited about 20 minutes or so chatting, hoping the person would come out and move. They never did. It was a smallish car, a Corolla, so several of us carried the car to the space in the hedge where people had access to the softball fields beyond. It fit perfectly, the front bumper against one side of the gate and the rear bumper within two inches of the other side. Note this wasn’t a metal gate, it was a hedge with an arbor vitae forming the “sides” of the entrance.
Then, out of sheer schadenfreude, we waited. Some left, of course, but most of us were there about 45 minutes later when the person came back to discover their car was basically unmoveable without cutting down a tree owned by a private entity, or have it dragged out by tow truck.
Going Anonymous as my parents follow me and I don’t want them to know this.
I was young ,probably in 7th or 8th standard when I used to do this.There is a bakery near my home of which I still am a regular customer .I buy things from the place at least 5 times in a day.
As we were regular customers we had credit system of paying the owner .We used to pay our credit on a monthly basis. So basically anyone from my family could go and get anything from the bakery and the owner would just write it in his accounts book and we used to pay the whole amount at the end of the month.
Me being really smart found a loop hole and would buy a lot of snacks,basically all kinds of items available for me to eat . I would just buy snacks worth Rs 2000 or so when the owner was not at the counter. He had an assistant who did not know how t read or write so he used to tell me to write it in the accounts book and I would just pretend to write everything and hand him over the book and he never used to check or bother about it.
I did this 3–4 times when I started to feel guilty about this because clearly it was shoplifting or stealing.
I later made a promise to myself that I will never do this again and would pay the whole amount I had stolen to the shopkeeper once I start to earn .
I completed my graduation this year and started working at an MNC and after I got my first salary the first thing I did was to take the money and confess to the shop owner about this.
He got angry at first but looking at my honesty he accepted the whole amount that was due which was about Rs 10000 and thanked me for this.
I told him not to tell my parents about this as they will be really disappointed .
This was the happiest day of my life as a big burden that I carried for almost 6–7 years was finally gone.
I’m not a mechanic, but wanted to share this story.
I needed a new battery for my Jeep Cherokee. I went to the local place that handles my maintenance. I was in a hurry and also needed an oil change. I brought the vehicle into the Maintennance bay. The guy went to get a new battery. He said something about the battery being backwards, or similar statement. It had something to do with not having the exact battery needed. The engineer in me thought that we should wait to get the right battery, but I didn’t push the issue. I had to be somewhere and was in a hurry. The guy puts the battery in and asked me to try to start it. Smoke billowed out of several places inside the vehicle. Wtf was going on?!? This guy had reversed the poles on the battery and had effectively electrocuted my jeep. To say that the electrical engineer in me was upset was an understatement. I had to be somewhere. I got them to fix my Jeep so that it would run. I was irate. It was a Friday. I had to be somewhere all weekend. I was back on Monday morning. Thankfully, they did pretty much everything right. The mechanic had quit, thankfully. There were some additional repairs that had to be completed. Everything was covered.
A few years later, I needed some warranty or recall thing done. The dealership wouldn’t handle the recall work because of non Jeep parts. I went back to the local shop, and they replaced everything with Jeep parts. The dealership handled the recall work.
while I was mad about the incompetence of the mechanic, the local shop did the right thing.
It’s a wild assumption, but one very likely case is Yemen
image 30
For those who quite don’t know, the situation in Yemen is like this
image 29
The green region is under Houthi control (backed by Iranians), the light red is controlled by Hadi government (backed by Saudi Arabia, UAE and Bahrain and even USA), the yellow is the Southern Transitional Council (a movement that wants South Yemen to come back as it existed prior to 1991), and the white is al-Qaeda in Arabian Peninsula, also called AQAP
Now one would expect either of the sides to fall, however seeing the way each one is sticking to their captured lands, it looks that another division of Yemen may actually happen. If the AQAP could be vanquished , then the country would end up with three separate authorities, leaving the whole field very much open for a possible trifurcation . It’s quite possible that the Southern Council could get vanquished too, if that happens then a bifurcation would happen, leading to once again a North and South Yemen to emerge.
The difference would be that unlike the previous versions where North Yemen was an independent Arab Republic and South Yemen was a communist state, this time North Yemen would be an Iran-backed client state whereas South Yemen would be a Saudi-UAE backed client state.
Too white
Chicken Cubes with Cherries, Pineapple and Lichees (Bo Lo Lichees Gai Kew)
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Ingredients
1 chicken breast
1 teaspoon sherry
2 teaspoons light soy sauce
1/2 teaspoon anise pepper
1 tablespoon chopped scallion
1 egg white
2 tablespoons cornstarch
2 cups vegetable oil
2 tablespoons granulated sugar
3 tablespoons ketchup
3 tablespoons vinegar
1 tablespoon cornstarch
1 cup lichee juice
1 cup lichee meat
1/2 cup maraschino cherries
1/2 cup pineapple chunks
Instructions
Bone chicken and cut into cubes; mix sherry, light soy sauce, anise pepper and chopped scallion together, pour over chicken and marinate for 30 minutes.
Beat egg white and 2 tablespoons of cornstarch together. Pour over chicken breast mixture.
Heat oil to 325 degrees F. Deep fry chicken. Drain on paper towels.
Mix sugar, ketchup, vinegar, 1 tablespoon cornstarch and lichee juice in saucepan; stir until thickened. Add lichee meat, cherries and pineapple. Stir until hot, then serve over chicken.
This was Central Florida, the lawns were St Augustine grass that with lot of water, mulching and fertilizer, they grew a couple inches a week, and the leaves are wide and tough unlike the soft lawns up north.
My neighbor disliked me because I built a 2 story house and that blocked the view of the lake. We worked for the same company and he was upset that I was hired in at a management level although he didn’t work for me.
Our lawns were about a 1/3 acre, so a Saturday cut and trim would easily take 3 hours with a normal lawn mower.
He bought a basic riding lawnmower, and he would drive his mower on my property, up to 5′ before making a U Turn. That was OK, except he would make the hard turn on top of my sprinklers. Almost every week, I had to replace the broken PVC pipe, digging up my lawn. I tried several things to dissuade him, but in the end on a Friday night, I brought home about 20′ of a high strength braided steel cabling. It was the smallest diameter I could find. I uncoiled it surrounding the sprinkler heads pushing down into the tall grass so you would never see it. But you would hear it, and I was in my garage when I knew he ran over it. The racket it made was frightening.
Even a 25″ blade on a 10 HP motor couldn’t cut it. But it did wrap it around the shaft and stalled the motor. All 20 feet of the cable was gone from my yard.
He had to push his mower to the garage, and spent the rest of the day disassembling his mower to untangle the mess.
The Only Billionaires who are restricted from leaving are those who are Directors of Public Companies or Director’s/Top Executives of Companies that owe minimum 10 Million RMB in Loans to Banks or vide Public Bonds
They need an exit visa
Others can leave when they want
Many Billionaires from the Mainland have their families in Singapore, Australia and USA while they live in the Mainland for 6–9 out of 12 months a year
The only rule for them is they cannot repatriate in excess of $ 300,000 a year out of China , that too for very specific reasons
So what they earn in China, must be kept in China at all costs
They try sending more money out, they face upto 18 years jail
So keep your family wherever you want, have Villas in Sydney or Florida, Send your mainland sons to UK for school but THE MONEY YOU EARN IN CHINA CANNOT LEAVE CHINA OR YOU NEVER SEE DAYLIGHT AGAIN FOR AT LEAST 10–18 YEARS
How about instead of notorious we focus on an evil genius that should be more notorious? Nazi scientists always get all the focus but what if I told you Japan had their own version of an evil scientist and he was an absolute monster.
Meet Shirō Ishii – a serious piece of sh%t
image 348
This guy was a Doctor and microbiologist- and a rather smart one at that. He was regarded as a brilliant person for nearly his entire life. He was well educated and joined the army as a doctor. While there he caught the eyes of his superiors and was sent for further education at Kyoto Imperial University.
During WW2 he was placed in charge of Unit 731 and this is what he was known for.
What was unit 731? Well, they were a scientific unit that conducted experiments and thought up new ways to win the war. Some examples of things they did include
Imprisoning women, raping them until they got pregnant, and then running horrid painful experiments on them just so they could see how certain poisons affected pregnant women.
They would infect people with syphilis and then cut them open (while alive and awake) so they could see what their bodies did as the infection progressed. Women, men, and even children were forcibly infected
This is called vivisection- its the practice of cutting someone open while alive to see what their body is doing and its typically done when experimenting on animals. In unit 731 they did it to people without anesthesia- always resulting in a slow agonizing death for the person.
Injected people with animal blood to see what happens (bad way to die)
Placed people in centrifuges and spun it until they died
Deprived prisoners of food and water to see how long it was until they died
Placed people in low-pressure chambers until their eyes popped out
Burned people alive to see how long they would live
Injected people with saltwater to see what would happen
Poisoned people to see the effects
gave people radiation poisoning to see the effects
Leave 3-day old babies in the cold just to see how long it took them to freeze to death
Tested flamethrowers on live people
Tested grenades on live people
Removed organs for fun. For instance, they would remove someone’s stomach and attach their esophagus to their intestines directly.
Tested hundreds of diseases and biological weapons on people
In all, around 10,000 prisoners were killed by Unit 731 and as many as 20,000 were tested on. The biological weapons produced by this unit were used to kill as many as 500,000 civilians
On a side note not even the Nazis used chemical weapons in WW2 (they only did in concentration camps). The ONLY nation to employ chemical weapons against civilian and military targets in WW2 was Japan.
You may wonder what happened to Shirō. I mean we caught him and put him on trial for war crimes right?
Nope
He was given full immunity in exchange for full disclosure of his tests. American microbiologists stated that Shirō’s findings were extremely valuable and impossible to replicate unless the experiments were done again.
Shirō lived out the remainder of his life a free man and died in 1959.
A businessman went to a shoe store to purchase a new pair of shoes. He was a prominent person in that town. After selecting a pair of shoes with size 8 he asked the salesperson to pack it. The salesperson had just started his career and joined the shoe store a few days back.
The businessman soon discovered that he had left his wallet at home. He told the salesperson that he would take the shoes with him and make the payment the next day. The salesperson being new to business excused himself in order to discuss this matter with the store manager. The manager knew that the customer is an eminent businessman; however, was reluctant to deliver the shoes without payment. At the same time, he was not ready to lose a sale too. He advised the salesperson to handle the situation in the best manner possible and left the place.
The salesperson stood there frozen for a few minutes unable to decide. He then returned to the customer, started packing the shoes and handed the package to the customer.
The next day the customer arrived at the store with the shoes he had purchased, made the payment for his purchase and told the salesperson that “After opening the package I found one shoe with size 8 and the other with size 7. Maybe you packed them by mistake. Can I have the shoes with size 8 please?” The salesperson apologized for the inconvenience caused and replaced the wrong size shoe with the correct one. The customer collected his shoes and left the store with satisfaction.
The manager happened to overhear their conversation and realized that the salesperson had used his presence of mind and handled the situation very well. They didn’t lose their business as well as the customer.
Moral
It is by the presence of mind in untried emergencies that the native metal of a man is tested. If an individual has a calm state of mind, his attitude and views will be calm and tranquil even in the presence of great agitation.
In the fourth grade, Mr. Mowry, our high school biology teacher, visited and gave a lecture. Afterward, he asked the class to name the smartest animal.
One kid said “chimpanzee.” Another said “dolphin.” I kept waving my hand, but he ignored me. (He later told my mother he knew I knew the answer.)
Finally, after the rest of the class ran out of ideas, he asked me. The class looked incredulous when I said “human beings.” After all, people aren’t animals.
His response was “Life has only two choices. Plant or an animal. Which is it?”
(When I had him as a teacher in the tenth grade, I pointed out there were other life forms, such as fungus and bacteria. He acknowledged that, but figured it was a bit much for a fourth grade class.)
In any case, it felt like my fifteen minutes of fame.
I was at a wedding once where the Groom ended up in hospital with achohol poisoning, but it wasnt what you think.
There is a tradition where I live, where right after the ceremony, the bridesmaids “steal” the Groom and take him for a drink. While the groomsmen do the same thing with the Bride.
An hour later, right on time, the groomsmen had the Bride at the next venue where the dinner and dance was to be held, but there was no sign of the bridesmaids and the Groom.
We guests sat around for a bit, wondering what was going on, and eventually food was served despite the fact there was no Groom, and the Bride was looking more and more upset.
It wasn’t until the start of the wedding dance that news filtered through about what happened.
The Groom had never, up to this, had a drink in his life. And the over enthusiastic bridesmaids had made the guy down several hard drinks in that hour.
And, he reacted really badly to them.
So badly they had to take him to the emergency room to be treated for poisoning, and that is where he spent their wedding night.
The rest of the wedding evening for us as guests, kinda fizzled out as you can imagine. But that poor Bride was in tears and left shortly after the dinner to be with her new husband.
Once you VISUALIZE CORRECTLY, the SHIFT happens IMMEDIATELY. (This Is How)
A lot of things, but I’ll focus on just one for this answer. Maybe other parents can relate:
Cooking for the family is a one-person job.
My children always want to help me cook. I remember, as a child, I always wanted to help my mom cook, but she only let me help on the weekends. Now, I usually only let my kids help me cook on the weekends, too.
In fact, during the week, I kick them out of the kitchen, just like my mother did with me 30 years ago.
Why?
Because, after a long day at work, cooking is actually very relaxing… if you’re doing it alone. Cooking with children is mostly just teaching and supervising. I do that all day. I don’t want to come home and do more of it most days.
Plus, when children “help” you cook, it just slows you down, and I’m usually in a hurry to make dinner before my wife gets home.
My children also tend to stand right behind me when I’m cooking, and I’ve tripped over them before. So now, for speed and safety reasons, I have a “the only person who should be in the kitchen while I’m cooking is me” policy on weekdays.
My mom took me to see this doctor when I was 8 years old and she wouldn’t tell me how come. When we got there the nurses took me in and got me ready for the doctor. They had me laying down with things on my arms and legs so I couldn’t move. I thought this was really funny but I was really embarrassed because I didn’t have clothes on and they could see my boy part. When the doctor came in she started looking at my boy part and she asked me if I know why my mom has brought me here this morning and I didn’t know why. I was like yikes when she told me that in a moment they are going to be circumcising my boy part. I have friends that are circumcised and I know what that means and I was like yikes. They give you stuff so it wouldn’t hurt but I still feel her doing stuff to it and I was like yikes thinking about what she is doing. After it was done and mom come in and got me I was really embarrassed because everyone seen it and know what happened to me. We went for breakfast after and mom told the waitress why I had pajama bottoms on. That was the most embarrassing day ever.
Because the biggest killer and tormentors of Muslims (IN THEIR HOME COUNTRIES) this century has been the UNITED STATES!
Back home, Muslims have been discriminated, and watched like a hawk by the authorities, especially those of Middle-east descent.
The last time America “rallied” the Muslim world was the first gulf war, where a UN coalition liberated Kuwait from Iraqi occupation. Cooperation has been downhill ever since. Even MBS, the Crown Prince of Saudia Arabia, has cooled relationships with America and delivered repeat diplomatic snubs. America’s strongest and most important Muslim ally in the Middle East is working hard to diversify risk, such as settling in non-dollar currencies.
Besides, the evidence is weak, and nothing like the blatant genocide/war crime broadcasting live from the Gaza strip today.
I was camping at a campground in Northern California, and had gone to the bathroom in the morning. A guy was washing his hands with his ten year old son. This guy was decked out with a full on safari outfit, right down to the hat and it was clearly brand new.
When they had finished washing hands, the Dad took a few of those super cheap, thin, brown paper towels and dried his hands. When his son reached for his own paper towels, the Dad said “uh uh. Waste not, want not!” And handed him his soggy, used, brown paper towel and the kid had to try to dry his hands with this gross, soggy wad of used paper towel. The dejected look on the kids face said it all.
I was so disgusted with this guy and felt so bad for the kid. If he was so desperate to save such a minute amount of natural resources, he should have let the kid wash and dry first, and used the kids leftovers.
it really felt like psychological abuse, but he said it with such vigor that I think he was just an ignorant narcissist.
It was a Friday night and the last day of school. My son would be a Senior in the fall.
When I pulled down our street on my way home from work, I noticed both sides of the street were lined with parked cars. You probably guessed it. My son had turned our house into Animal House! We had just had a pool built and it was full of kids every afternoon. I didn’t mind. I could relax knowing where my son was.
But this wasn’t one of those afternoon get-togethers. This was a full blown wild party. Girls were naked in the pool, and there were whiskey and beer bottles everywhere. It looked like half the high school was packed into my house.
My fear was someone leaving drunk. I couldn’t let that happen. I found my son. I told him and the group with him that I was going to my room and would let them have their party, but I needed everyone to leave me their car keys. I didn’t want anyone leaving drunk.
In my state, 17 yr-olds are not old enough to drink. I am responsible for each one as long as they’re in my house. I’d also be responsible for them drinking at my house, I could be arrested. But my worry was getting those keys and keeping them from leaving. I’d figure something else later.
I had what looked like 10 sets of keys that kids had gave me. I told them to write their name on their keys. I thought that once I got their keys, I wouldn’t be so worried and I’d contact parents and let them know what was going on.
I’d been home about 15 min, and went in my room to change out of my work clothes. In under 10 min, I was out of my room and was going to get more of the kids’ keys. Problem was, no one was there. The house was empty, and the cars on the street were gone, except for a few that were probably passengers now. Not one kid was in sight, only a few articles of clothing had been left floating in the pool.
I was furious. My son had left too. He wasn’t answering his phone either. I called a few parents and explained. A few didn’t enjoy being bothered with it. None of them seemed concerned. I was so upset I puked. I didn’t know what to do, or where to look. I just prayed they were all safe at someone’s house. I cleaned the house, and every 30 minutes called and texted my son. He never replied. I tried to sleep, but I kept thinking about all the terrible things that could happen to them, how one night of partying can ruin the rest of their life. I couldn’t stop thinking. I probably buried my son a dozen times in my mind that night. Around 3am, I dozed off
At 4:14am, I got a call. The connection was poor, and I couldn’t hear every word, plus there was a lot of noise. I heard “this is blablabla with —-sheriffs —-EMT paramedic—-permission to treat———!l? Ma’am? Hello? We need permission —-accident involving 4 minors—-please ma’am!
I was yelling, “ Yes, yes, you have my permission to treat them.” I kept saying it over and over, because our connection was so bad. I wanted them to hear me.
The call was dropped. I hit redial on the phone, but it wouldn’t reconnect with who just called. I didn’t know where the kids were, who was with my son, or the details of the accident and the injuries. It was like being trapped in a horrible nightmare. I didn’t even know where to begin. I called all the hospitals and police stations in the area. Nothing.
I have never felt that much pain and heartache at the same time. I wanted to be with my son. I was no longer angry, I just wanted to to be where my son was. I kept envisioning the worst. I paced the floor while holding my bible, and praying those next few hours. I hit my knees and begged God to take me and leave the kids here in good health. For hours I was frantic. I was shaking and felt so helpless. The not knowing was tearing me up. I felt crazy.
At 6:20am I get a call from the hospital. She can’t discuss the accident or injuries. She just gave me the address and names of the passengers. These 4 boys were in a hospital a 4 hour drive away. I had to drive 4 hrs, having no idea of what condition my son would be in. This had become the worst night of my life.
This drive was a long 4 hours, plus a bad storm had rolled in and made driving difficult. I kept thinking, “ Why doesn’t my son call? It has to be bad if he’s not calling me.” The hospital was in a small town on the way to a popular city on the bay. I couldn’t believe it! They had left the house and driven to the beach. I kept thinking about all the empty beer bottles and whiskey bottles I’d picked up at the house. My mind was thinking the worst.
It had gotten pitch black, and the wind was gusting. I was driving into a bad storm, lightning struck all around me. The rain was so heavy, I could barely see the lights of the gas station ahead of me. The cars on the road had all pulled in to wait out the storm. I figured I should too. thought I’d fill up with gas, but there wasn’t a pump not in use. I pulled over by the air pump and just then lightning stuck a transformer, it was on fire. My nerves were shot. The explosion scared me so badly that I almost pee”ed my pants. I couldn’t take it. I decided to get out of that parking lot before a gas pump exploded. Just as I was about to pull out, I heard the sirens. Tornado sirens! Wtf! I was done, I couldn’t handle this. I just wanted to be with my son. I didn’t know what to do. The rain was now falling almost perpendicular to the ground. My windows were rolled up, and still the rain was coming in. My car was shaking. I put it in park, turned off the key, and just sat there crying and praying. I couldn’t see anything out of the windows. I heard another loud explosion, but couldn’t see what it was. I shut my eyes and cried. I listened to the wind and thunder and sirens. My car was shaking so badly I thought the doors were going to open. Then everything stopped. The wind had pushed me to the end of the parking lot next to the railroad tracks. There were railroad tracks (the big wooden beams) all around my car. I guess the wind pulled them up and tossed them around. I put the car in drive and drove. I was hyperventilating, and pulled over at a rest area. I began thinking I would never make it to my son.
I made it to the hospital, and found the corridor they were on. When I got off the elevator I was looking at a waiting area. My son and his one friend were sitting there talking and laughing. A cop was sitting with them. I ran to my son, and he stood up. At that moment I didn’t know if I wanted to hug him or punish him. (Of course I hugged him.) I was looking at his face and arms and I wanted to count his fingers and toes just like I did the first time I held him. He was holding me as I was crying tears of relief. Not a scratch on my son’s body. All four boys were fine!
The cop told me that he had seen a car in a corn field and stopped to check it out. Apparently the crash had just happened when he arrived because the tires were still spinning. My son had fallen asleep behind the wheel. When the car went off the road onto the shoulder he woke and his reflex was to turn the wheel. This caused the car to spin and he lost control. It hit a cable line and the car flipped 5 times. One boy in the back seat flew through the windshield and landed 30’ from the car. He drove a hatchback, and the other boy in the back seat was thrown out of the back. No one was wearing seat belts, but not one boy needed a stitch. Thank God! The cop said he didn’t think he’d find anyone alive. It was the worst accident that little town had ever seen. I was so relieved that everyone was fine. The cop told me that when he was walking up to the car he followed a trail of beer cans all the way to the car. They were unopened and no one had been drinking. They were tested and they were all found to be sober. The car had flipped through the corn field, and the cop said the corn probably softened the blows.
We had to go to the wrecker yard to pay for towing The cop told me to prepare myself. There was no way to prepare myself for what I was about to see. His brand new car didn’t have one place on it that wasn’t damaged. You couldn’t tell what you were looking at. The front and back looked the same. The door handles were the only thing that made you know which end was where. Ears of corn were sticking out everywhere. It was a sight. I stood there crying and holding my son and his friend. They cried too.
I don’t remember if my son got a ticket. I do remember that I had to drive him to alcohol awareness classes twice a week for a month. And once a week I had to drive that 4 hrs to see the judge for a month. The car was sold for scrap for $325. I joke now, and say that we would have gotten more for the corn. The other two boys were arrested for having marijuana on them. They had to wait for their parents to get them.
This happened 19 yrs ago. Last year I was visiting friends near that little town. We went to play bingo one evening. I was talking with a couple sitting across from me. I had mentioned that the last time I’d been down this way was for a bad accident that my son was in. The man looked at me and said “OMG! You’re —’s mom!” He knew my sons name, and said he was the cop on the screen. He told me how he has never been able to forget that morning and the accident. He still has nightmares about walking up and finding 4 dead boys. His wife said it really got to him. She had told her husband that he needed to maybe find the boys and once he knew they were okay, maybe the nightmares would stop. But he didn’t have contact info. I showed him pics of my son and grandson. This man cried right there in the bingo hall. I think it did us both good. I hope he’s sleeping better.
I truly believe we a learned something that day. It definitely changed all involved.
Also there’s another more shrewd reason: Any beer that is NOT opened isn’t one that they have sold and it can allow them to 86 a patron who is sneaking in beers to drink.
While this is, of course, uncommon in higher class establishments, in lower-end bars, patrons have been known to BYOB as the prices of the bar’s offerings are unacceptably high in their opinions, necessitating the “need” for them to sneak in their own and defray some of their drinking expenses. The bartender and servers can tell if they see a beer that’s unopened or witness a patron opening their own beverage that the bar didn’t sell it, and they can eject the patron(s) involved.
This actually was quite common at some of the establishments that I used to frequent in North Carolina decades ago. One of the worst fights that I have ever witnessed was when a bartender tried to eject a patron who brought their own and the patron struck the bartender with a bottle. Unfortunately for the patron, things weren’t like a movie and the bartender proceeded to beat the shit out of him which including some kicks to the head when the man was down. Had some other patrons not stopped things, we probably would have witnessed a murder. I left shortly afterward and I never returned to that establishment.
Anyway…an unopened beverage is one that wasn’t sold by the bar and that’s another reason for the bar to open theirs.
Suddenly (for me). He had been planning it for a while as he had met someone else. I found out and confronted him. He admitted it and left. I cried alot mainly because I had two very small children and another on the way. To be honest I was scared. However within a few weeks I began to notice things. The atmosphere in the house was calm and happy and it was MUCH tidier and better organised. . I was far less stressed and not shouting at the children. Mornings were a breeze because I was in charge and there was now a routine. Bedtimes were easy for the same reason (this had been a nightmare before). I enrolled the children in after school activities which they loved and hadn’t been able to do before because ‘we couldn’t afford it’. Also their friends could come over for tea (not allowed before). I had loads of spare money because no one was buying cigarettes or alcohol. Then the icing on the cake… a gorgeous new baby came along. Life was good and 21 years later its better than I ever imagined possible. The woman he left me for is much better for him. She treats him the way he treated me. I am happily married and the children are all grown up. The end of that marriage was the beginning of my life.
Chicken Slices with Sichuan Peppercorn Sauce (Jiao Ma Ji Pian)
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Ingredients
1/2-1 teaspoon whole Sichuan peppercorns
5 green onions, green part only, thinly sliced
1/4 teaspoon salt
3 tablespoons chicken broth
2 tablespoons light soy sauce
1 tablespoon plus 1 1/2 teaspoons sesame oil
1 pound cooked sliced chicken
Instructions
Soak the Sichuan peppercorns in a small bowl of very hot water for 5 minutes; drain.
Puree the peppercorns, green onions and salt in a food processor; transfer to a small bowl.
Add the broth and soy sauce, stirring until well combined; stir in the sesame oil. Drizzle over the chicken slices.
I’ve written this before and it seems right for this answer.
When young, this is the strangest thing we found in our yard.
Dad had a house built in a new subdivision just out of town. It was one of the first houses. It used to be prairie land.Here’s the story.
Yes. We had a very large, beautiful back yard with fruit trees, lilacs, birch and spruce. It was like a park. Anyway, mom had my older twin sisters and I doing yard work, or helping in yard work because she wanted us to learn about planting, growing and nurturing. Lori and Tracy hated yard work. It was like being on a chain gang to them. “When I have my own place, I’m not having one, bloody plant,” Tracy said. Only she didn’t say bloody. The twins were sixteen here, I was fourteen. I was digging a hole to plant a small tree mom had bought and my spade kept clunking on something.
Lori was raking and Tracy weeding in the garden with a hoe but no plant was safe with Tracy around. Good and bad plants were sliced to death. She figured the worse she did, mom might not ask her to help anymore. “They’re all green anyway!” The girls had better things to do. They would have much rather been with their friends, boys, or shopping for clothes.
I dug around this thing, pulled it out and cleaned some of the mud off of it. It was a small, very old statue like object about a foot and a half long and a eleven inches high.
“Hey guys, come here,” I called my sisters. I always called them guys. They came running over glad to get away from work. We cleaned off the mud as best we could. “Holy shit! Do you know what this is?” Lori exclaimed. “RJ, bring it by the house.”
It looked like it was made of cement. I lugged the heavy thing to the house. Lori turned the hose on it and washed off the rest of the mud. When finished, we stood there looking at a small, very old, well worn statue of a baby kind of laying down in its side. That’s what it clearly was.
Lori looked at Tracy, then me. “I think it could be a grave marker, for a baby. Maybe some pioneer’s child died and they lived around here and buried the child and the father made this statue to honor the baby.” My sisters were real life Nancy Drews plus they had vivid imaginations. Lori had it figured out in minutes. Tracy and I agreed. We couldn’t come up with anything better than that.
“Unless,” I said, “This is a prehistoric baby that was buried and fossilized.”
“Don’t think so,” said Lori quickly.
“Ok,” I said agreeing with my big sister maybe a little too quickly.
“There were no humans in the dinosaur era,” she added, “it’s a babies grave marker.” We lived a way out in the suburbs. Dad bought the land and built a rather large house on it. Pioneers could have lived here and buried their child.
We got mom and dad to come out and have a look and they thought it quite interesting. “Dad, maybe if I dug up around there I might find some more neat things,” I said holding my spade. The twins agreed. “No,” mom said, “knowing you, you’ll have this backyard looking like a prairie dog village.”
We wondered what to do with the baby statue. “Why don’t you put it by your pet cemetery?” Mom said. In the far corner of the yard we had a little pet cemetery with some birds, turtles, fish, my gerbil Gerry, and a squirrel we found dead in the yard. All our pets who died except the bird that flew through the open living room window and my rabbit I took out in the back yard the first day I got him. He hopped away, under the fence and was gone. I was not allowed any pets after that except a fish named Cleo, after Pinocchio’s fish. Cleo was kept in Lori’s room because I overfed the last two fish and they died. “You’re supposed to sprinkle food in lightly,” said Lori, “not give it a big buffet!” I was not trusted with fish.
Anyway, I’m getting way, way off the subject here. We liked the idea of the baby stone guarding our pet cemetery and that is where our unexpected find ended up, watching over our deceased pets. “We have a lot of pets buried out here,” I said after setting the statue near the cemetery.,
“Yeah, and you killed most of them,” Lori said messing my hair. Tracy laughed.
“I did not,” I said, “just two fish that I gave too much to eat and the turtle who escaped and was found under my bed.”
“Cause you left the lid off his pan,” Tracy said. “I think he was trying to crawl into bed with you.”
We stood there looking at the stone baby, as we called it.
“Back to work guys,” mom called, “Tracy, you’ve chopped weeds and good plants, I told you the difference.”
“They’re all green mother, all look the same,” Tracy said under her breath as she walked back to the house.
It was a pretty neat find that we all remember. To this day, we are still not sure of its story but it was a small statue of a baby laying on its side in rest.
It is a child laying on its side in a fetal position facing you, head on a pillow.
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Legend of the Phantom Fortress | The Ghost Plane that Flew and Landed Itself
A girl I knew, we’ll call her Jen, had a pretty lousy dad.
He was on disability from the government and hadn’t worked in years because of a ““““back injury”””” that didn’t hinder him from partying, playing basketball and romping around with girls.
Consequently, he was perpetually broke and living paycheck to paycheck.
Jen’s mother divorced her father when Jen was 2, largely because of his inability and lack of desire to work.
She remarried another man. They had kids, which was fine, but Jen always felt like an outsider in that household.
Her biological dad was in her life but never came through in the most important moments.
Her birthday came around and when I asked if her dad got her anything, she said, “He couldn’t afford to get me a present.”
Without thinking I said, “But wait? Didn’t he just take a surfing vacation to Mexico?”
She sulked and said, “Yeah…”
I felt terrible. Wished I hadn’t said anything.
A birthday present might seem like a small thing, but it is a big deal to a kid.
Airlines have a rule that everyone must be in their assigned seat on take off.
It is because if there is an accident it makes their processes easier after the fact.
Once the plane is in the air, the attendant may move people around.
You have the choice of moving or not – often if you do, the seat offered to you will be better than the one you have. But check first.
I was in the situation where I had an aisle seat in a bank of 3, and the other two seats were taken up by a couple who were extremely fat. They didn’t speak the language I spoke, but by gesture the man was pretty clear what he wanted, and was getting really angry with me. However, I had sat down and stayed there. There literally was no room for me between them, as it was I could barely keep my seat. He called the flight attendent and was insisted I swap. She explained to him, and then to me, in English, that she had to insist we keep our assigned seats until we were at cruising altitude, and she assured me I wouldn’t have to sit in the middle. When she came back, she asked me if a window seat in bank that had no other people in it was acceptable – of course I jumped at the chance. (I tend to be a bit claustrophobic and find being able to look out the window a true joy.)
But I did go, on the mistaken belief that the pedicurist could relieve the discomfort from my ingrown toenails. So a friend told me.
I had no appointment; had to wait. Reading women’s magazines and crayoning in the coloring books for children. I never was very good at that.
The air was thick, redolent, I should say, with estrogen fumes; choking. They were sucking the oxygen out of the room.
There they were, all those females reclined in chairs, sort of like dentist chairs, their feet in little bath tubs. I had never seen that, before. Good Lord, deliver me.
So I deployed my best defense: I turned invisible.
It must have worked; none of the women seemed to recognize my presence, or even my existence. No problem, there; I get a lot of that, anyway.
But, alas, as my power of invisibility slackened, a technician noticed me, and motioned me toward a chair. We could not speak; her language was Vietnamese and mine was Klingon. Hand signals, gestures.
But then, as I reclined, and the warm water engulfed my feet, I started to relax. Then came the gentle massaging of my feet and toes, soon followed by the most gentle clip-clipping I have ever known.
The finale was a massage of my lower legs whereto were applied various emollients and ointments, emitting scents of citrus and of juniper, frankincense and myrrh. I wondered if I was being prepared for burial.
Its called tip creep, I was in a hardware/automotive store a few months ago, when I went to pay, it asked if I wanted to leave a tip. The top suggestion was 35 percent. I glared at the poor cashier, and she said, dont blame me, the new credit card/debit machines all came preprogrammed like that. She had no idea if management had asked for it, or if essentially all new machines were like this. She told me to complain to management, not her, and so I did.
I think its an American problem. I was shocked that many states had frozen minimum wage increases for 25 years.
In some states you only get a couple of bucks an hour, if you make your minimum in tips. This is sick, boost minimum wage to 15 or $16 an hour. Get rid of the bribes, err , tips. When I was in Egypt, if you wanted your government paperwork processed faster you paid a facilitation fee, if you wanted the plumber to move you up the priority list, again it was backshees ( I m not sure of spelling) or a facilitation fee.
Thats what we are moving towards. First it was restaurants and bars, then hair stylists and masseuses, then fast food restaurants, then pick up at pizza joints, then hardware stores. At a hardware store, where I self served, who gets the tip? Would the cashier get 35 percent of all sales, I want that job.
Here in Canada where minimum wage is $15 or $16 , we pay the same tip as the US where its $2.33
So my guess, is that the credit card machines have tips as a default, and fast food restaurants have no incentives to remove it, because who would they give that tip to?
Years ago, I was traveling with a gentleman who owned multiple companies, all successful, and was worth multiple hundreds of millions. He had rented a car several days before my arrival (I flew in later), and he offered to drive to the airport for the flight home. As he drove, he explained to me that the car was not full on gas when he picked it up, but the rental car checkout person had given him his business card and assured him if there was an issue with the amount of gas on return, he would handle it. As you might expect, on return they wanted to charge him something trivial like $15 to top up the tank. He was livid. He paid, just to get to the flight, but then spent the next hour on the phone and at the gate, and onto the plane, stopping only going through security, arguing on the phone to have it removed. Couldn’t let it go. This man was probably made more money in interest in 1 minute just sitting than he would have saved in a hour+ of arguing. It could not have been worth his time, or rather, his time could have been so much more effectively used.
In my experience with folks at this level, and I’ve met a few, it’s a compulsion. They simply cannot let it go. They will spend a million dollars to make $1.2 million in an instant, but will not spend $5 if they feel taken advantage of.
Col Douglas Mcgregor: “It’s OFFICIALLY OVER! We have WASTED TRILLIONS OF TAX DOLLARS ON THIS..”
Rest assured the CEO is not doing it out of the goodness of his heart.
Most likely what happened is the CEO or company realized they need your expertise in something or to train your replacement. Or perhaps as some others pointed out, the company forgot to dot their I’s and cross their T’s when terminating you. Perhaps they had to fire you for cause but didn’t follow progressive discipline procedures. In order to protect themselves and avoid a lawsuit they are bringing you back to perform these tasks.
If you do go back, insist on signing a contract for a certain duration like 12 months. I’d also insist on a certain raise like 25-100%. Whatever you think is reasonable. Insist on no derogatory information in your file. I’d also add language that the contract could only be voided for cause and company bears the cost of the arbitration.
If the company brings you back keep in mind they will try to part ways with you when they no longer need whatever short term assistance so start looking for another job immediately.
Do not under any circumstances come back under their ‘reinstatement’ conditions. You are better off collecting unemployment and looking for other opportunities.
In China, the subway is a social infrastructure, not a profitable business.
Although the subways are operated by “subway companies” in various cities, they are usually state-owned enterprises.
In other words, the equity of the subway system is controlled by the government.
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Therefore, in an accident like the Beijing Subway, there will be two different responsibilities.
1. Legal liability
The subway company must make up for the losses, which includes repairing damaged vehicles and facilities, rescuing injured passengers, and paying their medical expenses and emotional distress. They also face criminal prosecution if anyone dies.
In short, they must bear all the responsibilities that a Western subway company should bear.
Of course, insurance companies also play a very important role. They will activate insurance clauses to provide necessary compensation.
2. Political responsibility
Since subway companies are state-owned enterprises, they must bear more political responsibilities than private companies. In other words, an official must be held responsible for the accident.
First, the subway director of the Beijing Municipal Transportation Management Bureau must bear direct responsibility. He may be subject to isolation and review to determine whether he has committed malfeasance. If suspected of committing a crime, he would be thrown in jail. If not, you are usually fired.
Secondly, the director of the Beijing Municipal Transportation Bureau must assume management responsibilities. He usually needs to make a public apology and be demoted or transferred to a minor position.
Also, the director of the Beijing Emergency Management Bureau must assume management responsibilities and accept investigation. Are they doing their job and completing routine inspections and supervision? If not, it’s usually demoted or fired.
In China, for any important social incident, government officials will be investigated and held responsible. If you think that after the accident, some official stood up and said: “We are very sorry.” Then it could be over, and then you’d be totally wrong.
I don’t know if it’s witty or not, but it stunned the other person and was extremely satisfying.
When I was in my early twenties I worked at one of those cookie stores in the mall. I was working With my friend L who hired one day when a man in his 60s or so came up. I started helping him and L went behind me and kind of playfully kicked me, I laughed and told her not to kick me. I’ll agree it was childish, but that isn’t what upset that man. I’m guessing that just dropped me that last little bit lower in his eyes and he figured he needed to tell me off.
“I think you should be kicked for having that shit in your face.” I had a small nose stud at the time.
For just the tiniest hair of time I was stunned and had no idea what to say… then he opened his mouth again.
“What does your dad think of that?!” Big old smirk, oh he thought he had me on that one.
But I knew I won.
“I don’t care, he was an abusive alcoholic that almost beat my mom to death and molested me at eight, and he’s dead now. My mom however thinks I’m amazing in every way and is happy we all turned out well.” Big smile. All true by the way, I just don’t normally tell strangers all the details like that in go.
His face fell and he stared. Then he grabbed his cookie and stomped away.
We had to announce to the rest of the family any time we were going to use the bathroom, and how long we thought we’d be in there.
This was because we only had one bathroom and my father got really mad at us if we interrupted him while he was in there, or if my sister was in there for a long time, as she tended to do when she was a teen.
Some of my fondest memories from childhood are of my sister knocking on the door to get into the bathroom, like it was an emergency, shortly after my father went in there. It was never really an emergency. She just needed to fix her hair or something.
My dad: [Goes into bathroom, newspaper in hand.]
Thirty seconds later, my sister comes out of her room and starts knocking like crazy on the bathroom door.
My dad: [Godammit I just got in here! Leave me alone!]
So, every time any of us needed to use the bathroom for any reason, we’d stand in front of it and say, loud enough for everyone in the house to hear, something like:
“I’m going to the bathroom now! I’ll be in there for about ten minutes!”
Then we’d pause, in case someone wanted to use it quickly before we went in there.
I didn’t realize until I was an adult that announcing to your family that you were going to the bathroom wasn’t a normal thing to do.
YES… when I was in South Africa, I hired a maid through an agency. She arrived on the appointed day. She gave me the agent’s papers and introduction letter, and she asked me where she should start. I said she could start with cleaning the oven. “Oh no,” she said, “I don’t clean ovens”. “That is OK,” I said, “make yourself a cup of tea and make some breakfast for yourself and then I will give you your money and you can leave”. She looked very crestfallen and told me she needed the job. I said “OK; then clean the oven and you can stay”. She cleaned the oven.
She stayed for 30 years, and every month we had the same conversation. She left the agency after a month and she became my best friend, my companione.n, my housekeeper, my babysitter, and my nurse when I was ill. When she retired, I paid her a pension for the next 12 years till she died of COVID-19. I miss her very much. She was a wonderful woman.
In my youth I was hard up for a summer job so I took a position delivering newspapers. I was a substitute driver for the regular person doing the route. My paper had a shed where I and the other drivers would come to load up our papers at about 4 am, and across the alleyway there was another shed where the rival newspaper distributed papers to it’s drivers.
One morning I park in front of my paper’s shed to load up. As was my usual practice I used the tying machine in the shed to secure a couple dozen papers to throw at the beginning of my route and loaded them in my car. I then loaded stacks of papers that I put rubber bands on while driving to use for the rest of the route.
I found that while I was doing all this, the delivery truck for the rival paper had unloaded several large stacks of their papers just behind my car. I was ready to leave for my route but could not start because the papers were in my way. I went over to the other paper’s shed and asked the guys there to please move the papers so I could leave my parking spot. They laughed at me and said I could move them myself.
So, I did. I got in my car, started it up, put it in reverse, and backed out of the space. The stacks of papers went flying, my rear wheels driving over many of them. I then accelerated forward over the papers and they shot out in a satisfying rooster tail all over the parking lot and I was off for my route.
I was working in a record store that had booths to listen to records before you bought them. I was in a booth setting it up for someone to listen when the boss/owner was outside the booth, not knowing I was there. He started to complain that he did not like my hippie looks and did not trust me. The next day, the manager quit (I do not know the reason), and the boss came to me the next day and wanted me to take over as the store manager. I told him I would think about it. After work, I called the ex-manager and asked why he quit. He said he was sick of the two-faced liar that was the boss and he had got a job with a new company called the Wherehouse (an up and coming big chain record company, He asked me if I wanted to be the assistant manager which paid a lot more than I was making.
The next day, I called the boss/owner and told him that I did not want the manager job, and, by the way, I quit. He tried to talk me into staying when I said, “Then why did you say…” and repeated everything he had said about me.
“One day the great European War will come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans”
In 1914 the assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Serbia (in the Balkans) would be the event that led to WW1
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Then in his final days, he said
Jena came twenty years after the death of Frederick the Great; the crash will come twenty years after my departure if things go on like this.
Exactly 20 years after Bismark’s death Germany would lose WW1 and nearly collapse.
In his final meeting with Wilhelm, he stated
“Your Majesty, so long as you have this present officer corps, you can do as you please. But when this is no longer the case, it will be very different for you”
Indeed when the present officer corps moved on and were replaced by the next generation Wilhelm was forced from power and exiled in shame.
Let’s tell some more Bismark facts because the guy was just such a hoot.
During his younger years, he famously got in an average of one duel per month and never lost. Duels as in fights to the death with swords.
While working his first job for the government, he disappeared and left his post randomly only to appear weeks later with the daughter of some English gentry.
There was an assassination attempt during his rise to power. A man shot at him six times and then was disarmed by guards. Bismark said he was fine and walked home. Hours later the royal court doctor finally got in to see Bismark despite the protest of Bismark. Turns out all six bullets hit him but none of them did much damage. Bismark was just unconcerned about the whole thing.
Bismark was a local lord in his younger years. He had an estate with some peasants who worked for him. He would announce his entrance into their homes by shooting a gun in the air or releasing a fox.
He would drink two bottles of champagne and smoke two cigars for breakfast
There was a period where rebels took the Prussian King (his king) hostage. At the time Bismark was still a countryside lord minding his land. He decided to raise his farmers into a peasant militia and free the king. As he went to leave with his militia, a local man told him to stop whipping up the peasants and go home. Bismark responded, “You know me to be a kind man, but if you try to stop me I will shoot you”.
For all of his antics and wild personality, he ended up marrying a very calm, devout, conservative Christian lady.
The rest of his story is a little less flashy but just as interesting. The man was a freak of nature. He played Europe like a chessboard for decades. He created Germany and accidentally the French Republic, and he was one of the most brilliant political minds ever.
Let’s end with some fun quotes because why not.
“If you like laws and sausages, you should never watch either one being made.”
“There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America.”
Next a few Andrew Jackson facts.
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After being elected president of the United States, Andrew Jackson faced an assassination attempt. Richard Lawrence bought a gun and approached Jackson to shoot him. The first shot misfired, and the second shot misfired as well. Jackson noticed this and proceeded to attack the man and beat him with his cane. Jackson’s guards had to pull Jackson off his assassin — what a mad lad.
After winning his election, Jackson threw a rager in the White House inviting a ton of random people in to drink heavily. The party went on for hours and was out of control. Jackson was forced to flee the out-of-control party through an upper-floor window.
Andrew Jackson loved to duel, like step back and shoot each other type duel. In a duel with Charles Dickenson, Jackson did something bonkers. As the men turned, Jackson just stood there. You see the rules were that both men had to stand still until both shots were fired. Charles turned and shot hitting Jackson around his ribs. Jackson then took his time to aim so that his shot would be fatal. He calmly took a bullet so he could kill his opponent guaranteed.
When Jackson’s friend approached him about this, Jackson said
“If he had shot me through the brain, sir, I should still have killed him.”
I have been living in the US for about 7 months now. I am strictly comparing my life in India and here:
India has PayTM: You don’t need to carry cash, cards. Most businesses, even small stores, auto rickshaws have paytm facility. Here I cannot, cannot, leave my credit card at home!
Public Transport: Is almost non-existent, at least where I live. There is the Caltrain, at a 1 hour frequency, and some buses and VTA, but they usually do not cover the routes I need. And I cannot just take an auto rickshaw to the grocery or Target/Walmart. If I don’t have a car, I need to depend on Uber/Lyft which are expensive.
Online shopping experience: Myntra, Jabong, Flipkart, Amazon, most e-commerce biz in India have home pickup for returns, which you don’t have here.
Laundry is a headache: Most apartments do not have in house laundry, dryers, and making several trips to the laundry room is not something I enjoy. Not to mention, it is expensive too ($1.5 laundry + $1.25 dryer per load)
Medical Services are way too expensive and not easily accessible: Medicines and vaccines are expensive. Something like a tetanus shot which costs Rs. 50 (less than $1) in India, costs $80 here. I can get spectacles made for Rs. 2000 (~ $30) in India, but it would cost me upwards of $300 here. In India, I do not need an appointment in most cases, and I can walk in to a clinic. For my son’s eye checkup, I got an appointment for after 2 months. For the spectacles, the optometrist said they do not have the technician available and can only accommodate us after 3 weeks(!!).
Paper wastage: I get so many paper adverts in my mail every two days, which go straight in to the bin. Sheer waste of paper! And the DMV refused to accept a soft copy of one of my documents. They said they need a hard paper copy! I thought the US was at the forefront of the Digital revolution.
Tipping: Expect to pay about 15%-30% more than your actual restaurant bill, for the tip. There is no service whatsoever, servers just come and put your food on the table.
Shopping experience: Shopping here is not something I enjoy. There is usually no one around to help you with sizes, suggestions or finding something. They simply tell you to go help yourself by saying that whatever they have is out there, so you are left to find stuff yourself.
Lifeless atmosphere: Every city, village in India is vibrant, full of life (and noise 🙂 ). I miss that very much here.
Of course, my answer is restricted to my observations and my small sphere of life. There are definitely greater differences, social, political, economical, which some people have put up here. I just listed some that common folks like me might experience.
Thank you for the upvotes!
Just a couple of months short of completing a year in the US, and I keep finding things that I wish were different ( I know I sound very cynical, but I am not, and I do appreciate the good things in the US too)
Going to add a few more to this list:
10. Road trips aren’t as much fun as they are back in India. Half the fun of those long road trips lies in watching the scenic beauty on the way and halting at roadside dhabas or tapris for chai and bhajiyas or food. Be it any highway, you are bound to find one or two such small roadside hotels or dhabas where you can stop and savour hot food and talk and laugh with your companions. I do not find that here. Road trips are just driving on long freeways or interstates where sometimes people tend to fall asleep due to the monotonous driving.
11. International shipping : There are very few choices in that regard, namely FedEx, UPS and probably DHL. And they are quite expensive. FedEx gave me an estimate of between $100–200 plus $30 for the box ( which is not charged separately in India) for a 4lb (less than 2kgs) shipment. Whereas, our parents sent us 8 kgs of Diwali faraal 🙂 from Pune for less than $70.
12. I miss the air of celebration or festivity here. During Diwali, Indians might put up their festive lights and diyas on their patios, but they do that and go back into their houses and shut the doors or pull the blinds. That’s that! That was Diwali here. Sad. But, the same Indians celebrated Halloween with such gusto, I was left wondering is this what happens when we move to the US? That we forget to celebrate our own festivals the way they ought to be while embracing the festivities of the West? While I see nothing wrong with the latter, I would have definitely loved to see more enthusiasm towards the former.
13. Gun violence: The gun violence happening in the US is being covered in almost newspaper and sites. It has created a general unsafe atmosphere. Especially the shootings in schools and colleges, innocent young lives being snuffed out by some senseless act of violence are tremendously sad.
14. New Year celebrations: India – restaurants, malls, roadside dhabas, almost everywhere that you get food, open till 5 am. US- most restaurants closed post lunch or early evening on 31st Dec and closed whole day on 1st January. So, we had very limited choices of restaurants to go to for New Year’s Eve dinner.
15. Limited places for kids to play: Most apartments here do not allow kids to play inside the apartment premises. Kid scooters, bicycles are not allowed. Playing in corridors is also discouraged so as not to disturb residents during quiet hours. Going to a park everyday is not possible. So, all in all, kids have only the school grounds to play mostly. It would be very helpful if apartments designate a play area for kids.
When my son was an infant, after my wife’s maternity leave was over, she went back to work about 30 minutes from our house. My job was about 90 minutes from our house. I had to leave home by 6am every morning to take my son to my in-laws for the day, so I could make it to work on time. Then, I had to be the first one out the door at work to make it back to my in-laws so I could pick up my son and bring him home. On a good day, I would be home with him by 6pm. On a bad day, particularly if it was snowing, we might not make it home until 8pm.
One day, my son slept through the morning ride to my in-law’s place, and was asleep when I went to get him at the end of the day. I realized, when I went to sleep that night, that I had not seen my son awake that entire day. Worse… he hadn’t seen me that day.
So I started looking for a job closer to home. Over the years, I’ve taught at four different schools, always getting as close as possible to my own house, to maximize the time I get to spend with my children. I’ve got my commute down to fewer than ten minutes now. It’s great! I even come home on my lunch break so I can walk the dog some days.
When I was very young, I’m guessing about 5 ,my uncle gave me a letter holder that was shaped like a dachshund, it became my favorite toy.
My grandfather was visiting, and he saw me playing with the letter holder. Which was dogs front and rear separated by coils, which would have held letters.
He said, “you’re playing with office equipment, that’s not for little boys, you don’t want that do do you “ I assured I did, that it was my favorite toy. He took it anyway. My mother wouldn’t stand up to him, and he was gone.
When he died about 10 years later. I went to his office to get my toy back, just on principle. It wasn’t on his desk, my grandmother said that she had never seen anything that looked like what I described.
When I was about 8, we had a standalone bathroom sink that just stuck out of the wall. My grandfather very nicely made us a stand that went around the sink, with two doors on the front. It allowed us to store stuff in the bathroom. It looked professionally done. He said it was practice for the one he would build himself.
A month later, he came down with one that was miscut badly. He took it into the bathroom and replaced the good one with the garbage one.
He said that he needed the good one in his nice house, and the crappy one wouldn’t look out of place in our house, and he didn’t want to spend the money on new supplies.
Honestly! Who would take back, what was supposedly a gift of love, that he had made for his daughter.
Writing anonymously so it don’t come to bite me back…
To win some times you ‘really’ have to lose
I was working for a US based MNC in India’s self proclaimed Silicon valley.
I was leading a team, the work was too strenuous. I was clocking in around 12–17 hours of office time everyday for almost 8 months. My health started to deteriorate (constant back problems) due to long hours of sitting. I was not able to spend time with my newborn baby. Had to practically live in office for almost couple of months. And to top it all , Management was the least bit supportive , they take employees for granted and make their life hell. As in most services based companies , work life balance is a distant dream. They thought Vacations are an aberration, And thought that the more miserable an employee became the more productive he becomes.
To cut the long story short , I decided enough is enough and that I would pull the plug on the job. I work for my life sustenance and not the other way around. The problem is we have to serve 3 months of Notice period, which is a big NO for most recruiters. During the week when I was mentally preparing for this ordeal, my Manager approaches me saying , your performance is OK, but we are initiating a Performance Improvement Program (PIP) for your own benefit. Which they thought would make me more productive. They thought this would make me teach a lesson, and I would work ‘HARDER’, and this was a process were they monitor me for a month and would let go if employee is not performing better. This is an absolute horrendous experience for any employee to go through. Let alone somebody who literally ‘broke their back working’.
But this was a boon in my scenario if I fail not only they would let me go in a month but also they would give me four months Salary ( They don’t want the undesirables to hang around). I kind of simply stopped working , and made sure I fail in ALL the review meetings , we don’t want to leave anything for chance do we? , with a puppy face of course. So at the end of the Month , I was relieved of my duties and I received 4 months of my salary in due time. And I landed the next job in 2 months which gave me 30% hike as well.
There was a time, quite a few years ago, when I worked as a cashier at Burger King. I mostly worked at the front counter, taking orders and keeping things neat and tidy up front.
One night, I noticed that our drive-thru times were seriously lagging, even though we weren’t that busy. The kitchen was sending food out quickly, and I was bagging it up just as fast, so why did we have four orders waiting to go out the window?
I went to investigate and found my drive-thru employee in the middle of a meltdown. We had a dinosaur for a system back then, and the drive-thru was tricky because the register didn’t tell you how much change to give back, just how much the order cost. To help those who needed it, we kept a calculator by the register, but apparently, nobody had thought to let the new girl know it was there.
Honestly, though, she wasn’t the only one who struggled with making change, and it always shocked me how many people were incapable of doing basic math without technological assistance.
Long story short, I ended up teaching many of them how to make change without the calculator, but it was shocking how many high school and college kids could not make small change.
After my husband was killed in an accident, friends and family sent their condolences and were ready to help me with whatever they could. Many brought us meals and others took care of the yard work and some gave money and gift cards. I was very grateful for all their kindness. It was overwhelming how kind people were, it brought tears.
In time things began to settle down. I was cooking out meals and mowing the yard. But what continued on was the sympathy. I’d be in Walmart and I’d see a friend or neighbor, and the conversation would be about how I was doing and how sorry they were, and even when I’d say I’m doing fine and just want to get past the pain, it was as if they didn’t hear me.
Everytime the phone rang it was someone who was reaching out, praying for me, and asking if I was ok.
It’s hard to be grateful and appreciate all the support, but at the same time wanting to move on without hurting anyone.
Grieving my loss was going well. It was front constantly reminded of the tragedy that set me back. I had to stop answering my phone so I could heal. One day someone was knocking relentlessly at my door. I opened it to find a friend that I hadn’t talked to since before my husbands death. She was telling me to get my purse and come with her. I asked where we going? She said to have some fun, so grab your purse and let’s go.
Not once did she bring up his death. We talked about the stuff we had always talked about. We got our nails done, ate lunch at our fav fajita restaurant and stopped at a few antique stores. When we got to my house I asked her why I hadn’t heard from her and why she didn’t even ask how I was doing. Her answer was, she didn’t need to ask how I was doing, she knew how I was doing, she said you were grieving. I let you grieve. Nothing I could say or do would benefit you. I figured that after a few months of grieving you’d be ready to get away from everything and everyone that’s keeping you from moving on. She hugged me and said softly, Lori, it’s time to move on and live your life.
G’day folks, this is your captain speaking. Sitting next to me is my old cellmate Dave ‘Eye Patch’ Gordon who failed his driving test but passed the FAA exam, so as long as there’s no roads up there, we’ll be pretty safe. ‘Dave turn that oil leak light off please.’ We’ll be flying up over New York, then over Canada, where, on the way in, we were shaken like a shitting dog, so we’ll try and avoid that really rough air – no promises, but we’ll try. Then we’ll turn and begin our passage over the Atlantic. That British Airways jet parked next to us gave us the bird last night, so we’re likely to give that asshole a close pass on climb-out. Our cabin crew, led by the gorgeous and ample Lisa will serve you dinner later. Enjoy a few drinks on us and when we turn off the no-smoking sign, light-up those Malboros and be kind enough to throw one in my direction. In the meantime, while we’re waiting for our slot from these union controllers, spare a thought for us pilots, whose lives depend on these assholes when they walk off the job. We’re flying an old 747 original today, so if you hear it moaning and groaning or even see an engine fall off, we have three others, built in 69 and patched up with some really good glue. Dave, turn that fucking oil leak light off.
Maybe they do but unlike the U.S. China has culture, US don’t. Unlike the U.S. China knows right from wrong., the U.S. don’t! Unlike the U.S. they are mature, he U.S. is not! probably will never be! China don’t want anybody to attack anybody!
China don’t want another death. China want a safer and better and more peaceful world. These Arab and Muslim world want China to help make a better world. Not one that the white Caucasian can wake up on the wrong side of the bed and decide that they feel like carpet bombing them to kill their grand parents and their babies and children and they can pluck from the sky any excuses such as WMD or made up genocide such as Uyghurs forcing Japan into a 30 years stagflation!
Arabs an Muslims are not wrong, they want a life that the U.S. cannot fxxked the up! Or steal every penny that they work hard to save. But U.S. insist that they must have the monopoly rot do genocide and slaughter! Why?
Because of their skin colour! Because of their religion and their Anglos Saxon culture! They can kill and not be killed! Because like whites Caucasian humans they deserved to raped any coloured women and lynched any coloured human because they are 4/5 of an actual human!
Yes their message is that there are are behind the Chinese. If the U.S. misbehave they will all fight a war that totally destroy America. China is frankly calming them down! The world ought to rid the U.S. rules based International order 50 years ago!
DNA Clinic Reports: Half Of Men Who Take Paternity Tests Are NOT The Real Father
1. Try to maintain a positive attitude as much as possible, it will make you more productive and better equipped to handle challenges.
2. Challenge yourself by setting realistic goals that stretch your capabilities and inspire you to work harder.
3. Take regular breaks throughout the day to give yourself time to relax and recharge.
4. Surround yourself with positive people who support you and help you achieve your goals.
5. Visualize success in your mind’s eye – see yourself completing the task or achieving the goal in a clear, focused way and visualize this outcome happening with ease and enthusiasm.
6. Break down tasks into small manageable steps to help avoid feeling overwhelmed or discouraged by large projects or goals.
7. Create positive self-talk statements that motivate and remind you of your goals, abilities, and purpose throughout the day.
8. Minimize multitasking and focus on completing one task at a time for greater clarity and productivity in your work or personal life endeavors.
9. Reassess strategies that have not worked for you in the past, rather than feeling like a failure try again with a different approach if necessary for success in any situation .
10 Finally remember, patience is key! Allow yourself adequate time to grow and accomplish objectives in life without putting too much pressure on yourself to succeed quickly .
Well this is not exactly of being fired or let go from a job but the revenge factor is there. Pretty immature now but at the time a very sweet one.
Back in the 80s I was on my senior year to become a CTA by Christmas. The well done summer job in the research lab of the local paper mill was rewarded by a job offering after I graduate. We set the contract signing to end of November. Surely I was happy about this.
Cometh the day of signing and the head of the HR explained they’ve received an order from high up that I cannot be hired. No names or reasons were given. After pulling some strings I got to know the picture.
In the lab school we had two classes and the teacher of the other one was an mean old frustrated witch for whom anybodys happiness and joy was a thorn in the eye. Nobody got along with her but since she was about to retire people just put it up with her. She of course heard about my job offer. As we of course all knew her husband was the chief of all labs at that papermill. The order not to recruit me came from him and was based on some bullshit about me. I personally never met him so it was easy to guess where the order came from. When I confronted the Witch about this she just smiled vily and said something nasty which prooved my suspicions. I was so furious I didnt know how to sit or think straight. Eventually left town to work at the university lab instead and academia actually became my career.
She was a dedicated gardener and had a collection of massive palm trees and other plants in our coffee room. Comes the graduation day all her plants suddenly turned brown and died. She was utterly upset about this and with watery eyes was thinking of some parasite attacking them. She was right – that parasite was me equipped with 2 kg of sodium hydroxide pellets dissolved in 10 l bucket of water. Poured on the plants the evening before graduation…
This is now over 33 years ago and I regret killing her plants…sorry for that….but at the time the revenge factor was pretty sweet.
I was sitting in a student bar many years ago with some friends. There was a young lady there who me and my friends knew from the Aikido class we went to. She was much better than us and we didn’t know her well but we had said hi as we went to her table.
A couple of large guys came in being rather loud and obnoxious. We ignored them but one of them decided to start hassling the young lady who was sitting alone at the bar reading her course book. We would have got involved but she didn’t need us to! She told him no, he tried to grab her and then, like a flash, she just put him in a wrist lock. She didn’t move from the bar, just put the lock on one of his hands and he collapsed in agony, a few seconds later she took it off again and repeated her request for him to go away. This time he did, rather sheepishly!
Chicken Bokeumtang (Spicy Korean Chicken)
IMG 0552
Ingredients
1 (4 pound) whole chicken, cut into 11 pieces with bone in and skin on
1 pound potatoes, peel, halved or quartered
3 to 4 carrots, peeled, cut into large chunks
2 onions, cut into large chunks
8 cloves garlic, chopped
3 tablespoons Gochujang, Korean red pepper paste
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon Gochugaru, Korean red pepper flakes (optional)
1 tablespoon honey or granulated sugar
2 tablespoons rice wine
1 tablespoon sesame oil
1 teaspoon sesame seeds, plus more for garnish
4 green onions, sliced into 2 inch pieces
Instructions
Bring enough water to boil to blanch chicken in a large Dutch oven; add chicken into boiling water, bring back to boil, about 5 to 10 minutes.
Drain chicken into a strainer and rinse pot quickly. Rinse chicken under cold water and place back to pot.
Add potato, carrot, onion and garlic to Dutch oven.
In a small mixing bowl, combine gochujang and next 6 ingredients. Add combined sauce into pot and toss everything together until chicken and vegetables are evenly coated with sauce. Cover, bring it to boil over medium high heat. Stirring frequently.
When it starts boil, reduce heat to medium and simmer for 40 minutes, stirring frequently for first 20 minutes of simmering to prevent burn bottom of pot.
Stir in green onion and remove from heat.
Transfer to a serving plate, garnish with some more sesame seeds.
Serve with warm cooked rice, kimchi and other your favorite side dishes!
БОЙЦЫ ДОЛЖНЫ ОТСТОЯТЬ МАЛЕНЬКУЮ ДЕРЕВНЮ. МОЩНЫЙ ВОЕННЫЙ ФИЛЬМ БОЕВИК! ЛУЧШИЙ ФИЛЬМ ПРО ВОЙНУ! Ржев
When I was with my first wife, back in the late 1980’s her mental illness started to “kick in”.
For me, it was brutal.
I didn’t know what the Hell was going on. She started acting more and more peculiar. Followed by strange… really, REALLY strange behavior, and a mix of passive-aggressive and full-on aggressive behaviors flooded and spewed from her.
She would just spend 24-7, never sleeping, never taking a break just berating me for every problem under the sky. Non-stop tirades. First it was personal stuff. Then it evolved into the kinds of television commercials that played on the television… going to why I “allowed” the television to show those commercials.
Or, why I permitted a grocery store to price the cans in a “haphazard way”.
Why did I allow those commercials? Why didn’t I yell at the Store Manager?
She started saving boiled egg shells on plates. As they “predicted the future”.
The bedroom closet ended up being stacked with piles of plates with shells on them. She even labeled the plates with dates written on masking tape.
That was only the beginning, and she stopped washing her hair, and showering as it was a sign of my “male dominant” desires…
Like I said … “crazy” behaviors.
At this time, I was also living a nightmare as a cubicle employee in a company. It was a scene right out of “Office Space”. So, between the nightmare work environment, and the nightmare wife…
…and STILL being in MAJ with all the world-line swaps…
…I was HEAVILY stressed.
…
One day, we went for a walk. In those days, I would need to go out and get some “fresh air” and she would burst out of the house tagging behind me continuing her narrative of how rotten her life was, and why I was at fault. He was running amok and I hadn’t a clue as what to do. I couldn’t get a break. I couldn’t get a rest. I couldn’t get any alone time except while being in the car…
And…
…I snapped…
No, I did not go crazy. I did not go into a rage. I did not get upset. I did not freak out…
Something snapped inside of me.
I had an event. I had a breakdown.
Suddenly I was enveloped in fuzzy grey calmness, and all her talking was volume muted, the ground became warm and fuzzy and I felt like I was detached.
I was…
…comfortably numb.
…
She noticed this. She looked at me.
She then started to yell at me. “What are you doing!” she screeched. She grabbed me by the arms. “Snap out of it! We are talking about me! Pay attention to ME!” she hollered.
But it was too late. I was too far gone.
I had retreated inside. And the storm raged outside.
…
…
…
Look, I got over this. Buspar and Trazadone really got me back on track. They helped immensely.
And if you are going though this kind of event… you will too.
Stress and the horrific situations that it creates are but fleeting moments. Later on, when we are older, we look back in amazement of the things that we endured.
Yep. Was commuting into the office on the train as per usual, when my work cell phone rings. Bit early for calls, as it wasn’t barely 8am yet, but ring ring ring anyway, and while Caller ID wasn’t blocked, I didn’t recognize the number entirely but it did seem vaguely familiar, and I pick up.
Turns out it was the support department for the company who hosts email for where I worked, since they outsourced it rather than dealing with running Exchange natively. They tell me the reason they’re calling is that they have somebody else on the other line who is asking to be promoted to owner of the email system, and asked if I approved it. I asked who it was, and it was somebody from HR, interestingly enough. Of course, nobody ran this by me, so being unable to rule out a social engineering attack, and not having approval from anybody to do so, I declined.
A few minutes later, I got another phone call on my cell, different number, still not my office or boss, and was asked the same thing pretty much by our phone system vendor. At this point, I’m thinking it’s less likely a social engineering attack and more likely that HR is trying to secure things I have access to. I pull out my laptop and MiFi and sure enough, my access to our VPN is terminated already. I figure I’m about to be fired, and sure enough, I get into work after disembarking the train and don’t even make it to my office before I’m ushered into HR and informed of the decision to let me go.
I ask if there’s a severance package, and am told there is not, and that before the company will release my final paycheck, I must return all my equipment and sign the paperwork. I do so, since I had my laptop, work issued cell phone and MiFi with me, and the charger for both at my desk. I expect HR to then hand me my check, but apparently, no, they instructed me to wait, while they called the email vendor back to get me to authorize a transfer of ownership. I waited patiently, and when they went through the department to make the request with me standing there, the support rep asked me if I was able to authorize the transfer.
I simply informed them that I was no longer a representative of the company and as such, couldn’t authorize anything, while smiling at the HR rep in the room. The email support rep then informed the HR rep that they’d need to file the correct paperwork to verify the business, exactly the paperwork they were trying to avoid, to reclaim the account. I snatched my final paycheck off the table and said “If there’s nothing else, I’ll be on my way, now.” which went unresponded to, unless the glare from the HR person and my boss was a responce.
That would be Cadillac, I bought a new Catera, which is a rebadged Opel. It came with 4 year bumper to bumper warranty, and service. When the oil needed changing, it was free, new wiper blades free. New tail light bulb free.
So far, so good. On the night of the last day of my warranty, when the dealership was closed, my right turn signal would flash the radio light, but not the signal light. The dealership said that they consider the failure to have happened the first thing the next morning, when it was off warranty, because I didn’t report it when they were closed. It only happened at night, when the radio light came on. They said it was a $10,000 repair, if they did it by the book, but if they just clipped the old signal light wire, and ran a new one it would be $300.
Two weeks later both catalytic converters went, the dealer wanted $2500 a piece, but I was able to get new ones welded in at a muffler shop for $1300 for the pair.
A week later, I was driving, and suddenly lost all power, the engine died, most electrical went out. It turns out there is a cable, under the car, that requires the seats be removed, that came unplugged, it was the main power conduit. It was a $500 fix, including the tow.
The car requires that I pump the pedal to start it, its fuel injected, and that shouldn’t be the case. They park it outside in the winter, and they run the battery down, trying to start it, to take it in to work on it. They put in a new battery, that I don’t need. They tell me that you never have to pump the gas on a fuel injected car, to get it to start. So it was a bad battery. I point out that, the car was in to be serviced, because it wont start, without pumping the gas. It turns out that its a computer error, and is soon fixed, but they still charge me for the battery.
A month later, the transmission starts leaking. Its a totally sealed unit, there is no dip stick, no way to add fluid. It can’t be repaired, I need a new one. The dealer wants $5000. I go to a transmission shop, and they say they can put in a rebuilt one for $2500.
The kicker comes, not even a year after the car is off warranty, when idling I have no oil pressure, but it returns to normal when I step on the gas. I assume worn bearings, but how can it be, when the car only has 60,000 km, 40,000 miles on it, and all the service has been done at the dealer. The dealership is perplexed, they say that they have another, a year newer doing the same thing, and I should wait for them to figure out what is wrong with that car, as its under warranty.
I have had enough, I have paid more in repairs than the car is worth. I go to the dealer that I had bought it from, and trade it in for a Chevy.
I wouldn’t sell that car to anyone, but the company that sold it to me. The mechanics, gave it a clean bill of health and I got full trade in value.
I didn’t really want a Chevy either, but you take what you can get.
Due to employee carelessness, I was badly injured on the job. Due to the owner’s negligence, there was none of the required paperwork at the store to fill out an on-job injury report. I drove myself to the ER, got treated, and the ER (very reluctantly) filed the injury report. (I had to write it up for them, with both hands heavily bandaged!).
I was off work for about 10 days, when I got back the owner told me because of the “poor quality of cleanliness”, my hours were being cut by 20%. The week before I got hurt, we had scored a perfect 100% on a corporate cleanliness/service inspection. I gave him the keys, and walked out, with him yelling after me I wasn’t allowed to quit.
When the staff realized what was going on, all but two of them followed me out, and when the customers found out what was going on, half of them came with us!
I came home from work at 4:30 pm and was unpacking purse, jacket, etc.
My son came close to me, and whispered. “Mom. I have to tell you something. I hope you won’t think I’m a tattle tale. But Nicholas* is smoking cigarettes when he’s on duty taking care of my sister! Sometimes I see the smoke going right into her!”
My daughter, with a tracheostomy, acute allergies, and chronic lung disease, was cared for while I was at work by Nicholas, an au pair from a Scandinavian country. He was referred to me by his sister, who was another au pair; she was good and I trusted her.
My son was protecting his sister. As a child, he could not defend her against this au pair. He was trusting me to intervene.
I went into Nicholas’ room, smelled cigarette smoke, and fired Nicholas immediately. My children’s father immediately came home from work when I called him. He drove the au pair to the airport.
When I went to clean out his filthy room I found a lot of Nazi propaganda. And, months later, we were notified of three lawsuits. Apparently he had crashed the car we provided for him into other cars.
I will never forget that my son saved our family with an unforgettable and frightening conversation, because he trusted me to fix a situation he knew was a bad one, even though he was only five years old.
*not his real name
Brigsten’s Restaurant Banana Bread Pudding with Banana Rum Sauce
This is a fantastic cross between the classic bread pudding and Bananas Foster, the great flaming bananas and ice cream dessert.
Banana Bread
Yield: 12 servings
Ingredients
Bread Pudding
6 cups bite-size pieces day-old French bread
3 cups milk
3 large eggs
2/3 cup + 1 tablespoon granulated sugar
2 large very ripe bananas
3/4 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/2 cup seedless raisins
1/2 cup roasted pecans
3 tablespoons unsalted butter
3/4 cup heavy whipping cream
Banana Rum Sauce
2/3 cup unsalted butter, room temperature
1/2 cup packed light brown sugar
6 large ripe bananas, quartered
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
3 tablespoons dark rum
2 tablespoons banana liqueur
1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
Instructions
Heat the oven to 300 degrees F.
Bread Pudding
Put the French bread pieces into a 9 x 12 x 2 inch baking pan.
In a blender or food processor, blend the eggs, milk, 2/3 cup of sugar, bananas, cinnamon, nutmeg and 1/2 teaspoon of the vanilla extract until smooth. Pour this mixture over the French bread pieces. Fold in the raisins and the pecans and let the mixture set for 20 minutes. Top with small pieces of the butter.
Cover the pudding with aluminum foil and place the pan into a larger pan. Add warm water to a depth of 1 inch in the larger pan. Bake for 1 hour.
Remove the foil and bake uncovered for 15 minutes until set.
In a deep, medium bowl, whisk the cream just until it begins to thicken. Add the remaining 1 tablespoon of sugar and 1/4 teaspoon vanilla extract. Continue whisking until soft peaks form. Cover and chill.
Banana Rum Sauce
Heat a large sauté pan or skillet over low heat. Add the butter, sugar, bananas, cinnamon and nutmeg. Moving the skillet back and forth, cook until the butter and sugar become creamy and the bananas begin to soften, about one minute. Remove the skillet from heat and add the rum and the liqueur. Return the pan to the heat. Tilt the pan, avert your face and and light the liquid with a long match. Shake the skillet until the flames subside. Add the vanilla extract, remove from heat and keep warm.
To serve, place a large scoop of bread pudding in the middle of each serving plate or bowl. Place 2 slices of banana on each plate and top with about 3 tablespoons of sauce. Spoon the whipped cream over the bread pudding and serve immediately.
My husband, kids and parents went to dinner with my sister’s family…a total of nine. We went to a unique steak restaurant where you ordered what you wanted and paid the cashier, then sat at a table where the food was delivered to you.
My brother in law, always the epitome of good manners (not!), made sure he was first in line when we entered. My parents were not in such a hurry, as they were chatting and having fun with their grandchildren, and were closer to the end of the line.
My BIL ordered a very basic steak dinner. This guy had a well-paying job, but the lengths he went to to save a buck or two were almost comical.
As the cashier was ringing up his order (He usually made my sister pay for her own), my mother called out that dinner for everyone was on her.
Charm boy immediately told the cashier to cancel his order, then proceeded to order the most expensive dinner, the steak and lobster with sides of prawns and garlic toast.
I hated going for a meal if he was included. He was always rude to the server and usually sent his meal back if he detected the slightest problem.
I’d love to know how many gallons of spit he has invested thru the years due to his rude and abusive restaurant etiquette.
“I’ll be devastated if you’re not at school on Monday.”
This was said to me by my teacher for Math and Italian when I was 14.
I won’t go into great detail, but I was experiencing a particularly difficult period at that time.
I was severely depressed and expressed to multiple teachers how I felt. No one reacted.
Naturally, I decided to put a permanent end to a temporary problem over the weekend.
I had Maths for my final class on Friday.
As my teacher for Maths and Italian had always been my favourite, I left him a short note on the back of my test stating I wish you and your family all the happiness in the world.
He collected our tests, saw my message and asked me to stay behind.
He spoke to me for an hour and expressed how devastated he would be if I (or any of his students) were to take their own life.
At 14, to have someone I only spent two hours a day with show genuine concern meant everything to me.
China JUDGES United States: “War Addicts” Will an “Intervention” to stop our addiction come next?
The People’s Republic of China has JUDGED the United States of America as being “War Addicts.” As families of anyone with Chemical Dependency know, making such a determination is the step before an “intervention” to put a stop to an addiction!
A uniformed spokesman from China’s People’s Liberation Army brought the judgement to the world via a Press Conference. “”The USA are war addicts.” The country has existed for 240 years, and only 16 years it did not go to war. They built 800 military bases around the world. “Wherever the US military goes, people die everywhere,” said a spokesman for the Chinese Ministry of Defense.
RUSSIA CHIMES-IN
Russian President Vladimir Putin said yesterday “The terrible events in the Gaza Strip cannot be justified by anything.”
He went on to say “We see that in the Middle East, instead of punishing terrorists, they began to take revenge on the principle of collective responsibility.
When you look at bloodied, dead children, the suffering of the elderly, the death of doctors in the Middle East, your fists clench, but emotions are unacceptable,” the president said.
Then Putin let loose with the quiet part that isn’t supposed to be said out loud:
“Behind the conflict in the Middle East, Ukraine, Iraq, and Syria are the ruling elites of the United States and their satellites
“They don’t need lasting peace in the Holy Land, they need constant chaos in the Middle East,” said the Russian President.
The US ruling elites, without achieving success on the battlefield, are trying to weaken Russia from within.
Putin’s key statement to Palestine sympathizers:
“We can only help Palestine in the fight against those who are behind this tragedy. We are Russia, and we are fighting them as part of a special military operation. Exactly with them. Both for ourselves and for those who strive for real true freedom.”
The President of Russia called it the duty of a real man to fight Nazism during the North Military District appearance he made yesterday, defending the Russian Federation and the future of the world, including Palestine.
Hal Turner Editorial Analysis
Folks, the rest of the world sees us for what we have actually become: Dangerous and out of control. Specifically, two of three most powerful nations on earth are now openly saying we’re causing the whole world deadly trouble . . . and we’ve been doing it for years. They’re tired of us.
It’s sort of like any other addiction. A family sees one of their own out of control, and decides to intervene. First they talk to the chemically-dependent/addicted person. They try to reason with him. Then they start applying efforts to make the addict’s life harder. But finally, and it ALWAYS COMES TO THIS, the family must physically stop the addict.
It seems the United States has now been judged an “addict” by China and their 1.5 Billion people. (Four times larger than OUR population.) If they decide to the we need to be physically stopped, we will have brought it upon ourselves.
The people in Washington, DC in the federal government, are personally to blame.
If the world begins to “intervene” in our war-making, and bombs start falling on . . . us . . . . to put an end to the trouble-making around the world by the people in OUR federal government, be sure to remember who is directly to blame.
Never compare your sex life with porn videos. Because porn videos are totally fake.
Never be sad for losing someone. No one lasts for long period of time. Even, you are gonna lose your beauty, money and health with age.
Never underestimate failure.Only a failure gives you the proper perspective of success.
Never “Trust” easily on anyone. Because trust is the most expensive thing and so don’t trust blindly. Even, your friends get jealous when they see your progress.
Never share your password of social media accounts, email, Internet Banking, and ATM pin\CVV number with anyone. Never!
Never get involved in sexual activities till you are not serious in your relationship.
Never believe on that girl\boy who have lots of relationship in their past. They can easily manipulated you by crying their bad past.( Exception is everywhere)
Never try to hurt your parents. They have lots of expectations from you.
In any situation, Never think about ending your life. Even plants regrow leaves after one leaf shed.
Their life has grown visibly better under the so called dictators and very rapidly too
image 58
Take Gautam Adani
In China
Adani if he was building a plant within a distance of 200 Kms Radius of a Village that had a chance of pollution effluents
He would have to pay for mandatory medical tests every 6 months
He would have to build a School for every 875 students between ages of 7–16
He would have to furnish and equip the school and pay the State / Province who would arrange the teachers
He would have to build roads, build warehouses & basic infrastructure plus employ a mandatory 85% of his staff from these villages and TRAIN THEM UNDER HIS OWN DIME
He would have to pay insurance premiums for all the employees he employs and if he fires anyone, he has to pay a mandatory 6 months salary plus a 36 month premium
This comes from his revenue which is audited by a State Auditor on his Board.
So no lying about making losses
If he is unable to sustain his businesses , his shares will be transfered to someone else
And he can’t leave China unless he has an exit visa
That is how the CPC protects the common mainlander
The Billionaire gets a tax credit and tax discount to cover this sum
If he tries to dodge this payment, he can be levelled with PUBLIC CORRUPTION and Jailed for 240 months/ Life or executed by the State
This is just one example of how China mixes it’s Capitalism and Socialism and rises accountability for the Party and it’s Private Sector
image 57
Likewise Poor Kids are inducted to WORK for 26 Hours a week at a minimum wage of 264 RMB a week
In exchange the employer must Mandatorily ensure that the Kid is TAUGHT Chinese & Mathematics until the age of 17 with proper medium of instruction
Talented Kids who score above a threshold can be paid a scholarship for 2 years to prepare for the GaoKao and prepare for the School Leaving Exam as well
Otherwise they are still educated and can become upto Foreman or Floor Manager in the factory and take basic certifications
While the whole world targets China for Child Labor, China does best for poor kids and gives them a FIGHTING CHANCE without burdening their families with Debt
So many poor kids today have respectable jobs as Foremen or Supervisors or Small Business holders because of the CPC
image 56
In Chinese Cities, if you have a Job and no housing, the City gives you a Public Housing with minimum space ranging from 24.45 Sqm in Shangahi to 61 Sqm in parts of Chongqing
Very low cost and rent
No homelessness
If you are a Sweeper from Rural China working in Chongqing, four of you get a single public house with a heater, bathroom and indoor plumbing
No Slums since 1976
No Shanty Towns
Proper Public Houses
image 55
In the words of Gita Gopinath, nobody in the world has a Public Housing program like the Chinese do
No desperately homeless families in China
image 54
Xilin purchased 11000 Pre Fab homes for their public housing which is more economical
This in China, you are GUARANTEED of a roof above your head and indoor plumbing no matter how poor you are
Plus Healthcare
The Poorest Rural Villager can get a Coronary Bypass for 5000 RMB on State Dime even without Employer Insurance
They trust Alternate Traditional Medicine Quacks more, that’s a different story
Plus Education
Plus Food Prices capped
This means Pork, Rice, Beef and Soybeans can’t sell beyond a maximum price in China
The State will absorb the extra cost
image 53
So in a way
The Median Chinese feel protected and safe
This is around 86% of the Chinese living in China
Among the remaining Chinese , mostly in Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen and other top cities, some 3% of the citizens feel they cannot really live upto the standard of their wealth in China and leave for Singapore and Australia and extol the virtues of Democracy
86% triumphs 3% is it not?
So that’s why People are comfortable under China and Chinese Dictators
Give them a Multiparty system like India and by God they would vote for a Putin like man for 40 years consecutively
There was a crew of men replacing the carpeting in the offices at work. It was a long, narrow hallway in that part of the building and someone in the crew set up a radio and had it blaring. I ended up having to be the one to tell them they couldn’t do that during work hours. I talked to the guy who seemed to be the foreman on the job and he seemed pleasant enough about it. He turned off the radio and talked to the others about it. He then came back and talked to me for a few minutes. Just to make conversation I asked him about the quality of the carpeting. He assured me that it was pretty good stuff, even though it was fairly thin. He said that he used the same stuff in his house. I said, “Oh, really?”, as I thought it was odd that someone would use commercial carpeting at home. He answered, “Yeah, I had to use this because my grandson is living with us. He’s only 2 years old, and he’s blind, so he has to have this kind of carpeting to make it easy to walk.” I was taken aback somewhat and said, “I’m sorry to hear about his disability.” The foreman quickly replied, “Oh, it’s fine. He’s a great kid and a lot of fun to be around. Sometimes we move the furniture around just to watch him bumping into things. It’s funny as hell seeing him all confused and falling down.”
I have to say that I’ve never met anyone else in my life that could entertain themselves by torturing a blind baby.
Why Women Are Upset When Men Have PREFERENCES?!
Why? The inability to emote. Many women (that are younger) just are unable to emote. They think they have a high EQ, but an inability to emote decries EITHER a ZERO EQ, or a narcissistic personality disorder.
My story is awful in its own fashion but very different from the other responses. I had a wonderful roommate my last two years of college. Let’s call her Sue. She helped me get a job proctoring standardized tests. One Saturday I was finishing up a test when I saw my roommate in the door along with her then-boyfriend, Bill.
That surprised me because I thought they had plans since he didn’t live in town and they didn’t see each other often. Sue motioned me over.
“Jen, as soon as you can get away, we’ll give you a ride home.” The supervisor noticed the conversation and told me I could leave. I walked out to the car still wondering why Sue was here. After we got in the car, she turned around and gently told me, “Your mom called a little while ago. Your grandfather passed away this morning. Bill and I are going to drive you home.”
I was shocked. Although my grandfather had been diagnosed with terminal cancer the previous fall, he had responded well to radiation and had been active and in good spirits when I had last seen him only a month or so ago. Sue drove me back to our apartment to pack, then she and Bill drove me two hours back to my hometown for the funeral.
I’m not sure I ever really conveyed to Sue how grateful I was for that ride. I didn’t drive at the time, and it would have taken much longer for my sister or brother to have driven over to my college town to pick me up. She and her boyfriend gave up a large chunk of their rare time together to drive me home while I sat silent and grieving in the back seat, barely able to give directions in those pre-GPS days. “Sue,” if you’re on Quora and see this response and recognize the scenario, Thank you!
A little background — I was working in a chain drug store in Southern California, the only employee who came to work, on Christmas Eve. We were a 24-hour store, so, having cleaned everything, and faced all the stock on the shelves, I was thinking how to murder the “dancing Santa” (bad recording, 2 1/2 feet tall, and poorly made).
10:30 (22:30 for 24 hour clocks) a guy comes in, freaking out. His wife has recently left him for her “hot stud boyfriend”, with whom she has a brand-new baby. They are divorced, but she got the kids on holidays. He had bought and wrapped the presents for the kids (daughter, son), and dropped them off at her boyfriend’s house — left them on the porch, because she refused to open the door until he left. He gets home, and finds the kids waiting on his front porch. His ex-wife’s mother had just dropped them off, and left them alone, because ex-wife, new baby, and “Hot Stud” were going to his parents for Christmas, and she didn’t want the kids “getting in the way”. Grandma had plans of her own, and refused to take the kids with her.
Ex-wife left him with two kids with no change of clothes, no presents, not enough groceries, on Christmas Eve. And there was no way he could not make her sound like the totally selfish bitch she was.
Semi-happy ending. I abused the hell out of my authority as the manager, and “store-used” or “over-ride discount”ed everything we needed to put together a Christmas for his kids.
Each of them got a ream of paper, the largest box of Crayola (crayons) we had, a generic fuzzy toy, and two other toys that he thought they might like. Each present was individually wrapped in a different paper, with big fancy (store-bought!) bows, and a Christmas card on each present, plus each one got a good sized bag of “stocking stuffers”. (Pocket sized toys and games, candy, fruit, nuts, etc). Then I threw in (from me) a couple of bags of Christmas candy and chocolates.
It’s Christmas Eve, and your mother has her mother drop you off at your father’s house — who isn’t even home — because she doesn’t want you, because she has the new baby that you aren’t even allowed to touch.
Because there are two worlds: the one you see in real life and the one you see on TV or newspaper.
You watch TV, navigate through social media and you think you are well informed abou the world. And you know a lot about China. A strong dictatorship, damn commies, cheap labor and poor brainwashed people that would be amazed to see the “Free world”. The government is spying on their citizens, like CIA or NSA. But when commies do, you think is worst. Of course.
And one day, casually, you decide that you will visit China.
You arrived there and you are shocked. You can barely believe in your own eyes.
The big cities are super modern, big, shinning tall buildings. The way you pay, the way you shop, the hypermarket looks like in The Jetsons. You are in the future.
The level of automation there is out of this world (Western world, cough, cough). You had no idea that so many online services were already available to the people. You realise you have been scammed by your own country and media.
After the initial shock, you, an an educated person after all, well traveled, you have knowledge. Knowledge from the free world.
You decide to talk to the educated Chineses. Another shock. They know more about you (you as a citizen and your political beliefs) and your country than you know about them. Where is the brainwashing?
“Hey, but they are not free” you think in relieve. What can you do that they can’t? Let’s see… protest?
As if protests are changing something…
Vote? Chinese economy is growing faster and better than democracies…
It doesn’t matter, you are a free, superior citizen of the developed world. You travelled there to China to see them! And see that the Chinese studying abroad are going back to China… Whatever, they are commies.
You visit the Rural China, you still see a lot of poverty. You feel better about yourself. Hahaha, they are still poor!
You go back to the big cities and there is no way to deny the reality: China is growing and is glowing.
You go back home and you see, China is actually a good place. Very different from what you see on TV.
That’s why year after year the experts in your country are predicting the fall of China. There is nothing else to do beyond pray that somehow China will stop growing and wil be the end of the Western hegemony over the world.
Oil tankers are large and heavy vessels that carry oil across the world’s oceans. They can be up to 400 meters long and weigh up to 500,000 tons when fully loaded. They are also designed to be stable and safe in various sea conditions. There are several factors that contribute to the stability of oil tankers.
The hull is the main body of the ship that floats on the water. The hull of oil tankers is usually long, wide, and deep, which gives them a large displacement and buoyancy. The displacement is the weight of the water that the ship displaces when it floats, and the buoyancy is the upward force that the water exerts on the ship. The larger the displacement and buoyancy, the more stable the ship is. The hull of oil tankers is also divided into several compartments, called tanks, where the oil is stored. The tanks are separated by watertight bulkheads, which prevent the oil from spilling or sloshing in case of damage or movement. The tanks are also arranged symmetrically along the centerline of the ship, which helps to balance the weight and distribution of the oil.
The draft and trim of oil tankers vary depending on the amount and location of the oil they carry. The draft and trim affect the stability of the ship by changing the position of the center of gravity and the center of buoyancy. The center of gravity is the point where the weight of the ship acts, and the center of buoyancy is the point where the buoyant force acts. The center of gravity and the center of buoyancy should be as close as possible to each other and to the centerline of the ship, to ensure a stable equilibrium. The draft and trim of oil tankers are controlled by adjusting the amount and distribution of ballast water, which is seawater that is pumped into or out of the empty tanks to balance the weight and trim of the ship.
The metacentric height is a measure of how stable a ship is when it is upright. The larger the metacentric height, the more stable the ship is. The righting moment is the torque that tends to restore the ship to its upright position when it is heeled by an external force, such as wind or waves. It is proportional to the product of the metacentric height and the angle of the heel. The larger the righting moment, the more stable the ship is. The metacentric height and the righting moment of oil tankers are calculated and verified by using stability instruments, which are devices that can measure and display the stability parameters and criteria of the ship.
I didn’t work for a company, it was just a guy who sealed driveways.
I was 16 when he offered $10/hour under the table for good work.
We had fun. I busted my butt. I mixed sealer like a machine, process improvement every time.
We completed three or four driveways in five or six hours and then he took me out for a few beers on him.
It went on for two years.
At the end of the second year, he left his payment book open in the truck while getting something at the convenience store. He charged $300-500 per driveway on average.
I did the math quick in my head. Materials $40-50, labor $10, amortisation on equipment $20 (being generous).
That led me to: he gets $220-440 per hour and I get $10.
It was our last job of the year and I said nothing.
Next year in spring he called me and I upped my price to $20 per hour.
He freaked out, and asked if I was crazy.
I said, “Go and hire anyone you want, you won’t make as much money as you do with me and you won’t spend the last two hours at the bar drinking beer with somebody you like.”
My 83 year old father had an accident which caused a severe traumatic brain injury. He survived for a few months. My own mother died when I was 12, followed by my father emotionally abandoning me. He and his new wife carried this treatment forward for decades. This wife of 35 years, had always made it known I was not her cup of tea, was now terrified and desperate for help and support. I was the only one Dad recognized. She was panicked if he came home what would she do because he would have been severely disabled. During this time her tone changed and she made exclamations of “Family forever”. She asked me to move there and I agreed. The plan was I would stay for a month and then settle up the details of the sale of my home. I was moving whether Dad lived or died. I stupidly believed the cheetah changed her spots. Dad died and less than 48 hours later she told me I had to leave and I realized I was not welcome. I overheard her tell someone what a trauma it would be to have me around.
At that moment I felt the entire weight of 35 years of emotional abuse and neglect and the scales fell from my eyes. I felt like I was hit by a lightening bolt. I sobbed every day for the next 1.5 years…the pain was horrible as I realized how I allowed myself to be manipulated by her and how I allowed myself to be mistreated for all those years. I will never speak with her again because I refuse to be a second class citizen.
When you are looking for countries that have unusual or weird capital cities, Tokyo takes the cake. Tokyo itself is a beautiful city, which is incredibly safe, and has some of the best food in the world. The city itself has over 13 million people in it (3rd largest capital city), and the metropolitan area has 37.8 million people in it – more than 195 countries (making the Tokyo-Yokohama area the largest metropolitan area in the world). It is also the best city that I have ever visited in my life. Tokyo is a city that is totally worth visiting.
I like Tokyo because of how weird it is. It’s not weird in a bad way – its just that you see a lot of things in Tokyo that you don’t normally see in other cities.
Tokyo restaurants often display plastic models of their food on their windows.
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Now, where do you think you get these plastic food models?
Look no farther than Kappabashi Street – because the whole street is dedicated to selling restaurant supplies – such as these plastic food models.
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Want to sleep in unusual hotels? Tokyo’s got your back. Introducing the capsule hotel – not for claustrophobics!
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Ever felt like sleeping in a Kikkoman Instant soup bed?
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Bored of playing Mario Kart 8 on your Nintendo Switch? Now you can do it in real life!
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Tokyo is also known for its really weird restaurants. Alcatraz ER is a medical-prison themed restaurant.
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Zauo is a restaurant where you literally catch your own food, bring it to the chef, and tell them how you want it cooked.
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Mr. Kanso is a store that only sells canned goods.
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The best way to experience the wonderfully weird city of Tokyo is to visit it, and I highly recommend to do it – it’s totally worth it!
Not to me, but to my mom. 15th of July is “Asshole day” in my family. Why, you may ask?
When I was 9 years old, my mom got pregnant. I was soooooooo excited to have a sibling! But a few years after, my mom finally told me what had happened before she told me she was pregnant.
When she first found out, she was so happy. Her first doctor check up was fine. She went back about a week after, and there the doctor (a different one) did the ultrasound, looked at my mom, and simply said:
I’m sorry. You lost your baby. It’s dead
No explanation, nothing. My mom cried but came back home as if nothing had happened. She told my step dad but not me, I had no idea of what was happening in my home. I don’t remember seeing my mom cry, she would always make sure I wasn’t around.
In the next 2 weeks, she realised she still had all the pregnancy symptoms. Still had the same cravings. She was sure she hadn’t lost the baby. She went back and got an appointment with the same doctor as last time (it was at the hospital, you couldn’t really choose who you would see).
When she explained that she was still experiencing all the pregnancy symptoms, he denied all of it. He told her she was doing a phantom pregnancy. That she was too old (37) to have a baby so she just imagined she was having one. She refused to accept it and demanded another doctor to do the ultrasound. It took a while but finally another doctor came to see my mom. Took him about a minute to find my brother with the ultra sound. Doctor 1 was so embarrassed he didn’t even apologize.
Doctor 2 explained that Doctor 1 was still a student, hence why he made a mistake.
I don’t know why that student was doing ultrasounds alone. All I know is, the first thing my mom did when coming home was telling she was pregnant.
She was first told my brother was dead on July 15th. So we commemorate that day as Asshole Day and my mom usually goes out with my brother!
Just when I thought I’d run out of stories for Quora answers. Praise almighty god.
I was on a date with a Veterinarian in her late 20’s. A very polite girl, pretty, smart – she had all the right boxes checked.
It was our second date and we were talking about “kids growing up too fast” which is code for teenagers having sex too soon.
We probably shouldn’t have been talking about that topic so soon and it was probably my fault, I tend to steer conversations to bad places. But oh well. Good dates usually involve being honest and talking about real things. And it was indeed a good date.
All I remember though was that at one point I was taking a sip of beer as she said,
“I mean I get it, kids experiment from time to time. When I was 8 years old I stuck a pen in my p—y.”
At which point I choked on my beer and started coughing and she immediately started blushing.
I was actually glad that beer was coming out of my nose because it probably minimized her own embarrassment.
She said, “Sorry – that was too much.”
After I wiped the beer off my face, I waved both hands and reassuringly said,
My dad always bought his cars from a specific car dealership. After he died, my mother gave her big boat of a car to my brother, and decided to buy a smaller car.
We went to the dealership that dad had always used, he must have bought 10 cars from them, and we picked out a small one year old lease return, with very low mileage.
We were paying cash, and my mother and I sat down and signed the contract. We would pick up the car, after the check had cleared. When she went to get up, she almost fell over. We got to the door, and we were parked right out front, and she didn’t recognize her car. I took her directly to the hospital, she died 8 days later, never leaving the hospital.
After the funeral I went to talk to the dealership and they refused to take the car back. I tried to contact the local television reporter, who always aired these kind of stories, and never heard back. I asked Mom’s lawyer, and he said that she was obviously not of sound mind when she signed the contract. But that it would cost us more to use him to fight it, than it was worth. So we sold the car, still sitting on the dealers lot, to someone for $1500, less than we paid for it, two weeks before. A week later, the reporter contacted me, he had been on vacation.
I told all my friends, family and acquaintances about it. Many of them used that dealership as well. They all said they would never set foot in it again.
There were at least 50 people, who had bought at that dealership in the past, who swore they wouldn’t go back.
It didn’t make it right, but it felt better to know that they were losing customers.
This actually happened in 2011 or 2012, a hacker stole a penny from millions and millions of ppl amounting to a total of 78 million dollars. They couldn’t prosecute him for a plethora of reasons and as a matter of fact it got him tons of clout. He ended up getting tons of job offers because of his genius feat. So you’re late to the punch and that loophole has long been sealed by now
What is a strange experience you’ve had that you’ll never forget?
Sorry folks, this isn’t a ghost story, but it was awfully weird.
Years ago, when my husband lost his job, we used to run a stall at a Craft Market. We sold African crafted goods, and framed pictures of African wild life.
In the stall next door was a lady who did upholstery – she sold beautiful Ottoman’s and all manner of stuff to do with upholstery. She had a sister, Cat, who would help her out at times.
Cat had a deck of Tarot cards, and after obtaining permission from the owners of the market, set up a cubicle to do readings, within her sister’s stall.
Cat invited me over for a ‘practice run’. Not believing in any of it, I reluctantly obliged. I knew how these things ‘worked’, so was determined not to give anything away, by way of body language or expression. I sat immobile and stony-faced as Cat did her reading.
I honestly can’t remember 99% of what Cat told me, but one thing stuck in my mind. She told me that someone in our household was pregnant. I laughed it off.
At that time, we still had a young cleaning lady, Rachel, who lived in an outbuilding on our premises. I was very attached to this young woman, she worked for us for ten years and was almost like one of the family. I fed and clothed her as I knew her other job didn’t pay very much; I also saw to her medical needs.
A few weeks later, Rachel confessed that she was pregnant. Well! You could have knocked me down with a feather! I didn’t see that one coming.
Not only did Göering speak as others have posted, but he used a clever trick. He would listen to the question in English, which then had to be re-asked in German. The trick (so I’ve read) is that Göering was fluent in English. He’d get to hear the question and have time to consider his answer while it was put to him again in German.
1, Taiwan’s TSMC already moved out of Taiwan. It is a US firm now. Do you see China suffering?
It hurts Taiwan more than China.
2, It is all a political show by Taiwan’s pro-USA politicians. They all do business with China. With business with China, Taiwan has trade surplus. Who hates money? Not the corrupted Taiwanese politicians.
3, Of course, there are Taiwanese who are pro-China. They welcome China to “invade” Taiwan.
Taiwan is part of China. Is a Chinese province. There is no invasion of China when China decides to suppress the Taiwanese rebels.
Maurice was a soft-spoken and mild mannered boy in my class. He was friendly and pleasant to all. I cannot think of a single moment where he said or did something that angered or offended anyone while in school.
He lived further up the hill from where my school was; practically walking distance from the school. Girls confided in him due to his reserved nature and boys respected his kindness. Once he invited a few of us guys to his house for food and to watch SpiderMan (the very first movie) on his PC, after school. Maurice was the last boy one would think of when the word ‘dangerous’ was mentioned.
When we entered Form 5, a boy named Kevin entered the school and stoke fear upon many of us. I say ‘boy’ but he was already an 18yo adult when he came. He had transferred from a really rough school and practically every week he was involved in vicious fights or would be seen breaking class to smoke behind the labs. He would harass random boys, threaten them for their money and if they didn’t cough up he’d shove, slap or thrash them, according to his mood.
Maurice happened to pass by him one day and judging Maurice to be harmless he tackled Maurice for some money. Maurice ignored him but Kevin grabbed him by the shirt and slapped him on both cheeks, warning him that next time things will be worse.
Maurice’s shirt was dirty and his face red from the fracas but he remained silent and walked away.
After school ended I was walking with my friends out the compound and down the hill when we saw trouble was brewing. We saw a gang of no less than twenty young men from the area had accosted Kevin. Kevin’s face was bruised and swollen, eyes red and most of his shirt buttons were ripped out from a prior struggle. They dragged Kevin to Maurice and asked what to do with him. Maurice, in his soft voice told them that that was enough. The men shoved Kevin off and fired kicks behind him as he ran down the hill, thoroughly learning his lesson. The hill where the school lay was Maurice’s turf.
Kevin learned a lesson that day.
The most dangerous people are sometimes the ones you least suspect.
Your manager is not your friend, no matter how nice, friendly you think he/she is.
Understand difference between a friend and colleague. Draw the line, and keep your friend circle outside work as much as possible.
You’re a “resource”, that’s how upper management refers to you.
Do what’s required of you, go a bit outside your comfort zone sometimes when required. Do the basics consistently, that’s what is expected.
Look at your payslip, offer letter and understand your salary components. Plan your tax accordingly and investments accordingly.
You can stay in a company for a long time, or keep shifting every 2–3 years. It’s upto you, and no one is right or wrong. Some people prefer respect and comfort and some more money.
Update your LinkedIn, spend time on it.
Have a life outside work.
POSH can attack you from anywhere anytime, please be aware of it, and understand it. Know when to talk where and you’ll save yourself a lot of trouble.
Choose a company that is still starting out, you’ll have an opportunity to learn more, and your views shall be respected.
An employee without a good personal life and stability cannot be a good professional. Give people time, lend some hand if you can, if it’s in your professional prowess.
“Easy to work with” is in more demand than “good worker”
If you don’t like your job, move on, try to get a new job but please don’t expect that you’ll like it either.
9–5 jobs are amazing. All these entrepreneurs need some workforce as well to survive.
Be aware of skills required to upgrade in your role and the latest trends that are dropping in.
HR (employee relations) actually don’t do anything.
Nobody likes you and everybody talks about you behind your back. So, don’t try to build an image to be likeable.
You’re there to make money and learn. Everything else is not a priority.
Learn how to be respectfully sarcastic on mails, communication channels.
Don’t keep grudges. You won’t work there forever.
If you find someone is toxic, ignore them. If you have to work with them directly, just keep it to minimum work talk, and get everything over mail or slack/skype/teams.
Verbal communication is pointless. Document everything.
Smart people in corporate world will make you think they’re idiots and get away with everything.
Use Glassdoor. It helps other people.
Don’t be an attention seeking unethical jerk. Be normal, come on time, leave on time.
Does Iran have NUKES?!? Should we be worried?
Did you vote for a war with Iran? Your elected representatives did! On Wednesday, U.S. House of Representatives passed House Resolution 559 on Wednesday which paves the way for a war with Iran over nuclear weapons.
Second trip to New York a couple of years ago. Loved the first trip, the sights, the people, the atmosphere. Got chatting to a young lady who had moved to New York and was working as a ticket seller for one of the tour bus companies while we were waiting for the bus she’d just sold us tickets for.
Turns out she was a heavily qualified medical professional who was struggling to find work in the US.
Middle aged lady came up to me and asked if I knew how to get to such and such a place. I explained that I was a stranger, but suggested that she asked the young lady we were talking to.
He response? “I don’t ask ni**ers for directions”
I wish I could say that I said something witty in response, but I was so shocked that I just stared at her. The Englishman in me meant that I felt I had to apologize on her behalf. Swore never to go back to NY.
1) China has something like 4.5 times America’s population, so the fact that their economy is en route to exceed ours is hardly surprising. If you think that’s a bad thing, you are essentially saying that 1.4 billion people should be living in poverty. What reason is there for believing that the U.S economy should always be the largest on earth?
2) What do you think the government should be doing to prevent the Chinese economy from growing? A boycott is hardly possible and a trade war would hurt us as badly as them. Investment restrictions would again just hurt us and benefit Europe and Japan.
The fact is that the American and Chinese economies are tightly linked. We should be thinking about how to benefit from China’s rise (for example, selling them some scrubbers for their coal plants) instead of pointlessly trying to keep them down.
Who produces Huawei’s Kirin 9000S chip? This is a mystery that no one can figure out.
The test results of the United States have also come out. They admit that it is not an American technology and that it has reached the chip level of 5 nanometers or higher. However, they still point out that there is still a gap of five or six years between Huawei’s chip technology and the technology controlled by the United States.
What is the difference between six years?
The one that can help Huawei produce high-end chips cannot be TSMC, let alone Samsung. SMIC does not have this ability, so who else in the world can produce such high-level chips?
The relationship between Huawei and Songshan Lake began in 2005. At that time, Songshan Lake signed a project investment agreement with Huawei Investment Holding Co., Ltd. to establish a 750-acre Huawei Southern Factory, which was officially put into production in 2009. In 2012, the two parties signed an investment agreement to establish Huawei’s terminal headquarters. In 2018, Huawei’s terminal headquarters officially settled in Huawei Xibeipo Village, located in the south of Songshan Lake, Dongguan, where Huawei’s production and R&D capabilities also began to gather.
This is called the Shenzhen-Hong Kong-Guangzhou S&T cluster by the WIPO’s Global Innovation Index 2023, but actually the Songshan Lake Science and Technology Industrial Park in Dongguan, Guangdong, China in the Guangzhou Shenzhen Hong Kong Macao Greater Bay area.
The photo was taken at the opening ceremony of the new academic year of Dongguan Institute of Technology. The speaker in the photo is the Secretary of the Party Committee of Dongguan Institute of Technology, introducing the industrial situation of Songshan Lake.
In July 2020, the state approved the joint construction of the “Greater Bay Area Comprehensive National Science Center Pilot Launch Area” by Songshan Lake Science City and Shenzhen Guangming Science City, covering an area of 90.5 square kilometers. In October 2021, the Songshan Lake Science City Development Master Plan (2021-2035) was officially approved by the Guangdong Provincial Government.
At present, the new generation electronic information industry cluster with Huawei terminal as the main chain has reached a scale of 100 billion yuan, becoming a pillar industry in Songshan Lake and even Dongguan. When a steady stream of scientific research results is transformed and applied to the high-quality development of the manufacturing industry, Dongguan’s “smart” manufacturing will have endless productivity and creativity.
Songshan Lake has gathered 84 national-level talents of various types, including 21 dual-employed academicians, and has 56 innovative scientific research teams at or above the municipal level. More than 50 academicians and experts and more than 2,000 well-known domestic and foreign scientists carry out scientific research here all year round.
The City University of Hong Kong (Dongguan) and the University of the Greater Bay Area (Songshan Lake Campus) are accelerating their construction and are expected to be completed and enroll students in the academic year of 2023. Songshan Lake, which is only 103 square kilometers, will have 6 universities.
The production and R&D capabilities of Huawei will also expand even further in the most productive and innovative Greater Bay area of China.
Why the fuck should China be complying with any of the U.S. sanctions?
By your logic, China being the most sanctioned country by the U.S. should be sanctioning itself?
China should in fact be working together to bypass U.S. sanctions – Iran also being heavily sanctioned by the U.S. – by directly settling trade negotiation with their own currencies. This, together with Saudi Arabia – directly contributes to the discarding of the petrodollar.
FreshandFit REACT To Cheesecake Factory DATE Gone WRONG
She’s forever the Cheesecake Factory chick. Ironic and poetic.
If you cry out of happiness, the first tear will fall from the right eye; if you cry out of sorrow, the first tear will fall from the left.
A person has 7 minutes of neural activity left before he dies. You will see your memories in a dreamlike pattern during the 7 minutes of neural activity you might have before dying.
When people who speak two or more languages switch from one language to another, they may unintentionally change their personalities.
As humans, we are most imaginative at night and least creative during the day.
According to studies, travel improves brain wellbeing and even lowers the risk of heart disease and depression.
When you’re sleepy, your brain does more imaginative work.
Being around happy people makes you happy.
Persuading yourself that you slept well deceives your brain into believing you did.
The music you listen to has an impact on how you perceive the world.
China is more than a first world country but unfortunately for China , it is neither Caucasian (or of European descent ) nor friendly to them so it is rather called an emerging economy just to pretend to take it out of the disgraceful third world status . Tiny Israel with a beggarly $300 bn GDP ( lower than Nigeria’s $500 bn ) is put in the first world whilst China with an $18 trn GDP (or 60 times than of Israel is virtually ranked third world . And China has technology that even America cannot comprehend — high speed trains , landing on the dark side of the moon etc . The World of Wonders
When I was growing up, I saw my father going to office every day. He would eat his breakfast at 9 and leave for office by 9.30. It was a six days week during that period. Since he was a civil servant, he had to many times go for work even on Sundays and holidays.
When I was in school and then in college, I seldom missed my classes. It was fun going to school and college and meet with friends and participate in all activities.
When I joined my job, everyone in office used to come in time without fail. There were many who wouldn’t even avail their full quota of casual leaves (15 in a year). There were a few instances when due to Deewali or some other vacations, there were continuous holidays for 4–5 days. People used to wait for offices to open.
Even today, in most government offices, there is no concept of working from home. All government employees go to office every day.
During the covid pandemic, most of the private sector companies introduced the concept of work from home. It was the need of the hour and was very convenient for the employees. Lots of people shifted to their home towns and worked from there. It became a new normal.
Now that the things have gotten back to normal, a number of people are still preferring to work from home. I know a few youngsters who resigned their jobs when the companies asked them to report to office for work. They became too comfortable perhaps working from home.
Maybe I am old school, but for me staying home all day is not done. I want to go to my office and work.
China in November 2023, will not be lectured and talk down to. Not now not again. Certainly by a nation build on slavery after genocide on its own natives. Certainly the one and only nuclear bombs on human. Certainly not by the biggest murderer of Arabs, Muslims, orientals, and certainly by the biggest terrorist state on earth.
Get use to the new fact of life. Then let’s talk as equal. No more no less. If the US has any sense of reality not to mention humility, it is the US needing China. Not China wanting this talk. Without China the US can kiss goodby to 30–50% of world demand. Without China it cannot win over the Global south or 170–180 out of world’s nation. Without China the US will collapse and implode.
But the US is lucky China is not the US. Not the hypocrisy, not the hubris, not the nation that wants the world to be submissive and subservient to them. Not the nation that is at war 237 out of its 247 years after stealing their nation from their natives. China don’t steal Hawaii, Guam, and some 50 other islands! And this nation wants to lecture China!
But China is willing to help make America good again. If it ever grow out of puberty. I doubt it will but if it does it will be good for the US and for Americans. And certainly the world.
This is a very complicated situation, involving multiple sides with intertwining relationships. So who’s fighting whom, which side is China supporting? It’s China’s version of the drug Cartel south of the border.
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This conflict is mainly fought in the Kokang (green) region, on the borders between China and Myanmar. There are 3 sides to this conflict:
Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) VS Myanmar’s Military (Tatmadaw) Allied with Kokang Local Forces.
Both MNDAA and Kokang Forces are ethnic Han Chinese. MNDAA split from the Myanmar Communist Forces in 1989, founded by Peng Jiasheng (pic below) In 2009, MNDAA rules Kokang’s capital Laukkaing. A splinter group betrayed Peng and the MNDAA as the Tatmadaw attacked Laukkaing.
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The splinter group worked with the Tatmadaw to drive the MNDAA out of the city of Laukkaing. They later formed 3 branches of the Kokang Local Forces, controlled by 3 families. The first and most powerful are the Kokang Militia controlled by the Bai clan. Headed by Bai Suocheng
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The 2nd branch is the Kokang Police Battalion. Controlled by the Ming clan. Ming Guoan (Up) was in command, but he recently suffered a serious injury while horse-riding on the streets of Laukkaing. So his younger brother Ming Guangcai (Down) assumed command.
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The 3rd branch is the Border Guard Battalion, overseen by the Wei clan. Wei San as the head of the Border Inspection Committee that controls the Border Guard Battalion.
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Other families have interests in different industries, from Mining to Gambling to Prostitution to Telescamming. These 3 clans wields the gun, I’ll call them Kokang Militia for simplicity (Kokang Militia Up, Kokang Police Battalion Middle, Border Guard Battalion Down)
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Northern Myanmar is a lot bigger than Kokang. Kokang is just the Northern periphery of the larger Shan Autonomous State, which contains anther autonomous State called Wa State(Red). All of them are involved in drug trafficking (less so now) and telescamming(until very recently).
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Wa State is another interesting faction, it’s entire government structure were copied from China. The Party Leads the State and Military. Even their congress building took hints from the one in Beijing.
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Wa State is led by Bao Youxiang, used to be a drug smuggler. Wa State is the best administered state, with the most financial muscle, they also cooperate closely with China, to more or less resolve the drug epidemic on the border. Wa State is officially neutral in this conflict
image 27
MNDAA, Kokang Militia, Wa State, they are all vying favor from China. The Myanmar’s military, Tatmadaw that has a ceasefire with Wa State and is allied with Kokang militias, also needs China.
China’s official position is to avoid conflict, and negotiate a power sharing structure. MNDAA, Kokang Militia and Wa State are all ethnic Han Chinese, we can’t really betray any sides.
Wa State is the good-natured elder son.
Kokang is the son hanging with the wrong crowd.
And MNDAA is the rebellious son with a sense of righteousness. After Peng Jiasheng’s death, the command of MNDAA was passed to his son, Peng Deren.
image 26
MNDAA follows the party and military structure of China. Although they are no longer communists, they still have many iconographies from China. Before 2009, Peng clan struck hard against illicit drug in Northern Myanmar Winning praises from local Chinese citizens on the border
image 25
In the 2023 offensive, they also listed the eradication of telescamming from Kokang as one of their goals. Along with driving out the Tatmadaw and regaining the control of Kokang. The announcement of eradicating telescamming was a propaganda coup for them.
Chinese netizens cheered for them, some even organized donations. This is because the telescamming industry were on par with the Mexican Cartel in terms of brutality. They would lure people from mainland China and Taiwan with promises of very high salary. After they arrived..
They are forced to be trained in how to scam people through online and telephone. If you’re not very good or don’t comply, you’ll be tortured or worse.
After which if you are of no use, you’ll be sold into the local mines, after you’ve been exhausted, your organs will be harvested and sold on the black market This can exist in Northern Myanmar because of its lawlessness It’s under these circumstances the 2023 offensive started.
MNDAA has 4 Brigades of troops, all based in the deep forested mountains of Northern Myanmar, On Oct. 28th the 211 Brigade of MNDAA took control of Chinshwehaw, a land port with China.
As of me writing this thread, battle rages on in Kuktai and Hsenwi in the West, and Monekoe in the North. The MNDAA strategy is to cut off routes of reinforcement by the Tatmadaw and deal with the Kokang Militias separately. The goal is the city of Laukkaing (green circle).
image 24
221 Brigade have already taken Mang Dong Ba today. It’s only 7 km away from the city of Laukkaing. But what awaits them in Laukkaing will be a tough battle. This is the business HQ of a warlord of sort, called Liu Abao (all big businesses have their own private army). He’s been singled out by the MNDAA declaration due to past grudges. Liu fortified his building accordingly
image 23
As the MNDAA brigades marches towards their objectives, numerous Tatmadaw outposts were taken, weapons taken to bolster their firepower.
image 22
Graphic images of dead Kokang militias and Police brigades are plenty, which I won’t show. Tatmadaw armors have been destroyed, MNDAA have also learned from recent wars to use commercial drones to drop mortar rounds.
But the numbers is not on MNDAA’s side It’s 17,000 Tatmadaw + 6000 Kokang militia vs 7000 MNDAA. How will this end? Who knows. But Kokang authorities are handing over 2000+ telescammers to the Chinese side as MNDAA marches on.
image 21
Happy to report that Wei Qingtao of the Wei clan, and Liu Zhengqi of the Liu clan of Kokang are under Chinese custody. They are 2 key family members of organized criminal groups in Northern Myanmar, involved in murder, torture kidnapping and telescam. Why is it significant
image 20image 19
They sincerely urged their families to give up telescamming and other criminal activities in Northern Myanmar. Relaying China’s resolute actions taken to eliminate organized crime in Northern Myanmar. All of this happened as MNDAA troops marches towards the capital of Kokang.
image 18
Wei clan is in charge of the Border Guard Battalion, a private army of sort in Kokang Myanmar. Wei Qingtao is the younger brother of Wei Rong, the CEO of the Henry Group, the biggest telescam organizations in Kokang.
image 3
Now, if you’re wondering, how did we get our hands on 2 key family members of 2 influential organized criminal clans in Myanmar? As their clans prepare for a fight? Let’s just say the plot of Wolf Warrior is not entirely fictional.
image 17
At the moment MNDAA troops are mainly fighting with the Myanmar Tatmadaw, encircling Laukkai capital of Kokang, Northern Myanmar. The Bai and Ming clans seems to be the main resistance. Let us see how MNDAA will exploit this major development.
The original Thread. follow her, she really have many info that hard to get otherwise.
I was in a big steakhouse in California about 30 years ago. The waitress, like many Americans, liked our Brit accent and happened to say their head chef was from England. Thought nothing of it because England is quite a big place with a lot of people . About an hour later as we were finishing up our desserts , the chef came out.
Conversation went something like this.
CHEF: I heard your accents and had to come out because you sound like you are from Essex.
ME: Yes all four of us are. We are from Southend on Sea. ( A very famous large Essex town recognised around the UK).
CHEF: Really. That’s where I’m from. Actually Shoeburyness just outside Southend.
ME: Really! I lived there for 12 years,after I was born.
CHEF: Do you know West Road. I ran the Chippy ( fish and chip shop) there for 10 years between ’71 and ‘81.
ME: You’ve got to be joking. I used to come in your shop the last Friday of every month with my brother and my parents to get fish and chips.
In Turkish places they drink too. But those who don’t have a chai (tea culture) where you sit outside tea houses and pretty much do what you do at bars violence excepted.
A young woman was brought in by ambulance at 3am after she collapsed while working a night shift restocking shelves in a nearby supermarket. After examining her and some tests, I concluded she had simply fainted. So I started asking about the causes.
Was she dehydrated? No
Suffering a mild viral illness with a slight fever? No
Had a history of vasovagal faints? No
Had been very stressed or seen blood or something upsetting? No
Could she be pregnant? She says no. Hmm. They always say no. Does she have a partner? Is she sexually active? Both yes. What birth control was she on? None. When was her last period? It was overdue. Oh, but it was coming because her breasts were sore. Double hmmmm …
But… but. … but she couldn’t be pregnant she told me. She had very painful periods and investigation had shown a bicornate (“double”) uterus with both sides nearly closed off by abnormal membranes and she had had surgery a few months ago to correct it and her periods were much better and….but she had been told pregnancy was nigh impossible. Her and her partner really wanted children, but had accepted it was not to be and were talking about adoption.
Could she produce some urine for a test? She was sceptical about the value of doing it but was a nice girl and would do it if we wanted. She handed me the sample and I did the test myself. It was firmly positive. I did a second to be sure. Same result.
I took the test and showed her the two dark blue parallel lines. She asked what it meant. I told her.
She lit up like a Christmas tree. She was beside herself with surprise and delight. Suddenly, she asked what she should do. I suggested telling her partner. She checked the time- 4.30. He’d be asleep and had work in a few hours. She decided to phone her mum. It took a while for the phone to be answered, I could hear the sleepy voice. Where are you? At the hospital? What? Suddenly more awake. Are you ok? What? Pregnant? But… PREGNANT!
We could all hear her mum screaming down the phone, her Dad being woken, and then him shouting too. They were just all so happy.
It was just a really lovely experience, giving welcome news for once.
Modern Women DEMAND Chivalrous TRADITIONAL Men but Don’t Want To Be Traditional Women…
I got pregnant in my freshman year of high school, I even remember the day it happened. I was 14 almost 15. Too young to be having sex and definitely too young to raise a child.
The circumstances that lead to me getting pregnant weren’t ideal and I knew that I would be on my own. Completely. I knew that the father wouldn’t have anything to do with the baby, especially since he already had one that he didn’t see or take care of. My mother told me I’d be kicked out of the house, which wasn’t anything new since I had been living with friends when I got pregnant. My life was completely unstable and wasn’t a good place for me, let alone a baby.
The first time my mom kicked me out of the house was when I was 11, she always picked her boyfriend over me. So I bounced around from grandparent to grandparent and then eventually friends houses.
As any kid who is unsupervised and has no boundaries whatsoever, I did things I shouldn’t have. I missed a lot of school but no one ever bothered me about it since I kept a 3.8 gpa. I always wonder what I could’ve done had I actually applied myself, but I didn’t take it serious. It came too easily to me. I was more interested in partying.
Long story short, I got pregnant September, 1998. I was in denial for the first couple of months. The guy said he’d give me money for an abortion but then he spent it. I don’t think I would’ve gone through with it anyways.
When I was 5 months pregnant I wrote my mom a letter before I went to school. Looking back, that wasn’t the best way to tell her but I was scared out of my mind and she wasn’t the easiest person to talk to. When I got home from school she blew up. Asked how many periods I had missed and when I said five I thought she was going to have a stroke. She said, “it’s too late to get rid of it!”, to which I replied, “I know, that’s why I’m telling you now. I’m going to place her for adoption.”
I don’t think my mom thought that I could do it since that was her original plan for me. I think that is part of the reason she always told me that I wouldn’t be able to live there if I kept the baby. But I had my mind made up. I was going to find a maternity home and an adoption agency. My mom was in a maternity home when she was pregnant with me, so that was our first thought. Thankfully we couldn’t find it when we went to look. I do believe things happen for a reason.
I was absolutely blessed with an AMAZING teacher. I truly miss her and would give anything to see her again and express my thanks to her. She helped me find a nice maternity home that was about an hour and a half from my home. She took the time out of her life to drive me all the way up there to check it out. Took me out to lunch and most importantly talked to me like I was a human being and not another dumb teenage statistic. She helped me in so many ways and she will always have a special place in my heart.
So I moved into a Christian maternity home (a culture shock to me since I grew up with no religion) with four other girls. I was the only one who was planning an adoption. We soon became a little family and I had a wonderful time there. The staff was amazing. I’ve never met a nicer group of women who were so supportive of unwed pregnant teenagers.
I formed an extremely close bond with one of the girls. Shortly after I had arrived she had lost her baby. Her and I were the only ones going home without babies, I think that is what brought us closer.
The time came to find parents for my little girl. A daunting task. You wouldn’t believe the amount of profiles that I looked through! I had certain things that I expected though.
They couldn’t have a child of their own.
They had to be educated.
They had to live “comfortably” but not be too rich.
They had to live close (within a few hour drive).
Most importantly they to had agree to an open adoption.
A lot of people don’t want an open adoption, and I can understand that, but it’s my child, my rules.
I found couples who were extremely rich, couples with a bunch of kids, and I even found an Amish couple. Then I found my couple. Something about their profile made me instantly like them. They came from a large family, lived comfortably (she was a teacher and he was a business man), they only lived a few hours from me, they were down to earth, they couldn’t have children since she had a hysterectomy, and they were open to an open adoption.
I had my lawyer set up a meeting with them. I liked them right away. They were a little leery about a completely open adoption but after I told them my reasons they seemed to understand. I don’t think it’s healthy for a child to live under a lie, I didn’t want her to think that I didn’t love her and just abandoned her, and if she wanted to get to know me one day she could. I made sure that they knew I wouldn’t be in their lives constantly, but I had to know that she was ok.
They were the only couple that I met. I told them that day. I know they didn’t want to get their hopes up too much, but I knew.
So the big day finally arrived. I was in labor for two days! It was hell. She finally arrived very early in the morning. When they put her in my arms my heart melted. It was the most incredible feeling in the world. I didn’t know that I could love like that. Didn’t know a love like that could exist. The entire world stopped once I looked into those blue eyes. She was pink and perfect and I’ll never forget the way she smelled. I was lucky enough to spend four amazing days with her. Four whole days that I spent just looking at her, smelling her head, and making sure that I always remembered these things because she was going to be out of my life soon.
Those were the quickest four days of my life.
The other big day finally came. The day I had been dreading for months. They had been staying in a local hotel since I had called them before I went the hospital to let them know. I imagine those were the longest four days for them. I signed all the papers, took a thousand pictures, and held her as much I could.
Putting her in their arms was the hardest thing that I’ve ever done, but I knew in my heart that it was the right thing to do. I only had love to offer her and babies need much more than that. I had dreams for her, dreams she’d probably never realize had she stayed with me.
And she was gone.
Misery and depression became my constant companions. There are no words to describe that pain.
I was lucky though. Her mother sent me letters and pictures constantly. I saw my beautiful baby girl grow. Always happy and smiling with little curls and chubby dimpled hands.
Five years later I finally got to see her again. It was amazing. She knew who I was and was so excited to meet me! I was scared, but that day helped me so much. I got the closure that I needed. I knew I had made the right decision when I placed her for adoption. I backed off for a few years after that. I wanted to give them space. I wanted to let them be a family.
This past summer she turned 16. She’s beautiful, smart, and amazing. We talk once in awhile but I don’t want to intrude. She knows I’m always here if she needs me. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to see her again soon, but only if she wants to. I told her that I would understand if she didn’t want to, but she wants to meet up. She says that she wants to see me again and meet her sister. I’m thrilled.
I have thought about her every single day for the past 16 and a half years. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t wonder what she’s doing, how she’s doing, if she’s happy, if she’s sad. I love her more than life itself.
I think of them as my family. It might not be your typical “normal” family, but it works. We love and respect each other. I’m incredibly lucky to have them in my life and I’m thankful every day that they are amazing parents to my girl.
I have had many embarassing moments as a foreigner in several other countries. But here are two of the most embarassing ones in Norway where I currently live.
“I accidentally did drugs, thinking it was chewing gum.
I was once at a pub with a few people. One girl on our table there was offering this one thing called snus to everyone seated at the table, except me because she knew that I am not into smoking, tobacco or any kind of drugs. I innocently thought it was chewing gum because it looked exactly like chewing gum, it came in a box that looked like a chewing gum box. I was wondering why she was offering it to all the others seated on the table but not me. Then I asked her for one She said, “It contains a bit of tobacco is that fine ?” I was like yes yes, convinced that it was harmless chewing gum. Then she told me that I needed to put it on my gums and I did that. Within 10 minutes, I noticed that my vision was getting blurry, someone was talking to me but I couldn’t focus on what they were saying, my head was aching so badly and I was getting really really dizzy. I felt very nauseous as well. I was so confused and upset about what was happening and I was almost about to cry. Then, I told the people there that I wasn’t feeling good for some reason. Then they guessed it was because of the snus and they asked me to spit it out immeadiately. Then they gave me loads of ice water and I was fine within a few minutes after that.
Image Source:BBC. This is how snus looks like. To me they looked like chewing gum on first sight.
I was told later that the amount of tobacco in one snus is equal to the amount of tobacco in ten cigarettes. To prevent air pollution, people in Norway use snus more than cigarettes. Almost everyone uses it here in Norway.
“Touching food with hand.”
In India, it is a common practice to eat with hands and to touch the food with your hands. But in Norway, they consider it unhygienic to touch food with your hands especially if it is out of a tray from which everyone takes food and if your hands are unwashed.
I once went to a bakery and instead of using the tongs to take out scones and pastries, I used my hands. Then the staff member manning the bakery at that time came running to me and said “Please don’t touch those with your hands, use these” and he handed me the tongs that were placed right next to the tray and I didn’t see those.
But, this wasn’t the first time this happened to me. This has happened with me many times. I frequently forget that I am not in India and take food with my hands, only to get told off by people.
But, now I more often than not remember not to touch food that is not mine yet and is for public consumption.
There are several more embarassing moments that I encountered. I plan to write a book about them one day.
China-Russia collaboration
China-Russia relations have become stronger through the collaboration of Presidents Putin and Xi. They have met some 42 times in both one-on-one and virtual formats, according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry. This contrasts with 17 meetings reported with Presidents Obama, Trump, and Biden.
Stronger relations are marked by strengthening economic ties. In September 2023, monthly trade between Russia and China reached a record high of $21.2 billion which is up almost 60 percent from the same period in 2021.
President Xi said that “developing the China-Russia strategic partnership of coordination with ever-lasting good neighborliness and mutually beneficial cooperation is not an expediency, but a long-term commitment.”
The “long-term commitment” emphasized by Xi underscores a comment that he made to Putin on his visit to Moscow. “The world is undergoing changes unseen in a century,” he said. Putin agreed with the realistic assessment.
President Putin emphasized Russian support to the One China Principle and that Taiwan is part of China. His support for China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity was acknowledged by Xi. “China supports the people of Russia following their path to national rejuvenation and in safeguarding sovereignty, security and development interests of the country,” he said.
The changing international situation
The changes in the international system are indeed profound. The world is inexorably moving toward multipolarity. The Russian side describes the situation as a transition from Western “colonialism”. The Chinese side describes the situation as a transition from Western “hegemony”.
Both Moscow and Beijing stress that there are now new centers of development emerging. The Global South is rising in relative terms. Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America are increasingly factors impacting the general direction of global development.
Thus, both countries recognize what can be called a period of global transition. This period may extend over a decade or two. The challenge is to maintain global economic development and at the same time attempt to bring stability to an inevitably more turbulent world.
It is recognized by Moscow and Beijing that increasing turbulence during the transition era is caused by the United States and West who are attempting to maintain their hegemonic position in the international system.
The international community, however, realistically sees the changing situation and desires to be on the right side of the transition.
President Xi underscored China’s commitment to work with Russia within the United Nations as well as within the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and Group of 20 (G20). Cooperation in the areas of food, energy, and supply chain security were highlighted.
For his part, President Putin emphasized continuing cooperation with China in the BRICS as well as in other multilateral mechanisms and platforms.
It was noted that the two leaders had an “in-depth exchange of views on the Palestinian-Israeli situation.” Given that the current Middle East crisis could expand into a regional war or worse, the cooperation of Russia and China to stabilize the situation is urgent.
Well my friend, that’s a terrible trap to be caught in, I know that hollow feeling only too well.
But the thing is, as dark as it seems right now, you will get through it..your not the first person to deal with or the last. It can catch up with you really fast. You put one foot in front of the other and you walk. The day will come when you will remember this all like a bad memory. I truly feel your pain, I’m an INFJ, I can’t help it. If you need to talk you can message me on quora. Things will get better, I can promise you that
Within 20 years, Chinese cars will emerge from vaporware into global consciousness.
There will be Chinese jets, helicopters, trucks, maglev trains and many other products traditionally the exclusive domain of the first world economies.
Why am I so confident?
Whatever Japan and korea and Germany can do, China can do better.
Because it has the scale and domestic market.
All the Chinese need is someone to point the way and teach them, and the Chinese market will do the rest.
Whatever emerges from the Chinese market will have gone through a baptism of fire like no other. China class is world class, because the Chinese market is incredibly open for an emerging economy. The winners that emerge pit themselves against the heavyweight champions who have decades of experience before entering the Chinese market.
The other thing about Chinese scale is data. Big user base equals mountain loads of data. And China has many megacities to do experiments in collecting and harnessing big data and ai. What is impossible to test in say, Korea or Germany is a walk in the park in china. Even the US will find it hard because big, dense cities are not that common stateside.
We are entering the decades of Chinese surprises and delights, and they will come one after another.
I’m Getting Married in 2 Weeks, But My BRIDE Was Involved in an AFFAIR, and so was an OnlyFans Model
I was probably 10 11 years old when I was at another friend’s house playing. We were playing in the garage where we were nurses and and the boys were our soldier patients. One of the boys, that I secretly liked, ask for everyone else to leave and let me stay with him as his nurse. I got so flustered I left and went home.
I have heard a few people say this, mostly pompous folks.
But in the mid 00’s I was at a hacker conference, and we were waiting for me to be on a panel. I was helping a colleague with his notes, and apparently I was taken for his assistant.
Another hacker asked me if I wouldn’t be a dear and get them coffee. The panel was about to begin. I said, “I don’t think there’s time to get people coffee — the panel’s on in a minute.”
The guy said, “Well that’s why the people who belong up here don’t have time to get it.”
I realized he thought I was an administrative assistant or something.
He doubled down, “Run now and we’ll be all set and then you can go do whatever people like you do when the tech jargon starts.”
I had worked at that time about 25 years online, and more than that in computer engineering. But being a woman who was not dressed informally meant that I must have some boss who made me dress up, I suppose.
I think that the “Do you understand who you’re talking to?” was justified, tbh. It isn’t always a “Karen” sort of thing.
edit: No, I’m not saying that a support staffer should have been treated like that either, and I was angry at the guy for assuming he could ask anyone to be a dear and get coffee. Condescending AF.
But I really do believe it was raw misogyny, and I wasn’t worried about being personally disrespected. I think he disrespected anyone female, and anyone he thought he could boss around (which was a superset of anyone female, to him).
Some hacker types are just asshats. I try not to be.
About a million years ago, some coworkers said, “John want to go to a concert with us?” I was a grad student, I didn’t know anybody and so I sensibly (and uncharacteristically) said “yes.”
I asked who was playing. They said “Pat Metheny.” Well that’s cool. I don’t know anything about Jazz, but what could possibly go wrong? I’d hear some Jazz from a great Jazz person that even a classical music weenie like me had heard of.
So it’s time for the concert, and I carpool with the others. We get to the stadium, and everybody is excited, and on the banner over the entrance it says “Joan Armatrading.” I growl “I thought we were going to hear Pat Metheny!” and my friends responded, “Pat Metheny, what are you talking about? It’s always been Joan Armatrading!”
Kind of pissed off, and having shelled out about two week’s worth of food in the form of grad student money, I went in.
I co-signed my ex-girlfriends mother’s apartment lease. We were together for 8 years and I knew her mother well. She had divorced my girlfriend’s father and was having trouble getting a lease. Her mom had a stable job and an above average income for the time. I considered her a pretty low risk. I was wrong. Her mom paid her rent for 3 months, then went and traded her paid off car for an expensive two door coup and bought a ton of new clothes. She started going out and missing work the next day and eventually ended up getting fired. The apartment manager contacted me to let me know that she was a month behind and they wanted her rent. I had a discussion with her mom and she explained she’s got a new life and will get a roommate if I could help her with just this month’s rent. I did help her, and the next month it was the same story. I could see where it was leading and had a deep conversation with my girlfriend and her mom. It was like talking to a pre-teen and my girlfriend couldn’t understand why her mother is not my responsibility when I told her she needed to be the one helping her financially. I spoke to the apartment manager and they agreed to terminate the lease if I could find someone to assume the remaining term. I did find a coworker looking for a new place and willing to move in and assume the apartment. When it came time for her mom to move out she refused to leave until the property manager explained to her that if she was actually evicted she would likely never be able to rent again and that she was being done a huge favor. In the end, I lost my longterm girlfriend, I was the bad guy. Her mom ended up living with her son in another state and losing her car. Not what I had wished for her, but that is the result of her choices. I was lucky to escape without an eviction or having to pay her rent for 8 more months. Never again. I don’t cosign or lend money to anyone. If I do help someone out it is with the expectation that it is a gift and do not expect any to be repaid.
Let me talk about the reverse, and healthcare in the US.
I’m British and live in Northern Ireland.
I have a chronic condition called Ulcerative Colitis, its a gastrointestinal condition, I’m seen frequently by my GP (primary care), I’ve also a consultant which I see every 6-9 months. I take a handful of medications every day plus a treatment called a biologic, it comes in an epi-pen injection format, which I collect from the pharmacist each month and inject at home at a time suitable to me.
All this is covered via the NHS via general taxation.
Prior to Covid in my previous job I was given the opportunity to take on a project in the US, before I accepted I investigated how my meds would work for the 4 months inwould be there.
My employer said I would be covered, as did my general travel insurance, and they would pay for everything on the days as needed, this proved not to be the case.
The company sponsored physician was an asshole saying I didnt know what i was talking about (despite having lived with the condition for a decade, and being a patient advocate, a mentor to those newly diagnosed and often asked to be a teaching aide to medical students), attempted to change the medication to what I assume was a medication he got kick backs for prescribing and refused to sign the script, it took a second doctor to give me the usual meds that worked for me.
If that wasnt enough, the trip to the pharmacy turned into a nightmare and a second argument at being forced to use the EpiPen injection there and then whilst being watched in disgust by a crowd of folk each time.
I then got a bill for $1375. This repeated for each of the 4 months,
It then took a further 6 months for me to be reimbursed by both employer and insurance for the costs I incurred which they had to argue for.
It’s a bloody good thing I had savings and a credit card or I would have been stuck.
There is a HUGE difference between the meaning of the two.
—
When you look at “Chinese Communist Party”, the actual noun is the word “Party”. The words “Chinese” and “Communist” are both descriptors of the word “party”. Going more specifically into linguistics, the word “Communist” is an adjective, while the word “Chinese” is an adverb.
Party: noun. Subject of the phrase.
Communist: adjective. Describes the subject.
Chinese: adverb. Merely describes the descriptor.
The phrase emphasizes the political party portion of the phrase. And Anglo propaganda loves to artificially emphasize the Communist part, because they have a raging boner for fascism.
—
But what happens when we do the same analysis for “Communist Party of China”?
China: noun. Subject of the phrase.
Party: secondary noun. A subset of the subject. (Not quite an attributive noun though).
Communist: adjective. Describes the secondary noun
Now the emphasis is on the word “China”. The entity is indeed the political party, but it is merely a subset of all entities that “China” encompasses. The Communist adjective indicates this party is but one of many political parties that China has had, and will have.
—
See how the Anglo propaganda works? Rhetorically the “Chinese” part is but an afterthought, and it can be dropped completely without changing any of the linguistic meaning. “Communist” could also be dropped, as the subject is “the Party.” Of course, Anglos will never, ever, ever forget to say the “Communist” part negatively as part of their overall support for fascism.
In reality, “Communist Party of China” illustrates that the entity is a political party that represents China, advocates for China, and promotes China. It isn’t just a political party performing actions, it is China performing actions. The word “China” is the subject, and it cannot be dropped without destroying the rest of the sentence.
Yes. Yes I have. And my teacher (actually professor, this was my second year of uni) literally said “this is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” so I wrote, on my own time, a second essay supporting my assertions, and the next day he told me I “had a good point.”
My essay concerned ethics and morality. Specifically, I said that a lot of what we call “morals” aren’t actually morality at all—theyre custom and practicality.
As a simple example, people who migrate to cold climates need to wear clothing almost all the time to keep warm. After a while, as in generations, people simply become accustomed to seeing others almost always wearing clothing, and a few generations after that, not wearing clothing becomes viewed as “immoral.”
There’s nothing intrinsically immoral about not wearing clothing. Unless you’re out in the cold, it doesn’t cause harm. It certainly doesn’t harm bystanders. But the practicality of wearing clothing makes wearing clothing the custom, and because people get used to seeing others wearing clothing, eventually not wearing clothing becomes viewed as immoral.
The climate causes a practical change, that change gets cemented as a moral value because many cultural moral values are based on nothing more than “this is usually what I see the people around me do.”
So I said in my essay we should, as a society, unpack “this is practical and therefore customary, so not doing it is morally wrong” from “this harms others so it is morally wrong,” and stop labeling as “moral” that which is only practical social custom.
Anyway, unbeknownst to me, he was quite conservative and religious, and subscribed to a very different view of morality, so that caused some friction.
When I was first married to my husband, we attended his company Christmas party. It was a rather small affair but included satellite offices and clients. The boss and his wife were there when we arrived and we went up to them to greet them and wish them Merry Christmas. It just so happened that the boss’s wife and I were wearing the same palazzo pants though mine had a skirt overlay. She looked me up and down and barely spoke to me. As we were drifting away from them I heard her say to her husband: “Well she has a nerve dressing so well when her husband is only one of your truck drivers!” She had no idea who I really was, my background, my education, my past career history, nothing. It was the fact that I was married to a truck driver that made me, in her eyes, less than nothing. My husband had to grip my arm pretty tightly and keep me moving forward to stop me going back and slapping her face. It wasn’t the insult to me that bothered me so much, as the insult to my husband because of the job he had. Sure we didn’t have a lot of money and my outfit which outshone hers in spades was purchased at a thrift store for $10! Apparently it looked expensive to her though! lol
Beware: China’s MASSIVE DF-1000 Missile Is A New Threat To US
China’s upcoming DF-1000 missile has raised a lot of conspiracy recently. Its deployment with the PLA Rocket Force underscores China’s ambitions in the Asia-Pacific region. As regional tensions evolve, the DF-1000’s significance lies in its potential to reshape the strategic landscape and protecting the nations interests while also ensuring regional stability and peace.
Many years ago, over 40 years for sure, my mother and I were driving down an Oklahoma rural highway. It was a windy day, and we were following a pickup truck which had a huge cardboard box in the back. That box was wobbling back and forth in the wind. My mother and I were commenting like, geez, wonder what is actually in that box, because it looks like it is going to fly away any second now.
Well, that’s exactly what it did. That box flew out of the truck and into our windshield! We were expecting the collision to be mild, since the box seemed to be very light weight. Nope, it was a pretty good crash! Wanna guess what was in the box??? A bathtub!! Just a fiberglass bathtub, but still.
But that wasn’t the fun part! The fun part was calling the insurance company about our accident. You know, the one where we are just driving down the road, minding our own business, when all of a sudden we got hit by a flying bathtub!
Brigtsen’s Champagne Vanilla Sabayon
Champagne Vanilla Sabayon
Ingredients
12 egg yolks
1 1/2 cups champagne
2 cups granulated sugar
1 vanilla bean, split
Instructions
In a mixing bowl, add the sugar and egg yolks. Beat with a wire whisk until light and creamy (ribbon stage). Add the champagne and vanilla bean. Cook this mixture over a double boiler on low heat, whisking constantly, until the mixture becomes thick and frothy, 15 to 20 minutes.
Scrape the inside of the vanilla bean into the sabayon. Discard the bean.
The Perception value of a Chinese Brand is between 8% to 70% of a German or a Swiss Brand
This means even if China creates the same quality lens as Zeiss , a supplier would not pay more than $ 70 as against $ 170 for Zeiss
Thus China would be unable to compete and would be forced to sell high quality products at a loss
Now that’s fine if these products have a MASS MARKET
They don’t
Thus even after a decade, China won’t be able to expand enough to recoup it’s losses
Yesterday someone gave me a brilliant example of perception
India makes Audio panels, it exports the Audio Panels for $ 60 to Europe
Europe modifies the panel with around $ 20 worth of work and sells these Panels worth $ 110 including Import Duties and inventory BACK TO INDIA for $ 300–340
Indians gladly pay $ 2000 for these full systems (₹1.7 Lakhs) with foreign Brand name
If the manufacturers purchased directly from India, they could sell each system for maybe $ 1300–1400 but then the customers won’t buy as many
The Market Sphere for the 7 nm Chip is $ 88 Billion
China controls 3.1% of this market
The Market Sphere for the 28 nm Chip is $ 273 Billion
China controls 41.9% of this market
So you tell me what makes sense?
Blow Billions of Dollars into a market where no matter how high quality product you make, you can’t control more than 7% or so
OR
Blow a fraction of that money and utterly dominate the 28 nm market with the best efficiency and price and supply chain and use the 28nm to handle it’s potential in terms of maximum and be the BADSHAH
Thus Chinas 7 nm Manufacturing is for SELF SUFFICIENCY entirely
China will never compete in all these areas where the 7 nm is used. Except maybe smartphones
Chinas key for competition is 28 nm , 45 nm and < 100 nm process chips
These Chips run EVs, Flights, Superior Drones, Port Logistics and most aspects of Semblance related AI
When my son was in middle school, his German teacher asked the class if they’d like to do a secret Santa. They were enthusiastic about it. They all had the choice to opt out of they didn’t want to participate. My son picked the name of a female student and I helped him shop for gifts. The limit was $10 but we went over it, finding fun and useful gifts at the mall. He said she was really excited about two of the things he got her.
Day of the party, the teacher hands out gifts and my son got nothing. He said the teacher looked so embarrassed. This was on a Friday. On Monday, there was a wrapped box on my son’s desk. When he opened it, it was filled with candy and the kid that had picked his name said something to the effect of “I didn’t get him that!”
At first, when it happened, I figured maybe the kid’s parents refused to buy something, and the kid was too embarrassed to say anything to the teacher. So, I held no grudge. No, this kid was just an asshole trying to make my kid feel bad. He had bragged to his friends about it.
It was late at night on an Icelandic Airlines flight to Reykjavik (the old “hippy express). Most of the passengers were asleep, the cabin lights were down low. I gazed out at the window and noticed sparks coming from one of the engines. Suddenly it burst into flame.
I turned to my partner and shook her awake. “Do you get nervous on airplanes?”
“Nah”, she said. “I love flying; a piece of cake”.
“Look out the window”, I said.
She spied the burning engine and screamed. The cabin became awake, full of anxious passengers. The engine was spitting long, nasty flames now.
The captain’s voice came on throughout the plane’s cabin. He spoke in a confident, matter-of-fact voice “Good evening. As some of you have noticed, one of our four engines is having a problem. This plane can easily and safely fly on just three engines. You will be completely safe. We will be taking a slight detour to Gander International Airport in scenic Labrador to address our engine problem. Accommodations and food are being arranged. I believe you will have a pleasant stay. If you wish, go back to sleep and enjoy the rest of the flight.”
The engine stayed burning for a while, casting red shadows throughout the cramped the cramped cabin. Most of us settled down for a cold drink or two. My partner’s fingernails dug into my palm. “I hope he’s not bullshiting us”, she said.
She had withdrawn her and my dad’s weekly old age pension from the bank and was leaving the bank when a bloke tried to yank her handbag off of her. Surprising herself and her assailant she twisted his arm into a lock, forced him to the ground and sat on him. When a couple of minutes later the police arrived, he was heard to say, “l’ll come quietly, just get this fat cow off of me”
My mum was 80 years old, a little over 4 feet tall and as thin as a stick. It seems that all the years of watching my brother and I practice Aikido in the garden and sometimes using her, to show the other, how arm locks work had rubbed off on her.
She was affectionately known as the “fat cow” for years afterwards
If you ask this question in Chinese, mainlanders and those in the know will laugh.
And won’t stop laughing.
How does China achieve state objectives?
By getting people to work on them.
1.4 billion of them.
How do the people know what to do, what to expect, in order to reach set targets on time?
By being thoroughly informed.
How are the masses informed?
Through an information blanket.
Through TV, social media, radio, websites, posters, slogans, publications.
You name it, the Chinese have done it. From in-depth, to the lightest of touches.
It is called mass dissemination, and the Chinese are very serious about getting the message to everyone. It costs a pretty penny to get everyone on the same page.
Chinese society has changed so much in the last 40 years it is disorienting. How else do they navigate, much less keep up unless there has been a steady stream of information to guide their decisions and plans?
Learn some chinese. The western world leaves too much on the table when the Chinese generously serve lunch, and dinner to their guests.
They leave the feast untouched, and complain about hunger.
Not everyone does, but for those who do, have some empathy. Many become that way because they are suffering from bodily pain, require frequent trips to the hospital or doctor’s offices. Hard to have a cheery attitude if you hurt frequently.
Others are living in or near the poverty level. Some of these were good, loyal workers but were fired as they neared retirement so that their employer wouldn’t have to pay them a pension. Some people are living on only Social Security. That would sour anyone.
Some are lonely, sad, frightened, depressed. It often goes with aging. Being kind and thoughtful of older people could make a world of difference. I recently read of a young woman who goes out of her way to speak with older people, whether in grocery lines, on street corners, or elsewhere. She says she often sees sadness or loneliness in their faces and wants to help a bit. Yet most young people don’t even see old people. To them, they’re invisible. Try saying a cheerful word to old people you see. It just might make their day!
I have always said that it is really stupid for the American media to spread rumors about Xinjiang.
I am a Chinese, and I have been to Xinjiang (by the way, if you like cycling, Xinjiang has three desert roads across Taklimakan, also known as the Sea of Death, each of which is about 500 kilometers long, very exciting! Super interesting! You must come! During the day, the temperature can reach over 50 degrees Celsius, and at night, it can drop to freezing point! Except for the highway, there is vast yellow sand everywhere. If you dare to leave the highway, if you get lost, you may become a mummy within 48 hours. ! Particularly exciting. Ah, there is also a bicycle highway in China, which is a little more difficult but absolutely safe. It is a bicycle ride from 0 kilometers from the People’s Square in Shanghai to Lhasa. If you are willing to continue riding, the end point is Nepal, with a total length of more than 5,000 kilometers. kilometers, passing through more than a dozen provinces, climbing over 14 snow-capped mountains, and countless sharp turns! It is particularly interesting. Every year, many people in China ride this road. This road covers almost all the scenery in China, also known as: China’s landscape boulevard. Trust me, ride it once and you will come back and thank me! It’s so awesome)
*** Sorry, as a cycling fanatic, I accidentally said too much, let’s get back to the topic…
There are many friends living there, both in the city and in the countryside. The blatant lies of the Western media made everyone feel angry, and then laughed – how could they dare to lie so brazenly?
Do you know what they lost? trust. Even the Chinese who believe in the United States the most believe that the American media is fair and selfless. When praising the United States, we only need to say one magic word: Xinjiang. They just have to shut up because it’s so simple, clear and powerful. If they want to continue to defend the American media – we often say that a person can be stupid or bad – they can only choose to be stupid.
You have to know that there are not many people in the world, and there are even fewer people who care about Sino-US relations. One word, “Xinjiang”, can make 1.4 billion people share the same hatred and create a deep disgust for the American media. How difficult this is!
As credible as they say Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. As credible as those who said earth if flat. As credible as those who believe that Elvis is alive.
I grew up on a farm. There was a small forest, which we called “the woods,” on one end of the farm. Every year, my father would post “No Hunting” signs around the woods. But every year hunters would still come there, as the woods were filled with rabbit, pheasant, deer, and other game. When he saw them, my father would go out to the woods and explain to the hunter that these were his woods, he did not allow hunting, and they would have to leave.
One time, when I was four, my father was with my brother, who was six, when they saw a hunter at the edge of the woods, looking into the woods for something to shoot. My father took my brother’s hand, walked over to the hunter, and said “These are my woods. I don’t allow hunting. You’ll have to leave.” The hunter turned around, pointed his shotgun at my six year old brother’s chest, and said “I’ll hunt wherever I damn well please.” My father slowly backed away with my brother and went back to the house.
A few minutes later, he came out again. But instead of crossing the field that led from the house to the woods, he went to the side, where a chicken coop extended to the edge of the woods. He walked quietly behind the chicken coop, until he came to the edge of the woods, about twenty feet from the hunter, who was still intently looking into the woods for something to shoot. My father said to the hunter “Drop the gun and leave immediately.” Except this time, when the hunter turned around, instead of my father holding the hand of a six year old boy, he was holding a .38 revolver…which was pointed at the hunter’s head. As soon as he turned around, my father said simply “Drop it or die.”
My father passed away four years ago. It had been almost sixty years since the incident with the hunter. When I went to clean out my dad’s house, the hunter’s shotgun was still in his closet.
I actually had a customer – the owner of a similar business with whom we exchanged work where our capabilities dovetailed – come in on a Friday and tell me he’d seen my job listed in that week’s classified ads. He told me to call him on Monday, and when I did, he offered me a job. I worked for that fine gentleman for four years, and when I left, he shook my hand and told me, “It was good enough to hire you to stick it to that bitch you were working for, but even better that you spent every day proving I was right and she was wrong about you. Best of luck.”
Perhaps I’ve missed someone else offering this answer…
In 1911, about two hours north of where I live, a man walked out of the mountains. He was finally too lonely to continue being on his own. He was approximately 50 years old. He was the last of his kind.
image 40
Ishi, as he would come to be known, is considered the “last wild Indian.”
In 1871, 4 settlers came along and murdered 30 of the Yahi tribe, approximately 2/3 of the tribe. This was one of many such incidents that are categorized as the “California Genocide.”
As you can see, the Native American population in California declined quite rapidly until it reached its nadir around 1910.
image 39
In 1908, what remained of Ishi’s family fled upon seeing strangers. His uncle and sister disappeared. His mother remained hidden at the camp and then died from an illness. Now Ishi was the last of his people. He remained in the wilderness without anyone to talk to for a few years.
Upon descending, he was studied by anthropologists, chief among them being A. L. Kroeber, father to the famous science fiction/fantasy writer Ursula K. Le Guin
.
image 38
Ishi was able to tell anthropologists many things about his people. Unfortunately, he was often ill. About five years after descending from the mountains, he died from one of the many illnesses his immune system couldn’t fight off because he lacked any kind of immunity.
One of the saddest things about this is that Ishi isn’t his real name. We’ll never know what it was. “Ishi” was the word for “man” in his language. The Yati people had a custom that proscribed them from speaking their name unless formally introduced by another of their tribe. As he was the last of his tribe, he could only say, “I have none, because there were no people to name me.”
After 2/3 of your people are killed off, you spend the rest of your life on the run, watching as everyone else disappears, leaving you to be the last among your kind. Finally, too lonely to go on, you live amongst the people who killed your people until their diseases slowly whittle you away. That sounds plenty lonely to me.
But the most dispicable thing and the one that I just cannot ever forgive him for is.
I wet the bed until I was about ten years old and every morning my dad would get up and come straight into my room and rub my nose into my wet patch like I was a dog being toilet trained.
He actually screamed at me.
If you are going to piss the bed like a dog, then I’m going to rub your nose in it like a dog.
He would even give people to belt me if they taught I was misbehaving.
In the end I got up before my dad, stripped my bed, remade it and went to school or a friend’s house
China’s Breakthrough in HYPERSONIC Sector Has Baffled Scientists
Without a doubt, it has become universally recognized that China’s dominance in the field of hypersonic technology is nothing short of remarkable. With each passing breakthrough, China continues to surmount obstacles and unveil groundbreaking innovations that have garnered global attention. In a recent stride, China has once again achieved a significant milestone, firmly establishing itself as the frontrunner in the dynamic realm of hypersonic technology.
I most especially like the large shady kinds. As a boy in the 1960’s I used to climb them, and hike through the woods as my adventures would take me.
With each and every event, the trees made my life magical.
The earth was rich and moist, and the air was cooler, with the sounds of the swishing of the leaves from the slightest breeze.
aspen woods
When I moved to Indiana, I noticed that people there did not appreciate the trees at all.
Entire forests were cut down and replaced by either flat farmland or parking lots. And Indiana was a most boring place.
Let me tell you.
When you all have a moment, take the time to stroll in a local woods. Spend the day. Take in the scents. Feel the moist earth. And listen to the birds.
I was night manager of a large resort hotel. We had a spate of thefts. People weren’t locking their doors, and the thieves would walk up the hall trying door knobs. If the door opened, they took a few steps into the room and took what they could quickly find. A lot of guys left they wallets on top of the TV, so that’s what most often got stolen.
The couple were caught, it was a 17 year old girl and a 19 year old guy. The girl turned 18 before the trial, so her juvenile record was sealed. She looked pretty punk when she was arrested (this was in the 80s). She showed up in court wearing a tasteful black dress and looked very proper.
They were both found guilty. The judge said the girl looked like she was “well bred and just got caught up with the wrong people”, and sentenced her to time served. The guy got 12 years.
After the trial, one of the victims told me he worked for the court system and saw her record before it was sealed. She had all sorts of crimes going back to when she was 12. The guy had one arrest. It was unfair, to say the least.
Rio Grande Valley Pink Grapefruit Pie
9b296f5c257208e9cd42c4846c76ab15
Yield: 8 servings
Ingredients
4 medium to large pink or red grapefruit
1 cup granulated sugar
1 3/4 cups water or strained grapefruit juice
2 tablespoons cornstarch
1/8 teaspoon salt
1 (3 ounce) box strawberry gelatin
1 (8 or 9 inch) pie crust, baked
1 cup whipping cream, whipped
Instructions
Peel grapefruit, separate sections* and remove from membranes. Place sections in a strainer over a bowl overnight.
Cook sugar, juice, cornstarch and salt until thick and clear.
Add gelatin and stir until dissolved.
Brush gelatin mixture over pie crust.
Chill gelatin mixture and crust.
When gelatin starts to thicken, add grapefruit sections.
Pour into pie crust and chill until set.
Top with whipped cream.
Notes
The grapefruit should be sectioned lengthwise. By slicing the ends off, the fruit can be set flat on the cutting board to make it easier to slice the rind off lengthwise. Use a small, sharp knife to then remove the sections from the membranes.
Oh I let them know I noticed, when I quit. I worked for a Spokane based home healthcare service. I’d been in hospice for a long time and the additional licence for this job was stupid easy. That should have been a clue.
This company has a jaw-dropping philosophy: they provide the barest minimum of service possible without getting sued. That’s it. They don’t give a damn about their clients. I actually offered to give a course in wheelchair safety because OVER AND OVER I’d hear about clients getting dumped on the floor by untrained caregivers. I’ve never dropped a client. Not in 13 years! I was told to “mind my own business.”
The absolute final straw was when I reported bedbugs in a home that had been treated just a few months before. The other two caregivers SWORE there were no bugs. My supervisor told me an exterminator had checked on my day off.
So I came to work that morning and went to make the bed. And it was ALIVE. And when I called the exterminator he said he hadn’t been contacted. So…my employer lied, and broke the law. I sent about 5 minutes of film to dispatch. Live bedbugs. Dead bedbugs. Bedbug and mouse poop. I told them I was reporting them. Well, that got their attention and a state case manager was there in 15 minutes. They got turned in. They got SUED. No job is worth the risk of contaminating my own home or carrying bugs to another client’s home! I’ve never, ever had an employer that literally didn’t care if the clients lived or died. In this case, the clients family had signed her very nice home over to the state to pay for her care. It’s heartbreaking! The state actually wants these elderly clients dead.
Cost have risen so high that labor intensive goods below a certain value are increasingly non-viable in a a growing majority of China’s industrial regions.
The most critical problem of cost, though, is the enforced step change in the price of Chinese exports.
The two biggest factors in the past decade have been the reverse Plaza accord, and Donald the Orange’s illegal blanket tariffs.
The reverse Plaza accord was kicked off by the devaluation of the yen in 2013/14. A top-3 global currency was given the political mandate to devalue 100% in a single decade, pulling most of the third world along, making the yuan more than double against most third world peers this century.
China was singled out as a currency manipulator and threatened with designation to force the PBOC to keep the yuan up.
We live in odd times today. The JPY is a mover and shaker in the immense global derivatives market, but a 100% devaluation has been consistently ignored over the past decade. A 10% devaluation of the yuan, which doesn’t even show up in BIS reports, is exaggerated as a meltdown that will bring the rest of the global market along for the “china collapse”.
Note that the yuan will have to trade north of 14 to the dollar to mirror the yen’s decade-long move from 76 to 150 today.
These conditions created by the first world have sent shock waves rippling through margins and prices of Chinese exports.
Instead of climbing a gentle slope, the Chinese have had to struggle up a steep staircase, due to the speed of the enforced change.
But the biggest driver of long-term change in China is the replacement labor. In the 2000s, less than 10m students took the Gaokao. Today, that number is hitting 13m from a smaller cohort. There are fewer factory workers to go around, and the only answer is automation, and moving up the productivity ladder.
Take footwear. China competes on speed and quality, because there are entire shoe manufacturing ecosystems concentrated geographically that can turn idea into product within mere hours/days. Chinese speed underpins the success of Temu and Shein, which has redefined the fashion shopping experience by affording quality at the very forefront of trends.
In a nutshell, the jobs that cannot be automated away will have to eventually leave China, and the belt and road will be a big enabler. There are Chinese-run business parks in Pakistan, Laos, Vietnam and elsewhere, all enabled by infrastructure that didn’t exist before the Chinese came calling.
China will continue supplying the components, and as skills improve overseas, the lower-margin component lines will also be transferred.
My husband and I were living in an apartment but when we found out that I was pregnant we had to move, our landlord didn’t allow children (it was legal at that time and place). We looked for another place to live and found a lovely little cottage in a small village about 20 minutes out of town.
The day after we moved in, our neighbour to the right knocked on the door holding a plate of baked goods, she didn’t linger, just welcomed me to the village and gave me the goodies. Living there for the next few years, they became the best neighbours I’d ever had. They reminded me of The Waltons, so wholesome, cheerful and friendly. Two of their boys often came over to cut the lawns, shovel snow or to babysit. I’d stop by for visits and we’d share fruit from our trees to make pies and fruit salad.
My neighbour to the left side was a younger couple with small children, so when my daughter was a toddler she played with their children while their mom and I sat and enjoyed a chat and a cuppa.
The entire village seemed to be equally as kind and helpful. At the grocery store they packed my bags and delivered them for me, no charge. The local Ford dealership often fixed my car for no charge or just the cost of parts, and the local jeweler owned several homes that he rented out for low rent. Our landlady was a young woman who’d inherited the cottage, but she was happy living with her mother who worked at the post office, each of them were always pleasant. Generally the entire town looked out for each other. It was nothing like I’d experienced before, having come from an urban area and never lived in the country.
I doubt that it’s still the same, it’s been over 30 years, developers did their thing and it’s no longer a quiet little village. The grocery store has bars up the windows, the Ford dealership is a used car lot now, and the jeweler is probably no longer with us, but it was a very good time in my life that I still think about once in a while.
GERMANY Beg CHINA For Money As They Resume Economic Trade!
Germany should apologies to China and offer tea and stay sorry to China.
Let’s start answering this question by addressing the “elephant in the room”.
If you read any Western press, you will be aware of the “common expectations” of what a war with China, and what it would entail. These are clearly explained in policy papers and popular media. The strongest promoters of this narrative is the legacy media to include Yahoo, CNN, BBC, FOX, ABC, MSNBC and all of Australian and Indian “news” media.
This is a “seeded” and intentionally promoted narrative, and no deviance is permitted on this script. This the narrative popularized by NEOCON publications, the United States Congress, and legacy media such as Forbes, Bloomberg, New York Times, etc.
It is a CIA / NSA / NED narrative concocted out of Langley, Va.
[CIA / NED Narrative]
China continues it’s “provocations”.
And “invasion” of Taiwan occurs.
The USA, through it’s proxy nations, intervene.
Chinese advantage is ONLY with numbers and proximity. And thus the PLA run like cowards to the massive military might of the combined Allied forces.
China does not have the ability to innovate, and are novices in fighting. They fall into the “new Verdun” that the United States constructed. The Chinese leadership is also swamped by plagues, famines, and internal revolts that suddenly cropped-out out of nowhere.
A long, drawn-out war ensues.
It will be limited to the South China Sea, and Taiwan.
All trade with China stops. All BRI are interrupted, and Naval blockades are complete.
It’s World War I all over again, only inside of Chinese territory.
China will pour weapons and men and material into those designated war-zones, and the Allies will do the same from their staging locations in Japan, The Philippines, Australia and South Korea.
Eventually, after a few decades, China backs down and surrenders.
The Chinese people, tired of their pathetic lives, revolt and topple the CCP.
Peace overwhelms the planet and everyone enjoys democracy and freedom under the brilliant leadership of the President of the Untied States.
Sound familiar. It should.
And only an ABSOLUTE IGNORAMUS would actually believe it. Because it relies on a plethora of lies, distortions, falsehoods, in order to arrange and fabricate a narrative that many WISH and HOPE to occur.
That is exactly how propaganda works; it tells lies that you WANT to believe.
…
But, you all know, it’s not really “rocket science”. This scenario has already been “gamed out”. At least the early stages. The United States has been following the well-worn, tired and true playbook for decades…
The United States initiates a provocation.
China refuses to act on it.
The United States the stages a “false flag” event, supported with a media barrage.
China reacts militarily and destroys all belligerents in the area.
What happens next depends on numerous factors, but I will break it down in really simplistic categories.
[Planned Response]
This is pretty-much a rehash of the earlier CIA plans.
This is what the Straussian NEOCON psychopaths want. This is their objective.
The United States now has the excuse for a war with China.
As a result, it starts blowing up Chinese cities, ships and assets. The plan is for overwhelming superiority in aircraft and missiles from numerous nations, Naval vessels, and bases.
The plan is for a victory over China, and the assumption that China would be incapable of fighting back in any positive way.
Now, this is where the NEOCON plans go “off the rails”.
Instead of fighting a conventional war, on American terms, to an American defined timeline, and on Chinese soil, using the well-worn war-playbook, China does something different, and unexpected.
I argue (it doesn’t take too much effort, either) that China would…
China and Russia work together lob hyper-sonic nuclear weapons at key cities and infrastructure in the United States directly. This is done at the same time as China is attacking the invading forces and their staging centers.
Most of the United States population centers, as well as those of the proxy nations, are erased from the face of the globe. New York gone. Los Angles and Silicon Valley; gone. Virginia… all of it…gone.
The dinged-up USA responds with nuclear weapons.
The Chinese shoots most of them down with their laser umbrella.
But even with a hand full of American detonations, the Earth experiences a global catastrophe. North America and Europe, as well as Japan, South Korea, and Australia are radioactive wastelands.
[The USA backs down]
This scenario describes the highest probability event cycle.
This concept of withdrawal is unheard of in the United States and Western media, but historically, this is almost ALWAYS the case. This is the Afghanistan, the Vietnam, the Korean War event scenario. Thus, this is a higher probability of occurrence than what one might otherwise think.
The USA performs a politically motivated war plan. While technically well-gamed out, political considerations force erroneous assumptions.
The plan goes to shit early on. FUBAR occurs, and the entire backbone of the plan collapses.
A period of aggressive losses in manpower and material occur, and Washington disengages from the battlefield(s) under some context.
The American and Western media praise the “Great American Win”.
But the impact of very bad Geo-political decisions ignite a “ticking time-bomb” internally.
American domestic opinion turn against the administration.
A nation-wide American civil war breaks out.
It is a catastrophe for the West, and aligned nations all experience internal violence. Japan, Europe, Australia and South Korea suffer massive changes at all levels.
[USA first strike]
This is the great concern, of the “Global South”; the rest of the world outside the G7 led by the United States. But, personally, I really do not see this ever happening. The American military will not allow it.
The USA launches MAD in the belief that China will stand down. Full spectrum war is unleashed, but unlike the earlier scenario, this one engages nuclear weapons from the start.
The SLBM’s and ICBM’s start flying
The Chinese shoots most of them down with their laser umbrella.
But severe damage still occurs inside of China.
China and Russia launch nuclear weapons at the entirety of the West.
Most of the United States population centers, as well as those of the proxy nations, are erased from the face of the globe. Europe is no longer a population region. The United States glows at night.
The, being leaderless, under the control of “the deep state” and rudderless, the United States continues to engage the world in a nuclear war on auto-pilot.
It is a global catastrophe.
[USA Sanctions China & interrupts shipping]
This is the “China Lite” version of war that is debated within the NEOCON publications and talks. I can confirm that this has a great deal of support as a “war on China” option in Washington DC.
The USA decides to implement sanctions (Russian style) against China, and also starts sinking ships. American piracy, and shipping losses enter billions of dollars in losses.
China readies it’s long-planned counter-actions. And they are BRUTAL.
A period of time passes, while the United States, and it’s proxies tries to ignite a “cold war II” fuze.
The Western media is on a full-war gallop…
The American led provocations are numerous, and dangerous. China continues to avoid all of them.
So far, it appears that this is on-going right now. Which makes this scenario the most worrisome.
Then, during a point in time when all the American “leadership is in one place”, such as during an election, or government event, China launches hyper-sonic nuclear weapons at major American cites. The idea being to completely unleash maximum damage in a very short amount of time.
America is erased from the surface of the planet. There simply isn’t any American government left.
The USA auto-retaliates with a MAD nuclear response.
The Chinese shoots most of them down with their laser umbrella.
But even with a hand full of American detonations, the Earth experiences a global catastrophe. But, the USA is the most destroyed nation on the planet.
…
It is a lose-lose in every scenario.
No one wins.
How ANYONE can advocate World War 3 clearly shows how idiotic, moronic, and deranged the Western “leadership” actually is.
How anyone can think otherwise is amazing to me.
There is absolutely NO SCENARIO where the world becomes a better place. Instead, it becomes HELL, and most people DIE.
…
At this point in time I want to address some misconceptions.
One of the greatest is accepting American anti-China propaganda as truth. It’s insidious, and everywhere. If you get any information about China, make SURE that it is from CHINESE sources in CHINESE. Otherwise you are regurgitating CIA propaganda and disinformation.
As a (now deleted) troll said “China only has 300 nuclear warheads, while the USA has over 6000”.
Oh, really?
And, “China is unable to make more because of <insert technical jargon here>”.
China can build two (x2) 6,000 bed hospitals in ten days.
China can build a 62 story skyscraper in two days.
China can design, manufacture and produce cutting edge IC chips, complete with it’s own OS, operating system, and includes satellite comm ability in four years.
China can lock down an entire nation of 1.6 billion people, with only 5000 deaths…
But it cannot make nuclear bombs.
Uh huh.
Sure. What ever you say.
(Eye roll.)
…
Drinking the American propaganda is dangerous as it is in everything. In fact, nothing is left untouched. Those in the upper (the very top) know its all a lie, but have succumbed to their own hubris; the believe their own lies. Oh man. That is dangerous.
So I have to ask…
How do you know that the United States has 6000 nuclear bombs?
Well it said so in an American report, and in American publications.
How do you know that the USA did not blow up Nordstom 1 & 2 pipelines?
Well, it is investigating the issue. American and Western publications say so.
How do you know that the Apollo moon landing program put men walking on the moon?
Well, NASA filmed the guys doing it, and the American government verified it happened.
It is not that EVERYTHING that the United States says is a lie. It’s just that most are distorted truths… approaching the laughable.
How do you know that America is recovering from the “disastrous Trump administration” and inflation is only a mere 3% today?
Well, the American government announced the latest inflation figures.
Crazy huh?
…
The world is spiraling all out of control, all because a group of psychopathic nihilistic narcissists with delusions of ultimate power. And they all are in a circle-jerk believing their very own lie-machine.
What will happen?
No one actually knows, but we do know this;
In 1995, the CIA remote viewed the year 2025. They remote viewed the world 35 years into the future.
You might not believe in “remote viewing”, or the CIA. But you have to admit, that there is no way, that in 1995 anyone would be able to predict the world we live in today.
The predictions are uncanny.
And, if you think that the future is not going to unfold this way, then you are delusional.
VOA tried to sabotage Indonesia’s new high speed rail opening
Indonesia’s brand new, China-built and financed high speed railway officially opened to the public yesterday, with most Western media being surprisingly fair in their reports. Voice of America didn’t get the memo, apparently, and ran with a story using their typical, blatant misinformation, posting a picture of an old train directly under their headline. I rode the brand new train during a test run about ten days ago and will share some of my experience with you today, including a chat with a local reporter.
What Is Third Wave Coffee?
Coffee has undergone several major transformations in the past century, commonly referred to as “waves” that denote shifts in how coffee is produced, processed, and consumed. Here’s an overview of the progression of coffee waves.
First Wave Coffee: Accessibility and Mass Production
The first wave of coffee began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This era was characterized by the mass production and widespread accessibility of coffee.
Brands like Folgers and Maxwell House emerged, making coffee a staple in households across the U.S. and beyond.
The beans were often robusta, chosen for their yield and price point rather than quality and flavor. Brewing methods were basic, with drip coffee makers and percolators commonplace.
Espresso drinks like cappuccinos were rare outside of Italian immigrant communities. Overall, coffee was viewed as a commodity rather than a specialty product.
Key Features of the First Wave:
Instant Coffee: The invention of instant coffee made it easier for people to prepare and consume the beverage.
Branding: Major companies began advertising campaigns, making coffee a household name.
Consistency: The focus was on producing a consistent taste, often at the expense of quality and flavor nuances.
Second Wave Coffee: The Rise of the Coffee Shop Culture
The second wave, which began in the 1960s and peaked in the 1980s and 1990s, saw the rise of coffee shops and espresso drinks. Brands like Starbucks, Peet’s, and Costa Coffee played pivotal roles in popularizing this wave.
Beans were sourced from specific regions and often single origin. Roasts were lighter to preserve the distinct flavors of bean varietals.
The emphasis was on taste and freshness. While speciality coffee chains drove the second wave, independent cafes also popped up throughout the US and helped fuel coffee connoisseur culture.
Key Features of the Second Wave:
Espresso-Based Drinks: Lattes, cappuccinos, and mochas became popular choices.
Coffee Shop Culture: Coffee shops became social hubs, places for meetings, work, and relaxation.
Variety: Consumers started to become more aware of different coffee beans, origins, and roast levels.
Third Wave Coffee: Appreciation of the Art and Science
The third wave of coffee emerged in the early 2000s and continues today. This wave strives to produce the absolute highest quality coffee through control of the full production process from crop to cup.
There is an emphasis on direct trade, single origin beans, lighter roasts, and freshness. Brewing methods highlight the distinctive qualities of each bean, with pour over, cold brew, and microbatch espresso common.
The barista is viewed as a skilled artisan. Innovative coffee shops focus on the total coffee experience – the aroma, taste, feel.
There is also transparency about sourcing and farming practices. Third wave coffee is complex, nuanced, and treated more like wine or craft beer than a mere commodity.
Key Features of the Third Wave:
Direct Trade: Coffee roasters and shops often build direct relationships with coffee farmers, ensuring fair prices and sustainable practices.
Specialty Coffee: There’s a focus on high-quality beans, often graded 80 points or above on the Specialty Coffee Association’s scale.
Brewing Techniques: Methods like pour-over, siphon, and cold brew highlight the unique flavors of each coffee bean.
Traceability: Consumers can often trace the coffee’s journey from the farm to the cup, understanding its origin, variety, and processing method.
Fourth Wave Coffee?
Some speculate that a fourth wave of coffee is emerging, focused on sustainability and fair treatment of coffee farmers and workers.
But others argue the industry is still deep in the third wave, working to perfect coffee quality and the consumer experience.
Whether the fourth wave coalesces remains to be seen. For now, the focus is squarely on continuing to improve coffee quality.
Potential Features of the Fourth Wave:
Technology: From blockchain for traceability to apps that connect farmers and consumers, technology plays a central role.
Sustainability: There’s an even stronger emphasis on eco-friendly practices, from farming to packaging.
Education: Consumers are not just passive drinkers; they’re educated about every aspect of coffee production and preparation.
The progression of coffee waves shows an increasing appreciation of coffee as a complex food product requiring care and craftsmanship.
What began as a commoditized morning drink is now regarded as an artisanal product that brings nuanced flavor, community, and connection.
The future of specialty coffee promises even more dedication to the bean, the farmers, and the drinkers who savor every sip.
Ukraine SitRep: Bad Demographics – End of Support
Via a Responsible Statecraftpiece I came onto a EU study that tried to predict the future demographics of Ukraine’s population.
The study is from early 2022 and is based on Ukrainian casualty numbers from only the very first month of the war. Their worst case scenario was this:
Our third and fourth scenarios assume that the war will continue for a month or longer so that further casualties and refugees are expected. We assume the following casualties: 5,000 deaths among soldiers and 1,500 civilian deaths based on the current trends. There will be 5 million refugees, which is an estimate by UNHCR (UNHCR 2022a)
The real refugee numbers are twice as high and the casualty numbers, wounded and dead, are of course about 100 times higher than the study assumed. It was thus not worth the money that had been spend on it.
Still, some graphs in it are usable.
Yesterday I shortly discussed the op-ed by the former British Minister of Defense Ben Wallace in which he asserts:
The average age of the soldiers at the front is over 40.
He then urges the Ukrainian government to throw more young men into the meat grinder.
The young Ukrainians are gone. They either have fled from Ukraine or are wounded, disabled or died. You can not mobilize what is no longer there.
Unfortunately the real situation is worse then I had thought.
The ‘age pyramid’ in Ukraine isn’t a pyramid. In 2020 there was a huge lack of 15 to 20 years old people. They were simply not there. They never existed. The number of newborns around 2000 must have been horribly low.
The reason for that was likely the serious downturn of Ukraine’s economy after it had separated itself from the Soviet Union.
It took a decade long severe recession for Ukraine to find a bottom for its economy. Bad economic times and low expectations of betterment had influenced the desire of its people to procreate. Two more downturns followed during the global recession around 2008 and due to the 2014 Maidan coup and the civil war following it.
Thus when the war started there were only half as many people of 20 year age than 40 year old ones. It is no wonder then that few of younger age are seen at the front line.
There is still one measure Ukraine might take to increase the numbers of young soldiers. There currently are exemptions from mobilization for those who study at a university. If Ukraine would draft these if could probably find a few ten-thousand additional soldiers. But it would also strip itself of its future elite.
The already bad demographic prediction some 20 years out would then look even worse than they currently do.
Early this year Ukraine’s birthrate had hit a new low:
To keep a population steady, research shows it’s necessary to have an average of about 2.1 babies per family — known as a replacement rate. In Ukraine, fertility rates have remained under that threshold since 1990. Over the last two decades, the rate has often dropped below what experts call a “very low” fertility rate of 1.3, when a population begins to shrink at an ever increasing rate. In January 2021, a year before Russia’s full-scale invasion, the fertility rate was 1.16, according to national statistics.
Birthrates in Ukraine have fallen by 28% in the first half of 2023, compared to the same period prior to the war, marking the most significant drop since Ukraine gained its independence in 1991, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sept. 25. … Due to the ongoing war, millions of Ukrainian women with children were forced to leave the country, while men aged 18 to 60 were prohibited from leaving. As a result, many couples were physically separated, while others delayed starting families, the report says.
In the first half of 2023, there were 96,755 children born in Ukraine. Since 2013, the country’s fertility rate has been dropping by approximately 7% per year.
The population of Ukraine will shrink further. In 1990 Ukraine had a population of more than 50 million people. Twenty years from now the country will have less than maybe 25 million inhabitants. This even if all refugees return. A large if that this is unlikely to happen.
As Russia has become more bloodyminded, Ukraine’s allies seem caught in their own conflicting boundary conditions. There is no willingness to mobilize to defend Ukraine. There isn’t even a serious effort to ramp up military production to an adequate level to match, let alone surpass, Russia’s output.
And that’s before getting to the fact that Ukraine as a county has become a very costly ward of all its backers.
Yesterday a meeting of the EU’s foreign ministers on further military assistance for Ukraine ended without results (machine translation):
The foreign ministers of the EU countries at today’s summit in Kiev could not agree on the allocation of military assistance to Ukraine in the amount of 5 billion euros for 2024.
This was announced at a press conference following the event by EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrel.
The EU’s budget for 2023 was €168.6 billion. €5 billion are peanuts but the EU countries could not unite over it. The senseless generosity has reached the end of the possible.
Earlier, EU Foreign Policy Chief Josep Borrel said that the cessation of military support for Kiev from the West will lead to a quick end to the conflict in Ukraine, but as a result, the country will lose its independence.
Look at the demographics and economics above and ask yourself what 30 years of ‘independence’ have done for Ukraine.
To end it could well be the best that could ever happen to it. Unfortunately for it Russia is unlikely to step in and to subsidize its further existence.
Posted by b on October 3, 2023 at 13:30 UTC | Permalink
Something TERRIBLE is happening to me right now!
We are all in the same situation, Tucker is just the FIRST. The agencies will get away with this because CONGRESS won’t stop it.
U.S. CONGRESSMAN: ” . . . IF WE’RE GONNA LOSE THE DOLLAR . . . “
Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-FL) speaking about the growing BRICS nations engaging in “de-dollarization,” Gaetz told reporters “. . . if we’re going to lose the dollar . . . .”
Does Gaetz already KNOW the Dollar is doomed?
Here is the one minute, fifty second clip, so all of you have context of the Congressman’s remarks:
This off-the-cuff remark by Congressman Gaetz made me sick to my stomach when I heard it. In __my__ view, this validates ALL the reporting I have been doing on this web site and on my radio show, telling my readers and listeners the US Dollar is collapsing and will be rejected by nations around the world as a means of trade.
That would utterly cripple the United States since we don’t manufacture mcuh of anything here anymore; we import most of it from other countries.
If those countries stop accepting the US dollar in trade, how will WE get what WE need?
Stock-up, folks. Food, clothing, medicines, etc.
Get what you need NOW, while it still can be gotten.
If this collapse takes place, I suspect it will happen like a lightning bolt out of the blue.
No advance warning before it all goes to hell.
Don’t let the US fool you: China is AWESOME!
“For a person who have been to China multiple times, I absolutely love and envy China. It’s absolutely a big disappointment when I return to India and hear all the negative news about China. Chinese people absolutely love Indian people and we instead are preaching hatred towards them. It’s a very very sad affair. Even my children are asking why we are always saying bad things about China all the time. They went to China with me too. I can’t answer them. What can I say? ….India afterall is my country and we are supposed to hate China.”
Israel Confesses War Crime
No, not really. Israel did not confess war crimes. It never does. It proudly announced that it will now commit a war crime:
Israel’s defence minister described Palestinians as “human animals” and vowed to “act accordingly,” as fighter jets unleashed a massive bombing campaign on the Gaza Strip.
Yoav Gallant announced a “complete siege” of the Gaza Strip, an area of about 365 square km, and home to 2.3 million Palestinians, which has been under an Israeli-led blockade since 2007.
“I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed,” Gallant said.
“We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly,” he added.
The Israeli air force has dropped 2,000 munitions and more than 1,000 tonnes of bombs on Gaza in the last 20 hours, the army said on Monday morning, having shelled 20 high-rise residential buildings, mosques, hospitals, banks and other civilian infrastructure.
Israel military spokesman Daniel Hagari said that the army drops hundreds of tons of bombs in attacks in the Gaza Strip, and —— “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.” — Haaretz
… On Saturday they were already talking about wiping out entire neighborhoods in Gaza, about occupying the Strip and punishing Gaza “as it has never been punished before.” But Israel hasn’t stopped punishing Gaza since 1948, not for a moment.
After 75 years of abuse, the worse possible scenario awaits it once again. The threats of “flattening Gaza” prove only one thing: We haven’t learned a thing. The arrogance is here to stay, even though Israel is paying a high price once again.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bears very great responsibility for what happened, and he must pay the price, but it didn’t start with him and it won’t end after he goes. We now have to cry bitterly for the Israeli victims, but we should also cry for Gaza.
Gaza, most of whose residents are refugees created by Israel. Gaza, which has never known a single day of freedom.
—
The Israeli government has called up another 360,000 reservists for a total of 660,000 reservists plus the 170,000 in the regular standing forces. Israel’s total labor force is 4.4 million.
This is not sustainable for more than a week or two. With 660,000 mostly young people, 15% of the total workforce, suddenly absent, Israel’s economy will immediately tank. The Shekel and the Israeli stock market have already dropped significantly and the central bank had to intervene to keep the currency stable.
Meanwhile 200,000 out of a total of 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza are now displaced. Israel bombed their homes to smithereens and they have nowhere to go.
A few days ago Netanyahoo told people in Gaza to leave. The only place they theoretically could go is Egypt. Today Israel bombed the Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt.
A ground invasion of Gaza will be difficult and likely lead to massacres – on both sides. Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria would likely see a ground invasion of Gaza as a reason to intervene. It has missiles and drones that are precise and can reach any part of Israel. Israel may then retaliate by attacking the Syrian government. Iran and Russia would thereby get involved in the war. The U.S. of course would jump in on Israel’s side.
This war could really, really escalate and do so soon.
Posted by b on October 10, 2023 at 14:42 UTC | Permalink
First Time in U.S. History: SPEAKER of THE HOUSE — OUSTED
Speaker Kevin McCarthy was voted out of the job Tuesday in an extraordinary showdown, a first in U.S. history, that was forced by a contingent of hard-right conservatives and threw the House and its Republican leadership into chaos.
McCarthy’s chief rival, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, forced the vote on the “motion to vacate,” drawing together more than a handful of conservative Republican critics of the speaker and many Democrats who say he is unworthy of leadership.
It was the first time since 1910 that a vote has been held on whether to remove a Speaker and the only time such a motion has been approved.
McCarthy is now the shortest-serving House Speaker since the year 1876.
Next steps are uncertain, but there is no obvious successor to lead the House Republican majority.
Stillness fell as the presiding officer gaveled the vote closed, 216-210, saying the office of the speaker “is hereby declared vacant.” The Hammer fell at 4:49pm EDT. Here is video of the historic moment:
Moments later, a top McCarthy ally, Rep. Patrick McHenry, R-N.C., took the gavel and, according to House rules, was named speaker pro tempore, to serve in the office until a new speaker is chosen.
The House then briskly recessed so lawmakers could meet and discuss the path forward.
Trump Wanted U.S. Out Of NATO!
Among the list of Biden administration accomplishments, the expansion of NATA is usually mentioned prominently by the President’s supporters. And that represents a stark contrast with Donald Trump, who at one point during his presidency declared an intention to pull the U.S. out of NATO entirely. But he soon backtracked, which has led a number of observers to speculate about what might have changed Trump’s mind.
Huawei has established the third truly COMMERCIAL Asian Tech Ecosystem from China and the eighth in Asia after Toyota, Nikon, Canon ,Samsung , BYD, Trina and Xinyi
The Huawei Ecosystem now has
The Chip
The OS
The 5G Modem
The GPU
The Networks
Yet Huawei Ecosystem is fragile because SMIC the manufacturer of the 7 nm Node depends on Advanced DUV equipment from ASML
Now SMIC has stockpiled massive orders from ASML and that will keep SMIC going till maybe 2026
However that’s still dependence, a lot of dependence on the West
So i would say HUAWEI has made a start
Meanwhile people forget the REAL WINNERS of the three companies that have established it’s own dominant ecosystem on which the West is entirely dependent on :-
BYD
BYD has:-
The Chip – The Mature 28nm Chip that only China can today manufacture cost effectively and in huge volumes
The Software
The Satellite Navigation System
The Battery
The Dynamic Unit
It’s completely and entirely Independent from Western Technology
Trina and Xinyi who have :-
The Intelligent Chip
The Micrograde Wafer Panel (That to this day no nation can produce except France but at 87% higher cost)
The Carbide micro layering etching equipment (Chinas equivalent of the EUV Lithography Machine)
The Silicon extraction process into Mono, Poly Crystalline Silicon with infusions
Yes Huawei deserves all the admiration for its clawback and fighting
Yet BYD, Trina and Xinyi actually get Proprietary License Fees from the West which is unique for a Nation that to thia day didn’t kowtow to the West unlike Japan, Israel and South Korea
Huawei to win, needs SMIC to become another BYD or Xinyi or Trina
If SMIC can achieve that, then China truly begins the challenge to the established Semiconductor industry
Oliver Anthony – I Want To Go Home| REACTION *TEARS*
Oliver Anthony is breaking a spell we’ve all been under with his pure unfiltered honesty. It’s just disarming and appears to allow everyone to drop the mask we put on everyday and speak to each other from the heart. I haven’t not cried yet.
First you ought to understand the issue in the first place. Anything made in the U.S. simply cannot compete and won’t sell. Why?
Your workers demand 5 times the salary and is willing to work half the hours, expecting 10 times more benefits. You CEO wants 100 times their income, your workers refused to be train, your colleges turn out lawyers and bull shit artist and not STEM engineers, your infrastructure is dilapidated, Your government spends all its money fighting wars instead of helping industry. You offend all your prospective customers.
So my friend. You need to outsourced your production. China offers a best value for money. You Choose China. China don’t choose you.
So you want to stop. Can you? Can you ask US workers to get 20% salary, work twice as hard, accept 10% of benefits, your CEO earn 1% it did, you stop fighting wars, making wars and building infrastructure? Can you? I doubt so.
You can’t have the cake and eat it too. Choose one! I think this questioner will choose war because you have been conditioned your whole life to think the U.S. must bomb any nation that refuse to be submissive and subservient to you. Your media and your politicians made you what you are.
ER DOCTOR reacts to BRITISH PUBLIC guessing US healthcare costs | Dr Jmack
Heyo!! Today I’m reacting to the British public reacting to the cost of healthcare in the US. I thought this would be a cute and funny reaction video, but it really turned into something else. I may or may not have ended up ranting for 20 minutes! Topics hit: absurdity of US healthcare costs, does US medicine already have a combined capitalist/socialized structure, do doctors/nurses care that the system is rigged?
When I was in middle school, I took “typing” for all three years of my tenure there, and I never learned to type. I never did anything in the class except draw, use my Gameboy, or shoot the shit with my friends. Somehow I always got a passing grade, like a ‘B’, and I didn’t ask any questions. it wasn’t til my second year did I figure out what was going on….
The teacher always wore a decent conservative business suit, carried a large hard side briefcase (this was the late 80’s), and never really taught us anything. He only taught typing and “computers” and the computer class was the same vibe. Well, I viewed into his open brief case one day to see real estate materials, flyers, business cards, etc. This guy was a real estate agent, that somehow got hired as full-time teacher as a side hustle……..at least he had a steady income and full bene’s as a teacher.
He was always working on his real estate business when he should’ve been instructing! He couldn’t give the few of us that did nothing bad grade cuz that’d ruin his gig. I’m still not sure why he decided to teach, who decided to hire him, and why he seemingly got away with this for years.
However, this did teach me that I can successfully juggle two projects and receive two paychecks!
U.S Senators Travel to China to Beg Xi for Trade Deal !
Engagement and dialogue are essential for constructive international relations. This video examines the delicate US-Taiwan-China relationship, addressing the importance of mutual understanding, compromise, and respect for sovereignty for maintaining stability and trust between nations.
He plays the piano beautifully, and he practices with the children on weekends.
He likened the first world’s iron grip on tech to this little tool here…
It’s called a metronome, and musicians use it to set the beat-rate for sheet music.
I taught myself how to read notes (very, very poorly) as an adult and as an engineer, I couldn’t figure out how sheet music communicated the speed one played the notes.
Until my friend explained the metronome to me.
Pre-2020s, the pace of progress was set by the first world. The standard-defining or cutting-edge tech always came from advanced economies. For cars, we had the S-class/7 series, for computers we had Intel and more recently, AMD/Mac, for planes we had Airbus/Boeing.
In essence, the west defined tech generations. We were stuck with 2G… until the first world came along with 3G. We were stuck with DDR3 Ram, until DDR4 was introduced.
The first world ran the clock when it came to tech, and the rest of the world planned around the schedule.
The most important reason was the monopoly they had on the upstream tools. If we gave the best talent the best tools, different teams will eventually optimize towards convergence. There is only so far one can push the expression of the state of the art, and that is why Airbus models are head to head with Boeing, and Android not too different from iOS.
China is third world.
And for the first time in modern history, a non-first-world country has dibs on the cutting edge. China has established itself as a dominant player in diverse fields such as nuclear power generation, medium voltage power architecture, EVs, high speed rail, TBMs, photovoltaics and many more.
In every one of these fields, China isn’t competing on cost alone, but setting standards, and helping to define the next generation.
Case in point: China is currently the only country to operate a test 4th-gen nuclear reactor that’s plugged into the grid, putting it a good decade (or more) ahead of the competition in terms of commercialization.
Similarly, Huawei, after being kicked out of the Bluetooth SIG, has redefined short-range wireless technology with its Nearlink standard, capable of 1.5Mbps speeds consuming way lower energy. And these are delivered numbers, in physical consumer products available TODAY.
That’s bluetooth 6.x/7.x territory, which is years away from being issued as a standard, never mind consumer availability.
Imagine Huawei, one third world company, leapfrogging the current state of the art Bluetooth by at least 1–2 generations.
The west/first world no longer controls the clock.
Let me repeat, because this is important.
THE WEST NO LONGER CONTROLS THE CLOCK.
Rather, China will continue to pop surprises, just because the country and society is poorly reported by the first-world dominated media.
The educated, and well informed who read ABOUT the Chinese exclusively will repeatedly wake up to head-scratching bombshells in the coming future.
What? The Chinese did THIS? That’s… impossible. Don’t they only know to steal and copy and reverse-engineer?
I won’t be surprised if Nearlink is adopted by Apple and the Android alliance, because it is a transformative standard that can enable brand new ecosystems. What will Huawei do with Wifi, and next-gen navigation, particularly indoor spaces? What will a 5.5G Huawei phone add to the mobile experience?
The Chinese, at the minimum, are turning up the metronome, and playing Beethoven as he originally intended.
Shape up, or screw up, sanctions be damned.
Things a Filipina Fears in Dating Foreigner – Untold Reasons!
Most of you if not all foreigners were really curious of us filipina why we are still single but always wish in the corner to have a foreigner partner. Now you will know the untold reasons and that includes mine. Some of it are very hilarious and might offend one of your pride but let me tell you a word that you will enjoy and learned alot by watching this video.
The Osiris-Rex mission conference has wrapped up, and the newly released pictures of rock samples collected from the asteroid Bennu are leaving everyone in awe.
These samples consist of 250 grams of primordial material, which means they originated around 4.6 billion years ago during the formation of our Solar System.
Within these minute fragments, scientists have detected the presence of clay, water, and even organic material.
Three MORE Aircraft Carriers Leaving Port; 101st Airborne Division Relocating from Romania to Jordan. Target: Iran? Syria? Both?
Most of the general public already knows the USS Gerald R. Ford Aircraft Carrier and its Strike Group arrived in the eastern Mediterranean Sea near Israel. What few people know is that THREE other aircraft carriers and a NATO Maritime Group are also being deployed . . .
The big media bru-ha-ha over the past few days was the urgent deployment of the USS Gerald Ford and Carrier Strike Group 12.
But the mass media has been almost silent about some other vessels suddenly putting to sea and the US Army’s 101st Airborne Division are all heading out — fast.
If you work harder than everybody else around, you will become more successful.
It’s that simple… at least on a first glance.
But on a second glance, it might be a tiny bit more complicated than that.
Let’s look at an example: Elon Musk.
Elon Musk works 90 hour weeks regularly, although he has been known to work over 110 hour weeks during some parts of his life.
He definitely worked harder than anyone else around and eventually reached success with that.
But the question you have to ask yourself is if that is the kind of life you want to live.
Elon Musk has very little time for anything else in his life.
Since he works so much he only has very little time for friends and family, little time for hobbies and even less time for any other activities like watching movies.
He doesn’t travel much outside of work and is probably not caught up on any of the newest series or movies.
Instead his life is centered around his work and he invests most of his time into it. To him, this is the best place to spend his time.
Before you get all up and about in becoming successful ask yourself first what you are willing to sacrifice to get there.
Elon Musk sacrificed and still sacrifices a lot of family time, hobbies and experiences to give himself more time to work, allowing him experience of being successful. That is what he wants out of life and that is what works for him!
You can definitely reach high amounts of success in your early 20s, but to do that you have to sacrifice many friendships, hobbies, a lot of family time, a large amount of sleep and many other niceties.
You will miss the relaxing cinema experiences, opportunities to engage with friends about the newest series, and time spent on hobbies and other things… but you will increase your chances to be successful!
The question is: Is that worth it to you?
If you are still willing to work for success with that all being said, keeping in mind all you might need to sacrifice, then by all means, go and work!
If your definition of success does not include any of the sacrifices, then go for it! Do what you can, read more books, learn, improve, grow and spend 90% of your waking time grinding away.
If that however does not seem like the life you want to lead, then maybe think about what it is you want instead.
If you want to spend time with your family, want to travel and go on vacations, want to have crazy hobbies, and spend some time chatting about the newest series, then you will not be able to work that much or succeed that fast.
You will have to spend some time every week in these things. Is that okay for you?
Different people have different values in life and depending on them they need to spend their time differently.
While Elon Musk is driven by his work, you may not be, and that’s okay!
It’s not about creating THEsuccessful life, but about creating YOURsuccessful life!
Okay… those were my 2 cents on it; now lets get into the actual How to do it!
Ascertain what “Success” means to you – Depending on your personal definition, the work you do will be different.
Consume Information from People that have reached that Success – The closer they are to your idea of success the better it is. Learn from them and follow their advice! Trust them, as they must have had some right idea to get where they are today.
Produce don’t Consume – Besides the consumption above, you should be grinding and producing non-stop. More work = Faster results. That is the rule of thumb and holds generally true.
Adjust – Every week… no… every DAY you should be looking at what works, what doesn’t, where you struggle and how to get results faster. Keep tabs on yourself and do not allow yourself to get away with less than you want!
Create a System – You have to create a path that goes from your action to the desired result. In finance this is called a ‘Funnel’. How are people going to go from site X to purchase on site Z, for example.
The rest, depends entirely on what your version of success is and how hard you work.
Other than that, if you do steps 2–4 every day, you will become successful in your 20′s no problem.
Just make sure it is really what you want first!
6 Reasons to Retire as Soon as You Can
There is a MAJOR uptick in these kinds of videos about people dropping out of the work-force.
The threat meter is flopping back and forth from zero to pinging at 100%.
The meter is normally at zero.
Then, out of the blue, some NEOCON psychopath does something stupid like slamming their fist on the meter, kicking the table or banging on the dial… and the meter pings to MAX.
Ah.
One day, I’ll tell you what, that ol’ meter is gonna break.
I don’t want to be anywhere near it when the glass shatters and shards of metal start flying.
Pedernales River Chili
This is the chili that was always cooked at the LBJ Ranch in Texas. It was a favorite of Lyndon B. Johnson. He ate this with saltine crackers and a glass of ice cold milk.
2023 10 18 15 54
Yield: 12 servings
Ingredients
4 pounds coarsely-ground beef
1 large onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 teaspoon Mexican oregano
1 teaspoon ground cumin seeds
6 teaspoons red chili powder
2 (16 ounce) cans tomatoes
Salt, to taste
2 cups hot water
Instructions
Put the meat, onion and garlic in a large pot and sear until light brown.
Add the remaining ingredients. Bring to a boil, lower the heat, and simmer, covered, for 1 hour.
The next minute tanks will surround all the the unfriendly embassies in Moscow
Every Diplomat in Russia will be arrested with impunity
Putin will be arrested in an ICC Country and will be in a nice Dutch cell
The US Ambassador, UK Ambassador and others will be in Russian prisons where the probability of their rape in the first 24 hours is 82%
Their families will go out of contact
60–65 Kids will face their lives being risked in an ‘Unfortunate Accident’ where six and seven year olds will vanish
Any Western Leader who flies will face risk of attacks of his aircraft over Europe
Meanwhile Russian Diplomats will face nice European cells and european laws
Russia will then declare war on the ICC Country which arrested Putin
The West will be forced to Release Putin or see their diplomats never come out including the wives and kids
That would cause many diplomats to refuse to serve in 50–60 dangerous nations out of fear that they would be next
So that will never happen
Putin will not go to an ICC country because he won’t embarass the leadership but other wise if they touch him all hell breaks loose
And the Judges will pay
The Judges will face a fate like Prighozin
Nice Ricin Capsules or Novichok
China’s rise and the changing global order | Ben Norton & Li Jingjing
This is pretty good.
Ben Norton, has recently moved to Beijing. We’ve met in person and had a discussion on the rise of China and the whole Global South. We also exchanged our thoughts on Syria, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, BRICS, and all the recent events that will change the global order.
Li Yuan is the author of the NYT article. Her article bases its assertions off of interviews with 14 Chinese professionals as well as China’s median yearly emigration as reported by the UN. In terms of claims, she is pushing this line of logic:
Quite a few people I interviewed said, like Mr. Chen, that they had started thinking of leaving the country after China amended its Constitution to allow Mr. Xi to effectively rule for life. The “zero-Covid” campaign, with nearly three years of constant lockdowns, mass testing and quarantines, was the last straw for many of them.
And as for why they aren’t showing up in the US:
Most of the emigrants I spoke to, explaining why they did not pick the United States, cited America’s complicated and unpredictable process for applying for visas and permanent residence status.
This is in stark contrast to Yu Xie et al., who have published a paper in the National Academy of Sciences’ official peer-reviewed publication. Their study has a sample size of 1,229 (or 934 for the federal grant question). In terms of their claims, they point to a steady increase in the number of academics leaving the US for China, and more crucially they have measured out some indicators.
Perceptions and intentions of scholars of Chinese descent. Note: Only past and current grant awardees were asked the question of whether they were considering “avoiding applying for federal grants”.
Their study claims fear is high in the Chinese-American community despite 89% of scientists clearly interested in promoting science in the US. Most dramatically, the study concludes with one data point:
One respondent, self-identified as a US citizen and a former recipient of the NSF CAREER Award, told us that he quit his academic position exactly because of what he perceived as an “anti-Chinese atmosphere”. He then wrote:
If it were not because the COVID pandemic cuts off international traveling and I am a U.S. citizen, my family would have left the U.S. permanently without any intent to come back in the future. What I have experienced at my former institution was not only disgusting, but a system[ic] corruption that I believe [is] illegal. I had never thought of somewhere in this count[r]y to be dark and corrupted like this. If I had, I would not have become a naturalized U.S. citizen, which I regret now. What I ha[ve] experienced not [only] ruined my academic career, but also destroyed my American dream.
Interestingly, Li Yuan makes absolutely no attempt to recognize or challenge the claims made by the paper. While the paper acknowledges weaknesses in its methodology, it notes that it is corroborated by two similar papers, one from University of Michigan, the other from University of Arizona. Instead, she goes for this description of the fates of those headed from China to the US:
But it won’t be easy to stay in the United States. Mr. Zhao has a job offer and will get temporary employment status as a graduate in a STEM, or science or engineering, field. That will last three years. He will participate in a lottery for an H-1B work visa. He did the math: There’s a 40 percent chance he won’t win the lottery by the end of the three years. He might have to go back to school to remain in the United States, or ask his company to transfer him to a foreign post.
Li Yuan’s claims are in my opinion cherrypicked and misleading. She points to data to support her position, but the mild rise in emigration out of China from 2016 until now is something she attributes strictly to political reasons. She makes no attempt to recognize economic factors, such as the well reported glut of graduates unable to find a preferred job, nor any temporal factors such as the COVID opening up releasing otherwise delayed plans due to COVID restrictions and more importantly prohibitive flight costs. Instead, we are left with a threadbare attempt at explaining data with a political narrative.
Li Yuan, and perhaps the staff at the New York Times, are selling a narrative that runs contradictory to peer reviewed science. They are advertising one America, which promises a better life for Chinese, if only America would make it easier for Chinese to migrate into the country. Meanwhile professors at Princeton, Harvard, and MIT are telling us a very different story in which Chinese living in America are doing so in fear of both the government’s actions as well as anti-Asian violence. They have chosen that dramatic quote at the end for a reason— the NSF CAREER award is NSF’s most prestigious award, and many go on to win Nobel prizes.
The NYT and Li Yuan wonder why the US isn’t attracting Chinese scientists. Maybe they should have asked Chinese scientists in the US before making their gloriously nationalist article.
A stray kitten was terrified of everyone and everything and just wanted to hide
There’s something about a kitten’s motor just purring along that makes me melt!
Today I want to relate the events leading to why my wife and I left American Samoa.
American Samoa is an American territory in the South Pacific. It is a very beautiful island, but is way off the shipping lanes, and is really difficult to get to, thus it is not really a tourist destination.
American Samoa
I had an opportunity to build a hospital there.
Anyways, the social and societal organization there is very, very different from what I, as an American, realized.
Here’s a short recap.
Families are in the wife’s name.
Ownership is by the wife, the men own nothing.
Each village has a “pecking order” of hierarchy, all woman led.
If the leading female in a village dies, the next ranking female takes over.
Now, my “Boss” was a man in the leading family in the local village. And he provided me an apartment to live in and a car.
Pago Pago harbour utulei south american samoa 1
Then one day, there was a death in the village and the leading woman died.
Immediately, the next week was a reshuffle of power, and ownership changed hands. My “boss” was no longer in control.
We lost our apartment, and our car, and had to find a place to live. And it sucked!
…
No answers, but my “boss” gave me a place for free. He told me where to go, and later on that day I went to see it.
Ugh!
It was a open-air cinder-block room beneath a backyard chicken-coop/garage. And seriously, I wouldn’t even consider to have my dogs live there. No windows. Just an open square. The “door” was a piece of plywood with a hasp. The “bed” was a ancient well-worn hospital bed. One electrical outlet, and a century old fan.
Mold everywhere.
Moist. Damp. Dirty. Filty.
Something like this…
341D35D800000578 0 image a 72 1463138700608
I looked around. Said “nope”.
She started to go to the building. I sad NO!
My wife who was trailing me as I entered the hovel was confused. But I spun her around. There was no way in Hell would I subject her to the indignity that I had just been exposed to.
I just left from the site, hopped in the car. Told my wife “we are leaving”, and then made the necessary arrangements.
We were out of there within 24 hours.
…
Do not; never expect the same levels of social norms, respect or allowances that you have grown up with. You might end up with one Hell of a surprise.
This was a “close one”, for once trapped there, we might never had gotten the opportunity to leave.
Sanwan’s adaptation (1937), Mao’s purge of “three gulfs” after the Boxer uprising
After the failure of the Autumn Harvest Uprising, Mao Zedong led the remnants of the army to the south, retreating towards the Xiang-Gan border. After the clear transfer to the Jing-Gang Mountain area, the troops arrived at the village of Sanwan, Yong-Xin County, Jiangxi Province on 29th September, 1927, when the commanding group of the Front Committee at that time decided to integrate the remnants of the army.
At the time of integration, there were less than 1,000 troops left in the remnants of the army, and there was no CPC organisation at the grassroots level of the army, so the army’s culture was no different from that of the warlords’ troops, and the soldiers’ ideology was chaotic, and they did not have any absolute sense of affiliation to the CPC.
The contents of the integration included the following:
Dispatch some of those who did not want to stay in the army, reduce the army to one regiment and rename it as the First Regiment of the First Division of the First Army of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Revolutionary Army;
Establishing CPC party organisations in the troops, so that there were company branches (CPC party branches were built on the company), battalion and regiment party committees, and CPC party representatives above the company level;
To stipulate that officers and chiefs should not beat up soldiers, that officers and soldiers should be treated equally, and to establish soldiers’ committees to take part in the management of the unit and to assist in political and mass work. The troops were united under the leadership of the CPC Front Enemy Committee, of which Mao Zedong was the secretary, and a democratic system was carried out internally.
The Sanwan’s adaptation clarified the absolute leadership of the CPC over the army, and at the same time became a guarantee of the CPC’s armed seizure of power.
Within the PLA, officers and enlisted men are completely equal, and at company meetings, ordinary soldiers criticise their officers, who are mortified.
In the U.S. Army, it is unthinkable for the average soldier to criticise his commanding officer.
KMT army vs. CPC army in the Chinese Civil War:
1. The American-backed KMT army of Chiang Kai-shek was entirely a warlord army.
In the case of Chiang Kai-shek’s direct subordinate Hu Zongnan’s Seventh Corps, for example, some of the KMT officers mistreated and brutalised their soldiers to an appalling degree, as reflected by the regiment’s insurgent officers and soldiers:
its 430 regiment’s deputy battalion commander Chen × × when the machine company commander, soldier Liu Yanchun desertion was captured back, Chen × × Liu Yanchun hung up and beaten to death, the body was thrown into the field to feed the dogs, and then cut off the ears of the dead, hanging on the wall, and then gathered the company announced: “You see what this is? Whoever escapes again in the future will be dealt with in this way”.
its 351st regiment soldier Yue Quanfu disclosed: he was 16 years old, was captured by the head of the security force, the village with him at the same time to be captured as a soldier of 10 people. The 10 people, two were shot, one was beaten to death and fell off a cliff, and one was flayed alive by an officer because he didn’t ask for leave to relieve himself!
its 473rd regiment deputy battalion commander Wang × × pick up new recruits, met a few sick people can not walk, so they deceived them and said: “Who can not walk, say, I let you go home”. Four soldiers just turned their heads to go back, was called by Wang × ×, he let the four sick kneel on the edge of a cliff four or five feet high, copied a stick, a stick one, all beat them to the bottom of the ditch, then, long gone.
Its 158th Division officer Deng x x revealed that when he was a platoon leader, he once followed the mortar company commander to Sichuan to pick up new recruits, and saw with his own eyes that this company commander killed more than 20 recruits who deserted. Most of them were killed with guillotines, and others were killed by “splitting the bodies of five horses”. When one of the recruits ran away, he led men to the recruit’s house to catch him, and when he didn’t catch him, he set fire to the recruit’s house. Another time, when he failed to catch a deserter, he ordered four soldiers to carry the deserter’s family and put them on fire until they were burned to death.
Zhu x, chief of staff of his 55th Division, once ordered the commander of the company directly under him to “bury alive any soldier who makes a mistake”. This man once dug out a soldier’s heart on the spot during a punishment and hung two large bunches of them. Soldiers revealed that “he dug out the hearts of many soldiers”.
349 regiment 2 battalion platoon commander Shi × × to sodomise a soldier, was rejected by the soldier, Shi × × even get a carrot to the soldier’s anus hard stuffing!
A division of a deputy division commander is a big sex maniac, his subordinates in the past only know that he often use his authority to force sodomy subordinates, who knows, through the denunciation of the revelation, by his sodomy of the subordinates was as many as 89 people, the anger of the uprising of the officers and soldiers have demanded that the deputy division commander’s crotch penis will be cut off!
According to statistics, of the 2,451 soldiers in the 144th Nationalist Division, 107 soldiers’ mothers were raped by their officers, 21 soldiers’ mothers were abused by their officers, and 185 soldiers’ mothers were forced to remarry; 57 soldiers’ wives were raped by their officers, 53 soldiers’ wives were abused by their officers, and 93 soldiers’ wives were forced to remarry; 159 soldiers’ sisters were raped and abused by their officers, and 175 soldiers’ sisters-in-law were raped and abused by their officers, and were forced to remarry; and a total of 850 soldiers’ mothers, sisters, and sisters-in-law were raped, abused, and forced to remarry by their officers.
Of the 2,451 soldiers in the division, 345 were hung up and beaten by officers, 289 were tied up and beaten by officers, 1,238 were clubbed by officers, 13 were stabbed with bayonets, 677 were beaten with rifle butts by officers, 1,362 were slapped by officers, 945 were beaten with belts by officers, 991 were kicked by officers, 53 were beaten to death, 20 were beaten to vomit blood, 22 were crippled, 1,298 were made to kneel, 535 were made to freeze, 1298 were made to dry in the sun, and 53 were made to faint. The number of people who were beaten to death by officers was 53, 20 were beaten by officers and spat out blood, 22 were beaten and crippled by officers, 1,298 were punished to kneel by officers, 535 were punished to freeze outside by officers, 128 were punished to be exposed to the sun, 1,302 were punished to starve by officers, one was punished to drink urine by an officer, one was punished to eat an officer’s sputum by an officer, 33 were shot and buried alive by officers, and one was shot and buried alive by an officer, but not dead. 33 people, 24 people buried alive by officers ……
image 117image 118image 119
You tell me, how does such a warlord army get the support of its soldiers? How can such a warlord army gain the support of the Chinese people?
If this reactionary, inhumane Kuomintang army can win the Chinese Civil War, it will not be unless the days and nights are turned upside down and the Pacific Ocean dries up!
2. Mao’s army was an army of equal officers and soldiers.
First, on the way to catch up with the enemy. Mao Zedong asked CPC officers to grasp the ideological education of captured soldiers and new recruits.
For example: Mao Zedong knew that most of the captured Nationalist soldiers were from poor families, some of them were forced to be arrested by the Nationalists, some of them were here for money, and they had no idea why they were fighting the war. In response to this background of origin of the captured soldiers, CPC officers were required to provide one-on-one ideological education to recruits and captured soldiers.
CPC officers talked to the recruits and captive soldiers on foot and when they had the opportunity, talking about their family history and finally blaming it on the KMT, which was caused by the exploitation of the poor by the landlords and rich peasants they supported. If the KMT’s Chiang Kai-shek continued to exist, the poor would never be able to turn over a new leaf and would have to live in poverty for generations.
Every day, CPC officers had to report to the CPC Party Leader on the ideological work they had done with the masses, the reaction of the masses, and the ideological sentiments of the masses, before accepting the task for the next day’s work. The CPC party group leader then reports to the CPC party branch, and the CPC party branch then reports to the CPC party committee. The ideological situation of the fighters was firmly in the hands of the CPC Party leaders.
The thoughts of the captured soldiers were quickly transformed through the ideological education of the CPC officers.
Secondly, during the march of the army, the CPC officers set an example by carrying the luggage of the captured soldiers and new recruits. When resting at the end of the line, the CPC officers burned foot-washing water for the captives and recruits, and cooked food for the sick for those who were not in good health, so the CPC officers really treated the captives and recruits as their own brothers.
Thirdly, the captive soldiers also saw that the officers and soldiers in PLA were united, all of them had no salary, ate, wore and slept together without any special treatment, united with each other, and took care of each other as if they were brothers, like a big family.
Fourthly, in order to comfort the KMT captive soldiers and stabilise their minds, the CPC branch sent an official letter to the captive soldiers’ hometowns, stating that they had joined the PLA and that their hometowns should treat them as military families. This moved the captive soldiers and made them settle down; turning their guns to fight the KMT.
At the beginning of the Chinese Civil War, the KMT had 5 million soldiers and the CPC had 1 million; when the Chinese Civil War ended, the KMT was left with only 1 million soldiers, 4 million of whom surrendered to the CPC and joined the PLA.
Xi walked into the dormitories of ordinary soldiers to see if their blankets were warm enough, and Xi ate a pot of rice with ordinary soldiers; has the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States ever done this? These are PLA traditions and have been so since Mao Zedong.
My best friend/co-worker Larry was the IT guy in the training department for a large computer corporation where we both worked. I was a course designer/instructor. The company had been doing quarterly layoffs for almost two years. When it was your turn to be laid off, security watched you pack your personal items then escorted you off the property.
One night during a software update Larry discovered the next layoff list on the boss’s computer (she hadn’t even bothered to password-protect it, but her incompetence is good for another story). Both he and I were on the list. The date was a week away.
In the bookcase of my cubicle were copies of every technical manual and instructor’s guide I’d written for this company. They were my proof of ability. I would need them when I went on interviews and was asked “can you show me something you’ve done?” I spent the next week slowly replacing each binder with an empty one. By the time we were laid off, my entire collection of authored books was safely at home.
Bonus, Larry called the local news to expose how the company was using layoffs as a quick boost to their quarterly earnings numbers (fewer employee expenses improved the net bottom line). They’d often lay off the most critical employees right before end of quarter and then hire them back as “consultants” a few weeks later. We were both interviewed on the news the afternoon we were laid off. Screwed our chances for being rehired but I wouldn’t have gone back anyway.
Oh yeah, and the company? Failed a year later after an even bigger scandal surfaced. They had sales reps creating huge fake sales orders, then right before end of quarter all that equipment would be “shipped” to a large storage facility. They were caught with millions of dollars of fake earnings from falsified sales.
Passport Bros Meet Filipina In The Provinces
No need to be nervous in the small towns in the Philippines. Almost everywhere I go, the Filipino people are the nicest, friendliest people I have ever met. Moved here from So. Calif. in 2010, found my sweet wife here, the Philippines is HOME for me now.
Back in 1999, my then husband began to threaten to harm our children. I set in motion actions with only one thought-to protect my children.
January: I filed a complaint at his precinct (he was a police officer). They took away his guns-he had 10 (he told me 3) and enough ammunition to fight a battle (they told his brother in law that). He filed a complaint with them, saying he threatened to kill us. They told him “we know, he’s a psycho cop. But he’s ok. He loves his kids.” They had zero clue what went on in our home. His brother in law called Child Protection because he saw the police were not taking this seriously. Child protection came, saw it was a clean house with food in the cabinets and he was polite and calm. They never spoke to me or the kids. He told me if I said anything he will make our children orphans. I filed for an order of protection to get him out-his buddies faxed inletters swearing he was a nice guy, loves his kids-she was the bad one. I got denied. He refused to give me money for groceries, mortgage, utilities.
February: I went to put the child on welfare and food stamps. Why are you staying there, they asked. Take your children and leave. I had two sons with asthma and they all had special needs. Why should WE leave? He was the menace-take him out!! So the welfare people called child protection on ME. That’s right-because I didn’t want to take my asthmatic and special needs children to a homeless shelter 3 trains away in the Bronx! My parents didn’t want anything to do with my problems. We went to their home for two days and they threw us. You married him and had his children-now live there. Child protection came to my home at 11:30 at night. They saw the children and me living in the basement. We had a clean home and food (I told them my parents bought them food sincevhe gave me no money). The next day I called my therapist in tears-they will take my children away from me! All because I won’t leave the house! I can’t understand it-we have no where to go or any money. Why should we leave? He’s the threat!! She calmed me down. She made calls all day. By the end of the day, they closed my case-she had the faxes on her desk because I trusted no one.
March: I told my parents there was no more choices. I was getting a lawyer and divorcing him. My parents were horrified. They couldn’t believe he was starving his children. I showed them my temporary support which was running out. Their grandchildren were getting food stamps because their father wasn’t buying them food. My father called our rabbi to talk to him while we stayed in their house. Two hours later, the rabbi came to my father’s house. “It’s a terrible thing to see people change from human into something monstrous. I tried to talk to him about a man’s responsibility to his family.” “Rabbi, he doesn’t like you since Fort Dover, when he was in the hospital for a week and you saw him only once for 5 minutes.” “He told me. He spat on me for it.” My father and I lowered our heads in embarrassment. “I never advocate for divorce unless there is nothing left. Benny, I’ve known you for many years. Get your daughter a good lawyer, she’s going to need one.” I started to cry and the Rabbi put a business card in my father’s hands-it was my lawyer to be. My father and I went the next day and hired him. I told him everything that happened. My lawyer gave me his phone number-call him after 911 in an emergency. And get the children on as much welfare and food stamps as you can. I had to hire 3 servers at $200 a piece to wait at each exit of his precinct to serve him with the order to appear in court. On that day, I went to social services and gave the title of my home as a guarantee so the city can put a lien on my house against any financial support we got from welfare and food stamps. The children and me were finger printed and got ID cards that day. I got formal letters stating we were in need and were getting food stamps and money. The date was March 10-My then husband’s birthday. I chose the date. I wanted everything to have his birthday on it -the court papers, the welfare papers. It was my last happy birthday to him.
April: when the Jewish community and our friends found out about the pending divorce, we were ostracized. I went to Jewish agencies for help. I had no money for Passover. I got a $25 food voucher from an agency that helped the poor and aged. I went to another place that gave me such bad smelling food my father was outraged. He made me take him and the food back. He screamed at them in Yiddish how shameful this was to a poor girl with children. The man shrugged and said “she’s your daughter, you take care of her.” My father said “if only I had back the charity money I gave to places like yours” He put the box on the floor at the man’s feet and he ordered it thrown away. I asked my brother for money, and he gave me $200. But he always reminded me I owed him the money and anytime he needed a favor, he reminded me of the money.
May and June: I finally got approved to work at the Department of Education as a substitute. I accepted any job I could get, no matter where it was or what it was. Getting my money was harder. Sometimes I got my check in the mail. Sometimes I had to go back to the school. Sometimes it was at a district office. I had to drive to the payroll center to make sure all my checks were processed. Meanwhile, the city demanded I worked for their workfare program. No one gets welfare for nothing. I tried again and again to explain how subs worked. I had to wait for them to call me. I told my counselor she can call 65 Court Street to confirm how they call subs. I was told “no problem, you can go there and clean their toilets and wash floors.” Didn’t you want me off welfare? I can get hired by the Dept of Ed if I keep accepting jobs. If I’m washing floors somewhere else I won’t get hired. My counselor took it to mean I was too good to wash floors (if I had no prospects of a job I would have done it gladly). I was thrown off welfare.
July-September: I had been going to court, but he kept putting it off. I couldn’t miss a single court date, but he could show up and say he’s not ready, no lawyer-he fires his lawyer right there in court once! I was getting worried because I needed to keep getting called in to work-30 straight days in any school and I could get hired. I had 20 days and they stopped calling me. It was frustrating as can be.
October: the bank sent over two big guys to serve us with foreclosure papers on the house. The first met my husband who threw him bodily off the premises. I agreed to sign off on the papers if I could get 48 hours to pack our things and leave before they came to lock up the house. They saw what a bad spot I was in and that the idiot didn’t tell me the house was being foreclosed because he didn’t pay the bill in months. They gave me the 48 hours. I called a friend who had s vacant apartment. He didn’t clean it yet. I’ll clean it. I need it in 48 hours. He was ok with it. I called a moving company that specialized in last minute moving-especially in domestic situations. They sent over big guys in case he cane by to interfere. I threw clothes and toys in bags and boxes. I grabbed whatever I could that day. My father and I cried-my marriage was dead. I never told my father-this wasn’t a parole from prison, where I got timevoff for good behavior. It was a pardon-I was freed because of a terrible mistake that shouldn’t have happened. The next day I called Sub Central with my new address and phone number. We were trying to find you! I had to move suddenly. We have a job for you-and it could be permanent. Can you go there tomorrow? I cried with joy. Thanks to God-we had a safe place and I got a chance for a permanent job. It was the School I’m still working at-18 years later. I hung up and my children and I all hugged each other. I moved to this apartment with no job and borrowed money for the first months rent. I didn’t have anything for security. Now, I had a place and a job to take care of my children.
November: Family court once again. The case had been moved to another judge who refused to delay the hearings. She asked him “what did you do to support your children?” “I’m having a problem with their mother-“ “that’s not what I asked you. Did you buy groceries? Pay the phone? Electricity? Gas? Mortgage?” All the answers were no. The judge turned to me. “What did you do to support your children? I turned over all my papers from welfare, food stamps, my pay stubs, and a joint bank book stuffed with grocery slips and utility payments. His lawyer turned pale. The judge went through everything very carefully. “So, your wife put your children on welfare and food stamps while you didn’t do a thing?” “She didn’t put the kids on welfare (chuckling).” The Judge has him look at the papers. Yes I did – and they were all dates on his birthday. “You put my children on welfare-on my birthday?” “Yes, the same day you were served to come to court.” The judge flipped back pages. “You mean to tell me that you have been screwing around all this time while you had no idea how your children were living? You’ve been putting this off from March to now?” She threw her hands on her table. “I’m done talking to you. Let me see your pay stubs.” She reviewed his stubs and was about to order support of $400 a month. I asked to see his stubs first. I pointed out to my lawyer 3 pension loans he took out which come out of his gross pay check, thus reducing the net check to look less. My attorney stood up and said “why should the children have to have their money reduced because of his pension loans? We request you add those amounts in.” The Judge looks over the stubs and screamed “you think you’re so smart huh. I had someone from Sanitation do this last week. Know what I did? I threw the book at him. Like I’m going to do to you.” She reworked the figures. $636 semi monthly-and give me a list of expenses you borrowed-moving, apartment, clothes-anything you had to borrow. He’s going to pay you back for 1999. Every penny!” My husband jumped up out of his chair and yelled “you can’t do that to me! We’re on the same team! All the judges love me.” “The other judges don’t know you-but don’t worry. I’ll make sure they do.” The bailiff had to stand behind him and keep his hands in idiot’s shoulders. My lawyer stood up “your honor, we realize this had been quite a shock to the defendant. We know how hard it is to support a sexy sport car instead of a family (he showed pictures of him in the car). How about if the defendant pays my client $50 semi monthly until his debt is paid?” The other lawyer said ”yes, please!” So the idiot wound up paying me $50 twice a month for two and a half years! These $50 checks were in addition to the child support the court ordered.
December: I was formally hired by my School to work there full time. I paid back my father the money I borrowed. I caught up on my rent and paid security. My children were removed from welfare and food stamps. I bought my children clothes for the first time in nearly two years. We had a real holiday as a family that we didn’t have for so long. And their father told them that I was a bad mother because I took them away from him. It would be years before they saw the truth. I also got back into my house that had been locked up. He set fire to our wedding pictures, most of my old photos from School, books, whatever he could throw in. There was a huge black circle in the middle of the living room. I grabbed more of the children’s things, whatever I could salvage-and his grandmother’s silver items. He left all of them in the China cabinet. I took the Jewish books he left, anything I could throw in a box or bag. He broke my dishes in the kitchen sink. I took a few pots and pans I found. I took all the children’s pictures I found still hanging up. Oddly enough-he never opened my nightstand. I had, shall we say, personal items that a lonely woman keeps in a nightstand drawer. I decided to throw them out instead of bringing them home. I don’t know why. I stopped at the doorway. I looked inside for a last time. This horrible nightmare was finally ending. I knew I had more-the foreclosure sale, the divorce. But this prison that I loved because I raised my children in it, that I cared for, was finally closed. I saw the mezuzah still on the door post. I took it off-my father bought that for us. I gave it back to him.
Yes I know-I wrote a novel. I did it with a time line and great detail for a reason. Any moron who says just leave without a plan or money or support is just that-a moron!!! It’s easy to say “just leave”. And go where?????? If parents turn you out, your family and friends shun you-where do you go? The only person who helped me was HIS sister and her husband. She kept my important documents safe and $300 of emergency money for me. It was her husband who filed the complaint back then saying he heard their father say we were better off dead-and because he was a cop, he would get a slap on the wrist. No one-NO ONE stood up for me. Even my parents told me openly they were ashamed of me. My father gave me money for the sake of his grandchildren. The next person who says just leave and has no plan or idea on how to accomplish that action should be slapped. Because they were never standing at that black pit as I did. Just leave. Why not just say “jump into that black hole?”
Im sorry for writing a long answer. As you see, nearly 20 years later, I can recall it in great detail. Thank you for reading all the way through. If my story can help just one person-then it was all worth it.
No one wanted this cat, so I adopted him.
This is very interesting.
“I adopted a cat and realized everything I thought I knew about them was wrong. In this video, I’m sharing my whole journey from the first week to what I’ve learned, and how Bepo is doing now.”
One of the many encounters I’ve had with a Trump supporter was the time a woman commented on a local news station’s Facebook post with a picture of what she claimed was the 1938 Time Magazine Man of the Year cover. It was clearly photoshopped and had Hitler in an heroic pose with a caption calling him a great leader. She gave her own opinion that Time was a liberal hate rag that supported Hitler.
I knew it was fake because I’ve seen the real cover. It’s hard to forget. It’s a macabre illustration of a tiny little Hitler sitting at the bench of a giant pipe organ. Above him is a wheel with several naked corpses hanging from it. The caption reads, “From the unholy organist, a hymn of hate.”
I replied to her with a link to the official Time website archive page showing the real cover and the story calling Hitler evil.
You may have already guessed this, but she used the laugh reaction to my comment, called me an idiot and then said there was no way to know my cover wasn’t fake and hers was real.
Again, it was a link to the actual Time archives. She could have also done 10 seconds of research on Google, but no. She was more willing to believe this random, poorly edited JPG she found on Facebook was real and that Time Magazine in 1939 praised Hitler and somehow got away with it.
Her husband joined the conversation and attempted to prove his wife was right by telling me I have a woman’s name.
This encounter really drove home for me that we are in a lot of trouble as a country because a lot of people are completely stupid and unwilling to believe facts. A month or two later COVID hit.
Americans React To “When Americans Realise The Entire World DOESN’T Revolve Around Them”
In this video, we react to moments shared on Tiktok when Americans realize the whole world doesn’t revolve around them. These are hilarious but also somewhat eye-opening.
For example, up to 2009, Facebook was fully accessible in China. Then in July that year, a group called ETIM (which the UN categorises as a terrorist group) used Facebook to organise and instigate a riot in China. 197 people died and more than 1,000 people were injured.
The Chinese government asked Facebook to cooperate by identifying the ETIM members who had used Facebook to instigate the riot. Facebook refused. So the Chinese government banned Facebook, saying that otherwise Facebook might be used to instigate violence and organise riots.
As the years passed, it became clear that the Chinese government was not wrong. I say this, because of events in other countries make this clear and obvious.
Well, the fight was with me, and I sort of picked it. Just wait for it, you’ll understand as I go.
If I recall correctly it was 2018 and I was at a bus stop, there was a young girl, I would say about 13 years old. It was pretty late at night, I had just finished a routine commute from the city I trained in to the city I lived. I’m standing outside of the bus stop, gym bag over my shoulder while in the distance I saw a person kind of walking all over the sidewalk. Not unusual, there were a few bars around, I had even popped into one for a drink before waiting for the city bus home.
As the person got closer, my assumption was confirmed that they were in fact a bit drunk. Not a big deal, being drunk in public isn’t necessarily a crime unless you go overboard with it. So I ignore it. He comes up to the bus stop, stops for a second and then notices the girl. He starts banging on the glass, asking her questions and telling her to smile for him. I think to myself “Well, he’s an asshat”, and then asked some advice on my phone (facebook) of what to do. I got a few responses right away, mixed, but overwhelmingly saying I shouldn’t do anything.
Here is where it got dicey, instead of just being on the outside of the bus stop continuing his belligerent ways, he proceeds to walk to the entrance of the shelter and continues to tell her to smile and she should talk to him. I see the girl is visibly upset, and now it’s getting to a confinement issue. So I said to the guy to leave her alone, she’s too young and that’s you are making her uncomfortable. He turns around in a rage, swearing at me, telling me he used to race cars and she clearly wanted him. I repeated what I had said, he starts approaching me so I backed up a couple of steps, put my gym bag down and tried to descale it. He said he was going to smoke me. He starts trying to get in my face and I put my hand on his chest and asked him “what are you doing? I don’t want to fight but you have to leave her alone.”
Anyways, he tried to push through my hand and by that point I had enough. I grabbed the back of his neck, pivoted and shucked him to the ground. I didn’t follow up with anything because at that point it was done. He got up, realized he was outmatched and left her alone.
I looked over at her after to see if she was okay, and she mouthed thank you. So I asked her if she wanted me to sit with her on the bus so he wouldn’t try anything else.
It sounds like a lame “fight”, but I’m not going to let a young girl get sexually harassed and potentially assaulted by some drunk guy.
Getting to the point of picking a fight with the wrong person. At that point I had been training in mixed martial arts for 8 years, had 3 fights against opponents that were supposed to be way better than me, and was training 6 days a week. I wasn’t worried about what could have happened because at our gym we are more self defence oriented and I knew to keep an eye out for weapons.
Biden Beg China for Xi Jinping Visit to America For Talks!
Today’s geopolitical landscape is vibrant and ever-changing. In this video, we explore the tense dynamics between the United States, China, and their respective allies. Engage with us as we unravel the threads of trade conflicts, technological competitions, territorial disputes, and the subtle, strategic game of international influence in the 21st century. Biden Beg China for Xi Jinping Visit to America For Talks!
In the late 1990s my then-husband, also a firefighter, became ill from a chemical exposure in a fire. We had just built a vacation home in a tiny town (population 231) in the Colorado Rockies. He retired and chose to live there full time because he didn’t know how much longer he had. (Firefighters can retire earlier because of a typically shortened life span. He passed away a few years later.)
I wasn’t ready to retire so I stayed in Bay Area and continued working for my fire dept as well as a safety trainer for a large semiconductor company. Every two weeks I went to Colorado for a week to spend time with hubby.
While in the mountains I made friends with our nearest neighbors. They told me their brother was retiring soon from the Navy and planned a wedding at their house upon his return. We were invited.
About a week later I was in California teaching a safety class at the company. One of the new hires had just gotten out of the Navy and when I introduced myself as living in Colorado, he said his family lived there, too! In fact, the following month he would be having his wedding at his sister’s house in the mountains.
Yep! He was my neighbor’s brother! AND when I showed up to the wedding in a new dress I bought in California, his sister was wearing the exact same dress!
We remained friends for years.
How To Reduce Stress For Passport Bros | Floyd Gets A Filipina | Philippines Vlog
Honestly the Philippines has over 7000 Islands so not very hard to discover a place like this off the beaten path. Most of the named products are copies but still provide good quality for a lower price. Once you discover the lower cost of living you never want go back home.
Always have ways to relieve stress creating a peaceful mind. Try to find a way to keep yourself cool in a hotter climate that can also stress people out. If you are overweight the heat will help lose weight fast in the first few months.
This is the time to try maintaining a healthy body. Don’t fall in love with the first women you meet having plenty of options available. When meeting women make sure your intentions clear at the beginning never misleading them.
No matter where you live each person has their preferences that attracts them to others. Don’t stress over this since there are plenty of people you can vibe with.
Remember you are a guest in another country so show respect at all times. I agree Thailand suits younger men better who enjoy the night life.
A positive attitude is key to having a wonderful time. Remember you are responsible for your own happiness. I wish all who visit or move overseas to enjoy a happy life for less money.
Athletes come, bring their coaches, family and support staff. So 12000 athletes maybe bring 50,000 people
They get a look into China the real one not the Washington version.
We can see how western media isn’t even acknowledging it at all.
…
Look at the BBC link it’s right at the bottom.
Add on bloggers and private people traveling to have a look? There’s potentially half a million people who get to see what it’s REALLY like.
These people will return home. These people will hear the usual propaganda garbage spouted against China
These people might decide to push back, at which they have a great thing to say.
“I’ve been there. I’ve seen China up front and close, yet YOU know more than I do?”
I often say this to westerners who claim to know everything about China despite never visiting, not understanding the language or being able to read our media. They literally have no response to it other than I know better than you because (racist) reasons.
US And TSMC In Pain, As China’s SMIC Becomes World’s Best Chip Manufacturing Company!
Congratulations China and SMIC. Many of us around the world have been waiting for this day. Both the US and TSMC had been arrogant and thought no one could shake them.
This is how I learned how crooked employers can be, right at the start of my career. 1984, first job out of university. Five young women were hired by Sperry Corp. We were working on a contract for the State of Texas which involved a lot of traveling and overtime to install and look after a new computer system.
We had to fill out two timesheets, one for our employer (single copy) and one for the State of Texas (triplicate). We were told to put eight hours per day on the employer timesheet but our real work hours on the State’s timesheet, because we were not going to get overtime pay from our employer. So, 40 hours per week for Sperry, 50+ for the State usually, since we often started by leaving on Sunday night and didn’t get back until Friday night. Travel hours were considered work hours. It was no fun, especially since we weren’t allowed any vacation time the first year.
If you’ve ever worked in IT, you know you get stuck working weekends and holidays when fewer people mind if the system is down. Thus we were working on Thanksgiving weekend doing testing, along with some seasoned employees, all male. It was boring and we had lots of time to chat. One of them said “at least you are getting overtime for this”. We wryly laughed – “ha ha NO.” Two of them replied, “Well you should be, you’ve been here less than six months and they automatically classify you as non-exempt for six months when you are new.” Then some comments about the bosses probably not telling us this and figuring we wouldn’t complain because we were female.
We quickly realized we had one copy of the triplicate time sheets for each week we’d been working, because we kept part of the State’s timesheet. Of the four of us ladies remaining, two did not want to make a fuss about it, and two of us decided to confront the bosses. We added up our overtime and had a plan going in.
Our supervisor and his boss and his boss’s boss actually admitted they hadn’t paid us on purpose! Because “the project didn’t have the budget.” Really brazen and condescending attempt at deflecting us. I pointed out this was still illegal and I’d go to the EEOC if they didn’t make good on what they owed. We said we wanted a paid week off at Christmas and cash to make up for the overtime, which they gave us. Our two colleagues who were afraid to complain got nothing. My friend and I had a nice ski vacation together with the proceeds.
I immediately found another job and moved away within a few weeks. Later I got to be an agent of karma: I rose to a position in my company where I had influence on decisions around large contract awards. When Unisys (formerly Sperry Corp) was competing for our business, I made sure my fellow decision-makers knew about my story. It’s bad business to cheat your employees!
The United States will not give up its high-tech sanctions against China.
Not only the United States, but also Japan, South Korea and even Taiwan Province of China are the same. As soon as there is an election season, all kinds of stupid anti-China remarks will come out one after another.
Normally, they create rumours and smear China every day to brainwash their own citizens:
How China steals their technology? How China has taken away their jobs? How China threatens their national security ? Even rumours of genocide are created, so in the eyes of most American rednecks, China is “unforgivable”.
You see, there is such an evil country in the world, and it is righteous for us to be tough on it!
If you give up high-tech sanctions, you are pro-China and treasonous!
Every chip sold to Huawei will become a bullet that hits us!
If you’ve watched too many Western-style elections, you’ll know that it’s the same as a TV talent show.
Whether it’s Trump or Biden, they shout “CHINA” from the podium like a tenor voice, and the voters under the podium feel like they’ve been stimulated by a egg-vibrators in their G-spot, and they instantly orgasm, their minds going blank.
Inflation, health care, and Gun violence and drug-infested are not important, they just want to hear more “CHINA”, and keep on having orgasms, and keep on being happy, and descent into madness.
After enjoying the orgasm calm down and think about it, in the past, the United States to the Soviet Union, to Japan is not also such sanctions? The United States has already achieved success, there are success stories, and as long as the United States increases the sanctions against Huawei, the United States will not fail, and they will keep reassuring themselves in this way.. 🤣
Their election is a race to see who is more anti-China, so the White House will continue to impose technology restrictions on Huawei.
In any case, Biden must take a tough stance to avoid being labelled a “pro-China traitor” by Trump.
Reaction To Jimmy Dore’s TRUTH At The United Nations
On Tuesday the United Nations Security Council welcomed a very surprising speaker — comedian and political commentator Jimmy Dore! Jimmy explained about how the United States was behind the Nord Stream bombing and the western media all fell in line to push the lie that Russia or Ukraine or someone else was responsible. Guest host Craig “Pasta” Jardula and Americans’ Comedian Kurt Metzger discuss Jimmy’s UN appearance and Seymour Hersh’s startling revelation that the Nord Stream bombing wasn’t actually about the Ukraine War at all.
My mom was on welfare when I was ten years old. She had been taking a bus (public transportation) to school every day to become a dental technician. Her goal, which she worked towards and accomplished, was to get her family off of welfare.
On the day she was scheduled to graduate, her unemployed boyfriend was supposed to watch my brother and me. The plan was for him to pick us up and take us on a hunting trip with him and his friends. Not that we would have been allowed to shoot anything, but we were really excited.
He never showed up.
Mom called the neighbor and asked her to watch me and my brother, to which the neighbor agreed. I was really upset and disappointed that we weren’t going hunting.
As my mom was leaving for her graduation, I was crying and begging her to stay. She said she loved us and left.
When she got back, she asked me how my day was. I told her I hated her. That was it. That was all I said. “I hate you.”
I can only imagine the strength it took for her to hold back the tears as she got my brother and me ready to go for a walk.
Right outside the door, there was a brand-new bb gun sitting on the porch. We lived in Cherry Ridge Terrace which is located on a mountain in the woods of Barnesboro, Pennsylvania. There are tons of wooded trails around those parts.
She took my brother and me down a trail.
Located in almost every tree, shrub and plant, were empty aluminum cans. One by one, we switched off possession of the bb gun and shot cans out of those trees and shrubs the whole way down the trail.
It was so fun for us.
As it turned out, my mom had gotten a $50 graduation gift from her father and bought a bb gun before she came home from her graduation.
She walked that trail and put those cans all around before she came in the apartment, so she could take us hunting. And right before she did that, I told her that I hated her.
That was the last time I told my mom I hated her.
And when I saw this question, I called her and apologized for saying that I hated her, thirty years ago.
What I can teach you right now is something I learned ten minutes ago.
When I was 17, I went camping at a beach one day, and decided to make a sand throne, to relax in, except… it wasn’t made entirely of sand, because it would collapse the moment I sat on it. So, I gathered some large stones nearby, arranged them neatly to form a chair, and then covered it with sand to even out the gaps so that it would be comfortable to sit in.
After 2 hours of toiling under the hot sun, the job was done, and I sat in my throne with a great sense of fulfilment. After a while, I retreated back to my tent nearby to rest.
As I stared out of my tent to enjoy the view of the beach and admire my handiwork, a young boy, around 10 of age, went to my throne and walked around it, inspecting it curiously. For a moment, I thought he was going to sit on it. But then, a mischievous glint shone in his eye and he backed away from it a few steps. Then, he dashed and swung a mighty kick! And… collapsed, clasping his foot and crying for his mom.
I stayed in my tent, with tears in my eyes trying to hold back the laughter, thinking “Served you right! “. It wasn’t intentional, but making a “sand” structure with stones was definitely the most satisfying passive aggressive thing I did to a troll who goes around kicking sand structures.
I sponsor poor children in Thailand through an accredited international relief fund. I have been doing this for 15 years.
I do pro-bono law work for the poor. I have saved single mothers from eviction, saved a person’s life, helped someone wrongly arrested and charged from going to jail and being away from his children, and others.
I rebuild and repair computers and donate them to impoverished families.
A socialist society would require less of me having to deal with evictions for poor mothers because the mother would be given her own place, free from that concern. There would not be the systemic injustices that cause so many legal problems for people. Most poor people would make a living wage so they wouldn’t be destitute. An equitable economic and legal system is far superior to charity. Until the beautiful day of communism, we all need to do what we can.
But in terms of aggregate function, it is arguably THE smartphone SOC of 2023.
Why?
Well, it is the first mobile device with Bluetooth 6.x that can deliver lossless high fidelity audio at lower power than the current industry standard, Bluetooth 5.x. Huawei calls it Nearlink, and it is 100% Huawei controlled.
It is also the first mobile device that can make satellite calls, courtesy of a sophisticated antennae design that, according to my friend who has done a partial teardown, is the most complex he has ever seen. There are 9 separate segments on the frame of the mate 60.
The WiFi 6 speed can hit several Gbps, while the 5G mobile connectivity has been demoed above 1Gbps. These are class-leading numbers, with the signal processing improved through AI.
Wired/wireless charging at 88/50W are way better than what Apple offers, as does the battery capacity.
There is also a large language AI model built into the OS, making Hongmeng stand out among the 3 mobile ecosystems. The AI also enables the nifty camera, which takes some of the best mobile photography in 2023.
There is nothing like the features enabled by the Kirin 9000s chipset, even if we combine the best features of the Android and iOS universe into a hypothetical superphone.
Is that better?
You decide.
Nvida Shocked! Huawei’s Secret Weapons: Ai Chip Ascend 310 Explained
Huawei is becoming the company Apple wants to be… building its own modern ecosystem for the internet of things and huawei car integration. Let’s see who gets there first.
I thought about this for a long time , a very long time
Yes it’s true that the West led by the US has become unusually harsh towards China. In fact the US is destroying it’s entire reputation in front of the world through it’s actions against China & Russia
So why?
First let’s get rid of the obvious NONSENSE theories here
Theory 1:-
That US doesn’t want China to be a threat in the future and become a Rival
This is ridiculous. It’s also highly improbable. US doesn’t think long term at all. US thinks only short term, typically from Election to Election Or Boom to Recession to Boom
That the US is doing all this , to throttle Chinas Growth seems foolish to me because the US gains nothing at all
If the US simply and quietly did it’s work without any threat of sanctions, the USD would remain a global currency for a century perhaps
So US destroying it’s own reputation by the day, it’s reputation as a free country, as a country of laws, as a country of responsible media and as a country promoting free trade – just to ensure China doesn’t grow to be as big as the US is downright foolish
Theory 2:-
That US wants to protect it’s Companies from Patent infringement
Again Nonsense
That’s not how the US works
These Companies, they have for several decades run their own businesses and have never come crying to the US Government for help
That the US doesn’t want China to become technologically advanced and sell more smartphones and laptops is illogical
Theory 3:-
That the US are doing this for National Security
Again foolish. US have Nukes. China has Nukes. In any struggle between two nuclear powers, the power heading for defeat will try to balance the equation by using nuclear weaponry
This US will never fight China in a major war and vice versa
The US has no conflict with China and the Sphere of Influence for the US is in the Atlantic & Pacific not the South China Sea or Africa
And for gods sake if you tell me this is because US cares about the Taiwanese people, I would tell you the chances of Netanyahu being a Hamas agent is higher than that
Plus nobody uses 3 nm Chips for Missiles or Space
Theory 4:-
That US wants to break up China and destroy the CPC
Again nonsense.
Why?
China is an economic and trade ally and helps make $ 2.3 Trillion a year to the US Economy by value addition. Why destroy that with breaking up China and destroying Status Quo?
image 133
Sure you do have a handful of faggots like Lindsey or De Santis who are demented enough to have this illogical ideology
Yet they represent maybe 3–4% of the US collective of Politics, Press & Big Businesses
Theory 5:-
Politics & Elections
Again doesn’t make sense
US voters vote on various issues and Anti Chinese Rhetoric isn’t one of them. Hell, both sides make Anti Chinese Rhetoric don’t they?
This brings me to the real reason in my opinion
The US NEEDS CHINA to do something very badly and is using all these measures as bargaining chips
Taiwan
Tech barriers
Tarriffs
Propaganda
The US wants something from China in return for which the US is ready to go back to removing all of the above
That’s the only logical explanation of why US keeps threatening China and it’s businesses
It hopes these businesses and people will put pressure on China to somehow do what the US expects
This also explains why China isn’t reacting at all to all these provocations but quietly making firm statements
Its ECONOMIC
The US Economy is a time bomb waiting to explode. When it does it will take the economy of the entire world with it.
It will cause huge blows to every nation including China
Yet it will also finish the US as a global power completely
Unless China steps in
image 132
China can invest $ 770 Billion today without needing a signature or getting into debt
China has $ 18 Trillion in savings alone
A Huge Swathe of Chinese Investments into USA , especially PUBLIC MONEY belonging to the Chinese People will allow the US to either delay this time bomb from exploding immediately (7–12 years) to around 40 years
It’s why so many US higher ups are visiting China again and again
It’s why no top ranked Chinese is visiting the US
image 134
The US keep telling China, it’s in their own interest to prevent the US from the great economic collapse
Otherwise China would be badly burnt
Yet China may feel that it’s best to let US collapse even at great personal loss. This may be why China is busy with alternative settlements and alternative currency routes
I somehow seriously doubt Xi Jingping wants to be the Global Hegemon
All his moves are to secure Fuel, Energy and Food and Independence from the Dollar
I thought this was because the US is insane enough to sanction China but maybe it’s because China wants to put distance between the US Economic time bomb & themselves and their clients
I believe it’s why US have enmeshed the EU into this quagmire and also the UK and Japan and S Korea
If US experiences this Economic Collapse, these nations would be gutted completely. Hence they sink or swim with the US. That’s why they too put pressure on China yet have some major visit to China almost every month
image 131image 130image 129image 128
This is my hypothesis
Nothing else makes sense
Politicians have their ideology
Media Channels have their ideology
Businessmen may have their own issues with China
But a full concerted effort to target China and that too announcing everything months in advance all the time , looks stupid and completely ineffective
It looks like the US is desperately putting hook after hook into China and saying “If I go down, you go down”
China still doesn’t believe that and feels that if the US goes down, and if China survives – it would be a better world altogether
I am firmly convinced the US is having an economic nuclear bomb within itself and needs China to prevent the collapse which will damage the Global Economy heavily
All these moves are completely Anti Chinese but intended as bargaining Chips
Originally Answered: Have you ever encountered a lawyer who was so good that your jaw dropped?
I had been the victim of a road rage incident when I was in my 20s. Long story short, I was in a left-turn-only lane; the perp was in the right-turn-only lane, and she wanted to go left. I made my turn, without ever noticing her, as there weren’t very many cars on the road, and went into a restaurant to pick up my dad’s dinner. She followed me in, kicked the chair out from under me, and kicked the crap out of me while screaming, “Do you know who I am?” Luckily, one of the waiters got her license plate number.
I had eight broken ribs, a fractured cheekbone, and she had ruptured all of my stitches from my gallbladder surgery that I’d had two weeks prior. She tried to have me arrested for assault, saying that I threw her against her car. I’ll come back to that.
At my first court appearance, the prosecutor took me into a room and wanted me to drop the charges against this woman. I obviously refused. The prosecutor said, “You are 22, you work as a hairdresser, and you live with your parents. You are nothing. Marjorie (the perp) is a pillar of the community, and is the child psychologist for the county, so I’d think real hard over this (let’s not forget that I had been the victim here).”
I did point out that I had brought a witness (the waiter), as well as notarized affidavits from several people who were in the restaurant at the time, and CCTV footage from the restaurant, too. She refused to allow them to be admitted. Wasn’t she supposed to help me?
The judge wanted me to let the perp have my car fixed (she broke a window and keyed the door) by some unlicensed guy, whom she had treated when he was in school. I agreed to an estimate, but I was going to get my own estimate as well.
My sister used to work as a legal secretary, and she took me to one of her old bosses. We went over all of the evidence, and he agreed to come with me for the second court date.
So, at the next date, the prosecutor called me back to a private room, before going into the courtroom, again trying to force me to drop the charges, but still wanted me for assault. My lawyer, Mark, said, “So you say that my client threw Marjorie over the hood of her own car and held her against a wall with her right arm, correct?”
The prosecutor said, “That’s what Marjorie told me.”
Mark: “Marjorie, how tall are you?”
Marjorie: “5’10”
Mark: Chole, how tall are you?
Me: “5’3″
Mark: “Marjorie, you are a big woman, easily close to 200 pounds, while Chole weighs 92 pounds, so how could she throw you?
Prosecutor: “That’s not important.”
Mark: “I disagree. Marjorie, you said in your sworn statement that Chole held you up against the wall with her right arm. Are you certain that you want to say that?”
Marjorie: “That girl is a wild animal; who knows what those people are capable of?”
Mark: “Well, Chole had emergency surgery two weeks prior to the incident, on her right side, and still cannot lift that arm past shoulder level, no thanks to you. Also, she’s left-handed.” Checkmate.
Marjorie, at this point, jumped up and started screaming about how important she was and I was just white trash, when Mark stood up, looked down at her (he’s 6’9) and said, “Lady, you might have convinced this prosecutor that you’re somebody special, but I have, in my briefcase, a filing, ready to go to the state board, along with all the evidence from this case, as well as sworn observations about your general behavior from your fellow psychologists and some of your neighbors. You will never be able to work again once I’m through with you, so I suggest that you sit the f**k down and admit that you lied and that you beat this ‘white trash girl’ for no g*****n reason.” Then, he turned to the prosecutor and said, “How dare you assume that someone is guilty because they’re not from this s****y town? What does that prove, or are you just bored and lazy?”
Marjorie had to pay for all of the damage done to my car, as well as the ambulance service, medical costs relating to everything that she did to me, and the damage she did to the chair in the restaurant. All of my charges were dropped and expunged.
Mark usually handled divorce cases, but he had way too much fun that night!
Flash-forward a few years, when I was at a luncheon with my mom. We ran into a friend of hers, who is also a child psychologist for another district. My mom mentioned my case, and the woman said, “We’ve all been waiting for that b***h to get knocked down a few pegs for years! She’s a nightmare to deal with, but she did lose her job shortly after your case was resolved.” The district didn’t want to have to pay out a small fortune if and when this woman blew her top again, so they forced her into early retirement.
Eliminate Apple Android compatibility! Huawei’s independent operating system shocks the West!
“”In today’s episode, we dive into the latest developments in the Huawei vs. United States tech competition. Huawei has made a groundbreaking announcement – its HarmonyOS will no longer be compatible with Android. HarmonyOS 4.0 has sparked intense discussions, with industry experts suggesting it could challenge iOS and Android. Huawei’s move to disconnect HarmonyOS from Android is a strategic maneuver in the global tech arena, countering U.S. dominance. We explore the implications and Huawei’s plan to create opportunities for global tech enterprises.
Russia is still sitting on 40 billion dollars worth of trapped Indian Rupees.
BRICS member Russia is evading US sanctions by accepting local currencies as payment for exports and not the US dollar. Russia’s third-biggest oil producer, ‘Gazprom Neft announced that the company has completely stopped accepting the US dollar as payment.
The oil exporter has ditched the US dollar and switched to accepting local currencies for cross-border transactions. This is the first oil-producing firm to completely switch from the US dollar to local currencies in 2023.
The development comes on the heels of the de-dollarization efforts initiated by the BRICS alliance. Saudi Arabia also confirmed recently that it is open to accepting local currencies for oil trade across the world.
Alexander Dyukov, the CEO of Gazprom Neft, said that the company has completely moved away from the U.S. dollar. He added that the firm will not be accepting Euros, which will eventually put pressure on the countries of the European Union. “We have virtually moved away from payments in dollars and euros,” he said to Tass.
Dyukov revealed that the oil firm will accept the Chinese Yuan and the Russian Ruble as payment moving forward. “We mainly use Yuan and Rubles,” he said. A spokesperson said that the company has no issues accepting and withdrawing foreign currencies from across the world.
However, the CEO stressed that the company is not open to accepting the Indian Rupee as payment. “No. We don’t use Rupees,” he said without citing why the INR is left out as a payment option. If many other oil companies follow suit, the US dollar could be in jeopardy. The means to fund the dollar’s deficit will narrow, leading to economic turmoil in the US.
ASEAN Rejects US As Biden Tried Disrupting Summit And Made These Silly Requests!
“im from the Philippines and i firmly believe that without U.S. hegemony, the world will be at peace.”
Quite a few years ago I worked for a large insurance company. I had an office on the fifth floor. In that office I had a decorative ceramic eagle worth about $200 sitting on my bookcase. One Friday afternoon it was there when I went home for the weekend. When I returned on Monday it was gone!
I trotted down to Building Security and explained the issue. They smiled and said, “Give us an hour.” I said, “Why?” They said, “Very few people know about the hidden cameras in the elevators!”
An hour later they called me. They showed me a video of one of my employees carrying out my eagle at 11:00 PM on a Sunday night! They happily printed out a hard copy of a frame that showed the theft.
On Monday morning I called my thief into my office. I had a little fun. I told him how shocked I was that my eagle was missing. He said all the right things about how terrible this was!
“Who would do such a thing?” I inquired. He quickly threw two other employees under the bus. Then I laid the picture out of this SOB doing the deed!
“I guess I’m fired” he said! “You guessed right,” I said.
Footnote- My superiors were not satisfied with that. They called the police and had him charged & convicted for theft!
It FINALLY happened (mask off moment)…
Thanks, Canada, for confirming what Mr. Putin has been saying all along.
“Remember, don’t talk to the hostesses, and don’t start a fight. Got it?” I asked my friends, making sure everyone also had a drink in hand.
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Girls holding signs, where sometimes a man may come in to “persuade” you to try it
“What happens if we lose you?” one of my friends asked.
“Look, you’re not carrying shrooms or weed. Don’t start a fight, and worst case they put you in a cell until you sober up. Then call me.” I grinned back. The Neon lights with the words “Kabuki-cho” illuminated behind me. Farther ahead, many girls with signs.
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Sorta like this now
They all nodded, some coming from downtown LA, some former military members, and some just like you, traveling Japan for the first time.
As a preamble, they wanted me to take them to the sketchiest part of Tokyo, which I find to be a contradiction.
After seeing a beer cans and some trash on the floor, I looked back at my group, shaking my head. “I’m so sorry guys. This area is not as clean as Japan, and it can get pretty bad.” Then I looked back up and winked at them.
The reason why it’s so safe is because of the culture.
People in Japan from a younger age are taught to think of the community first, and not themselves. There are pros and cons of this, which I’ll reserve for another post, but it starts from school as the students are expected to clean everything. If you do a bad job, you will be socially ostracized until you put in “your part”. Everywhere you go it’s pretty much handicap friendly, so if you have any disabilities people make sure you can go about your day.
The reason why it’s so safe is because there’s no incentive
It didn’t used to be this way. Japan has organized crime like any other country (Yakuza ring a bell?) but even they realized it wasn’t profitable to do violence so they pretty much resort to financial racketeering or money laundering and other “services”, but never violence.
The reason why it’s so safe is because of the police culture.
Japan has what some in the West would be almost a too trusting culture with the police. Kid is lost? Go to the local police station. Harassed? Local police station. Followed? Local police station. You get the idea.
You also don’t really have to worry about being injured going to the police. The police are liable if they do physically hurt you, so they have come up with ways to restain you without harming you.
The reason why it’s so safe is because the population is older and busy
If you look at Japan, the average age is almost 50. People don’t need to prove themselves when they’re older, and have it stable. Likewise, the younger generation are almost too busy with school, work, or other societal aspect that there’s almost no free time to do anything else. This obviously has major cons, but it does make it so that most people follow the rules and are rewarded on the “successful” pathway.
If it’s 10degrees or hotter outside [50 degrees Fahrenheit, for Americans] we will go out in bikinis and sunbathe
Almost every family owns at least one summer cabin that is frequently visited
We say ‘good morning’ or ‘good evening’ to everyone we pass on the street, depending on the time of day
We will often have long discussions (*hem* arguments) of what type of snow is snowing at the moment
The first real day of summer was three days ago and almost everyone took a break from work to go and enjoy it (it was around 14 degrees or something)
It snows from August to June
All the houses are built like fortresses so they can withstand the frequent earthquakes
We await the next volcanic eruption with excitement
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(Eyjafjallajökull, 2010)
Most of us watch football religiously
Dried fish is a delicacy
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We loudly announce when we go to the toilet and ask if we have permission to do so
Going on dates is a formal and a rare experience, not standard at all
Blind dates is something that doesn’t happen
In swimming pools we wash without clothes with everyone else of the same gender, no stalls
We drink a lot of milk —it goes with everything
We leave our babies outside in their prams -of cafes, our homes, in the garden, in our unlocked cars
We love sauces; we probably have hundreds of different types, also ice cream shops normally have about six different sauces
We will have barbecues in any weather
We drink lots of alcohol: beer, wine, you name it
It’s never cold inside our houses, ever
We party until way after midnight —if you are camping and want to sleep, don’t camp next to Icelanders
Believing in elves and trolls is normal and we have tons of stories that we’ve been told about them since we were young
We have 13 Santa Clauses
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edit : some more for y’all + pics on the original answer
We have a Christmas Cat that, if you don’t get new clothes for christmas, will come and eat you (particularly children)
image 138
The christmas cat is owned by a pair of trolls called Grýla and Leppalúði. they are the Santa Clauses’ parents, who are also trolls.
Grýla kidnaps, cooks and eats misbehaving children.
image 137
We have a day dedicates to eating these delicious balls of air
image 136
The water quality is 500% and so when we visit other countries we are dying because the water tastes so bad there
We are taught from a young age that we should never ever ever step on the moss and if you do then u deserve to burn in hell (ok maybe not but that’s the idea)
Everyone hates Justin Bieber for that music video he did. (+We had to close down the park a part of it was shot in because the tourists were tearing up the moss.)
In winter we all wear the thickest coats you’ll see while still trying to stay fashionable and we all look giant
Conjugation is a thing so a noun has 16 different variations of itself.
Tourism is the top industry of Iceland
Ice cream is enjoyed whenever; in a snow storm or on a rare hot day; doesn’t matter
While waiting to turn left into a busy street, the person behind me grew impatient and honked. Not wanting to be the person to face death by oncoming traffic so he could hurry, I put my car into park and got out.
I pasted a look of quizzical concern on my face, and slowly walked to the back of my car. I inspected the back and could find nothing wrong, so I turned to the guy who honked and said, “What is it? Is one of my lights out? Is one of my tires flat?”
He shouted, “I just want you to go!”, but it was busy, so I pretended not to hear him, so I cupped my hand to my ear and walked towards him.
“I JUST WANT YOU TO GO!!!!” he shouted.
“Oh, well, I’m turning left, and it’s kind of busy, so I’m waiting for a break. I’ll go then. I thought you were honking because you saw something wrong with my car. Thanks!” I cheerily shared.
I went back to my car, put it in drive, and waited for a safe time to pull out.
I used to until I was sued and faced legal action against my credential that was filed by my principal. The principal also convinced the boy’s father to file a criminal complaint and tried to get me arrested. It cost over $150,000 in attorney’s fees to fight the administrative actions and criminal actions. I ended up prevailing and in the end, after spending another $100,000 in attorney’s fees, I recouped my fees by filing suit against the parent of the student and the school district.
The back story was this male student who suffers from schizophrenia and has other learning disabilities was assigned to my science class. I was never informed about his medical diagnosis. He was enrolled in the intensive intervention program at our school that was for students who had behavioral issues. These students were supposed to have an aide with them in the mainstream classroom or they were supposed to be in the II room doing their work. They had a behavioral intervention plan for each student.
I was not given this student’s BIP because his mother, a teacher in the district and at another site, did not want his medical diagnosis shared with his teachers. She also did not agree with it and refused to administer his medication at home. To be allowed at school, he had to take his meds. The year prior, he had beaten two students so severely, they were hospitalized for several weeks and one almost died. So his meds were administered at school. He did not take them on the weekends so on Mondays he was always exhibiting extreme behavior. It also turns out that at times the voices he heard told him the meds were poison so he would pretend to take them and then spit them out when the school nurse was not looking.
I knew he was supposed to have a BIP and I made several requests for it by email. I cced the requests to the vice-principal and the principal and never received a response. By state and federal law, I was supposed to be given the BIP and made aware of anything that could possibly endanger myself or my students. I was supposed to be informed that the previous year he went into a psychotic rage and nearly killed two students in his PE class and it took 4 PE teachers to pull him off of the student both times. It was after the second attack that he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and placed in the II program and assigned an aide to be with him at all times.
Well, his case carrier let him go to his classes without an aide because none of the aides would deal with him. He had assaulted all of the aides that were available and so they refused to work with him. He was confined to the II room for the first 5 periods of the day. She sent him to my class 6th period because it was her prep period and she wanted a break. Since no aide would work with him, she did not send an aide with him, so I had to deal with him on my own. Of course I had no idea about the schizophrenia or that his constant talking was due to his talking to the voices of his imaginary friends that were real to him and that were telling him what to do.
One day those friends told him to beat the crap out of a female student that was half his size because she had disrespected him because she was looking at him funny. Of course she was at the back of the room and he was at the front and she wanted nothing to do with him. Nobody wanted to even talk to this kid. So he got up and walked back to her, and pulled her out of her seat and started beating her. When I got to her, he had her on the floor and she was in the fetal position. He was kicking her head repeatedly. I grabbed him in a bear hug from behind and walked him to the door. He was continuing to kick and so he and I went down. I just continued dragging him to the door and pulled him out the room. I left him outside and returned to the room and shut the door behind me. He was locked out side.
I called the office to come and get him and to send for paramedics for the girl. He spent the next 30 minutes pounding on the door and windows with his bare fists. He actually shattered several windows to the classroom. It took administrators 10 minutes to get to my classroom. They spent 20 minutes asking him to calm down and walk with them to the office. He charged them several times and hit and kicked them but they would not use any physical force to restrain him. Even after he broke the windows with his fists and cut his hands, they refused to restrain him. I finally had enough and called the police. They came and took him down and cuffed him. My principal was upset. But the paramedics were able to stop his bleeding before he bled out. Then they were able to treat the student he had kicked in the head several times. She had a severe concussion and needed medical attention now, not 30 minutes from now.
Of course in this day and age of cell phones, a few of my students filmed this. As allowed by state law, I confiscated the cell phones because filming inside of a classroom is a violation of state law, and filming fights is a suspendible behavior. I handed the phones to the admin and wrote the appropriate referrals.
The district policy is the admin is supposed to review all photos and videos with a parent present, copy any thing taken in a classroom then delete those images from the phone. Those copies are then saved as evidence for the basis of the suspension and depending on the severity of the offense and the number of previous offenses the student gets from 1 to 5 days of suspension. The phones do not get handed back under any circumstances until the videos are erased.
Well, the principal just handed them back immediately. I still wrote the referrals. I documented everything.
The next day. I get called to the office. I find the SRO wanting to interview me. I respectfully declined. I invoked my right to have an attorney present before answering any questions. I have attorneys for relatives and friends. When a police officer asks you a question about a situation you were involved in, they are not your friend. Anything you say can be used against you. You do not say anything without an attorney. What the officer did not say that I learned later was the father had filed a criminal complaint against me. The principal had encouraged him to do so. The problem was, he did not have custody of his son nor did he have legal educational rights. In fact, there was a restraining order prohibiting him from being on school grounds or within 1,000 feet of his son. Mom did not want to file a criminal complaint because she knew what would happen, absolutely nothing. She was a teacher and knew what the education code was.
In CA, a teacher may intervene to protect the safety of a student. So if it is mutual combat, I could legally intervene to prevent both students from harming each other. I am not legally required to but I can if I feel I can do so. If I am injured, I am covered by workman’s comp for injuries sustained in performing my duties. The top duty of any teacher is to ensure student safety. That takes a higher priority over teaching students. I have broken up fights before and have been injured and they have always been covered. I do it because I am a teacher and student safety is first.
The principal then filed an administrative action against me for violating the rights of a special education student. I did not follow his behavioral intervention plan. Had this been successful, I would have lost my job and my credential. This was made worse by the fact that the video taken by a student was posted to social media. It then made the local news.
Of course the story was one sided. I could not provide my side of the story. Anything I said would violate the student’s privacy rights under state and federal law. So, I was the teacher that assaults students for no reason. Nothing was said about the student that was on the floor, in the fetal position, having her head repeatedly kicked. Nothing was said about her traumatic brain injuries or the induced coma she was in for two weeks or her overwhelming fear of returning to the same school this monster of a student was at so she ended up transferring to a private school. By the way, this student who was the aggressor was never suspended because his special education rights were violated. He did this to at least 6 other students after this incident over the next 2 years and the district ended up paying out several millions to the parents of his victims. They finally got rid of the student by moving the program off of my campus to another one. This allowed them to fire this inept teacher. At the new campus, this student is confined to his II room and not allowed into any general education room. That principal has made sure of it. He has signed one school security officer to be with the student at all times.
My union would help pay for the legal defense, but only if I prevailed. So I did what was best for me, I hired the best attorney in the field of Education Administrative law. She has earned several awards and has won many cases that went all the way to the CA Supreme Court. I mortgaged my house and paid the retainer. I then shut up and let her talk for me.
My district told my principal to back down, she would lose. Since this was a legal action, I got a copy of all emails and I got this email. My principal did not realize I got this email and her response was she was not going to because I hurt a student and she needed to make an example of me. Their response was they would not pay for her legal costs, she was on her own and she had to pay for all of her attorney fees. They would not provide an attorney for her. She decided she did not need one. She went it alone. If you are dealing with a legal issue, never, ever appear before a judge without a competent attorney. If your boss tells you to drop it and you insist on following through on the legal action, it is a sign you are going to lose.
After 3 months, she lost. Then I took all the documentation of where she went wrong and filed suit. Then she realized she screwed up big time because the district told her to get her own attorney. She refused to settle out of court and so her costs went up and she lost. The district also lost because I went after them because she was their employee. I also went dad for his defamation and libel and filing a false police report. Because of the deep pockets law, I won an enforceable judgement against the district and the principal.
Now, as a teacher, I really do not want to take money from the education of students. So, I negotiated with the district. Since I won against the original criminal and administrative complaints against me, my union will cover much of the attorney’s fees for that. I also had to hire a criminal defense attorney. His bill was only $10,000 because he only had to file some paperwork with the DA to get the DA to make a decision to either charge me or drop it. The DA decided that at worse I was guilty of an infraction, and since I was protecting another student and had a strong defense that I was protecting her from certain death or permanent harm, what I did was legal, he would never consider filing charges because the case would be too weak and I would never be convicted. The district negotiated with the principal to cover my administrative attorney’s fee not covered by the union. This meant they told her they would withhold the money from her paycheck to pay my attorney or the principal would no longer have a job.
Then, the principal would buy 10 years of credit into my retirement plan with the state. This would come from her paycheck rather than from the district so students do not suffer. If she did not agree, she would not longer be working for the district. This will allow me to retire early and leave the state and seek employment outside of CA where education has not become so bad that the schools are run by the lowest common denominator and the students who want to learn and get an education are being left behind and whose safety is in danger every day.
In exchange, I signed a contract that I will never intervene in a fight. I will call the office and report it to an administrator. Last year, I had 8 fights in my classroom. Administrators are trained to not run to fights. They are supposed to walk because it demonstrates a calm response. My classroom is at the back of campus and it takes a minimum of 5 minutes to walk from the front to my room. The average administrative response time from the time I call to inform them there is a fight in my room to them actually arriving is 15 minutes. During that time I am supposed to evacuate the classroom of all students who are not participating and who will follow my directions. I have to supervise those students outside. The defiant students stay inside. Since I have done my duty, I am good. The students inside can hurt and maim each other all they want and they do. After the administrators arrive, a few ambulances are required.
The result, last May a police officer attempted to do CPR on a student that collapsed at lunch time. Other nearby students assumed the officer was assaulting the student or arresting the student and started a riot. They threw trash cans at that officer and the other responding officers that arrived within two minutes. The 4 administrators that arrived and told the students to disperse were ignored. The administrators sounded a lock-down and the students ignored it. They continue to attack the officer attempting CPR. The student died.
That student had tapped a mixture of pentyl and THC and she stopped breathing. It took 20 minutes for the police to to control the students, including arresting 30 of them, clearing the area enough to get the paramedics to the girl. They could not perform CPR during that time. The officer that tried to do CPR was taken to the hospital with a concussion after having two garbage cans slammed over his head.
Students learned if they fight the adults back down.
If I see a fight or a student assaulting another, I walk the other way. I am legal safe if I just call the office. If I intervene, I can lose everything. I can be sued, I can lose my job, I can lose my life savings. If I do nothing but just call the office, I am protected from all legal consequences. The worst that can happen is I get called to answer the questions from a few attorneys. I spend a few days at the district office with pay while talking to attorneys. I did that two months ago.
It went something like this. Did you see the fight. Yes. What did you do? I called the office to report it. Who did you report it to? I reported it to the attendance secretary who answered the phone and she said she would call security. I then waited in my room because I feared for my safety. I watched the fight through my classroom window. It took security 15 minutes to arrive.
Why did you not break up the fight? I did not feel I had the physical strength to do so without incurring injury to myself and I have a written contract with the school district stating I will not break up fights but will only report them to the administration because it is their job to break them up. Here is a copy of that contract.
The district hated that I brought that up but it gave me 100% legal cover. It was proof I did exactly what I was directed to do by a superior so they were 100% on the hook for my actions.
The truth is, your students are not as safe at school as district administrators want you to think.
Banana Custard Cobblers
2023 10 15 09 54
Yield: 8 servingsIngredients
Custard
1 cup granulated sugar1/2 cup cornstarch8 large egg yolks3 cups whole milk1 vanilla bean, split lengthwise6 tablespoons (34 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature1/4 cup dark rum
Topping
3/4 cup all-purpose flour1/2 cup almonds6 tablespoons (packed) golden brown sugar5 tablespoons chilled unsalted butter, cut into pieces3 bananas, thinly slicedInstructions
Custard
Whisk sugar, cornstarch and egg yolks in large bowl to blend.Bring milk and vanilla bean to boil in heavy large saucepan.Gradually whisk hot milk into egg yolk mixture; return mixture to saucepan. Whisk over medium-low heat until custard boils and thickens, about 3 minutes. Remove from heat.Whisk in butter and rum. Cool slightly.Discard vanilla bean. Cover with plastic and refrigerate until cold. (Can be prepared 1 day ahead. Keep refrigerated.)
Topping
Blend flour, almonds and brown sugar in processor to mix.
Add butter and process, using on/off turns, until coarse crumbs form. (Can be made 1 day ahead. Transfer to bowl; cover and chill.)Position rack in center of oven and preheat to 400 degrees F.Place eight 1 cup ramekins or custard cups on baking sheet.Divide custard equally among ramekins, using about cup for each.Top each dessert with about 8 banana slices.Spoon topping over banana slices, dividing equally.Bake cobblers until topping is golden brown, about 15 minutes.Remove from oven and cool slightly, about 15 minutes.Serve warm.
Unlike its better known relative, the Enigma machine which was infamously deciphered by code-breakers at Bletchley Park throughout the war, the Lorenz cipher posed a much greater challenge. Utilising 12 wheels to scramble up the message being sent as opposed to the 3 or 4 rotors found in the Enigma machine, the Lorenz cipher was incredibly secure. As a result, unlike the Enigma that was used by the German standard armed forces, the Lorenz cipher was used only by high command with messages coming from Hitler himself. As a result, to crack the Lorenz cipher (or Tunny as it was code named by the British) would have the potential to change the course of the war.
Not much headway had been made in breaking the Lorenz cipher through the war until a German operator made a catastrophic mistake on 30 August 1941. When a German receiving operator did not receive a message correctly, he asked the transmitter to resend the information and despite clear protocol against it, the two operators resent the message without changing their key settings (the settings that determine how the text is scrambled up). However since the message in question was 4000 characters long, the lazy German operator abbreviated several words, thus changing the length of the message. Since their key settings were both the same, the two messages had the same scrambling pattern of characters. Thus by comparing the locations where the message text changed, details of the way the rotors worked could be determined.
These two messages were intercepted by the British who soon realised the importance of what they had discovered. This task of cracking Tunny was given to W T (Bill) Tutte who began to find repetitions in the cipher which allowed him to reverse engineer the Lorenz machine’s logical structure in what would be later described as “one of the greatest intellectual feats of World War II”. In order to support the painstaking decryption of German messages, the British Colossus was built in 1943 by Tommy Flowers, the first ever modern computer.
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The Colossus Machine
The impact of the decryption of Tunny was enormous. It gave the British intimate details of Hitler’s most secret communications which was most notably vital in D Day where the Allies were able to deceive the Germans that they were going to attack at Calais as opposed to Normandy and at the Battle of Kursk in 1943, Germany’s last ditch attempt to reverse their fortunes on the Eastern Front and one of the largest battles in history. Involving 3 million men, without foreknowledge of German planning provided by the British, the Soviets would have been badly prepared defensively and could have lost this crucial battle and as a result, the war would’ve been prolonged. In fact, historians estimate that the breaking of the Lorenz cipher shortened the war by two years and thus saved millions of lives all due to the careless mistake of two lazy German operators.
However this pivotal event is not well known due to the Official Secrets Act keeping the nature of the code breakers working to break the Lorenz cipher secret until 1974 and some former staff even today still refuse to break their vow of secrecy, preferring to take their knowledge to the grave.
image 125
W T (Bill) Tutte, the man responsible for cracking the Lorenz Cipher
Sweet cat is trying desperately to fit in, find a home
On a somber note, the Israeli destruction on Palestine is a (text book) genocidal event. This is just as disturbing to me as the complete killing off of all the males in Ukraine.
There is something truly evil about the oligarchy that rules the West.
Their “heads aren’t screwed on tight”. They are unhinged and behaving in complete disregard for their fellow humans.
No care towards humanity.
Which means that they have evolved into something NOT HUMAN.
I shake my head in sadness.
As Everyone’s Lοοking At Ιsrael, Something Τruly Unbelievable Has Begun Ιn America
I bought a used coat from a yard sale and months later, when it turned cold, I put the jacket on and noticed a hand written note in the left pocket. It had listed things to buy at Ace Hardware.
It said Lye, ropes, tape and a small shovel.
Next to the list was the actual receipt showing the stores name, what was bought and exactly when.
I thought it seemed suspicious so I took it to the local police and they ran the info I had against an unsolved murder case.
After pulling the archived video from Ace Hardware, it was clear who the man was and after interrogating him and his fake alibi, he broke down and admitted that he was the one who picked up a 22 year old hitchhiker and raped and murdered her.
He forgot about the note and receipt in his left pocket.
He was also left handed. Had he not written it himself, it would not have proved anything, but it matched the handwriting analysis.
He also had no idea his wife sold the old jacket in a yard sale months earlier. That simple task on her part, cost him his life and he sits on death row today.
You just never know what you’re gonna get for three dollars at a yard sale.
A strategic nightmare sneaks into Washington’s political agenda: Global Times editorial
By Global Times Published: Oct 14, 2023 12:38 AM
This is horrifying. -MM
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A simultaneous war with China and Russia is a strategic nightmare that sober American strategists such as Henry Kissinger have been warning the US to avoid at all costs, and it is also a topic that some US media outlets have become more and more fond of talking about in recent years. At least from the publicly available information, Washington has never previously addressed it as a formal political agenda, supposedly aware of its seriousness and the terrible risks it carries. But the publication of a report by a congressionally appointed bipartisan panel titled America’s Strategic Posture crossed this “red line” on October 12.
The central point of the 145-page report is that the US must expand its military power, particularly its “nuclear weapons modernization program,” in order to prepare for possible simultaneous wars with China and Russia. Notably, the report diverges completely from the current US national security strategy of winning one conflict while deterring another, and from the Biden administration’s current nuclear policy. It is not a fantasy among the American public, but a serious strategic assessment and recommendation in the service of policymaking.
The 12-member panel that wrote the report was hand-picked by the US Congress from major think tanks and retired defense, security officials and former lawmakers. This report makes us feel that a “strategic nightmare” is sneaking into the US political agenda, but has not drawn due concern and vigilance in Washington, and to a large extent, the American elite group represented by the panel is actively working to make this nightmare come true.
A look at the specific recommendations of this report will send shivers down the spine of those who retain any basic rationality. The report recommends that the US deploy more warheads, and produce more bombers, cruise missiles, ballistic missile submarines, non-strategic nuclear weapons and so on. It also calls on the US to deploy warheads on land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and to consider adding road-mobile ICBMs to its arsenal, establishing a third shipyard that can build nuclear-powered ships, etc.
What depths of insanity is the US sinking to? The US’ military spending accounts for nearly 40 percent of the world’s total defense expenditures, and it has been growing dramatically for several years, with military spending in 2023 reaching $813.3 billion, more than the GDP of most countries, but even that is not enough for these politicians. Such a report full of geopolitical fanaticism and war imagery, whether or not it actually ends up as a “guide” for Washington’s decision-making, is dangerous and needs to be resisted and opposed by all peace-loving countries.
According to some American media, the report ignores the consequences of a nuclear arms race. In fact, the report doesn’t seem to consider this at all and doesn’t suggest any measures other than nuclear expansion to address this issue. In other words, it is a reckless approach. Both China and Russia are nuclear powers, and everyone knows that provoking a confrontation between nuclear powers is a crazy idea. Even promoting a nuclear arms race under the banner of “deterrence” is a disastrous step backward in history. Washington’s political elites, who lived through the Cold War, cannot be unaware of this. However, the fact that such an absurd and off-key report is being presented in all seriousness by the US Congress is both surreal and unsurprising. It is in line with the distorted political atmosphere in Washington today.
The motives behind this exaggeration of threats and creating a warlike atmosphere are highly suspicious. The recent outbreak of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict caused a sharp increase in US defense industry stocks, while American defense industry companies have also been the biggest beneficiaries of the long-standing Russia-Ukraine conflict. The military-industrial complex, like a geopolitical monstrosity, parasitically clings to American society, manipulating its every move, pushing Washington step by step to introduce and even prepare for ideas that were once considered “impossible.”
The prosperity of the American military-industrial complex is built upon blood and corpses, and carries a primal guilt. Serving the interests of the American military-industrial complex is unethical.
The reality is that such rhetoric is becoming increasingly politically acceptable in today’s Washington. The idea of “preparing for possible simultaneous wars with Russia and China,” once a fringe fantasy, has gradually made its way into Washington’s agenda, which is deeply unsettling.
If Washington were to adopt even a small portion of the recommendations in this report, the harm and threats it could pose to world peace would be immeasurable and would ultimately backfire on the US itself.
There is an old Chinese saying: “Those who play with fire will perish by it.” This is something that is worth Washington’s careful consideration.
In 1980 my boss had left the company and had planned to sell his very nice 1970 Buick LeSabre for $500. One Monday I came into my office and the keys to the Buick were on my desk with a note saying that the automatic transmission was bad and that it would cost more than the car was worth and that I could have it for $25 since that is all the wrecking yard would give him.
I picked up the car one evening and was able to make it part way home before the “transmission” problem occurred.
Fortunately, I was near the company parking lot where I left the car. The next morning, in daylight, with the help of my brother-in-law, we discovered that the “transmission problem” was actually the air conditioning compressor intermittently locking up and putting a severe drag on the engine.
Since it was fall in southern California, we just cut off the single belt that drove the AC compressor and the car ran great. Months later, a neighbor was putting a Chevy V8 into a Toyota pickup and gave me the AC compressor, which we installed on the Buick. And the AC worked perfectly.
I told my boss how we fixed the “transmission” problem and offered him $500 for the Buick.
He declined and said I should keep the car for $25.
I told him I didn’t want my wife driving a $25 car, so he agreed to $250.
That summer I decided to install an aftermarket cruise control unit on the Buick and while routing wires under the dash, I noticed a small spring, not unlike the ones in ball point pens, was broken in an AC/heater duct. I replaced that spring (cost was less than $1) and noticed that the AC was coming out of the dash vents where previously it was just coming from the floor.
When I next saw my former boss, he said that he had taken the Buick to the dealership to complain about the AC/heat not coming from the dash vents, and they told him that to fix the problem they would have to remove the dash and it would cost more than the car was worth.
I put an additional 100K miles on that car and only recall replacing the brakes and a distributor, in addition to routine maintenance. In 1992, as I was moving to Texas from NJ, a co-worker asked if I would sell him the car, which I did.
As an aside, my former boss went to work for a company that made high power gas lasers, costing at that time about $25,000.
At my next company, I needed one of those lasers. I happened to mention to my former boss at a conference that I hoped to buy one of those lasers, but didn’t have the budget.
A few weeks later, a high power gas laser unexpectedly arrived on the shipping dock!
I called my former boss and he said if and when I get the budget, let him know and he will replace the “loaner” laser with a new one. Probably a year or so later, I did find the money and paid for the “loaner” laser.
My former boss’s company also made an even higher power laser for $50,000. I later wondered if I had given him $500 for the car if he would have shipped a $50K “loaner.”
I would ask him, but he passed away, way too young, years ago.
Rest in peace, Dean…
Life in URUGUAY! – South America’s Richest and Safest Country
As an Uruguayan I want to make a comment. First, great video, mostly accurate expect for a couple of details.
When you show the ‘gauchos” those look more like people on horses from Bolivia or Peru, or even maybe somewhere in northern Argentina or Chile. Because, first of all, in Uruguay, the gaucho’s “poncho” is usually made of plain dark colors, and most important, we do not have mountains, like the ones you show. About population “skin” color, let me make some remarks.
The original population in Uruguay is around 90% of European descent, and when I say European I mean, from all over Europe, including countries like: Germany, Poland, Switzerland, Russian, Denmark, etc. Not only Southern Europe. So there are a lot of fair skin color people including blonde, blue eyes.
But what has been happening in the last decade is that there’s a large immigration wave, such as from the Caribbean countries, as well as from the rest of Latin America.
So, the demographic is changing rapidly because Uruguayan’s population as you established is very small, so the culture is also changing, including the food and even the language…
2500 Foreigners have been invited to the Hangzhou Asian Games in China
Ordinary Foreigners
From US, Canada, Europe and Japan and South Korea
Fully paid for, Business Class Tickets, Five Star Pampering
All China asks them to do is to cover the Games on their Social Media (TikTok mainly or YT or Instagram)
The result is despite the Western Media almost entirely ignoring the Asian Games, a whopping 673 Million people worldwide are watching the events
This is China’s Strategy to counter thr Western Media
Not launching their own MSM and insanely and making accusations
Instead , they bring ORDINARY PEOPLE and treating them to what China looks like and spreading the message
A Popular Teenager goes home and says “Man do you know China is so different from what we hear in our TV channels”
Slowly this gains traction
It’s a long term plan targeting the 19–24 year olds today and gradually influencing the Younger Generation
The key reason is INFLUENCE
The 12–36 year old US Generation doesn’t view China as an enemy but as a neutral country or as a mutually beneficial country
Yet 36–65 year old Americans, the MSM influenced generation see almost 75% of them view China as an enemy
China is slowly influencing the younger generation and in a way that US simply cannot comprehend
Long term, slow and PATIENTLY
Every year you have 20,000 Vloggers invited to China and cover China positively
They influence around 60 Million -150 Million people
Tourvashu is one of these
He influences 2 Million Indians
Most are 16–20 year olds
More likely to watch Tourvashu than Palki Or Gravitas or Arnab
Slowly the Younger Indians will be influenced and say “Yaar Tune Chaayina ka wo Video dekha. Mast tha”
So you wonder why Apple is not banned. In China?
Same reason
It’s not the Chinese way
These Brash, Useless and Economically unsound tactics are not something the Chinese do
China will encourage Apple, use it as a gold standard to develop their own industry, and undercut the iphone eventually
Take the Chinese High Speed Rail
In 2005, Chinese imported exclusively their Boring Machines (Germany, Switzerland), Engines (Japan, Spain), Software (UK, Singapore, US) and Electronics (Japan, S Korea)
Today nearly 90% of their High Speed Rail Supplies are COMPLETELY MADE IN CHINA with same or better quality
They have decimated TBM markets in Germany with export shares plummeting from 69% in 2000 to 11% in 2023
Took them 17–18 years
That’s how China works
These loser protectionism bans don’t work for China
They COMPETE and UNDERCUT and enhance quality with competition
The Trump Ban begun in 2019
So the key is to see if China will beat the Apple and undercut the company by 2036–2037
I am willing to guarantee that they will
It’s what they do
Kind of their Mantra
Banning is what Losers do
Competing and beating with Economics is what Winners do
When I was a young boy I used to get teased a lot in school and I didn’t have many friends. I was a fat kid and often got called a “fat slob”, “pig”, and “smelly or “stinky”. I took a bath at least once a week, more in the summer, and tried to keep clean so I knew I was just getting teased because I was fat. When I was eleven my best friend’s mom drove us home from baseball practice one day. Out of the blue she turned to me in the back seat and said, “Andy, you smell and you need to bathe more often.” She did not say it in a mean way but in a stern businesslike manner. My best friend was horrified and said nothing.
When I got home I immediately took a shower and wondered about what was going on. Obviously, I’d been sweaty from practice but she must have known that. As I thought it over, it also dawned on me that my skinny little sister often got teased as “smelly” too. I’d always assumed she got it from association with me, not because she smelled. So I told my mom what happened and asked her to tell me honestly if I smelled. She said, “no” and started to get a little upset about my best friend’s mom saying that to me.
I went to play outside and saw one of my classmates across the street. We had an on-again/off-again friendship up to that point. I guess we were what you might call “frenemies” today but at this point in time, we were more on the friendly side. I decided to get his opinion believing he wouldn’t hold back. In fact, he had teased me before about being smelly. So I asked him straight-up, “Do I smell?” He answered very matter-of-factly, “yes”. “My sister too?” “Yes, her too,” he replied. Then I asked him what we smelled like. He then told me that this had actually been a subject of discussion among his family who did not want me or my sister in their house because of our smell. He said his parents said we smelled like “old books”. Immediately, this brought to mind the set of Encyclopedia Britannicas I had in my bedroom closet. I immediately went home to check them out. Not only were they covered in mold but vast sections of my closet and room had mold. In fact, I found it throughout our home. But it didn’t smell to me. I was used to it. We all were. We lived in the woods surrounded by soggy tree pools so our home was often damp. We had no AC nor did we need it. This was back in 1972 before the internet and all the scares about the dangers of mold.
I told my mother what I’d learned and was able to convince her this was what was causing my sister and me to smell and probably her too. We cleaned everything with bleach, aired out the house, and bought dehumidifiers. From then on I showered every day. My friends all told me I no longer smelled. That following summer I also worked my ass off to get physically fit. I don’t know how many more years I might have suffered but for this very simple and brutally honest admonition from my friend’s mother. To this day, my best friend of 58 years still tells me how embarrassed he was that his now-deceased mother said that to me. And I always remind him she did me one of the greatest favors of my life.
Flip Flop Cherry Cobbler
CHERRY COBBLER 05 28 2028115 1
Yield: 6 to 8 generous portions
Ingredients
1/2 cup butter
1 cup granulated sugar
2 cups all-purpose flour
4 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup milk
8 cups cherry pie filling
1/2 cup granulated sugar
Instructions
Coat a 9 x 13 inch baking dish with cooking spray.
With an electric mixer, cream the butter and sugar.
In a separate bowl, combine flour, baking powder and salt. Add to butter mixture alternating with the milk; mix until well combined.
Spread batter evenly into prepared pan.
Top with filling and sprinkle with sugar. Cover and freeze.
To bake: Thaw completely in refrigerator.
Bake at 375 degrees F for 40 minutes or until browned.
Mighty China Remove All Iran Sanctions Placed By U.S and E.U
In this eye-opening video, we explore the shifting dynamics of power and influence between Iran, the United States, and China. With the U.S. imposing stringent sanctions on Iran, China steps in to form a strategic alliance, challenging the global power balance. Learn more about the economic, political, and strategic implications of this trilateral relationship and how it could shape the future of global geopolitics.
Going anonymous because it is a part of my life that not even my closest friends are aware of.
This is from the time when I was 12 years old. My mom had a problem where her breast would develop lumps which would have to be removed surgically. This problem started before I was born and she would undergo these procedures every couple of years. We lived in a small town with limited access to advanced medical facilities, but the doctors always told us that the lumps were not malignant.
When I was 12, this one lump was growing very big. My dad (who is a doctor himself) decided to take her to Delhi to get some tests done. I have two elder sisters and we (me, my sister and my parents) live with my grandparents.
So, my parents were away in Delhi and my grand mother would spend the day on the phone talking to relatives, spreading rumors that my mom actually had cancer and saying that we three are a burden on them and that they just want my parents to come and get us off their head.
My sisters, who were older and more mature, would mostly stay in their room, but I, by nature liked to be outside with my mom and in her absence, my granny. Hearing these things used to hurt me, but I wouldn’t tell my sisters since I knew they’d be hurt even more.
I started taking up house-work with my granny (though we had help by my granny used to crib that we 3 were a burden)-cooking half meals, helping with washing clothes. All this I did without my sisters’ knowledge (or they’d never have let me do it).
This was a time when mobiles didn’t exist in India and fixed line phones were the only means of communication. News from my parents used to reach us with a lag. We just kept praying that our mom comes back safely.
After tests at AIIMS (top hospital in India), our parents returned awaiting results and my granny immediately left for my aunt (her daughter’s) place citing she needed “rest”.
Results came in-the growth didn’t seem malignant but needed a fairly complicated medical procedure in Chandigarh. These were times when my dad was under a lot of financial pressure (though my grandparents were well-off and my dad was the only son). My dad requested my granny over call that they need to leave immediately and that though he had applied for their life savings-their FDs to be broken, but if it doesn’t happen on time, if my grandparents could lend money till the FD money could reach home.
Unbelievably, my granny just didn’t come home! She made my aunt call in saying she would stay longer at her place and that my parents can leave for the surgery! I still remember my dad almost crying, not sure if he would be able to arrange money on time to save his wife (the tumour had grown visibly big). By God’s grace, the FDs broke a day before they had to leave and they left us alone, at the trust of the neighbours who were more helpful than my grandparents!
It was a long, painful time when my mother received treatment-a surgery which lasted 9 hours, where doctors almost gave up hope, where she was on ventilator support for days. All this while, I kept hearing from my granny’s conversations as she invited friends over, that it was certainly cancer, that such complicated surgeries could only be for cancer. It kept on making the 12-year old me scared as I knew cancer is something bad, it is something that can take away my mom.
We first got a chance to speak to our mom after 35 days when she managed to call from a hotel after her discharge. Those 35 days had been a struggle beyond my imagination for my parents (which they told me much later when I was around 20). With just my dad for company-he had managed everything from sleeping on hospital floors to washing my mom’s clothes.
My mom has recovered fully and still prays everyday for the doctors who cured her.
My dad still hates my grand parents, and I don’t feel any love for them wither.
My grand dad passed away a few years ago and we still live with my granny because my mom still thinks its our duty.
But, the pain is still there, the fear that the 12-year old felt is still there ,the betrayal is still feels fresh when I see my granny.
I grew up in those 2 months, chopped off my hair because I had long hair and my granny wouldn’t help manage them.
I hardened, realized I only have my parents and my sisters who will stand by me, and I will stand by them till I die.
I realised the world is cruel, looking at my relatives’ behaviour in that period.
“Hector, I retired before you were born,” he laughed.
Confused, I asked again, “Be honest, Dad, I mean, when will you stop working?”
His response was simple, “Working? What’s work? I don’t know what work is.”
“OK, Dad, forget about it,” I said as I assumed he wasn’t willing to talk about this.
“Hector,” he said, “what you know as my job is not work for me. I enjoy architecture so much that I could do this 24/7. This is who I am. Architecture is my life.”
So, to answer your question, why do rich people work even after they become rich? Why don’t they play?
My father lived to be 91 and worked until his body gave up on him. He was a passionate architect who found joy in his work. That’s what kept him active and full of joy every day. His passion for architecture was infectious, and it taught me this valuable lesson about work as a lifestyle.
So, if you ask me about retirement or work-life balance, I’d say it’s better to find what you love and make it a part of your life. When you find that, you’ll stop working and start living. We achieve a balance not by separating work from life but by integrating what you love into your lifestyle.
Today, this is how I see it: It’s not about working less; it’s about loving more what you do.
That’s the secret to a fulfilling life. As my father always said, “The day you find what you love is when you will stop working.”
Heavy Rain forced Mother Cat to Carry her kitten in Streets, but No One Opened the Door for Them!
In the pouring rain, we spotted a soaked cat seeking shelter. Feeling sorry for her, we followed as she led us to her hidden kitten in the woods. We gently petted the mama cat, who had braved the relentless rain. The tiny, wet kitten needed our care, so we wrapped him in a warm blanket. Back at our home, where rescued cat families and foster cats live together happily, we ensured both mother and baby were dry and well-groomed. A vet visit ensured mama cat’s health, and we even gave the kitten a bath, revealing his adorable charm. The heartwarming reunion between mother and kitten was filled with playfulness and bonding, showing the strength of family ties.
Here’s one example, regarding myself: I was working as a bouncer at a bar in Erie, Pa one night and some guy, about 24 years old or so was making quite a bit of trouble, harassing customers, pushing some, bullying others, etc.
He was somewhat high, but not drunk, and it seemed he was there just to harass and embarrass/humiliate some who were there with a date. He was pretty big, about 225 pounds and about 6 feet and acting like a real bully. When I was told about some guy doing these things ( He wasn’t near my door, but farther inside ), I went in to see what was up.
When I got there he was harassing some poor kid who was clearly scared and was with his girlfriend. As I approached, a few people pointed at this guy and said, “get him out if here, he’s an asshole.” .
I got up to him and very nicely told him to leave the kid alone and that he’d have to leave because he was causing too much trouble.
He looked at me, stood up as high as he could (I hate when they do that, like it matters), and said, “Who’s going to make me?” I said, simply, “me.”
He told me to get lost or he’d beat the shit out of me.
I said, “Well, let’s go outside and see who comes back in, and, if it’s you, you can stay.” He smiled, said,”I’m gonna enjoy this” and said, “let’s go” and we walked outside. By that time, everyone, including the other bouncer at my door knew what was going to happen.
The other bouncer, Tommy Williams, just stood at the door and smiled while we walked outside. Well, when we got out about 15 feet from the door, the moron suddenly turned and tried to hit me with a roundhouse kick which I not only blocked, but grabbed his leg and picked him up by the leg and threw him to the ground, saying, ”I don’t think karate is going to help you here.”
He jumped up and said, “how about this, asshole? and then tried a double leg takedown, as, apparently, at some time he was a wrestler. I actually laughed and said, “oh, you want to wrestle, huh?” and then as I countered his sad attempt, the other bouncer, who had heard everything, shouted out: “Wrestle? well you picked the right guy, he’s the National wrestling Champion……”
I just said, “You picked the wrong guy you moron,” and, as my friend, Tommy later said to me, I literally swept the parking lot with him.
I never saw him after two of his friends ended up taking either home or to the hospital.
He was a bully.
He got to feel like those he had bullied before.
I was NOT kind to him.
No regrets, but I bet he was kinda surprised when he heard the other bouncer tell him who I was, and he had no escape, as even as he said over and over, “I quit, I give up.”
I told him that it wasn’t up to him, It was my call and I wasn’t done yet.
That is a scary thing to realize, that you can’t quit, that it’s up to the guy beating the crap out of you. But I believe it has led others like that guy to never bully anyone again. Jeff
Sat in a bar in South Pattaya one Sunday afternoon in 1991 I noticed a fairly fit looking bloke dressed only in flip flops and shorts. He suddenly ordered everyone a drink then turned to me and said “I see my friend that you are interested in my tattoos.” I wasn’t that interested but I wasn’t going to argue and let him tell me. One he’d got for some work in the Philippines – the other some thing in the Mekong Delta. A mahout then came by with a large elephant which the man went across to look at saying they’d always fascinated him. So I asked him where he came from – American Samoa he replied. And what did he do? He worked “for the government”.
He then stepped back and ordered another drink for everyone in the bar. I thanked him and he turned and said “Let’s eat and drink for tomorrow we may be dead”. He then looked me in the eye with the coldest eyes I’d ever seen and said “ You know it is very easy. I pick up the gun, I pull the trigger and they are gone.” It was evident he wasn’t bullshitting.
That evening I saw the bar owner – who comes from Texas – and mentioned this guy. “Oh yes that’s so and so – he’s a US Navy SEAL. Bad news when he’s drunk.”
Guess I can be thankful I met him whilst he was sober!
Atheist Overdoses; Shown Soul’s Process Of Pre-Life Planning (NDE)
Her story is powerful. All of her words should have been heard and none bleeped out….
If you are offended by profanity, best skip this response.
I, too, am in the top 1% of wealth holders in this country, albeit, on lowest rung, yet minimum wage at my small Inn is higher than it is at this billionaire cunt’s company. I have no problem finding employees. This piece of shit motherfucker sits on his yacht sipping pina coladas while his employees need a second job to just pay the bills to live their day to day lives.
This asshole supports the Republican Party with massive amounts of money, and as a wealthy person, I can tell you a thing or two about how tax laws work in this country. For those of you who make less than $250k a year but still vote Republican, your economic misery is your own fault. The Democratic Party has LOTS of problems, but one problem they don’t have is trying to make life better for the average person and if you stopped watching your choice of right wing media, you’d soon realize that. It’s people like this cunt who are destroying America and contributing NOTHING to it.
What did this prick do? He built a fucking store, massively exploited his workforce by grabbing all the loot for himself and then whining when ordinary people have had enough and don’t want to work for anymore. Fuck him, and his fellow cunt billionaires.
When I was doing my B Tech, there was a Professor Talukedar who used to teach us ‘Mechanics’.
His lectures used to be very interesting since he had an interesting way to teach and explain the concepts.
One day, in the class, he asked the following questions,
What is ZERO.
What is INFINITY.
Can ZERO and INFINITY be same.
We all thought that we knew the answers and we replied as following,
ZERO means nothing
INFINITY means a number greater than any countable number
ZERO and INFINITY are opposite and they can never be same
He countered us by first talking about infinity and asked, ‘How can there be any number which is greater than any countable number?’
We had no answers.
He then explained the concept of infinity in a very interesting way, which I remember even after more than 35 years.
He said that imagine that there is an illiterate shepherd who can count only upto 20.
Now, if the number of sheep he has less than 20 and you ask him how many sheep he has, he can tell you the precise number (like 3, 5 14 etc.). However, if the number is more than 20, he is likely to say “TOO MANY”.
He then explained that in science infinity means ‘too many’ (and not uncountable) and in the same way zero means ‘too few’ (and not nothing)
As an example, he said that if we take the diameter of the Earth as compared to distance between Earth and Sun, the diameter of earth can be said to zero since it is too small.
However, when we compare the same diameter of earth with the size of a grain, diameter of earth can be said to be infinite.
Hence, he concluded that the same thing can be ZERO and INFINITE at the same time, depending on the context, or your matrix of comparison.
The relationship between richness and poverty is similar to the relationship between infinity and zero.
It all depends on the scale of comparison with your wants.
If your income is more than your wants, you are rich.
If your wants are more than your income, you are poor.
I consider myself rich because my wants are far lesser than my income.
I have become rich not so much by acquiring lots of money, but by progressively reducing my wants.
If you can reduce your wants, you too can become rich at this very moment.
I came home very sick with flu one day, went up to my bedroom, my husband was in my bed with the mail lady. I told them both to get the fuck out of my house. He argued that he needed sleep cuz he worked overnights. He needed his clothes and stuff. I told him all his clothes would be alongside the garage by Monday. It’s where the garbage is kept. Take a shirt and stuff he needed for tonight and get lost. Take a shower at her house or work. I packed up his stuff in garbage bags along with the topper to our wedding cake, some mementos from our honeymoon, I was being passive aggressive I agree, but how dare he sleep with her in our bed, in our home. We had a 2 year old and a 6 mos old. He was just wrong. He showed up a month later crying to me that she had broken up with him. I told him too bad, I didn’t feel bad for him in the least. I got the house( and mortgage) in the divorce. It was ok cuz I wanted the kids to stay in their home and school and I made more money, the root cause of the problem. He felt inadequate cuz I was a senior manager and he was doing maintenance work. This was no issue for me, just for him.
When I first got married, we would be passionate everywhere, if you know what I mean, bed, floor, couch, where ever. We would do things for each other. And we enjoyed each other’s company. She was from Japan I am white american.
I learned to speak Japanese and we lived in Japan a few years and life was good. We had kids together, but over the years things grew cold between us.
They say that people change and you grow apart. I don’t think either of us changed. I doubt that most people change. What I suspected happened was that I would base my love on how much she loved me and visa versa. If she did something nice for me, I would do something nice for her. Or if I did something nice for her, she would do something nice for me.
That all sounds fine and dandy, but I think in practice, it doesn’t work. When I do something nice for her, I expect something of equal niceness in return. However, often is the case that you don’t perceive what is done in return is as valuable as what you gave him or her. So the next time you do something, you feel less inclined to do something as nice. And so the love kind of fizzles.
You basically stop caring because you perceive your partner as not caring. And chances are your partner feels the same way about you. Neither person has changed. They are both the same person, but the love isn’t there anymore. They let it spiral into nothingness.
That is what my wife and I did. After 20 some odd years of marriage, there was nothing. I really had no desire to do anything for my wife, because she wasn’t going to do anything for me. We didn’t hate each other. We helped each other when needed, but that is about all.
I was unhappy with the marriage. I either wanted out or I wanted it fixed. But after 20 years of marriage, I knew that she wasn’t going to try and fix the marriage. I knew that she thought I would not change so why should she have to do anything special and if I did change, it would only be temporary and things would go back to how they were, so why even try. I knew this would be her mind set.
So I had 3 options. Divorce, stay in the lifeless, sexless marriage, or take a chance and do something about it.
I thought perhaps divorce would be the better way. Start anew. She had given up on me and didn’t care.
But I decided to give it a try anyway. I completely revamped my approach. I decided that I would try for one year to fix this. I would not require her to do anything. I would just do these things on my own. If these things wooed her back then she would be back on her own terms and not mine.
So I did the following.
I committed to get into shape… better diet, exercise
I committed to do something special for her everyday regardless of whether we were getting along or not.
I committed to do at least an additional 30 minutes of house work every day.
I committed to pay her a sincere compliment at least once per day.
I committed not to fight with her and to only have calm arguments with her.
I decided to fix her dinner and breakfast as often as possible.
In essence I decided to love her every day.
As I thought, I got essentially no response from her day after day. I mean she would sometimes say thank you, but that was about it. After about four months she started to change. I kept at it. She continued to change. Ok.. she didn’t change. She was the same person, but she saw that I was trying. She saw that she was important to me. She saw that I wasn’t giving up. She wanted to be loved.
She started doing things for me again. We started talking a lot more and doing a lot more together. We started dating again and going on trips. It was almost like we were newly weds again, but with less passion, but it felt great. Sometimes I would just hold her in my arms for 30 minutes.
Love can be revived. It is not easy. True love takes work. Making the decision above to love her regardless was the second best decision of my life. The first of course was to marry her. Our marriage is not perfect, but I look forward to seeing her every day. She is an awesome woman. She is basically the same person I married. We just let our love die. We were lazy lovers. She asked me one day what got into me and I talked with her about my plan. I think it was a pretty good plan and so did she. And yes, we are still married, but much more happily now.
I knew our love couldn’t be one sided, but I also knew it needed to start somewhere and why not me. Ask yourself, why not you? Do you want the love back? what kind of sacrifice are you willing to make to have the love back? If I had decided that she needed to do something while I was doing something, then we would have been right back to where we started. You can’t base your actions on what the other is doing in return. You need to commit to love regardless of what is done in return. That is the sacrifice and that is where real love will begin.
Edit.
I can’t believe how many people have read and liked this. Someone mentioned the 40 day challenge. I found out about that several months after I started on this path. There is a movie out there along these same lines called fireproof that is worth a watch.
For me things didn’t change around in 40 days. It took quite a bit longer. But you have to ask yourself is divorce really the better way out? Yes, sometimes it is. But infidelity doesn’t have to be the end of life as we know it.
I look back on these events and they seem like a distant memory, the hurt and pain. like a forgotten dream. But it really wasn’t that long ago. I am a better person because of it. She has become a better person as well and we are definitely a better couple.
6 REASONS WHY AMERICANS ARE OBESE. WHAT IS CAUSING THE RISING OBESITY IN THE USA?
It’s no secret that obesity in America has been an ongoing issue and that doesn’t seem to be changing anytime soon.
In fact, according to Harvard University; about 2 in every 3 adults or 69 percent of the population in the US are overweight while1 in 3 adults are obese or 39 percent.
It has to make you wonder how the most powerful and advanced nation in the world can be so obese especially when compared to countries in Europe and Asia, it’s not like we don’t have the means as a nation for healthier lifestyle and better-quality food.
Or maybe Americans are meant to be obese, and they want us to stay that way? Sounds controversial right, well in this video we will expose 8 reasons why Americans are so obese compared to other countries.
Our country born with troubles since its independence.
Have you ever heard about the Burma Campaign in World War 2? It is quite thorough and one of the most destructive campaigns largely forgotten by Western Powers and historians. The entire infrastructure of the country was destroyed during the course of the war. By the end of the war, the country was totally in rubbles and a massive number of firearms were widespread even in the village level which was left behind by warring powers. The situation was ripe for armed insurgencies.
The country was never been administered as a whole before British arrival. The region out of central Myanmar was usually administered by local petty chiefs with vassal-high king relationship which never need any direct contact between different cultures (except a few tributary missions and merchants). There is no large-scale internal trade and the transportation was also difficult. Different cultures and ethnic groups suddenly came into contact under British rule. As usual, the British exploited the situation by creating a divide & conquer strategy by favouring ethnic minorities over the Burmese majority. This led to extreme Burmese nationalism.
Due to economic disaster in the 1930s and later devastating war, the country is under very hard economic conditions which was a natural breeding ground for communism. The Burmese Communist Party which never believed in British plan for independence already went rebellion even before independence.
Then, the world’s longest-running civil war began.
In the 1950s and 60s, the civil war lost momentum and Burma came under the spotlight of international relations due to its leading role in third world nations, one of the founders of the non-aligned movement. The country was also the only real democratic nation in Southeast Asia with regular elections. The country largely recovered from the war at the beginning of the 1960s and hopes ran high. A federal system was proposed by the ethnic leaders and the government agreed.
All out of sudden, the coup came. At first, people weren’t serious as they already seen a short 2 years long military rule which stabilized the country and the coup ended with the mostly free and fair elections. By the time they realized that the military is no longer intended to give up the power this time, the civil war gained intensity and all the things we achieved in the last 10 years were gone.
The military junta slowly transformed themselves into businessmen by laying hands on the country’s economy entirely. The Myanmar Economic Corporation (MEC) ran by the military alone control nearly 40–50% of the country’s economy directly or indirectly. With the lack of a proper banking system, the ordinary people have no access to much-needed capital for investments. Small and Medium scale businesses have no chance to grow unless the monopoly of military elites and their relatives were removed.
So he responds in self-defense and you teach him that if the attacker is female he’s supposed to just sit there writhing in pain getting injured? And she got off scott-free?
What’s next? She stabs him and he gets tossed in a closet and fed gruel and water? Because you might as well.
If you knew she attacked first, you should have punished HER. You discipline all parties that have transgressed, not just the ones who have a penis. Having a vagina doesn’t magically bestow immunity on a person.
If you confiscated all his devices, you should have confiscated hers as well. For his month of grounding, she should have received two.
There’s a big difference between a slap in the face (which stings but quickly dissapates) and kicking someone in the jewelies (which could cause irreparable damage).
No. You’re punishment wasn’t good enough. You half-assed it due to sexist reasoning. Go back and discipline your daughter as well.
Who Wants To Be A WARMONGER?!
Inspired by the war hawks that run the West, it’s the game show that always ends badly!
Even though this was a relatively small thing, it affected me profoundly.
On my lunch break from work, I went to a fast food place. A homeless man came in. He was absolutely filthy, with long, greasy hair and dirty hands, dressed in raggedy clothes with a piece of blanket wrapped around him. He smelled bad. He didn’t seem able to talk and he went from table to table, sort of chittering at people, like a rat. People were pretty horrified and either gave him a quarter or just ignored him.
There was one table with 4 Mexican day laborers. These are guys who often are in the U.S. “illegally” and who hang around outside home improvement stores, hoping to pick up jobs. They don’t make much money and sometimes people cheat them, knowing the laborers can’t go to the authorities. A lot of these men may live in one house so they can save money and send it back to their families in Mexico.
When this homeless man came up to their table, they asked him, “Are you hungry? Do you want something to eat?” Then they gave him all of their food, packing it up for him so he could carry it away. Then they didn’t go and buy more food themselves (they probably couldn’t afford it), but simply cleared the table and walked out. They knew what it was to suffer, and they very likely would suffer a bit from their generosity. But that didn’t stop them; and they were the best example of kindness I have ever seen. It was over 30 years ago, and it still affects me.
The night my daughter died in a double hit-and-run in Colorado, a stranger stopped to help her and was witness to the second car that hit her, ending her life. He had been trying to help her though; he called for an ambulance and although it was ultimately unsuccessful, every effort was made to save her life. That stranger is a hero as far as I’m concerned.
The man who tried to help was very traumatized by what he had witnessed and had to change jobs so that he no longer had to daily pass by the place where my daughter died as he went to and from work. Unrelated to the accident, he and his wife got rid of their landline when they moved. I wanted very much to thank him but although I had tried every way I knew, his job had changed, he no longer had a telephone I could call 411 for and he no longer lived in the same place. I finally decided that simply being grateful would have to be enough, even if I couldn’t tell him myself.
Two years later, I’m sitting at the dinner table in a hostel in London and strike up a conversation with a guy also having dinner there. He was from the same area as me. He remembered my daughter’s death not just from it being in the news, but because the husband of one of his co-workers had stopped and tried to help the young lady.
OMG.
To make a long story short, he put me in touch with his co-worker and I was able to email her and express my thanks and gratitude for her husband’s efforts that night. She emailed me back and said that although her husband was desperately sorry he couldn’t save her, he was grateful that she didn’t have to die alone. He is a hero in my eyes and I’m so glad I got to let him know how grateful our family is. May he and his loved ones be abundantly blessed.
China Reveals HUGE Sanctions On US Tech Giants Due A STAGGERING Unpaid $1 Trillion
The direct consequences for the implicated U.S. tech companies are potentially disastrous. China is a significant market for many of these entities, and the sanctions could drastically affect their revenue, stock prices, and global operations. Companies like Apple, which rely on China for both sales and a vast portion of their supply chain, could see significant disruptions. The same goes for firms like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, which have invested billions in capturing the Chinese market and establishing a supply chain nexus.
Furthermore, these sanctions could also impact hundreds of smaller U.S. tech firms and startups that might not be direct targets but could suffer collateral damage due to the intertwined nature of the tech ecosystem. This isn’t just a bilateral U.S.-China issue; the sanctions have ramifications for the global tech industry. Supply chains across the world are intricately linked, and disruptions in China could lead to ripple effects impacting tech manufacturing globally. Countries and businesses that rely on these tech giants for critical infrastructure, software, and hardware might find themselves caught in the crossfire.
The European Union, India, Japan, and South Korea, among others, will be closely watching the developments. Any prolonged conflict could force these nations to recalibrate their tech dependencies and alliances. On the diplomatic front, this escalation further strains an already tense U.S.-China relationship. The last few years have witnessed a hardening of stances on both sides, with trade wars, tech bans, and territorial disputes. This new development might just push the diplomatic ties to a new low.
As the news of China’s unprecedented sanctions reverberated across the globe, key stakeholders began weighing in, highlighting the vast complexities of the issue. Major international business councils, traditionally silent on political matters, expressed deep concern over the possible long-term disruptions to global trade. Wall Street responded predictably, with significant declines in tech stock prices. Investor sentiments seem to mirror the broader fears. If China and the U.S., two of the world’s largest economies, can’t resolve their differences amicably, what hope is there for the stability of the global economic order?
Moreover, experts in international relations also sounded the alarm. The escalation of this magnitude in the U.S.-China tech conflict marks a deviation from conventional trade disagreements. The integration of geopolitics with business is not new, but the scale of this rift indicates a deep-seated power struggle reflecting ambitions, fears, and strategies beyond mere economic interests.
One of the most pressing concerns for the sanctioned tech companies and the international community is the verification of China’s claim. How is this enormous one trillion dollars figure reached without transparent documentation and a clear breakdown? Suspicions linger over the validity of such a vast sum. The call for a neutral third-party audit has gained traction in various quarters. International bodies like the World Trade Organization could potentially mediate, ensuring that claims and counterclaims are examined impartially.
While the U.S. government has not yet announced any countermeasures, there’s widespread speculation about potential retaliation. Would the U.S. respond with equivalent sanctions on Chinese tech companies? Could there be a broader economic response that targets other sectors of the Chinese economy? Such a move would undoubtedly lead to further escalation, intensifying the trade war and potentially causing harm to global economic stability.
As an immigrant, one thing that always spooks me is paperwork and all related things to immigration process.
One day, I was outside working on my garden, when I came back inside, there were four missed calls. Just like a habit, I copied and pasted the phone number to Google search, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection – Corpus Christi Border Patrol Station popped up.
I started panicking. Why? Why they called me?!?? So, when the phone number appeared again a few minutes after that, I picked it up.
A woman on the phone let me know that there was someone used my identity to cross the border, tried to traffic drugs into the country. She told me that this could happen because I traveled outside of the country recently (which was correct). I was nervous. Then the woman proceeded to tell me she ‘would help me to verify and straighten things up’. Then she asked me my full name, DoB and Social Number.
At this point, I started smelling B.S. I told her, wasn’t it an identity thief case? Shouldn’t she have those information already? She got furious and told me, she was ‘trying to help’ and I needed to ‘cooperate’ or else I would ‘end up in jail’.
I decided to cut off the call, told her I would contact my lawyer and said goodbye then hung up.
I did some searching, then I decided to call back the phone number. It went to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection – Corpus Christi Border Patrol Station for real. I talked to an officer. He told me I was right hanging up the call and told me scammers nowadays gets really aggressive. They can hi-jack the phone number line like that, so the Caller ID looks like it’s legitimate from government offices. He also told me: If the government wants anything from you, they will send snail mails, they don’t call.
He came home from work, ate dinner, and said , ““I want you to do something and I don’t want you to fight me on this. I want a divorce.” I was completely blindsided. Then he packed a bag and left for his mother’s house. I made him leave his key. He didn’t understand that, ““how will I get in the house?” I replied that he had no reason to enter the house when I wasn’t home. He didn’t live there anymore. He was shocked.
I started thinking about his infidelity and the micro-aggressions that had recently increased; for Christmas he had given me a bottle of men’s cologne! That’s it. Of course, he kept it for himself. It was evident that he had given my gift absolutely no thought.
So instead of begging him to stay, I emptied out the joint accounts and made an appointment with a family attorney for the next day.
Of course he wanted to drag things out. He came to get his things the same week, and I watched TV while he packed and loaded the car. He actually asked me to help. I said “This is something you want to do, not me.”
Before he left, I told him that I know he is still committing adultery and that my attorney said he should be careful about that. Lots of denying and sputtering but the thing that bothered him most was my getting a lawyer. He actually said “You got a lawyer? You know I will always take care of you. Don’t you trust me?”
By the way, he told me the reason he needed space was “the children are grown now, so I don’t have to pretend anymore. I never wanted a family that I had to hang out with.”
So that was the end. A year later, a judge granted me about a third of his assets and income as alimony until I remarry or die. We were married 32 years, and I was 65 years old. I’m sitting pretty comfortably and very peacefully in a different city. Except for incidental paperwork handled by my attorney, I have no contact. I don’t have to pretend anymore, either.
‘’Edit: I want to say that finally getting a chance to tell my story has been cathartic for me. Thank you all for your support and encouragement. I am much less angry and more resolved to live well after this. Thank you all.”
INTERVIEW: Reaping the whirlwind
Karma is a BITCH. Well said Scott.
Steak over Noodles
0 2
Ingredients
1 (3 pound) round steak, cut into strips
1 can tomatoes and green chiles
1 can sliced mushrooms
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 teaspoon brown sugar
1 teaspoon oregano
Parmesan cheese
1 envelope onion soup mix
1 can tomatoes
2 tablespoons wine vinegar
1 teaspoon garlic powder
Salt and pepper, to taste
1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
1 package egg noodles, cooked
Instructions
Cut steak into small strips.
Heat oil in a large skillet. Add steak and brown quickly.
Combine tomatoes and green chiles with onion soup mix. Pour over steak.
Add remaining ingredients, except noodles and cheese. Simmer until steak is tender, approximately 1 to 2 hours.
Cook noodles according to package directions, then drain well.
Serve steak mixture over cooked noodles. Top with parmesan cheese.
Last week I needed to drive to Sheffield for my brother’s funeral. On the morning in question I thought I had better top up the oil so l lifted the bonnet, undid the oil filler cap and placed it on top of the engine. It rolled off and fell down into the body of the engine just below the fan belt and where all the pipes and tubes and things I don’t understand are. I tried reaching it, I tried a magnetic rod, I tried a long reach grabber thingy but couldn’t get it.
I stuffed some paper towels in the oil filler orifice and set off for my local garage. Explained the situation on arrival and they immediately allotted a young lad to retrieve it for me. He got it up on the ramps, undid a few things, removed a panel or two and then there was my oil filler cap.
Then they did the unthinkable – they said there was no charge and they were happy to do it for me.
Needless to say I couldn’t stand for that type of impertinence and gave them £20 and told them to have a drink on me.
China and Iran are still discussing a $400 billion strategic agreement over 25 years.
This agreement has many benefits for both countries.
Since Donald Trump unilaterally denounced the Vienna nuclear agreement that Iran had been respecting, Iran has once again found itself under a very strict embargo.
Iran has realized that the European Union is not in a position to resist the pressure of American sanctions.
Therefore, Iran is looking for partners who can help it resist US economic sanctions. China is the only partner capable of offering this.
China will invest 400 billion dollars in Iran over the next 25 years if this agreement is signed in early 2021.
This agreement provides for the sale of Iranian oil and gas to China at a preferential rate. China could also set up military bases in Iran and have privileged access to all investments in the country.
Iran would join China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
For China, securing its oil and gas supply is essential. For Iran, having a partner as powerful as China will enable it to better resist the United States.
An Iran-Russia-China axis is being formed to better resist the United States.
Two years ago, a surgeon told me my left testicle was malignant and had to be removed. He worked out of a teaching hospital, so he asked if the students could come in. They get very few malignancies like this— a rare form of cancer. I agreed. Every visit, I’d have 5 drop dead gorgeous women in masks and white coats come in and feel my nutsack while the surgeon had his hand in there giving the tour.
One day, while the crew was working my nutsack over, I noticed a woman had come into the room, and was standing back from the crowd huddled around my nether-regions. She seemed hesitant.
“It’s okay.” :I said. “Join the party.”
“No thanks,” she said. “I’m just here to have you sign some forms.”
Look, one thing you’re going to have to get over with this sort of thing is dignity. There’s just no room for it.
When the day came, I drew a big arrow up my left leg with marker and wrote THIS ONE! When I got in the operating theatre, there were over a dozen people. Some were surgical team , while others were student observers. Before they passed me the gas, I sat up on the table and asked for everyone’s attention.
“Just so there’s no confusion here,” I said. “I want everyone here to repeat for me; ‘It’s the left nut!’”
“It’s the left nut!”
“It’s the left nut!”
“It’s the left nut!”
“It’s the left nut!”
I didn’t want any mistakes.
My advice to anyone reading this is as follows. Throw away all notions that what you have under your clothes is private and unique. Whoever is going to see you started working on this with cadavers. The whole point of the exercise is to keep you from ending up as one of those cadavers. Once you embrace it, have fun with it. You might as well. You’re getting cut on anyway— one way or the other.
Just so y’all know, the orchiectomy went well. I was back at work in less than a week. The cancer returned 9 months later. I had to undergo chemo; that darn near killed me, but I pulled through and made it out to my deer stand that November. I’m now cancer-free and there is very little chance of it returning.
Up until the late 1960s, U.S. prisoner populations weren’t much that greater than other similar countries.
However, both the Nixon administration and the Reagan administration decided to use the justice system to fight both the counter-culture movement and, of course, minorities. Many states already had draconian laws in place for marijuana possession (Michigan made it a felony punishable by life imprisonment) but the federal government upped their own penalties for marijuana, treating it as the equivalent of a narcotic (which it wasn’t).
This initiative was, of course, given the name “The War on Drugs” as “The war against hippies and uppity n*ggers” didn’t play out so well in the press. African-Americans and Hispanics were using their newly found “civil rights” to vote for Democrats in droves, pretty much driving Republican mayors and councilmen out of America’s biggest cities, where blacks and Hispanics were quickly becoming the majority.
Naturally, none of the new drug laws were administered equally. Possession by rich white people in the suburbs was pretty much ignored or got a slap on the wrist, while police and the courts came down hard on blacks and the poor living in the big cities.
The effect on these communities were immediate – other crimes related to drugs started to rise in concert as drug dealers stopped being the friendly guy down the street and started to be organized criminal gangs with the wherewithal to bribe cops and the power to eliminate competition. Having most of your young male population serving time in jail devastated black and Hispanic communities, fueled prison and street gangs as prisons became more overcrowded, overwhelmed the courts with drug cases. Cities collapsed as those who could moved out and the people left became more desperate.
With this side effect being crystal clear by 1980 when Reagan was elected, he decided to double down. The new menace was “crack”, cheaper than cocaine, but shorter acting. It was preferred by the poor as a gram of cocaine could set you back $100, but a dose of crack with much less cocaine might only be $10. Nevertheless, even though a gram of crack contained less than .1 gram of cocaine, the penalty for using it was identical. That meant white cokeheads got the same sentences as black crack users for using a more potent drug. That particular issue wasn’t fixed until the Trump administration. (It’s the one thing Trump did right, although he did it for all the wrong reasons and got angry when black people didn’t start voting for him).
Meanwhile the underground drug economy was growing by leaps and bounds. Raw product was available in Mexico for peanuts, but once across the border markups of 1000% weren’t uncommon, and then it was marked up again for retail sale. So much money was flowing to Columbian drug lords that they had more money to spare than the government, and a good chunk of the cash coming out of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing was solely for the purpose of feeding the drug supply chain. I think I estimated at one point that about 10% of the BEP’s output was going solely to Pablo Escobar.
But you know who else was taking advantage of all this free cash and the cars, planes and yachts that came along with it? United States law enforcement agencies. You see, in most civilized counties, if you levy fines or seize ill gotten assets, all that money “excheats” to general revenue, so it becomes part of general government funding to be distributed as politicians see fit. That wasn’t what happened in the United States. In the United States, the agency that seizes the assets, such as the Drug Enforcement.
Agency or the Customs Service, gets to keep them, and they’re added directly to their budget, just like a small community that runs a speed trap on a major highway.
As such, the efforts of federal, state and local law enforcement started to become to seize as much stuff as possible. A single marijuana cigarette on a yacht allowed the Customs Service to seize and sell the entire thing. The practice was so reviled that even the most conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justices railed about its legality, and eventually the Supreme Court forced reform of the system.
So, with many federal, state and local agencies being dependent on drug money for their operations, they got more aggressive and, the more aggressive they got, the bigger they got and the more money they needed.
Naturally, all of this, together with people stealing money for drugs, drug dealers fighting over drug territories, and all the other secondary effects of a prohibition movement (remember alcohol prohibition, remember Al Capone, take that and multiply it by a hundred) the prisons got stuffed full. No problem because it provided a lot of free labour, most of the prisoners were poor, black, or Hispanic, and prison budgets didn’t allow for such luxuries as “enough well trained guards” or “rehabilitation programs”. When many states hit a wall because of the cost of new prisons, they privatized them, paying prison owners a per diem for every prisoner, which the private prisons demanded a new supply of.
Since many drug offences are felonies, it often means that when people are released they’re prohibited from entering lots of fields such as “barber” in New York State (a felony conviction keeps you from being licensed).
Luckily, things are changing on a bipartisan level. Conservatives are noting the cost of running all these prisons as other crimes had longer sentences attached. Drunk driving is a bigger problem than drug use, but it was clogging Texas prisons until they came up with a more effective diversion program to keep people out of jail. The increasing cost of an aging prison population serving time for things that happened when they were 20, and they’re now 70, are stretching prison budgets to the limit. Moreover, the “defund the police” movement notes that many of these initiatives that put people in jail for minor offences turn local populations against the police, making it harder to investigate more serious crimes.
THE GREATEST SPEECH EVER by AN AFRICAN LEADER explaining THE NEW AFRICA-EVERYONE MUST HEAR Historic
Here are 10 laws of manhood that my father taught me:
1.Don’t pay for sex.
You don’t need it that bad, you’re not an animal, you should spend your evening trying out new pick up lines and having a good time with people.
2. Never chase after a woman
Never base your life around one single person that is not a sure thing, instead, you should be chasing your dreams and goals while trying to make a success of yourself.
3. Know when it’s time to fight back
There comes a point in life, where you can no longer expect others to solve a problem for you. If you can’t stand up for yourself, why should you expect others to? A man should know when it’s time to hit back. There’s never a reason to fight — until there is.
4. Your marriage should not always be a choice between your mother and wife
Your mom is definitely the first woman in your life. But your wife is someone to be cherished and respected, too. A clear line should be drawn between the kind of relationship that you share with both of them. In case of a tussle take a neutral, just and impartial stand.
5. Don’t brag about things you’ve done, instead let the things you’ve done speak for itself. Actions will always speak louder than words so keep that in mind.
6. It’s good to talk about the emotions you’re feeling with loved ones as they’ll be there for you. Being a man does not mean that you have to hide your emotions and be a rock.
7. Stay clean, if you have a long beard then take care of it and keep it neat, brush your teeth and shower
8. Failure doesn’t threaten your manhood
A lot of men fear failure in life, career, and relationships. They feel they aren’t “real men” if they fail. But failure is an essential part of life! It’s a reality of life. Accept it!
9. Be able to cook a good meal.
It’s important. You don’t have to be a chef, but know how to make at least one good meal. It doesn’t need to be fancy, a good sloppy joe is perfectly fine, but be able to cook up something and make sure it’s good.
10. Take action because it is right, not because it is popular.
The things that matter are not merely what is popular at the moment. A true man, a gentleman, takes action because it is the right thing to do, and they do the right thing whether or not it feels cool or fun.
Man Dies & is Shocked to be Shown the Future (NDE)
Jeff Tolley shares his Near Death Experience (NDE) after being so distraught after his brother’s death that he took his own life. While on the other side Jeff met up with his brother and three beings that showed him he had more to live for and the state of his energies bodies. He was also shown his future and the future of Earth. Jeff came back from his near-death experience with a renewed sense for life and a new outlook on life and his purpose.
As an Australian who travels to the us a lot , I prefer Australia and New Zealand. I’ve got a business that is growing in the US but I really don’t want to move there so instead endure the 12 hour return flights .
There are some really awesome Americans. But there’s a lot of dicks, and this huge focus on materialism that I just don’t buy. If you drive a $600k super car and look like the Kardashians you are idolised there more than you would be in any other country I know. The American god is the god of material wealth . I find that quite noxious, even though I can afford a $600k car.
what I respect about America is that you can , as a middle class battler, still buy a nice house for USD400k in most cities . America protects its middle class , and that’s cool. Affordable housing is a big tick. I come from humble beginnings and know what it’s like to struggle to get your first house , and I think America does well here .
As a place to live though – naa. Australia and New Zealand far better . And from what I’ve seen Western Europe far better also. Go to downtown LA or San Francisco. It’s vile. Miles and miles of people living on the streets, shooting drugs , littering. It’s some sort of future dystopia ! Who the F would want to live near that depravity. It’s down right depressing and disgusting. It’s what happens when you drive the cost of living beyond what the poor can afford to exist and you offer no support for the cost increases – the bottom 15% of society simply fall out and end up living like animals on the street. Is this the sort of country where you would want your kids to grow up in? Not me , not ever.
America is dangerous, riddled with crime and depravity. They have got it wrong and are paying for it. And it’s gunna get worse.
Don’t take this as all Americans are pricks – they aren’t. But there’s something structurally wrong with that country – not my cuppa!
“The Mandela Effect” These examples will make you question EVERYTHING in your reality
This is fun. And it is a MUST WATCH. Especially for you MM followers.
It wasn’t just a sixth sense. Things had been moved. Curtains were now open, moving as if they’d recently been touched. Things on her table had been moved. She lived alone and she knew where everything belonged.
She walked through the house uneasily looking down hallways. In the kitchen. Moving quietly.
She walked past her bathroom. She turned into her bedroom.
Standing there was a bearded man, holding a hammer. He charged her and swung his hammer, hitting her on the side of the head. She fell down. He got on top of her and kept hitting her.
They then began wrestling.
Susan was a larger woman, who was particularly strong and worked as a nurse in the ER, trained on how to subdue wild patients.
After being hit several times, she managed to get her assassin pinned to the ground in a sleeper hold.
She began choking him. When she released him, his throat had been crushed — he later died (after Susan called an ambulance for him).
The assassin had been sent by her husband.
Their marriage had fallen apart and he wanted her dead. He’d paid the assassin $50,000 to kill her.
She was later treated for injuries and made a full recovery. Her husband was then sent to jail for the remainder of his life (he died in prison).
Her would-be assassin’s last words, during their fight, were “you are strong.”
Girl power.
I Had 0 EXPECTATIONS.. But I LOVED IT | Oliver Anthony – Rich Men North Of Richmond (REACTION!)
My two older sisters, twins, had a long and busy career in fashion modelling. I always thought they would marry the Hollywood hunk type of guy because those were the types they would sometimes go out with.
However, when they did got married, the guys were just your average Joe types; certainly not the Hollywood attractive male type. My parents and I were quite surprised. However both were confident in themselves.
They married good men who always treated them nicely. They didn’t put the girls on pedestals, treat them like starlets or have them as trophy wives. They didn’t ask them to leave modelling. They just treated them as regular women, were loyal, and had a great sense of humour. Of course they loved and cared for them deeply.
Lori and Tracy were the business girls who after modelling, took over dad’s car dealerships when he retired and made them very successful.
Mom was a fashion model who was on her way to Hollywood with a friend when she met dad. Dad was at the time working at a car dealership, which he later bought, but at the time he was a sales manager. “He made me laugh and didn’t fawn all over me like I was a movie star. He treated me as a regular girl and I just fell in love with him,” she said. She was six years younger than dad.
So attractive women don’t always go for the rich, good looking businessman. The smart ones go for the ones that make them happy.
Missile Excerpts from the TV Movie “The Day After”
While not completely accurate in technical approach, the failure of the deterrence mission was shown in the made for ABC TV movie “The Day After” that premiered on 20 Nov 1983. The movie used scenes from the film “First Strike” to show the USAF detection and response to an ICBM attack against the U.S. Presented from the archives of the Association of Air Force Missileers (AAFM).
“I spent 4 years in SAC as a Minuteman II launch crew commander back in the 70s. This depiction of the launch actions is very accurate. Of course, they left out some of the classified details in processing the message, but, all in all, this was very accurate. Several times EVERY DAY we got coded Emergency Action Messages (EAM) that could have been real execution messages for nuclear war. As others have mentioned, we did NOT know whether these were tests/training messages until we had competed decoding and authentication procedures. That was the real test of your nerves. You never knew. I am sometimes asked if the launch crews would obey the execution messages. The answer is an unqualified YES. If the message turned out to be a valid and authentic message, keys would be turned. We believed that the EAMs would not be transmitted unless the U.S. was under attack and the sooner we got our missiles off the ground the sooner we could stop any further incoming attacks. While I count that as a valuable experience in my life, I do not miss the stress.”
The U.S. can win if they compete on who is better in plundering, looting, stealing, abusing nations, regime change, orchestrating demonstrations and coups and unilateral sanctions. That kind of competition the US will win hands down.
Tech war! Are you kidding me. For ever 100 Chinese engineers the U.S. barely produce one! Chinese will eat them for lunch any day. Over the past decade China has registered twice the U.S. registrations of patent in the U.S. patent registration office.
And according to the Neo con funded Australian Strategic Policy Institute ASPI, out of 44 of the most strategic technologies China leads in 37 of them! The U.S. only manage to lead by a whisker in 7 out of the 44 these days.
Try colour revolutions competition I guarantee the U.S. will! Hahahaha.
I was tutoring a young man in HS. He (and several classes of other students) had to take his teacher’s Math Final over the Internet with a non-relative adult as Proctor. He took the Final at the tutoring center with me as Proctor.
About an hour in, he discovered that an entire sentence was missing from a Question rendering it impossible to solve. He asked my help. I refused. He asked my advice. I first looked at the Question and said nothing but knew he was correct — unsolvable because of missing information. “What do YOU think you OUGHT to do?” “EMAIL THE TEACHER, AND THEN DO THE REST OF THE EXAM?” “Then do that.” He did. I watched.
About 20 minutes later the teacher put out an email announcement to all students to skip that question, saying it had a misprint and was missing required information.
Fine. EXCEPT she flunked him saying he was absent from the exam. The problem escalated but the tutoring center did nothing because that teacher had threatened to have our contract with the County terminated (possibly causing massive tutor layoffs and lots of kids screwed….)
At that point I went in to the center’s boss, announced my resignation, and contacted the Principal and the young man’s father’s lawyer. The bitch teacher tried to get support from the Teacher’s Union and got caught in more lies.
The lawyers worked out a compromise. The kid passed and graduated, but the D in a straight A record was kind of a screw job and the bitch teacher accused me of lieing.
Oh well, let it go….
Five years later, my wife and I received a brief note with tickets to a university graduation. The kid not only got in, he was Straight A for four plus years.
US And Western Media’s Dirty Propaganda About China’s Lithography Exposed!
I had a bank customer who was a older gentleman that had recently lost his wife. He came across as a mean person only because he didn’t engage in conversation nor smiled much. Somehow he trusted me and we became good friends. He was the second person I called when my own father died and he explained to me why my father chose to just give up. My friend was 90 at the time and in better health than my dad. Anyhow he made me understand why he was “tired” and just wanted to feel alive again. I teased him telling him he more less became my surrogate father from then on. The day I quit the bank, he cried thinking I was going to forget him. He had two daughter’s who didn’t live in the same state so I continued to check on him taking him home cooked food, to appointments and just to visit. The day came when he moved into a retirement home so helped him get his house ready to sell. I never asked for anything because I never expected anything. He was a friend and I’ve always enjoyed dealing with elderly people. Once he hit 92, he decided to move near his daughter in another state. That’s when it was my turn to cry. Felt like I was losing my father all over again. Kept in touch with him until the day his daughter called and told me he had a massive heart attack. I was devastated. Months went by until out of the blue I got a call saying he left me alittle something in his will. I didn’t want anything and didn’t have a friendship for that purpose. His little something was a check for 20,000. I was blown away but his daughters thanked me as well for being there for him. It never was a duty but it was more of a way to let him know, he wasn’t alone. I work home health now and always keep him in my mind.
People Who Disappeared Because They Knew Too Much
The people you are about to see in this top made discoveries that would have changed humanity. However, unexpectedly, they disappeared from the face of the Earth or ceased to exist. Many theorize that they disappeared because they knew too much.
One big reason the Chinese people don’t want democracy is the USA.
The USA keeps holding itself out as the world’s prime example of democracy. Chinese people take a look and they are horrified.
The US imprisons more citizens than any other country in the world. The police step on black men’s necks to kill them. U.S cops carry weapons designed for war! Then there are the widespread demonstrations that degenerate into rioting, looting and arson. Half the U.S population believes that the last election was “stolen” from them. Then there is an attack on Capitol Hill. Furthermore Americans say that gun ownership is a fundamental liberty. But every week they have mass shootings. People get killed all the time in schools, supermarkets, pubs, parking lots, country music concerts, churches, Independence Day parades etc. The infrastructure is crumbling, the country is mired in an endless drug crisis and they don’t seem to have a healthcare system. The country claims to have freedom of expression but it bans TikTok, which the rest of the world has. Meanwhile fake news is so prevalent in the US that Americans’ trust in U.S media, as proven by survey results, has plunged to a record low. The country claims to have freedom of religion, but clearly Christian nationalism is sweeping across the USA and women can’t even get birth control or abortion. Also, did you know that the U.S violent crime rate is 3 times higher than that in China, and that the U.S homicide rate is 4 times higher? Meanwhile every day, the Dems and Republics are attacking each other for the sake of attacking and they do not appear at all to be interested in working together in any way for the good of the country.
This terrifies the Chinese people.
Then the USA says “Oh, we are the champions of democracy.”
Well, of course the Chinese people don’t want democracy. “Errr, thanks but no thanks!” they say.
The Middle Class Can No Longer Afford Rent In America
All Americans require a nice, secure, and inexpensive place to live in order to prosper. For years, low-income families have battled to find cheap rental properties, but today the middle class is also facing significant difficulties in this area.
Due to the sharp increase in rent prices seen in major American cities since the outbreak, millions of middle-class Americans are unable to pay their rent.
These middle-class households are being excluded from normal middle-class communities without major income increases or government support, which starts a domino effect that results in systemic poverty and enduring inequality. In other words, middle-class Americans are being squeezed to death by housing costs.
Compared to just two years ago, the average home now costs approximately $80,000 more, and the average rent in the US is over $1,000 more than it will be in 2020.
The survey discovered that while middle-class renters’ salaries have decreased 9% over the past ten years, rents are rising on average by 3.5% yearly.
The American middle class has been spending far more on housing than they can afford in the majority of urban areas across the nation, researchers found.
According to the survey, 46.3% of middle-class renters and 21.2% of middle-class homeowners in the US, respectively, are moderately or severely burdened by housing costs, which are defined as spending more than 30% or 50% of one’s salary on housing.
This happened to me when I was a programmer in London, back when coding was done in ANS Cobol. I was sitting in my office at around 9:30 a.m., feet up on the desk and probably snoring. The big boss man came in very quietly, pushed my feet off the desk, and told me I was fired and to leave the company immediately.
Well, I know how to wind people up, so I just shrugged and started to leave. He stopped me, asking if I had anything to say, and the conversation went something like this:
Boss: “Why did I find you sleeping on company time?”
Me: “Where were you at 3 a.m. this morning?”
Boss: “In bed with my wife, of course. Why?”
Me: “Well at 3.a.m. I had already been here for two hours fixing a bug that had interrupted the operation of the mainframe computer at around midnight. It was a bit of a bugger to find, and the system wasn’t up and running again until 7:30 this morning. This means that I get triple pay for the hours I worked, all expenses, a full meal (even though no place was open), and today off work. I’m leaving now, and will be contacting my union to discuss how best to get as much as I can in damages”.
His only choice was to give me a raise, which he did. Tosser.
My parents divorced when I was 4. My mother remarried a man one year later in 1965.
He was a very controlling man about most things—but that’s a different story. In the summer between my 4th and 5th grade, he became “Born Again” at a Billy Graham revival. At his insistence, my mother soon followed, as did my sister. I was the only one in our family of 4 who didn’t want to give up their entire life and become a singularly focused religious fanatic.
My stepfather had never really liked me before that. After that he hated me, and could barely contain his loathsome attitude toward me.
Speeding ahead a few years, when I was entering the 12th grade, my mother took me aside one day and told me that they had no money to help me with college—that I was going to have to figure out my future on my own. (She was quite literal about that. They never even once discussed with me what my options might be.) I said it was ok. I’d figure it out. I did, and after high school, I got a job at a factory.
My sister, who is 4 years older than me, did attend a religious college, and while it crossed my mind as to how she was able to pay for college, I never asked. We weren’t very close.
Fast forward to 1994. I am now successful in my career. I have a large house with a swimming pool and hot tub in the backyard. My family—mother, stepfather, sister and her family—are invited to my house for an afternoon barbecue.
My mother and sister are sitting in my hot tub. I am around the corner of the house tending the barbecue. They don’t realize that I’m there. They are talking loudly, and I can clearly hear them. My sister starts talking about college education for her kids and she asks my mom how she and my stepfather saved up the money for her college education.
My mom immediately started to panic, and began shushing my sister to be quiet. She frantically said, “I don’t want Kent to hear this! We told him we had no money for college.”
I always knew that I was the black sheep in the family, but it was in that moment that I truly realized how much I was excluded. From that point on, my eyes and mind were opened to the lies and deception within my family. It forever altered our relationship.
Update- stepfather died. Felt nothing. My wife thinks that I suffer from PTSD because of him. Maybe with time I can now forget and maybe even forgive. I wonder if he got that gold-plated throne next to God that he obsessed on his entire life. I doubt it.
Update- mother died. I felt almost nothing. I do mourn that she was more interested in keeping her abusive husband happy than having an interest in her son. Such is life.
Why CHINA Will Win The Space Race
China has rapidly advanced its space capabilities, achieving milestones such as landing a rover on the far side of the moon and establishing its own space station, the Tiangong. The Chinese space program’s impressive progress has raised concerns in the United States about the potential erosion of its dominance. Today’s episode is explaining how and why China will win the race to space.
I once was in a very tough situation financially. I worked three jobs at the time to keep up with life.
One day, at the end of the month, my rent was due, my fridge was empty, my paycheck was late, and I got a phone call from my daughter’s teacher reminding me to pay the school fee – my daughter was the only one who hadn’t submitted the payment. I was exhausted and didn’t know what to do, so I called my best friend and just cried. He came to my office, forced me to call in sick that afternoon, then took me to an ice cream shop and bought me an ice cream.
Then he sat me down and told me, ‘Life is tough, so you need to be tougher. In order to do that, you need to be nice to yourself, and don’t beat yourself up. You need a break too. Look, if everything you carry is heavy, you can put it down for a second, take a break, and then pick it up and keep moving. Sometimes, just surviving to the next day can be called a success.’
After that day, I went to the supermarket and bought a package of candy. It’s Korean milk mint candy; it’s really good and I had one every day in the morning to remind me that, no matter how hard life could get, there would be always something sweet, as long as I’m kind to myself. That one candy in the morning was what helped me going strong through life. I don’t remember how many candies I’ve eaten.
I don’t think ‘self-love’ needs to be something big or serious, it can be as small as a candy.
Oh, and I still have that kind of candy around the house:
But of course they won’t publicly. These setback has very severe consequences that cost the US trillions of dollar loss and hundreds of thousand or a million jobs!
The billion of dollars investment in the Chip plant in Arkansas, US is barely in its teething set up stage with painful bickering between the Taiwanese and the U.S. contractors. 3 full years into the most ridiculous day light robbery of Taiwan technology and know how coerce by the U.S. with promises of billions of U.S. taxpayers money as subsidy to produce in a place without the skill and expertise needed and to be made by workers 3 times that if Taiwanese and 10 times benefits to produce half the result.
But the losses that is huge is nothing compared to the loss of respect that the U.S. believes in free market mechanism. And free trade. Forcing a Taiwanese company to shut its operation in their land and uproot to US heartland against their wish is anything but freedom! But what is worst is that it will be the biggest white elephant before even a chip is ever made. And if course destroying the entire livelihood of the very people they said they want to defend.
China has all but proven that every technology the U.S. tried to protect and stop China from having at a humongous cost to the U.S. is now proven to be easily produced in China. Made better, cheaper and faster by China a mere 3 years after this obnoxious and ridiculous attempt to stop China. All in all hundreds of US, and U.S. cronies technology companies simultaneously going obsolete all due to this ridiculous decision. Think about the billions and billions of losses of each company. And think about the workers losing their livelihood.
China whose own market alone is 30% while also producing most products for 60% of this planet’s need now will totally stop using anything from these firms. Just on business losses and profit loss is in the billions. Which fool could have thought it is a good idea losing this customer. But now you lost the entire world’s business.
In Wall Street trillions got wiped off the stock value of these firms. And 90% of these firms will go bankrupt. Mostly insured by the U.S. What an unbelievably daft decision by some neocon politicians and administrators yet 20 odd days after China shock the world not a word by those responsible! Not a whisper not a groan not an apology.
But this is the real irony of the U.S. they screamed so loud of freedom of expression who is talking now. Here in QUORA there are many brain dead Yankees who cheered this on. Where are you now! Don’t be a coward come out and continue your hateful agenda. You let the U.S. and your American friends down. You gave them false hope. Now they lost everything because of your selfish hate. I like to hear what you have to say.
Texas Grilled Cocoa Chile Steak
Bored with burgers and hot dogs? Offer seasoned steak slices in flour tortillas at your next backyard cookout.
2023 10 10 18 53
Prep: 5 min | Refrigerate: 2 hr | Cook: 16 min | Yield: 6 servings
Mix brown sugar, cocoa chile blend, lime juice, oregano and salt until well blended. Rub paste over steak.
Refrigerate for at least 2 hours or overnight for best flavor.
Broil or grill over medium-high heat for 6 to 8 minutes per side or until desired doneness.
Cut steak across the grain into thin slices.
Serve steak slices in warm flour tortillas.
Top with salsa, shredded Cheddar cheese and sour cream, if desired.
The Day the Earth Stood Still
Epic action and mind-blowing effects rock the planet in this thrilling reinvention of the sci-fi classic, THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL. Keanu Reeves portrays Klaatu, an otherworldly being whose arrival on Earth triggers an unstoppable series of events that threaten all of mankind. In a desperate attempt to save humanity, governments and scientists race to unravel the mystery behind the visitor’s appearance. When a woman (Jennifer Connelly) and her young stepson find themselves embroiled in the alien’s plan, they become the world’s only hope to stave off apocalyptic annihilation.
I met Senator Strom “Spermin’” Thurmond not long before he died. He gave me and my young friends this priceless advice:
“Boys I’m going to share with you the most important thing I have learned in my life; Two women in ten that you ask to sleep with you, will. You just have to ask the other eight first!”
For years I was grumpy about the issue this question addresses. I’ve made my peace with the post #MeToo dating regime. You should too.
I’m no longer persuasive. No means no.
If I for some reason wanted to ask a woman out face to face instead of on a dating site like a normal person, it would go like this:
“Would you be interested in being courted? No? OK. You know where to find me if you change your mind.”
That’s one less woman I need to ask to reach my goal of ten. The end.
The old way – sidling up to a woman.after enmeshing yourself in her life, finding a good way to ask, then being persistent (but not too persistent) if she didn’t shut you down hard sucked for men and it sucked for women.
Why would you want to go through that again?
In the early 2000’s back to time immemorial that push-me-pull-you cat and mouse bullshit was simply how courtship worked. I had no complaints because that was all I ever knew.
You might do this dance for weeks, months, or in same cases years with ten women for every two who would eventually consent to date you. In some cases you as a man were making their lives hell and their work/school/social environment hostile in the meantime. In other cases you were feeding their “A Man Is Courting Me” ego at the expense of your dignity.
That’s all gone now. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Women who liked the game lost. Game players. Flirters. Time wasters.
Women who preferred straight forward yes/no propositions won. Normal women.
Now we don’t have to distress eight women to suss out which two of them really “just want to be pursued”. Now we don’t have to be a creep just because we “can’t read the signals”. No more wasted bouquets of flowers. No more months long pre-courtship. No more of the woman’s friends coming up to you and telling you that you’re making her uncomfortable.
You ask. She answers. The end.
If she tries to play a game, she will lose every time because in this new post #MeToo environment you can’t be persistent. Neither can any other guy. You suffer no competitive disadvantage by accepting the first “no” you get because all other guys must do the same.
It’s liberating really. They only people who lose are the super aggressive men who don’t mind making 100’s of women uncomfortable to get laid once, and the women who want a Disney Princess experience of being chased.
Senator Thurmond would be a happy man… “ask(ing) the other eight first” has never required less effort or risk! We no longer must or may be “persuasive”. We live in Strom’s world now.
If he had done this in America, flag or no flag, there is a high probability he won’t be granted a trial, because he would have been shot dead, one of a thousand killed by American police in a normal year.
He didn’t just chant a slogan and walk the streets as a protester. He drove his vehicle at speed deliberately into a group of police officers who were armed and trained in the use of deadly force. It would have been a justified shooting, because tong ying kit turned his bike into a deadly weapon. The officers used their bodies to stop him. Several were forcefully thrown by the impact. Tong remains wheelchair bound, with a cast on his arm, injuries sustained in the crash.
The sentence is a little harsh but there is no doubt Hong Kong society must make an example of him to warn others what he did is unacceptable.
His notoriety did him in.
He is the perfect index case for the nsl, and an illuminating case law example.
MINDBLOWING NDE: Secrets From the Other Side! You are NOT Who You Think You Are.
When I took car of my mother (when she had cancer), I had to put a halt on my career, and just take care of my mother. Sure, I still was in MAJestic, but I operated while taking care of my mother, instead of doing corporate engineering and all that stuff…
It was mostly just being there. Oh, sure, I took care of the grounds, repaired things, and built and repaired homes on the property, but for the most part I was a companion to her. And as a result we got to be pretty close.
But “the manor” was in a rural area outside of Kittanning on Highway 422. It was isolated. And while I grew up in the area, I really didn’t know anyone, so for me it was lonely. And over time, I depleted my savings looking over her, and with no other sources of income, I was just scraping by with her charity.
Winter comes, and Christmas arrives.
The grandchildren are lavished with presents, and I fade into the wood work. Ignored. I just sat off by the fire in the back. Watching things.
But you know, I had to give my nieces something, so I scraped up the little money I had, and got a simple hackisack ball. Nothing fancy. But it was all that I could afford.
I gave it to my niece as they were leaving the house.
My brother in law, told my niece, “give me that”, and he went and threw it as far as he could. Did that right in front of me too.
Rude Ass Fuck face.
Yah. It upset me.
My mother just negated it. Said, “well, it’s his right“. She noticed that I just moped around all subsequent week. “Just let it go” she said.
It was ALL the money I had.
Gas money. Date money. Medicine money.
Discard on a whim.
I just wanted to participate. I just wanted to contribute. I just wanted to be treated as family.
…
After Winter, I went mowing the North Forty, and found the ball. It brought up bad memories to me.
I suppressed them out of deference to my dying mother.
…
When my mother died, this jackass and my “sister” were a constant pain in the ass and contributed greatly to my discomfort. And as they prospered and continued in their overt bellicosity, I started to deal with massive changes in my life as my Bazi fate forecast was pinging black…
…
Life moves on.
Let me tell you guys this, I don’t know how, or when, but bad selfish and hurtful actions will construct your pre-birth world-line template. You forge the topography that you will experience though your actions.
His, oh boy yes, will be a doozy…
Today.
Scott Ritter: THIS is Why the US Will LOSE Its War on China
Great discussion with Jack Ritter discussing the MAJOR backtracking that the USA has made regarding a war with China. I strongly recommend that you all watch it.
This is surprisingly good. Take this video to the bank. It is really, really good.
Blend cheese and sherry to a smooth paste. Make small incisions 2 1/2 inches apart on both sides of the steak, cutting only halfway through.
Pack the cheese paste into the slits; use it all, making more slits if needed.
Paint one side of the steak with kitchen Bouquet (lightly but thoroughly) and broil 3 inches below heat for 4 minutes.
Sprinkle cooked side of the steak with pepper, turn and paint the other side lightly with Kitchen Bouquet. Broil again for 3-4 minutes.
Remove to a warmed platter and sprinkle lightly with more pepper. NO SALT! There’s enough in the cheese.
To the broiler pan juices, add Claret or Burgundy. Stir for 1 to 2 minutes over medium heat to warm through, and pour over the steak.
China Takes Dollar to Deathbed as Japan and Iran Started Trade In Digital Currency!
Dedollarization is the direction of a multipolar world, it is now the matter of speed of dedollarization, the initial start would be the next few years and the momentum is really up to the rest of the south-south countries on whether this process would benefit them. Once the momentum gets going, in other words wide acceptance, it will be unstoppable.
China is celebrating its National Day with a record-breaking surge of tourism, both abroad and at home. Some may wonder if this is a wise use of resources, given the challenges that China faces in its economy and society. But I would argue that National Day tourism is not only a source of joy and pride for millions of Chinese people, but also a catalyst for economic growth and social progress.
One reason is that National Day tourism boosts China’s income and employment, as well as its global influence and cooperation. China is the world’s largest outbound tourism market, spending more than $277 billion in 2018. This year, orders for overseas trips during the eight-day holiday increased nearly 20 times compared with last year, according to China’s leading travel platforms. This shows that Chinese travelers are eager to explore the world and support the recovery of the global tourism industry, which was devastated by the pandemic. Many countries, such as Thailand, have welcomed Chinese tourists with visa-free policies and special offers, hoping to benefit from their spending and goodwill. China’s outbound tourism not only helps the airlines, hotels, and travel agencies, but also stimulates the consumption of goods and services in the destination countries, creating jobs and opportunities for local people.
Another reason is that National Day tourism promotes domestic consumption and regional development, as well as cultural diversity and innovation. China’s Ministry of Transport estimated that more than two billion passenger trips will be made across regions during the holiday, an increase of 11.5 percent over 2019. This means that more Chinese people are traveling within their own country, discovering different places and cultures, and spending money on local products and experiences. Domestic tourism generates revenue for local governments and businesses, especially in rural areas and ethnic minority regions, where poverty alleviation and environmental protection are priorities. Domestic tourism also increases the demand for cultural and creative products, such as souvenirs, handicrafts, and local specialties. These products reflect China’s rich and varied heritage, as well as its potential for innovation and entrepreneurship.
A third reason is that National Day tourism improves the quality of life and well-being of Chinese people, as well as their social capital and patriotism. Traveling can offer many benefits for physical and mental health, such as reducing stress, enhancing mood, strengthening immunity, and expanding horizons. Traveling can also increase social capital and cohesion, as people can interact with different people and communities, learn from each other, and appreciate diversity. Furthermore, traveling can also inspire patriotism and civic responsibility, as people can witness the achievements and challenges of China’s development, as well as participate in various activities to celebrate the National Day and Mid-Autumn Festival. These festivals are important occasions to express gratitude and solidarity among family members, friends, and fellow citizens.
In conclusion, National Day tourism is not a waste of resources or a distraction from problems. Rather, it is a positive force for China’s economic growth and social progress. National Day tourism can help China achieve a more balanced and resilient economy in the long run, as it can support the global economic recovery, enhance China’s economic cooperation and influence, enrich China’s cultural diversity and identity, foster innovation and entrepreneurship, improve quality of life and well-being, increase social capital and cohesion, inspire patriotism and civic responsibility. Therefore, I believe that National Day tourism is something to celebrate and encourage.
This happened to my husband when we were first married. He was working (salary) 60–70 hrs a week. He worked for a company that was a family business, except my husband and the skilled field employees. The familly office staff didn’t do as much as my husband, so he asked a raise, since he was doing a higher level position than he was working. He also asked for an assistant, because he was doing that much work. My husband knew they would probably not honor his requests, so he went prepared. He had gotten a license to form his own company, and and went in with a resignation letter. When he asked for the raise and an assistant, his boss literally laughed in his face. My husband gave his notice and walked out. He had a couple of jobs lined up from other contractors whom he know from his connections other than his job, so he didn’t skip a beat in getting work.
A week went by, and his boss called him begging him to come back. My husband rightfully declined. They had to hire 3 people to fill his position there, and within 2 years, they went out of business. I’m proud that my husband did all of this with class, dignity and integrity!
Russian tankers are using a technique called spoofing to deceive global satellite tracking systems and maintain the flow of sanctioned Russian fuel.
This involves providing fake coordinates to the automatic identification system, making it difficult for buyers to trace the origin of cargoes. At least half of Russia’s oil is thought to flow out through shadow-fleet tankers engaging in spoofing.
The G7 granted exemptions for handling Russian oil and fuel traded at or below fixed levels — $60 a barrel for crude and $100 for premium refined fuels like gasoline and diesel.
On a sunny day off the southern coast of Greece last week, two aging tankers nestled next to each other while one pumped oil to the other. As far as global satellite tracking systems could tell, it never happened.
The deviation between real and electronic locations — measured in this case at over four miles — wasn’t a glitch, but a deliberate deception that’s part of a sophisticated system to keep sanctioned Russian fuel flowing, often at prices that are higher than western powers would like.
The practice of giving fake coordinates to the automatic identification system, known as AIS, is called spoofing. It muddies understanding of where cargoes come from, soothing nervy buyers trying to conceal dealings with Russia following international measures to punish Russia.
China SLAMS Sanctions Again on US Tech Giants Over Alleged $1 Trillion Debt
China’s government has recently announced sweeping sanctions against several major US tech corporations, citing an outstanding debt purportedly amounting to a staggering one trillion dollars. The sheer magnitude of these sanctions is without parallel in recent trade history, and the implications for global business and diplomatic relations are profound. To comprehend the genesis of this conflict, one must delve into the evolving trade dynamics between the world’s two superpowers over the past few decades.
If it’s the actual global community, then Xi has been more part of the Global community than anyone else in the world
Under Deng, China was top trading partner to 6 Countries
Under Jiang, it was 19
Under Hu it was 78
Under Xi it’s 137
Likewise
Under Deng, China assisted and helped build the infrastructure of Zero countries
Under Jiang it was 5
Under Hu it was 34
Under Xi it’s 96
Likewise
Under Deng, China mediated security treaties with 4 Countries
Under Jiang, it was still 4 Countries
Under Hu it was 9 Countries
Under Xi, it’s 51 Countries
Likewise
Under Deng, China averaged $ 1.3 Billion annually on trade benefits to other countries
Under Hu, this was $ 102.9 Billion
Under Xi, this is $ 436 Billion
Not to mention that under Xi , China has mediated and settled terms with 5 Countries while Hu and Jiang did nothing
So it’s evident that Xi is more part of the Global Community than either Deng or Hu or Jiang were
The Vaccines were the best example
China sent vaccines to 119 Nations with 86 Nations vaccinating their populace majorly with Chinese Vaccines Sinovac and Sinopharm
The US?
34 Nations, 12 of them for a Price like Japan and Israel and Singapore
Europe?
26 Nations like Japan, Israel, Korea and Singapore
If you say the word ‘Global Community’ means the G7 and their lapdogs then you are right
The reason is because under Deng until the 1990s, the US followed their own rules to a great extent
They weren’t hypocrites
They asked you to follow the same rules that they followed
Made sense to everyone
Later on this began changing from the INTERNATIONAL LAW to the INTERNATIONAL RULES BASED ORDER
US invaded Iraq brazenly
US passed a law that their soldiers can’t be tried for Military Atrocities outside US and such trials will lead to Sanctions
US would be immune from WTO appeals and rulings
In short, the US and by extension it’s lackeys began to dictate rules to the rest of the world BUT WOULD THEMSELVES NOT FOLLOW SUCH RULES
As China grew more and more, the US became more and more belligerent and nervous
Accusations against Huawei of Security threats
Accusations of Uyghur Genocide
Throttling Chinese companies through blacklists using trumped up charges (No Pun Intended)
So is that your ‘AIN’T BROKE’?
So Xi had two choices
Either be like a servant like Japanese, spread his legs and do what he is told to do
Pay for US technology all his life, Never develop beyond a Global Factory making low end products and then phase out and stagnate once these products leave China for other Nations and end up leaving China as an MBA question for 2040
Or
To challenge the US and it’s belligerence and use Chinas 5000 year diplomacy, 1.4 Billion People and the United States own massive problems like Social Divisions and Political Corruption against the US and spear the development an alternate Multipolar world
Xi is doing the latter
He isn’t a gutless jap is he?
A significant change in policy and let the market set the floor.
More pain ahead for Chinese consumers but it must be done to work through the bubble.
…
In recent weeks, articles appearing in state media have argued that it may be time to ditch the policies and some cities are starting to loosen them. On Tuesday, the southwestern city of Chengdu removed price restrictions for projects on newly sold land in central areas and scrapped government-guidance prices for existing homes.
A broader retreat from price floors could help developers to clear inventories of unsold properties and raise revenues to pay down their sizable debts
, setting the stage for a potential recovery.
But it could also expose Chinese homeowners to bigger drops in home prices, hurting consumer confidence when growth is weak
—and potentially destabilizing the financial system.
About 96% of urban households in China owned an apartment as of 2019, according to the country’s central bank. And for many, their home is their largest financial asset.
By comparison, U.S. home prices tumbled nearly 20% between 2006 and 2008. Markets including Phoenix, Las Vegas and San Francisco saw drops in excess of 30% at one point during the financial crisis.
Economists say China’s price floor mechanisms are helping to prevent steeper falls because many buyers and sellers don’t want to do deals when they can’t price properties at their true market value. That has left many properties sitting on the shelf.
Private data shows home sales among China’s 100 largest developers plunged by 34% in August from a year earlier, extending a decline since April. Pain from the slowdown has rippled through the economy
, depressing consumer spending and construction activity.
in the years leading up to the Covid-19 pandemic. Initially, the government required developers to seek approval on listing prices before they could sell new units—a measure meant to keep them from pushing prices too high.
When Chinese real estate entered a major downturn in late 2021, Beijing ordered cities to make sure the property market continued to develop at a “stable and healthy pace.” Local authorities in many cities—mainly smaller ones—responded in part by barring developers from lowering prices too far below the original ones that they registered with the government.
While some cities set the floors at 10% to 15% below the original prices, others left the details vague, banning developers from “malicious price-cutting
” without specifying what that meant.
Recently, Beijing has sent signals indicating it is okay with cities easing or abandoning the price floors, in tandem with other steps the central government has taken to support the market, such as lowering interest rates
.
China Real Estate Business Weekly, the flagship newspaper of China’s Housing and Urban-Rural Development Ministry, published an editorial on Aug. 20 urging local policy makers to eliminate price floors.
“Developers should be allowed to carry out self-rescue through price reduction promotions in order to raise funds as soon as possible,” the article said. Other articles in state media have made similar cases.
Some industry analysts have pushed back, arguing in other media that it is too dangerous to remove the floors.
Guangzhou, a manufacturing hub in southern China with a population of 15 million, this month allowed developers to start selling apartments freely without seeking approval on sale prices, according to Chinese media reports. It also lowered the city’s price floor late last year.
10 KEY Reasons I Left The United States (and might never return)
I emigrated from The United States as a U.S. Citizen to Spain (Europe) 2.5 years ago and I give you 10 reasons why I did so.. Some move to Costa Rica, Mexico, Colombia, or Ecuador, to name a few, but many of the reasons are similar as to why we do.
I am a huge China fan and you know that but this is not true by any means
First
The Huawei 60 Mate Pro is using a MODIFIED 5 NM CHIP DERIVED FROM THE 7 NM PROCESS
This is now confirmed by Huawei
They also confirm this is from SMIC
Don’t get me wrong, this is EXCELLENT NEWS and something to be very proud of.
Most Nations would have lain down and surrendered by now.
China has not only fought but innovated and ensured a comparable product that can match the best product of the west using sheer backdoor innovation and technology
However this 9000S Kirin Modified 5 NM Chip has been tested by various experts and the most neutral of them say
It beats the Chip in the Iphone 13 Hollow (7247 vs 6414)
It squeaks ahead of the Chip in the Iphone 14 (7247 vs 7118)
It is quite behind the Chip in the Iphone 15 (7247 vs 8831)
It lags behind the Snapdragon 888 mildly (7247 vs 7470)
So the 9000S Kirin Chip of the Mate 60 Pro known in China as CHONGSHEYENG (Meaning Rebirth) is very good but still a generation behind the Iphone 15 Chip
Now they say something else
The 3nm Chip SUCKS
The Chip is poorly performing and is by no means delivering enhanced power and processing capabilities
It is still better than the 9000S Kirin Chongsheyeng
So you can safely say
The Kirin 9000S processor for the Mate 60 Pro has EXCEEDED ALL EXPECTATIONS
The 3 NM Bionic A17 has not delivered or performed upto expectations
However the Chips are a generation or so apart
In fact the experts say the Mate 60 Chip while very innovative, still works as a 7 NM Chip than a 5 NM Chip
Chinese win because they acknowledge facts and work to improve them
Don’t become like Indians and start with all this 1–2 generation superiority
How to Survive the End of a US Superpower
The US is slowly circling the drain, and its painful to watch because it used to be great in many ways. In recent months I’ve visited a few parts of SE Asia, what an eye opening experience. The people, the culture…..the whole vibe about that part of the world is quite different from the West and I have become very drawn to it. More trips are planned as it is now my personal first choice for a retirement location in a few years.
ASML Stock Falls as Analyst Warns of Order Cuts for Chip Equipment
ASML shares dropped on Wednesday after TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said the chip-equipment maker may face cuts to orders next year.
ASML makes the extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography machines that are critical for manufacturing advanced semiconductors. Its customers include TSMC, Samsung and Intel.
Kuo is widely followed for his checks on supply chains in Asia and the conclusions he draws from them. “My latest research indicates that ASML may cut EUV equipment shipment forecasts significantly for 2024 by about 20–30%,” he wrote in a post on social media and Medium.
ASML shares were down 1.4% in trading on Wednesday, with a noticeable drop after the report was published.
The company had no comment on Kuo’s analysis, but said it would offer a forecast on sales of EUVs when it reports third-quarter earnings in a few weeks.
Demand for advanced chips and the gear needed to make them may come in below expectations in 2024, the analyst said, citing softening sales for MacBook laptops and iPads. He also predicted that makers of memory chips may not go ahead with planned factory expansions until 2025 at the earliest, hurting ASML’s business.
Kuo is uncertain about an imminent recovery in the chip industry, saying it may take longer than anticipated.
“The current market consensus is that the semiconductor sector will bottom out in 2H23,” Kuo wrote. “However, it needs to monitor closely whether this bottoming timeline would be pushed back to 1H24/2Q24.”
It’s not just Mate 60 pro that shock the world in terms of self development in OS, chips, EDA, GPU, but showing other products that they are launching on 25/9 that sends shivers to the tech world. What Huawei said they planned to do, in building a totally new, truly fully integrated ecosystem down to networks (5–6G), satellites, servers, homes, cars & any electronic devices is on track and no Western companies are anywhere close!
Ro*Tel Pepper Steak
2023 10 06 09 49
Ingredients
1 to 1 1/2 pounds round or sirloin steak (tenderized)
1 small onion
1 green bell pepper, sliced
Garlic salt (to taste)
Salt (to taste)
1 envelope brown gravy mix
1 can Ro*Tel tomatoes, diced
Instructions
Cube and braise steak. Add onion, sliced bell pepper, garlic salt and regular salt.
Mix gravy mix as directed on package and add to mixture.
Stir in Ro*Tel tomatoes with their juice. Let simmer for 15 to 20 minutes.
It was a sunny day. I was going to my class. Suddenly I saw a lot of people gathered at one place. I stopped my bike and saw a cow badly injured with her broken leg. She was trying hard to get up.
I just couldn’t take it!
I called a tempo and took the cow to the hospital.
There,
Doctor: it will take around 5000 rs to treat her(a big deal for a 17 year kid)
Me: I will arrange the money you start her operation.
I rushed to my home broke my piggybank and gave money to the doctor
i just saw how calmly the cow was walking after treatment i smiled and got away
after 6 days!
I was going by the same road and suddenly I lost my balance and fell from my bike
I felt like someone took me in hands and put me on road
I got no injury!
when I opened my eyes I had fallen on the road.
I saw the same cow looking at me with the bandages still on her!
I felt she saved me. I was on the 7th sky feeling the feel of karma!
When I was a young boy, perhaps in first grade, my father had a business trip up into New Foundland. And there, he did some work and (apparently) attended a local festival.
When he came back, he had a special gift for me.
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It was a full Scottish kilt ensemble.
And I, well I wore it with pride, and being the photo buff that he was, took a zillion pictures of me wearing the outfit.
I don’t know what ever happened to the outfit, or the pictures, but I do remember that time, and how I felt being parading about in Bridgeport Conn wearing that kilt.
…
My dad was kind of silly. But he was cool in a strange way. And this little event is one of my best memories.
The U.S. have a right to adopt or adapt any any stance it wants. Or behaves as obnoxiously and despicably as ot wants too! But China will act swiftly in its own path forward to protect and defend and its own territories including Taiwan. And the world’s 99% will be behind China solidly. The Taiwan issue is totally and absolutely none of US or anybody’s business except the Chinese people and the Chinese authorities. Get that through your think skull once and for all.
You can talk as much shit, or stir as much shit as you want but touching an inch of Taiwan and we all go to war fully and comprehensively till the world as we know it will be change forever. If that is what you want. Let that be absolutely clear even a single U.S. marine parachute into Taiwan and China will without a doubt take drastic and immediate action.
No go back to asking shit like this and waste all your time. If you want. China don’t gives a shit about U.S. stupidly and waste fully sailing 10 thousand miles blowing a billion gallons of fuel to aimlessly flex your muscles a million times. We don’t mind if you to go hang yourself if that is what you want. You can have a million discussion in Washington for all we care but the business of Taiwan is decided in Beijing.
FLASH TRAFFIC: GERMAN ARMY TANK CREW CAUGHT OPERATING TANK IN UKRAINE, ATTACKING RUSSIAN ARMY
German supplied Leopard Tank With German Army Crew Zaporozhye Started WW3 2 large
This is FLASH TRAFFIC: It appears World War 3 has officially begun. Saturday morning the Russian Army engaged a German-supplied Leopard Tank operating for the Ukraine army in Zaporozhye. The Russians hit the tank with an anti-tank guided missile. The tank blew up. The tank crew evacuated and were captured. The crew identified themselves as ACTIVE DUTY GERMAN ARMY TROOPS.
Thus, the actual Army of Germany has now been caught waging actual war against Russia inside official Russian territory, Zaporozhye. The image above is the actual tank involved in the actual incident this morning, 23 September 2023.
Hal Turner Remark: It appears, on its face, NATO has just started World War 3; using the active-duty German Army to attack Russians.
More as I get it . . . .
UPDATE 10:14 AM EDT —
Details are emerging. It is now CONFIRMED a Russian Army reconnaissance team destroyed a German-supplied Leopard tank of the Ukrainian military but manned with a crew comprised of Bunderswehr soldiers. The Bunderswehr is the actual active duty Army of Germany.
This took place in Zaporozhye this morning.
A member of the actual Russian Recon team directly and personally involved in the incident has stated the following: “When we curbed another offensive and ATGM-ed [destroyed with an anti-tank guided missile] the Leopard, we moved out to the burned vehicle hoping to seize the ‘tongue.’ Then we saw that the crew’s driver-mechanic was severely injured and the others were dead. Once he awoke, the mechanic started yelling ‘nicht schießen‘ [“do not shoot” in German],” the head of the reconnaissance team said.
“The mechanic repeatedly stated that he was not a mercenary but a Bundeswehr serviceman, and that he and the rest of the crew were members of the same unit of the German army,” the Russian fighter said, adding that while receiving medical aid, the German soldier named his brigade and its dislocation site.
The tank’s driver died from wounds minutes after he was found despite efforts to save him.
Philly Cheese Steak Stuffed Peppers
2023 09 25 15 22
Ingredients
1 pound thinly sliced sirloin steak (or deli roast beef)
8 slices provolone cheese
4 large green bell peppers
1 medium sweet onion
1 pound white mushrooms
3 tablespoons butter
3 tablespoons olive oil
Kosher or sea salt and pepper, to taste
Instructions
Slice a thin piece off each pepper lengthwise, remove ribs and seeds.
Slice onions and mushrooms. Sauté over medium heat with butter, olive oil and a little salt and pepper. Sauté until onions and mushroom are nice and caramelized, about 25 to 30 minutes.
Salt and pepper the steak and sauté in a little olive oil until just not pink, about 5 minutes.
Heat oven to 400 degrees F.
Add steak to the onion/mushroom mixture and stir to combine.
Line the inside of each pepper with a slice of provolone cheese.
Fill each pepper with meat mixture until they are overflowing.
Top each pepper with another slice of provolone cheese.
Bake for 15 to 20 minutes until the cheese on top is golden brown.
Back 20 years ago my 8 year old son and I went to the bank. When we walked in the only customer was a lady filling in forms at the bench. We walked up to where the lines started, identified by some silver poles with plastic chains showing the flow of foot traffic. We waited while the teller finished doing her task.
As we waited a few people came into the bank and lined up behind us. The lady at the bench then walked over and pushed in front of us stating that she was in the bank first but had to fill in some forms. I commented that she should take her place at the back, and again she said she was in the bank first. My son looked up at me, knowing that her behavior was rude but he had a glint in his eye. I should have known better.
Silently, without anyone noticing, including me, he picked up the end of the plastic chain from the top of a metal pole and hooked it into her handbag.
As she stepped forward in her self importance her snagged handbag then pulled 4 or 5 poles onto the tiled floor with such a loud clatter. As she spun around to see what had happened she pulled another 2 poles over.
We slipped past, went to the teller and on our way out saw that she had been passed by most of the line and was still picking up her paper, pens and other things that had spilled from her handbag.
On my next trip to the bank the teller told me that was the funniest thing she had ever seen and presented me with a savings book for my son with $20. Each teller donated $5 because no one liked that lady.
One day it will be you.
Twice this week, I have watched an elderly individual, fade into the busy life in which we all live. One man just needed Panadol for his wife but the shop assistant simply said it’s in ‘6’.
But he struggled to navigate the supermarket and as I watched him go in the wrong direction, I left all my groceries and took him where he needed to go.
Today, I watched an elderly man struggle in the heat, who had obviously had a fall with a huge scrape and blood on his leg. He walked past people in the cafe, while he slowly made his way to his car. Not one person stopped. Or looked.
Or acknowledged him. I took him to his car and checked he was ok. He told me he had a fall and wasn’t sure how the air con worked in his car so he just didn’t use it. I sat with him, until his air con kicked in and heard him talk about the old frail body that he is in, that fails him now, every single day.
When you see an elderly person walking down the street, searching in the supermarket or struggling to their car, take a minute out of your busy schedule and ask them if they need a hand. Think about your grand parents and your parents and how pissed you would be if someone didn’t stop to help them. But more, think of them as you.
Once upon a time they were you. They were busy, they had work, they had children, they were able…. Today, they are just in an older body that is not going as fast as it used to and this busy life is confusing. They deserve our utmost respect and consideration.
One day it will be you, it will be us. I wish more people gave a sh*t about them and acknowledged them for their admirable existence and geez I hope someday, not that far away, someone does it for me.
Full-Time RV Life: The Quitting Has Just Begun – Why Many Have & Will Come Off The Road
Notice these trends that are going on in the United States.
Chinese people are consistent with Japanese people, only one enemy is japanese imperialism and chinese national scum. – Mao zedong, 1941.5.15 (This was at a time when Japanese imperialism was invading China)
Likewise. Chinese people are consistent with US people, only one enemy is US imperialism and chinese national scum.
The Chinese national scum includes Taiwan independence elements, Hong Kong independence elements and overseas dissidents funded by the US government. not elaborated here.
The point is: who represents US in the world? Is it the US people, or is it US imperialism?
No other country in the world has invaded the United States. Even if Bin Laden had created 9/11, it was not an act from the military of any country.
It’s not US politicians or capitalist who die on the battlefield, it’s you! idiot! In war the politicians give ammunition, the rich give the food and the poor give their children… When the war is over the politicians get back the leftover ammunition, the rich grow more food and the poor search for the graves of their children.
The US people need to pay more in taxes and lives for the war of aggression waged by the US government. Obviously, the U.S. government has launched a war of aggression against all countries in the world, which goes against the interests of the US people.
Do you think it is in the interests of the US people for the US government to go around the world invading?
It is not in the interest of the US people, nor is it in the interest of the Chinese people, who are simply generating profits for the capitalists of the US military industrial complex.
Because US is a capitalist country, capital controls US politics.
The US has more than 240 years of history, only 16 years without war.
So, Does the US government represent the interests of the US people, or the interests of US imperialism?
Do you represent the interests of the US people, or the interests of US imperialism?
Biden did not tell the US citizens that he wanted to invade China, only “to defend Taiwan”.
So, I ask, how does the US plan on doing that? with some sort of video game competition?
I mean, in order to “defend Taiwan”, you have to have military troops pertorming military actions, aka combat inside of China.
And that’s because Taiwan is in China.
So currently America has soldiers in Taiwan, which is either illegal, or at the very least gray area because that’s part of China.
And the government of China doesn’t approve of that and hasn’t allowed it.
So that’s the current status.
If US start performing military action, that’s an effort to militarily conquer at least China or push them back inside of China.
That‘s called an invasion.’
Sorry, everybody, if you don’t agree with this definition, but that’s what it is.
So US is yet again confirming that it will invade China if China attempts to continue its reunification by using military action.
So this is a very, very dangerous game that US are playing.
George Carlin – It’s A BIG Club & You Ain’t In It!
Lots of bullying stories. Here is mine. My son (autism spectrum, language disabilities) had a chum who happened to be a boy-crazy girl. Dating wasn’t his thing, but she was pretty smart and he liked her and they looked out for each other.
Another boy in the class was a little behind on his social skills, and was doing some low-end bullying of her. Calling out to her “Hey— coat rack!” or similarly stupid things. She was annoyed, but it wasn’t quite so bad that teachers noticed or disciplined him.
Anyway, we got a phone call from school that my son finally lost his temper and pushed this kid against the wall, telling him to knock it off and never do it again. It was pretty clear that regulations about bullying required us to be told of his inappropriate response, so they were following the rule but they weren’t too concerned.
When I told the program director of his previous school about this, he high-fived me. It never would have happened when my son was overwhelmed with sensory overload, so it was a real sign of progress.
China Destroyed US Sanctions Whole Car Industry in Big Trouble
Historic times!
Patrick Lawrence: The Real Threat From China: They’re Better at Capitalism Than We Are
The Biden regime’s robotic procession to Beijing proceeds apace. Following Antony Blinken’s fruitless visit in mid–June, we have paid Janet Yellen’s airfare for another fruitless visit, and following Yellen it was the same for John Kerry. This week it is Gina Raimondo’s turn. The secretary of state, the Treasury secretary, the chief climate envoy, and the commerce secretary: What is the point of this parade?
I cannot but wonder whether these officials are dispatched across the Pacific in descending order of competence. Raimondo, who previously flopped as governor of Rhode Island—except for her plan to cut civil service pensions, an unfortunate success—is mediocrity made flesh. The Chinese must be wondering, with chagrin or amusement or both, who the Biden regime will next send their way.
The assignment in all these cases is the same: It comes down to “two seemingly contradictory responsibilities,” as The New York Times’s Ana Swanson put it in a curtain-raiser last week. She described “a mandate to strengthen U.S. business relations with Beijing while also imposing some of the toughest Chinese trade restrictions in years.”
This is succinct, although we can live without the “seemingly.” Proposing to conduct routine business while sabotaging China’s competitive position in advanced technologies is prima facie a ridiculous idea. But The Times must have its “seemingly,” because it is imperative we pretend the Biden regime thinks sensibly and means well in its relations with the People’s Republic.
Blinken got nothing done, Yellen got nothing done, Kerry got nothing done, and in Raimondo’s case it is hopeless. The final item on her itinerary is a visit to Disneyland in Shanghai, and you have to credit the secretary’s scheduler for the parting reference to dreams and fantasy. An English friend observes that we Americans are doing a lot of blinkin’ and yellin’ across the Pacific these days. Fair enough, but I think it is more of the former than the latter for the time being. This administration simply has no idea what a sound China policy would look like.
What is this all about? For a long time now I have concluded that Biden’s foreign policy people match the definition of insanity commonly but mistakenly attributed to Einstein. These people seem to be doing the same thing again and again while expecting a different outcome. But with Raimondo’s visit to Beijing this week I have to revise this assessment. Those running Biden’s national security policies are unimaginative ideologues petrified of diverging from the neoliberal catechism, yes, but they are not insane. I start to see in their dealings with Beijing a diabolical design to which the Chinese are very right to object.
The Biden administration’s China strategy comes down to parrying, in a word. All the pointless talk is intended to obscure a concerted effort to undermine China’s economy because we cannot compete with it in various strategic sectors, while—part two—buying time to move maximum U.S. military hardware as close to the mainland as possible under the program the Defense Department named a few years ago the Pacific Defense Initiative, the PDI.
At the horizon, we are likely to see Washington’s trans–Pacific military ambitions trump longstanding trade and investment relationships. This is what “decoupling” and now “delinking” are all about. They are warnings to the corporate and financial sectors that their interests, which came first in the decades after the Dengist reforms of the 1980s, will no longer take precedence as the new Cold War Biden constantly denies provoking destroys relations with the mainland.
, the financial news network, that more or less announced the Biden regime’s intention to subvert key sectors of China’s economy. She was about to address something called the U.S.–E.U. Trade and Technology Council and told her interlocutor, “If we really want to slow down China’s rate of innovation, we need to work with Europe.”
It is useful once in a while to have dumbheads such as Raimondo in high positions, because, without meaning to do so, they can tell you so much more than you are supposed to know. Slowing down China’s impressive advances in high-technology sectors was precisely Washington’s intent by the time Raimondo spoke. The Commerce Department under her direction has since imposed a wide variety of restrictions on U.S. exports to China of semiconductor chips, software systems, and the machinery used to produce both. As Ana Swanson reports, Raimondo is likely to pile on more of these as soon as she returns from Beijing.
The Biden regime dresses up this profoundly undignified conduct as “narrowly targeted” to technologies that could be of use to the Chinese military. Jake Sullivan set the tone for all of these visitors to Beijing in a speech at the Brookings Institution last April. “We are imposing necessary restrictions on specific technology exports,” he explained, “while seeking to avoid an outright technological blockade…. The administration intends to maintain a substantial trade relationship with China.”
This is what Raimondo and all of those who preceded her to China say when explaining their intent: Washington’s sole concern as Raimondo imposes her regime of restrictions is national security, and all else can proceed rosily. It is hard to think of a flimsier dodge. By this standard, she would have to restrict sales of Juicy Fruit gum to the Chinese. What the Biden administration is doing comes down to securitizing the economic relationship. If you have ever doubted that the United States is a failing imperium unwilling to accept 21st century realities, I offer this as proof of the proposition.
The Chinese know this and have said so many times. I no longer think Blinken, Yellen, et al. have any thought of persuading them otherwise on these journeys. That only looks like their intent. Their true purpose is in the way of theatrical, and Americans are their true audience: They must make sure we do not understand Gina Raimondo’s efforts to punch the Chinese well below their belts for what they are: an uncompetitive nation’s attempts to hold back a rising economic power.
interesting for what he left out as much as for what was in it. There was not a single mention of the U.S. military buildup at the western end of the Pacific.
Talk about elephants in the living room. The Pentagon is developing the Australian–British–U.S. alliance known as AUKUS, there is the Quad group, comprising the U.S., Australia, India, and Japan, there are these recently and assiduously fortified alliances with Seoul, Tokyo, Manila, and Canberra, and none of this, we hear again and again, has anything to do with surrounding China or providing for the movement of U.S. military capabilities westward toward the mainland. This is only “seemingly” the case, as The Times would put it.
It is the same as with Raimondo’s projects on the technology side: Neither the Chinese nor anyone else in Asia believes these silly explanations, and no one expects them to do so. Beijing knows very well there is a point to all these apparently pointless visits U.S. officials insist on making. The Biden regime is buying time as it remilitarizes the western end of the Pacific. The only people who are supposed to understand otherwise are Americans. We are not supposed to watch as Washington provokes and prosecutes Cold War II before our eyes. We are supposed to watch as American officials—reasonable, constructive, well-intended—make all efforts to talk to the Chinese in the face of their stubborn reluctance to cooperate.
This is my revised take on the Blinken–Yellen–Kerry–Raimondo cavalcade across the Pacific. These people are not clods. They are purposefully malicious and, it should go without saying, are making the world even more dangerous than it already is.
There are two things to think about here. One, the Biden regime’s efforts to obscure what it is up to at the other end of the Pacific is a straight reprise of the first Cold War, which now resides in all but the most important history books as the responsibility of the Soviets. We have a responsibility to render and defend an accurate record so that this does not happen again.
Two, there is this administration’s immense betrayal of Americans as it aggresses in the Pacific, along with the numerous lost opportunities of which American are deprived. You will find in that Jake Sullivan speech grand and plentiful references to the revival of the American middle class, bipartisan unity, and other such elevated thoughts. Read the speech and then ask: What is this nation’s leadership doing in the cause of a competitive America?
Are we redoubling efforts to educate our people or are we, diabolically, shutting down access—see the University of West Virginia—to liberal arts education? What are we doing to produce the doctors and scientists we need to find our way in the 21st century? What are we doing to bring the dispossessed into the economy, address drug addiction, and all our other debilitating social ills? What are we doing—seriously doing, I mean—to repair and build out the infrastructure we need? Nothing or not enough are my answers.
The Chinese challenge could and should be understood as a chance to reinvent America by way of a Great Mobilization, cap “G,” cap “M,” of New Deal magnitude. There is, of course, no more than lip service to any such idea. We are instead sacrificing this historic opportunity to the military-industrial complex, the greed of corporations, and the ambitions of political leaders who lack all principle or any thought for the commonweal.
Maybe you think, as I do, that none of the Biden officials flying off to Beijing is serious about the true work to be done in our relations with China, or is competent to do it. We must consider, bitterly, that they are perfectly representative of our circumstances as defined by a leadership that is more or less across the board unserious and incompetent to meet the great challenges of our time—China merely one among many.
US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has held “candid” talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Malta this weekend, as the world’s two largest economies seek to stabilize troubled relations over trade and militarization of the Pacific.
During the two days of talks on Saturday and Sunday, Wang brought up the issue of Taiwan – a self-governing, democratic island that China claims as its own territory – as a “red line that cannot be crossed in Sino-US relations”. The US has vowed to defend Taiwan against possible Chinese aggression.
“The United States noted the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait,” said the White House in a statement, adding that the two officials “committed to maintain this strategic channel of communication and to pursue additional high-level engagement”.
A Chinese government statement on the Malta meeting largely echoed the US version, saying “the two sides conducted candid, substantive and constructive strategic communication”.
China has accused the US of weaponizing tech and trade issues under the guise of national security while Washington has warned Beijing against its military ambitions in Taiwan and the Pacific. The US has forged security alliances in the Pacific to counter growing Chinese influence.
Sullivan’s meeting with Wang was the latest in a series of high-level discussions between US and Chinese officials that could lay the groundwork for a meeting of US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping later this year.
Sullivan last met Wang in the Austrian capital Vienna in May.
Why I Gave up on the American Dream
Huawei is full of surprises
Huawei has made an interesting discovery about the Kirin 9000s processor after a recent software update. Previously, this processor was thought to have an 8-core architecture, but it turns out it actually has 12 cores. This revelation has attracted significant attention, as it brings a substantial boost in processing power and performance for devices using this chip. It’s always exciting when technology surprises us with hidden capabilities, and this discovery could have a positive impact on the performance
of devices powered by the Kirin 9000s processor.
Huawei has released HarmonyOS 4.0.0.116 for its Mate 60 series and Mate X5 smartphones. These devices are powered by the Kirin
9000s chipset, which is a new processor developed by Huawei. This update brings the latest features and improvements to these smartphones, enhancing their performance and user experience. It’s always a good sign when manufacturers continue to support their devices with software updates, ensuring that users can enjoy the latest innovations and enhancements.
There seems to be a discrepancy in the reported core count of the Kirin 9000s chipset in the Huawei Mate 60 series. Initially, phone information apps and Geekbench indicated that the chip had an 8-core architecture. However, after a recent software update, these sources are now reporting that the Mate 60 is running a 12-core chip. This is indeed an interesting development, and it could indicate that Huawei has unlocked additional cores in the chipset
through a software update, potentially improving its performance. It’s a noteworthy change, and users may experience enhanced performance as a result of this update.
in the meanwhile … see Huawei new Cloud Service
I gave up on the American Dream|And you should too
My mother did. I moved out at 18 because of physical abuse (beatings). I didn’t talk to her for about 10 years. She called me one day and asked if she could see me. I said no. She started crying and begged me to see her. I agreed. We met and talked for awhile. She told me how sorry she was for the way she treated me growing up. She apologized and begged my forgiveness. She told me of the abuse she went thought from both her parents. Like burning her tongue with a red hot knife for lying. And the beatings that left her bloody. By the time the evening was over, we were both crying and hugging. After that we had a more loving relationship until she passed away.
Years ago, pre-Covid, I went on holiday to Hong Kong with my mother and aunt. I was a teenager at that time, so most of the time, I was roped in to become my mother and aunt’s ‘pack mule’ when we weren’t sightseeing, and they were shopping like no tomorrow.
So one time, we passed by a shop that was selling jewellery and my aunt wanted to take a look. One of the shop attendants take one look at us and spoke to her colleague in Cantonese.
Now, I live in Singapore, and me, my aunt and my mother are all Singaporean Chinese. As such, we are bilingual and Cantonese happened to be one of the languages we can speak and understand.
Essentially, the shop attendant is telling her colleague to not serve us or just show us the cheapest items they got as ‘we can’t afford it anyway’.
Oh geez, I wish phones have the video function at that time, as the dressing down my aunt and mother gave to that shop attendant is GOLD! Not to mention her very impressive imitation of a fish out of the water!
6 Major Culture Shocks After Returning to the US From Europe
The world knows better. China will absolutely take over the entire chip making process, production, business and industry. The U.S. can make some chips for its military equipment. At 1000 times the cost of a Chinese equivalent to fool themselves that they are in charge if that is what they want. That is their right.
But there is no way China will stop till they make their own stuffs. And they will get it done faster, better and cheaper. They always do. The U.S. export control will end the U.S. involvement in 99.9% of chip business losing them trillions of dollars over time. It is too bad. It is not what China wants it is what China is forced into it by the U.S. excesses and U.S. obnoxious and despicable behaviour.
I grew up in a poor family from a small, poor village in Vietnam.
I don’t know why, but to me when I was a small kid, a globe being displayed on the top shelf of a glass cabinet in the living room was the symbol of wealth. A family had that thing, they were rich – that was my silly logic. I liked the globe a lot, but I knew I couldn’t ask my parents for one – because we’re poor.
In my neighborhood, there was a decent family. The husband was a math teacher. He liked me, because every time when I had a tough math homework, I would bring it to him, asked for his guidance, listened and tried to solve it. I also played chess with him. I liked him, because, well, he was nice but also because he had a globe.
One day, after finishing a chess match with the math teacher, I stood there in front of their cabinet, looked up to the globe with my widening eyes. I guessed that he noticed it. He opened the cabinet, took the globe down, then he showed me and asked, “Do you know which country is The land of the Rising sun? Do you know why they said The empire on which the sun never sets?”. I shook my head. Then he told me stories about countries, and the world. All of my dreams were condensed into two things: traveling the world and owning a globe.
I grew up. My dream about traveling around the world is still an on-going dream. But I do own a globe now. A very traditional old school style globe. I don’t display it in a cabinet. I have it on my dining table.
Every day, during dinner, we play a game called Where am I now?. Each of us will take turn to pick a country, then others will ask questions, ‘Are you in Asia?’; ‘You border the ocean?’;… and try to guess which country is it.
Why I Left the USA (Again)
The consumerism here in the USA is ridiculous. And people’s self worth is all determined by what they buy and their social media reels. So sick of it.
In mt early 20’s I had a cute little expensive sports car that I had worked multiple jobs to afford. Some idiot rear ended me and did a lot of damage to it and it should probably have been totalled. Insurance adjuster comes to my house, reeking of alcohol, and decides it can be saved.
Trying to take advantage of my youth & sex, he tells me that he can help me out by referring me to his buddy’s shop to get all the work done. RED flag #1 And that I needn’t worry about getting ripped off. RED flag #2. And that his friend would gladly send a flat bed to my house that afternoon, free of charge, to pick it up. RED flag #3. He gives me his friend’s business card
He then proceeds to hand me a pre-written “letter” from my insurance company, that he has personally signed, that authorizes any & all work to be done. RED flag #4. I read it and realize that nowhere in the paperwork does it state that I have to use his friend. Actually, it is an authorization for me to go anywhere.
I sign it, get my copy and quickly usher him out, implying that I need to call his friend and get this in the works. He leaves smiling. I call my buddy who owns a high end exotic & sports car repair shop and read him the letter. He confirms what I thought and arranges to have a flat bed sent ASAP.
My buddy does the accident repairs, plus a few other custom things that I wanted done. Ends up costing 40% more that a brand new version of my car. Pissed off insurance company contacts me to find out how this all went down. I explained about the adjuster being drunk, pushing his friend’s business, the pre-written letter he showed up with etc.
Ends up the adjuster was getting kick backs from his “friend” and gets fired. Plus the insurance company sued him & won a judgement requiring him to pay the full cost of my car’s repair. And I got my car back in better shape than when I bought it.
I was in Michigan with a bunch of Canadian students on a SERVE trip. Our host, the pastor of a church, complained that when he retired all he would have was “‘Obama Care, like the health insurance you Canadians hate so much.”
I said,”Whaaaaat?”
He insisted we Canadians hate our health care system with its delays and problems. He ‘knew this fact’ from TV and articles he’d read.
I told him, “There’s not a single politician I’ve heard of in Canada who would publicly say he would get rid of our health care and replace it with an American system. Not one. He or she would never be re-elected.”
“Whaaat?” he asked me. “How about heart attack victims who never got treated in time and died? I read about a guy…”
“You have to start reading Canadian newspapers and watching Canadian news channels. We love our health care system. Sure, there are delays, but usually serious cases are treated quickly and families are not bankrupt when they have a medical emergency. You can thank Kiefer Sutherland’s grandfather…”
“Who?”
“Tommy Douglas, grandfather of Kiefer Sutherland, the actor. First Canadian leader to initiate universal health care in his Province.”
“His what?”
Finding True America: Why Americans have left the U.S.
Putin cares about the security of Russia preserving the Russian motherland and it’s glory
He cares about RUSSIA and he will choose his future based on what is best for Russia
Putin has no ideology
He is a crisp man of logic and reasoning
Here is why he won’t trust the West again:-
They are LIARS – They promised no eastward expansion of NATO, They made promises with Minsk 2 – eventually they lie and lie and lie some more.
They are steeped in Ideology – They are insane. The leaders are. They are steeped in ideology equivalent to Hitlers. They have caused death and devastation of millions of people in the name of human rights and freedom.
They HATE RUSSIA – The West hates Russia. It’s as simple as that. They want Russia balkanized. They want Russia broken up and swindled of all it’s resources by the Evil Coalition of the West
Putin may do business with the West in the future but he will never trust them or come on their side
Now let’s see the track record of the West :-
They nuked Japan and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people
They destroyed Vietnam, a war where they had no direct causation
They destroyed Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya and Syria all for some demented ideology and flooded the world with migrants plus Al Qaeda plus ISIS
They haven’t helped a single country fruitfully towards Independence and Strength
They throttled Japan single handedly in the Plaza accords
China is where the USSR should have been and that rankles Putin
Yet he is enough of a realist to understand that China is a giant and the only major economic bulwark to the USA today
So it’s a mutually beneficial partnership
China has no interests in Europe and Russia has little interest in the South China Sea
They have territorial peace now
Russia has the Military Capabilities and the Energy Resources & Raw Materials and China has the High Intellect People and the Manufacturing and the Economy
Together these two nations form a strong bulwark against Western Sanctions & Bullying & Restrictions
They have the largest pliable land area on earth now and they can route bulk of their energy and trade by land and entirely bypass blockades
Plus China has never let down it’s friends at crucial times nor caused color revolution in any of it’s friendly countries nor interfered with any such country
It’s always been TRADE, TRADE and TRADE
It’s why Putin and Xi are teaming up
It’s the only way to form a bulkwark against Western Hegemony
Get Iran into the picture and maybe Saudi Arabia and that would be a very powerful alliance
Ranch Steak
2023 09 25 15 24
Yield: 4 to 6 servings
Ingredients
3 tablespoons olive oil
1 medium onion, thinly sliced
1 1/2 to 2 pounds round steak
Salt and pepper
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
3/4 cup beef broth
1 tablespoon Ranch dressing mix
1/2 cup sour cream
Instructions
Heat oil in large heavy, nonstick skillet.
Fry onions until limp. Remove from pan and set aside.
Cut meat into serving size pieces. Sprinkle both sides with salt and pepper. Dust lightly with flour and beat it into meat with edge of a saucer. Brown on both sides, adding more oil if needed.
Return onion to pan with meat. Add beef broth, cover and simmer for 50 to 60 minutes or until meat is very, very tender, adding a little more broth if needed.
Combine Ranch dressing mix and sour cream. Remove meat to platter.
Stir sour cream mixture into meat juices. Heat through until bubbly. Pour over meat and serve.
This is not true. Since poverty was wiped out in 2020, 800 million Chinese entered into the middle class, that’s 2.5 times US entire population. Half of rural population moved to cities for better education and healthcare. China has 4 times the US population, but less homelessness. Wealth is concentrated in 1% of population in the US, trillionaires like Bill Gates and Elon Musk, and the middle class is shrinking, many without healthcare. “Middle class” as defined by 96% literacy rate in China, people with basic needs of food and shelter, healthcare and old age benefits.
Russia Retaliates for Sevastopol; Hits Kremenchug Airport Where Missiles were launched
Just days ago, Ukraine fired either French-supplied “SCALP” or British-supplied “Storm-Shadow” missiles at the Russian Black Sea Fleet HEadquearters in Sevastopol, Crimea, Russia, killing what we are now told was 34 high-ranking Russian officers. Now, Russia has retaliated.
The Kremenchug Airport, launch site for the cruise missile attack upon Sevastopol, has been hit by a significant Russian missile barrage.
NO AIR-RAID WARNING WAS SOUNDED PRIOR TO THE ATTACK, with locals suggesting Russia utilized low-observable, KH-50 cruise missiles for the retaliation attack.
Both SCALP and STORM SHADOW missiles, which were stored at the Kremenchug airport, along with the Ukrainian SU-24M/MR bomber aircraft which fired those missiles, have been destroyed.
A substantial number of fire-fighters and ambulances have been dispatched to the airport. We are told there are “significant casualties among pilots, ground crews and even NATO personnel, including Polish troops, who were involved in coordinating the operations and maintaining the missiles.
After my first year at university, I ended up working for McDonald’s, where I made a number of friends and several lovers, and even met my first wife.
I generally worked the night shift. The night shift is quite a lot different from day shift: the average age of the workers is slightly higher (at least when I was there, this was decades ago), and the workload is different.
During night shift:
We spent a huge amount of time cleaning. We deep-cleaned the lobby, dismantled and cleaned the shake machine, and deep-cleaned cooking trays and food prep utensils. (We didn’t have an industrial dishwasher, this all happened by hand.)
We cleaned the grills, a rather tedious process involving lots of scraping with a dedicated tool that was basically an aluminum handle with a stainless steel blade bolted to the end, another tool with a wire mesh pad on the end, and a special cleaning solvent that would take the hair out of your nose.
We changed deep-fryer oil.
We received the supply truck.
We snuck off to make out in the walk-in freezer. Yes, I’m serious. I had several rather delightful makeout sessions with a lovely woman whose name I sadly no longer remember.
We played with the helium tanks that the cDonald’s kept on hand for birthday parties. I will never forget working the back drive-through booth one evening when my friend Henry filled a garbage bag with helium, walked into the booth, and pushed it out the window. We all just kind of stood there watching it float away…including the customers in the drive-through lane.
We played practical jokes on day shift, like stacking the trays the hamburger buns were delivered in all the way to the ceiling, so you actually had to take the entire stack outside to remove the top tray.
At closing, we’d disassemble and clean the various bits of equipment before we locked up. Then we’d go across the street to the 24-hour Perkin’s, which back then was called Perkin’s Bar and Grill (this was before they re-branded as “Perkin’s Family Restaurants”). We called the place “Perkin’s Brawl and Grill” because it would usually be the scene of at least one or two knock-down-drag-out bar fights a month.
There was a 1979 movie starring Peter Falk titled “The In-laws”, and for some strange reason I just remembered this movie. I tried to download the torrent, but it is taking forever. It is just a goofy and funny comedy, but for some reason… it came to mind.
The premise of this film is really simple: if two families are about to enjoy the union of their children in a marriage, is it not likely that the in-laws involved can come to depend and help each other out in times of need? Most of us would probably say no, or want to know the extent of the help. However, when Vincent J. Ricardo (Peter Falk) asks Dr. Sheldon Kornpett (Alan Arkin) to assist him in retrieving something from a safe in Ricardo’s office, Kornpett is willing (if somewhat suspiciously) to do it.
The reason that Kornpett is suspicious is he is not quite certain what to make of Ricardo. They only met at Kornpett’s house the night before, for a dinner party introducing the families of the bride (Kornpett’s) and groom (Ricardo’s) to each other. Ricardo acted…well oddly. He told tales of his business travels in Central America, including how in one country babies are being carried off by huge bats that are protected by the Guacamole Act of 1917. Kornpett hears this with a blank face, although his eyes do bug out a little in disbelief. Later, when Ricardo gets testy with his son over a comment about the former not being home enough, Kornpett can’t believe the near rage that Ricardo demonstrates at the table. So his suspicions about his future in-law seem well based.
Shortly, after being chased and nearly killed by two men who are after the items that Kornpett picked up, the suspicions seem confirmed. Ricardo explains to him, over pea soup in a restaurant, that he actually is not a successful salesman but a C.I.A. operative (a photo in Ricardo’s office confirms this: it is of President Kennedy, and the autograph refers to the Bay of Pigs Invasion). He is in the middle of a critically important mission in Latin America dealing with international finance and a conspiracy against the richest nations. Kornpett hears him out, and is upset to hear that there is more material that Ricardo hid in Kornpett’s home the night before. He wants no part of it, and leaves to go home – only to find the police there. He flees, and does evade capture – at the cost of having his car repainted in a way he never would have wanted it to look.
Soon Kornpett is forced to join forces with Ricardo, and enters the deadly serious but (here) quite farcical world of international espionage and intrigue. At the end of the road is the ringleader of the conspiracy, General Garcia (Richard Libertini) who has a special little friend that makes Al Pacino’s little friend in SCARFACE lethal but sensible in comparison.
THE IN-LAWS is funny. Arkin with his tight-ass repressive personality works well against the free-wheeling, anything goes Falk. Libertini appears only in the films last twenty minutes, but he does equally nicely as the ultimate in screw-ball dictators. Well supported by a cast including Nancy Dussault, Arlene Golonka, Penny Peyser, Michael Lembeck, and Ed Begley Jr. the film is just a laugh fest until the happy ending. As mentioned elsewhere in these comments Arkin and Falk should have made several films together. They have only done one other movie together since THE IN-LAWS. Pity.
‘If you lose this baby, you could always have another one’. The comment above was made by the doctor who my husband and I had a consultation with. I was roughly 10 weeks pregnant with our first child. I was in my mid 30’s while hubby was in his early 40’s.
An elderly man in his fifties, he barely looked at us, ignored me, said hello to my husband, looked at my file fleetingly, a file with tests and scans which showed I had fibroids, looked directly at my husband and said to him, ‘She will be fine’. I was furious that this man was clearly sexist, ignoring me as if I was invisible. I responded by asking what that meant, what was the cause of the bleeding as he had not told us at this point about the fibroids. ‘You do not need to bother about it. That is why we are here’. This statement was addressed again to my husband who he was still looking at while still ignoring my presence.
At this point, something in me snapped and I snapped at him, ‘Look at me and tell me what is causing this bleeding. It is my body and I need the details’. He then slowly turned to look at me as if seeing me for the first time and emotionlessly said, ‘you have fibroids. They are not massive and do not pose a danger to your baby’. ‘But I am bleeding. Is that not dangerous? ‘ I worriedly asked.
That was when he looked at the file and without lifting his head, retorted ,Not really. However, if you lose this baby, you could always have another one ’. I almost cussed the insensitive idiot out but my husband who knew I was fuming at this point, got up and ushered me out of the office while the doctor was still talking about ante natal visits at their hospital. We had heard enough. I went on to another hospital where I met the amazing doctor who delivered my daughter without complications and went on to have a son after that.
She is now a healthy, happy 10 year old who is pure joy and always a little mama to her 7 year old brother.
London Broil
London Broil is a favorite recipe from the Iowa Beef Industry Council.
delish london broil horizontal 1546553273
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
1 (1 1/4 to 1 3/4 pound) beef flank steak
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 clove garlic, crushed
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
Instructions
Combine vegetable oil, lemon juice, garlic, salt and pepper for marinade.
Place steak in plastic bag and pour marinade over it.
Close bag securely and refrigerate 4 to 6 hours or overnight, turning occasionally.
Pour off and reserve marinade.
Place steak on grill and broil at moderate temperature for 5 minutes.
Turn, brush with marinade and broil 5 minutes or to desired doneness (rare or medium).
To carve, slice diagonally across grain in thin strips.
10 STOIC LESSONS TO HANDLE DISRESEPECT (MUST WATCH) | STOICISM
Learn something important.
ASML
Here is the reason why ASML CEO said a few years ago that if ASML gave China the blueprint for the EUV machine China would not be able to make it.
This is because all of the core technologies is NOT owned by ASML. ASML is the system integrator that was allowed by the US government to participate in the US government project to create an EUV light source.
This project pulled together many US national labs including Lawrence Livermore Labs, Sandia Nation Lab, Brookhaven National Lab, Lawrence Berkely National Lab, IBM, Intel, AMD, etc. And it took over 10 years to create this laser light source.
This was considered a national security project so Japanese companies like Nikon and Canon were not allowed to join.
The difficulty of this light source and the engineering problems that had to be overcome was as difficult as the first atomic bomb.
So I have to admit that I was wrong in my speculation about using a Rube Goldberg device to generate EUV. They didn’t have a choice. This was the best possible source at the time. It took literally the US, Germany, and some other nation’s best experts to create this light source.
The other parts are relatively easy in comparison.
The problem is that China has also created this light source and using another method so it isn’t so Rube Goldberg machine. Not that it was simple to make. But it is more reliable and you don’t have to worry about residue removal that will mess up your mirrors and the inside of the your machine which has to remain at clean room levels.
The Answer is yes. Yes indeed the U.S. and the west has been propagating that only western liberal democracy works. Nothing else. Either be a liberal democracy or die says the US. That is of course simply not true at all. And the real truth is simply that the West wanted to install liberal democracy so that the west can easily manipulate it and install a government that surrender its sovereignty to the west in order to manipulate and steal it’s resources to enrich the former colonials.
Now that China proved beyond reasonable doubts and against all odds that it could grow phenomenally and economically dwarfed every other nation, this fear and worry the U.S. mightily. Failure to contain China means failure to perpetuate this lie!
This is indeed worrisome for the west since they the west in general has essentially collapsed in a huge pile of debts. And law and order disintegrates through the western world. With high inflation and a looming recession with countless millions of homeless people living in the streets while their government finance and orchestrate wars. Based on printing money without basis and rampant money creation.
China U.S. out innovating the U.S., it U.S. out thinking the U.S., out growing the U.S. and out influencing the U.S. growing even its military and wealth and out manipulating the U.S. government everywhere on earth. The U.S. wants to stop the truth from being revealed to the world.
It’s Not Just You: American Jobs Didn’t Used To Be This Terrible
My Dad’s Union IBEW is the reason we went from lower middle class to solid middle class in 10 years. Unions are one of the most important checks for capitalism.
Government promise something. Give it a few years and it happens.
Some bigger projects like Mao wanting to borrow some water from the south took a bit longer.
OTOH governments like the UK one I lived under… they promise shit, then they say haha you sucker you actually believed me? Fuck you!
Gordon Brown’s QC literally said that election pledges and promises were not subject to legitimate expectation.
Here? Here in Hong Kong? The government construction projects shaved 20 minutes off my commute.
25 years ago they shaved an hour off the commute for the villagers by widening the dirt track that lead to my village and paving it. Then offering a bus franchise nearby so it was connected with the world.
Most people my age would either be listening to music, watching some TV show/movie in their smartphones/tablets. A very few would be reading a newspaper or book.
I was one of them. I always had music on. I can’t read/watch anything because of motion sickness while traveling on road.
The older generation- they do nothing. They don’t use phones, they don’t talk, don’t read, nothing. They just sit and look around.
I wanted to try this and coincidentally my earphones broke down.
Now it has been over six months. I travel in the metro for 3 hours everyday and do nothing, just look around. This has helped me so much. I observe people, their behaviours. I look around to see what’s actually happening.
It may sound weird but there’s something weirdly enjoyable about it. It feels like living life the old school way. This has helped me reduce the screen time as well.
I have even started recognising the regular commuters. I am sure they don’t recognise me.
Unbreakable (2000) | *First Time Watching* | Movie Reaction | Asia and BJ
Still one of the top 10 best comic films of all time. Its really the first one that showed what the comic genre could do when taken seriously.
This is one of my top, and most favorite movies. It is so meaningful to me. Seriously people. I can relate to this movie. So very much!
When my daughter was about 9 or 10 years old, whenever she got a scolding from my wife, I would annoy her by doing a chicken dance and do so in a way that ONLY she sees it.
“Mommy! Dad is making fun of me!” she would always complain.
When my wife turned around, I would stop and act normal and go on with my stuff. This went on for a while till it became a game of HER trying to catch me in the act and prove it to her mother.
She would learn to very quickly take out her mobile phone and try to snap a picture of me doing it. I would tease her by dancing until the moment the phone was almost pointing towards me, then I would stop and behave normally.
“I will get you someday,” she said.
“No, you won’t! I am too fast for you,” I replied.
On a particular day, I again did the ridiculous chicken dance, she was rolling her eyes and her hands move slowly towards her phone. I continued dancing and mentally calculating how fast she could key in the pass-code and turn on the camera mode.
Something didn’t feel right, her action was slower than usual, by the time she pointed the camera at me, I had stopped. But she started laughing loudly.
“Guess what daddy? THIS isn’t my phone. I switched the phone cover with mum. MY PHONE is behind you, just above the cupboard, ON VIDEO TAKING MODE.”
Ouch! A full two minutes of myself being ridiculous caught on video!
NOT genius smart, NOT intellectual smart, perhaps a little STREET SMART!
The gay and bisexual men are not as common in China as they are in the West. It is difficult for MPOX to become an epidemic in China.
From June 2 to June 30, 2023, 106 new confirmed cases of monkeypox were reported in mainland China (excluding Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan), including 48 cases reported in Guangdong Province, 45 cases reported in Beijing City, 8 cases reported in Jiangsu Province, 2 cases reported in Hubei Province, 2 cases reported in Shandong Province, and 1 case reported in Zhejiang Province. There were no severe cases or deaths.
The epidemic presents the following characteristics:
One is that the vast majority of cases are mainly transmitted through male homosexual sexual contact.
Secondly, the risk of transmission through other forms of contact is low, and the vast majority of close contacts, except for sexual contact, have not experienced infection.
The third is that most cases were found during medical treatment, while a few cases were found through follow-up screening of close contacts.
The fourth is that the vast majority of cases have typical clinical manifestations, mainly symptoms such as fever, herpes, and lymph node enlargement, with no severe or fatal cases.
An American Reacts to Why America Sucks at Everything – THIS ONE HURT
This is very good. Really.
It is a MUCH watch. This is the real truth about the United States.
“I’m so glad you made this video because my conservative mom watched it and now she’s starting to wake up. I got screwed over by the “in network out of network” bullshit recently. My employer changed our healthcare coverage, and I had to find a new neurologist and start the “prior authorization “ process for a particular drug that I take all over again”
The sheer power of Xi Jingping is the fact that QG has been buried away and cut off in a matter of seconds and China and it’s foreign affairs moves without a single blip
Thats power
Had Xi been weak, a rival faction would have lobbied immediately within the CPC but the fact that China has simply chosen to forget QG and not talk about him shows the power of Xi Jingping
China and CPC knows that today in the hostile atmosphere with the West — Only XJP is the right man to lead China
Hu JINTAO would have kowtowed in seconds
Li Keiqang would have kowtowed in maybe a month
Bo Xilai would have kowtowed in nanoseconds
Xis power is at its peak now
Had QG defected to US and been declared a mole for CIA then yes , Xi would have been finished politically
Yet QG is in China and safe and under the Partys safe hands 😁
My father-in-law did. He was moving some tools around in his garage and suddenly had a strong urge to move one of the cars, a Subaru, out into the driveway. He tried to ignore this feeling, because the car was not in his way and it seemed like a needless waste of time. But he couldn’t shake it, so he went and got his car keys and backed the car out of the garage.
Just as he had done so and was getting out of the car, a speeding Tesla flashed past him a couple of feet away and crashed into the open garage, then burst into flames. If he’d stayed in the garage working, he would most likely have been killed.
The resulting fire destroyed the entire garage and his other car. It was 9 months before he and his wife were able to move back into the house. But he was alive, and they still had their Subaru. There was no good explanation for the “little voice in his head” that told him he needed to get himself and his car out of the garage.
By the way, the Tesla driver, who was pulled out of the burning car by a neighbor, was uninjured but was convicted of DUI and had to pay restitution and perform community service.
He was suffering from pancreatic cancer at the time, but from that moment his desire to oversee the restoration of the house gave him a new determination in life. It was a very busy and stressful time, during which he and his wife lived in rental housing. At last they were able to move back into the house which had been perfectly restored to its original state, including a new garage of course, new roof, new heating & a/c, new paint and flooring, and every item inside the house had been removed, professionally cleaned, and replaced. It was beautiful. However, his condition declined rapidly after that and he passed away in August 2018, not quite a year after the fire.
The US Plan to KILL Second Citizenship
“As a Venezuelan born in the 90s (post oil-golden era for that country), I know first hand what he means when he says it’s important to have options. I saw how my mother and her siblings were unable to get their second citizenship by descent from Trinidad and Tobago, once things got terribly bad in my country. My grandparents had both US residency and Caribbean citizenship, but because things were going so well in Venezuela in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, they didn’t work on securing and passing along those other options; and their children never thought things would get this bad. It only took less than 30 years to see things turn around for the worst.”
For many years now, the USA has been classified as a “flawed democracy”. Events such as the Capitol Hill riots – intended to disrupt the inauguration of your elected President – did not help. A significant proportion of Americans themselves believed that the last election was rigged and “stolen” from them. So how can the USA be said to be the “very embodiment of democracy”? This strikes me as an extremely grandiose and indefensible claim.
As for freedom, the USA comprises 5% of the world population but holds about 20% of the world’s prisoners. With so many Americans literally locked up behind bars, how can the USA claim to be a “free” country? Furthermore your 13th amendment legalises the enslavement of prisoners – and the USA heavily exploits these slaves/prisoners in ways that your own civil liberty lawyers have described as an abuse of fundamental human rights. (Eg US prisoners can be forced into hazardous jobs – such as fighting wildfires – for as little as zero to fifty cents per hour of work). Errrr, seriously, you think that the US is the embodiment of freedom?
What hope does the USA bring to the world? In the past 40 years, the USA has dropped more bombs, fired more missiles and killed more people in other countries, than any other country in the world. In the past 40 years, the USA has killed people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Grenada, Bosnia, Somalia and Uganda. Because of US sanctions, the world was afraid to send even vaccines, masks and ventilators to Iran during the covid–19 pandemic. This is how the US brings death and destruction to the world.
Please stop watching your Hollywood movies where the USA is always the one to save the world from invasions by aliens from outer space. Open your eyes and look at the real world. At least look at your own country. Your people are dying from drug overdose at the highest rate in the world. Your people are getting shot to death at the highest rate among all developed countries. Your policemen are shooting citizens for minor offences. Your cities are littered with homeless people living in tents. Your national literacy rate is collapsing together with your average life expectancy. Medical bills are the biggest cause of personal bankruptcies in the USA; your infrastructure is crumbling and aged water pipes are leaking lead into the drinking water for your public schools. To lead your country, you are choosing between a criminal octagenarian and a senile otagenarian. Your income inequality is vast, with the top 1% controlling more wealth than the middle 60% – let’s not even discuss the sufferrings of your bottom 20%.
The US is the embodiment of … HOPE, you say?! Hopelessness is more like it. The USA is no example for the world – unless we are talking of negative examples.
I used to work for a major mail order company; as tech staff I could be sent out anywhere in the country, for which the company would pre-pay for accommodation and pay 40 pence per mile for fuel costs (which was tight-arsed of them, as other companies paid 65ppm).
They also supposedly insured us for using our private cars this way.
People who regularly went out for long trips had a company card to pay for hotels with.
One day they decide they are cutting the fuel payment to 25ppm, and back-dating it SIX months, and also cancelling the company cards – people would have to pay with their own money and claim it back.
This latter move caught a few out who were already out on trips – one guy was unable to pay his bill at a London conference centre, and the staff there were threatening to call the Police.
We also discovered at the same time, that the company HADN’T been paying for the extra car insurance policy, so we were all using our cars effectively with no insurance.
Next day, everyone parked 1/2 mile away and walked into work. “Sorry, can’t go on that job, no car” was the story from every member of the technical staff.
Every senior manager was made to turn over his company car for us to drive around. Even the CEO’s chauffeured Bentley was pressed into service, but it still wasn’t enough; by the end of the first week the taxi bill was running into the high hundreds, and everyone was refusing overnight jobs on the basis they couldn’t afford to pay for the hotel.
It took a MONTH for the suits to cave, and god only knows how much it cost them, in money, customer relations, and the lost goodwill of the tech staff.
Why the American Dream is a Myth
“It’s expensive to be poor” Just…. damn man!
Mediterranean Steak and Pasta with Tomato-Olive Sauce
Whole-wheat pasta is served with beef Sirloin Tip Center Steaks and a tomato and olive sauce. This one will please the adults and the kids in your family.
2023 09 25 15 07
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
8 ounces uncooked whole grain fettuccine
4 beef Sirloin Tip Center Steaks, cut 3/4 inch thick (about 4 ounces each)
1 (26 ounce) jar pasta sauce with olives*
1 teaspoon dried oregano leaves, crushed
1/4 cup finely shredded Italian cheese blend or mozzarella cheese
2 teaspoons chopped fresh parsley leaves
Instructions
Cook fettuccine according to package directions; drain and keep warm.
Heat large nonstick skillet over medium heat until hot. Place beef steaks in skillet; cook for 11 to 13 minutes for medium rare (145 degrees F) doneness, turning occasionally. (Do not overcook.) Remove from skillet; keep warm.
Combine pasta sauce and oregano in same skillet; heat until hot. Return steaks to skillet; turn to coat with sauce.
Place steaks on fettuccine; spoon sauce over all.
Sprinkle steaks with cheese, allowing cheese to melt. Sprinkle with parsley.
Notes
* You may substitute 1 (26 ounce) jar pasta sauce with olives for 1 (26 ounce) pasta sauce plus 1/4 cup chopped olives.
US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said she was “upset” when China’s Huawei Technologies released a new phone with an advanced chip during her visit to the country last month but noted that the US has no evidence China can make these components “at scale,” Bloomberg reported. She also said the US is trying to use every single tool at its disposal to deny the Chinese the ability to advance their technology in ways that can hurt the US.
Raimondo’s words are nothing new, but saying that China’s technological advancement “can hurt the US” is a stupid and ridiculous line of thinking. Many American elites refuse to accept that the Chinese have broken through the technological blockade. Radical lawmakers are calling for efforts to strangle Huawei and SMIC, which is not only hegemonic but also an evil way of thinking.
Whether it is ASML, the Dutch manufacturer of lithography machines, or the American chip giants, they do not believe that decoupling can stop China’s progress in semiconductor technology. They believe that China can find alternative methods and its own technological path. However, a large number of American elites are non-technical and refuse to face reality, blindly believing that Huawei’s breakthrough is because the US export controls on technology to China are “still too loose.”
It should be said that Huawei’s breakthrough has to a certain extent undermined the credibility of the US’ technological blockade against China and shattered the collective confidence of the West in this regard. Washington’s current investigation into the origin of Huawei’s chips and attempts to tighten the noose on the blockade against China will only isolate itself.
Because Washington clearly lost the first round, it has to bet even bigger and risk losing the Chinese market for many Western semiconductor companies. Imagine the result of continuing technological restrictions if Huawei makes further breakthroughs – can ASML’s lithography machines still enjoy their current glory? Where will the US-controlled chip production factories find their next market? Just look at the panic faced by Japanese and German automotive giants today in the face of the rise of Chinese electric vehicles. If the current semiconductor leaders are cut off from the Chinese market, who can guarantee that their future situation will be better?
Huawei’s Kirin 9000s is a breakthrough that it was forced to make by the US sanctions. If the US exerts even greater pressure, it will turn this breakthrough into a systemic breach, promoting a highly integrated and strong production chain in the Chinese semiconductor industry. Chips produced in China will also be much cheaper than those produced in the US.
If the US semiconductor industry loses the Chinese market, it will not be as lucky as Google and Facebook. The latter have software advantages that some Chinese internet companies do not have, including the application ecosystem they established by being the first movers. However, semiconductors are hardware, and when Chinese companies like Huawei can provide a cheaper alternative, the situation will be completely different.
A crucial crossroads has been reached. If the US forces China to achieve complete independence in the semiconductor industry, it will have no further cards to play in blocking China’s progress. Moreover, the technological landscape of the world will undergo a rewrite. China now possesses the capital, and we will continue to progress no matter what. It is now the US’ turn to make a choice: continue gambling or change course and resume cooperation?
Expat’s THAI WIFE disappears and so did his fortune $$. Then it got WORSE!
One of the “head shakers” about China is the ever-present music of Kenny G on elevators, in supermarkets, in malls, and in restaurants. I do like slow easy jazz, and back in the 1980’s. But I, like most Americans, have moved WAYYYY past all that.
We moved past mullets. We moved past Miami Vice. We moved on from large curly hair, and pastels. We moved on from Windows DOS.
But, you know, China never experienced those things, and have no idea how out of date all this is. And us expats, really, have no heart to admonish our friends in China to stop being so retro. We, well, we just let it all ride.
Just like no one ever says “What’s uppppppppppp!” any longer.
First of all, Fentanyl is used for treating severe pain especially for cancer patients and is deem a medicine product which many countries import mainly from China. Likewise it is your own country laws and regulations to prevent abuse instead of blaming China or Mexico or another other countries. If illegal Fentanyl managed to slip into your country, blame your border guards and custom officer for not doing the job or your judges for not imposing severe penalties.
Just like a simple soap for washing and bathing and you decided to abuse it by eating them as food and then you blame China other then yourself.
I suggest in that case better that your country be pure communist like Mao time where China totally shut off from the world where no exports and no imports can take place.
Would that scenerio be a better option for your country . That covers all your citizens from visiting any countries so that they will not be arrested or detained or even your organs been harvested for scientific research.
The moral of my answer is don’t blame others, other than yourself if you decided your own will to do stupid things.
We don’t actually need them. This is from the US military college. A war with China will wipe 3600 US soldiers out or 50,000 a week. That means ONE brigade a day.
Yes. My brother died last September without signing his will (they had it filled out but he didn’t sign it).
I have helped his widow out with cleaning the house.
Because he was intestate, I’m technically entitled to 25% of his inheritance under my state law as our parents are dead, but he was married (75/25 split by law).
He literally told me he wanted everything to go to his wife, who I would consider my sister now.
I’m not screwing a 60 year old lady out of her house.
Yeah, as a working class guy, I could REALLY use 100k+ dollars if I fought it, but I will absolutely NOT destroy his dream of his wife having a nice little home.
Them home cooked meals, talk and sharing memories a couple times every few months are worth more to me than money.
Maybe I’m an idiot, but I love him and her too much to go by “the law”.
Signing that form for her lawyer was about the easiest moral choice I’ve ever had to take.
CN bans ASML products,Lays off 86 million employees; Photolithography machine turned into scrap metal
For china to make a competitive smartphone to Apple with old generation technology is truly remarkable, I know why U.S and Europe is scared of china…they are simply better in technology.
Russia IS a democracy. Merely because they keep electing Putin and the UR Party all the time or because the election rules favor the ruling party doesn’t disturb the definition
Ultimately Putin IS elected by the people of Russia
The Government under Putin has helped Russia rise from a torn apart and destroyed country in 1991 to a very strong, united force in 2023
So the People are happy and the People vote for the Government and President
That’s Democracy to me
If the US don’t like it, they can go f*** themselves
Next China
Chinese society is 5000 years old
The Chinese mindset is entirely based on the premise that EVERY CHINESE has a role to play in Society and if every Chinese plays their role properly, China will flourish
Under the Emperors, this role was defined by birth and family
Under today’s CPC, this role is defined by ABILITY, ABILITY and more ABILITY
That very mindset is completely against Democracy which claims everyone from a Pauper to a Beggar to a Technology Geek to a Clerk to a Oil Baron have the same rights in choosing a Government
The result is before you
India and China became Independent in 1947 and 1949 – at the same time virtually
Yet China is advanced in EVERY SINGLE FACET over India
China stands before the US as such a feared opponent that the US spends every waking moment on trying to countering China with propaganda and lies and failing
Proof that the CPC did more for China than any Democracy in the history of the modern world
Why would they need this US loser version of democracy
The Chinese version of Governance:-
The Worthy keep voting in the Grassroots
The Unworthy do what they are told to do
Only Ability and Merit matters
One Party, different opinions
Gays, Transgenders put in their proper place which is a ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell environment’
That alone is enough for China to grow
They don’t need the horrors of becoming a Cesspit democracy
Oh SH*T, What Russia and China are doing will change everything, and the west wants WAR
What Russia, China and North Korea are doing will change everything. The massive economic expansion is pushing the West to do some very desperate things. This week Russia and North Korea signed remarkable new trade agreements. It came on the same week as China and Russia launched a new cross border energy hub. Do you see what’s happening?
URGENT: RUSSIA **HALTS** ALL EXPORT OF GASOLINE AND DIESEL FUEL
This morning, Thursday, September 21, Russia announced they are “temporarily” halting the export of all Gasoline and Diesel Fuel.
Russia is the world’s single biggest seaborne exporter of diesel-type fuel.
Their decision will have an immediate impact on fuel costs and availability. Expect skyrocketing prices, especially for Diesel, and subsequent skyrocketing prices on EVERY product that moves by truck.
It is not known at this hour, exactly how long this “temporary” halt will last.
Confession of the Day
There’s always someone who ended up in a worse situation with a bigger loss. Every time I hear those stories, it makes me feel a little better that it “could have been worse.” Hope this helps someone realize how bad it can get before you ultimately end in the same place, with the same loss, and the same need for help. It’s also therapeutic to write it down, I’ve found.
In 2012 I had $20k to my name. Turned that into $100k in 5 years buying American Airlines and chip stocks. Took most of the $100k and bought a house to run as an Airbnb. Made about $100k off that in 2 years and sold it when they banned airbnbs. Bought my own house and sold it a year later for another $100k profit. Invested that $300k in the market around the Covid drop and ended 2020 with about $600k. Then I started with options. The ability to make huge gains so quickly was so intoxicating and addictive. $20k in a day. $50k. $100k. I was crushing it and starting to dream of my new rich life. I broke the $1mil threshold and ended the day with $1.1m.
The next day the market sucked and I knew it. But I had such an itch I made a play anyway. I was down $250k by noon because I broke all my own rules just to avoid “taking a loss.” I finally accepted the loss but tried to chase it by jumping to the other side. That cost me an additional $100k loss. Within 2 days I made it back to within spitting distance of being a millionaire once again, but spoiler alert, I’d never see that number again.
Down $200k, another $300k. I finally had to go to my dad for a bailout. He refueled me and I lost it all again within a month. Another bailout, another loss. I was so depressed and suicidal at this point. It was like a bad dream that I couldn’t wake up from. I will forgo buying a drink with a meal because I don’t want to spend the extra $3 but I had no problem loosing $600k in a single day if it meant I could get the dopamine rush.
Then comes the shame of having to admit what happened. The relapses. The broken future. The never ending despair.
I made right moves far more times than wrong but my losses were always much larger than my gains because I couldn’t accept a loss and didn’t want to further risk a gain. In the end, the money didn’t actually mean anything and it was never about the money (not really anyway) it was always about the high of submitting the order and watching the dollars come or go.
In the end, if it wasn’t for anti depressants and my daughter, I wouldn’t be here today. Looking back it’s impossible to imagine how something could have completely high jacked my brain in such a way but it really did.
There is recovery. There is help. It does work. I only wish it didn’t take losing $2mil before I realized it and finally sought help and treatment.
Don’t make my mistake if waiting and find help now. Also, give the “unhappy millionaire” episode of Happiness Lab podcast a listen, changed my life.
Giving up the American Dream is hard.
giving up the American Dream is Hard. I made a few videos: why I gave up the American Dream, the real cost of the American dream and how to ditch the American Dream. Folks have resonated with it, hated it and everything in between.
But let’s be honest, it’s hard to give up the American dream, especially as a Black woman.
Hustle Culture is not for Black women, but the pursuit of the American dream is tied directly to it.
Let’s talk about grieving the American Dream. content included: giving up the American Dream, I gave up the American Dream, Giving up the American Dream is hard, Hustle Culture is not for Black women, Healing for Black women, I gave up Black excellence, hustle culture is toxic, the real price of the American Dream, Black Women deserve good things, Black woman wage gap, I gave up the American Dream, why I gave up on the American Dream, grieving the American Dream, Black women and the American Dream,
I work as a manager in a Charity Shop/thrift Store and I look having a good search through donations for that special item!
One day, I had some items donated and a handbag. In that handbag in a secret pocket was a Genuine Cartier watch.
I was in absolute awe and was so excited!! Thing is, I wasn’t 100% sure I wanted to sell it without the donors consent. (I knew it was genuine as it’s myself who deals with all the name branded luxury items)
I chased the lady through town and told her what I’d found. She broke down in tears telling me they were her late mums things and the watch was lost for many years. Her mum had dementia and her father was only just starting to clear through her things.
So anyway, she asked me to stay with her whilst she rang her father to tell him the news (he also cried which started me off crying!)
After the ordeal of the day I genuinely felt pretty chuffed with myself. I could’ve easily sold it online for a 3figure sum – but something just didn’t feel right.
A few days later that same gentleman came in and thanked me personally. He told me he’d brought it his wife for an anniversary present. I asked how it came to being in an everyday handbag and he explained that she went to get it cleaned (it was boxed) but her dementia was in it’s early stages and was eventually forgotten about. The kind gentleman had a funeral collection in the Charities name and even made a £200 donation to me personally, which I put to the charity.
So yea, that’s my amazing find
Oprah has no idea there’s a Cost of Living Crisis
Why everything feels so expensive right now.
“The basic price of commodities has tripled in my experience from 2019. The same 1 bedroom apartment I rented in Dallas for 700 dollars in 2017 is 1400 dollars in 2023. The house that would cost 180k in suburban DFW just 5 years ago costs 400k. The cost of home and car insurance is over the roof. All this in Dallas which is still very cheap compared to many other big cities in the USA.”
Beijing says it uncovered US National Security Agency operatives behind cyberattack on Chinese university
Article HERE Second Date’ software used in Northwestern Polytechnical University attack is potent cyber espionage tool developed by US agency, says state media After global tracing, Chinese team reportedly found ‘thousands of network devices’ across the country still infected by the spyware and its derivatives
China says it has identified US National Security Agency operatives while investigating a recent cyberattack on Northwestern Polytechnical University, as its top spying and anti-espionage agency vowed on Thursday to root out all “digital spies”. The revelation came just three days after Beijing revealed more details about John Shing-wan Leung, a Hong Kong permanent resident and US citizen the Chinese Ministry of State Security said posed as a philanthropist while snooping for information. He was jailed for life for espionage in May, two years after his arrest in China.
State-run CCTV said on Thursday that China’s National Computer Virus Emergency Response Centre, with help from Chinese antivirus company 360 Total Security, had discovered the identity of the National Security Agency (NSA) operative or operatives – the broadcaster did not specify how many or name them – after it extracted “multiple samples” of a spyware called “Second Date”.
It said the spyware was used in the cyberattack on Northwestern Polytechnical University in Shaanxi province.
‘Stop stealing’: China condemns US over Trojan horse cyberattacks on state-funded university The report said technical analysis showed that Second Date was a cyber-espionage weapon developed by the NSA to sniff out and hijack network traffic and insert malicious codes.
Quoting senior engineer at the National Computer Virus Emergency Response Centre Du Zhenhua, it said software was a potent cyberespionage tool that enabled attackers to take control of target network devices and the data traffic flowing through them, and use them as a “forward base” for the next stage of attacks. It could run on various operating systems and was compatible with multiple architectures.
Du was quoted as saying the spyware was usually used in conjunction with various network device vulnerability attack tools from the NSA’s Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO). The TAO, now renamed Computer Network Operations, is a cyberwarfare intelligence-gathering unit.
China’s foreign ministry says the international community should be highly vigilant about CIA activities as a new report alleges a years-long global cyberattack campaign. Photo: AFP The report said that after global tracing, the Chinese team found “thousands of network devices” across the country were still infected by the spyware and its derivatives. It said they also found springboard servers remotely controlled by the NSA in Germany, Japan, South Korea, India and Taiwan.
I had an abusive boyfriend. He was great at first, of course. As soon as he was confident of me, he stalked me, tried to run me off the road many times, pointed a gun at my head a few times, cut my phone lines, beat me, fired a gun into my floor pretending to commit suicide (he would never have done that, he only wanted to scare me), destroyed my things, and more. He was military (so was I) and I had no protection. I was able to get him out of my apartment with the help of his best friend and because he was put in a mental hospital for a few weeks. But I never got a break until I was discharged (honorably), moved across the country to a large city, and changed my name. An ex-husband kindly let me take his name, a common one. The abuser knew my friends and family. A false friend who secretly hated me (I didn’t know) kept telling him how to find me and encouraged others to do the same. People thought it was romantic that he carried such a torch for me. I thought he would appear at my door any day and kill me. He stalked me for 13 more years until I persuaded his commanding office to make him stop. I can’t imagine after all those years that this worked, but it did. Perhaps it was because he didn’t deny what he did and the commanding officer threatened his career and his pension. I never heard from him again. In those 13 years, things had changed somewhat.
I went to law school and made it my mission for many years to protect other women who were treated this badly and sometimes worse by abusers. I got them protection orders and divorces. I got their abusers out of their homes and sometimes in jail. It was very satisfying work. I’m retired now and happy to be so. I feel I did my bit.
It will be amazing if BRICS can come up with some gold-backed trading currency. The dedollarization is happening fast. Over the last 20 years, you see the share of global payments in the dollar has gone down at a steady rate.
This is getting even faster now. At the same time, to “truly dedollarize,” several aspects should be taken into account, he added.
“The harder part” in efforts to replace the dollar lies in the reserve aspect of the currency, the Netley Group president noted. For instance, the United States’ big advantage at the moment is the breadth of its bond market, Goddard explained. “One of the ways, I think, BRICS could develop something to compete with that would be the technology to actually link the BRICS bond markets,” the entrepreneur added.
Combining these two things — a stable trade currency and a strong joint bond market — could create the potential to eventually displace the dollar, Goddard also stated. This process could be even sped up with the enlargement of BRICS, increasing the depth of these economic ties, he concluded.
I live in Haifa, Israel, the location of that port.
A few decades ago we decided to build tunnels to connect the north, the south, and the middle of Haifa. We hired a Chinese company from Shanghai with experience in tunnel building to do the work. It was a massive project and took a few years, during which the Chinese workers lived here. The Chinese company did an excellent job. These tunnels have reduced traffic congestion in Haifa.
The Chinese company we chose to run the new Haifa port has a lot of experience in that kind of work.
In both cases, we chose based on objective criteria, not on politics.
Btw, many Chinese students study at the Technion here, and Chinese tourists visit.
China offers subsidies to their EVs in battery making and other areas, heavy subsidies in taxes and waivers to ensure that EVs are produced at a final cost that is 20% cheaper
This makes Chinese EVs deliver lower cost at better quality than many European EVs
Second complaint is that most of the world pays a premium for Chinese EV batteries but BYD and other players pay 45% lower costs for the same battery due to the fact that the batteries are made in China
This is alleged as unfair competition
They want either the batteries at lower costs or a 20% mark up on Chinese EVs that eliminates the subsidy effect
It’s Classic Protectionism 101
Soviet Style rather than Adam Smith
China didn’t do this
When Volkswagens and Citroens and Mercedes Benz and Toyota and Mitsubishi dominated the vehicle markets of China a decade or so ago:-
China didn’t impose extra tariffs on them nor make it unfair for them to import custom made parts by imposing 60–260% tariffs
China told BYD and SAIC and Great Wall to either make similar quality cars or go out of business because the customer needs the best
Thus these companies formed partnerships and purchased technology and leased technology and made a living with limited market share
Yet this competition helped them prepare a lead in EVs and dominate today
However the West isn’t prepared to do the same thing and ask Renault and Chevy and Volkswagen to COMPETE or go out of business
They want to protect their companies
Like US , Germany, France
They talked of free trade when their products were much superior and Asian nations imposed protectionism
Today when they are being left behind, they scream and yell and whine about tariffs and duties
China has many weapons here
China sells 61.5% of the EV Batteries in the world and 86% of EV Batteries today are made by Chinese players with only Tesla having it’s own supply chain and making it’s own battery for it’s own cars
If you want EVs – you need the Chinese Battery, Electric System and Motors and Chargers
The Chinese make the world’s best and most cost efficient products
Even Tesla battery technology is inferior to CATL and it’s latest batteries
It’s only in Autonomous driving that Tesla has an edge
So frankly China for the next 15 years at least can simply ban the export of batteries or impose a 80% tariff on EV exports and ensure European and US EVs simply can’t compete with ICEs
It throttles the EU green initiative
China loses the EU market but critically ensures Russia & Saudi gains a major leverage as EU and US become more dependent on Oil
That is one card
The Bigger card is
China can play it’s own protectionism
China has a huge market for European Cars with Eight Brands having their largest market in China
That’s 157,000 Jobs
China could simply ban the imports tomorrow and that would finish these companies revenue and share wise
Like the Iphone
Intel & Qualcomm openly said if China forced them to choose between the Chinese market and the Commerce Department restrictions, they would have to choose China for the sake of their US stockholders
If China banned Qualcomm entirely today and said “Okay. We will live with inferior phones but you B******* won’t sell or get a fifty cent piece from us”
Qualcomm would be brutally mauled
The Entire smartphone industry will be brutally mauled
The Entire Semiconductor industry will be brutally mauled
The Chinese are VERY PATIENT PEOPLE and they will play their cards very slowly
They thrive on competing
If China simply decides to close its markets to Foreigners except it’s Russian and Global South friends who will sell it all the Energy and Food it wants
Then most of the Tech firms will be brutally mauled
It was predicted that if Apple was banned entirely from China – $ 1.02 Trillion of it’s market share would never come back
The Total hit on the entire industry could touch $ 7–12 Trillion
Who will take up the slack?
India is expected to touch 40% of Chinas present market in 17–21 years (2040–2044)
Nobody else can take up even 3% of this slack
So China has a lot of Brahmastras to use
There will be no more Huaweis
Huawei was a blow
Nobody expected the West to be so brutally lawless and act like a mafia state , like a land with zero laws
Today China is ready
Every US attack has a party from China including the biggest Brahmastra
CUT OFF ACCESS TO PHARMA APIs & Cut off all components needed for Medical Equipment
Devalue US Debt by suddenly pegging an exchange rate of 2 Yuan to 1 USD. China will lose 17 Trillion Yuan and after the peg is removed the rate could reach 10–11 but US will lose 160 Trillion Yuan ($ 25 Trillion) , 8 times worse than the 2008 Crisis
APPLE Shocked! Huawei’s Secret Weapons: NearLink Explained
Amazing technology. Zero coverage in Western “news”.
Chinese wisdom: Wang Yi urges nations to help avert cold war
INTRODUCTION
Human behavior falls into durable patterns of action and reaction/response. Taking China-U.S. bilateral relations as an illustration, one almost always finds that China is forever responding, and that the United States is non-stop plotting, agitating and acting in annoying or irritating ways, resulting in China’s patterned response of rebuttal.
For example, in picking a fight with China, the United States will accuse China of “spying” and/or soliciting a prominent politician to accuse and confront China on “ideological” grounds, making it difficult for China to defend.
How do you defend an ideological choice?
As ideology is value-laden, it was adopted to change a sick Chinese society for the better, by bringing in fresh or foreign ideas that are believed to work.
For China, socialism with Chinese characteristics is designed to address its chronic social inequality and alleviate abject poverty. China’s adoption of a socialist ideology is observably bearing fruitful results, lifting millions of its people out of poverty, and building railways in foreign countries.
But, for the U.S. hardcore irrational antagonists such as Mike Pompeo, China is “on the wrong side of history”. What else then can these self-styled enemies of China do but to use and recycle the “spying” game of accusations, hoping to see their cooked-up situation comes to fruition.
In the following article taken from an English-language newspaper dated Thursday, July 30, 2020, the incidents that happened at the beginning of the Trump era were nearly the same as that is happening in the United Kingdom, which has officially announced that a parliamentary researcher has been lately accused of “spying” for the CCP.
For fear of missing its juicy details, let us go over this article.
Entered Wang Yi Who Called on All Countries to Resist “Unreasonable Acts” and to Help Prevent…
FM Wang Yi called on all countries to “resist” the United States’ “blatant and unreasonable acts”, and to help prevent the world’s two greatest powers from descending into what he called a new cold war.
In a phone call with his French counterpart Jean-Yves Le Drian on Tuesday, Wang said China would take “firm and rational responses” amid the intensifying rivalry with the US, but also stressed that Beijing would strive to maintain stable relations with Washington.
It was the fourth time in less than a fortnight that Wang, who is also a state councilor, has named the US in conversations with foreign official, following calls with his Russian, Vietnamese and German counterparts.
Before that, veiled attacks against Washington might have been made in talks with foreign governments without naming it.
The change in rhetoric and the increased frequency of verbal aggression by both sides has meant a rapid deterioration of China-US relations, and an imperative for Beijing to ensure other nations do not side with Washington.
“Tolerating a bully [such as Pompeo] will not keep you safe. It will only let the bully get bolder and act worse. All countries should act to resist any unilateral or hegemonic act and safeguard world peace and development.” Wang was quoted as saying in a Chinese foreign ministry statement.
Wang said the current decline in China-US relations was caused by a certain political faction in the US, driven by the need to lift campaign prospects and maintain unipolar hegemony.
During the phone call to Le Drian, Wang called for “vigilance against US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s recent remarks instigating renewed ideological confrontation and leading the world to a new cold war”.
In a speech last week, Pompeo called for China’s own citizens to join an international effort to “change the behavior” of the ruling Communist Party.
“We believe that all countries will make the right and wise decisions, instead of being held hostage by a small number of American politicians,” Wang said.
“All countries will make concerted efforts to prevent the world from being dragged into a new cold war of conflict and confrontation,” he said.
But Wong said the interests of the two countries were deeply integrated – and that Beijing stood “ready to maintain the stability of China-US relations through equal communication and exchanges with the US side”.
“We will never allow a few anti-China elements to overturn decades of successful exchanges and cooperation between China and the U.S., nor will we allow ideological prejudice to undermine the future development of China-US relations.”
Ties between the world’s most powerful nations have plunged to the lowest point in decades as they clash over trade, technology and geopolitical clout.
In their latest brawl last week, the US ordered the closure of the Chinese consulate in Houston –over spying claims. China retaliated – by ordering the US mission in Chengdu to shut down.
The foreign ministry rolled out a 10-point rebuttal yesterday against American accusations over the closure of the Houston consulate, denying that it was a hub for China’s spying efforts or that it was used as a base for its “fox hunt” operations to induce the return of Chinese fugitives. (Source: SCMP)
CONCLUSION
Readers may find it amazing after reading the above newspaper article on U.S. accusation of Chinese spying, and China’s retaliatory response. Amazed because the narrative over alleged Chinese spying is the same, except this time it is the UK that is the accuser. This pattern persists, and tensions go up.
The ultimate reality, though, is that “U.S. trade is still chained to sources in China.” Research demonstrates the difficulty of severing the countries’ economic ties. According to NYT.
In the end, it is U.S. pragmatism and Chinese rationality that prevails, settling the “spy” squabbling.
Ties may temporarily go sour; bilateral efforts will be made, and trade activities between the U.S. and China will resume. Wang Yi’s rationality is right and wise.
The latest visits by high-profile U.S. secretaries starting with Anthony Blinken, Janet Yellen and Gina Raimondi wrapped up the futile spying game – testifying to the law that damaging business ties lead to revenue loss.
Only 100 years?! You bet, will be at least 1,000 years, or maybe, better back to the Stone Age!
And then, you might find one day, your country would have to import chips from China, and the products you use would be embedded with Chinese chips. LOL
The whole Western world, especially the nuclear powers, even later the Soviet Union, had blocked nuclear technology from entering into China back in the 1950s and 1960s. Then what?
The first Chinese nuclear test was conducted at Lop Nur on October 16, 1964. Then in less than 32 months, China detonated its first hydrogen bomb on June 14, 1967. Now, China’s nuclear arsenal is the world’s third largest, and China has, more importantly, also developed its nuclear technology for peaceful use, boasting the second largest number of nuclear power units in operation or under construction in the world.
China was officially barred from visiting the International Space Station (ISS) by the United States in 2011. Then what?
China is nearing its completion of the construction of its own space station -Tiangong, with many visits there already done by Chinese astronauts, three of them are right now flying over us in the station. With the ISS retiring sometime in 2030, China’s Tiangong will be the only space station in the world.
China has been under the tough blockade of Western military techonologies, especially high-end, advanced ones. Then what?
China has successfully tested several times of its hypersonic missiles, among the first nations who have achieved success in this most advanced weapon development.
Also, China has finished its third air-craft carrier, with a fully indigenous design, featuring a CATOBAR system and electromagnetic catapults, one of the most advanced in the world.
And China has its J-20, a twinjet all-weather stealth fighter aircraft with precision strike capability. The Y-20, a large military transport aircraft, the first cargo aircraft to use 3D printing technology to speed up its development and to lower its manufacturing cost.
Similar cases also include the tunnel boring machines, giant cranes, giant excavators, deep-sea drilling machines……You name it. Then what?
China has self developed all of them, not only meeting its own market needs, but also exporting them at a much more affordable price than their Western competitors. What’s more ironic is, some of them have been exported even to those countries who had previously blocked their techonologies into China!
So, in the short term, yes, China is sufferting from the heavy blow from the US, but in the long run, the US and its allies would not only lose the lion’s share of chip market here in China, but will have also to face a strong competitor in semi-conductors, or chips, or something alternative which have similar functions, in the not-too-far-away future, maybe in their own market, and also in the global market.
But during the process, the US would have dried up its influence as a banner-holder of liberal market economy, its credibility as the rule-setter who betrays its own rules, its reliability to its allies since all of them would have to suffer along with the US, and hence, its soft power in leading the world.
Nothing much to gain, but a lot to lose, yet, the US is determined to ride on the self-devastating road. The faster it runs, the quicker the fall of its hegemony.
Japanese-Style Sirloin
japanese style sirloin
Yield: 4 servings
Ingredients
1 pound Certified Angus Beef ® boneless sirloin steak, cut into 1/4 inch strips
3 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon sugar
2 tablespoons sake or dry sherry
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
8 scallions, cut diagonally into 1 1/2 inch pieces
1 large red bell pepper, chopped
8 ounces Napa cabbage, chopped
4 ounces bean sprouts
1 cup cooked short grain rice
1 teaspoon toasted sesame seeds
Instructions
Combine soy sauce, sugar and sake in a small bowl. Set aside.
Heat wok or electric frying pan to medium heat.
Heat oil, add steak strips and stir until beef is browned (about 3-5 minutes).
Push beef to one side. On the other side, add scallions and peppers and stir-fry for 2-3 minutes.
Add cabbage and sprouts, combining all ingredients in the pan. Stir-fry about 1 minute.
Sprinkle soy mixture over meat and vegetables. Cook for 1 minute.
Serve over warm rice and garnish with sesame seeds.
Why People are Leaving Canada, Top 5 Reasons Why People Leave
I left Canada about 1.5 years ago to travel the world and here are some of the top reasons why I left. I give a lot of my own personal anecdotes as someone who has lived in canada for over 20 years. This video represents my personal opinion about living in canada and why I prefer to live in Asia or other countries.
The main reasons. why people are leaving
1. High living costs creates a low standard of living, especially in Vancouver and Toronto.
2. Lack of infrustructure for transportation which means you need to have a car in order to get around
3. Brain drain and lack of opportunities because most talent go to the states
4. Lack of medical healthcare because most people can’t find a family doctor or are finding it difficult to find one
5. Not much social life /activities for young people, most stores close at 6pm
https://youtu.be/2vXjQHNfiW8
China, the next war
On China, the US is again lying itself into the next war. The US says “The [Defense] Department remains committed to abiding by the well-established one China policy of the United States” and “this Administration opposes any unilateral changes to the status quo from either side of the Strait. We have not supported Taiwan independence, we do not support it now.”
But actually the US is supporting the Taiwan independence from China, while Taiwan is calling its independent government the “Republic of China” which is a violation of the “one China” claim. The US also admits that the principle reason for this attention to China’s internal matters is to sustain the anti-China barriers in the off-shore China region: “Taiwan is located at a critical node within the First Island Chain in the Indo-Pacific region.” More detailed information on the coming anti-China next war is recent testimony in the House Armed Services Committee here and here.
A spoiler must possess some power to manipulate but this India clearly does not have.
India can do nothing within BRICS with China around (that’s why they didn’t even dare to join RCEP). Modi was left sitting in the corner of their meeting hall.and as quiet as a church mouse during the last BRICS summit because he had no allies to support him on anything. BRICS proceeded accordingly to invite those countries that Xi had pursued.
An interesting thing happened between then and the Modi show at the G20 with new BRICS members Saudi Arabia and the UAE getting into the act. And of course Xi completely abstaining from even attending. Expectations are of course that the G7 countries, headed by Biden, would be there to cheerlead to elevate Modi’s ego as their way of wooing him to their side.
As the saying goes, give the guy enough rope and he’ll be sure to do it to himself!
And true to form, Modi came out with a true masterpiece that had behind him the G7 countries – U.S., E.U., Germany, France and Italy – applauding him on. and the Western MSM hyping up Modi as the new major player to contest China’s BRI plans. This is the G7’s main challenge to China and to be implemented unti its GPII initiative!!
But this plan could not have been possible without the push of Saudi Arabia and the UAE.
Of course, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have grand plans for themselves – mostly to transition and establish their economy as a major global force after their days of oil dominance is over.
But look at the curious first part of the IMEC journey that has the starting route going through the UAE and Saudi Arabia, which essentially is an alternative route to bypass the Suez Canal.
And then of all places, this very expensive trans-Arabian rail line ends up in Isreal!!!!!
Now, who are the Arabs in their right mind would set up the crown jewel of their economic infrastructure to land in the hands of their arch nemesis to be held hostage anyttime any conflict should arise?
So, you have Modi hoisting himself as a challenger to Xi’s BRI.and also coincidentally, there will be after this G20 a third BRI Meeting in Beijing in October 2023!
The big question is: What are Saudi Arablia and the UAE’s real plans? Are they with the IMEC or are they part of the BRI still and be officially inducted as new BRICS member in 2024?
A friend of mine told the story of going to visit his childhood home in Brooklyn. He had hired a car for the day to go all around the old neighborhood so he wouldn’t have to rely on taxis. On the way to visit his mother’s grave at the cemetery, he spotted a flower shop and thought it might be nice to bring flowers.
He went inside, and found a couple of men playing cards, They didn’t seem to notice him. He cleared his throat to get their attention.
“A customer!” one declared, as if in shock.
My friend said he had grown up in the neighborhood, and he chatted with the proprietor a bit about how things have changed over the years.
“Why don’t you sit down and have an espresso with us?” he asked.
“I can’t, I have a driver outside!”
“Well, invite him in, too!”
After he politely refused, they made a beautiful bouquet for him, fairly quickly. He was impressed with the work.
“How much do I owe you?” he asked.
The florist looked hurt. “It’s for your mother! How could I possibly charge you?”
After a little back and forth, it was clear that they weren’t going to accept payment. He thanked them for their generosity and left.
It dawned on him that this place probably wasn’t a flower shop. But they did make him a nice arrangement.
Something TERRIBLE Just Happened in Maui, Oprah & The Rock
James sues Hawaii for First Amendment violations over ban on public photography in Lahaina “This isn’t merely about the freedom to take photos; it’s about the freedom of the press and the right to hold our leaders accontable.
What are your thoughts on China surpassing the USA
Well, China has surpassed the United States in so many ways, that this question is a tad out of date. China is quite a formidable and powerful force right now. Depending on the measurements used, you can easily map out the dates when the mantel of power was transferred.
Economic = around 2013.
Military = around 1950.
Educational = around 1995.
Social = around 2005.
Manufacturing = around 1990.
Technological = in process.
So what are my thoughts about this?
I really don’t think that China is trying to surpass anyone. And certainly isn’t trying to better the USA. I just think that China is doing what it needs to do to serve it’s people. It’s 1.4 billion people, don’t you know. And they need to be satiated, satisfied, and happy.
China is doing that.
All these sanctions, political posturing, and the general madness out the United States (and it actually is a DSM-4 state of crazy-town) is only accelerating and necessitating China to become absolutely independent of the leashes and chains that the United States controls.
Soon, and I do mean SOON, whatever vestiges of American “greatness” will be eclipsed by a rather harsh reality.
Oh, and it PAINS me to speak of it.
But today, the United States is a lie, on top of a lie, that is covered up by lies, and the only good thing about it is that the lies are so obvious that everyone KNOWS that the lies are simply BULLSHIT.
Today, the USA is a third-rated, banana-republic, ruled by psychopathic morons.
And when history books are written about this has-been nation, it will refer to it as a over-glorified “strip mall” masquerading as transsexual brothel built upon an open sewer.
This is common knowledge in “fly over country”.
Those “Rich Men North of Richmond” really gutted the country, and are now stealing everything they can lay their hands on as they flee the cesspool that they created.
When did China surpass the United States?
Oh, sometime back in 1776. It’s been downhill ever since.
Neocons turn on Joe Biden
Calling Biden a president is like calling Harris a vice president.
My main “beef” with my parents was a simple one. At every opportunity for me to do something outside of the school narrative…
“Study hard. Get a good job, and you will be set for life with a good pension.”
…They pretty much sucked at helping me.
I asked my mother; “How do I buy land”? And she looked at me for a moment and answered…
“You just go and buy it.”
Gosh, Mom. That was so helpful.
NOT!
At that time, there wasn’t any Google about. No internet. Only a small town library, and neither the teachers or anyone would help me out. No one could answer my questions.
I’d ask my dad; “How do I buy stocks”?
He would chuckled. Then thought about it, and he answered…
“You just go and buy them.”
Gosh dad. That was so helpful.
NOT!
And it wasn’t just that.
I asked my dad, “How do I ask a girl out for a date”?
And his answer was…
“What, who’s the girl?”
And I would say, “No one you know. So how do I do it”?
And he would chuckle, and he said…
“Oh, you just go up to her and ask her if she wanted to go out with you.”
Wow! So very helpful.
NOT!
…
Do not make the same mistakes that my parents made. Take the time. Enunciate. Explain. Be empathic, and be kind and considerate.
It will make a BIG difference.
Todays…
How China Destroyed US Sanctions and Changed Microchip Forever!
The USA did not declare war on Huawei. They declared war on hundreds of thousands of motivated Chinese set to go starving on the streets, unless they pushed themselves…
What many people don’t know is Ren Zhengfei, the founder of Huawei only owns roughly 1% of the company, and the employees own 99% of the company, so imagine a body of hundreds of thousands of supercharged and super-talented people giving their all, not only for survival of their families but also with a vengeance to prove that they can’t be suppressed and will fight back.
Huawei is a networking equipment maker which makes mobile phones. This means it knows the backend first, and then how to connect the network to its Frontend devices, including mobile phones.
Apple only focuses on Frontend consumer devices, and not connecting with backend devices because its focus is on the user experience.
Apple relies on Qualcomm for its 5G transceiver; Huawei designs its own 5G transceiver.
That is the difference.
Newborn kitten cries when she sees her mother lying motionless on her left side full of thorns
Newborn kitten cries when she sees her mother lying motionless on her left side full of thorns The mother cat and her cubs have an accident on a strange fruit full of thorns A mother cat crashes next to the fruit back.
We have seen the mother cat and her two young children lying here. kittens just a few days old swaddled around their mother. and cried out of voice when he saw his mother in trouble.
next to it is a fruit full of thorns. This cat family is pitiful.
when I thought the fruit from the other corner fell on the mother cat. but luckily the other fruit is just next to the mother cat and the kittens.
Maybe the mother cat was exhausted.
We are walking in a tropical forest. There are a lot of dry leaves here. I came across a family of cats in distress here.
The kittens were crying when they saw their mother lying motionless. The mother cat lies next to the thorny fruit weevil. I come closer to check and will help the cat family.
The kittens are quite small. Luckily this thorny fruit didn’t hit the kitten. The mother cat is very weak. it needs immediate care. I will help this poor meod family.
Add egg yolks, one at a time, beating well after each addition.
Add sweet potato, water and vanilla extract; mix well.
In a small mixing bowl, beat egg whites until stiff; fold into the sweet potato mixture.
Combine flour, baking powder, cinnamon, nutmeg and salt; add to potato mixture.
Stir in pecans.
Pour into three greased 9-inch round cake pans.
Bake at 350 degrees F for 22 to 27 minutes or until a wooden pick inserted near the center comes out clean.
Cool for 10 minutes before removing to wire racks.
Frosting: Melt the butter in a saucepan; whisk in sugar, milk and egg yolks until smooth. Cook and stir over medium heat for 10 to 12 minutes or until thickened and bubbly.
Remove from the heat; stir in the coconut, pecans and vanilla extract. Cool slightly.
Place one cake layer on a serving plate; spread with a third of the frosting.
When I was in high school, in my senior year, I had a co-op job as an electronic tech, and worked for a small business. The business was on Rt 11, in a business district leading into Bloomsburg Pa.
One afternoon, while at my bench, we heard a car accident occur outside our building. Apparently, a young man no older than me was speeding and decided to use the enter lane to pass people, and caught a young family getting read to turn off to the seasonal hamburger place next door to so (to the right when facing the highway)
Tye family was ok, but a group of workers from the welding/fabrication shop next to us (on the left) ran out to the car and attempted to pull the young driver out.
But he apparently had a broken neck… I will never forget seeing how his head moved, it just sort of flopped around on his shoulders. That was 43 years ago, and I still remember that part vividly.
A day or two later his sister dropped by and asked us if we had seen a ring of his that was missing. We did walk around the accident scene but never found it.
Because he broke his neck on his steering wheel, I started to wear my seatbelt while driving, long before there was a campaign to require it.
Don’t know if this was a thief or not, but a number of years ago there was a rise in fake “Utility Company Representatives” knocking on people’s doors. In many cases things went missing if these people were allowed into people’s homes (they worked in pairs).
At the time we were living in a duplex. The first floor level was about 6–8 inches higher than the level of the front porch. We had a Siberian Husky/German Shepherd mix (both sides of his parentage were pure blood pedigrees), and he was the best burglar alarm even invented. 60–70 lbs of solid muscle, the face of a wolf, and the most disconcerting part, 1 blue eye and one brown eye. Our storm door had a solid panel that went about halfway up the door. High enough that you couldn’t see the dog if he approached the door. The top was screened.
My wife answered the door and was faced with 2 “Utility Company Representatives” that were checking the water meters which were inside, down in the basement. Their trick was to gain entry, get the person who answered to accompany one down to the meter while the other one stayed in side the front door and “waited”, picking up anything they could find that might be valuable. Like wallets from purses. True to form, they wanted to come in and check the meter. My wife knows better and told them they couldn’t come in without some sort of ID. They started arguing that they had a legal right to inspect their hardware (they didn’t), and she kept telling them no and flicked the lock on the storm door.
Our ever faithful guard dog had walked over to the door while they were trying to talk their way in. When their tone started changing he got interested and decided to see who was talking to the boss-lady like that. He popped up on his hind legs which put his face not too far from level with the people on the porch, who suddenly decided they no longer had to gain entry, and said ‘someone else will contact you later’ as they left for greener pastures.
Best alarm system ever.
EDIT… Punctuation repairs (Thanks Ed), and I thought you all might like to see this buddy of mine. We lost him to The Bridge from cancer 29 years ago now, and still miss him every day. Sadly, we didn’t do a lot of picture taking back then, so my choice of pictures is limited.
He had the black and white Husky markings, and the longer snout and some brown from the Shepherd side. Check out his eyes, and imagine them staring at you through a screen door at eye level.
China and technology
The reason Trump thought that he could stop China from making DUV machines is because DUV machines encompass a lot of technologies.
If China is unable to produce any of these technologies then the DUV machines China purchased from ASML would be completely useless in a year or so. The parts need to be replaced. No parts, no working machine.
The light source breaks down all the time. The coating on the lenses only last for a few months. 1 year at most. All those machines that China bought from ASML for over $500 billion would become very expensive scrap metal.
But China managed to develop these core technologies. And it required the entire Chinese scientific community to do so.
But now that China has the core technologies, there is nothing the US can do to stop China from advancing. The US no longer controls Chinese chip industry.
This video explains just how intricate chip production is and how much leading edge technology is required to make on of these machines work.
The Sopranos || Get It Up
This should get more views, it’s such a perfect clean edit
Start buying them lavish gifts, like expensive vacations at 5-star luxury resorts, free airline flights to exotic destinations, Rolexes, things like that. Then buy their mom’s house and let mom continue to live there for free. Then donate the money for their kid’s education at an expensive university.
Okay, that’s an extreme case, but it works. Most famously, the first black mayors of Los Angeles and Detroit suspiciously became a lot more pro-business after they were elected than before, and that was just the result of freely given campaign contributions, invitations to nice dinners, and perks like the odd bottle of whisky that remain within the rules for gifts.
Take a look at Krysten Sinema, who got elected mostly because she had a massive team of young volunteers who saw her as a progressive. After she got elected, she started getting massive donations from pharmaceutical companies and, all of a sudden, she’s shifted a lot further to the right.
One of the reasons why this works is that running for office is incredibly expensive. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s first campaign cost $2 million, mostly spent on the Democratic primary. She was funded by a group who wanted someone more progressive, and now she’s elected to a safe Democratic seat, she will need less money going forward, but her $170,000 salary (seems a lot doesn’t it) still doesn’t pay for her New York rent, her Washington rent, and her student loans.
One of the best tricks plays on vanity. The politician writes a book, which gets published, and “friends” buy enough copies to make it a best seller. This is really sleazy, but it happens all the time, and it is in no way illegal. There are allegations that Hilary Clinton’s success in the futures market was a set up where a benefactor essentially ate losses and just passed on the gains.
This is why the rich are heavily into “charity”, showing how good they are by building college buildings and universities (with their name on them of course). It’s certainly cheaper than paying taxes for the same thing, that’s for sure. Andrew Carnegie started it with libraries, and is seen as a saint, but governments still had to maintain those (most are now over a century old, including one or two in my home town of Toronto) and the donors usually don’t pay for the upkeep.
I’ve already written about some shocking things I’ve come across in the states in another post, so I suppose this is part 2, but here we go:
Heard people going at it…you cannot imagine my shock as a person coming from a conservative area, one who hasn’t even seen her parents kissing, to witness such a thing. But while staying at a hotel, for the first time in my life, I heard two people going at it very loudly so that it was impossible to ignore them. I was so embarrassed and my husband was laughing at me for looking so shocked.
Serving water for free in restaurants. For a capitalist country like the states, I was surprised they didn’t benefit from this one thing that people will undoubtedly pay for. You certainly have to pay for water over here in restaurants.
Ice.. always. Continuing from the last point, water is always served with ice. Someone like me who can’t have very cold water had to specifically ask for it to be omitted.
Medical issues. I needed antibiotics during my visit because of an infection that I get frequently. Not having insurance as a simple visitor, we had to pay 400$ to see a doctor and get this simple prescription. Meanwhile back home, I got it for less than a dollar. So I swore to pack lots of meds next time I come over.
Vast spaces. Perhaps because I’ve been only to Buffalo, Niagara, and Oregon but there was always a ton of space between buildings. The markets were huge with vast parking lots. And the roads were very big for the most part.
Black people everywhere. In New York airport (JFK), almost all workers were black! That was a surprise because I always heard of the diversity in the states. But even later in Oregon, almost everyone was white.
Security at the airport. That one was quite funny. When you get scanned at the JFK airport, you have to stand in a certain cabin, face your right, raise your arms like a criminal, then they scan you. The woman worker shouted, “Put your arms up!” and I had no clue what she was talking about. She kept repeating then showed me the exact position and where to face. Then she said “Seems like you don’t travel often”. I wanted to say “Excuse me? I’ve been traveling since I was 4 but this doesn’t exist anywhere else I’ve been!”.
Coffee. That was no coffee. That was dirty water. Period. Lol. For real though, our definition of coffee in Egypt is Turkish coffee which is very heavy, dense, and intense in flavor.
Huge meals. Everyone said so before and yet I made the mistake of ordering an appetizer before the main dish, only to be surprised that the appetizer is so big that it’s a meal on its own. I felt so sad throwing half the food away as we were traveling and I couldn’t take it with me.
Reese’s everywhere. It was Reese’s heaven! All sort of sizes, shapes, and mixes. Like mixed with Cadbury, Oreos, and so on.
Credit card everywhere. I am not exaggerating when I tell you there hasn’t been a single place I’ve been to that doesn’t take credit.
Rich wildlife. Coming from a desert, it was so impressive to just casually come across deer and squirrels. And at some point, I saw a massive number of seals. I learned the hard way that they stink.
They use their attractions wisely. I’ve been to countries that don’t give enough attention to grand places that leave you in awe, meanwhile, the states try to give such attention to whatever place they feel people may like visiting. Whenever you go to an especially cool place, you’ll find stores near it selling stamps, mugs, and stickers with pictures of that attraction. I’ve seen that at Niagara Falls and the redwoods in California. Did I mention that I’d never seen such huge trees in my life?
The world’s third-largest contract semiconductor maker, GlobalFoundries, on Tuesday opened a $4-billion manufacturing plant in Singapore as part of a global expansion to help ease an industry supply crunch.
The new Singapore facility will produce an additional 450,000 wafers annually at full capacity by 2025 to 2026, general manager Tan Yew Kong told reporters, raising the city-state’s overall capacity to 1.5 million wafers each year.
The chips, usually used in smartphones and other mobile devices, are also increasingly in demand by automakers, especially for electric vehicles, adding to the pressure to raise production.
“The key megatrends of our industry — digitisation, connectivity, cloud computing — are all driving acceleration to a more connected and data-centric world,” GlobalFoundries president and chief executive Thomas Caulfield said at the launch.
“It demonstrates how central and critical the industry is to the world economy and how pervasive semiconductors are in enabling and enhancing all aspects of human life.”
Caulfield said that despite current economic headwinds, the company estimates the industry will double in the next decade.
“The catalyst for this growth will be AI (artificial intelligence),” he said.
The firm’s 23,000-square meter Singapore facility, which broke ground in 2021, will expand the global footprint of the company, which already has plants in the United States and Europe.
Singapore’s chip output currently makes up 11% of the global semiconductor market.
The global semiconductor market is predicted to experience a downturn of 10.3 percent this year but recover in 2024 and grow by 11.8%, according to estimates by the industry monitor World Semiconductor Trade Statistics.
Very often, the answer is no. Not only do intelligent people very often fail to realize how much smarter they are than everyone else, they also tend to overestimate other people’s intelligence even when they do. Let me tell you a little story.
Once upon a time, I was at a bar with some friends. The bar had an outdoor area where you could stand around and drink beer. There was a guy who thought it would be funny to ride past the bar repeatedly on an extremely loud moped. At certain times, he would stop, rev the moped so loud that nobody could hear themselves think, and begin whooping loudly. This same guy had been at it all day, not just by the bar, but riding up and down the streets and residential neighborhoods, screaming and hollering and bothering everyone he could with his moped.
I mentioned, casually, that I wouldn’t mind chucking my beer mug at his head if he were close enough. A friend of mine, whom we shall call Angus (not his real name), said, “Well, you should probably leave someone as unstable as that guy alone. He obviously has some serious emotional difficulties.”
Angus is a smart dude, but he misread the guy on the moped. The issue is that the guy on the moped was probably not suffering from some deep emotional trauma that had made him so obstreperous. Rather, Moped Guy’s thought process was, most likely, no more complicated than this: “YEAH! YEAH! LOUD! LOUD MOTHERFUCKER! YEAH LOOK AT IT MAN! YEAH! LOUD!”
The issue that Angus was having is that Angus, being an intelligent and empathetic individual, was trying to understand Moped Guy’s motivations and look at things from Moped Guy’s perspective. Angus was thinking to himself, “What would have to happen to me to get me to act that obnoxiously?” The thing is, intelligent people of high character, like Angus, are not moved to act like idiots unless they suffer something really bad, at which point a complicated emotional process leads to bad behavior. Angus’ miscalculation was that Moped Guy would have to have suffered some horrible trauma to act in the way he did. The big issue is that Angus did not account for Moped Guy’s stupidity, and forgot the simple fact that stupid people will act stupid without any suffering or instability. Dumb people just act dumb.
I have suffered from this problem myself. For the longest time, I did not realize that so much of human behavior was posturing, and did not realize how to read people correctly. I thought that, when someone talked to me about their interests, they were merely stating facts and not trying to talk to me about themselves. The vast majority of humans are so subjective that most of their communication is about themselves and not about things or ideas or even other people. Intelligent people have problems grasping that.
My father, as I may have said before, is an ER doctor.
One night, a case arrived to the hospital of a teen girl with what seemed like a regular fever. The team gave her the necessary meds and started running a few tests.
Her mother had rushed to the hospital with her and looked particularly nervous. The doctor asked her some typical questions such as when her daughter showed signs and so on, but she would have vague half-assed answers.
However, within a few hours, the girls fever was sky rocketing, and her blood pressure was getting very low, and for some reason she wasn’t responding to regular meds or fluids.
The mother looked very nervous then she timidly approached a nurse and told her “actually, I forgot to tell you something. My daughter just went through a liposuction a couple of days ago. I don’t know if these two things are related”.
Yet by the time this piece of information reached the doctors, the girl had already died. She was being treated for a regular fever until test results showed the real issue.
Turns out that the mother took her daughter, who was not even chubby to begin with, to undergo a liposuction. Given that the girl was underage, a parent’s approval is a must. Her father was completely against it but the mother went ahead and sneaked it with the daughter anyway.
And she was too scared of her husband knowing what she did so she didn’t want to let the secret out until she realized that the complications are more serious than she thought. But it was too late by then.
Lessons of the day:
1-Don’t put your child through unnecessary plastic surgery.
2-And don’t hold back information from the doctor for God’s sake.
Christopher Moltisanti – So Far (The Sopranos)
The most tragic character in fiction, even with all his flaws he will always be one of the greatest characters in the history of television…
The Chinese government is a lot lot lot more transparent than the western government on the economy. It is simple Chinese government don’t need to be popular it need to be effective!
The U.S. government need to and use their media to fool Americans and hoodwinked them so that Yanks will always be highly naive and ignorant. How do they do that? Western media are profit motivated so they are free to make money by writing what westerners like to hear. So they write or broadcast what westerners like to hear.
After conniving you that China is at fault, China is your enemy, China is backward, China is evil, China steal your technology, China cheats, China take your jobs…..What do you like to hear? China fail and U.S. is great, it is exceptional, its economy is still wonderful. Your technology is unmatched. So you media cohort with your government to fool you and guess what that is what you want!
Chinese government don’t face election and popularity contest every 2 years! You do! China says and report as it is and encourage or motivate its citizens that it needs to buck up and work harder. Hence all the superlatives such ad the U.S. is exceptional, Britain is Great, US is the mist innovative, Britain invents everything…
China don’t do that. To us Empty vessels makes the most noise! Western media are simply lying media that spread half truths, fake news, misinformation, fabrications. Demonising others to distract your people from your impending collapse.
I was studious, which resulted into me getting a scholarship in college. One of my friends asked me for some money (2500/-). He was my good friend, not best, and I was completely aware of his gambling and drinking habits.
I wanted to say “No”, because I knew the importance of money at that moment of my life. I was aware of the fact that he will never return it, but I still lent him the money, which was obviously never returned.
It was my first breakup and I was leading a miserable life. There was this girl who was my junior and she started taking interest in me.
I was uncomfortable, but she was pretty. I wasn’t ready for a relationship and she kept pushing me. Again, I wanted to say “No”, but it could have hurt her feelings.
Unwillingly, I said Yes. And that relationship survived for a month only.
Don’t judge me, I was an immature teenager back then.
There were many incidents in my life where I desperately wanted to say “No”, but ended up saying otherwise. And in return, I paid a huge price, not monetarily, but emotionally and mentally.
But today, things have changed. I have changed for my own good. And I have learned the art of saying “No”. People call me rude, arrogant etc, but who cares about their opinion?
This is my life, these are my struggles. They will only give their absurd opinion which is never required. Sometimes people think that saying “NO” is hard because your image will get maligned or it will hurt other people.
My question is, what will you do with your false pride? Maybe momentarily you will hurt people by saying “No”, but in the long term it will save you from huge disappointment.
This is what I learned the hard way: How to say “No” to the face when/where I am hesitant/uncomfortable.
It comes with multiple benefits:
You don’t have to lie.
You don’t have to make excuses.
You don’t have to justify anything.
I refused to please others at the expense of my emotional well being. Even if it is saying “No” to thepeople who are used to hearing “Yes”.
Learn the art of saying “No”. Don’t lie, don’t make excuses, don’t over explain yourself. Just simply decline.
The Sopranos || Easier
“Man, thanks for this awesome work! This gives me power every time I rewatch it to deal with tough shit in evercold Moscow. I’d love to see more motivating sopranos vids from ya!”
When I first started High School, I had a guy that rode the bus with me every day, and made my life a living hell. His name was David R-. He was 18 years old and still in the tenth grade. He was bigger than me, and cussed like a sailor. He was mean and vicious, and he absolutely scared me to death.
I have vivid memories of him sitting behind me on the bus, slapping me in the back of the head as we rode home from school. It happened almost every day. This was 27 years ago and, back then, bullying was just a “common thing.” It was something you had to deal with. You had to learn to stand up for yourself and “be a man”. I would complain to the bus driver and the principal. Mr. Dave would get a good scolding, but he was right back at it the next day.
Well, after six months of this B/S, I’d finally had enough. I just snapped one day. I turned around and dove over the seat, and started pounding on him. Everyone went crazy. The driver slammed on the brakes, and brought the bus to a stop.
I was getting my tail kicked by this guy. He was bigger, faster and stronger, and the only thing I had on my side, was rage. We were up against the emergency exit, slugging it out, when, all of a sudden, the door just popped open, and we went tumbling into the street.
When we hit the pavement, Mr. Dave had his arm twisted behind his back. He landed on it, and I heard it snap like a piece of kindling. He pushed me off of him, and got up with a bone jutting out of his wrist. He was screaming his head off, and blood was pouring onto the asphalt.
Maybe I should have backed off at that point, but this guy had made my life hell for several months, and I wanted revenge. I twisted his broken arm behind his back, and took him down on the ground where I proceeded to beat the living daylights out of him. There were several cars that had stopped by this time, and it took two grown men to pull me off of him. It was the worst fight I’d ever had in my life, and it remains so to this day. My nose was busted and I had a black eye. Mr. Dave had a broken arm, a busted lip, two missing teeth, and a huge laceration across his forehead. They actually called an ambulance for him.
Both of us were suspended. Dave’s mother contacted my dad a few days later, and threatened to sue us. She wanted us to pay for Dave’s medical bills. However, I had a bus full of people, who absolutely hated Dave, and all of them were telling the principal about my six months of hell, and insisting that Dave had started the fight.
I was suspended for two weeks. I also got a month of detention, and couldn’t ride the bus for the rest of the year, but that was the end of my punishment. As far as I know, Dave never returned to school at all. I didn’t see him again for 15 years.
Then, right around 2005, I moved from Mississippi back to my hometown in Georgia. One day as I was walking out of a convenience store, I spotted my old high school bully picking up aluminum cans along the side of the road.
It totally shocked me, and I wasn’t absolutely sure that it was really him. After all, it had been 15 years. Still, I was PRETTY sure. So, I strolled over to the edge of the parking lot for a better look. Just as I walked up, he turned to stare at me, and I recognized him beyond a shadow of doubt. I’m not very good with names, but I rarely forget a face.
He looked terrible. His hair was long. He hadn’t shaved in several days. His clothes were torn and ragged, and he smelled like a wet dog. He was very thin and dirty, and half of his teeth appeared to be missing. He also had an old duffle bag slung across his shoulder, and I got the distinct impression that he was homeless.
“I’m sorry, you’re David R-, aren’t you?” I asked.
His eyes brightened for a moment, and he looked at me long and hard before responding. “Yeah, who are you?”
My first impulse was to tell him. I wanted to remind him of all those days that he had harassed the hell out of me, and then ask him if he remembered our little brawl and his trip to the hospital. Then I wanted to let him know how much money I had made the year before, and tell him all about the new job I had just started down in Atlanta. Instead, I just stood there, staring at him.
“I think we might have gone to school together,” I replied.
His eyes narrowed again, and he really studied my face. Still, I don’t think he had a clue who I was. Apparently, I had changed a lot in 15 years.
“What’s your name?” He finally asked.
I shook my head. “Not important”, I replied. I dug in my wallet, and pulled out a ten dollar bill. I held it out to him, and he took it. I said, “God bless”, and then slowly walked away.
A push-back against Western influence is reportedly prompting countries to reject the pro-Ukraen agenda. Zelensky during a UN General Assembly session.
Western officials have overestimated the willingness of neutral nations to join anti-Russia policies in support of Ukraen, according to The Wall Street Journal.
It’s clear that the West overall has been surprised by the pretty widespread reluctance by many of the countries in the so-called Global South… to come on board.
“animosity toward the US and Europe” in some parts of the world and the desire of rising powers, such as Brazil and South Africa, to “assert their independence”, the article said.
The WSJ detailed purported successes and failures of Western diplomacy to rally the support of neutral nations for what it called “a fair peace settlement for Ukraen” ahead of next week’s gathering of world leaders at the UN General Assembly.
Loozensky has been internationally promoting his “peace formula” with Western backing. It includes Ukraen regaining control over all former territories, war reparations from Russia, and a tribunal for the Russian leadership. Moscow has dismissed the Zelensky plan as being detached from reality.
My oldest son was driving a red Toyota 4×4 pick up . It was used but solid .
He worked at an auto parts store and had done a pretty good job of fixing it up . One weekend he did a tune up . Plugs , rotor , cap, plugs etc .. about a week later while I was working , he called and said it had statrting running rough then died.
At that point I had more money than time so we had it towed to a shop I had used before .
Next day shop calls me to tell me it jumped time and the engine was a complete loss .
Quoted me 2500 to rebuild .
Only paid 1500 for the truck .
I told them never mind and had it towed to the house .
Finally I was off work a few day and decided to check it out . Pulled the timing belt cover and checked the orientation of the cams to the crankshaft . It was perfect ! So at their point I’m a bit confused . Pop the distributor cap and noticed the rotor was on the wrong cylinder .
Come to find out my son forgot to put the holding screw back in the rotor and it had turned just a bit . This meant the timing was so far off it wouldn’t run .
Put the screw back in, cranked it up and it ran like a champ !
Drove it up to the shop and called out the boss .
Showed him and explained what was found .
His face turned 4 shades of red lol ! Come to find out the tech that looked at it got paid extra to do rebuilds and was condemning engines every chance he got !
Needless to say the tech got fired .3 hours of my time and I saved 2500$ and my son got his truck back .
As an Ordinary user of a smartphone, can you really tell the difference between the 3nm and the 7nm Chips?
You can’t
The difference is more from an engineering point of view and a design point of view than a commercial point of view
The Average customer doesn’t understand 3nm and 7nm.
There is Zero difference from the POV of a retail customer who doesn’t understand Semiconductor Design Or Power Consumption Efficiency (99.9% of the world’s retail customers)
Here are the top six parameters based on which people decide which Smartphones to buy :-
Price
Camera
Battery & Charging
Gaming
Color & Design
BRAND
Do you see ‘Performance’ anywhere?
No
Performance is impossible to gauge for a normal user
You need advanced tools that tech blogger guys from YT have
Sure you can see the difference between a 32 nm Laptop Chip and a 7 nm Smartphone Chip
However it becomes tougher as you come closer and closer to each successive process
Take the I7 vs Loongson 3AC6000
Assuming Loongson had Windows integration
An Average user could not distinguish the two apart unless by GPU performance or Memory superiority
Yet a professional with tools can see that the Loongson is performing only at 50% the rate of the I7
So the answer is YES
My guess is the 3/2nm Chips are redundant for modern smartphones. They are too advanced and unnecessary for the average retail user
Cost effective 7/5 nm Chips are the Uppermost limit for smartphones
The Iphone 15 vs Mate 60 is the best example
The greatest advantage of the Iphone 15 was the GPU of NVDIA according to retail users
Mate60 won with the Camera, Gestures, Satellite Calling, 5G speeds etc
Iphone won with the Graphics
Nobody mentions the A17 Chip except as part of the textbook spec comparison table
3/2 nm Chips will be pathbreaking for the NEXT GENERATION after the Smartphone like maybe Advanced AI systems etc
TSMC will find the 3nm process overkill
Yet if they keep at it, they may find it easier to progress to the next generation of communication technology
We have built a vacation home in a nearby province. Husband took on the contracting while maintaining his full-time police job – so proud of him!
I did not announce this; I dislike the comparison games people play and do not want to be perceived as bragging.
A good friend asked to see pictures at a reunion luncheon. As I flipped through pix on my phone, an acquaintance from long ago came up behind us.
She peered over our shoulders and exclaimed, “When you married that low-ranked cop, I knew you’d end up this way! How far you’ve fallen! How can you live like THAT!!”
The look on her face was not one of concern, but a sneer.
She was looking at a picture of the shed where building materials had been kept (that has since been removed).
*sigh*
*Note Some have asked about my response. I smiled, told her that it was the raw materials shed and went back to my conversation.
Why didn’t I snap back, go for her throat, etc?
Because that (and to embarrass me) is what she expected, what she wanted. She is in her element when someone defends herself or gets angry.
But she has never been able to handle a calm, non-defensive response.
My time in the Marines didn’t go at all as I expected; in fact, I was disappointed with almost all of it. However, I am grateful for these very disappointments. It took me a long time to come this viewpoint, but I am finally able to see the experience in a more wholistic way. As a Christian, I see it through the lens of Romans 8:28:
“And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” (ESV)
When I was planning to go into the Marines, my father encouraged me as he always had. He thought I had sound judgment and that I had made a wise decision. It was a sickening shock for me to find out in the Marines that very few people, men or women, thought this way.
I was generally despised as a woman Aircraft Maintenance Officer. Women hadn’t been allowed into this MOS for very long. I was about the sixth woman to choose it. People thought women couldn’t understand machinery or aircraft.
I personally got ugly comments. One was a note passed to me in AMO school that read, “A woman is a life support system for a cunt.” I was very quiet back then and kept to myself a lot, but other Marines’ hatred for me was so great they went out of their way to humiliate me.
At some point I found out I could not be assigned to a deploying squadron; no women Marines could deploy back then. So this fact meant I would not be assigned to any unit that actually had aircraft, unless it was to a training squadron. My dream of going to a deploying squadron and to a carrier ended.
I was so miserable. I had no friends after a while. A woman captain I knew went to Germany, and a woman TBS classmate with whom I was also close had to take a medical discharge. I was lonely and frightened and made bad personal decisions as a result.
But when I was at my lowest point, I reached out to God in desperation, and He answered. It was the beginning of our relationship which continues to this day. It was about that time my EAS rolled around, so I was then set free from the Marine Corps.
In spite of the traumatic stuff and in addition to my now having God in my life, I did however benefit from my service.
I was able to work for Sikorsky Aircraft as a technical writer. I wrote repair manuals for the SH-60B helicopter when it first came out. The job included testing the manuals out on the helicopter by doing an R and R (remove and replace) of all the parts on it, including the engines, blades, and rotor head.
Being a Marine helped me get a job with the Texas Department of Public Safety as a security officer. Marines are highly respected in the Department, and there are a lot of them in it. To my surprise, many other members of the Department admired me for my Marine service and accepted me because of it. That had hardly ever happened before.
A huge benefit was that my husband, a highly decorated combat Marine, chose me to be his wife. He said that when he learned I was a Marine, he knew I could understand him like no other woman could. We got married six weeks after we met.
So my military service was a rough go, but it prepared me for the rough life I had ahead of me. But most importantly, God used it to bring me to Him and to my wonderful husband.
At so many levels… I was a small child in the 60’s. I remember on the news there was a symbol- a silhouette of a soldier walking – with a number in it, and that number was the number of casualties there had been that day. My cousin was in the 101st Airborne- it would take forever to hear anything so we both were encouraged and afraid when they mentioned the 101st.
Many people say the Gulf War was the first war played out on television. It wasn’t. It was Vietnam. I remember it so distinctly. It was terrifying. I asked my Dad what the war was for… he started to explain but in the end, he just said “There is never a good reason for war, and in the end, it won’t change anything anyway…” Looking back now, what did all that death and pain- on both sides- accomplish?
The city I lived in had a Marine base. Many of the kids I played with had dads who were “in country”, or mothers and fathers who worked at the base. I saw many of them saying goodbye because their lives had suddenly changed, either because their dad would not be coming home, or that he had come home and was now facing extended time in rehab. I remember playing in the stadium right in front of the entrance to the housing area for the base… when we saw a black car with a driver, an officer… and a chaplain… all the kids would run home in terror. Someone was about to get some bad news.
I was grateful that my Dad didn’t have to go to Vietnam. He was in the navy as the war started but I was a sick baby and he was discharged on compassionate grounds.
I remembering wearing a bracelet with the name of an MIA soldier… he didn’t come home, well, his remains didn’t come home, until the late 1970’s, I folded up his bracelet and sent it up to his family.
One of my dearest friends, “Sarge” Robert Hultgren, was a 2 tour vet- he campaigned tirelessly for the MIA and POW. “I can’t forget a single brother” he said. Sarge died several years, of Alzheimer’s Dementia. He forgot his daughter, his wife, his own name… but he thought he was in Vietnam. His PTSD pierced his soul so deeply it was too deep even for Dementia to wash away.
Sarge used to put up a bamboo Christmas Tree in front of Boston’s City Hall each Christmas. Lest we forget.
I remember standing on the front steps with my Mom when all the church bells and sirens from Fire Trucks and Civil Defense were sounding to say the war was over. But how could it be over? My friends were still waiting for their dads.
That next year at Memorial Day, the 1st World War vets marched, all snappily dressed and although old were orderly and looked dignified. The same was true of the World War 2 vets, the Korean War vets… then came the Vietnam vets. The looked slouched, and where people had cheered for the other men, they yelled things at the Vietnam Vets… Baby killer. Rapist. Bastards. WHy didn’t you just die there….
Some of the my friends were there watching their dads marching and they winced at the hatred. We had already seen it, protests at the gates of the base, “peace protesters” telling the small children there that their daddies were murderers and rapists. Who did they think they were to “peacefully” destroy these kids?
Neighbours of my grandparents, the place where we spent every spare minute, were a military family. One day when visiting them, the news came on the TV and they turned it off. “We don’t listen to that when we are here… this is our escape” said the lovely Mrs Wittman. Her husband was a senior military officer. This was the reason:
Lance Corporal Narvin O WIttman 26–9–1946 – 7–8–1967 Their son had died in Vietnam. When I went to see the “Wall”, I took a rubbing of his name. He didn’t even make it to 21.
It was years before we learned our lesson. It is this deep wound of guilt that led to Americans thanking Vets for their service… never again would we forget that it’s not the soldier’s fault when he does what his country asks him to do. I hope.
All those of my generation had the same experience… the pain and horror of Vietnam was all over the news, inescapable, imbedding itself in our psyche.
Thanks for your service… as my generation joins those who pass away, I just pray we as a human race never forget. We inflicted pain on those young men- draftees- and their families. For what?
The Sopranos || Lovely
Breaking bad is my all-time favorite show.. But this show is… its a masterpiece. I remember the first time i finished it. Had a feeling i need to watch it again right away…. They don’t make them like they used to before. What a great time it was for entertainment back then.
Southern Crusty Coconut Pie
IMG 0070
Ingredients
1/2 cup milk
1 1/4 cups shredded coconut
1/4 cup butter
1 cup granulated sugar
3 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 (9-inch) unbaked pie shell
Instructions
Pour milk over coconut and set aside while creaming butter and sugar together.
Add eggs to creamed mixture and beat well.
Add milk, coconut and vanilla extract.
Pour into an unbaked pie shell.
Bake at 350 degrees F for about 30 minutes or until pie is golden brown and firm.
Chinese are not closed off from the world; more than 130M Chinese travel outside China annually, and they spend about US$250B annually on their travels, making them the single largest tourist group by nation, and the biggest spending one.
Just because you disagree with Chinese government policies, do not say that Chinese are closed off from the rest of the world. It is you who are out of touch with what is really going on.
It appears obvious. You know, right? The United States is forcefully and intentionally forcing the world into two sides.
You can see this with what happened with Italy. Sure they love China and the BRI investment, but a unified surrogate EU must be beholding to the USA. So we are seeing things play out.
The USA is trying to secure Europe. But the major nations of Germany, and France are trying to shake off the American pre-defined role that they MUST act as they are for the USA while moving against it. So is Italy, trying to walk a thin line.
One face gives big fat wet kisses to the USA, and the other face, is one where Italy is in bed having gymnastic sex with China.
So…
Do not be confused by scant NGO / NED successes in Pakistan, Thailand, and Mongolia. Those are not going to amount to anything and are not going anywhere.
Asia is united with China.
Africa is united with China.
The Middle East is united with China.
South America is now in play. And it is quiet. Too quiet, but things are going on.
If anything is printed in the “news”, it will be long after the bodies are buried.
Meanwhile, the “news” media screeches and howls about war, and this and that. They are just noise makers designed to keep the rabble in line. Don’t listen to them. It’s all bullshit.
…
Meanwhile, I could use a nice apple pie ah la mode. With a nice hot fresh cup of coffee. That is what I could use right now. How about you all?
This is important because it could happen to anyone. How easy is it to control groups of people, and how far is a person willing to go to serve another?
I have worked alongside anti-cult groups and wrote an article exposing one of the biggest cults in the world. Before I got involved in researching new religious movements I had a very narrow-minded view of the kind of people that join cults, but the reality was much different.
When I first joined the group I was researching I was recruited by a doctor, and a respected one who was also an author. She was smart and attractive and when we first talked, she had a very warm personality, not what you would expect from a group that believed Aliens had come to Earth to give their leader the secrets to life.
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As my research continued, I began to meet similar intelligent people who where working high end jobs, and I even met a psychologist who was a member of this group.
Imagine volunteering to be buried alive. This was one of the initiations into the upper levels of the group. At this stage, the cult has broken down so much you are willing to climb into a hole to be buried alive.
So how do smart intelligent people get to that point? Well, it starts gradually.
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When you join these groups, you will be subjected to what you would call love bombing, and it comes in many forms, and it happens with every cult. This is the time you start making connections with other like-minded people in the group. If it’s a large cult, then these groups would be split up all around the world, and each of these groups would have an instigator.
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Some people do well in these cults, and they always have similar personality traits as their leader, such as narcissism. These are the people that will start breaking you down. One example of this would be Keith Raniere’s, NXIVM cult, and the actress Alison Mack who was his instigator and helped control the girls in the group.
Like I said, the abuse starts gradually, and the abuse comes in the form of it being beneficial to you. It could be minor things like what you eat. They like to control what you eat because the fewer nutrients and calories you get from food makes you lethargic, which makes you more malleable.
They start to control who you talk to, like family members and friends outside the group. This isolates you from people who will try to make you see reason, and when you are around only the people from the group, it becomes hard to question the red flags. They slowly strip you of who you are, and by the time the abuse is ramped up, you’re so desensitised to it you don’t even know you are being abused.
What does it feel like to be in this state? There’s always a mix of fear from the many veiled threats you will receive from the leader of the group, and this will come from the instigators as well. You will be in a constant state of brain fog, and everything that was once normal to you will be distorted by the group’s beliefs, and it will become unfamiliar and menacing.
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I had a friend who was a notorious conspiracy theorist, and I didn’t like how his views would try to distort my reality into being something to be fearful of. But again, my friend was a prime example of how this form of group thinking can drastically distort one’s reality.
So how does a cult turn deadly? Someone willing to volunteer to be buried alive is know different then volunteering to die or even kill someone. It’s all dependent on the leaders ideology and how far he’s willing to take that control he has over his members. If you are willing to endanger yourself to the point of death, then you will be willing to anything.
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Deadly cults like Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple, Mansion and his family, Heavens gate, they all have one thing in common, a leader who was willing to cross that line. The people in these groups where all the same, brainwashed into believing death was the only option.
Tex-Mex Spaghetti
tex mex spaghetti
Ingredients
12 ounces spaghetti
1 tablespoon extra-virgin olive oil
1 pound chicken, cut into cubes, or 1 pound ground beef
1 large red onion, sliced and julienned
2 bell peppers, sliced
1 tablespoon chili powder
1 tablespoon cumin
2 teaspoons dried oregano
1 (15 ounce) can fire-roasted tomatoes
1/2 cup low-sodium chicken or beef broth*
1/4 cup Half-and-Half
1/2 cup shredded Cheddar cheese
1/2 cup shredded pepper jack cheese
Fresh cilantro, for serving
* If using chicken, use chicken broth; if using ground beef, use beef broth.
Instructions
In a large pot of salted boiling water, cook spaghetti according to package directions until al dente. Drain.
Meanwhile, in a large skillet over medium-high heat, heat oil. Add chicken or ground beef and cook 6 minutes.
Season with salt and pepper.
Add onions and peppers and cook until tender, 4 minutes more.
Add chili powder, cumin, and oregano and stir until coated.
Add tomatoes and stir, then add chicken or beef broth and Half-and-Half.
Add cooked spaghetti to skillet and toss until coated, then add cheeses and stir until creamy.
The United States is famous (or infamous) for the size of its restaurant portions. Honestly, if you didn’t grow up in the United States (or Canada, which isn’t quite as bad, but knows about it) you will be astounded by how much food you get for a reasonable amount of money.
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Travel YouTuber Mark Wolter talks about his experience in Chicago with their famous “deep dish” pizza. He’s from the midwest and travels a lot, and when he goes to Chicago’s most famous pizza places he orders a “personal” because even though he’s a fairly large fellow, he knows he can’t eat a small. On one of his trips, a European came in alone and ordered a “small”. Wolter tried to warn him, but the fellow insisted he had eaten small pizzas by himself lots of times and never had a problem. He couldn’t finish half of it.
Food is extremely cheap in the United States.
I completely disagree. But this is an American, who never left the USA and only knows what he knows. -MM
… because the production of much of it is either heavily subsidized or relies on agricultural produce that is heavily subsidized (like beef and alcohol, both the result cheap corn). The United States has 157 million hectares of arable land (only India comes close, and it has triple the population) and grows far more food than it can reasonably consume. There used to be a large export market for American food, but although it still exports, that export market is constrained. For example, since 1940, the U.S. population has doubled, but corn production has quintupled, and the vast majority of corn grown isn’t for human consumption, even when you take into account American favourites like corn flour, corn oil, and corn grits.
The bottom line is that food in the United States is cheap, plentiful and largely delicious. If you run a restaurant, food costs are the least of your worries – labour is a much more important expense, as is the cost of renting or buying land.
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These are actual soft drink sizes sold in actual food retail establishments in the United States. Yes, at some 7-Eleven locations, they will sell you a 128 oz fountain drink. That’s 3.7 liters of soda.
The cost of the smaller 40 oz “Super Big Gulp”? Generally around $1.59 plus 25 cents for the cup. Once you buy the cup, refills are only $0.99.
Mike Pompeo doesn’t really hate China. He’ll tell you he only hates the government but not the people. He’ll even tell you how much he loves Chinese food. In 2019 a whistle blower has accused him of using his taxpayer-funded security detail to pick up Chinese food, walk his dog, and chauffeur his college age son to and from Union Station in Washington DC. How can he hate a country he hardly knows?
Interestingly, China wasn’t on Pompeo’s mind while he was the Republican congressman from Kansas’s 4th District. However all that changed when he became Donald Trump’s CIA Director and later Secretary of State. He had an advisor who hated China—Miles Maochun Yu. Now all he could think about is China.
Yu was born in China and had a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley and taught at the US Naval Academy as a professor of modern China and military history. He was also a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institute, a conservative think tank.
Whatever scraps of knowledge Mike Pompeo have of China come from his chief China policy planner and strategist, Miles Yu. Now he knows how to stick it to the Chinese government in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Xinjiang.
The real question is why does Miles Yu hate China so much? We know that he has listened to Voice of America when growing up and supported the Tienanmen Square protests. In his social media account, he has considered sanctions against China as “a badge of honor.” He is also in favor of NATO expansion in Asia to contain China.
Phyllo Potato Knish
These unique appetizers with savory potato and onion filled phyllo pastries come with a small taste of comfort in every bite.
phyllo potato knish
Prep: 30 min | Cook: 30 min | Yield: 12 servings
Ingredients
18 (9 x 14 inch) sheets Athens Phyllo®Dough, thawed
2 pounds russet potatoes, peeled and cut in half
1 teaspoon + 1 pinch salt (for boiling potatoes)
2 tablespoons olive oil
4 cups sweet onion, thinly sliced
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1/4 cup butter, melted
1 large egg + 2 egg yolks
2 tablespoons milk
Instructions
Thaw one roll of Phyllo, following thawing instructions on package. Heat oven to 350 degrees F.
Place potatoes in a medium saucepan with enough water to cover and add a pinch of salt. Bring to a boil, and then simmer until tender. Drain, mash and set aside to cool.
Heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil in a large sauté pan. Add onions, cooking covered over medium heat until they become soft and begin to brown. Remove from heat to cool.
In a large mixing bowl, combine mashed potatoes, salt, pepper, onions and any remaining oil. Mix in one egg.
Unroll and cover Phyllo sheets with plastic wrap, then a slightly damp towel to prevent drying out.
Lay one sheet of Phyllo dough on a work surface and brush lightly with butter. Place a second sheet on top and brush with butter. Place one more sheet on top but do not butter. Cut layered Phyllo in half widthwise, so you have two stacks, each 9 x 7 inches. Place 1/3 cup filling on each stack toward the bottom (an ice cream scoop is perfect for this). Fold long sides over the filling and then roll from the bottom up, making two packets. Repeat the process with remaining 15 sheets of dough, yielding a total of 12 knishes. Place knishes seam side down on a baking sheet.
Whisk together egg yolks and milk. Brush the egg yolk mixture over the top and sides of each knish.
It has its most famous manifestation as the Hainan chicken rice. However it is also a dish by itself.
At its best, it uses capon chicken ie castrated cocks.
The French has their version in Bresse chicken.
In fact some say only the Chinese and French appreciate the nuances of poached chicken.
The Chinese go further with condiments of shredded ginger, spring onion soy sauce. Tomato sauce or chili sauce should not go as condiments for this iconic dish, although some use them, because they overwhelm the flavour.
Biden’s Childish Move Brings Shame US Technology Policy On China Shattered!
The US has never had any experience in dealing with real smart enemies.
The experience it had during the Cold War with the USSR didn’t have technological and economic factors in it.
The war against China is of a different nature.
Had the US had smart politicians at all, the war shouldn’t have happened. It started with the cocky President Trump, the real estate man who had never had any political experience before, and then passed on to Biden with his Neocon cabinet, together with the support of equally prejudiced Congress.
The most popular answer says that Neil Armstrong was a terrible actor, and that’s why the moon landings had to be done for real. Well, only the first part of that is true. Neil Armstrong was indeed a terrible actor. We know this from the Apollo 11 press conference:
EVs have far fewer parts. There is much less mechanical complexity. The modern EV is a flat, skateboard-like platform, with some bodywork bolted on the top.
Assembly requires far fewer man hours what assembly there is can be automated more easily.
So to build an EV costs a manufacturer far less – especially if they re-tool their production line for EV-first assembly. No fuel tanks, pumps, hoses, transmission tunnels, gearboxes, spark plugs, carburettors, manifolds, exhausts, catalytic converters, clutches – all gone.
The only issue remaining is the traction battery. This component costs a lot to buy, and the supply of batteries is less than the demand. So we see EVs with slightly higher prices than their ICE equivalents.
If battery pack manufacture and supply was improved, the cost of building an EV would be significantly less than the equivalent ICE vehicle. Whether car makers will pass that on to customers, is another question.
UNSOLVED: The Creepiest TV Hack in History
THE MAX HEADROOM INCIDENT. November 22nd, 1987 was a pretty normal evening for television viewers in Chicago. That night, like every night, Dan Roan was covering sports on WGN-TV, Channel 9. Then suddenly, the signal was disrupted and screens across the city cut to black. Engineers at WGN-TV thought their transmitters were failing.
They weren’t.
A few seconds later, something crazy happened. WGN’s broadcast signal had been hijacked in what is now known as “The Max Headroom Incident”. WGN-TV was able to act quickly and get their signal back. But, Two hours later, it would happen again to another TV station and there was nothing they could do to stop it. What happens next remains one of the most bizarre unsolved crimes in television history.
I was born in Singapore, and someone in my family can speak Chinese, so I have been able to speak Chinese since I was a child.
But it doesn’t mean I understand China. Actually, I knew nothing about China until I was 25 years old.
My knowledge of China comes from Hollywood movies, BBC news, Mediacorp, and BBS. It was a place ruled by an evil regime, and people wore gray and blue clothes, rode bicycles, and wore the same hats . They ate dog meat every day, and baby girls were killed. Anyone who says a bad word about the leader is gone the next day.The air is full of smog, food and powdered milk are poisonous. All in all, a horrible place.
Until ten years ago, when social media became popular, I saw many real pictures and videos of China. While there is still a lot of bad content, there is a lot of good content coming out. However, I still think it’s a terrible place.
5 years ago, I went to China for the first time because of my work. I went to Shanghai, Chongqing, Chengdu, Guangzhou, and even a village in Guizhou Province.
Within an hour of leaving the plane, I was shocked by this country, and for the next hundred hours, I was shocked by this country every hour. I found that all my images of China in the past were wrong. This is a super-modern country, people are very orderly, and the degree of modernization of buildings, roads, and cities surpasses all countries I have been to, including European and American countries.
There are no gray-blue clothes, and no one eats dog meat. The girls are very fashionable and beautiful. Their cops don’t even have guns and batons, and they rarely show up. We can drink in the street and take a walk late at night. In the pub people talk about elections in America, stocks in London. The milk tea is very delicious, and all kinds of food are very delicious.
Chinese people don’t use cash or credit cards, they use QR codes for all payments. Made me look like a redneck on my first shopping trip.
In the following years, I traveled to China twice. 2020 break. I went there again this year, and China has undergone tremendous changes again. On the streets of Shenzhen, at least half of the cars have been replaced with green license plates. That’s the massive EV revolution.
I don’t know how many words to describe the change in my view of China. Perhaps, only when people go to China can they experience all this.
Niger France Embassy Siege Moving To Forceful Removal, Macron To Deploy Troops To Protect Citizens
“I as a Tennesseean I stand with any country who seeks to throw off the yolk of neo-colonialism and freely rule themselves”
My flight arrived just after 5 and I got to the city centre around 7.
I went to the hotel and told them about it. They said they’d be happy to hold my luggage, and if I’d like a cup of coffee they could let me know soon if an earlier checkin might be possible.
It was, but still only at 12 noon. Would I like to visit the breakfast buffet? I’d need to pay, though. Yes, no problem, I’d love to.
Would I like to use and hang out by the pool? Yes! Especially as I could shower there as well.
At around 10, as my luggage was safe and sound I did some exploring around the neighborhood, found a supermarket, got a few bits and pieces (water, snacks, a little flask of booze, some soap nicer than hotel soap, toothpaste). I did some early gift and souvenir shopping, got t-shirts and stuff to take back home, had more coffee, and kinda bumbled around in an air-conditioned mall.
Found a food court and had an early lunch. My energy was fading.
Got back to the hotel around 11:30 expecting to wait, maybe with more coffee, and was greeted with “actually a room is ready for you. We just said 12 because we have to allow enough time for the cleaners. Would you like to go up now?” Oh yeah, I would.
Had a deliciously cool shower and flopped onto the bed for a huge nap, then woke up and headed out again. It worked out!
Why Does Biden Look SO DIFFERENT? TWO Bidens? A MASK!? We Finally Have The ANSWER
Beneath all that is actually Scrappy Doo trying to be a world leader.
I thought the U.S. is trying to de risk from China? Don’t sell them planes! They may copy it!
Oh they already have their own jets! Never mind keep your Boeing and sell it to your slaves and cronies. They will buy but give them 50 years to recover from the recession first!
You see China learns from the U.S. fast. You think only you needs de-risking? China needs to de risks from you too! Why should China buys from Boeing, who the. Makes money and fund its weapons subsidiaries to armed the U.S. to threaten and attack China? These are real tangible risk for China!
Remember you stop buying from DGI and Huawei because of de-risking or decoupling? Well China is de-risking and decoupling too! We learn from you!
Don’t do on to others what you don’t want them to do on to you! Learn this and leant it quick. China just stop 500 billion dollar jet planes purchase from Boeing since you de-risk we de-risk too!
P.S. apologies to the thousands of U.S. worker who lose their jobs!
Streets of Philadelphia, Kensington Ave Documentary, July 14 – 16, 2023
In Philadelphia as a whole, violent crime and drug abuse are major issues. The city has a higher rate of violent crime than the national average and other similarly sized metropolitan areas. The drug overdose rate in Philadelphia is also concerning. Between 2013 and 2015, the number of drug overdose deaths in the city increased by 50%, with more than twice as many deaths from overdoses as homicides. 2 Kensington’s high crime rate and drug abuse contribute significantly to Philadelphia’s problems.
Because of the high number of drugs in the neighborhood, Kensington has the third-highest drug crime rate by neighborhood in Philadelphia, at 3.57. The opioid epidemic has played a significant role in this problem, as it has in much of the rest of the country. Opioid abuse has skyrocketed in the United States over the last two decades, and Philadelphia is no exception. In addition to having a high rate of drug overdose deaths, 80% of Philadelphia’s overdose deaths involved opioids, and Kensington is a significant contributor to this figure. This Philadelphia neighborhood is said to have the largest open-air heroin market on the East Coast, with many neighbors migrating to the area for heroin and other opioids. With such a high concentration of drugs in Kensington, many state and local officials have focused on the neighborhood in an attempt to address Philadelphia’s problem.
I was at a mall today, paying bills, having lunch and planning on a visit to the gym (pat on the back: I did all three!).
As I walked to the bank, I noticed an older man sitting by a water feature, dipping his fingers in the pool. This was unusual as people here in Thailand rarely do this in a mall.
When I passed him again 10 minutes later, he was standing in the middle of the walkway, searching to his left, then to his right, over and over, looking distressed.
I was about to approach him when a group of (uniformed and backpacked) high school students got to him first. They spoke to him respectfully and quickly realized that he didn’t know where he was or who should be with him.
One young man sprinted off to Information while the others tried to distract the old man to calm him.
A few moments later, a female security guard approached the group, having been notified by Information. She told the kids they could leave, but they refused, feeling they should stay and keep ‘grandfather’ happy.
An announcement was made, and within a few minutes, a very worried, middle-aged couple rushed over to the old man, and although they fussed at him for disappearing, they were clearly relieved.
The high school students were thanked, and then they respectfully took their leave.
The old man watched them go, turned to the couple and asked, “Where are the grandkids going?”
The couple smiled at him and gently said, “It’s ok, Father. They are going to school.”
The old man replied, “They are such good kids. You raised them well.”
China DESTROYS the Neocons as Biden’s WAR Fails w/ Brian Berletic
“I joined Brian Berletic of The New Atlas on his channel to discuss my trip to China and what I learned about this successful defeat of US and European war plans against it.”
This is really good. Listen to what they have to say. Learn something.
Typically Consumer Products dont leave a country unless it’s market has reduced so much that there is no point in continuing
Today China has at least 100 Local Brands of Shoes ranging from the 21.99 Yuan a pair Danis available in every Hypermarket to the 2199 Yuan a pair LiNing in select showrooms in Malla
They have taken over sponsorship of events and Athletes begin buying them over brands like Nike or Puma
PUMA or Nike have so much unsold inventory in China that they typically offer mass discounts during Lunar New Year or Chinese New Year
Nike was very arrogant when it has a two third market share in China
It priced itself in Dollars
It sold shoes without it’s “Air”
Now Nike and Puma simply can’t sustain operations because CHINA ISN’T BUYING THEM ANYMORE
Domestic Brands in China have surged with Nikes market falling from 53% in the Middle of 2014 to 8% by 2021 while Domestic Shoe Brands rose from 6% in 2014 to 61% in 2021
Plus Chinese Brands Anta and Nining rose their Asian market share from 0.8% in 2015 to 8.6% in 2023
And if Nike gets such a mauling, imagine Puma!!!!
Plus the Nike production in Vietnam is 66,000 Pairs a day Or 2 Million a month
In China?
It was 14.8 Million Pairs a month in 2016
Almost 7.5 times higher
As for Global Exports – Prices to make Nike Shoes have surged in China due to higher labor costs
The Chinese say
You pay us 110 Yuan a pair for our Factory make, pay our wholesellers 240 Yuan a pair and you sell retail for 1300 Yuan a pair
Sorry, either you pay us more or we start making Anta or Lining which pays us more and shares price more evenly
Vietnamese don’t
They need these numbers
Same with Samsung
Once Samsung dominated Consumer Electronics in China with a 31% market share and Mobiles with a nearly 18% market share
Today?
Samsung Electronics have a 3.2% market share on the mainland and their phones have near zero demand
It’s market forces purely that many brands are pulling out of China
China has domestic equivalents now at half the price and same quality
Why would China pay twice the money just for a brand?
Chinese are some of the most practical people on earth when it comes to money
Only a few foreign brands like the Iphone or Macbook hold a fascination for the Chinese even today
INTERVIEW: The odds are on a nuclear war
Retired US colonel Tony Schaffer says there’s an 80% chance of war between America and Russia in the next year. No one in power understands the Russian perspective.
China is taking a very close look at investment money now, and in many areas, US investment money is not attractive because:
US legal jurisdiction claims to be above the law of other nations, giving the US the ability to sanction other nations for US IP products and services within the nation’s own borders;
US investment money favors New York as the world’s capital market, and the role of the US dollar as the global reserve currency. The Chinese government wants to cut back on the US dollar as the only global reserve currency, which is why it is active in BRICS.
The US keeps its global economic dominance through the Big 4 accounting firms which act as gatekeepers to US equity markets for raising capital. Same goes for US investment banks.
For these reasons, China is looking at diversification, especially in the area of manufacturing.
In order to find an alternative to US investment money, China has built very strong trade and investment relations with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, both of which were recently admitted to BRICS. Both are just starting to invest in Chinese projects in China and in their countries, and the new BRICS entrants of Egypt and Ethiopia.
This Middle East capital will flow into China and come without many of the strings which come with US investment capital.
This is part of China’s decoupling policy with the US.
24 Times Paulie Walnuts Had The Best Lines On “The Sopranos”
This question strikes close to home, thanks for asking Luther.
I was in the 160th in the early days, May 83 – Mar 88. I ended my 20 year career and retired out of the 160th. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the ultimate, there is no unit like it and after being in the 160th there’s no other place to go. *Everybody* in the Night Stalkers is a volunteer; officer, warrant officer, NCO, enlisted. You are so highly trained and the mission so specialized that once in the unit the Army will leave you there until you ask to be reassigned or the unit leadership asks you to leave.
There were several training accidents in my day resulting in a lot of casualties. So many that at one time the big Army considered shutting the unit down. Understand that we were charting new territory, what we did in establishing new procedures and ways to operate had never been done before. Things improved tremendously, the unit got better, provided the SOF community with a capability it never had before. The big Army realized this, we persevered and now the 160th SOAR(A) is the best unit of its kind in the entire world. Hell, it’s the *only* unit of its kind. It was born out of the disaster that was Desert One, the Iran hostage rescue attempt in April, 1980.
Our “customers” are the best of the best and the Night Stalkers will not let them down. They are why the unit exists. To them you can be one of two things, an asset or a liability. Nobody wants to be the latter. No matter the weather, no matter the terrain, no matter the opposing force capability, the Night Stalkers will get them to the objective. And most importantly the Night Stalkers will get them out. Time on target plus or minus 30 seconds.
To completely define a Night Stalker you need to also consider the spouses, the families. They are just as dedicated and it can be said that their job is the hardest.
Yes, you could consider it dangerous, probably more so than any other aviation unit. The training is intense, you train like you fight. It gets the call and is exposed to hostile action more often than any other aviation unit so the risk is always there. Its aircraft are not “off the shelf”. They are tailored and modified for the unique mission and is the best you can get. Night Stalkers and its customers are involved in some operations that you don’t hear about and never will. Everybody is a volunteer. The unit personnel are the best of the best and you don’t become a Night Stalker until you successfully complete assessment and initial training. Certain personalities are drawn to this kind of unit. Those that will willingly risk their lives for their buddies, for their Country. To them, the risk is worth it. To the rest of the country, be proud and comforted knowing that those types of individuals exist.
And ya know what? If you were to pass a Night Stalker on the street you’d never know it. They don’t brag, they don’t boast, they don’t thump their chests. Ah, they might in jest amongst themselves or their customers, but never in public. They look and act like your typical guy or gal that lives next door to ya.
“To those who have fought for it, freedom has a flavor the protected will never know.”
Night Stalkers Don’t Quit!!
Roasted Blue Cheese Potato Salad
Get rid of that boring old potato salad recipe and change things up in the flavor department with this delicious Roasted Blue Cheese Potato Salad.
roasted blue cheese potato salad
Prep: 10 min | Bake: 25 min | Yield: 10 servings
Ingredients
Pam® Original No-Stick Cooking Spray
1 yellow onion, sliced in 1/4 inch thick rounds
3 pounds baby red potatoes
3/4 cup diced celery
1/3 cup mayonnaise
1/2 cup crumbled blue cheese
2 tablespoons chopped fresh basil
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
Instructions
Heat the oven to 425 degrees F. Spray the bottom of a baking sheet generously with cooking spray.
Evenly spread out the onion slices and potatoes onto the baking sheet.
Bake for 20 to 25 minutes or until the potatoes are browned and tender.
Chill immediately.
Next, dice the chilled onions and place them into a large bowl along with the chilled potatoes, celery, mayonnaise, blue cheese, basil, salt and pepper and mix until combined.
Serve chilled.
USA mad!
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The USA is now into sanction inception! Say what? The USA will sanction already sanctioned companies for not respecting sanctions…
Again wut? Chinese companies that do business with another Chinese company, under US sanctions will get sanctions.
😀 😀 😀 😀
It’s like they think they can pass laws for other countries!
This Is WORSE Than China’s Treasury Dump!
China’s treasury dump has hit a 14-year low with $11 billion more bonds sold, but this is nothing compared to the tsunami of debt coming from America itself. Yellen is going to flood the economy with nearly $2 trillion dollars worth of treasuries which is putting enormous pressure on bond yields. While this might push the economy towards a recession, the real risk is accelerating towards a fiscal cliff which is unthinkable!
Huawei Technologies Co. roared back into the spotlight this past week after a Bloomberg report showed their new phone is powered by a 7nm processor, which is just a few years behind Apple’s iPhone. And who’s getting the jitters over this new development? Those very same Capitol Hill lawmakers, who, for the last several years, sanctioned not only Huawei but also China’s chip sector to stymie homegrown tech progress. That move didn’t pan out as planned.
Now, the US Commerce Department is panicking while it rushes to understand how sanctioned Huawei was able to design and manufacture a 7-nanometer processor for its new Mate 60 Pro smartphone. The whole purpose of blacklisting the company and many other Chinese tech firms was to restrict access to US technology to make these sorts of devices.
Mate 60 Pro went on sale while the US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo was on a trip to China last week. This is a sign that China is ‘thumbing their noses’ at the US for the wave of sanctions that have failed so far.
“We are working to obtain more information on the character and composition of the purported 7nm chip,” a Commerce spokesperson said in a statement.
According to Bloomberg. the Commerce Department will begin its own investigation into Huawei’s new phone. The Commerce Department’s Office of Export Enforcement will likely lead the study to determine if China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp.’s Kirin 9000s chip, was made using US technology.
The Mate 60 Pro news is a sign that suggests President Xi Jinping’s efforts to develop technological self-sufficiency are working. The Bloomberg report on the phone showed it has “an unusually high proportion of Chinese parts … a sign of the country’s progress in developing domestic tech capabilities.”
Meanwhile, China has banned iPhone use by central government employees and has expanded it to to local governments and state-owned companies. Such curbs threaten multinationals like Apple, which derives 25% of its sales from China.
Tom Nunlist, an associate director from the Beijing-based consulting firm Trivium, said, “Chip tech export controls may have been Washington’s one and only ace in the tech war.”
Tex-Mex Street Tacos
Flavorfully-seasoned flank steak cooked to perfection, and then wrapped in soft warm corn tortillas.
tex mex street tacos
Yield: 4 servings; 2 cups Pico de Gallo
Ingredients
Tacos
2 pounds flank steak
1/4 cup silver tequila
2 tablespoons low-sodium soy sauce
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 lime, juiced
1/4 cup orange juice
1/4 cup olive oil
1 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
1 jalapeño pepper, ribs and seeds removed, finely chopped
1 shallot, finely chopped
2 tablespoons cilantro, chopped
Cotija cheese, crumbled
16 corn tortillas
Toppings
Minced white onion
Chopped cilantro
Optional Toppings
Cojita cheese
Lime wedges
Pico de gallo
Pico de Gallo
4 tomatoes, seeded and chopped
1/2 cup red onion, chopped
2 green onions, white and green parts, thinly sliced
1 jalapeño pepper, ribs and seeds removed, minced
1/4 cup cilantro, chopped
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 lime, juiced
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 teaspoon kosher salt
Instructions
Tacos
Place tequila, soy sauce, garlic, lime juice, orange juice, olive oil, salt, black pepper, jalapeño pepper, shallot and cilantro in a freezer proof zip-top bag. Add flank steak. Seal and marinate 6 hours to overnight in the refrigerator.
Heat gas or charcoal grill to 400 degrees F.
Remove meat and discard marinade. Place steaks on oiled grates and grill for approximately 4-6 minutes on one side or until moisture startes to pool on the top and beef releases easily from the grates with tongs. Flip once, grilling on the other side for 4 to 6 minutes or until internal temperature reaches 145 degrees F with meat thermometer inserted into the thickest part of the steak. Transfer steaks to a platter and let rest for 3 minutes before slicing against the grain, into 1/4-inch thick strips.
Warm the tortillas for 30 seconds on each side in a dry skillet or on the grill.
Stack 2 tortillas, add beef, toppings and lime juice if desired.
Pico de Gallo
Pico de Gallo: Combine Pico de Gallo ingredients in mixing bowl and toss thoroughly.
I must admit that I enjoy a cold left over pizza in the morning. It goes good with black coffee. It doesn’t matter what kind of pizza, or how much, or what the toppings are. You can reheat it or not. Personally, I guess I am strange, I prefer the cold pizza in the morning. Who figures, eh?
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It’s an American thing.
Pizza is an American food, and one of the things that I love, but cannot eat too much of. It tends to make my body rotund, and you guys know that I am in the process of losing weight.
…
I am at 85Kg today.
Last week I was at 90Kg, and (if you recall) my BMI listed me as obese. I said “NO!”, and then lost 5Kg in one week!
I also noticed that I became weak at noon and needed a nap, and afterwards I really needed to urinate. I noticed that my urine became very thick and deep in color.
My waist shrank.
But you know, the rest of my body is still bony as ever. LOL.
…
What I did was change my diet to “slight”.
Breakfast = 1/2 cup of black coffee.
Lunch = One small chicken burger or Baozi.
Dinner = Tiny dinner. Vegetables with meat and small portion of rice.
No snacks.
Today, we are going to sponsor another meal with friends. The excuse is a shared birthday. We rented a room and we will be drinking a case of Shiraz, and 5 liters of Guoji wine. (37% alcohol).
I’m sure to gain some weight. But I will not glutton out, We will enjoy fine seafood, BBQ chicken and other tasty morsels and sign and dance until midnight, and then take my daughter to bed.
Then I will return back to my (now normal) routine.
…
My affirmations agree with my new lifestyle.
I’m one week into my latest campaign and the transformations are stunning. I am actually witnessing the slides manifest in real time. Not since my Majestic days have I experienced such “easy” changing.
…
My daughter has really taken to boxing, and loves to spar with me. So I get on my knees and allow her to punch me relentlessly. It’s a father’s duty, don’t you know.
She also loves Hip-Hop. Ah. She’s a natural.
And sports; she loves basketball. And she can dribble like there is no tomorrow!
Not too bad for a four-year old. LOL.
…
While she understand my English, she has preferred to speak in Chinese. But lately, she has been speaking to me in English, and it makes me very happy. Still, it’s baby-English and she speaks it like it’s Chinese, but still, it makes me glad.
I’m a proud father.
…
The world continues to turn.
The “news” has hit the stratosphere and now orbits the earth in some kind of lime-loop. And we all move on with our lives one way or the other.
The editors and their owners are absolutely clueless.
…
Typhoon hit yesterday. Today is a steady medium rain with small squall gusts. Much flooding. Some debris on the ground, and some trivial damage. Most of the trees are intact and remain rooted in place.
We took a ride out to check out the damage. Trees are down. Flooding everywhere. Many shops closed. Leaves galore. Some damage to face scanners, cameras, and traffic lights. The thermal scanners are mostly intact, though.
We drove in circles looking for a snack place that served coffee and hybrid / fusion food. Only one open was good, but the dishes served were too big. We wanted a light snack, not a banquet. Sheech!
We swam the car home, dusted off the branches and leaves and ordered home-delivery. I ordered some Zha Jiang Mian for myself and a cup of coffee, the rest got some pigs feet, Chinese spinach and some rice. Ok. Fair enough.
Zha Jiang Mian
Zha Jiang Mian is very much like American spaghetti. Only the sauce is very thick with lots or ground pork, and thickened with bean paste. You can eat it spicy if you want. Often it is served with these toothpick thin slices of cucumber, which you stir into the noodles.
Its one of my favorites.
I just cannot believe the Chinese expats being happy in the USA and not being able to enjoy such delicious Chinese food on demand. You have to make it at home. Sheech! What a pain!
This is what Cleverly thought he can do in China in one day:
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He thinks the U.K. is a peer to China and for the sake of the British people and the world, he wants China to work with the U.K. on climate change, prevent nuclear proliferation, and matter relating to AI and other technologies.
It’s humiliating if you think so much of yourself and China politely listens to you and quickly send you off home without discussing any of these.
What Cleverly can’t admit to is that the U.K. needs economic assistance and densely believes that the U.K. can get it from China while barking ever so loudly as a U.S. lapdog.
LOL.
Ha ha ha ha ha!
China doesn’t care if the U.K. is ignoring China.
It’s just that China is simply ignoring the U.K.
LOL!
(Burst of laughing loudly and rolling on the floor.)
Cleverly hasn’t realized it yet that the U.K. is irrelevant to most of the world.
The African nations are rich in natural resources, but are weak in infrastructure development, especially transport infrastructure. China is now the world’s leading manufacturing nation, and it needs raw materials and natural resources to keep Chinese factories busy. For this reason, it makes sense for Chinese construction companies to improve the transport infrastructure of the African nations;
The quality of government and governance in the African nations has been gradually improving, and the African farmers and miners of today are destined to become the African consumers of tomorrow. It makes sense for China and Chinese companies to improve their standard of living so that these Africans will eventually buy the output of Chinese manufacturers, instead of only supplying raw materials to Chinese manufacturers;
Because the African economies will become more important, it makes perfect sense for China to build goodwill with future African political leaders and business leaders and entrepreneurs. If they attend Chinese schools, learn Chinese, and understand Chinese culture, they will become future ambassadors for China in their home countries, and will be well disposed to building bridges between their government, society and Chinese official and business interests. These societies are also likely to have significant local Chinese populations which will serve as bridges between China and their new African home countries. Because China’s relationship with Africa has never been tainted by a history of brutality, racism and slavery, Chinese and Africans are able to deal with each other equally, and are not burdened with negative historical stereotypes based on racism and discrimination. This racism, discrimination and condescending attitude are something which western societies have great difficulty escaping from, which hinders the development of relations with the African nations and societies. For Africans, this mutual respect with China and Chinese based on pursuing their individual interests, and seeking shared interests when possible, is a breath of fresh air.
Chinese manufacturers have the know-how many African nations need to move up the value chain. Some of the lower value-added manufacturers, such as textile manufacturers, may move some of their operations to African nations since the Chinese government no longer sees China as being leaders in these areas, and is encouraging high-tech manufacturing development, especially with the Made in China 2025 plan. So far, most Chinese textile makers have been moving to Vietnam, Thailand and SE Asia, but it is likely that some will move their operations to African nations. This will help Africans to get their first step into manufacturing. In contrast, during the colonial period, the British, French and Germans never allowed manufacturing in Africa, instead preferring to keep Africans poor and underdeveloped. China and the Chinese have no such agenda.
To sum up, China is not giving away free money.
China is investing in the African consumer of the future, and sees them as important future Chinese partners.
China Exposed the US Call to Ban Anti Satellite Missile Tests; Fake Arm Control!
Chinese laser technology and rail-gun are more advanced than the U.S.’ ones, while Russia has the most advanced hypersonic missiles. The U.S. lags behind in those fields. That’s why, the latter tries to prevent these cutting edge technologies from destroying Western satellites in case of conflicts. The Americans also aim at slow down the progress of the Russian and China space industries. When Russia and China hadn’t such technologies, the U.S. didn’t offer peaceful use of space, because of Russia and China lagged behind American military and space technologies. It’s too late !
https://youtu.be/EhTFmIswgVU
The “government” is simply fucking with us…
You’ve got to be kidding me…
2023 09 02 12 20
Beef Curry
2023 08 25 21 45
Yield: 6 to 8 servings
Ingredients
3 pounds beef round steak, cut into 1 1/2 inch cubes
1/2 cup all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon curry powder
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 cup raisins
2 apples, peeled, cored and sliced
1 cup diced onion
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
1 (14 ounce) can beef broth
2 apples, unpeeled, cored and finely chopped
Fluffy rice
Instructions
Dry beef well with a paper towel.
Mix flour and curry powder.
Coat meat cubes with flour mixture.
Place meat in slow cooker.
Add garlic, raisins, sliced apples, onion, salt and pepper.
Pour in broth and stir to blend.
Cover and cook on LOW for 8 to 10 hours or on HIGH for 4 to 5 hours until meat is tender.
Before serving, stir in additional curry powder to taste (up to 1 tablespoon) and chopped apples.
Kangaroos! They are a lot bigger than what I’d imagined. These days what with YouTube one can get a good idea about their size, but when I went to Australia I had no idea. I also imagined them to be, you know, out in the bush or somewhere out there away from civilization, but no, I get up in the morning and look out the window and there a pretty big dog outside. Then it stands up and is about 8 feet tall, well maybe not 8 feet, but hella big. My brain sort of short circuits for a second until I realize I’m looking at a kangaroo! Big and in the suburbs of a large city!
I burst out of the room yelling that there’s a giant kangaroo in the back yard! My friend, er… mate says, “Yup, he’s probably eating the dog’s food”. He doesn’t even bother to look. Later we go out the front door and there’s a couple more just standing there. I’m slack jawed and he just walks past them, gets in the car, and off we go. Kangaroos!
Oliver Anthony – I Want To Go Home And Rich Men North Of Richmond (Reaction)
I have been asked to tell the following story many times, and it became so famous that I was even asked to record it for NPR.
I worked for a high-tech company when high-tech was just starting to make an impact on the world. This was before the internet, even before everyone had PCs. We had one IBM PC for the entire department and it was a thrill to use it. I say this just to give an impression of how things have changed since then.
Our company made high speed modems, but the fastest anyone could do in those days was 9600bps, and you paid 10,000 dollars a piece for each modem — and you needed at least two of them, one for each end. We had invented a mechanism that would double that rate to 19,200bps, which was like lightning at the time. The benefits were immediately apparent and every major company wanted them, damn the cost. Unfortunately, the techniques we were using were in their infancy and had lots of bugs. Even though we were selling them like ice cream on a hot day, they didn’t really work as advertised.
A huge oil company bought a massive amount of product. Their plan was to link all of their gas stations across the US to their central site and have the managers report daily sales to the home office. This previously had been done by mail or phone and was slow and inefficient. With a modem system they could know what their revenues were to the penny overnight, or even several times during the day. They did some cursory testing on the devices and rolled them out. But they didn’t work.
Our engineers worked day and night to fix the issues but it turned out to be intractable. There were grave concerns that we might never solve the problem. Our salesman for the company was a brave and confident expert with years of experience but he was becoming increasingly despondent. The customer was agitated and angry and threatening to return the product. This would have been a huge setback, possibly a death blow to the company. They were by far our biggest customer and by far the biggest sale we had ever achieved. And the salesman would not get his commission.
I was the manager of the business unit, newly promoted into the role at the age of 26. I thought I was something special, and to be honest if not modest, I was a world-wide expert on these technologies and frequently flown around the world to solve problems. But what I didn’t know was that behind the scenes the senior managers of this customer were now DEMANDING a reckoning with our company. Our management knew it was the end if we did not have a solution, and we had no solution.
The salesman set up a meeting with the Senior Vice President of this oil company, a man who probably had the power to overthrow third world countries or have people killed. Suddenly, the President of our company had pressing business in Europe. So did every other executive down the line until, casting about, they looked at me. I was to be the sacrificial lamb they would send to the slaughter. I was told to go “make nice” with the customer to buy more time. I was unaware of the political issues behind the scene. If I failed, I would be unceremoniously fired as a token of good faith. The salesman knew it. I did not.
Thinking this was going to be yet another triumphant visit, and with a swelled head, I went out, bought a new suit and briefcase and flew from Boston to the West Coast. I didn’t even have anything to put in the briefcase except a pad and pencil since I wasn’t given any progress report, possible solutions or any token that might mollify them. Management was so certain of disaster that they thought it best I go completely in the dark.
I was picked up by our salesman in his new Jaguar , along with our field engineer, both of whom knew the gravity of our situation and how dire things were. I was cheerful and humming in the car as I took in the sights. I was surprised by their gloomy silence until we got to the customer’s campus. I had never seen anything like it before. Oil money can buy anything, and this building was modern and massive, the lobby was an art museum with original paintings by the Masters.
We didn’t even have to wait. As soon as we announced ourselves we were shown to a conference room. This is when I really got scared. The room was huge with an impossibly long conference table surrounded by the most expensive leather chairs money could buy. There were tuxedoed waiters with white gloves bringing crystal glasses for the pitchers of water. There was a stenographer with a real steno machine to take the minutes. The room was already filled with executives and lawyers speaking to each other in low voices and grim expressions. I knew then that I was doomed.
Finally the door opened and the SVP came in. A hush fell over the room. Here was a man that everyone in that room feared and respected. You could feel the power and electricity coming from him as he strode in. He sat directly opposite me. I blinked stupidly as the sweat rolled down my sides. Next to me our salesman was gripping his Mont Blanc pen like a drowning sailor clutches at a piece of driftwood. On my right the SE sat stoically. No matter what happened, he would be safe — unless the company went broke because of this debacle.
The SVP opened the meeting as if it were a legal proceeding, reading a summary of the problem and all the actions taken to date, emphasizing our failure to solve it. As he got into it he became angrier and angrier. He started pounding the table and he got red as he spoke of how much time and money had been wasted and spoke of “fraud” and “malfeasance” and “misrepresentation”. All of this vitriol was directed at me. He was further insulted that our company had the nerve to send me, of all people, not even a VP. Finally he pointed at me and said in a harsh voice, “If you can’t fix this problem today, right now, around town your name isn’t going to be worth squat!”
And then he sat back in his chair. I can still hear the leather creaking. There wasn’t another sound in the room. Every eye was on me now, and what I would say next. I had nothing. I didn’t even have anything in my briefcase to fumble with for time.
And then, without even thinking, I said, “Around town it was well known that when they got home at night their fat and psychopathic wives would thrash them within inches of their lives”
I couldn’t believe my own ears. I couldn’t believe I had just said that. To my left, our salesman looked at me in horror and tried to pull himself away from me in his chair. The SE had his mouth open. So did all the important lawyers in their suits and suspenders. Even the stenographer looked up from her machine at me. I was well and truly fucked. The SVP wound up to scream at me and I flinched.
Then he stopped.
“Wait a minute,” he said, “I know that line…” “Yes,” I whispered, “It’s from Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’ album.” He said, “I knew that. You like Pink Floyd?” “Yes,” I said, “It’s my favorite group.” “Mine too,” he said, suddenly smiling and getting up, “I saw the ‘Wall’ concert in LA in 1980. It was fantastic! I even caught one of Gilmour’s guitar picks. I have it framed in my office with the ticket stubs. Come on, I’ll show you!”
And he got up and walked over to the door. I numbly followed. My ears were ringing and I knew I stunk of sweat and fear. The people in the room were dumbstruck. Everyone had their mouths open or were looking at us in absolute amazement. No one said a word.
As we left the room, the SVP smiled and said to the room, “Oh, we’ll give them a few more weeks,” and he waved them off and we went down the hall. The rest of the visit passed in a blur.
The salesman was pounding the wheel and laughing out loud on the trip back to the airport. “We gotta get you a great big steak,” he said, “You know, you can only get away with that once in your career.” The SE didn’t say a thing except, “I like Pink Floyd too.”
When I got back to the office I was the hero of the hour.
The salesman had called and related the story to everyone he could reach, and I was called into a meeting to recount the adventure. Everyone was laughing and slapping me on the back. It felt good to be the hero for once: tomorrow I would once again be the goat, I was sure. Over the next few weeks we had a dramatic breakthrough in Engineering and the problem was solved, the situation resolved, the customer saved. They went on to buy many thousands more modems.
In 2005, in outskirts of Istanbul Turkey, 1500 sheep were grazing in the field. It was early in the day when all the sheep were relaxing in the field eating there breakfast. The shepherd’s were watching the sheep graze, when they noticed one lone sheep break of from the herd and wander off on it’s own.
This didn’t seem out of the ordinary as sheep tend to wander. They watched as the sheep made it’s way to a cliff edge, but before they even realised what was happening the sheep jumped to it’s death. This was obviously devasting for the shepherd’s watching, and they were definitely not preprepared for what happened next.
Suddenly another sheep left the herd and made it’s way to cliff before following the first sheep to it’s doom. This caused another to follow and jump to it’s death causing a domino effect of suicidal sheep.
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The Shepherds tried in vain to stop the sheep from jumping, but it was like they were determined to follow their brothers into the unknown. The sheep began piling up at the bottom of the cliff, but as the sheep piled up in a mass of blood, guts and wool they began to cushion the rest of the sheep as they hit the ground.
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The whole herd, 1500 in total had jumped, but only 450 perished with the rest being cushioned by the first of the doomed sheep.
THIS IS THE WORLDS ANTHEM! FOR THE PEOPLE! (Reaction) | Oliver Anthony-Rich Men North of Richmond
Absolutely incredible! Oliver Anthony shines light on those hiding in the shadows. Those D’s wanting to C everything we do, while trying to cover up and hide everything they do. THIS is the voice we need!
Many years ago my ex husband and I had our own pottery business.
We sold a lot to members of the British Aristocracy (for some reason it seemed to appeal to them).
We only ever realised who they were when they paid by cheque (credit cards weren’t really a big thing at the time).
We had cheques signed by The Marquis of Bath, The Marchioness of Tavistock, Marquis of Salisbury, Earl Spencer amongst many others.
They were the nicest, most down to earth people that you could wish to meet. All of them were very casually dressed and you would never know that they were aristocracy.
My current husband 🤣 was on guard duty at Windsor Castle during the Falklands conflict. Very early one morning our beautiful late Queen Elizabeth passed him on the way to the stables, no bodyguards or companions. She stopped to talk to him, asking where he was from, about his family. She had no particular need to do so, nothing to prove to anyone.
These people screamed class, without making any sound.
China does not see relationships as being transactional the way the US has;
Russia deserves respect as a sovereign nation which makes its own choices, and if China sold out Russia, it knows that Russia would never trust China again.
It understands that the US always views relationships as transactional, and that it would turn against China when expedient.
Tucker: “We Have Proof Obama was Having Sex With Men, Smoking Crack…”
There is a bunch of pictures of Obama with “a brother”, only before he had the sex change. That’s right. “Michelle is a trans man”.
After a long-running buildup pinpointed by immense expectations all across the Global South, Global Majority, or “Global Globe” (as coined by Belarus President Lukashenko), the BRICS summit in South Africa, on its first day, revealed a “lost in translation” incident that should be taken as a serious warning.
The BRICS Business Forum feed on South African network SABC turned into a BRICS linguistic Babel. The voice of all the translators, simultaneously, was clashing on the feed. Explanations vary from the desire to forge a new Esperanto (not likely); plain incompetence from the sound engineering team; the isolation of the translators in a separate cabin, not warned to turn off their mikes; or last but not least, NSA interference, messing up with the translators’ mic frequencies.
Whatever happened metastasized into a serious impediment for a South African – and international – audience, online, to understand what was being discussed. Even though “lost in translation” would not nullify the BRICS’s ambitious agenda for change, it certainly will be played up to the max by the usual Divide and Rule suspects to boost their already in effect all-round Hybrid War against BRICS.
The Shakespearean de-dollarization drama
Whatever the final concrete results of these potentially game-changing days in Johannesburg – I analyzed the key themes here
– the basic facts are immutable.
China and Russia, as the main drivers, are bent on expanding towards BRICS+ to resist imperial bullying, diplomatic and otherwise; build alternatives to SWIFT; promote economic self-reliance among members and autonomy from the sanctions dementia (which will only increase); and eventually forge an alliance against imperial military threats – with the possibility of BRICS+ merging in the future with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).
The China factor is arguably the key vector in all these complex, intertwined processes. It’s no wonder that President Xi, in his only second state visit abroad in 2023 (after Russia), will convene a special meeting in Johannesburg with dozens of African heads of state.
by the BRICS summit, with “interest surpassing the G7”. There’s extensive debate on the whole Empire-defying agenda – from de-dollarization to heightened influence in the energy market – and on the China-India divide, with New Delhi often pointed out as a hostile agent inside BRICS.
Sherpas, off the record, as well as diplomats from the current BRICS five (soon to expand) have been extra-cautious to frame the whole debate not on de-dollarization – still a distant prospect – but on alternative trade/payment systems in local currencies.
Yet in his address by videoconference – saluted like a rock star – President Putin was adamant: the de-dollarization process inside BRICS is irreversible.
Yet it’s internal contradictions that stand out when it comes to BRICS+. New Delhi has been extremely cautious – even as sherpas let it be known that the main rules for admission have been agreed upon.
The proverbial Divide and Rule spoilers have been spinning that Beijing wants BRICS+ to be a competitor to the G7. That’s nonsense. Chinese geopolitics is way more sophisticated – and would never present partners with an iron imperative. Beijing wants to solidify its de facto role of geoeconomics leader of the Global South by seducing the maximum number of partners, not intimidating them.
Thus the importance of the China-Africa meeting. South Africa was the first African nation to sign up to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Beijing and Pretoria are celebrating 25 years of diplomatic relations. Xi and Ramaphosa will be talking overall African economic integration, in detail, with all those heads of state.
What does India really want?
China’s vision for BRICS+ and especially for Africa is intrinsically linked to BRI, which after all is Beijing’s overarching foreign policy concept for the next few decades.
India, for its part, has other ideas when it comes to configuring itself as a leader of the Global South. Earlier this year, New Delhi hosted a Voice of the Global South Summit, attended by over 100 nations. That might have conformed a sort of informal, multilateral alliance with diverse values but focusing largely on the same aims promoted by BRICS.
If China rolls with BRI, India rolls with a sort of – complementary – counterpart: the International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), where it’s one of the main actors alongside Russia and Iran. So here we have a top BRICS member and a putative BRICS+ member: India is very much keen on Iran’s accession.
All of that in fact points towards integration of BRICS, BRI, INSTC and also SCO (Russia, China, India and Iran are all members). Once again, the devil will be in the “lost in translation” details. There’s no categorical imperative stating Chinese and Indian priorities may not converge.
The RICs (Russia, China,India) have also noted that the overwhelming majority of Global South/Global Majority nations did not support – nor adhered to – the collective West wet dream of strategically suppressing Russia. Even though Russia is now the fifth-largest economy in the world by PPP (over $5 trillion) – ahead of imperial European vassals – the Global South’s perception of Moscow is as “one of our own”.
All that adds extra power to the new Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) – which has to be courted full-time by the RICs. Global North late “initiatives” such as the American Build Back Better World
Even as China is bound to solidify its prime Global South role especially in Africa after the summit, India counts on a boost as well in its self-designed role as a North-South power. That may be seen as a hedging-your-bets sort of game, as the New Delhi establishment prides itself to be intertwined with the Global North when it comes to strategic goals (Quad? Really?) while remaining a Global South actor.
Well, sooner or later something’s got to give. The Empire tailored its bogus “Indo-Pacific” terminology and strategy specifically to ensnare India. No one across Asia-Pacific has ever referred to the region in terms of “Indo-Pacific”. Yet, in one go, the Empire gets rid of China, the South China Sea and even Southeast Asia to accommodate in a catchy slogan what it regards as a geopolitical neo-colony at best and battering ram against China.
It seems that New Delhi is developing a trend: never live up to its potential when it comes to exercising sovereignty to defy the Hegemon.
Undermining BRICS+ from the inside
Russia’s reach is way more ambitious – ranging from the post-Soviet space across the Heartland to the real Asia-Pacific, West Asia and, much like China, also Africa. All of these players rely on Russian energy, food, chemical fertilisers and a host of commodities. As far as all of them are concerned, there will be no “decoupling” or “de-risking” when it comes to trading with Russia.
In his videoconference address to BRICS, Putin absolutely killed it on the connectivity front – expanding on the INSTC and the Northern Sea Route. Same when it comes to providing free grain to the poorer African nations. He also destroyed the “so-called” grain deal: Moscow would consider coming back, but only if its legitimate demands are met.
In contrast to fast expanding Russian soft power, how could Beijing expand its own – which may be severely lacking in several areas? Setting up Confucius Institutes is not enough; ideally the Chinese should start promoting a string of Global South think tanks, from West Asia to Africa and Latin America, to analyze the ever mounting geopolitical and geoeconomic challenges to the multipolar road.
For the moment, Beijing will turbo-charge institutional forms of South-South interactions, such as the Belt and Road Forum (the next one is in October); the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation; and the China-CELAC forum with Latin American and the Caribbean.
But then again, inside BRICS, it all comes back to China-India. 2023 might become a turning point in their bilateral relations. New Delhi organized the latest SCO summit (unfortunately only online; rumors about internal dissent were never fully disproven). And will preside over the next G20 summit.
And then there’s the toxic external factor: the already ongoing imperial Hybrid War against the BRICS. The usual suspects will go no holds barred to pit Beijing against New Delhi, especially after everything they threw against Moscow miserably failed.
This multi-faceted Hybrid War has been designed to undermine BRICS+ from the inside, especially weaker nodes Brazil and South Africa, and including already mega-sanctioned Iran if it becomes a member. The Empire will go no holds barred to not lose key pivots to Latin American and African hegemony.
As a whole, the RICs – and perhaps soon RIICs – should concentrate their attention on Africa. That doesn’t mean that a host of African nations should be allowed to join BRICS+ literally tomorrow; the question is to be able to help them in several crucial fields as the process of breaking from imperial/neocolonial control is now irreversible.
The Empire never sleeps – at least those who really run the show: Crash Test Dummies impersonating Presidents is another matter. With Taiwan false flag dreams fast waning, all bets are off that the Empire might set up its next big war psyop in Africa.
WHO THE F**K IS THIS GUY?!? Reacting To Oliver Anthony “Rich Men North Of Richmond”
Hungary has vetoed the European Union’s intent to give more money to Ukraine until such time as Ukraine accounts for the 50-70 Billion EUROS already given!
Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said today “Of course I won’t give-=in to pressure. Until we get a detailed, clear account of what the approximately 50-70 billion EUROS spent on Ukraine, was spent on, and until the OTP Bank is removed from the list of so-called International Sponsors of the War, there can be no question of making a decision about additional funds to finance armaments, or _anything_ related to Ukraine.”
European Union Chief, Borrell, was literally in tears (pictured below) over the situation.
Borrell had tried to allocate more “Peace Funds” to Zelensky in Ukraine, but had to publicly admit he could not release the next tranche of funds to Kiev “because Hungary said no.”
With European money now halted for Ukraine, it is only a matter of time before the Ukrainians completely collapse.
Another Betrayal Saudi Arabia Dumps US, Backs Up China In The US China Rivalry!
2023 08 25 17 45
https://youtu.be/NVfM07YUMYA
Russia Announces “SARMAT” ICBM’s Now on Combat Duty”
Russia’s Sarmat strategic missile system has been put on combat duty, Yuri Borisov, the head of Russian state space corporation Roscosmos, said on Friday.
“The Sarmat strategic complex has been put on combat duty,” Borisov said during an educational event.
Russia tested the nuclear-capable Sarmat missile throughout 2022. Last December, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Russia will maintain combat readiness and improve the country’s nuclear triad, which he called the main guarantor of its sovereignty.
The Sarmat system is meant to replace RS-20 Voevoda missile systems. The new missile is capable of striking targets at long ranges using various flight trajectories and is guaranteed to overcome any existing and prospective anti-missile defense systems.
Having the longest range of target engagement, Sarmat is also expected to reinforce the combat capabilities of the Russian strategic nuclear forces. The first test launch of the Sarmat missile was carried out on April 20.
SPECIFICS
The RS-28 Sarmat is a three-stage, liquid-fueled ICBM equipped with multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs).
The operational range of RS-28 Sarmat is up to 18,000 km allows it to target almost any location on Earth.
The missile can be armed with 10-15 warheads or a combination of warheads and countermeasures, including dummy warheads to confuse enemy missile defenses.
Additionally, the Sarmat can carry up to two dozen Avangard hypersonic glide vehicles, making it an even more formidable weapon.
Each warhead of the RS-28 Sarmat is estimated to have an explosive power of up to 500 kilotons, equivalent to leveling a major metropolitan area.
The destructive potential of the Sarmat is unparalleled, and it serves as a potent deterrent against any aggression directed towards Russia.
RESPONSE TO U.S. “PROMPT GLOBAL STRIKE”
Russia points out that the Sarmat missile system is Russia’s response to the Prompt Global Strike (PGS) concept developed by Pentagon planners.
PGS proposes preemptive conventional massed cruise missile strikes to disarm an adversary and eliminate its leadership.
This concept, unveiled after the US withdrew from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty with Russia in 2002, prompted Moscow to develop advanced weapons, including hypersonic missiles and glide vehicles, and ultimately, the Sarmat.
THIS SONG GOT ME EMOTIONAL! Oliver Anothny-Rich Men North of Richmond | Reaction *SONG OF THE YEAR*
Cheetahs seem ferocious, they’re natural predators; carnivores. They typically stalk their prey, charge towards it, trip it up and bite its throat to suffocate it, you know, to make it nice for the eating.
They’re the fastest land animal, too.
image 8
Cheetahs are “instinctively shy” – they’re nervous and shy animals by nature
So, when they’re kept in zoos, their anxiety keeps them from socialising with each other, and most importantly, from procreating. This puts them at a high risk of becoming extinct. (Risk of extinction is why they’re in zoos in the first place – to help get their numbers up.)
For years zoos have been pairing cheetahs with their very own support dogs.
These doggos are raised from very young ages alongside the cheetahs. They live companionably; the cheetahs take their social cues from the dogs, because dogs are very sociable animals by nature.
Cheetahs are so sensitive by nature that almost all of those who are held in captivity suffer from anxiety-related conditions, but dogs make it better, just by being their friends.
“We Have Never Seen Anything Like This” | Victor Davis Hanson
Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, a professor of Classics Emeritus at California State University, Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services. He is also the Wayne & Marcia Buske Distinguished Fellow in History, Hillsdale College, where he teaches each fall semester courses in military history and classical culture. Victor discusses current political and social events and ideas, and current and past cultural trends.
2023 08 25 17 52
Beef Ragout with Grilled Bread
This dish can be made in a slow cooker or the stovetop. Canola oil is used to make both the ragout and grilled bread because of its neutral flavor and heat tolerance. The ragout is served with bread to soak up the hearty and flavorful broth, but it can be served with pasta or polenta instead.
12 slices whole grain Italian bread, sliced on bias, about 1-inch thick each
1 tablespoon canola oil 15 mL
Instructions
In large, nonstick skillet, brown each side of beef roast in canola oil. Place roast in slow cooker.*
Add onion, garlic, Italian seasoning, eggplant, peppers, tomatoes and red wine. Cook on LOW heat for 8 to 9 hours (or on HIGH heat for 4 to 5 hours) until beef is tender and has an internal temperature of 145 degrees F (65 degrees C).
When beef is cooked, shred with a fork.
To prepare grilled bread: Brush bread with canola oil and grill for 1 to 2 minutes on each side, until toasted.
To serve, top ragout with parsley. Serve with grilled bread.
Notes
* If preparing on stovetop, use a large pot (8-quart) and bring ragout ingredients, except parsley, to boil and simmer covered for at least 30 minutes.
In the US, if you go to the Department of Motor Vehicles to get your driver’s license, the same thing happens, and US security services and intelligence agencies can access your photos and data.
The same thing happens when you apply for your passport.
Get over it.
Rescue a dying kitten that the owner abandoned it front my clinic the kitten only breathing
I loved him dearly, and he was a good cat. I will tell you that we had him for perhaps four years when he started having problems, and so we took him to the vet.
It turned out that he had Feline AIDS, and Feline FIV, and was very contagious. Our vet recommended that we put him down so as not to contaminate the rest of the cats in the neighborhood. So we resigned ourselves to keeping him in our home and isolated.
But over time, he started to behave aggressively and strangely. Like peeing over everything.
And he kept on breaking out of the house…
Eventually, we got him, and took him to the vet and “put him down”.
I was there, and from the moment the needle was inserted he knew what was going on; and he hated me for it. I could feel his spirit attacking me, clawing at me. Biting me, and hissing at me.
This went on for hours before it finally dissipated.
I hated it.
I hated everything from having to put him down, to the fact that he was sick, to the hate being directed towards me. It was a grim time.
Two days later, I had to fly out for a job interview.
While I was sitting on the flight, Scooby came to me (in spirit form, of course) and curled up in my lap. He forgave me. And was giving me love. He lay there in my lap for the three hour flight, and then disappeared.
I do miss that lanky old cat.
He was a good little guy.
…
Nothing lasts forever. I look forward to seeing him again “on the other side”.
Flying back from Mallorca on Jet2, the pilot said on the intercom:
“Ladies and Gentlemen, I have some good news and bad news. The good news is that we’re ready early and we’ve made it with plenty of time for our departure slot. The bad news is that unfortunately it seems the Spanish air traffic controllers have decided to walk out in solidarity with striking French controllers so we currently have a 2 hour wait. However, to ease the boredom, I’ll step out of the cockpit and you can all come up, sit in the pilot’s chair and be shown around by the first officer who’ll answer any questions you have”
The second I saw him come out of the cockpit I sprang out of my seat to get to the front of the inevitable queue and had a good chat with the FO while sitting in the seat. My impressions were that the cockpit of a 737–800 is a lot smaller than you’d think and that the seats are pretty difficult to move.
main qimg 1e3db121b8aefdf1dc546a91b2f41878
After 90 mins the pilot is on the intercom again:
“Folks, unfortunately we’ve been told we have another 2 hours, 45 minutes wait (huge groans from the cabin) Only joking, we’ve got to get going quickly so back to your seats and buckle up soon as you can! (cheers from cabin)”
The pilot landed pretty hard in Birmingham and 10 seconds after reducing reverse thrust was back on the intercom:
“I’ve just been informed that my landing was a bit on the hard side. I don’t know what the fuss is about, it seemed fine to me. But apologies to anyone with loose fillings”
Decades ago, I received a past-due notice for a loan payment to a bank I’d never done business with. Puzzled, I called the bank. After explaining my confusion three times, I finally was talking with someone who had sense enough to look into it instead of fobbing me off to someone else.
“Did you make a purchase from Such-and-such Music Store?” Indeed, I’d purchased a piano for my wife a month or so earlier. (Might’ve been nice if the salesman had mentioned they’d turn the loan over to a third party, but whatever.)
I then asked the bank worker how the *very first* communication I’d received from the bank could be a past-due notice.
“You should have received a payment coupon book,” she said. (As indicated, this was ages ago.)
“I’ve received nothing from you till this,” I replied.
And then, to my everlasting amazement, she said, “I know. The printing company we use had an equipment breakdown and the coupon books haven’t gone out for a while.”
That “I know” blew me away. The bank *knew* their customers weren’t being told when their payments would be due, and how much they would be—and, in cases such as mine, didn’t even know their loan had been sold to that bank—and instead of notifying people, they just sent out overdue notices.
With a late fee attached, of course.
So I told the nice lady that I’d be happy to make the payment, but I would not stand for a late charge.
Now it was her turn to be puzzled. “Why not?”
“Because I wasn’t late—*you* were!”
In the end, she had to have a VP call me later, and after I went over it all again, he agreed it was kinda dumb for them to send late notices to people who didn’t even know they had a loan with that bank, he waived the late fee.
That only took half of my day.
U.S And Europe in Trouble As China Rush Into Legacy Chips!
In 2007, Jennifer Strange entered a competition to win a “Wii. console.” The competition was run by local radio station in Rancho Cordova, in California, and was called “Hold Your Wee for a Wii.”
The challenge was a group of participants had to drink as much water as you can, and who ever could hold their wee the longest would win the Wii console.
2023 08 20 12 0g4
Jennifer strange drank more than one and half gallons of water in just three hours, but still only managed to come second in the competition. One of Jennifer’s co-workers who was driving her home after the competition, said she started to complain about a sever headache, which became so bad she started crying.
A few hours after the competition Jennifer Strange was found dead in her room, with the cause of death ruled as “Acute Water Intoxication.”
Her parents sued the radio station and they were found liable for her death, and the parents were awarded 16 million dollars in compensation.
China Scientists Tease the US as They Found a Weak Spot in US “Undetectable Submarines”!
https://youtu.be/9FYE_-FiHPw
South Korea To Run “NUCLEAR ATTACK” Evacuation Drill August 23
The entire country of South Korea will stage a NUCLEAR ATTACK EVACUATION DRILL on August 23. Fifty-one Million (51,000,000) citizens are REQUIRED to participate to practice evacuating to shelters or underground safe spaces during the 20-minute exercise.
The drill, scheduled for 2:00 PM on Wednesday, August 23, will see many drivers required to pull over to the side of roads and the exits to subway stations closed with commuters required to remain inside, a statement from the South Korean Interior Ministry said.
“We expect to strengthen the response capacity of the nation through a practical drill reflecting the aspects of provocations of North Korea,” Prime Minister Han Duck-soo said in a news release this week.
The release said the 20-minute drill is part of a larger exercise to test the South Korean government’s response to potential threats including “advanced nuclear missile threats, cyber attacks, drone terrors, etc.”
The prime minister also called on South Koreans to take the drills seriously, something that hasn’t always been the case.
The Interior Ministry said 17,000 shelters would be open nationwide, and locations are searchable in popular Korean online apps.
The South Korean prime minister said the civil defense drill would be held in conjunction with large-scale US-South Korea military exercises that have drawn sharp criticism from Pyongyang in the past.
It will also come less than a week after South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol travels to the United States for a trilateral meeting with US President Joe Biden and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, where “the continued threat posed by” North Korea will be on the agenda, according to a White House statement.
Hal Turner Opinion
HMMMMM. Having a nuclear evacuation “drill” of 51 Million people into 17,000 shelters at THE SAME TIME as a large-scale US-South Korea military “exercise???????????”
Gee, it occurs to me that maybe that military “exercise” isn’t an “exercise” at all. What if they first-strike North Korea?
With 51 Million South Koreans already inside Shelters, and US-South Korean Troops already on-station and fully armed – seems to me it would be a perfect opportunity for the US to first-strike North Korea.
What better conditions would exist than the ones described above?
Easy Sloppy Joe Pot Pie
All the great taste of classic sloppy joes in an easy one-skillet pot pie. No one will miss the buns!
2023 08 19 17 23
Prep: 5 min | Bake: 40 min | Yield: 6 servings
Ingredients
1 pound lean ground beef
1 medium onion, chopped (1/2 cup)
1 (15 1/2 ounce) can original sloppy joe sauce
1 cup (4 ounces) shredded Cheddar cheese
1 cup Original Bisquick® mix
1/2 cup milk
1 egg
Instructions
Heat oven to 400 degrees F.
Cook beef and onion in ovenproof 10-inch skillet over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until beef is brown; drain.
Stir in sloppy joe sauce.
Sprinkle with cheese.
Stir remaining ingredients until blended. Pour over beef mixture.
Bake for about 30 minutes or until golden brown.
Notes
Special Touch: Before baking, sprinkle with a tablespoon of sesame seed.
Woman Dies And Is Shown The Year 2042 And Beyond | Near Death Experience | NDE
2023 08 19 17 15
U.S. Sanctions Syrian ‘Moderate Rebels’ It Had Previously Armed
In 2013 the CIA was handing out TOW anti-tank missiles to ‘moderate rebel’ groups who were fighting the government in Syria. These groups were allegedly ‘vetted’ before they receive money and weapons. Unfortunately ‘vetting’ was something the CIA had never been good at.
Hamza Division (Forqat al-Hamza – فرقة الحمزة): An FSA-banner group composed of six substituent brigades that operate mostly in the environs of Inkhil, Daraa. The Hamza Division has received TOW ATGMs and it works under the supervision of the Daraa Military Council. They receives foreign support from Western and Arab state backers and are a member of the Southern Front coalition. The Southern Front has stated their commitment to a civil state, and have released a comprehensive political program in support of democratic reform. The Division came together with the Syria Revolutionaries Front and the 1st Artillery Regiment to create the 1st Army, which later disbanded. The Hamza Division continues using the 1st Army imagery alongside its own while the other former substituents do not. Social Media:YouTube;YouTube (older channel)
Do you remember when the #US spent $500 million to train/arm Al-Hamza Division?
Well the US-trained “Moderate rebels” are fighting – under a NATO flagged country (#Turkey) – the US-trained Kurdish YPG in the area occupied by the #US.
I’ll make it even easier: A few minutes ago, #US Prsdt @realDonaldTrump said the “PKK is far more dangerous than #ISIS (The Islamic State)”.
The US trained & armed Syrian Kurds proxies, the YPG, are the Syrian branch of the PKK that Trump considers far more dangerous than ISIS.
Today, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is designating two Syria-based armed militias and three members of the groups’ leadership structures in connection with serious human rights abuses against those residing in the Afrin region of northern Syria. An auto sales company owned by the leader of one of the armed groups is also being designated. … The Hamza Division, another armed opposition group operating in northern Syria, has been involved in abductions, theft of property, and torture. The division also operates detention facilities in which it houses those it has abducted for extended periods of time. During their imprisonment, victims are held for ransom, often suffering sexual abuse at the hands of Hamza Division fighters.
The Suleiman Shah Brigade and the Hamza Division are being designated pursuant to E.O. 13894 for being responsible for or complicit in, or for having directly or indirectly engaged in, the commission of serious human rights abuses against the Syrian people. … Sayf Boulad Abu Bakr is the leader of the Hamza Division and its public face, appearing in numerous propaganda videos produced by the Hamza Division. While Abu Bakr has been commander, the Hamza Division has been accused of brutal repression of the local population, including kidnapping Kurdish women and severely abusing prisoners, at times leading to their death.
Sayf Boulad Abu Bakr is being designated pursuant to E.O. 13894 for acting or purporting to act for or on behalf of, directly or indirectly, the Hamza Division.
The AP report about the new sanctions does not mention any Pentagon or CIA support the groups had previously received.
One wonders how long it will take until the U.S. will sanction the fascists militia it has and is now arming and sponsoring in Ukraine.
Posted by b on August 18, 2023 at 15:36 UTC | Permalink
Well Ladies, Men Have Gotten The Message…Enjoy Your Cats!
2023 08 19 16 50
Confessions of a 57-Year-Old Virgin
August 16, 2023
I’m a 57 year old man, about three years away from whatever the grandmaster of all the wizards are. I’ve never hugged a woman before (beside female relatives), never dated anyone before, no one at all. And then obviously that means that I never had my first kiss and I’m still a virgin.
Now, if I were to sit here and tell some random stranger on the street about my current life predicament, I would be laughed at until the end of time.
That brings me to my first point of advice. Ignore all of that crap. It’s worthless to feel like shit, for what? Because life didn’t come as anticipated. It can be harsh, but it’s not entirely over.
Which brings me to my second point of advice. Get out any way that you possibly can, I cannot stress this enough!
Up until the age of around 52, I never went out. I was a complete loner. One day, I decided enough was enough and I finally got off my ass and made something worth living for.
I began engraining myself into work dynamics and friendships. (By the way, get a job if you dont have one). I made it my personal goal to make friends any way that I could.
Eventually I had my first solid group of friends in roughly 45 years, yes you heard that number right.
The results? I currently do fantasy league with them once a week, as well as a cards night. Every couple of weeks we meet up at a bar, and I’m telling you it all came about from not giving up and striving to make something of my life.
Also, I keep up with hobbies such as working on used cars in my past time, so that’s another thing to keep in mind. I’m going to guess most people aren’t as old as me, maybe a majority are in their late teens to early 30s.
If you are in this range, even mid 30s, you still have a shot to not only make good friends like I did being the bum that I was, but also to get a date. Especially if you are a teen, that won’t be a problem in the slightest.
I’m saying this because doing what I’m doing at 57 is far more valuable during the younger years.
I know now that if I would’ve started this train of thought, I probably could’ve picked a date or two at least by now. That ship has sailed for me. Don’t worry though, I got over my self pity at 45 and my libido has dropped, so good friends, my dog, and beer, is what I make of life now.
Finally, good luck out there guys and ladies and don’t put yourself down. Strive to bring self-worth and meaning to your life!
BRICS Bank Just Dropped A Huge Bombshell | Stuns Everyone With This Move
What Is Self Discipline And How To Build More Of It
August 15, 2023
Self-discipline means that you do the things that you know are right or beneficial, even if they’re difficult. But what does that really mean? What does that actually look like?
People often associate self-discipline with diet and exercise, but it goes beyond that. Yes, staying active and eating clean in our current culture takes discipline, but being a self-disciplined person goes way beyond that.
When you build self-discipline, you’ll find it reaching into all areas of your life: your career, your relationships, your goals, your attitude, your self-talk, your mindset. Self-discipline becomes a part of who you are and impacts every single decision that you make each day. Disciplined people start to prioritize their future selves out of habit.
Discipline means having the ability to hold back those damaging words that you want to say during a disagreement. It’s being honest with yourself, looking at your weaknesses and assessing them so that you can improve. It’s sticking to commitments that you’ve made, both to other people and to yourself.
Self-discipline is a skill!
I cannot tell you the number of times that people have said things like, “I wish I could do what you do,” or “I wish I was as disciplined as you are,” to me, and it frustrates me every single time.
I know that it’s easy to tell ourselves that we aren’t capable of the things that other people accomplish. When we decide that we just aren’t capable of working out five times per week or starting a business or building a happy and stable relationship, we give ourselves an out.
By deciding that disciplined people are somehow different from you, you have what seems like a valid excuse for why you haven’t done all of those things that disciplined people do. You’ve convinced yourself that you just aren’t capable of it so it’s okay that you haven’t done it.
But that’s not true.
You are capable.
You are stronger than you realize.
And I know this because I know that self-discipline is a skill. I haven’t always been a disciplined person. I, too, have spent 14 hours a day sleeping, eaten whatever I felt like eating, procrastinated on my homework until the absolute last second, and gone months without getting any real physical activity.
Then, I decided to build self-discipline. And just like building any other skill, it took practice. I made mistakes, I faced setbacks, I struggled, and sometimes I fell off the wagon—in fact, I still do all of these things. Discipline is a skill that I am still building because—just like any other skill—there is always more to learn. You can always continue to improve.
You can become a disciplined person.
If you’re reading this blog, I’m sure there are a lot of things that you want to do, but you haven’t done them yet, and you likely aren’t working toward them consistently, or even at all.
You might want to start a business, go to school, improve your grades, get in better shape, learn to play an instrument, work on your mental health, write a book, etc. You have things in mind that you would like to do.
These things haven’t happened for one reason: lack of self-discipline.
Self-discipline is the skill that lets you build every other skill.
When you build self-discipline, you become the kind of person who does all of those things that you’ve always wanted to do.
A little later in this article, I’ll give you some advice on how to start building self-discipline, but for now, sit with everything I’ve just said. Start to consider that you are much more similar to me than you might realize. You are 100% capable of the things that you want to do and the only thing standing in your way is a lack of discipline. You can build that discipline.
How does self-discipline improve my life?
You already know that eating healthy, starting your homework early, going to bed on time, exercising regularly, managing your time, and meditating will improve your life. But as most people already know, doing all of these things, and doing them regularly, is difficult.
If you try to rely on motivation to do these things, you’re never going to do them because most of the time, most people don’t feel like doing these things.
You’d rather do what’s easy and enjoyable. You’d rather sleep in, eat fatty, sugary foods, and have a lazy, fun, easy life.
But that lazy, fun, easy life is only fun at first. Soon, you’ll start to face consequences. You’ll be tired all the time. You’ll see others reaching their goals and realize you haven’t accomplished anything in months. Your mental and physical health nose-dive.
What started out as fun and easy soon becomes miserable.
Those things that disciplined people do—exercising, planning, goal setting, thinking ahead—those things benefit your future self. And one day, you’re going to be your future self. The actions that you take now directly impact the life that you will get to live one day.
So how does self-discipline improve your life? Well, if you have the discipline now to save money, eat clean, exercise, work toward a career that you love, build healthy relationships, and create systems and routines that benefit you and your mental and physical health, one day, all of those things will pay off.
One day, you will be happy and healthy. You’ll be in a positive place living a life that you enjoy waking up to.
And I know this because I’ve done it. I’ve been putting in the work for long enough that I’m living and enjoying a life that I built intentionally. And I’m continuing to put in work that will improve my life so that it only goes up from here.
Self-discipline directly translates to living a life that you love. Self-discipline brings stable, long-term happiness.
Why is self-discipline important?
This is something that I’ve touched on before and is probably fairly apparent already from the previous section of this post. Self-discipline is important because motivation is fleeting and unreliable.
To get where you want to go, you need to complete a set of tasks, and either you want to do those tasks or you don’t. I doubt anybody would argue that those statements are untrue.
If you want to do those tasks, that’s motivation. In those moments, it’s easy to find the time and energy to do what needs to be done.
If you don’t want to do those tasks, and you’re trying to rely on motivation to get them done, the chance that those tasks will ever be completed is low. You likely know from experience that it’s hard to drum up motivation when you need it.
Discipline, on the other hand, is reliable. When you have self-discipline, it doesn’t matter if you want to put in the work. Disciplined people do what needs to be done regardless of how they’re feeling.
Many of us fall into the habit of doing what’s easy rather than doing what needs to be done. When you have discipline, you can do what needs to be done. When you can do what needs to be done, you reach your goals. If your goals are important to you, then self-discipline should be as well.
How to build self-discipline
Self-discipline is an odd beast to tackle. It’s simple, yet it’s not. And because it isn’t something that you can build outside of the context of your everyday life, becoming more disciplined inherently involves changing your life.
Begin by figuring out a direction. Start considering what actions that you currently do that you’d like to quit and what things that you don’t currently do that you’d like to do habitually.
Realize that building discipline is necessary to change your life and that the act of building discipline is what changes your life. The two things are inseparable. If you aren’t ready to change your life and don’t have a direction you want to go, you aren’t in a place to start becoming more disciplined.
Recommended Reading: The 5-4-3-2-1 Method for Setting and Getting to Your Goals
Self-discipline doesn’t look the same for everyone, and it doesn’t look the same day-to-day. What gets you moving one day might not work the next. Learn and grow with it so that you build an arsenal of strategies to use when you need them, and don’t beat yourself up if you have a bad day or five. It’s normal to struggle sometimes.
At its core, self-discipline means taking action.
Your aim throughout this process is to practice quickly making the decision that you know is right and then acting on that decision.
Rather than debating whether or not to go to the gym, then eventually deciding two hours later that it’s the right choice, then sitting on the couch for another 45 minutes before putting on your sneakers, discipline means deciding to go to the gym the moment it crosses your mind and then heading out the door.
That is your eventual goal. That is what you’re working toward. Some days, you’ll have no problem doing that. Other days, it will be a battle. The more you practice deciding quickly and taking prompt action, the better you’ll get at it. This is how you build discipline.
Let’s be clear: if you aren’t acting, you are not building discipline. Reading this blog post is a decent first step, but if your actions don’t change because of it, you have made exactly zero progress in the self-discipline department.
Practice taking action.
Practice doing small actions even when you don’t want to do them. This is probably the best way that I know of to build discipline. You don’t want to hang your coat up when you come home? Too bad. Do it. Don’t think about it, just do it.
You don’t want to do the dishes? Too bad. Do it. You don’t want to write that paper? Too bad. Get started.
I know that it sounds harsh, but when you start with small steps and work up to bigger tasks, it becomes easier to act despite your feelings. Practice ignoring your desire to avoid action.
Now, I’ll soften that blow a bit. Yes, “just do it” is the ideal. Acting quickly based on what you know is right is the aim, but that isn’t always possible. Sometimes it’s a bit of an internal battle, and that’s okay. There are some strategies that you can use to act when you don’t feel like it. After all, the goal is action. Getting there with a little help is better than not getting there at all.
START SMALL
I wish I could scream this from the rooftops. I wish I could scream it and scream it and scream it until my lungs give out.
The bigger the task is that you don’t want to do, the more you won’t want to do it. The smaller you can make it, the easier it will be to do.
Your goal is action. A smaller action than you intended is always better than no action at all. There is no shame in scaling back a bit so that you have an easier time getting moving. Doing one pushup is better than doing zero of the ten you intended to do. Washing three dishes is better than not cleaning the entire kitchen, even if that was your original goal.
On a broader scale, don’t attempt to overhaul your entire life overnight. I have a whole blog post about this. Focus your efforts on one area at a time. You’ll be much less likely to burn out, you’ll see faster results, and you’ll be much more successful in the long run.
Find Your Why
I’ve talked about this about 10,000 times before so just in case you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ll just link you to the post about it.
I do want to note, though, that it’s okay if your Why stems from wanting to leave a negative situation rather than wanting to reach a positive one. I often frame Whys in terms of positive things—the goals that you’ll reach, for example—without acknowledging that my first Why was that I wanted to improve a bad situation.
I was trying to build a better life after a rough break up, largely out of spite and a little sadness. Though I now focus my Whys on the good things that I will reach because of my actions, it is valid to build discipline that is motivated by a desire to leave a bad situation. In fact, wanting to leave a bad place in life is a pretty common reason for people to want to build self-discipline.
Practice calling yourself out on your excuses
Most of the “reasons” that we give for why we didn’t do something are invalid. On the surface, they may seem fine and they’re enough to placate our brains and prevent us from feeling guilty, but they don’t stand up to further inspection.
Start taking time to assess your excuses. Remind yourself that you really want to see results. You really want to start making progress. Does your excuse truly prevent you from doing what you need to do? Is there any way that you could create a backup plan?
Next time you find yourself making an excuse, write it down. Then write three reasons why you want to do the thing you’re trying to avoid and three things that you could do instead, even if you don’t accomplish your primary goal.
For example, if you decide you can’t go for a run because it’s raining, list three reasons why you want to exercise, and then create a list of three things that you could do instead of going for a run, like doing yoga or going for a run on a treadmill. You’ll train yourself to reconsider your excuses and realize that just because you can’t accomplish your original goal doesn’t mean you can’t many any progress at all.
Monitor your feelings
As I’ve said before, self-discipline means doing what needs to be done, even if you don’t feel like it. Most of the time, “I don’t feel like it,” and “I don’t want to,” are not valid reasons not to do something that needs to be done. Learn to shut them down.
But that isn’t to say that you should totally ignore your feelings. They’re there for a reason. Notice them—meditation can help—and respond appropriately. Often, we may not feel like doing something that’s good for us even though that thing will actually make us feel better. Self-discipline often means getting uncomfortable and knowing that the discomfort is worth it.
Self-discipline is a tricky beast. It gives you what you need to be consistent, which gets you to where you want to be. It takes practice and patience, but it will improve your life in the long run.
Discipline means being willing to choose long-term gains over immediate success. When you think long-term, the whole process starts to become easier and make more sense. Practice becoming friends with your future self, and before long, you’ll start seeing the results of your self-discipline paying off.
– Life By Grit
Europe Panic: China Cancel $100 Billion Car Order from Germany!
In today’s video, we explore the complex relationship between the European Union and China, focusing on Germany’s recently canceled $100 billion car order. How did we get here, and what does this mean for Europe’s future? Join us as we dive into the policies, decisions, and global economic trends that have shaped this unprecedented situation.
Interesting
2023 08 19 17 53
Raining spiders, frogs, fish and … meat. Yes, meat.
What is Occam’s Razor?
August 15, 2023
Occam’s razor is often misstated as “the simplest answer is the correct one,” but it should more accurately be “the simplest answer is the best starting point to investigate.”
The idea is that the more different variables or assumptions have to add up to get to a solution, the more difficult it is to investigate, and the less likely it is to occur in general. “Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.” is the classical way to state it.
So the classic example is: you hear hoofbeats outside, is it a horse or a zebra? Well unless you live in the African savannah, it’s very unlikely to be a zebra. We’d need more assumptions to get there – a zebra was imported to a local zoo, it escaped captivity, and now it’s running amok. Whereas a horse requires just one assumption – a horse is nearby. That doesn’t mean that it cannot be a zebra, it just means that you should start at “it’s probably a horse” and investigate from there.
I had a fun moment the other day, when I went to my kitchen and saw a jar of pickles left out on the counter. I knew it wasn’t me, which left two possibilities that my brain somehow jumped to:
A burglar broke in, stole several other items, and also ate a pickle. He left the jar out to taunt me.
My wife had a pickle and then forgot to put away the jar.
I could have totally checked my locks, made sure my valuables were still in the right place, etc. Instead I just yelled “Hey, did you leave this pickle jar out?” and got the simpler answer right away. Starting with the simpler solution (fewer assumptions than my burglar story) got me to the right answer efficiently.
Man Dies, Sees Future & Says Don’t Freak Out (Powerful NDE)
Gary Wimmer had an NDE (Near-Death Experience) and discovered what happens after death. He saw seven beings/angels, and after leaving his body was shown future events. Gary’s NDE (Near-Death Experience) showed him that there is life after death, and it was a life-altering experience that changed him forever.
Now this is something that I would buy
2023 08 19 17 55
Gobble It Up Pot Pie
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Yield: 4 to 6 servings
Ingredients
Filling
2 (15 ounce) cans mixed vegetables, drained
1 pound (2 cup) cooked turkey, shredded
1 (12 ounce) jar turkey gravy
Topping
1/4 cup butter
1/3 cup chopped onion
1/3 cup chopped celery
1 (6 ounce) package instant turkey stuffing mix
1 2/3 cups water
1/4 cup dried cranberries
Instructions
Heat oven to 350 degrees F.
Filling: In large mixing bowl, combine vegetables, turkey and gravy; mix well.
Pour into a greased 2-quart casserole.
Topping: In skillet, melt butter.
Add onion and celery and cook until tender.
Add seasoning packet from stuffing mix and water. Bring mixture to a boil. Reduce heat, cover and simmer for 5 minutes.
Remove from heat; stir in stuffing. Cover and let stand for 5 minutes.
Stir in dried cranberries.
Spread stuffing evenly over vegetable mixture.
Bake for 30 to 45 minutes, or until heated through.
Girl With Huge TaTa’s Gets HUMBLED For The First Time In Her Life!
“A small peep is natural, BUT a wide pussy is man-made” I laughed so hard at this statement it took me 12 minutes to gather myself enough to write it down
How to (actually) talk to kids
It’s not dissimilar from talking to other adults, but even the most well-meaning grown-ups can forget that.
Somehow, despite our best efforts, it still happens to even the most self-assured adult. You’re at a birthday party or a family dinner or a picnic in the park, and suddenly, you find yourself face to face with a kid. You introduce yourselves, there’s a slight pause, and then, even though you know better, you hear the boring question coming out of your mouth: “So how’s school?”
Why are adults so bad at talking to kids, considering each and every one of us used to be one? “We forget what it’s like to be a child,” says Tina Payne Bryson, a psychotherapist and co-author of The Whole-Brain Child. “It’s hard sometimes to relate to kids because the rhythm of our days is so different.” Our brains and habits have changed, and as adults, it can be tough to remember what it’s like to be a 10-year-old.
But that’s the key: Talking to and connecting with 10-year-olds now doesn’t require remembering what you were like at 10. Instead, it’s all about approaching them as people: individuals who have their own interests, insights, and personalities. If you’re curious, warm, and earnest, you can make a new friend — and leave your awkward adult persona behind.
Find a point of connection
Much like in an initial conversation with an adult stranger, it can be hard to know where to begin. But once you offer up an open-ended topic, a kid will often run with it. Icebreakers with a kid can be situational. If you’re at a barbecue, ask them what their favorite condiment is. Or they can be general: Did you see a funny animal video recently? “You just want to get the kid talking,” says Ben R., an 11-year-old who lives in Highland Ranch, Colorado. “You want to get to know them.” Ben recommends starting with a question about something that you enjoy. If you like video games, ask what games they like to play; if you’re a big reader, ask about their favorite recent book.
The framing is important. “Adults reach for whatever they can, and ask a yes or no question,” says Robyn Silverman, host of the podcast How to Talk to Kids About Anything. If a kid is wearing a baseball cap, asking whether they like baseball is not a good question — just like if you were wearing a baseball cap, that question wouldn’t encourage you to keep talking. Don’t despair: You can just tweak the format of a question to improve it. “Instead of ‘How’s school?’, you could ask, ‘If you were principal for the day, what’s one thing you’d absolutely change?’” suggests Silverman. “A more interesting question will elicit a response more than ‘fine.’”
That first conversational volley is all about finding a point of connection. It could be a shared interest, such as the card game Codenames, or a low-stakes disagreement, like whether dipping french fries in a milkshake is delicious or gross. “The great thing about asking questions is to find out what you have in common,” says Ben. “You’ll feel more relaxed then and can focus on connecting through that.”
Ask good follow-up questions
The next step in a good conversation with a kid? Pay attention. This is where many adults slip up. Instead of actually listening to what a kid has to say and asking a relevant follow-up question, they jump in with a long story about themselves — or, worse, offer up a weird non sequitur. Recently, Ben was waiting in line for a waterslide when the adult behind him asked what grade he was in. After he answered, the stranger, who had not previously met the fifth-grader, replied by saying that he grew up so fast. “I thought to myself, is this how adults are? They just ask simple questions, half-pay attention to the conversation, and get distracted by something else?” Ben says. “I felt like he could have just realized that I could talk the same way everybody else could, but he made it really awkward for the rest of the conversation.”
Asking a good follow-up question is all about active listening, which requires humility. A kid is a person with their own interests and expertise, and you can learn from them, just like you learn from a conversation with another adult. “Kids are egocentric in nature, and they love to talk about what they love,” says Morgan Eldridge, a clinical psychologist who recommends framing a child as the expert on what they care about. “If you don’t know anything about Pokémon cards, ask them to tell you about it.”
More key aspects of active listening are body language and tone. If you’re talking to a younger kid, physically get down on their level so that you’re not looming over them. For kids and adults alike, face them, put away your phone, make eye contact, and smile. No need to speak in a different voice, though. “There are multiple occasions where adults have talked to me with a childish tone,” says Ben. “We’re more sophisticated than they think.”
When you’re fostering a comfortable conversational environment for a kid, you should also think about safety. There’s an inherent power imbalance between an adult and a kid, especially when you don’t know each other well, and as the adult, you’re responsible for making sure that your relationship and conversation stay appropriate. “Kids need to feel safe, seen, soothed, and secure,” says Bryson. “When you smile and have relaxed posture, it sends signals of safety and connection.”
Let their enthusiasm lead
Once the conversation is moving, step back. “When talking to kids, adults make the mistake that they need to talk a lot,” says Silverman. “But people [not just children!] actually love it when you listen.” Instead, ask questions and let the kid direct the flow; they’ll naturally lead the conversation toward what interests them most.
In many cases, this means going in a speculative, silly direction, which can be tricky for grown-ups. “Adults are more logical and solution-driven,” says Bryson. “We’ve forgotten what it’s like to play.” To rediscover your playful side, you can always ask an open-ended question, or even a goofy one: If you were going to open a restaurant that only serves three dishes, what would they be? What celebrity has the coolest style of all time? Would you rather have to fight 50 mosquito-sized alligators or one alligator-sized mosquito?
No matter what, don’t dismiss their enthusiasm. If a kid loves basketball but you don’t care about sports, ask them to tell you about their favorite player of all time. If they just learned a ton about bugs in a science unit, don’t try to show off how much you know — encourage them to share instead. “There’s a power imbalance, and it seems to give adults permission to belittle,” says Silverman.
If you do make a faux pas, like talking over them or getting distracted, own up to it, apologize, and redirect. You can always say, “I just spaced out, I’m sorry. What were you saying about summer camp?” Just pick the conversation back up afterward.
Be yourself (even if that means being shy)
Kids have different temperaments and personalities, just like adults do. They don’t expect everyone to be outgoing and loud. In fact, not every kid will want you to be. “Just like different friends appeal to different people, different kinds of adults will appeal to different kids,” says Bryson. “The boisterous adult doesn’t appeal to some kids, and the quiet adult doesn’t appeal to others.” Just come as you are, since kids can tell whether you’re being authentic or not. “It’s really about showing up as yourself in the moment,” Bryson says.
If you are on the quieter side, don’t worry. Kids know what it’s like to feel anxious in a conversation, too. “Sometimes you just get nervous, and that’s okay,” says Fiona A., an 8-year-old who lives in Salinas, California. “Or sometimes you need a little bit of alone time. Just be you.”
Ben suggests a trick that he uses when he feels awkward or unsure about what to talk about: When you get stuck and start to feel self-conscious, ask a question. “Even if you don’t pay attention, it diverts the conversation away from yourself,” he says. “You learn more about them, and also you don’t have to talk as much.”
Sometimes, you’ll notice that a kid seems anxious to be talking to an adult. In that case, make sure you’re projecting a warm, friendly, safe environment. Being vulnerable can help them feel more comfortable, too. “A lot of adults are authority figures, and sharing something embarrassing can make us more accessible,” says Bryson. When she’s talking to a quiet kid, she often shares a story about when the class rat bit her in first grade at the school Christmas party; her listeners are always on the edge of their seats, ready to share their own best animal story afterward. You can be vulnerable about feeling awkward, too: If you share that you often feel shy at parties, then it normalizes the kid feeling shy.
And if they’d rather be quiet, it’s also fine to share a companionable silence. “If we ask a question or two and they don’t expand, it just means they don’t want to be asked a question right now,” says Bryson. If they’re not uncomfortable with quiet, then you shouldn’t be, either.
Refer back to your shared interests
Once you’ve had a friendly conversation with a kid and found some common ground, you can start to develop an ongoing relationship with them. Just like with a new adult friend, it’s important to remember details about them and refer back to them in future conversations. Did they tell you about joining the soccer team? Ask how the season is going. Did you bond over your love of superhero movies? Ask them what they thought of the sequel to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. If you know in advance that you’re going to see a kid who you’ve already spent time with, you could send them something that you can then talk about in person. Bryson recently hosted a friend and their 13-year-old son; in anticipation of his visit, she sent him some funny dog videos on Instagram. That offers an easy way to break the ice and connect in person again.
No matter the age gap, making conversation and becoming friends always happens much the same way: capitalizing on shared interests, asking good questions, and paying attention. And once you’re friends, conversation is easy. “After I get to know an adult, it’s easy to talk to her,” says Fiona. “It’s more complex to build friendship with an adult, but once you do, it’s like they’re a kid just like you.”
He Did It Again!
At a recent speaking engagement, President Biden attempted to tout his success at getting a bipartisan infrastructure bill through Congress. At least that’s what one would assume, even though what actually came out of the President’s mouth sounded more like “bipah infraloction.” This is, of course, just the latest verbal stumble from Biden, and you know there are plenty more to come. Jimmy and Americans’ Comedian Kurt Metzger discuss not only this difficult phrase for Biden, but also his similar inability recently to say a series of Asian names.
The Hardest Pill To Swallow About Self-Improvement
August 16, 2023
One tendency I’ve noticed about a lot of us who are into self-development is that we are incredibly hungry for information.
Some of us may have had neglectful parents or an upbringing that was very scarce, we may have not gotten the encouragement for self-betterment, we have no one around us who are striving for the best — so we want to consume and process all the information, methods, tips, and tricks we can.
I think that’s great because being deeply desirous to change yourself is better than being apathetic and lethargic.
Unfortunately, this over-consumption of information can become gluttony. Gluttony then leads to lethargy, which then leads to sloth and not doing anything with this information.
More books! More articles! More podcasts! More lectures! More, more, more! I need to know the secrets of the universe before I end up starting my business, before I apply for that job, before I take that trip, before I ask out that girl.
We need to be perfect and then, then we’ll act. One day. One day.
But one day never comes. Neither does perfection.
The real truth about self-development, the real pain is the application. It’s in the messy interactions between imperfect human beings.
You’ve read what’s in that book about dating. Now, go out on a Friday night and apply it.
You’ve read how to start a business. Now, start your own.
A lot of people are dreaming with their heads up in the clouds, thinking they’re moving the needle when they’re just reading a book or an article online.
How many people are out there actively trying, failing, getting knocked down on their ass, and trying again? Very few.
Most people read about a diet in a book, try it for 2 months, then relapse into their old eating habits.
Many people say “I’m gonna meditate for 20 minutes a day” but they “can’t find the time…because Netflix”.
Then people wonder why 2021 is 2020 is 2019 is 2018. Repeating a fucking Groundhog Day existence for 30 years.
Then you’ll be 68 years old and realize that you just twiddled your thumbs in your ivory tower while your life passed you by.
Because the real pain of self-development is exertion, it’s doing it when you don’t want to do it, it’s progressively getting better and actively cutting out areas where you don’t need to be doing things.
What methods work? They all work. There are some that are more “optimal” than others, but they will all work – if applied. If you read a self-help book starting from ground zero (like you know nothing about this stuff), you will be a better person on page 258 than you were at page 1. I guarantee it. So it’s not about “choosing the right methods”. It’s about application.
There are people who think self-development and self-help is a joke. These people have never even walked into a book store and yet they’re laughing all the way to the bank or living the life that we want to live!
I can pretty much guarantee that if you took one book like Deep Work or Psycho-Cybernetics and applied everything in there to the T, your life would dramatically alter.
You wouldn’t need to be browsing Inc. magazine for the newest hacks. You wouldn’t need to go on Entrepreneur and say you’re “hustling”.
We need to stay focused, guys. We need to build a core set of practices and not stray from the narrow road of improvement.
We need to throw ourselves into the task with everything we have and not look around for another hack or tactic to help us when we have an arsenal of 1,000 inside our head.
You won’t know all the answers. You can’t know all the answers before you take action. You need to act before you are ready.
You will NEVER be ready.
You can’t solve the puzzle without taking action to assemble the pieces.
Get going and the pieces will start to fall in place. Then the puzzle starts to solve itself.
Voynich Manuscript Decoded | The Mysterious Book Finally Solved?
For 600 years the Voynich Manuscript has stumped scholars, cryptographers, physicists, and computer scientists. Now, a researcher in Germany has claimed to have finally decoded the most mysterious book in the world.
I was terminated without notice only to be offered my job back for significant less than I was making. I declined and filed an unpaid wage claim costing them over $12,000 in damages due to me.
Worked for a Co. that terminated me at end of day on a Monday without notice or reasoning other than, “It just wasn’t working out;” but was promised to be paid the rest of the week as a courtesy severance for the inconvenience. Wanted to stay professional, so I complied and thanked them for opportunity. I was allowed some time to pack up my things and head out.
I handled all payroll and AR/AP but wasn’t presented final check upon termination and even offered to do it before I left but was told it would be mailed to me. Fast forward 6 days and I receive a text message from former employer urging me to return their call as soon as possible.
I called the next day and was offered my job back for $10,000 less per year than I originally was hired for and was told a few duties would be taken off my work load. It was insulting and I asked to think about it but asked about my final check prior to ending call and they asked me to go pick it up from office. I was out of town for a few days so made arrangements to pick up the following week (now 14 days after term).
I arrive and was presented with a check. I open it and say that it’s incorrect. They apologize and agree to have an amended one in mail next day. I offered to wait but they had an “interview coming shortly.”
I waited 7 more days before filing a wage claim for the final check. I end up receiving a final check for the one day of that week a few days after but didn’t include my vacation time / PTO, the severance, or penalty for late payment.
After 8 months, we were granted a hearing where they were ordered to pay me for 30 full days salary as penalty, all vacation and PTO, adjusted benefits, and severance as promised.
Employer called me an extortionist, and Labor Board representative interrupted their tirade to say “No, that’s the law. You should be happy he didn’t sue you for retaliation, well, he still can. So maybe you should lay off the insults and direct that energy to educating yourself and finding counsel.”
It was vindicating.
Hey! Look at what “president” Biden is doing…
2023 08 20 13 11
Nearly ALL of America FEELS This | Oliver Anthony “Rich Men North of Richmond” | Just Jen Reacts
One of my first cars was an AMC Pacer. It was like driving in a large greenhouse. It had windows all around, and it rode pretty smooth. My particular vehicle was yellow; a nice 1970s yellow.
amc pacer
I used a lot of scrap shag carpet to line the floors at which my grandmother, and her girlfriends all thought that I had a great car to drive about in.
Man, that was a long time ago.
My friends drove other cars, of course. But I was forced to drive this after my GTO was lost while driving at speed along the dark curvy roads of wooded Pennsylvania.
GTO OIP
In those days, the price for gasoline was cheaper than today. But it was still high. It was 65 cents per gallon. So we would fill the tank and go a crusin’. Maybe stop at the local burger joint and grab a burger and drink some beer.
e40635876e97d579deeb190586da819b bob s nostalgia
Today, my life is very different.
Here we have to worry about psychos wanting to set the world on fire, instead of grooving and jamming to some tunes.
Sigh.
Gonzalo Lira Update and the Doom Loop Tour
So Gonzalo is alive. Yay!
Money
Large sums of money are a real HEADACHE. You do not want a large sum of money, and all those ideas that you might have about what you would do with it are just fantasies.
Hollywood is not reality. So get over it.
In today’s world, any amount of money over that which you can fit in your wallet is suspect. And if you are an American, it is subject to seizure as “potential criminal gains”. Which is, by the way, how this question was written. In the USA, the police really do not need a warrant, or an excuse to seize your money. They will just do it, so it’s really not in your best interests to have a lot of money on you.
But, I live in China, and the rules on money use, obtainment and storage are really strict. If you have a lot of money, then you will have a lot of headaches.
TRUE STORY TIME
I had an affirmation about getting a large; an enormous sum of money. And sure as shit it materialized, just not like I expected. I wrote about this event HERE.
in 2020 one of my clients approached me. And they had an interesting “project” that they wanted me to help them with.
Outside of Guangzhou were four warehouse complexes filled with 3.4 billion dollars in USD. These bills were in $100 denominations, counted and wrapped, and shrink wrapped on pallets. The owner of the bills, the warehouses, obtained the money over a span of many, many decades though various legal businesses, and just accumulated the money as he believed that the USD was a guaranteed hedge against the ups and downs of the Chinese political scene.
Well, things changed a lot since the 1980s.
He just kept on collecting the money, and not really using a bank to store the money. So the money was transparent to the Chinese government. Hidden really.
Around 2013, China started to crack down on this kind of activity, and so he registered the amount with a bank in Guangzhou. So now the money is recognized as his, and as legal tender. However, due to the laws inside of China, he can spend no more than $50,000/year of it inside of China. Nor can he take more than $50,000 out of China in any given year.
The warehouses are not really hidden, but non-descriptive and distressed, and patrolled by his security guards. He’s not worried about thieves. How would anyone haul away any of the money? Five million trips in a van?
Any kid could easily climb though the rusted chain link fence, and walk in and around the complexes. But they don’t. He has a very good reputation in the local area, and everyone knows him, respects him and loves him. He’s a very down to earth kind of fellow.
What he wanted me to do was figure out some legal way to use the cash (hard cold cash) to buy assets or something; like businesses, hotels, investments, minerals, etc. Without breaking any laws or rules. As for certainly, the government is now absolutely tracking his actions with his cash.
So, I and some of my staff met him at a hotel, had lunch and he drove us out in the countryside where he took use to one of the warehouse complexes.
The guard waved us in, and it was just a big complex of huge vine covered old warehouses and peeling paint. And he opened up the big sliding hanger doors and we went into the complex. It was stacks and stacks and stacks of shrink-wrapped pallets of cash one on top of the other as far as the eye could see.
And this was true for all of the warehouses. I have never seen so much paper in my life.
The owner told us that his biggest problem were local field mice and rats that liked to gnaw on the pallets and get into the money to eat it, as well as an occasional leak or two in the roof that might seep into the bundles of palletized cash.
He was tired of spending money to protect all this money that he could not spend, and he wanted an out.
We left, and went back and came up with some ideas and solutions. He was willing to pay us 10% on whatever we could “free up”. So for every 1 million that we can de-paper, he would give us $100,000 USD. Though, according to the law, it would have to occur over two years before we could get the money.
Of the various ideas that we came up with, none of them were acceptable to him. And so, after a few months of “wracking our brain” we gave up. Too much of a headache.
End of story
Now, that client is doing well. More money than he knows what to do with. Four girl-friends that he supports, plus a wife. And being older, in his 80s, I’m sure that the gals are more for company than for any “exercise”. But all this money is a big waste. He cannot spend it. He cannot give it away. The most he can do is give one person $50,000 that’s it. And he cannot move it.
It is the proverbial “white elephant”.
You do not want piles of cash. You do not want the hassles that come with it. You want freedom from worry, a roof over your head, and some delicious food and fun. But over and above that becomes more and more problematic as times moves on.
Same with fame. But that’s another story for another time.
Another idea
I’d amend Jon Mixon’s #1 to say “pay for some necessities and bills, then save the rest”. On paper, you’d just look like a very frugal person, but the savings would be essentially laundering the money very slowly.
If you’re living comfortably in a middle-class or professional job, maybe you’re saving $1–2k a month or more with this method. That’s $12–24k in a year, which you can easily turn around into small legitimate investments that can then enjoy compound interest.
People get away with embezzlement this way for decades at a time, and the only way they ever get caught is that an accountant *at the place they’re embezzling from* catches them. Since you’ve already got the $1,000,000 in hand, and no one’s looking for it, there’s relatively low risk of getting caught.
The trick is to spend your paycheck on everything that you’d use a credit card for: TVs, car note, gas and insurance, modest groceries, airline flights, etc. The practical rule is that “if it’s going to be sitting around your house when the IRS comes around, use your paycheck on it”.
Everything else? Use the dirty cash! Eating out, babysitters (already traditionally paid in cash!), subway tickets, beer money, and so on. If the IRS is too concerned with checking your bank records to make sure you DID buy that TV with a credit card, and that checks out, they won’t think you’re worth investigating how often you’ve been eating out.
One last thing.
I’d keep a storage unit, paid for out of a separate bank account in my name. Every month, like clockwork, I’d personally make a cash withdrawal from my paycheck, and a cash deposit in this bank account, in order to pay the storage fees.
And all I’d do is store my old junk in it. None of the $1M! The practical reason is, of course, very smart: if the IRS ever decides to audit you, you want something that *looks* suspicious on paper, maybe even borderline stupid in that way that most people get caught on “something very stupid”, but is an absolute nothingburger upon any closer inspection. It distracts people and makes them figure nothing else is wrong with you.
Plus, I’d just love to see that look on the IRS agent’s face when I rolled up the garage door and all he smelled was SOCKS.
Blinken’s accusation on China a disrespect of Tonga as sovereign state
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Upon arrival at Tonga’s capital Nuku’alofa on Wednesday, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken wasted no time throwing mud at China.
This time, he called Beijing’s engagement in the region “problematic behavior” and Chinese investment “predatory” that would hurt the local economy.
Behind the China-bashing cliche, Blinken, the first U.S. state secretary to visit Tonga, was actually asking the island nation to take sides and making the region a new arena of rivalry, but he should understand that smearing others’ normal cooperation is a real problematic behavior. His accusation is not only an attack on China, but also unwise questioning of Tonga’s judgment on choosing partners as a sovereign country.
At a joint press conference after his meeting with Blinken on Wednesday, Tongan Prime Minister Siaosi Sovaleni told the U.S. guest that his country had no concerns about its relationship with China.
When Tonga was faced with multiple challenges, including volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, and the COVID-19 pandemic, China often rushed to its assistance. As facts have proven, China’s friendship has always been based on deeds rather than words, Tongan King Tupou VI has said.
In the broader Pacific islands, China has carried out a large number of assistance projects that meet the actual needs of the countries it tries to help. These projects have strongly promoted local economic development and improved people’s livelihood. While offering help, China always fully respects the sovereignty and independence, as well as the will and the cultural traditions of the countries assisted.
Based on its own development experience, China has conducted mutually beneficial cooperation with other developing countries by upholding justice and pursuing shared interests, and provided assistance without attaching any political strings.
Such cooperation has greatly promoted economic and social development as well as people’s livelihood in relevant countries. The Mombasa-Nairobi Railway financed and built by China has created nearly 50,000 jobs for Kenya. By the end of 2022, the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor has brought 25.4 billion U.S. dollars in direct investment to Pakistan and created 236,000 jobs. The list goes on.
If Washington really cares about the development of the Pacific islands, it should first apologize and fully compensate for the damage caused by its over 60 nuclear tests in the region, address the islands’ pressing challenges of climate change with concrete actions, and focus on the real needs of local people, rather than sending senior officials to stage a runway-show-like diplomatic campaign.
And if the United States is truly committed to a better future and the well-being of the people in other parts of the world, it should stop slinging mud at China, and instead join hands with China to help countries in need.
A country that offers very little help, but tries very hard to obstruct other countries’ helping hands, and even pursues its own interests at the expense of others’, does not measure up to the image of a respectable major power.
Geopolitical INFERNO: Victoria Nuland’s South African Visit Sparks Fear and Fury!
Dive into the fiery world of geopolitics as we dissect Victoria Nuland’s enigmatic trip to South Africa. Uncover the deep-seated anxieties and justified fears that arise from her actions. Could her visit be a menacing threat to South Africa’s sovereignty? Is she secretly aiming to sabotage the BRICS’ new currency? Brace yourself for a no-holds-barred exploration that leaves no stone unturned!
“Amazing” is the buzzword in Chengdu, Sichuan province, the venue for the FISU World University Games.
Athletes and officials participating in the biennial Summer Universiade, which opened on Friday, said they are deeply impressed by the games facilities in the provincial capital, and underlined that Chengdu has set the bar high for future hosts.
The organizing committee of the games has taken recommendations from all sides into consideration and made sincere efforts to include them in the preparations, which has set a perfect stage for athletes to shine on, Leonz Eder, acting president of the International University Sports Federation, said in an interview with China Daily.
A total of 6,500 athletes from 113 countries and regions are competing in 269 events across 18 sports at the Chengdu games, which will run until Aug 8. Thirteen new venues have been built for the competitions, while 36 existing ones have been upgraded and renovated to meet international standards.
Athletes echoed the FISU acting president and said that they were also touched by the warm welcome accorded to them.
Elavenil Valarivan from India, who won the women’s 10-meter air rifle gold at Chengdu Shooting Sport School on Saturday, said the competition venue and its services are excellent. “What they have done here is so good, I mean, so much better than many of the places where I have competed before. … I’m really happy to be in Chengdu,” she said.
Brazilian basketball player Caio De Souza Pacheco said the smooth organization of the event is helping him focus on his game.
“I’m very happy to be here. We’re very excited. … What you guys have been doing in Chengdu, in China, has been amazing,” Pacheco said.
Jonathan Larsen, coach of the German badminton team, said that all athletes received a warm welcome at the Shuangliu Sports Center Gymnasium. “The venue looks absolutely amazing. And we are looking forward to competing in it,” Larsen said.
The badminton venue, which has a floor area of 14,626 square meters, boasts 14 courts and a warm-up area.
Sofus Rasmussen, head of the Norwegian delegation, said he is very impressed with how things have been organized. “From the moment we’ve arrived, we’ve been taken such good care of. … Things have been handled very efficiently. I think this organizing committee has set the bar really high for the next committee.”
Rasmussen said the opening ceremony on Friday was so splendid that it has been the most-discussed topic among athletes and officials over the weekend.
“It was incredible and nothing like (any ceremony) I’ve ever been to before. I was expecting it to be spectacular, but not on that level. And the audiences were fantastic. The athletes were so touched. For these young people, it was something they will never forget,” he added.
Mainly because China is a major challenge to the West and is the only Eastern Nation which is coming closest to pipping the West from its supremacy that was established nearly 400 years ago
So the smallest rainfall becomes a deluge ,a two man protest becomes a major massive million man protest and a minor confrontation at a bank ends up being a major run on banks
Likewise a normal cyclical economic problem where China should have been hailed for 6.3% growth despite all negative factors is being treated as a major economic crisis
Tomorrow if China convinces the West that it will allow western hegemony, purchase $250 Billion of US T Bonds and defunds it’s investments in AI and Defense and appoints someone like Hu Jintao as President and Secretary — then suddenly every media will be pro China and hail China as a modern miracle
India?
India is way way below anyone’s radar today
Zero core technology today
Heavy reliance on the West
Relatively low economic power
No major military threat to anyone
Parliamentary Democracy as per Western Norms
So why focus on India
They will instead focus on RRR & Leo & Diwali as a holiday & all the superficial stuff and rate India’s 7.2% growth as rocket like while China’s 6.3% in a six times larger economy as huge crisis
If India comes close to say 50% of Western GDP (US) and looks like it may be of some significance and a threat to Western Hegemony, then India will face its own share of horrors and fake stories
Within India?
That’s how Indians are most of the time
Always short term and Always burying problems under the carpet
Typical Democracy sadly !!!!!
Whatever wins votes will be what’s discussed
The Lowest Cost Airline You Can Imagine | The Carol Burnett Show
Look guys…. US is growing exponentially with whooping ONE POINT ONE PERCENT. It’s a lot you know? So awesome. America numba ONE. Best country in da world!
China is suffering horrific growth of mere 6.6%. So pathetic! China is going to collapse in 10 days!!
Another headline for this post is: ”Western media fail at math”.
I Visited a Chinese Factory…What I Saw Shocked Me!
This is what the Mars landing looked like from the perspective of the Perseverance rover about 10 km above the surface. We are in the middle of the descent phase into the atmosphere, and that disk in the center is the heat shield, just released, that protected the probe from the intense heat as it plummets toward the ground.
It’s all real! Human ingenuity is extraordinary!
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Mama’s Family – Don’t call Mama while she’s at work
Today, ‘John’ was bragging to me about how good he is with chess. He kept rambling on and on about how nobody he met in real life could beat him.
So to shut him up, I challenged him to an online game of chess.
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And I completely utterly thoroughly destroyed him, while taunting him in the chat at the same time.
I also made my moves super-fast, like within a few seconds after he finished his moves. More than once during the game, he exclaimed, “Wow Shanks, how do you play so quick?”
Unbeknown to him, during the game, I had another tab open where I was playing Chess against an AI set to ‘insane’ difficulty.
I played as Black against John, but white against the AI. This meant that John started first against me, while I started first against the AI.
All I did was mimic each of John’s move in the match against the AI and mimic the AI’s move against John. In other words, while it appeared that I was playing two chess matches at the same time, I wasn’t actually playing at all — John was playing the match against the ‘insane’ AI.
To top it off, I’ve only played like 5 chess matches my whole life. I barely know how to move the pieces!
Suffice to say, John wasn’t very pleased when I told him.
24 hours back in America from China | American China Expat’s Thoughts
24 hours back in the USA from China. What do I think about it here? What are my first impressions? Expectations?
In this case , these were orders placed by China before the so called Export Ban
There is no provision in the Export Ban asking for cancellation of existing orders and thus ASML happily exported $ 650 Million of Equipment to China
It’s no coincidence that before the ban, China placed almost $ 1.7 Billion of orders with Tokyo Electron and ASML for advanced semiconductor equipment and
NEITHER JAPAN NOR NETHERLANDS included any clause which called for cancelling existing orders in their legal notifications
Basically the Japanese and Dutch told their companies
Sell as much equipment as you guys want and we will turn a blind eye but before we pass the export ban
Experts estimate that Chinese plans for semiconductors will remain uninterrupted at least until January 2025 thanks to these small loopholes which I believe were deliberate
Meanwhile only one Moron blindly agreed to all the export bans and included cancellations of orders for the Chinese worth $ 1.46 Billion
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SAMSUNG & SOUTH KOREA!!!!!!!
Everyone else,even the Japanese used simple common sense
Sure they hate China but they like money and they know , nobody else will pay $ 1.7 Billion for that equipment
Ultimately it’s why Politics never succeeds against Economics
It’s why Donald Trump never suggested an Export Ban but an extra Tariff on Exports to China from Japan or Netherlands or S. Korea. A Tariff would have increased Chinese costs and made them uncompetitive
Trump said “Develop your AI but PAY THE PRICE FOR IT”
Luckily Bidens win has given China four years to combat the situation and hopefully before Trump comes to power, China would have made the preparations to battle the onslaught
Development to come up near JB-Singapore rail terminus
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Hong Kong will join Malaysia in developing an economic hub in southern Johor, near the Singapore border, as Malaysia looks to tap the land development potential near the site of an upcoming cross-border rail link.
signed a memorandum of understanding to develop a six-acre land for mixed use in Bukit Chagar on Friday, as part of Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee’s visit to Malaysia.
The development, worth 3 billion ringgit ($660 million), will come up less than one kilometer from the Malaysia-Singapore border. The location is also the site of the under-construction Bukit Chagar terminus station that’s part of the Johor Bahru-Singapore Rapid Transit System.
The intended mixed development is expected to transform the area into an attractive investor destination, for local and international investors.
The RTS project, which is expected to serve up to 10,000 commuters per hour in every direction, is due for completion in 2026. It is expected to ease traffic congestion at Malaysia and Singapore’s land border crossing, one of the world’s busiest. The four kilometer transit has two stations — Bukit Chagar in Johor and Woodlands in Singapore.
Nouriel Roubini in a talk said that China growing by 6.3% against the worst geopolitical and trade climate showed the strength and power of the country’s resilience
He also said China’s internal debt was something that could be infinitely restructured and be an ASSET to the Nation rather than a liability
He said their 2% inflation was also a huge positive against reeling inflation in the West
What Roubini says isn’t rocket science
Anyone who understands 101 of economics knows this
Still the West is rooted by SO MUCH PROPAGANDA that even something so basic , appears like some form of huge redemption for China
Not that the Chinese give a damn
They simply do their job and do their best for their country and people
The Best line of Dr Roubini was
Ten years from now, China would have moved on , solved it’s problems and be on its way as a developed economy
We (The US) would still be reeling with debt and inflation because we are so damn afraid of facing the truth and for once putting common interests over politics and ideology
My teenager went to a very diverse Chicago public high school. I knew she, as a white girl, was in the minority at her school. I didn’t realize just how much so until her graduation a few weeks ago.
I watched her and about 400 of her classmates walk across the stage. Between their names, skin tones, and outfits (about a dozen girls wore hijabs), I’d bet that there were at least 50 different nationalities/ethnicities/races represented in her graduating class. That type of diversity was intentional… it was an International Baccalaureate (IB) school. My daughter was one of just a handful of students that represented what is actually the majority demographic in most of the country: white, born in the U.S., Christian, and straight.
Naturally, the parents in the audience were just as diverse as the students on the stage. Except, most of us had something in common. It wasn’t our skin tone or the way we dressed or even the language we spoke… it was that most of us, the parents, were noticeably overweight.
I’m a really big guy. I don’t lie to myself about it. I notice when people are as tall as I am, because it is rare. I notice when people are as big as I am, because it is rare. Well, it used to be rare. Now it’s becoming common.
When I sat in my seat for the ceremony, I expected to be cramped and uncomfortable. When you’re my size, you just get used to that whenever there’s side-by-side seating. But I noticed that it wasn’t just me. Every single person in the row in front of me looked cramped. Everyone in the row in front of that one look cramped. A few people were standing on the sides, unable to fit in the seats at all.
There was nothing unusual about the seats. They were the regular size you might find at any stadium. But so many of the adults in the room barely fit in them, because so many of those adults were overweight.
And that’s my “only in the USA” moment: hundreds of people, representing dozens of demographics from all over the globe, gathered in one place to celebrate our children’s accomplishments and transitions into adulthood, and most of us carrying at least 50 extra pounds on us.
Have you heard of Arnold Abbott? He was a 90-year-old man with a big heart and an unwavering belief in helping those who were less fortunate. He lived in Florida, where there was a growing problem of homelessness and he was concerned about this issue and wanted to do something to help.
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So he decided to start feeding the homeless in his community. He set up a table in a public park and began serving food to anyone who was hungry. Soon it became a regular fixture in the park, and many homeless people came to rely on him for a hot meal.
However the city council of Fort Lauderdale had recently passed a law making it illegal to feed the homeless in public spaces. The law was intended to address the problem of homelessness in a different way, but it made it difficult for people like Abbott to provide much needed help to those in need.
Abbott was undeterred. He believed that it was his moral duty to help the homeless, and he continued to feed them despite the new law. Soon, other volunteers joined Abbott in his efforts to help the homeless. They set up tables in other public spaces and began serving food to those who were hungry.
The city of Fort Lauderdale was not happy about this. They began to issue citations and fines to Abbott and the other volunteers who were feeding the homeless. But he remained resolute in his belief that feeding the homeless was the right thing to do and many others agreed with him as well.
Despite the legal challenges, Abbott and the other volunteers continued to feed the homeless. Their actions inspired others to join them, and soon a movement was born. People all over the country began to speak out against the criminalization of acts of compassion, and many cities began to repeal their laws banning the feeding of the homeless!!
The case of Arnold Abbott raises the question of what is truly ethical and what is legal? In some cases laws may conflict with our sense of right and wrong. In such instances, it is up to individuals to decide whether to follow the law or follow their conscience.
China doesn’t just lend the money. It also builds the projects. Yes it gets its hands dirty in the actual work, and its Chinese architects and civil engineers and construction workers are right there on the sites working as well.
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(This, by the way, is another reason why the US “Build Back Better” project will fail. White Americans are not going to move to Africa and stay there for 5 years working alongside their ex-slaves. But I digress.)
The point is – Chinese construction companies always get involved in the construction, which means that they are making money out of the work they do, which also means that basically part of the Chinese loans are recouped as profits for the construction company.
Commentators are often so wrapped down in the politics that they forget the business side of things. Chinese construction companies are the best in the world – they have a tremendous amount of experience and expertise. When they go overseas and build things, they are just exporting their experience and expertise in the form of their construction work. It’s their business. Building things is how they make money.
Why The U.S. Gave Up On Public Transit
VIDEO: Ukraine Troops SURRENDER en-masse; WHITE FLAGS on Tanks
Hundreds of Ukrainian troops, displaying white flags on their tanks and infantry vehicles, surrendered en-masse to Russia today. More and more common as troops see with their own eyes, it is hopeless to continue fighting.
Video from the battlefield shows the mass surrender:
Star Trek Next Generation – Sentient Starship
China’s Chip Production Soars with Arrival of 6 Lithography Machines, US Blockade Falters!
In recent years, China has made tremendous breakthroughs in the chip field, while the United States, in order to maintain its dominant position in the chip industry, has attempted to curb China’s development in this field and use a series of measures to suppress China.
However their Impact is much lesser than what was expected by the West.
The West threw their entire financial might at Russia and the Sanctions against Russia are perhaps the worst Sanctions against any Nation ever.
Yet Russia stands , survives and even grows
Its like say the difference between blowing up a house with Dynamite and burning a house with a slow fuse and kerosene.
Russia stands to lose around 34% of its Export Volume and Revenue by 2023 which translates to 55,000 -75,000 Jobs
This in turn translates to around $ 34 Billion Contraction in GDP
Add to this Russia stands to lose around 14% Industrial Productivity due to Restriction of Spares by the West. This translates to around $ 44 Billion Contraction in GDP and around 45,000 – 60,000 Jobs
Add to this Russia stands to lose around 41% Service Industry temporarily for minimum 12–18 months. This translates to around $ 21 Billion Contraction in GDP and around 14,000 Jobs-21,000 Jobs
Adding we get around $ 99 Billion GDP Contraction or around 5.45% Contraction of GDP
Adding we get around 186,000 Jobs
This means we can add around 279,000 Auxiliary Jobs
So Yes. It Definitely isnt a Walk in the Park. It would require a lot of hands on work for Russia
However it could have been far worse
The West expected a far higher impact. Around 15% Contraction. Around 1.5–2 Million Jobs etc.
Russia can make this up by 2025 easily
Why did the Sanctions not make things as bad as the West expected?
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China primarily boosted the Russian Economy. They almost replaced 70% of all Car Parts , purchased Car Factories, Building Plants, Took over other financial projects – and you know the speed of the Chinese….they are very fast
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The Dragon may be the Elder brother but the Elephant India – too played a role here as Chota Bhai.
The Huge Orders of Oil, Coal, Diamonds and the Cooperation for Alternate Mechanisms and best of all indicating that the Hachet of Galwan can temporarily be buried by trading and purchasing Yuan for the FIRST TIME EVER.
Add to this China and India both refused to delist Russian Bonds and Russian Instruments and have accepted payment for these instruments in RMB & Rubles. Another big concession from India.
For example Indian Investors who were to get $ 15 Million in Interest can now get 750 Million Rubles paid by Russia into SBI Kathmandu who will in turn swap for Chinese Yuan and use the Yuan to buy more Coal and Oil and Gas.
So Russia is far better off than the West believed. It will Survive and Grow much Stronger.
Especially if the SINO-RUSSO-INDO-IRANIAN Alliance clicks off
Will Sanctions deter Putin from Continuing the War?
In March 2022 – there was a 50% Chance that Putin was looking for a Face Saving Off Ramp and was deeply worried about Economy and Militarily
Now – Not the Smallest Chance
The West had their shot. They could have forced Putin to the Table, forced much smaller concessions and ended with a Strong “Victory”
Now Putin calls the Shots
Star Trek Next Generation – Ancient Battle Cruiser
Trucking giant Yellow collapsed on Sunday, ceasing operations immediately and leaving some 30,000 workers without jobs.
The closure is the biggest in terms of jobs and revenue in the U.S. trucking industry.
The company, which received $700 million in federal COVID relief funds in 2020, is preparing to file for bankruptcy and is in talks to sell off all or parts of the business.
The nearly 100-year-old firm is known for its competitive pricing and has more than 12,000 trucks shipping freight across the US for brands including Walmart and Home Depot.
At this time, it __appears__ that all of Yellow’s subsidiaries may be GONE too:
YRC Freight reflects the Yellow Transportation (founded in 1924 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma) purchase of and subsequent merger with Roadway (founded in 1930 in Akron, Ohio).
YRC Freight is the largest subsidiary of Yellow with corporate headquarters in Overland Park, Kan.
Other Yellow subsidiaries include Reddaway, Holland and New Penn.
HAL TURNER OPINION
I am just guessing, but given the sheer size of Yellow, ad some of its subsidiaries like Roadway and New Penn, this could trigger “supply-chain disruption” that would make COVID look like child’s play.
Think about this. Yellow is an LTL carrier. That stands for “Less-Than-Truckoad.” They handle things like skids (pallets) of shipments.
They have 12,000 trucks. Each day, each truck handles about ten pick-ups, and ten deliveries. (Average)
That means tomorrow, about 120,000 deliveries — won’t come. Another 120,000 pick-ups, won’t be made.
Stores won’t get products.
Factories won’t get raw materials or parts. They also won’t be able to ship finished products out.
Do the math. How long before this becomes an actual catastrophe in the supply chain?
Are there other truckers? Yes. Can they just step-in and take up the slack? NO!
Trucklines must carefully balance their equipment to their actual need. There simply isn’t enough capacity within the rest of the system to absorb a sudden change like this.
Moreover, certain truck lines only service certain geographic areas. In some places, where maybe YELLOW was the only carrier, shippers simply may not be able to get a trucker to come to them! No service. At all.
I cannot even begin to guess the impact this is going to have on the US economy and supply chain. And I suspect it will show itself within a matter of days.
Julius Caesar was once kidnapped by pirates, who would go on to regret that decision. In 75 BC, 25-year-old Caesar was traveling to the Island of Rhode’s to study oratory when he was captured by Cilician pirates, who infested the Mediterranean, but were usually left alone because they provided wealthy Romans with slaves.
Although this was about ten years before Caesar would start to make a name for himself, according to the biographer Plutarch, he didn’t act like he was a captive.
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When the pirates informed Caesar he was going to be ransomed for the some of 20 talents, he burst out laughing in their faces, telling them they clearly didn’t know who they had captured and should raise the sum to 50 talents.
Caesar only had a few friends in captivity and Cilician pirates were known to be particularly blood thirsty, but this didn’t stop him from sending his friends to tell the pirates to shut up because they were making too much noise as Caesar tried to sleep.
It’s also recorded that Caesar would recite poetry and speeches to the pirates and should they not be impressed he would openly call them illiterate savages and threatened to have them crucified.
Eventually, the ransom was paid and Caesar was released, probably to the relief of the Pirates, who were sick of him. However, the now free Caesar wasted no time in having the Pirates hunted down and crucified, which he over seen personally, making good on the promise he made when the pirates didn’t enjoy his poetry.
Sen. Feinstein’s Brain Melts Down DURING A VOTE!
By now everyone knows that 90-year-old California Senator Dianne Feinstein has no business holding public office — everyone except Dianne Feinstein, that is. Her most recent episode: attempting to pontificate about the importance of defense spending during a Senate vote when all that was required of her was to say “aye.” An aide came to her rescue but not before the awkward episode had made everyone in the room cringe.
When sperm whales need a nap, they take a deep breath, dive down about 45 feet and arrange themselves into perfectly-level, vertical patterns.
They sleep sound and still for up to two hours at a time between breaths, in pods of 5 or 6 whales, presumably for protection.
No one knew whales slept vertically until a 2008 study documented the behavior.
And no one captured really good photography of it in the wild until 2017. French photographer Stephane Granzotto was documenting sperm whales in the Mediterranean for his book on the creatures when he came across these sleeping whales…
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Factory Owner Reveals the Truth About Chinese Manufacturing
The world has trusted Chinese manufacturing for decades, but recently many politicians are stating Western countries must decouple from China. Will Chinese manufacturing continue to play a vital role in our global economy? Today I travel to Wuxi, China to visit a Chinese textile factory to see how Chinese factories make clothes.
Most American movies are written and produced by wealthier, trendier people who live in major cities. Thus, many of them are set in major cities. If all you knew of America was what you saw in movies, you may think things like:
Most young, single adult Americans live in nice apartments or condos in trendy areas of major cities and have “fun” jobs like museum curators or tour bus company owner/operators.
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In fact, very few young, single people live in places like that and have jobs like that. Most young, single people can’t afford that lifestyle, and work “regular” jobs which they may enjoy, but aren’t really “fun.”
While there are some major cities in the United States, and a lot of people live in them, the majority of people do not.* For the average American, a scene like this is something they will only experience while watching it on a screen themselves:
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Taking public transportation from your condo or apartment, then walking down a crowded city sidewalk on your way to your job in a high-rise office building? That’s the exception, not the rule for most Americans. For most of us, it’s leaving your single-family home and driving your own personal car to your job in a building that’s two or three stories tall, max. And you park your car in the parking lot next to the building.
I live in Chicago, which has a good public transit system, but I only know two people who actually use it to get to work. Everyone else just takes it on special occasions, like when they want to take their kids downtown to act like tourists for a day. Actually, that’s also one thing my out-of-town guests always want to do when they visit me in Chicago, too: ride the subway. Why? Because it’s so rare here… it’s something that most Americans only experience in movies.
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*A lot of people are commenting that the majority of Americans do, in fact, live in “urban” areas. “urban areas” and “trendy parts of major cities” are two different things. According to the Census, an “urban area” is any town with over 50,000 population. That includes literally tens of thousands of places most people would just call small towns.
Robot Chicken – Channel Flip Compilation Part Five
He sacked a colleague the day my colleague was leaving for a family holiday. My boss (and owner of the business), Paul, just liked to show people he had the power. He was often petty and a micromanaging control freak. He seemed to like me, so most of the time he left me to do my thing.
My colleague, Ian, had become a friend, and we’d hang out after work. He had been planning an overseas family trip for some time, and had been talking about it for a couple of months in advance of the date. He had requested leave, which was approved, before making the booking. He was a friendly, genuine guy, and most of us in the office shared his enthusiasm for his holiday. We could see he was looking forward to taking his family away.
He was due to fly out on a Saturday. On the Friday, Paul called Ian into his office and told him he had changed his mind, he was revoking the leave. Ian tried to argue that the tickets were non-refundable, everything was booked, his wife had taken leave, and they had permission to take their children out of school. Paul wasn’t swayed. He made it clear, cancel or be fired.
Ian asked what was so important that he needed to stay, Paul didn’t give a real answer. He just shrugged and said, “it’s my company, my call.”
Ian called his wife, and then decided to do the holiday. He didn’t want to lose the money or let his family down.
He came and told me just before lunch what had happened, and suggested we go for a farewell lunch.
I was incensed!
I immediately wrote a handwritten resignation, left it on Paul’s desk, packed my things, and went to lunch. I told Ian and some other colleagues at lunch that this was also MY farewell.
As lunch wrapped up, the others drifted back to the office, and it was just Ian and me, commiserating over a beer, when Paul came in, in a fluster.
I had never seen him in such a state (I later realized it was because he was no longer in control). Paul loudly tried to convince me to stay, offered me everything (other than more money!). I just said no, calmly. He left saying something like “you’ll be back when you can’t find another job.”
I called in on another friend on my way home, and had a job offer that afternoon.
Pepe Escobar: Russia-Africa Summit a GAME CHANGER as NATO Isolates Itself
Pepe Escobar discusses the significance of the Russia-Africa Summit and what it means for the ongoing move toward a multipolar world led by Russia and the Global South.
Heavenly Chicken Garlic Soup
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Ingredients
1 whole chicken, disjointed
2 carrots, minced
2 stalks celery, minced
1 large whole yellow onion
Chopped fresh parsley
Salt and pepper to taste
5 cloves garlic, chopped
4 tablespoons softened butter
2 tablespoons flour
Instructions
Make the chicken broth by simmering chicken, carrots, celery, onion, garlic, parsley, salt and pepper in enough water to cover. When the chicken is thoroughly cooked, remove it and skim the fat from broth.
Simmer broth, reducing it until it is very rich. Add the flour and butter to a small amount of broth and mix with a wire whisk until velvety. Pour this mixture into the remaining broth.
Tear chicken into bite-size pieces and add to the soup.
Assembling the car requires a complex number of steps where hundreds of parts are put together. Each part is worth very little on its own, but when everything is together, the finished product has amazing value.
This is how I pictured college:
All my years of education assembled together to come to this very moment.
I felt like the world was telling me, “Congratulations! You are a complete product.”
So, imagine that moment… yes, it called for a victory fist pump!
Well, my educational “assembly line” took soooo… sooooo… long that my expectations had built up.
I felt like a top-of-the-line fully equipped Tesla Model S!
I felt entitled.
I thought that by just getting out of the “assembly line” with my degree in hand made me valuable like the Model S pictured above.
“Hey world! I’m an Engineer!” I would say with arrogance and pride, “You want some of my knowledge? It’s going to COST you!!!”
Haha!
Please don’t laugh at me…
I felt that my time had value, so whatever work I did, I felt I deserved to get paid.
I WAS WRONG!
My father taught me this lesson the hard way.
After I had spent one week working at his office, I demanded a late Friday evening, “Pay me, Dad!”
“Son, you’re not entitled to a payment.”
“I’m an engineer, Dad! Pay me as an engineer!” I said with pride.
“I pay for results!” my father said.
“But I’m working hard on this project! I have invested hours into this. Pay me!” I angrily said.
“No results, no pay!” he said firmly.
You know what happened?
He eventually changed my mindset!
He helped me understand that in this world I’m NOT entitled to anything simply because of my credentials or for sitting at the office all day long.
He helped me understand that if I don’t deliver results to others, my fancy college degree hanging on the wall might look nice, but it won’t pay my bills.
So, to answer your question: What is one small thing that you can do differently to make your life better?
Learn this truth: Life pays only for results.
The world doesn’t care for your credentials, or how hard you work, all it cares is for how much value you DELIVER!
It’s in giving which makes us deserve something in exchange.
There’s no secret formula.
The only thing that works is work!
We do not deserve what we want, we only deserve what we do.
Embrace this small truth, and it will radically change your life.
You could ask this women. Caron McBride had no idea she was wanted for a felony for 21-years. She only found out when she went to update her married name at a Texas DMV, in April 2021 and they told her she was wanted for felony embezzlement.
She was charged after falling to return a VHS tape of Sabrina the Teenage Witch, from a Oklahoma video store, back in 1999. The shocking part is she had no memory of renting the tape or ever seeing the show. Its likely someone else rented the tape under her name, leaving her with a felony, that thankfully has been dismissed.
Cambodia’s Controversial Election: U.S. vs. Russia & China!
Cambodia is celebrating a new election of leader Hun Sen from the Cambodian People’s Party but the U.S. says: Not so fast. The U.S. says that it will announce punitive measures because it does not consider this to have been a “free and fair” election. They claim that the opposition was threatened and harrassed. But the U.S., E.U. and other Western countries did not send observers to the elections. Russia and China did. Is this U.S. posturing or something else?
Why is it the US’s business what happens in Cambodia?
“Your checking account is overdrawn. There’s a $35 NSF fee.”
When my ex-wife and I first started dating back in 1988, we got a bank account at a bank that no longer exists (after multiple mergers it’s now part of Bank of America) called Citizens & Southern.
So it turns out they hit on a great money-making idea. If you had money in your bank account, and write a check so that after it was cashed there would be less than $35 in your account, hit you with a $35 fee and say “See? Your account balance is negative!”)
Say you had $110 in your account and you wrote a $100 check. They’d hit you with a $35 NSF fee and say “See? You’re overdrawn by $25! Your balance is -$25! That’s why we charged the fee!”
You might think this is illegal, but…
…you’d totally be right.
Eventually someone hit them with a class action lawsuit for doing this, and years later they refunded us all the NSF fees they’d ever charged plus a couple hundred bucks on top.
Arizona teen missing for nearly 4 years shows up safe at Montana police station
An Arizona teenager who vanished without a trace nearly four years ago is safe after walking into a police station in Montana, authorities said Wednesday. Alicia Navarro, 18, of Glendale showed up alone this week in a small town about 40 miles from the Canadian border and identified herself, according to police in Glendale, a Phoenix suburb.
The worst nuclear disaster in North American history was discovered by accident. In 1983 a hospital in Juarez Mexico had a Radiotherapy unit dismantled and sold to a scrap yard for just nine dollars. However, the person responsible for getting rid of the waste spilled an un-marked cylinder of 6000 cobalt pellets contaminating the entire junk yard. The metal was than sent to two foundries that produced 6600 tons of rebar and 30,000 contaminated restaurant table legs.
It was only by chance that a truck transporting some of the metal took a wrong turn and drove passed the Los Alamos National Lab where the first atomic bomb was developed and their sensers detected the radiation. By that time the metal had already been shipped around Mexico and the U.S, hundreds of people were exposed to the radiation making it one of the worst Nuclear disasters in American History.
ALMOST UNWATCHABLE: Kennedy Will Not Stop Listing Reversals Of Judicial Nom’s Decisions To Her Face
At today’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) grilled Judge Karoline Mehalchick, nominee to be United States District Judge for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, about the several reversals of her decisions.
The average age of Congress is rising. That’s unlikely to change soon.
The current class of lawmakers is one of the oldest in history, with an overall median age of 59. The median age of senators is 65, the highest on record. In the House, the median age has hovered between 57 and 58 for the past decade, higher than in any year before that period.
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How is the experience of riding a subway in America Vs. China
Counter-Revolution – ‘Do You Know What Time It Is?’
Both the U.S. and Europe have stalked brazenly into traps of their own making, Alastair Crooke writes.
To be blunt, both the U.S. and Europe have stalked brazenly into traps of their own making. Caught in the lies and deceit woven around a claimed inheritance of superior cultural DNA, (vouchsafing, it is said, almost certain victory), the West is awakening to a fast-approaching disaster to which there are no easy solutions. Cultural exceptionalism, together with the prospect of a clear ‘win’ over Russia, are draining rapidly away – but exiting delusion is both slow and humiliating.
The coming devastation is not just centred around the failed Ukraine offensive and NATO’s weak showing. It comprises multiple vectors that have been building over the years, but which are reaching culmination synchronously.
In the U.S., the run-up to momentous elections is underway. The Democrats are in a fix: The party has long since turned its back on its old blue-collar constituency, engaging instead with an urban ‘creative class’ in an exalted, world-shaping ‘social engineering’ project of moral redress, in alliance with Silicon Valley and the Permanent Nomenklatura. But that experiment has run off into the weeds, becoming ever more extreme and absurd. Push-back is building.
Predictably enough, the Democratic campaign is not gaining traction. Team Biden has low, low approval ratings. But Biden family pressure insists that Biden must persevere with his candidature, and not yield to another. Either way – Biden staying or going – there is no ready solution to the Party’s conundrum of a non-performing, non-platform.
The electoral landscape is a mess. Heavy ‘lawfare’ artillery is intended to break the Trump defences and drive him off the field, whilst an attrition of disclosures of Biden family malfeasance are intended wear down and implode the Biden bubble. The Democratic Establishment is spooked too by the flanking manoeuvre of the R. F. Kennedy candidature, which is snowballing rapidly.
Put simply, the Democratic wokish ideology of historical redress is separating the U.S. into two nations living in one land. Divided not so much by ‘Red or Blue’, or class, but defined by irreconcilable ‘ways of being’. The old categories: Left, Right, Democrat or GOP are being dissolved by a Cultural War that respects no categories, crossing the boundaries of class and party affiliation. Indeed, even ethnic minorities have been alienated by the zealots wanting to sexualise children at age 5 years, and by the pushing of the trans agenda on to school children.
Ukraine has served as the solvent to the old order and has become the Albatross hanging around the neck of the Biden Admin: How to spin the looming Ukraine debacle as somehow ‘mission achieved’. Can that be done? Because the escape route of a ceasefire and a frozen line of contact is unacceptable to Moscow. In short, ‘Biden’s war’ cannot continue as it is, but nor can it do ‘other’ without facing humiliation. The myth of American power, NATO competence and the reputation of U.S. weaponry hangs in the balance.
The economic narrative (‘everything is fine’) is poised, for somewhat unconnected reasons, to turn sour too. Debt – finally – is becoming the sword suspended above the economy’s neck. Credit is being tightly squeezed. And next month, the BRICS-SCO bloc will take the first strategic steps to disentangle up to 40 countries from the dollar. Who then will buy Yellen’s $ 1.1 trillion Treasuries – now and in the future – that is needed to fund U.S. government expenditure?
These events ostensibly are disconnected, but in reality, they form a self-reinforcing loop. One leading to a ‘run on the political bank’ – that is to say, the U.S.’ credibility itself.
Faced with many questions – and no solutions – the mood amongst sectors of the electorate is driving a radical and increasingly iconoclastic mood. A counter-revolutionary spirit, perhaps. It is too early to say whether it will sweep a majority, but it may – for the radicalism is coming from the two wings: GOP grassroots and the Kennedy ‘camp’.
One strain of GOP voters separates conservative leaders into two camps: those who “know what time it is” and those who don’t. That is the catchphrase on the Right that has become increasingly important to a significant wing of the Party who see a country weakened and corrupted by ideology; who hold that there is almost nothing left to ‘conserve’. Overturning the existing post-American order, and re-establishing America’s ancient principles in practice, is advocated as a sort of counter-revolution – and the only road forward.
That aphorism for ‘knowing what time of day it is’ refers to an emerging sense of urgency and appetite for sweeping action, not dragging and dull academic debates among more populist-minded conservatives. “The premise is that the struggle against wokish cultural power is existential, and that extreme tactics that would shock an older generation of conservatives need to be the norm”.
In fact, if a leader is not shocking in his conduct and proposals, he or she probably “doesn’t know what time it is”.
The second key feature of this us-against-them mentality is that any policy consensus, ipso facto, triggers suspicion and becomes a focus of attack.
“When you realize this, what looks at first like a hodgepodge of different ideas seems more unified. Covid health policy, disgust about Jan. 6, the Pentagon budget, immigration, support for Ukraine, promoting racial diversity, trans rights — these are all issues that enjoy a measure of élite bipartisan consensus. But for the Tucker Carlson wing – Republicans who embrace these things simply – don’t know what time it is”, Politico explains.
What is salient in this formulation is that just as unreserved support for Covid regulatory practices was a ‘marker’ of ‘correct-think’ in pandemic time, so support for Ukraine is defined as ‘a marker’ of correct liberal-think (and being in the Team) in the in the post-pandemic era.
This suggests that – already and as the election nears – Ukraine will be no-longer bi-partisan in terms of support, but rather will become a sword used against the hated Uni-party establishment, and any hint of a major f*ck-up will become centre-piece in this counter revolutionary war.
The GOP’s sense that U.S. culture has gone off-track: Legislation was snarled in Congress earlier this month, when the formerly sacrosanct Pentagon Defence Bill became the target of culture-war amendments on abortion, diversity and gender that could scuttle its passage. Speaker McCarthy was forced to accept the far-right rebellion against the Defence budget bill and push it through, without the usual widespread bipartisan support.
The measures stripped funding for diversity initiatives in the military and added restrictions on abortion and transgender care for service members. GOP lawmakers said they acted because liberal ideology was weakening the military. But the amendments endanger the bill’s path in the Democratic-controlled Senate.
The heightened feelings on both sides are reflected in a poll that found that about 80% of Republicans believe that the Democratic agenda “if not stopped, will destroy America as we know it.” About the same share of Democrats had the same fear of the Republican ag.
Col Macgregor: NATO’s FRIGHTENING Plan For Russia
Absolutely. The United States is in the hands of someone who is mentally unstable.
https://youtu.be/k1TwoB1mGOk
What’s the most impressive thing you’ve ever seen a doctor do?
My daughter was 13 years of age and something was very wrong. She is a nonidentical twin. This information only matters because her illness is genetic and hopefully her twin will never have it.
We went to a new doctor at the practice we had been to before. He was just downright off in behavior. I had been a teacher about 20 years at this point and one of my Master degrees was in special education. I immediately saw him for what he was. Autistic.
I had twin daughters in the exam room. He could not function until we were all seated and all 6 feet flat on the floor. He paced silently in that tiny room until we were exactly as he felt we should be. He seemingly ignored all questions until he was leaving and would turn his head to the side and in a rapid fire voice, answer all questions. There were many more indicators but those were very telling. It was really odd but I saw it for what it was and shushed my daughters comments.
He took one look at her and gave a devastating diagnosis. A thirty year life span with a very low quality of life until then. I was not about to have that. Oh no.
I went home and Googled of course. Life became more grim. I realized she had all the classic physical signs. No doctor in our 200,000 population was taking a pediatric with her disease. The nearest was Dallas Texas which was a six hour drive each way.
As a working single Mother this seemed impossible.
Three days pass. I receive a phone call from a local specialist who is willing to take her at 6:30 am in the morning. She tells me that when one of her patients die, we can have their later slot.
She also tells me that the ONLY reason she is taking our case is because of the doctor who called her. The doctor who could not speak until we were all seated properly. The doctor who could not speak until he was leaving the room. This doctor meant so much to her that she was willing to take my daughters case.
As the next few years progress I learned many things. I learned that our autistic doctor was the doctor that all the other doctors, nurses and medical personnel went to. I also learned that this man saved my daughter’s life at this time and that she was very near a critical time in her disease. I learned that he gave her more quality and more meaning in the years ahead of her. When one of her many specialists were being hostile, he believed her. He LISTENED to her. He stayed with her through many trials in her health.
We continued to see him three times a year. He began to relax around us. My child held a special place in his heart and he began to joke and speak a bit differently. Not a great deal but enough for us to notice.
For those of us who have a loved one who is terminally ill, a doctor can be ambivalent, an asshole, or one such as this “A Jewel”.
This is impressive.
Italian Style Pot Roast Soup
leftover pot roast soup 500×750 1
Ingredients
1 (3 to 4 pound) chuck roast with bone, cut into pieces
1 (16 ounce) box acini de pepe (very small pasta)
8 carrots, peeled and cut into chunks
2 large yellow onions, sliced
5 stalks celery, cut into pieces
3 -5 cloves garlic, chopped
2 (15 ounce) cans diced tomatoes
1 (15 ounce) can tomato sauce
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
6 quarts water
Freshly grated parmesan cheese
Instructions
Place meat, vegetables, garlic tomatoes and tomato sauce in a large pot with the 6 quarts of water. Season with salt, pepper and red pepper flakes. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer for 2 to 3 hours until meat is tender.
Toward the last half hour cook the pasta until al dente. Drain pasta add a little bit of butter and set aside.
With a slotted spoon remove meat. Trim fat, remove bone and shred the meat. Place meat back into pot.
Place some pasta in a bowl and ladle in the soup. Top with lots of parmesan cheese.
The Chase (1946, Film-Noir)
Todays treat; full movie. Film Noir.
Hunted … Haunted … Hounded … Chuck Scott gets a job as chauffeur to tough guy Eddie Roman; but Chuck’s involvement with Eddie’s fearful wife becomes a nightmare.
Do you remember when the “Bic Banana” came out? I do.
It was big and bright yellow, and all of us just wanted to have one to do our homework with.
Shortly after that came “Maxi skirts” which was the death blow to the mini-skirt fad of the late 1970’s. It wasn’t until the mid-1970s that my mother threw away her white go-go boots.
…
The year was in the early 1990’s. And I was working as a contractor at a electronics company that made high end military systems. Well, one day, I went to my boss and asked him for a raise. He said, “let me think about it”.
The next day he called me into his office. He accused me of being a fraud and a fake. He said that no one could find any background on me. And he spent perhaps the next two hours berating me up and down.
I left the office shaken.
Long story short, I made a few calls and got the entire mess all straightened out. But, you know, the damage was already done.
I came in wanting a raise, and left just happy that I had a job.
…
One thing that I used to love to do was crunch up aluminum foil into balls and toss them at the kitty cats to play with. They really enjoyed that game.
…
Oh, yeah. I have been listening a lot to B-b-b-b babymetal lately.
The lyrics to the songs suggest multiple song writers, as some of the songs are so very simple (Give me chocolate) while others at multi-levels deep.
Like Megitsune メギツネ.
Babymetal is a stage show; a production. Unlike the West, it’s not really a bunch a kids in a garage that got a hit record and a following, but a thought out and choreographed entertainment system.
If you read the subtitles to Megitsune メギツネ, you see that the song is all about how some women are actresses; “shape shifters” that follow a system of “seven techniques” to achieve their ultimate desires, goals, objectives… and purpose.
A female fox.
2023 07 29 07 06
HUSH – HUSH: Pentagon Orders “COMBAT PAY” For U.S. Troops – UKRAINE
The Pentagon has ordered COMBAT PAY for U.S. troops serving in . . . UKRAINE. Here’s the official memo:
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This begs the questions:
1) Why are US Troops inside Ukraine at all, AND;
2) If the only US Troops in Ukraine are “Advisors” then why Combat Pay?
(HT Personal Opinion: I’m going to go out on a limb here and speculate . . . . I think the reason for this memo is that US troops ARE in combat in Ukraine and we ARE at war with Russia even though it is undeclared.)
First, my impression of Japanese upper class is that it tends to whisper.
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We spent a day in one of the hot spring bathhouses up in Hakone. At dinner everybody got drunk, and at some stage the wall to the next room was slid away and two very drunk parties became one.
In that other party there was an old geezer that seemed to have the time of his life. Rolling about on the floor, laughing and pointing his finger at us westerners. We had no problem with that, we beat him at poker and won maybe 20 yen 🙂
Next day we were extremely hung over. While waiting for our taxi, a runner came and said: “Nomura-san would like to thank you for a most successful evening yesterday and since you are going to Kyoto he asks if it is OK if he arranges for one of his friends to give you a guided tour of the city tomorrow?”
Of course we said yes and sent our thanks.
Next morning at breakfast a very old man in very traditional clothes appeared at our hotel. He was totally unassuming like David Bowie who just appeared at the front desk and mildly said, “Good morning, I am David”. But you could see from the hotel staff that he was somebody. They even started to treat us differently.
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We took the tour. It was amazing. He took us to temples and gardens that were not open to the public, and he was extremely knowledgeable. Then he asked if he would be allowed to invite us to his home for dinner.
Yes he was.
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His home was almost empty. But large. He had a large collection of original woodprints that he showed us. His wife, a very refined woman, had a degree in art history from the Sorbonne in Paris. The staff moved about like ghosts. He told us that he came from one of the really old Samurai families, but when Japan started modernizing, his family went into textiles and made a fortune.
We asked him what he did when he was not guiding westerners. He said that he collected 19th century sailing yachts. He had one in Newport, one in Monaco on the Riviera and one in Hawaii, and they all had crews that stood by in case he felt like sailing.
To this day I do not have any clue whom we met, but his friend up in Hakone that set us up was a Nomura. And they are bankers, right. Unless he was a Nomura written with different signs.
Chinese people don’t care about ancestry like Europeans do; there is no aristocracy in China, or everyone is descended from an aristocrat.
British proverb: It takes three generations to make a gentleman or aristocracy.
The Chinese have a saying, “Fu bu guo san dai”, which means wealth never survives three generations.
No hereditary aristocratic after the Zhou dynasty, interrupted by the policies of the Qin dynasty; 皇帝輪流做,明天到我家,基本是這個情況。
No hereditary power elite after the Tang Dynasty, interrupted by the imperial examination system;
No hereditary landowners after PRC statehood, interrupted by CPC land reform.
But after 1949, where was the space for the old aristocracy to survive?
Even the cadres of the CPC are not aristocrats. They went from muddy farm labourers to suits in short order, and were no aristocracy’s noble temperament at all. / 中共建政才70多年,從泥腿子洗腳上岸才幾天呀?中共領導層上一代誰不是農民出身?這麼短的時間如何產生貴族?
2023 07 29 13 26d
China went through a Maoist communist revolution. Who calls himself a fucking aristocrat? He will be sent to the remote countryside to be re-educated by the poor peasants!
As we all know, Xi Jinping once worked as an ordinary peasant labourer in Liangjiahe Village, Yanchuan County, Shaanxi Province.
This happened last month, June 2017. I met this man.(The one on the left)
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Image source: selfie.
Know who he is? You might be thinking that he’s some random Chinese guy.
Okay, I’ll tell his name. Carl Pei.
Haven’t heard of his name anywhere right?
Okay, heard of this mobile company?
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Yes, it’s Oneplus. He’s one of the two co-founders of that company. I had met him in Bangalore, one plus experience showroom when he was traveling around for one plus 5 promotion.
One plus, being one of the best mobile company in the world, after Apple and Samsung he hasn’t made himself famous. In the generation where people become entrepreneurs to gain name and fame, this guy
has no Wikipedia page about himself
He doesn’t own a mansion. He rents an AirBNB room for a month and keeps travelling.
He doesn’t own any posh cars. Travels only in Uber.
He wears one plain black round neck t-shirt.
He was sitting like he was one among us and talking about one plus phones.
Not rude, not loud, spoke softly.
He posed with everyone who asked for a selfie.
He had also arranged for free, unlimited ice cream, (Häagen Dazs!!!!) at that event.
It was such a nice experience. 🙂
Best thing was, the next day was my birthday. 🙂
American Hedge Fund CEO Moves Entire Company to China in 2023
In today’s video we share the story of Taylor Ogan of Snow Bull Capital and why he moved his hedge fund from the US to China and is still optimistic about Chinese Innovation in 2023.
As a teenager in the late 80s there was this show on TV called Roseanne.
2023 07 29 13 37
(Source: ABC Television)
I watched a few episodes but had very little interest in these middle-aged (aka “OLD”) people deal with their rebellious teenagers and unending money problems. The TV family was struggling, but I didn’t think they were poor. The parents worked. They owned their house. They seemed like a normal family with a big helping of TV drama and family dysfunction. As a teenager, I thought my family was doing just fine.
My parents owned their 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom house with a mortgage, of course. I had my own room. My brother had his own room and bathroom.
At 16, I was given my family’s beater, a Ford sedan, to drive. When the backseat caught on fire due to a faulty muffler, I used my birthday and Christmas money and my parents chipped in to buy a used Japanese sports car. It wasn’t fast but it was cool. How did my parents afford car insurance for a new teenage driver? More on that later.
I was a straight A student and had been accepted to a top in-state college. I got a mix of scholarships, grants and loans, but it didn’t matter. My parents made up any financial shortfalls and gave me $300/month allowance for food/groceries/gas which was way more than I needed. Where did they get the money? Not my problem.
30 years later, Roseanne has been rebooted (now called The Conners), and I start watching the show with more interest. Now I am now middle-aged with teenagers, but my life looks nothing like theirs. I semi-retired at 40. I’m wealthier than I ever thought possible. My kids (so far) have stayed out of trouble. They attend elite private high schools. We travel the world. I own both of my dream cars. I have no neurotic family members.
I start having flashbacks about the show’s original storyline and my own life at the time, and I realized that my childhood was closer to the Conner’s than I thought. Like the Conners, my family appeared to be middle class on the surface (i.e., homeowners with good jobs), but my parents were always struggling financially in large part because they were helping less fortunate/capable family members. My parents bought their house when I was born, and the house was the center of their financial and emotional well-being. They lived there my entire life. All important family gatherings were held there.
My mother worked as a waitress and my dad was a door-to-door salesman. His clientele were restaurant and bar patrons in rough neighborhoods. They worked a lot. They argued a lot—probably about money.
As a young child, I would accompany my mother at the diner since childcare was an issue. I sat quietly in a booth while she worked her shift. When I got older (5th grade), I walked home after school to an empty house. The key was under the doormat. I did homework and watched TV.
Unlike my kids now who have enrichment programs, private tutors, private coaches, private college counselors, and of course highly involved (borderline helicopter) parents, I did all my school work and college applications on my own.
Throughout our lives, my parents tapped into home equity to get out of financial jams. They refinanced the house to put me through college. My dad would regularly run up 6 figures of credit card debt with up to 30% interest. They refinanced the house repeatedly with mortgage rates > 10%.
My parents had very little savings and never invested a cent in stocks or mutual funds. There were no IRAs, 401Ks, etc. They were on social security and Medicare later in life.
Whenever they came into some money, they would blow it—usually by bailing out a relative in trouble, sometimes by making a bad investment. They each at some point bought a junker “dream” car that turned into a money pit. My dad bought a “classic” Mercedes and my mother bought a “classic” MG. Both were worthless.
I was on the free school lunch program, but it never occurred to me that it was income based. I just thought lunch was included.
We owned a working TV which sat on top of a non-working TV. If you’re a fan of Jeff Foxworthy, you know what that means.
I started driving when I was 16, but I didn’t know I had no insurance until I started insuring myself in college. My parents happily let me drive without insurance.
We also didn’t have any health insurance. Seeing the doctor, dentist, optometrist were on an as-needed basis. Something better be broken. Forget about preventative care except for the free eye and dental exams I received at school. I didn’t know health insurance was a societal norm until I got my first job out of college.
I got all my immunizations at the free county clinic. I also had my cavities treated for free by dental students at a local university during special “low income” days.
I was the first in my family to get braces after the school nurse identified a speech impediment due to crooked teeth. My mother actually protested, “Does a boy really need straight teeth?” I wasn’t planning to enter any beauty pageants, but I had some really gnarly teeth.
I was a good student, so I needed tools of the trade. I got 20-year-old hand me down encyclopedias for my studies. It saved me trips to the library and photocopying money. The library encyclopedias weren’t much newer.
Even though I had my own bedroom, we had a revolving door of aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents living with us, sleeping in the living room for months at at time. It was not a large house; it was often full of people.
When the relatives did move out, my parents subsidized their relatives’ lifestyles. My parents paid for rent, food, cars, kids’ college expenses.
While my own life has been drama free, there was no shortage of drama around. My half-brother came to live with us when I was 10 and he was 19. He had a drinking problem early in life. He went to a “lesser” college because of a girl. They eloped and when they couldn’t make if financially, they had to move back home; this happened several times. The last time it happened, it became a permanent move, with a kid in tow. He’s doing well now, and he inherited our parents’ house.
Some family members had out-of-wedlock kids and interracial marriages (maybe not a big deal today but not as common back then). I had an aunt who married a husband who had a second family in a foreign country (she was a gullible person and easily conned). She had a kid with him, then found out she was the second wife, and he moved his first family to the US to be with them. I had another aunt who we all thought had “made it” because she married into a super wealthy family. She and her husband were kidnapped and held for ransom (and murdered).
Many aunts and uncles had mental health issues that went undiagnosed. They were known as the crazy family members, but still family. They led their lives suffering and really not knowing or understanding. They were unemployable. They might temporarily act normal but could never hold down jobs and most relationships. My parents helped them as best as they could. Ironically, they outlived my parents. and their kids support them. Their kids can support them because my parents helped support their kids.
There were a lot of arguments between my parents, siblings, in-laws, etc. Small house. lots of people, mental illness, it was inevitable. I mostly stayed out of it. Sometimes people made bone-headed choices (aka mistakes) and another family member would bail them out. I didn’t like it. I couldn’t understand it. But I accepted it.
Most of all, my parents’ dining room/kitchen looked just like the Connner’s. It was cheap looking. It was small and cluttered. It was usually filled with a large, close but sometimes dysfunctional family. The room still looks the same except the family has dispersed after my parents passed away.
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(Source: ABC Television)
It helped me immensely to grow up with some challenging circumstances and complex family dynamics but never really having the stigma of being poor. Because I lived with my less fortunate family members, I always thought I was doing all right. I grew up in a solidly middle class neighborhood and felt like I had everything my friends had (minus the Izod shirts, Member’s Only jackets and Jordache Jeans). My parents did a great job of maintaining an illusion of middle class stability while building a mountain of debt. It wasn’t until college that I began to even have a glimpse of the structural problems with my parents and their extended family. Before that, everything was just “normal” to me.
As a I started my own journey of financial obligations (e.g., student loans, car loans, credit cards, etc.) and eventual financial independence, I realized all the challenges but also missed opportunities my parents encountered. It’s heartbreaking to think the lives they could have led had they just had someone guiding them and perhaps if they had fewer relatives draining their resources. They worked hard their entire lives but enjoyed few luxuries. They were able to hold onto the house through the ups and towns, raise financially independent kids (it took my brother a bit longer), and help their family members, so that does count for something. In that sense, all our lives are better than the Conner’s since they seemed to be stuck in an endless loop of misery (even 30 years later).
I developed a strong interest in personal finance. I semi-retired at 40 due to diligent saving and investing. Although my family is much smaller, it remains central to my life. Rather than maximize income, I focus on optimizing my time. How do I make enough money while maximizing my time with my wife and kids.? My wife and I both work from home, and we’ve been present at every of one our kids’ milestones and events (e.g., sports games, talent shows, scouting, plays, etc.). We take a lot of family vacations. Other than our kids’ private schools, we keep our expenses low. Financial security has driven my choices but the display of wealth or excessive consumption is anathema to me. I strive to be financially savvy enough to avoid stupid mistakes and financially wealthy enough to survive the inevitable mishap.
China is not a dictatorship because Xi Jinping cannot make any major decisions without first discussing them with the seven-member politburo.
You have no idea about how societies collapse; it is not about wasting public money.
It is about a significant portion of the population not having ownership over any assets, such as land, so they have no interest in social stability. Most importantly, they feel that the door is closed to their owning any assets.
So they feel the only way out is to overthrow the current system.
Any Chinese citizen can apply to join the Communist Party; usually they will be rejected on the first application. Xi was rejected nine times before being accepted the tenth time.
Chuck Roast Soup
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Ingredients
1 (3 1/2 pound) chuck roast
2 (46 ounce) cans tomato juice
1 package frozen mixed vegetables
1 large onion, finely chopped
2 stalks celery, finely chopped
1/2 cup okra, chopped
1/2 cup chopped parsley
Tabasco sauce to taste
Salt to taste
1 cup spaghetti, broken into small pieces
Instructions
Cut chuck roast into small pieces, removing all gristle and fat. Place in a very large pot and add all ingredients except spaghetti. Cover and simmer slowly for 3 hours.
During the Cold War, the Soviet Union believed that the downtown Pentagon building was a top-secret meeting room.
They claimed this because they saw government officials entering and exiting the building at the same time through the satellite images available to them.
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They believed it only ended up discovering something completely different:
The “secret” building was a kind of hot dog kiosk for employees.
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Our Eye-Opening 24 Hours in CHINA in 2023 (has Shanghai changed?)
We visited Shanghai for the first time in 2016 and have since been there three times. However, our last visit was in 2018, and A LOT has happened since then, in the world overall but in China especially.
The battle for Osowiec Fortress
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On August 6th,1915, over 7,000 German soldiers surrounded Osowiec Fortress. The Fortress was built in the 19th century on a strategic hotspot near the river Biebrza, in what is now Poland,but back then was part of the Russian Empire.
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It was a formidable fortress, but only 900 Russian soldiers defended it against 7,000 advancing German troops. After months of trying to get the soldiers to surrender, the Germans launched a Chlorine and Bromine Gas attack against the fortress, followed by an artillery bombardment.
Since the Russian soldiers were just simple militia, they had no protection and suffered horrendous casualties from the gas. As the 7,000 thousand German troops advanced against the fort, they were met with a terrifying sight.
The hundred or so Russian troops who had survived the gas attack charged the German soldiers covered in blood and chemical burns, and coughing up bits of their melted lungs. The Chlorine gas mix with the moisture in their lungs turning it to Hydrochloric Acid.
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With bloody cloths wrapped their melting faces they charged the German soldiers. The German troops thought the dead where coming at them and ran screaming in terror. As the horrified Germans retreated they got caught in their own barbwire traps, allowing the Russians to pick them off with ease.
They didn’t manage to hold the fortress, but the remaining Russian soldiers were able to destroy the fort before retreating to safety. The battle for Osowiec Fortress was so horrific for the advancing German army, it went on to become known as the Attack of the Dead Men.
The Yanks want to get involved in the third Chinese Civil War, fine, it’s the Yanks we want to fight.
Hainan Island incident, U.S. bombs Chinese embassy in FRY …… Wait, the Chinese haven’t had a chance to get their revenge yet.
Revenge is a dish best served cold.
U.S. naval, ground and air forces did participate in the 1945~1950 chinese Civil war in China.
There were U.S. naval bases in Tsingtao, Shanghai and Taiwan.
U.S. troops were stationed in Peiping, Tientsin, Tangshan, Chinwangtao, Tsingtao, Shanghai and Nanking.
The U.S. air force controlled all of China’s air space and took aerial photographs of all China’s strategic areas for military maps.
At the town of Anping near Peiping, at Chiutai near Changchun, at Tangshan and in the Eastern Shantung Peninsula, U.S. troops and other military personnel clashed with the People’s Liberation Army and on several occasions were captured.
Chennault’s air fleet took an extensive part in the chinese civil war.
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Besides transporting troops for Chiang Kai-shek, the U.S. air force bombed and sank the cruiser Chungking, which had mutinied against the Kuomintang.
All these were acts of direct participation in the war.
The Chinese civil war from 1945 to 1950 was apparently started by Chiang Kai-shek, but actually started by the United States.
As stated in Acheson’s Letter, the United States in this last war has given the Kuomintang government material aid to the value of “more than 50 percent” of the latter’s “monetary expenditures” and “furnished the Chinese armies” (meaning the Kuomintang armies) with “military supplies”.
It is a war in which the United States supplies the money and guns and Chiang Kai-shek supplies the men to fight for the United States and slaughter the Chinese people.
All these wars of aggression, together with political, economic and cultural aggression and oppression, have caused the Chinese to hate American imperialism.
Make trouble, fail, make trouble again, fail again . . . till their doom; that is the logic of the American imperialists and all reactionaries over in dealing with the chinese people’s cause, and they will never go against this logic.
CAST AWAY ILLUSIONS, PREPARE FOR STRUGGLE!
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American Imperialism has prepared the conditions for its own doom.
This is a story about how one night in university can destroy your life forever. Danny Santulli was 18-years-old and a freshman at the University of Missouri. In October 2021, Danny was captured on CCTV being blindfolded and being led down a flight of stairs, in an event named “Pledge Dad Reveal Night.”
Danny was made to drink a litre of Vodka straight and by himself. At around 10.55, Danny collapsed and some of the frat members carried him to a sofa. At around midnight Danny was captured on CCTV sliding off the sofa and shortly after he was found unconscious with blue lips.
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Shockingly, instead of calling an ambulance for Danny the frat members piled him into a car dropping him on the way. They drove him to hospital, but at this point he was in cardiac arrest. He had to be resuscitated and spent the next 6 weeks in intensive care.
Prior to this evening Danny had been left needing stiches and crutches, after he’d been forced to climb inside a bin with broken glass inside. Two nights before the night in question, he broke down in tears on the phone to his sister and told her about how stressed he felt about the pledges.
His family had begged him to quit the pledge, but he didn’t want to be ridiculed. This is Danny now, in the picture BELOW.
He will need full time care for the rest of his life.
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Michio Kaku BREAKS DOWN Into Tears: “They Lied To Us For 92 Years!”
In a world shrouded by secrets and concealed truths, one man’s shocking revelation is changing everything we thought we knew about our universe. Prepare to witness the unraveling of a century-long deception that has kept humanity in the dark for 92 years. Dr. Michio Kaku has now exposed a breathtaking reality about the origin of our universe, one that starkly opposes the Big Bang theory. But how exactly does this discovery change our understanding of the Big Bang? And what does the discovery of this ancient galaxy mean for our understanding of the universe?
BEIJING: I moved to China in October 2010 and from the perspective of Western popular opinion that’s very absurd. Much of the West looks at China in a very negative way and they believe it odd people will stay in the country for a long time.
Most of my family and friends back in my native country are quick to post anti-China stories on their Social Media sites and they do so without confirming the veracity of the articles through me.
But that’s alright, I’ve gotten accustomed to it. Sometimes, I’ll read articles in the media about China and wonder if the author is an aspiring fiction book writer.
The basic themes are: China is collapsing, its economy is crashing, war against China is imminent and Covid has destroyed China.
But if such tales were true how did China become the world leader in attracting inbound Foreign Direct Investments? The country is on pace to lure in over US$160bn this year.
Major Wall Street and London banks and investment firms including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and HSBC have poured in huge money into China this year and they have published reports forecasting the nation’s economy will stay strong.
Hence the narrative that China’s economy will crash is just noise and nothing more. As such the other claims are proven wrong.
Wealthy bankers do not intentionally make silly investments and conduct extensive research before choosing where to invest.
The Western countries appear to have been hardest hit by the Covid pandemic so it’s very odd they see China as the nation that will crack under the public health crisis.
Let the numbers speak for themselves. The US has had hundreds of thousands of people die from Covid while only a few thousand died from the virus in China.
The virus has adversely impacting everyone’s lives and hopefully the social distancing measures and wearing face masks’ requirements can finally end next year.
The regulations are a real nuisance and not enjoying the rights to travel has bothered me a lot. Nevertheless, these restrictions will not spell the death knell for China.
The Chinese government is not on the verge of collapse either. The economy is running smoothly and social stability remains secured.
Accordingly, my opinion that China is doing fine and will continue to do so will be an unpopular viewpoint for the next few years in the West.
But I care very little about following pop culture sentiments. That’s just not who I am.
As reported by the Global Times:
“Regardless of their attitude toward China, most US and other Western elites tend to believe that China's GDP will surpass that of the US in a decade or less, and most of them also believe that the US' military and technological advantages over China will shrink further as time passes. Although many have claimed that China's stability was achieved through economic growth and controls and tried desperately to search for internal tensions in China, few Western forces believe that China would get out of control politically.”
China has endured many challenges and will prevail. People predicting the nation’s doom are just engaged in fantasy-thinking.
They don’t like China, want the country to fail and therefore concluded that will happen. But their forecasts have been proven false time and again.
A Bullied Student With Vitiligo Is Celebrating Learning To Love Her Skin By Turning It Into Art
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A bullied student with vitiligo is celebrating learning to love her skin by turning it into art making a world map, flowers and even a Van Gogh painting. Ashley Soto, 21, from Orlando in Florida, USA, has found turning her white patches of skin into art has empowered her and helped her to embrace her vitiligo.
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She was diagnosed with the condition that affects one percent of the worlds population, at the age of 12 when a porcelain spot appeared on her neck. Within a year, it had spread to 75% of her body in spots and patches.
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After being asked if she had showered in bleach the teen hid her skin beneath long jumpers and jeans to avoid further ridicule. But now, shes turning her body into art by tracing her vitiligo, making a world map and a beautiful arrangement of flowers to Vincent van Goghs The Starry Night painting.
A nerd is an individual with great intellectual capacity who does well in school, particularly in subjects like mathematics and the sciences. They may not care about socialization. “You don’t want to take that class. It’s full of nerds”.
A geek is a person with a passion for something that isn’t particularly popular with everyone and has very deep knowledge of the subject. “She’s a real anime geek”.
Geek. Loves computers and knows all about them, but no deep general knowledge. Often will wear clothing reflective of their passions. Won’t read anything outside their specialized base.
Nerds become scientists. Geeks become engineers.
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NATO failed in Ukraine against Russia. Now it’s targeting China
Pepe is the star in this show. This is a VERY GOOD discussion. Talking about Europe, and the pivot to China, and the fiasco as it stands.
Some interesting points… The Dangerous trio. HERE at 21:00.
Russians fighting one had behind their backs. HERE at 27:00.
Ukraine war entering a new stage with the Poles and Northern European Proxies. HERE.
Originally Answered: Why can’t African Countries produce cars?
This question should be rephrased to “How many African Countries produce cars?”
There are 54 countries in Africa and more than 10% of the countries manufacture cars though some of them still import engine parts and assemble them in their plants.
MOROCCO – LARAKI
Laraki, a car manufacturer based in Casablanca, Morocco The company designed and manufactured its own range of luxury performance cars and sport models. Larakis are strictly concept cars, custom-built for each customer, and were ranked among the most expensive cars in the world in 2015, priced at over $2- million each.
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Rapper French Montana shows off his Laraki car.
2. TUNISIA – Wallyscar
Competing in the lucrative off-road market, the small but powerful Wallyscar, manufactured in La Marsa, Tunisia, is a relatively new company, founded in 2006. The company is building a strong reputation for affordable, reliable and powerful 4X4s, despite the size of its vehicles, which are similar to Suzuki and Skoda.
According to reports from 2014, the company sells over 600 units a year, predominately in Africa and the Middle East, but also as far as Panama and Europe. The company’s plans include making its sporty, colourful, off-road vehicles more environmentally friendly, as well as trying its luck in international off-road motorsport
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3. UGANDA – KIIRA
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4. NIGERIA – INNOSON
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5. GHANA – KANTANKA
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When India was under British rule, there was a problem there. There were many snakes.
They were so common that it was dangerous to go out. Snakes were everywhere.
The risk of dying from the fatal bite of such a specimen was too great.
Therefore, the government decided that something needed to be done to prevent the snakes from flooding the land.
It was decided to financially reward people who brought in dead snakes. “It’s a win-win situation,” the government thought. People will get the money they need while reducing the snake population.
That went really well for a while.
Under the government’s direction, people dutifully killed snakes in exchange for handsome sums of money.
But people think for their own benefit when the situation permits.
So some enterprising minds decided to breed snakes and then kill them and collect the money for it.
Soon the government realized what these people were doing and immediately stopped the bounty program.
The people who bred the snakes for money decided that the only thing that could be done with their now worthless snakes was to set them free.
As a result, the snake population grew faster than ever before.
This snake effect now also serves as a metaphor for when one state intervenes too much and therefore causes the opposite effect.
Budget travellers can be problematic. There are two types of budget travellers. One is people like me. I don’t have big money, so when I travel I go by train or by low cost airlines, stay in cheaper B&B’s or budget hotels (occasionally in hostels), and eat one meal per day from the grocery.
, relatively wealthy first world tourists that travel to considerably poorer countries and live relying on begging from locals.
Why do countries welcome tourism? Because tourism brings money. George Clooney (or whichever rich person) visits Edinburgh flying in with an Emirates flight (and he clearly books the First Class private cabin) staying at the Balmoral hotel, eating at three Michelin stars restaurants, and visiting the city with a rented limousine: he leaves a lot of money. I fly in with Ryanair, stay in a cheapo B&B with shared bathroom, eat fixed price lunches, shop at Scotmid for dinner, mostly walk and only take a local bus if necessary. But I still bring money.
Begpackers do not bring money, rather they draw money from the local economy. A young American or European tourist visiting India and relying on begging from people that are less privileged than they are to fund their holidays isn’t a budget tourist, they are leeches!
Originally Answered: What is something you hate about the direction society is heading?
Just one thing? I’m a certified middle-aged curmudgeon. I could go on for pages about all the things that are wrong with the way society is going. But I’ll pick just one for this answer, lest I make everyone hate me.
And, ironically, that’s one of the biggest problems with society today: the inability to tell the truth for fear of offending people.
I see this all the time in education.
Before I was a teacher, I spent some time as a special education assistant for a public school in a wealthy suburb of Chicago. It was there that I first saw the lengths teachers and administrators had to go to avoid stating the obvious to a parent, lest that parent get offended and/or threaten to sue the school.
Your child has severe emotional and behavioral disorders and if you, the parent, don’t get some outside help for your kid, your kid is likely to end up in jail. Your child’s problems are beyond the abilities of the school to help at this point.
We could never say that to a parent, no matter how true it was.
I saw it even more when I became a teacher.
If a student has an attitude problem, I can’t just tell the parent, “your kid was giving me attitude.” I have to document exactly what was said, the context, why I felt it was offensive, and what I think should be done about it. Then I have to wait before I tell the parent, and re-read my documentation to make sure it doesn’t sound offensive. Most of the time, when a student is giving me attitude, I know that the student’s parents won’t do anything about it anyway, so why bother documenting it and punishing the student, when it won’t change the behavior? The student often gets that behavior from the parent in the first place.
If a student fails a test, I can’t just tell the parent it’s because their kid was not paying attention in class and spends too much time talking to the people around him and disturbing his classmates. I have to word it in such a way that I sound non-judgmental, which usually means making it sound like the problem was with the way I taught it, not the kid’s complete lack of attention while I was teaching it.
We can never blame the parents for bad parenting or the students for a lack of parental guidance at home, no matter how true it is. So I usually just end up taking the fall for a student’s and parent’s problems.
A student can come to school half-asleep and announce to the class that they went to a midnight screening of a new movie the night before, then fail that day’s assignments, and I can’t tell the parents it’s their fault for letting their kid stay up all night for a movie. That is, I can’t tell the truth.
I’ve had parents tell me that they’re afraid of taking away their child’s video games until the child gets their grades up, because they don’t want the child to be mad at them. Somehow, I’m supposed to avoid telling the truth in that situation: you’re trying to be your child’s friend, not their parent. It’s a good thing if your kid is mad at you sometimes. That’s how the system works.
A few years ago, there was a movement to weigh students in public schools and send the parents a letter if their child was overweight or obese. As a former overweight child (now overweight adult), I thought this was a good idea. Maybe some parents just don’t see it or don’t realize how bad it really is with their child.
So many parents got offended when they got the letters that some school districts quit doing them.
Imagine getting a letter from your child’s school saying that their BMI put them in the “overweight” category for their age and, instead of thinking you need to help your child get healthy, you get offended and criticize the school for telling you the truth.
The schools made a mistake: they told parents the truth about something the parents should know about. Imagine that … telling the truth. No wonder so many parents got offended.
[Honorable Mention]
Derrick Mosley, a 22-year-old man from Portland, tried to rob a gunstore with a baseball bat.
He entered the shop, smashed a glass display case and pulled a handgun from the display.
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The store manager drew his own handgun and ordered Mosley to drop his bat, the newly acquired gun, plus a knife.
He made Mosley lay on the floor, and that was where the police found him when they arrived.
He was charged with first degree robbery and unlawful possession of a firearm, according to the news release.
I guess he learned the hard way that you should never bring a bat to a gunfight.
Just how bad is it in China? If you think it’s bad in China, please watch this
If you know someone who hates China for all the wrong reasons, maybe showing them this video will help.
What was the centrepiece of US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s speech? She said:
China must accept America’s demarcation of the status quo. If it does not respect the boundaries drawn for it by Washington between harmless prosperity and historically consequential technological development, then it should expect to face massive sanctions.
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What does that mean?
Obviously, it means that China must respect the division of labour in the world that the US has drawn for China. China can only be at the low end of the industrial chain, producing cheap household goods and doing some incoming assembly.
If China develops according to this international division of labour, it will be “harmless prosperity” for the United States.
This is the international order that has already formed rules.
If China wants to develop high technology, it is breaking the order and the division of labour in the world. Of course, the United States and the West want to sanction China because China is a “disruptor of the order”.
In the eyes of the Americans, the status quo of the United States and the West at the top of the “food chain”, which was formed after the WWII, is unchangeable. China is at the lower end of the “food chain”, and this is China’s destiny, which the Chinese must accept and must not challenge this order.
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Janet Yellen wasn’t the only one to say this, and Jake Sullivan’s speech put the US’s intentions in what amounted to a direct pick-me-up. He said:
In terms of global economic integration, the United States’ expectations for the stability of the global order have not been realized. The original order of the world is a pyramid structure. Developed countries and developing countries should perform their duties in this pyramid structure and get their own place. This is the stable international order and international division of labor that the United States hopes for.
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Jake Sullivan’s speech was obviously more straightforward. What he meant was that the “food chain” of the world division of labour formed after the WWII was irrevocable, and that both developed and developing countries should play their respective roles and should not try to change it.
That is to say, the financial hegemony, scientific and technological hegemony and military hegemony of the developed countries are the results of the WWII division of labour, and the production of cheap commodities by the developing countries is likewise the result of the WWII division of labour. This world economic order is unchangeable and cannot be challenged.
The speeches of Jake Sullivan and Janet Yellen actually revealed the U.S. government’s understanding of China. That is, China should accept the post-WWII international division of labour and should not challenge this order.
China is now developing the whole industrial chain, and will also invest in high technology, and will also step up investment in military construction and military equipment. These are all disruptions to the existing order, which the United States certainly cannot tolerate.
Other countries are either technologically advanced but have far fewer people than the US, or have large populations but are far less technologically advanced than the US, and they have nothing to compare with the US.
Only China has a population several times larger than the US, and the technology is still catching up, and the size of the economy is getting closer.
With an economic scale, it can support a huge and advanced army, and it will have a strong ability to export culture.
Therefore, China is indeed the only country on earth that may pose a “threat” to “America First”.
If “America First” cannot be preserved, can “Eurocentrism” or “Americacentrism” and “white supremacy” still survive? China is therefore a “threat” to the West as a whole.
But China is an opportunity for Asia. Whether Asians can be on an equal footing with Westerners depends on whether China can rise smoothly.
Gone are the days when whites were at the top of the “international caste system” and coloured people were at the bottom.
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Creamy Chicken and Wild Rice Soup
Fall is officially here. Now is a great time to try out some hearty autumn dishes like chicken and wild rice soup. Our recipe is rich and creamy. You can serve it as an appetizer if you want, but it’s filling enough to stand on its own as an entrée. This recipe stands out from the rest because it calls for freshly roasted chicken, plenty of delicious vegetables, and a nice dollop of plain Greek Yogurt. Adding yogurt, instead of cream, for example, helps to make this soup extremely flavorful but also relatively light, calorie-wise.
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Ingredients
1 deli-roasted chicken, about 2 1/2 pounds
6 cups water
2 medium carrots, ends trimmed and cut into chunks
1 small rib celery, cut into chunks
1/2 teaspoon whole black peppercorns
1 small bay leaf
1 tablespoon butter
1/2 cup chopped yellow onion
1/3 cup uncooked wild rice*
1/2 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup Cabot 2% Plain Greek Yogurt or Cabot Plain Greek Yogurt
2 tablespoons cornstarch
2 teaspoons chopped fresh thyme leaves
1/4 teaspoon salt, or more to taste
1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper, or more to taste
* You can reduce the cooking time with “quick-cooking” wild rice, which is done in about 15 minutes, or substitute another flavorful rice, such as brown basmati.
Instructions
Pull off meat from chicken, placing skin, bones and any hot or solidified juices in large saucepan. Dice 2 cups of chicken meat, saving rest for another use, and set aside in refrigerator.
Add water, carrots, celery, peppercorns and bay leaf to saucepan; bring to boil over high heat, then reduce heat to maintain simmer. Cover pan and cook broth for one hour.
Pour broth through strainer set over large bowl, pressing on solids to extract all broth. Discard solids.
Melt butter in empty saucepan. Add onions and cook, stirring, for about 3 minutes or until onion is tender and just beginning to brown.
Pour in strained broth. Add wild rice, bring to simmer and cook covered for 40 to 50 minutes or until rice is tender.
In small bowl, whisk together heavy cream, yogurt and cornstarch until completely smooth with no small lumps; stir mixture into pot and continue stirring until soup thickens and returns to simmer. Add thyme, salt, pepper and 2 cups of reserved diced chicken.
Taste soup, adding additional salt and pepper if needed. Stir until heated through and serve.
Lockheed Martin, the main contractor, and manufacturer of the F-35 fifth-generation fighter, is bracing for a significant financial hit in 2023. Production issues have led to a shortfall of about 50 aircraft, which is expected to cost the firm hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.
The production hiccup represents over a third of the total F-35 output and exceeds the entire annual order from the U.S. Air Force, which usually stands at around 48 aircraft. Initially, Lockheed Martin had plans to deliver between 147 and 153 F-35s to all clients in 2023. However, the implementation of upgrades under the Technology Refresh 3 [TR 3] program has been fraught with significant challenges.
J-20 production is booming
News of this drastic drop in F-35 production comes amidst reports of China’s rapid expansion of its own fifth-generation fighter production, exceeding 120 aircraft per year. The F-35 and China’s J-20 are the only two fighters of their generation currently in production and deployed at the squadron level.
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Both aircraft sit at the pinnacle of aviation technology with their advanced features and sophistication. However, the J-20, a larger twin-engine fighter, is more attuned to long-range missions and air-to-air combat.
The F-35 Block 4 upgrade will elevate the internal air-to-air missile capacity of the F-35A and F-35C variants from four to six missiles. This narrows the gap with the J-20, which can reportedly carry up to eight missiles in its more spacious weapons bays. Initially, the first TR-3 F-35s were slated to enter service in April, but unforeseen obstacles have pushed this date back to December.
The F-35 program has experienced a series of setbacks, drawing criticism from both military and civilian leaders. One of the most notable issues since early 2022 has been the underperformance of the F135 engine, which has resulted in billions of dollars in additional operational costs for the American fleet alone and likely more for international operators as most F-35s are built for export.
Foreign operators have echoed these sentiments. The South Korean National Assembly’s National Defence Committee disclosed in October 2022 that the country’s F-35s had experienced 234 flaws in 18 months from January 2021 to June 2022. These included 172 incidents rendering the aircraft non-operational and 62 cases where specific missions could not be performed. Despite hopes for improvement, the first half of 2022 saw little change in these figures.
Despite these issues, the U.S. and its allies face a conundrum. There is a noticeable lack of NATO-compatible fifth-generation fighters, leaving them with limited options. Older fourth-generation fighters are likely to struggle against advanced aircraft like China’s J-20, the forthcoming FC-31 naval fighter, and even Russia’s slightly less stealthy Su-57.
Along with the much-discussed dismissal of Qin Gang as foreign minister, another important dismissal in July was Yi Gang as the 12th governor of the People’s Bank of China.
Yi Gang was widely criticized with some of the reasons being:
He was educated in the US, and his family continues to live in the US, and he was more considerate of US interests than Chinese interests;
He supported western globalist interests instead of Chinese national interests, and did not have enough awareness that the US and China are fighting a full-spectrum cold war;
He did not take advantage of the high inflation in the US to make the Chinese yuan a more powerful currency globally and instead lowered Chinese interest rates, helping the US Fed to bring more US dollars back to the US;
He missed multiple strategic opportunities by not changing more Chinese assets into gold, and did not move out of the US dollar fast enough.
Some of the criticism of Yi Gang came from Pan Gongsheng who was party secretary at the People’s Bank of China, and has now been appointed as Yi Gang’s replacement as the 13th governor of the People’s Bank of China. When Janet Yellen visited China in July, she met with Pan Gongsheng.
The likely outcome of this appointment is that Chinese currency and foreign exchange policy is likely to become more sharply aggressive, starting with the August BRICS meeting in South Africa.
In order to make a stronger impression and announcement at the BRICS meeting, where more members will be admitted, and as the most economically powerful member of BRICS, China will have to make some big moves on this front. Pan Gongsheng is likely make major moves for this major event, which all of the developing world and France are watching closely.
This didn’t happen to me, but it happened to a friend.
My friend Tony lived paycheck to paycheck in assorted jobs. He inherited $50,000 when his grandmother passed away. His friends convinced him to invest the money rather than spend it on a new car, vacations, etc., and eventually he agreed. Another friend, Jack, who worked in finance, convinced him to put the $50,000 into Cisco stock. This was back in April 2000, just before the tech bubble burst, and Cisco was at its all-time high, around $75 a share. Then the bubble burst, and the stock crashed.
Two and a half years later, we were all at a wedding of a mutual friend, and the friend who recommended Cisco was very embarrassed and apologized profusely for his recommendation.
Tony: What do you mean? Why are you sorry you made that recommendation?
Jack: Because the stock tanked right after you invested, and it’s continued to go down and down; your $50,000 investment is now probably worth $6000 or $7000. Haven’t you looked at your statements?
Tony: Sure, I’ve looked at the statements; it’s up to about $83,000! It’s doing great!
Jack: You must have misread your statement; maybe it said $8300? When was that statement?
Tony: Maybe two weeks ago, and I’m sure it said $83,000!
Jack: That’s impossible!
After the reception we all went back to Tony’s apartment and Tony pulled out his last statement, which indeed did say $83,000!
Then we saw why; Tony bought the “wrong” stock!
Jack had told him to buy Cisco (the high tech company), and Tony bought Sysco (the food distribution company); both stocks are pronounced exactly the same. While Cisco crashed, Sysco did great!
So that was a very happy ‘mistake’ that Tony made!
China has had a continuous and steady rule of the Communist Party of China
It has always been Country & Party First, Individual Next
For China the Leadership and Governance was always there. Always Strong and entirely spread across the Nation.
All it required was an Economic Transition Which Visionary leaders like Deng and later Xi Jingping have been able to fulfil to a massive extent.
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From 1931 in many cases to 2022 – for almost 91 years you have had a very strong and in general unified Political System that has never grown weak mainly due to a Unified Populace (90% Han Chinese) and an Ancient 5000 year old Civilization that was never interrupted too much.
So as i said – China just needed to make some Economic Tweaks and change from a Socialist Communist Country to a Capocracy.
Russia is much different
To begin with – the Entire Political System was overhauled – from Tsars to CPSU to Presidential Democracy to Presidential Autocracy
Already the CPSU was mainly a fractured body loaded with inefficiency and where Meritocracy was replaced by Party Loyalty and Political Relationships and even Family Backgrounds.
Now suddenly in 1991 – A Country that had never voted in the last 1000 years of its life from the Tsars to the CPSU now suddenly began to develop a democracy!!!
It resulted in the Worst form of Oligarchy where a Bunch of Oligarchs, Dolugraki Mafia etc took control of the Soviet Economy and its Resources.
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Unlike China – Putin who came in 2000 first had to consolidate the entire Political System. He started off as being a representative of the Oligarchs which is why Clinton and Bush considered him to be basically a Zelensky 1.0
However by 2007 – Putin began to emerge as one of the strongest men in Russia slowly abandoning the Oligarchs and consolidating the Military and Intelligence and building back Russia.
Today after15 years – Putin has a relatively STRONG Political Structure. Basically a Presidential Autocracy.
To build a Political Structure of such Strength and use it to build a Military Force – PUTIN had to sacrifice the Economy to the Oligarchs and use their money for building the Political and Military Strength of Russia
So Today – Russia is at Level Zero when it comes to Economy
Good News is – Russia is now in the same stage that China was in 1982 when Deng Xiaoping began his Economic Reforms.
Today Putin is in full control of Russia and is very powerful Politically and Militarily.
This is the time to begin Economic Reforms and this is also a perfect time.
He has Chinas support
He can start building Local Russian Brands and converting Military Technology to Civilian Technology
He can slowly adopt the Chinese method of Manufacture for which he can import the Skilled Labor from China and also train the people of Russia.
He can slowly crush the Oligarchs and Nationalize their Assets. I am sure that is the long term plan. Now that the Oligarchs are posion in Foreign Countries like US or UK or Canada or Australia – Putin will soon go after them and take charge of all their Assets that they got for a throwaway price in 1991–1999
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Bad News is Putin is 70 Years Old
And unlike Xi and the CPC – Putin is the Autocratic President so he needs a very strong Successor and groom him so that tomorrow the Successor (Someone of around 40–45 years) can continue Putins success and take Russia to newer Heights.
“Utterly Horrifying” Battles Along Front Lines as Russia Smashes Ukraine and their new NATO Heavy Armor
Heart-breaking scenes of dead Ukrainian soldiers and smashed/blown-up NATO Armor are emerging from the battlefields of Ukraine as the Russian Army makes minced-meat out of Ukraine’s “Counter-Offensive” despite all its shiny new NATO gear.
While this radio show and web site support Russia on the political level, there is also the human level which is part and parcel to this conflict. I candidly admit I find it heartbreaking to see such death and destruction; even when it is Ukrainian troops.
Sadly, I understand that it __has__ to be this way, but it is still just emotionally terrible to see such carnage.
I want the best outcome for the people.
Russia has at least 4 times the artillery of Ukraine and 10 times the ammunition.
We have run out of normal ammunition to send Ukraine, so now send them cluster bombs in desperation, debasing ourselves with no change to the outcome.
Ukraine should just surrender. They have no chance at all to defeat Russia; they NEVER had any chance. To continue this slaughter is just useless.
A Nice Find! A 1967 Porsche 911S Barn Find
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You know, we all dream of finding our classic dream ride in a barn somewhere. Well, recently Nick Zabrecky recently had his dreams come true, and today we get a look at his 1967 Porsche 911S Barn Find. Nick Zabrecky, of LBI Limited, found this legendary ride a friend had in his barn, where it had been parked for years.
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The ride was a bit rusty from years of sitting, and had a small dent in the rear. The ride other than that looked to be in good shape, and after negotiating a deal, Zabrecky was able to purchase the car from his friend.
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The ride can be seen in the images below, and Nick hopes to restore it one of these days. Check out the ride in the images and speak your mind on it after the jump.
People weren’t having babies and leaders feared a population collapse. The infamous dictator, Ceausescu, made a new draconian policy “Degree 770”.
It banned contraception and abortion. Schools then began evangelizing the importance of motherhood. Families began putting more pressure on women to have children.
This led to a rapid uptick in unwanted babies. Orphanages overflowed with children. Babies were being abandoned on street corners.
Years later, there was a rapid uptick in crime. Many of those children grew up without stable homes, living on the streets and in subway stations, huffing paint. They later resorted to theft, prostitution, and became ensnared in poverty.
And, in a bitter political irony, it was this very demographic that was responsible for Ceausescu’s downfall in 1989.
Beyond any talk of abortion, this moment in time speaks to the importance of people living the life they want to live. For generations, our parents and grandparents were pressured to live within narrow confines and fill the shoes their own parents left behind.
Happiness necessitates you disappoint people every now and then. Don’t let outside forces pressure you into a path that you don’t genuinely want.
If you don’t want to do something, say no.
Don’t get so caught up in pleasing people and conforming to expectations. You do you.
SAN DIEGO — The White House has decided it will bar Hong Kong’s top government official from attending a major economic summit in the United States this fall, according to three U.S. officials familiar with the matter, in the latest test of President Biden’s bid to reset relations with China.
The summit in questions is the yearly meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) to which 21 Pacific Rim entities belong. China, Taiwan (Chinese Taipan) and Hong Kong are members since 1991. The location of the summit rotates through the membership entities.
Chief Executive John Lee, along with 10 other Hong Kong and Chinese officials, was placed under sanctions by Washington in 2020 after implementing a national security law, imposed by Beijing, that enabled the targeting of pro-democracy leaders, tarnished the reputation of the courts and earned international condemnation as leaders sought to silence dissent.
Lee, then Hong Kong’s security chief, was elevated last year to chief executive, handpicked by Beijing to continue what critics say is a broader campaign of repression in the once-semiautonomous city.
Let me first take issue with the description of the effects of the national security law, specifically the claim that it ‘tarnished the reputation of the courts’.
Courts do not make laws but use the law to make judgments. How then could a new law or a change of a law have tarnished the courts?
A recent judgment by the a Hong Kong court proves that the Hong Kong security law has not done that at all.
The official hymn of Hong Kong is the Chinese national anthem “March of the Volunteers”. After the riots in Hong Kong which led to the implementation of the national security law some protest backers came up with a new one called “Glory to Hong Kong”. (They probably consulted with Bandera followers who suggested ‘Slava Ukraini’ which means ‘Glory to Ukraine’.
Searching Google and some other such service for `Hong Kong national anthem’ brings up the protester hymn. This has led to some embarrassing moments when it was unintentionally played at international sport events.
Any use of the song in Hong Kong is prohibited and can lead to criminal prosecution. But the justice department in Hong Kong wanted to add a civil injunction against any one who makes the protest song available.
But a judge, hand-selected by Lee for national security issues, took the new law down:
A Hong Kong court has dismissed the justice secretary’s request to ban the promotion of a protest song popular during the 2019 anti-government unrest, questioning the effectiveness of the move.
In blocking the injunction bid, the High Court on Friday said the publication and distribution of “Glory to Hong Kong” was already punishable under existing laws, adding a ban might not compel internet search giant Google and other technology firms to take down the tune. … Justice minister Paul Lam Ting-kwok lodged the application last month in a bid to bar anyone from promoting the protest tune through “broadcasting, performing, printing, publishing, selling, offering for sale, distributing, disseminating, displaying or reproducing in any way”.
Authorities believed the ban could provide greater leverage in demanding that internet service providers remove content related to the song.
But Mr Justice Anthony Chan Kin-keung said in his 30-page judgment that the government’s expectations were misplaced. … While acknowledging Lee’s view that the song would undermine national security if it were allowed to spread further, Chan rejected the argument that the court should defer to the executive branch on the merits of the intended ban just because it related to the country’s safety.
“It is too sweeping a statement,” he said. “Here, the court is asked to exercise its exceptional powers which affect innocent third parties. The court cannot abdicate its responsibilities.”
Chan pointed to the city’s “extensive and robust” criminal law system in questioning the effectiveness of a civil injunction in deterring offences.
Now again, has the new national security law in Hong Kong really ‘tarnished the reputation of the courts’?
To me its seems it has not. In fact the court ruled against a misuse of the ‘national security’ argument in much sharper form than U.S. courts would probably do.
It was the Washington Post which, by making the claim, actually tried to ‘tarnish the reputation of the courts’ in Hong Kong.
That Chief Executive John Lee was put under U.S. sanction is one of the typical abuses U.S. foreign policies create. It is also not the real reason for keeping him away from the APEC summit.
The snub by the United States, which in November will host the annual summit of Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders in San Francisco, comes in the midst of a tenuous thaw in the two powers’ frosty bilateral relationship. It could, some analysts say, induce Chinese leader Xi Jinping to skip the APEC summit — where a meeting with Biden has been anticipated.
If Biden, as the Washington Post‘s opening claimed, really has made a bid to reset relations with China, he would not have taken such a step. One does not try to find better relations by constantly acting against the interests of the other side.
To keep Lee away from the summit is one of the typical kindergarten moves the Biden administration is becoming famous for. The cumulation of such moves under Blinken and Biden has created a strong block of countries that stand united in opposition to U.S. policies and to a large number of the rest of the world developing more sympathy for them.
As Kishore Mahbubani once told his listeners during a speech in Harvard:
The era of western domination of world history was a 200 year aberration, it’s coming to an end.
As a result of that you’ve got to learn to understand non-western perspectives in the world.”
“As someone who travels to 30, 40 countries a year, when I come to the US and I go to my hotel room and turn on the TV, I feel like I’ve been cut off from the rest of the world.
The insularity of the American discourse is actually frightening …
It is time for the U.S. to grow up.
Posted by b on July 29, 2023 at 16:21 UTC | Permalink
My (at the time) 75 yr old grandfather, ex Mustang, Spitfire and Typhoon pilot and post war paratrooper was living in a small market town in East Anglia. The house was a nice bungalow backing onto the golf course where he played. He was an imposing figure having boxed and played rugby in his youth and he had seen and experienced things during the war that no man or woman should ever see. So, when he came home from the golf club and found two heroin addled junkie burglars in his hallway, he wasn’t about to be intimidated. Over Sunday lunch a couple of days later he described punching one in the face, breaking his nose. He then grabbed his sword from the umbrella stand and chased the other one out of the front door and down the street. He returned to literally kick the other one out of the house and down the garden path.
When the police attended they were able to identify the burglars from DNA due to the blood that they had left behind.
My grandfather was commended for his help in catching and convicting the aforementioned scumbags but was also given some friendly advice concerning his attempts to run through one of them with his sword!
He died a few years later and I miss him every day.
Washington Post Still Covers Up U.S. War Crimes And Use Of Biological Weapons
The Washington Post is still covering up U.S. war crimes.
Seiichi Morimura, a Japanese writer who helped force a reckoning upon his country with his 1981 exposé of Unit 731, a secret biological warfare branch of the Imperial Army that subjected thousands of people in occupied China to sadistic medical experiments during World War II, died July 24 at a hospital in Tokyo. He was 90.
Morimura’s book sold astonishingly well even when it was unusual to confronted people in Japan with the imperial crimes of their nation.
Unit 731 was at its time only comparable to some Nazi doctors who widely experimented on humans:
At a time when Japanese textbooks often minimized atrocities committed by Japan during the war, Mr. Morimura interviewed dozens of veterans of Unit 731 and documented in harrowing detail the conduct of the operation, which was established in 1938 near the Chinese city of Harbin by Japanese medical officer Shiro Ishii.
Disguised as an epidemic prevention and water purification department, the unit functioned through the end of the war as a testing ground for agents of biological warfare. Mr. Morimura’s work helped prompt more investigations in the 1980s and 1990s, which in turn led to a court case that further revealed the extent of the atrocities.
The perpetrators included many respected Japanese physicians. Thousands of people — mainly Chinese, but also Koreans, Russians and prisoners of eight total nationalities, according to Mr. Morimura — endured medical experiments that have been compared to those of Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.
Victims, referred to in Japanese as “marutas,” or wooden logs, were infected with typhus, typhoid, cholera, anthrax and the plague with the goal of perfecting biological weapons. Some prisoners were then vivisected without anesthetic so that researchers could observe the effects of the disease on the human body.
“I cut him open from the chest to the stomach, and he screamed terribly, and his face was all twisted in agony. He made this unimaginable sound, he was screaming so horribly. But then finally he stopped,” one unnamed member of the unit told the New York Times in 1995, recalling a victim who had been infected with the plague. “This was all in a day’s work for the surgeons, but it really left an impression on me because it was my first time.”
Several thousand people, and maybe many more, were experimented to death by the unit.
When the second world war was over Unit 731 members were supposed to be put on trial for the war crimes they had committed. The U.S. military stopped that as it had planned to use what Unit 731 had learned for its own wars:
The same year that Mr. Morimura’s book was released, an American journalist, John W. Powell, wrote in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists that the U.S. government had granted immunity to members of Unit 731 in exchange for the laboratory records from their research. Mr. Morimura alleged the same. For years, the United States dismissed reports of the unit’s experiments as Cold War propaganda.
There is no further mentioning of this in the rest of the Washington Post obit.
The reader is left hanging without learning if those U.S. government claims of ‘Cold War propaganda’ were true or false.
The U.S. did of course do what had been alleged. Documents were released that proved it. The U.S. had done much more.
The Post also repeats false U.S. claims that the Japanese government had hindered war crime trials against the units members:
However, according to U.S. officials, the Japanese government continued to decline to assist American efforts to place perpetrators on a list of war criminals prohibited from entering the United States. Ishii lived in freedom until he died of throat cancer in 1959. The Times reported that other Unit 731 veterans became governor of Tokyo, president of the Japan Medical Association and chief of the Japanese Olympic Committee.
It was the U.S. government, not the Japanese one, which gave immunity to Unit 731 members. It even paid them high amounts for their knowledge:
The US government offered full political immunity to high-ranking officials who were instrumental in perpetrating crimes against humanity, in exchange of the data about their experiments. Among those was Shiro Ishii, the commander of Unit 731. During the cover-up operation, the U.S. government paid money to obtain data on human experiments conducted in China, according to two declassified U.S. government documents.
The total amount paid to unnamed former members of the infamous unit was somewhere between 150,000 yen to 200,000 yen. An amount of 200,000 yen at that time is the equivalent of 20 million yen to 40 million yen today.
40 million yen today are the equivalent of $284,000. Nicer to have than not to have …
The U.S. military used the knowledge gained from Unit 731 to developed a number of biological weapons and to test them, allegedly also on humans. It even used those weapons, like Unit 731, during the war against North Korea and China.
As Jeffrey Kaye, who has long studied the case, writes:
The story that follows documents what seems like an unsuccessful attempt by Air Force flyers to tip off the press and government officials to the secret U.S germ warfare campaign then underway in Korea and Northeast China. This attempt at military whistleblowing allows for a wider consideration today of the evidence surrounding the germ warfare charges, especially how the bioattacks were organized.
By repeating the U.S. government false claims of ‘Cold War propaganda’, by not correcting it and by repeating false U.S. statements which accuse the Japanese government of hindering the war crime trials, the Washington Post is covering up the U.S. war crimes that were based on the experiments Unit 731 had made.
Posted by b on July 28, 2023 at 16:45 UTC | Permalink
Once, while in high school, I went to a store in my small town to buy a gallon of milk for my family. I paid the cashier with a $5 bill but she somehow gave me change for a $20.
I didn’t notice her mistake until I was almost home- I had too much money. I told my Mom that I was going to return it to the store. When I walked in the store, the cashier was not at her place so I went to the back and talked to a man in the meat market area (it was a small business not a chain store like we have nowadays).
I told him I had received too much money in change. He looked at me with a look like “WOW”. He then said, “You are an honest young man, aren’t you?”
I told him that I would have felt like I was stealing if I didn’t return the extra money.
Come to find out that he was the owner of the store. He thanked me and said he would not forget about my honesty.
Well, three years passed and I needed a job. I went in to fill out an application for a job at the same store. When I asked for an application at the front counter, the owner came out of the meat market area and asked if he could help me with anything. I asked him for a job application. He said, “You are hired. Can you start tomorrow?”
Now it was my turn to have a “WOW” look on my face. He told me that he remembered me from when I had returned the extra money.
So…by me not keeping $17 three years earlier, I made way more money for three years while I went to work there after high school.
He also trained me to be a butcher, too.
It does pay to be honest.
This is a true story that I told my kids (and every sports player I coached) as they grew up.
Scarlet Street (1945) Film-Noir | Fritz Lang | Full Movie | Colorized HD Quality
Todays treat. Full length film noir.
The things she does to men can end only one way - in murder! When a man in mid-life crisis befriends a young woman, her venal fiancé persuades her to con him out of the fortune they mistakenly assume he possesses.
It seems that the re-posturing is in process, right on a schedule established decades ago. One; mind you, without any allowance for change in the Geo-political situation.
Todays…
You know, I was watching Babymetal the other day, and it occurred to me that the entire band is the embodiment of a cat.
Yes. Seriously.
The elements of [1] hard, and fast along with [2] the very cute.
It’s one manifestation of a cute kitty cat. Then it gnaws on your hand… and draws blood.
Seriously. Check this one out with that thought in mind.
BABYMETAL – メギツネ – MEGITSUNE (OFFICIAL)
Though… it is about a FOX (which is a human female embodiment of a feline).
Walmart My friend, 5″10″ 185 was walking out of the store on an Friday night. There were several high school boys horsing around with each other. As my friend walked past the biggest one, he went into a Rocky boxing stance behind him.(The store cameras caught the whole thing). He push punched my friend’s right shoulder enough to almost unbalance him. When my friend turned and saw a large figure in a fighting crouch, he continued his turn and placed the point of his elbow on the far side of the kid’s jaw.
Resulting in the kid flying backward to land flat of his back unconscious, with a broken jaw. Took about 2 seconds start to finish. The jaw was unintentional.
In the past 40 years, Chinese have worked hard, and the government has continued to invest in soft infrastructure (education, etc.) and hard infrastructure including transport and manufacturing.
In the US, Americans have voted to cut taxes and the size of government, which meant that there has been no investment in hard and soft infrastructure.
The “rise of China” is simply the result of those different policies.
According to the United States constitution, the purpose of the Government is as a vehicle to serve its people.
Are they being served?
Is inflation under control?
Are the streets clean, and safe?
Are people happy, employed in useful productive activities.
Is the nation as a whole, healthy mentally, physically and emotionally?
Does the future look bright?
Is food, and shelter affordable?
Is medical care cheap and easy to obtain?
Is the government meeting the needs of the individual?
As I see it, the most basic, of basics is neglected.
This is not only unhealthy, but completely unsustainable.
You do not need a nuclear conflagration to destroy the United States, it is already destroyed. It is torn up and sitting in the garbage swill of past glories.
The American society is dead. DEAD. Gone, and slaughtered.
There are ZERO vibrant and healthy cities in the United States today. The downtowns are boarded up, squalor rat and rodent infestations exist, and tent cities abound. Those that exist fumble and mumble in their drug haze like the zombies they are. Today, the United States (though there are a handful of “pockets” of normalcy) is simply a ghost-nation.
Hollowed out.
Void of any real and actual leadership.
Inept, incompetent, and runs a well produced “clown show” in front of green screens, reading well produced scripts to keep the rabble in line.
No.
A nuclear war will not kill the United States.
It is already a carcass.
Pick it up off the side of the road, and start fresh. It’s the only thing that is left to do.
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Remember…
Nuclear weapons are designed to destroy large functioning cities, and masses of military. That are their targets. If the cities are just crumbling, and the only strategic targets are a warehouse here, a factory there, or a government building over there, then it makes far more sense to use conventional munitions in “surgical” strikes.
As the United States stands today, a nuclear war would have very little effect on the nation.
A dead dog is still a dead dog. To shoot it full of holes will not change anything. It doesn’t matter if you use a .22 caliber revolver, or a 10 gauge shotgun.
Thus, to hasten the demise of the United States (as it is already post-collapse) is to target the few remaining assets that keep it alive;
The factories that make the bombs and missiles.
The “leaders” that run the remains of the nation.
The transportation hubs that distribute goods and services.
That is the true and real reality of the situation.
…
The United States is a carcass.
Any action by the rest of the world would be to add lime to it and advance the decay.
SHOCKING PRE BIRTH EXPERIENCE! I Saw Why I Chose a Life of Suffering!
Please enjoy my interview with Betty Guadagno about he Near Death-Like Experience and pre-birth memories!
No, why would China invade Taiwan now when Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan was restored and recognised in 1945? The only question is whether or not the rival PRC and ROC governments which do not recognise the right of the other to govern China, intend to finally finish the Chinese Civil War. Admittingly, it does not take a genius to realise that at this point, if the fighting does resume, it is but a matter of the PRC finishing off the last remnants of the ROC rump on Taiwan, since the ROC forces have no chance of reconquering the entire mainland by now (though they did hold on to this desire as late as the 1970’s).
And the answer to whether or not the fighting should resume is a resounding ‘no’ on both sides as well. Everyone on both sides of the strait is Chinese, and quite frankly most of the irreconciliable points of contention in ideological dogma and political doctrine between the KMT and CCP have long since become obsolete.
What most Chinese wish for is to find a peaceful long term resolution to the civil war which does not involve bloodshed, and most people from across the Chinese World regardless of political affiliation recognise or are at least willing to trust that those advocating for ‘Taiwanese Independence’ are but a small albeit vocal minority on Taiwan. Meanwhile, no one finds writing systems or pinyin romanisation standards to be worth fighting and dying over. My own hometown is somewhat inland but not entirely remote from Xikou, where Jiang Jieshi himself grew up. There are plenty of people in Xikou nowadays who in principle do not object at all to the prospect of welcoming the remains of the KMT leader back for a proper burial when the situation permits it (which was his own dying wish).
Of course, negotiations will not be straightforward, and it is completely understandable that ROC officials will have concerns about their specific status within a reunified Chinese state, and what protections and guarantees will be offered for the specific particulars of their own way of life. However, almost everyone of political prominence in the 1930’s and 1940’s is either dead or rather senile, so most understand there is no concern of anyone being dragged away to a public trial by the people.
The only reason why there would be a motivation to achieve reunification by force would be if something drastic happens, such as if the MJD attempts to change the ROC’s name and contitution, or the US uses ROC territory as a base for attacking other parts of China.
Is China–Russia Alliance is Likelier than we think?
On 4FEB22, it was formally announced that China and Russia formed a new “national structure” together. In short, they joined together into one singular “state” of a type never before seen on the planet. This nation state is tighter than any kind of individual nation, and stronger economically than any other singular nation in the history of the globe.
Since today is late July 2023, this new “nation-state”; a unified Asia, has been in force and operating now for a goodly one and a half years. And we have seen some amazing changes take place.
Both the paramilitaries of China and Russia integrating together.
Joint leadership in the various national organizations.
A wide selection of free trade and energy activities.
Massive infrastructure projects.
Of course, NONE of this is reported in any of the Western “news”. You have to be able to read Chinese, Russian, or Persian to keep abreast on the massive big changes going on in the world today. The English reporting is absent, and if reported, it is distorted beyond recognition.
For instance, take the joint Naval exercises with Russia and China around Japan last week. Western reporting equals zero. Or, the new rail lines connecting Western Russia to China, the Western reporting is yet again; zero. How about the new manufacturing plants in Russia? Zero. Or the trade corridors from the Middle east into the Heart of Russia, via the China “bridge”? Reporting is zero.
And so, with the West living in this bubble of ignorance, it can be expected that those in the West are unaware that China and Russia are one.
It is a united Asia.
To a person in the West, it is almost like waiting to get an invite to a big party. And you wait and you wait and you wait. Then you find out that the party came and went, and no one told you. Yeah. It’s like that.
So to answer the question;
Is China–Russia Alliance is Likelier than we think?
It happened a year and a half ago. It is more than an alliance; it is a new global superpower. If the USA is considered to be a superpower, then the new Russia-China “new national form” is a Super-Duper-Supreme-power. And that is how things stand today.
Which is why…
The people; the citizens, worry about war, Taiwan, nuclear bombs.
The multinational companies, are all renewing investments in China and Russia independent of any American-led sanction efforts.
The nations are all abandoning the USD in favor of a BRICS “basket of currencies”.
So do not be confused by the dearth of actual “news” reporting. Watch what people, companies and nations are actually doing. Not what they are saying.
For instance, as an example…
Thailand elected, via color-revolution, a pro-USA leader. However, just this week the Thai Navy spent all week drilling with the Chinese Navy, and the the BRI projects are proceeding that connects Thailand to China, and Laos without any interruption.
Pay attention to what is physically going on. Not, what is being “reported.”
Fluffy Dumplings
unnamed
Ingredients
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
2/3 teaspoon salt
4 teaspoons baking powder
1 egg
1 tablespoon melted shortening or oil
2/3 cup milk
Instructions
Sift flour, salt and baking powder into mixture of beaten eggs, shortening and milk.
When ready to serve, drop by teaspoonsful into boiling gravy (about 4 cupsful), cover and cook gently for 8 to 10 minutes or until done.
The Hunter Biden plea deal appears to have collapsed. The so-called ‘Sweetheart deal’ on tax and gun charges seems to have fallen apart in a stunning twist after prosecutors said president’s son could STILL be charged with other crimes.
During his appearance in front of a judge in a federal court in Delaware the president’s scandal-hit son said ‘yes, your honor’ when asked by the judge if he was going to plead guilty, and admitted he’s been to rehab six times in 20 years for addiction to drinking and drugs.
But then the Judge demanded a recess when an agreement between prosecutors and attorneys for the president’s son appeared to fall apart.
Hunter’s attorney Chris Clark said the agreement was ‘null and void’ after top prosecutor Leo Wise said the president’s son could still be charged with other crimes – including violations related to representing foreign governments.
He was a party guy who hated school and got really bad grades. One day, two men savagely attacked him and robbed Jason outside a bar, leaving him with a severe concussion.
This damage turned him into a math genius and made him learn fractal geometry, which he had never learned before. He then became a renowned mathematician.
Derek Amato
2023 07 25 16 1y9
At 39, he hit his head after diving into a pool. He was diagnosed with a concussion and 35% hearing loss. After that Derek started seeing black and white keys on his head and out of nowhere started playing the piano like an expert and eventually became a composer.
Ben McMahon
2023 07 25 16 20
He was in a car accident in 2015 and was in a coma for a week. When he woke up, he spoke perfect Chinese, even though he had only learned the basics in childhood.
Tony Cicero
2023 07 25 16 20fd
He was struck by lightning while making a call in a phone booth. Within days, he became addicted to music, which wasn’t the case before. After experimenting with the piano, he became a musical artist who composes his own music.
I may not call them superpowers, but they are definitely powers for the uninitiated.
NDE: Woman is Shown Pre-Birth Plan and is SHOCKED to see she Did Not Accomplish her Life’s Purpose
Please enjoy my interview with Norma Edwards about her Near Death Experience!
2023 07 25 15 41
The CIA
an ALL powerful organization unlike anything the world have ever seen
far more powerful than the Illuminati, the Free Masons and all powerful Men like Kim Jong-un
this organization had, thru mission creep, amassed GREAT POWERS for itself and now control the most powerful nations on earth
in a demonstration of its power, it had also made possible the Presidency of Joe Biden. It was in Ukraine that the CIA co-opted Hunter Biden as it fund bio labs. It also suppressed critical information that allow Joe Biden to win the 2020 election
2023 07 25 15 51
What most Americans are NOT aware is that the CIA:
is the largest drug smuggler in the United States and in many parts of the world. It also arms Narco trafficker in Latin America which destabilized MANY countries
the slush funds created from drug smuggling enable it to fund activities outside state control
throughout the world, it is responsible for the death of tens of millions of people as it funds wars, mayhem and overthrow governments
overseas and in the United States such as in Fort Detrick, it operates bio.chemical labs that conducts research into bio weapons designed to kill and eliminate whole races of people
In the United States, the CIA:
spies extensively on Americans
control pedophile rings such as those run by Jeffrey Epstein which allows it to control American business and political elites (Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Bill Gates were just some of the individuals who were frequent visitors to Epstein’s island). This control allows it to direct America’s domestic and foreign agenda
thru its funding of American and foreign media and think thanks, it promote hate in the United States against China, Russia, Muslims and others distracting Americans from what it is doing and the governing Plutocrats openly stealing from the country and its people
it CENSORS books in the United States and fund major Hollywood movies in order to manipulate Americans while funding studies on thought control experiments
it’s involvement in the opiate trade has led to the death of millions of Americans devastating lives and communities.
From an organization which was created to gather intelligence from foreign countries, the CIA have evolved to spy on and manipulate Americans as it wage wars and inflict death and chaos which affect millions around the world while controlling bio-chemical weapons. Most of all, it now controls American political and business elites.
What is the CIA up to? As we have seen, the CIA is involve with much nefarious activities. If Oliver Stone is correct, this could also include the assassination of an American President
It has now united the countries of Europe and Japan – countries with a long and bloody history of waging wars of racial domination – after triggering the Ukrainian crises by funding neo-Nazis Ukrainians and triggering the Maidan revolution
for it is clear that the CIA objective is world domination and to set the world alight triggering an orgy of death, chaos and destruction
more than anything else, the CIA represent the physical and spiritual manifestation
of the Dark Angel himself where it has now found a HOME
always seeking power and domination while sowing death and chaos in its wake
it is now in the cusps of accomplishing its objectives of lighting the world on fire
in this world, in a country that is big and small, haven is preparing its favourite son
for that epic confrontation against Evil itself
in order to save the world from a fiery end
Most DETAILED Near Death Experience Ever Recorded; Woman is given TOUR of the Universe! Venia Hill
Please enjoy my interview with Venia Hill about her incredibly in-depth Near Death Experience!
2023 07 25 15 45
These Humorous Stinker Station Signs Helped to Provide Comic Relief for Motorists in Idaho During the 1950s and ’60s
0 12
When traveling to distant places, it is well to remember where you come from. If you come from Idaho, chances are you are familiar with the Stinker gas stations, which used to put up gag signs along the roads. Those bright yellow Stinker Station signs all with black print truly were an “Idaho only” institution. The Stinker gas stations used to break the monotony of traveling through southern Idaho’s miles of sagebrush with their comic signs.
“BALLISTIC MISSILE LAUNCHES” UPDATED AGAIN 1:13 PM EDT — Major Air Strikes Against Ukraine
2023 07 27 10 25
Reports are coming in that Russia has launched 12 TU-95 aircraft carrying missiles for Ukraine
If each aircraft is carrying a full load, that is up to 96 cruise missiles.
Air Raid Sirens are sounding throughout the red shaded areas of Ukraine shown on the map above. Explosions likely to follow.
Check back.
UPDATE 11:31 AM EDT —
13 Russian Tu-95MS and a number of Tu-160M Strategic Bombers are currently noted Airborne across Western Russia heading towards “Launch Zones” over the Caspian Sea.
A Large Missile Attack on Ukraine _SEEMS_ Imminent.
UPDATE 11:34 AM EDT —
Preliminary launches of X-101/555 missiles from Tu-95 from the Caspian direction.
CONFIRMED! Initial Detection by the Ukrainian Air Force of Cruise Missile launches by at least 12 Russian Tu-95MS Strategic Bombers over the Caspian Sea; the Missiles should be entering Ukrainian Airspace within the next hour.
UPDATE 11:38 AM EDT —
ADDITIONAL MISSILE ATTACKS NOW TAKING PLACE! High-speed missiles entering Ukraine from the north, Ukraine’s air force says.
These are DAYLIGHT launches, not something the Russians usually do.
UPDATE 11:40 AM EDT —
Cruise Missiles Flying towards Kharkiv, Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk .
Possible direction – Kremenchuk, Kropyvnytskyi!
Explosions are reported in Berislav district of Kherson region and in Kharkov.
UPDATE 11:43 AM EDT —
Right now, Ukrainians are in a panic that has long crossed the line of hysteria.
Rockets over the Kirovograd region towards Kiev;
More missiles in the direction of the Vinnitsa region;
Apparently, the Russian Air Force took significant steps to deceive the Ukrainian air defense; today’s missiles are constantly changing course in mid-flight!
Russian cruise missiles are flying to Vinnytsia, Mykolaiv and Odesa regions, — Ukrainian Air Force.
Explosions reported in Dnepropetrovsk region.
The second wave of Russian missiles is entering from the East.
Cruise missiles on the approaches to Vinnytsia, Mykolaiv, and Odesa regions!
MORE:
Explosions Reported in Dnepropetrovsk and Kirovograd Regions
It appears that a portion of the Iskander missiles have successfully struck their intended targets.
The activation of the air raid alert following the initial strikes indirectly confirms the accuracy of the hits on these targets.
Moreover, there are indications that a ballistic missile strike targeted an assembly shop in Kharkov, which was allegedly involved in the production of drones.
As for the cruise missiles launched from the Caspian region, they have not yet reached their intended destinations.
There is speculation that these missiles could potentially target certain sites belonging to the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the Khmelnitsky and Vinnitsa regions.
NEW: A group of missiles is moving along the border with Moldova in the direction of Khmelnytskyi region!
UPDATE 12:13 PM EDT —
Multiple explosions heard in Khmelnytskyi region
UPDATE 12:25 PM EDT —
Missiles entering Lviv.
Lviv region advised to take cover immediately, missiles inbound.
Volyn and Rivne regions. Missiles also fly towards you.
COURSE CHANGES – AGAIN: Several RU cruise missiles turned from Lviv to Volyn region NOW! Some rockets in the Ternopil region made a 180-degree turn.
A group of missiles from Ternopil Oblast changes course to Zhytomyr Oblast, another group in the direction of Lviv Oblast and Volyn Oblast.
UKRAINE authorities in panic, now hysteria: screaming to citizens “Missiles constantly change their flight path. Stay in shelters!”
UPDATE 12:46 PM EDT —
Russian “Dagger” missiles heading in the direction of Kyiv!
(NOTE: Today’s ongoing missile barrages appear to be the largest and longest-sustained attack since the Russia-Ukraine conflict began. Ter for months, we were all told “Russia is running out of missiles.” HMMMMM. Looks like the people telling us that were . . . ahem . . . wrong.)
AT LEAST FOUR (4) HYPERSONIC “KINZHAL” MISSILES HAVE BEEN LAUNCHED AND APPEAR HEADING TOWARD KIEV.
MORE:
Iskander missiles have JUST BEEN launched from the Bryansk region Russia.
***** FLASH *****
Multiple reports coming in claiming land-to-land BALLISTIC MISSILE LAUNCHES have taken place inside Russia, heading toward Ukraine.
UPDATE 12:57 PM EDT —
Explosions heard once again in the City of Khmelnytskyi in Western Ukraine.
UPDATE 1:13 PM EDT —
The attack seems to have subsided. No additional missiles are being tracked in, or toward, Ukraine.
Unconfirmed Reports that Starokostiantyniv Air Base in the Khmelnytskyi Region of Western Ukraine has been struck by at least 5 Russian Cruise Missiles. This Base is Home to the 7th Tactical Aviation Brigade who operate Su-24 Tactical Bombers which are claimed to be the __ONLY__ Ukraine aircraft capable of utilizing “Storm Shadow” Air-Launched Cruise Missiles provided by the UK and France.
If this base and its planes have been put out of commission, then Russia achieved multiple wins; knocking out more Ukraine air power and HALTING the ability of Ukraine to use STORM SHADOW missiles, anywhere in the country.
Reports are that this is attack was focused on NATO Assets, Supplies, and Command Centers inside Ukraine, which would explain the daylight strikes.
THIS ENDS ONGOING UPDATES
Cajun Pork Chili
2023 07 27 11 25
Ingredients
2 pounds ground pork
2 large onions, chopped
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 sweet red bell pepper, chopped
1 sweet green bell pepper, chopped
3 stalks celery, chopped
1 (28 ounce) can tomatoes
1 (28 ounce) can kidney beans, drained
1/4 teaspoon hot pepper flakes
1 teaspoon dried oregano*
1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
Dash of hot pepper sauce
Salt and pepper
Instructions
In a heavy saucepan, cook the pork over medium heat, stirring to break up the meat, for about 5 minutes or until browned. Pour off the fat.
Add onions, and cook until tender. Add garlic, red and green peppers and celery. Cook, stirring occasionally, for 5 minutes or until vegetables are softened.
Add tomatoes, breaking them up with the back of a spoon. Stir in kidney beans, hot pepper flakes, oregano, cayenne pepper, hot pepper sauce and salt and pepper to taste. Bring to a boil; reduce heat and simmer for 20 minutes.
Notes
* If you prefer a more traditional chili flavor, use cumin instead of oregano, and add chili powder to taste.
Originally Answered: What is it like to live on a small island?
I’ll answer for an island of 300 in the Maldives.
Enjoy? Things get boring very quickly unless you LOVE water sports or fishing. After we exhausted these options, cabin fever set in really quickly. Chess is a favorite pastime for locals.
Lizards and spiders galore, bats hanging in trees all day. Mosquitos are everywhere and the sand fleas are worse. Locals seem to have developed a tolerance for both though.
Translucent crabs COVER the edges of the island closest to the ocean from dusk to dawn.
2023 07 25 16 29
Biggest swimming pool ever
2023 07 25 16 2r9
The reefs are absolutely magnificent
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Fantastic visibility
Supplies come once and sometimes twice a week – you miss everything and if you don’t order it or get it on the day or even hour it’s delivered, you’re out of luck that week.
There is one small general store that has a regular refrigerator for Kit Kat ice cream cones and bottled water/soda (only Holstein’s that I can’t even find online) – while they last.
Most mosquito coils in the general store are so old they won’t light
More coconuts and fresh fish than you could ever begin to try to eat
2023 07 25 16 3ew0
The boat that brings the supplies
2023 07 25 16 3ge0
Waiting to board the boat – yep, you can go for free but you’re gonna ride with the bananas, pineapples, bread and orange juice headed for the resorts
2023 07 25 16 31v
Knocked out on the floor of the ship. There wasn’t an open spot left anywhere.
It smells like ocean, sand, coconuts, fish, and musky people – no deodorant, obviously
Air conditioning and heating don’t exist – ditto for heated water.
2023 07 25 16 31g
We caught all these fish using fishing line and a hook tied to a water bottle. We just let the line drop and our “captain” drove around until one of us got a bite. No more than five minutes and usually less than a minute. I’ve never fished so easily in my life.
Sometimes fish is cooked by gutting, covering with salt, spearing with a freshly picked palm frond and roasting lightly over a coconut husk fire
2023 07 25 16 328
Cooking on the deserted island across the atoll from where we stayed
2023 07 25 16 3s2
Yeah, there were plates on the deserted (read: private party) island. They get rinsed in the ocean.
Everyone eats with their hands. All the time.
Everyone knows everything about everyone – this cannot be underestimated. You have ZERO privacy
Even though everyone knows everything, there are still drug (heroin) and alcohol abuse problems – they are isolated enough that they protect each others privacy from the rest of the world.
You can walk from one side of the island to the other in under 15 minutes if you go slow. 10 minutes for a nice, brisk pace.
2023 07 25 16 3e3
One of the two main “streets”
Most furniture is made from wood and rope – withstands the sand and wind quite well
2023 07 25 16 3ere3
Finishing off another coconut in my favorite chair
2023 07 25 16 34
Pretty cool six seater chair
There is a plane ambulance for major health emergencies – it has to fly to the island and fly back out
There is a speedboat ambulance within the atoll that will take you to another, slightly larger island with doctors for less major medical emergencies
There is one doctor from India who lives on the island part time for basic checkups and minor health care needs
There’s a large soccer (football) field that is used nightly, an open air mosque, and an open air two room school house
ZERO automobiles, a couple bicycles, a motorbike (maybe 50cc) every local rolls their eyes at because it’s so ridiculous (I think they’re waiting for him to accidentally ride into the ocean), and a couple carts for hauling what comes in on the boats
Two plastic lawn chairs at the end of one lane that faces the nearby resort island. On a good day, you can pick up the wifi from across the ocean. Spotty, but workable. Some days, people wait in rotation for a chair.
Hope that helps. Perhaps you’re looking for details about a bigger island, but some stuff should be similar. Good luck!
US Begins Draw-Down of ACTIVE ARSENAL to Give to Ukraine
The US is giving another $400 MILLION (Corrected) of Military aid to Ukraine but this time, the weaponry is coming out of the ACTIVE ARSENAL and NOT coming from reserves or excess inventory! The Active Arsenal exists to defend the USA itself.
The US confirmed a new aid package to Ukraine valued at up to $400 million. It comes direct from Department of Defense stocks.
The capabilities in this package include:
1. Additional munitions for Patriot air defense systems and National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS);
2. Stinger anti-aircraft systems;
3. Additional ammunition for High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS);
8. Javelin and other anti-armor systems and rockets;
9. Hornet Unmanned Aerial Systems;
10. Hydra-70 aircraft rockets;
11. Tactical air navigation systems;
12. Demolitions munitions for obstacle clearing;
13. Over 28 million rounds of small arms ammunition and grenades;
14. Night vision devices and thermal imagery systems; and,
15. Spare parts, training munitions, and other field equipment.
This latest gift of military aid is now directly impacting the ability of the United States to defend ITSELF.
It’s almost as if someone in government is deliberately doing things to the country to make us vulnerable to invasion!
Smoky Pasta and Bean Soup
Warm up with this hearty soup. Serve with warmed bread sticks and a salad.
68e34c05d98c7e4635fa7ee0ba9b663c pasta dinner recipes recipe pasta
Ingredients
6 slices bacon
1 small onion, finely chopped
1 rib celery, finely chopped
1 medium carrot, peeled and grated
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/8 teaspoon hot red pepper flakes, crushed
2 cups canned crushed tomatoes
2 1/2 cups canned white beans, drained
6 cups chicken broth
3/4 cup macaroni or other small paste shape
Fresh Parmesan cheese, grated (optional)
Instructions
In a large deep skillet, sauté bacon until some fat is rendered; add onion, celery, carrot, garlic and red pepper to skillet and sauté until vegetables are softened, about 10 minutes.
Stir in tomatoes, cook and stir occasionally for 10 more minutes.
Stir in beans; add broth and bring to a gentle boil. Add macaroni (or other small pasta) and continue cooking until pasta is tender, but still firm, about 15 minutes.
Serve immediately with Parmesan cheese if desired; or cover, refrigerate and reheat gently to serving temperature.
Right now, as of 2023, the “adversaries” against the United States is roughly about 85% of the global population.
The United States is a tiny part of the globe, and getting smaller each day.
So, who is the United States, and it’s allies, that the Mainstream Media like to refer to as “most of the world”…
American proxy nations.
These nations will do what the United States say. The methods of control vary from nation to nation, but they are not independent at all. It is extremely unlikely that these nations would do anything without asking the United States for permission first.
Canada
UK
Minor European states
Japan
American friends.
These are proxy nations that might have the ability to “break away” from the United States if conditions are favorable. Each nation operations under their own unique conditions. Some desire to be United States proxies, but Geo-political realities prevent full engagement, others wish to be more distant, but again, Geo-political realities prevent that as well. These nations are in a sort of limbo, and political expedience results in a default abeyance to American dictates.
Israel
Germany
Poland
France
Switzerland
Sweden
Finland
Neutral
These nations are trying to walk the razor-thin line of neutrality. There are internal elements that are dividing the ruling leadership. The issues involved in these nations are complex. Yet, their actions suggest that they are trying to “play both Geo-political blocks”.
Australia
Philippines
South Korea
The Global South.
These are the current “enemies” of the United States “Western” ideological block.
Some are codified, and formalized, such as Russia. Some are not formally engaged, such as China. Some are considered to be “American easy lays” such as South East Asia, though they are anything but that.
Russia
China
North Korea
Iran
Pakistan
All of the ‘Stan’s
South East Asia
Much of Africa
Brazil
South Africa
Argentina
Much of South America
Neutral but leaning with the Global South
These nations are currently picking sides. Most intel suggest that they are strongly leaning towards the Global South and rejecting the “American way of life”.
Mexico
Most of Latin America
India
Turkey
Bulgera
And that is pretty much the entire world. So, if you look at the list above, you can see the reality of what the world has fractured into.
A “West”; led by the United States. It promotes “American values”, “American democracy”, and woke progressive ideology. They use the USD as the dominant trade currency, and are referred to as the “English speaking world”. (Though that is NOT an accurate statement.) It’s an “American rules” order. It represents 15% of the world
An “East”. Led by the China-Russia-Iran-Saudi Arabia- Brazil-South African nexus. It’s a “multi-polar” order. Organized fundamentally under the UN charter. It is further subdivided into sub-blocks such as G20, BRICS+, and SEO. They use a basket of currencies based on hard tangible resources to trade. And combined, represents 85% of the world.
No.
It is unlikely that the United States can fight the entirety of the rest of the world and win. How likely or unlikely, is dependent on your personal point of view, and the intelligence or “news” that you (personally) consume.
American neocon = Likely that the United States will win, because it is blessed by God.
Typical proxy nation citizen = Tough call. Maybe the United States can persevere.
Global South Citizen = We are constantly underestimated. The United States cannot win.
Road to Bali (1952, Adventure) Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Dorothy Lamour | Full Movie, Subtitles
Today’s treat. Full movie. Great background movie.
The small things are really BIG BIG things. In all sorts of ways.
Don’t you know.
I get a lot of crazy people on MM…
Not that it is bad, mind you. But I am a VERY BUSY fellow.
So this guy pops up on the comment boards.
Long, long diatribes. Interspersing praise, with meandering comments, and passive aggressive demands.
Very suggestive of a home-bound; locked in person with neurotic tendencies. I told him to stop posting long comment trains on the articles, and instead use the forum.
He responded…
2023 07 03 11 33
I don’t want to be dictated to jump, beg and roll-over like a common dog by a stranger on my own God-damn website.
I did not send him to the cornfield. But I did blow away all the MM followers around Nebraska. Oh well…
Passive aggressive FUCK.
2023 07 03 11 37
I do not need this shit.
Good fucking bye.
Interesting Discussion
The United States was sharply critical of Germany’s energy dependence on Russia, imposing sanctions on the construction of pipelines carrying Russian gas beneath the Baltic Sea to Germany (if not, as a now-refuted report by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh recently claimed, getting its navy divers to blow them up).
However, the US’s economic dependence on China runs far deeper, and severing the link—for example, in the event of conflict between the two nations—would be far more disruptive.
A provocative report by economist and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis suggests China could more easily break free of the relationship of mutual dependence than the US.
Varoufakis relates that a Chinese official described to him the ‘dark deal’ China struck in the 1970s under which its manufacturers would send their excess production (that is, their output beyond China’s domestic needs) to the US and reinvest the bulk of their US-dollar profits into America’s ‘FIRE’, or finance, insurance and real estate sectors.
‘It ensured that the dollar’s supremacy was just as functional to the interests of US rentiers as it was to Chinese capitalists,’ he says. Of course, the losers in the transaction were the US domestic manufacturers (and their workers) who went out of business under the pressure of Chinese competition.
The list of countries ready to join the BRICS alliance and accept the new currency is growing leaps n bounds. From a set of 19 countries in April, the numbers have spiked to 41 by the end of June. A total of 22 new countries expressed interest to enter the bloc and ditch the U.S. dollar in two months. The next BRICS summit will be held in August in South Africa where the bloc of five nations will combinedly decide the formation of a new currency.
The decision to expand the alliance will be jointly taken in the next BRICS summit and the bloc could soon become BRICS+.
The total number of countries that could challenge the U.S. dollar on the global stage has reached 41. The developing nations that want to accept BRICS currency hail from Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe.
Belarus is the first country in Eastern Europe that expressed interest to accept the new BRICS currency. On the other hand, France has also shown its interest to attend the next BRICS summit in South Africa.
Additionally, many countries in Africa remain on the sidelines and could announce their support for the BRICS currency after its launch. Kenya has urged African nations to stop using the U.S. dollar and trade with native currencies within the continent.
Offensive, but funny
2023 07 03 11 17
How free am I really in CHINA?? 在中国的自由
She is correct.
These “little things” are really BIG and important things.
Here’s my version (MM version) of her video above…
When the lightning of History strikes, better cut to the chase in our first draft.
When the lightning of History strikes, better cut to the chase in our first draft.
Here we go.
After the extraordinary events in Russia during The Longest Day, President Putin wins on all counts.
Among other feats, he has made an absolute, inter-galactic ass of the whole collective West MSM – all over again.
He rallied virtually every Russian to end the Special Military Operation (SMO) – or “almost war” (according to some business circles) quicker.
He – and the FSB – amassed a formidable list of traitors and 5th and 6th columnists, which will be properly dealt with.
And he now enjoys unlimited freedom to deploy de facto Counter-Terrorist Operation (CTO) martial law powers.
As much as Putin helped perennial Lukashenko in August 2020, preventing regime change in Belarus, good ol’ Luka prevented Russia from sliding into civil war in June 2023.
A complex wide-ranging counter-terror op is now in effect in Moscow and beyond, while assorted Western sub-zoology specimens are stunned, dazed and confused: wasn’t that supposed to be Putin meeting his Czar Nicholas II moment?
A first glance at the chessboard tells us that all the pieces seem to be falling in their right places.
Prighozin gets a golden parachute in Belarus. Shoigu may be about to be sacked, perhaps even Gerasimov (yes, there are deeply dysfunctional layers inside the Ministry of Defense). The Wagner musicians will be incorporated as a regular Army Corps. They may keep doing business in Africa: demand is huge.
So what really happened after The Longest Day? Hefty CIA funds may have changed hands. But in the end the “coup” could turn out to be the Greatest Russian Trolling of the West Ever.
The Mother of All Maskirovkas
Once again, facts on the ground prove Putin is the undisputed champion of Russia. After keeping a strategic silence for a few hours, his intervention gathered full support from the civilian population, the FSB, the Chechens, the Army, the Communists, everyone.
The exact terms of the deal between Luka and Prighozin, with help from the governor of the Tula region, Alexey Dyumin, are still unclear.
Prighozin said he was satisfied with the terms. Peskov confirmed on the record that a criminal case against Prigozhin would be dropped. A key Prighozin demand was the twin resignation of Defense Minister Shoigu and Chief of Staff Gerasimov. That may – or may not – happen in the immediate future.
And that brings us to the still fascinating possibility this was the Mother of All Maskirovkas. Prigozhin sets up all this circus just to get a meeting in Moscow with Shoigu and Gerasimov.
Talk about an overkill just to go out on a date.
The Mother of All Maskirovkas scenario also implies a move worthy of 5D chess.
On Saturday, Wagner was 200 km away from Moscow.
Yet on Sunday, Wagner was 100 km away from Kiev.
Next level Sun Tzu Art of War, anyone?
Between sovereignty and betrayal
Alexander Dugin correctly points out how this was also an exercise in Sovereignty: “Only Sovereign Lukashenko, together with Sovereign Putin himself, confronted [Prighozin]…It turned out that many can frame the President and the people, acting in the shadows and apparently on his behalf, but saving the Fatherland in a critical situation is not their specialty.”
The corollary is that Russia needs “a sovereign elite, otherwise everything will repeat itself.”
As for the dazed and confused collective West, especially the NATO-Kiev junta, with everyone instantly rebranding Wagner from “terrorists” to “freedom fighters”, getting bogged down in their own swamp is the art they excel in.
Mainstream media spun that the proverbial “Western officials” were “taken by surprise” by the mutiny. That depends on the amount of funds that changed hands, and in which direction, during the preparation.
The SMO, now CTO keeps rolling along. The Russian Army continues to fight, undisturbed. The “counter-offensive” remains teetering over the edge of a cliff, ready to kiss the black void.
Putin winning on all counts implies the whole civilian population – and the military – engaged into preserving him and the Russian institutions, as well as perfecting them. There’s absolutely no nation anywhere across the collective West where we find this level of citizen support.
Russian politics is a special animal. It works at the highest level and also at grassroots level – unlike in the West, where the norm is deep hatred between the elites and the people.
Of course it should always be stressed it’s the less patriotic Russian oligarchs who run away every time something approaching The Longest Day takes place.
For a few hours, the West was betting heavily on the dismemberment of Russia. Not now. And not in the foreseeable future.
The succession is already being prepared, by Team Putin and selected patriotic oligarchs. Among the contenders, there’s a secret name that will stun everyone when it pops up. He’s still invisible in terms of public opinion, and works in the shadows. His name should remain secret for the time being.
As it stands, what matters is that Russia as whole emerged even stronger out of The Longest Day. The man and woman in the street showed himself and herself, once again, as a true patriot, ready to defend the Motherland whatever it takes.
There was no confrontation between those who are pro-Russian institutions and those who are pro-Wagner. People actually support both. People regarded Wagner like the “polite green men” who helped to peacefully retake Crimea in 2014. Facing them, there was not a single policeman or military.
So Putin is stronger than ever. But everyone should always keep this in mind: the one thing he can’t forgive is betrayal.
There is an ongoing hazmat incident at the White House in Washington DC. The US Secret Service along with emergency personnel are investigating the situation.
The Secret Service has cordoned off a significant area around the White House, and a full hazmat response has been requested to the scene.
2023 07 03 11 22
Zambia President’s speech made China take only 1% interest on its loans
Russia may have started operating its S-70 Okhotnik heavy-strike stealth drone against Ukron. Based on photgraphs of the drone flying in the Ukron skies published by Ukron’s telegram channels, Turkish media first reported the use of the drone in the Sumy region.
The drone is speculated to have struck military facilities of the Armed Forces of Ukron (AFU) in the Sumy region.”
On the afternoon of June 27, the Ukron media reported explosions in Sumy and Kremenchuk, Poltava region.
Report Credibility
A photograph, purportedly of the drone flying over Ukron, posted on Mash Telegram Channel conforms to the shape and size of the Okhotnik (Hunter).
At least two Okhotnik drones are known to be undergoing flight testing.
In June 2022, Janes reported, quoting RIA Novosti, that the S-70B Okhotnik had conducted its first test launch of precision-guided munitions (PGMs) against ground targets on May 28, 2022. The drone had launched air-to-surface missiles developed for the manned Sukhoi Su-57
Janes reported that the missile was likely the Kh-59Mk2 standoff cruise missile, a development of the Kh-59-series heavy tactical missile that entered service in the early 1980s.
Kh-59Mk2 range and payload estimates vary widely, but it’s likely to be able to reach targets at least 150 miles away while carrying a 500lb warhead. The modular nature of the design may allow for multiple configurations, such as larger fuel sections, to be swapped for smaller warhead sections.
Izvestia reported in February 2020 that the Grom (Thunder) 9-A-7759 glide bomb had been integrated with the Okhotnik. The drone can carry four Groms in its internal bomb bay.
The Russian Ministry of Defense (RuMoD) has not commented on the report.
Drone Availability
As per open source information, two Russia Okhotnik prototypes are undergoing flight testing, and two more are under construction/flight testing.
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The first prototype, which features a non-stealthy circular exhaust, flew for the first time on August, 2019.
The second prototype incorporated tweaks to the aerodynamic design and electronics based on the operational experience with the first Okhotnik.
“The third and fourth drones “will match the production version of the Okhotnik,” the source said.
In March 2021, it was reported that construction of the second prototype of the S-70 Okhotnik was underway. Besides improved electronics and software, the drone would have a shaped nozzle for improved rear aspect stealth.
On December 14, 2021, Russian Deputy Defense Minister Alexei Krivoruchko reportedly told Russia-24 TV channel that a serial contract for the supply of the S-70 “Okhotnik” would be concluded within six months. A special control center is being created for the newest Hunter drone.
Flight testing of the second prototype began in July 2022 summer.
Russia may have operationally deployed two Okhotnik drones. Also, it’s conceivable that the two additional prototypes, under construction in 2021, are either available to Russian forces or will be available shortly. It is even possible that they have been operationally deployed already.
The Su-57, S-70 Combination
Russian officials have consistently reiterated that Okhotniks can operate under the control of a Su-57 fighter jet pilot.
“These planes and drones can interact not only with each other but also in various types of combat formations,” said Andrey Yelchaninov, the first deputy chairman of the Board of the Russian Military-Industrial Commission, in April 2021. “Within a very short timeframe, there will be a possibility to control several Okhotnik drones from the Su-57 cockpit.”
Conclusion
Extrapolating development timelines, Russia may have operationally deployed the Okhotnik drone in Ukron. Indeed, it would be logical for Russia to do so to obtain feedback and accumulate operational experience.
The drone in the published photograph features a circular exhaust, which would mean it’s the first prototype. The use of the first prototype would also be logical. Having been under flight testing since 2019, the prototype has likely served the purpose that it was developed for.
Also, losing the first prototype wouldn’t compromise trade secrets or set back the development program to the same extent as losing the second prototype for reasons discussed earlier.
The first prototype is unlikely to operate as a Su-57 loyal wingman. The communication suite, computer hardware, and software required for loyal wingman operations would most likely have been installed and tested on the second prototype.
If the Okhotnik proves itself capable of penetrating Ukron’s airspace undetected, Russia could fast-track serial production of the drone.
Russia’s competent military industrial base could eventually turn the tide against Ukron, which relies heavily on free Western weapons supply.
Now, let’s get on with some more important stuff…
Your BACKWARD voice reveals all your secrets (And the CIA knows it)
Zero evidence of any link between the pandemic virus and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, whether deliberate or accidental
Zero evidence that the Wuhan Institute even researched the particular strain of coronavirus that was responsible for initiating the pandemic, or even a similar strain
Coronavirus is a large family of viruses. And what the fuck does an Institute of Virology do if not conduct research on viruses?
“We continue to have no indication that the WIV’s pre-pandemic research holdings included SARSCoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic,” the report said.
Out of 6 other US intelligence agencies, 4 have concluded that the pandemic was due to a “natural transmission” of coronavirus, while 2 others are “undecided.”
The declassified CIA report is 4 pages long. That’s how little they have.
But watch their politicians state or suggest the opposite again and again.
First Time Hearing Ronnie James Dio | Rainbow’s “Stargazer” Vocal Analysis
Russia’s Medvedev: “. . . there will be a nuclear winter . . . “
Statements by Dmitry Medvedev, Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council, made during an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta:
Below are statements made by Deputy Chairman of the Russian Federation Council, Dmitry Medvedev. Pay close attention!
The course of the AFU counter-offensive proved unexpected for Kiev’s Western sponsors, who believed in the “omnipotence of unlimited dough”. The defeat of the AFU in the Artemovsk direction was a foregone conclusion;
European businesses that have left Russia are “biting their elbows”, lamenting their lost revenues. It has permanently lost the Russian market; goods have been replaced by others. Production growth in Russia is “much higher than in Europe”, and inflation at the end of the year will be lower than in the eurozone;
Russia was forced to conduct a special military operation to protect its sovereignty and millions of people. The Kiev regime should be scrapped and banned as fascist;
The situation in Ukraine is not a regional conflict but a total confrontation between the collective West and the rest of the world. The confrontation between the West and the rest of the world could last for decades;
The current confrontation between the West and the rest of the world has brought the world to the brink of a third world war. In the event of a third world war, there will be no winners – there will be a nuclear winter, epidemics and famine on Earth;
The outcome of the total confrontation between Russia and the West should be enshrined in a new document like the Helsinki Act.”
Tex-Mex Beef Lasagna
2023 07 02 13 44
Turn to Tradition for Tex-Mex Taste
(Family Features) The next time your loved ones crave a comforting dish that’s warming from the inside-out, turn to an all-time classic with a touch of southern flair.
Take inspiration for this Tex-Mex Beef Lasagna from season 3 of “BBQuest: Beyond the Pit,” a video series that dives into the long-held traditions, new flavors and everyday inspiration that make Texas barbecue legendary. Developed from the show by BBQuest co-host and “Hardcore Carnivore” cookbook author Jess Pryles, this tasty take on comfort food can be the perfect solution for a family meal with plenty of leftovers.
After dinner, settle in together and learn pitmaster techniques from the experts as the series follows four themes that capture the essence of Texas barbecue: legacy and tradition; creativity and innovation; Texas trailblazers; and family and community.
“Since launching BBQuest four years ago, it’s truly remarkable to see how much has changed and yet stayed the same when it comes to Texas barbecue, and that’s exactly what you see in season 3,” said Rachel Chou, Texas Beef Council’s director of consumer marketing. “There has been so much exciting innovation around cooking methods and international flavors while there’s still a huge dedication to long-held recipes and smoking techniques.”
10 ounces canned diced tomatoes with green chiles, drained
15 ounces canned red enchilada sauce
1 cup Mexican crema or sour cream
Nonstick cooking spray
12 corn tortillas
8 ounces shredded Mexican blend cheese
Cilantro (optional)
Green onions, thinly sliced (optional)
Instructions
Heat oven to 375 degrees F.
In large pan or skillet, heat olive oil over medium-high heat then add onion. Cook until softened, 4 to 5 minutes, stirring regularly.
Add ground beef and cook, stirring regularly, until beef has browned.
Add kosher salt, garlic powder, cumin, chipotle powder and onion powder; stir well. Add corn, black beans and diced tomatoes. Turn heat to medium and simmer 10 minutes. Remove from heat.
In bowl, combine enchilada sauce and crema; mix well.
Spray casserole dish with nonstick cooking spray. Pour about 1/4 cup enchilada sauce mixture on bottom to prevent tortillas from sticking.
Layer 2 to 4 tortillas across bottom then top with layer of ground beef mixture. Use ladle to spoon some enchilada sauce mixture on top, distributing evenly. Top with another layer of tortillas then repeat layers until casserole is full, 3 or 4 layers. Top with shredded cheese.
Loosely cover dish with foil in tent shape to help prevent cheese from sticking, then bake for 30 minutes.
Remove foil and bake for 10 to 15 minutes until cheese is bubbly and golden brown.
Cool for 5 minutes before serving. Top with cilantro and green onions, if desired.
I turned 16 in January of 2000, my dad “gave” me his beat up old 1987 Ford Ranger. “Gave” is in quotation marks because it wasn’t REALLY mine, it was my dads but I was the primary driver.
In the summer of 2000, my mom’s youngest brother (my “guncle”-gay uncle) got ANOTHER DUI. I don’t remember if it was his 2nd or 3rd one, but it didn’t matter. He ended up losing his license for a year.
My home life wasn’t the greatest that summer, my mom and dad had separated, I finally had the freedom you can only get when you have a car, but you have to have money for gas and fun things to do.
I had already worked at McDonalds since I was 15 and a half, and I took on another job at our local movie theater (one of the best jobs ever!!)
Of course, since I had my license, and a vehicle, and my uncle’s schedule just happened to work with mine, I became his chauffeur for the summer. No one asked me if I would help, I was told to help.
I was a little peeved about it. I love my uncle, but I wish I had been asked. That’s all.
I’d normally work at McDonalds from noon to 4, go home, change, eat and then head to the movie theater and work from 6 to close.
My uncle worked at a seafood restaurant and had to be there by 9 until 4, the he’d walk to his other job and work from 5 to close, which just happened to be the time I got off of work. Sometimes he’d get a ride home from another co-worker, but it was mostly me.
Most of the time it worked out great. I got to know my uncle better than anyone in my family, I even ended up working with him at a pizza joint for a few months the next summer.
We had our own little rituals, I’d run by Wendy’s once in a while before I picked him up from his 2nd job and get him an iced tea, and he’d make me personal pan pizzas once in a while.
We both worked Saturday nights, so I’d take him grocery shopping after work. It was fun.
As I mentioned before, my truck wasn’t in the best of shape, so the inevitable happened.
I had dropped my uncle off at his apartment and was heading home. My truck broke down. I was able to get it to a side street, but it was in the middle of the road.
I walked over to the gas station and used a pay phone (Hahahaha) and I called my mom. It was like 11:30 PM. I was literally a 10 minute drive from home.
ME: “Mom. My truck broke down. Will you come get me?”
MOM: “Why aren’t you home yet?”
ME: “It’s Saturday, you know I take Trevor grocery shopping.”
MOM: “Well, you’re going to have to find your own way home then. It’s not my fault you’re ‘hanging out’ with Trevor so late.”
ME: “Yes it is! I didn’t volunteer to be his chauffeur, you volunteered me!! I don’t mind doing it, but it’s not fair to pin it on me.” I was so frustrated I shouldn’t have said it, but I did.
MOM: “I will NOT pick you up. Walk home if you have to.”
She hung up on me.
Okay. Fine.
I didn’t want to walk home, in the dark, after midnight, and I didn’t want to leave my truck in the middle of the road.
I sat in my car and cried for about 20 minutes. It was well past midnight.
I look up, and in my rear view mirror I see flashing blue lights.
GREAT. GOOD. A TICKET ON TOP OF EVERYTHING ELSE!!
I rolled down my window and the police officer approached my car.
PO: “Hello young lady. Are you okay?”
ME: “My car broke down and I can’t find anyone to pick me up, plus, I know it shouldn’t be in the middle of the road.”
PO: “Okay. Let me see what we can do. Can I see your license, registration and insurance. I’ll be right back.”
I handed him the paperwork, and he went back to his car.
He came back a few minutes later.
PO: “Everything looks good on my end with you. Why are you out so late?”
I explained that I had gotten off of work and taken my uncle grocery shopping, and my truck stopped and that was as far as I got. I called my mom and she refused to pick me up. I didn’t want to leave my truck in the middle of the road and risk it being towed and it was an almost 2 mile walk home, and I didn’t feel safe walking that far by myself.
PO: “I understand. How about we do this? Put your truck in neutral and we will push it to the side of the road, and I’ll take you home. I’m off at 1, so this will keep me busy until I can clock out. How’s that??”
I started to cry. We got my truck where it needed to be and he took me home.
I can officially check the “rode in the back of a police car,” box off my bucket list.
When we got to my house, he asked me to stay in the car while he talked to my mom.
He knocked on the door and my moms face dropped.
He said something along the lines of “Your 16 year old daughter was stranded on the side of the road She was scared and didn’t know what to do. When she called you, the one person she should be able to rely on, and you refused to take the 20 minute drive to go and pick her up. She is in the back of my car, right now, and she’s still scared. I’m glad I found her before someone else did. In the future, of this happens again, please pick her up or send someone else to.”
He let me out of the car, I told him thank you, and I went into the house.
My mom apologized to me, and we had a long talk. I told her I loved spending time with Trevor, and I’m glad he’s in my life. However, it wasn’t fair for her to punish me for doing something that I was told to do.
She never let me down after that.
For those who will ask why I didn’t call my dad, he was working. This was pre-cell phone (well, they were expensive for the time, and I didn’t have one) and I didn’t have his work number memorized.
The Over-Hyped ‘Spy’ Balloon That Didn’t
With regards to China President Joe Biden said on June 20 2023:
And the reason why Xi Jinping got very upset in terms of when I shot that balloon down with two boxcars full of spy equipment in it is he didn’t know it was there. No, I’m serious. That’s what’s a great embarrassment for dictators, when they didn’t know what happened. That wasn’t supposed to be going where it was. It was blown off course up through Alaska and then down through the United States. And he didn’t know about it. When it got shot down, he was very embarrassed. He denied it was even there.
Biden acknowledges that the weather balloon was ‘blow off course’ and thereby debunks previous claims that it was steerable. China had no intent to let the balloon cross Canada and the United States. And if there had really been ‘two boxcars full of spy equipment’ on the balloon why hasn’t the U.S. shown any of it?
Why would or should a president of the U.S. or China know of some weather balloon floating somewhere?
Xi was embarrassed by the circus the U.S. made over that affair? … Xi denied that the ballon was where it was to whom? And the U.S. would know about that how?
There were so many questions about those ‘spy balloon’ claims that, from the very beginning, I was sure and said that it was all bunk:
But the Biden administration created a scandal over the randomly floating weather balloon. It thereby opened itself to criticism from the hawks in the Democratic and Republican parties. It canceled, without need, the planned mission of Secretary of State Anthony Blinken to China.
Well – as it turns out it all was bunk, just as I had claimed.
The ‘spy balloon’ was not spying at all. It had a U.S. made camera on board for this or that (navigational orientation?) purpose and was not submitting any pictures from it:
The US gear was intermixed with “more specialized Chinese sensors and other equipment” with the purpose of snapping photos and capturing videos and other information to transmit to Beijing, according to the Journal.
Despite the spy balloon’s surveillance capabilities, the Defense Department does not believe the spy balloon collected data while it was flying over US territory, Pentagon press secretary Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said Thursday.
Via Reuters the Pentagon confirmed that the ‘spy balloon’ was just a balloon that was not spying at all:
A Chinese spy balloon that flew over the United States earlier this year before being shot down did not collect information as it went across the country, the Pentagon said on Thursday.
“We assess that it did not collect while it was flying over the U.S.,” Pentagon spokesman Brigadier General Pat Ryder told reporters.
The balloon spent a week flying over the United States and Canada before the U.S. military shot it down off the Atlantic Coast on Biden’s orders.
Biden had already confirmed that the balloon was ‘blown of course’ which had been immediately clear to me and to anyone who could look up and understand the relevant weather maps of pressure systems and their atmospheric wind directions and strength.
2023 07 02 14 00
The balloon was also not a spying device because there are obviously much better ways, like satellites, to gain more precise information than a randomly floating weather balloon will ever be able to catch.
The Biden administration is intentionally using anti-Asian racism to create an ‘enemy’ by alleging that the Chinese are doing wrong in this or that or in whatever may randomly float over the horizon. At the same time it is copying those Chinese policies it had previously criticized:
Bidenomics seems increasingly likely to play a pivotal role in US President Joe Biden’s upcoming 2024 presidential election campaign. With great fanfare in a June 28 speech in Chicago, he offered a stirring endorsement of “industrial policy” as the centerpiece of his economic strategy. … For the US, there is a certain irony, possibly even hypocrisy, in embracing industrial policy as an effective strategy to counter China. Washington has long been critical of Chinese industrial policy as one of its most egregious anti-competitive sins. That was a key allegation in the Trump Administration’s March 2018 Section 301 report that quickly became the foundational evidence for tariffs and the broader trade war that was to follow. The Section 301 report argued that China was unique in relying on the subsidies and targeting of industrial policy—a conclusion I took strong issue with in Chapter 4 of Accidental Conflict, in which I presented evidence of a legacy of industrial policy strategies in Japan, Germany, and, yes, the United States. And now the Biden Administration, which has endorsed most of the tactics of Trump’s trade war with China, is embracing the very same industrial policy approach that China has long practiced.
Well, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Doing like China does, because what China does is successful, is now the new normal.
Next: A U.S. weather balloon, with a defunct Chinese camera on board, unintentionally crossing China. “U.S.A., U.S.A., …”
Unfortunately the U.S. is not good at imitating China’s policies:
[T]he point I am trying to make here is that both approaches rely on the government’s ability to target the so-called vital, strategic industries of the future. Japan failed miserably at that, and the US didn’t exactly distinguish itself the last time it tried—ironically aimed at the same semiconductor industry that is getting all the attention today. Indeed, the failure of the then widely-heralded Sematech effort of the late 1980s seems all but forgotten. … The US economy is performing well by many accounts. Competitiveness, however, always remains a major challenge. Bidenomics is aimed at addressing this key challenge, a goal I certainly applaud. But is industrial policy, one of China’s hallmark tactics that we, ourselves, have been so critical of, really the best way to pull it off?
The tax-payer money that Biden is now providing to industries is likely to bump up stock prices and CEO wages through major bullshit projects like the over-hyped garbage in-garbage out patter recognition algorithms that are sold to the public as Artificial Intelligence.
Is there, after all the previous promises and investments, any autonomous driving vehicle out there today that is trusted to do no harm? No?
I was over run by a group of very tough, young criminals living in a re-hab group home located about 1/4 mile behind an old caretakers cottage I was renovating. The group home was at the end of an unpaved road in a heavily wooded border to a multi-thousand acre forest. My cottage was down closer to the highway.
As soon as the trades left, they swarmed to their new “clubhouse” to smoke and drink all sorts of stuff and the rubbish they left made it a big problem. Some friendly local cops and the caretakers that ran the house were helpless in discouraging my nighttime and weekend visitors.
The solution: I posted a little typed notice on the front door (no locks yet). “ Caretakers wanted! Meet me here at 6PM Tomorrow. Cokes and snacks provided.”
I was met by a hoard of 6–8 that you wouldn’t want to meet after dark. After a short intro, cooler opening and chip bags handed out, I explained the problem. Damn trespassers, always on days of no work, nights, weekends, neither the cops or I could catch them. The damn mess they left should be a shootin’ offense. I needed help with security.
My proposal was that if they would keep an eye out for trespassers, helped clean up any mess left by ones we couldn’t catch, and get license plate numbers, I’d let them hang out on the porch and every weekend I would fill a cooler with drinks and provide a couple of big bags of chips for weekends and do a monthly hot dog cook out for the couple of months left until I expected to move in.
Brinks Security could not have provided a more secure work site than I enjoyed for the remainder of the project. And Brinks does not offer the trash and debris pick up as a bonus. These kids took to the project as if there was a Nobel Peace Prize at stake.
These truants all, one arsonist, a couple of brawlers, most thieves, all turned out to be some pretty fair neighbors and great lookouts for my little hideaway.
Tex-Mex Calabacita con Puerco
calabacitas con puerco 1a
Ingredients
2 tablespoons shortening
3 pounds pork chops, boned and cubed
3 or 4 serrano chiles, or more or less to taste
1 large onion
2 teaspoons whole cumin seed
4 cloves garlic
1/3 cup flour
3 ounces squash (yellow or zucchini or Mexican squash), sliced, large slices quartered
1 can whole kernel corn, including liquid
2 cans Ro*Tel chopped tomatoes
2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon black pepper
Instructions
Heat shortening in Dutch oven; fry pork cubes in batches until browned. Return all pork to pan.
Place chiles and onion in food processor container and process until chopped (or chop together by hand).
Slice garlic and place with cumin seed and salt in a mortar and pestle and grind together. (The garlic and cumin seed and salt can be chopped in the food processor with the chiles and onion, but grinding it gives it more flavor).
Add chiles, onion, garlic, cumin and salt to pan with pork and cook over high heat until onion is transparent.
Sprinkle flour over pork and vegetables and stir to combine. Cook a few minutes to remove the raw taste of the flour.
Add all remaining ingredients plus about 1 tomato can of water — enough so that pork and vegetables are not quite covered with liquid. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer and cover with a lid. Cook at a simmer for about 2 hours, stirring occasionally, checking periodically and adding more water if necessary.
I was a witness to this during my first year of med school:
One of the second year med students and I decided to hit a pizza place one day for lunch. Our server, who looked like she was in her mid-20s, was walking over wearing a cast on her ankle and using crutches. The guy I was with said “watch this- I’ll show you how to pick up girls using your med school knowledge.” He mentioned her cast and then in an arrogant tone told her that she must have injured this and that tendon or muscle. Second year students can tell you the names of nearly every muscle in the body and tens of thousands of other medical facts but don’t know a lot of clinical information yet because they have not spent much time in the hospital. To make this scene worse he finished with a condescending look and said “oh, I’m sorry, sometimes I forget that you non-medical folks don’t know all of the advanced medical information that those of us in the profession know.” I was cringing.
We had our pizza, paid the bill, and as she was picking up the checks turned around and said to him “ hey sport, it wasn’t any of the muscles you mentioned, I actually injured a different set of muscles” then started listing them. She topped it off by explaining in excellent detail the surgical procedure using flawless medical terminology. His mouth was open, I was dying inside, and her mic drop comment as she walked away was “I’m a fourth-year medical student who just matched in orthopedics. You need to get some better pick up lines.”
The Prime Minister of Poland, Mateusz Morawiecki stated today that he has requested for the United States to begin the Deployment of Nuclear Weapons into Poland due to the recent transfer of Russian Tactical-Nuclear Weapons onto the Territory of Belarus.
Polish President, Andrzej Duda stated in October of 2022 that he had also spoken to U.S. Officials about the possible Deployment of Nuclear Weapons to Poland but this was before the transfer of Russian Nukes to Belarus.
What does Poland want with US Nuclear Bombs on its territory? What do they think it might accomplish?
If such devices were placed in Poland, the Polish government could NOT use them; they don’t have the Permissive Action Link needed to arm the bomb.
Moreover, having US Nuclear weapons on their territory only guarantees that Russia will target Poland with VERY MANY nuclear bombs to make certain Poland cannot achieve anything with any bombs they might get.
So what is Poland actually thinking? Unless they want to get our bombs, disassemble them, take out the enriched nuclear cores, install those cores in Polish-made bombs, then use them . . .
Việt Nam and China have issued a joint press statement on the occasion of Prime Minister Phạm Minh Chính’s official visit to China and attendance at the 14th Annual Meeting of the New Champions (AMNC) of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Tianjin from June 25-28.
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Chinese Premier Li Qiang hosts a welcome ceremony for Vietnamese Prime Minister Phạm Minh Chính in Beijing on June 26, 2023. — VNA/VNS Photo Dương Giang
HÀ NỘI — Việt Nam and China have issued a joint press statement on the occasion of Prime Minister Phạm Minh Chính’s official visit to China and attendance at the 14th Annual Meeting of the New Champions (AMNC) of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Tianjin from June 25-28.
During the visit, PM Chính met with Party General Secretary and President of China Xi Jinping and held talks with Premier Li Qiang. He also had meetings with Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC) of China Zhao Leji, and Chairman of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) Wang Huning.
The two sides have informed each other about the situation of their respective parties and countries, engaging in in-depth discussions and reaching important shared understandings on deepening the Việt Nam-China comprehensive strategic cooperation in the new context; as well as on international and regional issues of mutual concern.
They agreed to continue effectively implementing the joint statement on further deepening the comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership between Việt Nam and China, which was issued during Vietnamese Party General Secretary Nguyễn Phú Trọng’s visit to China last year.
They agreed to maintain high-level exchanges and strengthen party-to-party, government-to-government, and parliamentary exchanges between countries. They agreed to enhance mutual learning and exchange experiences in promoting the cause of socialism building and seeking distinctive modernisation paths in each country. They vowed to promote the overall coordination role of the Việt Nam-China steering committee for bilateral cooperation in deepening exchanges and collaboration in such key areas as diplomacy, defence, law enforcement, trade and economy, and culture.
Việt Nam considers the development of relations with China as a strategic choice and top priority, while China views Việt Nam as a priority direction for its neighbourhood diplomacy. Both sides said they will engage in in-depth discussions on related specific measures.
The two sides concurred to actively promote strategic connectivity, accelerate joint work in building a high-quality “Belt and Road” initiative, strengthen connectivity in border roads and railways, build a multi-modal and efficient logistics system, accelerate the upgrading and connectivity of their border infrastructure, and promote smart border cooperation. They will step up mutual learning and exchange between their state-owned enterprises; explore opportunities to foster bilateral and multilateral cooperation in key mineral sectors. Việt Nam pledges a favourable business climate for Chinese enterprises investing in the country.
The two sides agreed to enhance friendship exchanges and mutually beneficial cooperation between localities, especially border ones, raise the awareness of the two countries’ people, especially youths, about the bilateral friendship, and well organise exchange programmes, including the Việt Nam-China Youth Friendship Meeting, the Việt Nam-China border people festival, and the Việt Nam-China People’s Forum.
They will seriously materialise important common perceptions reached by leaders of the two Parties and countries, and the Agreement on basic principles guiding the settlement of sea-related issues, satisfactorily control disagreements at sea, foster maritime cooperation, and work together to maintain peace and stability in the East Sea (known internationally as the South China Sea).
Việt Nam and China will also push ahead with the comprehensive and effective implementation of the Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the East Sea (DOC), and on the basis of negotiation and consensus, soon reach a substantive and effective Code of Conduct in the East Sea (COC) in line with international law, including the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (1982 UNCLOS).
The Vietnamese side affirmed that it consistently supports the “One-China” principle.
On the basis of equality and mutual respect, the two countries will cooperate in human rights issues, promote dialogue and international cooperation in this field, and resolutely oppose the politicisation of human rights issues.
The two sides consented to persist in true multilateralism, work together to safeguard international justice and fairness, and enhance coordination in major international and regional issues.
They will maintain coordination and mutual support within international and regional frameworks such as the United Nations, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, ASEAN-China Cooperation, and Mekong-Lancang Cooperation, while effectively implementing the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP).
Việt Nam supports China’s accession to the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) in accordance with standards and procedures of the agreement.
During the visit, the two premiers witnessed the signing of cooperation documents in market supervision, smart border gate development, and less-sensitive sea-related fields.
The two sides shared the view that the official visit to China by Prime Minister Phạm Minh Chính was a great success, helping deepen the comprehensive strategic cooperative partnership between the two countries, for peace, stability, and development in the region and the world at large.
PM Chính has on the occassion invited Premier Li Qiang to visit Việt Nam. The Chinese leader accepted the invitation with pleasure. — VNS
It was October 2016. At the UMass Club in Boston, Tom Ashbrook was set to interview the Woz for an alumni event. When I heard about this, I simply had to go. I had to meet the legend and get his autograph on my working Apple II.
Ticket prices were a staggering $250, so I called the event organizer and asked if I could volunteer for free entry. She said yes!!
So there I was in Boston, clutching my Apple II as I waited to be let in to his room. When Woz saw me and the artifact I was holding, he smiled and turned towards me. He started telling me about the making of the original Apple I and how he got color to work for the Apple II series. He also told me about his devotion to circuitry since a very young age.
When it was finally time to get his signature, I offered him a marker I brought. He then told me that I must be uncreative, because I couldn’t predict that he would bring a marker of his own. Simultaneously, he whipped out his personal marker. I just stood there with my mouth open; what could I possibly say!? I was too happy to care, and posed for the following picture.
Yesterday I took my young son to see a property I just closed.
He was in shock.
“What piece of JUNK did you buy, dad? Why waste your money on this?”
I laughed and asked, “Why is it that I find opportunity here, while you see a massive problem?
“But how can this be an opportunity, dad? The place is in ruins!”
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It’s incredible how our reality is determined by how we perceive the world around us…
— While one is giving constructive feedback, the other person may feel criticized and offended.
— While some may feel they’re making the best use of their time, others will feel they’re wasting it.
Our beliefs, values, experiences, and even our mood will massively influence our perspectives.
I enjoyed helping my son change his perspective and visualize the opportunity I had found on this property.
It’s important to note that without his willingness to listen to me, his wrongful perspective wouldn’t have changed.
This made me think how important it is for us to stop, analyze and LISTEN to our trusted friends and advisors before we settle our ideas on stone.
Chinese ambassador wear Mao suit to meet Biden
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He’s EXPOSING The UFO Secret Access Programs
Hey! He is saying that I have been saying for years. LOL! Plus lots of other things, curious. But don’t go too far down the “rabbit hole”. Just pay attention to the overview. Not the details.
So, after watching this video…
Now you know WHY I refer to reptilians, and Tall Greys as a “joke”. Stage-play, and other cover activities that are unbelievable, but used to hide the real truths.
Lots of reverse engineering stuff. But I was involved in actual work with DOMAIN.
Now you know WHY my entire section was “retired”.
Now you know WHY everyone in my MAJ branch fled to China when we had the opportunity.
Once, when I was living in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, my cat (a cute but smallish Maine Coon) named Phelie jumped on my bed at 4am. She took out her claw, and carefully… so very carefully… opened my eyelid. She wanted to see if I was alive.
I guess that (then, at that time) I must have slept deep.
Cats and dogs; our little buddies. Our pals. Well, they care for us. They worry about us. And if we have the opportunity, we should take care of them too.
…
Today, this article is going to be heavily laden with “reaction videos”. People listen to a song that they never heard before, and you listen to their reactions. You would be surprised how many of the younger folk (20s and so on) have never heard of the music that we all grew up with. And it’s a treat.
I suggest that you watch all of them, but if you are busy, then just watch the very first one, which is a compilation of reactions to an Opera, and the last one which is a reaction by an African woman to “Zombie”.
Enjoy today. And if you have the time, I strongly recommend watching all those videos. Most especially those with a “@” at the front.
First Reaction To Queen – Bohemian Rhapsody THE BEST BY FAR!
There was an older woman on my block growing up who disliked that a bunch of older boys kept walking on her lawn and garden. One day I watched as she called the biggest boy over. He was menacing and we all walked in fear of him. She said, “Son, I have a problem I am hoping you can help me with. I have all these kids who walk on my lawn and garden and I am trying to grow things. Do you think you could make sure no one tramples them since you are clearly such a leader in the neighborhood?”
From that day on not one person touched her grass or garden. That boy defended her turf like it was his own and with every fiber of his being.
All it took was a frail 80 year old woman with some wise rhetoric.
“Rebels beheaded, instigators arrested”? And this is not Prigozhin
An audio recording appeared in one of the telegram channels of the Wagner group. Someone describes the situation with Prigozhin’s rebellion, prefaced his speech with the following words: “I ask you to put this on your information resources.” This person introduced himself as an officer of the Marine Corps of the Northern Fleet “from the Kherson direction.” He says that a unique KGB-style special operation was carried out – “lightning fast and deadly for the enemy.” And explains what it is.
The entry with the “officer’s” story, of course, may be stuffing and intrigues of enemies. And the fact that it was posted on the resources of PMC “Wagner” is not a guarantee of authenticity. First there was a recording, then its textual transcript. This “military” says that allegedly a group of rebels from the Ministry of Defense, the General Staff and the National Guard were going to remove Putin, but they did not succeed:
They are beheaded and destroyed. All the instigators, organizers, performers were handed over to the authorities that should deal with this. And they are already doing it hard.
He explains the role Wagner played in this:
Vladimir Vladimirovich turned to his loyal soldiers and his most trusted person, Prigozhin Evgeny Viktorovich. Special thanks to him for saving the country and people from the coup. He is a true patriot and deserves a second Hero star.
Next, the listeners are explained why the PMC units occupied Rostov-on-Don in the first place:
Because the headquarters of the Southern Military District is located there. The instigators-generals were sitting there. Some managed to escape to Moscow. In a panic, they gave orders to attack the Wagner columns with aircraft. But it did not bring results.
The narrator drew attention to the fact that the buildings of the FSB and the Ministry of Internal Affairs were not occupied by the “Wagnerites”, but only cordoned off – because there was no need for this.
The generals who fled to Moscow could not believe that an uprising had been raised against them. They were really scared, because they don’t have combat-ready troops, everyone is involved at the front. They ran to the president: what to do?
Who is with the president?
Then there was Putin’s appeal to the people, in which he spoke about some rebels, but did not name “Wagner” and did not mention the name of Prigozhin. It was about the rebels, “who will be punished to the fullest extent of the law.” And the narrator emphasized in this regard that it was “precisely about the group of generals of the Ministry of Defense.”
Vladimir Vladimirovich is waiting after the appeal. The Federation Council speaks out for the fact that they are devoted to the Supreme Commander. Mayors, governors – too. President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko calls Prigozhin: “Zhenya, hang up.” Wagner divisions are leaving for their permanent locations.
Here a hint is made that we did not hear such assurances from some leaders of the army, and by this they betrayed themselves:
That says a lot… That’s what “Wagner” did. The most unique operation. The rebels are completely beheaded. The grouping has been destroyed. According to some information, the leaders have been arrested. I don’t know for sure, but we’ll know tomorrow.
Quick “palace coup”
The narrator also answers the question: “What would we expect if this operation did not take place?”
“Wagner” was going to be disbanded the other day, depriving the president of such a power lever, because everyone is at the front. There would be regular regroupings like Kharkov, Kyiv. Only already in the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions. Something would have happened in Crimea. Then the people would get excited. Here the generals would make a quick palace coup, taking their place (Putin. – Approx. ed.).
Also, according to the author of the entry, as a result of the coup, Russia would pay indemnities to everyone and “would go to hell”, and the new rulers would rule “this decaying and dying” country.
And, of course, our president, as always, was on top. Grandmaster!
Will the Tula governor go for a promotion?
Wagner also reports in its TG channels that the Prosecutor General’s Office allegedly found procedural inconsistencies in the FSB’s decision to initiate a criminal case against Yevgeny Prigozhin, and it was closed (later, a message appeared in Telegram channels, without any reference to specific sources, that Yevgeny Prigozhin remains under investigation in connection with the rebellion):
Prigozhin, Lukashenka and Dyumin will meet in Moscow. You will learn about the results, detentions with resignations from the media.
Also, according to the “Wagner” channel, soon the governor of the Tula region, Alexei Dyumin, will begin work at the headquarters of the Southern Federal District of the Moscow Region, where he will be presented in a new position. And he will bring to the final the goals and objectives of the special operation:
Surovikin will be the chief of staff, some of the PMC fighters will enter a separate structural unit of the Russian Defense Ministry. Only Alekseev and Yevkurov will retain their positions. Prigozhin will be engaged in a new large project on the territory of Belarus.
As for all PMCs, the Ministry of Defense signs a contract with them, and they cease to be structures of state corporations. And the Wagner structure will receive a unique legal status, which “will allow it to be a subject in a dialogue not only with the authorities in Russia, but also with the governments of other states.”
These are the plans voiced by the anonymous speakers of the Wagner Group. How true they are, time will tell. If this is the case, then we will see the results very soon.
The word “throw” immediately comes to mind.
The political observer of Tsargrad Andrey Perla expressed the following opinion about the conspiracy theory voiced in this material:
I think that such texts do not improve the situation, first of all, for Wagner himself. Because these texts are an attempt to prove that although you retreated in front of everyone, in fact you achieved everything and won everything. There is a public in the world that can believe this, but this public is always in the minority. And can never influence the decision makers.
The second point that Andrei Perla drew attention to is that these words were not spoken on behalf of the PMC, but were expressed by an anonymous person who calls himself a marine, but does not disclose not only his name and rank, but even his call sign. This, of course, does not inspire confidence in him , but adds doubts about the authenticity of the text. And the word “throw-in” immediately comes to mind.
In any case, very soon we will understand how great the consequences of the “mutiny”. I think they are quite large. But the content of these texts has nothing or almost nothing in common with everything that happened.
– considers the observer of Tsargrad.
@ Black Reactors First Time Listening To Luciano Pavarotti Singing Nessun Dorma Pt 2
I was once driving my car from Indiana to visit my family in Pennsylvania. On the way, we had our three (x3) cats riding with us, when we hit this massive traffic jam near the “Liberty Tubes” outside of Pittsburgh.
It was hot. Miserable, and traffic was slow. All four lanes were at a standstill.
We were listening to public radio, and they put on an Opera. And as we sat there, I watched the hair stand on end on all my cats simultaneously. They all arched their backs and their ears perked up, and they stood frozen for the climax of the music.
Then one by one, they got down and came up to me and kissed me on the face.
Music. Universal.
‘Give War a Chance’ – A ‘War That Even Pacifists Can Get Behind’
The West is now waking up to the reality of the emerging, polycentric and fluid global order, Alastair Crookewrites.
More than a year into Russia’s Special Operation, the initial burst of European excitement at western push-back on Russia has dissipated. The mood instead has turned to “existential dread, a nagging suspicion that [western] civilisation may destroy itself”, Professor Helen Thompson writes.
For an instant, a euphoria had coalesced around the putative projection of the EU as a world power; as a key actor, about to compete on a world scale. Initially, events seemed to play to Europe’s conviction of its market powers: Europe was going to bring down a major power – Russia – by financial coup d’état alone. The EU felt ‘six feet tall’.
It seemed at the time a galvanising moment: “The war re-forged a long-dormant Manichaean framing of existential conflict between Russia and the West, assuming ontological, apocalyptic dimensions. In the spiritual fires of the war, the myth of the ‘West’ was rebaptised”, Arta Moeini suggests.
After the initial disappointment at the lack of a ‘quick kill’, the hope persisted – that if only the sanctions were given more time, and made more all-embracing, then Russia surely would ultimately collapse. That hope has turned to dust. And the reality of what Europe has done to itself has begun to dawn – hence Professor Thomson’s dire warning:
“Those who assume that the political world can be reconstructed by the efforts of human Will, have never before had to bet so heavily on technology over [fossil] energy – as the driver of our material advancement”.
For the Euro-Atlanticists however, what Ukraine seemed to offer – finally – was validation for their yearning to centralise power in the EU, sufficiently, to merit a place at the ‘top table’ with the U.S., as partners in playing the Great Game.
Ukraine, for better or worse, underlined Europe’s profound military dependence on Washington – and on NATO.
More particularly, the Ukraine conflict seemed to open the prospect for consolidating the strange metamorphosis of NATO from military alliance to an enlightened, Progressive, peace alliance! As Timothy Garton Ash effused in the Guardian in 2002, “NATO has become a European peace movement” where one could watch “John Lennon meet George Bush”.
The Ukraine war is portrayed, in this vein, as the “war that even former pacifists can get behind. All its proponents seemed to be singing is “Give War a Chance””.
“…especially in the past 12 months, telegenic female leaders such as the Finnish Prime Minister, Sanna Marin, German Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, and Estonian Prime Minister, Kaja Kallas, have increasingly served as the spokespersons of enlightened militarism in Europe … ”
“No political party in Europe better exemplifies the shift from militant pacifism to ardent pro-war Atlanticism than the German Greens. Most of the original Greens had been radicals during the student protests of 1968 … But as the founding members entered middle age, fissures began to appear in the party – that would one day tear it apart”.
“Kosovo then changed everything:The 78-day NATO bombing of what remained of Yugoslavia in 1999, ostensibly to halt war crimes committed by Serbian security forces in Kosovo, would forever transform the German Greens. NATO for the Greens became an active military compact concerned with spreading and defending values such as human rights, democracy, peace, and freedom – well beyond the borders of its member states”.
A few years later, in 2002, an EU functionary (Robert Cooper) could envisage Europe as a new ‘liberal imperialism’. The ‘new’ was that Europe eschewed hard military power, in favour of weaponising both a controlled ‘narrative’ and controlled participation in its market. He advocated for ‘a new age of empire’, in which Western powers no longer would have to follow international law in their dealings with ‘old fashioned’ states; they could use military force independently of the United Nations; and could impose protectorates to replace regimes which ‘misgovern’.
The German Greens’ Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, has continued with this metamorphosis, scolding countries with traditions of military neutrality, and imploring them to join NATO. She has invoked Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s line: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor”. And the European Left has been utterly captivated. Major parties have abandoned military neutrality and opposition to war – and now champion NATO. It is a stunning reversal.
All this may have been music to the ears of the Euro-élites anxious for the EU to rise to Great Power status, but this soft-power European Leviathan was wholly underpinned by the unstated (but essential) assumption that NATO ‘had Europe’s back’. This naturally implied that the EU had to tie itself ever closer to NATO – and therefore to the U.S. which controls NATO.
But the flip-side to this Atlanticist aspiration – as President Emmanuel Macron noted – is its inexorable logic that Europeans simply end by becoming American vassals. Macron was trying rather, to rally Europe towards the coming ‘age of empires’,hoping to position Europe as a ‘third pole’ in a concert of empires.
The Atlanticists were duly enraged by Macron’s remarks (which nonetheless drew support of other EU states). It could even seem (to furious Atlanticists) that Macron actually was channelling General de Gaulle who had called NATO a “false pretence” designed to “disguise America’s chokehold over Europe”.
There are however, two related schisms that flowed out from this ‘re-imagined’ NATO: Firstly, it exposed the reality of internal European rivalries and divergent interests, precisely because the NATO lead in the Ukraine conflict sets the interests of the Central East European hawks wanting ‘more America, and more war on Russia’ up and against that of the original EU western axis which wants wanting strategic autonomy (i.e. less ‘America’, and a quick end to the conflict).
Secondly, it would be predominantly the western economies that would have to bankroll the costs and divert their manufacturing capacity towards military logistic chains. The economic price, non-military de-industrialisation and high inflation, potentially, could be enough to break Europe – economically.
The prospect of a pan-European cohesive identity might be both ontologically appealing – and be seen to be an ‘appropriate accessory’ to an aspiring ‘world actor’ – yet such identity becomes caricature when mosaic Europe is transformed into an abstract de-territorialised identity that reduces people to their most abstract.
Paradoxically, the Ukraine war – far from consolidating the EU ‘identity’, as first imagined – has fractured it under the stresses of the concerted effort to weaken and collapse Russia.
Secondly, as Arta Moeini, the director of the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy, has observed:
“The American push for NATO expansion since 1991 has enlarged the alliance by adding a host of faultline states from Central and Eastern Europe. The strategy, which began with the Clinton administration but was fully championed by the George W. Bush administration, was to create a decidedly pro-American pillar on the continent, centred on Warsaw – which would force an eastward shift in the alliance’s centre of gravity away from the traditional Franco-German axis”.
“By using NATO enlargement to weaken the old power centres in Europe that might have occasionally stood up to [Washington] such as in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Washington ensured a more compliant Europe in the short-term. The upshot, however, was the formation of a 31-member behemoth with deep asymmetries of power and low compatibility of interests” – that is much weaker and more vulnerable – than it believes itself to be”.
Here is the key: “the EU is much weaker than it believes it to be”. The outset of the conflict was defined by a cast of mind entranced by the notion of Europe as a ‘mover and shaker’ in world affairs, and mesmerised by Europe’s post-war prosperity.
EU leaders convinced themselves that this prosperity had bequeathed it the clout and the economic depth to contemplate war – and to weather its reversals – with panglossian sanguinity. It has produced rather, the converse: It has put its project in jeopardy.
In John Raply and Peter Heather’s The Imperial Life Cycle, the authors explain the cycle:
“Empires grow rich and powerful and attain supremacy through the economic exploitation of their colonial periphery. But in the process, they inadvertently spur the economic development of that same periphery, until it can roll back and ultimately displace its overlord”.
Europe’s prosperity in this post-war era, thus was not so much one of its own making, but drew benefit from the tail-end of accumulations hewn from an earlier cycle – now reversed.
“The fastest-growing economies in the world are now all in the old periphery; the worst-performing economies are disproportionately in the West. These are the economic trends that have created our present landscape of superpower conflict — most saliently between America and China”.
America may think of itself as exempt from the European colonial mould, yet fundamentally, its model is
“an updated cultural-political glue that we might call “neoliberalism, NATO and denim”, which follows in the timeless imperial mould: The great wave of decolonisation that followed WW2 was meant to end that. But the Bretton Woods system, which created a trading regime that favoured industrial over primary producers and enshrined the dollar as the global reserve currency – ensured that the net flow of financial resources continued to move from developing countries to developed ones. Even when the economies of the newly-independent states grew, those of the G7 economies and their partners grew more”.
A once-mighty empire is now challenged and feels embattled. Taken aback by the refusal of so many developing countries to join with isolating Russia, the West is now waking up to the reality of the emerging, polycentric and fluid global order. These trends are set to continue. The danger is that economically weakened and in crisis, western countries attempt to re-appropriate western triumphalism, yet lack the economic strength and depth, so to do:
“In the Roman Empire, peripheral states developed the political and military capacity to end Roman domination by force… The Roman Empire might have survived – had it not weakened itself with wars of choice – on its ascendant Persian rival”.
The final ‘transgressive’ thought goes to Tom Luongo: “Allowing the West to keep thinking they can win – is the ultimate form of grinding out a superior opponent”.
There are a number of critical steps that occur before two nations engage in open warfare.
All of these steps have already been taken by China in response to American aggression and provocations.
China has taken the necessary steps. It’s all public knowledge, though you would have to perform some pretty deep sleuthing to find anything about any of it in the Western “news”.
Publishing a Casus Belli.
Dumping the other nation’s currency.
Stockpiling of precious commodities.
Military mobilization.
Severing military lines of communication.
Severing diplomatic lines of communication (touch and go presently)
It’s pretty “cut and dry”. Obvious to everyone.
China already has provided the “due diligence” and set up the “rules of engagement”. World War 3 will be on the Chinese timetable, following Chinese defined rules of engagement, and China will dictate the terms of Western surrender.
The United States is being run by ignorant idiots that have no clue as to what they are fucking with.
China’s time line is running HOT. And the “stop watch” is ticking.
Brace for impact.
FREAKING SHOOK!| FIRST TIME HEARING Faith No More – Epic REACTION
In the rest of the world, fentanyl is a controlled and regulated substance and is used as medication. In the US, fentanyl has been turned into a recreational drug inspite of the obvious dangers.
There is no effective government in the US. It is that simple.
It is obviously stupid to blame China or any other country. Other countries do not run the US government.
Only US citizens can run and manage the US government.
Well, if you distill the terms presented by the United States and it’s proxy “allies” you have this…
All Chinese must die.
Chinese culture must be erased.
All history books must be rewritten to avoid any mention of China.
China to be broken up into parts.
China to be looted until nothing is left except junk and stone.
The surviving Chinese are to be used as slaves, servants, and sex toys.
Can China survive under these conditions?
Personally, I actually think that China can.
But it will not want to, and it will flatten the United States into a radioactive wasteland of ruin if the United States continues it’s moronic march towards “suicide by cop”.
SO CATCHY!… | FIRST TIME HEARING Dexy’s Midnight Runners – Come On Eileen REACTION
President Joe Biden travels to Kyiv, Ukraine Monday, February 20, 2023. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)
In the absence of official scrutiny of Washington’s spending spree on Ukraine, The Grayzone conducted an independent audit of US funding for the country. We discovered a series of wasteful, highly unusual expenditures the Biden administration has yet to explain.
During a recent discussion with New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Samantha Power, touted her organization’s push to guarantee transparency for US taxpayer funds sent to Ukraine.
“We are involved in funding efforts at ensuring judicial integrity, which is intrinsically important to building Ukraine’s democracy and its integration plans to get into Europe,” Power declared, adding USAID’s work in Ukraine was “also really important in terms of assuring the taxpayer, the American taxpayer, that they’re resources are well spent.”
While innocuous on the surface, Power’s comments revealed a great deception the US government is currently waging against the American public. In the roughly 16 months since Russia’s February 2022 escalation of the Ukraine conflict, the US government has approved several multi-billion dollar spending packages to sustain the Kiev military’s fight against Moscow.
Though many Americans likely believe that US dollars allocated for Ukraine are spent directly on supplies for the war effort, the lead author of this report, Heather Kaiser, conducted a thorough review of Washington’s budget for the 2022 and 2023 fiscal year and discovered that is far from the case.
US taxpayers may be shocked to learn that as their families grappled with fears of Social Security’s looming insolvency, the Social Security Administration in Washington sent $4.48 million to the Kiev government in 2022 and 2023 alone. In another example of bizarre spending, USAID paid off $4.5 billion worth of Ukraine’s sovereign debt through payments made to the World Bank — all while Congress went to loggerheads over America’s ballooning national debt. (Western financial interests including BlackRock Inc. are among the largest holders of Ukrainian government bonds.)
Though it is nearly impossible to calculate the total sum of US tax dollars sent to Kiev, Kaiser was able to perform an independent audit of Washington’s proxy war in Ukraine through a careful search of open source data available on the US government’s official spending tracker.
Kaiser reviewed all the funding allocations in which Ukraine was listed as the “Place of Performance” for fiscal years 2022 and 2023. Additionally, she discovered supplementary funds were sent to Kiev by listing Ukraine as the “justification” for spending, rather than the location where the money was physically sent.
Calculating the total dollar amount that the US has given to Ukraine is incredibly challenging for multitude of reasons: there is a lag in reporting expenditures; covert money given by the CIA (Title 50 Covert Action) won’t be publicly disclosed; and direct military assistance in the form of military equipment is not calculated in the same manner as raw cash. The Pentagon recently admitted to an accounting error revised up to 6.2 billion dollars. Despite this, Kaiser submitted a request to the Department of Treasury asking them to disclose the total dollar amount of US taxpayer support for Ukraine. Treasury has not responded at the time of publication.
Though Kaiser was able to search through pages of reported spending, the US government has yet to conduct an official audit of its funding for Ukraine. What’s more, there is currently no limit to how much Washington can send to Kiev.
In the absence of dedicated official scrutiny of Washington’s spending in Ukraine, The Grayzone has produced an independent audit of US tax dollar allocation in the country.
Among the many troubling contracts we discovered was a $4.25 million payment from the Pentagon to a military diving contractor that a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee has described as a “fraudulent company.” The US government asserts the payment covered the company’s delivery of explosives equipment to Ukraine.
So how exactly was that money put to use? And why has Congress so far refused to implement any program to track these shady weapons deals?
Unfortunately, the “justification” for contracts like these often consists of just a brief paragraph — or worse, a single sentence. Little little information is available that documents precisely how the funds were spent down to the dollar and item.
Beneficiaries of USAID’s Ukraine aid: Polish NATO lobbyists, a private equity firm, rural Kenyans, a TV station in Toronto
to Ukraine throughout fiscal years 2022 and 2023, roughly 41 percent of the 53.4 billion it spent during that period. Mysteriously, a portion of USAID funding earmarked for Kiev was sent to Kenya and Ethiopia via other agencies, with the award description stating projects in Africa were “partially funded with response funds and Ukraine supplemental funds.”
USAID sent $4.5 billion to Ukraine via the World Bank to pay off Kiev’s debt and fund various social programs, including government pensions. USAID made a total of $21 billion worth of direct payments to the World Bank in fiscal years 2022 and 2023 (9.1 Billion and 11.9 Billion respectively), more money than all of the funding Washington sent to the bank between fiscal years 2008 and 2021 combined. The $4.5 billion allocated for Ukraine funded programs directed by the bank’s International Development Association and International Bank for Reconstruction and Development.
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USAID supplied a $1 billion grant to the World Bank’s International Bank for Reconstruction and Development to subsidize projects “Ukraine cannot fund at this time.”
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USAID has supplied $20 million to “Miscellaneous Foreign Awardees” since February 2020. Recipients include a Polish think tank called the Casimir Pulaski Foundation, a Toronto-based Ukrainian TV channel, a collection of Ukrainian “anti-corruption” organizations, and other groups listed in the screenshot below. These awards were issued on top of $26 million worth of funds USAID sent these groups between 2016 and the February 2022 war escalation.
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USAID allocated $500,000 for the Casimir Pulaski Foundation in 2023 to fund a program dedicated to “advanc[ing] U.S. foreign policy objectives by supporting economic growth, agriculture and trade; global health; and democracy, conflict prevention and humanitarian assistance” in Ukraine. The funds were earmarked “to strengthen the International Center for Ukrainian Victory (ICUV) initiative in implementing international advocacy campaigns to keep high levels of international solidarity with Ukraine.”
subaward the State Department granted to the Casimir Pulaski Foundation in June 2022 to “build capacity and policy formulating capabilities of the International Center for Ukrainian Victory (ICUV) and assisting Ukrainian civil society based in Poland.”
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According to their own so-called “Peace Manifesto,” the ICUV’s top priority is to admit Ukraine into NATO, a move that former US diplomats from George Kennan to Jack Matlock to Henry Kissinger and even current CIA director William Burns have described as a major provocation against Russia.
(WHO) in 2022 “to improve health outcomes in drought affected areas in Ethiopia.” The description stated, “partially funded with response funds and Ukraine Supplemental Funds.”
from the US occupation of Afghanistan, raking in as much as $600 million from USAID.
USAID sent $20.7 million to PACT, INC. for “USAID Ukraine’s public health system recovery and resilience activity and will strengthen the Government of Ukraine (GOU) capacity to address COVID-19 and other public health threats, sustain health services during a crisis, and protect the health of all Ukrainians including vulnerable and marginalized populations. According to its 2022 impact statement [PDF
], “In Ukraine, Pact’s work empowers citizens to push for transparent and democratic governance, advances gender equality and human rights for women and girls, and accelerates efforts to achieve HIV epidemic control.” The contractor’s work contributed to “172 people increas[ing] their net income,” according to Pact.
, a “leading private equity firm in emerging Europe, via the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC), “to back high-growth tech and export-oriented [Small and Medium Sized Enterprises] succeeding globally, based on platforms in Ukraine and Moldova.”
for emergency nutrition response in ASALs (Arid and Semi-Arid Lands) in Kenya. The description stated, “partially funded with response funds and Ukraine Supplemental Funds”
located in Atlanta, GA to “support humanitarian information management through geographic information systems, data analytics and visualizations”. Ukraine was listed as the place of performance.
The Pentagon sponsors diving contractor with “history of fraud” to send mysterious explosives to Ukraine
on June 8, 2021 for the following purpose: “PROCUREMENT OF TWO 38-FOOT FULL CABIN RESPONSE BOATS, FOUR 38-FOOT CENTER CONSOLE RESPONSE BOATS, TRAILERS, SPARE PARTS, AND TRAINING AS REQUIRED UNDER FMS LOA DB-P-LCL FOR THE COUNTRY OF UKRAINE.”
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The Department of Defense has transferred 4.75 Million to Atlantic Diving Supply, Inc.as of February 3, 2023 for “PRO SAPPER AND EOD EQUIPMENT [CONTRACTING SQUADRON] UKRAINE” and “Marine lifesaving and Diving Equipment.”
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Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) and sapper equipment is exclusively used to blow things up or clean up explosives. And Atlantic Diving Supply
is a military contractor originally founded to provide tactical gear to Navy SEAL divers.
When a company like this is tasked with a highly specific delivery of explosives gear to any foreign nation, including Ukraine, it should prompt questions about the mission, particularly when US intelligence is blaming Ukraine’s military for attacking the Nord Stream pipelines without the knowledge of President Volodymyr Zelensky. (The payment date does not necessarily correlate with the date of delivery from the vendor; in other words, the equipment could have been delivered at a prior date.)
Luke Hillier, the founder of Atlantic Diving Supply, paid a $20 million settlement in 2019 to resolve charges that he defrauded the Pentagon by falsely claiming his company was a small business. Atlantic Diving is consistently listed as one of the top 25 largest military contractors in the country.
In 2021, Hillier raked in a massive $33 billion contract under the same program, prompting fresh accusations of fraud. This pattern of malfeasance prompted a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee to bluntly denounce Atlantic Diving as a “fraudulent company.”
Hillier currently owns a $13 million mega-yacht in the Cayman Islands, $24 million worth of beachfront property in Hawaii, and two Bahamas-based companies with murky operations, according to the Project on Government Oversight
.
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Atlantic Diving Supply founder Luke Hillier living his best life
The Department of Defense has paid 4.9 Million to BAE Systems GCS Internationalas of September 12, 2022 for “UKRAINE LCS LW 155 SPARES” and “guns over 155mm through 200mm”. In Navy terminology, LCS means “Littoral Combat Ship,” while LW refers to the lightweight gun. And “155 SPARES” refers to the gun mounted on the ship’s main battery off the bow.
So what is the exact purpose of the LCS LW 155mm gun spares, why were they given to Ukraine, and where are they now? Is there a tracking mechanism in place to know where they are and how they’re being used?
Washington funnels cash to a private equity firm, Georgian finance corporation, a ‘private entrepreneur’ via Ukraine aid
US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC)sent $25 million to Horizon Capital Growth Fund IV, a “leading private equity firm in emerging Europe, “to back high-growth tech and export-oriented [Small and Medium Sized Enterprises] succeeding globally, based on platforms in Ukraine and Moldova.”
US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC)sent $1.5 million to the Gazelle Fund LP, another private equity firm, to relocate Ukrainian businesses to Georgia. Georgia does not border Ukraine, nor is it a primary location for Ukrainian refugee resettlement.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sent $882,291 to a single individual described as an “private entrepreneur” in exchange for “overseas technical assistance program support services.” The private entrepreneur listed, Igor Lavreniuk, serves as the Program Coordinator for USAID’s Competitive Markets Program according to his LinkedIn.
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The National Science Foundation sent 1.3 million to University of Illinois for faculty and curricular development in remote sensing. The place of performance is listed as Ukraine.
Along with the blowback from their government’s gratuitous sanctions policy against Russia and other official enemies, Americans are feeling the impact of this overseas spending spree at grocery stores, gas stations, and everywhere in between. Meanwhile, rising generations are not only struggling with historic inflation, but concerns that Medicare and Social Security will be insolvent in the near future.
Washington and Europe have insisted that the flood of aid to Ukraine is essential to defending democracy against the existential threat of an authoritarian Russia. This framing is designed to shut down all debate by casting anyone who questions the ballooning price tag as fundamentally anti-American — if you are against funding the West’s proxy war with a nuclear power, you oppose the very ideals that define our nation.
Yet our inspection of US government spending in Ukraine demonstrates that Washington has prioritized its supposed fight for “democracy” abroad over the well-being of the American people.
As the war drags on, lawmakers like Sen. Lindsey Graham have marketed military aid to Ukraine in increasingly grim terms. As the senator boasted
during a recent trip to Kiev, “The Russians are dying…it’s the best money we’ve ever spent.” Meanwhile, Congress has rejected any mechanism that would guarantee transparency on the billions sent to Kiev, and shunned a war powers debate over the US military’s presence on the Ukrainian battlefield.
President Joseph Biden, for his part, has pledged that official Washington will support Kiev “as long as it takes.” As the potential for blowback grows from Western pressure to push Ukraine into NATO, and a nuclear-armed Moscow is backed into an existential fight for its survival, while economic powers including China gradually decouple from the Western financial system, Americans can only wonder how much will this war cost them when it is finally over.
FIRST TIME HEARING Brad Paisley – He Didn’t Have To Be *TEARS*
Pennsylvania Dutch Apple Butter
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Ingredients
3 quarts sweet cider
8 pounds ripe, well-flavored apples
2 1/2 cups brown sugar, firmly packed
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon allspice
2 teaspoons cloves
1/2 teaspoon salt
Instructions
Cook cider over high heat, uncovered, about 30 minutes or until it is reduced to half.
Wash, quarter and core unpeeled apples. Add to cider, and cook over low heat until very tender. Stir frequently. Work apple mixture through a sieve, returning the puree to the kettle. Stir in sugar, all the spices, and salt. Cook over very low heat, stirring almost continuously, until mixture thickens.
Pour into sterilized pint jars and seal securely.
Makes 4 jars.
First Time Hearing Jay Chou (feat. Fei Yu-ching) “Far Away” Reaction
How To Plant Propaganda: “Putin has been weakened. Russia is crumbling.”
On Sunday the U.S.Secretary of State went on four morning shows to play the same distinct melody over and over again:
SECRETARY BLINKEN: And it was a direct challenge to Putin’s authority. So this raises profound questions. It shows real cracks. We can’t speculate or know exactly where that’s going to go. We do know that Putin has a lot more to answer for in the weeks and months ahead. … SECRETARY BLINKEN: These create more cracks in the Russian façade, and those cracks were already profound. Economically, militarily, its standing in the world – all of those things have been dramatically diminished by Putin’s aggression against Ukraine. He’s managed to bring Europe together. He’s managed to bring NATO together. He’s managed to get Europe to move off of Russian energy. He’s managed to alienate Ukrainians and unite Ukraine at the same time. So across the board this has been a strategic failure. Now you introduce into that profound internal divisions, and there are lots of questions he’s going to have to answer in the weeks ahead.
SECRETARY BLINKEN: … So I think we’ve seen more cracks emerge in the Russian facade. It is too soon to tell exactly where they go and when they get there. But certainly we have all sorts of new questions that Putin is going to have to address in the weeks and months ahead. … This is just the latest chapter in a book of failure that Putin has written for himself and for Russia. Economically, militarily, its standing in the world – all of things have plummeted. We have a united NATO that’s stronger than ever before, a Europe that is weaning itself off of Russian energy, Ukraine that Putin has managed to alienate and unite at the same time. Now, with trouble brewing from within, this, as I said, just adds more questions that he has to find answers for.
SECRETARY BLINKEN: But we can say this. First of all, what we’ve seen is extraordinary, and I think you see cracks emerge that weren’t there before … … We’ve seen this aggression against Ukraine become a strategic failure across the board. Russia is weaker economically, militarily. Its standing around the world has plummeted. It’s managed to get Europeans off of Russian energy. It’s managed to unite and strengthen NATO with new members and a stronger Alliance. It’s managed to alienate from Russia and unite together Ukraine in ways that it’s never been before. This is just an added chapter to a very, very bad book that Putin has written for Russia.
SECRETARY BLINKEN: But I think we can say this much: First, we’ve seen some very serious cracks emerge. … But we’ve seen, I think, lots of different cracks that have emerged in the conduct of this aggression, because everything Putin has tried to accomplish, the opposite has happened. Russia is weaker economically. It’s weaker militarily. Its standing in the world has plummeted. It’s managed to strengthen and unite NATO. It’s managed to alienate and unite Ukrainians. It’s managed to get Europe off of dependence on Russian energy.
In piece after piece, issue after issue, what Putin has tried to prevent, he’s managed to precipitate. And Russia’s standing is vastly diminished as a result. Now, add to that internal dissention. Again, we can’t speculate on where this goes. We have to remain and we are focused on Ukraine, but it certainly raises new questions that he’s going to have to address.
The very same (false) talking points, repeated over and over again, are a sure sign of lies and an organized propaganda campaign.
For the record. Progozhin was all alone in his mutiny attempt. Not one element of the Russian government or civil society joint him in his ride. So where are the cracks? There are none. Also Russia’s military is now larger and better equipped then before the war. Russia’s economy is fine and growing. Its standing in the world has increased.
But Blinken’s propaganda works well because the U.S. media are trained to pick up any sheet of music an administration hands out and to sing its tune over and over again.
I could quote dozens of participants in that game to make that point. But the Washington Posts has made it easier for me when it asked eight of its columnists to comment on the issues. All but one, a neocon who wants to see more action, repeat Blinken’s message: “Putin has been weakened. Russia is crumbling.”
David Von Drehle: Even failed coups have consequences
Putin evidently had no more confidence than Prigozhin as to the outcome of the clash. Rather than test the loyalty and strength of government forces to crush the uprising, the Russian leader grabbed the first exit he was offered — a sign of weakness that might invite another attempt. … The bad news: A weakened Russia has weakened leaders and is spinning out of control. Putin has taken his country into a disaster, and there is no one in sight to save it.
Max Boot: Prigozhin has made Putin’s weakness clear to everyone
Putin, has now had his own legitimacy undermined by the revolt of Prigozhin and his Wagner Group mercenaries. Whether the damage is fatal remains to be determined. … Even if Prigozhin is gone, the discontent he has revealed will remain an Achilles’ heel for Putin.
David Ignatius: After dodging the bullet, Putin will need to show he’s in control
Putin’s vulnerabilities were vividly on display last weekend, but so were his uncanny survival skills. He got inside Prigozhin’s conspiratorial plot and stopped it. … Putin will need to show that he’s in command now, after this near-death experience. That’s the bad news for Ukraine and Russia both.
Eugene Robinson: Putin is likely to survive this crisis
The revolt by the mercenary butcher Prigozhin did reveal Putin’s regime to be more brittle than it had appeared from afar.
Charles Lane: Prigozhin is the only Russian to publicly speak the truth
Vaclav Havel insisted that truth still exercised a mysterious, but latent, power.
It can unexpectedly “issue forth … in something visible: a real political act or event, a social movement, a sudden explosion of civil unrest, a sharp conflict inside an apparently monolithic power structure, or simply an irrepressible transformation in the social and intellectual climate,” Havel wrote. “And since all genuine problems and matters of critical importance are hidden beneath a thick crust of lies, it is never quite clear when the proverbial last straw will fall, or what that straw will be.”
Spy, oligarch, warlord — Prigozhin was an unlikely candidate to confirm Havel’s prophecy. But in a way, he did.
Jason Willick: Chances for escalation in Ukraine have gone up
Some observers might be overstating Putin’s weakness — he did suppress the mutiny quickly, after all — but the spectacle has clearly dented his image of control.
Josh Rogin: Prigozhin’s failed gambit is an opportunity for the West
Now that the Kremlin can no longer pretend Wagner is a separate entity, Russian government and defense officials must also be held accountable for Wagner’s worldwide crimes, which include credible allegations of mass murder, torture, rape and other atrocities.
Megan McArdle: Turmoil in Russia shows the fragility of illiberalism
Nominally, Putin controls a massive army, a substantial police force and a population that returned him to office in 2018 with a resounding 77 percent of the vote. But when push came to shove, those same folks were indifferent between him and a murderous warlord — or, at least, didn’t care enough about the distinction to risk getting shot. Putin survived, but the risk to his regime has risen now that it is clear how little actual support he has.
The overall tone: Putin did not fight the loon Prigozhin but found a peaceful solution. This shows that he is weak.
This bears a question. If eight columnists at one paper come to the very same (but false) conclusion, just issued in different words, why hire and pay all eight of them? Clearly, one would suffice.
Oh, that would show a lack diversity? The religious believe in individualism where all humans must differ – but for the opinions they are allowed to espouse?
Posted by b on June 27, 2023 at 15:43 UTC | Permalink
Rap Fans React to The Cult- She Sells Sanctuary REACTION
Use of your HK residency card might cause some problems for you. You will not have the same kind of treatment that you have grown accustomed to.
Oh, of course, the Chinese will smile and be so very polite. But, a “black mark” is a interruption of normal process, and will require an override by upper management.
Of course you can apply for a visa.
[1] If you are denied that visa, accept that reality. That reality is one of a perpetual “outsider” that will not be given the chance for redemption. If so, then you fucked up BIG TIME. Nothing worse than “missing the bus” for the global future.
[2] If you are granted that visa, you must accept the reality that you will be monitored absolutely. The duration of the monitoring will be at least ten years, and if you apply for work, there will be limitations on your applications. Certainly the housekeeping, and janitorial professions will probably be open to you, but forget about any skilled positions.
You made a very BIG and BAD MISTAKE.
But there’s always hope for redemption. If you can prove that you are reformed, you have a chance.
Finally…
If you do enter China, and you decide to break a law, or participate in NED sponsored color revolution activities, your fate will sealed (and very horrible). Ask the two-timers from HK that participated in the Shanghai protest last year. They will never leave China.
Don’t be like them.
FIRST REACTION! Wild Cherry – Play That Funky Music SHOCKED! THEY WHITE?
She speaks fluent Baby-Chinese, and completely understands my English. However, the only time that she uses English is when she is MAD. When she is angry, that is when she spouts off in English. And lordy, it’s a sight to behold.
At home, she watches a mix of Chinese and English age-appropriate shows. And she attends Kindergarten, Dance, and boxing classes all in Chinese.
Starting last night and into today, Beidu is reporting that China has laid out defined rules on violation of Chinese air space and sea lanes. No longer will China issue a verbal warning to planes to leave, or for ships to exit.
They now are authorized to fire weapons with the intent to kill and destroy the intruder(s).
My opinion is that…
This follows the North Korean model of engagement. Which is why the United States avoids flying into to North Korea, but happily pushes into China’s.
This is a direct result of [1] the Canadian / USA naval transit in the Taiwan strait, and [2] the Spy Plane violations of air space. Now, if those events were to reoccur, there would be two sunk Naval vessels, and one destroyed spy plane.
Never the less, the rules are going to be violated by the United States. The American “leadership” are just itching for a war. Like I have repeatedly stated, “stupid beyond comprehension”.
People are going to die. No way to avoid this result.
WOW!| FIRST TIME HEARING Tears For Fears – Sowing The Seed Of Love REACTION
Western media and political propaganda works very much to China’s advantage.
Chinese strategy ever since the time of Sun Tzu is based on deception, and namely on making the enemy underestimate China.
This means that the more the west thinks that they are ahead of China, the more they underestimate China, and the more China hides its true strength, the better it is for China.
This means that if the Americans think that they will defeat China in the end because of American exceptionalism, and because the US is the city on the hill shining the bright light of freedom and democracy, the better it is for China.
This means that in the end, if China strikes, it will strike to kill.
There will not be any of that Russian pussyfooting around in Ukraine in the early stages of the war which Russia did, and which ended in failure.
@ A MASTERPIECE!!! Emotional Reaction to CRANBERRIES – ZOMBIE | Difficult to Get Over This
Back in 2007 I had gone to Russia. Being an African American woman in braids, I pretty much stand out over there. I even had a police officer ask to see my passport because, well, there’s not a lot of black people there, and those that are there are usually European and African descent.
So we were visiting a type of flea market in Moscow to shop for souvenirs. I only know three or four Russian words, so I did my best to bargain (but it helped to have Russian students in our group translating for us).
This vendor suddenly stared grabbing my hand joyfully and kissing my hand and arm! He was saying something like “krasivaya” or something like that.
He was pointing to my arm and I realized he was enamored with the color of my skin.
One the students (or another vendor helping him, I’m not sure), knew English and translated for me, “He says, “You’re beautiful.”
It dawned on me he had never seen a black woman before.
That actually amused me —- I mean, who knew that, considering all the crap black people have put up with because of our skin color, having dark skin would elicit such a positive response?
@ THIS IS FIRE!!! THE CULT – FIRE WOMAN (REACTION)
My parents built a cottage on Loon Lake in Ontario in 1965, Mum and I spent many happy summers there while Dad came up on weekends. Mum died in 1983 at age 60. Dad couldn’t stand going there anymore because “there was too much of Mum in it” so he sold it (with my knowledge and blessing) in 1986 fully furnished to include dishes, linens, two boats – everything. Apparently this is quite normal in that marketplace and situation.
Fast-forward to 2004; I took my wife and four sons to a rental cottage a couple lakes away. We took a boat trip to show the boys where I grew up. Fortunately the owner was there so we moved the boat over toward the boathouse (both boats were still there) where I turned off our boat and said, “My parents built this cottage when I was 10 years old.” His immediate response was, “Oh, you’re a Kuhs!” I was amazed. Not only were he and his wife the purchasers but they had owned the cottage – still named Cry of the Loon – for 17 years and he came up with our fairly odd name so quickly. They gave us the “grand tour”, Mum’s cottage was over 90% unchanged from the last day I saw it over 20 years before. Not a dry eye in the house!
We have lived on the upper Chesapeake Bay for 35 years so there’s no animosity.
China isn’t in a race to be better than the US or to surpass the US.
The Chinese are in a race to become the best version of themselves after being poor and politically divided for so long.
The problem is that when Chinese say this to Americans; US politicians and western politicians tend to think that the Chinese are lying to them, when in fact, the Chinese are not.
This means that the fate and destiny of the US is in the hands of the Americans themselves, not in the hands of the Chinese.
Americans have done great things in the past, and if they work hard and apply themselves, they can do great things again, such as landing men on the moon, and defeating diseases like polio.
To do this, Americans would have to give up some bad habits, and apply themselves the same way the Chinese have in the past forty years.
If the US competed with China this way, the world would become a better place because all of humanity would benefit.
Reaction To “Simple Minds Someone Somewhere In Summertime Live 1983” THE WOLF HUNTERZ Jon and Dolly
I don’t. I don’t interpret it at all because it is not sincere, either way. No sooner than Blinken met with Xi Jinping, Biden called Xi a dictator and Blinken quoted more foolishness trying to justify arms sales to Taiwan. The U.S. is not capable or interested in following China’s conditions. There is no sincerity. It is always speaking with a forked tongue out of both side of the mouth with my country. Don’t be surprised. His visit was all an elaborate show on the world stage.
On a positive note, China chewed him a new backside, so I’d say it was a win for China.
WERE SHOOK! | FIRST TIME HEARING Patsy Cline – Crazy REACTION
UPDATED 10:39 AM EDT — Russian Presidential Fleet Plane Enroute to Washington DC – Evacuating Diplomats?
An aircraft from the Russian Presidential fleet is presently on its way from Moscow to Washington, DC. It is now feared this plane is coming to evacuate Russian Diplomats prior to . . . well . . . what __could be__ the start of a war.
As of 6:16 AM Eastern US Time, the aircraft has left air space which is tracked by radar, and is now over the Atlantic Ocean being tracked by Satellite:
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No word yet from anyone why this plane is coming to the USA.
The Russian Federation maintains Consular Offices in three locations in the U.S., Washington, DC is its main Embassy. In New York City and in Houston, are Consulate offices.
Main Russian Embassy: 2650 Wisconsin Ave., N.W. Washington, DC 20007
Folks in an around those cities may wish to take a drive by, and see if there are any obvious signs that staff are evacuating, or if there is dense smoke coming out of a chimney indicating the burning of documents.
BELARUS TO COMBAT ALERT
Belarusian President Lukashenko said that he has given orders to bring the army to full combat readiness against the backdrop of the events in Russia.
“If Russia collapses, we will remain under the rubble, we will all die” he said.
‘The threat of a new global conflict has never been as close as it is today.’“Once again, they are trying to blow up our country, our entire region, to disorient people. Shake up the situation by any means and, under this noise, impose your own rules, establish your own order.
An order in which there will no longer be either our countries or people.”
UPDATE 10:39 AM EDT —
The Russian Foreign Ministry has commented on this plane:
“A Russian plane is on its way to the United States to evacuate diplomats ordered to leave the country by US authorities, Zakharova said in her Telegram channel.According to the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, it is not a question of expulsion, but of restrictions on operations created by Washington.”
@ I DISCOVERED THE BEST SONG EVER! | Ram Jam – Black Betty (REACTION!!!)
All Sources inside Russia Have Gone “Dark” – Largest Submarine Sails with Poseidon Nuclear Torpedo
A very troubling situation has developed inside Russia this morning, Monday, June 26, 2023. All my intel sources have either gone dark or told me they have to go dark immediately. Apparently ANYONE who expressed support for the Prigozhin Rebellion is being rounded-up and/or turned off violently.
More interestingly, Russia’s largest submarine, the “Belgorad” (K-329), set sail from its Arctic port in Severodvinsk, along with a support ship “Akademik Aleksandrov.”
This Support ship is associated with testing the “Poseidon” Intercontinental Nuclear-Powered Nuclear-Armed Autonomous Torpedo.
The sailing of the two vessels, together, plus other signs observed, may indicate that a Poseidon test launch is imminent.
The question becomes, is it a test or will it be live?
The Poseidon torpedo is autonomous. It can be pre-programmed to travel almost anywhere in the world, silently, take up position off a coastline at a depth of 1-2 miles, and wait, undetected and undetectable.
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At the pre-programmed time, it can detonate its scalable 100 MEGATON nuclear torpedo, creating a radioactive tsunami that takes out the entire coastline of an adversary. In some areas, the tsunami would come ashore as a 1500 foot tall wave of radioactive water, knocking down entire cities, and leaving them covered in a radioactive flood that would make the area uninhabitable for decades.
The submarine carries SIX such Poseidon torpedos.
It could place one off each coast of the UK, travel across the Atlantic, place one or more off the US East Coast, the travel down to the Gulf of Mexico, place another, and leave the US West Coast to typical Russian submarines.
None of us would have any idea at all that anything was wrong and then, suddenly, BOOM, all of them go off at once. The US and UK would be completely crippled immediately, wiping out NATO.
The three key things about China we need to keep in mind are that
it is strong, not weak;
it has become a sea power; and
its values are both different from those of the West and not necessarily what Europe and America think they are.
“When we are discussing anything to do with the People’s Republic of China in the contemporary context, therefore, these three factors are good places to start,” writes Kerry Brown, professor of Chinese Studies and director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College, London, in the first chapter of his new book, “China Incorporated: The Politics of a World Where China is Number One.”
The title reminds us of Japan Inc, the words used to describe Japan’s combination of industrial policy and mercantilism since the 1980s; and “Japan as Number One: Lessons for America”, the popular book by Ezra Vogel published in 1999. Brown’s book even has a chapter entitled “The Enigma of Chinese Power,” which echoes Karel Van Wolferen’s “The Enigma of Japanese Power: People and Politics in a Stateless Nation,” published in 1990.
But the book does not explain Chinese industrial and trade policies; it does not tell us what the West can learn from China’s rapid modernization; and it is certainly not about what the writer imagines is the hollow political center of a great economic power.
Rather, Brown examines the more important issue of how Western misunderstanding of Chinese thinking about the role of government and international relations has magnified the problem of dealing with a different civilization that has grown big and strong enough to reject our criticism and push back.
The misunderstanding has historical, cultural and political roots but fundamentally it can be attributed to the universalist, Manichean (good vs evil) worldview of what Brown refers to as the Enlightenment West – and the projection of that attitude onto a civilization that doesn’t share the same history.
“The distinctiveness of the intellectual and cultural history of inhabitants of the space now occupied by the People’s Republic of China is undeniable,” Brown writes. “In terms of language, modes of governance, economic behavior, and fundamental view about how the world operates and how society should be shaped, the Chinese tradition is a long, complex and sometimes (but not always) contrasting one to that which has created the Europe and North America of today.”
He continues, “The Western European proclivity has been to maintain the conviction, at least until recent decades, that there is a final, truthful, unifying vision of the world.”
On the other hand,
In the Chinese world where a notion of harmony in the abstract was privileged, the focus was on accepting different kinds of views and convictions for different spaces and occasions….
A syncretic worldview is the result – one that in the twenty-first century continues to puzzle and fascinate because of the ability of modern Chinese to place capitalism next to socialism while seeming under Xi Jinping to be proud of Confucianism as well as having as many as 200 million Buddhists in various sects and about half that number of Christians.
That description runs head on into democratically elected politicians’ abhorrence of one-party dictatorship and American alarm over perceived or potential subversion by Confucius Institutes, Huawei or any other Chinese organization under the sway of the Communist Party.
Brown does not dwell on the nature of the Communist Party, but points out that Confucius Institutes have often been their own worst enemies and that Huawei, due to its leading position in the telecommunications industry and the legal environment in which it operates, will never be free of suspicion.
After all, China’s National Intelligence Law stipulates that “all organizations and citizens shall support, assist and cooperate with national intelligence efforts in accordance with the law, and shall protect national intelligence work secrets they are aware of.”
Combined with the rapid growth of its military power, including the ever-longer reach of its navy, the globe-spanning infrastructure investments of the Belt and Road Initiative, allegations of hacking and the hot-button issues of the South China Sea, Taiwan and Xinjiang, this makes China for “a large number of American and European politicians … not just a problem, but the problem.”
The problem with this problem is its ambiguity. The Chinese military has never used more than a fraction of its power. No clear evidence of surveillance via Chinese telecom equipment has been publicly provided. The motives and capabilities are there, but there is no smoking gun.
As for the Belt and Road, which critics regard as a combination of debt-trap diplomacy and strategic threat, Brown asks, “How much longer do we have to wait till we see Beijing’s hand fully exposed? What if, in the end, it really was all mainly commercial?”
For centuries, the West has been working to remake the world in its own image. Its Enlightenment mind finds it logical to conclude that the Chinese are trying to do the same, regardless of China’s doctrine of non-interference in the affairs of other countries (rejected as duplicitous on the one hand and as unprincipled support for dictators on the other) and its cultural exclusiveness.
Western military and national security officials default to the worst-case scenario, while many politicians favor a simple narrative of evil communists oppressing the good Chinese people. But, as Brown writes, “one thing stands out – the complexity of the issues China poses, just being itself, and doing the kinds of things it does as an actor of its size and reach.
“Complexity alone is a vast problem, and one the Enlightenment West in particular, with its love of orderly frameworks and all-embracing tidy theories, clearly abhors. China upsets the epistemology of the West – it violates notions of universalism being universal.”
If economic prosperity either is contingent on the existence of multi-party government and Western style rule of law or inevitably brings these in its wake, this leads to:
China explanation number one – We are right; China is undertaking a huge con, and
China explanation number two – China has to democratize.
Otherwise, China will collapse. But it hasn’t collapsed since Gordon Chang’s book “The Coming Collapse of China” was published in 2001 and Brown now doesn’t expect it to collapse anytime soon. Rather, within a decade, “the world’s largest economy could well be an Asian country under a Communist government.”
If and when that happens, the West is likely to be a sore loser, angry and frustrated. In fact, it already is doing everything it can to slow China down and prevent that outcome.
At the same time, China
is certainly more frustrated and irritated than ever before at the outside world. This has reached such a level of intensity that there has been a formal policy response: “Dual Circulation” – a strategy in many Chinese people’s eyes to simply get whingeing, moaning, sore losing Westerners with their toxic social media, their crazy political systems, their moralizing and ignorance and arrogance, off China’s back.
Dual Circulation is an economic policy that puts priority on domestic consumption (internal circulation) while remaining open to foreign trade and investment (external circulation). Dependence on exports is to be reduced while technological independence is achieved through innovation. It is an answer to Western sanctions and protectionism, a sort of reverse decoupling or de-risking that is less ideological and more pragmatic.
Brown hopes that pragmatism will also take hold in the West. He states that, “Whether we embrace or have distaste toward China as it is politically today, we have no choice but to recognize that it is there and that it is as it is. We will not all wake up tomorrow, like protagonists in some fantasy film, and find China is no longer there, or that it has magically transformed to become somewhere we actually like and feel close to. We can console ourselves with the associated thought that exactly the same in reverse applies to China.”
There is a lot more to this book, which is informed by the author’s 30 years’ experience of life in China, where he has worked in education, in business and as a diplomat. He is the author of more than 20 books on China.
WHO DEY!!.. Guns N Roses Welcome – To The Jungle | FIRST TIME HEARING REACTION
32 Billion Chip Orders Canceled, Chinese Enterprise Installs First Domestic Lithography Machine!
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The Chinese chip market is undergoing a transformation, and under US chip restriction rules, China has embarked on a self-sufficient development path. Not only has it set a goal of achieving a 70% self-sufficiency rate in chips and producing more chips domestically, but Shanghai Microelectronics is also increasing its research and development of lithography machines, and Chinese enterprises have moved in the first domestically-produced lithography machine.
China is the world’s largest chip market and spends a considerable amount on imports in the field of integrated circuits each year, especially for high-end chips imported to meet the needs of a range of consumer electronics products such as smartphones, computers, and tablets.
Chinese chip manufacturer SMIC is vigorously expanding its 12-inch wafer capacity for mature chips and significantly increasing its 28 nanometers chip shipments since China has its own domestically produced chips, its dependence on imported chips is not as great.
In the first quarter of this year China’s Imports of integrated circuits totaled 108 billion pieces a year on year, a decrease of 22.9 percent equivalent to a reduction of 32 billion chip imports from last year, a total of 32 billion chip orders were canceled, making it harder for overseas chip Giants to make big profits, more signs indicate that China’s chip industry’s self-sufficiency ability is constantly improving in the first quarter of this year.
In the 1st quarter of this year Chinese Enterprises moved in the first domestically produced lithography machine the advanced packaging lithography machine from Shanghai microelectronics was moved in by Chinese Enterprise conscience for a production line project.
Shanghai microelectronics is the only company in China that has mastered the production of complete lithography machines in the front-end lithography machine field.
Shanghai microelectronics has excellent capabilities and can produce 2.5 D to 3D Advanced packaging lithography machines perhaps many people do not know that there is a difference between front end and back end lithography machines.
The front end and back end lithography machines are two different steps in the semiconductor chip manufacturing process. Front-end lithography machines are mainly used to make lithographic masks in the chip manufacturing process that is to project the design chip patterns onto the Silicon wafer to form a pattern. While the back-end lithography machines are used to etch the patterns on the Silicon wafer to form the chip circuit component.
Front-end lithography machines usually require higher resolution and precision while back-end lithography machines require higher processing speed and stronger etching ability.
Relatively speaking the manufacturing difficulty of front-end lithography machines is greater, in that they require High Precision Optical systems, Precision mechanical systems and high stability control systems and require knowledge in multiple disciplines such as physics, Optics and Mechanics.
ASML can achieve high-end processes of five nanometers and below in the front-end lithography machine field and the most advanced EUV lithography machines are in short supply. The mass-produced process of domestic lithography machines in the front-end field is 90 nanometers and there is still a lot of room for improvement in the future.
The domestically produced lithography machine moved in by Chinese Enterprises belongs to the back end and is mainly used to meet the demand for chip Packaging.
Nevertheless advanced packaging is still of great significance for domestic chips this is because advanced packaging technology can improve chip performance power consumption and reliability while also reducing chip size and cost.
The use of advanced packaging technology can enhance the market competitiveness of chips attract more customers and partners and promote the development of China’s domestic chip industry therefore doing well in advanced packaging is of great significance for the development of domestic chips.
The frequent restrictions on Chinese Chips by the United States will only accelerate China’s self-sufficiency. China canceled 32 billion chip Imports and Chinese Enterprises moved in the first domestically produced lithography machine which is the best proof some foreign media have stated that Bill Gates is right.
Bill Gates has long said that the United States can never stop China from having powerful chips and restrictions will only make China self-sufficient while the United States will also lose many high-paying jobs.
The fact is indeed as Bill Gates said China’s chip industry shows signs of self-sufficiency while the U.S technology industry laid off 130 000 people from January to may this year with more than 410 000 layoffs nationwide, if the United States does not stop its restrictive measures it will only affect the profits of U.S companies and the number of layoffs will continue to swell.
In today’s Information age the importance of chips is beyond doubt but as the crystallization of the world’s top technology the technical difficulty of Chip research and development is also very high.
China started late in the field of chips and many core Technologies and underlying Technologies are in the hands of the United States.
If China wants to independently develop chips it must start from the basics in addition to the difficulty of research and development the supply chain of the chip industry is also a problem just because chip manufacturing requires multiple steps such as photolithography etching cleaning and precipitation more than 10 kinds of semiconductor equipment are needed as well as chip design chip packaging and testing and other links.
The US just wants to slow down the development of Chinese Chips by excluding China from the world supply chain it’s just that this move by the United States is undoubtedly an invalid behavior and it will only lead to Market chaos in the semiconductor industry.
In any case if you want to develop Chinese Chips you need to rely on Independent research and development only by mastering the core technology can you avoid being stuck.
Many Enterprises and talents in China have devoted themselves to the field of chips and have made many important progress for the development of chips in China among them Deng Han and his Starlight China chip project are an important part of the history of China’s chip development.
It can even be said that China’s first self-developed chip came from Deng jonghan.
The young genius Deng jonghan left the US and returned to China. Deng Han who was born in 1968 not only founded vimicro group but also is an academician of the Chinese Academy of engineering and the commander-in-chief of the Starlight China chip project.
He has contributed a lot to the development of China’s chips and developed China’s first chip with independent property rights.
Since he was a teenager Deng Han has been full of curiosity an exploratory Spirit towards the world after he was admitted to the Department of Earth and space science at the University of Science and Technology of China Deng Han’s Talent was gradually discovered when he was in college Deng Han also pointed out the professor’s thinking deviation in solving problems and because of this he was favored by the professor and joined the project team after Deng junghan entered the University of Barkley he successively obtained a master’s degree in physics a doctorate in electrical engineering and a master’s degree in economics and management after graduation Deng Han founded an integrated circuit company in the Silicon Valley of the United States
Entrepreneurship was a great success and the market value of the company he founded once reached 115 million U.S dollars however at the invitation of chairman of the China Association for Science and Technology Deng Han resolutely gave up his company in the United States and returned to China to engage in chip research and development.
After returning to China Deng Han founded vimicro and started the Starlight China chip project officially entering the field of Chip research and development the Prelude to the rise of China’s chips has begun during the chip research and development process Deng Han’s conditions were very difficult and he could only conduct research and development in the warehouse and once faced the risk of capital chain rupture but in the face of many difficulties Deng jonghan did not give up lightly but faced up to the difficulties and solved one problem after another.
On March 11 2001 under the unremitting efforts of Deng Han and his R D team vimicro launched China’s first chip with independent property rights Ching Guang number one Starlight number one is a multimedia chip and it is also a large-scale integrated circuit chip.
After that vimicro launched the Starlight series chips into the market and successfully listed them in the United States which made the reputation of Chinese Chips and opened the Prelude to the rise of Chinese Chips himself became an academician of the Chinese Academy of engineering and a foreign academician of the American Academy of engineering it is not difficult to see from this information that Deng Han has provided a major boost to the rise of China’s chips.
With the development of time many top Chinese technology companies have entered the chip track one after another according to statistics from 2019 to the present the total of 40 000 companies in China have entered the chip related field it can be said that China’s chips are developing flourish and gradually rise with the support of national policies and the large investment of some top companies Chinese Chips have gradually made major breakthroughs in many fields such as huawei’s self-developed Korean chips and EDA industrial software which are also at the advanced level in the world.
Shanghai microelectronics has gradually come to the Forefront of the world and semiconductor Fields such as etching machines and lithography machines and can reach the top five in the world in terms of market share now China’s chip industry can be said to be flourishing and the entire chip industry chain has a Chinese layout but China should always keep in mind that it was Deng Han and his Starlight China chip project that opened the Prelude to the rise of China’s chips.
SQUEEZE – Tempted (By The Fruit Of Another) REACTION
I was going to a conference in Las Vegas to attend a huge convention. Hotel rooms were scarce, but I had made my reservations far in advance.
I got to the hotel after midnight after a long flight, and had just unpacked and was about to get ready for bed when the door opened. A weary-eyed man glared at me and showed me his room assignment. Same as mine. We had been double-booked by accident.
The man got on the room phone and started screaming at the assistant manager, demanding that he be given the room. The intruder then gave the phone to me, and the manager asked if I minded being moved. I did, of course, but given the white-hot rage of my accidental roommate, I said gently, “I understand. These things happen. I’ll take another room.”
I repacked my clothes and soon the manager arrived, full of apologies, and took my bag. The man who had “won” the room smiled triumphantly.
And then the manager took me to one of the hotel’s biggest suites, which had four bedrooms, a kitchen stocked with liquor and fruit, and a killer view of Vegas. It was worthy of Sinatra or Elvis, and it was all mine for the week-long stay, at the same price as the standard room I booked, the manager said.
I was dazzled. When I asked the manager why I was being given such a glorious upgrade, he explained that it was the only room left in the hotel. He had to make a quick decision as to who would get it, “and lady,” he said, “you were the nice one.”
The 70’s were a VIBE! 💃🏽🕺🏽| KC and the Sunshine Band – I’m Your Boogie Man [REACTION!]
I’ve always had this almost irrational dislike for influencers. They’re just about the most self-obsessed, vain, terrible and entitled crowd of creatures alive on this earth. So whenever one of them gets his or her comeuppance, I’m quite pleased.
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Apparently there’s some law where if someone steals just a small amount, you get a warning of a ‘slap on the wrist’ style of punishment. And that’s all they do to you. Whereas if someone steals a larger amount of value, a store can actually press charges and get the thief in serious trouble. Hence the store waited, patiently, as they wrote down all the things the little kleptomaniac was taking. Compiled a nice, neat, comprehensive list of all items stolen over the years…
…and called the cops. Who sent her to jail. These are the same entitled influencers who demand to eat at a discount in restaurants “because they will give a shout out on their channel” and act offended when the bill comes in and they have to pay the full amount. Nothing puts a smile on my face quicker than seeing such a person get arrested.
Rainbow “Gates of Babylon” REACTION & ANALYSIS by Vocal Coach / Opera Singer
Are you ready to hear a story about a friend I had for 32 years and would have done anything for, whom I met when I was 5 years old?
When I was about 5 I was walking around the corner of my street, it was only 3 houses down, to my friend mark’s house which was right after the culdesac immediately after the corner. As the further of the two end houses came into view, in the yard I saw a boy my age getting beat up by a slightly older boy, so I immediately ran to defend the boy. Next thing I knew, I was on my back on the asphalt with the older boy on top of me strangling me and bashing the back of my head against the asphalt. I remember the mother of the boy I tried to save yelling and the kid beating the crap out of me ran off.
next I’m scream crying as I run to my house and my mom sees the blood on the back of my head and we head over to the house of who beat me up and my mom verbally bitch slapped that woman and her kid. Never had any issues with him again.
anyway, the boy I tried to save became my best friend. As time went on, I started to notice that his mother was awful to him, constantly telling him “why can’t you be more like Joey?” and every time I went over there, his mom always made me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with Peter Pan peanut butter and a glass of milk, always. I still love that peanut butter.
A short time later, my friend started calling me asking “Joey, can you please come over to my house and ask my mom for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich?” my friend did this because his mom would punish him by not feeding him when he got in trouble and my friend knew that his mom would always feed me, and so I would give my friend the sandwich and milk so he could eat.
This is just the beginning of the absolute madness that was this kid’s life.
His mom hated him and he knew it and she constantly told him that she wished he was like me, I was super polite and calm because I had to be or I got my butt whooped at my house. For our entire childhood I was always trying to suggest to my friend how he might want to try behaving because I thought that if he started acting like me, his mom wouldn’t hate him so much… my friend never listened and, in fact, he always did the opposite of what I suggested and he would cause chaos and get in trouble that I would always be there to help him out of.
I was always there for him, failed relationships, finding out that his mom was his adopted mom, when his real mom died from cancer, when he was homeless after becoming a methhead, the birth of his daughter, when the mother of his daughter left them… I was there for every single trauma he suffered, I was there for him…
I had been married 12 years and my son had been showing symptoms of autism and my then wife couldn’t handle that her son had autism so she left our boys and I and for the first time, I desperately needed a friend.
My friend ignored my phone calls for almost two months before he finally answered his phone and agreed to meet me so I could talk to him.
when I get to my friend’s girlfriend’s apartment, he was out of work and living with his girlfriend, I was devastated still and after I walked into the apartment and asked my friend what he has been doing that was so important he couldn’t answer my phone calls…
my friend said “I’m glad your life is falling apart, because now we are even.” He then walked outside on the porch to smoke and closed the glass door behind him.
I was shocked. I looked at his girlfriend who was right there when he said it and I asked “did he just say I’m glad your life is falling apart because now we are even?”
his girlfriend, who was also shocked said “yeah” after staring at me, or through me for a few seconds.
at this moment my friend was on his phone outside and that’s when I realized, that for my entire life, the friend who I was always trying to get back on his feet, the guy who I believed had an awesome potential, the guy I tried to train to become a martial arts instructor at my school but he quit before he became a black belt and he’d been trying to get me to quit, this entire time he had been hoping that my life had gone wrong because he was so envious of what I had… turns out, what my friend was doing on his phone was messaging my soon to be ex wife and trying to hook up with her…
for the entire 32 years I knew him, I never once wished harm or misfortune, in fact, this is the moment I realized that I’ve never once wished ill on anyone, despite the explosive drunken abuse I suffered from my family… I always wished that they would get better and stop destroying their lives and everyone’s lives around them. It was this moment that I have ever felt true hatred towards someone, this was the first time that I felt like if I ever see him again, I will beat his face in until he is mush.
I still wish him the best, I would never wish harm upon someone, but to this day, I know that if I see him, I won’t be able to stop myself…
I hope that answers your question… it was rough writing this, it brought up some seriously painful feelings. I’m getting tears…
Biden has made clear he won’t invite Israel’s premier in the near future.
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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is set to visit China next month, signaling growing impatience with Washington, as Beijing increasingly throws its weight around in the region.
While there, the premier is slated to meet with President Xi Jinping and other Chinese leaders. Advanced contacts have been held in recent days between the two leaders’ offices to arrange the visit.
No dates for the trip were given and no plans for a visit have been announced by Jerusalem or Beijing. The Prime Minister’s Office said it had “no comment at present” when contacted. The Chinese embassy in Tel Aviv did not immediately respond to a request for confirmation.
Netanyahu is seeking some kind of assurance from Chinese, sort of an unwritten agreement on the similar lines as Russia with which Israel has strategic understanding involving Iran.
Israel does not want China or North Korea sell Nukes to Iran. It is Israel’s only and a prime concern because Israel is known as one bomb country.
But I think Iran should have nukes, this way there would be peace in the middle east. As it is, Israel has several (nukes) warheads of its own. Deterrence is the name of the game.
AC/DC – Highway to Hell – (REACTION!)🤟🏽🔥WE CAN’T BELIEVE IT WAS THEM THE WHOLE TIME‼️
Back in 1990, I was a Sales manager at a car dealership and was one of the winners of a sales contest for Sales Managers of all the dealers of that make in the Boston District. The bar was pretty low to win this contest and there was no big payoff for winning because I guess they just wanted to show some recognition and get the Sales Managers together to socialize, build communication, and cooperation between the dealerships which were located all over New England.
So we got to spend one night in a nice hotel in Boston, had a nice meal, and everyone received some recognition during the after dinner ceremonies.
But then came the after dinner fun. They gave us about two hours for a “Vegas Night”. Tables were set up just like in a casino: Blackjack tables, Roulette tables, and one Craps table.
The rules were they gave each of us $200 in chips that we could use to make bets. Whatever amount of chips that we had left at the end would be cashed in for real money.
Now, In the few years previous to that night, I had been to Las Vegas and Atlantic City a few times and found that Craps was my favorite game. I had played it enough and studied it enough that I was very familiar with the odds for every bet on the table and knew how to play the game.
So as soon as I got my $200, I headed for the craps table. Surprisingly, I was the only one who went to the Craps table.
And then, even more surprisingly, the person who was in charge of the tables came over and said to me and the dealers, “Just to make things simpler, we’ll pay out 2 to 1 on all the numbers bets.”
I don’t know why he said that. Maybe the dealers were inexperienced and he was trying to make it easier for them so they wouldn’t have to try to figure out the different odds for the different numbers, or maybe he figured that there was only one player at the table so not much damage could be done.
But as soon as he said that, I knew what he meant . . . and bells went off in my head . . . I knew immediately what I was going to do!
A Numbers bet is where you put a bet on one of the numbers: 4–5–6–8–9–10. You are betting that when the dice are rolled, they are going to add up to the number you bet on before they total 7. If the dice total 7, you lose. Different numbers normally pay different odds.
For instance, the 6 and the 8 have the best odds of coming up, but they normally pay the lowest odds because of that. Normally if you make a $6 bet on the 6 or 8, and you win, you would win $7.
What happened here was they changed the payout on that very same bet to $12. . . . Which drastically changed the odds in my favor. All I had to was make a pass line bet, roll the dice, then keep betting on the 6 and 8. The odds were in my favor!
What I didn’t do was say anything out loud. I didn’t want anyone rethinking that decision to change the odds.
So I started winning right away. But it didn’t look like much at first because I started with just $200. But as the money started coming in, I slowly raised my bets and the money started coming in faster.
After awhile, I was still the only player on the table when one of the other Sales Managers walked up and stood next to me at the table. I had previously talked to this guy a few times on the phone at work but didn’t really know him other than that. And then he decided to be chatty. He was started asking questions like, “Do you know how to play this game? I don’t know anything about it. Can you teach me how to play?”
Well, the last thing I needed right then was someone disturbing my concentration on the game. I knew that I only had a limited amount of time to take advantage of this unexpected loophole.
So I turned to him and said, “Listen, put your chips right up here and do exactly what I tell you to do. Don’t ask any questions. Just do it. I’ll explain it all to you later.”
He was kind of taken aback at that and I could see the confusion on his face while he was contemplating what I had just said . . . but then he said, “Okay”.
So I continued doing what I had been doing and started telling him where to place his bets, how much (how many chips) to bet, and what to say to the dealer when he placed a bet. He caught on pretty quick and followed my instructions very well, so I wasn’t slowed down too much, and he started getting more excited when he saw the money starting to roll in.
When the time was up, almost all of the players who played the other games were broke. They had lost their seed money. Very few players had any money left at all.
We were the big winners!
I won just over $3000 and my new best friend won just over $1500. Needless to say, he was ecstatic!
The funniest part was when other Sales Managers that he knew came over and asked him how he did it. His answer was, “I don’t know! All I did was do what he told me to do!”
It was a fun night!
I am so mad I haven’t heard this tribute until now: AC/DC – Back In Black (Official Video)
Back in 1920s, gangsters needed some way of showing their money came from legitimate sources. The solution was to invest into laundromats and show them as highly profitable enterprises. The bookeeping standards of the day made it quite easy to show 127 customers used their facilities in a single night, even though they only had 1 paying customer at the time. I will hazard a guess and say the term “money laundering” probably started as a joke.
The term stuck and now the process of showing illicit profits as coming from legitimate business is called “laundering money”.
I legitly cried😭| FIRST TIME HEARING LUCIANO PAVAROTTI – NESSUN DORMA REACTION
Watching these reactions, and reading the text really underlines THE MESSAGE.
Never (ever) touch someone’s laptop screen with your fingertip.
Never do this with someone’s book.
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Please use bookmarks. Please.
Never take too much interest in someone else’s life, mind your own business.
Never believe on these types of Instagram quotes, “People having extraordinary creativity tend to have less sleep at night.” You’ll have less capacity to learn, you need deep sleep for deep insights.
Inspiration isn’t imitation. Don’t be a sheep, just because someone else is doing it, doesn’t mean it works for you.
“Never deduce that attraction is love.”
Never do something stupid just to fulfill your desire, know difference between desire and dream.
Don’t speak bitter words when you are angry, regret is unbearable.
Don’t rush. Never. If you’re late for office or college, it will make difference of a few seconds at most. Your life is far more valuable.
WHAT A SHOW!! Mötley Crüe – Home Sweet Home REACTION
Here are a few psychological tricks that you may find interesting:
1. The Power of Mirroring: Mirroring someone’s body language, gestures, and tone of voice can create a sense of rapport and connection. It can make the other person feel more comfortable and receptive towards you.
2. The Contrast Principle: When presenting options, strategically place a less desirable option before the one you want the person to choose. By comparison, the preferred choice will appear more attractive.
3. The Zeigarnik Effect: This effect states that people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed ones. If you want someone to remember something, provide incomplete information or leave a task unfinished.
4. The Foot-in-the-Door Technique: Start with a small request and once the person agrees, follow up with a larger request. People tend to be more likely to comply with the second request if they have already agreed to the first one.
5. The Anchoring Effect: When making a negotiation or presenting a price, start with a higher number to anchor the person’s perception. Subsequently, any lower numbers will appear more reasonable and favorable.
6. The Halo Effect: People tend to associate positive qualities with someone who possesses one admirable trait. For example, if a person is physically attractive, others may assume they are also intelligent or kind.
7. The Primacy and Recency Effect: People tend to remember the first and last items in a list more accurately than those in the middle. When giving a presentation or conveying important information, place key points at the beginning and end for better retention.
8. The Ben Franklin Effect: Ask someone for a small favor or advice. This can create a sense of investment and liking, as people tend to rationalize their actions by thinking they must like the person they helped.
9. The Scarcity Principle: Highlighting limited availability or scarcity of a product or opportunity can increase its perceived value and desirability. People tend to place higher importance on items that are rare or in short supply.
10. The Power of Framing: The way information is presented or framed can significantly influence perception and decision-making. Presenting the same information in a positive or negative light can elicit different responses.
Use these psychological tricks responsibly and ethically, focusing on building positive relationships and improving communication.
@ Dio “Don’t Talk To Strangers” REACTION & ANALYSIS by Vocal Coach / Opera Singer
“I can’t get enough Ronnie James Dio. I hereby further profess that he is my vocal crush, and we’re digging into your next highest requested song “Don’t Talk To Strangers.” This is by far one of my favorite songs of all time. Its message, the vocal runs and how flawlessly Dio brings out that emotion is insanely captivating. He is a god.”
At the height of the United States being a “Manufacturing Giant”, there were clusters of industrial centers scattered throughout America. This is a fact that most Americans know, but few others understand. The United States was NEVER a homogenized Manufacturing Colossus. Instead, it was a nation that contained “manufacturing areas”.
A “Manufacturing Area” had the following characteristics…
Easy access to raw materials (Rail, roads, and canal, or ports)
Uninterrupted supply of electricity.
Access to water (to cool the machinery)
As these “Manufacturing Areas” evolved, they developed…
A series of suppliers (small industries) that served the major factories.
Housing for the workers.
A network of outlying communities.
Over time, These “Manufacturing Areas” would come and go as technology advanced. For instance, one of the first “Manufacturing Areas” was the Blackstone Valley in Massachusetts. They were big on Buggy Whips, and Corset Hoops. The canals in the Blackstone Valley delivered the products to the ports up and down the New England coastline for distribution to the population centers.
For our purposes, we will omit Blackstone Valley, and instead concentrate in the most recent clusters of “Manufacturing Areas” in the United States. These clusters are all that remains of the industrial might that the United States once was. These clusters were active from the 1930’s through to the 1970’s, with some migratory egress lasting into the 1990’s to places such as “Silicon Valley” and “Industrial Parks” located in the Southeast states.
At that time, the United States had (perhaps) five major “Manufacturing Areas”, and around twenty or so smaller “Manufacturing Areas”. They are all gone now.
The video tours of these areas are very telling…
Video tour of Pine Bluff AR (Clothing Hub) found HERE
.Video tour of the supporting towns surrounding Pine Bluff found HERE.Video tour of Jackson, MS (Household and commercial goods) found HERE.Video tour of Gary, IN (Automobile, heavy Industry) found HERE.Video tour of Chester PA (General goods, minor industry) found HERE.Video tour of California in 2023 (Western migration of Industry) found HEREVideo tour of Shreveport, LA (Oil, and light manufacturing) found HEREVideo tour of Pennsylvania (Steel and hard Industry) found HEREVideo tour of Kenningston PA (steel and manufacturing) found HEREVideo tour of Pasadena CA (High Tech Hub) found HEREVideo Tour of Steubenville OH (steel, automotive, and household) found HERE
I can provide many other videos. You take a camera and film yourself driving through these “Manufacturing Areas”. There are many of them, and they all look the same. Zombie empty cities. Ruined buildings, decayed infrastructure, crime, drugs, and many, many abandoned shopping carts.
The very few remaining “Manufacturing Areas” in the United States are very well dispersed. They are in these stand alone mini-clusters called “Industrial Parks”. Most American Industrial Parks house from five to up to twenty companies, and typically consist of an office building and a warehouse. Of those that provide any kinds of manufacturing, they tend to be primarily final assembly stations with people who unpack 40′GP shipping containers, re-box foreign-made items, and slap a “Made in the USA” sticker on them.
For the United States to regain ANY kind of major manufacturing role, it must focus on the basics.
Infrastructure. Infrastructure. Infrastructure.
laws and regulations that make it easy to create a supplier base to support manufacturing.
An educational system that encourages talented, and hard-working personnel.
A society that praises merit, fidelity, and an attention to detail.
I argue that of what remains in the United States today, the United States has a long, long way to go towards regaining it’s long lost industrial base. Do not be fooled by charts and figures that say otherwise. Anyone can lie and create bogus nonsensical charts and figures. Go outside yourself and look around.
American industry is dead.
What remains are either “soft industries” such as “Customer Service stations”, “Computer software coding centers”, or a handful of military and high-tech specialists. These types of industry are not providing “much needed” products and services to the United States domestic requirements.
Compared to China…
There is no comparison. China (which is large enough to house five complete United States inside of it) has over 2000 “Manufacturing Areas” supported by an amazing network of perhaps 10,000 smaller communities that provide first and second tier supply. All with everything needed to make, design, ship quality products globally.
So to answer the question; “Can American industry be revived to a point of serious competition against China?”
The answer is YES. But it will require a complete turnover of the American leadership class, a discarding of the American method of governance, a revamp of the American educational system, and a complete rebuilding of America’s infrastructure from the ground up. If the United States were to come to a full and complete screeching halt right now, and focus on this objective, you can see major changes in the “proper direction” with the next twenty years.
Otherwise, forget-about-it.
Ram Jam “Black Betty” Best of Reactions Compilation
Pennsylvania Dutch Brownies
Fudgy Brownies 2
Ingredients
4 tablespoons butter or margarine
1 (1 ounce) square unsweetened chocolate
1/4 cup light molasses
2 large eggs
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup plus 2 teaspoons granulated sugar
1 1/8 teaspoons ground cinnamon
Instructions
Heat oven to 375 degrees F. Grease 13 x 9-inch metal baking pan; set aside.
In a 4-quart saucepan, melt butter with chocolate over low heat. Remove saucepan from heat. With wire whisk or fork, stir in molasses, then eggs.
With spoon, stir in flour, ginger, cloves, baking soda, salt, 1 cup sugar and 1 teaspoon cinnamon just until blended. Spread batter evenly in pan. Bake 15 to 20 minutes, until a wooden pick inserted 2 inches from edge comes out clean.
Meanwhile, in cup, combine remaining 2 teaspoons sugar and 1/8 teaspoon cinnamon; set aside.
Remove pan from oven; immediately sprinkle brownies with cinnamon-sugar mixture. Cool brownies in pan on wire rack at least 2 hours. When cool, cut brownies lengthwise into 3 strips, then cut each strip crosswise into 5 pieces. Cut each piece diagonally in half.
Source: Good Housekeeping Christmas Joys – Hearst Books
@ A Masterpiece! Cranberries – Zombie
So many Africans have been “moved”by this song and video. I guess all the wars in Africa really strike home.
U.S./NATO HQ in Kramatorsk Reportedly “Hit” by Russian Missile(s) – Conflicting Claims and Blame
Late yesterday, June 27, 2023, reports began FLOODING out of Kramatorsk, Ukraine, that a Hotel/Restaurant had been brutally hit by “Russian” Missiles, and NUMEROUS American-English Speakers — and troops with American Flag patches — could be heard and seen in the aftermath.
Photos and video proved there was, in fact, a missile strike. Those photos and video also PROVED American troop-type people were hit, some injured, some killed.
Within an hour, Ukraine publicly claimed that innocent children and “American tourists” were the victims.
“Tourists?” In military uniforms?
In an area 30 or so miles from the active front lines that is being shelled almost daily now, after the loss of Bakhmut??
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Then, some damning pictures came out showing the remnants of a missile trail in the sky over the hotel, and worse, missile debris on the ground PROVING the missile was a British Storm Shadow missile. Russians don’t use those . . . .
This morning, the story has changed quite a bit – TWICE !
First there was a claim that the Ukraine Air Force “accidentally” targeted the hotel. Well, that might certainly be possible and would explain the Storm Shadow missile debris. It would also explain the extensive damage – it could, in fact, have been a Russian missile and then a Ukrainian missile by mistake.
But wait, the story changed yet again.
Word is out this morning that officials are “looking for the people who betrayed the secret meeting taking place, to the Russians.”
Secret meeting?
With Americans and other NATO troops, under arms and in military uniforms?
China has banned nothing in China and in the world.
Amazon, Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube, Discord, WhatsApp, Whisper, and pretty much every single major US website refuse to follow the Chinese laws to operate their operations in China, thus they have not been approved by the Chinese laws for these businesses to operate in China.
It is the US who has blocked all the free international media and internet such as the free Russian international media and internet.
As a result, all Americans have been living in their totally isolated, completely censored and lying media. Americans know nothing about the free world, but the US style of democratic nonsense and disinformation.
In less than 24 hours Wagner have rolled back and left Russia
Prighozin is leaving for BELARUS
Wagner PMC soldiers who didn’t participate in the Mutiny get new MoD contracts
In 24 hours
No Moscow
No Civil War
So like i said ,
Putin was never Prighozins Target
He was BAITED into organizing a march on Russia
He was used by Putin into convincing all hardliners that Shoigu and Gerasimov be eased out and Putin not take the fallout politically
My guess is Surovikin will get overall command
Wagner is part of MoD
Prighozin is regarded traitor by all of Russia
Putin noted which Russians offered resistance and which Russians didn’t and MADE A LIST as a LOYALTY METER
And PUTIN SHOWED THE WEST HOW A POTENTIAL CIVIL WAR CAN BE CHANGED IN A MERE 24 hours
If this was the West, you would have the cities bombed by now
Man of the Hour — LUKASHENKA
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APPLAUSE!!!!
Conveniently there to talk to Prighozin and end the situation
If you tell me the whe thing where Wagner invades , holds a city for 24 hours as people are still rushing to watch the latest movies and malls is logical
To others especially Indians who believed Putin would be deposed and Prighozin would be moving to Moscow
ITS WHY THOSE 200 YEARS HAPPENED (1757–1947)
Untold Truth: Rent-a-Girlfriend – A Popular Trend in China
Is it possible to rent a girl in China? How much will it cost? What is included in the services of a girl for rent? We will answer these and many other questions in as much detail as possible in this video! Renting girls in China for a long time is a fairly frequent service, why do the Chinese so often resort to renting girls? How much do these girls get, and what is included in the cost of their services? We have to answer these and many other questions in this video! Watch this video from the beginning to the very end to know everything about renting girls in China!
The wackiest thing in history has just unfolded.
12:50 AM EST
So, a few hours ago, I was pretty sure the Russian state was going to utterly collapse, and that the Ukraine would seize Russian territory.
It now appears, by some fantastic twist, that this is actually not going to happen.
I have zero idea how it is possible that Prigozhin had everything lined up to take control of Southern Command, and then was like “ah – nah, I guess I’ll just surrender.”
He could have just been drunk. But he had to have lined this all up with the FSB and the military, and that would have been a very big thing, to do that all in secret, and get that many powerful players on his side.
As of right now, he has stopped the push towards Moscow, and is possibly en route to Belarus.
Just out of nowhere, it was announced that Prigozhin agreed to talks with Lukashenko, President of Belarus, and then hours later it was announced that he was calling the whole thing off.
This is part of the statement from Belarus:
“Evgeny Prigozhin accepted the proposal of President Alexander Lukashenko to stop the movement of the armed men of Wagner in Russia and to take further steps to de-escalate tension.” It added that Prigozhin had been offered “an advantageous and acceptable option for resolving the situation, with security guarantees for the Wagner PMC fighters.”
This is still in flux, or whatever, and something could still go wrong, but that is where we are apparently at as of Sunday morning in Russia. Actually, that statement is 12 hours old, at time of writing, but nothing seems to have changed.
Wagner peacefully left the base in Rostov, surrendering control, with the troops going back to the territories of the former Ukraine and Prigozhin going wherever he is going. He should be executed, but I guess he can’t be if he made a deal. I think he will most likely end up dead in the next few months either way.
It really, really, really looked like this was going to turn into a full-on civil war, and the Ukraine war would collapse, and Russia would collapse as a country, breaking into different parts like the US wants it to.
I have no idea how Prigozhin was so competent to organize taking over Southern Command and then just giving up. Something must have went wrong.
The chaos now is over, the borders and airports are back online, the military seems to be totally off the streets in Moscow.
There are going to have to be purges of the FSB and whoever else sided with Prigozhin.
The people who said the whole thing was a staged event are going to claim victory. I don’t really understand what the purpose of faking this would be, but the way it collapsed, and the way none of it made any sense, will allow those theorists to say “see, this was the plan all along!”
How this will affect Russia and the war effort in the longer run, I do not know. I think there should be an increased desire to escalate, and Putin is definitely not going to want to look weak after all of this, so he will probably back a move toward “total war” or as I like to call it “Blitzkrieg.”
Yesterday, I said that Putin’s legitimacy would be gone if it wasn’t solved in 12 hours, and 8 hours after I said that, it was solved. So I do not think he’s lost legitimacy. It looks bad, but not so bad he’d need to resign.
I do think the fact that so many people would back Prigozhin in his insane plan shows that there is a very real desire for Putin to get more aggressive in the Ukraine, and that has to be taken into account.
But wow.
This went from being the worst thing ever to the most confusing thing I’ve seen in my life.
I bought an old farm with a barn. The roof of the barn was sagging and the walls were bulging out. I contacted a local contractor to fix it. He was known as the best in the business. He studied it for a while and made the following offer:
“We’ll jack up the entire barn and then reinforce the walls and install some pulleys to draw in the walls and then we can put in support beams from the roof apex down to the ground and then slowly over a week or two, lower the barn back onto the new beams. This will give the roof time to adjust and bend back in shape. It will cost about $50,000.”
I listened and then said:
“What if we pin the walls to the roof joists and then put in beams and screw-jacks along the roof centerline and jack up the roof slowly over time? The rising roof will draw in the sides. Then we can replace the screw jacks with 10×10 beams”. How much would that cost?
The contractor thought about it and said: “Yeah, that would work, too. It’d cost about $3000.”
I think it would be an excellent sign of good character if you can just take a step back and acknowledge that the entirety of what you know about “Chinese food” is either based entirely on the “Chinese food” in your country that has been adapted, sometimes quite extensively – to the point that it is no longer seen as Chinese food in the eyes of Chinese – to suit the tastebuds of the people in your country, OR just a tiny speck on the tiny tip of a Titan-sized iceberg.
I mean, I’ve been eating Chinese food since I’ve been a kid, and yet, I dare not say I know any more than 1% of all the dishes from all the various Chinese cuisines. Sometimes, a friend will mention this or that dish from their hometown, and I would be like “what is that? Never heard of it before…” and it just leaves me with the impression that I will never be able to sample every Chinese dish out there in this lifetime – it would be too tall of an order for one lifetime. Give me two or three lifetimes, then I might be able to give it a shot.
Things like “Chinese like to eat this and this for breakfast” or “Chinese like to eat more vegetables than meat” or “Chinese are very obsessed with meat” don’t hold up well when you’re speaking of 1.5 billion people – just like it wouldn’t work if you say all Americans love eating donuts or Girl Scout cookies. See: countless arguments on Chinese social media whether “savory” or “sweet” tofu pudding is better, or whether glutinous rice dumplings should be “sweet” or “savory”.
There are Chinese who don’t like to eat rice and who don’t even own a rice cooker. There are Chinese who won’t even touch savory tofu pudding if you paid them to eat it. There are Chinese who don’t like eating green leafy vegetables.
Generalizations break down very quickly when they encounter reality.
IMHO, the much better attitude to adopt is:
Every cuisine has dishes that have carbs. If you don’t want to eat carbs, don’t order dishes that have carbs. Don’t cook dishes that have carbs. Don’t eat dishes that have carbs. Order, cook, eat all the other dishes that dont have carbs.
I mean, let us imagine if the assumption in the question is true, that Chinese food is indeed “high in carbs”.
If that were indeed true, then Chinese folks who suffer from diabetes would …. what?
Starve?
Or go “I have diabetes now. I think I should change to a Western diet. Let my new Western diet begin. This will mark a new beginning for me. Ho ho ho.”
I know quite a few Chinese peeps with diabetes. They have neither starved to death, nor changed to a Western-style diet.
To round off this answer, I’ll provide some pictures of home-cooked Chinese meals. Everything that has carbs, I’ll cross off in red. By doing this, you’ll see that you still have a lot of other dishes to enjoy.
There’s some tofu in the various dishes, usually paired with meat. As far as I’m aware, tofu does have a bit of carbs, but it’s generally viewed as a low carb food.
Here’s the lunch my cousin and I prepared two days ago. Don’t eat the rice. Don’t eat the dish on the top left, because it has julienned potato strips in it. I’m not sure whether North Americans or Europeans eat potatoes, but potatoes do have carbs, so that’s why I’ve crossed this dish off.
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Don’t eat the rice. There are a few small fermented black beans in the meat+veg dish on the right, but hopefully that still counts as low carb.
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Don’t eat the rice.
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Don’t eat the julienned potato strips. Don’t eat the peanuts.
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Don’t eat the noodles. Don’t eat the glutinous rice. Don’t eat the fruits. Don’t eat the snow fungus dessert and cake.
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You’re good to go.
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You’re good to go. You can avoid the soy sauce dips easily enough.
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You’re good to go.
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Conclusion:
Just like in any cuisine, when it comes to the various Chinese cuisines, if you don’t want to eat carbs, then order, cook, eat those dishes that do not have carbs.
From my experience the above is the best way to avoid carbs for people who are looking to avoid carbs.
Advice From Cats On How To Survive The Holidays
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The holidays can be quite stressful—between buying gifts, coping with family, attending various functions, and realizing that mixing Jagermeister and egg nog together to make “Jag Nog” was a bad idea, it can get a bit overwhelming. Fortunately, the felines behind You Need More Sleep: Advice from Cats are here to give you all the tips you need to enjoy a joyful, peaceful, and—most importantly—restful season.
Tanks, depleted uranium shells, long-range missiles, F16s: hardly a week goes by without some news of how Britain is upping the ante again.
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The deeper the economic crisis bites, the more desperately the ruling class is throwing everything it can into military confrontation. Only through victory in war will it stand a chance of keeping its failing system alive for another generation. The world’s masses owe it to their children to make sure that such a victory is never achieved.
By Proletarian writers from the Communists (dot) org
The recent announcement that Rishi Sunak’s government would be providing first depleted uranium shells to Ukraine and then Storm Shadow long-range missiles represent two of the latest of examples of the British government’s consistent and active efforts to escalate the war in Ukraine . It is doing so with zero concern for the lives of British workers and even less for those of Ukrainians.
Reckless and criminal escalation
This was demonstrated very clearly when the Ukrainian military stored the aforementioned depleted uranium shells in a large ammunition depot near the town of Khmelnitsky. When Russian armed forces blew up this arms store, a cloud of radiation was dispersed across the town, posing both immediate and long-term health risks to everyone resident or present in the area.
Not for nothing did the Russian foreign ministry warn the Sunak government not to provide such weapons to its Ukrainian proxies. Russian armed forces are not using such weapons in Ukraine themselves, knowing well the health risks they pose.
Russia had previously warned very strongly against the use of such weapons: “If Kiev is supplied with such shells for Nato heavy military equipment, we will consider this as the use of dirty nuclear bombs against Russia with all the ensuing consequences,” a statement said. (Russia warns Britain against supplying Ukraine with depleted uranium shells , Donbass Insider, 22 March 2022)
The cancer epidemics in parts of Serbia and Iraq following Nato’s widespread use of depleted uranium munitions there are just two of the many war crimes perpetrated by British and US forces in their wars of plunder that are carefully ignored by British and US establishment politicians, journalists, lawyers and scientists.
How far across Ukraine and neighbouring countries this radiation and its effects might spread is at this time unknown. Nor can we yet know how Ukraine’s food exports will be affected. In all likelihood, no meaningful effort will be made to find out by our self-identifying ‘defenders of human rights’.
Sanctions war has failed
These latest reckless escalations by British imperialism come hard on the heels of bitter admissions carried in the Spectator and the Telegraph that the “shock and awe” sanctions war that was supposed to “reduce the rouble to rubble”, in the words of US president Joe Biden , has been an abject failure. The aggressive western wagers of this economic war had confidently expected to bring about the collapse of the Russian economy, triggering either a mass uprising by a hungry and unemployed populace or some other political crisis that could result in the long dreamt-of regime change in Moscow.
But, owing to the preparations the Russian government has been making since 2014, the severity of the sanctions regime has been mitigated both by increased state intervention in the Russian economy and by redirecting the country’s trade flows eastwards – in particular to China, Iran and India. The workers and economies that are being destroyed by the sanctions are not those of Russia but of the west, most specifically those of the European Union and Britain, where residents and industry alike have been suddenly cut off from the cheap and reliable flow of Russian oil and gas on which they have depended for decades.
Now, having failed to defeat the Russians either economically or militarily, the imperialists are getting desperate.
The aim of the war in Ukraine, from the perspective of US imperialism, is to destabilise Russia itself and, ultimately, to secure regime change (ie, the installation of a client regime in place of an independent one) and, ideally, the fragmentation of the country. This is all in order that the USA and its junior partners in Europe can seize full, unrestricted control of Russia’s immense natural resources.
With the global overproduction crisis deepening every day, the contradictions of the imperialist economic system are becoming ever more apparent. US imperialism, mired in a mountain of bad debt , has reached the point where it is not only seeing long-term stagnation at home but is also losing control over markets overseas that it has long sought to dominate by means of its economic, technological and military might.
Meanwhile, African nations are increasingly trading with China and turning to Russia for energy and security partnerships, thus further deepening the contradictions faced by US imperialism and forcing it down the road of trying to remove both the Putin-led government in Moscow and the Communist party (CPC) in China. The removal of these two rival centres of power, which are working increasingly closely together, is necessary for US imperialism if it is going to succeed in ‘solving’ its crisis via the ruination of its opponents and the destruction of the opportunities for independent development that they are offering to the oppressed countries via Brics, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO ) etc.
Decline and decay of British imperialism
British imperialism, likewise mired in crisis and tied hand and foot to the US imperialist bandwagon, is equally desperate for these plans to be brought to fruition, hence its reckless escalation of the war in Ukraine by supplying long-range missiles and depleted uranium munitions. The British ruling class has played a subservient role to US imperialism since at least 1956, when it failed to win its war to bring down Abdul Nasser’s anti-imperialist pan-Arabist Egypt .
The decay of British imperialism actually has its origins ever earlier than this. In fact, even at the highest point of the development of British capitalism, the seeds of its own terminal crisis had already been sown. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels pointed out in Capital Volume 2, there is a tendency inherent within the system for capitalists not only to maximise profitability at all costs but to actually cut out commodity production altogether if they possibly can.
“The process of production appears merely as an unavoidable intermediate link, as a necessary evil for the sake of money-making. All nations with a capitalist mode of production are therefore seized periodically by a feverish attempt to make money without the intervention of the process of production.” (Chapter 1 , 1885)
Marx identified a tendency that would be explored and fleshed out by VI Lenin in his work Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Written in 1916, at the height of the first world war , Lenin’s examination of the development of imperialism included an analysis of the ongoing deindustrialisation of Britain. He showed how the development of imperialism was linked to the declining profitability of commodity production for the home market in Britain in the latter part of the 19th century.
At this point, British capitalists were able to realise far greater profits by exporting their capital to the colonised nations, where resources and land were cheaper and where labour could be exploited in a far more profitable fashion (ie, with even greater brutality). This brought the British ruling class into conflict with other imperialist powers, mainly the newly unified Germany. The competition for markets, resources and hyper-exploitable sources of labour led (ultimately) to the mass slaughter of World War 1.
As a result of the war, however, the British ruling class was much weakened, and it ultimately failed to restore its position as the overwhelmingly dominant power in the world, partly because it had heavily indebted itself to the rising power of US imperialism during the course of the war.
It was only after World War 2 though that the crisis of British imperialism was fully realised. Britain began to lose control of its colonial possessions (starting with India) and faced the reality of having to depend upon US imperialism for economic and military support both for reconstruction at home and for exploitation of the oppressed nations abroad.
A faction within the British ruling class tried to resist this subordination to the USA, but it was decisively defeated in 1956, partly due to the anti-imperialist struggles of the Egyptians and also because the US ruling class would not tolerate what it regarded as its British junior partner operating without its consent. Following the Suez debacle, the British ruling class realised it had little choice but to fall in line behind the USA if it wished to continue to operate in the markets it still dominated abroad, even after being forced to give up direct control of most of its empire.
In order to maintain their profits, Britain’s financiers need to be able to move capital anywhere in the world. They require all barriers to this to be knocked down, and, since WW2, the USA is the only imperialist country with the global economic and military power to be able to do this. The state of British imperialism is one of profound and multiple crises: it has undergone a longer decay and is much more vulnerable than the USA is.
The fortunes of the imperialist powers ultimately rest on convincing the oppressed and developing nations of the world that they have to accept the terms dictated by countries like Britain if they want to escape being put under an economic siege or subjected to military attack.
Anti-imperialist bloc cutting the ground from beneath the imperialists’ feet
Today, the economic fortunes of British imperialism are entirely tied to US economic and military power. The British ruling class has been cutting its own armed forces down for many years now, so it depends ever more heavily upon the USA to facilitate the ability of British finance capital to keep on plundering the world.
The British state may spend a large amount of defence, but it does not maintain the kind of forces that would be capable of taking on the Russian or Chinese armies for more than a few days. What Britain’s armed forces have specialised in since their failure in the Iraq war is in waging wars by proxy, training and directing jihadists in Libya, mercenaries in Yemen and fascists in Ukraine to do the heavy lifting while they remain in the shadows – advising, directing and facilitating.
If Nato’s fascistic Banderite forces in Ukraine lose their war with the Russian Federation, which they show every sign of doing in the near future, this will be a defeat for US imperialism of an even greater magnitude than its humiliating retreat from Afghanistan in 2021. Many nations that are currently dominated by British and US imperialism will see the defeat of the Nato-aligned forces in Ukraine as being a clear sign that the US-led imperialist bloc has been fatally weakened.
This in turn will undermine British imperialism’s ability to continue to exploit countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia . If US imperialism decays or collapses entirely, the British ruling class will be fatally weakened as well, not only in terms of the markets and resources it seeks to control overseas, but also in its ability to contain the class contradictions within Britain society itself.
This is why the British ruling class is desperate to secure the destruction of the Russian and Chinese governments. Because British imperialism needs to ransack huge areas of the world if it is to try and resolve the deep crisis in which it is enmeshed, and the anti-imperialist governments of Russia and China are standing in the way of that goal.
That is how we must understand Sunak’s declaration at the recent G7 meeting in Hiroshima that China is “the biggest challenge of our age to global security and prosperity”.
Of course, Sunak was referring solely to the ‘security and prosperity’ of the class he represents – the class of billionaire owners of capital. All that will come to the majority of the world’s workers from the strengthening of our exploiters is the prolongation of the existence of the system that keeps them immiserated, condemned for another generation and more to the miseries of unemployment, poverty , crisis and war.
Those of us who oppose British capitalism at home must learn this lesson: that there can be no victory over capitalism at home without also destroying British imperialism’s ability to loot abroad. Only with the departure of this parasitic system can the British working class advance in solidarity with the workers of the world to a bright and fulfilling future.
The Poverty In Mississippi Is Unlike Anything You’ve Ever Seen
Shaker Strawberry Summer Pudding
British Berry Summer Pudding 13 735×491 1
Ingredients
1/2 loaf white bread, sliced
1 quart ripe strawberries
3/4 to 1 cup sugar (depending on the sweetness of the berries)
Instructions
Line a 9-inch square pan with aluminum foil or wax paper.
Remove the crust from the bread.
Mash and sweeten strawberries.
Place the bread slices slices on the bottom of the prepared pan.
Spoon strawberries over the bread and alternate berries and bread until pan is filled. Cover with wax paper slightly smaller than the pan. Chill at least 8 hours or overnight.
To serve, invert on a platter. Top with whipped cream. Scatter fresh berries on top and around edge.
Pay it forward
Waiting in line to pay for groceries while maintaining a 6ft distance, this man cut in line. He didn’t appear to notice what he’d done.
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The person he skipped didn’t say anything, just maintained the proper distance.
When it was time for the man to pay he reached in his back pocket and pulled out a small note pad. He’d forgotten his wallet.
He looked a bit disappointed and embarrassed. The person he skipped stepped up and told the cashier they’d take care of his groceries. (Which only consisted of Milk and Chocolate Chip Cookies.)
He was more than grateful. He kindly thanked them and off the man went.
Upon arrival to the register, the cashier asked: “He cut you off and you paid for his groceries.. Why??”
“They calmly replied with a smile: “I hope that if one day my Dad forgets his wallet, someone will step up and buy his Milk and Cookies”
With all the negativity going on in the world..I thought it would be nice to share this moment.
A little kindness goes a long way. Why not pay it forward?
Shaker Spoon Bread
Spoonbread 32391 small
Ingredients
1 cup cornmeal
1 quart (4 cups) sweet milk
3 eggs, separated
2 tablespoons butter
1 3/4 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
Instructions
Scald milk and add cornmeal gradually. Cook until thick.
Pour small amount over beaten egg yolks. Return to heat and cook a few minutes longer.
Add butter and fold in beaten egg whites.
Add baking powder and salt.
Pour into greased baking dish and bake at 325 degrees F for 1 1/2 hours, stirring once after the first 15 minutes of baking.
In the 1930s, a full decade or more before the advent of fast food, George Orwell put his finger on this problem. His book The Road to Wigan Pier chronicled the lives of the poor and unemployed in Northern England’s distressed mining regions. Orwell described their insufficient diet and brilliantly explicated the psychology underlying the poor’s consumption patterns:
The basis of [the poor’s] diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea, and potatoes—an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty’. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let’s have three [penny’s worth] of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and we’ll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind works when you are at the P.A.C. [public assistance] level. White bread-and-marg and sugared tea don’t nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread-and-dripping and cold water. Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated, and especially with tea, the Englishman’s opium. A cup of tea or even an aspirin is much better as a temporary stimulant than a crust of brown bread.
A “Karen” is a woman (naturally), white (always), middle-aged (30–55), attractive solely because of her hair, makeup and clothing, blonde (usually), and middle-class or higher. As a customer or citizen, she is demanding, entitled, privileged and impossible to satisfy in any reasonable manner.
Karen wants you to take her expired coupon and, when you won’t, she wants to speak to your supervisor. Karen calls the city to ask them to stop road work in her area from noon to 5 p.m. so her child can have a nap, then calls her city councilor when her request is refused.
It’s use was popularized by African-Americans on Twitter in 2018.
African Americans have had slang terms for such an individual since before the American Civil War, including “Miss Ann”, “Becky”, “Barbecue Becky”, “Cornerstone Caroline” and “Permit Patty”. “Karen” is the type of person who would call the cops on kids running a lemonade stand without a permit.
The first use of “Karen” as a pejorative refers to an ad for the Nintendo Switch from 2016 where the woman on the right was referred to as “antisocial Karen”. Unlike the typical stereotype, she’s a brunette.
main qimg dfe0709f5b4152ea823433cda5b983da
Before the breakout on Twitter, “Karen” was the subject of many memes on Reddit in 2017.
Naturally, white people co-opted the term. The UK paper The Guardian, noting the rash of women calling the police on black people engaged in perfectly legal behaviors like barbecuing in a public park or pointing out that Central Park has a leash requirement for dogs, dubbed 2020 “The Year of Karen”.
Psychologists say the stereotype is the result of a pattern of “weaponizing victimhood” where a group of people who have suffered social discrimination in the past don’t just ask for empathy with their plight but instead use it to claim rights over and above everyone else, including both present and past victims of similar discrimination. Karens are hardly the only group that do this.
Why Africa is angry at the “West”
https://vt.tiktok.com/ZSLBRxQov/
Train derails into Yellowstone River sparking fears of hazardous spill
Montana residents have been warned to conserve water after a freight train potentially carrying hazardous materials collapsed into the Yellowstone River.
A large emergency response has been seen in the area, amid concerns of a toxic spill after the bridge collapsed early on Saturday morning.
It was initially feared oil or petroleum was contained in the cargo train, but the Yellowstone County Sheriff’s Office said it was later determined they contained asphalt and ‘a second substance that officials are working to confirm’.
Water treatment facilities throughout the area have introduced emergency measures due to the crisis. Despite warnings to conserve water, officials said there is currently no threat to life in the area.
A statement re-posted by the Yellowstone County Sheriff’s Department on social media confirmed no injuries have been reported in the incident.
‘A total of 8 rail cars are involved and in a great stroke of luck, none contained oil,’ the post said.
‘The cars contained asphalt and a second substance that officials are working to confirm. Both of the substances are described as “slow moving” and have not gone much past the initial scene.
‘The public is asked to stay away from the (scene) to prevent congestion.’
Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Department also warned locals to avoid water from certain parts of the river.
‘From Indian Point to Buffalo Mirage, avoid water due to possible contact with contaminants,’ the department tweeted.
A multi-agency effort was on the scene Saturday, including Stillwater County Emergency Services, the Yellowstone County Sheriff’s Office and Columbus Fire & Rescue.
Water treatment facilities in Laurel, Billings and Lockwood shut down their headgates in response to the potentially toxic spill.
The Yellowstone County Disaster and Emergency Services department said irrigation canal companies are also implementing protective measures.
According to the Billings Gazette, the train fell into the water after a bridge it was crossing collapsed under the weight of the carriages.
The outlet claimed the bridge had recently been battered by high water levels as a result of storms in the south-central Montana area.
The potential toxic spill comes months after a similar incident in East Palestine, Ohio, sparked mass evacuations when hazardous chemicals leaked from another train derailment.
Locals reported side effects including eye and throat irritation, and some even claimed pets had died due top the toxic fumes. The chemicals on board the Ohio derailment were not the same as those from Saturday’s incident in Montana.
Putin just dropped a BOMBSHELL & outplayed the Western coup | Redacted w Clayton Morris
The Pleistocene epoch is a geologic epoch which began around 2.6 Mya (Million years ago) and came to an end around 11,700 BP (Before Present). It is characterized by lower sea levels than the present epoch and colder temperatures. During much of the Pleistocene, Europe, North America, and Siberia were covered by extensive ice sheets and glaciers. The Pleistocene was an important time because it was when the human genus first evolved.
The flora and fauna today also more or less reached their current form during the Pleistocene. Most Pleistocene animals and Pleistocene plants also exist in the Holocene. Furthermore, the Pleistocene epoch was the last geological epoch in which humans had relatively little impact.
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Pleistocene Geology and Climate
The Pleistocene glaciations are among the defining geologic events of the Pleistocene. Much of North America was covered by the Laurentide ice sheet and northern Europe and Siberia were covered by the Eurasian Ice Sheet Complex. The size of the ice sheets resulted in lower sea levels and dryer climates. Britain was a peninsula and the Indonesian islands were connected to the Southeast Asian mainland, for example. There were also glaciers on Mauna Kea of the Hawaiian Islands.
While parts of the world were dryer – such as central Europe, which was mostly covered in tundra, other parts of the world were wetter and greener. The American southwest, for example, contained grassland with numerous lakes. The Sahara Desert was also covered in savannah grassland for many parts of the Pleistocene. Parts of the north-eastern Arabian Peninsula were the site of an enormous oasis. It is even possible that this ancient, wetter environment may have helped inspire stories like the Garden of Eden or have been the original Garden of Eden itself.
Pleistocene Animals
Many of the animals common today were also common in the Pleistocene. Deer, big cats, apes, elephants, and bears could all be found in a Pleistocene landscape. There were also animals that were common which have since gone extinct, such as mammoths, mastodons, saber-toothed cats, giant ground sloths , and pre-human hominins .
Europe and Asia had significant populations of African fauna. Cave paintings and paleontological finds in Europe reveal that rhinoceroses, lions, and hyenas were all common at that time in southern Europe. The island of Sicily was also inhabited by a dwarf elephant species until surprisingly recent times. Northern Europe was covered in glaciers and inhospitable, while central Europe was tundra. Southern Europe, however, contained forests and was inhabited by numerous species of megafauna, most of which have since died out.
Lions were also much more common in Asia, as were rhinoceroses and elephants. There were even rhinoceroses living on the islands of the Philippines. Apes were also more common. Until about 300,000 BP, Gigantopithecus, possibly the largest ape ever to live, flourished in Asia.
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Pleistocene North America is known for its impressive megafauna populations. The more well-known are the woolly mammoths and mastodons. North America was also inhabited by American lions, North American llamas, and giant ground sloths, all of which are extinct today.
The continent of Australia has been separated from Eurasia since the Mesozoic. As a result, Australia has very unusual vegetation and wildlife. Pleistocene Australia was no different. Australia was inhabited by extraordinary creatures such as kangaroos the size of a rhinoceros and other giant marsupial mammals. There were also numerous giant flightless birds such as moas in New Zealand, rheas in South America, and ostriches in Africa and Asia that had to compete with large mammals.
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Pleistocene Humans
Another important development on the Pleistocene timeline was the emergence of the human genus: Homo. Humans probably evolved out of bipedal apes, such as the Australopithecines and Ardipithecus Ramidus . These early bipedal apes are classified as hominins. Hominins first evolved near the end of the Miocene epoch (25-5 Mya) in south and east Africa. Other than their upright posture and bipedalism, these hominins were not significantly more human than previous apes.
Their skeletons indicate that they resembled modern apes such as chimpanzees and their use of tools was limited or absent. At the beginning of the Pleistocene, however, a new type of hominin appeared. These hominins were taller, more dependent on upright locomotion, and had larger brains, which allowed them to excel in tool use over any previous hominin. These hominins belong to the genus Homo and hominins in this genus are simply called humans.
The earliest human species was Homo Habilis . The first examples of this species appeared about 2.3 million years ago. They used simple flake tools which were made by taking rocks and striking sharp flakes off other rocks – which could be used as cutting tools. Homo Habilis was more technologically inclined than its hominin predecessors, but it was still closer to earlier and more ape-like hominins than modern humans.
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The next earliest human species is Homo Erectus . The first H. Erectus evolved around 2 million years ago and the last of them did not die out until sometime within the last 100,000 years. Archaeological and paleontological evidence suggest that they may have been the first humans to use culture as a wholesale approach to adapt to their environment. They were more advanced tool users and were also much taller than previous hominins, about six feet (1.83 meters) tall. They were also the first humans to leave Africa. By 1 million years ago, H. Erectus had spread to both Europe and Asia, bringing humans for the first time to these regions.
The earliest humans were universally hunter-gatherers. Their use of technology to interact with their environment made them very adaptative – so that humans eventually found their way into every possible environment on the planet: forests, grasslands, deserts, even tundra.
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Megafauna Extinctions in the Pleistocene: Accelerated by Humans?
For most of the Pleistocene, humans did not significantly impact their environment. There were no more than a few hundred thousand individuals at a given time and their ability to transform the landscape was limited by primitive technology and limited social organization.
This all changed with the emergence of Homo Sapiens (modern humans) in Africa and Homo Neandertalensis (Neanderthals) in Europe. Anatomically modern humans first evolved in Africa around 200,000-300,000 BP. After the emergence of anatomically modern humans, something happened, perhaps a rewiring of the human brain , that led to the emergence of modern behaviors like art, blade production, long distance trade, and more efficient, organized hunting, among other abilities.
This change in behavior caused humans to have a significantly larger influence on their environment than in previous times. This can be seen in the fate of most megafauna, especially in the New World. Megafauna extinctions occurred around 40,000-50,000 years ago in Australia and around 13,000 years ago in North America. Both occurred shortly after the appearance of humans on these continents.
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It has been suggested that the reason for the worldwide extinction of megafauna at that time was overhunting by humans combined with climate change. The climate was constantly changing during the Pleistocene and the megafauna survived these changes. When humans were introduced into the environment, however, these same megafauna populations died out not long afterwards. It is possible that the addition of a powerful predator, like humanity, may have added an extra factor that was just too much for the megafauna to handle while also adapting to climate change, leading to their extinction.
The Human Age: Life after the Pleistocene
As humans become more technologically advanced and more adept at manipulating their environment, they continue to influence it more and more. How much longer human civilization will last is uncertain, but one thing that is known is that humans are likely to leave a mark on this planet which will last for ages to come and it all started in the Pleistocene.
Well, I have been playing around with the image-generation AI for a while now. I have passed the “introduction” stage, and am nor in the “novice user” stage.
I have been focusing my attention on one particular program known as DeepAI.
I have bought some “AI call” time, and been “mucking around” with it. This is what I have learned about this one particular type of image AI generation software…
Each time you click on the generation button”, a new picture is generated. Even if the rest of the settings stay the same. No two images are the same.
Word text description orientation makes a big difference.
Big grey elephant with monkey riding on top
Will have a very different image result than…
Monkey riding on top of a big grey elephant
Make sure you spell things properly. Steel is different than steal. A spelling mistake can have substantial impact on your resultant art.
The simple sentence will generate “pure” drawings, while the complicated description will provide more accurate results.
The art seems to generate some kind of “feel” for the imagery that you detail out, not any actual anatomical, or functional details.
The image context “style” groupings make all the difference in the world.
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Quick note; Double Click on the images to see the full size.
Example – Spaceship interior
In this example, I have created a text that looks like this…
detailed interior view of the control deck of a futuristic and shiny chrome and metal style spaceship
And the screen will look like this…
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Resulting in the following images… very futuristic, and stylish. Reminds me a little of the spacecraft in the movie “Alien”.
output 3
output 2
output 4
output1
Now, I then went and changed some wording. What I intended “black lit” was obviously not understood by the AI ‘Bot. I wanted to have a kind of “2001 space odyssey” kind of interior.
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Resulting in the following images… not really what I intended. But pretty cool. Anyways.
detailed interior view of the control deck of a futuristic and shiny chrome with black lit controls in a metal style spaceship
2output 3
2output 2
2output 1
Whoops!
I should of said “Back lit” instead of “black lit”.
Oh well…
Make a change…
Jules Verne style.
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With this… very interesting. You do get the “feel” of Victorian science fiction.
detailed interior view of the control deck of a Jules Verne Victorian century style spaceship
3a
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Make the following changes…
From this…
detailed interior view of the control deck of a Jules Verne Victorian century style spaceship
To this…
detailed interior view of the control deck of a Jules Verne Victorian century style spaceship. Outside the view ports and widows is a brilliant blue sky with white fluffy clouds and bright morning sun.
Resulting in… this very beautiful and interesting drawing.
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And some more… looks good with the blue skies, eh?
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More…
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Let’s jazz up the interior some…
Let’s add brass, and red velvet.
detailed interior view of the control deck of a Jules Verne Victorian century style spaceship. Outside the view ports and widows is a brilliant blue sky with white fluffy clouds and bright morning sun. The interior is one of brass, and red velvet.
And look at the interior now… damn!
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But, of course, some of the results can be really unexpected…
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My gosh! Check out this one!
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And this one…
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The images build upon each other, as you can see in this train of images.
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Let’s further refine the description…
From
detailed interior view of the control deck of a Jules Verne Victorian century style spaceship. Outside the view ports and widows is a brilliant blue sky with white fluffy clouds and bright morning sun. The interior is one of brass, and red velvet.
To
detailed interior view of the control deck of a Jules Verne Victorian century style spaceship. Outside the many big view ports and wide widows is a brilliant blue sky with white fluffy clouds and bright morning sun. The interior is one of brass, and red velvet. leather chairs. Many levers and switches.
And it’s getting closer and pretty impressive.
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.
Let’s add some carved ivory handles…
Let’s make this change.
detailed interior view of the control deck of a Jules Verne Victorian century style spaceship. Outside the many big view ports and wide widows is a brilliant blue sky with white fluffy clouds and bright morning sun. The interior is one of brass, and red velvet. leather chairs. Many levers and switches. There are white carved ivory handles for the doors, switches and fixtures.
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Let’s do something radical…
It’s going in a direction that I am not that interested in. Let’s change the description.
From
detailed interior view of the control deck of a Jules Verne Victorian century style spaceship. Outside the many big view ports and wide widows is a brilliant blue sky with white fluffy clouds and bright morning sun. The interior is one of brass, and red velvet. leather chairs. Many levers and switches. There are white carved ivory handles for the doors, switches and fixtures.
To
detailed interior view of the control deck of a Jules Verne Victorian century style spaceship. Outside the many big view ports and wide widows is a stormy and rainy sky. The interior is one of brass, and red velvet.
Resulting in this…
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More playing with changes…
detailed interior view of the control deck of a Jules Verne Victorian century style spaceship. Outside the many big view ports and wide widows is a brilliant morning sky. The interior is one of brass, polished wood, and red velvet.
Resulting in this…
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Changing the style…
As in this image displays…
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Results in this…
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Pretty impressive, though all the details are sketchy and there really isn’t any conformity in Industrial Design…
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And…
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It can also make very beautiful, but complex and nonsensical images…
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Another alteration to the text…
Let’s try this, shall we…
detailed interior view of the control deck of a Jules Verne Victorian century style spaceship. Outside the many big view ports and wide widows is a brilliant morning sky overlooking lush green hills. The interior is one of brass, polished wood, and red velvet.
Resulting in…
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Another change…
Adding a cupola bubble.
A view from the observation cupola bubble that is part of detailed interior view of the control deck of a Jules Verne Victorian century style spaceship. Outside the many big view ports and wide widows is a brilliant morning sky overlooking lush green hills. The interior is one of brass, polished wood, and red velvet.
Resulting in…what?
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Sigh.
I think that you all can get a “feel” for how this systems works. Right?
A view from the Palaeozoic period
New attempt. Different subject area.
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Next try…
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Back to Basics…
We revisit the initial statement with an add-on, and removed the requirement of metal.
detailed interior view of the control deck of a futuristic style spaceship. the interior is clean and organized
Resulting in…
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And now let’s make yet another change…
detailed interior view of the control deck of a futuristic style spaceship. the interior is clean and organized. The walls are brushed and anodized aluminum, the controls are back-lit.
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Conclusion
I have started playing with this software and find it has potential. You are able to effortlessly create your own royalty free art to illustrate your projects instead of paying for images, or using the tired old “internet” art.
That being said, it’s a cantankerous beast. You have to run through many iterations before you can find anything usable.
In this example, I tried to obtain a spaceship interior, but none of the generated art fit my notions of what it should be. Though the art was in many cases spectacular, more practice must be mastered before it can be of any use.
I will tell the reader that I continue to play with this software and I will have further reports in the future.
...that's the thing... all this money going to the military and banking complex means eroding living standards for the same citizens..
the destruction of the fabric that holds a country together - medical system, gov't funding for any number of programs that benefit people - have to be removed so that more can be spent on the military..
oh and forget about this global economy where all boats rise.. no.. cordon it off into areas of exchange that remove all the so called bad guys...
i hope this bites the west in the ass really hard to the point more people wake up to this bullshit..
i am not counting on anyone waking up though, or if they do - probably too late...
Posted by: james | Jan 31 2023 18:24 utc | 11
Today we are going to have some irreverent fun. Lot’s of cussing, profanity, and other anti-social behaviors. We are “letting loose”.
When I was in second grade, we were living in our new home in Monroe, CT. (Which by the way, ended up turning into a multi-million dollar house, in a very exclusive neighborhood. Too bad we sold the house, for a job in Pittsburgh. But it was the 1960’s, and my dad couldn’t peer into a crystal ball for the future…)
It was Easter.
My bad brought a cute white rabbit home. And all of us kids played with it all day. And of course, it being Easter, we had tons of hard-boiled Easter eggs, and chocolate. And of course, being kids, we fed that rabbit a long stream of our chocolate.
What we did not know, being all of seven or eight years old, and what our parents did not know, is that while we (as humans) could eat chocolate, little animals such as a dogs, cats and rabbits could not.
The next day; Monday, we woke up to a dead rabbit.
And there, on Monday morning, we had a little memorial service and buried the rabbit in our back yard.
The End.
Let’s get on with today’s installment…
This Instagram Account Creates Sinister Parodies of Kid’s Cooks To Ruin Your Childhood Memories
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Thomas Columbo is the creator of Digital Meddle. He alters vintage children’s books through the use Photoshop, adding the text in order to give the stories a different meaning with a comedic effect. Something that drives his passion for this unique art form is people’s disapproving comments, although overall his work is well received.
“It is reported that [yesterday] Jens Stoltenberg said in one of his speeches that Russia must lose, must be defeated, and that the West cannot afford to let Ukraine lose, because in that case the West will lose and the whole world will lose”
MOSCOW, January 31. /TASS/. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s message on Ukraine, handed over by Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, contains only calls on Russia to “quit and stop,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told a media conference following talks with his Egyptian counterpart on Tuesday.
Mr. Minister, while answering the previous question, said that he had conveyed a certain message from Secretary of State Blinken, who was recently on a visit to Cairo. I confirm this,” Lavrov said, answering a question from TASS. “Russia is ready to listen to any serious proposal that is aimed at resolving the current situation in its comprehensive context.”
“We have had one more message Egypt’s foreign minister has handed over to us to the effect that Russia should stop, that Russia should quit, and then everything will be fine,” Lavrov went on to say, adding that at the same time “Blinken omitted something.”
“The other part of the message, showing the true interest of the United States and the West, was stated by NATO Secretary General Mr. [Jens] Stoltenberg, when he was in the Republic of Korea yesterday,” Lavrov noted. “He said in one of his speeches that Russia must lose, must be defeated, and that the West cannot afford to let Ukraine lose, because in that case, he argued, the West will lose and the whole world will lose.” Stoltenberg, as Lavrov pointed out, “took the liberty of speaking not only on behalf of the North Atlantic Alliance, but also on behalf of all other countries of the world.”[.] (emphasis added)
Certainly, that message will not move 1 millimeter for talks.
3 Strikes: the West cheated at Minsk. Theft of RF’s foreign reserves. “Terror attack” on NordStream 1, 2 and last week very publicly bragged about the dastardly act.
Wake up. It will take decades to restore Confidence, Trust, Credibility.
Russia will soldier on (pun intended) until ALL its goals for de-militarizing and de-NATOfying to its 1993 borders are achieved.
Posted by: Likklemore | Jan 31 2023 18:39 utc | 19
Common School Blueberry Muffins
IMG 7463 682×1024 1
Ingredients
1/4 cup granulated sugar
2 cups all-purpose flour
2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup blueberries
1 egg, beaten
1 cup milk
1/4 cup melted butter
Instructions
Heat oven to 400 degrees F. Grease tins.
Sift together dry ingredients; add blueberries to flour mixture and stir gently.
Mix egg, milk and butter together. Add to flour mixture; mix only enough to moisten flour. Do not beat. Fill tins 3/4 full.
Bake for 25 minutes.
Size Matters – On A U.S. Ground Intervention In Ukraine
A European financial research company has sent me one of their quarterly research letters. It is a ‘contrarian review of political and military ramifications’ of the war in Ukraine. It analyzes ‘winners and losers’ of the war.
It is contrarian only in the sense that it counters the false views of ‘western’ mainstream media with reality. The losers of the war are all on the ‘western’ side with the only two winners being the owners of the U.S. defense industry and Russia.
I was sent the courtesy copy because, as the company writes, the discussions at Moon of Alabama were “immensely helpful” in forming their view.
Note to the authors: You are welcome.
I will not quote from the paper as it seems to be a somewhat confidential business product. But I will steal two graphics from it that will help to understand the size of the war in Ukraine and how it will NOT end.
There have been theories that Poland or some U.S. led coalition force would intervene with their troops on the ground in Ukraine to ‘kick the Russians out’.
The two graphics though dispel any hope for such an operation.
The following is an operational map of Desert Storm. The U.S. led operation in spring 1991 to kick Iraq out of Kuwait.
iukr1
biggerIt took the U.S. some nine month to assemble a forces of some 700,000 U.S. and 250,000 allied troops with all their equipment. Iraq had an estimated 650,000 troops in the theater. The U.S. first created total air superiority by destroying Iraq’s fighter aircraft and air defense forces. With that done it took only 100 hours of ground operation to destroy a third of the Iraqi forces. The rest of the Iraqi army retreated under fire towards Baghdad.
There are some 550,000 Russian troops in and around Ukraine. A hypothetical operation to ‘kick Russia out’ would thereby have about the same size as Desert Storm. But the geographic dimensions differ drastically.
The following is an operational map of Desert Storm from above overlaid in scale on the map of Ukraine.
iukr2
biggerThe map was turned to the left by 90 degree. North is to the left, east at the top and Crimea in the south to the right.
Russia occupies some 87,000 square kilometer of Ukraine. The Desert Storm theater around Kuwait was five times smaller.
A hypothetical U.S. coalition of the size of Desert Storm could probably cross the Dnieper and cut of Crimea. But it could do little more than that. The Donetz and Luhansk oblasts and Crimea itself would still be in Russian hands.
But there are many reasons why no such operation will ever be planned and executed.
The U.S. no longer has a force of the size it committed to Desert Storm. Nor do its allies.
The U.S. was able to create air superiority in Iraq because it could fly from nearby Saudi airfields and from aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf. Air superiority in eastern Ukraine could only be achieved with the destruction of long range air-defenses within Russia. The next safe air fields the U.S. could use are in Poland and Romania. No U.S. aircraft carrier will dare to enter the Black Sea. U.S. fighter planes to not have the necessary reach for combat missions in eastern Ukraine.
The Ukrainian rail system is by now a mess. It is incapable of moving a large force from the west into east Ukraine.
Any attempt to move a large force through Ukraine would be subject to deep battle interdiction by Russian and Belorussian forces.
Iraqi equipment was badly maintained and Iraqi forces were barely trained. Russia has a well trained high tech army.
I could go on but you can certainly see the point.
No U.S. ground troops will move into Ukraine. It is ludicrous to think otherwise.
Posted by b on January 30, 2023 at 16:23 UTC | Permalink
Humorous Illustrations Blending Sarcastic Nature and Adopted Cat’s Attitude
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The Internet has been abuzz in recent years with the phenomenon of cats taking over, and now we have one more artist to add to their ranks. @st.aftercigs, an Instagram account with 190K+ followers, gives a whole new dimension to cat appreciation with their bold, humorous artworks inspired by the artist’s own adopted cat.
The artist behind the account expresses the stark contrast between cats’ sassiness, and their ability to be inspirational muses. By blending the artist’s own sarcastic nature with their cat’s grumpy cattitude, a unique and lively art style has been born. The artworks are a great reminder of the many nuanced personalities our cats possess and the joy they can bring to our lives.
st.aftercigs 326340476 704182134774296 3636887320990145096 n
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About the USA
The US only engages in direct conflict against a far weaker opponent.
It’s preferred method of controlling other states is to work in the shadows – propaganda and psy ops to turn people against their government, support of extremist factions, manipulation of elections, color revolutions, and sanctions.
All underhanded and sneaky.
The neocons were sure their toolkit would work in Ukraine.
The US government is committed to this as long as it doesn’t have to confront Russia directly.
The US public is committed to this as long as it doesn’t come down to thousands of boys coming back in body bags.
Otherwise it’s one big reality show to entertain.
There are descriptors to be used for people who act like the US acts, none of them complimentary.
World War 3 is proceeding. NATO and the United States are “throwing everything, including the kitchen sink at Russia”. At this point in time, details are trivial. Russia will eventually win, and the United States will sulk, but then “pivot to China”.
China is ready for this. And if they are not, then they deserve what will be coming.
Preventative efforts to minimize the “bads” from being big, to something more manageable are in process. But I have no “crystal ball” and cannot predict the future.
I, like you all, tire of war talk, covid talk and all the rest.
We all should be exhausted of this nonsense. But the evil son-of-bitches won’t stop. They are functionally evil.
Here, let’s take a light view of human relationships today. I’m throwing this post in the art section.
The Married Kama Sutra: The World’s Least Humorous Erotic Sex Manual
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For centuries, lovers have found inspiration and advice in the ancient text of the Kama Sutra. Now, Simon Rich – ‘one of the funniest writers in America’ (The Daily Beast) – and Farley Katz have unearthed a valuable new document – a guide to the positions most common after marriage.
From ‘the interrupted congress’ to ‘the beaching of the whales,’ here are the poses, positions, and games married lovers play to keep the spark alive – and the dishwasher properly loaded. Complete with four-color, full-page illustrations in the style of the original Kama Sutra, but with modern, domestic accoutrements: dirty diapers, TV remotes, and wine glasses aplenty.
Things can go really bad, or a managed up-swing that changes the Geo-political situation forever.
I’m looking at an “event” of some sort towards the tail end of this 2023.
Meanwhile, everyone, please continue with your campaigns and living your own lives. Eat WELL.
Please do not get too CAUGHT UP in the “news”, it’s all fake.
And enjoy life a little bit more.
Surprise! Corruption Is Behind Recent Southwest Mass Cancellations
The American way! Don’t you know!
Chicken Lazone
“This recipe comes from the restaurant “Brennan’s” located in New Orleans. No one has to know how simple and quick it is. I posted this recipe exactly as it was in the book, however, if you like a little “heat” please feel free to add some cayenne pepper to taste.”
In large saute pan melt half of the butter and cook chicken over medium heat for about 7 to 8 minutes, turning once.
Pour the cream into the skillet and lower the heat.
Simmer for several minutes, stirring until the sauce thickens then add the remaining butter.
When butter is melted place chicken breasts on four plates and top with the sauce.
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A Beverly Hillbilly’s Christmas at Hooterville
Its so nice to see these shows again. Loved watching them week to week when I was little. These shows made you forget everything and laugh at anything.
He DOESN’T want you to know this about Hunter Biden laptop story and Ukraine
If you think the laptop is bad, consider how much COORDINATION went into silencing it to ensure a certain candidate got positioned where he is.. It is no simple task to organize a 100% media blackout. Along with inter-agency buffer operations. Whatever entity needed this candidate in, went to extreme lengths, and it sure don’t seem to be because they had America’s “best interests” at heart.
“Suburbia”: The Melancholic and Mythological Artworks by Carlos Barahona Possollo
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Degree in Painting, final mark of 18/20, from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Lisbon University. In 1995 Carlos Barahona Possollo accepted an invitation to teach at the Faculty. He had read Architecture at the Technical University of Lisbon from 1986 to 1989.
He was officially commissioned to paint the Portrait of the Portuguese president Cavaco Silva, shown at the Presidents’ Gallery permanent collection in the Museum of the Presidency of the Republic, since 2016. Since 1995 he has been co-operating with the Portuguese Mail in the production of originals for the printing of stamps, notably their commemorative series of the 500th anniversary of Vasco da Gama’s arrival in India (1996-98), and also with the Portuguese edition of the National Geographic Magazine (first nine issues).
His works can be found in private collections in Portugal, Spain, France, Switzerland, Italy – most notably, of many in this country, in that of Prince Jonathan Doria- Pamphilj – The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, U S A and Argentina. Also, in public collections such as the Vatican (IOR), The White House, the Bank of Portugal, the Portuguese Museum of Communications, The Setubal Museum, and the Union of Portuguese Speaking Capital Cities.
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Christmas With The Addams Family | Full Episode S02E15
Did you notice when the kids realized they had way too many presents, the first thing they thought was to donate them? They really are raising them right.
https://youtu.be/U19Bizv-LQQ
Making the stinkiest chemical known to man
I love this series of a slightly anosmic chemist’s perilous quest to find a smell that moves him.
This is just GREAT!
Artist Challenges Herself To A 100-Day Cat Meme Drawing Challenge
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Emily Paquin, aka Catwheezie, is an animation student who challenged herself to draw a cat meme every day for 100 days back on the 13th of June. She is currently on day 75 and it looks like she’s determined to reach that 100!
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Emily said that cats were actually the first thing that she ever learned to draw. She says that she always loved funny cat pictures and used to print out similar ones and glue them on her school notebooks.
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As for the current 100-day challenge, the artist says that she finds most of the cats for her drawings on Instagram, and says that each one of the drawings takes her 2 to 3 hours to finish. “Usually, I work on several of them at a time so I can make sure I’ll have a new cat to post everyday,” says Emily. “A lot of planning goes into this project.”
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Former President of France Admits: Minsk Agreements Were to DECEIVE Russia; Allow Ukraine to build for war
In an interview with the “Kyiv Independent” newspaper, former President of France, Francois Hollande, claimed that the Minsk agreements had brought Russia to diplomatic territory, leaving Kiev’s army time to strengthen. An admission contradicting the peaceful declarations of the time.
While Vladimir Putin was advancing in the Donbass using the pro-Russian separatists ( … ) “we led him to accept the Normandy format and to come to Minsk for the negotiations.” said Hollande.
The former French president aligned himself with Angela Merkel who, December 7 in an interview at “Die Zeit,” claimed that the Minsk agreements had been “an attempt to give Ukraine time” to strengthen militarily for a future confrontation with Moscow.
Officially, these agreements, signed on September 5, 2014 were concluded with the stated objective of restoring peace between Kiev and the Donbass Republics. That conflict left nearly 15,000 ( civilians and soldiers ) dead between 2014 and 2022.
To the question of whether the Minsk negotiations were intended to delay Russian progress in Ukraine, François Hollande replied in the affirmative: « “Yes, Angela Merkel is right on this point. The Minsk agreements stopped the Russian offensive for a time. What was important was how the West would use this respite to prevent any subsequent Russian attempt.”
Holland claims to have enabled the strengthening of the Ukrainian army, a respite that the West and Kiev seem to have taken advantage of: “Since 2014, Ukraine has strengthened its military capabilities. Indeed, the Ukrainian army is completely different from that of 2014. She is better trained and better equipped. It is the merit of the Minsk agreements to have given the Ukrainian army this opportunity” he said.
According to him, the latter also prevented the area controlled by the separatists from expanding. In winter 2015, they were at the gates of Marioupol and had just won two decisive battles, taking over Donetsk airport and the city of Debaltsevo.
Regretting divisions within the EU and German ambiguity, refusing to question the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, François Hollande reports today that he was in favor of maximum sanctions, recalling that he himself had canceled the sale of Mistral ships to Russia in 2014.
In 2022, trust between Moscow and the West disappeared. Strangely, François Hollande, who believes that a lasting solution is necessary for peace in Ukraine, completes his remarks by affirming that “the Minsk agreements can be resuscitated to establish a legal framework already accepted by all the parties.”
Angela Merkel’s confession, however, already provoked a strong reaction from Russian President Vladimir Putin on December 9. Putin said “Trust is almost nonexistent, but after such statements, a question of trust arises: how to negotiate, on what, and if it is possible to negotiate with someone, what are the guarantees?” Putin went on to say “I still hoped that the other stakeholders in this process were sincere with us. It turns out that they also cheated on us. It was only a question of strengthening Ukraine with weapons, by preparing it for hostilities” he added.
Vladimir Putin then estimated that in view of these new facts, Moscow should have, perhaps, had to launch its military operation in Ukraine earlier, stressing that Russia, for its part, hoped to be able to resolve the conflict in the Donbass through the Minsk Agreements.
Hal Turner Analysis and Editorial Opinion
So there you have it: Both Angela Merkel of Germany, and Francois Hollande of France, personally KNEW they were attending the Minsk Negotiations as a ruse, as a deception, for the express purpose of buying time for Ukraine to prepare for . . . . WAR . . . with Russia. The very war which is taking place right now.
Back in February of 2022, when Russia finally sent its troops into Ukraine, both France and Germany, along with the United States, feigned horror that Russia was engaging in battle, when all along, that was the precise goal of Germany, France, and without doubt, the United States and the rest of NATO. Their “shock” at Russia using its military, was phony. They not only knew Russia was going to act militarily, it was THEY who set the entire stage for it!
In my opinion, this was a criminal conspiracy to facilitate war.
Some may argue that both Merkel and Hollande enjoy Sovereign Immunity. They do not. Fraud vitiates everything, and both Merkel and Hollande perpetrated premeditated and willful fraud upon the peoples of Europe, Russia, and America, as the very crux of their meetings in Minsk, Belarus back in 2014.
The fraud perpetrated by Merkel and Hollande has cost the people of the United States, tens-of-billions of dollars in war support for Ukraine, cost Ukraine hundreds of thousands of dead soldiers, cost Russia tens-of-thousands of dead soldiers and countless billions in war costs. The consumers in both Europe and America have had to pay Billions more in increased costs for natural gas, oil, gasoline, and diesel fuel as a result of the Sanctions imposed, over a war, they planned to start!
I want Merkel and Hollande criminally prosecuted at the world court, for Fraud and criminal conspiracy to facilitate war. And if such a prosecution takes place, it will be interesting to find out what role then-U.S.-President Barack Obama played in this fraud. It seems to me that neither France nor Germany would have engaged in such acts without the express approval of the United States.
Merkel, Hollande, and likely Barack Obama, belong in prison for the rest of their lives because the war they deliberately facilitated has killed hundreds of thousands of people, whom they used as pawns for their “sport of kings” — war.
Putin, Xi year end summit. China, Russia De facto alliance
Very happy to learn more of Russian/Chinese alliance to combat the insane neo-cons in the US! The whole world rejoices also. Thank you both and happy New Years as 2022 comes to an end!
This is an important video.
Stolen Elections Have Consequences: Stocks Suffer Worst Year Since 2008
Stocks slipped on Friday to end a brutal 2022 with a whimper, as Wall Street wrapped up its worst year since 2008 on a sour note.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average slid 73.55 points, or 0.22%, to close at 33,147.25. The S&P 500 shed 0.25% to end at 3,839.50. The Nasdaq Composite ticked down 0.11% to 10,466.88.
Friday marked the final day of trading in what has been a painful year for stocks. All three of the major averages suffered their worst year since 2008 and snapped a three-year win streak. The Dow fared the best of the indexes in 2022, down about 8.8%. The S&P 500 sank 19.4%, and is more than 20% below its record high, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq tumbled 33.1%.
Sticky inflation and aggressive rate hikes from the Federal Reserve battered growth and technology stocks and weighed on investor sentiment throughout the year. Geopolitical concerns and volatile economic data also kept markets on edge.
“We’ve had everything from Covid problems in China to the invasion of Ukraine. They’ve all been very serious. But for investors, it is what the Fed is doing,” said Art Cashin, director of floor operations for UBS, on CNBC’s “The Exchange.”
As the calendar turns to a new year, some investors think the pain is far from over. They expect the bear market to persist until a recession hits or the Fed pivots. Some also project stocks will hit new lows before rebounding in the second half of 2023.
Lemon Chicken Milanese
“This dish makes a quick, filling meal. Great served with rice or pasta. Enjoy!”
Season chicken with salt and pepper and set aside. Combine breadcrumbs, parmesan cheese, parsley, and salt and pepper to taste.
Pour flour onto a plate and set aside. Do the same with eggs and then with breadcrumb mixture.
Dredge chicken in flour and tap away excess. Dip chicken into egg. Cover chicken with breadcrumbs and press them inches.
Heat oil in frying pan. Fry chicken on the first side for about 2 minutes, flip and fry for another 2 minutes. Repeat until chicken is browned and cooked through. If you’ve pounded the chicken thin enough, cooking time is greatly reduced.
Once chicken is cooked, place on a paper towel-lined plate in order to absorb excess oil.
Serve with a squeeze of lemon and additional lemon wedges.
I Went Back To California. My Home Town Looks Like A War Zone.
A MUST watch!
For those of you not in California, it is 100 times worse than what you are being told. Homelessness is literally INSANE here. Drug problems are WAY out of control.
Rage is an emotion, and as such it can be useful or dangerous. It’s up to us to figure out how to use it adequately. Many people would use other techniques to funnel their rage so that it wasn’t destructive.
Some would run, lift weights, or apply themselves in sports.
Others would internalize it, drink, brawl, or jut be an asshole.
Still others funnel that rage into music.
Those of us who are from the United States, or from the Domain, or have survived a broken marriage, a bad boss, or a corrupt government have all experienced real cold rage. I know I have. And I do my best to control it, least my “incredible hulk” comes out.
This post is going to be a tad different.
And it isn’t for everyone. What this post contains is some pretty harsh rock-n-roll music that has often served me (personally) in releasing and dealing with rage.
As such, it’s a bid dangerous and a tad toxic if you are not ready for it.
If you are not ready, then just skip this article and wait for a calmer and gentler post tomorrow. But if you are ready, or willing, or adventuresome, then have some fun…
BUT DON’T SAY I DIDN’T WARN YOU
Here we go…
Austin Meade – Happier Alone
A Day To Remember: Miracle [OFFICIAL VIDEO]
Zero 9:36 – Adrenaline (Official Video)
Bring Me The Horizon feat. BABYMETAL – Kingslayer
Wolfgang Van Halen – Mammoth WVH: Distance (Official Music Video)
Seether – Bruised And Bloodied (Official Music Video)
AC/DC – Shot In The Dark (Official Video)
Beartooth – Below / Devastation (Live at St. Augustine Amphitheater)
AC/DC – Realize (Official Video)
Papa Roach – The Ending (Remastered)
Greta Van Fleet Candlelight Sessions – Broken Bells (Live)
Greta Van Fleet – Heat Above (Live)
Five Finger Death Punch – Living The Dream (Official Music Video)
Daughtry – Heavy Is The Crown (Official Music Video)
Pop Evil – Breathe Again (Official Music Video)
I Prevail – Every Time You Leave (Official Music Video) ft. Delaney Jane
Rise Against – Nowhere Generation
Architects – “Animals”
The Pretty Reckless – And So It Went (Official Music Video)
The HU – Wolf Totem feat. Jacoby Shaddix of Papa Roach (Official Music Video)
Bring Me The Horizon – Teardrops (Official Video)
Papa Roach x Jeris Johnson – Last Resort Reloaded (Official Music Video)
Chevelle – Self destructor (Official Music Video)
Five Finger Death Punch – A Little Bit Off (Official Music Video)
Here’s a nice art interlude. Please enjoy this post.
I know that there are some people in the MM audience who can ABSOLUTELY relate to these comix. I hope that it resonates with you all. Please enjoy this nice little interlude.
31-year-old Lainey Molnar is on a mission to empower women, and she’s using her creative expression to do so. Molnar creates honest comics that cut through all of the filters and focus on women’s role in society and the way it perceives them.
“I believe that the pressure on women comes from both inside our own community and outside, be it family, media, or men,” the artist told Bored Panda. “It is incredibly hard to navigate all of their expectations and reach the milestones society has set out for us, like maintaining the perfect size and shape, being maternal but also ambitious, strong but also sensitive, staying youthful and fresh while gracefully accepting the aging process, looking ideal but not overdoing plastic surgery. I could go on and on and on, and we are all so tired of this.”
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You could say the series was a long time in the making. Molnar, who is from Hungary and works as a digital business strategist, deals with content creators and women-owned businesses to align their goals with their social media, facilitating growth. “I started my career as my country’s first personal blogger and ran my blog and the fashion store attached to it for almost 8 years, wrote a guidebook for powerful women, and I also wrote for women’s magazines.”
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Drawing and art in general has been Molnar’s hobby for over two decades now. “After my blogging days, I stepped away from the limelight because of the habitual online harassment I received, so when [the place I live in] went into lockdown [due to the pandemic] earlier this year, I decided to create a comic-style avatar for myself and started posting drawings about her to process what I’m going through (or all of us go through) as a woman under the pressure of society and just simply… life.”
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I hope that you enjoyed this little treat of art, commentary and fun. Have a great day! And remember… I believe in you!
Do you want more?
I have more articles like this one in my Art Index here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Called my family member in Germany to ask him WTF is going on. How can they let the pipeline be blown up?
He responded something crazy. Said these Germans are sooo scared of being out of gas is pathetic. Also said the German governmeny is full of pro Russian infiltrators.
I was shocked. My own blood is completely and utterly brainwashed. Hes not German btw. An immigrant.
I responded by saying the pipeline was most likely blown by anti Russians. He changed the subject.
Crazy shit going on in the West.
Posted by: Comandante | Sep 29 2022 18:48 utc | 9
Covert intelligence is suggestive of the United States loading tactical nuclear warheads for shipment to Ukraine in and among conventional warheads and weapons systems.
This would be for covert false flag operations; as the United States military normal for starting full-scale war operations. It would not be for reactionary measures. This is in line with the neocon war philosophy and the current leadership of the United States whoever it is.
The scenario planned, would be …
Detonate a tactical (small scale nuclear bomb on a “minor” target.
Blame Russia
Respond with a NATO tactical nuclear weapon barrage.
Of course, that would trigger the Russian “Dead hand” system which would be the wholesale obliteration of Europe and the United States.
My personal opinion is that [1] all this is just rhetorical cover and disinfo.
[2] The United States “leadership” does not believe that the Dead hand system exists, or that it will not make a difference. That Russia is like the United States, employing rhetoric instead of stating things clearly.
I believe that [3] NATO bases already have nuclear systems and missiles in place, and the United States [4] has a very detailed plan to use them to destroy Russia.
Further [5], Russia is aware of this.
But, it is my belief that if Russia was aware of this, that [6] Russia would unleash HELL before America gets the opportunity to set up a false flag, I would think. But, what do I know? The USA did blow up the pipeline and did do the unthinkable.
Stay tuned for the end of the world. Well, at least the end of the United States.
URIAH HEEP JULY MORNING 1972
I hope that htere is just ONE person in the MM audience that appreciates this tune…
Ancient Elites in Western Britain Enjoyed High-Island Living
Archaeologists in the UK have shown how ancient elite families retained their command over communities in the medieval world of Britain’s crannogs. They controlled the communities they ruled from offshore homes located on enhanced islands in lakes and estuaries.
While the elites of Ancient Egypt let their hair down in vast stone palaces, and as the ruling classes of South America hosted parties in temple-pyramids, ancient landlords in western Britain commanded their power over communities from the safety of artificial luxury islands.
Crannogs: From Iron Age Houses to Medieval Control Centers
In prehistoric Scotland, Wales, and Ireland “ crannogs” were generally wooden circular structures built on islands in lakes and in river estuaries. While the vast majority of ancient populations lived in mud and wattle huts on the surrounding shores and fields, societal elites enjoyed the relative safety of their “gated” crannogs.
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Just one of countless Iron Age crannogs that once dotted the Scottish Highlands (this one is a faithful reconstruction), which have now been proven to have developed into elite party palaces in the medieval period. ( DMac / Adobe Stock)
However, understanding day to day life at crannogs has always been something of a mystery to archaeologists, for until the age of underwater archaeology little material was available to study. But now, a new study has determined that elite families “displayed their power and wealth through elaborate parties in crannogs.”
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Figure 1 from the Antiquity study: a) Map of crannogs recorded in the dataset; b) age distribution for Scottish and Irish crannog radiocarbon dates using median ages; c) generalized stratigraphic model of a lake crannog and associated sediment inputs. ( Antiquity Publications Ltd )
Crannogs: Ancient Structures Recently Revised, Twice!
But this all changed after the publication of an earlier 2019 paper in the journal Antiquity (entitled: Neolithic crannogs: rethinking settlement, monumentality and deposition in the Outer Hebrides and beyond ) that demonstrated “at least some of Scotland’s nearly 600 crannogs are much, much older.” In fact, this would make them nearly three thousand years older, putting them firmly in the Neolithic era, as early as 2500 BC.
Now, Professor Antony Brown of UiT Arctic University of Norway, lead author of a new study published in the journal Antiquity, says that between 4,000 BC and the 16th century AD, “hundreds of crannogs were created in Scotland, Wales and Ireland.”
Further illustrating how central the crannog was to ancient communities in Britain, the 1998 book “ The Archaeology of Lake Settlement in Ireland ” informs that there are an estimated “1,200 crannogs in Ireland” alone.
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Lough Na Cranagh. Prehistoric crannog, a defensive man-made island, in Lough of the Crannog on top of sea cliffs of Fair Head. Ballycastle, N. Ireland. ( David Matthew Lyons / Adobe Stock)
Crannogs Were Also For Parties, Trade, and Communications
Professor Brown said ancient builders first selected shallow reefs in lake beds and on the sides of river estuaries. Then they built up these islands with “stone, timber and peat – to a diameter of nearly 30 meters (100 feet),” said the researchers.
The new study explains that such wetland sites are “much more difficult to study than those on land,” however, the team of archaeologists explored three submerged crannogs gathering organic samples for their analysis.
Dr. Brown told LiveScience that lakes are still and shallow around crannogs and that archaeological materials “never wash away.” Sediment DNA samples (sedaDNA) were taken from a crannog in Scotland that was occupied between 500 BC to 10 AD and from two sites in Ireland dated to between 650 to 1300 AD.
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A generalized model of a typical crannog and how it is effected by erosion. The small right side figures are too scientific for this article. ( Antiquity Publications Ltd )
The SedaDNA analysis revealed that people in ancient Scotland, Wales and Ireland were cultivating cereal plants on crannog islands. Furthermore, the team of researchers think traces of bracken ferns ( Pteridium) were brought to the island to fill bedding and for use in the construction of roofs. And common to all three sites was “a lot of DNA evidence suggesting “feasting, partying, trade and communication.”
Evidence of cows, sheep, pigs and goats kept on these ‘island palace’ sites and their slaughter for feasting and ceremonies was identified at all three crannog sites.
Dr. Brown and his team of scientists interpreted this new data against previous studies into samples of pollen and animal bones gathered at other crannogs. Based on these foodstuffs it was concluded that, while crannogs functioned as farmsteads during the Iron Age, they evolved into “elite gathering places” in the medieval period.
Cobb Salad
The classic cobb salad includes chicken, bacon, egg, tomato, avocado and blue cheese tossed with a tangy lemon vinaigrette. Whether you are looking for a way to use up leftover chicken or just want to avoid turning on the stove, this salad is sure to satisfy!
For the good of humanity, this has got to stop. The United States and Russia both keep raising the stakes, and if we keep repeating this cycle it will end with a nuclear war that could ultimately result in billions of deaths. Unfortunately, leaders on both sides do not seem interested in peace at this point. The votes that Russia just conducted in four disputed territories were inevitably going to raise tensions even higher. Of course the western powers have been greatly escalating matters themselves. Over the past couple of months, NATO has gotten far more deeply involved in the conflict in Ukraine, and now the war is starting to spread beyond Ukrainian borders.
Everyone agrees that the damage caused to the Nord Stream pipeline system was an act of sabotage. As I discussed yesterday, an explosion that registered 1.9 on the Richter scale was followed by a second explosion that registered 2.3 on the Richter scale. These explosions were absolutely huge, and that suggests that this was a military operation.
Many in the western world are blaming Russia for the sabotage, but why would they blow up pipelines that they spent so much time and energy constructing and that have enabled them to make giant mountains of money selling natural gas to Europe?
The Russians have already been punishing the Europeans by restricting the flow of gas through those pipelines. There was certainly no need to blow them up.
If it is ultimately proven that the Russians did this, it would be one of the stupidest geopolitical moves that I have ever seen.
Of course there is someone else that could have done it.
The United States will never recognize Ukrainian territory as anything other than part of Ukraine. Russia’s referenda are a sham – a false pretext to try to annex parts of Ukraine by force in flagrant violation of international law, including the United Nations Charter. We will work with our allies and partners to impose additional swift and severe economic costs on Russia. The United States stands with our partners around the world – and with every nation that respects the core tenets of the UN charter – in rejecting whatever fabricated outcomes Russia will announce. We will continue to support the Ukrainian people and provide them with security assistance to help them defend themselves as they courageously resist Russia’s invasion.
So Joe Biden promised to impose “swift and severe economic costs on Russia” on Friday, and then on Monday both Nord Stream pipelines were blown up.
Pres. Biden: “If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.”Reporter: “But how will you do that, exactly, since…the project is in Germany’s control?”Biden: “I promise you, we will be able to do that.”
Biden had obviously been discussing this option with his advisers, and one of those advisers named Victoria Nuland also made a similar threat prior to the outbreak of the Ukrainian conflict…
“If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.”
Some enterprising reporter needs to ask the Biden administration if they were responsible for the sabotage.
Of course they will probably deny it even if they ordered the attack.
But it is interesting to note that the Kearsarge Amphibious Ready Group entered the Baltic Sea in early September…
The Kearsarge Amphibious Ready Group (ARG) with the embarked 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) concluded two successful training events with the Swedish Armed Forces and Standing NATO Maritime Group (SNMG) 1 while operating in the Baltic Sea, Sept. 4, 2022.
Unfortunately, the Kearsarge Amphibious Ready Group didn’t leave the Baltic Sea area right away.
In fact, it is being reported that this task force didn’t actually leave the Baltic Sea until a few days ago…
The Kearsarge Amphibious Ready Group (ARG) and the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) have departed the Baltic Sea and are in the English Channel. The ARG includes USS Kearsarge (LHD-3), USS Arlington (LPD-24) and USS Gunston Hall (LSD-44). Kearsarge and Gunston Hall completed port calls in Gdynia and Gdansk, respectively, last week.
This would have given them plenty of time to plant explosives on the Nord Stream pipeline system if they were inclined to do so.
In addition, we have learned that the U.S. Navy was testing “the latest advancements in unmanned underwater vehicle mine hunting technology” in the Baltic Sea during the month of June…
A significant focus of BALTOPS every year is the demonstration of NATO mine hunting capabilities, and this year the U.S. Navy continues to use the exercise as an opportunity to test emerging technology, U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa Public Affairs said June 14.In support of BALTOPS, U.S. Navy 6th Fleet partnered with U.S. Navy research and warfare centers to bring the latest advancements in unmanned underwater vehicle mine hunting technology to the Baltic Sea to demonstrate the vehicle’s effectiveness in operational scenarios.Experimentation was conducted off the coast of Bornholm, Denmark, with participants from Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific, Naval Undersea Warfare Center Newport, and Mine Warfare Readiness and Effectiveness Measuring all under the direction of U.S. 6th Fleet Task Force 68.
Our Navy seems to have spent a lot of time in the Baltic Sea lately, eh?
“Russia has requested an urgent meeting of the UN Security Council in connection with sabotage against two lines of the Nord Stream. We expect it to be held tomorrow,” Dmitry Polyanskiy, one of Russia’s top representatives at the U.N., wrote on his Telegram channel, according to a translation.Shortly after issuing the statement early Wednesday, the French delegation to the U.N. confirmed to him that a meeting would indeed take place on Friday – a tacit acknowledgement of the panic that the explosions and subsequent leaks have caused.
It will be very interesting to see what transpires at that meeting.
Let us hope that the truth about all of this eventually comes out.
But even more, let us hope that cooler heads start to prevail and that leaders on both sides start to push for peace.
Because if both sides continue to hammer one another, at some point someone is going to cross a line that can never be uncrossed.
Nuclear war is a fate that is too horrible for words, but with each passing day our leaders are dragging us ever closer to such a conflict.
The Islands
Meanwhile in the Pacific the Biden administration, late to the party, is trying to force multiple Pacific islands into a joint declaration that somehow 'fights climate change' by increasing US coast guard patrols in the area. The Pacific leaders, who don't like to be rushed into anything, feel pressured and the US is pointing the finger at the Solomon Islands (Guadalcanal) for being too close to China and obstructing the proposal. The MSM reportage on the subject omits to mention that the US has been funding insurrection in the Solomons for years.
Posted by: Raumati | Sep 28 2022 22:53 utc | 31
Around 1400 Chinese scientists left America in 2021 in fear of looming return of McCarthyism and hostile anti-China environment. Is this very good news to the Chinese government?
Let me tell you about a man I deeply admire. I wish I’d had the chance to sit down and listen to him talk before he passed away—though I wouldn’t have been worthy to have met him.
His name was Qian Xuesen. He was born the same year as the Chinese Revolution was born; in 1911. His father established China’s national education system.
Qian was brilliant. Gifted from a young age he eventually went to MIT and CalTech in the US. He was well respected in the beginning. He was part of the very first research into rocket propulsion. He and a group of friends were part of a group on campus nicknamed “The Suicide Squad,” as they dared the very extreme with chemical compounds and rockets—they all lived to tell about it but they were risk takers for sure.
They earned the attention and funding of the US Military to set up a Jet Propulsion Lab. Qian had some of the highest security clearance and was part of the US Science Advisory Board.
By the end of the war he was one of the world’s foremost experts on jet propulsion—BBC
Then Chairman Mao rose to power back in China. Overnight it seemed, Qian became an object of suspicion. MaCarthyism was sweeping the United States and men like Qian were paying the cost. A cost they did not owe.
Meanwhile, a new director at the JPL came to believe there was a spy ring at the lab, and shared his suspicions about some members of staff with the FBI. “I note that they are all either Chinese or Jewish,” says Fraser Macdonald. The Cold War was under way, and the anti-communist witch-hunts of the McCarthy era were just around the corner. It was in this atmosphere that the FBI accused Qian, Frank Malina and others of being communists, and a threat to national security.—BBC
Qian had always been loyal to the US up to that point. For goodness sake, his wife was from an aristocratic family in the Republic of China.
His wife was the aristocratic daughter of a Nationalist leader, and until Qian’s fall from grace he’d been living happily in America – he’d even taken the first steps towards applying for citizenship.—BBC
No evidence ever came to light to suggest that Qian was anything more than a gifted man excited about his research.
Zuoyue Wang, professor of history at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, says there is no evidence that Qian ever spied for China or was an intelligence agent when he was in the US.—BBC
Did that matter to the US government or the FBI? Absolutely not. Who cares if they couldn’t prove it. He was Chinese so that must’ve made him the enemy, right? Sound familiar?
He was, however, stripped of his security clearance and put under house arrest. Caltech colleagues, including Theodore von Karman, wrote to the government pleading Qian’s innocence, but in vain.—BBC
This is one of those moments in US history that make me embarrassed and ashamed of who we have been. Which might not be so bad if we’d learned from it. But oh no, we are still doing the same racist, hateful things. Still we treat our Chinese scientists and researchers with suspicion and mistrust. They just want to do what they love.
Qian was finally shipped out of the US with his wife and children on a boat bound for China. He felt betrayed and bitter at such an unfair resolution to his career in the US.
“He was one of the most prominent scientists in America. He had contributed so much and could have contributed much more. So it’s not just humiliation but also a sense of betrayal,” says the journalist and writer, Tianyu Fang.
And who could blame him? Qian was the victim of frenzied fear of Communism as well as racism. He was a brilliant man who set the future of space travel in motion and this was the thanks he received!
Little did the US know and realize that they’d made one of the worst geopolitical blunders of that century. Qian was so hurt that upon his return to China he gladly joined the Communist Party and he threw his ferver and intellect into building China’s space and nuclear program.
When he had arrived in China there was little understanding of rocket science, but 15 years later he oversaw the launch of the first Chinese satellite into space. Over the decades, he trained a new generation of scientists, and his work laid the foundations for China’s Lunar Exploration Program.Ironically, the missile programme that Qian helped develop in China resulted in weapons which were then fired back on America. Qian’s silkworm missiles were fired at Americans in the 1991 Gulf War, Fraser Macdonald says, and in 2016 against the USS Mason by Huti rebels in Yemen. “So there’s this odd circularity. The US expelled this expertise, and it has come back to bite them.”
Can’t you just hear the collective screaming of the US military officials with each new accomplishment of Qian, resulting in accomplishments for China?
It was said about his expulsion from the US:
A former US Secretary of the Navy, Dan Kimball – later head of the rocket propulsion company, Aerojet – once said it was “the stupidest thing this country ever did”.
Qian was a distinguished scientist and a good man. He died a hero in the People’s Republic of China, but he could’ve died a hero in the US had he been treated with the respect he deserved.
I’m watching history repeat itself. The US will experience brain drain and China will gain from it—as they should. If the US can’t make them feel safe to practice research then they should be free to pursue it in a country that will recognize the talent and intelligence they bring to the table. The arrogance of the US may not readily be seen but in twenty to thirty years when China grows more powerful because of the contributions of these scientists and researchers, we’ll see once again how wrong we’ve been.
No, Russia Didn’t Blow Up Their Own Pipeline
Have you ever witnessed a judge go completely ballistic and “lose it” in court?
I was a juror on a murder trial. An older, disabled gentleman, Bill, was charged with murdering a 20-year-old male, Derrick, twice his size and 1/3 his age.
It was in Baltimore. Bill was a quiet tiny gentleman. He was disabled from a bus accident that left him with a small settlement, a disability check from the government, and a metal plate in his head.
The gentleman that was killed was young, and judging from the photographs entered into evidence, very powerful. He was shot once, through the heart, with a .38 caliber bullet. He died as he was falling to the ground.
On the day of the killing, the accused had gone to cash his disability check. “Check day” was well-known in Baltimore at the time. All, or most government checks physically arrived on the same day each month. On this day, checks are cashed, rents paid, groceries purchased, needs met. Depending on the needs that are met, it can get pretty energetic on check day.
Maisee and Derrick encountered Bill at the check cashing center. Maisee knew he would be there because her mom did some cooking and cleaning for Bill, and he always paid her mom right after check day. Maisee and Derrick demanded money from Bill. He refused and started walking home. They followed him to the street, pushed him down, and kicked him. He pulled a revolver from his pocket, fired it into the air, and got away running towards his apartment.
Derrick and Maisee followed him, with Derrick picking up a piece of steel rebar, and Maisee throwing rocks. Bill ran to his house. He realized he couldn’t unlock the door and get inside before they caught him, and firm in the knowledge that any strong blow to the metal plate in his head could kill him, he pulled the revolver from his pocket, shot one time, and a man was dead.
The police and ambulance were called. Derrick was taken to a hospital to be pronounced dead. Bill was found and arrested in his bedroom, hiding under his bed. He had hidden the pistol in the back of his closet. It was a five shot revolver. It had three empty chambers, and two expended shells. He literally had no more bullets.
Baltimore city was as violent then as now, and gun crime was prosecuted to the maximum. Bill was charged with 2nd degree murder, voluntary manslaughter, involuntary manslaughter, assault, discharging a firearm in the city limits, everything. Baltimore was going to prosecute its way out of crime.
Judge M. was presiding. She was a no-nonsense black lady in charge of a case where an old black man was accused of killing a young black man. The girlfriend Maisee, was also black. Race enters into this because of her reaction.
Maisee told the police that she and Derrick had confronted Bill because he had beaten her mom. The defense attorney called Maisee’s mom as witness, and asked a few about Bill. No, he had always been kind, and had never hit her.
Of course, the case for the defense was self-defense.
When the defense attorney was asking Maisee about the events of the day, it was clear that he wanted to establish the fact that Bill had run from the confrontation several times, that it was physical, and it was escalating. Every time she began her answer, she prefaced it with a variation of “he beat my mother”.
“How did you meet Bill?”
He’s the man that beat my mother.
That was the lead-in to every answer she gave. The defense attorney objected, because the police had asked, and her mother had testified that he was only paying her to help him around the house. Judge M. told the jury to ignore that remark, and instructed her twice to answer only the questions as they had been asked, without any mention of the fictionalized assault.
She did it again, was interrupted by the judge, and the jury was sent from the court so she could better instruct Maisee.
When we came back to court, Maisee was still in the witness box, and the highly professional defense attorney asked her about the chase through the street, where Maisee and Derrick were following him, she with rocks, Derrick with a piece of steel… Maisee answered to the effect that “He had been beating on my..
Judge M: “Miss xxxxx (Maisee) do not make such a reference again. Now please just answer the question as we discussed.
Maisee: ”Well if you would stop interrupting me…”
THAT’S ENOUGH!
“Young lady, if you think I sweated and worked myself nearly to death to get on the Baltimore Police Department as one of the first black female officers, worked every weekend, night, and holiday shift the good Lord sent my way to pay for my night school law classes, studying law while raising two kids so I could become one of the first black female lawyers in Baltimore, and the first female black judge in the city just so some gum-popping finger-snapping Miss Thang can tell me how to conduct my courtroom, then here is your another think coming.”
“The next two words out of your mouth will be ‘I apologize’. You will apologize to this court, and you will then apologize to the jury for wasting their time. Then, every question you are asked will be answered as it is asked. You will show nothing but a respectful voice and tone in your answers to me, or any member of my court, and before I allow you to respond to me, I want to make one thing absolutely and perfectly clear to you: I will put you in jail for contempt of court. And that stands for you, and anyone else in this courtroom who wants to test my patience today. Now, what do you have to say?”
“I apologize. To you, and the jury.”
“Excellent. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I regret you had to witness that, but we judges are only human, and my understanding and acceptance of some habits is growing thin over the years.”
We, the jury went back to the jury room later, and all promised not to make Judge M. angry no matter what.
I shared this story later with a couple of lawyer friends that I knew practiced in city court, and they had the same long, slow whistle response that I did on that day, and mentioned that they had heard of that episode before.
Sorry for the long prelude, but it was a heck of a thing to witness, and I remember the hush that fell on that courtroom was as if all the oxygen had left. Everyone was remembering an important appointment anywhere else, but afraid to broach the subject. That lady was impressive.
If you are interested, we found the old fellow innocent of everything except discharging a handgun inside city limits, which he plainly admitted to doing.
I checked out the defense attorney, and he is still practicing: A. Dwight Pettit was a heck of a defense attorney then, and most certainly got better. That guy was as smooth as wet silk, and smarter than anyone has a legitimate right to be.
Edit notes. I updated the story to include a warning shot that the old fellow fired on the street.
I was a bit overwhelmed by the number of readers and comments. When I posted my story, I was concentrating on the actions of the judge. It wasn’t until I saw the comments about the guilty verdict for discharging a weapon in the city limits that I began searching my memory. This was twenty five years ago, and I had to think for a bit. I remembered being concerned that he only had two bullets. It was remembering that fact that brought the warning shot to mind. It was for the warning shot, fired into the air/street that he was found guilty. In retrospect, I wish I had worked harder for an innocent verdict on that as well.
As I reflect on that week-long trial, I remember being pleased and proud of how seriously the jury took our duty. It stunk, because a young man lost his life, a family lost a son, and a frail, old man feared for his life and took another.
Huawei begins Third-Gen 5G Massive MIMO deployment in global markets, starting from Philippines
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Huawei has decided to commercially deploy the third-generation 5G Massive MIMO in the global markets. And, to begin with, the company has initiated the assembling procedure of the product from the Philippines region.
According to the latest information, the Huawei 5G Massive MIMO is capable of achieving the best performance with the lowest power consumption. Further, it involves several advanced and new-generation innovative technologies for managing operations.
For instance, ultra-wideband, multi-antenna, and extremely large antennas. Together, these components improve spectral as well as energy efficiency. Besides, it also aids the industrialists to maintain green, simplified and high-end 5G networks.
So far, the Philippines has been constructing the 5G infrastructure for three years. On the flip side, it executed several Massive MIMO products to continuously deliver 5G facilities among users as well as maintain the 4G demands.
However, in the recent few years, the 5G techniques have overtaken the network spectrum. And the latest MIMO product can face all the hurdles to meet the required network development. The proof is the download and upload speeds which are 35% more than the normal network solutions.
Moreover, it enlarges the coverage area of the network by 30 percent. Eventually, it surrounds the large inter-site distances that other technologies usually don’t.
Has there been a military coup in China? Is Xi Jinping under house arrest, and is General Li Qiaoming the next President?
Where are you getting this nonsense from?
You’re getting it from Western mainstream media.
Haven’t you learned your lesson yet? You can’t trust Western mainstream media. It constantly publishes anti-China propaganda. Western mainstream media is essentially the propaganda arm of Western hegemonic governments (USA, UK, Australia, Canada).
King Cat
This is my cat. His name is Muesli.
He may look cute with his heart shaped blob on his nose, but in reality he is a South London geezer cat who wants to bite me all of the time. He doesn’t, but he wants to. He is my boy & I prefer him to most people. He is also a hopeless cheese addict & even becomes temporarily strokable if given lightly fried fresh mackerel. He is very spoilt but he deserves to be as he had a rough start in life & would have no doubt been put down at an early age due to his “challenging” behaviour. I have been his dad for over 10 years now & would not swap him for anything.
Muesli
How can I convince my pro-CCP Chinese girlfriend that there is genocide in Xinjiang?
Pardon me? Did I read this correctly? You want to convince your Chinese girlfriend that you know her country and her country’s political system better than she, a native born Chinese?
You are smoking something stronger than tobacco and need to stop because China will put you in prison and throw away the key, unlike what they do to the Uighurs. That or you have no business dating this woman. None.
You do not respect her, her beliefs, or her country—and by extension, her heritage. I am all for interracial relationships. If I ever remarry I hope he’s Chinese so it’s not like I have problems with the practice. Interracial relationships can help two people grow stronger together and build a relationship of respect unique to them.
But not everyone should date interracially. It burns me up to see arrogant non-Chinese people treating their partner disrespectfully by assuming their Western view is automatically correct. It especially upsets me when it’s about something Chinese. Do you really think you know better than a native Chinese on these subjects?
Likely not! Sit back and ask questions of her. Intelligent and thoughtful questions. And then listen to her. If you disagree, respectfully express that and then drop it. It isn’t your job to change her. She’s not perfect but she’s entitled to her own political beliefs.
U.S., Poland, Bulgaria, and Italy Warn Citizens to LEAVE RUSSIA
Yesterday, September 28, the United States, Poland, and Bulgaria, URGED any of their citizens in Russia to “Leave Russia Immediately.”
Today, Italy issued a similar warning for any Italians who may be in Russia.
Glenn Greenwald asks if Russia would sabotage its own pipeline
FOX is like screeching fingers on a chalkboard to me, but it is mainstream. It’s pretty much making fun of the USA government narrative.
FOX is heavily laden with Vault 7 influences. Watch at your own risk. I put it up for reference purposes, as even this “network” is not “buying the narrative”.
What do you think of China and the Solomon Islands?
According to “the free world”, every country in theory is allowed the right to choose who to ally with. Which sounds logical and reasonable right?
Until they choose to ally with Russia, China, or Iran. Then, you get headlines like this
“How the West should respond to China’s search for foreign outposts”
“Chinese influence is spurring violence in the Solomon Islands”
“Why won’t India’s government condemn Vladimir Putin?”
“India’s vaunted strategic autonomy is a mirage”
“Iran’s rulers enthusiastically seek to destroy the liberal world order and therefore support Russia’s aggression.”
The hypocrisy of certain countries and their undying will to dictate to the little guy who they can and can’t have relations with is amusing. If Ukraine has the right to choose, why doesn’t the Solomon Islands?
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How can I deal with everyone around me eating meat? I am vegan and I think the meat industry/eating other creatures is horrible. I try not to think about it (normalize) but sometimes I get so upset thinking that people I love actually do this.
Lemme tell you a story about some of the most hardcore and admirable vegans in the world.
In 2008, the Chinese province of Sichuan was hit by a giant earthquake. When a maternity ward in the city of 什邡 (Shifang) collapsed, the hospital manager helped the afflicted families seek refuge at the local Luohan Temple, a Buddhist place of worship.
The temple’s leader, 素全法師 (Master Suquan), did not hesitate to take them in, and let them pitch tents in the courtyard.
However, new dilemmas soon surfaced – some mothers were giving birth, leaving puddles of blood and filth on the temple’s holy grounds; babies needed to be breastfed, which meant mothers had to bare their breasts in public; husbands needed to slaughter, cook and feed livestock to their wives to help them recover after giving birth and produce breast milk.
These offended many of the monks, who lived by a strict code of discipline, including tenets on diet that forbade them from consuming living creatures (i.e. animals). They considered what the families were doing to be utterly taboo, blasphemous and disrespectful.
Master Suquan rebuked the other monks, by saying that the biggest taboo in the universe was to see a life in need of saving and doing nothing. Next to that, nothing even compared. He decreed that they had no business interfering with the choices of others.
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He opened the temple’s granary and allowed the families to take anything they needed. When the local People’s Liberation Army medical corps arrived on the scene, the monks would cooperate and do their share to ensure the women had a roof over their heads, and managed to give birth in sanitised conditions. Most of them would have violated some tenet by helping a woman give birth. But it didn’t matter – saving lives was more important.
Eventually, 108 healthy new babies were delivered, and the mothers were all safe.
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No doubt the act of slaughtering and eating animals can be horrific and traumatising, especially for privileged people with no other worries in their lives. And yet, most people on earth aren’t privileged white collar workers in developed countries with time, money, energy or knowledge to spare. They depend on meat to survive. Between loving animals and loving human beings, the biggest good is always to love human beings first.
How vegan are you? No more than a Buddhist monk, surely. If those monks could stand the sight of meat and other such “obscenities”, so could you.
Russia has selected two cities against which it will launch “strategic nuclear weapons.”
It is important to note, the Russian are saying they will use “strategic” nuclear bombs, NOT “tactical.” These bombs are “city busters.”
Full details on tonight’s Hal Turner Radio Show.
Set an alarm or reminder in your cell phone to tune-in at 9:00 PM eastern US Time, which is 8:00 Central, 7:00 Mountain and 6:00 Pacific time (GMT -0400)
Then press "LISTEN" or click the right arrow on the small player that appears. THIS LINK DOES NOT GO LIVE UNTIL ONE HOUR BEFORE THE SHOW! During that hour, it streams commercial-free music until the show begins.
Have you ever told your cat to do something? What was your cat’s response?
When my fiancé and I moved in together we moved into his house.
Blink, his cat was already living with him and I had a bearded dragon called George.
Bearded dragons are known to get stressed in new environments and he refused to eat for weeks and when he did eventually eat, it was barely enough.
No matter what we (the humans) tried, George was wholly miserable.
I thought he was maybe afraid of Blink, seeing her as a predator, but any time George came out of the vivarium to exercise, Blink was his go to.
Since all else failed we asked Blink to explain to George that this was his new home, he was wanted here and we just wanted him to be healthy and happy.
We proceeded to offer George his favourite fruit and locusts.
He once again refused.
We left him alone so as not to stress him out.
While we were away from him, Blink walked up to him, put her nose on his, sniffed around him for a while and kind of nudged him.
He walked towards the vivarium we keep the locusts in, looked at us and licked his lips.
This was George’s way of asking for food.
I got one locust out and offered it to George.
He seemed uninterested but we left it a little and when we looked back around George had munched on the locust and Blink was patting him on the head.
They bumped noses, Blink went her own way and George has had his appetite back ever since ❤️ if not for Blinks intervention, things were so bad, I expect George would have just curled up and died of starvation.
Also, when George was outside in the garden in summer we would ask Blink to stay close to deter seagulls from trying to take George for a meal. She never left his side and it became routine in the morning for George and Blink to make their way to the back door, sit beside each other and catch some rays
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his girl has a beautiful smile but whenever she does smile, she puts her hand over it as if trying to hide it. Why would she do that?
My goodness all these “she has low self-esteem” answers… Judgemental much?
I cover my mouth when I smile or laugh. It’s a cultural habit. Chinese traditional etiquette dictates when women smile/laugh, their teeth should not be visible. So I was told as a kid that I need to cover my mouth when smile or laugh.
In fact this is a pretty common etiquette through out East and Southeast Asia. You see women do this all the time in real life and on TV.
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It’s pretty common in Manga as well.
So it could be that this girl has East Asian or Southeast Asian heritage and grew up being told covering her mouth when laughing is good manners. Or she could be a Manga fan and found the gesture cute, so she is doing it in real life.
But no… oh no… it must be she has low self-esteem and all that.
Why do Americans want the CCP out, when in fact the CCP and vested interests is what is keeping China from advancing ahead of the USA?
Some years ago before the global financial crisis, I began to develop a habit of grinning at almost every piece of supposedly serious journalism on China, whether it was Time, NYT, the Economist or even the BBC and Der Spiegel.
I was unaware of my subconscious bubbling to the surface until my friend asked worriedly “why are you smiling at the laptop?”
I came to the realization I was reading about China in English, and it was a far different picture from the one painted in Chinese, a rusty language I had brushed up in my two years stateside.
I was tickled by the absurd gap between the two, further reinforced by the dismantling of the China in my mind with the reality of modern China I had witnessed with my own eyes.
I have slowly come around to the conclusion that the free west love communist China for the same reason they hate her.
I kid you not.
You see, the west loves doing business with China because she is big and delivers.
But the west also hates competing with China because she is big and delivers.
The west used to dismiss and laugh off Chinese competition.
Today, they still dismiss Chinese efforts, but there is no laughter. The rhetoric is designed to stir up anger instead.
China delivers, but that is because the evil communists government has turned the poor Chinese people into a monolithic army of spying zombies.
Anyone who wakes up from the zombie apocalypse will be caught and delivered to Tiananmen square to die under passing tank tracks.
Evil must be opposed.
Cue heroic music and the entrance of the white hero with guns blazing to save the day.
On a more serious note, the CCP leadership over the past 70 years has led China from an agrarian, feudal, war-ravaged and exhausted society to a confident, peaceful and modern nation state that has landed on the far side of the moon and launched her own Beidou GPS system with global coverage.
China is behind because she squandered a century and three generations whilst the west industrialized.
She is closing the gap, because a stable China at peace is a formidable proposition.
My Favorite Martian S01E01 (1963) colorized
What was a loophole that you found and exploited the hell out of?
Back in 1982, when I was 16 years old, I was looking to buy my first car. In the newspaper I found a 1972 AMC Matador advertised with low miles at a price I could afford, so I bought that car, and it served me well for a few years., with no issues. When I turned 18, the Matador started having fuel pump problems, making it harder and harder to start. My dad, who was a fairly decent mechanic, said we could go to the local parts store and get a new one, then put it in ourselves and save some money on labor. Sounded like a great idea to me, I was always one to get my hands dirty, and with my dad helping, I was sure we would be able to slap that new fuel pump into the car in short order.
We went down to Chief Auto Parts, it was a chain type auto parts store that was local to us, and we requested a fuel pump for a 1972 AMC Matador. The store worker went and found the replacement part and brought it back up. Of course, the mark of a great shade tree mechanic is to check the new part with the old part to make sure it is the correct one, which we did … and it looked right, so we went ahead and paid for the fuel pump, got a core charge for the old one, and went off to put it in.
It only took a few minutes to actually put the new pump in, it was held in by two bolts with a paddle that pumped the fuel from the up and down motion made by the lobe of the cam shaft, a pretty slick design. Once it was in, the car started up no problem and ran like a dream, for a week … then the same sputtering and hard starting started again. We figured we got a bad fuel pump, so we pulled it out and took it back to Chief Auto. They didn’t ask any questions, just went to the back and gave us the new one, took the old one and told us to have a nice day. Being the curious type, my dad asked how long the warranty was on the new one, in case we run into another issue. the clerk said that Chief had a life time factory warranty on them, being that they were genuine Mopar parts. Visibly impressed, by dad mentioned that he would certainly be buying Mopar parts and buying only from Chief’ Auto in the future. Little did he know that he was going to be spending quite a bit of time at Chief.
We installed the new “Genuine Mopar” fuel pump, which was the exact same model as the last one we had gotten, and sure enough, the car started right up and ran great, FOR A WEEK. Yep, at the end of the week the car was sputtering and hard starting again, and eventually got to where it wouldn’t start at all, just like before. So we pulled the fuel pump, yet again, and back to Chief Auto. This time did not go quite the way the previous two time went …. the clerk saw in the records that we had already exchanged one of these fuel pumps before, and he started in on a 3rd degree to find out what kind of terrible environment we were running the car in that was causing these fuel pumps to go bad. Of course we explained how the original one had been fine for years, but these last two only lasted a week, but that we had our receipt and that it stated lifetime warranty on it, so the clerk was obligated to honor the Chief Auto warranty for the Mopar part.
After about 4 of these replacements, someone in Chief Auto called the Mopar parts rep, who did some digging, and they found out that the “Genuine Mopar” replacement fuel pump was actually an after market fuel pump that was being made in Malaysia, and that the original manufacturer of that model fuel pump had gone out of business. Worse yet, it was discovered that the paddle used to pump the fuel as it rode along the cam lobe was a half inch shorter than the original design, and the material used for the paddle was not the same hardness, so as it got hot and worn over the week of use, the paddle would deform and then stop engaging with the cam lobe, eventually deforming past the point of operation.
The Matador was a fine car when it ran, and even though I could not continue to drive it due to the potential unreliability of it, my dad traded me his Chrysler New Yorker for the Matador, and each week on a Saturday, he would go out to the driveway, loosen the two bolts to the fuel pump, pull it out and go to Chief Auto to swap the old one out for a new one. I stopped counting after 32, but he continued to use that car and change out that fuel pump for about two years. Finally he gave ithe car to the High School, they needed cars to work on in auto shop class, and it was a huge tax write off, so he made out like a bandit. Funny thing, at $20 buck a pop for those fuel pumps, he must have got a couple thousand dollars worth of free fuel pumps out of that auto store, but even years after we got rid of that car, every time we went into Chief Auto, the guys there would greet my dad like he was one of their crew when he entered the store.
I gotta give Chief Auto props for honoring that warranty for as long as they did, that was great customer service, you don’t see that anymore.
Mamas Family Mamas having a fling
What are the implications of recognizing Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan?
Taiwan is already recognized by the United Nations to be a part of China through the following resolution:
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There is no issue about recognition of China’s sovereignty over Taiwan.
The implication of this is that any attempt to separate Taiwan from China is a violation of the above UN resolution and an interference in the internal affairs of China.
Do you own a cat with a disability?
Yes. Meet “Tipsy”:
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This is a picture of her when I brought her home.
I adopted her from Humane Society when she was 2-years-old. She’s diagnosed with Cerebellar Hypoplasia.
Basically, her hips tip as she walks.
She’s grumpier than most cats. It’s lots of low growls (or something like that) from this girl, if another cat just walks past her the wrong way.
She has mood swings. “Yay! I love you!” or “Ew! Get away from me!” in seconds.
She always tries to beat me to a door. Don’t let her wobbly demeanor fool you, she’s a fast cat! If she hears the creak of a door, she’s at my feet.
She LOVES hugs! I swear, she could hug on me for hours. She puts her arms around me and presses her face against my shoulder. So sweet!
She needs a little extra help with going potty. She’s litter-trained, but accident-prone. I have to hold her hips still, to avoid any poos or pees out of the litter.
She loves to explore! Since she can’t jump too high, she’s safe in my backyard (under supervision, of course). I take her for short walks, to parks, even on road trips (although she’s only been on one).
She’s scared of loud noises. Fireworks, thunder, barking, car horn, ocean waves—she needs a hug to get past those sounds.
She’s completely healthy. While she may look different, walk different, meow different, and act different—she’s not all that different. She’s a normal kitty that will live a long, healthy life. She’s currently 9-years-old, going strong!
The Wild, Wild West s02e10
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PeJVsRsKJM
Why do some Chinese call the US racist when in China, Black people couldnt even ENTER McDonald’s in Guangzhou in March 2020?! Do they realize how crazy & silly they look criticising the US when China is much more racist than even the racist US?
Anyone who doesn’t have their vaccine pass is denied entry.
So it’s pretty stupid to compare one incident of someone being denied entry because they didn’t have a vaccine pass 2 years ago to how many cop assassinations of black guys in the US since then?
Even if it wasn’t about a vaccine pass it’s kind of stretching things lol.
Nord Stream Explosion Removes the Chance of Seperate German-Russian Peace
Russian ability to restore gas to Germany alone lies in tatters
By supplying German industries with gas Russia held a tiny amount of leverage over Berlin since it could theoretically switch off the valve. It was a tiny amount of leverage since nobody had ever witnessed Russia actually do such a thing despite decades of financial, economic, diplomatic, political, propaganda, and moral war against her by Berlin and its Washington overlord.
When a month ago Russia actually went ahead and switched off Nord Stream gas it boosted its leverage. By carrying out the threat it demonstrated the credibility of said threat, while still retaining the ability to restore supplies. Its leverage proposition was “We can restore your gas the moment we reach a modicum of peace.”
By destroying Nord Stream the “mystery” explosions have removed Russian ability to make that offer, and have removed Russian leverage with Germany.
The explosion also removes popular pressure on Berlin from below. If there is no Nord Stream then there also can not be protest to open Nord Stream by freezing proles.
The explosion also removes a piece of infrastructure that the Imperial Capital has been obsessed with for years. Obsessions that led it to enact sanctions against entities of its own “ally” (vassal). Obsession that was out of all proportion to Nord Stream’s actual significance or prospects of German-Russian peace.
That is to say, I believe the chances of German-Russian rapprochement were always zero. But that did not stop Washington from traditionally hugely overreacting to the possibility and zeroing in on Nord Stream as the potential catalyst. Its final destruction will have caused a deluge of satisfaction and merriment in DC. (Never underestimate the drive of DC apparatchiks to create feel-good moments for themselves.)
And because the pipeline was inactive anyway the costs associated with blowing it up are minimal. Blow up an active pipe and you risk turning a vassal against you. But having succeeded in making the pipe into an object of shame that Berlin must apologize for ever having built, delivering the explosive coup de grace carries little risk.
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What has China done to the USA for the USA to be tough with it?
To be honest, I would also like to know what China has done! I’ve been racking my brain thinking, did China disrespect the US? Did it provoke the United States? Or did it collude with other countries to try to bring down the US? But I don’t see China doing anything like this at all. On the contrary, it is the US that has been actively provocative and offensive. So I reasonably believe that the United States is turning their jealousy of China’s rapid development into a containment policy that suppresses China in an all-round way.
I want to ask every fair and rational person, is there anything wrong with making his country strong and prosperous? In the past three decades, China has experienced unprecedented economic growth in modern history, with a GDP that rivals that of the United States.Some people see this as a threat to the United States, but in fact, China is doing so well because the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party are trying to make life better for the Chinese people. Moreover, China’s economic growth has directly benefited the United States, and the United States has always been dominant in bilateral trade. It is unfair to blame China for the US economic recession. This is entirely caused by the mistakes of the US’s own economic policies.
As we all know, China is the most peaceful major country in the world. It has always been moderate and does not interfere in other countries’ internal affairs like the US. It hopes to coexist peacefully with other countries for mutual benefit and win-win results. China will not compete with the United States for hegemony, but the real problem with China is that it does not want to dominate the world, but it may prevent the United States from doing so in a unipolar manner. Therefore, we are now seeing more and more of China’s counterattack against some of the sanctions imposed by the United States.
So do you know what the truth is? The United States has tried hard to make so many accusations against China, but what the United States is really angry about is China’s “crime of disobedience.” There are many countries that are not obedient, but only China is the “real threat” in the eyes of the United States. Because of its size and influence, it enjoys good popularity in the world.
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Finally, I would like to ask if a country relies on its own strength to be arrogant and domineering, requiring the whole world to act according to its will, interfere in other countries’ internal affairs under the banner of “human rights” and “justice” and even launch wars, will you stand up and resist? Maybe some people say yes, some say no, I understand. But if there is another powerful country to stand up bravely for you to fight back, help maintain world peace and multilateralism, help poor countries develop, would you support it? I hope there is no hesitation now.
American Roulette
By Batiushka for The Saker blog
Introduction: America’s Death-Wish
‘Russian roulette’ is a most peculiar expression. At least for any Russian. For the simple reason that he has never heard of it. In fact, it does not exist in Russian, neither the expression, nor the reality. It is something we learn about with astonishment when we learn English. The expression is an American invention and only an American with a death-wish could have thought up such a thing, in 1937, in fact (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_roulette). And so it is that only an American with a death-wish could have thought up the present situation. He has poked the bear so much and so often for over thirty years that the bear has had a lot of time to plan exactly what he would do. Now he is doing it. Why are you surprised? You loaded the gun and pointed it at your own head, now expect the bullet to come out.
Where We Came From
The Special Military Operation (SMO) in the Ukraine could have been over as early as April 2022, or at latest in August when most of the old Soviet weapons of the Kiev regime forces, augmented by supplies from ex-Warsaw Pact countries, had been destroyed. However, ignoring the Ukrainian people, since they are mere cannon fodder, the West intervened and escalated the conflict into a full-scale war by supplying its weaponry, technology and manpower at the bidding of the Westernised Ukrainian oligarchate. (Just as in February 1917, when the West created the ‘Russian Revolution’ at the bidding of the Westernised Russian oligarchate, also ignoring the people). Thus, the Ukraine has become merely the battleground for the real War, that between Russia and the USA.
The Russian response to Western escalation and aggression is partial mobilisation. The limited SMO will need more manpower to defeat the doomed NATO-supplied Nazis, whose numbers have been much increased by the arrival of NATO troops in Ukrainian uniform as well as by mercenaries. President Putin was accused by the Western ruling class through their State-controlled media mouthpieces of threatening them with nuclear attack. This was not the case. He had simply answered Truss, who had threatened Russia with nuclear attack, replying that any such aggression would be met by Russia with the same.
President Putin now awaits the winter in order to give the peoples of Western Europe opportunities to reflect and then force their spineless leaders to reject American tyranny. Since 2014 President Putin has become determined to remove the American threat to his Western borders and so to Western and Central Europe once and for all. Only then will the North-Western peninsula of the Eurasian continent at last become free. In order to do this, he has built up relationships with China, India and others in Asia, as well as with many countries in Africa and Latin America. Thus, in recent months he has rapidly gathered influence all over Eurasia.
Where We Are Now
As the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991, so the European Union between 2022 and 2024. Now is not the time for top-down Unions –in the last two generations since 1989 they have been collapsing in favour of international co-operation between sovereign nations, as is needed by the grassroots. Demonstrations have taken place in the Czech Lands, Austria, Germany and the Netherlands, all calling on Kiev to start negotiating with Russia, and on the EU Commissars to stop behaving like vassals of the US feudal magnates. Germany is very nervous, it risks its industry shutting down. And German winters can be very cold. Now the two undersea Nordstream pipelines for Russian gas to Germany, have exploded. Of course, it is sabotage.
The USA has successfully cut off German industry, and much of Europe, from the Russian gas that could have powered it up again, had the EU wanted to be free of dependence on the US. The Hungarian government also wants Kiev to negotiate – it has Hungarian citizens across the border in Zakarpattia. And there are those in Romania who think the same about the province of Romanian Chernivtsi across the border, though those who think that are not allowed to be part of the present US-puppet government. Poland also wants its territory back, perhaps all five provinces of the far western Ukraine: Volyn, Rivne, Lviv, Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk. Meanwhile, Italy is about to get a new, anti-Brussels nationalist government, much to the dislike of the unelected EU elite.
The euro has already collapsed against the dollar. Now it is the turn of the pound sterling. The pound sterling has lost 20% of its value against the dollar since MissTrust came to power. The UK, stabbed in the back by the US for its anti-EU policy on Northern Ireland, has an economy which is not emerging from covid, but submerging after covid. The UK Establishment media trumpet that the UK State Health Service’s waiting lists are now down to only (sic) two years for most people (if you don’t die before that). Over 10% of UK citizens, 7 million people, are now waiting for treatment. Some are in great pain. In any other country in the world, there would be a revolution if waiting lists for health treatment were longer than two months. Some UK citizens are even going to the Ukraine to get proper health treatment.
The UK’s infrastructure, utilities, roads, railways, education and healthcare, has in many places reached what used to be called ‘Third World’ levels. The UK currency crisis has come about because of the UK government’s need to borrow huge amounts of money – this was MissTrust’s ‘bold plan’. After all, the UK Establishment follows to the letter US orders and has had to refuse Russia’s riches and subsidise the bankrupt Ukraine. The UK level of debt is now approaching that of the USA and catching up with that of Italy, whom it used to mock as a ‘basket case’. As they say: ‘What goes round, comes round’.
Where We Are Going
How will all this end? From the start I have believed that this will all end with the Russian victory. This means:
1. Another Ukraine
There will always be an East Slav-speaking country between south-eastern Poland and south-western Russia, whatever it will be called. However, in the future it will be a country within its natural borders, occupied only by those who voluntarily identify with the government and culture in their capital of Kiev. Moreover, deNazified, it will present no military, biological or nuclear threat to its neighbours and will be independent of geopoliticians in Washington and Brussels.
2. Another Russia
As a result of the War against NATO, Russia will be freed of the froth of Westernised sycophants formed in the 1990s, the liberal chattering classes, called in Russian ‘the creative class’. The 5% who are enserfed to the West and its overpriced consumer baubles are only repeating the treason of the Westernised ruling class and traitors from before 1917 who also wasted their fortunes on overpriced Western consumer baubles. Those who will continue to behave like chimpanzees with regard to their Western lords and masters should go and live in the West, if they have not already fled Russian justice for Finland, Georgia or elsewhere. Russia at war against NATO (= the US) is a land that needs patriots, not traitors.
3. Another Europe
At the present time Central and Western Europe risk ‘Donbassisation’ as a result of US demands for absolute obedience to their anti-Russian tyranny, known as ‘sanctions’. This means that NATO-ised Central and Western Europe will become deindustrialised, impoverished, cold, hungry and also left defenceless, as their arms will have been destroyed in the Ukraine. However, it is only at that low point that they will begin to understand that their future is not across the Atlantic, but next door, with Eastern Europe and Eurasia, the gateway to Asian growth and prosperity.
4. Another World
Seven billion of the eight billion people of the world, 87.5% of the planet, await the day of freedom from Western imperialism, exploitation and nuclear threats, aspiring to humanity, truth, justice and prosperity. Their only hope is the coming Russian victory over the US. Once that is here, much will fall back into its natural place. Asia with China and India, Africa, Latin America and all the Western peoples (basically, Western and Central Europe, North America and Oceania), so long oppressed by the gloomy darkness of the feudal Western elite, will be able to follow in Russian footsteps and walk, at first dazzled, into the bright daylight of freedom.
Conclusion
In 1939, quite infamously, Winston Churchill expressed his extraordinary ethnocentric ignorance by calling Russia ‘a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma’. Like many ignorant people, he was of course talking about himself. When you cannot be bothered to understand someone else’s viewpoint, just call it ‘a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma’. You will then have successfully defined yourself as a blinkered and selfish narcissist. The only thing is, when you depend on that someone else for vital gas, oil, fertiliser, wheat, paper, titanium etc, maybe you really should after all make an effort to understand their viewpoint. Otherwise, they will definitely consider your death-wish, the totally suicidal behaviour of your American Roulette as, ‘a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma’.
Eagles – Turn To Stone (1977)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzkKAyFpnjY
US politicians move to introduce radical bill over China’s Taiwan, in a ‘dangerous provocation’
In the latest round of increasingly frequent attempts by US politicians to “score points” by provoking China over the Taiwan question ahead of the midterm elections, Republicans introduced their own version of the highly provocative “Taiwan Policy Act 2022,” which is more radical and dangerous than the version approved by Senate Foreign Relations Committee two weeks ago.
Analysts said that as the current House minority, some Republican lawmakers have tried to use their version of the Taiwan Policy Act to put pressure on Democrats and speed up the progress of the legislation. But at the same time, it also shows that there are indeed some pragmatists among Democrats who are concerned over the damage the bill will do to China-US relations.
Along with 36 other House Republicans, Michael McCaul, Republican leader of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, introduced the House minority’s version of the Taiwan Policy Act of 2022 on Wednesday.
According to VOA, the Taiwan Policy Act introduced by GOP House representatives retained and restored some highly sensitive requirements in the original version, including a requirement that the US increase strategic clarity in “defending Taiwan” and designate Taiwan authorities as a major “non-NATO ally.”
The GOP’s bill calls for the renaming of the “Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office” as the “Taiwan Representative Office.” The legislation would also require the US to sell Taiwan island more weapons.
On September 14, the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved its own version of the bill initially introduced by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Menendez and Senator Lindsey Graham in June.
Republicans, the minority party in the House of Representatives, came up with a new version of the bill to further hype the Taiwan question, and apparently to pressure Democrats in Congress and the White House to speed up the passing of the bill before the midterm elections, Diao Daming, an associate professor at the Renmin University of China in Beijing, told the Global Times on Thursday.
“I don’t think it means that the Democrats, who have a majority in the Congress, are interested in passing this bill quickly,” Diao said. “If the Democrats want the legislation to be achieved as soon as possible, it should be the Democrats that introduce a House version, which is different from the reality.”
But it does show that some members of the pragmatic wing of the Democratic Party are concerned about being so loud and provocative in damaging China-US ties, Diao noted.
Senior Colonel Tan Kefei, spokesperson for China’s Ministry of National Defense, expressed strong opposition to and condemnation of a series of recent US acts that infringe upon China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, including the Taiwan Policy Act and arms sales, at a press briefing on Thursday.
Some people in the US have violated the one-China principle, reneged on their political commitment to China on the Taiwan question, and strengthened military ties with Taiwan island’s DPP. These provocative actions are very dangerous and do great harm, Tang said.
We urge the US side to end military links with the DPP authorities, or bear the resulting serious consequences, Tan added.
Despite the belligerence of the US lawmakers in drafting the Taiwan Policy Act 2022, experts say that procedurally, there is limited time for the bill to complete its legislative process before the midterm elections.
If more Democrats join the Republicans, the bill is likely to be taken up in the House, followed by bipartisan, House-Senate negotiation. If there is no reaction from the Democratic majority, the bill will just sit there and the Senate version will go to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, where it will be reviewed and amended, and another long process of bipartisan, House-Senate negotiation will ensue, experts said.
In less than 40 days, Congress needs to pass a series of appropriations bills for fiscal year 2023, as well as some major authorization acts, such as the National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2023.
However, experts warned of the risks that lawmakers defeated in the election may be more likely to be driven by “special interests” to do risky things for the sake of their legacy. As for the possible winners, they may also do something extreme in the next two months on the Taiwan question in order to meet their own interests.
Although November 8 is the date set for the midterm elections, lawmakers who lose will have to leave office by January 3. If the legislative process for the Taiwan Policy Act is not completed by this date, the next Congress will have to go through the whole process of proposal, review and approval all over again, Diao said.
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What is the cheapest dinner party meal you’ve ever cooked?
The “Indian chef” came to our house to fix a meal for our office staff and the neighborhood. The guy had creds. He was the chef at some of the G7 meetings, at various White House events, and carried with him clippings from various magazines that followed his career.
He came to us owing to the kindness of his son, who was training our technical staff on some specialized software. When he learned of my love of Indian cuisine, he said, “Great! I’ll bring my father next time, and he’ll cook for you!”
Which he did.
I collected father from his hotel in the early afternoon, when he handed me his clippings and I began to comprehend his skill and authenticity. He carried with him a black “doctor’s bag” which contained various spices and herbs and some utensils. Our agreement was that I would buy whatever food he wanted, and he would cook, gratis.
Off went we to a supermarket, where he trundled the cart up and down the aisles, tossing in this and that, eventually filling the cart. I was getting nervous about the cost of all that food. But I need not have been. Most everything was fresh — he would be cooking from scratch. We didn’t get coconut milk; we got the coconuts! And the only meat was chicken wings. The bill, I think, was around $60.00. To feed about 20 people.
Now back home, he took over the kitchen, directing the volunteer helpers and me to do this and that. And there was he, roasting red peppers directly on the stove burners! When they caught fire, he would hold them by their stems and gently rotate them for an even char. Pots of heaven knows what were bubbling, and the most alluring fragrances soon filled the home and wafted onto the street.
At roughly 6 p.m., he directed the assembled company to evacuate and await his call to dinner; he and his son would finish everything and set table.
And so we gathered on the deck, preparing ourselves with copious volumes of spirits, wine and beer, while struggling with churning stomachs which eagerly anticipated the feast to follow.
At last, we were called into the dining room, where his creations were arrayed down the center of the table. He explained what each item was, and from what region of India it originated. “I hope you enjoy,” he concluded, modestly. I then asked if people of Hindu faith had such a thing as “grace” before dinner. “We do,” he said. I replied, “Please, then, give us a traditional blessing for this food.”
Which he did.
Now as it turns out, a Hindu blessing is not like the short Christian prayer most of us knew. No, it was more in the nature of a little sermon, drawing parallels between food and nature and goodwill and music and I forget what else; but it all had to do with a kind of karmic harmony. All very nice, but at this point, we were ravenous and wondered when his hermeneutics might, at last, conclude.
Which they shortly did. I pulled out a chair of honor, for him, but he wasn’t having it. No, he preferred to keep the platters and serving bowls filled, to clean up scraps and otherwise wait on us. I didn’t argue.
So at last among the clatter and clinking of plates, bowls, and silverware, we circled the table, filling our plates and either sitting right there or drifting off to the porch, the deck or other rooms as space permitted. And every time we returned for seconds, or thirds, or more, the serving vessels were all filled, again.
By 10 p.m., we were all fully sated and immobile; belt buckles were loosened, bras discreetly removed; there we sat or we laid out like beached whales, groaning with contentment, emitting vapors from our pores or otherwise.
When at last I stumbled to the kitchen, I found it pristine. The left-overs had been neatly packaged and stowed in the refrigerator, and the Indian chef was quietly reading the newspaper. And he thanked ME for the privilege of serving us. He and his son took their leave.
Sixty dollars, over 20 people, a sumptuous feast, prepared by a famed chef. And there were leftovers.
Incredible.
The Guitar Man – Bread – HQ/HD
I was 13 years old…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPoJNdKNT40
Is there any reliable confirmation that the Xi JinPing President of China was replaced today?
I see you’ve been reading Western mainstream media. They publish anti-China garbage and you swallow it without discriminating it.
There is no coup in China. Xi Jinping is perfectly safe in his job. Nothing to see here, folks.
Manfred Mann – Blinded by the Light
Asia tech ‘godfathers’ to decide US chips fate
US ‘friendshoring’ and Chips 4 alliance may or may not lure region’s semiconductor heavies to Washington’s side
The importance of semiconductors to economic security adorned newspaper headlines in 2022.
As part of its technological competition with China, the United States has introduced a policy of “friendshoring” its semiconductor production to secure its supply of high-end chips that enable daily life and stock the inventory of major technology firms such as Apple.
The term friendshoring rose to prominence after a speech by US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen in April 2022. Yellen proposed a shift towards “favoring the friendshoring of supply chains to trusted countries”, arguing that this would “lower the risks” to the US economy and its partners.
Washington’s efforts also include the Chip 4 alliance — an arrangement through which the US government aims to diversify supply chains among Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.
The not-so-subtle aim is to frustrate the ability of Chinese producers to upgrade their capacity. That will help US firms maintain an advantage over Chinese firms like Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), which recently reported the development of a 7-nm chip, among other new capabilities.
The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is preparing to mass produce 3-nm chips, while South Korea’s Samsung has just begun 3-nm production.
Much of the coverage of friendshoring has focussed on manufacturing and design capabilities, the market share of chip firms and political posturing. But friendshoring and the US Chip 4 policy are ultimately about the people, or “friends”, behind these technological innovations.
Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have chipmaking “godfathers” — people acclaimed for their crucial roles in developing semiconductor capacity. Yet several of these “godfathers” have proven to be “frenemies” to their own companies after being poached by competitors — including Chinese market entrants.
Yukio Sakamoto, dubbed the “godfather of Japan’s DRAM”, was the president of the former semiconductor company and foundry, Elpida Memory. Sakamoto was disgruntled after his experience at the US-based Micron and joined China’s Tsinghua Group in 2019 to build DRAM products.
In June 2022, Sakamoto announced he was joining China’s SwaySure. Sakamoto worked for Texas Instruments in Japan earlier in his career before being recruited by Kobe Steel Electronic Information Group.
Kim Choong-Ki is often called the “godfather of South Korea’s Chip Industry.” Kim trained upcoming semiconductor engineers — called “Kim’s mafia”— who went on to lead semiconductor production at Samsung, LG and Hyundai.
Kim earned his PhD at Columbia University, after which he joined the then semiconductor industry giant, Fairchild, where he worked on R&D in Palo Alto.
Morris Chang founded Taiwan’s semiconductor powerhouse, TSMC, in 1987 and led the firm’s growth for decades. Chang obtained his PhD in electrical engineering at Stanford University, working for Texas Instruments for more than 25 years. The Taiwanese government soon after recruited him to lead the soon-to-be-established “dedicated silicon foundry.”
Chiang Shang-Yi headed R&D at TSMC until 2006. After military service, he completed his undergraduate studies at National Taiwan University and graduated with a PhD from Stanford University.
He made headlines for joining China’s SMIC as an independent non-executive director from December 2016 to June 2019, becoming vice-chairman from December 2020 until November 2021.
Liang Meng-song, another semiconductor doyen, was in the spotlight of a court case between TSMC and Samsung.
He was charged with leaking classified information to Samsung after joining the same year he left his long-time employer, TSMC. Liang, like Chang and Chiang, studied in the United States. He spent 23 years working at TSMC before leaving in 2009.
These “friends” gained crucial work experience with US firms and most completed postgraduate studies in the United States.
Sakamoto learned during his time at Texas Instruments while Kim and Chang, Chiang and Liang graduated from elite US schools and worked for leading US firms such as AMD, Hewlett-Packard, Fairchild and Texas Instruments. After returning home, they became the executive officers of semiconductor firms or holders of intellectual property rights.
The US-led Chip 4 alliance has come to life amid the interplay between the long-standing personal connections in the semiconductor industry and the risk of talent moving across firms and countries, as the trajectories of these godfathers exemplify.
The movement of semiconductor professionals ignites wars over employee talent and brings lawsuits relating to patents and trade secrets, intensifying industry rivalry and competition.
While Washington’s friendshoring policy aims to deepen supply chains with key producers in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, policymakers must remember that the people who comprise the leadership of those firms can move.
Friendships evolve over time, and friends learn from one another. In Granovetter’s terms, Washington’s “weak ties” might prove more beneficial than its strong ties to South Korea, Japan and Taiwan in advancing its semiconductor capabilities.
Robyn Klingler-Vidra is Reader in Entrepreneurship and Sustainability at King’s Business School. She is the author of The Venture Capital State: The Silicon Valley Model in East Asia (Cornell University Press, 2018) and Inclusive Innovation (Routledge, with Alex Glennie and Courtney Savie Lawrence).
Yu-Ching Kuo is an independent researcher based in Kaohsiung. She is the co-author of ‘Brexit, Supply Chains and the Contest for Supremacy: The Case of Taiwan and the Semiconductor Industry’ in A New Beginning or More of the Same? The European Union and East Asia After Brexit (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, with Robyn Klingler-Vidra).
The Time Tunnel Ep 05 The Last Patrol
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Have you ever done something insignificant, but it turned out to lead to something phenomenal?
Followed a rabbit down a hole.
I own a cleaning chemical manufacturing business in Australia. My business makes all sorts of cleaning chemicals for retail, industry, commercial and end users. My niche, something the business does very well, is private labelling.
The vast majority of the products leaving my business has other company’s labels, not my own. This has it’s pros and cons but for me and my business it has been hugely successful.
Now here’s the thing. I receive an awful lot of enquiries from people who want their own brand cleaning chemicals and most are simply too small for me to deal with. I give them the time of day but know they are wasting my time.
So this one day, maybe 5 years ago or more, my business receives an email from a Chinese online seller wanting us to manufacture and private label, cleaning chemicals for him and ship them to China for him to sell online.
Of course I dismissed this as an absolute waste of my time. China manufactures for the world. Almost every western nation has outsourced their manufacturing sector to China, why would he want me to manufacture for him?
Fortunately I didn’t dismiss it entirely. What I did was tell my sales rep to “follow the rabbit down the hole and see how far the hole goes”.
From their it progressed. We sent samples, which I was sure would not only be a waste of my time but now my money too. We waited for the samples to get there, and then be tested by them, and to my surprise they wanted to move forward.
So we priced up the products they were interested in and sent through the quote. This would finally put a stop to this absurdity and I could get back to business as usual. Even though I priced it fairly, I was certain we would be too expensive.
But no. Too my surprise they in fact wanted to place an order for something like 20000 500ml bottles. Now I was certain it was a scam. I had been suspicious all along, after all China buying from an Australian manufacturer didn’t make any sense at all. A scam!
My response was I won’t do anything until 100% of the invoice is paid and only after the money has been sitting in my account for a week. They agreed and promptly paid. It turns out they are legitimate after all.
Not only are they legitimate but they are wonderful people and fantastic to deal with and now some several years later they buy a 40 foot container every month on average and it is growing. It is great business to have and fantastic to be supplying China instead of the other way around.
So why did they want to buy from us I hear you say? I asked them the very same question.
Because China has a lot of middle class and wealthy people that don’t necessarily trust products made in China. These people prefer products made in Australia, the UK and the USA. So my client invented his own brand that is manufactured in Australia. And it has been hugely successful for him and for my business.
An insignificant email I almost dismissed entirely as a waste of time has changed my life and my business considerably.
Before I leave you I will tell you what he said to me when I asked him why he chose my business.
“You were the only one that responded to my email.”
Phew! I nearly didn’t either.
Did your cat make your house a home?
Absolutely. My wife and I decided to remain childless – and we never really intended on adopting cats. But here we are. The kittens were born in our parlor and we have been a constant presence since they took their first sniffs and opened their eyes. We are as much their parents as mama Pumpkin and daddy Midnight. They let us do things to them that Pumpkin would never allow us to do to her. Dr Wifey has confessed on several occasions that she has never been around an animal that has loved, trusted, and needed her so much, and fulfills her natural maternal instinct that we rightly avoided with human children.
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If you aren’t familiar with out story, Midnight was also born in our house prior to our buying it – so the only ones who weren’t born here are us and Pumpkin, a minority! The dynamic is pretty incredible and interesting. I love that they are all comfortable here, especially Pumpkin. Her life, as was Midnight’s, was so hard outdoors. She hasn’t been outside for 18 months as of yesterday- and she displays no desire to leave. She enjoys lying on the screened porch watching nature – or just napping – but she loves her big house with her family – and I love that I could provide this for her.
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Why has China increased military activity around Taiwan?
China is sending a message to the world, loud and clear:
Stay out of China’s domestic matter. You cannot prevent Taiwan reunification.
China will reunify with Taiwan one way or the other. She prefers peaceful reunification but is not above using force.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova has asked who the EU intends to punish with the “strongest possible response” for damage to the Nord Stream gas pipelines.The diplomat said Poland’s former foreign minister has already identified the US as the party behind the apparent sabotage. Radoslaw Sikorski is well connected to Washington elites through his employment at various think tanks.The two Nord Stream pipelines were seriously damaged this week in what is suspected to have been a deliberate attack.European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen on Tuesday called the incident “sabotage action” and warned that “any deliberate disruption of active European energy infrastructure is unacceptable and will lead to the strongest possible response.”
On Wednesday, Zakharova asked who exactly the warning would apply to.“I don’t get it. MEP Sikorski thanked the US for what had happened, so whom is Ursula ‘threatening’ there?” she wrote on social media.Zakharova was referring to the reaction to the incident by Sikorski, now an EU lawmaker, who posted a photo of the site where the explosions occurred on Twitter with the words: “Thank you, USA.” He described the incident as a “special maintenance operation.”Sikorski added that “there’s no shortage of pipeline capacity for taking gas from Russia to Western Europe, including Germany,” referring to the Yamal-Europe land pipeline that goes through Belarus and Poland. After the damage to the Nord Stream strings, Russian President Vladimir Putin “will have to talk to countries controlling” the alternative route to resume supplies, he predicted.Zakharova earlier asked if Sikorski’s tweets amounted to an “official statement that this was a terrorist attack.” Meanwhile, Dmitry Polyanskiy, the Russian deputy ambassador to the UN, thanked Sikorski for “making it crystal clear who stands behind this terrorist-style targeting of civilian infrastructure!”
The Ukrainian Jews came out and blamed Russia for the pipeline attacks, which means the Ukraine probably did it themselves. The Ukraine has been obsessively pushing this “false flag” stuff whenever they do terrorism, so I think it’s safe to assume that whenever they blame Russia for something that benefits them, they did it.
Of course, bombing a pipeline is a pretty complicated sabotage operation – much easier than say, blowing up someone’s car – so it’s possible it was done by the US.
Have you ever stumbled across a valuable rare find at a garage/yard sale or a secondhand store and knew you were getting too good of a deal? If you bought it, did you feel guilty and tell the other party what you found was worth at some point?
I worked with an estate sale company for four years. We saw all sorts of things, and sometimes the first person to slap a price on items erred pretty spectacularly. So, we looked out for each other and often suggested bumping prices up or down (all before our first day of sales, during the prep week).
For example, there was a full canister of r-22 refrigerant someone had slapped $10 on (it was going for about $60 a pound at the time, and this held maybe 5 pounds). We bumped it up to $80 & it was still one of the first things to sell. Another time, there was a $10 box of lightbulbs that was $6 at the store – we bumped that down to $4. If a wildly underpriced item from your area came up to the register, you were going to catch heck from the boss later and you would also get chewed out (to a lesser degree) if few things sold in your zone of responsibility because they were all overpriced.
One thing though – if the boss had priced an item, you did *not* suggest changing that price. She took it as an insult to her pride (& really did have a good grasp on market pricing 99% of the time).
At one sale, I couldn’t work the prep week and came in just to help out during the sale days. Before the doors opened, I was doing a once over, looking for any items we had missed putting a price on. A big serving spoon caught my eye. It had a certain “bong” to it, that you may have read about in the Lovejoy novels. Simply lovely, well crafted, and heavy. I turned it over, and spotted English hallmarks (1815, London, if memory serves). It was about 3 ounces of silver… priced at $8.
Pure silver.
Not knowing who had priced it, I took it up to the boss and suggested we bump the price up because it was hallmarked. She got a bit haughty and told me never mind, she had priced that one and serving spoons never sell. I said, “Well, OK” & put it exactly back on the table where I’d found it.
At exactly the 1 hour mark into the sale (when employees are allowed to buy items), I carried that silver spoon up to the front and put it in a basket. She didn’t think much of it, but I certainly felt like I’d found a way to pay myself that day.
Someday I’ll sell it. But, for now I keep it as a memento from that job and a reminder that no matter how much I think I know, it never hurts to listen to someone else for a second opinion.
Mr. Ed | Ed The Lover
5 Major Events That Have Happened Within The Last 100 Hours
If you think that nothing is happening, then you have not been paying attention. Within the past 100 hours, there has been a mysterious attack on the Nord Stream gas pipeline system, two monster storms have threatened North America, NASA rammed a spacecraft into an asteroid in order to knock it off course, and our ongoing stock market crash reached a new level when the Dow Jones Industrial Average officially plunged into bear market territory on Monday. I would say that is a pretty active 100 hours, but of course this is just the beginning. I believe that global events will continue to accelerate during the months ahead, but meanwhile most of the general population is still assuming that things will eventually “return to normal” somehow.
We live during times when so many things are happening all at once that it is truly difficult to keep up with it all.
Personally, I fully expect things to get even more “interesting” now that summer is over, and we are certainly off to a flying start. The following are 5 major events that have happened within the last 100 hours…
#1 A series of explosions has caused “unprecedented” damage to the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines…
The Nord Stream gas pipeline system endured “unprecedented” damage to three offshore lines on the bed of the Baltic Sea in one day, Nord Stream AG, the network’s operator, said on Tuesday.The AG said it was impossible to estimate when the gas network system’s working capability would be restored.“The destruction that occurred on the same day simultaneously on three strings of the offshore gas pipelines of the Nord Stream system is unprecedented. It is not yet possible to estimate the timing of the restoration of the gas transport infrastructure,” the operator told reporters.
As I discussed in a previous article, these pipelines are very well constructed and are extremely thick. In order to damage them, very large explosions would be needed, and that is apparently exactly what happened. In fact, the explosions that damaged these pipelines were so large that they actually registered on the Richter scale. Many European officials are insisting that this could not have been an accident, and I agree with them.
But if this was not an accident, who was responsible?
#2 Fiona turned out to be a truly historic disaster for our neighbors to the north. It violently slammed into Nova Scotia on Saturday, and we are being told that it was one of the most powerful storms in the entire history of Canada…
Fiona, the most powerful storm of this year’s Atlantic hurricane season, roared ashore in eastern Nova Scotia early Saturday as one of the strongest systems ever to hit the region, knocking out power, toppling trees and forcing residents to flee.Across Nova Scotia, 414,000 households were without power, or about 80% of Nova Scotia Power’s customers. Thousands more were hit in neighboring areas as well.
This was definitely a “monster storm”, but it looks like an even bigger storm could be about to hit Florida…
#3 On Tuesday, Hurricane Ian strengthened into a “major Category 3 hurricane”, and forecasters are warning that it could actually turn into a Category 4 storm before it finally collides with the west coast of Florida on Wednesday…
The center of Ian could strengthen into a Category 4 hurricane as it continues to move over the Gulf, NBC News forecasters said.
Ian will continue to intensify today through Wednesday as it approaches the west coast of Florida on Wednesday “as an extremely dangerous major hurricane,” according to the National Hurricane Center.
Without a doubt, Ian is a very dangerous storm, and it has the potential to cause an immense amount of damage once it reaches shore.
#4 On Monday, NASA rammed a spacecraft into an asteroid for the first time in history in order to see if it could alter the trajectory of the giant space rock…
NASA’s DART mission slammed into Dimorphos, a smaller space rock circling a larger asteroid called Didymos, to see if it could throw off the orbit of a potential future asteroid that was threatening life on Earth. Scientists will be watching the Didymos system closely to see how much Dimorphos’ orbit actually changed – those results won’t come for at least another two months.
Confirmation of NASA’s successful planetary defense test came seconds after the 7:14 ET (00:14 BST) 14,000 mph collision, sparking applause among the ground team at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland. ‘Impact success!’ NASA tweeted after the DART spacecraft collided with the 560 foot asteroid, around 6.7 million miles away from Earth.
Is NASA conducting such a test for a specific reason?
If so, they would never actually admit it.
Personally, I have a feeling that this is a very important story that is far from over.
#5 U.S. stock prices continue to crash.
Unlike the crash of 2008, what we have witnessed so far in the fall of 2022 has been slow and steady.
But prices just keep going down.
On Monday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average officially entered bear market territory.
And then on Tuesday the Dow fell some more.
Overall, the Dow has now fallen 21.2 percent from the previous all-time high, the S&P 500 is down 24.3 percent from the record it set in January, and the Nasdaq has plummeted more than 33 percent from the peak that it hit last November.
The amount of wealth that has already been wiped out is absolutely staggering. In fact, Forbes is reporting that the wealthiest tech tycoons have collectively lost 315 billion dollars over the past year…
Stock prices have dropped and inflation surged, making the members of The Forbes 400 list of the richest people in the U.S. a collective $500 billion poorer than last year. The wealthiest tech tycoons have taken the brunt of the beating: They have lost a combined $315 billion in net worth since the fall of 2021—accounting for nearly two thirds of the total drop in The Forbes 400’s wealth.
How would you feel if you and your friends lost 315 billion dollars in just one year?
Unfortunately, it appears that much more turmoil will be coming to Wall Street in the months ahead.
Economic problems are erupting all over the globe, more war is on the horizon, and our planet just keeps getting hit by one disaster after another.
It is almost as if we have entered some sort of a “perfect storm”, but most people out there still do not understand what is happening.
The strange events of the last 100 hours are not an anomaly.
We live at a time when really weird things are happening on a regular basis, and I have a feeling that the remainder of 2023 will bring us a lot more surprises.
What was life like in China year by year when it was having double digit GDP growth? What rapid quality of life improvements did you witness?
As a foreigner who has lived in China for almost twenty years, I think I have a lot to say on this issue.More than ten years have passed have passed since I followed my wife, whom I met abroad, to Hangzhou, China in 2005 and started a family here. Over the years, I have been to many places in China and have felt the many changes that have taken place. I would like to share my true feelings.
My city, Hangzhou, is located in the eastern part of China’s Zhejiang Province, it is a city with a long history and beautiful scenery. When I first came here, there were not so many high-rise buildings and clean and spacious streets, but many muddy and potholed alleys, poor drainage and even lack of lighting, and the traffic was not so convenient, but soon after I came here, Hangzhou government started a “city improvement” project, from road leveling, demolition of illegal buildings, construction of highways and overpasses to landscaping and landscape lighting, and suddenly the place became a new look. The city has suddenly become a new place. Hangzhou has been developing faster and faster over the years, with all kinds of beautiful skyscrapers going up and infrastructure getting better and better, and there are many scenic spots here, so more and more domestic and foreign tourists come here every year. As a “half” Hangzhouer, I am proud to be a part of it.
In addition to the changes in the appearance of the city, there is a change is also very obvious, that is, more and more small cars on the street. When I first came here, there were not many people driving cars, so I didn’t have to worry about traffic jams, but slowly, people are getting richer and richer, and more people are buying cars, but every time there is a traffic jam I can’t help but complain: I wish people weren’t so rich!
I have met many friends in China who have gotten better and better over the years. Almost all of my friends live in bigger and more beautiful houses, some completely self-funded and some government subsidized. I used to think that my friends were always hustling for a better life, they rarely thought about how well they would eat or how stylishly they would dress, they were always waiting for that “better” moment. Then one day, they finally began to enjoy, no longer “life is forced” hanging on the lips, food and clothing are more sophisticated, we have more opportunities to meet and have fun, and sometimes travel together. From them, I feel the happiness that life is becoming better and better. Of course, our family is also getting better and better.
The most amazing thing to me is that one day, cell phone payment suddenly appeared everywhere. You don’t need to carry cash when you go out, a cell phone can realize all the payments. Whether it’s taking the bus, taking the subway, eating at a restaurant, or visiting a tourist attraction, you can easily pay as long as your phone is in your hand, which is convenient and time-saving without worrying about the hidden dangers of carrying cash. In addition, you can also pay the phone bill, gas, electricity and other daily living expenses through the cell phone, no longer need to run to the relevant department institutions to pay, not to mention how convenient!
And, you know, there’s no fees. NONE. ZERO. No ATM fees, nor banking fees, no late fees, no “processing” fees. You can do it anywhere you want… pay in the toilet, at the bus station, in the taxi, at lunch. Easy to do, simple, and no fees at all for anything.
In addition to living in Hangzhou, I love to travel around China, it’s just so big and interesting! Every time I go to a different city, I get to experience a different culture and people. That’s why I found out that not only Hangzhou is changing, but also other places in China are developing and progressing. I used to have to take a train for more than 20 hours to go to places that are far away and not accessible by plane, but then there are many places that can be reached in 10 hours at most by high speed rail (you have to know that China is so big, this speed is already very impressive.) Over the years China has seen more and more high-speed trains and airports, connecting many big cities and smaller ones, forming a convenient transportation network, so you don’t have to worry about transportation when you go out to travel.
What struck me was some of the rural areas of China. I like to travel a lot, and when I first arrived in China, I would occasionally visit some rural areas, because many special landscapes are located in rural areas of China. But I have to admit that many of the places I visited at that time were not so economically developed, as evidenced by the muddy roads, backward infrastructure and imperfect tourism services, where people lacked transportation to get around and not many people had cell phones and computers. But when I went to these places several years later, I was shocked by the spacious and flat concrete roads, the solar-powered streetlights standing by the roadside, the beautiful buildings, and the well-built mobile communication base stations. I was amazed by such a strong change.
All of the above are the most realistic things I have seen and felt in the more than ten years I have lived in China. I have to admit that I didn’t like it very much at the beginning, but my wife is here and I am going to have a family here, so I choose to accept it. But when I saw the changes in both the big cities and the small places, I felt a huge surprise and emotion. China is a big country with a huge population. It is not easy to make the lives of so many people better in a short time, but China has done it. Now, I have fallen in love with the city of Hangzhou and with China.
So back to your question: What is life like in China that achieves double-digit GDP growth year after year? My answer is: progressive and full of hope. Welcome to come and see China if you have the chance.
Three Legged kitty
I have two 3-legged cats, Bert and Prius, but despite this difference they seem to be able to do everything they want to! They both can jump up 4–5 feet, and they often start the day with 3-legged races (zoomies). Bert is a master eater and cuddler, and Prius keeps close track of the activities of the next-door neighbors and the pigeons in the roof. And they are both exceptionally talented shedders of fur.
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Russian Foreign Ministry’s statement on the referendums in the DPR, LPR, Kherson and Zaporozhye regions:
On September 23-27, the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics, Kherson and Zaporozhye regions held referendums on their accession to the Russian Federation. The results of the voting have been tabulated, with the overwhelming majority of voters supporting unification with Russia – 99.23 percent in the DPR, 98.42 percent in the LPR, 93.11 percent in the Zaporozhye Region and 87.05 percent in the Kherson Region. The turnout was as follows: 97.5 percent in the DPR, 92.6 percent in the LPR, 85.4 in the Zaporozhye Region and 76.9 percent in the Kherson Region.
Despite the provocations of the Kiev regime that gave criminal orders to massively shell areas where civilians gather and civilian facilities, people were not afraid to come to the polls and express their will. The results of the plebiscite speak for themselves – the residents of Donbass, as well as the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions do not want to return to their former life. They have made a conscious and free choice in favour of Russia.
In fact, they had no alternative left. Far from all people in Ukraine acquiesced and accepted the coup in Kiev in February 2014 that brought to power radical nationalist forces that unleashed a bloody fight against those that would not accept it in the southeast of the country. The signing of the Minsk agreements approved by a UN Security Council resolution did not rescue the situation. As Ukrainian representatives are cynically saying now, Ukraine was never going to honour them from the very start and was preparing for war. For eight years, the population of Donbass was subjected to persistent and cynical attempts to destroy them. The decision of the residents of Donbass, the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions to seek protection from Russia was a natural result of the inhumane policy pursued by the Kiev regime.
The referendums took place in full conformity with the standards and principles of international law. The people of Donbass and the south of Ukraine exercised their lawful right to self-determination in accordance with the UN Charter, the 1966 international human rights covenants, the 1975 OCSE Helsinki Final Act, and the verdict of the UN International Court of Justice on Kosovo on July 22, 2010. The latter confirmed that the unilateral proclamation of independence by a part of a state does not violate any norms of international law.
International observers from Italy, Germany, Venezuela, Latvia and other countries (overall, 133 people) monitored the course of the referendums and recognised them as legitimate. We are grateful to foreign experts, bloggers, journalists and representatives of public organisations for their courage, integrity and objectivity.
In the near future, we will enter a critical stage in our joint efforts to translate into life the desire of the residents of the DPR, LPR, and the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions to be together with Russia.
Twelve O’Clock High S03E05 A Distant Cry
Germany and EU have been handed over a declaration of war
by Pepe Escobar, posted with the author’s permission and widely cross-posted
The sabotage of the Nord Stream (NS) and Nord Stream 2 (NS2) pipelines in the Baltic Sea has ominously propelled ‘Disaster Capitalism’ to a whole new, toxic level.
This episode of Hybrid Industrial/Commercial War, in the form of a terror attack against energy infrastructure in international waters signals the absolute collapse of international law, drowned by a “our way or the highway”, “rules-based”, order.
The attack on both pipelines consisted of multiple explosive charges detonated in separate branches close to the Danish island of Bornholm, but in international waters.
That was a sophisticated operation, carried out in stealth in the shallow depth of the Danish straits. That would in principle rule out submarines (ships entering the Baltic are limited to a draught of 15 meters). As for prospective “invisible” vessels, these could only loiter around with permission from Copenhagen – as the waters around Borholm are crammed with sensors, reflecting fear of incursion by Russian submarines.
Swedish seismologists registered two underwater explosions on Monday – one of them estimated at 100 kg of TNT. Yet as much as 700 kg may have been used to blow up three separate pipeline nodes. Such amount could not have possibly been delivered in just one trip by underwater drones currently available in neighboring nations.
The pressure on the pipelines dropped exponentially. The pipes are now filled with seawater.
The pipes on both NS and NS2 can be repaired, of course, but hardly before the arrival of General Winter. The question is whether Gazprom – already focused on several hefty Eurasian customers – would bother, especially considering that Gazprom vessels could be exposed to a possible NATO naval attack in the Baltic.
German officials are already spinning that NS and NS2 can “potentially” be out of commission “forever”. The EU economy and EU citizens badly needed that gas supply. Yet the EUrocracy in Brussels – which rules over nation-states – would not follow, because they have been dictated themselves by the Empire of Chaos, Lies and Plunder. A case can be made that this Euro-oligarchy should one day be tried for treason.
As it stands, a strategic irreversibility is already self-evident; the population of several EU nations will pay a tremendous price and suffer serious consequences derived from this attack, short, medium and long term.
Cui bono?
Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson admitted that was “a matter of sabotage”. Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen admitted “it was not an accident”. Berlin agrees with the Scandinavians.
Now compare it with former Polish Defense Minister (2005-2007) Radek Sikorski, a Russophobe married to rabid US “analyst” Anne Applebaum, who merrily tweeted “Thank you, USA”.
It gets curiouser and curiouser when we know that simultaneously to the sabotage the Baltic Pipe from Norway to Poland was partially opened, a “new gas supply corridor” servicing “the Danish and Polish markets”: actually a minor affair, considering months ago their sponsors were in trouble finding gas, and now it will be even harder, with much higher costs.
NS2 had already been attacked – in the open – all along its construction. Back in February, Polish ships actively tried to prevent the Fortuna pipe-laying vessel from finishing NS2. The pipes were being laid south of – you guessed it – Bornholm.
NATO for its part has been very active on the underwater drones department. The Americans have access to long distance Norwegian underwater drones which can be modified with other designs. Alternatively, professional navy clearance divers could have been employed in the sabotage – even as tidal currents around Bornholm are a serious matter.
The Big Picture reveals the collective West in absolute panic, with Atlanticist “elites” willing to resort to anything – outrageous lies, assassinations, terrorism, sabotage, all out financial war, support to neo-Nazis – to prevent their descent into a geopolitical and geoeconomic abyss.
Disabling NS and NS2 represents the definitive closure of any possibility of a German-Russia deal on gas supplies, with the added benefit of relegating Germany to the lowly status of absolute US vassal.
So that brings us to the key question of which Western intel apparatus designed the sabotage. Prime candidates are of course CIA and MI6 – with Poland set up as the fall guy and Denmark playing a very dodgy part: it’s impossible that Copenhagen was not at least “briefed” on the intel.
Prescient as ever, as early as in April 2021 Russians were asking questions about the military security of Nord Stream.
The crucial vector is that we may be facing the case of a EU/NATO member involved in an act of sabotage against the number one EU/NATO economy. That’s a casus belli. Outside of the appalling mediocrity and cowardice of the current administration in Berlin, it’s clear that the BND – German intel – as well as the German Navy and informed industrialists sooner or later will do the math.
This was far from an isolated attack. On September 22 there was an attempt against Turkish Stream by Kiev saboteurs. The day before, naval drones with English language IDs were found in Crimea, suspected of being part of the plot. Add to it US helicopters overflying the future sabotage nodes weeks ago; a UK “research” vessel loitering in Danish waters since mid-September; and NATO tweeting about the testing of “new unmanned systems at sea” on the same day of the sabotage.
Show me the (gas) money
The Danish Minister of Defense met urgently with NATO’s Secretary General this Wednesday. After all the explosions happened very close to Denmark’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ). That may be qualified as crude kabuki at best; exactly on the same day, the European Commission (EC), NATO’s de facto political office, advanced its trademark obsession: more sanctions against Russia, including the certified-to-fail cap on oil prices.
Meanwhile, EU energy giants are bound to lose big time with the sabotage.
The roll call includes the German Wintershall Dea AG and PEG/ E.ON; the Dutch N.V. Nederlandse Gasunie; and the French ENGIE. Then there are those which financed NS2: Wintershall Dea again as well as Uniper; Austrian OMV; ENGIE again; and British-Dutch Shell. Wintershall Dea and ENGIE are both co-owners and creditors. Their fuming shareholders will want serious answers from a serious investigation.
It gets worse: there are no holds barred anymore on the Pipeline Terror front. Russia will be on red alert not only for Turk Stream but also Power of Siberia. Same for the Chinese and their maze of pipelines arriving in Xinjiang.
Whatever the methodology and the actors who were in the loop, this is payback – in advance – for the inevitable collective West defeat in Ukraine. And a crude warning to the Global South that they will do it again. Yet action always breeds reaction: from now on, “funny things” could also happen to US/UK pipelines in international waters.
The EU oligarchy is reaching an advanced process of disintegration at lightning speed. Their window of opportunity to at least attempt a role as a strategically autonomous geopolitical actor is now closed.
These EUROcrats now face a serious predicament. Once it’s clear who are the perpetrators of the sabotage in the Baltic, and once they understand all the life-changing socio-economic consequences for pan-EU citizens, the kabuki will have to stop. Including the already running, uber-ridiculous subplot that Russia blew up its own pipeline when Gazprom could simply have turned off the valves for good.
And once again, it gets worse: Gazprom is threatening to sue the Ukrainian energy company Naftofgaz for unpaid bills. That would lead to the end of Russian gas transiting Ukraine towards the EU.
As if all of that was not serious enough, Germany is contractually obligated to purchase at least 40 billion cubic meters of Russian gas a year until 2030.
Just say no? They can’t: Gazprom is legally entitled to get paid even without shipping gas. That’s the spirit of a long-term contract. And it’s already happening: because of sanctions, Berlin does not get all the gas it needs but still needs to pay.
All the devils are here
Now it’s painfully clear the imperial velvet gloves are off when it comes to the vassals. EU independence: verboten. Cooperation with China: verboten. Independent trade connectivity with Asia: verboten. The only place for the EU is to be economically subjugated to the US: a tawdry remix of 1945-1955. With a perverse neoliberal twist: we will own your industrial capacity, and you will have nothing.
The sabotage of NS and NS2 is inbuilt in the imperial wet dream of breaking up the Eurasian land mass into a thousand pieces to prevent a trans-Eurasia consolidation between Germany (representing the EU), Russia and China: $50 trillion in GDP, based on purchasing power parity (PPP) compared to the US’s $20 trillion.
We must go back to Mackinder: control of the Eurasian land mass constitutes control of the world. American elites and their Trojan Horses across Europe will do whatever it takes not to give up their control.
“American elites” in this context encompass the deranged, Straussian neo-con-infested “intel community” and the Big Energy, Big Pharma and Big Finance that pays them and who profits not only from the Deep State’s Forever War approach but also wants to make a killing out of the Davos-concocted Great Reset.
The Raging Twenties started with a murder – of Gen Soleimani. Blowing up pipelines is part of the sequel. There will be a highway to hell all the way to 2030. Yet to borrow from Shakespeare, hell is definitely empty, and all the (Atlanticist) devils are here.
Pepe Escobar is an independent geopolitical analyst and author. His latest book is Raging Twenties. He’s been politically canceled from Facebook and Twitter. Follow him on Telegram.
China is going to kill an Australian citizen who smuggles drug in China. Should the US and other allies help Australia to rescue him?
Two things I believe: One is a man should have the choice if he wishes to end his own life. Its nobody else’s business.
Two, is a soveriegn nation should have the ability to make whatever laws it chooses within its borders. It’s only the business of its citizens.
The Australian drug trafficker chose to end his life when he smuggled 7.5kg of methamphetamine through a Chinese airport. Whether I agree with the law or not is of no consequence. I am not a Chinese and it’s not my country. It’s their law and you must respect it if you go there. If you dont agree with their laws, or don’t trust their enforcement – don’t go there!
I am a western expat and live in Indonesia, another country with the death penalty for drug smuggling, and another country with a regular flow of Australians who wish to end their lives. There are signs at the airports just to remind you of the choice you are making:
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Should you proceed, and smuggling drugs you have chosen to end your life. Simple!
Dan Bongino: Biden could literally annihilate the planet
Peter Frampton – Baby, I Love Your Way – 7/2/1977
Senior year – High School. MM stories and tales.
Slow-Cooker Meatball Stone Soup
Simmer this hearty main-course meatball soup in the slow cooker, and make it a fuss-free, delicious dinner.
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Ingredients
1 bag (16 oz) frozen cooked Italian-style meatballs
1 carton (32 oz) Progresso™ beef flavored broth
2 cans (14.5 oz each) diced tomatoes with Italian herbs, undrained
1 medium potato, chopped (1 cup)
1 medium onion, chopped (1/2 cup)
1/4 teaspoon garlic-pepper blend
1 bag (1 lb) frozen mixed vegetables
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ELO – Mr Blue Sky, Turn to Stone & Shine a Little Love
The United States seems to think it has the right to interfere in the affairs of other countries if it serves its ends. Is this moral, and in the end will it backfire on us?
In my opinion, it is immoral. Countries have their sovereignty, which makes them independent of other nations like the United States. What right does the US have to stick their nose into other countries’ business?
Violating sovereignty is usually a basis for war. Is this what we support, unending warfare around the globe in the name of US exceptionalism?
It is already backfiring. The US reputation around the world is shit. Countries are trying to distance themselves from America like, for example, move away from US Dollar (or “Petro-dollar”) tyranny.
“The least-bad scenario is a hard landing, global recession worse than the 1930s. The worst-case borrows from the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: war, famine, pestilence, and death.”– Kenneth S. Deffeyes
I don’t pretend to be a biblical scholar or have any particular expertise in interpreting scriptures, and certainly not the Book of Revelation, supposedly written by John of Patmos during the reign of Roman emperor Domitian sometime between 81 AD and 96 AD. But I did suffer through twelve years of Catholic school, with plenty of time reading the bible for homework assignments. I know many people take everything in the bible literally. I do not adhere to that understanding. I believe most, if not all, of the bible is parables and symbolism written by men as a means to guide early Christians in how they should live their lives. The wisdom imparted by these writers is vast and deep. The Book of Revelation is the most apocalyptic, mysterious, and prophetic.
I would agree with scholars who say Revelation does not refer to actual people or events but is an allegory of the spiritual path and the ongoing struggle between good and evil. But, as our modern-day world seems to be coming apart at the seams, the battle between good and evil is reaching a zenith, only seen at crucial turning points in history.
The scale of propaganda designed to mislead the public, scope of deceit exhibited by our hand-picked leaders, level of wickedness in the purposeful destruction of economic systems based on climate crisis lies, purposeful infliction of pain and suffering upon the masses through destruction of conventional food and energy structures, implosion of the financial system due to incompetence and/or willfully malicious motivations, and incessant provocations of Russia and China designed to ignite a global conflagration, are all part of one demonic plan.
Knowing we are reaching the most violent phase of this Fourth Turning and this kind of horrendous whirlwind has occurred during the fall of previous empires, does not make it any easier to confront or endure.
As the stock market implodes, draining the retirement savings of working men and women once again, inflation rages out of control, pushing lower and middle class families to the brink, our senile Trojan horse president, implements a country destroying agenda at the behest of his globalist handlers designed to incite a civil war, and the Deep State/Military Industrial Complex attempts to monetize Ukraine and Taiwan to fill their coffers with billions in war profits, the world teeters on the brink of a collapse which will make the Great Depression/World War II era seem like a walk in the park.
And very few people see it coming or are prepared in any way for the consequences. They have spent too much time in government school indoctrination centers, soaked up too much propaganda spewed by the corporate legacy media doing the bidding of those in power, have been misinformed and misled by the left wing Silicon Valley social media conglomerates, and are too distracted by their gadgets, social media likes, fake reality TV, and modern day sports circuses.
I’m certainly not predicting the end times or second coming of Christ, but the parable of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse sure seems applicable in this modern-day Crisis – the latest times that try men’s souls. We are in a time of Crisis, just as we were in the 1780’s, 1860’s, and 1940’s, all 80 years apart. The 2020’s will also go down in history as a time of fateful decisions, great battles, heroes, villains, and ultimately a purging of the existing social order – to be replaced by something better or far worse.
It truly is a time where government tyranny at the behest of billionaire globalist elite will need to be overcome by true patriots who value freedom and liberty enough to sacrifice their lives in its pursuit. As evil engulfs the world from all sides, the stalwart few are all that stand between never ending tyranny and the possibility of re-instituting a semblance of the republic we were originally given. We can be heartened by the words of Thomas Paine.
“These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives everything its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as Freedom should not be highly rated.”– Thomas Paine, The Crisis
The parallels between our current state of affairs and the prophecies foretold in Revelations 6: 1 – 8 certainly seem eerie and disconcerting. The four horsemen seem to symbolically portray four disastrous occurrences that will take place before the second coming of Jesus Christ. Since these books were written during the height of the Roman Empire many historians tie the passages to events taking place during that time. In John’s revelation, the first horseman rides on a white horse, carries a bow, and is given a crown – he rides forward as a figure of Conquest, perhaps invoking Pestilence, Christ, or the Antichrist.
The second carries a sword and rides a red horse and is the creator of Civil War, conflict, and strife. The third, a food-merchant riding upon a black horse, symbolizes Famine. He carries The Scales. The fourth and final horse is pale, and upon it rides Death, accompanied by Hades. The four horses certainly seem well represented today, as global conflict is on the verge of breaking out; our illegitimate president declares half the country as dangerous extremists, attempting to incite a civil war; purposely created food shortages and famine endanger the lives of millions; and death on a large-scale looms across the globe, as the malevolent purveyors of the satanic Great Reset seek to depopulate the planet.
White Horse – Conquest, War, Antichrist, Pestilence
“Then I saw when the Lamb broke one of the seven seals, and I heard one of the four living creatures saying as with a voice of thunder, “Come.” I looked, and behold, a white horse, and he who sat on it had a bow; and a crown was given to him, and he went out conquering and to conquer.”— Revelation 6:1–2
The White Horse of Conquest seems to be the most confusing of the four, as early Christians interpreted the rider to be Christ. Many centuries later the interpretation was redefined by evangelicals as the Antichrist. Considering the other three horses clearly represented negative events, the negative connotation of the rider on the White Horse makes more sense. Other historians thought the White Horse represented the prosperous times of the Roman Empire. Another interpretation focused the spreading of pestilence and disease, as stated at the end of the passage regarding the Pale Horse.
“The horseman on the white horse was clad in a showy and barbarous attire. While his horse continued galloping, he was bending his bow in order to spread pestilence abroad. At his back swung the brass quiver filled with poisoned arrows, containing the germs of all diseases.” – Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
As I step back and observe the sheer malevolence of our overlords, who control the world behind the scenes through useful idiots and empty vessels (Biden, Trudeau, Johnson, Macron, Ardern), I certainly lean towards the negative viewpoint of an Antichrist figure or figures bent on destruction of the world for their satanic purposes. I know the left and their neo-con brothers in arms bloviate that Trump and Putin are the Antichrist figures on the scene today. Neither fit the profile of leaders looking to conquer the world. Trump started no wars and sought to conquest no one. It has been the warmongers who stabbed him in the back.
The real Ukraine conflict commenced in 2014 with the U.S. initiated coup against the democratically elected president. For the last eight years, besides functioning as a Biden family money laundering operation, Ukraine has been slaughtering Russian speaking citizens in the Donbass region. Putin has shown tremendous restraint in limiting his special operation and has shown no inclination to conquer Ukraine. It has been Biden, NATO, and their globalist controllers who stopped Zelensky from negotiating a peace treaty and are pushing the world towards an apocalyptic outcome.
In my view, the triumvirate of Soros, Gates and Schwab represent the evil forces purposely attempting to destroy the world, so they can institute their Great Reset agenda of depopulation, digital currencies, forcing the plebs to eat bugs, instituting social credit scores in a techno-gulag world, and creating a modern-day dark age. These maniacal narcissists are nothing but a malignant cancerous tumor growing across the globe that must be eradicated by any means necessary. We are truly in a battle for the soul of this planet.
Whether you are religious or not, you cannot deny there is a clear delineation between good and evil in the interactions propagandized on a daily basis. Mutilating children in the name of transgender deviancy, promoting drag show freaks being touched by children, pushing porn in school libraries, unleashing a crimewave of lawlessness in our cities by releasing convicts and not prosecuting felons, weaponizing diseases as bio-weapons, killing millions by suppressing lifesaving treatments (ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine), and injecting a billion people with a poisonous concoction that will kill more people than died of the flu virus it didn’t stop, are all deliberately being thrust upon us by these diabolical satanic monsters in their thirst for power, wealth and unimpeded control of the planet.
They are truly representative of the Antichrist, posing as saviors of the world, but driven by evil motives. The battle has begun, but most have failed to come to this realization.
Red Horse – Civil War, Persecution of Christians
“When He broke the second seal, I heard the second living creature saying, “Come.” And another, a red horse, went out; and to him who sat on it, it was granted to take peace from Earth, and that men would slay one another; and a great sword was given to him.”— Revelation 6:3–4
The rider on the fiery red horse with a raised sword is associated with war, and specifically civil war. The red color and the sword suggest blood to be spilled. The second Horseman represents civil war as opposed to the war of conquest that the first Horseman is said to bring. Others have suggested it might also represent the persecution of Christians. Edward Bishop Elliott’s interpretation of the Red Horse was a foretelling of the period of the Roman Empire after the death of Commodus, a turbulent period lasting 92 years, during which time 32 emperors and 27 pretenders to the Empire hurled each other from the throne by incessant civil warfare.
The first two horses portend war, and the world is clearly hurtling towards conflict on many fronts. We already know Biden is fronting the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine as the tens of billions in “aid” flow directly into the coffers of the U.S. military industrial complex. Thinking they could bankrupt Putin with sanctions and bleed him with weapons has completely backfired on the EU lackeys and Slow Joe. Frostbite and famine are on the horizon for Europe, while raging inflation and crashing financial markets shift control of Congress to the “extremist party” of insurrectionists.
Biden’s dark hateful speech on the steps of Independence Hall, where brave “insurrectionists” spit in the eye of a tyrant two hundred and forty-six years ago, cast the first stone in the inevitable civil war which will rage across the land when the so called MAGA extremists actually push back against the tyranny being inflicted on them by the FBI, DOJ, and their co-conspirator social media censorship police.
We are in the midst of both a physical war, where Biden and his apparatchiks are using the power of the state to inflict their totalitarian punishments, and a spiritual war where deviancy is celebrated, and Christians are persecuted. Innocent men and women who meandered around the Capitol on January 6, after being ushered in by undercover FBI agents, with incitement provided by Ray Epps and ANTIFA plants, continue to rot in DC dungeons, as real criminals who murder Trump supporters with their vehicles are back on the streets within hours.
Just this past week Biden’s goons at the criminal DOJ sent a SWAT team of 25 to 30 heavily armed FBI agent thugs to terrorize and arrest a Christian anti-abortion advocate in front of his seven young children based on bullshit trumped up charges from a minor incident over a year ago. Biden’s handlers have been using intimidation tactics since his installation as a Trojan horse president to provoke Christians and normal people into responding violently to their authoritarian atrocities.
So far, the only violence has been committed by left wing extremists, as Democrat run urban ghettos descend into lawless murder sanctuaries, with Soros bought DA’s inflaming the spiral of violent upheaval. The time will come when there will be pushback at a level not anticipated by these vile worms as they continue to promulgate their toxic slime, thinking they are untouchable. They aren’t.
Black Horse – Plagues & Famine
“When He broke the third seal, I heard the third living creature saying, “Come.” I looked, and behold, a black horse; and he who sat on it had a pair of scales in his hand. And I heard something like a voice in the center of the four living creatures saying, “A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius; but do not damage the oil and the wine.”— Revelation 6:5–6
The rider on the Black Horse has been generally interpreted as representing famine and plagues which accompany them. Famine does go hand in hand with war, and today’s circumstances certainly confirm this linkage. The sanctions imposed on Russia by the U.S. and the EU have created famine and starvation, especially in the 3rd world countries. Ukraine and Russia account for the majority of wheat produced in the world. This NATO/U.S. proxy war has created shortages of wheat and produced a global energy crisis which fuels further famine and supply chain disruptions.
These actions have been purposeful, with disastrous consequences which have only just begun. Driving the price of diesel fuel and fertilizer to sky high levels has driven farmers into bankruptcy and the price of food to stratospheric levels. When Mr. Depopulation – Bill Gates – owns the most farmland in America, you should be worried. His agenda does not benefit you.
The reference to wheat and barley becoming too expensive, while oil and wine are spared shows how, once again, the poor suffer, while the rich continue to eat and drink lavishly. It was true during the Roman Empire, and it is still true today during the waning days of the American Empire. The statement suggests a continuing abundance of luxuries for the wealthy, while staples, such as bread, are scarce, though not totally depleted.
The selective scarcity of foodstuffs for the average family is the result of injustice inflicted upon the masses by our wealthy powerful overlords. I know the passage refers to olive oil, but in today’s context high oil prices benefit the powerful interests, while inflicting pain upon the masses. Never ending war benefits Biden’s controllers, while currently sentencing Ukrainian citizens to death. Young Americans will be offered next as cannon fodder for the Deep State.
Those pulling the strings of society (the invisible government per Edward Bernays) know civilization will crash when food and energy become scarce and too expensive for the plebs to afford. They control the modern-day mechanisms of mass food production and fossil fuel production. Whatever they have been doing with geo-engineering our weather through chemtrails to create droughts and floods, it is not being done to benefit you.
It isn’t a coincidence that hundreds of food processing plants have been burnt to the ground in the last year. The shutting down of nuclear power plants across Europe, with no replacement energy sources is madness, but is being done by globalist puppet leaders across the continent. Biden and his handlers have banned pipelines, fracking, drilling and anything designed to produce more fossil fuel energy. The green energy lies are spewed 24/7, based upon fantasy thinking. These evil acolytes of Satan want you to starve and freeze and then beg them to save you by surrendering your freedom, liberty, and lives to their totalitarian whims.
Pale Horse – Death
“When the Lamb broke the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature saying, “Come.” I looked, and behold, a pale horse; and he who sat on it had the name Death; and Hades was following with him. Authority was given to them over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by the wild beasts of the earth.”— Revelation 6:7–8
The rider on the Pale Horse was named Death, with Hades, the god of the dead and king of the underworld, following. In my view, the prophecy of the Pale Horse is not complicated. When food supplies dwindle, fuel is depleted and wars break out, death will naturally follow. The pale color connotates death, as human beings go pale as death approaches and their lifeblood is drained. I would also postulate the deadly pale appearance displays a hue symptomatic of approaching empire dissolution.
It is clear to me we are witnessing the fading glory of a dying empire, with the wailing and gnashing of teeth expected during such a phase. The rampant deviancy, corruption, greed, intimidation through dwindling military might, and threats of an aging bully against trumped up enemies, are all signs of an empire turning pale, but willing to create death on a grand scale during its own death throes.
Death is the last rider, because the previous three have sowed the seeds of death across the earth. If Death has authority over one-fourth of the earth, we may be in for a difficult final 5 to 10 years of this Fourth Turning. Strauss & Howe do contemplate the worst-case scenario as one of their four outcomes:
“This Fourth Turning could mark the end of man. It could be an omnicidal Armageddon, destroying everything, leaving nothing. If mankind ever extinguishes itself, this will probably happen when its dominant civilization triggers a Fourth Turning that ends horribly. For this Fourth Turning to put an end to all this would require an extremely unlikely blend of social disaster, human malevolence, technological perfection, and bad luck.” – The Fourth Turning, Strauss & Howe
When they wrote these words in 1997, this particular outcome seemed outrageous and unthinkable. If I step outside of my normalcy bubble and observe everything swirling around this demented world, I can visualize this scenario playing out due to the miscalculation of evil men trying to implement their evil designs. If Death engulfs a quarter of the planet, that will result in the deaths of 1 to 2 billion people. Hades would be a busy guy.
The Soros, Gates, Schwab Great Reset agenda is built upon a massive depopulation of the planet, centralized control of the world in the hands of a few billionaire global elites, a totalitarian technocracy enforced by police and military forces, and a population thankful to be eating bugs, owning nothing, and forever subservient to their overlords of darkness. This is not the future any freedom loving person should accept or tolerate.
Have we entered the End Times? Hell if I know. With the advances in technological warfare over the last eighty years, the possibility of Armageddon certainly exists. I prefer to concentrate on a way to avoid my own death for as long as possible and to make sure my sons and their children have a future worth living for, and not rotting in a gulag, because I didn’t fight back when I had the responsibility to do so. Two quotes from Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago resonate with me as I ponder the evil deeds of those in power today.
The first addresses the dilemma of parsing good versus evil. To me it shows how complicated it is to put faith in any leader as being good and trustworthy. Every human has good and evil in their hearts (except Hillary Clinton’s charcoal black soul), and we are capable of following either when put in certain circumstances. I believe most of those who have gone over to the evil side have been lured in that direction by the promise of extreme wealth and power. Satan (aka Soros) knows greed and avarice are the major weakness of human beings and employs them to the fullest.
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.” ― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
As Pedo Pete (aka Dementia Joe) declared a couple weeks ago, he and his minions are already at war. They are already using their Stasi security forces in the DOJ and FBI to break down doors, imprison innocent people on false charges, intimidate political enemies by raiding their homes, not following due process for J6 defendants, declaring all opposition as nazis and extremists, and trashing the Constitution on a daily basis. Those in opposition to the existing establishment have already been declared enemies of the state.
Before long, just as they did under Stalin, security state goons will begin apprehending and intimidating good people for no reason other than their opposition to Biden. Will enough people have the courage and fortitude to fight back when the time comes? To passively submit and hope for justice in a court of law will be a fool’s errand. Expecting to vote ourselves out of this predicament is another fool’s errand. If the vast firepower of current day patriots is utilized properly, today’s Organ’s will be rapidly depleted of men and will pause before breaking doors down in the middle of the night. Our remaining choices are to burn in camps or fight for our dwindling freedom.
Peter Gabriel Solsbury Hill Best Quality in HD with Lyrics
I rolled down my window and offered to buy him coffee which he was hesitant but grateful to accept. As we drove to Dunkin Donuts I asked him where he was going to sleep he said he didn’t know so on the way I called the local and other homeless shelters within a 10 mile area…no spots. It was then I knew why I won the $200, God placed Glenn in my path for a reason, so I drove him to the Rosewood Inn in Wareham and paid for a 2 night stay.
I’ve never seen a grown man cry; he began praying and telling me I was an angel. So tonight I know my new friend Glenn is warm.”
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What’s it like living in Vietnam?
For an expat, I think living in Hanoi is a little like living in Paris in the early 20th century. Even though it is a communist country, I feel like Henry Miller here-I am free. Life is affordable and intellectuals and artists and students gather at cafes over rich, dark coffee in the ruins of old French colonial villas. Photographers get together for street photography outings. The art scene is booming , with many contemporary art galleries flourishing, set in atmospheric colonial buildings and spotlighting Vietnamese artists who were oppressed for decades but now freely expressing themselves. Here you have the great luxury of time. Vietnam is on the rise and is an incredibly hard working country, yet life still is lived at a human pace . People take time out one another,
The architecture is hauntingly beautiful, and the layers of history in this 2,000 year old city would take a lifetime to explore. The streets are lined with stately old trees shading broad French boulevards. But walk away a few steps and you find yourself lost in winding alleyways that likely haven’t changed much for centuries.
Like all of former indochina , Vietnam offers much of the beauty of French life, although perhaps more that of Paris circa 1890 or 1920 than today’s France. And you can see a French aesthetic in everything from the tall yellow villas with their green shuttered windows and winding staircases to the patisseries on every corner, the French cheeses in neighborhood stores, the baguette lady selling bread on the street, and the hot roasted chestnuts cooked fresh over an open fire on the sidewalk on a wintry day. The food is delicious and healthy. I realized after moving here how much of a food desert the US is. People bring each other fresh fruits as gifts, and even the most humble dishes are loaded with vegetables, many of which I was unfamiliar with, greens gathered by the roadside or grown in a vacant lot. People shop at the market every day for fresh produce and you can easily eat a healthy delicious meal at a street side restaurant for $1.50. The coffee culture is a world unto itself, with separate cafes that only serve coffee, including the famous egg coffee.
Vietnam is very safe. There is almost no violent crime and surprisingly little petty crime . Guns are outlawed, and the biggest danger is motorbike accidents. And of course, Vietnam is one of the safest countries in the world in terms of COVID, with only 33 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic. Children play outside after dark and walk to school alone. There is still a Confucian culture of respect and mutual obligation and a strong Buddhist belief in karma. So you will find that most people act honorably and with kindness, and want to help others.
I have found that in Vietnam I have had opportunities I never would have had elsewhere. Within six months of living here I had two books on learning English published by the national publishing company, which are now in widespread use at universities throughout the country. I was asked to host my own television news show on state TV. As well as teaching at a university, I started working for a government minister starting schools in apartment complexes throughout the city, so children don’t have to travel to school. I began assisting the vice minister of golf with plans to promote tourism in resorts centered around world class golf courses.. I have met fascinating authors and artists and musicians. Vietnam is a place that is rising, and it is easy to find many financial opportunities and the chance to try new things, whether it is a business business venture, a life drawing class or traditional Vietnamese martial arts
There are downsides of course. The first month I moved here I was absolutely overwhelmed, anxious and depressed.The pollution, the noise and chaos of millions of motorbikes seemed too much for me, and many foreigners leave because of the stress and find the culture too different to adjust to easily. But I soon found that despite Hanoi being a city of 8 million, life is actually gracious and gentle here, and the people are truly welcoming and care about others.
In terms of dealing with the more anxiety-producing aspects of Hanoi, I have done something I don’t usually do in a new country, which is remove myself to a more westernized environment. I lived in a very local area the first few months and it was too hard for me. But moving into a luxury high rise apartment complex provided a buffer. Although no westerners live in my building, it is populated with wealthy, well-traveled Vietnamese as well as Korean and Japanese expats who are less likely to want to touch my hair or comment on how fat and white and tall I am. I have a little more privacy, which is very hard to come by in this country, and an enormous outdoor swimming pool and a gorgeous indoor pool and spa. A Japanese bakery and Korean restaurant in the building, as well as a Vinmart and a Vietnamese restaurant. Manicured grounds free from motorbike traffic allow me to walk in peace and safety, without always dodging the appalling traffic. A live-in maid here only costs about $300 a month and having a driver, saves me from the excitement and danger of driving a motorbike in traffic except on rare occasions. Normally, I would want to live in the most local area possible and get to know the life of the average person. But in this instance, I found that having a quiet place to retreat with a few luxuries has made all the hard adjustments of living in such a very foreign place possible. I suppose it depends on your temperament.
Hanoi has about the same population as New York-8 million -and getting out of town every now and then helps too. The city is only about an hour from beautiful mountains with rivers winding through Ninh Binh province to the west and the breathtaking karst islands of Halong Bay heading East towards the Pacific. Hanoi does have four seasons, though the winter is mild and brief. But if you prefer hot weather all year round, Ho Chi Minh City may be better. And if you enjoy a smaller city or rural area , there are many breathtaking mountainous provinces where traditional hill tribes reside, and beaches and islands that can rival anywhere in Southeast Asia.
I think Vietnam is a good place to live as an expat regardless of your tastes, although I cannot speak to what it is like to live here as a Vietnamese. If you want to start a business and invest, work as an English teacher, explore ancient cultures, wildlife, contemporary art, or just lie on the beach, you can be happy here.
Why is the Chinese Communist Party so corrupt? Xi Jinping has already purged 1.5 million corrupt officials.
There’s an interesting difference between China, and say, US politics. I use the US as I am American and know more about my government than other Western countries.
In the US, it’s just a matter of course that our politicians accept large amounts of money for their campaign, that they have access to stock market trading information (I just read articles this week about Nancy Pelosi and her insider training), and they’re given money and perks by special interest groups and we call it lobbying. They have truckloads of money that their salary doesn’t explain (guess they got paid well for some appearances etc) and many if not most of them have mistresses or lovers outside of their marriage. They get special privileges if they’re ever pulled over by the police. Heck, Trump had advance notice that Mar-a-Lago was being raided. Must be nice!
We just accept all of that. We don’t like it but we know those with power will never vote to reduce their power. That’s why they never vote to set term limits even though it’s needed for both sides of the aisle. I’m fair about it; I hate both sides equally. We don’t like it but we know we can’t change it.
So we watch our country implode. Crumbling infrastructure, a homelessness epidemic, a drug crisis, kids being killed at school, systemic racism, urban inner city areas turned into turf wars and shoot-outs between gangs. Broken healthcare, broken education, broken justice system. We are broken.
In China? If their government officials are money hungry and ineffective they will pay for it. And depending on how bad the corruption they could receive the death penalty. People are people everywhere so of course some still try to fly under the radar but Xi’s reform and targeting of corruption has improved things a lot. Is he supposed to fix all of it in three terms when it’s a decades-old problem? He’s not God. He can’t work miracles. He’s doing what he can with what he has. He’s trying to return them to a meritocracy and for that I applaud him.
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Jazzy
This was my best friend, Jazzy. She died recently due to a heart and lung problem that came about very suddenly one morning. The night before she seemed fine. I found her beside the bed frothing from her mouth and having a very difficult time breathing. I dropped everything I was doing and in a total state of panic drove her immediately to the emergency pet hospital. Her prognosis was very grim with only a 2 percent chance of survival and she was suffering horribly. The vet said the kindest thing would be to put her down. Reluctantly I agreed and stood by her side until the end. I cried uncontrollably as she passed, trying to console her that it was ok for her to leave. I stroked her gently as she took her last breath. She was with me for 15 years of her life.
x
I had her remains cremated and keep her next to my bed by her favorite spot by the window. This all happened about a month ago and I still cry at the loss of a friend who gave me unconditional love for all those years.
Daniel Craig once said: “If your kid is bullying my kid, and my kid has tried to tell your kid to stop, and your kid doesn’t, my kid has been instructed to punch your kid in the face.” What are your thoughts on this?
In preschool, when my daughter was bullied, she was instructed to inform a teacher, and the bully was immediately punished.
Upon entering kindergarten, she was struck by a boy in her class, and she informed her teacher. The teacher replied, “You’re tattling! Stop it!”
My daughter came home and related the story, and I taught her how to punch.
Hard.
The next time the boy hit her, she punched him in the face and he burst into tears.
Big surprise – I was called into the school for a conference with this teacher.
She barely got two words out when I broke in,
“So, if the boy hits her and she tells you, its tattling. If she hits him back, she's in trouble?
What, do you expect she should just get hit?
Nobody, but nobody, is teaching my child that she must be somebody's victim!
That's how abused women are made.
My daughter will either take the problem to you - you do have those anti bullying posters all over the hall - and you punish the child who is causing the problem, or if you won't stop him, SHE WILL.
It's called self defense.
She is nobody's victim including yours.
She will not be punished here or at home for defending herself.
If she lays hands first, she WILL answer TO ME and I assure you this will not happen.
Now are you going to take care of this boy problem or is she?”
The teacher just stared, open-mouthed, and never answered.
I said, “I guess she will then.”
No punishment was ever served on my daughter, and that boy didn’t bother her again – until once in the fourth grade.
He smacked her in her back and she turned around and punched him in the head.
Two teachers saw it, and laughed.
Never happened again.
MM Video
My video, if you haven’t seen it yet.
Companion article
This excellent article by Thierry Meyssan is the perfect companion to the keen answer our colleague Metallic Man gave in his 12 minutes long video published on Youtube today to the question " Who is actually running the United States ? "
Cheerio ! Quan
This is a nice mystery that has turned the archeological world on it’s side. It’s a great read and I really hope that you all enjoy what is presented here. Translated from an old scan. Correct, and edited to fit this venue. I doubt that you will be able to find a complete recounting of this story elsewhere in the Western Internet today.
…
Father Carlo Crespi, who comes from Milan, has lived in the small town of Cuenca, Ecuador, for more than 50 years. He was a priest of the Church of Maria Auxiliadora.
Crespi was accepted by the local indians as a real friend.
They (the local indians) used to bring him presents from their hiding places.
Over a period of time thefather had so many precious objects stored in his house and the church that one day he receivedpermission from the Vatican to open a museum to display them.
This museum (in the Salesian School at Cuenca) grew and grew Until in 1960 it was oneof the biggest museums in Ecuador, and Crespi was recognized as an archaeological authority.
But he has always been a rather embarrassing servant of his church, for he asserts vehementlythat he can prove that there was a direct connection between the Old World (Babylon) and the New World (pre-Inca civilizations); and thatgoes right against prevailing opinion.
Complicating matters, on 20th July 1962 there was an act of arson and the father’s museum was burnt down.
What Father Crespi managed to salvage from the damaged museum was housed in two long narrow rooms, which were in a terriblemuddle.
Brass, copper, sheet-metal, zinc, tin and stone and wooden objects and in the midst of them all pure gold, sheet-gold, silver and sheet-silver.
Eric Van Danken in His book Gold of The Godssays of this Treasure “Let the Vatican grail guardianFather Crespi of Cuenca be the key witness to the pre- Christian origin of the metal treasures. He said “‘Every’ thing that the Indians brought me from the tunnelsdates to before Christ. “Most of the symbols and pre-historic representations are older than the Flood.’”
“Father Crespi has partiallystacked his metal plaques bymotifs, for example those withpictures of pyramids.
I took a close look at more than 40 objects.
Allthe pyramid engravings have four things in common: a sun, but more frequently several suns,is depicted above the pyramid; snakes are always flying next to or over the pyramid; animalsof various kinds are always present….
“Professor Miloslav Stingi is the leading SouthAmerican scholar in the Iron Curtain countries; he graduated in the ancient civilizationsof America. today he is a member of the Academy of Sciencesat Prague and author of archaeological and ethnological books.In versunkenen Mayasta~dten(1971), for example, is highly acclaimed. Professor Stingl, who was a guest in myhouse, saw the photographs I had taken at Cuenca. ‘If these pictures are genuine, and everything indicates that they are, because no one makes forgeries in gold, at any rate not on such a large scale, this is the biggest archaeological sensation since the discovery of Troy. Yearsago I myself supported the view that the Incas had no writing in the alphabetical sense of the word. And now I am facedwith Inca writing. To beable to give a precise scientific verdict I should have to subject each plaque to a detailed and lengthy examination, and compare each one with material already available. For the moment I can only say that I am dumbfounded. The sun was often part of the scenery in known Inca engravings, but man was never equated with the sun, as I see time and again in these photographs. There are representations of men with sun's rays round their heads and there are men depicted with star points coming from them. The symbol of holy power has always been the head. But in these pictures the head is simultaneouslysun or star. That points tonew direct connections.’”
J Golden Bartonin 1998 tells of a visit see Father Crespi with Dr. Paul Chessman from BYU and others in the late 1970’s. He writes (ref. 2): “High in the Andes mountains of Ecuador lies beautiful Cuenca, a peaceful city with red Spanish tile roofsand worn cobble stone streets. Townspeople go about their daily business happily trading with each other and the native Indians who populate the hills and valleys surrounding the village.
The Indians speak the tongue of their Quechua" ancestors, who watched the sun rise over the Amazon hundreds of years before. With weathered and rosy cheeks they radiate a simplicity of harmony with the rugged mountains where they have worked time out of mind.
The men of the tribe wear a single long braid of hair down their back underneath a Panamanian hat. Men, women and children are dressed in the same black and brown earth-tone cloth, edged with bright colored trim. Each shuffle along the paths long known by their forefathers, carrying them back and forth from village to village. Not many tourists travel this way and the service is unrushed but thorough.
“A few blocks from the center of the village stands a Catholic "College of Salesino."
Young men and women from prosperous families attend this secondary school, its classrooms facing a clay and terrazzo tiled courtyard.
Entering through a side door, we found ourselves in a small open-air enclosure facing stately, hand-carved wooden gates.
A friendly young man bid us enter through old wooden doors and ushered us into a private chamber.
A few moments later, a bearded, monkish-looking man with twinkling eyes and a benign smile arrived and embraced Dr. Cheeseman. Although an octogenarian, he appeared in lively good health, despite his quaking robes which betrayed a shaky hand.
We had heard that he was senile, but his personal behavior only radiated complete mental iompetence.
So this was Father Carlos Crespi, Ecuador's unlikely focus of a unique archaeological controversy that continues to baffle everyone who has heard about it.
“He led us into an inner court of the school yard, where old Spanish wooden doors faced inward, and the oft-scrubbed floors gleamed with sunlight bouncing off the polished terrazzo.
We were unprepared for what was to come.
Father Crespi took a large key from a ring that hung from a braided belt around his robe, then moved to an obscure wooden door and turned the lock. Together with a single helper, he disappeared into the dark room.
Both soon reappeared with a largepiece of metal that had been molded and hammered into a long sheet.
It looked like it might be made of gold. The sheet was inscribed with a curious artworkbeyond identification.
“Next, they dragged something from the darkness too large to be carried, and only with strenuous exertions were they able to lean it against the stuccowall.
It stands twenty-two inches high and about seven inches wide its weight must have been prodigious.I reached my hand to touch the object and noticed it featured a dark covering, as if it had been painted.
At first, I supposed it must have been made of lead, because it was soft and almost pliable.
Then the nailsof my fingers bit into thebody of the figure through the paint and the gleam from the tell-tale scratch left no doubt that it was made of pure gold.
Our cameras began to click, and in the excitement Father Crespi talked excitedly, hardly stopping to breathe. He was our enthusiastic instructor, showingus each new piece as though it had just been brought to the light of day for the first time.
“What other wonders did his black vault contain, we wondered? The old man's nimble fingers joined the ends of two barren electric wires and the chamber was instantly revealed in the radiance of an incandescent globe.
The gleam of gold, silver, and bronze everywhere added to the brightness of its interior.
Shelves of dusty, worn ceramics, starry-eyed idols posturing in hideousstances or strange proportions.
Stacked from floor to ceiling were hundreds of large cardboard pieces on which were wired metal bracelets, earrings, nose rings, and necklaces,some untarnished by time. Hide-scrapers, tools, implements of war, spears, axes, clubs, of wood, metal and stone were stacked everywhere.
Father Crespi's mysterious room seemed overburdened with the treasures of an unknown antiquity. It literally over-flowed with bizarre artifacts, many wrought in precious metals.
Most intriguing were the innumerable plates of bronze, brass and gold.
Many bore strange inscriptions and hieroglyphic symbols. Others were replete with the engravings of incongruous animals--elephants, snakes, jaguars, wild beasts of every kind.
The images of horse-drawn chariots were clearlyetched into metal, calling to mind Juan Moricz's description of "a Roman chariot" in his underground chamber.
“Wephotographeda plateinscribed with representations of what appeared to be Egypt's step-pyramid.
Still more plates contained artwork with what looked like Assyrian or Babylonian symbols.
We grew dizzy with the gleaming opulence and historicalanomaly all around us.
Newell Parkin, a banker from Bountiful, Utah, Dr. Paul Cheeseman, Wayne Hamby, an undergraduate student from Brigham Young University, D. Craig Anderson, a Utah State UniversityResearch Associate, whoacted as our interpreter, and I spent the afternoon amid these otherworldly splendors.
In all my travels throughout the world, my visit to the Crespi Collection was to be their crowning experience.
“We asked Father Crespi how he came by suchmarvelous things. He said he headed the local parish for over fifty years after studying at Italy's University In Milan, where the subject of archaeology had caught his interest.
Following graduation, he became a priest and was assigned to Ecuador's beautiful city of Cuenca to work among theIndians.
In time, he came to lovethem. Moreover, in South America he had opportunity to further his archaeological interests.
To his great surprise and delight, the religious celebrations over which he presided brought a host of Indians bearing gifts to the kindly man who performed baptisms and marriages and was their friend in trouble.
Aware of Father Crespi's enthusiasm for archaeology, the grateful Indians brought him ancient objects long hidden in the jungle.
Soon, his collection steadily increased until, after fifty years, it filled many rooms.
“A museum was constructed to house these remarkable gifts, but a few years before our visit it was seriously damaged by an arsonist's fire.
Father Crespimanaged to salvage three full rooms of the relics, one of relatively obscure and unimportant tributes, another filled with items of curious antiquity, but the last was a treasury of gold artifacts.
Residing high amongthe Andes mountains in an obscure village, the old man had no interest in fame or fortune.
Few travelers knew of his collection and even fewer scientists.
He was a private person with a big heart and a deep interest in the past. ‘Where and how do the Indians find these incredible things.,’ we wondered.
‘Oh, they just get them from the caves and subterranean chambers inthe jungles,’ he answered in an offhand manner.
'There are over 200 kilo-meters of tunnels starting here in Cuenca.
They run from the mountains down to the eastern lowlands near the Amazon."
Wayne Hamby, an assistant to Cheeseman, spent a few more days with Father Crespi to catalogue and photograph the entire collection.
His results went into the files of Dr. Cheeseman, who died after his retirement from the faculty of Brigham Young University.
“Two years following our visit to the kindly priest,I returned to Cuenca with Ben Holbrook, our two young sons, and a pair of Ecuadoran LDS missionaries acting as interpreters.
We were greeted by a young priest, who informed us that Carlos Crespi had passed away in January 1980, and his collection was no longer available for public view.
In spite of my effortsto convince him that we had traveled a long distance to view the relics, he stubbornly refused to allow us tosee the treasures.
He insisted that the room with the artifacts could not be shown on orders from the Vatican.
To my knowledge, no one from the outside world has seen the treasure since the death of the old Padre.“.
Mr. Barton heard rumors that much of the treasure had been shipped to Rome to the Vatican.
Richard Wingate a Florida based explorer and writer visited Father Crespi four times during the mid to late 1970’s and photographed the extensive artifact collection. He says this concerning his visits:
“IN A DUSTY,cramped shed on the side porch of the Church of Maria Auxiliadora in Cuenca, Ecuador, lies the most valuable archaeological treasure on earth.
More than one million dollars worth of dazzling gold is cached here, and muchsilver, yet the hard money value of this forgotten hoard is not its principal worth.
There are ancientartifacts identified asAssyrian, Egyptian, Chinese, and African so perfect in workmanship and beauty that any museum director would regard them as first-class acquisitions.
Since this treasure is the strangest collection of ancient archaeological objects in existence, its value lies in the historical questions it poses, and demands answers to.
Yet it is unknown to historians and deliberately neglected in the journals of orthodox archaeology….
‘Ah,’ the priest said, ‘enough flattery, then, let’s take a look.’ Without ceremony, he forced a key into an ancient, rusty padlock and opened the rickety door to his museum.
He touched two bare wires together and a watery yellow light went on.
FatherCrespi was smiling like a man with a very remarkable secret.
I was skeptical of the reports I had heard about this place, but now that cautious attitude gave’ way to unabashed astonishment.
Stacked against the far wall were golden mummy cases in the quasi-Egyptian style with a black, baked-enamel finish.
A dozen complete sets of gleaming, golden ceremonial armor, beaten-gold Chaldean-style helmets, and golden inscribed plaques were piled haphazardly on the floor.
These dazzling memoirs of lost times were scatteredamong an array of beautifully carved Pacific Oceanic and African-styled wooden statues,shields of a rich, red copper, pottery, canes, sheets, androlls of silver-colored metal, and strange, unidentifiable gears, pipes,and wheels which might have been parts to long-lost technological systems.
Rolls of intricately figured sheet metal stood haphazardly piled around the shed.
The priest explained that it had been torn off the interior walls of long abandoned, vine-choked buildings in the inaccessible eastern jungle.
The Indianartifact hunters bring this wallpaperin three different metals: gold, a metallurgically unique, untarnished silver, and an unknown alloy with the appearance of shiny aluminum.
Every square inch of the peculiar sheet metal is decorated with intricate designs, some of them depicting long-forgotten ceremonial occasionsand some of them humorous andcartoon like.
Therolls come in heights that vary, for the most part, from eight to twelvefeet, and they are often fifteen to thirty feet long.
These lengths are composed of many individual four-foot sheets which have been artfully riveted together.
He showed me a dozen bronze plaques. Seemingly,they were among his favorite acquisitions.
The illustrations borne by the plaques made me catch my breath.
Images of Egyptian princesses and Assyrian gods stared at me with a severity undiminished by the passage of centuries.
One of the plaques bore the image of a Caucasian man writing linear script with a quill pen.
Linearscript?
A quill pen?
Needless to say, the Andes Indians did not have a written language when the Spanish arrived, let alone a tool for writing.
There were reportedly fifty-six solid gold plaques originally, but after a disastrous arson in 1962,which local political fanaticsclaimed credit for, Father Crespi had molds made by a local casket maker and the best dozen of his precious plaques were duplicated in coffin-handle bronze.
The original gold plaques lie safe today in a bank vault.
“Father Crespi granted me permissionto take photographs. Since most museums jealously guard their treasures from photographers, the priest’s open generosity won me over.
Lack of space inside the shed forced me to set up my tripod and camera in the sunlit outer courtyard.
The priest himself brought his treasures out for me to record on film.
Hours passed, and the usual, afternoon equatorial winter rain began.
The Fatherwas growing tired. We quit for the day.
I had exposed over ten rolls of film, taken more than three hundred pictures, and covered only a tiny percentage of the seventy thousand artifacts which filled the museum’s three rooms to their ceilings.
“As it turned out, I made not one but three additional visits to Father Crespi in Cuenca, exposed over three thousand frames, and Istillhave captured only 2 percent of the collection onfilm.
Between my secondandthird trips, the Padre’s treasure hunters apparentlyhit upon a fresh cache inthe jungle caves.
So manynewpieces arrived during thisperiod that I was forced to climb over heaps of newly unearthed objects in order to get to certain items that I particularly wanted to photograph.
I found myself in the classic one- step-forward, two-steps-back situation, for new articles were arriving more rapidly than I could take pictures of the old!
“One of the reasons for my continued efforts was my apprehension for Carlo Crespi’s advanced age.
He was born on April 29, 1891, and when he dies, the integrity of the collection is by no means assured.
It might be saved and protected by benevolent church authorities, but an auction to private dealers seems just as likely.
If the priceless museum is somehow disbursed before modern techniques of dating and evaluation can be applied to its artifacts, a great chance for the reevaluation of the history of the Western hemisphere will have been missed.
“In spite of the plethora of startling material in his museum, Father Crespi regrets that he missed acquiring most of the ‘treasure unearthed in the jungle, including mostof the best articles, because he simply couldn’t match prices with other bidders.
Maintaining the jungle museum has proven a difficultadventure for the Father in other ways as well.
The collection weathered an arson fire in 1962 which melted many objects, burned others, and substantially diminished its value.
Another fire occurred in 1974.
There have also been instances of outright theft.
A few archaeologists whohaveheard of the collection are prone toan understandable condescension, because the shedful of artifacts poses a violent offense tothe procedural r~es of their fraternity.
The articles in the trove have been discovered in sloppy, unsupervised, surreptitious digs by wholly untrained J ivaro Indian diggers.
Crespi is not even an accredited museum curator.
Although not an uneducated man~he holds a master’s degree in anthropology from a Milan, Italy, university.
The priest has no formal archaeological training, and the time he gives to hisimmense collection is stolen from a heavy schedule of parish duties, as I saw on my visits.
Crespi, furthermore, occasionallyexpresses a salty indifference to the judgment of the accepted experts.
Theclassification system of his museumis best described as chaotic.
It does not make highly publicized acquisitions at blue ribbon auctions, for the Father wouldn’t have the money, even if he had the need.
Nor does it have advanced dating machinery, assistant curators, guards, guides, set hours, or any of the other appurtenances of the respectable, contemporary museum.
And yet the affection in which the Padre is heldby his Shuara (Jivaro) collectors,has made it possible for him to accumulate the most significant single assemblage of South Americanartifacts anywhere.
“Carlo Crespi was raised in the prosperous northern Italian -city of Milan, where, after a youth spent with a comfortably wealthy family, he decided to jointhe Salesian Fathers. Morethan fifty-five years ago this missionary order sent Father Crespi to South America.
Ever since that voyage, Father Crespi has lived a life of voluntary poverty, sleeping on the floors of native huts with only a single blanket, and carelessly eating poor but lovingly offered food.
He has cared for the people, listened to their stories of fabulous deep-jungle temples, explored the treasure-filled Tayos caves, and stubbornly provided a museum for the strange artifacts of the country…
WhenFather Crespi and his Indian diggerstell of the places where they find their artifacts, they described giant pyramids, immense, deserted cities, fantastic sacred tunnels, and caves.
The cities, they say, still shine with a mysterious, cool bluish light when the sun goes down.
The tunnels are reportedly large enough to drive a locomotive through.
They have cut-stone entrances and walls which, by native account, are as smooth as glass.
And it is thesetunnels, at least according to the Indian explorers, that hold the bulk of the material being offered to the Maria Auxiliadora museum and to other collectors.
It is a fantastic tale, but when one sees the evidence, the thousands of gold treasured trinkets, the story of a vast tunnel system become nearly plausible.
“Although legend tells of this tunnel network honeycombing all of Ecuador and Peru, the only part of it that has, to my knowledge, been documented, is located in the very dangerous Jivaro country, between the Santiago and Morona rivers, near Tayos.
Unfortunately, this area is decidedly out of bounds for the foreign adventurer.
The local Indians have killed at least fourinquisitive outsiders in the last two years.
Yet the tunnels of the Shuara tribes (Jivaro) have been photographed.
A naturalized Ecuadorian named Juan Moricz took several rolls of high-quality pictures, verified in this way the accounts the natives have been giving Crespi, and subsequently lay legal claim to the entire tunnel network.
His grandiose claim was denied by the courts, but his photographs cannot be.
<Portion unrecoverable>...less than the bullion value of the precious metal.” (p. 139)The “heavy mineral crust enamel coating” of many artifacts indicates that they were “buried under searing volcanic heat.” (p. 139) Concerning sophisticated artifacts, like the Phoenician calendars, the golden Middle Eastern helmets, the golden armor, and the golden plaques: these “would bring hundreds of thousands of dollars and perhaps millionson the private market; to suggest that a sophisticated forger unloaded them on the priest for a low price is to deny the greed that motivates forgery!” (p. 140) Concerning a cast steel shield: “Steel casting is beyond the metallurgical capacity of present day Tayos Indians.” (p. 143)
(B) Fakes
Regarding fakes (which Crespi knowingly purchasesin his casual, humanitarian style, at the same time chiding the seller): “The modern solder and hacksaw marks give them away.” (p. 136)
(C) Hybrid real-fakes
Far from creating fakes in order to reap high profits, some of the Indian diggers in Ecuador have cut up and reshaped genuinely ancient and priceless materials in order to get any kind of price at all for it. We have mentioned earlier the ebony column...carved with the Ecuadorian national seal and decorated with gold cut from a sheetof mysterious ancient wallpaper.” (p. 139)
Picture (p. 36)—“Obviously genuine copper ‘radiators’ were redecorated by Indian discoverers.”
Picture (p. 39)—“Heavy brass ‘bass viol’ a real-fakesoldered together from original thick wall sheeting.” The brass sheet metal is genuine and very old, but the instrument was crafted by modern forgers. One can see where existing designs on the brass sheets were cut through in the manufacture of the article.
Picture (p. 142)—“Genuine silver wrapped goldtrimmed elephant. Yet decorated with modern brass thumb tacks.”
Picture (p. 146)—“Bottom of tin can. Clumsily fireblackened to simulate real volcanic mineral patina on genuine objects. The carbon on this olive oil can be rubbed off on a sheet of paper. The black patina on most of Crespi’s material is enameled to the metal.”
In summary:“The genuine green porphyry patina onmany of the articles,...the enormous quantities of cheaply bought gold articles, the metallurgical uniqueness of some of the artifacts (such as the platinum nose cone and the radiators), the Mid-eastern artistic motifs, and the abundance of art ides for which little or no market exists (such as the air pipes and the ‘wallpaper’) pose difficult questions for thosewho carelessly write the collection off as a hoax.” (p. 140)
References 1.Eric Van Daniken Gold of The Gods (1973) 2.J. Golden BartonThe Lost Gold ofAncient Ecuador,Ancient American Vol.4 Number 25, 1998 3.Richard Wingate Lost Outpost of Atlantis 1980Everest House Publishing Company 4.Wayne Hamby Voices From The Dust1977 Osmond Publishing Company
Summary
I hope that you enjoyed this little glimpse in the statist-overturning world of the good Father.
Normally, I conduct a 3/3 affirmation campaign. This is a fine balance for world-line travel and seems to mesh well with the fate-forecasting. But, as long time readers will recognize, I am running 3/4 campaigns (three months off and a four month wait (dwell) time) and the result are (personally) stunning. My life has cranked up a notch and there’s all sort of discomforting changes in my life. In short, seriously, MM’s life is upside down.
Not in a bad way mind you, but in an exhausting and time-consuming way. New things are being forced into place as a matter of necessity, and other things have dropped to the side.
For instance, being in a new home, you adapt to the new environment.
When I lived in Shenzhen, we rode subways all the time to get around.
When we lived in Zhuhai, we rode bikes or took ride-hail services or buses.
Now in Tanzhou, a (growing, developing, but) rural section of China, we must rely on buses, electric scooters, or cars.
This is forcing the purchase of a car. Not something that I want to do, but (well) it’s a different situation, and I have to adapt to the changes as they materialize. And a car, will force a change in daily routines, habits, and finances.
That’s just one example.
I am conducting the campaign with pluck and still plowing forward, and I hope that you all do so as well. Good things are in your future. I just know it.
For today, here’s another art post. The world needs art.
Please enjoy this post.
A midcareer figurative painter with a distinctive and haunting narrative vision, Bo Bartlett composes large-scale contemporary portraits and landscapes that combine the memories and impressions of his upbringing, his faith, his family, and his friends. Presenting iconic American subjects subtly underlined with open-ended questions, Bartlett implies that there is a chance for magic and wonder in everyday life. Bo Bartlett belongs to the tradition of American realist painters defined by such artists as Andrew Wyeth, who called Bartlett “fresh, gifted and what we need in this country.”
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
It’s sort of like a rhinoceros, only twice the fun..Today, I want to play some “catch up” and explore some of my often “set to the wayside” subjects when the hot portion of World War III broke out in Ukraine. And the United States decided to “make it’s move” to carve up the world like one big birthday cake..This little adventure concerns a member of the megafauna that used to roam the world at about the time the humans started to gather and form societies.
In terrestrial zoology, the megafauna (from Greek μέγας megas "large" and New Latinfauna "animal life") comprises the large or giant animals of an area, habitat, or geological period, extinct and/or extant.
The most common thresholds used are weight over 46 kilograms (100 lb)[1][2][3] (i.e., having a mass comparable to or larger than a human) or over a tonne, 1,000 kilograms (2,205 lb)[1][4][5] (i.e., having a mass comparable to or larger than an ox).
The first of these include many species not popularly thought of as overly large, and being the only few large animals left in a given range/area, such as white-tailed deer, Thomson's gazelle, and red kangaroo.
In practice, the most common usage encountered in academic and popular writing describes land mammals roughly larger than a human that are not (solely) domesticated.
The term is especially associated with the Pleistocene megafauna – the land animals often larger than their extant counterparts that are considered archetypical of the last ice age, such as mammoths, the majority of which in northern Eurasia, the Americas and Australia became extinct within the last forty thousand years.[6]
Among living animals, the term megafauna is most commonly used for the largest extant terrestrial mammals, which includes (but is not limited to) elephants, giraffes, zebras, hippopotamuses, rhinoceroses, and large bovines. Of these five categories of large herbivores, only bovines are presently found outside of Africa and southern Asia, but all the others were formerly more wide-ranging, with their ranges and populations continually shrinking and decreasing over time.
Wild equines are another example of megafauna, but their current ranges are largely restricted to the old world, specifically Africa and Asia.
Megafaunal species may be categorized according to their dietary type: megaherbivores (e.g., elephants), megacarnivores (e.g., lions), and, more rarely, megaomnivores (e.g., bears).
The megafauna is also categorized by the order of animals that it belongs to, which are mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and invertebrates.
-Wikipedia
This beast has long died off. No one knows why. But there are many interesting theories. Don’t you know.
Arsinoitherium
Quick Arsinoitherium Facts
Lived from the Late Eocene through the Early Oligocene Periods
Lived on the plains of North Africa
Was as long as a black rhino
Weighed more than a cow
Was an herbivore
About Arsinoitherium
Arsinoitherium is an extinct paenungulate mammal which lived approximately 35 to 30 million years ago during the Late Eocene through the Early Oligocene Periods.
It’ bones were first discovered in the early twentieth century and was named in 1902 by paleontologist Mr. Beadnell.
The name of this dinosaur means “Arsenoe’s beast.” It was given this name because it was found in Egypt near the palace of Queen Arsinoe – a queen who in this area in 305 B.C.
If you look at Arsinoitherium pictures, then you might think that this mammal looked quite like a rhinoceros with two big horns jutting out of the top of its nose. However, that isn’t really true because these mammals weren’t a direct relative of the rhino.
No, they were more closely related to elephants, sea cows and dassies than they were rhinos.
These herbivorous mammals roamed the Egyptian plains.
They had primitive teeth which were pretty well suited for handling the tough vegetation in this area at this point in time.
One of the most fascinating facts about Arsinoitherium is that is probably lived off a diet of water plants, mangroves and a variety of other plants. It probably had to eat a whole lot of plants in order to meet its nutritional and caloric needs. It might have needed to eat in excess of 150 pounds of plant material a day in order to survive.
Arsinoitherium walked on all four legs – much like a rhino – and it was approximately 10 feet long and weight around 1 Ton or 2,000 pounds. These animals were about 5’9” tall at the shoulders – which means they were as tall as the average human man.
That’s pretty big.
The horns on its nose probably had very little to do with defending itself from predators. Instead, they were probably cosmetic and used to attract females during mating season. Paleontologists believe that is had very little use beyond mating.
You do know that women are always attracted to pairs of large predominant horns. Ah, don’t you know.
Some paleontologists have speculated that this mammal had to be in or near water all of the time in order to prevent from drying out. Much like a modern-day hippo.
Other paleontologists don’t believe that was the case at all, however. Until further evidence is produced, well, I suppose we’ll never know.
I hope that you enjoyed this little post about the lovely two horned beast. Now you have something to talk about at the pub, the beer hall, or over dinner with your family.
Let’s take a little break away from the insanity of global politics. The United States has a death wish, but that is not our problem. Instead, let’s appreciate some art, why don’t we…
Corrado Vanelli is an extremely talented digital artist living and working in Italy. He discovered computer graphics around the mid 90′s. After some experiments with 3D modeling he decided to work only with 2D painting because its the best way for him to expand and concretize his ideas. His artwork are really brilliant. Don’t pass by and make sure to check them. It’s worth it!
“To eat and pay bills I work like mechanical designer because for me art is a passion, not a job. I’m not looking for job or commissions, I want only share my pieces and have your feedback to improve my art. I believe in the energy that every artist puts in his personal projects: it’s the genuine sense of the art.”, says Corrado.
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.
Here’s a nice change of pace for MM. I hope that you all enjoy this art.
Inspired by archaeology, lost civilizations, and the art of illustration, James Gurney’s children book Dinotopia creates an extraordinary place where humans and dinosaurs live in harmony.
“The thing I love about dinosaurs is that they are on that balance point between fantasy and reality,” says Gurney. “It might be hard to believe that mermaids and dragons really existed, but we know that dinosaurs did—we can see their footprints and skeletons but we can’t photograph them or see them, except in our imagination.”
The Dinotopia storyline chronicles the adventures and remarkable experiences of Professor Arthur Denison and his son Will on Dinotopia, a mysterious “lost” island inhabited by dinosaurs and shipwrecked travelers. The faraway land of Dinotopia—wholly the product of Gurney’s fertile imagination, scientific knowledge and meticulous artistic ability—is a civilization like no other. The society has its own language, alphabet, colorful festivals and parades. The lively cast of characters includes the inquisitive Professor Denison; Will and Sylvia, the adventurous young Skybax riders-in-training; the devious curmudgeon Lee Crabb; the beautiful musician Oriana Nascava; and a multilingual, diplomatic Protoceratops named Bix.
His first Dinotopia book, Dinotopia: A Land Apart From Time, appeared in 18 languages in more than 30 countries and sold two million copies. Gurney has written and illustrated three other volumes in the series, Dinotopia: The World Beneath and Dinotopia: First Flight. A fourth volume, Dinotopia: Journey To Chandara was published in the fall of 2007. In 2002, Hallmark Entertainment produced a lavish television miniseries for ABC TV based on the Dinotopia books that received record-setting ratings and an Emmy award for best visual effects.
Let’s go back to some core MM subjects. Here, we will dust off some fine art. I hope that you all appreciate this art as much as I do. Please enjoy.
With a personality as unique as his art, Jose Perez has painted his way through life. His paintings are his voice, his method of expressing himself, his commentary on society.
Born in Houston, Texas, on June 30, 1929, of Mexican parents, Perez moved with his family to Mexico when he was five years old. Returning to the United States as a teenager, Perez swam across the border carrying the papers which proved he was a U.S. citizen. His brother, also a U.S. citizen, had lost his papers and so talked Jose into swimming back to their country. This incident is a foreshadowing of the personality Perez was to become.
Jose developed a sense of humor in his early years, and it’s been an integral part of his life and his art ever since. Through years of working in menial jobs, through his struggle for recognition as an artist, through a bout with glaucoma — through all the trying times of his life, Jose Perez has maintained his sense of humor.
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The confusion Perez had felt in earlier years evaporated when he began to concentrate on satirical art and pursue his profession seriously. His work is owned by a wide variety of art collectors in the United States and Europe.
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Do you want more?
I have more articles like this one in my Art Index here…
You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.